#152 How the Best Practices of Startups Relate to Your Life | Alisa Cohn

Hello and welcome. I'm Dr. Adam Dorsey, a psychologist in Silicon Valley and the host of Super Psyched, a podcast dedicated to supercharging your life. Each episode contains fun, high quality interviews with experts looking at psychology from all angles. Super Psyched is your tool to get more of what you want in your life and less of what you don't. Startups are popping up all over the globe, and having been at one during my corporate days, I can attest to the fact that they are very exciting. Yet as exciting as they are, they can be very stressful and at times, even chaotic. The founders of such companies, many of whom are clients I serve, tell me that they are often baffled by the complexities and the multiple roles they must play to get their companies launched. I recently read a book that brings order to startup chaos, and the person behind it is a legitimate master. Alyssa Cohen is a seasoned executive coach and the author of From Startup to Grown Up, Grow youw Leadership to Grow your Business. I love this book, as did thought leaders as diverse as marketing guru Seth Godin, the world's top executive coach Marshall Goldsmith, as well as the mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez. Even if you're not in a startup setting, you can learn a lot from this interview and the book about how to launch a successful mission of just about any kind, since the principles apply to all types of businesses and projects. So listen in as Alyssa and I talk about rocking a startup. Alyssa Cohn, welcome to Super Psychedelic.

Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here.

Adam. Oh, I loved your book and I'm so grateful to Jeremy Utley, who immediately, if not sooner, said, you gotta talk to Alyssa. And as soon as I completely just mainlined your book in the audio form, I understood why I took down notes upon notes. Love this book. Anybody who is in the space of startup or moving towards grownup needs to read it as the title suggests. But I actually thought the tips related also to pretty much people even outside that. Would you agree with that?

Yes. First of all, thank you very much for saying that and thank you, Jeremy, for introducing us. Several things to say about that. First of all, it is about the journey from so from startup to ground up, about the journey from founder to leader, but actually it's about the journey that all leaders go through as they grow in into being leaders. Not only that, but I'm acquainted with a dentist and she was kind enough to read my book and then she said, alyssa, all dentists should read your book. And I thought, wow, not my target audience, but thank you. Right so like, I understand these are universal concepts about personal growth, about growing into leadership, and certainly about entrepreneurship.

I love it. And thank you to the dentist for saying that. And I'm wondering the way I kind of phrased it was this is a book for pretty much anyone who wants to kick ass. And I'm wondering, like, what would be some of the basic gleanings just to kind of whet people's appetite to read the book that they might get from reading the book, even if they are not in startups. But of course, all the more salient for those who are.

Yes. So my book is divided into three sections. Managing you, managing them, the people around you, and managing the business. And all of the insights really fit under that. So first of all, the first person you lead every day is the one who wakes up in your pajamas. And you need to make sure that that person is kind of primed to perform, has a strong morning routine. Also, that person needs to have self awareness. How do you show up in the office? Frankly, at home, certainly in the office, certainly for founders to recognize that they are the boss. So their suggestions are orders, their inklings are orders, their brainstorms are orders, and of course their orders are orders. And you know, that's part of that is so managing yourself to have the self awareness to see you're showing up. And then I would move into the notion of managing others. Everybody needs to continue to hone and refine and build their skills around basic management. So delegation, giving feedback, giving difficult feedback, coaching people, holding people accountable without making them feel bad, all those specific kind of tools that you need to intermingle every single day to be a great manager and a great leader. And then finally, how do you know what the scorecard is? How do you know what you're shooting for? It's about knowing what the goals are, having structure around the goals, how to run a great meeting. I'm the only one who loves meetings. And that's because I know the potential. Yeah, the potential of meetings and how significant they are, because that's how people communicate. So those are just a few tidbits of what are in the book. And they all come and I think my signature is they come with practical tools. So it's not just like, yeah, you should be self aware, anyway, moving on. No, it's how do you be self? Aware? How do you build culture, how do you deal with your co founder?

And I love that you get granular in those areas and that you look at these three kind of emerging concentric circles from self to team to the business. And if you think about that, whether it's a startup or a dentist or a full time parent, all of the tenets apply and you nailed it. I was going to talk about meetings later, but since you brought it up, it's just too delicious not to attend to. Meetings are the bane of most people existence. I talk to scores of C level folks from Silicon Valley who just talk excessively about how much they cannot stand meetings. And in your book you drop a bomb and that is that you love meetings. And I'm wondering how meetings can actually be fruitful. By the way, it's in the book, but let's just hear what you have to say on the fly.

Okay? Well, absolutely. Well, so first of all, I think so I do love meetings and I love meetings because I actually what I say in the book, and this is true, I love the potential of meetings. We bring all these people together, they're smart, they're engaged, they have different points of view about a single subject. What's not to love? I'll tell you what's not to love. Meetings meander. Meetings don't have a purpose. Meetings don't have a goal. Meetings don't have the right people in them. Nobody knows how to facilitate a meeting to bring it to conclusion. So you need to learn those skills and understand those skills and that's what it takes to build a successful meeting. And I also say in the book, and I think this is going to be a little bit of soothing for the Silicon Valley folks, what I say in the meeting is before you have a meeting, determine the goal of the meeting and maybe you'll come to realize you don't have to meet. It's just an email. It's just an email, which is a quick chat, no meeting necessary. If you're going to go to the trouble of having a meeting, right, making sure you actually have a purpose, a goal. The goal starts with two to sync up, to communicate, to decide, to discuss. That is the goal of the meeting. And then separately, what you have is a how are we going to get there? That's the agenda and the facilitation to get there. And the last thing I want to say is my three questions to end all meetings. Number one, what do we decide here? Number two, who else needs to know? And number three, who will do what by when and if you will end your meetings with those questions, you will also do something that meetings rarely do, which is make progress. And that's important.

It's amazing because you're something of A wonderful hybrid between Mary Poppins and Gordon Ramsay. You just come in and you're like, this is how it's done, folks, and it's right and there is a solution. And I love that. There's no quality of nebulousness, if that's even a word to your directives. They make sense.

Yes.

Just before I even get to my next question, having attended various meetings to various degrees of fruitfulness, everything from looking around the room thinking, wow, this is maybe a table full of the smartest people who are being so unused in terms of their intelligence. This is such a profound squandering of talent all the way up to. I'm so glad we're having this meeting. We are just smoking it. Things are happening and we are just knocking down one clown at a time to use a kind of a carnival image. If you can imagine, you know, throwing a ball and hitting those little clowns, uh, it feels like a row of clowns getting knocked down. Fantastic. What could be more gratifying? Let's go into something that you also talk about with regard to meetings and that is having. I've been forgetting exactly how you phrased it, but it's kind of like a conflict meeting, actually. Saying, we will address conflict regularly and conflict is not a bad thing. And so many people are so averse to conflict and yet not addressed. Things persist or get worse. So let's hear what you have. Yeah, they do.

I know. So thank you for bringing that up. So the conflict meeting is a tool that I use and we'll talk about, I'm sure, later. In co founders in particular. However, any relationship needs to have practice conflict meetings so that you can then have real conflict meetings. Because normal smart adults disagree. That's normal. So how do you handle it when someone disagrees with you? How do you handle it when there is conflict, when there is disagreement about how you handled something, about how you perceive something, about what we should do? You also just about like personal slights that get in the way because everyone says, oh, it's not personal, just business. It is personal. Business is personal. So how do you deal with the fact that someone's feelings got hurt and how do we talk it out and process it rather than, you know, just shove it under the rug. And then to your point, it comes out by festering, that people sort of bring it up later, either aggressively or passive aggressively or something. And so I. The conflict meeting really has to start with sort of saying is a time and a place for us to have conflict. And if you. If you like, well, we don't have any conflict. We love each other. Like you and I, Adam, right now, we've got no conflict. We love each other. What's helpful is that you bring to the table, for example, past conflicts you've had with close relationships, maybe other things that are not between us, but that are not going right around us, so that you can really understand even your values, you can understand actually points of disagreement. So, for example, you and I, Adam, we don't have any conflict. When we look out into the company and we see things going wrong, I would say this is going wrong. And you would say, oh, that's not going wrong. No. Interesting. Now we have a conflict. It's a super mild conflict, nothing personal, easy to handle and resolve, and gets us in practice to in the future have more fundamental conflicts.

I love that idea. And I love the idea of practicing and being able to cultivate the mutual trust that accompanies navigating conflict. Because part of what leads people to becoming, from my experience, conflict averse, is the fact that there's. There isn't trust in self and trust in other. And I think we also need a taxonomy to actually describe conflict and faux conflict. Conflict, in my understanding, is the reality or perception that if I get what I want, you can't get what you want, or vice versa. But a lot of people conflate conflict with misunderstandings. We can only actually diagnose that if we talk, or differences of opinion, which may not actually lead to conflict itself. It may be that, yeah, you know, and I both go to ice cream and I'm like, wow, you're ordering that? That's shocking. The brilliant Esther Perel's point. In relationships, none of us is a carbon copy of the other, right? And by virtue of that fact, we will not see things exactly the same. And that's not a bad thing. As our friend Jeremy at Lee would say that all creativity is the byproduct of two disparate ideas coming together. And conflict is a great opportunity to rock creativity and come up with something even better than something that you and I came to the table with. So if founders are able to do that. Wow. Let's pivot, though, because you talk about one of the most flummoxing things of all, and it shows up in TV dramas, and it certainly shows up in business, and that is involving friendship and how messy things can get when we work with friends. So let's talk about that. Like, how can we be friends and business partners? What are some of the risks? What are some of the potential benefits and the multiple outcomes, some of which involve some pretty gnarly outcomes. So let's talk about that.

Challenging. Challenging. I just met yesterday with a CEO for the first time who then unveiled his issue with his business, his issues multiple with his business partner whom he's been friends with for 20 years. So this is not just a business partner. You get to have an analytical discussion about what's wrong. This is all the emotion wrapped up in a 20 year friendship. So you know what I say in the book and what is true is that you can hire your friends and you can get into business with your friends and recognize that you are taking a risk and you recognize that there is, by the way, high risk, high reward potential. There are two founders that I work with who have known each other since they were eight years old and they skateboarded together and they surf together and now they are building a company together. There are a brother and a sister who co founded together, you know, who obviously known each other a long time and have this relationship together. Those two scenarios are going along really well. They have plenty of fights, have a lot of issues, but that underlying sense of trust and affinity from having known each other for that long is always present. Now on the flip side, I've worked with plenty of founder, co, founder, CEOs who have fired their longtime friends, hired and then, you know, never retained the friendship. You know, it just, it was not going to stand the test of the business. And you know, you have to recognize that when you are getting into business with a friend, the expectations of the old relationship no longer apply and you often don't reset the table, which is what you should do. So in the back of my book, I have 14 scripts to help you navigate delicate conversations, difficult conversations, and one is about what to say to a friend when you hire the friend. And some things include a renegotiation of the relationship. We always hang out together and now that I've hired you, we don't want to hang out so publicly because everyone's going to think you're my favorite. And also there may come a day where we're going to have to part ways and I want to discuss that upfront right now because that is the thing that happens in business and you really need to address those things upfront if you want to be able to have a better perspective on hopefully being able to retain your friendship.

And what a tragedy to not have that conversation and for a 20 year relationship to go down the tubes because of business. And of course feelings are there and People do get hurt. And having as many protective conversations in place ahead of time is so, so brilliant. I found myself really tripping on the idea of you recognizing that this is a new relationship and having that conversation and saying, hey, listen, you and I, we held each other's hair while we were vomiting after being drunk and Speak for yourself. And now we are trying to bring revenue into a company, and we may have different ideas of how this is done, and there may come a day where I fire you or you fire me or something like that, and how are we going to deal with that? And that is just such a gift that you've given the readers. I just cannot state enough.

Can I add one more thing about that? In chapter four, I talk about culture, and specifically I taught. I list out a number of unintended toxic cultures. As in, you didn't plan to have a toxic culture. You didn't dream one day I'd have a company with a toxic culture. But there you go. And the friend thing plays in because people assume that your friend is untouchable. People go around your friend and don't tell you because people don't know how to address it with you, you know, that your friend might not be up to it, and so you don't hear about it until it's late in the game. One of the founders I work with, he hired somebody who he knew a little bit, and the years go by, and then it comes back to me and then to him that they can't, you know, give any feedback to this individual because he's the founder's friend. And the founder's like, wait, what? I mean, we're friends. Like, we've known each other in the context of the business, but we were not friends. I did not hire my friend. So it's not just the reality of the friendship, it's also the perception of the friendship you've got to be mindful of.

I love that idea. And what are some things that you would tell founders who are actually friends, not just the perceived as friends, but actual friends. What would you put in place so that people would know to be able to engage even though the friendship is there? So let's say you and I are besties and we've got some employees, and somebody's really worried about telling me that I really blew it, and they need to tell that to you. How would you create that line of communication so that they could come to you and share that with you?

Yeah, that's a great question. It's the same way that you open up the line of communication for you to be able to tell me anything. So in general, employees don't tell the boss things. That's because they have a whole baggage of things called boss. They certainly don't tell the CEO and founder things because that's the boss and the founder CEO. So you need to go overboard to get people to tell you the truth. And then the way to do that is to reward people for telling you the truth. One of the all hands and one of my clients, you know, someone stood up and was like very even aggressive with the founder. And the founder was very taken aback and also said in front of everybody, I really want to appreciate you for saying your truth. It's really important that everyone does that, even if it's something I don't want to hear. Another technique is to not let people into a meeting unless you tell them, unless they bring you bad news, Right? So you've got to bring me bad news. Otherwise you don't get to be part of this executive meeting or this special meeting or whatever people want to be in that meeting. And finally, you need to have your people around who will always come and tell you what the vibe is and tell you the truth about the vibe and what's going on around your company.

So important. And I think about that great book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, in which he describes a really troubling issue with. I believe it was Korean Airlines. And I. If I'm speaking out of school, I apologize. I'm fairly sure it was. And cultural issues. The junior pilot would not tell the pilot. The senior pilot, hey, we got a problem ahead of us.

Yeah, we're about to crash.

We're about to crash. And yeah, lo and behold, they would.

They crashed.

And one of the things they needed to cultivate was that line of communication. And to my knowledge, Green Airline has gone from one of the least safe to one of the safest airlines. And I always tell my friends, one of my descriptors of a friend is, you will let me know if I have spinach on my teeth or if my flies unzip. I need to know these things in life because I don't know if I don't know. And similarly, in business to tremendously catastrophic outcomes, if things are not discussed, we got a problem. So I love that idea of creating that type of psychological safety. And I'm going to pivot to that because that is the most crucial element. I think if I was asked as a psychologist, obviously I have a bias like psychological safety is one of the most Crucial elements to a successful enterprise. And you speak about that extensively throughout your book. So I was just like, amen, sister. This is great. Let's talk about psychological safety and what the presence of it looks like and what the absence of it looks like, as well as what each reality, the outcomes of each reality.

Yeah. So the reason psychological safety is so important is not to make you a nicer person. And it's also it's not for you to be nice to people. Which kind of people think, I know, I should be nicer. Right. It's not about that. It is about this. You got to think about what are the conditions people bring out their best. You could think about that for yourself when you are feeling. By the way, I'm going to just caveat that by saying that founders are not like normal people. Right. So under pressure, they do tend to do in some cases better. However, when you're feeling criticized, if you think about your employees, when they're feeling criticized, when they're feeling they can't do anything right and they're feeling under pressure in an extreme way, what happens? They make mistakes. They are concerned and are afraid to speak up. And they are not getting their your best out of them. They're just being order takers if that you're not getting their creativity out of them. I saw this in act. This is non psychological safety. I saw this in action in a meeting actually a few years ago where one of the co founders is, let's say, passionate. And he was getting very passionate in this meeting with an employee that he kind of thought didn't have the goods. And so the employee was speaking up, the founder really drilled into him in front of everybody. And this employee started faltering like. And then it did not go well. Meeting ended and I was myself confused. So I went and talked to him and I said, what were you trying to say over there? And then he beautifully articulated the right answer. And the reason he couldn't pull that out in the meeting is because he felt attacked. So that is the downside of psychological safety. The upside and the conditions around psychological safety, like when it's present, is that people feel they can say what there is to say without being shamed, without being victimized, without being attacked. And that brings out their capacity, their ability to be wrong. So they can throw in ideas, they can be wrong. No one's mad at them, no one makes them feel like an idiot. And then they keep throwing out ideas. And then suddenly you're like, wow, that's a great idea. Thank you for Sharing that. And you know, that's really back to Jeremy Uttley's work again about how it's not about having one good idea, it's about having a lot of bad ideas. And so when you create the conditions where people can feel good about their bad ideas by mistake, they're gonna throw out good ideas. And that's what you need in your startup.

I love that so much. And one of the things that we know in psychology is that as anxiety increases, intellectual functioning decreases. We have what's called an amygdala hijack. The lower portions of our brain, which are involved with our emotional realities begin to hijack our prefrontal cortex, which is not great if we're trying to do executive planning and really generate creative ideas. So I'm so grateful for you for reinforcing this idea. I do want. I often think about my sons who will be in the workforce one day, and I really want them to be able to experience the totality of who they are. And that's incumbent upon leaders recognizing the value of psychological safety so that they can show up with their whole selves. And that being said, you're not also saying, oh, that their whole selves mean they're inappropriate sides, they're parts that don't show up at work. Let's talk a little bit about that for a sec. Because you also very wisely bring in vulnerability as a very important thing to be able to have the safety to show up with. And yet there are limits to that as well. So let's talk about what is the just right amount of, say, vulnerability and bringing yourself into the equation.

Yeah, and I'm going to add the word, the bogeyman, authenticity. I got to be authentic. I got to be me. And the thing is that people don't actually want you to be authentic. They want you to be in air quotes, authentic, which means they want you to show up with the right amount of vulnerability, but not too much. They want to show you. They want you to show up with a little tear coming down your eye, but not bawling, write your eyes out. They need to sort of see you as the leader and they have a picture in their mind about what that looks like. So your authenticity, which is, let's say terrified, as in I'm terrified, or cranky and angry, as in you guys are all idiots. That kind of authenticity is not actually going to ever work for you. It is to acknowledge and have self awareness about your own humanity. Allow some chinks in the armor, because if you got it all buttoned up and you're all set. People cannot contribute to you, and people cannot contribute to the company. And it's surprisingly demotivating when they realize that there's nothing they can add. So you've got to find that balance of recognizing that you need to reach out to people and ask them for help and let them help you, but also maintain the demeanor of, we're heading over there. There's going to be a lot of obstacles on the way, but we're going to get there. And I have confidence in our ultimate direction no matter what catastrophe is facing us right now.

I love that. And the idea of tempering it and speaking in a manner that keeps the bridge intact also keeps the recognition that the leader is human but in charge at the same time.

Right.

It sounds like a really tough equilibrium, but a really important one to constantly work on. And that being said, I'm going to go to the idea that you are one of the top executive coaches. You're in Manhattan. You've got all of the education, all the experience that anybody would want to in an executive coach. And yet many people don't actually know what an executive coach is and what an executive coach can do. I was wondering if you could speak to what is an executive coach and what can somebody like you do for a team?

Sure. So an executive coach. Coach comes from, like, the Latin word to convey. So a coach is not a consultant. I'll tell you what to do. A coach is not a therapist, which is, let's talk about your mother. And a coach is not a mentor, which is like, here's what I did when I was in corporate. A coach walks beside you and pushes you and helps you be the best you can be. Creates space. And by that, I literally mean time. Like, I meet with my clients for an hour, and in that time, they have. One of my clients once said was forced reflection. You're going, going, going, going, going. We slow down together and examine what's going on around here. How are you showing up? How do you need to show up? How do you want to show up? What does the company require of you today? And those. And I, you know, ask those questions to. And also I ask questions around, you know, what do you think you should do? And what are the conditions that you're using to make these decisions? Now, some coaches, I would say, stay in the world of what we call inquiry, which is asking questions, asking questions. I don't want you wandering around the desert for three months waiting to get to the right answer. If I. Back to your point. Earlier about, you know, Gordon, Francie and Mary Buffett, like, and their love child. If I have a point of view about what I know you should do, because of my 22 years of experience having seen this movie multiple times, I'm going to share my point of view. And if you're really doing it wrong, I'm going to say, you're really doing it wrong. So it's the combination of helping people find their own truth and reminding them of what they already know and then showing. Also declaring with my insight and my perspective how I think this is going to go and how the options that I think you have available to you.

Love that definition. And I can only imagine how many months are saved by just taking a few hours to reflect. Reflect just the way you did about the root causes of things, helping people tap in. I'm thinking about, you know, the leaky faucet metaphor and saying, okay, well, let's just bring a whole bunch of buckets. Rather than address the leaky faucet, which is what you do, and you say, guys, there's a leaky faucet in the room, and you can bring in buckets till the cows come home. But that's not going to address the underlying cause. And it seems like that is one of the great things you do. One of the things that I also took tremendous delight in is the idea of the user's manual. And I want to talk about that for a second. My best boss, Martin Dorner, may his memory be a blessing. And I talk about him a lot because he was my mentor. He was the best boss of all time. He showed up and said, I'm going to give you my David Letterman top. Before I was a psychologist, I was in the corporate sphere. I'm gonna give you my David Letterman.

That's what you're gonna say. Before I was a psychologist, I was a TV show host. Talk show host.

That would be amazing. That was my missed opportunity. Dang.

Top 10 list.

Never too late. But Martin shows up and says, give me your top 10 list and of what you expect from a boss, and I'm going to tell you my top 10 list of what I expect from you so that we can know each other. And you beautifully sum it up as a user's manual. Let's talk about the user's manual for a second. I imagine you sometimes even face resistance when you come up with this brilliant idea. But let's talk about the benefits of the user's manual and what it is.

Sure. Well, it's really a lot. What you just said, it's basically like, let me show you my. Let me show you on the outside, my inside. So I'm not going to have you guess. And it's the tactical things about the way I am. How do you win with me? How do you get a gold star with me? How do you get a black mark with me? How do you. How do I best get communicated with? I know personally for myself, when someone calls me out of the blue, I mostly I'm like, oh, why are you calling me? Right? As opposed to emailing me or sending me a text saying, can I call you now or is it a good time to talk as opposed to other people? And this, actually, this happened with a CEO and a CFO that I work with. The CEO would say, you know, please don't just call me, send me an email. Let's find a time to talk. And the CFO would say, if it's important to talk, just call me. And you can imagine the conflict that comes up without even realizing it when they have those just very different communication preferences and styles. Doesn't mean one's right and what's wrong. It also doesn't mean that you who don't like to receive calls can never, like, just deal with picking up a call, but it becomes this thing that's out in the open, like, okay, I know I called you and you hate calling. All right, tell me what's up, right? And. Or like, thank you for emailing me. I know you just prefer to call me or whatever. It's the way we operate together. And then it's also about standards, right? These are the kinds of things I expect. I expect, first of all, for you to paint the picture and then I want you to back it up with data. Or I don't want the story, I don't want the picture. I just want the spreadsheet or whatever that is. And those are part of what you're talking about in terms of the top 10 list. It's the way my makeup is, and you don't have to always do it my way, and I'm not going to always do it your way, but if we know what our trigger points are, what our high points are, we'll just get along better and it'll be quicker to operate together.

Love that so much. And for couples, I do this all the time, including an idea called the magic words. What do you need to hear from your partner to really feel loved? And thankfully, we've gone beyond the golden rule, which is doing to others as you want done to you really half baked. What I want done to me may not be exactly what my wife wants from me and I'm giving her love, as I might think of it, but she may actually want the exact opposite. Just to your point about those two different CEOs, so I love that idea. One of the big takeaways I've gotten in life in general, and certainly in your book, is that there is often a chasm between so called common sense and common practice. What we know and what we do. And I'm imagining that you periodically will be sharing something with a leader and they'll say to you, yeah, I already know that. And you have to ask, yeah, but how much of that are you actually doing? What are some common things? Some common, I'm going to call them cockroaches that you see in offices where people think they know what they're doing and they're actually not doing those things that they actually know?

Yeah, that's a great question. One thing that comes to mind is communication. So the CEO, the founder, the leader needs to narrate for people what's going on and they forget to do that. They do it one time and that's it. And they don't have a regular way to narrate either. In all hands, what I say in the book and what I say to my clients so they make fun of me, is you've got to communicate in all hands, in large groups, in small groups, in one on one, in writing. They need to learn how to do that and then do it consistently. And they would say, I'm already doing that. I worked with a CEO and I asked her if she was talking about culture and how she was frustrated because people weren't doing it right. And I said, well, have you shared your expectations with them? And she said, all the time, yes. And I said, oh, well, tell me more. So she said, I sent them a slack and she goes into her slack and she scrolls like she waits for me. Wait, I'm going to show you. Right, so scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and scroll up. There's the slack that she sent. I'm like, okay, let's talk about effective communication. And so I think that's one very big one. And I think the notion of how as founders grow into leaders, when you're somebody and you're eight people in your company, you're 25 people in your company, and now you're 50 people in your company, there's a moment where it becomes like a real company. It's not just this funny thing you're doing with your friends. And you've got to have real systems and you've got to have a real all hands and you can't just say whatever comes into your head anymore. And I think those are the moments also that are not, as you said, there may be common sense, but not common practice.

And you're speaking to some extent about asynchronous versus synchronous conversation. And asynchronous is like text and synchronous is like in real time. And that idea of, well, I articulated that kind of hidden in the text of a slack from God knows when and being befuddled that people aren't doing what seems, seemed like kind of a parenthetic thing somewhere in slack in an asynchronous conversation. Yeah, I could see how it's like. Well, I did articulate it. So therefore it was communicated, except for the fact it wasn't communicated with the best medium. And I love that you brought that one up as something that somebody may be unconscious about doing. Before I get to my final question, is there anything I haven't asked but I should have?

Well, the only thing I would just add is I want to emphasize that there are scripts in the back of the book. Scripts for you help you have delicate conversations, difficult conversations. Conversations that you as a leader, you as a founder, you as a family member need to have on a regular basis, which are hard to have. That's why they're delicate or difficult. So I want to help you get your mouth around the words. And there are additional scripts on my website, alyssacon.com scripts to help you navigate additional difficult conversations. Because I'm very committed to people not having to wait and agonize over having the conversations that make them uncomfortable. I want them to have the words. They can get their mouth around the words.

Brilliant and beautiful. And what a gift to give somebody the words almost. I mean, that's one of the things that so many of us are bereft of, having those words. And you provide them. I'm sure your background in journalism comes to the fore. Your MBA from Cornell, I mean all these things. And of course your 22 years of actual rubber meets the road experience. And now I'm going to my final question. Oh, and by the way, of course, folks, listening as always in my show notes is a link to Alyssa's website as well as her book. And I'm positive that you are going to derive a huge ROI from reading her stuff or being in contact with her. And my final question is this if you had the magical skills to confer upon all humanity, this is a big one. One skill or one insight that would dramatically improve the lives of individuals as well as perhaps people associated with those individuals. What would that skill or insight be and what effect do you think it would have on both the individual as well as the stakeholders, the other people in their lives?

What a beautiful question, a lovely question, a graceful question. I'm going to give you my answer as follows People, everybody believe in yourself and then act like it it. And the impact would be that you would showcase your own gifts to the world with more confidence and less editing and more full throttle and all of us together would feel less constrained all the time and self doubt and worrying. I think worrying gets in the way. I think wondering gets in the way. So I would just say to everybody, believe in yourself, act like it and go for it it.

I love that so much. Cheers sister. Oh Alyssa, I knew I was going to love meeting with you and this has been a blast. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with my listeners and thanks for contributing to the minds of leaders, helping not only their businesses, but the ripple effect into all stakeholders who have any exposure.

I loved our chat Adam and thank you so much for having me. It was so fun.

I know. This is Dr. Adam Jones Dorsey thanking you for listening to Super Psyched. If you know anyone who might like it or who might benefit from listening, share it. And if you like the episode, please hit subscribe.