The inner child at work: Healing wounds of the past for present success

“We are all young wounded children in adult bodies, walking around, bumping into each other and then blaming each other  when our wounds get touched on or when our traumas get activated.”
Lael Stone

In this episode you’ll hear about

• Parenting and leader parallels: Drawing parallels between effective leadership and conscious parenting, highlighting the similarities in communication strategies and nurturing supportive environments in how we lead as parents and in business
• Understanding human behaviour in the workplace: Exploring the deeper motivations behind people’s actions and behaviours, emphasising the importance of curiosity and empathy in engaging with co-workers
• How your childhood affects your working style: The way in which unresolved childhood traumas, emotional wounds and even just the parenting styles in our childhood homes can influence adult behaviours and interactions in the workplace.
• Fostering authenticity and vulnerability: Recognising the value of being authentic and vulnerable in expressing needs and concerns and how to cultivate a work culture that enables such expression
• The role of conscious leadership: How to grow in conscious leadership and see transformation in fostering work environments where individuals feel valued, empowered, and able to thrive personally and professionally

Key links

Lael’s TedX Talk

Lael Stone

Woodline Primary School

The Resilience Project

Raising Resilient and Compassion Children

About our guest

Lael Stone is an educator, TEDx speaker, author, mother, and parenting counsellor who has worked with families for over 20 years. Her work as a birth educator, postnatal trauma counsellor, and parenting educator has seen her work with thousands of families consulting about newborns all the way to the teen years. She spent over 5 yrs in secondary schools working with teens around sexuality, well-being, and relationships and her great aim is to empower parents to create connections and stronger relationships with their children.

She is the co-creator of Woodline Primary School, an innovative new school based on emotional well-being and connection. Lael was the co-host of The Aware Parenting Podcast and a sought-after public speaker who talks candidly about her experiences and her great passion for creating wellness in adults through connection and communication.

As well as sitting on a few advisory boards and consulting with organisations around emotional awareness and trauma-informed practices, she has teamed up with The Resilience Project to deliver presentations about raising resilient children all over Australia.

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 everyone and welcome to your next dose of the Company Road podcast where we look even more broadly at what it takes to change an organisation or a company and by helping the people within. So a lot of podcast hosts hark back to their first idea about what they had in mind when they first started their shows and the type of aspirations or goals that they had, and mine were pretty simple, really to help organisations succeed in some way and to change by driving positive conversation and by helping the rising stars and the people within those organisations succeed, really. So, to do that, I really think that you need to look past some of the face value of work and business and all of the usual stuff, and we need to get a bit deeper and a bit more personal and actually empathise with the co-workers and the people that we are. It’s time to get real, and we don’t all have kids, but we all start life as kids so, in today’s session, I’m really excited. I’ve got to say a little bit starstruck by my next very special guest, the one and only Lael Stone. So, Lael, I met you for the first time about a year ago at a parenting talk you gave, and it just filled me with positivity and actually made me feel a little bit more adequate as a parent, as I walked away from that session.

And we can be so quick to judge ourselves as people and as parents and as adults. And if you’ve not come across Lael’s work I deeply encourage you to get around it, as they say over here. So Lael, you’ve done some amazing stuff. You’re an educator, TEDx speaker, author, mother parenting counsellor.

You’ve worked with families for over 20 years. And you work with a number of different groups and you’ve helped thousands of families be better at being families, really and your aim is to empower parents to create connections and strong relationships with their children but we are gonna have a bit of a chat about that within the context of business today, which I think will be really cool. So Lael a huge welcome to the show. Thank you so much for coming on.

[00:01:46] Lael Stone: Thank you. I’m so happy to be here. As I said to you before, I’m excited about this chat because actually parenting is really just leadership. It really is and when we look at business and a lot of businesses about leadership. It’s the same kind of thing. There’s a lot of the same principles that apply and I think how we respond to our children and also to our team, if we are a leader

they’re very similar. We have similar themes and threads that go through it. So I’m really excited for this chat today.

[00:02:10] Chris Hudson: Yeah, thanks so much. Let’s jump into a couple of chats. I think the interesting thing is around I guess we work day in, day out for years and years and years, until we can’t work any longer and, we can afford to retire, but we sort of migrate from the world of being a child at one point to being, a little bit older than maybe a parent and you’re pushing yourself on and on.

And you’re obviously having to manage children, if you have children from time to time. But how does that kind of carry into the world of work and what are we taking with us from our childhood into the world of work?

[00:02:39] Lael Stone: This is a good first question. And I go, we are taking mostly everything from us from our childhood because, one of the things I talk a lot about is something that I call imprints that we all carry. And our imprints are the belief systems, stories, perceptions that we take on board as children.

And then we believe to be true. And then we keep looking for evidence to be true as we go through out the world. And we have imprints on everything. And some of them are brilliant. Perhaps we grew up in a family where it was modelled to us about taking care of others and perhaps our parents did charity work and what was imprinted within us is, wow, it’s really important to give back.

And it feels amazing to do that. We could also grow up in a family where the story and the message was you are only loveable if you’re super successful. And so there was a pressure right from the beginning that you have to get the best grades. You have to be the best at sport. You have to look a certain way.

And that story that we take on board is I am only loveable if I am the best now on some level, people could argue, that’s a great thing, right? Maybe that makes you succeed. But I have worked with enough adults to know that sometimes that story comes at a great cost. It comes at a cost of our self worth, our self esteem can come at the cost of relationships, intimate relationships, those kinds of things.

So I think there is, there’s pros and cons with all that we’ve been imprinted with and of course our parents were doing the best job we know how. But so often what happens is we are born into these families or whatever environment we grew up in, and we watch what the adults are doing in our world.

And then we create a story in an imprint as a child that says, this is what it looks like to be a human. And that is across the board with everything, our relationship to money, our relationship to intimacy, to feelings, to trust, to the jobs we do, to creativity, to everything. We watch everything as children.

And sometimes what we do is we go, I am so not going to do what my parents did. And we swing so far in the opposite to make sure we never do that. But then sometimes we can overreach or equally, we often unconsciously carry on the same stories and how this works into the workplace. I think is really interesting because for me, what I’ve observed over the years is there’s a few core kind of imprint themes that turn up a lot as adults in any dynamic and these are the ones that often shape how successful we are, how healthy our relationships are in the workplace and how we feel about ourselves.

So parenting is without doubt, the biggest mirror to all our own crap. You know, I go, if you want to become enlightened, just have kids and then try and raise them as consciously as possible. Because your kids are going to come along and go here’s this bit and that bit, because ultimately our children are like, hey I want to be free to be who I need to be.

So I don’t want you to project all your unconscious stuff onto me. So kids will push back beautifully as they can, whereas in the workplace, it could be a little more subtle. It’s not usually okay for a colleague to come up and have a big tantrum in our face. Although that does happen.

And really our reaction to it’s quite interesting, but it is a little bit more subtle and it usually comes back more to the internal narratives we have, the stories that are going on within us. So in a bigger picture, we’re looking at, all relationships with what we have, whether it’s an intimate one, whether it’s a parent or whether it’s with our colleagues in the workplace, they are all a beautiful insight into who we are, who we believe we are, and the stories and the limitations that we carry with us around leading a successful life, whatever success means to you.

[00:05:52] Chris Hudson: It’s true, obviously that kids carry a representation of you, of adults, because you’ve made them, you’ve influenced them quite directly. In the world of work, there are a number of people that obviously you work with and your influence over them and their influence over you is obviously, it feels like there’s a connection there in one way or another.

Do you feel like those two things are the same?

[00:06:11] Lael Stone: Yeah, well, I think it’s any relationship, isn’t it? And any parent can tell you, if you’ve got more than one child, you’ll probably have one child that really pushes your buttons, right? Because it’s like they were born just to mirror back all the stuff that you need to work on.

And often, they’ll do something and it really riles us up, or it pushes our buttons and we get really fired up around it, and then we have another child that we’re like, nah, we get each other this flows. And that’s the same as work colleagues as well. We can have people that we walk into a room and just the way they respond to stuff or the way they react really push our buttons.

We can either get really judgmental. I often say, if you want to know where your stuff is, just watch your thoughts and your judgments. It’s usually a pretty good indication of a story you’ve got going on. Work colleagues are exactly the same because it’s all relationships.

And not everybody sees the world the same way. We all have the power of perception of what we believe to be true or how we see things. And so of course, when we all come together and we interact, we are going to have times where we’re like, judgements are going to come up or we’re going to have our buttons pushed or we’re going to, our colleagues going to say something to us and then we’re going to make it mean something else.

[00:07:12] Lael Stone: So we are constantly moving through life with these stories going on of perceptions and beliefs that we believe to be true. A lot of the time they’re not true. It’s just because we’re looking through a certain lens to say, yeah, that’s what I’m making this mean.

[00:07:25] Chris Hudson: What would be some of the instances of that happening where you see something and you think it’s true, but it’s not true. What do you mean by that?

[00:07:31] Lael Stone: Okay. So like I find that probably there is three kind of key components, particularly in the workspace. So if we talk about in the business world, three kind of top level kind of key imprints that turn up where there’s lots of little sub pieces underneath them where we often lose our power or we have a perception of how things are.

So the first one is really about worth. And that is about a big story that made most of us carry around. Am I good enough right now? Also our relationship to money can sit underneath this because again, depending on how much we believe we are worth our story and imprint around money. I mean, money’s a massive one.

Like I could just talk about money for a whole episode because our belief systems and stories around money is fascinating. So we look at something like worth and what that means. It could be if we have a story that says we grew up in an environment where perhaps we were told we were too loud all the time.

Now we learn as a little kid well, in order to be loved, because our prime force as a child is I need to have someone take care of me. It’s all about attachment. So, if I’m learned as a little kid that I’m too loud or too much, I’m going to curb that behaviour because my key survival force is all around.

I need this caregiver, this adult to take care of me and love me. So I need to be good. So really what happens is little kids, then we learn, I need to quieten down or it’s not okay for me to speak up because then that could rupture potentially my attachment which means I might not live. So therefore, as a little kid, we learn, okay, be quiet.

Don’t speak up. And then we go into the workplace. So we believe that story to be true. And then we go into the workforce and we might sit in a meeting and we have something to say, but we don’t want to speak up because there’s a belief system that says, but don’t speak up because, you know, you might get rejected because it’s not okay to be loud or to have a voice or I don’t know, laugh in the office and someone walks past and goes, God, you’re so loud and all of a sudden our wound pops up of Oh my God, I’m too loud. I’m too much. This isn’t enough. What are they all thinking about me? We just go into a spiral of a story that we tell ourselves, right?

So that is one example of what it could look like is turning up. I mean, the other thing, which is huge, I think for most people, and I work with a lot of women and this one is like the dynamite is our relationship and imprint around boundaries, because a lot of the time we were taught, as young kids to not have strong yeses and no’s to keep everybody happy all the time.

I mean, I often talk in my parenting talks, we think that the job as parents is to raise good boys and good girls. And I say, that is actually not the job at all. We don’t want to raise good boys and good girls cause usually good boys and good girls are compliant children, which means that they have a story that says it’s not okay for me to get angry. It’s not okay for me to cry and get upset. And I also can’t say no when something’s crossing my boundary. I’m learning from a very young age that in order to survive, I need to be compliant. Now this is our complete school system, right?

This is why I built a school because I was like, Whoa, there’s a whole thing here. And so then it carries on, right? That we have a story that says it’s not actually okay for me to speak up. It’s not okay for me to have my boundaries. So then we go into the workplace and then perhaps when we’re in an organisation that is not valuing our self care, our wellbeing, they’re like, you must work this much.

And it’s taking a toll on us. And we don’t feel like we can say, actually, no, I can’t do that. Or, that’s crossing my boundaries. What you’re asking me to do, because the younger parts of us turn up and go but I can’t say that because then they might not like me, or they might not think I’m good at my job, or they might not offer me another shift.

So the boundaries piece is massive and I particularly see this with women is that they have never really learned to have a healthy boundary. And so therefore often the story that comes with it is if I say no to something, then someone won’t like me, they will judge me, or, they’ll not value who I am.

Whereas actually it’s the opposite. When we set our boundaries, people often respond to where our boundaries sit. So if we have very wishy washy ones, or we believe that we’re not worthy of setting boundaries, then people will keep taking advantage of us often. So boundaries is a huge key piece and that also ties in with self care and what we believe we deserve is taking care of our own needs.

And then I think the other biggest one, which I see, especially more a corporate space is authenticity, which is really, is it safe for us to be vulnerable? Is it safe for us to express our feelings? Can we take risks? Can we be creative? Because again, all of these things often come back to these imprints, which is all around, am I enough?

Am I loveable? Am I okay the way I am? And I think after working with thousands of adults and working with a lot of these themes, the core one always comes back to our enoughness. It comes back to, am I loveable or am I okay just the way I am? And I think what happens is we are born enough.

I often say that, as soon as you hold your beautiful baby in your arms, you look at that baby and you just think they’re perfection. You never hold your newborn baby in your hands and think, I don’t know if they’re enough. We just think they’re amazing just the way they are.

And then what happens is we then grow up and life keeps giving us these messages that we’re not. And then I think we get to adulthood and we have to learn how to undo all that to come back to, I do not have to be number one in order to think that I’m okay. And I do not have to look a certain way to go, I’m enough.

And I do not have to earn this amount of money to think that I am worthy. We are enough just because we are humans. But a lot of those stories and narratives drive this desire to succeed or what we think success is, or to push stuff in a way that actually can be quite detrimental to who we are.

[00:12:54] Chris Hudson: And I think many of those instances that feel like would draw you out of yourself because I guess the feeling is that, you’re not able to be your full self at work, in a sense if you’re putting your finger on it, I mean, it feels like the boundaries of the often, to your point they can be set by the company and the organisation and the people that you’re around rather than by you, or you can feel probably powerless in that situation because everyone is sort of setting the precedent and if you start on day one of your work, then people have been there for years and you’re coming into that whole construct, which is already there and laid out for you.

The expectations are set by what’s already happened really.

[00:13:28] Lael Stone: Yeah of course but we all have choice. Like here’s the piece, right? Nobody’s saying you have to do this and that, we have a choice to go, well, does this serve me or not? Somebody might think, yes, this is amazing. This is what I’ve been waiting for. This is brilliant.

And someone else be like, no, that doesn’t feel good for me. So there’s no right or wrong, right? This really comes back to, does it feel in alignment with us? Does it feel like this is where I want to be. Is working a 60 hour week? Does that fill me up? Do I love it? Does it feel amazing?

For some people it’d be like, yes, this is what I’ve wanted to do my whole life. And then other people would be like, this is the worst. I never get to see my family. My health is deteriorating, but we have a story around what would mean if we leave, or we set a limit or a boundary, all those kinds of things.

And, for me, the job is always, we’re trying to come back to being the most authentic versions of ourselves. And there is no doubt in our workspaces where we often believe that I have to be like a certain way, or I have to put on a front or I have to behave in this way in order to be accepted or to be okay.

Now, in some places, yes, we have standards where we’re like, yeah, you do have to wear like clothes. You can’t wear pyjamas to work, you know, or, we do have to be courteous and respectful. We can’t just yell at people. There’s a whole lot of stuff where we’re like, this is about just being a respectful human in the world, but it’s also often again, and I come back to this, if you want to know where your imprints are not working for you, it’s just look at the places where there’s tension. Look at the relationships you have with a colleague where it really rubs you the wrong way. Or look at the narrative that goes through your head all the time where you’re like, oh I can’t believe they’re asking me to do more, or I don’t get paid enough for this.

So, it’s watching our thoughts to see where our stories and our issues lie. Because it’s there that we can unpack a little bit around our imprints in our belief systems, around what is unfolding. And in my experience, life is going to keep giving us these lessons until we get them.

So, you might work in one job and you’d be like, Oh, I don’t like this. And, that doesn’t feel good. And then you’ll go to a different workspace, right? And the same thing will come up again. It’s just presented in a different person. And that’s because, there’s something here for us to work through.

I mean, this sounds a bit big, but I’ll just say it cause I believe in being authentic, 90 to 95 percent of the world is completely unconscious. We are completely asleep on a lot of levels. And we just do the things that we’re told that we should do in order to be a good, human, or to be a good boy or a good girl.

And therefore, because we are operating out of that place, we often move into what I call a victim consciousness, which is when someone does something to us or something happens. We immediately go into being the victim and we blame everybody else instead of actually saying, well, what is this about here for me?

And this theme is really familiar to me. What am I making this mean here? And what is this about? So, I think as a bigger picture, particularly in the corporate space, and I think this is what I said earlier, parenting is an insight into awareness and consciousness of who we are as humans, but.

But work is equally, because it’s, we’re in relationship and we have a whole lot of stuff that comes about that is often asking us, what am I making this mean? How am I turning up in this situation? Am I moving default into blame all the time? And it’s usually a pretty good indicator too, that there’s some story there.

So there’s, there’s always stuff to work with. I just, again, I come back, just watch your judgments, watch where your mind goes and you’re like, Oh, yep. There’s a story. We’ve all got story too. No one’s perfect. No one’s immune to it because we’re humans. But the job is to be curious about it and to work with it so that we don’t need to keep repeating it.

That, that’s the gold.

[00:16:59] Chris Hudson: Yeah. I love the language that you’re using there around, watching what you think in a way, because it puts a little bit of distance. Like often you think like what you think is what you think, you’re in that headspace and it’s all consuming and you move to the next thought and you know it feels like you’re in less control really, but I’m wondering a lot of what you’ve touched on in the way of identifying, authenticity and talking about boundary and enoughness.

And I think there’s a big theme around self awareness and I’m wondering just in relation to the concept of work when self awareness pops up, because it feels like some people come to that later in life other people that I’ve worked with that just starting out in the workforce are incredibly self aware to an extent that I never was starting out. I’m wondering what some of the trigger points are for that and where it would be healthy to become self aware as you’re starting out or through your career, have you got any thoughts around that?

[00:17:51] Lael Stone: Well, I mean, for me, the ultimate is being raised by parents who are asking these questions and who are modelling this to you, I’d be really curious as for the people or colleagues you’ve met who come with a level of awareness, I’d be so fascinated to hear about their childhoods and to hear what was modelled to them.

Because again, I often talk about this. Most of us grow up speaking English in a sense of that, this is what life looks like, which is, you don’t really feel your feelings, you get angry, you’re projected onto other people. We often don’t take accountability for what’s going on.

It’s easy for us to fall into more of that victim space. When we don’t get our needs met, we yell, most people grew up in what I’d call an emotionally unaware environment. Now, this is not to judge our parents. Our parents were doing the best job they knew how they were doing what was done to them and we just pass it on down the line.

And then often what happens is there’s one person in the lineage that goes, this doesn’t feel good. I don’t want to yell at my children or I’m really angry all the time. What is this about for me? Or I would like to lead an authentic life. And what would that look like? And they start doing the inner work.

So they start questioning the imprints they’ve been given. They start unpacking that story. They start doing that work and then they start speaking a different language. And so then that language might be Italian, for example, they start speaking Italian and at first it feels clunky and at first they don’t really know how to do it, but they listened to lots of podcasts that speak Italian and they read books and then they find friends who do it.

And then all of a sudden they start to become more fluent in Italian and then they have children and their children grow up speaking Italian. So it becomes a default to them to go, hey when something goes on, I’m going to pause and I’m going, what’s happening here for me, or I’m going to take responsibility for something, or I’m going to look behind the behaviour in front of me of any person and go, I wonder what’s happening for them there.

And our default becomes empathy and compassion and emotional awareness and emotional intelligence. And that’s what we learn. So my first thing is I’d be super curious as to how did they grow up in an environment like that? Or where I find it usually kicks in for people is when we’ve had some form of crisis.

So I find that because most of the world lives in this, I guess, more of an unconscious space, it’s usually when some form of crisis happens that we are forced to go, well, who am I and what am I about. Now sometimes that crisis is we get sick. Sometimes it’s we get divorced or a relationship splits up.

One of our parents or someone we love dies. Perhaps, there is an accident or something happens to us. It’s usually some form of crisis where we are forced to go, okay, well, who am I and who do I want to be in this world? And usually what happens at that point is we go through a bit of, what can be known as the dark night of the soul, which is where we ask all those questions.

Well, who am I and who do I want to be? And what was modelled to me? And do I have some baggage I have to work through and who do I want to be in the world? And you know what, I don’t want to do that job anymore. I want to paint buildings instead, or I, want to become a children’s entertainer or something.

I don’t know, whatever. We all of a sudden we just, we switch because we go, I’m actually not living my authentic life. Now, usually that comes through some form of crisis. And that is where we often have the opportunity to become more aware. And we actually start to go, where am I? And what do I want to be?

And that is beautiful because most of the time we won’t ask these questions or we won’t change unless we’re forced to, because as humans, we just really default to being quite unconscious and just carry on until something comes and rocks our world and then goes, whoa well, who am I and who do I want to be?

And then we actually go, or we get into a relationship with someone who goes, well, I don’t want to live like that. And you’re like, yeah, no, but I’m comfortable here. And they’re like, well, I’m not. And then all of a sudden we’re like, Oh God, okay. If I want to be with this person, am I going to have to lift and grow?

And that’s often what happens. Trust me, I say that all the time is we go, I want to live a life that feels more authentic and genuine and where I’m connected to myself and my truth. So that’s often what happens that pushes people to do that. So I think there’s many interesting paths of how we find it.

But I come back to this place of every single one of us can do this, right? Every single one of us has the opportunity to pause and ask ourselves the question, what am I making this mean? What is going on here when I’m constantly in this loop of feeling not seen or validated, or I’m constantly in this loop where I don’t think I’m being heard, or I’m constantly in this loop where I don’t have any money and it’s really stressful.

What is the story that’s going on here that’s going on here that’s continually playing out? We all have the opportunity to ask ourselves those questions. A lot of the time we just don’t know how to ask the questions or what we’re looking for within it.

[00:22:11] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I love that. I think the big moments in life that, as you were talking, I was thinking about which some of those, what were those moments for me? Yeah, I think, if you’re thinking about like a breakup or something where you’re evaluating yourself or redundancy, I think is a big one where a lot of people take that very personally.

And I remember that happened to me, a few years back and I thought this is the worst thing and actually you’re right. It does encourage you to think about yourself and your place in the world. And if your work is everything and you’re rejected for that then that can be incredibly hard hitting, right?

You’ll just be.

like knocked out of the park unexpectedly.

[00:22:45] Lael Stone: Yeah and I often think when people get fired or they’d be made redundant, my reaction was amazing. And people are like, why is that amazing? I’m like, you don’t mean to be there anymore. And you perhaps weren’t listening. And so all of a sudden the world’s come on, move on.

Up and go. And it’s often one of the best things that can happen to people because it shifts you exactly as you say, to asking these questions and to move forward. But the challenge is, it’s so beautifully as you put is we make it mean, well, I’m not enough, or I’m not good enough, or I’m not, we’re all the things that come in and they usually, those beautiful threads that are asking to be healed.

[00:23:18] Chris Hudson: That’s the situation where you’re having to respond. So basically things come to a head in some way and then you’re having to respond and pick yourself up off the floor and then you’re up, you’re back into the world again. But I’m wondering like on the other side, is there stuff that you can think would help?

You know, without self evaluation on a more ongoing basis in a way that’s a bit more planned, so you can get ahead of it. You can be a bit more proactive. You can think I’m tuning into myself. I can channel like my efforts and my thoughts and all these things.

[00:23:46] Lael Stone: Yeah, look, I think there are things that we can do, but I also think life is like, yeah, okay. Try and plan that. And then let’s just see how it goes. So I think there’s also that, I love that. You’re like, how do I troubleshoot this? Is there a step with the hard stuff, right?

I love that, but we’re always going to have a curve ball, but actually what you do say is quite true is, well, I think this is where we, the two questions I always ask people, which is this, what am I making this mean? And what do I want it to look like? So, for me, I think one of the most important things we can, which I think ties into what you’re saying is to be able to sit in a place where we go, okay, what do I want this to look like?

What do I want my life to be? So if we talk from a business point of view, it could be like I want to go work with a company that really values who I am. I want to be able to work creatively. I want to be part of a team that’s really collaborative cause I love that. I want to earn this much money.

I want it to be, close to where I live. So I don’t have to travel much, whatever, right? We get to dream up what we want. I think one of the most important things is we have to be intentional, and there’s a lot of research and there’s a lot of great books out there that speak to this, energy follows thought.

Yeah and so if we are constantly wondering around, I don’t know what I want to do, or it’s this, we will often be broadcasting this channel that just says, nah, I’m not worthy of it. I don’t want it. Can’t earn that much money or that kind of thing. Or we actually go pause and we actually say, what? Do I want this to be now?

The trick around this is not getting fixated on it’s got to be, in this building and it’s got to look like this and these things we have to open ourselves up to possibility. Cause I think, again, that is one of the most powerful things we can do is open ourselves up to possibility, but we have to get intentional where we say stuff like, I want to work in a job.

That really lights me up with people that really value me. And we start to actually go, these are the things that I deeply desire. Now, what will often happen is when we open ourselves up with that intention, we will actually start looking for that more. We are more likely to see the signs. We are more likely to talk to someone about it.

Something will pop up and make us go, Oh yeah, that’s a good connection. I’m going to follow my intuition with that. And that again is one of our greatest superpowers is when we get intentional of what we want and then we stay open and curious about it. We are more likely to follow our intuition and talk to people and see what happens that can open up that possibility.

I have done this most of my business life. I started my first company when I was 20, so I’m almost 50 now. So it’s been 30 years of business of running my own companies of playing that game of going, what do I want this to look like? Because I think the, what I want it to look like is basically setting ourselves up with an intention to go this is what I desire.

And this is what I want now. It doesn’t mean it always happens in that way. And what will often happen within that is those hiccups will pop up because they’re meant to help us again, troubleshoot, Oh, there’s a bit of a belief system there, there’s a story or that kind of stuff. And I have to tell you, money is one of the biggest things.

Best ways to our relationship with money is one of the most powerful ways to see our belief systems, our worth, our story, because it’s a huge energy exchange and we’ve been taught over the years to make it mean it equates to worth, right? The amount of money you earn means that you’re good enough in whatever way, and that looks on a bar, but actually money is just an energy exchange within it.

And when we change our relationship to it, we can actually completely change, what our experience of money is. So I think we can. Really have intention to go, this is what I’d love to create. This is what’s important for me. But I do not think that there is a a spreadsheet that we can tick off to make sure that we don’t have the hiccups because everybody will tell you this.

The best things that help us grow are the failures of the things where it doesn’t work are the challenges. That is the gold. I mean, when I built my school. Which is, I have to tell you, one of the hardest things that you can do. There’s a reason why people don’t build schools because it’s really tricky.

And the woman I was building it with, Mel, we came together and went let’s create something that is different and focuses on emotional awareness, intelligence, all that kind of stuff. So it took us three years to do it. And lots of hiccups, as you can imagine, lots of all the red tape, all the things, whatever, anyway, we finally got there, we opened the school and I remember thinking, okay, I thought that was hard.

Oh my God, this is now hard because now we have to try and implement what we say we’re going to do. And anyone who has a startup will be like, oh yeah, yep. that. And so I remember on the first day we opened the school and I was crying because I was so happy that we’d done it. And then I was angry.

Absolutely terrified of I don’t even know if this is going to work. And I was really like, whoa. And all these people have trusted me and Mel and how are we going to do this? And, I felt an enormous pressure and I learned pretty quickly, we had to hit the ground running and I was like, as much as we had troubleshooted for what we thought was going to happen. Nothing was going to prepare us for that first year or two of all the things that were going to go wrong. And right in the beginning, my amazing principal, we would, we’d meet, a few times at what’s going on and she’d be telling me this is not happening, this is wrong and dah.

And it was full on. And every time I would just keep coming back to beautiful, we’ve got the contrast now of what we don’t want. What do we want? What do we want this to look like? And the way we navigated Every time a hiccup would come up, I would say to her, brilliant, great. We have the contrast.

Now we don’t want people like this, or that is not going to work. Or this is not the right energy for it. And I would keep asking her the question, what do you want it to look like? What do you need it to feel like? And she would go, this is what I want to go. Great. How do we work towards there? So.

even though you try as hard as we can as humans to make it safe for us, because that’s what we’re trying to do constantly. It’s I just want to feel safe. I don’t want to feel challenged. I don’t want the hard stuff to come up. We have to go, the hard stuff is going to come up because it’s how we grow.

And I would not change any of that contrast, even though those few years were so tricky and hard, and we often look back and think, well, that was brutal. All of it shaped and formed where we are now. Where we, and any business owner will tell you this, like what a gift, right? But the way we see it is so important because that is the contrast.

That is the beautiful evidence of that doesn’t feel good. This does, how does it help us move towards what we want to? So as much as I think we want to try and keep ourselves safe and comfortable and just cruise along, we have to love and embrace the failures and the contrast because otherwise we’re probably not going to grow in the way that we need to.

[00:29:53] Chris Hudson: Yeah, it feels that. I mean, those moments as you describe. Terrifying. Challenging. You’re thinking about the worst, it’s not always the worst thing that can happen, obviously, but the things that come up day to day that you’re unprepared for, or not you, but one is unprepared for it just feels like that’s part of living.

Particularly within an entrepreneurial setting. That. That would have, that’d be happening all the time. The way in which we read those situations, see them for what they are. And it’s almost a clarity of thought, I think within those situations, which can really help because if you can see it in a constructive way.

Rather than it coming across as a threat, essentially then, almost triggers a different part of your brain, I’m sure to,

[00:30:30] Lael Stone: 100%. Yeah.

[00:30:31] Chris Hudson: onto it and do it. So, so that can be, incredibly learning. It’s a formative experience. Basically you’re figuring out the things and then in a sense, that’s part of the reward and that you wouldn’t want to sacrifice that you wouldn’t want it to just be perfect from day one, because you wouldn’t be probably building a business.

If that were the case,

[00:30:46] Lael Stone: That’s exactly it and you wouldn’t be growing and I think, like even in my own life personally, I had really severe PTSD about 16 years ago from a really challenging birth experience I had with my third child. And I went from being someone who was, up on stage talking, running workshops, like really out there doing it.

To absolutely being stripped back to, I could barely take my kids to school. So I didn’t work for nearly two years. Like I was in it, and I would have paid anything at that point to be out of it. Like I was. Trying every modality and trick and thing in the book to not have to feel what I was feeling because I went through a big trauma and I had to learn how to navigate that trauma.

And those two years of my life were the toughest, but I would not change any single part of it. It’s one of the greatest things that ever happened to me because it actually took me back to who I really am and actually taught me more than any university degree or book or podcast. Cause I had to leave the work.

I had to learn about vulnerability. I had to learn about healing. I had to learn a ton about feelings and emotions and healing my stuff. Like all my work now has so sprouted from those experiences that I had to navigate and live through. And I had to do the work. I had to actually walk through it myself in all the terror and the panic and the anxiety and the fear.

Fear and all those things to find my way out the other side to be embodied because that was a really important for me. Like I, it’s always been important for me to live an authentic life. And I’m like, well, if you’re going to talk about all this stuff, you have to have lived it. You can’t just go, yeah, this is what I hear is good.

Do this three step process and you’ll be fine. It’s knowing the messiness of it. And I think that’s where it was one of the most powerful things that ever happened to me to be able to. navigate it and find my way through it to actually then go, okay, this lived experience really does allow me to sit in a place of big compassion for others when they’re navigating hard stuff, but also know how to navigate when things don’t go well, because yeah, stuff is often not going to go well and things are going to not, Turn out the way we want to, and especially in business stuff is going to happen.

Our ability to meet it with possibility and curiosity is to me, the depictor of where it then goes, right? We meet it with a, this is unfair and how can people do this? And we blame and we, pass it on to someone else or we just go, okay, this is here. This is interesting. What do we want this to look like?

And what are we learning from this? Because it’s a gift. Everything is. So the way that we look at it and the lens that we look through is super important in these moments.

[00:33:22] Chris Hudson: No, I totally agree with that. I think, accepting it for what it is, is always an opportunity. And it’s a starting point for that seed of, an idea or, a resolve or something. It feels like if you see it for what it is, then you can obviously move on from it in some way.

That’s from your own point of view. But the world of work is also complex from the point of view of noticing this in other people. There’s a lot of focus around conversations in relation to empathy and seeing other people for what they’re experiencing in one way or another.

And we’re thinking about the inner child and how that represents for yourself. We talked a lot about in the conversation so far about ourselves in this situation, but actually we’re working with hundreds of other people or kids, depending on what you do for work and you’re trying to navigate all of that. Now that we think about it, it just feels like a minefield, right? You’re trying to figure out your own self in that sense. But you’ve got hundreds of other people that you also have to be aware of. You don’t know how to respond. What are you watching out for there?

[00:34:15] Lael Stone: I often joke, we are all wounded children walking around in adult bodies, bumping into each other, right? Getting reactive, firing up from our own wounds for the other person. And this is tricky, right? It’s tricky when you have, I think a level of awareness because it can be often easier to see what’s going on for people.

It’s always hard to see our own stuff, right? We’re always better at seeing everybody else’s things. So here’s the thing I often go, we cannot control how anybody else is. We know that, right? We can’t make someone do the work. We can’t make our partner lean into doing the work. We can’t make our kids do it.

Can’t make our colleagues do it. All we have control over is perception and is our reactions in those moments. So I think one of the most powerful things as humans is if we constantly, and I say this phrase all the time from a parenting point of view, is if we learn to look behind the behaviour.

So when we see a colleague come into work and they’re angry and they’re fired up, the first thing we want to think about is, all right, well, anger is not bad, but anger usually isn’t. Is one of three things. The first is their boundaries have been crossed. So something is not feeling good and they’re needing to fire up to go, actually, this is not okay for me.

And that’s a good thing, right? We need to hold our boundaries. The second thing is there’s something they’re really passionate about. And they’re like, this doesn’t feel okay for me. And that anger is going to, create change and action to make something move. Or the third thing, which is most of the time is anger is a real mask for her. And it’s a mask for a whole lot of other feelings that sit underneath. Now anger is a very good protective mechanism from shame, from vulnerability. It can often feel empowered to feel angry, but it all, but then often feels deeply vulnerable to feel sad and upset.

So as adults, most of us have learned this is that when we feel vulnerable, anxious, unsure, upset, we default to anger and projecting that onto everyone else to protect ourselves from the healing, the feelings we’ve got underneath. So you see an angry work colleague and you can start to be curious and go, I wonder what’s going on here.

Cause that person’s angry now, a lot of the time. And again, depending on the family you grew up in where anger, what your imprint was around that. Someone’s angry in the office. You are either going to default into the trial part of you that goes into being a good boy or good girl and keep your head down and don’t upset them.

And just, don’t do it. Or you’re going to go, yeah, let’s fight, you literally fire up. And you’re like, yeah, I’m going to go and you can’t do, you know, and we start meeting that fire, right? Which again, as parents, what we do, our kids get angry and either we try and stop it by appeasing them, or we go I’m going to power over you and we get angry, whereas really ideally what we do, and this is the same in parenting and it’s in the workplace, is we take a deep breath and we get curious and go, I wonder what’s going on here.

And we might approach someone and say, Hey, I can see you’re really angry. What’s going on? Do you want to talk? What’s happening here? And they might be like, this isn’t right. And that’s what’s happening. You’re like, yeah, that’s, I can imagine how powerless that feels. Because what our anger needs is it needs safety in order to melt into the stories that are sitting underneath.

Now, here is the biggest problem is because a lot of us haven’t ever felt safe to feel or to be angry when things don’t go well in business, we get angry and then we project it over everyone else. And that to me is not good leadership at all. And I work with leaders and I talk a lot about this is that as the leader of a company or as the leader of a whole lot of people, if you are angry and you are spraying that over everyone else, you’ve just mostly put everyone back into the child position, right? So they’ve defaulted back into what their stories around anger. And actually what we’ve modelled is we’re not processing what we’re really feeling here. And so again my advice is always that you’re angry. You need a person to take it to allow that anger to come out in a safe way.

So someone who’s going to stand there and go, yep, tell me all the things let’s get it out. Let’s move it. So then you can operate from the adult wise part of you. It’s something that I’ve done with my leadership team in our school And they are brilliant at doing this. They know now that when they get angry and fired up, which happens a lot, because, when you’re dealing with children and parents and the whole thing they will often call me or I’ll go in for a session.

I’m like, go, let’s let it rip. And I’m like, swear, say whatever you need to like, I’m your safe place. And they’re like, oh I can’t stand this. And this is that, and they’ll let it all out. And I’ll be like, keep going. You’re doing a good job. And then ultimately it’ll move into some tears or some upset, or they’ll get to the point of the powerlessness inside them or where things need to change or what it’s bringing up for them.

But that as an executive, they need a safe place to take that. We all do. So here’s the thing is a circle back to your question, which is really around how do we navigate this? Well, our first thing is to be curious and to look behind the behaviour of our work colleagues and to actually not take it personally.

Cause it’s not about us. I mean, we often like to make things about us. But if we were to curious and go, I wonder what’s going on here. And what is my reaction to this? And I mean, in an ideal world, like this is my dream, Chris, my dream would be this is that as humans, when we have a reaction, when we get angry, when we get upset, we all are able to take a breath and pause and ask ourselves, What am I making this mean here?

What’s going on for me? And own our story but most of us don’t, we then just take it and project it onto everyone else. Now imagine what the world would look like if we all had the capabilities to be able to pause and navigate what’s going on here. Now that to me would be ideal, right? But that takes a level of consciousness.

And then also, and we haven’t even touched on this. We all also have trauma, right? Which is a trauma that we’ve had throughout our whole life. And so often we are coming to life and reacting from our trauma spaces as well. So when we bring a trauma informed approach to work, when we are able to be aware of where our triggers are and stuff like that, and be able to work through it, we are less likely to be reactive.

We are less likely to interact with others in that way. So, it’s complex, it’s massively complex. And because as humans, again, as we’re saying, most of us have not been taught how to navigate our feelings, have not been taught to pause and go, what’s happening for me here? It’s a completely foreign language.

It is big. And our job, as a human is when we are working with colleagues and we do see it is to not default into judgment, but to default into curiosity and compassion. I wonder what’s happening for that person. Do they need someone who can come over without judgment and say, Hey, are you okay, or can I help you in some way?

Or what’s going on for you here? Because when we sense that someone is safe and nonjudgmental and can hold it, then often we get to the root cause of what’s going on. That’s powerful.

[00:40:28] Chris Hudson: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. The situation around, I don’t know, somebody getting angry at work is right at the extreme, it feels and there are so many other instances as you’re talking that kind of pop into my mind around where judgment might be present, because I think that it’s not just about when somebody, your work colleague, your boss is angry, but it’s also about, if it’s a strongly held opinion, or if they’re coming across in a really passionate way, or if it’s ego, or if it’s bravado, or if it’s this or that.

Like the kind of realm of judgment within the work context is ever present. It feels you’re always there. And you’re noticing other people for what they are and what they stand for and how they behave and what they’re saying and judgment. If we can think about that more broadly, not just in the situations where, somebody’s getting so frustrated. They’re shouting about it but actually more broadly, we have to be a bit more accepting by the sounds of it.

[00:41:14] Lael Stone: We do, and I think it’s, I don’t know, my work over these years has always been to be super curious as to the story behind the story. So when somebody is acting with, as you say, their ego is really at play, or there’s a lot of bravado and I’m right, or this is how we should do it or whatever.

Like for me, I’m always like, huh, I wonder what the story is there. Now, usually when we see a lot of stuff like that, we can presume that there’s sometimes a worse self worth story. I’m not good enough. I need to prove myself. This is how it looks. It’s the louder we get, the more we talk over the top of people, that kind of stuff.

There’s often a like, I need to be heard here. Like, hear me, see what’s going on. Whereas the person who’s able to pause and then say something quiet, very profound, or this is what I think, that kind of stuff. We tend to listen more because we’re like, Oh, it comes from more of an embodied place. So you know, it’s really interesting what you’re saying.

Again we are all doing the best job we know how as humans, right? And I have a saying, we are always coming from protection. So if we have a story around I’m not good enough, or people don’t take me seriously, all that kind of stuff, then how are we going to protect that narrative? Well, sometimes we’re going to do it by coming over the top and being loud and always needing to get our ideas out there.

Or sometimes we will do it by hiding, and we won’t speak up and we won’t say something because people might laugh at my ideas or, it’s not okay for me to have a voice. Again, we all take it on in our own interesting ways. And I come back to again. As a leader, if we are able to be curious about this and to get to know the people that work for us and what is happening, and we begin to understand more of their story, then we are going to know how to get the best out of them.

We are going to know how to work with them so that they actually do not have to play this game or do it in a certain way that actually doesn’t serve them. That to me, I think is brilliant leadership that we are always curious to go, all right, let’s see the themes that play out here and how do I get the best out of the people that I work with, so that it benefits all. There are so many different pathways you can go down with this, right? It’s very interesting because again, as humans, we are complex, beautiful, flawed, imperfect humans, and we all come together and then we all come together to work. And it’s a miracle that we all get through the day sometimes when we’re all bouncing up against each other with all our wounds and stories and traumas and beliefs, really.

[00:43:24] Chris Hudson: That’s all part of the fun. That’s why people go to the pub on a Friday. No, I think there’s some interesting stuff in that. There’s the sort of I guess, the playground politics of working in an office or, working, any kind of work environment.

There are things going on and there are stories and it’s always like this kind of wonderful mix of, business objectives, personal life and other stories that come out through the mix, you know, there’s the aspect I want to touch on, which is around, the control that the business has over people a little bit and how that makes people feel, because I think that in some cases particularly at a leadership level, if things are decided and people aren’t consulted in the right way, then, initiatives can be introduced in some way or another and people almost have to just toe the line, a little bit and just go along with what’s being proposed.

So I think there’s an element of masking sometimes, and we’ve talked about authenticity, but it’s almost and this comes up a lot in relation to I guess vulnerability and the topic of that work, how much of yourself should you reveal and how authentic can you be if what you’re being presented with doesn’t sit comfortably with you.

So just wondered whether you had a perspective on that in some way.

[00:44:30] Lael Stone: I think it comes back to again, what we are willing to do and what we’re not willing to do. And that’s going to look different for every human. So for me personally I learned from a very young age, I need to be my own boss. do not like being told what to do. It’s pretty clear for me.

I don’t like being locked into things. I like to have the freedom to move how I want to move. I’m really creative. And all of a sudden at 10 o’clock at night, I’ll have a big idea. And I’m like and I’ll just start working for a few hours because it’s dropping in. And I need the freedom to do that, which is why I started my first business when I was really young.

Cause I was like, nah, I’ve got to make my own money, my own way. Because it does not feel good for my spirit to be trapped into something. Even when we built the school, I was like, I need the flexibility to come and go. I cannot be here every day and my team are like, okay, let you do you right.

But I was like, that’s who I am as a being. It’s interesting. My husband and I, we share the same birthday and he’s exactly the same. He’s. He’s a designer and he’s worked for himself right from the very beginning as well. Cause we both kind of value that. That’s just who we are. We’re just like, yep, that’s who we are as people.

And none of that’s right or wrong. Now for other people, that sounds deeply overwhelming and I couldn’t, I don’t want to work by myself and I need more structure and we’re all different. So it’s not about a right and wrong. I really do think it comes back to our willingness. Of what feels okay for us.

Now, for some people being authentic is a very important value for them. And if they are working in a space where they don’t feel like they can be authentically themselves, then they’re going to feel the rub and they’re going to feel challenged by it. And maybe the challenge is to stand up and be authentic and say, actually no, this doesn’t feel good for me.

And this is where I stand on this issue, or this is what it looks like and see what happens. And maybe That is the right place for them to be and things shift and change, or it’s not. And they find somewhere else where that is valued. Like I’ve seen that a lot with people over the years that I’ve worked with, right?

We stay in stuff because it’s familiar and not because it’s actually good for us. We do that a lot as humans. We’re very scared of change. So I’ll stay in something that feels crap, just because at least I know it, I know the level of crap I’m getting, so I’ll stay here. Now, then you also might have a person who’s that’s cool.

I see the bigger picture here and the company’s doing that way. And I’m all right with that. Like I still get to sit in my little space and do what I do and work feels okay for me and I can go home at the end of the day and that’s all right. And for someone else, that’s going to be fine. And so I think it is really about where do we sit?

What are we willing to have in our world? I think that’s going to look different for everyone. I do not think there’s a one size that fits all. And in any company, business, school, medical system, in any system, there is always going to be stuff that people are not going to like, because when you have to move a whole bunch of people in a certain direction, or you are creating something that’s for the bigger whole.

There’s always going to be stuff that people are going to jump up against, that’s going to be the rub. And really the whole idea of a company or an organisation is to know who they are and to be true to who they are as that business, as that authentic, this is what we stand for. And the leader of those businesses, their job is to really hold true to that and guide it in the most conscious way possible.

That’s what I believe. But that often doesn’t happen that way, because then we have people who are just coming in, trying to get their needs met and then others that will push up against it. And that’s the beautiful, messy ecosystem of any big system that we have is there’s going to be stuff that’s going to come up.

One of the things that, we have learned a lot from our school is that, because it is a business has to run as a business, but we are also a school that is educating and doing something different. And we are also our top value is emotional awareness. So our school is based on the authenticity to, for kids to express their feelings in ways that feel good.

We’re non punitive discipline, which means we don’t use punishments and rewards, so therefore you’ve got to build a relationship of connection. And it was very clear for me right from the beginning that if we are to do this, we have to do it with the adults as well. So the adults have to feel supported.

We have to make it safe for them to be authentic and vulnerable. We have to give the team the support to do that. So, we really saw, we cannot just say we’re going to do this with the kids and not do it with the team. It’s not going to work. And so that was a really important thing that we know of who we are as our business of this school of what we do.

Now, what’s interesting is you have people that come and want to work with us, which is amazing, or families that want to come and be part of it. And what begins to become apparent is they’re not aligned with that, right? And so that’s where the rub happens. And part of the journey of it was actually to keep going, no, but this is who we are.

And this is what we stand for. And it’s okay if it’s not right for you. And so then we did have some families leave and it’s in for right for them. And we did have staff members who came and part of our values, we have to be vulnerable and real. And that felt too confronting for them. And so it wasn’t the right place for them to work.

Now, for other people, they’re dying to work here because they’re like, Oh, this is what I want. I want to be real. I want it to be seen. I want it to be that stuff, but for others, it just didn’t feel right. And that is okay. There’s not a, this is perfect for everybody, but one of the goals of that is knowing who we are and knowing what we stand for and holding that as our piece. And again, it comes up to the individual. Am I willing to do that? Does that feel in alignment with me? Yes, no, all those kinds of things. Now, hopefully the business is doing it from a beautiful, ethical, conscious point of view. Sometimes not, right?

And that’s where people will leave. But this is the beautiful opportunity for growth, for learning, for us to figure out as humans, where do I want to sit within this? What feels good for me? What doesn’t? And this is where, again, we get to learn about our non negotiables. We learn about what we value as humans and what feels good for us and that’s the beautiful thing about the world is we’re all different and we all don’t have to look at it the same way, but there, we want to find a space where it feels in alignment for us to be able to stand in that place authentically, that feels good. That for me, I think is the goal there.

[00:50:12] Chris Hudson: that’s the ambition, then it feels like getting there sometimes can be quite hard from the point of view of just friction I mean, the situation around telling your company that you don’t feel like there’s a fit there or telling your manager that their way of working isn’t, you’re not responding well to it.

You’re almost inviting judgment on yourself for putting that opinion forward a lot of the time and actually leaving on bad terms with companies is something that a lot of people fear because their reputation is then, shot a little bit. So, yeah it’s a tricky scenario.

[00:50:41] Lael Stone: I think with kindness and respect, and I think when we can turn up to any space and say, I really would value having a conversation and we bring it back to I, I statements, I feel, that it feels a bit compromising for me when you ask me to do this because I feel like it’s not ethically balanced with me. And I’m wondering if there’s a way we can work with it. Again, most people, most, if we’re aware enough, are open to conversations that don’t come from a place of power over an attack. When we go into any conversation and we are straight away, like you are doing this wrong, that wrong, what else is there to do, but be defensive.

That’s all there is. And so I think that is, and I absolutely hear that it’s a game. We sometimes have to play, and this is why I often talk about leadership is exactly the same as parenting. You don’t go into a child and you start pointing your finger at them and telling them all the things they do wrong and stuff like that.

What are they going to do? They’re going to fire up and get angry, or they’re going to go into shutdown and shame. We don’t want that. We want to go in and we want to connect with them. And then we want to say, Hey, my love, this is what I’m noticing. Can we be aware of this? How could we do this better?

We’re learning and growing and again, as we all have the opportunity to do that as humans is to meet it from a place of, can we discuss this? Because my value is to have a great working environment or what I really want is to find a way that we could work together so you can get the best out of me, because at the moment, I know what doesn’t work for me is when someone yells at me.

It makes me shut down and not work. Can we find another way to communicate within these? Now that takes so much courage to have those conversations cause most of the time it’s the child part of us turning up at work, feeling like we’re naughty or wrong. And that’s why it feels scary. So I often say to people, how do you bring the adult self to come and have a conversation?

Now, if you go and have a conversation like that, and it still doesn’t land well, then at least you have spoken from that adult authentic place. And then you get to decide, does this feel the right place for me? Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe I’m actually better off somewhere else. Maybe I am getting paid enough to go, you know what?

I can suck this up. And that, that works for me right now. Like it’s, again we all have choice within it of what feels okay. In my ideal world, we would have leadership and management who would understand all this, who would know how to communicate in these ways so we can say, how can I get the best out of you?

How can we work with this so that we can all thrive here because again, ideally that’s what we want.

[00:52:57] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s a bit of a flick switch between feeling vulnerable and feeling you have that have no control. Almost like bringing out that inner child that we were describing and then the person that feels empowered and that light switch could go on and off all day at work, or it could be a bit more regulated than that, but it just feels like as long as you know how to manage it, it’s probably okay.

Some people would know more than others probably.

[00:53:19] Lael Stone: Yeah. And I think that the powerlessness stuff you’re talking about, it’s really poignant because a lot of the times we do feel powerless in our world. And when we feel powerless, our default is to want to empower over. So we then go, what can I control? If I can’t control this, what can I control?

And so then we look to, well I’ll power over someone else less than me so I feel better, because someone’s pushing down on me. It’s like the whole bullying thing, right? If someone’s treating you badly, then you’ll often treat someone else badly because you’re like, I want you to know how bad I feel.

So I’m going to do this. I’m going to feel more powerful within that. And I know that is alive and well in the workplace, right? It happens, so I think it’s one of those things where we have to be super curious as to, what is going on for me here? Where is my powerlessness?

And what do I need in order to feel powerful or to feel at least seen and connected to where I know that I’m being valued, and that there is worth there because all humans, that’s what we want. We want to be seen. We want to be valued. We want to know that someone actually sees what we’re doing and going, hey we really thank you for the work that you’re doing here.

I really see that. Yeah, it’s another really important part of a business running well is that out the people that work, they go, Hey, I am respected and seen and valued for what I’m doing. And when we don’t feel that again, it can tap up that imprint of nobody sees me. Nobody knows that, I’ve got any goodness that we can go right back into the wounded child that says, see, there’s more evidence here, but we don’t see it.

That I’m not worthy because nobody recognises me. Nobody sees me. We keep playing that loop over and over again of our story that says I’m not worthy. And sometimes we call in the right people just to keep playing out that story for us instead of us going, actually, what’s turning up for me here.

There’s a little five year old in me. That’s feeling like I’m not good enough. All right. Well, what does that five year old need? That five year old needs to know, hey that was a story that we took on board when we were little, and you are enough and what do we need to do to work with that so that we don’t continue to keep attracting that into our world.

[00:55:11] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I mean, it’s a cool one. I remember listening to a previous podcast episode that you featured on. You were talking about, I think, a dispute or something that like a disagreement, I’ll put it, that you were having with your husband and you were talking about, how old are you in this situation?

How old are you right now? Which is cool and I wondered how much of that discussion about your younger self or anyone’s younger self we could bring into the world of work and how we could do that in some way.

[00:55:33] Lael Stone: Well we can, right? I mean, you have to have the language around it. And I think people have to understand what you’re doing. Cause it’s not going to be great if you’re standing around the water

cooler and someone’s venting and you go, how old do you feel right now? So this is again, something that we have done at our school and my amazing team.

What I love the most about them is they’re so willing to go to these places because they know how important this is. So, one of the things when one of my teams having a really hard time and they’re angry and I’ll listen to all the upset first, and then I will often ask them, Who’s here and they know what I mean when I’m saying who’s here.

I’m like, is this a young child part of you? Or is that like your mother standing in the corner with all the criticisms that you’ve taken on board, or is that your sister relationship that you have? And when we often say that they’ll stop and they’ll go, I feel like I’m this, and this story’s happening.

And I’m like brilliant. So we’re back in the place where all of a sudden we’re like, this is the wound surfacing in this moment here. And most of the time it’s got nothing to do really with what’s happening in this moment. It’s just, there’s a whole story there. I I do tell a story about one of our beautiful guides who worked at our school.

And she, one day I walked up to school and she was really upset. And she was lots and lots of tears. And I went into the office with my principal and she’s like full, just crying. And she’s saying things like, I’m not going to teach him anymore. And it’s too hard. And I don’t want to do it.

And she’s really fired up about this student and I’m like, oof, there’s something here. And you can tell there’s something cause the charge is high. And so I’m like, okay, tell me more. And she’s getting out all their anger and I’m like what is it that comes about with this student with you?

And she says something like he just makes me feel stupid. So this is an adult and this is like an eight year old she’s talking about and I’m like this is interesting. Her story here is that this eight year old makes her feel stupid. And so then I say to her, well, does this feeling remind you of something?

Do you know this from somewhere? And she stops and she says, I felt this my whole life. She said, my sister used to tell me I’m stupid. And she said, and I always felt like this at school. It took me longer to learn, and I always felt like I was stupid. And I was like, ah, and as we start talking about these stories that are very familiar to her, you know, I do this question of well, how old were you?

when that kind of happened. And she’s sharing that. And then I said to her, if you imagine that the younger part of you is sitting in front of you, what would you want to tell her? And she said, well, I’d want to tell her that she’s not stupid. She just learns differently. And that, we just need to go a bit slower and that it is okay.

And so as she’s saying all these things, everything’s softening in her body and she’s stopping crying and she’s calming down and then she looks at me and she goes, Oh God, this has got nothing to do with my student, does it? Like, like he’s the catalyst for the stuff. Now that happens everywhere with everything we get triggered about stuff because it’s like the younger parts of us are wanting to heal the stuff that’s the story. So, she talks through that. She comes back into balance within her and then she goes and there is no longer the charge with their student.

Then they form this beautiful relationship and they move forward. So this is us every day with everybody, right? We have things that we bounce up again and we make it mean certain things. Now, again, I would love if at the workplace we could all pause and go, what am I making this mean? And how old do I feel right now?

And brilliant, right? But a lot of people don’t have the language around it. They’d be looking at you crazy. What are you talking about? Or don’t even know as a concept that a lot of our stories from our past keep turning up in the future. Or a lot of our stories are what shapes, how we respond and react to stuff, right?

That’s still a huge concept for people to get their head around. But I have to tell you, after doing this work for a long time, to me, I’m like, it’s so clear. It’s so blatantly obvious everywhere that we are all again, as I said, young wounded children in adult bodies, walking around, bumping into each other and then blaming each other when our wounds get, which touched on or when our traumas get activated and, so I think it is amazing if we can start to even have conversations that say, what are you making this mean? What’s here for you? I think this is where we would actually all begin to operate from hopefully our adult selves. This is where it could be incredibly powerful.

[00:59:28] Chris Hudson: No, I mean, it’s brilliant. I mean, it’s been such a good chat today. Thank you so much, Lael for coming on and to sort of finish on the positivity that I mentioned at the start, it just feels if you can be aware of this, you’re finding out more about yourself through the situations that you encounter at work and through your lives really.

And we know this, but it feels like if we can be even more aware of it, with eyes wider open, then we can actually understand it and probably use it for great good, for channeling positivity, for facilitating better conversations and for moving on a little bit, I mean, people that have had those situations in the past don’t always get the opportunity, if they haven’t worked with psychologists and other practitioners, clinicians that don’t get the opportunity to go back to that and examine it and talk about it and think about how they’re going to move on from it or how they’re going to use it for good in their lives. But all of this feels would present itself through the workplace, you could use it as an opportunity in a way.

[01:00:18] Lael Stone: Absolutely and I do have a lot of hope and I see what we’re doing in our school actually, and I see that the children in our school are getting this on a foundational level. So this awareness, they’re owning their feelings, they’re being conscious, they’re asking for what they need.

And I have hope that as these generations move through, this is the standard that they’re going to walk into business with that we actually go, no, it’s really valid for me to hear what you’ve got going on and why that feels powerless for you. And how do we all get our needs met here and how could we all work together?

Like we could actually really shift a whole different way of business and for people to feel fulfilled and seen and valued. ’cause then we know that they’ll work better, better quality of life, better self care, well being, everything. I mean, the world needs this deeply. So I think where we sit now it’s sticky because, people are starting to get it and then they’re trying to work with it, but then a whole lot don’t, and, it’s going to take a few generations of us being able to have more consciousness and awareness, and I mean, this really is the time, the internet has opened up everything where we have more information.

We can learn more. We have access to courses and podcasts and all sorts of things that our parents and our grandparents never had. So we are the generation where the opportunity for consciousness is coming in. And that is what is exciting for me of what we can bring into a business level, because we know it’s going to thrive and work better.

And so I think that it is exciting of what is possible. I think we’re just in the messy steps at the moment where we get it. But I also think too, businesses can start like this. They can start with a foundation of this. I see the beautiful stuff we’re doing at our school of again, holding the team in this way, having these be priorities, how we educate the parents, the children, all that kind of stuff can be something that can continue on.

So I have hope that we are able to change the narrative from where it’s been for a long time in business into something that feels empowering and valued and that we actually have a business system that flows and really does work well.

[01:02:15] Chris Hudson: Yeah. I mean, I think that is ripe for disruption. You’re not going to come across many people that disagree with that. I think that there’s so much in that and it just feels like the opportunity if you think about the world, the way in which we prepare people for the world of work and welcome them into it and how they interact with, even parents, if you’re a kid and your parents are working and how those messages are coming across, is it this unhealthy thing that kind of takes you away from your time together or can it be used constructively?

How do we prepare people? It just feels your school will be probably setting up for the next future leaders within our industries, there’ll be some amazing people that come out of that experience as well.

[01:02:49] Lael Stone: Well, let’s hope so cause I think again, when we think about what schooling’s been for a long time, it was set up in the industrial age, right? It was set up to create workers. It was not set up to create creative thinkers, risk takers, all that stuff. Now we know what the world needs now is more people that think outside the box, who are those risk takers, those beautiful creative thinkers.

But in order to do that, we have to feel safe, which means, we have to be able to feel how we feel. I mean, there’s so much that speaks to why our system, education system particularly needs to change for what the future is wanting and that is my hope for our school that it sets a precedent of what is possible and that, yeah, the children that move through there are ones that are deeply connected to themselves, to the world.

Who are know their own truth and authenticity can speak what they need a deeply respectful humans, and want to take care of the earth. That’s for me, the goal in helping them to stay connected to themselves, because then we are going to create more, ethical businesses. We are going to bring changes into workplaces that are going to serve people so that we’re not doing this rat race that so many of us are in, where we juggle and hustle and all the things. And we often then go, what is this all about? What are we here for? So we don’t have to get to those questions through the crisis. We actually set up our life in a way that does feel good so that we can be in alignment with who we are because, again, that makes for healthier humans, that’s for sure.

[01:04:07] Chris Hudson: Wonderfully said. So thank you so much, Lael. I really appreciate you coming onto the show and for talking to us about all the things that you do and the stories from your school and obviously your expertise from running all the positive parenting work that you have done and for over many years is incredibly useful, I think, within a business context in discussing, what we bring to work and who we are as people and all the things we should be, aware of and asking ourselves, I think.

So thank you so much.

[01:04:30] Lael Stone: Oh, thank you. It’s been a pleasure to be here. I really do love talking about this and taking it into other spaces, so I’m grateful for the opportunity, Chris. It’s yeah, it’s been good conversation.

[01:04:39] Chris Hudson: Brilliant. Thank you. And if people want to have a if they’ve got a question, they want to get in touch where can they find you?

[01:04:43] Lael Stone: You can, well, I often joke about this. The only benefit of having a weird name is that if you Google me, I am the only Lael Stone that is on Google. Well,

[01:04:51] Chris Hudson: Awesome.

[01:04:52] Lael Stone: for now. So you can Google me and like my website is laelstone.com.au or you can find me on social media and I’ve got courses and podcasts and all sorts of things there if people want more info about my work.

[01:05:02] Chris Hudson: Brilliant. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time today.

[01:05:04] Lael Stone: Thank you.

[01:05:05] 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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