Tara & Nicki

Sa Tara, welcome. Welcome to Cadre. Thank you so much. We are so glad that you're here. You are a newer face on the Cadre sphere. And so it's important that people know who you are, what your story is and what you bring to your lives and what you bring to. To all of us here on Cadre. So let's just check in and connect. It is 11 o' clock Pacific, so it's 1 o' clock Central. Your morning has happened. How would you summarize your morning? If you could just use one word? Energized. Ooh, I love energized.

My word is caffeinated. So I feel like we might be on the same that also. Yes. Could you share with us maybe three reasons why Energized is your summary of choice? Ooh. Number one, I've got a lot of exciting stuff percolating right now for my business. But also into the fall with some community events that I've been kind of working on this morning. So that. Number two, caffeine. Obvious choice. Yeah. And. And number three, probably gonna go see Nine Inch Nails on Sunday. So I'm super excited about that.

I used to be a music reviewer and I'm a total music nerd. So I used to do much smaller gigs than that. But I am a sucker for music of my youth. So that's. And I've never seen them before, so I've been listening to a lot of them, which has probably helped. That is so cool. And what's the coolest or in your. Yeah, your opinion? I know that your cool could be different than my cool, but I'm really interested in what your cool is. The coolest group or musician that you've reviewed. A lot of them were smaller bands and this was like 15 years ago when I was doing this locally in the Twin Cities.

But far and away, a band called Rock Plaza Central. They don't exist anymore, but they're from Canada. They were like six to seven piece band that had strings, horns, like all of this amazing stuff. And I had the pleasure and privilege of writing reviews for them, seeing them live on the road. All their music still exists out there. And if you're a literary nerd also. Which I also am. Their second album is all about William Faulkner's book Light in August. And it is gorgeous. Is it like Stream of Conscious?

Kind of. Kind of. But it's really lovely. And I actually just re listened to it cause I finished the book this summer. Again Nerd. And so I listened to the album again and was like oh, this is still brilliant. So it's probably one of my favorite day and do all of this. Yes. I need a new Faulkner memory, because the last time I read Faulkner, it was post divorce, and I thought it was a really good idea to read As I Lay Dying. Oh, no, Bad idea. I have read that also. I actually read that in the parking lot.

I finished the last few pages in the parking lot of his house in Mississippi. Because I was going. I went with somebody to go see the museum, which is his house, and I was like, I can't go inside till I'm done with this book. But my first with him was Sound and the Fury, which I fell in love with, but he's great. As I Lay Dying is a heavy one, especially post divorce. It was. I was in a friend's house, and, like, the. That was the only book that was in English that I. Yeah, it was one of those things where I was like, okay.

But I learned about the Bevels, so that's cool. There you go. My woodworking has never been so on game. We have some folks joining us today that we're so excited to have in our Cadre sphere watching us live. So great to see you Speak Wonder. There's been a few others that have joined that I haven't seen your names, but welcome. We're so glad you're here. If you could give us your word of your morning or your week, whatever. How you want to describe it. Tara's was energized. Mine was caffeinated, and we'd love to hear from y' all and Speak Wonder is also a literary nerd.

We know this about you. I love that we got to talk. Okay. Tara, you have many stories, and it's such a joy to be able to be in a platform where we storytell. I have the dream job, and I am wondering if you'd be willing to share a story with us that gives us a little bit of insight into who you are and how you show up in the Cadre sphere. And if you want to share stories for that, that's great, too, but take it away. Okay. So the story, the Cadre Sphere is actually kind of the perfect meshing of why I am where I am.

And I'll kind of dig into that a bit. So when I was in my mid-20s, I worked in mental health. I worked in an outpatient mental health clinic. I was right on the fence of wanting to be a therapist. But during that time, my father was retiring from his job in computer sales. He did it for I don't know, 35 years with IBM and then smaller plants. Places was very successful on paper, so he was able to retire early. But within a few months of retiring, he had never really processed the stress of his job.

It was very old school. Mad Men, you don't sell, you don't eat. He didn't have an outlet. Especially in the 80s and 90s, you don't talk to your partner or your kid or even your colleagues or your boss about struggles. And he had a psychotic break while I was working at the clinic. And when that happened, you know, it was a culmination of things. But the biggest reason, and spoiler alert, he's doing much better today and I'm super grateful for it. I'm actually going to bring him coffee and donuts tomorrow because that's what we do every other week.

But he, he wishes that he would have asked for help and he wishes that he could have been more honest about not putting on the brave face, especially anyone in positions of power, but especially, you know, any breadwinner and family, especially, like, stereotypes around men and how they're supposed to be like, tough and push it all down. And he did all that, and it broke him. It literally broke him. And so we spent the next few years in and out of hospitals. Several suicide attempts. I had him under commitment twice, legally, and which was a whole process.

And the only reason I even knew how to do these things is because I worked in a clinic setting. And then when that happened, I actually transitioned into not doing mental health anymore because dealing with my dad, plus the job itself was just taking its toll on me. And I got more into a database research setting and then eventually moved into technology. But the problem remained the same. That was such an outlier for me, watching people who were the people who were my employees at the clinic to people I worked with in database research and then technology.

I'm watching them all, not sure if they can be honest with each other about where they're struggling leaders who do what I call the pressure cooker, which is just pressing everything down as much as they can in themselves, but it obviously bleeds out to the rest of the team and eventually you implode. So I started really getting into the practice of better organizational behavior practices, things like psychological safety, things like giving and receiving feedback and really understanding how we can experiment in real time with our own behavior to create better products and better ecosystems that are sustainable.

So in a nutshell, that's my story of how I came to Cadre is the work and the mental health piece together. So that's that. Tara, this is so helpful because we all have our own flavor of how we interpret and how we offer service around mental health. And the way that you described the story gives us such an insight into how you show up for, for others and how you show up for yourself. And even walking us through your story for me anyways, has modeled some really important behavior that, you know, it isn't always the common behavior.

It isn't always the common behavior to talk about the things that are hard to talk about in front of others. It's not, it's not. And you know, and I feel like there's this really amazing gray area that often gets ignored. It's either you put on a mask and you protect yourself and you don't let anyone in and eventually you crumble, or you think that you have to take like all of these, you know, all of these bits and pieces to be the perfect employee who does all the right things. And like, it becomes more subjective and less about actual outcomes of changing your behavior.

Where it's, you know, if you go to a workshop for two days on psychological safety, you might come out of it thinking like, that's great. I'm going to lose everything that I'm doing now because it was just a brain dump. And so a lot of the work that I try and bring to the table is creating experimental, hypothesis driven practices to start to change things in small slices. Because we so often focus on culture and culture is a beast, we cannot change culture overnight. We also can't change it as an individual.

However, collectively, if we focus on our behavior first, we can start really making some changes, especially when we can talk about what's our biggest challenge and how do we want to experiment with our behavior. Let's say we're a leadership team and we notice people are really quiet in meetings. We know that's probably not good. We're not really sure why it's happening. So let's do some inner work, start to figure out how we're showing up and then experiment with our behavior and see what happens when we change it.

And that's the stuff that's really exciting to me. Amazing. Yeah, your, your, your work that you do your day job outside of Cadre is all about engagement and Cadre is, you know, it, it was birthed and created to be the, the place where we get to belong and. Right. So it's, it's nice to see that, that overlap and that Venn diagram for you specifically, do you think that you would be able to maybe workshop a little bit of what it looks like to work with you, what it looks like to have to build that psychological safety that you mentioned.

I mean, maybe for some of us we've never heard that term before, psychological safety. And it's what's really interesting too is next month, in the month of September, we're going to be talking about safety. And psychological safety is definitely one of the themes that we want to dive into. So could you kind of walk me and anyone who's listening, whether you're listening live with us or later on in the recording or your first. It's. This might be the first time that you've experimented with something like this, but will you help us get to that experience, hypothesis driven place and kind of walk us through that so we know how to do that ourselves?

Absolutely. I guess I'll start, Nikki, with the. With what psychological safety is and what it isn't because I think it's been a buzzword for years now. Amy Edmondson pioneered the term back in actually 1998. She wrote her first book, which is the Fearless Organization. So what psychological safety is is a belief shared by a team that the team is a safe place for risk taking, period. So things that are important about the definition of it is that it's a shared belief and it's the team. It's not an individual.

It's a whole group of people who are feeling safe together because they've agreed with how they want to show up together. What it's not, and I think it's important to call that out, it's not just feeling comfy and cozy or something that I call fuzzy safety. Fuzzy safety leads to apathy because it doesn't really challenge us. And it's not that we never want to relax. Often a byproduct of psychological safety in organizations or on teams is you're more relaxed. But that doesn't mean you're never challenging yourself.

Right. So it's not about just feeling cushy and cozy. It's also not something anyone can solely define. So if a leader says, if I'm working with a team and the leader says, oh yeah, we're psychologically safe, that's not a thing. People don't get to just define it in a singular term like that. It's something that continues to ebb and flow over time. When a team member leaves, when a new person onboards, when there's a reorg that's going to shift everything. So it's a dynamic practice. It's not something that you are or you aren't.

And thirdly, it is something that will evolve over time. So in the beginning, it might just look like, as a team, saying that we agree not to work outside of our office hours because it doesn't feel good and it makes us all feel pressure about working at 10 o' clock at night. Okay, great. And then the second piece of that is, okay, well, what happens? And it's often called a working agreement, but what happens when someone breaks that agreement? Because someone will. And it's not about punishing people, it's about recognizing that we can call each other in, not out about it, to say, hey, remember how we weren't going to do that?

Or maybe somebody's, you know, seven hours away working remotely. And so they're like, hey, guys, I'm not trying to break our agreement, but just know that I'm working remotely. So don't feel a need to respond. But it's that continuous conversation that really helps. Now that I've kind of defined that and talked a little bit about how teams define it, I'll go back to your question about, on an individual basis, how do we start experimenting? So for me, when I tell people what I do for a living. So my business, Tara Scott Consulting, is about helping organizations and individuals inside of organizations.

Regardless of your role title, seniority, what have you, build a better space for yourself and others. And often when I first tell people what I do, and this is so normal, and I would do it too, you know, when I. If I were working as an employee somewhere. When you talk about problems at work, you do this, and by that I mean you point at everyone else being the problem. And that's not that. That might not be true, but it has to start with you first. So my sole focus in the beginning when we work together is focus on self.

I have folks walk through an exercise called dynamics mapping, which is kind of a simple little grid where we map out things that get you really excited to work with other people, things that shut you down, things that make you angry. Because I want to get to know, and I want you to get to know what happens in those conversations when someone interrupts you, when you've interpreted something the wrong way, when you feel like somebody is attacking you. We all go into what's called amygdala hijack.

And if folks aren't familiar, that's that fight or flight response. It's the oldest part of our brain, it's our lizard brain, and it's helped us survive. But sometimes it goes into overdrive and when it does that, we cannot respond logically from a neurological perspective. We just can't from neuroscience, Neuroscience's perspective. So I try and encourage folks to first understand their response to states and things and start by just observing how do you respond in those moments? And I have them start with physical things.

Do your palms get sweaty? Do you? I get like blotchy on my neck. I get like a rash. Like I'm just. It's almost like my throat chakra. It's like stuck. Yes. Yeah, it's even painful on the inside. Like it feels almost like I have strep throat or something. Yeah, you just get really frustrated or maybe you just get really hot. You get trembling. All these things can happen. It's like when you watch a gazelle survive an attack on it, like a nature program. When they get up and shake off, that's their body processing things and letting their nervous system come back to a more neutralized state.

So I try and encourage people to first observe and then walk through ways with them to process things so that when they have those conversations that they need to have with people, that might be challenging, that might be scary, that you're coming in from a place of neutral nervous system processing the way you want to approach things, and that you are taking responsibility for your own behavior, period. So another thing that I also introduce in those first couple of times where I meet with folks is something called the responsibility process.

It was created in the late 90s by Christopher Avery and Bill McCarley. And it's something I've studied for a long time. It's near and dear to my practice, but it's all about how conflict is internal. And that might sound silly because if somebody does something horrible, how is it not my job to act horribly back? Well, the question at the end of the day is what do you want out of that? So if somebody is behaving really badly, you don't have to own that because you can't own their behavior. Responsibility is not something you can give someone.

And so what we often think of as responsibility isn't that, but it's things like lay blame, shame, guilt, obligation. You know, it's all these other things. It's not really owning it. So my focus, first and foremost, is to get people, especially leaders and especially executives. I work with a lot of executives to get them to understand how they present and how they communicate. And that's. That feels long winded. Apologies, but that's kind of where I start on every word. You're, you're explaining beautifully.

Thank You? Yeah. So that's where I start. I have people start with the basics of getting to know yourself in a way that we never give ourselves time for. That also includes some reflection on leaders that we've had. What leaders have we had that brought out the best in us? And what leaders did we have that maybe kind of left some baggage that we have to still deal with? For example, I had a leader who was a very angry individual and I actually once witnessed him like basically having a temper tantrum and he threw a phone at a wall and the phone just like shattered.

And it took some time for me to kind of process exactly what, what I couldn't control or know why that happened with him. It was actually about something silly. But at the time I didn't realize I didn't have to own that. And I get to walk away because sometimes we feel like we need to fawn all over someone and make them feel better or we get angry and those are all going back to that kind of amygdala hijacked place. So it's really coming back to flexing your muscles around your own behavior. That's my focus.

Love that. Okay. So there are times when I am able to really connect to myself and I know how I feel and I can take responsibility for my actions and I can stay in my own lane and know what's mine. I mean those do happen. And there are also times, as I'm sure you're familiar with, when, where you know, it's one thing after another that doesn't seem to line up correctly according to my worldview. Or instead of feeling at ease, I'm feeling confused or vulnerable about something. Maybe my ego had a little bruising, maybe I had some feedback that I didn't digest right.

And I go into that lizard brain sort of, you know, where you go from standing up tall to where your shoulders drop and you know, you physically turn into a different state of yourself. Right. What are the things that you have learned in your life, in your experience, with your experiences that have helped you sort of nurse yourself or get yourself out of those lizard brain lows to a more responsive, caregiving, self loving place? What are some of the things that you've learned along the way? That's such a great question.

Because this stuff is all like great. That would be ideal to have us like understand our behavior and we never screw up. Like I, I'm so in the responsibility process. There's something called below the line thinking and those are the things like guilt, justify, shame, all that stuff. Yeah, and when I am below the line, I love that I have the responsibility process as an anchor. When I'm in those spaces, I can ask myself, where do you think you are on the chart right now? And that can help me kind of get to a place where I'm not necessarily in that amygdala hijack anymore, but I still have to figure out how to work my way up.

I'll give you a real life example. So about almost four years ago now, I went through a very not fun divorce. Divorces are never fun, but, you know, it brings up. It can bring up, I wouldn't say the worst in us, because I don't believe it's the worst of us. But all of our vulnerabilities, our insecurities, all of these things, it just becomes this. All those things that are already existing in you become a big tangled ball. When you go through things like a divorce or you get laid off or you get fired or something like that happens, and you're staring into the void thinking, what do I do now?

And all you do, it feels like, is ping pong with emotions. You're just constantly in this state of, you know, hyper responsiveness number one. That's totally normal. So give yourself grace for that. Like, even when it's. I was in a conversation with someone a few weeks ago who said some things off the cuff that didn't sit well with me. And even those micro instances, it's like, oh, and then you want to defend yourself. So what? I often tell my clients and anyone, if I'm giving a workshop or a talk, give yourself time.

We as a society love to think that we're busy all the time and we don't have time to process. And, you know, when I talk to my dad still, you know, he'll check in on me. My dad's big on texting, so he'll text me and say, how are you today? I bet you're busy. And I'll say, yep, yep, I've got some stuff going on. He's always like, busy is good. And I've had to remind him, busy isn't always good. Busy also means that we are distracting ourselves from what's present. We have to make intentional choices about what we want to do.

But when we are bouncing from thing to thing to thing, we're not going to have time to process whatever's happening. Exactly like you were saying, Nikki, in those moments where your ego's bruised or you leave a meeting and you're like, that felt awful. Give yourself some time to Think about why it felt awful and reflect before responding in a text or an email for sure. Like, give yourself time. And I still have to do that. I practice this stuff. I literally eat my own dog food because I have to.

And I practice it every day. I had to do this with an email. I think it was about a week ago where I thought, oh, that was really strange. And I wrote a thing and I read it to my partner and she was like, I want you to just step away for a little bit and like give yourself some time to think about if that's the message you want to send. And when I came back and I, I will put a timestamp on it though, if I need time to digest. I'm like, okay, I'm going to give myself a half an hour, I'm going to take care of some other stuff, let my nervous system chill out a bit.

And then when I came back I was like, okay, now I'm in a more level place. Approach this now. This can be challenging if you're having a face to face conversation and it's happening in the moment. Right. Like we're in, in the middle of a conversation. There's a practice that is Gottman's four horsemen, if anyone's familiar with that. Yeah. So the Gottmans teach, they do marriage counseling and they can tell what is it? I think like with the 98 certainty whether a couple will stay married or not based upon their responses in these intense interactions, I have found this to be extremely beneficial.

Surprise, surprise in the workplace too, because we're still human beings. So when we find ourselves in places like contempt, criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, which they say is the most challenging one because you won't let anything in, it's up to you to say, I need to think about this stuff. Can we come back and meet in 10 minutes or a half an hour? But put, put a place placement, a placer on that so that you actually come back to it. Because otherwise time is of the essence with these things.

If you don't go back to it, it loses any meaning. And now we've moved on to something else, but the resentment hasn't gone away. So my biggest piece is time. I think time really allows us to be more thoughtful in our response and helps. It's like, how should I call this? I would call it like, it's like insurance for us to not say things we're going to regret and then have to apologize for now we've been a bit more thoughtful about our response and we can say how we really feel. So I think we're always afraid to ask for time.

We have to do it if we really want to move through things sometimes in a way that gives us space to do so. Yeah, that's. That resonates so much with me, especially that nuanced piece where you were saying not just time and a specific allotment of time. So it's not going to create more tension or more anxiety about, you know, there's a lot of us that have anxious attachment, myself included, which means that basically, like, if someone tells me they need time, that's like really challenging for me.

And it's also really helpful and healthy for me to practice that edge and walk myself back and say the time is great for them. It's also good for me. And when people model asking for time with me, then I get to learn how to do that with others. And so we, you know, we start. Yes. I love the. I used to. My, my. I have a sister that's a, That's a bestie. And when she's just so lovely and whenever we would, you know, just come to a ahead, she'd be like, I'm gonna come check on you in 10 minutes. And that was she.

Because she knew, you know, that was what was going to keep me calm enough and we weren't gonna codependence where she, you know, she taught me how to do it, but then it was my responsibility to do it right. But Right. Knew she wasn't abandoning me. And I think those are real. You know, I. I've. I've. I've learned the beauty of time. Sort of kicking and screaming, but it's been really lovely to, To. To see the benefits of that. So I'm so glad you. You mentioned that. I'm writing that down, Nikki.

I love that so much. The beauty of time. I am. It's such a gift. It's such a gift, and we don't take it enough. And I'm like, you where I want to figure stuff out now, now. And I am an in the moment processor, or so I think. But then I get into it and it's like, okay, well, now I'm super feisty. And I don't know that I want to come across that way because I'm being defensive about something that might have nothing to do with them. It's just some old story that's playing in my brain. So I love that idea of being of somebody saying, like, let's take a little bit of time.

I actually have two friends who are Married. And they're. They therapist practices Gottman's work. And so one of them is a stonewaller. And they told me that now when they're part, they get in an argument with their partner. They say, okay, I'm gonna take the dog and I'm gonna go on a walk for 20 minutes and then we'll come back because I gotta cool down. And their partner's like, yep, got it. And it actually has really helped them be able to figure things out. Because when we force ourselves to engage when we're not in a place where it's going to be healthy, all we do is feel regret afterwards.

And then it's like those memes you see about, like, waking up at three in the morning where you're like, oh, my gosh, did I make that person mad in 2006 when I yelled at them and said something that I didn't mean to like, it lives. There's a phenomenal book called the Body Keeps the Score, which I'm sure you've heard of. Yeah, everybody reads. I got to go see him at Esalen Institute. Oh, I'm so jealous. Yeah. Because I have a lot of stored some. I'm a somatic coach as well, so I. Oh, amazing. Okay.

Love that. Or groupie. I don't know if we say that anymore. I need to think about that. I'm a Body Keeps the Score fan. I love that. And I've also been going to a somatic therapist for about almost nine years now. And for those who aren't familiar, somatic experience is really tracking where things show up in your nervous system and in your body and where things get stuck. And we also, as humans, especially me, like, I know I'm a Chatty Cathy. I'm, you know, an extrovert, and I'm blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, spitting out stuff all the time or actively listening so that I can respond to something, but I'm not always paying attention to what's happening in my body.

And it's forcing. Forced me to slow down because I can't tell you how many times my therapist slash coach would be like, back up. Can you tell me what's happening? Because, like, your throat's starting to look red and something's happening in your body, so can you just close your eyes and sit with it for a minute? And that has been a game changer for me. It has required me to start listening to things that I was going so fast and I was so busy, I. I couldn't hear before. So big fan of somatic experience therapy.

Well, that's so awesome that you brought that up, too, because I think it goes back to what you were talking about with the beauty and the, like, gift of time. Because the time allows for me to do just, like, what it does potentially for you, as you just shared, it allows me to actually check into my body and I do, like, a 4. A process. Process question to be sure that I'm, like, actually even. Oh, I love that. And I asked myself, you know, like, how do I feel? What do I believe? What do I know?

What don't I know? And that comes from my. Oh, I love that. Sort of the, the ontology, ontological background or the study of how we learn. Right. And yeah, the way we learn is really with our, Our. Our body and also with our beliefs. Right. And our understanding. We also learn with our romantic understanding of what's the worst, best, tallest, shortest. Right. We learn with our philosophical understanding of the principles and the designs. And we ironically understand that if I am like this, I'm still here.

Right. So when we're asking ourselves, like, what we don't know, we're also including the nuance and all of our ego bruising. And when I ask myself those four questions, it is astonishing, the feedback I get. And I used to be really hard on myself because I realized I was just so disconnected from my body when I would ask myself. Yeah. And now I'm like, oh, this is just the alert to get to check in. Like, I need to. Yeah. This is how I can come back from lizard brain breakdown. Right. I love that, though.

It's. It reminds me of that practice that I've read a lot about where if you're having an anxiety attack or a panic attack. Using your senses. Yeah. Or the, or the, the opposite side, breathing. I've done that. What do you see? What? You know, names, smell. Yes. And I've taught myself to do that in moments of, you know, intense anxiety. And sometimes I need a reminder because, as I often tell people, like, I've been on. I've given talks before where someone says, like, you're the expert. And I'm like, I'm not a human being expert.

Here's the deal. Like, we're all still learning and growing. I pour my heart and soul into my work, and I love it. And I'm always going to be evolving because I'm always going to be doing things that are going to teach me something. So to your point, it's like I. If I'm investing in myself in a way where I want to learn what sorts of things can I do to be more introspective about the way that I react? And I'll be honest, like, this is very stereotypical. I was born in Boston. My parents are both from the East Coast.

I'm feisty, I just am. And I'm in the Midwest and my partner is from Louisiana, so she's got the Cajun, I've got the Boston. So we both are a little feisty. I love it. But I'm aware of that and I've seen that be. I think sometimes we. I don't want to say it's an excuse, but I've had some interesting conversations with friends recently about, like, how Minnesotans are passive aggressive and east coast people are really aggressive and people on the west coast are super passive. I think that those are just stereotypes that are given to us depending upon where we live and how we grew up.

It's really up to us then to determine what of those are strengths and what of it is fiction, that we're just saying that we have to be a certain way. Because I'm from blah. Or as much as I love astrology, I don't think it's fair to say, like, well, of course I want to, you know, of course I'm going to be loud and want to be the center of attention. I'm a Leo. That's just what I do. It doesn't work like that. We have to own. Yeah. As, as I'm talking in front of all these people as a LEO during Leo season.

But you get my point. Like, it doesn't. It can't be the. We get to define who we are and that gets to continuously change, but it's really up to us to determine what that journey is going to look like and how we show up. I just keep hearing, like, as I'm listening to you, that you're the subject matter expert of yourself and. Yeah, drinks is helping others be the subject matter expert. Excuse me, the subject matter expert of themselves as well and. Exactly. You know, it's like how you model that by, you know, prompting the questions, the inquiry, the curiosity around what lights you up, what doesn't.

How do you want to move in the world? What feels fuzzy and not so. Not so sustainable? What feels sustainable and potentially slippery. You know, you, you're. You're the. You ask the questions and your clients or members on Cadre or clients in Cadre find their own interpretation to the. The situations that you're proposing. That's kind of what it seems. Sounds like to me. Yeah. Exactly, exactly that. So I really ask people who I work with or if I've done, you know, when I do lives on Cadre, I ask folks, what's, what's presently happening with you.

Don't worry about anyone else. But let's say you're in this, you're in this, like, what's your biggest challenge right now at work? And somebody might say, I did a live talk a couple of weeks ago about internal conflict. So when we have conflict with somebody on a team who we just, we don't jive with, we don't get along with, and then we start to create this story that's probably a lot of, it's untrue about how this person's terrible and horrible and we don't want to do that, but that's what we do.

We're defending ourselves. Right. So I have them kind of walk through, okay, how did you get here? And I walk through practices like something called cycles of mistrust, where you walk through your perceived observation of what someone's doing and then your own protective response to that. They see it, they think you're protecting yourself because you are. They get frustrated, they do it again. So now we've got this cycle and it's. And it's up to us to break it. And I actually had a client tell me recently in a one on one coaching, she was like, why do I always have to be the hero?

Why do I always have to be the one to fix it? And I said, because you're aware of it. And it's not about being the hero at all for anyone else but you. It's about you not putting yourself on a pedestal. And it's also about recognizing that that other person isn't the bad guy. It's finding that middle ground. The best way that we can communicate. And most people learn by absorption and by observing. Absorption and observing. Those are like the two big ways that we, we see things. Like when we've seen, like for me, going back to the question about leaders you've had in the past who were great or who were terrible, I still remember my fourth grade teacher, Mr.

Fink, who was like, in my mind, he was like 7ft tall. I don't know that he was that tall, but giant guy. But like, like him or not. Okay. Loved him. Okay. I was feeling the good vibes of Mr. Fink, but I was, I was on your team, so I was ready to throw down. Yeah, no, he was no Mr. Fink. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah, he was, he was kind, but he was Direct and gave us feedback. So he had rules, like, if you come up to my desk and say three times, you gotta sit down and come back up. Because he was trying to teach us good diction and tone and all of that.

And it was never humiliating. He would say, okay, you've hit your limit. Why don't you go sit back down and come back up when you're ready? And he never got explosive mad, at least not that I saw. I try not to speak in, you know, always and never. But when he'd get mad, he'd do this giant eye thing. And since he was so tall and we were kids, we're like, okay, he's serious. He's not happy. We have to, like, back it off. But that taught me that you can be gentle and still have an impact and give people feedback because he wanted betterment for all of us.

It's like, I also teach a lot about radical candor, which is very similar. Kim Scott, if you. If you're familiar, and for folks who aren't, it's really about teaching us how to be direct but be empathetic. So we care about someone enough to give them feedback. 80% of the time, we are in ruinous empathy, which is caring about someone but not really wanting to give feedback. And we never get anywhere when we do that. And is it pick your battle sometimes? Sure. But if we're leading people or if we're on a team and we're collaborating, we're expecting the best out of each other.

So let's talk about how we can show up in a more honest way and practice that. I love the practical examples that you've just described. And I want to go back to the. The word empathy that you used. And what was. What was the. Something. Empathy you said empty. Like that. That somebody. That. That if somebody's the. They don't really care about you, but they seem like they care about you, right? Oh, ruinous. Ruinous empathy. Ruinous empathy. Ruinous. Yeah. So one of the. A key concept. My background is education.

So in, you know, middle school classrooms, contemporary communications and key concepts around empathy were really strong. And one of the things that we kind of figured out together as. As a classroom was empathy was really believing the other person. And what's interesting about what you're saying, right, like, if. If we spend our time just believing the other person, we don't have to be involved in their business. We don't have to be involved in how they're perceiving the world or what their experience is.

It's believing them. And that is, I think, felt. And so that's that, like, know in. In benevolence or that care, that kindness. So there is a. There's a. There's a truth to that there. That you really are on your side of the street and you're taking care of what. How you feel and what's that? You know, I think when we start to know, like, okay, I'm responsible for how I feel. I don't feel mistreated. I feel sad. Right. Feeling mistreated is. Is. Is. Is a violent way to communicate about somebody else hurting me.

And I think, right. There's a. There's a. There's a hook in there where I don't have to take responsibility. But if I can accept that I feel sad, and the myth or the story that I'm creating is that they hurt me. And what. No is that their value system didn't align with mine. And if I don't know what I'm going to do about it, I'm in a heck of a lot better place than I was before. I asked myself those questions when I was just in the spin of my myth of how terrible they were. So that's my full circle to what you were speaking of earlier.

It just made so much sense that we're all in our own myths and our own spins and our own stories. Yeah, I love that you. You're really cranking out some good phrases that I am loving. I. I wrote down. Spinning our own myths because we love to do that. And we also like to make ourselves the victim sometimes, even if we're really not. Like, I have left conversations before where I think, oh, and I can't believe somebody did that to me, and blah, blah, blah. And then when I come back to a state of reality, I'm leaving Delulu delusional land, I think.

You know, I don't know that that's necessarily true. Pema Chodron, who a lot of folks know as, like, she's an incredible human being, if you aren't familiar. We mentioned. Both of us mentioned a couple of divorce things, but one of the greatest books that I've read is When Things Fall Apart and the places that scare you. Both of those books, incredible. Pre divorce, the past divorce. Way, way better. It could be pre or past, but way better than As I Lay dying. Okay, I'm not going to interrupt again.

100%, yes. If you are going through a divorce right now, and if you are, I'm so sorry, because it's not fun. We got you You've got this. You will get out the other side and reach out to us. I lay dying. Don't read it. Don't read it. Recreate your life. It's possible. It is absolutely possible. And when you look back, like, I look back and think, I am so glad that that happened, actually. Like, would I do. I wish it had gone differently for sure. But I am where I am now and. And I get to live with that.

But on the Pema Chodron piece, she did the, the. The Super Soul Sunday with Oprah, like, I don't know, a couple years ago, where they're on a couch in this gorgeous garden. And Pema says that when she, because she, she also, you know, she's a practicing Buddhist, she said, you know, I still experience frustration with other people. Like, we're human, we do that. But her favorite practice is when she's standing in a line, like in a grocery store or something like that, and something's annoying her.

She looks straight out at them and says to herself, that's me. Like, I am them. They are me. We're the same. So I think it's so important for us to reground ourselves in those moments of frustration with other people, just recognizing we're all just clumsy human beings trying to figure it out. And that's not to say that anybody is never in the wrong. However, if you come at it from an attacking place, you're not going to get as far as you would be if you're empathetic and curious. But this takes time, practice, and that's a lot of the work that I do with leaders and with teams is to help folks step into those uncomfortable spaces and start practicing.

So that's kind of my biggest thing is practice, practice, practice, because you're going to have plenty of opportunities at home, at work, outside, with strangers. It's everywhere. I feel like you're like the container and the playground so that people can practice in a safe space. Some of these gnarly realizations, and once they're realized, the. The digestion occurs and kind of, how do you take those, those pieces of understanding and, and nuggets of information that come when you start to really look at what's happening and, and how.

How you are at a point of choice, and if you're not at a point of choice, how to get to that point of choice so that, you know you're in charge of your own life. Right. You said, you said something that I just found. I just appreciate so much. I've always felt a lot of Kinship with people who thrive in telling others about this being practice, not perfection. And, yeah, it's taken so long for me, not so long. That's. That's just, like, a thing I say right out of habit. But my whole life, I've. I.

I've really tried to understand what is this pull for perfection versus just being able to practice, you know, how I want to show up. And I think it's because I still am trying to break this idea that there's this final destination where I'm going to have optimal mental health. Yes. The most wonderful partner and the most delicious meal, you know, and it's so funny, because I actually don't want this state of perfection that I'm right. Yeah, I love that. We think we do want that, though. We think we want perfect things.

We want. She. It's another Buddhist nun who I've listened to, Robina Corten, and she's out of Australia. She's amazing. But, like, how we get frustrated when a light isn't. When we get to a light and it goes from green to yellow to red really fast. And we're frustrated because it's not what we expected. But the thing is, like, life is all about. You know, it's the Bukowski quote. Like, what matters most is how well we walk through the fire. And that's true. I mean, that's also why. So I've got my Joan of Arc poster back here.

So this is an Original World War I war bond poster that. I didn't know what it was because I can't quite see it, but it looks. Yeah, it's Joan. It's Joan. She's. She's right there. Just in case people don't know of the. The French back. People don't. If people don't know about Joan, would you give, like, a little snippet of why she's such a. A baddie? Yes, I could go on. I could have a whole live event just on her. Well, we should. We should. I'm totally down with that. I'm. I'm a big Joan of Arc person, so.

Joan of Arc was tried and executed for heresy as a young girl who led soldiers into battle. And she was burned at the stake. It was really traumatizing for her family, and her family actually came back and had her exalted from all of those things 25 years later. And I actually went to the town, which is pronounced Wa, but it's spelled Rowan, where she was tried, and it was phenomenal. But the reason why she matters so much is because she spoke her truth honestly throughout the whole trial. It's fascinating to read, but my favorite words from her are, I am not afraid.

I was born to do this. I just got goosebumps saying it because it always gives me goosebumps. But I'm such a fervent believer in, you can be afraid of, you know, what we have lurking in the shadows of our own behavior and our mind and stuff. But we also have the opportunity to move forward with it. And it's not always going to be perfect, and that is okay. We get the chance to reflect on those things and we get another day to say, what do I want to do different this time? That's how I look at every, every day.

Like, if I have a bad day, which happens to everybody and you just. I always think, and I know I'm an eternal optimist and I'm grateful for that from both my mother and my grandmother. I know I have that in, like, loads. But we do get another chance. There's always another chance to do things differently. It's just not. When we look at it as this overwhelming thing, it swallows us. And that's really why I wanted to do this work and why I love doing it is because I try and make it as practical and as actionable as I can in small slices.

So you see incremental progress. I love that even just in this conversation, I feel that texture in your, in your work. Right. Like, I feel like there's just been so many micro doses of clarity and practical things that I can do and that our listeners can do. And it's. I really am grateful for how much you're. You've shared with our community. And I think that having your perspective on burnout, plus having your perspective on your own mental health and your coaching perspective and business acumen, I think it's a really lovely perspective that we get to see modeled.

So thank you so much for modeling, for showing and being a resource to, to all of us. So if you, if any of our folks are interested in learning more about you, specifically, of course, you're going to be on the Cadre sphere and they can find you there. How can they find you outside the Cadre sphere? Great question. net super simple to remember. And then I'm on LinkedIn as Tara Scott. You can always find me there and then, of course, in the Cadre sphere. But if you go to my website, there's all sorts of ways to contact me.

I do offer private workshops. I do quite a lot of those with groups of individuals who usually a leader in teams or sometimes it's at the C suite level where they want to roll out like a different strategy to the way that they communicate and how they show up and tell folks about change. Anything that plays in the communication, self exploration, behavioral piece of things is kind of my wheelhouse. So feel free to reach out. Happy to chat anytime. Wonderful. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to have you.

One thing I just wanted to. Just a little blooper to share. Actually it's not. I don't think it's a blooper, but we're at the end of the segment and just to sort of highlight and, and shine some authenticity on, on, on Utara. I really appreciated at the beginning of the call when you said. I said hey Tara. And you were like, no, it's Tara. And thank goodness that we had that interaction because well, not thank goodness if it wouldn't have happened then it would have happened later on. But that's an example of our relationship I know is clear.

You know that I see you fully. And not only that, but if you ask me to course correct, then you know that I'm going to go ahead and do that. And all of that came by being direct. And I think those are sometimes when you see those little micro wins of what it means to be direct and how that gave my relationship with you even more fidelity. I think those are really important moments and I just want this little blip to encourage all of us to keep finding that voice. Right. To, to the directness is.

That was the most gentle. There was nothing at all. I didn't, I. My ego wasn't bruised. I was able to be, I was able to be accountable for my behavior because there wasn't, you know, you believed me that I thought your name was pronounced Tara. There was no right judgment. You weren't coming from a place of, of judgment. And I think, you know, sometimes when people. But how do I stop judging and how do I. This is, this is, this is what kind of works for me. Gosh, I'm not perfect at it. But these are the little things, you know, believing others, making those micro, micro changes and, and showing up in the relationship by digesting what's actually there and, and practicing that while we're also talking about it, I think is fundamentally important.

Oh, thank you, Nikki. That's so sweet. I mean I've, I, I never really think about it that way, but I've been You know, I, when I moved from Boston to here, I mean, nobody out there called me Tara. They all call me Tara or Tara. I lived in New York also. But it's something that I had to, to learn how to do at a young age. And I didn't even realize I was kind of flexing that muscle as I was continuing to do it. So I really appreciate that because every time I do give myself pause and think about how I want to say that.

So I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah, and I felt it. I felt that you gave yourself pause and that's what allowed for me. And not that, you know, I got to make that choice too of how to respond. And I think because, because of that pause also, it just set me so up for success. So thank you. And it's incredible. And that's how we build community. So thank you for your time, your energy, for being on Cadre. Thank you. This is great. This will go on the Cadre sphere and so if you want to link or put in the notes, your website, feel free to do that.

So folks can absolutely on the replay also be able to find you. I would love to do that. Thank you. Nikki. This was so fun. This was great. This was wonderful. Bye. Bye. Thanks everybody. Thank you. Bye. Sa Foreign. Hello, Cadre Spear. Hello. And happy Thursday to you. If you are joining me on Thursday, if you're joining me somewhere in the future in the replay. Hello to you as well. So I hope that the world is treating you well. If not, shame on it. Not shame on you. I'm Ms. Shannon, everybody.

I hope that you are here. If that's you speak, wonder if there's Nikki is here. I hope that you are doing well as well. Scylla, good to see you. Junk food junkie. I see Tara. I see a bunch of people coming into the chat. I hope that you are thriving. Amar. Amar, good to see you. Amar, if you are here, I want to say hello to you. Amar, thanks for sharing your chef like journey with us here in the Cadre sphere. I am also a fan of the legumes. Thank you for showing the beans that you cooked earlier today.

I don't have a companion bean photo to share with you, but good to see you. Hello, junk food junkie. Good to see you. I am on location. No sound. No sound. I wonder if it's because my earbuds think that they are connected. So I'm going to try two things now. I'm going to keep talking and I'm going to see if I start talking. Hi. Hi, Nikki. Do I have sound now? You can go ahead and tap that screen or do something else and let me know if you can hear me now and we'll see if maybe that's what it is because I had my earbuds in because I'm hanging out at the St.

Paul River Center. And maybe when I had those on, it thought that that's what it should be using in order to hear me. So I'll just wait to see in a couple of minutes if now you can hear me and see what happens. And we will wait and see if there is sound coming for me or if you just. Still no sound. No bueno. No bueno. Still no sound. I wonder what you think that is. I have never had that happen. I believe. Believe you, Nikki. We're going to try this again. We're going to take these out, do this.

I'm doing. Doing it perfectly. I obviously, obviously not. Obviously it is not perfect. And I normally don't go for perfect. If I was perfect, you'd be able to hear me. Check, check, check, check, check. There's a tech error, I believe. Oh, let's see. So I'm going to try this. Check your microphone. Make sure it's not muted. I don't think it works that way. I think we should leave and start again. So I'm going to leave. Let's see if it works this time. We will wait to see if maybe some people join me in this new adventure that is the first time in all this time.

Junk food junkie, it looks like you have joined again. Can you hear me this time or is there still no audio? So I will wait to see if you can hear me this time or if I still just look like I'm in an old timey movie and that my lips are moving and that you actually can't hear anything. Hello, Nikki, if you can. Let me know if you can hear me this time. Since I restarted the stream and see if it actually is working this time. We shall see. Complexities, complexities, complexities. It is quite often what we are doing.

Hello, Speak wonder. I see a tap and a screen and we'll see how that goes. There's just always something that we like to navigate and do all of the. The twists and turns in this river that we call life. We are constantly trying to see how things are working. No audio for you. And I have not done anything different with than what I normally do. Okay, I'm gonna try one more time. I'll restart my phone. Phone. I will be right back. Stop and live stream.