How to Regulate Your Nervous System Before a Hard Decision

You don't know how people are going to respond. And if one person responds in an unpredictable way, if they happen to have influence in the system, that will influence other people in different ways. If the thing that's predictable is you know that people are not predictable.

If you're searching for how to lead through uncertainty, working harder may be exactly what's keeping you stuck. Complex problems like culture change, AI transformation, leading people do not have one right answer. Treating them as such leaves even the best leaders exhausted and ineffective. Today, I'm joined by Carolyn Coughlin, co-leader of Cultivating Leadership and author of Unleash Your Complexity Genius. In this conversation, you'll discover how to recognize when you are facing complexity, not just a merely complicated problem. You'll learn to notice and read your nervous system as an early warning signal. You'll learn to use your power of breath and movement to reset, start to make progress through an experimentation mindset, creating safe-to-fail experiments. And you'll be able to use wonder and laughter built on a foundation of love to truly unleash the wisdom that lies trapped in your organization. If you're leading change, navigating AI, or wrestling with challenge that refuses to be solved, this episode will help you start to dance with that complexity. Carolyn, it is so lovely to have you on our Flourishing Edge podcast. Thank you, my friend.

It's so good to be here finally, Ashish. It's so good to see you.

Well, listen, you know, the powerful work I experience in the domain of complexity with you, almost now 4 years ago at the Next Practice Institute has stayed with me. And I have to admit, that week really helped me build a solid foundation that has helped me really navigate with more agility, or as you would call, dance in complexity rather than just try and survive it. And so I'm excited to have a conversation on that so that other leaders too can learn some of the key moves. One, learn the distinction between complex problems versus the simple complicated problems that so many of us are trained to lead and kind of make our way through, but also really start to learn the moves that you so beautifully teach about that create that foundation for them. And so with that, I just want to start with that question about differentiate for our listeners. What differentiates a complex problem from a simple or a complicated problem that we experience in the business world?

This is a question, interestingly, that when And that when we talked about this, you know, my colleagues and I talked about this with leaders, it wasn't even a question that people asked. And when we talked about complexity, they would mostly say, oh, right, that sounds like not what I'm dealing with. But today, people really get, at least the leaders I interact with, really get that what they're dealing with very often is complex. And so you asked what the difference is. Complicated problems are problems that can be solved. They have knowable solutions. So like simple examples are doing your taxes, fixing a car engine, figuring out a, you know, like a workflow, an optimal workflow. Those are problems that have knowable, good enough answers. And once you find an answer, if in similar contexts, it's repeatable. So if you apply a solution in one context, a similar context to another context, it should work there too. The thing about complexity is it's Complexity, in complexity, there are a number of features, but there, one of them is that there are many, many interconnected things, often referred to as nodes in complexity. And complicated problems can have many interconnected things as well. But the relationship between and among the nodes in complexity is itself unpredictable. And so when the relationship between things is changing, or when one thing in a system changes and it has knock-on effects and changes other things in unpredictable ways, that's complex. So, the simplest example I can give you, we usually use the example of raising children is complex.

Yes.

Rocket science is complicated. It can be figured out, although there are bits of it that are complex, like the people involved. But raising children, anyone who's ever raised children knows that if you figure out how to raise one child, you might see patterns that help you raising the next child, but you can't just like Rinse and repeat. You can't do that because each child is different. And if you figure out what, how to, like what works with a child on one day, it may not work on the next day. It can be explained in a much more complicated way, but I'll try to keep it simple. People are inherently complex because we, there are so many interconnected parts in us, including, you know, our genetic makeup, which is knowable, but our experiences, our shaping, all of those things lead, and we have agency. So So it leads to human beings being not predictable because we don't know which thing is gonna matter most today in terms of how we show up. And then if you put a group of, you know, number of people together, you've got all these unpredictable nodes that are now interacting. So groups of people are inherently complex, which is why we talk about leadership as being inherently complex.

To me, that was such an important distinction when I discovered this work, right? Because if you think about change management, as a profession, right, or at least how it's rolled. Every transformation program, you're upgrading a system. You're doing a digital journey. There's a lot of elements of that that are complicated that can be figured out. But I think a common flaw I often see organizations do is they'll have 10% of the effort going on change. And the effort they're using on change, they're solving it like a complicated problem. We're going to communicate this often. We're gonna do this training. We're gonna tell people. We're gonna have these posters, and that's gonna go across the whole organization. And then they wonder why it actually doesn't work, right? Because implicitly, people are complex.

That's right. You don't know how people are going to respond. And if one person responds in an unpredictable way, if they happen to have influence in the system, that will influence other people in different ways. The thing that's predictable is, you know, that people are not predictable. So knowing that the effort that goes into figuring out what to do in a change management program, I think there's a really, really important that there's a healthy dose of humility about how much you can actually make people change.

Absolutely. There's a lot of truth to that, right? Like, you have to be open. You know, you can take a horse to water, you can't make it drink. You might think you've got it all figured out. And you have to be able to figure out what will drive change in that organization or in that unit, in that person. So one of the key things— so I'm curious, from your point of view, what advice would you give to leaders to first even be able to know, is this complex or complicated, based on kind of what they might experience somatically?

Well, I'm gonna give you one that's more of a— it's not necessarily a somatic signal, but if it has to do with people, And getting people to do things, it has some element of complexity. So, that's like kind of the easy one. I think somatically what leaders could pay attention to, and people who support leaders could pay attention to, is if the person, a leader, is feeling like they're rolling a ball uphill, or maybe even a better analogy is like kind of you look in, I don't know if you've ever looked into a pond full of like tadpoles swimming around. And they're, they're sometimes they're so thick, it looks like you could just put your hands in there and pick them up. But it, the feeling of trying to apply complicated approaches to complex situations is kind of like looking at that thing thinking, oh, I'm just going to stick my hands in there and I'm going to, you know, pick out a handful of tadpoles. And every time you put your hands in the pond, they disperse and you get nothing. And so it's this, it should be easy. And it's not. I should be able to figure it out and I can't. So that feeling of grasping and not getting, and often the action urge that comes up for people, especially people who have been really successful by working harder and trying to get smarter and trying to get the right resources, is, if only I had more resources, were smarter, worked harder. So if you get that feeling, You might actually be dealing with complexity.

Yeah. For me, this notion of always feeling like there is not enough and I'm trying so hard, or almost oftentimes I get the feeling, and I think it's a good trigger for me, is I'm trying so hard, I'm running so fast, and yet I'm still in the same place, right? So this just notion of efforting without actually getting anywhere is an important one. I also like, you start to kind of really, in complicated problems, it's more of our head that is, OK, let me go figure it out. And often I can go long hours. trying to solve my way through it. I think for me, with the other telltale sign that I've experienced with this work is you actually get more like exhaustion because you're trying and nothing is working and you're frustrated and you start to actually question your own worthiness. Like, am I good enough? Like, can I actually lead this, right? So there is a lot happening within us that is fundamentally keeping us from being able to move progress. And from that activated nervous system, it's very hard to find the moves.

That's right. So you've just described the paradox, which is that when we're faced with something that's hard to solve and we keep trying to solve it as though it were a figure-outable problem, it's like banging our head against the wall again and again. And that banging your head against the wall usually is associated with an activated nervous system, you know, like you're in a fight-or-flight mode, like, grr, gotta figure this out. And Exactly what you say. From that nervous system, it is actually exactly the opposite of what you need to deal with the complexity. So it's pretty impossible to do what's needed in complexity.

So in your book, Unleash Your Complexity Genius, you highlight a range of moves, right? So first is, you know, when I get here and I recognize I might not be in a state fully capable to navigate, There's a set of things that leaders can do, and I would love to go through those with you, maybe give an overview of some of the complexity moves, and we can go into a couple of them and bring them to life for how leaders could use those.

So do you wanna start with noticing?

Yeah, let's do that since we were just touching that anyway.

Well, it's also the— of the complexity geniuses that we talk about in the book, it is, if you don't do that one, it's pretty hard to do anything else. I remember one time, probably I don't know, 11 or 12 years ago, we were working with a new client and we were talking about what would we do to— it was a program for developing leaders who could lead better in complexity. And we were talking about what are the competencies? And I said, noticing. And this client said to me, seriously, Carolyn, like, we can't tell these senior leaders that the thing they need to do more of is notice. Like, that's not very sexy and it's not very earth-shattering. And, you know, it's true. It's not very sexy and it's not very earth-shattering, and it's also really crucial. So, you know, we talk about— so there are a lot of practices that people can be in to help them notice more. Meditation is helpful. Various presencing exercises are very helpful. But actually, I find this like very simple idea that we can direct our attention to be very helpful. In terms of learning how to notice. So I often will take people through a quick exercise where I'll say, okay, focus your attention on noises in the room. Can you do that? Yes. Focus your attention on what you see far away from you. People can do that. Then focus your attention on your feet. What do you feel? People feel stuff. They can describe it. So it's like really, it's bringing people's attention to the fact that they can direct their attention is, I think, very, very basic. So why why do we need to do this? That, so there's, there are 2 things that are crucial to notice when leading in complexity. One is the most important one, I think, is what is happening in me? So you mentioned kind of what's happening somatically.

Yeah.

I think this is absolutely crucial because, as we just talked about, one of the key signals that we're dealing with complexity but not approaching it in a complexity-friendly manner is this set, our nervous system is activated. And so because we're fighting, we're trying to kind of figure something out by beating our head against the wall. So noticing in ourselves what that feels like, for different people, it's different. You know, some people it's sort of like a clenched, almost like a clenched fist or a tight jaw or a kind of forward leaning. It's different for different people, but being able to notice that is super important.

Yeah, just the signal of how you react when you're in a fight-flight, right? Just becoming aware that you're actually activated.

That's right.

And also, you know, I think you talked about when you said like, look, we can direct our attention. I think that itself is, is so revolutionary because we know that our brain basically ignores almost 95, 97% of information coming at us. And I'm, I always, you know, if you wanna talk about the power of noticing, I'm sure you've shown that video of people throwing the balls, the, you know, to each other. Like, how many times is the person in the black uniform passing to the white.

Yes.

And half the room doesn't notice the gorilla that actually goes in the middle of the room, and nobody sees it because everybody's so busy counting the ball. And so I think it's an important element that you point out that in complexity, if you're activated, I think it's important to notice what are the parts of the system, what's actually happening, the information that's coming to you that you're actually not paying attention to. That might actually hold the clues to the answer you're looking for.

Yes. And what you're pointing to, Ashish, is the, is the kind of external noticing. So in order to be able to notice what's happening around me, kind of in a way that's wider than, than what the thing I think I need to pay attention to, I have to be in a state that enables me to do that, a nervous system state that enables me to do that. And One of the key practices or competencies in complexity is to be, we call it scanning the system. So scanning widely, but when our nervous system is activated, we actually narrow, zero in on the threats.

Right.

Exactly. So broadening our gaze, scanning widely, and particularly noticing things that don't fit the story that we already have. So in complexity, we wanna look for outliers in In the complicated world, outliers are noise. That's what I was taught in my consulting career. Don't pay attention to the outliers. But the paradoxical thing in complexity is that the outliers matter a lot. And so training ourselves and being in practices that help us pay attention to the outliers is really crucial in complexity.

Yeah, it points me— it highlights to me this work by Kim Cameron and the Center for Positive Organizations, looking for the energizers, looking for those who have the courage to be positively deviant. Most of us want to conform to the norm, but there are few who are willing to be positively deviant and almost learning from what they're doing, right, in order to make things happen, I think, is an example of that.

One of the hardest things to do as a human being who's under stress to solve a problem, to lead a change, to make something happen, is to not only notice that there are positive deviants or other kinds of outliers, but then to actually pay attention to them and get curious about them. That is really counterintuitive, and it feels to our bodies unsafe.

So what's the move to be able to get that capacity? So I've noticed I'm activated. I've noticed, right, my heart is beating fast. I might be leaning forward. I'm tight. What's this next step that if a leader notices that's my inner state, what do I do?

There's no linearity to what to do next, but I will tell you what I do and I suggest to my clients is to lean into this capacity, this thing that we have as human beings that's always with us, and that's breath. So our breath is, as we talk about in the book, it's, it's one of the, if not the only aspect of our autonomic nervous system that we can actually to some degree control.

Yes.

So it's happening in the background all the time. And we're, and we're very unlikely to stop breathing under normal circumstances, even if we try. So you've all tried this, you hold your breath for a certain amount of time, And then you can't, even if you tell yourself, I'm gonna hold my breath for 10 minutes, most people won't do that no matter how much they want to.

Yes.

But we can control, like within the kind of constraints of having to breathe, we can control how we breathe. And so the very simple act of taking a long out-breath, a sigh, an audible sigh, the out-breath activates our parasympathetic nervous system. So focusing on that, very simple. That's— and there are other breathing techniques that we can do, but the breath is a direct access to our nervous system. And it's, I mean, that's why the ancients have been doing it for like before any of us.

Thousands and thousands of years. Millennia.

Yes, exactly. Exactly. And I don't think they knew why. Of course they didn't know why scientifically. They just knew that it worked, which is, by the way, another aspect of complexity that we can talk about, which is just like, Rather than trying to know exactly why things work, which is important in some cases, trying stuff and seeing what works. Try breath practices that calm your nervous system. That's one. I mean, the other, the next genius that we talk about, which is also has not quite as direct access to our nervous systems, but still pretty direct, is movement. So I tend to, so it's like using your actual physical body in different ways to calm our nervous system. So The first thing I try to do is notice what's tight. If my shoulders are raised, I drop them. If my attention is up here in my head, which it usually is if I'm activated, I bring my attention to my feet. I really like push my feet into the ground and feel gravity. Because I love to move, I just go get up and walk around. It's, or go outside. It just changes my nervous system state and therefore what's possible. I call them the direct nervous system out. Access points?

Just going spending time in nature, that works a lot for me. We are lucky we live in Boulder. But just even, I found even when I don't have access, just sitting next to a plant has just an effect on just getting— and even if you're in New York or you're in LA, there are parks. Just go. If you're activated, and you might say, I don't have the time for this, but try it. Go for 10 minutes just without your phone. Just sit next to a tree or a plant. and just breathe, right? Just breathe and let nature do its work in bringing you back to a more calmer, grounded state. And then go back and try and tackle the problem that you've been tackling. Or maybe you'll tackle it with a different place.

I love that idea of sitting next to a plant. I so wanna hear what happens for you when you sit next to a plant.

My God, we are blessed, Carolyn. One of these days when you come visit, I'm blessed because I literally, my office, We had this massive fir tree, unfortunately, that fell on our house and it's gone. But we have trees all around. We have a beautiful maple tree and we have a catalpa. I think to me, just surrounded by these giants that have been around for so many years, I just have to— I can have a really hard conversation. I can just— first, they're all around, so I'm anyway enveloped. But then just going down and just even just regulating or looking at a piece of leaf and noticing all— again, goes back to noticing that is Everything is a blur. It's just a tree. And then you start to notice all the different colors and the variants. And I think I just find this level of soothing and just expansion in my capacities because you're choosing to see so much variation in something that you don't see. And then that curiosity comes in for me when I go back and look at what I was dealing with.

That's beautiful. Living things have an energy, and the plants and the trees are not probably consciously worried about are they gonna make their numbers or not. You know, like it's a calmer energy. There's the awe of nature. There's the curiosity that you described about, you know, wow, what is that like? What are the finer details of that butterfly wing? But there's also just the pure energetic nature of nature.

Vibrational energy.

Yeah. That's right. That we can co-regulate. Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. Yeah.

I just, just before this, I'm lucky enough to live in a beautiful place as well. And we have a little lake right down at the front of our yard. And so I needed a little bit of additional energy because I've been up for a long time. And I just went down and sat by the water for just like 10 minutes and listened to the water lapping on the dock.

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Yeah.

One thing that I would love to touch on as well, because we are in a sleep-deprived world, the first act of waking up often is with a phone. And so we are training our sympathetic nervous system to be on fire from the moment we wake up. And the last thing before we go to bed, many people are checking, is there anything urgent before I go to bed? And I think you also, in your book and in your work, talk a lot about why sleep is so important and why that found— if you wanna do hard stuff, you have to able to tap into the magic elixir of sleep.

Yes, absolutely. I just had such a huge revelation this morning because I had to wake up at 3:30 in the morning. I'm on a global board and it was my turn to be on the meeting at 4 o'clock in the morning today. And I think of myself as a very good sleeper. My Oura Ring confirms that most of the time. It also turns out I'm not quite as good a sleeper as I thought I was in terms of how much, you know, REM and deep sleep I get. But this morning I used to, I used to think, oh, I can power through a night of just 5 hours of sleep, no problem. And but this morning what I saw was I got almost no REM sleep at all because I cut my sleep off at 5 hours. And so often a lot of the REM sleep comes in the morning. I used to be had this view that I didn't really want to know the data about my sleep because I thought, well, what good is it going to do me? But actually it makes a really big— for me, it makes a really big difference because I can ensure that I go to sleep at the same time. I really think about like somebody was passing around a big bar of chocolate last night after a dinner party I was at and I did not have any. It's not because I'm like live a boring life. It's because I actually want to sleep and So many people tell me that they notice their Apple Watches or their Oura Rings or their Whoops or whatever they wear really have made it so clear to them that even one drink in the evening disrupts their sleep. These things allow us to make different choices if we want to, not that we always have to.

If we build that capacity, right? If we build that foundation, we ground— if we are activated, let's ground ourselves. In your book and in your work, you also talk about the importance when it comes to complexity of experimentation. So talk about why that is important and what is good experimentation versus bad experimentation.

Well, my views on this have changed so much over the years. This idea that experimentation and complexity is crucial originally, at least for me, came from Dave Snowden's, you know, the— he, in the Cynefin framework, which describes— I won't go into it, but it describes the difference between You know, predictable and controllable problems as opposed to problems that are not predictable and controllable. So complex or complicated complex. In Complexity, he talks about safe-to-fail experiments. And so in the early days of doing this work with clients and with myself, we did a lot of practice with developing good safe-to-fail experiments, which means essentially— An experiment is different from a decision or an initiative in that it is small, it doesn't take a lot of resources, it's quick. You want to learn. The whole point of it is to learn from it. And you should get— 80% of them should actually fail in the sense that they don't do the thing that you thought they were going to do. It's all about probing and learning about the nature of the problem or the system that you're working with or that you're in. So, we talk a lot about how to develop safe-to-fail experiments and how to distinguish them from solutions. It turned out that most leaders we worked with didn't have such a hard time, like, knowing the difference, but there was such, such a strong resistance to actually doing experiments. And so Jennifer and I came to refer to this genius not as experiments, but as being experimental. So it's really a mindset. Experimental sort of means you're not attached to any particular outcome. It means you're always learning it so that you have to pay attention to all the information, that you don't get attached to your own stories about what the solution is or even what the root cause is, because there isn't one in complexity. So experimental, I often think of being experimental, I sort of equate it with being playful, right? You know, we think about when we were little kids, like Even from the moment that we watch toddlers throw their bottle or their food off of the high chair, they're not doing that to be bad. They're doing that to see what'll happen. Will mom or dad or the caretaker pick it up? And how many times will they do it? People learn how to talk through experimentation when they're little. That's why it's so easy for little kids can learn languages. It's partly about the brain as well, but it's just harder for adults to be experimental. Why? Because we're attached to our identities. of knowing stuff. So, we had leaders say, you know, I get this experimental stuff, but really, I'm gonna go into the organization or the thing that I'm leading and say, let's do experiments, and let's make them playful. It's so counterintuitive, but also counter-identity.

Right.

A leader should know stuff. A leader should be in charge. A leader should be serious. A leader should be whatever the thing. It's hard.

We just covered this topic in the podcast we released this week. It was with Ramesh Renuvasan from McKinsey. He leads our Bower Academy. And we talked about the importance of being vulnerable in the right situations for the leaders to be able to say, hey, I don't know. And I think we'll have to figure it out. But I think we will be able to figure that out, but we'll be able to figure it out together, right? Here's what I do know. Here's what matters. Here's what we exist. But how do we get past that? I think we talked about the power of vulnerability as one of the most important gifts and powers to navigate in this world.

Ashish, do you get the sense from your work or from talking to people, like, that it is becoming more acceptable and even desirable for leaders to say, I don't know, we need to figure this out together. Is it shifting? Because back in the day when I was a consultant, that was not kind of— that was not what leadership looked like.

It might have gone from 5% to 10%, but still people today, right, don't. And in fact, one of— so we are running a program right now, which is an 18-month journey where With a large food company. And one of the biggest moves that we are trying to normalize, and we've been doing it, is for people to actually ask each other for help and even say, I don't know the answer, or here's what I'm thinking. I am open to other ways. And we started with actually taking those who were willing to go do it to then create a space where others are now feeling comfortable asking and offering their help, right? So it's small. I think we have to, but this is where— We had no idea. How can you get somebody to be comfortable saying, I don't know, if they've grown up for 25 years being the person who knew? But I feel that in the world we are navigating in today, I think that is the biggest difference between companies who will be able to navigate, whether it's AI, whether it's the economic disruptions, the constantly changing tariffs, the climate change around us, is by tapping into the answers that exist at the edges versus As a leader, feeling that I can know all the answers.

Yeah, I'm so glad I asked you that question, 'cause listening to your response really crystallized something for me, which is that in my work with leaders, I don't hear overt resistance to the kind of the vulnerability and I don't know. People, if you ask any leader I work with, they always say, yes, of course, we can't possibly, I can't possibly know everything. I can't do everything myself. I need all the perspectives. It's just harder in practice. It's very hard in practice.

This is the complexity of humans. There's so many other things going on. So I'll give you this dynamic, right? They are all peers. They are the senior leadership team of this operations team. We can't ignore that part of it, there is competition. So if I tell my peer I don't know, will that be misused against me? What will other people think about me not knowing versus somebody else who knows it all, right? So I think there are all of these stories we actually start to create. So we are comfortable, like, yeah, of course we need to be vulnerable. But how do we be vulnerable? By sharing something about ourselves or asking for help. And I think that's where you start to kind of get uncomfortable, or you'll ask— you'll have the smallest thing that people will share, but not really. But I think this is where I think that trust also develops over time. And I think so the only way we can do that is like, I share a little, that allows you to share a little, that allows me to share a little bit more. That allows you to share a little more. And over time, we get comfortable with that move.

Do you know, I think people misunderstand vulnerability as well. At least I have a kind of a new definition of vulnerability, which I now call letting yourself be known, because that comes from one of my colleagues. I don't know where she got it from. Maybe she made it up, but my colleague Heidi Brooks talks about this in her work because vulnerability, I think it has come to mean a certain thing, at least with my, a lot of my clients, which means talk about your family, talk about your shortcomings, Talk about your weekend, talk about things outside of the kind of norm. I think that's part of it, but I also think that just consistently revealing yourself, and that includes, I don't know, but it also includes sometimes, I do know, like, I do have a really important perspective here, and it's an outlier, and I'm gonna tell you what it is. Or, I have a piece of feedback for the system or for an individual that I'm gonna offer, and I'm gonna offer it skillfully and clearly, and I'm gonna do that even at the risk disrupting whatever kind of collaboration or homeostasis we're in.

Harmony. Harmony, right? We're disrupting harmony.

Harmony is the enemy of complexity friendliness.

Really. Let's just be comfortably numb because we don't want discomfort, right? And I think from that place, you don't have your capacity to notice. You don't have your capacity to make those moves other than what you've always known. And you just sit. I loved your move also in this space of— that's why bringing the power of, rather than knowing, the power of wondering and laughing as 2 of the kind of really complexity genius moves that you talk about. So talk about the power of those, wonder, and why actually laughter is so important in this domain if we have to figure our way out together.

I'll start with laughter because I think that's more unusual. People don't talk about laughter in leadership that often. A couple of things about laughter. One is it goes back to playfulness. Which playfulness gets our, our nervous system in a more of a parasympathetic state, and which is much more suited to complexity because it enables us to scan widely, to stay in a thing rather than fighting a thing. So that's, that's one about playfulness. Another one is that people trust each other. There's some research on laughing that suggests that we trust people that we can laugh with more. And trust is— yeah, it's so interesting. Now we have to be really careful not to ever be laughing at somebody because that can really destroy trust. But laughing together is— we trust people that we laugh with. And so there's like bringing some levity to situations and doing it, you know, like with care is— we need— it builds trust among people. And there, because in complexity you don't have processes that can govern everything because you don't. Processes are only useful when you could sort of predict what's gonna happen, and the process is there to either make things happen or keep things from happening. You, what you have is people and you have trust and people to be able to have to respond to what's happening next. So that's, that's really the second thing about laughter. I won't tell the whole story, but the very personal story with laughter in how, how incredibly quickly it can shift my state. Like I have, I found myself once in the really depths of despair and a really, really hard time for me. It's many years, about 7 or 8 years ago. And I was running a workshop. It was very bad timing. There was somebody in the workshop who taught laughter yoga and I dragged myself out of bed early that morning to participate in laughter yoga. And I thought, oh my gosh, I can't believe I'm doing this. And just like engaging in laughter about nothing. Literally about nothing, shifted my state so profoundly. I mean, it didn't mean I wasn't grieving anymore. It just meant I could show up differently because it shifted my state. So I am sold on laughter.

Yeah. Well, there are lots of laugh clubs around and sometimes till you participate in one, you go like, what are these odd people? Why are they just standing there in the garden just laughing? You know, beyond the fact that they're really breathing in a lot of oxygen and out because they're actually laughing. It's a way to train our nervous system. Again, we don't laugh out loud. We try to be polite. So I think part of it is just truly creating that space. But yeah, it's very powerful. Laughter is very powerful. And I think it goes so importantly with, you can't have an experimental mindset and not actually laugh because if you're taking everything so seriously, then you're not really being experimental. You're just only being experimental on the fringes because you need everything to be right. But being able to laugh at what didn't work and say, oh my God, look at what happened. Here's what I thought. Here's what happened. What can I learn from it? I think it, again, creates, opens up more capacities to notice what we are learning from it.

Thank you. That was the third point I was trying to remember and couldn't come up with it, that if we cannot laugh at ourselves, I think we're kind of dead on the water when it comes to leading in complexity or navigating complexity. Generally.

Yeah.

Yeah. 'Cause we're gonna get it wrong all the time. All the time. And if we're not getting it wrong, we're not doing it right.

Exactly. So look, you know, I really wanted to talk about something else in leadership that very rarely gets talked about, which is loving and the power of connections. Because we've, up till now, we've talked about in complexity, you don't have all the answers. You'll never have all the answers. And your power to be able to tap in I think I wanna hear a little bit about loving from you and what do you mean and what does that mean like in a workplace context and how tapping into that power emotion and that act can really make an organization complexity ready?

Yeah, thanks for asking about that. When Jennifer and I were writing the book, we got feedback from the editor who said, okay, look, this is great, but you really can't use the word love. Like, that can't be one of the Geniuses. And we were pretty adamant that that was the word we wanted to use because we could have gone with connection. Which is also really, really important in complexity for some of the reasons we've talked about.

Yeah.

But look, we spend so much of our lives in the workplace, either virtually or energetically or physically, right? So much of our lives. And if there isn't love in that place that we spend so much of our lives, I think that's really sad. That's really sad. And so there are very practical reasons, which many of which we've talked about. We love people. That means, that doesn't mean romantic love. That means we have like genuine positive regard for them. It also means we can like tussle with them. I mean, I personally, the people I tussle with the most in disagreeing and productive ways are the people I love and trust the most.

Yes.

So we, you have to be able to do that in complexity. But also if we're talking about our nervous systems kind of needing to be in a state where we can address complexity well, what other better way is there to be in a state of kind of the parasympathetic nervous system state than when we're feeling love and positive regard? It just, yeah, it's a mood elevator and it just helps us be ready. So I mean, there are lots of other reasons, but we did it as a, because we believe it, but also as a kind of a nudge to say, actually it is important.

Well, you would be— I have 2 stories on that one, right? One is I was at a Conscious Capitalism meeting in Denver and we were going around and we were with Timothy Henry, who's taken over as the CEO for Conscious Capitalism. And they were talking about all these attributes around Looking at which companies would choose to be consciously capital, follow up with the movement. And one of the CEOs in the room said, well, have you thought about using scanning for love? He said, what do you mean about love? He's like, using the word love, do companies fundamentally believe and embrace in loving their employees and loving their customers and their suppliers? And it was interesting. And all of a sudden, people were like, yeah, we have that in our motto. And we have— and it was no surprise, 7 out of the 10 companies all actually had a very different relationship with love and the importance of love, right, as kind of a core foundational element. And it was like, our invitation is, don't search for, do you connect with purpose and people are first? Go for, scan for, do you believe in love, right?

That sounds like a song.

Exactly, right? And then I'll give you the second story, which I thought was very, very powerful. And it was with a bunch of corporate executives who were actually asking one of the mystics I've done work with and I love is Sadhguru. And he has like an army of a million volunteers who go out of their way to do things, right? None of them are paid. And they just— and these corporate leaders were asking him, they're like, you know, I don't get it. Like, we pay people and we can't get them to do 1/10 of what these people do for you. And why is that? Like, how is that? And he says, well, it's simple. It's because they love me. Do your people love you? And they said, I'm not sure. I said, well, that's it. They love me. And they said, but how? Do you get— how do you get them to love you? I would love for my people to love me. How do you get them to love you? And he said, well, you have to fall in love with them first. And so this notion of you want somebody to love you, love them first. Hold them in utmost regard. Care for them about who they are, not what they do for you. Recognize that everyone in the world has suffering. You are not responsible for solving their suffering, but you can create an environment where they can show up. And they feel psychologically safe because they feel loved to be able to tell you things, to be able to grieve with you, to be able to cry with you, to be able to laugh with you, to be able to celebrate with you. And I think for me, that's why this notion of love as a complexity genius was actually one of my favorite moves and components of your book, Carolyn.

That was the most vulnerable one, actually. And I don't regret it one bit. And it's so, so amazing to hear that all these leaders are talking about it. That feels really hopeful to me.

Well, my friend, I love your work. I love the impact you had on my life. We are gonna put Unleash Your Complexity Genius, the link to it. I think it's such a simple, easy book and offers such practical ways to master complexity. I think it's a core skill that we need today more than ever before when you wrote it. Any parting advice for our listeners that you wanna leave them with?

I think that I'll keep it very simple, that pay attention to your nervous system. It is probably the most important lever that we have in terms of being able to thrive in the world as it is today. And it's, it's a thing we actually have some agency over, and that's, I think, really useful. Yeah.

Beautiful. Well, thank you, my friend. I know it's been a long day for you. I won't keep you long. Be well. I appreciate you and have a wonderful day.

Yeah. Thank you. You too.

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