Finding Brave 112: How To Free Yourself from Conflict, with Dr. Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler

Hello, everybody. Welcome to another week of Finding Brave. How you doing today? I'm so excited about this particular content and topic and our amazing guest, Jennifer. Oh, Jennifer. I needed to make sure I'm pronouncing your name right, but. Everyone, this is Jennifer Goldman Wetzler. Did I get it right? All right, great, Jennifer, thank you for taking the time. And we're going to be talking about Jennifer's latest book and the idea of conflict. And you have a really interesting take, Jennifer, on Are we going for Conflict Free? Are we going for Conflict Resolution, which a million books have been about, and I've even had a few guests about resolution. Can't wait to hear. So, you know what I'd love you all to do? I mean, most of us, we live in a very social world at work and in our own lives. Think about where there's some conflict that you've struggled with, that you've tried everything you know how, but it hasn't resolved. And I have a feeling Jennifer's gonna help you right here on the spot. So, everyone, let me tell you about Jennifer. Jennifer is founder and CEO of Alignment Strategies Group, the premier New York based consulting firm that counsels CEOs, yikes. And their executive teams on how to optimize organizational health and growth. Author of the new book Optimal Free Yourself from Conflict at Work, at Home, and in life, she's the keynote speaker. She is a keynote speaker at Fortune 500 companies, public institutions, and innovative, fast growing startups, where she inspires audiences of all kinds, including those at Google, Harvard, TEDx, and your popular course at Columbia. Wow, you're busy. A former counterterrorism research fellow with the U.S. department of Homeland Security, she's a graduate of Tufts and holds a PhD in Social Organizational Psychology from Columbia. Good grief. Too bad you're not so busy. Thank you for being here. All right. I have so much to ask you. And we were just chatting before. Can you just tell us you're in? And gosh, your counterterrorism experience, I bet it feeds in very well to what you do. I'd love to hear a little bit about that and a little bit about, you know, we were saying after I was a corporate person, I became a marriage and family therapist, and you were saying organizational psychology is different. Can you tell us a little bit about how. How that all works and how you advise CEOs and what you leverage from your experience? I'd love to hear that.

Well, I will first say, first of all, thank you for having me on the show.

My pleasure.

It's great to be in conversation with you. You know, I think clinical psychologists who help people in family situations and marriage situations have more in common with organizational psychologists like myself than, you know, then we have with other, with people in completely different fields, obviously. So there's a lot that's in common.

Right, right.

Also, if you take a systems approach to family dynamics, those are very, very similar to any kind of group dynamics work that you'll likely come across in organizational settings. So there's a lot of similarities. And I think it's important to recognize the boundaries of our professional expertise because it can be just all too tempting. And even in the title of my book, it says at work, at home and in life because this absolutely intended. And there are many, many, many stories from the home context and the work context and the public life context in the book. You know, the prime family story in my book is about me and my mom and I talk about that in my TEDx talk. So I do absolutely have insight and ideas and practices that people can use, no matter where you are looking at conflict in your life, whether it's at work or at home or elsewhere. That said, you know, I was trained professionally as an organizational psychologist, which means that the first thing that I do is I look at what's happening in a system, what's happening not only with the individuals involved, but also with the rest of the people who might be either influenced by or influencing the situation. Often those people are more of a factor, more involved than we like to give them credit for. And it can seem like it's just us and one other person and we're in conflict with that person. And the part of the problem and part of how we can free ourselves from those dynamics, the problem is we, we see these things in such black and white terms. We think it's me and them. And so if it doesn't, you know, if my doing XYZ with them doesn't work, then I'm going to try ABC with them and see if that works. And then I'm going to try def with that person. And part of the key to the whole thing is to realize, hey, maybe there's nothing more to be done with that person. Right. Maybe I need to look at the rest of the system and see, is there anyone else here? Is there anything, anything else here that's involved that might have some leverage. And my experience is that in organizations in particular, when I help people take that wide angle lens, they sometimes immediately, I mean, with a snap of a finger, you know, just thinking about that Helps people go, oh, my gosh, I can't believe I'm banging my head up against the wall trying to figure out what to do with this one other person when there's this other very obvious way to go about it.

Wow. I so just want to highlight and I so resonate with what you said, and I think that's why I'm so drawn to your work. You know, I trained as a marriage and family therapist, and MFT work is systems work. And I remember the first class I ever took, they were basically saying, you know, we focus not on that. The individual is broken or the individual is the problem. We look at the system that is sustaining and perpetuating the issue. And I remember going, I don't get this. You know, sometimes the person is the problem. But now, after years of thinking of a system, thinking of it that way, I think it's just so much more powerful, so much more potent in understanding how conflict is sustained. Oh, I love it. I love it. I love it. So we probably have a lot of we over dinner. We would have a lot of similar stories, I think, if we shared.

Yeah.

All right, so let's go to. What do you. What do you think is the biggest message from your book about. And talk about conflict free versus conflict resolution? Can you. Because let me just say this. Everyone wants to be conflict free. I think, although some people thrive on conflict, some people love it, some people feel that's what gives them juice. Right. But I think most of us feel that conflict. You tell me if I'm wrong here, but I think most of us feel it gets in the way. It sucks out our energy and our confidence and our ability to move forward in. In ways that uplift us and others. So what do you mean by free versus conflict resolution? Can you tell us?

Yes, absolutely. So we're not treating conflict. I would never want anyone to walk away from anything that I said or did or any writing that they read of mine and think, wow, you know, I can really just rid myself of conflict forever, and I'll never have another bit of conflict in my life for the rest of my life. No, that's not the point. That's not reality. I think the first thing, the key is, first key is to recognize that conflict is a part of being human. We cannot be human. We cannot live on this planet without experiencing some conflict at one point or another in our lives.

Should we, Jennifer, should we even define conflict? How would you define it?

Yeah. So I don't want to spend too much time on this. I will definitely Answer your question as best I can. Sure. And you know, I spent five years just researching the factors that cause long term conflict. And I realized in doing that, I could spend the rest of my life doing it. And there are plenty of scholars who do.

Gotcha.

Academics who do. And I have so much more interest in talking about how can we get ourselves out. But just to, you know, to answer your question, I would say, right, one way of defining what conflict is is when our interests or what our needs and concerns and desires are don't match the needs and concerns and interests of other people. Perfectly said. Yeah, there we go. Okay. The kind of conflict that I'm talking about and that I really work with most specifically is the kind that recurs. So it's the kind that is resistant to resolution. Meaning for the last 40 years there's been a lot of research and a lot of practice in principled win win negotiations. So if you've read the book Getting to Yes or Difficult Conversations, these are all amazing methodologies that I myself have gone around teaching early in my career. And I still do these ideas that if you can understand what other people want and why they want it, and if you can understand why you want what you want and have conversations about those underlying interests, you can then develop options that meet both sides interest, or as many sides, as many interests of both sides or as many sides as possible. And then you can come up with options that you know will make everybody happy. So in an ideal world, that's what we do when we're faced with conflict. The only problem is in the last 25 years of my practice and my research in this field is that sometimes it doesn't work right. We all know this from experience. I can't think of a person living on the planet who has not at some point tried to resolve a conflict. And hey, it's a park, you know, what's going on.

I don't think you can have a life without, without intractable conflict in a particular situation. Right. Where no matter what you try, nothing's working. Right.

Exactly. So that is what my work is all about. It's about, you know, I'm attracted to the most difficult, the toughest problems. You give me a situation where it's come, it's so complex, you don't even know where to begin. Or it's come up so many times despite you're trying to resolve it and it hasn't gone away and you just are at the end of your rope, you don't know what to do. That is the kind of problem that I'm most interested in, that the methodology that I've been using and teaching and that I've written about can be most helpful to people.

And, of course, I want to understand why is that. Did you have conflict as growing up? Did you have to navigate conflict?

Yes, that is how I got into this field. So when I was a kid, I grew up in a family of screamers and door slammers. My grandfather was the kind of biggest offender. He had come from a very difficult life of fleeing from Nazi Europe and losing many family members. And so out of that trauma and that grief came anger, anger, pain and sadness. And he, you know, like many people in his generation, never was. It never saw someone like you or like me who was able to help him process his emotions. And so my understanding, looking back now as an adult, that there was a lot to work through that he didn't have the opportunity to work through. And so it came out in these very unhelpful, emotionally, mostly emotionally destructive ways. But, you know, those have impacts on a family and on, you know, the generations in a family. So I grew up across the street from my grandparents. So having grown up in a family where that was, you know, where we came from or one place that we came from, I had to learn as a child how to deal with people who were angry. And lucky for me, on the other side of my family, my grandmother Florence, Grandma Florence, she. We used to go and visit my uncle and aunt on the other side of my family every Sunday. We would travel in our car, my brother and me in the backseat and my dad driving and my mom up front, and Grandma Florence would sit in the middle of my brother and me. And so at some point in every car ride, you know, there'd be fighting every which way, people screaming and yelling at each other. And then Grandma Florence would say, sha.

Sh.

With her presence, right? She was the conflict whisperer. She had the presence and just the ability to whisper, literally to calm the rest of us down. And then she would proceed to tell us a story. And so I think it was growing up with both the juxtaposition of learning how to deal with the anger on one side of the family and having the model of Grandma Florence on the other, that led me to be that conflict whisperer in my own life, to be that for my friends and family as I grew up, and then now to have taken it on as a career.

What a story. And listen, folks, I want to just highlight something I'm always talking about when you're building your career look at who you have always been. Look at what you have experienced that made you who you are. And most likely when you leverage that, you're going to have a great career. And of course, there are tools and skills, and you took that landscape and you built on it. But it is who you've been all your life.

Yes.

How do I. Don't you tell me.

Tell me. Well, I think what you just said is super important. That, you know, what I feel proud of and happy about is that I took what naturally came easily to me because of how I grew up and built on that by taking the classes in college and going to study in Jerusalem my junior year abroad and working with grassroots leaders who were trying to resolve conflict, you know, in the Middle east. And then, you know, learning as much as I could. Going to work, you know, was not easy. My first or second job out of college, knocking on the door of the program on negotiation at Harvard Law School, which I had known about in, you know, as a student, and knocking and knocking and knocking until I finally was able to. To break through. So. So having that persistence and following what you know in your heart is the right thing. And then having both sides right, having the piece where you have the training and you have the background with the piece of. This is how I grew up, I think, can be particular.

What a story. All right, now tell us what we need. What are we not understanding? You talk about values. What are we.

What.

What do we need to do today? Let's say today we have an intractable conflict at work.

Yeah.

Gosh, I'd love to see you at work, like, working with these. I'm sure you've worked with some narcissistic personalities. You know, I've. So let's start there. I've had a lot of narcissism in my life in bosses where. And this may be too hard to deal with, but with rational people, there are some. And who are emotionally whole. You can. You can talk about what you need and what they need, and there can be a rational discussion with narcissists. And I don't mean to just pin it on them, but people with personality disorders, there's a lot of emotional wounds. So maybe we don't even want to go there. But when you're dealing with somebody that it's so important that you get along at work and you do have conflicting interests. What do we need to understand that we don't understand? What do we do?

I want to go back to the question you asked me that I didn't fully Answer before about what's the difference between resolving versus freeing yourself from conflict? It has to do with the example you just gave. So the beauty of freeing yourself from conflict as opposed to trying to resolve something, and I did talk about it a little bit before, is that the idea of resolving conflict is that you're going to be in conversation with someone else, you're going to try to elicit what they care about, and you're going to let them know what you care about. And when that doesn't work, like in an example that you just described where you're dealing with someone who you're after trying and trying and trying, you get this, you notice, hey, wait a minute, you know, I may be barking up the wrong tree here. This is not working. This ain't working. So when, when you notice that, and sometimes, you know, it may take a few times of trying, you may not know that right off the bat. And that's okay. When that happens, to ask yourself, what would it look like to become free from this? The beauty of becoming free is that it doesn't require necessarily. Sometimes it does, but sometimes it doesn't even require a conversation or cooperation with someone else. What it does require is courage, being brave, to look inside of yourself and ask yourself a whole series of questions about who you are, how you've been acting in the situation, how you've been viewing the situation, and also what is going on in the situation. And to really get crystal clear with yourself about the most kind of, to be as objective as you can about who this other person is, how they've been acting, what their background might be like that might have caused them to act that way so that you can build as much empathy for them as you can while preserving and getting what you need for yourself out of the situation. So the beauty of freeing yourself is that it does not necessarily require cooperation from other people. So here's how I would tell me.

Because I've got a, got a story I need your help with, you know, a situation. So how do we go about this? So shall I give an example and you work with that?

Yeah, yeah.

One of the hard, and this was before I was a therapist, before I had self awareness. I had, I was a senior person at a role managing a multimillion dollar budget. And they brought in kind of a turnaround guy. He was, you know, and basically anti women. He surrounded himself with a sycophantic posse of men. And I would notice that when I would speak to him about an issue. I literally, I've never had this before, but he would look at me as if, I want you to go clean the kitchen. Like, the look in his eye would be, you are nothing to me. So, of course, it perturbed all of my insecurities. And he would speak in a demeaning way in meetings. So I complained in hr and they said, listen, we see what you're talking about. You need to go and talk to him about this. So we have it on record. Well, he was a narcissist and said, you're wrong. I support you openly. There's nothing wrong with how. I mean, it sounds very familiar to a lot of people who can't be accountable in our world today. You're wrong. It's in your mind. But the minute I said it, that was the end for me. I felt. So if I had known what your book was teaching and what you're teaching. You know what? I'm guessing, tell me if I'm right, that to try to get him to change is not the way we're going to resolve this conflict.

Most likely. Well, let me ask you, given that you've. What I typically do is I ask people to bring me a situation that's still ongoing because now we know you know what has happened. And I do want to ask you what has happened, because that can help me have it. It can help me answer the question better of, well, what else could you have done? Or what? What would I recommend that you would do?

So it didn't end well. You know, the. The senior leader at the time who kind of said, we've got your back, was fired by this, and this person moved in and ran the company. And it was never said. There was no data that I could have. He never told me, I'll never forgive you. But then there was a very large layoff, and I was one of the people on the list. And truthfully, it didn't feel copacetic.

Yeah.

And other things happened later that kind of proved it wasn't, but. So it was pretty much a disaster to go at him that way. That was not what should have happened.

Right, right.

But they didn't know what narcissism was either. And I really believe he was a clinical narcissist. Clinically defined that there's not going to be any way you could challenge this individual for it to go well.

Exactly. Exactly. So what the practices in the optimal outcomes method have to offer in a situation like that is to help you really cut your losses. Right. To cut down on the costs that you are paying or that you might Continue to pay and really look at the situation straight on with no rose colored glasses on and notice what you eventually found out, which was that you know, or what you eventually assumed, and that did seem to bear itself out, which was that you were dealing with someone who, no matter what you would have said or could have said, was not likely to treat you the way you knew you deserved to be respected and the best situation for you would have been to walk away. So, you know, who knows, maybe the way it went was that you had to spend more months than you would have preferred in your life dealing with the angst of having to deal with him and that. But, but maybe you got a good severance and maybe it worked out for the best. Right?

Maybe I became a therapist and I wouldn't be sitting here. I think God for it every day. But when you are in the middle of a dynamic that you don't consciously understand.

Right, right. So your tips.

Yeah.

Tell me what this methodology could help you with. So the fact that it was a gift in the end, notwithstanding, what we can, what I can offer that given that my goal and my job really is to help people look at situations and see how can I stop paying all the costs that I'm currently paying. So there's an exercise that I help people do which is about looking at the costs and the benefits of staying in conflict. So if I do nothing and I stay where I am right now with this boss in this job, in this organization, what are the benefits to me and what are the costs to me? What am I paying for staying here? I would even say staying stuck here because sometimes we stay stuck in these situations thinking about all the benefits and we don't, we don't get present actually to all the costs that we're paying, then it's, we're not only looking at that, we're also comparing that to what I call a quote unquote ideal future. So in my imagined universe, the best situation I could imagine happening here, what would that be? Thinking about that at the time, like thinking, you know, in my best case scenario, what would that be here? You know, I'm one I could imagine you might have imagined would be something like, you know, I have this lovely, amazing conversation with the boss and he finally understands me and he listens to me and I'm able to really break through to him and, you know, things get up.

Our relationship is his success. Right, Right.

So we have that imagined ideal future and we put that down and we say, what would be the benefits to me if that happened. And what costs, if any, might I pay if that happened? And then we compare the ideal future that we just said against the costs and benefits of staying in conflict against what might happen if I walk away. So if this ideal future doesn't work out, and if I'm paying too many costs for staying stuck in conflict, what would happen if I walk away? Well, if I find a new job or I get fired or I quit.

Right.

What cost might I pay if I do that? And what benefits might there be there as well? And we want to look at the situation and compare the costs and benefits of each of those three ways of going. And look, which one of these has the fewest costs associated with it? Which one is the most likely to allow me to engage in pattern breaking behavior? So if I've been in conversation, it doesn't sound like you were in ongoing conversations with one. And that was the end, right? It was one. And you learned pretty quickly that you paid a high cost for doing that. Yes. And sometimes that is, you know, we have to do it and learn. So I would call that in your ideal future. You did it. And then you could list out, all right, I paid some big costs, so that's not an option for me anymore. And staying stuck in conflict, you know, maybe that's not going to be a great option for, for me either because I'm paying so many costs now that he isn't treating me well, or he never was treating me well. And I can't be my authentic self at work. I can't get my work done because he's standing in my way every day I show up and I just have a pit in my stomach and this is not the way I want to live my life. So we've now basically seen the deep cost that you're paying for both the imagined future and staying in conflict with. Well, what would it look like to walk away? So, again, all right, I got a.

Deep question here, Jennifer. Here we go.

Yeah.

I have a feeling I know what you're going to say, but I'm putting myself back there. I think I've evolved after 20 years, so I'm not the person I was. But what I would say to you then in my irate, you know, maligned, you know, victim feeling is why should I have to walk away away? It's not fair.

Yes, absolutely.

Don't you hear that every day, all the time. Right.

I say there are three things that we wish. We all wish when we are stuck in conflict.

Yes.

We wish the situation were different. It's not fair. Why does it have to be this way?

Why should I have to do the work?

Why should I have to change? The second thing we think we wish is why can't they be different? I just wish this guy wasn't such a narcissistic. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right, that's it. I just. The third one is we wish we ourselves were different.

Oh, get there.

Right. You didn't come to.

I forgot that one.

You forgot that one. And a lot of us do. Although there are some people. And we. I talk about the four different habits, conflict habits. And we each are susceptible to one more than to the other three.

What are those?

Well, one of them is blame ourselves. Another one is blame the other. Another is we avoid or we shut down in the face of conflict. We all probably know people who do that. Maybe it's yourself. And then relentlessly collaborate. A little counterintuitive, but we try and we try and we try and we try. We offer option after option and people are not willing to work with us. So we, you know, fall into these conflict habits. We get trapped.

So.

If. So these are. So back to the three wishes. We typically wish the situation were different. And yes, I feel for you. I have empathy. We all do it. And I think the problem is when we're wishing that a situation or another person would change and the reality is that they're not going to. We can wish till the cows come home and it's not gonna make a single iota of difference. It's just not.

Would you agree with this statement? You know, this podcast is all about bravery. My upcoming book is the Most Powerful youl. It's about how do we take back positive power? The problem, I think, with this, in another way of speaking, is it's placing all your power in the hands of this individual. You will remain a victim in your mind.

Exactly right.

Is that it?

That's exactly right. I couldn't say it any better. The only thing I can add to that is to say what I talk about as an optimal outcome is one that not only takes into account your ideal future. So in your imagination, what could you imagine would be the best thing here, which we already talked about in this case, but it also takes into account reality. So I'm holding up my arm as the. This is the Y axis, right? Going up to the sky. And then the X axis is reality. And an optimal outcome is one that's out here that. That maximizes what is the reality of the situation and also maximizes your ideal future state your Imagination, and you need both. If you're only in your imagination, you're going in and having conversations like the one you had with a complete narcissist who's never gonna change, who's never gonna listen to you, or maybe will one day when he goes to, you know, whatever self help seminar he's in, he.

Has a breakdown moment that leads to breakthrough, hopefully.

Exactly. But you know, and you may, who knows, you might have been a part of that in his life. We don't know.

We don't know.

Maybe you were, maybe you weren't. And it wasn't, you know, you needed, you needed something more quickly than him going on that journey for himself was able to provide for you. So. So we don't only want you to be imagining, we want you also to take into account the reality of the situation and to cut down on your costs. Right. So if you had noticed maybe sooner, well, maybe I need to walk away. Maybe I should find another job. That's what eventually ended up happening. So all it is is that maybe you would have saved yourself a little bit of heartache and a lot of heartache.

I want to talk about values for a minute, but I also want to highlight something else. These habits you touch on. It's amazing how our work dovetails, but in completely different ways, and terminology and data and research. I think the habits are also the perpetual stories we tell ourselves in the perpetual way we cope with challenges. So for instance, mine might be blaming others. That might have been where I was always going, why don't I get the recognition I deserve? Why don't I get the validation? And I really do believe energetically, we co create what we're in. We're in the soup. And the soup looks familiar because we had the soup when that soup when we were young. And often we're trying to correct a dysfunctional situation that is really not correctable, but we're used to it. So I think some of these habits go very deep. Does that make sense?

Yes, absolutely. I write about that as well. Yes. That we, we take on these habits because we learn them either from other people modeling them for us when we were kids. Right. So, you know, my primary habit is also blame others because I grew up in an angry household where people are screaming at each other.

Right.

Like, what else am I going to do that? And if you ask my colleagues. Right. So I once took an assessment online and one of my colleagues and it came out that, you know, they didn't call it blame others, which is the assessment that I've created, but you know, based on my own research, but it was called something similar. And I shared my results with my colleague who I was working with and he said, are you kidding me? You, you know, anger, I just don't get it because I've learned. And I mean, I had Grandma Florence, right? But I've also learned from doing the work and helping other people do the work, how to manage my emotions, particularly when I'm in a professional environment. So we can learn these things and we can change it around. But for sure we're influenced by how we were grew, how we grew up in particular. And you know, what else did I want to tell you about these four habits? Oh, is that we do them with the best of intentions. So we don't typically start out intending to blame or attack someone else. We intend to win a fight, or we intend to show someone we're right, or we intend to win the argument. These can, you know, these can be good intentions. But when we do them habitually, they become warped into, you know, constant competition or constantly blaming or criticizing other people. So the key is not to never do them. The key is to kind of notice when they become these habits that we don't know how to do it any other way when we're stuck in return recurring conflict. Also, we don't do these willy nilly all the time. We do them particularly when we're stuck in conflict. So collaborating is a great thing, but when we're stuck and we just keep trying to collaborate and collaborate and collaborate and the other people are not cooperating back with us, it's just not getting us anywhere. We're wasting time, energy, wasting your precious time.

It's so good. And I need to interview you on my Forbes blog because I also want to talk about your counterterrorism experience and, and how it feeds in. So we're going to do that, if you don't mind. But one final thing. Can you tell us how values play in? We haven't touched on that, have we? Tell us that. Then I have to ask you, where can we learn more? Take your assessment, read your book, but tell us about values, please.

Well, there are two different kinds of values that I talk about. One are what I call ideal values. And these are the things that we put up on a plaque in the lobby of our company. These are the things that we're proud to say.

We put the customer first. So generous and compassionate.

Oh, please. You got it. Sounds like you've been in lots of lobbies of clients lately. Yes. So you know These are the things we're proud to say really matter to us, right? Healthy living, spirituality, adventure, customer first. And then there are what I call shadow values. And these are the things that we are, we really care about in life and we are not proud to say that we care about. And so what happens is we push them down, we pretend they don't exist, but the problem is they ooze out anyway and they tend to wreak havoc on our relationships with other people and cause all kinds of conflict inside of our own selves and of course, then with other people.

So what are the top shadow values? Winning. Winning at all costs. I gotta be on top.

Could be competition, could be a shadow value of status or recognition, financial security, even love can be a shadow value. The total. To me, one of the fascinating things about juxtaposing ideal values and shadow values is that one person's ideal value, like love, can be another person's shadow value, meaning one person might be very proud to say, you know, love is something that is really important to me and I care about it. While someone else might have grown up in a situation where love was not allowed to be shown, was not talked about. You're not allowed to say that you love each other. And so it go, it kind of gets pushed down into the shadow and can be very, you know, can cause conflict with other people who understand what you know, what your behavior.

So you might value it, but it was a negative, it was perceived negatively or punished in you. So you don't actually show it in a way that people can feel it and understand it.

Yes. I think a better love is a kind of more tricky example.

It's hard. Yeah.

But a better example or an easier example to understand is something like caring about recognition. Many people want to be recognized for their contributions to a team, let's say. And when we're not recognized, it can feel very hurtful. And yet, particularly in American culture and in many cultures all around the world, it can be very difficult to come right out and admit to ourselves, I care about being recognized for my achievement or for my contributions, or for the fact that I'm part of this group of friends or whatever it is. And so owning. So there's a lot of power in being able to own just for yourself. Again, this does not require a conversation with someone else necessarily. It might eventually lead you there and that we can talk about, you know, what's a pattern breaking path and how do you, how do you get there eventually. But at the, at the core, this is about acknowledging for yourself you know what? I do care about being recognized. And so if that's the case, I have a choice. I could either choose to let that value settle down and kind of let it go, or I could choose to honor it. And I could choose to say to myself, you know what? I care about this. And I'm going to ask myself, what could I do in this situation that would allow me to. To feel recognized? Do I need to ask someone else for the recognition that I am so craving? So we can. We can turn those. We can honor those shadow values for ourselves, and there's also a ton of power in honoring those for other people. So if someone's treating us just in a way that is very difficult for us, and we don't understand why someone's either, you know, being greedy or obnoxious, or we're pointing our finger at them and saying, why are they so narcissistic? Whatever, it can help us to ask ourselves what might. What shadow value might they be harboring that's leading them to act the way that they're acting? And in the book, I have, wow.

I want to. I just want to be transparent and share when you're talking. You know, I realize. And people have pointed it out, Kathy, you need a lot of validation. And it's not something I'm proud of. It's not something that serves me. And I know where it comes from, because I didn't feel I got validation as a child. And, you know, people have said, oh, you're blaming your parents. I'm really not. Nobody gets out of bed and says, I'm gonna blow it. I'm gonna, you know, make my kid go to therapy. It's not blame. It's eyes wide open. I didn't get what I, my little soul needed. But I think part of your work is eyes wide open. Is that really working for me? To continue to feel a wound of not being validated and to really understand yourself and love yourself, But I think to close the wound, close a power gap there, does that make sense?

Yeah. Yes. And to be able to do that for other people, even when they can't do it for themselves, that's the power. That's where you can free yourself from a conflict situation, even when the other person hasn't done the 10 years of therapy that you have or that you wish they had. Right. Is to be able to say, I'm taking my best guess at what might be possibly going on for this person. And even if I'm wrong, the risk of taking that best guess is Worth the reward, even if I'm wrong, because it gives me empathy for them. It helps me calm down, it helps me stop needing something from them that they will never be able to go, or at least not now.

And if you, oh, I don't want to let you go. One more thing. If you sense in someone, oh, my God, this Kathy, she needs a lot of validation. You sense their shadow value. Would one approach be give them the thing that they're desperate for?

Yes. That is how. Well, she just needs me to say.

She did a good job.

Exactly. Exactly. Can you imagine this world if we went around being that for other people? We thought to ourselves, what shadow value could possibly be driving Kathy's behavior? Oh, maybe she needs some kind of recognition or validation. Oh, let me just say, hey, Kathy, great job. And like, look at that smile she has. Like her, the stars in her eyes. She's so happy. And all I had to do was walk over and say, nice work, Kathy.

This is beautiful work, Jennifer. Wow, thank you. I cannot wait to dig in even more. In your book, where do people take your assessment? Get your book, watch your talk. TED Talk. Tell us, tell us where we go.

It's all@optimaloutcomesbook.com. there you go.

That's what we're looking for. I've so loved it. You know, part of the job that I do, the work is that I learn from every single person I speak with. I feel like I just took a master class at Columbia. Thank you for being here. Thank you, Jennifer. It's beautiful work you're doing.

Thank you so much, Kathy. It's great to be with you and.

We'Ll do something on Forbes soon. All right, everybody, I hope this really speaks to you in a deep way. I mean, who is conflict free every minute? I hope you will pour over Jennifer's book and apply these strategies because I know they work. I already feel better. I didn't even know I had a shadow value work. And we're so hard here. I know you will love this and we'd love to hear from you. So wherever you see this and put a rating and a review on Apple podcasts for us, let us know how these strategies are helping you. We'd love to hear it. All right, everybody, have a fantastic, brave week and see you next time. And thank you so much, Jennifer.

Thank you, Kathy.