Owning the Turbulence with Jodi Akst

How do you cope when life throws you turbulence?

In this episode Johnny G talks with Jodi Akst, Executive Coach, as she shares with Refractive listeners the system she has fine-tuned over the years for not just navigating- but OWNING the chaos and turbulence that inevitably appears in life. From understanding what really matters to leveraging available resources, she offers a simple, powerful method for reclaiming your power whenever life sends you some rough air.

Please visit Jodi’s website at https://www.JodiAkstCoaching.com to learn more about her services, subscribe to her newsletter, or ask any questions you may have.

Jodi referenced Daniel Pink’s book “Drive,” you can find information about Daniel Pink and his books at https://www.danpink.com

For information on how I might be able to help you find clarity and step fully into your power, visit www.refractivecoaching.com

For other episodes on increasing serenity, try Self Care for Parents and The Ancient Truths of Acceptance & PLINKO

Find below a transcript via automated software; please excuse any errors.

Ever since you can remember, you felt something in your chest telling you to move, to love, to speak, to try day after day. You pretend you don’t hear calling, or maybe you dismiss it as silliness or worse that it’s there ready for you. And it will wait for you as long as you. My name is Johnny G and I invite you to join me on a journey of awakening. As we dare to embrace our light. This is refractive.

Hello everybody. And welcome to another episode of refractive. Today. I am here with Jody axed. Jody is an executive coach based in Baltimore, and she spent the majority of her professional life working for a nonprofit that sought to end the inequities in our country’s public school systems. She decided to take that passion she had for helping other people and blend it with a home life that felt right. And so she founded her own coaching practice. Jody asked coaching today helps people who are seeking to live a more mission based life. So I’m really happy to have her here today, as we discuss a topic that I think is going to resonate with a lot of people and we decided to call it Jody, owning the turbulence. Right?
Speaker 2 00:01:26 Absolutely. Welcome to
Speaker 1 00:01:28 Refractive. I’m so happy to have you here. How are you doing today?
Speaker 2 00:01:32 I’m doing well. Thank you for having me, Johnny.
Speaker 1 00:01:36 Um, I think we have a really nice outline of material to cover. And I mean, if there’s any time where the turbulence feels especially relevant, I think that’s now
Speaker 2 00:01:47 Right in its simplest terms. When I think about owning the term turbulence, I think about just getting through the hard stuff. And uh, if anything, 2020 has been a lot of the hard stuff.
Speaker 1 00:01:59 Yes. Everything feels hard, but you know what today? I like to say all is, well, I have my coffee, I have water. I have my place decorated for the holidays. I’m sitting in a comfortable chair talking with a friend of mine on zoom right now. I mean, what else do I want? It’s like the universe just handed it to me on a silver platter.
Speaker 2 00:02:25 Uh, well, your space is beautiful. Looks like you’re all ready for the holidays, which is really exciting. We just finished deliberating Hanukkah and our house. Um, for me, the only other thing that’s going to make this perfect is that my kids and dog don’t interrupt us. So we’ll see if we can get through that. This is about owning the turbulence.
Speaker 1 00:02:46 Right. So talk to me about the framework that you see for this episode.
Speaker 2 00:02:51 Yeah. So when I think about owning the Chevy Lyndon, as I said, sort of getting through the hard stuff, it takes me back to the reason we landed on the word turbulence is it just takes me back to that when you’re sitting in an airplane and it starts to get bumping and you just think to yourself, Oh my God, when is this going to end? Is this turbulence? Or is there something more going on? Can I stay calm? Can I reassure myself that the plane is not going to fall from the sky? Right. And so that concept of sort of getting through the turbulence is something that I think we all feel in big and small ways at work and at home. So for me, it’s all about knowing that there, that you can get to calm that you were going to get to a better place. Um, and that, that is true when, whether it’s trivalent in your home life or your personal life. And this matters to me. And the reason I wanted to bring this topic forward today is because I’m a leader and I’m a mom in equal measure. And so I have many other humans that are looking to me, um, for cues on how they should feel, how they should act, what they should do.
Speaker 1 00:04:12 And the canine to
Speaker 2 00:04:15 A puppy was a Corona virus puppy. So this topic is just something that that’s really important to me. And now as a coach, because I have a framework for owning turbulence in my life, which I’ll share in a moment, I can relate to my clients and I can help them create their own process. It may not be mine, but it can, I can help them create their own process for getting through those, those tough times. So what do I mean when I’m talking about OMI owning the turbulence and what is this process? So for me, it’s four steps. So it’s finding the calm, which includes anchoring in what matters. And what’s important to me, it’s about getting clear on my options and setting that vision for moving forward. It’s then step three, leveraging the resources and supports that I have all around me to then four, share that vision with everybody involved in whatever it is that we’re going through and getting buy-in so that we can all weather the storm together. And this approach is something that’s allowed me both as a mom and as a professional to continue to reach Michaels, um, and hopefully become better at both
Speaker 1 00:05:34 This really duct Hibbs, uh, dovetails well with some of my guiding principles earlier this year, people who listened to the podcast will know that I took a road trip and it was kind of like a last minute surprise road trip that lasted two months because the apartment I was moving into flooded two or three days before I was moving in, I decided in that moment, uh, to call it above the storm, right? Because when you’re flying in a plane, you hear the pilot say, Oh, we’re going to go around this storm, or we’re going to go over this storm, ladies and gentlemen to avoid turbulence. And so just like for you, it really resonated with me that I don’t need to suffer through pain for the sake of suffering through pain. If there’s a way to bypass it, I don’t need to be a martyr and lay down and suffer for idealistic reasons. And so I love this idea of taking what can be a chaotic situation, breaking it down to more manageable parts and applying it to a smoother life. That sounds really good. Does that kind of capture what you’re talking about?
Speaker 2 00:06:43 Yeah, absolutely captures what I’m talking about. I think when we’re in that moment and things just feel, I think another word that comes to mind chaotic, right? Like owning the turbulence or stabilizing the chaos or sort of two, two phrases or ways. I like to talk about it and think about it, but in my personal life and professionally, and for me, it’s all about understanding what the end game is like, where are we going? And to remember that at the end of the day, we ha we have to try to keep it simple, right? Like when you’re in that moment, your instinct is to catastrophize. If, if I have a word of, of advice or some wisdom to share, it’s when you’re in those moments that you actually want to do the opposite, which is to sort of narrow whatever you’re thinking about and in your approach to handling it and get really down to that common denominator of what you’re trying to accomplish.
Speaker 1 00:07:50 How did you arrive at this conclusion?
Speaker 2 00:07:56 So it’s so interesting when I think about this, you know, I think back to when I was a girl, right, like just sort of who I was naturally like nature versus nurture. And I sorta was just like part of my being my personality was to always sort of like figure out easily and quickly, like, what am I trying to accomplish here? So my parents love to tell this story of why I was in fourth grade, which is really funny because my son is now in fourth grade. So I’m, I’m watching him at that age. So thinking about myself as a ten-year-old and I had to do a book report and I hated reading, I just, there was something about, it was hard for me. I didn’t like it. And so I, I picked a book on dogs, which was a favorite topic of mine. And I picked up a book that was almost like a textbook that had chapters on dogs.
Speaker 2 00:08:47 And I realized as I started looking through this book that I could need the beginning and the end of each of these chapters and understand what it was really about. And that my goal was to just do well in school. Right. Like that was my goal. Um, and so I got really focused on the fact of like, what would it take to get a good grade on this report? And then, and I was able to figure that out and just sort of get down to the basics. And that has really become a methodology for myself, I think too similarly to college. So my whole life as a student, I was not one of those people that spent Saturdays in the library. Like I was able, always able to sort of understand what is the main point? What are we supposed to learn? How do I apply it? And it allowed me to be really capable of just sort of zeroing in on, as I said, that that lowest common denominator. And so it’s, I think some of it is instinctual. And then I think for me, some of it is applied. And then that is where I can think about other examples in my personal life or my work life, where being able to sort of look among the chaos and zero in on the end game has always been my approach.
Speaker 1 00:10:14 Let me tell you, as I worked my way up in my career from line staff to leadership and human resources, I noticed quickly that the difference between the people who were in charge and the people who weren’t in charge was this ability to have a perspective. And I remember when I was on the front line of companies, I cared so much about the little details that, I mean, I would get lost in them. And when I found myself driving culture and, you know, managing performance of, of teams, I realized that there’s a place for that fine detail orientation, but there’s also a place for, for a high level perspective. So, I mean, it’s a, it’s a skill that obviously for you was innate.
Speaker 2 00:11:10 I think so. Right. And I think that there are ways in which we also adapt to our environment. So I think about like my husband and I, we were newly engaged. I was living in New York city. We had this long distance relationship. He came in and we spent a whole weekend registering. Yeah, exactly. Right. And we met a dear friend of ours for a drink after this long day of picking out, chatting up. And, um, she, uh, she happened to also be my boss. So she knew me very well professionally. And we had, we had formed this amazing friendship and she, we talked about our day and she looked at us and she goes, Jody, you are a suffice, you know what you want. And as soon as you find it, you’re done, like it’s met your needs. You feel really good about it and you’re ready to move on. And then on the other hand, my husband is what she called a maximizer. If he’s making a decision, he has to research every option out there. Right? Like the, when we were, you know, I think back to like picking the stroller when, when we were pregnant with our first child, I mean, he knew every single stroller that ever existed or relating it back to the registering. Right. He wanted to look into every China pattern in the store. And I was like, Oh my God, I know what I want.
Speaker 2 00:12:35 And so right. When I think about the two of us and we’ve been able, you know, you asked like, is it a Nate? And it is a Nate. And then I look at the two of us, I say, okay, but we’ve been able as a couple to merge these two styles in a way that has allowed us to be really successful as a team. Um, because there, you don’t always have to be as precise and efficient as I like to be. And you don’t always have to be as expansive as my husband is when it comes to decision-making. And so I do think I am on one end of the spectrum, but that there are many people that have just as strong of an ability to own the turbulence that may fall on all ends of that. Excuse me, may be on all points of that continuum in terms of, of how they want their process to look when they are in these situations.
Speaker 1 00:13:30 All right. Well, that’s, I mean, I feel like that’s an important caveat that this methodology doesn’t require a certain set of gifts or abilities. It really is a formula that anybody can apply,
Speaker 2 00:13:44 Correct. It’s like anything else, it’s a framework and how you choose to apply. It is going to be based on what works best for you. So for me, somebody that is really typically able to pinpoint that end game really quickly, um, I can move past that point on to looking at options and setting my vision fairly quickly for other people. They might have to spend a little bit more time getting clear on what that end game is. They may have to do a little bit more internal reflection, or they may have to do some external processing to understand what that true end game is before they’re ready to move on to the next step. So there’s no right or wrong in any of the stages of the process in terms of how you, how one individual might experience it.
Speaker 1 00:14:37 Okay. So can you recap for us these four steps again, because it’s already, I mean, my mom’s already gone in a million ways.
Speaker 2 00:14:47 Absolutely. Step one is finding the, everybody
Speaker 0 00:14:52 Get out a pen, Siri, record this for me. Okay.
Speaker 2 00:15:00 Finding the calm anchoring in what matters to you, what is the end game? What is really important, if you could sum up what you want to try to, what you want the end of this turbulence period, to look like, what would that end goal look like? Step two, getting clear on your options and vision. So you may know what your end game is, and then there can be tons of different ways to get there. So step two is about spending time thinking about what are my options, and then what is my vision for how we’re going to get there. Three is leveraging your resources and support. So you’re never expected, or I don’t ever expect anyone to have to get through the trivial it’s Allah. And then lastly, sharing this vision with anybody involved. So just to sort of make this come alive a little bit, I can talk a bit about what this looks like in my professional life and in home.
Speaker 2 00:15:59 And I’ll start by saying that I have two amazing children. So I have a 13 year old daughter and a 10 year old son, and they each have their, their challenges. So our daughter has moderate to severe ADHD. And our son was born with a congenital heart defect and had open heart surgery when he was 12 weeks old. And he has extreme anxiety, which is correlated to children that have open heart surgery. So their brains work differently. So my home life can be can’t. Um, so when I applied this formula to home and work, I go through the same steps. It just looks a little bit different. So for example, um,
Speaker 0 00:16:43 With the chart, like counting that step one, so maybe you haven’t already refrigerator, I don’t know.
Speaker 2 00:16:51 I’ll tell you, I love a spreadsheet, love a spreadsheet, which I can talk about in a little bit, like what role that plays in terms of this process for me. But I do write, I do like an organizing tool so that if I can get past that emotional initial charge that you’re feeling, whether it’s at home or at, or at work to then help yourself get grounded in what matters. Um, so if it’s helpful, I can, I can talk through what this looks like a little bit. Go ahead, please. Great. I think back to my early days in my career, so as you mentioned, I was a leader in a national nonprofit. I was the program director and later partner for a program called the New York city teaching fellows, which is a program that recruited career changers into education. We were early, early, early in the tenure of understanding how to run these programs.
Speaker 2 00:17:53 We, um, the organization, I worked with consulted to the New York city department of education, and we had tremendous success right out of the gate with this program and found ourselves in a situation where we process these to run the program. Hadn’t caught up to the pace at which we were growing. And this is the point at which I was brought into the team. It became really clear that we needed a singular focus, which is that at any moment in time, we need it needed to take us less than two minutes to know where all our thousands of applicants were in their process of admissions. That was step one, my team. And I got really clear that I should be able to say at any point in time, where is X in the process and anybody on the team should be able to tell me within a couple of minutes?
Speaker 2 00:18:50 Yeah. A similar example. It would be at home for a period of time. Family dinner was just chaos. Like it was, it was not what we wanted to be family dinner. Is it very important to my husband and I, and we had a goal as a family that we would be able to have a family dinner where both children were sitting at the table for a minimum of 10 minutes conversation in which nobody was talking over each other and everybody was feeling heard and seen. Right. So we got very clear on that. Um, so that was step one in both of those scenarios. So then we moved on to thinking about the options and the vision. So at work with the data management system, my vision was that we would have an online applicant tracking tool, but where we would be able to see where everybody else was, every anybody else was in the process. So that vision came into clarity based on my end goal of wanting to be able to know at any point in time where anybody else was in the process at home. As I said, that vision was a minimum of 10 minutes, have a really nice dinner in which we were all sharing our dates. Okay. So that became step two. So then step three becomes leveraging your resources
Speaker 0 00:20:20 For the dinner. Like I can’t wait for, to hear the resources for dinner. Go ahead, go ahead.
Speaker 2 00:20:24 There’s this vision. And now we have to actually get there. And this is where obviously the bulk of the work happens. And in some situations, this, this step of the process can be months. It could even be here is right. It doesn’t happen overnight, but this is about leveraging your resources and figuring out how you’re going to actually do it. So at work, I knew that app that we needed to develop an applicant tracking system. And so then it came down to looking at our budget, looking at our people, resources, figuring out whether we have the skills on our staff to build this, or whether I need to have needed to hire other people. So it, it meant, you know, reconfiguring the budget and, uh, making it a priority to hire. We ended up hiring two developers who built us that the applicant tracking tool and at home, my husband and I looked at each other and said, we don’t know how to do this.
Speaker 2 00:21:24 And we leveraged a family therapist. And so we, as a family, went to family therapy to not have to solve it ourselves, if not getting owning the turbulence doesn’t mean you have to do it by yourself. And then step four, in terms of sharing the vision and getting the buy-in at work, it was about the whole team, understanding what the new processes were going to be for how we worked through our applicant system. But we built the process for processing applicants to align with the tool vice versa. And then we had to get, you know, and get the entire team trained on the new processes and make sure they were comfortable and make sure that we have the quality controls and all of that, that you do when you’re putting in place a new process. And at home family therapists work with us. So that as a family, we, we created this vision together.
Speaker 2 00:22:26 So our kids were part of the solution. The therapist gave them lots of options and they decided they wanted to use a timer. They said that would feel really good if we knew that we could set a timer and that mom and dad had an expectation that we would sit here for 10 minutes, it made it doable for them. And so that was, that was what we did to realize our vision of being able to sit for 10 minutes. And now, you know, a couple of years later, it’s not uncommon for us to have 30 minute dinners or even longer because the kids learned what it looked like and felt like to be part of that and to get all of the benefits of having that time as a family every night, those are a couple of examples of how, how those steps actually look in the real world.
Speaker 1 00:23:21 You know, I find that when something starts to go, maybe not even wrong, but when something feels like it’s not going in the direction, I wanted it to like my first reaction as a perfectionist and as a people pleaser, I mean, I got to say is to scratch everything and start over and say, I’m not doing this right. And this whole plan is doomed and we’re going to have to start over. And it feels like this gives an alternative to that gut response.
Speaker 2 00:24:04 So these are obviously the four steps that you can do sequentially, but then you can go back to any of the steps. At any point in time with work, we were halfway through building the applicant tracking tool. We weren’t where we needed to go. And our client was like breathing down our neck about the inefficiencies in our process. And so we needed a bandaid. We needed an alternative solution to get us through that period of time prior to having the, like the big vision, um, real well. And so we had to have a concurrent manual process that we did for a time being. And that was okay. It didn’t pull us away from the end game. It wasn’t like, Oh, no, like we can’t do this applicant tracking tool because now the client needs this faster. It was like, okay. So this is just a bum.
Speaker 2 00:25:00 We’re going to continue with our vision, which we feel really strongly is the right vision. And we’re gonna do this concurrent process to continue to move us forward while we are getting to the final approach. Um, and then at home, I mean, if I tell you that we would use the timer, we got to a place where things were good. And then, you know, six months later it was like, we’ve never had a family dinner, right? Like things got crazy. Again, the kids were not wanting to come to the table or they were shouting over each other. And we went back to the time or we went back to the base. And I think that that is something that I focus on a lot in my work and with my clients, which is when you’ve tried something and it’s worked, if you veer away from it, it doesn’t mean it didn’t work. It means that sometimes you just have to go back and make sure you’re implementing it with fidelity. And that’s what we did at home. We brought that timer back out and we will bring it out anytime we needed to, when our vision of our family dinner is veering from what wa
Speaker 1 00:26:15 That feels comforting. Like I actually like, like, I have a response to hearing you say that because even today, while I don’t necessarily let those perfectionistic impulses drive me the way they used to, I’ve developed tools and systems and different beliefs. And I’ve healed a lot around that. I still, I mean, even decorating that Christmas tree, like there, there was a, a point it’s like, wait, I need to like, take the lights off the tree, take the tree out of the stand, recut the base of the tree. And that actually went through my mind because it wasn’t doing what I wanted it to do. And it’s like, wait, hold on, hold on. We don’t need to start everything all over. It doesn’t mean that the system is broken. It means we just need to go back and look, where does it make sense to reapply a tool? You know?
Speaker 2 00:27:14 Absolutely. Right. The old cliche don’t throw away the baby with the bath water. Right. I think there are very few instances where you have to start from scratch. Um, yeah. Yeah. Sometimes there might be, but if you’re really clear end game, you usually have made some sort of progress towards it to the extent that you don’t have to start. For sure. So one of the other things that I’ve learned over the years, right, as I’ve grown as a human, is that stabilizing Cass or owning the turbulence, isn’t just about the doing, it has to be about the feeling. So I think back to early in my career, I was relentless about goals. I mean, if people would say, tell me about Jody, they would say she’s results oriented. Like she’s just going to get there, um,
Speaker 1 00:28:13 Group, project people that was like cracking the whip, you know, handing out the, the assignments to the group.
Speaker 2 00:28:20 Right? Absolutely. I was a no excuses. Like we are getting there, I think back. So I’m only five feet tall. And I lived in New York city, as I mentioned. And I, because of my height, I wore heels and I walked miles in New York city every day in my high heels. And I’m not really known for my grace and I have this, I have this like determined walk, right? Like my coworkers always knew when I was coming. Cause I’d be clomping through the office, a clipboard in one hand, my water bottle and the other just clumping to my next meeting. And that sort of, that image of myself, when I think back to it just symbolizes this laser focus that I had on meeting our goals, which served me well in a lot of instances, but it, it’s not what true leadership is really about. And so as I’ve matured, I’ve learned how to be relentless towards my goals and just softer in depth.
Speaker 2 00:29:23 Um, I still clump around quite a bit, right like that, but it’s no longer about no excuses. It’s no longer about the goal regardless of what else is going on. Um, and this really, I think I learned this lesson more so at home than I even did at work. I, you know, when I became a mom and I had these two children with these emotional challenges, um, my instinct was to over plan and over control. I just have this approach, which is if I have the spreadsheet and I know what we’re supposed to be doing scheduled every moment in every day, then things can’t go wrong. Right. And one of my children’s early therapist said, if you want to actually teach your children to be flexible, you have to model that flexibility.
Speaker 1 00:30:20 I don’t know if we’re ready for that. I mean, Lord,
Speaker 2 00:30:24 I don’t think that there were words that my husband, that, that were uttered that my husband, wasn’t more excited to hear.
Speaker 1 00:30:31 Oh, I can imagine. Because Jody, you seem like someone, I would love to walk through the mall with, you know, cause like I need, when I’m walking through the mall, I need someone who knows where they want to go. And I need someone who is not moseying standing in the direct center of the pathway with or four Nordstrom bags blocking everybody. Right. Like I need, I need a mall partner when this is all over Jody. And I feel like you’re my mall partner through that bad boy.
Speaker 2 00:31:03 Oh my God. Happy, happy, happy to do that. Um,
Speaker 1 00:31:09 Okay. So I took you completely off track.
Speaker 2 00:31:12 That’s fine. I love that. And that’s so true, but here’s the thing, the difference between who I was before and who I am now is that we will still have a plan and I still can get us through that mall as quickly as you want to go, we might venture off and do a store that we hadn’t planned to. Right. Like it will be a little bit more fun than just the dog and determination to get through there as quickly as possible. Um, and you know, now that my kids are older, um, they, they keep it real for me. So they, um, when they see me being flexible or realize that I’m, I’m not being over-planned or not, you know, don’t have everything. So tightly wound, my, you know, my name is Jody. They call that person Joni. Um, and they get so excited and it comes from, this is like my daughter and I were out shopping one day and a sales person misheard me in terms of what my name was and started calling me Joanie. And she thought that was hilarious. Joni is now my persona when I need to lighten up. And when I’m not trying to over control. And it really speaks to the fact that when you’re going through day to day and particularly in tough times that the, the light, the lightened approach often just makes it that much easier to weather the storm.
Speaker 1 00:32:44 So, okay. So this is great. When we’re talking about the inside work here, we’re talking about, I’m putting on my Joanie hat today and I’m making a conscious effort to, to own the turbulence through these four steps, through understanding what’s happening relating to my vision. Right. And, uh, leveraging my resources and getting buy in. But what happens when there are people around you like hard-headed coworkers, um, or, you know, you talked about like working with a child who doesn’t necessarily see the value in being flexible. Like I want what I want when I want it and I want it, let me be clear. I want it. So how do you handle this? How do you become Joanie when you don’t have a willing partner who is supporting you in this drive?
Speaker 2 00:33:37 Yeah. So I think it comes down to two things, right? So one is myself having confidence that, that we’re going to be okay. Right. Like, so I do those spreadsheets so that I’m clear on my goals and my visions. And then I have to let it go. I just started to have to be, and the other is communicate, communicate, communicate. So, and this is, and it’s communicating about expectations and visions, but not necessarily the, how would you actually make, which actually makes me think of, um, Daniel Pink’s work. So he’s an author who often raised about motivation. He’s known for a book called drive and a couple others drive. Yeah. And he says, which I agree with him wholeheartedly when people have their own way of doing something, they are more likely to do it when you’re in that situation where the buy-in is, is not great, where you were hoping it would be, you have that child that wants what they want or the coworker that’s not quite there yet.
Speaker 2 00:34:45 In terms of this vision, it’s really about going back to the shared vision and making sure that they understand what it is and then collaborating. And this works for a two year old, a 10 year old, a 13 year old. I’ll tell you when my kids are older, whether it works on their oldest and it works with coworkers, which is okay, so here’s where we’re trying to go. How do you want to do it? What, what matters to you? And then truly as a leader and as a mom being okay with what their response is so that they then have a lot of autonomy and a lot of ability to do it their way. And this is what’s really exciting to me about this is that that’s really what the core tenants of coaching. So with my coaching clients, my, one of the main things I’m doing is helping them find their way, whatever, whatever it is that we’re talking about, it’s about finding their way when you’re in a situation where you yourself have a vision and have an idea of how you want to go, you are, you need to be open to others, what they want as well.
Speaker 2 00:36:07 And then, you know, as a coach, it’s all about supporting my clients to find their way, and then equipping them with the support and confidence to be able to reach their goals.
Speaker 3 00:36:23 I hear you say, you’re listening. And I’m glad to hear that because when I look back at my career and all the times, let’s say a company would get a strategy, come down from the corporate office and we’d go to implement it. And we would have round tables and, uh, discussion groups and all this stuff about how to implement this and that. I found so often that the people who were managing the teams directly were not really interested in input and the people that you’ve invited to a round table to give input, no, when you aren’t interested in the input.
Speaker 3 00:37:16 And so this idea of being willing to hear and accept as valid, even if it’s not the end point of the conversation, but accept as valid the result in comments. I think that, I think that matters. People want to be heard. They want to be acknowledged, you know, to disregard someone’s concerns with a solution or a plan or a strategy, whether it’s how to, how to make these unbearable, 10 minutes of family dinner go by, or whether it is reorganizing after a mass layoff at work, like whatever it is. People want to know that what they have to say counts.
Speaker 2 00:38:02 Yeah. One of the things that I believe really strongly in, um, and once again applies both professionally and personally is being really clear on the negotiables and the non-negotiables. So with my kids, sometimes we use a red, yellow, green system at work. I often use, I feel strongly about this, or I don’t feel strongly about this so that you’re calibrating, people’s expectations about whether they do have a voice and whether they don’t. And so that way, when they don’t, you’re very clear on that. I feel very strongly about this. This is how we’re going to do this is very different than so I have this idea. I don’t feel so strongly about it. I have a vision for where we’re going, but I’d love to get your input for how we’re going to get there. And then truly listening to that. And in most cases ending up with a much better end product than you might’ve on your own. And so I’m a huge, huge believer in calibrating those expectations and then following through. So if you believe that something needs to be done a certain way, say that right out of the gate, don’t give people a false sense that you’re listening. And if you don’t, if you really do want to collaborate, then be very clear that you’re going to collaborate and then make sure you actually do that. So that approach has worked for me and I, I believe really strongly.
Speaker 3 00:39:36 So for the listeners, I want to, I wanna, I want to return to this and underlying it real quick, because I’m imagining that if I were listening to this, I hear these four steps and they sound great, but it requires the participation of the people around me. And sometimes those people around me are the resources that we’re talking about, leveraging and things in order for this system to help smooth over the difficulties. It requires a certain integrity and integrity on the part of, I care enough about you to bring this to you. And to be honest with you to say, I’m sorry, this is not a discussion that it makes sense to have. We already have our plan in place. And I just want to be honest about that or asking for feedback when you mean it and being respectful of that, you know, that integrity matters, I suppose, when you’re trying to get people to buy into your plan.
Speaker 2 00:40:47 Yeah. Integrity. And the other thing I would add onto that is transparency. So, um, when I think about my values and what matters to me in professional situations, candor and transparency are really high on that list. Um, and that, that comes down to respect, right? Which is that you, the people around you need to feel trapped, need to feel respected and to feel respected. I believe you share things in a transparent manner so that they understand, and you treat them as adults that are capable of handling situations. And, and when you’re doing that, then you’re showing up with a ton of integrity and the people around you are always understand where the, where do they fit in both in terms of, um, how you value them and when you want to meaningfully involve them. Um, and I think that goes a really long way of building collaborative teams and being able to get through any turbulence that you might find yourselves.
Speaker 3 00:41:58 All right. So Jody, take us home. Let’s bottom line, all of this cat, because as a former trainer, which was a major part of my career, anytime we’re given people a series of steps or whatever, we gotta, we gotta repeat it again. So walk us through some of your main points and then recap those four key steps for us.
Speaker 2 00:42:20 Absolutely. And I’ll start by saying as sort of a theme of this whole podcast, which is that this is what’s worked for me. So I invite the audience to take what they’re finding meaningful and useful in this process and go with it and adapt it as it might work better for them, for me, when I find myself in a situation that is overly chaotic or is feeling very turbulent, I first find the calm, right? I anchor in what matters and what’s important. I get really clear on that big idea. And then I look at my options to set my vision for where I’m trying to go. Once that is clear, I look at my resources and my support. I don’t have to do this alone. You don’t have to do this alone. There’s nothing that I’ve gotten through in my professional career or my personal life that I hadn’t leveraged resources and asked for help.
Speaker 2 00:43:15 Um, and I don’t think I said that in those simple terms on this podcast at this point, asking for help is really important and everybody should feel comfortable doing it. And then lastly involve everybody that is part of the solution and get a shared vision and buy-in with them. And that’s going to make everything you’re going to be able to get through whatever you’re getting through faster. And, and everyone involved is gonna want to get there with you. So those are the four steps that have worked really well for me. I don’t know when this is going to air, but we’re, we’re sort of at the end of 2020 right now. So as we sort of close the book on this chapter and move into 2021, I hope we all find ourselves dealing with a whole lot less turbulence, but know that whatever is ahead of us, that everybody can be equipped to really own the turbulence, not let it derail them and get to a place that they want to get to and meet their needs.
Speaker 3 00:44:15 Yeah. What are the things that I was thinking about recently is on Facebook every year without fail by the second half of December, people are posting about what a year it was and how next year’s gotta be better. And I mean, it is an annual tradition about talking about how awful the year was and while 2020 was certainly noteworthy for a lot of reasons. Yeah. I think it is important to maintain a perspective that things, how can I say this? First of all, I want to be respectful for people. Who’ve had their lives turned upside down and I don’t want to diminish any tragedies or anything like that because you know, that’s not what that’s, that’s, that’s not the spirit of what I’m saying, but I want to say that there are gifts that each of us were born with and also may have been given over the years and they might be experiences.
Speaker 3 00:45:27 They might be people in our lives, but we all have these gifts that are like battery packs. And they allow us to move through a slow patch and move through the quick sand that we find ourselves in from time to time. And I believe that if we forget our access to these gifts, whatever they are, we’re doing ourselves a disservice we’re hurting our lives. And we are giving in to this turbulence. We’re screaming that the plane’s going down when that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s probably not what’s happening. And, uh, you know, I think the perspective of finding your calm, looking at the options, leveraging your supports and resources, reaching out for help and noticing what you have around you to make it through and then partnering, getting buy in communicating, being transparent. Um, you know, I just think that this is a valuable path to regain some of the power that we may have given up inadvertently maybe during difficulty and whether you need to tape this to your bathroom wall so that you can remember and internalize this, whether you want to play this episode on repeat, I’m not going to stop you from doing that please, but whatever it is you need to do, uh, maybe you even carry a little note of your favorite point of this in your, in your wallet or in your purse.
Speaker 3 00:47:16 Maybe it just says, what are my resources right now? What is my calm? What really matters right now, having just, even one of those little valuable points, staying your orbit can be a game changer when something unexpected knocks you off your balance. And, and the whole point of this podcast, it’s always been to give people resources, to step into their own magnificent power. And I feel like through your introspection and observations, you’ve been able to come up with a tool that can be helpful for people. And I, I want to thank you so much for the thoughtfulness of sharing that with us today. And I’d like to ask you Jody, to share with our listeners how they can get in touch with you. Maybe they have questions. Maybe they’re curious about your practice. Maybe they just want to thank you for your, for your efforts today. Um, but how can people learn more about you and your coaching and get in touch?
Speaker 2 00:48:22 Well, Johnny, first of all, thank you so much for having me today. This is so fun and I hope that your listeners are walking away with a few nuggets that they are going to be able to take into 2021, no matter what this year brings us. My website is Jody axed, coaching.com. And I will spell that J O D I, my last name is axed, which is a as in Apple, K as in kite, S as in Sam, T as in Tom, a mouthful, but actually a phonetic. So Jody asked Jody taxed coaching.com my website, and on there, uh, there are ways to get in touch with me. So I would welcome anybody to reach out questions or just to say hi, or just subscribe to my newsletter or whatever way in which, um, you would like to.
Speaker 3 00:49:13 All right. Well, thank you, Jody, that does it for today. Anything else that you want to say before we close out
Speaker 2 00:49:21 Just that Johnny, this podcast is, is a joy and thank you for bringing it into the world. Um, and for having me as a guest in the conversation,
Speaker 3 00:49:32 I appreciate that. Thank you, Jerry. All right, everybody you’ve been listening to refractive podcast. This is Johnny G and my guest today was Jody ax. And you can find her contact information in the show notes on the podcast page, the webpage, the YouTube page, et cetera. I am a personal, spiritual and career coach. I’m based out of Washington, DC. I am also a speaker and I’m here to help people step into their own authentic power and live their best lives. So if you’d like to get in touch with me, my email address is Johnny J O H N N [email protected]. You can also visit the website for information on the ways that I can be of [email protected]. Thank you so much, everyone for listening and always remember, be good to each other and aim your
Speaker 4 00:50:23 Take care.