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Vulnerability as a Superpower with Dr. Bob Beare, Psychologist and Author
64 Plays1 year ago
In this episode, Dr. Stacy Thayer chats with Dr. Bob Beare, Psychologist and Author of Stop Doing Sh*t. You Don’t Want to Do, about personal awareness, managing traumatic events and how to find strength in vulnerability https://www.drbobbeare.com/
Contact us here: https://netography.com/contact/ #Netography
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Transcript
Introduction to Cyber Psych Podcast
00:00:11
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Cyber Psych, an Autography podcast where we talk with industry professionals about the human side of technology and how it relates to security and how it impacts overall business. I'm your host, Dr.
Meet Dr. Bob Baer: Psychologist & Executive Coach
00:00:24
Speaker
Stacey Thayer. I'm a cyber psychologist and senior manager of research and engagement at Autography. And I'm here today with a very special guest, Dr. Bob Baer.
00:00:34
Speaker
Dr. Bob Baer is a PhD, said psychologist and executive coach living in Austin, Texas. He is the author of The Creative Fire, 10 Weeks to Emotional and Creative Fitness. And this book right here, which I have read recently, is Stop Doing the Sh-A-S-T that You Don't Want to Do, a Straightforward Guide to Letting Go of Unresolved Trauma.
Dr. Baer's Journey: From Acting to Coaching
00:00:57
Speaker
Bob is the founder of Deep Waters Recovery, experimental workshops, bobbaer.com empowerment programs,
00:01:04
Speaker
The Creative Life Institute and is a professional actor, director, singer and composer. So lots of interesting things to talk about. I'm really excited to have you here today. Welcome, Dr. Bob Bair. Hey, Stacy, thank you. It's going to be fun.
00:01:18
Speaker
Yes. So why you kick us off because you will be new to many of my listeners who are in the security industry from either the technical side or the human side. But this is the first time I'm reaching way out and reaching to somebody who isn't necessarily rooted in the security industry. Way out.
00:01:38
Speaker
You reach way out. You reach way out. But that's what makes it exciting and different. And so for those of you who aren't familiar with you, who let's go with that, it's going to be most people. Can you share a little bit about your background and your current work? Yeah.
Understanding Trauma and Its Generational Impact
00:01:57
Speaker
I was wandering around in the dark for the first 35 years of my life. Although along the way, I picked up a few tools in my travels as an actor and director and theater person and also picked up some nice addictions that were fun for a while until they weren't.
00:02:19
Speaker
I was about 35 when I hit the wall of, shall I even stay in this life or not? Which for some people, that's the wake-up call. For other people, it doesn't have to be that big of a wake-up call. But that's when I took the turn from kind of living a... I was committed to superficiality. Like, keep me out of anything underneath the surface. I was taught that, right? I'm a male. Here's my marching order. Be tough.
00:02:49
Speaker
figure shit out and fix stuff.
00:02:55
Speaker
That's it. That is a lot. I got a little bit of what women get a lot of, which is be nice also and help people be very helpful. Smile. None of that stuff, you know, all of it's good, but it's not the whole thing. And I wasn't being living in an authentic life. So I found 12 step recovery. And I happened to get into this work into the deeper healing work during the beginnings of the men's movement, which
00:03:25
Speaker
Writers like Robert Bly and Sam Keene and Michael Mead, some of your listeners, I guarantee you, some of your listeners have stumbled into that work. But it's grown into a culture now.
00:03:41
Speaker
in my estimation that it has a little bit more consciousness. I now have a 21-year-old. She is like so much more awake than I was and so are her friends. You could either blame everything that's wrong in the world on technology or you could say,
00:04:01
Speaker
Maybe there's a doorway into some wisdom also, if it's used correctly, just to try to make a reference to the topic that we're on here. But for the last many years, I have
00:04:13
Speaker
gathered up a bunch of degrees, lots of alphabet soup after my name, and written a bunch of plays, written a bunch of books.
Trauma: The Root of Societal Issues?
00:04:23
Speaker
But the main thing that I do is help people heal their trauma, which is underneath, you can say I'm arrogant or maybe I'm simplifying it a little bit. But if you look around the world,
00:04:35
Speaker
and you see a particular kind of problem, which is what you do for a living. Where's the problem? How can I mitigate it? Right? We're all doing that. For me, I look at it and I can see the trauma underneath it. In other words, the
00:04:52
Speaker
The conditions that created this situation happened for many people in their childhood. And they're trying to work it out either by sending rockets to another country or through some technology. We're trying to work out our unconscious stuff through whatever means we're in. And if we're completely in our heads, in our intellect, and don't have access to the emotional part of us, it's just a shit show. That's what I've been up to.
00:05:22
Speaker
Now, would you say that does everybody have some sort of trauma that they're working through? I know for me personally, I would reach out and I would say, yeah, probably. We all have something that hurts us. We all have something unresolved, something we haven't worked through. Would you agree with that sentiment? Yeah, but you are in a somewhat of an advanced category because you're a seeker of sorts. You are a person that has already gotten past the
00:05:52
Speaker
The most common phrase I hear when I start talking about traumas, Oh no, I'm from a good family. And then I just let it sit there for a minute. I said, well, I wasn't at the, that's a non sequitur. I wasn't asking if you're from a come from a good, we're all from a good family. There was goodness in all of our families. That's not the question. What we're talking about is what actually happened.
00:06:15
Speaker
We're not talking about blaming anybody. We're not accusing anybody, but there was dynamics in my great family that my folks were trying to work out their own trauma, and it gets on the kids. It's just data. It's not a morality thing of any kind. But if you want to grow, we have to look at it. And yes, in my definition of trauma, we all have it.
00:06:44
Speaker
Yeah, and I mean, for people who do have good families, life, man, life's a bitch, right? Because if it's not from your family, it's from your peers, it's from your coworkers, it's from partners, boyfriends, girlfriends, best friends.
00:07:02
Speaker
There's a I saw a meme recently and it said none of my scars are from people Who I hated or something along those lines that most of our scars come from sometimes the people that we were closest to whether might be by choice or By circumstance, you know work environments or whatnot, you know the depth of the trauma can can differ but we're all struggling with things that we don't know how to resolve in some way I would I would
00:07:29
Speaker
I don't argue anymore. I've quit arguing in my life. I've ever heard of such a thing, but I just don't argue anymore. I sort of just move on. But if I were to argue, I would argue that it's all choice. It's just that most of it is unconscious.
00:07:46
Speaker
Yes. Yes. So a lot of research research shows that we are about the very best five percent conscious. Everything we do is run by the unconscious. Ninety five percent of it is just subconscious running on running on the rhythm that we have gotten on in in reaction to our childhood from zero to seven, zero to 10 those years after that.
00:08:14
Speaker
I don't know if you have kids or not. After 10, she was done. She's on her trajectory and probably will hit some walls and have to unravel what was put on her.
Childhood Trauma's Impact on Adulthood
00:08:27
Speaker
So what you're talking about is what we in this world call complex trauma, which I'm sure you've stumbled into at some point or another. So we get off of our track, right? When we're kids, we want to please people. We want to please our caregivers, or some people got some serious trauma and just completely shut down, you know, and they're just not themselves at all completely in an authentic human being walking around in somewhat of a daze. Others of us had
00:08:56
Speaker
things happen that were a little more subtle like Just everybody was playing a different role if there was addiction in the family and all the roles were shifted So we became something that we're not right and then we make choices based on that our our caregivers or our our jobs our our
00:09:18
Speaker
our partners, everything that we choose from there is somewhat of a trajectory and the trajectory is off. So no wonder it crashes and burns. We're making choices unconsciously from our original wounds. And then it just stacks trauma on top of trauma on top of trauma. Or if you want to call it, there's many different ways to talk. If you don't like the word trauma, you can use
00:09:45
Speaker
in the four agreements, have you run into that body of work by Ruiz? He refers to it as domestication. Sometimes people can stomach that better than trial, like we've been domesticated to be a certain way.
00:10:03
Speaker
Then there's a wake-up call that happens eventually after we stack up more trauma on top of it, crashes and burns that just seem like fate, right? Jung said anything that we don't look at underneath the surface is going to show up in our life and we'll just call it fate while it just happened. No, it's directly from the trajectory from our unresolved stuff.
00:10:28
Speaker
And I think what's also important is that I hear a lot of people brush their own trauma. I mean, trauma is a strong word, right? And I think what most people hear is they hear the word trauma and they think like,
00:10:41
Speaker
Oh, I've been abused. It's a spectrum. It's a gray area, I think. I mean, tell me if you certainly disagree or anything, but what I've found is when I've encouraged people to go and talk to a therapist. Oh, I don't really need it. My problems aren't that bad. Everybody could use that as far as I'm concerned. Granted, being in a clinical psychology program, the first thing I tell you is go actually be in therapy. And you actually talked about this in your book.
00:11:11
Speaker
When you're training to become a clinician, they're like, here, you don't go anything on your own personal wisdom. In fact, you're not supposed to share anything about yourself. But that's what makes us the most relatable to understand other people. So the trauma, you don't have to hit like, there's no number. I'm at 10% of my trauma quota. I'm at 100% trauma quota. Trauma is trauma. Emotions, they come out sideways.
00:11:37
Speaker
If you don't deal with them too, you're right. It's a strong word. And if we're, you know, I think your world is a lot in the workplace. So you're not going to flop the trauma word out there to everybody. You can sneak it in. You can sneak it in through the emotional intelligence conversation. That's the way I found in the, in the workplace. Uh, the, the, okay, we can talk about emotional intelligence. That's about as close as we get to feelings. Uh, but, uh,
00:12:06
Speaker
I'll try to do the short version of the world of trauma that I'm referring to here. And we can take the name trauma off it and just look at the circumstances that I'm referring to here. First of all, abuse. That's the thing most people think it is, right? And we all know what that is. Sexual, physical,
Workplace Burnout and Emotional Intelligence
00:12:27
Speaker
emotional, verbal, intense stuff. We know what that is. That's trauma.
00:12:33
Speaker
Accidents is the other one, like shocking incidents. That's the other one. Those are the two things that we think are trauma. It's so much more than that. And the other three are more subtle. So most people, if they have that, they don't think they have trauma. It's part of how we keep it in denial. One of them is abandonment. And that can be just our parents were working a lot.
00:12:57
Speaker
It's not intentional, but we didn't have like the emotional presence that we needed as a kid. And some people got actually physically abandoned. And then we're always looking for that thing to fill the hole. Sometimes it's a job. Oh, this job is going to make, and then we're always unsatisfied.
00:13:16
Speaker
And then there's neglect. Anybody that's from a military family got dragged around to 20 different houses. Nobody was intentionally neglecting. But any military kid will tell you, I'm not always sure where I belong. So there's so many things that happened to us along the way. We don't have to put them in the category of bad or blaming anybody.
00:13:41
Speaker
the biggest one that most people are in denial of the most under acknowledged misunderstood is called enmeshment. I kind of let folks unpack what they think enmeshment is but there's usually a oh yeah, oh yeah in everybody because we're imperfect humans right enmeshment is a
00:14:07
Speaker
is when the roles in the family, because of some kind of dysfunction, which we all have, there is no perfect person or family or corporation anywhere.
00:14:18
Speaker
there is imperfection. And when we are trying to sort out our stuff, if there's mental illness or addiction, it's even more exaggerated. We take on roles. There's people that take on the caretaker role to help the person that struggled. There's the hero role. There's always a hero in the family. And there's always the scapegoat. And there's all these different roles, depending on the amount of dysfunction in the family that we all take on to try to compensate for the organism that's out of balance.
00:14:48
Speaker
Yes. You know, we take this role into our lives and we wonder why it's not working. It's not us. We have compensated for balancing the organism. Right. And we get really good at stuff, too. Like there's certain like you're probably a good you probably help people really well. You know, I was a gentleman. I learned how to take care of my mom and put on a show that that that that that that. Wow.
00:15:15
Speaker
But it's not all of who I am. We learned some things, but it's not completely satisfying for us to play those rules. But enmeshment is the one that we all have. It's very subtle. Most people don't think it's trauma and it's running the show.
00:15:31
Speaker
You stumble on something there. Once you stumble, because you were very purposeful, you hit something really that is near and dear to me. So I talk a lot about burnout. And one of the things I was giving a talk at a conference called Black Hat two years ago. And one of the things that I talked about was that
00:15:49
Speaker
A lot of times people in the security profession, what is their profile? Because they get really burnt out. And when I talk about burnout, I say, well, what is motivating you? Are you the white knight who's working hard? Because you are saving the company. You are the person who is between all of these attackers. Or how is the system of the team working together? Are you compensating because someone isn't doing enough work?
00:16:13
Speaker
So you think, so now all of a sudden you're, why am I having to pick up the slack for this other person? And you're having to do that. I've done consulting with different IT and tech and security organizations and the dynamics. One of the things I think is so interesting is people go to therapy to talk. They understand, oh, I'm going to talk about my childhood. I'm going to talk about my relationships. And yet here you have a working environment or your career path. And for many of my listeners, it's people in the security or technology industry.
00:16:43
Speaker
What made them choose that? What is that about themselves, that self-reflection piece? And then, you know, how is that kind of fulfilling their purpose or their role? And so much of your work defines your self-worth. I'm watching people who, you know, companies, they're being laid off. That is traumatic for many people. I went through a layoff a couple of jobs ago and I was shook, right? It's like, you're just sort of looking for the next. Is it going to happen? Is it going to happen again? Many people in security who have been through a breach.
00:17:13
Speaker
Right. There was recently a big reach on this company called SolarWinds and a lot of people are pointing fingers at the head of the security, the CISO there. And the CISO community is sort of kind of coming together and going, don't blame one person. The CISOs are doing the best that they can.
00:17:29
Speaker
But I can only imagine what it's like to be in that role and know that if something comes down, if something happens, if you have been breached, how do you recover from that? That is a traumatic episode. I mean, if everybody's blaming a breach on you. So to get to that is when it comes to these workplace traumas, the way that I sort of feel, self-flagellate ourselves with. Well, I signed up for this. I'm lucky to have a paycheck.
00:17:57
Speaker
I deserve this treatment." Or, I'm in a situation, and to your point earlier, you do have a choice about if you want to work for a toxic environment or not. The alternative might not be great, especially in this economy, because there's not a lot of jobs out there and everything. And so, how great is the choices that you have? But what are your recommendations? Where do you begin? And focus a little bit more on the workplace trauma, just starting there, but where do you begin?
00:18:26
Speaker
I had a client enough years ago that I think I can just talk about it, whether it's appropriate or not. He wouldn't care anyway and I'm not going to speak directly about him. He worked for a particular government organization.
00:18:45
Speaker
He was in my group, several of my groups and work healing workshops that I do and new recovery and doing a lot of work. But whenever he was in group, he was complaining about this government entity that he was working for and had been for many years. And when anyone would mention to him that perhaps it's a choice that he's staying there, he would say, oh, no, it's not a choice. He said, well, you know,
00:19:12
Speaker
Brother you chose it and you're continuing to know I have to do it He absolutely could not get it through his mind that he had chosen it and that he he said I had to do this out of school This is the what gave and I have to now I have to finish for the retirement I think I have to he could not see he could not get out of step back from himself far enough To see that it was a choice and it's and this is a person who was severely abused as a child. There was many
00:19:42
Speaker
many moments where he absolutely could not do something other than what his fascist caregivers wanted him to do. It was in his bones that he would die, probably, or be severely punished if he didn't do what he was supposed to do. It happens to be the government agency that's the most feared by most people. That has to do with money.
00:20:13
Speaker
Yeah, you're asking me, well, where do we start? Train wreck. All I have to share with people is my experience. And you can't just say, hey, this is a job that's not fulfilling me very well. I think I'll go do something different. Very few people do that. They have to have some pain.
00:20:36
Speaker
pain is the only because you know we're we get it works just like addiction work workplaces are just full of a variety of addictions including work addiction it's a
00:20:51
Speaker
The validation that we get from our jobs and waiting for that pay raise or waiting for some boss to say you did great and is a, it changes our chemistry and we get addicted to it. And it takes, what does it take for an addict to get? Well, there's no therapist, there's no coach, there's no family member that's going to help. He has to almost die. And when we talk about burn it, when I hear the word burnout, I'm saying, Oh, well, we got some hope for this one.
00:21:22
Speaker
Well, that's in fact, I would not my orientation, certainly probably not yours or most of my colleagues. My orientation in that case would be not to try to mitigate the burnout, not to try to make it better, easier, softer, fix it. I would say, hey, let's work a little harder and get that burnout to the point where you can say, wait a minute.
00:21:45
Speaker
This is not what I want in my life. And I'll take it to an even other level that I've had quite a bit of controversial conversations about. I'm not sure the jobs in themselves are a good idea.
Rethinking Career Paths and Personal Choices
00:22:02
Speaker
So that's kind of radical, but why am I working so hard for someone else's vision?
00:22:08
Speaker
And that's why my book is dangerous. I gave it to a bunch of folks at a car dealership. I did a workshop over there. I said, seriously, you want these guys to start noticing that they hate this shit? Yeah.
00:22:22
Speaker
It's dangerous to start looking at what do you really want? What happened that got you off the trajectory of being able to pay attention to that wise little child that lives on us and says, no, this is what we should be doing. Oh, shut up. We can't do that. That's impractical. It's dangerous doing the work. Well, the exploration of self and I think
00:22:47
Speaker
One of the things that I do find interesting, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing if I didn't do this. I overthink. I overthink. I navel gaze. I'm like, but what about this? And I could sit here for another hour and tell you all the reasons for that.
00:23:07
Speaker
I enjoy that. It's probably not an hour. You, you had to learn how to think and it doesn't the details of what got you to that. But that was something that you got a lot of affirmation about figuring shit out. I'll guarantee it somewhere. And you're growing up. Yes.
00:23:26
Speaker
Yes, and how to understand people. I mean, just to be able to understand people. And so I always encourage people. So when I talk about Berna, I say, if you Google search mental health in the workplace or something and you get, go meditate, go do this. And it's like, no, that doesn't, that's not where it starts. You need to go, and I do say this from personal experience, it's like when you're having that down day,
00:23:53
Speaker
And nothing matters. I don't want to go for a run unless you're chasing me. If I'm having one of those days, I'm not like, yeah, I'm going to go do self-care. You're not there yet. It's easier to have that drink. It's easier to numb yourself. It's easier to not make the harder, what I'll say is kind of the harder choice. And I've been there. I have made those easier choices, regretted it, and had to climb the wind and do that work.
00:24:23
Speaker
It's worth it, the growth and everything, but it's not for everybody. And I do get the feedback of like, can we just hang out? Do you always have to talk? And I used to be at one at a party who'd be, this is 20 years ago or so, but was always interesting. I would be in the smoker's room because that's where the interesting people were.
00:24:43
Speaker
sitting there harming ourselves, smoking our cigarettes. And you know, and that's not necessarily the way that's that's a very jaded way of looking at it. But I always wanted to dig deep and to understand and to learn and not everybody does. And that's OK. I tell a lot of leadership that if you're not the touchy feely person who wants to really know why somebody is not performing. Cool.
Vulnerability and Emotional Intelligence in Leadership
00:25:05
Speaker
Excuse yourself from it. But every manager of a team has to have that dynamic that where people can vent in a healthy way
00:25:12
Speaker
they can come to you if something's going wrong in their life, that you're able to communicate, and I have a couple of other questions around this, but be vulnerable. If you're not vulnerable in some way, then how are we able to make change, but to help other people and accept the challenges they're facing with, which we have to do in a workplace?
00:25:36
Speaker
So my doctoral dissertation was on vulnerability. I don't know. I don't think I said you that. So you might not. No, you didn't. You didn't. Vulnerability and leadership. So I interviewed a lot of leaders who I happen to know had had done some inner work. Right. Which is actually that's not easy to find. But
00:25:56
Speaker
Because we live in a culture that's raw raw success success success not a whole lot of Pay attention to the full experience of the of our body and our emotions. It's really not encouraged very much So these guys are not these men and women are not
00:26:13
Speaker
There aren't a lot of them. Anyway, I found a lot of them. And that was part of the research just to find these folks. And I interviewed them about what it's like to be vulnerable as a leader. In other words, what do we mean by vulnerability? Brené Brown's definition is willingness to be uncertain, not always have the answers. Take risks. Take some risks. Emotional risk mostly is what she means by that.
00:26:40
Speaker
uh and and to do things that might not always work you know be willing to make some mistakes right in front of your people and um the third one is to be emotionally transparent that's the hardest one and uh there there i did a multiple case study it was a qualitative study so you can't
00:27:00
Speaker
extract a result really okay well this is the truth no but a multiple case study you can at least say yeah it's probably true and in in that study there was two or three things that they almost all agreed on one was
00:27:17
Speaker
Ah, it's, it's dangerous. Vulnerability is dangerous as a leader. You will be taken out. People will use it against you. People will use it to manipulate the best, you know, people that are built like that will use it against you. You can bet on that.
00:27:33
Speaker
And they also, our whole industry is built on people taking advantages of vulnerability. Everybody gets it. They can relate. I think, I hope actually while I'm thinking of it, while I was doing my research, it's really hard to find articles on the vulnerability that we're referring to. Most of the vulnerability references are, uh, that it's a bad thing. Right. Right. Right. Mitigate, uh, vulnerability, which is your whole.
00:27:57
Speaker
world, right? That's right. Right. We're going to protect against all the vulnerabilities. How can we be less vulnerable? No vulnerability. I mean, it's, it's a whole, that's the mentality partnered on the other side with some very real hackers that are designed to exploit your vulnerabilities. They're proving they're proving that you need to
00:28:15
Speaker
It's proof that we need to be secured. Before I forget, the second thing the leader said was that it's worth it because it is the most inspirational leadership stock. People trust it. They will give you everything. And people will tell you the truth. If you tell the truth as a leader, you can bet that the people that are working for you are going to tell the truth more to you. And a good leader wants to know what's going on.
00:28:46
Speaker
And you're going to find out more if you're willing to be vulnerable, although it's dangerous. And I'm trying to think of what the other, maybe it'll come to me at some point. But those are a couple of the big takeaways that these leaders shared. Vulnerability is not popular. Oh, the other thing was it's lonely.
00:29:09
Speaker
There aren't a lot of people doing it. You're not going to see a lot of models for vulnerability. You kind of just have to do it and create your own your own world around that. And, you know, you'll create a community. But, you know, I'm sort of jaded. I'm more of a I did a lot of work with the Dunbar number, the the the you know about that, the rule of 150. No, after you get over there, there's lots of research on this.
00:29:38
Speaker
Dunbar, I think back in the 20s, or I'm not even sure when it was, but there's been many studies since. Put a bunch of monkeys out there and they got along well until they got to about 150, then they started fighting. Because you can't really know 150 people. You can over that. Anyway, after that, you really can't know who they are. And then you're making rules for people you've never met.
00:30:02
Speaker
Right now I'm talking in the workplace. So I'm not, you know, any organization that grows to a certain size and here you and I are saying, damn, why can't they just be a warm, loving family? I don't know. I think it's a high expectation. It is.
00:30:22
Speaker
It puts the onus on every manager and every individual right because somewhere up there you've got an HR person who we need them bless them but you know whatever but we need them and they put these policies like so you know unlimited vacation time okay great but if your manager doesn't
00:30:38
Speaker
allow you that, what good is it? And so what I looked at for my dissertation is what does it take for employee engagement? In other words, for that to be able to give and to get that flow of like, I love my job, I'm in the zone. And what I found was that psychological safety was essential, that if somebody felt that they mattered and that they could be their authentic self, and they could present their authentic self in a work environment,
00:31:07
Speaker
and that their input was valuable, that was what created their loyalty and their work. And they would be willing to say, work those extra hours. And they would be willing to say, yeah, I wanted to go in because of that reciprocity. And I always just found that so interesting because it implies that really what people are looking for is a safe place to be themselves. And that is the scariest thing in the world as well. Yeah.
00:31:39
Speaker
it's
00:31:54
Speaker
You kind of got to take a few breaths and look around and you're going to find some of the most loving, creative, wise, mature people you've ever met in your life in those rooms.
Cultivating Safe and Authentic Work Environments
00:32:03
Speaker
But you have to kind of get out of the victim and waiting for somebody to do something bad to you. Because when we do that, we're going to find it. And it's the same thing in the workplace. We have to find people to connect with. But the expectation that people are going to
00:32:09
Speaker
possible
00:32:20
Speaker
create our safety for us. We both have the same finding, I think. We need to create environments that are a container
00:32:36
Speaker
that has safety. That's as good a word as any. In other words, safety for us to be ourselves. It doesn't always have to be nice and kind and sweet. And, oh, aren't you such a perfect... No, what safety means to me, this is a place where, you know, like, what's his name? Jack Nicholson in that movie. You can't handle the truth where...
00:32:58
Speaker
Yeah, that has done enough inner work to handle the truth So this is when I was doing executive coaching I had this little dog and pony show thing that I did that was sort of what I called the grid on the one side I'd ask the leaders. So do you guys have this handle? Do you folks have this handle the skills the computer skills the security skills the in this particular outfit was an electrical
00:33:23
Speaker
Company so you have the do you guys it's everything in place. Are you guys up and running here? Okay. Yes. All right Then I can help you if you have work to do on that side marketing or whatever and and that's why you're having trouble then I can't help you but if that's all in place I can help you because Those are the skills now. There's another set of skills that will give you the unfair advantage in the marketplace. Well, what's that? Dr. Bear emotional intelligence skills
00:33:53
Speaker
And that's what almost nobody's working on because they're afraid of it. The leaders themselves are afraid. But if you want to have a big leg up, then you have to learn the skills, which in the first one is the most loathsome to most success oriented people because they just want to do, do, do, do, do, push, push, success, discipline. Oh, my God, I'm tired even saying the words.
00:34:21
Speaker
but the first, you know, the first skill of emotional intelligence is to know what you're feeling. And I can't tell you how many, especially men have sat in front of me and said, well, what are you feeling brother? It's like not a clue. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, I pulled from your book. So again, when we talk about the, uh, you talk about the four basic skills of emotional intelligence. So feelings, awareness, knowing what you're feeling,
00:34:46
Speaker
Empathy of having that interest and sense of another person's emotions regulation and expression, the ability to articulate and manage emotions and then presence being in the moment emotionally. I mean, all of which, depending on the situation and your own personal comfort with it can be challenging and and even.
00:35:05
Speaker
I do a lot of work with some neurodivergent folks, and I've given talks on the autism spectrum and things like that. I mean, you're dealing with a range of different people that can handle that level of emotion. Some people are very skilled at emotional intelligence. Other people, I just want to write the code or be in the knock or whatever it is, and I don't want to interact with people.
00:35:29
Speaker
And another thing I pulled through you had some great quotes. I've also been a fan of young and I mean, so this quote of we do not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious and Maslow self actualization Nietzsche has talking about the abyss looking into the abyss. Why do you think it is that some people are able to really
00:35:49
Speaker
have that emotional awareness intelligence or is there just truth to ignorance is bliss and the less you know the better and the hell with it. I'm perfectly happy bumping around and I have the confidence to in myself and I would argue it's not necessarily confidence. It's faint faked faux confidence, but because there's certainly a lot of people out there that are very successful with very little emotional intelligence. Yeah.
00:36:20
Speaker
Well, you know, the word success is a subjective term and, you know, success in some people's mind might be completely unconscious, not feeling anything. They just have a lot of money now.
00:36:33
Speaker
Okay, good, that would not be satisfying for me in itself. But for some people it is, and it's not yours and my job to try to slap them into understanding that there's more to life. You know, life will do it itself. I had an old mentor who said, if you feel like you're working too hard as a facilitator, you're working too hard.
00:36:59
Speaker
It's like, we don't have to get these people to wake up. It's not our job. Life will do it. But when they start waking up, we have some tools to continue the journey, to deepen your life, to live a life that's wider and more passionate and that you have more access to actually experiencing this life, which is what emotions are, by the way. Those are our response to being alive. If you want some of that, we have some tools for you, right?
00:37:29
Speaker
A couple of quick vignettes. One kid came to me. Well, actually, he got kicked out of a particular country because he caused so much trouble. They kicked him out of the school. He and I like to talk. They kicked him out of Israel.
00:37:45
Speaker
So anyway, I'm sitting there doing a family session. He's got his arms crossed off. Eventually the whole family needed the support. He was just the identified patient at the time. But eventually he said, well, why do I need to go to meetings and to talk about my feelings? And I just told him, well, you don't want to be a superficial prick all your life, do you?
00:38:06
Speaker
And I was just, I was just being kind of casual with him, but that had meaning to him. He remembers that. That was like a wake up call. He said, yeah, no, I don't know. That's one, that's one thing. There was another thing that happened when I was a brand new therapist. I work in a psych hospital. There's old psychiatrists and there was this one person on the unit and as an old man.
00:38:30
Speaker
And he was really hurting. And I said to the psychiatrist, because I was new to the work. I was ready to get him in. Shouldn't we help him heal from his childhood and wake up those feelings? He said, eh, I don't know. Sometimes you get to a certain point. You might want to just consider trying to make somebody's life a little better that day rather than trying to break open all of their shit, right? So we have to look at the people we're working with one person at a time. Where are they? Are they ready? It's that old adage with,
00:39:00
Speaker
addicts, right? They're gonna be ready when they're ready. You're not gonna make them ready.
00:39:06
Speaker
But, you know, sometimes workplace horrors are a wake-up call to folks. And unfortunately, in the workplace, you're hired, we are hired there to make it all better. We wanted to, you know, conflict is why we're invited in this consultants, right? And I love it. That's, I know I can do something when people are hurting, but when everything's fine, it's like, all right, come on back to me.
00:39:32
Speaker
Right. Things aren't seen is the only thing that I've ever made much really sustainable change behind. Yeah, you asked my kids I do I have their eight now twins two girls and one of them is very comfortable with her emotions doesn't care what people think
Teaching Emotional Awareness: A Superpower
00:39:50
Speaker
she is who she is. She's very unique. And the other one
00:39:55
Speaker
She gets it from her mama, I know. And she's big emotions, big heart, but also big frustrations, big challenging of things. And we were sitting there, we were talking, and I said, it's okay to feel how you feel. And she says, I don't want to feel bad.
00:40:11
Speaker
and she was kind of fighting it. And I said, I get that. Like logically, why would I want to sit and feel, why would I want to feel those emotions rather than just numb them or push them down? Like she was trying to, like, it's no big deal. I don't want to talk about it. I said, you know, the thing is, is that when you, if you ever find a way to be comfortable with your emotions and sit in that pain and say like, yeah, this hurts, this sucks. I don't like this. I want to make it better, but I'm hurting right now and really allowing that feeling
00:40:42
Speaker
that it's your superpower. And if you learn how to do that, that's right. Yeah. And we've talked a lot about that. And I can see it. She's been working on that. But she just says these emotions are so big. She's eight. We talk about the big emotions that she can't take so long time for her to come around. And then she's like, sorry, I freaked out, mom. And I'm like, I know you didn't mean it. It was a big emotion. We talked through it. But I mean, I get it.
00:41:11
Speaker
It's hard to go there. It's hard to go there and go, this is going to be uncomfortable. This is going to be awkward. I'm an introvert. If I have to have an awkward conversation, I'm like, oh, this is going to be awkward. I'm sitting with people having awkward conversations. I tend to absorb that. That's my own. But I've done the work for myself to know, all right, Stacy, what's going on? Why are you doing this? This is reminding you. And I have that inner monologue that gets me through it.
00:41:40
Speaker
What is the motivation? Why why should we if someone was to say to you? Well, alright, why should I and I love what you said about, you know living life and everything but you know again kind of coming back to where we started in the beginning because we're almost running out of time, unfortunately, but
00:41:57
Speaker
for both the people who want to do it and want to do that work. And then for the skeptics who say, there's no such thing as soft skills. This is just a bunch of emotional mumbo jumbo. For those two camps, what's these words of wisdom and advice? And why do it? Why does it matter? Right now, I'm thinking of the
00:42:24
Speaker
making space for diversity, right? Neurodiversity is that's the new language for it, right? It's got a different brilliance. And if we can like create spaces like that, but the corporate world is just not set up for that. They got a goal. They want you to make those widgets and
00:42:41
Speaker
The best we'll do is kind of because HR has decided that you have to do a diversity thing or whatever the list is. In some workplaces, it's slightly better. And this is the point I'm going to make. Leadership and parenting are the same topic. Everything that is healthy about leadership is the same things that are healthy about parenting. And here's the thing that most parents don't want to hear and most leaders don't want to hear.
00:43:14
Speaker
You can make them do it for a short time. You can tell them to do it for a short time. You can even get in there and do it with them and show them what a good person you are and be a servant leader. You can do that for a while if you want. And none of that is sustainable. There's only one thing that's sustainable, and that is to model what you want.
00:43:33
Speaker
You're not gonna talk, I'm not gonna talk my daughter. We're not gonna talk our kids into being what we want them to be. They're gonna model, they're gonna see that I'm a man that has access to my emotions and I can sit with my emotions. I don't have to be reactive and hurt people with it or to run away from it or medicate it. That's the modeling I do with my, I've done with my daughter mostly. It's working out so far.
00:43:59
Speaker
I don't put a lot of, I've never, this is another experiment I've tried that's working so far, come back in five years, I don't know, but she's 21, and I've never punished her for anything. Of course, she's a pretty easy kid. So I will say that, but I've never taken shit away from her, taken away her phone and all, because, oh my God, the horrors of screens.
Personal Growth and the Power of Vulnerability
00:44:21
Speaker
Oh, come on. What was it when I was rock and roll was gonna ruin me.
00:44:28
Speaker
Yeah, whatever. Now it's AI. Oh, my God. AI is going to take us out. Oh, my God. Everybody breathe and just do your inner work, will you? And then model it for each other. And here's one last thing on that. I don't think you're going to create a place in the workplace for people to do the work.
00:44:48
Speaker
You might give them a little toe in the water by using a personality instrument. Like I use the Enneagram. I love the Enneagram. Maybe that's for another podcast, you and I, or the Berkman. The Berkman is really, because it starts a conversation in a fun way about our shadow.
00:45:10
Speaker
To mention Jung again, we can in a fun way talk about, oh yeah, I'm a control freak. Yeah, he's a control freak. Rather than having to kill each other off around it, we can sort of play with it. So it's a doorway. But the real work happens
00:45:26
Speaker
It has to be a coaching or a therapeutic somatic, someone that's trained somatically because all of our problems are lodged in the body. You are not going to figure it out in this thing called the intellect. We are very proud of our intellect. It ain't that great.
00:45:47
Speaker
The trauma is lodged in the body and it's running the show. We have to get into it. I run workshops called the Deep Waters Experience every other month. People dive in and break that stuff loose, let it go and have a whole new level of freedom. But it's not permanent. You have to keep going to groups or people. We have to find our people. That's what if anybody's listening this and say, well, how can I do it?
00:46:11
Speaker
You have to find your people. And there's different 12-step groups that are open to feelings expression. You have to get to the feelings in the body. Grief is the river that washes the trauma away. I know that's kind of...
00:46:27
Speaker
I didn't mean to make a little poem there, but it's how we're built. It's our physical healing mechanism is grief, and we are running around trying to create security systems to make sure we never cry.
00:46:47
Speaker
And so hopefully maybe you and I and this group of folks that are listening, now we're going to take this message out and we're going to create safer places for people to have their emotions. That's kind of my mission. I'm a little older than you. Wait a minute. No, I'm a lot older than you.
00:47:03
Speaker
And, you know, I'm hoping to leave a rhythm of that in the world, a little, a few more drops. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I feel the same way. It's like if, if there's somebody out there that listens and pauses for a second and their life is a little bit better or, and it doesn't come without a lot of work and pain and the growth and everything, but it is worth it.
00:47:28
Speaker
It is powerful. And yeah, to find those resources, I love that of find your people, we're your people. There are your people. And the advent of the internet makes it so much out there. And you may be vulnerable, but in a way, it's like you're just so much more vulnerable when you're not comfortable with your emotions. When you're comfortable with it, when you own it and you can get to that authentic self, then you're kind of
00:47:54
Speaker
You know who you are. It's not scary anymore. If you're committed to being perfect at having your feelings, forget about it. It never gets perfect. And especially when you're new at it, you're not going to be great at it. But you'll be appreciated in circles of folks saying, wow, thank you for being so vulnerable, man. It's like, it's beautiful work. And I'm happy to talk to anybody if they want to reach out to me.
00:48:19
Speaker
And I can direct you to low cost, free, by donation circles of folks to help those emotions start coming forward.
00:48:32
Speaker
That
Conclusion and Further Engagement Options
00:48:33
Speaker
is great. I will include links to all of your work and everything when this gets posted so that people can reach out because I think you're just an incredible resource and I enjoyed reading your book. And thank you so much for coming on here and for being a guest and sharing your world into my world, which they don't meet all that often. So it means a lot to have you on here. So thank you so much.
00:48:59
Speaker
Yeah, thank you. Thanks for your good work. I've been in that world. It's not it's it's hard to be a touchy feely leader in that world. So I'm sending you a lot of love and a lot of support. Keep breathing. Yes, keep breathing. All right. Well, thank you so much. And to my listeners, thank you so much for listening. If you have any questions or comments, you can you can email and message me comments. And I will see you next time. So thank you.