CASEY: Welcome to the Questions to Hold podcast. I'm your host and BWB founder, Casey Carroll. In a world that often praises answers over questions, the act of holding a question is an act of resistance, presence, and devotion. In this podcast, I hold space for discussion at the intersection of life's biggest questions and our personal and professional worlds.
These are honest conversations with progressive leaders dedicated to questioning our institutions, igniting change, and provoking new possibilities.
Join me for my next discussion.
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CASEY: Hello everyone and welcome to the Questions to Hold podcast. Today we have a very special guest who is a little bit new to my world, and once I discovered the work of Taylor's, I feel like I dove all the way in, and now I'm feeling very giddy and like a little bit of a fan girl over here that we get to have a really great conversation, um, and learn more about her work and some of what she's up to in providing some really interesting thought into the arena of care and leadership and wellness and so many other spaces. So Taylor, I'm gonna let you introduce yourself in whatever way feels true for you, any context, setting, any identifiers you wanna name about yourself that are helpful for our community, and then we'll, we'll dive in from there.
TAYLOR: Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you for having me, Casey. I'm really excited and honored to be here. My name is Taylor Elise Morrison. Everyone just calls me Taylor. I just found out when I got married though, that there's a big company called Taylor Morrison, and so I gotta throw the Elise in there if anyone's ever gonna be able to find me on the internet. I like to say that I develop leaders who care and I've got a portfolio career, so I have the work that I do through Inner Workout, which is my company. It's also the name of my book, but I also get the chance to work in collaboration and partnership with other organizations, including Google and Franklin Covey to do facilitation work. And yeah, I feel like I could get into the nitty gritty of all of the different things I do, but I feel like that's a, a good high level. I develop leaders who care through writing and speaking and coaching and facilitating.
CASEY: Yeah. I'm so excited to get into this care conversation with you and more about this Inner Workout. Some of what I've been reading about with Inner Workout too reminds me a little bit of like some of the practice of Questions to Hold that we talk about. Obviously they have all their own places in the, in the matter of things, but there's definitely some parallels that we’ll hopefully talk about. I love to kick off just with a question around what your relationship to questions is. So, um, you know, something we talk about a lot is that we all come at questions or the ability to go into our inner realms and be with questions from different places. Some of us have been questioned and feel like there's maybe kind of an attack that comes at us. Some of us had a lot of questions that were disregarded, some of us were nurtured questioners. Um, so there's kind of a million directions you could take that question and none of them are wrong. So I would love to just hear your thoughts on, you know, what, whatever comes up for you as you hear that asked you.
TAYLOR: Yeah, I love questions. I have always asked a lot of questions for as long as I can remember. I just wanted to know how things worked, how people related to each other. Something that I've realized as I've grown older is that while I love asking questions, and that's so much of my work, like as a facilitator and a coach, is to ask powerful questions. I've realized that when I am on the receiving end of questions, it can trigger some of my more perfectionist tendencies where I'm like, I can offer beautiful questions, but if someone's asking questions of me, it means I did something wrong because I should have been perfectly clear and so some of my personal work has been to hold space for people to-people with good intentions-I will clarify that piece, to ask questions of me and to know that they are inviting me into deeper relationship, both with them, but with myself as well.
CASEY: Yes, I talk about that a lot, about kind of like-Somebody being like, you're naming you or somebody who asked a lot of questions and letting that be nurtured. But then when that gets turned around on us, it's like, “hmm, uhoh”, some other kind of alarm bells go up. And it's just really interesting to tease out when you're on the giving or receiving side or all the different ways that questions can kind of come in and. How we know to be with them in our life. And I would love to just hear you talk a little bit more, cuz I think it's so true as a facilitator and a coach myself, just questions and being able to ask like powerful, skilled questions in the moment. Like, how you've maybe cultivated that as a skill or how that's developed over time as you've stepped into your facilitation work more deeply?
TAYLOR: The first thing I go back to is like, I had a phase where I was really into mock trial, and over the summer I would go to like a mock trial camp.
CASEY: Cool.
TAYLOR: We, I tended to do like the closing arguments. I loved weaving together all of the insights that had been gained and putting it into this powerful story of why you should rule whatever way I wa- whatever side I was on. But the reason I bring that up is because my first introduction to asking questions like strategically, so to speak, was from mock trial and we had to be aware of like, are we leading the witness? Is this a question that is opening the door to something or closing the door to something? And that's something that I've carried with me in coaching as well. It's so interesting. I'll have it where I work with other people or I see other materials that are developed. And the question that's posed, you can tell the heart behind it is to get someone to a certain place. But it's like there's such a grasping on getting someone to that place. Yeah. That you ask the closed question and then they're not actually able to explore. So I'm constantly having to like, okay, I think there might be something there for them to head in that direction, but instead of asking, do you think you should head to this direction? I'm like, okay. Backing up, how do you know what the right direction is for you? And it's hard because I, I want someone to get to a place of like growth and knowing themselves, and so that's why I keep opening up my questions because I know that that's where the real work happens.
CASEY: Yeah, I love that. It's so much discernment that you're kind of talking about as well, and also this drive I know that I have, and so many of us that I've talked to have where it's like, okay, the question that's then moving us or advancing us or taking us where what you're naming is like, okay then also identifying how do you zoom out? Or maybe there's a few steps back before we're taking that question to like move us forward. And especially in, you know, modern society where so much has been rewarded on like forward movement and getting towards the goal that sometimes, you know, the real skill is actually getting back into that expansive nature. Um, before we're stepping there. But that's a skill. It's a practice, you know, to, to be in that. I'm definitely hearing you have cultivated over time and I, I wanna hear more about, cause at the beginning you named Leaders Who Care as like a difference. You know, there's, there's lots of leaders, but you're talking about leaders who care. And something Caitlin and I in the business talk about a lot is in this realm of creating an economy of care and really trying to center care in the way that we work. We have a part of that with anybody that we onboard into our collective and into, you know, our team, but also with our clients. And it's just such a fascinating topic to me. So I'm curious to hear you speak a little bit more about some of how you differentiate, you know, the leaders who care, what that means, and I guess even just the journey you've gone on on really identifying care as such a central component to, to your work and to your life.
TAYLOR: Ooh, I love this question cuz this is something that I've been nerding out on even more deeply. So when I first started this work, it really was me being a person who tends to be a workaholic, who's super burned out all of the time, needing to learn how to care for myself, and it became a company. It gave me a lot of opportunities to work in and with organizations a lot of times, delivering programming to give individual contributors toolkits and what I found time and time again is that yes, it's great to have a mindfulness practice that you can do. It's great to know that there's some breath work that you can do or something like that, but if your leader is leading from a place of micromanagement and mistrust and you're constantly looking over your shoulder, all of the individual things that you're going to do are very likely not going to be able to outweigh that. And so I think it's so important to develop care and leaders first in that they're able to care for themselves because they have so much that they theoretically should be giving to other people. And second, to develop a skillset that thinks, how can I present an assignment that someone needs to work on in a way that facilitates care for me, care for them, care for the objectives of the organization. And yeah, I just keep finding that organizations tend to want to say, ‘yeah, let's just do a meditation class here and there’. And the real work of change for care and wellbeing in organizations is with leaders.
CASEY: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that makes so much sense. I'm wondering how you, or if you have like a working definition of care or even like how it feels in your body, like what are you moving towards like cultivating so people understand really what the leaders understand what care is and when they're in that place for themselves. And their work.
TAYLOR: That's a great question. So the words that I've really been playing with, especially with regards to leadership are like care and wellbeing. And my mom, before I was born, was an English teacher, an English major, and really instilled like a love of words and going to the dictionary and understanding what this means and when you look at the various definitions of care, it's about intention. It's like this interest and intention. And so when I'm thinking about care, I'm thinking about those two parts. Am I really interested in this other person or this other community? And what is my, how am I displaying it? Well, I guess first, what is my intention with them and how am I living or not living into that intention? So interest and intention are the big things that come up for me around being a leader who cares, is being able to define those two things and how you're showing up in those ways. And then it relates to wellbeing, because if we're looking at this wellbeing as a state of like, I mean, it's in the word of being well up, flourishing up, thriving. Like. That's what we wanna create our, our work environments where people can show up and they're like, yeah, I'm giving 40, 40 hours at least a week to this thing and it's giving me something in return.
CASEY: Yeah. It's so helpful. I mean, again, like I was saying, something that we have been talking about a lot and why I'm really, love your work and interested in kind of learning more about your work is in that space of like, when we talk about care too, Caitlin and I are always nerding out, as you were saying also on words and getting really like explicit and you know, being very mindful of word choice and why we're using it and how we're using it. But we've been unpacking care for ourselves too. And then thinking about, okay, what does that look like then in protocols and principles in the business and exchanges we're gonna have as leaders with our team, with our each other, with, um, all the different things. So basically how does then that get put into action in all these ways? And I love how you're breaking apart that kind of like intention and the interest and, and those pieces too. And just to name, I, I've said this potentially on another podcast, but often something I'll say is like, I went 38 years where I blurred the lines between pleasure and achievement, without really understanding and teasing out the differences of those things for me in a, in a more kind of comprehensive way. And I see that sometimes with leaders that we're working with, or even within our own organization as it relates to care, like it's kind of gotten lumped, a bunch of things have gotten lumped into it. Like I was lumping a bunch of things into pleasure. And then when we tease it out a little bit, we start to get really clear on like what the care components are and maybe what some other slight nuanced pieces are, you know, with like nurturing and like, just like other components that might be going into the, the care landscape that you're talking about. And that's why I really love how you're framing all of this and helping people, you know, find that center in, in their work and in their organization.
TAYLOR: Yeah. Thank you. It's been, it's ever-evolving and it's something that I'm constantly like sitting with and listening and learning, and again, because I came to this primarily thinking about self-care, at Inner Workout, we define as listening within and responding in the most loving way possible. Then I realize like I, Oh, we went straight to the self-care and now I'm almost having to go backwards and zoom out to think, okay, but what is care overall before we get into self-care and community care? So yeah. Yeah, that's the work I'm doing right now.
CASEY: Yeah. Well, and you've talked about Inner Workout, you've mentioned it a couple times. So do you maybe wanna share a little bit both about just about Inner Workout as a context setting?
TAYLOR: Yeah, so Inner Workout is my company and it has kind of two sides to the business. So there's the consumer facing brand where we have a podcast, we have a book that just came out. We have various live or asynchronous resources that people can access to develop skills across five dimensions of wellbeing. That's really like the foundation for all of the work at Inner Workout. The other side of the business is working with organizations, so coming in, leading workshops. It's interesting because I, in organizations, it's probably about a 50/50 split of working directly with leaders and helping them skill build and then working with individual contributors. And that's part of why I've been teasing out all of these questions around what roles do leaders play? Because when I'm starting to talk more with the leaders, I'm like, wow, you all have so much potential for workplace wellbeing and flourishing in your organization.
CASEY: That's so cool. Yeah. Do you wanna say anything that's about the book? I'm excited to order a copy and read it, but that's a huge feat, just to say, we work with so many authors and we also know what a huge accomplishment and feat it is to like go all the way through and get the book out into the world, which you have done. So would love to just hear a little how that process has been and how you're using the book as part of, you know, your business and, and getting the larger message and teachings out about this.
TAYLOR: Yeah, the book I have jokingly said is like my dissertation on self-care. I started the company, it actually looked very different. It publicly launched about six months before the pandemic, and so there were a lot of pivots that had to happen just to continue to stay alive. And also people really needed self-care, but the way that they needed self-care was different than, yeah, what we had been thinking months before. And I realize, I always say we, I do have people that I work with, but so like at that point it was me. It was just what I had been thinking, um, that came up on another podcast and I'm like, oh yeah, I should be careful when I use I versus the royal we. So the book basically takes the Take Care assessment, which I developed like two weeks into the pandemic. It measures your wellbeing across five dimensions, and then it offers personalized recommendations based on your results. So for a long time, that was like this free resource that people had access to and the book is kind of like a strengths finders for self-care. So like you can take the assessment and then the book is a choose your own adventure. So depending on your results, you can go straight to the chapter that aligns to your results to get some really practical prompts and resources and questions to hold to use your terminology, questions that you can be asking yourself to support your wellbeing and that dimension.
CASEY: I'm so excited to get it and to read it. That's so cool. I love the take care assessment. What a smart idea. And it sounds like you made a lot of pivots, like so many of us did. Um, but listening to what was needed and being in touch, in tune with it, and then moving, um, and growing in the way you have is super impressive. And I, I believe you also mentioned and if these weren't your words, just correct me, but something around, you know, wanting to focus on your own care, like coming from a place of burnout, I believe you said too. So did you enter in, like this care conversation from a place of self-care, or did you really come at it from like, what care in the workplace looks like? You know, kind of like where, where was your entry point in coming into some of this work?
TAYLOR: It's so interesting because it was kind of both. So like my first job out of college, I was in a leadership development program and I worked on Allstate's Employee Value Proposition team, which was all about like, how do we make good on the promises that we're making to employees and how do we make the workplace as great as it can be? So like, that was care in the workplace, but I wasn't using that terminology there. And then I worked at another organization that supported wellbeing in both commercial buildings and in residential buildings. And then I came back and I was on the team for culture at a startup owned by Allstate. So I actually have done a lot of care in the workplace, but the business really came from, I'm burned out. I need to figure out how to care for myself. I'm just gonna kind of talk about my journey and then realize that other people were having the same struggles as me and it became a business.
CASEY: Mm-hmm. So cool. And you said what, how you within Inner Workout defined self-care. I'm just wondering if you can repeat that.
TAYLOR: Yeah, so it's defined by Inner Workout as listening within and responding in the most loving way possible. So it's like a conversation that you are having with yourself. So I really don't believe that self-care looks exactly the same every single day. Every single moment. It's gonna shift and change because we shift and change and our environment certainly shifts and changes.
CASEY: And do you find in how you do the work that when you're working with leaders or organizations that you're like, what's the order of things I suppose, you know, do, do you work on folks in understanding how to listen within and know how to respond in a loving way first? Or does community care come in first? Like, or does it, not really matter, but just kind of curious what the way to kind of like build this skillset and like understanding and conversation with ourselves as leaders is.
TAYLOR: I think it's gonna be really individualized. So when I think of like some of the recent things that I've led, it has generally talked about both self-care and community care and depending on where someone is at, they might get more out of either of those pieces. The piece that I always come back to you as like, a starting point, especially when I'm doing one-on-one work, is getting people to understand how they hear from themselves. What does listening within look like for you, and how can we turn up the volume on that voice within. Before we get to any of the actions that we're taking, how can we make sure that you are actually hearing from yourself?
CASEY: Wow. What, have you seen them just from like breakthroughs or just what's happened for people when they have been able to go deeper into hearing themselves? I mean, it's something that we see a lot in a noisy world there tends to be not a lot of opportunity in just really being able to hear ourselves and have that space. So I'm just curious what you've seen when you support people even in that one facet of the work.
TAYLOR: Yeah. I would say that a big thing, I would probably like 99.99 of the people that I've worked with have been women leaders. Shout out to my, like one male client, one and a half male clients. Um, yeah, maybe two and a half. But yes, anyway, I bring it up that I primarily work with women because there's so many dynamics and honestly, a lot of my clients have also been women of color, so I work with people who often hold multiple marginalized Identities where not only is the world noisy, but they're also hearing from people who are saying, this is what you should do to be a good leader, or this is what you should do to be doing self-care, quote unquote, the right way. And there are people who have completely different lived experiences for them than they do. So what I see when I'm working with clients is like a lot of permission granting. A lot of confidence that's built in, like these moments of kind of celebration where they're like, oh, celebration and liberation. Like I can do things in a different way and still get to the same place, but my starting point is different. And I'm allowed to do things in a way that work for me that, that serve my needs and the broader vision. And yeah, it just makes me really excited. Like I love seeing my clients be like, oh, there's, there's more possibilities. There are different ways of being. It all comes from hearing from themselves and realizing, oh, I don't have to copy and paste into that formula.
CASEY: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, so important. And in some ways too, that reminds me a little bit of just, you know, how much is out there with, so what you're talking about too, which is like, defining in maybe a dominant system what self-care is or what it looks like and how to do it and how to find it, and how to, all of the different things, especially that are being kind of like sold to us or messaged in in those different ways on social and TV commercials and so many other spaces and you know, that versus then applying this like deep listening process that you're naming in conversation with yourself, that you're naming. How have you found like people are putting these. into action essentially, or like integrating them into their daily life from, you know, kind of like unhooking from all of that and really listening to them themselves and then applying it like consistently?
TAYLOR: I think the first step for everyone, and I always try and call out this step, is just the noticing or the awareness. It's kind of like going back to 12 step programs. Like the first step is admitting that you have a problem. And so when I see clients, doing it on their own and telling me about it later or live in a session being like, oh, I was just about to prioritize that person's opinion over mine. Let me pause and check in. That is huge. And for some people, like you might be there for months of not yet able to elevate your voice, but noticing when you're elevating someone else's voice over your own. So that's a first step for a lot of people is just like, This is happening. I am aware of it. It's not an unconscious process anymore. And then from there, it depends on the person. I am thinking of one client who we, I mean, really she, I've held space for her to cultivate a practice that she might do before a meeting where she really needs to build her confidence or after a meeting. And so these are things that she has in her back pocket to do. I'll work with clients sometimes on specific conversations in practicing and navigating what those things can look like. And then I have another client who like loves journaling. So for her we're looking at how can we put these into journaling prompts that you can regularly check back into, because that's how you hear from yourself. So again, it all goes back to like, what is a thing that's gonna stick for you for how you hear from yourself and how can we build a practice around that?
CASEY: Now that you're deepening into your work, and it sounds like you're working, you know, within organizations and it sounds like you're also coaching one-on-one potentially and in some other ways. What are some of the bigger questions, like as the onions peeling back on your work, you know, that are revealing themselves to you or things you're, you're own getting curious about as you're learning more and working with people more in this space, what's emerging for you?
TAYLOR: The biggest question on my mind right now is like, what skillsets do leaders need to develop in order to support care and wellbeing on their teams? And so I've got like all kinds of articles and research that-papers that I have been saving to go through because that's just been a big question. I, yeah. I'm so curious about the leadership side of it. I think it's also like how, from an organizational perspective, so many of the things that we offer are these, these things, these programs that are really easy to measure, and that's part of why we like to deliver them, because we can measure them, whereas some of the leadership things, yes, it can come out on a pulse survey, but it might be a little bit more squishy. So what does it look like to measure wellbeing on a team? What does it look like to measure the presence of care on a team? Because ultimately the things that get measured are the things that get funded and pushed out and expanded throughout an organization. So those are two of the things that are kind of top of mind for me right now.
CASEY: I love that question of what does it look like to measure some of that, you know, again, no answers there, but it's just such a great question. Like what kind of forms of measurement could capture that, you know, in like, in what realm? I, I'm just so curious. I love that question. I'm so curious. I don't know if you've discovered anything yet or if you're just really thinking about that now to help the work take on kind of a next level of expansion.
TAYLOR: Yeah, I wish I had more answers of–I, I have some thoughts on like the skillsets for leaders. That first one. But the second one, I'm not entirely sure, like I know how culture surveys, how I've seen them administered in other organizations. I obviously built the Take Care assessment, but I, I don't think that either of those is entirely the answer. So, yeah, I'm excited to like, roll up my sleeves and hopefully get to partner with some brilliant people to figure it out. I'm putting that into the universe.
CASEY: Yeah, I can't wait to see what you come up with and, and track around that. Well, is there anything else too that you would wanna pose, uh, I guess, questions to the listeners today that, you know, ha have folks sit with as it relates to some of what we've been talking about?
TAYLOR: Yeah. The first question I would say is, when's the last time you heard yourself clearly? And like really dig into that. What were the circumstances around that? How did you feel it? Was it in your gut? Was it like, did it feel like a voice in your head? Did your body do something? I think that can just reveal a lot for people of just pinpointing on a specific moment. Another question might look like– I would ask for two sides of it. So one is like, how am I demonstrating care in my workplace? In your workplace? If you're listening and it's just you, how am I demonstrating care to my clients, to my customers, to the contractors, to the vendors, and then what has made me feel cared for at work. I think all of those questions, if you sit with them, it will give you a lot of like really rich insight for things that you could be doing more of, or things that you wanna move away from, and hopefully start a good conversation with yourself.
CASEY: Mm. I love that. That's so valuable and I'm super grateful with you sharing that. Um, how can folks find you? What's a good way for folks to engage? Is it through the book? Is it reaching out? We'll have links and everything in the show notes, but I'm just wondering if there's anything specific, um, that you'd like to be reached out or contacted about?
TAYLOR: Yeah, if you go to innerworkout.co that's got the link to the free assessment and the link to the book right on the homepage. You also can sign up for our Self-Care Sundays newsletter, which comes out every Sunday. And then if you're interested in working with me more directly, I would say taylorelise.com is the best place for like all of the other things that I do beyond Inner Workout.
CASEY: Mm-hmm. Well, awesome. I can't wait to take my Take Care assessment after this and reach out to you about what happens. Um, I'm really grateful. It feels like such the beginning of a conversation and I'm grateful that you took the time to talk us all through what's so important. And I think what so many of us are looking for both as leaders and as folks just in organizational cultures with what we need to really be in our wellbeing and thrive and work. So thank you so much for our conversation today.
TAYLOR: Thank you for having me.
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CASEY: Thank you for listening to the Questions to Hold podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode and are leaving the conversation with way more questions than answers.
I invite you to build a more meaningful relationship with yourself and the world around you through the simple yet profound act of holding questions. Visit questionstohold.com and wearebwb.com to learn more about this practice, our Questions to Hold card deck, and explore more conversations. See you there.