How to Flourish and Be More Productive By Leading From a Place of Wholeness with Mieke Jacobs

Productivity comes from attuning rather than forcing and pushing myself through this and getting a lot of work done. If leaders can let the solutions come to them or let the help come to them instead of pushing through. It's so magical.

Welcome to the Happiness Squad Podcast. Your weekly dose of practical tips and inspirations to help you operate at your fullest potential by integrating the science of flourishing into how you live, work and lead. In each episode, we will share insights, tips and stories from leading experts, company executives, and flourishing solution providers that you can implement right away to make happiness your competitive edge and find more success, joy, health, love and meaning in everything you do. What if strategy and poetry aren't opposites, but twins? What if leadership needs tuning into not just what we know, but what we feel, sense, and cannot yet explain? In this episode, I sit down with Mickey Jacobs, author of A Poet Assassin, Global Transformation Facilitator, Energy Mastery Guide, and the Systemic Intelligence Pioneer. Miki's work lives at the intersection of logic and mystery, strategy and soul. Through poetry, polarities and powerful questions, she invites leaders and organizations to return to wholeness, to remember that healing and high performance are not at odds. We talked about the cycles of life and leadership, the difference between doing and being, and why silence, spaciousness and energy are essential ingredients for true work that helps you flourish and unlock your full potential. If you've ever wondered how to lead from your deepest wisdom, not just your job description, this conversation is your call to stillness and action. Let's dive in. Hi Mike, it's so lovely to be here with you and to record and share your beautiful poems that you've written in your latest book. But frankly, your rich set of work in the field of leadership and flourishing with our listeners. So thank you for being here.

Yeah, it's such a pleasure. And I can't wait to weave our fields of work together. So. Yeah. Because that leads to unexpected exploration. So thank you for having me.

Absolutely. And you know, art is such a beautiful vehicle, you know, as a way to kind of really awaken the soul, whether it is painting or poetry or dance. You shared some of your poems from your new book, the Poet Assassin, and I can't wait for our listeners to experience some of that magic. But before we go there, I just wanted to ask, what does the title Poet Assassin mean to you? You know, share with us this just a position behind it and these polarities that you have navigated your whole life and now you've brought it to. Brought it into this field, this work.

Yeah. And I think you caught that very well, of course, many different people read something different in that title. And of course, the interesting thing with poetry is that you don't necessarily think up front what it's going to be about, because. And I also described that in the prologue of the book, like how poetry comes to me and comes through me. So I can only talk about the title in hindsight, knowing that at that point in time, it is what had to be expressed. But I would say a few things. First of all, yes, that juxtaposition, I think you captured that very well, because in that there's. It comes back in the book two times, once in the poem Laroderma, and there indeed, I infuse the more disruptive and the more, I would say, aggressive archetypes like Marauder, like Burglary, like Assassin, with then very healing qualities. And in that exploration, I was just exploring what that would be like. And somehow it feels like some of the healing qualities need also the more intrusive archetypes to just get things done and to get some of that movement in the world. So it's exactly that. That I'm exploring in that poem. But it means so much more, right? It also means, as you saw, the photo on the COVID of my book is quite, you know, determined and powerful. And I also wanted to show up with that. So it also has a lot to do with finding these polarities in me, and I'm. And am I allowed to do that? So am I allowed to show up with a strong voice? Am I allowed to speak up for things that I stand for, et cetera? So that whole exploration of that polarity in me is also a part of that. And then there's one haiku, and I truly don't remember whether I wrote the haiku first or the poem first. You know, sometimes that gets very blurry. And the haiku talks about the power of words, but also the power of silence because it says poet assassin. He can kill you with words or silence you to death. And there's an aspect of playing with words, but also sometimes withholding words and the impact of that. So, yeah, there's. I mean, there's many dimensions. Yeah.

Can you repeat that a bit slowly? I mean, that's so beautiful.

Yeah. It says, poet assassin. She can kill you with words or silence you to death.

Mm. So beautiful. You know, and it's so interesting, right, these polarities, these somewhat two very different qualities ways of being actors and characters. And I was on a walk yesterday, and I'm gonna create a LinkedIn post on this. Mikael I'll tag you. And I was walking through the woods just 30 minutes away from where we live with Lizzie. And there were two polarities that were so present in any nature, in any forest. And it is life and death in any forest. There are trees that are dying or are dead, that are feeding. Life that is emerging. They are becoming food for others to grow. Right. And I was very keenly aware of. I just before that, in the morning, I was reading some of Thich Nhat Thanh's work where he talks about the nature of interbeing and how each has the other and has this beautiful story where he, he was talking about. It's like a biblical story where, you know, God says, let there be light. Or, you know, he tells light, light, it's time for you to go into the world. And the light says, well, I can't go without my twin brother, darkness. And God says, darkness is already there, you need to go join it. And he says, well, if darkness is already there, then I am already there too, because how can I exist without the other and how can that exist without me? So, you know, as I reflect on kind of what you were talking about, there is so much of one in the other. And where there is one, there is the other two. It is just another end of it. But our ego points it as two very different things. We hold them apart, we value one over the other. And I'm so curious how that lands with you and your reflections on these huge polarities we hold versus this third way, the middle way, that often leads to better answers.

Yeah, the non dual way. A few things. You know, when we started preparing for this, I was so intrigued by your whole body of work, which is a lot around happiness and, well, being and flourishing. And then my book, which, if you do not fully get it, there's a lot of the heaviness in it as well. Right. There's quite a lot of death in it, actually. But for me it's just that cycle as you're describing. It's that cycle of life. There's, you know, I explore that even through time. There's one of my poems, it's called Thanatos. I'm using a lot of Latin and Greek influences because I studied that. And it starts with the sentence, how do you want to die? He asked a question not to answer lightly. But then there's a poem about the Japanese forest that. Where a lot of people commit suicide and I wonder and I, you know, I almost converse with, with those that choose to go there. There's A poem around. What will I do when the dark descends? And my, I think I. The way I phrase it, my living under disguise completes. So, and then how it starts again. So the cycle of life, whatever your belief system is, because then I don't have the truth in that is very present. So this polarity and that one movement flowing into the next movement that you're describing is just very, very present in my book. And for me, that has a sense of happiness to it, that has a sense of being in the fullest of the experience and not only be on the, you know, on the upper side of it. So, yeah, it just speaks a lot to me what you're saying. And it's, it's very present in, in my quest, they would say, and these.

Are, you know, it shows up everywhere. You know, this was one of the. My journey into this field, Mika, as you know, was I grew up for like 20 years doing large scale transformations, operations, pricing, et cetera. And then I started delving into this field, becoming a student again in a really, really big way across spirituality, psychology and neurosciences. I read a book a week. I've read one book since almost 10 years. I'm on my side. 695th book now, counting, I counted. I keep them right here in front of me. I keep adding to it because everyone has added something to it and they're from all these different fields. Now it's just become a game of like, when do we get to a thousand, right? Who are the thousand? What are the thousand books? But I love this, this notion of, you know, the other polarity that exists that people hold separately is form, is emptiness. Emptiness is form. You know, it's a core Buddhist belief, but it's also a core belief of quantum mechanics, right? When you really look into any atom, 99% of it is empty. And in there is the nucleus. And when we go at the nucleus level, you look subatomic level, the same reality shows up. So all of these forms that we, these things that we hold are the same we hold as our body. This is me, that is you. But we know again from all the quantum particles and waves. Everything is a particle in a way. And the act of noticing actually makes it one versus the other. And I mean, that's what I loved about your book. Now, look, poetry's always unlocked something really deeply within me. Every time I read something, whether it is the Prophet by Khalil Gibran or Rumi, you know, some of my favorite poetry poets. Talk to me about a moment, Mickey, as you do Some of the work you do around leadership development strategy with teams. Talk to me about a moment when poetry unlocked something in this team of humans that strategy never could have.

What an amazing question. And actually it stimulates me to do that even more because you know, the moment, it was quite a journey for me to understand that the poet in me is not different from the team facilitator, is not different from the coach, is not different from the mother. It's actually very integrated. First of all, I'm very fascinated by what you just said about form and emptiness, because in essence, for me, poetry and strategy reside in the same field. Namely, I mean, visionary strategy, right? Not, not necessarily the tactical plan, but visionary strategy of where an industry, a company, but by extension an industry needs to go in the future. And I think a lot of the industries that I work with and I work with, you know, all across industries, a lot of them need to do some deep soul searching. But in order to find that, they almost need to tap into the same field as where at least poetry resides. Because for me, that's a field of inspiration. It's a field of emergence, It's a field of creation that. And that's why it's so beautiful that at one point in time needs to be pulled into form from that field that still has all possibilities. It needs to be pulled into form. And that's why I think opening up a leadership team to that field and almost offering them a bridge to reach that field and almost go out of their thinking minds, but to be very present to an emergent future, as Otto Sharma would so beautifully say, it's the same gateway, hundred percent. And it's super interesting that you, you name Khalil Gibran because I'm going to use, I'm gonna refer to one of his poems and not one of mine, but last week actually. Really this happened last week. So one of the things that I'm very, very aware of is how leaders are one element in the chain, right? So I often work with leaders to take their place in the lineage of leaders so that, you know, it's not about them. It's putting your stamp on this organization. And it's not an ego thing. It's very much taking over the baton from often a long standing organization that will live beyond you for quite a while, hopefully, right when they're in alignment. And I use a poem of Khalil Gibran last week to illustrate that. And you might know it, it's my favorite favorite poem. It's the poem on children where he talks, you know, someone asks him talk to us about children and he speaks about. I think the first lines are, your children are not your children. They are manifestation of life's longing for itself. And I'm not saying it exactly right. They come through you, but they are not from you. And for me, that poem talks a lot about the future and how in essence, at one point in time, we hand it over to the future again and we cannot influence them. And he speaks about that a lot like you're not residing there, you know, your children are the future. And I think he compares the parents to the bow, you know, and the, the children to the arrow and then God to the archer, by the way, God is the archer. But I used it to illustrate how life flows forward and how in essence, again, you have your role to play in this moment of time with the full responsibility. But in essence, it's about how life flows forward. So. Yeah, and again, it's a very different paradigm, you know, parenting. And at the same time it resonated because it is about taking your place in the lineage and doing the right thing for the future generations to come. Yeah. So those would be my answers. I really had a concrete example from last week. And at the same time, I very often use the healing arts or poetry to open up that or to build that bridge to that field. So I think that that's another important thing. Like, like how do we get them to the field of creation when all possibilities are still available? And then of course, they do have the power to bring it into form. They do have the impact to bring it into form. So that's why I think it's essential to work with leaders in these industries. Sometimes I wonder, should I work with this industry or not? Because again, a lot of industries have some big, big, big existential questions to answer.

Yeah.

But they are also the ones that carry the solution and they have the impact. They have the maybe the investment and maybe the technology or the capacity to call in the solution as well. So.

Yeah, well, I have a off site I'm facilitating later today with three founders of a startup. And you know, I'm going to start with a poem. I have a poem in mind from John Donahue, one of the. One of my favorite poets. I'm going to start with that. But friends, if you're listening to this, my invitation to you is. Oftentimes our workplaces can feel so much about doing and action and from fear and kind of execution that the soul often we don't have space to hear what the Soul is saying of our own or those in the team. You don't have to be creative. I actually do believe everybody is creative. But you don't have to feel that you're creative. But try every week, when you open a meeting or an idea, problem solving or a strategy session, try finding a poem. In fact, if you really want to not even do that work, but have something else do this for you, go to ChatGPT and say, I'm facilitating this. Find me a poem or four lines that would open up the heart and create a beautiful environment for the question. And you'll find something and just try experiment, read it and just go around and ask people what emerges, open up the hearts before you start doing the mind and the brain work and notice how that session will feel different from the others you might have run.

I was with a bank last week. I had two engagements, so one was in London, one was in France with the bank and the cfo. So I asked everyone to bring a song. And the cfo, you know, was very beautiful, moving story. But he also said, I'm now starting my team meetings with a song, because music is this language, right? So I was so moved by that. I was. And he said, you know, I start the song three minutes before, if it's online, I start the song three minutes before the call starts. And people know by now, and everybody comes three minutes ahead of time because they really connect over the song and to the song. And so I thought that was so beautiful. So any. Yeah, any language that brings us there, that brings us to a different reality and a different.

Yeah, beautiful, more generative, more creative rather than reactive space in which we live most of the time. And then we wonder why we are creating outcomes that are putting our planet at jeopardy, putting our children at jeopardy, putting each other all constantly running on stress. Right? Because we are operating not from generative fields, but from reactive fields. We've cut ourselves from nature. We have cut ourselves from life into these boxes of dead buildings where we amplify human suffering rather than allow each one of us to tap into that that lives within and create beautiful, flourishing spaces with generative outcomes. You know, Miki, your work is so much about wholeness. Poet Assassin is wholeness of two different aspects. All the work you do on energy systems, it's always been about wholeness. You have this unique ability to see whole systems rather than just compartmentalized pieces that so many do. Talk to me about why you have always believed. And you were one of the early leaders in this space who felt that wholeness and not productivity is the real path to leadership.

Let me first talk about, you know, being one of the early ones in this space. You know, sometimes how transformation is ignited from more suffering, and then sometimes transformation is ignited from, you know, already feeling the calling from the future. I would say that my real relentless quest to understand what life is about started more from suffering. And I don't want to over dramatize that, but I really had this unease with life for a long time and with things that were happening. And for a long time, trying to understand and trying to find meaning was, you know, was a way to cope with that. I'm very grateful for that now because, again, it makes me a lifelong wisdom seeker, and I will be for the rest of all days, which is also a sentence from one of my poems. And it's also. But. But it's now less a coping mechanism. It's more now the, you know, the hearing, the whispers. So I cannot imagine a life without seeking wisdom and without integration and processing and seeking wholeness. And when we talked about this, I really started to understand that for me, the path of leadership is not different than the path of life. And I'm mostly doing team facilitation. But of course, I also have some individual coaching journeys. And in both, it almost feels as if they're not separate. It almost feels for me that leadership is equally. And one of the chapters in my book is called Odyssey. Again, big mythological influences from my early years. It's always about the Odyssey. It's always about, what is this journey with, you know, Ithaka very far away. Often he only reaches it very late. But with the challenges on the way, with the allies that show up with the wisdom, the nuggets of wisdom that you find along the way, with strange creatures that show up with the gods that interfere. You know, certainly in Greek mythology, I love the gods. I'm very intrigued by the gods and their interference. So all my journeys are journeys or, you know, my coaching journeys are journeys. My team facilitation is journeys. We work with what's happening, right? We work with what is at that moment disruptive or. Or disturbing or exciting. And. And we work with that material as you do in life, right? You work with your. Well, I do and you do. We work with the material that comes our way and whether that is some very traumatic stories or whether that is beautiful highlights, whether that is finding teachers and wisdom that makes sense and that you can apply and then, you know, build a bridge to organizational systems. So for me, that's how it works. Is not separate. So, you know, productivity, in light of all of that, in light of eternity, productivity is at its best useful at times. But again, in light of that wholeness, it's relatively small. So for me, it's always about finding the whole leader. That includes whatever shows up for them privately, that includes their story, and that includes the systemic dynamics in the organization and how magically both have attracted each other. Right? So how sometimes you're attracting exactly the right challenge, maybe exactly the right challenging boss for you to, you know, to grow and to see certain things in a different light. So it's, in a way, not even a question. That being said, myself, I can be very productive, but it's always that combination of productivity from. From a place of being. So I spend quite a lot of time, even if I work with organizations and teams, and someone who works with me needs to know that because I can spend quite a lot of time not doing anything but really taking in the system and really letting this whole system move through me and being puzzled by the contradictions, being puzzled by the fragmentation, sitting with it, dreaming about it. And then all of a sudden I can be very productive, right? And then I have a plan in half an hour time again. So my colleagues who work with me, they know that by now and they fully trust this process. And I often can give enough productivity up front so that nobody gets into a panic mode. But the productivity comes from attuning rather than forcing and pushing myself through this and getting a lot of work done. So that's how I learned to work, work with productivity. And again, I see that more and more. If leaders can let the solutions come to them or that the help come to them instead of pushing through. It's so magical. I mean, that's also energy mastery, which we talked about. Like, one of the things that I do is I use a lot of energetic skills as well, because it's increasing productivity so much. It's not about pushing.

Absolutely.

My energy teacher referred to a beautiful book that I haven't read yet, but maybe it's one that you want to read. It's Hiring the Heavens, that was the title. And it talks about that like, you know, how can I call on solutions, help movement in stuck situations without having to push through both only on will and strength and effort. And that's for me, the, you know, that's for me, the interplay between wholeness and productivity.

Yeah, well, listen, you know, I love. I love that about your work. You know, I lived in a world, Mickey, as you know, I was at McKinsey for 17 years. I was in consulting for 25. Constantly on the motion, filling every waking minute with busyness, whether it was work or whether it was dinners or celebrations or what have you. But you're constantly on. And I think that's the reality for so many individual leaders and you know, anyone, frankly, right. Even if you're not working, you know, you are working on home stuff or other stuff. And I think in this world we have left, we have completely eliminated any space for silence, for stillness to listen to. I love the title, Hiding the heavens. Listen to the heavens, listen to the universe. Listen to the whispers. About seven years ago I shifted, even in the context of McKinsey. I went part time, I went 70%. So I would literally have two and a half, three days of emptiness, of reading, sitting under a tree, sensing into what needed to emerge. I wrote a book, Hardwired for Happiness. To this day I maintain that practice. Right. I need space even in the busiest of days, being able to step back and sense and be. Because sometimes when we do that, we find things that we shouldn't be doing in the first place. Not doing them faster or changing what we are doing, but actually stopping. It's not working. That wisdom doesn't exist in a blind rush for productivity, only measured as number of keystrokes on a computer now, or how many calls did I do or how many emails did I write and how many memos or how many PowerPoint pages, right? I just gave a TEDx talk two weeks ago and I said flourishing can't exist in days filled with back to back meetings with no space, even fire. You know, you can take a bunch of wood that can burn, but if I suffocate it of oxygen, of space, there will be no fire. And so this notion of really wholeness and really spaciousness, I love Miki, that that's something you integrate in your work too. But talking of fire, even before you.

Go there, I even this, it's intriguing. I think we must have followed the same path because for me it's eight years ago when I, you know, I was super busy, did a global role. They wanted to add a second global role to, to my role. And I, all of a sudden I was like, I want to break free. And I, I think I phrased it like this. I want to see. And so my boss asked me, what do you want to do? I said, I don't want to go to another company. I really just want space. I want to see what, what happens when life comes to me. Instead of me chasing Life.

Yes.

And that's exactly what you're describing. Like, and I feel very privileged. You know, I mean, we might at one point in time talk about privilege, because, of course, not everybody has that privilege.

Yes.

I feel. Yeah, I'm grateful every day since that I have the space to do that. That I can take enough space to let life come to me. And I do see around me that. Yeah. That not everybody might have that possibility depending on your private and professional situation. But I think we might have been in that same.

I know.

Moment of breaking free and really understanding that.

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I believe that so much. Yeah.

My client utilizations, my client impact, my experience for colleagues, my innovation, my productivity, my creativity, everything was so much more when I was working less at the same level. It's not even relative in terms of absolute numbers. I was higher. And I think that's possible for you, too, and it's possible for your organizations. But you have to learn to stop and create space. We don't like creating space. We don't like even a moment of. Of silence. We don't like to just sit. We beat ourselves up. If somebody is just sitting, looking up at the sky, we ridicule them. We think they're just goofing off. But it's real. To find wholeness, we have to be still.

You have an absolute ally here. Yeah.

To get to that space, we need to be curious about our energy. Because as much as we might say, wait, why do you need more energy to be still? You need energy. You need to honor energy. Because stillness, if you're extremely tired and you don't manage energy becomes lethargy. And that's not what we are talking about here. So talk to me a little bit, Mikke, about energy mastery and how you think about that in organizations, in teams, in yourself.

Yeah, so. So energy. If I would describe my work, I would always say there's a few foundational streams, rivers that will always flow through, through, and energy mastery is one of them. It's such a vast field. So let me see if I can give a short version of that. First of all, you're absolutely right. For me, my personal energy has to do with my life force. And for a long time I had a very deep, deep imprint on life force being limited, being something to protect, being something that can be taken away from you. So there was quite a lot of fear around life force. And I absolutely know where that comes from. But knowing it is not that easy. So I think for me, the whole energy mastery shifted when I started understanding. And it was around the same time, eight years ago that the body had anything to do with it. So despite being on a wisdom journey for a long time, the somatic element of it was relatively new to me. And they might have said it to me before, but I was not ready to hear it. So I was in this week long program with Jen Cohen around somatic coaching. It was for the first time that I realized like, oh my God, as they say, the body keeps the score. That's a book of Bessel van R. Kolok. This whole notion that quite a lot of the events that had happened and had not been integrated in me were actually stored in my body has completely shifted my exploration. So I think that's also the journey when my somatic journey started and when I started to, you know, to release some of the contractions in my body to actually open up my capacity to hold energy, also in groups. So for me, the field of energy mastery goes from the self regulation capacity. So a lot of the polyvagal theory, understanding, you know, how does my nervous system work, how do I self regulate when I'm overwhelmed? What is my survival mechanism when I'm overwhelmed? So that's a whole field of work to the whole area of CO regulation, which of course is very relevant in teamwork. Strong coherence in a team allows them to handle much more disruption. So if the team is fragmented, anything that is disruptive will fragment them even more. Or play them apart, where strong coherence can really hold a lot of disruption. And I've seen that as extremely powerful. So the core regulation capacity of a team, of course their individual self regulation capacity that connects to that two and that's a whole additional field of work that often is in the background of my work is that I'm also using quite a lot of the ancient wisdom around inviting a larger field so that it's actually as a facilitator, you do not need to do all the work on your own. You can be largely supported by for example, the land. Right. So whenever I'm at an off site, I recently was in Romania, I become very attuned to the land and what had happened on this land and how the land and the grounding force, of course earth and trees and nature can really also be a resource for teams. Again, that's not always in the forefront because for some teams that's already quite out there, for some it's not right. Some organizations, because of the nature of what they do, they understand some ancient wisdom traditions much more. Like, you know, I working with the mining organization because they have so many relationship with the original owners of the land, they have a much better understanding of larger holding fields. So again, for some it's in the forefront, for some it's in the background. But I would say it's that whole range of self regulation, defense mechanisms, what's happening in the body coherence as a team and then using larger coherent fields to also truly support organization in what they want to bring forth. So if an organization has a purpose that is aligned with the right thing, you have support there, right? In principle, life wants to support a healing movement. So it's that whole range that I'm now summarizing in a few sentences. It's been a really deep field of study for me in the last seven years. And it's one of those, and you might have some of those as well that you wonder, like how did I do this before knowing this? Right. How did I even do this work before knowing this? Because you know, a team facilitator is a lot of holding energy, one of the energetic practices that I'm using a lot. I'm curious if you have. It is me, not me, right? So I'm quite sensitive to what's happening in the team. Where's everyone? What are the tensions, what is the collective that is also still held here. So I need a regular practice to separate myself again from that so that I'm not carrying the weight of the world on my shoulder. So that's for example, an energetic practice that's important for me where I'm now thinking like, how did I do this work before understanding some of that Energetic.

Yeah. Well, I think that's where I want to go next is Mikke is, you know, for, for those who might not be as deep in this as you are, you know, and they're leaders and they're thinking, okay, there is something here, there is my energy that is tuning into the energy of the team. There's tuning into, frankly also the energy of the system, the organization. And then there is tuning into the overall energy of communities, spaces where we live.

Totally.

You know, if we are doing off sites, into the. Into the. Into where we are, what are two or three practices that even the initiated could actually lean into to at least tap into a little bit of the magic.

Yeah. And again, you can bring, you can take it as far as you want. So I think there really is, you know, there is essential practice that you can do. The one that I would say is to set an intention in a. In a charged field, we call that. So maybe I'll. I'll explain charge field in a moment. But for me, the intention setting of a team journey or an off site is very important. And that's not productivity based, but that's very much like for example, what, what I will always include in my intention. And again this is learned from my energy teacher is may everyone receive what they need in the amount that they need it in, from, whom they need it from. And even with that intention, I'm also meeting people and the team where they are. So I can have a strong intention for a team in mind. But it might not be ripe very often as a systemic facilitator and you notice, you see much more then the team is ready to look at. So you see other dynamics coming to the surface. And I want to be very respectful of not interfering in the system when it's not right. So for example, with that intention, which actually says you're meeting people and teams at their growth edge, right. You want to meet them at their growth edge. You don't want to be comfortable, but you don't want it to be terror either. I really hold myself to a high standard of respecting where they are and what shows itself and then work with that. So that I mean, and of course there's more. I always ask it also to be light and easy. I ask, for example, for it to support the transformation that they are actually embarking on. Always when you Know when it's in alignment, when I feel that this is a transformation that is much needed. Take the energy sector, there's so much needed in terms of that movement towards sustainable energy. So companies that are on their journey, you know, I'm asking that our work together is supportive of that transformation. So I would say intention and then in a charge field that can be anything. It could be just if you, depending on what your belief system is, it could be just a prayer and even if you don't have a faith system then a prayer for things to go well and for for example tensions to be dissolved in could coherence. I mean that you know, you don't do any harm with that. So. But it could also be if you have another practice. Some people work with the four directions of the wind. Well, the four directions, let's say it like that because in essence that, and that speaks to the cycle of life, right? There's a, there's an opening, there's a maturing phase. So opening is the spring maturing phase, that's the summer, there's a closing phase and saying goodbye, that's the autumn and there's a stillness that's the winter. And even in projects you have that cycle, right? You have a start of a project, you have the maturation of a project where it's full of energy and everything's happening. You have the closure of project where you need to say goodbye, you need to let go. You almost want to capture the lessons learned and then hopefully there's a bit of breathing space between the end of the previous one and the only if we allow it.

If we allow it.

If you allow it, the winter. So even that for me that's such a natural rhythm of things that you can even just imagine like oh, we really need the west energy here. We need this team to allow to say goodbye. We need this team to allow maybe morning that it's over. We need this team to capture the lessons learned so that the next opening is a wiser opening than, than what we did before. So it's a very natural thing to do. And that is a charged field, right? Using the four directions or losing the cycle of life or the day of the day. I mean it's also morning, midday, end of the day and the, the night where you're resting is. That's a, that's a charged field. And then that intention in that charged field. So for me that is a critical practice and I will never start something without doing that. And then I feel very held, I'll feel Very supported. And it's not only about me. I'm not the star of the show. Right. It's often coming through me, but it's for the benefit of the system. So that would be one, and then the me, not me, would be another one.

How does that work?

Anyone? Well, also many different things. The very earliest version I learned from Amy, who was also one of your guests, I think, and this is many years ago in 2011 or so. And I was so overwhelmed by everything that was happening. And she just took me outside. She said, maybe put off your shoes barefoot, bare feet on the ground. And then she said, you know, just breathe in three times. Anything that does not belong to you can give back to the earth. And then breathing three times, you know, all parts that you have left somewhere, you know, just call back because, you know, that is. That's the part of you. And then just, you know, and just trust that everything is okay. And it was that simple as a practice to just once again discern between what is really yours and what have you picked up from other people or from the systemic field in the meantime, my me, not me practice is a bit more elaborate, but in essence, it's still the same. It's just a moment of awareness, of resonance, like what is resonating with me and what is what I can. Because it's also the right thing to do, to leave things with other people and. And to leave things with the team that's actually.

Well, I love it the right thing, because I love it, because what you're introducing and inviting listeners to think about is give away those that are not you, that are somebody else's monkeys, somebody else's problems, somebody else's perceptions. That's the not me, but what you are, again, in wholeness, inviting in, is the essence of you that you might not feel comfortable having brought in. What are those pieces that you yourself have put out there that you do want right here? Right. And it's just, again, leaving things that are unnecessarily burdening us, but also resourcing ourselves with our deepest wisdom, our strengths, our things that can help us, that in the moment, we are not using.

Absolutely, yes. It's truly two parts. It's letting go of what's not yours. And with that, energetically, you have space and then fill it up with you. Right?

Yeah.

Because if you don't fill it up with you, then there's plenty of things to worry about everywhere else. I'm very sensitive to that. I'm unlearning to carry everyone's burden because it's actually not unburdening the other person. You know, that's the interesting thing. It's really not that it's taking it away from them and you're resolving. It's now double. So for me to fill it up with me again is a very essential step of the. Me, not me.

100%.

Yeah.

Yeah, 100%. Well, energy shows up in all the flourishing work I do, Mickey, at so many different levels. You know, we have the Rewire program which becomes a part of our flourishing transformations that are focused on individual. And we have a set of practices around body, mind and spirit that we invite people to build habits around. Whether it is movement, whether it is being really good about the sleep, whether it's about what you eat, spending time in nature, reading, you know, spiritual texts. There's a whole range. There's about nine or 10 interventions that we invite people to. One, take an inventory of their own inner energy from day to day and how resourced they feel. Because to do any of this work, you have to first make sure you're at your best. And then second, we have a practice. It shows up in our PERL model for organizational and team level, where we ask leaders to actually collect data but also tune in on. Do our workplaces energize people? Where people are excited to show up Monday and leave with more, more energy on Fridays? Right. Or are we. Are these workplaces where people are just. They drain them? Because if our workplaces are energy creating versus draining, that again, directly not just taps into how individuals do, but more importantly what they achieve.

And it's so fascinating how. And there's more and more research around that as well. And how still so many of our workplaces put people in a survival state.

70, 80% of them. 70, 80%, Mickey, are workplaces that way. And yet we know by the way, and it's not just about the work. That's why we do both. Because what we know is energy mastery is as much about the system as individual. And all of Kim Cameron's work at Michigan around heliotropic systems and individuals and how energizers, even in systems that are draining, can actually become a source of light and illuminate going back to the darkness and light. If you're in a dark cave and you light, darkness dispels. So there is this notion again of there is so much agency that we can have if we really learn this skill. You don't have to be a leader to know it. Even as an individual, you can have a heliotropic effect on any theme that you're a part of.

And very often that includes. That includes being with what hurts. So. Yeah, yeah. So it's, it's not like we come in and we are all, you know, bringing energy. Someone once told me, and I'm trying to remember who it was. Like, you know, she compared the system. I sometimes do that, by the way, ask, like, if you, if this would be a patient, how would you diagnose them? And you know, if a system is depressed or. I think she brought in the wisdom how to deal with a depressed patient. And that is you need to be with them in the pain and then ignite moments of life force. So it's not about, you know, when someone is depressed, you're also not coming in with party. So there's something around meeting. And that's what we do with systemic work. Right. So if there's a trauma that has not been integrated or if there's a restructuring that has not been mourned, then to do that work. But by doing that, there's a healing movement and then you ignite these energizers. So it's really that interplay between both that can truly, truly shift the system.

Yeah. Which is where I want to go. Which is where I want to go next. Miki and I have one question. Then we'll end with, and want to end with a poem from your book. That would be an invitation to our listeners. Look, whether it comes to flourishing work, whether it comes to strategy work, systemic intelligence is so critical. You know, we've talked about it all the way through. And that was, you know, you were again, one of the original kind of leaders in this, in this field of systemic intelligence. Break it down for our listeners. What do you mean by systemic intelligence? And in today's world filled with so much volatility and uncertainty and complexity, if you are not on a path to master that intelligence, I don't think you survive. Talk to me a little bit about what is systemic intelligence.

Ah, my whole life's work in a few sentences. No, it's not. And it's not my only life's work, but it's part of it. So a few sentences for me, the reason why, the moment I discovered this field of the work, I was like, this makes so much sense. So before that, by the way, I worked for 20 years in DuPont, amazing global company with a lot of opportunities. And I, I remember that I was so amazed about so many dynamics. And it's only when I discovered that field of systemic intelligence, That I thought, okay, so that's what's going on. So systemic intelligence for me is to really, really see organizations and teams, but also communities and schools as living systems. And we are very aware of systems because we were born into a system. So our family system is the first system that we get to know. And the dynamics there often very much influence. It's a very early, strong imprint that influence how we show up in later systems. So it's to understand that an organization is a living system with its own intelligence. And that sounds maybe a bit strange, but in a way, people, you know, the system was founded at one point in time. You know, there was a founding spark, and all of a sudden there's this, you know, small, large system, and then people come and go. So the system in itself has an intelligence that has roots, has a collective memory, and is often still living the impact of past decisions. So very often, the dynamics that we see now, what we call symptoms are a reflection of something either deeper on deeper levels, or something that has, you know, has its roots much earlier on. So why is it so essential to not just fight the symptoms? Because, you know, when you just fight the symptoms, at best they will repeat itself. Like, you know, like, oh, this happened two years ago as well. We're doing this again. At its worst, it's making it worse because you're really not understanding what is really going on. Does that mean I always have the full picture of what is really going on? Of course not. Right. This is complex material. It's almost like maybe in hindsight you might see more than you see now. But we have in systemic intelligence a few lenses that really help you to start to become curious about what is really going on on a deeper level.

And what might be some of those. Yeah, talk to me a little bit about what some of those lenses are.

One of the big ones, and this is one of my favorite ones, and it is because it was very interesting. In my family of origin, one of the big ones is order. So any natural living system has a certain order of things. Right. There's no such thing as an orderless system. And again, because I had quite a lot of dynamics around order and place in my family system, I became very, very attuned to understanding what the criteria are for order and whether those criteria are still supporting the system to reach their purpose. Because very often there's criteria for order that are informal or unwritten and that are working against achieving the purpose. So, you know, you can have your perfect org chart, but the actual order of things is Based on totally different criteria. There are subsystems at work. There may be old criteria for order. There are criteria for order that are actually working against it. So order is one of those things. And a lot of the dynamics have to do with order and place. So for example, we see a lot of micromanaging happening in the organization that we are called in to work with middle manager because they are not getting it. And then we start to become very curious at the highest level at the executive team what the order of things is there and who's taking their place and who's maybe going out of their own place and stepping into other places. And all those dynamics there lead to the symptoms that we see in middle management. So order would be a big lens that is always on for me and very systemic work.

Yeah, bringing us to the surface.

What's the real order of things here and is it in service of what we try to achieve? I'm not saying that there's many different criteria for order and they might have been right for an early stage of the organization, but they might not be right anymore right now. And that's the question. And that's why what I like about systemic intelligence is that it's actually a non judgmental way of looking at organization because it's not about right or wrong, but it's trying to understand like, oh, we're still applying the criteria for order from a different era when we were not yet a global company and where, for example, you know, nationality or closeness to the CEO was a very relevant criteria for order. But now it's dysfunctional because, you know, the weight should be with, for example, the people with the biggest P and L, or the weight should be with the people with the highest number of employees. If we take an employee decision, but if a subsystem or an informal order is working against that, you might not take the right decision. So but by bringing that to the surf surface, there's often a sigh of relief like, oh, we're finally naming what's really going on here. So it's a very non judgmental way of things. Or for example, you know, sometimes you have strong conflicts like CEO and CFO or the Western hemisphere and the Southern hemisphere and Northern hemisphere leaders are fighting. And when we trace that back through the history and the timeline of the organization, there was a big conflict in the very early, for example, in the first moment of the founder handing it over to their children and there was a big conflict there and it led to a fight and they split companies. I mean, there's One example that I worked with, two brothers, founded their own company. That rivalry that was there keeps repeating itself. So, so those are things that we become curious about. So you're really zooming out, you know, zooming out in time. You're zooming out, you know, vertically. It's, it's super interesting to all of a sudden see things in the light of a much larger system at play. So. So that's systemic intelligence. And what I like as well about it, that the moment you start integrating some of that, the system has its own intelligence. So very often the solution resides in the system as well. So it's not so much about intervening, it's more about the holding around it so that the system can come up with its own intelligence. Yeah, so that's in a nutshell, systemic intelligence.

Yeah. Well, it's beautiful. And look, we should do a whole second another podcast just on that field together with us, you know, the way we weave that in, you know, we call it systems and team intelligence. So one of the big things that I'm pushing leaders to do and we integrate that into our system transformation system around flourishing Mickey, is I say don't run top down programs. Give the data on flourishing collected every month to teams rather than engagement once a year and let the teams every month tune in to what's needed for them to flourish and deliver the performance that is being asked of them. Not at their cost of burnout, but by actually making sure individually and collectively they're able to operate at the best. They have the intelligence, they know what's needed. They need the autonomy, agency and space to create the solutions and experiment and try. And then you scale what works versus the current state today, which is somebody comes up with the program top down and every team in every country in every function runs that as if that's going to solve such a complex system. Right. That is at the heart of some of the issues. So, my friend, we're almost at an hour. We could go talking for hours.

I think.

I would love to end with a poem or a mantra. You know, we started with this notion of polarities, this notion of kind of one or the other. And I want to invite you and just leave the open space for. What's one poem that you want to leave our listeners with that touches on any of those themes, polarities coming back to whole systems energy. What would be your gift to our listeners?

It's always a difficult question and I typically change my mind throughout a conversation because we touched on so many different things. I think I want to end with one last essential stance that I think I also recognize in you. And there's a deep bow to not knowing and to always have a beginner's mind and to not get stuck in our fields of wisdom, in our frameworks, and to almost have all of that in the background and show up present and attuned every time again. I love looking at people and teams with new eyes every time again. So I chose one in the end that talks about not knowing. Yeah. For the rest of all days will I know that I don't know Will I bow to the mysteries of the multiverse? Will I cry the tears of mankind? For the rest of all days will I seek redemption? Search all lands for their narratives? Attend to the trees that have seen it all? For the rest of all days will I take a single step and then one more Treading in the mud Micro marks in linear time yet striding through the ages Pass over child between the worlds for the rest of all days will I concede that I was blind to the beauty of the form for the rest of all days is this my overriding task? To abide by the sacred law Correspond with the book of life I call upon thee Keepers.

Wow, Vicky, thank you for the amazing work you do for the time you spent with us. There is so much I'm taking away and I know our listeners would as well. We'll post all the links to where people can find you, access to the books, et cetera. But deep gratitude from me for you to be a friend, to be a fellow wisdom walker, to a fellow energy master who's really trying to bring this wholeness into our increasingly fragmented, busy world. Thank you for all that you do.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Such a joy.

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