Rachel Schromen 0:03
When I was in law school, I jokingly referred to it as my robot training. Because I felt like I left law school being taught that to be a professional attorney meant that I didn’t show emotion, which at the time wasn’t a problem. I didn’t emote much at all. I had, you know, stifled a lot of that as women. I think there’s a tendency to overcompensate in that direction as well because an emotional woman is a hysterical woman, is an unhinged woman. And it took me a long time to step into that. And it happened as I started gaining traction in my own trauma recovery, and getting to the point that it was a detriment to me, and it was almost intolerably uncomfortable not to let some of that come up in meetings.

Blake Schofield 1:01
Hi, I’m Blake Schofield, founder and CEO of The Bridge to Fulfillment®. Mom to three, USA Today Top 10 professional coach, and former corporate executive who got tired of sacrificing my life for a comfortable paycheck. My mission is to expand perspectives to achieve greater impact at home and work without sacrifice. This is The Bridge to Fulfillment®.

Blake Schofield 1:36
Welcome to another episode of The Bridge to Fulfillment®. I’m really excited for this guest interview today. I’m talking with Rachel Schromen. She’s an estate planning and elder law attorney and owner of Schromen Law, LLC. Since starting to practice law in 2013, Rachel has been named one of the top three best rated estate law firms in St. Paul, and was voted Minnesota’s best estate law firm by readers of the Star Tribune in 2021, 2022, and 2023. Apart from her law practice, Rachel is a hospice volunteer and an end-of-life doula. And I can just tell you, the vulnerability journey and heart that she shares on the podcast today was really quite astounding to me, when we allow ourselves to connect to the things that we’re most passionate about in life is truly where we can make the biggest impact. It was an honor to have Rachel on the show. And I hope through her sharing her journey and her story, that she opens up the path for you to become more of the person that you’ve always wanted to be.

Blake Schofield 2:48
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of The Bridge to Fulfillment®. So excited for today’s interview. And I’m not even going to go online with this. I just want to welcome you, Rachel, to The Bridge to Fulfillment® podcast.

Rachel Schromen 3:02
Thank you.

Blake Schofield 3:03
So excited to have you! We had an opportunity to connect, I don’t know how many weeks ago through a mutual friend who we both adore, that was also on this podcast and our crew. And immediately when we started talking, I just really felt a sense of connection with the heart of the work that you do, and how you help people in a number of different ways. And so with that, I’d love for you just to introduce yourself to the audience. Let them know a little bit about you and we’ll just dive in.

Rachel Schromen 3:30
As you shared my name is Rachel Schromen, full time I’m an estate planning and elder law attorney and business owner. I own Schromen Law, LLC located in St. Paul, Minnesota. I’m also an end of life doula, and I volunteer in hospice in that capacity. And then personally, I’m a dog lover, and I’m a trauma survivor, and a human that’s on a recovery journey from childhood trauma from substance use disorder. And I think like a lot of us and kind of what we’re going to talk about today learning how to cope with grief and just navigate life.

Blake Schofield 4:08
Thank you for that. I think, you know, as we were saying, many of us go through life and don’t really understand a lot of the signs and symptoms or health issues that we have are related to what we’ve experienced. You know, it’s really amazing. If you look at society today and how different it is growing up today than it was 30 years ago, 50 years ago, but we come from a culture that has had a lot of trauma and pass that trauma on over and over and over again, I think many times without any understanding that it actually is trauma.

Rachel Schromen 4:41
Yeah.

Blake Schofield 4:42
It’s just one of those ‘Well, that’s the way it is‘ or ‘That’s the way it was for me‘. I’m interested to hear at what point in your life did you recognize ‘Oh, I have some trauma or have some things that are holding me back that I need to work on‘ and what were the signs and symptoms when that first started that you said ‘Wait a second, there’s an opportunity to do something different‘.

Rachel Schromen 5:02
I would say that first kind of started cropping up when I was in law school. And it manifested academically. And I was having a lot of, I was having anxiety and panic attacks in testing settings. And I went into a therapist, and it was impacting my grades and my ability to perform on tests, went into a therapist, and she said, ‘What are you feeling during the test?‘ I explained what was going on in my head. And her response was, she immediately asked me if I had been sexually assaulted. And I said, ‘Why would you ask me that I’m here to talk about testing‘. And she said, everything you just explained, is what I hear from someone who’s been assaulted. And that I mean, that’s an I don’t want to say obvious, but I knew I had had those experience that was the kind of more the big T at that time in my life, but to learn that, it was showing up in settings where that threat wasn’t, that wasn’t the immediate threat. But my nervous system felt trapped in a room, I felt like I couldn’t leave, I was scared, you know, I was having these really intense panic attacks and confusion. So that was when I started realizing, ‘Whoa, I’ve had some stuff happen. And it’s showing up in interesting ways. And I need to do something to deal with this‘. And initially, it was very focused on I want to be able to perform, this cannot impact my studies, you know, that developed over time until pretty darn recently, in 2021. Through a series of events, all of my lifetime of pretty significant trauma came flooding up at once, and I had a mental health crisis. And that was not sleeping, not eating, suicide planning to end my life. It’s pretty intense.

Blake Schofield 6:56
Thank you for just sharing so openly and honestly. I too really had a ton of test anxiety. And I got emotional as you kind of went through that because I think we know how prevalent it is that it happens to women. And yes, there are so few resources to help women deal with what they’ve experienced. And I think a real lack of awareness about the lasting impacts of that type of trauma in your life. It took me a really long time to understand for me personally, I think, well, it’s interesting. I think for me, the first place I really began my journey and sort of started to see ‘Oh, something’s going on‘. It was I just labeled myself a type A perfectionist, that’s just who I am, which is what we always do. But it manifested an insane amount of having to plan everything, everything having to be perfect, over analyzing things, being very fearful of making the wrong decision. And ultimately, that led to staying in a career for 18 years that was only partially aligned and was creating a tremendous amount of stress and anxiety for me. And then when I became an entrepreneur, people don’t tell you this, but entrepreneurship is a personal development journey. And I think the first 18 months I probably cried every day as an entrepreneur, I literally felt like I had lost my mind. I was so emotional. And I felt like I had no capability to like, hold back or process that. In a world where in corporate when I had lost it and cried, I felt judged, and unprofessional.

Blake Schofield 8:40
And I grew up with a mom who you know, highly emotional, she went through her own journey to healing. And I think as a young child, I decided that if you were emotional, that meant you were impulsive, or irrational or made bad decisions. And so I spent so many years of my life not being emotional that when I finally became an entrepreneur, it was like the dam opened and wouldn’t stop. And I think for me, that’s when I started to go, ‘Wait, what’s really going on?‘ And so if you’re listening to this right now, and you’re thinking, ‘Man, that some of this is really hitting home for me‘. I think that’s a beautiful thing. Because in society, we label the anxieties and stresses and things that we have as who we are. I’m just a perfectionist. And often that isn’t true at all. It’s our way of coping. It’s how we learned how to adapt in a world that felt unsafe, or we were fearful we wouldn’t be loved, or we felt it was necessary to be successful. And I often think I say all the time how you do one thing is how you do everything. Because I find that to be true. People think you can separate work from personal but they’re really not, but you can usually see trauma in work or in school first, because that’s you Zero to look at.

Rachel Schromen 10:02
Yeah.

Blake Schofield 10:03
As you went down this journey, and you’re talking to the therapist, and she shares this revelation with you, where did you go from there? How did you decide what to do with that? Because I think when you first become aware, ‘Oh, I have this unresolved trauma that’s creating all these problems‘. It sounds like to me your focus was great. ‘Let me get rid of it. Let me get rid of it. So I can achieve‘. And I can relate to that, too. ‘Let me get rid of it. So I can achieve‘. Was it purely based on that? And if so, do you also think that that was part of the trauma response?

Rachel Schromen 10:33
Initially, I mean, this first meeting that I referenced with the test anxiety, I was like, 22 years old. And at that time, I would have said, I had a wonderful childhood, like, I just was not aware of the culmination of everything. I remember looking at people and saying, ‘Well, yeah, I’ve been sexually assaulted. But it did not affect me‘. Because I was able to dissociate and I didn’t have a lot of real obvious symptoms, and I can still talk about it without a lot of emotion, I’m pretty darn, I was dissociated when it happened. I’m pretty darn dissociated from it now. And so initially, when it was brought to my attention, it was okay, we need to figure out a way to, like, shut this off even more, make it go away, so I can test. And my journey and it’s been a journey, it’s been 22, I’m 35. Now 13 years, it’s evolved. And it’s deepened as I’ve been capable. And I can give myself a lot of grace around to that. Initially, it was double down on focusing, I got sober, I quit coping, and using alcohol and drugs. To help the anxiety, I utilized medications, I had rituals, I would unwrap six cough drops, and set them out every test. I mean, I did all of these little coping things. And they worked for me then, and they got me through it. It looks very different today, when that feeling comes up. And when I do a ton of public speaking, in the first 10 minutes of every public talk that I do, my body will go, you can’t get out of this room, you are here for the next hour, you don’t know any of these people, and I have a mini panic attack. I don’t medicate going into that, I don’t have a ritual. I hear it. I sit with that feeling. I talk to that teenager. And I process through that feeling now. But that’s been the culmination of a lot, a lot of work, time, money, including a nine week inpatient trauma treatment. So I share that because it’s looked very different at different points in my life. And that’s okay. Some of the methods I used initially. Am I going to do any of that now? No, but I’m sure glad I did it, then. And I’m happy that that 22 year old could utilize those tools, then.

Blake Schofield 12:58
Thank you for sharing that. I think at the society, we get really focused on chasing things, cars, house, motions, yeah, in the hope to be happy. But what I consistently see is coming home to who you really are, is truly the greatest gift and the only thing that sort of solves that missing hole, or stress, anxiety, etc., that everybody’s trying to fill. At some point in your journey, you began to realize that you had a passion for helping other people to heal. Can you share a little bit about that, and how that’s led into the work you do today?

Rachel Schromen 13:37
I think I’ve always, like I would say most humans desired authentic human connection. It was something that I didn’t grow up with, because I had traumatized parents who did not have the support or the resources to heal and didn’t have the emotional capacity to connect, with us as children. And so at age 14, I was volunteering in nursing homes, and going in and playing games with elders, you know, et cetera. I was a social work major before I went to law school, and then in law school initially, I mean, getting into this career, it was this very intellectual way of helping someone. And so I thought someone comes to me with a problem, I fixed the problem. That is my purpose. I like that. I like it a lot. I mean, I love what I do professionally. I like drafting legal documents, etc. I can tell you I focused on that the first handful of years of practicing law and at age 30 was considering a career change. It’s the human connection that really brings joy and passion to what I do. And that comes with the underlying issues of what I address for clients. I’m here to solve a legal problem. There’s usually a lot of underlying emotional grief, etc., that to an extent I can connect with that person on and support them through. I actually just watched movie Patch Adams last night. Kind of exactly on this topic. You know, he’s there to connect with, have a human connection, a human experience. And that’s what brings him joy and purpose in life. That kind of showed up in the doula work. I became become a trained doula. I was really experiencing human connection in that work. I wasn’t welcoming that in my legal practice. So I’d be in my law firm with my lawyer hat on and my lawyer costume, as I call it, my full suit, having very type A, you know, intellectual conversations, and then I’d leave work and go do doula work and have these beautiful human experiences. I’ve worked to meld those together.

Blake Schofield 15:35
I love that. I really appreciate that journey, because I think that’s again, part of the different layers of coming home to who you are, we so often want to segment things and compartmentalize them. And for those of us who have been through a lot of trauma, what I consistently see is removal of the human elements at the detriment of your own personal health and your own personal connection, but also an extreme reliance on perfectionism processes being right, being right. I just didn’t know it back then, when I was experiencing that, that that was a manifestation of trauma. And so the beautiful pieces, you sought out what you missed, and you were able to create that, and then you realized the dichotomy between how you were living your life, and who you were really at the core. And I appreciate that so much, because I feel like that’s been my journey the last year, and really significant way when I, you know, launched The Bridge to Fulfillment® in 2017, was a structured program. And then last year, when I launched Ascend and really said, I’m gonna really showcase what I’ve learned in the last five, six years, and how I’ve grown and make that available to people. And then I was living these two separate lives just like you, with the entrepreneurs and the people, you know, men and women I was working with Ascend then, and then this very structured program that a lot of people are coming in thinking this is exactly the way it works. And it felt like I was almost pulled in two. Like, some people see me as this. And when I’m doing this, it’s frustrating because they don’t actually understand, this is just one way of which I help people, but it’s not the entirety of me. And so I love the fact that you learn to meld it because I believe that it’s the unique mixture of our experiences, our gifts, and our passions, and our skills that when combined make us able to contribute our unique perspective to the world. There are a ton of lawyers that are Type A will do your work whenever, there are very few that understand the human component behind it all. Because I would imagine you see what I see which is I always say it’s all, everything I addresses always emotions plus tactics. Everybody’s just trying to do tactics. But if you try to do tactics without addressing the emotion, it’s like ‘Ack’, big red ball.

Rachel Schromen 18:06
Yeah, 100%. And professionally, when I was in law school, I jokingly referred to it as my robot training. Because I felt like I left law school being taught that to be a professional attorney meant that I didn’t show emotion, which at the time wasn’t a problem. I didn’t emote much at all. I had, you know, stifled a lot of that as women. I think there’s a tendency to overcompensate in that direction as well because an emotional woman is a hysterical woman, is an unhinged woman. When one of my first jobs I worked doing bankruptcy law, and I had a meeting with an attorney that I was training with, a woman came in the these are people filing bankruptcy, which is usually after a traumatic event, is when this is happening. death of a spouse motorcycle accident. I mean, there was some pretty heavy stuff we dealt with. She was very emotional. I cried during the meeting, and we’re talking a few tears, and afterwards was told, ‘You know, that’s not appropriate‘. You do not cry in front of clients. And I just thought that made me sad. I should be able to emote I should I be inconsolable and need the client to take care of me now. Like there’s an appropriate way to show emotion. And it took me a long time to step into that. And it happened as I started gaining traction in my own trauma recovery. And getting to the point that it was a detriment to me. And it was almost intolerably uncomfortable not to let some of that come up in meetings.

Rachel Schromen 19:39
I’ll give a short example. I had a gentleman come in to meet with me. And it was around the time my dad was dying from Alzheimer’s. And this man, he looked just like my dad. Cowboy boots, Harley shirt, handlebar mustache, and I’m not kidding you as it says if my father’s eyes had been put into his head, and we’re starting this meeting, and I’m look, talking to him. And I was having so much emotion and anxiety come up, I, in my head, I’m going, how do I get out of this office I need to leave to like, collect myself because this is really intense. And what I ended up doing is I said, ‘I’m sorry, I have to pause for a moment‘. And I said, ‘You look so much like my father, you have it is like speaking to him. And I feel like I’m talking to him again when he didn’t have Alzheimer’s‘. And the gentleman nodded, and he got a little teary, and he slid his hand across the table and just held my hand for a few moments. And I wept, and we just kind of held each other’s eyes and you know, nodded. Then I said, ‘Thank you‘. And we continued the meeting. And I remember after that happened, I even thought while we were doing our meeting, ‘Okay, well, he won’t hire me‘. But obviously, he’s, you know, I seem unstable, blah, blah, blah. Not only did he hire me, but it was one of the best client relationships I’ve had. And that was an experience pretty early on when this started happening. And I’ve leaned into it. And the opposite has happened with my business, by the way, like the growth has been exponential. When people comment on their experience working with me or any attorney at my firm, they’re commenting on how we made them feel, how we handled sensitive topics. And that is so, so, so important to me,

Blake Schofield 21:23
I love that, I think they’re, the world would be so much better of a place, if we slow down and really saw people for who they are and what they’re experiencing in the moment and allow them the opportunity to process it. I just struggle so much with our society today, where it’s not a today thing, really, but where emotions are seen as weak, where we have a whole rhetoric about just sucking it up. And what people don’t understand is a) those motions store in your body and physically make you ill; b) there’s nothing greater than the power of human connection. And when we shut that off, as a society, we become a bunch of people who feel depressed, disconnected, alone. And we seek distraction and avoidance, whether that’s alcohol, drugs, self harm, food. And it seems like such a simple thing to say like, if you look at it from a society, it’s like that’s it. But yeah, and I think it’s really complicated, because we grew up, just like you do believe in why I had a great childhood, and nothing really bad happened to me. And this is the way that it is. And we grew up being told it’s not okay to process negative emotions. And unfortunately, what I usually see is the ones who make their way out of it, the ones who learn the power of doing the work to transform their lives, and then therefore help others usually are the ones that suffer quite a bit before they get to that point.

Rachel Schromen 23:01
Yeah.

Blake Schofield 23:02
To a point where it will break you. And then you have to put together all of the pieces.

Rachel Schromen 23:07
Yes.

Blake Schofield 23:08
And so if there’s anybody listening to this, that is can really relate. And I would imagine most people that are listening will be able to relate because we all go through big T and little T trauma. It’s just the reality of the human experience. I’d be interested in your perspective on what would be some advice that you may give someone who currently is suffering from loss or grief, in terms of how can they accept that and also learn how to move forward from it?

Rachel Schromen 23:40
That’s a big question. I think it can look different for a lot of people what helped me, what has helped me is reaching out to others and that that’s looked different. It’s very, I have a very hard time reaching out for help. Still, to this day, it’s something I’m still actively working on. However, I can reach out to professionals pretty easily. I feel worthy of help from professionals if I’m paying them. So when my dad died want to out initially couple months, I really really struggled with the grief came out real sideways. It wasn’t pretty. And then it got to the point where I realized, ‘Whoa, I need to do something here. I’m not really knowing how to process this‘. So I started working with a grief therapist, and that was pivotal. There’s a lot of groups that people can go to around grief. My law firm also actually does monthly seminars that are free to the community on grief, loss, and transition. There’s death cafes, cropping up all over. There’s all sorts of spaces that people are creating to hold where you can show up and sit, and not talk, or you can go in and ask questions, or go in and share your story. Connecting with other individuals that can be helpful too. I’ve found, it can be very hard for individuals who are in the thick of it to take action steps. So I might also offer some suggestions as to what we can do for others who are grieving. Some things I do and that we do as a law firm, affirming what the person is experiencing.

Rachel Schromen 25:24
If someone’s sharing grief with me, saying that’s normal, I cannot tell you how many clients I’ve had in the office that they say my brain is just not working. I don’t remember what I did yesterday, I couldn’t get out of bed today. And I say, ‘Yeah, I know what you’re talking about‘. They talk about your brain on drugs. Jeez, your brain on grief really is something you know, I mean, I, when I was going through grief, it was unreal. I remember driving to the grocery store. Once I parked in the parking lot. I couldn’t remember why I drove there, or how I got there. And I just started sobbing. It was one of the scarier experiences I’ve had. We send just notes checking in. When my dad passed away. And I was young, I was 32. So I didn’t have a lot of people in my life who had experienced loss. The people who showed up in the best way, unsurprisingly, were the ones who had experienced loss. And one of my friends texted me and said, ‘Will you be home tonight, between five and six? I’m going to drop off a meal, I will leave it at your door and ring the doorbell‘. And I said, ‘Yes, thank you‘. It was I mean, I still get emotional. Because it was one of the kindest things and I felt so freaking loved and supported. And if she had texted me and said, ‘Can I drop off a meal?‘ I would have said, ‘No‘. If she had texted me and said, ‘What can I do to help?‘, I would have said ‘Nothing‘. But just reaching out and offering, we send, there’s a local company in Minnesota that does grief care packages called Beyond Words, Co. They’ll put together these little curated boxes, and it’s all grief things, whether it’s tea and chocolate, and a candle and a book or whatever, I send those out to individuals in my life, we send them out to clients. Creating conversation, just opening the space, I think, goes a very, very long way.

Blake Schofield 27:13
Hm, I appreciate you, saying that my mom’s dad got really sick with leukemia when she was nine and seven in the hospital for two years, died when she was 11. And she often tells the stories that they survived off of all the people from the church delivering meals to their home. And it, it can feel like such a small thing, but be so huge in a moment when maybe you don’t even have the energy hardly to get out of bed. And you do feel completely alone. And I think that’s the piece over and over again. And I really always try to focus on with this podcast on the work that I do is that you are not alone, and nothing is wrong with you. And I think those are the things we often need to hear. Because when we are in the throes of transformation are something really emotional. The first thing our brain is going to do is judge.

Rachel Schromen 28:06
Yeah.

Blake Schofield 28:07
And usually go inward. And those are the two biggest risks you can have, because when we sit alone in it, or we think there’s something wrong with us, we very very quickly can get sort of thrown into the depths of it. And it’s through the human connection and allowing somebody else to, to be there with you, to show you that you’re not alone that I think we begin to see the light again.

Rachel Schromen 28:32
Yeah, those two statements, you are not alone, and there is nothing wrong with you, so powerful. It, I remember the first time, I don’t know if it’s the first time someone said it to me, but it’s the first time I really heard it. It was when I was in, in inpatient trauma treatment. And I had all these emotions coming up in these feelings. And I’m really recognizing, you know, I’m in my 30s having to use a feeling chart to identify what my feelings are, for a very type A high achieving successful intellectual, that was not a great experience for me. Didn’t feel good, I really felt alone, I felt for lack of a better phrase like an idiot, like I was developed mentally challenged in that way. I mean, it really I was a lot of self shame was coming up. And I was in a session with a woman who did DBT Dialectical Behavior Therapy. And I was talking and I was crying, and I think I was probably making some sort of shame statements and she caught my eyes and she said, ‘Rachel, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with you‘. And I just sobbed. Because it felt so good to hear that, and it was the first time in a while, at least at that point in my life that I felt some hope. And then later she shared her story, she had gone through, she had multiple suicide attempts, she had gone through her own treatment. And this was, I’m hearing this from someone who I was looking up to as the beacon of like, ‘Oh, she’s got this‘. And she’s saying, ‘Yeah, I do kind of got it. And I’ve also been where you are‘. And there’s power in sharing that, and I have conversations almost daily, with people where I’ll share something vulnerably. They say, ‘Ah, it feels so good to hear you say that‘. Or ‘I have felt exactly the same way‘. Like, of course you have, like, we’re all having a human experience, you know? And why do we all feel so alone in it? We don’t have to.

Blake Schofield 30:37
That is powerful. Why do we all feel so alone in it, and we don’t have to. And I think it’s because the conditioning of a society that’s told us, it’s not okay to have feelings. And that the only way to be successful is X. And I believe change always starts with one person, right? It’s the ripple effect. And the hardest thing is just to take the first step for anybody that struggling with anything emotionally, the hardest part is take the first step, go to the meeting, call the friend, and met whatever it is that your feeling. And yet, that to me is the door opener of which everything else becomes possible. And so we’ve been really deep today, and I really appreciate your honesty and sharing. And my hope in really spending some time going deep on these topics is to help people understand that they aren’t alone, there isn’t anything wrong with them. And what I often find is that the missing human connection is a significant portion of why we suffer. And we think it’s because we need the promotion or the job or the whatever it might be. But it’s really us being disconnected. In a world where we are connected, we just believe that we’re disconnected. We’re all connected by the same experiences, the same challenges, the same joys, the same sorrows. But if we aren’t open to seeing it, and we don’t allow it, we will miss what’s sitting right in front of our face.

Rachel Schromen 32:12
Mm hmm. I agree entirely.

Blake Schofield 32:15
It’s been such a pleasure having you, it’s done so fast. I have two things before we wrap up, if that’s okay. The first one is, is there anything I didn’t ask you that I should have? Or this just really on your heart to share?

Rachel Schromen 32:29
On my heart right now, we’ve talked a lot about how reaching out to others can help us and our own journeys, it can be hard to reach out in those moments. One thing that helps me is how I have seen that reaching out ourselves or being vulnerable ourselves can help others. When I went into trauma treatment, I was very, I did not share it with many people. I shared it with a small handful. One was a small networking group of female business owners, and I felt safe sharing with these business owners. Few weeks after I went in, a woman reached out and she said, ‘I wanted to let you know that when you reached out to our group, I was really suffering personally. And I had a plan in place to take my own life. And when I got your message, I thought, God, if Rachel needs help with this, if even she is struggling, maybe I can get help, too‘. And she sought an outpatient treatment. And when I ever have moments where I feel hesitant to be vulnerable, or I’m worried what people will think, I think back to that, because gosh, just that one story was worth, you know, all that I went through. And so that was on my heart to share as well, because I think it’s also an important element.

Blake Schofield 33:44
Thank you so much. Yeah, I really appreciate it. Dr. Jeff Spencer, one of my, you know, former mentors, he always says ‘Don’t decide the value of your contribution‘.

Rachel Schromen 33:55
Mm hmm. Yeah.

Blake Schofield 33:57
And I think that echoes what you’re saying, which is often we don’t realize how important it is that we share our journey or our experience or our perspective. And we can question whether it’s worthy of sharing. And what you’re saying, I have found to be so true, which is you would have never known that ripple effect. But because you chose to share, you save somebody’s life. And I see that same ripple effect over and over and over again. And so it’s a challenge for each one of us to recognize that we may never see the impact of the work that we do, but it always matters, your voice, your experience, your perspective matter. And that when we share them, it creates a positive ripple effect for others. Thank you. So last thing, obviously you’re located in the Minneapolis Minnesota area, which is awesome, but I know there may be some people that want to connect with you, follow you, or maybe work with you. How might they be able to, how might they be able to do that Rachel?

Rachel Schromen 34:58
You can contact me through my website, SchromenLaw.com. I’m also on Instagram and Facebook, social media accounts. Those are probably the best ways.

Blake Schofield 35:11
Okay, awesome. And we’ll have that in the show notes as well, so that you know how to spell it and can find her. Thank you so much again, Rachel, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you sharing. Just vulnerably your experience what you’ve been through. And I think really providing some way finders for people going through their own human experience to understand the power of connection, the power of sharing your experience, and really the resiliency of the human spirit. Because we truly can overcome anything. Nothing that we’re sitting in, no pain we’re sitting in, no struggle that we’re sitting in, is permanent. And I think that’s so important for people to understand, because when you’re sitting in it, it can feel like it is. But that’s a lie.

Rachel Schromen 35:54
Yeah.

Blake Schofield 35:57
So thank you so much for joining us today. And until next time, have a great week.