Episode 6: Midlife Renaissance — a limited series

Reclaiming Your Power: Moms Demand Action’s Shannon Watts on Living a Life of Passion and Purpose

When you get involved in something like activism, it helps you realize that you have all of this untapped power. And it does give you the audacity to become a firestarter, to prioritize your desires over your obligations. – Shannon Watts

Episode 6

Today’s guest, Shannon Watts, has come to be known as a formidable force in the world. As the founder of Moms Demand Action, the largest grassroots movement against gun violence formed after the Sandy Hook school shooting tragedy in 2012, her activism has mobilized millions of moms to successfully pass over 500 gun safety laws. As Amy poignantly stated, Shannon’s work “has legitimately made a tangible impact on the safety of my kids in their classrooms”, demonstrating the profound significance of Shannon’s contributions.

Watts has since shifted her time and attention to empowering women, whom she credits as the real changemakers in any movement. She has founded the Firestarter School, a platform designed to help women reclaim their power and has a forthcoming book, Fired Up: How to Turn Your Spark into a Flame and Come Alive at Any Age, releasing in the summer of 2025, which explores the necessary elements needed to ignite a fire in your life and pursue your passion and purpose.

Episode Transcript

Shannon Watts: Hey there!

Jen Hatmaker: My gosh. Hi. I’m so happy to meet you.

Shannon Watts: How are you?

Shannon Watts: I’m so excited to meet you!

Jen Hatmaker: I was just telling Amy, just can’t believe we haven’t met.

Shannon Watts: I know, isn’t that nuts? We know all the same people.

Jen Hatmaker: I just said that. Like, know our circle of overlap is so high. I’m like, and I have wanted you to be on the show forever. So I’m just delighted that you’re here today. Yeah. Thank you for your time. This is Amy and I’m Hi. We’re just going to jump into it. We’ll introduce you separate. I don’t know if you’ve ever done an interview before, but.

Shannon Watts: I’m thrilled!

Shannon Watts: Hi Amy.

Shannon Watts: Yeah, of course.

Jen Hatmaker: Gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh. Okay, awesome. All right, here we go. Well, you guys, we’ve got a powerhouse on today. Shannon Watts, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome.

Shannon Watts: Hahaha!

Shannon Watts: Thank you, I am so thrilled to be here.

Jen Hatmaker: Gosh, same, we were just saying, I feel like I know you and we know all the same people and our story arcs are similar. Just, we care about the same things. I’m like, how are we just now meeting in 2025? I don’t know what took us so long.

Shannon Watts: You

Shannon Watts: Well, finally we’re best friends.

Jen Hatmaker: Geez, gosh, finally. We’re so, so glad that you’re here. Let’s start here. Cause we’re, you have a new book that comes out in June. I’m really excited for you. And we’re going to talk a lot about that book today and its central messaging and what it means for women, what it’s meant for you. But let’s, let’s pull back a hair and start here because this had to have certainly fed, fed the content. You know, obviously you built one of the largest grassroots movements in America ever. And so I’d love to hear what that story, what that journey taught you about people, women people particularly, these little seeds, right, in the field that are now like flourishing into this new kind of branch of your work and of your career and particularly this book.

Shannon Watts: You know, I had a career in corporate communications before I started Moms Demand Action. I had taken a five-year break and was blending my family with my new husband. Have five kids all together. And I thought, okay, I’ll take five years off. And at the very end of that five years was the Sandy Hook School shooting tragedy. And I posted on Facebook, you know, it’s time for women to stand up to gun lobbyists, the way Mothers Against Drunk Driving did in the 80s when I was a teen, right?

Jen Hatmaker: Yeah. Yep.

Shannon Watts: And just to restore the responsibilities that should go along with gun rights. Just thinking this was going to be an online conversation, but if you know anything about women, you know that very quickly it turned into the largest offline grassroots movement in the country, right? Because women are so passionate about protecting their families and their communities and no one could believe that 20 children

Jen Hatmaker: Sure.

Shannon Watts: and six educators had been slaughtered in the sanctity of an American elementary school. So I kind of went into this knowing that women were the secret sauce to activism, right? I’d seen it through MAD. You can go all the way back to prohibition if you study activism. The more you realize the stories that it’s women and often mostly women of color who are on the front line forcing change. And that ended up being the same successful recipe for gun safety too.

Jen Hatmaker: Hmm. Hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jen Hatmaker: Sure.

Shannon Watts: Over a decade, I worked with volunteers and survivors shoulder to shoulder. Passed over 500 gun safety laws. But this journey taught me something that I did not expect. And that was that the activism that we were doing on the ground through Moms Demand Action wouldn’t just transform the issue we were working on, that it would transform all of us, all of the women who were working on it.

Jen Hatmaker: Crazy.

Shannon Watts: You know, women who would come into the organization because of a shooting tragedy or because their kid went through a lockdown drill suddenly realized that when they were working on something they were passionate about with other people who supported and encouraged them, they had this unique set of values, skills that unlocked these dormant desires that they had. And so when you get involved in something like activism,

Jen Hatmaker: Totally.

Shannon Watts: It helps you realize you have all this untapped power and it does give you the audacity to become what I call a fire starter and that is simply a woman who makes the choice to prioritize her desires over her obligations.

Jen Hatmaker: Mm-hmm. Man. Hey, hey, your book is called Fired Up, How to Turn Your Spark into a Flame and Come Alive at Any Age. And it opens with a really powerful moment in your own life where you realize that the life you’ve built is making you incredibly sick. Yeah. Physically ill emergency room. Can you take us back to that moment and how it led you to where you are now.

Shannon Watts: Yeah, you just for context, my parents divorced when I was graduating from college and it was a particularly brutal divorce and I’m an only child and this whole experience really sent me into a spiral because everything that I sort of clung to was imploding. And I think because my family was falling apart that I subconsciously decided, I will start a new one. So, you know, as one does when their brain is not fully developed and so

Jen Hatmaker: Sure, as one does. Yes. That’s right. That’s right.

Shannon Watts: Right out of college, you I marry my college sweetheart. I’m 23 years old. By the time I’m 29, I have three kids. I have a job I don’t love, but I’m the person who pays the bills. And then I get to be in my mid thirties and I kind of realized, this isn’t the person I would have picked, you know, had I waited until a normal age to get married. And so my marriage was faltering too. And I was really having a difficult time acknowledging that I was living this life that was not true to me. I loved my kids desperately, but I was in an unfulfilling job. I had an unhappy marriage. I had an unbelievable and overwhelming amount of pressure, but I just kept doing what was expected of me, these shoulds that society puts on us, all of these obligations. And so ultimately what I push down internally came out externally. I became engulfed.

Jen Hatmaker: Sure.

Shannon Watts: in eczema and I know that some people might think, you had some itchy bumps. No, I from head to toe, my scalp down to my feet was covered in these horrible oozing lesions that prevented me from sleeping and focusing and, you know, just kind of operating misery and nothing I was prescribed calmed it down. Nothing. In fact, anytime I felt stress in my body, I felt the eczema flare up.

Jen Hatmaker: It’s just misery. Yeah.

Shannon Watts: And so I go to this appointment, this guy gets me in during my lunch break, you know, I have like 30 minutes. I think he’s just going to look at it. He’s a specialist. He’s going to help me. And it ended up being this epiphany, this moment where he shows me all the sympathy and I just break down and start to sob and finally face all of the things in my life that aren’t working and that I have made some really wrong choices.

Jen Hatmaker: Yeah, I get this.

Shannon Watts: that I am going to have to undo if I want to get well. And it really wasn’t that eczema was a sickness, it was a symptom of a life that was making me sick. And I think this can be applied more broadly, which is to say no matter how you ignore what you want or what you need, that is like an energy that will find its way out, right? Through anger or anxiety or depression, apathy, resentment, and mind basically burned me from the inside out. But that experience and this realization in that doctor’s office that I wanted and deserved more for my life was really a turning point that helped me figure out, we’re gonna talk about this, I know, but this formula for living on fire, right? A formula that encouraged me to ultimately end my marriage, to reimagine my life, and eventually to start Mom’s Demand Action.

Jen Hatmaker: Hmm. I want to drill into that for a second because this is one of the central messages of your book. Um, this, this powerful idea that in general we have been, women have been conditioned to make themselves smaller, more palatable. Um, which means in order to do that, we are going to have to prioritize obligation over desire, right? Over whatever it is, whatever hunger we have what we want, what we know, what we need. And so you call embracing what we want a radical act. And I would agree. It shouldn’t be. It’s not radical when men do it, but it is when women embrace their own hunger over obligations, a radical act. So yes, yes, yes, times a million to this. Can you parse that out a little bit more?

Shannon Watts: Yes. Yes, we get so used to catering to the wants and needs of other people that we don’t prioritize our own wants and needs to the point where it can start to feel really uncomfortable and foreign even to believe that we deserve more. I also have seen with myself and with, know, Moms Demand Action really became like the world’s largest field experiment for helping other women figure out, you know, what makes them come alive. And so we can start to mistake those obligations for our desires. You we think we want to be busy. You we think we need to be perfectionists. And so we start to live by the rules of the system that is actually designed to keep our desires in check. And that is what leads to anxiety, isolation, exhaustion, all the things that put me in the emergency room, really the opposite of living on fire, just to be clear, living on fire is a metaphor that I use for this journey of personal transformation. Not the kind of transformation that’s gonna make you younger or famous or wealthy, but basically an internal shift. What it really helps you see two things more clearly are what’s limiting you and what’s calling you. And those things are gonna differ from one woman to another woman. It could mean, being open to new experiences and relationships, could mean bringing new energy or intensity to what you’re already doing. It could be pausing and slowing down and maybe doing less than you were before, right? It doesn’t mean like, do more things, be more busy. It means do the things that are meaningful to you, even if they’re ordinary things. And I think given where we’re at in the world right now, there’s really an immoral imperative to figure out what makes women feel alive, right? That you were living the life you want, that you’re leaving a legacy. And I know that’s a really big word sometimes, legacy. Know, people think it’s like your name on a hospital building or, you know, something that is going to be in the New York Times obituary, but it’s not. It’s really just about giving your life meaning, giving other people the permission to do the same thing.

You know, living authentically is a little bit of a hackneyed phrase, but it’s this idea that you’ve made the most of your life. And when we, when scientists ask people, what is your deathbed regret? They say that they did not live a life that’s true to them. And every woman deserves that.

Jen Hatmaker: In your book, you introduce this incredible concept about a fire formula. Every actual fire in nature needs three things to occur and to keep burning. And you frame it as combining our desires, our values and our abilities to sort of create this real transformation in ourselves. Can you break down what those three components are in our lives?

Shannon Watts: Yes, and just as you said, it really is using the fire triangle, this simple scientific method in real life that explains how fires work. Each side of that triangle represents an element that is required to bring a fire to life, heat, oxygen, and fuel. So if you look at your desires, right, that is one of the most powerful element of this triangle. It’s the heat that activates your fire. It’s your deepest longings, the part of you that really want to be seen, to make an impact, to be shared with the world. And these are longings that you want to act on.

And then the next part is the oxygen in your fire triangle. And that’s really your values, your personal beliefs, your principles, how you define your priorities, your decisions. And it determines what’s really important in your life.

And then the third is your abilities. And that is unique to everyone, right? That’s your mental or physical gifts, your talents and your skills. Some of them are innate. Some of them are acquired, but ultimately they set you apart from other people. And this is the element that fuels your desires. And using this formula, it is a really a way that I have seen women come alive. They start to live not just from the inside out, but from the outside in and

If you combine those three things in just the right way, it will ignite a fire in your life, big or small. If you remove any of those elements, right? Just like in the real life, the fire will not start or it will go out. And so it’s really a sweet spot where what you long for is aligned with what grounds and guides you. And, you know, I just want to say, you know, I’m not a unicorn. I wasn’t.

I didn’t start Moms Demand Action because I’m some extraordinary person. I started it because that formula came together for me and really, it’s like magic, right? It feels like touching the divine.

Jen Hatmaker: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know exactly what you mean when the wind is just at your back and you just kind of hit the zone and the groove and you’re like, this is it. This is my lane. This is my thing. I like how you’ve mentioned a couple of times that a fire in any given life, it does not necessarily mean something massive. It could, I mean, it could mean you’re gonna quit your job and start a whole new career. It could be that. It could be you’re going back to college. It could be you’re starting a whole new relationship. It may be like a full sea change, but it could also mean small. It could mean reclaiming really precious parts of ourselves that we’ve lost and maybe like one chamber of our little hearts or whatever.

One way that you’ve structured the book is you include all these incredible examples. And so I wonder if you might share an example of a fire starter from your book, who did something small.

Shannon Watts: Yes, I had the privilege of speaking to over 70 women from all walks of life for this book, which was just exciting on top of all the other experiences I’ve had in my career and in my activism. And what I’m so impressed by is, you know, when women figure this out, what makes them come alive, they really start to do other things, right? They start to speak up in the workplace or they start to claim the space they deserve. And so, you know, there’s one story in there about a woman named Carol Frick and she’s a retired teacher. And she had always wanted to be a writer, but she, to pay the bills had to be a phys ed teacher, which she loved. But once she retired, she decided she was going to volunteer at an animal shelter. And she came up with this idea one day that she was going to write a novel about a love story in an animal shelter. She teaches herself how to write dialogue. You know, she spends hours and hours of research and practicing and telling a compelling story. She transforms herself from a novice, right, who doesn’t know how to create a plot into an expert. And she writes this book and she decides that it is so important to her. She does not want to self publish. She wants and deserves to be published by a publishing firm. And she was rejected more than 200 times. Finally, on the 219th try, she gets a book deal and she becomes a published author in her 70s, right? There’s another woman who has severe ADHD and doesn’t know what she wants to be and is sort of struggling with her own identity. She’s 40 years old and she decides to volunteer with immigrant families at the Mexico border.

Jen Hatmaker: That’s amazing. Love. I have goosebumps. Yeah.

Shannon Watts: And that encourages her to start this organization that has been around for almost five years now that is helping to support mostly mothers by bringing them money and supplies. And the last example I’ll give, just because there’s so many I could give, but these women are impressive. Amber Goodwin had applied to 16 law schools after she graduated from college. She was rejected by all of them. After the 2016 election, she decides she’s going to try one more time at age 38.

Jen Hatmaker: Yeah, yeah.

Shannon Watts: She gets accepted. She’s going to law school, working full time. At 40, she’s elected the first black president of her student bar association. And now she’s a prosecutor in Texas, working to get more people of color represented in law school. All of the, this didn’t happen overnight. It was this ongoing process.

Jen Hatmaker: Wow. And I love the through line there of a bit of tenacity. You know, that the first rejection doesn’t like eject you out of the idea, you know, or that there is something about being dog on a bone. Like the triangles in place. I know it. Like I know it. This is my deal. These are my values. This is my thing. I’m going to stay the course until I get there. I love that piece of it because we kind of live in a overnight success world right now.

Shannon Watts: So much tenacity.

Jen Hatmaker: It’s such a weird world, you know, watching people just spike up and all of a sudden they’re everywhere. I’m like, oh, it’s just that’s not really that’s not how it works. And it’s not how it lasts either. Right. And I love that if you use this formula of the heat and the oxygen and the fuel. So many of these women just keep collecting their fuel. Like keep collecting the kindling, like acquiring new skills, like for years waiting for the other two things to come together. And then we’re we’re prepared when it does. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When an opportunity presents itself. True. Good point. Or when we have the bandwidth to create our own opportunities, we. Yeah, for sure. One of the chapters in your book is called Why Women Don’t Live on Fire. And why you must anyway. Why don’t we? What holds us back?

Shannon Watts: You know, the good news is there’s this formula for living on fire, but the bad news is that following it is not easy, right? We live in a society that puts up all of these obstacles that attempt to block us at every turn and and that’s because society knows what would happen if women were encouraged to To want and to fulfill their desires, right? The world would come undone without our mental and physical energy propping up the system governments would fall institutions would crumble, traditional family systems would fall apart and so to make sure that doesn’t happen society really shoulders with women So many burdens and so many responsibilities and that includes everything as we know from housework to caregiving and so you don’t really have room in your life to explore your desires so you are gonna get blowback, I call these extinguishers. They are this this negative inner voice that that society has told us all the reasons why we shouldn’t do this. And what it boils down to are feelings of guilt and shame, right? Guilt tells you you did a bad thing. Shame is more insidious. It tells you you’re failing as a person. And that can be manifested as everything from imposter syndrome to perfectionism to self-sabotage, right? Like I’ve seen all of it because it can make us uncomfortable. It can make other people uncomfortable.

And so if you’re going to claim space, raise your voice, you are going to get this blowback. And what this book talks women through is what to do when that happens, right? How you respond to this backlash, the fact that it’s proof that you’re doing something right, because ultimately, the direct proportion to which you can grow your fire depends on the amount of blowback you’re willing to withstand.

Jen Hatmaker: That’s true. That is so true. That thick skin will see you through for sure. And you do have to be prepared for that. It’s not even a matter of if, it is when, it will come, there will be resistance. Nobody wants you to disrupt the life you have made possible with your complicity, right? Like with my invisible labor, my unpaid labor, my all the ways that I’m doing. Nobody wants us to pull the pin out of that grenade. They like it that way it is. So yeah, be prepared for someone to say you’re being selfish, to want what you want, to do what you want for sure. And your book gives a lot of answers to that disruption. I’d like to hear you very specifically talk about the listener right now who’s hearing this and going, yes, yes, like I’m catching feelings here for this conversation, but I am too old. I’m too old. My building years are in the rear view mirror. The time when I had all the energy for this was in my 30s and 40s or whatever. I’ve missed my window. I have big thoughts here and I’d like to hear yours.

Shannon Watts: I hear this so much. Yes, I would like to hear your big thoughts, but I hear this so much. I just gave some examples to you of the women that I talked to in the book and I make sure that I talk to a lot of women who are over 50. Because for many of us, because I had kids so young, I became an empty nester at 49 and I still have so much runway in my life. I didn’t start Mom’s Demand Action until I was 41. I didn’t figure out what it was that made me tick.

As I said, I’m not a unicorn. I am an introvert. I struggle with severe ADHD. I have a debilitating fear of public speaking. I knew little to nothing about politics, organizing, or gun violence. This is not the description of someone people would point to and say, she should take on the most powerful, wealthy, special interests that’s ever existed. No, no one was saying that. And in fact, lots of people told me I wasn’t the one and that I shouldn’t do this. Yet, despite all of my imperfections,and my lack of preparedness, I stepped up. And even though there were a lot of obstacles that seemed insurmountable, right? Some I had constructed inside myself over a lifetime, some built by society, I still overcame my fear of public speaking. I stepped into the spotlight. I summoned the courage to put myself out in the world. And it turns out, right, that this neurodiverse reserved middle-aged mom in the Midwest was exactly the right person for the job.

And lots of women in the book don’t have that epiphany until they’re in their 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond. And even young women struggle with this. You know, I teach a lot of college classes and many of the women stay behind afterward. They’re like 20 years old and they say to me, I’m about to graduate and I don’t know what I want. And so I really wrote this book for women of all ages, right? Young women and women in midlife who don’t feel like they’re thriving. Women who might look like they’re thriving on the outside but feel off internally. Women who want to make an impact on the world and don’t know how. Getting back to this idea that we all deserve to leave a legacy.

Jen Hatmaker: You have this really interesting concept of a controlled burn in your own life. The idea of pruning away things that no longer service, taking time in between the fires in your life to sort of leave space. Can you talk about that concept and how we can start doing that in our own lives?

Shannon Watts: Yeah, I think this is a really important part of this discussion because just like in real life, right? Controlled burns are part of the fire cycle. They balance and restore the ecosystem. They make it less susceptible to wildfires, but they don’t just prevent fires that are out of control. They really rejuvenate the forest floor. They return nutrients to the soil. They get rid of debris. They create space for sunlight and that can happen in our lives too, right? It is removing anything, any person, any system that is an obstruction. And it’s a way to kind of audit all the demands on your time, right? And to decide what to do less of, what to do more of, maybe what you need to get rid of altogether. I think a lot of what this comes down to are boundaries, right? This person’s thing or system is not honoring the energy I am spending on negotiating and dealing with them.

I could be spending that energy and time nurturing my fire. And so my book takes people through exercises that help them figure out what that control burn should be. I interview a woman in the book. She goes by the stage name of Milk, if you’ve heard of her. She’s a singer and a musician. And when the Women’s March happened, she had a song go viral. And suddenly she had a record deal and she had all the things she wanted in her life. And yet she wasn’t happy. She wanted to go back to being an independent artist. And so she did this controlled burn where she got rid of her record label and she decided to take control back over her musical direction. And she also had been struggling with an eating disorder. This disorder that told her she had to stay small. And so part of her controlled burn was an experiment where she decided to get rid of all the clothes that were restricting her. And she threw them all away and bought clothes that fit her. That was part of her control burn. Look, it could be minor, like getting off social media, limiting the amount of news you consume, something I’m sure we all want to do, know, weeding out things that suck your time, like unnecessary meetings, social gatherings, but it could also be major. Maybe it is cutting a relationship out of your life, giving up a vice or habit, leaving a job. You know, whatever it is, it really gives you more energy to dedicate to your building your fire.

Jen Hatmaker: Did you come across any of those while you were writing this book where you thought, yes, I’m going to, I’m going to write the chapter on getting rid of the stuff in your life. And all of a sudden you were like, uh-oh, I got some stuff. Yeah.

Shannon Watts: Yes, I absolutely did. You know, being on social media while I was leading Moms Demand Action was really a full-time job. And I was spending way too much time on Twitter. And being able to kind of look at that was very healthy for me to cut back on that. You know, when I stepped back from Moms Demand Action in 2023, I thought, who am I and what am I without Moms Demand Action? And yet I wrote a book. And I started writing more and I joined a genealogy class that I was passionate about. That controlled burn of social media gave me more time to do the other things I wanted to do.

Jen Hatmaker: Totally. I know this is off topic. It’s over here, but well, we live in a world. We live in a world and in a time and we are just, we’re just, fighting for our lives over here. You know, you are too. We all are. And we’re trying to figure out how to live with conviction and integrity right now, specifically. When it just seems like truth itself is up for grabs. Morality certainly is. Democracy apparently, like just a lot of things that felt that we can maybe count on in our adult lives aren’t holding the water that we expected them to. And so, you know, we’re freaking out. And so, but we’re also overwhelmed. We’ve talked a lot for these last couple of months, you know, here on the show about in terms of a controlled burn, I have absolutely had to limit my media intake. I just had to because I just couldn’t get through the day. I was just in such a spiral of despair and outrage. And to be clear, we have to our feet on the gas. Of course we do. That’s always gonna be our work, but I had to figure out how to manage it all.

Anyway, what is my question here? My question here is how are you managing the world right now? How are you managing? You’re obviously so politically savvy and you’ve done so much of your most amazing work through the system, like with the system. You are a policy maker. You are a change agent at the legislative level. So can you help us? Can you help us? What are we doing? What do we do?

Shannon Watts: I will tell you when we pull our volunteers what they tell us about why they stay involved. And they say two things. One is they feel like they’re winning. So I think it’s really important to remind yourself of all the positive things. Yes, they feel like they’re winning. And I’m talking about gun safety specifically, but I think this applies to life. They feel like they’re winning.

Jen Hatmaker: They feel like they’re winning.

Shannon Watts: Remind yourself of all the wins every day. Maybe they’re your wins, maybe they’re wins for what you want to see in the world, but it’s really important to give yourself hope and affirmation. The second reason that they stay is because they find their people. When you find your people, not only does it bring out the best in you and help you realize who you are and what you want out of life, but you don’t want to disappoint those people, so you keep showing up.

What I have seen in activism, and in particular gun safety activism, is that it is very easy to become cynical or hopeless or to feel helpless. To feel like it is easier to sit on the sidelines than it is to get involved. And I have always felt like that is just ultimately an excuse for inaction. We have an obligation in a democracy to step up. Alice Walker says, activism is the rent I pay to live on the planet. And I kind of think of it like a sick child, right? For those of us who are moms, you’re up with a sick kid in the middle of the night, they have a fever, they’re throwing up, you’re exhausted. You don’t say, sorry, I’m really worn out, I gotta go to bed, I hope this works out for you. You hold their hand until they’re better. And I think the same is true with democracy. That we don’t have to do all the work, but we have to, again, using our, if we look at the fire triangle right, our abilities, our values and our desires to guide us toward the work that is right for us and to do it passionately and to do it well and to do it in community because those are the people that are gonna keep lifting you up and helping you to keep going.

Jen Hatmaker: That is true. That is true. I love the example of a choir can hold a note for a really, really long time because individuals can take a breath and then resume their note and we just have to do it together. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s the only way. And that is its own fuel. You’re right. It is. It’s a self-fueling endeavor just to be with friends and like-minded people kind of rowing in the same direction. Yeah. Yeah.

Shannon Watts: And it’s also a form of self care. We talk a lot about self care right now, which I think is important, but don’t forget that fighting for your safety and your rights is a form of self care and a form of protection for other people.

Jen Hatmaker: Certainly. I do. When I start to spiral, I pull out my little app and I make a phone call, even one phone call to a congressman’s office. And if I can be as kind as possible to whoever answers the phone and get through my script, feel better. Yeah. Yeah. And it makes a difference because it’s something. Everything is something. Yeah.

Shannon Watts: Yes, one email, one call, one tweet. I always say it is incrementalism that leads to revolutions. So don’t think anything you’re doing is too small.

Jen Hatmaker: Yeah, yeah. That’s good.

So, wrapping up, where can our listeners find you? Where can they find Fired Up? What are you working on currently that they can participate in?

Shannon Watts: Well, I’m so grateful you had me on. Just, you I am so excited about summoning other women’s audacity. It’s my favorite thing. And I hope that this this book unlocks in women the reality and the realization that they can do whatever they want to do and that they deserve it. Right. And so you can go to fire.book.com to find more out about my book. I’m on all social media platforms at Shannon R. Watts. I have a Substack called Playing with Fire.

And then I’m going to be launching Firestarter University in the fall and it’s a year long online program based on the book.

Jen Hatmaker: I love this. Love that. Look at, look at you go. All this like new work, this kind of next iteration of what you’re going to put your hand to is so exciting. I love it. Yeah. I love this. I love watching it like right here at the Genesis of all of this coming out into the world. This is exciting. I’m thrilled for you. Thank you for all the labor it took to write the book. I know what that feels like. That is a heavy lift ma’am.

Shannon Watts: Yes. This is my next fire.

Jen Hatmaker: Getting to that finish line is no joke. So good on you for also for clearing some space. You couldn’t have done it while you were still at the helm. And so following your own instincts on that was also audacious to do so, because I’m sure there are plenty of people who are like, no, Shannon, you need to lead us for the next three decades because you’ve done it so superbly and it’s so important and it’s always important.

But even now as we’re kind of grappling for rollbacks. And so for you. Yeah, good for you. I mean, I think that impulse was right. And here we are about to stand on the precipice of all this this new this next work of yours. And so it’s exciting. Thanks for being on the show. I’m just delighted to have met you. Yeah. Same, same, same. And listeners, we’ll round up all this for you, like every link, every everything.

Shannon Watts: Thank you so much for having me. It’s so wonderful to meet you both.

Jen Hatmaker: Don’t worry about it. You’re not gonna have to remember at all. We got you. All right. And thank you. Yeah. For your work. Yeah, right. It’s incredible. It’s mattered. It’s mattering. So what else can we do except matter? You know, I just love it. All right. You’re the best, Shannon. Great to have you on today. Thank you.

Shannon Watts: Thank you. Hello, I appreciate that.

Shannon Watts: Thank you. Thank you.