Archetypal education offers an experiential opportunity to discover the human patterns that define our lives. Those patterns hold the answers for how to navigate our increasingly disruptive economic, political, environmental, and societal experience. Many people ask others to practice civility as a solution for our social divisions, yet this often leads to silencing each other rather than dialogue that bridges from what is to what could be better.
The world in 2022 calls forth the archetype of the Transformer, which “embraces deconstruction and even death as the compost out of which new beginnings will grow - over time.” Seeing the world through the timelessness of archetypes equips all of us to change in ways that align with life’s true passion and purpose.
Join Janet, Garry and our dear friend, colleague and global leader, Dr. Laurence Hillman, PhD as we explore this archetypal context for CIVILITY, the mindset essential for inclusive and respectful engagement that generates wholeness and belonging for all humanity.
Register here for the Vanguard Series so you never miss an episode!
Watch the full interview by clicking here.
Grab your free issue of choice Magazine here - https://choice-online.com
Archetypal education offers an experiential opportunity to discover the human patterns that define our lives. Those patterns hold the answers for how to navigate our increasingly disruptive economic, political, environmental, and societal experience. Many people ask others to practice civility as a solution for our social divisions, yet this often leads to silencing each other rather than dialogue that bridges from what is to what could be better.
The world in 2022 calls forth the archetype of the Transformer, which “embraces deconstruction and even death as the compost out of which new beginnings will grow - over time.” Seeing the world through the timelessness of archetypes equips all of us to change in ways that align with life’s true passion and purpose.
Join Janet, Garry and our dear friend, colleague and global leader, Dr. Laurence Hillman, PhD as we explore this archetypal context for CIVILITY, the mindset essential for inclusive and respectful engagement that generates wholeness and belonging for all humanity.
Register here for the Vanguard Series so you never miss an episode!
Watch the full interview by clicking here.
Grab your free issue of choice Magazine here - https://choice-online.com
Welcome everyone. I am Janet Harvey and this is the 2022 Vanguard Conversation Series. Together we explore an unearth pathways for change through provocative and courageous conversations that assist all of us to find the path through the liminal space our society is in today. Each episode, we're joined by an inspirational global visionary leader that we know you'll love, want to engage with, and integrate what emerges into your learning, living, and leading. Before we go into our program, let me unveil the why of our series. I think you know, we live in unprecedented times, and we believe that calls each of us to choose to disrupt on purpose. Your being here with us tells us that you're awake to the cascading crises in this 2022 world. While some fantasize about someone out there making our challenges disappear, your presence here for this 55 minutes says you, and we are already catalyst for change, and we're ready to lead together. Please join me in expressing a special thank you for our sponsors, Invite Change Enterprise Solutions and Choice Magazine, founder and publishing editor Garry Schleifer, who is my co-host for the series.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Janet. A little self-indulgent plug there. Vanguard means being at the forefront of ideas that are emerging, so we may be proactively disrupting in our thinking. As an easy example, most people commonly put pork chops and apple sauce and think, what is apple sauce, if not with pork chops. Just so you know, I tried plum sauce the other day. Awesome. I disrupted our dinner. Our conversations focus on our experience of life today, rather than a theory, an outcome, a process, or a promotion to buy anything. We invite you to transform your process of listening from something to get knowledge about, to listening to ask differently and be differently in our daily lives. Use this time together and after, in our virtual dialogue spaces to engage in conversations clear of preconceived notions. Together, let's demonstrate that we are not smarter or better. We are co-conveners of these important conversations. Everyone is invited into an inclusive, participatory experience of reflection, learning, and motivation to engage in catalyzing change.
Speaker 1:And to that point, let's be sure that you have your chat window open and use it liberally. We all know that when we have a reaction to something it clouds our heads and we can't hear what comes next. So don't sit on it. Use chat to make a comment or pose a question. And we'll, together with Lawrence and to Garry, have an opportunity to weave it in real time. And so, Garry, let's frame the three key ideas that we're gonna be exploring this morning or this evening. Wherever anybody is.
Speaker 2:Wherever everybody is. Morning, afternoon, evening. Welcome, welcome. And, I'm just thinking, I want to just shake off what's been going on before this and just get ready. And then we invite you to get ready to open your thinking and your participation with the Vanguard View, what we must self observe and practice to restore and sustain civility in our society today. Picking up from last time we explored a necessity for authenticity in our choice, yes, for how to live in an liminal space of society today, especially in facing cascading crisis and change. Today we move to civility in our thinking about societal change that is necessary to generate healthier communities and be future fit. The first key idea is this. Perhaps you've told yourself inside,"You failed me, I'm outta here." How do we see that we share rather than only what is different? Incivility is rooted in that difference. We need a common unifying language that goes beyond separate concepts. A place where we can agree, remember how to agree and sustain that. We have a hypothesis to explore today. When we are more comfortable talking about right brain and yin or feminine energy, we see more solutions emerge. This exploration focuses on a second key idea about civility. Humans do not experience another person is uncivil or inhumane when receiving through our right brain and the corollary, when we initiate connection and relating through the right brain, we stimulate a balance and holistic access between well developed analytical capacity or yang and intuitive capacity yin. Third and equally important idea is that civility applies fully for the individual and the collective. Civility is the privilege we enjoy by fulfilling the responsibility to self and others. The frame that we have for this idea is that for over 5,000 years humans have a set of enduring stories expressed through the energies, qualities, traits, and behaviors of 10 major archetypes. There is safety in what we know yet history clouds our capacity to perceive what is occurring, even when we feel it deeply and this triggers our incivility. Our guest, Dr. Laurence Hillman, co-founder and executive director for the Archetypes at Work Guild joins us today to explore how developing an archetypal eye empowers healthy civility in our way of relating. Welcome, Dr. Laurence Hillman.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Garry. I do appreciate being here. It's a pleasure.
Speaker 1:And our great privilege, Laurence. Right? I've had the opportunity to explore and learn alongside you for all of my professional life. I was thinking about that the other day. It's a long time. You are a compassionate and wise guidance. I think in many ways, you have always been committed to building better leaders and better human beings. And I'm eternally grateful that you've chosen your 40 year passion in the field of both transformation, archetypal astrology, and archetypal psychology. This is a wonderful foundation for this discussion we're having today about how to move the human family towards a more civil and holistic harmony. Of course, your wonderful paradigm shifting books. Paige, if you wouldn't mind putting these in chat for everyone as well. Planets in Play, which I absolutely adored and the new book, Archetypes at Work, Evolving your story one character at a time. So thanks for joining us today. I know the time will go way too fast and here we go. With no further ado, Garry, what's our first question for Laurence?
Speaker 2:So, Laurence, if you're ready, what is your perspective on civility as a central ingredient to be fit for the future through adopting an archetypal eye?
Speaker 3:So, it's a great question. I think you said it earlier when you said that incivility occurs because people don't understand each other, either because they can't or they won't, or for whatever reason, but it's miscommunication. It's like, well, when you say that, that triggers that in me and so I won't talk to you. And, by the way, you're a jerk. That's kind of the normal way conversations go these days. It's extremely common. So what I've been interested in for the last 45 years actually, is to explore a language that is universal, not esperanta, which was a big deal at one time in history, when people try to actually create an actual language that is universal, but one that is a right brain language. And what do I mean with that? So there is an idea comes from Carl Jung, mostly with psychiatrists, of the last century, who postulated that there is a collective unconscious, which is sort of a place, a repository if you want, of images that we all share, what he called archetypes. So this is a really important idea because if that's true, if we can go anywhere in the world and say a word like mother, and wherever we go, people understand or have a concept of that archetype or warrior or lover or old man or old wise woman, whatever it is. These are concepts that people, wherever you go in the world are going to understand. So we already have a language that everybody understands and agrees upon because it's in images, it's not literal. Sure, people will translate the image into a personal experience. Archetypes are not actually seen. They are universal images that we then make into a personal experience, but we recognize them. We have some kind of an ability to recognize them. So I've actually thought of them, thought of archetypes as the human genome of the soul. It's like that's the inner language that connects us all, just like the genome makes us all the same, so does that. Now if I'm talking the same language you are, we're kind of all in a bubble together as opposed to in separate bubbles.
Speaker 2:Wow. I want to go back to one of the points that you're making in that about a language. So how well received is this new language and what, I know you're doing archetype at Work Guild, but how are we going get this to everyone?
Speaker 3:Well, there's lots of different ways, but yes, the language, because then the next question that is that, that has to be asked, if you say, Okay, if we all have these different archetypes, how do we map them? How do we actually make them? What is the alphabet of this language? And the alphabet of this language for me the way I've chosen to see. There's lots of different ways. Some people work through with dreams. Some people work through symbols, imagery, whatever. I have chosen to work with archetypal astrology, which is based on a rchetype psychology, which essentially says there are these 10 principles that we all share wherever we a re in the world because everybody has the same 10 planets within, if you want, We call the s un and the moon planets i n astrology, even though s ome c all them luminaries and it's a shorthand, b ut 10 heavenly bodies if you want. So we share that. It's like musical notes. We can play any music with those 12 notes of the keyboard, just like we can explain anything in human behavior or in human interaction, or even what's going on in the world with these 10 planets. So it's simply a way to structure the archetypal images that are universal. And so how do we learn that? Well, there's lots of different pathways. Some people learn astrology, some people learn archetypal psychology. What we do is we teach this language to organizations and to leaders because we think that the biggest change that's going to come is going to come through those with power. So we address that very directly. There's a book out called Archetypes at Work. It's a model and we train other people who are in the helping professions in the human development world, which includes coaches, consultants, therapists, all kinds of people, psychiatrists, people who work with other people who say, Well, I need a more universal language where it doesn't matter what the person looks like because I'm actually going deeper and it's taking off like wildfire. And so what we do is we train people in about 106 hour course in four modules. We train them and then they can apply to become a guild member, which means when there's a job out there, somebody needs this kind of work, we will call on people from the guild and others will call on people from the guild, just like a carpenter's guild. You know, I need six carpenters for this job. So they come to us to get them and we make sure that they're qualified, that they have the training and the knowledge and the language.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Wow. That's great. And Janet, I know that InviteChange is offering a course in that, and perhaps Paige can put a little thing in there. I've seen the email. So collectively doing our work to support your work, Laurence.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Yes. InviteChange is the official school that we have partnered with who's doing all the training and is doing an amazing job of helping people get through the maze of going through something like this, but in a very organized way. And then we have teachers who come in and do the training and they are helping us tremendously. So yes, it's a collaboration and different expertise is coming together in a fruitful way.
Speaker 2:Awesome.
Speaker 1:Excellent. Thank you for that, Laurence. One of the reasons why I am such a fan of the work is that I've seen the challenge with leaders who are dealing with so much complexity right now, and the kind of first introduction of archetypes can feel a little overwhelming. And I wonder if you might speak a little bit to the multiplicity. In other words, how do we strengthen a leader's capacity to hold the multiplicity of who they are, the multiplicity of all the people that they work with, and the multiplicity of the system they live within? Right? There are so many layers to this and no wonder people have a hard time reclaiming their sense of social consciousness and their responsibility to create civil society. That just feels like, Oh my God, there's no way I can do it, because there's so much going on. How does the archetypal eye solve that problem?
Speaker 3:Thank you. Multiplicity is my favorite word. It is really what this is about. So thanks for bringing it up. We live in a very mono kind of a world, at least psychologically, that's what we want to believe. That monocultural, it's a white Christian country, is kind of the idea. That's just not true. But that's the mono thinking and monotheism with one God. We have a singular model of development in most developmental psychologists where there's this one me that is developing through these different stages. So this idea of singularities very strongly emphasized and used to keep people in check and to make things very simple. We no longer live in a mono kind of a world. Everything is now multi. And so the word that I like here is poly. So the word that I like to use is poly-poetic, which is the idea that there's different poetic ways of understanding the world. Polyamory suddenly in the conversation very, very commonly. The poly crisis, a term that Janet uses often, that there's just multiple things going on. I don't want to misunderstand poly for us having to juggle a lot of different things in life. That's a problem we all have because the world is complex. What this does is it gives you a language to understand the nuances of your own inner multiplicity because we are not singular individuals. Everyone who is on this call and will watch this has had the experience of having an argument with himself or herself. I would like to do this, but I want todo that. We are not singular beings as well. Whitman said, I am multitudes. I contain multitudes. It's a beautiful idea. So multiplicity is the key. And yes, it's complicated. Multiplicity is complicated, but it's only complicated because we are used to thinking in singularities. And so if I say, if the me that I've always perceived as being me is really made up of 10 different parts of me, that takes a different kind of capacity. That capacity is a right brain capacity. You can't think analog in this kind of a thing. You have to get a sense, think of a stage inside of you with 10 different characters, 10 actors and they're all parts of you. They're all in this squabble in this play that is your inner life. That's a much better description of really how we perceive ourselves. I'm teaching a course right now to grad students. It's amazing to me how many people feel incredibly relieved when they're giving permission to think of themselves as multiple. It's like, Oh my gosh, I've always thought I had to be this one thing. People want to know, Well, who are you? What are you, what's your title? What's your little box? People don't wanna be in boxes, particularly leaders don't want to be in boxes. Don't tell me I'm an I N TF J or I'm an extrovert, or I'm an introvert, or I'm a sunshine Aries. That is too simplistic for the modern world. We need multiplicity. So this is a way to train people to start thinking and recognizing these different voices that have arguments with each other in themselves. That's what we do. And that's helpful because those parts that we reject, those actors that we send off stage. Yeah. I don't like the warrior. I don't like to get, I think that's just about becoming angry. And I was beat up when I was a kid, so the warrior is not a part of me. Those actors that we push off stage have a great cost to us and that's shown again and again and again and I have tons of stories to show that.
Speaker 2:Laurence, what comes to mind for me is a leadership training I did once and you were boxed as particularly high in this area, but what we all were asked to remember is, you're this and so much more. Right? It's like coaches and leaders. Leaders have coaching in their toolbox. They're not just a coach. They're not just this. They're many, many different things. I also think about the conversation about gremlins or saboteurs and I personally think that all of those things, like the warrior, has something to tell us. And I think that's what you're suggesting as well, is don't push them off. Let them engage in the conversation. And yeah, it may not be comfortable, but that's where growth occurs.
Speaker 3:Exactly. And I would even go further and say that your inner warrior is something to tell you. It's not the warrior out there, it's your inner warrior. And so I would say the only thing that scares me is somebody who denies having an archetype. Like someone said, Oh, I don't do warrior. That's the person who suddenly goes berserk because they have no relationship to that part of themselves. So getting in touch with that, the warrior i s also the part of you that is precise, that finds the g old, that hits the target that can defend you or others, that can stand up for what you believe, that can confront a bully. All of those things is what the warrior can do as well. No archetype is good or bad. It depends how you direct it.
Speaker 2:So, s omething's bubbling in my head here. We talk, Laurence, you and I, a lot about any ism is othering and we're often talking about an external context, whether it's racism or sexism. It's always something about kind of protecting to h ave power over and the notion of an in g roup and an out g roup. B ut in what you just said, I'm also thinking about how does that happen interiorly? And I'm wondering if it's happening interiorly, is that what gets projected? And then we go out in the world and we perpetuate the very thing that's the inner conflict. Is that what you're describing?
Speaker 3:I think that's an excellent point. Whatever we can't accept within ourselves, we also can't accept out there. There's plenty of that in psychology about projection and externalization and all these things that people, that we all do. Yes. And if we think more on the positive end about civility, which is the topic of today, if I meet you Garry, and you are in a different country, in a completely different culture, and I go there, rather than starting to complain about the things that you or your country or whoever else is doing wrong, making you an out group because it's different from what I recognize, we can have a conversation about what we have in common about this human genome of the soul. I can ask you about, Hey, in your country, in your culture, how do you express the warrior? In your family, how do you express the warrior? In your every day, how do you express the warrior or the lover, or the nurture or the dreamer, or the transformer or the renegade? I'm curious about that. And then we can have an interesting conversation because I can learn from the way you are doing it to the way I'm doing it, and we can discuss that. Isn't that interesting? We do it differently. That's a different conversation. We start out that what we have in common and what we make out of what we have in common of these common ingredients, what we make out of that, rather than what is different. So it immediately creates a global language once we think like that, if we accept that we understood that we have these archetypes within which we do
Speaker 1:Yeah. So there's never any outgroup. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:Definition is not possible. Right.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Right. Exactly.
Speaker 3:There can be. We can externalize certain architects. Like, I don't wanna talk to these kinds of people because they are all expressing this archetype too much for me. But that's my problem. That has nothing to do with the archetypes themselves.
Speaker 1:Right. You're building the case for strengthening our stability. Right. Exactly.
Speaker 3:I think we need to find what brings us together rather than what separates us. We have enough things that separate us, but this is something that I know is universal. I've worked with people literally around the globe in every continent for decades and decades, thousands of people, and every person I've ever talked to can relate to this language because it is not limited by context.
Speaker 1:I wan5 say, Oh, go ahead Janet.
Speaker 3:Hang on. I wanna get one more piece. No, yeah, no, go.
Speaker 2:So I'm thinking about leaders in organizations and they often have very sophisticated marketing departments that learn how to tell good stories. That's the whole idea behind brand development. But it occurs to me that that might transform quite a lot if the strategic conversation at the leadership level is a story of manifesting embodiment of all the energies of the 10 archetypes. And I wonder if you could speak a little bit to how leaders have resonated with the ability to speak the story from each of the archetypes and how you've seen that influence a better harmony between yin and yang as you talk about it.
Speaker 3:Thank you. And you bring up another really important word to me. The embodiment part. This archetypal language that we teach is an embodied language. My partner in this project is a trained theater director, has been doing leadership training for decades based on Shakespeare all around the world with very high powered organizations and leaders. So it is an embodied way of doing things. It is not just a cerebral thing you do here, but you actually need to be able to experience this and embody these archetypes consciously. So if you want to make a point in a meeting, if you walk in as the sovereign warrior sort of archetype, you're going to get very clear what you want to say. If there's been change and suddenly the company's been bought up and everybody's freaking out, and you walk in particularly strong and let's say a nurture a warrior, now you've got an ability to say, Here's how we're gonna go forward. I care about all of you. And everybody actually feels that because you're embodying that. And so what we know, and this has been researched by others, but what we know is that for a leader to be successful, they have to be able to embody all 10 of these archetypes, preferably consciously. And most of them, who are successful, do it in their own way unconsciously. But if they do it consciously, you have much more control over how you manage a situation. And that can be really useful because you are embodying what you're trying to say. I remember I've had clients sit in, in my office and tell me I really, really, really want to be in a relationship.<laugh>. That's an incongruent message. The embodiment of a language really helps make the message that you're giving congruent. And we are so well trained as human beings to read incongruency. I just showed you an extreme example, but boy, are we good with micro movements in the face and stuff that we know when people are just faking it. So that ability is to get conscious of the archetypes. You're asking for practical examples. So we have a leader, for instance, I remember one who thought, well, the nurturer that's for HR. I don't need to deal with that as a leader. Guess what? Turnover was giant ginormous in this guy's company. It was a guy. In his company, the turnover was great. He didn't see the connection. Nobody felt at home there. Nobody felt cared for. Nobody felt like anybody gave a damn if they showed up or not, as long as they did the work. And this was a real issue. This guy's motivation to learn more about how to embody the nurture congruently was because he didn't want to have that much turnover.
Speaker2:Wow. I h ear it i s almost like that's going back to t he previous conversation o f saboteurs a nd gremlins of how they can be of service. So, they can be perceived as negative, but the archetypes, it's like, Oh, okay, I've got this circumstance. I'm gonna pull this one in a nd I can use this one and I can use this one. And some you may have more proficiency with than others, but if you're going to embody that then other things are needed. You h ave to go outside of your box of just warrior o r whatever it might be.
Speaker 3:Exactly. And you know, there are lots of different models about inner figures, saboteur, inner child. There's lots of different ideas of inner characters. The difference in this model is that it's based on astrological archetypes, which are universal and are the most studied archetypes. For the last 5,000 years, astrology's been around, every major culture has created one. So it does have a robust footing in something that is not made up by some person, but has been made up over many, many, many years with collected information that people have found and registered and empirically shown. So it's a well founded model that's not based on, I decided these 10 architects will be cool.
Speaker 2:And they are.
Speaker 3:They are cool, but not cause not cause I found them.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:Wow. So civility. We have a lot of incivility. I just finished updating our brief on the state of incivility in the workplace and it's pretty scary. Of course we're seeing it in our public and private discourse as well. How many times have we all heard someone say, My family is split. And we're talking about a projection of issues rather than really getting to the heart what do we believe? So how do you strengthen civility through an archetype of eye to help people who are feeling challenged in their thinking, challenged to be courageous in a divisive issue? What are your thoughts about how this helps with that situation?
Speaker 3:Well, just the other day you casually mentioned a concept that's really stuck in my mind in a different setting where you said that the main response to all the change that's going on in the world has been sort of either stop or fix. That's a really good language for what most people, Oh my gosh, all this change, let's stop it or let's fix it and move on. Neither of those are gonna work for the changes that are occurring. And so, a different way, if you use the archetypal model, is to ask the key question in archetypal thinking, the key question in archetypal thinking is, who's here? So if somebody starts to tell me so and so and so and so is doing this and this and this, and it's just unbelievable. Look what it's doing to so and so. We've all heard, you can fill in the blanks in 50 ways, right? And so I sort of take a step back and I watch that person that can be anywhere. And I ask myself, I wonder who's here? Which part of them, which archetype is freaking out? Cause it's not all 10. And I will say that there is a part in all of us called the Renegade. I sometimes call it the Third Finger Planet.
Speaker 1:Oh, really? Really?
Speaker 3:It's the part of us that says to hell with it all, and I'm not gonna follow the rules. I'm gonna do it my way. That's the planet that's the most active right now in the culture around the world. So those who are pushing against that are not getting in touch with their own inner renegade, rather than saying, Well, why don't we do the Renegade like this since this is the time of the Renegade? The Renegade scares me, so I'm gonna attack anywhere I see the Renegade showing up. The Renegade is an architect. Why don't we just learn how to do the renegade and show other people, hey, here's how we could do the renegade better. That is what I call getting in touch with what's emerging. Because what's emerging is a renegade energy where everyone is trying to become free of rules and do it their own way and heightened individualism and at the same time a tremendous sense of the collective and of globalism and that we are all in this together. Yeah. The borders are invented. Ask any astronaut and these kind of things. That's the paradox of this renegade archetype.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So there's the healthy and unhealthy, although that seems a little bit dualistic. How do you strengthen someone's ability to perceive what's called for? I find myself in the situation, and obviously it's pause and get in touch with what's going on inside, what's emerging inside. So you can see what's emerging outside. But boy, that feels like a big development path. And I wonder if you see a, a shortcut in some ways by looking at the archetypal eye.
Speaker 3:Well, you know, I like to say that to write good poetry, you have to first learn grammar so you can break all the rules. You have to learn the language. I mean, if you're one to do archetypes, you got to learn the language. There's no way around that. You have to understand what this is. This is not something you do overnight but it's worth the effort because however you choose to do that, when you come out the other end of this learning, you have tools available to you to understand. To paraphrase, Nietzsche, we can take any what if we know why? And this archetypal language gives you a why. It gives you a why to the what. So here's what's happening, Why is it happening? Everybody wants to know why is the world falling apart? Well, archetypal thinking can explain that. I just gave you an explanation through the Renegade. There's others, but that's one to understand what's going on.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 3:So this is global speaking. This is not limited to any particular culture. This is really a universal way of seeing the world that can be quite dramatically changeable. Imagine if everybody at the United Nations spoke archetypes instead of anything else, how that would change the world overnight? In this meeting there's too much warrior in this meeting. Can we tone it down and do a little more nurture? Can somebody bring some water and some croissants? Okay. Now we have a different way of saying than you are getting in my face, you piss me off. It's a different way of thinking. It's just allowing what's present, who's here right now. And there can be lots of those who's here. And then that's what we're really dealing with. So let's address it at that level and speak the language that these presence archetypes want to be spoken to and heard in.
Speaker 1:You're pressing another button for me, which is the ridiculous push for executive presence development that is rampant for coaches working with women leaders because male leaders think women leaders don't have enough masculine energy to be suitable for the boardroom. Holy Toledo, I could see us transforming that to say, regardless of your sexual identity, what are the energies the situation calls for? How do we bring more of that forward?
Speaker 3:So who's the bypass? Sorry, that pushes my button because that's my favorite topic. This is what I wrote my dissertation on, what we're talking about now. So who's here when we say women don't have enough power or whatever?
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 3:Well they don't have enough power because men don't let them, or they don't take it or whatever. But that's another problem. But the men who say women don't naturally have enough, whatever, so they have to stand up bigger and stronger. The presence kind of idea. Who is speaking there? To me it is fear. It is fear that what many women have more than men is, and not all, definitely this is not gendered, but it is more common because of lots of different reasons we could discuss, is what I call a right brain capability, which is imagination, dreaming, intuition, sensing, reflecting, feeding back, listening, these kind of things. That's right brain capability. Think of anything that we do with our right brain that would be, what I call, a person's yin function, which is yin and yang. Again, yin the feminine, I don't use that word becasue it's such a loaded word. Instead, I use yin function is from Young's typology that says we're different types. Myers-Briggs ideas. So I say the yin function is essentially a person's capability for their right brain. This is not gendered. We've all met plenty of men who have a very strong yin function and plenty of women who have a very low yin function. That's absolutely there. But in general, and culturally, the fear of men who are trying to hold down women is that their yin function is actually superior to the men's or they just don't know how to deal with their yin function. Women are literalizing that for them. For whatever reason, the work is to activate and up level and develop the right brain for leaders. That's a must. Why is that a must? Because complexity that we talked about, the fact that the world is now complex. The world is complex. The world is no longer simple. Things are incredibly complex. The difference between complexity and complicated, from my perspective, there's different ideas about this, is that complexity includes emergence. And so Covid is a great idea. Boom. Suddenly everything changes because of Covid, war in the Ukraine from Russia is an immediate change of it. That's an emergent thing that happens that is simultaneous, real and leaders are freaking out cause they don't know what to do with emergence because they are trained in a certain way. I got an MBA in the eighties, and I can tell you this stuff was not talked about No
Speaker 1:No way.
:I'm sure not.
Speaker 2:So things are changing. So this right brain capability is also complexity capability. That's a fact. In other words, left brain capability is linear, is evidence based, data driven, scientific, all those things that are very necessary. Absolutely. But you can't function today if you're only a left brainer. You just can't, not as a leader. And so we have to get into the right brain capability. And that means elevating this yin function in everybody preferably, but certainly in leaders and particularly in those who don't have it well developed already. Those who do often get eaten by the system so far because they are the sensitive types. They are too soft or whatever. This stupid things is that people are saying. But again, all of that is changing very, very quickly. And leaders are recognizing, I'm finding, the great need. We have words for it, like soft skills, which has already come and gone and these kind of things. It's more than that. It's a capacity to trust that not knowing and things emerging can actually be some of the, some of the greatest gifts that we can bring to a problem. It's what Yates called the negative capability, just sitting still and not having an answer and letting it float up to you as opposed to saying, if I get enough data, I can fix this. Different approach. That really, Laurence, thank you because that just explains a number of coaching conversations that I've been having with not only the leaders but the managers being led in that left brain thinking of it's gotta be this way, it's gotta be the way it was. It's linear, keep it the same. I understand that sort of thing. And their inability to engage the right brain. Like how do we help our clients recognize that they're being that way?
Speaker 3:Well, I'll tell you a story that I use with very, very left brain sort of warrior types. This is how you run business. You gotta kill the competition and you win at every cost. The typical way of thinking for most businesses still today. I have a friend who is a former F 16 fighter pilot, retired as a colonel. He was the last squadron leader in Iraq before we left there with the Air Force. Many, many years ago when I was just getting into this kind of thinking about left and right brain, I said to him, I wonder when you're flying an F 16 in combat and you have six dimensions to worry about, forwards backwards, up, down, left and right, you're going at Mach 1.2 that's very fast. You've got deadly weapons at your fingertips. You've got three bad guys in front of you, two good guys behind you. I said, There is no way that you're operating with your left brain because a left brain would be like a computer saying, If I get this data, then I gotta do this. If this happens, I gotta do that. It's linear and there's no way you're doing that because there's much too much information for the human brain to follow. This must be a right brain experience. And I thought either he is gonna hang up on me, since this was the first time I met him, and we've become very good friends since. But instead he said to me, I know exactly what you're talking about. He said, In War College, I had two professors that talked about that. About complexity, about right brain, about intuition, about sixth sense, about all these things that belong to the right brain. So that's a story I love to tell when I'm talking to a really sort of a macho male leader who thinks it's all about force. It's not. So we need it, we need that right brain. Somebody had their hand up. Jessie.
Speaker 1:That would be Jessie, come off mute, Jessie. Yeah, there you are. Go ahead.
Speaker 4:Thank you very much for the space. I love what you're sharing, appreciate all of this. I'm curious to know in your work or with this paradigm shift, where does some of the extra work or other work go? Because being a heartfelt or a right brain leader, it is important and it also takes more time and more thought. And I think in doing so means that some something will have to come off the priority list. It can't just be more and more and more otherwise, that leads to this pandemic of burnout, which I think we've all probably seen as well. So how do you suggest you manage that in organizational design or in organizations in general?
Speaker 3:That's a really good point. When we work in companies, we often work with the OD team or the LD team or something like that, organization development, leadership development, HR, people who are trying to help their employees today, try to help them stay but also who are trying to help them have a better work experience in whatever ways. And so they're already using some kind of a model. The Myers-Briggs has been taken by I think over 80 million people. It's a very common model. There's lots of different models out there. Somebody who was in one of my classes said she wrote a master's paper and stopped counting at 150 different assessments that were out there. So there's a lot of different models out there. This I can show you, we probably don't have time today, but this model is different from others. It's different from almost all other models that I've ever seen out there, and I've seen many, for the particular reason that it does look at us as being multiple which is different from every other model that assumes that there's a particular you, that you're a type, which puts you in a box. If I'm an INTFJ I'm not all the other 15, and so I'm now different from you. And then even worse, the team leader might say, Well, we want this type to work in accounting and this type to work on the floor. Well, that's a real problem because it puts you in a box and negates all the other things that you are. We're saying actually, you're all these different things. For this job you might need more of this. And then where do the others go and what do we do for those others? And so on. So the way you deal with too much on the plate is really, well, first of all, I will report back that many, many people that I have done this work with, many, probably most of them have reported back that they feel incredibly relieved because they feel seen. So it's actually relief. It's not just adding another thing to their plate. It's like, oh my gosh, finally somebody sees me the way I feel and the way I've sort of understood myself to be, but I've never had an opportunity to actually be told that, especially not in a work environment. So that's a big thing. And then the other thing is to just take the time and the commitment by the organization to learn the language. They gotta see an ROI. They gotta see all these things. We can give them that if they need that. But the ROI is that people feel seen and feel developed because each of these characters, especially the ones that we're not so comfortable with inside of us, can be developed. That's what we do. We come in and we help them develop certain parts of themselves, either in a team or individually. So practical example, we were working with an R and D team, about 30 people, at a big budget, millions and millions of dollars every year. And one day top leadership looked at their budgets, said, you know, these guys are getting a whole lot of money, they're not doing very much with it. They keep making faster chips, but they're not really making anything new. Why are we giving them as much money? Big panic in the department. You've all been there, you've seen it or dealt with leaders who have had these situations. And so we came in, we did an assessment on everybody, an archetypal assessment that we have. And found out that nobody in this team had the renegade in the top three of their preferences of these archetypes. Like they were all sort of out there somewhere, the renegade within them. Nobody was really comfortable with being in the renegade. Well, the renegade is the inventor, one of the gifts from the Renegade. So they weren't inventing anything new. So they recognized, oh my gosh, we are an inventing team supposedly and we're not inventing anything. Why? Well, it makes sense now. Instead of saying, Hey, let's keep all these people out and go get some inventors, we said, let's do it a renegade development workshop. In other words, we're gonna show these people how to activate that part of themselves because we assume and know that it's in them. And so we're gonna find out why it might not be there because they're afraid to stick out. Because what if corporate says this is wrong or whatever the reason is we're gonna get to the bottom of it and we're gonna develop that and let that speak because that's what we need for the, for this department. Or we can help them find somebody who's very strong renegade sort of person and then let them, you know, become the leader of the department or something like that. But I prefer the first one because it recognizes the multiplicity in the group. I don't know if that answers your question, Jessie, but I hope it does.
Speaker 1:J essie, is there a f ollow u p for you?
Speaker 4:Yeah, if I can, I'll put my camera on too. When you spoke, what I heard was like building resilience or more specifically building capacity to be able build more empowered teams. I imagine from that the team itself would pick up this proposed slack I'm talking about. But I guess I work with a lot of leaders and theme of feedback I've been hearing, picking up out of the noise, which is they wanna be these leaders that are being spoken about. They want to rise up and use right brain thinking archetypes based on your tooling and paradigm. But it does take time. Building capacity takes time. Executing and leveraging those tools takes time. My hypothesis is that the leadership roles have to change and that work goes to the empowered teams. But I think it was gonna be a big transitional period. And in the meantime, I think leaders who embody this or do the work you're talking about, they're gonna have to let something go. It's something I'm trying to figure out so I want some feedback on that. I'm using follow up. Thank you.
Speaker 3:I think I understand what you're asking and what we also offer, which is also important. There's also archetypal coaching. So I work with a lot of leaders one on one where you find out what would help them the most. So if somebody wants to be seen and recognized, I'm thinking of a leader in Hollywood I was working with who had that. An executive who wanted to be even a bigger executive. Then there's certain archetypes and then we look at their profile and we talk about it and we say, you know what, t his is the one that would want to be developed. And then we do all kinds of fun things to do that with a person. So leaders are used to coaching, otherwise a lot of us here on this call wouldn't have work. So leaders do get coaching, they do understand they have to improve the questions. What are you doing with them in the very precious time you get with them? And so I'm saying that if we teach them, we don't even have to teach them the theory or anything else, we just throw them right into the conversation. And I've done this work with people around the world and they jump right in because you have a tool that goes beyond all the normal resistance because people feel seen right away. Oh my gosh, have you been following me? I've had people ask me that.
Speaker 1:So Laurence, I'm gonna build on what you just said because Jesse, I see what you're talking about all the time, right? There's an inherent paradox. How could I do one more thing? And if I'm right brain, which takes more time to build relationship, then I have less time to be productive. But here's how you reconcile the paradox. You're wasting a ton of energy right now doing rework and dealing with a consequence of incivility in the workplace. If you want to regain access to that energy and that time, do it on the front end. Build relationship, create health in those interactions so that you're not doing very work and spending time doing conflict management, which is a ridiculous concept in and of itself, right? But we need to help them to see that paradox and that's what builds the value proposition for the development necessary to fundamentally transform how people interact. And I think you're right. I think we're gonna have breakdown. I think we've got a transition ahead of us. I could be not being as optimistic as I could be.
Speaker 3:There's another thing there is that, that we can ask the rather sort of cheeky question. If you say, Well what's the cost to me for doing this all the time I'm gonna invest? What's the cost for you for not doing it? Yeah. And that is a question that is increasingly being asked by lots of leaders. They realize, Oh my gosh, this is going downhill really quickly and they're panicking. And so people are more open right now because of the changes that they don't know what to do with. Like I said, the 1980s business model that I learned, they're afraid of this and so they are more willing to try something as weird as what we're talking about here.
Speaker 2:Well, I think we're going to start winding down in order to honor everyone's time. Thanks Jesse for that obviously deep question and Laurence, thank you for being here. What would you like our audience to take away from the conversation and from dealing with civility?
Speaker 3:I would leave them with a question. I would leave them with a line that I got from one of my teachers. That is one of my favorite lines ever. When somebody starts yacking and we all know what that means. They're yelling at us or complaining or whatever it i s, you know, yacking, running their mouth as we used to b e t old a s kids. Push all of that aside and ask this question. Somebody once said to me, this wonderful line, It's not what you're saying, it's what you're telling me. Ask yourself what you're really t ell what they're really telling you here. Not what the words are, not the noise. What are they really telling you? Are they afraid? And then are they angry? Are they, what's the emotion that's underlying and what are they really trying to say? And once you get that you can respond to that part that's sort of starting to pay attention to who's here, who's really here. You may not have the language to say which archetype is here. That's sort of takes more learning. Just on a human level, because this archetype is in you as well, you will recognize it and then you can say who's here? And now you have a different kind of a conversation because now you speak to that part that's here in whatever way you choose, that's natural for you as opposed to responding directly to the yack.
Speaker 2:I'm thinking about raising teenagers and the last little s pat I had with my husband.
Speaker 1:So it's here in all of our domains. Personal and professional. Oh, Laurence, you're just magnificent. Thank you so much for your time today. Paige has put all of the resources we've been talking about today again in the chat for you. And I think you're gonna put a link to, or just an announcement, there's one more Vanguard Conversation series event. It will happen in November. We'll be concluding with the subject of judgment and Neil Scotton will join us. A coach located in the UK. And of course all of the sessions in the series are available to you on the bechoosecause.com website. You can sign up and joining that community gives you access. Bye Laurence. Thank you.
Speaker 3:Thank you very much everybody.
Speaker 2:Thanks for coming.
Speaker 1:Yes, Neil of Neil's wheel, that's correct.'m sure we'll be looking at that in November as well. And, of course join us on social media and really be with the inquiry question. What have you learned today about how to navigate civility that you're going to integrate to who you will be until we are together again.
Speaker 2:Take care everyone.
Speaker 1:Thanks Garry. Thanks Paige. Bye everybody.
:Thanks Janet.
Speaker 2:Be safe. Bye.