Episode 11 - How to Be a Whole Leader in a Divided World with Dr Louise Austin

What kind of leadership does the world need now?

In this deep and wide-ranging conversation, Dr Louise Austin—psychologist, senior lecturer, arts-based researcher, and integrative psychotherapist—joins me to explore what it truly means to be a whole leader in today’s complex, divided world.

We delve into topics rarely discussed in organisational life: the shadow side of leadership, how shame and power dynamics play out in teams, the role of reflective practice, and why genuine transformation always begins within. Louise brings her rich cross-disciplinary perspective to illuminate how depth psychology and arts-based methods can unlock new ways of leading with courage, connection, and compassion.

This episode is part of our Undiscussables series—shining a light on the hidden forces that shape leadership and workplace culture. If you're tired of surface-level talk about leadership and ready to explore the work that truly matters, this one’s for you.

Connect with Louise: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-louise-austin-b2445156/

If you’re a woman leader who’s ever doubted your confidence, explore my programme “Exploding the Confidence Myth” → https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/exploding-the-confidence-myth-tickets-1617750698889?aff=oddtdtcreator

🔗 Connect with me: marygregory.com

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✨ Produced by Mary Gregory Leadership Coaching

Transcript

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Hello and And welcome to this week's episode of the She Leads Collective podcast. We are in a time of global crisis and deep division. So what kind of leadership does the world need now? In this episode, I'm delighted to be joined by my long-term friend and colleague, Dr. Louise Austin, for what I hope will be a rich and honest and deeply reflective conversation, exploring what it means to be a whole leader in today's fractured world. Louise is a psychologist, senior lecturer, arts-based researcher and integrative psychotherapist. Her work bridges the organisational and therapeutic worlds and she brings profound insight into the inner dimensions of leadership that often go ignored. Together, we're intending to explore some of the undiscussables of modern leadership, how shame, power, fear and vulnerability shape how we lead, relate and show up. We'll be talking about the role of the unconscious, the pressure to perform, the risks of disconnection and why genuine transformation always starts from within. This won't be a conversation about techniques or performance metrics. It's an invitation to slow down, look inward and consider a different kind of leadership, one grounded in relationships, reflection and responsibility. let's get going hello louise and thank you for being here hi mary it's really good to see you i i'm finding it hard to believe that it's been such a long time since we've seen each other and we go back such a long way um to co-facilitating with um cosmopolitan i remember in the day all those sorts of things but you have moved on and grown and developed so much since those days and i'd like you just to spend the first part of this conversation sharing a bit about your story Well first of all I'm just full of memories of you and I standing up together running workshops for Cosmopolitan on presentation skills for women and assertiveness for women and that was probably over 30 years ago. Oh goodness you're making me feel old. So it's been a long journey hasn't it and I think yeah my work has evolved over the years for many years the focus was as you know on leadership development and then I trained as an integrative art psychotherapist and so that meant I sat between two worlds of doing leadership development in large global organisations and then having this other completely different life as an art psychotherapist. What drew you towards becoming an integrative art therapist? I think I've always had a fascination in psychology and I've always done arts-based experiential learning. So I think the two together really appealed to me. And also I just wanted to change a career. Yes. Actually, what happened was after four years of training as an integrative arts psychotherapist, I had a vision which sent me off on a totally different track, which was I was so blown away about how to work in depth in a way that's really transformative. Yes. Using the arts. So I thought this would be great in business. Fantastic. So actually, I kept the two worlds going. Yes. So until... Recently, I worked in global organisations doing leadership development, but really bringing in psychology into the learning journey. Yes. And also doing that through arts-based methods. Lovely. And then just before COVID, as you know, I then decided to do a doctorate. Yes, you did. And the doctorate for me was like bringing the two sides of my world together. together of clinical thinking and organizational and transformative learning programs yes yes um because what i was exploring was the educator learner relationship from a psychodynamic perspective already you're blowing my mind and you're probably blowing the mind of many of our listeners as you speak but before we go down that there's something i wanted to hold with uh for a moment which is when you were when you were working with big organizations in leadership development, bringing in the art therapy and supporting leaders' development through using creative media. Can you give us an example of the sorts of things you did? So it could be anything from, let's offer something really simple, which was inviting leaders to think in metaphor. So if I ask, who are you as a leader? I'm going to get something very descriptive and probably coming from the place of ego. Yes. This is how much I know yes if I ask the question what are you like as a leader and what does it feel like to be a leader in this organization something really different opens up if I then say if you want to explore the dynamics of your team we can talk about it but if you were to make an image of what you imagine it feels like to be in this team, that image gives very different information to just that top line surface explanation. It does. It brings out things that wouldn't ordinarily get expressed. Exactly. So I can see it straight away how it contributes to a much deeper level of experience and therefore opens up that possibility of transformation as well. And I think it's not only just deeper. I mean, I've just been recently running a workshop actually with a group of therapists this weekend. But one of the things that came up was someone said to me, oh, I expected to come here and watch, look at a PowerPoint, take notes and sort of be fed information. She said, I never expected it to be experiential or to be using the arts. And what she said was it immediately brings in the body. It becomes an embodied way of exploring our experience. Yes. And that can throw up all kinds of surprises and insights. Yes, absolutely. So tell us then a bit more about your PhD and what you studied in your doctorate. Well, I think first of all, I'll start with the experience of doing a PhD. First of all, when people say, would you recommend it? And I'd say it's definitely not for everyone because it's a very lonely journey. But also, For me, it was utterly transformative because I was really forced to look at a subject in depth and to go even further. And I think a lot of people that do a PhD come out thinking, gosh, I feel really humble about what I don't know. So you don't come out of a PhD feeling an expert. You sort of come out with a real sort of humility. Wow, that's such a different perspective from someone with a PhD gets the title doctor and immediately you Oh, yes, they are an expert. But the fact that you actually end up thinking there's so much more than I don't know. it's a different turn from rather than me having a box of techniques that I'm very good at and I deploy those techniques and from doing that I do something which is transformative it's saying let's look at our relationship lovely and what's happening in the relationship now what that means and this is why it was so personally transformative for me is even now when you and I are having a conversation I'm thinking about our relationship is what happens when we put ourselves into the alchemical pot of transformation rather than sitting on the outside that we really realise that we are the ones that can either block transformation in others or we can be a help simply through being in the relationship rather than being out of relationship so this is very meaningful what you're sharing here because everything does happen I I believe leadership is a relational activity. So everything happens in relation to others. As a leader, it's very hard to be a leader if you can't relate and can't take people with you and work collaboratively with them. But in terms of the quality that you're talking about, there's a certain need as a leader to be mindful, to be conscious and to be intentional around your relationships. And yet in so many organisations, it's so, so busy. How many leaders do you feel, you know, are able to actually give that level of consciousness to their relationships? I think that's a big problem we're facing. I think we're facing a crisis of leadership. And I think that we live in a world and I'm probably going to focus on the western world because that's the world I know better but I think in organisations there is a real drive for productivity for skills based learning for measuring competence and everything which is observable so if you do lots and you're really busy and you're really productive you'll get a lot of points for that because that's what the organisation is looking for. Relationships are messy and they're more complex and you're more likely to fail. So it's downplayed as not important because performance takes the role of king in an organisation rather than people. And this, for me personally, is what creates a crisis. So a book I was reading recently called Workplace Vulnerability was just talking about some of the issues that people are facing in work from burnout classic one from leaving because you have a really bad relationship with your boss from abuse within organizations from bad decisions being made willful blindness and people being scared to call it out so there are issues there that are not being tackled with because the leader thinks the best way to be a leader is to be productive and there's something missing there is there's there's a disconnect because it's about i want everyone to perform and to be productive. And the gap is actually it starts with me and how I'm being with others to create that performance and that production. Well, so I call it whole leadership. Right. Becoming a whole leader. And it's sort of an evolution from being an authentic leader. And I think my experience of in particular running programmes with people who are just moving into leadership, I genuinely believe that there are many leaders who choose to become a leader because they actually want to be a whole leader want to be an authentic leader yes so when I'll ask the question you know what motivated you to become a leader most of them will say people I love working with people I love watching people grow so actually the aspiration is completely there it's then what happens when you get the job title and then you'll be measured against productivity and performance so I think for me what a whole leader is is a leader that has taken the really brave courageous step to do their own work to do their own inner work and so that almost feels paradoxical that in order to focus on the team that you're running and the people that you're working with the requirement then is to look within to yourself and it is through you doing that kind of depth work and developing your self awareness and self-knowledge that can really help you attend to the quality of relationships you and your team and what's that's bringing up for me I absolutely agree that the work as a leader has to start with yourself first but I've also experienced leaders who are resistant to doing that work you can think of one leader in particular who brought me in to fix his team he tried his best to do what he could do but he wanted me to fix them and when I asked him what about where you're at he was completely Completely don't want to go there. So how do you engage leaders who may be that fearful and that unwilling to enter into working on themselves? Well, I'll take it back to myself because I'm a leader. I run groups. I run different groups. So I step into that leadership role. So I'll bring in my own resistances. Of course, I feel resistant to looking at my own material because let's say something, I'm running a group and something goes wrong. My ego part will go, gosh, they're so resistant. They're resistant to change. And so it's easy for me to look at the group and say they're resistant. Yes. What becomes harder is my fear of addressing my own vulnerability, my own mistakes, my own failures, and taking responsibility for that. It's much easier to blame others. So of course we get resistant. And I think in particular, what is not addressed often when we start to look at what does it mean to be a whole leader it means we have to look at two very uncomfortable topics the first of all is shame the second one is power and I think the two can set the other off so for me to look at doing my own inner work I may touch on what makes me feel a sense of shame of maybe I didn't get it right with the group maybe I made a mistake maybe it was something I said which caused a rupture in the group so that could take me to a place of shame but also when I think about power when I start to do my own inner work I've got to look at power and what's my relationship with power and that can be uncomfortable. What do you think's at the root of that discomfort? I'm not necessarily asking you to share your own story here just the sorts of examples you've come across. So I think what comes to mind when you ask that question Mary is first of all what do we get from our own power? Is the allure of being in a powerful position and the privilege that we have when we step into that leadership role, which we might deny by saying, oh, we're all friends here or we're all equal. Well, we're not. Because in that moment, I have a position of power that can feel very uncomfortable. So that's the feeling of being powerful. The other flip side of it is the terror of feeling powerless, of losing control, of thinking a group doesn't receive I'm thinking, if we're really going to talk contextually, Keir Starmer at the moment, with the bill, the welfare bill, and reading the newspapers, what has he been called? He's lost control of the parliament. He's a weak man. He's not a strong man. So a leader who doesn't have power is considered weak. Is considered weak. Yeah. And is that the reality? Is he really weak? Because you could say from the perspective of, you know, we get the story that's reported in the paper, and he's labeled weak, but that doesn't make him personally weak. Well, and this is why it's such an interesting discussion where we start to get into power, because there's the having power, having levels of authority, which means I can do things that other people can't, for example. If I'm a leader in a company, I can hire and fire. That is a reality. But it's also a quality that we assign to the word power. So if power means strong, it means if I'm seen as powerless means I'm weak I'm just curious because it's the whole thing about effective leadership today is considered leaders having the ability to be vulnerable and yet vulnerability is often associated with being weak as well so it's a real conundrum it really is and it's something that I've really explored in myself so for example I wrote an article called the wounded facilitator looking at my own vulnerability and to really explore what do I really mean when I'm talking about the word vulnerable and actually my thesis was exploring the the leader's vulnerability and so what do we mean by vulnerable and we've got different definitions but for me from an experiential you know experiencing vulnerable vulnerability is first of all experiencing how we admitting we get impacted you know things hurt us I'm thinking of Keir Starmer now I bet he's not feeling great today but all Also, there's a robustness that comes from dealing with our own emotional experiences and acknowledging it and naming it. There's a strength that comes from a leader standing in front of an organisation and naming emotional his or her or their emotional experience. That means they've done the work in even to get to that place of being able to name emotional experience. And that gives permission. then for the rest of the organization to do that but that's a journey it absolutely is and a journey that many leaders wouldn't do not go on which brings us back to the world today yeah you know that this whole theme of our conversation is how to be a whole leader in a divided world the world today is full of challenges full of crises and i've heard it said of the leadership that we see today is obsolete for what the world needs I'm just wondering what your views are on that oh gosh a lot I think I've been thinking a lot about you know that we live in a poly crisis yes and actually to such an extent and when we say poly crisis for me it's everything from climate change and the impact of that to increasing division around poverty and privilege who the haves and the have nots through to war happening in the world world today and it's what Otto Schama calls the narrative of destruction and a paradigm of separation and for me I cannot do any of the work that I do without framing it within a polycrisis to ground it in the reality of what we're facing the wake-up call the story of the polycrisis is one of division and increasing division so taking it back to whole leadership and this is for me and the work I do as well, is that everything I do is about how do we foster connection in a divided world. Now, for me, the tools I use or the knowledge I use is psychology, depth psychology, and using arts-based methods as a method. But the purpose is that. It's about connection and attending to the quality of relationships. And unless we deal with, move from division to connection, the polycrisis will continue Yeah, absolutely. work out a lot better. Well, and I agree with that. I've just been doing a training with Otto Schama, who came up with the Theory U, a real systems perspective of working with organisations. But his latest one is on presencing. And he began with a great question, which is, why are we still producing the results that no one wants, and it doesn't work? Why are we doing that? And it's a real sort of, yes, why are we doing that? And so I think there are a number of thought leaders around the world, of which I would name Otto Schama as one of them, Marianne Williamson is another, that are saying that the leadership that we have now, not only is it obsolete, but it is not helping us deal with a polycrisis. In fact, it's created a polycrisis. And so for me, in any group, I bring in the word polycrisis to remind us that's the work that we're doing. We're working within the context of a crisis and that's our reality absolutely and what I'm processing there is also we're talking about this as being how to be a whole leader in a world that is so divided but there's also how can we connect more with our loving side and be a more loving leader rather than an ego driven fear based leader which again I think is what fuels the division if you look at all the division that's going on it's all very much fear based and all of that is ego so what what are your thoughts on how we can create a more loving approach to our leadership well it may come in as a slightly different angle to sort of um and sort of work towards loving because when i think about what is a whole leader and i mentioned earlier about what is an authentic leader an authentic leader for me when i'm being an authentic leader that my measuring stick would be when i um notice an undiscussable and i name it i bring what What's the elephant in the room? What's been marginalized and what's been avoided? And I name it. So that for me is an authentic leader. A whole leader for me is different because that's where I go into depth psychology. A whole leader recognizes that there is another part of the psyche, which is the unconscious. All the aspects of myself that I deny or I don't know that has been pushed down. So the ego part is the face that I put out there. That's my personas. the acceptable part but the unconscious can be the the dumping ground for the parts that i deny in order to be accepted in a culture so when we say what does it mean to do the work as a whole leader it means going down into the depths which is not a popular route to go in this world of fast-paced working to take it slow and to see what's the unknown in me and how can I make that known so what does that mean where love is concerned it means that I have to look at the parts of myself that I don't like that I have repressed and forgotten and to do work that makes that conscious and that to me is what love is all about it's accepting our darkness and our light yes and until I accept it in myself I can't bring that out into my outer relationships for me at 64 I see that as a lifetime's work it's a lifetime's work and I think something that you and I have spoken about before when we're talking about what does it mean to be a whole leader I I think that's a job for us all. I think we're all leaders. We can all be agents of change, which I think is what Marianne Williamson talked about. And our job is to start with self-compassion. To start with us, it always comes back to self first. Whenever there's anything that's like, oh, I don't like what's going on over here, or I don't like what they are doing, it's actually look to yourself first before you even consider addressing what might be going on first. I mean, I do know of an organisation, actually, who their ethos around leading teams is that if a team isn't performing, they invite the leader of that team to go and have a look at how they're being and what's going on for them. And that's quite unusual. I think that's really powerful. I wish more organisations took that approach where it's like, don't keep pointing the finger at others, but actually look at how you're being as a leader of that team that might be creating the circumstances where people aren't performing. I think that's very powerful. Well, that's the word I was going to use. I think that's really powerful work to do and you know it's interesting as i'm hearing you i can imagine the counter argument coming up which is oh that sounds very self-blaming so it's not your fault actually it's my fault and and of course that's not what you myself and other people are doing this kind of work are talking about it's not moving from blame to self-blame but it's around ownership and there's a lot of personal power in that when we own our own Now, I think an organization that becomes a whole organization. So going from whole leadership to whole organization, create spaces, reflective spaces where they can sit around and say, what is going on? And so everybody is exploring their stuff collaboratively and together. But how common do you find that in organisations today? I think it's something quite new in the sense of the last three years as part of my thesis, you know, how I've disseminated my thesis has been running reflective practice groups, arts-based reflective practice groups. The feedback I get is this feels new. And I will also get feedback like this feels very counter-cultural because we're doing the opposite to the culture of the organization which is slowing down going deep focusing on our relationships and bringing our emotional process into the space and that is not met with oh this feels very common we do this all the time it feels oh gosh this feels new and i've also had it feels uncomfortable and feel that's exactly that because people are so used to do do doing all the time to suddenly have that space to reflect like well what do I do with this space and I know for myself doing my own reflective practice myself of course it brings up uncomfortable stuff because we've got time to think about things and then what comes up are things that we've not been looking at we've not been addressing because we haven't given time for it so for example in the groups that I run and they're quite small groups often the starting point is this is going to be fun as in oh thank goodness I get time to have some time to slow down and and rest and be grounded and but actually what comes up is oh and then really uncomfortable material comes up that we haven't been addressing or thinking about when we turn the lens back on ourselves we might then be facing and confronting material that is uncomfortable and could feel hazardous so yeah it reflects effective practice sounds quite gentle doesn't it it does but actually it's it's tough work yeah it's doing the work well it's getting you to look at yourself and do that what what needs to be done for yourself and and that's often what we want to avoid or resist it's much easier to put it onto somebody else isn't it well and it's much easier and it's much easier to call it woo woo yeah i mean where did that word come from woo woo yeah what people find hardest to do which is looking at themselves is is almost almost dismissed as being well we had it all of our work together mary soft skills yes yes and you and i soft and fluffy oh you and i would be saying okay now let's see how soft it is when people at the end of workshops with us would go that was really hard yeah i absolutely get that and i want to move on because i want to talk about whole leadership again and bring our focus there a whole leader is someone who's who is okay with discussing the undiscussable because I think some of the challenges organisations face particularly if they want people to perform and people to be engaged is that they don't necessarily have those conversations or talk about the things that need to be talked about because undiscussables are a more in-depth conversation and as you mentioned earlier organisations are very good at just skimming the surface how can we get or support leaders and develop cultures in organisations that will make it more accessible for them to talk about the undiscussables I mean this is where trust and relationship comes in I mean for example for me and I'm sure for you working as a coach and working with groups is without basic trust no one's going to discuss anything I wouldn't you know if I was in a group where I felt unsafe or a team I am not going to discuss the undiscussable because it may have ramifications I may lose my job for example. So basic trust has to be the foundation and without that there's no point going there because you actually create a dangerous organization by forcing people to discuss the undiscussables for example having a whistle blowing policy in place which actually is not a safe process where the whistleblower is then found out to be a whistleblower and then loses their jobs but then become blacklisted in an industry so trust has to be fundamental and then a this is where the trust comes I believe the trust comes from knowing that senior leaders have done the work it always goes back to that I will trust somebody if I know that everything they are saying they have done before me so if they are inviting emotional intelligence as a key aspect of culture the first question I would ask is how has the senior leadership team done work on that and if they feel that that's not necessary for them then my argument would be you'll not get the culture change that you're hoping for because they're not bringing it alive in their own behaviour it comes back to their own behaviour but also I just want to flag because for our listeners actually what we mean by undiscussables I mean you referred to something there you didn't actually name an example but you're referring to something that maybe was big and meaty that needed to be addressed and therefore somebody blows the whistle on it but also an undiscussable is anything that could be a withhold so you know i use the example that you know some of the team stuff i do you might find the ceo favored one team member over another which caused resentment on the team now that sound might to many might think well that's just a small thing but that's absolutely the sort of thing that if it doesn't get surfaced and cleared up will hamper the team's performance even the little things it's being mindful of those micro moments and how you're showing up as a leader how you're treating different people on your team and how that impacts the whole team. And as a holistic leader, what you're suggesting is we have that level of consciousness, that willingness to notice, recognise for ourselves why we might be doing that and heal what we might need to heal as well. And I think as you're saying that, and that's really helpful, isn't it, about grounding in day-to-day team reality. Yes. is how a leader brings that into the open. And I came across something I was reading the other day and I thought I'm going to remember that, which is a very simple intervention, which is what is the most difficult question we are not asking in this space right now? What a fantastic question. That's your undiscussable. Yes. What is the most difficult issue that we are doing everything to avoid addressing? Yes. right now in this space and so going back to your example that you brought in it could be actually the most uncomfortable difficult question that is happening right now is why are you favouring this person over the rest of the team that's my most difficult question I'm bringing into this space so it takes real courage and that takes courage yeah and it will own those questions will only ever be asked if whoever is holding the power goes first or whoever isn't holding the power is very very brave is very brave because when you don't have the power and you take that stance then it may feel like you're going into dangerous territory but not if there's trust I mean the whole work that has been done on psychological safety is if there's psychological safety that makes it much more likely to happen have those conversations and the challenging thing about psychological safety which is sometimes forgotten when people talk about it psychological safety is built when people take risks and in my experience and certainly for me and i'm sure for you when you're running groups when you're stepping going back into when you're stepping into that leadership role unless you take the risks first so i'm always going back to that leader always goes first unless you take that risk first why would anyone else do it I'm going to move us on slightly because you know the purpose of this podcast is all about getting the conversation going around gender equity and how masculine and feminine energies and that I believe that we all men and women all possess a mixture of those energies where does whole leadership fit in to that conversation well when I approach that subject I will hold my daughter in mind who is in her 20s and moves in a circle where people identify themselves as non-binary gender fluid and polyamorous so it's been a whole new so I've learnt more about gender from my children than I think for all the reading I've done around what does it mean to be a feminist so I'm bringing her into the midst here when we approach that question. When I did my thesis I came at it from a perspective of you Jungian psychology and certainly from Jungian psychology's perspective there's this whole notion of male and female energies that Jung called the animus which is the male energy and anima which is the female energy and rightly so that was an aspect of his conceptual scheme that has been pulled apart by feminists because the danger is gender essentialism which is strength becomes positioned as a male quality and emotion and emotional intelligence becomes a female quality. What we're learning is to approach this in a non-binary way, is to take away the gender and focus on the qualities so we can all be loving. It is not something which is assigned to a particular gender. So what for me is going back to the whole leader is experience. exciting actually is that we are made up of a pluralistic universe of multiple qualities and it doesn't need to be assigned to gender it is the who we are I find that freeing to hear because you know what runs through my mind is this whole thing about when a man behaves assertively he's considered a leader when a woman behaves assertively she's considered bossy wouldn't that be wonderful if actually any of these qualities are for all genders whatever gender you are wouldn't it be fantastic to get to that day where you're not labelled as because you're a woman and you're assertive you become bossy well and then we have to and this is where criticality comes in yes you know this has been my journey I would say probably the last 10 years of really thinking about what does it mean to be a feminist and how to be a feminist in a patriarchal world and a divided world yes it does mean that you become the person who says can I just pick up on that word you just used yes yes I noticed that I was referred to in joking terms of oh Louise has been bossy so to be the one who goes well actually can we explore the word bossy then sets up another level which is oh now Louise is picking up on everything yes but we have to we have to we really have to pay attention to to those labels that come towards us, but also because this is internalized patriarchy, how we then might assign it to other women. I've got a son and a daughter. I have learned firsthand that I've done it myself. I've done it myself. So it's a journey and it's a hard journey to take to start to pick apart all of these equalities that we're assigning to different people. And I think from my experience, I probably get it wrong more than right. And that's why the self-compassion is so important. Yeah, because otherwise you won't do the work. Because we're all just learning this. Yeah, we're all newbies to this really. So I'm really mindful we've covered some really gorgeous topics today. We've gone into quite a lot of depth. And the theme is, you know, how to be a leader in a divided world. So I want to just start moving towards a close here by inviting you to summarise what are some of the things people could actually take on that would help them move towards being a more whole leader? I think if you ask me that every single day for a year, I'd give you a different answer. So I think given our conversation leading up to this, I am going to quote the book I brought in for you, which is by a female activist and lawyer, human rights lawyer and many other things, Valerie Corr, who wrote a book called See No Stranger. In a time of rage, how do we lead with love and I've only just started reading it so I'm not going to say too much but the first opening is a statement which she says begin with wonder if you wonder about people and you approach them with curiosity in a way of openness and a desire to learn about every single person that you meet with wonder which is of course what children do you can then move on to the second part which is the brave part which is you are a part of me that i'm yet to know wow which means in our opponents in people that we find difficult or challenging situations to imagine that we are part of a whole which is the whole leadership part means i take ownership for those ruptures in relationship yes i have a part to play so that part that we're seeing or experiencing in someone i mean i can think of people that irritate me for example it's like what am i not owning in myself exactly is the work that i haven't done on myself yet exactly because that's actually quite a gift even though at the time you might be feeling irritated yeah It's a gift that they are presenting something to you that you can then go and look at. And that's doing the work. It is doing the work. That is so powerful. And I love the whole thing about wonder and curiosity because that immediately suggests to me suspending judgment. Exactly. And it's judgment that causes a division. That's ego again, isn't it? Exactly. Gosh, Louise, really powerful stuff. And thank you. I love the conversation. And we're having an important conversation for what is going on. on in the world we talked about poly crisis and it's these kind of conversations that matter yes absolutely because each of us has the power to make a difference in our zone of influence I guess or wherever we are you know we're all agents of change as you mentioned earlier so yes I think a really important conversation for us all to get that we can all make a difference thank you Mary if people want to connect with you where can they connect with you I'm on LinkedIn as Dr Louise Austin fantastic if anyone wants to find out more about Louise connect with her on LinkedIn thank you thank you so much thank you so much for listening to the She Leads Collective podcast if this episode resonated with you follow the show or share it with a friend and leave a quick review below or leave us a comment change happens through conversation so let's keep this one going listen out for the next episode and join me as we keep lifting the lid on the stories that matter take care and keep leading with heart