Unapologetically Human: Why Stability Is the New Superpower for Leadership and Performance with Crystal Fernando

Welcome to the Flourishing Edge, the podcast where we share weekly tips on making flourishing your competitive edge. I'm Ashish Kothari, your host, and each week we'll dive deep with flourishing experts, change makers and executives to share best practices that can help you unlock higher performance through science based interventions. Let's step together into the edge of what's possible and live, work and lead with more joy, health, love and meaning. Crystal, it's so lovely to have you on our Flourishing Edge podcast. Welcome, my dear friend.

Thank you, Ashish. It's been a long time that we've been talking about this, so it's exciting to be here today. And thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

Yeah, it's such a joy. And look, I think you had a big part in my day, just starting off so beautifully. Um, you know, I usually always have a morning practice. I meditate and I do something physical and read. Right. Every morning I start my day with some reading. And today it happened to be your new book, which is just absolutely a delight. And so we're obviously going to be digging into that today in the podcast. It's called Unapologetically Human. And it is such a beautiful book. It is such a beautiful book. Rich storytelling, but combined with really practical approaches for us to thrive in this increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex world.

Thank you. That means a lot. You know, you were one of the first people I talked to when I was thinking about even writing a book. Do you remember that? And I. So I feel like it's a full circle moment. You're my first podcast and the book launches in a few weeks, so I am, I'm excited. Well, we'll be launched by the time we publish this, so that's exciting and it's meaningful for me to be full circle back with you and I'm very grateful for your friendship, mentorship, partnership. It's been great. Thank you.

Thank you, my friend. So look, I want to start with, you know, your opening the human capacity crisis. And you open with the idea that, you know, we are living fundamentally through a human capacity crisis, not just a performance crisis. So unpack that for our listeners.

Sure. You know, it's funny because I used to do pre Covid, I did talks about performance and I would talk about this perfect storm of underperformance. And it's the idea that you have constant connectivity on the brain. You have rising complexity, and it's coupled with uncertainty and constant change and also stress and anxieties on high. And what I didn't fully understand when I was having those talks initially was the brain story behind that. So for me it was like, yeah, these things are coming together and it's a collision. And I used to solve my problems early in my career. I don't know if you, if you think back, way back for me, not for anybody now it's way back, back to the beginning of my career. I used to solve my problems. They were in hand, right? It felt like they were. The problems were solvable. And so now we're looking at constant change. And now AIs hit the scene. It wasn't a single moment, Ashish, that I realized it, but I think it was a season. And I'll tell you exactly how that unfolded. But I was having. So I started met a gentleman. I've been very, very lucky and fortunate in my career to have great bosses, great mentors. And I met a gentleman named Evie and Gordon who wrote the foreword for the book and for whose partnership I'm immensely grateful. But we had met in Emory University and we were chatting and I approached him because he happened to mention he was a brain scientist and an artist and as someone with deep background in innovation creativity. And I was really fascinated by the neurology and neuroscience of creativity. And so we started that conversation and he happened to own the world's largest brain database on health and wellness. And that was sold to Sondermind, which is a therapy company. And we began working on a product to take to market which we still have around peak performance. It was really targeted at innovation executives and what it means to create the climate and the. Both externally in your team and internally within yourself for creativity to rise and higher order thinking. And then Covid came and we were watching the world pause, the world pivot. We were watching the data. So we had a very interesting behind the scenes view on watching stress and anxiety and the capacities in the brain respond to this huge crisis. And then I was kind of acting, not kind of, I was acting as a. Both an advisor and a coach to many senior executives. C Suite. And I guess in that you hear people's inner. It's safe space, right? You hear people's innermost thoughts question. And it was really in that moment and it was one day with Evie and I said, you know, I don't think this is. It is a performance crisis. But really we've missed the point. It's not that we are underperforming. We've missed the idea that we're setting the wrong climate for the brain to perform at all makes any sense. And so we actually Rebranded it. You know, we still have something around performance. But it was really at that moment that I said to him, these capacities are human. This idea of higher order thinking, which is what that product was about. Creativity, innovation is still performance, just higher order thinking. So anyway, I did at that moment started re evaluating. As the world begins to change and the pace begins to pick up, what do we need to do to understand and empower people to understand their brain enough to have agency? So what I was hearing in these coaching sessions was a decline of agency, if that makes sense. And as I was learning the brain at the exact same time and really going into a rabbit hole with Evian, that's what stood out to me.

Yeah.

Shortly after that, I began to teach his course, so I was his successor, which is another full circle moment, which was amazing. And as I began to pull together that curriculum to help coaches, executives, leaders understand the very basics of the brain is really when I began to change how I think about it and I talk about it. Yeah, it's underperformance. That's what we're seeing. What we're not seeing is that it's a crisis of human capacity.

Yeah.

Never meant to think this way at this pace.

Well, I think it's amazing. You know, I came to the same conclusion about ten years ago, Crystal. I came to it from a very different place. You know, very similar research that I was doing. I came into it from two places. I came to this place from an evolutionary biology perspective and I was reading around how our brains have evolved. Right. And the fundamental properties of our human brain, they evolved over millions of years to keep us safe, not keep us happy. We have a fundamental negativity bias because those things that are not going well are the ones that are going to kill us or throw us out of our community, which means we're going to die. That's why, you know, the comparison, we always are comparing. Right. Good luck not comparing. We can choose who we compare ourselves to, but we are always comparing which creates this level of scarcity because our brain compares to those who have more than those who have less. You know, we have continuously this scanning out for danger rather than kind of connecting to our moments. And I was realizing that these circuits are actually on overdrive because of a higher complexity world that we are creating, which are putting us constantly in psychological threat. So I was coming at it from that point, but then I was also looking at all this research in Harvard around adult development theory work by Keegan and lohi and back 20 years ago, they were highlighting A fundamental complexity mismatch where only 20% of leaders were at a stage of development to thrive in complexity. Most of them were stuck in a survival mode. Right? And that's what became kind of. So I mean all of this really, really resonates. And I almost say, you know, in, in, in a lot of my conversations with people, I think what we are, if you really look at describing. You call it the human capacity crisis. Absolutely it is. But I think the needs of our time is I say people to be superhuman, not human. Because when we describe the property of a grip, right, like it's a fifty hundred, you know, if you describe dogs, you describe what dogs do, right? Or if you describe things made of wood, you describe physical properties of what in general wood behaves versus metal. If we describe properties of humans, we would not describe humans as the most compassionate, charitable. We will describe humans as highly focused on self solving for the here and now negativity by all of these components. And so my point is these are actually superhuman capabilities. That's what we need to evolve to, to be able to thrive. Otherwise we go back to kind of, you know, our brains that are going to keep us constantly in fight, flight, freeze and under resourced to be creative and innovative and solve these second order problems from a higher state of consciousness.

Fascinating point of view. Ashish. What was coming up for me was interesting because I was like, yes, yes, yes. And then when you said we need to be superhuman, part of the thesis in the book is to return to our humanity that our best. If you think about anybody listening thinks about when am I at my best or think of any leader that you have looked up to that has really influenced your personal life. It's very rarely because they were superhuman, it was because they connected to you. And when you think about your best self, it isn't when we're being our least empathetic, it isn't when we're being our least creative. Usually we're proudest of the moments when we were most human. We just don't play there enough. Does that make sense? Because the world is saying you need and it's kind of this combination between the world has changed and is demanding more of us. But at the same time our narratives and our scripts and our mindsets are telling us we have to do more, be more.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're stuck below the line. That's exactly classic. We're stuck below the line. So it is about us. And I think my point on superhuman is a little bit tongue in cheek where I basically Says don't go to your basic tendencies of what you have, go beyond it, which is what your core book is about. That these brains we have, we can rewire our brains with practice to be in a state that has those creativity, innovation, compassion, more accessible to us then these fear responses, right? So I think that's where they come back in full circle.

We're saying the same thing, but it was just interesting and I wanted to pick on it for a second. But the. That, that's exactly right. Awareness equals choice. So for me, if you can learn the basics of how your anatomy works, you don't have to be a neuroscientist. Had a lot of imposter syndrome. And I was like, why am I writing a brain based when I'm not a neuro. Neuroscientist in quotes. But honestly, having gone way deep into the science and then lifting it back up, one of my biggest, I guess traits is simplifying. And you don't have to know how your engine of your car works, but you sure as heck need to know where the key goes, where the gas goes, how to drive it, how to steer it. And I, I don't know about you Ashish, but I wasn't taught that in school. I went, you know, university. We were, we've been in the work world. When I learned the basics of the anatomy of the brain and how it connects to empathy, higher order thinking, creativity. If we understood that, we wouldn't be asking people to do more with less. You know, do, do more, be more creative, do these things that are actually intention when in fact there is no tension, they rise together. So that was my passion in doing this work, was to illuminate some of that, simplify it.

I love that, go into the sub.

It but understand it enough to simplify it without it being simplistic.

So hopefully yeah, you know, one of the, one of my teachers that I follow, I love his work is Indian mystic by the name of Sadhguru. He actually wrote a book called Inner Engineering. And his whole point was you're the most complex walking, talking human computer. What we are able to do, no computer can do. When you get a new laptop, a new car, a new equipment, the first thing is you read the user's manual. And his invitation to people is have you read the user's manual on how to use it and how to take, you know, this complex chemical factory that resides in our body, this unbelievable imagination to be able to explore different futures, this vivid memory, right? The ability to be able to take in all of the kind of imagery and make sense of it. But most of us are not taught how to actually use this unbelievable equipment. That's why he created a course called Inner Engineering. A lot of his work is around helping people reconnect to our own core, rather than based on the programming of the external world that we actually start to operate from.

I love that. I think I've used that metaphor and I'm not familiar with this work, so I'll go find out for sure. But we don't.

He's brilliant. He's brilliant. He's brilliant. So, look, let's get into it. You know, I want to start with your chapter on your introduction, right. In the Human Capacity Crisis, you shared this powerful story, which I've seen play out so often in different versions. You said, you know, you were nominated for best rest at school, but you came home and you have nothing in the fridge to eat, right? So the story of perfect external lives, oftentimes struggling internal lives. And I'm curious how that early experience, right, of masking struggle or trying to show up in a particular way, reflected in, you know, reflects in how you show up as a leader today. And how does it really, you know, how does it really explore all the work you're doing to lead unapologetically being human, you know, and not feeling like we have to always put up this perfect Personas out there.

That's an interesting place to start. Yeah. When I was writing the book, you, I'm sure you, you went through these processes when you were writing, when you were writing hardwired happiness. You got to, how much do I share personally? How vulnerable do I be? And this is one of those moments I'm like, is this relevant or not? And then, yeah, yeah, it's absolutely relevant because we. I have a story, but so do you and so does everyone else. And my story happened to begin with growing up in the Deep south, having a father who struggled with paranoid schizophrenia, a mother who ultimately was hospitalized. But so much time trying to figure that out. And then my mom going back to school and being what you call latchkey kid, and my sister had moved out and she was providing me clothes. And I think she did that in hindsight because she knew it would just keep the questions away. I couldn't answer, right if I looked the part and I played the part. And so what that taught me, and I carried that for a long time with a lot of intensity, actually. And the way I carried it in the beginning is so much different than the way I carry it now. But the way I carried it in the beginning was I must have two lives. I must have my inner life and my secret world, and I must have my outer life. And that outer life has a certain Persona, right? And I was an achiever and, you know, had a very quick. Right. When I did graduate from college and started working in the real world, had a very quick rise to leadership. And I carried that as almost something to hide because that's how I had been programmed. Right. And it wasn't until I was a new director and I was invited into a high potential program. I think I was one of the youngest only female directors globally. And so I found myself in this room and there was a process. It was called leading with purpose. And there was a process by which we were supposed to tell our timeline. Here were the pivotal moments in my life and here's how it contributed. Kind of the question you just asked me now, but that question I was unprepared for. At this moment in time, I can tell you exactly how it did. But at that moment it was. I must have just looked at like a ghost, because the coach pulled me aside and said, are you going to be okay? And I said, no, no, absolutely not. This is not okay. The inner world and the outer world kind of combining, long story short is I did muster up the courage with itself to tell my story. And then I sat there and he had me go last. So as I was waiting, I heard 30 other executives tell their story. And I think what happened for me that day was to realize we carry these, but we cannot separate them. And as a leader, I. Not just that moment, I decided to share my story with my team, but every team I led after that, every team I've ever worked with, I've sat down at some point in time and said, what are the big things that happened for you? Every client, executive client, I work with their timeline in a similar way. Yeah, I understand context. And so I guess how it's shown up for me years later is, number one, we are human first. Number two, we cannot. We can separate to some degree inner and outer world, but our inner world dictates our outer choices. Behaviors absolutely shows up that way. And then third, performance is in the nuance. It's very rarely the story that you see first. That is the story. And the nuance is not to say, yeah, bring all that and let's make. I think that the fear is, let's make work therapy. Like people kind of go, no, no, no, there has to be a personal life. And yes, there does. But I do need to understand your context. What country you grew up in, what culture you. What part of the country did you grow up in, what culture, what norms, what mindsets drive you, what fears, that type of thing. And you don't have to be in therapy to get that stuff. You can absolutely get to know someone. And in so doing, you meet them where they're at instead of having them meet you where you're at. And in a world of constant change, constant uncertainty that you touched on in the beginning, we have to meet people where they're at because otherwise you're locked. Right. And you can't get them to move to where you need to go. So it's a fine line, but it absolutely informs the work that I do now. It informs. Like having grown up in that mindset and then having that pivotal moment has changed so much.

Yeah. You know, one of the program, one of the key things and almost all the work I do is we have an origin stories discussion, a dinner. And it's one of the most transformative, you know, events that we typically do because for the first time, people start to see the other person as the full human rather than the role or the colleague and, you know, the function or whatever stories we might hold about them. It was one of those moments that also shaped my decision to shift from performance and operations transformations to human and flourishing transformations when I realized in a five day retreat, there were 35 to the 40 of the leading partners and senior partners in the firm. And everybody had perfectly curated external lives and internal lives that many were struggling with but very rarely opened up to anyone. And recognizing that and recognizing how much load people are carrying and how that is shaping or har. Either is accelerating performance, but at a huge burnout cost or actually holding them back from being able to perform because they're putting up all these external kind of armors that is leaving this beautiful humanity of theirs to show up. Right. So it's robbing them in one shape or another. And really the heart of the work is about returning home to who we are, which is we are perfectly imperfect beings on a journey. Journey. A journey towards whatever. Right. Our better self. Whatever that means. Whatever that means. So look, another concept so very much synced up and it's. It's beautiful. Like, I thought I knew you Crystal for the last two years, but, you know, I think I know you so much more through these beautiful stories that you've shared in the book.

Thank you. Thank you, Ashish. That is. That was intentional to be a little. You have to be A little vulnerable in order to ask others to be vulnerable, don't you? Yeah, sometimes it's a big, A big secret, you know, it's a big thing that we're sharing. Sometimes it's little things in coaching, sometimes people mention it. Something as simple as I used to be able to focus and I can't anymore. I don't know what's happening. I don't know why I can't. You know, I'm constantly busy. I had a client, a client that we both know and share and adore that said, I used to play to win and now I play to not lose. You don't have to go down deep to realize that those are inner scripts that we're not showing externally and from.

What I gather, but they shape our worldview. They shape how we show up. They shape what we are able to create. Right.

They. And they're abundant. I'm here to tell you, as I listen to executives time, time and time again, different industries, different parts of the world, different, very similar wonderings. I wouldn't even say scripts yet. Like wonderings, why can't I focus like I used to? Why do I feel like I'm reacting all day long? And part of that is not understanding the context and then not understand of the world and then not understanding what happens when brain meets world. And so just giving them that back to owner manual.

So, yeah, so look, I want to go next to this concept that you talk about in your book, stability before agility. Right. Everybody wants to be agile. We always talked about at McKinsey when we ran programs, if you want to do agile, you have to be agile. And being agile is actually being stable. So I loved when I saw that reflected back. Stability before agility. Why calm is a skill. You know, you write beautifully. Without stability, agility collapses into reactivity. And I want to explore that a little bit. What does stability really mean? What does it mean for you? And how does one cultivate a stable foundation from which to be agile?

That's a great question. I won't go too deep in asking a question for a question, but I'm just curious. Quickly, Ashish, because you do this work and you are in consulting, we're similar. We walk similar paths and similar purposes. Do you find that people come to you asking for agility? They rarely say, come give me a stability. They really want the agility, the adaptability, the resilience. And so that's what. Is that what you hear as well?

All the time? Yeah. It's all about doing right. It's all about, how can I do X, Y and Z move faster, be more transformative. It's all out there about agility. Very rarely do people want. Because there's a story. Stability, for me, people mean slowness. Stability means no change. Right. Stability means a lot of these things we don't want. And yet, you know, as I'm a huge fan of Bruce Lee and his. And his work, and if you look at Bruce Lee, right, and if you read any of his initial teachings and his books, he fundamentally always talked about creating a stable foundation, a foundation that was so stable, but also allowed him to be able to move in any direction that he could. He was not stuck. He was. He had a stable foundation that allowed him to pivot. And so it's counterintuitive, isn't it?

Yet every. Every sport, if you think of any athlete, we start with core streng. And I tell a story in the book about salsa and how you know you can't, or you look at ballerinas, or you look at any type of athlete, they will have core strength first. And yet we are asking, the world is moving and is unhinged with air quotes, and people are unhinged, and yet we're asking for agility and change and creativity. So let's unpack it for a second. What does it mean to be stable? It doesn't mean ecstatic, not at all. It means that you're grounded and that you're clear, coherent, aligned with something that you're after. So we're not just transactional and responsive, and we're working from a place of quality decision making rather than reactive emotive, which is kind of what I hear more often in the world that leaders are working in right now. My colleague at Emory and I, she has a saying. The world is nothing but a sea of triggers for leaders right now, theirs or others, right? So they're walking through the day either finding themselves triggered or hijacked or unstable or in some way, shape or form, loss of agency. Or if they're grounded, then they're working with or corresponding with someone who might feel that way for a number of reasons. So being stable simply means that you are grounded in your own ability and agency to navigate whatever comes, and that you're making decisions with intention, clarity, and purpose. And from that place we can go, we call it the base camp or performance. From there, we can go anywhere we want.

Yeah, but you have to start there first.

That's absolutely right.

Brenny Brown, in her most recent book that she created, I'm Forgetting the name of it now. Really talked. Yeah. Grounded, grounded, something. Right. Really starts from that. She tells the story of her core. She was playing pickleball and how she was like stuck up and she said, no, where's your core? Find your ground. Right? Find your ground. I think that was kind of became a core part. But look, I can remember many moments like these for me, but I'm curious about a moment, a story from your time when reclaiming that stability, finding yourself. Right. Spinning, but being able to come back to that changed the outcome of a high stakes moment for you. What was that for you?

You know what, what actually comes up is it is a story that I'm involved in, but it's a story. It was one of my first clients and I'd love to tell her story because it was so. But in. In so doing, it's going to. Here I was. She was my very first client when I started what Box Partners, which is my consultancy. And when you're new, I know you know this too, Ashish. When you, you go out on your own and you've been a part of an organization, you're kind of still trying to prove yourself and you might find old behaviors popping up. And so here I was trying to be smart and be the one that knew, you know, you're. They're hiring you to be smart and to be a consult. The first conversations we had were more along those lines. And as I got to know her more, she was the president of a very large organization and she was busy, I'll just put it that way, busy all the time. Right. And I noticed that a lot of our conversations would go into transaction mode, right? Part of it the role that I was playing, part of it the role that she had kind of assumed. And if you asked anyone on her team, and this was pre Covid, so we ride the elevator and say, ashish, what are you doing today? Everyone would go, oh, I'm so busy. Busy, busy, busy, busy. I'm busy, busy, busy. They never talked about the outcome. And I would go, why is that? What's that? Why is that important? Tell me about that project. But the instinct and the. The first go to was I'm so busy. Right. So I asked her a little bit about that and as we began to get to know one another, dug in a little bit deeper and realized that it wasn't just something that she had assumed herself. She had created a climate of busy. It was spilling out of her, if that makes sense. And it was becoming the cultural norm. And it wasn't what she intended at all. It was really. And she was struggling with some health concerns and realized, like, oh, my goodness, I was a bit overwhelmed with not just that I was doing this to myself, but the responsibility she said she had. So we architected a retreat. It was her top 30 leaders. And we had some moments of silence and stability and lots of conversations leading up to that retreat that were less about the agenda, less about the. The thing we were going to create or the decision that we were going to make. And it was more about the shift. And so a lot of the work I do, I kind of focus on what's the from to. And as you read the book, you'll notice every chapter has a from to. There's a counterintuitive. Really easy, but maybe not your obvious shift from one thing to another as you read the parts of the framework. And her shift was, I want to move from being busy to intentional. And I want to create a culture that is no longer busy, but is intentional and human. Anyway, long story short, she began by standing up in a moment of clarity, led to a moment of courage where she stood up and said, I am not healthy. I am busy. I'm not doing okay. And I realize I've done that to you, and it stops here and now. And we gathered everyone's phones at the beginning, and we spent three days architecting with her, kicking off with that clarity of message. Right? And three days with her top leaders, not just saying, hey, I want to do this, but how? How are we going to do this? What is it going to look like? What is it going to feel like? What are the moments that are going to happen? How are they meaningful? And we went from that at the end of those three days was truly, she's. That's not my work. That's her work. That was her courage coming through. So the story I tell is really about her, but it was also about me realizing that, gosh, this moment of transaction became very human and very impactful when she stood up and had the courage. Courage. So clarity does lead to courage. And said, this is not what I want. This is never what I meant to create. So we spent those three days. At the end, her team was crying, hugging. It was meaningful. They were thanking her. And we went from those 30 leaders to her top 300 and then rolled it out throughout that cultural transformation from there. But it started from a very, very grounded.

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Place of clarity. Hopefully that helps. But that's good. That's what came up first when you started to say, tell me a time when that really mattered. It was so incredibly powerful to watch in a short period of time. What a critical and pivotal difference. And then performance followed, for what it's worth. So I tell that story, very human story. But honestly, performance followed. It doesn't mean that you're doing more. It means that you're doing less, more meaningfully. And so they helped. It really began as the path of being really clear and engagement scores rose. Performance rose. It's really the after effect of creating the right environment. The rest of it followed.

Yeah, well, there are many companies who can benefit from that, right. They, they constantly inhabit a culture of busyness. So if are listening to this and like your standard response when somebody asks you is how are you? Is busy?

Absolutely.

You know, I think that just recognize what you're creating for others, what you're creating for yourself and from where you're operating. Busyness. As, as a, as a dear friend once told me, busyness is a form of laziness that you are actually not. You're just busy because you're trying to, because you're not stepping back to actually think about what matters and being able to make the choices. Look, I think personally I've shared this before, but like when I shifted at McKinsey from 100% on five days a week, four days on the road to a 70% schedule, 36 hours a week I had the other two days. I was really. I created that environment of stability around me and that 70% forced me to really think about where I was spending my time because I didn't have an infinite amount of time anymore.

Right.

What shifted were so many things, of course. My health, my ability to think clearly grounded, the work I was doing was obviously became a lot more meaningful. But most importantly, if I looked at all external markers for me of performance, my client impact, my client billings, the impact on my team and their experience, the relationships with the client, new knowledge and innovation that I was creating. Almost all of them were at the same, if not higher than when I was a hundred percent. And so this is a very much of a lived experience for me too. Crystal right. Of like when we. But the question is, are we willing to make that shift? Are we willing to create that space no matter in whichever way of creating a stable environment for us.

Yeah.

And for all of those who are looking to do that. Right. You offer a very quote unquote simple framework. It's a. You call it simple. It's not simple. It's easy to read. It is incredibly look to do it. It requires practice and that's why we love it. You've simplified it. But in the end, neurons that fire together wire together. And what fires neurons is practice, not knowledge. So I want to go into that framework with you. It's called simple. The first three parts obviously have stability. The next three have agility. We already started talking a bit about stability. But take us into that framework. Let's spend a little bit of time on stability and the three moves. And let's talk a little bit then on agility.

Sure. So I'll backtrack for just a moment to put the pieces together. Ashish, if that's okay. So it does start Sim PLE S is simple for safety, intention and mindset. So the SIAM is safety, intention and mindset. And with each part of the framework, it's probably important to say how it became a framework. Part of it was when I work with companies, large companies for big transformations, one of the biggest, best questions you can ask is what is enduring? What will not change? What is sacred? Tell me about the history before we go to the future. Right before we start telling people how things are going to be different. And in so doing it kind of led me to ask the question, well, as the world changes dramatically now especially. And that we started this book well before AI hit like a title web, like there was enough change. And then we've added the AI component as well. And it the question the thesis was what will not change? And so we went through a very rigorous process to look at all the different strategies, all of the different things. And it was also a bit of a frustration for me to when things are. You can go really deep on any one of these six parts of the framework. There are multiple books just about safety in the brain. We wanted to make sure that we could integrate. So as I was working with my colleagues and with Evian around the brain and then we have some other designers, therapists different and then testing it real time in the real world. I wanted it to practical applicable. This is not academic, this is real world in the trenches. This stuff works kind of thing. And also deeply vetted. So it isn't new research. We're drawing upon a wealth of research and it had to be enduring. Not for one change, but for 15 changes. And then lastly it had to scale. It starts with you, expands to teams, goes to entire systems and organizations. So with that in mind, then we kind of looked at it and one day it just, honest to goodness, we did not cram it into an acronym or I didn't. That was simple. It was, it sort of emerged, if that makes sense. And so we were like, wow, that's really interesting. And then the first part of it, as I began to study it, the first three were really about getting grounded, and then the last three were really about new skills to navigate with power and grace. So that's what we've done. And then each chapter has a from to shift. So the safety, which we've talked about and the brain science behind that really starts with your stability and how that stability is a contagion. So one thing leaders do is they may, you know, they're either going to show up grounded, clear, or they might be late to a meeting, stressed, manic, unfocused, and whatever you bring is the weather. And you've now set the climate for everyone, especially if you hold power or title, right, if rank. Even though I know a lot of leaders don't want that or realize that, but that is absolutely the case. Intention then gets into. So the first chapter, safety, is really around how do you ground yourself? Then how does that expand to teams and what are real strategies and tactics to move from protection to possibility? Is the shift under that one, intention is getting really clear. And it's a twofold process. Intention is clear about what matters in human terms. So yes, I know you have performance metrics, but I'd love to hear them articulated in outcomes. And if you hit this, then why does that matter to your clients, to your shareholders, to your employees? And so we begin with articulating intention, but in so doing, how do you have, how do you walk with intention? How do you bring intention into each and every day? So it's not just about organizations, it's about purpose driven leadership. And then the mechanic that we often forget about is the deep work and reflection that makes that a choice. We tend to go, yes, yes, that's my purpose. And then we run into the transaction of every day and we don't make the space. So it's sharing the science behind why this works, why it's profitable, why it sustains, and why it scales. And then the third one, which we've not talked about yet, but we've alluded.

To, I think, yeah, so your second shift for intention, which I love is from distraction to purposeful direction.

That's right. So you go from protection to possibility, from distraction to purposeful direction. So at that place you can say no, or you can say not yet. That's a good one. When we're talking about strategy, because every company wants to do all things and you're like, you can't do all things, so make some choices. And then if it feels really hard for you to say, but I can't, I won't just say not yet. Sequence it. And you know what? By the time you get through these first ones, that will either be strategically irrelevant or it will be there waiting for you, but it's making choices. And then the last one is mindset and the biology that it's not just a like, let's all go have a great mindset. It is what impact our mindset has on our biology, our physiology. What we believe about change, what we believe about complexity has everything to do with how safe you remain when another change pops up. And also it defines your limits. So the shift there is from powerless to powerful. And the reason we made it around agency was because what we believe. Do we believe that we can learn through anything, do we believe that change is terrible for us, then yes, actually it has absolutely both a physiological and a mental. It's the scaffolding around what's possible, if that makes sense. So we talk about.

No, it totally does. In fact, you know, I spent so much of my last year and a half when I was at the firm researching adaptable mindsets and agency, which you talk about in this one. Right. From powerless to powerful shows up as one of those, you know, we also found some other ones. From expert to growth. Right. From expert to curiosity, from fixed to growth, from scarcity to abundance. These are mindsets, you know, and I snehn said this beautifully. We see the world as we are, not as the world is. And so part of this is about saying, hey, how are you seeing the world? That's right, right.

The rest of the leaving a gap as big as it is invisible or something like that. There's some. Yeah, that's exactly right. So then understanding the interconnection between what you believe and how that has framed your intention and potentially even impacts your safety from a moment to moment perspective. So there's a little bit of that. And then we get into just to finish out the framework. The ple then shifts to from a place now that you are safe, you have, you understand where you're going. You can say, no, you're grounded, you Understand your mindsets. And of course it's not going to be perfect, but you've kind of gotten a hold of that. Now we can shift over into power and grace. How do you navigate this crazy world when you don't have the answer? So the shift is in the next P is powerful questions. So then you alluded to that there's a little bit of mindset work in there of moving from. I don't have. The shift is from certainty to curiosity. But then more than a mindset shift, it's a skill being able to absolutely being able to ask the right questions, understand the science behind really great questions that are not just to inform, but to transform. And that's a skill in and of itself, since we talk a little bit about the neurology behind that. And then moving from that. And the shift was from certainty to curiosity. And then leveraging systems, which is the L and the leveraging systems, is really beginning to understand as a leader that we are not on autopilot, that that isn't performance, that moving from autopilot into architect and designer. So a lot of the science around habit meets systems thinking. And how do you create systems that sustain? And I wrote a post recently about Machu Picchu and how like, if you look at these really ancient cultures that sustained, they did not do stuff for the quarter. Sometimes it took generations to build these things, but they built them to last. So when you began to look at the systems and every system top. So when we go into organizations, I do listening tours and I start asking questions around mindsets and questions around failure and questions around clarity and what's your purpose and what I don't even ask your person, like, why does it matter? I'll ask that question, what's your. What's your strategy? And hear what people say and where they have similar stories and where they have different stories. But then taking all that information and becoming 100% positioned with agency to design rhythms of learning, rhythms of reflection that help you bring simple into your organization or to bring reflection, for example, or learning loops, for example. And so we look at systems at the individual level, team level, and organizational level. And then the last one, which is the E is kind of bringing us home, but it stands for empathy and beginning to. And empathy can be misperceived as soft, like everybody's, you know, nice sympathetic culture, which I know, Ashish, you would endorse so much more than that. But it is where innovation begins. It's starting to look and listen to whatever your world, whatever you have responsibility for that could be your school, your family, your organization, your team, your entire organization, depending what, you know, quote unquote leadership role you play, or even stance. But when we begin really understanding what matters to people, and we design for that, and we listen to whether that design happened, and we speak in terms of experimentation, then we point everyone towards. And then we attach that empathy to our intention, going back to the beginning, right around, how do we show up? Why it matters.

Yeah.

What are we after? Then we stop all of the noise, if that makes it for me. This separates signal from noise. What does it matter? What are we doing? And how can we use that as our lens for human leadership? And it isn't niceness. Sometimes it means having really tough conversations.

Absolutely.

And in spirit of and service of the bigger picture and your values and what you stand for. So you can skirt conflict or you can stand strong and stable and clear and yet compassionate and kind. So in the last chapter, we also talk a little bit about the science of empathy and why it is the first thing that goes. Why is reflection and empathy like. Reflection is your rearview mirror and empathy is kind of like, where are you going? Like, how are you. The context by which you were existing in the world and the science behind that is interesting because when. Tell me more stressed. Yeah, I was gonna say when you're hijacked and stressed and you're working. So back to the beginning chapter around. This is an ecosystem, and as you fortify one part of it, and the reason we landed on these six is not because they're the only six, but it's because they're interconnected. So when you begin to work on one, you change another. So when you begin to work on your mindset, guess what, your safety is fortified. When you begin to get more curious and you ask better questions, guess what? You have. You're impacting your mindset. When you begin to understand the science of empathy, you also understand why it's so important to start with stability. Because when you mentioned at the very beginning of the podcast, I believe that we are here to protect ourselves. That is how we're engineered. And so if we understand that, and we understand when we're slipping into that perfection mode, protection, protection mode, then we also realized that our brain is an energy consuming organ. When you're using all of your attention and your capacity to protect yourself, you are not being creative and you're certainly not being empathetic. Does that make sense? And so we lose sight of innovation.

It does, absolutely. And you're actually not. And you're not using your gut brain, you know, in fear, you're operating completely from your head. That's why so many people today are disembodied. Like, they have no idea what's happening in their body or. Or trust or what's happening. And they. They don't create space to listen to intuition, to our gut. Right. Which now also all the research is showing around how valuable that is and how much actually more of the thinking and kind of intuition comes from here, from our gut. Look, I mean, this is. This is. I love the framework. It so resonated from all my research over the last 15 years in this field. I loved how easy and accessible you've made it in terms of moves. You know, I loved how you've covered individual, team, and system organization. Because if you only do work on the individual or only do work on this, first of all, most people do work on the system without individual work. And I'm like, you don't have a stable foundation to hold that work. Or if you only do individual work, you don't have enough system intelligence to be able to change the context in which this work can actually take root. Right. You go to a retreat, you come back, nothing happens. Nothing happens. In fact, you get frustrated and you actually leave. Most people leave, right? Many people go to CCL retreats and they leave because they're like, oh, my God, I'm enlightened, and nobody else wants to change. So I love how each of these are beautifully integrated. You know, Crystal, I want to go to your salsa story, because that salsa story talks about a beautiful. Another important concept, as we think about this work, is most leaders, if you ask them how important it is for you to be in control, many people will say, yes, I have to control everything. And yet we know that complex systems can't be controlled. That's the whole fundamental nature, effect and cause can only be found out after the fact because they respond differently depending on the situation, the person, et cetera. And implicit in that is really this learning to let go. And your salsa story beautifully brought this to life around, how by letting go, you could actually flow and do so much more. So bring that to life for us.

Yeah. So, look, I did not grow up a dancer. Let me start that way. I was not in dance class as a child, and so I had. I'd fallen into salsa through. I lived in Mexico for a while, learned to speak Spanish, started listening to the music, and then kind of found it through culture and community and fell in love and just dove in. And I loved the fact that just as an art form, that it's a mixture of sound and rhythms and culture and it's just so rich. And I began to get better. So at first you're going to have to learn that you have to count the music, you have to learn the steps. And as you begin to push past that, I wanted to do more turns. And like everything else in my life, I kind of ran at it. That's what I do. That's what achievement that sounds.

That seems very familiar. Yes.

Yeah. You're going to conquer. To me.

To you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm gonna dive in. I'm gonna be this. So I did that. And I think I tell a story about I ended up throwing up in the bathroom because I was so dizzy from doing spins without actually understanding the biology of having to spot. So there's a technique when you are spinning a lot to stare at a place on the wall so that you can kind of get your stability. And then it also helps with just the inner ear and kind of dizziness. And so when you do that and your head kind of whips around at the last minute. If you watched professional dancer, just ballerinas, they do the same thing. So it goes back to this, my understanding, not just of stability, needing to get that stability for the agility to happen, but I was also a female following role. And so what I had been doing for many years was leading. And so I would anticipate the music, I would try to lead the move. And you just can't, Number one, you cannot do that. You absolutely have to be in the moment, and I have to not know where my partner's going to go. And so I found that both really humbling, challenging initially, because it wasn't something I could conquer. But in so doing both, finding the stability so that I could have the agility, and then also letting go of the agenda. In coaching, we call it dancing in the moment. So you have to be absolutely present. You don't know coming into a. And now my whole life is that I don't know. Going into a new client engagement, a new coaching session. Each and every session has its own beauty, but it never has an agenda. It has a structure. But I can't tell you what the client's going to want to work on that day. It demands a level of presence that you. You just have to let go of control. And when you do, as long as you trust your skills. So in salsa, I kind of learned you have to trust both your instinct, you have to trust your skills, you have to have the confidence to know wherever that person's going to lead you, you can go. And you have to let go of control. So it definitely spills over. Even though it's a personal story and is a bit of a metaphor in the book for the agility and the stability, it definitely. When I work with senior leaders especially, and I know you've seen this and probably experienced this as well, as did I, I always say, yes, I've been. Yeah, there's, you know, the moment when they're really leveling up, because they can. Their capacity is always a question. When you reach a point that you can no longer be the hustler. Right. You can't be the one who stays the longest and get it done and be the superstar. Your capacity is being challenged. You have to pause and reskill. Does that make sense in the world right now?

Totally does.

It happens in leadership. It happens to all of us. There was a moment where we said, what's got me here is not going to get me to the next stage. And the world is at that moment. We are at capacity. We have to stop and reskill. So, anyway, it's a lot. There's a lot packed into that little story, and it's a little bit of a window into me as well. I love culture. Culture. I love music. I love dancing. For me, it was one of the first times, I can tell you, I found flow. And we talk about flow in the book, too, which we won't get into right now. But when you do feel that it is effortless, it is timeless, it's delicious. Right. And it makes you want to come back to it. So when I work with leaders, helping them find flow so that they can value it, like that delicious moment, did you see how clear that was? And then right after that, or let's say right after a certain priming routine, did you see how clear you were? Do you see how effortless that was? Then why is it that we're grinding the rest of the day?

Absolutely.

Highest quality moment, right? Well, I think, you know, our intuition tells us and all of our mindsets and all of the world's wiring has told us, try harder, push the gas harder, when in fact, you're just gonna spin.

Yeah.

It's actually counterintuitive to slow down. But anyway. So actually, that's a bit of the story in the background backstory. Hopefully that answers your question a little bit.

Yeah. Well, and I think it's. I think the reality is most people. I was. I was the same way. Crystal. Right. I operated for the longest time, from wanting to control the outcomes, the quality, it was all about, right? How could I do it? And I was a miserable manager for a long time till I learned to shift that right? And by the way, you know, you talked about from protection to possibility, and you said, well, protection, perfection. My way to protect was to be perfect. And it was a seed that was thrown very early in my life where I was like, if I have to be safe, I have to be loved. Everything has to be perfect.

That's exactly.

And I'm going to control everything I can to make sure it's perfect. But for me as well, when I learned the art of learning to let go, right, where you focus on the actions, but like from an outcome, you're not so tied to it, you know, everything changes. You know, I work a lot of the US Olympic bodies and almost every one of the athletes, right, if you will. I work mostly with the governing bodies, but you hear it all the time with athletes time and time again. Once that ball is out or once that hit is made, you go back to the next hit, the next ball, the next turn. You're not kind of looking in the pass, you're not looking at the. You're just saying what's coming up for me. And you continue to move. So it's a key skill, especially today in today's world where change is the only constant. In fact, even what's not constant is the pace. The pace is going up. You can't have all state organizations trying to control the results, right? You have to be able to democratize. You have to be able to empower. And that's where purpose becomes really important. You have to be able to create that level of stability so that people can be agile and people can move fast. We don't have time for that direction to go all the way up and for it to come down.

That's exactly right. We're all dancing in the moment a little bit, aren't we? And I forgot to say, the last shift. So we went from curious to, you know, from certainty to curious. With systems, we went from autopilot to architect with empathy. The last shift was from superhuman to human. So we cannot expect the same thing from our brain and from ourselves, really. And it is that moment in leadership. We should start a high Achievers recovery club. Totally, totally, totally identify with that. And so many of my clients would say the same thing. At some point. We've said busy equals value. That's the mindset, right? In order for me to be busy, I am Valuable in order to be valuable. And then I, I have to be valuable to be loved, to be, to be, to matter.

It's a very simple like 1, 2, 3, 4.

Right, that's right. And I know we could talk about that and we will, I'm sure, talk about that more after the podcast. But the idea here is that you are not alone. Many while I've been working for years, I say I lead on the edge. I've always lived, I've always led on the edge of whatever's next. So I started in the dot com era as a consultant for many years, spent the rest of my days in innovation. I've always kind of lived on the edge of whatever's possible. And it's, it's uncomfortable, but it's full of hope. That makes sense. And I feel like this, this particular moment in time, the framework will always endure because it, and we've made sure of that. Whether it's this moment or the next moment, these are human truths that you can rely upon and they are integrated. So when you work on one, you're improving the other and they will sustain and scale you. So it's a bit of the stable scaffolding and the signal between, between signal and noise. However, if we do it right, to me this moment is a, is not about being replaced, it's about being released. So big picture here is returning back to the very simple core mechanics of what make us human and why we innovate to begin with. So we've sort of lost the plot, if you ask me. I've completely lost the plot and our internal narratives. And so everything that you said around, well, I believed this. Of course you believed that. Because we grew up in a world where maybe that was true, maybe working harder and grinding harder and fixing the problems and you know, like whack a moing them worked. But the capacity of those, like the absolute volume has changed and our capacity to continue that is in challenge. It's intention, I'd say. That's what I'm here to say. It's like it's not just what for leaders anymore. And that was the big revelation at the beginning of the call when we were saying, yeah, the moment. And I said, you know what? It wasn't that. Yeah, we were designing this course for peak performance because quality thinking and creativity is highest order thinking, but the mechanics are the same. And the world is calling us to be more creative, to be more human, to be more adaptive, to be more agile. And in order to do that, we're going to need to re skill, regroup and retool our strategy, so to speak. So hopefully this is, I don't know, I offer it to the world as a moment of, you know, here's some work and the stuff that I've done in my career, hopefully someone will find it helpful. But I assure you Ashish, your work and my work are very aligned and our goal in the world. So.

Yeah, well, listen, I've only, I mean I've loved, I mean I only got into it today. I know what I'll be doing over the next couple of days is really savoring each of the chapters of the book. So in closing, becoming Unapologetically human. What are one or two small brave actions you might recommend? I can add a third one. Go get a copy of Crystal Swept when it comes out. But what might be one or two other actions that people can, you know, this week as people start to slow down, at least in the US a bit, Thanksgiving, families get together. What might be one or two practices that you invite people to just, just you know, questions or practices to tune into to start to create that stability in their life.

I'm going to take a leap and assume that many people, maybe not all many people who will listen to this feel like they're at capacity. And so I want to speak to those people first. Right. If you feel like I have not a moment in the day and I get up and I am on all the time. Part of my message to you is act against those instincts and spend. And you mentioned you do this and I do too as she is invaluable. I have small children. My household never sleeps. As soon as they're up, it's chaos all day long. And I until, until bedtime. So I have started cracking open a very small amount of space in the morning. I've been doing that for years. Do a gratitude practice. I read that's when I learned. But I'll tell you what, I do not pick up my phone, I don't read my email, I do not get on technology. I spend some time reflecting and it's something that I work on with many clients. You don't need an hour, you need three minutes to start with. That's it. Before you and I three minutes of you are awake. Maybe you're drinking your coffee and you put the very last sip on the table and you sit for three minutes. You may breathe in time. I like to teach them priming techniques and kind of brain, you know, brain related strategies. But even so today if you're listening and you don't know those yet. You haven't read the book yet. The very smallest thing you can do is ask yourself two questions. How do I want to be today? How do I want to show up? What's on your calendar? What would that look like if you're your best self and what is your most meaningful move? And when you ask it in that way, it isn't about I've got to be here, I'm busy. Right. It kind of replaces that like I'm going to go through the day on autopilot and shifts it back into your intention with time. You crack open that little space and you feel a dividends of the intention that creates. Then we can come back and add on, stack on other strategies. But the most, in my humble opinion, the most underutilized strategy today is reflection. Doesn't happen. People wake up and before they're even out of bed, they're looking at their phone and they're looking at their and they're answering emails and they're going through and their kids are off to school and it's just go, go, go. So if we did nothing at all, I'd say granted, crack open that tiny three minutes, nothing more and hold on to that and notice what happens in that space.

Thank you Crystal for joining us. Thank you for sharing that practice. I am deeply grateful to know you, to be your friend and to collaborate together to make flourishing a competitive edge for our friends, our clients, colleagues and really through that serve the world. Thank you for all the work you've done.

Thank you, Ashish. My pleasure. My pleasure.

Take care.

Thank you.

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