In this episode we engage in this enlightening dialogue, we explore the profound insights offered by Dr. Bridget Cooper, a distinguished author and transformative leader, who provides invaluable tools for enhancing workplace interactions and reducing stress.

With over two decades of experience in human resources and leadership development, Dr. Cooper shares her expertise on fostering trust and authenticity within organizations, while addressing the detrimental effects of stress on employee performance. The conversation delves into the significance of self-awareness, emotional regulation, and the power of narrative in building healthier work environments.

We invite you to consider how these principles can be integrated into their own leadership practices, ultimately paving the way for a more inclusive and thriving business landscape for women-led enterprises.

Takeaways:

• The podcast emphasizes the importance of amplifying women's voices in the business sector to foster leadership and innovation.
• Dr. Bridget Cooper's insights focus on the necessity of addressing workplace stress effectively to improve employee performance and satisfaction.
• A key message is that organizations built on trust and authenticity outperform those that operate under fear and control.
• The discussion highlights the significance of emotional and psychological safety in the workplace as essential for fostering creativity and collaboration.
• Listeners are encouraged to engage with practical tools that facilitate personal and professional growth, aiding in overcoming challenges.
• The episode reiterates that true leadership involves creating environments where individuals feel empowered, valued, and capable of contributing meaningfully.

Chapters:

05:03 Understanding Workplace Stress and Trust

11:10 Breaking the Cycle of Victimhood

16:38 Navigating Stress and Control

24:22 The Impact of Stress on Learning and Creativity

29:15 Creating a Culture of Safety and Purpose

34:32 Empowering Women Founders

Burning Questions Answered:

1.Why do high-performing leaders struggle with stress despite their success?

2.How does fear, trust, and control shape workplace culture?

3.What’s the difference between coping mechanisms vs. healing mechanisms—and how do they impact leadership?

4.How can women founders create psychological safety in their companies to unlock innovation?

Favorite Quotes:

"You can be incredibly efficient in your very ineffective behavior." – Dr. Bridget Cooper

"We spend most of our lives at work—let’s make it a place that fuels us, not drains us." – Coco Sellman

"Stress is a math equation: What you seek to control minus what you actually can control." – Dr. Bridget Cooper

Closing Thoughts:

Leadership isn’t about doing more—it’s about leading with purpose and clarity. In this episode, Dr. Bridget Cooper and Coco Sellman dive deep into what it takes to build a thriving, people-first company. From shifting out of survival mode to unlocking trust, this conversation is packed with practical insights for women founders looking to scale their companies with ease.

OFFERS & CONTACT INFORMATION:

LinkedIn:   https://www.linkedin.com/in/drbridgetcooper/ 

Website:  https://www.drbridgetcooper.com/ 

“Unflappable” the book:  https://www.amazon.com/Unflappable-Smart-People-Overthinking-Thrive-ebook/dp/B0CKRMBR5M?ref_=ast_author_mpb 

Email Dr. Bridget Cooper at bridget@drbridgetcooper.com or call her at 860-986-9616 to sign up for your free 15-minute phone consultation. Best 15 minutes you'll carve out all year, I promise. Dr. Bridget change lives every day...is yours next?

Follow the #WisdomOfWomen show for more inspiring stories and insights from trailblazing women founders, investors, and experts in growth and prosperity.

YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/yja3w7nh

Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/4tak8ajk 

Amazon Prime: https://tinyurl.com/366syddj 

Apple Podcasts: https://tinyurl.com/bdhananz 

RSS Feed: https://feeds.captivate.fm/womengetfunded/ 

Coco Sellman, the host of #WisdomOfWomen, believes business is a force for good, especially with visionary women at the helm. With over 25 years of entrepreneurial experience, she has launched five companies and guided over 500 startups. As Founder & CEO of A Force for Good, Coco supports purpose-driven women founders in unlocking exponential growth and prosperity. Her recent venture, Allumé Home Care, reached eight-figure revenues and seven-figure profits in just four years before a successful exit in 2024. A venture investor and board director, Coco’s upcoming book, *A Force for Good*, reveals a roadmap for women to lead high-impact, high-growth companies.

Learn more about A Force for Good:

Website: https://aforceforgood.biz/ 

Are Your GROWING or PLATEAUING? https://aforceforgood.biz/quiz/

1-Day Growth Plan: https://aforceforgood.biz/free-plan/ 

FFG Tool of the Week: https://aforceforgood.biz/weekly-tool/ 

The Book:  https://aforceforgood.biz/book/ 

Growth Accelerator: https://aforceforgood.biz/accelerator/ 

Welcome to the Wisdom of Women Show.

We are dedicated to amplifying the voice of women in business.

A new model of leadership is emerging and we are here to amplify the voices of women leading the way.

I am your host, Coco Salman, five time founder, Impact Investor and creator of the Force for Good System.

Thank you for joining us today as we illuminate the path to unlocking opportunities and prosperity for women led enterprises by amplifying the voice and wisdom of women today.

Gift we have a brilliant author and transformative, I'm going to say healer.

Her name is Dr.

Bridget Cooper, affectionately known as Dr.

B.

She is a seasoned expert in making leaders and organizations better.

Her work focuses on teaching corporate officers and their teams how to think, think, communicate and solve problems more effectively.

As the author of Unflappable How Smart People Quit Overthinking, Ditch the Drama and thrive at work, Dr.

B provides practical tools very, very, very awesome tools for reducing stress and enhancing workplace interactions.

With over 20 years of experience in human resources, counseling and leadership development, Dr.

B has helped countless worldwide shape their strategy, resolve conflicts and improve their company culture.

Our energetic seminars and keynotes cover essential skills like communication, managing changes, and building teams that push themselves to itself.

Welcome.

Wow.

Every time I get introduced on a show or in in a podcast format, I'm like, you know, I should probably just give you a couple really small, low level things that I do so that we don't oversell because you know, you want to go in with low expectations and then exceed them.

Whenever I get introduced I'm like, oh gosh, now I have something to live up to.

This is going to be fun, but thank you for that.

Certainly live up to it all.

You are the real deal.

So as we always start, what is a book written by a woman that has significantly influenced your life?

Life.

Okay, so first of all, I just want to give you a shout out.

If you haven't already bought her book, you need to.

This has newly significantly affected my life.

However, I had that homework before I got to read your book, so I came up with another one.

Elizabeth Gilbert is one of my favorite authors.

She's written a whole lot more than the first book that introduced me to her.

Big Magic is an amazing book as well.

But when I think about what shifted the trajectory of my identity and my life and getting empowered at a time when I felt less than empowered, Eat, Pray, Love.

And for me it was this idea of I love some of her quips of you have a wishbone where your backbone ought to be.

You have more Hope than sense.

And if you love someone, you can send them love.

The difference between love and relationship.

And all of those things factored into my ability to really know who I was as a person, what I could be as a professional and be able to see relationships in a more healthy light in all aspects of my life.

For me, creating the business I created had a genesis in understanding who I was as a woman, a wife, a partner, and a mother.

All of that kind of gelled together in Eat, Pray, Love.

It's such a delicious book.

It's so good.

And I really thought the movie wasn't going to do it justice.

And it did.

But I still preferred the book.

Great.

I mean, Julia Roberts is spectacular, of course.

And there is more that you can share in the book because you're not limited to like 2 hours of screen time.

It's so good.

It dispels something and uplifts something within, you know, Eat, Pray, Love.

I felt seen in that journey, like watching her come to terms with some of her ghosts and demons and the way that she was equating her worth and value and identity.

And I think that was so much a part of my journey at that time.

So it was very powerful.

Well, you are a terrifically wise woman.

And you know, it's very evident whenever I get to spend any time moments with you, I feel it in the bottom of my feet and in the top of my head and all in between.

I just love your book.

It is really spectacular.

At the beginning of the book, you lay it out so beautifully.

You cite that stress caused by a manager leads to a talent loss.

With 75, 78% of workers saying their stress negatively affects their performance.

All is stress.

And you said only 46% of workers trust direct managers to do the right thing and only 32% trust senior leaders.

And I read that and I thought.

Oh my goodness, there's no trust.

What's going on here?

There's so many things that are going on.

The clients that I work with appreciate the parallels between how we, we are as humans outside of work and how we are as humans and workers inside of work.

And so there is a.

There's a global unhealth around our own self perception and our perception of others and relationship.

And so this idea about trust is there's a lot of pieces to unpack underneath that.

I have a model called Fear Trust Control, which I've been presenting at companies.

And it really just says that when fear is high, trust is low, and control mechanisms escalate to unthinkable Proportions.

And when we have organizations that are not built in trust, they're not built in authenticity, they're not built from core values being evident in the work.

The why doesn't equate to the how doesn't equate to the what and the who.

We have just so much lack of integrity.

And even with the best meaning of people, if people are unhealthy, they bring those unhealthy patterns into work and then organizations are unhealthy and then on and on it goes.

So the book was written as a collection of tools to be able to help people open quickly to just anything that might shift their thinking about a problem.

Because often we can't solve problems because we're thinking about the problem itself.

Wrong.

And yeah, and that's one of the reasons why I loved your book, because it talks about doing things with purpose, I think.

So often we lose sight of that in our day to day work, get caught up in the minutia and go off track.

It creates all of this stress and we have behaviors that come out that are not so good.

And I love this quote in the book.

Unchecked, the unconscious thoughts and pathways that we go into lead us to think, feel and behave in detrimental and unhealthy ways, yet incredibly efficient ways.

I mean, you can be incredibly efficient in your very ineffective behavior.

Like that's.

I mean, efficiency cannot be the only standard by which we judge behavior because it's inaccurate.

A lot of our.

What I differentiate, and it's one of the tools in the book, is the difference between a coping mechanism and a healing mechanism that can be truth inside of yourself or in relationships.

What we use to cope can be very effective to get us through a moment, through a crisis, but it does not do much of anything.

It actually does a detrimental service to healing and resolving a problem.

So often we get into these coping mechanisms over and over again without checking ourselves to see if we have a healing mechanism in place that's going to actually restore and repair the relationship or the crisis or the source of the problem.

It's actually really profound what you're talking about.

The efficiency is actually of a lower order of goodness, I would say, because the efficiency basically gets us to default to seeing somebody else as the problem.

Oh, absolutely.

Getting ourselves to be able to be the victim, which everybody always wants to not deny being the victim.

Actually you're behaving like it and it's comfortable to be the victim because then you're responsible.

And we think we're the only ones struggling.

You talk about this.

Can you say more about this?

Because I think this is at the center of how we take ourselves out of the problem and then can never address it.

It's the nexus of it.

We can be victimized without being the victim.

And I think that's really a thing to keep in mind, that a person can victimize us in a moment.

There is a moment or a series of moments where we can be victimized.

But victim is a position where you feel power to do anything.

And I used to say this to my kids, and they could tell you, they would get really irritated with me because I would say, you always have a choice.

And they'd say, well, not if someone has a gun to your head.

I say, I didn't say they were good choices.

I said there were choices, that there is always a choice.

And so often we put the ownership of all the choices to the people who are holding more of the power without respecting where we have the power.

I think deep and meaningful messages in all of the lessons that I teach and for those who have done any digging to find out what my background is and my family history, have a sense of where some of those things come from.

And it comes from this idea that all of the pain I have experienced in my life, I can boil it down to one thing.

People either giving away power that was theirs or trying to take power that wasn't.

And so this victim mentality for me is this idea that I'm going to hand over my power, my agency, my authority, to a story about how someone else has done something to me, which may be accurate, but it's not the end of the story.

There's still choice within that.

There's still the ability to exercise agency choice in that by saying something, by shifting my behavior, by calling out a behavior, by creating a boundary.

Like, there are so many things.

And that's what unflappable really is, is about taking back your power so that you aren't flapping in the wind at the gusts of others.

Like, that's what happens.

And the more that we do that, the more that we compromise our organization's success, health, happiness, all of it.

So, Dr.

B, would you be willing to tell us about your personal story and your.

And the.

And sort of the.

You know, because I think we like to say that all these tools will work except for our situation.

Right?

But this one is really bad.

And it's like, you know, and.

And I can't feel.

I can't.

I can't navigate anything.

There's no choice in Any of it.

Right, right.

And so I, I, I would love for you to share your story because even in this situation, you can learn to be inflappable.

Yeah, absolutely.

Go ahead.

Yeah, there's so much.

Right.

It's like, where's a Reader's Digest version of a life?

I wrote Little Landslides, which was my fifth book, and it is about my story.

Even then I put a container around it of the first 18 years.

As a story happens, your first 18 years, you have call forwards and flashbacks throughout that subsequent journey because you end up in some of the similar places and you're like, can I learn this lesson faster and stay here less time?

You know, because I keep returning to this, but like, hey, Bessie, Bestie, I'm back.

Yeah, I'm gonna try to do it a little differently this time.

You know, I think my story begins in.

And I had a TED talk about it as well.

I was born into a domestic violence situation with drug addiction and abuse and crime and was part of that.

Right.

Became bystander, a victim of that throughout.

It wasn't until I got into college that and I went in and I went to my own therapy because again, I think that whole journey from that point you can imagine that I put myself in and I was put in so many subsequent compromising situations where I was able to be abused again and again because I didn't have any sense of myself that there was anything other than what I had experienced.

I had two mentally ill addicted parents who were depressed and anxious and not treated.

I was just talking with a colleague about it this morning.

When you're in a situation like that, when you're raised, as I call it, raised by wolves, when you're in that situation, what you believe, you have to believe one of two things.

Either you are the one that is crazy or they are the ones that are crazy.

And the problem with the second one is that then you feel unsafe because not only are they crazy, but then you can't trust them to do the right thing.

So the one that preserves your safety, when we talk about efficiency, the one that preserves your safety is the one that believes that you're crazy.

And so there's this self abandonment that happens when you're in a situation like that that then creates all sorts of tendrils that I think carry forward.

It was really in unpacking that when I got to be 18 and I went into a therapist and I was like, okay, we're done.

I can't do this anymore.

I got to figure this out.

Because this isn't working for me anymore.

It was in realizing that I had created a sense of my own crazy in order to survive it.

And then I started realizing how those coping skills and healing mechanisms, like all of these tools, came hard won through my own journey, through my clients journeys, through listening really intently and deeply to the pain underneath the problem and then being able to find a solution.

Because I think the gift that I was given by my parents was an internal drive to solve problems, to solve pain, because in their own pain, they handed their pain to other people.

And so the only way to reduce it is to have people heal from the things that have hurt them.

So, you know, that's kind of the short story.

There's obviously so much more to it that really, I think condenses why I'm on the journey, my purpose, my reason for doing what it is that I do.

And it makes me think of being an alchemist almost, right?

This idea of taking whatever is in life and transforming it into something richer, better.

And what you're talking about here is how you've taken your power back in all the ways you talk about in your book, right?

You've decided how you're going to think about this and how you're going to choose to live as a result of it, and.

And so give that to other people.

I mean, that's my point is like, I want to give these tools.

Somebody asked me this morning, how can I support you?

I'm like, hand my book and my tools to everyone, because if the world is better, it's better.

That's what I want, you know, And I think there's this quest that I have because I could never heal my parents and if that story ended differently.

But I can help heal their people.

I can help other people lighten their load.

I can help other people put down some of the frustration and anger and things that are happening at work that replicate things in their personal lives.

Like all of those journeys, taking things personally, being defensive, enclosing when they need to be connecting.

All of those things are human journeys that are happening in and out of the workplace.

And we spend most of our lives at work, in work, toward work, from work, with work, taking it home.

And I want to alleviate the frustration and the stress that comes from that by being able to see what we can control and what we can't.

Stress really is just the difference between what we're trying to control and what we can actually control.

The more we focus on the things that we can't, the more stress we feel, the less we put ourselves in positions to control the things that we can, the more stress that we feel.

So when we can get to that point of accepting things exactly as they are, and as they present themselves to us, we can feel less stress and we can focus our energy into resolving those things that are to us to resolve.

Right.

And you, you talk about this in the book, you have a section on stress busters.

Yep.

And I love the way you put this.

Stress is a mathematical equation.

It's what you seek to control minus what you can actually control.

And then you go on to say, and I think this is the, this is so powerful because like you really can't control anything other than this.

You only can control your thoughts, your feelings and your behaviors.

So anything else that you're trying to control is what's causing you your stress.

That's it.

And I always get pushback on feelings and I get pushback sometimes on thoughts too.

Like, but what about if I have a bad thought?

So if you have an errant, intrusive thought, how long do you entertain it and how much do you challenge it?

That's when I get into tools on cognitive distortions.

My and or tool.

All of these tools to say, okay, let's hit the thoughts first.

Thoughts create feelings.

That's a biochemical response.

If you think a thing, even if you're not conscious of thinking a thing, you think a thing, you feel a thing.

And we are self regulating systems.

If you think a thing and then you feel a thing, the feeling goes, oh, I must have a reason for feeling this way.

And then you think the thing that makes you feel the thing.

So you just self regulate over and over again until you jump in there and go slap, snap, clap something to stop that sequence to say, hang on a second.

What story am I telling?

What truth am I accepting?

What thought am I pinning this experience on?

Because if I stop, if I disconnect the thought from the feeling, if I just find the feeling in my body and I feel the thing without reinforcing it with a confirming thought, that feeling goes away in about 30 seconds.

Doesn't hold without the thought.

So it's really about trying to pull the thoughts back and go, huh, what else might be happening here?

What story am I telling?

Is this an empowering story?

Is this a disempowering story?

Right, Totally.

And so maybe you could illustrate this with, you know, like an actual example of a person in work circumstance.

They have this thought that's triggering them and causing stress.

What would be an example?

Love it.

So I'LL give you an example, because to not reveal a client story, I'll give you an example of my own where I put it to use.

I was texting with a client and this client is known to be strong minded and strong in command.

There has been in the past, the story that I've told is there has been in the past a VI for power, a vie for control.

Like there's been not that struggle.

And I get a text from him and it says a thing and I look at it and I go, I can't believe he said that.

I show it to my boyfriend who's sitting next to me and he goes, say that again.

And I read the text out loud.

He said, if you stress that word and not that word, the meaning of that text completely changes.

So then I used a tool that I use in the book, which is I got curious and I said, okay, so if I tell it this way, I'm going to snap and jump down his throat, right?

At least in my head, if not in practice, you know, but I'm going to defend myself.

I'm going to, you know, be a proponent of my position.

But if I read it the other way, I'm just going to move forward with what we were doing.

So I asked him a clarifying question that would give me the indication as to whether or not he was coming at me hostilely or gently.

And it turns out he was coming at me gently.

It was just the way I was reading the text with my preconceived notion about what he was capable of.

Now, that does not mean he wasn't capable of what I said he was capable of.

And that's the same with all of our colleagues, managers, clients.

Sure, they're capable of all those things, but does it serve you to assume that without clarity, what I think about is this, Coco, sure, you can be right and you can be right all the time about your judgment.

But what does it do in hijacking your nervous system to hand over your power and your ability to think clearly?

The problem with our brains is that they're built for survival, not for thriving.

As soon as you get triggered by anger or fear or hostility, any kind of conflict, stress, you go to the back base part of your brain, your monkey brain, and all you're trying to do is survive, which means you're usually going to fight or retreat, right?

That doesn't really help in most situations.

What really helps is to get curious.

But that's the front of your brain and that can only come online when you turn off that more base part of your brain with curiosity.

You can only make that move by changing the brain chemistry and moving into curiosity.

So that's a way that we can be more empowered in any situation at work is to just think, I use this tool.

And, and, or which is this is true.

And this is true.

This person's being a jerk and they've been really generous to me.

This person is irresponsible and they're really smart.

And then.

Or which is this is what I'm thinking is happening.

Or this could be happening.

Or this could be happening.

Let me get curious and let me turn down the volume of that part of my brain that's trying to survive this moment and instead find a way to resolve this moment.

Yeah.

And that's so, I mean, to me that's so valuable because then it's like you say you feel your whole neurology calm down.

Yeah.

And it doesn't mean that somebody couldn't have unkind intentions, but it brings your own power back.

Yes.

So now you can respond and your diligence rather than, you know, like I'm afraid and I have to fight.

Is that going to get you.

And that's the efficiency thing.

Right?

Correct.

Right.

It may be more efficient in the sense that if I get curious about this, I'm going to really be able to solve whatever the situation is.

Correct.

You first in your book help people understand what stress is and provide these great frameworks and practices to help with your stress.

You're sort of getting between your ears.

Yes.

The head trash.

I talk about taking out the head trash.

Exactly.

We don't learn well.

We don't resolve things well when we're under stress.

We go to our least efficient tactics when we're under stress.

Right.

If you want to know who somebody is.

Right.

Put them under stress.

I don't know if that's fair.

But we do know their go to methods when they're under stress.

So if you want someone to learn something and do something differently, getting them to listen and be open when they're under stress.

So I start trying to get you to dial down that stress response so that you can listen to the other tools that are going to be more effective in helping you resolve the intra and interpersonal dynamics and struggles that we find ourselves in at work.

Sure.

Started to learn about this when my daughter, who's now 16, was three.

Her school had this positive discipline course.

It was all about helping the child feel safe and that they belonged and that their needs were met.

Then they can learn and do so yelling at them because they didn't do something right is just gonna put them into that little brain part that the, the monkey mind.

Right.

They're not actually gonna.

That prefrontal cortex, cortex and go.

And it made me think about our environments that we work in and how this command and control thing that's been passed down for, for all these years in work environments doesn't set people up to be creative.

It doesn't set people up to get along.

It doesn't set people up to provide any innovation or help your companies to grow.

Because everybody's just trying to stay safe.

And they're all living in their little lizard brain monkey minds.

They're doing efficient things.

So Maslow, the father of modern psychology, talks about the hierarchy of needs.

Safety's first.

You know, I used to run a summer camp for kids and we said safety first, fun is a close second.

But safety first, you can't get anywhere without safety.

And the problem with organizations that are built on fear, that are built with a lack mentality, with a scarcity mindset, not looking toward where they're going and why they're going there and being more mission led, which is at the top of the pyramid of self actualization and belonging, right.

Is this sense of you have to feel safe.

And so if we are taking away employees safety by having things toxic work environment, rewarding negative employees, you know, not addressing conflict, we're setting ourselves up to not actually succeed as well.

And that's.

It's in the data.

It's not just conjecture and just conversations.

You find that organizations that are motivating their employees, organizations that are trusting their employees to do the right thing, are doing better, they're more creative, they're more profitable.

Like this is numbers.

So if you want to get greedy and it's all about numbers, great, make it all about numbers.

And guess what?

Change the culture.

Because the culture is going to change your numbers.

So even if you're doing it for that purpose, which I'll get on board with for a minute because it's just another route to the same outcome, then do it that way because that is actually proven in the data.

Right?

Yeah.

So when you.

I'm going to go back to your book now, please.

So in your book, first you talk about the pieces that are about stress and what that, what creates that and some ways to help get out of it.

And then you talk about the interpersonal toolkit.

So it's intra, then inter.

So intra is within, within your own little mind.

Right.

Because you got to start with you, I wish we could start with everybody else.

But again, we can't change them.

We can influence them, but we can best influence them when we get our stuff taken care of.

So tactics to address the parts of you that foster conflict, just to call ourselves on it, we're fostering the conflict and you need to focus on the role you play in your misery.

We play a fairly large role, if I can boil it down to a few things.

One is obviously dysregulation, not being emotionally regulated, because then you take all the bait you're handed.

And so when you're dysregulating, how do.

We make that better?

Oh, well, I mean there's so many tools are out there.

I mean there's so many apps for meditation, for centering, for self care.

And that doesn't mean spa days, it could be, but it really means going in and doing the work, telling the stories differently about yourself.

I have a whole contracts workshop about how you are living a life that you have agreed to live and maybe not the life that you've dreamed of living, right?

Being able to be real honest with that.

Because then you're externalizing the source of your misery instead of internalizing and realizing, am I really working in my own best interest?

Right?

And then the other pieces around.

So we've got the dysregulation piece that's fostered by a number of things.

We've got the storytelling piece, which is what story are we telling and how are we picking up certain details that either undermine us or embolden us and empower us.

And then cognitive distortions are part of that, like the stories that we're telling ourselves.

Recognizing that our brains are built for safety and our brains are built for negativity because negativity keeps us away from taking risks that can make us be unsafe.

So if we know that our default programming is to be more negative than positive and to seek safety before seeking satisfaction, then we can recognize that, okay, I'm doing this and I don't need to fault them and I don't need to fault me for doing the thing.

So I need to figure out, am I safe and how can I assure myself that I am safe so that I can then take the risks and make the moves that I need to make that are in my and others best interest.

When you talk about being forced for good, so much of that comes from having clarity of purpose.

And that is what's necessary.

Having clarity of purpose is feeling like you're safe to be able to communicate that so it all comes back to how do you create a sense of safety?

And for those of us, and again, I speak from my own experiences who were not born into a sense of feeling safe.

It's something that can be hard won.

You have to really work at creating a sense of safety.

Emotional and psychological safety, we talk about that a lot in the workplace now, but also physical safety, all of those things are important.

And I, I believe that it's incumbent on leaders to grow in our abilities to create that kind of safety, because if we don't, people are just, first of all, they're not going to be doing their best work.

And, you know, it's.

I just feel like we have this opportunity as leaders to make the world better.

You know, we have this little microcosm of community that Whether you lead five people or 5,000 or 500,000, you can make that world better by the way that you construct your narratives, your rituals, and your mission.

Yeah, yeah.

And you talk about it in vision, right?

All those pieces.

And I, you know, I do a lot of strategic planning with organizations and I come down to, you know, we have four core needs, right?

We have control, connection, passion, or purpose, and validation.

And they all come together, they all connect around that mission, that sense of our.

Why.

One of the most powerful organizations for that purpose that I've worked with in the years is the Vietnam Veterans of America.

I'd go to their leadership conferences and they'd have these meetings, these chapter meetings, and people would be fighting about all these little things, kind of like the.

The marital equivalent of leaving the toilet seat up.

Just like the little irritations leaving the coffee mugs in the sink at work.

And I'd say, okay, hang on a second.

Can someone say your mission?

Never again will one generation of veterans abandon another.

Never again will one generation of veterans abandon another.

I would have them say it over and over until these grown men were crying.

If you can put yourself in the position of recognizing that when you have passion and purpose, you can mobilize so much strength to focus on the things that are actually going to matter in your journey than the things that are just distractions.

That's so much of what unflappable is also coming from.

What is your why?

What is your purpose?

Like, what do you want to be in this world and how do you make that happen?

And it can cycle right back to purpose, which again, we can talk about both of our books because I just loved it in yours.

Talking about your remarkable care.

It's those pieces that I think are really Invaluable to creating the kind of culture that we all would benefit from.

So great.

We have these wonderful tools.

So I encourage everybody to pick up this book because Dr.

B really walks through.

It's so tangible.

And what I love about this is you could really like.

It would be a great practice weekly.

Take one little section.

There's practices, there's frameworks, ways to think about things.

And you could bring one a week to your conversations with your team.

It would unbelievably transform the experience and the connection, the conflict and the stress.

We're team oriented.

We learn, relearn and change through connection.

One of the things my clients have found most valuable is when they bring it to their teams.

One of the things that, from a cultural standpoint, that brings us together is language.

Language and tradition, right?

Like customs, things like that.

When you create a custom of doing personal development, you create a bond within the system and it creates more trust, which brings down fear.

Also, we learn and we connect through language.

And when you have similar language.

So if you pull out from one of these tools and you start talking about awareness equals choice and choice equals power, which any one of my students or clients could rattle off to you in a moment because that's something I say all the time.

When you read that together as a team and then someone calls that out, it's a shortcut.

Instead of having to have an in depth conversation about where you might be coming from, you remember the moment that you learn that tool together and you recognize what, what is it's calling for you to do next.

So it's this shorthand that creates these audibles, you know, calls on the field so that you can move and pivot in ways that help the team benefit.

If only one of you is doing it, it can be harder because other people aren't speaking that language and they're not going to necessarily know the next move they're supposed to make.

Whereas when you're doing it together, you can.

Brilliant.

Well, as we start to close out, my question is, is there any other lasting points of wisdom or guidance you would want to offer women founders who are building visionary companies that you know and they're coming across challenge.

I think one of the things for me when I created my business 21 years ago is I kept following that purpose.

I'm going to tell you this story and maybe this will condense it.

I was teaching Catholic education like Sunday school to some young kids, and this little boy came up to me and he said, Ms.

Bridget, that's what I had Them call me.

I said, listen, I didn't like being Mrs.

Cooper when I was, so I'm going to be Ms.

Bridget anyway.

So I said, he said, Ms.

Bridget, what's heaven like?

And I said, well, you know, I haven't been so I'm not really sure but I think there's a lot of puppies and chocolate first off.

And second, I think we're asked three questions.

Did you have fun?

Did you use the gifts I gave you to the best of your ability?

And did you try to leave every situation in person better than you found them?

And to me, when I'm talking about women leaders or anyone, but especially women leaders, we have a capacity for caring and nurturing that can be both our best friend and also our greatest impediment.

Right?

And I think those three questions, when we ask them clearly we can tap into some of the power we have as women to care for others but also to create a sense of legacy while we're still here, here that creates that pathway to living the life we were put here to live.

Amazing.

Thank you.

So how can people get in touch with you?

How can people work with you?

I would love them to reach out, obviously.

I mean picking up a copy of Unflappable is great.

If they go to my website@Dr.bridget cooper.com I promise I don't send out a lot of things so not going to get pummeled by things from me but they can be on my mailing list that allows them to download a couple of free tools.

They can order the book through my website on Amazon or go straight to Amazon if that's better for them and reach out to me.

I give and to your guests I'm actually enhancing it but I give 15 minute free consultation to see if you want to work with me.

For your guests it's 30 minutes because I feel like we're going to have so much to talk about between your book, mine, their work, I, anyway, so I'm giving them more time because I want to really support the women who are listening to you, the other listeners that are listening to the great messages that you have, really powerful messages.

So yeah, give me a call and go to my website, Dr.bridgetcooper.com and I would love to hear from you.

It's brilliant.

Thank you.

Well and I, I hope everyone you know, you listening have a, have, have some, have a 30 minute time with Dr.

B.

It'll really soothe your soul and open you up and you know there, there's possibilities for the future.

So thank you.

Ah so thank you for your wisdom.

All right.

I'm gonna hold both of our books up at the same.

Oh, I really appreciate and honor your wisdom.

This is what the sound of a wise woman sounds like.

Thank you.

And so I, I'm grateful you're here and I'm grateful to the listeners.

I'm grateful to you, listener trailblazer who's here and sharing your heart and your soul in the world.

If you enjoyed our time together, please be sure to like follow and share the With Wisdom of Women show on your favorite listening or viewing platform.

Be sure to infuse more wisdom, your wisdom into your business.

One way you can do that is to take the growth readiness quiz at a ForceForGood biz quiz.

And right there you're gonna uncover where your wisdom is needed most.

And the world is made better by women led business.

So let's all go make the world.