Empathy for Change with Amy J. Wilson

Former White House Presidential Innovation Fellow and best-selling author Amy J. Wilson weighs in on leading change with compassion, the importance of community, and diversity of thought. Learn more about her perspective as we discuss:

• her experiences inside the Obama and Trump Administrations
• Empathy for Change, her debut best-selling book
• building 50 homes in 4 months after Hurricane Katrina
• eliminating systems of oppression by reshaping culture

Guest Biography
Amy J. Wilson is a change leader, community builder, movement maker, and an empathy advocate. Her journey to sparking change started in AmeriCorps*NCCC, leading a project to rebuild 50 homes in four months in the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. She was a chief architect of Booz Allen Hamilton’s Building a Culture of Innovation movement, which transformed the 100-year firm.

Amy later served for three years as a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow, where she created a shared language and led a movement for innovation and change in government. In her debut book, Empathy for Change, she hopes to inspire others to embrace kindness to enrich the world. In her free time, she enjoys baking pies, traveling internationally, and telling stories.

Connect with Amy:

• Website
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• Twitter

Amy's Book

• Empathy for Change

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Lady Grey is an award-winning international entertainer and educator. She has been at the helm of numerous performing arts organizations and has performed everywhere from Broadway to the Sydney Olympics. She currently serves as Artistic Director of Lady Grey's Lovelies and continues to work as a mentor and empowerment coach.

Connect with Lady Grey

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Live Outrageously Website

Transcript

Amy: 0:00

I feel like we're better together than we are alone than I believe in diversity of thoughts, not just having an us versus them mentality.

Unknown: 0:16

Hello, lovely humans. Welcome to the live outrageously with Lady gray podcast. I'm your hostess lady gray. And I have had the great honor to interview a number of super inspiring world changers about how they live outrageously. So we're going to share about how they push boundaries, they fight for change, and how they seriously shake up the status quo. Today we are talking about empathy and change. And I couldn't be more excited to welcome Amy J. Wilson, to the show. Amy is a change leader, a community builder, a movement maker and an empathy advocate. her journey includes serving for three years as a White House Presidential Innovation fellow, where she created a shared language and led a movement for innovation and change in government. Her debut book, empathy for change was just released. And she hopes that it will inspire others to embrace kindness, and enrich the world.

Lady Grey: 1:23

Welcome, welcome. Welcome, Amy. So great to have you here today.

Amy: 1:27

Thank you for having me. It's I'm excited to talk with you. But we

Lady Grey: 1:30

are honored to have you share a little bit about your outrageous journey with us and some of the fabulous concepts and change that you're bringing to the world. So I like to start things off, you have a very long resume of innovation and empathy and all these beautiful concepts. What I would love to know is what you consider sort of the most outrageous moments or things that you're most proud of that have happened kind of along the way?

Amy: 1:58

Hmm, good question. I would say that I kind of talked about myself as a public entrepreneur. And people were like, what does that really mean? So I have like these entrepreneurial tendencies, I feel like I'm an entrepreneur deep down inside, but I do I have a penchant for things that are for the public good, and impact. So I'm kind of like a junkie when it comes to having impact, which you know, necessarily a bad thing. But it does make you work around the clock, because you really care about impact. So there's some key moments that I would say throughout my career that really stand out. And they all involve me being a change maker. First one that really stands out is after Hurricane Katrina and Rita, I stopped my job and consulting to join AmeriCorps. And this is the kind of AmeriCorps call to the national civilian community Corps. It's a team based service. And so I was a team leader. And we were doing things like gutting out schools and houses in after the Gulf Coast. And when I was there, I was given this amazing opportunity that kind of set me in this trajectory to do this entrepreneurship. And I was asked to create a rebuilding project for St. Bernard Parish right next to New Orleans to build 50 homes in four months. So five zero homes and four months and with very little resources, because I'm moving into elementary school at the time, and it's 110 degrees outside. And so because it's New Orleans heat, right. So that was pretty outrageous at a such an early age, having people rely on you to do such a important project. Another thing that stands out for me is about five years later, I'm working at this company called Booz Allen Hamilton. It's a management consulting firm, and it was getting ready to turn 100 years old. But in order for us to survive the next 100 years, we need to change things pretty drastically. So I was selected to be part of a team of five people to build a culture of innovation. And so there was not really any guardrails, they had lots of money, they were throwing towards this because this was the future of the organization. So I became the chief architect of a lot of things I wrote the innovation playbook, we wrote, create an innovation ecosystem, and we recreated the core values around empathy and change. And then I would say another outrageous moment was just after that happened, and I gained some prominence, I was asked by the Obama administration to come in and be an entrepreneur and residents for the administration. So what that involves is taking really big challenges that the government is facing your people from outside of government who come in and just try to make sense of things and try to improve things. And so what I eventually ended up creating was this thing called innovation.gov, which had a shared language for what does public sector innovation mean? We also created a community. We had about 5000 people join and just the first two years it's a community That's open and participatory and peer driven toward the better government movement. So yeah, those are some of the things that stand up for me. When I talk about living outrageously, I always am questioning the status quo.

Lady Grey: 5:11

And that's exactly what being outrageous is all about, in my opinion, it's shaking things up. So I feel like there's so much to unpack there. Oh, my word. I think I could probably talk to you for hours and hours and hours here. So I read a quote from you that leading change is not about breaking things, but it's about using empathy to enrich the world.

Amy: 5:32

Yeah. Empathy is a conscious choice we make. And it's something that we can learn. A lot of people feel like you're just born with empathy. But it's actually a learned trait, Jamil Zaki, who is a psychologist and the director of the Stanford social neuroscience lab. He's been studying, you know, neuro, the neuroscience of empathy for more than a decade in this written amazing book. And he finds these things. And so it's actually something we have proven through science. What's interesting is that empathy should be a conscious choice we make but we usually relegated that to the our subconscious. So many things in modern day society block empathy from presenting itself. And many usually have a hard time explaining this concept to others. So the book that I wrote was called empathy for change. And so I started kind of looking at these two aspects of myself in the sense that I'm an empath. I'm a highly sensitive person. And my biggest strength is empathy. But also at the same time, I'm a change maker. So I think that in order for us to go in this direction, towards empathy, we need to have innovation, and we must redefine it, because what's happening in our country and in many other places in the world, is that we are kind of at this turning point, this path that we have to choose, are we going down this path of narcissism of command and control of you do what I tell you to do? Or are we going down this path of empathy. And we can certainly unpack that a little bit later. But for us to veer towards empathy, we have to have innovation, right. But I've been a leader of innovation for more than a decade now. I really think in the day, we're trying to create positive change in the world. In order to get to positive change, we need to have empathy plus action,

Lady Grey: 7:24

if you can explain to us because I feel like this is a core of your messaging, what empathy is to you? How do you quantify it.

Amy: 7:34

So when I was going through working with this book, I created my own definition of empathy. And it actually encompasses quite a lot. It's responding to the thoughts and emotions of others, with a purpose of meeting each other's needs. It's focused on three kinds of empathy, it requires us to have the whole body approach. The first one is cognitive. And I call up the head, am I willing to take your perspective in the first place, am I choosing to decide whether I want to take your perspective and what's also interesting in this idea of choice, is that you also only have empathy for people that you value. So if you don't value a certain gender, or race or ethnicity, then empathy won't even happen in the first place. So that's certainly part of it. And the second piece is the heart, which is emotional empathy. Am I willing to feel your feelings and emotions but what's interesting there is that when you have emotional empathy is you have to understand yourself, and community with others. And then the third one, which I call the hand, is that part where you're like, I'm taking your perspective, I'm there I'm feeling with you. And I'm willing to help if you need it. That's a key component. The compassion piece is like, Okay, I see you as a person, I really want to help you. I found over my career, that with compassionate empathy, it doesn't say you do act. So we need to add that extra layer where it's like you're actually acting upon it. And the last thing I'll say about that is a lot of people describe that empathy is feeling with somebody and not for them.

Lady Grey: 9:20

Mm hmm. That's fascinating. I, you know, I've never heard anybody break it down into those separate categories. And that's really intriguing to me. I think a lot of people strictly talk about empathy, and sort of that emotional piece that immediately comes to mind. People who are empaths have a hard time with big room full of buzzing emotion or heightens energy and things like that and keeping themselves in a place that's balanced. I think also addressing these other concepts of, you know, the cognitive peace and the compassion, peace and compassion being both a willingness to help but also actually doing something about it and step into it. One thing that you mentioned was the inability to have empathy for people that we do not value. I feel like this is really relevant. In today's day and age, there's a lot of people that are not looking at that part of themselves critically and saying, Hey, what's the origin of my inability to empathize? And it comes back to their inability to value the person. Do you have any advice for people that are maybe doing some self analysis,

Amy: 10:32

I think, awareness unpacks a lot of things for you. I've dealt with a lot of trauma in my life. And I have spent many years going through therapy and understanding myself, and how I relate to the world. When we talk about empathy. There's four words that kept showing up in my research when I was talking to people, and also doing the deep research to understand like, what is it nature versus nurture? How do we build empathy, and the four words kind of stick out? Number one, its dignity. And Dr. Donna Hicks talks about dignity. We all inherently are valuable and worthy as people, if you don't believe in this, you're not seeing these people as humans, right. So dignity is an essential element in human existence. We're born with it. We are valuable or invaluable, priceless and irreplaceable. So a second thing that's key for us to either give empathy or not give empathy is humility. Another person I interviewed and worked with for the book was this woman named Antoinette Carol. She's in St. Louis, Missouri, and she created this organization called the creative reaction lab. And this is what they say humility is recognizing the influence of your own biases and perspectives. When trying to understand another's emotions, thoughts, experiences, and actions. Empathy is the act of attempt to understand another person's perspective, by imagining how you would feel think or act, if put in their situation. And empathy and humility, help us understand others while also acknowledging our biases.

Lady Grey: 12:10

That's brilliant. I won't interrupt your list of four words.

Amy: 12:15

But that's brilliant. Thanks. But it is brilliant, right. And that's why I put it in the book. This is a direct quote from the work that she does. And I should mention that Antoinette Carol and the credit reaction lab, are working on solving systemic racism in this country. So they have this perspective that the systems around us have been designed with oppression in them. So we can actually redesign them and reclaim the power, reclaim our agency to change the world around us. Fascinating work that they're doing. And it's formed a lot of the work that I'm talking about and other organizations I've talked to. So going back to the four things, another thing is have curiosity, having a strong desire to know or learn something about someone or something. If you don't have curiosity about people about things, then you're not going to want to know more, right? You're not going to want to overcome those biases. And those assumptions that you have, we were talking about the humility piece, and the last one equity. So why equity matters is that historically underinvested communities such as black and Latino populations, females, transgenders, people with disabilities, etc. They face disproportionate racial and economic inequalities or inequities. And so it limits their social, economic and cultural growth, because of systems of policy, education, housing, etc. And these disparities propagate, because of the barriers that have been built between various people in the world equity is different than equality, right? equality is giving sameness, everybody gets the same thing. And actually, equity is different outcomes for different people based on where they are in the pecking order, so to speak in society. Wow, that's a lot to process for people. And it's all really good. So I'm encouraging everybody to pick up this book, and give it a good solid read and use it as a self examination tool.

Lady Grey: 14:17

You had mentioned earlier to me about it being a love letter to people that want to be world changers.

Amy: 14:23

Yeah, that's right. In the introduction of my book, one of the things that I was told in my journey was that this person who was in a place of power was like, I'm giving you a magic wand. And this magic wand opens up a lot of doors for you. You can talk to whoever you want, you can do whatever you want, you can change the world around you. And I'm also passing it on to the next generation of changemakers or people who think that they can't make change happen. I want to pass that magic wand to say, Yes, you can. Wonderful.

Lady Grey: 14:55

Yeah, so I guess if we get into a little bit more of the nitty gritty of How this is sort of presenting itself in the world around us right now, I know that you mentioned the rise of narcissism and this idea of control and how that might play a role. Can you tell us a little bit about what your encounters with that have looked like and maybe unpack empathy deficit disorder?

Amy: 15:19

Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, I'm a public entrepreneur, myself, when you're in a place of leading change, you are coming up against a lot of friction from a lot of organizations that you're working with, because you're changing the status quo. And when you talk about socio economic spectrum as well, that's where a lot of research is showing is that if you have less wealth, you actually have to rely on community to participate in the world. So there might be a single mother, who needs to rely on her parents to take care of her children while she goes to work, when you are wealthy, and you are higher on the socio economic spectrum, you can hire somebody to take care of your children. So you are essentially getting into this place of, of I'm an island unto myself, I don't need other people to do what I need to do, the more wealthy you are, the more you can choose who is part of your community. And you can have exclusivity. So this all creates a really interesting, powder keg of narcissism, like not, I'm not saying all people who are wealthy and have power are narcissists, but certainly many of them are, one thing that people can do is to provide opportunities for them to be part of community a lot more. And then also to have opportunities where you can try something out and fail at it, I have an interesting story that kind of explains this idea of old power and new power, about looking at how globalization and technology is shifting us into this place where we're going from this top down leader driven world where it's like you do, as I say, and I when I tell you to do, it's kind of like 20th century thinking, you know, building a model t, which is a car. For those who may not know what a Model T is, it was a, it was one of the first cars that came out in 2011, that you had to explain that. I just thought there was nobody who might not know what a Model T is, unless you've watched like, you know, the History Channel. It's like assembly line, it's like, you know, the people who are the workers do not have the power, the people in the top have the power. And that's command and control. You do as I tell you to do and power is directional. It's like downward, usually. But new power, which is this phenomenon that's been happening in the past decade, and accelerating at a very fast pace, because of technology and globalization is we're being shoved into this place of open, transparent, participatory ways of changing the world, right, not just changing the world, but of being part of the world. So now, power is not just at the top power is a current, you can direct it to people that you need to direct it to. So I personally experienced this firsthand. I mentioned before I worked as an entrepreneur in residence for the White House, and technically the name what's called the Presidential Innovation fellow. So I have, you know, a span of up to four years to make impact in the federal government. That kind of impact is really fast. Usually people are running marathons, I was running a sprint. So you know, I was ruffling some feathers. In the last 18 months of the Obama administration. When I came in, I started working on research for innovation and change in government. By the time it was done, we had about 600 pages of research and 15 reports, talking to hundreds of people across the spectrum and trying to define what does really innovation mean, but two weeks before the 2016 election, I take on this new job, we take this information, create a shared language, a playbook and a toolkit, create the federal government movement I mentioned before, but I we had a lot of success in the work. But it was a very grassroots movement. So my chance was, I was actually given an opportunity to start this new center of excellence that was being stood up. And it was about the people side of change. So I was trying to think about how do you create 21st century agencies, so working at Housing and Urban Development and other organizations at this point, I'm getting closer. I'm in the Trump administration, I'm getting closer to working directly with the white house as opposed to a grassroots movement. And I hear rumblings that they want to know more about my work. And so I wanted to understand their vision. So I get into a meeting and I'm trying to explain like all of the progress we've made with these hundreds of people and he stops me in mid sentence and he says you are Thinking about everything wrong, you need to fit into what we're doing.

Unknown: 20:05

The box,

Lady Grey: 20:07

the dreaded box, okay? And this is Trump, you're talking about, right?

Amy: 20:14

Trump himself is somebody at the front office of American admissions. And so I was very confused. At that point. I was like, Well, I'm here to understand what you're doing, right? Like, I've been needing to understand your vision, and articulate what you're doing so that I can see how I fit into it. And as the meeting progresses, there was some bullying involved. And then, at the end of the meeting, he says, You work for me. And you work for this president. He was like our conversations over, we're done here. And it was very jarring. And what happens a few weeks later, happens to be the week of Halloween in 2018. I was removed from my post, the White House ordered GSA to dismantle innovation.gov I could never convene the federal government movement again.

Lady Grey: 21:06

breaks my heart. Okay, so

Amy: 21:08

yeah, that's Oh, I know, let's pause right there.

Lady Grey: 21:11

Man, I do a lot of work talking about breaking boxes, and these boxes that other people put us in that are defined strictly by their belief system, their worldview of how we should conduct ourselves, and and we get comfortable there, when we're in a place that isn't empowered when we don't have a knowledge of what's outside the box. And we become blind to the possibility for change because of it. And I think we stagnate we end up not acting on our internal desires and dreams and the things that we have been gifted as human beings from birth. And I am so fascinated that not only is that still a thing that people are doing to each other, you know, but it's a deliberate thing. It's not even just an accidental imposition of your own beliefs on someone else, which is obviously still happening. But it's a deliberate thing. And it's happening in our workplaces. It's obviously in your situation happening because conformity is valued above change. And, like you said, equity and acceptance and compassion, it makes my hair stand on end, when I hear you talk about somebody saying, you work for me, and this is what you're gonna do. It's that not valuing someone.

Amy: 22:30

Yeah, it was very, very disheartening. I have a short quote from my book here that I'd love to share that kind of talks about how I was feeling after this happened. Please do so it says what happened here was significant, traumatic and frustrating on a personal level. It was also teach me a lesson professionally about power control and future change. As I started peeling back the layers of this multifaceted onion, I started to unravel a few things. Number one, those in power were purposefully destructive because they were threatened by a movement of people working to change government, something they couldn't control. And number two, this leadership did not value or give empathy, command control. And top down leadership was the nature of the beast, I was both a product of and affected by a dysfunctional system that I was holding up but couldn't hold anymore

Lady Grey: 23:24

trying to hold up an entire system. It's exactly that, and especially as an empath, it feels like you have the weight of the world on you in those moments. Wow. How does the need for survival as an empath come into play for you? That was a very unique situation. But even if you're just in your day to day encounters with some of those difficulties, how do you protect yourself?

Amy: 23:49

Hmm, that's a good question. You know, we have Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which essentially is like food, water, shelter, these things that you need as a human. But then there's some things that are human needs this person, Monica hersa, who does peacebuilding says, These are non tangible human needs, many of them have to do or being able to have challenges in our life and become resilient and to overcome those challenges in our lifetime. I think that part about being resilient is really important. I spent 12 years in management consulting, before I worked at the White House. So that kind of created a hardened shell for me. I feel like we're better together than we are alone than I believe in diversity of thoughts, not just having an us versus them mentality. So I think there's power in numbers when it comes to that. And what's important, has been certainly important with me is this feeling of having community around me, I had a series of eight to 10 leaders who were volunteering, but they believed so fully in what we were doing for the public good. We all like had this higher vision and purpose that really bonded us together. You know what I was crying when I was when I was getting hit left and right by a lot of leadership. They were the ones who picked me up when I needed it, and they could understand what I was going through. And I can, I'm gonna get a kind of book clumped about that right now. But it's important after I was removed from my post, and this terrible thing happened in my world, I said, you know, enough's enough. And I had to stop the world and get off for a second. So I decided to take a sabbatical. But I was like, I need to heal, or I'm not going to be here anymore. Because I knew that I needed to write I needed to process what happened. So that's when the book started. And, you know, many, many more blessings came through. And anyway, so those are some of the things that I personally did, stepping away, and saying, no, really makes a difference.

Lady Grey: 25:56

Going back to something you said about community, we are surrounded by people that want to hold our hand. But we have to find that group of people to be able to deconstruct your box to be able to step out into your greatness, and to change the world. And whatever way it is that you're meant to change the world. I feel like that support is key. And that community of people who are like minded and encouraging, allows you the freedom to be bold.

Amy: 26:29

Yeah, I wanted to like add something to what you were just saying. So I go into the importance of community and one of my chapters, because I think it's an incredibly important piece of empathy building. Number one, if you just stay alone, and you're having your own thoughts, and you're not engaging with the community, that box that you were talking about shows up, right, you're just keeping yourself in a box, and you're not open and curious about other people in our society. Today, we are split up in networks, more networks and communities and a network seeing is only a small portion of who you are. Facebook, Twitter, you're putting up a face that only a portion of these people are seeing, they don't see you as a whole person. And if you look at community, they see you as a whole being that has all different aspects to you. And it's not just you're not just a monolith, that is something that we've walked away from, I have another chapter where it's called understand before you are understood, which is a Stephen Covey Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And that goes into more details. But essentially, it's just that the lack of community is contributing to divisiveness that we have in our country and around the world.

Lady Grey: 27:48

I'm going to spend some time with that one personally. Holy cow. Thank you.

Unknown: 27:53

Thanks for that. Yeah.

Lady Grey: 27:55

So in addition to Stephen Covey, who I obviously have spent time reading and use some of those concepts in my own life, I know that we have a shared love of Rene Brown. And for me, the concept of daring greatly by being vulnerable, and living authentically is really key. And I'm wondering if that resonates with you in your life and your desire to be a change leader? Yeah, absolutely.

Amy: 28:22

I mean, brene Brown Daring Greatly is one of my favorite books. Bernie Brown is a goddess, somebody once compared me to Bernie Brown. And I was like, Are you kidding me? Like, like, I don't know if I could get to that level of amazing. She's one of my amazing teachers in the world. And she teaches so many things to many people. And I believe vulnerability is really important. But what's interesting is that the beginning of Daring Greatly, she has this quote, that is from Teddy Roosevelt. And a lot of people caught the man in the arena speech, and I always forget the real name of it, but it's like something about the Republic. But the paraphrase here essentially says, it's not the man who counts that's in the stadium that's there that's watching you. It's the person in the ring, who is getting marred by the blood, sweat and tears of the thing that's happening, that really matters. If you're just a spectator watching what's happening in the world, you're perpetuating the systems of oppression that are oppressing people every day. So it's the people who are daring, greatly pushing against what is happening and what's right and what's wrong. That literally makes the difference. And those are the people that you can listen to and take advice from and thoughts from because the people who are the spectators are just watching and not participating. They don't really have skin in the game. They're not actually doing the work in a lot of ways. We all have a responsibility to dare greatly. Those who are Daring Greatly should be banding together and working with each other.

Unknown: 29:55

Mm hmm. Yeah,

Lady Grey: 29:56

I think I found the right quote, The credit belongs to The man who is actually in the arena whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who airs who comes short again and again. Yeah, like the freedom to make mistakes.

Amy: 30:13

Exactly.

Lady Grey: 30:14

So let's talk through Amy's outrageous advice. This is the section of the show, if you have something else that you need to talk to us about, like how to make a brilliant peach pie or something like that, you let me know. I hear you like to bake pies.

Amy: 30:29

I do. Yeah, that's one of my things.

Lady Grey: 30:31

I could not bake a pie to save my soul. Seriously, I have all the respect for you. But I would love to talk through first steps that people can take. So we people can pick up your book and work through some of their own biases, evaluate their values, and maybe those three different categories have had, and I'm gonna let

Unknown: 30:53

cognitive

Lady Grey: 30:54

emotional and compassion is

Amy: 30:56

that, did I get that? Right? Get it? Right, yeah. Just say the head, the heart, the hand,

Lady Grey: 31:01

head heart. And okay, but so let's talk about action. What are some steps that people can actually take to get out of this box, get on a path to compassion and leading change with empathy?

Amy: 31:14

What do I stand for? What do I value? In a lot of ways, we're being fed a lot of things from the media there, there's people shaping our world. It's not just the media, it's school, we're taught about specific things for various reasons. So always try to look for the other side of the story, try to understand where you lie on that we need to have a culture change. culture change happens because of a movement and not a mandate. In order for that to happen. We need to step up as employees of people who do have influence Google, some of their workers are unionizing. They're asking for equal pay for some of the workers that might be working a third party that aren't paid as well. But they're asking for a better say, of what their companies are doing in the world and the ethics behind it. How do you build a culture with leading with the heart, right, leading with this emotional aspect of ourselves, because change is inherently an emotional act that we have, right? So we need to acknowledge that our emotions while we're going through the change. So I just talked about some of the things we personally can do try to look at values, etc. But this is for a bigger culture. So a micro changes, number one, acknowledge that empathy is not an inherent trait, but something we can build, realizing that we can learn empathy, that we can choose empathy, bring them from the subconscious into our consciousness. Number two is look for Phantom norms and work in communities that you're in. And that's usually the people who have the dominant voices are the ones whose voices get heard, and they tend to have more power. So when we're talking about culture, listen to the people who might be a little bit more quiet, make sure that you most people are being heard this kind of feeds into the third piece with the micro work we can do is get other people who are championing empathy, connect with other people, I love to say that like, you know, go to the people who are leaning in and expanding around you and are excited about you than the people who are like moving backwards. Because then you can build coalitions of people, right. And that's how change happens. A couple things in the macro side of things is like, creating policies that allow you to have more empathy, or allow you to put in your performance plans, having communication channels that create increased transparency. And at the end of the day, you want to recruit people to come into your company that lead with empathy, and have that as something in your recruiting process, diversify your leadership, if you if you're looking around, and everybody around you is the same gender, or the same color, or even like disabilities, you want to have like both hidden and physical disabilities, you want to just have like a variety of people who think different things about it, because in the end, you're going to be stronger off, and more empathy is going to be had. Well, I

Lady Grey: 34:15

really appreciate that advice. I think it's great because it touches people kind of where they're at. There are some people who are at the beginning of that journey, and some people who are CEOs, maybe looking to change their hiring policies and things like that. So I think that's great advice. So before we go, I like to give everybody the opportunity to give a shout out to anyone that's a big supporter or someone that you want to recognize. Do you have anybody you'd like to say hi to?

Amy: 34:47

Oh, gosh, we're gonna say hi to your mom, you know,

Unknown: 34:51

Hey, Mom. Hey,

Amy: 34:52

Mom. There's been so many mentors. I have not done this by myself. I think of all the women that have supported me, you know, and my mom is certainly she's my biggest fan like most moms are. But I also think about sisters, I have three sisters, I'm getting verklempt thinking about it, too. They pushed me to do things that I normally wouldn't do, and they lift me up. I keep thinking about one of the best leaders that I've ever had during everything that was happening with the Trump administration. Her name is Kelly Olson, I think about her frequently, she always stood up for me to fight for what I believed in. And what she believed in one man that comes to mind is what two I want to say is Joby Aurora. He is you know, work with him in the better government movement. We, you know, he donated, volunteered so much of his time to help build this because he cared so much about the federal government movement, and then kind of a friend named Alexander Romero or he called row row. And we we were our fellows together last year, and he's just incredibly empathetic, empathetic, human and just wonderful person all the way around. And I really look towards his

Lady Grey: 36:06

his guidance. That's fantastic. Well, big shout out to all of them. So that wraps up what I wanted to kind of talk about today. Although again, I feel like there are so many things that I'm going to want to talk to you about as soon as I dig into this book and really devour it. So you are welcome to come back on this show anytime to talk about empathy and leadership and change. I really appreciate your voice. Thank you so much for the time. Absolutely. Hey, friends, I hope you enjoyed this interview. If you'd like to learn more about Amy Wilson, you can check her out at www dot Amy j wilson.com. A big thank you to Amy, for teaching us to live a little more outrageously. Well, outrageous friends. It has been my honor and my pleasure to have you here today. I hope that you took away some outrageous ideas for your own life. If you enjoyed yourself, make sure that you're subscribed to live outrageously with Lady gray on whatever your podcast app is. You can also connect with me personally on facebook@facebook.com slash outrageous lady grey, or on Instagram at lady dot gray. Also, be sure to check out the website at www dot live outrageously.com. Once again, this is lady gray encouraging you to go out and live outrageously.