E49: Mastering Mindset: Navigating Tension and Overcoming Resistance as Entrepreneurs with Janet Harvey, CEO and Director of Education at Invite Change

Jim: Remote Star Nation, This is a special episode that I'm really excited to share with. I met Janet on LinkedIn a few months ago. Since then, we've had multiple conversations and she's absolutely blown me away from our conversations about leadership and business from an owner's perspective and how it all relates to mindset. Regardless of where you're at in your business journey, I know this episode with Janet and I where we're gonna continue our conversation on mindset and we're gonna dig into how to navigate tension that is always present, is going to provide a ton of value for you. We're gonna deep dive into the importance of using mindset to help us navigate our daily lives as entrepreneurs and leaders, and we're gonna use, we're gonna uncover how to use mindset when taking risks and overcoming resistance. So with that said, at this time, I'd like to welcome my friend Janet Harvey, CEO, and Director of Education at Invite Change to the show. Janet, it's an honor. Welcome to Remote Start Podcast.

Janet: Thanks so much, Jim. It's been a joy to get to know you and to learn about your audience, and I'm thrilled to be here today.

Jim: It's been fun and I know, like I had said in the intro, I know there's gonna be a ton of value for the Remote Star Nation and yeah, I'm very excited, it's been great. Well, this is our third conversation and looking forward to many more.

Janet: Good.

Jim: So, to get started, I'd like to start every show this way, but, you know, tell us something about what you, what we wouldn't know if we first met you.

Janet: I'm a renegade story teller. And while I've been in the professional arena for a very long time and I know how to, you know, show up and be professional, the truth is I love breaking the rules and telling everyone the stories about them. So they maybe choose to do that themselves too.

Jim: I love it. So give us a background on how you started and where you're at today.

Janet: You know, as you were doing the introduction, I was thinking about, I often get asked the question, how did you plan your professional life? And I'm like, are you kidding? No, I did not plan my professional life. And in the early years of my young adulthood, I was a professional figure skater. I'd been competitive, I then started teaching and one day I realized that seven days a week I was inside of the ice rink for as much as 15 or 16 hours. I'm like, no. This is not what I want for my life. And I went the traditional route and ended up going into corporate life, I worked in sales for a while and then really landed beautifully in financial services where I stayed for close to 18 years. Absolutely adored every minute of it, and I got to do a project at the end of my career there that was changing the lives of 6,000 people, which was a little frightening, frankly, and coaching was just starting to constellate, as you and I have talked about. Coaching's been around as long as adults have grunted to each other, we we're by nature social animals, we support each other, we want people to be their best selves. All those altruistic ideas, those are inherent in our DNA. And the field of professional coaching has emerged because I think we have a tilted the pendulum a little far to the right in our insistence on consistency and productivity and efficiency and results, at all cost, and we've left some of our humanity out of the formula. And so coachings come in to say, hang on a second, let's see if we can get these into a little better harmony. And I was fortunate to be there at the very beginning. And, we took a coaching approach in this project and it was wildly successful, under budget, less time than we needed, and we then my greatest pride is the retention of the workforce. We had an 85% retention goal, we kept 96% even though 40% of that workforce chose not to learn the new customer experience in the branch offices, and they moved to a city where we had stood up call centers. That was just phenomenal to me, you know, we didn't take a ding in loyalty, we didn't take a ding engagement, if anything, it went up, and I walked into my boss's office about a year later and I said, you know, the renegade in me is really clear, I have earned the right to go be an entrepreneur. I'm going to exit, I'd love to consult back for a year. So I made a contract with them so I could, you know, have a way to pave my way as I was building my practice. But I became an entrepreneur in 96 and I've never looked back, being in learning and development, human development, coaching, organizational effectiveness, climate and culture consulting, all of those things are in there. And it's just I don't have a job, I get to do my bliss every day, it's really quite wonderful.

Jim: It's my favorite part about being an entrepreneur is getting to do what you want to do and, just every day is a new, I wouldn't say challenge, but it's something new every day to get up and look forward to. Let's go back to that conversation that you had with your boss. I mean, was that, were you prepared and was it an easy conversation or was it something that, you know, let's talk mindset through it, was it something that you were, you know, really scared and not knew the future?

Janet: Oh, you know? Yes, yes, yes and yes, it actually was one of those things where when we really listen interiorly in those quiet moments, we hear the honest truths. Sometimes we don't like the honest truth we hear, but we hear it. And it was the end of the day, I was at home, I'm standing on, I'm in the second floor of my home, I'm standing on the deck outside, I'm looking at the garden and I'm just sort of reviewing the day, and all of a sudden this idea pops in my head, I think they're gonna fire me. And I thought to myself, well, where in the world is that coming from? And the more I just let it percolate, I could see that my renegade self, wasn't gonna fit to the next I should have had the next promotion, right? It was the right time in my career, I just had this great big win. But I was getting the signals that, I just wasn't gonna fit with the Esri de Corps they wanted, in the next echelon of executive leadership and you know what, I was okay with that because I realized it was going to require putting me in a straight jacket, I'm an ideator, I love breaking things, I'm not a good runner of a steady p and I've learned how to do that as an entrepreneur. But at the time, everybody valued giving me assignments that nobody else wanted to do 'cause they were high risk profile. And I didn't have any problem with that, my company is called Invite, God noticed, that's sort of an easy thing for me.

Jim: So let's you know, so let's talk about that, that was 96, where's invite changed today? How large is your organization?

Janet: So we've kept our organization relatively small and instead focused on how do we scale and reach more people? And I made a decision in 96 to be a virtual company, it was before anybody ever talked about that. We didn't have any brick and mortar, everybody worked out of their homes, we learned how to use technology really smart, I did spend a lot of time on airplanes though in the first, 10 or 15 years, and I didn't like that very much. And so I took a year sabbatical, and in that year, I moved, I left San Francisco, I went to Florida, I met my now husband, I moved all the way back to Seattle. I brought my own harmony back in, right? It was important to find that personal balance with. All of the things that I creatively wanted to accomplish, and when I came back from sabbatical, I got really clear my work is about catalyzing, awakening, energizing love. And when we do that, everything else falls into place. So whether I'm working with an executive that's got a contentious senior team that doesn't seem to wanna get along with each other, or we're standing up a nonprofit organization with a new board, all of it is about relationship. And can people recognize nobody ever comes to work wanting to have a bad, which means we're all responsible for creating the climate that lets people thrive. How do we thrive when we feel loved? Yeah, respected, honored, belonging, competent, get autonomy, we talk about all those elements, but at the end of the day, do I belong? And that's love. So that's been my guiding light ever since. And we have a team of about 75, 18 or so that are core to the business that really run it every, only four of those are employees, everybody else's independent contractors, 'cause I believe in the guild or jazz band kind of concept, so that, you know, they do the work they love doing with us and if they wanna do other things that's not in our remit, that's okay with me, we get the benefit of that is reciprocal prosperity. They have new things that, identify new customers, oh, this would be a good foot for invite change. So we help them out with that and vice versa.

Jim: I love that.

Janet: And you know, we have people working on all six continents in five or six languages and it's fun, it's a great collaboratorium.

Jim: That's incredible. Let's dive in, let's discuss this concept that you and I talked about a little bit previously, that tension is always present. How do we navigate it?

Janet: So the origin of this idea, this concept, might sound a little abstract in just hearing the two dimensions of the words, so I'm gonna give it some, a little more substance. And about 15, no, it's actually maybe closer to 18 years ago now. I kept hearing the same question from the executives I was working with, why does what you do. And I'd take it back to the team and I'd say, you know, it's not only the coaching work we're doing, we're also developing people to have coaching, professional coaching as their livelihood. Why is what we do work? How is it that we are able to create these extraordinary, adult professionals after just about 18 months of training, because that's the other thing, people talk about our students as really artful, masterful coaches at a hundred or 200 hours of experience, that's kind of crazy. So I decided we'd do a little survey qualitative, not I don't have the resources of a Google to do thousands of hours of metrics, but we built a qualitative survey and interviewed about 250 of the leaders that we'd worked with, and the theme that kept coming back over and over and over again is that there were some common. That all of them were facing and they just felt like a stretched rubber band, I kept hearing that phrase like attention and nothing really to reconcile it, and they could feel themselves kind of swinging like a pendulum from one side to the other. Nothing in life is really dualistic, we've manufactured right, wrong, black, white, good, bad, and it's crazy making. We can't make good decisions when we swing from one side to the other. So I said, what if? What if we could develop the capacity internally for people to sit in the discomfort just a little longer and to recognize there's value in both sides of the tension, and as they then put their attention to what's the thorny problem I'm trying to solve with a different approach, not solution oriented, but reflection to gain awareness and clarity and alignment about what's creating the tension in the first place. Because otherwise I'm gonna solve from one side or the other, and I'm gonna miss what's really important, and I'm always going to miss that there is more than one, right?

Jim: Yeah, so true.

Janet: So that's the genesis behind this. And there were seven dilemmas that emerged. And we'd originally thought, you know, well, getting from this to that, from resistance to risk taking maybe what you're doing is fostering autonomy. But that was still one way, and the truth is, they're always present, just because I get good at risk taking doesn't mean resistance doesn't also exist, and it should because some things are worthy of slowing down, we put our foot on the brake and we slow down when we're out in an ice storm, we know we don't travel at 80 miles an hour, even though we think our cars can do it, not a good idea ice doesn't care, right? Just to give it a really simple metaphor. So where do you wanna take it now?

Jim: So let's talk about like, you know, you had said sitting back and like really thinking about it and sitting in that uncomfortable, that's hard to do, that's really hard to do.

Janet: Yes, it is. But why is it hard to do, right? So you said something in the intro about mindset and what are the characteristics of a mindset. So, let's probe that for a little bit and you know, this might be a good thing if they've got a piece of paper handy and a pen to write these down on a piece of paper and leave a little space in them because definitions of terms are really important we all have our own experience in backgrounds and history, we interpret things differently. So mindset has a number of elements to it. One is our frame of reference. So that could be cultural, that could be geography, that could be education level, that could be, you know, technical experience, it could be what you know about your family's lineage, even epigenetics, for those who are interested in the neuroscience side of this, frame of reference is everything in our rear view, that's influencing the way I'm interpreting what's in front of me. Oh, by the way, is often invisible. Take it for granted, right? We've learned to navigate our alive, particularly entrepreneurs, we don't spend a whole lot of time talking about our frame of reference. The next is attitude. So what in my energy and emotional, experience influences whether I show up as an optimist or a pessimist? The fact that we even say I am an optimist is crazy, I feel optimistic, cause in the next moment, a good decision might require that I feel skeptical, right. So that's a subtle distinction, but it's important, the attitude is energy and emotion, it's not an identity. Then we have things like our thought patterns, our habit, our value system, the beliefs and principles that we operate from our routine actions, all of these things are in that bucket called mindset. And every moment, every day, it has a dynamic quality to it because we've got all kinds of things bombarding us. Now, here's the difficulty, mindset is influencing how we show up, how we interact with other people, and how we make decisions, that's a pretty big job for the mindset. And if we're not leaving enough space in ourselves to kind of step back and not do everything out of habit, we'll miss that. The circumstances have changed and our habit doesn't work, we don't figure it out until there's a breakdown. Darn it, what did I miss? What wasn't I paying attention to? Somebody gave me this line the other day and I just loved it, so I'm gonna share it with the audience, pause gives more time than it takes. Pause gives more time than it takes. And that's exactly what I'm talking about here, sitting in the discomfort is a pause. I'm gonna pause making a decision here and give myself the opportunity to reflect on how is my mindset interpreting resistance or risk-taking? What is it about this situation, this problem that I'm nibbling on, that I am not paying enough attention to? Where do I have a belief? Where do I have a habit? Where do I have a preference? Where do I have an assumption or even a set of any of those that's built a bias that my first knee-jerk reaction is to say, that person's wrong and that person's right, or they're both wrong and I know what's right and I'm going, we're always gonna miss something. So we're learning to sit in the discomfort to pause so we don't miss what's really going on in front of us, including the things we don't really like to see, like, you know, I wasn't very nice to that person and we just lost our best marketing admin, right? And that stuff happens, we're a human, but when we pause, we can go, oh, you know, maybe this really was me and I could apologize. I know for sure I need to go talk to that team because they've watched me behave badly with this person and they've left as a result, I got some stuff to clean up here, just an example. So mindset is important, and the first step is taking a bit of an inventory. Do I even know what my own frame of reference, attitude, thoughts, beliefs, values, habits, routine actions are, how do I navigate?

Jim: Would you recommend, is there, you know, as entrepreneurs and business owners and you know, leaders, we're busy, we, all these things coming at us, how do we stop and take that internal inventory? How do we stop and reflect?

Janet: Yeah. So I'll tell you from my personal experience and then you can see if you've got your own version of this. I pay attention to when my edges get frayed, when I'm impatient, when I'm annoyed, when I'm disappointed in, some result that's happened when I'm observing interactions with the team and I can tell the energy isn't just right, I'm like, okay, that's the moment when I need to go find a half an hour and I'll go for a walk and I'll run through the questions, Well, it's my frame of reference, when I was paying attention to that, what was the attitude I was listening to it from, what might be filtering the way I'm understanding what's occurring, and in every step of answering, asking those questions, and I basically do four, what are my habits? What are my preferences? What are my assumptions and what's my bias around this thorny problem? And usually about halfway into that set of questions, I realize, ah, I see, let me get curious, I now have four or five questions to go back to the people involved in that particular situation to learn. So it's the value of learning so I can make a better decision and show up in more of my own harmony that compels me to make the pause and ask the questions in the first place, what am I missing here, missing something.

Jim: But will you stop, like say you're in a meeting with your team, you know, the group of you that's the core and you're in a meeting and you, you start to feel this way, do you, do you say like, Hey, we need to pause this and we can come back to it.

Janet: Yes, absolutely.

Jim: It's powerful.

Janet: So there's, there's two structures that we have one that I call teaming agreements, which is, everybody gets a chance to weigh in and we regularly review these, so teaming agreement is a behavior that we agree to embody individually and be responsible on behalf of the team. Are we behaving in the way that we said we wanted in order to be our best performing team? And we use that to acknowledge, yeah, we're absolutely being timely with feedback when somebody says something that feels outy, good because it's never meant personal, and you know, when it doesn't, do you any good to say assume a good intent, I don't care what your intent is, if what you said hurt me, I want you to apologize, and I want to do whatever we need to do to make it never happen again. So I'd much rather see an agreement that says, call for a timeout when the conversation is diverging from feeling co-created and constructive into something that feels like a ping pong game. That's one of our early agreements, which is a really fun way to help people stay connected to what feels a little uncomfortable and emotional. So that's a structure. We built it, we checked in on it once a month, we have a meeting that's nothing else, but how are we doing? Let's attend to our own humanity as a team, we review the agreement. Sometimes we update those agreements, we look at the ones that we think need to be a little stronger with what we know is coming in the month ahead. So we're attending to our wellbeing and our harmony. So, if that's happening. I'm thinking about a time when our head of sales was just on a terror. She was not happy, she was sure everybody else was doing everything they could to sabotage, something, some big program, she was lifting for a particular customer segment. And at one point I finally said, have you run outta steam yet? And she gotta push her chair back. And we all just stayed really quiet, and held the space for her to be in her upset, and she finally started to chuckle and laugh and go, okay, I was on a rant, wasn't I? I said, yeah, and you had no idea you were doing it. So that means we've all contributed to something that got you well past your own ability to regulate, so what's going, you know, to have the safety in the space, to be able to hold our humanity, our imperfections, to have some humility about it and come back to what must we choose to attend to differently in order to lower the anxiety for you, address this issue and let's make sure that sooner you're able to recognize that you want some support and not wait for a you know, a meeting when we're discussing the sales objectives, that's crazy. Be more timely with it. So and that happens all the time, all day long with our customers, we watch that kind of behavior and, you know, there's a wonderful body of work called, total Motivation. Prime to perform is the name of the book, for those who wanna kind of dig into this a little bit more, but here's what their study was revealing, and you're gonna hear a little bit of the tension and presence in here, when people are feeling emotional insecurity, it sets emotion, protective strategy, If it goes unnoticed and unacknowledged for long enough, it turns into economic insecurity. At this point, you have about 50% of their potential operating, sometimes even a little less than that, because they're always scanning for what's the evidence that supports them about to get fires, right. And if they don't get fired and they continue to on this path, they move into inertia. And these are the people that your high performers on the team say, why is this person still here? And the boss isn't doing anything about them? So now you have contagion with the team. So that's the downside. How do you keep people from getting into emotional and economic insecurity and ultimately inertia? The three words that the study came up with was play, purpose and potential. I'm a leader who's standing in resistance and risk taking, I am not feeling very playful, purpose is gonna help me, right? That's gonna come outta the questions about my bias. Wait a minute, what are we trying to accomplish here? What is the key result we're trying to produce from this objective? Who are the people that are involved? Are we really maximizing the potential that they have to contribute to this? ‘Cause the way we're going at it ain't getting us where we want to go. So now I'm starting to flush out habits, preferences, and assumptions, and then I'm gonna bring it back to the team and say, All right are we still on board? Do we like the subjective and the key results we're going for? Yeah, we definitely do. All right, what do we need to clear out of the way? What's the interference we need to remove in order to get everybody back into potential? So the act of naming it, noticing and naming it, and then negotiating with the team to actually produce the pathway forward, that's the sweet spot. And that's all lines at.

Jim: And with your sales manager at this point, when you asked her the question and said, are you outta steam yet, she takes a step back, like didn't realize what she was doing, did you then give her that time to say, Hey, go in, go and reflect, go in, go and think about it for a minute, or did you do it right there in the room and give her the time in the room?

Janet: We worked together long enough that we did it in the room right then and there, and some leaders are going to require a little bit of timeout. You know, just like kids, we have the same thing, we can get over revved and we need something to cool down our parasympathetic system. So that's a little bit of space, take a break, we'll see you in 10, right? And there's no shame in that, it has to be fine for people to leave the room, we have another agreement, you don't talk about people when they're not in the room.

Jim: I love it.

Janet: It is a hugely important, um, way to ensure that you don't end up into, triangulation and a water cooler, and, you know, people start to build an attitude in a frame of reference that has no facts, right. They're responding or interpreting out of their emotionality. So everybody's responsible for attending to the wellbeing of their mindset.

Jim: And Janet, I know we're here talking to entrepreneurs and leaders, but you know, as you're talking, I keep thinking to myself different opportunities where my family, my kids, we've had these like the same things going on and it's like, wow, how powerful would it have been if as my daughter's going off about, you know, something that really, she's just fired up, like, how powerful would it have been for me to say, Hey, take a step back, like, think about it for a minute and, and come back. And I love that advice.

Janet: Yeah. You know, the really simple question, and it's hard to answer, but it's an important question to receive. What do you want in this moment to feel back in yourself, and able to think about this, without so much intensity and emotion. What do you want in this moment?

Jim: So, to recap what we've said in Remote Start Nation, I know Janet gave you a minute to grab a pen and write some of these things down, if you missed that, let's do a quick overview.

Number one, don't be afraid to take a step back, take a breather, take a timeout, go for a walk. And Janet, what were the steps that you want them to go through to really figure out, okay, what is the problem right now? What sit with that uncomfortableness? What should they do?

Janet: Right. So there is some situation that's created the reactivity, so they're gonna feel the reactivity in all kinds of different ways. Some people do it by getting busier, like, oh my God, how did I overstack my schedule like this? Some people do it by, as I was describing, by paying attention to when they're annoyed, frustrated, disappointed, and starting to manufacture a narrative that everybody is just being lazy, and entitled and like, what the heck? Do I have anybody that cares about what's going on? Oh, that's a little catastrophizing, right? So outer proportion reactivity, it's another form of a clue. I'm not getting to things, I'm not talking about procrastination, but really just, oh, I'll do that tomorrow, Oh, that's too big, I need to find the right person to work on it, and the stack of not getting to just gets bigger and bigger. And that's that overwhelm, potential burnout kind of stuff, right? So it's noticing that the rhythm of being in flow and productive has been disrupted in some way, that's what we're paying attention to, that's the indicator that it's time to take a pause and it might be a 60 second pause, or sometimes we can regulate just by leaning back, softening in our eyes and taking a few deep breaths, okay. It's really not as bad as my first reaction. Let me look at this a moment more carefully. It could be just a moment or two. Other things are bigger problems, need a walk. And then when I'm on the walk, I say to myself, okay, this was the objective we were trying to prove these results, and this is the problem we're having, we don't like the result we're creating, these are the actions we took those didn't work. What was the basis of this decision? And here I'm looking at habits and preferences. I'm gonna ask the question, where do we traditionally go when this kind of thing happened? And maybe I'm always harping on and we have a prime and I missed it, it's really like the scenario is really different from what we've traditionally preferred as our response just the other day. This RFP response we were working on, the customer was asking for something that's so out of bounds to what we would prefer to do or what we would ever recommend. And yet the team was pushing to get that response out and nobody raised their hand and said, wait, I don't think this is our customer, which would've saved a whole bunch of time in agony, right? But our preference is to turn out responses in 72 hours, and they were doing it like clockwork without ever checking, which means they made some assumptions that it was more important to get the task done than it was to make sure the task we did was in alignment with our objective, which was the sweet spot of customer we wanna serve, right. So there were the assumptions, and because I'd slowed down enough, I could see, oh, this is what happened here, and what's our bias? If that's what they were doing, then they're seeing a bias to the transaction and not to the quality. And that's on me as a leader, I gotta go back, straighten out the decision will break. Now that I've got the clarity, I can go back into it, nobody's wrong for what they did, there's missing information. So let me ask a few questions, now that I've gone through, what was the habit? What was the preference? What were the assumptions? What was the bias operating? What might I be able to learn from them? This is key, what can I learn from them by asking some questions that helped me to see how they arrived at the choices and decisions they made. Because armed with that, I can say, yep, 80% of what you were thinking about is spot on, here's the 10%. I want us to collaborate to identify another way to go because we need to say no to this one. And when this comes up the next time, this is how we wanna manage it and, you know, bring it to the team or you know, everybody's got, got permission to raise the red flag and go, are we sure? This is something we wanna do. This happens in tech decisions all the time, right? Because tech changing so fast and we're always looking at once a month, we've probably got five or six new pieces of either an application or some resource that we're tapping into. Do we like any of these? Do any of these make sense? Does it replace something that we have? And if people couldn't debate constructively, I like these features, I don't like those, no way, their customer service sucks, we're not doing it, that needs to be a robust conversation 'cause not all of us are gonna be able to see.

Jim: So, that example you just gave was so important in understanding how what we've discussed today as a leader can help just understanding your mindset can help, I mean, you just saved your company so much time and energy, and hopefully they learn, so next time, they do it without you, right?

Janet: Yeah, that's exactly right. I always want to build institutional capacity, so I'm never the cog on the wheel, and I want them to do the same thing with the people they're working with, including our vendors and stakeholders, and sometimes even customer, you know, who are busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, and forget that we're doing something for them, right. So those relationships too can be managed in this way by giving a bit more attention to the elements of the mindset, what's operating here.

Jim: And it's, we've touched on, the mindset operating invisibly. And so that's where it's, I from what we've talked about, it's like, okay, it's there, what are we doing to understand it?

Janet: Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, if you go back to the family, example, our CFO, has two granddaughters and they are, actually I think, 11 and 13. And they'll come over which school? One of them has already got a little entrepreneurial business she's running, they both play soccer, very athletic, right? And they'll often come over and talk to him about something that's unfair or, you know, how could this person have done this action, you know? And he always starts with, what do you want instead, right. So it is fine, you're upset, but you can't do nothing about the thing in your rear view mirror, right? The only thing you can attend to is what's right here in the outside the front windshield, which, by the way, is a big view. So, first, kick clear about what you want, what's it worth to you to disrupt the current relationship? What would be a way for you to find out more information and see what maybe you misunderstand? Do you really have the whole picture, right? And it's amazing, I've been around them and they'll watch a television program or a soccer match on television and they'll be able to say, what decision did the ref make there seems to me there were two options and the ref made this option, I wonder what he was thinking about here. It's like he's teaching them critical, in a very personal way, and that's what mindset produces.

Jim: I love it. Let's talk a little bit more about, you know, mindset and resistance and risk taking.

Janet: This was one of the key dilemmas, one of the seven dilemmas that we work with all leaders and teams with, and it's a pretty common one, usually it starts, we have this cool innovation we wanna do, but I've got a ton of resistance in the change process going on. That's usually how it gets articulated. And you can hear the duality in that either or I can't get the risk taking done to do this new innovation because people are being resistant. So we'll often spend a bit of time on, what is your tolerance for risk and how did you evaluate the benefit or contribution of this innovation you wanna make? What's going to be left behind as you pursue this? And all the while in asking those questions, we're helping the leaders start to identify what some of the potential sources of resistance are, I don't start with that question. What's the resistance? Because it doesn't matter, it's already present, that's the rear view mirror. What we need to see is, what's the end game on the other side of the front windshield that they're attempting to produce? What's the value? How well have they articulated the value proposition and the change they're trying to create? Because if they can't get there, they're not available to invite people to change their resistance into being willing to take a risk. So most of the time, not paid enough attention to whether people will feel confident in the skills they have to be at least as productive, if not more so with the change that's coming, they've also not done a good enough job talking about the analysis. So for the risk profile that they've done, entrepreneurs don't care, they've made the decision, they know where they're going, let they just give it her, done. If you want people to implement on your behalf, you need to help them to see that you've done thorough analysis. Have a little more patience to articulate for people how you see it, and then invite them to tell you how you see it and pay attention to it, acknowledge it. Ah, I see, from where you're coming and here's what's in this design or in this project, or in this plan that addresses what you're talking about. What would give you confidence that that's sufficient for us to move forward? It has to be okay for people to have resistance. Why? Because they are telling you what the system is available for, you hired them, you know, they're the right people for your team, pay attention, they're trying to keep you from doing something stupid because they're the ones who are touching the customer day in and day out, so it's not what they say is the source of the resistance is the right answer, it's that resistance exists, tells you there's something in the system that hasn't quite embraced what you've accepted as useful risk taking. So go get curious about it, that's the value of mindset, 'cause it's absolutely focused on, remember how we show up, how we interact, and how we make decisions. And if we've made a decision too fast without a consideration of what's actually the resource and capability in the system, somebody in the system's gonna be resistant because it's telling you, pay attention, slow down a little bit, be a little more patient, ask a few more questions and ask them, what essential for you to feel some relief about the risk of this and drop your resistance in favor of some inspiration to get on board with the risk that we're taking to bring this innovation to market and give them the space to make that process change.

Jim: So Janet, when you're, when you go into an organization and you're working with leaders, are these some of the things that you walk them through. I imagine every organization has to, it's like, okay, you can either continue going on about the way you're doing business, or you can jump in and understand your mindset better and ask yourself these questions and develop the leaders on your team to continue to achieve these results with everybody underneath them by taking a step back.

Janet: That's right. That's generative coaching, that's the work we do and we teach leaders how to use generative coaching techniques, in the way that they manage their teams so that, you know, if an organization's gonna be successful scaling, leaders have to replicate themselves, and entrepreneurs have the hardest time doing this cause they like being, you know, arm up to their elbows in things. And that's the enemy of being able to grow and to grow exponentially have to be able to build bench, which means you're teaching them to think the way you think, maybe not exactly the same style and process, but that what you pay attention to the criteria that you're using, frame of attitude, thoughts, beliefs, values, habits, routine actions. All of these elements are important to transfer down into the organization if you're going to have people be able to work in a distributed way, look what happened with Covid, right? This is the problem with hybrid is that managers keep thinking they're gonna get back to frame the problem, figure out the steps, focus on implementation, sorry, that's not how things are gonna work, they're gonna work through rapid conversation, people being present with each other, staying curious, checking in, not waiting for a meeting to decide, action needs to be taken, being clear about delegating authority so people can accept responsibility. That's my definition of accountability. By the way, most of the time leaders don't do a very good job at delegating authority, there's not enough information so people don't act, and it looks like resistance. It's not, it's a lack of information.

Jim: Leaders that are listening right now and wanna learn more and have a conversation with Janet and her team, Janet, let them know where they can find you.

Janet: Well, I'm definitely on LinkedIn, so Janet M. Harvey, our website is invitechange.com and there is a cool series we're doing this year called Vanguard Conversation, I'll have a different global leader joining me, I have a co-host Gary Schleifer, and we're gonna look at the seven, Oops, there we go, the seven common dilemmas that all leaders face in all industries and all size of organizations. We've done a little bit today on resistance and risk taking, and the first one starts on March 10th. You can sign up for all of them, they're free, you'll get the tool I've been talking about today about the four questions to be asking yourself with a thorny problem and it's a great way to learn and apply and bring your own thorny problem and get some coaching.

Jim: Excellent. And we'll have that link as well to be able to sign up and find more information in the show notes. So Remote Start Nation, be sure to check that out. Janet, we've got a couple more minutes here, what is the one biggest takeaway that you can leave the Remote Start Nation that we either hit on or didn't hit on today?

Janet: Well, I wanna bottom line what we've been doing all in this conversation, which is about shift. How do we shift? Successful people can get attached to the way that they walk in the world personally and professionally. And you know, there's plenty of books you can read that will tell you that's going to lead to calcified thinking. And calcified thinking is the best way to get stale and lose your business, lose your interest, and off you go, or you sell it and you go and you invent something else. What does it really mean to create value? Value is in response to what's going on in the world around you and what you feel called to contribute, which means you have to get good at shifting your mindset. Mindset shift is the most underdeveloped capacity we have as human beings in modern life today. And boy, do we sure need it in order to solve the social issues that all of us are influenced by, no matter what your persuasion is, we're all suffering right now from the mismatch in our world. And that's gonna take some big mindset shift for us too. Figure out better solutions.

Jim: So much value. Janet, thank you so much for joining us today.

Janet: My pleasure. Great to see you, great to be with you.

Jim: It was a lot of fun, thank you. Well, Remote Star Nation, I hope you learned as much as I did today, and I hope you can put some of what Janet shared with us to work for you. Thank you all for joining me on this journey, and remember, leave a comment, subscribe and share this episode with your community who you think can learn from what you heard here today. Until next time, go start something, start today and go build a lifestyle you desired by taking action!