Leading for Belonging

We're going to go ahead and get up and running. So welcome to Beyond Limitss. We do these sessions on the first Friday of every month. If you have not yet, put your location in the chat. Go ahead and pop that chat open and leave the chat open.

We're going to use it a lot today. There's lots of opportunities to participate, lots of opportunities to put your thoughts and or questions, so leave that chat open. If you have the ability to turn your camera on, like many of you have done already, please go ahead and do so. Uh, myself and our special guest today, absolutely love seeing smiling faces. And since this is not a webinar, it is a zoom meeting, we would love to see you.

Without further ado, though, we are going to go ahead and get up and running today. I teased it, I'm going to tease it no longer. I have a special guest today in the form of Dr. Sarah Sarkis, who's been here to help us. Before, if you have not had the pleasure of working with Sarah Sarkis, buckle in, you're going to have an enjoyable next hour of your life.

If you were to look up Sarah on the website, you'd see a loose description that describes her as part shrink, part performance consultant, and part Jedi of the unconscious. And I don't know that I've ever seen three sentences strung together that better describe my good friend and colleague Sarah Sarkis, who is going to be providing what I would call a little color commentary throughout our presentation today. So as we talk through some of the science of belonging, most of the things that I'm going to be sharing with you today, I learned from Dr. Sarkis. So just in case I misspeak, she's going to keep me honest and provide a little bit more of a, let's say, an academic backing to, uh, to our sessions.

Sarah, welcome. Anything you'd like to add before we get up and running? No, that was, that's, uh, I can't improve upon that, but I'm as always very glad to be playing in the same sandbox and invited to the party. Nothing makes me happier than the ability to announce that I get to co-host a session with you. For those of you that have not been to anything with The Pacific Institute before, real quickly, let's just learn a little bit about us.

We believe at a very high level that you, your team, your organization, you are perfectly designed for the results that you're getting right now. Everything that you've done so far has been done flawlessly to land you exactly where you are right now. And if where you are right now is perfect and you're very, very happy, good knowing you, this is not the right meeting for you. If you are looking for something more, and most of us are, and more can mean a lot of different things, more can mean more growth, more alignment, more energy, innovation, revenue, time with your kids, time with yourself, you name it more. Anything that's going to start on the inside, it's going to start with the way that you think we say we're going to tap into your causative power.

And at The Pacific Institute, that's exactly what we do. We help people unlock their ability to think differently, to act differently, to behave differently, and ultimately to be able to create the future that they want. Not by accident, but or not by default, but by design. We believe that beliefs drive behavior before you do anything. You think it first beliefs drive behavior.

Behavior drives results. How many people here, let's see some, uh, some answers in the chat. Just put the word yes. If your job says that you are in charge of some form of a result, you can wave at the camera or nod your head. But how many people here have a result tied to their name?

And would you look at that? The chat goes crazy. Everybody nods along because absolutely everyone is responsible for a result in some sense or another. No matter what we all do for a living, we have that one thing in common. And another thing that we have in common is in order for that result to happen, chances are we have a strategy.

It's February now, we're in strategy season. How many people had their offsite in January where they planned the whole year and they came up with the strategy that's going to make this the best year ever, right? We all did that. And how many times have you had that strategy meeting in the past? Only to find out maybe we did not in fact have the best year ever.

So we start to realize that there is something a little bit more important in strategy, and that's the behavior that the strategy calls for, right? Strategy is like telling you floss. How many people have been told the strategy to floss, but they never do the behavior of actually flossing. So there is a behavior that needs to take place in order for a strategy to work. Now, for many of us who for some reason don't floss, we know that sometimes there's a belief that has to go along with that.

And that's true in the workplace as well. So for absolutely anything, there's a belief that draws a behavior that follows a strategy. But if we're trying to drive results, the most important levers that we're going to pull on are not the strategies. It's really going to be the beliefs that drive the behaviors. And at The Pacific Institute, that intersection where those two live, we call that culture.

We say that's the collective self-talk of your team. Those are the thoughts, the beliefs, the expected norms of the individuals that are all around you. And if you have control over the beliefs, you have control over the behaviors that are going to follow that strategy. Inevitably you'll see those results go up before we get up and running. One activity that we love to do at the beginning of these sessions is we like to draw our awareness towards something good.

What I'm going to ask everyone here to do is if you have a keyboard, which I bet you do, type something good into the chat, anything at all that's happened in your life personally, professionally, you can tell me that the weather's good or that your dog made it through the night. Anything at all in the chat. Because we want to turn on our awareness to positives. We want to prime our mindset for learning, and we want to set a constructive tone for today. Thomas leads the way with the ever optimistic answer of we are one day closer to springtime.

While we're at it, we are one day closer to daylight savings being over with. I would say something good. Tell me something good. Ooh, Rebecca says, her son aced his math test this week and Bobby's back is feeling better. Those are something great, excellent stuff.

It's a sunny Super Bowl weekend. And as an Eagles fan, I say, what? Football season it's happening. The daffodils are blooming. Yeah, you look outside here in southern California, there's a lot of, uh, a lot of flowers blooming here in the winter.

Somebody says they are a grandparent. Congratulations. We do this because it only takes 60 to 90 seconds. And if you look around the screens like I am, you see a lot of people smiling. You hear a lot of good things going on.

I am not in a worse mood and I sincerely hope that nobody else is. This is an activity that we recommend that you bring to your team. It takes just a few seconds to talk about something good and it primes us. Sarah, there's science behind this, isn't there? Yeah, I was going to say, this is the power of framing, um, and anchoring.

And you only get one shot to anchor. And so, you know, you have this moment and these little practices, they go a long way. Um, in theme of today, which is bonding. And now that we are anchored into a little bit of positivity, let's talk a little bit about something else that we can anchor into, which is the idea of belonging. And that's our topic for today.

So go ahead and keep that chat open. Thanks for all the good answers. Let's see in the chat, what does it look like? Or what does it feel like? Rather when you really belong at work, put some answers in the chat.

What does it actually feel like when you truly, truly belong at work? Give everybody a minute or so here. Open trust, communication, connected, comradery, fulfilling, and keep up with these are coming in so fast. Mm-hmm. Trust, valued and heard.

That's really, those are technical terms that we can dig into. Ooh, I like that answer of comfort. Hmm. Scene. Simple answer.

I like it. All right, we're going to flip the coin. Put a number two in front of your answer for the second one though. What does it look like when that's not there? There's not belonging.

So we can tell the difference. Put a two before your answer. Put a two in. Whatever your answer is for when belonging is not there. Cheryl leads the way with guarded.

Put those dukes up. Kelly says, scared, stressed, lost. Ralph. I love the visual. A sinking ship.

Frustration. Good old fashioned, awful. Wait. People don't like the feeling of not belonging at work. Sad Is a really good answer.

Exhausting. Good answer, Bobby. So when we think about belonging, belonging is more than just a feeling. It's easy for us to identify how we feel when we belong. Maybe even easier for us to identify how we feel when we don't belong.

But belonging shapes performance, it shapes communication, it shapes culture. So what we want to do is a little bit of level setting for the day today. We want to set some baseline understanding behind what it really means to belong. And part of the reason that Sarah is here today is Sarah's the person who taught me about these four stages of psychological safety as learned by one psychologist, Amy Edmondson. So I'm going to go ahead and walk you through each one of these.

At the end, there's going to be an opportunity to scan a QR code where you're going to download A PDF, where you can see what these four stages are to follow along throughout our session. But if we start at the base of our pyramid here,

it starts with inclusion. Sarah, feel free to chime in at any point here. But feeling accepted, feeling valued, and like you belong as your authentic self. Free from fear or rejection or marginalization. We start at the base of inclusion.

Yep. As we begin to move up the ladder, we move towards the learner stage. That's where you're feeling safe to learn. By asking questions, you're okay admitting your mistakes, you're comfortable experimenting and viewing errors as growth opportunities. We get closer and closer.

Yeah. This is where you start to see like deeper engagement. Notice that first inclusion is just sort of like you got to the starting gates. Um, the other thing to notice is that a lot of times, like the companies and the teams that I've worked with, they sort of think when you get under the hood, they think once you get to learner, there's other words for that phase, but we'll, we'll stick with learner. And once you get there that you've sort of like done your gig, many people are surprised at what comes next.

So on the third tier, we move towards contributor contribution, which is feeling empowered to use your skills, actually taking initiative and contributing ideas and knowing that your input matters and has purpose continuing to climb up the ladder. And then at the very, very top we have the challenger, the top tier is feeling secure enough to speak up, offer constructive criticism, challenge the status quo or existing ideas, and do so without fear of retaliation. Yeah. So these last two, the third and the fourth phase, um, are really an achievement and often dictated by the strength of leadership. So they're not a guarantee and um, they don't happen by accident.

So you have to sort of decide to create this type of environment. Um, and it's a misnomer because when we think about psychological safety, um, a lot of what people think about is the notion that it's conflict free or it's confrontation free or it's challenge free. But there's actually like this golden rung that we strive for, which is you want to see, um, high intellectual friction so they're challenging and contributing to ideas, to strategy, et cetera. And then you want to see that there's very low social friction. One of my favorite things that you talk about, folks that have been here before have probably heard me quote you on that before talking about that high intellectual friction, low social friction.

Yeah. As Sarah was alluding To. Yeah. You want to have a, a deep sense that socially you're fine. The technical definition of psychological safety is that you can contribute challenge, et cetera without the fear of humiliation or retaliation.

And those are the two important words, right? Those are, um, those are when people feel either humiliated or there's retaliation, they, we tend to fall right in line. We'll stop talking, we'll stop speaking up will begin to self-censor. Uh, it's, it's, you know, really difficult for humans to feel that way. So All in line.

So you mentioned that, uh, by accident. So, uh, another way of saying that then is in order to get to those top two stages, you really need to do so intentionally. Oh yeah, yeah, totally. And yeah, I mean, we don't want to get too lost in the, the weeds, but there's like very natural dynamics inside of a thriving team of like competition and resources and allocation of resources including like rank and access to power and there's all these things. And so it's not just like a static force that you're going through.

You know, the environment itself has like a cadence and a, um, it has an influence on us. So it's uh, it's great when it, first of all and you also can't, you don't get there and then it's like a static place. You achieved it, now you stay. It's something that sort of, you know, goes like this. And you also, you have to start at the beginning.

So every team, even if you have like a very well established team and then a member of the team leaves and somebody else comes in, you're sort of back in terms of um, the group dynamic. You're back at inclusion now you have a solid base. So typically people can build quickly on that. Um, but you know, every new dynamic inside of a team

or a family, this is why when you have, you have one kid, you have another kid, the whole dynamic changes for exactly this reason. See, and as a middle child, that means I can blame my little sister, right? For why I needed to re feel included all over again. Even better. As you can blame both your older brother and your younger sister, This is outstanding.

These are recorded, so this is perfect. You'll send it out to them. Just have this little blurb isolated and send it to them. Perfect. This is actually the whole reason we ran this session.

Everybody can take off. I got one We can leave now. Yeah. Now it was really enjoying, uh, Sarah and I had conversations about this yesterday and was really enjoying some of the things that I was learning about how, you know, as it says on the slides, you can't effectively contribute or challenge the stage three or four until you've feel included. And Sarah was making the point is you can, but not for long, you can kind of moonlight.

But in order to be there and stay there, and in the words of The Pacific Institute stay above the line, the more frequently you've gotta have that foundation. Otherwise it's just dabbling with contributions. Yeah. Yeah. 'cause you can force a lot of things.

Um, but that's not what we're talking about, right? That's living sort of below that line. So worse than that, you can't, leaders can to great consequence. I like. So for leaders to foster these stages, we talk about acknowledging their own fallibility mistakes, modeling curiosity.

Sarah and I often talk a lot at length about how the importance of modeling is there for leaders creating environments where vulnerability and voice are rewarded and not punished. So where speaking up is something that you're rewarded for the act of speaking up, not punished for the content of what you say in the chat. Let's hear some thoughts as you're looking through these. You can see them on the screen. Where have you seen these four stages in place at work, in your own workplace or outside your organization?

Where have you seen folks moving between these different levels? And while we think about that, while, while people respond to that, the other thing I want people to think about, and this is kind of how I talk about it with the people that I work with, certainly the teams is like, you can actually sort of diagnose and understand where your team is at by looking for these behaviors, right? So like the first thing, um, when somebody challenges you that like a simple way to reinforce it is you want to say, I'm really glad you are bringing this up to me. Right? You just want to simply reinforce that that exists.

Um, it's a, it's a, you know, it, these, I see them as like trust tokens and they're really necessary to build this elusive thing called trust, which is really what investing in the type of environment that allows for all four stages of psychological safety. What what that really does is create a high trust environment. Not to be confused with a high comfort environment. I love the expression trust tokens and how those are so easy to earn with something just as simple as, thank you for bringing that to me. Thank you for saying so And twice as easy to lose.

And here's the thing we lose and rarely is it talked about in the healthy environments. It is, Hey, I didn't trust when you said XI want you to know that, okay, in in, in healthy environments, not comfortable environments, but in healthy environments you can say that. But most of the time when somebody starts losing trust in you, they're the silent objector. They just say nothing and they just begin to tally your deficits differently. So another way of saying that is there's an awful lot of untapped potential within those individuals that's sort of just lying dormant because they're too far down on the pyramid.

Yeah. And they haven't inside of this, like when we really get into the nitty gritty of like, okay, so how do leaders handle this kind of friction, right? We get into this concept, this concept called rupture and repair. And most people spend their whole portions of their whole adult life, not just in professional relationships but in private ones as well, that they try to avoid rupture versus realizing to avoid conflict sidestep not blah blah, instead of realizing that it's inevitable. And so we turn our attention to how can we optimize repair, right?

Okay, I dropped the ball, I said the wrong thing,

I sent the wrong thing, I didn't perform whatever it is, right? And I have to now repair that. So, um, you know, people have really strong Feels a bit like a cycle. Yeah, it is a cycle. And also what you really find to go even a slide back is that behind a lot of the miscommunication up at these higher levels is beliefs, unconscious beliefs about what it means.

And they're unexamined. And because they're unexamined, they're taken as fact. I love that unexamined beliefs taken as fact as promised. There's a QR code if you'd like to have a copy of these. I'm going to leave this up for just a moment so folks can scan that And they're not taken as facts 'cause we're idiots.

They're taken as facts. 'cause that's the cheapest neurochemical thing the brain can do. It's just trying constantly to like cut weight on how much energy it's spending. We do two crazy expensive things. We learn and we move and curiosity falls in that learning.

So the first thing it will do with beliefs is just assume they're true because it's cheap to believe they're true. It's much more expensive to critically think through our belief systems. I will put the QR code back up again at the end if anybody needs it. We can also send a copy. What I'm going to do here is we're going to play a short video for everybody to watch.

And as you are watching this short video, I want you to think about those four levels of belonging. Specifically. I really want you to think about what this video that we're going to watch here reveals about leadership, about trust and about team dynamics. And there'll be a chance to put some thoughts in the chat afterwards. In 2006, Steve Nash won the first of back-to-back MVP titles in the NBA Steve Nash, NBA most Valuable player.

And Steve Nash was one of my all-time favorite players. And that first year that he won the MVP, he only led the league in two statistical categories. Number one was assists, Unbelievable assist. This guy is the MVP of, I mean this is incredible. He got everybody else involved, certainly the mark of a great leader.

But the other statistic that he led the NBA in were touches, I'm talking about high fives, fist bumps and pat's on the butt. How could I possibly know that Steve Nash led the NBA in high fives, fist bumps and pat's on the butt. There was a research team from uc, Berkeley, that was doing an official study and they were trying to measure to see if there was a direct correlation between showing signs of enthusiasm and actually winning basketball games. So they had an entire research team watch every minute of every NBA game and tally every time a player gave a high five a fist bump or a pat on the black, the Phoenix sons who Steve Nash played for were so enamored with this study that they hired a full-time intern to keep track of just Steve Nash. In the first game that the intern recorded for Steve Nash, he delivered 239 high fives, fist bumps and pats on the butt.

He is a furnace of human connection. He was an unbelievable teammate and, and team player. If you ask any one of those guys, you know, you say, who was your favorite teammate? Pretty much everybody says he. He was just an amazing, a guy in the locker room.

Funny. Uh, and I thought he always sort of kept those teams together. There's actually a physiological transfer of energy when you touch another human being. You can actually raise their level or raise their game through physical touch. The MVP of the NBA Give you a chance to put some thoughts in the chat.

I did go ahead and put the link to that YouTube video if anybody wanted to see it. But what stood out? What stood out when you were watching that video there? All I kept thinking is thank God that we have data nerds. The original team that was like, we're going to watch every game and painstakingly count.

'cause this is before that was clearly done before. Like now you just put it in the bots.

Yeah, AI can do this for us now. But back in 2006 You had to want it. Yeah, It was, it was, There had to be a dose of OCD behind this drive that was clinical. Now I'm a lifelong basketball fan, so this one's going to stand out a lot to me. Um, you look over my shoulder, you can see a signed John Wooden basketball.

My father was a basketball coach and there was a lot of rules that I was arra raised around in sports. Like you always high five your teammates after free throws, whether it goes in or whether it doesn't. And it wasn't until having conversations with Sarah many, many years later that I realized that there was actually science behind some of this stuff. Oh, My father was a genius. That's what you're thinking is like, oh, my father was a genius.

He knew exactly what he was creating And what really stood out about this is 239 touches. This isn't a basketball game. He played roughly 40 minutes per game and he had the ball in his hands for most of those games, but still managed to touch his teammates. An average of once every 10 seconds during a game. Like that's intentional.

You have to absolutely go out of your way to do that. It has to be something that you're consciously thinking about and doing and then it becomes a habit that you're addicted to. But those high fives, those fist bumps, those pats on the back, those are just simple demonstrations and it was not celebration. Sure, yes, somebody hits a shot, you're going to high five them, but I promise he wasn't celebrating 239 times a game. Each and every one of those was a direct signal to his teammates that said, you belong, you're on this team, you matter.

Which is why the bench would get involved with him as well. It's not part of this video, it's part of another one. The teammates led the league because this stuff is contagious. So I'm curious, think about a time when someone made you feel like you really belonged when you were on a work team. How did, who is the, what did they, Steve Nash, what did they do to you?

Let's see. Some answers go in the chat of when someone made you feel like you really belonged on a team. The addition of music is really clutch, A warm welcome when they saw me. I love that. Hear all the echoes to being seen and heard.

Absolutely. Somebody else earlier called it valued and heard, but seen and heard is actually the technical word. Um, yeah, this is like critical to humans, right? So developmentally, um, we have to be seen and heard in order to develop a sense of self. It is actually through somebody else, caregivers, et cetera.

The community, um, seeing and hearing us and validating us that we gain a sense of ourself. It doesn't start solitary on the inside. I'm looking at some of the stuff going in the chat here and some of them are so complicated and some of them are so simple. You know, Bobby writes the word smiles. Yeah.

They go a long way. They go an awfully long way. Resting something face doesn't always go over so well in the workplace. I like the answer of, uh, introducing, not letting people feel left out. Mm.

Some really good ones in here. We're going to save this chat. I'll send it out afterwards. Yeah. I like, I'm al I'm always trying to bring these concepts from theory into like the tiniest behaviors we can do.

And I also like when the thing we can do is free. It's like none of this costs us anything. Yeah. Scroll through the chat and I'm going to go ahead and add up everything I see here that costs money. And so far I'm at a running Zero.

Handshake, smiles, welcome. Acknowledgement. Not one of these things is economically expensive, but they're pretty darn valuable. I like it. So every interaction, particularly as a leader, is going to send some sort of a message.

It's a constant level of communication and your actions are going to say the following, hopefully I see you, you matter. We are in this together. So what do you hope people feel or understand from how you lead when you're leading others? What do you hope to take away is from those other individuals?

What are you hoping that they feel when you're leading them? You are valued. Doggone it. That's good. I get you, you get me heard and respected.

Appreciated, appreciated, appreciated. I mean, I'm not glitching. That's just how often y'all are writing. Appreciated. Appreciated for the, for the win.

Yeah. Gosh. I guess we like that feeling. And notice we don't say right. We don't have like a i I want to feel smart.

We have, you know, pretty, pretty, um, That's such a Good point. Foundational needs. That's such a good point. Nobody put that they need to feel correct. That's right.

They feel Powerful that they need to feel in charge. Yeah. Or that they have all the answers even though those are all the things that become our self-talk. Right, right. Interesting.

And yeah, I mean, and 'cause by the way, you can be, you can feel heard and still disagree with people. So you don't even have to have consensus. That's why you can live up and contribute and challenge, right? So, um, that's a good thing for us to think about, right? So belonging matters, but why does it matter?

It's a basic human need. Sarah's been alluding to that and outright saying that. It's, it's absolutely something that's fundamental to us existing as human beings. And when it is met, some pretty good things happen. Some pretty bad things stop happening right when it's met, that threat response decreases all that bad cocktail that lives inside of us that brings out the worst in us.

It goes away. The good cocktail comes in. Our collaboration starts to increase. Our motivation start to rise, our trust starts to rise. And if we're looking at creating cultures, we don't want to be in an environment where we feel that we're under threat and under duress.

We want to be an environment where we collaborate, where we're motivated, where we feel trusted. So these are the components that all start with the basics of having somebody feel included and belonging. So leaders with their actions that they take every single minute of every single day can either trigger or they can calm the brain with every interaction. They can choose to raise the cortisol levels or they can choose to lower them when it comes to interacting with those individuals. And we know what it looks like, we're good at it.

So let's see what it looks like. How can you tell air quotes? How can you tell when someone on your team feels included? If you answer included, put a one in front of your answer. And if you feel left out, put a two in front of your answer.

How can you tell if someone feels one included or two left out? How can you tell l we good interpretation machines? Pamela says they show up. That's pretty darn good. Disengagement when it's not contribution when they do.

Yeah, body language can go both ways, but definitely it sort stands out when they feel left out. We all know what that negative body language looks like. It's a three-year-old girl throwing a tantrum with those arms crossed. Lori says higher levels of contribution for one disengagement or silent if they feel left out, yeah, Going on strike in the middle of your workday. I'll show you.

I won't speak again for the rest of the day. So we can all tell we know what it looks like, Which is encouraging, right? It's encouraging because we know exactly what to look for and we know exactly what it looks like when it's not happening. We're really, really good at that. It's like humidity.

We're pretty good at interpreting. It's tough to describe, but it's really easy to feel we're good at telling when we belong and don't belong. Just like we can tell when it's humid outside. So consistency, doing this regularly, regularly, having people move up those ladders of belonging, that's what's going to build trust. It's not your occasional grand gestures.

And I know this is frustrating for those of you

that have season tickets to something or another and think that you can build trust by just inviting somebody to a game every now and then or to happy hour every now and then, right? It's built by repeated intentional acts, inclusive of others of all. And they don't have to be grand. They sure as heck don't have to be expensive. Here's some simple examples, thank yous, check-ins, follow ups, particularly follow ups that are things that you said you were going to do.

I'll check back next week and then lo and behold, you actually do check back next week. These are just some of the versions of what we can do as our version of 239 touches. So I'm curious, what are some of yours? What are some of the simple gestures that you use or maybe will start using to build trust or connections with others? I'm not about to get anybody in trouble with hr, so we don't get to pat anybody on the butt and it's not possible for high fives and fist bumps in a Zoom environment.

So what are our versions of 239 fist bumps? Pats in the back? Ooh, I like those answers. Jeff says humor. Oh, look at that, Bobby.

Using technology. So thumbs ups and hearts. Those are the equivalent of the fist bumps in the high fives on our slack channels. Kelly gives me my answer, making me feel included as she put up the little confetti in the background while speaking. Ah, leaving anonymous notes for people.

I love this Dave, with a strong active listening answer. Listening, by the way, can I just give a nod to listening for a second? Um, most people are below average at it just 'cause like we don't kind of work on it past like kindergarten, so, or we work on it in ways that's not actually effective. Um, so just practicing how to really attend to somebody that is butane for trust that to that feeling of being seen and heard that which is a biologic drive. We need it in order to, uh, basically to survive.

If you have a teenager in your life in some way or another, you know what it is like to have somebody not listening to you. And we know what it looks like and we know what it feels like when the person is distracted. And simply just showing a person that you are listening. And in many instances that's just as simple as putting the phone down and looking at the person. It is night and day difference when you have a conversation with a human being who's directly engaged with you versus somebody who, again, if you've got teenagers, is doing this.

Yeah, I'm walking into walls. I will say from the other side as well is that having a teenager requires us, the adults to begin to listen differently. Often up to this point we've been up advice givers to our kids. We sort of can fix everything we can solve, we can. And so I think having an adolescent who, um, they're, they're, they're a hundred percent certain with a hundred percent conviction that you lack vision and you know nothing, right?

And so there's no more solving anything for them because you're suspect. So I think that it's also made me a better listener because I've had to resist a bunch of my natural impulses that when he was 12 he's like, okay, you know, um, and at 17 he's like, no, just no. You know? So I think it's bidirectional, um, the change process that happens in listening in adolescence. If only there was the opportunity to sit down and learn active listening skills from a professional like Dr.

Sarah Sarkis. I'm advertising for her, by the way. So, well I'm obsessed with listening. Uh, but just as a concept, I got really obsessed with listening. I basically lost like two years of my life to trying to understand this thing that I was supposedly supposed to be better than average at.

And, um, there's a lot to it. I would say two things. One is that listening starts in the nervous system, not in your ears. It has very little to do with the ears. It starts in our nervous system.

And the second thing is a fun way to improve your listening. I see listening in question asking as partners in crime. And two thi one thing to think about is when you're, if you like podcasts, listen

as though you are co interviewing with them. Not like you're waiting for the answer as like sort of a passive listener. And that doing that task for a year when I listened to my favorite podcasts really helped me listen differently. Every now and then when you interact with Sarah, you get these things that are known as genius attacks. California No joke, you mean, you mean, um, an a DD side bubble that you tolerate.

I, there are people here that might have neck injuries with how vivaciously they're nodding along with you. So very, very good stuff. I love that. I wrote it in the chat for anybody that might have spaced out for a second. But listen to that podcast like you're a co-host if you want to improve those listening skills instead of listening to it like it's your favorite song.

Brilliant. Sarah mentioned this before, uh, she said go back a slide. I should have said, we're going forward a slide to talk about belief, but belief is at the basis of all of this. It's what I talk about at the beginning of all of our sessions. It's what we talk about with all of those quotes that we put up where people don't believe what you show them or tell them.

They usually believe what their friends tell them and they always believe what they tell themselves. It is at the absolute root. And if you believe that people want to contribute, then you're going to behave differently. Remember beliefs first, then behavior, then results. Therefore you're going to lead differently.

And if you believe that connection matters, maybe like Steve Nash did, then your actions are going to reflect it. You're going to show people that they belong. And if you believe that you belong individually yourself, you show up in a totally different way and that's valuable for yourself as a leader. But remember, if you show others that they belong and they believe it themselves, then your team and the people that are around you are going to show up with strength and determination and curiosity. So it all starts at that base level of what's going on between the left ear and the right ear, AKA, our thoughts and beliefs.

And it helps when they're positive. So what's a positive belief that could help you lead with more trust and more intention? What might be a positive belief? You could throw in the chat there. It would help you lead with more trust and more intention.

Steve comes in strong. I have the best team, Cheryl, with one of the most common tenets that she says always assume positive intent. Those are good ones to remind ourself because again, for that same neuro efficiency exchange that I mentioned earlier, it's not 'cause you know, we, we do these thought patterns because it's neuro efficiently, um, cheapest, right? And um, that this kind of training your brain to think this way, it stops that negativity bias or it doesn't stop it, it, um, weights it in our favor. Anything that slows down the negativity bias, I'm all for it.

You want to put some speed bumps in front that helps too. Some good answers going in the chat here. Give with no expectations of return. Bobby says, people want to do their best. We all win together some ted lasso stuff, Michelle, I love it.

And with those positive beliefs, think about what the next action would be if that's what the belief was every single day. If we always had that belief all the time in our action, in our, in our minds, what would be the subsequent actions? So as we're nearing towards the end of our time, we throw out the reminder that you as leaders have the opportunity to shape this, right? And leader doesn't mean by title, right? You don't necessarily have to be the boss or the manager or the supervisor to be the quote leader, but you're going to be able to shape the environment.

But it's not going to come from strategy meetings. A lot of decisions come from strategy meetings, but culture doesn't. Okay? Culture comes from the shop floor and it's built in the moments who you recognize as a leader. So are we going to recognize only results or are we going to recognize those that make others feel that there's a high level of contribution who you invite, who actually gets a seat at the table?

Who gets to come? And whether or not what they're invited to is actually appropriate. Because believe it or not, not everybody wants to go to the football game. What you reinforce, right? Actions speak 1000 times louder than words.

So what are you actually reinforcing? Sarah has exclamation points I can tell. Yeah, yeah, I mean we're basically all day long we're just creating reinforcement patterns, right? So it's just the task of under understanding like, oh,

what am I reinforcing here? Um, can change our life even by one degree. It's like, you know, you can change everything just by understanding that concept that we're always being reinforced into something both internally and externally. And we are doing that. That's how we co-create the environments we're in.

I do like a co-created environment. What are some examples? What's, uh, what's a moment recently? Or you can go into the archives if you need to, when you help shape the tone of a culture or your team. What are some of the Steve Nash moments that you had?

What are your 239 in a game, By the way? And in one day we have eight hours. They only measured a game. There's a lot of hearts and thumbs up. Yeah.

Setting the team values together, especially when you set real values, not just ones that you write on the wall, but ones that you live by. We have something to learn. Co-opting group norms. Yeah, that's culture, right? Lori?

The behavioral norms, what's acceptable and not acceptable around here? Not what you tell people they're allowed to do, but what you let them get away with. Oh, culture. I love the share successes and how they overcame obstacles. Yes.

And also share iterative successful failures. Like yeah. Build failing into our model, um, of, of the process. And uh, I think it, there's this famous book called, um, the Last Lecture by Randy Puch. And he was a professor, he's since deceased, but he was a professor I think at Carnegie Mellon and he only gave out one year at one award annually.

And um, it was on the most spectacular failure. And what it was was somebody who really swung for the fences, but sort of pieces didn't fall into place, but the swing was so worth it. Um, and I always remember that being like a very impactful way again to reinforce doing like sort of dangerous things safely, right? And innovation and building things. That's all Dan doing dangerous things safely and failure is baked.

I love that. Uh, book recommendation. Uh, there's a book called Run Like a Girl by a woman named Lauren f Fleshman, who is a, uh, former Olympian long distance runner. And when she was growing up, ironically in the town right next door to mine, her dinner routine with her family as her father would sit down at the table and some families will say, tell me about your day. They started their dinner conversation with What did you fail at today and what did you learn?

The idea being if you didn't fail at something today, you didn't push yourself enough, therefore you didn't learn anything. They move on to the Other process that 17 years ago. Yeah. Where was, where was that, where Were you when I needed you to set my dining room table talk. That's so good.

Also free. I'll put the book, uh, I'll put the name of the book in the chat here before the end of it. But it's run Like A Girl by Lauren Fleshman. If you happen to have a daughter, read it. And if you don't still read it, it's good.

Yeah. Finally, let's talk about what we're going to do. So we always talk about actions. Sarah and I always talk about one of the, one of our favorite studies that University of Waterloo study that said that human beings are stupid. That's just me paraphrasing.

What it really says is that human beings forget two thirds of new information if we don't put it to use in our daily life within 24 hours. Meaning if you found something that you heard today that you like, that you think is going to help you, that you could put use in your culture, that big brilliant brain of yours is going to flush it by tomorrow. By the way, three times. That's by design. That's by design.

The reason there's a very intricate relationship with our unconscious, which is 95% of what happens to us, and consciousness, which is 5%. There's some debate, but we basically process every second 20 to 40 million bits of information and seven to nine make it to consciousness. So an efficient brain dumps all of that. It dumps all the data from the day out of consciousness. Um, and that's a, that's a neuro efficiency exchange.

Same process. So we can do this intentionally. Sarah mentioned this before, that it's not by accident, it's done by intent. So you can be intentional. So what are the things that you can commit to or where do you think you can be consistent?

Not pipe dream, but today, right away with your team, maybe even before the end of the day, what's an action that you want to practice more consistently? What's your high five, your fist bump, your pat on the back

or butt beating with empathy, active listening. I'm curious what some of those physical actions are going to be though. A thank you for what you do. Pamela's going big, more outings and retreats, uh, for remote workers though, how do we do this when we're remote? Good stuff, more conversations, writing appreciation notes.

But they're so expensive. When I told you, remember when I told you I lost that whole stretch of time to my obsession with listening? Somebody wrote in there that they were going to sort of talk less. And one other thing is, and during that stretch of time, I limited myself to, I would only speak 25% of sessions. I was like a straight up therapist at that time.

So 25% and 80% of that 25 had to be in the form of questions. So while you step back on speaking yourself, increase your number of questions and um, that's like a, you know, it's a way that we tell people we're listening and we're tracking and we're sequencing and we care. By the way, if you can remember things about people that's a free, Hey, how's your dog? How was your knee? How was your just little things like that will go a really long way.

I love it. This is a perfect lead into the next slide, which is, it doesn't have to be loud. Asking me how the dogs are doing will make me feel so unbelievably included. It takes five seconds, we can move right on. And I'm dying to tell you.

Yeah, I'm dying to tell you. Do you want to see a picture? I'll show you 30. Totally. So what's something we're taking away in our final couple of minutes here, kind of a repeat and we can still keep coming from last time, but what's an action?

How are people going to know that they belong? How are you going to show people that they belong today? If you happen to be in person, you can give 'em a fist bump, but if not, Steve, with another good answer. More human interaction. Go figure.

Especially those of us that are fully remote, which is a lot of us, you know, taking the time to have a zoom conversation that's only five minutes is the equivalent of bumping into somebody in the office when you used to work in the office and go get coffee. But when you don't have those interactions, there's that level of belonging that doesn't exist and suddenly you're only as connected as the last time you were in the same room. For some of us that's only once a quarter as we are off, keep seeing the answers coming in. Please keep, That's a great example, Rebecca, of repair. Remember, we don't avoid rupture, we attend to repair and um, yeah, there's so much to say on that, but I'm also aware of the time.

So wow. Besides Michelle put one of my favorite answers in there. She said, make somebody smile. Yeah, pretty darn easy because humans are very reflexive. They usually smile right back.

That's right. Before we run out of time entirely, I want to take one extra second to say thank you to Dr. Sarah Sarkis for joining us today for sharing the insights, for making us all just a little bit smarter and putting some really good science behind some of the things that we talk about here. If anybody would like to get in contact with Dr. Sarkis, please reach out, let me know.

We do a lot of work together, but again, thank you for joining us. It was outstanding. For those of you that are still on and are sticking around, we have some open sessions that are taking place throughout the course of this year. So for anybody that would like to explore concepts like this a little bit more in depth, we will be able to host a session of Invent Your Future. That starts in two weeks on February 17th.

Our sessions are going to be running two hours virtually. So we'll run sessions on the 17th, the 19th, 24th, and 26th doing this full development program in four total sessions over two weeks. You can scan that QR code and there's information there as well. We'll be emailing out the, um, the link

to this later on as well as the recording to this session. But you can get, get all of our recordings on our website. If you go to the events page and scroll to the bottom, you can get to our archives. So this presentation should be available today or Monday. All of the others are in the archives.

You know, in our careers we're always thinking about what's next, right? The next promotion, the next big project. But have you ever just stopped and asked yourself who's really calling the shots on that journey? It's a huge question when you really think about it. Are you actually designing your future or are you just letting it happen?

You know, letting things like old habits or what other people expect make the big calls for you. Well, today we're going to talk about an approach that puts you right back in the driver's seat. Okay? So how do you make that switch from just letting things happen to intentionally designing your path? Well, it's probably not what you think.

It's not about learning some new software or a fancy management trick. Nope. It starts with something way more fundamental. Your mindset. I love this analogy.

Think of an iceberg. The stuff people see, our skills, our actions, that's just a tiny tip sticking out of the water, the real power, the massive part that's driving everything is hidden underneath. That's our beliefs, our thought patterns. So if you want to make a real change, you can't just polish the tip of the iceberg, you've gotta go deeper. And that right there is the whole idea behind this program.

Invent your future Professional 2.0. It's really built for any professional who's just ready to lead themselves with more purpose. The goal is simple, but it's also a total game changer to help you find more clarity, more confidence, and a real sense of intentionality in everything you do. And this is what makes it so different. Think about most professional training.

It's all about external stuff, right? The what and the how. This program flips that script. It is a genuine personal transformation that starts from the inside out. This quote just nails it all meaningful and lasting.

Change starts on the inside and works its way out. See real growth, the kind that actually sticks isn't just about tacking on a new skill. It's about changing your core thinking so that all the new actions and better results, well, they just become a natural part of who you are. Now, this isn't just a bunch of feel good ideas, it's a really practical step-by-step journey. Let's actually take a look at the path it lays out over four sessions.

And you should know this whole thing is built on solid ground. It's not just theory. The entire experience is grounded in the real science of human behavior. It uses proven principles to help you understand why you do the things you do, and more importantly, how to change them for the better. So here's the path.

It's a really powerful and logical progression. First, you build awareness. You finally get to see the unconscious patterns that have been running the show. Next, you get the tools to reframe the ones that are holding you back. Then with that new perspective, you can strengthen your decision making, which builds incredible confidence.

And finally, you anchor all that new change by connecting it to your purpose. It just makes it stick. So what do you actually get out of this? We're talking tangible results. You'll learn how to line up what you do with what you truly believe.

You'll build up your resilience so you can handle challenges without getting knocked off course. And the big one, you'll create real sustainable forward momentum in your career. All right, let's zoom in on that first step for a second because honestly it's the foundation for everything else. Session one is all about building that awareness. Yeah, this first session is where you really start making that shift.

We mentioned right at the beginning from living by default to creating by design. It's like turning on the lights in a room you've been stumbling around in for years and finally seeing what's actually there. You're going to explore some really fascinating stuff here, like how your brain automatically filters information to prove what you already believe. You'll see how these mental filters literally create your reality and you'll start to notice those little internal cues that decide whether you jump on an opportunity or shy away. This is where the real change starts to happen, and that's just the beginning.

That foundational work in session one kicks off the whole four part journey. So if this whole idea of moving from default to design is hitting home for you, well your chance to get started is coming up really soon. So you might want to grab your calendar. The next session of Invent Your Future Professional 2.0 officially kicks off on February 17th. This is your chance to jump in with a group of other professionals who are ready to take intentional control of their careers and their growth.

And that really brings us full circle back to the big question. This isn't just about learning a few new skills. It's about fundamentally changing how you think. It's about personal growth that directly fuels your professional success. So I guess the only question left to ask is, are you ready to grow from the inside out?

Thank you again to Dr. Sarkis. Thank you everybody for being here, for sharing your time and attention with us on a Friday. And as always, we will be back exactly one month from now on the first Friday of March, which is March the sixth for another Beyond Limits session. Have a wonderful weekend.