The extra-Ordinary Leader with Dolly Waddell

S3 09: Mountains, Mindsets and Mastery: The Small Steps of an extra-Ordinary Life with Cathy O'Dowd

• Dolly Waddell • Season 3 • Episode 9

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In this episode of The extra-Ordinary Leader, I’m joined by the incredible Cathy O'Dowd – the first woman to climb Mount Everest from both the north and south sides. But this conversation isn’t just about physical mountains; it’s about the emotional and professional peaks we all face.

Cathy’s story is one of grit, humility and mindset, and I couldn’t have been more inspired by the way she talks about doing extra-Ordinary things by simply taking the next right step. Whether it’s writing a book, leading a business, or learning to kitesurf at 42 (yes, I really did that), this conversation is a reminder that success is not about fairy dust – it’s about steady, consistent, powerful choices.

We spoke about what happens when life feels like a cul-de-sac, when perfectionism gets in the way of progress, and how sometimes saying yes to uncomfortable opportunities is the very thing that takes you to the next level. Cathy shares how she navigated being parachuted onto the first South African Everest team – as the only woman – and how she’s learned to let go of the “token” label and find confidence through action.

We also dove into the power of physical challenge – why sports like climbing or kitesurfing can be an antidote to rumination, stress, and even imposter syndrome. Cathy had so much wisdom to share about how we lead ourselves and others, how we perform under pressure, and why empathy isn’t a gift – it’s a tool.

This one will stick with me for a long time, and I hope it stays with you too.

Inside this episode:

  • What extra-Ordinary leadership really means
  • Why we need to let go of perfectionism
  • How to reframe tokenism and self-doubt
  • The difference between stress responses – and how to manage them
  • Why physical adventure can transform your mindset
  • How to use empathy as a tool – especially in high-stakes leadership
  • The 'STOP' technique Cathy uses in moments of pressure
  • The surprising link between coffee, presence, and performance

Mentions & Links:

Dolly:

Well, Kathy, it is such a delight and an honor to have you on the podcast today. How are you in snowy and Dora?

Cathy:

recovering from a cold, so I sound a little hoarser than normal, but delighted to be with you and looking out of my window to the first snowfall of the winter.

Dolly:

Oh, gorgeous. Well, I'm at the beginning of a cold, so between us we're gonna sound quite croaky and quite gru croaky and bugged up, for sure. Well let's kick off then, Kathy, with, what does extraordinary leadership mean to you?

Cathy:

I think what I really like about the idea of extraordinary leadership is the ordinary of it. Because what it really means is moving through the life you've got, the life you live, trying to turn it to your best account for yourself, for the people you interact with, and that's both the people you lead and the people you are in a team with. Or, or however it works for me, extraordinary leadership is just that act of being self-aware as you move through your ordinary life to try and get the very best out of every interaction, with yourself, with other people.

Dolly:

Now for someone who, is just totally ringing my bell about loving bit the r ordinary life, I'm here speaking to you Kathy, and your life is quite far from ordinary by my standards. In terms of what you've done with your expeditions and accomplishments, physical accomplishments, adventurous. How do you marry together what you've accomplished with mountaineering in an expedition with ordinary?

Cathy:

I see it as ordinary because I see the steps that connect the beginning with where I am now, which of course is what we miss when we tend to look at other people and be overawed or. Uh, demoralized, depressed by other people's apparent success. What we are missing is the infinite number of small steps that took them from being a kid, to whoever they are now. So for me, I never pursued some great goal. My God, I must conquer Everest. I'm six years old and here's my life's mission ahead of me. I don't think like that. I follow a process, I follow Journeys. I just started climbing rock climbing at 18, mountaineering at 21 Africa. The Andes, bit by bit, step by step, each challenge a little bit harder, a little bit higher, and even when I. Unexpectedly got parachuted onto the first South African Everest team. Frankly, as the token woman, with no expectation of getting to the top, it was still a journey. What can I learn? I'm here as, as an apprentice. Whatever happens, I walk away from this with more experience and that's what I'm interested in. And I followed that path and that path ended on the summit of Everest, which then in turn opened a whole nother set of doors. So, although. From the outside. Yes, it's quite the story from the inside. It is still just an ordinary person taking one step after another, eyes open for opportunity, a sense of what I'm hoping to accomplish as I move forward.

Dolly:

I love that because it's so, um, it's so ordinary and so brilliant. I was doing a little talk a few weeks ago and saying, so I've just written a book and I remember some people saying, wow, I'd love to write a book. How have you done that? And I actually demystified it in a similar way by saying, it's not like there's this fairy dust is there that just sprinkles upon you and you go, Ooh, I'm a book, I'm an author. Or, I mean, that's minimal compared to you

Cathy:

God I wish. I wish it was. It's so much work to be an author.

Dolly:

And, but you know, like climbing Everest, it's not like there was fairy dust that just got sprinkled upon you to pop you at the top. It is, the choices you make and the doors as you talk about the sets of doors that are open to you, that you open and go through to the next level, to the next level, to the next level. And it's, these small steps are almost like leveling up on a game, aren't they? Like Super Mario Land is just what's popping into my mind, just leveling up to the next level. But how, how have you found, that these opportunities have opened up for you because I coach people who are a bit flatlined in life who want more opportunities. How have you found a way of seeing opportunities and opening doors to opportunities?

Cathy:

Hmm. It's an interesting question because you can absolutely get sort of, I don't know, um, caught in a quida sac somewhere where you feel you can't see any opportunities in front of you, and there are a lot of ways that life can do that to you. I think I have two ideas about this, that matter. The one is that you need to try and open out that quil, dde sac, whatever it is. So when I was trying to find more opportunities to climb, I'm young, I'm female, I'm in South Africa, which is not a country known for climbing. We're, you know, the bottom end of the world very far away from any of the world centers of mountaineering or any of the major mountain chains. Anything you constantly try and. Open your circumstances. So in my case, whatever it is, join a club. Look for people online, take some training courses, get some books, go out there on your own and try and build experience. There are a dozen ways in which you can just try and open your circumstances slightly, and every time you open, they become slightly wider, and that in turn should then give you a slightly wider set of choices going forward. I think the other one, and this is quite a tricky one, possibly for women, don't let perfection get in the way of good enough. My huge break of my lifetime was this, competition to be the woman who joined this Everest team. Now, this was horrible. I mean, this was back in 1995, so you know, things were a good deal, more sexist than they are now. And you know, they, the men had been invited based on their cvs and the women were going to have to do this reality television. You know what felt like a bikini parade for the media? It, yeah, it was sexist as hell. I was a postgraduate student at a university and I was just like, where we don't do this. And yet all I could think was if I don't, if I don't jump through these silly hoops, some other woman will go and I'll never know if that could have been me. So I jumped through the hoops and I did it with my teeth gritted. And, yeah, I didn't like all of it. Don't look, take, look at an opportunity and make it an excuse. Oh no, that's not appropriate. That's too sexist. That's. If this is wrong with it, that's wrong with it. Look at it and go, is there any way I can while staying true to my, my deepest values? Can I grab this and turn it to my own account? Even if they wanted to go some other direction, can I grab this and get what I want out of it? that's what I did with my big break. I want experience. I want to go to the Himalaya and I'm gonna take this weird, uncomfortable. Option'cause it's the only one I've got.

Dolly:

That's very profound because we talk about integrity so much now that there's almost an inversion of integrity, of like, I won't touch that because I just haven't got, you know, it's just against my integrity

Cathy:

I agree. We're a little too busy talking about integrity, talking about authenticity. I can't beat my authentic self in those circumstances. Eh,

Dolly:

yeah,

Cathy:

careful because you can end up just using this as an excuse because you're too scared to do something where you're not sure if you're good enough.

Dolly:

And actually there's a, there's a thing about, we don't talk enough about humbling ourselves. And actually sometimes you do have to humble yourselves to do things that are not quite what you would like. Not quite right? Not quite. Ingrained with how you would like your reality to be. But it is a, it's a humble stance, isn't it? Rather than a selling yourself out stance is what I'm hearing.

Cathy:

I, I'd take another one on it. I think it's a curious stance because it's a little too easy to go like. I know. I know who I am. I know what I stand for. I know what I want to do. Like, eh, really? You've been alive for 20 years, 30 years, 40, 50 years. It's still not that much in the history of the world, of the, what are we, 8 billion people on the planet? You've probably met a few hundred of them. Do you rarely know? I think often we don't know. When you get into the opportunity, it opens your perspective. You learn about other people's opinions, other people's experience, other people's cultural values, and you go like, oh, okay. There's more to this than I understood at the beginning. And that has made me a bigger person as well as introduced me to a bigger set of opportunities. So yeah, again, I think we are living at a time where we're a little too rigid about standing our ground and not often open enough. To learning from other people. We don't know what we don't know and you won't find out unless you try.

Dolly:

I love it. It makes life open up as a really exciting playground with that mindset, doesn't it?

Cathy:

And so those times you get out there and learn things and you go like, oh my God, alright, I'm taking a step away from that. But that's good life knowledge as well, you know, it's okay for it to to happen like that. It's all learning, it's all moving you forward.

Dolly:

when something you said that I'm really interested about was when you, you used the word, you got parachuted in on the, south African team to climb Everest as a token tokenism for, for the female candidate when you got parachuted in. And found yourself as the only female. I don't want to make assumptions of what that would've felt like, but, but what did that feel like? Can you remember, and can you talk us through how you found your way through that experience of being subtly on this team as the only woman?

Cathy:

It was like everything. It was an interesting multilayered experience. Because initially I very much felt that I had sort of token woman's emblazoned on my forehead, and I did.

Dolly:

Yeah.

Cathy:

And there was a lot of other team conflict going on. It wasn't all about this. So the sexism was almost turned into a bit of a sides show of conflict going on between the men. And eventually some part of the team did actually walk out on the project and left. So riding through all of that, not getting too bogged down in is this sexist because sometimes it wasn't as the woman, it looked as if it was sexist, but actually there were more layers of complication. So while I agree that we should call out sexism and we're better at that than we were 20 years ago, we should also just take a couple of beats and go. Is it or is it other stuff? And before I demand that, that, that, that, that, you know, I interpret this as sexism and therefore this is my truth. it because there was some stuff that happened on the expedition, which I thought of as sexist, and the guys would've said was hazing the new person? And they'd have done it to a guy. But because it involved cooking it, it so obviously seemed sexist and. Anyway, none of this was the real problem. The real problem was actually that we were trapped and stressed and not making progress, and the weather was bad. So by the time you've dug four stages down, it's like actually the problem is something else entirely.

Dolly:

Hm.

Cathy:

So the first thing I mean is just take a beat and try and understand the. Multiple layers

Dolly:

Yep.

Cathy:

before you jump to a conclusion. The other thing that I noticed from the setup was I carried the label of token in my heart, I guess much longer than the men around me carried it in retrospect, the men I was with once we got going in the mountain were like. Oh, good. She can climb. She's solid. Not a problem. Let's go. And I was still thinking, oh my God, do they think of me as a token? Have I proved my worth? Am I, am I being good enough? Long after everybody else was just, oh, we're a bunch of climbers. Let's go climbing. And I had to let go of that. And that's a me thing. I had to find my own confidence. I had to believe in the way I was being treated by the rest of my team, and I had to let Token woman go.

Dolly:

How did you,

Cathy:

And honestly, the experience just got so intense and so overwhelming that I stopped having space to think about it. then when I got to thinking about it again a bit later, I was like. All right. That's a thing that's just slipped into the past. So I think this might be one for people who have a little bit of a tendency to ruminate about things. I, I'm not much of a ruminator really. Try not to, or try and have tricks in your tool bag to help you let rumination go.'cause it may be keeping you stuck in the past about a problem that has actually dissolved. It's not there anymore.

Dolly:

Do you know, I mean, that's a, a side conversation I'd love to have, which we will just touch on lightly is rumination, because I think that's where we see a lot of people struggling with imposter syndrome and, and as you say, carrying labels far longer than the, the circumstances require. And, and you say that people who do ruminate need some tips and tricks to, to manage that. I mean, a tip and trick you had was to actually be climbing up a very difficult mountain. So your life, your, energy, your fuel, your ability to survive probably took precedent over your thinking power. So as you said, it just kind of took a backseat, but how do you think people in business spaces can. Borrow from that, to not ruminate.

Cathy:

Well, I think. There's a reason that a lot of senior executives do some kind of extreme sport, and the most common ones are marathons and Ironman.'cause they're fairly easy access road cycle racing. That's another fairly easy access one. But there are various, and I don't think it's just that they're all overachievers or that they might be, it's partly that by being. Intensely involved. As in you're trying to do it at a high level, a personal high level, rather than a world class, high level. You're trying to do it at a high level. You're trying to do something that is physically demanding, but that is also mentally challenging.'cause these extreme sports always require some kind of risk management and a good deal of mental and physical self-management. You cannot ruminate people who say that, oh, for a rest, I'm gonna sit on the sofa, or I'm sorry, but women who are like endlessly doing self care, which mostly seems to involve sitting on the sofa while painting your nails or something, it leaves you a lot of time to ruminate, to have stuff round and round and round in your head, get off the sofa, get involved in an outdoor. Act of sport where you are chasing personal achievement levels. It's good for your body, it's good for your mind. It leaves you no space to ruminate, and it will take you back to the office mentally fresher, even if you are physically tired.

Dolly:

Kathy, you're so right. I mean, so this summer, I'm, I'm sadly going through a divorce and this summer my husband took the children away for a week, which was a new experience and a lot of friends and family said, well, go on a spa, go and have a retreat. And I thought if I do that, I didn't think of the word ruminate, but I'll probably collapse. So guess what I did? I mean, I tell everyone, so they're all sick of hearing the story. I went to Morocco to learn kite surf,

Cathy:

Exactly. That is such a great response.

Dolly:

you know, it was so empowering. I'm 42, I've been saying for 10 years I'm gonna learn to kite surf. And I, did and it hurt. I nearly broke my arm. I had bruises to prove the pain. I had to get my head in the game. I had to experience frustration. I got crossed with my instructor. I yelled at him and he yelled at me. And then I got it on the last sort of three hours and I was just going, yes, I've got the bruises to prove it. And. It was so empowering and so filled me up to kind of keep me going,

Cathy:

Yes. I'd love to pick up just two quick ideas about why I really do think this is a great thing. The one of course is the self-confidence you got from it, which then translates back into other things. If you're feeling you're being ground down by your job, it's great to go away and do a sport where you go like, I've got this here, here, I'm, I'm good. But the other one, and I think this is particularly for middle-aged, thoroughly successful people, go and do something where you're a beginner. It's rarely humbling and it's rarely useful. It reminds you what the, the low level people in your own organization probably feel like. They're new, they're confused. They're getting it wrong. They're making a fool of themselves. They're failing where other people are succeeding. It won't just freshen up your brain by making you learn something new and stop you being quite so self satisfied about the level of success you've achieved in your life. It will also link you back to people. You know who are beginners in your area of expertise about how challenging it is to learn something new.

Dolly:

I love that also. I think there's a sense of, if you are a perfectionist, just nodding back to that, or someone who's very, acclaimed in a space the. The sports or the extreme experiences you used to have, you don't wanna touch them again'cause you'll only ever be worse. So it's demoralizing. So it keeps a lot of people quite stuck and immobile. They don't do physical stuff because they'll never be as good as they once were. So taking up something new is great'cause the only way is up. Right?

Cathy:

Exactly, and it's interesting. So just to say that I do walk my talk, obviously climbing has been my life, but I do less of it than I used to, partly because I am to some extent falling off the edge of a 30 year career and. Like you said, I'm never going to be as good as I once was.'cause some of it is just sheer physical strength and fitness. But I still climb, but I've also taken up other sports and I'm parti the moment I'm particularly into. Canyoning and sea kayaking. They're both travel through wilderness activities. They're both manage risk activities. They're both skilled technical activities, and I'm very much on that upward learning curve with both of them, and I find that inspiring. I find it immersive. I can see myself improving. I love the great feedback I get from that.

Dolly:

Oh, absolutely. It's funny how the conversation's taking us here because learning something to be in your body as well. We talk about all this mindfulness stuff, which I completely agree with, but being mindful is about being really present and actually doing a sport or an activity that requires you to be in the moment right there. Like when I was kite surfing, it was so present orientated. It's so good for us. Meditatively, I would say

Cathy:

I think it's very good for us, and I think it's particularly good for women and women are slightly less likely to do it, and one of the reasons is it means your body is something other than something men admire. You can look at your body in the mirror and go, these are these legs that climbed Everest. These are the arms that held up the sail on that kite surf. These are the hands that can cling to that rock face. Whatever it is, it gives you a different relationship with your body.

Dolly:

I love that because, I mean, it's funny, having a relationship with your body almost sounds like an unusual thing to consider on the podcast like this, but we are so detached from our physicality, aren't we? I often think that with our bodies. It's a bit like an ox. We're like, you know, go faster, go harder, carry more stuff. You know, get on with it rather than being integrated in it and being able to really enjoy. If you have health, what it can do. It's a privilege, isn't it? And it's about being alive. And when I coach people who are sitting at offices, or at home on their laptops not, and really believing that they haven't got time to go out, because it will take away from their productivity, even though the science says actually you can do less, you can do more in less time. If you get your kind of thinking space more effective, if you get your physical state, different people still the science isn't enough. The habit of just staying on a laptop, it's heartbreaking because it's so devoid of what the body wants. It's like going to the ox again. It's like, just stay in an environment that's gonna cr you know, crash. You, it's, it break. It's really sad, but I'm not saying it's easy to not be like that. It's just, it's sad, isn't it?

Cathy:

It is, and I mean, where success in our modern culture is. Terribly sedentary. It's all cars and planes and, office chairs. And even there, we're trapped in a single position focused for hours and hours and hours. And yet if you move, you will think more clearly. You will get fresh ideas, you will get new perspectives. I think probably the best thing anybody can do for themselves is the very least, is just get up and walk, walk briskly, and let yourself. Think over your problems, your issues, your challenges for the day while you're walking rather than while you're sitting.

Dolly:

I love that. It's so classic. It's so, so obvious, but it's great. I wanna go back to something you said about your team when you were climbing Everest and there were different dynamics and it was all, some people left, you said things. Things happen when you are trapped and you're stressed, you have to let go of things. So you let go of the mindset of being a token token woman being trapped and being stressed. Those are common human feelings in fast paced business worlds. What did you learn from being trapped and stressed about how to perform well within it?

Cathy:

A couple of ideas came out of it. One is that it's one of the key reasons for the failure of a project. Is the team spiraling into conflict and the conflict is rarely born out of stress rather than out of there being any major issues. The stress may be about lack of progress. So the lack of progress may be something you have to work on, but it's the stress and the stress responses that are making the interaction of the team so toxic and so difficult, and that's where you spiral beyond the point of saving yourselves into collapse and chaos. The next thing I noticed about stress is different people react differently, and this is going to be cultural and it's also going to be gender based, and it's worth being aware of your own stress reaction and aware that other people stress won't look like yours. So this is one for the woman. We burst into tears, that's how it goes. And I have burst into tears on the side of Everest and it doesn't feel good. But I will say bursting into tears is remarkably not very destructive. You look like a bit of an idiot while you are sobbing and other people are uncomfortable. But that's about it. That's not that bad. And frankly, as anyone who's had a good cry knows it takes about five minutes. And then on the whole, you're probably gonna feel better afterwards and you could probably pull yourself together and go like, okay, let's get back to the, to the issue here. I've watched men on the side of Everest have a fist fight. And that was, that was the, the issue was. Negligible, non-existent. This was sheer stress. Now that is damaging, that's gonna get you up on an assault charge if you weren't on the side of Everest. So that's another reaction to stress. That's a really damaging one. I once had A-A-C-E-O, at a talk I was giving ask me. think it's okay for people to show emotion at the workplace. Don't, don't you agree with me? And I was like, oh, I know what he means. He wants me to say it's okay for him to shout at his subordinates because when he gets emotional, he gets angry.

Dolly:

Yeah.

Cathy:

And we're now at a point where we're prepared to acknowledge that anger is an emotion rather than somehow a rational reaction. Where, you know, tears, for example, is an irrational reaction. They're both an emotional reaction. He wants to be told he can shout at his subordinates. Which I don't think you should. And my answer was, if you're gonna say emotion can be showed like that in your workplace, you've gotta say that bursting into tears is just as valid as shouting at somebody. And that, all things are allowed and won't be penalized. He didn't like that answer. He didn't want, he didn't, he didn't want to know that his shouting was the equivalent of, of some

Dolly:

Of someone bursting

Cathy:

best to get to tears. All of them are just a stress reaction, and we should give ourselves and other people some grace. Within limits. I'm not saying that they have grace to shout at you too much. And we should also be aware for ourselves and our teams, what, how do they tend to react to stress, and what are the management techniques we can have in the ruck sack to try and reduce the stress and make the stress reaction minimally damaging to the

Dolly:

Well, there's two questions I have on the back of that. One of them is what do we have in the rucksack? What are the tools? And the other question I have is how do we know? How do we make sure we're not rationalizing our stress reactions

Cathy:

Yes. That's a very fair one. Well, let's just take the toolbox.

Dolly:

do the tools.

Cathy:

Yeah. The, the tools. Tools in the rucksack.'cause I always think of life as being like this. You approach any situation with a set of skills, tools, tricks, techniques, the breathing, breathing and counting. It's what you would tell your 2-year-old. It's what you should tell your CEO. It's the same deal. Big breath in hold, big breath out, counting down before you do anything. Those are the quickest and simplest ones. The breathing thing is astonishing. If you ever have the time, you can actually sit there, do the breathing and watch your pulse rate lower as you are doing it. If you can get attuned to your body, you can actually feel your stress reactions lowering as you breathe your way into a state of calm. I think my other one is just kind of self-awareness. Know how you tend to react to stress. If you really think it's, and it can help to just warn people like, oh, as a woman, sorry, this is the kind of thing that can bring me to tears. It's not a problem. I mean, if you're the kind of guy who gets angry, you. At least tell people I need to walk down the corridor for five minutes

Dolly:

Mm-hmm.

Cathy:

and then I'll come back into the room,

Dolly:

Mm-hmm.

Cathy:

go and walk, walk your anger out, something like that. So know yourself realistically and possibly help to talk people through what you're about to do, and then you will rejoin the meeting in a minute. I think that can help. When we are fooling ourselves, when we're trying to say that our stress reaction is justified and other people should take it, empathy. Can you take a minute and just think what it's like to be at the receiving end of this, and work back from there? And empathy is a tool that we actually need to work on. And I think it's high but hard for successful executives because you often have to be fairly ruthless about business decisions. And you do have to think about people as assets, and

Dolly:

Yeah.

Cathy:

that's, this is part of what this gets difficult. People become numbers, people become assets, people become negatives or positives on your balance sheet. Any kind of practice where you step outside and reactivate your empathy muscle so you can remember what it's like to be at the receiving end of the stress reaction or of the corporate directive, or of the downsizing or whatever it is that you're doing, I think helps you be a better leader.

Dolly:

Yeah. That's interesting you say empathy is a tool, because I think that's a really insightful paradigm shift on how to. Acts as empathy because a tool is something external that we choose to use. Whereas if it's, empathy as a state, it's almost like this magic dust again of like, well, I've just got natural empathy. You know, in this Clifton strength finder, it's one of the strengths, isn't it? It's high up for me, whereas it might be lower down for you and therefore it's, it kind of makes us think it is this very dust of a gift you either have or haven't got, but. That's where language breaks down. When, when it's not about the word in and of itself, it's about what it encapsulates and how to utilize it. And it is a tool, to use. But when people are, you know, stressed, trapped, like you know too well, how do you remember to pick up the tool of empathy when the stakes are really fast and high.

Cathy:

I think let's start with the idea of, trapped,

Dolly:

Yeah.

Cathy:

because there's no doubt that I think people feel most trapped when they feel they have no control. Everything is happening to them and they can't change any of it. So I, I mean, I'm, I'm not a counselor, but, uh. What I would do with myself, what I would say to a friend would be to try and create a little more space in your trapped position, which means finding anything where you can take control, a little bit of control, even if, I don't know, getting up from the desk and walking away to pull yourself a cup of coffee, choosing to stop a stressful conversation. We're gonna take a break and we'll come back to this in five minutes. Anything where you've slightly expanded your space so you're not completely trapped, you've got a little bit of control, which means you've given yourself a little bit of room to maneuver and in that little bit of room to maneuver, now you have a moment to start trying to think. So the next thing you want to do is create five minutes of thinking space for yourself. And in that thinking space, now you can start to go. What's in my tool bag?

Dolly:

Yep.

Cathy:

What have I used before in a difficult situation like this? That helped. And now I do quite a lot of rescue training because I do extreme sports. For example, I recently did a qualification in sea kayaking. And one of the things that can happen, you're with a group of people. Somebody's in a sea kayak, a huge wave has turned them over. It's washed them up against rocks. There are other waves coming back at them, you know, echoing back off the rocks. So it's muddled up. They're upside down. They, they're possibly, they haven't pulled their spray deck. They might be drowning upside down. You've gotta react in seconds.

Dolly:

Oh my gosh.

Cathy:

And we have a mnemonic. There are a whole bunch of mnemonics, but one of them is stop. It's basically stop think because people who rush in without thinking will do the wrong thing. Even though somebody's possibly drowning in front of you, you are supposed to stop and think, what has gone wrong? What's the environment like? What are my options? What will I do? I think we can take this into the corporate world as well.

Dolly:

Yeah.

Cathy:

So it's stop. Create a little space, create a little bit of control, and then think about your toolbox and at that point, and if you are at the low end of empathy on the spectrum, it's consciously remind yourself to empathize with the people you are dealing with. Take a moment to think what it must be like for them in this situation before you reengage. And I do think you talk about the fairy dust. I like that idea.'cause it's like you've either got it or you don't, but it's not true. All these things are a spectrum, and I'm not saying that the person with no empathy at all can be turned into an empath. They can't. But what we can do is move ourselves on the spectrum, widen our capacity, and your challenge is to know yourself well enough to know what your weaknesses and strengths are, and then to look at widening your capacity. Where you've got a weakness that is playing against you, in your

Dolly:

Yeah, there's a quote you'll love, I wanna make sure we get the o and the P of stop, by the way. But there's a, a, a thing I love, which is, I don't know who quotes it, but I use it a lot. Be yourself, comma more of comma with skill. And it's beautiful, right? So it's like if you are someone that's really direct and really, you know, really kind of just loves to just crack on with it, be more like that with, you know, more of it. But the skill part is bring the empathy with you. The skill part is to stop a little bit more often, to think more, isn't it? As opposed to making us all an empath and something we're not. It's just bringing the skillful tool toolbox items with us.

Cathy:

Exactly. So it navigates skillfully. You'll have a set of weaknesses, you'll have a set of strengths, understand the power and the drawbacks of those. So quite a lot of this is just asking people to have done a fair amount of self-reflection. About who they are, what they value, what they're good at, what they're not good at. And that's not always easy. So again, it can be a real help to lean into any opportunity to get feedback, whether it's through therapy, whether it's through anything offered by, your company through 60 degree review. Whether it's through, as I said, being a beginner in a new activity.'cause then you're likely to have a trainer giving you feedback about where you're doing well and where you're not.

Dolly:

What is the O in the P for?

Cathy:

Oh God, I knew you were gonna ask me this.

Dolly:

If we can't remember the And the T is just good enough. You've passed the test. It doesn't matter now.

Cathy:

Because I was going Stop, think

Dolly:

can I guess? Can I guess,

Cathy:

completely blank.

Dolly:

Okay. I would think that O is options.

Cathy:

Yes.

Dolly:

Would it be?

Cathy:

I think it's something like stop think options perform.

Dolly:

perform. Yes. Play it out. Yeah,

Cathy:

So stop, don't rush in, think what's going on. The key in the thinking, what are my different options? And of course what will happen if I apply those different options. And only then do you perform or plan or whatever it is.

Dolly:

Yeah, yeah. But there's such a focus on that because we're so disparate in life, aren't we? With, you know, everyone thinks they've got a DHD when they haven't. They're just distracted in thought. And because we are not stopping to think. And you know, something I talk about with coaching is get a coach. I call it aeration chamber time. Like just get into a different, decant yourself into a different space to be allowed to think like. Almost let your, your dog off a lead like you, your, your brain unclip it from the lead of life and let it, you know, if you take your dog for a walk without a lead, it just goes wherever it wants to go, doesn't it? And sometimes our brain just needs a chance to just think and be, be untamed in order to then get the focus again.

Cathy:

Absolutely, and it works at every level. That's big picture thinking. Give your cha brain a chance to refocus, to come back with more creative ideas, or it's literally when somebody said something and you are about to make a really nasty reply that is gonna sink the relationship. Don't stop. Bite your lip. Count to three before you say the next level. Don't send the email, walk around the office for five minutes and come back to it before you press it. At every level we just, we react a little too fast, I think, to many things.

Dolly:

Yes, for sure we do. As we come into land, Kathy, I am loving this conversation by the way. What is your household item that you have brought in that exemplifies extraordinary leadership

Cathy:

Right. I'm going to show you. And it's, it's, it, it runs straight off what we've been talking about. Okay. This is a cup of decent European espresso. Thank you very much. Not your tubs of American Joe, and this is kind of the personification of stop and think.

Dolly:

Huh?

Cathy:

Walk down to the kitchen. Make a nice, small, beautifully flavored sip of coffee.

Dolly:

Yeah.

Cathy:

Stand there and drink it and think this is my kind of personification. It's not so, and I'm not thinking of it as like, oh, it's the buzz of the caffeine. It's not about that. It's the ritual. Of making something beautifully flavored in, in, you know, European style in a small amount, and then savoring it while you take that stop and reset, stop and think, stop and enjoy, stop and just be fully in this moment of your life. So yeah, here's the good European coffee.

Dolly:

Gee, it's so inspiring. I'm gonna give myself an espresso and do just that because a word you said there about savoring and I think that in and of itself is a way of, to me savoring is by being present, by stopping and thinking you are getting the most out of the moment in life. And that's not ordinary. It's ordinary to rush, and that is extra. To ring out life like a flannel in the moment. And I don't do it enough, but I feel invited into that, so thank you.

Cathy:

Oh, I, I, I love, I love doing that. People obsess about the summit of Everest, but actually it's the moments where you stop anywhere on the mountain and just look round you, and you go like, oh my. God, look at this place. Look where I am. Look how far I've come, and you don't worry about what needs to happen next. That's for another moment. Just right now it's just like, my God, this is my life and I'm living it.

Dolly:

Because actually there's something about I once heard, and I love this as a philosophy of this moment is the perfect moment. Like right now, if you can, even in pain and suffering, even in grief, you are feeling life. You are experiencing something, and that is. I find that a very stilling and very rich way of living, to go. This is, this is the perfect moment. Even in the midst of all sorts of troubles, it's, it's beautiful, isn't it? So that's, yeah. Kathy, I cannot thank you enough for your time. It has been such an honor to have you on the show. And we will put in the show notes all the ways of getting in touch with you, and your book and your keynote. Should you, people want keynote with you, um, which I would love to hear you live. Um, but thank you so much for joining us.

Cathy:

It's been my pleasure.

Dolly:

Thank you.