CoachesRising-230 Jennifer Garvey Berger and Amy Elizabeth Fox Love as a Business Imperative

Joel Monk: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the Coaches Rising podcast. I am really delighted to be sharing this conversation with you today. I'm joined by Amy Elizabeth Fox, who is the CEO and co founder of Mobius Executive Leadership and Jennifer Garvey Berger, who is the co founder and CEO of Cultivating Leadership. And we are going to be exploring this topic of love in business, love in leadership, which as Jennifer and Amy share, it's a topic which has really been excluded from the table and there are consequences for that. And so we're going to be exploring today, why in these [00:01:00] times it's incredibly necessary that we bring this topic and the experience of love firmly into the center of the work we do and into business and what some of the Consequences could be if we do that.

So I really hope you enjoy this conversation. Without further ado, let's dive right in. Before we get into today's podcast, I've got an invitation for you. We're about to kick off the sixth edition of our most popular program, The Neuroscience of Change. This training is based on what revolutionary research in neuroscience has revealed about transformational coaching.

Essentially showing us what works. What doesn't and why in the program, you'll learn what happens in the brain and body when different coaching techniques are used, how to guide your clients into positive learning states that allow genuine change to occur and why some tried and true coaching methods actually inhibit change and what we can do instead. We created this course because I learned things from the lead [00:02:00] teacher, Amanda Blake, that truly revolutionized the way I coach. And every year she and all the teachers bring in new cutting edge science that continues to illuminate the process of transformation. Amanda will be joined by the rest of our world class faculty of coaches and neuroscientists for this program, including Dan Siegel, Alan Fogel, Claire Dale, David Treleaven, and Richard Boyatzis.

It's going to be an amazing transformative journey. So I hope you'll come and join us. You can head to coachesrising. com forward slash neuroscience of change to book your spot. The first class is February 25th, 2025 with Amanda Blake. And if you sign up by February the 7th, you can get the early bird discount.

So just go to coachesrising. com forward slash neuroscience of change to book your spot. So, yes, we're going to talk about love. I feel a lot of love right now, having you both staring out at me, Amy and [00:03:00] Jennifer, um, together on our podcast for the first time, at least. So that's amazing. Um, how are each of you in this moment?

Amy Elizabeth Fox: Well, I'm super thrilled to have time with my dear beloved sister, Jennifer, on this topic and to have you as our interlocutor, Joel seems really perfect. So I'm very excited for this radical conversation of revisiting love and business. Yeah,

Jennifer Garvey Berger: I agree. I'm all, uh, I noticed my energy is really up. Um, this is, this is better than like seven cups of espresso just to look at you and imagine what we could talk about together.

Uh, let's go.

Yeah. I mean, that's a great invitation. I just want to sort of tee you both up with like Love and business isn't something that usually goes together. Why, why love and business? Why is this word love important to you? I mean, that sounds like a ridiculous question on why could you, how could you ask?

[00:04:00] Why is love important, but you get where I'm coming from. I think,

Amy Elizabeth Fox: yeah, you want to go first, Jen, and I'll build on you.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: Yeah, maybe I'll start. Um, you know, I was, I. I have a chapter in the, in the book before, this most recent book, I have a chapter about love. And my, my editor at the time, at, you know, Stanford University Press, this, this editor, was being really careful and thoughtful about my work.

He said, the book is great, love the draft. Love, though, that might be kind of a problem for readers. So, um, how about if you took that chapter out? Uh, And I said, no, chapter's kind of the culminating point of the book. And he said, okay, okay, okay, okay, I get that. Um, how about if we call it something else?

Like we could call it connection. We could call it, um, uh, compassion. We could call it, you know, [00:05:00] um, psychological safety. We could call it, you know, something like that. I think we should call it love because I think this idea that love has been banished from organizations because it's difficult, because it's, um, because it's big, because it's a lot, um, because it's so fundamentally human.

I, I think that's a real problem. I think our banishing of love from organizations creates, um, anemic and cold and cold hearted places. And, uh, we are seeing in the world what happens when we banish love from spaces. Bad things grow. And so I am interested, as my dear friend Amy is, and as I know you are, Joel, I am interested in a reclamation of the potential for us to think about what the What could genuine [00:06:00] loving connection bring to organizational spaces at this moment when people in organizations are so strained, where even the idea of what they're on about is so contested, where people are exhausted and the world The world is heating and complaining about the way we are with each other and with our planet.

Seems like a good time for love.

Amy Elizabeth Fox: I mean, of course, I find everything you said utterly delicious, and I'm just going to build on a couple of the themes. One, what Jen called, you know, the sterility of organizational life, what I might call the emotional austerity or radical isolation people are living in inside organizations in which they attempt to then team and collaborate and co create and have genuinely meaningful dialogue.

It's antithetical to believe that you can do all of those important [00:07:00] transformational tasks inside an organization that doesn't create any sense of intimacy. and love and connection between the people and doesn't invest in that as the necessary moisture for those activities. Um, and I think not only do, are we falling short of our organizational cultural aspirations, but every executive that I meet is walking around feeling like they're holding the stress and strain of their leadership.

by themselves and being told that the hallmark of success is personal resilience and autonomy, which really means I'm being told I'm not supposed to need anyone. And only in a hurt world would we suggest that leaders shouldn't operate inside an ecosystem of mutuality, of generosity, of solidarity, of emotional nurturing.

Um, and so I, I agree with If I feel myself, I can feel you, and I will feel myself as a natural [00:08:00] extension of a waterfall of caring to you. But if I don't feel you because I don't feel myself, then I walk around in a state of numbness and emotional disconnection that produces the harm that organizations are currently doing to the people who work for them and doing to the planet.

Powerful. So it's a

very high

Amy Elizabeth Fox: cost, this alienation of care.

Yeah. Uh, you know, I can see how love has been kind of, um, left out of the equation with this, the modern mindset, which, you know, has kind of tended to, uh, reduce everything to, you know, a function of productivity or, um, you know, output and, and maybe disconnect the world, reduce things to kind of materialistic, um, reified parts.

And, and so it, I'm just curious for you, you've already alluded to this, both of you and your answers, but what, I [00:09:00] mean, and this is a big question, you know, that philosophers have been wrestling with for a long time, but what do you mean by love before we talk about how we might. Reintegrate love back into our work.

What do we mean by love? Actually? Yeah,

Amy Elizabeth Fox: it's a beautiful question. I think one thing we mean by love is that I feel safe enough with you to tell you the intimate details of my life. And so as my life is unfolding and my parents get ill or my child is struggling, or I am disappointed by the outcome of a project, or I'm hurt by something you said, instead of holding all that and cradling it in, in an apartness.

a separateness, I bring it to you as the fertility of our intimacy and the generativity of our continued healthy connection. So love is an expression of extending my interiority and vulnerability to you as a gesture of our [00:10:00] colleagueship and our friendship and our work together. I think a second thing it means is that I Embrace all the dimensions of who you are with an unconditional benevolence.

I welcome you. I want to know you. And I want to know the ways in which you are alike me. And I want to know the ways in which you are very meaningfully different from me. And to embrace all of that. Um, so I become a safe harbor for your full embodiment and your full potential. At least those things. I don't know, what else would you add, Jen?

Jennifer Garvey Berger: Love that. Um, I would add maybe two things. Uh, one is that your well being becomes important to me for the sake of your well being and not for something that happens for me because you are well. So my, my regard for you, um, And, um, my, my sort of my circle of support around you is not for [00:11:00] my benefit, it's not for my profit, it's not because it makes me feel good about myself, it's actually made of regard for you.

And, and my curiosity or, um, or acceptance of those parts of you that don't look polished and per, perfect in some way, um, becomes part of the, the fodder of our affection for one another. I can always tell when I'm in a loving relationship with somebody because their foibles, I, I find amusing and endearing.

And when I'm out of connection with those people, the same person, the same foible becomes annoying and frustrating. And so, with all the annoyance and frustration there is, In organizations to understand that we could transform that experience into an experience of like amusement and closeness, instead of, oh, it drives me crazy when so and so comes to the [00:12:00] meetings and are like, that's amazing.

We have this transformational power for our own experience by simply incorporating the other person across from us into a circle of regard. I love that. I

Amy Elizabeth Fox: love that too. It made me think of two other dimensions. One is, I know enough about your life story to know that the things that Jen is calling foibles are rooted in an earlier childhood experience in which that behavior was the best and highest possibility at that time.

So instead of seeing those as your executive derailers or your weaknesses that I'm trying to hack you out of. I bring to that a tremendous wise compassion of really understanding why you act that way. And then I become a bridge to a freedom to act in a different way. But I need to really know your story and take the time to care for the walk you've walked in order to put your foibles in the right holding.

The second thing Jen said I just love, [00:13:00] which is your well being for the sake of your well being. So in a real field of love, the circle of my attention, of whose well being I'm safeguarding and investing in, isn't boundaried by my personal well being. It's boundaried by the health of our community of practice.

And You can think of that as a way to extend your heart to a wider field. You could think of that as a way to participate in the unity we all walk in. I mean, you talked about, Joel, the link between love and moving from a technical to a more sacralized worldview. In part, when we're talking about love in its most numinous form, we're really talking about that sense of all pervading genuine unity, um, that can be at the heartbeat of an organization if it wants.

That's, that's beautiful. Um, yeah, cause then one of the things that's standing out is that, that like love is [00:14:00] a verb, you know, and that it's something living and connecting. And something we can perhaps, uh, tune into, you know, it's something that we can, um, maybe, and it, and it fundamentally can even, um, change our sense of identity in any moment.

Amy Elizabeth Fox: Yeah, and I love love as a verb because it implies a state of rigor. That love is not a hallmark sentimentality. It's, it's really, well, I stand in the trenches with you when things get hard. Can you count on me when it matters? Um, and will I be willing to sacrifice something for the well being of us all?

Um, and that, that starts to get very, where the rubber hits the road for me of where does love count? It's

Jennifer Garvey Berger: also a practice, right? It is, uh, like other verbs. It's a thing we are doing that there's a kind of sense that love happens. Right? If you're lucky, if you're lucky, love will happen. And if it doesn't happen, then, [00:15:00] you know, keep, keep looking around as though it's out there and we have to, we have to search for it out there somehow, but actually love is a developmental practice, right?

It's a, it's a practice of actually reaching outside of ourselves, opening ourselves up enough to let in another person. I believe that pretty much everybody who walks on the planet is worthy of love if you can let them in. And they have something in them that if you were to see it would change you in some way.

Well, that's a practice. And, and it's not always a fun practice. And it's not always a practice that works, right? Practice we do because sometimes it's hard, and sometimes it's grunty, and sometimes we fail. But it is a thing we could be trying to do every day.

Amy Elizabeth Fox: Yeah, I love the dimension of what you just said, Jen, which is the practice of love [00:16:00] that is looking for the genuine beauty in each person.

And mirroring it back to them, like being the developmental mirror that can celebrate the specific contours of someone's uniqueness is, I think, a beautiful daily practice an executive can do. And the other thing that was implicit in what you said is the practice of risking asking for support. You know, we have so little relational vocabulary.

The leaders that come into the programs that I guide, when you ask them, how might somebody support you emotionally, they usually can name, they could hug me or they could listen to me. But they don't have hundreds of options for cook with me, sing with me, pray with me, meditate with me, walk in nature with me, cradle me, grieve with me, believe in me, you know, etc.

And I just feel so excited about the notion of Starting the conversation about what are the love practices that we could be fostering inside of executive development.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: I like you're pointing to the sort of paucity of our vocabulary here, Amy. [00:17:00] Uh, the, the paucity of our kind of request field. Exactly. Uh, because we weren't taught that love was a practice.

We were taught that love is very special, it's for these highly specialized relationships, it's very rare, you're lucky if you find it, you're mostly not going to find it, it's reserved for the closest circle of your concern. But anybody who has ever loved anyone will say, that changed me, it opened me to something, it created space for me to understand myself more, um, The amazing Heidi Brooks says it takes two to know one.

It helps me know myself. It helps me see myself in a different way. And we reserve that for like, whatever, four people in our lives. Four, like, that's ridiculous. It's available everywhere. It's [00:18:00] everywhere. And we could all be big enough to, to grab for it. Um, it, it makes me feel sad that we consume so much of so many other things, but this thing, which is so generative, we, we take these tiny little sips.

How can we practice love, loving? Being love. I mean, you're both giving a lot of examples of that already. Um, like I'm hearing there's, you know, having distinctions around love being important as a possibility and a certain kind of perspective taking. And I'm just thinking in my own life, um, you know, we said like love being a verb.

So there's a kind of orientation to ourselves and other people that it seems important here. But I'm also thinking about. Love as a kind of embodied quality that in my own life comes online at times as well. [00:19:00] So it, it's not only just, um, you know, uh, a type of connection, but it can also be, uh, well, well, maybe I'm about to say it's the same thing, but it's like, it's a felt sense of like sweetness or value.

warmth, uh, expanded, uh, care of, um, sphere of concern and care. And, and so, and, and maybe that's even come as a kind of, um, I don't want to say byproduct, but, um, As a result of integrative work of like denumbing myself, we use that term numbing before, so I just wanted to throw a few things in the mix there and kind of invite that question of like, how we could begin to practice love with ourselves and in business, you know, as leaders.

Yeah,

Amy Elizabeth Fox: I'm going to start by saying something maybe paradoxical to your question, Joel, and then we can take up your [00:20:00] question. I, I worry a lot less about having to teach people how to love because my experience is that as soon as you remove the stigma that love is inappropriate in the world of business, people's hearts know how to extend themselves to one another.

It's the most natural thing in the world for us to love each other. And it's only because we've been told that the world of professionalism in the world of your personal life are meant to be bifurcated and love is sort of not a welcome. Uh, lexicon in the place of work that the natural arising of care, everything you said, care, tenderness, concern, intimacy, messiness, risk, you know, the volatility of closeness, um, that should be the natural perfume of the workplace.

That should be the natural fragrance of the workplace. Fertile ground from which we co create and we dance together and we make stuff together and we provide services side by side. It's so amazing to [00:21:00] me, like I'll do a workshop with 40 people who've worked together for decades and they don't know the basic story of each other's lives.

They don't know that they have an autistic child. They don't know that they have a parent that's dying. They don't know that they had forced migration when they were five and they lived in an internment camp and how that lives now as. There's fears that they walk with, they don't know each other. But once they do know each other, then loving each other is just the natural, inevitable arising.

At least that's my experience.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: Yeah, I, I think I'm, I think I'm on the same path. I, part of my practice with executives is to, uh, give them ways in. Right? Give them, uh, ways to see each other. I really fully believe if you let somebody else in, uh, most of the time, not on, not every moment of every day, but most of the time, if you let somebody in really [00:22:00] fully, uh, This thing spontaneously arises.

You don't need to go after it. We used to practice a, a kind of listening where you would tell anything. You wouldn't say any story about your life. And, um, and I would listen for the values that were underneath that story. We're just listening for the values that were underneath that story. And the thing that we found as we're teaching people just, you know, like, it's a fairly simple listening act, right?

When people want some distinctions around listening, this is a fairly simple one. Anybody can do it. Kid can do it. Um, people Their faces softened. They would sometimes cry. And as they would read the list of values to one another, the other person would cry. And at the end of this, like, four minute exercise, they would embrace.

And so, this gives a lot of credence to Amy's point, which is, all you need [00:23:00] is to know where the tap is, and then, and then it just, it goes, it goes. But I, I teach the leaders around me, um, when they're feeling really pissed off about something that somebody else is saying, when somebody is like right up under their skin, and they're on opposite sides of the table, and the person's habits are so annoying, could they listen underneath the argument that this person is making, and say what this person cares about.

And say it back to them and see what happens. And what happens is the negotiation goes better, the solutions get richer, and suddenly the person is not so annoying. Suddenly the person is a human being who has a different set of ideas about how to make something good come into the world. That's pretty good.

Amy Elizabeth Fox: Yeah, that's super beautiful. There's a wonderful exercise I learned from you, Jen, that I've seen you do where [00:24:00] you ask people to bring their favorite songs from different ages in their life's journey and to play the songs to one another and tell the story of why those songs mean something, which I love because, first of all, I love introducing poetics into the corporate world because that is one way that love finds its way in is through music, through poetry, through movement, through the connections of our hearts.

But I also just love the self revelation that that exercise invites. So you can use almost any doorway to give people a chance to bring something that really matters to them across the threshold from their private world to their shared space. And in that mutual exploration, there's a spark of intimacy, there's a spark of connection, and there's a possibility of friendship arising that I believe is pretty reliable actually.

Yeah, that's really beautiful. I'm thinking about the presence based practices I've done as well, and it's the same journey there where actually what's taking place is, is intimacy. You know, you start off [00:25:00] and there's this person and through being in a kind of transformational connection with someone, then you start to feel, they start to see you.

You know, you start to, and the sense of connection between you starts to reveal itself. And there's this, you know, it's amazing to see how meaningful people find that. Inherently meaningful. Just this, this kind of intimacy that can arise. So yeah, that's really a strong theme.

Amy Elizabeth Fox: I love that you brought that in Joel, because it gives both Jen and I a chance to honor our friend, Doug Silsby, whose work you're referencing and who we both.

Um, but it also gives me a thought to add another dimension to what we've been saying, which is you have to have organizations that are willing to slow down enough to foster this quality of connection and to consider it important enough that they give it time and space in the interstices between crazy busy lives.

This kind of flowering of. human connection [00:26:00] of deep meaningful contact cannot happen. So organizations have to be willing to have rhythms in a day or rhythms in a week or rhythms in a year that can promote and bless this slower pace to also be treasured and to be welcomed. Um, because in the hurriedness.

There isn't space for the unfolding that we're talking about.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: And I mean, ironically, in the hurriedness, there isn't the space for the creativity, for the innovation, for the actually, uh, taking on the challenges of the organization, understanding them, and working with them. The very things that foster spaces for connection are the same as the things that foster spaces for innovation, for newness, for creativity, for excellence.

And we have this, uh, This lie told by our nervous [00:27:00] systems that says when we are anxious or activated, then we need to be very busy and we need to be very active. And so you check out an organization, they're very busy and people are very active. There are lots of activities going on, but I actually think I'm, I'm really busy that idea of I'm really busy that you get in a lot of organizations.

I'm really busy. I think it's just another way of saying I'm afraid. I'm afraid right now. I, I am, I am amped up and there's something in me terrified. And if we slow down enough to connect with each other, that terror gets held by more people. And we can collectively begin to do something about it. That's not mine to do.

That wouldn't be possible for me to do by myself. All of the most significant organizational interventions, all of the most significant, uh, changes in [00:28:00] organizations that lead to goodness, they require a lot of people, trouble, trying, getting their heads against the wall, and feeling frustrated, and then laughing, and telling jokes to each other, and then trying again, and going out for a coffee.

This practice, is the same as the practice of creating relationships. They are, I, I believe they are actually the same thing and, and we don't actually invest in any of it in organizations by and large.

Amy Elizabeth Fox: Yeah, that's beautiful. I mean, that esprit de corps, that sort of sense of playfulness and creativity and ease with each other and lightheartedness that's so generative for ideation, for, you know, fresh thinking, for creativity is exactly, as you said, fertilized by lowering the level of fear inside an organization.

So one of the reasons I think Jen and I feel love is such a business imperative is that we [00:29:00] actually can't induct the future. From a place of terror and so many leaders right now are not under mental stress and physical exhaustion and a sense of real depletion, but are doing trying to hold that by themselves, which simply, as Jen said, it can't work.

It won't work. We're going to start to see absenteeism. We're going to start to see mental illness. Rising, we're going to start to see physical exhaustion and burnout symptoms rising, et cetera, et cetera. Um, and the cost to life just to people's well being is too high when we have the antidote so close at hand.

The other thing that struck me when Jen was talking is that There's another pandemic, which is the pandemic of routinized behavior and exchange. So, so much of the organizational conversation we have is repeating things we've already said and having conversations day in and day out that are just the habit of discourse that we've gotten into.

Used to. And nothing fresh comes into [00:30:00] that because it isn't alive with emergency, it isn't alive with safety, it isn't pregnant with intimacy. And in that distance from each other, there's this gap of possibilities that the future is actually sitting in.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: And by the way, people hate it. People are bored.

They don't get anything done because it's, it's organizations as theater, right, as opposed to actual craft, the craft of being together, of creating new solutions together. It requires a different way of engaging with one another and a different trust in ourselves and each other in order to engage in this way.

Amy Elizabeth Fox: Yeah, I love what you're saying, and it takes me full circle back, Joel, to one of your first questions. Like, if we stop thinking of creating the cultural pillars of psychological safety or adaptive leadership or innovation as a set of technology or tools [00:31:00] that we can import into an organization, and we instead think We have to teach people the craft of connection.

We have to help people open their hearts. We have to help people heal enough to rewire genuine safety and belonging. Then we have real hope. I think

Jennifer Garvey Berger: I have, um, I know you're about to ask a question, Jill, but I just can't. Um, I teach about this, right? And I'll, I'll say at the end of a program, I'll say it's really important for us to as leaders to design for the creation of connection.

And very often there's somebody. Or many people in the room who say, Oh, isn't that kind of artificial? Like if we're designing for it, isn't it kind of fake? Does it, isn't that, that not what we want to do? I, I'm not even sure it can be done. Like, I don't know. I, I just, this whole idea of like designing. For connection, just, it leaves me cold.

[00:32:00] And I say, it's fair, it's a, it's a fair point. How many of you feel deeply connected to other people in this room? And all their hands go up, like, deeply connected. Absolutely. How many of you feel, like, deeply seen by other people? All the hands go up. Deeply seen. I said, I believe in designing for connection.

Can you tell? Like, can you tell that this is what happened for you? And suddenly they have this felt experience of, oh. It's not only possible, it's kind of delicious. It, they learn a ton about other things. It's not like we sat around and eye gazed for three days, right? They learned a lot, they, they practiced a lot of other things.

They had meetings, you know, they, they worked on their, their business challenges. But all the while, they were kind of falling in love with each other. And the more in love with each other they fell, the more creative they got. The, the more their business challenges began to [00:33:00] lighten, the more innovative their solutions became, the more brave they got.

That's a pretty nice outcome. It's pretty, pretty nice if we could just sort of fold that in, uh, and see how we could change what happens in organizations.

Amy Elizabeth Fox: I love the move, uh, movement from a contrivance to a lusciousness that you just described.

Yeah, it's a really powerful case, um, as you both speak of, of the necessity for this and the love as an intelligence, you know, it's, it's, uh, as an evolutionary current, you know, that, um, actually we can't not tap into that right now, you know, as, as we feel the dearth of love and the isolation that we're all ensconced within.

I'm curious, therefore, how you feel in a way you're alluding to this, but do you find the leaders that you work with are hungry and [00:34:00] open to this idea of love as, as something to design in, you know, to, I love that idea, Jennifer, of like, yeah, you can't, it's just a nice idea. You actually have to practice it, you know, design it in.

Are you finding leaders are are actually hungry for this. And do you know, do you know leaders who are actually doing this, applying this and seeing the consequences?

Amy Elizabeth Fox: Yeah. I mean, maybe I'll take the second one and Jen, you can take the first one if you want. Um, I, I don't know that leaders are self consciously hungry for this when they walk in the door to a.

Leadership experience. But exactly as Jen said, once they have had the experience, they hold it as very precious and they very easily understand that it's the missing X factor inside their workplaces. Um, so it's a thing that people treasure, but only after you've sort of soak them in the benefit of the gift of it, I would, I would say, because mostly we've been taught to be very walled off and protective and people come in in a bit of a [00:35:00] hardened state and in a cynical state and in a defensive posture.

So you have to melt all of that in order for people to really be honest about their yearning and to be receptive and ripe for that kind of profound connection. However, thousands of leaders that have walked through Jen's door and my door Do that melting process and leave saying it was the most significant professional experience of their lives and it changes them forever.

It's once you have a felt sense of this, it's you can never forget it. There's no going back to reasserting the wall. So then you become homeopathic in every organization, every team that you participate in. to the cultural deadness that you walk into because your heart is more open and you can extend your field in that way.

Um, and there are organizations that are, that are really putting, I think, enormous amount of effort into building these cords of connection and genuine teaming and genuine intimacy and particularly organizations where they have a kind of love for their customer. [00:36:00] Um, and so love is part of the ingredient of their secret sauce as an organization, whether that's a consumer goods company or a pharmaceutical company or a consulting company where they really want to extend themselves to the people they serve, then this becomes a very natural cultural pillar, I would say.

Jen, what would you add?

Jennifer Garvey Berger: Shouldn't all organizations be there? Right? I agree with you that that's a beautiful start. And wouldn't we hope that that would be true for all organizations everywhere? That there's already some kind of seed of love. Somebody loved something to start the organization. Right?

Somebody Loved some idea or some solution or, um, some hope for things to be different. And so there is this spark of, of love, of generativity, of passion at the [00:37:00] beginning of organizational stories and. If you can nurture that, it is an energy force that is extraordinary.

Amy Elizabeth Fox: I love the connection you just made between not just relational love and interpersonal love, but love for a shared purpose or love for the world in undertaking something of service together.

That's a whole other dimension of what we've been talking about that's very precious too.

I'm just remembering. Uh, George Washington Carver, who said what you love will reveal its depths to you and speaks to me of, yeah, so much of what we're talking about. And just the quick story on him was he, he, he like grew up on a slave plantation and they would bring, they would, everyone would bring their plants to him that weren't doing very well.

And, uh, he was a young child and they would leave their plants with him and they would come back like a week later and their plants will be thriving. And, uh, they were like, what are you doing to our plants? And he said, I just, I love the plants. [00:38:00] I give them attention and, and they reveal themselves to me.

And he went on to interestingly make, he invented like, um. Hundreds of different things from peanuts. I don't know why you go into peanuts, but, um, so yeah, this idea of, of like the revelation that can occur and everything that's so meaningful and deeply human about that is, is very touching.

Amy Elizabeth Fox: Who puts me in mind is one of the phenomenon that I see in these programs is that somewhere in midweek, somebody who hasn't written a poem for 20 years will write a poem, or somebody who hasn't told a certain story for a long time will share something that's very precious in their life story and that I love what you said, like the patience and the curiosity, the deep fascination with one another that allows more of the facets of who we are.

That all have [00:39:00] seeds of contribution inside them to reveal themselves. That's, that's part of the pandemic of superficiality. It isn't just that we're walled off. It's that we don't know each other in our full dimensionality. I just love what you said, Joel.

Um, I have a final question, which is, um, maybe a question that, um, You might unanswer, but, um, well, what invitation or suggestions would you make to people listening to this, who are touched by what we're sharing, what you're sharing and feel the call to, to towards love and how to bring that in, how to design, uh, practices around love in their organizations or coaches who want to bring it in.

maybe explicitly in the coaching work they do, if that even is the way to bring it in. I don't know if there are explicit invitations or practices you want to share. [00:40:00]

Amy Elizabeth Fox: Jen, you want to take

Jennifer Garvey Berger: it? Yeah, sure. Um, yeah, I, I think as we are I, I think as we are designing anything in an organization, we can think how at the end of this thing, coaching session, uh, team meeting, um, strategy session, uh, weekly check in, right?

Like, there, there really is no structure that can't be aided by something that helps people connect with each other. Uh, and, and I think basically all we're looking for is can I make the conditions for you to disclose something and for me to receive that? That's all. That's everything. Can, can, can you be visible and can I be seen?

Can I be seeing you? Right? Can we each take turns with this, uh, dance of I'll be [00:41:00] visible if you see me. Oh, I'll see you if you're visible. Right? Like that's the dance. And that dance can be in a check in question that gives people a chance to actually engage with each other. That dance, we're talking about that it takes time and slowing down.

I think you can do it in five minutes at the beginning of a meeting. It can be in a. Uh, in, in a conversation where we ask a question, you say your answer for five minutes, I listen to you without saying anything for five minutes, then I say my answer for five minutes, you listen to me without saying anything there.

That's 10 minutes we just invested and I didn't need any skills at all except to not check my phone. Right? Like that's the only skill I needed during that experience to speak and not check my phone. But to be actually present and available to you and people. Walk away from that, and they're like, Oh, our relationship is transformed.

Our relationship, which has been tense and difficult for the last eight [00:42:00] years that we have worked together, ten minutes, and suddenly I have compassion for you, I see something in you. I mean, it really is such a low hanging organizational fruit. I am gobsmacked that organizations aren't saying Oh, wow.

This increases wellness, creativity, it decreases loneliness, people will come to work more often, people will actually be more loyal to their job. I mean, like, the, the constellation of goodness available to us requires only our thinking before I have this human engagement. How might I deepen my connection?

How might the other people around me deepen their connection to one another? In my company, how might I devote 4 or 5 [00:43:00] percent of my time to that activity and see what happens?

Amy Elizabeth Fox: Oh, I so love that answer. Maybe I'll just add to the repertoire if that's okay. I think as a practitioner, it's on us to Develop a more and more loving relationship with all the fractured and fragmented parts of ourselves.

That's the first practice I would say. So that we can bring that same quality of understanding, of kindness, of tenderness to the leaders that we coach and that we work with. I think a second thing is to change the questions that we ask somebody we're coaching so that you orient them towards being custodians of this connection.

So questions like, is anyone on your team in trouble right now? Does anyone on your team need your help right now? Is anybody going through a significant life event right now? When was the last time that you thanked the people on your team and how did you do it? Um, what are you going through and how have you shared it?[00:44:00]

Um, you just start to talk the language of love as if that's relevant to a business conversation. Um, and you don't ever have to use the L word, although I love to. Um, you just start pointing their attention towards gestures of relatedness. That would be another thing I might say. Um, and then you can start to ask people on a team, How do you repair a relationship when there's a breakdown?

How do you welcome and manage conflict? How do you deal with it when somebody's really in a reactive Place and they're really triggered and to build the capabilities of mature relatedness into the ways that you do team coaching so that you're actually imparting to people not just the invitation, but the capabilities to be intimate and successfully intimate with each other.

Those would be a few add additions. I might bring.

Yeah, thank you to each of you. I don't know if there's anything you want to add. Uh, as we come to a close, I think we've [00:45:00] said, maybe

Amy Elizabeth Fox: just, maybe just one, Joel, both Jack and I have the privilege of leading with some of our close friends, organizations, and in both cases, our organizations operate out of this quality of love.

In how they serve their clients, but also how they operate as communities of friendship, and how they reach beyond the obvious boundaries of their organizational structures to build affiliations and associations with seeming competitors that are built in generosity and love. We do it gratefully for over a decade with one another, but we do it more widely.

And I think that sort of cross boundary consortium Ecosystem building is also part of the way that this business will get rewired, that if people go beyond just thinking self interest and profit and think how can we be a community of practice across the boundaries of seeming forms, um, in love and in care and in mutuality, um, then we also rewire the kind of sick, um, [00:46:00] Profit centric, driven, and um, isolationist mentality that's costing us so much on the planet right now.

So I just, I really honor you, Janice, for that facet of your pioneering work, and I cherish the way that we dance that with each other and also with you, Joel, so it just seems like an important thing to name also. Yeah,

Jennifer Garvey Berger: I think, I, I love this, Amy. Um, and Joel, I love you, that you're hosting this conversation.

Uh, it, If we are moving through the world with a kind of generosity and care, uh, if everybody listening to this thinks, oh, how could I How could I approach this with just a little bit more generosity and care than I was feeling before I heard this podcast? Right? I know, Joel, the heart of your work is here.

Amy, the heart of your work is here. The heart of my work is [00:47:00] here. And we can build profitable, successful, Excellent organizations. I think each of us stands for excellence, for quality, for innovation. We, we can get the stuff that most people are kind of driven to get, uh, as a byproduct of, uh, an organization that's, that's built around, that has as its central animating force, this idea of generosity, care, um, and, and a sense of the larger us that we are serving.

And the other things, I, I truly believe, I don't want this to sound like a Pollyanna thing. I've been practicing this in my own life for decades. And I truly believe that when we practice this in our own lives, and in our own businesses, we [00:48:00] see the proof that this actually delivers so much more than this competitive, um, perfectionistic, uh, polished, hidden, armored, busy, busy, busy life that we, that we tend to think is what like success looks like.

I think if we could redesign this idea of success, I just think the possibilities are, are boundless.

Amy Elizabeth Fox: I just adore you, Jennifer Garvey Berger. And I'm going to add one thing to what you said. Just my Pollyannish voice. I think the things we currently think are impossible to solve are impossible to solve because we are not webbed together in this interdependent mutual field.

And that we will discover that the threshold of what's possible literally moves when we start to weave ourselves into this unified field of love. I, I really believe that the intractable [00:49:00] problems will dissolve in the heat of that love.

Yeah. Wow. And it's palpable here right now, you know, I can feel that sense of, uh, the, the interconnection and, and the felt sense of intimacy and shared, shared purpose.

And I just want to thank each of you for this. It's really, really been a potent invitation into, into the frequency of love for me. So yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Amy and Jennifer.

Amy Elizabeth Fox: Utterly precious. Yeah. Thank you,

Jennifer Garvey Berger: Joel. Thanks so much, Jill. Thanks, Amy. You

Amy Elizabeth Fox: too, Jen. Happy Holidays, everybody.

Thanks for listening to the podcast.

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