 So, we are very excited today to talk to Michael Ventura. He's an entrepreneur, creative director, and CEO of Subroza, an award-winning strategy and design practice. Worked with clients like Google, Nike, General Electric, as well as the United Nations and the Obama administration. So, wide breadth of companies and organizations you've worked with. And your book, Applied Empathy, really spoke to me and Johnny. This is our month around connection, and we know that connection starts with being vulnerable. And empathy is a big part of that vulnerability, and I know for a lot of our listeners and participants in the boot camp, it is something that we can struggle with as well. And I found it really fascinating how you broke down empathy in the book and talked about ways that you can instill it in your team members, bring it out of yourself, and how it relates to leading a company, as well as connecting with those team members themselves. So, we're going to dig deeply into empathy, how it applies to our personal lives outside of the business world. But I'd love to hear a little bit more about Subroza and how you got started, because recognizing that empathy is your thing has a very interesting story tied to it. Yeah, for sure. And thanks for having me. The company started really on the heels of the dot-com bubble bursting in the early 2000s, and I had just come out of university, was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, and was one of those punk kids that knew how to make flash websites, essentially. And if you remember the era of flash websites. And so, I had a buddy who was a technologist and a finance guy, and I was a bit more of a designer and a strategist, and so the two of us paired up and launched this thing that would eventually grow to become Subroza. And yes, we made good digital experiences for a lot of brands, but I think what we discovered early on was that under the hood of that, what we were actually doing was helping them behave more like people. We were actually helping them understand how to have a two-way conversation, because this is that era when we were just switching on comments on our websites, right? And we literally sat in rooms with clients who were like, what do we say when people respond to us? And they just didn't know how to show up like a human. And so, a lot of our work actually became consulting work that helped them think about their voice, their mission, their values, their consumers, what their consumers actually want to talk to them about, and then pulling that into a dialogue or an experience, be that online or offline, that would let people engage in it. You know, I find it fascinating that we've come so far with that to where a lot of those things are now just a second nature to all of us of comments and interacting with these companies, with these brands, with our friends. But it wasn't so long ago when that was all brand new. We were all figuring out for better or for worse. Yeah, absolutely. And as new businesses come online, they are born with it natively. But when you look at some of these older, stodgier multinationals that may have had legacy systems or policies that they had to sort of stop in order to start something new. It was a long process. It was really turning a battleship around for many of them to kind of get pointed in the right direction. Yeah, especially when you look at business back then. It wasn't a conversation. It was, I have something to sell you, make a decision. Now, business is all about conversation. In fact, science has shown that marketing is the start of that conversation. It takes seven to 10 touch points before you even turn someone into a buyer. I can imagine back in those days in the boardroom, a lot of executives being confused by this, wait, we have to showcase our values and actually have a conversation and we have to engage our potential customers. Right, yeah. And the anxiety around getting it wrong was so high. But getting it wrong is human, right? And so we had to realize and had to help clients realize that you're not going to do this perfectly. And I love how you said that, because we were just talking about the idea of fear and what a lot of people who have a social anxiety when they go out and what they think about, right? They think about the mistakes that they're going to make or what to try to avoid, where people who are over that sort of thing are focused on making a good first impression or sticking out and doing things right. And so if you go into a playing not to lose, your message is not going to be as strong as somebody who's playing to win. Right, exactly. And there was someone who said to me once that we were like, do you know who's thinking about what you said yesterday? You. You know, and I was like, yeah, I guess you're right. There really isn't anyone else. And when we started doing this empathy work, I mean, it really kind of was born out of a desire to stand for something as an organization. But it was really it was a way to to put a stake in the ground, too. And to say that this is this is our North Star. This is what we what we care about the most. But it was very organic how it came to bear. I mean, we really started it by doing an assessment of our own cases and trying to make ourselves our own best client, right? And we looked back over our own work and said, OK, where did we where did we really nail it? And what were we doing when we were nailing it? And what we came to find was it wasn't sitting in a room shutting the door and saying, wouldn't it be cool if it was opening the door, getting the hell out of the building and going, talking to people and meeting people and having conversations and sponging up all of that good insight and then coming in the room and coming up with ideas. And that is ultimately where the empathy approach really was born. And I think in a day and age where bottom line drives most decisions to take an empathy path to a solution is pretty foreign. Yeah. And it's I often tell our clients it will be slower before it's faster. You will have to be more patient. And and you may not get the answers you want to hear. And so that doesn't make a ton of friends early on in the process, but it actually is the truth. And if you accept that early on, you'll get where you want to go faster. And so the clients who have adopted this and seen it be successful for their organization are the ones who realized this is going to shine a light on all the works in our business. And it's going to really point out what we need to do to change as an organization. And if we acknowledge that and not just as an organization, I should probably even say as an individual inside an organization because so much of I mean, all organizations are as a collection of individuals, right? And if those individuals are aware of their faults and aware of their strengths and working well together, then the organization thrives. So once people sort of get a handle on that, things start to shift in the right direction. And you had a great example in the book of General Electric, which is one of these battleship companies. They're not agile. They're agglomerate multinational with lots of stuff going on inside the company and this one process that's, you know, pretty routine for most women that has been the same for decades now. An important test. You guys really went in and said, how can empathy change this experience? So let's unpack that a little bit. Yeah, for sure. So then CMO Beth Comstock came to us and she said, look, we are third in medical imaging category wide. You know, Phillips and Siemens sell more products than we do. We're GE. We want to be the first in everything. So help us figure out a way to get from third to first. And we can't ask you to look at all of medical imaging because it's going to take too much time and there's too much complexity. So we're going to ask you to zero in on mammography. And we make these machines that perform mammograms, but we realize that there's probably work we could do to make that better and more, more interesting and more competitive, but we don't necessarily know what that is. And so we want you to use your process, go in and tell us what we don't know. And so we designed a physical environment down in Soho in New York and sort of a big shopping area and and opened a retail level space that said that it said it was called for women by women. And we were inviting in women doctors, patients, cancer survivors, everyone who would talk to us about the process of getting a mammography and what that feels like before, during and after. And so folks would come in and talk to us about their memories or about someone they know who didn't make it through breast cancer or, you know, the the anxiety they have about making the appointment, all of these little kind of touch points. And so we started to really think about how could we take all of these insights and start to test them and prototype them live in the space? So we built this model exam room that we were taking an insight. So someone said, I wish we can control the lighting, the visuals and the scent of the room. So we built a little app and had a little, you know, atomizer on it and this and that. And so we could put someone in a room and they could actually do that. And we started to see how people felt more comfortable, the more in control they were of their experience. So as we do the research, one of the big complaints, the number one reason most women don't get screened on an annual basis, eighty seven ish percent of the women we surveyed said that the memory of pain is such that when ten months come around, you have to make that appointment. Ten months might become twelve, might become fourteen. Breast cancer is super treatable if you catch it early. But most people will put that off a little bit because that memory of pain is so strong. Now, G also told us in order to change the business, we can't change the core product. We can't go in and say the way you can change your business is by making this machine less painful, right? Because, A, that would that's not our job, right? We're not product engineers in that way. And B, it would take seven years before that machine is in a hospital at scale working with patients. So the number one complaint we can't really address because pain is pain and that's the way it's going to be. But the second complaint that we heard, eighty four percent of the women we talked to said that the room's freezing cold. And we said, well, that seems solvable, perhaps. And so we started to poke at that a little bit more. And we heard, you know, I hate the gown, the gowns, you know, that immodest thing with the opening in the back. And I just one woman said, I remember very clearly, she said, it's the gown that gives sick people. And she's like, and so psychologically, she already felt like something was wrong with her throughout the process. And, you know, and all of the things in between the way the doctor talks with you about making the appointment sounds like making an appointment to find out if you have breast cancer. It doesn't sound like making an appointment for your annual physical, right, which is perceived as like good proactive health. But this is this feels different. So we said, all right, we're going to prototype all of this in new circumstances. So we designed the app and put it in a room and we went to G. And we said, can we change the temperature? And they said, well, 64 degrees is the optimal temperature for the lifespan of the machine. And we said, get that. But can we change the temperature? Because even though that's what's right for the machine, the patients are really cold. That's pretty cold. Yeah. And and especially for women. Yeah. In the little dopey paper gown, right? Going through an uncomfortable procedure. So G said, yeah, you could probably push it by about 10 degrees. It's not going to affect the test. It just might, you know, some parts might need to be replaced more regularly or things like that. So we said, OK, great, let's let's do that and see what happens. So we were working with Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York, and we did a screening of 200 women who had been screened 60 days prior under normal conditions. We brought them back 60 days later to get screened with better temperature, a different appointment making process, a different gown, the app that let you control all the things in the room. And the complaint of pain dropped from 87% to around 45%. Massive, massive shift just by changing everything other than the machine itself. And so we found that to be fascinating, but it wasn't the most fascinating stat. The most fascinating stat was that it also increased the effectiveness of the test by 12%. So we could find 12% more cancer when people were comfortable. And so this was like a huge moment for GE to realize our business is not just in the product making business. We came back to them and said, we have a business plan that says you should not just sell the machine, but you should sell a service suite to hospitals where you design with all of these best practices the best imaging clinics in the country or in the world, where we have the right lexicon, where the right temperature is there, where the human factors are considered from start to finish. And we created a more empathic experience. And so GE has done that. And actually, despite the fact that in the past year GE's business has taken a bit of a tumble, their health care business has actually done decently well because it's really sort of stood for patient empathy. And it's been a real keystone in the strategy they've built for growth. I think one of the most difficult things in that is getting people comfortable enough to be able to discuss this experience candidly and openly where anyone who has reached adult age has had their vulnerability used against them several times. And so, and every time that we say something such as, well, that's the last time I open up to anybody, it's another wall that we have to then deconstruct to reach back to be able to become vulnerable again. And what struck me in that is that you guys didn't really spare any expense in creating this environment that would allow people to feel comfortable to open up, knowing how difficult that's going to be. Yeah, but we also, you know, we created this great environment and people would sit down and they would have these conversations, but we also realized that there's probably stuff not getting said in these because even though we've done everything we can to create safe space, people are still gonna feel a little uncomfortable. So one of the things we had them do also was to take home the women who were going through this trial with us, take home video cameras and actually record before bed a little video diary with that we told them there's only gonna be one person who watches this. They know who that person is as part of our team. This is literally between you and them. It'll be completely anonymized, but if there's anything you haven't said in the room that you wanna say there, do it. And we got some of the most profound things. And like people would talk about how I am so afraid for my children because I'm gonna be going into this and I'm worried I have a history of breast cancer and if all I'm thinking about is my daughter right now. And like those little insights, those little human stories are what not only helped us think differently about the problem, but also what helped motivate us as a team. Like we wanted to solve it for this woman because we saw her vulnerability to your point and in that vulnerability we saw opportunity. And what's so fascinating about this is the bedrock principle is listening. And not just listening in a focus group, right? We were laughing about this pretty show. Everywhere gets in a room, two-way glass, okay, great. But people aren't gonna be that vulnerable in that room and people aren't gonna be that vulnerable when a group appears, but you have that one person listening and they feel like, okay, now I can unload, now I can be myself, now I can tell you what truly matters. And that led to massive change not only in the business, but in the actual test itself, to be able to find more cancer to make the diagnostic more effective, that's a huge win. Yeah, exactly. And it didn't take a lot to do that, right? It just took dropping your bias and taking a different perspective and listening and then using that insight to put something new on the table for people. Now, most people listening would not view empathy as something in your business toolkit, right? It doesn't jump to mind. It's like, oh, that's my strength. How did you realize that that was your strength? That was where you wanted to lean into and then ultimately take Sobrosa down that path? I think that for me personally, empathy was always part of my DNA. I had a high degree of sort of a sense for what other people were going through my whole life. You know, ever since I can remember, I could always put myself into someone else's shoes and see what they were going through. I didn't always agree with it. And I think that's the conflation sometimes that happens with empathy. You don't have to agree to have empathy, right? You can understand where someone else is coming from and still make your own choices about things. What's difficult about it is when we're younger, we're so internally focused. And so then we're seeing it in the social media age, which is promoting more of me, me, me, me. As you get older, the more experience you have, it's able to let itself of how other people are feeling because you might have been there in the past. But I think in today's world, we need to find out a way for people to enjoy and then accelerate being able to use empathy and discover empathy for their own gains and the gains of the community and their friends. Interestingly, on the heels of this book coming out, the one of the biggest communities that has sort of come out of the woodwork, obviously we're talking a lot with the business community and that's been the lion's share of feedback. But we've been getting a ton of outreach actually from educators who are saying this is not something we're teaching at a K through 12 level in the world right now. And it's something that we need to have more of because these kids are becoming more and more isolated. They're living on their iPads, they're living on their devices, they're not learning the social cues and the little subtleties that you pick up when you spend time with people. And we're all generally around the same age, I assume. And so we grew up in that last era of analog before digital became like an edgy, like I was given the first digital education in my school, right? Like I was, I don't remember what grade I was in but at a certain point like a computer showed up, right? But it wasn't there at kindergarten or first grade. It showed up at some point. And so as a result, we have this obligation I think to sort of be torch bearers for a generation that is born digital to remember the humanity in the interactions we have with people. And along with that, this isolation that comes from technology is we're barely listening to ourselves, right? We're trying to put outwardly on social media the best version of ourselves, not necessarily be the most vulnerable in touch with our own feelings. And that was a big lesson from the book in order to cultivate empathy, you actually have to know yourself on a deeper level. It's not just about jumping into someone else's shoes. It's, well, first I gotta understand my own stuff and the more and deeper I can understand my own stuff, then I can start to relate on deeper levels to other people. Yeah, absolutely. That foundation is so critical because if we immediately leap to trying to understand everyone else but don't know where we're leaping from, it makes it quite difficult. And I had a personal journey getting to this thought myself, which was when, but pre-empathy being a thing for subroza when I had first started the business, the stress of that was significant. And I would walk in the door at 24 years old, 25 years old and see a group of 50 people who I was responsible for. I had to make sure that if I did not close that deal, if I did not manage the business the right way, if I did not, did not, did not, they can't pay their rent. They can't pick up groceries tonight. You know, I'm responsible for these people. And that, or at least that's what I felt at the time. I've since gotten a little more distance from that, but at the time it really was crippling. And one day I was changing the water cooler in the office. And the next thing I remember, I just like went white and I woke up and I was on the floor and the thing was, you know, glug, glug, glug water all over me. And I had herniated a couple of discs in my back and literally couldn't walk. And when I went to the hospital, their recommendation was, you know, we're gonna put rods in your back. We're gonna fuse your discs. It's gonna be this whole procedure. You'll have arthritic pain the rest of your life, but like you'll be able to walk. Nothing anyone wants to hear. No bueno. Yeah. And so I kind of left in sort of a huff. I would say it's probably a mild way of putting it, but I got... And you were a young man at the time. Yeah, I was 25. And I got a walker and I left and it was miserable. And a friend of mine said you should try acupuncture. I don't think it's gonna fix everything, but before you go get under the knife, see what happens. And so I went and it was the first time I'd ever had an alternative medicine treatment of any kind. And if I went in and my pain was at 100, I left at 99. I didn't leave at like 50, right? Like it didn't change me overnight, but I saw a crack in the door and I went back again. And then I went back again. And then after like the fourth or fifth time, the acupuncturist said to me, so what do you do to manage your stress? And my only answers were drink and do drugs. It's the American way. And like I didn't have a good clean answer to that. And he said, well, your back issue isn't really a back issue. It's a stress issue in my opinion. And that I think if you can learn how to manage your stress better and comport yourself in a different way, a lot of that pressure you're putting on your shoulders and metaphorically on your back will start to lessen. And so fast forward, you know, nine months of that and Tai Chi and finding some meditation that worked for me and this and that. And I had no back pain and I had no surgery. And I was able to manage my physical body by managing my interior body a bit more. And that led you down the empathy pathway. Yeah, exactly. It showed me that if we don't have that internal foundation and understanding for what's actually going on inside us, there's no way we're gonna be of service to someone else. And so that empathy for me, which sometimes like psychologists I've talked to have said like, you can't have empathy for yourself. You can only have empathy for other people. And like, yes, I guess I'm sure technically that's true, but you can have understanding for facets of yourself, right? And this was a facet of me that I didn't understand that I was blind to until a physical injury made me pay attention to it. Yeah, and the other options were surgery and potentially being not able to walk for the rest of your life. Well, I guess this would be the point that maybe we should put a flag here so we can preface what we're gonna be going into with the archetypes and things like that, which is fascinating. But there's a few questions rolling in there that I wanna set the stage with us before we go into it. But they know a lot of our listeners can be very analytical. And we were talking before the show that in today's world, everything's so based on rational and reason and the numbers and the statistics. And now we're going to move into your affair here with Eastern religion and that whole side of this and how that had lend a hand in the emotional side of the human spirit and being able to dig into this empathy idea. Well, even stronger. And just one thing that I was mentioning in that is we spend so much time in the Western world of numbers and statistics and all of that. We tend to forget that at the end of the day that we're still human beings and there's an emotional component that is never going to go away. No matter how much we might try to get rid of it, it's going to be there. And if we're not willing to connect with it, we're gonna find ourselves in a world of trouble. And this is why I really enjoyed these aspects of this book. And you even mentioned how sometimes you'll kind of dance around the idea without letting on that it's an Easter philosophy or something like that in order to slide in the results to be able to do the work. So I guess we'll go ahead and talk about that. It is a, when I come into an organization and they say, tell us about your business. And one of the first things we say is, well, we work in this design thinking approach called applied empathy, the eyebrows raise almost immediately. And people are like, what are these hippies talking about? But what's interesting is some of the most switched on organizations that have accepted this and actually really not even accepted, but embraced it have been some of the less expected suspects, right? So one of them is West Point. And so we've been working with the Military Academy for over a year now. And the superintendent of that school who's a three star general is a career military guy, you know, as crisp and as sharp of a thinker and a strategic person as I've ever met. And when I first met him and we started talking about what we do, and you know, I've got long hair and a beard and I'm talking about empathy on the campus. And you know, I'm a sight to behold as I walk around there sometimes for sure. My ideas check multiple times. But the soup said to me, empathy is the number one skill any leader who leaves here with needs to have in their tool set. Absolutely. Yeah. And that accolade or that acknowledgement from someone like him was something that I have been able to use in conversations with other organizations. You know, I can sit across the table from, you know, a Fortune 10 company CEO and say, look, if you don't think empathy is going to be important to your business, answer this question to me. How well do you understand your consumers? And, you know, they'll usually say they have some sense of their consumer and they'll talk about what it is and say, okay, what about your other consumers? And I say, well, what are their consumers? And I said, well, you just described your end consumer, right, but there's probably 15 different end consumers if we're being honest, right? Because they all kind of break down into sub seconds. But then you also have your employees who consume content and information from you every day and consume the culture that you perpetuate inside this organization. You've got shareholders, you've got the media, you've got potential new employees that you wanna recruit away from someone else to come work here. All of those are your consumers. And are you really thinking and do you really make the effort to understand them and all of their disparate needs and then back that into strategy that you're building for the business? And then usually you can hear the crickets in the room because it goes quiet for a moment. And then people are like, okay, yeah, this is actually something that is not as woo-woo as I thought, there's gonna be some real heavy insight work that's gonna come along with this. And I will say, like I said earlier, it takes a little while. It's usually slower before you pick up pace with this because it does take more work to go gather that information and bring it into the process. But the companies that have been doing it with us for over a few months start to see everything shift, not just the bottom line, which does happen, but also the employee retention changes and employee satisfaction is on the rise. And even you can look at a drop in complaints to HR because people are handling their conversations with people better, right? So there's all these knock-on effects. Well, I would think anyone who is in that part of the company who's looking at the numbers, who's looking at the evidence, who wants data, they should go along with this idea of applied empathy because you're about to give them all the information that they're going to need to make better decisions all around. Yeah, in our view, if we do this really well, we create our own obsolescence, right? And we've empowered our clients to be able to be better leaders, be better partners to their cohort and ultimately to be more aware of the place their organization sits in the broader world around them. And a lot of our listeners are not in the boardroom, they're not managing large multinational companies, but we always talk about this concept leading from the seat you're in. Yes. We are coworkers, we are team members and lacking empathy can lead to a lot of disagreement and ultimately team falling apart and team frustration. So looking at it, not just, okay, how can I be empathic to my potential customers but how can I be a better team member? How could I foster the culture of the brand so that the media takes notice? These are all levels that everyone needs to be working on if you're the leader of the company or if you're just a coworker and then from the interpersonal level, when it comes to building friendships, we hear time and time again, it's difficult to build friendships as adults, it's hard to find friends. A lot of times it's because we've amped up our analytical mind, we've focused on the analytical because it gets us money, it gets us success in our career and we've turned down some of these empathic tendencies of like, oh, how is this other person feeling? Let me put myself in their shoes. Those are the things that actually build relationships that connect us. Absolutely, and the trust that comes along with that is something that is so formative in a relationship, even a late in life relationship. I have a personal anecdote, but I made a new friend a few months ago who he actually told me is like, I didn't think at 45 years old I'd be making new friends because it's just like, that's one of the things that people tell you. And he said, and I think the reason why we became friends is because you made me feel comfortable trusting you early on because you didn't like kind of jam friendship into it. Neither one of us was like, on Craigslist looking for new friends, right? We just like, we happen to have some good conversations and one thing led to another and we started to share sort of deep stuff fast, right? And that's what happens when you do that. And we've developed these archetypes that we use within our process, right? There are seven different archetypes for how one might engender a sense of empathy with someone else. And my own being aware of where my strengths and weaknesses lie on those seven allowed me to kind of connect with this person in a different way and have a different type of conversation than the, you know, the bullshitty kind of, you know, small talk that we often go through life with. Right, what I loved about the archetypes is it breaks it down in a way that you can understand, okay, these are the areas of my life where I have this skill set or I feel most at ease. And then it also breaks down some areas that you can work on so that you can identify where you relate and then you can identify, okay, maybe these are some areas that I can improve on. We have this beautiful deck of cards sitting in front of us. We'll talk about it a little bit later, but let's walk through these archetypes and how you discover these archetypes. Yeah, so we've got these seven and we really think about it that we are all seven just in unequally distributed ways, right? So I've got some strengths, I've got some weaknesses and everything in between. So the seven are, and there's an archetype and a behavior that attaches to it. So the first one is the convener, right? The convener's behavior is to know how to hold space, to create an environment where people feel comfortable. And when conveners do that and people come into that space, they're more apt to share. They're more apt to tell you how they feel. They're more apt to kind of drop into a state of comfort and that's how conveners gain empathy, right? That's how they understand the folks in the room or the folks in the retail store or the folks in the, whatever the setting is that they've created. The seeker is daring, they're confident, they're unafraid to take risks or to pivot their entrepreneurial. They know that about themselves. They know their limit. They know when they're pushing up against that limit. They know what it feels like to like take the one big step beyond that and to learn and grow. And they know what it feels like when other people are pushing up against that and they can use that insight to help them move along. The alchemist is an experimenter. They're a tweaker of the formula. They're a prototyper. It's actually one of my least natural ways of being and I've spent a lot of time with that archetype in particular trying to improve my deftness with that. The confidant is a listener. They know how to really listen to hear you. They're not listening, planning what they want to say which is what most people do but they're actually like listening to genuinely hear what you have to say. The inquirer is a deep question asker. They know how to ask the real question under the superficial one to get to the heart of the matter. The cultivator is a big picture person. They see the big goal. I think of them sometimes like a farmer. A farmer doesn't plan a seed and expect to sow it tomorrow. They know it's gonna take tending and it's gonna take water and it's gonna take fertilizing and eventually this thing will come and knowing that big picture and being inspired by that motivates them but it also helps them bring that into the present so that other people can connect with that and understand it as well. And then the last one's the sage and the sage is about being present. They don't come into the room thinking about what they did five minutes ago nor are they sitting in the room thinking about what they're gonna do next. They just have the capacity to really hold space and be in a space with a person. And in so doing, that presence creates a sense of connection that allows them to understand folks better. And the book has a great exercise. If you just heard those archetypes, you're wondering how do I know which one I am? A great exercise to work through. So pick up a copy of the book and dig in a little bit because I do feel like these, much to that educator's point, we've been saying this for years, these are not skills learned in school. These are not areas that are covered in school, but emotional intelligence is where your career lies. Being able to understand and communicate more effectively with humans leads to management, leads to career success. Yeah, absolutely. And it is, I believe, a muscle that takes practice, right? That's like any muscle. If you don't work it, it's gonna atrophy. Empathy can be treated like a muscle that the more you work with it, the more you keep it in your frontal mind for a period of time, the more natural and embodied it starts to become, and then you don't have to presently think about it, you're just doing it. Well, also having more tools to deal with problems makes problems more fun. Yeah. You get to use all this different stuff and to be able to have an issue and to look at it from the sage perspective, right? Or to a convener. And like for what you had done for GE was put together this space that will bring those memories, that will bring those feelings to those people so they could be able to talk about that issue. And then not only that, but also be in that space where this is going on, but it's also a safe space to talk about what is going on around us. How incredible that, when I'm reading that, I was like, wow, that's so cool. Yeah, no, you're spot on. And one of the things about the design of that experience, right? So like one of the things that was important to us was being a cultivator, creating the space. Another one was a inquirer, like, you know, know how to ask the deep questions, right? And all seven were represented in some way, shape, or form. Absolutely. So when you're building your team, are you looking to fill all seven of these? Yeah, I mean, we want to make sure we don't have any gaps, right? But we also want to try to be as well-rounded as possible. So like, you know, while I said I'm not naturally an alchemist, I do spend time trying to put myself into that state so that I can be a useful partner in that way because if we build an experience that's only for conveners, well, there are six other types of people who we're not gonna address directly, right? So the more well-rounded the experience can be, the more well-rounded the solution or the culture inside an organization is, the more included everyone feels. Well, I was just gonna say, in learning about this, I couldn't help but think about everyone at AOC and the role that they play, right? I had you as a convener first and foremost, big time. Okay. That was the one that stuck out to me the most. And also, I just love these things you were mentioning that how their skills, their muscles that need to be used and developed. But also, it's hard living in the world of technological development that we're in today. How something like the Sage, be present. How difficult is that for the average person anymore? And if you're not actively looking for opportunities to do that, then it's not going to happen. Right, yeah, no, for sure. And that's why treating it like a piece of work for yourself that you're committing to and you're saying, yeah, I'm going to spend the next whatever it is, couple of weeks, really having a sense of awareness for this is gonna help you start to train your brain to put yourself into that mindset more often. I had a teacher, I'll talk about this in the book a little bit, but I had a teacher who was helping teach me presence and particularly the Sage-like behavior. And he said, Michael, are you left-handed or right-handed? I'm right-handed. We're just tight-handed. And so I'm right-handed and he said, okay, well, I want you to open every door you go through for the next week with your left hand. I said, that's the easiest thing ever, I'm gonna nail that. Oh yeah. And walking out of his office, I opened the door with my right hand and I was like, oh, shit, this is gonna be harder than I thought. Well, soon as I read that, I was like, I'm gonna give this a try and I fell miserably. And it took me putting post-it notes on the doors of my apartment to remind me to do it with my left hand. But how much effort it took and to enable that, it was difficult. Yeah, it's an untraining before it's a training. Yeah. Yeah, and then I loved the best part. He goes, okay, now go back to your seat. Yeah, once I got comfortable, I was like, oh, I nailed it, Kill, this is gonna be great. What do I do now? He goes, now switch back. Well, it gives a great perspective and an idea of what it's going to take to create change and create new habits. It's not impossible, but it's going to take work. And it's going to take bringing these things to a conscious level. If it's not at a conscious level, you're gonna do it the way you've always done it and the story. 100% agree. And what I've seen from teams when a team, and going to your point earlier, like you don't need to be in the C-suite to be doing this, you could be the most junior person on a team. Just start by looking for where the gaps are, right? Like, are we not being inquisitive enough? Are we not listening enough? Are we not thinking about the environment we're creating for people enough? Whatever it is, right? Just have the best question. Don't worry about having the best answer, right? And I think that often that introspection or that sense of inquiry that comes from just trying to get a little objectivity on how a team works or how a problem is getting solved often helps open the door a bit more for this kind of conversation to occur. And for us, we teach a principle called the conversation formula. A lot of our listeners, fans, struggle with how to break that ice, how to start that conversation with people. And the formula is ask a question, listen to their answer, reply with a statement. And what's so interesting is that second step, everyone's like, oh yeah, listen to the answer, I got that, that's the easiest step in the equation. It's actually the most difficult because to your point, we're not listening to figure out where's my cue to say something next. We're listening to understand the person and when we can create that space, much like that new friend you made, right? It feels like, oh, we had this such depth of conversation instantly. It's because you felt heard. If you don't feel heard, you're not gonna go to that level of depth. You're not gonna be that vulnerable with that person. Most of us right now, we're not listening. We're thinking about how many likes we got on that Instagram photo before we got in the room or what we're gonna have for lunch. We're not present to actually listen. And all of these skills that we're building on asking the right question means you're listening to the answer. That's why we're asking in the first place. Absolutely, and one of the things with the cards that I've seen as a tool for that is even in deep relationships, like I have a friend who lives in San Francisco and he and his girlfriend were going for a drive from there to LA. And I got a text message from him a couple of weeks ago and it was a photo of him and his girlfriend pulled off at like a little turnout on Highway 1 somewhere around like Big Sur. And both of them, she's got mascara running down her face and his eyes are like red and puffy. And he's like, we just did the whole deck of cards in the first three hours of this and we learned more about each other in this three hours and in the three years we've been dating. And he said, and we're in a totally different state of our relationship because the cards were, and it's not like these cards are a panacea for anything but what a good question does is it's a permission granting tool to go to a step deeper. And when the card asks the question, when it's not coming from you but when a card asks the question, you can't be held accountable. If the card says to you, what's your life's purpose? Well, you can't blame me because the card asked the question, but if I came into a bar and walked up to a woman and said, tell me about your life's purpose. I'm the creep in the room and I'm not gonna get an answer. Well, yeah, it's what's your agenda and what are you getting at? Where's the angle here? Exactly. I found that, I've just found that amazing because we have done dinners and AJ, we usually have some questions rolled out for that. And we were talking about how great to get to another level without raising people's suspicions because well, it's the card. Right, exactly. It just opens some space so that you don't get held accountable for it. And I think a lot of us when we think about ourselves and we think about how we wanna present ourselves to other people, there are these gaps. It is kinda like opening your hand, opening the door with your right hand. You just, you do it all the time, you tell the same story to people you meet all the time and oh, the significant other walks in your life and you're telling her the same stories, but there's so many other levels to you and who you are and what shaped you and what got you there that we don't always take account of them. And these cards, the questions on here dig to that deeper level, which can create those moments beautiful enough where you're crying on the side of the road and there's significant another. But having conversations that are not normal, that are not routine, that break the mold, that break out of that pattern. Now, the theme behind the cards is interesting too. We were laughing earlier about getting our cards read tarot style. So the theme of the cards, they have representations of these archetypes on them and the theme is based on tarot cards. And you had some experience with tarot cards that was interesting. Yeah, so I think what we tried to do with this deck was to really kind of create something that felt both old and new. And in the world of the mystical, of which I've danced around quite a bit over the years because I've found it to be fascinating for my own personal development. So whether that's sitting with gurus who have studied Taoism for their whole life or Mexican shamanic witches and everything in between. I mean, these people took me under their wing and helped me learn more about me. And the same is true with the inspiration that we found in tarot because it's all built on archetypes and it's all built on story, right? And so how can we use these things as a proxy to help you learn more about you and you learn more about other people? And so that was really where that was born. And frankly, even Subrosa is named as a company under a banner of a fairly sort of something from antiquity and something that was kind of shrouded in a bit of mystery. So when you were to conduct a conversation that was quote unquote Subrosa in antiquity, that was a conversation had in private. It was something that it denoted that anything that happened under the rose was something you could feel free to speak freely because you knew that you were in a safe space. And we wanted our clients to know from the moment we named the business that we're creating a safe space for you to tell us what's actually going on not like what the brief says, right? Like what's the real problem you're trying to solve? And a lot of times those are uncomfortable conversations. Most of the time. These are the conversations that maybe you don't want your coworker to hear. Maybe you don't want your boss to know how you truly feel because there's this tension, there's this stress tied to it. But getting to that place where you can have those conversations actually alleviates a lot of other problems that you didn't even know existed. A lot of the miscommunication that goes on in a team, people not being able to work together, there's usually a deeper reason. And one or both parties are not feeling heard. And that's where that empathy really comes into play. So it's not just dealing with customers. And I know it's easy. It's a business related book. We talk a lot about businesses as a start. It's easy to take it that route, but connection is about empathy. And there is a misconception around empathy and sympathy. So let's unpack that a little bit because you define empathy really well in the book. And I know some of our listeners might not even be familiar with that concept. Yeah. I often start by saying whatever these not, right? Because everyone's got a perception of what it is. So the first slide when I give a presentation on this is empathy is not about being nice. And then people are like, wait a minute, it isn't? That's what I thought it's all about. Because that's the colloquial way we throw it around. It's like, oh, you should have more empathy for that. Which is shrouding a way of saying you should be nicer. You should judge as much or you should relate more. But empathy unto itself is actually in a objective perspective taking to gain deeper understanding. So we want you to step out of your shoes, step out of your bias, and see the world from a different perspective so that you can understand it from that vantage, right? What you do with that understanding might be to act more sympathetically. It might be to act nicer. It might be to act compassionate, right? Those are all side effects of empathy. But empathy unto itself can and should be objective because once you add the action of sympathy or something like that, you're putting you in it, right? So that's the way I sort of look at it. And Brene Brown is a great quote about this. Empathy actually fuels connection. Sympathy fuels disconnection. Because you insert yourself, which is not what connection is about. But a lot of people don't make that connection. They think of sympathy as, oh, that's being nice. It allows the other person to feel good. That doesn't lead to connection. Empathy is just allowing yourself to feel what the other person's feeling regardless of agreement, disagreement, and step outside of where you are viewing the world, which is very hard for us. We're very much wired to be in our own movie and have this one perspective. It's extremely difficult, but the minute you allow yourself to play that game, it offers up experience, other ideas, different ways of looking at things, and it gives you more tools going back to making problems rather than obstacles. They're now something that you can have fun with to get over this hurdle. Without it just makes everything so just dry. You just hit, everything's a nail to your hammer. Right, and one of the things we often tell people is if the feeling of someone else's stuff is a bridge too far, just think about it, right? Like you don't have to feel it, right? Like there's a lot of talk about empathy burnout and how nurses and psychologists and people like this have this because they're feeling everyone else's trauma all the time. And that might not be as far as you need to take it. It might be good enough to start to just perspective take, right? Just hear it and acknowledge it and say, yeah, I can totally see where that person's coming from. And based on that, here's what I'm gonna do about it. And you don't have to own it and feel it and somaticize it and bury it deep inside. Some people do practice empathy that way because that's what works for them. But I think especially for folks who this is a new topic, you can live in a much more arms reach way and still get a lot of success out of it. Well, we were talking about this earlier and we wanted to bring it into this discussion. We both work with the military and when you think of military, you don't think of empathy. You think of something the opposite. You think of aggression. You think of running away from feelings. But understanding human emotion, grappling with human emotion and being able to win over hearts and minds and connect with other people is a big part of the military as well. It's not just violence. So when we think about empathy, I think there is some negative connotation tied to it that makes people uneasy because there's a sense that it's woo-woo touchy-feely. That's not what we're saying. Right, yeah, I think it's important for people to remember that really what this is going to do is help you understand yourself and the world around you more fully. And with that understanding, you can do a lot of things. Like I often joke, I mean, it's true, but some of the best sociopaths in the world are empaths, right? Like they know what's gonna piss you off and then they go do that, right? Like that unfortunately is empathy also, right? Because they understand you and what pushes your buttons and then they're gonna go do it. It's a bad implementation. Don't get me wrong. I don't want to create more sociopaths in the world. Well, the study that we saw that was also interesting is they don't feel it in the same way. So they know how to turn it on, but it doesn't impact them in the same way. Yeah, if they need to gain something, they can turn it on to use that as a tool, but it's not something that comes through first. Where for a regular folk, we'll get hit with that and have to deal with it and work through it. They only can tap into that when they want. Right, right. And I think the other thing to say about the military specifically that I've learned in working with current active military as well as returning servicemen and women who are coming into the private sector is helping them have a sense of empathy for the recruiting side on the potential new company that they're gonna go work for. So if you've ever seen a military resume, it's a very complicated thing to read as a non-military person. There's a lot of acronyms you don't understand and there's just a lot of stuff that just doesn't translate to the private sector. And we've worked with a lot of organizations that want to hire returning servicemen and women. And so one of the things we helped do with one of the clients of ours was to build a kind of a transition program that helped recruiters understand what skills were actually coming through on their resumes in a way that was more empathic to what a service person has actually done in the field and how that could be applicable to their business. And in the inverse, helping those folks update their resumes to say like, look, people aren't gonna know what it means to be the X, Y, Z, this and that. And this unit. Exactly. Like it just doesn't translate. So here's how to take those skills and make it more applicable to the private sector. Now you talk about members of your team and we all have these strengths and weaknesses but obviously we want to improve, we want to strengthen the skill of empathy in general and some of our listeners are struggling with connection. They maybe only have a few people in their life where they can have that deeper connection with but it's not something that comes naturally. So what can we do to cultivate empathy in ourselves and how do you train some of your team members who maybe struggle in this area? We start with using the archetypes. We start with having you just self identify where your strengths and weaknesses. It's super easy, right? It's, I jokingly refer to it sometimes as like the gateway drug for empathy, right? Just start with that. Can you look at these seven archetypes and say, what's the one or two that for me, I just innately naturally feel good at? And there will, for everyone, be one of those. I've not met a person yet and if you're one of those people who is saying I'm not any of those, you're being hard on yourself. I guarantee you there's one that is more prominent than the other six. They're gonna find you on social media and they'll prove it to you. It'll at least be more prominent than the other ones. So let's put it that way. But being able to, on a team, what we ask our team to do is to figure out where do your strengths lie and how are you playing to them, right? Because you might actually find that you're a great convener and you haven't been doing anything that is sort of touching on that. But you've actually been really trying to write great questions, but you're a terrible inquirer, right? So let's figure out where our strengths and weaknesses lie and then let's play to our strengths and work on improving our weaknesses and just do it for yourself to start. Because if you can start to have empathy, no one understands you better than you, right? So start with understanding you more fully and taking that understanding to other people. And people pick up on it too. When someone goes through this work and starts to realize that they are more aware of themself, people will ask, what are you doing? Why are you like, you seem different lately or like there's more confidence in you or there's more this or there's more that. And that's because they've switched in, they've clicked into something different inside themselves and that will then open the door for them to have a conversation with someone else. I always, I see self development as always starting there, it's a sweater thread, right? And empathy is no different where as soon as you're open to this idea of being able to get better in some places and know some strengths and weaknesses within yourself, then you start seeing everything and everybody else and then you're able to start making those changes. I know for myself and even for the guys at the house, a simple thing such as body language, right? If we can point out some body language characteristics, especially for someone who is just an arms crosser, right? And we let them know about how that affects the way that they're thinking and feeling and what it says to everyone else in that room who maybe has never met them before. So then they put this conscious effort into keeping from crossing their arms. And now that they are conscious of it in themselves, they just start seeing it and everybody else who's now doing that behavior. Which is, yeah, I just enjoy that. And as you mentioned, when soon as you make that small change, even if it's in your physiology, people will notice, there's something about you that's different, is it a haircut? Is that a new shirt? And that's how you know you've made that change. They can't figure out what it is, but you know you've done it. Yeah, exactly, it's not the shirt. And understanding where you lie and your strengths and weaknesses is very helpful. And then being able to work together to get the end result is starting to understand where everyone else's strengths and weaknesses lie. That's right, and understanding that of your team helps you understand where your gaps might be, understanding that of your manager or your boss or the people that are reporting into you, same thing. When I grew up, I played a lot of sports and the coaches that got the most out of me knew that I wasn't the kid that needed to be drilled every time I made a mistake. If I screwed something up, don't make me run sprints for the next half hour, please. I'm not gonna work harder for you, I'm gonna resent you. But if you were the kind of coach that told me, hey, when you do it, actually move this way as opposed to that way, it's gonna give you more leverage or whatever it was that I needed to learn, and then had me practice it a couple times, not only did I learn it and get better at it, but I also had a lot more respect for the coach, right? But there were some guys in my team who needed to run sprints. They needed that corporal punishment in order to actually learn I'm never doing that again. And a good coach knows how to do what, when, for who. Right, to leave the room. When they give the stick, when they give the carrot. Yes. So this is an interesting concept that we were talking about as a team, and I think the current political environment, not to go too heavy into it, really is what's going on here. And it's that humans are willing to be empathetic towards a single person, it's a lot easier. But once we get in a group setting, it becomes trickier to feel empathy for an entire group of people. In fact, you see dictators use this to their advantage, this dehumanization in group, out group. So understanding empathy towards one person is something we can cultivate, and some of us struggle with some of us are very good at, but we can improve it. Do you see any of these learnings that you have around empathy that could apply to larger groups where we are feeling in versus out? Yeah, for sure, and it is a loaded conversation, but the... We'll dance around it. We'll dance around it, definitely. There are two anecdotes I'll give you on this. One is we had an interesting conversation about probably about 10 months ago now with a woman who runs some of the training at the State Department. And she said, we're in a weird spot because we still have to train ambassadors to go out into foreign countries and run our different outposts. And we're living in a climate where we're not always very welcome. And so how do we bring empathy into the training process for these folks so that when they get to a post, they know how to think and how to gather insight from the local community and engender a sense of connection because if they come in on the headlines that everyone's reading, it's a pretty steep uphill battle to win the hearts and minds of folks somewhere in a far-flung corner of the world. But if you are trained to say, yes, this is one side of the story, but I'm also here to understand what your side of the story is and help me understand how we can play a role in your community and so on and so forth, things will shift, right? So that was an interesting area where I was heartened to know that the State Department is thinking that way and caring about that. Another area where we're looking at this right now is we're doing some work with the Southern Poverty Law Center. And one of the particular areas they've asked us to look at is what they call everyday hate, right? So this isn't the Tiki tortures and stuff like that. In many ways that is a hard empathy bridge to build, right? It can be done, I'm sure, and God willing it will happen, but that is difficult. But what they wanna really focus in on combating in addition to that is what they term everyday hate. So the off-color comment that if you just sat down at a dinner table with six people and you don't know one of the people at the table and the meal just gets put on the table and someone says something off-color, are you the kind of person who is like, well, I don't wanna ruin this for everybody and I don't need to make a big thing about it and maybe it was said in portaste, but like, oh, it's okay and you have this internal monologue that rationalizes that you won't do something about it and we've all been there, we've all had those situations. What we're working to try to do now is to help build a training program and raise the awareness of that is the moment where you have to draw a line, where you have to actually say, you know what, with all due respect, like, that doesn't make me comfortable and here's why, you know, or whatever you need to do to address it because I do think that it is hard to blanketly say, you know, okay, for this large group, here's how we're gonna understand them. It does take one-to-one hand-to-hand combat sometimes to make those changes, but small shifts make a big difference, right? And those little standing up for your integrity and what you feel is right or what you feel is right for someone else can sometimes shift things. Well, once again, I think you summed it up there where it's understanding yourself first and knowing how you feel about things so you're able to start seeing it in other people. You had four spectrums that you had drawn up that a lot of people see it as one side or the other, but it's not, it's a spectrum and everyone's on that spectrum at some place, even your company will be on that spectrum and how it behaves to the consumers and to the public and by noting what that is, you're able to see it in other people just like somebody's other things that we've been talking about and once again, it's a place where I think more people need to have that empathy and understand that you're not one or the other, it is a spectrum. I think the first one was subjectivity to objectivity. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, and understanding where you as an individual or you as a business lie on that spectrum, right? So I'll give you a quick... Can't be all things to all people. No, no, we... And we struggle when we try. Yeah, absolutely. There was a, we were teaching this class at an Ivy League institution and we were sitting inside the engineering school teaching empathy, right? And so engineers are inherently objective thinkers in many ways, right? That's how engineering works, right? Like the light switch turns the light on or it doesn't, right? Like it's pretty black and white. And so we had to talk with them about how comfortable are you with subjectivity and empathy is a fairly subjective thing. It's gonna be based on your intuition on something or your sense of understanding something. And then being open to someone else's subjectivity. Exactly, and we had to calibrate the way we taught that class differently for Princeton than we did when we taught it at West Point because they had a different calibration on that. But the second tension that we talk about is top-down versus bottom-up culture. You can imagine there's a pretty top-down culture at West Point, more so than Princeton. Oh, absolutely. So everyone's got these sliders that we have to kind of acknowledge and say, where do we sit on it? And is that where we want to be or is that where we are? Yeah, I thought it was really interesting that it was named top-down to bottom-up. I could think of some other names for that very same thing that might drive people a bit batty, right? And it's the culture of the company. And all companies have a different culture. They're all built in a different manner. With different leaders? With different leaders. And obviously, when you have a company that's, as you even mentioned, from top-down, then it's a bit more organized. Everyone understands the protocol. When it's a bottom-up, there tends to be a lot of flux, but then we are able to see things from multiple different angles. And there's pluses and minuses to any side of the spectrum you go. And that's fine. You just have to be comfortable with that. Exactly, yeah. There's no wrong way to calibrate on that. It's just, once you find those spots on those sliders, you have to ask yourself, is this where we want to be? And if so, great. And if not, then what are you gonna do to change it? Let's unpack that State Department example a little bit more, because I think we've all been there. Maybe not to the level of a diplomat going into a hostile territory, but we've all been there where we're the outsider, we're not in the in-group and it's uncomfortable. How can we instill empathy in those moments where we're not in that in-group? And what were some of the training pieces that you worked on with the State Department to really help those diplomats in those situations? So we haven't actually done the training with them yet, so I can't speak to that. But what I can say is when you're in those settings, one of the simplest ways that we've seen success emerge is almost treat it like you're like Jane Goodall and you're looking at the apes and you're really trying to understand the behaviors and be, except that your distance from the group may actually be a benefit for a period of time. There's a thing we do at Suburban Rosa called Fresh Eyes, which is that for the first six months you work with us, we have a meeting where we wanna talk with you and understand what do we do that we're blind to, right? Because after six months, you don't have fresh eyes anymore. You've drank the Kool-Aid, you're part of us, so you're not gonna see these things anymore. And so the same is true in those settings. You have the benefit of Fresh Eyes by being an outsider. Don't begrudge it, but actually embrace it as an opportunity to ask probing questions and say, hey, I know I'm not part of this program or I haven't been here as long as you guys or maybe we don't see eye to eye on this. Can you explain to me why we do fill in the blank or like, why is it that, and asking it in a benign form of a question really lets people have to own up to why they do something a certain way or they may acknowledge, well, actually, we don't know why we do it that way, right? Which is often sometimes the case too. Yeah, I feel like a lot of times these things are passed down traditionally without the reasoning behind them. Oh, well, because we did it last week and we were doing it for two years, but everyone's lost the context as to why. Yeah, there's a great case study. I feel like it was based on, I feel like it was a Kodak case study that I read years ago that there was some issue that they were getting behind in their payments to vendors and they didn't know why and they didn't know why and Kodak was an enormous company at this point if it was Kodak. And someone eventually brought in an external firm to say, what's going on? Why is our process so screwed up? Well, we only cut checks on Tuesdays. Why do we only cut checks on Tuesdays? We're multinational and as they do the digging they realize that in the company's formative years they had a part-time bookkeeper who only came on Tuesdays and so checks got cut on Tuesday and that became canon for the organization as opposed to evolving the process. And we probably have a million checks we cut on Tuesdays things that sit inside all of our organizations that we don't know why we do them and now it's time to start questioning them. Yeah, I think curiosity in general is part of this empathetic skillset, right? If you can cultivate curiosity in your life you will have the baseline skillset to be open to the empathy we're talking about here to connection. I know growing up for me, I grew up in Dearborn, Michigan which is the largest Lebanese population outside of Lebanon very Muslim, I grew up Catholic and obviously culture difference and I was one of the few non-Muslim students in this middle school and during Ramadan it was very clear who was on what side of the fence and my friends had zero interest in participating but I just wanted to know, like this is fascinating to me you're not eating at certain times and part of the Roman Catholic tradition is around lent we're not eating certain foods so all religions have these to varying degrees these sacrifices built in to get to a longer payoff a very important lesson in life and just that me taking a step out there and being a little more curious to figure out what does halal mean? What is going on? Why are you not eating at this time? Oh, you're waiting till sunset. That allowed me to bridge that gap and now I can say that I have a number of friends who are Muslim that growing up never would have thought oh, AJ's Catholic, they didn't identify me as that but it's very easy to follow that in-group, out-group mindset and not bridge that gap. But to also go along with the question thing we've been in business a long enough with AOC that we've seen quite a number of people have come through the doors and we've seen the people who come in and will tell us why everything's broken, what we need to do and this is how it's going to be and this is what we need to fix it. And then with the people who come in and start asking questions about why is everything, why are we doing everything that we are going to be doing and obviously we found the best answers and the best help and the best way over certain issues when we were asking questions, not when someone was telling us what the problem was and just running their mouth right out of the gate. Questions are always, it's extremely important to get over hurdles, questions open up for change and they light a clear path and direction. Yeah, absolutely and I also think that one of the things that I've seen from the best leaders we work with is that people always think, well, you can ask questions to leaders because leaders have the answers. Some of the best leaders I know are the people who are asking great questions because they have acknowledged they don't have all the answers. Right, the pursuit of the answers is what makes them the great leaders. Exactly. When you said at the top saying I have all the answers, it's very difficult to repeat. You're not going to be at the top for very long. It's very difficult to get anyone to follow you. Are there any daily practices or rituals that you use to cultivate empathy in your personal life? I do a check-in for myself every morning as part of a larger Tai Chi and other things that I like to do for my physical body. But I do probably about a 15 minute check-in in the morning with myself to just sort of get a sense of how am I feeling? Where's my energy level today? Is there something that's nagging at me that I haven't addressed because I don't want to? Which is sometimes the way things go, right? It's like, oh, there's that thing. I don't want to send that email about that thing. But today's the day you got to send that goddamn email, man, and get it over with and just make sure you get that monkey off your back. And so I think about those types of things. And then I, but I attach them to actions, right? Like, even if the action is, I'm not going to do something about it today. That's an okay action, but I've decided to, I'm not ignoring it. I've made it conscious choice. It's a decision, yes. And so I think that's an easy first one because we all can do it. And I had a, during my learning of Tai Chi, I went to my Tai Chi master, Master Rue, who's got a shout out in the book. He's an amazing man. And I said to him, you know, Master Rue, I love Tai Chi, it does so much for me, but I just, I don't have the time. I can't do it every day. And he said, wake up earlier. And then he just walked away. And I was like, oh, yeah, I guess you're right. So for those of you who are hearing this, I'm like, I don't have 15 minutes in the morning to check in with myself. If you can't give yourself 15 minutes for yourself and your own personal development and your own sanity sometimes, then maybe you should think about your priorities a bit more because 15 minutes isn't that much. Well, there was a, someone had said this to me and it changed the way I started my days and it just changed the way I, how I looked at my week, which was you will find the time to do the things you want to do. So if you want to work out, you'll figure it out. If you want to play video games, you'll figure out a way to play video games. And so I was like, oh yeah, okay. So it's like, well now the choice is easy, right? Because if I'm saying I want to do this, well then either I'm going to do it or I'm not. And if I'm not doing the thing I said I want to do, well then that's not me being honest with myself and to who I'm speaking with and how you do anything. It's how you do everything. So get after it, right? Yeah, exactly right. It's all prioritization. The last thing I want to ask you and we talked a lot about curiosity here to end and listening is a big part of that and allowing the other person to actually give you their perspective, give you their point of view. It sounds like at Subrosa you guys do a lot of listening with your clients, a lot of listening with your teammates. Are there any tips that you have for those of us who struggle to listen and be present to allow that to happen more effectively? I'll tell you for me personally, one of the ways I do that is I actually got very specific about how I note take because I knew that if I was holding all of that in my head as I was listening to someone I wasn't gonna actually retain much. I was gonna be too focused on capturing it all and logging it. So I actually got really analytical about it and you remember those old BIC pens that have four colors on them? So the only pens I have, you can still get them on Amazon. And basically all of my notebooks are these like four color, like really specific ways of taking notes where if someone's saying something that's like a negative thing that's happening, I put it in red and if there's a good thing I put it in green and like I have a whole little system for it. And I made a game out of listening for myself, right? And that to me incentivized me to listen with different ears on. But I have other colleagues who are great at not taking notes and just pulling out the right thing because they've got a different way of doing it. I don't know how they do that to be honest. Like I mean, for me what I had to do, what I knew I needed was I needed a way to, for me to sort of practice listening in a way that felt right for me. And I came up with a way that was color coded. But for you, it might be something else. Do you have a color for when it's your own thought when you're listening to yourself black? That's right. I myself. So what's blue? So blue is basically the wild card. So it's like positive, negative, my own insight on it. And then like whatever doesn't fit into it. I have to, yeah. It's still important. I don't know what it is yet, but it's important. Well, thank you so much. Where can our listeners find the book and your cards? We talked a lot about it. Yeah, everything's on appliedempathy.com. And yeah, thank you guys. This was a really great conversation. I appreciate the work you're doing. Thank you. Yeah, us as well. I think empathy is an important skill set. I know in business we could use it and I know our listeners can use it in their personal life. So it was a great conversation. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. Thank you.