Cold Water Swimming Diaries: Intro "A Journey of Change and Transformation"

In the special series 'The Diary of a Cold Water Swimmer,' your host Jay Humphries dives deep into topics of diversity, resilience, and visionary leadership for the future. Sharing personal backstory, Jay discusses overcoming challenges, starting a consulting business, and thriving in the hospitality industry. The impact of COVID-19 caused significant disruptions, leading to new discussions on resilience and mental health. Jay's journey includes coming out as non-binary and facing exclusion, which highlighted the importance of authentic inclusivity. Jay invites you to engage in 'The Cold Water Swimming Diaries' podcast series for meaningful conversations about inclusive leadership and embracing diversity for a better tomorrow.

Thank you to Katarina Hagstedt, owner of Tinka Media, for her production in this introduction.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to this special series of the Hocoso conversation. It's called The Diary of a Cold Water Swimmer. In this series, I'm diving deeper than ever before on the topics of diversity, resilience, and my vision for the leadership of tomorrow. And in order to welcome you in, I need to give you a little bit of context.

[00:00:21] So here we go. Finding your why is a key to success. They said, so I did what I needed to do. By the age of 22, I had three degrees. My father was an entrepreneur and things were shaky financially. We moved around a lot. I went to private school, but then I was kicked out due to unpaid bills and I was in state school, so why became creating a better life for myself, a more stable life, where I could be free from all that unpredictability even.

[00:00:53] Even though I didn't have the grades to land the top jobs. I knew how to read a situation, and that skill got me into a special unit of 20 employees. At one of the Big five consultancy firms, we traveled around the world doing special projects in the hospitality industry. I knew how I needed to show up and I was thriving.

[00:01:15] A few years later, I came up with a new concept for a big hotel chain, which is still today one of the biggest in Europe. I designed a curriculum for tourism that was taught at some of the top hospitality schools in the world. I realized that if I worked hard and delivered well, there is a place for everyone at the table.

[00:01:33] That's what I'd proven to myself with my own story. I started my own consulting business and projects were rolling in. I was the person you came to and you needed something creative and profitable. I. And we did some amazing projects. Thinking big, being ambitious now to growing concerns about the deadly coronavirus officially hitting the us.

[00:01:55] Here's what we know. Unwelcome but expected the coronavirus has hit the uk. Then we all, all got this sudden uncomfortable cold shower. Two patient. Many hotels, lodges, and guest houses are closing. As a result, the panic of the situation made no one think big anymore. It's tough, it's unprecedented times.

[00:02:13] You know, I was, I led a company through, uh, nine 11. I, I led a company through, uh, the Great Recession and, and what we're experiencing right now is unprecedented managers started to get obsessed with how to clean their hotels. Seemed like the old leadership tools that we'd relied on for so long was not enough.

[00:02:37] But what I started to realize from the situation was that it had never been enough. So I decided to start some round table discussions around resilience. Thank you for being part of our ever expanding community focused on wellbeing. I could regale you with lots of stats on the importance of mental health, avoidance of burnout.

[00:02:57] Yet our focus has always been on how we can do things better. This way we can focus on how we can become better leaders, individuals, teams, organizations, and companies. Hospitality leaders showed up and opened up the fact that it,

[00:03:14] um. One of the things we have control over is, uh, routine and schedule. We could have some real discussions and the more we were speaking, we realized that we needed more space to show up as we really are. We needed to cultivate a sense of diversity deep into our organization. We needed to include everyone around the table if we are going to make it through this crisis.

[00:03:38] We needed to think about these topics in new ways. And it's not about problem solving. You're tired and frustrated. What should they do about it? It's acknowledging, it's normalizing, and it's about being human. And this resonated with people, and I was invited to conferences to talk about the importance of psychological safety for leaders and their employees.

[00:04:05] I felt like I was part of something big and important again, but had nothing to do with building shiny hotels. This was the real work. But there is one thing to talk about it and another thing to be about it.

[00:04:21] Talking about change is easy, but being change is hard. I started to see how change was implemented, how the scarcity of COVID made organizations cut the most vulnerable people first. There was simply no space for the difficult rooms needed to be cleaned.

[00:04:43] This is me having dinner with my best friend and his partner at a restaurant by Lake Grier. It's a summer, weekday, evening, and just a couple of days before this, I had realized something significant about myself. How did he told me? I think he just said it like, of course, it was very new. If I'm not wrong.

[00:05:03] This revelation happened in NDA itself. So in a, in our, in our place. And I have to say, I, I don't really understand it profoundly, and, and it's so, it's totally okay. I have to say. It's not because I don't understand that I have to judge or that I have to be scared of, or that, uh, he's still exactly the same person I love to share time with.

[00:05:28] And that's it. And, uh, on my, on my point of view is. A tomato is a tomato. I mean, if it's green or red, if you bite in it blindfolded, it still tastes tomato, or in the words of my ex, are you fucking stupid? They're gonna fire you. Yeah. Suddenly I found myself on the other side of that table from a privileged white male with the right CV to a non-binary human expressing myself freely.

[00:06:07] My world started to crumble. I was left out there in the cold. Like so many others, people don't know how to talk to me. They don't have policies that have room for me. I'm not welcome as I am. I'm now the other, and that's where I am right now. I'm out in the cold. Out in the cold water. It's not so fuzzy, warm and cozy here.

[00:06:33] I don't feel a clear sense of belonging, but that's okay because the belonging we were holding on so tightly to was a false sense of belonging. A false sense of warmth. So I'm okay with swimming in the cold for a while. Every morning I go down to the lake and have a cold water swim. I have time to do that because as it turns out, losing my mandates and current projects coincided with me coming out as non-binary.

[00:07:02] Figuring out how we practice leadership that is truly inclusive and diverse needs more than neat principles. On paper, we need to talk about it. We need to have those uncomfortable discussions that allow us to be us. That's what I'm having in my new podcast. It's called The Cold Water Swimming Diaries, and it's a place where I have those uncomfortable conversations with hope that it will help us navigate the needs of leadership of tomorrow because there is no such thing as other.

[00:07:33] There is no them or us. We're all others, and the more we're allowed to be ourselves at work, the more human we become. We need all this beautiful diversity to create the organizations and societies of tomorrow. We must not forget that even the mainstream is made up of others who somehow have conformed to fitting in.

[00:07:56] Even you listening to this are other, but that mold doesn't fit any of us anymore. So here's my invitation to you. Would you like to join me in this cold water?

[00:08:18] My name is Jay and I'm the host of this podcast. And I do hope to see you back here in the next episode.

[00:08:31] That's it for now.