Teatime with Miss Liz Podcast → on Why Judy Ryan Started LifeWork Systems

tless tea time making a difference one cup at a time te time yeah this is tea [Music] time a difference oneup at a time so be sure to grab your tea grab a seat tune in Miss time making a difference one cup at a time [Music]

time well welcome everybody and it is afternoon tea time yes we are 1 hour if anyone is paying attention and you know what life happens sometimes but you know what I think it needed to happen because the guest that I have sitting in the background is the leadership and you know if you don’t communicate and have good communication skills with your guests sometimes you know things happen and we need to have that communication so again Judy is in the background Judy riding and you know what I think I needed that extra hour too of break because yesterday was so huge with the birthday and the book launch and all that good stuff so I really want to thank Judy for being you know me and Judy communicating and getting it figured out and she is here so we are doing RT time one hour a little later but you know what sometimes you got to just go off schedule we were talking about that this morning with Monique you know sometimes you got to take that bend in the road and you got to just go a different way so we are going to do all of the good stuff disclaimer and bio and all that good stuff and then we’re going to get Judy in here and we’re going to get her to share a good strong tea with you that’s right we serve a different type of tea at Tea Time with Miss Liz we don’t serve the beverage we serve life stories we serve life organizations and Foundations and all those incredible things individuals who actually make a different and they are strong teeth and that’s what Miss Liz does is bring strong teeth to the table so we’re going to start with the disclaimer and then the bio and then we’re going to jump jumping we’re going to get Judy in here and then miss Liz going to sit back and sip on some teeth while she shares a little bit about what she does disclaimer for Miss Liz’s teatime live show this list myself is going live using streamyard before leaving a comment please Grant streamyard permission to see your name at streamyard dcom please be advised that the content brought forward for any tea time show hosted by myself Miss Liz is always brought forward in good face however may bring for dialogues and opinions that are not representative of my platform the facts and information are perceived to be accurate at the giving time of airing all tea time guests and audience participants are responsible for using their good judgment and taking any action that may relate to the discussion the content brought forward may include some discuss may include discussions for somewhere they may be emotionally at risk it is significant to know that the show is engaging in discussion forms only to offer and Inspire awareness and connection and is not providing therapeutical advice if you have any questions about the disclaimer or the panelist discussion you may freely contact me m through my email at booking misses gmail.com moving forward should you choose to voluntarily participate in today’s show in any aspect I myself Miss Liz welcomes you and should you decide that the show is not made for you at this time I respect that and I will see you at a later show at a later date in time and again all tea times are on Thursday this year for 2023 unless it’s a rescheduled tea time then it’s Monday or Tuesday so now let’s get into who Judy Ryan is well Judy Ryan has been the CEO of Life work systems a company specialized in culture transformation and employees engagements and performance since 2002 she’s an award-winning author col columnist consultant trainer and Conference presenter she is frequently interviewed on television radio and podcast she is the best known for her development of a digital scalable sustainable culture transformation system and implement imple framework Judy’s mission is to create a world in which all people love their lives so let’s get Judy in here and let me sip on some tea and I wouldn’t want to say that five times fast that all those supplements and I was like what is this a tongue twister it’s exactly it’s a mouthful isn’t it and I like to ramble when I’m really excited about a guest I like to ramble like I just get really excited and my tongue gets ahead of itself and I’m just like okay I’m reading this and this is starting to sound like a tongue twister here but welcome Judy it is an honor to have you here same here Liz thank you so much and I already have your t-w which is thoughtful I can I feel it right away from you well thank you so much it is an honor you know and sometimes we just got to take that moment to understand that life happens you know and time zones and everything like we’re working around the world here we’re not just in one country we’re in different countries and different time zones so my guess sometimes will say oh well it’s 3:00 my time no it’s 3:00 my time you know and we don’t realize we have that time change because we’re going with our time zones so you know and and I think we needed it we really needed it and gave and it could also just be Mercury in retrograde which completely screws up communications right but I really feel that Communications is part of being a good leader you know uh if you don’t have that communication skills then you know it’s it’s not a good platform to have yes I couldn’t agree more in fact one of my core values is overcommunication so that everybody gains understanding so I’m I’m with you on that so Judy let’s let’s go right back so who’s the little Judy and who’s the big Judy oh gosh the little Judy is still alive and well uh but uh I I I’m assuming you mean how did I get started is that what thing was okay yeah I think I have always kind of had this um probably this path in me because uh I remember one of my earliest memories was when I went from one school to another school and I was actually being bullied in the school that I was in and I remember trying very hard to uh fit in and and do things that I thought people wanted from me and I realized when I was starting a new school no more no more of that it’s too stressful it doesn’t feel right for me I’m going to go into this new school and I’m going to be completely myself and the chips will fall where they they do and I remember when I first went to the new school and I was authentic and I kind of expected the sky to fall and what happened instead is it was one of the best years of my life and I think part of my mission to create a world in which all people love their lives it’s not only love your life love their lives in other words the life we’re here to live not what someone else is trying to pressure in us or what we think we have to do to please other people and so that’s a big part of little Judy is how do we help ourselves move more and more into the truly authentic people that we are not always easy right because we have so many bugs in our ears that are you should do this you should do that and then when you try to explain but that’s not mean you know uh you know we really just got to start accepting people for who they are and you know some people take a different Trail than you do uh you know or take a little longer to get to where you think that they should be you know I I get that all the time miss Liz you should do it this way you should you know what don’t be shoting on Miss Liz if you want to do it you’re more than welcome to do it I’m not stopping you you know Miss Liz is gonna do miss Liz and you do you you know well I’m gonna support you and you support me that’s all I’m asking I just wrote an article yesterday called being um seen heard and understood because that’s what we all want as who we are as opposed to um and also I had written one recently called do I care enough to risk losing you because being ourselves is an act of Courage it really isn’t easy uh if there are people that have certain expectations of us so I think it’s one of the benefits of getting older is you finally get to the point where you say it’s too stressful trying to be what other people want and I really feel more and more free as I develop um that self-acceptance not so much uh looking at for it outside yeah so I want I want to get into uh we’re here today for life work systems so where did that all come from and how did it start when I was in my early 20s and I was raising children um I W stumbled upon a psychology model by the work the work of Alfred Adler and for those of your listeners who don’t know much about him he was around during Freud and young but he didn’t get as much press but um one of the things that I really believe and I read a book about him about five years ago where the authors in Japan said he was at least 100 years ahead of his time and I felt that way when I first heard about him because he’s really he’s the one who founded the words inferiority complex which is very much like what bernee brown does on shame and vulnerability only he was a hundred years ahead of her and um if you really understand what causes people to feel inferior and what it costs our world and what it costs individuals and groups we would never go for win- lose we just wouldn’t and our world hasn’t really been ready for win-win in fact even today I believe there’s a kind of a battle between people who want win-win and people who want to hold on to win- lose with a death grip because they’re afraid they’re going to lose something so when I recognized Adler’s work he also said that we need to be concerned about how we use our personal power and that we use it with consideration for what it causes other people and and how to develop as an individual as well his Psychology was called individual psychology so as I was learning this for how to parent my children I felt like it was also reparenting me and um I learned a lot of unconventional practices so by the time my kids were four or five years old they all knew how to run a family meeting and we learned alternatives to punishment and permissiveness and and all kinds of things and so it was healing my own childhood which was fairly normal but yet who’s is really normal you know so I reading a book right now called the myth of normal and the author said we’re so inundated with the conditioning we have that we can’t even see how harmful it is and how what we think is normal is actually a cause for a lot of the problems we’re having even with um you know stress and anxiety and depression and ADHD and a lot of things are coming out of uh the amount of domination and kind of coercive practices that we have even in parenting and in schools and then we continue them in workplaces so I became a parent educator in the 80s and then I always had this vision of how do I bring this out to the larger Community because here I was this outlier mother who wasn’t rewarding my kids for reading books and things like that and I um I wanted to go into schools and work with the parents the teachers the administrators and the students all simultaneously so one of the things that happened early days for me because my company’s in our 21st year oh is um I wrote a vision for that and one of the school districts I just stopped by one day and this woman says to me what would you do if money was no issue and I said oh that’s easy I wrote that down in a vision and she says here’s a $300,000 Grant application I like what you just shared and I’m hearing good things about your work so if you want to write it it’s due in two days and um if I like it I’ll sign off on it and that’s what happened because we’re a for-profit company so I could have never done that by myself and so I just think sometimes when you’re really aligned with a mission and a vision and you just kind of allow yourself to really you know describe it it can become manifested whether you were even looking for how it was going to get manifested so not only did that happen where we worked in multiple schools multiple years but we also ended up with an $800,000 School Reform project uh a couple years years later because the city of St Louis was collecting uh tax dollars for kids they had a proposition k for kids and we helped some inner city high schools help more high school students stay in school and graduate because they had a really high number of kids that dropped out yeah and um at the same time that we were doing school reform work we were also working in corporations and health care and nonprofits and it just kind of happened that way so we go in and out of you know doing work with parents teachers and schools and then also within all these other settings because good human systems are good human systems and I really like that I like the name of the business life Fork systems you know because you saying life work well you know we we say that systems that make life work but our parent company is actually expanding human potential which is also a great name but we wanted people to think of systems because system IC change is really what will make the difference Y and so it’s a little bit technical compared to expanding human potential but we wanted um systems in the name for that reason and if you don’t take a systems approach you’re not going to have the the kind of scalable change that you need that I believe we need right now in the world absolutely and I love conversations like this I love deep strong tees because we need to have conversations about systems about Society about programs Bec not just build them but talk about them and understand the meaning behind why the systems are being built you know yes well what’s interesting about it I don’t know if you know this or not because in our temper one of our temperament models that we use um I’m a particular type of temperament and only 8% of the population are systems developers all of us can appreciate a system like we all know if we didn’t have a satellite system we wouldn’t be able to speak on our cell phones or you know have our internet connections and so on but um most people don’t know how to actually Envision and innovate and build a system I happen to have the kind of temperament that is a system builder for human systems if I didn’t have that kind of Direction I Would probably build some other type of system like an accounting system so I I find that that is a helpful thing for us all to know because most of us don’t realize that the systems thinkers are the kind of the ones that are looking at the whole puzzle and all the pieces that belong in that puzzle I would bet maybe you could be a systems developer as well just from your interest in it yeah I and I really like digging deep in understanding things when I don’t understand things I have a lot of questions and I tell my to my kids all the time ask questions there’s no wrong question if you don’t ask the question you’ll never get the answer anyway yes completely agree completely agree in fact um our mentoring when we work with clients and we have a pretty um comprehensive way we help them to adopt a particular model um it’s very Socratic which most people know Socrates was a philosopher that asked questions in order to pull the wisdom from the people Y and that’s really um our process because many many people have awareness of things but they don’t know how to shift that awareness into managing something and that’s really emotional and social intelligence is going from self-awareness and social awareness into self-management and relationship management most people don’t know how to do that sh shift yep and they’re used to being told how to do it as opposed to ask asking the right questions so that they do it yeah and I think it’s deeply important that we get it out there for the listeners that are tuning in and the ones that will be listening to the replay later you know ask questions get involved and you know that’s the only way we’re going to create a difference and the ripple effect is if we start reaching out you know you go to a seminar or you go to a conference and you’re you’re sitting there the whole time and you’re like I don’t know about this like I’m not understanding instead of just saying you know what I’m not understanding what you’re saying can you get more into detail you’re not going to hurt anybody by saying that if the presenter you you’re a professional presenter Judy if somebody would in the audience would say you know what I’m not getting it can you get a little deeper I’m sure you would you would be honored to reach deeper I absolutely love that and I think a lot of people are afraid to ask questions they’re afraid of looking like you know they’re assuming everyone else understands and it’s really a mistake because usually if they’re asking a question someone else in the room is also struggling with that as well so I couldn’t agree more yeah because we always wait for that one person to ask the question it’s just like in school right when you’re in school and the teacher says does everybody understand everybody’s all quiet you know who’s that who’s the one that’s gonna break the bubble and that’s that question that the whole class wants to be asking yes you know uh yeah I I I learned over the years through through my challenges and through my healing you know ask the questions Express that you don’t understand or that you do understand and it intrigues you and it wants you to ask more deeper questions you know yeah I mean two thoughts come to me when I think about the idea of questions not only the way you’re describing them like be curious and be willing to learn and grow and be vulnerable by asking but two things one is questions the right kind of questions are incredibly powerful yeah um we’re big Believers on not necessarily asking why and who as much as what and how because that allow ows people to receive responsibility and pick it up and the other thing is we teach uh one of the things we teach in a year-long process it’s just one of over 30 tools is called appreciative inquiry I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that Liz have you no I haven’t so appreciative inquiry is super powerful if I were to say to you how are you today Liz you might say oh gosh I have a headache or I had a flat tire or I’m fine but if I said what’s the best thing that happened to you today that causes you to go into a section of your mind of all the good things that have happened and then prioritize which is the best it’s a totally different way of questioning so if you were going let’s say you were going to an appreciative inquiry therapist for your a marriage and I’m just making this up an appreciative inquiry therapist would say I know you’re here because you have some issues and problems but before we get started tell me the stories about when you were most in love what were you thinking about each other what were you feeling what were you saying and now now tell me what is worth working in your life what’s working in your marriage oh you parent really well together oh you’re great on finances tell me those stories now tell me the story of what your marriage would look like at its best if you were able to overcome these challenges tell me those stories it puts everybody in a totally different mindset yeah than coming in and complaining about each other and that’s an example and I honestly believe that if we asked appreciative questions we wouldn’t have people going in um the United States going towards uh autocratic strong men mentality because a lot of people want to give up on Democracy because there’s a lot of negative questions that slow things down but if we were all creating from these more positive questions about what works what could work what has worked I think it would be a much faster process to be Democratic for example I find in the last couple of years not even with covid and doesn’t even have to do with Co I just find like the whole world not just us not Canada you know you know the whole world has just become so negative and so defensive you know my way is the right way you’re you you know we’ve been divided why not just start getting positive and start asking those right questions and come together you know unify well you’re describing what we say is when people are activated in feeling inferior they go into those um internal struggles where they feel stress and anxiety and depression and and disengagement and I’m going to quiet quit shut down and all those things but between people what it looks like is that I’m right you’re wrong I’m going to cancel you if you don’t if I don’t agree with you I’m gonna um I’m going to do all kinds of isms on you because I’m not feeling good about myself the the primary question we have in our work is if inferiority complex is the the underlying cause of all struggles including War including all misbehavior if that’s the root cause what do we need to do to help people people to and what’s the antidote to inferiority complex yeah and yet most people don’t want to look at inferiority complex if you do you know bernee Brown’s work yes I follow her quite close so she went she said in one of her workshops that she uh she gets invited all over the world to speak but people will often say to her don’t talk how about you not talk about you know you’re so funny and you’re so smart bne but how about you not talk about that shame stuff it’s a little dark and it makes people uncomfortable and her response is um if until we deal with this this shame that people have and how to overcome it in our society the rest of it’s pointless that’s what she said and it’s her number one platform well that was Adler’s number one platform that’s been my number one platform in fact when you were asking me for some Tew I thought oh I could say Troublemaker because we all have a little bit of trouble in us like you know if if we’re being transparent you know we all have a little trouble in us we’re human beings right as uh Lewis John Lewis said good trouble you know because disruption is trouble to a lot of people right but it it is necessary to disrupt the status quo and I and I think that’s you know what’s going on with people is we’re not asking the right questions because it makes people uncomfortable yeah a lot of people come to me and they say in Judy they tell me Miss Li don’t talk about that it makes me uncomfortable and I’m like well you know what this is who Miss Liz is I’m sorry if it makes you uncomfortable guess how I’m feeling because you don’t want to listen to the uncomfortable yes you know we we can’t get comfortable until we get uncomfortable yes yes in fact you if if anything when somebody says don’t talk about that it’s probably a clue that you’re on to something right and I’m like uhhuh like why don’t you want me to talk about this is it because it might be a trigger for you it might you know it might be something that you haven’t dealt with uh you know and I tell people I do everything uncomfortable I just try it and if it works it works if it fails it fails do I get upset when I feel of course I do I’m human being you know but at least I try and that’s what I this is what this platform is for it’s to show people that you can make a difference by just taking an hour of your time for another human being that’s all I’m doing yes I and that’s really what my um article on being seen heard and understood is it’s about presence and being moved d by people and being able to be affected and to be able to disclose how you feel and that’s not easy for most people no um they think it means they have to spill their guts no it doesn’t it it means that in our work uh we talk about four cor needs which are the opposite of the inferiority complex one of them is misunderstood a lot but it’s the primary reason I do this work so the four core needs are to feel empowered lovable connected and contributing and we all have those needs so lovable is not the same as people needing to feel loved by others although feeling lovable is a feeling when somebody’s doing a particular loving thing but it’s not saying things to you giving things to you or doing things for you it’s witnessing you and allowing yourself to be moved by this other person in a place of appreciation and delight and when you when you do that for another person they feel seen heard and understood and most people are not great at doing that because it feels passive to them but it’s absolutely essential and then the other one out of those four that kind of gets um lost is we all need to contribute but because we feel so inferior we don’t want to look like we ever need anybody’s contribution and so we don’t we sort of Rob each other of being able to be helpful to one another yeah and we wait until there’s a crisis and then everybody jumps in but it shouldn’t have to be that we can only contribute when when there’s a crisis well I want to really thank you for saying that because we really need to get that message out there you know you don’t have to wait till it gets to the part where we need after care programs and after care help and look at the prevention that we can create the prevention programs we can make if we paid attention and we actually said you know what I’m not going to wait until that person has a crisis I’m gonna that person is slowly falling how can I help that person how can I help that business actually always a little bit easier because we like to give better than receive there’s even that saying it’s better to give than receive and I wrote an article is it really not really you know because the reason the the reason the contribution is a problem is not just that we don’t jump in before it’s a crisis but we don’t ask others to help us before exactly and when we take away um incentives and rewards from people I remember there was a school principal and he was like what am I gonna do if I don’t if I can’t bribe the parents to come to parent teacher night with a steak dinner you know and I said ask them to to all bring something ask them to bring a quote ask one of them to bring a story of success about one of their students ask somebody to bring a soda a bottle of soda you know people love to be contributing don’t give to them to bribe them give to them in a way where they feel belonging and significance in the community and it was like a completely reversal of what he was thinking to think about that contributing thing that we all have where we want to be able to support yeah and if if we’re the one always giving giving giving then no everyone expects us to give it right yes and then when we can’t give it because we’re burnt out because we’ve been giving and giving and giving then everybody’s like well no you’re the giver you got to do it well it’s so true and that happens in a lot of organizations because the leaders uh they have that complex of a larger than life hero a real leader develops leadership in others yes that’s why we had our kids by the when my kids were little my first four by the time the oldest was like 12 and the youngest was like six they would all go to the grocery store and do all the family shopping for a week now back then it was safe we could drop them off there wasn’t worries about them getting kidnapped although who would kidnap four kids and we trained them we trained them and how to pick things out how to use a list and check things off how to use a little clicker because back then they didn’t have cell phones and then how to call us you know from the pay phone and um what they felt was this sense of empowered lovable connected and contributing so we went out of our way to have faith in them yep and to develop them and most people don’t realize how much more capable everyone is than we think they are and so I don’t remember exactly what you just said that led to that but that’s kind of the idea is how do you transfer responsibility to other people oh I know what it was you’ll burn out if you’re a leader that doesn’t develop other leaders you’re going to burn out if you’re a larger than life hero but you don’t really develop others yeah well and Leadership is not about the the person in the lead you know the leader should be sitting in the back sometimes and watching the team and saying you know what I’m going to give you the afternoon to show me a little bit you know if you’re always in the front how do you know what’s happening in the back yes you know how do you know what’s going on with your team if you’re just looking forward and you don’t see the people in the back I I love sitting in the back like I I like to be the Watcher I like to analyze the room and just kind of pick up and then when it’s time to come to the front I’m I’ll come to the front but I like to watch and I like to just analyze the the body language and and you know just the when you go to a conference I like to watch the audience I’ll watch the speaker but I also see if the audience is actually engaged or you know like are they getting bored are they like oh it’s just another one like this what’s interesting about that is um even the most interesting speaker if you’re sitting in a passive way too long your brain starts going on autopilot kind of like a screen saver so what I do when I present is every five minutes or so I have them turn to the person next to them and share something that they just learned about in the presentation and what it does is it resets the brain but it also engages them and they’re always plugged in I I learned that a while ago about Neuroscience um here’s something that you might find interesting about uh the whole thing about asking questions or engaging people this is one of my favorite stories is it okay if I tell you a quick story absolutely it’s your time BR go ahead I’m saying it’s quick but I I don’t think it’s too long but um we use it a lot of times when we even open a big conference with a bunch of Executives but it’s an actual story from our school workor and it happened to be a school where one of the teachers learned about our work and she was the only one in her school doing what we call a responsibility based culture model okay and the whole idea of it is how do I help my kids in my classroom feel empowered lovable connected and contributing and she was doing classroom meetings and she had an eighth grade class and so she called me one day and she said I know my job is to to develop them into leaders but sometimes I don’t always know how to do that would you sit in on one of our classroom meetings so that I can see how that’s done when I get stock and I said sure So I came one day and one of the boys in her class came in at the beginning of the classroom meeting and he says I’ve got something to put on the agenda I’m being bullied by my home room teacher because The Home Room teacher wasn’t in this program didn’t have this whole notion and so she says we’ll put it on the agenda so when it was her his turn to talk he said here’s what’s going on we’ve been given this new thing in the morning along with like the Pledge of Allegiance it’s called the peace pledge and we have to put our hands on our hearts and pledge that we’re going to use our words and our actions for peace in the school and he said I don’t really have a problem with the pledge but the problem I have is that the teacher did this to us and real angry and ser serous said if I catch any of you not doing this pledge I’m going to give you a detention which Liz isn’t that kind of ironic it’s all about peace but I’m gonna use a sledgehammer on you so he said I just don’t think it’s right that she’s bullying us about it and I said I happen to agree with you well first she said the teacher said Judy how would you how would you help him like can you show me how you would help him because she couldn’t see it and so I said um I said do you want peace in the school and he saidwell yeah and I said okay good I said do you want peace with the teacher who’s bullying you I didn’t even pull any punches I said she’s bullying you do you want peace with her and he goes yeah I guess so I said okay are you willing to look at where you’re doing war with her and he’s like me I’m the one being bullied you know he got really defensive and um I said yeah but you’re the one saying you want peace with her and in the school and you’re the one asking for help she’s not here in the room and he said yeah okay and I said Do you ever say bad things about her behind your back her back and he said well yeah I hate her I said huh hate and gossip anything warlike about that and he go yeah I guess you know and I said Do you ever try to go to her when things are calm and have a really reasonable peaceful kind of conversation and he said no we’re all afraid of her and I said did you know that when you’re afraid of anyone you’re in attack mode and he said what do you mean and I said when a dog comes racing up to you and it’s bearing its teeth and it’s growling at you if you become more afraid does that dog become more hostile or less hostile and he said more hostile and I said exactly I said why he goes I don’t know I never really thought about it and I said the reason the dog becomes more hostile is when you’re afraid of it he knows that you’ve got him in the Monster Box you are holding him as the enemy and he’s going to return the favor I said so now do you see that you have been in war by gossip hate and attack through fear what do you want now now that you see that and he said well now I want to go to her and have a peaceful conversation but I’m not quite sure how to do it and I said well isn’t it great that you have 20 other classmates and a teacher and you have a coach in the room right now and you guys have time to practice it and what I thought was so powerful is is that other kids started saying I’ll go with you I’ve been at War I and I didn’t know it and the teacher said to me you can see I love my students and I love this kind of thing but I realized at the end of the year I want to quit teaching and come work with you in school reform because I walk around this school where nobody else is doing this and I see all these signs about responsibility and respect and and um accountability and and and it’s like saying math is crucial in not having a math class and she said so to me we’re doing a disservice by teaching them Reading Writing and arithmetic but not how to manage relationships even with authority figures and when I tell this to Executives I’ll say you might be wondering why is she telling us a story about an eighth grader but it’s what we all want in our workplaces y we want people that can go and work things out and not have to be uh tattling to anybody and not have to be the victim and if I had been more conventional I would have said oh you poor thing we’ll go and take care of that mean bit big bad bully but what I did instead was ask him questions that put him in touch with his own power yeah and his own ability to influence and his own ability to choose his intention and so that’s um that’s kind of along lines of the socratic questioning that we do and I and I think it’s deeply important that you know sometimes an outsider comes in and and a mediator or or coach and shows us a different way of looking at the situation you know instead of coming in and all on attack it’s like you said when you’re on attack you you know you just go defense and and that’s what I’ve been seeing around the world is everyone’s on defense like how do we fix everything if we’re just attacking everybody right and I think most people don’t actually have the understandings and the tools to fix things that’s what I really believe and I think a lot of people think they’re already supposed to know how to do that in fact sometimes when we work in companies they’ll say well how come these people don’t know how to behave with each other well it doesn’t matter how come the fact of it is they got to learn somewhere yeah and if you want a healthy workplace then you’re going to have to be the one that invests in them getting these skills because otherwise they’re going to continue doing what they’re they’ve been doing and it’s not it’s not effective most places yeah I I I yeah I’m learning so much from you this this afternoon you know uh I really like deep conversations and I really like to get the information out there because we don’t have enough Awareness on topics like this and proper leadership programs you know there are so many people that use the word leadership and have no idea how to lead I know and in fact in our model leadership is everyone being taught to be a leader that eighth grader my kids learning how to grocery shop or lead a CL a family meeting uh most people mean leadership development of the title leaders yeah that’s the that’s not the only people that need to be that’s like saying we can only give cell phones to the the titled leaders no we be are you know personal computers or something yeah well we’re dividing again right you know like and I find that titles are being thrown out and words are being thrown out that they don’t even understand and I like that you use that word loved you know because a lot of people use that word I love you or I love what you do and then you ask them why do you love what I do and they have no answer to it they’re just like I just love it well you know what’s funny about that Liz when I was first working um with comp with a marketing company and I told them our mission was to create a world where all people love their lives uh one of the marketing people said business owners don’t care if PE their employees love their lives and I said then I don’t want to work with those leaders because you know you’re like me that’s that’s how I am you know even anybody the ones that don’t care they’re being forced to care because so many people are saying I don’t want to put up with this anymore Y and so you know regard if they’re doing it for their bottom line or not they better care because people really realize they don’t need to you know tolerate that so I I find in today’s world we’re using a lot of words that we really don’t understand right even the word culture I always say to people it’s like the word parenting you could have 10 parents in a room and they’d all have a different idea of what healthy parenting is and the same is true of culture yeah and um one of the things that you just touched upon was we have all of these separations in the levels when we go in and we do a guided culture transformation we use an immersive process which is um based in best practices from education which is and I can explain that if you want but one of the things we do is we break people into small groups as part of our immersion process but we insist that the projects have a range from CEO to Frontline staff and that the small groups have that range and a lot of times the senior Executives say oh we don’t want to put the leaders with the Frontline staff because some of our managers are kind of rough around the edges and I say you need to do that because you need to break the barriers when you have a company that has all this hierarchy sometimes you need that for the job skills but when it comes to Being Human with one another you got to level the playing field and your people need to see so just like we did the family meeting where our kids took turns rotating the leadership with the adults we do that in these small groups that we do every month the CEO might lead one month and then the next month the receptionist is in the group and she’s leading or he’s leading and it’s important to break down some of those artificial barriers on purpose and I think it’s it it it really opens up the eyes of getting everybody seen and heard like you said the article you know every level of the company and the business is getting seen and heard not just the top leaders yes and also you you need to develop the leadership and the followership in all of the people like I was I’m a good strong leader you can kind of tell I’m a dominant personality I had to learn how to be a good follower to a four-year-old who was leading a meeting because I was tempted to steamroll that child you know so sometimes people are um in need of being flexible to be the good follower that supports the leader and they have to know how to lead when they’re the appropriate person to jump into the breach and if they don’t know both they’re going to stay stuck in these very um I don’t know like stereotypes who they think they are and it’s just not very agile well and you know some of us when we’re putting to these leader positions we’re not really ready to be leaders you know because that’s right because we haven’t even been trained what real leadership development is and real how do you Empower and how like that student we were showing I was showing that teacher this is how you create another leader but you know because otherwise she would have been the person that goes and handles it instead of teaching him how to handle it and she was interested in learning how it was just new for her to learn how to transfer that responsibility and I think it’s really deeply important that we Open the Eyes to different you know that’s what tea time is about is different being different just being yourself you know if if you learn a little different way than someone else that’s okay you know we shouldn’t be knocking people down because they’re learning it a different way you know the conversation it might impact them in a different way you know you see like you see a six I see a nine but neither one of us is wrong we just see that a different angle yes yes and you don’t really get that unless you create um in an environment where there’s a lot of trust and a lot of um ability to really hear one another and share ideas um when I mentioned that we use an immersive process in what we do that’s actually sometimes a very difficult thing for us because it requires um a multiplicity of ways to engage in what you’re learning and in what happened in education was they found that if if you just stand in front of a classroom of students of any age and you just lecture to them they only learn what they learn long enough to take the test maybe a few months after they don’t retain that information it’s it’s not even really that relevant to them much of the time but if what they found is if you send a student home with a packet or a video and they have to fill out a worksheet and workbooks and then they come to school and they have peer discussion and and their teachers there to kind of just support that discussion and they talk about the relevance and what they understand and how they would apply it they found that they retain that information so what we do is we kind of do that on steroids we know that we’re appealing to the kinesthetic learner the visual learner the auditory learner the one that has to hear it multiple times in order to absorb it to try it on to practice it we have like 11 touch points for Content before we even end a culture transformation process and um is it okay if I tell you another story sure go ahead I love stories I you know we get so much from a story sometimes I know I know well this is a true everything I tell you is always a true story so we had this company that has 550 people and the guy is the CEO he knew the adarian psychology so he was already on board right away but when he found out about this immersive process he’s like I don’t know about that that’s a lot I don’t know if I want my Executives to have to because what we do in the immersive process is people watch an individual module they fill out of work book they fill out a reflective survey then they meet in small groups where the levels are mixed like I was saying and they take turns rotating the leadership and they have to be prepped for that and then they go and do mentoring Pairs and sometimes it’s like the CEO mentors the receptionist and then she mentors him back and so it’s it’s very different it’s not um counseling and coaching it’s a really interesting and then we help the organization to integrate with their their learning so there’s a lot it’s about four and a half hours a month and so he said you know what I want to do first is I just want you to take all 52 of my leaders everyone from supervisor up and just do kind of a skim a review of all these Concepts and tools that you do in a year I want you to do it in six months every other week for two hours and I just want you to lead discussion and presentation I said okay I’ll do that but here’s what you’re GNA lose you know and he’s like okay I’m okay with that I don’t want them mentoring I don’t want them doing homework I don’t want them you know so one of the tools that we taught is one of two tools that is designed to eliminate or reduce gossip so Liz if I was doing this Tool It’s called The Mind trust and the other tool is called healthy venting which most people don’t do healthy venting they just call it venting but it’s really gossip so mind trust is a commitment that we ask people to think about reflect on write about and make to one another so if I was doing it to you Liz I would say I’m gonna promise you four things I commit to you that I won’t say bad things about you behind your back so I’m doing this one-on-one I commit to you that I will come to you if I have a problem with you and work it out out with you I commit that if anyone else comes and starts to say bad things about you to me I’ll politely stop them I might offer them the healthy venting tool but I won’t let them tear you down to me and the fourth commitment is I’m going to try to get that person to go to you and work it out so that they don’t hold on to that Grudge or take it to other people so when I presented that to these everybody from seite to supervisors I said what do you guys think about that tool and they said oh we think that’s great we’re gonna you know we love that and I said would you all go within the next two weeks to all 52 of each other do it on Zoom do it in person and make that commitment they’re like yes we’ll do that so at the end of the six months one of these leaders is over eight other leaders and he calls me and he says you know we’ve gotten so much information and so many tools from you in six months but we’re still having a lot of interpersonal problems we’re really not sure what we’re doing with all these tools could you come in for a couple of days and just guide us in how to apply everything because we’re not really getting better with each each other and I said well I’m going to be talking to your CFO today I’ll find out if there’s budget for you so when I called her now this is where it gets kind of interesting she was also in this training right the CFO she says to me oh he do he definitely needs your help he was at a meeting with his leaders and he was saying so many bad things about me that they came and told me all the bad things he was saying and I said so did you ask them if they stopped him because don’t they have a mind trust with you she goes oh I didn’t even think about it I Saidi guess you didn’t ask them if they went to him and saidwe have a problem with what you’re doing because they did have a problem with him but they didn’t come to him they went to her and she said no I didn’t think to ask that and I said once you knew he was saying bad things about you and you had a problem with that did you go and talk to him and because you have a mind trust with him and she says no I actually went and tattled on him to his boss and then I found out his boss was at the meeting and he didn’t stop him either and then she goes what is wrong with all of us isn’t it hilarious I actually wrot an article called a tool with a fool with a tool is still a fool because we grab these tools like we’re gonna it’s going to make us you know so what I said to her is there’s nothing wrong with you this is why we do an immersive process because when I gave you that tool it was like I gave you all a shiny tennis racket yep and Y all thought it made you a tennis player yeah and I said but you don’t become a tennis player unless you watch some games you understand the ins and outs of all of it you get out on the court you practice it you might get some coaching you fall in love with it and you develop muscle memory because if you sat down with the homework that they didn’t want to do it would ask you to think about could you really go to everyone and work it out directly with them at the early stages most people would say no what if it’s my boss and I’m afraid I’ll get fired or I have no idea how to do that it always blows up in my face when I try to deal with someone directly or maybe I can’t commit to not talking about everyone behind their back and saying bad things because I kind of like saying bad things about John or Mary over here and so it requires reflection writing it down discussing it practicing it then going and seeing if you’re really ready to do it when we do this in groups live about 50% of the time they’re not ready to do it right away and the goal is to help them get all the skills and the trust built so that they can eventually really mean those four commitments and so isn’t that I I mean that’s what we struggle with oh we just want a fast food solution yes it won’t get them there yeah well that’s it right every every body wants instant impact you know and it’s I don’t want to put in the I don’t want to put in the time exactly it they just want the fast food they don’t they don’t want to take the time to make that homecooked meal you know I I say it all the time A lot of people are like Miss Liz how how do you do I take my time and take ownership take accountability if you make something and you do it wrong take accountability you know you’re not going to nobody’s going to love you any less they might talk about you and gossip andan how can we possibly learn all of these things if we’ve never been taught them like we should have been taught them like Reading Writing and arithmetic and we weren’t much of it we were taught wrongly the conditioning that we have been provided is the biggest part of the problem that’s right like if we’re not taught properly you know and the right way it’s like asking the right questions everyone says oh there’s no wrong there’s no wrong question yes there is wrong questions when it’s nonsense and it’s just continuing the pattern and a Cycles those are wrong questions right and there’s also wrong systems like one of the things that we say is the biggest cause of inferiority complex are four ways that we control people and we do it from infancy we do it by um being domineering in a way like do it or else right autocratic scaring people into doing the right thing we do it by dangling carrots we do it by saying I’m so disappointed in you or I’m so proud of you which causes them to be people Pleasers Y and not feel like they can ever question authority um and bring a new idea forward and then we do it by enabling them if I had said to that eighth grade student oh you poor thing we don’t expect you to go handle that I would have been enabling him instead of empowering him and and it and it creates an entitlement mentality so people are when they start to we Adler had a phrase called spitting in your soup and what he was basically saying is sometimes there’s something that looks nutritious and has been sold to be how many people you heard say well I was spanked and it didn’t hurt me you know because they’re they’re holding on to the soup yep oh I have to give my teacher my parents a Stak dinner or they won’t show up to the meetings that’s just your belief system that you have to externally motivate them so most people don’t even know that those need to be dismantled and then what do you replace them with because if you don’t replace them with something better they’re going to go back to what they know you know where it’s comfortable right where it’s comfortable where where even Society is saying but those work and they work so fast well yeah it works like a gun to your head or if I give you a bribe but it doesn’t develop you well it doesn’t create your own internal motivation yes so it’s not only the questions we ask it’s the systems that we just buy into uh I recently called them sacred cows and I found out that’s not a politically correct thing to say because of the Indian the people from India because they do actually have sacred cows but my point in that is we don’t like to challenge the things that we’ve done for centuries yeah so so true well our hour is running really quick and I’m getting so much points and and tools and you know we’re giving the tools but until you really take the time to understand the tools they’re only tools well and I would say if you don’t have the mindset shift y the tools are you really will be a fool with a tool yeah and that’s why what I think a lot of people do that are into that immediate gratification is they grab a tool like the Mind trust and they think that’s going to solve everything thing and then they say later well I learned all that stuff in that workshop and it didn’t work well it didn’t work because you didn’t also shift your mindset yeah and and so you’re absolutely right and I think it just takes people a while to realize that you don’t get it anything worthwhile is going to take a while yeah so we’re almost at the hour so I want to get into your tea before we wrap it up because I do want to know what Judy’s tea is because I’m really curious about your tea because I’m learning so much from you this this afternoon and I really think that it needed to happen this way the universe needed to make us take that extra hour because I I feel that there’s a lot of deep information here there’s a lot of tools there’s a lot of tips and there’s a lot of reflection in today’s tea uh so I want to know what your tea is if I give you the letter the word tea what words do you have for me um well do you just want one right uh one for each letter oh I was thinking I needed three that were starting with a t no one for each letter so the the T that I would so I didn’t yes yet do the E so we’ll figure it out the E and A as we go but the T I would say my most important one is trust building okay trust Builder because in our um culture model we have a house picture and the foundation is trustworthiness and there are eight behaviors that build trust and they are things like being honest and straightforward and disclosing and uh respectful and um receptive and following three on commitments and seeking excellence and all of those kinds of things and um so what that means is if I was in your life all the time and I I would like right now I feel like I have a 10 with you that means we have nothing unresolved we’re good with each other I actually feel beyond that because you could have a ten and not be friends with somebody but um but you just don’t have anything unresolved so if we say that’s foundational that means if you’re in an environment and you don’t have a ten with someone you go and fix that right away way because if you don’t it goes from a 10 to a nine to an eight to down to a one big blame Fest and then it’s all about this person’s Breaking All the Rules but I’m the saint and you know and it just gets really really difficult to fix so trust is huge in this model if you’re not responsible to build trustworthiness with people you’re actually setting uh your Dynamics up in the way that is going to have all kinds of um energy sucking and negativity going on because of you making that sort of a nice to have but not a need to have so that would be my tea if I had to pick one because I I had three words with tea well let’s do something different we don’t need to always have the tea like Miss Li likes to switch it up and I love when my guests like you know sometimes it’s meant to be so well I appreciate that because I’m getting freaked out thinking what’s the what’s the I like doing different everyone knows Miss Liz kind of justop so I I I’d be wanted to have the other two te’s okay well one of them is um the word transformation because I always think of it this way and I tell this story when a caterpillar gets so full of itself and and it it sounds terrible to say it but they’re kind of like an eating machine right they’re just eat neat neat neat eventually they get kind of bloated and they they form the they hang from the tree and they form the Crysis and if you were to poke a hole in that crysalis about you know a certain period time into it it would look terrible because it’s a black soupy mess because the caterpillar cells are being inundated by what’s called imaginal cells and that’s a real term that’s what the biologists call that these dormant cells within an in a caterpillar and the caterpillar doesn’t like it because it feels like it’s being um invaded and it is I mean it’s a disruptive process if you if you didn’t know there was going to be a butterfly on the other end it would look like a disaster yeah and even as it it strengthens this new form that it’s in you can’t cut it open because it won’t be strong enough to fly so what happens is we always tell people that transformation is like that it is not always a comfortable process because you have to dismantle things that you think were like your stability your security and I had a woman that was in our the ninth month of our 12-month process and we happen to talk about the imaginal cells in in this particular session and at the end of every session the group leader always says you know I want everybody to share at least one Aha and this woman said I realized that I came in as a caterpillar but I’m now an imaginal cell and she said I was so upset when they told me I had to do this I was like I just got hired I have to learn all these other things why do I have to do this too and and she said then I started to open to it and I realized that this is going to help me with my the people I serve with my co-workers with my family and I came around but it took me nine months and that’s kind of a really good process to say transformation doesn’t always look and feel good in the beginning because it’s a complete metamorphosis if you’re doing it the way that we would suggest transformation happen and so there’s kind of a need for Faith and seeing the higher vision and we always start with the end in mind with the top person is helping them have a vision for what do they want at the end of this transformation process and what are the biggest things that they want to cause and how what are the biggest core values that they have to cause what they want to cause and that aligns people in a way that is lifegiving so that’s that’s my second t-word was transformation and then do you want another one yes I do I want three words okay so the other one I thought of was um thought leadership because I think thought leaders are always a little bit like you know you want to say don’t shoot the messenger I had somebody say I think you’re just a littlee of your time maybe you’re going to be like um van go where you have to die before people realize that you did something I’m like oh God forbid I don’t want that to happen but um isn’t that funny and terrible right but um I think thought leadership is something that because so many people are afraid of change they don’t always welcome it um that’s why even though our mission is to create a world in which all people love their lives what we want to do is fulfill that mission in partnership with like-minded like-hearted thought leaders worldwide change agents because um like in our world a good customer and a good partner is somebody who is innovative in their mindset they’re not saying oh we we always did it this way we have to always do it this way they’re not risk averse to some degree they are convicted about the importance of people people in purpose come before profit the reality is if people put people in purpose first profit would follow easily and they don’t get that they try to keep putting purpose or profit ahead I remember one time I was talking to somebody and this guy he had 10 nursing homes and they were losing $8.8 million and I said well what if I could charge you $250,000 to do this transformation and I was able to save you two million on your turnover problem he’s like I don’t know we’re kind of used to the 8.8 million we don’t know you know like it was like complacent about the 8.8 million loss that is not a good client for us we need people that are itching to improve something that they see where the world is going and they’re not going to say oh we don’t have to pay attention to where the world’s going right you know if you don’t pay attention to where the world’s going you’re going to be left behind exactly and and we also look for people who are willing to um be such thought leaders that they say we’re going to put the time and the effort and the money into doing the change process because we can’t we can’t be successful without doing the change yeah I I’m the same way if you if you if you’re comfortable being in that spot and not growing I I’m G to wish you the best and move on exactly I I literally Liz I have two prayers I pray every day one of them is Release Me From the Need For Love approval and acceptance from others and it doesn’t mean I don’t love love approval and acceptance but I’m trusting this is my faith I’m trusting to get that from God because if I want it from you and I’m trying to help you I can’t be honest with you because it’s transactional if I’m trying to get something from you yeah so I might say things and you would hate me for it and the next day you’d love me for it but I can’t worry about that if I want to make a difference in your life because I know that my goal is to help you love your life even if you don’t like where the I’m dismantling the caterpillar and so um so that’s one prayer the other prayer is please send me the people who are partners and Prospects who are ready for and hungry for this and they just haven’t known about it because I don’t want to push any rocks up the hill I don’t I’m not a believer that I’m here to fix or convert anyone else yeah I’m here with a solution if the right people are put in my path because that is a God thing that’s providential and that’s graceful and that’s what I want is it to be graceful and I’m so glad Judy that you put people before a profit you know we really need to change that mindset because a Prof will fall once we build the relationships start building relationships before you ask for the paycheck you yes I would say people and purpose because you can have a bunch of people but they won’t necess like that uh Home Room teacher she didn’t have a great purpose if she’s saying we’re going to create peace I’m G to use a sledgehammer you know so um so it is people and purpose but I do believe profit comes so much better and so much more gracefully if we could remember that yeah I really want to thank you Judy for joining me today on tea time and sharing all these cool points and you know just opening it up and sharing the stories because you know sometimes storytelling actually gives us more than just uh you know targets and points and slideshows and stuff like just having an open conversation and discussion on bringing the awareness of change you know and change is uncomfortable and I and I really appreciate you saying that because I tell everybody that all the time I don’t do comfortable I don’t I you a lot of people will say Miss Li oh I wouldn’t do it Miss Liz needs to do it that way because that’s what’s going to make Miss Li grow it’s G to be painful I’m going to get some scars I’m GNA bleed a little but I’m going to get it done you know I always tell people Comfort isn’t your enemy I mean discomfort isn’t your enemy um complacency is your enemy and I I’m not a big Advocate that everything has to be painful either but sometimes because I think there’s a mindset no pain no gain and that’s not always true but if we can relax into the differentness it doesn’t have to be horrible um it’s that idea that it’s going to be terrible right and I do different I love the word different everyone asks me what my one word is for Miss Liz it’s different I am different I do different I serve different and I bring different so I want to thank you Judy for joining me on tea time and we will be back tonight for the final show at 7 pm with Brad Evans I had to think for a second uh and he’ll be talking about the jerk stir it’s a punching bag a coordinating punching bag and I feel like today’s tea this week’s tea has been about coordination leadership and following directions and P and breaking those patterns and just going in a different direction taking that bend in the road uh I think this is what we’re doing this week is we’re just doing a bunch of bends in the road and looking at things differently and again I want to thank you Judy I want to thank the supporters I want to thank everybody who Tunes in and listens to tea time share this tea time share them as as many places as you can uh the more we get the awareness out there the more we make a difference and we and we might just be sharing it with somebody who is actually looking for this information and doesn’t know that it is out there so again thank you Judy thank you for everyone I will see everybody at 7 p.m Eastern Standard Time for the last tea time of this week and then we’ll jump into next week and then on the 23rd don’t forget to pay attention all of June’s guest will be released so M just keeps going and going and going that’s just the way I roll I flow a strong cup of tea and I I want to really just enjoy a moment of peace and Tranquility in in all of the hassle and bustle and everything but I want to get a message of teaching educational awareness to each and every one of you out there so again thank you everyone for tuning in to Tea Time with Miss Liz thank you

Liz