Forged By Trust Podcast → on Building a Healthy Workplace Culture

welcome to the forged by trust podcast i’m your host robin drake i am the founder and ceo of people formula a leadership and communication strategies company as well as the retired head of the fbi counter intelligence behavioral analysis program where my job for over 21 years was recruiting spies judy welcome today we have judy ryan on my podcast and she’s the ceo of lifework systems a culture transformation company and we’re gonna really dive deeper on that and i gotta tell you she has resources abound i will include the mail all in the show notes at the end so and also listen to the very end for a very special opportunity as well one of the things i really want to draw you to as well in these resources i’m going to put a link to is she has over 220 articles and i started perusing some of these articles they are really really good really really rich we’re only going to be able to touch a service today but i gotta i got a sneaky suspicion i’m going to have judy on many more times in the future so with that judy welcome and as a really quick kickoff you’re the ceo of a culture transformation company if you could tell us a little bit about your journey and how this basically became your life’s passion well first of all thanks for having me on the show robin and i’m enjoying getting to know you so i’m looking forward to spending that time with you and i i feel very fortunate that i’ve came upon my passion pretty early in my life my like my early 20s and it was because i stumbled upon a psychology model that began to really do a lot to help me personally because all of us are raised up in a society that has some conditioning that’s not so great and and to untangle that i found this particular model that i just fell in love with and i haven’t really lost my passion for it in close to 35 40 years something like that which makes me sound pretty old but it’s been really great i first applied it to families and parenting and i was a parent educator and then i started to see the application of it in any setting and really had a calling to do this work full-time in the late 90s and then formed my own company did it under another umbrella another company for about four years and then i started my own company 20 years ago so we’re in our 20th year wow congrats on that too thank you thank you we focus a lot on you know how do you make your organization work how do you make the world work but a lot of times we really struggle to understand about what makes a human being work and really expand into the potential that’s possible so a lot of times we see people with high potential but we don’t necessarily know how they got there and why they seem like more of an exception than the rule and so our work is really around how do you understand the conditions and conversations that people need to really expand into their greatest potential and and that’s what i love to see i love to see it coming to life in people i love to see them overcoming the barriers that they’ve had maybe sometimes their whole life and i just think a lot of people don’t necessarily have that information and they suffer unnecessarily so that’s a pretty long answer but i that’s how i got here and it’s a perfect answer or actually the simple truths that people miss and that they don’t understand for your personal success both mentally um psychologically you know spiritually all these things is when you become a resource for the success of others and you become a servant leader in whatever capacity you see fit for that it is the greatest thing you can do not just for the other person but really yourself we are genetically and biologically coded to do these things so when we’re being of service to others which is servant leadership which is creating that healthy culture you talk about it does such amazing things for us personally i mean my entire life when i started recruiting spies you’re thinking oh it’s all about manipulation and taking advantage of people and making it all about you no it’s actually figuring out what their pain points are and being a source for them to achieve whatever it is they’re trying to achieve for them and their families but i digress into that so i love it that you talked about servant leadership but i would say that i always have this little message in my head that says servant leadership is for everyone no matter what your title no matter what your name no matter what your role i mean i think i mentioned it before that when um my i was raising my five children by the time they were five years old they knew how to run a family meeting and that was because they needed to know the joy and the fulfillment of being part of the contribution five children i’m sorry five children you’ve been a ceo a very long time with a lot of challenges that’s for sure that’s the biggest uh challenge as a ceo is managing children but you know it was important to me that they learn to get consider what their power does to other people like that’s what we call social interest what are the consequences that they can cause other people and that they do cause other people so that they’re responsible with their power so i love servant leadership but sometimes it almost has this notion in my you know most people think of it as the top titled leaders serving the underlings in a way i believe it’s everyone realizing the joy of contribution to one another and maybe you feel that way too absolutely you know that joy of contribution to one another what a great sound bite that is and you’ll probably see it in the social media postings i do because i’m i’m with you leadership is not about title position it’s about being of service to others and everyone is a leader you know in the marine corps we always said if you have two marines together you know that’s one’s a leader one’s a follower and they then alternate back and forth because again and you hit that keyword power method we’re going down rabbit holes already off my script of the things i was going to ask but that’s such an important point is power it’s you know jocko talks about an extreme ownership and dichotomy of leadership all these dichotomies and i used to believe that leadership was a continuum scale either you’re really good at it you’re really bad at it and we spend our lives on this scale trying to move up towards great leadership but in reality what i discovered was it’s a dichotomy of power and leadership because power as you’re so defining here is about self and leadership is about others and it’s learning how to let go of the self and be about others and people get afraid of doing this because of our insecurities and because we think you know we’re going to get walked on or trampled on and it’s anything but the truth because in in in all honesty a leader is the one setting the goals and objectives and has a plan to move forward to get there and when you make it about others others on that path that’s what certain leadership is and so that’s why i absolutely love what you do and the things you’re bringing up so i think it’s a good segue so i can get to my first question and it’s something that we’ve talked about and again we can dive so deep on so many of these things but what is a healthy workplace culture and how does trust fit into one okay both good parts i see those almost as two parts so i’ll start with the first one what is a good healthy culture i look at the word culture and i think about like the word parenting that if you had a room full of parents and you asked all of them what is healthy parenting they might have very widely differing ideas about what that is so in our world a healthy culture is one where there is the minimal or elimination of the power structures of hierarchy that does not mean that there aren’t certain authorities in positions of you know responsibility but in terms of the dynamics of a lot of the decision making and the power that is used within an organization it’s it’s the the goal is to have as much shared power as possible and i think what it requires is a leader with a healthy ego and i i say healthy ego because we you know ego always is thought of as a negative thing but when you have a healthy ego you’re not driven to prove anything right you’re not driven to hold on to your identity you’re actually in a place where you can create other leaders and you want other people to become leaders at all the different levels and that’s that’s what we talked about ours is called a responsibility-based culture it’s a culture that’s based on purpose and core values and that that comes before profit and so people and purpose before profit insures more profit and a lot of people don’t see that they say no profit’s number one you know it’s my bottom line and they miss the point because when you make your people and your purpose priority then your profit follows and so so it’s shared power it’s uh purpose and value driven it’s an organization of learning and supporting and mentoring so that people are able to learn how to be inductive reasoners and they’re able to solve problems without having to be told what to do you know the the old culture was just tell me what to do and i’ll do it our new culture is you better know how to make decisions on the fly and see the opportunity and where you’re you know you need to step in and lead something and when you need to step back and most people haven’t even been given the information or the experience to do that and it’s also a model where there’s a holistic view of people where you get to be the same person at work as you are in your personal life yes congruence gosh not having that concurrence is so stressful to people absolutely because you’re being someone that you aren’t and you know that kind of mental juggling is extremely stressful you know it’s really interesting too you know these concepts you’re bringing up of basically decentralized command is what you’re saying is it’s it’s all over the place and yet a lot of people because they are insecure are a little afraid to let go of that command and and i know you’ve worked with so many companies that and you have so many examples of this but i’m going to tell you i i’ve recently read a book that a client put me on to because they wanted to chat about this during one of our sessions and i think the biggest company right now that people can reflect on and think about that does exact exactly what you’re talking about is netflix there’s a book out there that they wrote called no rules rules basically they got rid of all the rules on netflix because they decentralized the entire command and there’s no policy for vacations there’s no policies for vouchers basically you are empowered with good talent density if you have great people on board um to make all the decisions granted make a few wrong decisions that hurt the company and we might be looking for another job but they really really decentralize that command and power people so i think it’s you know if you’re looking for a huge company given that example of exactly what you’re talking about that’s one of them and i’m sure you have a million more anyway well i think it’s what you’re describing is what’s called a reserve it’s called row a results oriented work environment they’re brought in they’re um but it’s also it also means that you have to have the right kind of conditions and conversations like you’re saying that they’re throwing out some of those traditional rules some of the traditional rules that most people don’t know are so default set in them are the extrinsic motivators that we’re raising our families with and we’re raising um our kids in school with and then it translates into the community and into the workplace so some of those rules are our command and control so it’s the decentralizing but it’s also the use of incentives and bonuses those kinds of things dangling carrots or when people use a lot of you got to please me like i’m proud of you or i’m disappointed in you and and also um doing too much for people not giving them the wheel so i i know that that example with netflix is one in which when people feel that they understand the purpose of the organization and they understand the purpose of their own roles and they have choices in that and they have the support for their their job skills and they have the they have all the intrinsic motivation that they need to be high performers so when best buy was years ago best buy did a row a results-oriented work environment experiment and they took a whole group of people and they just told them here’s the outcomes we want you guys to figure out how you’re going to do it and i think they took every thursday off and went golfing and all that kind of stuff and they produced at a much higher rate than when they were in a conventional model so i i do think that there’s a caution there of making sure people are equipped to transform from the old system because it’s embedded inside of them right they don’t automatically just know how to do that well right and and so i i think that’s probably that combination of knowing how to create the right conditions and conversations so that people can trust their power most people do not trust their power because their power has been micromanaged and punished and threatened in all of those things yeah which creates a fear environment and people do not innovate in a fear environment and the only thing that gets us through our challenges that we face in both personally and in companies and organizations is innovation because every day is a new challenge and if you’re doing things the way things have always been done then you are not moving forward you know i as you know my i suffer proud parent syndrome as many people know and i got a daughter who’s a nurse my son who’s about to become a second lieutenant in the marine corps about to graduate the naval academy and he spent the summer dealing with covet and bringing new plebes into the naval academy and it was a disaster i mean everyone every company every organization in the world faced what do we do now and as i as he was frustrated looking for a process and procedure a standard operating procedure or an sop i reminded him i said there’s no sop for chaos that’s what innovation’s about yes yes and if you have purpose um in chaos you can have what’s called a kr which is being able to take that chaos and focus it it’s not necessarily bad to have chaos if you have an intention for what you’re going to do with it and what your outcomes are so or it’s organized chaos even though you’re having to be that’s where your son is actually getting the message from you that he can handle being heuristic being in uncharted territory and being able to um create on the fly because that’s the way the world is moving right now it’s moving too quickly for us to look back at a manual and figure out what worked in the past you know absolutely so i hope that kind of answers the first half of your question what is a healthy culture it’s a responsibility-based purpose and value-based kind of organization where the goal is to mentor and empower people not manage them control them uh motivate them it sounds great to say well i’m a manager i’m supposed to manage them no you’re not you’re supposed to help them become self-managing it’s not that you’re supposed to motivate them it’s that you help them remove the barriers to their own motivation it’s not that you’re to judge them it’s to help them to assess themselves and grow into where they need to grow and it’s not for you to enable them it’s for them to discover how capable they actually are so those are the things that build a healthy culture but you also asked me how does trust play into it sure so in our world we have this little house model and in the rooms of the house we have things like emotional intelligence which is self-awareness self-management awareness of the relationship dynamics whether it’s two people or a whole group and how to manage those relationships and it’s things like personal responsibility and what does that mean and how does that show up and how do you know if you’re being personally responsible or not and how do you have intrinsic motivation which i just touched on a minute ago and how do you distribute this kind of information to everyone because what traditionally happens in companies is that the title leaders get all of that leadership development training and it’s almost thought as if it’s impossible to train everyone or to mentor everyone and that’s about as crazy as saying we can’t all have a cell phone you know but it’s almost like yeah the mentality hasn’t caught up yes we can have everybody trained and have the same common language and tools but the bottom of the house the foundation is trustworthiness and what we mean by that is that we’re asking people in the companies to commit to the the notion that having a ten relationship and i’m telling you i’ll tell you what that is a ten relationship with everyone in the company is the most important priority and it sounds kind of nirvana right like how can you do that first of all 10 does not mean perfect 10 does not mean best friends 10 means that if i’m working with you on something robin and i realize there’s anything unresolved between we’re not at a tent it doesn’t mean we have to go to lunch every day or you know want to hang out or anything it just means am i good with him is there anything that i’m not saying or doing or working through and so what happens for a lot of people is they they operate in their lives not even paying attention what that is and they might even go from like i had a nine with somebody now i have a seven with them now i have a four with them and they will wait until the house is burning down to even acknowledge they have a problem sometimes even to just themselves so in our world what we teach people to do is to pay attention and it’s part of the mentoring process so if i were mentoring you i would say robin do you have any relationships here in which you don’t have a ton and that is the beginning of your self-awareness let’s say there’s two people where you don’t have a ton then you say yeah i think i have two people like that i would not want you to tell me their name or tell me the story i would say okay i’m gonna write down that you have two of them what number would you give the first one which forces you to go in your head and say is it a nine or is it a two you know because it starts to clarify to you how crisis is this situation or is it really minimal and judy if you could i’m sorry to interrupt you you broke up a little bit when you described what makes a 10 can you go over again what makes a 10 and what it is a lot of people would say oh nothing’s a 10 that’s perfection but in our world ten just means not having any unresolved issues okay there you go doesn’t even mean we have to like each other or be best friends it’s just i’m not ignoring something that is uh troublesome even if it’s minor so most people are not making that a priority they’re not even asking themselves am i out of ten with everyone because it’s a new behavior that needs to be conditioned in us and so when you own that that’s a foundational requirement of the company then it becomes part of the practice of the business to have conversations around it not conversations that go into the story the conversations just to raise the awareness right so if you had two people and you said one of them’s a seven and one of them’s a four i don’t need to know anything more than that if i’m mentoring you then i might say okay here’s the eight behaviors that could be being violated or neglected right now i want you to look through the list and we actually give them the list after a while you just memorize them sure and then what are a few of those yeah so they’re like being straightforward which means saying what you um expect and what you want straight you know straight to people and and if i could stop you right there real quick because i love this concept and they talked about it no rules rules as well and it’s it’s being transparent and when you being straightforward you know if we could expand that because i think a lot of people get afraid of being straightforward because they they’re afraid of being cruel there’s because correct me if i’m wrong there’s a difference when you’re being straightforward when we’re talking about an event objectively and when and then some people say well i’m just being honest and they’re actually being very egocentric when they’re actually poking at you yes absolutely so first of all straightforward is the hardest one it’s kind of like the top of the chain of knowing that you can handle yourself trust is really more about how we are with ourselves than we think uh we think it’s do i trust robin do i trust robin not to hurt me etc the real trust issue is do i trust myself to know how to handle any kind of communication and so straightforwardness is one of the hardest ones because you do need to know the skills and the understandings that keep your straightforwardness intentional like i’ll tell you a little side story there was a woman who worked for one of my clients and she was a very timid very loving very you know doesn’t like conflict that was her temperament and she worked for the cio who was the one bringing in the project and was very you know very lovely and she also had to do work for the cfo who was not involved in the culture change at this point and he was very much lead by intimidation and proud of it and so she was having an issue with him because he would tell her to come to a certain location to work with him and then he wouldn’t show up and this happened repeatedly and she was very conscientious so it freaked her out like oh my god did i get the wrong location did i get the wrong date and time what you know what am i going to do and and so it was very frustrating and she didn’t know how to deal with it because this first of all it’s an authority figure and second of all she’s terrified of it blowing up in her face or her hurting somebody right so what she did was she learned this tool we talked we teach called the frustration it’s like this i don’t like it when you do this and you state the behavior and that’s you know that’s straightforward i don’t like it when you like if i if let’s say you were my brother and i said robin i don’t like it when you leave the toilet paper roll empty right right and then the next part of it is because what i most want is i want a relationship with you and the family where we got each other’s back i want to know that you know everything is needed in the bathroom when i go in the bathroom you know like that’s the basic this is what i desire with you and then the third thing is asking for the behavior change so what i want is i want you to commit to changing the role if it’s empty or whatever you know are you willing so she thought oh this would be great for me to use with this cfo so she goes to him and she says hey i just wanted to let you know i don’t like it when you cancel meetings and you don’t let because what i want is i want to feel really secure and doing the best possible job for you and i want us to have really strong teamwork where we have great communication so what i want is for you to text me or email me or call me if you change a meeting are you willing because she felt like this was a safe way for her to know that it wasn’t going to go out of control and and she knew what she was doing and she even practiced ahead of time sure this is the kind of hilarious part he says to her lady who the hell do you think you are i pay your paycheck you don’t pay my paycheck what do you mean saying all this to me you’re like that’s how he responded but she called me afterwards and she said oh my gosh and you know she told me what happened and i said so if you weren’t worried about what he did how did you feel about your yard and call it your yard when you know you took care of your yard she goes well honestly i was pretty proud of myself and i said yeah i said why don’t you just stay in your yard and appreciate that you had the courage and you used a tool that you know you didn’t disrespect or hurt anybody and she said yeah i’m gonna thank you i’m gonna do that so about four months later now this doesn’t always happen but about four months later she calls me and she says you know what he keeps coming over this way because you know she’s in a department and he says what is this stuff you guys are doing over here and she said oh we’re just doing this culture change stuff with life work systems and he says well we got a lot of gossip over in our area and she’s like yeah we used to have that kind of stuff too you know she’s just kind of low-key in it and you know and he’s and she tells me he’s never done that thing to her again where he cancels a meeting even though he was horrible to her never apologized or anything and then she heard him go into the cio’s office and say what is this stuff you guys are doing over here you know and what was happening was people were moving from his department to this department and then they were like oh my god it’s night and day over here right and he knew he knew that it was different and he knew that it was better so my point is that you can be straightforward but if you don’t have the tools and somebody to support you in practicing them and to support you even when the other person goes nuts you know it is always a risk to be straightforward i mean she could have been fired but probably wouldn’t have been you know i mean how could he fire her over that but it’s terrifying for people to be straightforward in certain conditions and so even i wrote an article one time said called um sometimes transparency can become a bloodbath like you don’t want to just encourage people to be apparent without any guardrails of any kind around emotional and social uh intelligence and psychological safety and those kinds of things because a lot of people haven’t been given the skills to be straightforward and feel confident in it you hit a few things in there i want to really highlight and that is you know so i have a communication model for communicating with people and she honored it and so in my communication model to make it about the other person if you’re going to be straightforward is one you have to seek thoughts and opinions of others instead of sharing your own talk in terms of their priorities instead of your own validate them without judging them and giving them choices and the way you phrased it was she put the behavior change that she’s looking for in terms of one of his priorities assumed priors at least of her performance and so if she’s if he’s looking for her to be a higher performer for him this is behavior change she needs for so she honored that but he still flipped out so what happens is you know so she basically flared up his insecurities and you so articulate you know stated and demonstrated that we all deal with bullies in the workplace from time to time and this is another great example of when you can’t change the behavior of a bully what the only other thing you’re left with is what can i do to affect the people around them and when you mitigate the people around them and create that culture around them the bully just has nothing else to work with you know and kind of relating it to some real world stuff right now as well i mean literally that’s what’s going on with ukraine and putin you know you’re not going to change his behavior the only thing people can really focus on is the behavior of the people around him because a bully is a bully until the bully has nothing to feed off of well and even the ukrainian people are showing up courageous and trustworthy within themselves and even this woman even though the outcome wasn’t what she was hoping for with him she felt better because she was training him how to treat her like yes even putting up with his behavior all those other times was training him that it was okay to do that to her right and so and she she has um such a loving heart which most people do and and they don’t know that there’s a safe or um responsible way to be to be direct what is usually necessary around the trust behaviors before straightforwardness becomes strong is some of the other trust behaviors and those are things like having respect for one another and a lot of times when we have anything that’s a disruption in a relationship the first thing that goes is our opinion about someone are holding them as we call it in the monster box where they know are no longer a person they’re just a pain in our side you know and and that is it’s a really tough one because i remember this one story this guy told one time he was on an airplane he said imagine you’re on an airplane and you’re in one of the southwest airplanes and you get to pick your seat and you you’re really excited because it looks like maybe the seat next to you won’t get taken and you’ve put your your briefcase on it you’ve got your little tray down so that you’re discouraging anyone from wanting to go there right and then all of a sudden at the very last minute you think you’re free and clear and onto the plane comes this heavyset person all sweaty like he’s been running the whole length of the airport and you’re like oh great he’s going to want that seat right and he says in that moment is that a person or is that an object right because if you’re thinking about how inconvenient it is to you you you have completely dehumanized that person that’s a person that just wants to get home just like you do right and and then he and then he gave the example of imagine a it was a gorgeous woman that walked in and i immediately put up my teeth and my tray my tray and i immediately cleared the seat and then he says is she an object or is she a person and again she’s an object you know and so that’s what we teach about respect respect is not creating a transactional relationship with someone and it’s um treating them as a unique separate individual that deserves respect and deserves to be treated as important and so so those are the that’s just like one of the eight but it’s one of them that until you have that you you don’t even have a desire to be straightforward in a constructive way you know judy i again boy i want to dive on deep on all these but i want to do a little bit more on this one too because i want to get into a little bit if you can of the how you do that because one of the things when i took over the behavioral team you know especially in law enforcement people tend to think of the individual they have to interview or get a confession from as the subject of or the target of the investigation those are two words that i personally outlawed because you are objectifying the human being that you’re about to try to have a productive trusting relationship with believe it or not if you’re trying to inspire someone to confess if you’re trying to inspire someone to spy on their own country you’re not going to do it by treating them as an object it’s got to be extremely personal extremely humanizing and so i i just used language to help me but what kind of things do you tell people do you know to not objectify someone well part of it i think it’s a brilliant question i really appreciate a lot of people don’t dive into the respect more deeply and i i appreciate having the conversation because people pick up on this they do it’s absolutely a felt experience and it’s and it’s very much um part of our self-management it’s if the part of emotional intelligence that is the beginning is recognizing when you’ve dehumanized someone like that example on the plane is a great example of if you’re not awake you’re going to just objectify somebody and you don’t even realize you just objectified some innocent person on the airplane right and so part of it is understanding human nature for example most people are walking around feeling dehumanized because of their experiences and and they’re actually feeling unworthy so they’re gonna they’re gonna feel the fact that you’ve got them in a monster box so a pretty extreme example is the prison systems in the prison systems the rate of recidivism which is repeat reincarceration is anywhere between 60 and 70 nationwide so that means a criminal not only gets convicted once he gets convicted again and again right you know and that’s that’s pretty serious that’s a pretty serious pattern with somebody and what what’s kind of ironic is that’s about the same as the disengagement levels in our country in workplace is 60 to 70 percent so what what they did there was a group of people that went into a prison in florida and they remembered because of the learning psychology they remembered that the four core needs of all people are to feel empowered to feel lovable which is the same as likable to feel connected and to feel that there’s contributions that they have to make and so what they realize is that all behavior is coming from that even the negative behavior and by that what i mean is say somebody’s in a gang and they go and kill somebody because it’s a requirement to fit into the gang they will override their conscience and their fear of imprisonment that’s what any crime the criminal will do is they’ll override their conscience and their fear of imprisonment unless they have a psychosis or a you know schizophrenia or something right they’ll do it because there’s core needs that are not being met in a productive way so what they so a person might actually kill somebody to just to find that sense of belonging and significance in a gang and that’s and then they end up in prison well when the people went into the prison in florida and they said to the criminal you’re no different than i am we both want the same things you want to feel empowered lovable connected and contributing just like i do so they consciously took them out of the monster box and by the end of their progress so these are the the next step was so how can we help you get those met a different way like they didn’t make them wrong for wanting those things they made them wrong for choosing how they were going to get them like let’s help you find a different way to get them and so once they started to create their life around that in it from a different perspective the recidivism rate went down to four percent wow that’s pretty remarkable and and we see that same sort of thing happen people cannot respect one another if they’re trained to be enemies to one another to be afraid of one another to have each other in a monster box and and one of the conscious ways that i help do that in the lives of others but also in my own life is focusing on purpose purpose is the way to be high vision and high purpose proactive so if i’m tempted to see somebody and discard them in my mind if there’s a part of me that’s trained to say oh my gosh am i helping that person love their life by what i’m thinking about them am i helping myself love my life because that’s my mission to create a world where people love their lives i can measure against that and go wait a minute i got them in a monster box they’re not going to love that i’m not going to love myself doing that to them so that’s an internal management so respect is really one of those things that you have to learn how to internally manage yourself to choose to not dehumanize people but we have a lot of role models in our lives including our parents that often said things about people that were very dehumanizing whether it was a political difference a racial difference an age difference a gender difference you know we’ve had we’ve heard because people recklessly use their words to dehumanize one another and so we have to consciously train ourselves out of it i hope that’s is that answering what you’re asking yeah i love those four areas and this is going back to my my four pillars of communication this is going deep diving on non-judgmental validation this is seeking to understand the other person from their point of view without judging it and that’s where we make those connections and so one more time what are those four things people are looking for so the first that i they’re not in any order but the first one i always think of is empowered so that means having a boy so you can see what’s happening in our society right now where people are fighting to have a voice yeah so that’s it it’s being potent in your influence it’s being um okay with your power all of that lovable is not the same as being loved i i that’s this is a huge one for me personally because i was deeply loved but i did not feel lovable meaning my parents didn’t really allow any of us because that was probably just the era i was raised in they didn’t really have curiosity about how our minds were what we thought it was more like you’re a blank screen and we’re supposed to ride on you and let me tell you how wrong you are if you disagree with me you know like that that was just a way of the way of the world and it still is so when you do that to people where your goal is to kind of kindly i mean my parents weren’t mean but it was constantly like let me fix you let me convert you let me heal you let me change it right and it does not make a person feel very delightful in themselves right so lava bubble to me is really crucially overlooked you could be the most loving leader in the world but if you don’t know how to make people feel seen and heard they will suffer and they will cost you yes so curiosity and compassion and openness and respectivity is all part of likable and lovable connected connected sounds like a no-brainer but a lot of people don’t feel connected they don’t feel invited they don’t feel included they don’t even know how to do it i had a friend call me that started a new job recently and she said i don’t feel like anybody’s very welcoming and i said you’re already in attack mode to them you already have them in the monster box i encourage you to say in your head i love these people i love this company i love them and she went in the next day and did that she said oh my god i had a completely different day and they were very responsive because it’s a felt thing so she was feeling disconnected so what did she do she started putting them in the monster box right and as soon as she took him out of the monster box connection started to happen in a very positive way so that’s going on all that all over the place where people are in clicks and they’re not connecting and then they’re feeling isolated and then they get stuck in that and then the fourth one that i talk about that is also kind of like lovable where it’s not as well known is the need to give contributions to make contributions yes we’re we’re often robbing that of people by being so stuck in our own feelings of inferiority that we don’t want to act like we ever need anything from anybody which is robbing them and also we don’t foster the joy of contributing when we pamper people and we enable them and we exempt them and i remember i remember one time i was working in school reform and we were taking away the control models the extrinsic motivators and one of them was using rewards and in this one school they were big on like we got to give the parents a steak dinner to get them to show up with the parent teacher meetings and you know all these prizes and all this and i told him you need to stop doing that and he got so mad at me i remember him yelling at me down the hall he was so mad what are we supposed to do how are we going to get him there you know and i said why don’t you just invite them to do something like call them up and have the teachers call them up and say hey when you come to the meeting tonight will you bring a quote to open the meeting and another one will you bring a story of that success story about your student and and be willing to share it tonight and oh will you bring a bottle of soda to another one do you see how people love it when you give them a chance to contribute but we don’t even know that so we’re constantly trying to buy them and that’s what the school was doing they were trying to buy the parents to being there and then they were wondering well why aren’t they that motivated when they’re there you know it’s such a and that’s such a great point of contribution you know two quick examples of that one every single 12-step program there is out there that people are in recovery for and whether it’s alcohol overeating or just being a disgruntled bad person who puts people in monster boxes is be of service you know your best way to fix yourself is to serve others that’s a huge one and i remember after 9 11 i was in new york city during 9 11 for the fbi and working very closely my building was five blocks away and i remember so many people wanted to feel connected and i felt an obligation to allow them feel connected whether it was they wanted to bring cookies or sandwiches that i could bring down to folks or or seal toe boots for folks like me that were going out to the landfill every day you know and i i intuitively did this and in hindsight i i never really made that connection until right now when you said it was i was allowing people to feel connected and that they could contribute because psychologically that’s what people needed for healing for moving forward and unfortunately a lot of times we don’t give them the opportunity until there’s a crisis right you know because we’re just not it’s not on our radar so a really good leader would be looking at what is it in my environment that takes away from these four core needs like what are the things that we’re practicing like for example in my family i learned an alternative to punishment and harshness and bribery and all the things people do when somebody misbehaves most people are like well what else is there if you don’t have punishment and harshness and bribery i can’t see anything else but there are other ways to deal with all kinds of negative emotion what’s that what’d you do well it’s actually a pretty uh interesting system that we teach called redirecting negative behavior and by negative behavior we don’t just mean a conflict we mean like people that are uh seeking undue attention you know those people that are very annoying because they’re constantly trying to get attention or uh a person that almost knee-jerk goes into power struggle right or a person who is in a lot of pain and they don’t know how to acknowledge it or release it and they feel ashamed of it so they’re striking out because they believe that they should be rejected so they’re going to create the dynamics where they will be rejected right you know and if you don’t know that’s going on you’re going to get all of these misbehaviors are going to get sucked into them if you don’t understand what’s actually occurring and then there’s another behavior where people are caught up in a belief that they’re not capable and so they they learn have what’s called learned inadequacy or assumed inadequacy and then they get others to reinforce that they aren’t capable it’s like a vicious cycle and the same with the fifth one which is my favorite one it’s it’s generally unfairly high asset people that they do this it’s called the goal of significance and that’s when a person doesn’t feel okay because we all have moments where we don’t but we act pompous because our unch our unconscious goal is to get invalidation which sounds crazy right but once we have that unconscious goal to be invalidated we will act all smug and dismissive and other people are like who died and made her god you know and and instead of knowing how to read that and redirect it and that is a it’s a tremendous tool because but what it also does is it brings up a lot of pain in people when we teach it because they start realizing oh my god the way i grab onto punishment and rewarding and bribing and all that that has been a big part of the whole problem and they feel a lot of pain over the fact that they were contributing that because they never heard of this alternative so in our family i wanted to release everything that would diminish those empower you know empowered lovable connected and contributing and and that was one of the big ones how do we remove punishment and harshness from the family and still create firmness high expectation and right behavior and and so a lot of people need those skills but they haven’t even been they’ve never even heard of them right so what’d you do so when someone did something wrong in your house what did you do well i’ll give you an example of what of what a redirect would look like uh-huh well that last one i called the goal of significance where somebody acts uh superior and smug um because subconsciously they don’t feel okay and they really subconsciously want to be invalidated so i worked there was this husband and wife and they had a 35 million dollar company and the husband had approached me because their hr manager heard us talk and said oh my god we need you so bad and he says but how about we just don’t tell my wife because his wife was this very outspoken jewish woman who was like very in control of the company and he didn’t want her even to know that he wanted to bring in culture change i’m like i don’t function that way like there’s no going around your wife we gotta work with your wife if we’re gonna make this work so we had a meeting and during the meeting first of all they were a very accomplished company they had gotten to 35 million dollars they had uh helped a ton of people they had won a lot of awards they really were an incredible company in what they did but during the meeting it was really evident that she was in the goal of significance because she was very dismissive to her husband she was dismissive about her leaders some of them who she treated very poorly and i’m sitting there going really god i’m in a sales meeting and i’ve got to redirect somebody you know because this behavior shows up you don’t just pretend it’s not there if you’re going to walk the talk you walk the talk right so i’m seeing her in the goal of significance and having had to do that a lot myself because i had to you know whatever we attract we are working through our own healing absolutely so i said to her i said hey i just want to point out something to you i said you have done so much good so the first step in the redirect for this goal is acknowledge their assets with sincerity you have gotten all these awards you’ve gotten to 35 million you’ve helped this many veterans you’ve really been amazing and i just want you to know i see that and i said but i also see that you want to go to 100 million and i see a really big stumbling block in front of you right now that i could help you with if you let me and i don’t think you can see it and it’s really going to get in your way and this is what she said and this is what people will do when you redirect them they will get worse before they get better so here i am validating her and her deepest unconscious wants me to invalidate her so of course she’s going to whip out whatever can make me invalidate her if i wasn’t aware so this is what she says to me why do you think you can help me with anything you don’t have a big company like mine you haven’t done all the good stuff i’ve done right right i have so much stuff i could teach you you how what makes you think you can help me like that’s how she got she went like on steroids with her her uh and i said and this is what you do you mirror it back you don’t invalidate it i said you’re absolutely right you’ve come way further than i have you’ve done way more than i have i don’t know if i’ll ever get to your level and there’s a ton i could learn from you and i would love to learn it from you and this one thing that i’m seeing right here right now is in your way and you don’t know how to deal with it or you would have i’m sure you would have so will you let me help you and that’s what the reader act looks like if i had not known that i would have gotten caught up and heard her nastiness to me because it would have triggered my own inferiority feelings yep and so this was an interesting outcome which isn’t typical she said to me after i said that to her she said well you have no idea what it was like growing up in my family my father criticized me right and left all over the place and my mother was a paragon of virtue nobody usually gives you the backstory but that is what is behind that goal is feeling like you got to prove yourself all the time and i was able to say well thank you for sharing that wouldn’t it be great if that didn’t get in the way of your company going to the next level you became her greatest loving critic which everyone needs in our lives and you use the great skill of that non-judgmental validation you did not argue context which is critical to getting shields down and building that trust and i love that example you know non-judgmental validation but it was also the point at which you invite the person to stop being in competition with you in partnership with you and that’s the piece that you can’t just because there was another person there just trying to do the validation part and she didn’t that wasn’t going to take her to where she needed to go absolutely so um so thanks for acknowledging that and it is it is when you said you have your best ally or something when you redirect somebody in that goal but really all the goals you create incredible people because she could become the most productive person on the team if she took that energy that she’s using to invalidate herself and used it to be in service um and that’s really what you’re doing you’re feeding two birds with one loaf of bread instead of hurting yourself and hurting the other person you’re you’re helping everyone absolutely judy believe it or not we have gone quite a while and we’ve only brushed the surface of what we even planned on because we went down this route that was so rich and i love it to death it’s going to i think it’s going to really equip people much better even this these this one little nugget out of the eight that you can talk about is gonna make a big difference and i can’t wait to get it out to folks so this brings us to one i want people to know you’re extremely busy you have a lot going on but here’s a special the special gift is that if you reach out for me at my email is robin peopleformula.com again robin peopleformula.com yes that’s my personal email and say that you’re interested in having a chat with judy and for your company and exploring things i’ll see what i can do to move you at the top of judy’s list and do an intro for you because she is extremely busy but that’s one special thing we’ll do and with that i will also want to say uh thank you and judy is there any out of all things we’ve covered today is there two things is there anything that you want to make sure we add in this chat because i i guarantee you we’re going to have more that we want to leave people with and what’s like one or two actions someone can start right now before they even dive into your content i i would say if i were to give a takeaway it would be to write down empowered lovable connected and contributing and then start looking at even begin with yourself when i look in the mirror in the morning am i thinking and saying things to myself that make me feel empowered lovable connected and contributing or am i looking at myself and going oh my it looks like i gained weight or i got another wrinkle you know like really it begins with us and so that just even becoming familiar with those and trying to like line things up with those is very powerful as far as getting in touch with me i i appreciate the link from them to you because they know you and they trust you and you know and trust me now and i’m grateful for that other than that people can use the links that you’re going to supply on my linkedin profile and there are tons i can’t wait to show them in the show notes judy provided me so much to give all to you and i’m excited to put it out there so yes there’s tons out there thank you robin and thank you and again everyone thanks for tuning in to this intriguing episode of forge by trust and again our special guest judy and we will see you all again on the next one bye-bye thank you for tuning in to another episode of forge by trust if you enjoyed the show took away a few new tools i hope you will leave a great review of the show to show your support if you are interested in more information about how to forge your own trust building strategies please visit my website at www.peopleformula.com

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