Jimbo Paris Radio Show → on Expanding Human Potential

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In this interview with host Jimbo Paris, he asks Judy Ryan about her work in culture transformation and formation. The bottom line is that her work is provided to organizations so they can help their people expand into their human potential.

Interview Transcript

[Music] I am Jimbo Paris and you are listening to the Jimbo Paris [Music] Radio

show all right how’s it going everyone this is Jimbo here and today we’ve got Judy Ryan let’s see what she has to say nice to meet you and to be doing this with you yeah it’s been a privilege can you please give me kind of a brief summary of who you are what you’re about and what your message is yes thank you um well first of all I’m a CEO of my own company we’re in our 20th year it’s called life work systems and what I’m really about is creating a world where all people love their lives and I know that sounds very idealistic I see you rolling your eyes a little but um there really are a lot of things that people can do to create certain kinds of conditions and conversations where people become psychologically safe they become emotionally intelligent they’re able to really get along with each other and they’re able to feel like they have a ownership of their personal power and that they know how to guide it in a way that isn’t frightening to them or anyone else I find that really interesting thing and what kind of gave you this highlevel perspective because it seems like you have a lot of technical well again forgive me but maybe Psy olish knowledge I’m not too well versed in this field but you also seem like just a very wise person as well how did you cultivate that in yourself well first of all thank you for that um I happened to pawn a psychology model back in the mid 80s and it was the psychology of Alfred Adler and he was the person that coined the phrase inferiority complex and what he basically was saying is that all struggles in the world come from a state of unworthiness and feelings of inferiority and what we don’t realize is that most of the way ways that we raise children in homes and in schools actually creates more feelings of inferiority complex than most people realize we have all these adult things we do to children and and to one another as adults that we don’t realize actually are coming from our own fearful beliefs so once I understood that that whenever we’re behaving in a way that causes inferiority conf comp Lex we’re actually uh creating the conditions in which people are going to struggle and some of that struggle is inside of them like stress or anxiety or depression um but some of that struggle is between people like all the isms all the I’m right you’re wrong I want to win and I don’t care if you lose all of that is coming from inferiority complex and once I understood that I began to this was a long time ago decades ago I began to use this method methodology with my family so by the time my kids were five they all knew how to run a family meeting because we wanted them we consciously wanted to cultivate in them how to feel empowered how to feel lovable which is very different than being loved lovable is when someone listens to you and they don’t try to fix you or convert you or change you or make you wrong but they they you feel received and witnessed by them uh we all want to feel connected and we all want to feel that we have contribution to make and so when we consciously decided to do that we learned all these tools and Concepts in which to use with our own family that would minimize wherever people are feeling um inferiority and so once I started to do that not only did that provide a way for me to be a parent that I was proud of I had five kids um it healed some things in my own childhood and I would have to say my childhood was kind of normal but even normal is pretty traumatic and then you add on on top of it other kind of abuse it’s really difficult so I felt like oh my gosh this would relieve so much suffering in the world so at one point I had the vision in my mind of I want to take this out into the world and and where I first began with it was to go into schools in the early days and work with parents teachers administrators students and the neighborhood all simultaneously because I was this parent doing this and I didn’t have other parents around me that knew what I was doing I didn’t have my kids school teachers know what I was doing and I know that this isn’t just about schools because most of our work now is in corporate settings or nonprofit or government but it’s really about how do you create a whole community of people that understand a new way of operating so that everyone’s on the same page everyone knows how to like put things down like punishment put things down like rewarding and bribing and you know even saying I’m disappointed in you all of those types of things that we don’t realize are really harming people so I don’t know that I’m so wise as much as maybe I was wise enough to recognize what was healing for me and to you know build my conviction about it and then I wanted to bring it out to so many people that I created it all on a digital platform so that it could scale out to lots and lots of people speaking of what you do for other people you seem like a person that also tends to do a lot different sacrifices as well I think there was you know a certain man that you you turned down in order to focus more on your goals in life I don’t know if I would hold it as sacrifice I think when we’re aligned with our design as a human being when we’re aligned with what we feel the most excited about it doesn’t feel like we’re living a life of sacrifice now it’s not to say my life is always easy because what I bring to the world is disruptive honestly when we do live live according to our purpose and our values and we’re aligned with our Visions we really don’t work a day in our lives so that’s why for 30 years really I have still have passion about what I’m doing I even had one of my kids when they were still living at home she said I wish I had your work ethic and I said you do you stay up all night and we watch video games she’s like Mom that’s just fun and I said it it’s fun when you’re living the life that you want to live is this the life that you actually want to live though are you doing this for a much deeper reason is this more of a a calling not really an eny I think it’s I think it’s a calling and an enjoyment because what I see is I see that the world is in a lot of pain and I’ve also seen whole communities that I’ve been able to impact and it takes time and over time they’re they’re happy in their work they’re happy with each other they have some things that we’ve all kind of heard about like anybody that’s in business they’re studying you know they’re hearing about psychological safety and Trauma informed ways of operating you know but most people don’t know how to actually Implement something so that it is safe and it is um emotionally intelligent and what would you define as systemic change well our system is based on um holding people in a persp a perspective of you are great and if you’re not looking and acting great it’s because you want to be great and you haven’t been given the right conditions and conversations and order to become into that greatness that you are that’s interesting so this is kind of how my brain is picking up what you’re saying instead of actually praising people we need to teach people how to praise themselves I would say maybe I mean really the what I just described for you are the four extrinsic motivators so if I’m praising you I’m trying to puppet strring you right yeah so what are the internal motivations it might be internal praise but what it’s really really it it that could fall into one of those categories because what’s more important is instead of using those extrinsic motivators what if we help people to see and and make sure that they’re choosing what’s meaningful to them and that what they’re doing that they can connect to what’s meaningful about it most of us become competent in reading and writing some people do some people don’t but not all of us are even taught how to be good communicators encouragement is very different from praise I can encourage you even if you fail at something I can say I really saw you put good effort into this and I can see you put your heart and soul into this and but I can’t say I’m proud of you if you failed but I can say I noticed that you really gave it your all or that this really matters to and that you um you had a lot of you know courage or thank you for doing this I think a lot of times in the internet we talk about things like extrinsic motivation motivation from rewards external things I don’t think everyone here knows and I personally don’t know the exact definition but what’s the difference between something intrinsic motivating versus extrinsic so here’s the difference when somebody’s extrinsically motivating us it’s as though they’re holding the puppet strings intrinsic motivation is helping a person to discover within themselves that was him saying in his own heart and in outwardly I intend that that’s meaningful to me so Choice that’s an intrinsic motivator we don’t often give that to people that’s why in our projects we have people lead groups themselves just like when my kids were F by the time they were five they could run a family meeting because we wanted them to know how to both lead and follow I think I think now that you say it most people run off extrinsic motivation they do they do yeah and from what I’m getting from that story you told me extrinsic motivation is not as sustainable as something intrinsic right right right we even say it this way when a person is in reaction to someone else they’re either doing one of two things they’re either um resentfully complying because they feel as if they have no personal power or personal control another one is to go into what’s kind of a pseudo power and when we do that we go into rebelling and resisting and then we um we also don’t take responsibility for our tasks our relationships than our outcomes we um we just function as um like a like in almost like a mean-spirited no I won’t you can’t make me it’s almost a Revenge kind of dynamic all right great so this is her website uh we expand human potential to maximize life and work performance and this human potential is the uh intrinsic kind of values you try and it’s even Beyond intrin intrinsic motivation is all about our motivation but but who we are we all have our own unique callings in the world and people don’t often get the encouragement to figure out those callings or to appreciate and recognize who they are and so human potential is so much bigger than any one component part it’s our motivation it’s our engagement with life it’s our relationships it’s our relationships with ourselves it’s how well we take care of our bodies you know it’s just almost anything you could imagine how Innovative we are so expanding human potential means that we have the conditions and conversations that allow us to expand into the fullness of who we are and most people have never been given those conditions and conversations we used to have our company name used to be called expanding human potential and now we call it life work systems because we want people to know that you need a system that you can rely on and the kind of system that we’ve been relying on in in homes and schools and workplaces is not necessarily a healthy system so we we come in and explain what is a healthy system and then they we help them to start living it and then they own it so they have a system that they can now lean on and they can say Judy you know we need some more online training modules we just hired five new people but they have their own internal subject matter experts on the culture because they’ve already paid their dues and they understand it and they don’t have to rely on our company to keep it going they just had needed us to get it started after okay so after someone clicks this button what is the next step on this website what what’s the next place people should go because I kind of want to create a road map to how people should navigate your website so do I click that first and then do I go to what what else do I go to well here’s the thing we’re working on right now Jimbo we have like if you go to go under about us and go to articles all right yeah we have about 200 250 articles in there and most of them are written by myself because I I wrote two uh columns but then we have some industry articles that’s the one I was telling you about a fool with a tool is still a fool so what we’re doing right now is we’re rebuilding our website so that when a person goes to a subject on uh redirecting negative behavior for example right now what we don’t have is we don’t have the TV interview on redirecting we don’t have we have all of it we don’t have it connected together so we’re going to our new website is going to have if if you like this article on redirect you might like these four you might like this television interview you might like this podcast you might like this um testimonial about redirect you might like this course and and what that does for us is it creates Google being able to show people that we are thought leaders in certain aspects and so we’re we’re in the process of building all of our content out into a a central place so that we can make all of those connections so that if somebody goes on our website and they read one article and they say I really like that article and off to the site it says if you like this one you might like this one or you might like this video and they stay on our website for an hour because there’s so much that they are getting from what they’re doing that’s really what our next step is on this site because we have about 500 videos on YouTube we’ve got all these articles we have podcasts we have interviews excellent so there’s been a great interview can you kind of uh do you have any other final words you’d like to say to the audience gosh you know I would just like to say to you Jimbo and maybe it’s for the audience too I appreciate your calm open um demeanor it’s very calming it’s very peaceful and I appreciate it because I’m kind of a hotwired person I always say I’m a Northeast uh Coast kind of personality stuck in a Midwest City so I like to talk fast and move fast and it’s just been really nice to be with you not rushing me and not stopping me and I just I love that about you so so hopefully the audience will realize it’s nice to have somebody around you to be

peaceful thanks again and also remember to buy Alison Costco’s good book she’s a a great author great influencer and she has a lot of great points to bring into your life too thanks again Judy Ryan thank you for having me Jimbo I really appreciate it all right I’m Jim Paris is the Jimbo Paris [Music] show thank you for listening to the Jimbo Paris [Music]

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