Michael Hunter
Hello!
Welcome to Uncommon Leadership.
I’m Michael Hunter with Uncommon Teams.
Today, I’m talking Nalani Rodriguez.
Nalani is an executive coach focusing on transforming our relationship with work. She has spent the last decade focused on building workplaces that refuel us rather than drain us. She’s done this through work in strategy consulting, experience design, people ops, talent development, and most recently, building an internal coaching team at a fully remote and global software-as-a-service startup called Chili Piper.
Her current work focuses on working with leaders to transform their relationship with work for themselves and for their teams. Her belief is that leaders hold particular power, influence, and responsibility to create the conditions for themselves and others to live this reality.
Nalani is currently in the middle of six months of travel and remote work with her husband, and today, she’s talking to us from Greece.
Welcome, Nalani!
Nalani Rodriguez 1:11
Hi Michael, thanks for that intro, and happy to be in dialogue with you.
Michael 1:15
I’m excited to have you here today.
In your journey to seeing people as people and learning to leverage their unique gifts to best accomplish your goals, when did you first recognize this might be a valuable approach?
Nalani 1:35
My first instinct is to say that maybe the turning point for me, or the lightbulb moment for me, was a little bit different from others.
I won’t qualify it, I guess.
That moment or that time for me was early in my career when I was working in consulting at a boutique consulting firm.
There was a small number of us, but we were working with really large international clients. Think companies like Samsung, Verizon, and these behemoths.
We’re working at a strategy level, often with C-suite folks.
My realization of including people and seeing people as people came—I remember this specific project, where we were we were helping some executives make really strategic decisions around future direction, but the recommendations weren’t grounded in real human experience.
They were grounded in executives’ thoughts about other people’s experiences.
Sure, those are informed by those people’s lived experiences and what they’ve learned from teams they’ve loved in the past.
I had this moment that I sometimes reference as a light bulb, that once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
I realized there were these huge strategic decisions being made with implications for employees, for customers, for users. But none of those people had a voice.
It didn’t make any sense to me.
Part of it turned into for me, thinking about the strategic process, the product development process, as, why aren’t the downstream users or folks, stakeholders, really, being more involved? And being consulted for their lives human experience in the development of things that are going to impact them?
That was this moment for me of, it doesn’t make sense. Why aren’t we and others doing this more?
That launched me into the next stage of my career working in experiences and UI.
That whole industry is about focusing on customers, focusing on users. What is their lived experience? What makes their experience unique? How can they contribute to what we’re trying to build?
We can get into how that then connects to my work as a coach and around building workplaces where employees are the stakeholders.
You have to talk to them about what is it that they want.
Same as being a manager.
When you’re leading a team, if you just lead based on what you think is right, versus really listening to the people who you serve, people on your team.
It’s a totally different model.
It started from some consulting work.
Michael 4:28
In that case, were you able to bring the stakeholders experience into a discussion at all?
Nalani 4:38
That specific moment in time, there wasn’t really a willingness to go there.
I often talk about the difference between wanting something and being willing to do something.
In my experience in consulting, it was often that executives wanted to, say, involve more stakeholders, but their willingness to take the extra time wasn’t quite there.
So, you can really want something and say, “Yeah, okay, that sounds great.”
But if you’re not willing to face what maybe are the tradeoffs or the implications, investing that time often doesn’t happen.
That was my experience, often in consulting, where there are tradeoffs for time and speed, and also giving up a little bit of ego and the vulnerability to say, “I might not have all the answers here,” both as a consultant or the lead on a project, but also the customer, an executive who’s been in their industry for so long, to say, “I’m gonna go talk to a junior frontline manager, about what they know about our industry, with this new product line that we’re thinking of.
It takes a lot of humility to do that.
For that specific project, where I had this realization, we weren’t able to get there.
So much of my work since then, it’s been, how can we have the most right people at the table to really hear that?
Michael 6:08
Have you found an answer to that question?
Nalani 6:12
That’s the “how” question of, how we can do that?
It’s always a matter of priorities.
Especially in the startup world, which is where I’ve spent the last five or so years, the tradeoff for speed is real.
It’s really a titration that sometimes you’re gonna get wrong.
Maybe you’re going to over-index a little bit.
You spend a little bit too much time on something where you’re heard the same thing from a bunch of people.
Okay, looking back, I could have talked to, you know, 10 people not 30, or two people instead of seven.
This is true for leaders making decisions.
Even just run-of-the-mill week-to-week decisions.
How many people do I get involved to hear inputs?
Maybe that’s a long way of saying there’s no silver bullet and I haven’t figured it out.
In my coaching work, I’m constantly working with leaders and finding their own titration to increase the way that they are able to listen to their instinct about, “How much can I trust what I already know, versus how much do I need to really make sure the right voices are heard for their unique human experience?”
I as an outsider to someone I’m coaching won’t have an answer for them.
I don’t know what’s right or wrong in their specific context.
That’s the beauty of getting other perspectives.
It’s coaching is doing the same thing in a lot of ways.
When someone says, “Hey, this challenge in my life, for this challenge at work, I’m not quite sure we know where this is taking me or how I feel about it,” they’re getting another set of eyes and ears.
I don’t think I thought about it in those terms until you asked me that.
It’s a really beautiful connection, I think.
Michael 8:12
It is so important to connect with our inner guidance and understand what that’s telling us. Even when, and maybe especially when, that’s going against what common wisdom, or all our other advisors, other factors, are telling us should happen, we should do.
Nalani 8:42
That’s the pillar of leadership.
How can you stay true to your instincts, but also support your decision making and your leadership with the right complements?
It’s not all about you.
As a leader, your instincts are often about when to delegate, when to empower, someone else.
When is it right for us to step away?
Sometimes our instinct is saying, “I need to grab someone else. I don’t know.”
That’s okay, too.
Michael 9:32
Have you found a process that tends to work with most leaders to help them get more in tune with that intuition?
Nalani 9:48
The first thing that comes to mind is that the work around tuning into your intuition typically doesn’t manifest when you’re in the day-to-day hustle and bustle, work and life.
So, there’s a pause or a slowing down and a listening that’s really important.
Where the noise that’s around you, whether metaphorical or actual noise, needs to soften in order to tune in.
I don’t mean this in a woo-woo way of connecting with, or a religious way, of connecting with anything higher or out there.
The intuition of our thoughts are something that we’re often pretty attuned to.
We most of us know, “I had this thought. Maybe I could do this. Maybe I could do that.”
But there’s other intuition centers within us that aren’t usually taught in the typical leadership development program of, “What are my emotions communicating right now?”
If I’m really scared, that’s information.
I love the work of Dr. Susan David. She has a book called Emotional Agility that talks about this idea of emotions as signposts.
It doesn’t mean that they are telling us exactly what needs to be done and we don’t need to follow that.
But, listening to the direction and the signposting.
The information that they’re delivering is really critical to this, what I’ll call this process of tuning into our intuition.
Emotions are information, they’re not just here for no purpose.
You might not like the purpose that they’re trying to fulfill or what they’re trying to protect us from.
Those parts of us, especially that experience fear, are often just bringing a good intention of wanting to protect us from some future pain.
That’s really hard to tune in to what that message is, if we’re caught up in the hustle and bustle of going from meeting to meeting and the busyness or, I often think of it as this like, it’s buzzy vibration, and I get it with the best of them.
I took some deep breaths before you and I hopped on today because I was in a busy coffee shop and I was feeling that energy of the busyness of people working on their laptops and chatting and networking, and all that.
So, bringing the awareness to pause and being, “Okay, well, that meeting that I’m about to step into, I’m feeling a little bit nervous. What might that be trying to tell me?”
There’s intuition inherently in that.
Then, there’s another layer of intuition that would be, “What’s our body telling us?”
Is my stomach in knots right now?
Is my chest really constricted?
Or maybe it’s the opposite: I’m feeling so light and so energized when I thought about that team meeting that’s coming up.
When I think about intuition, it’s really those different sources. Our head, our heart, our body.
Michael 12:59
How much have you found leaders are able to do this internally in the moment, or after the fact? And how successful are they at bringing this into the team dynamics so that everyone starts talking about, “My mind is telling me this, my body’s telling me this, and my emotions are telling me something else. I’m really confused.”
Nalani 13:31
The way that I’ll answer that is by saying this is a muscle to build.
If we go to the gym and we want to get stronger because we have a big move coming up and we want to be able to lift our boxes, we’re not typically going to build that muscle by that one-time moving process.
We’re going to train, we’re going to practice.
This muscle is most easily worked on in times where things are a little bit less critical.
That moment of, I’m in a meeting, my whole team is looking at me, let me pause to tune into what I’m feeling, that’s a pretty advanced level of this work, to be able to identify that in the moment.
That’s not where we start.
We start with looking retroactively at that thing that happened two weeks ago or yesterday.
In my coaching work, that’s often what we’re practicing when someone arrives at a coaching session.
They bring something that’s been happening or there’s a question or a challenge, and we practice just that in an assisted way, where we all can look back at a situation and be, “I feel this way. I feel that way.”
Pausing to say, “Okay, and what’s below that? What might that be trying to tell me? I had a similar experience in the past. What did I learn from that that I might apply here?”
That quieting of the noise around us, is easiest to do in those calmer times.
I use the analogy of building the muscle in times of peace, but it’s available in times of war, forgive the kind of violent reference.
It’s the intentional practice, even in the moments where you don’t need it, that then can allow down the line us as leaders to have that available at that critical moment.
This is a long journey.
There’s no band-aids to this work.
Unless you have maybe a little birdie in your meeting constantly watching you and being, “Michael, hold on, let’s pause,” who can help role model what they’re seeing.
Whether it’s in my work with organizations, or even in a coaching session, I can often play that role.
I’ll see someone going down a path and pause and be, “Hey, can we take a step back? I need to take a deep breath here. I’m wondering if that would be supportive to you. What are you noticing about how that energy just shifted for you?” Or, “What are you noticing about when that person asked that question? What changed?”
Let’s do that in real-time.
For leaders to role model that for their teams, that’s really, really hard to do if they haven’t built that muscle for themselves first.
Michael 16:32
If I as a leader would like to start experimenting with this in real time, do you have suggestions for how I can approach this?
Nalani 16:46
My first suggestion is, if there if there’s a willingness to explore this, is to start by not doing it in real-time, but to do it as a practice, or at a time where you’re not kind of in the spotlight.
That could be after a presentation, after a meeting, at the end of each week.
Looking back when you can have a moment to reflect, to practice.
“Oh, okay. I realize I was feeling this. Hmm. If I realized that in a moment, maybe I would have approached this differently now.”
If there’s a true commitment to exploring this, doing it with space to have repetitions, not in the moment, is my preferred way to step into this work.
If someone’s, “No, I just really want real-time. To in meetings be able to pause for myself and for others,” one way to do that would be to ask for someone to hold you accountable to it or to do it on your behalf.
If there’s someone that a leader maybe trusts enough.
I’ll talk in a moment about what that could look like.
The caveat is, it takes a lot of vulnerability.
I keep using this example of team meetings; I think it’s a good one.
Because if a leader anoints an accountability buddy for this pause-and-check-in-with-the-group, make sure that others are having the space to tune in with themselves and they’re contributing, to have someone call you out and saying, “Hey, let’s pause for a moment. I’m noticing maybe we’re going a little bit off track,” or, “I’m noticing that the energy in the room like is getting a little bit heated,” it’s really easy as a leader to get defensive if someone says that.
So, unless you’re really confident that you can receive an interruption like that with grace and vulnerability, my recommendation wouldn’t be to jump to that as the first step.
You risk—we could talk more about team dynamics—you risk displaying behavior, and role modeling behavior, that you probably don’t want to be reinforcing with your team.
Does that make sense?
Michael 19:14
That does make sense.
Both, let’s practice in a safe space.
And then, when we’re ready, this is naturally going to start happening in a less safe space, or an environment where the risk is bigger.
Also, that if I push ahead and do it before I’m ready, I’m likely to have reactions that are not the reactions I need to have.
And so, I’m teaching my team opposite of what I’m trying to get to.
Nalani 20:12
That’s a good summary.
The thing I would add is that reactions are just that: they are instinctual.
They are going to come from a place of us not feeling like we have choice in that moment.
So, as a leader, one of the more powerful things we can do is to own our reactions after the fact if we’re not able to do it in the moment.
If there’s a really bold leader out there who’s like, “I just want to jump in and I want to be showing up with checking in with myself, checking in with my team, in real-time,” without that practice, if they can own that after the fact and go back to their team and say, “Hey, team, I realize in that meeting, I got really defensive. That wasn’t my intention. But, my reaction got the best of me. Can I get a redo? Here’s what I would have liked to say in the moment.”
Something where you’re really role modeling taking ownership over your impact on others, ownership over your behavior, that situation can actually be even more powerful than the simple getting-it-right-in-the-moment.
It’s a question for all of us as leaders of, where is our own psychological safety with the team we’re leading or with our peers?
What are we willing to experiment with in our own development journeys?
Because that’s what this is.
This is our journey as humans, as leaders, as peers, how much we show of the trying something and not going exactly how we wanted.
That’s part of the learning journey, too.
Especially if we can own that and continue the learning cycle.
Michael 22:05
Come at it with intention and awareness of the impact we’re likely to have on the other people in that meeting, so that we can show shape that impact more like what we want it to be.
Nalani 22:27
We will never get it all the way right. Part of being human.
Michael 22:33
A friend of mine says, as humans, the only thing we’re perfect at is being imperfect.
So, if I as a leader want to experiment with this in meetings, one way I can help set that environment, shape that environment, is to start the meeting saying, “I’m trying something out here. I don’t know how it’s gonna go. I may have not the reactions I want to have it. Can we see what happens?”
And even, maybe ideally, “Are each of you okay with this?”
So that we can offer them the experience rather than inflict it on them.
Nalani 22:36
I would actually go a step further by saying this can be a really wonderful way of building more safety with both the individuals on the team and the collective.
Often, starting with the individuals can be safer than starting with a statement to the whole team saying, “Hey, I’m trying something out. Can you, group, hold me accountable or bear with me?” or whatever the request may be.
There’s often that anonymity of a group, depending on how large it is, of, “Yeah, sure, we got it.”
But if that same leader, in their one-on-ones with each person on their team, was to say, “Hey, I really want to share with you something that I’m working on. I would really welcome your feedback.”
We’ve hopefully already talked about how I best receive feedback, how you best give feedback, so we have some common understanding.
Turning it into a personal relationship-building moment.
Then you get to that meeting and each person has already had a conversation with you where you’ve invited that honesty of, “I want to let you into my journey as a leader and I need you, or I’m requesting, rather, that you play a role in helping me be a better leader for you, for our team, for the company.”
In my experience, approaching it from both that individual level and then also speaking to the collective is a safer way to make that progress.
Michael 25:03
Ease into it.
Just like, go back to your “We’re working out in preparation for the move” analogy.
We could walk into the gym and start lifting our bodyweight.
That’s probably not gonna go so well.
We’re probably not gonna be able to get back to the gym for a while, because we’re gonna hurt things.
Whereas, if we go in and we start with a two-pound weight, and then a five-pound weight, and then work up to whatever our goal is, we can do that in a safe manner, and we can sustain that work over time.
Nalani 25:45
Yep.
And then, to build on the analogy, it would be sharing with people in our life that we have this goal and we’re starting to go to the gym.
“Hey, if you see me posting on Instagram before 10am, can you call me out? Because I should be at the gym.”
That’s a silly example.
But, having accountability is a funny thing.
Ultimately the most powerful is our intrinsic accountability to ourselves.
There’s a really important role to invite other people in to hold up the mirror for us.
And that can be both accountability, that can be reflection, that can be generation of insight.
There’s a lot of ways that we can use the people in our life to support our growth journey.
Leadership is the best example of something that you can’t go at it alone.
You’re inherently intertwined with so many other people.
If you try to make your growth journey an independent one, I’m just not sure how that works.
Michael 26:55
When you’re working with someone who seems to want to go faster than you’re feeling is safe for them, how do you help them understand what might be going on and reason about what is going to work best for them?
Nalani 27:20
Can you maybe give me a reframe or a different example? Because I’m finding that the “faster than it’s safe for them,” in this context, I’m not really I don’t quite know how to answer that.
Michael 27:36
Let’s come back to this example of, I’m a leader who really wants to go in and start doing this in the team meetings. And you know, from talking with me, that I haven’t built up that one-on-one connection with my team, that some of the reasons I came to you to work initially are that there’s contention between me and my team, there’s a lot of dysfunction going on, and I don’t understand what’s going on. I don’t have any idea how to fix it. So, you’re pretty sure that if I show up in a meeting, say, “Guess what, team? Here’s what we’re going to do today,” that’s not gonna go well.
Nalani 28:25
That helps a lot.
There’s a few different parts of me want to answer that in a few different ways.
One of them, with my solid coach hat on, is to say, “You are the expert in your life. Who am I to know if you going into that meeting with that is the right or wrong thing?”
And so with that hat on, it’s an exploration of, “I’m hearing that you’re wanting to do this, let’s double click a little bit. What is that need or that feeling underneath that’s really driving that speed and that urgency? Maybe there are other strategies to help meet that desire and that need.” We could talk through different scenarios.
Again, not for me to say what is right or wrong in your team, in your life, in your world.
But, at least inviting the perspective of, “What’s driving this desire? Let’s make sure that whatever action you’re wanting to take is actually fulfilling that root need.”
Because sometimes we come up with ideas and tactics that we think will solve the fear that we’re having or the desire that we have, and they ultimately don’t.
So, if we can backtrack a little bit, that would be an approach in a situation like that to get more on the table and generate possibilities.
Maybe that initial possibility still feels like the right one to that person.
Again, who am I to tell them, “No, that’s a bad idea.”
Unless I’m in an internal coaching context, like I’ve been in the past, where I know the players, I know the team dynamics, I know that department. Sometimes, there would be a time where I’ll say, “Can we take off my coaching hat for a moment? I’m gonna share with you from an outsider, but an insider’s view, how I think this might go, because I know your team.”
So that’s a little bit of a different context, if I have it with that leader.
Being really clear on what my role is.
If that’s welcome, to say, “Here’s some possibilities, if I were to guess, or if I were to put myself in your team shoes, here are some possibilities and reactions I think you might get.”
There’s a continuum between those options of ways that I work with leaders, in either a peer coaching context, or a strategic partnership context, or something in the middle, where it’s really about trying to surround the possibilities.
None of us can know exactly how things are going to play out.
That comes back, actually, all the way to the beginning to what we were talking about of our own lived experience.
I have a lived experience that might have me think I know the right answer. “Oh, if that leader did that, it’s gonna go haywire.”
That leader also has their own lived experience.
I as a coach need to trust their intuition that they do know something about their team.
Sometimes, they might not be in touch with that intuition.
It might be a part of them that’s operating from fear or ego or a need for recognition that’s taking over and saying, “I’m gonna I’m going to do this.”
Then it would be working with, surfacing, everything else that’s surrounding that to get everything on the table to talk about the different paths forward.
Michael 31:56
One thing we can do in those situations, whether we’re that leader who really wants to make this bold move or where we are someone else in that context somehow, is to bring awareness to what the driver is, and then to check, “Is that what I want driving me in this situation?”
Nalani 32:35
The references I’ve made here to needs, getting under the surface, that comes from the work of Marshall Rosenberg and his work of Nonviolent Communication.
That’s really the essence of NVC, acronym for Nonviolent Communication.
How can we operate from a place of needs? Of our own needs, of other people’s needs.
Needs here aren’t the thing that I materialistically desire, the thing that I need someone else to do for me.
Needs are what is core to us as humans.
All of us, there is this universal, basic list of things.
We all have a need for safety.
We all have a need for security.
And connection and collaboration and respect.
It’s a pretty long list.
You can also think of it as things that we value.
In my work, the past year and a half or so, NVC has been a huge way of getting to that core before we make a new decision or before we jump to conclusions.
Whether it’s about what we think we want in our own journey, that story we make up about why our team member did that thing, needs underlie everything that we do.
All of our behaviors.
All of our choices in life are essentially strategies to meet needs.
If we can get down—especially for ourselves—to, what’s the need that’s driving this, we can have checkpoints of, “Okay, that thing I was about to do, is it going to meet the need?”
Again, it’s a high level of self-awareness and muscle to build, to have that checkpoint and say, “Oh, okay, that decision I was about to make, where’s that coming from?”
Michael 34:32
This reinforces the usefulness of taking that pause on some regular cadence, whatever that means for you. So that you can check in on all these things. “Are my needs driving me or am I using them to move forward?”
Nalani 35:00
One of the things I’ve learned for myself, and definitely for all of the teams and the clients I’ve worked with, is that those check-in mechanisms to slow down are really personal.
If I was to say, “Hey, Michael, I think you should pause every morning to check in. Do some gratitude journaling.”
We could come up with a laundry list of all the things that blog posts say we should all be doing.
One of them being you’re checking in on, “What are my needs today? I really need in connection today. Okay. Maybe I’ll meet for coffee with a friend.”
But if I were to give you that list, the likelihood that that sustains in your life, it’s probably pretty low.
The personalization of what works for me in my own life and work journey to build these muscles, it’s so personal.
Sometimes it takes a lot of trial and error.
Like New Year’s resolutions, one example.
Trying something, we fall off the wagon, trying a new weekly goal-setting process or, in a corporate setting, quarterly OKRs (objective key results).
Most organizations try things and then they don’t work.
Maybe you iterate, maybe they totally fall off.
And then, six months later, another version of the same thing comes around.
Same thing in our own life of how we build that metaphorical gym for our mind and our heart and our leadership.
There’s no cookie cutters.
We can try the cookie cutters but those are usually what falls off the table.
Michael 36:39
We need to bring in our own lived experience and use that to guide us.
Nalani 36:46
Exactly.
What do we know about ourselves?
Maybe you know that you’re, “Mornings don’t work for me. I’m not going to do anything before 10am. Don’t talk to me.”
If I was to be, “Hey Michael, you should do this practice in the morning,” it’s a recipe for failure.
Michael 37:03
This has been a great conversation today, Nalani. What else should I ask you?
Nalani 37:10
We’ve talked about a lot.
I don’t know if it’s so much a question to ask me, but maybe a summary of what’s on my mind as we’ve had this topic, as we get ready to wrap up, is that the difference between, what we talked about before, the difference between wanting something or wanting to improve as a leader or wanting your team dynamic to be different, is very different than having a willingness to do the work and remain committed to making that change.
We can all say that we want something that’s different.
Not having the willingness doesn’t need to be a bad thing.
It’s more about checking in with yourself and being honest.
That is (I’ve said this term a lot today) the biggest part of leadership: being honest with ourselves, about where we’re at, and what we’re willing to do, what we’re willing to invest in, for ourselves and our teams.
If we pretend that we’re really open to feedback. if we pretend as a leader that we’re super open to feedback from our team, we tell them all we’re really open to feedback. Then we get feedback and we receive it defensively and don’t follow up with ownership. That to me is a display of, “I want to be open to feedback but I’m not actually willing and committed to.” Or rather, “I’m not yet ready to be willing to be as open as I need to be to receive it.”
That feels related to this intuition conversation we’ve had around leadership.
How can we, before we embark on anything new, any change, any decisions, how can we get really real with ourselves to not waste our time?
A lot of people think that they should be doing something different with their teams or they think they should be doing a psychological safety team exercises, or start their team meetings with this, or run their one-on-ones in this certain way.
But if you take at face value, those suggestions or frameworks, without a true willingness to be a part of or receive what comes out the other side, the inauthenticity is palpable.
The more we can be honest with ourselves about what we’re willing to engage with, as leaders, even if it’s no change, we’re going to be more authentic in that lack of change, in that status quo.
There’s all sorts of downstream benefits that come from that around employee engagement and productivity.
Authenticity is at the core of it all.
It has to start with people looking at ourselves in the mirror, of what are we willing to examine in our own journey too?
Michael 40:31
And Nonviolent Communication is a great way to bring that authenticity to ourselves and into our conversations with other people. And you, coincidentally, possibly not, have a blog post to share about that topic?
Nalani 40:53
I do.
NVC has been a really big part of my own personal journey, the past year and a half going on two years.
I actually just got back from an intensive lived residential experience of NVC in Norway with about 80 other folks from around the world.
Some are coaches, some are individuals interested in this, others are folks who work in organizational design, and all sorts of other aspects of walks of life.
I just published a blog post a bit ago about the basics of needs-based communication.
NVC is a framework.
There’s some easy things that tomorrow we could all use in our communications, whether it’s at work or with our partners or friends.
It’s also a bigger consciousness of, how are we orienting to the relationships in our world, in our life, to make sure that we’re getting what we need.
By proxy, it’s more likely that our needs are met, and that we get what we want, if we also have a little bit of care for the other person that we’re in relationship with.
This blog post talks about this needs-based approach at a really basic level.
There’s a lot of NVC content out in the interwebs. This is my attempt to distill it down from my experience. Especially working with leaders through this context.
Michael 42:20
Nice. Thank you for doing that.
To connect with you to learn about NVC, the gap between wanting and willing, all the other things that we talked about, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Nalani 42:37
Reaching out to me either through my website or LinkedIn are the two best ways to get in touch. I’m sure we’ll have that linked in the show notes here for anyone. Also Googling my name or putting my name into LinkedIn, pretty easy to get in touch with me, either of those avenues.
Michael 42:57
Sounds great. And those will be in the show notes along with the link to your post.
What would you like to leave our audience with today?
Nalani 43:10
This topic of getting real with ourselves feels really salient.
Maybe the invitation would be, after you listen to this, later today, tomorrow, to take a moment.
Could be on a walk or could be in writing.
Think about what might you not be admitting to yourself right now?
What is something that you say that you really want, but you’re not actually willing to engage with around pain, around decision making?
Even if you’re not in a formal leadership role in your life.
Holding up a mirror for yourself and see if you can ask yourself that hard question.
“What am I not facing or what am I not being honest with myself about?”
It’s really deep.
Actually, even before engaging with that, there’s this question of, for anyone, “Do I want to even give myself a look in the mirror?” Maybe I think it’d be a good idea, but I’m not actually willing.
Great. Pause there. That’s part of being honest with yourself today.
Michael 44:29
Any amount of awareness is more useful than a lesser amount.
Nalani 44:36
I love that. That’s a great way to say it.
Michael 44:39
Thank you.
Audience. If you take Nalani up on her invitation, let us know what you find.
If you have questions, comments, feedback on anything we’ve talked about today, we’d love to know. What did you enjoy? What did you resonate with? What do you disagree with? We’d like to hear all of that. Please let us know.
Nalani 45:12
Especially what you disagree with.
I’d love to hear.
In my own practice of my development, it’s an opportunity for me to check myself in the moment. Am I defensive if someone says, “I disagree with that thing you said.” Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. It’s my work to keep doing. So, I really invite that from others, to give me that chance.
Michael 45:34
Yes, I do as well.
Thank you, Nalani.
Nalani 45:41
Thank you, Michael! What a joy!
Michael 45:44
It certainly was. Have a great day!
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