S4EP02: The CREATE Leadership Model

This week Dr. Lee explores the CREATE Leadership Model, the method of leadership that considers the concept of attunement and its role in effective leadership. 

Dr. Lee shares her own journey of transformation through attunement, highlighting the power of undivided attention and unconditional acceptance in building authentic connections. She delves into the importance of embodiment and emotional regulation, and how being in touch with our own needs and emotions enhances our capacity as leaders. 

Dr. Lee also challenges us to question traditional leadership practices and embrace a trauma-sensitive approach to understanding others. You’ll also learn more about the upcoming CREATE Leadership Conference, which focuses on the C.R.E.A.T.E. model of leadership, incorporating curiosity, regulation, and sensitivity to past experiences. 

Gain valuable insights on the impact of attunement and positive leadership on organizational success, emphasizing the need to prioritize leadership development over performance metrics, as well as the challenges of success and the importance of resource allocation and decision-making in sustaining growth. Join us as we challenge conventional notions of leadership and uncover new ways to create meaningful change within organizations.

Want to learn more about the CREATE Leadership Conference happening in Columbus, Ohio November 9-12, 2023? Go to https://institutefortrauma.com/create 

Transcript

Dr Lee Cordell: 0:06

Hi and welcome to the Becoming Trauma-Informed podcast where we help you understand how your past painful experiences are affecting your current reality and how you can shift those so you can create your desired future. I'm Dr Lee, and both myself and our team at the Institute for Trauma and Psychological Safety are excited to support you on your journey. We talk about all the things on this podcast. No topic gets left uncovered. So extending a content warning to you before we get started if you notice yourself getting activated while listening, invitation to take care of yourself and to pause, skip ahead a bit or just check out another episode, let's dive in. Hey y'all, welcome to this week's episode.

Dr Lee Cordell: 0:53

So I'm recording this episode late, and not like lately, because I went ahead and checked with our podcast manager and was like, hey, what's the last possible moment I can get this to you for this to come out next week? And she was like she gave me the time and I was like, cool, so actually I'm early because I'm getting it to her a whole day early before she needs it. And lately I record these at least two days beforehand, and next week we're actually recording like four podcasts with guests and so we've got our cue built back up because for a while we have this really great cue of episodes. And why am I telling you all this? Well, a couple of reasons. One I just thought it was a really interesting thing that my brain was making me wrong for being late, and in reality I wasn't late. I'm actually early because the person doesn't eat it, because they're not even going to touch it until Sunday. So I'm not late, I'm early.

Dr Lee Cordell: 1:58

And what I'm realizing is that we are going through a really interesting season. My husband and I, with kids team. My husband and I have both been on our own personal growth journeys, but like they have been kicked into high gear over the last year, year and a half, and what I'm noticing is so much of how we lead ourselves, so much of how we make decisions, of how we decide how we want to journey into the future and live in the now and use the people and the resources that we have available to us to like move in a way that feels good and mutually beneficial for us and all of the people that we are working with or going on the journey. With this whole process there's not rules. There's not a lot of rules around how you lead yourself right and as we have been planning our Create Leadership conference that is happening in November November 9th through 12th here in Columbus, ohio, as we've been planning this and as we've been working out the content, you know I talk a lot on socials about how so often in the process of preparing to deliver a program or a course or host a mastermind or do a certificate or whatever it is, in the process of preparing to offer that to other people and in the process of selling it to other people, and I often get put into my own portal of okay, like let's make sure that you go through the thing before you then deliver it to other people, because then you've walked it already. And when other people hit stumbling blocks or feel any sort of feelings around what they're doing or they're struggling or they need support, like you just did it, so you have some really good insight and you've got, you can really validate how they're feeling and have an even deeper understanding about what this person is going through.

Dr Lee Cordell: 4:15

So, as we've been planning the Create Leadership conference, there's been so many places coming up around the actual leadership model that we're going to be teaching at the conference, which is based on the acronym Create and one of the other questions we've been getting about the conference is you know, this conference isn't $99. We're going to start at $14.97 and there's payment plans available and the tickets are worth every penny. I actually think they're worth 10 times what we're charging. If you go implement with this stuff once you're done, and this isn't a thing that people just go oh yeah, okay, that's fun, right, it's three and a half days of your time. It is, it's a commitment, it's an energetic commitment, it's a financial commitment and it's a time commitment. And so we've been getting questions about, you know, about the conference and what we're going to be doing in the conference, and I was like, well, this is a brilliant opportunity to talk through the Create model and what we're going to walk each and every leader through in that room over three and a half days, what we're going to walk you through, how we're going to walk you through it.

Dr Lee Cordell: 5:25

And I wanted to use the example of what's been going on in my own life. So y'all are going to get kind of a rarer peek into the behind the scenes of what's been going on at the Institute and what's been going on in our personal life. And typically the humans in our paid spaces are the only ones who really see this stuff. And our paying clients, our clients who are in our trauma informed, psychologically safe certificate program, who are in our teacher training, who are in our business collective, my all access pass people who are basically like, yes, I'm yet for a year of whatever the Institute is offering and I'm in. We have several of those humans and then, all the way up to our vision mentorship clients my vision mentorship clients, who get to work with me one on one on a consistent basis, all of them have been like, oh my gosh, it's been so helpful to see what's going on in your life lately.

Dr Lee Cordell: 6:22

It's so helpful to hear from you how you're navigating all of these things that a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of people don't talk about and I'm not going to get on my soapbox here, because I could just stay on here for the whole episode and what I will say is the level of transparency and vulnerability that I'm seeing from entrepreneurs and leaders in the industry and also from leaders outside of the online entrepreneur industry and in corporate and in academia and in healthcare and in other places in government. It's really lacking and it's one of the reasons we're putting on the leadership conference is because there is a lot more uncertainty and stress and struggle right now. That is very present and like top of mind for most people, and what a lot of leaders are doing is getting less vulnerable, not more vulnerable with their people. And so I want to model this for all of you, because this is something we're going to talk to you about at the conference, and so I'm getting a little ahead of myself because I'm getting excited and I'm going to just talk through this create model and show you how I have been using it and we have been using it to enhance our leadership and to grow trust with our communities and our people and within our team, and how I've been really using this to lead myself and to lead others. So let's get into it and, like I said, this is the exact model we're going to walk you through at the conference. We're going to go way deeper into it. So by the end of this, you're like, oh, wow, it would be really helpful to have somebody actually walk me through this, like personally, help me figure out my own leadership plan based on the looking at these aspects of leadership. Then you belong at the conference. So just throwing that out there at the beginning.

Dr Lee Cordell: 8:13

And for those of you who are like I can't go to the conference, I'm not interested in the conference, I don't even really consider myself a leader. Like I love those objections, I love that your brain's like, oh, let me just turn off the podcast because none of this is applicable to me. I said this on the last podcast. Every single person, I consider every single person to be a leader, because you have one person you can lead and that's yourself. So invitation to even if you don't want to go to the conference, you don't want to lead other people, you don't think that this is potentially going to apply to you. Invitation to listen Continue listening. Anyway, you can't get something out of it and at the very least, she'll hear a little bit of like the back story behind the scenes of what's been going on. So, with the create model, there's six letters, so we're going to go through all six. So you got C R E A T, e. So the first letter is C. C stands for curiosity.

Dr Lee Cordell: 9:06

Now, curiosity is something that will make or break you as a leader, and here's why Because in order to be curious as humans, we have to be in a mental and emotional and nervous system state that is relatively calm. We have to not be feeling threat in order to be truly curious, and I've talked about this in lots of other episodes in the past season. So if you go back and listen to when we talk about threat responses, I talk a lot about curiosity there and like why our nervous system needs us to be calm and needs to not feel threatened in order for us to be curious and we'll talk a lot about that at the conference too and, for now, just knowing that my nervous system needs to not be in fight or flight for me to or freeze for me to be able to be curious, that's really important, because curiosity is one of the things that will save you from making some really big mistakes and it will help you make decisions in a way that your future self is grateful for. Here's a great example. Okay, from a business perspective, we have grown from people being aware that we exist and a social media perspective, from how many clients we have. We've grown exponentially in the last 20 months, and that is something that a lot of people have asked us from this curious place of like how have you done that?

Dr Lee Cordell: 11:00

And one of the things that I really believe led to our explosive, expansive growth was that, when things worked, we paused and, instead of getting really excited and going like, oh my gosh, okay, now we've made it right, okay, it's working, so we're good, just keep doing the same thing. Instead of doing that, or instead of going, oh my gosh, how do we do more of this immediately, right, instead of treating those experiences with urgency? Right, when a video went viral or a really well-known person shared something of ours or whatever happened when, instead of treating those opportunities with urgency and going, oh my gosh, I need to respond to this right now, I need to respond to the 200 comments that people have left in 24 hours, or like, we need to like, do this again and again and again, instead of responding with urgency or going oh my gosh, this is overwhelming. And like not doing anything with it, which is the other option urgently that you can choose, instead of judging it as like oh my gosh, this is really overwhelming and I don't know what to do with this. Or going oh my gosh, this is amazing and I need more and need more and need more.

Dr Lee Cordell: 12:15

Instead of doing either of those things, we stopped and we paused and we were like okay, what does this mean? What does it mean that we are gaining followers as quickly? What does it mean that these videos are catching on? What else could it mean that people are really connecting with this content? And we asked ourselves questions. We were like what is the meaning of this and how do we want to respond to this instead of react to this?

Dr Lee Cordell: 12:44

So on the back end with team, we were having lots of conversations of like okay, how do we make sure people don't get burned out because people are being there's? You know, 95% of the comments are really kind and awesome and saying thank you and 5% of the comments are really mean or harmful or hurtful. How do we ensure that we, as humans with feelings, right even if people are being trolls or they're being super kind like, how do we ensure that us, as humans with feelings, don't get sucked into this and don't lose sight of, you know, reality? How do we, as a team, handle all of the messages and all of the incoming, the influx of these things? How do we ensure that we have what we need? What resources do we have that we can put towards this and that? What do we want to put towards this, because just because we have the resources to put towards this doesn't mean that we want to allocate them over here. That's a huge piece of leadership.

Dr Lee Cordell: 13:44

So often something really good will happen and you're like, oh okay, like let's take all of our resources and throw them at that, and you miss by not asking the question of well, how did this happen? What does this mean? You miss that, oh, where I had had the resources allocated previously. That's what helped this happen. So if I move the resources from point A to point B, this can't happen again because now the resources that are needed to have it happen aren't there.

Dr Lee Cordell: 14:18

So if the reason that this video went viral is because I'm making a bunch of TikToks and now all of a sudden I'm getting stuck in the comments and responding to people and I'm not making any content at all because I'm allocating my time and my energy to responding instead of looking at do we have someone else on team who could respond to that? Is there someone else? Or do we even need to respond to all the comments? That was a really interesting, curious question that someone on team asked do we need to respond to every comment? And at first I was like yes, absolutely, because if we don't, then people are going to write and I was in that judgmental, urgent state of oh well, people will think that I'm not nice anymore if I'm not responding to comments, or people will see that the business has vastly grown and I get to choose which comments I respond to because I'm allowed to do that as a content creator.

Dr Lee Cordell: 15:12

So noticing that and this is a place that I think I see a lot of leaders get tripped up is they will something really good will happen and they'll pull resources or they'll pull time or they'll pull other people to a place and then they forget oh, this is actually creating a gap over here that's going to cause a problem in the future. So we're not being curious about if we make X move. How is that going to affect why we are short-sighted, because we are acting from urgency or we're acting from judgment and we're judging things to be good or bad. And this is another place that I see leaders get really tripped up. And this is a place that I've had happened to me a lot, where before I learned about how to be more curious and ask the question what else could this mean?

Dr Lee Cordell: 16:02

I would be so curious to be able to actually talk to all of you who are listening and ask you if you've had a scenario like this, where you have had something happen to you that you judge as bad, you judge as undesirable, and you don't practice curiosity about it. You get really upset or frustrated or angry and you stay that way for a while and maybe there's some resentment or some ruptures in relationships and this whole situation feels really heavy and you judge it as like wow, I just really wish that this hadn't happened. There's a lot of regret there. And then, like three, four, five years down the road maybe less, maybe more something happens and it cracks open that curiosity for you and you're like wow, I'm actually really glad that that didn't work out, I'm actually really glad that that door was shut in my face and our judgment of the situation changes. Our judgment of if this thing is good or bad changes, because we get curious and go, huh, wait, what else could this mean? And so one of the things for us is we've had a lot of like hits come our way these last few months.

Dr Lee Cordell: 17:22

Some really unexpected things come our way, both good and bad, and by asking ourselves, like what else could this mean? It helps us ensure that we're looking at what's happening from all angles and seeing where the potential good is and where the potential downsides are. So it helps us evaluate more thoroughly and more carefully and more intentionally when things happen. Okay, how do we want to respond to this? And also can we not make assumptions that this thing, that isn't what we wanted to have happen, that it's bad or that it's wrong or that it can't still get us where we want to go. So we really stay curious about the how and we don't make assumptions or judgments about the house. So if there's something that we want to do or a goal we want to hit or an outcome we want to reach, instead of going, oh, it has to happen. This way, we can get really curious and go like, okay, well, what else? How else could we do that? How else could this happen? How else could this maybe not this exact thing, but how else could something even better and different happen?

Dr Lee Cordell: 18:32

One of the examples I have of this is the conference, because when I originally wanted to put this conference on, I was thinking like, oh, it's going to be a thousand people, it'll be $97, we'll invite all these people and one of our TRIPS certificate participants. Anne Schmitz she's our event planner. She had reached out along with two other event planners that I had had in my back pocket and she's like hey, I would really like to plan this. And Anne and I have been friends for a while and Anne's been a client for a while because we have mutually beneficial agreements in different roles. So Anne took me to breakfast, took me to my favorite restaurant, so we're sitting there and I'm describing the conference to her and she looks me in the face and she goes that's not what you want.

Dr Lee Cordell: 19:17

Now, if I was being judgmental or I wasn't able to be curious in that moment, I probably would have gotten up and walked out right, and I practiced being curious. So I'm like okay, anne, tell me more, what do you mean? And she's like you don't want that, and here's why. And she walked me through a lot of things that I hadn't considered. Now here's the thing Anne is the expert at planning events and understands what we're trying to do as an institute and understands me as a human and my capacity and what I desire, and so she is able to look at the situation and go, hey, I actually think that we could do something different here? And what if it's only a hundred people? And what if it's this? And what if it's this? And what if it's this? And she's describing it to me and I'm like, oh my gosh, I would have never thought of this on my own and this is amazing. And this is yes.

Dr Lee Cordell: 20:04

Let's do this, and I share that, because so often as leaders, we think we have to have the right answers and we think that we have to come up with the plan and once we've come up with the plan, that's it, and we can't change it and we don't shift it. And when other people bring new information to us, we don't feel comfortable or safe incorporating it in, because we don't want to look like we're wrong or we don't know what we're doing, or we don't want to look like we're changing our minds or flip flopping and you being able to stay curious and be able to decide, make a decision or make a decision around. Okay, what else could this mean? Right, this person's bringing me information that actually made me my idea, or the path that we're on needs to be shifted, and that leads us to the R. Okay, that leads us to the R and this is the regulation piece. So R stands for regulation.

Dr Lee Cordell: 20:56

When leaders are regulated, what that means is their nervous systems have a significant capacity to tolerate uncertainty. Leaders who are regulated have a what we refer to as a wide window of tolerance, meaning that they are less easily dysregulated when things don't go as expected. So if Anne and I have been sitting there having that conversation about the conference two years ago and Anne had said, actually I don't, really I don't think that your idea is what you want and here's what I think you want, I probably would have like stood up and walked out. I probably would have been really upset or I would have fawned and been like okay, yeah, sure, and then like never talk to her again, ghosted because I was not nearly as regulated, I had not done the nervous system work, I had not learned about how to increase my capacity to tolerate uncertainty, my window of tolerance was really narrow and I was walking around in a position of leadership in many places, either hyper aroused meaning I was in like a tense fight or flight, hyper vigilance state looking for threat all the time, or I was in a hypo aroused state where I was shut down and frozen and felt like I couldn't make moves because I felt helpless and powerless, and so the reason why we want to get really regulated as leaders is because if we can tolerate uncertainty more effectively without going into fight or flight mode or without going into freeze mode, we're going to make better decisions. Because we're able to be more curious, we're able to stay in the moment, we're able to hold things that are unexpected when they happen.

Dr Lee Cordell: 22:49

Here's the thing A lot of leaders who can really handle high stress environments they look regulated. When I was a nurse practitioner and I was in charge right, I had 30 to 40 patients to take care of every night and I would say about 10% of my shifts somebody got very sick and I had to send them to the ICU or we had to emergently care for them in their room right there before they could even get to the ICU. I had to do that. I think I'm being I'm low balling it, but 10% one of every 10 shifts, somebody got that sick out of the 30 to 40 people and sometimes those multiple people, and I used to be really proud of how calm and cool and collected I could be in emergent situations and with all of that uncertainty around. And what is actually really fascinating is as I've done the work after leaving the bedside and being gone for a few years and noticing and talking to a lot of healthcare providers and talking to a lot of first responders, a lot of leaders who are in very high pressure situations.

Dr Lee Cordell: 24:04

Maybe they're not life or death and they're handling millions of dollars they're handling, they're making decisions that affect thousands of people. They are the first call. They're in positions that are highly stressful. A lot of times those leaders are not leading from a regulated state. They are actually in hyper arousal, they are in fight or flight constantly and so that actually, on the surface, makes them look like really good leaders when they are in those stressful situations, because they stay calm and cool and collected and make good decisions and do all the things right In the emergencies. The problem with leading from hyper arousal or that fight or flight state when you are not in an emergency, you still make decisions like you're in an emergency.

Dr Lee Cordell: 24:57

When you are not in an emergency and everything is cool and chill and calm around, you guess what your nervous system is like? Restless and itchy and it can't stay still and you have to stay busy and a lot of times you end up causing problems or causing drama other places or trying to find some other form of stimulating activity that you can channel all of that adrenaline and fight or flight energy into. And so these leaders a lot of times end up getting almost neurochemically addicted to that fight or flight response. Their body gets used to those chemicals being there and so, when things calm down, sometimes they end up causing problems or finding problems, creating problems where they didn't exist. So these leaders end up burning out, and what I see happen a lot of times is they reach a point and this is what happened to me, y'all and I was lucky to catch it before it happened I felt myself starting to implode, slash, explode.

Dr Lee Cordell: 26:04

I remember there was one night that I, at 2.30 in the morning, when everything was chill and a patient needed something and a respiratory therapist was not allowing me to get this patient what they needed, I lost my shit on this woman like, screamed at her on the phone to the point that she called my attending was like this person's unprofessional, she's this, she's that, and I called her back and I said I called this respiratory therapist back and I said look, I understand that you are trying to do your job and I apologize for how that just came out towards you. That was absolutely unacceptable. I will not speak to you like that again. I understand if you write me up like I get it and we ended up being okay. That was a moment for me, though, because I was like, ooh, we are starting to create problems where they don't even exist. We are so amped up all the time and I was bringing it home. I was bringing it home when I was amped up with my family and I was amped up with my kids, and recently I actually noticed myself starting to go into this cycle again.

Dr Lee Cordell: 27:09

This is something that a lot of us leaders who live in hyperarousal states for a really long time and we are rewarded for that, we are promoted for that, we are given leadership positions for that, we are given awards for that and raises for that it is so hard to step out of that and learn how to lead from a calm, regulated state where our body isn't dumping adrenaline and cortisol and all these other chemicals in all the time, where we actually don't lead from anxiety. We lead from intention and alignment, and I go through patterns of this. So we are really looking at kind of like from a familial perspective, but me a lot as a leader, looking at how do I stay more regulated with my family and how do I stay out of hyperarousal, how do I stop causing drama, how do I stop getting activated in these ways. And so this isn't just out in these high pressure situations, this is also in the really important situations that, with the people that you love and the people that you trust and that you want to love and trust you. So often being in those hyperarousal or hyperarousal states cause you to act from urgency. You can't get curious, you can't you go straight into judgment and you end up doing things that really hurt the people that you love the most. Because you're trying to stay regulated out in the real world, in your job, professionally, and when you come home personally, you're so worn out and burned out and like on edge that you cannot stay in your window of tolerance with the people who matter to you the most. And so that's another piece of regulation that I think is really important to think about is I want to not only be regulated as a leader outside of my home, I want to be regulated as a human inside of my home and inside of my home home, my like internal home, my body and that is a huge piece of becoming a really phenomenal leader, and I've had people reflect this back to me.

Dr Lee Cordell: 29:17

You know, one of the situations we're going through right now is I was saying to somebody the other day I was like we're in this really odd situation where we have like the most money we've ever had and also the least money we've ever had, because there's like there's five figure contracts being signed, like with clients and then there's five figure contracts being signed for us to pay out. There is more money coming in and more money going out than there ever has been before in my life. And I have had to learn how to regulate around finances which was a huge place of trauma for me, which we'll talk about in a second and me being able to stay regulated around money and around like oh okay, you need $6,000 from me today, got it? Oh okay, we owe the IRS five grand in the next week. Okay, all right, you wanna pay us $27,000? Cool, how would you like to do that?

Dr Lee Cordell: 30:11

Like being able to stay regulated in those moments is huge, and what I've had reflected back to me from the people who know me really well is you are handling this and holding this and showing your capability in a way that most humans A would not show other people and B like wouldn't be able to do. And that's something I have to keep coming back to for myself and reminding myself that, even though I feel like I am in the current moment consistently riding the edges of hyper and hypoarousal, like I teeter on the edge of my window of tolerance a good amount of every day right now and I am actively practicing getting myself back more into the middle of that window I am really able to be vulnerable and to be open and honest and share what's going on with other people in a way that doesn't dysregulate them and instead inspires them and helps them learn and change and grow. So I'm actually leading through, showing people how I'm riding out those edges of the window of tolerance, and that's something that I never thought I'd be able to do. So I get to serve as an example to other people, leaders who have lived in hyperarousal and hypoarousal for a really long time to show them like, hey, you can get regulated and you can make decisions from states of curiosity. You don't have to treat everything as an emergency. So next letter is E, and E stands for embodiment. Embodiment is where I am here in my body in the present moment, experiencing the present moment in a way where all of my feelings are safe to be felt.

Dr Lee Cordell: 32:01

So I lived a very disembodied life for a very long time, you know, after being molested as a child, after being bullied several times, after having sexual assault experience, having panic attacks from the age of nine, some pretty significant PTSD moments and emotional flashbacks over the course of my lifetime, being diagnosed with anxiety and being medicated. For most of my life two thirds of my life Having all of those things happen, I was very disconnected. I was a disassociated or dissociated, whichever way you wanna say it. They both count, they both work. I was a dissociated human, meaning that I didn't really spend a lot of time in my body. I spent a lot of time thinking about what was gonna happen in the future and I spent a lot of time thinking about what had happened in the past. I spent a lot of time trying to not feel what I was feeling in my body and as I did my own trauma work as I did, went through my own process of recovery and of healing and of growth.

Dr Lee Cordell: 33:16

As I moved through that, I remember saying to my therapist one day I said to her. I said I'm having a really weird experience and it's been happening for like the last week or two. And she's like tell me more. I said I feel like I'm having an out of body experience, like my body feels different than it ever has before. Time is passing differently, it's time is passing more quickly and I'm noticing I'm getting to the end of the day and not like looking at my watch a bunch of times or going like, oh my gosh, like we have that in two hours or I'm not anticipating a lot of things. And what she said to me was oh, you're not having an out of body experience, you're having an in body, an embodied experience. And I remember going like is that what this is? It really freaked me out for a while and I had never known what it felt like to just live in the present the vast majority of the time that you were here, like you were just here, experiencing the things, doing the things being in the moment. I had never experienced that and I've told this story to a lot of people and a lot of people have reflected back to me. They're like oh yeah, I don't.

Dr Lee Cordell: 34:34

I spent a lot of time trying to get out of my body, not trying to connect with my body and really pay attention to what I'm feeling and what I'm sensing and what messages my body is sending to me. I spend a lot of time not listening to my intuition. I don't even know what my intuition is. I don't know how to hear it. I don't know how to see it or to like tell if it's present. I don't really know what I need, because I'm so disconnected. I can't tell you if I need a hug or I need a snack or I need. I can still rarely identify what my needs are because I'm so used to just invalidating them and not knowing what they are. Because in my past, when I knew what my needs were or communicated my feelings or communicated what was going on with me, people invalidated it or people made me wrong for it, or people just didn't meet my needs. So I've stopped paying attention to what my needs are because they don't matter, nobody cares.

Dr Lee Cordell: 35:40

And I was really surprised by how many leaders, how many people in positions of authority and responsibility, how many parents, how many people who were coaches or running their own businesses or like really that a lot of other people would look at and go like, oh yeah, there's somebody who leads. I was really surprised by how many of them felt dissociated, like I did. Who used substances or social media or sex or shopping, spending money, whatever. Insert favorite numbing tool here, preferred numbing tool. How many people were just numbing themselves out because they couldn't. They didn't know how to feel their feelings without getting really dysregulated. They didn't know how to be in their body and stay regulated.

Dr Lee Cordell: 36:36

Embodiment is really fascinating because it is very hard to make decisions that are from a place of curiosity and from a place of alignment and from a place of this is what is right for me and meets my needs and is mutually beneficial for the other people that I am in relationship with. It's really hard to make decisions when you don't have access to that information, when you have cut yourself off from that information, when you can't drop into your body and listen to it and ask, oh, what am I feeling here? And get curious and ask yourself why am I feeling that? What's going on? What else could this mean? What is my brain judging this experience? As If you don't have access to any of that, if you don't know who you are and how you feel things and why you feel things. You are operating with like a fraction of the capacity and the potential that you have.

Dr Lee Cordell: 37:39

Something else that's been reflected back to me over the last year about what has shifted in people's experience of me is a few things. One, they're like Lee. You're so much more who you are. You show up to TV shows without makeup on. You wear what you wanna wear. You do what you wanna do. You say what you wanna say. You pay attention to when you're hungry and when you're tired and when you're lonely or when you're thirsty or when you're hormonal or when you're whatever. You know what you're feeling. You have access to your feelings. You are able to catch yourself. When you say something judgmental. You are able to, in the moment, shift how you are thinking.

Dr Lee Cordell: 38:19

The way in which you talk is so much more intentional and slowed down without being, while also still being, impactful, like if you go back and watch videos of me talking four or five years ago versus today. I've slowed down, I've slowed down and part of that is the nervous system regulation work. Part of that is the embodiment work of if I am going really fast, I don't know what's happening internally and I can't respond to what's happening internally and the way in which I make decisions is likely not going to benefit me in the future, even though I'm consistently thinking of the future. So many leaders make decisions from a place of thinking about the future, without thinking about the now or thinking about the now because they're like feeling really uncomfortable and not thinking about the future, and we wanna make decisions thinking about both. We wanna think about the now and the future at the same time.

Dr Lee Cordell: 39:19

What is the thing that I can do? What is the decision I can make that in the now. Maybe it's not the most fun thing I'm gonna do. Maybe I have to go have a conversation with someone I don't wanna have. Maybe I have to go feel a feeling that doesn't really feel great for me to feel. And am I able to do that and will that benefit me later? Yes, great, let's do it. And how can I do it in the least dysregulating way right now? So I have to have that conversation with somebody. How can I have that conversation? Again, coming back to the curiosity, how can I have that conversation and stay in my window of tolerance? Do I need to write out a script? Do I need to send an email first with some information. Do we need to do it over the phone or do we need to resume? As opposed to in person, does in person work better? I can ask myself questions and listen to my body and go oh, my body lightened, my body felt lighter with that option, so let's do that.

Dr Lee Cordell: 40:09

Being embodied means that you are here. You are here now and you are not off somewhere else. And that leads me to the fourth letter, a, which is attunement, and attunement is probably my new favorite word in the last few years. I love teaching people what this word means. I've talked about it on this podcast a lot, but attunement is two things Undivided attention and unconditional acceptance.

Dr Lee Cordell: 40:44

How many leaders have you met that give you when you come into their space and you say that you need something or you want to have a conversation with them or you are entering into connection with them in that moment? How many leaders give you their undivided attention? How many of your bosses, if you walk in their office, give you their undivided attention? How many humans, even in other places outside of work? How does it feel when somebody gives you their undivided attention? Feels totally different, right. Somebody turns off their phone and puts it in their pocket.

Dr Lee Cordell: 41:20

If somebody says, one second, I'm going to finish this so I can really listen to you, and they finish their email off and then they turn off their computer screen and turn towards you and make eye contact and go, ok, and maybe not eye contact, because sometimes neurodivergence, that doesn't feel good and you feel the presence of them with you here. And then if you add in unconditional acceptance and unconditional acceptance does not mean unconditional approval it doesn't mean that whatever you tell this person, they're going to feel happy about it or they're going to be like oh yeah, you're totally fine, you didn't mess up, it's cool. We're not saying that they're going to approve, they're going to judge whatever you're saying as good or bad, unconditional acceptance is. I witness and validate the experience that you are describing to me. So whatever the person in front of me is feeling, that is real. Whatever the person in front of me is describing as their reality, that feels real to them and I am going to accept that. I'm going to accept that this, what this person is saying, is their version of reality, that their feelings are valid, that their perspective is valid. It doesn't mean I have to agree with it. It doesn't mean that I have to say, yes, your version of reality is the same as mine and so I'm going to just take yours at sight unseen and yep, that's the truth. It doesn't mean that it means that we are going to honor and validate what this person is experiencing.

Dr Lee Cordell: 43:03

This is a very rare feeling. It is a very rare feeling to be connected with somebody who is attuning to you, and you know this, you know if you've experienced this, because a lot of times you're like, oh my gosh, this person's like. They see me, they hear me, they get me and they're not making me wrong or judging me. Now. They may not like what I did, they may not agree with my decision making, they may have their own feelings in response to what I am sharing with them, and they're here with me. They're connected and they're not threatening disconnection because I've done something wrong or bad in their eyes.

Dr Lee Cordell: 43:50

Attunement is a skill, it is a practice that really requires us to be able to be regulated and embodied and curious. And when you learn this skill, this will shift everything. Because when we talk about the next point in the leadership model, if you can combine your ability to be attuned with someone else and your ability to be attuned with yourself, can you give yourself unconditional acceptance. Wow, I'm feeling this feeling and instead of judging it, I'm going to just let it be here. I'm going to give myself attention, I'm going to go inward and see what's going on with me Before I make a decision. If you can give yourself attunement and you can give other people attunement, there are levels to leadership, which we will talk about more at the conference. But there are levels to leadership that will automatically elevate the level of leadership that other people put you at automatically if you do this consistently.

Dr Lee Cordell: 44:58

And the reason why is because when we practice attunement, attunement is a piece of psychological safety and it is a piece of being a trauma sensitive human, and that's our T is trauma, sensitive, trauma, sensitive humans. Meaning when you do something unexpected, I am not going to judge you. I am going to ask why. I'm going to be curious. So notice, we're taking the curiosity and the regulation and we're turning it a little outward, right. We're turning it inwards to ourselves and go like why am I showing up like this? Trauma sensitivity says I understand that other people and myself, every human brings their past painful experiences that have not been processed, that we have not looked at from a curiosity perspective, the things that still dysregulate us because they have not been processed. I understand that every person who has unprocessed past painful experiences brings those into the present moment, even when they're trying not to, even when they don't know they exist. There are so many examples of this.

Dr Lee Cordell: 46:08

I didn't know that I was really good at attunement until I learned what attunement was and I was like, oh, this is what I used to do with patients and their families. I used to get a lot of the really difficult patients and I liked them. I enjoyed taking care of difficult patients because I was like they're not that difficult, did you? We just like, didn't see them, we didn't listen to them and I didn't realize what I was practicing was attunement. Here's a patient example we had a patient who was getting security called on them every shift because they were harassing staff. They were like verbally saying things, they were refusing care and this person had had a bone marrow transplant. It's not like you can just leave, they can't just leave.

Dr Lee Cordell: 46:57

I went in and this woman she was pissed. The staff was over it. I went in there and I'm talking to her. I actually noticed that her body tensed up when I was in specific positions. I asked her is there a place like how can I help you be more comfortable right now? I'm noticing you're really uncomfortable, noticing attunement right, is that correct? You seem uncomfortable, you seem tense. Yeah, I don't like it when the door is closed. I don't like it when people stand. She's telling me I don't like these things, aka, I need more safety here. Great, okay. Well, it turns out that a nurse, while this patient had been sleeping, put something in her IV. Now it's a scheduled medication that the nurse is supposed to give.

Dr Lee Cordell: 47:50

Ideally, in patient settings, you wake the patient up, you check their wristband, you ask their name and you follow the five medication rights. For any of my nurses out there, you ensure that the patient can sense to getting the medication. As nurses, sometimes you don't. Let's just be honest. It's not always how you do things, because sometimes the right thing the quote, unquote right thing actually isn't the right thing for that patient. If a patient's exhausted and they've been woken up every hour on the hour and it's a simple saline flush, sometimes nurses would not wake up patients for that.

Dr Lee Cordell: 48:29

This really bothered that patient, which makes sense. It made sense. The nurse is going well. I didn't want to wake her up. The nurse is having their own experience of like well. This is why I did the thing. The nurse is invalidating this patient's experience. So, as we're talking, I said okay, so you want to be asked before every single medication is delivered. You want to know what it is and you want to be asked before it's given. She said, yeah, absolutely, okay, absolutely, do that. That's what we should be doing.

Dr Lee Cordell: 48:56

Well, then a bunch of other things came out of. We ordered a psych consult on this woman because she was very, very agitated and belligerent. Well, two young men, one of whom looks like somebody who has assaulted this woman in the past she's got a history of assault that nobody knew about One of those those two men come in together and close the door and all of a sudden, she's no longer a human thinking rationally and logically. She is a. She is a trapped animal. Hermamalian instincts kicked in, and so we had a conversation about okay, this is a human that needs to not have male caregivers, or this is a human who needs to have a female present when a male caregiver is in the room. This is a human that, yes, normally we close the door for privacy. She doesn't want that. She wants the door open.

Dr Lee Cordell: 49:48

And so how can we be sensitive to people's past painful experiences to ensure that they have better experiences in the present Now? Is it other people's responsibility to do the work to process their past painful experiences? Absolutely. But do most people even know that trauma exists? I didn't until eight years into my career Psychological trauma that is. I didn't know that your past painful experiences left residue, that that it changed the way that your nervous system worked, that it could change your outlook on life. I'd never been taught any of that.

Dr Lee Cordell: 50:25

So a lot of times we were judging patients, judging clients. That's something that I see in the coaching industry all the time. Well, why is this person like this? Why are they so resistant? Why are they this, why are they that? And it's not. It's not a curiosity question, it's a judgment question. We're not coming at people with attunement. We're not actually giving them our attention and listening to them and accepting their version of reality. Instead, we're judging it and going that's not right or that's not valid or that's not. That's unacceptable. And we're re traumatizing because we are reinforcing the invalidation. And that's what was happening with this patient. Over and over. This is what happens in leadership. Leaders do this to employees all the time, and this happens to leaders all the time. This happens to us in our own boardrooms and in our own, our own meetings. This happens to us when we invalidate our own needs because we don't drink water or go to the bathroom or eat on time, or we take three meetings at once, or we work 14 hours a day, seven days a week and we don't actually give ourselves what we need.

Dr Lee Cordell: 51:34

Being a trauma sensitive leader and creating psychological safety for people means people can bring their full selves to work or to whatever experience. You are in together and you are going to practice attunement towards them, including yourself, and when someone does something unexpected, we are going to ask, like, what has happened to this person that would cause them to respond this way, instead of judgmentally making assumptions? That's trauma sensitivity. And then the last piece of the create model is expansion. And if you stop before this last E and you just like if you let me say this if you even start working on one piece of this massive difference, if you just start with curiosity, if you just start with regulation, if you just start with how do I start being a little bit more sensitive to people's past painful experiences. If you start with any one piece of this, you're going to see a huge difference in your leadership and how people trust you and how people respond to you, communicate with you all of those things.

Dr Lee Cordell: 52:42

And the expansion piece is this how do you start in intentionally modeling this for the other people that you are leading? How do you help, show and teach them how to start acting like this towards the people that they are leading, the people that they are working with, serving, supporting? The expansion piece is how do we create spaces and teams and organizations and cultures that have all of these things built in, because, remember, every single person in the organization is a leader? So how do I model this and how do I start sharing this outward with the people that I am leading so that we can transform systems, so that we can transform organizations? We can transform how policy is written, how procedures are put into place, how we hire, how we fire, how we get clients, how we market, how we message, how we do performance evaluations, how we assign benefits, how do we decide benefits for people. When there is a complaint against someone, how do we handle that? How do we allow people to be whole humans and bring their full selves into the places we are leading. How do we do these things? And that's expansion. Expansion is this gets to go beyond me, this gets to have a ripple effect, and so that is a huge piece of what we are going to talk about at the conference. Because, yes, you can find these other pieces and parts other places and I have yet to find.

Dr Lee Cordell: 54:33

The reason I created the Institute in the first place was because I had yet to find an organization that knew how to do this, that inherently modeled this, and we have people come from across the world, come into our space and go, wow, I've never experienced a space like this, because every space I'm in there's not attunement, there's not trauma, sensitivity, there's not like. The leaders aren't regulated, they aren't embodied, they don't practice curiosity on a consistent basis as leaders. A lot of times, we are responsible for ROI, we are responsible for our key performance indicators, our metrics, our benchmarks, our return on investment, all of those things, and so we focus in on our people satisfied, our people engaged, our people like what's our retention rate? What's our profit? What's our like, what are our profit margins, what's our attrition, what are our test scores.

Dr Lee Cordell: 55:31

We look at all of these outcomes and what we don't realize is that those are outcomes that are ends, and we focus on the ends without really looking at the means. And the means to those ends, a lot of times, are not based in curiosity, they are not based in regulation, they are not based in embodiment, they are not based in attunement, they are not based in trauma, sensitivity and psychological safety. They are based in outdated, dysregulated, scarcity focused practices. And so learning how to create a journey, to lead people on a journey that actually incorporates all of these forms, all of these pieces and parts of how we lead, shifts the ends. And I will tell you because I've seen it organizations where there are higher rates of attunement, there are higher rates of engagement, there are higher rates of satisfaction, there are higher rates of retention, there are higher rates of referral, there are higher rates of repeat customers, there are higher rates of positive reviews. Organizations that have employees that know how to stay regulated and also help others be regulated less complaints, less chargebacks, less cancellations. So all of those ends that we focus on as leaders, those KPIs, those metrics, those benchmarks, all of those things so often we're like, oh, that's what we need to improve, and so we go off after the hard things, like the solid, strategic things that will improve those numbers, those outcomes, those ends, and we don't realize that this here. These are the means. It's less about strategy and more about skillset in practicing. How do we be these things, not how do we do these things, how do we be better leaders, rather than how do we perform better. That is what we're gonna do together. That is what we are gonna do together in November, and we already have an amazing amount of people, like the list of humans that are coming. I'm geeking out already.

Dr Lee Cordell: 57:55

We have a few options for how you can come and how you can attend with us. The first one's a general admission ticket and you get to come to the conference. You get some snacks and some meals included and you don't stay with us. You come home, if you live locally, and then you come back in the morning. So each day you don't stay on campus, you don't stay at the location of the conference with us. That's our general admission, our all-inclusive. You get a room right on site, two minutes away from where we're gonna be meeting. Every day.

Dr Lee Cordell: 58:25

You can do a shared room option with another person or you can have a private room. If you're like me, you need the private space, all good. If you wanna save some money, you can do the shared option and you get to be with us on campus. If you're like I, need to be able to like, play full out and be here and not think about traveling or going back home to the kids or whatever. If you are able to do that, some of us we need to go back home because that's how we're gonna be able to attend and that's great, right. We're allowed to do what works for us. So there's a private room option and a shared room option. And then the third option is our expansion upgrade and you can add this onto your general admission ticket or your all-inclusive ticket, and that means that you get to be during our breakout sessions, where we go into smaller groups of humans. So there's a hundred-ish in the bigger session and then 10 to 15, potentially 20 in the smaller breakout sessions. When you get into your breakout session, you're gonna have some of our very own teacher trainers there with you helping guide you through creating your personal create model that you can take back with you home and implement.

Dr Lee Cordell: 59:37

If you do the expansion upgrade. You get to be in my group. You get to hang out with me for three and a half days Yay. You also get a private group dinner with us Friday night, with me and with team, and you get implementation help on the backend post conference. So three monthly group calls with myself and your other members of your breakout group and also you get a one-on-one consultation call with Team ITPS, with the Institute, to help you determine how you can specifically move this forward after you go back home and look at how things are going. So we are here, we get to be in your back pocket, so to speak, for a few months after the conference to help you really implement. Because that's a huge deal, it's really important. We have swag, we have amazing people. You're gonna get to meet Like I am, so y'all this is gonna be on like any conference you've ever been to.

Dr Lee Cordell: 1:00:33

If you decide to come, if it fits, if you have any questions at all, you can email us at helloatinstitutefortraumacom. I'm going to drop the link to the information page in the show notes. You do have to send us a little note, fill out a little form to let us know you wanna come. You can't just go to the sales page and purchase. That's intentional. We're not gonna anyone who's like I really wanna come. We're not gonna be like, no, you're not allowed. That would not be very trauma-sensitive.

Dr Lee Cordell: 1:01:01

And this is so we can make sure that we support you in getting what you need. Because there's a few questions we may ask around. If you're like, oh, I can't get there till the 10th, this is okay. Or you're like, oh, I wanna bring my whole team, we get to have a conversation with you individually and make sure you are supported so that when you say yes, when you do go to fill out that payment form, that you feel certain that your needs are gonna be met. So this is a chance for us to get to know you and ensure that when you come, you're gonna get what you need. So I hope to see you there. I really do. This is gonna sell out. I keep saying that to the universe. I trust it. This is going to sell out.

Dr Lee Cordell: 1:01:43

We also have payment plans available.

Dr Lee Cordell: 1:01:45

So if you'd like the most flexible payment plan, because they're gonna shift each month, so the most flexible payment plan is through July 31st, where you can pay over four months and then in August it goes to three months, september it goes to two months and then in October it will be pay in full.

Dr Lee Cordell: 1:01:59

So if you would like to do that payment plan and have the most flexible payment plan up in there in July. Thank you for joining me, thank you for listening and I hope that this helps you think about how you lead, how you wanna lead, moving forward, and identify some places that maybe it would feel good for you to get some support, because we are here to help you if that feels right. Love you all. See you next week. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. Invitations to head to their show notes to check out the offers and connections we mentioned, or you can just head straight over to InstituteforTraumacom and hop in our email list so that you never miss any of the cool things that we're doing over at the Institute. Invitations to be well and to take care of yourself this week and we'll see you next time.