Hey, everyone, Emily Abadi here. You're listening to another installment of five minute Friday. Now if you're new to the show, welcome. You are now officially a herdler on five minute Friday.

This segment is all about just giving you some thoughts about where I'm at finishing off the week and doing it on high note. I offer you a prompt to take you into the weekend or whenever you are listening to this to get your thoughts moving.

And then I share an answer to a listener question for five minute Friday this week. I mean, what's going on in my head is the fact that it is official hurdle. Finally, four million downloads all time. It's crazy. You know, oftentimes when these milestones happen, whether, you know, it's a million milestone or a birthday, hurdles, birthday happens to be like right around New Year's Day when I released it in 2018.

I mean, but when these big moments happen, I can't help but think to myself that it wouldn't be happening if I never started at all. And I think that that is something that a lot of us struggle with in a lot of different aspects of our lives, right?

Like when it comes to our own personal wellness churning is and we want to maybe get into a new style of fitness. Maybe you want to start running or you want to walk more regularly or you want to try CrossFit or you want to take a hit class and you feel like this level of intimidation, right?

This level of uncertainty because getting acquainted with something will that involves change and that involves you putting yourself in a new space and stepping outside of your comfort zone.

And for me, like with hurdle, please total new space for me, like I admittedly had hardly listened to a podcast before deciding that I wanted to start one of my own. I didn't know anything or at least very little.

But I committed to learning, right? I committed to trying that new thing. I reached out to people in the space and I asked them questions. I bought myself a microphone and I just started talking to people and I didn't have again all of the answers, but what I did have was a passion for storytelling and a passion to just give it my all.

I knew going into it and this is another huge lesson that I've learned over the past four million downloads is that you've got to trust your gut and sometimes you've got to jump before you're ready.

And with so many, you know, big asks reaching out to guests, talking to sponsors so much of that was me just 100% winging it.

And in these scenarios, it was really like, well, the worst thing that can happen in this moment is that someone can tell you know someone can say, I don't really want to be on that show.

A sponsor could say, that price sounds like a little too much for us or whatever.

And I have gotten very used to know over the last four years, but what that does for me is it makes the yes moments so much sweeter.

But going back to this idea of just starting of just putting yourself out there, I never envisioned four years ago that I'd be sitting in a dedicated home office space designed to record with other people one day.

Who knows, sometimes soon, I hope thank you, COVID, but does that in this in this office space with two microphones and a neon sign and a massive silver mylar balloon that says the number four and would have been featured in the New York times.

And today I was invoked like, are you kidding? Are you a thing kidding? I never thought that this was going to happen. And to be honest, like I didn't even have a thought of like where I wanted to go with this.

I just knew what I wanted to do and what I wanted to do was connect with individuals all over the country to empower them on their own personal wellness journeys and make them feel less alone.

I remember feeling so alone when I started mine back early in college and I'll link to episode one where you can hear more about my past and the show notes, but all of this to say is that I knew what I wanted to do.

I wanted to help people I knew that I could do that via a podcast and now it just blows my mind that four million times someone has opened up their podcast feed wherever they get their podcasts.

Hopefully a fraction of those times someone walked away with something some sort of nugget of inspiration of piece of advice that they were able to use in their day to day.

And so this little Ramley rant on this five minute Friday is twofold. It's one to say thank you to all of you with a heardlers without you.

I you give me so much purpose and you give me so much life and I appreciate it so much when I get the messages and the emails of people thinking me, but really what I want you to know is that you are my why you are giving me so much more than I can even possibly try to articulate here.

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