Navigating Conflict: Embracing Emotional Intelligence and Self-Awareness with Liz Kislik
Have you ever wondered why workplace conflicts can be so challenging to resolve? In this episode, I’m joined by Liz Kislik, a renowned management consultant and executive coach with over 30 years of experience, to discuss conflict in the workplace. Liz has made significant contributions to Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and is part of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 coaches initiative. Her TEDx Talk, "Why There's So Much Conflict at Work and What You Can Do to Fix It," has garnered over half a million views.
Listen in as we dive into practical strategies for leaders to create environments where divergent thinking and open discussions can thrive. We also discuss the importance of emotional intelligence, self-awareness, a nuanced approach to conflict resolution, and techniques to manage emotions effectively.
And as with everything I share on the podcast, these are my opinions and viewpoints based on what I’ve read and researched. But please don’t take my word for it. Keep what sticks, discard the rest and for goodness sakes, go out and test drive it!
Quotes:
“There’s a difference between suppressing emotion and managing it appropriately.” - Liz Kislik
“A minute of anything every day is way better than an hour once a month.” - Liz Kislik
“Most of us are not so lucky that steady state is sufficient for a long time.” - Liz Kislik
“Pain is a perception. The disagreement, that’s real.” - Liz Kislik
“To manage your emotions, be aware of your body.” - Liz Kislik
What You’ll Learn In Today’s Episode:
The importance of phase zero: building a foundation of trust and shared goals in a team.
How to manage and leverage conflict for positive outcomes in organizational settings.
Techniques for leaders to build their capacity for emotional intelligence and self-regulation.
The role of curiosity and self-awareness in reducing negative emotions and improving team dynamics.
Practical methods for creating psychological safety and fostering open communication in teams.
Resources:
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Unknown Speaker 0:01
Hey, it's Christina. Thanks for joining us. And welcome to the Squeeze.
Unknown Speaker 0:13
Pain is a perception, the disagreement that's real.
Unknown Speaker 0:20
Hi,
Unknown Speaker 0:26
Liz Kislyk is a management consultant and executive coach who frequently contributes to Harvard Business Review and Forbes. Her TEDx talk, Why there's so much conflict at work and what you can do to fix it, has over half a million views. For 30 years, Liz has specialized in developing high-performing leaders and workforces, helping family-run businesses, national nonprofits, and Fortune 500 companies tackle their toughest challenges. Her work has been featured in major publications like The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Business Insider, and Bloomberg Businessweek, Liz's articles appear in Harvard Business Press books and other notable publications. She's part of Marshall Goldsmith's 100 Coaches initiative, has taught at Hofstra University and NYU, and is a frequent podcast guest. Liz also created Better at Work with Liz Kislik, an animated series about resolving workplace challenges with practical insights and a touch of magic. She earned her BA from Yale and an MBA from NYU.
Unknown Speaker 1:30
I think Liz and I are kindred spirits with a shared passion for understanding human psychology. Her approach to conflict is one of the more measured and realistic that I've encountered delving into the deeper layers beyond individual perspectives. Liz emphasizes the importance of a nuanced approach to conflict, recognizing that positive outcomes require looking beyond black and white solutions. I hope you enjoy our conversation. All right, so welcome to the show, Liz. I'm really glad you're here.
Unknown Speaker 2:02
I'm really happy to be with you, Christina.
Unknown Speaker 2:05
Excellent. Okay, so let's talk about conflict, shall we?
Unknown Speaker 2:10
I heard you always good. Yeah, and I kind of make a jest because I, that's what got me attracted to your work, was seeing your TED talk on conflict. So I heard you actually say on a podcast recently, so I'm just going to quote you here, quote, "If everybody is nice and nobody wants to be the bad guy, and nobody wants to look like they're trying to order the other person around, you can end up with a kind of a stasis, because no one will go first. End quote. You're nodding, you recognize,
Unknown Speaker 2:37
so this just seems like a really great description of our usual relationship with conflict, so I'm going to ask you to unpack this a bit. I mean, what's wrong with a little harmony?
Unknown Speaker 2:49
Nothing
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if you don't need to make changes, make challenging decisions,
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or move forward in any significant way, if what you've got is what you want, more power to you,
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you know,
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run it out.
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Most of us are not so lucky
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that steady state is sufficient for a long time,
Unknown Speaker 3:22
and even if we have a good thing going in the working relationships in the generation of whether it's product or service or
Unknown Speaker 3:33
whatever it might be,
Unknown Speaker 3:36
the world is changing all the time around us, yeah, and we need to adapt, and we adapt in different ways, so right away, if you are insisting on harmony, you're basically putting the lid on what's real.
Unknown Speaker 3:53
Yeah, yeah, that's a great descriptor, because I think that it's beautiful that you make the discernment right out of the gate, that hey, if all things are equal and things are going great, enjoy yourself, have a party.
Unknown Speaker 4:07
Unfortunately, the reality is that change is continual, right? Our environmental pressures are continually changing. So,
Unknown Speaker 4:14
I guess, how does a leader then go about creating the right conditions for people? I'm gonna, I'm just gonna jump into kind of divergent thinking, right? Because obviously those pressures and changes are going to put us in a situation where we are at cross purposes to one another. So, how does a leader then go about creating those conditions for people to disagree where it's actually a good thing? So, like, what kinds of experiments have you seen leaders do that really work for that,
Unknown Speaker 4:43
so before we get into the experiments, I want to talk about what I like to call phase zero, and that's the work that you put in as a leader
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beforehand,
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making the group feel like a group.
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Being clear about purpose and goals and values, the things that the group needs for culture,
Unknown Speaker 5:06
right, those are really important, because then you have a bedrock to stand on, then
Unknown Speaker 5:12
you are likely to have confidence in each other, so when the leader then triggers
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the actual process of being
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in discussion. I'm calling it in discussion. I'm not calling it conflict, because
Unknown Speaker 5:28
if you know
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that it is important to bring different views to the table, you don't have to suffer because of it. You don't have to assume that it's painful, but pain is a perception. The disagreement that's real,
Unknown Speaker 5:48
the suffering you may really feel it, but it may not be necessary
Unknown Speaker 5:53
if you all know you're trying to get to the same great conclusion. For example,
Unknown Speaker 5:59
the best way to do that is to have different points of view, so you can debug each other's views, you can shore up a moderately good argument,
Unknown Speaker 6:10
and that gets us into your question about testing
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experiments, so if there are different points of view,
Unknown Speaker 6:22
there are so many thought experiments.
Unknown Speaker 6:26
Okay, people, let's talk about what would happen if we actually did
Unknown Speaker 6:32
this suggestion. Let's play it out. What would happen to our stakeholders? Who are the different groups? What would the impact be? How would we feel about
Unknown Speaker 6:44
it? Would
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it be financially viable? Let's look at those numbers now. Let's do that for scenario B, based on somebody else's input.
Unknown Speaker 6:59
This is like a whiteboarding exercise. That's what I was just thinking. Nothing has happened in the real world.
Unknown Speaker 7:07
You're just assessing different possibilities, the likelihood of their occurrence,
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the actual real world ramifications,
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and then you're picking and choosing which of those things you can put together to give you the best shot at whatever it is you're trying to accomplish,
Unknown Speaker 7:25
and if phase zero has happened,
Unknown Speaker 7:30
then everybody wants to build it together, and there is almost a kind of joy
Unknown Speaker 7:36
in bringing the different views to the table. Haven't you seen, you know, a bunch of kids playing a kind of game, making up a story. What about this? What about this? We could do that. There's excitement in figuring that out, not the kind of dread
Unknown Speaker 7:56
people assume if they think, oh, we're going to go to one of those meetings and have to fight.
Unknown Speaker 8:04
Yeah, yeah, I really appreciate what you talk about with Phase Zero, because, of course, that's the foundation upon which the safety and the trust all rest in order to do what you're describing here. So that's a really great reminder. So it's kind of like you can't pluck divergent thinking as just this thing out of the ether that we're going to do now. Of course, it doesn't exist that way.
Unknown Speaker 8:29
What you describe about, you know, the sort of whiteboard effect, kind of call it sandboxing. It's like whatever is in the sandbox, it doesn't necessarily mean we're going to go and do something with it, we're going to actually play with it, and I love the call to, you know, almost our childhood experiences, because I think we were very good at self-organizing in a way then that we've seemed to have lost track of, because we put all these labels and structures around
Unknown Speaker 8:56
it, so certainly my goal as a coach is to really normalize these processes, because I know it's the great, you know, it's the birthplace of great ideas and innovation.
Unknown Speaker 9:06
I remember hearing you say, 'I'll quote you again, isn't this fun for you? quote, 'If there aren't differences of opinions, you will never have overall as good solutions as you will if different people can share their different views, and then you take on the best of each. So we're clearly on the same page about that
Unknown Speaker 9:22
as an add on, because I think it's really appropriate to this conversation, and like before we dive into some of the big system patterns, which I want to get to in a moment, I want to bring in emotions, emotions in particular normalizing emotions, so I think just about every organization that I work with offers some form of emotional intelligence training, so I think that that's a really tacit demonstration of the acceptance of emotions in organizations. You're suppressing a smile there. Yet one of the reasons I think conflict can become so complex and difficult to manage is because of all the discomfort that leaders feel.
Unknown Speaker 10:00
Feel when the emotions enter the equation, like they're not prepared for that part of it, right? I think a lot of the issues in conflict are simple from a rational perspective. We just get down to it and we sort it out, or as my coach says, we become a little more comfortable with the discomfort, but we can't seem to help pulling back from that discomfort, so my question for you is this. So, what are some, no kidding, four real practices that leaders can engage in to build their muscle for that discomfort of emotion? Let's call it, I made this up, the standing in the heat of the kitchen muscle.
Unknown Speaker 10:39
Okay,
Unknown Speaker 10:41
I actually want to reduce the temperature
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because
Unknown Speaker 10:47
we are constantly having emotions.
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Neuroscience has proven that
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they are so constant
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that some of the research
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has included, you know, pinging people all through the day and just asking them what they're feeling now,
Unknown Speaker 11:11
so all kinds of things pass through our brains and through our systems,
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so the
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like quick and dirty, least time consuming, least expensive
Unknown Speaker 11:29
is for a leader first to know that they are having emotions. See, all the stuff you raised is right, and when I think about leaders, why would it be painful to see someone else's emotions? Because we have them.
Unknown Speaker 11:48
Yes, right. It pulls on us.
Unknown Speaker 11:54
We don't know how to deal with ourselves. I'm not saying that as a ding or a knock. It is hard to be a human, you know. All of Buddhism
Unknown Speaker 12:04
is about reduction of suffering,
Unknown Speaker 12:07
because we make ourselves suffer.
Unknown Speaker 12:11
If we can be neutral,
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curious,
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or compassionate, which, you know, that's where I would hope we would get to,
Unknown Speaker 12:22
we can tolerate other people's distress if they're distressed, their anger. We see it as what it is, it's a reaction to what is happening in the environment,
Unknown Speaker 12:35
but if we can't tolerate our own,
Unknown Speaker 12:39
if we're constantly suppressing our own or pretending,
Unknown Speaker 12:43
oh, I'm not feeling that squirrelly way. I'm not feeling jealous of my colleague. I'm not feeling angry about the promotion I didn't get. I'm not feeling anxious about whether I'm going to have to lay off staff.
Unknown Speaker 13:00
There's a difference between suppressing emotion
Unknown Speaker 13:05
and managing it appropriately, right.
Unknown Speaker 13:09
As a leader,
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just like as a parent, I give the example of
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driving one of my kids somewhere when they're too young to understand
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the Oh, I'm thinking about pre GPS, that
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you know it's okay. I remember those times. You'll find your way,
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but you don't want to frighten the kid,
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so you might be nervous, but you don't have to say,
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"Oh, I'm afraid right now, right? Right, you can manage your nervousness
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without telling yourself you're not having
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it right.
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So
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all the time leaders have to do layoffs, they have to separate from business partners,
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they have to turn people down,
Unknown Speaker 14:03
they know things that they don't like, and they can't convey them this minute. That doesn't mean you have to become a block of concrete.
Unknown Speaker 14:12
Yeah, so recognizing your own, coping with your own, and I will get even more specific in terms of technique
Unknown Speaker 14:22
to manage your emotions, be aware of your body,
Unknown Speaker 14:26
because your body knows the emotion even before your brain does,
Unknown Speaker 14:31
and your body holds it even after you've told yourself you're over
Unknown Speaker 14:37
it, so recognizing, oh, I feel my jaw tightening, or I feel heat rising in my face, or we all have these things, and not only do we have them,
Unknown Speaker 14:52
and can we manage ourselves by recognizing them, our teams know them, our team.
Unknown Speaker 15:00
Seems no art tells,
Unknown Speaker 15:04
so if you need to manage your emotions in the spot, on the spot, breathing - everybody knows about breathing. Yeah, but I'm going to say something a little different. Do not take a big deep breath,
Unknown Speaker 15:19
let your breath out,
Unknown Speaker 15:23
so emphasis on exhale versus inhale. Okay, say a little bit about why
Unknown Speaker 15:29
you have to inhale. Please don't skip it, but the idea of
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I'm taking a big breath,
Unknown Speaker 15:37
that's like a gasp. It can actually convince your body, and therefore your brain, that you're scared, that you're running from something.
Unknown Speaker 15:46
The
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parasympathetic nervous system is tied into the vagus nerve, right? When you exhale longer than your inhale,
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your vagus nerve calms, knows it's not running away, knows your body's not running away, right? You are safe enough to be where you are,
Unknown Speaker 16:09
and it calms your internal organs, and then your whole system can calm, and you can help yourself in that. Either put your feet flat on the floor if you're sitting and have your legs crossed, put your hands on the on the desktop, just ground yourself, be conscious of the room you're in, what you see, smell, hear, taste, if you're eating something,
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what you sense
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with your skin,
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all of those things, the time it takes to do that
Unknown Speaker 16:45
lets your brain know you are not in physical danger, right. And then you can cope with what's in front of you.
Unknown Speaker 16:54
Can I let me just check something, because I want to. I want to, you've, you're making a lot of good points that I want to just loop back on. So the first one, I, I want to just emphasize that sort of that ability to know what's going on for you, but not to actually be expressing
Unknown Speaker 17:10
it, so you know, I think what you're pointing to is the potential for that emotional contagion, I call it, where if you're flipping your lid, it's really, really hard for your team not to simultaneously flip their lids, so I wanted to make that point,
Unknown Speaker 17:24
as well as well, everything that you're talking about. I'm nodding furiously, you're preaching to the choir. What I'm really curious about is that
Unknown Speaker 17:33
to build this orientation to awareness through the day, as you're talking about, so, so I work with my clients on that. I practice that myself. I'm so familiar with the breathing exercise. I was actually doing that this morning in my meditation. Into the count of eight, hold for four, out to the count of four. So I understand all of the ways in which we can increase
Unknown Speaker 17:56
or support our parasympathetic nervous system. I understand all of that.
Unknown Speaker 18:01
What I want to just understand beneath this before you go on, Liz, is that orientation to awareness. How does a leader build that? Because I know that it's a challenge for me, and I've been doing this for a couple of decades. So leaders who are listening, and they're like, yeah, I'm I'm dialing into this,
Unknown Speaker 18:19
but they can sail through six hours of their day without any self awareness. How, how can they be encouraged to build that orientation to continual self reflection?
Unknown Speaker 18:33
So
Unknown Speaker 18:36
I'm going to give you a bunch of techniques, all of which work, none of which work for everybody, right. Okay, so that's an important thing.
Unknown Speaker 18:45
One of the things is actually to set a timer,
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could be on your watch, could be on your phone,
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doesn't matter what the interval is, and when that particular alarm goes off, you ask yourself,
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What am I feeling now. How am I feeling right? And the what is the label we put on
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it might be the physical sensations, and the how is a reminder that it is a process of feeling.
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It is not a monolith.
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I think every emotion
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passes through the brain in something like 90 seconds,
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so if you are, say, you feel sad
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90 seconds, you are going to start to feel better, or at least
Unknown Speaker 19:39
the sadness dissipate, unless you have a thought that reminds you just how sad you are, and then you will feel sad again. Yeah, so if you right, if you prompt yourself, oh, I could tell I was feeling sad.
Unknown Speaker 19:55
What am I feeling now? How am I feeling now? When you are cured.
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Curious
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when you ask yourself,
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check and see what the answer is, but your curiosity alone will
Unknown Speaker 20:11
dampen negative emotions. It's hard to be really angry, really devastated simultaneous curiosity, right? Right. So it's almost like you are having a bit more of an objective relationship with it, where you're actually kind of boring into it with your awareness, and thus it doesn't have the stamina to continue. That's right, yeah, that's right. And you can think of yourself as the watching or observing self.
Unknown Speaker 20:41
I notice
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I'm having an emotion of sadness, right? Is very different from
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I feel sad.
Unknown Speaker 20:52
There's a huge identification, right? Yeah, the second, second one, you are, you're sad. Yes, they both have a place. I mean, if something devastating has happened,
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feel sad.
Unknown Speaker 21:05
That's right,
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but that doesn't mean you have to feel that way forever.
Unknown Speaker 21:10
So, another way is
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you're familiar with BJ Fogg and Little Habits.
Unknown Speaker 21:18
No, tell me. Okay. Wonderful stuff,
Unknown Speaker 21:22
great. TED talk.
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He says do the smallest possible thing
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and connect it to something else. So he talks about flossing. I do know this. Yes, yes. Keep going though. I'm sure a lot of people listening have not. It's a low barrier.
Unknown Speaker 21:41
He doesn't even want you flossing three teeth, it's one, so that you are successful right away.
Unknown Speaker 21:50
It's easy, it's not time consuming, and you attach it to the brushing of your teeth, so you're already in process, and this is a tiny little add on,
Unknown Speaker 22:02
you could begin a practice of
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after every meal. I'm going to see how I feel,
Unknown Speaker 22:10
or after every time I wash my hands, or after every time I send an email,
Unknown Speaker 22:19
or it doesn't matter, you just anchor it to something. Yeah, you do the quick check. Nobody even knows you're doing it, because it's inside you,
Unknown Speaker 22:29
right?
Unknown Speaker 22:31
Yeah. And then you get used to checking,
Unknown Speaker 22:35
you train yourself.
Unknown Speaker 22:37
All of us go dark, you know? If we're very busy, if we're very stressed, we forget, but then you go back
Unknown Speaker 22:44
to it. It almost seems to me, too, that there's a bit of a core belief shift here about the I don't want to get super deep down the rabbit hole, but like the emergence of experience
Unknown Speaker 22:56
is it is, it is emergence, it's not a static thing, right? As you were saying, and so I think one of the things I've observed when I work with leaders, and particularly in groups as well, when I have them practicing in an experiential kind of reflection and using, I use something called the Experience Cube, which is from the work of Jervis Bush, Clear Leadership, and I have them spend time in the quadrant, what am I observing, what am I thinking, what am I feeling, and what do I want, and it's like they do one loop and they go, I'm done. It's like, well, try, see what's there still. So this, this core belief, I think that it might be useful to address that as a leader, to recognize that that is not static. Every single time you do this, it's going to be emergent. Do you agree with that? You're nodding. Yep, I agree.
Unknown Speaker 23:47
You know, leaders are entitled to growth and change too,
Unknown Speaker 23:52
and recognizing
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that they are all the time,
Unknown Speaker 23:58
as opposed to the person who's trying to batten down the hatches.
Unknown Speaker 24:03
Yeah, right. Stone face. We've all worked for a stone face. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 24:09
it's no fun. You don't know where you are. You don't know where they are. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 24:16
it's just not a good way to live.
Unknown Speaker 24:18
No. And I mean, I think it's pretty evident that a lot of those leaders that are batting down the hatches are coming from, you know, fear, right? It's trying to control and lock it down. If only they could understand the impact on their teams, on the trust, on everything else that I.. I can see that you probably agree with.
Unknown Speaker 24:39
I want to give you a slight shift.
Unknown Speaker 24:44
Most leaders don't like to hear that they're afraid,
Unknown Speaker 24:48
of course not. Oh, I agree with you. So, a different way to position it, yeah, is
Unknown Speaker 24:56
they're operating out of a scarcity model, right?
Unknown Speaker 25:00
A or a high-risk model,
Unknown Speaker 25:03
they are more concerned about what might go wrong or what they can't accomplish,
Unknown Speaker 25:09
and, and the stress of that locks them down, right,
Unknown Speaker 25:15
and so in that case it's actually about experimenting with what
Unknown Speaker 25:22
if,
Unknown Speaker 25:23
what if the good thing could happen, what if the problem didn't happen, then what would happen, and you follow the storyline,
Unknown Speaker 25:33
and it can be hard for people to think in this way if they haven't before, and so you tell them to pretend they're a screenwriter,
Unknown Speaker 25:41
good one, you know, because we've all watched the rise and fall of a sitcom, a storyline, whatever it is, and that can free people up a little bit.
Unknown Speaker 25:55
Nice, I like that idea. Yeah, because you're obviously going to be treading on
Unknown Speaker 26:01
tender territory with a leader who is battening down the hatches, so just to kind of reinforce that point, that it's really about how we interact with them in a way that makes it safe to almost be back in the sandbox, a little bit of the what if scenario, but it's almost like not contingency planning, maybe a little bit, so they're able to see that they're locked into a way. I don't know, I'm sort of riffing a little bit on what you're saying. It makes me think of
Unknown Speaker 26:31
something you said before,
Unknown Speaker 26:33
that if the leader,
Unknown Speaker 26:36
I forget what you said, blows the lid off, something like that, right, then other people will respond in kind. I'm going to give you another way to look at that too. If the leader is responding from fight flight impulses, right, everybody else does too. The leader who is really locked in
Unknown Speaker 26:58
is reacting to old experiences where somebody came at them
Unknown Speaker 27:04
and they decided they weren't going to show fear or they weren't going to show anger or confusion or whatever, so they locked themselves in,
Unknown Speaker 27:17
and we all choose whether it's fight, flight, freeze, all those words
Unknown Speaker 27:25
based on our own experiences,
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but when someone is not managing, not managing their emotions, when someone is
Unknown Speaker 27:36
not self-aware, when someone is not self-regulating,
Unknown Speaker 27:41
the people around them will behave in very varied ways, depending on their own capability, right, self-awareness and self-regulation. Yeah, it's what I've coined, and I said this to a previous podcast guest who was talking about the neuroscience of emotions. I call it the trigger jamboree. It's like, if I'm in my trigger, yeah, get out your ukulele, get out your.. we're gonna have a trigger jamboree. So, and all of our triggers are shaped based on our own experiences, so some will trigger here, others over here, and yeah, it's a good time was had by all. Not
Unknown Speaker 28:19
so, Liz, all of this sounds a lot like a description you gave in another podcast that I was listening to around self awareness and self regulation, so I just want to reinforce that, because I really liked what you said about, excuse me, leaders who take the time to get to know themselves, as you've talked a little bit about example, what's disruptive to them, how they operate under stress, and how that in turn fuels their ability to self regulate, but with so many competing things for a leader's attention,
Unknown Speaker 28:48
I guess it's sort of coming at the same thing in a slightly different way. How do you make the case for this kind of introspective work? So I've built this whole online leadership program that's dedicated to the inner game, and leaders take tremendous value out of it, but at the same time, the dedicated attention this seems to require is always at risk of getting sidelined or deprioritized. And here we come to the reinforcing loop. So, how do you make the case for a leader to do that work, that deeper self-awareness.
Unknown Speaker 29:27
Most leaders today,
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if you ask them,
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will complain of some kind of stress,
Unknown Speaker 29:36
could be budgetary, could be turnover, you know all of that,
Unknown Speaker 29:42
but everybody's got it.
Unknown Speaker 29:45
This is a way to start to feel better.
Unknown Speaker 29:49
It won't be all at once.
Unknown Speaker 29:51
You can't just flip a switch and suddenly be a master of self regulation, and even when you're good at it.
Unknown Speaker 30:00
It
Unknown Speaker 30:01
something shocking can knock you off, right? And then you just recover again and go on, because that's what humans have the capacity to do.
Unknown Speaker 30:15
You don't have to be on yourself every minute. It
Unknown Speaker 30:19
doesn't even have to be your top priority of the day, but any consistent work you talked about meditation before, I also meditate, that's really helpful because it creates a little buffer between the frenetic activity of the brain
Unknown Speaker 30:38
and what we could think about is some kind of higher or higher functioning self,
Unknown Speaker 30:46
so any kind of investment, if it is consistent, I'd actually say do less, but do
Unknown Speaker 30:55
it frequently. Yeah, right, yeah, right. Every day would be great, a minute of anything every day is way better than an hour once a month.
Unknown Speaker 31:11
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Unknown Speaker 31:42
and and the show resumes now.
Unknown Speaker 31:48
So I knew
Unknown Speaker 31:50
that we run into this thing where I know people listening are like, yes, I get it, Liz, that all makes perfect sense. Their rational brain is like completely dialed into this,
Unknown Speaker 31:59
and then they stop listening to the podcast, and they go back to their office, or whatever, and there's everything waiting for them. So, there just seems to be,
Unknown Speaker 32:09
excuse me, I'm sort of segueing a little ahead of myself, because I want to talk about these big system patterns that exist, where it's almost like, in spite of the intentionality that a leader may have, in spite of the way that you frame it for them, when you talked about, you know, this is a way to start to feel better. All of that
Unknown Speaker 32:26
is, you know, I have no, no concern with that.
Unknown Speaker 32:31
It's almost as though the system patterns that are waiting for them, and I'll, I'll describe a little more in a second, but it's, it's kind of like one leader against all of this churn, so
Unknown Speaker 32:43
what do you say to a leader in that situation?
Unknown Speaker 32:46
That's the same thing as if you picture one car merging onto the terribly crowded highway.
Unknown Speaker 32:53
You know,
Unknown Speaker 32:55
we face if you are working in an organization with a bunch of people and a bunch of conflicting priorities, you do feel like that a lot of the time. Phase zero may mean that you have colleagues above you, below you, or across from you
Unknown Speaker 33:14
who can help support you, because you help support them.
Unknown Speaker 33:18
That's always great.
Unknown Speaker 33:20
Any kind, any kind of buddy or group activity is incredibly useful for institutionalizing the practice, normalizing the practice, but even on your own.
Unknown Speaker 33:35
I'm going back to the traffic metaphor. Yeah, it's a good one. I used to be horribly stressed in traffic. I was going to be late. It was more dangerous. All the concerns.
Unknown Speaker 33:52
One day I remembered to breathe.
Unknown Speaker 33:56
I knew to breathe for how long. One day I remembered.
Unknown Speaker 34:03
Oh, okay. That was better. So, then you know, another time I reminded myself, oh, it was better when I breathed. Breathe, honey.
Unknown Speaker 34:12
Okay,
Unknown Speaker 34:13
so there is nothing wrong with going back to the world as it is and forgetting all your, you know, good intentions, best intentions. Yeah, if you think about them from time to time,
Unknown Speaker 34:29
an opportunity is going to pop up, and you'll try one, and then you become more interested in trying different kinds of ways,
Unknown Speaker 34:38
and you practice longer, and any of those things, it's, it's how we deal with anything if we actively want to,
Unknown Speaker 34:47
so that's the sort of me against the world thing. I still have me
Unknown Speaker 34:54
colleagues, fantastic
Unknown Speaker 34:58
external support.
Unknown Speaker 35:00
Yeah, is great, and then there are all the other business tools.
Unknown Speaker 35:06
Just put a note in your calendar, right,
Unknown Speaker 35:11
that you know you associate this particular chime, change your meeting alert
Unknown Speaker 35:18
to a new sound, and every time you hear that sound,
Unknown Speaker 35:22
you exhale. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 35:25
that's got to be like a couple times a day.
Unknown Speaker 35:27
Yeah, it's almost like what you're, what you're saying is like I think is that there's these moments where you have clarity. I call it your head is above water, you're looking around and you can sort of put these structures in place. I like metaphors as well, and so I think about a parking lot with speed bumps, so you can't go too fast, you can't get going out of control, you're going to hit a speed bump, so you know something that you described, having your little, you know, your watch signal something, get up, move, whatever it is, colleagues that you have, maybe set up appointments or sessions or conversations with accountability, whatever they are, so you have all that structure for the time when you can look around, so that when the time when you can't look around, because we all know what happens to us neurologically and our focus and everything just goes to hell in a hand basket when the pressure's up, but hopefully those barriers or those speed bumps are going to jar us and stop us and help us to figure it out, so, so this is this is the practice. Hey, no, no magic pills beyond this. Then, Liz, nothing. You've, you've, if there were magic, we would have different jobs.
Unknown Speaker 36:35
Good point. What would we be doing? Okay,
Unknown Speaker 36:38
so let me just
Unknown Speaker 36:40
harp on that, just a slightly little bit, because I want to layer in on something from
Unknown Speaker 36:46
your Forbes article, April of this year, actually, where you were highlighting several tips from William Urie's book, Possible: How We Survive and Thrive in an Age of Conflict, for How to Be Successful in Conflict. So, specifically, the first tip you gave was operating from the most from your most effective zone, so you're you highlight our tendency to react, and we've just been talking about that, and to act without thinking, and I've certainly seen enough examples, but in order to get to what you call our window of tolerance, I love that. What kinds of techniques, and we could be layering in, but honestly, I don't think we can say this too many times. That's that's my thought. What kinds of techniques are you proposing? Are we talking about things a little bit like timeouts, like we do with kids?
Unknown Speaker 37:31
You talked about the breathing,
Unknown Speaker 37:34
so timeout is great. If the room gets too hot, just take a break,
Unknown Speaker 37:41
that's fantastic. Make it a break for coffee, make it a break to clear the whiteboard. It doesn't matter what, just take a break.
Unknown Speaker 37:51
Encourage everybody to reset themselves. That's great, but the other, the other thing is take advantage of what actually works for you, so often when I'm with clients,
Unknown Speaker 38:07
I fall on these things by accident. I don't know about you, and then they work, so I use them, and I explain.
Unknown Speaker 38:15
I may be thinking something that's three steps ahead of what we can talk about right now,
Unknown Speaker 38:22
and I need to slow myself down, because if I say all three steps at once, they're not helpful.
Unknown Speaker 38:31
How do I do that? One day I said, you know, this is hard to think about, I have to pace,
Unknown Speaker 38:39
and I got up and paced,
Unknown Speaker 38:42
so first of all I slowed myself down, which was my primary goal, but the other thing that happened
Unknown Speaker 38:50
was the conversation stopped.
Unknown Speaker 38:53
Everybody watched me pace. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 38:57
so everybody calmed down.
Unknown Speaker 39:00
It's silly,
Unknown Speaker 39:02
but you never know what's going to do it. Just to say, "Oh, that's so interesting. Can we think about it for a minute?
Unknown Speaker 39:11
And then I'm going to ask another question.
Unknown Speaker 39:14
And if the leader says, "Can we think about it? or "Can we work on this?
Unknown Speaker 39:21
and pauses
Unknown Speaker 39:23
before they say anything else.
Unknown Speaker 39:25
Just pausing in your speech, instead of rattling on the way we tend to when we're stressed, helps everybody stop. Yeah, very small.
Unknown Speaker 39:38
You can also,
Unknown Speaker 39:40
once everybody's taken the first breath,
Unknown Speaker 39:44
ask, okay? We were getting a little hot,
Unknown Speaker 39:49
everybody just check out how you're feeling, see how you are. So let's call this this zero prime, or
Unknown Speaker 39:57
or maybe it's even three prime, you're already.
Unknown Speaker 40:00
Working together in a particular way, but you take the opportunity to self-check, to sort of annotate the process. Are we all okay?
Unknown Speaker 40:12
Yeah, and then
Unknown Speaker 40:14
if we were getting so heated about
Unknown Speaker 40:18
it, we are probably trying to defend or protect something,
Unknown Speaker 40:25
do we need to identify
Unknown Speaker 40:27
more than we have already in this discussion the things we are trying to defend or protect or prevent.
Unknown Speaker 40:39
You talked about a fearful leader,
Unknown Speaker 40:42
this is a way
Unknown Speaker 40:44
of getting some of that inside content out. I'm concerned if we go in such and such a direction, it's going to affect our customers in a negative way, or my team will have to work overtime to do that. I hate to have to ask them
Unknown Speaker 41:02
then. discussion can be about, oh, well, we really don't want over time, so can we change what we're asking for?
Unknown Speaker 41:09
Or it could be,
Unknown Speaker 41:11
yeah, they will,
Unknown Speaker 41:13
but we can offer them this compensatory, I don't know what you know, then then other people can chime in and try to make a better solution, right? It
Unknown Speaker 41:23
reminds me of something that I did years and years ago, when I was inside a team in healthcare, and I just, like you said, came by it naturally, and it worked, so we kept doing it, and we just called it call stop, that anybody in the meeting could call stop,
Unknown Speaker 41:38
and in that moment you could say, hey,
Unknown Speaker 41:42
I need to just check in with myself. Would it be okay if we all kind of did that, and it was kind of blows my mind how effective that was. When I think back on it now, I also notice in groups that I work with now there's there is a resistance, right? And probably for some of the reasons that you, you reference, like people want to, you know, they're really committed, they've, they've got their turf, they don't want to let go of their position, and maybe calling stop seems to water that energy down a little bit, but by the same token, I think, you know, the other thing that I used to do, I called it going out on the skinny branch, and I would say, hey, I just want to, I want to share what I'm noticing, and inevitably we know this, right? Somebody just needs to be the voice piece, and then people lean in, and suddenly the eyes are up, and people are engaged again, because you're just calling what's in the, it's in the room. So I really like those examples of all of how you know we can manage that, that reactivity and that stuff that's all a part of when I like to say wherever people get together,
Unknown Speaker 42:48
so
Unknown Speaker 42:49
we will always find complexity. Yeah, go for it. Add one to that, and that is agreeing that we will have shared code words,
Unknown Speaker 42:59
your safe words
Unknown Speaker 43:02
like that, but they could mean a variety of things. It's how we help ourselves. It's how we alert the other people that something's going on, right?
Unknown Speaker 43:13
Yeah, so what's an example
Unknown Speaker 43:16
then?
Unknown Speaker 43:18
So I'm going to first give you examples from family life,
Unknown Speaker 43:23
because when you explain the family life examples, people get it, and it seems less artificial. One of the difficulties with all these techniques is sometimes
Unknown Speaker 43:33
leaders, senior people, it feels too artificial to them. Yeah, yeah, they think, oh, that's stupid, and then they don't want to do it, you know. Why would I need that?
Unknown Speaker 43:44
So, when my kids were little, if they were upset about something going on with my husband, they didn't necessarily want to tell him. So, I would bring the child to my husband,
Unknown Speaker 43:59
and I would say, Daddy,
Unknown Speaker 44:03
child wants to tell you something, and that was the code word for
Unknown Speaker 44:09
stop doing what you're doing, right? Be fully present,
Unknown Speaker 44:15
look at the kid,
Unknown Speaker 44:17
don't fly off the handle, you know,
Unknown Speaker 44:20
12, a set of a dozen instructions you could, that you couldn't possibly give, but it was a cue, the
Unknown Speaker 44:28
kid felt prompted and protected. Yeah, and my husband knew what he needed to do in that moment, and of course it stopped being necessary to cue him over time.
Unknown Speaker 44:41
Nice, that's great. So example. You can do that
Unknown Speaker 44:47
sometimes. It's as simple as, okay, people, we have to think about this in a new way,
Unknown Speaker 44:53
or
Unknown Speaker 44:55
what are the considerations we haven't named? And anybody can ask that question.
Unknown Speaker 45:00
In
Unknown Speaker 45:01
or if you notice that somebody else is starting to tune out,
Unknown Speaker 45:07
you speak on behalf of yourself. I think we need a moment. Yeah, and everybody is legit to say that. That's like,
Unknown Speaker 45:14
you know, in in manufacturing
Unknown Speaker 45:17
facilities
Unknown Speaker 45:19
there were studies about when, when anyone
Unknown Speaker 45:23
had the power, the legitimate power to press the button that would stop the line, people didn't take advantage of that, right? Right, but they wouldn't let poor quality product pass them by.
Unknown Speaker 45:37
Yeah, so it sounds like you're talking about psychological safety and taking responsibility, because I have the safety,
Unknown Speaker 45:46
I can share that safety with everybody else, right? Right, I'm operating from scarcity,
Unknown Speaker 45:53
and obviously, so much of what you're talking about, I just keep coming back to it, and coming back to it, and coming back to it. It is the foundation that is created in the team over the time it takes the leader to do that to build that that robust group of people who can set things like code words and have understandings and play in the sandbox like that, that foundational piece is just such a crucial part for a leader. So I really want to underscore that I don't have to be the leader,
Unknown Speaker 46:26
okay? Fair. Yes, I agree. So say a bit more about that. So, what do you do if you're not the leader and you want to affect the foundation of your team?
Unknown Speaker 46:36
You can ask the question,
Unknown Speaker 46:38
do we need a break here, or I could use a break here, or let me just get some water for everybody, right? right,
Unknown Speaker 46:47
anybody can play host, yeah, or I just need to stand up and pace a little bit when I think, can we have, you know, just a minute for a stretch, I don't like the language, it seems
Unknown Speaker 46:59
yooky to me, but
Unknown Speaker 47:02
the let's have a bio break.
Unknown Speaker 47:06
I don't like that either. I don't like that language,
Unknown Speaker 47:10
but it seems oddly businessy.
Unknown Speaker 47:14
It's not I need something
Unknown Speaker 47:19
you're calling stop.
Unknown Speaker 47:22
I was a young manager in a very heated meeting many, many years ago, and I knew I was going to cry,
Unknown Speaker 47:30
and can't do that.
Unknown Speaker 47:33
And I said, I don't know what possessed me. I said, I hear my mother calling me, and I got up and left the meeting.
Unknown Speaker 47:42
I was crucial to the meeting, but I was not the most senior person,
Unknown Speaker 47:48
and
Unknown Speaker 47:49
I went to the restroom, and I washed my face, and I got myself together, and I went back in, and it was such strange behavior that everybody was just waiting,
Unknown Speaker 48:01
nobody went on without you,
Unknown Speaker 48:04
like, what was that?
Unknown Speaker 48:07
And so they said, somebody said, what did your mother say? This was not,
Unknown Speaker 48:14
and I said, no, I just needed to leave the room,
Unknown Speaker 48:18
so it was an exit line, and from then on, anybody in that standing meeting could invoke my mother.
Unknown Speaker 48:26
That's what I mean by code.
Unknown Speaker 48:29
I totally get it. It emerged naturally. It had such gravitas. I'm sure nobody's ever forgotten it. That's great. Okay, I'm going to shift directions a little bit, because I do want to reference your TED talk, that's how I came to know your work. So, in that, you make a really great distinction between what we think that conflict is, example, two people that don't like to work together or they have a different position on something, and what is actually going on in the larger system patterns. And so this is fascinating to me for reasons that I went into, and when we were emailing, so
Unknown Speaker 49:04
firstly, though I've been asked numerous times to come in and work with leaders who are not playing nicely together. These are usually senior people.
Unknown Speaker 49:12
Inevitably, I discover that the person engaging me, because they would be their senior senior person, is
Unknown Speaker 49:19
that a part of the conflict as well. I'm sure this is your experience. You're nodding vehemently, but managing this can be extremely tricky from my, my vantage point, because people - hey, this guy, the CEO, he wants fast results, he wants the problem to go away, and he most assuredly doesn't want to think he's part of the problem. So, what are your techniques for getting buy-in from that decision maker to expand your work to what you call ask the right people the right questions. What's your justification for wanting to go outside the boundary of what they think the conflict is?
Unknown Speaker 49:53
Bring them a business issue,
Unknown Speaker 49:56
figure out how the business is being harmed by this.
Unknown Speaker 50:00
Conflict,
Unknown Speaker 50:01
what? What does it cost?
Unknown Speaker 50:04
What are we losing?
Unknown Speaker 50:06
What initiative is it blocking?
Unknown Speaker 50:10
What's the cost of that? When you start gathering quantitative data, it is a lot harder
Unknown Speaker 50:22
for even a senior leader to look away, that doesn't mean you have to go and say
Unknown Speaker 50:27
you, sir, are the source
Unknown Speaker 50:30
of this law, right? Right? No, you say here's what I'm seeing. Yeah, it looks like, yeah, we're losing so much in turnover,
Unknown Speaker 50:43
let's talk about what we could change. What are the conditions we could change to improve that situation? You just treat it like a business problem,
Unknown Speaker 50:55
and so then they would obviously have the buy-in, because they're concerned with all those things that you're showing them, the costs, the results they're not getting, etc. so that then allows you to go on to, as I described from your TED talk, asking the right people the right questions. So
Unknown Speaker 51:12
there does seem to be, I don't know, about from your lens, a little bit of resistance from leaders to consider more of a complex lens, especially when it comes to managing organizational conflict. I think a lot of that is just what we've talked about. They're busy, they're on purpose, getting stuff done.
Unknown Speaker 51:32
But I also want to dig a little deeper into one of the patterns that I'm seeing between implicit and explicit culture. I referenced that in an email to you, so that they're not really in alignment, and it's easy for leaders to get caught in the crossfire. So, what I'm talking about is organizations that say they really stand for employee health and well-being, and they even commit resources to supporting leaders, but then leaders are continually pushed to do more than less. Now, I should point out that most of the organizational clients I work with are in public sector. There may be some distinctions with your areas, I'm not sure, but no matter what the sector, large system patterns are a reality, whether leaders can or will try to understand them or not. So, one of the reasons I invited you on the show was because I recognized in your diagnoses that you were looking at the larger system approach and a much higher likelihood of valuable outcomes, so for her, for those leaders who are,
Unknown Speaker 52:33
I don't want to say bombarded, but they certainly get clear messages that the organization is with you, we support you, here's some coaching dollars, here's some time for your team to do training. All this stuff is there, that's the explicit, but the implicit
Unknown Speaker 52:47
is so we're just going to add to your portfolio. We don't have the resourcing to bring in new people, and so what happens is, I don't know about you, Liz, but I just get leaders crossing my threshold over and over and over again who are this close to tapping out, they want to go on stress leave because they're so overwhelmed, because they keep holding out for things to return to normal, and they never do. So, I'm looking at those cross purposes.
Unknown Speaker 53:13
Do you see that? And how do you work with that with leaders?
Unknown Speaker 53:17
I think today's normal
Unknown Speaker 53:20
is stress,
Unknown Speaker 53:22
almost no matter how you cut it. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 53:26
so we talked earlier about strengthening ourselves, strengthening our teams, because then you can handle more of it. That's really important.
Unknown Speaker 53:38
All right, I'm going to go in probably three or four different directions,
Unknown Speaker 53:42
it doesn't matter
Unknown Speaker 53:46
how much funding there is for
Unknown Speaker 53:51
general training, self care, communications, all those things, if people are not sufficiently competent in their job functions,
Unknown Speaker 54:02
or if people are in the wrong spots,
Unknown Speaker 54:06
that's structural.
Unknown Speaker 54:08
You cannot overcome that
Unknown Speaker 54:11
through kindness,
Unknown Speaker 54:13
through caring. Okay, I can only pick up what they drop, so identifying if you've got somebody in the wrong seat.
Unknown Speaker 54:22
Absolutely crucial.
Unknown Speaker 54:26
You see this problem very frequently when someone is hired in from the outside with the expectation that their skills and experience from organization A are going to fit our organization B, and they don't exactly, you can get a tremendous amount of friction
Unknown Speaker 54:48
in that kind of situation,
Unknown Speaker 54:50
that gap, whether it's skills or understanding, a lack of onboarding, whatever it is that has to be identified and.
Unknown Speaker 55:00
Put on the table and worked,
Unknown Speaker 55:03
or it will not improve through effort.
Unknown Speaker 55:08
So that's an example of structural
Unknown Speaker 55:12
issues. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 55:14
all right. The next thing that I think about is a kind of
Unknown Speaker 55:21
self management, management of my team approach.
Unknown Speaker 55:27
Senior leader,
Unknown Speaker 55:30
you've given me these priorities.
Unknown Speaker 55:34
You know we have those resources.
Unknown Speaker 55:38
We can either
Unknown Speaker 55:41
do priorities one, three, and six,
Unknown Speaker 55:45
and complete them on time.
Unknown Speaker 55:48
We can do six priorities at once, but lengthen the time horizon.
Unknown Speaker 55:54
There may be some combination of this that I have not figured out yet, but you need to know
Unknown Speaker 56:01
that it is not realistic
Unknown Speaker 56:03
to think that we can deliver on all 12
Unknown Speaker 56:07
on time when we originally sized for five, right? So
Unknown Speaker 56:16
either please give me the direction and I'll let you know if we can do it, or we can work it out together, sort of like a game of Tetris. What can you fit in where
Unknown Speaker 56:28
sequencing
Unknown Speaker 56:30
critical path and sequencing are not used enough?
Unknown Speaker 56:35
Sometimes just saying we're going to do some of this thing up to this point, we do phase one of this project, phase four of that project. This is what the report will be by next Tuesday, because the senior leader not only needs the work
Unknown Speaker 56:55
done, needs it done well, but needs to be able to report up right to their boss, what is happening,
Unknown Speaker 57:04
and if they don't actually understand what it means,
Unknown Speaker 57:11
they're not equipped, and then they are in that fearful scarcity place we talked about before, right, whereas if they can say,
Unknown Speaker 57:20
oh, higher level boss,
Unknown Speaker 57:23
we're not going to be able to meet the original schedule, but I can show you how we will come out right within four weeks. So now let's talk about how we message that to everybody, right? Right. So that's like a negotiation almost, and it's definitely something that I support leaders to do, but here's where I find the problem is leaders don't even have the time to analyze why something won't work and feed it back up the chain, so the intel is not getting up there, it's one way, and so the system isn't learning right, sometimes it's not getting up there because I think it's not worth it, when people don't have time,
Unknown Speaker 58:05
they are determining they are actually making a decision that it's not worth the investment
Unknown Speaker 58:12
to figure this out, as opposed to plodding on with what's not worth, yeah, yeah, okay, don't take no time
Unknown Speaker 58:20
on its face
Unknown Speaker 58:24
they don't have enough time for everything, but choosing to do the analysis, so you can make the business case,
Unknown Speaker 58:35
yeah, is often a worthy investment, and I think it's like in those times when they say I don't have the time, they have a brain in that moment that's not prioritizing well to begin with, so they're under all the stress that we talked about before. This is the time to stop, drop, and roll. This is the time to go for a walk. This is the time to take a breath, and that's kind of what I, you know, coach leaders, to do, because you know I'm completely in alignment with you. The critical path, the sequencing, you know, these asks are not realistic for these reasons. Do you want this to drop or do you want that to drop? Which do you want? For like to be able to have that kind of conversation is what will change their reality. Of course, it's like the proverbial no, you're not necessarily saying no, but you kind of are saying no, you're saying I'll be happy to take that into consideration, which is definitely not a yes, and it buys you a little bit of a pocket of time, but again, I think I don't know, maybe it's healthcare,
Unknown Speaker 59:33
they are just so close to the edge in terms of their, their stress levels that people just don't have the capacity to even think I have a choice here, and so they get into what they call, you know, lizard brain. Yes, healthcare also, though,
Unknown Speaker 59:49
seems to me has to have a lot of masking going on
Unknown Speaker 59:54
if you are working with patients
Unknown Speaker 59:58
in the same way we talked about.
Unknown Speaker 1:00:00
You let the kids see that you're nervous because you're lost.
Unknown Speaker 1:00:04
Doctors have a lot committed to acting like they know what's going on, and they can make it work.
Unknown Speaker 1:00:12
They will find a way through.
Unknown Speaker 1:00:15
There is both a puzzle-solving
Unknown Speaker 1:00:18
aspect and a kind of heroic aspect, I just think of all the dramas around
Unknown Speaker 1:00:26
medical institutions, right?
Unknown Speaker 1:00:29
So
Unknown Speaker 1:00:31
that takes a kind of
Unknown Speaker 1:00:35
force field,
Unknown Speaker 1:00:37
like an energy shield, right? You're you're putting all that energy out. It's hard to have the energy internally to say, wait, there's no payoff in this. The payoff comes from making the situation better,
Unknown Speaker 1:00:56
and I can make it better for multiple people, not just for myself, right? This is where colleagues can be really helpful. You build the case together, you support each other in it. It's hard to be the only one.
Unknown Speaker 1:01:12
Yeah, it is difficult. It is, it is difficult, for sure. On your own, it's not a road I would ever recommend, anybody travel by themselves. Liz, I know that we're, we're getting to the top of the hour here, and I would love to keep you, but I'm not going to, so because I have to be true to my word, right? It's all about credibility, so I guess as a way to end this, you know, when I've talked about these system patterns, these leaders who are in sort of crisis, I do that in quotes, because I know that's perspective. I guess I would just want to give you the final parting word. So, let's just say the leader that's listening to you right now is just like, okay, I'm dialing in. I like what you're saying. I know I have to open my door and go back to that hornet's nest out there.
Unknown Speaker 1:01:58
What's your little sort of last tip advice for them.
Unknown Speaker 1:02:02
Oh goodness,
Unknown Speaker 1:02:06
I think the first thing I'd say is
Unknown Speaker 1:02:09
go back with fresh eyes. You know what you know,
Unknown Speaker 1:02:14
but if you were a new person coming today full of hope and optimism,
Unknown Speaker 1:02:20
and the expectation that you were going to make a difference,
Unknown Speaker 1:02:24
look around,
Unknown Speaker 1:02:26
what would you work on,
Unknown Speaker 1:02:29
and do that
Unknown Speaker 1:02:31
make the difference, because when you see that you can,
Unknown Speaker 1:02:35
yeah, it juices you up for more, yeah, it's true, it's kind of setting that upward spiral, as they call it. Yeah, yeah, I like that. Yeah, the journey of 1000 miles starts with a single step. Is that Lao Tzu or something like that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Eventually you get to your whole mouth.
Unknown Speaker 1:02:57
Yeah, I really appreciate the nuance that you've brought to this conversation, because I don't know about you, but when I look at all the new leadership books and titles and things coming out, it can convey that there is this sort of one step, two step, three step, boom, I've got it figured, and I really like the way you interweave, you know, the sort of personal mastery and the meditation and like know thyself and how that benefits our self regulation, so all to say that you're really aligning and underscoring much of what I've seen to be effective, so I think it's really strengthening a lot of both our work, hopefully. So I really do appreciate you bringing your, your, your fresh perspective to the conversation for the listeners. So heartily, thank you for that, Liz. Appreciate it. It's great to talk to a kindred spirit. Yeah, I like that. I feel a kindredness with you as well. All right, so thanks for being with us today, and
Unknown Speaker 1:03:52
we'll hear from all of our listeners about this conversation, and I'll share any of that back with you as we go forward. Thanks again, Liz.
Unknown Speaker 1:04:02
Bye.
Unknown Speaker 1:04:04
Yes,
Unknown Speaker 1:04:06
so you've been listening to The Squeeze. Thanks for joining us today. If you want to continue tuning in, don't forget to click subscribe, and as always, we want to hear your thoughts, your comments, your feedback, and challenges. If there's anything you don't agree with, thanks for joining us, and see you next time.