PITY PARTY OVER

Unleashing Kindness - The Superpower Transforming Workplaces - Featuring Michael G. Neece

Are you curious about how organizational culture can foster kindness and transform challenging interactions? Today's guest on the podcast Pity Party Over is Michael G. Neece, a renowned author, speaker, and business strategist.
In the episode, Michael takes us on a journey through his own experiences, where he discovers the value of kindness. He unveils how this remarkable virtue has shaped his understanding of human motivation and workplace dynamics.
We explore the impact of kind awareness and the realization that we seldom know the true motives behind someone's behaviors. We also delve into the power of intentional choices and their ability to bring about positive change in any situation.
Join us on this episode of Pity Party Over to learn how being intentionally kind to ourselves is the first step toward establishing meaningful relationships.
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TRANSCRIPT
Stephen Matini: Michael, when did you realize for the first time that you want to focus on kindness?
Michael Neece: Kindness has always been very important to me. I think I mean, an awful lot of us are raised believing that we should do unto others as they do unto us, right? I mean, it's the, it's the golden rule. We, we all hear about it when we were young. And I think, you know, you, you go through life and then at some point you meet that first person that is not so nice to you, and then you, you wonder what do you do, right? I mean, how, how do you handle that situation? And, you know, do you abandon that idea ...n ideology? Do you abandon that belief system or do you double down on that and somehow find a way to navigate?
Stephen Matini: Did you get interested in kindness also when you were younger? Or is it something that evolved as a professional?
Michael Neece: It's something that I had to really reevaluate as a professional, because you get into the working world and you find that there are people who misinterpret your actions. There are people whose actions are mystifying. And so it was, it was really after, oh, I don't know, two or three really embarrassing shame filled hard moments in the working world that I, I really had to look at kindness again and say, what am I doing wrong? Well, you know, what's, what, what's, what's the problem with how I'm doing it? Or am I, have I abandoned it? And yeah, that was, that was a big problem as well.
Stephen Matini: I believe in the power of choice, and so every single time that we face a difficulty or someone being unkind, we do have a choice in terms of which route to take. What makes people take the kind or the unkind route in your experience?
Michael Neece: I think it's like money. If everybody believes that these pieces of paper convey some sort of value, then, then they do. And as soon as people start having no confidence in it, then you have a run on the bank. And so the whole idea of, you know, you're, you're there and you're trying to be kind to somebody and they're being cruel back, and you can't just tell, you can't tell if they're having just a bad day or if this is a much deeper, you know, longer lasting issue. 
So you, you kind of look around and you see what other people do in response to the conversation that you're having with this person. And if it seems like I, I, if it seems like you're going to get support, then I think people double down on the kindness. And if it looks like you're not gonna get the support, then it's very easy to fall into that trap of trying to fight fire with fire.
Stephen Matini: Do you think that organizational culture plays a role in this?
Michael Neece: Oh, without a doubt. You know, I've, I, I'm currently at a company where we, we have our core values and we put them up on the wall, so to speak. You know, it's, it's on every part of our intranet. We have meetings about it. We have you know, leaders come and talk to us about situations where it wasn't working so well and what did they do. 
And I've been at other companies where you have no idea what the culture is supposed to be, and so it's just kind of whatever people make up in that particular office. And that's a much more uncomfortable situation because it just takes one or two people to turn that in a very strange direction.
Stephen Matini: Is it possible to turn any workplace into a kinder workplace?
Michael Neece: See, I think that's the beauty of kindness is that it is your superpower, Stephen. It is my superpower. It is everybody's in the kindest part of your heart, I think that you can always reach for it. It's easier to reach for, if you've just been to the spa, it's easier to reach for if you've, you know, just awaken, you know, just awaken to your day and you've had a very nice breakfast. I think, you know, the later in the day that it gets, or the less self care you indulge in, the harder it is to find that superpower inside of us. For sure.
Stephen Matini: As you compare yourself now as being someone who's focusing on kindness compared to how you were before, what has changed?
Michael Neece: Ooh. So earlier in my career I definitely had a couple of failings. And, you know, a notable one was when I was very fresh into the working world. I believed in kindness. I believed in doing und undo others, you know the best way that I could. It started off like any job. It had a lot of promise, a lot of hope. I was told, oh, you're the right person for this job. 
We really expect this is gonna work well. And then people started coming to me and telling me how bad the boss was, and I said, no, no, no, no, no. We'll, we'll work it out. We'll, we'll be together as a team. It'll be fine. And, and so I brought my idealism to bear, but I didn't have any sense of realism at that moment. And so I started watching as these bad behaviors really unfolded, and these things that I really didn't wanna see in the workplace.
And so my own kindness practice was not strong. I hadn't had to flex my muscles in the kindness arena before, and suddenly I was, you know, opposed to this person who oversaw every aspect of my work. And I did not respond well, I, I responded quite badly, actually. You know, the, I, I tried to hold the line for a while, but eventually I had you know, I joined the core of angry voices. I became one of the whisperers in the, in the corridors talking about how bad the boss was. It wasn't until I was sitting at his desk looking across the table at him that, you know, and he was, he was repeating back to me one of the mean things that I had said that I thought he had no way of knowing. It wasn't until that moment that I realized how badly flawed my strategy had been.
Michael Neece: Yeah. For the next oh, 15, 20 years, I, I started really researching. I started trying to understand what motivates people, how is it that people can fall into the different traps that we fall into? What are the unspoken undercurrents of all of the meetings that you're in and how to spot those. And so I just, I went on this sort of whirlwind self-education tour trying to understand how to do things better. And so I would definitely say my, my kindness practice has evolved quite a bit since that bad situation, sitting across from the boss and trying to, you know, try, trying to figure out where I had gone astray. So, yeah, no, I'm, I'm very thankful for the fact that I, I decided to double down in that direction. It would've been very easy to simply say, Nope, I'm just gonna fight fire with fire for the rest of my career. And that's apparently what the working world is. And and I'm glad I didn't go that direction.
Stephen Matini: As you're talking, there are all kinds of ideas and memories that come to mind, or situations that I personally went through. Is it easier to be kind or to be unkind?
Michael Neece: I think both things are easy. I think both things are quite easy. I, I think what you turn into a habit is the thing that you're going to reach for. It's, I'm gonna, I'm gonna confess something here to all of your listeners, which is really embarrassing. But when I hop into the car and I know I have to commute for 45 minutes or for an hour, the way I started my driving when I was 16 or 17, I saw it as a game. 
And for every gain that I made, getting in front of somebody, getting ahead, going fast, I saw that as being very, very sexy. Very good, very happy. You know, it, it, it's only been in the last maybe several years that I've been able to look at my driving practice and say, what if that person who's trying to cut me off and is trying to go fast, is trying to get to the hospital to say goodbye their last goodbyes to a dying relative?
Well, now that I've reframed everything, now I'm fine with anybody getting in front of me. I'm fine with letting people, you know cut, you know, cut and go fast and, you know, do, do the little shortcuts because I, I don't know their situation. I don't know why they're acting the way that they're acting. And for me to assume that me getting to the pharmacy is more important than whatever they have to do is silly. 
I, I don't know that for sure that, you know, that being said, I don't like having people cut me off. And I, I'm glad to get out of the traffic , but but your, your question of which one's easier, I think it's, which one do you try to prioritize? You know, is it, is it, you know, me centered, or is it the collective good centered? 
I spent a little bit of time in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. There are all kinds of different tradespeople trying to cross an intersection and go through the rotary. And what you find is that there are, at least during my time there, there were very few accidents because while people are trying to nose their car forward through the walking traffic, nobody is trying to be harsh and angry and mean about it. 
They're, they're simply trying to figure out, where's my place and how can I get to my objective without giving somebody else a, a bad day? And so, so again, I I just turned back to the idea of it. It's, it's whatever you're prioritizing, and it's whichever habit you are building. If you're actively thinking about building kindness, I think you try to act kindly whenever you can.
Stephen Matini: You know, as a driver, I think I'm still, your16, 17 years old, , I, I try not to drive altogether because it drives me insane when people behave the way you describe, you know, more selfish. And so I try, I try to use public transportation, you know, tram. And really, I try not to drive. I love driving, but it's a huge source of stress, you know, particularly these days. When you speak about kindness, all these this mindset that you have, can ... are you thinking predominantly about the workplace or also life in general?
Michael Neece: I mean, I think the two things feed each other. I mean, especially having gone through a pandemic where it, all of the lines got very blurry, you know, is this, is this my work time or is this my personal time? I'm answering an email at midnight. But I'm trying to take, you know, two hours in the middle of the day to go for a rotten.
Stephen Matini: For me, organizations are microcosmos like a smaller society, you know, they abide by their own rules. When you and I talked last time about psychological safety, and sometimes you are stuck with people that for whatever the reason, the chemistry is just not there. So when there's no psychological safety, how do you move around that? What would it be the first step in your opinion?
Michael Neece: Oh, I mean, the first step, if you're in the workplace and you don't feel like you have psychological safety, is to start asking your supervisor and some of your closest colleagues, you know, what, what's going on here? And, and how can we make this better? Is there a way that we can set forth a couple of rules to make things so that it, it's okay for us to talk, it's okay for us to have the opinions. 
Every once in a while you read one of these leadership clips about how a good leader will, you know, tell you, we, we hire really smart people, not so that we can tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do. If you're in a workplace, you were hired there, there's theoretically some set of skills, some perspective, some, some ability, some knowledge that you bring to that workplace that is valuable.
If you can't bring that skillset to bear, if you can't bring that perspective out in the open, then what good is it doing anybody? And so the business argument is, you hired me to be able to do certain things, and in the psychologically safe space, I feel stilted in like my, you know, my perspectives and things that I would offer are just never gonna come out. And so that's the business argument. 
I think the other argument is it's just a lot more pleasant to work in a workspace where you feel like you can trust others and where you feel like you can say to others the things that you need to say. So I, I think the first perspective is to have those conversations with two or three allies that you really trust. If you feel really good about your supervisor, I think you talked to your supervisor and you say, we can make this better. I need to hear what this other person is saying, even though they're always being talked over in meetings. And you do too. They were hired for a reason. So how, how do we get to hear that person and don't make it about yourself, make it about how, how do we hear each other better?
Stephen Matini: If the team leader, the manager, the leader is not on board, is it still possible to build a psychological safe environment?
Michael Neece: I think you're gonna have limited returns on that investment. I think the nice thing about having a really robust kindness practice is that at the end of every day, you can feel proud of how you carried yourself. At the end of every day, the things that you have done for other people, the ways that you have treated every single person you've interacted with, I think that that spills out. And I think people want to be around you. 
So going back to your question, if you have a team lead supervisor who is not, you know, who, who they, they don't buy it. They, they think you're being naive or something like that, they can actually see your kindness as a threat. They can actually see your appeal to the general group. You know, the fact that people come to you with hard questions and the people, you know, people come to you because they want to confide in you. They can see that as a very threatening thing.
The only thing that you can do with a team leader, other than, you know, eventually you might have to make the hard decision of to just leaving. But the only thing that you can do that's short of that is to have very robust conversations with that team lead and say, so-and-so came to me with this issue, and I think we can solve this together. 
Here's what I thought, and here's what I told them, but how would you have handled that? And then I think you start, you start putting coins in their trust jar. And once, once that trust jar gets full enough, they might really see, oh, you know, Stephen is not trying to, you know usurp. Maybe, you know, Stephen's not trying to outshine me on this team. Stephen is, is an ally Stephen's trying to help me as well, and trying to help the team.
I think it comes back to your own kindness practice and how robust it is. But it also comes back to really good strategy. You know in, in that situation where I was undercutting my boss very early career, and that boss was just not acting appropriately, what I did was I went away. And what I really should have done is I should have gone toward, I should have gone to that boss a lot more often and said, what's your vision? I'm not sure I really understand why we have this policy. Can you help me understand how I can help you more? And I think if I'd had those conversations, I would've had a very different experience in my earlier career.
Stephen Matini: One really awkward predicament that I often discuss with the guests of the podcast is this. Often times people feel fearful of what is it gonna happen to me if I speak up? But they're also aware that if I don't speak up, I may end up like a pressure cooker, you know, I'm gonna boil and rot inside. How can you overcome the fear in your opinion?
Michael Neece: At the end of your life when people are toasting your 80th birthday? What are the things you want them to be saying about you? I think that's the response to that. Because if I make one choice out of fear and then another choice out of fear, before you know it you know, you can think of these jar, you know emotions as jars, right? And that whole pressure cooker idea, like am I, am I putting more things into that pressure cooker? I, I think, I think the response is how do I want to see myself in the world and what's the worst thing that could happen? 
Or, or, you know, if, if they fire me, gosh, maybe that wasn't the right place for me to be in the first place. And maybe that's, maybe that's a good thing getting fired from a workplace because you stood up for principle because you stood up against those fears that could have knocked you down. 
I think at least you, you hold your head high, you feel good about the fact that you lived your beliefs, and when you step into the interviews for other jobs thereafter, you can say what you did to bring harmony to say the things that were hidden to, to be that voice of reason. 
And I, and I think that makes you a more appealing candidate. I mean, as long as you, as long as you can frame it as I tried to be tactful and I tried to be diplomatic in, I delivered the message. But I do like to say the things that otherwise sometimes go unsaid, that's an invaluable person to have on any team.
Stephen Matini: You know, recently I had a conversation, really difficult one with a business partner. So we have been working together overall for I think 12, yeah, 12, 13 years. So lot, a lot of projects. And every single project, there was always this negotiation going on about my fees. Every single time. I would stood my ground, but I would feel very frustrated until roughly three weeks ago. And I said it, listen, I find so saddening that after 12, 13 years clients been satisfied that we are still doing this game. I'm not willing to negotiate any longer this. I want my energy, your energy to be focused on something that makes sense, to have fun together, to build beautiful stuff. I no longer want to have the discussion with you. That's it. My fees are no longer negotiable.
Michael Neece: Sure, sure. Yeah.
Stephen Matini: And ... I mean, when I hang up, I said, oh my God, I might be destroyed ... But it seems to me that this time things, something might have changed because I noticed not just a specific person, but all the other ones associated with this person looking at me slightly differently. Because I did not criticize you. I'm just simply saying, I want to have a more functional relationship. So I love when you say it's a matter of perspective, you know, overall how you want to remember your life to be remembered. For me, in addition to that is, is this really a relationship I want to have? Do I want this relationship to abide by this rules and make me feel suffocated?
Michael Neece: Sure, sure. It's, it's very interesting because right before I got onto the podcast with you I was rereading something and it, it was this idea that you had this very frank interaction, and I think it's really important to be very truthful. And I think you were tapping into something that you suspected was there. 
The thing that I was just reading right before this was about limiting beliefs. It's the idea that everybody comes to the table with things that they don't, they don't necessarily even know about themselves. Perhaps they might know, perhaps they don't. But your business partner could have been raised in a family where money was always discussed and money was always tight, whether it was, whether it wasn't, there could have been this emotional response to, to be careful with money, and then that could spill out onto everybody for the rest of their lives.
And when I think we take the time to dig into our limiting beliefs, into these things that, that control some of our behaviors, that can make us sometimes have a, a large emotional reaction to a situation that most other people wouldn't have that same reaction to, I think it, it gives us a great gift. It helps us understand this business partner of yours is probably incredibly thrifty, probably very, very good at earnings, and probably very good at, at keeping everybody very flush in terms of money. 
The cutting and hard side of this though, is that there are always discussions about it. It's, it's almost like you intuited that there is something else there behind these discussions, but I feel like I need to speak my truth. And you weren't attacking, you weren't mean, you weren't you know, making it a personal thing. 
You were just simply saying, here's, here's what I need and we change this. And so I think it's a brilliant tactic but I think it's also a very insightful into the fact that other people always bring something to the table that is unspoken. There's always an undercurrent, whether you know it or not.
Stephen Matini: My unspoken truth is definitely the example of my dad. My dad was a, a small entrepreneur, and my father repeated countless of times when I was younger. The importance of honesty, honesty, honesty, honesty, honesty. And I want to be honest, and I'm happy to be honest, but sometimes I wonder, should I be more strategic? Maybe there's a little percentage of being hypocritical that I could learn ...
Michael Neece: There's a difference between hypocrisy and being a very good storyteller. You know, as, as someone who just writes incessantly what I've always been challenged with is what do I include and what do I leave out? That's every story ever, right? I mean, what do you know? 
Do I, do I talk about the fact that he had cereal that morning, and did he put the spoon to the cereal and spoon to his mouth? I mean, how, how much detail does this person want? So I think it's more a matter of being strategic and knowing which truths to tell at what times, and knowing, knowing how to bubble up that truth. 
Sometimes you are not the right person to deliver a particular message, sometimes delivering that message could come from a different ally to both you and the person who needs to hear the message.
Somebody who's trustworthy, somebody who knows that you're not trying to manipulate or, you know but, but somebody who can hear your truth and then can maybe deliver it in the right way for that person to hear. So I, so I think, I think there are thousand strategies. I don't think it's at all hypocritical to say that there are certain truths that you, you simply sit on and you don't ever say to hold back certain truths. I think some of them are obvious and don't need to be stated. I think some of them will never really truly be heard by the person you're trying to deliver it to. So why say it? And then I think there are other strategies. I think there are ways of feeding that truth to other people and letting them talk to that individual who, who might need to hear the truth.
Stephen Matini: Kindness, and assertiveness; are they the same thing?
Michael Neece: I've seen people be assertive in unkind ways, so I guess, I guess they're not always the same. I think there can be times when you're very kind and in a very overt way, and it's very affirming and, and out there. So I, I would say that you can be very kind. The, the, the example that comes to mind is you're in a meeting, somebody is continuously being talked over. 
I think that you can be assertive and say, Hey, guys, I, I, I'm so sorry to interrupt the flow. This is, this is such good conversation, I really want to continue it. But I think that Susan over there had some, had some ideas that she really wanted to share with us. And I know she's an expert on this topic, so if you know, Susan, did you, did you wanna share with the group a couple of your idea?
So I think there's definitely some times when you can be very assertive and, and, and forthright. I think there's some other times you can be assertive, and it's not, it's not so kind, you know? If it's, if it's a self-serving sort of thing, or if it's, if it's serving to a, a particular motivation that you have, then maybe, maybe it is, but maybe it doesn't. So but, but yeah. I, I think sometimes kindness, you do have to grab the conversation by the reigns and say, guys, there's this other thing, and I think you really need to hear it.
Stephen Matini: I love when you said kindness is a superpower. What are the adjectives that based on your experience, your studies, you would associate to your notion of kindness as a superpower?
Michael Neece: Well, it's something that is a renewable resource. It's something that again, I mentioned earlier, if, if you just come from the spa, you are happy to tip people, well, you're happy to let people get in front of you in line. And I mean, it's, it's, you have a lot more of that, that buffer built up. 
So think, I think your superpower as an all time pie, when you have been kind to yourself first, some adjectives that go with this caring to yourself before being caring to others. You know, they say if the oxygen masks drop while you're in the airplane, they say, if you're the adult, you should put it on yourself first, and then you help other people. 
That's not unkind. It is, it is a, a real situation where you have to make sure you stay conscious so that you can do more good. I actually, I actually got a mini lecture on this when I went and visited with my team in New York, you know, for the book that I'm writing. And they said, do you remember that thing where you recently got hospitalized because you weren't taking great care of yourself? Maybe this is something to go in the book ...
Stephen Matini: Is kindness, love?
Michael Neece: I think they're distinctly different things. I don't have to love a very thorny, very grizzly kind of person, but I should, I should still show them kindness. However it's possible to do that. For, for one thing, it makes me feel good about the fact that I, I'm living my values for another thing. It helps me collect a lot of data from that thorny person. If they are, you know, being angry at me, are they just having a bad day? If I continue to be kind, will I break through this barrier? Or is this something deeper?
Think kindness comes from a loving place. I think it really does, but I don't think that you necessarily will feel that big emotion that comes with it about every single person in every situation. Like there are horrible acts that you read in the news or that you know, are in history. It's very hard to find a loving feeling for that person. 
It might actually be a little easier to find a, a bit of pity for that person and to feel, to, to feel some moat of if only somebody had been kind to this person earlier in their life, if only somebody had taken better care of this person, if only this person had had their needs met. It doesn't mean that I have to love them, but it certainly means that I, I should be loving in how I approach my thought process about that person, if that. Does that make sense?
Stephen Matini: Yes, it does. Your kindness as an approach, I don't know if you call it approach or method or mindset, it sounds to me very secular, it doesn't seem to belong to any specific philosophy or religious background.
Michael Neece: That's accurate. Yes, that's very accurate. I was raised in a household by two PhD scientists. I think being raised in that environment, I learned very quickly that you, you believe in other people. You believe in hard work. You believe in doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, and you believe in a lot of equity. 
I mean, my mother was the one who was always teaching me about what was in her biochemistry books and trying to, to tell me about the, you know, the wonders of science and how we're exploring the universe through, through this very specific method. So, so yes, I, I, I firmly believe that people can be very kind regardless of what religion or faith they come from, or if they don't come from one I think it's very easy to be kind or unkind, but I, I think, I think you'll find a lot of people who are very kind, who have no faith at all.
Stephen Matini: One thing that you shared with me in the past was you said, we cannot pretend that angry people are not out there. How can you be kind, so make yourself vulnerable, but at the same time, protect yourself?
Michael Neece: First things first. If you are dealing with an angry person and you fear for your own safety, that's a very different situation. And that's, I don't think that's what you're talking about, right? 
If you were in a situation though, where the person is angry at you or you have anger between the two of you, I think eliminating the words I and you from the conversation is really, really very helpful. I used to give planetarium shows, right? I used to be in this big dome where, you know, you turn day tonight and you put the stars, you know, replicas of stars up on the ceiling. And I would point out, oh, Ryan's belt and Andromeda and all of, all of the constellations, and I've done it for years. So many people come past at the end and say, oh, I was so great.
It was so lovely, and I loved your storytelling. And so, so, so at one point I had a person who pulled me to one side as they were all walking out and said, this is horrible. This was terrible. What you, you have all of this great technology and what you chose to do with it was almost criminal. It was so bad. 
Fortunately, I had just read an article a couple of weeks earlier about what to do when confronted with somebody who has a, has an opinion that you do not care about, and an opinion that is very overtly opposite of your opinion. I looked the gentleman in the eye and I said, I just really want to thank you for being so honest, and I want to thank you for sharing your perspective. I didn't say his perspective was right. I didn't tell him that.
I thought suddenly I was a terrible presenter after so many years in, you know, in the planetarium industry. And he looked at me and he said, oh, and now you're a smart Tim. And so I just looked at him and he said, no, sir, I, I, I don't believe that that was what I was attempting to do. I just wanted to thank you for being vulnerable and for telling me your honest opinion. He had no idea what to do with that. 
He had no idea what to do with that. So he stormed out, and I never saw him again with, by not fighting fire with fire. He didn't know, like there was nothing for him to push against it. There was nothing there. And for me, not getting defensive and getting very upset, you know, it wasn't about me. His anger came from something else.
I have no idea what that anger was about, but so why, why treat it as if it's something I needed to defend myself against? So, so angry people will come at you and you can do some jiujitsu on them. You can do some really cool judo move on them, right? They come at you, give them nothing to push up very, very quickly. They realize that they are flailing about, they're losing energy, and they're not making any headway. They're not satisfying that that rise that they get inside of themselves when they, they challenge someone. And so they d they don't know what to do with that. 
And so they either will have to storm off, or if this is an ongoing relationship, they'll eventually have to come back to you and say, you know, I'm really sorry. I got so angry earlier and I'm still not sure that we've come to a conclusion on this, but thank you for not yelling back. That's a powerful message that you're sending just right there, is that you are not fighting cruelty with more cruelty. You are trying to be kind even in that moment. I've used this in several different instances in my life, and it is amazing how it is like a Jedi mind trick. And I'm not trying to fool anybody. I'm not trying to, to harm them in any way. I'm simply trying to take their energy and directly ground it.
Stephen Matini: Is this something that you also learn from martial arts?
Michael Neece: Yeah. As you know I started martial arts when I was 17. I did TaeKwonDo for years and years and years and years. I've done a little bit of kung fu as well. I think there's something to that. Interacting with other people in society is a contact sport. It really is, right? . And I think by having done some martial arts, I've learned that I don't really have to be fearful of anything. 
I mean, the worst is that somebody can hurt me a little, but if I see it coming and I understand strategy and I know maybe why things are happening the way that they're happening, then I have a shot, then I have a chance at using some strategy in it. So yeah, definitely, definitely. I'd like to infuse a lot of my discussions with kung fu or TaeKwonDo any chance I get.
Stephen Matini: I love that. And I love when you said remove the you and I from the conversation.
Michael Neece: Yeah. And, and I think that's actually a negotiation tactic that they use in the F B I is. If you're talking to somebody who's on the opposite side of a, a negotiation in the fbi, I clearly, there's not a lot of happy love that's going on in that conversation. But if you subtract out the you and the eye and you talk about our goals and how do we do this together, you're, you're showing the other person that I understand there's a problem. I get that there's an issue. Let's talk about the ways that we can get to a good resolution for everyone. And that's, that's what everybody wants. At the end of the day,
Stephen Matini: When I have some conflict with my partner, the first thing that really comes to mind as we discuss is, you know what, this is not about you and I, and I'm not here to get finger pointed, and I'm not here in the business of, you know, finger pointing. You, I'm talking about, I don't know how to resolve this issue. I really don't know, and I need your help. But if you're trying to make me feel crap, I do that all the time with myself, so I don't need another person who does that. And I have to say that it works. It works because you really, you remove the, the you I and you that talk about. This is our relationship, you know, I'm so sorry it's not working the way that we want. What can we do? It makes it more collaborative.
Michael Neece: And that's beautiful, Stephen. I mean, that's absolutely beautiful because that's, that's at the heart of an awful lot of being kind to yourself and kind to the other person is understanding that you're going to have emotions that will come into the circumstance by paying attention to what is our goal? What are the goals? What are our values? What are our beliefs? Then the emotions can inform those. 
Unfortunately, we, we, as human beings, we are wired to make emotional decisions and then use logic to back it up. We are, we're wired that way. That's just how we are, you know, what do you want to eat is very much rooted in what, what do I desire? So I, I love the fact that you, you subtract out the, you and the me and you talk about what are our goals, you know, this is such a lovely thing. 
We want this thing to be perpetuated. I want it to be perpetuated. I care very deeply about this relationship. How do we give it the care and feeding that it needs? It's like the boss who doesn't sit across the table from you as, as they have your, you know, end of year review, or as they have a hard discussion, they come and they sit next to you and they say, Stephen, how's it going? Are you okay? I care about you. I care about you deeply. And they, and they sit next to you, not across.
Stephen Matini: If you're going through a difficult moment for whatever the reason, you know, your energy is not there, your perspective is not there, and it's harder to be kind to tap into the superpower. Is there anything you do in order to overcome that bump?
Michael Neece: Oh, that's a great, that's the million dollar question. I, I wanna just bring in something that seems like a tangent, but I promise it isn't. Judges hand out nicer, kinder sentencing, right? As they start their workday, and as they get closer and closer to lunch, they are harsher and harsher sentences, and then they go and they have lunch, and you find out right after lunch, they give out okay, sentences, and it gets harsher and harsher, and it's the worst that it can possibly be at the end of the day. 
There have been studies that have been done on this. It's a great illustration of the fact that when you wake up, you are feeling your best self. You are the most recharged that you can get. And so if you get into a moment where you're not feeling particularly kind, you're, you've been having a hard day, think about what time of day is it?
I mean, that's, that's a real question for yourself. Another real question is, what are the things that I'm doing for me right now that are loving? What are the things that I'm doing that are kind, have I had a little sustenance lately and was it a, was it a, an apple or was it a donut? How much sleep did I get last night? Y
ou know, so, so I, I, you know, whenever I get into a situation where I'm not feeling particularly kind and I'm in that afternoon traffic and you know, the people are cutting me off, and I'm trying to remember that, you know, me arriving at my home five car lengths, you know, later than otherwise, is not that big a deal. It should be okay. Let them in. Let them in. I just try to remember the self kindness. That's a big, big piece of all of this.
Again, take the oxygen mask, put it over your face first, and then help others do that. That's one big thing. Now, if, if you're in a situation where you have to have a discussion, you have to have a meeting, it is, you know, five 30 and you were hoping to be gone by four. What I try to do is I try to remind myself of the good things that have happened that day so far. I try to remember the good actions that I have taken so far. 
I try to slow down my own breathing because I remember that you can actually affect your own psychology by how you are using your body at the moment. And so, if I'm trying to be calm and quiet and take those big breaths that, believe it or not, that can help just an awful lot. If, if that's not helping, then you try to pump out 15 really hard fast pushups, you know, you do something that's gonna get your system going and then give yourself 10 minutes to calm back down.
Stephen Matini: Michael, what would you like our listeners to take away? We touch so many different points, but is there something that is dear to you that you would like them to focus on?
Michael Neece: Yes. The golden rule says, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And that is a really high bar that is like sainthood. That's a lot to ask for. The silver rule is a lot easier. It's do not do unto others as you would not have done unto them, which is basically saying, don't go around punching people. 
Don't go around taking joy and hurting each other, like, just don't harm you. I think that in a kindness practice, you can do something that's sort of in between those two. Anytime you think of it, send a nice text to someone or a nice email, or stop by their desk and say, you know, that project that you know, we've been working on for so long, it's so rare that I say thank you. And it just really wanted to take a minute to say thank you, because without you, this project wouldn't be going anywhere.
So do little things that take you a minute at most, that make you feel better about who you are and help other people around you. They feel those ripples of kindness. Every, every little pebble that you throw in into that lake, it, it's a helpful one. It's something that can make somebody else's day that much brighter and can make them throw a few rocks into the, into the lake as well. If there's any one thing that I would want to say to your, to your listeners, it is, don't expect sainthood. 
Just expect little bits and pieces as you can throw them in. And I think that those cumulative bits of kindness add up. The only other thing, I think we've already talked about it a lot, but I I, I do wanna give another plug for it. Get a lot of sleep, stay hydrated exercise, have good nutrition. Do the things that are caring to you as a human being so that you feel more kind, more loving, more generous in your spirit. So the self-care is as critical in this discussion. As, as anything else,
Stephen Matini: Michael, your work could not be more timely. We desperately need Michael and kindness. Thank you so much for all that you are researching, for your efforts in your book and for spending time with me. This is really lovely.
Michael Neece: Well, Stephen, I I'm glad that you have this platform and that you're using it the way that you do. You know, pity Party of Over is something that I'm just, I'm really glad that you invited me onto and and I'm glad that we've had this conversation. And, and another one besides I hope we continue to talk.

Find Reasons to Smile - Seeking Meaning in Life’s Gifts & Challenges - Featuring Stuart Ross Carlson

Despite our differences, what brings all of us together, is our shared desire to be heard, supported, and loved. 
The guest of this episode of the podcast Pity Party Over is Stuart Ross Carlson, a violinist, violist, and music composer with autism who displayed his enormous talent from a young age. 
Stuart shares his unique experience with synesthesia, a condition where he sees colors when he hears music, and his mission to support neurodiversity and inclusion in education, the arts, and the world.
Listen to this episode of Pity Party Over to learn how to inspire others and create a more inclusive world where everyone feels valued.
Apple Podcast - https://lnkd.in/eSZZMb34
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Sign up for a complimentary Live Session: https://lnkd.in/eKsYi_6P
Managerial & Leadership Development - https://www.alygn.company/
Contact Stephen - stephen.matini@alygn.company
Connect with Stephen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenmatini/
You can access music from Stuart Ross Carlson on all major streaming services, including Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, YouTube Music, and many others. You can learn about Stuart Ross Carlson on Stuart’s website, Facebook and Instagram:
www.stuartcarlson.com
 https://www.facebook.com/stuartrosscarlson
https://www.instagram.com/stuart.ross.carlson/
#stuartrosscarlson #stuartcarlson #violinist #violist #violin #viola #music #purpose #mission #annarborsymphonyorchestra #mottchildrenhospital #autism #neurodiversity #yoyoma #billieeilish# katyperri #arianagrande #cristinaaguilera #beethoven #mozart #tchaikovsky #podcast #pitypartyover #stephenmatini #alygn

Ditch Your Ditties - Say Yes to What Matters & No to the Rest - Featuring Molly McGuigan

Are you tired of feeling burdened by responsibilities that aren’t yours? 
The guest on the podcast Pity Party Over is Molly McGuigan, a Positive Change Practitioner and Appreciative Inquiry Expert.
Molly discusses the project she co-founded called “Ditch the Ditty,” which aims to help women overcome unnecessary responsibilities and obligations. 
Ditch the Ditty explores ways to raise awareness of when women can say yes or no to things and the importance of valuing oneself.  
Join us on Pity Party Over and discover how to release yourself from the weight of responsibilities that don't serve you.
Apple Podcast - https://lnkd.in/eSZZMb34
Podbean - https://pitypartyover.podbean.com/
Spotify - https://lnkd.in/d7bqfSnM
Stitcher - https://lnkd.in/d6qzxMZp
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Sign up for a complimentary Live Session: https://lnkd.in/eKsYi_6P
Managerial & Leadership Development - https://www.alygn.company/
Contact Stephen - stephen.matini@alygn.company
Connect with Stephen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenmatini/
#conflict #assertiveness #boundaries #mollymcguigan #ditchtheditty #positivepsychology #appreciativeinquiry #podcast #pitypartyover #stephenmatini #alygn
TRANSCRIPT
Stephen Matini: When did you find out about human development that was gonna be your focus of interest?
Molly McGuigan: I, you know, I don't know that there was a moment. I feel like it's been a journey and that journey began really when I graduated from college. I went to school in Cleveland as well. I went to John Carroll University, and then after college, I, I worked for a company that did experiential training and development, and I sort of fell into that. 
I was working at a summer camp for kids with diabetes and I got interested in doing work on the Ropes Challenge course. So sort of the out, you know, the out Outward Bound type work that where you have kids that are going up and, you know, learning about climbing and, you know, high, high-end trees and, and teaching them about leadership, about overcoming challenges and things like that. And so I got really interested in that, probably more so from even the outdoor education and working, you know, working with kids aspect of it.
Molly McGuigan: I didn't really think a whole lot about how that impacted human development or organization development at that time. A company that I started working for right after that, that put the, the challenge courses in and did all the training for the challenge courses for the camp, I started working for them right outta college and wow, it just opened my eyes to this whole world of human development organization development teams. 
And I quickly got very interested in, in just how all of that worked, gave me the chance to to start to travel. And we started working in bigger organizations like Ernst & Young and, and things like that. And that took us all over the place. And so it was really interesting to meet people from not all, all over the country, but all over the world. And so I became, you know, became intrigued with that and that's where the journey began, and it continued for, for decades after that.
Stephen Matini: And then the whole positive psychology approach, how that one came about in your life?
Molly McGuigan: So I was working for that company Executive Edge, and we, because we were based in Cleveland, we, we had a connection to Case Western Reserve University, and we decided to take a program on appreciative inquiry. 
And so it really just, we, we knew actually about appreciative inquiry and about the work of David Cooperrider because we had been doing work with his sister Don Dole in the experiential world. She was actually one of the facilitators for some of the work that we were doing with Executive Edge and decided to, to take a, take a workshop. So three of us went from that organization and took a foundation's workshop with David Cooperrider. And that's where I first learned about appreciative inquiry. 
And again, just sort of another part, another milestone in the trajectory of my work was learning about how organizations can use this powerful methodology to, to plan to, to embrace change, to engage people. And it was just such a, an interesting and, and different way of approaching that work. And so I, we quickly started to implement that and use that within the, the work that we were doing with clients.
Stephen Matini: When I work with clients, I noticed that their traditional mindset is very much problem solving. Assess the situation, come up with the strategy, and then different actions, and appreciative inquiry focuses on strength. So it's a really different approach. When you deal with the client that never dealt with appreciative inquiry before, is there a specific way you would like to introduce it?
Molly McGuigan: I usually talk about a couple of things. I talk about, first of all how I think based on the premise that in every organization something is working, it's important to not throw the baby out with the bath water, so to speak. You know, we talk about that concept of really allowing some of what has worked well to come along, even as you're planning and thinking about the future. 
It's very different from organ how organizations orient, especially when they're thinking about change or coming up with solutions to big challenges. You know, they don't necessarily think about it that way. We're, we're really wired to think more deficit minded. And so I, you know, quickly sort of orient them and help them understand how different that is. I think the other thing is that for me, all about bringing the right people to the table.
And again, another way that organizations often embrace change or, you know, some sort of a complex challenge is that they get a group of experts together or a group of leaders, and they're quickly moving in the direction of, of something that is really sort of facilitated by that smaller group of, of people. 
But you leave so much out, you leave a lot of experience, a lot of knowledge, a lot of expertise out of the conversation, and you also lose the opportunity to bring people along with you to into that moment, into that moment of change, into that next phase of work, whatever that is. 
Even if you feel like you have all the answers, which you probably don't , it's so important to allow people to sort of step into that space, to, you know, to really be engaged with that and feel like they are part of, of whatever it is that's gonna come next.
Stephen Matini: Why do you think that so often leadership seems to be not fully aware of the strengths and the people and the resources that already has, and so feels compelled to go outside to the expert, to the consultant that magically he's going to provide you with the perfect formula.
Molly McGuigan: I always, I love it when, when organizations don't feel that way and when they're like, we know we, we have all the answers, , and the answers lie with from within, but it doesn't often happen. You know, most, a lot of times they are sort of looking for that. I think, I think it's cuz they're looking for that sort of quick fix. 
They think that there's this magic bullet out there, right, that's gonna change and be new and different. And the reality is there's really not that much that's new and truly innovative in the world, especially in the world of organization development and leadership development and things like that. There's really nothing that's really, you know, different. It's more of a, a reframe or a repackaging of things that we've known all along. But they are looking for something that brings some, some new thinking in, into the equation.
And they don't necessarily, it's not that they don't value their people or that they don't think that they have strengths. I think that they assume that they don't have something new because they are, you know, they're in the system. They're sort of married into that whole to how things are being done and they don't have that new provocative thing to, to think about. 
I mean, I I love to think about the fact that, you know, sort of take this combination of people. It's not that one idea, it's the idea that's connected to another idea that's connected to another idea that does spark something new and innovative and something that they haven't really thought about before.
Stephen Matini: Why would you say that has been one of the biggest lessons that you learned from change?
Molly McGuigan: I think the, the biggest thing, and I continue to remind myself of this, is that, you know, the organizations are, as I think David Cooperrider said early on, you know, they're systems of human relatedness. It's all about relationship. The sooner we've sort of realized that it's really about the humans, it's about the human side of, of how people are interacting with each other, how people are relating to people. 
And you know, every, every organization sort of has its own unique way of approaching that in the way of culture and how culture comes about. And and maybe in the way that they actually work together and things like that. But really at the end of the day, understanding what is important to people and what drives them and what makes them connected to each other. 
And, you know, so much of the work that I do ends up being about that. It does end up being about, you know, sort of a, maybe a process around something, you know, that's new or different and bringing people together and sort of dec and, and deciphering around some of the politics and things like that. But at the end of the day, it's really about sort of lifting up and figuring out what is it that's most important to people and what are they gonna be energized by and excited about.
Stephen Matini: When you deal with the culture, an organizational culture that is very extremely task oriented and somehow the human component doesn't have that much space, how would you approach that?
Molly McGuigan: But it always sort of comes up in projects, you know, what do we do with the, with the naysayers? What do we do with the people that are, you know, are, are not there, are not ready to sort of share. And I, you know, kind of tie that together with what your example was of, you know, well we don't wanna hear from them, you know, and those, those folks probably do have, have something to say, but that, but we don't, you know, we don't need to necessarily bring that into the equation. 
But I think that people tend to sort of hold on to what has been done in the past, feel very wedded to that, you know, very tied into that. And sometimes it, it is hard to, to sort of give people the space if you're especially talking about sort of a new process or new initiative, it's sometimes hard to give people the space to air things out or to work out the conflict that they have between point A and point B.
But there's so much value in just giving people that space to do that. And not in a negative way. You know, I always say let's frame a conversation in a way that allows people to feel like they can bring those things along without making it feel like it's this really negative thing, what they've been, just because we're doing something different doesn't mean what they've been doing is wrong . And that's, I think people's biggest fear in change is that they're being, you know, sort of asked to do something differently and maybe the way that they've been doing it is not the right way.
Stephen Matini: Based on your experience, what would you say that is an adequate amount of time for an intervention to start seeing some changes?
Molly McGuigan: Boy, it really comes down to, in my mind, it comes down to the messaging and the leadership and how quickly they are seeing that something is, is different or that there's, that there's something that they wanna be part of. 
And when there's a lot of skepticism and when leadership is not completely on board with doing something or really sort of steering that ship in a different way, it takes longer. 
In some cases it can take years. I mean, we know, you know, through our work that culture change, like true culture change can take three to five years, you know, in terms of really sort of rolling something out that looks and feels different to people and that there's consistency, consistency in actual work and consistency in communication around that. 
But I found that, you know, when leaders are really truly on board with, with something and there's, you know, there's momentum around something, a new, a new way of thinking, a new way of doing things. And there's that consistency in message and there's that true authenticity that comes through that, you know, it can be just a few months of, you know, of starting to, to do that work where you start to see some of those small shifts.
And that's, I think the key too is that it doesn't necessarily need to be this big audacious change or big audacious thing that happens sometimes. It's, it's the small tiny wins that are the most important and the things that we notice in sort of day-to-day work that might be different.
Stephen Matini: But, you know, you really have to have clear expectations. Like they want to have everything now, you know, it has to work immediately. Mm-Hmm. and I say all the time, it takes time, it takes patience and it takes repetition. So...
Molly McGuigan: It does, yeah. It is hard. I, you know, I found myself changing my work a bit over the last four or five years or so from kind of getting away from doing just one or two days with a group and then leaving and not coming back. 
You know, there's cuz there's, there were, I was always asked to do things like, you know, some sort of a team development or a retreat of some sort or, you know, bringing people together to plan for the next year or something, which I still do a fair amount of, but it's when I have a relationship with an organization and there is that opportunity for more long, long-term planning because until you really sort of get in and, and have a chance to really, you know, have some time with an organization you just don't see, I was feeling left out of the potential to see some of that change occur. 
And so it was impacting my own connection to the work and I really wanted to see that opportunity to see something happen, to see something come about cuz it, it inspired me, it engaged me, you know, into the work itself. So so I've been really trying to be intentional making that change, that shift.
Stephen Matini: But I have to say that now because of digital, remote connection mm-hmm. and Covid has been a huge boost in the way I'm able to have more touch points, you know, with people. So programs tend to be longer, the budget is not invested just, you know, in a couple of days, super intense and then yeah, a matter of a week everyone forgets all about it. And I love digital for that because realistically what is the likelihood of me going back in person and to see you. Yeah. Especially if, if you're work working with people, they're all over the place, but digital, you know, for that is phenomenal.
Molly McGuigan: Yeah. It is one of the things that came out of the pandemic that was a, a, a bright spot, you know, that our work has shifted and has opened up the world in a way cuz I've worked more internationally with groups, you know, as a result of being able to, as just as you said, do things, you know, where we don't have to travel, we don't have to be in in person. 
At the same time there is something that is, you know, back to sort of the, the fact that everything is so relational there, it's, it, you know, it can be a little bit of a challenge to build some of those relationships over Zoom or over teams or, you know, one of these platforms that we all use now regularly. So there's still something to be said for coming together at times to build those relationships because they're so integral to what, to the work we do and the work that they do together. But then it is so nice to have sort of that ability to have a hybrid where you can build that relationship and then connect, you know, over time and continue to build that relationship, you know, just in, in different ways.
Stephen Matini: And how did you come up with the idea of Ditch the Ditty?
Molly McGuigan: ? Yeah. Ditch the Diddy. Another, a project that is becoming more than just a project for me. A few years ago I was part of another project, a big project that I worked on for several years. I was hired to, to sort of lead up a big gathering of folks talking about positive education around the globe. 
I'd spent a long time working on that project a couple years, and I was working with a couple of individuals in that project and we were sort of backstage, you know, kind of getting ready to get folks up on this stage. It was, you know, a big conference. We had like 800 people from almost 60 different countries represented. So it was a really big global event. 
And so we're backstage sort of getting folks ready to come up and, and speak. And I had someone actually physically hand me this sort of bag, this what we came to refer to as a “ditty bag” a bag of his, his things, his personal things, and said, here, you know, hold this, it, it has my, my, my whole life in it, you know, so hold this and, and take care of this while I go up and, and give this this keynote. 
And so I was one of two women that were backstage and, you know, I was sort of surrounded by a lot of other men just making sort of note of that. And I realized in that moment that, you know, I took that bag and I held it out of the sense of obligation, responsibility. And and I also noticed that, you know, that that gentleman happened to, to pass it along to one of the two women that were behind this, you know, backstage, even though I was literally like running the whole show.
So so it was a, a metaphor for me and a moment of time of like real clarity where I realized, wow, you know, how many other times am I being hand in things, you know, metaphorically or real, that I really don't wanna be holding , that I have a choice to not hold, but I'm still somehow holding because I have this sort of sense of responsibility towards others, or don't want make them feel bad or, you know, I, I, I have some, some reason behind, behind that. 
And so we started to get really curious about that. And so a couple of my colleagues and I who were present at that event were part of that and have started to, started to sort of carve out this space of when are women more apt to, you know, to pick up these things? You know, how, how do they know whether or not it's something that they can say yes to or say no to? You know, sometimes it's just building an awareness around is this something that I can really let go of? Is this something that I don't have to take on? 
And also, probably most importantly, why we are in this space. You know, the socialized tendencies that we have that come from very early communication that we receive about the role that women play and how we need to show up in the world. 
And in that process, we've found that there are women, I mean, that women resonate with this topic, this idea of ditching the Diddy. So Ditch the Diddy came out of, you know, let's ditch those things that are un unnecessary, that are, are, that we are holding, that are that are wearing us down. 
Cuz I think that the biggest message that we've received through all of the interviews that we've done, the workshops that now we've done in this process, is that that these things tend to, you know, when they, when they pile up, they tend to wear us down and take away from the things that we really wanna be doing. And so it's been a, a really fun journey to get, to get to know this space a bit more and dig into it and understand what the, what the possibilities are.
Stephen Matini: So I'm not a woman, but what you say resonates a lot. As you were talking, this word appeared in my head, which is self-worth. Mm-Hmm. , and maybe I'm going a completely wrong direction, but all those times in my life that I truly never felt that was good enough. Yeah. There's a thought that I have no idea where it comes from. I mean, I may have some sort of idea, but there's been a, a good partner, you know, my whole life and very often has put me in a position of holding a lot of crap.
Molly McGuigan: Yeah.
Stephen Matini: Is this wonderful metaphor connected to self-worth?
Molly McGuigan: Absolutely. Yeah. I think so. And I think that that's where, you know, you say, I, I, I, you know, I know that men, all the men that I've talked to have also said, well, I think diddies, I do it all the time. I pick up these things that I don't wanna be holding. But there again, there's just a difference in terms of how women approach it from the perspective of, of how they've been told to value themselves. And so in this work through Ditch the Diddy, we talk about, you know, things like the Good Girl, you know, like it, you know, the idea that you have to sort of, that you're gonna get your, your, your, your worth comes from people thinking that you're doing things right, that you're doing things good, that you're stepping up to sort of makes, you know, to sort of save the day in a sense, you know, that you've put on your cape and you're, you're coming in to sort of, you know, make things better in a way, even if it means that it's sort of taking away from, you know, some, your, your own sense of being or your own sense of wellness.
And a lot of that is wrapped up in to the idea of self-worth, worth, because it's this idea that I have to do this in order to feel worthy of somebody's approval or, or maybe even of my own approval. 
This is the way that I value myself. And and, you know, there's, there's nothing wrong with sort of this sense of feeling, of feeling value or self-worth out of doing, doing good things for people or, you know, or, or stepping into that space of, of kind of of, you know, doing the right thing or doing, doing something that really helps people. Being a, a people pleaser in a sense. 
There's nothing wrong with that e until it impacts your, your own wellbeing, you know, until it sort of really does start to pile up in a way where you're doing these things and not really understanding the impact and sometimes the negative impact that it's having on you. And, and also not realizing that, you know, by doing those things, by being that people pleaser or whatever it is that you are potentially saying, you know, not giving, leaving yourself enough space to say yes to the things that you really want to be doing, and leaving that space for those, those moments of, of, you know, of things that you really want, are invested in and that you value and that you want to be doing.
Stephen Matini: How could people overcome the fear that comes with all this? Which is, if I say no, how am I going to be perceived? I will not be a “good girl” anymore. I understand I need to make intentional choices, and intentionality is such a huge word, you know, in, in your work. How would you approach someone that feels so terrified by the consequences?
Molly McGuigan: Yeah. Because the reality is that the consequences to women of saying no are significantly different you know, than than men saying no. Especially within organizations, within, within organizations, within families, you know, which are the original organization, , you know, I mean, with any of these sort of human systems that we live within, there's a different implication for women to say no than for men. So what I would say is, and what we've really spent a lot of time again on with our work thinking about and, and writing about, first of all to sort of think about it as, you know, are there places that you can say no, where you can try it on , where you can say, you know, I, I have a, a dear friend who says who talks about saying yes in small ways, which I just love, you know, just say yes in small ways.
But, but I also think about this idea of saying no, say no in small ways. You know, try it on, you know, say no to bringing, you know, cookies to your child's classroom party or something, you know, that's a little, maybe a little less significant if it, if you get some pushback versus saying no to the big project that you know, is not something that you necessarily have to do at work, but something that, you know, could elevate you to the next thing, or that there's a lot of different implications for it. 
So really think about those things that could, could, you could try it out and be brave, but you, but you can see how it feels. And then the other thing that we talk a lot about in our work with Ditch the Diddy is what we call scaling the No. And so there's lots of different ways to deliver a no.
And so much of it again, goes back to this idea that everything is about relationships. And so first to identify what is the relationship with the person that you are saying no to? Is it someone who, you know, what we call a high volume Diddy distributor , and somebody who gives you lots and lots of ditties, and you're finally sort of like, no, I'm, I'm not gonna do that. 
You know, and that, and that there's not as much of a a concern about that person takes that no in, or is it somebody who you really feel a great amount of respect for and, but you're really getting clarity about what you want and where you wanna spend your time and you're carving things out a bit more. And so in that case it might be, you know, no, but how might we find somewhere else for this Ditty to go? Maybe there's someone else who is actually really excited and inspired by this opportunity and doesn't see it as a ditty at all. They see it as a delight, . So are there other places where the city might go? And can you play a role in saying no, but finding another solution for that? So there's sort of a continuum, a scale of where that no fits and how you might sort of play with different ways of delivering that. No, based on the relationship that you have with the person that you're saying no to.
Stephen Matini: Last night when you and I talked, you also mentioned the importance of pausing, slowing down, essentially. How did you get to the point of acknowledging that slowing down is something so important?
Molly McGuigan: This work came, began sort of before the pandemic? I think the pandemic was just this really sort of profound pause for all of us , where we were able to sort of take a step back and think about things. But you know, it brought way to that fact that, that it is, you know, I, I think that came out of a lot of those early conversations that we had with women about how they were able to reflect sort of, you know, a about something that happened in the past. And they were, you know, they were faced with this situation in the moment, and then they were able to sort of reflect back and think of, okay, how might I have done this differently? Or what would I have said, you know, or how, what did I really wanna do in that sit, you know, situation?
It was even asked of, of me sort of, what would you have done if you had had more time to pause in that first, you know, Diddy moment of being handed that bag, you know, what, what might you have done differently? And there was so much sort of, even in my response to that, there was so much sort of wrapped up in, well, I don't know, I guess maybe I would've said, where might, where might we find a place for this bag? Where else? Who else can carry this bag? And, and then I thought about that relationship with that person, and did I care about whether or not they were upset with, by the fact that I didn't wanna hold that bag. And there were so many things that kind of went into it, and I realized, I think we realized in that moment too that if you have an opportunity to sort of pause and think about these things as you're going along and have a better sense of self, a better sense of what you value, what you want, who you wanna do work with, you know who you wanna be with, you know, in terms of just relationships and things like that, and you take, take that time to pause and, and reflect on those things ongoing, then you're not faced with this moment of sort of, oh my gosh, I don't know what I want.
I don't know what to do, . But we have to take that time to do that because there's so much baked into it. There's so many things that are happening that sort of, you know, that layer in when there's decisions to be made when there's an ask in front of us. And so taking that time really, you know, more regularly to pause and really reflect and think about what are the things, you know, am I, am I, where's my energy going and how much, how much energy is going towards things that I really want to be working on, versus things that I wish that I could just pass off and that I wish that I could release so that po Yeah, the pause is so important. 
Even if it, if it is, you know, sometimes we talk a little bit too about just even not being afraid to not answer that email right away, or not being afraid to spend 24 hours to really think about an idea or think about an ask of some sort and maybe have a chance to even talk with some friends or talk with some colleagues about what, you know, what they think about it.
Kind of vetted a little bit and, you know, spending a little time to, to take that pause and not feel like you have to give that answer right away. Cuz again, you know, because they might think, oh, well they don't, she doesn't care, or she doesn't know, or she doesn't want to, or, you know, all the, the negative things that sort of run through our head. It's, it's it's not, it's not the end of the world if you take that time, that moment, that pause to really think about it and to give it that space.
Stephen Matini: The way that I learned over time to pace myself has gone through a lot of trials and error. And now the way that I pace myself, I know there are certain things that work for me really well. To give an example, I start working in the morning and then usually I like to take a couple of hours in the middle of the day for myself, which could be going to the gym workout, doing something outside, because oftentimes I work from home just for my mind to relax. How do you pace yourself?
Molly McGuigan: Well, I, I think one of the things that sort of re forces me to have a bit of a rhythm is that I have a 10 year old son . And so I, and I do try to orient my time am around being with him, you know, so he comes off the school bus at three o'clock and, you know, I, I value greatly the chance, and I have a lot of flexibility, which I really value. It's one of the things that I value about being able to work independently and, and carve out the space to be able to do that. I know a lot of people don't have the chance to do that, but I, you know, I use that as, as sort of a opportunity to, to check in with him and to try to get my work done, you know, by a certain time so that I can really kind of focus in on, on that part of my day and, and the time that I get to spend with him.
Molly McGuigan: So that, that helps a lot. , you know, the, the ability and I, you know, I think that probably people can find us even within working with organizations, but for me, I have to stop and like take, take a pause and break from whatever I'm working on, because often my best thinking comes when I'm not sitting in front of it when I'm doing something else. For me, I, you know, it's, it's, it's often doing something physical. I'm doing something, you know, I'm taking a walk or I'm working in my garden or something. Something that kind of taps into a different way of, of, of thinking through a, a, a, a challenge or a new piece of work or something like that. It helps me to really think about it differently
Stephen Matini: When you run into a miserable moment, is anything you do to get out of that fun?
Molly McGuigan: Yeah, I definitely get there. , we all do, right? We all get into that space of, you know, just feeling like there's something that is not ins surpass. Usually for me it comes because I'm tired, and I just can't, you know, get, get my thought process around it. The way that I usually overcome that is, I think, again, it goes back to my number one core value, which is relationships. I will always sort of err on the side of finding a person in my network. You know, one of my, one I've got, I've got people that I'm just so grateful to have in my life who I can talk to about work, I can talk to about, you know, challenges with my personal life, whatever, just, you know, those people that are sort of vona friend kind of people that I can just, you know, talk about something with a challenge and, you know, something that I'm having a hard time thinking about a new client situation, a difficult client situation, or again, even something personally.
And so my first go-to is always to sort of think about and I, I'm an extrovert, so that's how I orient too. I process out loud with people . And so it's really important to know that about yourself because I'm married to an in an introvert and he in no way does what I just described . That's not how he orients to the world. He, you know, holds up in his space and he thinks about it and he reflects and he's quiet. He doesn't even talk to me about it. 
So it's, I think it's really important to sort of know who, who you are and how you orient because just that whole idea right there of the difference between an introvert and an expert is so important. So yeah, I, I rely on those relationships. I rely a lot on my gut and my intuition.
I was just talking to a friend the other day about a challenging situation at work that she was having, and, and I said, don't underestimate sort of really your, the, the physical feeling that comes about when you are asked to do certain things or, you know, when you're faced with certain things, you know, is it something that you're really excited about and that you feel that excitement and you sort of can't wait to, you know, respond and type that email or whatever it is. 
Or is it something that literally lives, that leaves a pit in your stomach, you know? And it's just so important to identify that and to really take a moment to, to understand like how, how you are orienting to that again. You know? And I think the last thing is just, I, I, you know, to, to be a little brave , you know, to sort of, maybe it's, you know, usually those challenges, those things that we are, are those difficult situations that we're trying to overcome are things that we're a little afraid of.
And it might be because of that, back to that whole sense of self-worth or messages that we're giving ourselves about, I don't know if I can really do this. I don't know if I have this expertise. Most of the time you do, you know, believe in yourself. I mean, believe that there's something that you have to offer if it's e either if you're working within an organization or you're, you know, working outside of an organization like, like you and I do, is there's something, there's some perspective that you have to bring that is probably very much needed in that moment. And so be be brave for putting that out there. And I often have to kind of talk, you know, remind myself of that, of those opportunities to really put, put it out there and allow others to benefit from, you know, just a difference in a, a different lens of which to to view that difficult situation.
Stephen Matini: Do you think that bravery can be learned?
Molly McGuigan: Yeah, I do. Absolutely. I think that it's inside of all of us. There's some element of it, and I think we but there's, I think there's, there's, I, I don't know. I mean, I, I definitely think that it's something that is innate and something that we shy away from be, again, because of just kind of more socialized reasons of of, of whether or not it's accepted or not to fail, right? I mean, we're, the bravery is all about sort of a, a a version to failure and how much we've been accepted in moments where we've tried something and it hasn't gone well, and people have still said, it's okay, you tried, it's fine. So that I think is inside of us and a lot of, but I, I do think that we can develop into a space where we try that again.
You know, we've maybe gone through different, you know, parts of our life through schooling, through family structures that we've oriented around that maybe bring us away further away from that sense of bravery towards something. But I think that we can develop that in, in, in humans and people to be able to get more comfortable with that. And I definitely think organizations and leaders can develop that too. 
They can give people the chance to, you know, to be okay with, with that sense of bravery around something. Yeah, I think that a lot of our systems don't allow for it. I, you know, I've been in this more entrepreneurial phase of my life, for, you know, for now almost 15 years. Cause I've been doing this work on my own now for almost that long. There is a lot of, a lot of bravery and and a lot of courage in, in that process.
And I'm, you know, I guess I think about where that came from and it really did mostly come from people who believed in me and said, why don't you try this? You can do this. You know, it was, it was not so, I don't know that it was as much, it was about me taking those messages in, you know, I had, I, I was brave enough, I guess, to listen to that and say, okay, yeah, I'll try that. 
But it came from somebody, you know, and it, and I can think of different phases in my life, you know, people stepping up and saying, you could do this. Try, try this and, and see what happens. What do you have to lose? You know, it's, everything's temporary, you know, let's try it out and see, see what happens. And you can always change. You can always shift . And I think those were powerful messages for me throughout my life, even from a, a pretty, pretty early age. You know, just giving, giving things a chance. I
Stephen Matini: Don't have many regrets in my life, but the only regret that I have, and there's one specific thing that I regret, is the fact that in that situation, I did not try and I did not try for a bunch of reasons, and I decided to say no, and my life went in a different direction. But I, and, and I'm, I'm referring to a professional choice, you know, that I, yeah, that I, that years ago. But if I'm been honest, I've been thinking about it very often, if not every single day. What if, yeah, what if? And then what if is horrible, you know? Mm-Hmm. and I, and I think a situation in which I busted my and nothing happened, but honest to God, I, I walked away thinking, listen, I've done everything . I don't know what else I could have done. You know, let's hope that life will provide some answers instead. I think when you don't try, it stays with you, you know, and it's not, it's not good.
Well, I think the, the appreciative inquiry background in me would in, would invite you to reframe that into a what now? what's next? You know, because I think cuz every, because I actually really do believe that everything that we do in life somehow, you know, there, there is some reason and for it, and even those difficult decisions that we make or those things that we do, and, you know, we kind of wish we had done something differently. 
We end up in a place where we look back and we think, oh, that's, that makes sense. You know, that makes total sense. These things are coming together now for this purpose. And maybe it was a difficult decision at the moment, and you feel like you could have done something differently. But I, I really, I, I don't know. I guess it's the, the optimist in me, the, the pragmatic optimist in me says these, this is, this is all, this is all how it was supposed to work out. You know, I was supposed to do these things and now it's all coming together and I'm doing this work, or I'm, or I'm playing this role, or I'm, you know, I'm in this relationship with this person because these things, this trajectory that I was on all makes sense.
Stephen Matini: What would you say that there seems to be something important, even though you would like our listeners to know?
Molly McGuigan: I think what comes to mind for me is, you know, life is a journey and be in the moment, being in the moment within each of, each of the components of that, of that journey. Each, each portion of that journey. And, you know, understanding who, who is around me, who who is influential. And really most importantly, what about myself was, you know, most important to that part of the journey. What can I learn about who I am and what I bring and what I value.
Stephen Matini: It is a squiggling line. .
Molly McGuigan: It's a squiggling line, . And that's the exciting part. I would actually be born to death if it was a straight line. I'm not a straight line kind of gal . And one of the things I value most is that it, it, yeah, it, I don't even know where the line is headed today. . Yeah. I think I, we, you know, we spend a lot of time in the work. I know that we do, you and I do a lot of, a lot of times encouraging people to come up with some big vision for their future, you know, some big audacious dream. 
And I, I do, I find I find a lot of value in the exercise of doing that. I think that there is tremendous value, but I also think that we need to sort of ditch this idea that there's this there, that there's this big audacious sort of space that we're supposed to be going towards, you know, because really the beauty is in the, in the journey there, and it can, it can shift and it can look completely different.
I mean, I think it's important to think about those things, but at the end of the day, it's about really sort of getting a better sense of what are your values? What are the things that really light you up, you know, day in and day out, and spending the most time doing those things and, and pivoting and adjusting as you go along to make, you know, make the space for those things. I think that's really how my work has, and my, and my life has evolved the most is, is in recognizing that it's okay, I'm letting myself off the hook, that I don't have like this big, you know, in 10 years I'm gonna be here, you know, I'm going to have, have this whole you know, this, this whole world around me because, you know, the reality is right now is, is the most important thing.
Stephen Matini: Your kid is really fortunate.
Molly McGuigan: .
Stephen Matini: He has a, he has such a wonderful mama. Wow. ,
Molly McGuigan: Thank you. Well, I'm gonna make sure he listens to that. And, and here's that one. I'm telling him to clean his room and do all the things that mom still do.
Stephen Matini: Thank you so much for spending time with me. Thank you. This is was wonderful. I loved it.
Molly McGuigan: Oh, thank You. Thanks for the invitation. I really appreciate it, and I love talking to you. It was, it was, it was a wonderful chance just to to take the, take a moment, take a pause for myself, and really think about some of these important questions that you've asked.

SHAKTI - Closing the Leadership Gender Gap - Featuring Puneet Sadchev

Today's guest is Puneet Sachdev, a global people and culture leader passionate about leveraging data, technology, and humanity to create inclusive and innovative workplaces. 
In a world of incremental technological changes, Puneet believes staying close to people is the key to success.  
In this episode, Puneet will share his views on the existing shortfalls in how organizations are developing senior female leaders. Puneet talks about Shakti, which is the principle of divine feminine, and how it can help bring balance to leadership in a world that is still predominantly masculine.
Listen to this episode of Pity Party Over to learn how to close the gender leadership gap in organizations.
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#leadership #change #femaleleadership #shakti #divine feminine #puneetshadchev #podcast #pitypartyover #stephenmatini #alygn
TRANSCRIPT
Stephen Matini: You lived in so many different places, so many different countries. What have you learned from all these traveling and all these experiences?
Puneet Sachdev: When I look back on this and who I am as a result of it, of course one of the things which comes from doing that and having, like you said, lived in four or five different continents, worked in all over US, UK, Europe, Asia, Australia, a bit in Africa as well, actually Botswana off for very short period of time. 
I think you have to have a lot of tenacity or you will develop that. Because remember each time you go in a new context, some situations I've had to go and create my life there. And then you have to start networking and you're dealing with a lot of stereotypes, a lot of mental unseen barriers. That's one thing which I have learned that just constantly have to be upping your game, build your networks, try to find people who understand who you are, what's your value proposition. That's one. 
It makes you very adaptable. It just makes you extremely adaptable. You can be, you can hit the ground running in utterly, I can talk myself that hitting the ground, running in no time is absolutely becomes a part of, you know, who you are in. 
In a way it's adaptation for survival as well to an extent. The challenging side of that is that networks, friends, because when you go to these places, they are people who you would like to hang out with, but they have their local schoolmates college friends. You gotta be there for a long period of time. And then also it depends on the culture. So I think it's you know, it's been a number of these different things. So it's, it's got it ups and it's got it's it's downs as well.
Stephen Matini: Have you always known that you wanna be in change management, leadership development, or is it something that unfolded over the years?
Puneet Sachdev: Not really. Stephen, no. My dad's from the Indian Navy, the area in which I grew up, whatever, where, you know, when finishing off college school in, in the nineties, the middle of the nineties and all of that, there were very few options available. 
There was in India, the engineering, doctor, lawyer, armed forces, rights? So mainly these were where you would get the jobs. I have a very, I had a very impressive uncle, my mother's brother, Tenesh Tata. I mean, until today, I don't think I met anybody else who was as impressive. 
Very charismatic, very handsome guy, dresses up extremely well. Very intelligent international chap, one of the pioneers in the hospitality business in India. One of the first few people to go overseas to Salzburg and study and come back and he joined the Roy Hotels as a management trainee in their first batch in the 1970s.
I think subconsciously that was planted that I want to be like the mau. That's what we call Uncle Mau in India. I finished my college and then I applied just for that program. Nothing else. I just applied for The School of Management. Now it's called The Center for Learning and Development. I actually don't know what I would've done had I not got selected for that way stringent the talent acquisition process. But two thousands of people apply and they hire only 10, 15, whoever they think would be general managers down the line, right? 
I think I was one of those eight or 10 who managed to make it that year. That's the way life started for me. Transition into OD work, which I do right now, people, culture, organization development, change management. It wasn't a part of my plan. I was doing very well where I was. What happened was General Electric was ramping up, scaling up at India considerably. Okay. This is I think like two thousands now. 
One of my fathers grand, Dr. Cherian, he was a management consultant in organization development working globally. He had suggested, why don't you think about stepping out of the hotels into corporate? 
So yeah, the transition was completely happenstance, but I love the work I do totally, you know, number of things, right? Which for me, create flow at work is connection with people is very important for me to know that, to have a sense of contribution into the world, into people is important, it creates that to me. 
As far as I have the ability to do that, to be creating the solutions I design to be, to bring in research, to bring in technology, work with smart people, solve problems. I'm happy , honestly. And I think the choices that I've made, it has given me all these options. So I really think it's been really lucky to have been doing all this work for so many years.
Stephen Matini: You have traveled hard, you have worked hard. Because you have seen so many different cultures, you have experienced at so many different organizations. From the perspective of someone whose specialty is change, you know, is organizational development, have you noticed any elements that seem to be consistent across all these experiences?
Puneet Sachdev: It's very easy to now get squared data driven and tech and all that. Fantastic. I think it has its place, but we don't want the tale to act the dog in many ways, and the dog in many cells, many sense it still remains the people, it still remains the humanity of the world, right? 
And we have a very privileged show to play, in my opinion, to raise the consciousness of organizations. That's the lens through which I do my work is to go there to elevate the consciousness of this organization, whatever that looks like. Consistent elements for me will always remain staying close to people, no matter what you do. 
Let's look at it in two different ways. Explain close to people. If you look at it in the sense, if I'm leading a team and I'm dealing with stuff, then having a regular one-to-ones with the people having two-way communication channels, having the opportunities to, to best practice sharing, to understand, to help grow and all of that.
So I think, I mean always staying close to the people has been important to me to understand the people as much as I can. I'll give you an example. 
Hotels, at least the Old Roy is very, very strict on the customer satisfaction scores. The the board or the leadership team of the organization, every day they would get these CSAT scores from all hotels, 30 hotels in the world. They would go through it. They would actually give a call to the general manager of a property if they saw anything that was, so it was a measure higher than I think for them money was the employee experience, right? 
In that context, the teams that I ran over there, we always ended out with the highest CSAT scores consistently throughout f and b operations. And the other part was the highest density of employees of the month. And I can attribute it to one or two things. 
We are still remain universal no matter where you go. I really, honestly, genuinely care for the people that I've worked with. I not only knew them, I knew about their families, I knew about their dreams and desires. I used to go to the houses, give them flowers and cakes. If there was any occasion, I've done that all personally. 
Even today when I'm working organization consultancy, I feel that what has made me successful and because it's me, right? I'm walking through all these cultures and everything else, I think is that first of all, that ability to just care about the people, build the rapport and be honestly on their side. Everything else will fall into place. 
I believe when you do that, when that's the soil in which you are cultivating what you are doing. Yes, there's people analytics there, employee experience there, employee external strategies, all that will come. But the essences, you're serving these people today. 
The other very important aspect, which has to be recognized by any leader is wellbeing. It's very overwhelming all around. Whether you look at the social environment, political environment, now you add the old complication of generative AI and all the anxieties, which that is bringing up with people. D&I is a big deal. There's so much going on. You need a robust heart in a human being to be a leader today. And that comes with a lot of self-awareness. I think that's the genesis of everything for me.
Stephen Matini: When you work as a consultant and you step into an organization, there's somehow that component, the human component that the consciousness is just not part of the organizational fiber. How do you move around as a first step to introduce a such important concept?
Puneet Sachdev: The way I would look to influence to shift the zeitgeist of leadership, to elevating the consciousness and the inclusivity of the human being is of course, number one, you walk the talk, right? So you role model it yourself. And fortunately for me, I have done incredible amount of my own interpersonal growth work, spiritual work. 
So I think it has automatically given me a level of depth naturally to create a level of comfort and safety for people around me. 
So role modeling it and the other way, the best way to do that is because we have, we have the influence, you design your leadership solutions with that built in. So I think it's just weaving it into the employee experience and into the design of solutions in leadership development. 
The easiest, and I suppose the most lowest barrier way to do that if you, if that language was very confrontational, is through coaching. It's through incredible coaches, people like that can shift the consciousness of leaders and organizations hiding the right kind of external people. Coaches then trigger more of those conversations in many ways.
Stephen Matini: Are you ever afraid of the impact that digital and artificial intelligence could have? And you have a lot of experience in digital transformation. Do you have any concern moving forward?
Puneet Sachdev: I think if I also think about concerns, I would break them up into two different buckets. One is systemic and let's say organizational. The other is the whole human aspect of it, right? 
I think as far as the systemic side of it is concerned, I would say there would be the, the whole data privacy, the, the cybersecurity, all of that is a very big concern. 
I think on the human side of it, which is more importantly as well today, is this constant and sense of surveillance, protection, insecurity. It has a lot of implications on mental health because the more and more we dependent on looking on the phones and the technology that is becoming a much more mental health epidemic than it has been, especially for the younger generations. I think those are the most common, I mean I, I think that's very commonly understood that these are the key concerns today as far as tech is concerned.
Stephen Matini: You mentioned last time when you and I talked the notion of the divine feminine. You talked about Shakti. Would you mind sharing, how did you gravitate towards that?
Puneet Sachdev: It's, it's an evolution. Yeah, it is, it is a percentage of the work I've been doing recently. Still not the bulk of it. Maybe it will in the future, who knows. But it is a, it is it's a percentage of what I do today. It's an evolution of the work I've been doing with women leaders, right? So I've been doing the coaching work, actually, it, it's even before that coaching over time I've seen that most of my clients tend to be female leaders. Bulk of them, like 60, 70%. They have been female leaders, you know, for one reason or the other. And they've come from all over the place. They've worked incredible places like Hollywood and from Rolls Royce to Goldman Sachs, like I said, et cetera. So a lot of them from tech as well. Cause I do coaching on the NASDAQ Center in San Francisco.
So I'm on the coach on the coaching panel for the number of years. I do that as well, Jen, from there it was to start looking at what would a solution look like for in-house women leaders, right? So most of this was one-to-one work with women who would come to me outside of my regular work consulting work that I was doing. So I started looking at the, the data around it, you know, now the concept of divine feminine in a very simple, very simple language is that it is both it is basically about the qualities of creation, nurturing the life, giving energy, the empathy. We are talking about those qualities. That's what we mean of the divine feminine and that that is there in both men and with women, it's just that it's easier, it's more prevalent and it's more of the d n a of a woman than it is of a guy.
When I started looking at the data, right, in terms of what are we doing for when there's a lot of talk about programs and solutions to address the leadership gender gap, to look at elevating women's leadership. All of that is going on right now in, in the world, as you know. So I started looking at some of the information. To me it still looks very, very traditional. It may be given a very fancy name of like wild, which is women in leadership development is one of them. But even if I look at some of the top business schools, I still think it's so masculine. It is so outside in the, the crocs and the essence and the drift of what is happening is around imposter syndrome, confidence, networking and understanding your leadership. So it's generally in that genre still. This is based on my research, right?
So, but that's what I notice and the soil in which it is created is still outside in. You are the problem. You go get fixed, go to this program, to this leadership, women's leadership program, learn these different things, and you come back into a patriarchal container in most of the situations. And then you fit in and you behave with those, those masculine capabilities or those somewhere masquerading there to be able to move up and succeed, right? So you are subjugating who you really are at the core and that's what it looked like. Like you know, you So it one is that the other part of it, what I don't think they do very well, they do not address the water in which this is going on. There's a huge big cultural piece to it. The performance environment piece to it. The legacy thinking, the legacy practices.
I mean, if you're not gonna address that, even if you do a great job with women leaders, they're gonna leave. That's what you'll do. You'll only make them more attractive, more self-aware to know that this is what I don't want , I don't want to do this anymore. You'll make them more aware of it. That is once they get tuned into truly who they are. So it began from their step to look at it. And then from there I started then I designed the solution. It's got shock theorizing. Shocki means the divine feminine as you already mentioned. And it's got two pillars to it. One is the individual tra the other thing as well, which I would like to add as well, most organizations, the work is still very cerebral. It's still very left brain oriented, right? I don't think it is transformational.
Now you look at the life of a woman leader, right? Let's just say directors, VPs, all that, they're probably late thirties. They're into their forties and fifties and that's their station in life today. So you, let's put two and two together. You look at their life outside of work, personally, there's data around it. In the UK there's a recent research of 2000 women leaders in organizations researched. They talk about traumatic experiences and between the, I mean many of them between, let's say between 40, 45 and 60 65 have been through at least five traumatic events in their life. Sexual abuse, domestic violence, there could be the menopause. And you have to remember this all leaves an energetic signature in the nervous system of that human being who is dealing with it, whether they acknowledge it or they agree to it because it's become so normalized that, right?
You just get on with it. But it does imprint. Where does that show up? It shows up in your wellbeing and your health. Most of the autoimmune diseases, 70% that happened to women. I'm not saying there's necessarily a core correlation, but there is something around there. Mm-Hmm. . The other part of it is decision making. You know, it will a hundred percent impact the quality of decision making. I think when you're designing a solution for the women leaders, and I've written extensive, I, I recently posted around International Women's Day, I wrote an article, which is when women lead firms win the metaphysics, the business case, and the approach for closing the leadership gender gap, it starts with this whole conversation about the divine feminine. Why is that important to the humanity? And then I have put a lot of data around it, McKenzie, Lena Gallop Gardner, which clearly states that when women lead firms win, you know, very much whether you look at the ebot performance of an organization, which is top quarter in their, in women in leadership, they will outperform their peers up to 25% in earnings before income and tax.
And then there are statistics about women, what 30%, at least 30% in leadership positions is a tipping point for profitability, et cetera, et cetera. So the number of stats are quartered over there. So it's very clear the solid business case to be able to doing, to do this work comprehensively and well enough. So the solution which has been designed, which I've designed, has got two core elements to it. One is the transformative experience for the women leaders. It's done in a group coaching and an action learning container. Okay? So business goals, what are you gonna be accomplishing or what we do? But diagnostics beneath Engram 360 on leadership do all that stuff. The ultimately the goal is to be able to take them deep with the themselves. The deeper they go within themselves, the more they get in touch with their own core needs, what they have not addressed, what they are, the better, more integrated people they will be.
They'll have clearer boundaries. They'll have a clear yes, a clear no that will have its own ripple effect in the organization and at homes in a positive way. It'll be uncomfortable to begin with. But if the sponsors and the people around these women are aware, then I think, you know, you know what you're creating. It's a very interesting quote by an Indian Bollywood actress, let me see if I can remember it. Her name is Pre Zinta. She says that behind every successful man, there's a successful woman behind every unsuccessful man, there are two women and they are behind. I thought that was hilarious. And behind every progressive woman is a progressive man. And that is the essence behind every progressive woman leader is a progressive organization. And that is what shock the is designed to do. So it's there, it's got wellbeing, self-compassion, understanding of leadership masculine and feminine leadership dynamics.
So it's got all that covered. It's a mind, body, spirit approach. The other element of it is looking at the performance environment. So that's, so this is a seven month journey, the individual journey, which can be bespoke and tailored. The other one is looking at the performance environment in the organization. So core element of the women's journey is the group coaching, the leadership, the business, your own business goals, personal development goals, introspection, self-compassion, and also allyship. If an organization was to say, just run the group coaching and the action learning piece, that's not shocking. That's, that's just group coaching it for it to be shock. The, the group coaching part of it, your business goals, the introspective piece, the self-compassion, the wellbeing piece, and the commitment by the organization to allyship is critically important. That makes it what it is, right? And as a part of the onboarding journey, all stakeholders are a, are there present in the room to hear the same language around let's say the divine feminine, the importance, all this data around what's happening, I shared with you about the traumatic experiences and business impact data.
So everybody is present to the same container that we are creating and that can be then taken and that these women leaders can be supported individually as well as organizationally. And then there is a five to seven week kind of a diagnostic piece that dives into looking at the performance environment in terms of policies, practices. Is there a clear charter on our approach towards general equality? If so, what is it? What are the KPIs around it? If an organization is well down that path, then it's fine. Carry on doing that, great. If not, then this is a comprehensive solution to actually genuinely address the challenge of the leadership journal gap and creating very targeted, very bespoke way persona oriented solutions for women leaders who require a lot of nuance. And you can't just do blanket the stuff that we've been doing in the past.
Stephen Matini: You have so much experience when you hit a rough spot, when you have somehow a bad moment. How do you get out?
Puneet Sachdev: I regularly have to be dealing with situations I haven't dealt with on a fairly regular basis. That comes as a part of doing, having worked and traveled so much and being in so many different situations, my own just dreams and desires. They just keep expanding and I'm always in a situation, I don't know what the bloody hell to do now. 
One is that I have got my practices and routines where I think are just the most important things to do. Getting up early in the morning, I do my prayers and my meditation for about a half and half, 45 minutes, sometime longer, sometimes lesser. I run regularly. And that also the running came into my life also because I was dealing with a lot of mental health challenges during separation and divorce. I mean it was about 10 years ago now, but I did not want to go down the root of antidepressants, which every people around me was suggesting.
I spoke to a few people and I said, no, I don't want to do that. So the way I dealt with it was more through prayer and running, quite honestly has been incredible. So I think that really has to be dialed in into your life. Even if you're not dealing with constant change, just looking around you, it's very overwhelming today. Ultimately, why you doing all this? To just keep your nervous system in the, what you call the parasympathetic nervous system as activated, which is your rest and relax. It's a nervous system game, Stephen. 
Nothing else. If you bring it down, it is all how you are regulating and co-regulating your nervous system. Co-Regulating would be with the people around you, the people supportive with you that COEs gives you energy and stuff like that. But otherwise, my own regulation mechanisms are my prayers are my running and exercising, having my green smoothie and eating clean food.
But when I'm going through some really challenging questions, decisions to make, then my prayers and my fasting, I do fast. Then for decisions, I would fast. When I say fast, I'll probably have one meal in a day for let's say three days or whatever I wanna be doing, depending on what I'm dealing with. So I can quiet and be noise within me and really get access to the truth. But the fact also is, you know, you can do all of that ultimately when you have to make a decision. It still is tough. It still is so bloody tough to make certain decisions. Whether it was a decision to move from the UK to Australia, right? The decision from them, it was a personal decision to have been made, et cetera. I regularly work with coaches and people who I trust as especially one lady Daphne.
She has been the most incredible support for me for the last 10 years. She knows me extremely well. I definitely will have a touchpoint call with her or maybe a few of them, but whoever I think I need to bring into the conversation. So that is my way of making decisions through challenging situations. And if you talk about organizationally when I'm working with teams and let's say you're going through challenging times. 
You know what I have done for my, what I've done is, number one is with the team being very open and upfront about what is what we are dealing with. Clear open communication, involve the team, break that down into constituent parts, bring the team into cre. Looking at that, okay, you look at the problem of the, let's say the revenue. You look at the problem of the people side of it, you look at this, you look at that, and then let's work on that together.
So that makes us all very cohesive way together on this. What I would also do is to have some kind of play or creative activity. Alright, we are gonna go do some basketball, but we'll do something like that. We get out. So we are tapped into our creative energy as well to create different solutions from the problem. What I've also used in the past very well is best practice visits or conversations quite okay, who do we know who is done this? Let's just line them up or let's go to their office. Let's have a conversation. So do that and do research.
Stephen Matini: Thank you for your generosity and for all these amazing thoughts. This is really, really wonderful. I
Puneet Sachdev: Hope for this episode to be
Stephen Matini: Listened to by as many people as possible. Thank you so much.
Puneet Sachdev: Thanks Stephen. Thanks for the opportunity.

Something to Fight for - Featuring Dr. Liane Davey

It's fair to say that most people do not enjoy experiencing conflict. Conflict is uncomfortable, and it's challenging to handle it properly when we are a piece of the equation.
Today's guest is Dr. Liane Davey, bestselling author, keynote speaker, and facilitator on conflict. Liane is a spoonful of sugar in the world of conflict, combining a solid academic background with a wonderful sense of humor.  
In this episode of Pity Party Over, we will discuss many practical tools to handle conflict, like the importance of understanding the truth of others before sharing our own and how to balance vulnerability and accountability to strengthen our connection with people. 
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Stephen Matini: I'm here with “Lady No,, I'm here with “Lady No.” My first question for you is, when did you become aware that “no” was gonna be center stage in your life, in your professional career?
Liane Davey: , when I started doing a lot of work on conflict and the importance of healthy conflict it, it started to dawn on me that no is a really central and important word in being able to have boundaries, have healthy conflict. 
I think it, it was, I don't even remember how long ago it was, maybe 2013, I'm not even sure, and I was writing for Psychology Today, and I wrote a post playing off of the name of the month, November to call it “No-vember.” That's when I started this, you know, identifying my brand with saying no. 
And so in this subsequent Novembers, I've been doing this sort of 30 days of things to say no to, to be happier, healthy, and more productive. So it was that first realization, and the first year it was just one article, about 10 things to say no to. But over time, it's become something very important to me. And not only, I think it, it started as a conflict thing, now it's about focus, and it's about boundaries. And so now it's using no for all sorts of good.
Stephen Matini: One of the comments that I receive from people most of the time is, it's easy for you to talk because you are an independent professional. So you are in a position you can say no, but me in this place, in this organization is much harder. People are often caught in this dichotomy: if I say no, how I'm going to be perceived? And if I don't say no, I'm gonna end up being a pressure cooker. When that happens to you, what is the first step that you take with the client?
Liane Davey: So what I'm trying to do anytime that I'm gonna have conflict in a healthy way with somebody, is the first thing I'm trying to do is understand what is their truth. 
So what we want to do when someone says something we disagree with or we want to say no to, we tend to assert our truth. Let me tell you, , why that's so wrong and what I really need, instead of just spending a moment pausing to try and understand where that suggestion came from. So first of all, I would just reiterate what they said. 
Okay, so I understand you want to host a big in-person client event, just reiterating and even that quick pause that says to the person I'm listening to you, even that is gonna help you be on a better path. 
Then I'm gonna ask a question to understand where are they coming from? So I might say, tell me about your thought process. What got you to recommending a client event? Those sorts of questions. Big open questions that allow them to paint the canvas with their truth. You know, probably you need a couple additional questions to really understand what it's about for them.
And then you wanna get to the point where you can say, all right, so my sense is that for you, this is about maybe our marketing campaign didn't land. Our customers don't understand the value, and you really wanna bring them together and have a have a second shot at telling them about our new product. 
If you can get to the point of having their truth come out of your mouth, they won't even know you're having conflict. And from there you can share your own truth. But the, the first step is very counterintuitive. It's not at all what people think the first step of conflict would be. The first step of conflict is to get to speaking their truth.
Stephen Matini: Easy, easy or hard to implement in your own life what you preach?
Liane Davey: Hard. It, it was really funny. I posted something on LinkedIn and, and my 21 year old daughter who's now away at university, you know, she was seeing me writing all of this stuff about productive conflict and, and she just texted me like, mm-hmm. , like . 
So it's hard and it's hard because the stakes are very high. It's hard because you have decades of baggage with, with your family members with doing it at home, but I'm getting better at it and I'm, you know, really focusing on raising things sooner, working through the discomfort all those sorts of things at home. 
Professionally, you know, it's a little easier, but if I can figure out how to do it at home, then I'll be in a much better spot at practicing what I preach.
Stephen Matini: People say that to me all the time. They say, well, you must have been able to handle this well, so that mm-hmm no girl the same thing. Maybe I know how to handle a little bit better. Yeah. But you have to be vigilant all the time, really.
Liane Davey: Absolutely. Yeah. I, the only difference for me is I say there's just a lot of accountability. Once you write a book about productive conflict, it's, it's really good accountability. So I just have I have more of a, an obligation than other people might feel because I do take it very seriously that I can't tell other people to do this if I don't do it. So I put a lot of energy into doing the things I recommend, but , that's the main difference.
Stephen Matini: You have become such an important voice for conflict. So now that you have become an important voice for conflict, how do you see it compared to, let's say, when you started out this whole thing? What has changed?
Liane Davey: Yeah. So I, I think when I started working as a team effectiveness advisor and consultant, I, I think my original point of view was that there was too much conflict in teams and all this unhealthy, dysfunctional conflict. Now, all these years later I believe there's not nearly enough conflict and, and there's much, much, much less than you might think. 
So one of the things that's changed my perspective is differentiating between, I like to think of conflict as a verb, like as a, a process, as something you, you do. And so I, I pull out all the things that are, oh, no, we have issues that we aren't addressing, and I try not to talk about those as conflict. 
So we have grievances and resentment and bitterness. There's lots of that. So don't get me wrong, when I say there's not a lot of conflict in teams there is lots of resentment and bitterness and grievance, but what there isn't a lot of is the active path toward resolving those sorts of things. And so I reserve the word conflict to be no, no, you have to actively be doing something. For me to, to call it conflict,
Stephen Matini: I was working with the leadership team, and these are people that have been working together for a long time mm-hmm. . So they had really very specific ideas of one another. There was a lot of cliquey weird stuff happening among themselves. So a lot of mistrust. Yeah. So we did the whole program and I'm, I don't think it was successful. And in the end, I still sensed their hurt, that inability to be transparent, to be communicative. So yeah. When you work with people that have been known each other forever and they don't trust each other, , what is the first step that you would take with them?
Liane Davey: So, interestingly, I don't start with the relationships because as soon as you start with the relationships and the team dynamic, I find people become defensive. They immediately are like waiting for the accusation to be pointed at them, and or worse, they're ready to launch the assault at, on, on somebody else. 
So instead of going into a team that has trust issues and a dysfunctional dynamic, and talking about the dysfunctional dynamic, I go in talking about what is the organization counting on this team to do? And there are a couple of things that help with that. First of all, I start talking about how is the world changing? So I'm talking about trends, opportunities, threats to their organization that come from the external environment. 
So the purpose of doing that is that if we're going to make changes in how we're behaving, we can say, it's not that we were failing. It's not that we were doing it wrong, it's just just that the world has changed and we need to evolve to keep up. And so there's a little bit of psychological safety in not admitting that this change is because of, of of, of me or being wrong, but instead a, about the future. 
And so, external orientation, longer time horizon, those kinds of conversations about what the business needs from you are safer. And people tend to align around those things. Their shoulders go down a little bit as they relax, but then the question becomes, okay, so if that's the way the world is changing and therefore our team needs to be more of this and less of this, then you can get to the, okay, so how do we need to show up differently to be that? And it's just a safer path toward the same conversation.
So that's how I come at it. And again, unconventional, counterintuitive. I think a lot of people who believe they have trust issues and, and go to a team offsite expect to be bearing their souls. And, and, and usually at the end of the day, people will say, well, it's not what I expected, because it's been a more constructive conversation. 
It's been back to, this is the other thing that's important, but getting them out of their own grievances and into, there are a lot of people counting on you to be an adult here, the shareholders, the customers, your suppliers, other employees. And so sometimes that's also helpful to give them some perspective that if this team can't pull it together, there are, there are people who are gonna feel that and who are gonna lose as a result. So that's where I start in a situation like that. 
The other thing that's worth saying is that in the vast majority of circumstances, there's at least one person on a team in that situation who just can't believe again. And I make that clear before we start, and the goal would be for the people to raise their own hands and say, I can't be a part of this. I can't believe in this. I can't let the wound heal. And those people just decide to, to leave. But almost always, at least one person leaves before you can reset the team.
Stephen Matini: If the team leader, if that person is not fully involved, is that person doesn't fully sponsor the event, can the team still become more functional and trustworthy?
Liane Davey: Yeah. I believe that they can. I think about it a little bit like children who are raised by very dysfunctional parents, and at some point the kids learn to band together and, and protect themselves. You know, help meet one another's needs, be a safe haven for one another. So it's, it's a positive step. It is going to feel better for team members. 
So one of the things you can do is if one of the ways the general manager is failing is that they don't get people aligned, they don't prioritize effectively. If that's the case, getting together with your teammates and saying, okay, at least we should be aligned, and let's all agree among ourselves what we're gonna prioritize, you can do that. 
If the team leader is pitting you against one another, creating competition, you can again come together and decide, we're not falling for that. Let's support each other. You can manage up together, . So there are lots of different things you can do. 
They aren't a full solution. I include it in a category that I call, if you can't make a dent in the problem, like you can't fix the boss, reduce the dent it makes in you. And so that's gonna make it a little bit better. Your experience will be better if you've got your colleagues and your teammates on side. It's not fixing the underlying issue of a poor leader, but at least you can buy yourself some time. See if that, you know, leader disappears if they, you know, have an epiphany. If you manage them up in a way that allows them to be successful in new and more healthy ways, at least for the time being, I do think you can make it a bit better.
Stephen Matini: You have this way of approaching this topic, which is so different compared to anyone else in my opinion, because you have a strong academic background, and you can feel it when you talk, but the way you speak it, it's always unconventional. You say things in a way that make a lot of sense. Where do you get your inspiration for talking about these things in a way that is so interesting and fresh?
Liane Davey: Yeah, you're gonna laugh at this story. This is a silly story, but this is the truth. Many, many, many years ago, I was watching the TV program, 60 minutes and 60 minutes. It was coming up to the American Thanksgiving Day holiday when everybody cooks turkeys for, for the holiday. 
They did a little segment on, there's a, a brand of Turkey called Butterball Turkey. When you buy a Butterball Turkey, it's coded in plastic and it has a telephone number on it, a toll-free number to call for Turkey emergencies, . And they did this segment on TV of the approximately 30 people at the time, all women, home economics graduates, this is probably in the eighties, I saw this segment. 
Those people are there just to answer your calls and deal with your turkey emergency. So it's things like, it's my very first Thanksgiving as a married woman and my mother-in-law is coming for dinner and I forgot to thaw the turkey. It's still frozen. What do I do? 
Or I forgot to buy the ingredients for stuffing. And these ladies would do things like tell you to open your fridge and open your cupboards. They would write down everything you had and they would create new recipes for you on the spot for how to make things. 
It was of a fun segment, but the most important part of the segment and the inspiration for me was the leader of the whole group. She said, look, there's only one magical thing about what we do, and that is we begin, we respond after they've told us about their turkey emergency, we respond to every single call with, it'll be fine. And what we're doing is we're projecting to the people that no matter what this is, we're the experts. We got you, and we're gonna get you to the other side.
And that truly was my inspiration, realizing that, you know what? I have so many recipes for better listening, better conflict. You know, I, I have all the recipes. I do have a PhD in Organizational Psychology. I'm not worried that I can open the cupboards in the fridge and find a way to get you through this. 
The most important thing is that you believe that I can get you through this and you can get yourself through this. And so as I've come to understand neuroscience better over the years, understanding the role of mirror neurons, the role of emotional contagion, I know that what I'm doing is giving the room a chance to believe, to stay in the moment, to stay with it. But all of that inspiration came from a very simple Butterball, Turkey lady , just saying, the most important thing is it'll be fine. 
So that's the truth of where my silly inspiration for the, the way I carry myself, the tone I use, the words I choose, I want them all to be, you can do this, I'm right here with you. Okay, let's open the cupboard and see what we got to work with.
Stephen Matini: So you're like the Julia Child of conflict
Liane Davey: . Yes. Exactly. I love that. Yeah.
Stephen Matini: You know, now that you said it, I understand
Liane Davey: I, that's the holy story. But that's, that's where it comes from.
Stephen Matini: Before when you were talking ... have you noticed any gender dynamics in the Henley of conflict within organizations?
Liane Davey: I think if I am, if I reflect on it, I would say no , that individual differences are massive and much bigger than gender differences. So there are certainly ways that men and women are socialized differently, the women to be more, to be more submissive, to, to give in, to bend to power. 
But I, I can tell you many examples of women who are vicious in conflict and, and really nasty. And, and so I might say women are more passive aggressive than men, but women's passive aggressiveness is, is gossip and that sort of thing. But men are very passive aggressive, but it's often in the form of sarcasm or one liners or those sorts of things. So it's not that men or women are more passive aggressive than the other, but that we've been socialized to channel that. 
I see many women who are conflict avoidant. They often talk about it from the, either, I don't want to hurt somebody else. I don't wanna say that cuz it would be hurtful or it comes from imposter syndrome, who have I to disagree with that person? But I see many, many, many men who are highly conflict avoidant. 
Over the years I've had moments of thinking that men are more conflict avoided or I see more of those than women who are. So I think it's really about massive individual differences. Each person I work with, I try and treat them as somebody who has a very different story, different baggage about why they, you know, approach conflict the way they do or run for conflict the way they do. I do think there are very interesting things about men and women in the workplace. But I wouldn't say that it's that we can say, you know, women do this and men do this.
Stephen Matini: One thing that I may have witnessed are cultural differences.
Liane Davey: Very, very true, right? So I was facilitating a session in Bangkok in the room, there were a couple of very senior women from Asian countries, one from Korea, one from Japan. There was a man who was Dutch and another man who was Colombian. And I would say the big differences in the room were both cultural differences, so just the, the Colombian participant, the way he expressed everything was so passionate that it was very easy to over-index his contribution just because it was so passionate. 
And the, the Dutch person beside him, people were not getting as upset about the issue as I think he wanted them to be. But it was because he was so level as he described it. But then I think we had the, when we had the Asian folks in the room, I think we had this interaction of both Asian cultures, but also women in Asian cultures. 
So all of it is in the mix, you know, certainly understanding the difference between how an Israeli is going to, you know, show up in a conflict. It's not personal, it's just the issue, and it's going to be very direct versus various South Asian cultures where it's gonna come at you very indirectly, maybe only on the break. So there's, there's all of that. You really have to be attuned to all of it. When you do this work, don't you, ,
Stephen Matini: What is the Canadian way to approach conflict?
Liane Davey: A hundred percent passive aggressive. 
Stephen Matini: Oh, really? 
Liane Davey: Yeah. So it's very funny because Canadians have a reputations as being very nice. We're always talked about it as a very nice culture. And I just laugh. I'm like, no, we just stab you in the back. 
So we, we do have a very strong culture of being polite and civil and friendly to your face. And I would say English Canada versus French Canada is a little bit different on this. I think, you know, culturally québécois folks in Canada tend to be better at at getting the issues out on the table. But for lots of Canada, lots of passive passive aggressiveness in the culture and it makes things hard. It means conflict avoidance is, is a big deal for us. 
It's like anything else. You can't, you know, describing an entire nation, of course 38 million people with one description is, is unfair. But just relatively speaking, I think that's what, and it's interesting cuz I work with a lot of expatriates who've come to work in Canada or Canadians working in US teams, and people are always surprised at, at how much effort it is to try and get them to get the issues on the table. It's challenging.
Stephen Matini: One of your interests right now is the concept of messing up. It is about becoming, expressing all the who you are. This idea, is it connected to conflict? I think it is. Would you mind telling me more about?
Liane Davey: Yeah. So for me, the ideal combination in relationships is this interesting combination of vulnerability and accountability. That's why I love messing up, because there's no better chance to get this perfect combination of vulnerability and accountability then when you mess up . 
And so by that I mean vulnerability is being willing to sit in the awkward, to sit in the discomfort of, I messed that up. I know that me messing that up had an impact on you. All of that. That's not a great feeling. Or I haven't messed up yet, but I feel it, I feel it coming. , I don't know how to cope with this. I I I'm not on track. All that vulnerability. Vulnerability begets vulnerability. So when we show someone else that we are fallible, but we are willing to be seen as kind of whole creatures who are imperfect, it encourages others to do the same. So when we're vulnerable with our teammates, it strengthens the connection. 
But if we're only vulnerable, our teammates might feel like, okay, I'm a little nervous about counting on Leanne because I'm not sure she like she's making me, she's making me worry. . So vulnerability on its own, while it's great for connection, it's not good for confidence. 
So we have to add the other half of the equation, which is accountability. And accountability says, yep, I, this just made me break into tears and I own that. I'm gonna take ownership of continuing the conversation, getting to an answer, still realizing that I own this and I need to figure it out. 
And so when you have accountability, then you get that sort of confidence. But if you have only accountability and no vulnerability, it's like you're driving, but you're driving through people, not with them messing up is this amazing chance we get to show, oh, okay, I'm not perfect.
You know, you can see me sitting in this true discomfort of learning that I've let other people down or let myself down. But also to show you that I own this. I'm learning, I'm making changes, I'm gonna do something differently. 
If you have a team full of people where you know, they're not hiding things from you, they're not pretending they're perfect, but they're also earning, your trust doesn't get better than that. And until you go through the fire together, until you mess up together, you don't really know if, if that's where they're at. And once you do, you go, okay, now I can relax and we can just know that we'll get through whatever we need to get through.
Stephen Matini: I had to learn how to handle conflict. And it was someone was actually a professor who taught me how to do it. For a couple of years was this constant no, no, no, no, no, no. And then for a while I thought, well, now I figured it out. But based on what you said, I think that for me now, the biggest challenge is probably balancing my accountability and me wanting people to be accountable with vulnerability, which is showing up as myself, my emotions, how this one affects me and all that. Which is hard. It's not easy.
Liane Davey: It's like yoga, it's a lifetime practice trying to get that balance right. And it tips right? , you have, you have periods where you tip into more vulnerability and what you're expressing in the, there's John Iso. Dr. John Iso talks about everywhere you go, you spread a virus. You decide if it's positive or negative. And when you tip into the vulnerability for a little while, you maybe spread a virus that's kind of negative and you have to like, woo, gotta tip back the other way. But if, if you tip back too far, the virus you spread is this sort of false sense of strength. And that's not a good thing to spread either. So I think it takes a lifetime of, of just constantly getting that, that balance right.
Stephen Matini: So maybe it's time to change the notion of conflict management because you talk about good fights. Yeah. And now you're talking about the importance of being messy. So I'm thinking that maybe it's time to change conflict management into, I don't know, how would you call it?
Liane Davey: Yeah. I totally, I've never had that thought before in my life, but I love it because it does make it sound like we're going to contain it and we're the boss of it. Exactly. It's the very opposite of let's throw it open and see what's in there and really, so like stop managing the conflict, start kind of experiencing it and moving through with some forward velocity. Right? 
Yeah. And I think it's why some people switch to conflict resolution. I think that is a good term. But the, the problem I have with conflict resolution is I think it applies to each decision and each deliberation, but I think some people who hear about conflict resolution think, oh, we can resolve the conflict in our team and not have any conflict anymore when I believe that conflict is something that needs to be present in your team all the time. The productive tension amongst very different and opposing demands, wishes, needs, all those sorts of things to the extent that we can think about conflict resolution is let's pick one thing, work it through to the right decision. I'm good with that. But if we use that term to, to suggest that, you know, we're done with it once and for all we've resolved that we don't need to have conflict anymore. That's an issue. We should, we should be looking for the good fight in every conversation we have.
Stephen Matini: The way that your approach, you know, your, your angle comes to me is about ...  what is the word? Continuity. It's not something that should be managed, something that stops. And now we figured out. In change management a better word is more resilience. You know? Yes. What the heck? You manage something that changes all the time. So resilience gives a sense of, that's something you continuously have to work on.
Liane Davey: I don't have a perfect word for it. You know, I always talk about it as embrace productive conflict, right? Mm-Hmm. It's something that we have to like hold onto, get comfortable being uncomfortable. It's something that should be a part of in an ongoing way.
Stephen Matini: I don't know if the right word is messing up, but when you said it to me last time, I felt that I could breathe. It feels as so much more humane, more realistic than managed conflict or whatever that is, you know?
Liane Davey: Yes. And people are messy and issues are messy and you know, decisions we have to make in organizations are messy. So let's actually appreciate that. And the key to making optimal decisions in a messy world is having all the information. 
I always think about it like algebra, you have your equation, I have my equation, and we need to solve for the unknown. We can do that. If I know your equation and you know mine, then we've got all the data we need to solve it. But unfortunately we don't do a very good job of getting your truth on the table, my truth ... 
You come from sales and I come from operations, we have very different perspectives. Your equation is very different than mine. We need to figure out what we do that optimizes the system and we just, just don't think about that frequently enough.
Stephen Matini: Conflict management or whichever word that we're going to use in the future has so many ramifications. And one of them that is so important is time management, which maybe that's another obsolete concept, but you said it's not a workload, it's our thought load. And you said, I work really hard at not being busy. I thought it was beautiful.
Liane Davey: You know, a couple of years ago I realized that it's not workload that's killing us, burning us out, it's our thought load. How much is buzzing around in our brains, waking us up at night, keeping us up at night, you know, having us in a conversation with one person fretting about the conversation to follow. 
That's when I got really obsessed with this. How do we think differently about our thought load? How do we manage it in a way? And of course we're back to NO, because you don't manage your thought load unless you are able to compartmentalize, really figure out what is the one thing that I need to be paying attention to right now. 
And so that's work that I've been focused on. So, you know, very practical things I've been working on like the bullet journaling technique. So I did a YouTube video about how to use bullet journaling as a way of taking things out of your current thought load, putting them in a schedule only at the time when you're gonna turn it into your workload. 
Collaboration and saying no, and, and understanding how somebody else’s, so doing a a, a racy understanding, okay, I don't own this so I'm gonna stop worrying about it. I know this person is on it so I don't need to fret about it. It's another piece of the puzzle. 
There are so many pieces of the puzzle. Of course the most important one is prioritization. And most leaders and managers I know suck at prioritization. They are profoundly abdicating their responsibility to their teams. 
Prioritize comes from the Latin for one, not seven. So there's all these pieces of the puzzle that I've been working on to help us get out from this absolutely inhumane thought load. Because as many people keep telling me that their workload is too high, I'm not buying it. I don't think people are actually accomplishing very much at all. 
It's like the difference between watching FIFA watching a football game where you know, you have 90 minutes and the run of play is 90 minutes. And if, if something distracts you, like an injury for two minutes, will we add the two minutes on because we need 90 minutes. And then I thought about NFL football and how there's, I don't even remember the stat cuz I can't stand to watch it because there's so little action. 
And I think that's what most people do with their work week. They're they're talking about, oh, like it was a three hour game. Yeah, but you were on the field for seven minutes. Like what? So we have so much distraction, we have so many things that are slowing us down. That's not a workload problem , it's a thought load problem. So I'm very excited about that. I think it's where my next book is gonna go is how do we manage the thought load problem? And, and that excites me.
Stephen Matini: This way of thinking of time. When did you approach it for the first time?
Liane Davey: No, it hasn't been around all that long because I used to be pretty bad at it. So I think about five years ago starting to do more mindfulness starting to manage my own. And I, it was really deciding a few years ago that I choose not to be busy. You know, another epiphany I've had is I'm okay with having a busy schedule. I'm just unwilling to have a busy mind. 
So many days, I think the day I spoke with you I had the wonderful conversation with you. I enjoyed very much and nine others that day , I was 10 different conversations, client meetings, sales calls, all sorts of things. But at no point did I feel busy during that day because each time I was fully invested in the conversation, I wasn't thinking about anything else because I have used a whole variety of techniques to manage my thought load.
So it's probably been about five years all tied to this decision. I was working with my colleague and friend Tammy Herman, and we were doing a program years ago to help women be more influential at work. And one of the things we realized we had to work on with them was their introductions, just their casual, if someone says, hi, how are you? What, how do you respond? Because they were all responding with busy. 
I said, as soon as you respond with busy, you look like you're not on top of things, you signal to the other person that, oh, you should probably be quiet now cuz this person needs to run off. You don't say I'm open for more cool opportunities. 
So we actually started with changing how they even respond to those casual conversations. And that was many years ago, I think it was 2007 when I decided I was never going to use the B word. I was never gonna talk about being busy as as a description for myself. So that was really valuable when I, when I had that epiphany and it just took until a little more recently to figure out all the tools to manage my thought load so that I could live up to that.
Stephen Matini: Yeah. If I had to say when things started changing, it's probably the same thing, these past four or five years, you know? Yeah. Like to give an example, today at some point I was it around lunch time, someone that I've been working with forever, she said, can we talk, can we talk at 4 something? So it was like 30 minutes before being here with you. Yeah. 
And I said to myself, no, I don't want to get to my conversation with you feeling tired or stressed out. I really want to enjoy it because how many times will I have the chance to talk to you? I really wanna be here. , you know, and me in the past it would've said, yes, this could be an account, could be a project, girl, you need the money. You know, I would've thought a million things, but I said, no, no, this is my day, you know, and I want to enjoy this and we can talk about it tomorrow. And the world is not gonna end.
Liane Davey: The likelihood that postponing that call by a day makes that opportunity evaporate is close to zero. And actually, if that person is so frenetic that if you didn't answer today, it, it's probably something you are better off without. Right. So I, I think just being conscious like you are, like you were in that moment, it is absolutely so liberating. 
And you said something earlier that's probably worth coming back to. Like, okay, well you two are entrepreneurs, you know, you control your lives, isn't it easier for you? And I would say no because of exactly what you said. You have that thought of nobody's paying me a paycheck. I don't just all of a sudden two weeks later get by, here's what's in your account. So it's very hard often to turn down those things to say no, to disagree with a client or prospective client about what they need.
So it's really just how you think about it and how you frame it. Certainly if you report to someone and they're your boss, you need to have conflict with them and use some techniques. I have one of my most popular YouTube videos is how to have conflict with your boss. And I go through four steps for, you know, how to do it in a way that won't get you fired. So you have to think about it, but, but I wouldn't say it's easier or harder to do it in one situation or the other, just the stakes are different.
Stephen Matini: I so do not envy younger people for that because yeah, I think it's something that probably comes with age for some people, you know?
Liane Davey: And, and for some it just never comes, right? So, you know, one of the things I remember doing when I was a manager and I was managing, I was young, so I was probably say 38, something like that. 
I had young kids and I was a manager of people who were even younger. On Mondays. My kids were competitive dancers. And so they danced six days a week and the carpooling was quite something. And so it just worked out that Mondays was my day among the, you know, there were two couples, four of us who split all the driving and Mondays was my day. And to leave the office, drive home, pick up all the kids, take them to get a bite to eat and get them to dancing for 4:30, I had to leave the office at 3:00. So I started this sort of really, really important thing for me as a manager, which is at three o'clock I would do what I call leave loudly.
Even though some people who need to leave the office, we would normally leave about five 30 and I was leaving two and a half hours early. Some people would just sort of quietly slip away . And I did the opposite. I'm like, okay, off to drive the dance bus and, and make sure everybody heard me. Because leaving loudly was such an important way to say, we can do this. It's okay. 
We need to fit personal lives and our work lives together in a way that's gonna last for the long haul. And I let a team of consultants, it's a grueling thing. Everyone knew that it, you know, as soon as the kids were in bed, I would be logged back on making up that time. There was no question about it. And I said, see, you don't question that. I don't work hard enough and I don't question that you work hard enough. So leaving loudly was a really important thing for me early in my career to signal to people that work hard, contribute value, and then be where you need to be. It's always been important to me.
Stephen Matini: Would you be an actress if you were not be doing this for a living? You would be great at stand up comedy Yeah!
Liane Davey: My favorite compliment I ever got was a salesperson in the organization I used to work in said I was like a love child between Jim Collins and Tina Faye. And I was like, okay, that's the greatest compliment. I try and sit in my big powerful brain, Jim Collins and hopefully I always refer to my brand as the sort of spoonful of sugar from Mary Poppins, right? The conflict work is very uncomfortable, very intimate, very deep. People are often yelling or crying or all these sorts of things. So if there isn't a little sugar to help the medicine go down.
Stephen Matini: We talked about a million things, . Is there anything that would be important for people that are going to listen to this, to bring home, something that you think it would be really, really important for them to focus on?
Liane Davey: I always go back to one line, which is some things are worth fighting for. If there's one thing I can encourage your listeners to do, it's to, and maybe it's even a daily practice or weekly or just try it once and see what you think. Make a list of the things that are worth fighting for. 
If you are in operations and that salesperson keeps selling new, different customized things to everyone, you may say consistency, efficiency, that's worth fighting for. I need to make sure that the sales leader understands the impact that all these differentiated products have on our ability to be efficient. 
It could be in a relationship, right? It could be the way you're treated by your colleagues and feeling comfortable and feeling respected. That's worth fighting for. Whatever it is. It's amazing how, if you're clear on what's worth fighting for, suddenly the courage to have the harder conversations to say no or to say yes or or to really engage. You'll find it. But if we aren't clear on what's worth fighting for, it's much, much harder. So that's a practice. 
You know, today. What's worth fighting for today? As you're going into a meeting, as you're walking in the door, you know, who that's not in the meeting is counting on me to fight for them. And what are they counting on me to fight for? Because pretty much all of us, when we walk into a meeting, we represent people who aren't in the room. And if we aren't willing to fight, no one's fighting for them. That's just what I would encourage people in any domain of your life, in a relationship at work, what is worth fighting for. And if you have the answer, you're gonna feel really emboldened and empowered all day.
Stephen Matini: Liane, you are a blessing. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for all that you share with me that it is going to enrich a lot of people. Thank you so much.
Liane Davey: Oh, I, I have found our conversations so joyous. So it's very, very, very much mutual, Stephen. Thank you.

The Place Where We Belong: Find Your Purpose by Serving Others - Featuring Andy Frick

As human beings, we all face difficulties and struggles in life. However, during these moments of darkness, we can often learn valuable lessons that benefit us and those around us.
Our guest for this episode of the podcast Pity Party Over is Andy Frick, Owner and Founder of A Place 2B Recovery Housing. Andy has a background in positive psychology and has provided a place where people recovering from substance abuse feel they belong.
For Andy, adding value to the lives of others provides meaning, a sense of belonging, and mattering. When we help others feel valued, we also validate our worth.
Listen to this episode of Pity Party Over to learn how to create a purposeful life by supporting yourself and others effectively.
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TRANSCRIPT
Stephen Matini: When you don't work, what do you do to relax, to center yourself?
Andy Frick: Well, one, I play a lot of soccer. Not the most common American response, but I, I play quite a bit of soccer, always did growing up and still a, a great way to connect with others and get some physical activity in which I'm sure I know I could certainly use more of. 
And then I, I really enjoy fishing, so I, I found out over the past, I don't know, maybe five, 10 years that I really enjoy fishing, especially just being in nature in general, you know, walking, outdoors, all that jazz. But fishing has become a passion of mine. So ...
Stephen Matini: Where did you grow up?
Andy Frick: I grew up in Akron, Ohio, where unfortunately there's not a whole lot of fishing opportunities, . So there's more here to offer than I had originally thought. But mostly Akron is pretty much known for... well, if you're a little bit later in life, you might know it from being the, the rubber capital of the world at, at some point. If you're a bit younger, you probably know it from LeBron James. And that's about the extent of , Akron's notoriety.
Stephen Matini: Have you ever thought about moving elsewhere?
Andy Frick: Oh, certainly. Yeah. I have, since I started going to Florida for vacation as a child, I had always dreamt of not having to deal with the cold winters of Ohio. Fortunately, life is taking me that way, and I am moving to Miami here in about a month's time, so ...
Stephen Matini: For real? Oh, wow.
Andy Frick: Yes, yes. So it'll be quite a change.
Stephen Matini: How did you get to where you are professionally?
Andy Frick: So really, my, my life experience guided me to this passion of wanting to help others in some way, shape or form, right? I've been driven by service for the, the past 10 years or so, and it was, it wasn't always the case. So I look back to my experiences growing up. I struggled to find meaning, purpose, a sense of belonging and mattering, connection to others, some of the things that are fulfilling in life. 
Those struggles kind of led me to some dark places. I think it was in the process of change that I experienced for myself, that transition from some of those darker places to experiencing some of those things I just described, where, where I had a sense of belonging and mattering purpose and meaning mostly through service to others, that really sparked my interest in helping others to experience that same thing for themselves. 
I found myself having a, a a lack of all of these things, then experiencing them in my life and then asking that question of, okay, how can I help others to have the same experience? Where, where am I needed to best help others experience wellbeing in their lives?
Stephen Matini: For many, many, many years in the past, I looked at those experiences as mistakes. And only later on in life I realized, well, probably they really had a purpose, because if they did not happen, I would not be where I am, and most likely I would not have developed the type of sensitivity that I have. Do you think you would've gotten to where you are if you hadn’t experience such darkness?
Andy Frick: No, I, I certainly don't. And I'll kind of talk about it in, in two different ways. So the one is something you touched on. You know, it's funny, I was speaking with a professor of mine, Dr. James Pawelski, from the University of Pennsylvania, and this was after I graduated from my master's program. 
There I was looking at the application process for PhD programs, and I was struggling to find, to trust the process and, and have faith that, you know, things will work out as they're supposed to. And it's something that I've grown to, to share with others, but when I needed it, I couldn't find it, right. 
And it, it was funny cuz he, he shared with me how we can't really engage in the process of sense making until we're further down the road looking back on our lives. And in the moment it's hard to explain to ourselves why things are happening the way they're happening.
We can't quite see the whole picture just yet. But when we find ourselves a little bit further down the road and we look back on our lives, kind of like you were describing, and, and my experience has been as well we, we can make sense of things and we can connect the dots and we can see, well, maybe there was some greater purpose to why this happened that happened, or I end up in this place, or, or whatever the case may be for each individual and for me in particular. 
So my work has been in the addiction and recovery space. And when I refer to these dark places for myself, it was in addiction. So I'm in recovery myself, and I had experienced active addiction. I certainly don't feel that, you know, that's maybe a more specific case, but I've likely not ended up working in that field had it not been for my experiences. 
 But more broadly, I still think that holds true for some of my other life experiences. You know, again, you don't notice it in the moment, but when you look back on your life, you recognize that, okay, I may perhaps I needed to endure whatever it was that I experienced so that I could, you know, maybe be the light for the next person. Right. And, and I think it, it does something for yourself, right? I, I found some self-fulfillment in experiencing those hardships and finding myself on the other side
Stephen Matini: When I experience darkness for me was the result of a series of really unfortunate events. At some point I experienced depression, which is something that I never had before. It really feels like all happiness has been sucked out of yourself, when you realize that it's too late, you know, I call depression the invisible assassin. 
The one thing that helped me out was the realization that the people that really love me couldn't care less about me being successful, or not all they wanted me is to be happy. So the question to you is, if we have someone that is in a dark place, for whatever the reason, and is trying to cope with that heaviness, whichever way, what would you say that could be the first step that we can take?
Andy Frick: Yeah. That, that is something I've certainly dealt with in the addiction recovery space in particular, right? So I, I find myself working with typically younger men as they're transitioning from inpatient treatment facilities and taking that next step in their recovery process. 
Oftentimes I find myself having conversations with their family. The family is of course like any of us would, looking for ways that they can help fix the problem, right? And, and that's what we wanna do for each other. We wanna find ways that we can relieve the pain for our loved ones, that we can help them to feel okay and, and fix the things that they're dealing with. 
The unfortunate reality, especially with addiction, and I think this translates well to other areas of life, is that there's only so much we can do as a loved one. We typically can't take away their pain or change their problems or make their, their situation go away in, in fact, I actually think we would be robbing them of a necessary process of life if we were able to play God, so to speak, anyway. But we can't, we're powerless over them and, and the circumstance, and the best thing we can do in my experience is, is to love them, love them unconditionally through that process.
And that can look a little different depending on the situation, but most of the time it simply means letting them know that you're there and available and that you care. And that's about where the extent of our responsibilities end, right? 
It's about as far as we can go is, hey, if you need something, I'm here for you. I love you. I support you through this process. I'm willing to do whatever I can to help. But beyond that, there's not much we can do for that individual in that circumstance. 
I think especially in, in the addiction area, parents in particular have to find a balance between that love and not enabling the individual further, right? So that's kind of overstepping our responsibilities and kind of what I was talking about earlier, a little bit of robbing the individual, the, the opportunity to experience the pain required to initiate change. 
Yeah, my experience has been just that we love them unconditionally. We support wherever possible and we recognize where our responsibility ends, and that's important. I don't think that's something we talk about very often in supporting each other through these places in life.
Stephen Matini: One thing I wanna ask you, it happened to me in the past to deal with people that were trying to cope with that deep pain in different ways, you know, it could be alcohol, it could be substance abuse, whatever there was. And I love when you say that you should not deprive them from the possibility of going through their, their journey. When you are in the situation as someone, close to someone going through so much pain, and at some point you realize that it's hurting you, that relationship is actually hurting you, how do you find balance between loving someone but also taking care of yourself?
Andy Frick: You know, sometimes loving someone means separating ourselves from that individual, somewhat similar to the situation you described in your own life. We recognize that in order to love somebody appropriately, we have to love ourselves appropriately as well. 
When we're focusing on trying to help somebody else, that's fantastic. And of course, I've found that to be tremendously fulfilling in my own life, but I find that one, I'm less equipped to do so when I'm not taking care of myself. And two, I might not being as effective as I could be when I'm not taking care of myself. 
Taking care of ourselves might leave us with that awakening that says, unfortunately, there's not much I can do and this is creating more harm in my life than good I'm doing for this individual. And in the end, when you do that, the relationship suffers regardless, right? So we find ourselves fighting to try and fix something that we cannot fix.
We're harming ourselves, and in the end, we're actually probably doing more damage to the situation than good, right? At what point does each individual come to that realization, and at what point is that in each specific situation? I can't say, right? It's different for each situation that we find ourselves in. 
For me, one of the best ways I've found is to make sure I have other people with me in the process so I can feel supported in my own process, because these are challenging times for us as well as the individual. So when I have people I can trust and that I love that are close in my life, it's important that I include them in that process as well so they can help check me and say, hey, you know, this might be taking a bit too much from you and we're worried about you as well. Right? and that's important to have.
Stephen Matini: You know, now I'm thinking about from the point of view, the person who's going through that. I did not experience, you know, substance addiction, but I definitely experienced super dark places. One thing that was really hard for me for many, many, many years was the sense of shame, like, I could not even verbalize what I was going through to people because there was so much shame and feeling that way and thinking, I wonder what people are going to feel are gonna think if I said that, and the tremendous amount of pain I would give to people that I love. And so as a result, I wouldn't say anything to anyone. Until finally I decided to speak up. So for you, when you experienced that dark place, what was the first time that you started seeing a glimpse of something else? What did you do?
Andy Frick: It's somewhat of a I don't know if I'd call it a cliche or a phrase that gets used in the recovery community. We talk about desperation and we consider it the gift of desperation. It's an interesting phrase because oftentimes I don't think individuals or anybody really would consider desperation to be a gift. But in these circumstances, I think eventually we find ourselves in a place where we're so desperate for something different than what we're experiencing, that we're willing to make the change, right? 
So we find ourselves in desperate situations, and the pain we're experiencing is powerful enough to invite a process of change. Again, this process is different for each individual, but in my own experience, that's exactly what happened. I found myself at the end of the road. I had burned many bridges. I was 19 years old and I was homeless.
I was pretty much in a, about as dark a place as I could have ever imagined my life being. The level of desperation that I experienced was enough for me to say, I don't even think I, I had this process of considering some of those things of, of, I don't wanna ask for help, so to speak. 
It was more so everything became fueled by desperation, and I was willing to do anything it took to experience something different in life. Now that's an extreme case, right? Like, that's not everybody's experience. I don't think everybody does find themselves in a place of desperation quite like that. Or the degree of desperation might be different. 
But I still think there's commonalities that we can experience no matter what it is that we're experiencing. And everybody's bottom is unique to them, right? It, it doesn't mean that everybody has to go to the places I went to experience this sense of desperation.
We can experience it in our day-to-day lives. I, I look at things like in my life today, trying to exercise, right? And I, I might find myself really struggling to get the ball rolling, and I don't wanna tell people how difficult it is for me to just go to the gym. 
And at a certain point I become so fed up with the circumstances that I become desperate for change. And I invite other people in to help me in that process. They say, hey man, look, I've, I've really been making an attempt to go to the gym regularly, but I can't seem to get myself to go. 
And just inviting somebody else into that process starts that process of change for me. And now I've got some accountability. For my specific experience, that point of desperation was the eye-opener that I kind of needed that began that transition to the recovery process.
Stephen Matini: Were there any particular people, special person that somehow has been instrumental to your journey?
Andy Frick: So many, it's impossible to discuss them all. I am immensely grateful for the people I have in my life. Has made my life incredibly rich and meaningful. In particular, my mom certainly deserves immense amount of credit for one, enduring all the stuff that she had to endure through those times, loving me unconditionally as I went through my process of change. 
And, and that extends to the rest of my family and some close friends as well. But my mom in particular comes to mind and has always been a, a supporter and cheerleader for me all throughout, all the way until today. It's really been a, a incredible relationship born out of some of the trials and tribulations we face together.
Stephen Matini: So your mom sounds really cool.
Andy Frick: . Absolutely, she is. She is. She's a fantastic, fantastic human being. Thank you.
Stephen Matini: If I remember correctly, both you and your mom, you are deeply interested in appreciative inquiry. So for those who are going to listen to this episode, appreciate inquiry is a method of change, which is based on strengths. It is the notion that we can transition faster if we focus on existing strengths rather than obsessing about how to fix an issue. How did you get interested in appreciative inquiry?
Andy Frick: The rebellious kid that I was never wanted to listen to my mom growing up. My mom really did some incredible work with appreciative inquiry and the folks at Case Western University, Dr. Cooperider, Dr. Fry, Dr. Godwin, you've spoke with Dr. Lindsey Godwin, fantastic human being. 
But nonetheless, so she, she had experienced some incredible work first at Roadway and then some work with the US Navy. And so she had shared these experiences with me at different points throughout my life, and I was reluctant to listen to what she was talking about. 
Of course, I had to find my own path. I actually, I found myself reading the book “Flourish” by Dr. Seligman. That was sort of my introduction to positive psychology, and it was the gateway to appreciative inquiry as well. 
I remember reading this, coming to my mom and saying, wow, look at this. This is incredible. Look at these overlaps to my life experience. How interesting the science of wellbeing and how have I not known about this? Right? And my mom says, yeah, I've only been telling you about appreciative inquiry and positive psychology for the past 20 years, . I'm like, no, no, no, you haven't. And sure, she, she surely had been, but I was reluctant to listen because I didn't want to hear it coming from my mom. That was sort of the gateway to that experience finding out about appreciative inquiry. Yeah.
Stephen Matini: Is she getting to appreciative inquiry because of you or other stuff?
Andy Frick: No, she, she worked at Roadway. They worked with some of the folks at Case they brought appreciative inquiry into roadway as a change method. That was her first introduction, I believe.
Stephen Matini: How did you come across the concept of mattering you mentioned that before.
Andy Frick: My experience growing up was interesting. I felt as though I never truly had this sense of belonging or what, you know, I, I would now define as mattering and we'll talk about in a second. I never felt as though I was truly connected to others, and I felt I was somewhat yearning for that sense of connection. 
I touched on the fact that I experienced addiction and then found myself in in recovery when I was 19 years old. And at this transitional phase in my life, I found myself being of service to others in the recovery process. And more specifically, I, I found that one of the best methods that was shared with me from other folks in the recovery community about change was to give of yourself to others. And in doing so, we might experience some things for ourselves. 
And, and what I mean more specifically is when I found myself inviting others into the group, helping others to feel as though they belonged, I experienced belonging for myself. When I found myself accepting and loving others unconditionally, I started to experience those things for myself. 
For the first time in most of my life, maybe my whole life, I found that sense of belonging that I was always looking for. I started to find purpose and meaning through service, work to others, and, and helping other folks feel like they mattered and belonged as well. 
Fast forward a bit and I found myself reading “Flourish,” I have these conversations with my mom. Eventually, this leads me to applying to the Masters of Applied Positive Psychology Program at the University of Pennsylvania. 
I didn't think I had a great chance of getting in, to be completely honest with you. The interview process went very well. I really connected with the faculty and folks I got to speak to before I was accepted into the program.
I really just felt called to this program and, and like this was the place for me to go. And I was determined that if I did not get in, I would just be applying again the next time around. Fortunately, I did get accepted. I found a tremendously welcoming and inviting community of people and academics in that master's program. And that is where I was exposed to the idea of mattering scientifically. 
So we, in our first semester in the program, we had a guest lecture, Dr. Isaac Prilleltensky. He spoke to us about mattering amongst many other things, but one of the ones that truly captivated me was mattering. 
He described mattering as this experience of adding value and feeling valued. And that can occur in a few different domains with the individual, with others in our work, in our community. He shared about the science of mattering.
I found myself recalling all these experiences in life and realizing how valuable mattering had been to me when I was one, not experiencing it growing up. And then that transitional phase in my life, when I started to experience what he was describing as mattering, I was like, wow, so you know, this, this engagement and, and, and adding value to the lives of others and then feeling valued by a group allowed me to feel like I was truly a part of and belonged and had meaning and purpose and, you know, all these other wellness outcomes. 
I was captivated by his presentation. It became something that I referenced quite a bit as I went through the program time and time again, I found myself turning to his work, using it in my papers. Actually, after graduating, I circled back and I had an incredible conversation with Dr. Prilleltensky, which led me to applying to the, the University of Miami's PhD program. That's what is sparking this, this move to Miami. So I was accepted into the PhD program at the University of Miami, and we'll be working with Dr. Prilleltensky come this, this fall. So ...
Stephen Matini: And I thought you were going for the sun .
Andy Frick: Yeah, the sun doesn't hurt. I'm excited about that as well, .
Stephen Matini: Well, congratulations Andy. This is wonderful.
Andy Frick: Thank you. Thank you.
Stephen Matini: You said feeling valued and adding value. In my job, I come across very often with people saying, I do not matter. I feel that in this organization, I'm just a number. I'm not heard. Is someone feels that way, what could it be the first step to feel that you matter?
Andy Frick: My experience has been that in order to experience something such as mattering, and I think this goes for a lot of other areas, love, acceptance, et cetera, the best pathway I have found for myself, and that seems to have worked for others that I have worked with, is to first find ways to give those things to others. When I find ways to help someone else feel as though they matter, I in turn experience mattering for myself. 
I think that that has been a key factor in what has allowed me to experience some of the, the richness of relationships throughout my life. First focusing on how can I add value to the life of somebody else? And in turn, that has allowed me to feel valued. 
That's really at the core of experiencing some of these things that we might be missing. I've heard people say they don't feel accepted, they don't feel loved. Some of these things, and the first thing that we can look to do is find an opportunity to love others, find an opportunity to accept others. It's been my experience that that has allowed me to feel accepted, loved, welcomed, and as though I belong as a result.
Stephen Matini: One of the early thoughts that I had when I was finally stepping out from this darkness was this thought, which is I think connected to what you're saying. I thought, if I can learn something from this, maybe this could be useful for someone in the future. And to these days, I'm always amazed when people come to me with specific questions about stuff that I blatantly failed say, why would you ask me? Well, because you know how it feels, you know how it is, you know, how, how it feels to be with your on the ground. So I'm asking you that because you went there. That's one of the beautiful thing about going through rough experiences, they become a tremendous treasure for yourself, but not just for yourself, also for others.
Andy Frick: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And that, that deeply resonates with me as well.
Stephen Matini: How did you come up with the idea for “A Place 2B Recovery”?
Andy Frick: Really, it was born out of a lot of what we just described. I actually started it with a friend of mine in the Akron area. I think there were two key factors that led us to start a place to be recovery housing, and the first of which was just the need in the Akron area and worldwide, really for that matter. Addiction is obviously everywhere, has been immensely challenging to deal with for our, our communities and our loved ones. 
Having a safe drug-free environment to begin the process of recovery, we felt was an extremely valuable component that we could add to our community and help others as they embark on this journey of change. And I think there were limited opportunities for individuals to have that safe place to go home, be away from some of the people, places and things that they were around previously when they were in active addiction.
Coupled with that was my personal experience of being homeless when I was 19, and it was a, a short-lived period of time, but it doesn't take many days of being homeless for it too really sink in on you, and it was that, that made me want to be a part of something that could provide housing for recovering addicts as they're transitioning from inpatient treatment facilities, so ... 
Those were at the core of our interests when we first got started. And I don't think we knew a whole lot of what we were getting into. And we approached it with an open mind and we asked for help from our community. And, and then I was later exposed to some of these other concepts in appreciative inquiry and positive psychology and how these could be influential on, on promoting wellbeing for the recovering addicts within our program.
Stephen Matini: When I read the difference between a place to go and a place to be, I smiled. So I think I understand what you mean, but would you mind explaining what that means to you?
Andy Frick: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I think simply put, folks could find themselves in the circumstance leaving a treatment facility, and oftentimes they need a place to go. That could be from requirements to be fulfilled by the courts or other fulfillments they might need to meet, whatever the the case may be. Oftentimes folks just need a place where they can go. 
We found it more important to provide a place to be where people can feel as though they belong, that they're a part of something meaningful where they're in a group that cares about them and where they can add value and feel value, right? Terminology I didn't know at the time, but later became relevant. We really set out with the intention of providing a place to be rather than just a place to go.
Stephen Matini: Based on anything that you've learned so far, you're still so young, , when you go through a rough time for whatever the reason, what do you do to get out of it?
Andy Frick: Hmm. I find that I am in a very fortunate situation in life today. This wasn't always the case where I could lean into those around me. Over the course of the past nine or 10 years, I have been able to apply much of what we just talked about, and that has led me to experience richness in relationships and develop trust with others. Thankfully, I have a support group of family friends that I feel I can turn to in these trying times. 
Most of the time I think I do well of turning to those people. However, sometimes I find myself and some of those dark places that we talk about and having that experience we described earlier where you don't quite want to, where you're just not ready to allow other people into that process. There's a couple things that have worked for me in that space.
One is just time. And unfortunately, as terrible as that might be, in some of the circumstances we find ourselves in allowing things the time required to pass has been an important tool in my process. Sometimes I just have to sit with my feelings and experience my experiences and recognize that eventually these things passed. 
And, and fortunately for me in my own life, I can turn back to past experiences and say, look, we've been through this and this will pass too, there are brighter days ahead. I don't know when, I don't know how, if I sit and let things pass, eventually things pass. 
The other is turning to ways to help others. I have found that to be a freeing experience for myself. You know, sometimes I think in order to get the relief we seek, maybe it's best to seek ways to help provide relief for others, right? If I can help to serve others, then in turn I might experience benefits to my own personal wellbeing in some way, shape, or form. 
That's been the action piece, the piece that I can, I can turn to and say, if I am feeling bad, I'm feeling down. I'm stuck in self-pity, I'm in the pity party. How do I end this? How do I get through this? Well, let's turn to action. What's the action? Let's help somebody else. And that's, that usually starts the process.
Stephen Matini: Today, I felt a bit weird, you know, this morning particularly. And so my method today to pity party over, I would say, is piggyback from you. Like talking to you is so energizing. So being the company of people that understand has a tremendous impact. You know, he really suits everything. So thank you. .
Andy Frick: Absolutely. And thank you. Thank you so much.
Stephen Matini: Andy, I wanna ask you, we talked about a bunch of stuff. When everything is so important, is there like something that you think it would be important for people who are going to listen to this to know or to take away from our conversation?
Andy Frick: Yeah, I, you know, I don't, I don't wanna feel like a broken record because I think I end up turning back to the same core piece and it's because it's served me well at the end of the day. The key piece for me has been that if I want to experience something in my own life, find a way to provide that in the lives of others. If I want to experience wellbeing first, focus on how I can add wellbeing to the lives of others.
Stephen Matini: You know, you have a lot in common with Dr. Lindsay Godwin. Now I understand why she suggested for me to talk to you .
Andy Frick: Oh gosh. She is an incredible, incredible friend, mentor, supportive individual. And her curiosity is unbelievable. And I think it makes all those around her equally curious and excited about what could be.
Stephen Matini: Andy, thank you so much for talking to me. I really loved every minute of being here with you. This is wonderful.
Andy Frick: Oh, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. This was terrific.

Focus on People for Human-Centered Conversations - Featuring Diane Lennard

In this episode, we'll discuss how leaders can communicate effectively by listening and paying attention to people.
We have an extraordinary guest, Diane Lennard. Diane is a performance coach and faculty member at NYU Stern School of Business. 
With her background in theater and coaching, Diane has honed her exceptional communication skills and has a unique perspective on effective leadership communication.
Diane believes that everybody wants to be seen and heard, and by establishing empathetic relationships based on respect and dignity, leaders can create more meaningful connections with any stakeholder.
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TRANSCRIPT
Stephen Matini: Where did you grow up?
Diane Lennard: I grew up in the middle of Manhattan.
Stephen Matini: A New Yorker!
Diane Lennard: I am, born and raised!
Stephen Matini: How was to grow up in New York?
Diane Lennard: Well, I grew up in a an apartment complex that had, that was very large and had lots of playgrounds, lots of families, lots of children, and it was wonderful. And there was a really good public school with a lot of parent involvement. So it was a very, very nice place to grow up.
Stephen Matini: Do you think it's true when people say that anyone who moves to New York after six months becomes a New Yorker or to be a real ... ?
Diane Lennard: No. That’s a definitive no. , you can tell by the way people cross the street if they jaywalk, they're likely a native New Yorker when, you know they stand at the street corner for a really long time, that's not a typical New York activity .
Stephen Matini: What would it be other typical things that New Yorkers do that no one else would do?
Diane Lennard: I would say that we tend to be really good at shielding ourselves from difficult situations. It's a street savvy in a way, you know, how to manage just situations that you don't wanna get involved in. You know, whether it's on the subway or on the street, not making eye contact if it's gonna protect you, things like that. Just common sense safety.
Stephen Matini: Were there any people or events that somehow have impacted more than others the way that you are today?
Diane Lennard: Oh, many. I would say that two most prominent are my exposure to cultural events and my exposure to multicultural food. In growing up, every Sunday my family went to a different nationality restaurant. So from a very early age I was exposed to different cultures, not just the food, but the culture. 
We would talk to the waiters and I grew an interest in international cultures that definitely impacted my career. And I also was ex, went to lots of theater and museums, was very involved in the theater. So I know from my friends who were not native New Yorkers, when they came to visit me, they got exposed to things that they wouldn't have unless they had come to New York.
Stephen Matini: Theater plays a huge role in your life. When did you decide to actually get into theater?
Diane Lennard: I started taking ballet lessons when I was six years old. Actually five years old. I was actually part of the Metropolitan Opera Ballet Company and performed on the old Metropolitan opera stage. I got paid a dollar a minute for running across the stage, barefoot in an opera. But I had the experience of a huge audience and the backstage and it was very intriguing to me. 
I also took piano lessons and went to a special high school for music and I remember at about age 11, 12, 13, I really was wondering, what am I gonna be when I grow up? And I recall sitting down with my parents. I, I remember the actual dining table where we sat down and to discuss my, my future and I was barely a teenager. 
The suggestion was, why don't you put music and dance together in theater? So I went to summer, summer theater programs and eventually summer stock and it was a way for me to put it all together. And so it's really been forever in my life.
Stephen Matini: I did theater for a long time and I did it mostly as an act of rebellion because of high school. I never thought I could do it, because I'm not really an extrovert. I'm not someone who lost to be the center of the attention. But I did very well. And to my surprise, lot of actors, are actually quite introvert.
Diane Lennard: That's definitely true. I had a similar experience when I went to, there were two arts high schools, one of them is very famous called, the one from the movie “Fame”. It was the High School of Performing Arts applied to that one for dance, and I applied to music and art, which was much more academic. 
I got into music and art for piano and voice, but I sang folk songs, rebellious teenage folk songs and in music and art they taught us opera. You know, I did the opera, but that wasn't my passion. 
What's interesting is now when I teach communication to business students, I am using all the vocal training that I got. And I'm not calling it voice training, but it is how to use your body and your voice. So all of what I learned, I'm applying to my current career.
Stephen Matini: How did you make the transition from, you know, the theater, the acting to what you're doing now, communication?
Diane Lennard: I always had an interest in teaching. I actually think, I'm not as much of an actress as I am a director and a teacher. So for years I supported myself by creating theater companies. 
So I would direct them in a play, but teach them how to act, come to my acting classes three days a week and will form a theater company and you'll perform. Which really appealed to my sensibility because they were learning and performing, not just ego performing. 
So I did that for a long time. I got a degree in teaching, a master's degree in teaching. I was still teaching acting for non-actors in a theater school, but then I started coaching executives on their speech. It was actually Boston Consulting Group. 
They would have people come and learn how to tell stories and learn how ... we had a whole coaching program. Then I did it for my university on a pro bono basis while I was doing my PhD. And then they hired me. So it, it kind of evolved.
Stephen Matini: One of the paradigm shift that I see noticeable in people is when they understand that a good presentation is not about performing, but it's about being. And somehow that gives people the liberty of being themselves. Have you maybe noticed something similar?
Diane Lennard: Oh, absolutely. The way that I frame exactly what you're saying is it's a conversation. And what I notice is people who are trained in theaters sometimes have a hard time with that because they're so used to being performative that they're not really engaging and connecting with individuals. It's more that they're connecting with themselves. 
I work very hard on making sure they're not performing because for me, when someone's performing then the audience is just observing. It's a passive experience one way as opposed to a conversation, which is a dialogue. It goes back and forth. Even if the listener is not talking, they're engaged in a conversation. 
So I find that really fascinating and I actually much prefer the conversational mode to the performative mode unless I'm in a theater. But if I'm in a presentation, I don't want people performing. Although some students, I must say enjoy entertainment, but I'm not teaching entertainment. Nor are you, I would imagine.
Stephen Matini: I don't . To be in a conversation for some people is hard. It means to be vulnerable, it means to be permeable. How do you make it easy for people to get in the mode?
Diane Lennard: Having a purpose to their message when it becomes about the message and less about me getting them out of their heads, self-evaluating and focusing more on the other person. Actually, I feel like my mission in life is getting people to focus on the other person.
Stephen Matini: So listening...
Diane Lennard: Listening and paying attention, listening and observing. I think both.
Stephen Matini: The professor-student relationship is is a pretty interesting combination and often time is very layered. It means different things to different professors. How has this relationship contributed to you, to your own growth?
Diane Lennard: I certainly learn a lot from my students in terms of technology. Very often they say things and I go to my daughter privately after class and say, I just heard my students say this. Is that something I can say? Because they are privy to a whole slew of things that I'm not aware of. It's not part of my lifestyle. So I certainly learn from younger people. 
But I also gain a lot because I get to be myself and that models to them, it's okay to be yourself. Something I've noticed after years and years of teaching is more and more people are saying, I wanna be funny, I wanna make people laugh. And my point of view is that people are funny when they don't tell jokes just because by being themselves, they're funny. And I think what I tried to do, I do my best at is be myself so they can be themselves. It's permission.
Stephen Matini: God, that being funny is hard.
Diane Lennard: Yes. And it's certainly not something I teach, although I did watch this show called Comedians Getting Coffee ...
Stephen Matini: In Cars. Yeah, yeah,
Diane Lennard: In Cars ... yeah. And I found that fascinating to listen to comedians philosophy and points of view. It's very specific and it's really an art form and I respect it. And I also think comedians are very, very good communicators. They know how to pause, they know how to emphasize, they know how to express, they know how to get a reaction. Whether it's think about this or laugh at this, I think they're wonderful. Good comedians are wonderful communicators.
Stephen Matini: I think it's a special skill that some people seem to have. I think sometimes I can be funny, but if I try to be funny it would be a disaster. It would be horrible. 
I wanna ask you about the students. Some people, particularly now the workplace is filled with the different generations and so there's a lot of talk about generational gap. Do you think, is there such a thing as a generational gap from a communication standpoint?
Diane Lennard: Absolutely. Yes. Last night I, I do some faculty consulting at, at our university. What I do is I observe classes and then I give feedback to the professor on whatever they're interested in learning about their class. 
Last night I sat in on a three hour Zoom class. It was an online class. The professor had never used breakout rooms, was totally unaware of what he could do to engage his audience and basically lectured for three hours. 
Now this professor was even older than I am and made no bones about, I don't like remote, but I'm going to do the class the way I always do. He thought he was being funny. I would say out of 60 students, 45 of them had their cameras off. We don't even know if they were in the classroom. It was an astonishing experience of generational disconnect. And I felt badly for the students because they appreciate it, I’m sure they respect this professor and learn something, but they could certainly learn more. 
The professor was saying to me, oh, I like it much better in person. Well of course, but he's not in person. It's time to go with the changes. So yes, I think there can be resistance to change and there can be huge generational conflicts. Part of the, that's what I was trying to say before that I learned from the students. I knew I had to do remote, so I had to learn it. 
I mean, I'm always learning something new because largely because of technology at this point, now we have to contend with AI (artificial intelligence), how do we wanna deal with that? So there's always something to learn and I love that. But yes, an answer to your question, yes, there are generational differences.
Stephen Matini: When I hear people saying that in person works, versus digital, I could not disagree more, because I think if you have a difficult audience, that doesn't care, it's the same in both medium and realistically, there are pros and cons in both medium. What has been your experience about digital versus in person communication?
Diane Lennard: For many, many years I resisted digital because thought incorrectly that I couldn't do the kind of coaching I do, which involves the whole body and the voice speech coaching, unless I was in person, but I've been doing it remotely and I, it's different, but it can be done just with awareness, exactly what you just said. 
You have to learn how to manage being on a screen. I just finished writing a whole book called “Humanizing the Remote Experience.” It actually talks about many of the challenges, but then there are ways to overcome them. 
And the book is less about teaching techniques, but more about what happens to the brain when we're not in person. And there are a lot of challenges, but there are also a lot of strategies for addressing them. But I think for some people it's so different that they haven't and it's necessary because it's not going away. It's necessary to adapt.
Stephen Matini: I also want to ask you, you studied even your book, you talk about a lot about leadership, you know, leadership development and how communication can play a huge role for effective leaders. What would you say that is the some of the most important things as of today for leaders to keep in mind?
Diane Lennard: I would say empathy even more so because people are remote. So showing that you care about other people. This gets back to my mission in life, which is focusing on the other people, but understanding where other people are working with that, creating shared purpose and values really matters because if people are gonna follow your lead, they have to want to, they're not going to, unless you show that you also care about them and you have common purpose. And so I think empathy and understanding social sensitivity is really important. And this used to be called a soft skill, but now I think it's an essential skill.
Stephen Matini: A lot of people struggling and talking about executives or people they're transitioning more and more and more in a leadership position is the fact that for years their worry was about this quarter, the numbers, have to make sure that everything works fine. And then as you step into leadership position, you become more of a people connoisseur, you know? So the transition is really hard and a lot of people are put in a leadership position thinking they're gonna do well, but it's a completely different type of job. Do you think that empathy is something that can be actually taught?
Diane Lennard: In the process of writing this book I learned something that to me really had an impact about empathy. That there are two different kinds of empathy, and one kind is called affective empathy. So it's, I feel your pain, you actually feel what the other person is feeling, but there's another kind, and I think that I use this kind more and it's called cognitive empathy, where I understand what you're feeling, I understand where you're coming from, your perception, your perspective, but you don't necessarily have to feel it yourself. And so yes, I think you can get more and more attuned to it.
Stephen Matini: By observing people, as you said before.
Diane Lennard: By observing and paying attention to who they are.
Stephen Matini: So if someone has always been very task oriented and we are asking the person to be more people oriented, some people probably would do it, other people could be more resistant. And the company now says, well, so far you've been really operational, now you have to stop being this operational, you have to become really leader. 
You have been so used to just worry about numbers and that's it. But you have to understand that from now on, people mostly are gonna look at what you do. You have to set the example, you can ask people anything, but you have to be able to behave in a way that is consistent with your ask. Otherwise people are not gonna follow you.
Diane Lennard: On a simple level, I experienced this with a lot of young people, my own children who are adult children, even my husband at the time. When you're very good at what you do, then you're promoted to a managerial level. That's a different set of skills because on the one hand you do your area of expertise, but then all of a sudden you have direct reports and you're responsible for people. 
I recall with my own daughter when that happened to her earlier on in her career, we would spend many nights on the phone talking about strategies of dealing with difficult people situations. And it got to the point over time that she got really good at it and now loves it. But it was, it's a different skillset, just as you're saying. And that's why I think it's really important in university level that they're trained in these human-centered, what used to be called soft skills because you can't manage people unless you have some understanding of what matters.
Stephen Matini: There's not really a big correlation between possessing a certain trait or displaying a certain behavior and automatically gonna be a great leader. Somehow, some people are called in a leadership position, incredible leaders, and they are probably the last person that you would think in that position. Do you think that leadership can really be learned? Can you learn to be a leader?
Diane Lennard: Yes, yes, yes. I definitely think it can be taught. So there are two references that come to mind when you talk about this. One is a wonderful article, it's a short article in Harvard Business Review called “Leadership is a Conversation”. And I love that approach. 
There's another wonderful book “Leadership Can Be Taught”. It tracks a professor from the Harvard the Kennedy School of Public Service, which is part of Harvard on how he works with leaders. So those two things really had an impact on my thinking about leadership being taught. 
And also I audited a wonderful class at NYU Stern School of Business called “Leadership”. This professor, and his name is Kablas Warren, professor Klablas Warren. He has a cab's model of leadership and it's three E's. The first E is envision, the second is engage, which is really about communication. And the third E is empower. 
First you have the vision, then you communicate it, and then you make sure it gets done. His course is very interesting cuz he looks at the biography of leaders who you wouldn't expect to be leaders. What happened early in their lives that got them to the point of being a leader in the time that they led? Because it's often in context, you know, the time, the country. 
And he, he goes through biography after biography and it's absolutely fascinating. So these different readings have taught me that it is a skillset that can be taught.
Stephen Matini: Why do you think these days there seem to be such a shortage of strong leadership in the world?
Diane Lennard: I'd have to really think about that. I don't know the answer to that. What do you, what do you think?
Stephen Matini: It's interesting because when I ask this question, when I ask people, who would you say is a good leader? Oftentimes people stay quiet. Sometimes people would point out amazing leaders of the past, but very, very rarely people point out someone that is a leader right now. 
First of all, it's a reality that changes really fast. So I think it would really challenge any leader, anyone, to keep up with this exponential variety of things. You know, it just takes a tweet of someone to change completely direction. I think it's really difficult. 
One of the questions that I received from employees all the time, we do not know where we are going and we are upset because they don't tell us. I truly believe it's so much harder now to be a leader than maybe it was in the past.
Diane Lennard: I definitely agree with you because, and I think technology is a big part of that. So part of training for leadership necessarily involves flexibility and adapting to change and paying attention to change. 
That's actually a big part of this teaching philosophy of leadership can be taught, is really almost looking down at the situation and seeing what is the context, what is going on, where is this? And really getting a view, a large macro view in order to be able to implement difficult change. 
So change is difficult and good leaders can see it and manage it. I think you, you hit it, that that feels really right to me. This morning I noticed a headline of an article about this particular woman (Mira Murati) who created ChatGPT, which is an AI tool and she's now the leader of AI because she created it. So it's not that she's leading everything, but she's leading that. 
And so let's say a leader of a corporation would have to be able to manage that and many, many other changes, leaders have to adjust to many, many changes. I mean, look what happened after Covid, now work is hybrid and that change of having some people come to work and some people not come to work, it's hugely different than it was a couple of years ago. So managing change is, is key.
Stephen Matini: And to be a leader, as you say, that is capable of seeing at the larger picture that it has a sensitivity to it, number of audiences, you know, stakeholders and issues is a very difficult thing to do.
Diane Lennard: I think responsible leadership, I believe that what it's referring to is being responsible to all stakeholders, as you just said, including the employees, the investors, the society at large. So that's a huge responsibility and it's really looking at a huge picture.
Stephen Matini: Based on your experience, what have you heard to be some of the biggest communication challenges of your clients?
Diane Lennard: Lack of confidence, who knows where it comes from? I mean, I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist, although a lot of coaching, communication coaching involves people's feelings about communicating. 
A simple example is when people inflect their voice up like that and they don't wanna come to an ending. Often that's because they keep talking and talking and talking and talking and I'm gonna keep talking and hopefully I'll hit it as opposed to, here's my point, get it. Just going for it and standing behind it, having conviction in it. 
And also standing in front of people because often people feel judged and evaluated and I'm not good enough. And all of these negative talk that has nothing to do with the message. So for me, getting people out of their heads and focused on the message, landing on the other person, it's really about the other person. That's a change because people think public speaking is about themselves. No, it's really about how effective they are with their audience.
Stephen Matini: If I don't feel confident, what would it be the very first step that I could take?
Diane Lennard: My particular approach to that is being behaviorally oriented. So thinking about what are you doing with your word choice? What are you doing with your body language and what are you doing with your voice? 
So rather than think, I wanna sound confident, what is your pace? Are you taking pauses? People don't know what to do with their hands, but if they're in conversation, their hands will move naturally. 
So rather than focus on the impression people have of themselves or others have of them, I focus on very specific behaviors and we work one at a time. Usually there's one turnkey. So for instance, if they slow down and this happens a lot, then their body language works, they're emphatic, or if they're conversational, their pitch changes and they're not monotone. So there are, there are certain things that are most important and they become the practice priorities.
Stephen Matini: You strike me as someone definitely very confident. Have you always been confident?
Diane Lennard: ? I'm not always confident. I'll confide in you. When people ask me to give a talk, I won't. I don't like giving, I'm not an introvert at all because I really learn from talking. I'm not an egomaniac where I have to be seen and I have to be in front. I'm much more of a director. I like to organize things. I love a conversation like we're having. I think I'm confident in my message. Communication is extremely important, but it's about the message.
Stephen Matini: I'm exactly the same way. I don't, I don't like to be the center stage, but I love people, I love conversations and I love when you say the message. I express that concept by saying, if you have something dear to you, focus on this gift and I want to give to you. And that probably makes me look a confident or effective. The minute that I start thinking about myself and people looking at me, that would be not fun, you know?
Diane Lennard: Exactly. Mm-hmm. exactly the same. So one of the ways I get people to focus out is the more you focus on the other person, the less you're thinking and judging yourself. And I love that. That's part of what I love about teaching. A hundred percent of my attention is on them. I am really not judging myself. I'm focused on accomplishing what I want them to learn in that particular class.
Stephen Matini: The name of the podcast is Pity Party Party over, which means “enough is enough”. Enough with this whole feeling awful, let's move on. When, if, you hit a rough spot and you feel in a moment that you are low for whatever the reason, is there anything specific you do to get out of the funk?
Diane Lennard: Yeah, I mean, and now you're making me have a little epiphany. I am a very action oriented person, so I spend very little time way down. I've been divorced twice. Those were way down times. But other than that, I don't spend a lot of time pitying because I believe in action. Yeah, I think that that's my strategy and that may be why I appear confident because once I make up my mind to do something, I do it. 
And I'm pretty conscientious and maybe verging on obsessive compulsive. If I promise to do something, I'm gonna do it. But I am action oriented. I like to think, but I'd much rather take action. But I thoroughly enjoy the thinking. But my first impulse is to take an action. And I think that's from theater training because it's a very much about doing, you don't just think about a character, you be it.
Stephen Matini: I always say keep putting a foot in front of the other. Then eventually you're gonna get somewhere, you know? Yes. And I've always been that way and, and maybe, yes, I have to say that theater must have something to do with it because in theater you have to keep going and so you can stop, sorry!
Diane Lennard: There's this show called whose, a television show called, “Whose Line Is it Anyway”, and it's about improvisation. There's a technique called “yes and” so whatever's given to you, like if someone sort starts acting like a pink elephant, you can't say no, don't do that. You just have to go with that and move forward. 
I never thought of it before, why I'm so action oriented. But I do think that theater may have contributed to it. I don't think it's the only thing. I do believe without being a psychologist that a lot of this starts from childhood and what you needed to do in your family dynamic. In my family, I had to pay a lot of attention. I had to observe and be really sensitive to what was going on in the moment. Nothing really harmful, but it was just in my best interest to do that.
I've had years and years and years of practice observing behavior. Even before I got way involved in theater, seeing things and listening to things is what I know how to do. Left to my devices, I had to take action. Like I, I learned that it was up to me. And so I became very action oriented. 
We really are as a human species focused on survival first and foremost. And that that book, “Humanizing The Remote Experience” starts with that. What are our basic human needs? Our human needs are to feel safe and comfortable to experience understanding of what's around us and people. And the third is to feel a sense of belonging. We need those things and we do what it takes to make that happen.
Stephen Matini: If you had to say, what is the heart of our conversation, what would you say that is?
Diane Lennard: I would say it's about being human-centered. I know that's very non-specific, but I think everything we touched on addressed people. The focus of leadership, the focus of communication, it thinking about the human fir in the center. The center is the person. 
I used to teach a course called Foundations of Business Coaching. So I was teaching potential leaders or emerging leaders, emerging managers, how to take a coaching approach, which is really working with people. And many of their cultures were not coaching oriented. They were much more command and control oriented. 
Because people are people, if you take a coaching approach, let's say different than the the organizational culture, people will respond. They'll want to work with you. So I think even within a system that doesn't have the same approach, you can deal with people in a human centered way and it will work because people respond to similar things.
Stephen Matini: That is true.
Diane Lennard: And I, and I think it's important to do it even though it's different than the culture. And if it's that different, then it's maybe not a good place to be. 
The more you pay attention to another person, the more they feel good about themselves and bottom line, what everybody wants is to be seen and to be heard. So I think it's about observing and listening that gives people what they want, it respects them and it treats people with dignity. And I think we need to do that. We need to do that.
Stephen Matini: Diane, thank you so much for these wonderful words. I think they're going to warm the hearts and the souls and the, the intuition of a lot of people.
Diane Lennard: Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure talking with you.

Inclusive Versatile Leaders - Featuring Wagner Denuzzo

This episode explores the vitality and richness of a diverse and inclusive leadership approach to help the success of organizations.
The guest of this episode of Pity Party Over is Wagner Denuzzo, a Latino HR leader specializing in the future of work, talent strategy, and leadership development.
Growing up in São Paulo, Brazil, Wagner moved to the United States at 22 with little means and big dreams.  As a minority leader, Wagner's professional career has been committed to creating inclusive practices in organizations to foster effective leadership.
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TRANSCRIPT
Stephen Matini: You were born in São Paulo.
Wagner Denuzzo: Yes.
Stephen Matini: And then what happened? How did you get to the States?
Wagner Denuzzo: A convergence of things because I was finishing college. I was working during the day to make a little money, and I did college a night. In Brazil at that time in the early eighties, in mid eighties was important for you to know people to get somewhere. 
It was important for you to belong to a social class that had connections to get you in. I didn't have that. I didn't have connections and I start feeling that although I felt I had some talent, I didn't have an opportunity for me to start my career in Brazil. 
And I didn't wanna do clothing. I was actually manufacturing women clothing with a friend of mine that worked to get some money, but it's not something that I wanna do for life. 
So I decided right after college to give the manufacturing, small manufacturing company to my partner and decided to come to United States. And actually it was my first flight ever. And the first flight I ever took was outside my country and had four stops, cause it was the cheapest fair. So between some polling Orlando, I had four stops in my first flight ever. I'm glad I wasn't afraid of flying. It would be really difficult if I did.
Stephen Matini: How old were you back then?
Wagner Denuzzo: 22
Stephen Matini: 22, God, so young
Wagner Denuzzo: And I came to tonight and I came to United States not knowing English. I didn't have English and I had $600 with me. So it was an immigrant story. 
Then it is interesting because I'm very resourceful. I think living in Brazil, Brazilians are very resourceful. We've figured out how to do things with very little resources. Arriving in Florida, I immediately start getting to restaurant work, being a busboy, trying to learn English. 
A lot of bullying, a lot of people making fun of you when you're an immigrant without the language. I went through all that ,and after a year I decided that Florida wasn't for me. New York could be. A friend of mine said, let's go to Florida, and we drove up in one of those cars that you help people drive their cars in, into Manhattan. And that's how we came. And was really interesting because it was very rough in New York.
I remember having $1 and thinking, I eat pizza or I smoke cigarettes. I chose cigarettes because they last longer . And that day I found two jobs as a dishwasher and a food runner. So I quickly understood that I had to act fast and there was nobody to ask for help. 
New York was a real challenge because it was very difficult. However, little by little I started learning the language. One person that was so remarkable in my history is this Canadian waiter. After I became a waiter a few years, he said to me, Wagner, you have so much to offer. 
Read this book because this book is about enhancing your vocabulary. Because being here, you're gonna need to enhance your vocabulary. It was so beautiful. He gave me, that was the first person that extended their hands and said, Hey, this is how you're gonna get through and be successful.And I will never forget him. 
Stephen Matini: You started communication, right? 
Wagner Denuzzo: Mm-Hmm. . Yes. 
Stephen Matini: How, how did that come about? 
Wagner Denuzzo: Communications is because I, I, I love the idea of advertising, marketing and radio and TV. I specialize on radio and TV. I love writing as well. So to me that's how I would make a living. But clearly in Brazil, communications, is something that's, you know, reserved for very few. 
In New York actually. It really helped me to think broadly about how can I connect with people, you know, taking pictures and, and doing things that could enhance my experience here . I did that, but inevitably you have to do what you need to do to survive. So being in restaurants, I worked in restaurants for 10 years. 
Patience was so incredibly important to me. I didn't have an office job until I was 29, 30. When I start volunteer, I volunteered for gay men's health crisis during the AIDS epidemic and then they gave me a job. That was my first real job in an office. 
And to be honest, it was worth go through all the experiences. I learned how to connect with people from all over the world, at all levels of expertise, levels of social, economic backgrounds. And it is beautiful how you can create empathy towards everyone because you can see that everyone has value. 
And to me this is a lifelong lesson to never discard anyone regardless where they are. Because the hidden figures, the famous hidden figures are our responsibility in HR to identify them. I really enjoyed that. 
So my first job, 29, 30 years old. Then I start getting burned out because then I worked for St. Vincents Hospital was an incredible experience. I work as a social worker in St. Vincents Hospital, in the immigrant program, was undocumented immigrants with HIV and AIDS and we had 43 country represented, 340 patients. And they all need us to figure out care, housing, living and all the immigration problems that they had, we had to help them solve for them. 
So was very enhancing in my life, the experience because you see how, how critical it is to have social systems that support people. The experience burned me out a little bit, to be honest. My, my boss actually said, hey, would you like to go to an employee assistance program? Somebody I know is hiring a counselor there. So I finished my social work degree as a clinical social worker and went to work for an employee assistance program. That's how I started my career in executive coaching, in training, in doing the, the work that I do today in HR.
Stephen Matini: Throughout all those years, those formative years, were there any person, any, any specific event? I mean you already touched some of them, but were there any specific person that somehow was really pivotal, you know, for the decision that you eventually made for your life?
Wagner Denuzzo: Well, several people. In, in sometimes I was thinking about this: many of the people that influenced me don't even know that they had an impact in my life. As an immigrant, I think you know this, you start becoming so hyper vigilant in hyper observant. You observe people at all times. You under, you try to understand how to adapt and assimilate new norms, cultural norms in the way of living. That's a survival mechanism. 
Many people influenced me, but what's really important to be influenced by one person in my life that I always carry with me was a teacher in college. I grew up in a, in public school system in Brazil. I didn't learn that much in the public school system. And she was the first person who believed in me and said, hey, I need an assistant, could you help me? I like the way you read. Do you write? And I liked your ideas. Come support me. 
I never forgot that because every time I have the imposter syndrome or those self-limiting beliefs, I go right back to the people who said, hey, now I believe in you. And she was the first one. And in fact, the funny thing is, last year I decided to contact her after 30 years and she loved that I contacted her and she remembered me of course. And we met in New York, it was a wonderful meeting because reconnecting to people who demand so, so much to you is was incredible. So she was one. 
There is always others, but it's, it's mostly my partner. My husband's amazing, you know, he helped me understand that actually I can be myself and always have the unconditional love at home. That was important to me. I didn't have any other support here. As soon as I met him, it was an incredible feeling of support.
Stephen Matini: I love when you said as an immigrant you become, I would assume a very empathetic, you know, you, you can read situations very quickly. Do you think that empathy is something that can be taught?
Wagner Denuzzo: I do believe they can. A few years ago there was an article in the New York Times about a research that showed, and this is related to positive psychology, which I really believe in. An individual who put themselves out there to help others during crisis are much more likely to develop empathy and be more resilient themselves during their own difficult times. 
And that was very interesting because not only you are helping others, but actually you are building capabilities for yourself to become resilient. And that's important. And that's how I think you start learning how to empathize with others. 
The other one is when things happen to you, you know, when things happen to you, so many crisis that happen to people health wise, economically or there's an accident, there's so many things that happen in life that makes you step back and say, how can I cope with this?
And then you notice the people that try to help you, usually don't know how to help you because it's overwhelming to help somebody. So this empathy towards others develops by experience, but you have to be open to that. I know a lot of people who are not really open to being helped or open to helping others, because if people accept that they need help or that people accept that others need their help, they might get in touch with a lot of feelings that they're not ready to be in touch with. 
And people try to protect themselves with mechanisms, what we call defensive mechanisms, right? We all do have them. But it's unfortunate that people don't try to go through the dark side of being a human being because it's worth it. It's more important to go through the experiences that enhance your abilities to be a human being fully than trying to hide and protect yourself from paying emotional pain, social pain or physical pain.
Stephen Matini: Acceptance, empathy, representation, everyone feeling included, which leads to things talked about these days, you know, diversity, inclusion. But oftentimes I had this sense that it's almost like a box to tick. A lot of organizations seem to have a hard time understanding how can this be of any advantage to me? Based on your tremendous experience, you had so many professional experiences, what would you say that it is the first step for an organization to build an environment that really feels inclusive?
Wagner Denuzzo: What I believe is the first step is acceptance. Leaders must accept the stage of maturity of the organizations and how far they have come in their efforts to create an inclusive environment. 
What I see is that we have mastered the ability to narrate a good story. We have mastered the ability to talk about our values, our principles and our mission and our commitments. But those do not correlate to actions.
And I think the acceptance that actually just been committed to something in talking about something is just the first step. But the first step to actually make a change and create a more inclusive and more diverse organization is acceptance that actually we have failed in the last 20 years to bring to fruition our wish for a more inclusive organization. 
I was thinking about this now we have data. People rely on data to assess the representation and all this. Representation is not influence, it is just representation. And how you create a culture that's more inclusive demands a lot of self-awareness. Because many organizations that I see, they use data insights to confirm their biases. And it's so easy to do that. 
So I tell people, don't use technology to confirm your biases because then everybody settles back in their comfort zone and say, see we have representation, we have the opportunity, but people are not taking the opportunity. I don't think it's like that. 
I think we need to stop putting programs in place, start thinking about taking chances on people who have potential, cause we all have potential, and start placing people. 
Ginni Rometty, CEO for IBM, once said, even herself had some biases when we are doing talent reviews for example. And she noticed that in her environment sometimes the male mindset was that men had the experience, and could take a new role to challenge themselves. Women usually were said to be in need of further development for some reason. 
There is a huge problem about self acceptance. If we accept ourselves at having negative biases towards others who don't look like us, I think we go much farther because then we can take the risk, provide support services for the person that we place instead of putting them outside on a program. 
Because it's very easy right now to mask our biases by putting people in programs, oh put so and so in the Latino program, put so and so in the affirmative action program. It's not a program, you are delaying their advancement when you don't take a bet on them.
Stephen Matini: It seems to me there's an awful amount of white men in a powerful position. That seem not to be self-accepting, but somehow are very vocal in terms of telling other people what they should be doing. What would you say it is the first step towards self-acceptance?
Wagner Denuzzo: I have a lot of empathy for senior leaders today, because they're being asked to represent their companies publicly about all issues from political issues to social issues and economic issues. We're asking them to be empathic towards their own workforce because workforce is very diverse. 
And I think one thing we need to realize is that the workforce has changed dramatically. They're distributed. We can't get away from that. They're distributed, they are dynamic, they wanted the next experience. Cause they know growth comes from a variety of experiences. So they're dynamic. You have three years to convince them that your company is the right one for them. And they are diverse and they're growing diversity just by the sheer number of people in the world. And they are digital. You have to be a digital leader if you wanna manage a digital workforce. And the last one I think is something that we are still struggling with: discerning. 
Our employees are discerning, they're paying attention to the narratives, they're authentic, those they are not. They're paying attention to leaders who have a consistent approach to values-based principles. They're paying attention to companies on sustainability and the work life harmonization is very strong right now. It's not work life integrations, harmonization. They wanna have the control and autonomy over their life. And that's very important. 
Senior leaders are dealing with all this and they have to respond to the needs of the board, shareholders, stakeholders and the public in general. They are in a really difficult spot. 
I think, I know a lot of senior executives who truly believe in inclusion, truly, truly believe in the actions that they wanna take. But there are so many nuances because your organization, let's be real, might be led by a few senior men if you put it that way, but the organization's, the collective of hundreds, sometimes thousands of people who need to be aligned to that strategy. 
To me, senior executives have to be the most authentic today and really walk the talk. Make sure that they are looking at the he figures, make sure that give access to those people, to leadership, give them exposure and show their value. Leaders now have to do that, represent an advocate for diverse populations. And I think that's the first step.
 
Stephen Matini: Being authentic. How to be a genuine role model. You can ask to your people anything you want, but you have to be willing to provide the example. But for a lot of people, being authentic is a risk.
Wagner Denuzzo: Authenticity is one of those words that is becoming a buzzword, right? Everyone is talking about being authentic. The reality is human development demands, reflection, introspection, and a lot of self-knowledge because authenticity is not about behaving the way you want to behave anywhere in any settings. 
Being authentic is really having this sense making skill, of understand the context you're in, the situation you're in, and responding accordingly, but always consistently according to your values, your principles and who you are. That's being authentic. 
I see a lot of people that confuse authenticity with rigid behaviors that people say, I am who I am, I'm gonna behave how I always behave. That's a big mistake. That's somebody who is not aware of themselves, that's somebody who didn't have the introspection to think the authenticity is about integrity, values, principles, but how you communicate and how you engage with others have to be a confluence of understanding the context, listening to others and really being empathic to not cause harm.
Stephen Matini: If I said that emotional intelligence could be the main competence to become authentic, would that be a fair statement?
Wagner Denuzzo: It’s a fair statement. The only thing I would go a little farther because what we are seeing now, you also need to understand cognitive mastery. Emotion intelligence allows you to understand how you react to things. Cognitive mastery allows you to step back and respond appropriately to stimuli. 
It is the Viktor Frankl’s famous quote. I love that quote. Between the stimuli and your response, there is a pause in that space. In that space is your chance to create your response, in your response is your growth and your freedom. I love that because that's exactly the essence of being authentic with a positive energy towards others in the environment.
Stephen Matini: There are so many leadership development programs, they use different approaches. You know, some of them, they're deeply imbued in emotional intelligence, others use different types of framework. You know, some of those frameworks could be a bit more normative, more prescriptive, you know, this is how you do in this situation, this is how you read a specific context problem, whatever that is. Based on all your experiences, is there any specific approach to leadership development that as of now you would recommend?
Wagner Denuzzo: I think there are some things that are timeless and some things that have to be very contextual. So for example, timeless things, vulnerability. We talk about this, but we haven't seen really coming to fruition at the highest level of leadership. When I was the head of leadership development for this global technology company was really important to start executive programs with the facilitator who was also a leader in the company to tell a story. 
They actually change them emotionally or kind of radically in their perspective of the world. That creates a safety. And we talk about psychological safety. That creates a safety you can't create through frameworks. It has to be a vulnerable leader, allowing others to share the vulnerability and experience something that has an emotional, transformational impact. I find that incredibly important. So without that, it's very hard to do leadership development if it's not an experience, it has to be a an emotional, cognitive experience.
But, when you think about the contexts we are in today, I think that's very different. You have to use the timeless vulnerability and all the emotional intelligence perspective, but also you have to help leaders understand that distributed power for distributed teams is the way to go forward. They will only be successful if they allow this collective leadership, shared leadership, sharing their knowledge, sharing more their vulnerabilities and their expectations. It's about sharing and letting the teams do the work to come to fruition. So I think leadership development today is missing the opportunity to create situations and experiences where leaders can get in touch with themselves. 
I recently did an executive program where I asked the leaders to do a breathing exercise for three minutes just for them to be present, to be in their own body, to focus without judging. Because right now, if you ask leaders, I think they're not having a great time, they don't know how to act forward. They are having imposter syndrome, feelings of imposter syndrome because it's hard to not know where to go. And I think they're not in touch with themselves because it's easier and it's less painful. 
I urge leaders to start being more introspective and allow themselves to just breathe and be in their bodies, being the moment. Because if you're not in the moment, you're not listening. If you're not in the moment, you're not learning.
Stephen Matini: I like when you talked about shared leadership, you know, and you were talking about teams. Do you think that that could be the next step for really, leadership?
Wagner Denuzzo: I truly believe that that's the way we are going forward in organizations. I've been advising a lot of HR startups. These startups, they're most successful. They create a community. They don't create a workforce. They create a community where members are mutually accountable for each other and care for each other. And with that, naturally they have to start sharing power, sharing knowledge, and becoming less fearful of becoming irrelevant. 
Senior leaders are afraid of becoming irrelevant because with the digital transformation of the last 10 years, people have access to a lot of data, a lot of information, a lot of everything. So leaders have to be comfortable and embrace that because that's the new, the new world that we are in. 
So I do believe shared leadership because in my concept of shared leadership is about consciousness. Consciousness speaks to the idea that you need the mental power to understand where you are, sense make, understand who you are, who you're talking to. Having this consciousness allows you to be present. Then you have to be curious because I think being curious allows you to always learn from others before you start talking. 
And you have to be curious about what's happening around the corner. You have to be curious about things that you never thought about, and you have to be courageous. 
When I was in this global company, we had early career folks interviewing MD’s, managing directors who are very successful and one of the early career folks. As the leader, do you really have authority? How much authority do you have? And he just turned to him and said, I have as much authority as my courage allows me to have. So it is about courageous acts of sensible leaders who are actually really centered, aligned, and know that courageous acts will lead to different outcomes. And many times courageous leaders lead to very positive outcomes.
Stephen Matini: When I read the news, everything is polarized, everything is sensationalistic, trivialized, you know, reduced to cheap bites to eat without much thinking. So how do you keep your energy up? How do you keep your strength?
Wagner Denuzzo: Let's put it this way. From my clinical background, we use to say that depression might be the most logical and normal reaction to the reality of the world. Period. But what you need to understand is that those emotions you need to experience, but you cannot isolate them and they become bigger than they are. 
What I advocate is for clarity. Clarity creates capacity for you to think, for you to grow, for you to cope but you need to be clear. Be clear about how you're feeling and what you are feeling is about in your organizations. Be clear about your strategy. Don't guess like people.
Now there's another term that's emerging, gas lighting. It is true when you're saying something to the public and internally you're saying something else. The way I approach life is you only have one job. Manage your energy, generate energy, manage positive energy in groups, in workshops and teams. Because I love what somebody said to me once, a good leader is a thermometer. You can get in the room and you see the temperature. A great leader is a thermostat. You set the temperature in the room, but you need to know yourself. You need to have the capability of doing that. So be clear about what your intentions. So clarity creates capacity. 
And the last thing that I would say is having a realistic optimism is important because regardless what's happening in the world, you always can find nuggets of hope and aspirations that you have in inspirations everywhere. 
You do need to start stepping back and feel comfortable being on your own because that's when you have the time to start assessing who you are. What are you feeling and how you can cope with this. 
One thing that we say in mental health is when you feel depressed, one of the best things you can do is to socialize. I think it's more important for you to engage in something social, engaging in the flow of life, engaging something that takes you away from that moment. Because actually it is important for you to take action.
Stephen Matini: Maybe the first step it is to understand that it, it's okay, a good leader, you don't need to be perfect,
Wagner Denuzzo: Nothing is perfect. You might try to control the environment, you might try to control things around you. And that's a natural tendency that human beings have, especially leaders. Leaders have to have this sense of control over their environment, over their actions. But that's a false sense of self because it's not about control. It's about understanding and sensing, making sense of things. 
Because I have so much information, so many data, and I always say focus on progress, not perfection. And I think now the world is asking leaders, you have to start focusing on progress even when it is not the most lucrative. 
That's why sustainability now is coming to fruition. That's why people sometimes are even taking their salary a notch down because they know that there is pressure socially. We are much more aware of the situation of the world and there are some positive pockets. So that's why I still feel optimistic.
Stephen Matini: If you have to come up with the name, a noun, an adjective for this new paradigm, which one would you pick?
Wagner Denuzzo: . That's a good one. I will pick several, but I would say versatile because that does not deny who you are and does not deny your authenticity. But versatility allows you to understand different realities because to your your point, a new paradigm is because we are in a paradoxical world. And being versatile to look at one's reality and not deny it. Look at your own reality and not deny it and accept multiple realities being part of your ecosystem. That's incredibly important.
Stephen Matini: Do you think you would've gotten to this mindset if you hadn't not been Latino? If you hadn't been part of a minority community, do you think you would've gotten to the same point?
Wagner Denuzzo: No, I'm clear. Valda, being a member of the LGBTQ community, being a a Latino immigrant from a lower social club, as in Brazil, I had to observe, understand, and overcome so much. All those messages made me who I am today. So I don't have any regrets about the paths that I took. They're very hard. Some people say, oh, I wanna go back to my twenties. I don't. 
I worked really hard on my twenties. It was really difficult, but it was worth it because I feel so much more integrated, because there is something in human development that I always tell people. Be aware that when you enter a different phase in your life, when you're more mature, some people get into despair, some people get into integrated moments. 
There are moments that are good, there are moments that are bad. There are moments that you fail. There's moments that you succeed. So try to integrate yourself because you're gonna be in a better place. If you're always trying to be defense, defending against what's happening to you, you're gonna be creating a false self that will lead to despair. It's not worth it.
Stephen Matini: When you go through a rough moment for whatever the reason, is there anything specific you do to get out of it?
Wagner Denuzzo: Sometimes it's important for me to be with the feeling, but I play a beautiful song. Sometimes it's just sitting with the feeling. But having something that creates a beauty in that moment. 
But I think also walking in nature, allowing yourself just to breathe, observe a bird. The little things in life can take you out of your self-rumination and your self-absorption. It's very easy to be self-absorbed these days. I think the best trick is to get to a place where you can get out of yourself a little bit. 
One thing that we didn't talk about, but it's so essential today for all of us, is being non-judgmental. When you feel you're reacting too quickly because there are triggers, right? People trigger you all the time. But you have to suspend judgment because you don't know exactly what the reality of the other is. It's so hard to step into a space where you don't have preconceived notions of how you're gonna respond to something.
Cause the moment you start judging, you start projecting others things that you accept on yourself. And that's where it is to do. Imagine the interactions, five generations in the workforce, how leaders can manage the cultural norms that lead to positive psychological safety? It's very hard, but I think starting with being non-judgmental improves the culture tremendously. 
Somebody that I really admire, Hitendra Wadhwa, he's a professor at the MBA School in Columbia University in New York, and I love his approach because he's one of the first leaders. He was at MaKinsey. He moved out of MaKinsey and he start growing this amazing theory that inner knowledge and inner confidence come to fruition as an outward success. 
And he talks about the energies, talks about love, energy, the growth energy, the self-actualization energies. And he's been very successful in transcending the business dialogue into a more meaningful dialogue. So he's been very successful in bridging the business and the self-knowledge and the human-centered leadership that we talk about. And I love that, you know, not many people are able to do that.
Stephen Matini: We talked about many different things, all of them are so important. Is there anything that you would like our listeners to know?
Wagner Denuzzo: The most critical thing to do is to nurture your leadership skills. In today's world and in the future, I predict the organizations are gonna rely on collective leadership, shared leadership, all members of the organization have to nurture those skills because you're gonna be in cross-functional teams. 
You're gonna be working in the no hierarchical environment, most likely agile teams are self-managed. So I'm advocating for leadership skills being developed as soon as you enter the workforce. 
I'm writing a book right now. Maybe it's gonna be ready by next year. It's called the Lead From Start. It's the idea that you are in charge of your success if you focus on leadership skills because it's the most important skills that you can have.
Stephen Matini: Wagner, you are so wise, you are so experienced. Thank you so much for the time you've giving me. I really, I really enjoyed this.
Wagner Denuzzo: Me too. Thank you so much for having me.

Doing & Being - The Strategy of Sustainable Leaders - Featuring Beate Klingenberg

Is it possible to be competitive and sustainable? Can leaders meet the needs of investors, employees, customers, and the environment? 
The guest of this episode of Pity Party Over is Beate Klingenberg, Professor of Sustainability and Supply Chain Management at FOM University of Applied Sciences for Economics and Management in Germany.
Professor Klingenberg’s professional interests combine two needs often viewed as antagonists in business: a short-term focus on efficient operations that meet quarterly quotas and a long-term sustainable strategy addressing the interests of all stakeholders. 
For Professor Klingenberg, a sustainable mindset combines systems thinking, ecological worldview, and emotional intelligence to develop leaders capable of driving organizations into the future.
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Sustainability Mindset Indicator by Isabel Rimanoczy and Beate Klingenberg
https://smindicator.com/
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TRANSCRIPT
Stephen Matini: So, how is life in Germany?
Beate Klingenberg: How is life in Germany? A little bit too busy, which I know is a running theme for me, but, and part of it is myself because I never say no when something interesting comes my way. 
Besides, I'm also, I'm always, always acknowledging that in comparison to my previous always busy life as an academic, I also have a startup. And it is really taking a lot of time by now, and it's all exciting. It's all there is so much new, new experience and new things to think about, but it, the result is basically that all what I do is work.
Stephen Matini: Is your life now that different compared to your life in Italy when you lived in Florence or in the US?
Beate Klingenberg: It's different because the, the circumstances around me are different. I think if I compare first to Italy, simply the German-ish lifestyle is, is a little bit more orderly, I would say.
Stephen Matini: No way. Who would've thought ?
Beate Klingenberg: Yeah. I mean, surprise, . I'm actually missing my chit-chats going to the mad car or when I would go to my groceries on Saturdays or just going to a cafe where people know me, where you talk. 
And I haven't made those kind of connections here yet. A, because it takes time. I know at the Marcato Centrale, it took me probably between two and three years before the, the people were willing to talk to me because initially they just thought, well, yet another stranger, she'll be here for a month and then she'll be gone again. 
So they didn't put a lot of effort in creating a relationship. And it's the same here. Of course, even there, there is an open market twice a week where I go and I try to go to the same places, but it will take forever before they know me. 
And then if I compare to the us, the US has this largeness to it, because a, you have to do everything by car and the country. I mean, you've lived there. The country is just vast in comparison. And so everything is a little, yeah, is, is bigger. 
I think my lifestyle there was different in a sense that I, I was driving around with a car a lot, but I was definitely, and this is the surprising thing, but it, it's a little bit because I don't have a car. I think I was more in nature when I lived in the US to go for hikes. 
I haven't established routines here in where I'm now in Germany, because I live in, in the middle of a big city. I have a big park, right ten minutes from me, which is nice. But to really go into woods and hike for three, four hours, I have done maybe two or three times in the last year because I have to train, take a train to get out somewhere, and you can't reach all parts easily with public transportation. I'm happy that I don't have a car anymore, but my nature connection has been reduced since I'm in Germany. 
In Italy, it was also easier because Florence particular is a city where you can do a lot of hikes even within the city, and then you get out into the hills. Connection to nature is important for me. So maybe that contributes also to this feeling that I, I feel a little sterile where I am.
Stephen Matini: The word sustainability is a word that, even in the past when you and I talked, comes up a lot. That's a really important word to you. What does sustainability mean in Germany versus the U.S. versus Italy? How does it manifest differently?
Beate Klingenberg: First of all, the word for sustainability in, in Germany has a different connotation, but it's, it's more something that means to be, to do something very long lasting, to do something that is, that is reaching into the future. 
And in terms of em, embedment in society, you hear many more people talking about sustainability in, in Germany than in the U.S. particularly in the U.S. And I just have to walk out of my house where there is a little area for shopping at the street, and there is a shop where you can buy things without you bring your own containers so you can buy pasta and, and all sorts of other things, dry goods in your own containers. 
Then there is another shop that is called the, the rescue market, where they sell off overproduction or food that is already beyond their, their official edibility. And it's, but it's still good and obviously for very low prices. 
So you can see just with these two examples that you have a lot of solutions that are being offered and people are very conscious about climate change and talking about alternative transportation. The reason why I don't have a car is, is for me personally, because I don't want to have one. 
In fact, also right outside of my building is a parking lot where there are car sharing cars. I haven't tried the system out yet, but technically if I need one, I can make a reservation and, and hop on a car. 
In Italy. I think being in Europe also, there is a good understanding for sustainability and it manifests itself in, in different ways. Maybe people talk a little bit less about it as in Germany, but I remember this idea that in supermarkets or in markets, you only have the, the plastic bags for the fruit out of biodegradable plastics. It's a huge step forward. 
In Germany, I think it's again, this the German word would be grundsätzlichkeit (principle), this fundamentalism that people always want to have these deep discussions and it's easier to move forward and to do something, I think in Italy because people just do it.
Stephen Matini: Do you remember the first time that the word sustainability entered your life?
Beate Klingenberg: I would think probably towards the turn of the century, because prior to that, at least what I recognized is more that we talked about pollution, environmental protection, and that of course goes back into the 1970s that those discussions were there for even into the 1960s for the longest time. 
But this more overarching idea of sustainability, which doesn't only include looking out for the environment, but it has a strong aspect of social justice in there with a recognition that if we're not fair to each other, we will never be able to protect also the environment because poor people simply don't have, if I make it quite simple, they don't have the time to think about, is this good that I use this thing in plastic or, or not, because their life is simply just about the basics. 
The concept of sustainability is really more overarching, and I think the first conference I went to that literally had the topic, sustainability must have been around the beginning of the century, doesn't mean that it didn't exist before, but that was about, so a little bit more than 20 years ago that entered my life.
Stephen Matini: When people hear the word sustainable, it means different things to different people, and often times evokes scenarios of climate change, the whole environmental issue and such and such. What I love about your background is the fact that you focus on operations, you focus on supply chain and those reasoning, those area often times are about optimizing, it's about saving money, it's about how to be more profitable. So how do you combine based on your experience and sustainability with areas such as operations and supply chain?
Beate Klingenberg: If I look at the, the consumption sector, we're basically flooded with products to make that really more sustainable in the sense that we look more for the resources of the planet that we use for these products, we look at if there is a circularity that we, these this materials that are being used come back into the productive cycle. 
We go to the basics. How can I make a, a container for water more sustainable? Only when I ask myself from the very beginning, what is this product actually going to be? How am I going to design it? How am I going to produce it, and how much can I think of the, here's this, I know plastic is always an easy example, but what happens to this plastic bottle when it's finished? 
If we start at that early stage, there is a concept that is called cradle to cradle means the cradle is the, the moment when a product is even conceived, not even produced yet, but the product idea that's already when we should start thinking.
It's like, what will happen to this product when the consumer doesn't use it anymore? And then the question, do we even need this product that should even come before? Which of course here I'm being a little radical because I I really think we have way too many products, but that's let's not go there. 
But for me, the practical thinking is like we're producing so many things, that's where we need to start. What is this product, what it is supposed to be, and how can I create it that it is the least impactful and uses the least resources and still fulfills the need that the potential client wants to have fulfilled.
Stephen Matini: In your opinion, what could be for an organization that decides to be more sustainable, the first step in that direction?
Beate Klingenberg: A profound reflection of their values. When I say profound, really to the deepest sense of looking at humanity and asking, what is this product for? What does it serve? 
And I'm going to refer to a concept that I am encountered a couple of years ago, which is called the sustainability mindset. This has been developed by a researcher whom I know by now very well, Isabel Rimanoczy, and she developed it based on talking with business leaders that were by themselves without stakeholder pressure, but just out of their own interest turning their organizations to be more sustainable. 
And then the interesting thing, and this was very, very insightful for me coming from this practical operations and supply chain discipline, is that yes, there is a piece to it that in this concept of the mindset is called the ecological worldview. 
So you have to understand all these ecological consequences, but then there is a big component that is called systems thinking, which in engineering disciplines is not a difficult thing because sys engineers are trained to think in systems, but business people often are not. 
Two components that when I heard about it for the first time, surprised me, and one is emotional intelligence and the other one is spiritual intelligence. And at the beginning I was thinking it's like, yeah, okay, maybe nice to have, but when I say profound over the years, I, I really came to realize there is big need for exactly that, this understanding and not emotional intelligence in the sense of Daniel Goleman who wrote a lot about it, although his, his work is very important, but more in the sense of understanding how my emotions actually impact my decisions towards sustainability. 
And the spiritual intelligence is of course a piece that is very personal. Everybody can develop their own spirituality and their own sense of it, and for one person it will be rooted in a certain religion, and for another person, it's simply meditation and, and concentrating on the self. There are, there are many, many variations, but that is important for me today to ask this question, what is the real value of what I'm doing?
Of course, that is a type of change for organizations that is really deep or do we want to be, how do we want to be part of this productive cycle of our economy? What I've learned also really working also for myself on this mindset is that we humans always talk about we are human and there is nature and we separate the two to a certain extent that it's nature against us or we against nature. And I think that's profoundly incorrect because we are nothing else than a species on this planet. 
We're not better or worse than the amp that crawls around on the floor looking for for food. We just developed a different level of intelligence that unfortunately allows us to destroy, I, I'm not familiar, I wouldn't say there, there doesn't exist one, but I'm not familiar with any other species on the planet that does that, that purposefully removes resources and uses them for something and then you can't reuse them again because the, the resources on the planet are not infinite. Eventually they're gone. 
So this profound recognition that we are just a little piece in a system. We are not the controllers, we are just a piece. And that makes a difference in, I would think, how you look at how you consume things, how you live your life. Nothing in this concept of the mindset is normative. Nobody says, you must do this, you must think like that. But there is, yeah, this deep sense of being connected to our natural environment because we are simply a part of it and that that changes perspectives tremendously.
Stephen Matini: To me, the ability of adopting a sustainable mindset probably is a transition from being a manager to being a leader, because you talk about values, you're talking about having a, a vision, you're talking about an organization that has a soul. 
One of the hardest bump that I see people going through is when they understand that operations is not enough, you know, to have an eye on this quarter, being able to meet the number is not necessarily the only strategic thing that you need to do. 
You really need to have a much larger perspective or you won't be able to survive in this competitive marketplace with things changing all the time. Why should I give any thought to what you just mentioned, all these important elements? Is just that it is a strategic, it is a strategic thing to do.
Beate Klingenberg: Yeah, definitely. It, it's of course if you read the quarterly reports of firms, you, you think, yeah, okay, sustainability, we do a little bit of ESG reporting, it's all fine. We try to reduce our carbon footprint, but it's not enough. 
Prerequisite is a realization that the impact humans have on the planet is unbalancing to the way we are living at the moment. What we're doing right now is not, it's not sustainable for the next a hundred years. A lot of things will change and they're already changing. I'm a manager or I'm a leader, I develop a vision that is more systemic and that is more looking into these many, many different aspects that a true sustainable mindset requires. 
And it's a journey. It's not something that happens in one step. In the theory of the (sustainable) mindset, there are 12 principles, but even if we go beyond the, the structure, I regularly go back depending on things that happen to me on a daily life, and I question myself like, is is this consistent with what I really want to be to put the focus? First of all, what do I want to be before saying what is it that I want to do?
Stephen Matini: It's like we're going through a paradigm shift in the way we approach management. There was such a focus on task that eventually shifted with human relations on people. And now we are talking more about really the context. How did you come up with the idea of the assessment, the sustainability mindset indicator?
Beate Klingenberg: I do agree paradigm shift is exactly the right the right word. The lady that I mentioned, Isabel Rimanoczy that developed the sustainability mindset as a framework, she approached me about two and a half years ago. We had met on conferences and she asked me that she would like to develop something that we can actually assess where a person's mindset is. 
And she had already thought a little bit about how to do it in terms of a type of questionnaire, like other personality assessment tools exist. She's a psychologist, so she's also very familiar with these kind of frameworks. But we try to come up with phrases and with statements that allow to connect to the 12 principles that I mentioned that so basically we, we have for each of the 12 principles, three sets of statements where you can decide if a statement represents you or not. And why three, because we also try to assess the emotional as well as the cognitive and the behavioral aspect of a principle. 
Who doesn't know about air pollution or pollutions through through industrial agriculture. It's just something we read about, but knowing about it doesn't necessarily mean that we do something about it. It seems like people only start to become active if they also engage their emotions, but if we assess these three for each of the principles, we get a snapshot, or it's the mapping of the place where you are on your journey towards a mindset. 
Based on these questions we developed, of course there is an algorithm behind it, but you get a, a report, you get a personal report that guides you if you want to try it, to proceed on this journey. Nothing is normative, so also you don't get a score. It's not like, wow, you have 90 out of a 100, because that's not, that's not productive in that context because we want to have a paradigm shift and we want to guide people in this paradigm shift if they're willing to, to take that journey.
The report is about thirty pages, so it's an enormous amount of material. There are some graphs that show you where, which aspects are less developed than others. So you can first focus on that part. You can jump back and forth in the report and see what speaks to you at a certain phase in your life and what you want to work on.
And around that we developed training programs. We started with training programs for educators because originally we thought that the assessment tool would be very useful in the development of leaders in the, in the academic context in universities. And now we're reaching out towards the coaching community because we think that there's also a huge interest in coaches to learn how they can help their clients in turn to develop such a mindset and to become leaders, as you said, yourself, leaders towards sustainability.
Stephen Matini: If someone starts gaining a greater awareness about being a sustainable, what would you say that would be some of the practical benefits on a personal and a professional level? What would I see?
Beate Klingenberg: At the end there is much more satisfaction with what you're actually doing. You're not just going somewhere, working your eight hours, and at the end of the day, you're coming home, you're happy about your paycheck. 
If I go back to what I said before, this understanding of the connectedness of us with our natural environment and us as people, if, if I can go to work and I can say what I did today is actually meaningful, not only in the sense that I produced something somebody else can buy or I offered a service somebody needed, but that it connected to the, to the essence what we are to the human side of us, it will be much more satisfactory to be more the person instead of just being the hamster in in the wheel.
Stephen Matini: I had a big question for you. Well, it's big and it's not. What do you hope to leave behind with your work?
Beate Klingenberg: It doesn't matter that my name or I am attached to something, but it’s ... I think it would be a very good feeling for me simply to know that something has gotten into motion that people start to think differently. 
I'll give you an example. I actually used the sustainability mindset principles as well as the indicator in the class in the fall semester. The students used the indicator, so I knew a little bit what the group looks like as a total. I did certain exercises, interventions, discussions with them, and at the end they wrote reflective essays. 
And in the reflective essays I could read that I've actually reached some of them. Some of them started to state as like, I'm after this class, I'm looking at my studies in a different way. I'm looking at my world in a different way. I'm starting to question my own behaviors. I'm starting to listen more to myself, various aspects where just feels, I guess something was set into motion that makes me, I feel, I feel glad for that person that I was able to trigger something.
Stephen Matini: That feeling you are describing, I describe it as the gentle reminder, that awareness, that feeling that I will not be forever. I want to enjoy it as much as possible, this whole path, as long as it will be, and hopefully is going to benefit people, they're gonna stay here longer that I do. 
It's not something that makes me feel sad, but it's nice. It's a warning of using my time in a way that is mindful, is productive, you know, not just doing, doing, doing, but also being and allowing other people to beat someone of value. 
You are truly one of those few people that I know that have had the courage to change. When you think about hard moments in your life, when you felt stuck, you know, in a rut, were there anything that you specifically did to get out of, of being trapped there?
Beate Klingenberg: That's not an easy question to answer, because sometimes the process wasn't entirely conscious from being in a situation that was really awful to suddenly being able to reach out and, and do something. 
Quite a few years ago, I, I would think at least 12, 13, 14 years ago, two colleagues of the university in the U.S. were worked convinced me to go rock climbing with them. I was very athletic at the time, so they said, oh, you can do that. We went once into a climbing center where there was just a, a wall, like 10 meters. 
And I actually, I thought, this is interesting because you have to be a little technical. You have to be a little strategic, and it's entirely satisfactory if you're up there. The only part I didn't like is that I had to get down again because I actually am, I don't like heights.
So they took me out after that on a real rock, and they had organized a guide. They were experienced climbers, but they, they said, okay, we want somebody else with us. What they didn't tell me is that the climb they had prepared for me to do was hundred meters . 
They just let me start and they said, anytime you don't feel like it, we can go back down. And eventually we came to a point, there were a lot of trees, so it was just straight up, absolutely straight up. I didn't really see what was happening. I was like, okay, we're going up. We're going up. And then I had to move myself around the corner of the rock, and it was suddenly in the open. And then it was a very difficult move I had to make. It was a very high grab, and then I had to pull myself up and I didn't make it.
The guide was ahead of me and my two colleagues were under me, and they said, well, we can go down, but it's going to be difficult at this stage. And then the guy had said, okay, let you, you sit in this harness and you said, let dangle just for a while, don't ... relax your muscles. So I was dangling in my seat, some probably 60, 70 meters above ground. And then I said, okay, I'll try it again. 
And I did, and it worked and my colleagues later said, they were absolutely convinced that we had to go down at this stage. They were so amazed that I got my strengths together in a way and pull myself out, literally speaking. And I think, although this is not a very precise answer to your question, that's what it is. At some point, there is a collection of energy and, and willingness inside me  that say, okay, this has to stop, or I have to do something.
It was this suddenly listening to myself and realizing somewhere inside myself, there is the strength to do it. And it's not that I necessarily think specifically, oh, what am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? But I let things flow. And that's very often when that moment happens where I can then say, okay, now, now there is this piece of strength I should add to that, that I did a lot of martial arts in my life, so I know about the chi, about the center of your energy. And then it's suddenly theres, then it's suddenly ready and it will not be easy, but you say, okay, now I can do the next step and pull myself out.
Stephen Matini: And maybe to find the strength, as you said, you need to dangle a little bit ...
Beate Klingenberg: Yeah. Yes. There needs to, there needs to be, I mean, the dangling was entirely scary. I have to be very, very very honest. It's, even when I talk about it, I get sweaty hands. It was a scary moment, and I said, oh, now we have to go down all of that, so I better, I better try to get me out of this situation. 
The recognition that something is happening to yourself that is really, really not good for you, even if it's difficult to try to change it, that at the end you know it will be better. Or it's like peeling layers of stuck-ness away from you, and with every little layer you get out of the energy increases, of course.
Stephen Matini: Is there anything that you would like the people that listen to this conversation to take away?
Beate Klingenberg: I think specifically when you asked about change and how to help yourself in difficult situations, then I think it's the suggestion to trust yourself that it's possible to find the energy inside yourself, and it will take time potentially to find it particular if you're not used to it. 
I'm thinking again, of these aspects of spirituality in the sustainability mindset. It's really that, it's like asking yourself, who am I? This being aspect, trusting yourself that there is something inside your, your being that you can trigger if you want to change. And then being trustful that there are people around you that are most likely willing to help you in whichever way it takes, be it practical or just talking or psychological support, whatever it may be.
Stephen Matini: A sustainable pace, that changes from person to person. And I believe recognizing what your pace is is absolutely crucial.
Beate Klingenberg: Yes, you're absolutely right with that. A person who's slower in taking the steps to change should not feel discouraged because somebody else is capable of doing something similar in a much faster pace.
Stephen Matini: You are one of the most fabulous people that I know. Thank you so much for these amazing thoughts that I'm so sure are going to warm a lot of people. Thank you so much.
Beate Klingenberg: Thank you, Stephen. That's a big, big thing that you just said, .

Be The Captain of Your Needs - The Life of An Unbroken Optimist - Featuring Kofi Douhadji

Life circumstances may sometimes appear discouraging and far removed from our biggest goals and dreams. That’s when we might feel voiceless, unrepresented, and trapped in a loop that leaves us with no options.
The guest of this episode of Pity Party Over is Kofi Douhadji, an American entrepreneur, executive coach, and airman in the United States Air Force. 
Growing up in the village of Afagnan in Togo, Africa, Kofi has learned early on the power of an optimistic and curious mindset that intentionally focuses on opportunities rather than letting circumstances define who he is.
His latest memoir, Unbroken Optimist, is a testament to Kofi’s tenacious and grateful attitude toward life. 
Listen to the episode on Amazon Music, Apple Podcast, Castbox, Castro, Deezer, Google Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Listen Notes, Overcast, Player FM, Pocket Cast, Pod Bay, Podbean App, Podchaser, Postcast Addict, Spotify, Sticher, TuneIn.
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Unbroken Optimist by Kofi Douhadji
https://www.amazon.com/Unbroken-Optimist-Kofi-Douhadji/dp/1737624354
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TRANSCRIPT
Stephen Matini: In your book, your dedication to your children, in which you say, “For the minute you start working for your freedom, that is the very minute you start losing it.”
Kofi Douhadji: Yes.
Stephen Matini: So why you wrote that?
Kofi Douhadji: I wrote that because I don't want my kids to take anything for granted. I want them to keep an eye on where we are coming from. And to know that success is like a rent. The minute you stop paying it, you're probably gonna go hit the streets. So I want them to, to know that it's a daily effort. You have to keep up your effort, you have to keep investing in yourself, growing, learning taking care of your responsibilities and everything. So I thought it was important for me to have my kids sink that in and know that their freedom is not a guarantee. Whenever they stop working for it, they're gonna lose it.
Stephen Matini: Do your kids have a, a sense of your upbringing?
Kofi Douhadji: They do. We talk about it a lot. I'm very big on conversation, so we talk a lot. And also we go beyond that and send them, for example, in 2022, they spent seven months in Togo where I grew up. It wasn't an easy decision to make, but for me, it was important for them to go and see, hey, where dad grew up. We are living a, a pretty decent life, they're living in their own rooms, they have their own beds, they eat whatever they feel like they want to eat on a daily basis, but I wanted them to go and see for themselves where I grew up. And that many people are not so fortunate as we are today. And I think even though my daughter is only 11, that brought her some perspective, I don't think she would've had otherwise.
Stephen Matini: And how do you feel now when you go back?
Kofi Douhadji: Personally, I haven't been back since then. 
Stephen Matini: Oh, you haven't out? 
Kofi Douhadji: I haven't. And I'm going in March. But from what I heard from my kids and my wife when they, they went back for several months, is that it makes you appreciate a lot more every single thing we have now here. And I know it's gonna be a very interesting experience for me going back
Stephen Matini: The circumstances, your experience were definitely super difficult. And somehow in those situations, without having anyone telling you how to do, you found the power of gratitude. Even in a difficult situation, you can always be grateful of many different things. And somehow that was your first paradigm shift.
Kofi Douhadji: Yes.
Stephen Matini: How did you do that by yourself, so young?
Kofi Douhadji: I would attribute the first trigger to providence, and I would attribute the second one to curiosity. I was very curious. There was this, there is this hospital that non-profit from Italy built in my village about 10 or 12 miles away from my, my village where we lived. I discovered this beautiful library in the hospital growing up, and there was one nun that came from Italy periodically to the hospital, her name is Clementine. I would spend time with her even though books I couldn't read when I was in high school, I will ask her to read and explain it to me. That reading books like that with her and having her explain certain concept to me, brought me to the realization that, hey, with controlling your mindset and being mindful and intentional about the things you wanna achieve, you can change your life. And I, I would attribute mindset shift to reading starting from that moment where I started reading through the library at the hospital, and also something in me that I can't describe that pushed me toward that place.
Stephen Matini: Other than Clementine, were there other people in your life early on that you considered to be influential that somehow have shaped the way you think?
Kofi Douhadji: I think there were, but again, when you grow up in a village where you know almost everyone in the village and people don't really have a futuristic vision, it's hard to have someone in your circle to look up to. When you are dreaming about stuff, people don't even encourage you to dream about. So I think most of the people that I consider that have shaped my life growing up are mentors met in the book. Like I like to refer to them. So some of those people, I met them in a book.
Stephen Matini: My life growing up was different than yours and in many ways was it was a different life. You know? However, there were a lot of parts of my life that I didn't like. And I remember pretty early on I learned how to escape in my head and books and games. There was, I think, something that I did in order to basically survive, you know? And I would really wonder what my life could be. And I would always say to myself, one day, I would have a different life, a very special life. So that curiosity for me came also as a form of how do you say it? Like escapism, you know, as a way to cope with very difficult situations.
Kofi Douhadji: Absolutely. I did have almost the same approach. You know, I would just go sit by myself on a farm under an orange tree, and just imagine things happening, a better life, an extraordinary life, and dream about it, visualize it, and just dwell on those feeling I would run following an airplane, flying over the village as fast as I can, as far as I could until it's nowhere to be seen un and then I'll stop, and then I'll just imagine myself being on that airplane one day. So I can relate to that es escapism, if you will.
Stephen Matini: If someone doesn't have that, doesn't have the ability either to escape or to focus on something positive or maybe doesn't have the innate curiosity, do you think that optimism can be learned?
Kofi Douhadji: Absolutely. Absolutely. I think anyone can learn to be more optimistic. And optimism is a mindset that can be developed with practice, just like any other skill. Some ways to do that I have worked for me is reframing negative thoughts when challenging situation happen, challenge negative thoughts, a more positive light, instead of saying, for example, I cannot do this, say, I haven't done this yet, I never done it before, but I can learn. And I think as human beings, our ability to learn and grow should be enough for us to be confident in ourselves. 
For example, as an officer in the United States Air Force, I was recently put in a position myself where I took leadership of my first flight with people who are older than me, have more experience than me from a different career field leading a flight that operates in a different career field.
But instead of feeling overwhelmed, worrisome about what's going to happen, the way I process the information for myself is, wow, this is going to give me the opportunity to do something I've never done before. 
So I started thinking, who can I reach out to to help me plan this out? What can I do to set myself up for success? When I start doing this, it's gonna help me become a better leader and give me more experience, therefore, I can lead better in the future. And instead of being worried and anxious, I was excited and thankful for the fact that I have this opportunity to serve people and grow along the way. 
Also, practicing gratitude, starting each day with a grateful heart can be really helpful to growing a more optimistic outlook on things and on life in general. Take each day to reflect on what you have. Feel grateful. I call it my counting my blessing practice. Every morning I will take a piece of paper and I'll start writing all the things that I'm grateful for until I can no longer have a space on that sheet of paper. And then I'll start. Most of my days, I start them like that.
Surrounding yourself with positive people. Seek out people who have a positive outlook on life and support and encourage you. Being around them. Being around positive energy can be very contagious and help you develop a more optimistic outlook or mindset. 
One last practice or approach that worked for me is focusing on solution, not problems. When facing challenges, try to focus on finding a solution rather than dwelling on the problem itself and how crushing and putting up a pity party for that problem instead of doing so. 
When you focus on the problem, you increase your chances of finding a solution. I always tell my coaching client that it is not about the size of the control you have in life, but it's all about how much use you make of the little control you have that makes the difference. 
Remember that developing, you know, a more optimistic outlook or any other skill takes time. Practice persistent and foremost, consistency. So when you engage on your journey to building a more optimistic perspective or mindset be patient with yourself, be gracious with yourself and understand that you are both a masterpiece and a work in progress. And be kind to yourself.
Stephen Matini: What would you say that are the things that kill optimism?
Kofi Douhadji: I will start with negative thinking and negative people. You can be around someone who is positive. If you don't accept yourself, accept the fact that you can to build that positive outlook on life, it's hard for you to become a positive person. So when you are around people who are always complaining, drowning, drowning your energy out of you that can kill optimism. 
Not being able to make a difference between your needs and your wants can also kill optimism. Thinking, wow, I want, I need this, I need this, I need this. I always say that we are the captain of what needs. We decide beside the basic foundational needs for us to stay alive and healthy. Everything else, we decide what is a need or not. 
With that knowledge, we have the power to design a life that is built on abundance in a sense that you are not more happy because you have more, but you are happy because you need less. And since we are the captain of our needs, we decide how much more we need. And that powerful ability for us to decide what we need makes life that much more enjoyable when we know, yes, there is more out there, but I'm going to stop here and enjoy what I have.
Stephen Matini: Why do you think so many people seem not to be the captains of their needs?
Kofi Douhadji: So many people fail to be the captain of their needs because they have society decide for them. They have other people define success for them. Success for you, Stephen might be different than what success is for me. So when we start comparing ourselves and wanting to be like other people, then we lose the ability to be the captain in command of our needs.
Stephen Matini: There are also a couple of things that I hear talking to people. One is probably fear. And fear is a term under which there's all kinds of different things, but fear often blocks people from moving forward. It could be the fear of losing a certain status, the fear of losing love. Choosing the right thing for you sometimes means to say bye to certain people, certain situations. And some people really struggle with it. If someone is still deeply attached to something, or someone, because of love or whatever habit, whatever that is, and somehow seems to have a hard time moving on, what would you say it is a first step?
Kofi Douhadji: Tell them they're gonna die.
Stephen Matini:
Kofi Douhadji: Tell them they're gonna die one day. And whether they want it or not, they like it or not, they're gonna be forced to lose everything, not just that one thing. And also tell them, the world is a place of abundance. There's a lot of everything. There's enough for all of us. 
Losing something is just as important as gaining something. And you can choose not to, you know, dwell in the lost and go find something new. Or you can choose to dwell in the last and still face the fact that what you lost is gone. So which one is more helpful? Adding more pain to what is already a fact or being grateful it happened and move on. 
So I think ultimately it's a choice. You can only change what you can control. And if you cannot control it, whether you embrace it, you change it, or you suffer for nothing.
Stephen Matini: Do you ever struggle with moving on?
Kofi Douhadji: I do. I do. I'm not gonna gonna shy away. We are human beings. Sometimes it's difficult whether it is a, a beloved one, whether it's a business you're working on, a project, a friend, something, a car. Sometimes it's difficult because you unconsciously build bounds with things with people. And sometime you don't realize until you lose them. 
What works for me is, yes, I'm gonna die. It could be tomorrow. It could be in 10 years. It could, could be far in many, many years, but ultimately that is the only truth. I can for sure tell you for sure that's gonna happen in my life. With that being said, I'm going to lose everything. So losing some now is fine. Just move on and go get other things. There's so much more out there to explore. There's so much more out there to have. And sometimes you can only pick up more oranges when you drop all the rocks in your hands.
Stephen Matini: I express the same concept by saying, you need to shut some doors to open new ones.
Kofi Douhadji: Definitely.
Stephen Matini: I love the thought one day you're going to die, which maybe sounds very scary to a lot of people. And I'm not saying that I'm not scared of dying, but I have to say that as time goes by, as I'm aging like anyone else, I am becoming more and more sensitive to what you're saying, as somehow is just a gentle reminder of not wasting my time now, now is the most important thing, and I should try to make the best out of it. And often times that's a huge motivator for me to, to do stuff, you know, to contribute.
Kofi Douhadji: In my family we sit and we talk about death. We talk about losing someone we love. We have a conversation about it. We try to do that every weekend. People would disagree that young kids can have that conversation. But I'm from a culture where that is praised. Not only does it train the kids, if anything unfortunate happens, but it also give them perspective and help them build that sense of urgency. 
It's not about the length of their life, but it's about the quality and the impact you can have on other people. Death is part of life. You can have the one without the other. And ignoring it or being in denial is not gonna change it whether we talk about it, yes, some people are superstitious, I am on certain aspect too. But disregarding something doesn't change. It's true nature. Yeah, I, I think considering that kind reminder for myself on a daily basis have helped me a lot with decreasing the amount of procrastination in my life, embracing a sense of urgency in everything I do.
Stephen Matini: Urgency is an important word for you.
Kofi Douhadji: Urgency is one of my favorite words in the entire whole dictionary for many, many reasons. You know, I attempted an artistic career, a music career back in Togo, which I failed to do. But during that process, writing songs and, and making music, there's this specific song I wrote, but I was waiting for it to be perfect. 
I will go back to the studio and have my song recording engineer go back and change things over and over again. He was tired of me of the project, of everything, but hey, he's working for me so , he's gonna do what I wanna achieve. 
So fast forward, I was in my car driving down to work one morning, and this song, this new song came on only to be shocked how similar the genre, the, the lyric. Everything was so similar that I myself could hardly believe if I put my song out that I didn't steal that person's idea.No one would believe it. So I never put that song out and that was my first reminder that you have to, to have a sense of urgency in life. 
Fast forward, I met this great man, we served together in the Air Force. He's such a beautiful soul. When I was leaving for training last year, we were testing back and forth, hey bro, I need to see you before I leave. He'll be like, Kofe, stop it, you are coming back. You know, we can hang out when you, you get back. 
I'm like, no, I just don't wanna see you. And the family share some hugs before I leave and I kept going back until he's like, fine coffee, let's meet Sunday. And we did that, spent time. And I can still to right now as I'm talking, feel how we squeezed each other. When we, we hugged the last time I was leaving, can you believe during my training, I found out he passed, he passed away.
It's always difficult when I talk about it always, every single time it's painful. But I'm happy and glad that we had that moment that I get to see him before I left, that I get to spend time with him. I can remember his face, his smile and everything. The smell of his hair when we hugged. That was a friend. 
So a sense of urgency. We always think we have time, but we don't. We are running out of time every single minute. We are running out of time. And that's how I see it. I have a lot of things to do, a lot of ideas I wanna bring to life, but I'm running out of time. So I have to put a sense of urgency in that I wanna stop. I want to be present and listen. I wanna go tell someone, make it known to them that I appreciate them. I don't want to give anything to tomorrow because I might not see tomorrow
Stephen Matini: With the sense of urgency, you seem to be a person that does a ton of things. You accomplish it so much , so much. So how do you make everything happen? Where do you find the time?
Kofi Douhadji: For me, it all boils down to management, management of resources, time, the self family, your team, your hobbies. I think it all boils down to self-knowledge, self-management, self-leadership, and then combining all that to make sense. 
I personally don't go with the work life balance mindset. I think of it more on a harmony perspective. Try to build harmony. If you take your favorite song, it has multiple instruments playing at the same time on multiple levels. Sometime the guitar is higher than the piano, sometime the voice takes the lead. 
That's how, what approach I use with my life sometime by prioritizing and using sense of urgency, you know, which instrument you wanna bring to the lead and what you wanna turn down a little. And just giving it harmonies and building the music you love. 
So for example, when I'm at work during my breaks, I take my guitar and I sit down and I play. While that allows me to decompress and break away from what I do, it gives me that space to distress and to relax and to recover. 
So finding those little ways to make things happen will be determinant in being able to do things that people can perceive as you are doing a lot, but you are just being mindful with how you use your time. 
When it come to the business side of the house though, I think something we look over a lot is teamwork. When you take my publishing company Flying Wings, I'm good at stealing the credit, but there's a team behind doing all the difficult stuff. If you are building a company that when you get sick or when you die cannot survive, then you are just, I mean, it's not meaningful in, in my opinion. So I'm building something that can outlive me. I'm building something that is not gonna stop when I'm gone. I want it to, to be here after I'm gone. 
Yeah. When I'm here or I'm working as an officer in the United States Air Force and people think, how are you able to run a publishing, a whole publishing company? Yes, I don't, my team do and I just create time to be there with my team when they need me to provide the vision, the support, and create the resources they need to get the job done and build the network they need to support them. You might see me being up in front about Flying Wings as a publisher. That's the team. The team is what en enables me to make it happen. 
Also, building processes, something that you can build and repeat. For example, I'm very present on social media. I used to think the number of followers doesn't matter, but I've changed my mind. It's very important how much people follow you on social media. You know, it's very important, but that's not the topic here. The topic is that when you can build processes, it helps manage time and resources better. 
When I have time on the weekend, there are tools that I use to schedule my post throughout the day or the week. When I die ... I know I talk a lot about a lot about dying. When I die, my social media platforms will post at least three months before it stops because I have a process in place. 
When I have time, I create content and schedule them out. So you might see me in my uniform doing military stuff. You'll be there with me and all of a sudden I'm posting on social media. So it’s, it's all about managing and building processes that are a sustainable,
Stephen Matini: A lot of people would love, or they dream of ... to have their own company, pursuing their dreams and what you just said is so important. Finding the right people, the right team. How do you select the right people?
Kofi Douhadji: It takes a lot of different things. For me, the most important thing is trust, integrity, and the willingness to fail. When I am interviewing my people, I'm prospecting to bring on the team. If you're trying to portray yourself to me as you know it all, you're strong, you're smart. You, you are talking to me about all your achievement. I will ask you about all your failures. I'm more interested in your failures. 
Those people who have failed the a lot of time, but still have the drive to win, those are who I want on my team. I've started things multiple times. I've been beginner at multiple things. I want people who can have the same drive because when we fail, not if, when, when we fail, I want people who are going to remain motivated and thrilled to keep going. People who find the joy in the journey.
Stephen Matini: You have so many interests. Of all these interests, is there any of your activities that somehow give you the biggest pleasure?
Kofi Douhadji: Absolutely. I would say coaching my bread and butter where I find a lot of fulfillment. I work with junior leaders stepping into their first leadership positions to build confidence, develop their own personal toolbox that they can use to navigate their first leadership positions. 
I also work with the seasoned and experienced leaders going to crisis or change in their organizations to gain clarity and build a roadmap that they can use to navigate the crisis or the change they're going through. Going from, oh my gosh, we are crashing, what are we gonna do, to actually next week? We need to do so and so, so that in two months this burning building here can be under control. When I see that happen, that's the most rewarding situation for me. So yeah, coaching is definitely where I find most of, of my pleasure.
Stephen Matini: There are so many thoughts and ideas about leadership. 
Kofi Douhadji: Yes. 
Stephen Matini: Based on your experience, what would you say that are the most important components to keep in mind about leadership development?
Kofi Douhadji: John C. Maxwell said, leadership is influence. You cannot influence people if you're not walking the talk. You cannot do that if you don't have integrity. I always tell my airmen that I, you have my trust, you don't need to earn it, but don't lose it. 
I think the most important things is to start with self-leadership. Everyone wants to lead others, but most of the time we overlook the self leadership. It all start with the self knowing yourself, being able to lead yourself before you can lead others. 
The most important second thing I could talk about when it comes to leadership, the best leaders are the best followers. The best leaders are able to switch into a followership position in a split of a second. They know they're serving, they know leadership is not a position, but it's influence. 
The Air Force has helped me tremendously on multiple level, becoming a better person, a better leader. The force has invested in me than any other organization has ever invested in me. I think I became a better leader. I gained better tools thanks to the Air Force.
Stephen Matini: Is there anything that you would like those who will listen to this episode to know?
Kofi Douhadji: I would love everyone who would come across this episode of Pity Party Over to know that they are amazing. Whatever your dream is, I know you have what it takes to get it done. You are worthy and none of the situations currently going on in your life does not take or add to your worth. You are worthy and you will always be worthy. And don't let the situations define you. You define what you do.
Stephen Matini: That will bring a lot of warmth to a lot of people. Thank you, Kofi.
Kofi Douhadji: Thank you very much for the honor and the opportunity to share sometimes with you and your audience.

Making Intentional Choices by Listening to Your Instincts - Featuring Dr. Lindsey Godwin

In our personal and professional lives, we all spend much time pondering problems, but focusing excessively on them may not help us overcome a challenge as quickly as we wish. 
The guest for this episode of Pity Party Over is Dr. Lindsey Godwin, one of the most influential voices for appreciative inquiry, emotional intelligence, and experiential learning theory.
Whereas problem-solving focuses on deficits, appreciative inquiry is an approach to positive change that leverage strengths. 
For Dr. Godwin, inquiring means paying attention to our thoughts, emotions, and bodily signals to make intentional choices on what is important to us.
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TRANSCRIPT
Stephen Matini: I would like to know something about your upbringing, if there were any special people, events that somehow have shaped and contributed the most to where you are today?
Dr. Lindsey Godwin: I would say my upbringing and yeah, the people in my early life had a tremendous impact on who I am and how I see the world completely. I grew up in a small town in West Virginia, sort of rural Appalachia, West Virginia Buchanan, West Virginia, where sort of many generations of my family were from. So it's sort of a lot of roots there too. Right. 
My grandparents were from there. My parents, you know, I was born in the same hospital my mom was , sort of all of that. Small, you know, small town sort of life where everybody knows everybody. So had a very sort of close-knit family where I had my, my grandparents were, both of my grandparents were sort of sets of, my grandparents were very active in my life. In fact my, my one grandparents were literally my next door neighbors.
So we had like dinner together, like a multi-generational dinner together every night. Which I realize now is not always, is not necessarily a typical normal thing in our modern world. And so I had a really sort of beautiful intergenerational upbringing. And part of that too, the closeness of our family and even the having my grandparent feel close. 
I'm the oldest of four children, and so that also impacts, I think, my personality, right? The sort of the oldest child and all of that stuff is true. , all of that oldest child stuff, I think is totally true. 
And I had two younger brothers and a younger sister, and my most immediate younger brother when he was three months old, he contracted infant botulism and through medical, different medical issues and actually some medical accidents at the hospital, some medical malpractice issues that happened at the hospital, when he was in the hospital recovering from his illness, he actually lo lost oxygen to his brain and, and different things. 
And so he ended up being profoundly mentally and physically impaired. He basically was permanently sort of mentally three months old. And so, although his body continued to grow normally, his cognitive ability was stunted at, at three months of age. 
And so he was non-verbal you know, couldn't feed or walk or talk. He basically communicated and interacted like a three month old so he could recognize voices and he would, you know, could laugh and, and and reacts again, much, much like you imagine like a three month old baby interacting. And so our whole family was really focused around his care and his needs. And so from a, I was three. I was three. I'm the oldest, right? And so he was three years younger than me. 
And so, and then my other siblings are younger than him. And so our, our household really learned that taking care of other people is something that we just do inherently without asking. And sort of the idea of, you know, looking at, at the needs of other people around us, I think was something that we saw day in and day out. 
And also the fragility of life, right? We saw that sort of day in and day out because he did have sort of fragile health. And in fact, he when I was, I was a senior in high school, so I was about 18 and he was 15. He had a massive seizure in his sleep and passed away at our, our house. So he al we always lived with us, right? And so even just the going through that right as a family and losing losing anybody is traumatic and, and such an impact on us. But I think that that all of that totally obviously had an impact on me. 
Also growing up, my grandfather was a, a Methodist minister, two uncles and a cousin who are Methodist minister. So there was a lot of also sort of this idea of, you know, again, focused on taking care of others and how can we sort of be servant leaders in the world, I guess is really from both, literally in my household, you know, being so focused on being such a, a primary caregiver to somebody who had special needs to growing up in a family where service and sort of asking, you know, how, how can we help other people? 
You know, my mother, my grandmother were teachers, my dad's a pharmacist. So there was a lot of , a lot of sort of service, service to the world. And so I think that I realized, I realized it then, but I definitely realized it now looking back how much that was an imprint on me in terms of A) believing that I can be of service first of all, right? So that self-efficacy belief of like i, I can be of service and of help in the world is hardwired in me, I guess, to where it's you know, I've seen in other situations. 
There was also a unique optimism in my family where, you know, this, this is, it is in so many, it's a tragic story, right? What happened with my brother? And it could easily sort of rip a family apart, right? I mean, I saw that with other families. So, you know, leading to divorce, leading to all kinds of things. And if anything, it made our family stronger. Like I said, my grandparents, you know, lived right next door to us, were so involved in helping to, to raise us and stuff. 
And so there was also, it might sound paradoxical in the face of something that really was quite tragic, was that there was a lot of optimism, and not, not optimism, but like he was magically going to be better, but optimism in the sense of we can still create a life of love and goodness and, and stuff. And so, so I think that those things really just were so hard. So yeah, not hardwired and lived day in and day out in my household. 
And so when I find myself now being called into like education, higher education, and then my work with appreciative inquiry and sort of, you know, positive psychology and all of that, and working with organizations to try to help them be their best self, right, leverage their assets and stuff, I realized, you know, that that comes from a very primal place in me, if that makes sense.
Stephen Matini: This event made your whole family a family of service. How did you find out what was gonna be your specific way to be of service to people?
Dr. Lindsey Godwin: Oh, that's a great question. And I, being in this space where I saw you know, my, my brother had unique attributes, different than other people and stuff, but I also became very aware of my own abilities too, right? In the face of, of having such different abilities than my brother. 
And so I was a really good student. I was a straight A student. I was valedictorian of my high school class. I always knew that I wanted to, I had a long, a long vision of myself going all the way in school. It was no question I was going to college. I was like, gonna get like higher ed degrees. 
Again, back to remembering that I lived in this, in, in West Virginia, in this town where I would say the majority of my people that I graduated with, a lot of them were first generation to go to college, some of them, right?
Where I grew up in a, in a family where education was my, you know, my grandfathers both had higher degrees, which wasn't the norm in terms of the population that I was living in. And so education was a very, was a very valuable thing in our household as well. Cuz I think my parents also realized that that was the path to having options, right? To having different options in the world and, and things. 
So I was this straight a student and knew that I wanted to go all the way, and I had a, I knew I wanted to get a PhD. I had no idea what I wanted to get a PhD in. That didn't matter to me. I was just like, I'm gonna get a PhD. And I had visions of being a professor. 
I started off as a genetics major. Actually. I was gonna be a genetic counselor because that was part of my like, oh, I can help other families, I could help other families. And I have that sort of empathetic experience that I could bring to that. And, and maybe, maybe there is genetic things that could help, you know. So I was in this very sort of space with that. 
So I went off to college and I was a declared genetics major, and then I took my first psychology class and I just like, it's like sometimes when you meet people and you just fall in love with them. Like, I, I took this psychology class and I was like, oh my God, this is like the missing piece of the puzzle. And for, and of course I love my professor, so I like fell in love with her. But I fell in love with the like, field of psychology and I was like, you mean I can understand human nature and I can understand how people react.
And so I fell in love with psychology. And then of course I, I went on and I took sociology classes. I fell in love with sociology. I just, so I ended up I ended up Stephen being a psychology, sociology double major with a biology minor . So I joked that I was like, I just like studying people and trying to understand them like at all levels from the like, cellular level to the interpersonal level to the societal level. 
So I, I was sort of following my passion and my heart of like, this is interesting to me, this is it was like opening up, you know, it's like opening up your eyes and seeing new things when you're studying things you're in love with. And so again, I knew that I wanted to go on in education. I had no idea what, I had no idea , I wanted to do it.
I pressure, I was like, I knew I didn't wanna be a, a counselor actually, I did know that like, I again, knowing and seeing the, the weight of my own family, I was like, I don't know that I can hold that for other people day in and day out. So I actually knew I didn't wanna become a therapist, an individual therapist. 
And so upon graduation I started, I was like, well, but I know I'm gonna get another degree, so what is it? It was just like, it was like not even a class, like, I'm gonna get another degree, but what will it be at? I have no idea. 
And so I, I came across this program in conflict resolution at George Mason University, and it was like this wonderful intersection of, you know, the psychology and the sociology and even bio ..., you know, it was like all of these things. And so I like traipsed off to George Mason at what is now the, the, the Jimmy Carter School for Peace and Complex Studies at George Mason. 
And still with this, I think it was like, I was still trying to figure out how can I help? I mean, it was still this calling of like, how am I understanding and adding to my toolbox and my sense of understanding people so that I could show up as a better catalyst or support for positive change, right? I mean, those weren't the words I was using, but I realized that's what I was trying to do.
Stephen Matini: I love that you studied people from different angles. What have you learned about people so far?
Dr. Lindsey Godwin: I think, and I, I, my husband and I joke about this, at the end of the day, I always say, I was like, you know, at the end of the day, we all wanna be loved and seen and heard. I was like, it's so, I was like all of this complexity that like, you know, we've studied and all this stuff. I was like, you know, at the end of the day, all people want is to be loved and seen and heard. Like that's what we want. We want to just be seen and heard. And, and fundamentally I think, you know, it does actually come down to wanting to be loved. 
And so there is many, you know, master's degrees, a PhD, at the end of the day, I was like, it's actually pretty simple. What people want and need and what we're all trying to, I think, act out in different ways, whether that's in our family life, in our organizational life, it is when we see so many, you know, whether it's wrapped up as a communication challenge or a, or a, you know, it's whatever. It's like, well, what's going on? 
Or do people feel like they are being seen and loved and heard often? Not often not. When we see sort of the symptoms of all of the, the strife and the things it often comes down to, not that solutions are, are necessarily that easy, but I think that is a huge thing that I've learned just about human that has sort of resonated with at people that I see and work with, is that at the end of the day, I think that we are human and what makes us human.
Stephen Matini: Why do you think we make us so complicated as humans?
Dr. Lindsey Godwin: ? Oh my goodness, right? What a great question. If we knew the answer to that, Stephen, you and I would be millionaires, . I don't know. Maybe we're surprised that it could be that simple? My dear friend David Cooperrider always says, you know, that people, no organization was ever made to be a problem, right? Organizations are created to be solutions to things, right? They're created, whether it's a healthcare system or it's a, it's a service. 
Organizations are, structures aren't created to be problems. They're created to be solutions. And I think sometimes we get overcomplicated and we forget that. I think we forget that, you know, a we've created all this, like we've created our, if our structures aren't working for us, guess what? We created those and we can change them, right? I mean, not that it's not gonna take time or be messy or there's, you know, there's not all of the things with change that we know in the sense of fear and loss that come with change that's so natural and normal.
But I think that we, we forget, we forget like we create these entities to be a solution and then we sort of edify them or you know, and we forget that we've created them and then we feel like they start creating us. Somehow we change our behavior to fit into the system versus realizing actually, you know, the system... 
And we also I think are creatures of habit. I know I'm a creature of habit. I should just, maybe I should say the royal we, but me, I'm a creature of habit and many organizations and people I work with are creatures of habit. And so we also, I think get into our routines and we definitely, you know, there is comfort in our systems and stuff. And, and I understand right that, that there's then a sense of, of wanting to not change or keep sort of the status quo and all of the, like, this is how we've done it.
And so there's comfort in knowing that even though as we're seeing very increasingly rapidly now that our systems aren't getting us the results that we want anymore. Or in the ways that we do. And so it reminds us that we need to revisit that and make changes. But I think we do, right? We get, we create these things and then they kind of take a life of their own. And then we forget that we were the, we were the artists, we were the architects, , we were the, you know, we were the painters of all of that we're seeing. And that we could pick up a brush and sort of paint with new colors, even though that might be a little scary.
Stephen Matini: You're one of the most important voices for appreciative inquiry, emotional intelligence, experiential learning theory. How did you put together these ingredients? I mean, you just simply were drawn to them. I mean, how did it happen?
Dr. Lindsey Godwin: I love it, Stephen. And I wish I could say yes, but I had this magical recipe and that I knew what I was doing. But I think I was listening to my just like I sort of went off to study conflict resolution. I, I found myself through listening to my own instinct and stuff. I ended up from George Mason with my master's. I went to Case Western Reserve University to the Weatherhead School of Management to do my PhD. Cuz I told you I knew I wanted to get a PhD. 
I didn't know. And what, and so this this is so funny, it's almost embarrassing to say this. I was taking a class, I was at George Mason, 9/11 had just happened. So here I am in Washington DC 9/11 had just happened. I was the we had a university dispute resolution project that did mediation and dialogue work on campus that I was the director of.
Again, here we are in this, you know, historic moment, sort of at this epicenter in DC where there was a lot of conflict happening afterwards in terms of things happening with our student population. Everybody again, trying to make sense of what was going on. There was things happening. And here I was in this center, this conflict resolution center, these like professors were sort of the go-to people around the world that were, you know, and I looked at 'em and I realized like, they don't have this figured out either. 
What do you mean you don't, you know, he help us, like we're students here, we're trying to like, how do we show up in this moment, in this turmoil, in this crisis? And realizing that they really didn't either. I started again, I went back to my, what is my thing? My, my fallback is like, I need to learn something that my instinct is like I have to, there's something here for me to learn.
And so I actually started then taking classes outside of the institute. I ended up taking a course called Consulting for Organizational Change because I was like, okay, I've studied all this that and then like may, maybe the missing piece is the system piece. This, like you said, this organizational system, like what the, the sys the system that's broken and like is holding us into these, you know, non-functional relationships with each other. What's, you know, maybe that's what I need to study. 
I ended up taking a course with a woman Ann Baker who's phenomenal, who had been a student of David Kolb’s experiential learning theory at Case Western. And she knew I was looking at doctoral programs and she's like, I really think that you should go look at this doctoral program. I think you would really enjoy it. And I was like, okay. I knew nothing about, I didn't even really know what organizational behavior is.
I shouldn't say that out loud, but I didn't, I didn't know who David Cooperrider was. I didn't know what appreciative intelligence was. I didn't know what, I didn't know any of these things. I just knew that I was like searching. I was for knowledge to help me again, show up in this what felt like, you know, nobody knows really how to show up and be a positive catalyst in this moment. 
And so I was, I was, I felt like I was on a quest and I found myself, I was like, okay, well I'll look at this program. It was like the top rated organizational behavior program in the world. And it just so happened it's the top rated cuz there was just these amazing thought leaders that were there together at the same time. So I landed myself in this moment of time when, again, David Kolb of Experiential Learning Theory was one of my professors. 
And Richard Boyatzis with Emotional Intelligence was one of my professors. And David Cooperrider and Ron Fry were my professors. And I, I felt like coming home, people come there to study with them, right? And I was like, I didn't know any, I was like, just following my, I was like following my curiosity and my quest to sort of fill in what felt like gaps, my knowledge and my skill base. 
And somehow this mixture just really, it did feel like a magical recipe. I joke, right? Like, so it wasn't that I actively went to the cabinet and pulled out the ingredients. It was more, I think I fell over backwards in the kitchen and some stuff mixed together. And I realized that I had this beautiful thing that had been baked in terms of sort of studying and learning alongside of these amazing thought leaders and seeing how these different pieces go together.
I always joke like I'm sort of a boundary spanner. Relationally like I'm the kid that was like friends with people that weren't friends with each other. I was like in, in sort of academic world. Like I studied things like across disciplines, right? That people usually stay in one silo and then stuff. And I, I think maybe I'm more like a bumblebee . 
So I like the cross pollination and I really, I started doing work. I did some work with Dave Kolb and his wife Alice. And so I got some, some deeper knowledge and wisdom and really seeing how experiential learning and really can impact. And again, it just so resonated with how I learned and how I showed up in the world. 
I started doing writing with Richard in emotional intelligence. And then when I started doing applied work with David with organizations and before I knew it, I'm like going off to the United Nations and different projects, you know, David's around the world doing amazing things and bringing students with him.
So I had this sort of front seat learning with these amazing people. And so you're right, these were ingredients that to me felt like in and of themselves, one alone wasn't the answer. But together weaving them together really, like I said, sort of creates a new, it just again, helps me understand the world at a deeper level. 
And it helps me be a better interventionist because it gives me a wider tool set, it gives me a wider appreciation, it gives me a wider curiosity of the questions that I ask. And again, I wish I could say it was because I was so brilliant, I put them together and it was because I was brilliant enough to follow my curiosity, my instinct that this was gonna be a, an an intellectual home at case Western for me. And it led to, yeah, my discovery of these amazing fields that you will know are just each and of themselves impactful in the world and together, I think are just so rich.
Stephen Matini: Based on your experience, curiosity and instincts are the same thing?
Dr. Lindsey Godwin: Curiosity and instincts, are they the same thing? That is a good question. I've never thought of that. I think they are related, but not the same thing. Instincts are a form of intelligence. There is a wisdom in our instincts. I think that sometimes we've lost the sort of tapping into like our physical wisdom in our bo like you feel it, right? 
Like something feels right or like you meet a person and you, you either you have an instinct about them or a situation, you have an instinct about them to be an instinct is sort of that, yeah, that sort of innate wisdom that we have that we don't always listen to , but that we have this innate wisdom often at a cellular level, right? Like at a physical level, whether it's sits in our stomach like I'm holding my stomach right now, I feel it, or right. Or it sits in our, you know, our chest or our head. 
And it's more of a sense of how or what we wanna show up in a situation or what we wanna do. You know, like taking a new job, is this right or not for me? Is this, you know, do I wanna promote, you know, like whatever, whatever sort of coming our way, an instinct of do I go left or right versus curiosity. I mean we can have, I think instincts can lead to curiosity. 
I think curiosity is more of the question, right? The inquiring, it's then it's the act of then actively asking and getting that curious, right? So asking and inquiring, I wonder why I feel that way. I wonder why that is my, you know, where did that come from? Or you know, you can get curious about your instincts and it can go back to like, oh, it's because this was my experience when I was five and that's , right?
That's why, where did it come from? But I think they are different. But I think they’re maybe cousins or one, you know, can lead to the other. I think they can sort of point us, right? Our curiosity can, we can get in touch with our instincts by sort of getting curious about, well what am I really feeling right now? And okay, if I make that decision in my head, how does that feel in my body? Right? Like in getting curious can help us tune into our instincts and I think our instincts can help open up curiosity. That makes sense.
Stephen Matini: Maybe, and I'm thinking out loud, maybe curiosity is how instincts manifest themselves..
Dr. Lindsey Godwin: Hmm. How say more. That's really interesting. Like, yeah, I love that.
Stephen Matini: You know, I have a very coaching like question, which I hate to ask, but I cannot verbalize it in any other way. A as a result of all these ingredients which you found and you pursued through your curiosity and instincts. Now who have you become as a person? How have they affected you as a person?
Dr. Lindsey Godwin: Well, part of it too, I think for me is the learning. It's been, I've become a person who has learned to trust her instincts and curiosity. And that might not sound like a big deal, but I, again, I think you see this probably with definitely people that we coach with organizations, is that I think we actually often sec second guess or ignore that innate wisdom or we suppress our curiosity because we're in a system that's telling us that we should look this way and act this way and, and this is what we should want. 
And so I think I, I, I feel that I am a person that being on this path where I have sort of followed my curiosity, my instincts towards sort of certain, whether it's things I'm studying or positions that's led me to do things that other people think are crazy .
But, but that have have worked out, right? So like I, my husband and I, for example, were at, we're at a university together. We were on faculty at a university, we were on tenure track positions together before we moved to Vermont. There was this position that sort of appeared in my radar at this little school in Vermont. 
And they were talking about experiential learning. They were talking about business as a force for good. I had never been to Burlington, Vermont. I had never right? Like, and I, my, I was like, well, let's explore it. And so we explored this, it felt like this job had my name on it and we explored it. And so next thing I know we're like, you know, my husband and I are giving up tenure because the school that that I'm at now doesn't have tenure cuz it's a different kind of professionally focused school.
You know, we're selling our house, we're moving away from our family to go live in Vermont, which is beautiful. But as far away, we, my husband and I sort of operate like this together. People thought we were crazy. People thought, like, my colleagues, you know, they're like, what are you doing ? What, what's going on? Like, what are, what do you mean you're like, you know, you, you have like tenure at this other place basically. 
So sometimes it leads me to do things that don't seem quite rational to other people that are sort of going step by step, like in the system that is created to do, to say yes to things, right? So again, playing on, in having the opportunity to collaborate with amazing people like David Cooperrider, right? Like he's invited me to do projects and I've been connected up with people around the world that's like organized and we'll plan a world conference in Nepal.
I had never done that, you know, in the moment. I was like, what was I thinking when I said yes to some of these different things that have just because they feel right? So I think it's, it's a long-winded answer to say, I think these different ingredients grounded me in like being an honoring my experience and also seeking out new experiences to learn from or the emotional intelligence definitely sort of tuning into the my emotions and the emotions of other people and sort of navigating the world that way. 
And then of course, appreciative inquiry. Inquiry is the verb , right? Like is inquiring and intentionally seeking out what is here that is giving life to me, to my family. And it doesn't have to make sense to other people. It doesn't have to fit into somebody's box of this is what my career should look like.
You know, again, I graduated from Case (Western), like, people were like, oh, I'm gonna go off to like a tier one research school. Well I knew I wanted to be at a teaching school because I knew that that's where my heart was, is I wanted to be an experiential teacher myself, I wanted to, I wa doesn't mean I still don't write and do academic things, but I'm not, that wasn't my vision for myself, even though it was maybe some other people's vision for me. 
You know, following and, and continuing to decisions and really trying to navigate the world from that place of instinct and inquiry. What is it that feels right and I know is right in my heart? And getting really curious about the, you know, from that appreciative inquiry space of what is giving life and energy to me and my family. And it doesn't have to make sense to other people.
Stephen Matini: Everyone wants to be loved, it wants to feel connected, you know? And and now we're talking about instinct. We're talking about the importance of being curious, you know, of constantly inquiring. I don't know how it works for other people, but I have to say that I made my life really complicated in the past because I did what you said. I second guessed my instinct. And I've done that most of my life. You know, the instinct was there, I knew, but in many situations was at some point afraid of making the decision. Have you always trusted your instinct or, I don't know, like me was you, you had to learn this along the way?
Dr. Lindsey Godwin: I know it's like, it's a, it's a cheap answer if I say sort of both actually. P paradoxically actually, if I get serious, paradoxically, I think that early on, and I think through even just the, like, you know, here I had just like lost my brother went off to college. I was very tuned into like, it was actually the first time, right? It was the first time. Like I went off to college. It was the first time like I could focus on what do I want, right? 
Like, cuz it wasn't, my life wasn't swirling around taking care of somebody else. And so it was sort of this opening moment for me to be like getting really in tune with my instincts. And so I think I had this wonderful sort of several chapters of my life where I was really tuned into following my instincts, following my curiosity.
And like I said, that led me to sort of case that led me to sort of then professionally land. It led me up here to Vermont to do this amazing work that I'm doing at the, the center and, and working with organizations. And I think actually in the past, I've been now here for 11 years going on 12 years. And that's the longest I've ever been in one place, one institution. 
I think I'm actually working to not reawaken, not that they're asleep, I don't know what verb I am. Maybe they need dusting off. I think maybe I've become a little, taking it for granted. I need to find the right verb. What is the right verb of of I think maybe ru I don't know if it's a rusty. I, I, I don't know Stephen, if you have a verb here, sort of like.
Stephen Matini: You got comfortable.
Dr. Lindsey Godwin: I got comfortable! That's a great thank you. Right? So it's like, I think that like I, my instincts took me to this beautiful place and like created this life that I love with my family and doing work that I'd always dreamed about. I'm a co I am a, I'm a full professor. I've won the awards and I've written the things and I've done the stuff. 
So now I'm kind of, and it started, I had a sabbatical in 2019. My first sabbatical was this wonderful gift in academia and just starting to try to reawaken and maybe check in with my instincts and my curiosity to make sure, and I'm sort of on that quest right now and it's active work that I'm doing right now to be like, how do I wanna continue to build? What is my next chapter? What is my next chapter individually, collectively with my family, you know, so that I'm not operating just from a place of comfort, just like we talked about with organizations, right?
Like, this is what it looks like and this is what it feels like and this is what my roles are. And I am starting to more intentionally check back in with my instincts. Where is my energy? There are, you know, new, new things I'm wanting to write about and talk about and put out into the world and what does that look like? 
And oh, does that mean that then my life still looks like this box? Or do I need to actually, it needs to look like an octagon or it needs to work. And so, you know, and then everybody has an opinion too, right? Like, oh, you should leave higher ed. Oh, you should be a full-time consultant. Oh no, you should, you know, everybody has opinions. 
And so it is going back to, and, and tapping back into my instincts, like it's sort of tuning all of that noise out and really sort of doing the work. Here I am at this stage in my life and my career and my kids are in high school and I still have so much more that I wanna do and be in, create and offer in the world. What is that gonna look like and how and where is the best place to do that? And it's not an either or, how am I continually actively creating what I want and what gives me life and what I think gives me an opportunity to add value in the world in new ways and not just being comfortable.
Stephen Matini: There's a wonderful master coach, his name is Michael Stratford. One day I asked, I said, how would I know that I'm right? And he says, righteousness, when he feels right., which seems to be such a simple answer, but it's true. And for me, like there's this sense of .. YES, that I have to go that way, you know? If someone were still in a phase of doubting herself, you know, her instinct, what would you say that could be the first step to be more reliant on that, on listening to that voice?
Dr. Lindsey Godwin: When I'm thinking about the righteousness thing, I think that's so true, . That is so true. I love that. I think the advice that I have, whether it's an an individual, organization, I always start from a, a place of small steps to just take a baby step and like experiment. Like just with my kids who are picky eaters and don't wanna try anything. I was like, you don't have to eat the whole hamburger. Just take like one bite. It's sort of finding like, where can we give ourselves the opportunity to experiment where I'm not gonna lose my job. I'm not gonna , I'm not gonna totally like, you know, fall apart ... 
Stephen Matini: Safe.
Dr. Lindsey Godwin: There's a safe space in it, but also that it does push me, right? So like, it's, it's safe. Like we're on the, we're ice. I always like, I'm terrified of like pond ice skating here in Vermont. You know, you're not gonna fall through the ice , but you're on the ice. 
One thing. What's one thing today that you can really try out, you know, make a decision about what, based on how you're, not how you're thinking, but how you're feeling. See how that goes. 
Great advice that I've been given that I do myself as like I try on decisions like clothes we're so out of touch with how we feel cuz we're so in our head, my dear colleague, she was like, you should, you should live in a decision for 24 hours and try it on like a coat. 
First of all, recognize and we often have more time to make a decision than we give ourselves. But if you can can really sort of in your head be like, fine, I'm gonna try on the yes to this, right? Somebody's asked me to do something and I'm gonna try on the yes.
So I'm gonna live in my head and my body for like 24 hours that like I have said yes to this ask whatever it is. And like, how does that feel? Do you, do you, does your stomach hurt cuz you're thinking about it? Are you excited? Like just noticing, right? And then switch, like then sort of be like, nope, I'm gonna say no to this and live with the, like I'm saying no to this. And what does that feel like and what, you know. So part of it is sort of the giving ourselves even the, the space and the exercise of, of listening, right? Getting in touch with what those instincts are. 
So the trying on of decisions is a great exercise to then, because then, you know, I mean, we know, right? You know, as soon as in your head you like said yes or no to something. And if you're really sort of, yeah, like my stomach hurts, okay, well then that probably isn't what I really wanna do.
Stephen Matini: When I go through a rough moment somehow becomes a super, it becomes harder to listen to that voice, to be self-reliant, to, to listen to those instincts. When you have a difficult moment, for whatever the reason, is there anything that you do to get out of it?
Dr. Lindsey Godwin: Try to connect with people, things or places that make me laugh . Like, so again, sounds easy, sounds silly. It's actually hard, right? When we're like in a space where we are. So, but sometimes again, that's one of the gifts my husband brings, that some of my best friends, my kids bring is like to see the, not necessarily even the humor in the situation, but to find humor in something. 
There is such a healing power in laughter. Whether it's seeing the absurdity in something else or the absurdity in ourselves. If I can, I try to like then actively connect up with people, things move these books, something that will, it's a shift. And we know that from a neurological, right? It's like stuff that we know even now from a neurological standpoint, right? Thanks to our positive psychology researchers and stuff. It's like I'm literally changing the chemical flow in my head.
I mean, they say right laughter's the best medicine. That's why, you know, I've cried until I've laughed, right? Like, you just sort of like, you've, you've probably experienced that too, where it's just you get to a place and to me that's like an emotional switch helps me to get into a different emotional space that then it actually helps me get into a place where I can be more reflective and I can be more thoughtful even because when I'm in such a negative emotional space, whether it's sad or angry or you know, fill in the blank, disappointed that I, you know, I'm literally not thinking straight. Right? 
And again, we know that neurological, we know that neurologically, right? That like our prefrontal cortex has literally shut down. And so it's sort of how do I, how do I reawaken the rest of my brain so I can even process what's happened? Richard Boyatzis from emotional intelligence and stuff, right? They talk about how, you know, you well know this, right? Amygdala hijacking, right? How do we hijack it back? Right? 
Like it's, so it's sort of, I try to find ways to sort of have that sometimes I literally have to be in a different space. I have to be with different people. I have to, I know when that first laugh comes out that I am, I'm switching gears.
Stephen Matini: If you had to say what is the main theme that has come out out of our conversation, what would you say that is?
Dr. Lindsey Godwin: I think there's a thread. There's some intention, I don't know the word intentionality is coming up for me. I'm gonna listen to my instincts, but I, the word intentionality is coming up I think because I think there's a lot of connectivity in the, the being intentional from whether that's, we've talked about sort of, you know, following our own path to listening to our instincts, being intentional about inquiring, being intentional when we're in a negative space. And how do we intent bring intentionality to honor that space, but also move forward from that space. 
And it's a nice, I think juxtaposition actually with our exploring of things like instincts and stuff. But I actually think the way that we've been exploring and talking about it, that there's a lot of intentionality, acting from instincts and a place of inquiry that actually requires a lot of intentionality, which I think some of our stories and conversation have shown.
Stephen Matini: I love the fact that we touched the topic of instinct and curiosity. And I find it really interesting because the whole business world, as you know, it's not set based on that type of thinking, if anything is about problem solving. You know, very rational, logical, and always say there's a space and time for that. Then you got to move on. And very often when people engage in that sort of thinking, they sink, you know? So that's actually what I personally love about positive psychology, appreciative inquiry, it just pushes people forward.
Dr. Lindsey Godwin: It is right. That intentionality. It takes, I guess it takes courage, , right? I don't often think about that. And I love, back to your word that you said, sort of righteousness, that there is something when you know that you're on your path. It's not that you're not gonna make mistakes to your point. Like it's not that the things are gonna be all easy or that it's, you know, things are always gonna be, I always joke, it's not that it's like rainbows and unicorns, like that's not what we're talking about. 
But we are talking about righteousness and I love that the righteousness, like the right, it feels right. Like, you know, you're on your right path. Decisions actually become a lot easier when you tap into that because you know, know that left is the way that you need to go. And it doesn't matter if everybody's going right because that's your even, you know, your right path happens to be left, well then go left. Right?
Stephen Matini: You are so precious, I really love the way you think.
Dr. Lindsey Godwin: Well this is ... Steve ...
Stephen Matini: Thank you so much for doing this with me. I really, really love listening to you.
Dr. Lindsey Godwin: Thank you. It's been a joy. I said, like I said, this has been my, I'm making a soft re-entry back into the semester and so you're helping to reawaken my brain. I really appreciate it.

Move Beyond Fear to Live With a Growth Mindset - Featuring Nina Bressler

Our past experiences impact our lives, from how we interpret current events to how we view ourselves and others. 
Sometimes our past experiences are responsible for the fear that keeps us trapped in a loop despite our best efforts to move on. 
The guest for this episode of Pity Party Over is Nina Bressler. Nina is the Global Head of Societal Learning for Novartis, a multinational pharmaceutical corporation based in Switzerland whose mission is to discover new ways to improve and extend people's lives.
Nina believes that learning from our experiences is the medicine to overcome fear and live a life with a  sense of purpose. Moving beyond fear is adopting a growth mindset that allows us to see the world and ourselves as ever-changing dynamics filled with possibilities.  
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TRANSCRIPT
Stephen Matini: I read your essay, “Do What Makes You Feel Alive.”
Nina Bressler: Oh ...
Stephen Matini: You struck a chord because my parents were born in 1929, and a lot of what you wrote, you know. resonated with me because both of them went through World War II ...
Nina Bressler: Mom was four years old when the siege of Leningrad started. She escaped with my grandma who was just who's quite young. She was only 21. They were on one of the first transports to leave Leningrad because my mother's father and my grandfather was pretty high up in the Army. And so there were two transports that went across. 
I don't know how much you know about Leningrad, but when the Nazis surrounded it there was, it was completely under siege and there was no supplies coming in. The Soviet government, you know, Stalin wasn't really helping the people of Leningrad. But in the winter when the, when Lake Ladoga froze, they were able to start bringing transports across. And my mom tells the story that she was in one of the first transports. It was her transport, another transport.
Nina Bressler: And as they were crossing the lake they, there was some bombings and they saw the other transport actually go through the ice, but they were able to make it across. And then she spent the majority of the war first, the first few years in Russia and then eventually in Georgia as refugees, but with some family members. 
And then my father, he was also a child during the siege of Leningrad, but he spent the first winter in Leningrad, so he really had memories of people starving. And he was a little bit older. He was six when the war started. 
When they came back to Leningrad after the war, you needed to register either as Russian or as Jewish. And so both my family, both sides of my family actually had Jewish roots. But what that meant was in the seventies the Soviets opened up the borders and let people through the Iron Curtain with the intention of immigrating to Israel. 
But many Russian Jews in the seventies went to other countries. So they used that opportunity to leave the Soviet Union. And then, yes, my mom ended up in Vienna then  was my grandmother who was, you know, already in her early sixties. And and my brother who was 15.
Stephen Matini: And then she found out she was pregnant with you in Vienna.
Nina Bressler: Yeah, so my mom got to Vienna. She you know, they went to the Jewish Refugee Agency and they actually said, oh, well you see your mother's baptized Lutheran, so you're not real Jews, so we're not gonna be able to support your asylum to the US. 
And they went across the street to Caritas, which is the Catholic charities. And Caritas said, oh, you know, we we would love to help you. And actually I think for my family it was better because all of the Russian Jews that were then transported from Vienna to Rome and a lot lived there almost in ghetto conditions for a year or more waiting for their asylum to be sorted. 
But Caritas kept their refugees in Vienna. So my family actually had a relatively nice apartment and my mother she was 42 years old, her stomach started to hurt one day and she went to the doctor and the doctor said well you are pregnant.
So yeah, so when she was in Vienna, she found out she was pregnant with me. And definitely a lot of people said, oh, you know you don't speak English, you're immigrating to a new country. Probably not the ideal time to be having a child, but she yeah, she always wanted a second child. 
And so I was born in Vienna and my father, you know, I'm very genetically very much like him. I look a lot like him. So he didn't meet me till he was able to get through the Iron Curtain when I was already almost nine years old. 
My mother had to stay in Vienna until I was born. That's what Caritas asked her to do. And then we came to the United States when I was four months old and you know, there were a lot of other refugees in the US and friends from Leningrad, which is now St. Petersburg. 
And they yeah, they would take pictures and send, send them to my dad and things like that. So he saw pictures of me. But you know, even then it wasn't like today you didn't have Skype or other, you know, video calling services, but even letters always were opened by the KGB and read and there were a lot of problems to even just communicate with people on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
Stephen Matini: There's one thing in your assay that resonated with me, I'm gonna read it and then if you don't mind maybe sharing some thoughts. You say, “the story that I was born into was one of luck and with that came an unspoken sense of duty. The sense of duty one feels to the legacy of the family can be both an enabler and a hindrance.”
Nina Bressler: Yeah. So, you know growing up my mother shared the story of her childhood a lot. And her childhood was not a nice one, it was in the middle of war. And now that I have a daughter, I think about that a lot because you know, as your child grows up, a lot of times you wanna process your own traumas or you start to process your own traumas as your child goes through that same period of their life. 
And probably a lot of my mother's storytelling was just trying to process what she had been through cause she couldn't relate it to how my life was so different. And so she would all highlight quite often about how lucky I was. And I think it was common to hear that anyhow from immigrants. You know, we gave up so much, we left our homeland and we came to this country to give you opportunity. 
So you have that sense of duty that you need to achieve something in order to live out their dreams in some way. But of course it also puts on a lot of pressure, especially in people who maybe are already, you know, looking to please and things like that. So it's an interesting psychological dynamic that plays out over time.
Stephen Matini: I believe it is such an important point of in the developmental maturity of any person. Some people are able to overcome this, this friction and some people get stuck in it.
Nina Bressler: At the time really wanted to be very American, right? And so there was this like age divide cause my parents were much older when they had me. Then there was the cultural divide. And so I definitely felt like an outsider in the family but also felt like an outsider in most other situations. But I got quite good at kind of becoming a chameleon I would say. 
So I actually didn't live with my parents from the age of 14. I lived with my brother for some time and then I lived in a roommate situation when I was still finishing high school. And I got really involved in like several subcultures. So I got really into horses and this was almost like my doorway to being really American cause I like celebrated all the American holidays or the Catholic holidays rather.
And then also I got really involved in the Boston music scene that also, you know, that subculture and there's many subcultures within that. But I was always able to be quite eclectic in my like tastes but then also fit in and almost any scene that I got involved in. So I enjoyed it was always this balance where I enjoyed observing what was happening in a culture a little bit from the outside, but also taste testing it a little bit, if that makes sense. And I think that those kind of patterns still continue today for me. 
My parents, I did a lot of work I think on understanding their relationship with each other, understanding my relationship with them. And I do feel that it's been an ama a wonderful perspective to understand what I take from them, but also to consciously be able to say this, these are things that I've chosen not to take from them. Cause these are patterns that have been passed down generation to generation sometimes, or just because of the, you know, culture in the society that don't serve me. And so I can also make the choice to not take them. That's sometimes harder to do than it actually is to say, but you know, if you work on it, you can achieve it.
Stephen Matini: When I was 16, my father was diagnosed with cancer. And so for many, many years I lived this really anxiety that I didn't have that much time. We loved each other, but somehow we really, there was a lot of friction, there were a lot of stuff that needed to work out with him. 
But at some point I remember that, I don't know how that happened, but there was this thought in my head which was, listen, if you just simply stay in this space, it's gonna be a nightmare for the rest of your life, especially when he will not not be around. So you really have to let it go. And somehow I started looking at him from a different perspective, which is really the perspective that I have now, which is I truly believe he did his best with what he had. 
So the question for you is, is there anything that you did that helped you make the switch that put you in a position of actually understanding what you could take from your family and what you could leave behind?
Nina Bressler: I think probably one of the main triggers was when my daughter was born. So before I gave birth to my daughter, I definitely had like underlying anxieties or issues that I knew existed, but I didn't spend time on them. 
And then after she was born I started to really kind of see the world a little bit differently and really think about, okay, what is the, what is the kind of parent that I want to be and how do I wanna show up for her? How do I wanna show up in my relationships? And that led me to start doing some work. So actually, you know, going and seeing a therapist and digging into some more of my family background cause that's where you start. It's like doing a master's thesis on yourself, right? , these are some really interesting patterns. 
I don't know that I would make these same choices for my daughter. I'm not saying I would've changed anything, but for years yeah, I realized that oh wow, I was really hurt and angry because of choices that were made that were actually nobody's fault. They were trying to do their best. 
The catalyst was that I didn't wanna live with that anger, so I needed to kind of find a way to work through it. And neither of my parents are able to really hear my experience without feeling defensive or not enough. Processing it with them directly hasn't worked for me. 
Actually going and doing the work to understand where they were coming from, how really horrible traumas impacted their behavior for life, being empathetic to that and then also being compassionate to myself that resulted in behaviors that hurt me too.  Makes it possible to kind of forgive everybody and be compassionate to everybody, but also to not be judgmental about my anger, let's say. 
Because for years I was like, oh, I shouldn't feel like that about my parents. And you know, the anger that just comes out sometimes cause you're not in touch with it. By being able to be somewhat compassionate that you do have some strong feelings about it you're, I think much, it's much more effective in terms of transforming it than feeling shame about it.
Stephen Matini: Your story has shaped your purpose, your motto, which you sum up in, “Do what makes you feel alive.” I always find interesting people, but throughout all these years in my career, I've seen very few happy people. Interestingly enough when we work together, oftentimes people have this question, which is, is this really the life I was supposed to have? And inevitably comes up an element of fear that may have prevented them from taking the steps to be really, let's say, align with who they are. What was important to them. What would you say? There could be a first step to, to find that the voice that makes you feel alive?
Nina Bressler: The first thing is you need to just reframe the way that you see your work. So I think for me, I really never pursued a position, so it wasn't a job title or at least the idea of pursuing a job title. I kicked out quite early that I pursued experiences and growth. 
So and I think, yeah, I mean I did so many different jobs. Like I worked as a bike messenger, I worked as a waitress and a bar. I worked as a veterinary technician I worked as an English teacher. And when I moved to Prague and others and all of those experiences, I got such valuable skills from and tools that I took to the next one. My advice is to shift your perspective and think about instead of building yourself towards a position you should look at building yourself in terms of skillset, tool set and mindset. And then the position is just what you do at that moment in time.
Stephen Matini: Learning is a form of medicine. That's brilliant.
Nina Bressler: Yeah. So that came in the past 18 months I studied art first of all, and then I did a degree in communications, didn't study adult development. And I'm just so lucky that I ended up this role first working on some learning technologies and then owning the skill taxonomy at Novartis as the competency leader. And then helping to drive the curiosity pillar of the of the culture transformation. 
And out of that I saw that we built up all these technologies and tools and have these amazing resources that were focused internally for this company for Novartis, which is a med medicines company, right? And I thought, wow, there's so many people who would benefit from these same tools externally and how can, you know, that feels like the right thing to do. It's not enough just to scale these within this organization of a hundred thousand.
How can I take them beyond the boundaries of the company? And with that, we start to think in the past 18 months about what this agenda for societal learning looks like. And yeah, this l learning is a form of medicine is really the overarching, let's say, vision for that. We as a medicines company, of course we are bringing medicines to patients, but learning is a form of medicine as well because it helps create space for dialogue. It helps to mobilize systems. Learning as a platform is much more powerful as a communications tool because it gives you a space to really understand and dialogue with and include many different voices in your understanding in a way that, let's say a one way a communication platform. Can't do.
Stephen Matini: It sounds, I'm thinking out loud, a beautiful alternative to just straight marketing, you know?
Nina Bressler: Yeah, yeah. I mean definitely. So being a little bit of an outsider to learning, I really felt like the journey of the learning function over the past few years was very similar to the marketing function. You know, we were really looking at how to put metadata behind content, how to get the right content to the right people, the amount of content, so it was following very much the same trajectory as digital marketing. 
Only the impact measures for digital marketing are clear, it's consumption, it's click throughs, it's things like that. For learning as a society or as a fa or as let's say as an industry, we haven't solved for impact measurement in learning sufficiently because the impact measurement of learning is desired behavior change. And we don't have really scalable ways to measure that yet. So I'm also really interested in that.
And part of my work on societal learning is also looking at how learning can be used to make impact on individuals who then drive outcomes in alignment with, let's say, broader goals like the UN sustainable development goals and how we can really measure that all the way through to show what the impact of investment in learning really can do. And so we're running some control studies around that already this year with some behavioral scientists and the Harvard re-skilling lab. Cause I'm so curious to see where that, that kind of thinking and work can go.
Stephen Matini: Before talking to you today, , I was watching on Netflix, “Megan and Harry.”
Nina Bressler: Oh yeah, I just watched it too. 
Stephen: You did? So at some point he says that misinformation is a humanitarian crisis, which I thought, oh my God, this is so brilliant. It is true in the sense that we are so hyperconnected, there's so much information out there. But the one thing that so many people struggle with is what is real and what it’s not, what is accurate information and what is not accurate information.
Nina Bressler: If I look at the quality of deep fakes and everything else, like the ability even if you take a lens of criticality, the ability to really decipher if something is real or fake is or if you're being influenced by an echo chamber that you're already in, it's getting harder and harder to do. I mean, everything we hear around our US is curated to align with our perspectives, right? 
As an American who experienced the influence of, let's say Fox News propaganda on the American populace and now is really, as I'm somebody who understands Russian and is experiencing the influence of Russian state media on the mindsets of Russians, I just think we are so, as a species, we are so easy to influence. I mean, ultimately we're social preachers. We want to trust and believe what we hear and we become easily convinced of what we hear as being the only truth.
And I think at something that I think is really interesting is that at this time of actually quite a lot of instability in the world and great change, we as humans are looking for security, right? We can find that security in many different ways. Probably the healthiest way is through inner development. So we get grounded in our inner values. However not a lot of people have those tools or opportunities available to them. So they look for other frameworks to ground themselves in for that security and stability. And a lot of times those frameworks are extreme in terms of politics or religious affiliations and when, and they become quite polarized against each other. And then once that polarization starts, it evolves into more extreme and extreme polarization as they push against each other. Come on. We probably are gonna say of course the answer to everything is inner development. But I do think the answer to everything is awareness and inner development, right? So...
Stephen Matini: You wrote in your beautiful essay, People are provoked when it pokes at their fears. The person has to push it through the edge of the fear to find the light.” Yes, it is in a development, but it is that relationship with fear that I believe it is such a, an essential point in how you deal with it.
Nina Bressler: So do you wonder how I deal with it or how I think people should deal with it?
Stephen Matini: Both
Nina Bressler: I became really interested in kind of what fear feels like in my body. Cause I realized that a lot of times I'm, I'm acting from fear still and I wanna know the difference. I wanna know when decisions are coming from, you know, a place of security and confidence and not overconfidence, but a healthy place or when they're coming from place of fear. 
So I think for me the work really started by spending time feeling how different emotions come through my body by practicing that and practicing meditation really. Just being able to recognize when something is fear-driven, but step out of it before I take the action, that is fear-based. So I think it's that same knowing that I'm quite action-oriented and for me fear, it doesn't drive an anger response in me, it drives an action response and sometimes those actions just need a little bit more time.
And it can also be good. I can, it, my intuition can kick in, I can do the right action, but it's just asking myself for a split second, is this something that needs a little bit of stillness? What is the wise thing to do here? Because wisdom is not driven by fear, right? Wisdom is knowing whether to go with the intuition or go with, take some time and just create space and stillness. So yeah, that's, I would say how I try to practice not being ruled by fear. 
When the war in Ukraine started, I could feel so many thoughts and decisions being completely fear driven and it still peaks at certain times for me. I mean, I live in Czech Republic, so we have a huge refugee crisis and, and we're pretty close to Ukraine, so you're obviously aware. Plus there's the trauma that this country went through with the Soviet occupation, et cetera. 
So the topic of people kind of being triggered into fearful stance is definitely front of mind for me all the time. And I think fear is useful too when you need it. It's just a question of asking yourself, is it useful to me in this moment? And being able to catch yourself before you make decisions that are fear driven unnecessarily.
Stephen Matini: Not that I'm trying to minimize the humongous problems that we have, but I do have faith that we can learn as humans in a way we can flip things around and really believe we can do that for sure. And somehow, oftentimes the way to learn difficult stuff is to go through pressure and pain. That's what I often see.
Nina Bressler: Yeah. Well coming back to the Harry and Megan documentary though. 
Stephen Matini: Yeah
Nina Bressler: Actually, I think that there is a lot of really amazing interpretation and work happening under the surface in our societies. It's just that what is shown in the media is a totally different story and it's so similar to their experience, right? 
The media created such a fear mindset for them and, and it was legitimate. I'm not saying it wasn't but based on kind of this story that they created. But we do that same thing for ourselves individually. We take all of the stories that are out there and then we weave together a narrative that it feels really threatening for us and it feels just as threatening as a war. So, and then the way that people act in it is yeah, can be really extreme. 
I think that it's necessary to appreciate that even, yeah, I think the practice of awareness and then integration of fears is just something we have to continually do and help others do through compassion and empathy even, just that they can behave in ways that are more constructive to the society as a whole. And that means giving them security also socioeconomically social safety net and that people have opportunities to work and learn and grow. 
Cause ultimately, I don't know, I'm of the belief that ultimately people want, those want to apply their talents to something that feels purposeful and that's, yeah, part of the work that I'm doing around societal learning now is also creating new career paths in, in my case, into healthcare for people who haven't worked in healthcare before at scale around the world, working with an a really leading educational partner on that from the learning and development industry, partnering with our company, with Novartis. 
The idea behind that, this impact framework I was talking about before, I needed to really, let's say, confirm my hypothesis, but the hypothesis is that if you give people these opportunities to grow into stable careers that are needed, we have huge skill gaps that you can actually really influence socioeconomic conditions which have really positive impact also on the kind of stability of the country from a political and yeah, socioeconomic perspective.
Stephen Matini: I would like to ask you about Nina the entrepreneur. “Inner Landscape,” how that idea came about?
Nina Bressler: Oh yeah. So this is just a new project I've just started this year, but I, in my own development work, I actually found words are really restrictive for me, like it's hard for me to describe. And for me visuals or music or colors were a much better association to certain feelings. 
It made me think as we ultimately, what is growth? It's identifying that you have certain patterns and then having a growth mindset, meaning is believing that those patterns aren't static, that they're dynamic and they can change. And actually they're very fluid. They change all the time. Words feel too finite and too slow in some way. And colors or art or images or even music, I think are much more fluid. 
Two years ago I start to think about, oh, how could we take the verbal representation of somebody's patterns? Let's say for example, there are big assumptions about how the world works and translate those into art. But at the time there wasn't an AI art generation tool that was able to handle that much language. 
Yet actually now this year in 2022, there's some amazing neural networks that have come onto the landscape that can take huge blocks of text and visualize them. I would like to eventually develop an app or some tool that gives, allows you to do this visualization at scale. For me, like I said, visual and auditory are the ones that help me get into seeing that dynamic way in which we can look at our inner landscape. But for other people it's a journey. Not sure where it's gonna go. 
Before I started Novartis, I worked for myself as an entrepreneur for a few years at the time, developed a product that I would say was a visualizer of competency and skill frameworks. So the timing was a little bit too late for the big tech. And I had a nice sales channel planned with a world, a global HR consultancy. And it was about to start kind of gonna be pushed out through a lot of their human capital consulting practice.
And then they got acquired by an, an even larger global consultancy. So I ended up going back to the corporate world. But this yeah, this inner landscape project is a way for me to enjoy being creative and bringing my other interests together with human development. 
But I also feel that in my societal learning role at Novartis right now, I'm also very entrepreneurial. So it's almost like a startup running within the boundaries of an organization. And I feel really lucky to have that opportunity because I'm taking on some project that I think can make the most impact, measuring that impact and then looking for the next one. So it's that same startup mindset.
Stephen Matini: If you think about all the things that we covered, what would you say, what do you sense to be the center point of our conversation?
Nina Bressler: I would say it's moving beyond fear and being able to really live a growth mindset. To ask the right questions of yourself and of your contacts, to see that the world is dynamic and you can be dynamic too.
Stephen Matini: You are fabulous.
Nina Bressler: You're fabulous. Thank you.
Stephen Matini: Thank you. You are fabulous. And you come from a fabulous family.
Nina Bressler: Oh ...
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