diana is so glad to have you on the show i'm i'm so thrilled to be here thanks for having me shane what are you obsessed with right now what am i obsessed with um i'm obsessed with wanting people to be more comfortable being uncomfortable what i mean by that is i'm watching people trying very hard not to feel heartbroken not to feel scared not to upset others around them so that
they don't have to feel any discomfort and so one of the things i'm spending a lot of time with with those i support and uh and hang out with is can we let it be okay to be uncomfortable and uh i think that if we don't choose that consciously we're gonna create a world that provides a lot of discomfort to force us to start to be more uncomfortable
um and so that's one of the things i'm putting a lot of attention on right now including in myself oh talk to me about that like are there tools that we can use to acclimatize ourselves almost to being uncomfortable or um to make that okay yeah like i you know i noticed it just getting ready for our time together i could start to feel my belly swirl and i felt my throat
narrowing and i could feel sphere moving through the body right which is an intelligence that says hey you're going into something unknown you don't know what this is like you don't really know shane you don't know how you're gonna dance together pay attention that's the intelligence of my fear but it's uncomfortable i could feel the part of me that's like wants to
stop my swirling belly wants it to go away doesn't want the body to do what it's doing and so you know if i'm not thoughtful i'll go distract myself and try to numb it out which is what i see a lot of us do different ways to numb out things so we don't have to be with the intelligence that's trying to move through us so aside from sort of like not running away
from it which i think is incredibly important and then when you feel it what do you do like walk me through you know your example of of this show i i'm sorry you're nervous to talk to me but like what are you walking through in your body in that moment in terms of like giving yourself permission or confidence to be okay with that yeah so first and foremost i just first notice
it what's actually happening and i like to think of my whole body like a bag of bits and there's all these little bits in there doing different things so first of all i just go what's happening what are these bits doing oh there's a swirling there's a little bit of a clenching there's a narrowing so i'm paying attention to that and then the second thing i say is can i just welcome
all of that can i let that be here as much as it is and not make that a problem and you know whatever it is just welcome it like you'd welcome your best friend into your house like hey man come on in so just welcome it and then just the welcoming of it helps it move all the way through so it can go wherever it needs to go and then i can be available for the moment
and not not have to leave or check out or contract myself in some way and sometimes we get this when we you know when we're about to have a difficult conversation with somebody too right we have this pit in our stomach how do we how do you think about that yeah so i was just working with the team the other day and they called me because they're really struggling with having
candid conversations with one another and they're not giving each other the feedback and they're all going to hr and everybody's complaining and so i came in there and said okay let's practice and what i noticed was so many people are like i'm not i can't even say it because i can't be with myself in the physical experiences that are happening if i speak out loud and i
was shocked by multiple people in the circle who just didn't have the willingness to be that uncomfortable and so what they do is they rob themselves and everybody else around them from feedback that could actually help us all learn and grow which is what i started to point out to them and so um so when i'm what i'm helping people do is can you just not label what's
happening the body as good or bad or pleasurable or uncomfortable could we just name it as just what's actually occurring as a sensation so it's when our i think our mind start to interpret and put a label on these on these experiences that we're having that then causes us to start to contract around those experiences and try to shut them down is there a pro you mentioned
feedback is there a process by which we can give feedback to other people that is better than others yeah i have lots of thoughts about this so feedback first of all i tell everybody feedback first of all is always telling us about the giver more than the receiver of the feedback some woman on that same team she said to one of her colleagues i have this thought that you have a big
head and that it keeps you from being more effective well what she told me first of all is likely that she doesn't either acknowledge her own big head and or she doesn't make that valuable about her uh which turned out somebody else in the room said i actually would trust you more if you had more of a big head so uh so a lot of the things we need to
first pay attention to is feedback is always about me first so can i can i be aware of that secondly am i willing to see that the opposite of my feedback could be at least as true you shouldn't have a big head maybe you should have a big head maybe i should have a big head so i'm looking at can i own it over here can i see how the opposite could be true and then could i
hold it with then because i can see it it's the opposite could be true could i hold the feedback lightly meaning you know like if i had it as a this is my feedback like i think this might be a thing instead of i'm gonna righteously defend i'm right about my feedback which then isn't going to often be something that the receiver is going to want to fully take in
it's workplaces are inherently messy and one of the things that came up in my research is you value that messiness in the workplace can you talk to me a little bit about that do you know i feel like ultimately i think human beings we're just here to learn and grow you know we're just here to learn and grow and we're all a bunch of scared kids trying to figure it out and so
um so many of us get caught in like let's be you know appropriate let's do it right let's not offend anybody let's and i what i see is is the the neater we try to get the less growth we actually get to experience most of the time now that doesn't mean we can certainly create environments that are you know too edgy where people are so anxious that they can't learn and grow and
that's not the kind of mess i'm talking about but i'm talking about can it be okay to have some have some tension sometimes honor polarities that are happening in the room use that as an intelligence that's allowing us all to evolve um i think that the trying to suppress messiness is a rip-off to everybody it seems like we're actually going more in that direction right where the need to
be politically correct the need to value everybody's opinion equally even though they're not equally well thought out the need to say things in just the right way so that we don't offend anybody the need to be you know cater to the crowd or the minority if you will yeah i'm very concerned about that i feel like uh if we're not um we're not giving each
other enough space to toddle i really like this word toddle you know like um like i'm a new i'm a little toddler crawling around you know and i want to learn how to walk and that looks so wild to be able to reorient my body like all these adults are and you just see the toddler is trying you know and the adults are saying like great job you know you fell down but and
that you don't see the toddler saying bad toddler you know what's wrong with me you see this toddler staying so curious and you see everybody else around them supporting that curiosity i just want more of that with each other you know so like hey yeah you fell down you know it you're learning can we just grant each other more more patience to support that while at the
same time honoring hey everybody's got to do their work everybody's got to pay attention so it's a yes and in my world as you were saying that one thing that came to mind is sort of like we're you know in a way more fearful of putting ideas out there because they could be proven wrong in the future or we could look like an idiot in the future and so we just don't
put those ideas out there and then we end up you know the world ends up in a worse place because of that we don't what struck me about what you said is the tolerance for other people like we it's like we forget that other people are human and they do make mistakes and they can be wrong and instead of looking that at an issue basis we look at it as a person
basis well diana diana said something you know that was incredibly silly therefore diana we're not going to value her opinion anymore yeah and i can feel that you know i i was making up a story like okay shane's more of an intellectual and likely his crowd's more intellectual you know and i'm not an intellectual and i don't think of myself you know i i don't i'm very experiential
and i can feel that part of me that gets scared of am i going to come on and people are going to dis miss what i have to say because it doesn't have scientific data to back it up or whatever and you know for a long time i think myself and others we hide out because don't come speak out about just your own experience or what you know because if
it's invalidated you know it feels um dismissive and people feelings can get hurt or um you know and no one wants to be sounding stupid uh and so you know there can be this like backup and what i'm trying to do is find my own courage to come out and speak and say okay i don't know i mean do any of us we're just learning so i'm just gonna put stuff out there and i'll learn from
your feedback um i'll learn from my own experience and that's the best i can do and that's courageous for all of us and it does it takes courage to speak out these days totally i think the ultimate question is not whether this is my truth versus your truth or how i see the situation versus how you see the situation it's more like does it work right right i have a bunch of stuff that
works for me and when i share it with a certain group of people it really works for them and so that's all i know is i know it works for some population of the planet and so perhaps it might work for you maybe not take what works and ignore the rest that's the advice of the podcast right exactly talk to me about the difference between the two me and the by me leader so
we got this model from gay and katie hendricks and i don't know where they got it from but it's this idea that there is a line and you're either in this above the line mindset or this below the line mindset and when you're above the line you're recognizing life is happening by me and in particular my own experience is happening by me so my emotional states
my physical states my mental states are happening by me the circumstances out there are not ultimately the cause of my direct experience here it's a um so it recognizes that i have a lot of um creativity here i am the creator of the experience whereas when i'm in leadership from to me it's more of those things out there are affecting me it's happening to me so i don't get to
have ultimate creatorship here i'm now a victim to some of the circumstances around me and so therefore i could you know from that mindset i might say shane you hurt my feelings you know you are the cause of my hurt feelings um which i hear you know a lot in the workplace uh or instead of hey shane i want to let you know i hurt my own feelings when you
said these words i took them in and i hurt myself with them i'm it was happening by me it didn't happen to me you know but most of us grew up like you know diana go apologize to your sister you hurt her feelings and so we got trained like we are responsible for each other and now that doesn't mean again that i don't make amends for like hey i do want to
acknowledge that i did this thing and likely that didn't feel uh you know likely didn't land very well over there and so i can still take responsibility for my impact in the world but ultimately everybody gets to have their 100 responsibility in their own well-being um when we're in this by me leadership model we're responsible for our own feelings something that you say to somebody else
may impact them in a way that you didn't intend but you're not causing them any sort of injury is that what i hear you saying yeah what i'm saying is you know if i say to you god shane i think you had an orange mohawk on your head you know i don't know why you're not wearing an orange one but it would look way better you know likely that's not really going to impact you
because there's no belief in your own head that thinks you ought to have an orange mohawk but if i said something like you know you could be a more effective father and i think maybe you should you know if i i said something something that you believed in too you might hurt yourself with it because there's a little velcro and so some part of you is believing or
agreeing with what i'm saying and then you use that to upset yourself so the idea here is i get ultimate decision rights on whether i'm going to upset myself or not and you should you know you might create conditions that make it a little more challenging so if somebody starts yelling at me i might need to take a little more get a little more present to
not upset myself and that's where tools like meditation and other skills help people be able to build that awareness so they can stay present in those scenes i think that's sort of like a good segue into the drama triangle and the the role of being a victim and how we see ourselves can you talk to me a little bit about the drama triangle how you came across it what it is
and how it limits us okay i'm i just want you to know i'm like a huge fan of the drama triangle it's the tool i use every single day with myself and with my clients so i learned this from gay and kathleen hendricks and uh it was originally created by a guy named steven cartman a psychologist and basically the theory is that we all have learned to do relationship
most in this role of victimhood and that there are three unique flavors of victimhood and so um the first one is the pure victim and you know shane it's so hard and the hours and my emails and oh my gosh and the kids and kobit and now now the masks and oh my gosh you know there's just all this i'm at the effect of and uh and so victim has this sense of disempowerment
it's got this it's taking less than 100 responsibility it it um it often has a little bit of a whine to it so then there's another role in the drama triangle and that's the villain and the villain's job is to blame whose fault is it so a lot of us have an inner critic that blames ourselves so gosh i should have more health i should be a more effective
partner or parent i should be more successful or i shouldn't be you know blah blah or you you know shane it's because of you that we're not having a good time and i was fine until you showed up so you should or shouldn't be a certain way or them i mean we all know who they are who are screwing it up for the rest of us and so this uh villain is constantly looking for who's to blame
and then finally is the role of the hero and the hero's job is to seek temporary relief and that really is the key word is temporary so i'm at the end of the day i'm so burned out where's the netflix where's my pinot noir where's even going for a run or something that gives me a little relief and it works day after day it works but i never go
address the core issue of like wait a minute what's going on that i'm living my life such that i come home at the end of the day so burned out you know how am i how is that happening can i address that so i don't have to keep temporarily fixing it over and over again we see this in friendships and in organizations where people listen to each other's gossip that's a great way
actually the hero let me give you some temporary belief by letting you vent so i'm gonna hero you by listening i'm gonna call it being a good friend but we don't really solve your issue we just make you know you hang up and you go oh i feel better that was great thanks a lot but now you've got to go back and we got to do it all over again and and so um that's a way we can hear
each other or we can hero them let's put a philanthropy together and throw a bunch of money in a population and not really ask them to take their 100 responsibility so that we'll take more and then next year they come back and they go you know we got all the same issues can you toss some more money at us so heroin is the most challenging i think in the drama triangle because the
culture can really applaud heroes and so our identities go hey look you know people think i'm good for doing these things and uh and so it takes a lot of awareness because in order to hero you need victims and then that means you are requiring people to be disempowered so you can hero and that's not such a you know that's how we're just going to create more
battles amongst us why is it called the drama triangle i think my sense is because in in that in those three roles what you get is drama you know you get recycling patterns where people are reactive and so that's that's a definition for drama is you know repeating patterns of reactivity i i think that word reactive is is really important because when we react what
we're not doing often is reasoning yeah right right we're not reasoning we're we're not responding we're in this kind of compulsive i gotta i have to and so and a lot of it again i think is because we get to avoid the discomfort that comes if we actually pause and become more aware and get and get present to what's happening and to be honest about what's happening with each other it's
like oh i don't want to do that so let me just temporarily relieve everything over and over again and what's interesting to me also about each sort of point in this triangle is that from that perspective we're just always right whether we're the victim or the villain we're the hero like the story that's going on in our head is that we're we're right
yeah and that's what we see yes and exactly we can create these biases that actually can we can avoid all the evidence to the contrary of our righteous perspectives and the more i'm in my own deep practice i get that ego and identities need to feel right in order to secure themselves and if i were to let go of being right from that righteous point of
view which is like a right that defends itself what's underneath that is a lot more vulnerability a lot more of i don't know a lot more fear and if you're not comfortable with that then the identity is going to secure itself all back up again and you're going to get back into i'm right that this is the right way and that's the wrong way and i'm right to be more like this and not
like this and everybody it's just we all get secured up again in these defense mechanisms to protect this deep deep vulnerability that comes under what if i don't know what if and that's a people don't like to sit in i don't know and they definitely don't like the fear of vulnerability like even just opening yourself up to somebody else and you
know telling them you care about them or whatever it is because you're worried about this rejection you're worried about all these things yeah that that threat to our approval because gosh we all want to be approved of it's so important and we want to we all want to feel secure you know that i'm going to be part of something and i want to we all want to have that control
but that all has to learn to be sourced inside of ourselves because if i can't source all the approval i've ever wanted i'm gonna then be out in the world trying to control my approval and that's going to cause a decent amount of suffering for me and maybe for others too one of the things that uh strikes me with the drama triangle is that it's all happening at the subconscious level it's
all invisible to our sort of conscious mind how do we go about making the invisible visible that's a great question so i'm a huge fan of saying hey look i'm on the drama triangle and let me show you let me show me and so if you knew me when i first learned these things um my husband and i we were practicing together and we got sets of the drama triangle we made cards
said the hero villain and victim we laminated them and we put them in our kitchen we put them in our living room and working on our master bedroom and so whenever we'd start to have any kind of a discussion that had any sense of reactivity to it we would literally get on the drama triangle we would step on it and we would move our our physical bodies around
on the bases as we could feel ourselves you know like you know i can't believe you didn't get the kids to school on time you know i'm now i'm on villain you know and then i always have to do it and i can never count on you and and so i would just run around on those bases so i could see oh as long as i'm going to have the conversation from here i'm not really going to be able to learn
and grow and really understand how am i co-creating these scenes that i tell myself in the world i don't want but yet unconsciously i'm creating them and so if i'm on the drama triangle those will never those will never become aware so i'll never be able to permanently shift those issues so i think having drama triangle physically on the ground to step on and
talk about and make big you know i say like let's soap opera this baby up and so let's you know make it the biggest tragedy so it's kind of funny because you know when you're in the drama triangle everything starts to get serious and my experience is the more serious we are the less we learn and if you look at all mammals mammals learn best through play and there's research
suggesting that children also are much more able to learn when they're in a states of play so if i'm serious about something and it's not funny and the more not funny it is the more likely i am to shut down my the all the awareness and all the learning that could actually really take me to a new place so i like when i go into a team i'll say all right what's one of the issues that
you guys have going on and they might say um you know we haven't made numbers the last two quarters and i say okay let's make this the best drama you've ever seen like everybody you know imagine we've all been at the bar we've had several drinks we're a little sloppy get on the drama triangle and really and moan about this issue and first of all that's sort of relieving to
a lot of people because it's like really i get to do that and so i let them get on the bases and moan and complain and who's to blame and who how do you fix it and how are you at the effect of it and just letting that out we all get to go ah okay all those parts get to one and complain now what now are we willing to get off this drama triangle so that we
can actually really learn how to co-create a different option and so i'm all for exaggeration and play around when we're when we're in the triangle walk me through what's next like you do that you have that session you moan you complain you get it out you over exaggerate you feel really good and then you feel open and a little bit safe i would imagine what's next
what's next is all what's next is can you just recognize you're in this dramatizing goal you guys because you're scared there's you're a threat feels like a threat to your security or control or approval people most people will go yeah i am threatened i do feel threatened now a few people will say i don't think i'm threatened but then if you help them see
a little more clearly everybody eventually gets to see okay you're right i'm in a state of threat so the first thing i know is if you can't accept the fact that you're in a state of threat you'll never shift anything and so i really i play i pay a lot of attention like looking at who's the one who's scared you know i could feel it today like the one who felt a little threatened about
coming on today you know like how old is she and i look at i'm like she's she's from third grade i don't like what is that nine or ten she's nine or ten and um and she got kind of bullied on the playground when she went to a new school and the kids didn't know her and so that part of me is here worried that this might happen again and so i just go oh sweetheart you're just
scared yeah come sit on my lap so if you know me i do that to myself like oh you're just come on have a seat and i'm not trying to stop it or numb it i'm well like you are welcome to be scared let's move that all the way through to completion take a breath with that welcome all those sensations and then check and see is there something that
you need and can we get that source from within so that then you can be able to respond so first and foremost after you recognize you're in this reactive place in the drama triangle except you're scared and then after that you just check and see would i be willing to move from threat to trust so i ask questions of myself and others like would i be willing to stop blaming
anybody if we all stopped blaming and we all recognize we each have a part to play so i could start to look at how am i co-creating this rather than throwing blame over someplace else and would i be willing to stop being righteous about this so that there can be something i can learn because right now obviously there's something i don't know if i did i'd solve this already
and would i be willing to feel my feelings about this and when i'm willing to other people feel theirs and what i'd be willing to really listen to the other side most of us don't listen and would i be willing to be honest like really truly candid if i've had to thought three or more times would i say it out loud instead of withholding it would i be willing to recognize likely
there's been some broken agreements here that have caused some of this and how am i how have i been a part of that so i ask people these questions we call them willingness questions to see would you be willing to shift out of threat to trust and then if people are willing then now they're in a more open state they're open in their minds they're open
in their emotional states they're open in their bodies and i say then their three centers are turned on iq eq bq which is a metaphor i like to use and then from that place from that state of presence they're a lot more available for learning and a lot more available for a new solution i want to explore the iq eq bq in just one second but before we get to that this triangle has three
points on it um sort of victim hero and villain talk to me are they all equally weighted like is one a better position to be in the other or are they all the same they're all the same they all are taking either more or less than 100 responsibility in their own ways so they're all not really taking full ownership and they all have they're all really brilliant honestly i mean
i really appreciate our psyches that created these structures to protect ourselves because that's what the drama triangle is it's a reactive defense mechanism that we've all set up and they each of those bases is equally valuable in its defense mechanism so um and my experience is that when people are dealing with any issue they're going to be on all three bases
they're going to have some of each now some of us tend to we learn to do relationship being more of a hero or more of a villain or more of a victim or some combination and that often comes because maybe those bases were already taken by the people we grew up with and so that's kind of a natural default that we go to so we have typical patterns that we do but they're
all equally weighted one of the things that you mentioned and not necessarily related to the drama triangle but as a way to get out of it was taking a breath and i find that really interesting because this summer i took my my youngest child cliff jumping and his first cliff that we jumped off was like 30 feet right so not you know he's 11 years old this is not a not a
small feat for him and the way that we sort of overcame this was through like breathing and we talked about confidence and doing difficult things and doing things we've never done before and we have a history of this and the easier my my theory on this is like the easier we can recall things that we've done that are difficult and the more we can just take a deep
breath we can talk to ourselves in a positive light we've done difficult things before and that makes it easier um to go forward but the question is what role does breathing play in that because i've always noticed that breathing is a part of it like when i was talking to him i'm like just take a deep breath slow it down and then you mentioned that and i i
thought of that instantly ah first of all i'm just touched by your fatherhood that that takes him and helps guide him to go to those edges it's a great gift it's just yeah and that and that you could remind him you know we've done difficult things before and so bringing some rationality in but then also that breath helps relax the body it helps open up the contractions
helps us get more present here it helps us recognize oh breathing doesn't just happen to me i can be the breather and so i get choice about that too and so it helps me come back to my own empowerment that it's one of the only functions i think in the body in which it happens automatically and i get to control it and so uh so i really i've never thought of it that way before
right i think that's the i think that's the case yeah i don't think i don't think it's really interesting i mean one thing i didn't tell him is that we can't get down other than by jumping [Laughter] yeah yeah so breathing helps me come back to my own sense of power helps my body relax helps me notice what's happening around me so that i can feel that empowerment
to then go through and push the edge of something that feels vulnerable let's explore the iq eq bq what's their relationship to sort of um each other and relationship to peak performance this is my theory um just a theory i have no idea if i'm right but i believe that we have these three centers of intelligence so this intellectual uh intelligence this emotional intelligence
and this instinctual or body intelligence and my belief is is that different people lead with a different intelligence i think we all have all three but some of us lead with intellect some of us lead with emotional intelligence lead with bq and so what i'm interested in is helping people honor their their one they lead with so i lead with bq that's my
i feel things i don't have to i don't intellectually know a lot a lot of the things that i that i um can go toward i feel them it's like a mammal maybe who goes back to a watering hole hundreds of miles away i just kind of know my way and that's challenging when you say to a group of people like i think we should go this way and people say well where's
your data and for those of us who have more bq intelligence that leads it's difficult because it's like well i don't necessarily have that data um i just have this sense about things and my sense is pretty on a lot of the time i got a nose i got a good nose and so um we didn't get trained most of us in schools to honor body intelligence you know we have most of us didn't get trained
for emotional intelligence either we mostly have been valuing iq so much which is great iq is fantastic but i find that leaders who are able to access all three centers equally knowing they have a lead in one are more able to make effective decisions and you know i think emotions are also like they have so much intelligence and um you know anger says hey something isn't
serving me the my people the situation it's so intelligent so when we're angry it's like stop change i like to think of angers like when the director goes cut like we need better lighting or say that a little louder or like the anger helps make everything more exquisite if we can see it that way and that fear says we gotta learn something here and then sadness says maybe there's
something we gotta let go of something we need to grieve so that we can be present to what's here i i help teams a lot grieve because you know i work a lot with silicon valley startups and um you know a lot of them are grieving that they had ideas that they would have a certain number of users by you know xyz or they'd have so much money in the bank
or they'd have investors coming in and they have to let go and they have to feel the wisdom of you got to let go so you can actually be with what's here now and deal with that because if you can't if you can't let go of that beautiful picture you had you you can't really see the beautiful picture that's now here but just in a different way and so um so i feel like uh
you know when they do grieve their they like can go okay so i was with a team in which uh they had to cut was doing right before covet and they had to cut uh or right as kobe was happening twenty percent of the team and so i asked the leader of the organization would you please give space to the whole team to grieve so he did he said hey i just want to
you know it's just presents for a minute i imagine we're all really grieving the fact that our colleagues are leaving and that this isn't going to be the same place and i want to make space for that and let us talk about it for a minute and so what i think happens is when people are able to talk about those things they get it through the system you know it doesn't take that long but
they get to really presence it feel it in the body you know maybe it's tears maybe it's just some aches in the chest maybe it's just some darn but can we let that come all the way through and then okay all right well that has happened now what and if we don't give space for that it ends up happening through gossip and man and and people talking and like then we waste a bunch of energy
doing all kinds of things to try to get that grief through that we didn't you know that we don't know how to get it through because talking alone isn't going to make that happen um so i i find that um there's just a lot we call like you know a lot of whole body intelligence that still we're we're just getting started and helping people understand and value that there's
so many ways that i want to follow up on this one of the one of them is sort of like avoiding the feeling actually makes the feeling come up later and in more unpredictable ways like i see this with my kids right when they try to suppress their anger it comes out later in in very different and difficult ways and it seems to last longer whereas if you just embrace it
you feel it and you know it sucks and you learn how to deal with it but then it passes yes it passes and if it doesn't pass then it does it does drop it does become suppressed and then what can happen is a story can start to be created and then that story the the mind starts to want to be right about the story and it can create what we call a cognitive emotive loop
in which then it now is not just an emotion that's moving through the body it's now a story i hold but then i activate with a feeling that then activates the story and it loops and it can go on and on and on so i could do it with um you know if i said like can you believe she said that about me i just can't believe she did that and i'm right that she shouldn't have said it and i
upset myself with my righteous story and then that saddens me and i'll just loop and loop and loop and then i could be sad forever about that and so i'm going to break it out then you got to just drop back down to underneath your story just what is the sensations and i like to get back to sensations because maybe i don't even know what the feeling is
just can i come back to what's happening in the body and let that process itself all the way through and the body knows you know the body knows how to move itself sound itself uh you know express itself to let it go all the way through and it's great to have i think opportunities for you know kids to be able to and we're all kids at heart but we were talking about parenting to be
able to have you know an environment in which kids can go yeah buddy you're you're angry i welcome your anger how angry are you like if your anger could make a sound what's it sound like you know instead of like well if you're going to be angry honey you have to go to your room which only just validates the you know the child's belief that anger's not welcome
here and i got to suppress it talk to me you mentioned being at this crossroads right your body's telling you you're you lead with your bq and your body's telling you to go one way and then you're trying to communicate to somebody who might lead with more emotion or intelligence how do we learn to have conversations between these different leads
yeah it's a great question so what we have to do is honor that that's one of the reasons why we like the diversity amongst us is maybe you have some data that will suggest why my idea is or is not a good idea um or maybe you have some emotional intelligence that says you know as i'm hearing you speak i notice i feel really scared and uh the fear is very strong in me and i'm not sure
that we know enough yet to make that decision so we count on each other in each other's intelligences to bond together to see what do we you know do we all have for our own unique intelligence is an agreed-upon next step and maybe we do say hey in this case like there are times when i say hey look you have brilliant intellectual understanding of this topic i'm gonna i'm going to
uh bow to you in this case because i think you're probably you know you sh you demonstrate a uh a better track record in these areas so i'm going to listen to yours and whereas you might say hey diana in this area you tend to always have good instincts i'm going to go your way and then all we can do is learn you know but it's just our job to keep listening over and over again what
do we notice what do we notice here as we decide next steps one of the most interesting quotes i've probably come across in the last year has to do with this and it was i think it's jeff bezos but i'm going to butcher the quote a little bit but it was basically to the effect of when my body disagrees with the data it's usually my body that's
right and the data that's wrong yeah that's my experience i um i had a son and when he was in high school he was using a lot of marijuana and um and not not well and he was such a smart kid you know already been moved up a grade they wanted to move him up again i mean brilliant intellect and he was poorly performing in high school could care less about school and i don't
think the marijuana in that case was particularly helping and when he turned 18 he'd already graduated from high school he said i want to grow marijuana i can do it legally and i want to grow my head the data in my head said heck no no way what would every other parent on the planet think if i let my kid is already probably using too much start growing
large amounts of marijuana but my body my body was so clear it just said let them grow let them grow and it was just kind of like inside of my own self it was like what like are you kidding uh but i said okay if you can prove that you can make it legal you live in california at the time you could do that and so he first of all i thought the kid will he has will never grow a plant because you
know he's never done anything like this in his life and but his passion for marijuana he learned everything he could about it he wasn't a particularly social guy all of a sudden he's social all the other young adults around want to come learn from him he grows the most glorious marijuana plans he makes a business out of it he gets people to come in and work for him
he sells it all to the legal places and he comes to life it's like his passion for something because he just didn't have his passion at school and he ends up going off to the community college then off to ucla graduates with a computational math major while you know thriving now and i really do think my body knew when my head was so looking at the data that suggests this wasn't a
good idea so it was a great example for me of you gotta just trust this knowing you have i like that example a lot one of the things you mentioned in that i find myself dealing with all the time which is how what will other parents think of me and you know when i'm conscious about it i'm like i really don't care uh but there's this this unconsciousness
to it where oh my god like if my kid has a temper tantrum like what are other parents can i'm a bad parent all of a sudden right and then you think about it and you're like well wait that doesn't actually mean i'm a bad parent and but you've that initial feeling is is such that i'm being judged by other parents yeah yeah i'm afraid what are they going to think and um
and then i'm also afraid of like what's my kid going to think when they grow up are they going to be like are they going to be up is my son going to come back and go you should never have let me grow marijuana like what were you thinking so it's like this double whammy you know for most of us of it's what are the parents going to think but what's my kid
as an adult going to think about my choices and so it does take a lot of um presence to listen to tune in and to decide ultimately i am going to do the best i know how that's all i can do and for me i keep using this mantra in my head which is i'd rather learn than be right i'd rather learn i'd rather learn like we're gonna learn about what happens here because if i try to be right i'm
just gonna miss out on something else and so and i and i keep when i say this about be right i mean righteous you know because it was righteous in my mind when i said no he shouldn't grow i was being righteous i wanted to prove that it wasn't a good idea um and so now i just would rather learn i just rather i just know i'll learn something and learning when you're in a by me
leadership stance learning is the most important thing and it's like it's being in a state of awe like well let's it's a wild world out there let's find out what's it going to be like you know that that whole state of being righteous i never heard it in that term before but i'm just seeing myself through this lens right when i was uh when i used to work um
for a large organization it was a knowledge worker and then you have this vested interest in being right because if i'm not right then what am i doing here what am i contributing and then when you need to be right you spend all of your time and effort not only you know probably unconsciously undermining other people but trying to prove that you're right to
other people and you're closed to new data you're closed to different perspectives yeah and i get this question a lot from people of well how like if you're not trying to be if you're not righteous like how will you know how to go any particular direction and my answer is well you are going to use your own background your own experience your own knowledge you're going to use those things you're
going to use all of your intelligences and you're going to make the best choice that you believe you can make based on what you know and in that way you'll be quote right you'll say i believe i'm right but you'll hold it loosely so that you would be available so somebody could penetrate through and support your curiosity and like hey maybe you don't know something or i'm
younger and i've learned some new things and you haven't you know you've been holding on to some old models and um and so if i'm righteous you can't penetrate me and so that's where it's a i call it like walking the line of holding two sides of a polarity equally which is i believe this is the best way to go and i'm completely available to learn that it
might not be and how do i be in a big enough state of awareness to hold both of those two things equally because most of us can't do that it's difficult because it's it threatens the identity to hold those both equally i i think for me i try to think of it as outcome over ego right and if i'm trying to prove myself right or i need to be right i need what what i need to be right
about is just getting the best outcome yes and that you know shifts when you when you have more skin in the game you tend to think that way naturally right like it doesn't matter whose idea it is as long as we're all getting better but when you work in an organization you have a different sort of self-image i guess of your contribution yes and you
know like you're an investor and so we know you're making decisions that affect lots of people's money and maybe their businesses and that you're investing in and so we're looking at you know of course you want to be as thoughtful as possible so you want to really do this well and you only can know so much i mean no one ever can say i can 100 say without a doubt this is the way to go i mean it's
rare that that happens and so being willing to stay in that curious place while being very definitive on your choices it one of the things i love about it is it just it's way more relaxing on the body and you don't you know you get to sleep nights and you know you're just all you can do is the best you know how and just give yourself a break talk to me about
the whole body yes whole body yes this is one of my favorite topics so whole body yes is this idea that when i'm given options of how i want to move forward in the world i consider the option with my full body and this comes back to iq eq bq so i'm listening to this intelligence that's moving through me that says yes or no and so um somebody says hey diana um
i've got uh this friend of mine who i think would be another great client for you and um so i'm gonna say we'll see you know so i don't know and so i'll have a conversation with them and i'll learn and i'm going to listen to my whole body yes to know is this somebody i want to be working with or not and you know my head might say yeah but they're you know
they they have a lot of impact in the world which matters to you you should work with them you know but my gut might go yeah but something's off i don't know what it is but i don't think this is the way to go and my heart might go yeah i notice um my heart's not in it it just doesn't feel and so in this case it's not a whole body yes there's not a check check check
um and so now it's a no and so i say anything other than a whole body yes is a no and i think it's a great skill to have and it takes a little time i think it's a muscle everybody has but very few of us ever got trained it's like a flaccid muscle but you can build it up over time and i find that most people have a signature inside of themselves for what a yes versus a no feels like
and i often walk people through that so they can get a sense of that and then use that and i say start with small stuff like oh i have a menu choice tonight at dinner what what's my body have a whole body yes to uh for for what i'm gonna eat and then practice on little stuff uh and how am i gonna get home from you know here to there there's several
routes which one do i want to take what time do i want to meet a group of people in the evening to try different things out so you start to learn like hey it's got a lot of clarity and then you can build that strength up to start to answer much bigger questions that have more impact on you um and so i'm a i'm a huge fan of it and my experience is people do know a lot more
than they are willing to let themselves be aware of talk to me about when we use it when we don't because one thing that was interesting there like when should we overrule ourselves like with your son you didn't have a whole body yes and yet the the outcome in that case was a great outcome and in some cases when you're taking a client or you're getting yourself into an
investment or a situation you want a whole body yes when do we use these when do we overrule ourselves yeah actually so that's a great thing to come back to the issue with my son because i actually did come to a whole body yes the first response was no yes yes but i really i was in reactivity so i really wasn't in a state of trust so i had to come back to
you know would you be willing to let go what people think of you would you be willing to let go of being right that he should you know this is going to harm him i had to be in my own curiosity first so then once i relaxed then i asked do i have a whole body yes and in that case i did so my so um we have to check and see is am i checking for whole body yes
from reactivity um because if i am then i need to shift it over if it's a node i need to shift over and see am i in a state of trust such that i can get a much more accurate read on whether this really is a whole body yes or not so i find i don't i can't think of a time when yes at least for me it's just the way i live now everything is being filtered through that and i
can't think of a decision i would you know need to make that i wouldn't honor that one thing i like about it is it raises the bar right like it raises the standard for what you agree to and you commit to i love the word exquisite and it's something that i'm putting a lot of attention on is how could i have it be exquisite and what i find for myself and others is
i can make a lot of things good i'm you know i give me some lemons i'll make you lemonade it's good but i might never taste champagne if i'm just tolerating good and so i'm really learning how to be discerning to say but what if it's what if you could have exquisite and so i'm learning to say no to a lot of things and it's very heartbreaking honestly um because those things are good and
they're wonderful and it doesn't mean i let go of all of them but i've been letting go of a lot lately that's been wonderful but i think there's even something more aligned more on purpose more that makes you know that gets me humming because it's like uses me in the ways that give my gifts the most you know impact in the world and uh and so i'm really in devotion to
whole body yes for that reason i want to explore that just a little bit more in terms of like was there a recent event that changed this um because i find with myself like if i'm saying yes to average opportunities there's so many of those opportunities that i never ever have time for the extraordinary ones so i have to learn to say no to the average opportunities to create the time
and space to work on extraordinary ones yeah but i'm curious if there was an event that sort of made that happen for you was it or if it just sort of like was a realization that you came too slowly well i think um if you knew me you would know that i grew up in a really i think you know as families go it was a very sweet family uh dynamic and of course there were you
know challenges in there like all families but overall i grew up in a beautiful family all of my sisters we all went to the same college we were all in the same sorority we're all really close i mean it's very kind of rare in that way and we all lived in the midwest and we all were having children around the same time the children were all close and it was good
it was really good but i just had this sense like there's something else and there was this day where it was kind of the first and last day i ever heard such a very direct call but it just said you got to move to california and i was like uh it's so good here though i just built my dream house with my husband i mean it was so good but there
was just this sense of there's something calling you that's gonna be even more exquisite than this and so i didn't have a job my husband did my job we just said like we're gonna take the lead to california we didn't know where we're gonna live it was just this really radical surrender and we came out here and sure enough as beautiful and as my life had been up until that point it
became a whole nother level of exquisite coming out here and and create you know being here on living outdoors in this land community creating community that i was so aligned with and then having this work be so fulfilling out here in a community that was much more open to it at the time this was 20 years ago where you know nobody where i was living in the midwest had a
clue what i was up to and so uh and so that was the beginning of me listening to a call and risking a lot and then discovering wow it could be even better and so that's a regular practice for me now is whenever i feel it and it's pretty uh clear to me i just had another round of it like make space diana make more space and so it's like um i grow a lot of fruits and vegetables if
you knew me and so you know i love cutting it's about ready to cut the fruit trees here cut off all the dead wood um and these trees are gorgeous the way they are they're like why can't we just keep them but it's like cut them back get get rid of the dead wood because you're gonna have something that flourishes even more something stronger you know more blossoms if you cut back
and so that's a regular practice in my life we only get one life right yeah you know it kind of begins when we realize that we only get one life yeah yeah and so like i and you know gay hendricks is one of my he and katie hendricks my mentors and gay taught me about this concept called the upper limits problem and the idea that a lot of us limit how good we can feel in our bodies
how good our relationships could be how good our work can be because we put this limit of of how good it could be which often is determined by the families that we came into and the stories that we all hold about you know how much touch laughter fun creativity community can we have abundance and uh and so i've really been playing around with addressing my own upper
limit in myself that keeps me from having it even more exquisite than i had known before and um and so i think and i work a lot with clients on upper limit it's one of their favorite topics to explore is could you imagine life going even better and even if it's just life in yourself even if it's just life in your body you know but you know my it's like i feel like
i'm humming inside all the time like it's this delicious it's ecstatic feeling of aliveness and joy um and all the other feelings that come through that are enlivening i mean i'm i'm friends with anger and sadness and fear i welcome them as part of the aliveness that happens in here how do we go about identifying that that ceiling for us that high limit yeah you'll know
it you'll you'll say things like um gosh you know i can't even remember a day as good as this or can you believe this is happening or wow honey i feel so close to you all of those things are all indicators that i'm right on the edge of how good i can handle things and so for example we see these patterns show up in couple hoods you know because of upper limits which i think
makes a lot of sense more couples will fight on friday night than any night of the week and i think that's an upper limits pattern because it's like oh honey we have the whole weekend now to you know have more connection and so that'll be a threat somehow to well you know to how good we can have it so we'll fight and then maybe we spend the weekend unwinding our fight
the second most popular night of the week to fight is on sunday nights and that i think is also an upper limb it's like oh we've had so much connection i feel really bonded so let's have a fight to bring ourselves to a more familiar place so you'll just pay attention to when you start to feel like wow this is pretty great you know you're on your edge and
in those moments what i've learned is those are the times to integrate to go sweep the floors and just remind yourself wow i could have life this good or uh you know watch a silly movie or take a bath or just just integrate let the nervous system recognize you could be this happy you could be this connected and then once the system is settled in then it's
available to even go up a little more and then you settle in a little more and you settle in so you start to grow over time the nervous system and so when i first met gang kd 23 years ago they were describing to me you know their exploration of this upper limit and gay said something like uh yeah i was in a mile i live in a mild state of orgasm most of the time
and i was like oh i want that whatever that is i give me that and i can feel that now like it's i get what he was talking about and i have built that over time by learning that it's okay to be happy because a lot of us are told you know if you're too happy people are going to cut you down or people won't want to be with you or you won't want to be with
them or maybe you don't deserve it there's all these deep unconscious patterns in us that psychological patterns that keep us from from opening to life going really well go deeper on and that where we we are scared almost to be happy yeah yeah it's like um who do you think you are you know you think you're so you think you're so much you know a lot of us got told that like
don't have a big head don't be too happy don't be too sure of yourself don't be too full of yourself and of course there's the i get the message underneath there about be humble and but it but it's like could we be humble and be like just having a blast i mean if you knew me you would know i have a fantastic marriage i think it's one of the best i don't i don't see anything
better i've seen maybe some equal ones but i have a great marriage i've worked a lot of time on that marriage i have fantastic relationships with my children i have an amazing community of friends i mean i love them i mean i actually created a business in which i brought a lot of my friends in so like most the time when i hang on business call it's i love you
like it's crazy i live in a beautiful place i get to be outside hiking all the time it's so good and i'm just learning to let it be okay to be that good and not apologize or not feel bad about that or not worry when the shoe is going to drop to just recognize yeah it's really wonderful and um and so my whole life is in devotion to how good could it be including
more most importantly how can i most give my gifts to serve those around me in ways that are really meaningful to me and really supportive to them because that that's one of the things that really is creating one of the most beautiful parts of my life i love that while we're on the topic of relationships your assistant flagged this for me so apologies if i get this wrong but what's
the hamburger versus steak like or steak sex life thing all about yeah well um so i've been with my husband since i was 16. so you have to know that that we were really young when we got together and no one really told us much about sex and i didn't have very much experience but you know everything seemed to be going pretty well but i started to realize like
i was getting it starting to come a little ho-hum like it's good i mean it's good every but it's it's just it felt like eating a great hamburger and i realized like what would steak taste like you know what would it be like to have steak more often and so like all things i'm always curious about you know how good could it be and so i started to learn everything i could about human
sexuality and couple polarity and all these different things started to discover oh there's a lot more possible and so now i you know i really like to stand for like hey hamburger's great and i'm not opposed to having a hamburger once in a while but i really like steak and so what does you know how do we create the conditions in which we get to eat steak and um i think you know
i used to be a couples coach before i worked with leaders and organizational leaders and so now i do work with a lot of their couplehoods because it's part of them being an effective leader and my definition of leadership is anyone who wants to take responsibility for their influence in the world and so in that way everybody is a leader in my mind who wants to take
responsibility and so there's responsibilities at home and at work and in your marriage and so i work with them and i'm really uh blown away by how many people are not having happy sex lives and who got stuck and because it just it was boring or they were too busy or because they didn't know how good it could be you know there was nothing that captivated
them to stay engaged in that and so it just fell to the wayside and you know a lot of people really grieving that and wishing it were different and so i'm asking people to learn and understand more about how could it be so delicious and intimate and enlivening that um you know you couldn't help but want to make sure you create time in your life to create curate those experiences
and it's not for everybody i want to honor everybody has their own different preferences and needs but i think there's a lot more people who would be interested in cultivating a really hot juicy sex life if they had more tools and understanding of what does steak look like and i'm looking forward to more and more conversations coming out more publicly about this i i was just
starting to watch um when if paltrow has this new show called i think it's like love sex or something like that i thought oh hallelujah some of these teachers who've been you know hiding back in the corners that you can't really access are now coming out more publicly and we get to talk about these things so um and again we have to get uncomfortable
to have these conversations and again it's very vulnerable to start having open and honest conversations with your partner about what good sex is like and again if we're not willing to get uncomfortable then we're not going to have great sex so you have to be willing to start telling each other you know what's true and hey i don't like that and i'm afraid
you're gonna go away if i say that and i'm really scared to tell you that like can we just get really raw and real about what's happening so that's um so i am proud of the fact that i've with very little experience figured out um how to you know really cultivate that one of the things that i like that you said is how do we create the conditions under which we eat steak what are the
things that get in the way what are when you're dealing with couples and maybe just to to take it out of your personal life like what are the things that constantly get in the way not only of that that of sex but like also like in couples and relationships that are consistent across the board i really like this book called come as you are and oh yeah yeah emily nagoski yeah yeah
she's amazing yeah i i work because i think she nailed it i think first of all there needs to be a in physical environment in which the conditions are set up that especially the person who tends to play more of the role of receiver which often is a woman but not always the one who's playing the receiver often needs to have a psychological environment around them
in which they really feel like they can surrender which means i need to know that the kids are fine i need to know i'm not going to be bugged i need to have like i need to know i have enough time there needs to be this psychological setup for me to relax and then i'm much more available to a depth of intimacy um and availability that would you know create something
that's more like steak rather than like hey i got 10 minutes let's quick do it i got to get out of here because you know they're going to scream in a second so that's one of the things i think that's really important i think people have to talk really honestly and they have to have a co-commitment to give and receive feedback and be and so that they both say yes i'm
committed to hearing and learning from you i also think um in some ways you have to come back to like healing any old trauma i mean there's a lot of us have sexual trauma so can we start back at the beginning can we come back to our innocence and our vulnerabilities and our shyness and our and make sure all that's healed and you know and some of us have much more uh
you know bigger sexual traumas in those cases they if they're not dealt with uh within therapy or other places they're gonna uh ongoingly affect um uh the relationship and then you know i had this i was working with a group of women i think it was like a ypo uh spouses uh forum and one of the women was complaining about having bad sex and so i said i want you to teach us the
course i want you to imagine that we're all here and we have come to learn how to have bad sex and we want to have bad sex just like you have so could you put together a list of everything that we would need to do or be in order to have bad sex so she thought about it for a little bit she said well first of all believe that if you tell him that you don't like something that he'll go away
and won't won't take care of you so you got to believe that right off the beginning secondly um keep all of your preferences to yourself and just hope that he'll figure it out uh third um do whatever he wants and don't really ask at all don't believe believe that his needs are going to be more important than yours and so she went on and on like she gave
us like 12 steps to how she creates this mediocre sex and that was a big aha for her because she's been sitting around waiting for 20 years for this to change and being at the effect of it in the drama triangle and now recognizing just as she was able to teach the course oh i'm the creator of bad sex i tell the world i wish my sex life would improve but survey says it's not
true because it's not improving and it's mine to change if i would choose to do so but there's a threat to her to change the pattern so she doesn't so that was you know enlivening to her to recognize that and i never i didn't see her again to know if she changed the pattern or not but the good news was what i said to her is you don't need a therapist here unless you need some
healing about this but you don't need a coach you don't need anybody you've just written down exactly the steps for how you've created a mediocre sex life just go do the opposite of every one of those things and your sex life is going to radically improve it's just a matter of whether you're willing to do it or not because it's going to be uncomfortable and that's why
you haven't changed it and one of the things i'm good at is helping people be with their discomfort because that's the catalyst for most human beings to change is to finally face and feel the cost of the patterns that they're in i love that for those of you curious listening we did a podcast with emily i think it's episode 66 and where we explore sex and it was one
of the most amazing conversations although uh slightly awkward for me to talk about sex to hundreds of thousands of people right which is why we don't talk about it because it's like yeah exactly right it's like oh all the more reason why i mean i there were so many things i didn't know and i was mad i remember like in my early 30s being mad like how
come i didn't know this stuff about sex why aren't we teaching this and yeah i get it i i i think it got really awkward for me when you know my mom uh listened to it and was like we need to talk and then you know my neighbors just started like looking at me a little differently after that episode how do you i'm curious switching gears a little bit how do you think about the
relationship between intensity and consistency i don't think intensity i don't think anyone can be consistently intense uh and uh i think that that's a great setup for burnout which is what i see all over the place um and so when you say intensity it's a state it's got a lot of at least for me in there it's it's drive it's passion it's alive it's um and it's like to me it's like a
weather pattern you know there are times when it's great it's a great weather pattern to have and it meets the moment and then there are times when it needs to be this like quiet still like and it's our job to be aware of when you know what weather patterns some of them they just come through us we don't really get to have much control over that intensity comes when it comes or
or grief comes when it comes but uh and there can be uh intensity in my grief or there can be a stillness in my grief and so it's about paying attention to what serves the moment i think over and over again and um uh intensity i think can be a real addiction and i think one of the things we have to pay attention to i see a lot of addiction to intensity these days
and i think people get think that intensity is what aliveness is and there are so many other kinds of aliveness like the aliveness of just sitting in stillness and watching the leaves quietly blow in a breeze can be as equally alive as a wild thunderstorm that comes through and so but are we do we start to get these habitual patterns and i think chemically we get
addicted uh to the different you know chemicals running through our body when we get intense and we start to think that that's what that's what aliveness is so i work with a lot of people to actually try to settle down their intensity that's really interesting i wonder if we do that a little bit when we procrastinate right i wonder if we are creating you know we're artificially
upping the stakes a little bit to to force the intensity to force that dopamine rush maybe yes and then so that's the other side of it so for those of us who are trying to avoid it then i think procrastination is exactly what you say it it provides an intensity that gives a fuel to give up to drive us through something that is uncomfortable um to help us get
to the other side and i think that's the that is the high side of procrastination and something i'm very familiar with you work with a lot of teams what have you learned about making good decisions that most people miss i just think people don't practice nearly enough candor i think people are withholding so many opinions and stories about one another
and so we're not getting the feedback we need to be able to be more present in the moment in which we can make those decisions so um you know i'm i'm working hard to open teens up to like can we just tell each other our stories that we make up in our heads about each other because it's about you and it's good to know what stories people make up about us because
my experiences there's almost always a gem in every story that somebody has about me and from presence i always ask the question not is it true what you're what you're saying about me but how is it true how is it true that i'm you know not as effective as i could be or how is it true that i'm not listening enough or how is it true so i'm asking teams to tell each other their
stories more often so that they can see how is it true and then learn from that to be able to grow and be more effective in their decision making is there sort of like tips and tricks that we can learn to as a group um because often groups are the the the body making decisions whether it's a preferably a person but the group has to work together and in order to get the
best information you need to be able to be honest about um about things are there how do you form that in a group how do you encourage it i like this practice i i use with teams a lot called fact and story so i'll say let's say shane you and i are on a team and i say um shane the facts are that you led a podcast between the two of us earlier today
and then i would say here's a story i make up about that in my hopefully i'm holding the story with curiosity um and so i you know i'll say i'm you know i make up a story that and then i tell the story but i can as a team member if i can put a fact in story it kind of helps the person relax a little bit to go i it's just a story and it gives them a little freedom to speak more candidly
to one another and so i've done this before where i just come into a team and i say we're just going to go around the circle you have to pick a different person each time and you know fact and story and we'd maybe do three rounds of that and each time you pick somebody new on the team and reliably i get feedback that that may have been one of the best
practices they've done in a long time that they learned things that had not been learned elephants came out um people people got valuable feedback and they realized like we don't give any time and attention to being able to reveal these stories in a way that lets us all evolve and so they all said like the decisions they were making about they had a big decision to make about
whether they were gonna um sell the company or not and that's one of the reasons why i was in there there was a lot of debate going on and so i just said let's do fact and story around and it wasn't even necessarily around whether we sell or not it was just around each other and some of it was around that topic but at the end they had such clarity about whether
knowing whether to sell or not once they did that and i think they felt more comfortable with the decision because they had challenged each other like a story i make up is you're more concerned with money than you are with the well-being of the company like that was one of the stories that came out um because the one somebody who wanted to sell you know they were saying i think you're
and so to be able to recognize oh that's a perception you all are having well let me clarify why i do think this is in the best interest and it's not just because i want more money so we wouldn't have known it we wouldn't have been able to even have that conversation if those voices hadn't come out so fact and story is one of my favorite tips to teach teach teams i
love that and it comes back to something we talked about right at the start and it seems to actually be cropping up throughout the entire conversation which is making the invisible visible yeah because the story i'm telling myself is completely invisible to you and the way out of this story to a better outcome is to start making what's invisible visible so i can
course correct so you can understand me more i love that i do think that's what i'm that's since i was a kid i would be nervous because i would say like doesn't everybody see this stuff but we're all they all look like the parents are all trying to make this invisible and it's not invisible to me and so i think that's been my whole life actually and just getting that aha
hearing you talk like my whole life has been i relax more when you make the visible or the invisible visible i it feels like a friendlier world it feels like we can do something with that we can't we can't grow with the invisible so that is i think my whole much of my work is about that in my inner work as well as my outer work yeah well let's explore a little
bit about self-awareness which is something that i know a lot of us including myself want to cultivate and then we're not really sure how to go about it how would you advise us to go about developing a deeper sense of self-awareness okay if you know me you would know that i really like this body of work called persona work um some people call it parts work
and it's the idea that inside of us is a make is a makeup like inside of us is like a village of all these different characters and they all have different agendas and they all have different strategies for how they move around in the world and that they're brilliant they all showed up somewhere along the way to protect us and they all have superpowers but they also all have shadows and
a lot of the work that i have done with myself and with others is to start to name these different parts and to start to play with them and to play with them meaning can i have some fun with them so uh and can i allow them to sit at the table inside of my own beingness because most of us start to say like these parts are okay but these parts aren't and we start to relegate those
down just like a dungeon inside of ourselves so a lot of my job has been to go open the cellar door and see who's down there and pull them back up and liberate them and bring them out and play with them so they don't play me so you know everyone you know i would say everybody has a inside of them you know and a lot of us could say like don't be but i say
we gotta we gotta let the be at the table because the has a gift and the you know there are moments in life in which we would want the leading the show um she could be really protective here so how do we just though make space except the so that the doesn't run me and so i can learn to play her i can make her bigger i can have some fun with
her so that i'm not at the effect of the power of her and i'm also not at the effect of her reactivity which wouldn't be ideal for myself and those around me um if she were to come out in a reactive state and so that's a big so like if you came to the conscious leadership group where we held these events and if you came to one of our events shane one of the things i would do is i
would say what's a part chain that you know you have that you don't like about yourself so is it can you think of one like something about you that you go like oh i don't i really wouldn't want people to see this part yeah but i'm not going to say it alone so if if you were in the middle we would just edit that out or i'd say maybe you don't even know the part and i would say shane what kind of
people bug you the most out in the world yeah people who aren't aware uh who just aren't conscious of other people like who don't hold the door or just have no context of like that they're impacting other people okay good so then what you and i feel horrible even saying that out loud so right so then what you tell me is you don't live you haven't allowed that
part of you to be at the table and we might call him like is he kind of selfish or like i know he doesn't care about other people what like what's you said he's unaware but like well just be like being late not holding the door when somebody's walking right behind you like that sort of awareness okay good yeah so he's kind of like he's insensitive is that it
he's insensitive he doesn't open the doors he doesn't care about time he's insensitive to keeping his time agreements things like that and we're all like that like i'm like that sometimes too right when we get into our own head and we get you know one thing that i always ask myself is when i see somebody behaving a certain way and i don't like that behavior i always
say like what would have to be true for me to behave that way like what would the world have to look like for me to do those same behaviors right like and then you make up stories which comes back to sort of like you know facts versus stories and the stories are you know um and then whether they're compelling or not you come up with reasons that you would behave that way
right like what would cause you to cut somebody off well you're driving your kid to a hospital like of course i'm gonna cut you off right like and you can you can always come up with these sort of like reasons that would cause you to behave in the very way that is you antagonizing you in a way that's right so here's what i would want to if i were working with you i would say okay shane
what you're telling me is you haven't fully liberated this insensitive part of you and so what i would do is we would we actually take everybody in the retreat out to dinner publicly and we have you all dressed up as characters and so i would say i would say shane all night long you just have to be super insensitive so in the waiters and you're gonna like tell the waiter
like get over here i have an order you're like you're going to play out your rude insensitive one to it and exact exaggerate it and just see what it's like to be that way and give yourself some freedom and so we you know the restaurants know we're here playing with all these and we call them these x out parts of ourselves and so you would play that all night long and
what you would likely learn is that there's certainly of course a shadow to it but there's also a part that maybe even needs to come out more in your life in in different ways than you have fully appreciated and that this part has a has a like let's take care of me first mindset that might actually be of service and especially particularly in places where
you might be stuck right now or at challenging issues that part might actually help liberate something but as long as there's like a no you can't be that then you're not really free to fully respond to the moment because i like to think about like these parts are like keys on a keyboard you know we have ting ting ting and we have boom boom boom we have
everything in between and when you're really present you're going to ask all those keys are equal the ones that the sweet and the ones are they're all equal and so i'm just looking to see what's the scene asking for and sometimes the scene might ask for your insensitive you know rude guy because he actually may be just the right voice to address the moment that could help shift everything
in a different way but most people i see have decided like these things are good and this is me i'm this and i'm not that and then when the moment comes i can't actually respond to it because i don't have access to my full self and so i'm all about find every part out there it's because it also lives in here and can i find its value can i see its gift and
can i appreciate that it has a place and how do i make room for all of that at the table that's been that's been my deepest work and that's where i help a lot of other clients is bringing those parts back online so everybody's whole and they everybody because then what you get is i get self-acceptance because now i don't make any part wrong now i can now i don't have to worry so
much about what everybody thinks of me i don't have to control myself anymore by saying i can't be this i can't be that so now i'm free inside i'm liberated in there and i don't have to be scared anymore then i'm gonna like you know make a mess because i'm not gonna have these patterns now come out unconsciously because that's what happens if you don't
be present to them they'll they'll play out unconsciously and you'll make a mess and then you'll think oh no and that makes me even more clear i can't bring it out and so the the value of recognizing honoring all the parts all the personas and seeing their great value you know like to your point it's a great value to go get out of the way i gotta i got a person who needs to get to
an emergency and i'm willing to cut people off i'm willing to do whatever i have to do to save a life um as long as you know that like we want that part of you and we want him here all the time available whenever he needs to be here so that's a big part of my own work and what i do with a lot of clients and and we find ways to play with it you know
like how do we have fun so it's funny it's interesting that you know when you're talking about that i'm thinking you know my initial response is like one thing and then my conscious mind takes over and i create a different story around it and i think that initial response to your point is highlighting parts of us that maybe we suppress and don't let out yeah
and that's why it's aggravating yeah so then when somebody like the woman who said you have a big head you know to the guy and then you know somebody goes you actually could i you know you don't have a big enough head you know it's like so of course she gets reactive and then she starts to pull away and she gets disconnected from the guy with a big head because he represents something
that she has x out in herself and that's what i see going on is we're all projecting on to each other oh i want one like that i'm not like that well yeah we are we are like all we're all like that and it's it's naive to think i'm not like that but that's where all the war comes from that's where the battle is lived is in this belief that i'm separate and not like you instead of
i'm just like you in my own way and can i love that part of me so that i can love that part of you and then i'm going to be able to be more curious and open to how do we make better decisions together because i'm not against you anymore and i think that's going to be one of the number one keys to all of us getting out of our own way here is this deep interpersonal work
around loving these parts well with apologies to the people i'm having dinner with tonight i'm going to be extra insensitive what's the most important thing for you to remember when you're under a lot of stress i'm just scared i'm just perceiving a threat to my security my control or my approval because i've left i've left presents so i just come if i can come back to right
now no past no future right now how am i i'm a woman sitting in a chair i'm okay there's no there's no threat in this now moment and would i be willing to come source that approval control and security back inside of myself and take a breath and if i'm not that's okay then i'm just reactive and i'm just gonna go it's okay to be scared and then
i'm just gonna do my practice over and over again i love that how do we raise the standards for others and ourselves when it comes to performance well i do think the more i can be in the present moment rather than in an imagined future that i'm scaring myself with and trying to respond to or you know caught up in a bunch of wounds from my past the more i can be right here right now
in a non-triggered non-reactive state the more effective i'm going to be and so it's all about cultivating a set of tools that i like and everybody has their own set of tools that they like but what are the tools that we're going to use that bring us back to presence over and over and over again and and will we devote to that like you know a lot of us
care about our physical well-being and we go to the gym or whatever the equivalent of that is on a regular basis like would you go to the gym in your own consciousness on a regular basis and so you know i use my phone uh it's telling me all day long diana where are you or diana could this be more exquisite or diana what are you feeling right now i i have ways in which i'm going to the
gym you know throughout my day so that i just keep staying aware and building those muscles because they're just in my mind it's just like physical muscles where they can atrophy quickly if they're not used and you can easily go back to old patterns and so it's reliably um tending to those and of course meditation is helpful and emotionally coming back down into
the body and being willing to be with that discomfort all of those things will allow me to be more present and then therefore far more effective i mean and i think this is going to be i think we're going to see this more and more you know for a long time you could have a really unconscious culture and a lot of drama and be wildly successful as a business i don't think
that's going to be the future i think the teams that are the most present are going to win the games and i think we're just we're moving into a much more chaotic uh cult you know world and things are not gonna be as predictable and we're gonna need all of our wits about us and presence will be the gift that gets us that so i i think um and i think people are starting to get
that and the millennials certainly one of the gifts they're giving us is you know they don't want anything other than that they really want to to be in cultures where people are relaxed and open and curious and um not defending and righteous and nene i want to come back to the stories that we tell ourselves and the stories that other people have and those are
those stories are our beliefs we have facts about a situation and we create stories which you know sort of uh weave together our beliefs about the situation how do we go about lovingly challenging those stories not only for ourselves but for other people right so it's easy for myself because for myself i like i have this little i call it a sacred law i have these sacred
laws inside of myself and they're sacred just because i'm in devotion to presence and so um a sacred law for me is any time i catch myself wanting to be right i immediately pause and just look to see how could the opposite be true or how could the other perspective be at least as true and even when i really want to bite down and like no i'm right which i do a lot i
just go uh-uh it's a it's a sacred law here diana you're gonna have to get curious here and i force myself to stretch and open in those moments and um and so that's my practice and then when i'm around other people who i have a co-commitment to do this with and this is important because i think that it's not friendly for me to point out when people are being
righteous or closed-minded um if i don't have an agreement that we can that we're going to commit to calling that out then me calling that out to people isn't necessarily friendly so when i'm co-committed with somebody else to giving and receiving feedback when we think we're getting righteous then i might say something like hey i really hear you i hear you have that
perspective i'm just wondering on my own right now how that that might not also might be true the other direction so i demonstrate my own curiosity and that's one gentle simple way to do that so i become the presence that i see missing over there in them that then often might get them to open up as well um another more direct way would be i hear that could you argue like let's say
your life depends on it could you argue the other side for a minute um and see how what we can learn over on that side of things i really like to play like imagine there's a jury and you have to argue the other side um sometimes with teams they'll be well it's pretty it's pretty common that when there's a big choice to be made teams often divide almost right
down the middle which is i think a law of nature the polarity forms and half the team says this way and half 18 says this and so one of my favorite exercises is put a piece of tape down in the middle of the room and i say first argue for your side first the side that you really and really go at it let's debate and then i have the move and physically move their bodies to the other side and
i say now you have to argue from the side that you're on and that works so well and so you know that's a gift we can give each other is okay go argue from the other side one of my favorite quotes from charlie munger is that and he says i never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that i don't know the other side's argument better than they do
it's beaut and i i think of that often because to me it's the work required to have an opinion yeah like we all have opinions but have you done the work have you done the homework have you done do have you earned it and that's where we get into this sort of notion that we talked about earlier whereas everybody wants a voice but not all those voices need to be equal
because not everybody's given equal consideration and brought equal judgment to those opinions yeah especially these days because we're getting more and more polarized in our opinions and so it's like you've got to if you're gonna and i work with a lot of activists and i say if you have an opinion that you think you're right about and you're gonna go in and try to
from that righteous opinion make any change good luck yeah it's a setup it's a setup you're just part of the issue now you're going to keep it in and even when we were able you know i think that the days of us like brow beating people over the head with the newspaper to get them to do stuff is sort of like long gone but even when that worked it didn't really work like
it worked in the moment but what you really did was you you made invisible right this resentment that i have that becomes like this negatively coiled spring that is going to come out one day in it you know it might be three months from now it might be six months from now but it will come out because the story that i've told myself about that is one where
i'm the victim and i need to extract some sort of vengeance if you will yeah i say all we did was just move the deck chairs around on the titanic and so we make ourselves believe we've done something different but we're still sinking here and not going any place new and i guess i think that's the thing i most want to like scream from the rooftops is from my vantage point it's like we're
not doing anything new most of the time here we think we are but there's it's just still the same nanette it's just now we switch roles and nobody seems to see that you know can we just wake up to that uh so you know it just requires us to drop down much deeper into something else that's that's more interesting that's that's more vulnerable which usually comes down to something
like i'm scared me too i don't know how to do this me neither okay that's a good starting point i like that a final question i'm conscious of time here uh how do you define success i think for me it's that um [Music] one what i'm doing has meaning to me such that when i'm on my deathbed i will say i'm really grateful that that's how i use my time um in a way that
served you know that i was that i was a contribution to others and that's that's and that and then i enjoyed myself that it was fun that i felt that like time and space went away when i did it um because i was so in the moment um giving my gifts but that that to me is success and uh it's like this hum to hum that i i feel inside and uh you know like a looking around and seeing
that was valuable that was helpful to others i love that and i love the fact that you tied that to how you feel in your body yeah thank you so much for an amazing conversation you are so welcome i'm glad to be with you and um thank you for this opportunity i'm really grateful to to speak through this beautiful community you've created and thank you so much you