Thomas Hübl: Welcome to Point of Relation. My name is Thomas Hübl and I’m very happy to be sitting here with my good, very good friend, Amy Fox. Amy, you’re the CEO of Mobius and Mobius Leadership. And I’m so happy to be sitting here with you. We did so many things together already. So first of all, warm welcome.
Amy Elizabeth Fox: Thank you so much. It’s always just such a joy to be with you, really.
Thomas: Yeah, for me too. We have so many, over a decade, I guess, or for 15 years of the mischief together. And we did so many things in this time. It’s unbelievable.
Amy: It’s really true. And I’m proud of all of them, Thomas. They all, I think, are really rays of hope on the landscape of corporate life.
Thomas: Yeah, and so many things we envisioned, we really did and they became life. And so I’m very happy. And so we are sitting here to look at your new book together and to talk about your new book together, together with Nicholas Janni, Leading in Chaos, it’s called. And so what motivated you, let’s start there. What motivated you to write this book together with Nicholas? Tell us a little bit. What’s the need? What’s the response?
Amy: Well, I think Nicholas and I both were seeing a extraordinary level of overwhelm and stress and anxiety in the leaders that come into our executive programs over the last year. And we both felt that we have some wisdom to offer having done programs and coaching and top teamwork for 20 years, both of us, to offer to this moment that might be both diagnostic, helping orient people to what’s going on and what they’re struggling with and prescriptive, helping start to articulate the antidote. And a huge amount of contributions to the book grow out of our 15-year collaboration and really stem from what I’ve learned from you, Thomas.
And what we’ve done together to try to bring healing and restoration into the business life. And to put a stake in the ground that in a moment when people are so overwhelmed, we can’t bifurcate private life from professional life. Organizations have to become places of deep intimacy and belonging and repair. And I’ve had the privilege to do many, many programs with you that hold up that candle and the book is just another flame in that story.
Thomas: That’s beautiful, Amy. Yes. I see you as one of the pioneers of bringing that level of in-depth work into organizations. So maybe you can speak a little bit, because for some people it might still be kind of foreign to say, okay, if you think business is hardcore business and then you look at the depth of developmental work that you’re doing in your programs, how do you bridge these two worlds? Because many people might say they don’t go together well and obviously they do because you’re doing it for a very long time and we have done it. So maybe you can speak a little bit to this confluence of these two worlds and also the difficulties and the beauties that you see in them.
Amy: That’s a wonderful question. Maybe to take it in a historical context for a moment. The fields of leadership development, of executive coaching, of team consultation started roughly 20 years ago. And 20 years ago most of the advice and most of the interventions were behavioral and cognitive. Meaning you would find an executive was doing a dysfunctional or destructive behavior like yelling at people and you would coach them that rather than yelling at them, they should ask a productive question or an open-ended question.
And that works fine for a week or so. But very soon because people’s reactive patterns are trauma laden, people will revert to the original behavior. So over time people started to understand that you had to go a little bit deeper, dig a little bit deeper and start to think about what was their mental model or their frame or their mindset. The belief systems that were causing them to, and the assessments and the sense of perceptive threat that were causing them to act in the less productive way.
And I think our work has really suggested that you have to go still deeper and look at the root causes of those mindsets and beliefs and ontology. And only when you can help people to really go back and revisit their earliest formative years and their earliest imprints, do you have the possibility of liberating a freedom of range of motion, a freedom of choice that’s really profound and sustained. That’s the first thing.
I think the business world has used a lot of language that’s useful for the things we’re pointing at. So people now talk about my friend Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety. Well, psychological safety isn’t people being nice to each other. Amy’s work points to having a level of trust and existential security on a team such that you can have conflict, you can dissent, you can disagree. You can handle creative tension, creative abrasion, my friend Linda Hill calls it. And that the psychological safety as a precursor to innovation or a team’s ability to collaborate together or to create novel ideas together.
And so there’s a business imperative I think that suggests the more trust you have and the more safety people feel, the more creative they’ll be and the more ideas that they’ll bring alive. And we know from our work that you can’t create safety by taking people on a ropes course or taking people to a ball game or taking people out for drinks. Those things are all lovely, but people’s genuine sense of trusting and solidarity and mutuality of care requires a very different intimate conversation that I think people are ripe for now because people are aware that they’ve hit a wall.
Thomas: So let’s take this for a moment. I’m sure you heard this too, and I heard this also. Some people say, so why actually to take care of the fears aren’t those fears great drivers for more performance? Aren’t those fears great drivers for more engagement? Also, that people hold on to their jobs, they really want their jobs because they’re more afraid. So aren’t we reducing a great deal of motivation by creating that safe haven in our organization? Doesn’t that lead to laziness and to a lack of motivation? Anyway, it’s safe so why should I engage?
And so maybe you can speak to this because that’s something that we hear more often and maybe that needs a response.
Amy: I think most organizational culture was based on a technical model of the workplace where people were fungible resources and the only coinage was really your intellect or your mind. And in that sense, they’re disembodied, they’re unemotional, they’re unrelational and they’re unspiritual. And all of that vitality is being left outside the boardroom table at a high cost. I know for myself, I do not function at my optimal performance level when I’m afraid. I can’t think as clearly, I get defensive, I get blaming, I get angry, I get agitated, I’m cutting people off when they present ideas that are different than my own. My reactive pattern is to get very bossy and shut down.
Everybody else has their own reactive pattern. Maybe they go silent, maybe they go mute. And the notion that fear is promoting us to be at our best, I think is just fundamentally neurologically wrong. And equally importantly, wouldn’t you want to work in a workplace that was generative and loving and where you felt valued and your unique gifts were being mirrored and attuned to? And I can’t think of what could be more motivating than feeling cherished. It certainly isn’t feeling threatened in my view. What would you say to the same question?
Thomas: No, first of all, I agree. I somehow feel that the fuel of motivation should be creativity. I’m very interested what makes you creative? What’s your purpose in life? Why are you excited to get up every morning and not why are you afraid to get up every morning? And so I agree very much.
We talked about this often, but I agree very much that the fuel is changing maybe from survival based fear to creativity and creativity is a much more abundant fuel for motivation. But then the question is how do we create environments where creativity can flourish? Where agency taking responsibility, wanting the organization at its best and know what we can contribute to it. I think all of that is much more sustainable fuel. Also, as you said, neuroscientifically than looking for how can we make fear the motivation to run our life. I completely agree.
Amy: And I think as things get more chaotic, and this is one of the things we talk about in the book, people are going to be more stressed and require a whole new set of transformational capabilities to sustain that creativity that you’re talking about, that spark. For one, they need a practice of reflection and stillness. You sometimes talk about how much white space is there in your life.
If people aren’t doing something that’s contemplative and restorative and restful and listening deeply, then the universe will not participate in their creativity. They’re going to be limited to the ingenuity of their mind. But if you lend yourself to a rhythm where you’re exerting and then you’re pulling back and making yourself available for fresh information to come in, that’s going to be an absolutely essential prerequisite I think of the teams that are really leading the future.
Thomas: So maybe you can speak a little bit to the traditional tools don’t fully work when you get really stressed and triggered, and you said it already now, that when more systemic stress and the higher speed of data in the world naturally brings up more stress points and more inner inflammatory processes. So you said a few already like having more wide space, having a contemplative practice to really develop that. So that’s great. Do you have some more points like that for everybody who’s listening?
So what can we focus on, especially in this time, because the book is also Leading in Chaos, so we are going through a more transformational time and things are breaking apart. So how can we lead and what are more of those skills?
Amy: So I think there’s four buckets of skills. One has to do with what you said, the level of fragility people feel and the structures and systems which they normally take refuge in or feel security in. So in order to create an anti-fragile organization, I think you have to knit people together in more of a community in order for people to be able to tolerate the level of adaptive demand that’s upon us.
So I have something I call nesting where when you join a company, you get assigned to a nest, which is a group of friends that meet once a month and simply share what’s going on in their lives. And it’s for emotional support, it’s for care, it’s for feeling witnessed and tracked. And so you belong not just to an organization, but you belong to a more intimate circle. That’s one.
A second thing I think you can do is have a place where you create ritual. We do this in a lot of our programs where people can use the time they’re given three minutes each per person for a group of 20, let’s say, to commemorate anything that’s happened that’s been important to them in the recent time. So sometimes people read letters to their parents who’ve just died, or people tell a story about something really precious that happened in their lineage or in their country. So you personalize the workplace in a way that then people feel really a sense of I matter here, I’m counted on and they count on me and I count on them. That’s the first.
The second is you really have to have practices for lowering your level of anxiety and stress, whatever that would be. Whether that’s martial arts practice or music or poetry or walking in nature or meditation. I think every organization that wants to have high performance is going to have to think about how do they help people down regulate the level of stress that they’re carrying.
The third one is I think it’s beautiful, which is we’re going to have to have exponential imagination. Because the future is not going to change in small increments and predictable linearity, it’s going to keep popping in ways that are very unpredictable and very mesmerizing and very catalytic. And so we’re going to have to get used to refreshing our picture of reality over and over.
And I think the last one, Thomas, is a deeply mystical and spiritual one, which is helping people to befriend the mystery and to have a quality of wonder and awe that keeps them alive and holding what’s holy to them.
Thomas: Beautiful, beautiful. Yeah, thank you. This gives us some directions, like what we can look into. And so when we say trauma-informed, many people say, okay, what does trauma have to do with my workplace? Trauma is a very personal thing. The workplace is my workplace so how are they connected suddenly? And what does it mean trauma-informed when you’re not a psychotherapist or a therapist that deals with trauma, how is that helpful? How can bias that term being used in the business world at all?
Amy: Yeah, I’m going to ask you the same question in a minute, but let me make a distinction between a trauma-informed organization and a trauma-informed practitioner.
People that are not trauma-informed will have well-being clinics in their workplace or a resilience program where people can do all sorts of exercise or I don’t know what have you as if the stress was individual, transient and present day. But what we know from thousands of trauma screenings is leaders in every organization all around the world have in their own personal lives and in their ancestry, unaddressed trauma. Which means the level of fear that I’m talking about isn’t modern day stress, it’s collective, it’s intensive longitudinal fear. And that requires a different sensitivity and a different attunement and a different quality of love in the workplace.
If people start to understand that parts of people, not everybody, not every part of a leader, but parts of every leader are looking through the eyes of a five-year-old. And that five-year-old needs to feel held and needs to feel they’re enough and needs to feel it’s going to be okay. And trauma-informed workplaces have the sensitivity to know that what shows up that isn’t beautiful is early trauma. What shows up as dysfunctional was once a survival strategy that was life-saving. And that sensitivity means we aren’t going to punish people for doing the things that saved their psyche. We’re going to learn how to support them to get more secure and to co-regulate as you talk about in your book Attuned so beautifully, so that people can relax and then be at their best.
Thomas: Yeah, beautiful. And so when, for example, as a coach now, so that’s the organizational level. When as a coach we go into an organization and we see a lot of activation or somebody gets triggered. So what will be a response that is trauma-informed to make it practical? Somebody has a trigger, gets very stressed, activated either fight flight or they shut down and feel withdrawn. So what would be maybe a classical response and what’s a more trauma-informed response to them?
Amy: Well, I think a classical response would be to try to mediate the substance of the work conflict as if nothing was going on emotionally or relationally. We didn’t use to have the sophistication of even understanding why people were in these repeat patterns of getting stuck.
The first thing I would say is a trauma-informed consultant or coach would be tracking their interiority and what arises for them when the executive is triggered or the team is reactive. Because without being able to continue to pay very close attention and monitor and regulate your own nervous system, you’re not going to be able to offer the team a clear seeing and a state of coherence in which they can resource themselves. So the first thing that a trauma-informed practitioner will do is to pull their attention away for a moment from the dynamics in the room to the dynamics in their interiority.
And then the second thing is they will make a very attuned response out of the natural arising compassion of their heart. It would be different in every circumstance. I can’t give you a generic response, but they wouldn’t be trying to respond to the behavior, they’d be responding to the interpretation that the behavior is a symptom of people feeling afraid. And that’s a very, very different place to move from if you have that sensitivity. What would you add to that?
Thomas: Yeah, that’s beautiful. I think a few things maybe I would add, but that’s also a big topic. I like your description first of all about how important it is to track oneself or we could say we are the instrument. So it’s not that what happens in us is separate from what happens outside. We get affected, it’s interdependent, and the more free or present a coach or facilitator is in that moment, the more freedom we have to respond to and interact with the situation. And you said that also beautifully. So I want to underline this because I think that is one of the key things.
And the other one is that we see responsiveness as a physical, emotional, mental, relational, spiritual, that all of us is required. Because bodies speak to bodies, nervous systems co-regulate with nervous systems, other bodies. It’s a biological process to reduce stress and to transmit safety. So when we feel safe in ourselves, we transmit it into the space.
So I think trauma-informed intervention is very holistic and has a higher level of resonance, most probably then, okay, how can I fix this situation? And also what some people often do is they try to want to calm it down. What we do is we try to suppress it, which makes it actually, it’s like you have a fire and you put more pressure on it so it actually gets hotter.
Amy: And the reason you do that is because you’re uncomfortable, not because they’re not okay.
Thomas: Exactly, exactly. And trauma-informed would be, oh, I know I need to grow as a human being myself so I can facilitate more situations in an easier way. So that’s beautiful.
Amy: And I guess the last thing I would just say about this, Thomas, is over the next few years as things get more and more chaotic, it is not going to be possible to talk about high performance and not talk about trauma-informed wisdom among your colleagues.
Thomas: Yeah, I very much agree. The time that we are in requires that… But we’ll come to this again in a moment.
We put out some small question on social media for people to write in questions-
Amy: Oh, wonderful.
Thomas: … for our conversation, just to have our audience be involved a bit in co-creating these conversations, which I think is great. And I read you one or two, and then maybe you can respond a bit to that. So how can trauma responsive practices exist within mainstream organizational frameworks that operate on KPIs that are anything but trauma aware?
Amy: I think of it as a movement. Most organizations have not spent a lot of time, energy and dedication to thinking about how to create flourishing cultures. That wasn’t the focus. They’ve been focused on KPIs and shareholder value. And now we’re seeing in organizations all around the world people starting to have a sensitivity and a care for the quality of life and the quality of experience for the people that work there. And I believe, I’m confident that there’s an entire wave of people who want to see the workplace be a place where people feel like they’re at home, where they feel valued, where they are well cared for, where they feel safe, where they can do some healing and where they feel loved. And the minute we believe it’s true, we can start to make it true.
Thomas: Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, and I want to also say that as I saw you over, I don’t know, 15 years, I think you walked into organizations that one would say, wow, they would never do this. And eventually they did. So-
Amy: It’s not even eventually, it’s not even that eventually. I really want to tell people leaders walk in cold, exhausted, shielded. And two or three days of putting them in a micro environment in which honesty is welcome, vulnerability is welcome, expression is welcome, the aesthetics and poetics are a part of it, they’re dancing together and they’re crying in each other’s arms and they’re telling each other their life stories. And it does not take a long time to go from frozen to love. It just doesn’t.
Thomas: And what I wanted to say is that I think it also depends on your deep inner holding or integration of these two worlds. That when you speak with the leadership of an organization to do such programs, I think it has a lot to do also with how you transmit this because in you, it has grown together. So I think that integration also makes a difference. So for all of us, I think also a very important ingredient.
So sometimes we say that the world is our second test. So it seems like because of the world it’s difficult. So it grounds that quality more in us because we need to go through something. But when that happens, then it opens the path. And I felt you really… And also pioneering. For a long time ago, you did that work already. And so it showed itself over a long period of time that I think your own internal integration, of course it grew, but that also opens the doors. So I think that the embodied transmission really makes a difference.
Amy: Thank you.
Thomas: So thank you for that, Amy. There’s another question like that similar. How do we prevent trauma-informed leadership from becoming a way to individualize systemic overload? For example, when burnout is met with regulation tools and resilience training while workload and expectations remain unchanged?
Amy: Yeah, that’s the exact thing I was pointing to earlier. I think there are bandaid versions where workplaces are being overly demanding, brutal in some ways, pushing people past their mental limits, physical limits, and then they give them a gym pass. That’s abusive. It’s not what we mean by a trauma-informed workplace at all. And I think people ought to start to ask when they’re looking for a job or they’re thinking to affiliate with an organization what is the quality of commitment to my wellbeing that you really hold?
Thomas: Yeah, that’s beautiful. And also really that there’s individual transformation, but individual transformation also results in organizational transformation. Because more and more people will demands changing structures, and high potentials will demand changing structures. So people who bring a lot of potential and value to an organization will want the organization to change because they feel it’s better for them and that in itself implements collective regulation.
Amy: Yeah. And often people, when I do this inside of a company and you’ve taken a few cohorts through a deeply meaningful transformational process, they start to advocate for the culture that they want in the organization. They become empowered, they become vocal, they become passionate, they feel free to speak their mind, and they feel connected to each other to become a force field for good.
Thomas: Exactly. Beautiful. Yeah. So Amy, last question maybe given our time. So tell us a little bit more what people can expect Leading in Chaos. Maybe is there anything else you want to share about the book that you and Nicholas wrote together and that people can look forward to?
Amy: Well, it’s a book made for leaders who want to be part of this movement. It’s a book written for coaches and facilitators who feel called to this as a vocation, and it’s a book about healing for anyone who’s on a healing and awakening journey for sure. The book is written in little vignettes and essays, so you can read it one or two a weekend and let it permeate you and reflect on it. It’s not meant to be red cover to cover, it’s meant to be a soul nourishing experience. And yeah, I really look forward to hearing what people find there.
Thomas: Yeah. Thank you, Amy. This is lovely. Thank you, first of all for joining me here on my podcast, and I really appreciate your work. Thank you for all that you’re doing and also send blessings to Nicholas and people will get the links and the information about your book at our podcast links.
Amy: Thank you for the great blessing that you are in my life and in Mobius’ journey, Thomas.
Thomas: Thank you. It’s a pleasure. I really enjoyed it.
