LifeWorks Today Podcast → 02 Are You A Puppet Or Powerful

[Music] Welcome To Life Works today this podcast is provided so that together we can create a world in which all people love their lives our current human systems aren’t working the way of superior versus inferior or management versus employee or adult versus child we need a powerful positive and sustainable transformation this podcast is for you who seek to be happy fulfilled and peaceful so that your Abundant Life Works

today welcome back to our podcast life works today this is our second episode called puppet or powerful before we get into this episode I want to just go back and review the last episode a little bit so that you have a little bit of context I introduced something that I thought was the most important starting place and that is that that we’re all operating within a set of control models that we don’t generally question we don’t generally question their their effectiveness their counterproductivity the importance of considering dismantling them and then if we dismantle them what do we put in place so in this episode what I want to do is I want to go through what is a healthy culture if control models are not the healthy culture what is the healthy culture and why does it matter so that’s the most important thing the why does it what’s the relevance of it in the first episode we covered what are the concepts that you need to consider in order for your life to work today and what are the Norms right under your noses that really could be the central cause for why people become discouraged and disengaged and a lot of people are sort of struggling inside and struggling with each other so one of the things I covered was the inferiority complex and how important it is to recognize that if we don’t set up certain conditions and conversations people start to go into uninterrupted struggles within themselves things like stress and anxiety and depression and between people like arguing and righteousness and win- lose Dynamics those sorts of things and so uh we also covered to try to demystify what is emotional intelligence and that it’s simply being self-aware and managing ourself being aware of the Dynamics we have with others and that we witness in others and be able to manage the relationship Dynamics so I encourage you to go back to episode one and really listen to that in depth so that this can even become more unified and holistic for you as we move into this second episode a couple of other Concepts that we covered is that there’s really no good old day you know that that’s really important because it’s so easy for us to go back to our default and to think that things were so great in the good old days and why can’t we go back to them and I just want to uh let you know that you’re settling for for something if you go backwards to the quote unquote good old days because those good old days always involve certain groups of people that were being oppressed coerced subjugated in the win- lose lose position and it really wasn’t good for anybody in the good old days so we want to move forward into that place where we don’t do power over or power under but where we help each other to build that power within and have confidence with that power and we also talk a little bit about the change process and some of this information that you hear today in today’s episode may cause you to feel like wow this is new information I don’t even know if I buy in yet I don’t even know if I have the will or the determination or the understanding to take any steps forward into it and just know that’s okay remember from this program all these programs that I do the most important thing I want you to remember are that you deserve to have a life you love and you deserve to treat yourself with compassion and curiosity as you learn and grow and you try on new things so in this episode I kind of switched up the title because I think I called it something like are you a puppet or are you creative and Powerful but I I wanted it to be really a focus on we’re either under the influence of believing we’re a puppet or we’re trying to make others into a puppet or we’re actually using power rightly so I wanted those to be in contrast imagine a person being you know with a puppeteer Puppeteer where they don’t feel like they have that strength of of their own will their own ideas of how things should be going in their lives and many many people feel that way no matter what age I’ve worked with people that are in their 40s and 50s and they’re so used to doing what they think others expect of them whether it’s an internal authority figure or an external authority figure that when they slow down and start to be developed whether it’s them helping themselves be developed or them being developed by by other people around them it’s it’s almost an alien scary and unfamiliar place for them so the way that this ties into the last episode is that remember when I was talking about the control models those all come with negative beliefs about people limiting beliefs about people in the autocratic mind your your mind is I don’t trust them I have to police them I have to manage them in the incentives and rewards the idea of a person is you’d be basically lazy and selfish if I didn’t dangle a carrot in front of you so in the judgment model that’s where somebody’s positioning themselves over another person and doing bestowal to them bestowing praise bestowing disf you know shaming them and in the LA so you’re holding again you can’t you’re not as good as me I have to be the judge of you and in the fourth one it’s pampering and spoiling actually believing I kind of have to carry you and do for you and overcompensate for you so in all of those you’re holding people very negatively whereas in this model that I’m going to be talking talking about your belief about people is you are and want to be great that all people are and want to be great even though they don’t always look like they want to be great so when they’re not being great I’m going to talk about what’s going on for them and how do you create the kind of culture and the kind of conditions and conversations where people can start seeing themselves as great and they can start living into that greatness and you can feel successful in supporting them in that greatness okay so I am sitting across from from one of my very good friends and clients Gabriella Ramirez arello I’m not sure if I ever say your last name right I’ll let you say it back but uh she’s kind of chomping at the bit to join in and I’d rather introduce her sooner than later I met Gabriella when I was working with her at the Hispanic chamber uh she also is a business owner of a restaurant she’s a a person that really coaches and consults other people in their business career paths and helps organizations to grow and flourish and connect and I’ll let you say anything else you want to say sure I’m just so excited to be here Judy I mean ever since we started working on everything that we’ve been working on at the chamber and just in general with different aspects of your business it’s just been exciting to see you present and oh my gosh the information that you provide is so valuable right so not just what you show us in the sessions that we have at the chamber but having gone through some of the modules and going on tour with you when we went to a couple of conferences I feel like all of that continues to feed my soul about the work um about how to truly live a life that you love and I’m really starting to take it to heart because I mean it just makes sense why do we live a crappy life yes you know that’s a good way to put in crappy life who willingly would do that yes but not knowing that we have the tools and the ability to do it a different way MH is a life changing and Awakening experience yes and I don’t if you want to start now or you want you want to wait until we get into the things but I remember one of those first questions or one of those first things that you brought to mind that just really made me genuinely inquisitive about oh my gosh I have a say so is what do you want mhm yeah you asked me that and I was like no one’s ever asked me right and I don’t want to put you on the spot but you’re not a teenager so you’re you’re a person that’s been around a while and and it’s hard for you to get in touch with what do I want was working with a teenager recently and I said what is your inner voice saying you know that wise voice and she said I can’t even hear it and I said that and then that just really hit me because I realized yeah as soon as you believe that it’s unsafe to have a voice you will sub subjugate your own voice because it feels unsafe and one of the reasons I think I was so drawn to this particular psychology model is that it helped me understand that we’re always interpreting things that are happening so you can kind of understand why a teenager or or a 2-year-old would be afraid of their power because the messages that are coming at them are don’t be like that don’t be different don’t think for yourself don’t dare question us you know that is often what’s going on so you get conditioned to think it’s not safe I won’t be loved I won’t be supported I won’t be able to survive I’ll be all alone if I actually claim my own inner voice and I I think I forgot that until I was working with that teenager even though I see it day in and day out with a lot of different people right and I mean I think it’s just a constant reminder that no matter if you’re in a position of power not power middle management in school to really claim your power yes but you have to know first that you have it and then you also have to take responsibility because it’s not just about oh I’ve got the power now I get to be the judge I get to be the one that makes other people feel bad you know what are we really doing and so that’s a lot of what I really have enjoyed with the mentoring and with just understanding how other people maybe why they’re acting out instead of acting you know oh power under power over all of that play comes into play so again I’m sorry if I’m getting ahead of myself no you’re fine it’s just amazing to me to be able to at 50 years old to finally say oh my gosh what do I want yes um and so excited about you being able to do this work with you know younger Generations because we don’t want them to wait till they’re our age no to realize that they could live a life they love right and I think when they don’t realize that they have interpreted it as though they’re fragile and that love is fragile and that their power is something to be scared of they don’t realize how much they’re already missing out on and I don’t think most people know that they’re causing them to miss out on it or or that we’re causing each other which kind of leads me into one of the key things that I wanted to talk about with you which I think you and I both really like is that personal responsibility chart that we teach and um I was thinking about it because even when we say the words we want to develop power within we don’t even know what that exactly means because the word power often conjures this notion of power over people like I’ve got to be somehow real strongl looking and I was thinking about how power is not always real strongl looking it could be that you’re talking with somebody and they ask you to do something and you say hang on a second I need just a second to think through this that doesn’t look real powerful and decisive necessarily but when a person’s really powerful they’re going to go through a process that sometimes says my first feeling is this and then I sit with well could I live with that consequence good or bad and then maybe another answer comes in that actually feels more aligned with a person and and then they’re really powerful because they’re lining up who they are and who they want to be at their best so in the last episode I told a story about an eighth grade boy who wanted to create uh peace in his school but I asked him first what do you want and so when when he was asked the question do you want peace do you want peace with this teacher he had to sit and decide that and so we want to teach people to get clear about our power is that wise voice that doesn’t come from uh stress and fear and panic and pressure and I better make everybody happy and I better not rock the boat so that kind of power is not widely modeled by people right and I and I I think that that’s a great example about power because the power that we claim ourselves is the one that we often don’t do that leads to all this other Discord it is so even just the example of someone asking you to do something and truly understanding I don’t have to do it if I don’t want to I have a choice and if I feel powerful I’m able to say hey guess what I can’t do it today or I can’t ever do it but a lot of times we let people take our power Away by automatically agreeing even though later on it’s a conflict with our schedule or it’s not something we agree with mhm um so I love that example because it’s so it seems so simple but it’s a perfect example about reclaiming your own power well and even I’m going to go into my little coaching hat but even the words I can’t do it or I might not I can’t do it today or I can’t do it ever it’s even more powerful to go wow I don’t want to I don’t I don’t want to today I may not want to tomorrow right and and oftentimes it is even more of a choice than we think I remember when I talk this over with people in the business World they’ll say to me well there are some things you have to do I said no you don’t really you could say I either go to work today do I want the consequence of the paycheck or do I want the consequence to stay in bed all day or do I want the consequence of this versus this and yet we we treat it as if those aren’t really choices but they really are choices I mean even the other example that we talked about last week where um it was a snow day and uh our boss was out of town and so Nishka said hey we’re all adults but if you want to stay home make sure you tell the boss yourself so she was kind of saying hey I don’t want to be in charge of you but you also need to own your own voice so if you’re willing to go to him directly go for it and that’s also a good example of a third option because if she was the one in Authority in that day she could set it up in a way that she felt comfortable with so her Comfort level was I’m okay with you having this Choice as long as you’re making sure that you’re communicating certain things where someone else might just say I’m going to give you that freedom and trust you to use it well and that would have worked but or tell them stay you have to come to work you know what I’m saying I really felt that that was her empowering them to make the decision yes or at least feeling like that they could but then they also had to weigh their options on do I want to have to call the boss or not do I want to risk going out in the snow depending on where I live that’s why I love what this example because when she did that with them she was creating conditions and conversations where they were thinking thinking through what they wanted to do and what their what their part in it was what we typically do is we take all that choice away from people I remember one time asking my good friend Mike bitter what is what is the difference of from codependency what is the opposite of codependency and he said it’s your work and I realized he’s right because when you start to go what am I feeling what do I want you’re not making that contingent upon someone else’s Behavior I don’t know if you remember or not one of the people at the session with you last week and your on your team said but what if the other person doesn’t do X Y and Z or what if this person and and I see that all the time that we’re so busy being in other people’s yards around what we want when we don’t even like taking care of our own yard to ask what do I want and what I feel I I think we still have a lot of childhood fear inside of us that says that’s unsafe territory right right and I I guess you know the more that I’ve been working with you the more I realize how important it is to go back to your your childhood like I almost hate the excuse of oh blaming on your parents and it’s something that happened in your childhood but for me not so much because of my childhood but because of the way it was ingrained that I had to be a certain way and then you’re an adult at 50 years old and you finally realize oh my gosh I don’t have to do that it’s so eye openening but also both liberating and exciting and terrorized ter terrorizing because I’m like oh my gosh I really don’t have to do anything right if I don’t want to I don’t have to do it like what’s the worst that could happen but it also makes me be more appreciative of of having certain powers over myself well that’s the thing I think even when we’re a kid like the reason I opened last episode with that eighth grade story is that it was it would be so tempting for most people to look at that kid who came into the meeting saying I’ve been bullied by a teacher because he was being bullied by a teacher and it would have been so easy to say poor little eighth grader and what I wanted him to learn was it’s all about your interpretation of what you’re going to do with this and so really when we go back to our childhood it’s not just to look at maybe where our parents influenced our interpretation it’s where did we agree with them where did we think maybe that is how life Works without realizing that that could have been faulty logic and so from that place we can have curiosity we can have compassion on our parents compassion on ourselves and um and which kind of leads into something that I don’t know if we’ve even talked about this I think we have but I wanted to go over a little bit more about what makes a person responsible okay so but before we get into that Gabriela I want to just remind our audience that life work systems specializes in Performance Management through healthy culture transformation and that culture can be within us or around us so to learn more about life work systems and how to get involved with us including access to the information that’s related to today’s episode please visit our website at www.work systems.com subscribe to our podcast where you can find the main points on each of the podcasts a list of all the podcasts and additional information on each episode that we produce we invite you to also join our mailing list to receive information on and find free videos seminars webinars articles surveys my book and how to contact us by phone or email and I would say that you have to check out the blog post because they’re amazing there’s so much content so if you’re not listening right now take a moment go to the website look for uh life work systems on LinkedIn amazing amazing content then I don’t even know how you find the time to put so much stuff together on a daily basis and it seems like you’re in my head because whatever you post that day I’m like oh my gosh she’s looking at me I’m so you’ve made my day Gabriela thank you I appreciate that because I do love writing and I I never ever thought of myself as a writer but it just feels like it kind of com com through and especially cuz the titles that you put sometimes sometimes when you read stuff online the title does not match the content but your titles are always relevant not only to my life but they actually match the content that you produce so I know I’m not supposed to be here for a commercial but it’s okay I love keep going oh I’m just kidding well I appreciate that and I love it that you like this particular topic because I do feel like it’s another really Central piece and so I like having the conversation with you so whether or not you remember this I want you to understand why I’m so in love with the person of the of people I’m in love with the person of who they are because uh we are really here to be connected with one another we’re very much Social people we want to feel a healthy sense of belonging to each other a healthy sense of connection with each other and when we have that so many things go right it really does feel to me a little bit like heaven on Earth when that’s happening and so when I studied Adler Adler psychology he had five major Concepts and one is that we are these social beings and that if we don’t have those conditions that are just right and and we’re generally not doing them right people will go into that inferiority but he also said that everything we do is purposeful that means that what I wore today how I’m speaking today who I’ve invited all the things of my life I’m doing with goals in mind even though maybe 80% of them are somewhat subconscious to me and that’s an interesting thing that reminds us we have power is that we’re always doing things to cause things and that kind of time in with the fact that we are so subjective and what that really means is that you and I could be looking at the same event and we might interpret it completely differently have different physical and emotional reactions to it we can make different decisions about what it means what it means to us personally and we would create our our own values and beliefs and behaviors out of that which I think is fascinating in itself I remember um a time where a friend had a surgery on her hand her arm and her arm was completely exposed you could see her bones and her veins and everything and her two sons came to visit her and one was like that is the most disgusting thing he looked like he was going to throw up you know and he he was like I could never be a doctor the other one was that is the coolest thing ever I can see your veins I can see your bones you know he was making decisions about himself and about what he was seeing they were very very different and so even knowing we can change like we have this notion that we’ve been formed by the time we’re seven years old or something and there that’s largely true but it doesn’t mean those things can’t be undone or shifted it just means it’s a little bit harder to get at them unless you know how to get at them right so that’s really really why I’m so infatuated with this model because the more that we understand what makes us tick and how we got where we got we don’t feel so at the mercy of it you know what I mean cuz sometimes uh like I was reading the other day I’ve become a v vegan and I read that we all think we’re so um controlled by our genetics and genetics only pay plays about 5 to 10% of what’s going to happen to us so we have way more control of our our outcomes than we know and I think it’s true also in this area of psychology and then the fifth thing that he said is that once we make decisions about life we determine the conditions around us we we massage those conditions often to create a world that will fit what we think it’s supposed to fit so maybe I I have this interpretation that men are scum and I don’t but that’s but maybe I was taught that and I believed it and I got scared around men I could meet the nicest man on the planet and I would turn him into a scum likee person if I could if I could do everything I possibly could if he was stronger than me I might have to change my mind about men but if I believe that that’s what’s going to happen I will be influencing that outcome and I don’t think we realize we’re doing that a lot and so that’s what it means to be self-determining creating our reality we really are kind of co-creators and we don’t even know we are and and the reason it’s hard for us to look at it is if we look at our cocreativ if it we think it might be bad we think we have to get punished for it so part of your ability to own and honor and love and trust and grow in confidence and grow in skill with our power is letting go of believing we’re going to get punished for it and so when we know we make sense when we know that we need help to do all of these things we will do them well but a lot L of us just haven’t even understood what makes us human and the thing that I love the most that Edler said is that we’re holistic we’re always trying to get back home to our best self and that even includes someone that’s out there killing maybe that that example of somebody that might kill somebody on the street because they want to fit into a gang and they’re going to override their conscience that person is actually trying to get back to a state of belonging and significance that they wouldn’t have otherwise so that I wanted to cover those things because because that is what sort of honors our humanness had you heard about those before you know what I think I remember you talking about some of these and and I when again what I love about this work is really just the understanding the level of understanding that you can get and again like you mentioned it is subjective but um somebody could interpret you know some stuff and say you know what I don’t I don’t believe in it um and through the last couple of years I’ve just slowly really been trying to understand how I can hold space in each of those areas that you mentioned um in fact um you know that my daughter and I are like constantly at each at opposite end of the spectrum and so she something happened this weekend and usually she’s the one that gets upset but this time I got upset and it was so weird because I got upset I yelled at her and right after I didn’t I hadn’t even hung up and I’m I’m starting to write her an apology because I’m like oh my gosh what state of power or or power under am I in that I’m reacting to her crisis like this so I sent her a message and I thought I should call her but no I’m going to send her a message and I sent her a message and I thought she was going to blow me off or whatever and again me thinking for her yes she responds right away that’s okay Mom I understand and I was like oh my gosh this has never happened in my life before where one I knew that I was wrong because I’m smarter now I understand that there’s something going on on both ends it doesn’t sound like you spent any time beating yourself up you just immediately said oh I see my mistake I’m going to fix this and I even thought oh my gosh what would Judy say if you were here oh that’s hilarious well I I really like that because you somewhere in there you got over your fear that even if you looked and saw something that you did that you wish you hadn’t done that it wasn’t a disaster that life wasn’t that fragile that you weren’t that fragile that your relationships weren’t that fragile and the reality of it is sometimes you could do something like that and it blows up in your face and you even get to the point where you know I’m strong for that even well I just kept thinking it’s my job it’s my responsibility I have to own this relationship and if I’m worried about what she’ll respond or that she’s going to blow me off then I’m not owning it do you have to own it I don’t have to own it but I want to own it okay so do you know I I caught you saying that right you know how it goes with me so when we say things like that like I have to do something the question we want always goes wow I hear myself saying I have to or you might hear your daughter saying I guess I have to go do this right you can say what would be the barrier so you want to live this way right what would be the barrier I’m afraid I won’t I won’t remember I’m afraid I’m never going to do it good enough I mean there’s probably a barrier in there somewhere right I mean I’m sure there’s a lot of barriers one will it be reciprocated am I going to feel like I’m going out of my way and the other person isn’t I’m so glad you brought that up but at the end of the day I can only control my yard yeah I can only control you know how I feel and how I react and because I do want to be intentional about living my best life uh I’ve heard you say it enough times where I’m starting to think okay I need to follow that like I want to have a purpose in my life and that is one of them um then I need to just take responsibility regardless of what’s going to happen on the other end of the telar whe yeah whether they reciprocate or not that’s when you know you’re free when you realize my behavior does not does not have anything to do with what they do with it because otherwise when we’re doing that we don’t know we’re in discouragement we’re actually being transactional we’re thinking I got to get something from them so even that’s okay because we don’t even know how transactional we are because we’re so often more discouraged than we know and feeling like everything’s so fragile so I keep using that word fragile because just talking with that teenager I realized she had already decided and this is happening to a lot of people at different various ages that uh everything’s so fragile and scary and it just really isn’t not making mistakes isn’t taking time to think about what you want um I I think the reason I loved all the stuff about Mr Rogers sits out right now his documentary his movie he models that complete presence and honoring of the child within him and the child within other people and the adult within other people and we don’t do that it’s like we have no faith in each other until we do right and and part of it is just knowing that we’re not most of us getting what we need to do that well so when I talked about the four control models in the last episode the model that we promote is called the responsibility based model and the reason that’s hard for people to put their head around is because we’re so used to the control models and they feel so endorsed and they feel powerful if I held a gun to your head and got you to do something it might feel powerful if I could hold out a carrot and get you to do something it might feel powerful but if we could remember that those are actually weakening everyone and we could really put them down the belief is often that if I do that the alternative is per permissive and it’s not the alternative takes High character High intention High love High purpose and it’s very demanding in a good way it feels good like when you do a good workout it feels good like when you do a great job on something so it’s not permissive and I want the listeners to really get that so when you do a responsibility based Community with somebody whether it’s a conversation or community that you build at your workplace or your home or in your school it is one in which you hold High belief it’s one in which you transfer responsibility to the people that you’re with in a way that they can feel fully supported and picking up that responsibility and owning what’s Theirs to own so like even in our conversation you’re picking up on oh gosh Judy’s gonna call on call me on it if I say I have to or I should or I need to she’s going to pick up on that because when we’re in community with each other I’m going to continuously be helping you pick up what’s yours and put down what’s not yours that sort of thing and the way that I do that and the way we do this with each other CU you and I have done this is we we Mentor each other and all that we do in our mentoring is ask a lot of questions just like that eighth grade boy what do you want do you want peace oh do you want to see where you’re doing War all those kinds of things yeah and I actually talking about the mentoring I found myself looking for the mentoring worksheet the other day because um now at work I have somebody that works under me and so I’m like oh my gosh I want to make sure that my his experience with the boss is nothing like the ones that I have had and I’ve heard you know crazy horror stories about other people having and really just asking him instead of feeling like okay as your boss and or your Mentor I know everything yes and I’m going to tell you how to save your life in your day and so really understanding and giving him the ability to see that he has all the answers yes I mean this is I mean I keep telling him what do you want and when you when you create the the uh understandings of some of these tools that he can be using you can say hey which tool would you want to use you know that’s what you and I did with each other that’s my next step but I got I got to learn all the tools right right but even as you go and and that’s why I love the idea that you can be friends with him even though he’s quote unquote subordinate right you could turn around and give him the the mentoring template that you’ve just done with him and and that’s probably one of the greatest gifts you could give to the person that you’re leading is let them have a healthy relationship with the authority figure that isn’t SC SC and overpowering and perfect all the time right yes in fact I introduced them to somebody the other day and I said my colleague and then they responded I thought you were his boss I’m like What’s the title yeah yeah well I remember we work closely together I remember working with a group where they had been doing this model for a couple years and one of them was promoted and she and I had a meeting and she said I guess I can’t go to lunch with my best friend Hannah anymore and I said why not cuz she automatically flipped into if I’m promoted and I have have this title now we have to go into this inequity thing and I said as long as you’re being as responsible with her as everyone else and you’re not giving her special favoritism you can do you can maintain all the friendship that you’ve ever had and she goes oh my God I totally forgot so even when you get a title change if you don’t remember your mindset is not the same in this responsibility based model right mhm this is a great place where we can share a reaction with you of from people who have shared feelings about this thing session with one of the owners um there’s a it started off thinking that you know this is going to be them just talking at me um but the first time that they legit like had an actual life Works mentoring session where it was like an actual give and take like a legitimate uh transfer of ideas and feelings like that it’s hard to believe that we can be so Mutual with each other in a responsibility based model and it’s hard to believe that another person’s going to hold for us a belief that you can handle your relationships I have faith that you can learn how to and have courage to go handle those relationships whether they’re easy or hard and I can help you to pay attention if you’re as productive as you want to be and I can help you to find out if there’s anything in the way of you loving your life and engaging in it and I can even help you have a plan so that you can keep moving forward forward in your life and so that’s that’s what I really want people to know Adler talked about it like this he said if we all learn how to own our own tasks we’d have an amazing world because we’d be so busy being responsible for our own world that we wouldn’t be in everybody else’s business to avoid our world because we feel so shameful in it so inadequate to it so low confident in it and that’s the cycle right and that’s another key thing I think the part of life work systems is helping you even understand those feelings M helping you identify them because you might just see someone that’s acting out because they’re powerful but then you realize well they’re insecure or they’re in fear or you know there’s these other words that you maybe don’t have that we we know the words but we don’t necessarily realize to label that and maybe label is the wrong word too but to identify that word with the reaction that the person is having yes I mean even the fact that we could be saying we’re talking about culture someone else might be talking about a completely different kind of culture than a responsibility based culture so even that term and what does it mean and how do you hold people like you have a positive belief about them how do you what is your job with them it’s not to manage them it’s not to motivate them it’s not to judge them it’s not to enable them it’s to help them become owners of their tasks so even that language is so explanatory but most most people haven’t even experienced that kind of culture right um the other thing I think we all assume that we have the same ideas about about what should be happening like um I don’t know why this is popping in my head but I’m just going to tell this story and you probably heard me say it before I remember of all the um Twilight Zone episodes the one that I remember the most is this guy dies and he goes up to what looks like the Pearly Gates and there’s this group of people and he’s like oh my gosh oh my gosh what are you guys doing and they’re like we’re here to do anything you want give you anything you want and he says oh my gosh I can’t believe it and they say what what come we do for you and he says can you get me a big mound of gold you know and they said yes come back tomorrow and I’ll be there and he he’s not sure it’s really going to be happening and he comes back and sure enough there’s this big mound of gold and he asks all these different things throughout the entire week and he gets every one of them and by the end of the week he looks to the people and says you know I don’t know what to ask for I kind of thought this would be more fun to be in heaven it’s kind of boring and I’m a little restless and they said who says you’re in heaven and the reason that’s so powerful is we’ve been sold this notion that to be a happy human being we just have to take care of number one and in the Adan model the idea is that we use our power and service to all which is very different than even the term servant leadership I don’t like it unless people realize that means all of us need to be leaders in serving one another whatever if we’re janitor or executive en title yeah no I mean that totally makes sense and when you talk about owners of your tasks and owners of your power it really brings it back to that exactly right because um we’re led to believe or in our mind we think that it’s a certain way that we’re going to be happy you know I mean how many times have we thought oh as soon as I get X that next raise or the next job title or the car or pay off this debt that all of a sudden that’s going to transform our life without realizing that we have it inside of us we just haven’t activated it right I mean all we have to do is look at a lot of celebrities that have tried every other thing and they’re beautiful and talented and Rich and they commit suicide or drug overdose you know it isn’t that guarantee and often um that’s a place where we’re not taught to be there in that way for each other and and um one of the ways I like to tell people what social interest is which is what you’re doing when you’re transferring responsibility to someone you’re also transferring their social interest is to notice what consequences do I cause you and so I remember one time being at a grocery store and I saw a little boy ask his mother why can’t we park in this parking spot it was the handicapped and she said do you see that $500 on there that means that if we get caught we probably get a ticket from a policeman and we’ll have to pay $500 which was the saddest thing ever because what she could have said is you know what’s really cool about our community we watch out for each other we want to make sure that everybody can get in that grocery store and especially those people that can’t walk well isn’t that great and so what she was focusing on were the consequences to him which is very self focused and it won’t bring him the happiness that she wants for her son and yet she doesn’t know to say that to actually use that as an opportunity to teach him social interests isn’t that kind of sad that is kind of sad yeah and I think unfortunately we live that way in a lot of other areas of our life yes so I am so glad that we have been working with you and even just the opportunity oneon-one for me to have done a couple of one-offs and attend the conferences I I want to say that I’ve gone through all the modules but I haven’t but the fact that I have access to the tools like you mentioned and that I even know the concepts is lifechanging yeah um like I said I mean I’m seeing a little bit with my daughter where we’re we’re having a better relationship but a lot of that is because I stopped trying to be the know-it-all figure and kind of said like hey you have power this is your your life too and you have to take control of it um or you would want to take control of it and not solving everything for her yeah yeah that’s one of the hardest especially as a parent is thinking it’s our job to protect them save them manage them all those things and really our job is to trust them faster further you know more frequently so and we’re not doing a good job we we are we just haven’t been taught so even in that we have to be compassionate that’s that’s why this whole and I want to wrap up with this this whole individual psychology this whole notion of a responsibility based way of operating is still not mainstream that’s why I try so hard to spit in that soup of the control models because until we’re ready to put that down then we’re going to be able to go further and further in this responsibility based structure which has lots of beauty richness complexity and gifts and so we’ll just continue to unwrap that but hopefully people have at least a sense of there’s an alternative to control it’s not persist uh permissive it’s not milk toast it’s not weak it’s it’s powerful and Rich and beautiful and it brings forth I want to share these comments from a person on this very idea and a quick anecdote for me personally I can say so I’ve had the um blessing in my life to take two maternity leaves and one was pre-life works and one was post bringing in life works and I will tell you the coming back after my second maternity leave was much easier than coming back after the first one without having this responsibility based model so just a little personal anecdote of how I really felt it and that’s a big big um stake to get over because when you start giving people permission you think they’re going to take advantage of it because you don’t trust them with it and so I feel like a lot of times that’s a first big step for a lot of companies is trusting and allowing them to make a mistake in such a way that you’re not that thrown by it because they’re still scared of their power and you understand that so you don’t go oh my God this stiff stuff doesn’t work you know I got to go back to the ways everybody else is doing it that’s our biggest challenge is how to prepare people for that transition because it is a little scary it’s scary even for the person getting the power so you have to get to the point where you know your power is so good and that theirs is that that you don’t carry any fear into the room over it even when they’re freaking out so one of the things that I I have been trying to do is connect the dots for people and so I had a futurist friend come to me recently and he said you know what you’ve built is a teal organizational model he was a social he was a master’s in social work and I said what is that and so I went and researched it and he was right and and what I love about the teal and I encourage you that are listening to go to my website under the Articles there’s a category called teal organizational model there’s articles I’ve written articles that industry has written so you can kind of see how this is tying with the Trends in culture change right now but what I discovered was that teal has a lot of these qualities that I talked about with adarian principles that we’re holistic that we shouldn’t be splitting ourselves out when we’re at work and at home that we should be in uh with each other in ways where we can be the same person everywhere where uh we drop all this hierarchy power over stuff and where we create uh leader and follower skills within people at the simultaneously back and forth with each other so I really encourage people to read the teal organizational model can almost seem a little bit like kind of Heaven on Earth kind of thing even though it’s not a spiritual term but it’s a natural Progressive Evolution where people do have a different level of Faith with each other and what’s really interesting is that it’s starting to be the method of choice in the most Progressive organizations because they’re aware of how fast everything is changing how complex everything is how Global everything is and and they need to have confident trusting happy responsible people to fulfill everything and so there are Technologies today like agile practices where people know that there’s this way they could be in group but they’ve never been taught how to be in group and so this responsibility based model is aligned with the agile principles with the teal organiz organizational models and things that are that people are reading about but they’re not necessarily sure where do I go to implement that yeah know I I definitely would recommend people check out the Articles because some of the things I got out of that especially your articles was not just the principles of what a teal organization looks like but also how to apply them what do I really do a lot of times you read that greatest article or the greatest new thing and it sounds great but how do you actually do the work yes it’s the implementation and so we’ll talk about that in a future episode one of the gifts that I bring to the table is I think in terms of systems and so I liked to build and have built systems that are implementable and that’s something that people don’t really know they don’t know that being a human being is more complex than they thought and that it requires more understanding and that it requires a set of guidelines that can be consistently sustained amongst a team or groups or even across a country or world and once they can kind of get their head around that they can start to recognize it when they see it yeah we need to get you in all the schools and the hospitals everywhere I’m serious because I feel like I don’t know if it’s age or whatever but just reflect on the fact that there are so few processes that have taught us how to be a parent a human a mother um a sister even or happy or happy right I mean even bunched up the bigger art the higher arching um thought process is exactly that how do I live a life of purpose how am I happy with what I do and that would be I mean the happiness comes in in from knowing how to be a sister and a parent and a colleague and it rolls everywhere just a neighbor yes I just thought of a t-shirt we could create go from crappy to happy because she opened up by saying that why do we live a crappy life so uh for those of you that are listening we are so grateful that you joined us today and you are the inspiration for us to share with you and we hope that something that we’ve said in this uh episode will have lifted your heart given you hope made you curious and helped you to believe that things can get better thank you so much well thank you Judy so people those of you that are listening make a commitment to do something with this information go on the website take the survey download my book go look at the Articles go to the articles that say industry articles and check out what Forbes and Inc and some of the larger players are saying about what’s going on with culture and and the trends today so we hope that you’ll join us again and that you’ll take that action and make your life one where it works and don’t forget to go go to iTunes and leave a five star review on all your favorite social media platforms because the information that Judy has and the life work system shares is definitely something that we all need we may not realize it in the moment but as you start to learn more and hear more you’re going to be able to start to apply it to your daily life and just wonder where have you been on my life Judy so be sure to give her a five star on all the platforms because that will also help her be more visible to more people access more and the articles on her LinkedIn page are amazing you guys got to go check them out I love you I love you thank you for listening to Life Works today this podcast has been brought to you by Life Works system CEO and host Judy Ryan the intent of this podcast is to provide you with hope and new ideas for Greater Joy in your life and work for more information on our organization and earlier podcast episodes related articles videos and more please visit our website at Lifeworks systems.com be sure to subscribe to our podcast and mailing list we invite you to join us in creating a world in which all people love their lives and where your life works today