In this episode, organizational psychologist Trisha Carter converses with Dr. Michelle McQuaid about the personal shifts that foster growth and well-being. Trisha reflects on the value of metacognitive thinking and the importance of reflection. Michelle shares her journey of experiencing shifts in thinking, in overcoming 'good girl' beliefs, asking key reflective questions about who sets the terms and outcomes for 'good girl' behaviour. They also discussed the value of David Cooperrider's Appreciative Inquiry method for effective change management. They discussed the value of data in motivating change and Trisha referenced data on leadership and wellbeing that Michelle and her team had used to move workplaces to change. Other research referenced included Deci and Ryan's Self Determination Theory, Dr Kristen Neff and self compassion, B.J. Fogg and tiny habits

Throughout, the discussion highlights practical advice on adapting to new environments, career transitions, and maintaining personal and collective well-being.

You can learn more about Michelle's work at The Good Girl GameChangers and https://www.michellemcquaid.com and connect with her on Linked in

I would like to acknowledge the Dharawal people, the Aboriginal people of Australia, whose country I live and work on. I would like to pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and thank them for sharing their cultural knowledge and awareness with us.

[00:01:02] Trisha: Those of you who have listened to some of the earlier episodes will know well that cultural intelligence, the capability to be effective in situations of diversity, is made up of four areas. Motivational, the drive. Cognitive, the knowledge. Metacognitive, the strategy. And behavioral, the action. And all four of these capabilities help us operate effectively in situations of diversity. In this podcast, we're focusing more on the metacognitive aspect thinking about our thinking, and it's called CQ Strategy. My guest today is someone I've had the privilege of learning from over a number of years on many different aspects that have influenced my work and my skills. Dr. Michelle McQuaid is a best selling author.

[00:02:00] Michelle: Hey, Trisha, it's lovely to be with you.

[00:02:24] Trisha: So there are many, many shifts that you have initiated and experienced. But before we go to that, I want to ask the questions we ask all our guests. Michelle, what is the culture, other than the culture you grew up in, that you have learned to love and appreciate?

[00:03:30] Michelle: We come from all sorts of walks of life, different backgrounds, different journeys, different hopes and needs, but whenever we're together, that shared love of just the simplicity of what is the mess and the magic of life and the privilege it is to get to live it for me is my heart's happy place

[00:03:55] Michelle: very much. And I think it's so interesting how unifying the shared values and actions is, even when so much of our context is so different from each other, when we're not in that moment, sharing an adventure like Japan together.

[00:04:09] Michelle: Yeah. So lucky. Yeah.

[00:04:21] Michelle: Yeah. For me, it's been some of this new work you touched on that around the good girl mindsets. And I certainly knew growing up that I was encouraged to be a good girl. It was often, you know, explicitly said to me in the houses where I grew up, I had a book as a child, a story book, called the good little bad little girl that I used to get my mother to read me at night and all the was she was a good little girl.

[00:05:01] Michelle: And of course, guys get a similar conditioning often more around being tough guys or strong boys. So there's kind of societal expectations. And about probably a decade ago, I kept coming back to the memory of the storybook. I didn't have it anymore, but I was like, something about that storybook and having it read to me as a young age, I'm like, I need to find this book and rewrite this story.

[00:05:45] Michelle: And then actually it was when I was away with the Soul Wanderers last year, we hiked through Nepal, through the Anaconda Mountains and I was sitting on a mountaintop in one of our yoga practices and I really felt this like - calling to my heart. I was like, you know, what am I meant to be doing next in this world?

[00:06:26] Michelle: And how do we. free ourselves of them, what would the world look like without it? And so the aha in all of that sort of period in the coming weeks and months after that was that there were two questions that I find over and over have set me free and seem to help others. And that is on whose terms. And for whose benefit are we behaving in these ways?

[00:07:00] Michelle: Originally, maybe it was my mum's, bless her, you know, it made her life quieter. I think also she was trying to protect and prepare me for the world that she knew at that time, where again, you know, this was in the seventies, women were just getting allowed to have their own credit cards and bank accounts.

[00:07:40] Michelle: And also, interestingly, Trisha, as I've played with it, it doesn't serve me well to always be only on my terms and for my benefit. So you kind of think the other extreme to that is, well, then it's all about me. It has to be right. And everybody else can sort themselves out. But actually what I've learned as I keep playing with these questions, maybe the second aha that's settled into this, is it ideally in the best scenarios is a win win.

[00:08:22] Trisha: Oh, that's wonderful. And. I mean, you can sort of see the environment of being on a, was it a mountaintop?

[00:08:35] Trisha: I, I don't think I've had a shift quite described to me like that yet. but I think it's wonderful and, and the recognition that there was something, something else, something more, and then just the searching for it and obviously a lot of reflection as well.

[00:08:52] Michelle: Yeah.

[00:08:55] Trisha: Are you a journaler or do you reflect with other people, you know, bouncing things backwards and forwards?

[00:09:29] Michelle: and reflect and sit with the complexity of things to sit with how they feel in my body to learn to actually trust and feel things in my body not just always run them from my cognitive mind. I journal, I walk a lot, in nature for me, often chatting away to myself, either silently or out loud, depends on the day.

[00:10:17] Michelle: So I think yes, it's awesome to journal and have that reflecting space alone, but you need buddies and safe spaces and challenging spaces to take ideas out and have healthy debates and turn them around and add different ideas and sources to them that you yourself wouldn't come across.

[00:10:37] Trisha: Hi, who I

[00:10:39] Trisha: Who I met on one of your courses, and, have obviously never actually met in person, but, have been in touch with since. Yeah. So that's wonderful. And speaking of that course that, I did meet Maureen, , that was a part of your work on leadership and on change.

[00:11:15] Trisha: Can you tell us a little bit about appreciative inquiry and how your research in that area has informed and continues to inform your work.

[00:11:46] Trisha: we fix it?

Yeah.

[00:12:03] Michelle: On our efforts and investments when we do that, because those things work for really good reasons, individually and collectively. And can we use those strengths to close some of that gap on what's not working? Or are there bits here that we still need to go ahead on? And I love Dr. David Cooperrider, the founder of that approach, and his colleagues suggest that most of the time when we approach change, We tend to spend 80 percent of our effort focused on fixing what's wrong and only 20 percent building on the strengths and appreciative inquiry tries to help us flip that equation again.

[00:12:53] Michelle: You know, it was go, go, go, as I said, in my mother's house. Bless her. And so I was not a fan of change. Not surprisingly, perhaps Trisha, by the time I got to my teenage years, I was like, let's lock that stuff down. We're just going to make it steady and stable and nothing's going to shift anymore, and then I'll be able to breathe.

[00:13:12] Michelle: because we. Constantly, we are sitting here in front of each other changing right now. And so then I was like, right, if you can't beat them, you have to join them. So I need to figure out how do we change in more effective and enjoyable and sustainable ways. And so appreciative inquiry for me really gave me those tools.

[00:14:09] Michelle: And so I love these four D's.

[00:14:31] Michelle: So that's a little on appreciative inquiry. I'm happy to go deeper if you want me into any specific parts. but that's why I've found it so powerful. Yeah,

[00:15:21] Michelle: Yeah, and I love that moving in the right directions because what is right for each of us, right? Who am I to say what's right for you or you for me? And so the other thing I really love around appreciative inquiry is it is this genuine open invitation of what do you care enough to own? What is right for you?

[00:16:20] Michelle: We want you to care enough. personally to own that change, that you will stay with it, that you will continue to evolve it as things change within you and around you. And so what I love about that appreciative inquiry cycle, and then it's grounding around the questions that we ask so that you can find your own answers that you care enough to own.

[00:17:02] Michelle: Because the truth is, if you force them through the change, and they don't want that, they still don't want it. And if you invite them into the change, but they don't feel they can be honest about the fact they're not that excited about the changes that you want, or it's not meaningful to them. All that happens is they nod their heads in those conversations, and then they go away later.

[00:17:38] Michelle: Not really excited about that. Let's have that conversation sooner than later. Then sit there all nodding our heads, pretending that, Oh yeah, sure, we'll do this. And then nothing shifts and we lose months in the process of it. So I always say to leaders, Yes, this can feel nervous. What do people care enough to own?

[00:18:03] Trisha: yes, and we know enough about the number of failed change projects. So

[00:18:09] Michelle: I think the evidence is all around us on this one.

[00:18:35] Trisha: But how do you use both the data insights and the nudges to bring about change?

[00:19:08] Michelle: And I think my strength was that. was actually coming from the practitioner side first and then falling in love with the data. Because while I love the data, to me, the data only becomes valuable when there are actionable insights, things we can do off the back of it to improve our world, our lives, the ways that we're working together.

[00:19:40] Michelle: What practically can we do with that? And so again, when we look at the data on behavior change, be it individual or collective, we really do better when we have tiny nudges.

[00:20:18] Michelle: If we can just start showing up and making small changes. That we can stick with some degree of consistency, build our confidence, build our muscles and capability in that area, then we will start to grow and move out to the bigger things we want to achieve. And so for me, this is where the tiny nudge part really has to sit alongside the data in order to realize the value of it.

[00:21:03] Michelle: As long as we remember, we at the end of the day are the best judges of what works for each of us. So we need to feel permission to pull that stuff apart and then tweak as required.

[00:21:21] Michelle: Absolutely.

[00:21:37] Michelle: Yeah, and really always better. It comes back to that invitation of what do you care enough to own? Because, again, if you don't care enough to want to own it from the outset, it might have all the evidence in the world to support it, but it's not meaningful to you. And therefore less likely to deliver the benefit. I love the research of Dr. Edward Deci and Richard Ryan around self determination theory. And while they say, look, you know, autonomy, belonging, relatedness and competence are these foundations for each of us to be able to thrive and to be well, and we could think about it a bit like a three legged stool at the end of the day, autonomy, Seems to be the thing that has the biggest impact on wellbeing.

[00:22:36] Michelle: do

[00:22:39] Trisha: Exactly! We know this works!

[00:23:04] Trisha: Yeah. That's brilliant. Thank you. And that takes us to the work that you're doing right now, where you have chosen to step into this, your most recent research that uncovered some really interesting insights about good girl thinking, and it's shaped some new playful change work.

[00:23:22] Michelle: Yeah, so again, these days, whenever I want to know about something, I just throw out an invitation and see who cares enough to want to be part of the conversation. , and we had, you know, more than a hundred women all over the world come together to talk to us about, well, what did being a good girl mean to them?

[00:23:58] Michelle: So you've mentioned I've come up through wellbeing and leadership and change, not gender studies. Um The only gender study part of this for me was I got given this book and told I had to be a good at the age of four , and I intentionally when we did the research with the women stayed away from the gender studies literature at that time because I wanted to come in with fresh eyes and without a bias to what else had already been discovered. what was fascinating out of the conversations we had with the women when we went back to try to say, well, how does this align with what was already understood in gender studies or not?

[00:25:11] Michelle: So that was kind of like, Oh yes, sanity check. You know, we're not completely out there. So the research to me still being really important in it. And then it's how do we make these practical nudges? Because again, that is what I get out of bed every day to do. And so the women were really clear around a number of evidence based tools like self compassion, , secure attachment, , self leadership work, , using things like internal family systems and other tools.

[00:25:53] Michelle: That was what we thought it might've been at the outset. Wasn't a bad girl, which was a popular. It wasn't even reclaiming what did the word good girl mean, but it was actually nothing to do with gender. It was recognizing our common humanity and that capacity we have in all of us. And so, these tools then we've been able to start bringing together because self compassion, for example, with Dr. Kristen Neff, we have decades of wonderful research and tools that we can start to connect to this idea around shaking off these "good girl" beliefs, if they're not serving you well, and then having an alternative. Again, we're always really clear that sometimes those "good girl" beliefs serve us well, even though they come with a cost.

[00:26:55] Michelle: But it's only one generation away for our mother didn't have those choices in Western countries. We look at what's going on in America around, you know, freedom of body choices and things like we're going backwards, you know, in a very supposedly civilized country. So it's really interesting sort of seeing.

[00:27:40] Michelle: It's been lots of fun for me. The research is there. The nudges are there. The addition to this for me, Trisha, is really two things. One was to stop. I realized that I'd spent a lot of time the last two decades hiding behind the data. For me, giving you all the data is my safe space and it is Little of me personally on the line when I do that, other than that these are things that fascinate me.

[00:28:28] Michelle: And I came out of big companies like IBM and Pricewaterhouse Coopers. So of course, first thing I had a business plan and a budget and milestones and how I'm going to make. And so, you know, and that's really how that part of my business has run all those years. This is not that. This is a again back to that mountain on Nepal, what joyfully called to my heart.

[00:29:11] Michelle: Maybe there's something else on the other side of it, but that not pushing and striving, but letting it be a joyful adventure that's unfolding. It's a very different way for me to be feeling my way through something like this.

[00:29:30] Michelle: Yes, definitely, because I think you know, the business plans and the like, give us the illusion that we're in control.

[00:29:38] Michelle: They're like, you know, a safety blanket or something like we've had as kids, right? And of course, we know from all of the change research, none of us are in control. The idea that we're in control, that we can manage change is a complete delusion.

[00:29:52] Michelle: And so it feels very vulnerable and raw and tender to be going, you know what, I'm going What I do know is from here to March, we're working through this little book, we're building up the sub stack, we'll launch these things and then we'll see, maybe that's it and it's done and it's opening space for whatever comes after that.

[00:30:27] Trisha: Yes. Right. And I can appreciate that. And can imagine some of the work you're probably doing on your mindset in the meantime.

[00:30:57] Michelle: Money and needing to be able to provide for my family are absolutely essential needs at this stage of my life. And that the fear of being driven by the money alone is not how I choose to live my life anymore, because that is on somebody else's terms and for somebody else's benefit, not mine. And so how instead do I come to those responsibilities from a place of love?

[00:31:35] Trisha: I think that would speak to a lot of people as they listen to this. And I'm thinking too about that, you know, as you spoke about that openness and uncertainty, and a lot of the people that I work with who are moving across countries and cultures and organizations are moving them around the world. and sometimes also the partners of those people, that complete uncertainty that you have about what am I going to do in this new country and you know what. You yourself have moved locations a number of times and so you've experienced that too. What did you do to help yourself adapt and shift in those situations?

[00:33:06] Michelle: And I hadn't given myself the grace of that time or expectation or even quite understood that I was going on this big experimental adventure and I needed to push myself out there sometimes more and also to know that not all of it would work straight away and that would be okay. I would figure it out and the same coming home.

[00:33:41] Trisha: You have changed so much.

[00:33:44] Michelle: Why was this so fantastic again?

[00:33:47] Michelle: So then the next time we went we went to New York and that was with my role And so again, I had in my mind in six months grace going in and six months grace coming out. And that made a world of difference because instead of thinking the whole time in those first few months, I'm bailing. I hate this. I want to go home.

[00:34:21] Michelle: The road running, have a bit more social structure and support around you than when you're the supporting partner. So in that case, my husband was the supporting partner. He stayed at home for those six months, drove me bonkers. We had a three year old son by then. So then I was like, you have to get a job because I'm in trouble every time I come home about the house and the systems and the things I'm not doing.

[00:35:17] Trisha: That's right. That's, give yourself time. you need time for a shift. It isn't an aha and you've got it.

[00:35:24] Michelle: And again, I think actively experimenting, like where are the people, the places, the ritual, like sounds silly, but even just finding the little cafes or restaurants you like, like give you some grounding place.

[00:35:49] Michelle: when I got there. And so we knew each other a little as colleagues. But when I got to Toronto, Mo was like, I'm going to come and take you out and I will drive you to different neighborhoods regularly.

[00:36:15] Trisha: Oh that's wonderful

[00:36:22] Trisha: Yeah.

[00:36:25] Trisha: Indeed. Yeah. Lots of, lots of strengths that you pick up along the way, including relationships, special people. Yeah. Michelle, how can people who want to connect with you, do so to follow up if they wish to do?

[00:36:58] Trisha: Fantastic. We'll put both of those links and maybe your LinkedIn, profile as well in, in the show notes so that people can connect. And so our concluding questions, what advice would you give someone who's going to follow in your footsteps and shift away from an established area of work into a whole new area of something like research and design or a different business sort of angle?

[00:37:39] Michelle: And then it was a few days after the leap. I realized. Oh, crap. Now it's all up to me to deliver it. So just, you know, go gently if you can make sure you've got a little safety net. I was fortunate. I had sort of a client for my first six months that just gave me some coverage to land there. In fact, I was talking to Mo the other day, who also runs her business.

[00:38:05] Michelle: to be able to give yourself a chance to grow into the role. And so that means you're juggling a little bit, or again, you've kind of got a client that's coming on board, but just take that pressure off yourself and then really think about the networks of how you're going to sell it.

[00:38:38] Michelle: So go gently, um, do give yourself, if you can, a six to 12 month kind of graceful landing period. So it's not too intense and overwhelming.

[00:38:49] Trisha: And as you look at your life and the people you've worked with, colleagues and clients, family and community, and as you look at the future, what are you hoping for, Michelle?

[00:39:22] Michelle: There's a very small handful of people that benefit from the ideas that we have to perform to these roles. I think, you know, guys are struggling just as much as women are with the set of expectations that are on their shoulders. And I think the more we can have that space to start asking on whose terms and for whose benefits am I living my wild and precious life.

[00:39:55] Trisha: yeah, that sounds like a picture of thriving that we all long for. Thank you so much, Michelle. And thank you, listeners. I really appreciate you joining us and your learning and growth. Please make sure that you've pushed follow or subscribe on your podcast app so that you can make sure to receive the next episode of The Shift.