Somatic resilience: Navigate work and life’s challenges with inner strength

“We need to consciously become aware of our patterns and our behaviours before we change them  and understand how they’re serving us in the first place.”
Celine Waters

In this episode you’ll hear about

• The practice of somatic design: How to create deeper connections between our mind, body and spirit and experience the transformative benefits of somatics
• Harnessing inner resilience: What it means to cultivate inner resilience through recognising your own capacity to adapt, bounce back from setbacks and find strength in adversity
• Understanding the impacts of trauma: Unpacking the somatic experience of trauma, and how historic trauma can become stored in the body and have deep physical consequences
• Create safe spaces for emotional expression: How to set up safe spaces for vulnerability and expression within the workplace and more broadly to enable personal growth, healing and emotional wellbeing
• Transformative leadership: How to drive positive organisational change and foster a culture of resilience and collaboration through prioritising emotional wellbeing, growth and collective transformation

Key links

Immunity to Change by Robert Kegan

Strozzi Institute

Eduardo Galeano

Sapiens book

Tall Poppy Syndrome

Amy Cuddy TED talk

About our guest

Celine Waters is a human-centred designer and somatic coach committed to individual and collective transformation. She started out in biochemistry and following a post-grad in computer science, moved into business consulting in Australia and Ireland, working across big organisations.

Her current focus is in the research of the intersection of design and somatics, bringing body intelligence into her work. She studies body psychotherapy and somatic coaching for social justice.

About our host

Our host, Chris Hudson, is a Teacher, Experience Designer and Founder of business transformation coaching and consultancy Company Road.

Company Road was founded by Chris Hudson, who saw over-niching and specialisation within corporates as a significant barrier to change.

Chris considers himself incredibly fortunate to have worked with some of the world’s most ambitious and successful companies, including Google, Mercedes-Benz, Accenture (Fjord) and Dulux, to name a small few. He continues to teach with University of Melbourne in Innovation, and Academy Xi in CX, Product Management, Design Thinking and Service Design and mentors many business leaders internationally.

Transcript
Chris Hudson: Hello. Hello and to all of you lovely people, wonderful listeners. I just want to say when the days and the weeks they just fly by it feels like we can almost lose our identity to our routine a little bit and the obligations and the hustle and bustle of working life. It feels like it can really just take us by control.

So our feeling of self can feel a little bit deteriorated, a little bit lost. And we, as employees or workers or entrepreneurs or whatever we do for work we hand ourselves over to the work that we do. We give ourselves to that. Probably because deep down we really enjoy it or we tell ourselves that we do.

And that we’ve convinced ourselves that passing over the reins is kind of okay, but it does wear us down. So today I want to go into a slightly different area, which I know will be super relevant for you and not just for you and your work, but also for your very being and finding ways to tune into this a little bit more. And we’re going to be talking about somatics or somatic design, which many of you won’t have heard of. And that’s somatics as opposed to semantics. And to shine a light on this fascinating topic and this philosophy and practice is none other than my wonderful guest here, Celine Waters.

So Celine, welcome to the show.

[00:01:11] Celine Waters: Thank you, Chris. Great to be here.

[00:01:13] Chris Hudson: Celine, you’re a human centred designer at heart, and you’ve moved between a few different fields from biochemistry to business consulting, systems design, and now semantics. So it’d be great just to hear about how you ended up winding around some of those really cool areas and what’s been your journey so far.

[00:01:29] Celine Waters: Yeah. What brought me here? Yeah, so I actually started off as a biochemist and I did a master’s in computer science. And I think my love for the body and complexity and systems all came from my original degree. If I’m like honest, and after I did computer science, I went into management consulting and this is all back in Ireland and it was during a time when tech was booming and it was a huge area to get into, very exciting at the time, and I moved into business consulting, management consulting for years even over here in Australia.

So I moved between Ireland and Australia and then I think about 14, 15 years ago, I saw a service blueprint and it changed my life. So I think you’d be pretty good at this. I’ve been part of 100, 200 service blueprints ever since that time. And also around the same time, I decided to dabble in coaching and I embarked on a professional coaching program with a postgraduate here in Melbourne. So it was really different. It was all around systems thinking and expanding your worldview. It wasn’t like, how do you get to a goal and go from there? So I did design and coaching together and I ended up quitting management consulting and moving to Berlin. I wanted to work in this space so much and I wanted to be in startups so much.

And I had this real energy about myself at the time. And even when I was in this space of working in products, I moved a lot into wellbeing and health when I was in startups. And that was also like such a big thing in Berlin when I was there and I also loved it and I had a real passion for it, but still something was missing for me.

I just had this thought sense that something wasn’t right. And I moved back into design and I started studying again and around this time, and I think I was in RMIT online. I was the lead in there in RMIT and I introduced adult development coaching into the work that we were doing as a bunch of designers and adult development coaching is really about how we transition and change as adults. And it’s all based on Robert Keegan’s work. He wrote a book called Immunity to Change and Jennifer Garvey Berger. And that kind of changed my world again. I was like, all right, this is it. This is amazing. Because it helps. We all work together to understand ourselves at a deeper level, like what was really getting in our way.

And then we collectively spoke about it. So we didn’t come together just to meet product deliverables. We came together to actually talk about ourselves and what it is, what our visions for ourselves in our lives were. And it’s really getting into the crux of what got in our way. And I found, I ended up coaching quite a bit then as well.

So I was in work designing and then I was coaching and I was collectively coaching at work and individually coaching outside of work. And I figured out that I really liked this space quite a bit. I found that in design and I found across a number of industries, I had the same belief systems were showing up all the time around perfectionism.

I guess aversion to conflict, I started to see the same patterns, aversion to conflicts, perfectionism, need for control, and it seemed to be a bit of a theme showing up, and even for myself, there was a lot of stuff coming up for me at that time. And it broke down the hierarchy. So when you collectively come together, you’re really building a container of trust.

When you start to talk about your vulnerabilities as opposed to what you’re good at. And that’s what really showed up for me in this space was how we built a container of trust among ourselves, dissolved hierarchy. And we actually, I think, increased our performance by, I don’t know, I’ve thrown it out. I threw it out there once with Yolanda, one of the incredible designers with me at 28 percent or something, and we also had great system structure around us at the time.

We were given this opportunity to experiment but something was still missing for me, Chris, right? So I walked down my journey again, because I felt that I was hearing all these belief systems that were showing up, but nothing was really changing. We were talking about it. It was still very cognitive, but it wasn’t changing.

And so I actually Googled, why isn’t this working? And I came across this whole expansive area of somatics, which is really around mind body connection. And the lineage I come from is the Strozzi Institute with, it is also around embodied leadership and transformation, collective transformation, but it was all around being in the body.

And also not just being in the body and the health of the body and that mind body connection, but also our need to connect to spirit and land something bigger than us outside of our individual thinking brain. And also how we’ve been shaped socially and it brought me into this magic of what the body is really about and how we have been shaped socially, politically, economically, how all of our stories are embodied in our tissues and in our bones and how our patterns can show up in our shape.

And I went, this is it. So with that work, and I think what somatics really did for me, Chris, was bring me into relationship with myself. And this is the question I often ask, what’s the relationship to myself, to others in this relational space that I’m in? Because we all need each other. And what’s my relationship to the planet and the things I care about?

So that’s what that did for me. And then I went down this path and I realised I was never about product. I’m actually in service. I’m someone that’s going to be in service to others and to healing and to progression and to transformation for the rest of my life. So this idea of this purpose and what that really means and having it out there, it was never really out there.

It was actually inside. And I know that sounds really corny at times, but it really is true. Tapping into your own intuition will show you the way. It’s just how do we get out of the way to show us the way.

[00:06:30] Chris Hudson: Tell me about the I guess the origin of the word. I think we had this in a chat previously, but somatics, where does the word come from?

[00:06:37] Celine Waters: I know. Cause you know what? When you hear it, it often sounds so technical and it’s anything but. I often go and like think of bioinformatics, but somatics is actually it comes from the Greek root word for soma and it means integrated wholeness. Cause we’re mind, body, spirit, relational, social beings. Okay. We are one big package. We’re not just talking heads. And so we put so much emptiness and cognitive thinking in the West and, that’s why I moved into computer science and did my master’s and all these things because intellect is what got you by, but then you’re ignoring everything else that comes with us.

[00:07:11] Chris Hudson: Yeah.

[00:07:13] Celine Waters: So that’s what’s the soma and I often talk to the soma and use that particularly once I describe what it is because I don’t like using the word body that much because I find the body has been so objectified and it’s just part of our social norms that has been objectified. through things like Instagram. It’s become like a brain taxi almost, rather than diving into and understanding the biology and the biochemistry of the body and how we are shaped. And how our stories shape us and impact us and influence us and how we see the world. And I probably won’t remember this quote, but I do love it.

And it probably popped into my mind. It’s by a man called Eduardo Galeano. And he’s the social movement leader in indigenous cultures in the US. And he’s an incredible person that I love to listen to. And he basically said, science sees the body as a machine. Marketing sees the body as business and the church sees the body as a sin.

The body says, I’m a Fiesta. Cause it’s true. There’s so much glory and there’s so much wisdom in the body.

[00:08:13] Chris Hudson: Yeah,

[00:08:13] Celine Waters: And I often, that kind of, again, there are little moments in my life when I read that and I went, wow. So that’s what Soma,

[00:08:20] Chris Hudson: where Soma

[00:08:20] Celine Waters: comes

[00:08:20] Chris Hudson: from.

It paints a lovely picture around the potential for us as humans. And I’m dying to ask what gets in the way of that. You’ve talked about Instagram and some of the other things to do with the body, which I think you’re right. We do just take for granted in our day to day lives that there’s a complete imbalance there, what are some of the signs of things going wrong as you see it?

What’s your kind of take on the lay of the land and the world and the things that we can do to perhaps be more aware of them and therefore change?

[00:08:47] Celine Waters: I think about transformation from a social context, as well as from an individual space. Because we are social and relational beings, we actually can’t be alone. We’re not programmed to be by ourselves.

We do isolate, but that’s because we’re trying to protect ourselves at times, but we all need each other. Like we’re a pack. We’re relational beings. We need to be able to connect with each other. Our nervous system has evolved to be in touch with the world around it and being balanced with the world around it.

Our brain is adapted to the environments that it’s in and understanding that is really important. And I think understanding inherent human needs. We have three inherent needs from a somatic perspective and that’s safety, belonging, and dignity.

If we had them integrated inside of us working really well, and that was the key message throughout the world, safety, belonging, dignity for all peoples in all life, we’d reduce traumas and world wars by 95%. Okay. If we were able to actually truly understand what it means to be safe, what it means to belong and about our self worth and tap into that.

Yeah. We’d be living in a very different world.

So that is a starting point and also understanding how much we’ve lost our traditions and in, as I said, again, in the Western world, like we lose why it’s bought so many wonderful, brilliant things. We’ve really lost sight a lot of our traditions and how fast we’ve moved.

There’s an incredible book called Sapiens. Have you read this book, Chris, by any chance? Have you seen this book?

[00:10:08] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I read it. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:10:10] Celine Waters: Remember that graph in it when it goes, this is graph of human development from January to December and it’s all in one year and you’ve got the Stone Age out here in January. Have you seen this visual?

[00:10:22] Chris Hudson: Yeah. Yeah. It’s insane.

[00:10:23] Celine Waters: I’m going to run by it, right? Cause I think this represents and puts into a nutshell exactly where we are. Again, one of these mind blowing moments when I read this book and I saw this visual and it goes, okay, in January we had the Stone Age, like great. Then I think we move into November and we start developing language.

And, we’ve got some cognitive language going on in there and then we’re doing all of that in December and the next thing in January, we’ve got the scientific age, the industrial age is on top of us, the digital age is on top of us, we’ve got a man on the moon. It’s like it all happened in one day.

Evolutionary wise, our bodies and our, how we are in the world, how we’d be in the world and how we see in the world hasn’t developed as fast as our tech, our digital world has, or how fast we’ve moved. Like we’ve done incredible things as humans have done amazing things, but we, I don’t know if we are ready yet to be present in the world that we’ve created through that fastness and through this new world, new digital world.

[00:11:17] Chris Hudson: Yeah, Why do you think that is? Because I’m just thinking about it. Obviously, nobody’s in control of the whole world, as in we all contribute, but we’re not singularly controlling that whole thing ourselves that would be terrible.

All we can do is influence and be part of it it feels so yeah, what’s your take on it?

[00:11:32] Celine Waters: Yeah, we can influence to be part of it. I definitely think it’s really important to start. For me, I can only reflect on my own journey and the journey I go on others with in terms of looking within and understanding our own belief system patterns and how we’ve been shaped. And that can show up in many different ways.

You can do that through a coach. You can do it through your own personal study, whatever it takes, but start understanding that. How have I been shaped? How have I ended up here in the world? What are my belief systems? What are my worldviews? How do I understand oppression? How do I understand trauma?

How do I understand my own privilege? And start painting that picture. It’s a very useful way to start looking in. Because the inner work serves the collective work. And then it’s about moving out. So once we understand ourselves a little bit more, I think it’s really important to get involved collectively in terms of change and transformation and moving towards active, embodied visions of a potential future.

And I think it’s really important to understand socially, how we can make a difference, even if that’s getting involved. And I know the problem is everyone’s so time poor. And I completely understand that, but what practices can we start to bring into our lives where we do actually have more time or start pointing and moving ourselves towards our own personal visions of the future and working within social causes, climate justice, even if it’s for a little bit of time, at least becoming aware of what’s going on in the world and how we can possibly contribute to that

[00:12:53] Chris Hudson: It was going to be my next question really, which was around, what you can practically do to understand that perspective, but also to be part of it. So those were some really good ideas, but what does a kind of more frequent practitioner tend to do?

[00:13:05] Celine Waters: I moved into psychotherapy because, body psychotherapist, I’m trained to become a body psychotherapist because I had so much joy for being in the body, because that connected me to something outside of myself.

So for me it’s about again, understanding the self. And then how can you collectively transform and connecting to land and spirit, it’s really important to understand, or even have something bigger than us, because there’s so much challenges in the world right now there is a lot, once we start to understand it’s overwhelming and it’s so easy for us to block it out because we’re going, I just need to get through my day.

I’ve too much going on. I’ve got a report to do. There’s so much going on. So we also have to find joy and we find joy by being in the world and having some incredible gratitude for this amazing spirit that we have. Around us, this incredible energy, this awesome planet, and this ever expanding universe.

It’s so incredibly amazing. Once you take yourself out of that and you start to look towards spirit and land, I think it’s really important to have connection to Indigenous culture and truly understand that. That was a big shift for me coming from Ireland to Australia.

Because I came from strong Celtic heritage and I actually wondered, I remember when I first got here, I really took me a long time to understand that lack of integration in Australia.

I think it’s really important for all of us to truly understand and do our best to integrate with Indigenous cultures here with practices to truly understand them and move towards that level of integration rather than seeing ourselves as separate because we’re not going to get anywhere.

We haven’t got anywhere by doing that.

I do a lot of work with that. I love to understand. I love looking at frameworks, career strategic frameworks. That’s another big love of mine.

I just, yeah, and it’s incredible movement organisations that collectively put these frameworks together, and I can share them with you.

And one that I’m really passionate about is the just transition where we move from an instructive economy towards one that’s a green economy, but we do so taking into consideration the major impacts to everyone in jobs and roles because we’re going to collapse, right? I’ll say it out loud. I’m not going to put a timeline on that, but we can’t keep going the way we’re going.

So I think that’s really important is to understand those frameworks and connect with people who work within these organisations. And say, okay, how do we collectively transform? What is my role in that? Even if it’s just even volunteering for a few hours, maybe it’s getting a job in these, in organising any organisation that’s actually organising for social justice or for climate justice.

What can I do? I’m involved with parents for climate change. I work a lot within social justice organisations to bring about reducing stress, healing, what we can do in those spaces. And I love to look at these frameworks, Chris, and bring them in and think about how we bring them into the double diamond.

That’s the other place I experiment. It’s intersection between all of this learning. I know I never stopped. All of this learning is somatic design, these incredible frameworks that sit or that are out there and I’m like, how do we bring this all together? How do we start creating and building something new or at least bringing that awareness in for when the transitions come and when we do have systemic and social structure change, which is, I think, inevitable.

Okay, I don’t know if I want to be, of course saying that for, it’s going to be caught on air for the rest of my life, but yeah, I’ve it.

[00:16:13] Chris Hudson: Do you think this is a an area of specialism? That you’ve been describing so articulately, or do you think, this is something that anyone can have a go at, given the right frameworks or given the right interest and channeling of some of the connections that you’ve been describing, do you think anyone can have a go, or do you think it’s something that you really need to train for?

[00:16:31] Celine Waters: Anyone can orientate themselves towards it. If they absolutely start working on what might be stopping them in the first, why they’re not there already. The whole point, I think a lot with somatic transformation or any type of transformation is that your values and your vision of yourself aligns.

It aligns with how you act and how you relate in the world, even under pressure. Because it’s under pressure that everything shows up and we lose it. We’re like right, that’s it. I can’t do it. So how do I start orientating myself towards my future, aligning with my values and I can do so under pressure, even when I feel like I don’t, I’m not good enough.

Cause then that’s something to work on.

[00:17:05] Chris Hudson: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:17:05] Celine Waters: Takes a bit of practice.

[00:17:06] Chris Hudson: How do you better understand your own values? Because I know I could ask you the question, what are your values? And you can ask me the same question, but I’d probably prompted a problem to come up with certain things, but it sounds like there might be a deeper way to, to unpack that.

[00:17:19] Celine Waters: Yeah. And look, this took me years of exploring, to be honest. But I, my values have become something I embody, if that makes sense. They align to my boundaries in life and all of those were things I had to embody because I didn’t really understand them.

I didn’t grow up in a home where we spoke about values openly and we spoke about boundaries and we spoke about what it was like to give and receive love. I’ve had to learn that and embody that and practice that. And I think that’s a really key part of understanding this, that your values come from within.

And it’s how we are and how we want to be in the world and when you’re not aligned, cause you feel it, you go, I’m not comfortable doing this. I don’t want to do this. And I often hear like things like authenticity as a value. And I’m like, it actually takes a lot of work to become an authentic human being.

[00:18:02] Chris Hudson: Yeah.

[00:18:03] Celine Waters: It’s a lot of work to be authentic, to have integrity, it actually. That to me is a constant ongoing practice because sometimes I’m not. And for me, the way I arrived or derived my values was, you can write them out and you can do belief systems and write them, but it was truly actually feeling into them.

And for me, it was a lot around care and really strong values around care. And I could feel it and I can feel that sense of tension when contradiction inside of me when I feel that value is lacking, I think respect has been a massive value for me and going within like this, that has been probably the number one calling for me, the curiosity of me and not that in this kind of closed off way is that means I can show up.

Be here and present in the world and moving towards presence was part of my journey because that’s really hard. We often talk about presence and I’m like, presence is not just, sitting here going, okay, yeah, I’m present with you. I’m not going to think in my head, but actually it takes a lot to be completely coherently present.

And that’s my vision of myself that kind of, that’s where I’m moving towards and it might be, it’s probably a lifelong vision that I hold for myself of that real, like, how do I become, or what am I in commitment to? I’m in commitment to the integration of being in my wholeness and healing whatever I need to, that comes along the way.

So I can be in service to social and climate justice needs. When social, I mean everyone. I mean that relational space, that connecting, that belonging. And yeah, so that’s how I started with my values. You can start writing them, but it’s how do I start to actually feel into them? And feel that tug and feel that pull towards something else.

[00:19:40] Chris Hudson: Yeah,

[00:19:41] Celine Waters: And people give you lists and you can write them, but experiment with that. I found that a really good prompt for me in the beginning, and I was like going, ah, it’s around communication or it might be around respect. And then it, I started to peel it back a little bit more and it really became about like this authenticity, this journey into authenticity and care.

And love is the universal one. Love is if you’ve got love, but that’s actually a really hard one to uphold because most of us don’t know how to give and receive love in a healthy way, like that would take practice. So what are you going to commit to in order to get to really embody your value, rather than say it, because I can say whatever I want.

[00:20:15] Chris Hudson: Yeah, that’s true, isn’t it? You would basically I think finding the value, It might be the easiest job in a way. You wouldn’t be going on online and finding the list and choosing two or three, but if you thought about it hard enough and deeply that you could come up with something, I’m sure yourselves.

And then it’s like you say, it’s about living with that value and almost using it as it’s, as your compass for making decisions and for that connection to the bigger an uncontrollable, this more spiritual side that you were describing. Is that right? Am I getting it right?

[00:20:44] Celine Waters: Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Start with the cognitive,

[00:20:47] Chris Hudson: Yeah.

[00:20:48] Celine Waters: It’s the language of the body, temperature, pressure, movement, how we feel. Sensation comes before emotion and we know when we’re going off track, we start to feel it. You’ve been in situations where you’ve been, oh it’s still not feeling right for me.

It’s not sitting well. And you might not be able to put words around it, but how do you get to a place where you go with what your body is saying, telling you as well? Okay, that’s the key. Like the body’s like, oh instead of going intellectualising that and going, Oh, why is that? It’s simply that you’re not on your path.

[00:21:12] Chris Hudson: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:21:13] Celine Waters: It’s not aligned to your vision and your values. And sometimes we don’t have to wrap words around it. We just, and then we can explore it and go deep. It is important to understand that things like meditation and mindfulness and presence and like this world of somatics was really about practice a lot are all so important and learning how to breathe, right?

Like we’ve never been, we don’t, we live with so much pollution and we live in a world where, we’re stressed or always like breathing on top of our lungs rather than learning how to deeply breathe into our bodies and feeling into that and going, Oh, okay. I don’t have the answer for that, but it’s my body’s telling me something.

I’m going to sit with it. and see what comes out of it.

[00:21:48] Chris Hudson: Yeah. Breathing’s a really important thing. The work I’ve been doing this is a side point, but just on voice training and training to sing better basically, has brought a whole different perspective on how the body works, and that’s only a small thing but that’s that’s a big thing for me, because as you’re delivering words, sentences, phrases, messages, you need to remember when and how to breathe, but you’re not usually consciously thinking of that,

So that’s maybe just a small thing, but you’re probably doing this much more acutely than I am.

[00:22:16] Celine Waters: No I think that’s a huge thing. And I love how you even brought that up. Music is so important. Sound is so important. Like it is incredible, the healing properties. Now I’m not a sound, I’m not a sound healer. I haven’t done that, but I’ve definitely loved being around anyone who has, and I definitely soak it all in.

Sound healing is incredible and like what the voice does and what it does for our mood. Music changes us. Music brings joy, brings resilience, and it’s so creative and the tones and the, oh, it’s definitely not a small thing, Chris.

[00:22:47] Chris Hudson: No, no, I know, I know. I’m just wondering, cause there’ve got to be moments in anyone’s day where people can almost tap into that feeling and use that as a way of thinking a bit more about their values and starting this thought process that you’ve been so wonderfully describing.

And I think that it’s important to notice that and the feelings. It feels like a luxury sometimes to sip your feelings, particularly in the busyness of the day. But I’m wondering about what would be some of the obvious marker. So maybe a certain situation or, something stressful, something like an event that would happen and how you could use that to then, take something from.

[00:23:22] Celine Waters: Yeah that’s fantastic. One of the key practices I talk about and I embody, which I’ve been doing so for a few years and it’s still not enough, is it’s a practice of centring and centring is a practice that helps you become, it helps, just helps you move more into presence, you’re more open, connected and there, and you’re not and in time as well, there’s lots of different centring practice.

I now embody my vision with my practice of centring. So I think I bring myself into my vision of my future, where I want to go. So I remain steadfast in my commitments, and I can move through this with you experimentally as well, but I think it’s really important to mention stress because we’re under a lot of stress these days, I feel it in the air.

I feel it myself at times and stress is constant. We’re never going to get rid of it. Okay. It comes with change. So we need to get better at managing it and managing ourselves is probably my outlook on stress. So I can walk through a practice around that and I often wonder why we don’t talk about this more.

Maybe it’s because I just, I’m the only one that finds it interesting or everyone else knows it, but like stress and not even prolonged stress, but stress within itself releases cortisol within the body. Cortisol restricts and tightens our muscles. It also stops our breathing and it becomes more shallow, so we’re up here.

And the constriction of the muscle, right? It changes your shape if you’re doing it. If you have a lot of stress in your life, you start to become, you often see that look, a little bit like really crunched over, we walk on our toes, we walk forward because we’re in a rush.

We’re not present with ourselves, right? So that’s the impact to cortisol, the impact to the breaths and what it does. And like not only to talk about the prolonged impacts in terms of the inflammation it causes in the body, it is not a badge of honour. To be working with a lot of cortisol or a lot of stress.

So I look at the edges of that and I work with a tool called the window of tolerance as well. But within this practice of the day to day and how you can bring it back, there’s this really simple technique. You want to release a cocktail of testosterone and oxytocin. All right, because testosterone is actually the confidence hormone and it dampens cortisol in the brain because when we move into that space space of cortisol and stress, we can’t think right.

We’re not thinking right. We’re not definitely not leading well and yeah we narrow down our creativity. We take a lot of ourself away. So let’s move ourselves back. And so testosterone actually is a hormone that helps with that. And we do that by extending the muscle. So lengthening the muscle and widening across the body are ways that we release testosterone and also oxy and oxy is often associated with the hug hormone. It’s actually not it’s a stress crisis hormone and we release it when we need to bond with others, connect and help others.

So we want to release that and I’ll walk you through an experiment and you can do this as well.

If you want to come with me on it, but I’ll do one and then we’ll do it fast. And it’s because it actually is quite quick when you get used to it, but I’d invite you to think about a stressful situation. Not all of it. Just maybe 10%. I don’t want you to have to hop off the call early. Like just,

invite a little bit of that stress in. And then what I’m going to do is going to ask you to lengthen through the body, feel your feet on the ground. You can remain seated. Cause most of the time we’re sitting at work. Anyway, I want you to lengthen through the back of the neck, lengthen through your spine. What you’re doing is that’s when you start to release testosterone because you’re stretching the muscle.

You’re not constricting the muscle like cortisol does. And I want you to breathe in. So when you’re strengthening and lengthening, breathe in. You’re lengthening in your dignity and your self worth. And feel that air, feel it tap into the bottom of your stomach if you can. And when you breathe out, I want you to breathe down the front of your body.

Breathe out. When you’re breathing down the front of your body, think of someone or something that makes you smile and that releases oxy. So what you’re letting in through the back, you’re breathing out and make the breath out that little bit longer. Think of someone you love, think of someone that makes you smile.

Then I’m going to ask you to widen out and widen out across the collarbones. Again, you’re doing that stretching again, and this is like you’re centring in your widths and this is your relational space. It’s how we connect to others. So this is your personal bubble. It’s your boundaries. You can let others in, you can let others out.

This is your relational space. Your personal space, it’s your interdependence. And then I’ll say, alright ask yourself a question, what is it, or what do I need to do in order to relax more into my body right now, or how do I relax even more into my chair by now?

So you breathe in, you lengthen, lift, you breathe out, you think of someone that you love or something that you love or vision of your future.

Beautiful sunset, widen out across your collarbones. This is your relational space, it’s your boundaries. You let others out, you let others in. How can I be a little bit more relaxed in this moment?

And that, how do you feel now?

[00:27:53] Chris Hudson: I feel relaxed, although I was a bit worried about breathing too heavily into the microphone because that would be a bit confronting for the listeners, but I feel quite happy and I’ve had a pretty stressful day. So I’m happy that it’s helped with that. So thank you.

[00:28:06] Celine Waters: So it’s really simple, right? And I just, there’s ones I do that are really like integrated needs, but it’s like that. You just go on a breath, you breathe in, you lengthen, you breathe out. Think of someone or something that you love or something that brings resilience to you.

Why not across the collarbone? That’s your boundary. You’re setting yourself boundaries up and going, can I relax in this moment? Just even by 3%. It brings a bit of distance, but you want to do that. The thing is about any practice, we’re always practicing something, but the key with that to me with the centring practice is do it offline.

You can’t just do it under pressure and think it’s going to work for you. Do it like all the time, take note of what your posture is start to become aware of that, lengthen, widen, bring in that love, be familiar with what is happening in the body with cortisol and it’s going to shut you down.

You’re not going to be yourself. And if you’re under pressure, and so that’s the whole point of somatic transformation is how am I acting under pressure, it takes 3000 repetitions to truly embody something. That sounds a lot, but how many times have you stopped breathing in a stressful moment? I know for me, it’s hitting millions, right?

So taking that away and like working through that, it actually starts to become something so rewarding and pleasurable because you start to get really on top of me going, I don’t actually have to go into that pattern. I don’t have to go into a stress pattern. I’m going to coach myself in this moment not to, just simply by stretching out my muscles I’m breathing to asking myself, I can do a little

bit more.

[00:29:26] Chris Hudson: Oh, just a quick one. It’s a quick question. At what point do you notice it and almost observe it and decide that you’re going to put it to one side?

[00:29:33] Celine Waters: I think the key is knowing when you’re about to hit that stress mark, because once you become flooded and once you become stressed, that’s your boundary, right? So we all have this window of tolerance, which is where we can take stress and we’re like, yay. And we’re really, we’re in flow.

We’re in play. We’re in creativity and we can take stress. We can be adaptive. We can take change. But once we start pushing on the fringes and we start moving out into those zones of survival strategy, the stress, the cortisol, the fight, flight, freeze and appease zones. We will become flooded and that either becomes a prolonged pattern and a practice in the body.

You’re like, I’m happy out here. Some people have been in these zones for years, but it’s not healthy for you for long term. That’s for sure. And you miss out so much in life because you’re not in your window. You’re not in that space where you’re going to absorb and be in the world.

You’re going to shut down. Noticing when you’ve gone too far. And even if you actually have a safe container and trust with the people you work with, if you build that out, like I did, or we did in our design practice in RMIT, they would put Celine, you’re gone into, you’re just gone off.

We can tell you’re stressed, we can see you’re tensing. And find people around you that have your back. They become, the people at your back, at your side, supporting you in your development. If you have anyone that can be your support, lean into that. Particularly if you have a workplace that wants that.

And we do, I do a lot of that in any of my workshops going who’s your buddy?

[00:30:53] Chris Hudson: You’re right, it’s easier to find stress and maybe a way to think about that traditionally or usually is that people, try and avoid it or they bury it basically. There might be a distraction technique or something else at play, but it feels like, you could kid yourselves that you’re trying to do, something for yourself. You’re going off to get yourself a coffee or whatever it is. But actually the thing is there’s the deeper underlying problem is still there and it’ll come back. From what you’re saying. I feel that would be the case. Yeah, that’s where you have to understand that we’re all practicing something.

[00:31:24] Celine Waters: That might be avoiding conflict. That’s a habit or it could be a belief system, could be even deeper. But being in positions where you can unravel that, and having a support group that can help you unravel that is to me, just one of the beauties actually of life because we are all different. We all have been shaped by our families, by our communities, by our organisations, by our social and cultural norms. We are so influenced by our family units and it all happens before we even know it’s happening. All of our practices, all of that, that all sits in that iceberg, that awareness. It’s the number one place you can get to just going, I’m going like, like even what you said there, am I going for coffee because I really need one or am I going because I need a couple of minutes to decompress from what’s happened?

Am I going because I’m avoiding a conversation? What’s my real, what am I attached to right now or what am I avoiding? And even having those questions to yourself, it’s pretty profound. Cause then what I find I struggle with is some of us can’t let go of it, and I mean that like most people I work with obviously want to, because we want to be in touch with our intuition.

We want to be in touch with our true self. We want to have that authentic connection to self and with others and not be in all this. It takes so much energy to be in touch with to wear and have all these strategies of whether it’s avoidance or attachment or whatever it is, a lot of energy goes into that.

And it’s really nice to think, okay, it’s going to take me a while. This is not going to happen like straight away, but what’s my creative journey look like where I started to push that stuff aside and what practices do I need to introduce into my life to be in myself or connected to myself and so Chris, for example, I would talk about boundaries, but for me, I had to embody what it meant to have a boundary, like no, yes, or maybe.

I actually had to work on a body practice to say what no looks like with love, what yes looks like and not over committing. Cause I used to over commit to everything because I want it to be light. People pleaser here for many years. So it overcommit and going, yeah, I can do it. And then wow, put myself on, and I’d never do that because I now have compassion for myself.

I have compassion for who I’m committing to as well. And understanding how to put a boundary in place from an embodied space, from a place of no, with love and with care. Or yes, or maybe I’m just not ready to make that decision right now. I can’t give you an answer. That under pressure is really difficult.

I’ve been in sessions where I’ve been coaching people because it’s an actual practice that we have in somatic transformation. And I’m like, okay, let’s practice. I’m your boss and we’ll bring again that little bit of pressure in to say no. And it’s like cognitively, no.

And then when we start to move it into the body, I’ve seen arms fly everywhere. Karate kicks coming left, right and centre because body is actually just not there with you, but the body will answer for you under pressure. That’s what I think it’s has been so fascinating for me. So I’ve had to embody that and you feel so much resistance.

You feel no resistance to learning anything new. It’s like Robert King’s immunity to change. Why? A lot of energy is going to go on that, but we’ve had so much happen to us as a human race. And that’s what I mean. I just don’t think evolutionarily we’ve really got there yet, to actually deal with this stuff.

Back on the plains of the Sahara, we’d hear paper dropping and run, that’s what our stress strategies or survival strategies were made for so we could eat things and not be eaten. We were taught to run. Like we had deep lungs to collect air. We were not standing up in a boardroom being judged by strangers because we could, particularly when you consult, you’re moving between different posses.

We had our own tribe, kept our tribe happy. We connected with our people and you know, now it’s all changed. And I don’t think we understand enough, even scientifically and bring it into work. As I mentioned, I thought understanding how your hormones work was so important, but also your nervous system in terms of that limb and that resonance that we have with each other, we’ve all felt when somebody else is upset or mad.

We’ve all felt it. And that’s because our nervous system is reaching out, going, Oh, back away here. And energetically we know as well. And understanding that I think makes such a difference because then it moves you into again that awareness space, but how you are and how you were impacting people.

[00:35:19] Chris Hudson: You’ve talked a little bit about tolerance and where your boundaries lie, what are some of the practical tools in that area that you could use?

[00:35:27] Celine Waters: My big advice, cause a bit of a I don’t know if everyone knows him, but Dan Zigal. There’s many people I can list that I think are incredible. Richard Strauss Hetzler, Stacey Haynes. Dan Zigal has this incredible mind for tools, and he’s created this tool called the window of tolerance.

I mentioned it a few times because I find it so effective for the self. And understanding and even reading about the window of tolerance. And he’s applied it to climate change, right? And it’s just this simple two dimensional like view, but it goes, okay, this is when you’re in flow state. This is when you’re moving out into survival strategy.

And what you want to do is when you have been through a lot of stress or trauma your window is really small. So you’re moving out into these zones really quickly, if not already in them. So you want to understand where you are in your window of tolerance and what practices you need to start embodying to expand that.

Because most of us want to be in a creative, happy state, or at least present with our families. Most of us don’t want to be out here thinking about the 2am email, or wake at 2am thinking about the email I’ve got to send tomorrow morning. Don’t to be in that state. That’s a cortisol driven state. No, thanks.

So you can work on expanding your window of tolerance, but first you must become aware of it and first you must dive into that awareness again of, okay, what is it? Where am I? What? How am I acting and responding under pressure? And what choices am I giving myself here in this moment? How do I respond over react?

And that’s a big thing because a lot of time we’re reacting. We don’t even know. And then if we do, it’s okay, I reacted there. I sent an angry email, for example. For the sake of what, and for me, I think it goes back to that simple steps of going, what’s the vision for myself.

If I was ready for my vision with my body and my brain or ready for my vision. I’m not ready for it, otherwise it will be here, right?

And then asking myself and having that vision of how you want to be and show up in the world, and then starting to understand and become aware of all of this information that actually sits out there and finding the right support people to help you move towards your vision of the future for you and even for your families, for your social groups, for the planet, for social change.

And so in that journey, you’ve got to start looking at the self. So the window of tolerance is one I point people to all the time cause I think it’s so easy to understand and it’s so easy to start reflecting on the self. And I think the second big thing is accepting that we’re incredibly flawed and that’s perfectly fine.

We’re all flawed human beings. We have grown up in this world of, especially in the West of perfectionism and striving. And even our language is so around achievement and cognitive achievement. As opposed to just maybe being happy and finding joy and all of these other things. So that’s one, I think having your vision, understanding the wind tolerance and also understanding resilience.

So with music, you mentioned music earlier and I have to share this with you because I think this is really important. I think music is incredible, dance is incredible movement is really important. Getting out of the cognitive and into the body and it’s being spontaneous with that.

That’s something I would never have done years ago. I’d have been like, Oh my God. embarrassing. You’re embarrassing yourself. Now, I just wouldn’t care. I’d be like, bring it on. I’m in. When it comes to resilience, and I cannot remember the name of the child psychologist who did this, but there are four.

She sees it in children, when children under incredible trauma or stress, those children that have vision of a better life, vision of a better future, those that have a creative art such as music, dance, animals, was the third one.

[00:38:44] Chris Hudson: Yeah.

[00:38:45] Celine Waters: And the fourth one’s gone out of my mind because they’re the three that

[00:38:47] Chris Hudson: Arts maybe

[00:38:48] Celine Waters: the arts, the creative, like drawing, the visual, they naturally have more inherent resilience to get through the bad times.

So where is your inner resilience is probably one question that I often ask people is what does that actually start to look like? What is your inner resilience? What do you start to see for yourself and others? And then the third thing is coming back into being in the world and actually connecting to the world.

And seeing that we’re just while we’re magnificent as an individual. Wow. Look what we are part of, and look what we are, we should be, in my mind, in devotion to, in this incredible planet, this incredible nature. Credible solar system. I heard this line once and it really, I said it to my son and he repeats it all the time and he’s only eight.

I said, it’s amazing. We’re this rock floating in space revolving around a ball of fire and we’ve got revolving around us and our universe is ever expanding. And when we start to bring ourselves out again, it’s that subject object. When we start to bring ourselves out of our stories. We make shape where you want to do that, it starts to lessen the impact or it starts to, we’re no longer in the story.

We’re now observing the story. We’re now on that balcony of life rather than being like, and stuff that’s really not worth our energy.

[00:39:59] Chris Hudson: Yeah. I wonder why so many people went camping and did the surfing and all sorts of things like that. Because it is a connection point, isn’t it? It’s not only an escape, obviously. And there are plenty of people that do it for different reasons, but it just feels like that.

Yeah, even just going to the beach or going for a walk or being outside or, whatever it is.

[00:40:15] Celine Waters: Oh, definitely.

[00:40:16] Chris Hudson: There’s scope to do that in so many different ways.

[00:40:19] Celine Waters: Like it’s the equinox, like this used to be such an incredibly powerful from our old traditions in terms of how we would honour the equinox. We’ve just forgotten a lot of that in our lineages, in our heritage, like the rites of passage. And that’s not my specialist area, but it is becoming more so because I, for one, years ago when I was in the depth of like performance, I can’t put it that way, and didn’t really know myself as well as I probably do now as part of this work.

I had very little joy. I wouldn’t consider myself, like we are wired for negativity anyway. And again, that’s a survival strategy because we’re running from lions, or whatever, big things. It was really hard for me to find joy, like truly connected joy or in the moon or in just her incredible nature.

I couldn’t do that. It wasn’t something I could naturally do. I’d say it and go, oh yeah, this is lovely. But it wasn’t something that kind of flushed out my nervous system and something that nourished me the way it does now. And I had to clear, and I think this would be the journey for most people, clear the stuff that’s getting in the way to make space for the stuff that really matters.

[00:41:22] Chris Hudson: Yeah, that’s a huge thing and an underrated actually, because the thing that we’re misaligned to. It feels ever present, right? You feel like you’re on the treadmill and you’re basically peddling towards something, but you’re peddling faster to get out of that pattern. And it’s the same with so many things, if you think about smoking or alcohol or work, all the things that kind of take us out of control essentially, and keep us perpetuating in that state.

Yeah, you think you’re helping yourself, but you’re not.

[00:41:48] Celine Waters: No self medication really works that way. And yet, but again, that’s the side like, we’re really influenced by our social norms in those spaces, but what they’re doing there’s strategies to avoid, smoking and alcohol, like, when you actually get into that thing of really loving yourself, which is a lot of the work we need to do is love ourselves more.

[00:42:05] Chris Hudson: Yeah.

[00:42:06] Celine Waters: You don’t want to hurt yourself that way.

[00:42:07] Chris Hudson: They are stress relievers but they’re messing with your hormones but you can actually do

[00:42:11] Celine Waters: that by lengthening and widening, and knowing that it’s a pattern and you’ve probably done it.

To break those patterns is massive. We need to know we’re going on to something better. We can’t just say, Oh, I’m going to give up smoking and I’ll be honest. I was a smoker when I was younger. I don’t want my son to know that even though it’s going to be recorded. Ouch. But that was a really good question.

He won’t watch it. That was incredibly hard practice. That was something I practiced for most of my early twenties and up from my teen and to my twenties and giving it up to just as long as for the amount of time that I put into that because of the impact it had to my cortisol and oxy levels and things and I could understand that all scientifically didn’t make me stop though.

I had to develop something later and that was love for myself. That was really a love for myself and knowing that this will pass. In these stressful moments, knowing I’ve got choice, and this is the hardest thing in that moment. And this is where we start to fail when we do have that choice, I can react or I can respond.

I can react and go down the old pattern but then when we do that, we also develop shame and all that becomes more embodied but we have to be so in gratitude to ourselves when we break habits, when we break patterns and we introduce new practices that are more life affirming because they are life denying.

We’re just disassociating. We’re finding ways to cope and we’re just coping, but once we just go, I’m just coping. I’m not going to, I’m not going to punish myself, but I am going to find a way to love myself that little bit more. So I’m going to look at that and go, I don’t need it or take myself out. And all the other things have been out there, but we know that’s a way for me to disassociate, but very dependable and the government’s made it really easy for us to have them.

[00:43:45] Chris Hudson: Oh, yeah. Yeah. we’ve talked about the serious stuff. Cigarettes and alcohol and drugs and all of that kind of fits in one bracket but the stuff that we have to do regularly and day to day is still, of that same ilk, right? It feels like you still got to make conscious decisions about whether you’ve got a healthy work habit or whether you’re overworking yourself.

And you think by working harder, you’re going to dig yourself out of the pit, but actually it’s just going to result in you feeling like you want to work more and You’re just keeping it going.

So I think like we’ve got to recognise those behaviours in ourselves, understand where we’re spending our time.

Like you’re saying what’s driving pleasure and what’s driving pain and how do you make more conscious decisions about this in your lives? Because it’s pretty hard. Like it just sweeps you away.

[00:44:26] Celine Waters: Yeah. And to think that’s the thing it does. And so everything comes back to, and I often debate around these things, but I know from my lineage and who I’ve studied with the Stacey’s and Strozzi Institute with the Institute of Body Psychotherapy in Brisbane.

We need to start in core energetics work, we need to consciously become aware of our patterns and our behaviours before we change them and understand the reason why they’re how are they serving us in the first place? Because that strategy came into place at a time and that should be honoured, right?

Regardless of drugs, alcohol, cortisol, prolonged cortisol has just much impact as drinking into excess and smoking. I better not read it. That’s not a scientific quote. I’m just going to use it for today. But my understanding is that because of the impact of the inflammation in the body, and we’re also, we’re life denying.

That’s all of what that’s happening. We’re really like denying when we’re in those patterns our behaviour. So they’re just as impactful. And we’re becoming aware of them. It’s like what you said, we have that choice, but it’s that conscious choice. In terms of how we want to change to be more life affirming away from being life denying.

[00:45:26] Chris Hudson: Because you think you’re getting an affirmation from the fact that you know how to do something and that you keep going with it. But actually, if it requires analysis and you figure that from that analysis you’re going to find that you yourself are at fault in some way, you’ve almost got to acknowledge that to be able to break away from it.

You know, it’s like admitting defeat, you feel, oh yeah, I’ve been doing something wrong with my life because I spent the last five years working this way, I shouldn’t have done that. And people don’t love that either, do they?

[00:45:51] Celine Waters: No, so you need to honour it. So this is the key, we have to say thank you, right? When something gets lodged in the body or pattern or behaviour, it’s done it for survival reasons, okay? It’s done it to soothe, self soothe, survive. Our best. And a lot of it we probably saw or witnessed or were part of as in childhood as well, right?

And the key is to honour it and thank it because it served a purpose for us. It kept us safe. Our body’s always trying to keep us safe. Our three inherent needs, safety, belonging, and self worth. And it’s always adapting, we are adapting to belong. We track for safety, we organise for dignity.

So it’s just going to adapt and it’s done so and if we look at it rather than this kind of view of wow, I can’t believe I’ve done that. If we look at it in the sense of going, thank you. I’m going to move with you. I’m going to move with you. And we’re going to release whatever we’re serving.

I just don’t need it anymore. And if it’s deeply lodged in the body then that’s going to take a lot longer to get out. There’s more work to be done, but we can move with it and be grateful and thankful for the role it’s played in our lives and let it go with peace and introduce something else.

[00:46:54] Chris Hudson: And it makes way for something better, doesn’t it?

[00:46:56] Celine Waters: Make way for something better, but honouring it is key and not shaming ourselves because that’s not self love.

We’ve done the best we can in a world that’s probably not orientated towards our best interests at times and our wellbeing.

[00:47:07] Chris Hudson: That management of trauma feels like would bring up a lot of big issues, big thoughts and yeah you’d feel a strong response to that if you’re bringing up certain things from your past in certain cases, but to honour it it feels, like you wouldn’t expect to have to do that to be able to move on because you’re feeling so, I guess negative towards it in some way or another you’ve badged it as a negative thing.

You’ve suppressed it. You pushed it down, but actually to bring it up, honour it, pass it over, move on, make space, it sounds practical, but it feels quite hard to do.

[00:47:38] Celine Waters: It is hard, like trauma’s a tricky one because of what happens to you in the soma. And trauma’s prevalent 90% of us will experience a traumatic event. I actually talk about this a lot because it’s becoming more prevalent and it’s a spectrum. We often think about it or associate it with, a national disaster.

It’s actually not. Most times it’s humans that cause trauma. It’s also oppression as well. So anytime we’re oppressed, we could be considered because we can’t mobilise. We’re unable to run. We’re unable to move. And the impact of the trauma gets lodged in the body and it shows up and pops out.

We might try and repress it. But it’s there, that story is kept in there, and I often say with trauma, the best, I talk about trauma a lot, to bring about the trauma informed and trauma event, and it goes back to those three values there, somatically, there was an impact to our safety, our dignity and our belonging.

And I’m really involved in preventative trauma campaigns and the education around that, but with trauma, something is lodged in your body. It’s going to pop out or show up maybe under any type of, we don’t know exactly all the time. It completely bypasses the prefrontal cortex and just goes into the limbic system.

It’s like, right, we’re on. And it thinks it’s back there. And if you want to run, can you imagine what that’s like that you’re in a situation where you needed to run and you couldn’t, it’s mobilised inside of you, you’re quite walking around with that and you don’t even understand like the impact of it because you’re trying to repress it.

I always recommend talking to, if you can and being with either, depending on the extent of it, someone that can help shift that and move that through the body. Because you can’t talk your way out of trauma. We just can’t, right? It’s lodged there. It’s in the body and you can do that. I know for me, I’ve done it with my therapist, my body psychotherapist.

She’s helped me a lot overcome those events that really shaped my life that I have to say goodbye to because they were considered traumatic events. And she’s helped me move that through my body. And it’s a beautiful experience once you start to do that because it’s free. And you feel free and you’re like, wow,

[00:49:31] Chris Hudson: Ha,

[00:49:32] Celine Waters: Look at this world.

I didn’t spot this before. it’s incredible. And actually letting, and knowing and having, again, it goes back to that self love and compassion and granting yourself compassion and extending compassion and gratitude outside of you and they’re all practices. So then you make space for that.

But I’m definitely, I’m someone that’s just speak to someone who’s, if you’re coaching make sure they’re trauma informed and if it’s something that’s in post traumatic stress, because that’s actually the spectrum of it, most of us move into post traumatic stress, which is prolonged cortisol.

Actually, we’re not allowed to release it from the body. Speak to someone that’s going to help you move it through the body. Find a somatic psychotherapist.

[00:50:06] Chris Hudson: This feels like another modelled behaviour that maybe shouldn’t have been modelled in such a way because, again, coming into the world of work, a lot of people starting out and they think it’s kind of accepted to just push these feelings down and move on and keep calm, carry on as the saying goes, I just feel like that behaviour and that response is almost considered to be quite admirable if you can keep calm under pressure, but what you’re saying is that could still be, but obviously you need to be working with other things at the same time for that to be, a healthier balance really.

[00:50:36] Celine Waters: Yeah, it is not a badge of honour to have cortisol. Like when we start to understand what it’s doing to your body. Would you want that for, do you want that for the next generation?

[00:50:43] Chris Hudson: Yeah.

[00:50:43] Celine Waters: Do you want that think about what we’re modelling, think about the information that it’s releasing in your body and who’s with you through life.

It’s your family, right? And your community. And those that we bring a transformation to. That old saying, they’re not going to remember my report that I did back in 2007,

It’s a big thing, it’s part of life. It’s part of the way we’ve been shaped in this world and through the Western lens and you know, at the same time, while there’s a lot of challenges in Australia and a lot of improvements in how we’ve been shaped. There’s still so many great things here in terms of our ways of living and how people work with each other.

I think introducing I think so much of it is through making this the norm to have these conversations. Making it the norm at work right because we’re all, when it comes to stress and understanding how that impacts us genetically and how we pass that on, there’s an incredible book called Genetics.

I think I mentioned it to you before. And again, I forget everyone I learned my stealth stuff from. It’s this brilliant book and a lot of it has intergenerational trauma discussions in it. But there’s a chromosome where we have, we know we’ve got stress.

There’s a stress sequence. When a baby is born, if the mother is stressed, that sequence is turned on and ready to go. And I’m not talking about this natural stress that comes with childbirth. I’m talking about prolonged stress of the environment that she’s in. Think about that. And is that the culture we want?

Is that what we want to do to, having that gene switched on for our kids? And so then they walk into that and they are on alert, ready to go, rather than, how it should be. I think more awareness around this, that we could start being nicer to each other and start growing together more at work.

This is my vision of the future a lot of the time. And none of this Tall Poppy syndrome or this hierarchy, or I know better, it’s like, how do we all really support each other? How do we support each other? Just not in our work. How do we do so emotionally? How do we do so spiritually? How do we actually weave that into our work and not in this really heavy way.

It doesn’t have to be that heavy, but it can be through information. And it’s like that safety, connect, safety, belonging, and dignity. That’s when I create and I’m designing, I’m always thinking to myself, my products and services, my persona, my people that I’m designing for. Am I integrating these three key central needs?

And that raises a lot of questions when I started talking about that stuff.

[00:52:52] Chris Hudson: Oh Yeah. The world of work is geared up differently

[00:52:55] Celine Waters: That’s the real stuff. Like I often have collaboration and stuff and I’m listening and going like, this is so, sounds nice, but what are we really doing here to make sure that works? What are the actual practices we’re embodying? What are the practices we’re introducing?

How do we know that we’re truly aligned to the vision and values that we’re talking about in this room?

And a lot of it shows up through the body, and it shows up through that personal work and really trying to actually embody it and move towards it, rather than just talk about it and stick it on the wall.

[00:53:21] Chris Hudson: You’d be picking up on quite a few of these cues if you’re interviewing and going to join a company, you’d probably see a lot of this right in front of you right.

[00:53:29] Celine Waters: Yeah for sure. And like I’m sure you’ve heard of Amy Cuddy’s TED talk when she talks about the power of poses and like all this, the body shapes, but most definitely, and I know for me, and it’s probably cause my eyes are training more towards it now, and I still feel like I could be doing this for the next 20 years and still wouldn’t know.

You can see people’s body language and how it starts to shift and change and associated to science over my assumption about how they are. And I think that once I start to see it, I can tell when people are moving into stress zones, I can tell when someone doesn’t truly believe in the vision and you can see it because the body starts to close off and we’re like, yeah, that’s right.

And then you just know on your transformational path, how are they going to show up emotionally? Cause we often talk about, when we talk about transformation, we’re always talking about the strategy, the structures, the vision, but what about the emotional pathway? Like how, what’s my behaviour going to be in order for me to reach this vision?

How is it I need to change in order for us to all get there as this leadership team, as you know, a bunch of humans moving together. And then I think that’s one of the biggest missing keys in transformation collectively overall, because it’s just done in this way that we don’t take ownership, I think, and responsibility for our own behaviours and the structure isn’t in place for me, for my behaviours to be exposed in a safe container.

[00:54:41] Chris Hudson: Wow. That is a big piece of the puzzle because you still need the people to deliver the transformation, but you’re not getting the accountability or the conversation going really around who should be owning what and how the change needs to happen on that level which is a big, yeah, that’s a big one.

Thanks for pointing that out. That’s fantastic.

[00:54:57] Celine Waters: That’s in the next hour, Chris.

[00:54:59] Chris Hudson: Yeah. Part two. But I think we’re out of time for now. I mean, it’s been like a really fascinating conversation and just wonderful to talk to you about all the things that you do and your perspectives and learning. And your learning keeps carrying on. It feels like you’re doing more and more with it.

Can’t wait to catch up again at some point. And yeah, where can people find you? Ask you questions if they’ve got questions.

[00:55:18] Celine Waters: Yes, absolutely.

I actually have a little webpage now that I’ve put together called life. I have a little, my, I suppose my collective stuff. It’s called life and I’ll leave my email address with you. But you can find me on LinkedIn. And yeah, and I’ll give you the details of that website too.

So people can reach out to me about anything.

[00:55:34] Chris Hudson: Brilliant. Thanks so much, Celine. Pleasure talking to you as always. And yeah, I really hope, and I know that actually I don’t hope, I know that the listeners are going to get a lot from this episode. So I really appreciate you taking the time to record it. So thank you.

[00:55:45] Celine Waters: No, thank you. It was awesome. Thanks a million, Chris.

[00:55:47] Chris Hudson: Okay, so that’s it for this episode. If you’re hearing this message, you’ve listened all the way to the end. So thank you very much. We hope you enjoyed the show. We’d love to hear your feedback. So please leave us a review and share this episode with your friends, team members, leaders if you think it’ll make a difference.

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