282: Jen Underwood — How to Say What You’re Feeling

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done? I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have. Talk to Docs of Talent and you won't be disappointed. Go to docsatant.com Bill G. Again, that's doxatant.com Bill G. One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G. Check it out today.

Oh yeah. Have you ever noticed certain things trigger you people conversations, things like that, and then you like get all worked up and you don't know why you're upset or maybe you kind of know, but it's a familiar pattern. That's all about our show today, Everyone. My name is Bill Gallagher. I'm the Scaling Coach, host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. And I'm happy to bring another show to you today all about this area of like dealing with it. It's really a leadership conversation, but it's also a people and communication conversation. How come we have to spend so much damn time dealing with ourselves and all the things that send us astray? We have conversations like this every week on things to do with leadership, getting your people right, the strategy, execution and even optimizing the cash in the business. You'll find all these shows and more wherever you get your online content, stitcher, Spotify, itunes, et cetera, et cetera. Or go to our own website@scalingcoach.com and you can see all of it, all the show notes, everything like that. Get a copy of the Scaling up book, like all that, all that. More scalingcoach.com. All right, so listening now. I'm welcoming Jen Underwood to the show. Jen, welcome to the show.

Hi. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for joining us here. Looking forward to talking to you and learning more about this, hearing some of your stories and that kind of thing. Where are you today?

I am in Alameda, California.

Right on. Right down the street from me. Not far away.

Yes, very close.

So for the listeners, Jan trades under the name the Emotional Dominatrix. And it's a great. I heard about her and I'm like, oh, yeah, we should have her on the show. We should talk about this stuff because all the time people are dealing with being Emotionally triggered, reactivated by different things that's going on in their conversations and with high stakes in our world. Right. So tell us a little bit about kind of the evolution, like how you got into doing this kind of work. Um, yeah. Give us your kind of background.

Yeah, absolutely. So I worked in helping professions for a long time. I was a teacher and then I got my master's in clinical counseling and worked in social work with severely traumatized, mentally ill, chronically addicted adults for a long time. And, and over time, like many people in those professions, like really just hit intense burnout levels. It was just like, I can't do this anymore. Yeah. And so I left, I quit, I left the profession. I started my own business having nothing to do with anything, helping anyone, just selling things online for many years. And then really came back to my passion and my roots, which has always been teaching and coaching and supporting people in their growth as a emotional mastery coach and supporting people really with learning how to say what they're feeling and feel what they're feeling and figure out what they're feeling and ultimately start to really even adjust the way that things make them feel. Specifically in leadership, I work with a lot of people in business who sometimes whose feelings are having a big impact in the world in the way in which they are leading in their businesses or in corporations.

So in the business world. Right. I think there's definitely more awareness for feelings for emotions these days. And yet I think the set point is to try to like, put them aside, set them aside, not deal with them or not recognize them. And, and I find people kind of go in a couple of different directions. They want to like, really deal with them a lot, process them, work through them, that kind of thing. And then there are people who just want to set them aside and ignore them. And I don't think either of those doesn't seem to be really ideal. Like there has to be action in that thing too, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And this is, I think my like, middle ground place that I love working with leaders on is we can't just set aside our feelings. They are so running things whether or not we are dealing with them. In fact, they're running things much more when we're not dealing with them. When we are pushing them off to the side. They come out in moments where we really don't want them to come out. But we also can't just sit there and process our feelings all the time and be in our feelings all the time. Do. Right. It's actually not even healthy to do that. The More that we do that, the more that we kind of can feed our negative beliefs and. And these things that are causing these big upheavals inside of ourselves. So I work with people to find the middle ground and feel their feelings, but also always stay in action in their business and in their leadership.

Yeah. So we're going to tell some stories in just a minute, that kind of thing. But before we get into that, let's talk about this term, this name, the emotional dominatrix. What's that all about? I think of dominatrix is, you know, if you employ dominatrix, really, you don't want to tell anyone that you're doing that. You want to hide those charges on your credit card.

Yeah.

Right.

So I rebranded as the Emotional Dominatrix a year ago, and it originally came from something that a client said to me once I was wrapping up a client session. And they were like, you're like an emotional dominatrix. Like, I feel a little bit like you just, like, tied me up, but in a good way and forced me to do something I really was, like, not sure I wanted to do, but I felt safe the whole time. Like, it helps me lean into my edges and figure out where my boundaries are. And, you know, like, it's this whole analogy, and I was like, I love that. And it feels. It just. It felt like an edgy way to describe my work. It also felt like a really accurate way to describe my work. I think that we do avoid our emotions a lot. And I think for most people, they feel like that feels. Even the word emotions can feel very unsafe. Yeah. And so my entire mission is really to bring safety into finding your emotional edges while at the same time honoring all of your boundaries.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It does sound like that it is an app description, but I'll bet that that cheeky title has some people be like, ah, yeah, I'm not going to work with her there. But then it also gets you people do. And since it resonates with you and it probably ends up having people that are really fun to work with for you.

Yeah. I mean, it definitely scares some people off, but. But it also, it also makes a lot of people lean in and be like, wait, what is this? Like, I do want to know a little bit more. And my work is not for everyone. I think my style is very, very direct. And like, let's get down to business. I like to transform things really quickly. I was a counselor and a talk therapist for a long time. I don't prefer that modality for the work that I do. I don't want to just sit there and listen and have it just be, you know, a five year thing. Like a five year process. So oftentimes I feel like people who lean away from the title might actually be an appropriate lean away from like, maybe they're not ready to, to work with me or just not a good fit for me. So it works out.

I worked with a therapist for many years and I haven't in some time now, but she was always good at. Well, let's, let's identify the source of this thing. Like look at the, the childhood trauma in pretty much early life trauma of some kind. Right. And then, but let's not spend too much time there, like taking the whole thing through, like just kind of get it. Then let's see how it's showing up today. And then let's like reinvent or level up what it is. Right. Create some new approaches.

Total, totally. Let's not stay there forever. Let's figure it out, let's look at it. I love to bring my counseling background into that and be like, okay, like, where is this coming from? And how do we shift it? How do we change it? How do we act different heading forward?

Yeah. So getting much more practical and actionable. So tell us some stories. Let's talk about some of the people that you work with. And I think that often helps to kind of bring it to life. So you can start with anyone you want, but you shared some things about some different people, working through the issues, difficult conversations, being honest like that.

Yeah, I work with people a lot who are struggling with different aspects of leadership. So I know one that came up recently was I have a client who is really struggling to be successful, which I think that this is a thing that many people deal with is like this fear of success is as much, can be as much or even more as a fear of failure. And one of the things that we identified was that part of that was that her family has never done that well financially and her mom is still working for like $15 an hour. And the idea of having these big, huge wins financially and, um, she's already grown her business to six figures. And the idea of sharing that was making her slow down and it would affect everything that we did. So whenever we would start to plan her next launch, for example, suddenly all of these fears would come up around, what if people find out, like, what I can't share about how good things are going, I can't share the prices I'm charging online. I Can't share how many people are signing up. Because if I share those two things, people can do the math. You know, all of these. All of these different pieces. And that really got very quickly solved or started to get resolved with a direct conversation with her mother and with a member of her, like, members of her family just being like, hey, can we talk about these fears that I'm having and these feelings that are coming up for me and getting an honest reflection about what that was like for them?

Yeah. It's interesting that you say that, because I notice it in two conversations. Last two days alone, people, one person I was working with, like, real concerns about pricing and like, can I charge this month? And this is a lot to charge and that kind of thing. Thinking about what they had spent recently on similar kinds of things, feeling unable to fully defend their pricing. I'm like, what kind of value do you create with your work?

Right.

And in all of that, all that, like, imposter, like, I don't really belong. I don't have the right background. I don't come from the right kind of people. I'm not the right, like. Like, I. A lot of, like, imposter conversation there with this particular person.

Yeah.

And then another one concerned about how much profit, how profitable it was. Like, if it's too profitable, then I feel like I'm not a good person. Yeah. Yep.

Right. It can go both ways. Right. Like, I, this morning actually was doing a training for my mastermind. I have a school, it's called the School of Emotional Mastery, where I work with entrepreneurs who are in business. And we were doing a training this morning where one of the things that came up was, well, if I make too much money, I don't know how much taxes I'm going to have to pay, or I might lose the health insurance that I have, or it might go up and I have medical issues. All of these things that sometimes, like these fears, they can even seem very realistic, very logical. But when the emotions are kind of running underneath the surface, it's almost like they poison the well of whatever it is that we're putting out and naturally keep us small and shrinking and sometimes even hiding in our gifts from the world, from having those levels of success because we have these fears of making too much money or what will people think? Or I'm not good enough. That are really common in the world, especially in small business owners and entrepreneurs.

I've had this come up not long ago, actually. I've had versions of it come up with CEO, owner, not founder, but of, of a fairly substantial company. I mean, many, many employees in many cities doing very big work and that kind of thing. And they looked at their taxes and they looked at their, both business and personal, and they got very wound up about, like, well, this is going to be that. And we can like, oh, like it's all just in scale. You know, you, like, you live in these communities, you operate in this. Look at the sidewalks, look at the roads, look at the police, look at the, you know, there's all things to pay for and that kind of thing. It's just, it's just a matter of scale. But they, they, it's funny because having scaled a business to a point, they were then concerned about the next point of scaling. Yeah, it's like that could happen. I, I've seen that happen at a few million dollars, at hundreds of million dollars, at over a billion dollars. You know, like, we, we get all wrapped up in, like, well, that's something that.

Okay, right, right. This number. And it's really interesting because I think sometimes, sometimes we don't even realize it. Like, it can actually get really sneaky. One of my clients today, actually, we uncovered that she's going through a divorce and she lives in an expensive city. And she was like, I just, like, I have this story that I can't live here because it takes two incomes to live here. And I was like, okay, but you scaled your business to three times what you were making. So you basically make three incomes. And it was just this total shift of, oh, you're right, I do. I'm okay. But until we put it in those words and those frameworks, like, she was just concentrating on this very specific framework of like, it would two people. Right. It would take two people's incomes rather than looking at what was actually happening. And I see this a lot with people in numbers where they're like, well, that's going to cost, say, $10,000. And that might feel like a really big amount of money. But then if you look at it in the whole framework of if you're scaling up to making a million, why would that matter? Like, it really doesn't matter at all.

Yeah. Talk about conflict. You shared a story or two about. People dealing with difficult conversations and conflict. Share with our listeners.

Yeah, so I work with one of the main things, I work with people on his boundaries and also difficult conversations, and the two always go hand in hand. So in that when we are not aligned with our boundaries, we have a really hard time having difficult conversations. And that can actually go even when we're like, if we feel like we have to defend our boundaries or defend what's happening for us or our feelings. Right. Then those conversations can very quickly go downhill and become problematic. And so a lot of the things I work with people on is how to have compassionate conversations that still are very clear and direct with people that work for them, with their clients, with their coaches or their mentors or anyone above them as well. Right. It works in all directions. That allows both parties to speak what's true for them, but also really listen to the other person.

Yeah, I think that's useful, but I'd love to make it more clear. And you were sharing a story about somebody who was dealing with time billing and feeling like they were being taken. Tell us that one again, if you would.

Yeah. So this came up recently with a client of mine who is a support person for a lot of different people, has a company where someone hires them and then they do some of the work and they're other people. Other employees in the company do other parts of the work. And when we first started working together, one of the things I very quickly uncovered was that she would over. Like, she would overwork, basically, and then not feel like. Like it was like, oh, well, this job is actually going to take 10 hours instead of five hours. And she would do the work, but then was so afraid to tell the person that it took more time that she would just give it to them for free, like, and not. Not actually, like, say, like, oh, and not bill for the time, basically. And there were other things, too, where her business had really shifted in the way that she was working. So there were old clients on outdated plans that made no sense logistically anymore for her business. Moments where she was doing a lot of work that she didn't actually want to be doing, but she was so afraid to have the conversations with her clients that she would just completely abandon all of her boundaries around it. And in the last, I think, three months of working together, we have slowly but surely helped her to regulate her emotional system so that she can have those conversations. Because this is a big piece of it is that so much of the time, people will shut down. Even before, like, even thinking about the conversation, they're like, I can't do it. And so once we regulated her emotional system and then I taught her a couple of frameworks of how to express herself and have those conversations, she was able to directly communicate with all of her. All of her clients stop doing any work for free. Actually take some of the clients onto updated payment plans. And work schedules. Stop doing work she didn't want to do. Have conversations with clients who that didn't align with them anymore and was like, okay, like, if my work doesn't align anymore, that that's okay. Like, we can end this, right? Ending contracts that just weren't aligned anymore. More. And in the three months I think that we've been working together, she's been able to more than double. I think it's two and a half times her monthly salary while cutting her workload in half the hours that she's in her business in half.

So did you do any work to figure out where that came from or why she did that in that way?

Yeah, a little bit. Like, a little bit. We talked a little bit about how some of it came from her childhood and interactions with her mother and past work experiences, which is a big part of what often happens. Like, you know, I know when we talk about trauma and counseling and emotions, like, there's a big pull to just go back to mom and dad and the family. But when we're talking about the workplace, a lot of times this is like, I had a boss 10 years ago who was really mean to me and berated me in front of someone, and now I don't ever want to make anyone else feel that way or things like that. And so we did a little bit of work on that. But with her, it was also more of actually that feeling that she deserved to have her boundaries and that it was okay for her to put those in place. And it wouldn't mean that everyone hated her or left or fired her. Even though ultimately it did actually mean that a couple of clients did complete. It didn't feel like it was a personal attack. By the time that we had gotten done with the emotional work, she wouldn't.

Take it so personal. Yeah, well, you know, I noticed that same kind of thing. Like, if you look there's. And I think about, like, so when I was a kid, my parents are a little out of control and not always taking care of business and things like that. And. And then I decided I had to keep it together. Right. I need to take care of business stuff. So I became really good at, like, I'm a firstborn. There's others behind. They were a little out of control, the parents. And. And so I developed that. And then as I went into business and into social situation to other, like, any area of life, then if it felt a little out of control, I would actually, like, pull back then and be more in control. And I would rather be the One who's, like, pushing everyone a little bit out. But if people start to go too far, then I'm like, oh, this is getting a little crazy. I have to pull things back. And I can see. See that through lots of things. But the result of that also then was that in business, in family and relationship and things like that, then I'd kind of be a buzzkill. Not kind of like, a lot of the time, be a big buzzkill on things, right? And only in kind of noticing that and then stopping and getting good at finding it would I realize, oh, this is actually a time where I, like, need to swing out, where I need to bring some fun, some play, make it a little edgy, like that kind of thing, and cut loose. But before then, and I can remember, there's that. And then there's the time when I was a little too playful in a corporate setting, and somebody said, you can't talk like that around here. You'll just sound like a loony person, and nobody will give you funding for your projects. And I was like, oh, yeah, okay, I got to keep it under control, right? But then after a while, you get to this weird, gray, safe, like, I can only operate in this little box kind of thing, and you wonder, like, why am I so basic? Why am I so boring?

I mean, I think that's a really great example of the way in which our family patterns can then morph into adult patterns and get really reinforced a lot of times through workplace trauma of like, oh, yeah, like, don't do this. This is allowed. This isn't allowed. Keep it small. And I think the way that I frame that for people is. It's just. It is actually. There's actually just a trauma response that. That's such a great example of, like, if things get too wild, right? It's like, no, I need to, like, keep it, you know, like, tamp it down. Be like, like, this. This feels unsafe. This feels unsafe, right? And. And when we can become aware of those patterns, then, and accept them and still love them, that's a big piece of the work that. It's not wrong. There's, like, nothing bad with that. Like, we all have them, all of us. We. None of us. None of us get out of this without some really, you know, weird patterns that we picked up through life that don't serve us. And then. And then we're like, okay. Like, it's all okay. And I can still take a different action to start to prove to myself that it is safe to, for example, let things be fun. Or to speak up for myself or to have boundaries or to charge what I want to charge or scale my business to the place I want to scale it to or any number of things. Trust other people to help me. That's one that's really big too. I think when people are scaling, many of us have patterns around needing to do it all ourselves. I know that was one that was certainly mine and you know, like learning how to trust people and bring people onto our team and build out teams. That's a big one too.

To be self reliant and. Yeah. Versus collaborative.

Yeah.

So as a business coach, but also doing a fair amount of leadership coaching, I, I only nod a little bit to some of these originating family kinds of influences because people are in, in a business setting, they're like, I don't want to tell you about my mom or my dad. Like I don't really want therapy right now. And yet like, okay, this pattern. So I'll usually stop a little bit. Like we'll talk about a couple of career experiences and how they develop this pattern and then I'll kind of say, you know, you've probably been doing this since you were a little kid. There's probably a teacher, a parent, a sibling or somebody that you can think of. This first is I encourage you to look for that. But like I, we don't go there much in business and actually say tell me about your mom or your dad or your teacher or your sibling or you know, like we, we kind of don't like scratch that. But I do always like probably started very young.

It did. And I think the thing that I found that's interesting is we don't always need to, honestly, we don't always need to simply awareness of what it is and then starting to take action to shift it. Yes, there's a lot of value in doing some of the deeper therapeutic work, but it doesn't always require five years of psychotherapy to really start to understand those things. Especially because we have an understanding of this in society now that we didn't used to have, you know, like 40 years ago. We weren't really talking about like, oh well, you know, you probably picked that up in your childhood because your mom was a little bit cold and, and distant or you know, like your dad was a little overburied. Like no one was really saying that. And I think now we have an understanding of that that's helping people to, to look at some of this and have awareness of it without, without even always needing all the really deep therapeutic work.

Yeah, Recognizing that you have a pattern. Yeah, I usually point back a little bit without going there, just saying, listen, this. You've been doing this for longer. If you think about it over the next few minutes or a couple days, you'll. You'll recognize it. But I'm like, we don't need to talk about all that. Except sometimes, you know that that's where it goes. Right. Sometimes people start to see something. I'll share a story about me and my mom or whatever, and then somebody in one of my leadership teams will kind of be like, oh, my God. And then they'll run out on the break and call their mom and reconnect or do something, and then that, like, will unpack a whole bunch of stuff at work, and we'll see results go up.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, the number of times that I have seen a breakthrough moment take 30 seconds or a minute or even a couple minutes. Oftentimes in my group programs, I'm working with people for just 10 minutes at a time. And the amount of things that we can cover in that time is amazing. And then the exponential impact that that has on their income and their ability to have an impact in the world is beautiful to watch.

Yeah, I kind of feel like in the group programs, when you got 13 to 50 people somewhere, 15 to 35 or something like that, it can take more time because you're trying to get. But after I get 50, I've got 200 people in the. Somebody will say something, and then, boom, a whole bunch of other people kind of realize they have that, too. And if you're looking for something, somebody's got it in their room. In a room of 100 people.

Always.

Somebody else has it.

Always. We are not. We love to think that we're very unique and that I think this is an ongoing theme in my work is that many of the people that I work with feel like their stories or their trauma or the things that they're struggling with are. Are unique and hard and different and. And honestly, it's just not true. Like, it's humans. There's a limited amount of things that we struggle with. And if you put a bunch of people in a room, there's always going to be someone else who's like, oh, me too. It's the same thing over here, even if it's a slightly different personal story and how that's showing up.

So you shared about somebody who was struggling with sales and, like, evangelizing promotional kinds of conversations. What happened? Tell us a little bit. You don't have to say, obviously the name of the person and all that, but tell us about what was going on with that person and how did that develop.

So one of the things that I found with people is, I mean, comfort with sales is a big piece, especially for small entrepreneurs. And one of the things I work with people on is that magic ground between inviting people into your work and also not pressuring them or not getting to that place where you want to kind of force them into doing something. Something because. Not because there's anything necessarily morally wrong with that, but because it just doesn't work and it doesn't make people feel good. And so one of the stories I had shared was that I was working with a client who was noticing on their follow up they were losing a lot of clients in the sales process because the follow up would look something like, you know, hey, like I, you know, I need to close this loop. Like I need to get to a decision on this. Like, you need to do this, you need to do that. It was very like directive or you know, by Wednesday at 12:00pm I expect to hear from you. Like this very kind of. Sometimes it's very kind of like kind of corporate direct language. And. And then people would just be like, yeah, actually no, I'm out. Like, no, I don't actually want to do this, you know, deep mentorship with you. Because it was about like one on one coaching. And so when we looked at it, what we really got to identify was that with this particular person it was just like that feeling of not knowing, of not being sure of what was going to happen was causing a bit of a trauma response of wanting to push and like force an outcome rather than noticing what was happening inside themselves and being able to breathe through it or process through it and allow space and time. So when we worked through that and then worked through a different way to communicate, which is simply not more about the way I work with people around boundaries, is can you, can you say what you want? Like, can you just openly, vulnerably state what you want or ask for what you want rather than saying what you don't want or putting these really strict rules and deadlines in place.

Isn't that kind of all kind of. We all have a similar story about that. Like, you know, I can remember in the seventh grade having a crush on this one girl and wanted to go ask her and I just, I couldn't quite bring myself to do it and I was so afraid that she'd say no and I kept waiting for her to move away. From her friends, because I didn't want to ask her in front of her friends. I needed to, like, get. Of course she's staying there around her friends, because that makes her feel confident and safe and, like, where's that intersection of that whole thing? Like. And then I can remember another time not long later where there was a girl I kind of liked in a social circle, and she was standing with her friends, and I'm. Okay, I'm gonna. I'm gonna, like, do it. And. And I went up and I asked her in front of her friends, and they all laughed. And I was like, oh, my God, I am never gonna put myself out there like that again in front of her unless I already know that she likes me and she wants me to ask her out. And, you know, like, that. What was I thinking? And now I'm totally embarrassed. I'm going to go find a new group of friends. And literally, I did find a new group of people around whom I felt cool and I was going to be fine. And I ignored them. And then I started to build a whole case in my head about how. How they kind of sucked and they.

Weren'T really, like, right, right. And then we go into this.

I'm talking about early high school, middle school, but. But we do the same thing in business all the time. I did versions of that. You know, I'm probably doing one right now.

I mean, we definitely do where we're like, oh, like, that person sucks. And, you know, this is. It's all their fault. Or opposite. I equally work with people who go the opposite way. They go, it's all my fault. I'm the worst. I suck. I should have known better. Right? It can go both ways, or I.

Much rather attack you than myself. A lot of people are really good at beating up on themselves. I'd rather go, what the hell is the matter with everyone else? Like, I'm awesome, groovy in the world, right? I never blow anything or whatever. I tend to do that. But of course, that's kind of behind, like, wondering if it isn't me, hoping it isn't. To build the case against them.

I have found that people naturally will lean more one way or the other. There's, like, an automatic impulse, and I'm like, you. I'm like, they suck. They must be the worst. And then I have friends and I have family members who. That's the last thing they would ever think they're always going to go to. It's their fault. And so, you know, like, no matter what, it's just offensive. And we do that so that we don't feel vulnerable. Right. So that we don't have to feel our feelings and we don't feel vulnerable. That's. It's just a way to defend ourselves either way. It is.

Yeah. So this vulnerable is an interesting word, right? What does that actually mean? I don't think a lot of people think about what does it mean to be vulnerable and what does it represent to make yourself vulnerable. Right?

Yeah. So the word to me means simply to be open. I think vulnerability, to me, I would define it as open. Open to connection with other people, to connection with ourselves. It is just about opening up. And in doing so, we always risk being hurt and. Or being misunderstood is a big one for people. You know, like, there's all sorts of things that. Being kicked out. Right. Not belonging, all of these. All of these pieces. And so whenever we open ourselves up, we're feeling like there's a risk, and that can be scary for people. But connection doesn't exist without vulnerability. Like, we can't connect until we're open. So it is a requirement, not just in relationships, but for me, it's a requirement in leadership.

Yeah. So the thing that I find people need reminding all the time is that it takes courage, it takes strength to be open. Our first company value is courageous authenticity. And it has meant in the past, a couple of years, people couldn't work with us or couldn't keep working with us because actually being open and speaking the truth and that kind of thing was hard, not okay for them. And there's like a moment, like, if I'm going to go on stage and tell you about my father's suicide, that's hard to do. But I do know that if I am willing to open up a little bit or tell you about the things that I've screwed up or the times I've nearly done trashed my businesses or things like that. Like, that's really powerful like that. That just changes everything. And it is like, oh, some people are worried about crying or that kind of thing. And you won't necessarily do that, but it takes a great deal of like, okay, let's open up a little bit. And it changes everything in the trust, in the affinity for the leader. Some people are definitely turned off, like, oh, I don't want to be around this kind of thing. Right. But should those people even be on your team? I'm not so sure.

Yeah. I love that you said that. It takes strength. And the reason why I love that is because I describe my Work a lot of times as it's just like a training program. It's just emotional cardio. Right. And we don't go. Like, you wouldn't go from sitting on the couch for five years to being like, I assume I can run an ultramarathon tomorrow. Right. We understand that you can't go from.

The couch to a marathon or even an ultramarathon.

You can't. Right. We understand that physically. We understand that. Right. And, like, maybe you could, like, push yourself through. Yeah. Like, maybe you could push yourself through walking a half marathon, but your body would be wrecked afterwards. Right. Like, it takes time to build those muscles. It takes time to build the cardio, takes time to build the flexibility. And all of that is true about emotions. That is true about vulnerability, too. It's true about boundaries and speaking your truth. It's a training program, and it never ends. I will never forget one of my clients was like, wait, you still have to do this, too? Then why am I doing this? Why do I pay you? And I was like, yeah, it doesn't end. It's not like you get done with the practice, and then you just get to stop forever. There's no real ending point in this. We just keep building strength and we keep going. And it gets easier in the same way that if, you know, if I told someone to run a mile, it might be really hard at first. And then if they did it every day for two weeks, it would be easier by the end. And we can build that strength emotionally so that it's not so difficult to be open and be vulnerable and be courageous. That's all a part of it.

Yeah. That goes to our fourth value. Never finished. And I think that that notion that you're always going to be at work on something until you die.

Yeah.

We don't have to, like, we don't know what comes next.

One of my favorite quotes is, do not be afraid of work that has no end.

Well, it's been a great conversation. There's so much to learn here. You know, you're not gonna live by your emotions alone, but you're also not gonna do anything or be particularly effective if you don't get a handle on them. So we want to bring awareness to them, get in touch with them, like, learn to operate with them, coexisting and. And even sometimes to tap into them. Right. Like, I can lean into things, and we can get our leaders to embrace the fear and tap into that adrenaline and use it to fire up and use them to develop trust. And, like, the whole range of that. It's very powerful space to get to play with if you're only willing to bring some awareness to explore what's going on with you and like that.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Get in touch with you. Find out more about jen underwood@emotionaldominatrix.com that's the URL. We'll throw that up on the screen here, down below. Throw that up right there. And we will also of course put it in the show notes, that kind of thing. I want to thank you for coming on the show and sharing with our listeners and stuff Today. I want to give a shout out to Lucy Summers who gets our show scheduled, our guests prepared, the things moving through production and out promoted every week. Big thanks to Vern Harnish, author and creator of our Scaling up framework that we use to help companies and leaders grow and develop. And to the folks at Platflight Productions who edit our audio and get our show notes and get the show out the door in itunes and everywhere else each week. Alby Burge who edits the audio, Ayn Codena who writes up the show notes and Tim McGowan who does all the proofreading. Thanks again everyone for listening for watching. Keep Keep Scaling Up. We'll talk to you again next time.

Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software powered by Align. It's the official software for scaling up With Scoreboard. You'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app, you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our Scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by Align. To try it now, go to aligntoday.com Bill Gates one more time. Aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.