[EP 21] Mastering Conscious Conversations with Chuck Wisner & Jack Canfield

Foreign.

And welcome back to the Jack Canfield Podcast. I'm Jack Canfield, and today I'm going to be talking with Chuck Wisner, who's the author of the Art of Conscious Conversation, where we'll be exploring the transformative power of effective communication. You know, in a world where conversations can easily become divisive, Chuck's insights offer a path to dialogue that bridges gaps, fosters understanding, and builds stronger connections with people. His work equips you with the tools you need to navigate even the most delicate conversations with grace and confidence. So, Chuck, welcome. We're really eager to learn from you today.

Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. This is really. I've been looking forward to meeting you and talking to you.

Well, good. Mutual. So let's start by talking about your book, the Art of Conscious Conversation. Curious what inspired you to write it, and what do you hope readers will take away from it?

I started this, this career, this is my fourth career, more or less, because I fell in love with the idea because of a problem I had with my former career. I fell in love with language and leadership and communication. And I just studied and retooled myself and studied. And over time, over 10 years or so, I was really lucky to work with some great folks at mit. We were doing transformational leadership programs for major corporations. And in that process, it was astounding how transformational it was for leaders in those programs to, like, say they never heard about meditation. They never knew about emotional intelligence. They didn't know about how to dissect a conversation. And so what we were teaching was this sort of like, it was a combination of many, many different things, including Peter Senge's book, the Fifth Discipline. And then things that one of my colleagues, Fred and I, brought from the Ontology of Language. And I realized that, you know what? There's no place that puts all this together in a practical, accessible way that people can try on and practice. So that was sort of where it started. And then at one point, a client said, you know, I love all this, but I don't know how to connect the dots. And that was another way for me to say, you know what? I have to figure that out, because that's what the book will be. And that's why the book is structured around four types of conversations, because that's the structure that holds all these various tools and practices together.

That leads to the obvious next question. What are these four types of conversations?

Well, so their storytelling, their collaboration, it's creative conversation and the commitment conversation. And the way I think about them at a very high level is on a funnel. And that when we're in a storytelling conversation, we tend to be self focused. We have stories we believe about ourselves, we have stories we believe about other people. And so the stories we believe and the stories we tell have a lot to do with how life unfolds. And so that explores that whole world of learning to look into the window of ourself and go, what stories are helping me and what stories are hindering. And when we do that, it opens us up a bit. So now we realize that, well, my story is just one of many. And so if we get that and we go into the collaborative conversation a little more open, that conversation is really about being open with other people, the ability to absorb other perspectives, the ability to tolerate other perspectives, and then the ability to advocate and inquire in productive ways. So we end up. That ends up being a mutual learning conversation where I learn from you, you learn from me and man, and that's just so rich. And then if we do that well, if you and I did that well, then you and I would go automatically move into a creative conversation where ideas just start bubbling up. Because we're both open vessels, we're both learning. And now ideas start bubbling up. And that's another way that's a bigger opening, right? As we get more and more open, we have our intuition, we can manage our own emotional intelligence and things. And then if we go through those, eventually all that collapses back to another point when we have to make a decision. And that's what the commitment conversation is about. It's about taking action, coordinating action with other people. It's how we make request offers and promises. And in fact, business thrives on this. You know, we make promises every day, little promises, and makes this chain of promises. And if we do it well, it builds trust. If we don't do it well, it leads to trouble. So these things unfold and then they collapse into this idea of making wiser decisions because we went through the process.

So as you talk about it, there's a flow from one to the next, to the next to the next. Let's talk about what gets in the way of those. And like, what are your suggestions for how we not get stuck in the.

Obstacles at a high level? One one thing that we are patterned around. So I like to call our conversational habits patterns because it takes some of the sting, some of the judgment out. Because I can say I have a really bad pattern about X, Y and Z or I get impatient with. I get impatient with incompetence. Like, you know, like, if someone's helping me, but they don't know what they're doing, I notice that I have. I have to conjure up my patients. So we have these patterns. And we tend as humans to love our stories. Our egos get attached to our stories, and that. That sort of drives bad meetings, bad interactions with family members. But we'd love to take action. So we say, okay, what are we going to do? Who's going to do what? And then what we do is we go. We do a conversational bypass. We bypass from our storytelling to each other to taking action or saying, okay, what are we going to do next? What's our commitment to one another? And those middle two conversations, which are really juicy, where we get to open up and learn from each other and have tough conversations and resolve them in creative ways, we bypass those. So one thing we can do is be more conscious about our pattern of going from, this is my story, and I'm right, okay, what are we going to do? We need to slow down a little bit so we can actually absorb other people's perspectives in a kind way, in a tolerant way. Doesn't mean we have to agree, but we need to take that middle ground and foster it, because we aren't. We aren't trained to do that. No one taught us how to do that. I talk about the DNA of conversations. What makes it work? What makes it doesn't work? We just aren't trained to do that. Does that answer your question?

Yeah, it does. It shows where the problem is. So let's say you talk about the DNA of conversations. You can unpack that a little bit. But if we get stuck going from stories to commitments without having those middle conversations, if you were consulting with me or us, what would you tell me I need to do in order to not jump over that?

Do that. Yeah. First I would say if. If it were a specific issue, I don't know if it's better to do. It can be home or work. But say, you know, if it's a home situation, to say, well, what is the specific thing that's. That's giving you a tough time? Or where are you getting triggered emotionally? And then I want you to look at your piece of that. Like, what's your story? What are your concerns? What did you want to have happen that didn't happen? Are there power issues involved? And by the way, most of our judgments that we make of ourselves and other people are based on standards that we aren't often conscious of. So First, I'd ask you to look at that stuff. I'd like ask you to do a little investigation on your side of what you're bringing to the conversation, because you might learn something and you might have that might open up a little bit, say, okay, this is what I think, but then there's another way to think. So that then when you do enter into the conversation with the other people, you're a bit more open. And the metaphor I like is we often go into a conversation with a fist and say, here's what I believe, and this is what we should do. And if two people do that, we're in a battle. But. But I say, don't give up your position, but open your hand and say, here's why I think this way. Here are my concerns. Here's what I think the goal should be. Here are my standards. So that investigation really primes us for a better collaborative conversation.

So say more about standards. What do you mean by that?

Okay, so besides the four conversations in the book, I use four archetypal questions throughout each conversation to help us sort of investigate our thinking, investigate what we're bringing to the conversation. And the standards piece says that from the time we were born and depending on our family and our culture and our education and our experience, we have standards of everything. What's right, what's wrong, what's good, what's bad, what kind of shadow I like, what kind of leader do I like? We have these standards that are always operating in the background. And so to bring them to the foreground and go, oh, I was judging my friend the other day because I have a standard that she shouldn't have behaved that way at a restaurant. And then I so, well, okay, wait a minute. That's my standard. So I can say, you know, let me investigate that. Is that a good standard? Is that a typical standard? And I could say, yeah, it is. And then I could say, you know, my friend just doesn't have that same standard. In fact, she might be blind to her behavior. So that would be one way the conversation go. The other way the conversation goes, you know what? I'm wrong. My standard is not necessarily the right one. Let me talk to her about that and see if we can appreciate one another's view and appreciate. And down, you know, lower the temperature a little bit and learn about each other's standards. It's a very powerful piece, as are our desires. Our desires are really powerful pieces of our conversations too.

I think the question that's on a lot of people's minds this day, you know, we have all this big political divide. People on the far right, people on the far left, and, and they're not talking to each other or whether they're talking to each other. They're stuck in that first conversation you talked about. You know, here's what I believe, here's what you believe. You know, I'm right, you're wrong. And then they don't talk to each other, they don't go to Thanksgiving anymore, whatever just turns into a big fight, you know, so when you take something as big and as important as what's going on and it's being exacerbated now with we're in an election year and Trump versus Biden or whatever's going to happen, you know, the liberals versus the conservatives, how do you advise people to have those difficult conversations? I mean, obviously you go through those steps, but I have a standard over here. They have like morality, you know, whatever that might be, or intelligence or maybe you have a standard about no one should be over 80 years old or whatever. How do you help people bridge that and get to that last thing where we commit to whatever or we just agree to not disagree or disagree. Right? Yeah, exactly. What would you say?

Okay, so I would then back up a little bit from the four questions, which are desires, concerns, authority, power issues and standards and say, you know, in every conversation we have that's hot or political society thrives and democracy thrives because we share a set of values and standards, but we also share what's true and what's not true. And as soon as we. So the best place to start is to see is there place that we can agree on some facts that we can move from because we both agree X. So maybe that gives us a foundation to move from. Right now we are in a dilemma because we are suffering from a lack of appreciation of expertise of data and, and save in science and facts. And that lack of appreciation of that or acknowledgement of the importance of those things really fundamentally says we can't go a whole lot into the conversation because there's no footing there, there's no foundation there, I think that's a great place to start. And if you find yourself in a conversation with someone who and I have had this experience multiple times with groups that I was involved in that we could not agree on fundamental facts, and I just bow out of those conversations because no matter what science I put in from them, no matter what evidence I put in front to them in their frame of mind, that was all just major. What do they Call it the, the press, you know, or the, or the government or whatever. But, but so that, that makes it impossible to go anywhere. And that's part of our dilemma right now. So I think we have to re, regain our, our appreciation and acceptance of expertise, of facts that we can agree on, you know, what's. And then we have, might have differences of policy, we might have differences of what morals are, we might have differences of who you can love or who you can marry, and we might have differences about other things. But at a foundation to move from without that, you don't waste your breath on those conversations.

No, I get it. I was at a conference recently and there was a guy there who was the, he worked with MasterCard or Visa, I don't know which one. And his job was to figure out how to figure out the things that you buy and what patterns and what products to put in front of you and yada yada.

Yeah, but he had to have a whole system.

Yeah. He retired and his whole thing now is like, how do you establish a fact, like how many people were at Trump's inauguration, How many people were this, you know, what happened here? And like, because we can't get agreement on what actually that fact is, we have a problem. The whole vaccine issue is another place where we have that problem. And I do think at one level those conversations do kind of degenerate and they don't go too far. But I think that's an interesting thing to look at as we go forward in society. How do you think you're talking about? What is it in cryptocurrency? There's blockchain. How can you create a fact based on a bunch of people aggregating and saying, well, here's what I saw, here's. Because to me a fact is observable. You know, you dropped your milk on the floor. That's a fact. We know that.

That's right. That's right. I'm sitting on a chair.

Yeah, exactly.

The sun is out.

Exactly.

And it's damn cold, but.

Exactly. So anyway, that's, I don't think we'll solve that one right now, but I do think that is an issue that's very challenging at the present moment. And also the benefit of like having the ability to challenge a fact and get people to believe it just because you repeated enough and you're on the, whether you're on Fox News or MSNBC or whatever.

Right.

Anyway, let's bring it back to what's more practical on the day to day level for most of Us, which is our families and our job and our clients and so forth. We're there in this first stage. Talk about those four questions a little more you mentioned to help us move from the first thing to the second conversation.

So when we have a judgment or we have a strong opinion that we're holding with our fist, when I say open our hand, what I'm asking people to do is say, if we have a strong opinion, also what's attached to that is our ego and our emotion. So we have a strong emotional attachment to that. And we have to be able to acknowledge that, wow, this makes me angry or this frustrates me, or this makes me depressed or this makes me sad. We have to acknowledge those things. And then I ask people to say, you know, let's open our hand and see what our thinking is under our emotional trigger or under our ego. Hold on the idea, right? And when we do open up like this, there's four questions that I just say, put them on a little piece of paper and stick them on your computer, because you can use them every time you're in a conversation, right? And they are desires. So every time we have an opinion or we're in a disagreeing conversation, we have something that is in the back of our consciousness, not in the forefront. In the back of what do we want to have happen? We want to accomplish this. We want. Or we want that goal, or we want this to be pleasant. We don't want it to be unpleasant. What's your desire? And desires are a good thing because they help us set goals, they help us move forward, but they're also a trap. Because much of our suffering comes when we have a desire that doesn't align with reality. Right. I want my kids to do X. Good luck, you know, or I want my boss to be this way. Good luck. I mean, not all bosses are going to set to your standard or behave to your standard, right? So just, just checking your desire to see if it's aligned with reality or if it's, or if you're stuck like fighting reality. I mean, fighting reality. Who wins that battle? Nobody wins that battle. So desires are really powerful. The next one is concerns. And usually we have a, a strong opinion or a judgment because we have a concern about tomorrow. We have a concern about, I don't want the same thing to happen tomorrow that happened today. I have two boys that are now grown men. And when they were growing up, they, they were on the wild side of things in spite of what I did. And, and they, you know, we, we Got too many of Those calls at 1:00 clock in the morning, like, dad, I just been arrested, or, dad, I need a ride home, you know, or, you know, and so when those things happen and I'm emotionally triggered, what I have to check is, okay, my concern here is for their safety. My concern here is I don't want tomorrow to look like today. I don't want them to repeat this in the future. That's a positive thing. We can also have concerns like worries that we have no control over that make us suffer. Like, I'm worrying that this could happen. Well, nothing has happened. So this future projection, that's the negative side of our concerns. The third one is authority. And there's every conversation we have, there's power issues, whether it's with parents and kids, whether it's with friends. One friend might say, hey, you look great today, or you look like crap today and you don't think anything of it. Another friend might say that, and they say, you look crap today, and you go, whoa, I wonder what's wrong. Maybe I'm not taking care of myself. So we give voices authority. And then you put that in business with hierarchies and the power and the authority issues get amplified by the hierarchies. You know, someone with more stripes says something, and that means a lot more than if someone under you or your colleague might say something. So there's power issues everywhere, and to be, to be aware of them helps us be awake because oftentimes we're fighting power issues where there's things we could do nothing about. In business, if you don't like what your boss is doing, you can, you can drink all you want and complain all you want and get depressed as you want. That's your boss, that's how he behaves, or that's how she behaves. It's really good to understand those dynamics. And it happens in every conversation, whether it's storytelling or collaboration or whatever. Meetings are. In a good example, you go into a meeting and the loudest voice, or the person with the most stripes usually is a big driver of how the meeting goes. The last one is standards, which we talked a bit about. So every judgment we have is based on a standard. And the cool thing about them, and why I like to call these patterns, is we did not choose our standards. Probably 90% of our standards, we unconsciously adopted. And so to bring them into the forefront of our consciousness is to say, oh, I have that standard, and I'm really being hard on my friend, but maybe that's Maybe that, maybe that's not fair, or maybe it is fair. So standards are one of my favorites. Sometimes I work with groups of women and I, and I. And this isn't a diss to women, it's just a sort of historical thing that, that happens. So I ask how many women, when you leave the house, if all the beds aren't made, you feel like a bad mom or a bad wife, and hands sort of rise up. And my only question is, you, that's fine, you can have that standard. But where'd you get that? Where did that come from? And then the answers are, well, that's what my mother taught me, or my grandmother said I had to do it or whatever. So that's how we, we accumulate these standards without a lot of consciousness.

One of the things I heard once was a quote says marriage is a constant fight about whose mother's definition of clean was.

That's good, right? Two different standards.

Yeah, exactly.

My wife and I have different standards in the kitchen. I love to cook. We both cook. I'm more of a cook and she's more of a baker. But when it comes time to go to bed, we have dinner, we maybe watch a show on tv and it comes out to go to bed. I'm like, I'm out of here. I'm tired. And she's like, no, no, no. She says, I want to clean the kitchen. And the joke is, do we go to bed like a queen and wake up like a maid or do we go to, we go to bed like a maid and wake up like a queen?

No, it's true. My wife, her mother, they never cleaned the dishes at night. They always did it next morning. I like to do them at night. So when I wake up, the kitchen's all clean. I can go in there and it's all, yeah, yeah.

You wake up as a king.

Yeah, we, we don't fight about it anymore. Are you familiar with Byron Katie's work at all? Do you know her work?

Oh, yeah, I love, yeah, Byron Katie. I love Byron Katie. And a colleague of mine that I taught with for many years, Leslie Pollott was Byron's right hand gal for many years. And I worked with her a little bit. I love her work.

Yeah, for me I did, I did it for a while and it was just really clearly that, you know, I have a belief my wife should do such and such. And when she doesn't do it, you ask yourself the question, is it true that she should do that or she should never do that? And you really get to the point where you go, well, it's not that. Not a truth. That's God put on a tablet anywhere. And if I realize that, then you ask the question, who am I? When I believe that I'm uptight, I'm miserable, I tiny shirt, etc. When I don't believe that I'm happy, get along well, et cetera. But I think it's good in terms of trying to determine what is reality, what is really truth, versus what is just stuff that we learned, been conditioned by, and so on and so forth.

Yeah, we. Yeah. And without the awareness of. Of our standards and things and desires, we. We. It just spins in our minds, you know, and then we project into the future. We carry pain from the past. And, you know, the. The nice thing about Katie's work and your example with your wife and my wife, once we did the work, we also are able to have a much better sense of humor around these things.

Right.

You know, I might. She might be doing something. And I go, oh, you're just going to do the whole thing tonight. Right? And then we both laugh. Or she says, maybe this is a night that we can go to bed and you can do the pots and pans in the morning. And we crack, we laugh. So having our sense of humor in all of this is really important because it helps us not take ourselves so seriously.

That's so true. Very good, Very good, Very good, very good.

Yeah.

So we're in that first stage. We're moving into the second stage. We're asking ourselves these questions. We're getting. Getting clearer about what our standards are and what the power issues going on and so forth. What's the next step? Moving into the third. Or maybe you already talked about moving into the third area.

Well, the next step, actually, the tools of the next step have to do with our why we listen and why we don't listen or how we listen and how we can listen better. Because we are actually trained to be bad advocates. If we have our fist, we're trained to have the right answer, raise our hand with the answer, and that's how we get rewarded. But that. That sort of leads us to go into the meetings with a closed fist or to go into the conflict with a family with knowing the answer. And the idea of shifting from that kind of closed advocacy of our position to open advocacy is saying, let's share my position with an open hand. That's revealing. So it's scary for a lot of people because you got to reveal your thinking under your judgment, or you got to reveal your thinking under your opinion, right, or your position. And so when we do that, there's a couple things that happen. A, I'm free. I'm like, hey, here's how I think. My story might not be the only. Might not be the right one, but here's why I think this way. That can be very contagious. It can invite other people to open their hand. You know, like we invite them into a dance instead of a fight. So here's how I'm thinking. And then another thing we're not trained well at is asking good questions. Because if I can invite them in or they see I'm a bit vulnerable, then I can say, well, what are your concerns? It's a very good question. Well, maybe we have different standards. Can you tell me why, what you're basing your judgment on? What's your standard of good or bad or successful or unsuccessful? And so we. With the four questions, we can ask them to open their hand. And that's the art of balancing advocacy and inquiry so that we can move into that mutual learning space. And there's no right. I mean, I can't give a formula, do this, do that, do this. You know, part of our being awake is saying, maybe it's best for me to ask a question to find out where someone's mind is or what their thoughts are, and then offer mine up. And that gets into power issues as well, to. To be alert to how that plays out.

Well, I remember early on, I was a psychotherapist for a number of years. Way back when. I mean, in my 30s, I'm. I'll be 80 this summer, but that's a while ago. But when I was training to be a therapist, one of the greatest teachers I ever had said, the thing you have to do is live in a state of curiosity. In other words, someone would say something like, I'm lonely all the time. And I would respond with, well, teach me how to be lonely all the time. How do you do it? And all of a sudden, they're telling me what they do. Well, I never ask people for anything. I don't go out. I tell myself no one would like me, you know, and it was fascinating. So for me, I think, you know, if you're saying to someone, you know, well, tell me your concerns. Most people don't ask that question. And I know I've been on MSNBC and I've been on Fox and Friends and other things, and I've seemed to be comfortable in both places because I get that both sides have legitimate concerns, and they're not listening usually to the other side's concern. But that's why it goes back and forth and so forth. But I think if you said, okay, I want you to go out and I want you to go out and come back and write a paper on why someone is a MAGA person or why someone believes in the squad, you know, it's whatever. And what happens is you have to ask questions, and these. You start to. You're not. What's the great quote I think was, you know, help me understand rather than to be understood.

Yes. Right, right.

You know, if. If you can do that, the other person starts to feel like you do care, and then they open up.

That's right.

Because they feel safe. You're not going to attack them immediately, you know, from their point of view.

That's right. Yeah. And that's like, that's. What if. If I open my hand and show some vulnerability. That's, you know, whether you're not talking about that, but you're doing it. That's inviting, you know, and it just might give them a little safety to begin to open, you know, one finger, you know, and then another. And if we get better at asking questions. So, like bad advocacy, we also are bad at asking questions. We're not trained to ask open, interesting questions. We're trained to ask questions to prove our point. Like, I'll ask you a question to make sure you're proving that my point is right and you're wrong. How would you think that? Why would you think that way? I mean, obviously that. Yeah. So this art of asking the questions and the four archetypal questions are just a template to go, Here's a basis. Start here. And that can shift the conversation. And then as we go up that funnel, you know, we do our own work. We have these artful, collaborative conversations where we're learning from each other. That is curiosity. That's having the curiosity to really wonder how someone else is thinking. Then that moves us to the third conversation, which is the creative. And that's when we have to trust our intuition, when we have to balance our right brain, left brain, when we have to shut down our judgment. Because, like, the trouble with brainstorming often is someone will say something, and then someone will say, oh, we tried that two years ago. It'll never work, you know, and we. We shut things down instead of allowing our space to be in wonder, like a. What's possible? How many possibilities could we just dream up, dream up in five minutes, you know, and that. So that conversation really asks a lot of the individual to also be curious, be vulnerable, and just dream, just wonder what's possible. And if we do all of those in a really thoughtful, mindful way, ultimately we get to a decision point. But we're going to make a better decision because we went through that process and that last conversation, commitment, conversation. It really is a critical conversation because it's how we coordinate action. Who's going to do what, when, why, how. Except we have a cultural addiction to yes. And that shuts down that conversation very quickly. Like, I'll say, you know, someone might run by my desk and go, hey, can you get me some slides for Monday morning? I say, sure, no problem. Happy to help you, boss. I spend the weekend doing slides. I give them to my boss on Monday morning. They take they. Or they get on their computer and they look at them, and half an hour later they'll come storming to me and say, this is. These don't work. This is not what I wanted. And that. All because they made a sloppy promise. All because the boss said, hey, get me some slides for Monday morning. I say, sure. Well, what the hell? I mean, who's it for? How long does it have to be? What kind of slides do you want? You don't want bullet points. Do you want pictures? Why do you need this? I mean, all those pieces. When we are addicted to sure or yes, no problem, we miss out on making a better promise. And so in the book, I sort of take apart what that means because every request we get has these five or six components that have to do with authority and concerns and desires and standards that help us make a better promise. And when we make a good promise and we deliver, then we're building trust. We make a bad promise, we don't deliver, then we have distrust. Then we have, oh, gosh, I'll never ask Chuck to do slides for me again.

Well, doesn't the responsibility lie on both sides? You're saying yes too quickly, and they're not giving you the specifics of what they want when they make the request. They didn't slow down.

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And I sort of said, I asked people to have a rule, like, say, you can't say yes unless you ask three questions.

Oh, good.

Or you can't make a request, do something for me. Unless you give them, like, three components of what you want. Because even if I say, hey, can you. If I'm the boss, can you give us some slides? It's for a board meeting at 11 Monday, the board is impatient. So they got to be no more than 10 words per slides and beautiful pictures. And here's the point I want to make now. If I said that, the receiver might go, well, that's interesting. And then I might have two more questions, the whole thing gets clarified, I deliver the slides, and we're all happy on Monday morning.

Right.

So it is responsibility both ways.

Yeah. Good. So curious. I looked at your website the other night, and you've consulted with, like, Fortune 100 companies and governments. I mean, everything that everyone would go like, wow, that's important. Can you give us an example, maybe, of one of the groups you work with and how you walked people through maybe a difficult situation, helped them to communicate better, and how that produced a better result?

There's individual examples, and then there's team examples. I'm doing some talks these days, and I joke that I've been behind the curtain of confidentiality 30 years, and now I'm stepping out from behind the curtain, but I still can't reveal names. And I understand that part. Sure. Right, right. But I am really happy to be talking about it and out from behind the curtain. So on an individual level, I've worked with leaders that range from someone who was totally oblivious to their style, that was shutting down their team, and another say, the other extreme was someone who's a really good leader and just is checking in regularly to keep on top of their game, and that I become a trusted advisor to them. On this scale over here where the guy was blind, an example would be. I said. I said, okay, let's call him Jeff. Jeff, let me sit in on two meetings with you and your team. He had a team of about eight people. Let me sit on a few meetings. And so I did. And of course, my being there sort of changes everybody's behavior a little bit because they know why I'm there. But nonetheless, nonetheless, Jeff showed his true colors. And he got up to the flip chart, and he started drawing a diagram, like, this is what we got to do, and this is what's missing. And. And he said, it's really exciting. Let's go for it. But he was so passionate. He was almost red in the face, and he was just adamant, and he would stop and go, what do you think? Crickets? Because, no, he just shut the whole room down because he put his ideas and his path and his concerns and his desires in the front. And they said, well, he's the boss, and we know how he operates. I ain't saying a word. I'm not disagreeing. So I worked with him to help him see how his pattern shut down his team. And then we worked with the team to say, we have to create different. We have to create a way that Jeff can change his style. But you guys need to take responsibility to speak up because it goes both ways. So that's, that's sort of an example of how that could play out. I've worked with larger teams where we.

Slow you down a minute. So go back to Jeff. So what did you teach Jeff to do? Like ask questions in the beginning instead of telling what they're going to do or what did you teach him?

Yeah, well, first I had to show Jeff, I had to be pretty blunt with Jeff to say, is this the consequent you want? You're telling me you get crickets and here's my observation. And then I have to give him some tough feedback. Here's what you did, and I'm not blaming you, but this is your pattern. You're really passionate, you're really smart. You might be ahead of the whole team. You. But you can't lead this way. And then. So I got him to shift to say, start with here's a problem we have. Let's go around the room and let's hear what everybody thinks about this. A collaborative conversation where we can do mutual learning. Right. And so there was a process over time that we developed to give the team the tools to do that. And on the other end, this other leader, who's a great leader, I'm a trusted advisor and we speak regularly because things always pop up. And with a senior leader, who else is he going to say? The CEO is driving me mad. You know, I hated the meeting. He drives me crazy. What am I going to do? And that's. He's a good leader, but he's also in these situations where he's. He wants some support in how to design or be in conversation and larger teams. I often just do cultural work. Let's talk about. Because I believe that in business, I think of three pillars. There's the pillar of the. There's the. Not three pillars, the triangle. And there's the task we're trying to accomplish. What's our goal? What's our work? What's our mission? Then there's individuals that make up the team, and then there's collective of the individuals, which is them together. The we of the team, the culture of the team. Often teams are focused on their goal and they don't go underneath. It's like the tip of the iceberg. They don't go underneath to Go, what am I doing as a leader to not make this work? And what culture do we have that is not allowing us to do our best collaborative work? And that's a tough conversation because most people don't even think about that. And you know, the bumper sticker, shit happens. I say to teens, culture happens. You might not talk about it, but you're going to wake up a year from now and go, how did we get here? So I try to make cultural conversations a purposeful commitment to. Let's try to work this way together.

Yeah. Was the old phrase culture eats strategy for lunch? Yes.

Right. That's a great one.

Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah.

So I'm just curious. I always like to ask this question because I don't have any other, like, specific question to ask you, but I know you have a lot more in your bag of tricks and knowledge and skills and so forth. What question do you wish I had asked where you could wax about it for a few minutes?

I think something that's really the part of the reason all this resonates so much with me, because of the, the, the things I've gone through that I've had to learn from. And so the, the personal lessons so that this isn't just academic, but it's very personal because it, the things I learned changed my life. And I can give you two examples. And, and one is I grew up with a step grandfather who was a real redneck and he was a racist, and he was a redneck, and he was. And I had three older sisters. I was the youngest until my brother was born years later. And growing up, I was on a farm till I was about five and we moved to a suburb. But growing up, the message I got when I. My sisters could cry, my sisters could be emotional. We've all experienced this, men of our generation, but we. I couldn't have the emotion. I couldn't cry. So the message I got was, be a real man. Be a big, big. Be a bigger man. If I didn't want to skin the deer in the basement of the house because it made me sick to my stomach, be a bigger man. So that was the message. And what's phenomenal about this, and this is why I love to tell the story, is I adopted that story that I wasn't a big enough man because that was an authority figure. That was someone that had power over me, that was an adult. They know what the hell they're talking about. Who am I? You know, I must not be a big enough man. And I lived with that for many Many years until I did my work around language and. And the power of words and things. And when I did that work, one of my teachers said, you need to bust that story. And he gave me instruction. He goes, you go write a paper on why that story is true and why it's not true. What are the facts? What were his standards of being a man? What are your standards? You know, what were his concerns? You know, And I did that, and that was. That was tough work. And I actually busted that story. And I was so looking at facts. I was married, a successful architect, two kids, six feet tall, great friends. Wait a minute. These don't add up to not big enough man. Right. And so I busted the story. And then I'll cut the story short, but one day I went to my office where I was friends with my partners, and we were having coffee. I was having coffee with a partner named Bill. And we were drinking coffee, and a light bulb went off in my head, and I said, oh, my God, I'm taller than Bill. And that was the first time that I saw myself taller than him because I. Because this story was so strong in my bones that I saw myself smaller than. So that was it.

Yeah. That's very cool.

That was an amazing opening. The other story is that I was diagnosed with leukemia 30 years ago. And about 25 years ago, again, something like that happens. And, you know, you. You have to put. To put on the brakes of life and go, wait a minute, I gotta get a handle on this. So that was a very reflective time, very spiritual time for me and all that. And so that led me into. To. To. To embrace my. My. My spiritual sort of interests.

And.

And I. I refused, through words, I refused to claim the diagnosis. I mean, I refused to claim the. The disease I would say I was diagnosed with, but I wouldn't say I have. And that was just a. A small way that I could say, you know what? I don't know what's going on. I don't know what will happen. But I'm not. I'm not claiming this quite yet. And actually, I'm. I'm. I'm healthy. I have never had a treatment. I still live with it, but I'm. I'm living with it instead of fighting against it.

Interesting. Interesting.

Yeah.

You know, your first story reminds me. My dad was a very macho. He was a lieutenant in the Air Force. He trained bomber pilots. He was a hunter, you know, all that kind of stuff. And I grew up Wheeling, West Virginia, which is probably not too far from where you were in Pennsylvania and. And I. I remember I got from him and my. And my stepfather because my mom got divorced when I was 6. If you don't stop crying, I'll give you something to really cry about. That was the statement.

Yeah, I've heard that.

Yes.

Right.

And the way I interpret it now is your crying is upsetting me and making me. Is stimulating my uncried tears. So I'm going to shut you down because I can't. It's not safe for me to feel that. And therefore it wasn't safe for me to feel that because I was going to get in trouble. And.

Yeah.

And I literally, I mentioned I was doing plant medicine down in Costa Rica with these shamans. And I remember one night on a journey, it was like my jaw started to quiver and it was like Godzilla and the Hulk were having this battle with each other. Cry, don't cry. Cry, don't cry.

Cry, don't cry, don't cry. Wow.

And it went on for like, I know, 20 minutes. It was, it was. I mean, it was lily. A life battle.

Yeah.

And then all of a sudden, the crying one. And I cried probably for 20 minutes.

Cried.

I just cried and cried and cried and then till it stopped. And that was amazing for me because crying meant you weren't a man. You know, it's like, you know.

Right.

I had a football coach when I was playing in high school, and I hurt my leg really bad. He said, how far is your leg from your heart? I said, I don't know, two feet. Well, that's two. That's. That's long enough. Go back in the game. You know, it's not okay to be pain and honor that. You know, it's just what, wow. It's how I grew up, you know, and. Yeah, so so many of us men go through that and women get, you know, you can't be powerful, don't talk back, you know, all that kind of stuff.

Right.

That happens.

Exactly.

But it's healing all that. That's so powerful. And. Yeah, yeah, I. I love you.

Yeah. That's. That's why I like, that's why the starting with stories for me is so critically important. People say California listen better and they can read all the books they want about mirroring and repeating back, but if their brain mind is locked into their story, they can't hear no matter what they do. We have to undo our own crap.

Right?

Right. It's true. And we have to investigate our own stories whether it's not a big enough man or whether it's I'm weak or I'm not a powerful woman, whatever that story is. There are stories we have that help us and there are stories we have that hinder us. And the ones that hinder us we better take a look at.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I do a lot of work on limiting beliefs that were formed usually between the age of 3 and 8 years old. And we made a decision not okay to cry. You know, I'm not worthy unless I am funny or keep my mouth shut or whatever. And then we don't realize we made them. We forget that we made those, their decisions and they can be redecided. And there's a lot of technology out there now in the world, human potential, movement, psychology, etc for unhooking all that stuff. And for me, I'm. I'm kind of addicted to learning that stuff and, and using it with people. That's kind of what I like to do.

Both and even neuroscience is catching up and saying, oh, yeah, we have these different personalities that we can, we can work with. So are you familiar with Voice Dialogue? Yes, Dr. House down. I worked with him up 20 years ago. Yeah. Yeah, because that's good stuff, too. It's like, it's a way of dialoguing with our stories and our voices. Right. Instead of fighting them.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah. We try to suppress it instead of give it expression and then integrate it. Well, this has been fun. I like you. I wish you were my neighbor. We'd hang out together. Well, let's let everyone know you have your book and it's available on Amazon both as an audiobook and a regular book. And you have a website, chuckwisner.com, a lot of great stuff there. I know you're speaking and consulting, so anything else you want to let people know before we break up?

No. I also am on Instagram, chuckwisner, and I'm doing more promotion on the book because I want the word out there. And I'm trying to get more speaking engagement. So anybody interested, give me a ring.

And the book again is called the Art of Conscious Conversation. So make sure you get it. It's the. You're teaching a lot of stuff that has a lot of depth to it because of all the stuff we just talked about. So really appreciate your contribution, Chuck.

Yeah, thank you for having me. Really appreciate the call.

My pleasure.

The conversation. Yeah. Good to meet you.

You too. All right, and thanks to you for joining us today as well. Those of you listening, please make sure to tune in next time when I'll be engaging in some kind of conversation with another thought leader or transformational trainer that can help you live a happier, healthier, more successful and more fulfilling life. Until then, I would really encourage you to re listen to this. Take some notes. Learn those questions. Practice. Make some conscious effort. Make some time. Set aside to practice what you learned both at work and at home until this becomes a natural part of yourself. I promise you, if you do that, your life will transform. Take care. Until next time.