People First! with Morag Barrett

Welcome to SkyeTeam's People First! In this series, we explore the people side of successful business and careers. We all have a story to share, a leadership journey that we are experiencing.

We'll be interviewing authors, business leaders, thought leaders, and people like you to uncover the latest ideas, resources, and tools to help you become more effective at work - and in life. As it turns out, the secret is cultivating winning relationships. Business is personal, and relationships matter!

So, sit back, and grab a coffee as Morag and Dr. Jen Goldman-Wetzler discuss how to free yourself from conflict!

00:00 Open
00:08 Intro
01:50 Origin Story
03:11 What Is Conflict?
05:08 Patterns
06:33 Breaking Patterns
09:49 Do Patterns Change With The Situation?
11:16 Happy Ending
15:30 Dealing with Emotions
24:58 Little House on the Prairie
27:22 Where to Find You & Wrap

Links:
https://jengoldmanwetzler.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jen-goldman-wetzler/

Transcript:
- [INTRO] Welcome to SkyeTeam's "People First" with Morag Barrett.

- Welcome to this week's "People First" and the theme for our conversation this week is conflict. One of my pet topics because it is a topic and an environment I try to avoid. But my guest this week, Dr. Jen Goldman-Wetzler is the CEO of Alignment Strategies Group. She is the premier New York based consulting firm that helps CEOs and their executive teams optimize organizational health and growth. But the key here is that she is the author of "Optimal Outcomes," which I can see on the shelf behind you Jen. "Optimal Outcomes; Free Yourself from Conflict at Work, at Home, and in Life." See, the secret to success. I can't wait to learn more. And this book was selected as Financial Times' book of the month. She's a keynote speaker for Fortune 500 companies, public institutions and leading startups including Google, Harvard Law School and the United Nations. Ooh, I'm looking forward to some stories about that Jen. And a former counter-terrorism fellow with the US department of Homeland Security. She has a PhD in social organizational psychology from Columbia University and has taught conflict freedom at Columbia for a decade. Jen, welcome to "People First."

- Thank you so much. It's great to be with you.

- Well, as I said as somebody who personally avoids conflict wherever I can, sweep it under the carpet, pretend it never happened, I am looking for some words of wisdom from you as we go through our conversation. But as ever I want to start with the origin story. So when you were a little girl, I don't know. Were you sitting there imagining that you were going to become a counter-terrorism fellow? What did you want to be when you grew up?

- I was not dreaming about being a counter-terrorism fellow. I was very interested in design, in interior design and architecture. I loved looking at houses and I grew up in a like a little red apartment building at the end of a long street in Riverdale, in the Bronx, in New York. And so, looking at houses and, you know, designing rooms was a fantasy to me. It was not something that was part of the day-to-day for me. And so that really, you know today what I do is I design organizations. I design lives, I help people design their own work lives, their own personal lives, their own organizational structures and so, you know, that's how I think that there is some connection there from what I love to do as a kid.

- Okay, that's also, I was trying to think, well the most I can think of as conflict for interior design was arguing over paint colors and trying to decide is this little swatch going to look fabulous when I do the whole wall? So thank you for that. Well, let's start with the basics, conflict. What is conflict? How do you define conflict?

- Yeah, well, people have so many different ways of defining what is conflict and what is conflict resolution? You know, the interesting question to me has been how do we, why am I talking about conflict freedom as opposed to resolving conflict? So, to answer your question one way to define conflict is simply say when people who are interacting with each other have different points of view or different interests that don't seem to be reconcilable. And over the last 40 years, we've had a lot of research and a lot of practice come out about how to resolve that kind of conflict. And a lot of that has come, has been about win-win negotiation. And the idea that even if we, our positions are different if we get underneath those positions and look at what are the interests that each person involved has, the reasons why we want what we want, it can be easier to come to a win-win solution. My work is all about what to do when that kind of process fails, when that win-win negotiation just doesn't work. We've seen again, over the past many decades, time and time again, whether you look at the international realm or the business realm, or the, you know inside the home community realm, very often these best practices using interest based win-win negotiation just doesn't work. And so my work is all about looking at seemingly intractable situations, where we feel stuck and how can we free ourselves from those situations from the thought patterns, from the behavioral patterns from the emotional patterns that get and keep us stuck on those conflict loops.

- So where do we learn these patterns that get us stuck in the first place?

- Well, very often we learn them from a very young age. We learned them from teachers, parents, coaches, religious clergy, you know, anyone in our lives who is helping to teach us something about the world we are likely to get the messages from them. And sometimes it really is just the most obvious, you know nuclear family that we learn how to deal with conflict from there. And I talk about these as conflict habits. These are the ways that we learn how to approach conflict. So you, at the start of the show said, I will admit, I like to avoid conflict as much as I possibly can. So that is one of the four conflict habits that I write about in the book and that I work with. We either avoid it. We blame ourselves, some of us. Many of us blame other people. And finally in somewhat more counter-intuitively what I have found is that now after 40 years of teaching people how to collaboratively work with conflict some of us actually relentlessly seek to collaborate with other people, even when it's not working for us. So we can actually get stuck in conflict by trying to collaborate with other people when those other people are unwilling to cooperate with us, we stay stuck.

- So again, realize, even though my internal, my natural desire is to avoid it there are times where I have to face up to it and own it. And I know in the book you talk about eight practices and that first one is knowing your habits and patterns. So for me, as soon as my heart rate goes up I can feel that adrenaline spike and it's either fight or flight, more often flight. I then have to make a choice to do different. So how do we break these patterns and know when to push and when actually flight or keeping quiet is the appropriate answer?

- Hmm mm. Great questions. So, the first thing to do as you noted, and that's why it's the first practice in the book is about simply pausing and noticing how you are stuck, because without noticing that you're stuck or how you're stuck, or why you're stuck it really is impossible to break free of anything because you don't know what you would need to break free from. So the first practice is to simply notice your conflict habit and notice whoever is involved in your situation with you, guess what might be their conflict habits. Sometimes this is not so hard to do, right? There are four choices and it's often very obvious that you know either I'm stuck in a blame-blame pattern where...

Welcome to SkyeTeam's People First! In this series, we explore the people side of successful business and careers. We all have a story to share, a leadership journey that we are experiencing.

We'll be interviewing authors, business leaders, thought leaders, and people like you to uncover the latest ideas, resources, and tools to help you become more effective at work - and in life. As it turns out, the secret is cultivating winning relationships. Business is personal, and relationships matter!

So, sit back, and grab a coffee as Morag and Tian Shi talk about how not to underestimate or be underestimated!

Chapter Layout:
0:00 - Open
0:55 - Origin Story
2:53 - Pivot Point
6:44 - The Book
17:53 - What Are You Taking Away?
18:45 - Contact Info & Wrap 

Links: 
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/exceptionally-average-by-tian-shi#/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tian--shi/  

Welcome to SkyeTeam's People First! In this series, we explore the people side of successful business and careers. We all have a story to share, a leadership journey that we are experiencing.

We'll be interviewing authors, business leaders, thought leaders, and people like you to uncover the latest ideas, resources, and tools to help you become more effective at work - and in life. As it turns out, the secret is cultivating winning relationships. Business is personal, and relationships matter!

So, sit back, and grab a coffee as Morag and Brad Montgomery talk about emotions drive engagement!

Chapter Layout:
0:00 - Open
1:48 - Origin Story
3:49 - Pivot Point
6:00 - Trips & Stumbles
8:11 - Receive Feedback
11:44 - Happiness Is...
16:38 - Applications
17:52 - Common Sense
20:36 - MBWA
23:04 - Contact Info & Wrap

Links:
Website: https://www.bradmontgomery.com/

Transcript:
- [INTRO] Welcome to Skye Team's People First with Morag Barrett.

- My guest this week on People First is my friend and colleague Brad Montgomery. Brad is a certified speaking professional. And if you don't know what that means stay tuned and you will learn. But ultimately Brad teaches people to use happiness to boost productivity, creativity, innovation and profits. He turns typical meetings into transformational events using the power of happiness. And he's a pretty funny guy. And if you are unsure, he has been able to make audiences, across 50 States and on four continents giggle his clients include Microsoft, Verizon, the FBI, yep, that one, the CIA, yep, that one too and the IRS, you mean the IRS has a sense of humor, Brad? I love it, I love it. Anyway, audiences of meeting planners describe Brad as authentic. He's a real human a funny guy on stage and off. And I am excited to share his leadership journey with all of us today. Brad, welcome to People First.

- And the crowd goes crazy.

- I don't know, I really should have a laugh track going or you should maybe you could have hit that button for us.

- That will do, it still goes boom.

- I'll say, it's nice to be... I've got my little graphic going, I'm sorry. I forgot that it comes up, Morag I'm so glad to be here.

- Well, I'm excited for the conversation and as we're there three People First episode, Brad, I'm always a little bit nosy and a little bit curious about everybody's origin story, 'cause of course we see you, the Brad of today, the successful keynote speaker Hall of Fame speaker no less.

- Oooh!

- And it's easy to lose sight of the wee lad you once were. So when you were a wee lad back in elementary school, the teacher said, "Brad, what do you want to be when you grow up?" What is your answer?

- I wanted to be a larger lad

- A larger lad.

- So in fact, I'm... In a second I'm going to walk behind the camera and grab a prop. 'Cause it's visual, baby! I wanted to be the... Not just the owner of an ice cream parlor. I wanted to be the owner of a chain of ice cream parlors. 'Cause I thought that was so cool.

- It would be. So can I ask what's your favorite ice cream color, not color, flavor?

- Well, I can tell you what, it's not, it's not vanilla and I'll tell you why it's not. I love my wife, my wife is a vanilla with chocolate sauce woman, that's what she wants and I like variety. So the key is variety, It's about... It's really has nothing to do with the vanilla it has to do with, Oh, for Christ's sake. Can we get something else?

- So when I was little at my granny used to buy Neapolitan in a block, it was... It was the vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, also with all the additives and you had to fold the box down and she would slice it and put it between little wafers, and I thought that was the height of luxury. But I have to say, I do like my sort of caramel waffle cone, mix with a bit of chocolate in there too. Well, there you go.

- My experience with Neapolitan, is it the strawberry is always left over. People are scooping out those vanilla and chocolate and the strawberries left.

- Well, I know, I didn't like the chocolate 'cause it was... It was always fake chocolate. So very important leadership journey in terms of ice cream flavors and how that has either emotionally scarred us or shaped us into the leaders that we are today. So tell me what was the pivot point that then took you from aspiring ice cream parlor leader, to professional speaker and Hall of Fame?

- My like so many of us Morag, my line is not straight. So I got out of... I did magic tricks in college, so my summer job was being a magician at a Renaissance fair, and oh, I have stories about that.

- Go on then. And then after college I thought, Oh I'll do... Honestly, I'll just master magic, I'm pretty good at it, I'll master it in a year, and then I'll go to law school, like my dad, and that'll be that. And then of course, when you're 21, you're an idiot and you don't realize you can't master anything in a year. So after being in it for a while, I realized one, Oh, this is hard and a year is not going to cover it. And two, I kind of got lucky because or I don't know lucky, maybe it's because I was awesome but my goals were just... My only goal that year was to have fun, master magic and not borrow money from my parents. And I got lucky and I got into some cool places and the money was coming in, and I was excited and I won a contest, which was cool, and I got booked at the Magic Castle which is a really prestigious magic club for magicians. And I came back and said, "screw law school, I'm not going." And I was kind of open to it thinking, well eventually I'll probably go to grad school but that time has not come so...

- Next year.

- I was an entertainer for years, and it was through that Morag, that I got exposed to professional speaking and professional speakers. And then it was a 15 year morph into becoming not just a guy who stands on stage to entertain but a guy who has an idea that he wants to communicate.

- So you make it sound so easy, but I have heard from you, around the stories around the Magic Castle, that it wasn't as smooth sailing as perhaps the jump, the time warp from then now might appear. So tell me about some of the trips and stumbles along the way.

- I didn't have any.

- It was perfect. Cool as a cucumber.

- I was born awesome, come on.

- This is where I go, liar, liar, pants on fire, Mr. Montgomery. I think it's like every... Every job is the same and that you start out as a young person thinking you're better than you are. And I think that's a nice that we all have that protective quality that we don't know at the time, how dumb we are and how bad we are. We only know that with hindsight. 'Cause like in my case, standing on stage, I never would have done it, if I would've known how bad I was. Thank heavens, I didn't know, 'cause I wouldn't, whatever. Yeah so, the trips and stumbles, when you're a guy on stage are obvious, I think, if you're entry level in a big corporation or whatever, sometimes they're not as blatant but when your audience walks out on you, as they have on me, if people just come up to you and say, that sucks which they've done to me and we're not talking like maybe that happens at your quarterly 360 review. We're talking if that happens daily or multiple times a day, which has happened to me, that feedback is instant and inescapable. So, quickly you learn, you can't be on stage and not have some dings. And it's just part of the process. It's just... You cannot be a good anything onstage until you're at least mediocre and in my case, really quite bad, but that's part of it, you know, at this point I'm proud of that. You can't... One of the reasons I'm good now is I've been on stage thousands of times and lots of them sucked.

- And li...

Welcome to SkyeTeam's People First! In this series, we explore the people side of successful business and careers. We all have a story to share, a leadership journey that we are experiencing.

We'll be interviewing authors, business leaders, thought leaders, and people like you to uncover the latest ideas, resources, and tools to help you become more effective at work - and in life. As it turns out, the secret is cultivating winning relationships. Business is personal, and relationships matter!

So, sit back, and grab a coffee as Morag and Alaina Love ask the question, "What's Your Passion & Purpose?"

Chapter Layout:
0:00 - Open
1:23 - What Did You Want to Be When You Grew Up?
2:09 - What flavor of Doctor?
6:21 - Navigation
10:25 - Ramifications
12:17 - Passion & Purpose
15:25 - This Isn't Everything
17:40 - Archetypes
21:12 - Fix Me
22:40 - Living Your Passion
24:48 - Inclusion
29:38 - Leading You
31:05 - Final Thoughts & Wrap

Links:
Website: https://thepurposelink.com/
Book: https://www.amazon.com/Purpose-Linked-Organization-Passionate-Leaders/dp/0071624708/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3AN6ODHXCEBU6&dchild=1&keywords=the+purpose+linked+organization&qid=1611423155&sprefix=purpose+linked+org%2Cfashion%2C192&sr=8-1

Transcript:
- [INTRO] Welcome to Skye Team's People First with Morag Barrett.

- So welcome to the latest episode of People First, where we explore the leadership journey that has brought our guest from where she was to where she is and we'll take you to where she's going. And my guest this week is Alaina Love who is the CEO of Purpose Linked Consulting and the co-author of the Purpose Linked Organization: How Passionate Leaders Inspire Winning Teams and Great Results. Alaina describes herself as a recovering HR executive, an executive coach, a global speaker and a leadership expert. And she's passionate about everything, well everything to do with passion. And her passion archetypes, and we'll learn more about archetypes, are builder, transformer and healer which is most apt. And I'm also honored to call Alaina a friend and a fellow member of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches. So Alaina, welcome to People First.

- Thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to be with you today.

- This is going to be such an interesting conversation because your journey has been windy and windier than many. But as with every episode, I always start with the origin story. So when you flash back to when you were a young girl, you're in elementary school, the teacher comes up and says, Alaina, what do you want to be when you grow up? What was your answer?

- I wanted to be a doctor. That was my answer. I remember in grade school, reading this book about Elizabeth Blackwell, who was the first woman doctor. And just falling in love with her story. And since I've read, someone's written another book about her and her life and how her journey came to be. But I remember reading about it and thinking to myself, I want to be that, I can do that. And so that's where I began my journey and it's sort of stayed on a path of healing, but not in quite the way I expected when I was seven years old.

- Okay so medicine and being a doctor, that's a broad spectrum in and of itself. So what flavor of doctor did you want to be and what flavor of doctor do you end up being at the beginning of your career?

- You know, it's really interesting. I ended up studying medical technology originally, when in my undergraduate studies which is a field that basically has you doing all of the research studies on a patient when a patient comes into a hospital, the laboratory studies, clinical chemistry hematology, microbiology, that sort of thing. And that was great preparation. It led me to getting into Tufts University School of Medicine up in Boston. And I went to med school there. And while I was in school, my initial thoughts were I think I really like hematology cause I loved solving problems. I didn't know whether I wanted to do that, oncology, forensics but it was sort of all that investigative, you know interesting forms of medicine for me that were, I thought fascinating. And I thought, you know I'm not quite sure what this is going to turn out to be but I'm just going to going to go on this ride and explore all of these fields of medicine as I'm a student and start to figure it out. But I knew that I deeply loved the connection with patients. So it was going to have to be a field where I felt like I had daily close patient interaction and it wasn't just, it was definitely for me, it wasn't surgery. I wasn't going be a body and fender person, go in and fix something and I'm done. I needed a longer-term connection. But during my first year of medical school, my sister passed away. And that happened in the spring of my first year. And I came home from medical school that summer. And the day after I got home from medical school, my mother died. So I ended up with these two enormous losses in the span of four months. And my mother had a business a garment manufacturing business. She owned a factory. She was making men's coats and jackets and had started off as a sewing machine operator. That's what she did to put me through school, you know, as a kid, to put food on the table. And eventually she ended up partnering with the person who owned the business and then bought him out and owned it herself. So I woke up one day with the loss of my sister and mother, a mortgage to pay, 50 employees all of whom were looking at me, wondering if they were going to have a next paycheck coming and a decision to make about what I was going to do. So I took a leave of absence from medical school to run this business. About which I knew absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing. I wasn't even allowed to have a summer job working for my mom at the factory. She used to tell me it was no place for a lady and I was not allowed to work there. Boy was she right, I learned. But the important part of that experience was that out of that tragedy, I learned that there was something other than science that I was good at. And that, and I learned that I was very interested in business. Because when you have a business like that every mistake you make, you see at the end of the week in your payroll and your income. And so you learn very quickly how to navigate what can be some pretty choppy waters in a business with very, very tight margins.

- Wow, so science, business, and the human element, I mean you talked about the clinical, the patient connection but now here you are literally in the deep end, you are now obviously early twenties but I would imagine your 15 workers span the generations. They're all looking to you for answers. How do you navigate that pressure, the grief, the desire to keep your mother's legacy going? No doubt if you're anything like me, the self-doubt imposter syndrome, how do you navigate all of that, Alaina?

- You know, I think that there was so many changes happening for me at the same time that I didn't have a lot of time to worry about imposter syndrome. I knew I didn't know what I was doing. So there was absolutely no concern that I was fooling anybody. I knew that I had a lot to learn. And the first thing I did was hire someone who knew the business to help me in the beginning of the process, to help me understand how to run the floor, how to run the business, et cetera. And I learned everything I could learn as quickly as possible from that individual so that I could run it myself. I, with respect to the grief, it took me a long time to process that. I mean, it was months and months and months after my mother died, where I really feel like I finally let myself feel that grief. And then it oozed out over some years after that, you know you're just so busy trying to figure out how to stay alive. You know, I was what I...

Welcome to SkyeTeam's People First! In this series, we explore the people side of successful business and careers. We all have a story to share, a leadership journey that we are experiencing.

We'll be interviewing authors, business leaders, thought leaders, and people like you to uncover the latest ideas, resources, and tools to help you become more effective at work - and in life. As it turns out, the secret is cultivating winning relationships. Business is personal, and relationships matter!

So, sit back, and grab a coffee as Morag and John Strelecky discuss discovering you Big 5 for Life!

Chapter Layout:
0:00 - Open
0:54 - What Did You Want to Be When You Grew Up?
2:47 - Inspiration
4:33 - Storyteller
6:18 - Big 5
10:08 - Museum Day
12:07 - Core Essence
15:10 - Practical Tips
18:27 - Patagonia
21:28 - One Thing
24:29 - Connect
25:12 - Wrap

Links:
Website: https://www.johnstrelecky.com/
LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnstrelecky/
Morag's Article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/you-dont-like-show-change-channel-morag-barrett/

Welcome to SkyeTeam's People First! In this series, we explore the people side of successful business and careers. We all have a story to share, a leadership journey that we are experiencing.

We'll be interviewing authors, business leaders, thought leaders, and people like you to uncover the latest ideas, resources, and tools to help you become more effective at work - and in life. As it turns out, the secret is cultivating winning relationships. Business is personal, and relationships matter!

So, sit back, and grab a coffee as Morag and Alain Hunkins discuss the three secrets to strong leadership!

Chapter Layout:
0:00 - Open
1:59 - What Did You Want to Be When You Grew Up?
6:00 - Toxic Leaders
10:00 - Pivot Points
13:46 - Fears
18:00 - Candor & Safety
20:20 - Transformations
23:50 - Tools & Advice
26:40 - Better Together
27:50 - 2D Leaders
31:20 - Learn More & Wrap

Links:
Website: https://www.alainhunkins.com/cracking-the-leadership-code
LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alainhunkins/

Welcome to SkyeTeam's People First! In this series, we explore the people side of successful business and careers. We all have a story to share, a leadership journey that we are experiencing.

We'll be interviewing authors, business leaders, thought leaders, and people like you to uncover the latest ideas, resources, and tools to help you become more effective at work - and in life. As it turns out, the secret is cultivating winning relationships. Business is personal, and relationships matter!

So, sit back, and grab a coffee as Morag and Sunny Bonnell ask the question, "What's Your Rare Breed Virtue?"

Chapter Layout:
0:00 - Open
1:07 - What Did You Want to Be When You Grew Up?
4:12 - Sabotaged, Edgy, & Absurd
9:20 - Fan the Flame
12:25 - 7 Traits
15:16 - Nature or Nurture?
19:50 - Audacity Personified
25:20 - Go All In on Who You Are!
29:00 - Final Thoughts & Wrap

Links:
Website: https://rarebreedbook.com/
LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sunnybonnell/

Transcript:
- [INTRO] Welcome to Skye Team's, People First with Morag Barrett.

- Sunny Bonnell is one half of the dynamic duo of the marketing and advertising firm, Motto, but she is also co-author of a phenomenal book called Rare Breeds. We're not talking cows and animals here. We're talking you and I, we are all rare breeds. We perhaps just don't know it. But the subtitle is what caught my attention. Rare Breeds, It's a Guide to Success for the Defiant, Dangerous and Different. So I'm going to keep the alliteration going, Sunny. I'm looking forward to a delicious conversation with you about how we can all be defiant dangerous and different, and understanding the concept of rare breeds. But welcome to People First.

- Thank you for having me. What a wonderful introduction, thank you.

- I'll tell you. It was fun as I was starting to read the book. Before we dive into there, the inspiration and so on, as with all of my interviews, I want to start with your origin story. Because we're all on a leadership journey and it is rarely a straight path from A to B. So flashback, you're a wee girl. You're sitting in elementary school and the teacher goes, "Sunny, what do you want to be when you grow up?" What was your answer back then? What did you think you would be doing at this stage of your life?

- Veterinarian.

- Oh, correlation to rare breeds. We'll go back to it. So say more. Why did you want to be a vet?

- Well, I had a fondness for animals, all things big and small. And I used to study the encyclopedia and look up all of the animals and the breeds and I was really into it. And I had that answer from the time I was really, really young to the time I enrolled in college and that was the path I was going to be on. As a matter of fact, I dropped out of pre-vet. I was in pre-vet studying to and wanting to be a veterinarian and dropped out of college just about a year and a half in to start Motto with Ashley in my early 20s.

- But going from the science of animals to the art of creating brands and compelling non-vanilla, edgy, marketing collateral. Help me understand that pivot point.

- Well, I think that I, so I was moonlighting as a graphic designer on the side and hence my background here for those that can't see or those that are watching and can't see, I have a wall of guitars. So I was a musician from a very young age started playing guitar around the time I was eight years old, grew up around Bluegrass and gospel, cut my teeth on that, became a performing musician by the time I was 14 and had kind of gone down that trajectory as well. So I was doing music and interested in becoming a veterinarian, I think from a very young age. And then fast forward I'm into college, I'm still in a musicianship, I'm playing out, playing shows end up starting to design band posters and band covers for some of the albums and artwork, excuse me, some of the music we were doing and just fell in love with it and fell into it, really. I stumbled upon it. It was not something that I had a dream of becoming. I just started doing it as a hobby. And about a year after doing that, getting into pre-vet and just realizing that it was not for me and dropping out to start a branding agency. And looked around and said, "Well, maybe I've got a talent for this and I can do this." So, of course, I get Ashley out of college as well, and tell her she's coming with me and we're going to start this thing together. And that's exactly what we did. She was on track to be, I think, an English major into journalism. And I just believed that she could help me and we could do it together. So that's what we did.

- So tell me a little bit more about that 'cause at the beginning of the book you talk about how many times you were sabotaged, how many times you were fired for being edgy, the very reason you were hired in the first place, the number of times you were told that your ideas were absurd, or essentially just written off. So what helped you to stay in the game and continue to be the rebellious you that's upended the market?

- Yeah. I think that we, because we had never worked for another agency and we had never had any kind of roadmap prior to that, I believe that it gave us what we didn't realize, at the time but was a competitive edge. And we also did not like what we saw. So we looked around, again, keep in mind, this is 2005, we're in a very small Southern conservative town. There's only a few big players in our market, mostly advertising agencies, ran by the old guard. And here come these two women, these two young women, who audaciously believe that they can change the conversation from what brands sell to what they stand for and believe in. It's why we named our company Motto. And it's what we started out to want to do. We didn't know what that looked like. We just knew that what we saw around just looked a little bit homogenized a little bit vanilla, and we just thought audaciously we could do it ourselves, or maybe do it better. And immediately, we're met with doubt. You're too young. You're too broke. You're too inexperienced. You're too female to succeed in a world where at this point 60-ish admins are making the rules. And who do we think we are? We're outspoken. We have a lot of bravado. We may not know what we're doing but we look like we do or we believe that we do. That self-belief was very strong. But the truth behind it was that we had no money, nobody knew who we were, we were rubbing pennies together, we were in this small 14 by 14 room in a warehouse stowed away where nobody could find us. And the truth was that made the first year or two of running the business extremely difficult. And about, I'd say maybe 2007, we're starting to sort of believe that maybe everyone who is doubting us is right. We're looking at each other and we're going, "Do we really want to do this? "What were we thinking?" We were on track to do this. We had a clear path, being a veterinarian's kind of a sure thing. Why did we think this was a good idea? So we start self-doubting and believing that we're a little too rogue. And no one is taking kindly to that. Because we didn't realize at the time but I think we were seen as a threat. We didn't think of ourselves as that but I think we, in a room full of balloons, we're the sharp knives. And I think we just didn't realize that to them, they were like, "Who are these two young women "who are coming out and being extremely outspoken, "and now people are paying attention. "And even though they might be rubbing pennies together "they can take our business." So we have this pivotal moment where we have this difficult conversation where we're like, "We should just give up. "We're not making any money. "Nobody knows who we are. "Maybe everybody's right. "Maybe this is just, we're not cut out for this. "We're not cut out for e...

Welcome to SkyeTeam's People First! In this series, we explore the people side of successful business and careers. We all have a story to share, a leadership journey that we are experiencing.

We'll be interviewing authors, business leaders, thought leaders, and people like you to uncover the latest ideas, resources, and tools to help you become more effective at work - and in life. As it turns out, the secret is cultivating winning relationships. Business is personal, and relationships matter!

So, sit back, and grab a coffee as Morag and Lacey Leone McLaughlin discuss, The Power of Coaching & Why We All Need One!

Chapter Layout:
0:00 - Open
1:03 - What Did You Want to Be When You Grew Up?
5:14 - Pivot Point
6:24 - Common Mistakes
7:52 - Coaching
11:00 - Authenticity
13:45 - Networking in 2020
15:20 - Student: Professional
19:10 - Remote Networking
20:18 - What Are You Celebrating?
22:30 - Reach Out
23:00 - What Are You Working On?
23:58 - Final Thoughts & Wrap
24:04 - Wrap

Links:
Website: https://llmcg.com/
LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laceyleonemclaughlin/

Welcome to SkyeTeam's People First! In this series, we explore the people side of successful business and careers. We all have a story to share, a leadership journey that we are experiencing.

We'll be interviewing authors, business leaders, thought leaders, and people like you to uncover the latest ideas, resources, and tools to help you become more effective at work - and in life. As it turns out, the secret is cultivating winning relationships. Business is personal, and relationships matter!

So, sit back, and grab a coffee as Morag and Ian Llewellyn-Nash discuss the Leadership and Emotional Wisdom!

Chapter Layout:
0:00 - Open
1:03 - Origin Story
4:30 - Pivot Point
10:05 - NLP & EQ
15:30 - EQ Neglect
28:20 - 2020 Rollercoaster
30:10 - Takeaway from 2020
33:42 - Wrap

Links:
https://www.tonuvacoaching.com/
https://www.instagram.com/tonuvaleadershipcoaching/

Welcome to SkyeTeam's People First! In this series, we explore the people side of successful business and careers. We all have a story to share, a leadership journey that we are experiencing.

We'll be interviewing authors, business leaders, thought leaders, and people like you to uncover the latest ideas, resources, and tools to help you become more effective at work - and in life. As it turns out, the secret is cultivating winning relationships. Business is personal, and relationships matter!

So, sit back, and grab a coffee as Morag and Chris Lever discuss Navigating Change & Uncharted Waters!
Chapter Layout:
0:00 - Open
1:43 - Origin Story
3:17 - Ferry Captain
6:02 - Language & Framework
10:42 - Pulling Levers
11:58 - Logical v Human
15:56 - Baby Steps
21:20 - Do This - Get That
22:15 - Find You
24:50 - Wrap

Links:
https://teleiosconsulting.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-lever-8621415/