You've heard us talk about the importance of self-awareness in management and leadership. Now hear it from the pioneer of self-awareness herself, Dr. Tasha Eurich. Tasha brings her years of research to The Bosshole® Chronicle's studio and offers up some of the most practical advice you could ever get. Want more? Follow all the links below!
Other related episodes of The Bosshole® Chronicles:
Have a BOSSHOLE STORY of your own? Click HERE to inquire about being on the podcast!
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Visit us at www.realgoodventures.com. We are a Talent Optimization consultancy specializing in people and business execution analytics. Real Good Ventures was founded by Sara Best and John Broer who are both Certified Talent Optimization Consultants with over 50 years of combined consulting and organizational performance experience. Sara is also certified in EQi 2.0. RGV is also a Certified Partner of Line-of-Sight, a powerful organizational health and executi
You've heard us talk about the importance of self-awareness in management and leadership. Now hear it from the pioneer of self-awareness herself, Dr. Tasha Eurich. Tasha brings her years of research to The Bosshole® Chronicle's studio and offers up some of the most practical advice you could ever get. Want more? Follow all the links below!
Other related episodes of The Bosshole® Chronicles:
Have a BOSSHOLE STORY of your own? Click HERE to inquire about being on the podcast!
HERE ARE MORE RESOURCES FROM REAL GOOD VENTURES:
Never miss a good opportunity to learn from a bad boss...
Click HERE to get your very own Reference Profile. We use The Predictive Index as our analytics platform so you know it's validated and reliable. Your Reference Profile informs you of your needs, behaviors, and the nuances of what we call your Behavioral DNA. It also explains your work style, your strengths, and even the common traps in which you may find yourself. It's a great tool to share with friends, family, and co-workers.
Follow us on Twitter HERE and make sure to share with your network!
Provide your feedback HERE, please! We love to hear from our listeners and welcome your thoughts and ideas about how to improve the podcast and even suggest topics and ideas for future episodes.
Visit us at www.realgoodventures.com. We are a Talent Optimization consultancy specializing in people and business execution analytics. Real Good Ventures was founded by Sara Best and John Broer who are both Certified Talent Optimization Consultants with over 50 years of combined consulting and organizational performance experience. Sara is also certified in EQi 2.0. RGV is also a Certified Partner of Line-of-Sight, a powerful organizational health and executi
0:00:04 - Sara
Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the Bosshole Chronicles. I am your co-host, Sara Best. Today, I'm joined, as always, by the Brofessor, my buddy, my partner in crime, John Broer. Hey, John, how are you?
0:00:19 - John
I am amazing, Sara, real good and, oh my gosh, what a guest subject matter expert we have today. You know what I don't know of two people who started a podcast two and a half years ago, didn't know what they were doing, who have been blessed with so many amazing guests. And today is another example of that. We are going to be talking to Dr Tasha Eurich, and I mean Tasha is an organizational psychologist, researcher, best-selling author, most recently known for her book Insight, also her first book, bankable Leadership, and she's going to talk a little bit about some new work that she's doing, but she has worked with tens of thousands of leaders. Many of you may know her from her TED Talk around self-awareness and, by the way, go to the show notes, it'll be in there. You might recognize a couple of her clients Google, salesforce, the NBA, nestle, Johnson and Johnson. I mean, it goes on and on.
0:01:19 - Sara
The White House.
0:01:20 - John
Oh yeah, the White House Leadership Development Program. We are a remarkable individual and we are so lucky to add her to the list of guests on the BOSOL Chronicles. So what do you think, Sara, Are you ready?
0:01:32 - Sara
I'm ready. I think our listeners are going to be blown away by the simplicity, yet the power of her approach on self-awareness. So let's dig in.
0:01:45 - John
The Bosshole® Chronicles are brought to you by Real Good Ventures, a talent optimization firm helping organizations diagnose their most critical people and execution issues with world-class analytics. Make sure to check out all the resources in the show notes and be sure to follow us and share your feedback. Enjoy today's episode. Tasha, it is absolutely great to have you here on the BOSOL Chronicles. Welcome.
Thank you Thanks for having me, and we couldn't think of anybody better to have us join in the conversation around self-awareness and Tasha for your benefit, our listeners just with our work around talent optimization and leadership development through all of our diagnostics, self-awareness is always the centerpiece to helping people, managers, supervisors and staying out of the BOSOL zone, helping them understand themselves better, and that's really been at the core of your work. So can you take us back a little bit? I know there's been a ton of research that you've done and we will post your TEDx talk and links to your books before we get to the books. Just take us back to that origin about self-awareness, is it? I've got to really dig into this.
0:03:01 - Tasha
Sure, it's a long time ago now and it really kind of set the course for my career, which I didn't anticipate would happen at the time. But I've been an organizational psychologist for the last 20-plus years and what I saw in the early period of my career was this really consistent phenomenon that I know you guys have a whole podcast about, which is that the executives that I worked with that were willing to question the assumptions they had about themselves, to learn different ways they might be perceived, to further clarify who they were and what they stood for were always more successful, and not just more successful, but just better off.
They had higher well-being, more confidence, more happiness than the folks who were not willing to do those things.
And this was probably around 2014 or so I remember it was over the Christmas holiday and most of my clients have all their vacation and time off during that period, so I had a little bit of free space and time, and I remember that I had read several articles that week about self-awareness, and they were like be more self-aware, introspect, and I said, yes, I agree, but the one thing that I didn't know, even from my own experience and from what I was reading, was what did the science actually say?
And so I started, sort of naively at first, just reading empirical journal articles about the topic of self-awareness, and as I started to do that, I discovered that there's actually not as much out there as we would think, given how critical the skill is, and so I sort of took it upon myself, as a PhD and a really quantitative field of psychology, to bring together a research team to investigate some of the questions that I wanted the answers to what is self-awareness? Where does it come from? Why do we need it? And then, probably most importantly, how do we get more of it? So our research, it's still going on. It's not something that we would ever just stop because a book came out about it, but we've looked at thousands of people all around the world that we've quantitatively surveyed. We've read a couple thousand empirical journal articles at this point, so you don't have to.
We can summarize it and then probably for our purposes today.
0:05:20 - Tasha
Even the most interesting part of our research was we found 50 people 5-0, very different backgrounds, all around the world, who didn't start out as self-aware but who, through some process that we wanted to elucidate, were able to become really dramatically, remarkably more self-aware. And we called these people our self-awareness unicorns, because at first my team was worried we wouldn't find any.
I knew we would because I had been coaching them for my career, but that was actually where we had so many surprises and really some of, I think, the biggest contributions to what we know about this important skill.
0:06:01 - John
Well, and, if I may, one of the interesting outcomes and I don't know, as a researcher, that you would consider this a happy accident, just to sort of reference, bob Ross, you know the painter that you expected. The expectation was that, well, self-aware people are going to be happier content, and actually was the opposite right? You started to realize higher degrees of self-awareness actually evoked, or created perhaps, more negative responses to a degree.
0:06:32 - Tasha
So there's a nuance there that I think is important. It wasn't that we found that self-aware people had those outcomes Quite the contrary. I can give you a litany of positive outcomes that self-aware people experience, but what I think you're talking about is people who spent time introspecting. So this idea that goes all the way back to Sigmund Freud, that all we had to do is sort of lay on a couch and talk about our mother, think about why do we do the things we do, and really that psychological excavation activity.
That was what we discovered was not just negatively associated with self-awareness, but it was negatively associated with well-being. And I was lured I mean, as a lifelong introspector myself and really trying to do my best to understand who I am and how I'm showing up I was very perplexed. But as we started to look at some of the research behind this, there were other studies that had shown similar things and interestingly, it turns out that self-awareness it's not that introspection in and of itself is bad or wrong. It's just that the way most people do it leads us down a path that A makes us less self-aware and then B actually makes us more stressed, anxious, depressed, et cetera. So there's a little bit of a paradox, on the face of it, between people who are self-aware, are very self-accepting, they're confident, they're happy, but they've figured out sort of a different way to go about that process than you know, including me. What most of us think is what we're supposed to be doing when we're introspecting.
0:08:12 - Sara
Is this a good place to also identify? So introspection versus monitoring your inner dialogue, which is something you talk about.
0:08:22 - Tasha
Yes, and we were talking about that a little bit before the show. You had a really excellent question and it made me ponder a little bit, which was what does self-awareness for our thoughts look like? Yes, and there are aspects of this and I'm sure we'll get into it where introspection is less helpful, like why did I say what I said in that meeting, or why am I feeling the way that I'm feeling, that are much less helpful scientifically, empirically. But what is really helpful the research has shown is to monitor our inner monologue, and that includes everything from just what are the thoughts that you're thinking today? What are those conscious, accessible things?
I woke up this morning. Oh, I'm so burnt out, I'm so tired. That's interesting. Okay, so I'm aware of that thought. I'm going to keep an eye on that and see if I'm still feeling that way tomorrow or next week or two weeks from now. It could also include our inner monologue response to the world around us, right? What are the stories that we're telling about the people that we encounter or the things that happen to us? That's an area where, again, as long as we don't overanalyze it which is, by the way, not self-awareness as long as we don't overanalyze it. Those can give us really valuable clues just about how we can live the best life possible and how we can be the most empathetic, compassionate leaders as we possibly can.
0:09:56 - Sara
I'm grateful that you differentiated monologue from dialogue, because it's really not a dialogue. It is a monologue, and the attention to that monologue then creates insight and potentially new action. That's probably a whole other conversation, isn't it? How do we bring that to our conscious awareness and how do we translate that into new behaviors or new approaches?
0:10:18 - Tasha
Let me give you one simple tool that might just to your point. Just scratching the surface, I call it the best front test. This tool is especially helpful for anyone just hypothetically. I'm definitely not like this that overanalyzes or overruminates, where we're kind of beating ourselves up for things that weren't perfect, etc. It's to ask yourself the next time that you feel kind of down on yourself, you're questioning what was that interaction I had with my spouse or gosh, I really just wasn't. My best self today is to ask yourself would I say to someone that I love and respect what I just said to myself?
Well that's good.
0:11:04 - John
That is a powerful question.
0:11:05 - Tasha
And I think even just the question on Earth's. What can be less than positive thought patterns in that inner monologue and if we're paying attention to it, I think that's more than what most of us do on a daily basis, let alone say what do I want to do about this?
0:11:26 - Sara
As the next question, oh my gosh, and you know what just kind of clicked in my mind. We often say that no one was born to be a bosshole. People don't come to work going. Huh, you know, I'd like to make everyone's life miserable today and micromanage and agree.
0:11:39 - Speaker 2
I don't say no.
0:11:40 - Sara
Yeah, they don't do that. But how many people and certainly I know you talk to leaders like we do they? They are lacking self regard. They are feeling that absence of self respect and self regard, or they may not be conscious of it, but this is, this is where that all happens. What you just described is what can pull a person's presence and behavior and attitude and response to things away from the good because they're stuck in a loop of, you know, beating oneself up. I think that was a really great question and a great tool that probably a lot of people don't know they need to try out. Does that make sense?
0:12:19 - Tasha
Yep, it does. So you know, what I would say to anyone listening is give it a whirl, you know. See, you might say, oh well, I'm not, I'm not that self critical, but then you might find yourself, you know, in a situation where you are getting down on yourself in a way that's not productive for you, for the people around you. I see that a lot actually in the executives I coach and I work in, usually the top one or two levels of midsize to large companies, where the person you know is going to work and trying to do the best they can every day but they're getting in their own way.
And there are lots of ways we can get in our own way which is why your podcast exists but I think that we minimize the attention to the internal things, that we can really be sort of holding ourselves back without even really realizing it.
0:13:09 - Sara
Well, I want to build on this idea of the inner monologue, and you had touched upon empathy and this sort of external focus. Sometimes, I think, when we talk about lack of self awareness, when we're describing a boss hole or we have this muscle experience, we're talking about somebody who doesn't even know how they show up, so they're not aware of the tone of their voice or the look on their face, or you know the way in which they deliver news, that kind of stuff. How can they move to better be aware of what's happening outside of them?
0:13:37 - John
And is this related to the thinking versus knowing that you frame up, Tasha?
0:13:42 - Tasha
Well, I think the thinking versus knowing is more about that introspection.
0:13:45 - Speaker 2
Okay, okay.
0:13:47 - Tasha
But I think I can let me make a distinction that might be helpful here. So we discovered in our research that there are really sort of two I would call them camera angles of self awareness. One is the way we see ourselves, and then self awareness being understanding ourselves, and two being how other people see us and then understanding how other people see us. Yes, what was really interesting, at least to me, was that, a you need both types of self awareness to be self aware and, b there was almost no relationship between those two types of self knowledge. There was actually, for any math nerds or stats nerds listening to this, there was a 0.0 correlation between what we called our internal and external self awareness, and what that means really practically for any leader is we have to focus on both. So we have to work on, for example, internal self awareness, monitoring our thoughts and feelings and behaviors, on knowing our values, understanding our patterns, knowing what our reactions are to things, just as much as we have to understand what's the impact that we're having on other people and how is it that other people are experiencing our behavior and our presence and so on, and I think one way to look at that if you're wanting to focus on your self awareness is which of these two aspects of my own self knowledge am I doing better at, and which might I be neglecting?
And this isn't always the case, because they're independent. You can be high on both, low on both, high on one, low on the other, but for most people they kind of have a default that they go to. For me, as an example, I tend to default towards thinking about how other people perceive me more than you know. What do I actually want? Like I'll give you. This is a silly example, but you know, a couple years ago I my car lease was up and I had to pick a new color for my new car and instead of sitting down and looking at the nine options that I was given by the dealer, I texted like five of my closest friends and I asked them what color they thought I should buy.
0:16:05 - John
Oh, my goodness Right.
0:16:08 - Tasha
Instead of saying like, yeah, what would make me really, really happy here? What's? What's the ideal color of my car.
0:16:14 - Sara
Did you get five different answers? Just curious.
0:16:16 - Tasha
No, you know what I think it was like split down the middle, and then I ended up saying, yeah, well, I agree with the majority. Conveniently, right, good.
0:16:24 - Sara
Yeah, that's a riot.
0:16:25 - John
Okay, well, don't leave us in suspense. What was the final color?
0:16:29 - Tasha
It was a nice metallic white Very.
0:16:31 - John
Okay.
0:16:32 - Tasha
Perfect.
0:16:32 - Sara
Perfect.
0:16:36 - John
Okay, so the external was really your default in that case.
0:16:39 - Tasha
Exactly, and that's not to say that 100% of the time. My default is to external self-awareness Right, but this is another thing your listeners can really just start to pay attention to. What am I analyzing in my day-to-day experience? And there's a lot of people that fall on the other side of the spectrum I call them introspectors where they might journal or they might really love self-improvement, reading or even going to therapy. It feels really really rewarding to them because they're excavating and understanding those inner parts of themselves. And what I would say to introspectors is great. That's an excellent start. And just like I need to pay attention to my own inner experience, they can probably do well by adding in that other angle of you know, how do I know how other people see me? Am I really asking for feedback that much? Am I really listening to feedback when I get it? You know that's what allows us to all you know eventually hopefully approach that unicorn status of you know really dramatic improvements in our self-awareness.
0:17:49 - Sara
All right, we'll be right back.
0:17:55 - Speaker 2
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0:19:03 - Sara
Okay, let's get back to the program. Well, this is a great segue, or an opportunity to plug. You actually have developed a validated 70 item self-awareness assessment, but if listeners go to your insightbookcom site, they can actually take the quiz, and it requires input from someone else. So it's an opportunity to really look at both channels Exactly.
0:19:28 - Tasha
Yeah. So it actually took us almost five years to develop this really lengthy self-awareness assessment. It was a multirator assessment. It measured seven different types of self-knowledge and as part of the release for my book about all this insight several years ago, we said, hey, why don't we take a five-minute version of that? We'll take a couple items from every scale and then we'll create a computer program where you can fill it out. It takes five minutes for you and then you actually can send it to someone via email who knows you well and then they answer those.
I think it's 14 questions about how they see you and it's really cool. It spits out this report that gives you kind of a high-level picture of your internal and external self-awareness and then, based on your results, usually two or three specific things that you can do to make some improvement, if that's what you decide to do and we initially thought it would just be this gimmicky marketing thing, to be honest. But so hundreds of thousands of people have taken it and I get messages all the time from people just saying I always tell people please don't make any major life decisions based on this, because this is literally a five-minute like party trick version of the assessment, but it can just be a data point right and people say oh my gosh, it was so helpful.
Or there's some people, like frequent flyers, who will take it, but every time they take it they have a different friend. Rate them Right.
0:20:57 - John
They're waiting for that correct external input. That's right.
0:20:59 - Tasha
Exactly, exactly. They will keep searching until they find it, but it's totally free and we continue to keep it out there and supporting it, just to hopefully give resources to make the world a little bit more self-aware.
0:21:13 - John
And just as a quick reminder to all our listeners, go to the show notes. You will see the links to Tasha's books, to insightcom, because we absolutely just based on what it can do and what it offers. Go there, you'll want to get that. Go ahead, Sara. I'm sorry, ann, I interrupted you.
0:21:29 - Sara
No, no, I was just going to say for anybody who's cautious or concerned or intimidated about this idea of self-awareness, and maybe they know they need to grow that capability, this is a way to dip your toe in the water with a safe person.
0:21:43 - Tasha
I love that. Yeah, because you can pick right. You get to decide who is that other rating.
0:21:49 - Sara
That's right.
0:21:51 - John
So, tasha, insight was actually your second book. Correct Bankable Leadership was number one. We'll put links to both, but tell us a little bit more about insight, in addition to what people can get in terms of a practical tool, just a little bit more of origin of its writing and what that motivation was for putting it together.
0:22:14 - Tasha
Oh, I love that question. It really takes me back. It was interesting. When I started this research program I sort of had it in the back of my mind that it could be a book, but I wasn't really sure. As a scientist I thought well, it depends on what I find. If I find a bunch of really boring stuff, nobody's going to want to read it.
But, if I find some really interesting sexy stuff, then maybe it is a book. And what was fun about that process was, as I've sort of explained already, there were a lot of twists and turns and a lot of surprises, a lot of things that really sort of fundamentally challenged the foundation of how most people see self-awareness, including me at the time and so it became clear maybe a year or so in that gosh, I would be doing people a disservice if I didn't write a book about this, because, again, it really practically changes. If you know what these insights are. It practically changes what your self-awareness journey can look like.
And the positive thing I think that we kept finding was this is not like an extremely time-consuming thing. Most of our self-awareness unicorns weren't devoting hours and hours and hours a week to the practice of self-awareness. They had figured out how to hack it and so, in the most sort of simple terms, I think one way to look at the book is to learn those self-awareness hacks. What do our self-awareness unicorns do differently from the rest of us have they figured out, and usually in a more efficient way, Because, of course, they're magical self-awareness unicorns. And a lot of people say I've actually decreased the amount of time I spend on my self-awareness, but I'm getting more insight, so it's how to be smart about your self-awareness journey.
0:23:58 - Sara
I have a question about insight. I know and you referred to this a little bit earlier the seven types of self-knowledge that separate the aware from the unaware. Of those seven, are there any that would surprise people, like we haven't heard of them or we haven't thought of them in our regular living?
0:24:15 - Tasha
So a couple of them surprised us, to be honest, because we started with what the current empirical research kind of showed as the dimensions of self-awareness, so things that we would normally think of. Things like what are our values, what are the principles that we want to live our lives by, what are our aspirations, what are the things we want to experience and achieve in our lives, what's the impact that we're having on other people? But as we started to develop the assessment, we had a couple of sort of new things come out. Obviously we were measuring people's knowledge of their weaknesses and their strengths and their kind of in-the-moment awareness. But there were two actually one really that came out that was so obvious I couldn't believe we didn't put it in, and that was understanding our passions.
So what are those things that make us want to leap out of bed in the morning and how can we kind of design our lives so that we're maximizing the amount of time and energy we spend on those things? And obviously it's important to be self-aware and to know all these important things. But if you don't know what lights you up, how can you possibly get all the benefits from self-awareness? If you're in a job that you're not passionate about. You can sort of get to a self-awareness ceiling in a sense, because you have the knowledge to be fully actualized, but you're not acting on it yet, and so to me I think that was almost the missing piece of the puzzle in some ways is self-awareness is pointless on its own, but once you have it, you can make empowered and important decisions.
0:25:55 - Sara
I can't get over the idea that knowing your passions isn't something many of us ever spent time on or even had conversations or overheard adults talking about growing up. I don't know if that's a generational thing, but it just kind of was like wow, it is your why, of course, but it's more than your why, it's your zing, it is what motivates you to move, but I just don't think as a society we make a lot of room for that.
0:26:24 - Tasha
I agree with you, and it's an interesting research question actually, whether there are generational or kind of age differences. But I do think we've made a little bit of headway in the last few years, just collectively, based only on hearing news headlines and a phenomenon where, for example, the Great Resignation in some sense that was a bunch of people saying, hey, I'm not passionate about what I'm doing and I want to be passionate about what I'm doing Now. Granted, there's also the headlines coming out now about all the people that regretted their Great Resignation.
So, I think it's a little more complicated than that, but I think in its simplest sense that is maybe an indication that we're changing the conversation at least a little bit.
0:27:10 - John
Well, and, as we say, our mission at Real Good Ventures is to help people find meaning and fulfillment in their work, and it's completely achievable as long as you have the right objective data, that people we talk about, the Head, heart and Briefcase that's a whole other podcast, but I mean when people can attain that, it can be done. But a lot of that has to do with at least understanding themselves and understanding what really drives them and realizing that that pursuit is noble and honorable and it's something that you can do, I mean. I think, Tasha, you're living proof that I mean. What you are doing right now, the work you do with your clients, your speaking engagements, how you are putting this into writing is an example of a passion fulfilled Unless.
0:27:58 - Tasha
I'm wrong.
0:27:59 - John
I mean it just pours out of you. Go watch Tasha speak. I mean it just emanates from you, that's right.
0:28:09 - Tasha
That is the most wonderful compliment, because it's acknowledging when we find our passions and when we're able to design our lives to allow us to focus on them. Amazing things happen, ideally, you know, not just with ourselves, but in the contribution we make to the world, and so that's that's like the nicest compliment I could ever hear.
0:28:32 - John
I think Well, it's so evident in what you do. But I do have a very practical question and it's a client-based question. I'm not gonna use any names really quick.
0:28:40 - Tasha
No first and last names, or add no first and last names, yeah, but we nobody.
0:28:45 - John
As Sara said, nobody is born a boss hole and but we have clients, obviously senior executives, managers. They drift into the boss hole zone. In our work with them around self-awareness through their behavioral data, eq, psychological safety, I mean they, they know, I mean there's a, there's an understanding of their wiring and what is driving Sort of their, their, their needs, their behaviors, how they're showing up, and the whole point of our work is to help them adapt. We're not gonna change them. Humans don't change. We say circumstances change. Humans through self-awareness, know how to adapt and they learn that. But what about it? What about the a few of our potential boss holes that are listening out there, that have all this awareness but they're not adapting? I mean it's like you want to go to shake them by the shoulders and say We've already talked about this, you already know that you keep showing up this way, yet you understand that it's not getting the kind of results you want. I'm not even sure that question makes sense, but they're just they're not able to make that step.
0:29:52 - Tasha
Yeah, is it is the question kind of what, what would, and I what's wrong with them?
0:29:57 - John
I was to share.
0:29:59 - Tasha
I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding the question is what is what to do right?
0:30:03 - John
Yeah, yeah.
0:30:03 - Sara
what advice would you give that leader who Just, oh, has that, what go ahead Well this is this is a chapter in your book or it's a reference in your book how to deal with the delusional people in your life, right, okay, good, let's go there.
0:30:17 - Tasha
So there's yeah, there's a couple ways to look at this, and I love the lens you both kind of gave is you know, one is how can I stop getting in my own way? Mm-hmm and then another way to look at it is how do I help other people stop getting in their own way? So maybe those are two little rabbit holes that we can get into Wowza, you know.
But I think, John, to your question, there is a space between awareness and action that if we, you know, if we're not fully committed, if we don't have the full support, if we don't have the right tools, we can miss opportunities. And that's really the way I look at that. Is is when, when you know but you're not sort of Deciding what you want to do about it, then you're missing that opportunity for being more effective, for being more confident, for for being more Successful.
Yeah and so the question then becomes I think, how do you, how do you give yourself a better shot? What I see quite often and this is usually isn't in my clients, because I simply don't let them do this what I see is people trying to take on too many things at the same time. So if I, you know, let's say, I take the insight quiz on Tasha's website and I learned that you know, my, my Internal self-awareness is lacking. So I say, okay, what I'm gonna start doing is I'm gonna start journaling, I'm gonna find a therapist, I'm gonna find a therapist, I'm gonna go on long nature walks and I'm gonna go to a meditation retreat and then Surprise what happens. So maybe I do those things, maybe I do them for a week or two weeks or three weeks, but then life gets in the way and those things fall off my priority list. Oftentimes, when, when people take on too much, the, the boomerang effect can be more Demotivating then, as if they had never even done those things right Interesting yeah.
And so what I think I would say to anybody who's listening and wants to, to feel more, feel like they're making more progress on that journey is make it easier for yourself. Hmm.
0:32:20 - John
This is.
0:32:21 - Tasha
I know that everyone listening to this is motivated and successful and focused and you know, sometimes those things can work against us in a situation like this. So it's not a crime to make things easier for yourself. It's in fact, you know, if you do what I do with my executive coaching clients, you're focusing on one thing, one thing at a time, and it hopefully it's one thing that's gonna make a big difference, but it's also one thing. So maybe it's you know, and and and make it an easy goal. If I pick journaling, because I want to be more in tune with, kind of my inner world and experience, don't write every day for good mistake, say I'm gonna write.
You know Every time something happens that I want to better understand. So then you're not locking yourself into something. Obviously you want to check in and say well, it's been three months since I've written in my journal. That's not good. But but to sort of take away the I Know like the the pressure or the weight that you might feel from doing it to making it something that's actually valuable and doable.
0:33:25 - Sara
You know if our listeners can just tune in to the very practical insight, powerful insight you just shared. That's how you write, like how you speak about this in plain English and like it's so Digestible, like yes, I could see myself doing that. I want our listeners to know that's how you speak, that's how you write. They need to grab on to these ideas. They need to get your book. They need to listen and tune in because it's not that hard. I mean, it really is doable. You make it so possible.
0:33:53 - Tasha
Yeah, I have a friend who jokes about my job all the time and he says it is really not rocket science what you do. It belies the 20 years of experience and the PhD, of course.
0:34:05 - Speaker 2
But right in a sense he's right.
0:34:07 - Tasha
I think our jobs are to help simplify this process for people and and there's something really powerful about that is to say oh man, like this, doesn't have to feel so terrible for me to work on myself awareness, this is actually engaging or fun.
0:34:22 - John
You know that that's always the goal, I think but Tasha, and really quick, because I know we're gonna. We're gonna wrap up here in a second. But when I think about your focus on self-awareness and so many of the, the Episodes we've had yet in the last couple of months around emotional engagement, noble purpose, vulnerability-based trust, belonging, peace building, compassionate leadership, this is not this is not your leadership or management development of the last century. This is a different. This has to be the way we evolve our, our leaders and our managers, and it's all. It's been there and the good ones, the unicorns, have Always understood that secret. We just have to make it more. We have to make it more broadly known and and get people fold them into this Wonderful world of developing people that doesn't have to be abusive or full of bossholes.
0:35:16 - Tasha
I Wow, amen. I feel so strongly about what you just said that about two and a half years ago, I started a global pay it forward project that I call the Tasha 10. And now it's like 16 or 17 people. But these incredible practitioners and thought leaders in the area of human-centered leadership, which I think is just a wonderful summary of all the concepts that you just mentioned there's so much to it, but they're doing great work all around the world in every industry you can think of, and my job is to teach them everything I know for free and bring them together and give them support, because it has to be a movement to your point. It's not natural for us to focus on these things. Certainly, we haven't been taught them particularly well, and then a lot of it goes against our natural way of being, which is crazy to think about, but humans are busy and they're goal focused and sometimes they have tunnel vision.
But that's the only way I think we're going to be able to get there is for there to be lots of movements like what you guys have, like our Tasha 10 community, to show people just the value, the importance. It's not nice to have, it's not. Oh, let's try to be more empathetic if we have the time and the energy it's. This is central, not just to our roles in our jobs, but as human beings on the earth.
0:36:46 - Sara
Well, and would you agree, Tasha? It's the responsibility, it's the added responsibility. If you're responsible for developing other people, if you're a leader, you own the need to develop this self-awareness and be effective and develop and grow your effectiveness. I agree.
0:37:06 - Tasha
Absolutely. It's a responsibility, it's a great responsibility, to be a leader, and that's one example for sure.
0:37:13 - Sara
I love it's something you said about your book Insight, but I think it speaks to just the work you do in general and I think it's an encouragement that our listeners should hear Three simple facts. That self-awareness is the exquisite foundation to a life well-lived, I mean, ah, you just kind of want to settle into that that it is possible to make the journey. It is possible. You make it very possible and I think we have great tools we can use and that the courage and effort it takes to get there are well worth it, not just because we have to or we should, but because we can and we benefit and the people we care about benefit.
0:37:51 - Tasha
Oh, I love what you just said. That's so well stated.
0:37:54 - Sara
Well, did you say it actually?
0:37:56 - Tasha
I just said it, no, but what you added on at the end, because we can, because we can. Yeah.
0:38:02 - John
Tasha, what is well? First of all, thank you so much on behalf of all of our listeners out there in the Bosshole Transformation Nation. Thank you for being with us and let us know what's on the horizon for you. What's next?
0:38:15 - Tasha
So I've been working on a new book for almost three years now, when we finally sold it at the end of last year, and so it's also based on some really surprising research around the area of resilience and how can we build a beautiful life in a world of constant change and chaos. Because that's the way the world is for sure, exactly it's not changing anytime soon, and I finally had to accept that. But a lot of really new, very interesting things, not unlike the insight research process, actually. So stay tuned.
0:38:53 - John
Oh, that'd be great, and if you were so inclined when it publishes, we'd love to have you back. Oh man let's do it. Tasha, this has been great, so good having you here, and we hope to have you.
0:39:04 - Tasha
I don't want to hang up, yet I like talking to you. I know that was so fun. Time flew by.
0:39:08 - John
And just all the best to you, absolutely.
0:39:11 - Tasha
Thank you both. Really nice to meet you. Such a great discussion. Thank you.
0:39:14 - Sara
All right.
0:39:15 - John
Good luck. See you soon, take care.
0:39:16 - Sara
Bye.
0:39:17 - John
And we'll see you next time on the Boss Hole Chronicles. We'd like to thank our guests today on the Boss Hole Chronicles and if you have a Boss Hole Chronicles story of your own, please email us at mystory@thebossholechronicles.com. Once again, mystory@thebossholechronicles.com. We'll see you again soon.