Employee Loyalty Leaders

How do you tackle the response people have to change and practicing the behaviors that people need to be successful?

Throughout our lives, in particular when we were children, we adopted patterns of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors in order to secure our physical and emotional survival in the environment we were raised. These patterns are comfortable and familiar to us – they kept us safe in the past – so fear kicks in the face of something unfamiliar and we tend to get stuck in these old patterns and hooked by habitual thoughts and emotions, even when they’re no longer serving us well or helping us move where we truly want to go.

To truly thrive, we have to learn how to unhook ourselves from our self-defeating thoughts and emotions and take actions that align with our core values and long-term goals. The better we get at unhooking, the better able we are to effectively navigate stressful situations, adapt to change, and bring the best of ourselves forward in work and life. Emotional agility is the set of psychological skills we need cultivate in order to unhook – things like courage, self-compassion, mindfulness, growth mindset, and walking your why.

These are all are daily practices, that when exercised enough, become these incredible gifts that allow you to get unstuck, embrace change, and make small, deliberate, daily choices that add up to make a huge difference in your life.

What did your eight-year-old self-love doing and how does it relate to what you do now?

I was a very curious little girl who loved to learn. I enjoyed school and became involved in many activities, from horseback riding to gymnastics to classical guitar. I loved them all. For me, learning created a sense of connection to a world outside of myself and cultivated a sense of wonder, discovery, evolution, possibility, and hope.

I eventually settled on music as my hobby of choice and began to play competitively. Over time, music became less about discovery and creative self-expression and more about competing, striving to get to the top, and winning, which sucked the joy out of it and left me feeling disconnected from myself and burned out. As I say this, it sounds a lot like the world of work today and many people’s journeys up the career ladder. It became my journey for a while too, until I started to say “Enough!” I continuously felt like I was abandoning myself and what mattered to me most in order to achieve society’s definition of what success and having it all looks like.

I stepped out of corporate in 2019 and went after work where I could dedicate my time to learning how to become more of who I want to be and helping other people learn how to become more of who they want to be. Building my own practice as a therapist and coach where I help people who want to truly thrive in the way live, love, parent, and lead makes that possible for me. And it fills me with that sense of curiosity, wonder, connection, purpose, possibility, and hope that I remember feeling as a little girl.

If you could go back 10 years and share some advice with your younger self, what would it be? (This could be a specific mistake that you learned from)

You don’t need to be extraordinary to be enough.

We live in a culture where so many of us suffer from the shame-based fear of being ordinary – the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose. I suffered from this too.

When I was younger, I missed out on joy where it’s most often found – in the ordinary moments – because I was too busy chasing down extraordinary, which for me showed up as a relentless striving at work to fix everything and be everything to everyone so that I could get recognized and validated. This left me exhausted, anxious, burnt out, and took me further away from my true purpose.

When COVID hit and I gave birth to my son, Avery, I was forced to get really honest about who I want to be and what I value, and take action to align my life with that and let go of the things that no were no longer serving me.

How do you see your job as a HR leader changing over the next five years?

HR has historically been about transactions, policies, and procedures. HR that brings transformational business value is about changing culture, which is not about open works spaces and pizza parties, but about how we as people show up in relationship with one another. It’s the hardest piece of culture to tackle, but the most important at driving business outcomes and improving the quality of people’s lives.

When companies start to deliberately create cultures that align with what people need to truly thrive – psychological safety, connection, development, higher purpose and meaning – companies will thrive.

Do you have a podcast (or book) you have listened to in the last year you would suggest to other people leaders? Why?

Podcast – I love Brene’ Brown’s “Dare to Lead” podcast.  She captures all of these messy human dynamics and breaks it down in a simple way for people to understand – and talks about how that shows up in the work experience.