Managing Through Change: A Personal and Professional Workshop
DishyMix
Susan Bratton
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Episode 80 - Managing Through Change: A Personal and Professional Workshop

In this episode I share with you a workshop I conducted at the iMedia Agency Summit's Aspen Group "Agency RX" Day:

Managing Through Change: A Personal and Professional Workshop

The advertising business gets hit harder than almost any industry in every down cycle. If you’re going to be in the biz, you have to learn how to roll with the markets. In this workshop, Susan Bratton teaches you first how to get control of your own fears and anxieties. Then you learn some valuable techniques to manage stress. Finally, you learn what it takes to be a really good manager during times of chaos. This interactive workshop includes three interactive segments involving Socratic Questioning, Calm Abiding Meditation and a Work/Life Balance Assessment.

“In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.” —Albert Camus

Quote from DAVID COWAN of Bessemer Venture Partners and recent guest on DishyMix - “Folks love to pick on ad folks along with lawyers, VCs etc. But I'd remind them of the vital role they play in society today by promoting digital media and the digital economy. At a time when people around the world worry about our friends in Mumbai, only the Internet brings us the news instantly and directly. And a time when households are under unprecedented financial pressure, digital media and e-commerce can play a vital role in helping us save money on everything we buy. The digital economy is transforming education, philanthropy, music, even dating. And none of it would happen without matching sponsors and publishers as efficiently and creatively as the people you're addressing.”

There are very specific behaviors you can invoke to thrive in the natural cycles of the ad business.

In this episode you will learn:

  • Confronting Personal Fear and Anxiety
  • Techniques to Manage Through Change
  • Emotional Leadership

ACTION

Change your thinking!

3 Exercises:

  • Socratic Questioning
  • Calm-Abiding Meditation
  • Lifestyle Balance Assessment

RESULT

  • You will be richer, thinner, more loved. ;)
  • Less stress, more accomplishment, a great leader through using these techniques and perspectives I’ll teach you today.
  • Excel in a down market.

Transcript

Transcript

Susan Bratton: Welcome to DishyMix. I’m your host, Susan Bratton, and on today’s show you’re going to get to meet you. Yes. We are always meeting new people and I’m always interviewing famous people from Internet, media, marketing and Web 2.0.

But I wanted to do a special show just for you, today. My show is called Managing Through Change. This is a workshop that I had been asked to do at the iMedia Summit at the Aspen Leadership Group. It’s a group of about 100 digital advertising agency professionals and executives and John Durham, who has been on DishyMix, asked me to come in and do a workshop talking about life balance and managing through change.

Our marketplace is hit hardest through the cyclical issues of the industry, and we go in, we go out. It’s always difficult. How do we manage ourselves and our teams through these more difficult times in the advertising and marketing world? That’s what this presentation is about. The first thing that I wanted to do was to lead off today’s DishyMix with a thought by Albert Camus. Here it is:

“In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.”   

What I’m going to do today is help you find your invincible summer, the summer that’s inside you, no matter how wintery it seems outside. One of the things I’ve done is asked someone of my past DishyMix guests to give me some perspective that I could share with you about these wild changes and cycles that happen in our marketplace and what we can do to weather the storm and what we can do to actually thrive in that storm.

The first point of view that I’d like to share with you is from David Cowan. He says, “Folks love to pick on ad folks along with lawyers and VCs. But I'd remind them of the vital role they play in society today by promoting digital media and the digital economy. At a time when people around the world worry about our friends in Mumbai, only the Internet brings us the news instantly and directly. And a time when households are under unprecedented financial pressure, digital media and e-commerce can play a vital role in helping us save money on everything we buy. The digital economy is transforming education, philanthropy, music, even dating. And none of it would happen without matching sponsors and publishers as efficiently and creatively as the people you're addressing.”

And that’s you. There are some very specific behaviors you can invoke to thrive in the natural cycles of the ad business. That’s really what this presentation is about.

Today, I’m going to talk about three things. I’m going to talk about confronting your personal fears and anxieties because until your house is in order you can’t help other people. Secondly, I’m going to give you some really good techniques to manage through change. And third, I’m going to teach you about emotional leadership. When change happens in organizations, it’s not change management. It’s about how you as a manager can be the container for all that emotional upheaval that happens and how you can hold that container, and how you can help your employees thrive in that change too.

What action do I want you to take from listening to my presentation today? The first thing I want you to do is change your thinking. Not an easy thing? It is. Because the things I’m going to teach you are things you are going to want to incorporate into the way you approach your life from today going forward.

We’re going to do three exercises. That’s why it’s called a personal and professional workshop. We are going to talk about Socratic Questioning. This is something I’m going to teach you. It comes from Socrates. He was a good guy. He asked a lot of the right questions. You can ask those in your life both professionally and personally, and I’m going to teach you how.

I’m going to teach you a mediation called Calm-Abiding Meditation. Even if you’ve never done a mediation before, this is something that you could start to do today and do successful that can literally change your life. The third thing I’m going to do, as far as in exercise, is a lifestyle balance assessment. You’re going to get to see how in or out of balance you are in your role today.

What are you going to get out of doing all these? Well, you’re going to get richer, thinner, more people are going to love you. I actually can’t guarantee the thinner but you are going to have less stress, and that is always better. You are going to have more accomplishment. You are going to become a greater leader through using these techniques and the perspectives that I’m going to teach you and you are going to excel in a down market. When other people are grumbling and being miserable and not getting stuff done and being a bunch of whiners, you are going to be shooting to the moon.

Let’s get to the first part. That’s confronting personal fear and anxiety. Now, the first thing I’d like to do is read you an excerpt from one of DishyMix past guests, and someone I absolutely adore, Joseph Carrabis. Here’s his story that he wrote to share with me and you. Susan, his wife, and I are coming on our 25th wedding anniversary. We’ve been together for 31 years. I wrote our wedding vows.

Here they are. I cannot promise you fidelity, sanity, health, hope, love, comfort or joy. All I can promise is that I will change. Not all my changes will be good. I ask God’s help that not all will be bad. I ask you today to be with me in my changes, to tell me when I am foolish, to heal me when I am sick, to love me when I forget to love and to give me hope when I have none to give. To give me comfort when I am cold and alone, and to give me joy when all I know is sadness. Stand with me the rest of my days. I’ve asked you to do this. I ask you again here before our friends and family. It’s said before others but the words are for you. I love you.

Nobody in the audience knew what the vows would be, not even the minister. People knew I’d written them and everyone assumed they’d be whimsical, if not funny. I can’t tell you the number of people who’ve asked for copies of our vows since then. What is the saddest is that 80 of the couples that attended only two remain together, and death took two other couples. Why did we last as a couple? Perhaps, because we defined our relationship from the beginning by the changes we would go through, both known and unknown, and recognizing that nothing is static and everything evolves.

Study change. Study evolution and you’ll learn that Nature preserves the balance of the whole at great costs. Nature reshapes oceans and continents, movies galaxies and suns, creates light and darkness in equal measure and always to keep itself in balance. A [?] model of eternity sensing a balance of harmonies by the winds of change. Isn’t it then a demonstration of whatever God wants honors to give the universe rest by keeping oneself in as much balance as possible? Do you want to know whether the times, economical upheavals, business excesses and failures, the birth of a child and the loss of a friend?

Keep yourself in balance first. Then keep balance with the world around you. Spend as much time fostering yourself as you do others. Give as much time to others as you do yourself. Your world can change in less than a heartbeat. So, find joy whenever you can.

The world will take care of bringing you sorrow when you least expected. The bad news is that keeping yourself in balance is in itself a full-time job. It’s what you are really born to do. Get used to it. Recognize it. Do it.

The good news is that making this your full-time job means everything else falls into place faster than you can imagine, in less than a heartbeat when you least expected. So, take joy in it.

That’s Joseph Carrabis from NextStage Evolution with a fabulous perspective on change.

Now, I’m going to ask you to just take a moment. Get out a pencil and a piece of paper and I want you to write down something that you fear. Something that’s been niggling at you. Something that’s making you anxious or bring stress to you. What is that thing? I’m going to ask you to write that down now. I’m not going to show that or share that with anybody. You don’t have to talk about it. But we are going to come back and address it in a few more minutes when we get some perspective on it. So, go ahead and do that now. You can turn off this podcast and I’ll give you just a second. Okay, put it aside.

Now, I want to tell you about something called Cognitive Behavior Therapy. We call it CBT for short. It’s something that can help you overcome stress and anxiety. Most of the things I am about to tell you came from an absolutely fantastic book called Change Your Thinking: Overcome Stress and Anxiety and Depression and Improve Your Life with CBT written by Sarah Edelman, a Ph. D., university professor out of Sydney, Australia. It’s a fantastic book. You can get it on Amazon and I recommend it.

Here’s the cliff note, if you don’t have time, I’m going to tell you. CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy… cognitions create feelings which effect our behavior and changing our behavior can change the way we feel. That’s what we want to do. The first thing, cognitive strategy, the idea is that you are learning to recognize the thoughts and beliefs and the attitudes that make you feel bad so that you can reframe them into realistic psychologically healthy ways of thinking.

In a minute I’m going to ask you to tell me some of the things that you might be     doing to sabotage yourself that are essentially bad thinking. Some of the things that are faulty thinking. That’s cognitive. We have cognitive strategies recognizing bad thoughts and changing it so that our behavior is changed. The behavioral strategies involve undertaking certain behaviors that help us change the way we think and feel. CBT is not positive thinking: I’m a winner, there is abundance all around me. It’s not affirmations. It’s actually emphasizing developing healthy and realistic beliefs. Not wishful thinking.

Recognize, when you have faulty thinking, think to yourself as I asked you if you do this, whether or not you do this and if you do this frequently. Do you have irrational beliefs? Do you suffer from something we call the [?] territory of the should, which is, oh I should do that, I should do this, these are expected of me. Have you ever done something called awfulizing, making something worse than it really is? How about black and white thinking? Are you working in the grey scale or you’re working in technicolor or you sometimes stuck in black and white? Do you over generalize? Do you personalize? Do you take things personally when they aren’t, anything about you? How often do you jump to negative conclusions?

You are probably thinking I do all these things. What about mind reading? You assume you know what someone is thinking, and you just don’t ask them. How about blaming? Are you placing the blame? I know I do. And what about predicting a catastrophe: oh my god, if this goes wrong the world is going to end. We do all of these faulty thinking things and we do them frequently. If you are doing them and I am doing them – everybody is doing them.

What CBT does is allow you to confront your fears? Abandon perfection and learn how to communicate more effectively and more assertively, and to problem solve. If not me, then who? Who is going to solve these problems? Who is going to overcome my fears? Are you going to overcome my fears for me? Am I going to overcome your fears for you? No.

What are we going to do? We have to set our goals. We have to get social support and finally, part of CBT is this idea that practicing deep relaxation techniques really helps. So, it’s a combination of intelligent rational thinking, overcoming your faulty thinking and combining that with relaxation. Those two things together help you overcome your fear and anxiety when you do them together.

I have someone else who contributed to this workshop that I want to read for you, and this is Andy Beal. Andy has been on the show. He wrote a great book called Radically Transparent. Here’s what he says: I used to fear change. I was quite contend to remain inside that box and I find comfort in my comfort zone. Fortunately for me, change found me over and over again. I looked at the worst case scenario for each area of change. What was the absolute worst thing that could happen without doing the expression, you have nothing to fear but fear itself, would hold true.

I would fear change without actually knowing what I feared. When I sat down and looked at the worst case scenario, I often found it wasn’t all that bad. What I discovered is that change is simply a misnomer for opportunity. These opportunities have led to a new consulting practice, a new book and new software. You can bet that I now look for change at every turn.

Andy is on fire and he shared that with us.

Now, I want to go back to that fear that you wrote down on a piece of paper. Get that paper back out and let’s rationally look at it. Let’s use Cognitive Behavioral Therapy on this fear by asking ourselves some pretty simple questions. Here we go, and you can just think this out to yourself and then you can go back and you can really work these questions. This list of questions is going to be published on the DishyMix blog so you have access to it. But let’s just think through it right now while we have it in front of us. You got that fear staring you in your face. Here we go.

First, you have to describe the situation that you are worried about. I bet what you wrote down isn’t very well organized as a thought. It’s probably pretty mushy. What’s the actual situation that you are exactly afraid of? What’s really making you anxious?

Secondly, what do you specifically fear would happen? Then, rate the likelihood that this will actually happen from zero to a 100 percent. What’s the reality of that to you? What do you think? And then, what evidence supports these worrisome thoughts? Do you have evidence that this might happen? Write that down.

What evidence doesn’t support those thoughts? What are the alternatives that something else might happen? If this bad terrible thing did happen, what action would you take? What would you do? And realistically, what’s the absolutely worse thing that could happen?

Now, what’s the best thing that could happen if your fear was realized? Is there a silver lining here for you? And are there any useful actions you might take now that could prevent this from happening? Finally, almost done, what would you tell a friend who had this fear? What advice would you give as a good friend? Can you take that advice for yourself?

Now, realistically re-rate the likelihood that your fears will be realized. Did that number go up or did that number go down, now that you thought socratically about your worst fear?

Facing your fears can be a huge relief.

Do you feel any better? I hope so. Okay, stay with me. We are going to take a quick break to thank my sponsors and when we come back, we’ve got more great information for you.

[Commercial Break]

Okay, we are back. Let’s keep going. I hope you are having a good time. I am enjoying relaying this information to you. Here we go. Alright. Let’s move into some more techniques to manage change. First of all, when we are worried about things that stress launches that fight or flight sympathetic nervous system. It [?] dumps, caught us all. We start to worry. We have a lot of adrenaline. Our adrenals get exhausted. We can’t live in that anxiety. We need to confront our fears.

There are a number of things we can do in addition to thinking through our fears. To calm our stress, we can use relaxation and visualization. Here are some of the things that might be possibilities for you. You can use visualization to think through what the possibilities might be. You can actually plan things out. You can create what you want things to be in your mind and then bring those to life having thought them through. You can use calming visual imagery. Some people call that going to their happy place. Maybe today we should call it finding our invincible summer.

You can do progressive muscle relaxation, just to chill yourself out when things are going crazy and you are wagging. What about just… relaxing your butt, cheeks a little and your jaw and just kind of… calming down a little bit and slowly letting your body kind of melt and not hold everything so tightly. Now, how about topping all that off with a few nice deep breathing exercises? Sometimes people like to really pull those in and out of their body through your four good deep breathes. A lot of people say, stop take a breath. That’s some good advice. [laughs] I mean we need to just take a couple of breathes now and then. And then, of course, meditation.

We will to get to mediation because we are going to do one. There is this new concept in the intersection of psychology and neuroscience. It’s called MBSR, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. They are using it to treat cancer patients, agitated teenagers, women with hot flashes, people who are in severe depressions, and it’s being used more and more and more in the workplace. This Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction combines meditation and yoga as the two things that can alleviate stress and some of the anxiety and depression that comes from things like change - a lot of the fear of the unknown.

What I am going to talk to you about right now is something from the Vajrayana Buddhism sector, you know, that kind of lineage. It’s called Samatha or Calm-Abiding Meditation. It’s Tibetan yoga actually. Here’s what you do. You’re going to sit up straight and kind of stack your spine. You can sit on the floor, maybe with a cushion underneath your buns and your knees a little bit lower. That’s a really comfortable place. Or, you can do it right at your desk, right in your chair. You want to keep your eyes open for this meditation. This is not a closed eye meditation. But your are going to keep your eyes softly focused, about a foot in front of you. Your chin is going to tilt down a little bit. You are going to sit in your chair or sit on a cushion on the floor, and you are just going to get comfortable. Sit Indian cross-legged style or whatever you want to do.

Look in front of you and soft-focus your eyes and then start watching your breath, going in and out. [breathing in & out] What you want to do is clear your mind. This is the time when you are going to lower your stress and anxiety by letting go of everything. You are going to say to yourself: let go. Every time your mind starts to wander in its crazy wild child way about whatever is going on and the sounds that you hear, each time something comes up for you, you want to say: let go, just let go. You want to do that for maybe three minutes.

You can do this at your desk. You can go to the ladies’ room and sit on the john and do it. You can just hide away somewhere and take three minutes whenever you are feeling a little like [making sound]. You have three minutes to this whenever you need to. It’s like 12 breathes and see if that has a more calming effect on you. Even just the two breathes I took made me feel better and I’ve got to keep talking because this is our podcast together.

I want to share a couple more sentiments from some of my past DishyMix guests. I asked Steve Wozniak if he had any words of wisdom for managing through change and work-life balance. Here’s what he said.

He said, “First know yourself. Many chase dreams that belong to others. Know what makes a happy life for you and realize that it maybe different for others.”

Marc Canter had a similar sentiment to share with you. He said, “Only do the things that you really like to do. Anything else will just bore you.” Good food for thought.

Now, I want to move into emotional leadership. We faced some of your fears and giving you some rational ideas to process them. We’ve given you some Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction techniques using Calm-Abiding Meditation.

Now, I want to talk to you about, after you have your house in order, taking care of the people around you, not just the people who work for you but maybe everybody in your organization. Maybe everybody in your family. Maybe everybody in your life. What can you do as an emotional leader?

Jack Meyers has something to share that’s a really nice perspective for you. He says the heart of the transition from the agrarian age to the industrial age was a period of about 45 years from 1875 to 1919. Then it took another 25 years for industry and mass media to shift from first to third gear. The TV was discovered in 1927, but it wasn’t a mass media until the 1950s. Most people refused to bring electricity into their homes for years fearing it’s dangerous and took many years before the electric outlet was actually developed. The sweet spot for the transition from the industrial age to the digital and relationship age will be about a 30-year period that began in 1990, and we halfway through it right now. Looking ahead to 2010, 2015 and 2020, the path into the relationship age is clear and exciting. Good luck!

What I get, from Jack say, is that we need to pace ourselves. We can’t just keep ploughing through or we are going to age into this era. We need to take care of ourselves and the people around us using the latest psychology and techniques that we possibly can to weather these cycles. You have to take charge. You are a leader. Even if you manage only yourself, you can be a leader. If it is going to be, it’s up to me. That’s a great thing. You need to own things, not complain about things.

I consulted with two leading consultants for you in emotional leadership. Kelley Rainwater is an organizational change consultant and a leadership coach. She has been working with Cisco, as an example, for six years helping foster the right culture for their organization. She works with Ben Thomson who is the founder of a Santa Fe-based leading edge self-care training company called Universal Self-Care Solutions and what you’ll find is that self-care is coming into organizations.

You know, what’s interesting I recently emceed a conference called Happiness & Its Causes. It was, I’d say, an intersection of neuroscientists, neurosurgeons, psychologists who are all studying happiness. The interesting thing about it was that Meng, who is Google’s jolly good fellow, he runs their personal development university at Google. Meng said that in 1925 companies looked at exercise as something really unusual and unique, yet now companies have gyms in their offices. We are going to look back at Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as things that we naturally do as a part of running a healthy and positive business for our employees.

Kelley and Ben helped me come up for you with the four things that you can do to be an effective and emotional leader. The first thing you are going to have to do is increase your communication in times of change. Secondly, you are going to have to maintain your executive presence. You can’t fall apart. You have got to hold yourself together which is why we did exercises number one and number two. You are going to have to create a culture of self-care and you are going to have to harness the existing anchors that are already in your organization.

Let’s talk about what those look like. The first one: increasing communication. You are going to have to do more one-on-one. You are going to have to talk with your people. Do they need resources? If you had layoffs and re-orgs if you lost a client, what do you need to do now? What do they need now? You are going to have to help them, have prioritization, provide, continuing and evolving prioritization. You are going to have to increase your positive feedback. You are going to have spent a lot of energy giving gratitude and appreciation to your employees who are probably working harder and from a more fear-based place than they ever have before.

Next, maintaining your executive presence. You have got to hold yourself together. You have to acknowledge stress. You can’t pretend there is not stress in the workplace. If there is you have to show it and say it and it’s not an elephant in the room any longer. You have to address it. You have to keep yourself calm. You can’t get all whipped out and upset about what your management is doing. You have to hold it together. You have to set the tone and you have to stop changing anything else in the organization.

When there is a lot of change happening, keep things the way they are as much as you can. Keep those systems flowing and be a role model for self-care. Do it yourself so others will feel like they are allowed to take care of themselves too. So, what is the culture of self-care? How do you create that? Well, you could encourage meditation. You could have yoga breaks. You can set up a meditation room. You could all learn how to do it together.

You could let people just do what they need to do. You could bring in superfoods and healthy snacks. You could take more breaks. There are a lot of things that you could do if you knew what your employees like to do. What recharge them? Those are the things you could do. Why not ask them? Maybe you can’t read their mind.

Here’s something from Diana Middleton. Diana’s been on DishyMix as well and here’s what she said in terms of balancing work and home. I think we all struggle with it, me included. I guess my first mantra is my work will never be done. So, it’s up to me to draw the line and decide when I need to walk away. Walking away can mean going home, ending the day, shutting down my PC, not engaging all weekend or stopping in the middle of a work day to ride on my horse for an hour, whatever I need to do to recharge my own engine. Everyone needs to understand what refills their field tank in order to balance work and life. For me it’s being outside, being with or on a horse breathing in the dry mountain air. It’s why I insist on living where I do.

Now, I love to go to New York and I come back energized about my career in ways that lights a passion fire inside the career part of me. But I also come back completely depleted of my soul energy. Keeping those in balance helps me perform at peak level.

So, I ask you do you know what keeps your soul balanced. Do you know what keeps your employees’ souls balanced? How could you support them and yourself in doing that?

Here’s the last thing that you can do and that’s harnessing anchors in your organization. You have to set realistic performance goals when there is a lot of change in your organization. You have to continue to communicate the company’s vision and strategic objectives. Those that has changed, what are the new ones? Are we hunkering down now, or what are we doing? What’s our goal? What are our strategic objectives this moment in time and how can your employees help you achieve those?

Finally, you’ve got to increase the fun. You’ve got to go out to the movies or go to a basketball game or go marching a parade or take a walk together or go out for a picnic or whatever it is. Find out what your employees would think is fun and then do that. At first, if you don’t do a lot of that, they are going to think, urgh it’s weird, what do we have to do this? This stupid motivational thing. Oh my god, we’ve to go to movies. They are going to be all cranky because they don’t actually have the working bones to know how to have fun with their employees, [laughs] with their peers, with you. Teach each other how to interact and have fun. Learn that together. Make that a goal. It’s really important.

Here is something from Pete Blackshaw to consider. He says, “It’s never easy to balance life and work, and I am far from the perfect case study on this front. In fact, the premise of the next book I’m exploring, Digital Detox, is all about recovering that balance. That said I do think we need to protect as much flexibility and agility in our lives to be successful. This applies as much to personal as business life. Social life media interestingly is softening the silo between the two. There are aspects of that dynamic which are positive. I’ve actually found that the best insights I pick up for business re-application derived from my personal social media pursuits. Whether it is creating and refining a blog for the twins, now [29:45] or through using social media to advance a personal cause such as votercam.com. We obviously can’t take this too far but, if managed properly, there is some upside. The recent economic uncertainty does add more complexity to the equation. It’s tempting to give the work side of the equation the upper hand. But don’t do it.

Alex Bogusky wrote to me about work-life balance and here’s what he thought. He says work-life balance… hmm, this is a difficult question but I don’t think it’s a coincidence we call it balance. When you watch somebody balanced on a tightrope you realize balance isn’t a set place. Balance can be found because it’s a process. A process of quickly moving from one imbalance to the next imbalance, never perfectly centered, but instead always loose and reacting. The smaller and faster the adjustments are, the better the balance. Balancing your life is the same process. I like the idea that balance is just a continuing state and maybe we just need to get used to that.

Alright, the last thing we are going to do in the workshop is take a lifestyle balance assessment. Now, the lifestyle balance assessment can be printed out from the DishyMix blog. Just look for lifestyle balance assessment and you’ll find that. And then, once you have taken that it will give you a sense of where there might be some holes in your lifestyle.

Then, you can ask yourself a series of questions about it to help you figure out how you can bring more balance to a life that might be out of it. How balanced is your lifestyle? Are there some areas that are missing out? What sort of changes could you make to enhance your lifestyle? What obstacles will you need to overcome in order to make these changes? And what do you need to believe to overcome this obstacle?

I think there is a lot of guilt in a lot of the things that we want to do around work-life balance. So, what beliefs do you need to change potentially using some kind of therapy or some kind of questioning? Then, just write a plan of action. I know you know how to write a plan of action. That’s what we do in business. We just need to do it for ourselves. Using Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and other tools can help you thrive in these market cycles. I want you to confront your fears.

I want you to help your employees do that too. You need to help them do it. Give them a permission to do it. Maybe consider meditation and yoga, and hold that emotional container for your organization’s step-up and take control of that. What you’ll get out of that is that you, your team and your customers will feel an ease that positively impacts results. Instead of trying to run through with brute force, let’s set it free and come together to make those results impactful.

I’ll leave you with a final thought. Here’s something from the Buddha:

“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts and with our thoughts we make the world.”

It’s been great to have this opportunity to talk to you. I’m your host, Susan Bratton. Let me know what you thought of this show and have a great day, and I hope you’ll take advantage of some of these great ideas and practices. Take care.