Technology Fostering Human Connection: 'From Corporate Management Consulting Executive to Women's Leadership Coach and Cofounder of the Daily Haloha App Amy Giddon

What I do encourage women to do is have a range of styles that all feel authentic. So the classic leadership communications is definitive, authoritarian, decisive, command and control. And what has been expected of women is caretaking roles, compromise, humility associated with being feminine. It can be a razor-thin edge sort of to navigate. It's about awareness, about reading the room and understanding the most effective style in that moment that still feels authentic.

This is RxChill Pill. Now is the time to stay well. Each episode teaches your brain how to become resilient with amazing stories, knowledge from experts, and short meditations you can do anywhere, anytime to elicit your relaxation response. I'm your host, Dr. Juna Bobby MD, resilience and stress management physician and mother of two amazing kids.

So today I'm here with Amy Giddon, and she is the co-founder and CEO of Daily Haloha. It's a mobile app and technology platform for people to connect more deeply and compassionately to themselves and to others through a shared experience of reflection and curiosity around a single daily question. She was inspired by an artwork that she saw in New York City, which I will let her tell you about. So Amy, hi. Thank you so much for being here today.

Thank you. It is my pleasure.

Can you just tell us about that artwork you saw in Union Square that, you know, prompted you to, I guess, put the seed in your mind to start this amazing app that you have out there now, which is free, right? It's a free app.

It is free.

That's amazing. Okay.

And I'd really love to keep it free, um, because this artwork that I experienced was free and open to anybody who was walking by and I think some of the magic of that experience was its accessibility to everyone. So that's a deeply felt principle that I hold as well. But the experience I had started in Union Square subway station in New York City after the presidential election in 2016. And I'm sure I'm not alone in remembering how divisive and polarizing. And I was carrying around the weight of that experience experience when I happened upon this participatory project that was built around the humble sticky note.

But it was so beautiful, right? Because it was— it filled up an entire space.

Exactly. I remember it was 50,000 Post-it notes by the time they took it down.

And wow.

Yeah, when you walked into that space, you felt power of it. And of course, you know, sticky notes are beautifully colored. It was an array. It's this colorful installation. But when you think about every one of those notes carrying a heartfelt expression by the person that took a moment to write something on that note and then post it for this collective experience—

and was it something that— did he have all the Post-its up and he invited people to write on them, or was it like you took one and you stuck it on?

Yeah, so you saw this thing on the wall, and then you looked around and you saw stacks of Post-it notes everywhere just waiting for authors to write their thoughts on them.

And was there a prompt?

There was no prompt.

Oh, wow.

The artist Matthew Chavez behind this installation, which was called Subway Therapy, has done other projects with a prompt.

And I remember after 9/11, I think there was a sticky note wall as well. I was near Bellevue at that time when I was training in New York City. And I remember there being a wall of notes of people missing and all that, but that was something different.

Yeah, but you know, you're right to bring it up because I think what happens in these moments of intense feeling, you know, is that people have this natural desire to be together and to collect around our shared experience of trauma or tragedy Or on the other hand, when we're feeling such joy that it bubbles forth, we wanna be with others in that moment. So I don't think it's, you know, it's an accident that in these intense moments of deep feeling that these installations pop up because it's a way for us to express ourselves collectively at a time when we want to not be alone.

You are correct in that people wanna have this sort of connection when, you know, we're scared or something traumatic happens as a collective. And of course, right now we're all in quarantine. So how do you find that your audience is dealing with that on your app? And first of all, your app is beautiful because it does look just like that wall, right? It has very colorful, pretty kind of virtual sticky notes.

So we did take our cues quite directly from the Post-it wall and something that's so simple and so magical about sticky notes, their color, their shape, their uniformity. You know, we ask our app audience one question a day as a prompt to unify everyone in reflection and sharing.

You ask a prompt. Once people answer, they get a reply from someone else, right? But it's all anonymous.

No, they're all anonymous. And we feel like that's really important because it enables people to express themselves really authentically and without fear or worry about how that's is going to land with someone else or in the public. We ask the world a question every day, and we give everyone a chance to self-reflect on that question, give it a color, and our colors are very reminiscent of sticky notes. So you pick a color according to your mood, and then you send it off, and it gets delivered randomly, and then you instantly get one back from someone else.

But you're not really chatting with each other, you're just seeing each other's answers to the prompt.

That's exactly right. And that's another cue that we took from these projects where it's not a conversation, it's not a dialogue. Everyone is synchronized in their communication so that you can feel like your own reflection was enriched by the reflections of others. Call it the Aloha Wall. It's very much like the sticky note wall where all day long the thoughts and feelings of everyone from around the world are collected so everyone can peruse them, get inspired.

I mean, I noticed that your app is for 9-year-olds and up, so you cut out that whole risk of creeps and trolls, because who's going to be on this app if they can't really directly chat to other people? It's really only for that sole purpose of expressing yourself, right?

I mean, it's not a very satisfying platform for trolls because it's hard to draw you know, a lot of attention to yourself. But when I think about what our intention is, and I want them to feel refreshed and uplifted, I mean, those are the two words that I always think about. I labor over the questions that I ask all the time because I think—

So it's from you directly? It is.

I come up with all the questions.

Okay, awesome. Okay.

Recently, I've enabled our users to suggest questions to me.

Nice.

Invitations to think about the moment that we're in. I'm asking people questions about how they're feeling while social distancing. And what I saw was such a range of reactions to that, everything from anxiety to deep peace. I believe there's a lot of people that are going to emerge from this time with such a deeper awareness of themselves and what's feels good.

I hope you're right.

Yeah, I mean, there were a lot of people who said how much they appreciated the pause of their hectic life that they were living. But there's also people who said, in this time of quiet, I realize how much I've been running away from myself, and that this is a time of reconnecting to self. And for some people, that was a positive, and for others, it was really anxiety-inducing.

Yeah, I mean, I have definitely seen the gamut, right? I think we're privileged if we can say that, you know, I know a lot of people who are happy to be home with their family, who haven't had their dads or husbands or wives spend as much time at home before. So I think that's a privilege because I also read a lot about people who are perhaps trapped at home with abusers or in poverty or just not having the social support or even the mechanical support to do school from home.

And as you're saying, for some it's a source of strength and calm, for others it's a source of distress. People are noticing their depth of connection or lack thereof. I had a lot of people expressing, you know, regret that at this time they didn't have the depth of relationships that they thought they did. I think it's challenging a lot of people to assess the strength of their connections to others.

Well, it's amazing that you're helping people have an outlet in a time like this. How did you come about doing this with your life? You're a consultant in the past. You went to Duke University for computer science and economics. So this is positive psychology? How did you come upon that?

Yeah, that's a great question. It has been a long and winding road, I'll say.

Yeah.

You know, I started my career deep in like corporate immersion right from the get-go. I went to work at Bain and Company in Boston in management consulting, like, you know, heavy-duty business. And, you know, I thrived in those environments. I enjoyed it. I was successful. Oh, I—

What was your specialty in that?

Mostly strategy, business strategy and strategic planning. And it's really through the decades, and this is the wisdom of experience, I came to understand myself a lot better and the ways in which my chosen career did and didn't align with where I derived a sense of real deep meaning and purpose. There's external measures of success like title and position and income and status. And there's— then there's that success that's really inward, which is, am I living my authentic life? Am I true to myself? Does the work that I'm doing provide meaning? Am I in service to the things that I care about most? Well, it's also a privilege to be able to even ponder those questions, right? You know, I guess I got to a place where I had a little bit of more freedom to think about my career. In the last, I would say, 6 years, I started turning more and more to work that tapped into my feelings of meaning and purpose.

So until 6 years ago, you were still in the deep financial world consulting? Yeah. Wow. I was.

Wow.

Do you remember what opened your eyes to the whole field of positive psychology, which is relatively new in the whole timeline of psychology?

Well, I have to say I'm not a positive psychologist.

I know, but you obviously know about it and it inspired you. And I'm just wondering where you heard about it first or how it came into your life.

I think that I first became aware of the field when I was doing work in women's leadership. So this was my first stop in moving toward meaning. So I left a corporate job and went to work at Barnard and Columbia in women's leadership. That was the first time when I said, you know, I'm going to do work that feels in service to something that I care deeply about: women having an equal opportunity to achieve their ambitions and rise to positions of influence and authority in a corp— in corporate environments. I worked at Barnard in their Athena Leadership Center developing programs for corporate women. We would do workshops. We would either do them at the client site or we would bring them in. When I worked with Columbia, we did programs that were offered over 3 or 5 days where women from all over the world will come in.

So how did you go from consulting management to a sort of a workshop teaching position?

That was a leap. You know, I came to Barnard with my lived experience as a woman leader. So what I ended up doing was architecting the programs based on a combination of my lived experience and what I felt like women needed to be successful in the workplace.

And what is that?

What I learned by really diving into the research, what helped and harmed women in the workplace and propelled them forward and held them back. And, you know, honestly, I learned a lot about myself.

Did you realize that you were interested in women leadership and helping them get there because of your own struggles in a male-driven sector?

Yeah, well, that's how I look at it now. In the moment, I was like, all gung-ho. I'm going to help other women. I'm going to make it easier for the women coming up behind me to fulfill their dreams. But now when I look back on it, I realize how much of it was also just to understand my own experience better. And understanding that there's real systemic barriers out there for women, and especially in male-dominated industries, was so helpful to me personally. It was like, no, I'm not crazy. There really are, like, Things that are harder for women.

Go back to, you were going to say, I will tell you about what women need to break those barriers and then what you found in research.

Sure. So it's not that women are broken and need fixing, right? I mean, women need tools and strategies to navigate in these environments that weren't built for women leaders. They were built for the patriarchy. So what women can benefit from, so those tools are things like various communication styles. Like so much of our success in corporate environments is about different kinds of communication skills running the gamut from negotiation skills to giving negative feedback to advocating for oneself and one's ideas.

Do you think women have to be a little different, or is it the same advice for men and women?

I wish I could say it's the same, but it's not the same.

Okay. Can you give me an example of what would be a little different for a woman versus a man?

The easiest way to explain it is there's something called the double bind for women leaders. The dichotomy between what has historically been expected of leaders who may, especially white male leaders, and what society has expected of women. And those things are sometimes at odds. So the classic leadership communication style is definitive, authoritarian, decisive, right? Um, directive, command and control. What has been expected of women often in society is caretaking roles, compromise, um, humility, a different set of qualities that are associated with being feminine. So for women, um, it can be a razor-thin edge sort of to navigate those styles. A stereotypical male style coming from a woman Women sometimes are being, are accused of being cold or being all sorts of things where men would, those terms would never apply to men using those same communication styles.

So let's say I'm attending one of your workshops and I'm a young woman starting in a career. What would be your recommendation to me?

Yeah, you know, honestly, often I don't give direct advice as much as help women be aware of the challenge. Because, for example, myself, when I learned about this double bind, I was like, oh, that's what that was. I'm not, you know, I'm not crazy. So, okay, so knowing what women can be up against, even, even the awareness is very helpful. But what I do encourage women to do is have a range of styles that all feel authentic to them. I would never advise someone to adopt a communication style that didn't feel authentic.

Sure, sure.

And it's so far from a one-size-fits-all. There's plenty of women that are very authoritative and are very, you know, effective in their roles. And there's plenty of women who bring their, their full feminine leadership style to their workplace and are very effective. I think it's about awareness. I think it's about having a range of styles. I think it's about reading the room and understanding the most effective style in that moment that still feels authentic to you.

That's wonderful. I love that. That is amazing advice. You hear that old saying like, don't ever let them see you cry. What do you think about that?

Well, I hear it.

I've heard it a lot in the medical field.

Yeah. Another way to put that is there's no crying in baseball, right?

That's—

yeah, I would say this, um, you know, I wish people could bring their whole selves to work, their whole human range of emotions, and be appreciated for it. I, I wish that was the case. It's not.

Sometimes there's no time for all of that, right?

So, um, I think there's a time and a place for bringing your emotionality to the workplace. I think it's always the time and place to bring your humanity to the workplace. And those are not the same thing, right? Sometimes your humanity is about keeping your emotions in check in the moment when people need your strength and leadership. So, and, and just be mindful about your emotionality and when's the right time and place to be, you know, to express that.

Mm-hmm. So intelligent. So, Amy, do you want to say a few words about your app from conception, like the day you saw that piece of art, to when you launched that app? How long was that, and what were the steps?

Yeah, it was about 2 and a half years, but the first year and a half, I was just— it was in head, you know. I was noodling it, I was talking about it, I was dreaming about it.

Uh-huh.

I did have—

it's like kind of an obsession.

I was steering clear of that word, but yeah, it was in fact an obsession. It still is. It took me a while to sit to say, yeah, but I think I'm actually gonna do this. Um, it wasn't until 2018 that I actually quit my consulting work and went full-time to commit to this. Scary. Very scary. I have a co-founder. His name's Greg. He's wonderful. Friends and family fundraised to get us going.

And did you give your friends and family terms or was it—

We did.

Okay.

It's, you know, it's a real legal thing. It's, it's, it's via a legal instrument called a convertible note. So these will be, you know, equity holders in the company and in the business. The idea being that it'll get us going and we'll be a self-sustaining business, hopefully before too long. So we just launched, what, 8 months ago. We're a consumer app and we're a free app. There are no ads right now. And our vision was always to create a business version of this app.

What does that mean?

Yeah, it would be like a subscription a pay-based version, and that would pay the freight for the consumer app. So it was always really easy for us to imagine, say, a company that wants their employees to feel closer and more connected, not only to each other, but to the company.

Interesting.

Daily experience of, you know, united around this question. And the company then also gets the insight about what's on the minds of their employees too.

That's cool. And are, are you gonna do any research around it? Let's say before and after app use. Is there anything like that coming up for you?

Oh, you're asking all the million-dollar questions. I love it. Um, I would love to do some research around it, some before and after. I mean, I would be really curious. I have already partnered with a professor, um, at Chapman University. She's a positive media psychologist.

What does that mean, positive media psychologist?

She explores what kinds of media exposure are beneficial to our well-being.

Okay, well, this has been an amazing interview. Thank you so much, Amy. Amy Gidden, founder of— co-founder of Daily Haloa, an app that helps us shift into positivity.

Well, thanks.

It's been such a delight to talk to you today. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Yes, this has been wonderful. Thank you again, Amy.

My pleasure.

Thank you for listening. Please subscribe, download episodes, and share with anyone who could use extra resilience right now. If you found this episode helpful to you, please leave a review. Go to mindbodyspace.com where you'll find online courses, all of these interviews, and meditations. Meditations organized into separate pages. If you have questions or interview suggestions, email us at info@mindbodyspace.com. Stay well, stay strong, and wishing all of you and your loved ones health, happiness, and hope. After this interview, Amy sent me a recording of some of the responses that she received. Here they are.

This pandemic is affecting all of us. How we live, how we work, how we relate to each other and to ourselves, even what we eat and our sleep patterns. But we're all experiencing those changes very differently. We recently posed to our Daily Aloha community the fill-in-the-blank question: At this time of social distancing, I'm noticing that I blank. We've received hundreds of responses from all over the world. For some, their worlds have clearly been upended and they are struggling day to day to find routine, to feel connected. For others, it's actually been a time of reconnection and self-discovery. Our community expressed plenty of mixed feelings and shifting feelings day to day. Many talked about time and how they were adjusting to a slower pace or more time on their hands. Some are appreciating a new cadence to the days, like this participant who says, "I'm actually enjoying the time with my family and doing things creative and fun, things I don't normally do." And from this participant in Arizona, "I'm noticing that I appreciate being more family-focused and less work-frenzied." And from this participant in Toronto, Canada, "I'm really enjoying slowing down." Other people, though, are searching for ways to feel motivated and to stay productive during the slowdown. This participant from Pennsylvania says, "I have a lot of great ideas and I'm very capable of executing them, but I just need to focus and stay motivated to accomplish my plans." And from Texas, "I don't lack time as much as I lack discipline." For yet others, it's less about productivity and more about going inward. Many of our participants express having new realizations and even newfound compassion for themselves. One participant from Michigan says, "I'm having plenty of time to gather my thoughts and get ready for life's next adventure." And from Istanbul, Turkey, I've realized I kept adding a lot of stuff on my plate to avoid hearing my inner self. From South Carolina: I'm noticing that I have a lot more time to take care of myself, and it's something I need to continue doing when life returns to normal. And from Missouri: I can learn some important things about myself from daydreaming. While people are trying to adjust to the new pace of life— while people are trying to adjust to the new pace of life, many also are noticing what they miss in this time of physical distancing. Many miss the structure they had before. People are missing other people, sometimes even to their surprise. And we miss physical touch. This participant from Texas says, "I'm noticing I want to be more social with others as each day goes by. Also how important human interaction is to us mentally." And from New York, "I work best when I have structure to my life. I miss people." And from this participant in Colorado, "I'm noticing that I'm craving intimacy." And from Minnesota, "I enjoy a schedule, miss having a full-time job, and miss, miss, miss tight hugs and meeting new people." More than anything, people are noticing the strength of their relationships and their feeling of connectedness, and it runs the gamut. For some, this time of social distancing is highlighting a desire for more connection that they've had all along. A participant in Florida says, "I have not been affected that much in my social life, which is depressing because I lack connections with others. I'm a bit of a loner, I guess." And from Kansas, "I have friends that say they are friends, "but I haven't heard a peep from them." And from this participant in Mexico, "I need someone to really talk to. I always wanted to have someone, but at this point, I realized I don't have anyone and how much it does affect me." There are also those who are quite content with their own company. In fact, the introverts seem to be having a moment. Someone in California says, "I feel less anxious than usual about my isolation tendencies." Knowing that my community is experiencing something similar together. From Illinois: I'm noticing as an introvert, I'm feeling far less pressure to explain myself. Forgive me, but after a lifetime of the opposite, that feels really, really nice. And from Norway: I relax much more and more calm and enjoying being in my own company. This has also been a time of reconnection and establishing new routines in order to stay in contact, for realizing the importance of relationships and appreciating the people in our lives. A participant in Vermont says, "I am making a stronger effort to stay in touch with my friends and family through video calls, feeling closer than ever despite the physical separation." From North Carolina, we hear, "I'm noticing I cherish each interaction with family and friends so much more." From Ontario, Canada, "I have more friends than I realized." And from Mississippi, "I took so much for granted, and I won't make that mistake again. I hope other people won't either." The threat and uncertainty brought by the pandemic and the profound impact it's had on our lives has really challenged our emotional well-being. So many in our Deli Aloha community have expressed feelings of anxiety and depression and grief for our collective losses at this time. There is also gratitude for what we do have. For the sacrifices that others have made for us, and for the new awakenings that we're experiencing. And all of these feelings can coexist at any given moment. A participant from North Carolina says, "I'm noticing that I'm feeling stressed, yet more connected to some people. It's confusing because I am both scared, and yet things have slowed down in a more peaceful way." And from Georgia: "I have really good days and really bad days." For me, these heartfelt expressions of what it feels like in this moment is a reminder to double down on compassion. I don't remember another time where I had such an awareness of my interconnection to every other human being on the planet. These observations also remind us of our differences and that everyone's experience is valid and deserving of empathy. As submitted from a community member from Spain, "In this time of social distancing, I'm noticing that we all need each other."