Why Success Makes Founders Lonelier

Sean Weisbrot: Welcome back to another episode of the We Live to Build podcast. Something every entrepreneur goes through but is not often talked about before, during, or after the experience is feelings of isolation. Being an entrepreneur puts you in a lonely place mentally because you're at the top of your organization and no one can understand what you're going through in trying to build, launch, and grow a successful company. Add on to that the pandemic forcing people to be literally isolated from each other, and you have a recipe for success or disaster.

Sean Weisbrot: In this very candid and frank episode about loneliness, I talk with Janet Semenova, the co-founder and CEO of Boutique Travel Agents and Centered CEOs, about her experience as an entrepreneur and how important it is to understand and develop coping mechanisms. More specifically, we talk about what is isolation, what is the difference in a normal day between working in an office with her team and being remote. How does this experience change her as a person? Did the feelings of isolation get worse, better, or not change at all? Does she think that working fully remote long term is making people stronger or weaker? And is there a mental health pandemic that's yet to come? It's one of the more important episodes we've done so far, so I hope you enjoy it.

Sean Weisbrot: What it is you do right now, so that they can get a baseline understanding of why you are able to talk about isolation?

Janet Semenova: Yeah. So, I actually have a quite a diverse background. Um, that is a little bit different than a lot of entrepreneurs. My background initially for 15 years I worked in the health care industry. I worked in the hospital setting, in the clinic setting. I worked in pediatric pain management as a nurse practitioner, so saw patients, worked with teams. Lectured extensively and was always surrounded by a lot of people. And then about four years ago, my business partner and I decided to start our first business together, and we actually created a company called Boutique Travel Advisors, and it's a travel advisory firm that focuses on creating transformational travel experiences and utilizing the power of travel to connect individuals, to eliminate biases, and to create opportunities for empowerment, retreats and team building.

Janet Semenova: And in the process of building our travel company, we noticed a trend that a lot of entrepreneurs that we were meeting who were really exceptional entrepreneurs and experts in their industries, in health and wellness and in tech or in the travel space, the hospitality space, the leisure space. They were really experts in their field, but they weren't necessarily experts in running a successful business. And so, we were noticing a pretty high burnout rate and an imbalance in health and wellness and an imbalance in their life and their business where the business was taking up so much of their energy and their time and their well-being that they were sacrificing a lot in their life to make their business successful.

Janet Semenova: So, we founded another company called Centered CEOs, with the purpose of creating a platform for small business owners to come together, form connections. And learn how to run a business that creates joy. Fulfillment serves a greater purpose, but doesn't necessarily take away from their personal life and their happiness.

Sean Weisbrot: Thank you for the intro. I absolutely love everything you're doing. I think it's extremely important for company owners to do what they're good at and to delegate what they're not good at, and I think a lot of my personal success has come from being able to travel often and experience different things. And I think travel is a very important way for anyone, no matter who you are.

Sean Weisbrot: If you're a company owner or not, to take yourself out of your daily grind and experience something new so that it helps you to get your mind, you know, working in a different way. For example, I love to spend a few weeks in the city and then a few weeks on by the beach. I'm actually by the beach right now. I have this beautiful balcony and like every morning the sun rises over this island. That's like, you know, a few kilometers or a few miles off.

Sean Weisbrot: And it's just this beautiful path of sunlight that goes across the water. It's just absolutely like, fantastic to look at every morning. So yeah, I love that experience. I think it's very important for people to travel. And so being able to give them the opportunity to travel and improve themselves at the same time is very, very needed for sure. So, let's get to the heart of this conversation. What is your definition of isolation?

Janet Semenova: You know, it's such an interesting question. I don't know that I've ever really been asked that before, and I think it's so personal, which is why this topic is so important, because the way we define isolation is really the way that we define who we are as individuals, right? You know, I think as humans, we have this deep seated need to connect with other people and to be surrounded by other people and to form meaningful relationships with other people. And so, isolation is the lack of human connection. I mean, that would be probably the best way that I could put it.

Sean Weisbrot: Obviously, we are social and we prefer to be around people basically face to face where we can talk to them if that's part of what the relationship calls for. Would you consider this conversation right now to be an isolated conversation? Because we're physically in different parts of the world.

Janet Semenova: So, you know, I think, again, it's interesting because this technology over the last decade has allowed us to form connections and stay in touch with people through, you know, FaceTime and Zoom and phone calls that allow you to form meaningful relationships and meaningful connections at the same time. I think it really depends on the individual. I think that there are some people that really need the physical presence of another person, physical touch.

Janet Semenova: I don't think that there's anything that can ever truly replace that. Now, if you're living alone in an apartment and you only ever see people on Zoom or talk to them on Skype or, you know, have phone calls or text messages, it's almost like living in a virtual reality. So, I don't think that that could be sufficient long term for people that have meaningful relationships and reside with people you can have the online and long-distance connections can definitely serve a purpose. And you can. Form meaningful relationships. But I don't think that in and of itself, that would be sufficient for the average human being to exist in this silo of isolation.

Sean Weisbrot: What I've noticed over the last decade, really, since the rise of smartphones, is that people have been sucked into social media and in essence, have lost the desire or the ability to communicate face-to-face. So, would you say that while technology has allowed us to form meaningful relationships at a distance, they've also maybe destroyed our relationships with people that are next to us or hurt those relationships in a way?

Janet Semenova: Yeah, I definitely actually just wrote an article, a couple of articles, and I'm in the process of writing a book. And that's a big thing that I talk about because I talk about the power of mindfulness and awareness and presence. And I think that we are, as a society, vastly devoid of awareness of the present moment, because we are. So, we're always multitasking, we're always looking at our phones, we're constantly attached to devices, and we lose that connection with the people that are right next to us. So here we are, trying to form connections with people around the world who are thousands of miles away.

Janet Semenova: And going through all this effort to, you know, have meaningful Zoom conversations and conferences and Facetime and then the person sitting right next to us at dinner, I mean, I was out at dinner with my husband the other day, and we're sitting outside and we look around and half of the people at dinner, which is such a privilege right now, to even be able to go out to a restaurant and sit outside and enjoy a meal are sitting there on their phones and not even really engaging with one another.

Janet Semenova: So, I definitely believe that we have this dichotomy of yes, technology allows us to make connections, but it also has perpetuated this isolation. And I think it also is dangerous in some ways because we forget that people who we may see on social media, who may be posting every day, who may be engaged in our, you know, team Zoom meetings, might actually be extraordinarily lonely on the inside and may have no real meaningful connections with anyone outside of this universe of social media and online presence.

Sean Weisbrot: So, it's interesting you say that because I don't use social media and I have a lot of friends online I've never met or it's been a long time since I've seen them because they're in different countries, and I feel I would say I feel close to them despite the distance. But I still feel lonely, even though I have people I can meet and I have a relationship and I have people around me, but I still feel lonely. I would say there's multiple forms of loneliness, right?

Sean Weisbrot: And I think we can start talking about that from here on. Where? Being an individual and feeling like you don't really have a support network. Even though I have one, I still feel lonely on a personal level and then being an entrepreneur sometimes, even though I spend a lot of time throughout my week talking to people like yourself who are also entrepreneurs, I still feel lonely at a professional level.

Janet Semenova: Yeah, that's so profound because it's true. Like, we can have people that are around us that we have meaningful connections with. We can have an entire universe on social media if that's what we choose to do. Or we have, you know, 900 friends on Facebook. But then as an entrepreneur, I think it's a very different sensation of loneliness because it's a loneliness that's not doesn't necessarily have to do with the connection of the person next to you. It doesn't have to do with the connection of like, your friends and your family.

Janet Semenova: It's a loneliness that is more representative of the experience of being an entrepreneur. And I think the stress and weight and uncertainty of entrepreneurial ism, I mean, I think that as business owners, we have so many things that we're always thinking about and so many things that we have to consider on any given day and any given moment, that it feels like a very personal, private experience that other people just don't necessarily understand.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah. And sometimes, like when you try to describe it, it's almost existential. And you may have your team, you may have your company, your experience. I have mine. And while we can commiserate about those experiences because they are personal, like the problems that I face in my business are different from the problems you face in your business. And so maybe you can go, oh, I remember when I, you know, didn't have revenue yet or I remember trying to build my MVP.

Sean Weisbrot: I remember trying to validate, but maybe you don't remember the feeling of what it was. And so, unless you're in my position right now, you may not be able to empathize. You could sympathize, but maybe you can't empathize. And I think that takes us to this existential kind of loneliness in that journey where the journey I'm on may be similar to yours, but it's not the same journey. It'll never be the same journey. And so, it's very hard for you to really understand where I'm at.

Janet Semenova: Yeah. And I think that that's kind of something that we make up in our own minds. Right? Because the ability to feel empathy doesn't necessarily mean that the person that I'm empathizing with has to be going through the same exact experiences I'm going through in that moment. The ability to show empathy is a characteristic of our personality. It's a character trait.

Janet Semenova: It's an ability to empathize and feel on a deeply personal level, what another human being is experiencing. And I think that if we have people who show us empathy, we are less likely to feel lonely. Whereas if we're surrounded by people that just sympathize with us or feel sorry for us, or prop us up when we really don't necessarily want to be propped up. Then we feel loneliness versus if we have a person who truly shows us empathy, it makes us feel connected and understood.

Sean Weisbrot: I think it's made even worse by the fact that sometimes you want to share things with your team, and no matter how much you share, they either don't get it or they don't care. Like I try to be very open with the team about our finances, about our roadmap, our vision. Why are we doing what we're doing? What's coming next? Why is it coming next? How is it going to help customers? I do that, you know, on a professional level.

Sean Weisbrot: But I think while they're engaged with what we're doing and they love what we're building and why we're building it, at the end of the day, they're probably just focused on like, their family or their health or their things. And so, while they're financially invested in working on this thing, maybe the emotional investment isn't deep enough for them to understand us as their team members.

Janet Semenova: Yeah. And I think that has to do a little bit with company culture as well. You know, I think it's becoming more and more difficult to create a company culture where the people who are on your team. Are truly invested in the success of your company. It's a big difference between liking your job, being good at your job, doing your job well, and feeling like you are fully invested in the success of the company that you work with.

Janet Semenova: You know when you feel like your team members are there because they are fully emotionally invested in seeing your company succeed, you don't feel as lonely when you feel like your team members are good employees. They're doing a good job, but they don't truly care. On a very deep and personal level. They don't have that innate loyalty. Then it definitely feels like a lot lonelier of a road.

Sean Weisbrot: Let's move back a little bit and we'll get a little bit more personal about you. So how long into your journey did you start to feel isolation and loneliness as an entrepreneur?

Janet Semenova: You know, I mean, I think from the very beginning, just because leaving the environment of being surrounded by other people who were taking care of patients in a similar way as I was and really could understand on a very, very deep level, the difficulty of having a sick patient or the difficulty of not being able to help a patient, they understood it because they were going through the same thing and moving away from that to become an entrepreneur. Even though I have a business partner, which has been hugely helpful, and I don't think I could have done this on my own, because I feel like a lot of the loneliness that most entrepreneurs experience I've been sheltered from, because I have a business partner who's just as invested in the success of our business as I am.

Janet Semenova: But, you know, very early on, the shift happened where I realized that, like, it's just me or it's just me and Angie, it's just the two of us on this island, like floating away out at sea. And the bigger our business got, the more successful we became. In some ways, the further out at sea I felt like we were floating and we were like losing sight of the shore and losing connection to, you know, having a regular job and having people that surrounded us who were going through the same experiences as on a daily basis. And so, it took a lot of self-work and reflection and making a conscious effort to maintain meaningful connections with the people in my life. Whether in business or personally, in order to negate some of those feelings of loneliness.

Sean Weisbrot: I think that's a really important observation, because I definitely find for myself, and I've been an entrepreneur for eight years, but Sidekick, which I started over two and a half years ago, is my first company with employees. Everything else I did before was just me by myself, so that was slightly different, and I had a lot less responsibility and all that. I have found that sometimes I get so busy I forget to call my parents or my grandparents.

Sean Weisbrot: Like I'll look at Facebook Messenger and go, oh crap, it's been a month since I called my grandma. And like, this happens consistently. And it's not because I don't care about her, but just so many things are thrown at me all the time that I just lose track of time that I sometimes have to stop and go, wait a minute. Like I'm forgetting about the people around me and I need to reconnect with them.

Janet Semenova: Yeah. And ironically, those are the most important relationships in our lives, right? And I think entrepreneurs make this mistake in some ways, but it's an unintentional mistake where we get so wrapped up in our business and so wrapped up in seeing our business succeed. That we sacrifice a lot of time and emotional capacity that we really need to be investing in the people in our lives. And life is all about finding balance and integration, and our business has to be able to integrate with our life.

Janet Semenova: The concept of work-life balance, to me, has always seemed a little off, because there is no such thing as work-life balance. It doesn't exist. There's no such thing. You know, your work and your life have to be integrated. They have to be part of a whole and they have to mesh. And so, you have to enjoy your work and feel fulfilled by your work, while at the same time being able to step away from your work to really invest as much emotional energy into your relationships outside of work as you do into your relationships at work and into your business.

Sean Weisbrot: Definitely. And I've tried to make my personal health a priority because I have gone through phases where I was healthy and not healthy. And I know, and I've said this many times before on the podcast, it's extremely important to take care of your health because once you lose it, it's very hard to get it back. I used to take calls on Saturdays and Sundays. I don't do that anymore. I used to take calls at 9 p.m. I don't do that anymore. I used to, you know, sit for hours. And now if I have a call, I'll take them on a walk with me. So how long were you doing these two companies before the pandemic hit and forced you to have your team go remote?

Janet Semenova: So, we have. It's interesting. So, our travel company, Boutique Travel Advisors, has always been partially remote. I mean, we have advisors in different states around the United States, but we also had a central office in Scottsdale, Arizona, where we're based, where we had team members who were working in the office with us, our assistant, and a couple of our advisors who are able to come into the office. And so, when the pandemic hit in March, we definitely shut everything down immediately.

Janet Semenova: And we actually still have office space that we have not physically stepped foot in since March. We're one of those businesses that keep paying because we're in a lease, so we pay for our office space. We don't utilize it because we felt like the health and safety of our team members was more important than taking a risk to go face to face into an office. Our second company, Centered CEOs, we actually started during the pandemic. And we've always been remote, and I think we probably always will be remote because our team and our developers are all over the world.

Janet Semenova: And so, I don't think we'll ever necessarily need a physical space. And we learned a lot from having a physical space, both the upsides and the downsides. And I think that the freedom of not having physical office space, the benefits of that in a lot of ways outweigh the benefits of having office space. But I miss the face-to-face. So, we have to then make an extra effort to create a connection with our team when we don't have an office for them to physically go into. And there's a lot of ways that we can do that.

Sean Weisbrot: It seems like you've adapted quite well to that.

Janet Semenova: Yeah, we had an office space until the pandemic hit. We opened our business in 2017. Um, and the pandemic hit in 2020. So, you know, we had been used to seeing some of our team members. But like I said, also, a lot of our team members have always been in other states. And so, it's always been a priority for us to create moments of connection where we, you know, we meet at conferences, we get together, we have retreats for our team. So that's always been part of our culture. And the difficulty actually hasn't been that as much that we've gone remote. It's that we're not able to get together in person for the conferences and for the retreats that we would normally utilize to really strengthen those bonds.

Sean Weisbrot: I haven't met any of my team members yet, some of which have been with me for two-plus years, except for my COO, who has been a close friend for 20 years. What's the difference in a normal day between working in the office with your team and working remote?

Janet Semenova: I mean, I think I'm actually, you know, in some ways I'm more productive working remotely because I get into a flow state and I hyper-focus and I work much, much more productively when I have 1 to 2-hour periods with no distractions. Where there's I turn off my email, I turn off my phone, I put all of my notifications on silent, and I just work and I write. Or those are times where I'm doing presentations or creative or creating itineraries. So, at home, I'm able to really get into that flow state much better. In an office environment, there was always distractions and interruptions, you know, because phones would ring.

Janet Semenova: My business partner would be in there, our assistant would be in there, you know, interns would be in and out. And so there was a lot more distractions and interruptions, which required multitasking, which doesn't actually is not a real thing, like our brain doesn't actually multitask. It just shifts from one thing to the other. So, in a lot of ways, I'm more productive at home. I like the flexibility of, you know, like you said, being able to take a client phone call while I'm taking a walk or, you know, listening to a webinar that I normally would have to do in person on Zoom, and I don't have to have my camera on, and I can be sitting there folding laundry, and I'm really multitasking at that point.

Janet Semenova: So those things are great and convenient. But again, not being able to see my business partner face to face every day, not being able to have those face-to-face, 5 to 10-minute check-ins or hey, this question came up every time I need to talk to her about something, I have to write myself a note because I don't want to call her every 15 minutes. You know, in an office environment, you're used to just turning around and being like, hey, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? Running things by each other. So, we have to be a lot more strategic and tactical and also a lot more organized when you work from home.

Sean Weisbrot: It's funny because we're having this conversation that's like isolation sucks. You know, as an entrepreneur or working remotely from people kind of sucks. But at the same time, it's making us better and smarter and faster in a way.

Janet Semenova: Yeah. Again, I think it's funny because I literally was just- I'm working on all these different articles for different, you know, blogs and our book. And I was writing an article today about growing your business mindfully and how you can incorporate mindfulness into your business as a business owner and what that means. And one of the things I'm writing about is limiting noise and distractions. And I think that one of the things that we don't do well as business owners, and most companies, in general, don't do well, is provide time and space for our team and even ourselves to have flow states and to have like these productive, hyper-focused periods of time without distraction, because we're so used to distractions and we have so many notifications and so many emails, and I was reading a study and I don't want to quote it because I'm going to misquote it, but it's something like an average employee in an office is interrupted 60 to 80 times per day.

Janet Semenova: So, they get, on average, 11 minutes of uninterrupted time to work at any given time. So, every 11 minutes or so, an average office worker, whether that be a manager or, you know, a team member, is interrupted every 11 minutes. So, then we wonder why we're distracted, why we're not as productive as we should be, why we don't get nearly as much done as we think in our minds. We should be able to get done. And while our team members are not getting everything done, or why we're making mistakes and having, you know, errors or the quality of our work is not as high as it should be. Well, when you're only working for 11 minutes at a time, it's really difficult to accomplish much of anything. So, I think working from home, you're able to limit those distractions much easier. But you also have to have a lot of self-discipline.

Sean Weisbrot: What I try to do with the team, I may have mentioned this to you in our intro was we tell them we know you have a wife or a husband. We know you probably have kids, so take care of your things with your family first, and then when you're ready, come start your day. If that means you start at 2 p.m. and you work until 11 p.m., I don't care if you work from 1 a.m. to 9 a.m. and sleep the rest of the day, I don't care as long as you get what you need to get done in a timely manner.

Sean Weisbrot: We use Slack for communication, so I essentially don't message them throughout the day. I basically leave everybody alone unless it's really urgent and I need to ask them something and it's blocking me from doing something. But otherwise, I leave everyone alone because most of the people on our team are developers. So, if I am sitting there bugging them with questions, then they're not going to get their stuff done, which means it's going to take an extra day or two for this thing to be implemented that we're now we're screwing up our deadline.

Sean Weisbrot: So yeah, I think it's really important for people to have no distractions. And I have noise-cancellation headphones. I highly recommend everybody buy them. I can't hear anything. I can go to a cafe that's noisy, there's music and people and I hear nothing, and it's just fantastic to just sit there and focus and all that. So how has the experience of going fully remote changed you as a person? And did the feelings of isolation get worse, better or not change at all?

Janet Semenova: You know, it's interesting. Like it depends on the day. Like our feelings fluctuate so much and so going remote and feeling isolated weren't necessarily tied together as much as the fact that we were also in a pandemic and also physically and socially isolated from the people we would normally see and the things we would normally do. So, activities that you normally find that kind of fills your emotional bucket and the friendships and, you know, going out for coffee and going out for lunch and getting drinks with friends, all of those things, all of that come to an abrupt kind of stop at the same time as we went completely remote and at the same time.

Janet Semenova: So, I couldn't see my business partner, who I was used to seeing face to face. Because even though we live a mile and a half apart from each other, you know, we chose to, you know, fully quarantine when, when everything happened. Lockdown in March or Leon. So, I had a full month of literally not seeing a single person other than my husband and my two kids. And that experience was interesting because I didn't necessarily feel as lonely as I would have thought I felt. I think that the pause. And being able to take time with my family was really necessary and really good.

Janet Semenova: I think the loneliness set in as time went on and this experiment that we thought was going to last, you know, two to 3 to 4 weeks initially when we all went into lockdown, has dragged on now for months and months, almost a full year, and our life is still not normalized. So, I'm not sure that I could really say, okay, it's the fact that I'm working remotely versus the fact that I'm still not able to do all of the things that I enjoy doing that make me feel connected to the outside world and to my family, who I'm not really seeing as much, and friends and not being able to travel. And all of those experiences together, I think, are perpetuating loneliness.

Janet Semenova: But I think for remote workers in general, I think the loneliness levels are really high right now because you're also in isolation with a very select group of people, and you're isolated from all of the people that normally kind of fill your bucket. So, I think in some ways we're less isolated because we're, you know, living with all these people in our homes. A lot of us have kids studying at home and spouses working from home, but at the same time, we're separated from the people that we normally are used to seeing. So, we're like surrounded by people while also extremely lonely and isolated.

Sean Weisbrot: Are we going to come out of this in the next few years, a better society, or are we just staring down the barrel of a mental health pandemic that we haven't seen yet?

Janet Semenova: I mean, I think both, you know, I'm in the United States and we have a huge divide in access to healthcare. We've always had a huge divide and access to healthcare. I think the pandemic has widened that gap tremendously. And I think that for people who had a predisposition to mental health issues, for people who have underlying anxiety or depression, for people that don't have a great support system and require a lot of resources, the pandemic was like the final nail in the coffin because suddenly you can't see your doctors in person. You can't. You can get your medicine, but you can't, you know, have those face-to-face interactions with your healthcare providers. And you're like, in a cage, you know?

Janet Semenova: And I'm lucky that we live in a big, beautiful house. I live in a gorgeous neighborhood. And even still, when we were in lockdown, like, I felt like I was living in a gilded cage, I felt like I just needed to break free. There were days I'm like, I just need to get out of this house. I just need to go for a drive. I need to get out. I need to see other people, you know? And for people that have mental health issues to be caged in like that without access to the right types of treatments, I think is devastating. And I think sadly, there's going to be once the pandemic ends. I think that, you know, in certain cases there's going to be more divorces.

Janet Semenova: I think that there's going to be a lot of mental health issues that have not been diagnosed, that are going to be diagnosed or the after-effects. I think that, you know, people who have lost their jobs and there's all these compounding factors, right? Like people who maybe didn't have a great marriage to begin with, didn't have the best relationships with their kids. You know, the spouse maybe had substance abuse issues. And then suddenly now everyone's at home in one small little apartment trying to make ends meet, while also battling the pandemic and being socially isolated and not having outlets. So, the people that were able to cope and that have good resources.

Janet Semenova: And sadly, I think the people that have more financial resources available to them that live in houses with backyards, that live in nice neighborhoods where they could take walks safely. I mean, I know people who live in neighborhoods where it's not even safe to walk outside. So even when that was the only thing they could do, it wasn't really safe to walk in their neighborhood. I think we're going to have an even bigger divide, you know? So, I think some people are going to come out of this stronger, better, wealthier, more resilient, happier, with closer connections to their families and their friends because they've now made it through this horrible pandemic. And other people are going to be poorer, sicker, and even less happy than they were before the pandemic.

Sean Weisbrot: Being in Vietnam, I was very fortunate that the government locked the borders and stuff pretty quickly because we're next to China, which is obviously where everything started. So, we were one of the first countries to see something happen, and therefore one of the first to respond before it got bad. And so even though we did have a basically a one-month lockdown where I was at since then we basically haven't had any lockdowns. And while people wear masks and they wash their hands and have their temperatures checked, essentially everything is open and everything is pretty much fine.

Sean Weisbrot: And so, I can sympathize with the people I talked to.

Sean Weisbrot: But it's hard to empathize because I haven't gone through this. I've been fortunate enough to not go through it, but I know that if I had to go through it, I probably would have not come out better. I was talking to a guy named Carl Shallowhorn. He talks about substance abuse and alcoholism, things like that and he sent me an article that said the number of people who have been drinking alcohol has spiked. The number of people taking opioids has spiked, the number of suicides have spiked. There's also been reports of a massive spike in the purchase of marijuana. And then there was a study that that I read about. I don't remember the details. 200,000 Americans were part of this survey, this experiment and it was about 6 to 9 months, I think, after they were first infected by the virus.

Sean Weisbrot: And of those, 33% of them showed mental health disorders and actual psychosis and other issues for the first time in their life and never had a diagnosis before. And they said that it was a result of the virus infecting them. And this was a side effect. This was a symptom of the infection. And so, what it was saying was, you know, knowing that hundreds of millions of people around the world have been infected by the virus as of now. We are probably facing a massive pandemic in the future of people who have psychological disorders that never had disorders before, possibly because of long-term isolation, but definitely because of exposure to the virus, physically.

Janet Semenova: Yeah, it's so interesting. And that's the whole other caveat is that, you know, I worked in in health care for 15 years. I mean, I've seen so many diseases and trauma and cancer and infectious diseases. I mean, I've seen so much. But almost everything that I saw, we had seen before. And so, to be living through something that nobody has ever seen because it didn't exist just over a year ago, I mean, now we're in the middle of February. This is really we're a year out from this. So, the long-term effects of the infection are not going to really be known for years, if not decades to come.

Janet Semenova: So, I think that we're going to have maybe we're going to have some positive findings coming out that people, you know, have a stronger immune system. Yeah, but probably there's going to be a lot of sequelae. So whatever new diseases come out, there's always long-term effects that we find years and years later. And these are going to be compounded by the fact that not only do you have this novel virus that infected people, and now we have all these variants, and certain people got very sick, and some people have lingering effects months later. But in addition to that, we also have had this isolation, lockdown, complete upheaval of our lives.

Janet Semenova: And a lot of people have, you know, not to forget that, you know, millions of people around the world have lost family members to the pandemic who they weren't even able to go in and physically say goodbye to. People had to say goodbye to their family members on Zoom. And my husband's an emergency room doctor. And, you know, he's seen hundreds of patients who have died from Covid. And, you know, all of my friends who are in health care share the same stories, like here they are on Zoom and their family members are trying to say goodbye. And it's such an unnatural thing. And you can't have funerals and all of the things that people have given up that are positive, you know, graduations, weddings, anniversaries, celebrations, get-togethers, reunions, holidays, Thanksgiving. I mean, all of these things that we've missed are now going to be compounded by the fact that we're also socially isolated.

Janet Semenova: A lot of people have also lost their jobs, lost their livelihoods. Entire industries, like the travel industry, is in complete upheaval and millions of people around the world, 1 in 10 people in the world before the pandemic worked in tourism. How many of those jobs are going to come back, and how long will it take for those jobs to come back? And how about the people in the world that live in countries that don't have a safety net, that don't have government checks, or the ability for the government to help them overcome this? I mean, I think that we're going to see compounded effects for decades, and I don't know that we'll ever isolate, you know, the exact source of where those mental health issues came from. But I think that we're going to have a lot of challenges in the population around the world.

Sean Weisbrot: Such a cheery episode.

Janet Semenova: There's positives to like, I will say. I mean, one of the things that I've seen is there has been an incredible effort of people coming together. You know, I volunteered at a vaccination event because I still have my nursing license, and we have these 24-hour events set up in Arizona, where I live, where you can go and, you know, clinical volunteers are administering vaccines 24 hours a day just to kind of fill all these appointments. And I spent eight hours administering vaccines for whoever was coming through. And it was our phase one be they called it.

Janet Semenova: So as people over the age of 65, teachers, firefighters, police officers, the amount of volunteers that have come together, both clinical volunteers, so people giving the injections, nurses, techs, doctors, non-clinical volunteers, people who were just there to help direct traffic, you know, intake information, gather information from people was astounding. And everyone was there with one sole purpose to help as many people as possible. And I haven't seen that much gratitude and appreciation in one place ever in my career. And I was talking to the girl that I was with, who was my partner for the day, administering the vaccines. She was a trauma nurse, and both of us were astounded because we had both worked in healthcare for over ten years.

Janet Semenova: I've taken care of thousands of patients and I said, I don't think I have heard, thank you as many times in my entire career as I heard in this one shift from every single person that came through to get this vaccine. There was so much optimism and hope and this like, collective relief that we're seeing a light at the end of this tunnel, and so much gratitude to the people who were there helping to administer this vaccine, that it just lifted my spirits tremendously. So, I think that that's a positive from the pandemic. And I think that there's going to be, you know, those effects of gratitude and appreciation for things that we normally would have taken for granted, hopefully, are going to be lasting.

Sean Weisbrot: So how can people deal with this isolation that they're feeling as an entrepreneur, as an individual during this time?

Janet Semenova: You know, the way I deal with my loneliness and isolation is to have gratitude. I do a gratitude practice every day, and I focus on asking for things that I already have and then being grateful for the things that I already have. So even on days where I feel really isolated, where I feel frustrated that I can't get together with my friends, that I can't see my family, that I can't hop on a plane and travel and get together with my team members for a retreat that we had planned that we've now postponed two times.

Janet Semenova: I focus on being grateful for what I do have and asking for things that I have, and I think that that helps us combat loneliness because it gives us a perspective of appreciation. And so, when we have gratitude and appreciation, we have are able to form more meaningful connections with people. In an authentic way. That and that, in and of itself, is an antidote to loneliness.

Sean Weisbrot: I'll try that. I am definitely grateful for a lot of things, but I don't usually stop to think about them.

Janet Semenova: You know, I recommend taking a pad of paper or a journal if you feel like really inspired. And every morning before you get out of bed, before you reach for your phone, write down three things that you're grateful for that morning. And one of I have a practice that I developed. It's called like building, um, a gratitude sanctuary in your mind. And it's almost like, okay, if I need to say ten things I'm grateful for on the worst day of my life, I could come up with them. But for a lot of people, it would be difficult, right? Because we get into this like, dark space in our minds and we start feeling sorry for ourselves, and we start thinking of all the things we don't have and the things that are going wrong and the things that have been we've been deprived of now for months and months, and how lonely and isolated we are.

Janet Semenova: So, I say start with small things. So, start with three tiny things that you're grateful for in that moment or that day. Like I'm grateful for the beautiful view out my window. I'm grateful for the sound of the ocean. I'm grateful for the beautiful temperature, whatever it is. And then the following day, remember what you were grateful for the previous day. So, it helps to just write it down. Just jot it down. It takes 30 seconds in your journal and build on from that and kind of see where it takes you. And what I mean when I say it builds a gratitude sanctuary is that it really helps you kind of expand every day. And the more that you're grateful for different things, the less space you have in your mind to feel sorry and lonely and isolated and unhappy, because it allows you to kind of create an internal happiness and reset your thinking.

Sean Weisbrot: That's great. I'm definitely going to try it. I've had a few people talk about gratitude journaling anyway.