This week, on the podcast, we’re talking to business leadership coach, strategist, and bestselling author, Sarah Olivieri about recognizing emotions, leadership systems, and leveraging change. Listen for some great practical examples and very helpful tools!
“In leadership situations and, especially, in crisis, you can either be a Chicken Little or a MacGyver.” Will you run around yelling, “The sky is falling!”? Or, will you stop and ask yourself, “What do we have around us that we can make work?”
This is what sets a great leader apart and what is possible with a basic system in place – one that works, again and again, to turn a potential crisis into a non-crisis.
In this episode of the podcast, we’re talking to business leadership coach, strategist, and bestselling author, Sarah Olivieri about recognizing emotions, leadership systems, and leveraging change.
She shares some great practical examples, as well as some helpful resources and tools.
We talk about:
- The importance of reading the room and checking in with emotions
- How the brain works and what we need to understand to make good/effective decisions
- The basic types of leadership systems (and what each is best used for)
- How to look for (or create) and leverage change moments
- The one thing that can bring so much peace and joy to your life as a leader/human
—
Sarah Olivieri is a business leadership coach and strategist with a passion for helping organizations thrive, and a #1 international bestselling author.
Sarah has a fundamentally different way of looking at things; an ability to see a kernel of opportunity, to flip a problem on its head, to understand which levers to pull for success – and she’s poured her strategic brilliance into the heart of The Impact Method™️, a leadership and operating system, that helps businesses get out of the weeds, rapidly pivot away from the ineffective, and create a coordinated, systemized way to develop and execute strategy effectively.
To learn more about Sarah and her work, visit pivotground.com. You can also find her on all the socials (by searching Sarah Olivieri or PivotGround).
- I'm Celine Williams and welcome to the Leading Through Crisis podcast, a conversation series exploring resiliency and leadership in challenging times. My guest today is Sarah Olivieri, who is a business leadership coach and strategist who has a passion for helping organizations thrive. She is also a number one international bestselling author. Welcome Sarah.
- It's really great to be here.
- I am excited to talk to you for a number of reasons. I'm really lucky with the guests I get to have on this show. But before we jump into all of that, I do want to ask the question I start every one of these episodes off with, which is the name of the podcast is Leading Through Crisis. When you hear that phrase, what comes up for you or what does that mean for you?
- I have to say when this podcast was coming up in my calendar and I saw that topic, I had like the mini-crisis process happen in front of me, which was like, "Oh my God, that's not my topic." And then wait, let me just check if that's the name of the podcast or if that's the topic. And then I was like, "Oh, that's the name of the podcast." And then I was like, "Well, wait a second. I deal with crisis all the time as a leader myself and as a coach of other leaders, and I have processes for dealing with crises and how to get out of crisis." And immediately I was then out of that temporary crisis moment. So I think that when I think about the word crisis or what is a crisis, which I had to as I had that moment, it's like sudden change that brings challenge with it. And for me, leading through crisis is about how can... And there's often a lot of fear. It's like an emotional word, crisis. And as soon as we can take it out of the realm of fear and total disorder and bring it back into the realm of knowing what pieces we can control and we can like have that fear reaction come way down, then you might be dealing with a challenging situation but you probably don't feel crisis anymore. And so I think the first reaction in hearing it is, "Oh, this is a thing." But really in thinking through it again I was like, "Oh, this is a feeling." Crisis is more of a feeling that's brought on by the sudden bad change usually.
- I love how you phrase that, because one of the... On the website for this podcast, the sub-phrase, that's not the right word, but whatever we're going to leave that is a conversation series about leadership in challenging times. And that's there specifically, because crisis is, and I agree like the... I love the way you put that about the feeling about it, but that's really what it is. It's change, challenge. These are constant. By that, if you think of it that way, then crisis ends up being constant if we have feelings attached to it. Which is like unsurprisingly leaders and humans are going to have feelings attached to change and challenge.
- Yeah, yeah. And I think when kind of diving right in to one of the secrets of leading through crisis is to get the scary feelings out of the change process as soon as possible. As soon as you can make people feel like we're not reacting in fear, all of the sudden everything goes much more easily.
- So I'm going to ask a question about that, because I think that is I work with, have worked with a lot of leaders who would not even acknowledge that fear was part of what they were feeling or how they were reacting or whatever the situation was. And I think that in certain organizations, in certain cultures, you really can't acknowledge or own that because of whatever negative associations they have with the idea of fear. Which I mean people are going to feel fear anyway, so it doesn't make any sense. And that's my own opinion on the whole thing. But with that in mind, how do you even like when you're saying people acknowledging the fear, if they don't see it, how do you get them to the point to see it, to acknowledge it? And I ask this as you work with leaders, leadership systems, you talked about some of these things. Let's start from the very beginning. How do you get them there?
- Well, I don't think people have to acknowledge that they're acting out of fear in order to be taken into a space where they're no longer fearful. But as a leader, one of the things I teach my clients a lot is whenever they enter a meeting, a room, people they're leading or whatever, you don't even have to have like any sort of control or power over them to show up as a leader, the first thing you need to do is read the room. And what I mean by this is, right, just see how people are emotionally. Are they happily chatting with each other? Are they sitting like looking at their phones? What's going on? And if you don't have a clear read, ask some questions to help you get a better read. Hey, what'd you do this weekend? Hey, what's going on for you right now, right? Find out what's going on. Do a more formal check-in activity. I like to start meetings off with like a high-low we call it. So you share a high from your week and a low from your week. And sometimes I will explicitly say share a personal high-low, if I think there's a lot of outside stuff going on that was coming into the room when we were having a business meeting. This happened a lot during the pandemic. I'd ask for a personal high-low. And then people shared, especially in the beginning, "My husband just got COVID, and we're dealing with that." And so once we read the room, if people are in an emotional state or really focused on things that aren't the topic of the meeting, the next thing I train is you don't start the meeting you planned until you've addressed this emotional distraction of your team. And I think one way to do that, 'cause you asked is listen to people. And/or the phrase I really like to be specifically say is make people feel heard. Because you can make people feel heard without actually listening to them and you can listen to them and still not make them feel heard. But it is the feeling heard that often makes people feel safer and calmer, because now they feel like, oh. And if you can stay calm yourself. So I think part of pre-reading the room, read yourself. Like, "Am I having an emotional reaction to this? Let me breathe a moment, get that in check." And now think through, what is this situation? And ask that question like I did for myself on my calendar read, right? I was like, "Oh, I'm reacting, but what's really going on here?" And if you can ask yourself that question, if you can get emotional awareness for yourself, and then say, "Well, what's really going on here?" and start to pull apart the pieces, you'll find pieces that you know how to deal with and that are familiar to you and it'll all get a lot easier.
- So there's two things that come up for me when you say that that I want to ask about. The first one is I think there's a lot of, look, I think emotional awareness is incredibly important. And I think there are many people who cannot name their emotions. They don't actually know what they are feeling inside of each of these moments, if that makes sense. Whether it's they don't know the name for the emotion. They don't connect how they're feeling to a specific emotion. They, you know, whatever. I think there's so many layers of this. So the first thing is, how does one start to, how have you worked with people to start to recognize some of those and name some of those emotions? Because I do, like you said, that emotional awareness matters.
- Yeah.
- And the second question I have, which kind of goes back to something that you said as part of this is and I'm not going to get this wording right so I apologize upfront, but you had said, someone doesn't need to acknowledge fear to move through fear. So if that's the case and they're not aware of the fear, how can you help someone? Or how does someone move through an emotion that they can't name or have an awareness of? Does that make sense? I'm just going to ask you all the big questions, Sarah, here you go.
- And I'm thinking here like this is how I learned this and how I learned that and here's a great source. So I think one is to be a great leader. And I'm kind of stumbling on this word a bit, right, 'cause some leaders are leaders 'cause they're in positions of authority and other leaders are not in positions of authority. So I often show up as a leader to the point that like when I'm shopping in the store, people will ask me questions. Other shoppers will ask me questions for my opinion to help guide them in their shopping, because I show up as a leader, right? They're just strangers in the store, right? So to be that kind of leader, to show up and to be able to guide people, influence people, support people. These are all different kinds of roles. The leader needs to develop a practice of learning. Think of yourself like you got to go to school to learn about emotions and really how the brain works. So one resource that I think has helped me a lot in learning about how to talk about emotions and teach people about emotions is Marshall Rosenberg's "Nonviolent Communication". And it's a little laborious as a system, but the big takeaways are you can print out lists of emotions, and it's really important to learn the difference between a judgment and an emotion. And of course now that I've said that I'm going to have a terrible time coming up with an example.
- I laugh because I would be the exact same way. I'd be like, "I remember this thing and oh no."
- What's a really good example? It'll come to me. But we attribute things to people. We say a lot of things that are kind of judgmental of people rather than describing their emotions in a totally non-judgmental way. And Marshall Rosenberg is really good at that. Asking questions and not... One of the pieces of language he talks about is rather than say you made me feel upset, the reality is you can't make me feel anything. My feelings are generated inside my body. You may influence that, but you can't force me to feel a certain way. So change your language. Say I felt this way when you said this other thing. And this is just like any skill. This is something you can practice if you hear. And I do it with my kid all the time, right? He says like, "Oh, you made me so upset today." It's like you feel upset, but you know, and maybe some of my actions were things that you didn't like, but your emotions are inside your body. So kind of lesson number one is recognize all your emotions are controlled inside your body and you can gain control over them. Well, different people have different degrees of ability to gain control. But meditation, there's many forms of meditation. But I think the basic benefit to me of meditation is it helps kind of rewire your brain, if you will, so that you can feel what's going on inside your body and inside your brain. Almost get like a clearer outside lens, so that you can go, "Oh, I'm feeling and oh." Maybe you can create a little space between when you feel it and when you react. And if you can slow down that timeline a little, which I think meditation is really good at, then you have a moment to acknowledge and realize what you're feeling before you react. And when you can do that and that takes practice. It's not like an instant thing. When you can start to do that you gain this control over your behavior that becomes very, very powerful as a leader and helping other people. Because if you can show up and either not be... You can be afraid, right? I'm not telling anybody, don't be afraid. I'm saying don't react from the fear, right? You can then exist, I feel afraid, but there's other things going on. And my fear is not going to help me, but something else will help me and let me focus on that. So it's really about have the emotions. Certainly don't deny yourself, but don't let them be the generator of your behavior. Especially if you're trying to get something done in a group. So I probably answered a few of those questions, but not all of them.
- No, you absolutely did. I mean, I'm not married to my own questions by any stretch of the imagination. So you did and more importantly, you sparked more curiosity in me, which is always the most fun part of this. So one of the things that I appreciate what you were saying about the distance between feeling an emotion and reacting. And I've probably said this on this podcast. Anyone who listens to this is like, "You always say the same thing, Celine, I have no doubt." So I probably said this here before, but one of the things that I say all of the time in real life with clients, probably here in general, is that we're not responsible for that initial feeling or thought that comes up in our head, right? That like, "I hate this, this sucks, fear over whatever." We're not responsible for that. That's our body telling us something. That's information and data and that's important. However, after we feel or think that, we are responsible for everything else that happens. And we have a choice even if we don't want to think we do, and if that is constructive or destructive. And to me like that's what I hear inside of what you're saying is I'm phrasing it a different way, but like let's get really clear on what's going to benefit what I can do that is serving me or the people around me, or however you want to think about it. And not just operate under the idea that the feeling is this thing that exists outside of me that controls me in these ways.
- Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And when you recognize that, you then can see what's going on for other people. And so if you see them reacting from their emotions, you don't have to carry on reacting upon their reaction. You can just go, "Oh, this person is having an emotion, and it's causing a reaction. Let's just address the situation. Change that state so they're no longer reacting to their emotion and then proceed." And I'm remembering one of the things I thought when you asked the previous question is the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow", which is a very long read, but I think it's an important one to get the concept from. But basically that's like the science behind we have part of our brain that reacts very quickly, and part of our brain that reacts slowly. That's literally why it's like thinking fast and thinking slow. And the more analytical part of our brain is the part that thinks. It's not just slow, but it comes second. So we usually have this quick reaction, and it's good for some things and not good for a lot of things in business or leadership. And so we have to wait for that slow brain to kick in. But that's a great resource for learning about how the brain's actually working in decision making. And I had something else, but I've forgotten it now. So we'll carry on.
- When you said "Thinking, Fast and Slow", I laughed, 'cause it is a great book, and it is written like a textbook, and I have read it. And it was painful to get through, but the information is so valuable. So I always hope people will read it and-
- And when I decided to read it, I'd read a review of it that said, "It is really long, but you can either read these three other books, or you can read this one book." And I was like, "I'll just read the long source material, because the three books are going to be just as much in the end."
- Absolutely.
- And I took my time, but I did it.
- That's a smart way to approach any of his books. And I say this with much respect, 'cause the man is brilliant. But any of his books need to be approached with time, for sure.
- Yes.
- I think I brought this up, and you may have brought it up as well inside of what we were talking about. And I say this, 'cause I know one of your areas of expertise, and I have no doubt there are many, but is this idea of leadership systems. And even inside of some of how you've approached these answers, there's a thoughtfulness and approach that I think is likely, and I say this just as an observation, I'm not saying it's the truth, but is likely part and parcel due to how you think about systems in general. So your approach is likely more systematic overall than, I don't know, someone like my brain where it's chaos 90% of the time. So I'm saying that, because I'm curious if you can talk to us a little bit about what leadership systems are, and how they can benefit, how they can be a detriment, because I'm sure there are many that can also be detrimental, and how they help you in what you do as well as clients, et cetera. But like let's get into some of this, 'cause I think it's really interesting.
- Well, you definitely picked up on this system part, and it's not just the way my brain works. The way my brain works helps me develop systems. But not everybody has to be able. No, no, not everybody has to be able to be a master chef to be a great cook and follow a recipe, right? So don't use my systems working brain to be like, "Well, I'm not like Sarah, this won't work for me." Learning a system is pretty easy, especially if it's a simple system, and then you can train yourself to follow it. And then it becomes a lot easier to use a system as your method of reacting. So like when I was a kid it was a big public awareness campaign to turn off the water while you're brushing your teeth. Simple system, you learn it with your body and your brain. You put the toothpaste on, you wet your toothbrush. Then you turn the water off, and then you keep brushing. And they had to train a lot of people to do this, not just to leave the water running the whole time. That's a really simple example of a system that many of us have learned and changed our behavior, and we now just follow this system. But let's go back to like what a system of leadership is. And it always sounds so foreign and nobody talks about it except you've all learned it. If I say democracy, do you know what that is? Probably. So we often use systems of leadership labels to talk about governments, but they certainly apply in other ways. So the basic kinds of systems, the general categories, we have oligarchy or like monarchy. So basically where there's people who have power, and either it's one person or a few people who share power. And these are longstanding systems. You've seen them, you're probably familiar with them, kings and queens, emperors. That is that whole system. And those systems are really designed. Each system kind of style is good for some things and bad for other things. So that kind of system is really good for maintaining the status quo and consolidating power. So if you want a small group of people to have all the power and keep things basically the same, that's the kind of system you want, an oligarchy or a monarchy. It's an authoritarian system. Then we have democratic systems, which are also very old, right? And that's where we share power by using a voting system. Everybody kind of gets a say, and then we put people in charge at the will of the people. And in the US we have our Checks and Balances system. There's different versions of democracy, but they all have the basic concepts. And democracy is where we start to see systems and processes start taking a lead over individuals. So like where we had that in a monarchy the king gets to decide, and/or the queen gets to decide, and then there's other levels of people who just get to decide. And they can change the process or do it however they want. Well, in a democracy, we become much more emphasize the processes, right? The election process is really, really important in a democracy. We have all these systems that keep the thing going as people rotate out. So it's very good at representing people's needs of a large group. It's quite good at maintaining stability, right? Democracies, once you get them going over a couple generations, they can stay in place for a very long time, because they're not people dependent. And you don't get like the wars over power between people, because it's not so much about the people. And then we have leaderless systems which are very, very powerful if you want to achieve an outcome. So right, so the monarchy is about consolidating power, the democracy is about representing people's needs, and the leaderless systems are about achieving. They're good at achieving outcomes. And they are almost totally about processes and about letting people be flexible, too, with what processes they use. And if anybody's heard of like Agile or Scrum from the tech world, these are kind of built more on that leaderless system type of model. So hopefully now you're going, "Oh yeah, I've heard of some leadership systems before." And I think so many of us, our businesses, if you're in business, default to that hierarchical model from the monarchy or the oligarchy, because that's how the school system is run. And that's how many family structures are also set up. And so many of us have that model ingrained, but we've been trained in that model. It's not like none of these are like naturally inherent one way or another. And so we start using it, because it's the one we're most familiar with.
- I appreciate that explanation. I'm guessing that there's a number of people who would be listening to this going, "I just assumed those were political systems, or whatever the..." Not necessarily leadership systems. And I think it's a really important thing to think about is how much those, especially that sort of traditional hierarchical one, exists and is socialized into most people, especially in any kind of Western culture as this. And I hate the term Western, but I'm going to, because it's not only English speaking. It's very common in Europe and parts of South America. I think there's cultures where it's not as common, but that is just the accepted norm in so many ways.
- Yeah, it is.
- And I love the acknowledgement that you had about school, and it just exists, because I think it makes people... I think it means that people often don't see them as leadership systems first. And then also say, how can we do anything different? This is how everything's run.
- Yeah, yeah. So then you're back up against, right, change. How do we manage change? And I don't love the word manage change. I feel like change comes about when we have a change moment. Something that is disruptive enough to kind of create that initial momentum to get the change going. And when I think about do I want to get something to change, first best avenue is to look for a change moment that's already presented itself. The pandemic, as horrible it was, was an incredible change moment and it created an opportunity for people to do things differently. So I was telling my clients as the pandemic hit, "Yes, this is scary, but hey, we also have a huge opportunity to change up how we run our organizations in a way that we didn't before." And when we don't have a big external change moment, we have to create a change moment. And change moments happen. It could be 'cause a leader is changing. It could be somebody died. It could be a new technology came out. If you have to make your own change, you're going to have to create your own change moment. It's going to take a lot longer to build up that momentum. But some of us are in that position. I always think there was this YouTube video that went viral once about the first follower. Did you see there was like this crazy dancing guy? So part of like change, you know, what change. People who write about change, they talk about sometimes the first follower. So there's the leader who like wants the change to happen. But the most critical piece is that you get the first person to follow the leader, and then once you have the first follower other people will join in. So there was this great YouTube video that went around for a while, this was a couple years ago, of this guy who was like crazy dancing in a field, and everyone's just looking at him like, "You're just a crazy dancer. Like what's wrong with you?" Until a second guy comes up and starts doing the same crazy dance following that guy. And once the second guy came on, the third and the fourth and the fifth came on really soon. And once there was a group of crazy dancers, all of the sudden they weren't crazy dancers. And everyone else joined in en masse once that happened. So we can get these things going, but we really have to start bringing people in slowly and get a few people to follow, and say, "Yeah, we're going to go in this direction too," otherwise you're just the lone change person.
- Well, I think it's really interesting. I love the idea of leveraging change moments, like the pandemic, that are outside of our control that happen to us in some way around us, affect us, whatever, however we want to think about it. And I think that often people struggle to recognize them. The pandemic aside. I mean look, I think there's still so many people who don't recognize the opportunity for change that it was, and from the beginning we're just waiting to quote-unquote, "Get back to normal." Which is very frustrating for me personally. I'll fully own it's my personal thing when I hear that, and I still hear it, and I'm like so frustrating that the opportunity was missed. But I do think that happens quite often is there is a change moment, and people are so resistant to change that even those that want change in some way don't know how to see that moment.
- Yeah, yeah. I think in that case having a guide is really helpful, or having a leader who says, "Hey, this is an opportunity." But you hear that enough times, and then you start to absorb it. I think my clients always say like, "We hear your voice Sarah. Like I was doing this thing, and Sarah's voice said," 'cause I repeated it again and again. And going back to systems, like how do I end up repeating the same thing again and again? Because when I think about how to deal with situations, I think about, what's the basic process, the framework that's going to work again and again and again so that I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel in the middle of a crisis to go back, right? That is not the time to be experimenting in crisis. That is the time to pull out the tried and true method for turning a crisis into a non-crisis again and again. And what do I use this basic system? First you check in with the emotions, then you ask, what's really going on here? Once you get people focused and calmed down, what's really going on here? What do we see? What do we know? What do we don't know? Gather the data, right? The emotions is part of the data. I love that you said that earlier. And then once you've gathered the data, then you ask, which things do we have control over and which things do we don't have control over? And then you say, "We don't have control over, we don't have control over, so we're not going to worry about those things. And we're going to take this smaller set of things that we're familiar with and that we have control over and we're going to start doing them kind of in most important order, priority order. And we're going to start coming up with solutions as a group. And then we're going to go off and implement those solutions and we're going to check back and see how it's working. And then we're going to refine and implement some more. And before you know it, it's resolved." And even better if you're on the lookout for things coming up, if you get used to that process, like we were just saying, you can avoid the crisis moment almost entirely. Or it's like very, very short and skip right to the opportunity that's coming with some disruption rather than the fear and crazy. I think there's "Chicken Little". You know "Chicken Little"?
- Yes.
- There's a scale of response to crisis. You could be at the Chicken Little end or the calm, cool and collected, the MacGyver end, right? MacGyver figures out what to do. Maybe it is a little dated example. But MacGyver does the same thing, right? It's not like MacGyver has everything he needs with him. MacGyver says, "Okay, well, what do we have around us so we can make work? And we'll put it together and come up with a solution." So I'd say the more you can train yourself to less Chicken Little time and scooch on over the MacGyver end of the spectrum, you'll be happier, and you'll come up with solutions sooner.
- I actually want to say something about this, but I just want to acknowledge that I love the scale of Chicken Little to MacGyver. Just the visual of Chicken Little to MacGyver makes me so happy. I really hope that people start using that scale, 'cause it's beautiful. So I did. So inside of what you were saying, I got so distracted by the Chicken Little visual. That's how my brain works is I was like, "This brings me so much joy." But I want to put on kind of a devil's advocate hat for a second, and acknowledge something that I, you know. First off before I put that on, I am a hundred percent on board on let's identify what we can control and let's identify what's out of our control. Like you it sounds like this is one of those things that I obsessively talk to people about, whether it's teams or individuals where it's like, let's get really clear on what these things are. And now here's the devil's advocate piece of this. Because you have systems, I'm really curious your lens on it is there are often groups, organizations, leaders, whatever, where there are many things out of their control. For example, funding, right? Funding is entirely outside of any public organization's control. I'm picking on public organizations at least here in Canada 'cause I can. You don't know what your funding's going to be like. And that affects everything. And there are leaders who were like, "We just have to wait. We can't do anything. We can't make any plans. We can't make any decisions, 'cause we don't." It just becomes that like I take no responsibility. And I'm playing devil's advocate knowing that I'm not saying I agree with that. But when that happens, when people acknowledge the things that are out of their control, and it is something like that and people react that way. What do you say to that? What do you say to that? Let's start with that, Sarah.
- Well, you know the first thing that came to mind is one of the things I teach is how to set goals. And I sucked at setting goals for a really long time. So I did my typical let's understand what's going on here and go to the academic deep dive. And what I learned was there are two types of goals and they're always interrelated. The academics call them outcome goals and process goals. Outcome goals are things that are results that are out of your control. And process goals, which I have renamed execution goals, 'cause I could never remember them, are things that you can do, things that you can execute on. That's why I call them execution goals. So it's really, really important even in your goal setting. So if you say, "Wow. Problem, we don't know what our funding's going to be. And also problem, we need more funding, right?" So we'd like to know what it is, and we'd like to have more of it. So having more funding and this is always a tricky one. I work with nonprofits so this is always, it sounds like, "Oh, we need to fundraise." But getting more funding is always really about getting other people to give you their money, whether it's government or private. So that's out of your control. All right, now let's think about the things that are in our control. Let's come up with a list of things that we could do to know when our funding is. Sometimes it's better to say like, "Well, if we could just know this certain percentage, we'd be good. And we'll plan on that certain percentage, and then anything extra is bonus." So knowing and predictability is often very valuable to us, but not always. We talked about earlier how I've traveled a lot, and when I lived in Africa I lived with a family. And they were pretty well off. The mother worked for the president and the father worked for the university. And they had a good car. But their system was they would get in the car, and they'd go to the gas station. And they would only put enough gas in the car for the trip they were taking that day, not fill up the tank. And at first I'm like, "Well, that seems weird. Why wouldn't you fill up the tank? Like it seems like a lot of extra trips, and why not just buy the whole thing?" It wasn't 'cause they couldn't afford it. And then I realized there was a lot of instability. You can't always get parts for a car. You don't know if your car is going to get stolen that day. You don't know what's going to happen. So to the point that it like didn't make practical sense to waste filling up your tank, because who knows, somebody could drain your tank and siphon all the gas out, who knows? So in that context it really didn't make sense. They were dealing with all this unpredictability. So their way of controlling it was they only put in the gas they needed for that day, and then they didn't suffer the consequences of the rest of the unpredictability. So we can think about things that make it more predictable. What can we know, right? Or maybe we can make a decision. Actually, I had a client going through this. She's moving a food pantry from one location to another. And the new location, the contracting work is taking longer than expected. Big surprise, right? It always takes longer than expected. And she's like, "Well, if we don't get in by this date, that's really close and we only have like a one day margin of error." Or like now they were down to like a 12 hour margin of error, 'cause concrete had to dry. Then I'm going to have to change everything. And she's all anxious waiting up. I was like, "Why don't you just push to the next date? Now you have a 30 day window to be ready. You have a date that you can be sure of. And what's the big problem with that? Well, it costs more, 'cause each month they extend they have to pay for rent in both places. But now we get to the funding part, right? Maybe you don't have control over the government funding, but you do have control over your fundraising activities. You are able to call up your donors, explain what's going on, and make an ask. Is it a guarantee? No. But is it highly likely that, because you have a large community support base that they will understand and support you? Yes, and now you'll probably have the money, and you're definitely going to be able to schedule everything in a timeframe. So we pushed it back, which she was thinking, "Oh, we can't push it back, 'cause it's going to be more expensive." But sometimes having that predictability is worth it.
- I love that. And I appreciate you talking through some of that, because it makes it real for people who get stuck in that.
- Yeah.
- And I think that, you know. I love what you said, and what came to mind was another thing you can control is to run call it as part of your process goals, the expedition goals. That's not what you said.
- I like that too.
- Execution goals. Is to even say like, "If we get this funding or this funding or this funding, let's come up with three high level plans or whatever to address them so that, 'cause we can control that having different ideas, so that when we get the funding or we don't get the funding or whatever that thing is that's out of our control, we have risk mitigate. We have mitigated a few different approaches to this situation."
- And you know what you're going to do.
- Yeah, so I love the examples you gave, and I love the different ways of thinking about it, 'cause again, I appreciate it. I think a lot of people get stuck in there's so many things outside of my control, I can't do anything.
- We do. And I think a lot of people make a lot of assumptions. I do too, we all do. We make assumptions that aren't necessarily helping us. I had another client recently. She runs a big convention in Hollywood, but it's for student producers. And she's a former Hollywood producer. And she wanted the event to be of Hollywood standards. And we had this conversation that, one, Hollywood standards, her own standards were driving her nuts, because there's all this extra stuff to do to make Hollywood event standards. And on top of that, we talked about the mission of her organization is to inspire and train future storytellers. And it was really important to her to involve students. So I said, "Listen, you make students more involved. Students would rather see their peers do something pretty good than have a pro-Hollywood contractor do something perfectly. It is more meaningful. So not only are you making your life more difficult by holding yourself to these standards, they're actually taking away from what you're trying to achieve with this event. And by lowering your standards and making it more about, yeah, it's student produced. Maybe we had a few glitches, but it was still really amazing and inspiring. And these are my peers or someone who just graduated. My close peer or almost peers is inspiring and exciting. So it's really important. I think kind of circling back to where we started about being in check with your own emotions. Also learning to be in check with your own assumptions and expectations, that if it isn't like law and they didn't say you can't do it, then you are free to change your own expectations of things.
- Well, and I would say, even if someone said you can't do it, sometimes you can still do it, and it's worth questioning anyways.
- That's right.
- Just my two cents on that. This has been a pleasure, Sarah. And before we wrap up, 'cause I think there's so much here. But I want to give you the opportunity if there's something that we didn't get to or that you want to say or emphasize before we wrap up give you the opportunity to speak into that. And saying, "No, I think I'm good" is also completely acceptable for the record.
- I feel like we covered so much. This is probably like a re-listen to. But I'd say my number one takeaway for folks if you need the cheat sheet is if you need to start somewhere, start with learning about your own emotions and learning to recognize them, because that's probably one of the most rewarding things any human being could do for themselves. Not just for business or leadership, but just to feel that you can experience joy and peace in any situation, that's so powerful. And it can bring you so much happiness. Just that one thing is worth it.
- I could not agree more. Thank you for your time, Sarah. It's been a pleasure. There will be links where everyone can find you in the show notes. So for everyone to check that out. I hope we do this again. It was a pleasure. It was a pleasure getting to know you a little bit. Thank you for being so generous with your time and energy and insights.
- That would be great. Thank you for the wonderful questions and great listening.
- You are very kind. I appreciate that. Thank you. Thanks for joining me today on the Leading Through Crisis podcast. If you enjoyed this conversation, please take a minute to rate and review us on your podcast app. If you're interested in learning more about any of our guests, you can find us online at www.leadingthroughcrisis.ca.