Ep 164: Healing Leaders are Better Leaders, with Kelly L. Campbell and Fereshta Ramsey

Speaker A: You're listening to Thrive, your agency resource, the only podcast of its kind for creative media and technology leaders who are ready to dive deeper into consciousness, leadership and agency growth. I'm your host, Kelly Campbell. This year, Thrive is brought to you by E2UM M Solutions, a trusted white label partner to hundreds of digital agencies across the globe. Visit e2msolutions m.com thrive today. Welcome to Thrive, your agency resource for what will actually be the very last time. It's a little bittersweet for me, but this is the final episode of a four year run of the show. I cannot believe how fast four years has gone. It's literally like I blinked and, um, here we are. I want to thank each and every one of you for joining me on this journey for the series finale. I've got something really different for you in store. I literally could not be more excited about it. I'm like bursting out of my skin. I am joined by a very, very special person to me. Fadishtra Ramsey is a transformational coach specializing in relationships and shadow work. I'm also honored to call her one of my best friends. So I'm actually gonna be in the guest seat today in the hot seat. And we're gonna be talking about my forthcoming book, Heal to Lead Revolutionizing Leadership Through Trauma Healing, which is actually going to be out in April 2024 through Wiley. With all of that said, where do we begin, my love?

Speaker B: Oh, my gosh, I'm so happy to be here with you and to name, like, the end of a chapter for you. This is a big deal. How are you feeling letting this close for new adventures?

Speaker A: You know, it's what the cliche one door closes, five more open. And I felt like I really just needed to create space. And so creating space for me meant looking at all the things that I do in the world that I like and I think provide value and are no longer necessarily serving the bigger vision that I have. So it's edgy and there's uncertainty, but there's also a little part of me that would love to do like a studio show in 2025. So I think that my sort of note to the universe is I'm gonna close this chapter so that you can create something bigger for me.

Speaker B: Yeah, that feels so expansive to me hearing that. And with this new chapter that I am just, I can feel coming for you about your book, right? This is the time you're going to be focusing on delivering this to the world. M what do you feel is the biggest message you are bringing to the world with it.

Speaker A: I just think we have to get real, and we can't keep doing what we've been doing. These repetitive patterns and cycles of burnout and staying in states of anxiety and leading in ways that are not aligned with our values. It's gotta stop. And I think that the bigger message here is when we think about how we have become the leaders, who we've become, nobody talks about trauma. Nobody talks about their upbringing or their emotional or psychological wounds from childhood. A lot of people will say, I had a great childhood. I don't have trauma. And there's a reality to that that is different than what we think. So. So my vision is that I would love to empower half of humanity to heal their childhood trauma so that we can reimagine and rebuild the world that we want to live in. M versus the one that we are currently living in. So that's the big message.

Speaker B: Amen. Yeah. So that's just breaking the ice on what you're bringing here. And you mention in your book this idea of true nature. Right. Just even before we talk about trauma, like, what does true nature mean to you in your learnings and understandings?

Speaker A: True nature coming from Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist study, really just a return to our original essence. Or, like, again, who we were before someone else told us who we were or created stories or narratives that informed who we were. It's, I think, who we're always trying to get back to being without knowing that that's what we're doing.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: It might come from Buddhist teachings, but true nature, to me is just a return to the simplicity and the gifts and the, uh, who we were. If we could rewrite that story today. And the good news is that we can. And that's really kind of what I'm positing in the book.

Speaker B: Yeah. The possibility that is clear in this book is that this is available to everyone. Hm. If they're willing to do the work.

Speaker A: Yeah. That's the big willing is the word. Right.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: I always say and say in the book there are two ingredients. It's willingness and courage. I say it to my clients. I only want to work with people who are all in. And I think reading this book, it will become clear to people how much they're all in from the beginning and how that may change positively or negatively, by the end of it. I hold space for that, too. Doing trauma healing or trauma integration work is not for the faint of heart. It is difficult. You know, with shadow work. I work together a few years ago, it's it is hard, but the benefits are just massive. And it's like, what do you always say? What is the impact of not doing this work? Right. So are you going to keep staying in the same patterns and the same maladaptive behaviors? If we were to have this conversation a year from now and you're still in the exact same place, how would you feel about that?

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And so if the answer is, oh, that's, that's a non negotiable, like I have to be in a different place, well, then you're willing. Then the question becomes, are you courageous? This work is hard. You're touching on really sensitive nerves. You're touching on things that you probably have consciously or subconsciously avoided for a long time. So courage and willingness.

Speaker B: Yeah, I love that. I'm also just thinking about how your book invites in gentle ways a turning towards what maybe some of us have been avoiding. Right. And uh, how that is actually the medicine as much as it also seems like the scary thing. So in this realm of true nature and trauma, what do you find trauma does to true nature?

Speaker A: I think the easiest way to think about trauma is that it sort of applies like a veil or a mask, going back to that true nature, that essence. If you've seen a young, a picture of yourself when you're younger and you just had a different energy about you, right. You were, you weren't jaded by the world. You didn't have all these different things. When you're 2, 3, 4 years old, you're just starting to collect all of this data, but you are just you, right. You draw, you skip, you play, you sing. You're interested in plants and trees and animals. Right. There's just so much like the whole world is awe inspiring and wondrous and then we lose that along the way. Right. So I think the trauma, big T or little T that we encounter just creates these layers or these masks or sometimes I think about it like an accumulation of silt that just like. And then it calcifies like sediment. So yeah, it really, it does that and then we build stories and stuff on top of that sediment so it gets really crunchy.

Speaker B: Yeah. And then like you said, it's masking true nature. And hopefully the psyche is onto that at some point because it's not comfortable or life doesn't have the ease and flow that it could. Yeah, yeah. And this is reminding me about the castle. Right. In Shadow work or Debbie Ford's work, the idea of being born this immaculate, amazing, gorgeous castle with all these rooms and all these aspects of ourselves that are open, available, basically available to us and we have access and then they close. Don't be so loud. Don't be so selfish. Don't be, don't be, don't be, don't be. Until people wake up often in midlife, as you and I know, and they're a two bedroom flat and they think it needs work. And it's like the work is opening those doors in some way.

Speaker A: Right. So true nature is. In your analogy or Debbie Ford's analogy, true nature is your castle, but it's your castle with all of the doors open to every single room. What more becomes possible when you can go anywhere you want? You can have that much expansion and expansiveness as opposed to automating yourself and doing the same, like kind of, uh, I think we've talked about this before as the neural pathways and carving these grooves right in our behavior, in our thought patterns and also our behaviors. It's hard to get out of those ruts. It's hard to kind of create a new lane. But it is possible. You just have to hire a locksmith to open up more of those doors. The reality is, though, you are the locksmith and healing trauma and integrating that trauma from your younger years is the way to unlock those doors. So I don't know, we're just full of really good analogies and metaphors today.

Speaker B: And I think this is what happens in good therapeutic settings is this idea of, well, you have the key, I don't have the key.

Speaker A: That's a good.

Speaker B: I'm just helping you notice that you're holding the key. Like, let's, let's work with that.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think that's your work as a transformational coach, my work as a trauma informed leadership coach. That is very true. Like, we're empowering people to understand that the key has been in their back pocket this whole time. They just have to reach for it versus outsourcing that, uh, to someone else and become reliant on, or Justin Foster calls this monetized co dependence. Right, right. Like that relationship where it's like, you can't heal unless you're doing it with me. Right. Like, that's not the relationship that I want with clients. I want them to feel empowered. I want them to grow and evolve and follow their own trailheads, do their own work. And when things get a little crunchy or they feel like they're at a little bit of an impasse, that's when we can work together on, um, correlating some of those Traumas from the past, how they're showing up in their leadership style and then figuring out what actions they're going to take and then what commitments they're going to make to take those actions. So I love this work so much. I know you love your work as well.

Speaker B: I do, yeah. And in this, I'm also hearing sort of some key ingredients to doing the work. Um, I'm curious for you, like, what have you found in your experience? Are those key ingredients?

Speaker A: Well, courage and willingness, for sure. I can't preach that and then, um, not turn that on myself. So it is courageous. You need that brave sort of. Okay, I'm gonna do this. The willingness, I think. I don't know, just maybe, like, getting a little bit real with yourself. So, like, radical honesty turned inward. Taking responsibility for your side of the street, to use your. Your terminology. And a really good support system. Right. A really good support system. Whether that's a coach, a partner, family, friends, some kind of group that you might belong to, or just other people doing this kind of work. Maybe you attend a sangha. Uh, maybe you have a meditation group, Maybe you go for a hike with a group on the weekends, whatever it is. People in community. I think healing in community is really important. Or just having. Yeah. That support system while you are doing this work, Whether it's trauma integration work or shadow work or any kind of real deep inner healing modalities.

Speaker B: Yeah. I appreciate you naming community, because so often there's the self care and there's the like, do your own work aspect. It's very lifted in our culture. And then we forget about community care. And, um, I'm feeling it as emotional scaffolding underneath a human doing big, difficult work.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So I appreciate you naming that. Yeah. So you named something in your book I got really curious about. You said, you need to adopt rebellion.

Speaker A: Uh-huh.

Speaker B: And I had all kinds of questions around, like, what does that mean? What does that look like?

Speaker A: I think that there are so many demands that are placed on us. We could say that maybe women or young girls have more demands placed on them than boys, but I don't know if that's actually true, because then there's like, the toxic masculinity kind of thing. I think adopting rebellion. What I meant by that was getting to this place where you let go. Comparison is the thief of joy. M. So if you keep comparing yourself to other people and thinking, I'm not X enough yet because I don't have what this person has, or I'm looking at people on instagram or other leaders that are my age are at this level and I haven't reached that yet. I think part of adopting rebellion is figuring out what does success actually mean to you. Right. Like defining it for yourself and doing that not just once and calling it done. Because success is going to be defined differently across your entire life spectrum. How I would have defined success 17 years old, was vastly different than 27, than 37. And how I define it today. And I'm finding that as I get older, the things that I define as success are not at all the metrics that we've been all fed for such a long time. Right. As an agency owner, I thought about employee headcount and revenue and caliber of clientele, the household names that we were working with that made me feel successful. But really what that was was a reflection of my ego and how it was not secure. Right. Like I was needing external validation by using these kind of metrics. And I think we get really in some, some tricky territory when we start talking about those things as like best practice, uh, metrics or we only focus on data like that. Because right now I will tell you that my measure of success, or when someone says, do you think that you were successful as a leader? How I would sort of frame that in, my answer is not at all what anyone would think. I mean, one of the things that comes to mind always with this is one of my employees who got married, I guess it's been about five years ago now, asked me to be sort of his representative at his wedding to sign the ketubah. Right. And that to me spoke volumes. That's what I look at as success. Yeah. I mean there's so many ways that we can think about this. But adopting rebellion, to me, to answer your question, is about pushing against those norms and the status quo and all of the things that have been sort of imposed on us that we think we have to fit into these boxes. And I just, I rail against that now. It's like the more me I can be, that's how I'm going to be successful.

Speaker B: Yeah. And that's how you're going to bring your medicine, whatever that is in this life. Yeah. So you said something in that comment that stuck out for me that I'm not X enough. Right. Whatever. Fill in the blank is for people, whether that's performance based self esteem, just big in this culture. What do you see is the epidemic of not enoughness. How does it show up for people?

Speaker A: It's so big. It's so big. And I think this is what I mean by what we will not touch with a ten foot pole. The things that we're numbing and distracting about. Because people talk about other types of epidemics, right? Mental health epidemic, but really if we go a step deeper than that, a mental health epidemic really is an epidemic of not enoughness. That's my terminology. We ultimately none of us feel like we are enough. Good enough, pretty enough, skinny enough, smart enough. You fill in that blank and all of that was fed to you through childhood. Right. Messages that, that you either overheard were directly on the receiving end of intuited, understood, just because that's how they came into your mind through some, some gears that were already starting to form. So this epidemic of like we're not enough, I think has really driven our hyper consumerist culture. What I mean by that is the more things that are available to help us fill that void, we just keep buying them. I did this thing this holiday season where I was like, I'm opting out. I'm happy to pay for experiences, meals out or activities or something with my families and my friends and all of this, but like, I'm opting out from purchasing a thing that's going to make someone else feel like it's filling some void. I think people tend to look at solutions like that or ideas like that and say, oh, that's really interesting. I could never do that. So, yeah, there's a lot to talk about with the epidemic of not enoughness. But ultimately it comes down to needing to heal these wounds, these core wounds that have been imprinted on us and programmed us to believe that we are not enough. On some level, it may be very, very below our, uh, level of conscious awareness. Right. And it usually is. But yeah, it's, it's big and it's strong and it's powerful and that's why there's a lot of lack of willingness to do this kind of work.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I'm also holding with you, like, you know, when you talk about wounds and stuff, I hear it as we've made up stories that we live and breathe every day and some of them

Speaker A: are lies and most of them are lies. I would think.

Speaker B: Uh, and I think we all deserve to be able to untangle that from our true self and live according to principles that feel aligned with us.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's what it is. I think the. I love the word alignment because it's like that when your values feel clear and in alignment, there's a lot that you will not put up with that you will not tolerate that you will not subscribe to. And that is the thing that could help us get out of this epidemic of not enoughness. But you gotta be willing to do the work because if you're not clear on the values, you're gonna keep feeding the cycle.

Speaker B: And that, that's also normal given what we're getting as a download. Right. Like people are normal for having that. And then this curiosity is around just grounding this not enoughness concept for people. How did this not enoughness and or your own trauma impact your leadership style? How did this actually show up so people can go, hey, I think I do that. Or that sounds familiar.

Speaker A: Do you have three hours? I mean, literally every which way you could imagine. And I, I hope I do a good job talking about this in the book because I really, really want to model this and give permission for people to be like, oh man, I totally do that. I was that boss who really wanted to be liked. That was a big thing for me. That likability factor that, like I'm personable or whatever. I think that led into calling our agency our team members like a family, which now I was. When I do consulting and coaching specifically for creative agencies and branding agencies and things like that, I'm like, please don't ever call your team a family. It's super dysfunctional. But I didn't know that at the time. Right. Like, these are things that you learn the hard way. I think that there was also a little bit of people pleasing, which I know I do talk a fair amount about in the book. I kind of have this bifurcation between people pleasers and people controllers. And um, I think that we can be, we can oscillate between those things really easily on a day to day basis, depending on the certain range.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: The people pleasing part was like, I wanted people to feel really cared for. And so I would, at some point in the first seven years of the agency, I would come in on Saturday mornings and I would clean the office. That's what I would spend like five hours on a Saturday doing. I would be literally scrubbing the toilets every day. And in one way I felt like, oh, I'm really taking care of my team. I'm making sure that they have a clean office. In another way, there was a martyrdom to it. Right. Like, I don't know, it was a really interesting situation. It's like I didn't want anyone to think that I felt like I was above them. Right. So it's like I took the job that nobody would ever want to take, which is like cleaning the toilets. And I was like, I will do that too. But there was also like a weird martyrdom thing happening there. And then as I'm cleaning the office and I'm finding six Coke cans on a desk or something, half of them are full. I'm the one paying for the Coke. I'm like resentful. Right. So it was really complicated. And I was like, what is this? Yeah, I think that ultimately how all of this showed up was unhealthy from a leadership standpoint. And listen, like, I wasn't a terrible leader. I think I got better over the course of 14 years, which, uh, it's almost a decade and a half. You would think that that would be the case. But I learned a lot. I didn't have any business training or leadership training, which most of us who start agencies don't have that. We start as practitioners loving a craft, and then all of a sudden we turn around and we've got 18 full time employees and we're like, what the heck? And when's the last time I designed something in Photoshop? So yeah, it just, it showed up. My childhood trauma showed up in lots and lots of ways that some of those ways could have been categorized as actually fairly conscious leadership from the outside. But internally what was happening was really unhealthy. And part of that is probably what led me to sell the agency. I'll, uh, give myself some grace that I think I did some things really right, as evidenced by when I was time to sell the agency, like how my team reacted to that. They were so supportive, even though it meant that they were going to be moving to a different location or being sort of absorbed by a new company or out of a job because they didn't want to do that. So they were very, very supportive. And I was also supportive of them. And there was a little bit of emotional manipulation with that. I'm going to sit down and take an hour each day to sit down and look through job postings with you and help you craft this and applications and letters of recommendation and all of that. There was a little part of me that if I'm being really honest, I wanted them to have a good experience. I wanted them to still like me even though I was putting them out. So it's complicated. I don't think that there's a binary. Just like gender, there's no binary in emotions. And my childhood trauma really, really played on that. Because ultimately what I did was I created an environment in the agency where I was just recreating some situation where I could feel needed and wanted and valued and that I mattered. That's my big, big wound. Is that my story? My not enough story is I don't matter.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: So if I am an employer and I'm handling, or my company that I own is handling all of this big marketing for lots of large organizations and nonprofits and all of that social impact in the world, like I mattered. So I was playing out a lot of that childhood trauma and trying to rewrite that story through the company, which that doesn't work if you don't do the work. When you try to play it out in a company, that's not the place. So it's going to show up.

Speaker B: Makes a lot of sense too. Right. Like I'm appreciating the nuance of. It's not either you're this magical, glorious boss or you're this menacing, awful boss. There's this range of like, oh, I do a lot of this well, but where am I operating from? Mhm. What I'm hearing you say is some of it looked really conscious.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: And did have you feeling liked and valued and you were not operating from a place that felt entirely clean for you.

Speaker A: Yeah. And to be honest, like there were some days that like nine year old Kelly was running that agency. Was mhm.

Speaker B: Nine year old Kelly the part running the business as though it was your family? What had you thinking this was where you would lean into family?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think so. Because I had such a tumultuous upbringing in the way that family never felt like a structure, it never felt safe, it never felt any of those things that I imagined that family would feel like. So one of the ways that that showed up or a couple of the ways was on Fridays we would get together and all have lunch together. Right. I got this huge, huge table that I had custom made so that all of us could fit and I would buy lunch for the whole company on Fridays and we would sit and have, you know, chat and laugh and have a meal together. We would do volunteer efforts and things in the community, which was great for the community. Totally values aligned with the entire team and was like a bonding experience for us that felt like I was recreating the family structure and the dynamic that I never had. But that's not clean and that's not what that environment is for. That's why I rail against it and say it's dysfunctional now, having been out of that for so long.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I appreciate your ownership of like this wasn't always Adult. You driving the car?

Speaker A: No. Um, no.

Speaker B: And you can see the places where the younger part I'm gonna say was wise and getting some needs met, but can't necessarily run a business, Right? Yeah.

Speaker A: Yep. And it was emotionally and mentally and physically exhausting. I burnt out by the time I hit 35. So selling the agency at 36 was, like, kind of almost felt like the only option. I couldn't keep going. Right. And this is one of the things that you've said to me. That's your marker when people come to you as a client and they say, I just can't keep going like this. There has to be a better way to be in the world. That's what I was feeling. And so it was. There was also some guilt and some shame that came along with that, because it's like, I'm only 35. There are lots of people who run agencies and make it look effortless. What's wrong with me? Why can't I do this? Why can't I have more capacity? And it's because I was burning out on all the wrong things.

Speaker B: Yeah. A lot of emotional labor in what you were doing.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So what about these? I'm, um, thinking of people listening to this and relating to some or many aspects of, like, oh, I might be up to this myself. Getting onto themselves. Where do you see. I often see leaders taking care of their mental wellness, doing self care, doing stress management, meditation, but not necessarily doing trauma integration. Right. Where do you see that? Self care and mental wellness. Missing what trauma integration gets at.

Speaker A: I think one of the more somewhat provocative parts of the book, I talk about this bifurcation between mental health maintenance and trauma integration modalities. I think that they are very, very distinct. And I might get some pushback, and I might, I don't know, sort of tread on some people's beliefs there. But I think that there. There's superficial self care, which is part of that. A glass of wine every night, maybe two, a hot bath is great, but it's not there to really get at the core of, like, what's going on. It's soothing. So there are things that soothe. There's. If you're in therapy, that's great. I'm a huge, huge advocate of therapy as a gateway, not as a trauma integration modality. And the reason I say that is for much more detailed about it in the book. But I think it's a great place to start when you're starting to talk to someone about thoughts that you're having or behaviors or when you Start to get onto yourself or you feel like you're stressed out and you just, you need support. I think it's great to talk about those things. But talking is still cerebral, it's still intellectual, it's still in your rational mind. Trauma lives in your body, it gets trapped in your body. I just wrote a blog post about this. So the somatic work and the somatic movement and emotional release and physical release of a lot of the things that are trapped in the body is really important to that work. And so I think it's both and. Right. Not uh, one or the other and not vilifying those other things. I think that soothing is great and sometimes you just have capacity and time for soothing. But to do the deeper inner work really requires that you go beyond that level of soothing. Mhm.

Speaker B: So just hearing. They can both live and coexist, but to have only the soothing without getting at what's causing that need for some more soothing.

Speaker A: Yeah. I almost think about the soothing if I'm, again if I'm like really pushing the envelope here. I think about the soothing as a means of distraction. We think about overwork, we think about retail therapy, alcohol, maybe not even addiction, just alcohol. Anything that's going to numb or distract or push us away from feeling what we need to feel, letting emotions arise. I think soothing in this superficial self care way is kind of a distraction. I'm um, not saying it's not. It doesn't feel good. Of course it feels good for some people, so does alcohol. For some people, so does overworking so that they don't have to deal and go home to a family or a partner or something that is causing some stress. Shopping. There's lots of things that make us feel good, but it's not about feeling good, it's about getting well.

Speaker B: And I'm hearing that so many things, even positive ones, could be doing over. Right. I think I see people who over over exercise. Right. They're doing healthy things. Right. They're doing it at a degree that it's like you're doing over something. You're not just doing this for your wellness.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Noticing that internally.

Speaker A: Well, it takes the noticing internally because a lot of those over things that you're talking about are actually celebrated.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: The overwork is a great example of that. If you're a uh, leader inside of an organization and you're working extra hours, the company doesn't know that you're doing it because you don't actually want to go home, but you're throwing yourself into your work you're probably going to get a raise or a promotion because of it. Right. So it's like you're only getting that, that positive feedback for something that's actually doing a detriment to your health and your long term, how you're showing up in the world.

Speaker B: And again, it's like where we're coming from. Right. Because I'm holding that we're celebrated in things that people might have no idea are actually injuring us.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And that's a big dissonance too, to work with. Yeah. So I rarely see leaders who are, let's say, showing those emotions, showing their process, especially in the setting of their office. I'm wondering for you, what are you seeing are like the real hallmarks of leadership versus what we have gotten as a download from like the colonial patriarchal leadership style?

Speaker A: Such a good question. Such a good question. I don't even know if I would call it a download. I would just outright call it a lie. We've literally all been lied to for centuries. This idea that we have to armor up and show up as one person at work and the other person at home, like the real us at home. And this, this masked, I don't know, person at work, whether that's people controlling or people pleasing. Oh my goodness. The hallmarks of effective leadership, all the things that you've basically been told you shouldn't do as a leader, that's what they are. So in the book I talk about this as some of the four fundamentals. So trauma integration. But we've kind of covered that a bit, leading with compassion, and compassion being empathy plus action. So empathy is feeling with, but then what it's feeling with and taking some kind of action, some, some action orientation to that to say, I hear what you're saying, I feel with you and how can I best support you? And then embodying vulnerability. We've been taught forever, don't be vulnerable. Like Brene Brown changed a lot of that with a lot of her work on shame and vulnerability. But it's so important, the more vulnerable that I am with my team, just to say, hey, I don't have all the answers, need your support, help me lead this company, help me figure this out. I don't have all of the solutions. You should trust me more because I don't have all the solutions.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Like being vulnerable is incredibly important if you want to create more leaders, not more followers. And then really the last one is the big one, which is why I think we're all here, which is lighting the way. So Lighting the way for other people, getting back to that true nature, getting back to restorative and generative practices, whether that's restorative and generative business practices, land justice, all of the things. I mean, I could go on and on about this, but moving in that direction, which is really where the high conscious leadership component comes in, it's thinking about your business, your agency, your organization as doing right by your people, the planet and profiting. The high conscious component of that in conscious leadership, in my definition, is that you've gotten to this place because you've done the healing work. A lot of people who talk about conscious leadership, Diana Chapman and Jim Detmer and Gina Hayden and Raj Sisodia and John Mackey, like a lot of the pioneers from about a decade ago who talk about conscious leadership, they all say the number one thing is that you have to be really self aware, which I am in 100% agreement with. My question back to that has always been how do you develop self awareness? Nobody talks about trauma, nobody talks about trauma integration. And I think that's been the missing piece of. So that's the whole spectrum or like kind of the, the linear thinking here with this book. So yeah, to me, those are the four fundamentals and they're the four fundamentals of high conscious leadership. I'm not saying they are the only four fundamentals for effective leadership. There are many more. It is not an exhaustive list. Maybe that's book two or three.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I'm also just as I heard you name those four fundamentals, I felt my body sort of feel soothed and softer and relaxed. Thinking of leaders like that, like, what would it be like to be led and to support a leader like that feels so much better in my nervous system and what I have generally seen out there, which as you said, was the opposite, the lack of transparency, the lack of humanness, the lack of asking for support. And then watching all these fires going on with someone who like thinks they have to armor up and, and know everything, it's very frustrating to see, hey, thank you for that. Is there anything in here? Because you work with a lot of leaders, right? And I'm imagining you've started with some who have distracted themselves.

Speaker A: Just a few.

Speaker B: And then hopefully. And um, I'm. This feels true for me, knowing you, you've helped them move towards not avoiding and leaning into any of that trauma integration work they hadn't done. What do you find is the key differences between a leader who distracts from their trauma and a leader who courageously leans In, I mean, it's night and

Speaker A: day, right when they're coming in, they might be really frenzied, really kind of disorganized. They might be blaming other people. There might be things, you know, like employee attrition, client attrition. They don't understand why. And they're sort of, again, looking externally at all of the factors, why these things are happening to them. They talk a lot about things being imposed upon them. They are typically very overwhelmed, very stressed out, really anxious, just sometimes micromanaging because of the anxiety. Finances get a little tight. What do we do? Where can we cut? Are you doing your work? Where do I have to jump in? They start distrusting the people around them. And then that further creates the cycle and informs the cycle of employee attrition. Because nobody wants to work in a place where they feel disempowered and all of that not rewarded and not acknowledged. And so just like I said, when I was an agency leader, I was oscillating between these like people controlling and people pleasing tendencies. I do see that in a lot of the people. You use the word medicine earlier. And I think, I think I figured out recently in the last year or so that I think I became the type of leadership coach that I wish that I had when I was a leader. Right. Like if I had me as a coach at, uh, I don't know, I started the company at 22. So from 22 to 36, game changer, game changer. I would have been onto myself a lot quicker. I didn't start this work until right after. Literally it was the catalyst of selling the agency. That was my biggest catalytic awakening experience. So I didn't have any of this stuff as a young leader. And if I had a coach to like really help me look at those things internally, it just would have changed everything. So the people who are doing the work, they're exploring and like I said before, following those trailheads, they're doing their inner work. They're asking the right questions, they're being self reflective. They see it in show up in their relationships, whether those are with their employees, their business partners, even their partners at home. They're noticing their communication style with clients. They see that the clients stay around a little bit longer. The employees are not leaving, they're a little bit more relaxed. If they need help, they ask for it. They don't pretend to have all of the answers. There's a relief that I kind of see in their shoulders dropping. So yes, it's all, some of it's anecdotal and some of it does show up in the numbers.

Speaker B: Sure. And then I'm also holding you've, you've walked this right in your own life. So you also have the awareness or the evidence of like this did work for you and has led to your contributions in the world as well. Which is the piece I wanted to ask about because you named that. In some ways Maslow got it wrong. And I, uh, know this is coming from some indigenous teachings. If you describe how what we've been given since 1943 really is counter to what nature and indigenous cultures are aware of, uh, what's the difference?

Speaker A: So it all comes down to self actualization, Right? So the way that Maslow has imparted his wisdom, or his version of the wisdom was that, uh, self actualization is at the top of some pyramid, some triangle. And we have all of these needs, core needs that need to get met, physiological, psychological, et cetera. But the point is self actualization is the top. It's the pinnacle. It's the highest thing that you can reach. That's what he's given us in the world, and we've all followed it. In researching this book, I came across the Blackfoot tribe, which is where he did some of his research, and he took that indigenous reality, I won't even say teachings. It was the reality of what was happening in that community, in that tribe. And he inverted it because in their understanding and their way of being, self actualization was where you start. So if 5% of us in the Eurocentric model were self actualized, 5% in comparison in their tribe, it was 95% were self actualized. Because you come into the world that way, that's how you're brought up. So therefore the question would be, well then what's after that? If that's how you come into the world, what more becomes possible? What more becomes possible is community and the continuity of community of, and the perpetuity of your personhood, your community, your contributions, all of these different things. So it's like you're self actualized. You've come into the world, you're fed these truths about who you really are, Right. Not masks. And then from that place you're able to really, really serve and serve as part of the whole and in service to the whole. That's what I see. And so it was fascinating to me when I came across this research. A lot of the research was from Dr. Sydney Stone Brown, all quoted in the book with permission, and it's absolutely fascinating. So I think it will turn A lot of things on their head in terms of what we've been fed and how we think about our inner work and how arriving at self actualization is not, not the be all, end all. You said before about midlife. I think that a lot of us in midlife, 40s, 50s, are encountering this situation. It's like, I can't. This skin doesn't feel comfortable anymore and I can't keep going like this. And these rooms in this castle keep closing, these, these doors keep closing. There's gotta be a better way. So you do some work. There's self actualization that happens, but. And through that work, you realize, oh, this isn't just about me. This is about the whole. This is about something much, much greater than me. What am I here to contribute? So it's about finding out through healing, work, what are your gifts? What are you here to contribute? And it's not about personal legacy. It's about continuity and restoring the land and all of those types of things. And I know it sounds like these things are very disparate, but they are so interconnected. And that's not just coming from an ayahuasca trip, literally. It's just. It feels very. I used to think that I couldn't feel the edges of all of this. It felt too big, like climate change. Right. It felt too immense. And now I can start to see it more clearly now I can start to feel the edges. And I feel a shift and a momentum. I think that the future is definitely trauma informed. And so we have more and more of these conversations and a lot of the things in the media, a lot of the books that we're being fed, a lot of things in our lives are kind of moving in this direction. And it gives me so much hope and just excitement and I'm really excited to be a part of that.

Speaker B: Yeah. And it's just. You're helping me remember the. The power of having a map. Right. Whether it's the wrong map, let's say, or a map that isn't feeling true for many, or the map that is your book. Right. And this way of saying, here's a way that this feels possible, feasible, accessible to everyone. I'm wondering if you want to close with just what that hope and mission is for you.

Speaker A: Well, I think, um, I'll just say that it's the same vision that has sort of informed a lot of this trajectory. I really, I want to be part of empowering people to do this work so that we can all really reimagine and Rebuild the world that we want to live in. I think it's worth reiterating because I know that I'm not the only one. Uh, I know that there's a whole contingency of people who feel the same way, who's the values are aligned, who celebrate diversity, equity, inclusion, land, justice, restorative practices, generative business conscious leadership. I mean, I could go on and on. I'm not the only one that feels this way and knows that this is the future, knows that this is the path. It's just about us trying to all figure out, oh, you're doing that work in that pocket and you're doing that work in that pocket and there's communities building. And so the more, more of this sort of like nebulous thing that starts to congeal, I believe that that vision that I hold will come true. It may not happen in my lifetime. And that's okay. Doesn't matter. It's not about me. If I can contribute to it. That's all I need.

Speaker B: Really touched to hear that. Thank you. Thank you for sharing all of that.

Speaker A: Thank you. This has been so much fun. Thank you for giving me this space. I mean, it's just been. I feel like we're having a coffee on a Friday. This is like our normal convers. But thank you. Thank you for doing this.

Speaker B: Such an honor. And thank you for sharing who you are and what you've moved through and how you're. Yeah, just inviting people to have the willingness and courage to try it too.

Speaker A: Yeah, thank you. And if anyone is interested in pre ordering the book, if you're listening to this before April 2024, it is available for pre order now on Amazon. And then if you're listening to this after April 16th, you can get it probably on Amazon prime in two days. What I'm really interested in is actually putting a list of independent booksellers together. So we're not driving all of that business to Amazon, but really supporting small booksellers in local places especially that are bipoc and queer owned. So that will be coming on the landing page which is in the show notes.

Speaker B: So thank you.

Speaker A: I appreciate you. I love you so much.

Speaker B: Thank you friend. I love you too.

Speaker A: And thank you for joining us. If you liked this episode, please rate the show or subscribe wherever you watch or listen. And a big thank you to the official sponsor of Thrive for this year, E2 um M Solutions, your white label agency partner. Learn more about their approach, services and subscription plans at e2solutions.com thrive.