The Soulful Leader Podcast
The Soulful Leader Podcast
Ep 166 Finding Clarity in the Chaos
Leaders who can articulate their thoughts grab attention. Leaders who can articulate their hearts create impact and connect hearts. Both of which are much needed in today’s world. Building that skill is not about talking - the real secret is the effort those powerful leaders put into listening.
Listening to what’s being said behind someone’s words.
So often, people seem to ramble about nothing for hours. As a society that idealizes the intellect, we live from the head up. We've disconnected from the (literal) brain cells that exist in our hearts and gut. We're so busy up in our heads trying to figure everything out we can’t help but ramble.
So, as a leader, how do you get to the crux? How do you sort through it all and find the nuggets?
This is a subject close to Maren and Stephanie’s hearts and they have a blast unpacking it together. Be sure to listen to the second half where they give 3 distinct skills that will help you further your own impact!
- 00:44 how you process the world impacts how you speak
- 03:41 Towards and away motivators
- 07:38 Shadow piece
- 11:40 Skill 1 Listening to what’s behind what’s being said
- 16:34 Skill 2 The question to ask
- 18:34 Skill 3 Shifting the energy
- 20:33 Restoring ourselves
LINKS
09:24 Sir Ken Robinson Ted Talk
12:30 Life is a Bowl of Cherries
12:40 Metaphors We Live By
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In a world where we have everything and it's still not enough, we're often left wondering, is this really it?
Maren Oslac:Deep inside you know, there's more to life. You're ready to leave behind the old push your way through and claim the deeper, more meaningful life that's calling you.
Stephanie Allen:That's what we invite you to explore with us.
Maren Oslac:We're your hosts,
Stephanie Allen:Stephanie Allen
Maren Oslac:and Maren Oslac, and this is The Soulful Leader Podcast.
Stephanie Allen:Yay! Hi! Welcome to The Soulful Leader Podcast. This is Stephanie and I'm here with Maren, and we're literally having a conversation about conversations. And I think as leaders, you know this is so empowering to be able to really speak well what's in your heart, what's in your mind, your goals, your dreams, but also to listen well. And it's been interesting to me, because when you start to listen, sometimes people can just ramble about nothing for hours. And I sometimes wonder why, like, are they wanting to be heard? And maybe what they're saying there's something else going on underneath that surface. Maybe they're avoiding a feeling, or they don't quite know how to drop in deep enough to get what the sustenance of what they really need to say could be. But there's an interesting thing of when I listen to someone, are they moving towards something, or are they trying to get away from something?
Maren Oslac:So, something comes up for me, as you're saying that. I know people, including you, who are verbal processors, like literally, I am more of a kinesthetic processor. So I'll hear something, and I need to process it through my body, which means sometimes I'm writing, sometimes I'm moving, sometimes I have to go work out. I have to go walk in nature. Whereas there are other people who are verbal processors, and they literally need to hear it come out of their mouth in order to make sense of it. And I know for myself when I when I'm listening to a verbal processor, I can't hold them to what they're saying, right? Because for me, I process through what I want to say, and then a fairly close version of what I had, the final version kind of comes out, whereas with a verbal processor, you're going to hear the entire like, mess of stuff before they can get to like, oh, that's what I wanted to say. So I think that as leaders, as humans, we need to be aware of, is somebody verbally processing, or are they having verbal diarrhea, or are they running from something? Are they moving towards something that they want our input? Bringing our own awareness to the conversation of, what's happening behind the conversation? Like, what's the what's the motivation?
Stephanie Allen:What are they not saying too?
Maren Oslac:Yeah! What's the motivation for them to be in the conversation? What are they getting out of it? What are you getting out of it? Like, there's, there's so much, it's amazing.
Stephanie Allen:Yeah, I also listen to someone's language too, of like that black and white thinking, like, right, wrong, good, bad, kind, you know, that polarity of thinking, and that's kind of what I mean by the running away from, usually people who are running away from something, it's very negative. It's like, you know, black and white, thinking it's either this or it's that there is no space for the integration of both.
Maren Oslac:I also noticed that if somebody is running away from something, that negativity, it does come up. So recently, I had an infection in my body, and I am not an antibiotics person. That will be my course of very last resort. So I very diligently took care of it, and it was fine till about two weeks later, when it wasn't. And then I was really diligent about, you know, taking care of it. And then it was fine until a week later it wasn't. And I was going through this pattern, and what I noticed for myself, and this comes back around to the negativity and the moving away from, is that having the infection gave me an opportunity to complain, to be in poor, me to be negative. It also gave me the motivation to move away from the pain and the suffering and all of the drama that I was able to create in my own life with this infection, and when I think about like the 'towards and away' that you were just talking about. This is one of my realizations, as my pattern became more obvious to myself, is I have the opportunity to move towards better health, better thinking, whatever the towards is that would keep the infection at bay, or if I look at this for a metaphor, as a metaphor for my life, right? And I'm not just talking about the infection at this point, I'm talking about the way I live my life. I want to be... I want to become more of a 'towards' person. I'm very motivated as an'away' person. When things get painful, I get into full gear, and I know how to make things happen.
Stephanie Allen:I think that's true of a lot.
Maren Oslac:(Laughter) Can anyone else relate to that?
Stephanie Allen:This is really uncomfortable, how fast can I get away from it?
Maren Oslac:Yeah! How many of us, including us and our teams, are motivated by last minute deadlines, or the drama of, you know, a complaint by a customer, or, you know, like, whatever the"we have to do something about it now" thing is? Versus,
Stephanie Allen:The urgency...the urgency.
Maren Oslac:And then there's the other piece, which is, what's the vision? What are we moving towards? And if we can hold that and have consistent action towards it, what I've found for myself is, when I can actually do that, there is so much less drama, so much less infection, so much less of having to find a different way to get the chemical cocktail download in my system, the adrenaline rush, because I'm actually being consistent, and things are happening and my world is changing. And you know what? I would much prefer that.
Stephanie Allen:You know, you mentioned earlier, too, about being a kinesthetic processor. I think a lot of times when we, and I would call this shadowy, like, when, what I mean by shadow, it's like, I don't want to look at that because it's bad, or it's negative, or it's wrong, or it's uncomfortable, and we push it away. And if we're kinesthetic, it doesn't go away. It actually gets pushed within us, and then it comes out, and it manifests as an illness or an injury or some sort of physical, chemical cocktail of a high. And there's another way of doing that, like, sometimes it's like, well, what would it feel like to actually move towards something that's ideal? It's going to feel uncomfortable too, but it's, it's moving towards an ideal, rather than feeling the uncomfortability of what you're trying to move away from. And that's, I don't know if that makes sense, but it's like, in that way of we have to feel, like we all need to feel, and I think we try to stay up in our heads and think about things instead of dropping in and going, is this feeling coming from a 'toward', and that's why it's uncomfortable, because I haven't been there before, or is it coming from an 'away' that is familiar, and we can actually become addicted to it and keep perpetuating that addiction again and again. So we leave one bad relationship and we attract another one that looks different on the outside, but internally, it's still creating those same sort of chemicals.
Maren Oslac:There's a great TED Talk where Sir Robinson... what's his first name? Do you remember his first name?
Stephanie Allen:...Ken.
Maren Oslac:Sir Ken Robinson. And he talks about how, as a society, we have become more and more just like we live, from the head up. We're cerebral beings. And the interesting thing is that we have the same cells in our brain. We have some of those same cells in both our heart and in our gut, and the three are meant to be connected, and we've completely disconnected from them. So this may be part of the reason that you know your question at the beginning of when we're in conversation and somebody is just rambling and rambling, and you know it's like, because we're so disconnected. We're up in our heads trying to figure everything out. And we are physical, spiritual beings. We're not just cerebral beings, and so we're meant to be all of it, and when we can connect those, there's more meaning. And when there's more meaning, I think there's less rambling. That's just a guess on my part.(light laughter)
Stephanie Allen:Well, yeah, I mean, when you can start to feel and see and hear simultaneously integrated, that's when you have the full spectrum of the conversation.
Maren Oslac:Well and that's the the word human being, hu. Hue is the full, think of colors, right? Color hues. That's the full spectrum. We are meant to be full spectrum beings....beings, hu.
Stephanie Allen:We're not flatland beings.
Maren Oslac:Right! Yet at this point in our evolution we are being very flat. We are so cerebal.
Stephanie Allen:The question to you then so you're talking to somebody who's rambling for hours sometimes. What, as a leader, what is your process to help understand what they're really trying to communicate or what you really need to hear? How do you work with that?
Maren Oslac:So I think it's twofold. First is that I need to develop the skill of listening to what's happening behind what's being said. That's a definite skill. We're used to listening to somebody's words and responding to their words, instead of listening to what's really being said behind their words. And a lot of times you can go to metaphor to understand that better.
Stephanie Allen:So tell me more about that. Like, what does that mean? 'Go to metaphor'.
Maren Oslac:So metaphor.... there's a really interesting book called Metaphors We Live By, and it talks about the fact that metaphors, we think of them as a language thing, right? It's just how we use words. We relate to this thing to that thing. So there was a book by Erma Bombeck called If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries What Am I Doing in the Pits? or something like that, right? So that's a metaphor. Life is a bowl of cherries but she lives in the pits right? The argument from the people in this book, Metaphors We Live By, is that they're not just words. We didn't just pick that association out of nowhere. And I think the Erma Bombeck's book is a great example of that. She felt like she lived in the pits. And now we have this image in our minds of what her life is like, right? Everybody can picture that, and she said it in a very succinct way. So that's what metaphors do, is they compare this to that, and we see it in a very succinct way. One of the examples that they give in the book is in talking about the fact that it's not just language. Our metaphors tell us how we think.
Stephanie Allen:So like where we are in awareness and what we're focused on kind of thing is that, what you mean, how we think?
Maren Oslac:So I mean, if you look at the Erma Bombeck book, right, she thinks that life is bowl of cherries, but she gets the pits...her life sucks. And we can clearly see that's not just language, that's not a choice out of the middle of nowhere. And in the book, they use like, argument as war, and as a culture, we do tend to think of argument as war. And I think a lot of people be like, Oh, I don't, I don't think so. And yet, when we look at our language around argument, one of the things that we do is when we talk about arguments, some of the things we might say is, like, he attacked every weak point in my argument. So you're using war words...attacking weak points...right?
Stephanie Allen:Viewing that person as an enemy.
Maren Oslac:Yes! Or I demolished his argument.
Stephanie Allen:Yeah, the win loss.
Maren Oslac:And this goes to what you were talking about, of like, the either or like I'm right, or they're right. When we realize that somebody is talking in those terms, we have a sense of what's going on behind so this takes it back to listening to what's being said behind somebody's words. It's not just what they're talking about, it's the larger concept behind what they're talking about, what's the belief system? Because when somebody's going on and on and on and on and on and on and on, I need to understand that before I can actually enter... I can either enter the conversation with them at the level that they're having it, which means that now I'm probably going to be in an argument with them, or I can start to become aware of what's really going on behind that, You know, who does this really well is good counselors. They can listen, and then they'll do one little zinger. They'll listen to a full hour, and then they'll come back with one little thing of oh...that was the crux of it, wasn't it? (laughter)
Stephanie Allen:When I'm listening to someone, I like to
Maren Oslac:you actually put yourself in their shoes, you think of...I like to be present to what is the question I need actually start to...
Stephanie Allen:...empathize. I will literally be like, see, to ask them? Or, you know, what is this conversation, what is it hear, feel from their perspective. Then that helps me leading towards as a question I can ask? I don't know if I'm ask a question, like, what, what would they, that's the question saying that right, but do you know? I mean....(sigh) I ask myself. What would it feel like or see like or sound like from that person's perspective? And where would be something more loving, something more beautiful toward, I would say. And if I was to move them towards an ideal, I don't know what that ideal is, but if I was to move them towards something that is more beautiful, instead of looking at what they're trying to push away. Like, when you think of pushing and pulling, I think of moving away from something is a motivation. It's like, you know, you want to, like, push it away, get away from me. But if you take that energy and you push, you're using your personal energy, your personal life force, to push away something, and then you are tired. You're exhausted. You need to replenish yourself, versus being pulled towards something. I always find when you have an ideal or a dream or a desire or a longing, sometimes we don't know what that is. That is what pulls us. It lifts us up, it lightens us up. So when someone is tired, I often will say, how can I change that direction... instead of a 'push away', more of a 'pull up'?
Maren Oslac:And I think that gets to the second half of the question that you asked before is, as a leader, how do we change the energy of, a diatribe of that ongoing monolog? Once you're aware of the energy behind it, I love that, because that's a great way to shift it. Usually it's some sort of a one sided something, and how do we shift it to a 'towards' so that it could potentially be both of us are moving towards something, instead of, I'm having to be on this side and that person's on that side.
Stephanie Allen:Yeah, this, you know, you and me. You know, it's like against everything, instead of like a community coming together and working towards the same ideal, or something even more beautiful coming together that we didn't even see individually. I think we, you know, there's so many possibilities. I think we get stuck in a prison of our own mind thinking, you know, it's doom and gloom, instead of opening it up saying, Hey, this is where I'm stuck. This is I'm feeling focused on. I need to get out of this situation, or I'm uncomfortable, I'm in pain, and I'm stuck here. Can you help me see a different version of it? Like, and that's where the question can come in. Well, what would you want different? Like. Like, if it's not this, what do you want instead? And how? And then, when people come together with ideals, and it literally, like you said, integrating means to make whole, but it also means to include both and go to a totally new level. Yeah,
Maren Oslac:So we were kind of mixing things here. One side of it was that we're talking from a leadership perspective, as a leader. How can I, you know, maybe diffuse something, an ongoing monolog, and then I think the other piece of that is when it happens in ourselves, like I was talking about for myself, of how do we find the towards piece so that we don't...(sigh) so we don't get stuck in that 'away'. Which is really easy to get stuck in, because we do get some sort of a reward system from our bodies about it, and all kinds of things. So is there a particular way that you as a leader, as a human, as a being on the planet that you are able to either get yourself out of it or know when to ask for help when you're in that?
Stephanie Allen:You know I had a situation just actually this last weekend. A little while ago, I was leading a group, and I had a very challenging out of the 20 people I had challenging 5 women that were just really, really hard on me and hard to be with the other 15 women who also found it hard. I was like, okay, this is a an us and them kind of situation. And I talked to, you know, my company afterwards, because we dealt with reports, and my company had talked to me, and they said, hey, look, you're not in trouble, I just want to understand the big picture...what happened what went down? We had a really great talk and understood it. And that night, I couldn't go to sleep. I literally had an anxiety attack, and I was like, man, I can't even breathe. I can't find my rhythm of my own breath, doing my practices. So I literally, I think I got up right then and there, and I just wrote an email over to my supervisor that I was working with, and I said, you know, it really stirred something up in me can we talk about this? I need to find another version of this, so I can make peace and be, you know, be at peace in my heart, but also just totally be restored from this. I want to be restored, and I really want to learn, and I want to grow, and I want to evolve so that the next time, because there always will be another time that that this would happen, I want to handle it different. And we had a lovely conversation, like, literally, a couple days later, and talked it all out. And she's like, hey, this is really great, I'm glad you reached out. And I said... yeah, what one piece of advice would you give me? She's like, next time, when it's happening, keep us in the loop. Like, right away, I said, Oh, that would have been wise. I said, I kind of felt like a little bit of a tattletale, like kind of over dramatizing saying, oh, you know, I'm calling and tattletailing on all this kind of stuff. And I also noticed that within myself, I didn't even know that it was as bad as it was until the end. And so it gave me an insight of going even when something is feeling off or it is like there's nothing wrong with just literally picking up the phone or sending an email or reaching out and saying... hey, I need another perspective. Can you help me? Because otherwise I'm going to spend all my energy pushing away. Yeah, it costs a lot of energy.
Maren Oslac:And you are in survival mode, at that point...
Stephanie Allen:...and then reacting constantly
Maren Oslac:I think, yeah, in our culture, we tend towards the adrenaline junkie, where survival mode is what we love, because it wakes us up. It gets us to feel. We feel something like you were saying earlier, and its one of the few things that will drop us into our bodies. So finding alternatives to that is really powerful. And I do want to point out one of two things that you said. The first was that you said, I want to find a different version of this. And I think so often we know that there's two sides to a story. We don't know that there's probably 200 sides to a story, and that it's never just our side and their side, because what if I made my side of the story different? And that leads me to the second thing you said, because you said that you restored yourself, and I want to point out the words there of you're-storied', so you told a different story, and it'restored' you totally. There's no accident that those words are related.
Stephanie Allen:You know, if I could have done it on my own, I would have, much faster. But it wasn't working. And I've been really holding a boundary, talking about boundaries here again, but holding an internal boundary with myself, like when I'm agitated, when I'm catastrophizing, when I'm the narrative inside myself is just really critical and negative, whether it's towards myself or something else or someone else. I know I need to ask for help, because I'm in it, I'm in it, I'm in the pit,
Maren Oslac:And when we're in it, we can't see it, right?
Stephanie Allen:So, really training myself that asking for help and reaching out is a toward is of like, it's like you're reaching your hand up and saying, can you lift me up and out? Can you pull me out of this so that I can be restored and have a new story? And to reach out and be pulled up and have
Maren Oslac:I can tell a different story exactly. I love that. So that's going to be my assignment for everyone this week, is there some place in your life that you could tell a someone else maybe give you a higher and more beautiful different story and restore something, maybe something that's really special for you? version of the story. Yeah, because when you're in it, you can't always see the full spectrum of what is there. And just that is something that Stephanie and I do on a regular basis. That's part of our jobs. So if, if you want to reach out to us, feel free. We would love to hear from you. And you can do that on our Facebook page or our LinkedIn page. Those are at the Soulful Leaders. You can do that on our website. We've got our business website, which is www.tslp.life and then we've got thesoulfulleaderpodcast.com. You can find us in lots of places, and please do. We would love to hear from you. Thanks so much for listening, and we will see you all next week on The Soulful Leader Podcast.
Stephanie Allen:And that wraps up another episode of The Soulful Leader Podcast with your hosts, Stephanie Allen
Maren Oslac:and Maren Oslac. Thank you for listening. If you'd like to dive deeper, head over to our website, at thesoulfulleaderpodcast.com
Stephanie Allen:Until next time...