Transcription of Christy Hemenway for the show Bees #132
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa radio hour and podcast, show number 132, “Bees,” airing for the first time on Sunday, March 23rd, 2014. Today on our show, we have Christy Hemenway of Gold Star Honeybees and Dr. Theo Cherbuliez, a psychiatrist and apitherapist. What do the bees have to teach us? Much more than we realize. These insects, which pollinate the plants that feed us, are offering important information about the impact of humans upon the environment. Bees are also used increasingly in healing therapies. Today, we speak with Christy Hemenway and Dr. Theo Cherbuliez, and explore what the bees have to teach us. Thank you for joining us.
As a doctor, I can’t tell you how often I recommend people use natural honey … natural, organic, locally produced honey from local honeybees as a means of staving off allergies and promoting good health. I, myself, use honey pretty much every morning, so I understand the importance of having good bees because without good bees, we wouldn’t have good honey. Today, we have someone who understands bees even better. This is Christy Hemenway. She is the founder of Gold Star Honeybees, a company that creates a low-tech, natural beekeeping system known as the top bar hive, which allows bees to make their own natural beeswax honeycomb. Christy is also the author of The Thinking Beekeeper, a guide to natural beekeeping in top bar hives, and a strong advocate for understanding the interrelatedness of bees, human health, and the health of the planet. Thanks for coming in today, Christy.
Christy: Thank you for having me.
Dr. Lisa: Christy, the first time that I heard of you or of Gold Star Honeybees, you were giving a TEDx talk in Portland TEDxDirigo. You were talking about something that was kind of scary, colony collapse disorder, and how this is related to, really, the health of all of us.
Christy: Indeed it is. My favorite, by John Muir, addresses that by saying that if you tug on one thing in nature, you’re going to find that it’s attached to everything else. Nothing will bring that point home to you like being a beekeeper, where you suddenly start to see just how connected everything is. Without bees, no food. Without … Or, with using the pesticides and toxic stuff on the food that we eat, you’re affecting the bees. Anything that goes on with the air or the soil or the water is all … It’s all connected.
Dr. Lisa: So, what is colony collapse disorder? Why is it something that your average person, say me, should care about?
Christy: Well, colony collapse disorder, which we refer to as CCD, is the name we gave to the phenomenon that started to happen late in 2006 where a commercial beekeeper by the name of Dave Hackenberg, from Pennsylvania, had gone to a beeyard where he had about 400 hives resting in Florida. They were boomers, just really big, thriving hives. Two to three weeks later, he went back to visit that same beeyard and found that only 36 of those colonies were still alive. Now, okay, so that sounds like a sad, lots of bees died story.
But, in fact, it’s even stranger than that because colony collapse disorder leaves you with a hive that is not full of dead bees; it’s simply empty. That’s extreme, in another way, because if you know a little bit about bees, you know that they sting, and they sting for 2 very important reasons: to defend brood, which is a fancy word for baby bees; and to defend their food source, which is their honey. So, for them to fly off and disappear and leave behind, in these colony collapse disorder affected hives, brood and food is really strange.
It’s also very difficult to study something when you don’t have the dead bodies. It’s not like you’re going back to these hives and finding the dead bodies. The bees have disappeared, and that’s just weird on a really deep level; a really strange phenomenon. So, they’ve been looking, ever since 2006, for a one-to-one cause and effect relationship there, and began to learn that that’s just not how nature works. Everything is connected, and so there’s more to look at than just, “Is there a bug or a pest or a disease that’s causing this?” Because my best … My favorite phrase was one of the researchers that said that that was a pretty naïve way for them to look at it. It’s definitely connected to a lot of other things going on in the environment, and that’s where they’ve started to sort of broaden their view, you might say.
Dr. Lisa: Bees are important, in no small part, because they are pollinators and because they make it possible for lots of other crops to grow, thrive. I’m not sure we all realize that.
Christy: If you want to put it in a really graphic way, sometimes a little too much information sends the point home. Bees are how plants have sex. They can’t get up and walk around and go and meet and greet each other, so the bees do that for them. Now, we call it pollination, but it’s how plants, like zucchini for instance … peas, greenbeans, the things that grow in your garden, flowers, trees, herbs, all of those things. That’s how they reproduce. Pollen has to be moved from one flower of that species to another, and so that’s what happens when a bee gets on there and bumps up against the pollen, and then gets on another plant of the same type and bumps up against the organ, if you will, of that plant. That’s how we get more plants.
That’s why we joke about, “How many times have you had to lock your car to keep your neighbor from leaving the bag of zucchini on your frontseat?” Because it’s how we make more zucchini, if you will. So, that’s the biggest reason that it matters is, I mean, honey is good and great. As you mentioned, it’s good medicine, a good allergy medicine and stuff. But, if we didn’t have something pollinating the plants, we wouldn’t be getting the fruits and the vegetables. Pretty soon, that would turn into a food shortage, and that way lies madness.
Dr. Lisa: Why did you become interested in bees? What was the path?
Christy: Well, I actually came into beekeeping through the alpaca business. Before I owned Gold Star Honeybees, I ran Gold Star Alpacas, and I was a herd sitter. So, I wanted to be able to offer more services than just herd sitting, so I went to a farm out in Waldoboro and learned how to sheer. After I had wrestled with this farmer about a half-a-dozen alpacas and some fairly bad haircuts, he reached over into a ledge in his barn and picked up a jar and handed it to me and said, “Here. Thanks for your help.” I said, “You’re more than welcome. What is this?” The jar was full of honey that he had harvested straight out of his own hives and just drained it and put it in the jar. But, it was so nearly unrecognizable from what you’re used to seeing in a grocery store, which is so very, very clear and runny and fairly processed honey, and this was just literally straight out of the hive, no more straining than it takes to get the wax out and maybe the occasional spare bee part.
So, I was pretty enthused at that point and wanted to know more. Since he was also tied up with the Knox Lincoln County Beekeepers, he got me started into bee school and the next thing you know, I was in conventional hives, the square box hives that people are mostly familiar with. But, there were a few things about it that didn’t really ring true. The first thing was the way the bees made their honeycomb. I was dying to see what they did before all the inputs that us humans have been giving them in these square boxes. When I saw just naturally made honeycomb that I pulled out of a colony that was living in a roofline, you might say that rocked my World. It just changed my whole attitude about it because the bees are doing something very different than what we’re asking them to do inside a commercial hive.
So, that got me interested in anything that had to do with natural beeswax, and that brought up eventually … A couple months of Googling was what it took at the time because it was not that prevalent, but that’s what brought the idea of top bar hives to my attention. Soon, I was running a service where say you wanted to have bees, but you didn’t want to necessarily be a beekeeper. That’s what Gold Star Honeybees did. We put a hive on your place. It didn’t move. It was not migratory pollination. But, it stayed at your place. I, as the beekeeper, travelled to care for it … sort of like the pool guy. You know, you have a pool, the pool guy comes and cares for it. So, that’s how I started out.
That made it apparent to me, in the big letters, that you had to have interchangeable parts. All of your equipment parts needed to be interchangeable. That sort of lit the lightbulb that said, “That should be a kit.” So, I went from running a beekeeping service, essentially, to manufacturing the equipment. Of course, I wrote a book about how to do it, and I teach classes. I’m working on making that class available electronically.
Dr. Lisa: Yes, you’re doing a KickStarter Campaign.
Christy: A KickStarter Campaign. Yeah, it starts on the 10th. It runs for 21 days, which we thought was appropriate because that’s about how long it takes to make a baby honeybee, a worker bee. Yeah, we’re really excited. There’s been a lot of people that have been very supportive of the idea, but not everybody can come to Maine to go to bee school. I’ve travelled a lot to teach this class, but I can’t get to everybody where they live, so this’ll make that a whole lot easier and help people feel more confident about being able to keep bees in this natural method.
Dr. Lisa: When you think about honeycomb and you think about what bees do to sort of build their hives, you’ve described what we offer them commercially, which is some sort of piece of … I guess, is it usually plexiglass or some sort of …
Christy: Well, it comes in a couple of different forms. What you’re talking about is called foundation, and it’s generally a piece of plastic, sometimes a very thin and flexible piece or sometimes much more rigid, coated with wax. The interesting thing, to me, about foundation is that it has hexagons embossed on it as if bees don’t understand how to make hexagons, which is a little bit laughable since they’re sort of the original engineers.
So, I really looked at that, and I looked at natural comb when I had pulled it out of a building and said, “Wait. There’s a huge difference here; first being that the foundation is all one size.” Natural beeswax, they need to make different sizes for different things. Girl bees or workers are born in one sized cell. Drones are born in another sized cell, much bigger. A drone bee is a bigger bee. The bees need to be in charge of that. Honeycomb, I’ve described it as being the heart and the skeleton of the bee colony. The bees really need to be in charge of where, what is put and making it based on what’s going on with their system inside the hive.
Dr. Lisa: Also, what we’re giving them to build on top of is of great concern.
Christy: Mm-hmm (affirmative). It is. When we started in the middle 80s with a pest problem called the varroa mite, we took sort of a zero tolerance attitude about the varroa mite, and we started to treat hives with some pretty strong chemicals. Of course, after a couple of years of treating them with strong chemicals, the mites, by this time, developed a resistance, so we moved on to a second chemical. So, a couple more years of treating with that, again, we had a resistance problem.
But, in the meantime, beeswax is what they call lipophilic, so it absorbs these chemicals. Now, you have not only that first chemical, but essentially a chemical cocktail inside the hive. Then, eventually, this wax that’s absorbed all of this persistent pesticide is sent away to be melted down and made into new foundation. The problem with that is those chemicals don’t just magically disappear out of the wax. They’re still in there. When you buy brand-new foundation today, the wax is already contaminated. So, even in a brand-new beehive using foundation, you’re starting out with a contaminated situation inside your hive.
Dr. Lisa: So, how does this impact us as humans?
Christy: Boy, we would like to have more data on that, wouldn’t we? Well, it can’t be good, first of all. It means that the honey that we would like to use for healthful purposes is contaminated, to a certain extent, with this stuff that’s been used to treat for mites. Anything else that a bee goes out and encounters in the field and brings back, which also goes into the wax and the honey and everything that’s in the hive. So, it really is a way of contaminating lots of stuff sort of all at once. You bring it back into the hive, and everything that’s in the hive has now got what the bees have been foraging on and anything that the …
Well, for instance, if you look out at the World and you see a green growing thing really of any kind, especially flowers, the thing I like to think of, purposely, is that that’s bee food. So, if you leave it alone and clean and pristine as bee food, then you’ve got a much safer situation than if you get into a situation where you’re concerned about other pests destroying a crop because that’s where you’re taking all that stuff right back in the hive. You can’t really control where the bees are flying. You can’t say, “No, no. Don’t go over there. That’s bad stuff.” They don’t know, and they get involved with that stuff, and in the hive it goes.
Dr. Lisa: You’re on the Dr. Lisa radio hour and podcast. We’ve long recognized the link between health and wealth. Here to speak more on the topic is Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial.
Tom: Have you ever sat on a lazy summer day and watched the bees as they buzz, from flower to flower, gathering pollen? Those little guys are focused, by instinct, and never waiver from their designated tasks. The byproduct of that singular, specialized mission is a tremendous amount of beauty. Now, just imagine what life would be like if you did the same thing all day, every day without fail. I’m guessing you’d drive yourself crazy with boredom. The thing is, we all crave change. The same can be said about your finances. We crave change.
As a result, we subject ourselves to fear and use it as an excuse to make a change. We subject ourselves to greed and use it as an excuse to, again, make a change. But, the real beauty in understanding and having an evolutionary relationship with your money is that you will let the bees do what bees do and get to enjoy the fruits of their labor. The honey then becomes the fuel you need to do what you do. Please get in touch with us, and we’ll help you avoid the cravings that take your focus off the important things in your life. I’m here to help. Send a note to [email protected].
Speaker 1: Securities offered through LPL Financial, a member of FINRA/SIPC. Investment advice offered through Flagship Harbor Advisors, a registered investment advisor. Flagship Harbor Advisors and Shepard Financial are separate entities from LPL Financial.
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Dr. Lisa: So, when I’m buying something that labels itself as organic honey, how do I know that it’s actually organic? If the bees are flying wherever they want, and maybe they’re going over to Farmer Brown’s crops and they’re all organically created. But, they’re going over to Farmer Joe’s crops, and Farmer Joe is using pesticides. How do we know this is organic?
Christy: Chances are good if you look carefully at the honey that you’re buying, you’re going to find very, very few labels that say “organic” on them. They will say “pure.” They might say “raw.” They might say “natural.” There will be all these glowing terms. Of course, we think of honey as this perfect food, and it really is an amazing thing. But, it’s almost impossible to have organic honey unless you’ve got control over … well, over 100 square miles. A bee can fly 5 miles from the beehive, and so if you took … Let’s say, for instance, I know the radio audience can’t see this. But, if this was my beehive and I had a 5-mile long piece of string and drew a big circle with that string, that’s the area that your bees can forage in.
So, unless that is all certified as organic, then it’s not organic honey. It could be that the beekeeper didn’t use any kind of chemicals in their hives, but still what they’re foraging on is what the honey’s made of, and so that’s the key. That’s what has to be organic. It’s not something that we think of right away because you … I mean, we do have this good feeling about honey. It’s a beautiful food, and pure, and natural, and all of those words seem to say, “Oh, it’s good stuff.” But, it rarely, if ever, is it actually USDA Certified Organic because of the forage that the bees are bringing it back from.
Dr. Lisa: Christy, your book is called, The Thinking Beekeeper: A Guide to Natural Beekeeping and Top Bar Hives. By the way, for those who are listening, it’s been a recommended book by Mother Earth News, which those of us who read magazines know that this is a very good … Mother Earth is a very well-known publication. So, congratulations on that stamp of approval.
Christy: Thank you. Thanks. I was proud of that.
Dr. Lisa: But, what is a top … Tell me, what does the top bar hive give people who are beekeepers or non-beekeepers? What does it do for us?
Christy: The most important thing about a top bar hive is that the bees get to make all of their own, natural, beeswax honeycomb. There’s no foundation used, and so that means when you look at a top bar hive, it is a series of bars that sit across a top of a cavity where the bees are nesting, and they draw honeycomb down from each individual top bar. The difference, really, between that and the conventional hives, with a sheet of foundation inside it, is that they’re drawing it with cell sizes that suite the purposes that they’re going to use it for.
When they’re beginning a hive, they need to make lots and lots and lots of baby bees, so the comb is called brood comb. It’s not necessarily honeycomb right off the bat. That means you’ve got to be prepared for the size of the babies that are going to be born. Worker bees are the girl bees in a hive, and there’s a bunch of them, and they’re a little smaller than the boy bees or the drones. They have to … The bees have to make the cells a different size for those baby bees to be … the eggs to be laid in and the larva to hatch out of. So, it’s all kind of going on based on what the bees know about what they need to be having in the hive.
They start out with building that brood nest. So, lots of girl bees, some girl bees, and then eventually they’ll change it over to honey. That could be just about any size. It could be a cell that’s big around. It can also be a cell that’s very deep. So, really, the important part of that is that the bees know a whole lot more about it than we do, and it needs to be under their control. It is really the heart and cell of the bee colony, and they’re the only people who … or the only bugs that have any idea what they need to have next.
Dr. Lisa: Honey is usually used for their purposes to actually feed their babies.
Christy: Right. That’s what honeybees eat in the winter. They make honey, while the sun shines, for those times when there is no sun. Like, we have sun today. We have sun today, but we don’t have flowers. So, that’s what they’re basically doing is getting themselves through the winter on their own, their own resources.
Dr. Lisa: We’re seeing more of an interest in people raising their own chickens, even inside the city limits … and beekeeping. This has become more and more popular. Why do you think that is?
Christy: Well, I think the first reason is because bees and chickens are each other’s gateway drug. I think there’s been a movement, sort of, to get a little better connected to the planet. We don’t necessarily like the pictures that we’ve been shown of factory farming. Chickens raised in an environment like that don’t look healthy or cheerful, and you just don’t really want to be connected to that or perpetuating it. So, people found that it’s fairly easy to lobby your local government and be able to keep chickens, and bees are somehow in that same vain. Obviously, there’s a huge difference between chickens and bees, but they’re related in that you can do it in your backyard and it’s not as intensive as having a cow, say, which requires a lot of space. So, it seems to just go hand-in-hand.
The other thing that I will say that I’ve found … When I started first marketing top bar hives and talking about the concept, I would have mothers, always mothers it seemed, come up to the hive with a child in each hand and she’d be, “Johnny, Suzy … Look. It’s bees.” Then, she would look at me and she would say, “We just got chickens, and next we’re getting bees.” Because it’s just the way of parents helping to teach their children, “Look. This is how the World works. This is where food comes from. This is important stuff. You should know this.” Especially when you can compare it to video game playing, it’s a great deal … more earthy, you might say.
Dr. Lisa: This was the way that things used to work. People would have a farm. They would have some chickens. They’d have a cow. They might have a beehive out back. I mean, this was a way that people had and to sort of create self-sustainability.
Christy: Agreed. Somewhere, we kind of got disconnected and came off track there. Agriculture started to blow up into a big industry instead of something that you did in your backyard. Bees kind of got to be considered something that were meant for the country, essentially, and so you didn’t necessarily have a lot of people keeping bees in urban or suburban places. That was all to the detriment of everybody’s backyard vegetable garden. It was … It used to be perfectly normal that if you gardened, you had bees. It was just kind of part and parcel.
When that came apart, it left us with a World where you could plant a garden all day long and not necessarily get anything out of it because if there were no bees, there was no pollination and now we have no zucchini. I could probably live in a World without zucchini. But, I’m very big on every other vegetable on the planet, so you need all of that to work. Somehow, when that came unplugged or disconnected, we just sort of lost track of it and started to think that maybe chicken really did come in Styrofoam trays wrapped in cellophane. It’s kind of … There’s a movement to change that back, and I think that’s one of the reasons that parents are interested in chickens and bees.
Dr. Lisa: What would the requirements be for somebody who wanted to keep bees? Say, I live in Portland on the west end, and I have a little pot of land to go along with my house. How much space do you need? What are some of that requirements? How much work is it?
Christy: Hmm. Good question for people who are getting starting, for sure. You don’t necessarily have to have a lot of land yourself because, as we talked about earlier, bees forage, easily, 5 miles from the hive. So, they’re going to be out in the area to the tune of about 100 square miles surrounding your place. But, you don’t have to have that whole … You don’t have to own all that acreage, and you don’t have to have it all planted with everything that the bees need to eat either.
So, you need to be in a good place. The less pesticide use and industrial agriculture in your area that there is, the better. But, they just need a place where it’s safe for the hives to be, and the traffic of the bees coming in and out of the hive needs to be somewhat secluded. I mean, you don’t want the bees coming out of the hive and going straight across your sidewalk so that they mailman has to walk through them to the mailbox. That’s kind of out. But, just a safe enough place where the hive isn’t bothered, and then enough good forage in your area that they’ve got the food that they need.
Dr. Lisa: How much work does it take to actually maintain these hives?
Christy: What I like to do is take the whole season, and then average it out by the week. So, I think that early on, you probably inspect once-a-week, maybe a little more often than that. You’re certainly out there excited about your bees, so you’re looking. At the beginning, you’re new perhaps, and so you’re not as confident and you’re not as quick. So, an inspection will probably take you 45 minutes to an hour.
Then, as the season progresses, you’re going to find that you get a little faster and a little more confident. It goes a little better, but your colony is now considerably larger as well. So, it seems to work out to about an hour in inspection no matter what. So, if you were to look at that chopped out over your entire growing season, from the minute you’ve put a brand-new package of bees into a brand-new hive to the time you close down in the winter, it’s probably a little less than an hour-a-week … or, like we like to say, less than chickens.
So, but an hour a week, if that. You don’t have to look at them every day. You don’t have to do anything with them every day; just keeping tabs on their health. In a top bar hive, and important thing to be aware of is you have to be sure that they’re drawing the wax straight. It was to be on each individual bar because you need to be able to pick up each individual bar to inspect it. If they happen to glue or wax, if you will, the bars together by the way they’ve made the wax, then you need to get in there and correct that situation so that you can inspect each individual bar.
Dr. Lisa: So, when you say “drawing the wax straight,” it …
Christy: That’s a hard concept. It essentially means this. Bees start at the top of the cavity, and they cluster. When they’re drawing wax, it’s also called festooning or chaining in the case of drawing wax, and they’re hanging down from each other holding hands like you wouldn’t believe. I mean, they’re just grabbed on to each other. They secrete tiny, little wax globs out of glands that are in their abdomens. They grab those, chew them up, and they stick them to whatever’s above, and then they stick another one to that, then another one to that, then another one to that. So, it’s all … It’s all wax made right out of their little bee bellies, but it’s all gravity based. The thing that the beekeeper really wants is for each piece of comb to be drawing straight down from a top bar.
Now, that’s one of the reasons that foundation was put into use because if you aren’t patient with the drawing of the wax, then it means you might be in there having to correct the problem. That will slow you down. As a commercial beekeeper, you may not have the luxury of that much time to let them do that and keep it so that it’s inspectable. But, in the top bar hive, it’s pretty important that they be doing that on their own, and so it matters that the beekeeper be what we call a “wax shepherd.” You need to be in there shepherding the drawing of the wax so that it’s something that you can inspect.
Dr. Lisa: Is this much of a financial commitment to decide to own bees?
Christy: Well, the bees themselves, it depends very much on what you want to do there. If you were to get bees from me, you’d find yourself … If you picked them up from me at Gold Star Global Headquarters, as we like to call it here in Maine, they’re $150 for what’s called a 3-pound package that comes with a queen. Three pounds of bees is about 10,000 bees. It’s enough bees to start a new hive. The queen that comes with it is all part and parcel, and that’s how they get started.
The, hive equipment, what I try to do, with the products that Gold Star offers, is hit several different pricepoints that are tied to your interest and ability as a wood worker, or your amount of available free time, or your amount of available free money. Because if you don’t have any time, then the deluxe size makes sense. It’s all in there. It’s painted. The roof is painted. The observation window is already installed, and all that you have to do is have a screwdriver and a staple gun, take it from the box and in 2 hours, wallah. There is is. But, if you like to woodwork and you can and you’ve got the kind of equipment and that sort of a interest in it, then for $50, the do-it-yourself kid builds the exact same hive, but you get to do all the woodworking.
Then, in between, because the top bar itself in a Gold Star hive is the most important thing about getting straight wax, it’s got a great guide on it. But, it’s milled out of one piece, and not everybody has the equipment that makes that easy. It’s not necessarily safe to do it on a table saw, and we like beekeepers to have all 10 fingers. Counting to 10 is a good thing in our World. But, the do-it-yourself number 2 kit that I offer has all the top bars in it, and the beekeeper gets to build the stuff that’s a little less labor and equipment intensive. So, $295, and you’ve got the important piece and the ability to build the rest of the hive. So, really, it’s a mix … time, money, woodworking. What do you want to do? What makes you happy?
Dr. Lisa: How can people find out about Gold Star Honeybees, and the work that you’re doing, and the instruction that you’re offering, and the KickStarter Campaign?
Christy: Well, the first stop would be go to www.goldstarhoneybees.com. From there, you can get to just about everything else. There’s a YouTube channel also. If you go to YouTube and you simply search for Gold Star Honeybees, there’s over 50 how-to videos on how to do this and that in your hive, tips and tricks for getting through winter, how to start up a hive, all of that sort of thing.
Of course, when the KickStarter launches next Monday, there’ll be a link to that there too. So, the classes … I’d have to say that my passion really is talking about bees. I love to teach the classes. But, to teach for a weekend in front of a class size of 25 to 50 people just isn’t getting the word out fast enough, and so we’re really excited about KickStarter making it so that anybody that wants to learn how to keep bees in a top bar hive can sit down and do it … get the information.
Dr. Lisa: Well, I encourage people who are listening who might have an interest in beekeeping or just an interest in bees to go to your website and learn more. I appreciate the work you’re doing, bringing a more natural way of beekeeping to Maine and to hopefully other parts of the country. I appreciate your coming in today. We’ve been speaking with Christy Hemenway, of Gold Star Honeybees, and also author of The Thinking Beekeeper.
Christy: Well, thank you for having me in.
Dr. Lisa: As a physician and small business owner, I rely on Marci Booth, from Booth Maine, to help me with my own business and to help me live my own life fully. Here are a few thoughts from Marci.
Marci: Sometimes, I get scared. While it’s difficult to admit to anyone, much less myself, there are times when what lies before me stops me in my tracks and makes me feel that I can’t go on. That’s when I know I have to dig deep, take a deep breath, step outside my comfort zone, and more ahead. Each time I do that, I grow and learn something new about myself and what it means to not be daunted by fear of the unknown.
I talk of this often with my clients by helping them understand that while some decisions can be scary and make you feel uncomfortable, none should frighten you into an action. That only limits progress, and they should be seen as growth opportunities. A mantra we use at our offices at Booth is, “Power through.” So, if something is holding you back today, my advice to you is, “Power through.”
I’m Marci Booth. Let’s talk about the changes you need, boothmaine.com.
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