listening tends to be contagious so how each of us listens does tend to wear off on other people so I've noticed again with my children that when I listen what we call I often call listening to win which is to just make them wrong or like when I say well that's not true you you look great or don't worry about that you you know
you'll be fine they don't feel heard in fact find that when people feel really really truly seen and heard it's one of the most extraordinary experiences that a person can have and so um just being around that and having the experience of being on the receiving end that sort of deep listening where you
feel truly seen and fully seen is itself a condition right for for learning to listen well [Music] let's start with adult development theory what is it and why does it matter so adult development theory is a I sort of think of it as a map it gives us it's a there are several different adult
development theories I won't go into detail about them but um but they are each of them is a theory that describes how once we get to the adults so once we look like adults what happens to how does our sense making change and the big news of adult development theory really when it when it first was introduced
about 50 close to 60 years ago was this idea that even when we look like adults we are actually um like what's not this so easily visible uh can but doesn't always continue to change so um just because someone looks you know that's 25 years old and looks like they ought to be a fully formed adult
there are still ways that the way they make sense of themselves in the world keeps changing um so it gives us a kind of a map to describe how that happens and that's useful in a variety of ways can you go deeper on that sense making yeah so sense making is um is basically how how do I even know what what I'm seeing
means right so earlier in our lives when young people look out at the world what they see makes sense to them in relationship to their own kind of physical well-being mostly like they look out and see things like I would look out and I would see my mother you know having a Stern face with me and
what I would think was what does this mean for me am I in trouble have I done something do I need to change something so that I will be okay later we look out at an angry face and we think oh my goodness I've done something wrong I've hurt somebody how do they they might think badly of me so I must be bad so
therefore what do I need to do to make the mirror that is this angry face looking back at me uh be different so that I can feel okay about myself later on that changes right I see an angry face and I might wonder well what's going on for that person um what might be happening in their life
and it doesn't get so conflated with with me I'm kind of I get to be more separate from that angry face but I wonder what does it mean and what what might I um you know it doesn't like influence me so much so that's what I mean does that help yeah it's like we're making meaning out of what we're seeing yeah exactly
but then there's another aspect to it so we look out at the world and what is what meaning do we make of it but also there's a way um it's like how do we make sense of ourselves and that changes over time too of course that's like closely related to what we see outside of us but it's this
it's this interplay it's really what we see it's the it's the meaning that we construct it's often referred to adult development theories are often referred to as constructive developmental theories because it's it's a question of it describes how do we construct reality how do we construct meaning and then how
does that change over time and are there ways that we can change it or is it just a way that we understand how we develop I described it as a map that's really helpful because it gives us kind of a it helps I find that with my clients certainly with myself and with my clients it helps people understand it
gives people a language a way to see what might be happening what what may have happened um like how I construct meaning of myself and the world has changed up till now and how it might change in the future so it gives me like a reference point um and yes of course we there are many
this is what developmental coaching is is all about it's like how do we take the experiences that happen to us every day and use them when when we are not quite fit we find ourselves not quite fit for for our context like up to what Bob Keegan called it in over our heads how can we what moves can we make to try
to develop our meaning making to be more fit for the context it happens better with company it's a kind of a hard thing to do alone yeah I want to talk about that in a bit in terms of how we make sense of ourselves and and how other people it prompted sort of something that you told me earlier as you were
saying that that a few years ago a friend of yours noticed that you were saying things like I need to check in with the kids or I have to get home right after we finish up which prompted a conversation on the need twos versus wantos can you explore a bit of that to me and the language that you're using I
find that I have a couple of go-to interventions um I'll call them interventions they're basically um when I say intervention I mean um a kind of something that disrupts our normal patterns and language noticing and disrupting language patterns I find to be very very helpful as a developmental move so yeah that
um that story happened about you know 10 years ago when my children were younger and I was um I was really torn a lot of the time because I was traveling around the world I was really feeling like I was experiencing the most exciting period up until then of my professional career and
all parts of my life and and I had these three children at home and a husband who was there with them most of the time because he's a teacher so he didn't travel he was around more and I felt torn you know between these two parts of my life and a good friend of mine noticed that I often when talking about
my kids and my family just as you said um used the term have to get home I need to check on them I need to call and um so this I already had had this idea that our language is not just an expression of our meaning making but it also shapes our meaning making so when this friend of mine noticed my that language pattern
I began to ask a question like what could I what words could I use um that might actually change the way I make sense make me help support me to be less torn about this kind of kids and family and the rest of my life thing and so that's what I mean and I did so I started to really deliberately notice
and I could also feel it in my body you know when I was about to talk about need to and have to um there's like this tightness and constriction and um when I change the words to want to it sounds like the tiniest intervention right it seems almost so simple as to be silly but it really really changed the
way I made sense of my relationship to my responsibility the role in the life of my family you know rather than something I had to do I was able to discern better between what it was I wanted to do and therefore how places it made it possible for me to show up differently with them as well because
effectively you're choosing it but if you feel like you you have to then it almost feels like not a choice I almost think of this in terms of three categories which is like things I have to do like I fundamentally just have to do them things I want to do and then things other people want me to do
and this helps me when I especially when I feel busy it helps me prioritize what I choose to take on and it's that little Nuance in language that is really interesting and then often another Nuance in language that you sort of prompted as you were talking is when I make a decision I usually I try to say I
choose to because fundamentally I'm making a choice the thing that you're pointing to there Shane is that that just by using the language I choose to it actually cultivates it creates or constructs a new meaning around what you're doing right rather than the world or someone else doing it to you you are
it's like you're you're you're stepping into it in a different way I have agency yeah yeah and it isn't just a pretend thing you know they this whole idea of acting as if it's talking as if speaking as if I were choosing after a while that translates into um you're actually seeing it as a choice
so it was quite powerful language I find and often we just think of it our language as throwaway right we don't see it as so important it's almost invisible to us a lot of the time it's habitual one of the words that you used uh in that response was torn and often a lot of us are feeling torn between competing
parts of our life and we sort of the words that we use to describe this range from balance work-life balance to Harmony to integrated to a mosaic how do you think about that and how do you help people who I want to fulfill multiple parts of their life and they seem to have competing demands a lot of it
really depends on where they are in terms of how they make sense of of these things so work-life balance like notice the difference between work life balance and Mosaic right those are those are really different and um so if I if if someone you know that I'm working with is talking about work-life
balance I may not immediately go to what if you thought of it as a mosaic um so because the work life balance um it's almost I get the visual of a of a one of those old-fashioned scales you know and you're trying to get it just right they need just enough of work and just enough of home just to hit it just
right and it's as if there's a a balance point that you can reach that will be um static and sustainable so if someone sees it that way um I would I I would probably ask a question like um you know what's the most important thing to you about getting the balance just right or what's the worst thing you
know about not getting it just right so I would probably want to disrupt that the underlying assumptions about work-life balance is nothing first or begin to offer it offer A disruption and um see where that goes um I also have to find metaphors to be really helpful here with these sorts of
things because often I will listen to the the metaphors that a client uses and try to tap into those um so um so for example um when somebody is talking about balance I will present to them like a scale a an old-fashioned balancing scale and I'll just ask them like how does that feel to you is that actually what
you're going for here um and often they will come up with a new metaphor and you know then sometimes it makes sense for me to introduce a metaphor that's slightly different and ask them to consider that so I think it's working really with where people are and just little nudges I personally find the work-life balance
thing uh really hard because you're never in balance and the moment you are in Balance it's out of balance right like you almost have to be actively uh balancing at every moment and therefore you're always sort of failing to achieve a work-life balance because just the second you have it figured out
you get an extra email or the kids need to be go to the doctors or something something just like tweaks it and then you're always just you're you're dissatisfied unconsciously with yourself because you're you're trying so hard to achieve this perfect sort of balance that is um a Pursuit and can never actually be
realized geez I love that Shane you know as I was thinking about I was having this um visual of um so instead of the old-fashioned scale um with two weights on it and trying to get that just right which theoretically you know if you get it just right it will stay as long as the wind doesn't
come up or the Earth doesn't move or something like that um but yeah what if you were trying to balance a scale like that like on a on a seesaw remember from when we were kids a seesaw and you had to balance it with your legs so you're standing in the middle and you had to balance it like
that that is constant work so when I think of work life like work and life and integrating these components of life it's not just work and life right and we tend to break it down into this but there's also your health there's your community there's all these other aspects that make for a meaningful life
that once you start thinking about balance and you think about living a holistic life it becomes impossible I think in in my experience and so the Mosaic term or sort of like integration of things is very different because the pieces at different points can take on different shapes and sizes but they're
always there they're always present and you're always giving some attention to it but you know it might be I'm going to do less of this right now and more of this right now and this needs to be a bigger piece right now because that's more important yes I I love that and on my better days I I see it that way and
um you know when I feel overwhelmed I don't know how it is for you I'd love to hear um that it's harder to see it that way when things are really really pressing on you um I because the the the the Mosaic um requires actually that we'd be able to like for the for the Mosaic to to for
us to feel satisfied with the Mosaic on any given day in some ways we have to be able to step back and look at it and see how beautiful it is but when you're stuck in the Mosaic because things are so pressing um really can't see the beauty of it all you kind of can see is the mess yeah in
any system you're part of you can never wholly see it right so you have to have these tricks to sort of get out of it and get a different perspective on it and one of the things we'll probably talk about later is perspective taking as a means to do that but you can also take perspective with yourself
by visualizing sort of five years in the future or you're 90 and what do you want life to look like and what's fulfilling to you and then working backwards from that one of the things that was interesting to me about that story though is how your friend took the words you were using and described a meaning to them and like
sort of it was a deeper sense of listening to than just to the words can you talk to me about that yeah so this friend is a developmental coach and she so she's kind of in the practice of wondering um what does when when she hears uh a somebody use a word or a phrase um that doesn't like she notices the
dissonance between what she would mean by that and what she notices I might be meaning by that right so this is the the listening below the surface this is listening for meaning um and so it's getting below underneath the story or the words and wondering wow what does that person actually mean by
that um and it can be a really hard practice practice to be in because we also have to to do that while we have to be able to notice what do what would I mean by that what do I assume they mean by that and and wondering then like how is it different right um and always noticing what I think it
means is probably wrong and how could it be wrong and therefore I have to inquire and then the words that we're using change how we think so the power of language is really important in that how how does the language that we use limit our progress or our ability our language tends to be habitual
and so we often don't like I said earlier we often don't even notice the phrases we use right so I had a I had a client um a few years ago who um who was trying to let go of the um you know achievement oriented nature of her life she had a habit nature of be always trying to always needing to do things in order to feel
valuable and so she described to me um what it feels like to her to be not um not adding value right and so she talked about shuffling around um aimlessly you know waiting for um her prescription to be filled this was at a time when when she wasn't she that she was recovering from an injury
so she actually had that experience right so she often used these terms that were sort of like if I'm not doing something I'm just kind of shuffling around waiting for things to happen um so this is a um this was really helpful because this person is really quite good at using metaphors and she could describe it and
sort of laugh at it so we you know what we did was we explored what does it mean to be like shuffling around waiting and who are you when you're shuffling around waiting what does that mean for you um but sometimes it's not that um it's not that overt um and so language that is limiting for
people is often as simple as what I you know described to you the have to's and the and the need to's it often shows up as like I am just this way um or I am the sort of person who has to respond when somebody emails me right away I have to respond within five minutes um so these are I think I think of these
as identity habits languages of habit sorry habits of language around identity I am this way I am that way um kind of language other limit limiting language you can hear in what I sometimes call monolithic narratives um so and so is always this way at work I never seem to get my voice heard
there's so many of them if you start to listen to people's language patterns um you'll start to notice all the ways that they can be limiting and also enabling so what we want is to find enabling patterns of language um that that help us in service of you know what it is we care about talk to me
a little bit more about language and our identity and how that affects our ability as leaders and people and perhaps performance or how small shifts in how we see ourselves or even how we describe ourselves even if we don't fundamentally believe it can the language that we use talking about ourselves change
who we are and what we're doing so I'm going to start with a definition of the definition I use of identity first I think that might be helpful because that that word gets used in a variety of ways and all of them are right but I just want to be clear about what what I mean I I sometimes call it identity with a
with a small I rather than a capital I because it's I don't mean um like my social identity or my racial Identity or my gender identity or anything anything like that what I mean is how I see myself and I often talk about um that our identity how I see myself um and how I want to be in the world how
I want you to see me in the world um is is um it's something we've been developing all of our Lives each of us right it's um we adapt as kids we learn what works we learn what doesn't work we amplify the things we keep doing the things that work and we can hopefully stop doing the things that don't work
um so we get to a point in our law any point in our lives we have this sense of who I am and we spend a lot of time um projecting that identity right we've perfected it up until now we in in what we do what we wear what we say what we don't say what we don't do who we hang out with um we're always projecting this identity
right most of it's unconscious um and so what does language have to do with that um it's just one of many ways that our identity is expressed and every time I say um something like um I would never do that I'm in the middle of a situation right now with a with a neighbor who's constructing something next to my house
and I don't believe that this person has been particularly um gracious or forthcoming or transparent about about what they're doing and um I I say I said found myself saying yesterday I would never do that I'm not the sort of person who would do that and um so that sort of that that that that
reinforces my sense of myself as a person who's whatever consider it transparent other focused and so that serves me really well like it's part of I think it's part of what makes me successful in life and in work and it also can get in my way because I often don't stand up for myself um and so if I see myself as the sort of
person who would never do something that might you know upset another person it really limits me you know that I can't do anything um that would possibly hurt another person or seem like I'm putting myself first because it would disrupt my sense of my own sense of myself I think that's
fascinating because one of the things I think about for biological creatures which humans are is that we have an innate sense of hierarchy in the world and hierarchy doesn't doesn't just mean status it can be an identity based hierarchy and when you construct a world and this can be completely wrong so push
back but when you construct a world which is like I'm not the type of person who would do that you immediately put yourself higher than that person in this arbitrary hierarchy that you've created which is like no matter what I would never do that to somebody and you might be right you might be wrong but that
that sort of like is not the point of this it's just you're placing yourself sort of in and you're not doing it consciously like you're not trying to organize the world in this way where you're better than somebody else and I remember I first did this when I was like 16 at a grocery store
we had this guy come in and he you know he illegally Parks runs in he's uh rude to everybody and you know I finally said something back to him it was my last shift at the grocery store so I won't say what I said but uh you know I was walking home and I was like well you know I might not be
rich and it might not be blah blah blah but at least I'm not and then in that moment I sort of realized that you know what I was doing or maybe not in that moment maybe later in life but I realized that I was just creating this arbitrary hierarchy and trying to make sense of this situation and make sense of where I fit
in this situation and how I handled myself and in that moment I was creating this arbitrary hierarchy in which that I was higher than that person that's a great story what I really heard in your story that that really struck me was in this kind of identity-based hierarchy most of the time we do it unconsciously
but let's be honest there's a lot of that in the world right now too um what we're doing is we're creating a separation between us and other people right it's like I'm not that go deeper on this creating the separation between us and other people is on the one hand for our own identity formation it's it's it's
useful I think like how do we create how do we construct our own sense of self again in an adult development way how do we become um self-authored right like standing on our own separate from other people this is important this is important developmentally the most complex problems that we need to to work
um in our in our lives these days they require us to see other perspectives they require that we build trust and connection with other people and so each time we um kind of fortify our own identity as separate we are severing connections that might actually be really really important like on a you
know on a team in an organization right if you have separation among people um it is a detriment to trust and when you're dealing with really hard problems that can't be predicted and something just happens you have to be able to trust each other in order to respond well I mean you can think of a million
examples of this in all different facets of life so I am really one of the things that I care about a lot these days is connection and how important that is and leaders don't think of that necessarily as a core part of leadership or at least they haven't um you know and it is I think it's
probably the most important thing when you say connection what do you mean I mean the relationship between between people so I mean um people actually thinking about um impact on others about CR about creating um trust between people I'm talking about um like a world yeah I guess I yeah it's simply it's it's connection between
people it's love it's trust it's um seeing us as as really in um as as interconnected with each other you know um you affect me I affect you and together we are more than two people separately talk to me a little bit more about this as you were saying that I couldn't help but think of sort of uh
work from home as an example of having an impact on Connection in terms of our impact on other people trust but our impact not only on the people we work with but the people that we don't see uh and what I mean by don't see is um if you worked in a downtown core and you're no longer going to a downtown
core well there's all those little corner stores and Starbucks and grocery stores that are now impacted by the fact that you're not going to work and when you do go into work you sort of get a more representative view of society you might sort of walk by somebody less fortunate than you you might interact
with somebody else who has a very different view than yours everybody has that crazy person at the office but that crazy person at the office sort of like actually exposes you due to what other people are thinking in a different way and now we're in our own bubble in a lot of ways if you're working from home and
you're you're sort of less involved in society maybe and so you don't see the impact that you're having on this broader community and then also want to talk about trust and how um how trust is enabled or disabled by sort of being in person and physically connected you're pointing to probably
one of the most the things that is most on the minds of the leaders that I am working with these days um this whole work from home hybrid work question um hadn't actually thought about it in the way that you just described not quite so vividly as you just described Shane like when we the bottom line in what I heard was that
when we work from home it's much easier to create our own Echo Chambers either on purpose or inadvertently and because we have so much more control over what we let in and what we don't let in right whereas if we go yeah you're surrounded by a world that looks like you right so you hop on Zoom
you have this interaction with somebody you get off of it you hang it with your friends you get delivery of food groceries whatever and the world just tends to look like you and the socioeconomic world looks like you the political world looks like you and my hunch and I hope I'm wrong is that this
starts to lead to political extremes yes I mean I'm you're hearing me hesitate here because it's such a it's such a dire hunt prediction right if we were to play this out without any um kind of disruptions to that then the world looks pretty siled and polarized and and isolated and we may be like I
hear people talk about and this was true for me you know when when the when the shutdown happened my three kids all came home from University and we got to spend a lot of time together that I thought we would never get again so that was beautiful right people talk about the wonderful things about work from home
and those are um your sort of dire story that you laid out doesn't take away from that and I think we really really need to watch for it um and this is this is one of the things that um that we talk about a lot in organizations where I work um it is that is you mentioned this earlier taking multiple perspectives
right um we have to often work to find the perspectives that are not only different from our own but are maybe even threatening to our own and it's hard enough work when we're showing up at the office every day and going out into a world where we see differences because let's face it we can shut those things
out even even more around the world it's just so much easier when we're not interacting with um with people who are unlike us can you go deeper on you said it was sort of top of mind to all the leaders that you're talking to today on this work from home can you go deeper on the relationship
between remote work hybrid work work from home you know whatever you want to call it going to the office and it's relationship specifically to connection and with connection I'm meaning sort of impact and Trust I mean I don't know the answer to this of course um I don't think anybody does
um I mean there is an assumption you hear it in some industries that um that going to getting people in the office is the only way to cultivate whatever the kind of office culture that that people want right um and and that's a pretty simple solution and it was the obvious one before the pandemic because that's what
most people did um now you've got people who are working from home and one of the things that we see I had a conversation with a leader several months ago um who's in an industry where they really really wanted to get people back to the office and um he's the head of an office and so
he's really watching the Dynamics and he really really wanted people to come back so at first they tried to get everybody to come back and what he saw was real pushback from particularly um the administrative staff now you could say that's a like though you could make up a story that says those people
just don't see the value of coming into the office they just want their cushy little lives and to stay home but when he looked deeper what he discovered was that these people tend to live further from the office so their commute time is really long like over an hour each way and the professionals did what they
would call the professional staff tend to live much closer to the office and so their commute time is in their when they're commuting they're like in an Uber or something going from one side of Manhattan to the other side of Manhattan and they're working while they're in the Uber too so
um so it's it's obviously a very complex question because um what the pandemic has revealed is that for decades or longer people have been coming into the office because that's the thing to do but it but there have been differences that have been not really acknowledged right how coming to the office is a really
different experience for different people you could say the same thing about you know like women in a heavily male dominated work environment right being at home working at home for people who feel out of place in the office environment has probably also been a great thing for them in some ways
um and it's also true that for the most part it's easier to connect casually when you're in the office um and so it is it is not um straightforward as everyone is finding out um and so what does the US particularly what's the connection between that and um and connection and Trust I mean I don't know you know I we've
been a um our firm has been remote since we founded in 2011 and I'd say we have a lot of trust a lot of trusting but we've developed mechanisms to be sure that we connect that like create the conditions for us to connect frequently and deeply um both in the sorts of connections that
we set up regularly as part of our systems and the way that we are together when we connect um so that so it really trust really can happen remotely what are those strategies that you use to create uh trust and enable it there are several but I would say the the the biggest one is that when we meet
um whether it's about a client situation or whether it's some internal kind of um thing that we're discussing or whether it's just that we're getting together just to be together um we start every meeting with the check-in and again that sounds incredibly simple but we um it's a we see it as a system
scanning exercise right so the check-in um someone poses a question and every person in the room responds to the question and then we step back and get on the balcony and look at the patterns the question being what's in the room today what are the patterns we're seeing and particularly when you do a check-in
um it's important not only to see the commonalities the themes but also pay attention to the outliers and also what wasn't said so it could take a long time to check in in this way and if you think about it when you bring a group of people together to do something it's the people themselves that matter the most
right that's the raw material from which the work is getting done so so this is this has become a been a habit for us we were doing it you know since the beginning and um one of our clients caught on to it early on um and and then it sort of became a thing that that a lot of our clients do
as well one thing that you said there that was interesting was listening to what isn't said normally we do that through body language uh but Zoom is a very uh you know or video is very torso heavy and not as detailed for micro Expressions as we're used to picking up perhaps in person how do you listen to
what's not said when our body communicates so much more than our words I mean the truth is we can't right you know you you can't see as much on video as you said um I would argue that most people don't pay that close attention to body language even when they're in person so that's that's a separate topic but
learning to like making the helping inviting the body in to be part of the conversation for everybody is is a um a really I think a helpful move but to your question um I think it really puts an onus on everybody to make the space to both to to ask questions like what's not being said right now
how often have you been in a meeting I'm curious for listeners too like how often have you been in a meeting especially a business meeting where um the facilitator or somebody stops to actually ask the question what's not being said here and then makes time for people to explore that
just doesn't happen very often that'd be an interesting question it could be an uncomfortable question too because you know when when you're running a meeting and you have something that you need to get done and um to stop and ask the question what's not being said here is essentially inviting a distraction from the you know
the thing that needs to to get done it's a threat to often our sense of identity you know if I'm the one running the meeting and I have some identity around getting things done that me inviting in different perspectives that might actually quote unquote derail us um it can be a real threat to my sense
of myself as someone who gets things done I want to come back to Identity and language just for a second before we we go to the next topic uh is it something where we can create our identity through language if we for instance want to go to the gym or be healthier and you say to yourself that I am I go to the gym
every day I am the type of person who goes to the gym every day even though you're not you're creating this identity and then you almost have a commitment against assistancy bias to live up to this identity that you've fabricated in your head just with these words and so you're more likely to go to the gym
because you see yourself as that type of person even though maybe perhaps that wasn't you're using language to create a habit absolutely I heard something about that recently it's that speaking as f um and yes I totally believe that it's not a guarantee that you will that if I I talk about
myself as a person who goes to the gym that I will become a person who goes to the gym and it's a nudge to the system It's A disruption it's a one of the many things that can create the conditions for me to become a person who goes to the gym talk to me more about creating the conditions that was something you
said earlier when we were talking to what does it mean to create the conditions and what are the most useful ways that we can think about creating the conditions for success or results or however you want to think or Define that for you creating the conditions is an idea that is one of the core ideas Moves
In in complexity right so if you're wanting to make a change in a complex system which since each of us as human beings is a complex system you know creating the change of becoming a person to go that goes to the gym that that's a that's a complex that's a change to a complex system right if I
want my team to behave differently um I'm also dealing with complexity there because people are complex and human systems are complex so the idea is that in a complex system you can't make change happen because the first thing that you need to do is understand how the complex adaptive system currently self-organizes
so what are its current patterns um so if you look at a family is one of the easiest ways to see this right families have patterns they have Dynamics people play roles and if you want to um we've probably all heard stories or been part of a story where one person in a family suddenly changes and
um it's the the family tries to reject the change right they want to continue acting the same even when one person changes so the idea there is that in a complex system you you have to understand the patterns and then if you want to make a change you don't intervene directly um because the system will push back
instead you make little nudges shape the path app like amp create and amplify conditions where so that something can change so in that family example um you might the family might um a couple key members in the family you might identify who like who are the strong attractors for particular un welcome patterns
um and start with those people and maybe those people um begin going to therapy or maybe it's real even much smaller right they get a buddy who has um who might have an influence on them in a particular way for example or conditions might be family dinners or they might be so family dinners are a condition
um I think that that might create family at least the conditions for family conversations what role does environment play are there examples of sort of environmental nudges that you can think of that come to mind we always have the opportunity to change our environment right as a way to help us
let's take the gym example go to the gym more or let's say we want to get fit or lose weight right but let's take losing weight one condition um that we could create is to take all the stuff out of our refrigerator that we're super tempted by that is not that doesn't contribute to our losing weight
another way to create conditions if you want to get more if you want to get stronger because you could buy some like light hand weights and keep them next to your computer so that it's you don't have to do much in order to lift weights and get your muscles stronger um buying a gym membership is an example
of a kind of a direct intervention that often fails I mean it could be a condition creating thing but but if we think that buying a gym member is going to make us go to the gym anyone who's ever bought a gym membership or most people will at least have had one experience of doing that and finding
that they just wasted their money that's why they sell 12-month memberships in November and December right exactly yeah they're creating their own conditions for profitability because they know the patterns of human beings the people who own the gems what about something that comes to mind
for me and this could be completely off but sort of like hanging around people whose default behavior is your desired Behavior so if I'm a leader and I want to cultivate uh better listening and I hang around somebody like you do I naturally sort of acquire um better listening or if I am a runner
and I join a running group then I start to hang around with people who run and then it makes it more likely that I become a runner or that I enjoy running and then that makes me run even more and I often think about how environment we think of our environment most of the time when it comes to mind is physical
but our environment is also our identity right we're creating an environment in our head an artificial environment if you will our environment is also who we hang around and there's their sort of habits and if we hang around people who are are sort of um politically extreme we will eventually
become politically extreme or we hang around people who are lazy we become lazy talk to me a little bit about your reaction to that what your experience has been I'm chuckling because um I'm the parent of three young adults and anyone who has ever had kids you might notice that who your kids hang
around with feels really important so I noticed that whenever one of not as much now but when they were younger when my one of my children would be have a friend that I thought would be a really good influence on them either because they were like a hard worker or ambitious or kind or not the sort of
person who got into trouble I always thought that was great you know and I wanted to amplify that um so I think the last lesson there is there are yes of course the people that we hang out with um I think can make a huge difference in shaping and creating the conditions for us to grow in particular grow and change
in particular ways and as I you know found out with my children it's not a guarantee right so um trying to orchestrate things just right so that you know you're hanging out with exactly the right people who will get you the exact right result is probably the wrong mindset um the a more helpful mindset is that
people communities do create the conditions for particular things and we can be intentional about which people and communities we spend time with in service of moving ourselves in a particular direction and it's no guarantee which is the way it is in complexity always there's no guarantees ever
listening is something a few people have told me that you're extraordinarily good at I suspect that's because you you listen below the surface uh and to the meaning and not just the words how would you teach uh your kids to become better listeners how do you teach adults to become better listeners
I would say is that listening tends to be contagious so how each of us listens does tend to um wear off on other people so I've noticed again with my children that when I listen what we call I often call listening to win which is to just make them wrong or like when I say well that's not true you you look great or
don't worry about that you you know you'll be fine um then um then it might feel good to me in the moment but is not kind of they don't feel heard at that that when people feel really really truly seen and heard it's one of the most extraordinary experiences that a person can have and so
um just being around that and having the experience of being on the receiving end that sort of deep listening where you feel truly seen and fully seen is itself a condition right for for learning to listen well um on the other end of the spectrum there are very particular techniques that help people listen well for me the most
important one has been really the training and under in and understanding of adult development theory particularly the one that um my colleagues and I are most um have most depth in which is the the subject object Theory um that it was developed by Bob Keegan and others and in the subject object
Theory you're what you're listening for the stage of development is defined by what is subject and what is object and when I when I say subject what I mean is like what you're fused with it's like the water you're swimming in the lens through which you see things but you don't actually even know you have a lens
um and what is object is what can be held out and examined and talked about um like a value is object if you can see how it's shaping um what you do and don't do a value is subject if it's invisibly shaping what you do and don't do for example so in the subject um this growth Edge coach training that
um several of my colleagues and I run what we're teaching coaches to do is to listen for what is subject and what is object and um in listening in that way you have to be listening below the surface of the story um and every time you hear a word or a phrase wondering hmm I wonder what that person means by that
and so it's amping up curiosity um it's it's um really really foregrounding the fact that we each of us never really knows what another person means and um so we can only be curious to find out so those are one is osmosis then one is really learning some very particular techniques grounded in a theory
um that help um that help us develop ways to listen I like the word curiosity because it sort of when I think of listening I think of seeing the world through the other person's eyes I don't have to agree with it I want to see what they see and I want to understand what they understand
one thing you said there that I want to come back to you in part because I have a child that does this is listening to win how as a parent do I coach intervene get this out of their system how old is your child 13. I asked that because um it really does make a difference at their developmental stage
um how how you might go about this and I'm struck by by your phrase I think you said um how do we how do we coach this out of them yeah maybe that's the wrong phrase but it drives me crazy yeah [Music] and he's super smart which is like it amplifies it even more because often he's right ah so what is the hardest thing for you
about that uh just the social nature of it right and how alienating it can be to um always be the person who um is listening to win right so from his perspective it's I listened to what you said there it I'm literal right uh and so it's it's incorrect and I'm going to do you he doesn't do it
maliciously he's like I'm gonna do you a favor and point out why you're incorrect as a parent uh I don't know what to do with this because on one hand on a literal sense he's right on a social sense he's wrong and on a is this going to get you what you want in life perspective it's
learning when to use that and when to not use that and I'm struggling with him in terms of how I I go about this so you're worried that he will the alienate people or is he alienating you oh he's not alienating me I I think I I'm worried that um he it makes it harder for him to fit in or be accepted by his peer group
yeah so I can hear that really that that sort of Deep desire for him to not have um yeah for life not to be harder for him because because he is he's playing on hard mode yeah yeah he's playing on hard mode and he's already uh exceptionally bright which in another another way puts it on hard mode again right uh in certain ways
so yeah I hear so deeply this I mean geez um the the wanting for um to wanting to help somebody change something that is making in your view making their life unnecessarily hard and and then worrying that maybe tell me if this is right but worrying that um that if you don't help them change
this it might just become a more and more and more ingrained habit that continues to make their life hard yeah well I think that as as he gets older I mean my role changes too right and it changes to um you're getting feedback are you seeing the feedback that you're getting are you instead of a direct
intervention like don't do this do this uh you know it changes to when you did this did it help you get what you wanted in that moment right or is doing this going to get you what you want and that coaching after the fact is usually very helpful for him because he's like oh I didn't mean it that way
or I shouldn't have done that or I wasn't thinking when I said something and so it prompts at least a little bit of reflection around it which we all have as adults too right like we all say stupid things on occasion or make a comment that we didn't intend to make and it has an impact on another person
and then we reflect on it and we we sort of that reflection codifies the learning a little bit so it takes that experience and it translates that experience into a little bit of learning and with enough reflection and enough experience and enough iteration enough feedback we sort of self-correct as as adults most of the
time yeah and I think you may have a part of your answer already um so it sounds like what you're doing is you're creating the conditions for him to reflect on what the impact of the way he's listening or not listening um is is having well trying to when when you said the phrase listening to win and
you were talking with your kids about not listening to win I was like well is there a way that I can put a term around it or a label around it when I can just say you're listening to win yeah and in that moment that means this whole deeper conversation to him which is like an instant prompt to correct or
not correct to nudge Behavior Uh towards a better that he's choosing right because I don't want to make his behavior choices for him but can I say something like that and when you were saying it that's what I thought you were doing so this is where the question I didn't I didn't intend for this to be
like a longer question but yeah yeah um so your question is is language um giving language to something can that be a help um well it's sort of a broader question if we take an OTA of the context of me and my son it it's sort of can we learn to listen to ourselves better or does it
take an outside person to sort of intervene and point out our blind spots and with my son I'm trying to intervene or or sort of point out a blind spot you're blind to this it's happening I'm pointing out that it's happening it sounded like that's what you were doing with your kids or maybe I'm
misinterpreting when you said listening to win which I love that phrase by the way yeah they're I guess my point is there are many things and one that you can can do to help somebody to notice what they're doing in term in this case in terms of how they're listening one is uh reflecting back to them what you're seeing
um and the impact of that one is the invitation to him invite them to reflect on it the connection between what they're doing and what they want another is giving it language I love hearing that listening to win is such a powerful phrase it is because you can just say that it it's like having a
um some sort of a reminder every time you do something like a light goes off if something flashes and it helps to create the connection between this thing that you're a really instant connection um a reminder of what you're doing so the idea of listening to win absolutely can be a super helpful
um in in shifting a pattern because it it helps you to notice the pattern instantly each time it's coming up we often cannot see what we're doing and this is why we need company and we need company with whom we have trust who will tell us things that we can't see in ourselves um this is this is one of the core
conditions for being able to shift and change how did you use listening to win with your kids I mean honestly I didn't use the phrase with them I wish I had now you know I really wish I had been more explicit about it I took a more kind of indirect approach in which you know for example if my I have twins and
um when when they were younger my daughter would often well they they all listened to win all the time to each other um but the there were times when I can remember when my daughter would get so upset with my son for making her life miserable in whatever way right like I have to do all your social life for you I have to
remind you of you know what homework we have like was this kind of stuff and um what when she was doing that to him or vice versa what I would do is I would come in and make what I would call a listening to learn or a listening to see move where I would say to her it looks like you're really upset
because um because he is relying on you for everything and you don't think he should have to be doing that and it's not your responsibility is that right and they could just literally see her whole body like breathe out so I generally took the approach of doing something different of
making a a deeper listening move um and My Hope was that they would see that over time um and notice the impact it had on them I probably could have been a lot more direct about it now that you say it Shane I love these phrases listening to in listening to learn I'm going to take this back and incorporate it and I'll
report back to you and how how it works there is another one that you might find helpful which is um called we call it listening to fix um and this is probably the by far the most common one so listening to win is let me make the problem go away by telling you you don't have a problem
listening to learn or listening to see is you know getting underneath really getting underneath the what's being said and reflecting back to the person um and listening to fix is let me take your problem and solve it for you I mean this sort of comes back to to um matter for Mars Women Are from Venus in
a way right which is women typically listen to learn men typically listen to fix problem solve and this creates a divide between us or in your word earlier instead of a divide it creates space between us but we we tend to think that listening just applies to words but we can also listen to our bodies I mean
our emotions our feelings these all come from the same systems that produce our words and our bodies tend to respond to our environment more than our words or quicker than our words how can we learn to listen to our emotions our feelings our body and what it's telling us I think that well there are many ways but um
this one I'll start with how someone else can help us do that um and this is what a lot of um coaches do this coaches who pay attention to the our people's somatic experience is simply to ask so if you were to say Shane I feel um really um like I have to get this thing done right now like I'm so busy I can't be
distracted by anything else um I might say so where do you feel that in your body and if you're unused to even noticing that you have a connect that there's any that there's a connection you might say what do you even mean by that I don't know and then um I might just like invite you to
um to turn your attention inward and to see if you can scan and notice if there's any connection and what it might be between any kind of sensation in your body and this sense of being super busy and don't have time for any distractions so this is where another person can be so so helpful it's about creating
noticing connections between things that are happening in our head which is what most people are used to noticing um and what's happening in our bodies I like that question where do you feel it in your body and that's something we can even ask ourselves yes so you don't need another person it can become a habit a
habitual question that we ask ourselves and um and over time people I'm a case in point you know I would 15 years ago if you had asked me to notice where do I feel something in my body I would say I don't know like I I would say okay I can make something up you know let me just make
something up I'll just tell you I tend to notice this if I feel it in my jaw that means that there's like a little bit of stress element involved in it for me or something I'm not looking forward to doing or we're only as good as the information we have there's a saying in Psychology that if you could see the
world the way that I see it you'd understand why I behaved the way that I do so a large part of the way we see the world is through the information that we have a lot of times the information comes from the questions we ask how do we go about the process of asking different or better questions of
ourselves and others in order to get better or different information the first thing is to notice the questions that you currently ask so each of us has habitual questions that we ask as well of ourselves of others of the world and for example um I I was working with a coach years ago um who was extremely helpful and he
noticed that I habitually asked the question why do I do this why do I do this and there's this idea that our questions direct our attention so you are alluding to this a minute ago so the question that I asked then becomes where I look so my attention because of this question um I would get sort of intensely focused
on trying to figure out um what was wrong with me or what was you know what what led me to do certain things and that turns out to be helpful in some ways but often you know like most of us we hit a dead end with that question um and so even if I got to the Y I do this it didn't always result in me
changing Behavior so that's just a one example so how do we get different questions um I really do think we get them most from other people often in um at least as a start so we borrow them from other people right um often when we're teaching around about this idea of asking different
questions we ask the question like of an audience um uh who in your life asks the the questions that are either most different from yours or the best questions and do you know what most people say why children ask great questions because they're not they don't have the overlay of what should I be asking they don't have the
overlay of I need to look smart they don't have any filter they're just asking the question that come that occurs to them and and so these are questions that we often as adults don't ask anymore and so like like why is the sky blue you know I for for example we don't ask those questions anymore because you know
we feel that's a question we either should know the answer to or it's not relevant um and so um we I often talk about borrowing questions from other people so listen to the questions like I'm listening to the questions that you're asking Shane and I'm noticing some of them I love their
questions I never thought to ask and so like I'm making a note of them I love those questions so that's the best way I know how notice the ones you you habitually ask and borrow shamelessly from other people's questions I love the idea of borrowing I mean the the whole theme of our podcast is mastering the
best of what other people have figured out so it's taking what you figured out and then integrating it into our lives so that we can become um better at what we're trying to accomplish or or live a more meaningful life in the process I just want to say Shane that there's something that happens to us as adults
um that we think we have to have it all figured out ourselves right I don't if if you don't have this idea this is great for those of you out there who don't who have never had that idea um you're way ahead of the game in my book um but we don't like the world is way too complex for that that sometimes our
greatest resource is right there in front of us in the form of another person or someone else's idea um it just is feel like we don't have to do this alone yeah I mean if you think of it sort of as climbing a mountain uh you can start at the bottom of the mountain where I can borrow from
somebody else and start a base camp or I can borrow from somebody else and start out like camp three and if you get to the top of the mountain and I'm just using the the metaphor here it doesn't nobody really asks uh did you did you start a base camp right uh and so if you can imitate other people uh to the point
where you can start at a higher level a higher position then that's awesome and then you can iterate after you imitate so it you can take something and I think it was montang who said you know I have to digest it and I have to make it my own so you can take something from somebody
else and then you can reflect on it and digest it and put a little twist on it that is maybe more personal to you but I love the idea of uh mastering the best of what other people have figured out already yeah and if you started thinking about your question like did you start a base camp
or did you start at the bottom and if you started at the bottom why did you do that you know was it because was it because you needed to prove to yourself and it would be perfectly legitimate right if you needed to prove to yourself that you could do the whole thing from bottom to top great but if you wanted to
get to the top and see the view from the top um yeah maybe you didn't need to start at the bottom or even base camp or or the next place so when you work with people you like to teach skills that are immediately useful and developmental in nature what are the common skills that you find people struggling with that you teach
them that make a big difference well I think the first one is probably listening so listening better is immediately useful because it um it enables you to get perspectives that you might actually need to solve a problem right super useful when teams listen to each other really well it makes room for
all the perspectives that might be needed to solve the problem um but listening is also developmental because it um it helps it changes my relationship to me if I listen deeply um I begin to see that I I might begin to question my own assumptions um I might begin to see myself differently Through Your Eyes
um so it's developmental in terms of the way I see myself it's developmental it can be developmental in terms of the way I see the world the the more perspectives I can make room for the more complexity the more the world becomes a mosaic right um and so I begin to see it um in its fullness more and more
because and that is a developmental move so listening would be the first one I would say um another one that I find really really helpful um is um well actually the idea of complexity itself right so helping people to see the world as a friend of mine used to say to see the world as it is rather
than as you want it to be so there's a you know we teach about complexity through a particular framework called the kinevin framework that I think is pretty widely known these days um and so it's a framework that can help immediately to sort out if I'm facing some sort of a challenge like again as a
team to sort out which bits of the challenge are are obvious so I can just like automate them don't have to worry about them don't waste time on them which parts are complicated we need to figure them out and which parts are complex and then so we deal with those things differently as we talked about
earlier but also seeing the world as it this framework helps us see the world as it is in its full complexity that is also really developmental because it changes the whole mindset changes my sense of what I need to be to as a leader as a person dealing with it um it changes my view of others
um from obstacles to necessary uh parts of the system so there's all kinds of ways two of the ones that you've said in past interviews uh that were the pyramid method and then polarity management I believe yeah polarity management was the one that I was going to talk about next yeah yeah so in a nutshell for those of you
listeners who are not feeling familiar with what a polarity is this is based on the work of Barry Johnson um who developed the idea of a polarity uh years and years ago decades ago and um I don't know whether it's just me who now sees it sees polarities and polarity work everywhere or whether it's becoming
more commonplace I think it's a little bit of both but a polarity is um it it's it's two things that are interconnected and that over time you need them both so it's like a an example in organizations is centralized decentralized right if the question is do we need to be decentralized or
centralized the answer is most likely both right yes sometimes we need to be decentralized sometimes we need to be centralized in some places we need it's it's in its Dynamic over time right in a very personal sense what I would call an intrapersonal polarity is um like is a question of do I focus on my needs or do
I focus on others needs right well both because if I focus on only my needs um pretty soon I'm going to be able to get a lot of the negative aspects of that I'm going to be isolated I'm going to feel disconnected and I'm not going to be able to get my work done if I focus only on other people's needs I'm going
to get the negative aspects of that because I will lose myself I won't have a voice um I'll probably get burnt out so a polarity or it's two things that are like an energy system and that they are inherently interconnected and to get the best outcomes over time you need both um this is in contrast to
um a choice like there I have a choice every day when I drive to the office do I go on the highway or do I go on the back roads well like that's a choice that's not a polarity right on any given day I can choose I'm fine they're not super interconnected um but polarities are so useful in organizations to help
um not only to get a different and more helpful perspectives on sticky problems um they also get people talking to each other um in ways that that um that I find quite magical but they're also polarities are seeing the world through polarities is also developmental because it literally changes the way
um you see the world because you look out at the world and suddenly you begin to see so many things are interconnected so many things are not either this or that um and and that's true inside me as well you know when we're younger we tend to see ourselves as I am of this and I'm not a that right I'm an athlete and I'm
not a student I am a a person who likes big crowds and I'm not a person who likes to be alone um but as we get older I think we most people many people naturally start to see themselves in more nuanced ways polarity management seeing polarities polarity thinking helps us to see things
in more nuanced ways um which you know not everything is nuanced a lot of things are not but when things really are nuanced um it's it's helpful to see them that way and not try to shove them into a box of of either or good and bad a lot of what we've talked about today is sort of recognizing that we're in a system and
then trying to get a better aperture into the system that we're in and to your friend's point about seeing the world as it is rather than have you as you'd have it be how do we do that how do we do that um I'm gonna just start for a second with why it's hard um it's hard because sometimes very often
the world as it is can feel overwhelming it can feel too messy to solve it can feel unpredictable and in many ways as human beings we don't like unpredictability um although interestingly we do like unpredictability when it comes to things like athletic events you know like who would watch a a soccer match if you knew
who was going to win and exactly what plays were going to happen first second third and fourth right we wouldn't do that that's what makes it fun who would go to a movie if you knew exactly how it was going to turn out but somehow in our own lives we don't like unpredictability because it leaves us
feeling sort of out of control so seeing the world as it is um does require a leap of faith in a way right that we will be okay that um that we don't need to be able to control everything in order to for ourselves to be okay and so I think um you know having that realization really admitting that it is
hard we want the world to be a certain way because it makes it gives us comfort and then the second thing I think is um is practicing being in discomfort so um nudging ourselves just a little bit a little bit a little bit in safe circumstances to feel discomfort and stay in it our urge is like going back
to the body um often there's this thing called what I call an action urge that when we feel uncomfortable there's something in our bodies that is saying get out of the discomfort so we act or react to remove the discomfort somehow um part of of seeing the world as it is um not just kind of conceptually but
actually being in the world as it is requires us to practice being uncomfortable and um our bodies are so and and all parts of us are really adaptable if we if we um put ourselves in uncomfortable situations where there's a safe and supportive environment um it's like going to the gym if you
want to build your muscles you just have to go every day and you do it um so those are the two things I would say um are are helpful at least as starters I think they're actually more than helpful they're required that's beautiful most of us are aware that we have blind spots and taking somebody else's perspective
helps us remove our blind spots but when it comes to the moment how do we prompt ourselves how do we turn this knowledge into action so we know we should do something we know it's probably going to help us in this in certain types of situations but we have a problem taking this knowledge and
transferring it into action how do we are there prompts or habits or like that we can develop or cues that we can use to uh remind ourselves to take other people's perspectives I do have a very specific answer to that to that question um which is is it developing the habit of asking the question how could I be
wrong so just think about that for a minute right like it it is most of the time we don't even think we're wrong so the question it doesn't even occur to us could I be wrong and the question how could I be wrong assumes that when it comes to the perspective of another person um we probably are very wrong right that
our perspective is our perspective and it's going to be different from other people's and so um how could I be wrong increases our curiosity um and it ideally the the purpose of the question is to prompt us to get more curious to go beyond our initial kind of assumptions about you know what the truth is
um and get curious and ask questions of other people and um so this is this is my favorite habit when it comes to perspective taking I like that it seems like something you could do individually and also as a group instead of asking how could I be wrong but how could we be wrong which is uh in a way um
a pre-mortem yeah so I want to ask you uh two other questions before we wrap up here one of which uh is what did you use to spend time on that you now see as unhelpful or not valuable oh my goodness that's such a good question um the first thing that comes to mind is trying to be on top of everything
so I used to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to attend to everything from answering every email you know within a certain amount of time to having um so having a clean inbox you know where I could actually see the bottom of the inbox on the first page um uh attending to making sure my house was
clean this is one that I I just had to give up when I had three young kids um and so just you know knowing the latest um like research on everything you know and making sure that I knew every last um possible question that someone could ask me before I walk into a situation so that I have an answer for everything
um these just don't seem they first became impossible so it was through realizing that I was in too much pain trying to get it trying to get these things be on top of everything um and now I see that trying to be on top of everything actually takes away my attention from the present moment from
being fully present um so I I see the temptation of it and um I just I'm really really grateful to be in this place in my life where I don't feel I need to do that anymore that's a really good one it's almost like um you're not and I I I'm not mapping this to you but when we think of being on top of
everything it's not like we're consciously choosing to be on top of everything it's almost like we feel like if we're not on top of it everything what will other people what does that say about us what do other people think about us it's almost like somebody else has a scoreboard and part
of that scoreboard is like are you on top of everything and then we're playing to that scoreboard and eventually as an adult you sort of like get to a point where you're like you know what I don't want to play by that scoreboard anymore because it's not serving me uh and it's just causing me to go crazy
because it's almost impossible in 2022 to be on top of everything yeah it as as you say that I'm wondering I'm asking myself why was I doing that and it would be so many different reasons but um I think it shifted over time um but there's some element of if I'm on top of everything my life will feel calm
and settled like there's some sort of a destination in mind it's like when you finish that last um when I was in university you know I'd finished my last exam of the semester there was this momentary feeling of ah I'm done so I think I was in search of that oh I'm done feeling um I think that but there are also a
couple other things one is um the the it was sort of a I think I was conflating respect for other people with being on top of everything so particularly with regard to answering all my emails I thought if I don't attend to things I will be being disrespectful of other people I will not be I mean if you get
down to the core of it I will not good people do not ignore things that need to be done especially when they affect other people so there's that whole element to it as well and I'd say that was a much harder one for me to to loosen and I still struggle with it sometimes um because because
um my impact on other people I'm talking about my identity now so you all as listeners can think about what yours is um but I have pretty strong identity around being a person who other people can count on and who would never intentionally do anything to hurt somebody else and you might wonder what
is email have to do with hurting somebody else it's a pretty big stretch but not in my mind sometimes um so I can see that I think it's also interesting where email is a medium where you want to be seen as reliable right we have this innate desire but anybody can just email you and you serve
your time without your permission and then you are mapping this to you but like I feel guilty if I don't respond to people and I'm like but I never asked for this email I never wanted this email like why am I the one who's on the receiving end of this sort of like guilt and I'm putting it on myself obviously and not other people
is that what happens with you too or um it never actually occurred to me Shane to wonder to think wow I didn't ask for this um why do I feel like I have to uh respond I just think what what what we're both describing here is how incredibly complex we are as human beings right and why it could be so hard
to change because we have these back to Identity this sense of ourselves as a certain kind of person and it has worked otherwise we wouldn't have we wouldn't be here at this place where we have this identity in the first place just a random question because I want to get it in but what what are the best leadership
books that you've uh ever read and taken lessons from so the first book that ever really that I can remember ever really shifted my perspective um uh was um I I think it's hot it's Heifetz and Linsky I think um leadership without easy answers um I'm sorry if I've got that co-author
wrong because they're he's a co-author of one of heifetz's books um and it just it really sh was the first time I I got the sense of complexity actually it really disrupted my sense that um that things are clear and um so that was a that was it that's an old one that's probably 28 years old at this point um
another one that really um impacted I would say the the the way we the way I've put um complexity into practice into leadership practice of our firm was um oh you're testing my memory here shoot it's um Lalu um yeah I can't remember the name of it I'm sorry it's so it's so popular and it's the idea that organizations also have um
like operating in complexity organizations like show up differently and so it had a lot of lessons in it for us as an organization about how we wanted to be um and how we wanted to create the conditions for ourselves to be um to be embracing the complexity of the world embracing in the way we run
ourselves um so that was another one and uh if you want to know more about adult development um Jennifer my colleague and friend Jennifer Garvey Berger's Book Changing on the job was Far and Away in my opinion the best book that's been written about about adult development not so much the theoretical part
although she it's really good on that but essentially like what does it mean what does it mean in terms of creating conditions for humans to be fully human um so that was and it's super accessible I would highly recommend it so those are kind of like in three different areas of my life and then um
there are a couple of really good ones um there's a I don't know why the names of the books are escaping me today Shane I'm sorry I've got the authors um there's a book by a guy named guy Claxton about about emotions it's not um uh Lisa Feldman Barrett wrote how emotions are made and that's really good too this one goes
more deeply into um like the physiological components of um of not only our emotions but the relationship between our bodies and everything else um and it's really I would highly recommend it it's it it takes some getting through but it's it's quite good if you're curious about the relationship
between um our bodies and um and everything else and last question uh what does success mean to you also try it I just want to look back on my life and know that um that my presence mattered to somebody else like that by me being in whether it's in a room you know running a workshop or whether it's in a
friendship whether it's with my children or my partner or anyone else that my presence mattered and not because I had great ideas um not because I was so smart but that in my presence um another person could be more fully themselves that's that's one definition of success for me