Recently at a dinner we hosted my longtime friend and old neighbor asked me, "Ellen, now, what do you do again?" So. Here we go. Tell me what you think of the elevator pitch.
You can also, always, learn more at my website:
Recently at a dinner we hosted my longtime friend and old neighbor asked me, "Ellen, now, what do you do again?" So. Here we go. Tell me what you think of the elevator pitch.
You can also, always, learn more at my website:
So we had some friends over for dinner a few weeks ago and I've known my neighbors for a long time. These are my old neighbors but they are still our friends and they come over to our new house. But my neighbor looked over to me and she kind of laughed and she said, ellen, can you tell me what it is you do again? And so here's the thing, like with my neighbors, like we rarely talk about work. We vaguely know what everyone does. One of my friends is a professor, one of mine is like a construction engineering kind of manager guy, and then one is a stay at home mom and we never really talk about work because we all have kids and our kids are all friends and they were always running around together. And so we were mostly talking about life and school and kids and parents and families and like whatever. And I would rarely talk about my work and also rarely talk about my work because I felt like it was always so amorphous, and amorphous is not quite the right word.
Speaker 1:Another friend has said you're a multi-potentiate and that sounds like I don't know what that means. And then someone says you're a multi-hyphenate, and I looked up multi-hyphenate finally, and that basically means like I'm a this hyphen, that hyphen, that hyphen, that's a long run on a list of things. So anyway, I made me laugh. My husband shook his head because he also has a very difficult time explaining to like his coworkers when they go oh, what does your wife do? And he's like, uh, and usually he just ends up saying she just does whatever she wants. And it is true, I do do whatever I want and I like it, but I also do it in service of people who actually need help with the things that I have to offer. And so this episode, if you're entertained enough to listen, thank you so much. Try to get at the heart of what it is I do. But I actually walked through some examples so that there's more understanding, because it is. It is complicated and you're talking about consulting work and coaching work and facilitation and training. Just saying those things doesn't always mean a whole lot. So that's what we dive into today. I appreciate you. Thank you for listening and enjoy the episode.
Speaker 1:Hi, you're listening to the inner light with Ellen podcast. I'm your host, ellen Wyoming Deloy. I'm an executive coach, trainer and facilitator who helps people and teams get from where they are to where they want to be through inquiry, reflective listening and by expanding what's possible along the way. On this show, I bring you conversations with leaders and wellness, spirituality, healing, mindfulness and more. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen and, if you love the show, leave a five star review so others can find us. If you want to learn more about my work and what I do, go to EllenWyomingDeloycom. Thanks, enjoy the episode. Hi, it's been quite a while since I've done a video though If you're listening to this on the podcast, clearly you can't see me.
Speaker 1:But I was motivated today because I got a haircut and I'll tell you first the story of my haircut, because even I was like, did I really just do that? But last night. So my hair has grown out a little bit since over the past year and I had one haircut, like maybe in July, and it was Larry and a little choppy and maybe not the best haircut I've ever had. It was one of those last minute. And then I same thing I did last night basically was like I just need to get it done and I found a person who wasn't like my, person who really knows how to cut my hair really well, and so finally last night I was just over it and I just chopped up. I put my hair into two pigtails, like down the like low ones down over my shoulders, and then I just cut them off at the hair bands and then I kind of tried my best to even out the back and you know, the head is round and hair is doing different things at different levels inside to do like a few more. And then I did a few more pigtails. I watched a couple DIY videos on how to cut your own hair and do a terrible job, but it needed a little bit of texture and thinning. My hair is really quite thick and so I, entertainingly, was very fortunate Sorry, I just bumped the camera, but the local salon actually had an opening this morning who's very, very fortunate and she brought me in and cleaned it up a little bit. So the length is the same, if you can see that I did to myself last night, but she just made it actually look like someone cut my hair on purpose, making it a nice shape instead, and I'm actually really happy with it. I would never have cut it this short, other than I just did it on a whim last night. So there's some of that classic little bit of Ellen impulsivity. Who says hair has to be some other idea of what I thought it had to be? So there's that story. So I was motivated. I was like my hair looks nice right now. I'm going to do it on this video so everyone can see it, if you're watching.
Speaker 1:Anyway, other things I have just had this burning desire to make an episode without it being an interview, and I've had it for the past few days, and I also didn't know what I really wanted to talk about. So I sat down this morning I had a meeting with a work colleague. We're working on a project together and we also started to talk a little bit more broadly about what kind of things we want to be creating. And he asked me a good question. He was just like well, ellen, what's your bigger goal for the work, for the business? And I was like, yeah, I still, I'm still anchored. Well, I do need to make money. So that's one goal, but it's not the goal. Like, let's just be real. There, everyone is working because they probably need some income. But the bigger goal and I said this a couple of weeks ago, kind of it just kind of came out of my mouth while I was talking.
Speaker 1:I was talking to the woman who owns the bar studio that I go to and I was trying to explain my work and if you're familiar with my work, it is like multi hyphenate, like there's a lot of things going on right. I'm doing coaching, I'm doing facilitation, I'm doing strategic planning, I'm doing community engagement. Sometimes I'm doing intuitive readings and I'm helping with organizational development, I'm helping with executive coaching. There's just a whole lot of pots that my energy gets interested in, involved in. I have a skill set for and I get hired by different clients individual clients, agency clients, corporate clients so it's just all over the place, which makes telling somebody what I do really hard. I'm like, can you just go to the website and read the couple paragraphs, because it explains it better than I've never. Like this whole elevator pitch concept where you're supposed to go in an elevator and say what you think in 30 seconds. That just is too tight for me. I'm like, no, we got to have a conversation, you got to get your cup of tea and we're going to get to know each other. Like that's kind of how I operate.
Speaker 1:But what fell out of my mouth while I was talking to her? Because I wanted to. I was asking her if I could do a workshop at her studio. I wanted to do like an intuitive, like kind of spiritual workshop, right, like this other thing. And I was just exploring some ideas with her because I know she sometimes uses her space for other events and I was like, yeah, I think the whole purpose of everything that I do is basically to reduce suffering. And I was like, oh, that's the one word answer or like the one phrase answer my work is to reduce suffering, right, and I actually sat there thinking about what does that actually mean in terms of what this is and then how it applies to the self, and not only the self in terms of like the one to one person I'm working with, but the self or myself, right, because I'm also working to constantly reduce my own suffering. Like I suffer, have lots of stories running in my head that just keep going and are not necessary, and when I'm in my work I can see what's happening. But then kind of when I'm out of my work or I'm just kind of going around in the day to day stuff, like it'll kind of creep in again and I'm much better now than I was five, 10, 15 years ago at noticing it and kind of pulling it back and going here you are this need or this thing that wants to keep playing right, but but overall. And so I wrote a few.
Speaker 1:I wrote a few things down in terms of this was again going back to my friend's question what's the bigger goal of what you're doing? And I was like I didn't say this to him in the moment, but I was like I think it's. I think it's the alleviation of suffering, and that's a very big thing. What do you do for your job? I want to alleviate suffering. Good for me, right? It just sounds so out there because there's so much of it, so much of it in the world, and the name of the business, of course, is inner light coaching, and the counterpart of the alleviation of at least some suffering, right, is to allow more light to shine through, and that probably is at the core foundation for who I am and what this work is.
Speaker 1:And so I wrote down in terms of the bigger goals and the areas that I do work it's to help people shed and it's going to sound like I'm reading now, because I'm literally reading the list that I wrote earlier today to help people shed the limitations that hold them back from what they want to be doing. So that would be within a coaching framework, right To improve work systems to be ones that create more collaboration, peace and harmony. So that's my organizational development work To build stronger relationships and trust in the world. Those are all just interpersonal dynamics. Most often will come up for the stuff I'm doing in a work construct, unless it's something to do with coaching and someone's working on that for a personal goal. And, let's be honest, I work on that for myself To have better relationships and trust in the world. There's lots of healing that I continue to also go through in that area for my life.
Speaker 1:And then that's where I found this big phrase. I was like, oh, the big picture is to reduce suffering at the individual and collective levels to allow more light. And so if I had to boil it down into this proverbial elevator ride and people say, what do you do? I would say that reduce suffering at the individual and collective levels to allow more light. And they would say, how, what now? What are you doing? And I'd be like would you like to get a cup of coffee? Would we like to sit together and talk about that, because it'll take a little longer, but there is a distilled way that I do this for myself and then that I help others to do this, whether at the individual or the team or the structure or the system level. And so the tools these are the tools, fundamentally mindfulness, body and breathwork, meditation and intuition.
Speaker 1:And so, working with an agency or a corporate client, the mindfulness avenue, along with the content that needs to be delivered, is the lens that I work through the most, and I'm doing this for quite a bit with my colleague, nathan, who I have mentioned. If you want to scroll back into the podcasts, there's a series of four episodes we recorded together about our work in equity, diversity, inclusion and mindfulness, and so that is the work that we're doing together now, and right now we're working for the CDC in Atlanta remotely clearly, because I'm still in the Pacific Northwest. He's actually in Central America and, yeah, we're working with the CDC, which is amazing and we're doing work with them on building a culture of equity and belonging, and we've partnered with their Office of Health Equity to deliver trainings to their staff members, and so that's what that looks like in a bigger picture level, but I deliver it beyond training, which is what that is also through coaching, executive coaching, helping, facilitating and intuitive readings right. So that's also, I think, really interesting and funny. I still think it's really funny that I have this business, sort of like capsule, that does all these things and then intuitive readings, psycho-gradings are a part of it, which maybe I should stop thinking it's so funny, because I think a lot of people are really interested in it, open to it, receptive to it, have definitely benefited from it. They'll be a regular coaching client and then I'll realize that they're pretty open-minded and spiritually curious and they don't shy away from that topic and we'll incorporate intuition and intuitive development and intuitive readings into their coaching work. And they have responded really well to that and so it's always been. That's like a joy.
Speaker 1:If I had an ideal coaching client, it would be the one who is looking for that type of support, right. And what are? What is all that right? What are the coaching, the training, the facilitation, the readings? What does all that have to do with the alleviation of suffering through that delivery system? And so it's a lot of. Sometimes it's teaching right, when it's in a training concept, when there's like a cohort. We've got in this current cohort right now with CDC. We have, I think, about 32, 34 people in it and so it's much more of a teaching and then guided conversation and small group practice environment, right, and so I'm not able to have one-to-one depths with anyone in that group. My colleague Nathan is not able to do that but we deliver information through a little bit of a lecture format and then intersperse it with conversation scenarios, prompt questions, reflections, and it's been very robust. We've had very, very good feedback and I'm really glad they did a mid-course evaluation so we got to reading what people were saying and we're heartened to know that we were on the right track and they were really getting a lot out of it, and so that's inspiring conversations that not only is there suffering alleviated in some sense by having the space to talk about these issues with people who are interested in it.
Speaker 1:Right, there's a deep desire. So there's a very diverse group of individuals who are really passionate about creating more racial equity and a sense of welcome and belonging and less urgency and culture of dominance, which would be sort of my way, or the highway top down leadership hierarchy, a little bit less room for listening and reflective practice, more punitive, critical, judgmental, stress inducing it would be a good way to say it and they're really interested in how to kind of perpetuate this culture of more reflective listening, more curiosity, more inquiry, more collaborative design, more mutual planning of a way forward, rather than this really intensive top down. But I get, cdc is huge. There's like 14,000 employees there and they're structured into all of the branches of the federal government. Right, the federal government runs the way it runs and so that can be hard, that can be a hard shift in culture change and yet they want to do it and they're trying to bring it in, and I think that's really amazing. What else the smaller ways it comes in is in groups. So when I do facilitation it's still a little bit like facilitation and training, but typically those are in smaller groups, maybe eight to 12 people, sometimes online, sometimes in person, to really kind of get together and organize around a common goal and help them get there.
Speaker 1:Often this will be through mission and vision work or strategic planning or, in a recent case, kind of like a reboot, I don't know how quite to say it. It was a department that was in a big turmoil, upheaval, lots of turnover, didn't have a director. There was like if it was a ship there would have been mutiny and it was really really deeply distressing because the hearts of the mission for the organization are very deep and true and the people were committed but also were getting so exasperated by everything going on around them. It's like they're a little just. When I think about this project and team and I'm not naming them intentionally is that they just felt like they were on a ship out to sea in the middle of a hurricane and a squall and a windstorm with 50 foot waves, and they were just getting battered and rammed and they weren't quite flipping over but like people were falling overboard. They were having to pull them back in. Some of them were gone, and when I say some of them were gone, I mean in the real sense. They turned over, they left, they retired, they quit. There was just a lot going on. That was really challenging.
Speaker 1:But over the course of the past year I did work with their leadership to help ground, center and get out of the emotionality, of the reactivity that so many of them were in, and start to be responsive to not only how could they care for themselves, because each and every one of those people needed self care as well, as if they were in that position of leadership or the boss's, boss's boss's trying to like make sure the program didn't die right, how could they support those below them and also give them new skills and new opportunities to be able to broaden their scope of capacity and potential when the storm finally passed, and so it was really wonderful, and they brought in a couple of great folks as staff members. I just was there as a consultant and I really got to watch and participate with the shipwriting itself and giving them feedback and insight and support along the way and through an executive coaching lens right To help them kind of to get through to the other side and to now we're at the end and there have been firm appointments made of how it's studied and I can see how different it is from 12 months ago. It's a completely different team, energetically, intention, wise, peacefulness, wise. They're still settling down a little right. Not everyone left right, there are so many people, but many who have been there and it's improving and there's a calmness and a steadiness now because they've probably been able to bring in the right person, because they're able to set the conditions to be able to bring in that correct person, and it's really been a privilege to be a part of. So I'm very proud of them.
Speaker 1:Elevation of suffering right, I'm not saying I did all of it it took the work of the people I was working with to implement, right. But I was able to be that objective third party who wasn't in the fray with them all the time but very much felt it. It was very. I would feel the stress of it often when I would go into meetings with them. But to be that person to help give them the guidance that really supported navigating tough conversations, thinking about the communication strategy and plan so that you weren't getting too far ahead of the game because there were leaders above them that needed to have say also that I wasn't working with. And then also to make sure that the people down here who needed to do a lot of the groundwork weren't left out or left behind or felt blindsided. Like really thinking about how to connect up the communication strategy for the change process that they were going through right On top of just the human relations management of it. Super rewarding, super rewarding.
Speaker 1:And then there's yeah, I mean I could go on, I could go on to the one-to-one clients, I think one that I'll just mention really briefly. He is quite driven Community leader, elected official, sits on a number of boards but, as I just said, those qualifiers very much felt not at the center of his own life, felt very much in service to everyone else always, and he was always far, far, far, far behind last. And he's got kids and a partner and was really struggling with this identity of having to always be the role model and then therefore show that it can be done. And so I think some of you listening may be able to recognize this in yourselves. Right, there are a lot of us out there in the world who are really pushing to improve systems, to make it better for our communities and we work so hard because we work on behalf of and in service of so many others. But then it can turn into a place where that's our full identity and then we're not only are we lost in that sometimes, but we can also get sick, we can burn out, we can get overburdened, and that's what was happening with him and it was really interesting to work with him on history because he's also an immigrant and came to this country very young.
Speaker 1:Parents were immigrants very classic immigration story which I always really strongly resonate with because, of course, my mother is an immigrant. I am like I feel like a generation 1.5 because my dad is not an immigrant but my mom was and we still navigated a lot of that and growing up with many of my cousins who whose parents were both immigrating over it feels very resonant to me. I always feel very tuned into that experience and so working with him was really beautiful, because what I got to see in working with him and then just thinking on, like the story of so many people who come here to the United States, is that we create these patterns, or our families create patterns for us early in life. Every family does right, but in terms of this particular example of survival and things that will work for us in that time period, which is work so hard, sacrifice everything, make everything safe for the family, right, and there's no question that you stop ever. It's like at the expense of what? At the expense of nothing, at the expense of I might end up dying, but I will do this so that my family has everything they need. It's this very intense kind of like martyr survival archetype that happens in so many, so many families that immigrate here. Right, and it's necessary.
Speaker 1:It's not an easy place to show up here, particularly I mean in the past because of racism, in the present because of the current political climate and maybe racism also, and it's just it's challenging, it's really challenging. And so to work with him to unpacking the sort of archetype conditioning he had as a child and to start to give himself permission to not embody the same way that he was taught to work in his youth and in his earlier years and to reshift it for what would work in his modern era. Right Now, now that he's a father because he definitely doesn't want to pass on what he has done work ethic wise to his kids he knows that he's like it's not healthy, it's unbalanced. I'm not present, I want to be able to be here more and I'm not. What kind of a father role model am I right now? And so we worked through so much of it, because it is good to have a father who is involved in community and does support and lead Like. That's wonderful as well. And so it was more about identifying for him what's that balance really going to be and how is he going to work through that. So that was fascinating and I really appreciated Hearing from him as we wrapped.
Speaker 1:We worked together for about six months and how and I did see the change over that amount of time, how much he did start to push pause before saying yes and I think that would be the biggest accomplishment that he had was realizing that he didn't have to be the one to take on everything, because he's also cultivating and raising up younger leaders in his workplace, in his organizations, who are ready to take on more. And so there was this like a little bit of he was aware of his heavy handedness or a little bit aware of the way he would step in and take over and really kind of coaching himself like I don't have to role model constantly how it should be done, just because I have an idea of how it should be done, but I'm going to pull back to allow these young people to start to experience it and the way that they're experiencing it, and they're going to do it differently than me, and I'm going to be here when they want help, but not tell them how to do the work anymore. And so that was really really powerful. He wrote this whole sort of like list of things after we had wrapped up together that he's taking away to work on, and I was also really quite proud of his accomplishments, especially that he even took the step. Knowing how busy he was. I could tell every time we got together that he was just running in from something, but he really wanted to make this time for himself to slow down.
Speaker 1:And so, again, the contribution of some in some capacity to alleviate suffering, and what this really is. Fundamentally, it's not that, and I think that I know why. I think saying the phrase feels kind of funny to me. I'm not the one alleviating somebody else's suffering. I'm the person that people come to talk to, organizationally speaking, individually speaking, to allow them to navigate the pathways they have within themselves to alleviate their own suffering. But they need a sounding board or they need someone to ask them a few more questions, to go figure out what the avenue is within them, because the fact that they have a desire for it means that they also have an answer to it. But we don't always have clarity on how to get there and we sometimes need help through a conversation or some coaching or a consultant if it's an organization, and that would be, I suppose that would be the other aspect if someone said to me in an elevator what is it that you do now, the alleviation of suffering through deep listening, being curious and asking questions to help you light the path on your own way. That might be the answer, and I don't know if I could repeat that because it just made it up as I was talking right now, but I'm glad I recorded this so, if that feels right, I could write it down later.
Speaker 1:Anyway, I wasn't sure what this was going to be about today. Maybe it was about the work, the work at hand, the work I do, the work that's happening. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks so much for tuning in today and listening to the show. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen and, if you love the show, leave a five star review so others can find us. To learn more about my work and what I do, go to ellenwiamingdolloycom. Thanks. See you next time.