Creative on Purpose Live - Jacqui Beaver

Confirm that we are live. And boom, just like that, ladies and gentlemen, we are live. Welcome to Creative on Purpose Live, conversations about cultivating greater fulfillment and equanimity in endeavors that make a difference. I'm your host, Scott Perry, author of Onward!, head coach at Akimbo Workshops, and Chief Difference Maker at Creative on Purpose. If you're ready to cure burnout and cultivate equanimity as a social impact professional, visit creativeonpurpose.com for insight and inspiration to help you fly higher in the difference only you can make. Let's meet today's guest, Jackie Beaver. Welcome to the broadcast. Tell our viewers who you are, what you're up to these days, and where can they go to learn more about you and the difference that you're making.

I love that. You know what, first of all, I love that you started with who you are versus what you do, because that's really important to me. So who I am, uh, I'll just sum it up in my why, because that'll give you a little window in. My why is I'm passionate about supporting people to become better versions of themselves, especially through transformation, connecting back into themselves so that they can achieve things they never thought possible. So that's what I'm passionate about. Uh, what I do, I do that a variety of ways. So I am a leadership development coach. I work in the field of leadership development because I figure if I can help people be their best selves in the leadership world, then that ripple effect and the impact that they can have on others is exponential. And so that's what I do. I've also got a podcast called Unicorns and Hand Grenades, and that's a little side passion project which I do with a friend, Kim, and it's about sharing real and raw stories about the brutal magnificence that is this experience of being human. And yeah, how I do it, I guess, is just through connecting people, uh, back to themselves and just holding the space for people to really be who they are, because I've been in a place where I wasn't who I was and I had no clear line of sight to my purpose. And yeah, that's it in a very large nutshell, really, Scott Perry. Oh, I've just lost your sound.

That's because my sound was muted, because I— in case our regular viewers can't tell, I'm in a different location, an undisclosed location. My wife and I are on vacation, exper— with our second experiment in digital nomadship. We're, we're at the beach for 2 weeks, so I'm broadcasting at the beach. Um, and the AC just came crashing on, and, uh, I didn't want it to interrupt the festivities here. So lots to unpack already, Jackie. I just want to first say that the branding of, um, unicorns and hand grenades is absolutely brilliant. I want to get to that later, um, but you, you've talked about a couple things that I, I'd love to, to hit on real quick. The first is recently we have had a lot of coaches on. I don't know if you've noticed, but there's a lot of coaches out there. And I know there's a lot of coaches out there because they fill up my LinkedIn inbox with offers to help me before they've even properly introduced themselves. So there's a lot of coaches that are doing coaching in a very uncoaching way. But you said that you're a leadership coach, and as one of the good gals and guys, that are in this game. I would love to, to hear a little bit about what's your approach. What's— how do you define leadership, first of all?

Oh, let's go in with a hard-hitting question, Scott. Um, I'll absolutely answer that. I think to acknowledge you, I've had a bunch of that LinkedIn spam as well. And so predominantly for me, coaching is what I do less, and it's a support to the development work that I do. So the workshops that I facilitate. For me, leadership, the first and foremost thing, it's actually not attached to any form of title or any position of power. So leadership for me is about fundamentally being able to lead ourselves first and foremost as humans. So connecting in to who we are, what our superpowers are. And quite often, I know superpower sounds huge, but quite often superpowers are things that as we grew up we were told were the things that weren't quite right about us, or they might have been the things that didn't help us fit in. And I had a huge experience with that. Maybe we'll get to that in another conversation. But for me, the definition of leadership is about knowing who you are, knowing what you stand for. And once you've got that foundation, then thinking about how you can use that with intention and purpose to to make a positive impact to others. So it actually doesn't matter what world you're in, what work you do, what your job title is. That's the guts of it for me. The reason I work in the leadership space is because I was a senior leader with one of New Zealand's biggest corporates for a really long time. And that I've had my universal car crash moments, my hand grenade moments that led me to my unicorn moment now. But yeah, so I'm really passionate. So I've got the experience, the skills, and the expertise from being in a senior leadership place where I probably wasn't doing it that well. I wasn't connected to myself and my purpose. And so I think sometimes we always end up helping people that were us before we had our universal car crash moments or our waking up to the possibilities of life moments.

I love that. I love— I had written down this idea of connecting with yourself as well. And you're weaving that into this. And what I'm hearing in what you're saying is something that we talk a lot about here at Creative On Purpose, which is, well, number one, you touched on how leadership is different than authority. It's different than title. It's different than status. Authority is something that may be bestowed upon you, and you may have the authority to order people around and tell them what to do, but that's not leadership. Leadership is helping people get from where they are to where they need to be. And the way to that we do this best is through this idea that you were talking about, about connecting with yourself. Leadership happens best when it's from the inside out, as opposed from the top down, or from when you're just telling people what to do. Uh, so I love that approach to leadership because it opens up the possibility that anybody can, if they choose to, lead themselves and make a difference, even without the benefit of a, a title status or authority.

Yeah, that's so true, hey. And I think that's where people struggle the most, because I know for me prior, this word purpose, it feels— when you don't know it clearly and you can't articulate it like that for yourself, it can sometimes feel really heavy. And I think it can sometimes have people doubting themselves, helping— making them think that to find their purpose, to connect to their purpose, to be creative with their purpose has to be bigger than Ben Hur. But what I've learned over a lot of my trials and tribulations is that for me, it comes back to presence. It's that ability to be present with yourself and to feel through all the emotions and emotional agility, because we can't lead ourselves or others if we're in a place where we don't have the skills to do that. And it's the ability to actually be present with other humans. So to really hold the space, to see into people, to connect with people, And I think if you kind of step it back to that fact, that if we can all just turn up as good humans and be present and be vulnerable, then that's a starting place for leadership because vulnerability was my Achilles heel for so many years. I know Brené Brown talks about it as a direct link to a measurement of courage. For me, prior to my universal car crash moment, vulnerability was a direct link to measuring weakness, not strength. So yeah, I'm passionate about that space. I love it. I've learned the hard way.

Well, I think most of us have learned life's most important lessons the hard way. I think most of us have learned far more from our mistakes and failures than we have from our successes and achievements. And one of the defining qualities of good leadership, I think, is holding space and grace for allowing people to explore the edges of their understanding and ability, giving them permission to make mistakes and fail strategically within reason, of course, so that they can grow and develop, because that's where growth and development come from. And I love this, um, this other piece that you were kind of weaving in when you say connecting with yourself. What we talk about here at Creative Our Purpose is very similar. We talk about being integrated, just being in and of ourselves. In other words, leadership, as you were saying, is not about having a title when you go to the office and then you leave that there and you go home and you're now a parent or a spouse or a pet owner or whatever it happens to be. Um, if you are an integrated human being, if you are able to lead yourself from the inside out, you kind of just show up everywhere as an integrated whole in and of yourself. You are one human being with the same set of values, the same guiding principles, the same dreams, wants, needs, desires, and aspirations. Um, the and are able to weave your way through all of the roles that you might play without having to change hats, switch gears, make sure that you have your badge on so everybody knows that you're in charge and that sort of thing.

Yeah, I think you said something really important there around stepping into the roles that you can play, because if you don't have the integration, if you're not showing up as a whole human, then you are going to step into roles. And in each role you step into, you'll lose a part of yourself. So you'll step into the role of leader whilst not being connected to the human side of yourself. Because I think, you know, I come from, I come from old school. My parents are children of the war era. Like I said, you know, resilience is actually about just shoving stuff down and getting on with stuff. So that was a whole part of what I brought to my leadership when I was a senior leader. Prior to kind of my big aha moment. And so yeah, we have to be able to turn up as who we are, because unless we can do that, we're not giving the people that we lead permission to do that. And that's something my co-host Kim and I have talked about in quite a few episodes, is that this expectation that we have to show up in the world as different people for different things. So the biggest gift that I was ever given was my world completely changing? Was being put in the position where I stepped out of a role that I thought was my identity, because suddenly when my world blew up, I started to understand that all of these identity markers and tags I had, senior leader, mother, my son, um, and dinesta, right, left home. Uh, I'd been married for 30 years and my marriage blew up at the same time I left my leadership role. It was a culmination of everything. It was the biggest gift I had because because all I started to see, none of those things were actually me. They were roles I played and I didn't have the anchor of my true self to help me step in and out safely while being 110% me. And so sometimes our biggest hangar day moments are our biggest unicorns and gifts. And so yeah, we do need to really show up as us. I'm not sure a lot of corporates as a whole and entirely give people permission to do that. But we need to be leading the world a different way now, so different than we have before.

Well, you, you, you brought up the importance of vulnerability and what you're just saying now reminds me, I know that here in the United States, we bestow leadership upon people frequently who look a lot like me, unfortunately. And we reward them for their overconfidence and certainty about things that they have no right to be overconfident and certain about. And it's dangerous because it has put us in a place where we are all in peril due to climate change, due to a long overdue reckoning over racial justice, gender equity. All these things that we're wrestling with now come from this status quo of rewarding people for things that they have no right to be certain or confident about? And what happens if we allow ourselves to be vulnerable? What happens if we reward people with leaders and bestow leadership upon people that are willing to see and do things differently, to say that the status quo is fine, but it's not as good as it could be? We can and must do better, and we can step into possibility a better possibility by co-creating a future where we see leadership, power, resources not as scarce things that are— have to be hoarded by the people with entitlement and privilege, but they're renewal resources. There's plenty of power. There's power in abundance to go around. There's opportunity in abundance to go around. What if we rewarded people for, spreading privilege and opportunity, uh, and turned it into a renewable resource that could spread not just throughout your country, my country, or anybody else's, but truly around the world, and maybe in the process save ourselves from annihilation. Anyways, I rant and I apologize for that. Sometimes that happens.

Um, I love a good rant, Scott Perry.

Well, we have this thing at Kimbo where we We talk about riffs, and, uh, sometimes the riffs become rants, and so now we call them riff rants.

Uh, so I'm gonna steal that with pride. A riff rant.

Oh, please. It's— well, as, as a card-carrying Akimbo, a Cambodian, uh, you're, you're welcome to steal like an artist anything, uh, from the Akimbo sphere. Um, we have, uh, a quick, uh, just a quick hello from my friend and co-coach in the Freelancers Workshop, Lillian Mahuku is sending greetings from France.

Oh, wow. How cool. Bonjour, Lillian. Comment allez-vous?

OK, I don't want you guys talking. I don't know what you're saying. So in the time that we have left, you've talked about several things that I think we could unpack for hours. But we've unpacked leadership a little bit. I would love to, because I think Just to set the table, I think, you know, I was taking some jabs at coaches that present in a very uncoaching way. And I think that's unfortunate because I think it does a disservice to one of the most powerful levers for leadership and for leaders to develop themselves, which is good quality coaching. And so to help people get a better idea of what proper coaching looks like. What is your definition of coaching or the way that you think about coaching? How is coaching is your way of being? I see it in all of the interactions that we have online. Explain a little bit about your approach to coaching.

So my approach to coaching is actually You used the word co-creative before. Coaching for me is a co-creative process. So I've been trained in multiple different ways of coaching, and my— the one that resonates most is transformative coaching. So transformative coaching is about the ability to unlock in people all of the ideas and the innate potential that they have just by simply powerfully listening. And when I talk about listening, I mean listening from a different level. So listening with the ears, um, listening with intuition, listening between the lines, and then being able to help just present back to people what I'm seeing in a way that they might not have seen it before. So it's actually really about that co-creative process of unlocking potential and someone, because I believe we've all got the ability to create our own realities. I think we limit ourselves in boxes, and I believe we can't rely on someone else to free us from that cage. And so coaching to me is just a beautiful way of holding the space for someone, truly helping them be seen and heard, because the person doing the talking is always the person doing the thinking. It's not about me talking. And to be a good coach, I believe you have to really have invested in yourself and your training. And you have to be able to know your stuff so that you can really bring that to the table. So yeah, I get— I don't know if I've answered that so well.

But yeah, no, you definitely have. And I agree entirely with everything that you just said, because coaching it Coaching is sometimes conflated with teaching or advising or consulting, and teachers and advisors and consultants are people with the answers that you need. So you, you know, they have information or insight that you, you need to get, and so you hire them or you employ them to get training, to get information. And coaching is not a top-down process like that. Coaching is built on the premise that you possess everything that you already need to be a thriving, flourishing human being in whatever endeavor you seek excellence in. And to your point, through the power of active listening, helping people see what they don't see. And I like the framing, the framing that I use and that I try to share with my teams at Akimbo is our job here is to is to witness, reflect, and invite. We need to witness someone else's experience without judgment. We need to reflect back what we're noticing, what we're seeing. And then we need to invite them with beautiful questions, more beautiful questions, to find the light switches in the doorways in the room and to take and to turn them on themselves and step through them themselves and step into their potential and possibility as flourishing, uh, in whatever endeavor it is that they seek to flourish in. So I, I think you and I are in complete alignment in that. And, you know, coaching is a way of being that you don't have to have, uh, a certification. You don't need the title. You, you can be an informal coach in every situation. Parenting at its best is informal coaching. Teaching at its best is informal coaching. So that This is indeed something that is available to everyone. It would be nice if more people that adopt the title of coach actually had that generous service posture and was not spamming up my inbox with invites to discovery calls. One last thing before I go.

Oh, the old discovery call. Yeah, gotcha.

You've used the word human a couple of times, and one of my handbooks leads with the questions, what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be happy? And how can you be more of both? And I wonder if you would unpack what do you mean when you're talking about helping people see and step into their humanness, their humanity?

Oh, that's a really good question, Scott Perry. Nice work. So humanity for me is— and this is just my personal view of it— it's about knowing that we are more than our thoughts. It's about knowing that we are more than the identity markers we have, like I said before, you know, our job, our title, what we do for people. It's about being— step in— it's about stepping into that. So it's, it's knowing who you are beyond all of that. So, um, there's something deeper in all of us. And so if anyone listening can actually sit back and go, okay, if I take my job title away and I take all the things I am to other people away, what does that leave me with? Who am I? And so I can answer that question for myself. I'm someone who has empathy. I'm someone You know, I've spent time with Chip Conley and the team up in Mexico on Soul. It's just like, I'm someone who believes in kindness. At the heart of it, I'm someone who wants to connect. It's all of those descriptors that aren't connected to a thing or a title. That's being human. It's embracing what we're put on this earth to do, which is, I believe, in my case, to connect with other people and shine a little light and spread a little hope and be of help in some way, shape, or form and help people turn on the light. Um, that for me is what being human is about. It will be different for every single human on this planet. So stepping away from thinking that our thoughts and our mind chatter is who we are, because I don't believe it is. There was a time when I did, and that's how I know that's not who we are. Um, so that's the being human piece. What was the other one? Being human and being happy. Oh, being happy. So my definition of happy now. It's so different than it would have been 3 years ago. So my definition of being happy is the ability to be present in any given moment with grace and acceptance of what is.

I love it.

Engo. I don't get it right all the time. I get caught up in my head and out of my human heart-centered place. But yeah, that's my definition of it.

Well, and you've mentioned presence a few times, so I just want to highlight, you know, the only time that we have, the only moment that we have to step into our potential and possibility is in the present, is in the here and now. And if we're spending all our time spinning cycles on old stories that no longer serve us, or setting unnecessary, you know, clinging to hopes and dreams of the future that are beyond our control, we're really not not fulfilling our human potential. Our human potential is in the here and now. And I love what you're saying about it's not really what you do, it's who you are. What are your values? What are your core principles, your guiding principles? What are the, the things upon which you will not equivocate? How do you act when nobody's watching? How do you treat others when nobody is really taking account? I think those are the things that really define who we are as human beings. So I really appreciate your highlighting that for us. We must wrap up our time together just a little bit early today because I have another call, but I would love for you, Jacque, to end with just one— you've delivered so much wisdom and so much food for thought, but if there was just one piece of advice, one tip, one idea that you would share with our viewers. We have people here that are aspiring to make a bigger difference in the world. We have people that are making a difference. Already but want to amplify and make a bigger difference and fly higher in the difference only they can make. What's one last tip, question, comment that you would share with them to help them fly a little bit higher?

Ah, I love to see people fly high, so I'm going to have to make this a good one. All the pressure. I would say, when are you finding the time to sit with yourself Uh, how can you chase the moments to step into being and out of doing? Because we're so set up to be in the doing all of the time, like you said, Scott Perry, um, the rat race and the spinning wheel. So until we can start moving more, like Chip Conley says, from that ego operating system into our soul operating system, it's hard to fly from the ego operating system. So find your moments to step into being. Connect to who you truly are, and then just start flapping your wings a little bit. You don't have to start by soaring. So yeah, that would be my advice.

I love that. You don't have to start by soaring. Fantastic. Well, thanks everyone for tuning in. Jackie and I really appreciate you lending us some of your valuable time and attention, and we hope today's broadcast motivates you to step into your potential and possibility with a little more curiosity and a little bit more courage. You can learn more about Jackie and the difference she's making at the URL down below there, handgrenades unicorns.com.

Sorry, it's unicornsandhandgrenades.com. That was my bad, Scott, because you did check with me before we started.

There you go.

Yeah, sorry.

And it's always great to also see you at creativeonpurpose.com. Now take the insight and inspiration from this conversation and start flying a little bit higher in the difference only you can make. Jackie, thank you so much for your time and the wisdom that you shared here today.

My absolute pleasure. Thanks everyone for listening.