Trust on Purpose
Are you intentional about building, maintaining or repairing trust with the people in your life? Most of us aren’t, and sometimes important relationships suffer as a result. So much of what is right or amiss in those relationships ties back to trust, whether we realize it or not. We are dedicated to helping you become intentional about cultivating strong trust with everyone important in your life: the people and teams you lead and work with, and your family, friends and community, as well. In the Trust on Purpose podcast, we dive into everything that makes up trust, what supports and damages it. We unpack situations we commonly see with leaders, teams, organizations, and others we work with to show how trust can be strengthened, sustained, and repaired when broken. Listen in for conversations between two pros who care deeply about you being an intentional and masterful trust-builder in your life so you and your relationships flourish. We share pragmatic and actionable takeaways you can use immediately and deepen with practice. If you have questions or situations related to trust that you’d like us to talk about in a future episode, please email charles@insightcoaching.com or ila@bigchangeinc.com.
We'd like to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music that you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for the superpower editing work that he does to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to the smooth and easy to listen to episodes you are all enjoying. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.
Trust on Purpose
How Might Work be Different if the Culture was Built on Love?
Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you
Could love be the key to workplace innovation, productivity, and social change? Amy Elizabeth Fox, CEO of Mobius Consulting, thinks so. We have a fascinating conversation with her in which she advocates integrating healing practices and psycho-spiritual transformation into organizations, challenging the idea that caring connection and high performance are mutually exclusive.
Amy believes our current reality (which she describes as brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible) requires stronger emotional connections within organizations, yet most workplaces remain stuck in outdated models that view emotions and vulnerability as weaknesses.
Tune in to hear how embracing love in business and recognizing others' inherent dignity, organizations can become powerful catalysts for broader social change.
We want to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for his superpower editing work to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to smooth and easy to listen to episodes for you to enjoy. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.
Hi, my name is Charles Feltman.
Speaker 2:And my name is Ila Edgar, and we're here for another episode of Trust on Purpose. I'm going to pass it over to Charles in a moment, but I'm just going to say right now like I have been waiting for this episode and this conversation and my heart is bursting with so much excitement and joy. So, Charles, who's with us today?
Speaker 1:We have Amy Elizabeth Fox, who is the CEO of Mobius Consulting, and I've known Amy for many years, many years. It's kind of frightening, and Amy is well. I'm going to let her tell you a little bit about herself, beyond just what I said a moment ago. But I will say that Amy's work is among the most exciting work going on right now out in the coaching and consulting and facilitating space, and you'll find out why as we unfold this podcast. I'm going to ask you, amy, to just introduce yourself a little bit, your background.
Speaker 3:Well, first of all, let me thank you both for having me and say how touched I am to be with you and how deeply aligned I feel to what the purpose of this podcast is. So it's a privilege to have this conversation and, charles, especially because of our longstanding friendship and collaboration. So I'm the co-founder and CEO of the firm Mobius Executive Leadership, as you said, and I have been working for the last 20 some odd years to try to introduce deep healing practices and significant psycho-spiritual transformational capabilities inside of top senior leaders inside of organizations in both the public and the private sector, with an eye towards how we can create more love and care in the workplace, and I've never felt as passionate about that topic as I do now. I think it's really a time where people are feeling so much anxiety and uncertainty that build that fabric of holding and caring inside of organizational life is really essential. So I'm looking forward very much to this conversation.
Speaker 1:Life is really essential. So I'm looking forward very much to this conversation. Great Thank you. More of that will unfold as we talk together and where you come from and what you bring to that, amy, so really excited for this conversation.
Speaker 1:I want to start it with a quote that actually is a quote from a man named Walter Anderson. He says quote from a man named Walter Anderson. He says we're never so vulnerable than when we trust someone. But, paradoxically, if we cannot trust, neither can we find love or joy. And one of the things that I love about that quote is, if you think about world of business, love and joy are rarely ever spoken about and yet I think that is something that is so needed, so important.
Speaker 1:I've worked with people when I worked in organizations. I worked on teams that where there was joy, where there was love, we loved each other, we loved working together, we loved the work we did. And also teams where there was joy, where there was love, we loved each other, we loved working together, we loved the work we did. And also teams where you know that was like ah, we don't want to talk about that stuff. We want to talk about, you know, results and productivity and let's get stuff done, but I think there really is a yearning for love and joy among people at work, and so that's kind of where I'd like us to start, is that idea of bringing love and joy into the workplace. And so I would love to hear from you, amy, a little bit, because I know you've spoken about this, thought about it, worked with people in this space. What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 3:Well, first of all, what you just described, charles, points to, I think, a false polarity that business believes it has to choose between, on the one hand, caring and interpersonal regard and connection, belonging in the workplace and high performance and results, orientation and excellence of output. And in fact, all of the research on psychological safety and teaming suggests quite the opposite. That places where they take the time to build deeper trust and deeper connection and deeper solidarity among team members, exactly as you described, produces not only a more joyful context for people to co-create and collaborate and execute, but also one in which they're more likely, for example, to have the meaningful tough conversations and tolerate the kind of creative abrasion or conflict that comes from really trying to create collective intelligence because there's enough safety to do that or enables people to dissent with the leader's perspective and allow you to tap into multiple points of view that have the possibility of getting to an optimized answer, whereas if everybody doesn't feel safe, they just defer to the authority. So on the one hand, we could say make the case for love and joy, because there's a case for the qualities and meaningfulness of more love and joy. But I think you could equally argue in a context in which there's this much complexity and the picture is much more dimensional than any one person can see. We're absolutely dependent on the ideas, perspectives, intuitions and insights of everybody at the table and then we need to bring them together at the table in a way that frees them up, to bring that intelligence forward. So that would be my first comment.
Speaker 3:I think the second thing to say is that I think we're starting to understand more and more how much underlying anxiety people are struggling with and as we have a more of a sensitivity to this context becoming not just complicated but complex, and maybe not even just complex but chaotic.
Speaker 3:In a context of chaotic, where everything is kind of hard to understand, hard to fathom, utterly nonlinear there's a new term, bani, which I really love, which is brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible.
Speaker 3:If that's the context in which people are trying to work together, then we have to do something to help people manage the inevitable strong emotional churn that that's going to create. And I don't know another way than feeling that the people I work with, care for me, listen to me, can help me to get centered and grounded when I get agitated and anxious, that we start to have an emotional fabric in our relationships in the workplace that allow us to soothe and care and comfort each other and to lift each other up in a hard moment, because I think this is going to be a very sustained hard moment. I don't think this is a momentary crisis. I think this is a new zeitgeist in which people are going to be a very sustained hard moment. I don't think this is a momentary crisis. I think this is a new zeitgeist in which people are going to be trying to do their best work and really struggling with a lot of disruption internally.
Speaker 2:I'm curious how that resonates. Yeah, yeah, I mean, as you're saying that, amy, I'm thinking of a few different clients that I work with currently where, quite literally, teams are hanging on by their fingernails. Right, there's so much chaos, there's churn, there's overwhelm in the workplace, nevermind. You know, then, what's happening to the individual and in the family, and in the community and in the city. And then let's look at our nation, and then globally, and also just sorry, this may be a point that's not known, as I'm in Canada, so so I'm also coming from a different perspective too.
Speaker 2:Yes, um, and so when, when people are literally hanging on by their fingernails, I feel like they don't even know that this is a possibility, that there can be anything other than anxiety, overwhelm, and you know, our lovely Renee Brown talks about in the absence of data, which, if I'm hanging on by my fingernails, I'm not even aware of data, but I'm making up story all the time, right? So you know, charles is a jerk, amy is just, you know, not pulling her weight. This happens, this happens, this happens. And so how do we help people? And I'm jumping into the how already. How do we help people know that there's a volume button, like playing with the volume?
Speaker 3:button. I mean you're pointing to a couple of the very important toxic symptoms of unregulated fear. Right, so I get more reactive, I get more judgmental, I'm more likely to default to blame, the quality of my mistrust, suspicion, attribution of negative motivation goes up. I mean you both are theorists about this. There's a lot of damage in the relational field that happens as people get more and more off-center. So we have to treat that as a business imperative that we can help people dial it down. It's beautiful your metaphor, isla, and I think the first thing is helping people to have this self-awareness that there really are, neurologically, states of centeredness and states of reactivity and that our cognitive capacity is different. As you said, I can't think in a linear, cognitive, neutral way about data when my emotions are flooding and I'm oversaturated and swamped. So the first thing is to know what's going on with my interior state. The second thing is to have strategies and practices, both individually and at the level of the team and the organization practices for down-regulating a flooded nervous system, the most central one of which is co-regulation. If I can go to a team member when I'm knocked off balance and I can allow a little bit of time and attunement between us and I have a sense of safety and openness, time and attunement between us and I have a sense of safety and openness, then my nervous system will start to calm down and get regulated, because I'm getting the transmission of their inner state of calm and tranquility and presence, and that's a beautiful thing, that we're hardwired to soothe one another through connection and love. I think that's a tremendous asset in the workplace. The second thing so the first thing, self-awareness that I'm actually noticing and I'm not acting from reactivity, I'm intervening to deploy a practice of down regulation. Number two I have a variety of ways I can calm myself down. And number three we're creating the preconditions in the workplace that make it less likely we're going to feel existentially threatened and like we're hanging by our fingertips, which means not waiting for the moment of crisis but building fabrics of relatedness and connection as a foundation for future trust and for future resourcing, for future trust and for future resourcing.
Speaker 3:And I really wanted to go back Ilo to something you said that's for me so profound and disturbing, which is most of our workplace organizational culture has been built on an industrial psychological model that treats the employee in a very technical way. We didn't build thriving, living human systems based on the relational premises of what helps humans to walk around with an open heart and a creative mind. So what that means is that most workplaces are anti-body, anti-intimacy, anti-spirit and anti-emotion. I mean, you could even say right. So then people wind up at an executive level, having been in a career for 30 or 40 years, with constant routines of numbing and hacking their emotions because they have nowhere to put them and they have understood that they're not welcome or it's unprofessional to be emotional that notion. It actually belies what we know from psychology and neurology we need of one another if we're going to undertake a big thing together.
Speaker 3:So I think helping people to question that assumption and to soften the rigidity of the boundary that the personals over here and the professionals over here and I'm not supposed to have any emotional or relational needs when I walk into work every day the first thing is to just debunk that notion and one of the things that happens when I do my leadership programs it's such a privilege to watch Within 48 hours of people living in a microsystem that takes as a premise that it's not only appropriate but necessary to operate with authenticity and vulnerability and mutuality of care.
Speaker 3:People melt. They walk in and sort of armored and walled off on the opening day and by the last day they're telling each other their most intimate secrets, they're reading poems that they wrote overnight, they're dancing together, they're singing together and they're caring for one another organically. So this is the good news. In my mind, you don't have to teach people how to love each other. You just have to get rid of the things that are in the way and keeping everybody siloed and walled off emotionally so that the natural river of care doesn't flow. Charles, I want to make room for you to respond to what I'm saying, because I know this is something you've thought about very deeply and long.
Speaker 1:Yes, and I really appreciate. There are several pieces in there that, as I was listing, really strike me. One of them is that you know people walk through the door of their office, or even before they get to their you know place of work, they're leaving home, they're preparing, preparing for that. You know they're armoring up, getting ready to go to work and do battle, if you will, and do so with this armor on that keeps what's coming at them from harming them, but also keeps what's inside of them from getting out.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, and that capacity to love, to care for the other people that we work with is what releases the corresponding capacity for creativity, innovation, productivity, as you said, in such a big way. And, as I said, I've been on both kinds of teams in my work life and there's such a huge difference between them. So, really, the challenge is and I love these workshops that you do and you talk about so, at the end of this workshop, what I'm really curious about is how does that sustain? How does the executive, who, at the end of the workshop, has let go of their armor, is open and the love, the joy and all of the other emotions as well are flowing freely the sadness, the regret, all the things that make us human and that's free-flowing. What happens when they go back into the office? And it's all waiting for them and waiting to reshape them back into the shape of the armored person that they were.
Speaker 3:How do they move past that? Yeah, I have a couple of thoughts, and then I'd love to just make room for you to come in too. On the last day of the program, I talk about a concept that I think is very beautiful. It comes from my teacher, thomas Hubel, and Thomas talks about the second day of the program. I talk about a concept that I think is very beautiful. It comes from my teacher, thomas Hubel, and Thomas talks about the second test of transformation.
Speaker 3:So the first test is do I have the courage, do I have the conviction, do I have the leap of faith to allow myself to change and open my heart, even if it's been closed for a long time? And my experience is that most people will pass that first test if you make a sincere invitation and that they're relieved by the fact that the sincere invitation has finally come. But the second test is will I stay true to those shifts that I've made in the face of change-back signals from the system I'm returning to, whether it's my family or my team or my workplace? Will I be fidelitous to and hold true to what's opened up, even though the environment may find it awkward or uncomfortable to adjust to my new way of being. And so the first thing that I would say is I'm alert to the fact that there's probably certain people who can't sustain the change through the second test, that the system's pressure to revert to something more predictable, more expected, less radically open will have their way with them.
Speaker 3:But I also would say that, at the depth of vertical development that I have the joy to do with leaders, we're not just giving them a behavioral shift and mental insight, we're giving them a kinesthetic, embodied, deep, deep intervention, a catalytic sea change and how they understand that it's possible to operate and it's possible to be, and that sea change you can see it in their faces.
Speaker 3:It's, you know, that people come in in sort of a gray pallor and they leave with fresh red cheeks and a little smile. And that vitality, that sort of re-engagement with life, is like walking through a portal that one really cannot easily rescind from, is like walking through a portal that one really cannot easily rescind from. And I think that especially when you are able to reach the senior, most leaders in an organization and they do this kind of development work together and they build bonds of intimacy and closeness and generosity of attention with each other, then that becomes not only a group that can role model a new way of working and a new way of collaborating, but they can also be mutually reinforcing when any one of them feels a little bit unclear, unsure of themselves. So I really love when an organization will say we're going to do this at some scale, because then it becomes not just an executive development intervention but a cultural change process, and there I think you have the highest likelihood that we all together pass the second test.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, thank you. That's I love that and I love that you've experienced that. I also am very aware of the words that you're using generosity, intimacy, care. Those are the emotions that really sustain people through that kind of okay. That second test, if you will, is being able to access those emotions. So I imagine a good part of the work that they do is to practice essentially accessing those emotions. Not that there's a specific way to practice them, you know, you sit down and do whatever, but rather just simply letting them arise in response to the beauty and love in the world and, in their cases, in the room.
Speaker 3:I agree with you that there aren't artificial ways to predicate practice, but there are contexts in which that kind of compassion or generosity is more likely to arise. So, as an example, if I don't just respond to who you are on the surface and whatever you do, that annoys me or disrupts me, but I get to know your life story and the circumstances in which your various behavioral repertoires were first shaped, I have much more sensitivity and much more patience to deal with the fact that what you do that's difficult is most likely once upon a time an urgent childhood survival strategy. It's not random. So if I see through a trauma-informed lens, the things you're doing that I find challenging, I'm much more likely to bring a quality of generosity to the interaction when we talk about that, or we debrief that, or I ask you, make a request of you to change your behavior. So there is, I think to vertical development, the necessity to think about what experiences can we walk a team through together? That will produce a heightened level of awareness of why people are behaving the way they're behaving and what people are struggling with. That's on the one hand.
Speaker 3:The other thing I would say is that you also have to look at when people aren't generous or they're walled off or they're in a state of mistrust. What are the antecedents that make mistrust a wise choice? Which is why I don't think you can do vertical development in a shallow way. I think you really have to look at what were the adverse experiences people had often in their early developmental phase of their life that shaped their executive behaviors and their quote derailers and help them to turn their attention not away, which is what they're standardly doing, but towards the things that hurt them and to give them a chance to metabolize and integrate the emotions, the memories, the sensations, the distorted beliefs that come from existential threats and absences of attachment and holding and attunement. And once that healing process has begun, they get freed up quite quickly to make different choices and to make more liberated choices and to at the very least be able to express themselves in a new, wider range of ways that are not so stuck behind a sense of self-protection and a stance of unsafety or mistrust.
Speaker 3:And I know a lot of your work, charles, has been about helping people to know how to foster trust, but the inverse. At the end of your book on trust you talk about mistrust. I'm fascinated by how do you help somebody go from a state of mistrust to a state of knowing how to build trust. Isla, let me stop talking.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's okay. That's okay. So I want to also point to Joseph Meyer's work. So if you haven't heard of him, his work on distrust is fascinating, but I want to. There's a couple of things I wanted to comment on, and thank you so much for sharing the way you have. I want, I want, to really honor organizations that commit to this kind of transformation Me too, and you know, the fact that that is happening in our world gives me hope and joy, and I think there's still a lot of a lot of organizations and you know some that I work with too that well, just can you do a two hour workshop on trust and think that that's going to change? And it's a little bit of knowledge, and you know there might be small behavior changes but again, they're not always sustainable. Can I just add that for a second? Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 3:So one of the things that we're saying, all three of us, or we're pointing to implicitly, that I'd like to make explicit, is that there are social agreements that are antithetical to building an environment of love and trust, and one of the social agreements is time is scarce, and if we as practitioners take that as a premise, we're already colluding with the dysfunction that's keeping people's hearts closed. So I have for 20 years insisted that deep vertical development takes three days, takes four days, takes five days, takes unplugging from day-to-day demands takes three days, takes four days, takes five days. Takes unplugging from day-to-day demands, takes putting yourself in an ecological context in which nature and beauty, as Charles said earlier, can be part of the medicine. And I sometimes think I could just take them off of work for five days and they'll get ROI, because everybody's so darn exhausted, so information saturated, that this white space is alchemical.
Speaker 3:But I just wanted to respond to what you're saying. It's absolutely true. The world of business right now is in such a high pressure, high, you know, high execution mode that people really do need permission and blessing to pause and slow down and to reflect and to consider and to metabolize experience, and that if people don't have that space, they start to go a little crazy. Any of us will, yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think there's something else you said. I just want to point to Lila and then we'll get back to you. I'm sorry I'm jumping in here, but you said time is scarce. Jumping in here but you said time is scarce, but I think actually, scarcity in general, the belief that things are scarce, the things that we value, that are important to us, are scarce and therefore we have to fight for them and we have to maybe cut other people off because it's a zero-sum game. That is one of the roots of all of this stuff that we're talking about, that we would love to change. Yeah, that's beautiful. Love is scarce. Love is scarce.
Speaker 2:Right there, you just peeked into my head and my heart. That's what I was going to say. Is that's another? Is that we, you know, oh, love is rare, you're so lucky if you find it. No, it's actually everywhere if we look for it. And so I think that's the other thing is redefining what love is. So there isn't only romantic love, there's all sorts of other ways to show and feel love with self and then generously extending that with others.
Speaker 3:One of the exercises I do in my programs. I ask people to make an inventory of how they numb themselves in small, large ways, you know, little, daily hacks and large scale addictions. And then we talk about the cost of that numbing. And you're both pointing to a bunch of them, so I won't reiterate it, but it's you know, access to life force, access to openheartedness, access to connection, access to you know, friendships, etc. And then I say one of the central costs which you just pointed at, both of you, is we don't have a relational vocabulary for what we could ask each other for. We know we can ask somebody to problem solve with us, but do we also know we could ask each other for? We know we can ask somebody to problem solve with us, but do we also know we could ask somebody to cook with us, to sing with us, to hold our hand, to listen to our stories, to grieve with us, to soothe us, many, many things? And then I start building on a flip charts relational request vocabulary, what is the language of mutual care? And I then ask people to look at the list and sort of inventory. Are there one or two of these relational needs that are well met in your life that you could celebrate and thank the people who are providing that for you. Are there one or two you wish you could add to your list, and who might you ask for them? And then I ask another Thomas Hubel question, which I love and how beautiful do you feel when you need these things?
Speaker 3:Because our society has put such a preference on autonomy and what we call quote resilience, which basically means I'm going to operate self-sufficient, when in reality it takes a village. None of us are self-sufficient. We're born interdependent, we die interdependent and we live interdependent, and so part of what we're teaching people to do is to have the inner safety to depend on other people, and that's very hard to do if you've been betrayed or abandoned earlier in life. I mean, people's hesitancies come from real scars and real hurts, and you can't ask people to take that risk if you don't also have a willingness to accompany and witness and cradle those hurts.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you might notice. So I buy these by the hundreds. I'm holding up my little knitted heart and these are with me whenever I'm working with teams in person. And it's so fascinating that, no matter the industry, the level of seniority or really any factors, I rarely come home with hearts and it's a reminder that, before any role, any title, any credential anything, that we're all human first. Right, can we remember that we're human first and can we extend that generosity of humanity, even if it's 1%, more, just 1%. And again, you mentioned I love the dial. I love, I play with it all the time and so if we're, if we're in an environment where we want to, extend a little bit more love, a little bit more joy, a little bit more care, a little bit more intimacy.
Speaker 3:We can do that in 1 percent, 2 percent, 3 percent increments. Yeah, I love your hearts, of course, and we are talking about how do you create a human-centric, human generative context in business. That's right, and I just want to add that the low points of the dial are actually quite accessible in daily life. Do I take an extra minute or two to listen to how your day was and ask in such a way that I'm making a genuine overture to receive you? Do I thank you when you've done something generous and was and ask in such a way that I'm making a genuine overture to receive you? Do I thank you when you've done something generous and gracious for me in such a way that you can tell that it mattered? Do I let you know what might be in your blind spot, so that I'm committed to your development and I say it in a way that's kind and supportive and many little little micro behaviors that create the kind of possibility we're pointing to writ large.
Speaker 2:And then I think you were talking about antecedents later is that then we reinforce the behavior? You know what I really noticed? That you listened when I said how my day was. Thank you for taking that extra 30 seconds Right. And so this creates and I want to come back to Charles, and the most important domain of trust is care Period, and it's these small incremental moments and behaviors that we choose that help really solidify that care, care and so, and I and I think the other thing.
Speaker 3:The inverse is also true, which is, if I don't know what's really happening in the context of your personal life and what you're actually struggling with, I don't know that you need my care. So I often am working with an intact team and somebody will say at the end of the five-day program I've worked next to this partner for 20 years and I had no idea they had an autistic son, or they had a mother with dementia, or they've moved six times in the last few years, Like we don't know one another's challenges. So then we don't know what, to where to extend our care. We're literally missing the reconnaissance that would enable us to do skillful acts of kindness. So you know, random acts of kindness are great, but telling each other what we need is even greater.
Speaker 1:Yes, and that's interesting because I listened to you talk about that and what comes to mind is often with people that I work with, people I coach individually, is when I start the coaching with them they're happy with, they're comfortable, let's put it this way they're comfortable, they feel safe with not knowing too much about the people that they work with, because then they don't have to extend themselves, they don't have to make themselves vulnerable and become more intimate with that person, and it's sort of safer that way in this context of the culture that they work in.
Speaker 3:I think it's safer that way, if I could, charles. I think it's safer that way to most people, because we're walking in a world whose cultural architecture is shaped by untreated trauma. What does it mean to say I feel safer if I don't get asked to be intimate, or I feel safer if I don't have to care? It means my heart is so hurt that I'd rather live alone and isolated and lonely than take the risk of extending it. It's a natural thing to extend your heart, so if we're in a world of unextended heart, it tells us how much healing there is to do.
Speaker 1:It tells us how much healing there is to do. Yeah, and that's generally what I'm working with my clients. To do is move into a different space, a different perspective on that. Go ahead, elin.
Speaker 3:No, I just want to add one thing, Charles yeah, I'm quite confident, and this is, I think, the beauty of coaching and our work as healers and facilitators of transformation. As healers and facilitators of transformation, I'm quite certain that the profound receptivity and care and attunement that you bring them creates the possibility of a felt sense of what's possible that they can then translate out in small risks elsewhere and I think that is the hope of our work is that it doesn't take that many corrective experiences to open up the door of something different. Is that it doesn't take that many corrective experiences to open up the door of something different.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I was going to add. I recall a conversation with someone where we were being quite intimate and sharing with each other and I had shared something in this conversation and it was. I was so grateful that he actually shared this back with me. And he says when you say that, I actually don't even know what to say and I don't feel anything when you say that, and I was so honored that he would share in that way, and I think it also points to in many ways in our organizational context, when we're not talking about transactional things, that we also don't feel sometimes, that we don't have the vocabulary, like I don't know how to respond to what you just shared with me.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:And rather than say the wrong thing, I maybe just won't say anything at all, because I don't want to ruin this moment, or right? I don't want to look like an idiot, so we may not have vocabulary, we don't want to say the wrong thing, and that fear then pulls us back.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think there's two dimensions to helping people move past that hesitation. One is a skill building, like you can actually teach people ways of reflecting and deep listening and ways of empathically communicating care in response to someone's vulnerability or emotional expression. But the other is debunking the notion that there's a right thing to say. That's like importing a sort of scientific method to the domain of human closeness. I mean, there isn't a right thing to say. There could just be like wow, I don't know what to say. That's enormous.
Speaker 2:I'm just so glad that you told me Right. Thank you for trusting me.
Speaker 3:I'm very touched that you trusted me with that.
Speaker 2:But this could go on to a whole other thread here, but that is also a living belief in our organizations is that I need to know the answer. There is a right answer and a wrong answer. There's a right way to solve this and a wrong way to solve this, a right way to behave and a wrong way to behave. And so I think this territory is like we're pulling apart all of this and bringing back. Hey, remember, we're humans.
Speaker 3:But what you're pointing to, ella, is super important. Why would we be even having this conversation in the context of business? I think it's important to be clear. We're not talking about just helping people to learn how to nurture each other. We're talking about breaking the habits of cognitive rigidity and control and sort of authority that keep us from generative teaming and keep us from co-creation and, as Charles said earlier, put the ceiling on the kinds of innovations that we're going to generate and that has direct bottom line impact. So there's a kind of rethinking of culture that's required to create transformational contexts in which some of these possibilities relationally start to occur but also systemically start to repair and restore.
Speaker 1:Yes, Can I just, amy you've mentioned this two or three times now this term and I want to just see if you could elaborate on it just a little bit and that's vertical development.
Speaker 3:I mean, I think what I mean by vertical development is sort of the movement in the world of organizational development that has started by sort of cognitive behavioral interventions. Executive is exhibiting behavior A and it's very dysfunctional. We should teach them to exhibit a behavior B and that would be better. And that worked for a while and we started to see that the frontier of the sustainability of that behavioral shift was kind of short-lived, to your point earlier, right. So then Chris Ardress, for example, one of our mentors, started to say you need double-loop learning to get a sustained behavioral shift. You don't just replace the move that they're making at the level of action. You have to start understanding their frame or their mental model that's driving that behavior and to get a mental shift in their paradigm in order to get sustained behavioral learning.
Speaker 3:Mckinsey called that mindsets and behavior as an example, and that's been the sort of zeitgeist of thinking. Where the intervention should live for most by trauma literacy is that actually you have to go much deeper in the unconscious domain of memory, of emotion, of stored somatic experience and sensation of identity, of met and unmet needs. You have to start repairing attachment breaches. You have to start helping people to excavate trauma and integrate experience in order to liberate them, to be able to make the mental shift to trust, to win-win value creation, to collaboration versus self-protection. And so vertical development is interventions for leaders that are designed to get to the root causes of why we get stuck with each other. Is that responsive?
Speaker 1:Thank you, that's perfect. Yeah, I just wanted to make sure that we're not throwing out terms that many people who are listening are going. What does that mean? Yeah, what does that mean.
Speaker 2:What does that mean? The other thing that I'm realizing we didn't define at the start of our conversation is what is love.
Speaker 3:I wish I had a wonderful roomie quote to share. There isn't one coming to my mind. I mean, I can say do you have?
Speaker 2:one. Well, I'm not sure if you're familiar with Dan Newby and Curtis Watkins. So, in their definition of love is the emotion where we hold the other as legitimate just as they are and have no desire to change them.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So maybe I'll just build on their definition and say it's when we recognize the innate dignity and holiness of the other.
Speaker 1:Yeah, love that. You know I was in this specific conversation with a group of people, mostly men, in prison. I co facilitate this program, a year-long program based on restorative justice principles, and anyway we had.
Speaker 3:Oh, sorry, I just have to interrupt for a second. Thank you for that work. And restorative justice is love at the level of society. I think that important.
Speaker 1:I love. Thank you, that's a wonderful way to put that. And one of the people said you know talked about we generate love. We generate love in the world. And as I was listening, I that flipped for me and I said, no wait, no, love generates us.
Speaker 3:Oh, that's beautiful.
Speaker 1:Love is there, it's just always there and it generates us, to the extent that we let it and allow it. It can be a circular process, it isn't just you know so.
Speaker 3:That's very explicit. I just thought to share a metaphor that I really love. It comes from my friend and teacher, shai Tubali, and Shai talks about the three layers of the heart chakra. So the outermost layer is the part of our emotional being that's responding to the day-to-day events and circumstances around us and being impinged and impacted by what's going on in our lives. The middle layer of the heart is where the current day events and their emotional experience reverberates with earlier emotional experience, intensifying, sometimes meaningfully amplifying the emotional impact of the current event because it looks like or resonates or feels similar to an earlier event. But the innermost chamber of the heart, what he calls the heart cave, is the part of you that is in abiding love and unity and cannot be hurt and does not struggle to extend itself. And I think one of the things, one of the ways you could think about the kind of restorative justice work or the kind of healing and transformational work we've been speaking about, is we're trying to help people re-access that state of abiding open-heartedness.
Speaker 1:Lovely. Thank you, that's really nice. I think we've probably come to the time when we should wrap up. We've covered so much territory.
Speaker 2:Wrapping up is kind of I know I'm like I have sadness in this moment because I don't want to wrap up. I want to continue the conversation.
Speaker 3:It's been a great joy to have such a deep and meaningful conversation about something that I believe is the urgent question of our time how to bring more love to the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yes, amy, if our, oh sorry, no, go ahead. You go ahead because mine's a wrap up, okay, good.
Speaker 1:But what I was going to say is that bringing more big in the world in that respect. So I love that. That's what we're kind of looking at here is not just generate more love in the world, generate it in a particular context that's so needing it and also so capable of extending outward. Yeah, thank you, elif, please.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I was going to say, Amy. If our listeners are interested in learning more about the work you do, how would you like them to connect with you? Where can they find you? How can they learn more about this such incredible work that we're all invited to do?
Speaker 3:Thank you for that question. Well, if people are interested in the leadership programs that I offer and the coaching work that Mobius does, you can find us on wwwmobiusleadershipcom and you'll get a chance to see this vertical development live and in action and at play. And if you're interested in the movement of love and business, feel free to look at my website, which is wwwamyelizabethfoxcom, and I'd love to hear from you on LinkedIn, and I really do see this as a growing waterfall of love happening in the world and I'm excited to be part of it.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. Thank you?
Speaker 1:Yes, thank you.
Speaker 2:My pleasure so much, so much love, so much. Like this was beautiful, amy, thank you. Oh, I'm so glad it was. I wanted to be present, but I'm like, oh, but I want to.
Speaker 3:I want to write notes.
Speaker 1:I figured I could listen to the recording later.
Speaker 3:Please keep me posted. When you're offering things that I can promote and point people to, I'm honored to do that and happy to do that Wonderful.
Speaker 2:I'll plant a seed, please. I don't know if it's going to happen, but a very good friend and colleague of mine just submitted last week a proposal to the greater good science center at berkeley to be part of their spreading love project. Oh cool, so I, we are also very much about like spreading, like let's create a movement, like fabulous. Let me know how I can help. So if we won't hear till june, but if we, if we're, it would be great to have your support. I don't know what that looks like, but I'm just putting that intention out in the world. I received it gratefully.
Speaker 3:Yeah, charles, amazing to see you honey.
Speaker 1:Thank you, it's great to see you, and are you?
Speaker 3:guys in touch with my team so that we can promote it whenever you put it out. We will definitely.
Speaker 1:We will let you know. We'll let Karen know.
Speaker 3:Fantastic.
Speaker 1:And then we'll be promoting on a LinkedIn.
Speaker 3:Glorious. Yeah, I'm really honored to have been with you both. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, amy. Take care, okay, take care. Bye, take care. Do you want to stop?
Speaker 1:Oh yes.
Speaker 2:The recording.
