053. How to Solve Our Toughest Problems with Both/And Thinking with Wendy Smith

Welcome. I am marketing expert and business coach Melissa Kellogg Lueck. And this is the Doing Business Like a Woman podcast, where we are exploring and teaching you how women are reinventing the way business is done and money is made to help you create greater impact and financial freedom one business at a time. Welcome, everybody, to today's episode. I'm really excited to bring to you a very interesting conversation that I can't wait to have. We haven't really chatted much. I turned on the recording early because sometimes I turn on the recording too late. And we've already had some really great conversation before before we turn on the recording, but we're going to catch it all this time. I have a really special guest with us today, Wendy Smith. And I'm going to ask you to introduce yourself and we'll get the full rundown. And then Wendy is an author. She's a co author, I guess would be the correct term of a new book. And we're going to hear all about that. And it's all about either or thinking. And, you know, you guys know I talk about this a lot. I talk about it as all or nothing thinking. But I feel like we get into that a lot. So I can't wait to have this discussion with you. Wendy, welcome. And can you please introduce yourself and tell us all the things?

Melissa, thanks for having me. I'm Wendy Smith. I am a professor at University of Delaware at the Lerner School of Business and Economics. And along with my co author, Marianne, we've been working on this idea of navigating in the both and moving from the either or to the both. And we talk about it, and we can talk more about what this means, the idea of navigating paradox for the past 20, 25 years together. And so this book is a compilation of the research that we and our colleagues have been doing over the past 25 years on this idea of paradox and how to live in the both, and it's called both and embracing creative tensions to solve your toughest problems.

Wow.

I love that.

And as you know, on this show, we talk about women entrepreneurship and women building businesses, and so we experience a lot of paradox in that journey. So I'd love to hear kind of how this book came about. I mean, obviously there's been lots of research you've been working on this, but just tell me how this, this particular work all came together.

Yeah. And I should say, by the way, and probably should have said this as well. So Marianne and I are both involved in women's leadership initiatives. She is A dean. She's the dean of the University of Cincinnati Lindner School of Business and has been a female leader and worked with women's leadership initiatives for quite some time. And I co founded and lead the Women's Leadership Initiative at the University of Delaware. So we think a lot about how these issues come up in the context of gender and in the context of leadership. So I look forward to diving into that as well in this conversation.

Yeah. So tell me how you and Marianne came up with the book and how your partnership has came together and a little bit of that background I'd love to hear.

I like to say that I stalked Marianne as a mentor and it all from there. And I like to say that in part because what started as a mentoring relationship flourished into a really brilliant colleague relationship. And I. So we were both, we are both academics. I was doing my PhD and I was studying innovation and how top management teams at IBM were navigating this ongoing tension between, and this tug of war that they were feeling between the managing for their existing product, what they do for today, operational excellence, all of the things that we need for short term success while simultaneously innovating, engaging, you know, experimenting, looking out to the future and long term success. And people have talked about that tension, that challenge, as trying to drive the car down the highway while changing the engine.

Right.

So, and it's a tension that we feel in our organizational lives as leaders. It's also something, entrepreneurs feel this all the time. We feel it in our personal lives. So I was studying that tension and started to think about it in this context of paradox, meaning that they were feeling this tug of war. They were feeling these ongoing conflicts between their existing products and their innovation, and yet success required them to do both. And to think about how they to move away from this is a trade off of one or the other to they needed to do both. And as I started to think about this idea of paradox, not a lot of people were writing about this in academia. In fact, I had a number of advisors that if not explicitly implicitly suggested that paradox was something that belonged in like a yoga studio or a Zen meditation center or. But not in real academic work, which is not the case. And so the two. So she had written, Marianne had written an amazing paper on paradox and really pulling this idea through from the last 2500 years, which we can sort of think through as well, looking at philosophy and psychology and sociology and quantum physics and psychoanalysis and bringing it all together. The paper won our best, won the best paper award in our top journal in the field, the academia, management review. I called her up, I said, I need to know everything you know about this. Can we please chat? And, you know, the rest is history. And I guess, you know, I often talk to female leaders about, you know, I think an underlying theme is take the risk, take the chance, reach out. You never know what will happen.

Yeah, yeah. And I love how you glaze over the rest is history part. I mean, because I'm sure there's a lot that goes into that of coming together with another, you know, author and working together on this project and meshing your strengths together and, you know, the, the both and thinking that comes from that. Right, that partnership.

Yes, I love that. And Melissa, I just want to say you're the first person to point that out and ask that question because so much of both ending has been. Or the work that we do together is such a reflection of both ending. We, you know, I think that what worked really well. So here, here's the, here's the key to both. And what are the way. What, what's the goals that you want to accomplish in the long term? What are the different things that different parties bring to those goals that are distinct and unique? And then how can you bring those together so that they lead to something bigger and better rather than they're always in conflict? And, and in our own work, it is indeed true. Our goals were that we both saw value in this notion of paradox. And we thought, and it sounds very grandiose, but we still think this. We think it's an idea that can change the world and really address some of our biggest world problems if people stop thinking about our issues. Challenges as forced trade offs, forced dichotomy, false dichotomies, you know, win, lose, but really can think in the more holistic win, win. So we, we both felt. We both feel. Felt passionate about the idea. We shared that and we very quickly built a trust with one another by understanding and valuing what we each brought to the table. So I'll just give you a quick example. I am a great crappy first writer. She is a great editor. We learned this early on and really, you know, leaned into that. So I often write the crappy first draft and then I know that and, and then she improves it. And I know that the first draft can be crappy. It gives me license to, to write quickly. Right. And, and I know it can be crappy because I know she's going to improve it. And she knows that she doesn't have to sit down and sort of muddle through that first draft and therefore, you know, has much more time and effort to then make it even better. And, and, and that's how we've worked over the years. And, and we go back and forth for sure. It's not just so static about that, but we also know how to value each other's talents in our, in our collaboration.

I love that because it's like you're going through that both and journey like you're living what you're writing through the process of writing the book.

I have to. I'll just say one of the other both ends in this book writing process. So part of it is our working together and knowing and by the way, very we. Yeah. So there's so much in how the both of us approach the world and that we've learned to learn from each other so deeply. The other both and is that we're both academics. And so much of the writing that we have done that has led up to this book has been very academic research published in academic journals. And our goal in this book was to try and bring these ideas to a very different audience. So one of the things we often hear from people is, gosh, it's so accessible given that, you know, people expect it to be dense and academic. But that was a real choice in writing the book, which was, how do we think about, you know, we've been doing research for 20 years on this topic. We've been writing for 20 years on this topic. How do we think about creating a book that truly conveys the depths of that research while making it accessible to a broader audience so that it's. They don't get muddled in the language and jargon and research and statistics that really makes it accessible. And that was something that we had to go back and forth on, on an ongoing basis to come up with a better opportunity option outcome that could draw on the depths of the research and be accessible? And I mean, we're very proud of where we landed. And I hope we really find it a compliment when people say, gosh, this is really accessible because that was our goal. Even while knowing that there's a depths and depth and richness behind that.

Yeah, that was a big both and.

And that was a big both and yeah, for sure.

So on that theme, let's kind of talk about how the work that you've done, the research that you've done, applies to women entrepreneurs. And I think both. And thinking is very. Is on in one sense, very inherent to women, because I feel like, I don't know, at least with my clients, I can talk about myself and my clients. We are able to hold so many things. Like we have so much of a holistic type of view of what's happening in our business, in our lives, but. So we can hold that. But at the same time, I see a lot of all or nothing thinking, like either either I'm, you know, super successful and I'm doing great, or everything is falling apart, you know. And so, yeah, I'd love to hear like your perspectives on the work that you've done and how that might apply to us as women entrepreneurs with maybe one or a small team of people in our business.

Yeah, there's so much to say here. So let me take just a step back and say, what do we mean by both and thinking and, and then we can sort of, we can think about how it applies to women. And I can tell you a little bit about the research on that as well by both end. Well, here's what we mean, which is that we face tensions, dilemmas, trade offs, tug of wars all the time. And they range from what should I have for breakfast, should I have the, you know, delicious looking croissant or the, you know, good for me green smoothie. And, but they, and they range into how do I show up as a leader, how do I show up as a parent, how do I show up as a partner, how do I navigate the conflicts in my life with other people that have different perspectives? You know, how do I deal with my organization and my strategic. They just range and they go all the way up. I was saying earlier, we think this is issues that deal with some of the grand challenges that we face in our lives. So we're always facing these tug of wars. And what we would argue or what we find is that the either or win lose is something that is helpful in the short term, a very natural response because it makes a conclusive decision and it makes us feel better because we want that conclusive decision. But what we argue is that that kind of approach is limited at best and detrimental at worst. And we can talk through that. But there's these patterns in which our either or trade offs can lead us into vicious cycles. They get us stuck doing the same thing over and over again. We get stuck and committed to a point of view. They keep us in a polarizing either or fight. We talk about that as trench warfare. So, so there's real reason why these either ors are limited. You know, they're also limited because they get us stuck between two options. And as one of my advisors Once said, if you're given an option between A or B, the right answer is C. Why accept the force trade off? Do I take this career move or that career move or do you know, there might be different options in those that can lead to something more creative? And so that's where we would say both and offers us an alternative and underlying both and. And here's where it gets. It could get a little abstract, but underlying both and is this idea that our competing demands, our opposites, our dualities, our tensions are not just in opposition, they're interdependent. That underlying both and is these paradoxes that we live in. And if we can see them as paradoxes, we can get to a better both. And, and so by paradox we mean that we have these opposing ideas. You know, what do I need for myself versus what do I need for others and do for others? How do I navigate my family and personal and you know, versus how do I navigate my career? It feels like these things are in tension with one another being collaborative or competitive, being generous and kind, or being selfish and addressing my own or, you know, to women's leadership. There's often this tension between as a woman leader, do I show up as compassionate, which might be more natural to who I am, or do I show up as more competence? Because we tend to frame compassion and competence, compassion and competence as this opposing trade off. Right.

Interesting.

If we instead notice that these aren't just opposing, but they're also interdependent. They inform and define one another. So the more that I take, you know, this is also a particular issue of women, between self and other. We want to take care of the other, but unless we take care of ourself, we don't have the resources and energy to take care of the other. And you know, if we only take care of ourselves, then we feel like we actually don't have the, the, the energy or the inspiration because we want to help the other and they reinforce one another. So if we can see that paradox underlying, we can get to better both ending move from either or. Let me just pause there because I know that's a lot.

Yeah, it is a lot. But I think it's interesting because to think about it's holding both. So we'll just bring it into. I can use an example from my own journey in my business right now. So I am thinking about and you know, as we're coming, we're in the fourth quarter, we're all thinking about what, what are we planning for, for next year, what's happening in the next three to five years. So kind of that longer range planning and holding that in this hand. But then in the other hand it's like, but I got a lot of stuff to do today. I got, you know, I got to bring money in now so I can pay my bills and my team, you know, and it is really, I find it hard mentally to I guess organize that or to balance that and say, okay, how am I, how is this, you know, writing this email supporting my 5 year vision? And I mean, that's kind of a dramatic example. But so maybe talk about that because I think that I see that a lot in myself and with my clients, that it is, you know, a lot of times as entrepreneurs we have a hard time thinking three to five years ahead because we're like, I don't even know if I'm going to survive. Right, right.

And so, so this tension between short term, long term, today and tomorrow, this temporal tension, we talk about that as a learning paradox in part because it's about growth, it's about change, it's about shifting. Right. So we have, we talk about different types of paradoxes that we experience all across our lives. So this is a big one and it's one that we feel on the, at the individual level. It's the same underlying structure of tension that the IBM teams that I was studying felt. Right. So indeed the first. So, so there it is. That is exactly the kind of challenge that we're talking about. What we would say is that the, the first question to ask in those moments is to notice that tug of war, notice that it's uncomfortable, notice that it's hard. We're not saying this is easy. Yeah, the first piece. And so the first approach to shifting to both and we would say is start by changing the question. So the first thing that we do is to notice how often we are framing these kinds of tensions in this either or win, lose, you versus me, right versus wrong, and just change the question into how can I accommodate what I need to do for today and start planning for three to five years? How do I do both? How can I accommodate and engage both? And that shift of question is the entree into both. And thinking it's the, it's the starting point, it's not the ending point. But what it does is that it opens up all kinds of new possibilities by just asking a new question. We have our colleague Ella Marone Spector at INSEAD in France and her team did some research on creativity where they just shifted. They brought in teams into a Lab to engage in a creative task.

And.

And they either frame the task as, look, you've got to either be really novel or really useful. They're really in conflict with each other and told them, you know, pick one and focus. Or they said to the teams, you've got to be novel and useful. How can you come up with something that's both? And just shifting the question changed the way that people thought about the task and led to more creativity. So that's the first thought.

Yeah. So it's having that awareness that, oh, here, here I am again, like that all or nothing. And I feel like the brain is. Maybe it's when we're feeling that a little bit of stress or what is kind of that stress response coming, that maybe that prime, more primal brain, it kind of throws us into that all or not or either or type thinking. And so we have to reconnect with that creative part and change the question.

Yes. And sometimes just cognitively changing the question will tap into that creativity. Just notice, you know, it's a bit of a professional hazard. Marianne and I both will talk about this with each other, that when we hear somebody offering up an OR question, the first thing we'll say is, what about. And. And so she's. She's shared her book with all of the administrators at the school. One of the issues that large organizations like universities are having is an issue around diversity. And that issue is often framed as this false dichotomy between either excellence or access. She was at a meeting the other day, all the administrators read the book. They were talking about excellence versus access. And somebody said, oh, wait, this doesn't have to be an either or what's the both? And. And she said that just completely shifted the nature of the conversation about what was possible because they started to creatively think about how they create access to enable excellence. Not in, not at the expense of excellence. Right. So. So just, you know, I'll just say one more thing. I have twins. They're 16. They have been raised on mother's milk of both. And they've had to hear a lot of, you know, me or you well, how do we do both? And I'll say there's a lot of eye rolling around that, but it just shifts up the possibility landscape. Yeah. Yeah, I love that.

So what are some really practical advice, some really practical advice that you would have for women that are building their own businesses and navigating the paradoxes of life and business and financial and, you know, all the things that come with having your own business like, what are some of your thoughts around that?

Yeah, right. And I love just naming some of these because sometimes just naming these paradoxes is useful. Right. This work versus life paradox. And for entrepreneurs, that's even more intensified because the boundaries can be so blurred. There is the tension between short term and long term. There's a tension between mission and markets, or the tension of making money, profits, doing well, doing good while at this, you know, doing well. At the same time doing good and thinking about the mission and the impact that. The social impact and environmental impact. And that's the tension that we see all over the place. Women and, you know, females. We, we. Marianne and I just hosted a webinar for our women's centers together with a group of four amazing female leaders where we talked about the paradoxes of women's leadership. Right. And right at the heart of that is this compassion, competence. Why is it women feel like they have to compromise their compassion and their strategy in order to, you know, seem competent, that as soon as they're more compassionate, which is a great female leadership strategy, they're seen as being too soft and therefore not assertive and not effective. How can we overcome competence and compassion and see the value of those two together? Those are some of the tensions that we see across the board in women. Women leaders, female entrepreneurs.

Yeah, I love that you're naming that because I think normalizing what the either or thinking sounds like in our heads, you know, that really helps to bring that awareness. Right. Yeah.

And reminds us that we're not alone. I think that's one too, that, you know, we, We. We would argue. And that paradox is the root of our. Is the foundation of our world. That we, we live in a world of paradox is just about how to navigate, get it better. And if that's the case, we all swim in these paradoxes. How can we support each other to do better in them?

So what would be some. So we talked a little bit about some of the steps as far as shifting to both and thinking. So first is having that awareness of the tension. So do you have any other. More any other suggestions around that? Like noticing that tension, what that might look like, how that shows up in our business and in our mindset.

Yeah. So there's two things that I'll offer up. And so the first is a couple of steps of what happens once you change the question and once you notice. And the second. And I'll just put this out there and we can play with this. At the core of the book, what we do is we argue or we suggest the tools that work together to navigating paradox. And we talk about it as a paradox system, meaning that these tools are not independent of each other, they're integrated. And those tools have to do with both our mindsets, our assumptions, the head, how we think about these. So changing the questions, seeing the underlying paradoxes, noticing they also have to do with the heart, our emotions. As we were saying earlier, these things are uncomfortable, they create this discomfort. And so we talk about finding comfort in the discomfort. So we've got the head and the heart. They also have to do with the structures and the context around us. So how do we create the scaffolding and boundaries that allow us to enable both and thinking and we can talk more about that. And also how do we create the ongoing dynamic experience? So both and thinking requires us not just to make a decision, one decision and we're done. It's about ongoing decision making over time, experimenting, changing, shifting, which is an important shift because sometimes we're looking for the perfect win win. And it's not about always the perfect win win. We call that win win, the creative integration or the mule. The perfect hybrid between the donkey and the horse. Stronger than a horse, you know, smarter than donkey hybrid. But that happens rarely. What often happens is that we're making decisions where we're just making these micro shifts between our alternative demand. So this minute I'm working on something that has to get out the door urgently by the end of the day. But then I'm shifting to be able to shift to some long term strategic thinking. And I'm able to make that shift between the two without overemphasizing one or the other. And we call that tightrope walking, tightrope walker.

Appropriate.

Right. But is never balanced. They're always balancing in these micro shifts, but these micro shifts are not these macro pieces where you're going to fall over on either side. So, so four different buckets. We spent a long time thinking about how to label them abcd A assumptions or mindsets. B boundaries, the structures that we experience, C comfort, the emotions and D dynamics, the experimentation and change over time. So, you know, and we can delve into any of those. But that's sort of the heart of the book, which is how do we bring together the research of this amazing community of scholars to look at what are these assumptions, what are the boundaries, what's the comfort, what's the dynamics over time?

Yeah, and I love the, the point about its little shifts because, and I hear this so often, it's like we think we're going to make one big decision and then everything is just going to be sailing along or we're looking for the one right thing to do in our business or for our marketing or whatever. And once we find the one right thing, then everything is going to just go from there.

And the problem with that thinking is that it puts a lot of pressure on the right decision. I have One of my PhD advisors, Ellen Langer, would often say it's not about making the right decision, it's about making the decision right. And what I think she means by that is that it's not, you know, two roads diverged in a yellow woods like Robert Frost said, and that's made all the difference. It's that we're always making decisions and making these shifts. So, you know, if we think about, well, what do you, how do we think about our three or five year strategy? Okay, so first of all, we need to spend some time on the five year strategy. And then second of all, even as we're going down the five year strategy, we're tweaking along the way, we're shifting, we're accommodating new information and new ideas and that takes away some of the stuckness that we feel that if we take, you know, if we pick the wrong path or road the wrong road, we're going to be doomed along the way. No, we're constantly, as long as we are open to these competing demands, open to engaging with them, open to experimenting and shifting along the way. We're growing, changing, learning and developing.

Yeah. And that is so much the beauty, I think, of the entrepreneurial journey. Once we can really enjoy that, it makes it so much more fun and enjoy the journey rather than just thinking about, oh, when I X, when I make a million dollars or when I do whatever, when I achieve, then I'll be done, then I'm there. But what about all the time in between? You know, there's a lot of joy and enjoyment to be had there. And I don't even, you know, I don't even think we ever really arrive. It's just like you said, it's just a series of little decisions, little shifts and that get us to where we're meant to go. Really?

Yeah. And in, in the world of both and thinking, the reason that this becomes important is because I think a lot of people really do expect that there is, you know, this ideal both and win, win for every tension, tug of war that we feel. That's not the case. In fact, that's what I found in my first study at IBM, which was that I was expecting that if they were going to be in this paradox mindset, as we call it, and if they were going to think paradoxically and live in the both, and they would find these ideal moments where their existing product and their innovations would come together in these perfect synergies. And that happens sometimes, but more often what they were doing was that they were sort of shifting their time and attention and resources and approaches to accommodate both these dual demands in these sort of small micro shifts in service of over time, accommodating both. Right. And I think this makes most sense to us in the, in the world of work life tensions, right, that, that, you know, we, we're never really fully balanced, we're constantly balancing. And that balancing means some nights I'm home for dinner, some nights I'm late at, I'm staying late at work and not home with my family for dinner some nights. And, and, and yet if we go too far to one end where we're just so enmeshed in work that we've lost connection with our family, we burn out. And if we go too far to the other end where we're so enmeshed in family that we've lost, you know, connection to our work, then we, we've, you know, I don't know what, the burns out there too. We, we flailed, we, you know, flamed out in our work. And so it's not about over emphasizing either. It's about accommodating both in these micro shifts and allowing them to inform each other that the energy that I get from being at home with my kids over dinner is going to inform my energy for my work the next day and I can share with them my work. It informs my family discussion. So, so these micro shifts allow us to have these things, create energy for each other, inform each other better, each other rather than being burnt out in the extremes of either side.

Yeah. And as I'm listening to you, I'm thinking about how just being open, like you said, to both and thinking we create the confirmation bias, right. Where then we're able to see the both. And whereas if we have the either or, then we're all our confirmation bias is always looking for the winner or the loser or the right or the wrong. That's right.

And in fact, if we have the either or and we pick a side, what we tend to do is, and there's tons of research around this, we surround ourselves by people that legitimate the side that we've picked so that we reinforce and claim that that's the right thing. And we miss out on this whole totally other opposite approach. And by the way, this happens not only in our own personal decisions, it happens as well in our interpersonal interactions with other people. I pick a side, someone else picks an alternative side. We get into this fight between the two, which one of us is right rather than I pick aside and have a point of view about some things, somebody else has another point of view. Can I pause, stop, listen, have the humility and the vulnerability to say, you know, I'm going to listen. I don't have to agree with you necessarily, but there's value in the what you have to say. And probably by coming together between the two of us, we can come to a better approach. We see this all the time in teams with, you know, the R and D people versus the finance people trying to decide how to move forward or you know, the sort of long term thinking people and the short term thinking people. We need both of them, the big picture people and the small detail people. We need, you know, the introverts and the extroverts. We need both of them. How do we move beyond thinking that we're in this conflict between them, but we can really value and appreciate the alternative approach so that they can come together in a better unity or better harmony? Yeah, I love that.

So good. So I know my wheels are turning, so. Oh, I know. What I wanted to ask you about is the gender differences. I'm so interested to hear about what the research tells us about the differences in both hand thinking between men and women.

I'm so glad you asked that. It turns out we haven't found them yet. And so we do have this hypothesis. I'll tell you what we have found. So we do have this hypothesis that indeed, you know, women should be better at this kind of both and thinking we have yet to find it. What we find is that women indeed are more collaborative in teams. And this is some work by Anita Williams Woolley at Carnegie Mellon and her colleagues where they find that women are in teams, able to sort of see the bigger holistic picture and be more collaborative across the teams. But in our own research we worked with a team again, our colleague Ella Marone Spector at insead and our colleague Josh Keller who's in Australia, University of New South Wales, and Amy Ingram who's at Clemson. We developed what we call the Paradox Mindset Inventory. So can we, can we assess or we have been able to assess through this inventory that's available on our website and available free online People can take it how? The extent to which people are engaging with paradox. Do they experience and see tensions, or do they hide them under the rug? And if they do, when they see tensions, do they tend to sort of preferentially privilege either or thinking, or do they get to both and thinking? And we have yet to find that women and men differ. And we've done this with thousands of people across the globe. We translated this into Chinese. We've translated it into Hebrew. We have yet to see a gender difference on those school scores. Now, that research is not totally done yet. We're still exploring because we do have this hypothesis from our lay experience that women in this more collaborative stage are more willing to hear the other side. Right. There was certainly these stories that we've written about in Congress when in the midterm election several years ago, there was this tremendous influx of female House of Representatives in the senators and House of Representatives in Congress that really pointed to the possibility and potential of collaborative thinking across the aisle. I mean, that all seems so antiquated in the last couple of years with our political polarization, but that it was women who were reaching across the aisle more so than men to be able to listen, hear, and develop that collaborative possibility, that cooperative possibility. So we certainly have hypotheses, but we have yet to find that fully fleshed out in the research that we've done. I'll have to come back to you because there's ongoing research around this. So.

Yeah. And I. It just makes me curious, like, I wonder what you think it is in the research that isn't showing what you're feeling anecdotally.

Yeah, I'm not sure yet. I think that, you know, it may be that, in fact. And so one hypothesis is that men and women are both very good at both and thinking, they just do it in different ways or it expresses itself in different ways. And so the ways that we're capturing, they're both able to experience and see the tensions and adopt both and thinking. But the way that they engage with that might be different with one another. And so we're not capturing those differences in that collaborative style that our colleagues are capturing.

I don't know. That's interesting.

Yeah.

I'll have to keep. Keep us posted. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I know we've covered a lot of. A lot of topics here, so I want to just kind of bring it all back. And I don't know if we can tie a bow on it, because there's a lot here. But we all have to go out and get the book and read that because it sounds like there's a lot of really practical advice in there as well. But really what I, I think is the most useful for those of us that are just venturing into this topic is just to having the awareness is practicing that awareness. First of all, right. That when we're feeling stuck or when we're feeling. I don't know, it's like, I don't know if hopeless is kind of dramatic way of saying it, but when we're feeling stuck, I guess is like, am I. Am I getting stuck with this, this all or nothing or this either or thinking. And if so, how can I shift that? Right. How can I notice that tension and then ask a different question of myself or of the situation and, and then allow that creativity or invite that creativity in of adding the. And. And the. Both.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'll just add one other piece here when we do. So we've done workshops on this where we've invited people to think about their tensions. And one of the things that we find is that it is so much easier to think about a. Both and for somebody else's dilemmas, intentions.

Right.

For our own. And we've learned over time. So what we typically will do in a workshop is that we would invite people to think about their own tensions and they'll come up with everything from, from. I have these two different bosses and I'm trying to navigate these competing work demands that, you know, or work life tensions or trying to navigate really difficult co workers where you want to be both collaborative but you're feeling that, you know, sense of like real competition with them. Or I was just, in fact having a conversation with somebody about this. This tension that we feel about teamwork, right, is we want to be individually great contributors. And yet being a great contributor also means sort of subsuing, subsuming your own individuality for the collectivity of the team. And so you have this paradox between the individual and the team. Best teams bring out the best in individuals, but they also, you know, bring those individuals together into a collective and a team. So how do you do? Right. Or, you know, I'll give you another one. One of the. The person who wrote our forward for the book was an advisor of mine, Amy Edmondson, and she talks about learning. Well, learning has this inherent paradox in it between what you're trying to learn in service of performing well. And in order to learn, you actually need to fail. Make mistakes, try take things, try take risks, try new things, make mistakes. That's the only way you're going to get to perform well, that's the only way you're going to get to learn and therefore to perform well. So you're in this tension between performing in the moment and learning in the moment, both of which you need in order to grow and, and succeed. Or Brene Brown's work on vulnerability and courage, that the most courageous people are the ones that are able to show their vulnerabilities. That's what leads to strength rather than hide their vulnerabilities.

Right.

So, so all of these tensions, we ask people to name and identify their tensions and then we invite them to think about both and thinking in a totally different case, they can see the value of it. They can feel the value of it. And then we ask them to go right back to their own tensions and they get so stuck they can't see they're both. And, and we've learned in these workshops to ask them to turn to somebody next to them and share their dilemmas and offer a both and to the other person and here the other person share both and for them. And I say that in part because it is emotional when we get stuck in our own, you know, very committed ways of thinking about things. And we often do need other trusted advisors, accountability partners to pull us out of that and remind us that, you know, we don't have to be stuck. This is not an either or.

Yeah.

It's not right or wrong. You don't have to be right here. You have to, you know, it's not about being right. It's about learning and growing and developing and how could you think more broadly?

Yeah, I love that. And just sometimes the act of talking it out or just expressing it verbally with another person is, helps you untangle it. Do you know what I mean? Like I'm a coach, so I, I, that's what I do with my clients all day long. And I have a coach. So I find that when I go to my coach it's like once I just verbalize it or write it out, you know, to request advice, it's like, oh, the answer is right there.

Yeah, well, and this is why coaching is so powerful is because we, some, we so easily get in the way of ourselves. I run a women's leadership initiative. In our women's leadership initiative we run two executive programs, one online and one in person for mid career women. And our programs are facilitated by amazing coaches whose roles have been to help women get out of their own way and see possibilities. And it's been an amazing response Actually from the coaching community of how this tool can be useful with clients, clients to help clients, you know, change their own questions and invite them to rethink their possibilities.

Yeah, which is definitely why I need to read the book and follow the steps, use them with my own clients. Because, yeah, I think it is something that really plagues us as entrepreneurs. And I don't know, maybe I shouldn't say plague, but it's definitely something that we have to work within. We're always on that tightrope balancing act because we wear so many hats in our businesses and in our lives. So.

And by the way, I just want to say the reason we love the metaphor of the tightrope is because you are, it is a little anxiety provoking to live in that balancing. There's a lot of. You have to let go. We talk about the importance of letting go, of control and instead living with coping because you're constantly, you know, making decisions and living with some uncertainty and being open and in the long term that's really energizing. But in the immediate experience, it can feel really destabilizing. And you know, there too is where coaching comes in. It's again reminding us that we're not alone and that we're doing this together. And, and that living in that ongoing balancing, whether it's work in life or whether it's, you know, trying to be compassionate and competent and make decisions around that, it's. It's hard.

It is, it is. And I love that, the balancing, because, you know, we talk, you talked about anxiety. But the other side of the anxiety coin is excitement. Right. It's like even that is a both and we can have that anxiety. But also it's the excitement, the thrill, you know, that we get from staying on that balancing and making progress step by step. Yeah. Oh, this has been such a great conversation, Wendy. I really appreciate your time and your wisdom and definitely going to be following your work because I think it's so important.

So thank you and thank you for all the work that you're doing, that work that you're doing with women leaders and beyond.

Yeah. And so please share with us how we can keep up with you and follow you and read all the, read all your work.

The Best place is both and thinking dot net. Okay. We put up both access to the book and access and more information about us. But also we have put up a whole bunch of the academic research, if anybody's interested, as well as the more popular press and articles that we've written where we've applied applied these ideas to everything from political decisions about Roe and the polarization and how we can get beyond that, to how we live in a hybrid work environment and navigate the at home at work space. And so those are all up on our website. So it's both andthinking.net perfect.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you for being here.

Thank you for having me.

If you like this podcast, then you have got to sign up for my free on demand video training Grow youw Sales Doing what yout Love where I teach you in depth. My simple process that you can implement right away to harness your mindset and your skills to grow your sales to whatever level you want. So go grab that now. The link is in the show notes and I'll see you next time. Sa.