Navigating Change: A Roadmap for Resilient Leadership | Deborah Gilboa | 605

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Dr. G, which is Dr. Deborah Galboa, and she has an interesting background. She is a physician, a business consultant, a resilient expert for the Today Show and for The Doctors, the show. And her focus is the challenges, financial, organizational, or due to unforeseen circumstances. There's a science to becoming more resilient. So she is in the, not just a doctor, but this, this domain expertise in resilience, which we could all use a little bit more of, I think. So welcome aboard, Dr. G. Thanks so much, Peter.

I'm happy to be here.

So let me ask you one of my favorite questions, 'cause my show, I get to do that, whatever. And we talked about this a week or two ago when you and I talked. How did you get here? Because it's, it's obvious how you became a physician, but not so obvious how the thought leader part of your world evolved. Maybe talk about that for a moment.

I can. I'll tell you, it's not so obvious how I became a physician either, because I was a drama major in college.

Oh, so you're actually acting like a doctor.

I do both. I am both a doctor and I play one on TV.

Exactly. In real life. So see, it all came together. Wait, so give me that back.

So that backstory is I got my undergrad from Carnegie Mellon University from the Department of Drama, a Bachelor of Fine Arts. And I worked in theater and television for 6 years. And I was— got an amazing job at Second City in Chicago, which some of your listeners will know as the premier improv theater company in the country. And it was amazing. But after a couple years, I thought, I wanna do something different. And it was really one of the best jobs I could get in my field. So I had been a volunteer EMT, so I thought about being a paramedic. I called a couple of friends who were paramedics and they said, you would be a terrible paramedic, which was really painful.

Why?

For one, you like to change the system. Like you're bad at just following protocols. You're always looking for a better way to do something. Just go be a doctor. And I said, too old. I was 26, so obviously ancient.

Ancient. Ancient, obviously. Right.

And so I called Northwestern's med school and I said, hey, I'm— because this is pre-internet— I said, I'm thinking about applying. What's required? And the woman said, a bachelor's. And I said, in what? Imagining that she would say biology or science. And she said, college. Oh, I totally have one of those. So I—

and when was the last time the med school had seen a BFA? Probably not a lot of them. Right.

I mean, actually, in my class at Pitt Med, which is where I ended up, I got into a bunch of schools. Every interview I did, they said to me, hey, we have a show, would you do it? And I was like, if you let me in for school, of course I will. So it turned out my theater background was useful in that way. But I— and there was one other guy who was a concert pianist, one who was a chef. So at that time, in the late '90s, it was pretty cool. For people to take a more non-traditional route to medicine. So I get to medicine, right? I finish medical school when I'm 29, almost 30, and I do my residency in family medicine residency. And so I become a family doc, and I'm a family doc for about 5 years, full attending, house calls, rounding, rounding at the hospital, seeing patients. When I start to notice that some of my patients, they handle— and I see kids and adults they handle illness or injury and they get through it and they get to the life they want. They start thriving again. And some people don't. They really get set back. Even if they recover physically, it's a setback that is very hard for them to get through. And I started to wonder, because it didn't seem to me like it was just the medicine I would prescribe or the therapies I would recommend, I started to wonder what is it that some people have and some people don't.

But this is, this is clearly a sort of human curiosity, not necessarily a medical, uh, observation that you're making.

And my obligation as a family doctor, my job is really twofold. It's to prevent the illness and injury I can and help people get back to the life they want from the illness and injury they get.

Got it. And so now the question that— that's— yeah, so the piece that's keeping you up at night is how come some people bounce back and how come some people don't, right? So you're seeing sort of to people.

I can't find a different similar scenario.

Yeah, right.

Or their disease process. What is it? And the medical literature calls this patient resilience.

Okay.

I was like, okay, so maybe that's a cop-out and maybe it isn't. But if it isn't, what is that? What is patient resilience? And can I write a prescription for that? How do I get it?

Give somebody more of that, right? Yeah.

So I got really interested in this. I was lucky enough to partner with a postdoc and fellow's lab at Carnegie Mellon University, which is near where I live, their Tepper School of Business. Because when I started to get interested in this, most of the research on resilience was done in adults with severe mental illness or post-traumatic stress disorder. And that's a minority of my patients, but it's certainly not a majority of my patients. So I wanted to know—

that's— those are extreme outliers. So it sounds like you're dealing with more of a general more in the middle of the bell curve kind of stuff.

Some of my folks have those extremes, but I feel like we have some guidelines for helping people in those situations. And what I wanted to know is, for people who are working a job or two or three, taking care of their parents, taking care of their kids, involved in their community, people who are really living very mainstream lives from a medical standpoint, what about those folks? What's resilience in them? I want to know really three things. What is resilience? Is it just something you're born with? Right? Like, it's— some people get more, some people don't. Is it a trait? And if it isn't a trait, can you build it on purpose? Not just by going through hard things, but on purpose.

So now, sort of, let's segue to— okay, so now this becomes a thing, and it becomes an important thing, such to the point that you're decreasing the amount of time you're spending practicing medicine and increasing the time that you are now a world-renowned thought leader in resilience. Because most people practicing medicine aren't saying, I'm looking for a side hustle or something else to do. It's, it's, it's kind of all-encompassing from the docs that, that are friends of mine that I know. So, but, but you've got this other thing that's drawing you.

It's drawing me and it's a way of helping. It's a way of helping people wholesale instead of retail, meaning in groups as opposed to one-on-one.

More scale, right?

Yeah.

Right. Right. Okay. So how did that happen? How does that— so you, you, what's the, what are the things that you did? So now I got what you had to do to go through medical school. You practice the practice. That's a fairly traditional route, even though the undergrad's a little bit different. But now as a, you know, mid-30s or whatever practicing MD, you say, hey, I'm going to go do this. How did that happen?

That happened in a couple of ways. One is I moved to a brand new health center to serve underserved folks.. And my boss had said, we don't have a lot of patients yet. Would you go out and speak to groups to let them know we're here? And I said, sure.

So you were basically on the, on the business development side.

Go, go, Jim. Yeah. So I was helping a little bit on the business de— oh, the marketing side, you know, in the, yeah, yeah. This young energetic doctor out to tell the community we exist. Yep. So we called any number of nonprofit organizations, churches and community centers and said, hey, there's a doctor who will come and talk.. And I would get there and they'd say, and I'd say, what would you like me to talk about? I could talk about high blood pressure. I could talk about why smoking is bad for you. But I said, Brooklyn, I was, I was very visibly pregnant. And so these people said, hey, could you talk about parenting? Now we all know that you don't need any parenting lessons to get pregnant, but it was my third kid. And in the office I was doing a lot. I work with children and their parents a lot. Sure.

Sure.

So I started for about a year, I was speaking about parenting strategies, how to get your kid to go to bed. You know, a lot of what people ask me in the office. About their children is actually parenting and not medicine. You know, very few patients say, is my child on the correct controller medication for their asthma? They say, how do I get my kid to take their inhaler?

Right?

Which is not so much a medical question as a parenting question. You know, not, okay, should my child's ADD be treated differently? But how do I get my kid to go to bed? Because they need sleep.

Yeah.

So I started to recognize that a lot of what I was getting asked about parenting was really, how do I help my kid grow up to be more resilient? How can I help them handle difficulty better? And I was like, oh, that's—

but they weren't using those— but I was going to say, they, they're not using those words directly, not use that word.

But I think because I was also on this path in my own brain at work, I saw the crossover.

I said, I don't know if I've ever heard a parent say my kid has a resilience problem. I'll say, oh my God, little Billy doesn't go to sleep, or he doesn't do that, whatever, whatever.

Or he melts down at the easiest, the slightest thing, or he listen, or— right? So I was like, basically, there are a lot of different philosophies out there about parenting, but every parent I know would like to raise their kid to be more respectful, responsible, and resilient.

Yeah, that would be good.

So I started talking about the— I called those the 3 Rs of parenting, unlike the 3 Rs in school that that only one of them actually starts with R. And I said, okay. And I, I wrote a couple of little books, you know, how to— activities that'll make a kid more, more respectful, more responsible. And then as I was speaking more and with more and more clarity about developing resilience in children, not only to parents but to educators, athletic coaches, and then people started saying to me, how am I supposed to teach my students, my kids, my whomever to be resilient when I'm struggling with it. And this is—

yeah, yeah, 2019.

And so I said to this group at CMU, let's really dive into what does and doesn't work to build resilience in adults. Got it.

So that's the research piece of this. From a business model standpoint, I get what being a doctor is, right? You see patients, you get paid, or takes you forever to get paid from insurance company, whatever, whatever. Right? How do you then decide and what is the business models that you've chosen in this space?

So for me, the easiest route, I thought I should write a book. I hate writing.

Yeah.

And then I, I researched selling a book because I can write whatever and found that, oh, you need a platform. So like 2011, 2012. So I'm, you should write a parenting book. Do you have a book I could read? I guess I could write a book on all these questions I ask. I answer the same questions like 5 times a month.

Right, right.

But to sell a book, you need a platform. So, okay, I can get somebody, you know, undergrad to put together a website for me. I learned about Twitter, but really the best way to do it would be to speak. I love speaking. No problem. I started applying to conferences, offering to different institutions.

I started— so just stay there a minute cuz I think this is a critical point in that yes, you absolutely need a platform. And many people, and I've talked more people out of this than anyone I know, say, oh, and you have to have a book. And I love books. I read a couple of books a week, but it is not a prereq to be a thought leader to have a book. And I would say you have to find the modality that is comfortable for you. So for me, I'm pretty much a crappy writer, occasionally mediocre, and more importantly, I just don't enjoy it, but I do enjoy this. I enjoy having conversations. I'm fairly good on video, you know, short-form video, that kind of thing. So that's where I play and that works for me.

I've talked a lot of people out of writing books too. I think there are 3 good reasons to write a book. One, you're burning inside to do it. You have something you need to see between pages. Two, You want to have something to leave behind to keep people working on the concepts you're giving them as a consultant or speaker. Yeah. And a book is in your mind the best way to do it. 3, you wanna prove credibility because even though it's stupid in the time of self-publishing, and this happened to me, I was known as a parenting and a youth resilience speaker, but I was doing all this research, had all these thoughts and ideas. And this knowledge to impart to adults. So I wrote From Stressed to Resilient so that when I was pitching, I could say author of From Stressed to Resilient. And it did get me gigs that I would've not, and it got me media opportunities not to talk about the book. I don't wanna be on TV talking about a book cuz then they only have you on as an author and then you can only be on every time you write a book. That's not often enough for me because media's—

but it's a nice little, it's, it's part of the intro. There's a graphic on the blurb if you're on the day show, whatever.

Maybe falsely, but people take it as credibility.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So there's, it's not no reason, but if you're writing it to sell a bunch or you're writing to make a lot of money, stop writing.

No, I love it. So you've got the platform, but what, where I was going is that you spent a lot of time in the modalities that you enjoy, that you're comfortable with, and eventually you wrote the book for the other reasons, but you spent a lot of time.

Yeah. 4 of them I cheated. So yes.

Okay.

Arguably also, because, meaning I wrote things that were 3-page chapters and it's meant to go through it as a reference book, not as a read it from start to finish.

Right. But it's still a book. And, and I would argue, argue that you did it somewhat forensically, right? You were reading.

But I, yes, but I, people ask me this question 100 times, right? By cheating, I mean I tricked myself into writing it.

Right. And do it again and do it again. If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps. As well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. So now let's get to, so, so the business model in this resilient expert space, who pays you to do what? Okay.

So I get paid often to speak at conferences because what I help companies do is navigate change more competently.

Mm-hmm.

And every company needs that. They often really misunderstand the neuroscience that's behind resistance to change. Can I give you an example of like something leaders get wrong all the time about this? Yep. So leaders announce a change, a well-considered, well-researched, necessary change for their business. We're moving payroll companies. We are adding a product line. We're gonna expand our market, right? Whatever it is. We're bringing in a new leadership person. And then what happens? They get resistance. Not universal resistance. Yeah. Usually, but some people struggle. And then leaders think either, don't they trust me? Don't they know I asked all those questions?

Oh.

About this organization that I've proved myself. You know, they see it as a betrayal of trust in their leadership, or they think, what's wrong with these people? Why are they resistant? Why are they obstinate? Why are they old-fashioned?

It's so obvious to me. You don't see it. Yeah.

Right. They think it's either a referendum on their own leadership or a referendum on those people's character. And it's neither. It's a reflex. It is a neurochemical reflex in the amygdala to be really suspicious of change and the loss, distrust, and discomfort that people— those are the three safety mechanisms.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

As people express those, it gets in the way of relationships. And so the analogy I give from my office is I say, hey, You ever gone in for a well check? And if you came in to see me, you'd sit up on the table, we'd talk, I'd examine you, I'd take out my reflex hammer, and I would tap your knee. And if your brain and your leg is healthy, what would happen?

Your knee— your leg pops up. Yep.

You kick, right?

Yeah.

If I stood directly in front of you, Peter Winick, and I tap your knee, what happens to me?

What happens to you? You're gonna get kicked, right?

I'm gonna get kicked. But would you— would Would you apologize for— no, you'd think, why did she stand right in front of me and make me kick her? As leaders, we announce change, stand right in front of our people and get kicked all the time.

But let me ask you, so I, I love that. So let, let me ask you this then. It sounds like there are parallels and similarities to what you're talking about when you extrapolate it at the organizational level, right? To change management. So I personally believe that the brand change management has gotten beat up because when you ask people, hey, tell me about the last change initiative you went through at your last organization, people start twitching PTSD. Nobody says it was awesome. We got it done on time, on budget. It was the greatest 6 months of my career. It's twitching, it's stress, it's this, it's like, it's all this awful ugh that comes up. So is resilience not just a, a rebranding of change management?

It's not. So I, well, I guess I don't know for sure because what I have seen from the outside of change managers is they help you through one project, right? They come in. Yeah. And they project manage a change. And that's not what I do. I help, and, and who I usually end up working with the most, I do a little bit with the leadership because they need different vocabulary and different expectations about change. Mm-hmm. So that they can, there's 5 inflection points, but where people usually muck it up is in the announcement, the navigation, and the recovery. They consider well, they decide well. Those two go great. But in announcing it, navigating it, and the redheaded stepchild of change, which is recovering from it, which nobody takes the time to do, that, that rehab afterwards to get back to strength, that's where the opportunities are.

So, right, right.

I do a little bit with the leadership. I do, and that's usually company-wide, so everybody has different vocabulary, but it's really the middle management that struggles. The people who have to implement change but didn't get to choose it, they're the ones who need ongoing support in how to get more competent at this.

So what is it? So this is what they're bringing you in for, is that, are you delivering the value in the forms of consulting, speaking, workshop, licensing your IP? How, how are you getting paid for this knowledge, for this?

Usually my entry point is speaking. They wanna hear what I'm talking about and they wanna see that people like me and are engaged or whatever.

Yeah. For one of, so they bring you to speak, they fall, they fall in love with it and they go, oh my God, we need, we need more of—

they get maybe convinced that this could actually help because what everybody knows about bringing in a speaker is no matter how good they are, 3 days later the impact is gone.

Yeah. It's not 100%.

So you need speakers at a conference and hopefully it makes people think differently, but it's really—

well, there's no stickiness. There's no, yeah.

Right. It dilutes very quickly. So once they see that and they say, we do want more of this, we do want this to be stickier and more long-lasting.

Yes.

Then I either do one of two things. If it's the management that are saying, we're positive it's these people, I do what's called, what I call a change resistance exam. And I put everything in medical terms because most people have had an examination for a problem. I go in, I work with leadership team, it's about 3 months. I can give them a prescription afterwards for what they can do without me to keep people to, to solve the problems I find that they're having instead of just giving a one-size-fits-all, here's a course, right? You can take it. That doesn't work. Change is a little too bespoke for that. What I more often end up doing is in a months- or years-long relationship with a company, and it's a retainer base. And so in terms of business model, it's simply a retainer because, okay, I give a lot of access. You know, I'm used to doing house calls. Yeah, I'm used to building phone calls. It doesn't stress me. And I don't know what people need as much as they know what they So I give, we'll have some structure to it. I'm gonna be at these two meetings, do a month. I'm gonna give you one strategy to use per week or per month, depending on how deep we are to strengthen your team so that this change goes better and so that future changes go better. I can't make people like change. I can make them more competent at navigating it and less overwhelmed by change.

So you're developing the capability because I think that, and maybe this is the difference between the skill side and resilience is Yeah. Is, is change management at this point in time, we're implementing a new CRM, whatever the external thing is.

Yeah.

Let's get through this and move on. And you're like, yes, and, and the end is, and I'm gonna leave you the capabilities of, right?

We're building a skillset.

Yeah. Love it.

And every once in a while, every once in a while I meet a business leader who says, well, we don't have a lot of change right now, so this is the right time to work with you. Let's do it preventively. And as a family doc, I like preventive medicine better than treating things. But very few people have resilience in their budget. You know, how much are we spending on resilience?

Well, and that's, so I think that's the, that's the, that's the issue with a, with a lot of thought leadership is that there's two ways to do it. Nobody, I've never met anyone that said I bought the burglar alarm the day before I should have been burglar, right? You know, right. You get the burglar on the day you come home to a broken window because now you're—

spend the money on the pain point.

Yeah, exactly.

But what I'm finding since the pandemic is that more and more companies accept that they won't, at baseline, do change well. What I found at first when I was in this is people saying, oh no, we have great culture, we have great company, I have great people, we're like a family, nothing's gonna hurt us. Yeah. You know, we can manage, we're flexible and, and adaptable, we can handle anything.

Yeah.

And my answer to that is resilience is absolutely a growth commodity and you can build it on purpose, but just like the stock market, sometimes it crashes unexpectedly.

Yeah. I love it.

And so having those skills in place make a big difference.

Yeah. Fantastic. Well, this has been great. I appreciate your time, Dr. G, and this has been—

Thank you.

Fantastic. Thanks for sharing with us.

Absolutely.

To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter@thoughtleadershipleverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.