#32 - There is a Time for Everything

Transcript

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Court reporters hold one of the most important roles in the justice system.

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We're entrusted with the official records of the courts and we also have to run our own businesses, which is not something most of us were prepared for.

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I'm Bryn Seymour, freelance court reporter and life coach, and I invite you to join the discussion about the problems we face and the solutions we create on the unique journey of a stenographer.

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Welcome to the Entrepreneurial Court Reporter podcast.

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So I've been thinking a lot about what I said in my latest episode, about how the one thing that brought a lot of overwhelm to my life lately or as I was reflecting on the year of 2023, was my desire to become a better court reporter, and that just so happens to be the one area of my life where I kind of feel like I didn't meet my expectations, like I don't feel like I improved which is not necessarily true, because I can definitely look back and find evidence of how I've grown and improved as a court reporter.

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But I guess I just say I feel like I didn't improve because I have these kind of like unrealistic and impulsive standards and expectations that I set for myself, to kind of just jump to the top without really making a plan without breaking it down into steps and making a plan of how to get there.

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So of course, I didn't meet those standards.

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It was more like a dream in the back of my mind and this belief that I should or need to be this perfect, all-star, top-notch, amazing court reporter, master, certified with all the NCRA certifications, especially being the host of the Court Reporter podcast, and as someone who has even been asked to speak at the upcoming NCRA convention, even though I'm not like.

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I just, you know, keep thinking I'm not qualified.

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But if they asked me to speak, then I am qualified and I must practice that belief and that thought that, yes, I am qualified and I can do it.

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I mean, ultimately, there really is no reason why I shouldn't get my RPR, rmr, rdr, whatever certifications exist, if I really want to.

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There's no reason that I can't get those.

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If I set my mind to it, I can do anything that I set my mind to.

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We all can.

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I know my potential, I know my skill.

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I actually am an all-star court reporter.

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I mean, I shocked all my professors.

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I finished first in my class, zoomed through school and just over one year I know that I'm capable of getting every certification that exists, if I truly, truly want to do that.

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So that brings me to ask myself do I truly want to do that?

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Like, is that really what you want?

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So then I start talking to myself.

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Okay, you're also a life coach, you're a podcast host, you're a singer, you're a performer, a speaker.

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You volunteer for causes you're passionate about, you host events.

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You put your mind and passion where you want it to be.

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Now, let's be real.

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Do you want to put your mind, heart and passion into court reporting and become the best court reporter that exists?

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If you do that, do you realize that you have to give up all your other passions and all your other extracurriculars and focus laser focus on this goal?

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My focus in school was also pretty laser focused and I don't really want to do that again.

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People who have already done it I would seek their guidance and help and they would be like yeah, why don't you just do it?

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Like, why don't you just start doing real time?

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Why don't you just do Get your RPR?

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It's not that hard.

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And I would just get so frustrated with them because they didn't understand what I was going through.

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They couldn't help me to get to the root of the problem because they're not trained coaches.

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That is one thing that makes a coach different from a mentor.

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A coach is trained to dig deep and find the root of the cause of whatever issue you're experiencing, whatever indecisiveness, whatever block is keeping you stuck from accomplishing your goals.

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A coach is trained and certified to ask the right questions to get to the root of the problem so that you can be empowered to fix it yourself.

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We don't fix anything.

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We just help expose and reveal what is actually going on, what is the root of the problem.

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So the reason why I couldn't just do it and I'm using air quotes here, like just do it, as they said is because I don't really want to and I didn't realize that, like all this time I've been trying to pressure myself to meet these standards that I created in my head, trying to be the person that I think I'm supposed to be.

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What if it's okay to just be where I am?

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What if I don't have to get my RPR?

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What if I could just be okay with who I am, the way that I am, the place that I am right now?

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Coaching has been helpful.

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It's allowed me to see that I'm putting all this extra pressure on myself and causing all this overwhelm that's stopping me from making progress in other areas of my life, or even in this area of my life in court reporting too, because of what I think I have to be, not what I actually want to do.

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We all know the feeling of being pressured to do something, like if your parents pressured you to be the president of the Young Republicans Club, or your parents pressured you to play lacrosse or to do anything that you didn't really want to do from your heart.

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How does that feel?

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Does it feel good?

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Does it help us to get better at those things?

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Not really.

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So we do the same thing to ourselves.

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We pressure ourselves and think that it's going to somehow help us, push us forward, but it's actually causing us this resentment and this resistance to whatever that thing is.

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So maybe if I practice thinking that I already am an amazing court reporter, I am exactly where I want to be and where I need to be, then maybe, perhaps I will naturally reach those other goals that I thought were so important, because the pressure will be off and I'll feel more free and not forced to do those daily practice routines and studying things that I really don't want to do, and it's not that I'm not interested in it.

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It's just that I have other priorities in my life that are more meaningful to me at this point in time that I'm really not willing to compromise with.

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But if I want to up-level to the extent that I was pressuring myself to do, there is really no choice but to remove other commitments from my life and I decided that's just like.

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I'm willing to take out a few, to constrain a little bit, but for other things, like there's a lot of things that I'm doing, so I just don't want to do that for this, for my career, at this point, right now.

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Okay, everything can change in a moment, but it feels really good to just say you know what?

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You're great the way you are, you're fine.

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Stop.

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You don't need to do all these things that you're pressuring yourself to do.

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Why are you giving yourself unnecessary pressure?

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So from now on, I'm practicing the new thought that I love who I am, I love where I am.

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I love my current status as a provisional unofficial court reporter who commutes three and a half hours round trip.

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I love my certification of just graduating from school at 225 and not having my CSR or RPR or any other certification other than what my state requires.

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I'm totally fine with that.

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I love it.

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I love who I am.

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I love what I'm doing.

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I love all my goals and all my hobbies and passions.

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I love the events that I plan and attend and I love the crazy ideas that I come with, come up with the time I spent and the overflowing gratitude and love that I try to share with family, colleagues, coworkers, friends.

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I love the performances that I do, whether serious or crazy and fun.

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I like learning new languages, experiencing other cultures.

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I like studying spiritual things.

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I like self-improvement.

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I love coaching.

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I love putting things into practice, utilizing the amazing tools that I've learned to create the life that I want to create, not the life that I feel like I have to live just because of what other people think or some standards that I created without realizing it.

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This is not to discourage anyone from going after your goals of becoming a better court reporter, finishing court reporting school or anything related to court reporting.

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After all, this career has really allowed me to shape the life that I have and to accomplish many of my dreams.

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I've heard stories similar to mine, like what Kenzie Benoit is doing with the modern Steno movement.

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I follow that on Instagram and I love seeing the daily stories of stenographers who have created their dream lives, all thanks to this wonderful, awesome career that we have.

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But for me, the career is exactly that.

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It's a catalyst for me to pursue my other dreams, and it itself is not my everything.

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I spent a year where I made it my everything, and Boy am I happy that that year is over.

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I literally cannot get myself to go back to living my life like that, no matter how hard I try, but I'm so thankful that I did do it at that time.

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You know there's a time for everything, so now is my time to focus on other things and always give thanks for this great career that has allowed me so much freedom.

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So if you're currently a student in school and you are determined to graduate from school or to get your RPR or to do whatever it is that your heart is set on doing, and you feel like you're suffering and you're never going to have time for anything in your life other than court reporting, and you feel like you have no life balance and you feel like it's all consuming, okay, just know that it's okay and it's not going to last forever.

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If that's you right now, I encourage you to focus 100% on finishing school or accomplishing that goal.

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Constrain, pick one thing and focus on it.

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Do whatever you need to do to create the ideal environment for you to finish school, and just know that your life will not be like that forever.

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As soon as you graduate, as soon as you get your certification, as soon as you've reached your goal, you will have the freedom to add other things back into your life that you removed for that short amount of time.

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I even recommend that you sit down with your friends and family to explain to them how much it means to you to finish school and let them support you rather than making you feel bad.

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Okay, I promise you, if you sit them down and explain it to them, and explain how much this means to you, they will understand and they will support you.

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They will help you to reach your goal.

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They will not pressure you to do the things that don't align with your goal, and then you'll finish faster and you'll be able to finally live the life that you've always wanted to live, to pursue any other dreams, any other hobbies that you have, to create the life balance that you've always dreamed of.

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Remember there's a time for everything and for students.

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Now is your time to focus on Steno, and it won't be like that forever.

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For me, now is not the time to focus on it.

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I just can't pressure myself anymore and now is the time for me to relieve myself of that heavy burden and that long list of goals related to court reporting that I had previously announced.

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I know I do this all the time.

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I'm so sorry, but it's all always related to a goal in my court reporting career.

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You know certain episodes I say like, okay, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this.

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But, like I explained, it was all pressured and it was coming from the wrong goals, the wrong time.

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And for other court reporters that are working, things might be completely different.

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And don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't want those things, but now is just not the time to push it and to pressure myself.

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And even though it's not my main focus right now, I will still probably end up doing it without the pressure.

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Actually, joshua Edwards and I are hosting a study session for the written knowledge portion of the RPR test, which is actually so ironic because I wrote my notes out like my bullet point notes for this episode back in.

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It's got to be like a month ago and I just spent a month kind of thinking about it and not really recording it, just thinking about it and ruminating on this thought and this idea of not pressuring myself and kind of canceling these goals that I had set.

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So it's just very ironic that after I established this thought and this identity, this confidence in my identity, this contentment with who I am and where I am at this moment, as soon as I established that and took the pressure off myself, I actually started making progress more progress than I've made in the eight years that I've been a court reporter, with this like half hazard desire to get my RPR, which is not even required in the state that I'm in, but I still want to do it.

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As soon as I took that pressure off myself some way somehow like this was not planned but like it wasn't like okay, I'm gonna take the pressure off and then I'm actually gonna do it.

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No, I genuinely wanted to take the pressure off and say like, forget it, I don't need to do this.

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And as soon as I did that, I started making moves.

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It's just amazing how that's just how humans you know when we are pressured, it's not effective.

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It doesn't work to pressure yourself into the things that you don't really want to do.

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It makes you want to do them even less.

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It makes it harder.

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So Sunday, march 17th, at eight o'clock pm Eastern time, joshua Edwards and I are hosting this study session for the written knowledge portion of the RPR.

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So, as I have explained, I think in one episode before, I have taken the RPR test once, I took it like immediately after graduating and I thought now's the time to just do it and get it done, get it out of the way.

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But the written knowledge portion was really intimidating because when I took it, I was just it was the worst two hours of my life.

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I felt so uncomfortable the whole time because I really didn't know how to answer the questions and I just felt like such a failure and I just kept thinking when did we learn these things?

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What is this even talking about?

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Is this even the same?

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Like?

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It just felt like a totally different language, like you know layman's terms, versus like expert language.

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And then there was all these.

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I just felt like what am I even reading right now?

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So it was like I never want to do this again.

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But eight years later, here we are Finally taking a step towards getting my RPR, after I took the pressure off myself and just allow it to happen.

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Naturally, I'm okay with where I am and who I am.

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I'm happy about it, I love it, I'm confident.

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So I hope this episode has helped to give you a little insight into and how much a difference it can make to just be honest with yourself and to just sit down with yourself and talk to yourself and talk it through, like whatever you're experiencing, whatever issue you're having, like really get to the root cause of the issue, just like I did.

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Or if you don't know how to do this with yourself, you can reach out to me.

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I'm a certified life coach.

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I know how to do this and I can help you to get clarity and to kind of get unstuck and to make decisions.

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Life is too short to waste time being overwhelmed and worried.

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So why don't we let go of the things that we don't truly want?

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Remember that there is a time for everything.

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If you are on the fast track towards accomplishing a goal like graduating from school, the suffering won't last forever.

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You will get through this, and if you're on a different part of your standard journey, just know that you're doing amazing, no matter what stage it is.

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The fact that you are a court reporter, working and graduated is a huge accomplishment and something worth celebrating and worth being happy about and worth being confident in.

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So until next week, see you later.

#32 - There is a Time for Everything

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