Latest / We Are For Good Podcast - The Podcast for Nonprofits / 507. Leading With Light: Choosing Conscious Leadership When You're Ready For More - Jennifer Mulholland and Jeff Shuck

Transcript

507. Leading With Light: Choosing Conscious Leadership When You're Ready For More - Jennifer Mulholland and Jeff Shuck · We Are For Good Podcast - The Podcast for Nonprofits

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Hey, I'm John.
• 0:02
  Speaker 2: And I'm Becky.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: And this is the we Are For Good podcast.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: Nonprofits are faced with more challenges to accomplish their missions and the growing pressure to do more, raise more and be more for the causes that improve our world.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: We're here to learn with you from some of the best in the industry, bringing the most innovative ideas, inspirational stories, all to create an impact uprising.
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: So welcome to the Good Community.
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: We're nonprofit professionals, philanthropists, world changers and rabbit fans who are striving to bring a little more goodness into the world.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: So let's get started.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: Becky, I just keep thinking like lucky us that we get to have this time, right now, right.
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: My heart is so full that these two humans are in here Like I almost want to cry, because my nervous system is settled and I know that what we are about to receive, what this community is about to receive, is exactly the ex-hell in the piece that you need right now, because these two humans are so amazing.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: Buckle up, yeah and they are no strangers to the show and if you hang around the podcast you know we're quoting them and pointing you to their resources.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: We are talking to our friends Jennifer Mulholland and Jeff Shuck.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: They're the principals at Plenty and if you do not know Plenty, welcome my friends.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: Run, run to Plenty.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: Please Get in this house.
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: I love this.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: They say their vision is our name.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: Our vision is a world of Plenty for everyone plenty of health, hope, happiness and fulfillment, and for us it is like a bomb spending time together with these two.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: They not just pour into you as like human, but they allow you to feel seen, allow you to find a path forward and just find like kinship for the journey.
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: And they're not afraid of a little bit of tough love too to come in here and like get us back on track.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: And so I'm really excited to bring them back on the podcast.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: You probably remember our mental health week conversation with them.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: It was all about conscious leadership and you know that's really channeled into a lot of the trends that we're talking about in terms of taking care of ourselves and becoming and showing up as a whole leader in this season of the podcast.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: But now they're back with their new book and in this meeting with light.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: Like you know, if there's people that we could will to write a book in the world is Jen and Jeff, and they actually did this.
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: It has taken them many years to put it on paper, but it really offers this blueprint to help you become more aware of what works for you or attuned to your soul's deepest calling and more confident in the choices you make.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: Hello, we need all of those things and I'm just so delighted to dive into this experience.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: They're going to draw from their decades in leadership and consulting and coaching, but at the core, they are here to just like serve, and you feel that in their words and the way with words, and so it is an honor to share space with you anytime we get.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: Welcome back to the podcast, jeff and Jen, thank you so much.
• 2:36
  Speaker 4: It's such an honor to be here.
• 2:38
  Speaker 4: I'm always emotionally moved by your introductions and this just shared sacred space that we have Of connection and kinship and friendship.
• 2:48
  Speaker 4: So really appreciate our time today and thank you, listeners, for tuning in.
• 2:55
  Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you so much for having us back.
• 2:57
  Speaker 3: Yes, every time.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: And when we're talking about these topics, I mean we want to talk about whole leaders today, and that's that's a topic that I think y'all not only understand, but you model so well.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: And when we start to think about who do we want to be in conversation with?
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: About that we could really amplify that message.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: It's you too, you know, and so you've heard us talk about.
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: One of the trends we're lifting is our sector needs whole leaders, but we believe that growth and healing starts from within, and so much all of our journeys.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: I'll start from within.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: Would you take us, you know, take us into your minds right now?
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: What are you thinking when you heard us kind of put a flag around that?
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: What do you think that leaders need, now more than ever that you're seeing?
• 3:37
  Speaker 4: Yeah, so I think what we mean by that is being our whole, real, truthful, expansive, vulnerable self wherever we show up, and the idea that we, we just don't live a personal life and a professional life.
• 3:56
  Speaker 4: We live one life and we are the common denominator of that.
• 4:02
  Speaker 4: And so, as many of us are looking for belonging for purpose, for a place to live this unbelievable gift of life that we get to live right now, in this moment, what is our most vital, most activated, most expressive self and soul?
• 4:29
  Speaker 4: Who is that?
• 4:30
  Speaker 4: And wouldn't it be amazing if we could bring that version of ourselves to every place we decide to show up, whether it's in the boardroom, whether it's in the office, whether it's with our being parents?
• 4:49
  Speaker 4: Many of us are parents and spouses and partners, and what would that look like if we had no holding, if we had no silos within ourselves or compartmentalization of?
• 5:02
  Speaker 4: It's safe for me to show this aspect of myself, but not safe to show this other aspect of myself.
• 5:09
  Speaker 4: So the idea of like really being whole leaders is the idea of being our full, activated, soulful selves wherever we choose to be, and that takes a ton of practice.
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: Heck, yeah, it does.
• 5:28
  Speaker 4: Of not putting on certain clothes for certain situations.
• 5:31
  Speaker 4: Of course we all do that.
• 5:33
  Speaker 4: That's called discretion and there's a good feeling of I'm not saying we don't do that right.
• 5:38
  Speaker 4: But underneath the masks, underneath the clothing, underneath the look that we present to ourselves, to the world, our personal and professional brands like where is their wholeness within ourselves?
• 5:54
  Speaker 4: Where are their holes?
• 5:56
  Speaker 4: Like where is their herd, where is their gaps?
• 6:00
  Speaker 4: Where is their space that doesn't feel so good, or that needs the bomb that you referred to, john, like the salve that?
• 6:10
  Speaker 4: How can we do that for ourselves so we're not so dependent on others doing that for us?
• 6:16
  Speaker 4: I think that's really our philosophy when we talk about an inside approach, inside out approach to leadership is that we have to know thyself, we have to heal thyself, we have to learn to be most intimate with our self and soul so we know what works for us, so we can help others do the same in real, true, authentic leadership, of modeling the way of empowering others to be all of their full selves, without having a cookie cutter model approach to what leadership management relationship looks like.
• 6:57
  Speaker 4: So maybe that just kind of sets the table on the tone, but when we think about whole leaders.
• 7:05
  Speaker 4: It really means being okay when we don't feel okay, being aligned not just to our self, our personality, our look and feel, our ego, but being aligned to the soul that gives expression to our soul, ourselves as leaders, mothers, fathers, friends, brothers, like all the roles that we play.
• 7:33
  Speaker 4: So I'll pause there and pass it back to Jeff of this inside out approach, of being a whole leader.
• 7:42
  Speaker 4: What does that mean to you?
• 7:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean where I take the other half.
• 7:47
  Speaker 3: Let's set the other half of the table.
• 7:48
  Speaker 3: Or, jen, put down the tablecloth, I'll get the utensils.
• 7:51
  Speaker 3: The idea is to bring it full circle.
• 7:53
  Speaker 3: We love what you're doing to set the table for January for all of us, or January and February, and to take things back to your first of the nine topics you've been discussing that the sector can't behave the way it's always been right.
• 8:09
  Speaker 3: It can't be business as usual.
• 8:11
  Speaker 3: And to go right to the tough love early in the episode, a lot of the growth of the sector has come on the backs of people who've been willing to put themselves in a closet, to put their own needs last, to work all kinds of hours for substandard pay, for little praise, and it absolutely is not working anymore.
• 8:37
  Speaker 3: And I think those of your listeners who heard our first episode heard us talk a little bit about all of the work we do and a lot of it's in the nonprofit sector, but a lot of it's outside of the sector and we started to notice something very curious and alarming seven or eight years ago as we started to work with larger corporations.
• 8:55
  Speaker 3: We thought it's going to be really revenue focus, bottom line focus, a lot of focus on costs, no time for culture.
• 9:04
  Speaker 3: The most engaged, emotional, passionate cultures we've been to again and again have been in the for-profit sector.
• 9:12
  Speaker 3: There's more permission to be yourself, there's more interest in being emotional, there's more compassion for figuring out how everybody wins.
• 9:23
  Speaker 3: And it shouldn't be that way.
• 9:25
  Speaker 3: And that's the part of saying you know, if we're going to make a change in the world, we have to be willing to allow changes in each other, allow growth for ourselves, and we can't say that comes last, we'll stop there.
• 9:38
  Speaker 3: There's a much longer rant here, but I think many people in the sector, once you're in the sector for five or six years, you start to notice the culture is too destructive, it shouldn't be this way and we're having trouble getting at it.
• 9:52
  Speaker 3: So if we want to change the way that we're working, we have to be willing to change the way that we show up, and that's a lot of what we're talking about in the book.
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: Y'all.
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: This is some real talk right now, and before I move on, I just want to recognize this emotion that I'm feeling right now, which is just feeling almost mourning Mourning anyone who's been in the sector.
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: When you're talking, jeff, and identifying all these things that have been culturally accepted in this work, it gives you a feeling of such sadness, like my gosh, what could have been?
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: But I also move into the.
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: It doesn't have to be that way.
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: And how do we, as a movement of people who believe in being, to your point, jennifer, a whole human, not a whole leader or a whole professional.
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: We are one individual.
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: How do we start moving into that rhythm?
• 11:28
  Speaker 2: And I think you both have elevated this notion of conscious leadership to me.
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: I thought I knew what that was, but you have this 2.0 approach to it that I think is so brilliant.
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: And it's not about being a conscious leader who does more.
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: It's about being a conscious leader who is about being more, and so I want you to like dive into that.
• 11:51
  Speaker 2: And, jeff, I think I'll kick it to you this time.
• 11:53
  Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you.
• 11:54
  Speaker 3: And thank you for saying all of that.
• 11:55
  Speaker 3: We love this point, the idea of being more and not doing more, and I think this comes, like all of the things that we talk about, it comes from things we're practicing and trying to learn ourselves and everyone that we have a chance to interact with and everyone you have on the show.
• 12:12
  Speaker 3: We're all learning and growing and we're all trying things that work, and for a long time.
• 12:17
  Speaker 3: When you're leading a team or just trying to lead yourself, you read, you seek out mentors, you look for checklists and, wow, are there plenty out there the 15 things you need to do to be more present, the seven practices of highly effective people like we could go on and on and on for the checklist and at a certain point, you realize a couple things.
• 12:37
  Speaker 3: One, I can't remember all this shit, like what I forgot to go to the grocery store.
• 12:43
  Speaker 3: I left my dry cleaning.
• 12:44
  Speaker 3: What are the 18 things I'm supposed to remember?
• 12:47
  Speaker 3: So, one, you can't remember it all.
• 12:49
  Speaker 3: And two, nobody else's advice works exactly for you.
• 12:53
  Speaker 3: When you start to realize all the checklists, all the guideposts, all the things that work for one consultant or one leader or one president or one nonprofit CEO.
• 13:06
  Speaker 3: They might not exactly work for you, your mileage may completely vary, and so the idea is, when you get to that point, you realize well, maybe all these lists and to dos and mantras, and maybe they're all just control mechanisms, right, maybe they're just ways of me trying to architect my environment.
• 13:29
  Speaker 3: What if I started with some simple things Like who am I?
• 13:32
  Speaker 3: What do I want right now?
• 13:35
  Speaker 3: What do I see?
• 13:36
  Speaker 3: What am I saying to myself?
• 13:38
  Speaker 3: Just those kinds of ways of being a powerful word you're saying often this year.
• 13:45
  Speaker 3: Being more present, being more intentional, reflecting on my own narrative.
• 13:52
  Speaker 3: First of all, what if I end up having the wisdom for myself but I never have time to pay attention to it because I'm so busy following other people's checklist that?
• 14:02
  Speaker 3: I don't even have time to listen to what's going on.
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: Jennifer yeah, feeling exposed, but when I keep going here, jennifer getting there.
• 14:12
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I love the question and certainly we lean into the idea of what is conscious leadership?
• 14:21
  Speaker 4: In the first place, of this idea of being not doing, and we define it as being more aware, aligned and intentional in how you show up and what you choose to do, where you decide to spend your time, where you decide not to, and so one of the things that we've practiced and continue to practice and hope that our readers will really be inspired to practice along with us, is the idea of being more aware.
• 14:55
  Speaker 4: So why does being aware matter?
• 14:57
  Speaker 4: Why does taking your head out of the sand?
• 15:00
  Speaker 4: Why is that helpful?
• 15:01
  Speaker 4: Only because we are multi-dimensional human beings.
• 15:06
  Speaker 4: We're not linear, we don't come in a box.
• 15:10
  Speaker 4: We are come from all shapes and sizes and backgrounds and color and experiences that we.
• 15:19
  Speaker 4: There's not one person like us on the planet, and if you so choose to believe what we believe that we are living in a most auspicious time in history, and how lucky are we that we got to incarnate during this time then let's be used in the most powerful, purposeful way, and the only way to figure that out is to become aware of what works for you, become aware of your surroundings, become aware of the synchronicities that take your breath away, the magic that is in every different day, that gets to kind of pull you out of the weeds, and the details of what's not working and like, have you ever had that moment where, like, all the green lights are green, or you think of somebody and they call, or you see 1111 and 111 or numbers on your phone and you're just you're not making it happen, it's, you're part of it's happening.
• 16:23
  Speaker 4: And so when we become more aware of what works for us, where we feel in balance, out of balance, where we notice flow, then we get to make choices that are in alignment or not.
• 16:37
  Speaker 4: So when we talk about the alignment piece, it's like, okay, well, with greater awareness, we become to notice signals and signs from the teams that we lead to, our partners and our relationships, to the feeling.
• 16:53
  Speaker 4: I love that, becky, of pointing to the feeling.
• 16:56
  Speaker 4: How is my body speaking to me right now?
• 16:59
  Speaker 4: Do I feel open and expanded or do I feel contracted and wanting to move away, like those cues?
• 17:08
  Speaker 4: So many people aren't listening to the basic cues that our body and our environment and our intuition are sending us all the time.
• 17:18
  Speaker 4: So if we can heighten our awareness, we can then start to become more aligned to the river, the current, the flow, the ease, where there is momentum, where there's natural flow, natural movement forward and alignment to our spirit, our soul, whatever you name that to be.
• 17:42
  Speaker 4: That there's a feeling of feeling good.
• 17:44
  Speaker 4: Like what?
• 17:45
  Speaker 4: If we followed the feeling of feeling good?
• 17:47
  Speaker 4: No-transcript, what would that alignment be in our day and our choices?
• 17:51
  Speaker 4: And then, once we become more attuned to what feels in alignment to our path, our purpose, what lights us up, what brings us joy, then we get to make intentional choices of what we do about all that information.
• 18:07
  Speaker 4: And it's coming from the inside.
• 18:10
  Speaker 4: No one's telling us what choices to make.
• 18:12
  Speaker 4: And as we get older I'm 51, like you start to learn that, yet nobody's going to tell me what to do, the way it works for me, right, I just know, I know what lands, I know what feels good and what doesn't, and that's so personally prescribed.
• 18:30
  Speaker 4: That's like no doctor, no teacher, no author can tell you how to be you and what works for you.
• 18:37
  Speaker 4: Only you get to play with that awareness and that alignment and then intentionally choosing with conscious choice of like.
• 18:47
  Speaker 4: What do you want to do about that?
• 18:48
  Speaker 4: How do you want to show up in your day.
• 18:51
  Speaker 4: How do you, how do we want to leave this podcast?
• 18:54
  Speaker 4: Feeling and orienting the conversation into that intention and then letting go that I have any control over that.
• 19:03
  Speaker 4: I have control over my part of how I choose to show up, but I really don't have control of all the interoperable pieces, of what's going on in the moment or what's going on in the project or what's going on in the year, right, and so really surrendering all of that so that it feels more free to be rather than constrained to do.
• 19:30
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and maybe can I just make one other underline here.
• 19:33
  Speaker 3: I think I love, becky, your point about conscious leadership 2.0 and I appreciate that, and I think one of the things we continually try to point to is what's the contrast to this?
• 19:45
  Speaker 3: The contrast to this is the kind of reactive management that many of us have to do a lot of times during the day, right, reacting to the goals that other people set for us, reacting to meetings that pop up on our calendar with no control, reacting to emails that come in.
• 20:01
  Speaker 3: Right, this set of things do, do, do.
• 20:04
  Speaker 3: And we're not saying that it's not part of our role here to bring things to ground and create things and do things.
• 20:11
  Speaker 3: It's part of how we express ourselves.
• 20:13
  Speaker 3: What we're saying is not everything that is meaningful.
• 20:18
  Speaker 3: Output can be quantified and all the time we're not just supposed to be efficiency machines and we could talk about the sectors not supposed to just be efficient but we as people aren't just supposed to be taskmasters and achievers.
• 20:36
  Speaker 3: Sometimes doing nothing or being in community or holding space for other people or ourselves is the most constructive way we can spend time, especially when we're faced with all these things like goals and emails and relationships that we can't control.
• 20:51
  Speaker 3: So that's kind of what we're meaning about focusing first on being.
• 20:55
  Speaker 3: It doesn't mean that there's no value in doing.
• 20:57
  Speaker 3: The meaning is not approaching life like a billiard ball and you're just bouncing off of everything that comes at you and you're being hurt by everything that pricks you and you feel like you have to protect yourself from the big bad world out there.
• 21:11
  Speaker 3: It's allowing yourself to ease into what you really want and who you really are.
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: This is such rich conversation.
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: I mean there's a lot of hooks.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: This could be multiple episodes of just what you talked about there, but I think, when we talk about alignment and intention and really getting to the core of who we are and what do we need, what I didn't expect going into this episode, I thought we were talking about developing whole leaders, and Becky began by saying you're kind of grieving the fact of man, our sector's been creating this, or as a byproduct of this, I think the next layer that I'm unpacking in my mind right now is just even those that we serve, it's like.
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: Are we expecting people to bend and contort and to fit into the box of how we make the impact in the world?
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: We want everybody to come alive into their genius and their beauty and their truth.
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: How are we even building our structures of impact that allow our beneficiaries to step into that?
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: I think that's this huge unlock to me.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: That's just really beautiful and poignant.
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: I can't get lost.
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: I want to come back to this idea of reflection because the universe keeps reminding me of this all year.
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: I keep talking about signs.
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: Jen, this is my sign.
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: This is king of signs.
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: This is king of signs.
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: I'm feeling it.
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: It's like the pause, reflect, be present process, like really creating actual space.
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: Y'all have this beautiful piece.
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: That's really kind of giving you some questions to try to get to the root of what fulfills or what drains us.
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: That's a resource I want to get into my hands and everybody listening today too.
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: How can we kind of uncover those pieces of ourself?
• 22:51
  Speaker 4: Yeah Well, one exercise that actually came from Brené Brown I love her use of the slash.
• 23:02
  Speaker 4: It's a really helpful idea.
• 23:04
  Speaker 4: We do a way to inventory your roles a little differently.
• 23:08
  Speaker 4: But just for the sake of point is to say something that's very effective is writing down all the roles you play and slashing it because we don't live this or that.
• 23:18
  Speaker 4: There's just so many hats and roles that we play.
• 23:21
  Speaker 4: Often we're not clear about.
• 23:24
  Speaker 4: It's easy to categorize as mother, business owner, ceo, evangelist, cheerleader.
• 23:33
  Speaker 4: Some roles are easier.
• 23:35
  Speaker 4: But really kind of stepping into the details of those roles, then looking at it as if your best friend wrote this page, like what would create a little bit of distance that it's actually not you that has inventoried your own roles.
• 23:53
  Speaker 4: That's a practice that we've found very helpful for ourselves in the last 20 years is practicing the art of the observer and the idea that you're speaking to your own best friend.
• 24:05
  Speaker 4: What would you see if that wasn't you?
• 24:08
  Speaker 4: As you look at all the roles, then it's a simple question, instead of making it so complicated, is what it feels expansive?
• 24:18
  Speaker 4: Where do I lean in?
• 24:20
  Speaker 4: Where do I open?
• 24:21
  Speaker 4: Where do I contract?
• 24:23
  Speaker 4: Where do I feel drained versus where do I feel enlivened.
• 24:28
  Speaker 4: Another way to say it is where is there natural energy, natural passion?
• 24:36
  Speaker 4: Where do I notice?
• 24:38
  Speaker 4: I light up, I speak with my hands, I lean in, I talk louder.
• 24:43
  Speaker 4: Where is your blood flowing versus?
• 24:46
  Speaker 4: Where am I so not interested that I'm checking my email, I'm tuning out, I'm procrastinating, which is a huge sign.
• 24:53
  Speaker 4: I'm avoiding and I'm doing everything other than what I need to do in that role, right?
• 25:02
  Speaker 4: So what is expansive, where do I feel expanded and open and energized and naturally vital, and where do I feel depleted and drained, is a great question.
• 25:17
  Speaker 4: As we look at where we are, where we're showing up, what relationships we're in the environment, at work, conversations with our boss or managers or colleagues or employees, that is really helpful to start to notice how it works for you.
• 25:37
  Speaker 4: And again, I'll just keep pointing back to your body.
• 25:40
  Speaker 4: Our bodies speak In our bodies.
• 25:44
  Speaker 4: Many people have not been taught about not only food and nutrition and what's healthy and what's not, and all of that's changing depending upon your unique blueprint of your own system, right, there's not one cookie cutter.
• 26:02
  Speaker 4: But also, how does your body actually speak to you?
• 26:06
  Speaker 4: Do you get a sensation like you're sick to your stomach?
• 26:09
  Speaker 4: Do you break out in a skin rash, Literally Like do you feel like you're?
• 26:16
  Speaker 4: You know you are hot all of a sudden that you find that like, oh my gosh, I just got so hot.
• 26:23
  Speaker 4: What's that about?
• 26:24
  Speaker 4: How does our body tell us where we are in alignment and where we are out of alignment?
• 26:30
  Speaker 4: And that is just something we all can practice.
• 26:34
  Speaker 4: That, again, is not meant to be shelved in the personal home space.
• 26:38
  Speaker 4: Right, it's happening, whether you like it or not, at your work and environment and in your institution of day to day operations and, unfortunately, when the drain continues without being noticed, without being acknowledged, we become burnout, and that is the sad state of a lot of culture and people right now is burnout, that we have left ourselves off of the priority list, everything else is first, and so that drain becomes more systemic and shows up in.
• 27:22
  Speaker 4: This is which is literally disease.
• 27:25
  Speaker 4: Right, we're being out of balance, and so how can we, as conscious leaders, attune the signals in a preventative way way up on the way up the channel, not only for ourselves but for the people that were leading, so we can tune into the queues to live in and not dream?
• 27:44
  Speaker 3: To link it back to the being but doing.
• 27:46
  Speaker 3: We're often so busy doing the things in our job or roles we were not.
• 27:52
  Speaker 3: We don't have the time to take inventory of what we're actually being and sometimes it's easier to see at home than at work.
• 27:59
  Speaker 3: But we're all parents on this on this podcast.
• 28:03
  Speaker 3: We know the word parent is hilarious shorthand for four thousand things right, bus driver, cook, dishwasher.
• 28:10
  Speaker 3: I t support nag picker, uppercut dirty socks on the ground and Part of the idea of being is saying which one of those do I want to take on, which ones do I not?
• 28:27
  Speaker 3: With kids at age twenty, I'm gonna leave behind nagging now.
• 28:30
  Speaker 3: That doesn't serve me.
• 28:32
  Speaker 3: In the same way, we play a bunch of different roles at work, but we don't often see them.
• 28:37
  Speaker 3: I can guarantee that nobody who's listening to the podcast on their job description has the role of act like a hurt child.
• 28:45
  Speaker 3: But often when we do team coaching, we, when we talk to team members and they get negative feedback from their boss, they're like they're looking for praise that they didn't get, they're looking for affirmation that they didn't get.
• 28:59
  Speaker 3: This is not to absolve bosses out there for not being Kind, encouraging, but to often see like leave that one behind you don't have to be hurt, child in the office, you can be competent.
• 29:11
  Speaker 3: You know I'm going learner, but we can leave this stuff over here.
• 29:17
  Speaker 3: It's not really helping.
• 29:18
  Speaker 3: And so, like again, like Jen's talking about slowing down being awareness to how Bring awareness to how we are being can really help us decide what we want to do and what we want to leave behind.
• 29:32
  Speaker 2: I want to share that I'm thinking in my head right now.
• 29:35
  Speaker 2: They are talking about me, becky and a car, and I wonder how many people listening right now are thinking they are talking about me, because I bet it's a lot and I want to share just personally and for anyone who hasn't heard my mental health story, I feel like I talk about it all the time.
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: I was that person at collapse and my body had been sending me signals for years, probably decades, that I had been ignoring.
• 30:02
  Speaker 2: My mind was so pre-program to get in that hustle culture, get those kpi's.
• 30:10
  Speaker 2: How many visits can I get?
• 30:11
  Speaker 2: How many proposals can I get out there?
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: What are the kids need?
• 30:14
  Speaker 2: Its picture day, and this guy cut in front of me and it's like all these things start to compounding.
• 30:20
  Speaker 2: Your body starts buzzing, and so I so appreciate you going into that level of detail, because I think that's what conscious leadership can elevate.
• 30:30
  Speaker 2: And I would even add to say are you creating time to even check in?
• 30:36
  Speaker 2: Because I was not, and I mean I'm talking about putting Ten minutes on your calendar every day, or one day a week or one day a month, if you want to start it and say how is my body feeling right now?
• 30:48
  Speaker 2: How is my head, how's my heart, what is sitting and weighing on me heavily?
• 30:54
  Speaker 2: And I'll tell you, it took me years of therapy to figure out, like, how to go in and identify those feelings and pull them out.
• 31:00
  Speaker 2: But I say that With so much love for you, community, because if you are someone out there that is feeling that, that is a signal.
• 31:08
  Speaker 2: That is a signal that it is time for you to care for you.
• 31:12
  Speaker 2: And I just think this book I know you guys are gonna think I'm just being emotionally over the top, which of course I am all the time, but I mean it truly feels like such a cradle to me Because you just feel so held in safe when you're reading it and all of these principles that we're talking about.
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: Every single one of these bullets is in this book.
• 31:33
  Speaker 2: I reference the river, jennifer, which I am so visual, so I am not a huge part of the book and I want that rhythm To be adjusted in everyone's life.
• 31:43
  Speaker 2: I want us to go with the river and, as someone who is the classic probably I don't know six generation warrior and my family, I want you to talk to us about why worrying doesn't work like at all what we should be focusing on instead, because I think a lot of us are just prime to oh my gosh, I'm at capacity as a human being.
• 32:06
  Speaker 2: I'm not sure how we're gonna reach this fundraising goal this year.
• 32:08
  Speaker 2: I don't know how we're gonna figure out time to get Educated on tech, and I'm we're feeling the nervous energy in the community and I want you to kind of just settle us.
• 32:19
  Speaker 2: Talk about where our focus should be instead.
• 32:22
  Speaker 4: Before we go there, I just love to make a comment on the mental health you just mentioned.
• 32:29
  Speaker 4: And so what are you shared about your own perspective?
• 32:33
  Speaker 4: And the only way we can share this is because we've lived it to, you are living it.
• 32:38
  Speaker 4: So Identification of she and here talking about me, it's cuz we're talking about ourselves to One of the things that I've noticed about myself that has, I would say, come into a more intentional practice Is not realizing that I was disembodied, meaning Mental health is a mental we living in our brain.
• 33:07
  Speaker 4: We're living in the air aspect of the mental quality of intellect.
• 33:12
  Speaker 4: Let's just take that for a moment as a component of our human.
• 33:17
  Speaker 4: This Business leadership culture has rewarded, has supported, has accentuated the need to be intellectual and it's really helpful skill.
• 33:34
  Speaker 4: But it's not all of us, it's not who we are.
• 33:37
  Speaker 4: We are not our mind.
• 33:39
  Speaker 4: We are so much more than our mind, but we live in our mental capacity of thinking and it's limiting.
• 33:48
  Speaker 4: We buy our thinking all the time and it's bullshit, like there are so many more times we should not trust our thinking right and learning to go from our mental living space, our mental home, to dropping in, you could say, to our heart home, but I'm gonna say it as literally being and body like in our body, because we're in our mental space and mental health.
• 34:20
  Speaker 4: We've just, oftentimes we disconnect from our physicality, like our physical being, this, and that's where sickness comes in, because we forget, we don't hear the signals, because we're so living in our mental how to judge, to decide, to do that.
• 34:39
  Speaker 4: That's where we get disconnected as leaders, as human beings, as parents, is because we're living.
• 34:46
  Speaker 4: Our living space has occupied, it's knowing that, it's pattern, it's habit, as coming from the thinking, intellectual mind.
• 34:56
  Speaker 4: One practice point that is so helpful to integrate headspace to heart space, physical to body, to be connected to our whole mess Again, that's only one part of ourselves is the moment your feet hit the ground when you get out of bed, when you sit up from your bed to say I am fully embodied and bring your awareness of the thinking mind into the body so that you're not so disconnected from your incredible insight and intuition and Information that's coming from the whole body rather than a part.
• 35:37
  Speaker 4: So I'll kick it to Jeff about the worrying, because that just feels so important that in order to feel more connected in the sector, connected to the work that we're doing, connected to our purpose.
• 35:52
  Speaker 4: We have to more fully functionally be embodied holy from headspace to heart space, physical space, and really tune into those signals that I think, from a Cultural conditioning standpoint, a business cultural reinforcement, we are living and occupying the headspace rather than the like, really activating all of who we are meant to be.
• 36:22
  Speaker 2: I agree.
• 36:22
  Speaker 2: I call it living in the malfunctioning brain.
• 36:25
  Speaker 2: We have to go beyond that, Jeff.
• 36:28
  Speaker 2: I would love to hear your thoughts on this too.
• 36:31
  Speaker 3: I'll do it really quick and want to acknowledge the incredible task you have of keeping us to a 45-minute podcast.
• 36:39
  Speaker 3: John and Becky are just amazing.
• 36:41
  Speaker 3: It's so hard, as it's Julie and the whole team and we could keep talking.
• 36:46
  Speaker 3: I'll be really quick.
• 36:47
  Speaker 3: I would love to say that when this came up it was in that spiritual vein that Jen's talking about.
• 36:55
  Speaker 3: I think for me it was more mundane of just trying to figure out my own mental machinery.
• 37:00
  Speaker 3: I love that expression, becky.
• 37:01
  Speaker 3: We tell the story in the book about really facetiously.
• 37:05
  Speaker 3: Seven or eight years ago, on New Years, I said to Jen and to my family I resolve to give up worry.
• 37:13
  Speaker 3: Everyone's like I'm going to give up chocolate, I'm going to give up alcohol.
• 37:16
  Speaker 3: I'm going to give up worry.
• 37:17
  Speaker 3: I was just joking and being a smart ass.
• 37:20
  Speaker 3: It was enough of a little space to help me observe like, oh well, how often do I use it?
• 37:28
  Speaker 3: I started to look at it like a tool I used or a pen I wrote with, or a vice.
• 37:35
  Speaker 3: I wanted to break chewing gum like a bad habit.
• 37:38
  Speaker 3: I was shocked at how often I picked up that tool.
• 37:42
  Speaker 3: It's just something I played with.
• 37:44
  Speaker 3: I'll just worry now being on the drive home from work replaying a conversation, doing it over and over.
• 37:52
  Speaker 3: I used to be the king at that, I used to be great at that, doing the argument again and again, thinking about what might happen if, just by giving myself enough again almost a joke, saying worry doesn't work, I put it on my Facebook page.
• 38:07
  Speaker 3: I just saw this is just a crutch.
• 38:11
  Speaker 3: No matter how much I think about it, nothing changes.
• 38:14
  Speaker 3: Actually, I feel better if I replace it with gratitude and thankfulness, if I say I'm so glad I had that discussion, I'm so glad I'm safe and well, I'm so glad I can laugh at myself.
• 38:28
  Speaker 3: All of a sudden I realize, well, maybe I'm just fooling the mental machinery.
• 38:34
  Speaker 3: Right, garbage in, garbage out.
• 38:36
  Speaker 3: When I put in worry, I would get worry out.
• 38:39
  Speaker 3: When I put in gratitude, I got peace, I got thankfulness, I got care for others.
• 38:45
  Speaker 3: I will tell you just a quick addendum.
• 38:47
  Speaker 3: Yesterday I got to see my daughter's senior speech that she gave to the high school class.
• 38:54
  Speaker 3: For years my kids have been hearing me say kids, worry doesn't work.
• 38:58
  Speaker 3: It's like one of those things they roll their eyes about.
• 39:00
  Speaker 3: Her speech was about worry doesn't work and how she's learned to not spend time worrying Proud dad moment, like everything else Becky and John and Jen and everyone listening your mileage may vary, but what if you replace the habit of worry, which we've all gotten really good at using, with the habit of something else that makes you feel a little bit better?
• 39:24
  Speaker 3: How would that change your day and your week?
• 39:28
  Speaker 3: How would it change the people around you?
• 39:29
  Speaker 3: That's the small question that I think was so great.
• 39:34
  Speaker 3: It doesn't work for me.
• 39:36
  Speaker 3: I'm pretty much rid of it not completely, but it's been a good practice for me.
• 39:43
  Speaker 4: I'll just add one other content, if I can.
• 39:46
  Speaker 4: I think underneath, or the broader reason worry doesn't work is the idea that whatever you are focusing on forms, whatever you are doing and choosing to focus on, you are feeding, and if you are feeding it, you are growing it.
• 40:05
  Speaker 4: So the more unconscious worry you are feeding, the more things you're attracting to worry about.
• 40:12
  Speaker 4: That's just how the universe works.
• 40:15
  Speaker 4: So if you make a conscious choice to pivot your thinking and to focus on gratitude, like Jeff just shared, intentionally replacing worry with gratitude, you're feeding gratitude and it becomes more of a neural pathway.
• 40:32
  Speaker 4: You change the neural pathways of your brain.
• 40:35
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's how you bring it.
• 40:36
  Speaker 4: And as you do, that the more you focus on gratitude, the more you are feeding gratitude and the more that is going to form in your life, literally, you will bring in more things to be grateful for.
• 40:48
  Speaker 4: So, whatever you get to choose, it's up to you to choose, but this is the idea of bringing the unconscious to consciousness, bringing that idea.
• 40:58
  Speaker 4: That space Jeff is talking about was absolute, pure awareness.
• 41:03
  Speaker 4: That worry wasn't working for him anymore.
• 41:05
  Speaker 4: What a magical gift he was given to just see simply that moment and then he got to choose what to do with it.
• 41:15
  Speaker 4: And so, at any given moment, we are so empowered to change, change our minds, change our brains, change our environments.
• 41:23
  Speaker 4: And it sounds easier than it and it's hard, it is not easy, but we are empowered and have that capability to choose what we are focusing on and therefore choosing what we're feeding, so we can be more intentional about what we're forming for our lives.
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: We love you guys, and this conversation is just why did we start it the way that we did?
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: I knew it would go into these places, because y'all model this, you, you radiate the whole leader and it's it's so magnetic you know, and I think it is what our sector needs, is what each of us need, and so this conversation has filled my heart beyond what.
• 42:04
  Speaker 3: I can share.
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: I mean, we got to link up to your book.
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: We've got to ask your one good thing.
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: We're running out of time, but I want to be like let's let's ask you know, how would you sum a?
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: We ask for a one good thing.
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: It's our feared question, but I feel like y'all's sage wisdom here in this space.
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: Jen, what's a piece of advice you leave us with as we kind of round up this conversation today?
• 42:25
  Speaker 4: I would say your presence is your gift, that being here in the world matters.
• 42:32
  Speaker 4: You matter and the more attuned and aware you can be come to your unique presence, the feeling you leave behind, the feeling you want to experience, the feeling behind your form, that is your unique blueprint and you're meant to be here and you're meant to be used in service of a higher, greater good.
• 43:00
  Speaker 4: And I really believe that our presence is our superpower.
• 43:05
  Speaker 4: So to harness that by slowing down, by bringing your attention to your presence, to be curious about actually what?
• 43:15
  Speaker 4: What is it?
• 43:16
  Speaker 4: How does it feel?
• 43:17
  Speaker 4: Where do you bring it?
• 43:19
  Speaker 4: It is the gift, it is the presence you give others and, most importantly, it's the gift you give yourself.
• 43:27
  Speaker 4: Is when we are activating in our full presence and dropping dropping that I should be any different than I am right now, that anything has to change for me to be healthy, happy and whole.
• 43:41
  Speaker 4: What is that presence that you can bring and give to yourself so you can really see it?
• 43:47
  Speaker 4: That would be my one good thing.
• 43:50
  Speaker 3: Becky, my one good thing.
• 43:52
  Speaker 3: I want to tee off of something you said a few minutes ago, which was creating time to check in, and I passed a huge milestone in my life about 60 days ago and I've been trying to decide if I want to share it with everyone and I'm going to share it here which is I hit 4,000 days in a row of journaling and I use an app called Day One.
• 44:15
  Speaker 3: I'm not getting compensated for this, but I love the app.
• 44:19
  Speaker 3: But about 11 years ago I decided I needed to find ways to create a little bit of the time for myself to check in, and a lot of the entries are drivel and a lot of the entries are cringe-worthy.
• 44:32
  Speaker 3: But consistently, for 11 years I've journaled every morning.
• 44:36
  Speaker 3: Most days I have three or four entries and it's been a massive game changer for me in terms of so many things Seeing my patterns, becoming aware of where I'm short changing myself, where I cut myself off at the knees, where I'm using tools like Worry, seeing patterns I want to get rid of, and just being in an honest dialogue with the one person that I'm going to spend my whole life with, and it's allowed me to develop such a gentleness about who I am and who I want to be.
• 45:10
  Speaker 3: It's made me a better husband and a better father and, hopefully, a better partner and a better ambassador for the sector, and I would just strongly encourage everybody whether it's on a notepad or a written journal or an app like Day One or just in your own mind to spend a couple minutes having a conversation with yourself, not telling yourself what to do, not making a list of all those things you haven't achieved yet, just talking about your day.
• 45:40
  Speaker 3: It's been a total change for my life and it continues to be my one big thing every day and every week.
• 45:50
  Speaker 2: I want to ask you a question, Jeff, If you're comfortable sharing.
• 45:54
  Speaker 2: What is your daughter's name?
• 45:56
  Speaker 3: Ellie.
• 45:57
  Speaker 2: What I just heard there at least what I just saw happen, and what you just said, is that you set your intention and you started living it out loud and you started working through it out loud and your daughter picked up on that and she integrated it into her soul and into her bind and body and then she got on stage and then she shared it and it rippled with a whole bunch of other people.
• 46:21
  Speaker 2: And so my point is perhaps this is my one good thing when we share these things, when we pour into ourself, it is absolutely the opposite of selfish.
• 46:33
  Speaker 2: It is generative, and the good that we can do to the world because we are whole humans is the gift to us back to us, and so I just think that you two are just some of the most extraordinary people that we have ever met since we've started this podcast.
• 46:53
  Speaker 2: I want everyone to get this book in their hands, and I want to repeat the name of it again.
• 46:58
  Speaker 2: If you are somebody who is going to Google this, it's leading with light, choosing conscious leadership when you're ready for more.
• 47:05
  Speaker 2: And if this conversation has touched you as deeply as it has touched me and I can tell John is very moved and I'm getting texts from Julie who's crying, which is great, so we're all in that sensitive, open space that you talked about.
• 47:20
  Speaker 2: Jennifer, tell us where they can get this book and add any more context about this book that you want to have, because I just think it's game changing for not just this sector, I think it's game changing for this world.
• 47:33
  Speaker 4: Thank you so much.
• 47:34
  Speaker 4: You can find it at leadingwithlightthebookcom.
• 47:38
  Speaker 4: You can also find it at plentyconsultingcom, which is our company website.
• 47:44
  Speaker 4: You can also find it on Amazon and all the bookstores.
• 47:48
  Speaker 4: It will be live March 21st, so pre-orders are happening before then.
• 47:54
  Speaker 4: I'm so excited for you guys On social as well, so we are so grateful to be able to offer some of our experience, and exercises are in there Client stories, personal stories hopefully that you really feel our own humaneness that you can relate to, as we're all on this path to wake up and to be more aware, aligned and intentional in everything we do.
• 48:24
  Speaker 4: So, jeff, would you like to add anything else to that?
• 48:28
  Speaker 3: That was lovely and I would just say thank you so much for the work that you're doing to help us lead with light and help people around you lead with light.
• 48:38
  Speaker 3: The best is yet to come, as we like to say at plenty, so can't wait to see how you grow and to grow with you.
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: Thank you.
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: I mean just reflecting it back to you.
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: What a conversation, what a gift you are.
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: Thanks for being here today, friends.
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: Thanks so much for being here.
• 48:56
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• 49:04
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• 49:06
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• 49:10
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• 49:13
  Speaker 2: Backslash hello.
• 49:14
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• 49:19
  Speaker 1: It means the world to us and your support helps more people find this community.
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: Thanks so much, friends.
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: Can't wait to hear our next conversation.