In this episode, host John Terrill has a conversation with Michaela O'Donnell and Lisa Pratt Slayton about their new book, Life in Flux: Navigational Skills to Guide and Ground You in an Ever-Changing World. We explored how internal and external reactions are crucial in effective leadership and the importance of profound inner work.

Here are three key takeaways:

🔑 Embrace Pain and Failure: True growth often comes from experiencing pain, grief, and failure. Acknowledging these elements and allowing oneself to learn from mistakes is essential for developing resilience and wisdom in leadership.

🔑 Prioritize Inner Work: Effective leaders don’t just react to change; they engage deeply with their inner selves. This introspection allows for navigating transitions with humility, confidence, and a willingness to be wrong, as emphasized by Edwin Friedman's work.

🔑 Value Community and Rest: Transitioning successfully means recognizing the need for community support and the importance of rest. Michaela O'Donnell's insights on Sabbath as a form of resistance highlight how rest helps leaders resist the rush, foster creativity, and maintain well-being amidst change.

This episode is a powerful exploration of what it means to lead with authenticity and courage in today's fast-paced world. Don't miss out on this inspiring discussion—tune in to the UpWords podcast and embark on your journey of becoming a more grounded and effective leader.

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📙link = http://bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/life-in-flux/408950

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Other 🔗's

https://michaelaodonnell.com

https://thehxcollective.com/speaker/lisa-slayton/

Welcome to the Upwards podcast, where we discuss the intersection of christian faith in the academy, church, and marketplace to illuminate the good work happening with individuals, institutions, and in our communities. Today I had a chance to speak with Michaela O'Donnell and Lisa Pratt Slayton. I want to highlight their work. Mikayla is the executive director of Fuller Seminary's Max Dupree center for Leadership. She's an author and does a lot of work with leaders across the country and beyond. And Lisa Pratt Slayton is the founding partner and CEO of Tameem Partners, LLC is a company that provides coaching and consultants to executives, businesses, nonprofits, and churches. So she brings decades of really rich experience working with leaders. We talked about so many things today, mostly focusing or entirely focusing on their new book titled Life in Flux, Navigational skills to guide and ground you in an ever changing world, and highly commend this book to you.

There was so much to discuss. I found this book so rich, with lots of really important lessons for navigating transition and change during really difficult times, foggy times. In fact. The book starts with a story, a maritime story, a real life story of navigating and getting lost in a boat off the main shore. From that starting point, the authors take us on a journey of how do we navigate change? Well? And some of it is counterintuitive. We're prompted to speed up. We're prompted to maybe rely on things that aren't going to help us when we're in the midst of really significant transition. So in our conversation today, we talked about the importance of outer and inner work.

We talked a lot about agency. How do we think about our own agency and locus of control? When are we in charge and when are we not charged? When should we try to exert control, and when should we sort of step back and push the pause button? And we talked about grief work. We don't always think of grief work when it comes to organizational leadership. But Lisa and Michaela really helped me and will help readers in this book think about the importance of grief work alongside our leadership and organizational life. Well, Lisa and Michaela, I'm so excited to be with you, and I'm really excited about life in flux. Thank you for sending me the Kindle version, the epub version. I got that, read that, and today I received the hard copy, which wasn't enough time for me. It didn't give me enough time to read in advance of our conversation.

But I did read the digital version and I think the print version is beautiful. So great job. This is Baker. Well, I'm super excited to have the conversation with you. Thanks for carving out some time. Got a whole bunch of things I wanted to ask you about the book. Really enjoyed it, learned a lot and found it really, really helpful. So thank you for writing it.

I'd love to know how the two of you met. It's clear that you have a warm relationship and a friendship, but how did you first get to know each other? And then how has the relationship developed over the years?

Yeah, well, I'll start and Mikaela can chime in. We met probably about five or six years ago through Mark Roberts, who at the time was leading the Dupri center. I've known Mark Roberts for a very long time. I was in Chicago doing some gathering that Mark had put together, which is what Mark, if you know Mark Roberts, you know, he loves pulling people into a room. And at the end of a day or so or day and a half of being together, he said, you know, you really have to meet Michaela O'Donnell, who's just come on board to do some projects for the Dupri center. And so within a short period of time, I think Michaela and I were on a call that was supposed to be like the 30 minutes intro call that went, you know, like 90 minutes later. We were like, oh, no, we have a lot to talk about. And within a couple months, Ed Forster, another mutual friend, I think of many of us, run something called the Quorum Forum, and he invited, invited us to be on a panel together.

And so we, that was our first physical in person meeting, which was not very long before COVID if memory serves me right. And, and then the next step after that was more conversations because we found out we really were like, just wanted to get to know one another. And we became part of a monthly prayer group of women who are leading in christian organizations, fondly call ourselves the Phoebes or the Phoebes, seven of us who have been meeting monthly now for four plus years to support women leading in christian environments is not an easy thing. And we've all had various levels of experience doing that. So we try to physically be together as often as we can. That doesn't, I don't think all seven of us have ever been in one place at the same time. We got six. And that's how the relationship started.

And it's both a personal relationship and a professional one. We've done projects together. And what else, Mikayla, what else would you say to add to that?

I think you covered it. Lisa. I think the only thing I would say is that it was January 2020 when we did that chrome forum. So it was like, it was this. The world was topic at hand, very much in flux. So we had a friendship that was forged in that season, too, which I think is interesting given the topic of the book.

Wow, that's fabulous. That's so encouraging to hear that you've invested like that over four and a half years, and you stay true to that. I know a lot of other women and men are listening and thinking, yeah, I'd love, love to be a part of a group like that.

Well, one last comment I'll add on this podcast today from my summer place up in Maine, which is a favorite spot. It was three years ago, right? Michele, you and Dan were celebrating your 10th wedding anniversary and said, hey, we're coming to Maine. And you came down and spent a day or two in my little place of peace and love and got to experience Maine. Of course, there's a story in the book, which I'm sure we'll talk about that's set in Maine that kind of sets the tone and tenor for a lot of the language and the metaphor that we use throughout the book. So having had Michaela here physically is very meaningful to me.

That's great. I do want to get to that imagery, that experience that Roger had. But I did want to ask you about the partnership in writing this book and how you negotiated your unique relationship. So it's largely, I think, Mikayla writing, but she's channeling both of you. You can tell it comes out of lots of conversation and storytelling. And I'm sure, Lisa, you were working behind the scenes with editing and structuring some other things. So what did the partnership look like? How did you figure all that out between the two of you?

Yeah, it's a great question. I think it will go down as a unique partnership in the best kind of ways. Get at why we made some of those choices. You have to back up a couple steps. I had a first book come out about three years ago at this point and was scheduled to do a second book with Baker. And the book was going to be on transitions, on change, on this kind of stuff. And as I was early in the research phase of it, doing the thing you do, which is talking to a.

Lot of people, kind of collecting your.

Own research and thinking, sourcing who the very best thinkers on this are. I found myself continually going back to Lisa. I was like, what would you read? What are you thinking about this? And at one point, she jokingly said, hey, if you're going to write this book. I want to write it with you. I was like, oh, that's interesting. That's not currently what I'm scheduled to do, and that might actually cost me some things individually, but I think that that's going to be a better book that started the process. And it was one of a lot like meeting in the middle, a lot of, you know, collaboration. It's very common.

There's different styles of, when people write together, it's very common for people to sort of divide and conquer. They'll say, you take these chapters, I'll take these chapters. It just didn't work like that for Lisa and I, us, we tried a little bit of that and it didn't. It wasn't really very good. Found she worked really well, was to do a lot of co brainstorming and architecting and ideating, and then actually for Elisa to do some plowing. We started calling it plowing. And then my job was much more of that finesse, much more of the braiding of the coming along. So there is a lot of, like, channeling, there's a lot of, like, individual.

And I remember we look back at it, we're like, oh, interesting. There actually probably is, you know, less of me in this book than maybe if I had written it by myself, less of lisa in it, as if she had written her own book. But something, I actually think it's exponentially better in.

The fact that we did it, too, was. It was very iterative, John, particularly in the early chapters, I would take a stab at kind of, it was supposed to be outlining. It wasn't really outlining. It was me defining some content pieces. And then Michaela would begin to finesse. And we had this process, little inside baseball. We had a shared Dropbox folder, and every time one of us touched the document, we added a draft number to it. Those early chapters, I think we had 20 or 30 or 40 drafts in some cases, because it just kept going back and forth, and I would research something and add it in and Michaela would fine tune it.

And, you know, we were. Yeah, it was just a very messy, iterative, but generative process is how I would describe it.

It's great to hear a little bit of the behind the scenes that you did to really pull this off, because it comes through as a single voice, very clear voice, and yet both of your personalities and your experiences come through well. There's lots of maritime themes that come through in this book, and I want to start, or you start the book with a story of Roger Slayton. And I think this is your husband. Is that correct? That is okay.

Yeah.

He loses his way in a thick fog while in a boat at sea and off the Maine coast. And you carry this story through and it frames the book. I wonder if you could just, for those who are listening, just set that scene for us. And why. And how did that scene become so pivotal for the way that you structured the book?

Yeah. Well, I'm happy to share a little bit of this story. Elle and I were really searching for something to, you know, not to be ironic here, but to anchor the story on it, you know, a metaphor that would hold up to what we wanted to accomplish. And one day I just told her this story, which is very familiar to me. Roger and I have been married for 43 years. It's happened to him when he was in high school, grew up coming to where we go in Maine his whole life. He's been coming here since he was born. And he and his brother were, you know, we always had boats.

The coast of Maine where we are, is a rocky coastline. So the activity is, you know, out on the boat, exploring the coastline, you know, none of the boats are. Well, a few people have fancy boats, but, you know, the boats we have are typically just, you know, for day trips and things like that. And he and his brother in high school had, you know, worked and put some money together and bought a small boat together, probably 16 or 17 foot runabout. And the activities were to go out, go from island to island and, you know, get off and hunt around and find artifacts. And, you know, that's what they did on, on hot summer days. And they did, we're out one day he was out with two friends, and, and they. And I'm coming home.

It was late in the day, and it'd been, you know, they were pretty far out. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, which happens in Maine a lot, fog rolled in. Like the kind of fog up here. We call it pea soup fog. Right. The kind of fog where you can't see your hand in front of your face. And the heart about it that's always been so fascinating to me is he's told the story many, many times, is that his move was so counterintuitive, right? Like the impulse, the knee jerk of, you know, when you're, when you're all of a sudden in a sort of a crisis and chaotic situation is just put your head down and plow forward. Right.

And he did not do that. And from, even at that young age, his years of boating better, he said, you know, the thing you have to do is orient yourself to the. To what's going on. And the only way to do that is to stop and cut the engine and listen. He did that, and his two friends, he sort of said, listen, let's hear. And of course, in Maine, if you've been or on any coastline, really, there are sounds that identify what's happening. And they're foghorns and their bell buoys. And all of those sounds are distinct through the lighthouse or the bell buoy location.

So if you're up here and you know them, you know the sounds. And so they were listening for the foghorns and the bell buoys that marked, you know, home harbor, if you will. And that's what they did. It was stop, cut the engine, you know, listen, and then make a small incremental move and repeat. Sort of just keep doing it over and over again. And you have to not only listen for the Foghorns, you also have to listen for other boats, because the danger in fog is that, particularly if you're a tiny boat, like this one was a big boat, could. Who has it? You know, they had no navigational equipment. It was like 1967, right? So they had were paper charts.

And those are not helpful when you can't see where you are. And so they did come across the lobstermen. At one point, they heard his boat. He was just idling in the water. He knew where he was, and he pointed them in the right direction. It's a counterintuitive move, even in a state of disorientation. And as they got closer to shore and they could finally begin to see the outline of the shoreline, the impulse, again is to head directly to shore. But in this case, they couldn't do it because the shoreline where they approached was rocky and ledgy, and the boat would have been destroyed.

So they actually had to circle out a little bit and find their way back into our little home cove. The boats are moored, and Roger has told that story over and over again. And one of the two guys who was out with him, we see up here periodically, and every time we're together, they share that story. It is the counterintuitive move in the midst of a chaotic situation where you really can't see the way in front of you. And it felt very orienting for the work we wanted to put forth to people.

Yeah, go ahead, Mikayla.

I was just gonna add. So the reason why it's sort of the enduring metaphor. Like there. There is data that says that adults in the US undergo pretty significant transitions every twelve to 18 months. It basically means that at any given moment, you're either going into right in the middle of, or coming out of fog. And so this, this over. And Lisa and I, in different ways, have both worked with a lot of different people, a lot of different leaders, a lot of different professionals, and you can just see the fog and, and it is, it's our instincts, and often we go hard after those instincts to frenetically put things in gear and keep going. And it's a learned skill to sort of say, me, listen, let me stop, let me cut the engine.

And so that is a metaphor that we felt like if nobody else gets anything else from the book, we're like, this is valuable. And so it's why we chose to sort of carry it through.

Encourage you to go to our YouTube channel, subscribe like it, and hit the bell to be notified when a new episode is released. You can also download this episode in your favorite podcast app, click the link in the description below, or search for the Upwards podcast. Yeah. And has the fog intensified? Do you think about your own practice and working with leaders over time, maybe over the last five years or over the last 10, 15, 20 years, is the fog intensifying and in what ways? And I guess my ultimate question is how uniquely can your book, your contribution here, help people navigate the fog as we experience it today?

I'll let Lisa speak to the last part, how the book can uniquely help us navigate it. But on your first part of your question, like, has it intensified? One thing that Lisa and I talk a lot about is altitudes. So you've got like the 30,000 foot, like, oh my goodness, we have more access more often to what's happening around the world, both in something that's happening far away and then how those things come together. Then you think about the systems that we find ourselves in kind of more at home. We might call those the 20,000 down to the 10,000 foot level. And then there's a very personal, like, does anybody even know this is happening? But it's very real for me and my people. What I think is that we've got more change cutting through those altitudes at any given time. And so you've got change on change, on change.

And, you know, I think a huge part of why we feel this really is accelerated technology. We have more access to more things that are going on. So is there more change happening in the world? I'm not sure. But do we witness it? Are we engulfed by it? Are we impacted by more of it? Oh, absolutely. So then, and then, Lisa, you take the, how our book uniquely helps in that moment.

Yeah. I mean, Sean, you know, I'm a practitioner. Michaela, part of our partnership has been. I'm the practitioner. She's a practical theologian, so she does both the practice work, but brings strong theological substance to what we're working on. And I led an organization in Pittsburgh for 20 years called the Pittsburgh Leadership foundation, and I've been working with leaders for 20 plus years, individuals and teams and organizations. And I do believe that the intensity of change and the pace of change has become such that leaders have to be learning to lead quite differently in this world that we live in. And we can unpack this further as we get into our conversation.

But the old traditional styles of leadership, more autocratic, top down, just put your head down and get it done, aren't going to get us where we want to go, actually. They usually work against us over time. And when I'm working with an individual, particularly a leader, who's in a season of what I call disruption or even crisis, my first piece of work with them is to help them slow down and see what has brought you to this point, and what do you have to wake up to and pay attention to in order to get ready to make the shifts you need to make for yourself personally, what we call the inner work, and we'll talk about that in a minute, but also for the sake of your people, your teams, your organizations. It's hard, heavy work, and it's very counterintuitive. We mapped through the book a series of what we called common postures and then uncommon postures. Right. How do you make these shifts and what do they begin to look like? And the desire of the book, the intent of the book, was to continue our theme and lay out these navigational skills that help us to make the shifts. And the very first one is waking up.

Right. We have to wake up to what's going on around us. We can't operate on an assumption that what got us from where we got us to where we are is going to get us to where we want to go. It just simply won't. Waking up can happen. I believe it happens most often because of some kind of pain or pinch point that's occurred, but it can also come about because of possibility. I can see something out there, but I don't know how to get there. And I want, I know I have to do something differently.

And so it creates this longing to make the shift map. These navigational skills and the accompanying postures, shifts to make. I think we're tempting to be as theologically grounded, thoughtful about it, and very practical all along the way. And so hopefully that's what the skills have laid out. And I'm happy to talk through more than we can do that as we continue our conversation.

Yeah, I want to get into the content of the book and some of the postures that you establish and responses that you establish. But for the benefit of our listeners and viewers, you could just define transition. Is transition the same as change? Could we use those terms interchangeably or should we use them in different kinds of ways?

Oh, boy. I think transition is so, I would describe transition. And Michele, you can add to this. We reference the work in the book quite often of an author and researcher named Bruce Feiler, who wrote a book called life is in the transitions. And a change is often as being like a switch that you flip. I changed from this to this, and we've done it. It's done and over with. Change doesn't actually work that way.

Changing your songs might work that way, but navigating through an organizational change or any. I mean, you're raising young children right now. You're watching your children developmentally change, and there's no switch that gets flipped. There are these seasons of equilibrium and disequilibrium as they developmentally transition through their own growth. And it doesn't stop when we become adults, and yet we just want to make the change happen and then move on to the next thing. And transition, I think, is the space or the even that holds, allows us to navigate through a change and get to the other side. Changes are very simple and mechanical and what we'll call technical. Others are much more complex, much more transformational in nature, and they require longer transition seasons.

We have to give ourselves the time and space to process through them.

I think this is just underscore it. What Lisa said is it's transitions about the in between.

Yeah, right.

It's just, it's. And I think this book gives light and space to something that's increasingly rushed, which is the in between. And we're saying actually, like, a lot of stuff happens here. Let's slow it down.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think William Bridges makes that frustration as well, where changes often, I mean, change can be positive or negative in the way that we experience it, but it is a, some kind of idealized view or something out in the future. It's the transitions that are so difficult, the process of moving toward that new state. So that's really helpful. So we shouldn't use those terms interchangeably, or we can, but understand that transition really is around that liminal space.

That's the word right there.

Well, one of the things that really, you guys pay a lot of attention to in your book, and it's so helpful, and you quote lots of authors who I really respect, and I'm sure our listeners know these authors as well. But you really try to help us navigate this that needs to happen at an outer level and an inner level. You toggle back and forth between understanding the external changes and navigating those. Well, also regulating our own emotions, what's happening internally within us, and our own sort of process of transformation. I wonder if you could speak to how navigating flux really does demand both internal and external work in us.

Such a good question. I think it's one of the reasons why I like the Rogers story so much, is because there is this counterintuitive, deeply able entered choice that's happening in the midst of something pretty terrifying with high stakes and consequences if you don't get it right. So there's this. It's not even just when do we shift from external to internal. It's that there at all times, there is this interplay and interdependence between them. I can think quite personally back to the moments I have regretted the most in my own leadership come to when I was trying to, like, objectively and quickly move. And it's like it just like never really goes well. And instead to sort of say, okay, why did I just get sort of flustered there? Ooh, what's happening in me? Oh, I noticed that that person's reaction made a different reaction happen in me.

And there's this real skill or takes a lifetime to cultivated, can't do it alone. This is where I think, like our faith in God and sort of the kind of movement we go on as people who believe in God, and I'm talking about Lisa and I here, people who believe in God and as disciples, all of this plays in is we really have to believe and expect that we are going to transition, we are going to change. Those things are possible. That just sets a very different framework. Thinking about talking about change, there's a couple of leadership scholars out of Harvard. The most prominent one, his name's Ronald Hyphens, and he talks a lot about the difference between technical and adaptive challenges. Technical challenges, really, really, really hard. We got to balance the budget, the us budget, company's budget, whatever it is, really hard, but can be done.

Then there's adaptive challenges which are really hard because they have clear answers. We actually don't really know how it's going to play out. Adaptive challenges are more and more common, and whenever adaptive challenges come, it's sort of this wrestling of. I'm actually probably going to have to change something about what I believe or a value that I'm holding onto in order to progress forward. Right. In order to make it back to shore, I'm going to have to do something a little bit different than I usually do. And the stuff that requires us to confront our values, to imagine a new way of being, sometimes for ourself, sometimes in a family, in a team that we're on, an organization that we're leading, I'm like, oh, my goodness, please, let's do the inner work. One quick example, and then I'll be done here.

I had a guy come to me. This was like in the middle of the great resignation, that period in which everybody was leading, deciding they did not want to be at one company making a move for another. He called me one day, and he was mid level management in a tech firm. So probably like 50 to 75 sort of reports that came up to him, and he said, michaela, I have a lot of people who are leaving. We're getting very, very hard hit by the great resignation. And Michaela, I think I know what the problem is. I was like, what is it? He said, I think it's me. I think I'm the problem.

And so this is like a pin on the point of at least it was like pain and possibility. It's like, whoa, now we've got those two intersection. And he went on a three or four year journey to really become a different kind of leader. That now when I talk to him, I'm like, okay, people like working for you. You guys do some amazing stuff together. And all that came about because he engaged in her work, that, that transitional moment, that flux moment, invited him to do.

Wow, that's really helpful. Lisa, did you want to jump in?

Sure. Yeah. I mean, what's always so fascinating to me when people come to me? I have a process that I've been working with folks for quite a long time now. That's usually over the course of six months to a year. This is not fast work question they usually come to me with is this thing happened? I don't know what to do.

Right.

And my answer to that question is often, well, let's start with who you are. And it requires a different shift. We want action steps. We want tips and tricks. We want hacks. To get us through the pain and to the next thing. And yet it does require this leader that Mikaela's talking about had this wake up moment. We use that language of waking up to realizing, oh, maybe I'm the problem, and I have to do something, and I have to do a little more work on who I am, how I'm bringing myself into the world.

That's not working quite the way, quite the way it should. And that's the deep inner work. And you know this, Sean, from. From your own experience as well, this is a lifetime journey, right? It's not. It's never one and done, but we have these seasons where we have to do what I often call excavation work, deep dive, and really get down to underneath, not just, you know, who do I think I am? Who do I say I am? But who am I, really? And this is the revelation of the true self, the revealing and peeling back all those layers that we layer onto ourselves to make ourselves function in the world, but not in a whole way, not in an integrated way.

Yeah.

So it often, if I'm hearing you correctly, there's often a dimension of pain or grief or failure that needs to be experienced to really navigate flux. Well, is that a fair statement? Is that what really leads to change and working through change in a way that's different than maybe we've worked through it in the past?

Unequivocally, yes. I literally just in the last couple of days, have seen some research that shows that 71% of our growth and real integration of knowledge and learning happens in failure. Right. Now, you can argue the statistic, but the reality is that it holds up under scrutiny as you look at. And so we have to. The stumbles and the falls are the places that we learn the most, and we also, and move in that place is to go into avoidance and denial. Right. We don't want to feel the pain.

We don't want to admit our mistakes. We don't want to acknowledge that maybe we've made a misstep. And yet that's where the opportunity is for growth and learning, and it requires letting go of things. One of our chapters is choose to let go. What do you have to let go of? And grieve. And we did a lot of research around grief and understanding grief in some new ways, and Michaela can speak to that, but the failure leads to that place of recognizing that what got me where I am won't get me where I want to go. Pieces of my own story, professional story, are in the book, and I had that moment. Right.

And it came about because a very dear and wonderful friend, colleague said to me, you know, Lisa, you're allowing the system to define you right now. That's language that might be familiar to some. It comes out of family systems. And he was absolutely right. And it's led me, I mean, that was, you know, 16 years ago, and I'm still on that journey. Right. Of understanding my own family systems and the dynamics that allow me to. To over function and be overly responsible and to get enmeshed in unhealthy systems.

It's a hugely painful moment, and I had to do some things very differently for myself. But if the organization I was leading was actually going to survive, and that was, I was committed to it. And so I had to do really heavy lifting for a pretty intense season, and it came out of failure.

Yeah. You know, and that's what I loved about this book is there are so many, it's like you mind all the wonderful best thinkers on navigating transition because you draw on that point on Edwin Friedman.

Yeah.

And his Bowen system work. And I just had a conversation this morning with a colleague about trying to offer an unanxious presence. That's the one thing we can do when we were sort of out of ideas, right. On how to, how to step into a situation is to be a non anxious presence or not anxious presence. And so there's so much of that in here and it's so, so helpful. Each chapter loaded. Mikaela, I want to turn to you and ask the question about grief work. Why is grief work so necessary for navigating transition? At least I'll come back to you.

Sure.

Because I'm sure you have some additional thoughts on that. But Michaela, let's start with you.

Yeah, thanks, John. I think part of what we do in the book is we acknowledge that different people are wired different ways, and that positions us to feel certain things and to react certain ways when change happens, when transitions are looming, when life feels like it's in flux. So I am somebody who's wired and not just wiring. It's like life. Right? All the things. I'm somebody who's wired to. Not would. I just would rather not with all the grief stuff.

I'd rather not with all the pain. I'd rather not with, you know, now I'm going to be theological. I'd rather not with Friday. Right. I'd rather not. Just rather not goodness. And I'm thinking, and Lisa knows about this. Something that's fun is that Lisa and I have all this shared vocabulary from our book to draw in together.

And then we bring our individual work and perspectives as well. Thinking about a research project, a pretty heavy lifting research project that my colleague Meryl, her and others and myself just did at the Dupree center for Leadership that I'm the executive director at. And there were all kinds of interesting findings. What we were really after is, what do healthy leaders look like? Who are they? Could we, like, the world needs better leaders and more of them, and things are hard. What can we find? One of the things that we found over and over is that the kind of leaders that were like, yeah, they're, like, flourishing. They're, like, doing the thing. People want to work. I keep saying, want to work for them.

I actually feel like that's an indicative thing. People want to work with you, right? In the work world, they just, like, face their pain head on. Not necessarily because they love pain and they're all wired to be down in the, like, mopey feelings all the time, but because somewhere along the way, and this would be true for me as well, John, is we realize, like, to Lisa's data point. Oh, gosh. Like, I actually, like, grew a lot through that season. Oh, my goodness. The people that were with me in that season, they're like my ride or die now. And these relationships are formed and these new muscles are formed.

And then what happens, John, is it makes the grief work less scary. Next time you're like, oh, I know this. I know this thing. I know Friday, but I also know Saturday and Sunday. Right. And so some of us, we, like love, and we're like, fine. And we want to put on the crying songs, and that's you. Great.

But, like, if you're listening, you know, like, I'm kind of a little more in the, like, grief is hard for me. Like, I get it. It's very real. Very worth it. It's very, very worth it, you know? Yeah.

Thank you.

Yeah.

It's a funny thing. I in. In the research that we did around this and my own learning on grief, which has been a journey for a while now, I've studied the work of a woman named Miriam Greenspan, who we reference in the book, and she wrote a book that was very valuable called healing the dark emotions. Her identification of the dark emotions or grief, fear and despair. And, you know, the book is worth reading after you read our book, but read that. Worth picking up at some point. But her case is very simply that we have lost our ability as a culture to grieve, and we treat these emotions as negative. And she reframes them as dark but absolutely necessary.

And if we don't learn how to walk into them and feel them and experience them, she makes the case that it's a part of why there's so much hostility and polarization and violence in the world today. And I think her case is valid and worth paying attention to because we are avoiding these emotions, and so they have to come up and out somewhere. But if we can process them and engage them and integrate them. She even talks about befriending your grief, befriending your fear. It sounds so bizarre. There's a way to get there that allows us not to forget the loss, ignore the loss or the pain, but to integrate it in a way that allows us to be better humans and better leaders over time. That's what I have seen over and over again. The people that have done the hard work, processing and integrating their pain and their trauma and their suffering are just better humans all the way around.

And that's what we want to see this book point people towards, is how to do that work.

Yeah, yeah, that's really helpful. One of the things you address, or I guess you address them throughout the book, are some of the spiritual practices. You don't necessarily call them spiritual practices, but you do reference these. And it at one point, you do go into some depth about Sabbath keeping. And I learned some new things about the Sabbath, particularly the contrast between pharaoh and God's creational design, this idea of his rule versus God's rule. And that was, I mean, I sort of knew it, but I never put the two closely together. And I wonder if you could speak to Sabbath and rest and reflection as a way to navigate transition.

Yeah, it's a good question. Sabbath and rest are so interesting to me, partly because I think of the spiritual practices. I would say that Sabbath is one, at least baseline understanding is one of the ones that christians are most familiar with. It's like, yes, we're supposed to rest, do that thing, and it's one of the ones that's, like, most elusive. It just feels like. It's like it's not really there. So, yeah, I think. And one thing I'll say is that every summer at the Dupri center, we started to focus on rest, and it ends up being really important for our audience.

So as Lisa and I were talking, like, okay, well, what is the role of rest? And what is the role of Sabbath in seasons of transition? Kind of. In a couple ways. There's. There's number. The first one actually comes back to something we already talked about, which is checking your speed is just so tempting to. Once we see the shore, right? Okay, we know we've been in the in between, we're out in the ocean, we're in the fog, but now we know where we're going, it's time to go fast. Whoo. That just, you just hit the boat on the rocky shores.

And it just. The sensibilities and what I would say the cultivated and trained surrogate, the spiritual practice, language, the cultivated ability to say, okay, I see it, but instead I'm going to listen, we're going to. We are going to move incrementally. So on that, that part of rest and speed is actually important from our.

How do.

We can't necessarily rush the process of transition, can't rush flux. Oftentimes we have very little control around what's happening. It's all about how we engage and respond. I do think that there's some helpful biblical framing here to help us understand why are we so enculturated to frenetically move quickly as soon as we see the shore. And this actually comes, a lot of this, a lot of the work here is rooted in Walter Brueggemann's Sabbath as resistance book. Fantastic. It's like 100 pages. And he talks about Sabbath as a resistance to the pharaoh like forces that are alive and well today.

Exploitation, coercion, multitasking, and anxiety.

Yeah, yeah. And more with less. I mean, if you remember that story, there's the demand for more with less. Right?

And I would say that's exploitation, right. That's absolutely exploited for a system. And we have many, many systems that are demanding more with less. So you get Pharaoh, who is potentially, presumably, I'm interpreting pharaoh now, but operating out of a ton of fear, a ton of greed, a ton of anxiety. And his response to the enslaved Israelites is to say, I want more. I am going to control you in order to make sure that this situation plays out on my terms. And in contrast, God's Sabbath is a gift, right? To sort of God, to say, I worked and worked and worked and worked. And as a result of that, you are going to rest.

A gift freely given to everybody, not just privileged folks who have certain jobs and get to take certain days of the week off. And I think this is where it gets sticky, is that we think about Sabbath. I think I'm even prone to this thinking about Sabbath as an overly individualistic thing, where maybe the reason we can't keep Sabbath is because we are not collectively pushing and or diverting our energy in a way that doesn't respond to Pharaoh's demands, whatever it is. And so there's just this sense and contrast of Pharaoh being a very either or system and God being a yes. And. And that when we feel that frenetic, gotta do more, gotta be more, even for very real things, like, gotta pay the bills, gotta make sure things happen, gotta, you know, respond to my boss. I've just more and more been able to say those. Those feelings that seem to come up very loudly when we're in the fog.

Very loudly because we're in the fog and we're trained to find the things and do the things. Leaning in then to say exactly at that moment is when God wants us, invites us to rest and to rest our way forward in transition. And that. That rest is actually the other side of the coin of the grief. Like that. Oh, okay. That is interesting. So, absolutely, Sabbath keeping has a play, but this rhythm of work and rest and frenetic energy and anxiety with abundance and peace in a context in which we're checking our speed overall as we move through these, the sure word liminal moments.

That's huge. That's huge, John.

You can also find this as an audio podcast in lots of different formats. The podcast notes for today's conversation include a link to view this episode on YouTube. For your convenience, remember to follow or subscribe to stay updated with our latest episodes in your podcast app. Elise, I want to ask you about community. You guys have formed a community there. We started off our conversation talking about that. What a gift. Community is really important for navigating transition.

I wonder if you could speak to the lessons you've learned over the years of coaching and mentoring and others. And we think about community in today's environment.

Yeah, I think it's such an important piece. In fact, it's a, I would call it, to use business language, a critical success factor right. To this work. The things I did early on at PLF in the early two thousands, part of the reason I went there, actually was I was invited to develop a cohort program for leaders. It had some criteria around it. It was explicitly Christ centered. It was oriented towards the city. We were a city based and city facing organization.

And one of the third pieces was that we found leaders were very isolated, and they were trying, particularly entrepreneurs were trying to go it alone. And we realized, oh, this is. They need a place and a space to come and be. And so we developed this cohort program called the leaders collaborative. It was a six month intensive, and the leaders came together, twelve to 15. We kept the numbers fairly small together, opening retreat, closing retreat. You know, familiar rhythms to many of the cohort and fellowship programs are around now. And one of the things we did that was a little bit distinct was we met monthly.

But in between, put our leaders in these small coaching groups of three with one of our coaches, like, I did some coaching, I had a couple colleagues, and it was really there in those little communities of three that the real sticky, transformational work occurred. And it became clear to me that that's what's missing. We need this solitary, individual work. I'm going to paraphrase my favorite Enneagram teacher, Suzanne Stabil, who says often this is solitary work best done in community. Right. And so there's work we have to do individually, but we have to have close, safe people with us, and not safe in the sense that they're, you know, that they're simply there to soothe us and comfort us, but safe in the sense that they can challenge us and ask us hard questions, and we trust that they love us enough to do that and that they're deeply committed to our good and our well being. And finding those people in this world is hard. Keeping them is harder.

But it might be the most worthy investment that you make. In the book, keeping with our nautical language, we call them the trusted crew. Right. For years, I called them the Wisdom councils. Who's in your wisdom council? I still develop wisdom counsels with every client I work with in a coaching capacity because they have to have those people who are your go to, and in many cases it's a spouse or a close friend. It could be a pastor. But who are your two or three people that know you right down to your toes and can say really hard things to you with great love? I think that's the kind of community that we're really talking about here. That intense writer and author.

I'm an anthropology major back in the day. So communitas is the word. It's the other level, that band of brothers kind of experience. We've gone through hard things together, and we're with one another through and through. We run on the surface, relationally, because of time and stretch and bandwidth and all the things. But at the end of the day, if we don't have those few people, we do find ourselves in broken, isolated, lonely places. And I think community is the antidote on so many levels for so much of what we're struggling with in our society today.

Yeah, yeah. That's so helpful. Just. This is a side note. For Dan, but for you as well. Are you guys still okay on time? I had a couple more questions I wanted to ask, but I don't want to go more than about ten minutes.

Yep, sure.

Okay. Okay. Back to the conversation. You know, one of the ways I. That I really. One of the things I really appreciated about the book was helping me think more carefully about agency. You referenced this idea of locus of control, which is a psychological term, and you draw on some of Covey's work around circles of control. Could you speak to change, navigating change and this idea of where our agency starts and stops, how we figure out where we should exercise influence or control and where we shouldn't.

I know this. I know our listeners and viewers really feel this in life because, Mikile, as you spoke about, we're exposed to so much change in the world, right, just through technology. The bombardment of change and transition is significant. How do we know to exercise agency and where not to?

Yeah. So I reactivated and Covey's circle of control. His original one was circle of control and circle of influence, and added over time. If you google it, you'll get a million returns for circle of control. So people have iterated on it for many, many years. The outermost circle is the circle of concern, which is one we represent in the book. And what I was finding with clients, particularly at the beginning of COVID is that all of their emotional, physical, and mental energy was being focused on things in the circle of concern, over which they had no agency at all. And so slowly the shift is to move into that circle of control, which are the things that you actually have agency over and you can control.

And here's the simple version, is it's yourself, right? I can control what I think and what I am experiencing and how I respond, rather than react emotionally in the moment. I can, you know, I can't. I can influence people. I can influence my environment. Sometimes I have a little more control over my environment if I'm in a leadership position, but I can't. There's an awful lot out there that I'm deeply concerned about, and that's deeply troubling that I can't do very much about. And I have a quick personal story that illustrates this. At the very beginning of the war in Ukraine, it just consumed me.

For whatever reason, there was something about what was going on there that just felt so outrageous to me and so horrific. And I was amped up, and I was burning a lot of energy on following the news and watching what was happening. And I realized after a day or two, okay, short of picking up and moving to Poland, you know, to be there and try and be on the receiving end of refugees, I have little control over what I can do about what's happening in Ukraine. However, a good friend and colleague in Pittsburgh had mounted a campaign with an organization called Brother's Brother, which takes all kinds of resources into humanitarian crisis situations. It's based in Pittsburgh, and I could do a couple things. I could volunteer some time, and I could donate some money. And that was agency that I had to impact something that was deeply concerning for me, that if I continued to burn all that energy around, I wouldn't be able to do the things that I actually could do in my day to day work and life with my family, an adult daughter who's struggling, who's living with us right now. I mean, I need to be present where I'm called, and all this energy going to the circle of concern isn't valuable.

And everybody resonated with it. As soon as I started putting it into presentations and coaching work, it's like, oh, my gosh. And so asking yourself those questions, is this mine to do, and what can I actually do about it? What can I change my thinking or control my own mind about it, but I can't change yours. I could maybe influence you a little bit. I can't make Michaela do something she doesn't want to do. She can't make me do either. We learned that in the writing process. So why am I burning calories on all this energy is going out to things in this outer circle, and we need to flip the switch.

80% should be focused on the things we can control, and 20% to 30% should be focused on the things we can influence. And then maybe a little bit on what. What we are concerned about. But that's a lot of what's going on in the world. People are always reacting to things they have very little actual control over.

Lisa, let me add something quickly here. Yeah, I think it sure is really important. First of all, we actually have an exercise in the book that helps you sort of, like, catalog and do a little bit of reflective work here, because I think it's one thing for us to say, like, don't focus on the things you can't control.

Yeah.

It's another thing to, like, get, like, there's some blurry lines there to John's point, I think, you know, we have. We have an entire navigational skill that we call stay in your headlights.

Yep.

And it's just a visual imagery for when you get outside and the things that happen when you get outside. And I think one of the quickest checks here is just like a don't say yes to things right away. Like, take a beat before. You know, we talk about responding versus reacting. It's some kind of, like, quick one, two, three minute things that put you on a little bit of a different trajectory. And we just. There's a pretty good exercise in the book if you're kind of like, I think I'm. I want to be good at that, but it's actually harder in real time than how they just made it sound.

Yeah, yeah.

The exercises are really helpful. And, Michaela, I wonder if you might connect this idea to the idea that you write about in the book of calling and vocation, because I don't know if it's in this chapter or not, but having clarity around our calling or vocation helps us also say yes and no and understand the kinds of choices we're making.

Yeah. Well, both Lisa and I, in a variety of different ways, meet people who are having professional issues. And because people are having professional issues, and we meet people in a variety of our ways who are christians. Now, not exclusively those two things, but there's a big common, no continuum there. And so christian folks in professional moments, goodness, they're asking calling questions. Now, we could have a whole nother podcast episode on the conflation of work and calling in american culture, and maybe we should do that. But that's just something that is right there. So we do some work early on.

You know, I think one of the. One of the most interesting things about the Rogers story is something that we don't name until a little bit later in the book. But it's fine to say here is that he forgot something with him that day. He forgot the tool that maybe could have helped him most. And that was a compass. It was out there without a compass. And so when we frame calling, we do so as sort of a compass tool. Okay, how do we even.

We're spinning around the fog. Where's the compass? There's imagery that came from make work matter, the first book I wrote, but it's something that Lisa and I are both on board with in a variety of ways. And it's set of nesting dolls, and this set of nesting dolls has become very important for me. Oh, look at that.

Look how I'm Akila. I'm your twelve. I got you, baby. I love it.

And the reason why it's become so important to me is because it flips the script on where most people start with work, which I think gets us into the fog, actually, sometimes. So the way that we talk about it is that the core most nesting doll is to call to belong to Jesus, the call to be the call to belong to God, however you want to phrase that. And from outd there, from out from there, you work outward. Next, call all the way back to Genesis. Call to create. Next. A call to participate in God's mission of redemption. Right.

That's the climactic story we find in Christ. And not until you have all this stacked together do you actually get the outermost doll, the call to particulars. And when I'm in front of people, and if Lisa was, like, super fast. No pressure, Lisa. Like, I hold up the outer doll and I say, like, if you didn't have everything, all those other ones nested, I. But then what would this doll be? And then someone ability says it would be hollow. And so there is this really critical work. You know, Roger spent a lifetime learning the sounds of home.

We would say that calling, those are the sounds of home. And so to be able to develop that theological framework not as a tool for life and flux, but as the comfort as the North Star for a life, so that kind of feels like a turning point in the book for us and just super important theology.

Yeah, that's so helpful. Lisa, did you want to jump in on that?

Well, you know, we follow the. I mean, a lot of the work that I do with people is deep identity work. Right. And calling an identity are also often inflated in ways that aren't helpful. And I think creating the nesting doll imagery is so valuable because it gives us a very clear picture of what true calling is. I have a good friend that I work with at the Denver Institute who says my call is to belong to Jesus. Everything after that is stewardship. Right.

And in some ways, that's right. And so how are we then stewarding, given that we belong to Jesus? How are we then stewarding the things, the gifts that he's given us, the experiences we've had, the work that we've done into our everyday life? And that's the deeper who am I? Work, right. In light of who God is, who am I, and how do I then, you know, do my inner life work? And that's hard work. And it always starts with the question. People come to me, as I said earlier, what should I do? And my response is, well, who are you? Right? And we dive in. And those two chapters in the book, setting your compass and coming home to yourself, are probably the heartbeat of a lot of what we want people to take away from life in Fluxley. You have to do that deeper inner work, and you have to understand, first and foremost, who you belong to. Right.

Apart from that, you will live in a state of constant being bandied about by the winds of change, because they're always around you.

Yeah. So, well said. I want to end on this, and I'm going to ask you a deep question, but I'm going to ask for a quick take. But paint a picture of the kind of leaders we need today. You've dedicated your life to helping form healthy leaders. Give me a glimpse of the kinds of leaders we need today. What would you hope to see in them? And I'm just going to end the question right there. What kind of leaders do we need, and what would you hope to see formed in them?

Deep humility and courageous resolve.

Yeah, I think like, appropriate vulnerability and I. Confidence and the connectedness to be wrong and to fail.

And I think one of the things you have succeeded in with this book is painting a picture, painting a healthy picture of how, as leaders, we can move in that direction. It is very much a process. It's a lifelong journey. But you've given those who will read this book wonderful navigational skills, maritime navigational skills, for moving in the right direction amidst a lot of chaos and a lot of fog. And I am so grateful. And we will put all of Michaela and Lisa's information in our show notes if you want to be in touch with them, how to contact them. But I would really encourage you to read the book, to follow up if you need a coach. Both of them do that work.

They are both involved in teaching and scholarship and all kinds of things that are helpful for the larger body of Christ and organizational life more broadly. And I would just encourage our listeners and readers to really check that out. Kayla, Lisa, thank you so much for spending time with me. I learned a lot from reading your book. I'm looking forward to circling back and reading it in print.

There you go.

Where I can put my pencil to it. I'm just so grateful for the work you're doing and the way you're modeling healthy leadership. So thank you so much.

Pleasure. Thank you, John.

Yeah.

Tom, thanks for having us. And I would be remiss if I did not say that we're big fans of what y'all are doing at upper house. So thanks for having us, and the admiration is mutual.

Yeah. Thank you to both of you. That was wonderful. Thanks. We'll get that you know, Dan has a way of kind of. You guys are fast, so speeding up a little bit. Both audio and video formats are available. If you appreciate conversations like this, we encourage you to attend an event at Upper House in person.

You can see our full program schedule on our website@upperhouse.org. dance thank you for tuning into the Upwards podcast. We hope you enjoyed today's conversation. For more information about the Steven and Laurel Brown foundation and Upper House, please visit slbf.org dot. Go in peace. Be a light on your campus, in your church, and in the businesses and organizations that you lead and or work in. Our hope is that you may flourish, so all may flourish. Thanks for being with us.