The Long Strange Trip Episode 23: The Hidden Network That Shapes Your Life with Glenna Crooks

About the Episode:

The Network Sage: Realize Your Network Superpower

If I’m being completely honest, I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking I had to figure things out on my own. You buy into the myth of the self-made professional, right? But lately, I’ve been looking at the math of my own life—and at 73, you start realizing how little runway you have left to keep making the same mistakes.

I teach this stuff. I talk about transitions, resilience, and navigating change. Yet, when the rug gets pulled out from under me, I still find myself sitting alone in an empty room, wondering why it feels so heavy.

Then I talked to Glenna Crooks.

She calls it The Network Sage. And it made me realize how blind I’ve been to the actual scaffolding holding my life together. If you’ve ever felt like you’re drifting through a major life transition, or if you’re just tired of carrying the mental load by yourself, we need to talk about who is actually in your corner.

The Advisor Who Learned to Stop Advising

Glenna Crooks isn’t exactly someone who lacks credentials. She was a senior advisor to Ronald Reagan and an executive at Merck. She knows how big systems operate. But during her corporate consulting career, she noticed the quality of her conversations began to shift.

People weren't asking her how to optimize their businesses anymore. Instead, behind closed doors, they were opening up about burnout, exhaustion, and a deep, nagging sense of uncertainty.

It turns out, success doesn’t insulate you from feeling completely lost.

Do You Have a Pit Crew?

Back in 2007, Glenna hit her own wall. She was running on fumes, trying to manage everything herself, until she hit a breaking point that forced her to look at her life differently. She happened to see an interview with Robert Downey Jr. where he talked about how he survived his darkest years. He didn't do it through sheer willpower; he did it because he had a "pit crew."

That phrase stuck with her. It stuck with me, too.

When you pull into the pit stop of life—broken down, tires bald, engine smoking—who is actually there to change the tires? Do you even know who is on your crew? Glenna realized she didn't. So, she spent the next ten years interviewing over 700 people to figure out how human beings actually organize their support systems.

The Eight Life Networks (Or, Who is Carrying Your Bags?)

What Glenna discovered wasn't a rigid corporate framework. It was a map of human connection. She found that our lives are governed by distinct networks, and when we feel stuck, it’s usually because one of these areas is completely neglected.

Think about your own life for a second. How do these look for you?

• The Family Network: The people you’re born with, and the ones you choose to build a life with.

• The Health & Vitality Network: The doctors, trainers, or even the friends who make sure you don't neglect your own body.

• The Education & Enrichment Network: The mentors and voices that expand your mind, rather than just filling your schedule.

• The Spiritual Network: The connections—whether religious or deeply philosophical—that keep you grounded in something bigger than yourself.

• The Social & Community Network: The people you grab a beer with. The ones who remind you how to be human outside of your identity as a "professional."

When you look at it this way, you start to realize where the gaps are. I know I did. We focus so much on our professional networks that we let the infrastructure of our actual lives crumble.

Hanging in Mid-Air: The Trapeze of the "Unknowing Space"

There was one concept Glenna shared that hit me right in the gut. She talks about the "unknowing space."

It’s that brutal, uncomfortable territory where you’ve let go of your old identity, but the new one hasn't shown up yet. You’re a trapeze artist. You’ve let go of the first bar, and you're just... hanging in mid-air.

"It's a very disconcerting place to be. Your instinct is to grab the very next piece of wood that flies by, just to feel safe again."

But Glenna argues that rushing to fill that void with quick answers is a mistake. The magic—and the wisdom—happens when you allow yourself to sit in the uncertainty.

If you are currently in that mid-air space, wondering who you are if you're no longer the "business guy" or the executive, let me tell you: it's okay to not know. But you shouldn't dangle there alone. That is exactly when you lean on your networks. Not to get you a job, but to hold the net while you figure out where you land.

What Do We Do With This?

I’m still processing this conversation, to be honest. But if you’re looking for a place to start, here is what I’m asking myself this week:

• Map your crew. Sit down with a piece of paper and write out who is actually in your life networks. Who handles your health? Who handles your intellect? Who handles your soul? You might be surprised by how empty some of those columns are.

• Stop rushing the transition. If you're in the unknowing space, stop trying to fix it today. Give yourself permission to be a little messy.

• Reach out before you break down. Don't wait until the engine blows up to call your pit crew. They can't help you if they don't know you're out on the track.

Life gets narrow very quickly if we only focus on achievement. Maybe it's time we start focusing on the people who make the achievement worth it in the first place.

What does your pit crew look like right now? Who is the first person you need to call?

Transcription:

INTRO (Josh)

Welcome to the Long Strings Trip. I'm Josh, the host of the show. We're going to dig into six areas together. Finding real work-life integration instead of that brutal 95-5 split too many business owners live with. We're going to approach retirement as an actual reinvention rather than just stopping work. And we're facing death honestly and avoiding PTSD around death. We're also building resilience when life throws us curveballs. We're sharing wisdom across generations.

And finally, we're understanding the patterns that show up in all our transitions. I'm not coming at this as an expert. I'm a fellow traveler figuring this stuff out in real time, especially now as I navigate my own dual cancer diagnosis at 73.

Welcome to the Long Strange Trip. I'm glad you're here. Hey, how are you today? This is Josh Pastrick. You're at the Long Strange Trip podcast. And my guest today is a dear friend of mine, Glenna Crooks. Glenna is probably one of the 10 most interesting people I know. If you looked at her CV, would say, how could one person do this in one life? She was a senior advisor to Ronald Reagan and healthcare, and she was a senior executive at Merck. But we're to talk to her today about wisdom in a project that she's been working on, which is really interesting and really important, which is networks.

And I think you're going to find this episode something you're going to want to listen to maybe more than once. So let's bring Glenna on. We'll start the conversation.

Hey, Glenna, how are you today?

Glenna (01:35.575)

I'm doing great. It's always a good day when I have a chance to talk with you, Josh.

Josh (01:40.152)

Well, thank you so much. That makes me feel so nice. So, Glenna, what is the project you're working on, the networking project, first of all, and how does that add to wisdom?

Glenna (01:53.198)

What would be the best way for me to talk about it is to mention the title of the book that came from this, the first book. There are others in the works. It's called The Network Sage, Realize Your Network Superpower. And I think the way that it relates to wisdom is in the origin of this project. I'm a global consultant and maybe you've had days like this.

You work a long day with people, you have a long dinner that night, they have a second glass of wine, they start letting their hair down and they become really personal. Now for years and years at moments like that, what I heard were stories about their kids' accomplishments or what their plans were for summer holidays, you know, what their hopes were for their career. But then in 2005, things really changed. I started hearing that

They, life was tough. They weren't sure they could do it anymore. Some of them wanted to quit. In some cases, a job, in some cases, a marriage, in some cases, both of those things. Some people even cried at moments like that. Now I was concerned. For one thing, we were working on really tough problems and they were the kind of smart, motivated, big hearted people that we needed on the job. But in addition to that, they were my friends.

And I didn't want them to end a career feeling like a failure. So I thought about solutions. Now, as I did, and this is to me, this is the part, this is where wisdom comes in. I thought back to my own life and I realized that, I'd been burned out too. And what if I do at times like that? Well, I did Covey's 7 Habits with Stephen Covey himself. Not once, but twice.

I didn't just do yoga. trained as a teacher. I learned meditation. I was very healthy. I was eating right. I was sleeping. I was working out with a tennis pro. All of the things that you might've otherwise told someone to do. Just do yoga. Just do seven habits. read another time management book. I read them all. And when I realized that eventually those all ran out of gas and I hit a wall myself again. So I

Glenna (04:13.932)

I kept thinking about what's wrong here, what's wrong here, what are we missing, what are we not seeing? And I think that's the part of wisdom. You have to ask the right question, but then you have to hang out for a long time in the unknowing. You can't get one thing or another because as soon as you do, it all collapses in on itself. So for me, the wait was a little over two years and I can track it to the exact date.

It was September 22nd then in 2007 when I had three experiences within about 30 minutes. The first one is that I stopped in at the dry cleaners because I had stored all of my winter clothes there and I wanted to pick them up. The woman at the dry cleaning shop fought me. Why was I picking up my clothes in September? After all, most people don't do that until October.

or November even, where we lived. And I was explaining to her that, I'd lost weight over the summer. I needed to decide what to alter and what to give away. And by the way, I was leaving for England in a couple of weeks and it was chilly there and I needed sweaters. Well, she said, I'll do what I can. And I left that shop thinking, what just happened? I couldn't articulate it, but it felt like it had sucked the life out of me. I walked a few doors down to the manicurist.

Where I had had an appointment. The manicurist had a little bit of a break before my appointment time, and so she took another client, which made me have to wait. I thought, I don't like that either. I'm meeting an appointment. If I show up, I'll wait three or four minutes, but 20 minutes? That's when I sat down and had read a fashion magazine. That's when I got the answer. I never expected to find the answer to a business problem in a fashion magazine, a very unlikely place from a very unlikely person. It was Robert Downey Jr. Now I would never have noticed that except earlier in the week, the trailer for the first Iron Man had just dropped and I happened to like Action Blake. So I paid attention to the interview with him and it's fashion magazine. is where the answer came.

Glenna (06:36.59)

He said he had a pit crew of people helping him out. A yoga teacher, sensei, a psychiatrist, he said, but I need a pit crew because after all, I'm not a model T, I'm a Ferrari. And it takes a pit crew to keep us on the road. Now you can only imagine my mood at that point in time, given what I'd just been through. I felt pretty snarky. And I thought to myself, Buster, if you're a Ferrari, I'm at least Maserati.

Glenna (07:05.166)

And you're right, it takes a pit crew who's mine. Now, without realizing it, I had looked at pit crews once before, but only for my business. I'd had a coach who said, why don't you make a list of everybody you have to manage? So I knew that number, but I had no idea about my personal life. So I put a blank sheet of paper on the kitchen counter and I started keeping track. I quit when I got to 147 people on that list.

And my first thought was, I high maintenance or what? And then I realized my client's problem because compared to them, I had a simple life. Cause I don't have a spouse, so no in-laws or his golf buddies on a list. I don't have kids, so no teachers or coaches or orthodontists or other soccer moms. My elderly mom was healthy at the time. She didn't need me for anything except fun and love. I didn't have a dog. I didn't even have a cat.

So I saw life in a whole different way. And I started making changes to mine when people noticed I was different, when my income went up, when my health got even better. And they tried what I was doing. It had similar results. So that's when I realized that there were some fundamental principles there. I spent the next 10 years talking to about 700 people.

Understanding the people in their lives and organizing those into the set of networks that I describe in the book. So this was a two-year incubation period of sitting in one set of questions and then a 10-year process of talking to people to sort out those questions, see the patterns in their lives. I tell people sometimes, my value is...

I know stories and I see patterns and that's where wisdom comes from. Wisdom has to be lived, it has to be embodied and it's in patterns and that's what I've been able to do is gain some set of wisdom that I can share with other people because of those stories.

Josh (09:22.036)

So, I am curious about unknowing. And can you talk a little bit about that, the unknowing space?

Glenna (09:34.286)

You know what, it's the hardest space to be in. I did a workshop once and somebody used the analogy of a trapeze artist and the circus, you know, you're, you're, swinging on a trapeze, you know, back and forth and back and forth. But in order to get to the next trapeze, you got to let go.

And that means you're suspended in space with nothing to hold onto. And we go through times like this a lot in our lives when we're transitioning sometimes between careers or jobs or between, you know, if we've lost a relationship, you know, for example, there's open space. It's very hard space to be in and it's very hard space for other people to watch you be in.

Lots of people will try to rush you at a moment like that to make some kind of a decision. Instead of hanging out in that unknown, it strikes at your very identity as a person, the identity you had before, the identity you might be moving towards. You've got to hang out there in order for whatever is new to come into your view so that then you could hold on to that.

Only then can you keep on moving forward. So that's my sense about that space.

Josh (11:10.51)

Okay. It sounds like what Bill Bridges and transitions would call the messy middle or Susan Bradley would call passage, which is you were one thing once and you're going to be a new thing in the future. Typically happens with a transition of some sort or other. I guess it's possible not to be going through a transition and be in the messy middle.

What do you think about that? Do you have to be going through a transition to be in this, you know, this, unknowing or liminal space or

Glenna (11:47.63)

No, I don't think so. By the way, I heard somebody recently describe it as the goo phase. The goo phase when that caterpillar in the chrysalis and it gets kind of gooey before it kind of dissolved before it emerges as a butterfly. I don't think it's just related to transitions. I think it's also related to any problem you're working on where you're not quite sure what the solution is.

So that you hang out. Again, my own experience of hanging out for two years in the question of what was going on at a deeper level, such that none of the traditional advice about how to reclaim yourself or, or reheal from burnout or whatever, what was missing? What hadn't we seen? That didn't have anything to do with particular life stage for me. It was just hanging out in that question of not knowing.

Josh (12:49.09)

So,

Josh (12:53.868)

When did you, well it was two years later that you ran across Robert Downey Jr. and pieces fell into place?

Glenna (13:04.11)

They started to, mean, at least at one point now I had a list. So a list is better than nothing, but an integrate management tool.

Josh (13:12.024)

Yeah.

Glenna (13:14:14)

And you know, since I come from government and I come from corporate, the first thing I did was create an org chart. And I looked at various parts of my life and I organized them in an org chart. You know, here's my health part and here's my social life part and so on. I lived with that chart for about a year before I realized that I was not a corporation with multiple divisions. I was a person with ingested my personal life had 147 direct reports. Now, when I helped build the Merck vaccine division, when I started, I had a rented desk in a rented office with a box of paper clips. I didn't even have a chair. had no staff. Two years later, I had 150 people on five continents. Now, when I designed that division, if I go back to HR and said, hey, I got this figured out, I'm going to have 147 direct reports, they would have thought I was nuts.

But in my personal life, that's what I had done. Even to have a home takes 20. Even if I said I was going to have 20 direct reports, they would have thought I was nuts. So I was beginning to see that the concepts we used in our business and government hierarchical structures weren't working when it came to managing our personal lives.

Josh (14:41.282)

What's the difference and what did you do about it?

Glenna (14:44.334)

Well, the difference is I put the person in the middle and I used a mind map and I spent three years organizing and grouping the people on that long list I had. Now I had 147, but by the time my research was done, I had identified 7,000 distinct types of people who could be in a personal's life. We will never have all of them, ever, ever, even a fraction of those. But, um...

And my criteria was they had to make sense from a social science perspective. That is there had to be literature that said this group of people kind of hangs together for a particular reason. And it had to make sense to people so that it was easy for people to remember. I wanted it to be something people could use on the fly. I'm pleased to say that I succeeded in both of those. eldest person we've ever worked with successfully was seven years old.

And when she saw her networks and the people in them, she started making better choices about what she wanted for her own life. So the, you know, you want to hear about the eight altogether?

So the first eight that I came to, five of them, I call all these eight life networks. The first five I call birthright networks because you were born into them.

Your parents created these for you. If you have kids, you created these for your parents. It's going to make, I think, intuitive sense based on what people tell me. First, a family network. Then a health and vitality network. Then an education and enrichment network. Fourth, a spiritual network. And fifth, a social and community network. That makes sense, right? Okay. I call these life networks, these first five in the Birthright Networks.

Josh (16:35.426)

Yes.

Glenna (16:40.844)

Because people come and they stay for a very long time, not forever, but for a very long time. Then you would sure do three more that I call coming of age networks. First, a career network, which is we usually think about networking, although in reality we're networking all the time. Second, a home and personal affairs network. Personal affairs being things like your car dealer, your banker, your accountant, your lawyer.

And then finally you have a network I call Ghost. I did not go looking for ghosts, but they kept showing up when I talked to people. Ghosts are people who used to be in your life who are no longer. Maybe they passed away, maybe they moved away. Maybe your path just diverged. I can't find my college roommate. I mean, think about your best friend in third grade. Chances are we're not in touch, all right? So, and those...

Ghosts are important because even though they're not here today, they are still influencing us. Sometimes for better and sometimes not. I mean, the kind that influence us for better, I call friendly ghost. For me, it would be my paternal grandfather. He died when I was four years old. Except for family photographs, I don't remember what he looks like, but I'm going to tell you something I'm never, ever going to forget, how wonderful it was to sit in his lap.

And when I'm having a bad day, if I think about him, I can almost feel his arms around me. And it's very comforting. Now, very often though, when I'm having a bad day, I think about the other side, the why not call hungry ghost. I call him hungry because you couldn't satisfy him then and you can't satisfy him now, but you are still trying. And not with them, by the way, because they're not here, but with people or in situations that remind you of them.

So if you've ever had those times when all of a sudden you had this inexplicable outburst of something, chances are that's a hungry ghost and something to come to peace with.

Josh (18:42.784)

It appears to me, Glenna, and maybe I'm wrong about this, that your networking work is a really good tool to develop personal wisdom.

Glenna (18:54.606)

It can be because, and I'll mention one of the thing about networks and why the ghost network is so important. Wisdom comes from being able to hear stories, to see stories, and to make connections in your life over a long period of time, which is one of the reasons why we associate wisdom with people who are older.

Is they just got a bigger database of stories and situations that they've seen, not only in their own personal life, but in the lives of others. And sometimes it's even easier to see it in somebody else's life than it is in your own. The other thing too is, and I think this is useful to think about with networks, is being really intentional about who you want to allow in your life, because every network has a center of gravity.

Um, if you are, um, below that center of gravity, it'll pull you up. I learned this playing tennis, although I didn't realize it at the time when I played tennis with a better player, my game was better. When I hang out with smart people, I get smarter. But the converse is also true. If you have, if your center of gravity is higher than that network, it'll pull you down. So if, if you are.

And other people will sabotage you and you will sabotage yourself. Not because they're bad people or you're an idiot, but because we survive in groups. And if it looks like you're moving on, the rest of the group was unknowingly thinking, my God, he's leaving. Am I going to be okay? And you're thinking the same thing. Are they going to abandon me if I'm not like them? So if you're not hanging out in a group of people who are wise and who are thoughtful, because it's not just an experience. It's having, taking the time and having the time to reflect on that experience is where wisdom comes from.

If everybody around you, if you've had a difficult situation and everybody around you is encouraging you to just move on and leave it behind you, you'll never gain the wisdom you might otherwise from being there for a while.

Josh (21:20.056)

So I'm not confused, but I do have a question. Is that this is my own personal experience and something I've been thinking about as far as networks go. mean, I have the word I'm very, very weak on networks is social. And the reason I'm very, very weak on social as well, A, I'm a man and that typically happens with men more than women in my experience.

But with me personally is that I get bored with others really, really fast unless they're really smart and are really interesting, are interesting going deep on conversations. And I have a difficult time finding people who are like-minded. Very difficult time, as a matter of fact. I live in a relatively small area. I live in Burlington from on or outside of Burlington. There's not a whole lot of people up here.

And there's not a whole lot of people who I consider that I know who I consider especially wise or especially mostly, especially interesting because they talk about small talk and I don't do small talk well at all, which I think you're probably aware of. So what's your recommendation for people like me?

Glenna (22:42.498)

Well, first of all, you're wise, you have good insights about yourself and that's important because we know that social connections are absolutely vital for maintaining your own health, physical health. But the second thing I would say is one of the good things that came out of the pandemic is that we have a level of connectivity that affords anybody regardless of how small a town they're living in.

The opportunity to meet other interesting people. And you're doing that a lot, I think, in your podcast, as I see. I think there's another element of wisdom that I haven't... We haven't talked about yet, and I'm not sure. I've seen some of your wisdom podcasts, not all of them. Maybe it's come up. Is that what's really also important is the cross-fertilization between steels.

Josh (23:39.406)

I agree 100 % with that.

Glenna (23:41.342)

I was trained in an interdisciplinary doctoral program, so across the health sciences, the social sciences, law and journalism. And so one informs the other in a way that you never would experience if you just stayed in one silo. And so the opportunity to use today's technology and to meet interesting people and to have the depth of conversation you want. Is something that's truly there. You're on Substack. I mean what a better up. I think thats a better platforms for engaging that purpose.

Josh (24:12.408)

It's a really good platform for that. And it's interesting that I,

The two-dimensional range is easy to have interesting conversations with interesting people. On a face-to-face basis, it's not nearly as easy. So that's where it gets to be my challenge is that, and the truth is, for the most part, I'm very, very happy in my basement doing the stuff that I'm doing and don't have a big need to get together with people on a regular basis.

Doing this seems to fill my need for social connection, I guess. I'm not really quite sure.

Glenna (25:01.814)

One of the things that I would wonder about, because I think it's true for me, is I like this kind of engagement. I do like depth as well. I'm an introvert. It sounds like you might be as well. I am. And I don't like small talk. I mean, can do it, but I prefer a deep conversation. But the other thing is I write a lot. And I find that writing then helps crystallize what I'm thinking about.

And then what I want is feedback from people about whether I am translating the ideas that I see or maybe the wisdom that I have into something that's operational. Let's face it, we're not in a, you know, the average hunter gatherer tribe was 150 people. And we're not sitting around the campfire at night telling stories to transmit wisdom. So writing is one of the ways to do that.

And so then what I want is to close the loop by having she back about what I've written.

Josh (26:10.318)

Makes sense. makes sense. I have one more question for you, then we're going to be out of time. When I've been doing some thinking about a journalist versus a specialist, and in my experience, journalists are much more interesting than specialists. And they probably have a broader sense of what the specialist works in. It may even have better ideas in that specialist because they're not narrow casting down. Estate planning, for example. There are so many other areas around estate planning that one could be interested in that an estate planning attorney would have no interest in. So I'm kind of interested in your thought on generalist versus specialist.

Glenna (27:00.748)

Before we got started, I told you that I wondered about wisdom for myself and that given everything that I've got going with Claude right now, I asked Claude if it saw any wisdom in my work. And what Claude told me informs my answer, which is it's not either or, it's both and. And it's knowing which one to apply when. So for example,

My next book is going to be called Longevity Pioneering, Building Networks to Remain in Control of Your Lives. Now, I've spent 10 years now incubating how do these networks apply to seniors? I'm doing that because seniors themselves have asked for a book. You know, most books for seniors are all about financial planning. They're all about the legal documents. They're all about those kinds of lists.

It's all about move to this town, which is one of the top 10 places for seniors to live, even if you don't have a friend there. So my perspective is both are needed and it's like wisdom is knowing what you need when every single...

Josh (28:23.048)

That is so good. That is so good.

Glenna (28:27.246)

So, yeah, it's both and, it's not either or. So, for example, every person, you know, my first book was written for working adults. Every person who was a working adult who was beginning to think about retirement planning and trying to choose between moving near their adult kids or moving to Florida to some over 55 community changed their plans because they realized what they would have to replace.

And so decided to stay where they were and either go visit the kids or send them the money to buy the tickets or, you know, go rent a condo in Florida for a month and golf, but they were going to stay where they were, you know.

Josh (29:11.982)

That makes sense to me. Hey, Glenna, unfortunately, we are out of time and went by really fast as usual. And I'm sure people will be interested in learning more about you and what you're doing and your network Sage project. How would they find you and how would they find more information?

Glenna (29:32.886)

My email address, and I invite anybody to email me and just reference the discussion with you, is glenna at glennacrooks.com. So my first name at first name, last name.com. The network's age is available on Amazon. And if somebody is specifically interested in longevity pioneering, I have a very short summary of all of the networks and why they matter to seniors that I'll be willing to send to anybody who asks for it. I'm also on LinkedIn.

You're finding climate crooks there.

Josh (30:06.606)

Cool. And I've got two things I would like you to do and both are around this podcast. The first is please give us an honest rating review. If you love a sheik it was five stars. If you hated it, can give me one star and you can watch me cry for just a little while. And I promise I won't leak all over your keyboard. And the second thing is if you found this podcast interesting and you think you have a story that would fit in along with the long strange trip.

Why don't you send me an email and we can have a conversation and see if it would be a good thing for you to be a guest on the show. Really easy. Just send me an email at jpatrick at stage2solution.com. That's the number two and solution is singular. So that's jpatrick at stage2solution.com. And this is Josh Patrick. We're with Glenna Crooks. You're at the Long Strange Trip podcast, and I hope to see you back here next week.

OUTRO (Josh)

Thanks for spending this time with me today. I really appreciate you being part of this journey. I'd be grateful if you'd leave an honest rating and review. It helps other people find these conversations, lets me know what's standing with you and what isn't. If you love the show, give us five stars. And if you hate it, give it one star and I'll just cry a little bit. Keep asking the hard questions. Keep being honest about what's difficult and remember.

We're all just trying to figure this out together. I'll talk to you next time on the Long Strings Trip.

Thanks for stopping by.