Fostering Deep Connections with Jennifer Hill

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Hi, I'm Susan Drum, and welcome to the Enlightened Executive, where your personal evolution sparks your leadership evolution. Each episode we feature groundbreaking techniques and strategies to help you get the edge in personal and leadership effectiveness. This episode is brought to you by Meritage Leadership. At Meritage, we strengthen leaders and empower teams to achieve high performance. Go to meritageleadership.com to learn more. Are you curious about your development path to enlightened leadership? Take our free 5 minute quiz at susandrumm.com to discover your superpower and the roadblocks that could get in the way of effective leadership. Today we're talking about cracking the code for connection, and my guest is entrepreneur keynote speaker and coach Jennifer Hill, who is arguably one of the most connected people I know. Jennifer successfully exited her first company focused on legal recruiting in 2018, and she was recently accepted as a member of Deepak Chopra's Evolutionary Leaders Circle, a group of thought leaders who come together to support a shift in consciousness. She's hosted over 20 TV episodes with Chopra and Don Hoffman called Conversations at the Intersection of Cutting Edge Science and Spirituality. Jennifer's current project is Optimatch, a SaaS company she founded, and it leverages her superpower, which we're going to get into in a moment. She also hosts a podcast called Regarding Consciousness and is speaking at Chopra's Sages and Sciences. All right, welcome, Jennifer. I'm so excited to have you on the podcast.

Thank you so much, Susan. And big shout out to our mutual friend Joss, who connected us a few years ago. From the first day you and I met, it was just kismet. I just love you as a human being.

Oh, thank you. Love you. Love Jocelyn Herman. She's amazing and so excited. She got us connected and. And one of the things I'm really struck by is your mission in the world. Can you share what that is?

Yes. Our mission, our dream, is that by the time I die, we will have connected 1 billion people deeply to themselves and others. And that is my life's work. It's what I do every day, whether I'm podcasting, whether I'm appearing on somebody else's podcast, keynoting, or it's what we do every single day with our technology. Optimatch. What if we could all find psychologically safe relationships where we could feel heard, known and understood and be our authentic selves? And it really starts, Susan, with accepting ourselves. When we begin to accept ourselves, that allows for acceptance and deep, meaningful connection to others.

I love that, and I'm so moved by that. Because I really believe the very same that it is to always starts with your relationship with yourself. And if you want deep, meaningful connections with those outside, you've got to do the inner work to heal some of the parts that are at war within yourself. And the more you create peace internally, the more you'll create peace externally. So excited to have you on. Share with us what you mean when you say connection.

When I talk about connection, Susan, I like to think of it as the golden triangle of connection, as we just referenced, deep connection to self, connection to others, and connection to purpose. And I've really found that connection to self is a cornerstone to all of that. And what I mean by the word connection is a sense of engagement. If we look at the world right now and the loneliness epidemic being at an unprecedented 24% globally across the world, it's not just a US thing or a Europe thing or wherever. We're all impacted by this loneliness epidemic. And it really begins with us. Because although we have all these fabulous devices that allow us to listen to podcasts and be on zoom with one another, we've disconnected and disengaged with ourselves and with life and with one another. And so our dream, my vision, is to re engage people. Let's plug ourselves back into the circuitry that is the life vitality. That is connection.

Absolutely. And why do people struggle with connection? Like you said, we have all these devices. There's a way that can be connected to more people than ever before, and yet we have this loneliness epidemic. Why do people struggle with that?

I'm going to give you a really surprising answer, and it's going to be steeped in a little bit of science. So most of us are aware, Susan, of our amygdala. Right? Our amygdala is that fight or flight side of our brain. It's that lower part of our brain, that reptilian side. Well, what a lot of us don't think about is we have three parts to our brain. We have the amygdala at the lower part of the brain. Then we have the midbrain, which is the mammalian part of the brain. Am I safe? Are you like me? Can I trust you? And then we have the higher part of the brain, executive functioning, the creativity, the capacity for love, kindness, compassion. And yet what most of us don't realize is that the higher brains can't function until the lower brain first feels safe. And I found that in a post Covid world, the reason that we're seeing these epidemics of loneliness perpetuating the world Right now is because we don't feel safe. Our amygdalas are running the show. We're not having a relationship with my friend Susan or my husband or whomever it might be. I used to do a popular talk on this called how to deal with an office jerk. And it was very funny. I remember I'd be doing these trainings at law firms and conferences and I'd say when you're dealing with somebody who's upset, you are not dealing with an upset 45 year old or 57 year old or an upset 25 year old. You're dealing with an upset 44 year old. And yet our upset 4 year old, our amygdala is fighting with their amygdala. And then we all disconnect and feel lonely and sad and fearful and so what if we could quiet that amygdala? What if we could spend time in self reflection to better understand how we're motivated, how those around us are motivated. Just the other day I had something where I noticed I got triggered, you know, such as life. I'm building a tech company. I love what we're doing. It's amazing. And as tech sometimes happens, something didn't work. So we had this big new engagement we were doing. We were super lit up. I was like jumping up and down for joy right before, like while I get on the call with our C suite team. And then as soon as we get on the call, something had went awry with it and I'm like, you know, and so in that moment, a lot of us as leaders, what I've noticed we do, Susan, if we don't have tools for self regulation to apply in that moment amygdala, then our amygdala is going to run the rest of that board meeting. So then when we quiet it in that moment, I used one of my favorite techniques, which is heart mass, heart focused breathing. Nobody is wiser. I'm literally having the conversation with our executive team. And instead of verbally vomiting on the team, or as I affectionately call myself, when I was building my first company, I did not have any of these skills. And I often refer to myself as, hi, I'm Jennifer Cahill. I'm a recovering jerk. Nice to meet you. Because I used to let that amygdala run the meeting. You can bring your awareness. You can pause in that moment before you send that angry email or say the thing that you're going to regret and just pause. Allow a few deep breaths in and out. I like heart focused breathing. There's wonderful Tools out there, box breathing, vagon breathing, anything to quiet that lower reptilian brain. And then we regain access to that higher consciousness. And I think a lot of us in business relationships and friendship and romantic, we're often coming from a reactive place rather than a proactive place. And the more that we can learn to be, use our consciousness to be proactive, use techniques and tools to be sure that we provide for our own needs, and we're not trying to take energy from the people we work with or the investors or whomever it is, then from that place, we become the sexiest human on the planet. I tell people this all the time because you're no longer trying to take energy. You become the most investable person, you become the hottest person in dating, no matter what you look like physically. Because so often we're always trying to take energy from one another. So I think the secret, a long winded answer to your question of what is connection? The secret to connection is to provide for yourself first. Put your own oxygen mask on first, engage with yourself first, and then that will give you the tools that you need to make meaningful engagements with others.

Yes. And when you're triggered, that should be a signal to yourself. Whatever comes out of your mouth at this point is not going to be from the highest reasoning part of the brain. It's a reptile, so it should be. And what's interesting is I think when people get triggered, the first place they go is looking external. You triggered me. You did this to me. You know, life is happening to me. And instead, if we could start to train ourselves, oh, I'm triggered. I gotta go within and take care of something internally. Because anything I do from here will not be at the highest level of consciousness and will not actually produce the results that we really want.

It's the antithesis of it. It's literally. I used to teach this to job hunters when they would go into the interview. So often I remember people, whether it was executives or general counselors or whomever it was, people would want to just sit and share their sob stories. Oh, this person happened and this company blew me off. I was on a call with somebody in the last week and I was really surprised that they shared a story with me about how somebody like lied on a contract or pull, pull the contract. But it was like a big crux of their story. And something I've learned is that if we make something significant, it becomes significant for those around us, those we lead, those we work with. But if we can make something softer, we can soften Our language soften the experience of it. Maybe you lightly touch that. You know what, we had this little pitfall the other day, but we learned from it, and it was a great learning opportunity. I think us as leaders, if we can constantly be reframing that, even when our team says something, you know, often as leaders, we're put in a position where our team might misspeak or they might get angry with one another and we put too much attention on that, then that can create greater frustration and turn, you know, make a mountain out of a molehill. Yet our perspective, which is something I like to talk about a lot, really directly correlates to how things show up for us in business.

And so tell me, what advice would you give to leaders who may be dealing with conflict on their team? I know more recently I. We did a survey in a company that I'm working with, and that was the number one concern of managers. How do I deal with conflict on my team as a leader? What would you say to that?

Great question. This is exactly what we focus on at Optinage and what I do with our own clients and so forth that we coach on. This is number one, to help people realize that the others on the team, no one on the team, is misbehaving. That is step number one. I think it's so tempting as a leader to say, oh, well, this person said this, this person said that. So to be neutral and just come from a place of we're all motivated differently, that's what I've been studying for 20 years, is human behavior, first in recruiting and now with optimatch. And what we found is if my motivators and your motivators are adverse to each other, then that could cause what we call a potential accidental adversarial relationship. So to any of you out there who have conflicts in your team, number one is get curious. Number two is help to understand whether you're using our software or somebody else's software. Understand what motivates your team. There are a plethora of resources out there. Our studies and research have shown us that motivators tie in directly to how easily and psychologically safe people.