Marlene and Jonathan, with guest, psychotherapist Amanda Youssef, explore how empathy is necessary to form connections between people and why people need those connections in order to show up as the best versions of themselves and in order to do their best work.

About Amanda Youssef

Amanda Youssef is a Registered Psychotherapist, Canadian Certified Counsellor, and Certified Meditation Instructor. She specializes in relationships and therapeutic approaches including emotion-focused therapy, dialectic behaviour therapy, and motivational interviewing. Amanda is an avid believer in practicing what she teaches her clients, so you will often find her "forest bathing," meditating, taking long walks with her dog, snuggling with her kids, and writing poetry when she is not busy doing the job she loves!

More about Amanda >> [https://www.valleyconnectionscounselling.ca/about-amanda]

Why Empathy Is a Necessity When Practicing Leadership

Jonathan and Marlene recount their own journeys to find words to understand why they, each in their own way, found and find externally imposed motivation structures (both the positive “carrot” kind and the negative “stick” kind) to be so confusing and counter productive. They propose using “intention” as a third way that Leadership Practitioners can use to escape the tactical “carrot/stick trap.” They explore exactly how this higher-level strategy avoids so many of the carrot-stick pitfalls, and the value it can bring to anyone practicing leadership, particularly in tough organizational contexts where one might have fewer colleagues sharing similar mindsets.

This podcast is listener supported. If you find value in what you've just heard, please consider supporting us by joining a Leadership Practitioner™ Connection. Monthly subscriptions start at $0.00. Go to https://leadershippractitioner.org/connection for more details.

Swapping Out Both Carrots and Sticks

In perhaps this podcast's most epic (we mean that literally) conversational journey to-date, Marlene and JR with guest, leadership development coach Alisdair Smith, take you from critical explorations of authoritarianism and idealism, through tactical approaches to balancing effectiveness with efficiency, the value of naming, being a "learn-it-all," honouring but not dwelling on the past, and the role of nurse logs in old growth forests. Just in case you're worried they might lose the way, no fear - this is all harnessed to together exploring exactly how Leadership Practitioners use forward-focused mindsets to co-create possible positive, compelling and intriguing futures.

About Alisdair Smith
Alisdair is an International Coaching Federation certified coach who works with executive leaders and teams across Canada. He specializes in human creativity and development related to governance, ethics, strategic thinking, teamwork, and leadership and works with diverse clients, from large corporations like Microsoft to NGO’s in Goa, India. Alisdair has also taught leadership and teamwork at the Masters level at 3 Canadian universities and has facilitated dialogues for the Dalai Lama Centre for Peace and Education and Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Dialogue.

This podcast is listener supported. If you find value in what you've just heard, please consider supporting us by joining a Leadership Practitioner™ Connection. Monthly subscriptions start at $0.00. Go to https://leadershippractitioner.org/connection for more details.

The Forward-Focused Mindset

Jonathan and Marlene explore the powerful change that can happen in a context where people are showing up, and choosing to practice leadership by making connection individual-by-individual. Plus: Jonathan and Marlene share insights from their own travels as they learned this lesson and experience how groups who are used to being subjected to this aggregate notion of "people" change when even just one or two individuals in the group model this mindset shift.


This podcast is listener supported. If you find value in what you've just heard, please consider supporting us by joining a Leadership Practitioner™ Connection. Monthly subscriptions start at $0.00. Go to https://leadershippractitioner.org/connection for more details.

"People" is a Set of Individuals

Marlene and Jonathan discuss how the "doing" of various practices of leadership is where one discovers how challenging showing up to create a context for people to be the best versions of themselves and do their best work can be. Plus: Marlene and Jonathan talk about the mantra of "practice makes permanent".

This podcast is listener supported. If you find value in what you've just heard, please consider supporting us by joining a Leadership Practitioner™ Connection. Monthly subscriptions start at $0.00. Go to https://leadershippractitioner.org/connection for more details.

Doing Is When One Discovers The Challenge

Jonathan and Marlene dive into psychological safety, why it is fundamental to creating a context where people can be the best version of themselves, and how increasing safety is built into each practice of the Leadership Practitioner™ Framework.

This podcast is listener supported. If you find value in what you've just heard, please consider supporting us by joining a Leadership Practitioner™ Connection. Monthly subscriptions start at $0.00. Go to https://leadershippractitioner.org/connection for more details.

Build in Psychological Safety

Marlene and JR chat about humanized interactions as prerequisites to creating a context where people can be the best versions of themselves and do their best work. Plus: Jonathan and Marlene demonstrate how the Leadership Practitioner™ framework invites humanization with every practice. 

This podcast is listener supported. If you find value in what you've just heard, please consider supporting us by joining a Leadership Practitioner™ Connection. Monthly subscriptions start at $0.00. Go to https://leadershippractitioner.org/connection for more details.

Humanization as a Prerequisite

Jonathan and Marlene chat the importance and the benefits of being zooming in and zooming out to solve challenges. Plus: Jonathan and Marlene share how to look for when you might be jumping to solutions to quickly. 

This podcast is listener supported. If you find value in what you've just heard, please consider supporting us by joining a Leadership Practitioner™ Connection. Monthly subscriptions start at $0.00. Go to https://leadershippractitioner.org/connection for more details.

Zooming in and Zooming Out

Marlene and Jonathan chat about the impact that sharing information and holding space for discovery have on context. Plus: Marlene and Jonathan share the challenges they had with creating a right kind of context for the Leadership Practitioner Learning Circles. 

This podcast is listener supported. If you find value in what you've just heard, please consider supporting us by joining a Leadership Practitioner™ Connection. Monthly subscriptions start at $0.00. Go to https://leadershippractitioner.org/connection for more details.

Context, Sharing Information, and Holding Space for Discovery

Marlene and Jonathan chat with Leadership Practitioner program alum Sam Morrison about what "context" means and how is it useful in one's practice of leadership. Plus: Sam shares their take on "context of self".

About Sam Morrison

Sam is a Leadership Practitioner and Product Strategist who focuses on growing and leading high performing teams. They are an analytical professional with a proven track record of developing tools and practices that empower people to do the best work possible and have lots of fun. Prior to working in technology, Sam worked with children and youth in at-risk communities developing leadership skills through arts education. Sam grew up in Canada's Arctic and currently resides in Toronto. Sam can be reached at sam@goodflow.ca or on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/shbgm/].

This podcast is listener supported. If you find value in what you've just heard, please consider supporting us by joining a Leadership Practitioner™ Connection. Monthly subscriptions start at $0.00. Go to https://leadershippractitioner.org/connection for more details.

Context (with Sam Morrison)

How does one need to "show up" in order to create a context for people to be the best versions of themselves and do their best work? What are the practical skills and tools that boost one's practice of leadership in order to do that? These are the challenges that hosts and co-creators of the Leadership Practitioner™️ framework, Jonathan Rozenblit and Marlene Ziobrowski, approach every day, as they observe and coach people in all kinds of roles, in all levels of organizations, and at organizations of various sizes.In this podcast, they share their experiences, the experiences of the people they support, and what they see is working.

Jonathan Rozenblit

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