 Hello to you our lovely patrons and welcome to another episode of our prestigious pint series. This episode we've got an absolute global agile superstar Lisa Adkins, author of Coaching Agile Teams. I shouldn't really need to say that, obviously probably don't. But we didn't really talk a huge amount about coaching agile teams. We actually started talking about the accumulation of anxieties as Lisa called it as a result of the pandemic, which was quite timely given that this week is Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK. And that led us naturally on to talking about the difference between coaching and therapy and whether there is a line and whether we need to add to our skill set within our organisations, which funnily enough led quite nicely into a couple of our questions from our patrons. So Andreas Wittler asked us to ask Lisa, how does she recommend we look after ourselves after an emotional involvement? And interestingly she didn't answer the question as it was asked, but incredibly useful answer and interesting answer. And also who are her inspirations then and who are her inspirations now before giving us a bit of an insight into what she's what she's doing now and in the future. So she's putting the agile coaching side of things to one side and starting to coach leadership teams to make a more positive impact on the planet. Fantastically interesting and fascinating and enjoyable conversation for us. We spent well over an hour talking to her, which flew by. Hopefully it will fly by for you as well. So yeah, enjoy a chat with Lisa Atkins. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Pouring myself a drink. You got one there, Paul? Already poured, my friend. Already poured. We're ahead of the game. Well, Lisa's got hers. That's an interesting colour there, Lisa. Mm-hmm. What have you got there? Well, I guess I could say whiskey because it's sort of that colour, but it's simply iced tea. It's an orange and clove iced tea. Yeah. Okay, with sugar? Sugar free? No sugar in this one. Nice sugar. Wow. Hardcore, man. Sounds healthy. Sounds like it's good for you. Well, I mean it is black tea, so it's only as good as black tea is for you. I was, yeah, I actually quite like iced tea. It was something that I only introduced to a few years ago. It's the thing I missed the most when I was travelling around the world is that really it's only a thing in the US. And so, you know, you just can't get it easily and I don't think about it much, but along the second week of being without my iced tea, I start to want it. And then when I get home, I'm like, the land of iced tea. So do you make yours stronger than you would normally get? I make it quite strong. Quite strong. Yeah. Cool. So yeah, if you hadn't already guessed, that is the voice of Lisa Erkins, our guest today, and she started off by introducing what she's drinking. Paul, what are you drinking? Well, just for a change, Geoff, I thought I'd have a pint of cider. Okay, yeah. Just for a change. It's not a change at all, Lisa. I drink it all. It's only a thing I can drink. But it's one of my favourites. It's a can of Stoford Press. Old school? Old school. It's exactly what it says on the tin. It's sparkling apple juice that's a little bit alcoholic. So yeah, that's me, Geoff. What about you? Very good. Well, I've got something a bit weird. I'll put this up so you can see this on the camera. Oh, it doesn't come up. I kind of read something. Yeah. So it's called... Oh no. It's called the theory of continual improvement. No. It's a can band can. It's an agile drink. So it's subtitled as Dr. Domingo's elixir for aches, pains and strains. You're supposed to take two tablespoons every four hours. I probably might exceed the dose. But it is an 8% beer. So it's a bit strong. But yeah, it's a double IPA. Wow. What's a double IPA then? Just double strength? Double hops. And yeah, usually double strength. So this has got Citra, Motueka and Vic secret. Not Victoria's secret. Vic secret. Vic secret. So yeah, it doesn't taste that strong, which is probably not a good thing really, is it? But it's nice. It's sort of like Long Island ice teas, you know? They taste like ice tea. They taste like what I have on my glass, but ooh. And they've got like five spirits. They do. Well, cheers to you. Cheers to you. Yeah, cheers, Lisa. Thank you very much. Cheers. Cheers to Paul, to Geoff. I'm thrilled to be here. One of the advantages of remote working is that we can connect. And we've been trying to connect with people remotely like this. And it's great. We've forged some new relationships, but also reignited a lot of the old ones. So it's great. It's great to see you again. Yeah, it's great to see both of you. So yeah, this is part of our prestigious point series where we're catching up with people who've been an influence to us, but also the whole community. And just, well, as with most of our chats, they are relatively free form, but just finding out a little bit more about, you know, your journey, what's inspired you and what's going on for you at the moment, that kind of thing. So what's new with you? Well, I'm successfully shifting my work life to work more with leadership teams, which has it's, you know, I think everyone knows it's challenges, which is great. It's a totally different thing, you know, because working with helping people build agile coaching skills in the last 10 years or so, you know, it's the willing that come to work with me in that case. And with, you know, working with leadership teams, it's whichever leader brought me in, that's the willing. And then everyone else sort of comes along for the ride. And there's a way to build a lot of willingness and, like, you know, like genuine desire for them to be involved, but they didn't get to choose initially. And that's really, really big difference. Yeah, I guess, did you ever get that? Not, let me say people come to your agile coaching skills workshops willingly, but I imagine you get people coming saying, I've got people back at work who aren't particularly willing for what I'm trying to do. And have you had a particular piece of advice for those people? Yeah, I think the biggest piece of advice is just helping those people get in touch with why they want to do this work themselves. You know, what they're in it for, and letting that be their guide for how much patience they can create for other people, how much compassion they can create for other people, and also for knowing when it's time to go. For making that discernment. Yeah, yeah. The Esther used a phrase a while ago, don't go around inflicting your help, which is stuck with me for my work as a coach, I presume that's something you would. Now Michael Spade says go where you're wanted. Yeah. And I think that both are sort of the same piece of advice. And I think that's a really good piece of advice. If you found that different sort of, you didn't say the word resistance there, but maybe the people that haven't brought you in aren't as willing as the people that have brought you in. Well, they just don't know, like they don't know what they're in for. Yeah. You know, they're sort of, you know, whoever brings in the agile coach or the leadership coach, you know, they sort of strap everyone else into this ride. It's not that they've had a conversation together and said, no, no, we should get a coach. It's one person thinks, I think we could probably do with a coach. I'm going to find someone. And that one person may have done a very good job of talking with all, you know, kinds of folks enrolling people in it. But that's not the same as choosing yourself, you know. Do you think, Lisa, that's changed over the years? Do you think that the appetite has shifted more towards proactively coming to you and asking for these things compared to where you were five, 10 years ago? Yeah, I think so as a whole. I'm doing some work now with about two dozen enterprise agile coaches. Michael Spade and Michael Hammond have a cohort program for developing like the IC agile expert level competence in these folks. And I'm hearing that from them. So I would take their word for it more than mine because they've been in that enterprise coaching game a lot longer than I have. I've been busy, you know, developing agile coaching skills in the public at the same period of time that they've actually been doing that work. So yes, yes, it's sort of like how yoga is sort of acceptable now. You know, it's not weird anymore. And not everyone wants to do it. But I think certainly during this, it can't help but come up in conversation, but obviously it's been a very strange 12 months for more or less everyone. But I certainly think it has emphasized looking after yoga and my wife, I can talk from a person experience, she's well into and she's become a Pilates instructor and she really believes in that. Looking after yourself, I think has become even more on the radar than it ever has, I think, and rightly so. Yeah, rightly so. Yeah, I tell you, so from a personal standpoint, I am certainly feeling what I what I view as the accumulated effects of this last 12 years. Feels like it, doesn't it? It feels like it. Oh my gosh, does it feel like it for 12 months? And to be really fair, if I think about what I've experienced in the United States over the last four years under the Donald Trump administration, that was a lot of stress and anxiety and daily outrage sort of building up over a long period of time and then bam, the pandemic. So I don't think it's just the last 12 months for me. And I think that obviously not everyone has had that same experience, but a good number of people have experienced, even people who don't live in the United States have had that experience of just like, Oh my God, what has happened to the world? You know, like that question over and over again for years on end. And I think it's just, it's, if we think about like the long arc of history and the very recent spikes in how the human presence is affecting the planet and our ability as humans to thrive on this planet, I think that what's under the surface of a lot of this is existential grief. I mean, if you hear a factoid that says something like 2000 species go extinct every day, you could just sort of trip along with your life. But that factoid, at least for me, is in the back of my mind going, Oh my God, really? Is that what we're doing? Oh my God. And I can't do anything about that directly. And so it does create, I think that as human animals, we can't help but feel on some level, our effect on on the living web of existence, of which we are just a part. Yeah. You know. And so I think that's that's like the the base tone or like the drumbeat that is going on all the time. And so I think all these things are combining to create a significant dip in mental and emotional and physical health. Yeah. That word accumulation, I think it's key because each one might not be huge, but if we haven't cleared it out, and we build on top of it with another little one, it doesn't take a huge amount of time for it to become quite meaningful. And we start to unconsciously rewrite our scripts about what's going on. And we don't perhaps notice it a little bit like that boiling of frog analogy. You don't realise what's going on until the water's too hot. And I think a lot of our gel teams have a similar kind of thing around that as well. I know it's on a smaller scale, but just from a work environment, just those little things that happen on a daily basis. Just accumulating. We're brilliant at building coping mechanisms that way. We're brilliant at building walls in our mind to try and shut that off rather than deal with it. But that's that can only go on for so long. These is also what makes me think of as well is with obviously the like you say the last 12 months has kind of amplified and put everything into that microscope. Why do you think that is? What is it in my mind? It's that everything kind of has kind of stopped and it almost lets you look a lot harder into yourself and analyze maybe even overanalyze what about yourself and makes you feel a little bit insecure. Certainly in the first few months of the pandemic and the first probably three to six months, certainly me and people that I know with those stress levels increase massively. Do you think is it just too much time on our hands to analyze things too much? Do you think? Or is it something else? Okay, so obviously it's going to be different for different people, right Paul? So if you're saying that, it sounds like there might be some truth in that for you. Maybe it's like, oh have I overanalyzed? Another aspect in what's in operation for me is the encounter with impermanence and lack of control. Yeah, so like in the United States right now, we're experiencing a significant interruption in supply chains, all kinds of supply chain. Now, okay, I just had to deal with this myself because we had to buy in a dishwasher. It was incredibly hard to buy a dishwasher. It was incredibly hard to get it installed. I mean, it was like, oh my gosh, like something that was just bing bang boom happened with no stress at all was a two month stressorama in my house, right? So now let's be really clear. When I say that sort of thing, I immediately feel sort of like the guilt and shame of, oh my god, Lisa, you're so like dishwasher really like that. So that is such a privileged problem, right? Yeah, exactly. And my daughter who's really skilled in these sorts of things would say, mom don't compare pain, right? So whatever you're experiencing that's not comparable with the pain that someone else experiences who doesn't have running water in their house, both are pain. You know, both are stress, both are anxiety. And I think that, so here's the thing, it's never the dishwasher. No. It's what's the underneath current. And I suppose you've never had to, just talking from my own experience, we've never, I've never had to deal with that type of situation before. Like you said, it's completely new. These are completely new feelings. I've never had to, they're similar to you, I've never had to queue for a supermarket, you take for granted that you can just walk in and pick what you want off the shelf. But like you said, there's people who have to walk to get food or water every day and they're walking miles to you. And then that's their normal. And I think, like you say, it's, I think it's a lack of control. These are things that I'm sparring. I have no control over these things. But also, they're just completely new problems that I've never had to deal with before. And that can fair enough, fair enough. And where I expected to get a little more relief from being vaccinated and initial. And so some relief has come off. I don't want to say that that has not happened. It definitely has. I've been fully vaccinated now for about four weeks. Oh my gosh, we went back to the swimming pool. It was amazing. We actually ate in a restaurant for breakfast the other day. And so those things are relieving because of the level of social anxiety I was carrying everywhere. And I'm still doing, you know, my civic duty of wearing a mask and protecting the people who aren't vaccinated because we're not, we're not there yet to where we can take the masks off. But just the fact of sitting at the table 10 feet away from other tables and I can not have my mask on and not worry about killing someone else. I mean, that has really been a huge toll. I mean, also worrying about bringing this virus home to my husband who's quite a bit older than me. So, so that, so there's a relief in that there's definitely a relief in that. But I kind of expected it to be a little more relieving. I'm a little disappointed. Because you put too much hope into it, do you think? Well, I think I expected to feel sort of a resurgence of energy and a movement toward, I don't know, toward some sort of future and what I feel is sort of like a stalling out. Now, that's also what's happening in my own personal, physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual bodies right now. So that's, that's what's happening for me personally. But I also feel it in sort of in the, in the overall emotional field. What do you all feel? What's happening in the UK? In the UK it's, I think there's a localized level of relief, like you said, relief that we're quite lucky in so much as within the UK the vaccination programme has advanced quite fast in comparison to most, most of Europe. Did you say Jeff? That's probably true. So a lot of European countries are way behind the levels that they use. So there's a sense there that a collective sigh of relief that things are relaxing, we'll be able to do some of the things that we couldn't do before. And that's, like I say, there's a sense of families coming back together. But at the back of our mind thinking, you know, we're not going to be out of this, we're not going to be out of this really until the world is out of this, until, until the rest of the planet is able to, to, to vaccinate as many people as the UK. So it's kind of a mixed emotions for me personally is that it's not, yeah, it's somewhat reassuring, but we're not out of the woods by any stretch yet. And we've just had a local, a very local school near to me that closed. And it's that front they had like eight, eight to 12 cases out of nowhere. And it's just that sudden realization that, hang on a minute, this could quite quickly still, the virus is still there, things could still revert back to how they were. And it's quite scary to think about that. I think we're very tempting to oversimplify, but sort of two types of people, if you like, I'm seeing in the UK one is the, the, the still skeptical in that almost no matter what happens, I'm still going to be worried. Even if 100% of people were vaccinated tomorrow, and we went a week without any cases, people would still be very over cautious. And then you got the, the other end of the spectrum, which is as soon as you see a glimmer of hope and the restrictions being eased, it's parties. And it's, it's, and it's people, I think, just depending on how far they've gone one way, tend to, tend to rebound, but there's also a self-defence mechanism in there as well. I think of, well, I don't want to let my hopes get too high because I don't want to be dashed again. So I'm not going to get ahead of myself. But there's, there's, there is only so much anxiety that people can take, I think before the coping mechanisms just don't work anymore. The, you know, for me, the, the big thing here, as well as the, the lack of control was for me just an absolute eye-opening smack in the face for everybody that actually we are living in a very complex world and highly interdependent world with lots of things that we don't understand. And like you say, can't control. And while when we had our routines around us, we could kind of ignore that complexity if you like. We had those routines to keep us in a sense of normality. But then all those routines were stripped away. And so we were left very vulnerable, very isolated, very exposed in this complex world without the safety net of our routines. And that being in that state for quite a prolonged period, I think has really taken its toll. And you can, I said, you can, you've only got a certain amount of energy, I think that you can expend on these things. And I don't know about you, but you know, when I've, when I've had a pretty stressful day, you know, talking to my family about, you know, what's been going on with my grandmother or what have you, I think, well, now I've got to get my head in the game for work. Well, I'm nowhere near as effective as, as I would be if I didn't have all these other anxieties going on, right? And that's not just me. Yeah. No, it's not just you. I mean, I'm definitely feeling, what I've been telling people is just I have less capacity right now. I really do have less capacity and speaking of privileged places, I get to choose how much I want to work, right? So I can, I can titrate how much I take in so that I have enough to give for that. And so far, you know, I'm still really functioning quite well for my clients and, you know, for the people I'm collaborating with. But I could also feel the edge of like, how much longer can this go on? And, and, and how much more capacity reduction will I experience? It's a real question in my mind right now. And I think, and the reason I'm, I'm, I feel a little bit sort of like I'm putting myself out there and maybe people won't want to contact me for work. And I'm like, don't do that. I love to work. I would love to work with you. You know, I want to, and at the same time, I just want to take that risk, because I think that as you said, Jeff, like, you know, I'm not the only one. And I think this is a growing elephant in the room. And, and how horrible, like I talked with my doctor, she's like, you would not believe how I am prescribing anti anxiety and anti depressants right now. Really? He said it's unbelievable. And, and we were already in the US at like something like 50% of adults before the pandemic, so like 50% of adults are on some sort of medication like that. And so now it's got to be a lot more. And, and so I think that would be horrible if that were the only avenue. So I want to just open up the conversation and start talking about what is going on for people. And I've been talking with my clients about, you know, so what's the capacity you're expecting from the people in your organization? You know, and how much can you scale back your ambition to meet the moment? Because the moment is not like all cylinders firing and we can just keep on this mythology of growth forever. It certainly put things into perspective, isn't it? And what I found is that it's quite easy to get absorbed into the opposite of that. Because when you, when you do have the perception of, well, you're at home, you know, you're always can be at your desk is that companies that have expected people to go to go further, you know, because they've got, you know, you've got you've got time at home, you've got internet access now, you can you've got your own machines at home. And the number of I think I'm getting more emails now on a weekend than I ever have with people and strange hours of the day thinking, no names, Jeff, but people that working, I'll put you on the spot, Jeff, but you do you work weekends and you it's not uncommon to see you emailing strange times in the evening or first thing in the morning. Yeah, I mean, I found there has been so I'm going to put a slight positive on this, not from my own benefit, but it has given people the opportunity to to fit their work around their life. So they can a lot more easily say, well, I'm not going to work during the school run, I'm not going to work during kids tea. And to make up for that, I'll work a little bit when they gone to bed. And that's that's a lot better work-life balance for for me. And if that's a choice, and it works for them, then I'm all for that. But that feeling of obligation. And I think a lot of that obligation comes from the uncertainty of am I adding value? Yeah, yeah. And in a compulsion almost, you know, that's what I'm seeing in my clients is this compulsion to be on all the time. Yeah. Do you think that's because, like you say, Jeff, adding value or being watching or you're being observed or you're I genuinely think it's an insecurity of I don't I don't I can't see I don't I don't have the same sort of feedback loops feedback mechanisms that I had before. I'm not getting as much sort of acknowledgement of what I'm doing. And also, I'm probably not working at full capacity. So I'm not as being as effective as I used to be. So I'm going to make up for it in terms of output rather than outcome. And it makes me feel more secure that I know that I've worked hard, even if I haven't got the right result, you know. What do you think about this? This came up for me recently, Lisa. So even even before the pandemic, quite a few people who my coaching clients would describe my coaching as oh, that was a bit like therapy. And it sort of made me a little bit uncomfortable because I'm conscious to not cross that line. So it's something I regularly talk through with my supervisors and things, but it has it's increased a lot more recently. Now, the rationalization that I've gone through to my with myself on this one with my supervisors is very few people at work get listened to like truly listened to without, you know, someone thinking I'm gonna hear what you say and then I'm going to point forward genuinely listening to them. And that's probably what they assumed therapy to be. And so do you get that kind of thing as well? Yeah, I do. And, you know, one of the things that that is a little bit of a essentially misleading is that it looks a lot like therapy. I mean, you're sitting down and talking, you might be using other modalities like bringing someone through a process helping them ground in their body, noticing the wisdom or the sensations in their body as well as their mind like so all of that would feel like therapy to someone who hasn't actually had therapy before. If someone has had therapy before and they know that where the focus is on, you know, sort of the past and how did I get here? What do I need to unknot from the past? Then they can see the distinction. But looking from the outside, like if you were just looking through soundproof glass therapy session and coaching session, could you tell the difference? Maybe not. So I mean, I do see that that is so. And the other thing is that, yes, I think it's because as you and your supervisors are saying people are not used to be listened to, not used to that. But I also think people are not used to a modality in which the purpose is for them. Because so much of our interaction in other kinds of setups is, you know, two people have agendas, they may or may not match. And so it's always like this jostling of like, am I going to get my am I going to get what I need or are you going to get what you need? And most of that stuff is implicit, not explicit. And so it's a very, that's that's much more anxiety producing situation. And I think that's people's normal baseline everyday interaction. And so when you're with someone like a coach who is for you and for your goals, that's a really different container to be in. And of course, I like therapy, right? Because that's what therapist is after. But for me, it's a very crude distinction, right? It is a lot more nuanced than this, right? But coaching, you're assuming someone is whole therapy, you're trying to help someone mend very crude distinction. But if we were to to look at it through that lens, and we're kind of assuming that more and more people are, if not broken, then close to breaking point, because of the accumulation of anxieties, does that mean actually there's less scope for coaching because people need to be in a resourceful state before they can make use of coaching, if you know what I mean? That's a good question. And you're making me realize that it's probably why I have been I have been picking up some other modalities lately. So I've been doing a lot of study of somatic coaching and trauma informed coaching. I think I just, it wasn't any like big strategic plan to do that. But I think I got attracted to those things because of what I was feeling in the ether is that, you know, we are headed toward this place where resourcing ourselves again and again is going to be a necessary skill. And so I don't necessarily think it's going to reduce scope for coaching. I think that what's going on is that we're all expanding our capability to be with a wider range of things. And not just coaches, but all of us in the sort of the spheres that we work in, in the spheres of business and the spheres of people who are who have enough to eat and who have shelter and all that sort of stuff. And so, you know, my clients are definitely showing up exhausted, overwhelmed. And I don't think I need to be a therapist to address that. I think there are plenty of coaching modalities that are appropriate for that. And I have had a couple recently where I've asked them the question, do you think you're depressed? And, and we've had a little exploration of that and some of them have decided to contact their doctors. So I think, I think that's a, you know, like an appropriate referral out, but I wouldn't necessarily assume that someone needs a therapist to function in the modern world, which let's just say is more uncertain now than it ever has been and humans aren't built for uncertain, you know? I think you're right, Lisa. And what I have seen is certainly is that a lot of the agile teams that I've been coaching and working with is that, and it's, and it's very timely at the moment because this week in the UK is Mental Health Awareness Week. And it's not that there should be only one week for it and not advocating that, but what I have seen genuinely over the last few months is team members that are much more interested and prepared to talk about emotions and prepared to name how they're feeling, what's going on. Because you do have that, teams have got that little bit more insight now. And I appreciate we've got virtual backgrounds here, but on a camera on situation where you can see people's faces, you can see perhaps what's, or hear perhaps what's going on in the background, it, it just, it's opened a little bit more of an insight into people's lives. And, unlike you said, Jeff, work has become part of your home life and vice versa. So people have found it, in my experience have been more, or more intrigued and interested to discover a bit more about people, what's going on for them in this, in this, in this climate at the moment. Yeah, you're making me think of a little piece of work I did with a leadership team. And this was early in the pandemic. And they're, and the woman who had brought me in there, the leader of this leadership team, said, you know, we really, I really want to start addressing resilience right away. And so we did this really cool, easy thing that I just want to talk about, because I think other people could do it, where we just present the idea of resilience, the presence of idea that we're the beginning of a pandemic, this is back in March, this is a year ago. And now, so now you could say we've been in the pandemic for a year, right. And all we did was two simple things. We made a list of, of solo resiliency practices, so things I do for and by myself. And we made a list of group resiliency practices, like things that we could do with each other. Sure. And that it was, first of all, amazing to me how fast they could fill out those two different lists. I mean, it was really shocking. There were about, how many of them were there? There were about 20 of them. And there were 60 entries on each of the lists. And how many beautiful group resiliency practices there were. So they said things like, take a minute to breathe together at the beginning of a meeting. Notice when people seem checked out or emotions seem high, and don't cruise through it. Stuff like that. So I don't know what happened for them. I hope they didn't forget that. I hope that at least some of that held them well. But I, you know, this is a time to turn to each other. So maybe, maybe this sort of crisis that we're in is what's required for us to not only take care of ourselves individually, but to turn to one another and take care of each other in the groups that we're in. Yeah. I'm really pleased to say that I am seeing a lot more of that. Just little slack messages. How are you doing today? That kind of thing. Reaching out little, just little surprise care packages to each other. These just little things like that, that I think people are really valuing and taking the time to think about. Yeah. Do you think we need to add another skill to our skill set as our child coaches? So, you know, I asked this because I think when I first started as a scrum master, I hadn't had any kind of training in facilitation or active listening other than the stuff that I'd done outside of work in my sort of night school stuff. Do you think there's something else that we need to add to our skill set? I, maybe not everyone needs to add this, but I think a number of us Agilists need to add trauma informed to our skill set. Not that we're like, not that we're going to become experts in helping people process trauma, but we're going to become much more aware of noticing when trauma is present or it's getting recapitulated for someone. Not pushing through in that moment. So my daughter actually at her school, she was all of her, she's now 18, a couple of years ago, maybe it was a year ago, I forget, but they were offered the chance to become what they called mental aid, mental health first aiders. Wow. And I quite like that analogy because you're not there to be a surgeon, you're not there to be a paramedic, you're there for first aid, right? So you can notice the signs and you can you can keep them going until they get to someone who can really help them, that kind of thing. That sort of analogy came to mind when you were talking about that. That's nice. That's really nice. Yeah. And yeah, I think, right, I don't think I can only be taught from my experience, but I think I would certainly benefit from just like you said, at least about recognizing patterns or recognizing responses where you think, do I need, you know, does this person need more? Does this person need to need additional help? And I think I'd like to think that yeah, there's something we can we can offer or we can put in place to help people find that. Yeah. I got it. This might be a good point, actually, Lisa, because we got some, so a couple of people knew that we were going to be talking to you and it's all, would you mind asking a question? So tell us and we'll see. We'll see if we can stick it in. And one person said, what they really like your opinion on is dealing with emotional work. So when you're, you set your boundaries and you get yourself in the right state, but it takes energy out of you to deal with emotional work. And then at the end of the session, you sort of recalibrate. Do you have any particularly good tips or tricks for how to cope with difficult moments? And I'm now reading into that in terms of self-care, in terms of that kind of self-awareness. So what I'm taking this question to mean is, so when I'm working with someone and, and we're encountering a range of emotion or a depth of emotion, then once that interaction is over, how do I take care of myself? Yeah. Yeah. Is that over? Yeah. Well, you know, I love my early training with the Coaches Training Institute on this actually, because it's not the question of what I do after. It's the question of what I do before. Okay. And so one of the things that I'm reminding myself a lot of these days is the one of the foundations, the cornerstones of co-active coaching, which is people are naturally creative, resourceful and whole. So this is back to like, there's nothing to fix, right? Even someone experiencing a moment of amygdala hijack because there's a trauma that's been recapitulated. That person is still whole. That person is still capable and resourceful and creative. And so my job in the, in the interaction with them is to help them explore, but to keep them at choice. Okay. So that when I leave the interaction, I feel really clean that I didn't force anything on them. I didn't try to do a sell job on something I thought they should do. I didn't even vote one way or the other on the thing they decided to do, but it really was something they owned so that when I leave, I'm not asking the question, oh, did I harm them? Right? So I think that that, that is a way of keeping, I guess, clean as like emotionally clean as though is the word. Now, having said that, I am getting much more in tune and I'm opening myself up to much more of my natural empathy and intuition, especially as that shows up in my body. And so I am, this is not so much with my coaching clients, but in other interactions, I am realizing that I'm starting to carry a little bit of, this is especially the larger client systems, like the larger organizations, I'm starting to carry a little bit of their stuff. Now, and so for that, I use something called cord release, which is, do you want to know what, do you want to know what it does? I didn't even know what word you used there, was it cord release? Cord, C-O-R-D, cord release. This is something my energy healer taught me, which is, oh, so good. So in a nutshell, what you're doing is you are releasing the cords or the connections that you have put into the client or the clients put into you that no longer serve. You're releasing anything that does not serve your highest good, this is for your benefit. And so in a nutshell, what you're doing is you're imagining that person or that client organization, that system, whatever is the thing that has cords, you're imagining them out there in front of you, and then you're just brushing your body from your head, and you're just noticing where it feels like there are cords, connections, bands, caps, blocks, anything that feels like it's gotten on you, and you're literally brushing it off and giving it back to the ground. And what my energy healer taught me to say is, I might easily let go of anything that is not in my highest good, give it back to the ground. And so once all that has happened through your, you're using your physical body as a way to have, to allow your imagination, really, to release these things in your energy body. And if you don't believe in your energy body, no big deal, just say in my imagination, I'm releasing these. So once that happens, you imagine that the other person or system over there is doing the same thing, because they've got to get rid of the shit that you put in them. And so I'm doing this a lot more than I've done before. And it's because of my growing capacity of me using my multiple intelligences, but it's also what we talked about before. There's just an accumulation of anxiety, you know, that I think creates more of those chords than would normally. Yeah. And I was going to add to that Lisa, is there also tying these things together? The fact that back to the COVID, the pandemic, if the issue is around, like you say, mental health, stress, anxiety, worry, is there a risk that we see the same things in ourselves as a coach that we're thinking, well, that's true of me. So it's harder to stay neutral. It's harder to be it to remain objective, because we think, well, that's happening for me as well. You know, we're all in this together. So it's harder to keep that distance. It's harder to strip some of those chords away. Well, it's actually not hard to strip the chords away, Paul. Just try it. Just try it. It's like so easy. So, so easy. And the intelligence of your body knows which chords don't serve and which chords can stay. And like you don't have to logic it out. It's just it's super, super natural. It's not supernatural. It's just supernatural. It's a natural, like we know how to do this. Empathy is a good thing, right? We want empathy. We want to be able to feel that pain almost. Yeah, of course. So what this is not doing is creating a disconnection between you and that thing you're you're dropping your chords with. It's not creating a disconnection at all. It's just getting rid of the entanglement that's not serving. So you're staying with it for the whole session and being able to disconnect. Yeah. And actually, it'll help you serve that person or that organization better. Because because you won't, as you were talking about, Paul, you won't be tied up in your own thing. Yeah. Right. Because so, you know, we're really now starting to understand just a tiny little bit about quantum mechanics and how, you know, how our world really is. It feels solid to us, but it's actually really not. And I do believe, Paul, that we get involved with clients and organizational systems because there is an entanglement. So for sure, for sure, I see the same things my clients are working on. I'm working on. Perhaps it's at the same level or the same scope. Sometimes it's not, but it's a very similar refrain. You know, and I've always noticed that and coaches have said that forever that, oh my god, things my clients work on. I end up showing up in my life in some way. And so now I think about the quantum world, it makes total sense to me. We get attracted and they get attracted because we're entangled somehow already. Deep. Well, I guess it feels deep to us now just because this is new information. But later people will think about quantum mechanics like we think about gravity. I'm going to change the subject slightly, but I think, well, in my mind, I think it's related, but on the surface, it could look like a complete change of subject. Are you inspired now by different people to whom you were inspired by when you were when you wrote coaching agile teams, for example? Yeah, I think I definitely am inspired by different people. So this is a really lovely question. Let me just sit for a second and see what's so. So, you know, at the time I wrote coaching agile teams, professional coaching was fairly new to me. And the idea that someone could be of value and of use without being smarter or knowing more than the other person was like mind blowing, right? And it essentially paved the pathway for me to move from a transactional work life to a relational work life, which was so much richer and also so much more effective. Loved it, loved it. So those influencers were definitely inspiring. We're definitely people in the professional coaching world, in the facilitation world, in the leadership world. Anyone in particular? Oh, yeah. So I can think about my teachers at Coaches Training Institute and Center for Right Relationship Global, CR Global. Yeah, so let me just name some of them. Lovely. Yeah, it's great to invoke them. Cynthia Lloyd-Darst, David Darst, Merida Frijohn, Faith Fuller, L.A. Redding, John Purcelli, and more, you know, of course, as soon as I start naming names, and now I'm more of who I'm excluding. But the good news is none of them listen to this. That's probably true. That's probably true. You know, and now who I'm following and learning from are really in two different veins. One vein is sort of like the vein of essential wisdom. So following like the woman who's my Zen teacher, Diane Musho Hamilton Roshi, and the lineage she represents and then the related wisdom traditions that we've always had that are essentially saying the same thing. So, you know, and if I think about, so there's a lot of very ancient masters that I'm in touch with there, like the people, ancient people who created the I Ching, you know, and Lao Tzu, Dogen Zengi, you know, people who lived centuries ago. And then the transmission of them to our current teachers. So that's one path that is really inspiring me and creating more ease in my life, actually. And the other is complexity scientist. I just like so geek out. And the one I'm loving these days is Glenda Ouyang, who's been around forever. But I just, I mean, so she's not new on the scene. I'm just new to her. You know, I'm the late comer. And I love, I love the work that she's created in the world with Roy's holiday and with other people who've been involved in the human systems dynamics Institute. So I mean, it's not just Glenda, but there's a body of work there. That's very inspiring because it totally matches the time we're in, where we're recognizing that we can't control change, we can influence, we can influence complex systems, but we cannot control them and we can't even plan them. Yeah. That's cool. What about you? I'd love to know who, like if there's been a change in inspires or maybe who your current inspirers are. I like to look in all sorts of different fields. I'm one of those geeky people who maybe geeky is not the right word actually. But just as me and Paul would fail to go to a pub and, well, we'd go to a pub and fail to have a conversation that didn't somewhere relate back to agile. Equally, I can't watch a TV show or a film or something or listen to a song without actually interpreting it through my lens of sort of agile or coaching. So, you know, I look at all sorts of different things and think, wow, there's something there, but equally, equally anti influence as well. I find the people that I think, you know what, that's something I really don't want to become or be associated with in any way. So, almost I'm going to try and move away from that more than I am moving towards someone that I particularly respect. So, I mean, I take this view that I can always take something from everybody that I meet. I'm sure somebody famous said that once. I couldn't remember who, but yeah, that idea that I can always learn from everybody that I meet. And that, so whoever I'm with at that point in time is going to inspire me in some way, either to be a little bit more like them or try and model myself on one of their traits or the opposite. Thankfully, it's a lot more the positive than the latter. Yeah, I'll read you, Paul. Yeah, I suppose I've always been, I've always looked from as a software developer in a previous life, I always tried to move to see what I can see from outside the software industry that's inspired me and looking for other coaches and other, and just the performing arts is something I've always took a lot of interest in. And just how other just more artistic industries can actually inform what would, you know, the software and engineering industry. I think it's quite interesting that a lot of discipline can actually be, can be used in different ways. So yeah, standard comedians, performing arts actors, actresses and yeah, teachers, school teachers, if those people inspire me, the people that have had to muddle through this pandemic and managed to still inspire children to want to learn in a completely different environment. I think we can learn a lot from people, key workers that have just kept this country and the planet moving. It's incredible. And what's on the horizon? What's new for you? What's your current area of focus? Well, there are some new creative endeavors starting to brew, which feels really good. You know, since closing off the chapter of my life where I was training and developing agile coaching skills and people, I haven't really created anything new for public consumption. So is that behind you now? Would you say the agile skills for the coaching skills for agile people? Yeah, the piece. Yes, it is. It is. I'm not doing any training in agile coaching anymore. And yeah, and I don't have any desire or plans to create more curriculum or development programs or anything like that. I am a mentor in Michael Spade and Michael Hammond's enterprise coaching cohort, but that's all their content and I'm helping people express the competencies. I mean, I love that role. I love that role. So what is starting to brew? Oh, you asked if that was done. So here's the piece that's not done. Is that the coaching adult team's book is still going like gangbusters. And so I feel a bit of like there's a privilege I have of honoring that work and honoring what it still wants to do in the world. And the piece I'm picking up from that is creating ways for more people to experience that content more deeply without having to go to a course. And I'm thinking about people who are in lower income situations and people who even though the world is online now, in Asia, for example, most of Asia, time zones are really still not very conducive for people in that part of the world. So there's something brewing right now, which is a coaching agile team's book club, which will be something that I take a group through and record it and then it can be available for a solo journey. It can be available for a group of people moving together as a cohort and doing the exercises together and supporting one another. So that's the piece that's still there from agile coaching and from that decade or so of that mission. But what's coming into focus for me right now is is my deep despair about where we are as a human species and on a planetary level. Deep, deep despair. And the stake that has come really clear in my mind is this almost ridiculously simple statement. Conscious leaders make healthy choices. Conscious leaders make healthy choices. And so for me, what's coming online is all of my work is arrayed around that phrase. And so whatever I'm doing, it's going to be to help people become more conscious, help them know that every decision they make is actually a choice, you know, and have greater skill and ability in doing so. And and just offer the skills that help all of that work better. And so, you know, I'm thinking about apps now. I mean, do you notice that there's like psychology based apps going on in the world and they actually work really well? And so if we can do that, I'm thinking, why can't we have an app that would help someone through a difficult thing like having a crucial conversation like that information has been out there in books for years and years and years and I know very few people who are actually good at it. You know, so why can't there be sort of like there's this great app called Noom for I've been really enjoying using it. And that provides a great model for like community based support, but also knowledge also challenge at a different level. You know, so anyway, I'm thinking about those sorts of delivery mechanisms. And also in this period of time, this just happened two weeks ago, y'all, the audio book for the lead together book came out and I narrated that audio book. Nice. So you got you got into that you enjoyed narrating your own book. I plan to become like a professional narrator. It was really yes, I love narrating my own book. And then I was talking with one of my friends colleagues, the Susan Bastropield, one of the three authors of this book lead together that came out in November. And she was just talking about the fact that so essentially here's that here's the here's the crux of that book. There's a great aspiration. And many of us have a value set that matches the teal altitude. Right. And most structures and most interactions revert to green, orange, amber, because the structures are not well known. Structures processes, you know, that sort of thing. So that's what the lead together book is. It's like, here are the structures of an organization that is focused on self organization and self management. You know, and it's like super practical. And so I loved it from that perspective. And you know, those conscious leaders make healthy choices that phrase came in later than me deciding to narrate this audio book where I see how they're related. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So is that is that a phrase that you created? Or is it something you've picked up and adopted? Or it was a long time and coming. I'm sure someone else has said that phrase in the world. So I'm not, you know, it's not it's not a thing that I'm just not aware of as a social media trend. No, no. No, it's not that I'm aware of. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So planning on helping save the planet through through coaching leaders of organizations. Leaders everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, leaders of organizations, that's the logical place for me to focus because their impact is so much greater. Yeah. And because it's time for them and all of us to wake up to the fact that there are very few inconsequential decisions in business. So are you targeting your work more organizations that have a bigger negative impact on the planet or ones that have a more open to change mindset? Probably the second one. I think I'm targeting my work toward any leaders and leadership teams that are welcome, that are welcome. That's a good, that's a good Freudian slip, that are welcome to look inward. I was going to say that are willing to look inward, but welcome to look inward is probably good too. Yeah. So basically, you know, if a leadership team is willing to say, you know, we could be part of the problem of why things are showing up like they are in the organizations, I could probably work with them. Okay. Sounds exciting. I don't care so much about industry, don't care so much about size or whatever, certainly not going after the worst polluters in the world, because those more than likely have leaders, they're like, oh, yeah, that's an externality. It's not even on our balance sheet. That's definitely not my client. But leaders that want to make an impact, I suppose organizations that want to make an impact. And so many do. I mean, so what I'm noticing is that our hearts and our value system is more toward holistic, systemic view of things. No one really wants to screw anyone else anymore, like the, that don't, I don't find that in leaders, but I do find them not knowing how to make it so. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I agree. I think that's, that's a good point to finish on. Yeah, nice positive finish on. It's good. So we're looking forward to hearing all about that. And the, and the kitchen. You'll find out when I do. Yeah. So just, no, just one more, one more time on behalf of the whole community. Thank you for everything that you've done and everything that you continue to do. Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you. And I think of the long lineage behind me that made that so as well. So we'll stand on the shoulders, don't we? Yeah, we do. Brilliant. Well, thank you, Lisa. And it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the Agile podcast. Hey, it's been fun. Cheers. Cheers.