0076 - Is Your Inner Critic Holding You Back? Transform Judgment to Make it Your Greatest Ally ft Janet M Harvey

Join host Ben Owden as he engages in a transformative conversation with Janet M. Harvey, a globally recognized leader in the coaching industry and author of "From Tension to Transformation: A Leader's Guide to Generative Change." Discover how embracing discomfort and leaning into tension can unlock your hidden leadership potential. Janet explores how to turn your inner critic into your greatest ally, break free from limiting labels, and overcome fears that hold you back. If you've ever felt stuck, unfulfilled, or constrained by others' opinions, this episode offers profound insights and practical strategies to spark authentic growth and unleash your full potential. Don't miss this chance to learn how to transform tension into a powerful catalyst for personal and professional development.

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Transcript

Ben Owden

Greetings to you. I hope you're at peace and I'm having a meaningful and productive day. Welcome to another episode of the why lead podcast. I am your host, Ben Owden. Did you know that embracing tension rather than avoiding it can be the key to unlocking your leadership potential? Have you ever considered how the judgments you hold could actually stimulate curiosity and innovation? Our guest today explores, is going to explore with us in taking a deep dive into these counterintuitive ideas that she has crystallized them in her new book, which will be the basis of our conversation today. Our guest today is not a stranger to you, as you've probably heard her in a previously featured episode titled Invite Change. She is a globally recognized leader in the coaching industry and the author of the insightful book from tension to transformation, a leader's guide to generative change. She has over 27 years of experience in executive coaching, working with leaders and teams across six continents. Her expertise lies in helping leaders embrace the discomfort of tension, transforming it into a powerful catalyst for personal and professional growth. Ladies and gentlemen, Janet Harvey. Janet, you're most welcome.

Janet M Harvey

Thank you, Ben. It's a delight to be with you. And we're getting to talk about our favorite subject, which is change.

Ben Owden

Exactly. And I think speaking about change, the one thing that a lot of leaders across the world, and I think in the last hundred years, psychologists and different people, when you talk about change, there's a lot of emphasis around mindset. And there's a quote that you have in your book, right, where you say your most reliable change strategy is your mindset. How do we develop this mental elasticity, especially in adulthood? Because sometimes it feels like it's much easier if that, if that's already in your arsenal of tools from when you are younger, if you had the right sort of nurturing at home or at school, but if you didn't have that, and suddenly you're learning about all these new ideas as an adult and you have to unlearn. And I go back to, I guess, move away from having a rigid mindset to a more elastic mindset. I know you know the idea of having a growth mindset and everything else, but how do, how do we develop a more elastic mindset? I guess in adulthood specifically?

Janet M Harvey

Yes. I love how pragmatic you are about it because there's so much history and theory that we've studied deeply. This question, question about how do we develop, how do we develop mindset? How do we develop capacity to face uncertainty and the ripple effect of complexity that far outstrips our brain's ability to process. And we are certainly living in a time in human history that is like that. And it can be very intimidating. I was thinking in the shower, actually, as it's morning here in Seattle, Washington, and the west coast of the US, that my first introduction to change as a business concept, as a construct that we would actually do something about was called the burning platform. And what struck me at the time and continues to strike me today is that we have held a relationship to change as only possible when somebody is stretched to the edge of their capacity to hold fear. And I think that this is quite manipulative. It makes an assumption that we are either incapable or simply choose to not change unless the stakes are high enough. And I don't buy that story. I didn't buy it then. I remember being a bit of a renegade, and of course, that's an energetic I carry for years, I think, my entire life. So when you say, are we born with it? No, I don't think we're born with a capacity to recognize consciousness. I think it emerges, and I say recognize consciousness because I don't believe it's your nature or your nurture that is the seed of how we shift our mindset. I believe it's a conscious choice we make. Now, how do we even become alert to make a choice? So think for a moment, Ben. What were the, what was your sensory system saying to you before you and I got on this morning? And I'd like you to use the vocabulary of the senses itself. Pause for a moment and bring back the memory. Before you dialed into the system and welcomed me, what was your sensory system telling you?

Ben Owden

I mean, I think it's interesting because, and I have some level of ADHD where, and over time, I have come to embrace and sort of be, have a look more curiosity around what that means. So actually, right before, maybe two or 3 hours before our session, I was very distracted and, and, and I don't know why, but I was just distracted. And there was a sense of tension in me and some. Some level of anxiety. And, you know, it could be because maybe these conversations are not the simplest conversations to have. I don't know, but that's internally, that was sort of what was happening, and I was curious, but I ignored. I was like, I don't want to explore, and then figure out exactly what's underneath that, but, yeah, right.

Janet M Harvey

All right, so let's use this, if we can, for a moment, because what you've just described is very common here. You are putting yourself forward quite vulnerably. Holding a platform for us to have a conversation that's going to stretch, it will stretch you and me as it is already, and it will stretch your listeners and it will have a longevity. You know, this is the thing about the Internet time, and I call it, you know, the Internet of things, and it is going to live in perpetuity. This conversation will be available to 8 billion people in about 30 minutes and it will live out there forever. You will never know how many people you've touched. That's a weight if you let it be a wait, right? If you hold it as, oh my gosh, every single word I say is going to be held by somebody, I better be thoughtful about it. That's anxiety producing now. Mindset shift says, okay, that's only one part of myself, the part of myself that wants to perform and do well, we all do, but we also have the part of ourselves that has joy, right? Something in you is excited. It's like, oh, I'm going to get to do the podcast today, hopefully. You were also excited that it was me you were getting to talk to for sure. And what you might already know about the condition of ADHD is that the distraction is information. It's not a weakness. It's not something that debilitates you with awareness and attention to what caught your attention and distracted you. You have access to information, you have access to what's moving in you physically. So the body instinct, the gut instinct, we talk about the gut brain, we talk about the heart brain, which is intuition. We talk about the cognitive brain, which is able to take information and make meaning out of it. We talk about the spiritual selves and how we define what it is to be a human being. Now, all of those are operating unconsciously, some ways because we're an animal, that's out of necessity. Now, this is where our nature and nurture has conditioned us. No matter what our environment is, whether we're in a refugee camp or, you know, a fancy hotel in the west, you are conditioned to respond to that environment. And I was, I think we talked about this last time. I remember in college learning that thoughts evoke emotions, create movement in the body. And I don't know, several years later I realized working inside of a company, that's not how it works. The body responds first. Just like a few hours before this, you were feeling distraction, you were noticing a certain level of anxiety and you chose to override it. This is very important. You said to yourself, somewhere inside of you, I don't have time to be distracted like this. I'm not interested in paying attention to the anxiety. I'm going to put my face forward and I'm going to keep moving. That's not for 2 hours from now. I'll deal with it when I get there. This is what we do to manage. We create a certain equilibrium, or at least strive to equilibrium so we can get our work done. We've made performance and results and the doing of our lives a higher priority. And somewhere we've said internally, I can deal with it later, it's okay. Unfortunately, for a lot of people, it's not. And the multiple times that we ignore that initial signal, that tension is present, not only do we miss out on the creativity of the moment, and I'm sure we'll talk more about that in a minute, but we're also storing the anxiety in the body rather than letting it move through. So now imagine in this moment that you didn't ignore it, that you noticed the distraction, you felt the anxiety, and you gave yourself a moment to pause. Just a few moments, maybe. What might you have discovered the source of the distraction was?

Ben Owden

Hmm, I think, you know, because I'm thinking as you're speaking, I was also thinking, I think part of it could be, you know, this is the second time we're doing this. I don't, we don't really have a lot of guests who come back on the podcast, and so maybe mentally, there's a sense of expectation that I know that's there because there's prior experience. And so I have to. I wouldn't have the grace of a clean slate where we're doing this for the first time. And so how do I make sure that this is better than the first time around? And am I prepared enough for the foreign audience who's maybe listened to our first conversation? How do I make sure that this is an even more enriching experience, listening and learning as well? So I think all of those things, then it's. And I think at one point, I was like, should I, should I reschedule this? Should I? So all of that was happening, and I think it's because of those two reasons.

Janet M Harvey

So I'm going to give two words, and you can tell me if they're off. You can adjust them. Expectation, expectation of yourself, expectation of me, expectation of what your audience wants. And will they get it?

Ben Owden

Yeah.

Janet M Harvey

And I think the other is performance. Will I be good enough? Am I prepared enough? What if. What if it isn't enriching enough? Right. And we begin to build up the anxiety on a future projection that does not yet exist unless we force it to exist. So what you've learned to do is to say, nope, I'm not listening to that. That's a story that's not happened yet. I'm going to ignore it and I'm going to keep going. This is how we all manage the anxiety, but we miss an opportunity. Imagine in that moment, and this is often what I'm sitting with leaders talking about. Imagine if in that moment of pause, five minutes, maybe ten minutes. We're not talking about hours and gobs of sitting in meditation. A useful thing, by the way. So I'm not dissing that, but we have to respond more quickly to the pace of what the business environment demands of us. If you paused in the moment and said, all right, what preparation have I done? And you're going to tick off the things you know, I've read the book. I've read it more than once. I've listened to the audio. I have earmarked my pages, I've used my highlighter. I have three key ideas that I want to talk with Janet about, and I always know we laugh and have a good time. I'm going to stay focused there and then maybe stay just a minute longer and ask yourself what's the most provocative question that I want to ask her? Let me let that come in and write it down. Now. You've addressed the anxiety of, am I prepared enough? You've restored a sense of balance with the parts of yourself that absolutely have prepared sufficiently. You have acknowledged the distraction, cleared it, and now you have space internally to go on with the rest of your day. That's mindset shift.

Ben Owden

And I think, you know, you've mentioned it there, thankfully, I've maybe been here a number of times where I now know how to move forward. But for a long time it was, okay, let's just ignore everything that sort of was happening internally. Let's just get this done and then let's just move, move forward. But the practice of stopping, be it in the moment or after the, you know, task or the activity and to investigate what was, what was, what was happening at the time. And I think that came much later. And after learning a lot, but I think for a lot of people generally, not just leaders, but people would not. It's, we don't want to sit in the mud. And I think, and we think of it as the mud. It's, I don't want to be there because we all have this ideal view of who we think we are, you know, and I'm above anxiety. I'm above this and I'm above that. I shouldn't feel this way. I shouldn't feel that way. I shouldn't feel that way. And when we do feel that way, it's a, it's almost like a reminder internally that you're, you know, you're, you're incompetent, you're this, you're that. And so we, you just silence the voice. So you just, you never address it. It's like this ghost that's right here that you just learn to ignore over time. And in ignoring it, yes, you become functional. You do what you need to do. But like you're saying, you miss out on the insights and the information that could transform your life. So how, for people who have made a habit of completely ignoring or becoming tone deaf to whatever this is, how do they, how do they get to a point where they don't see? And I think you talk about this as well. Sometimes you use the language, the inner critic. How do, how, how do, because the inner critic is sometimes like a frenemy of some sort. You know, they can push you and, but at the same time, they can cripple you. A lot of sometimes low self esteem and a lot of deep anxiety comes from this constant voice in your head saying things. And if so, how, how do we, how do we welcome the inner critic? How do we develop a healthy relationship with the inner critic? And I heard one sort of professor of happiness talk about this, and he was referencing in the Jewish Bible in the first book, Genesis, when God creates the world and he creates the man and then he creates the woman. And in English, it, it's, you know, she's called the helper. And, but it says in the original Hebrew the word, therefore, to do a direct translation of what's written, it's help as opposition or a beautiful enemy. It's an adversary relationship where we're not constantly in agreement with each other, but the idea of the relationship is to push and challenge the other person to really grow. And so how, how do we develop that same relationship with this inner critic that we have? And I think in your book, you say a significant mindset shift comes when you start to treat your inner critic as an ally.

Janet M Harvey

Yes. So, you know me, I like to boil things down more simply. And one thing I'd like to call your attention to is how dualistic your thinking is. It's good or it's bad. It's my ally or it's my enemy. And to try on for size using, and it is my. And it is my enemy and my ally. Frenemy. What an interesting term, right? I've actually. I've been interviewed and quoted many times on this very subject in the last few months. It's a big deal inside of organizations. What do you do with your frenemy? And I think that the simpler way to think about this is whether you're pushing it away or you're speaking to it, it's in your life experience every moment. Are you allowing it to be an energy input, or is it an energy output or leak? Do you find yourself spending tons of energy to push away, which is fatiguing you, and it means you are unavailable for the things that bring you joy and lift you up? It's so interesting to me as human beings, is that we have an easier time being mad and afraid than we do being happy and joyous and grateful. This is why there's so many books on the subject of happiness and a whole body of psychological research that underpins it. So I think maybe it's helpful for the audience to also think, what is mindset? This word seems to have a certain mystery to it. So it is the unconscious impulse of the human that shows up in our habits, our routine actions, our thoughts, our belief system. If this occurs, then that will be the result. Ways that we have constructed the definition of our reality, which we sometimes refer to as the frame of reference and attitude. These are all in that bucket we call mindset. Why it matters is because it's influencing, most of the time, invisibly to us, because of the nature of what it is. It's unconscious. We've incorporated it to us. Nature and nurture both how we show up, how we interact, and how we make decisions. Pretty important. So maybe you've been in a meeting and you've noticed yourself cataloging all of the people that you're in the meeting with. Oh, I know that person. They always like to speak last. Oh, I know that person. They like to challenge whatever is being presented. Oh, I know that person. They are the skeptic in the room. This one over here is going to be the cheerleader. Right. These are evaluations that we make in a split second based on our history with these people. And here it is, the mindset through which we are being with them. So in coaching, we talk about if we can believe in our own wholeness. Nothing wrong with me. Yes, I have an inner critic, by the way. All human beings have an inner critic. It's part of developing our psyche. There's nothing good or bad, right? Or wrong about it. It simply is a process, as the story from Genesis is describing, that we learn to navigate the world. Judgment is essential, as essential as breathing. In the contrast, we begin to recognize, ah, this is me, this is thou. And when we can start to own all of who we are, we stop needing to see it outside of ourselves. Now we can actually see the uniqueness of the other human being, not our projection on them. But I get a little sidetracked that if we are instead able to stay in our wholeness, we can actually see all those first evaluations, and then we can ask the question, and what else is here? I know that about that person. I wonder what else matters to them? What's a question I might ask in the room, in this conversation that would draw out something other than the usual points of view? That's leadership, that in the moment is a mindset, that's choosing to show up, to create collaboration, not competition, to create responsibility, not entitlement, to create agility, not rigidity, not control. Because no one of us has the whole answer anymore. There's just no way in the Internet of things. We are epically out of date in our expertise. And that might be fear inducing for some people who are listening, but it's the truth. Large language models are just going to get better and better and better because it's all of us. It's everything we've said since the beginning of time that's been written down is now in a computer. If you know how to ask the right question, you're going to get a massive volume of information back. Why in the world would I spend any time reading, to memorize and regurgitate to somebody. So what's left? Learning to receive the environment that I'm in, the relationships that are occurring, the energy that's flowing, and to use my critical thinking, my discernment, to make sensible conclusions. So, mindset bringing, brought, being brought to the surface, accessible, deliberate, purposeful. These are the ways that we begin to let the creativity flow. If we're stuck in a historical perspective, in the habit and the construction of a belief system that no longer matches the environment that we're in, we're going to be in the land of energy leaks and in judgment of everything that doesn't match up with the internal congruence, which we know is a requirement, right? None of us change. If. If you told me that you and I were going to get on a spaceship and go to the moon, my internal system would say, you have lost your mind, Ben. I am not getting in that spaceship. And I am not going to the moon. I like it right here on Earth. I like the feeling of gravity. Thank you very much. Internal congruence. I don't have any aspiration to go into zero gravity. I ain't going. Now, we've labeled that as resistance, right? Change resistance. We need to manage change resistance. If we're already at resistance, it's too late. Way back when, I learned about what do I thrive? Where's the condition that I thrive in? I thrive right here on planet Earth. And when someone asked me to do something, I remember being asked if I wanted to learn how to hang glide. I said, no, I'm happy to drive the car and pick you up on the other side. I am not jumping off a cliff with plastic and. And canvas. No, I'm not doing that. In that moment, I could have recognized that that was a fear. I had a choice about whether I leaned into it or not. What is it saying about how I'm defining my life experience, that I am overriding the opportunity to learn to hang glide with a fear that somehow I won't be okay, this is what comes in and hijacks us. And unless we can pay attention to it, we can't ask the question. We can't be in the wonderland. I wonder what else is here. And that's really what we're after. If we want creativity to flourish.

Ben Owden

I mean, that was great. And I'm thinking how you mentioned a couple of things there that I want to sort of explore. And, you know, one is the dualistic mindset. And I think in a lot of cultures, that's sort of how many of us have been conditioned, right? It's light or it's dark. It's good or it's bad. It's this or it's that. And I think, you know, some aspects of life are like that, but in most ways, things are not. As there are more than two options, so to speak.

Janet M Harvey

Time out. Stop. Stop for a second. All things in life are like that. The minute you say it's this or it's that, you have just made wholeness. The subtlety here that's important is you will spend energy trying to identify with this or that, right? Do you really want to spend your energy here? You want to be here? This and that. Two things exist, coexisting, that seem to be contradictory. Paradoxical polarity. Whatever word you want to use, they are coexisting. It does existential in the wholeness of our experience. So what we're really talking about is energy conservation. If we can move our mindset from dualism, energy here or energy there, right? We get to reclaim that energy and say this and that. Oh, and I can see both of those things means that I can see combinations of those two things, some ratio of this and that. That is serving the moment I'm in. So it's never separated. That's the fallacy that dualistic thinking has instilled. And it really gets in our way hugely, at the most basic, Ben, around. Where does my energy go? And gosh, what do we all complain about? We don't have enough time. I'm stretched, I'm burnt out, I'm lonely, I don't talk to my friends anymore. What choice am I making? If I'm making the choice that this person's priorities are more important than my priorities, I'm living in that I'm going to do it over here. And when I'm back over here, I'm going to feel guilty and resentful. Resentful to that person. Guilty that I didn't do that person. Why are we burnt out? That's a big piece of it. That's the energy leaking. What choice did I make? And this is back to your notion about frenemy. What choices am I making? Who am I giving authority to? I'm not giving it to myself. I'm giving it out there. And the first step, which is why I'm asking you to stop here, is replace this notion that there really is a split. There isn't. They coexist. It's the only reason you see them as an or you move to and something else becomes possible.

Ben Owden

So it's the yin and Yang. Yes. One full circle, so to speak.

Janet M Harvey

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Ben Owden

Something else that you talk about is, and this was interesting to me because considering the title of your book, from tension to transformation, and then you talk about transformation sort of not being this highest state of change, which is when many of us think of change, we talk about transformation. People use the butterfly as an example, you know, and. But you say it's too simple an approach. So if transformation is too simple an approach, then what should be the goal when we think about change and inviting change and getting to this place of generative wholeness?

Janet M Harvey

Yeah. Thank you for the question. And it goes to your opening question, really. I think that what my life experience has shown me, and of course, some of that is I walk in the world looking different than every other person because I have a birthmark on my face, and it evokes a reactivity of a wide variety. Very, very difficult for strangers to actually know me because they're so caught up in the whatever evaluation they're making of my image. I call it the falsity of image. And ultimately, if we are aspiring to transformation, we're holding the future destination as better than where I am, and therefore we need to better ourselves. This is the whole self help self improvement. Do you know that the self help self improvement parts of the bookstore have more books than any other section?

Ben Owden

Oh, yeah, for sure.

Janet M Harvey

And so this is a little countercultural to have this notion, what if you're perfect? What if you're perfectly imperfect? Right? Everything is exactly in the order it's supposed to be. And that we have the opportunity to tune in, to pay attention. Every single moment is an opportunity for transformation. I am transforming how I see myself. I am transforming how I'm interpreting the environment and the relationships that I walk in every moment, every day. I am transforming how I understand and make meaning out of the world. I am transforming that the image of my body and how I think about my strength and well being and vitality, every single moment is an opportunity for transformation. It's not a lofty, enlightenment idea alone. It is that. But I have found in working with leaders and teams and organizations that when we make it so lofty, it feels impossible. I'll never get there. I can't. Change is what people end up telling themselves. And it's a story. It's a story to compensate for the sense of feeling powerless. And we are not powerless. You know, Viktor Frankl often gets quoted in our space of coaching and working with leaders for his very famous narrative about his time in the concentration camps, and that the way he survived was by realizing he had the power of choice for every breath, and they were not going to break his soul's impulse to stay alive. All right, that's an extreme example, but we don't live in concentration camps. Grateful for that. You and I live reasonably in a place of peace. And we, you and I, have a choice in this moment. We can either buy into the narrative or we can say what's not yet known. What might our conversation evoke and create? Where can I trust that deep inside of me, my respect and love for you is going to bring something forward in this conversation that neither one of us has ever considered? That's innovation. That's what organizations are craving. Will people show up and trust their own inner authority enough to be responsible to the creative process?

Ben Owden

There's something you've mentioned there now, and I want to dig a little deeper for a bit, especially when you talk about transformation that, you know, sometimes it's not a state that you can get to, but maybe it's to transform how you see the state you're already in. And if I was to use this example you've mentioned, like body image is one of the examples, right? And you see this quite a lot these days where even in our country, for example, it's becoming quite popular, right, plastic surgery, let's use that as an example where there's a standard of what is considered beautiful, and most cultures have a definition of what that looks like. And here is somebody who feels like I don't measure up to this standard that's placed there. And the solution that the world has made available for people is that you can actually change yourself to be in this state. So that's one version of transformation where you get to this, but then another one that you've mentioned just now where this idea that maybe you don't have to change yourself to get to that point, but to change how you see yourself. And I think we see these days even this idea, a lot of brands, you know, where they are really finding the idea of what is beautiful and what we consider a conventional beauty, etc. Etcetera. And doing the latter is very, very hard because it feels like you're going against the grain where you're. I'm choosing to really find and I'm just using beauty as one thing. But it could be many things. It could be wealth, it could be success, it could be whatever it is, the different choices that people make in their lives, always, it's very hard to change how you see your situation when the world around you says you should leap into this state rather than where you are. So, so how do we do that? And at the same time, how. How do we avoid the risk of not challenging ourselves? Because some things, some states maybe need to change, right? So let's say, for example, someone is making choices that are of detrimental to themselves and maybe the people around them, and you do need to move to a different state, right? And that's a version of transformation that you should take for, you know, a better situation for yourself, maybe in the people who you're responsible for, etc. So how do we also make sure that we are honest enough to know what the change that requires us to change, how we think about our surroundings, our context, our life, and a change that maybe I do have what it takes to actually leap into the next state? How do we make sure that, you know, one, we have enough tools and courage to change how we see our surroundings, but at the same time, enough honesty to know when a leap is actually required in our state. Sorry, that was a bit loaded.

Janet M Harvey

I want your listeners to realize you just gave yourself the how you just articulated it. And I think that what's missing is the what we know. The basic why is stay alive. A more sophisticated why is to use all of one's capacity in service to something worthy. Worthy is always in the eyes of the beholder, which is why we have 8 billion people on the planet all doing different things. It's pretty awesome. And the question is, in service to what? What do we decide is meaningful enough, satisfying enough, life giving enough? The Quakers have a wonderful phrase. They say, what is the life affirming, compassionate choice that I can make in this moment? So this is a belief system. And take any of the world's religions, and they construct a belief system that helps people to navigate their lives. And at some point, people begin to realize, wait a minute, that's not my whole identity. I've been formed by those belief systems as I was a young child, through my parents, through my education, through my early professional life. But we all reach moments in our professional adult life when we start to recognize I am more than this identity. This is a first step. And the question we ask is, what is my identity? What do I value? What do I care about? Who are the people in my life that lift me up? Who are the people in life, in my life who pushed me down? What choice am I making about how I'm being in relationship to them? Everything I'm describing here is an act of reflection. I actually had something. I was in a conversation with somebody yesterday who said, oh, yeah, yeah, your book talks about reflection. And I. And I didn't stop it because we were. We were on a different subject. But I made a note to myself this morning to call this person back to say, and how often are you reflecting on your life? You did it a few minutes ago. I had you pause and notice what was going on in your sensory system. And not only did you pull up the anxiety, but you went on for another 30 or 40 seconds describing all the things that went through your awareness about preparation and performance and expectation. So it's in us, it's operating. It's up to us to pause, notice that something's got our attention, find out what's stimulated it, and then ask the question, what choice serves here? So this is important as a capability. It's the precedent step to claim it, declare it out loud, and then the how becomes negotiating. I'm negotiating with myself. I'm negotiating with people in my life. I'm negotiating with my circumstances. I changed my job. Now, here's a classic one for career coaches. I'm going to leave this job because I don't like my boss or I don't like the work, and I've tried to get promoted and they just won't let me, and I'm going to leave here. If the career coach only focuses on, what do you want in the next job, they will repeat history because we don't actually know what inside of them was occurring that had them be unsatisfied, because at some point in time they were satisfied. They went to work for that organization. Where did they let the tension bypass them and didn't pause to say, ouch, I don't like that. That doesn't feel respectful, or that's a missed opportunity. There's a place for me to make a different contribution and stand in their own inner authority to choose. Instead, they let themselves feel the weight of one tension moment after another and then finally say, I gotta go, okay, how many job changes until they have a moment when they realize, hmm, I've looked in the mirror and it's me. What is it that I'm not accepting in myself? What is it that I want? What is it that I have found myself railing against in others, but it's actually in me? I mean, you know, this point a finger out. I have three pointing back at me. Yeah, right.

Ben Owden

Sometimes four.

Janet M Harvey

Sometimes four, right. You know, a simple way of understanding is that we are always part cause or agent of our life experience. And this is the moment to our earlier conversation when I really embodied an understanding that I am powerful beyond measure and I better be responsible about how I exercise it, or not only will there be consequence for me, but everyone around me. And I began to realize that if I defined myself by my results and by my impact on other people, I would end up always chasing that expectation. And to come home to the word you gave me, which is contentment, to be in acceptance, unconditionally of myself. And I stopped chasing things outside. Now, that's a life journey. And what I set out to do in this book was really to say, what are the things we do very simply every day that can bring us home to that unconditional acceptance? Because that's the place where we get to have full expression of the essence of who we are.

Ben Owden

And I think you talk about this as sort of an authentic self, that as a place to get to and you say there are certain fears that limit this authentic self. You mentioned a few. Fear of not being important, fear of other people's opinions, fear of living up to being successful, you know, formal. Fear of missing out. So how do we overcome these fears to get to that point?

Janet M Harvey

I think rather than overcome much to the inner critic conversation we were having a bit earlier, it is about leaning into the fear to understand that it's false evidence appearing real. We're making it up that other people's opinions are more valuable than our own opinion. That this is your, you know, going to plastic surgery in order to change our outer image. It doesn't change the inner perception of our image. We might look in the mirror and we see we don't stand out as different from the ones who were held up as beautiful. But we haven't changed internally to say, do I accept myself as beautiful? And I guarantee you the first time somebody says, oh, why did you do that? I liked you the way you were. That's the moment of internal crisis. Oh, my God, what have I done? I've lost my. I've lost my soul's expression. I was brought into the world in a certain way, and I chose to alter it. Now I'm living in a lie. So the internal selves will always win. We might as well make them allies. Same process here. So if I'm fear of missing out, the strategy is to say, what is it I'm longing for? What is it I'm missing out on? It's usually not the thing someone else has. It's the being with someone who's having so much fun with the thing that they have that I don't. Or experience or relationship. Right. Fill in whatever you want to do. I think the fear of success, one is the most insidious in my mind, because it is what keeps us from living into our fullest potential. And it is the. It's this notion that if I were to give myself over that fully to something, everything I did before will be gone. I won't have any mooring. I can't go back. And I have to live up to others expectations of what that new level of success is. Now, this is the distinction between, that we see when we look at an entrepreneur who is, we call them serial entrepreneurs, right? Effort after effort after effort, being successful out in the world. And other people go, I can never do that. That's just not true. Everybody has the capacity to be a serial entrepreneur, but they're not actually looking at the downside of the serial entrepreneur who never pauses to say, it's enough. They're operating out of scarcity. There has to be more. We can look at greed, right? One of the seven deadly sins. What creates greed? The belief that there isn't enough. Wealthy people accumulate wealth because they can and because they don't think there's ever enough wealth in the world. It would be very interesting if they were able to shift their mindset and they saw equity in wealth as a higher value, as a higher priority than individual wealth. Imagine what we would see in the world and in our human society. But we don't encourage that. So much of this falsity of image is driving all of those fears. And the only resolution is internal. Each of us must choose to examine who do we want to be?

Ben Owden

Yeah. Wow. Thank you. That and a lot of things are running through my mind. But you talk about typology, and you say people cling to typology, which is true. You give some examples, you know, somebody who does something, and, you know, they refer to their star sign. Oh, they're emotional. They're probably a cancer. You know, I'm a Sagittarius and this and that. And, you know, sometimes people, in a context where everybody's doing personality assessments, oh, you're an ENTJ, you're this and you're that. And sometimes we find comfort in having enough awareness about somebody because of this box that they're in as a result of doing some sort of a assessment. Or. And. But you say a typology doesn't always give us the fluidity we need to adapt. It can limit learning. It can undermine our patience. And the purpose of a lot of these tools is to create awareness. So how do we make sure that this improved awareness doesn't become a trap?

Janet M Harvey

Yes, excellent question. And all of the tools we created are for the express purpose you just declared awareness building. And where we get into trouble is that we stop there. We're lazy. We're like, oh, now that we know that you're that and I'm this, and we're missing this kind of typology in our team, so we'll go higher for that. And that's all they do. They don't consider, who will we be together? What are the ways to behave that will optimize our unique expression as human beings? And the vocabulary becomes, stop being so like that. Right. We're in the extreme. You're not bringing enough of that. We're in this prescriptive formula. At a moment in time, someone said, this is who we are. First of all, personality is only half of the person. Personality is what we develop in order to figure out how to get along in the world. And we leave behind aspects of the self that don't fit the environment we find ourselves in. Think about the 65 year old who retires from an engineering career. Career and write symphony music, right? They're bringing in the other side of themselves. That wasn't allowed. It didn't fit. Or back in the day, women who wanted to be engineers and couldn't and became textile artists. My mother in law, for example. So what I'm describing here is that we are. We're kind of caught in this definition of who we're supposed to be. I've heard you use the word should many times. That's an external referencing about what is important. And actually, it's only the internal experience of what's going on in the dynamic between us that matters. So teams that do awareness building only doing maybe a quarter of the formula. So that's describing one part of myself. There's more to me than that, which is why I love the archetypal, the archetypes at work, because it is suggesting that forever, as long as humans have had an opportunity to write things down and to learn about the self, to thine own self be true, for example, is on every temple in Greece, you know, that we've all inherited that, that there's a genome of the soul that every single human being possesses. So we're more than whatever assessment we're using, how do we activate that? How do we bring that into the expression? How do we recognize that if our team is missing a certain energy, let's say there's no renegade and they're a research and development team. We're basically saying, only if we hire a renegade will we be better. But wait, nine people on this team. Are you saying that what they have isn't useful without a renegade? Oh, that's right, they have renegade. What's in the environment that isn't activating them, bringing that quality in themselves to the table overtly. Oh, now we're not talking about the individual anymore. Now we're talking about how do they collectively interact? How do they show up with each other? How do they make decisions? Now, when we focus here, we start to activate whole selves. That's where you get exponential productivity. It's not easy work, by the way, because we kind of like our comfortable habit of our identity. But it is the breakthrough. Only by moving beyond the first step of awareness to say, what's the embodied self in that awareness what's not being embodied, that by bringing it in would alter the way we're showing up and interacting and ultimately making better decisions. That's the work and the place where I think a lot of teams fall short. They stop at the, oh, yeah. Now that we know that, isn't that cool? And they put the plaque on the wall. Not so useful.

Ben Owden

Another reference that you talk about that I think connects with what you've explained as well is this idea of beyond mountains. There are mountains. And you say when people get on top of whatever mountain that they were climbing, be it a position, maybe, or certain level of success or wealth, sometimes it's relationship. You know, I want to get married. I want to have kids, I want to build a house. I want to do this, whatever it looks like. When people get on top of a mountain, there are two choices they can make, right? One is to ask what else is there? And. Or they can start protecting the newfound territory. And in each case, you say both are not maybe the greatest responses. And you mentioned this idea of beyond mountains. There are mountains. And so what is the response? Or maybe the appropriate response that we need to half when we get on top of our mountain, what should happen after? What is the better choice?

Janet M Harvey

Appropriate. What should happen? What's a better choice appropriate based on what criteria? What is the expectation, which is what's tied to should and better as compared to what you can hear in all three of those things. There's something invisible that we're establishing as a marker, and I think that the question is in service to what or so that what can happen? You know, I see this with development of strategy in organizations. Well, we, you know, we want to double in size in the next six years, or we want to grow our customer base by 40%. Okay, well, that's an interesting metric. What will be occurring in the day to day of your organization six years from now when those two metrics are achieved? Oh, now, that's a much harder question to answer because that asks them to pay attention to what is the dynamic that's occurring. So if I'm at the top of a mountain and I want to be alone, I can't remember if it's the third or the fifth or the 6th Star wars, but Luke's gone to be a monk on the top of the mountain, and then they, they go and find him because the alliance is in grave danger again. Right. But he's on the mountain by himself in the movie, right. In the mythic story, his energetic from the mountain is creating balance in the world. So solitude, contemplative life. At the top of the mountainous is fine. It's exactly what his soul is here for. Another person would get to the top of the mountain. Andrea lies. Water is rising. Floods will destroy the world. I want to call others up the mountain. I want to provide pathways for people to bring themselves up here and reestablish and thrive. America as an example. People under great difficulty crossed the Atlantic Ocean and created a brand new world, north America, for themselves. Now, they did horrible things and pushed out Native Americans that have been here for millions of years. What is it that human beings do? So the question isn't, should I or shouldn't I? The question is, what matters to me? What serves my situation, my context, my history, my soul's calling my life purpose. These are all important things that are happening interiorly, whether we're listening to it or not. When we listen to it, we can then ask the question, so that what can happen? My life is dedicated to dignity, and I believe that that's a human right. Everything I do is led by that, whether I'm climbing a mountain or I'm in the mud. And I have my days when I'm in the mud. And I know that there's a purpose to being in the mud. It's up to me to decide to have enough self respect, to treat that time in the mud as my learning, as my time to harvest, to collect myself, to have gratitude. I'm still alive. Okay. I made a mistake. Oh, ouch. That hurt. To tell the truth, compassion, and honesty, and to realize I'm still breathing. Now what? That's a choice.

Ben Owden

Wow. Wow. Now, for someone who's hearing all of this, right? This idea of generative wholeness. And you say, I mean, clearly, from everything you've said, it's pretty obvious that one can't get to this state overnight. There's a lot of patience required to do the inner work to get to this place. So what boundaries should someone put in place to help them remain patient in this journey?

Janet M Harvey

Yes. Getting comfortable with the discomfort is the way I describe it in the book, and I've heard you use patience several times, and so I'm very curious about that. What is patience? In some ways, it's the regular. It's a regulation of feeling activated to maybe flee, fight, freeze. I often also add one more fracture where we can't make sense of something. Right. We're in a traumatic experience. Patience is a regulation that says, hold on a second. Stay here just another minute longer. This may not be the whole truth. And I think that goes very nicely with this principle of boundaries that you're raising, which is, am I really in danger here, or is it my identity that's being challenged? Is there something that is a consequence that's not recoverable, or is this a mirage? Am I future projecting that something horrible will happen, but there's no evidence in the current environment that that is so, or the flip of that coin? There is a ton of evidence, but everybody around me is ignoring it. But my gut is telling me that the survival instinct requires something different than what I'm seeing out there. So patience is a regulation of the discomfort. Can I stay with it just a little longer? Not forever, not to apathy, but to recognize that the world is far more complex? When you say hard, I put complexity and uncertainty into those buckets. Well, what do we do when that's so? We break down the complexity into. It's easier to digest pieces and parts. What do we do with uncertainty? We construct a new vision, a perspective, a point of view. How do we do that? We ask questions to collect information, and we start to identify the things that create internal coherence. I've just described how we navigate the immunity to change Bob Kagan's work. Right. It is small steps, and it is valuing that regulatory, inner self regulation process of sitting in the discomfort a little longer to ask some questions. When I can notice that I'm having reactivity, or what we would call being judgmental, that's the place. If I can build the muscle to sit in it just a little longer, curiosity will surface. What don't I know here? What evidence supports this point of view? What in my history am I making more important than what's actually occurring right in front of me? These are the kinds of questions that when we're in that self regulatory moment, we can create the boundary that gives us a little room and ultimately find, what's the question to ask? What do I seek out? Who do I seek out that will help me to make sense out of what I am experiencing that has me being uncomfortable? This is the process of choice making, and all of us have the power of choice, always. We often set down that, and I.

Ben Owden

Think on a to speak to that. I think language as it has, it's been evident throughout this conversation. Right. Plays an important role, I guess, in how it influences our thinking and, you know, the consequences of the thinking. And there was a statement you talk about in the book as well, especially when you talk about organizations in terms of how they think about learning and maybe building learning organizations, you say all too often, leaders embrace learning initiatives as an expense rather than an investment. And those two words, an expense versus an investment. An expense is something that goes out and sometimes doesn't really come back to you. Versus an investment. It's something that goes out and becomes something better than what you gave. You plant a seed and it becomes a tree and it produces fruit. But I think there's a built in aspect that, you know, and this goes back to what you just said, right? That requires the patience, because when you invest, you have to wait. And in investment, there's this idea that do not disrupt, compounding, the longer you wait, the more you will benefit from it. And I think if we bring this into the context of an organization, part of the reason I feel like organizations don't really invest in learning as they should is because of the turnover rate. People don't really stay around long enough in organizations. And so as a result, even if they see it as an investment practically, it's not because most people don't really hang around long enough for the fruit to be produced, so to speak. And so. And of course, retention is a whole monster on its own. But I think this idea of investment, of course, on an individual level, it's also hard, because I think sometimes when you think about of this as a lifetime pursuit, then it's much more easy to be patient versus saying, oh, this is my annual goal. I have to get to this point. And if you're not moving closer to it, then the anxiety kicks in, the. And the tension. And sometimes we change our goals halfway to maybe pick something that is easily achievable. And, you know, you do that and you get your dopamine and you're happy, and you feel like I've achieved and accomplished something in my life, but you've not. And recently, I was actually reading, I forgot which book, but I was reading something, and they were talking about how sometimes any sort of state that has a level of permanence to it challenges you to grow a lot more. So in relationships, things like marriage, for example, where you constantly have to figure each other out, that challenges you to grow, versus a person maybe, who are like a serial monogamist and they're constantly changing. So it's like you hit the reset button all the time that you never really get to the depth of what you could get to, so to speak. That same thing applies to maybe sometimes employment. Wherever I people are constantly changing jobs, companies are constantly bringing in new people. And so the benefits of making this investment are not realized. And so how in your experience working with leaders in organizations, how can leaders in organizations, what sort of choices do they, can they make to develop a learning organizations? Acknowledging some of these challenges and tensions that are in place already.

Janet M Harvey

Boy, this is a big subject. So first of all, the premise behind what you have said is that I won't want, I don't want to invest because they're going to leave.

Ben Owden

Yes.

Janet M Harvey

It's taking historical data on attrition and applying it to a future vision.

Ben Owden

Yes.

Janet M Harvey

Essentially saying without investment, we're not going to make our future vision. But certain investments are too risky because of our past experience in the financial business. Past returns are not an indication of future returns. Right. It is a fundamental principle. One of my very favorite mentors in my early in my professional life was a CFO who said to me, you can never cross cut your way to growth. So you see, they set up the paradox with the premise that you were talking about organizations that recognize that the relationship between boss and subordinate and the opportunities that boss makes available to those subordinates, that's the key to sustaining retention. We all want to have the respect of our competency demonstrated by giving us autonomy to act and giving us opportunities to continuously do more and to stretch our wings and to embody greater responsibility, more creativity. Organizations that say, no, no, you're in this box and you will stay in this box. It's not always about upward promotion. Lateral, more exposure, horizontal development and vertical development are both useful. I'm back to my so that what can happen? What is the organization prioritizing? What do individuals prioritize? The organizations that, I think I might have told you this story last time, so I'll keep it short, but early on I was working in a financial institution and I had about 22 leaders that I was working with and I had six out of the first group of twelve who ultimately left the organization. And I was starting to feel really guilty, so I made an appointment with the CEO to go in and talk with him and I was going to give him his money back. And so we're chatting about this and he's not saying very much, was very unlike him. And he pulls back from his desk a little bit and he leans back in his chair and he smiles at me and he says, the greatest investment I made to give these people an opportunity to work with you, because guess what? If they've left us an amazing high growth, high performing organization, it wasn't a good fit. They're going to land in a better place. I have an employee who has been underperforming to their potential. Who's creating an opening for me to bring someone who wants to perform to their potential, that's a win win. That's a compound investment. So how we hold what development's contribution is, is really important. And I just, I just saw some data from LinkedIn, now owned by Microsoft. Right. And they're, they're talking about learning organizations and they're redefining what you and I have grown up with as soft skills, communication, reasoning, influence negotiation, that these are now power skills in a world of generative AI. Why? Because. Just because you have access to a large language database doesn't mean that you know what to do with what you just got. Whether you're in the fear mongering side of bias and plagiarism, or you're in the tremendously creative side of what we could partner with AI to generate. Right. Wherever you are in the spectrum, there's still the human exercise of discernment, good critical thinking of judgment, every bit as important as breathing, that must be attended to. That's what investment in people is about. So I love that it's getting reframed as power instead of soft skills because it gave the impression that it was discretionary. Right? It's not. You cannot cross cut your way to growth.

Ben Owden

You cannot cross cut your way to growth. And I love that. Power skills. I think I'm going to start using that when I go pitch to clients. And I think as we're winding down in our conversation, I would like to sort of close with talking about, I don't know how you pronounce it. Is it a car as a automobile?

Janet M Harvey

Is the, as the graphic, but it didn't tell enough. It's just an easy way to remember it. Think. A car.

Ben Owden

Yeah. A car as a vehicle to generative change. And so maybe if you could just explain what a car is. Of course a car. People know what that is, but. And how people can use this as a tool in daily moments of tension in their lives.

Janet M Harvey

Yeah. What is generative change? Most people know what change is. We take an action, we produce a result. We don't like the result, we take another action. We're driving for excellence and performance results. And we're maybe driven to the point of distraction. Right? We have changed cycle times. We don't even do alpha and beta testing on software anymore. We're just in continuous release. Unfortunately, our friends complexity and uncertainty make that a diminishing process. We're changing our actions based on our history and our knowledge base up to that moment in time. We're not wondering, huh? I wonder if the premise of my decision to take that action was a good premise. Is it congruent with what's really going on? What was the motivational belief system that had us adopt that premise? And what was the data we were aware of that chose that motivational belief that supported that premise that led to the actions? That is the result. I don't want a car stands for awareness, clarity and alignment before action and results. Yes. Action and results creates change. Yes, it can be the way you sustain excellence. It will only sustain excellence if we're calibrating, because we're always going to have complexity and uncertainty that we cannot see. But we know the clue is we don't like the result we got. So now work backwards. If you don't like the result, look at the actions you took. What was the premise you aligned with? Value principle, policy? What motivated us to choose that value principle or policy? That's the clarity of the belief system that's motivating. And then back to the awareness step. What data did we acknowledge and incorporate? What data do we dismiss? What did we deflect or deferred if we had included it, how might that have changed our motivation? So, good risk analysis, governance systems that help people think about worst case scenarios, being able to do scenario planning, worst case, mid case, best case. What are the underlying assumptions? Looking at habit, preference, assumption and bias as we're examining in reverse, what were we aligned to? What was the motivational belief? Now that we're clear about it, what were we aware of and dismissed? Ah, now I can see what was creating the breakdown when we got to the result. All right, no one person can do that. A car as a vehicle for generative change. Now insert generative in front of change. What we're saying is, can we step back and learn what happened? Can we create the condition that produced the result we didn't like in our thinking process so that we can actually do something with things like lean and six sigma, whatever quality principles an organization is processing with and start to recognize? Ah, no one person has the whole answer. This is the reason why collaboration becomes more important the more ambiguous and complex the environment. So a car is simply a framework to help people both think about more deeply, more deliberately. What are we aware of is going on? That's the what is going on in the environment? What's meaningful about it? Why do we care? That would motivate us enough to want to do something different? And ultimately, now what? This principle, this value, this policy. These are the things that matter. Take ESG policies, for example, environmental, social and governance. How do we reconcile the three in this decision? Super important for organizations now to learn to think in that level of complexity before they take an action, to raise the certainty that the actions they take are going to produce the result they are suggesting to others they're going to produce. And then that's a continuous cycle. You don't do this once, and if the result doesn't happen, okay, what was it in our thinking that got in the way? And we do the reflective work to work backwards. This bad result was caused by this set of actions that was motivated by this particular set of policies, principles or values that we aligned our decision to that was motivated by this set of beliefs and ultimately relied on a set of data that was insufficient or incomplete or inaccurate in some way because our biases and assumptions and preferences and habits got in the way. So what I'm doing is breaking down this process by which change happens. Do we stop feeling like a victim to it? We are part causer agent always. And this is a. A thinking process, a vehicle for generative change to originate new thinking, create something else, rely on the learning, and produce a new result.

Ben Owden

Wow. What a way to close and to package and put it all together. Thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to have these conversations. I am left with more questions and I think if we keep it going, we'll just go on and on and on and on and on. But thank you. Thank you for challenging my thinking, for pushing back, for making certain things clearer. And yeah, it's always meaningful to have these conversations with you. So as we're coming to an end of this conversation, do you have any last words, at least for now?

Janet M Harvey

Well, I think the call to action I would offer is coming from you, which is self regulation is important part of the day by day, breath by breath, moment by moment action. And we all have choice about is to regulate our reactivity in the patience with ourselves. If we sit just a little bit longer when we're uncomfortable, curiosity will emerge. It is part of the DNA of the human. And that curiosity then puts us in relationship to another choice. So practice patience, practice pause. It gives way more time than it takes. And if you want to learn more, Janet Mharvey.com is my book and speaking site. And of course invitechange.com is our work in the world as coaches and generative leaders. And I can be found in both places.

Ben Owden

And all this information is available under the description of this episode. As well, so people can just click and they will be brought to, you know, your website, places where they can purchase your book. I would encourage everyone to purchase the book as well. There's a lucky group of leaders who will be exploring these ideas in our thrive in the middle program with you. So lucky them. But yeah, everybody else, you can get in touch with her through all the links that are available in our chat description. Janet, always a pleasure to have you. And I look forward to having more conversations with you. Thank you.

Janet M Harvey

Thank you so much, Ben. And thank you for your leadership in the world. You're such a bright light.

Ben Owden

Thank you.