Podcast Transcript: Episode 4

COURTNEY MOORE: Welcome to the Women & Work podcast, the show that inspires you to confidently step into your God-given calling and view your work as meaningful to the Kingdom of God. I’m Courtney Moore.

MISSIE BRANCH: And I’m Missie Branch. No matter if you’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, on staff at your church or a stay-at-home mom with little ones wrapped around your ankles, your work matters, and God wants to use you right where you are for His kingdom purposes.

COURTNEY MOORE: Thanks so much for joining us today.

GUEST INTRODUCTION

MISSIE: Hello everyone and welcome to the show! Today, Courtney and I are excited to interview Tiffany Fykes. She is a realtor who lives in Nashville, but she is a native Texan coming from Austin, and because of being a native Texan, Tiffany had never really experienced autumn. So right now we’re getting to live through her favorite season, which is fall! That’s exciting.

TIFFANY: I know the leaves change color. It’s amazing!

MISSIE: I know, it’s beautiful. Tiffany is married to Joshua and they have two boys. And what we love is that Tiffany is a team leader at Fyke’s Realty Group. She is passionate about Jesus Christ, and she sees how her work as a realtor can actually be impacted with the gospel. Interesting fact about Tiffany is that she used to work at Lifeway using her film degree before becoming a realtor. I cannot wait to talk to you about that. Welcome to the show.

TIFFANY: Thank you!

COURTNEY: Tiffany, we are so glad to have you on. I personally know so many women who work in the real estate industry, Christian women, who would probably say that they need some help establishing just more faith-filled, more Christ-centered vision for their work. And that is really why I’m just so happy to have you on today so that you can share a little bit about what you’ve learned along the way and pass that on to women who are curious about how they can really honor the Lord as a realtor, specifically.

RAPID-FIRE QUESTIONS

COURTNEY: Alright, Tiffany, so before we jump into the questions, we like to do a little something with all of our guests, and that is to ask them three rapid fire questions. Alright, you up for this?

TIFFANY: I am always up for a challenge.

COURTNEY: Awesome. Alright, so as a kid, Tiffany, what did you wanna be when you grew up?

TIFFANY: A lawyer. I like to argue.

COURTNEY: Is that right?

TIFFANY: I could argue when they pay me money!? Great!

COURTNEY: You didn’t go down that job that route though, something changed. What age were you when you just said “eh, no I’m not gonna go to law school.”

TIFFANY: Whenever I got introduced to film, actually. I was a sophomore in high school, and I was like, “Oh, this is so much better, I would so much rather do this”. I don’t wanna do the three years of working 80 hours a week kind of stuff in the lawyer field.

COURTNEY: Wow, and those are way different paths too. Film seems so creative and lawyer seem so black and white and analytical- so that’s interesting.

TIFFANY: Well, an attorney and arguments- it’s creating a story that you want them to see, and it’s the same thing in film. You’re just creating a story. Just like in real estate, I produce the story that somebody wants to have in their real estate journey in their life. I’m just a part of their story.

COURTNEY: Wow, I love that Tiff. Thanks.

MISSIE: I used to wanna be a lawyer and I’ve never been thought about the creative part of that so that was great. I just learned something. Okay, second question, what was your first job?

TIFFANY: My first job, I taught piano. I was a freshman in high school, and my mom was like, “You can either go work over here for… You go to McDonald’s and work for 5 an hour or whatever it is. Or I bet you could convince somebody to let you teach their kid piano for 5.00 for a 30-minute lesson. And sure enough, I did it.

COURTNEY: There you go. How old were you? Did you say?

TIFFANY: I was 15. The way that I got the competitive advantage was I would come to your house for lessons, and my mom agreed to drive me for the first year. So she would drive me, I’d do a lesson at somebody’s house and then she’d drive me to the next one.

MISSIE: You have a great mom.

TIFFANY: I do have a great mom!

COURTNEY: Awesome. Alright, last question is, what kind of work do you have to be doing when you’re 80?

TIFFANY: Oh, I wanna do work kind of like I’m doing now just on a bigger scale of inspiring others. My personal mission is to help others make the best decisions for themselves, and so when I’m 80, I wanna be doing that for other people who are starting businesses or whatever. I just wanna be inspiring people in mass- to be using the talents that God’s given them. To be the best version of themselves.

COURTNEY: Wow, I love that.

MISSIE: Well, that makes a lot of sense, because the idea of you wanting to inspire seems to go hand in hand with the idea that you would wanna be a filmmaker. So we’ve mentioned this, you went to film school, what were your dreams? Did you want to be specifically a Christian filmmaker, or what did you wanna achieve?

TIFFANY: I wanted to make good films. I wanted to make films that were excellent, which sometimes Christian films aren’t excellent films, but I also wanted them to be available and viewable by all. Because I think you can make great films without some of the extra stuff that makes them to where- Kids shouldn’t watch that or other people shouldn’t watch that. And so I just wanted to make good films that were quality and accessible to everyone, that was my big dream when I left high school and went to film school.

COURTNEY: Very cool. And then you were able to be- You used your film degree in some capacity, working for Lifeway Christian Resources, right?

TIFFANY: Yeah, I actually, it’s funny, all my close friends are three girlfriends coming out of college, one was a business major, one was an art major, and I was a film major, and the art major and the film major used their degree and the business major did not, which was so funny.

MISSIE: So that’s interesting.

TIFFANY: So yeah, I made documentaries and I did a lot of other kind of work on the side, and then I got really excited about a product that Lifeway was producing for youth. It was like a Youth Sunday school material, and I had said at that time, I was like, “Okay, I could do that, I wanna go do that.” And so I reached out to Lifeway and got a job at the bottom, and within a year was their youngest video producer they’ve ever had on staff, and making documentaries for life way to coincide with Bible studies that they were creating.

COURTNEY: Wow, that’s cool. Now, were you married at the time? And is this how you move to Nashville originally or… How’d that work out?

TIFFANY: Yes, I was married, my husband and I actually met in high school. We are high school sweethearts. So we moved from Austin to Nashville actually for his job, and then I tried to get my footing in the film community here, and in doing that, discovered that opportunity with Lifeway, which was super fun, and so I did that. So no, that’s not what brought us to Nashville, but I was married at the time.

INTERVIEW

COURTNEY: Cool, okay, and then somehow you’re not doing film today, somehow your career really took a shift toward real estate. So I hear that from you and, Missie- don’t you feel like a lot of the women we’ve even talked to on this podcast- they have had a shift in career, whether it’s through circumstances change in their lives, whether it’s a move, whether it’s children or just they themselves change. A lot of these women are changing careers, and so how did that come about for you? This switch over to real estate.

TIFFANY: Well, so Josh is my husband. Josh and I always wanted to work together, our dream in college was to work together, but he was a residential architect and I was a filmmaker, and we did that for quite a few years side by side and discovered, “yeah, this is never actually gonna cross unless we make a change.” And by that point, I’d been able to pitch my documentary to Lifeway, they made my idea, I got it from start to finish.

Outside of Lifeway, I got to work on a feature film, got to walk a red carpet, got to do a lot of these things that I knew that I would regret if I didn’t do. And so I got to the point where -I’m not gonna regret it. Do I miss film-making? Sure, but I loved a lot of what he was doing as well, and my strengths complemented his strengths, and so we went actually into architecture.

I joined him in his residential architecture firm originally, and through the collapse of the real estate economy in 2008-2009… That’s actually how we got into real estate was all of our business was gone within six months of me jumping into it full-time, everything was gone. And we kind of had this grand plan of, “Okay, we’re gonna do real estate, architecture, and construction and we will design the house, build ’em, and sell ’em. That was kind of our plan. And when we looked at the economy we were like uhh construction is definitely not something we wanna get into. Real Estate. Okay!

I never wanted to be a realtor, ever. I actually had to get over my pride- I went from being a filmmaker to being a realtor. I had some work- I think that’s a big thing of the sanctification process that work does in your life that God uses. “Get over yourself, Tiffany!” And so I got the real estate license, I got into that in 2009, and we really just thought, “Tiffany, just go learn how to do this”- because we don’t do things poorly. I can’t ask somebody to trust me with their biggest investment if I don’t actually know what I’m doing. So let’s get in and let’s get good at it, and then when the economy recovers, we’ll be ready.

Because at that point, we’d been surviving. God have been providing for us for a year through driving pizza and odd jobs that we could do to keep food on our table. So we knew we could keep doing that and God would provide-And so let’s just get good at it. The economy would recover and we’ll be fine on the other side.

And turns out, I didn’t have any bad habits, I didn’t know that people lie to get listings and all this stuff, and very quickly we were selling houses. I got my license in May of 2009, and we had our first closing in June, and never had a month after that we did not have another closing. Through that process of learning real estate, we discovered, man, this is an industry where we can be change agents. It is ripe for change, and we wanna make a difference here, so we re-evaluated our entire plan, entrepreneurial plan- created a new plan that centered around real estate and making a huge difference in that industry.

MISSIE: Wow. Well, so tell us then more about your personal business, Fykes Realty Group. I know you guys have created a vision statement, you have a team… Tell us about that.

TIFFANY: Yeah, and that was also another surprise to us! My husband and I just wanted to work together, we weren’t planning on building this big business, we were just gonna be solopreneurs- I think is how they say it. We just wanted to do the work, make the money that our family needed to create the life that we wanted to do the work that we were called to do.

In the end, discovered… Oh my gosh, so many more people need an excellent real estate experience than I can give- than my husband- than both of us together can give. We need more people to help make this difference.

The mission of our company is to create flourishing in our industry, communities, and the families that we serve. And that’s the families that are on our team, it’s our personal family, it’s the families that we help in real estate. But we don’t wanna just give them not a bad experience, we wanna create flourishing and the world is better, the community is better, the families are better because they had an interaction with our company. That’s our ultimate mission.

COURTNEY: So I love that. And so- would you explain just for our listeners tuning in- I hear the word flourishing a lot sort of in this kind of vocational space that we occupy. How would you describe: what is flourishing? What does that look like to you?

TIFFANY: Well, I think… Let me think about how best to explain it. The best way that I think of flourishing is I think of a flower versus a plant. So a plant is sustainable, it exists, we don’t hurt it in anything that we do, it just exists there. But when we care for it well and create flowers and flowering in it, we interact with it in a way that it becomes more than it was before we were there. That’s what flourishing is for us.

COURTNEY: That is really beautiful. I just… When you say that, I just think of the word life. Just life overflowing, and I love that that is the vision that you guys have for your business, your work, the people you interact with, the clients you have. It’s all just life-giving us… Oh gosh, that’s beautiful.

So you guys mentioned that you said you didn’t have any bad habits, you didn’t know people were lying to get listings and all of that kind of thing- how did you see when you entered into the industry beyond those things, were there other ways that you felt like clients were underserved? And then how did you guys combat that? How would you say, “okay, here’s what we would want our clients to say about us”- in a way that they would say “This is how they went really above and beyond…”

TIFFANY: Well, I think underserved in knowledge. The advantage and opportunity that we had is we were coming out of a degree about houses, basically. My husband knew everything about houses. So we could walk into a space with somebody and say like, “Oh my gosh, take this wall down and you’re gonna have exactly what you need”- we could create the vision for somebody to have what they truly want and to see what they may be incapable of seeing.

And we weren’t just looking to make a sale- we aren’t salespeople. We are truly advisors who are coming at this from all these different angles. I was also raised by an accountant, so I can talk money really well, and I can talk good investments, and so when we talk to people, we talk about- Is this the right financial decision for you? Is this the right project for you, do you know what your life is gonna look like when you tear this house apart? Do you have the right marriage counselor in place in your team of buying this home? Those kind of conversations, because we have the experience of doing all of these things.

So that’s what we strive to do with anybody on our team, like right now, literally we spent 20 minutes talking about radon this week with our team. Asking- Do you know what this is? It’s a natural gas, do you know what it causes? Because I want you to be able to talk educatedly what most people in the real estate space is do is they unlock a door. They say, “Does this meet your needs? Yes, okay, let me negotiate well for you” and then that’s the end of it.

Where we’re crawling in crawl spaces and “Hey, this may be the perfect house, but there’s gonna be some work you don’t know about, and I don’t want you to get a 1000.00 into this before the inspector finds this…” And we don’t make promises, we’re not inspectors, none of those things, but we just- we have this thing we say to our clients.

We wanna get out in front of everything and stop the surprises and keep it as good as it can be. Because the reality is moving is one of the most stressful events of your life, and you’re doing that and we understand that you’re going to be at your wits end, and so let us carry as much as we can for you, because it is one of your most stressful events, and it’s just another day in the office for us. So we can carry for you what you feel incapable of caring right now.

MISSIE: That’s amazing. Well, do you have a special story and maybe something particularly, something meaningful that stands out from you or for you, about a journey with a client or something that would demonstrate how you guys have gone above and beyond?

TIFFANY: Do you want a sad one or a happy one?

MISSIE: Whichever one, whichever one that sticks out to you.

TIFFANY: I can talk about two- Let’s do a happy and a sad. I’ll start with, Amy, who we all know on this call, who introduced us. They had a rocky end to their transaction, and basically at the end, at the final walkthrough, the buyer knew- and this was in a bad real estate market where selling the house wasn’t easy- and they knew that they could get more from them, and they basically hijacked the closing and said, “You’re gonna give us a 1000.00 or we’re not closing.”

And they marked it under the guise of this final walk-through on an issue. My clients had already moved, they HAD to close, we had to close. I mean, we cried together on the phone and just said, “This is the worst” and I said, “We will go back on the market, I will do this, we will do this all again if you want to, but the reality is- here’s what it’s gonna cost you to do that. It’s gonna cost you two more mortgage payments, that’s a lot more than 1000.00, and this is wrong, and we can believe that it’s wrong, and we can still move forward with it and cry at the closing table about the world that we live and the brokenness. So there’s that.

And then on the flip side, it’s, man. We’ve got one family- the Kelly’s- we’ve helped them through two houses, they bought two houses with us, that we walk in and say, “Here’s what this can become!” And they just tear the house apart and they do it! And they didn’t think they could! They did not think they had the vision to do that, and they did it the first time, and then they knew that they could do it the second time, and they had this confidence about the process that they would never have had previously. And they didn’t have previously. And so you can just lend your confidence to your clients and see them come alive even in the stressful transactions.

COURTNEY: Well, Tiffany, one of the things -I feel like when you were really sharing your vision for Fykes Realty Group, and you’re really… You’re wanting to help these people make the best decisions possible.

I just kept thinking of the first and second greatest commandments. The first is to love the Lord our God with all your heart, and the second is to love your neighbor as yourself, and it just sounds like that second commandment keeps coming through my mind as you talk. That you guys are really using the work God has given you as a way to love your neighbor well, and so I’m just curious, how did you guys begin really this passion to incorporate excellence in your work, your faith into your work?

Were there certain resources that you read, or speakers that you heard, that taught you about how work can really be a part of your Christian life beyond just- I feel like a lot of people hear about their work and they think “Okay, I need to… It’s all about evangelism, sharing the Gospel with my co-workers”- but I hear from you, it’s really so much beyond that, so how did you even-How did you even become passionate about this? Just talk to us a little bit about that.

TIFFANY: I never saw work as separate from my faith because I believe I’m a whole person. I’m one person, I don’t have these two different parts of me. And so when it was film, it was-“I wanna do something in a way that’s different yet excellent.” That doesn’t get a Christian label on it, but it can play in the real world, and it’s excellent.

God, we can see in creation that excellence is important to Him, and that is one of the callings that he’s placed on me is just excellence. When I think of when faith and work became a thing, it never wasn’t a thing for me. But I also didn’t have a language about it, and I for sure never heard the church talk about work unless it’s in…” Faith without work is dead-“-that context. I never heard the church really talk about that until I read Every Good Endeavor by Tim Keller. And that was kind of my first intro into vocabulary around this concept and how to talk about it.

And it’s interesting, a group of us in the real estate world kind of found each other around that concept and we started meeting and really talking about what does that look like beyond the work of evangelism- which isn’t the true calling of business. Profit and sustainability and creating change is the true calling of business.

So what does that look like? Because our church isn’t talking about it. What are the resources we can do and how can we hold each other and have good conversation around that? So the first book that we read together as a group, ’cause everybody had read Every Good Endeavor was a book by Jeff Van Duzer called Why Business Matters to God. And it’s definitely more of a textbook read, but it introduced us to the concept -or showed us really how the work of the Bible and the work of the Spirit is from Genesis to Revelation, moving from the garden to New Jerusalem- in that city. And that the work of man is how God is making that transition from the garden to New Jerusalem. And so we decided to start meeting together. We call our group Garden to City, and yeah, that’s kind of how it became more of a piece of conversation in my world. Was finding like-minded people.

COURTNEY: Awesome, so you mentioned a couple of resources, you mentioned Every Good Endeavor about Tim Keller, and we’ll just let our listeners know, we’ll give you guys a link to these in the comments below in the show notes. and then Why Business Matters to God by Jeff Van Duzer and we will definitely link to those. How often does your group-Garden to city meet, how does that work? Tell us about that.

TIFFANY: So we get together at a big conference, like a real estate conference, at least once or twice a year for dinner to just catch up on everybody’s life. And in non-covid years, we get together once a year for a retreat where we would have a speaker come or a facilitator come to help us process through these things together. But the way we most stay connected is we have a slack channel that we’re all on. We are constantly in each other’s lives that way.

COURTNEY: Very cool. I just think that women who hear this, even if they’re not in real estate- you could be in a completely different field and still find people. Maybe they don’t work with you in your office, but people- I know I have friends from just all over the country because we’ve moved so much that I’m still in touch with. Women could hear this and create their own group of encouragement within their field as Christians. This would be really cool to have that Slack channel or that text thread, so that’s really a neat idea.

MISSIE: Wow. Hearing what you’re doing makes me think in my head with both you and your husband being realtors and you’re leading this group and you’re working hard-I can imagine your life is busy juggling your personal schedule, you have kids and they always have schedules. How have you found a good rhythm of work and rest? I hear this phrase all the time called “work-life balance”, but I don’t know that balance, but what are some of the things you do to find that?

TIFFANY: The word balance is such a… Like you think of a scale where it’s like an email on both sides, but the reality is balance is constantly counter-balancing. So even if you stand on one foot- if you really pay attention to your foot, there’s constant movement between each side to keep your balance.

So I think blowing that myth out of the water, there’s no such thing as balanced. I just came off six weeks of a very intense season- some major hires I needed to make in the business, a huge event I was putting on and facilitating on Zoom. So I was counterbalanced more heavily at work, and then this week, I have a very light schedule and I am much more focused at home this week.

But rest is a different… It’s not the same thing is balance and work-life balance. Rest to me is one of the hardest things. I go a thousand miles an hour- tell me it can’t be done, I’ll prove you wrong kind of a personality. And so the concept of Sabbath and rest is so hard that I actually- I got a tattoo to remind myself to do rest.

I have three stones- a stacked stone- an altar of remembrance. The lesson God taught me in that, is I have to put down. I am not God, there is a God, and I am not Him. And so I have to put down the work and figure out- I’m gonna work hard, I’m gonna work really hard- but the reality is the results are not mine. The results are His. This is His business, and so I’ve gotta give up that striving- which is what keeps me up at night and makes me not sleep well. I give that up so that I can be that whole person that I wanna be, and I’m not just “work Tiffany”- and my work is not the definition of who I am, and it’s not my everything. And so learning how to do that.

And with kids- we grew our business and our family at the same time. We tried lots of different iterations of how to do that. I had the real estate license, so Josh was like, “Alright, I’m gonna stay home with the new baby”, and six months in, he’s like, “This is a horrible idea, we are not doing that and we gotta find another plan.”

So then we became alternating and then it was somebody coming in and helping us. When these kids were little, I had help three days a week, and Joshua did one day and I did the other day, and then we had the weekends. And that was hard for me as a Christian woman raised hearing what that “ideal woman” looks like is she can do everything.

The ideal woman can do everything, and that is not true. That is not real. And my kids don’t care who washes the clothes, as long as I’m there to put them on. My kids don’t care who cooks the food- as long as I sit down and eat with them. And that gift was something that another Christian business woman gave me- it was release these activities that don’t matter, so you can focus on the ones that do. Knowing your kids and being present for them is more important. Because what I found is I would get home from work and be time with the kids, but now I’m yelling at them to get in the playroom and leave me alone ’cause I’ve gotta do the laundry and I’ve gotta cook dinner and I’ve got all this stuff that I’ve gotta do at home.

My work at home was stealing the joy of motherhood. And so if you are succeeding in work and have that profitable business, you have some capital to throw into whatever those activities are that are not serving your mission.

And it also looks like…I don’t regret a single thing of having somebody in my house three to four days a week picking up my kids from pre-school and that sort of thing, but now my kids are eight and 10 and I was made for this age! 4th grade is my jam and I’m not gonna miss that. And so now what that balance looks like is I have a lot more leverage at work, and I take my kids to school every day, and I pick them up from school every day, and I do those activities now because I know that even if my business doesn’t grow for the next five years, whatever, that’s God’s plan. And when these kids are 17, we can pick it back up and start running again. So just learning that rhythm of setting things down in the right time.

COURTNEY: I hear you talk- it’s just so much freedom. There’s just so much freedom in Christ to follow him and to be faithful, and there’s no one set way. For some reason we women, we tend to think that there’s just one way to be a woman who honors the Lord and our journeys and our paths are all gonna be so different, and it’s so encouraging to me to hear you say, “Okay, we tried it all these different ways and we brought in help..”and now you’re taking them to school, and it’s just…I don’t know, it just gives me hope that there’s freedom in my own life that I can have before the Lord.

TIFFANY: Well, and stay open to hearing what that is and be open to it changing. Because just ’cause you make a decision for today doesn’t mean that’s a decision for tomorrow. Seek after Him and follow what He guides you for. Because for us in our family, like we pulled our kids out of a great school that they were in because we took a year to figure out: what do we really want our family to look like? What’s really important to us in our life? And what is God’s call on our life? And what does that look like? And we did some counter-cultural things because we took that time to re-evaluate everything and we didn’t just keep doing what we’ve been doing.

And that’s one of the blessings of covid, honestly, right now, it’s like everybody’s life is so disrupted, it’s the perfect time to re-evaluate and be quiet and be still and take this time of rest and figure out- (“rest” with covid, I’m sure that making a lot of you laugh) but you have some extra time because you’re not running to all these different activities. And what a gift to say, “Alright, when this is over, do we want it to look like it did in 2019, or do we want it to be different in 2021?”

COURTNEY: Yeah, that’s really good advice. That’s great. Well, speaking of advice, I’m thinking about all the women who, maybe they’re young, they’re hearing this podcast and they’re thinking, “Oh, maybe I could be a realtor” or their kids are 15 now and they wanna have a career change. What advice would you give? Encouragement, warnings you would give these ladies as they consider moving into the industry you’re in?

TIFFANY: Real estate specifically… Never stops. Unless you make it stop. And so know that going in eyes wide open. You can sell one house every once in a while, and it not really affect your life, but in Nashville, Tennessee, the contracts end at 11:59 PM at night. So you have one minute off before the next day starts. That’s not sustainable, and if you’re gonna create a big business, you need to create the habits that are going to allow you that rest and that recovery and the life that you wanna have.

Whether that’s kids or not kids. Like at the beginning, before I really got serious with habits and boundaries, I was walking out of dinners many, many days to take a call with a client who was in the middle of something and apologizing to my friends and all of that. You’re gonna have to do a little bit of that, but you don’t have to do it every day, and you can create boundaries, and so make sure that you’re getting into business with people who believe that you should have boundaries, because not everybody does in this industry.

COURTNEY: That… Being an outsider, I would have never thought of that. So that is very interesting, and I could totally see how it could just… You could become a slave to it.

TIFFANY: For sure.

COURTNEY: Because it’s constant, it’s like a river. Just moving, people are moving and you gotta stay in there, so I think that is really good advice.

MISSIE: Well, I’m gonna asking for more advice, so what is one piece of advice or even a scripture you would leave women with who want to honor God through their particular vocation and calling?

TIFFANY: I think I can look… I think that it’s okay to look so different than anybody else in your world and know that you’re going to look very different than most people in your world. It took me a long time to find people who were like me, women who were like me, who thought like me, who were gifted like me, who wanted to create a life like we wanted to create. And that’s okay.

It is worth the struggle to find that. Persevere and find your community of people. And it doesn’t mean that if they’re not like you, that that’s not your community- but you need to have some people who are like-minded to help spur you on, because there are gonna be days when it’s just too hard. It’s just too hard to get out of bed and keep doing this. Know that you’re not alone, there are other people who are striving to be excellent and to serve God and to create the city that He is creating on earth.

And right now, my kids are memorizing Ephesians 6, and I think of the bondservants and masters section, which to me is just workers and employers is how I look at it- and it’s do all of it unto the Lord. You are a bondservant or employee of Christ. Or if you’re the employer, Christ is still leading you and your employees. And so you’re gonna be responsible for that, and so just do all things as unto Christ and find your community, Is what I would say.

MISSIE: Community is probably one of the most vital things for women who are at work in their lives. Other women to cheer them on, other women to hold their arms up and they’re struggling, and other women too…

TIFFANY: It’s also to call you out when you’ve overstepped.

MISSIE: Yes- absolultely. So that’s great advice.

COURTNEY: I think it’s so important to just… As you’re saying this, I’m thinking of just these covid days where a lot of us are working from home, we feel more isolated, and so it’s just-even I hear that and just in my own soul, I’m like, “Yes, I need to be more proactive in creating those conversations with the women in my life that I just haven’t reached out to as often as I should.”

So I’m sure a lot of women are feeling that right now, particularly during these days, from just having to work at home and all that goes on of trying to manage it all. So thank you so much Tiffany, and guys, I just want our listeners to point out if any of you are moving to Nashville or if you’re already in Nashville and looking for a new house, I want you guys to look up Tiffany, it’s FykesRealtyGroup.com, and if you go to their website, you can see their whole team, you can see the houses that they have listed. Reach out to this girl! Tiffany, I almost wish I was moving to Nashville.

TIFFANY: Well, and here’s the thing, if you’re thinking about getting into Real Estate, reach out to me. To create flourishing in the industry, that’s not just in Nashville. So let me help connect you with the people that I know across the country that are like-minded- they’re all over the country now, or all over the world now. So if you’re thinking about real estate- reach out to me, I’d be happy to have a conversation with you.

COURTNEY: That’s great, and they can find all your information right there at Fykesrealtygroup.com Correct?

TIFFANY: Yes. Under the team, our team tab there.

COURTNEY: Tiffany, thank you so much, this has just been really encouraging, I really appreciate you coming on and being our guest today.

TIFFANY: Thank you for having me. I love the mission of what you guys are doing, so always happy to help.

COURTNEY: Awesome, thank you, girl.

CONCLUSION

MISSIE: And thanks to our listeners for joining us today. As we mentioned at the top of the show, make sure to head to womenwork.net to download your free copy of this month’s Women and Work Going Deeper Bible study. That’s where we take content from today’s episode back to the Bible. Where you will study and gain a Biblical foundation from the show’s topics.

COURTNEY: While you’re there, don’t forget to grab your copy of the Women and Work podcast discussion questions. Again, our vision is to help lead you and your friends from work or your neighborhood or church into a meaningful conversation, and that will help you take the next step of faith into your calling.

MISSIE: If you were encouraged by today’s show and don’t want to miss an episode, please subscribe in Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

COURTNEY: While you’re there, take a minute to rate and review our show.
And with that, we hope you’ve been inspired to more confidently step into your God-given calling and view your work as meaningful to the Kingdom of God. Thanks!