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Welcome to the Healing Our Politics Podcast!
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Guests:
Lisa Witter is the Co-Founder of Apolitical, a certified B Corp, and the Apolitical Foundation, which are collectively the largest trainers of public servants in the world. They have trained over 200,000 leaders in over 160 countries and focused on improving government effectiveness through sharing policy ideas, peer connections, and leadership training. A key advocate for more inclusive governance, Lisa’s work has spanned the intersections of politics, social innovation, and gender equality. She has also served on the World Economic Forum’s Council on Agile Governance.
Lisa Witter is the Co-Founder of Apolitical, a certified B Corp, and the Apolitical Foundation, which are collectively the largest trainers of public servants in the world. They have trained over 200,000 leaders in over 160 countries and focused on improving government effectiveness through sharing policy ideas, peer connections, and leadership training. A key advocate for more inclusive governance, Lisa’s work has spanned the intersections of politics, social innovation, and gender equality. She has also served on the World Economic Forum’s Council on Agile Governance.
Kimberly McArthur is a senior researcher and strategist at the Apolitical Foundation, focusing on democratic innovation and political well-being. Through her research, she addresses the mental well-being challenges faced by politicians globally and works on fostering healthier political systems. Her extensive psychology and political science background allows her to analyze the intersection between leadership and mental health, contributing to global conversations on how leaders can best serve their communities without compromising their mental health.
About the Episode: In this episode, Lisa Witter and Kimberly McArthur discuss the critical underpinnings of political leadership and well-being, emphasizing the importance of creating a political environment that nurtures mental health for leaders and politicians. The conversation dives into how poor mental health among politicians can destabilize democracy, leading to burnout, harassment, and declining civic participation. Lisa and Kimberly share their groundbreaking research on mental well-being in politics and how a shift towards more inclusive, supportive political structures is urgently needed. The episode also explores actionable steps public leaders can take to prioritize well-being, break down barriers like cynicism, and adopt a leadership style rooted in gratitude, community, and joy.
Key Topics Discussed:
· [00:01:52] Guest into
· [00:03:59] Episode intro
· [00:06:20] What is Apolitical Co / Foundation
· [00:10:26] Kim loves the struggle
· [00:11:00] Be kind, work hard, have fun!
· [00:12:13] “Citizenship” - what is it to you?
· [00:15:32] Where to apply your service?
· [00:17:16] Kim - Citizen of the world
· [00:19:57] Motivation for public service
· [00:23:49] Hiring for curiosity + Courage
· [00:27:10] The art of iterative organization building
· [00:29:43] To fix things, we must get “transformational”
· [00:31:23] “It’s hard to un-swallow the pill of cynicism”
· [00:32:14] Build up > tear down
· [00:33:50] Two types of folks…
· [00:37:58] Mental wellbeing in leadership
· [00:39:25] Blueprint: World-class teams doing impossible things
· [00:41:05] Win-win-win dynamics
· [00:44:35] Generous, kind, curious FTW!
· [00:48:40] The feeling of kindness
· [00:48:18] Nice vs. kind (there’s a right answer)
· [00:51:23] “Clairity is kind”
· [00:52:21] SSG (succinct, specific, generous)
· [00:52:50] Investment deficit: Inner development
· [01:07:08] Importance of Representation
· [01:09:40] “Desertification” of our politics
· [01:11:35] Sponsors: ELC Foundation & Donors
· [01:15:03] Mere Mortals Report
· [01:16:38] The sad state of Politician’s well being
· [01:19:00] Harassment
· [01:19:15] Overwork and underpay
· [01:22:24] Psychological violence
· [01:23:58] Which leader’s wellbeing is affected?
· [01:26:49] Varying approaches to wellbeing internationally
· [01:30:24] “Disagree, and be human about it.”
· [01:32:59] Love letters to politicians
· [01:36:08] Common contributors to low wellbeing
· [01:39:44] Elected training deficit
· [01:42:16] Respect Required: New public comment policy
· [01:46:09] Is “public service” the right frame?
· [01:48:14] Effective tools leaders are using
· [01:50:24] Awareness to action
· [01:54:26] Apolitical reports and toolkits
· [01:57:24] University wellbeing studies
· [01:58:03] How citizens can support politician’s wellbeing
· [02:00:35] Resources for citizen learning
· [02:01:19] Media wellbeing
· [02:01:44] Better journalism resources
· [02:03:04] Lisa’s wellbeing practices
· [02:06:15] Kim’s wellbeing practices
· [02:07:51] Closing Question: People are doing their best (Lisa)
· [02:07:51] Closing Question: Stay hopeful (Kim)
Key References and Resources Mentioned:
· [00:31:23] Bill Moyers
· [00:51:23] “Clairity is kind”; Coach Stephen McGhee
· [01:46:09] Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything Is All of Us; Jon Allexander
· [01:54:26] Apolitical Trilblazer organizations and services
· [01:57:24] Brennan Center for Justice local elected officials survey
· [01:57:24] National Leauge of Cities Report: On the Frontlines of Todays Cities: Trauma, Challenges, and Solutions
· [01:57:24] University of San Diego California Threats and Harassment Initiative & Studies
· [02:03:04] Demon Copperhead: A Novel; Barbara Kingsolver
· [02:07:51] Thinking Fast and Slow; Daniel Kahneman
Where to Find Lisa + Kim:
· LinkedIn
· Twitter
· LinkedIn
Where to Find Host Skippy Mesirow:
· Receive Support at the Elected Leaders Collective
· Follow on Instagram www.instagam.com/skippymesirow
· Book a free Clarity Call to see if coaching is right for you
Episode Sponsor:
Helping You Heal Our Politics
The Elected Leaders Collective (ELC) organization is the leading US-based provider of mental well-being training for public servants, conducted by public servants and the world's best mental health and human optimization professionals. With ELC Training, you will learn to rise above and become the political healer you were meant to be, improving your well-being in the process.
Contact the HOP Team:
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Creators & Guests
Host
Skippy Mesirow
Skippy Mesirow is a prominent leader, certified Master Coach, and founder of the Elected Leaders Collective (ELC) and ELC Foundation. ELC leads the US in mental health and well-being training for public servants, recognized in The Apolitical Foundation's Mere Mortals report, and named as one of 26 worldwide political well-being "Trailblazer Organizations." A transformational leader in political innovation and wellness, Skippy serves on Gov. Polis’s Natural Medicine Advisory. Skippy’s work has been featured in numerous podcasts and publications, as well as main-stage speaking engagements for organizations NLC, YEO, CML, MT2030, Bridging Divides, and Fulcrum, highlighting his significant contributions to mental health, community, and policy reform. Alongside his professional achievements, Skippy lives in Aspen, CO. with his partner Jamie where he enjoys running ultra-marathons, road biking, motorcycling, international travel, culinary arts, Burning Man, and lifelong learning.
Producer
Aaron Calafato
Aaron’s stories are currently heard by millions around the globe on his award-winning Podcast 7 Minute Stories and on YouTube. Aaron is a co-host of Glassdoor's new podcast (The Lonely Office) and serves as a podcast consultant for some of the fastest-growing companies in the world.
Editor
Jesse Link
Jesse is a strategy, research and partnership consultant and podcast enthusiast. A 2x founder, former Goldman Sachs Vice President and advisor to 25+ businesses, Jesse brings a unique and diverse background to HoP, helping to elevate the range, depth and perspective of HoP's conversations and strategy.
What is Healing Our Politics?
Hello,
I’m Skippy Mesirow, host of “Healing Our Politics,” the show that shows you, the heart-centered public servants and political leaders, how to heal our politics by starting with the human in the mirror.
Healing Our Politics, “HOP,” is a first-of-its-kind show that provides tools and practices for mental well-being, health, and balance, specifically for public servants so we can do good by feeling good and safe in our jobs.
HOP brings together experts, scientists, doctors, thought leaders, healers, and coaches to share their insights in practical, tactical, actionable ways specifically tailored to the public service experience for you to test and implement with yourself and your teams. Episodes feature intimate conversations with global leaders about their self-care practices and personal challenges, providing insights for a more holistic, connected approach to leadership. Whether you're a Mayor, teacher, police officer, or staffer, this podcast will guide you to be the best version of yourself in service to yourself and the world!
Sign up for our once-per-month Leader’s Handbook newsletter to receive an actionable toolkit of how-to guides on topics discussed on the podcast that month to test and implement in your life and with your team: https://leadershandbook.substack.com/
Hello. My name is Skippy Mesereau, coach, former elected official, and lifetime public servant. Welcome to Healing Our Politics, The show that shows you, the heart centered public servant and political leader, how to heal our politics by starting with the human in the mirror. It is my job to sit down or stand up with the best experts in all areas of human development, thought leaders, coaches, therapists, authors, scientists, and more, to take the best of what they have learned and translate it specifically for the public service experience, providing you actionable, practical, tactical tools that you can test out today in your life and with your teens. I will also talk to leaders across the globe with a self care practice, getting to know them at a deeply human and personal level so that you can learn from their challenges and journey.
Speaker 1:Warning. This is a post partisan space. Yes. I have a bias. You have a bias.
Speaker 1:We all have a bias. Everybody gets a bias. And I will be stripping out all of the unconscious cues of bias from this space. No politics, partisanship, or policy here because well-being belongs to all of us, and we will all be better served if every human in leadership, regardless of party, ideology, race, or geography, are happier, healthier, and more connected. This show is about resourcing you, the human doing leadership, and trusting you to make up your own damn mind about what to do with it and what's best for your community.
Speaker 1:So as always, with love, here we go. Welcome to the Healing Our Politics podcast. The show that shows you, the heart centered leader, how to heal our politics by starting with that human in the mirror. And in this episode today, you get a 2 for. This is our 1st three way episode as I sit down with experts in training public servants.
Speaker 1:That's you, Lisa Witter and Kimberly McArthur. Honestly, there is too much to share about these 2 remarkable women. So let me start with the organizational highlights. Apolitical, a certified B Corp, and the Apolitical Foundation are collectively the largest trainers of public servants in the world. They have trained over 200,000 leaders in over a 160 countries.
Speaker 1:Their newsletter reaches fully 4.9 percent of global elected officials. The goal is 10%. Their mission is to be a place where public servants learn and connect with a vision of a world where political leaders are one of the most respected roles in society. And doesn't that sound nice to you? It certainly lands with me.
Speaker 1:As authors of the Mere Mortals Report, The State of Politicians Well-being and Why It Matters, Apolitical spent a year studying well-being among elected officials across the globe and are leading the world in convening resources, testing new approaches, and doing the work to build structures and partnerships to support you. So you'll want to listen up in this one. Individually, these women are deeply accomplished, but you will have to pick that up in the episode, lest this turn into an hour long introduction on its own. Suffice it to say that I am wildly honored to share space with these 2 wonderful, powerful women doing incredible work to uplift other women and society broadly. In this episode, we dig into, well, just about everything.
Speaker 1:This is a wide ranging one, folks. Where government is now and why it's not working, the pillars of effective political leadership, global citizenship, the choice to serve internationally, and how to think about if serving beyond borders is right for you, approaches to hiring, balancing teams and organizational help, non zero sum thinking, how to grow your work through platforming and supporting others. Why women's justice is universal justice frameworks for effective office communication. The distinctions between nice and kind or SSGs succinct, specific, generous, for instance. And of course, we dig into the mere mortals report using the data to tease out what leaders across the globe are feeling.
Speaker 1:Trust me, you're not alone, folks. The prevalence of challenges, which groups are most heavily affected and why, what the contributing factors are to these experiences, and what we can do about shifting our experience to become better, healthier, happier, more effective leaders together. And doesn't that sound nice? So I hope you enjoy this inspiring, tactical, and wide ranging conversation with Lisa Witter and Kimberly MacArthur. 1st and foremost, Kimberly.
Speaker 1:Lisa, thank you so much for being here on the Healing Our Politics podcast, the show that shows you, the heart centered leader. In this case, this is both of you, how to heal our politics by starting with the human in the mirror. And I immediately notice in you guys getting on the Zoom. The audience can't see this, but the style that you've come prepared for a podcast, which has no video, is indicative of the level of preparation, the owning of yourself and journey, the willingness to step into what you believe is right for you, and the high degree of preparation, focus, and intention that I have seen you both layer through all of your work at apolitical and apolitical foundation. And it's just such an honor to have you here.
Speaker 1:So thank you for your time.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Kami.
Speaker 1:I wanna share more about the 2 of you and sort of how you found your way here. But before we do that, I wanna give the audience an opportunity to understand what apolitical and the apolitical foundation are. And I know humility is central to your brand, so I want to give you the opportunity to brag a little bit. How would you describe a political the apolitical foundation and what you guys do?
Speaker 3:Thanks to the audience for listening to this. It was really important for Kim and I to be together. I think a lot, Skippy, about how you invite leadership and thinking about shared leadership and facilitative leadership, which I hope we can get into, but so I'll start with the company. So if we step back a little bit, dear friend, as you know, I personally have been a really passionate person around governance and freedom and democracy, and I've been thinking a lot about where we're at and where we need to go. Basically, we have 18th century politics, 19th century governance models, 20th century technology with 21st and even 22nd century challenges and opportunity.
Speaker 3:And so first and foremost, we thought about how do you sort of create and have a democracy flywheel functioning where citizens give power to the politicians and become the politicians. The politicians then deliver the mandate to the civil servants, the governance body, and then with the citizens, help deliver on that Democratic flywheel. And so first thing we did is set up a for profit company called Apolitical, which is a b corporation. It's, the largest network of public servants in the world. We work with a 170 governments around the world, and our mission is to help governments and public servants serve the people on the planet for the 21st century, and we do that through peer to peer learning.
Speaker 3:So, basically, we're building the gov graph when it comes to governance and public policy. But I think what's really interesting about our model is that we wanted to be an impact everyday company, so we didn't wanna wait to have an exit to be impactful. We built an impact into our model everyday. We've also given stock to the foundation from the company from the very beginning, so we're not waiting for just some philanthropic moment. We're doing the foundational work right now.
Speaker 3:So, Kimberly, over to you.
Speaker 2:Thanks. Yeah. So the foundation works on the political side of this flywheel that Lisa mentioned. So whereas apolitical is very much focused on public servants and the bureaucrats, The foundation was really set up, and it was set up pretty soon after, Apolitical, the company, as a nonprofit to focus on political leadership and think about what are the political leadership skills that our leaders should have, and who are they? Who are the people that are running for office?
Speaker 2:And how do we get better political leaders? What does better even mean? And how do we do that sort of around the world? Because this is a a global issue, lower levels of trust in politicians all around the world, those sorts of things. And I guess to Lisa's point, how do we do that in a really timely kind of immediate way?
Speaker 2:We can't wait for policies to be made, to go through the process, to then be enacted maybe, but then also to be maybe done away with because of a change of government. So we need to work on all aspects of that flywheel to really make a difference.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I think I've heard, and correct me if this is wrong, that one of the initial guidepost was to positively impact 10% of the global population of elected officials in the world. Is that still the guidepost?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. At any given point, there are 6150000 elected officials. So 10% you can do the math. But what's really interesting about that is there are only 45,000 members of parliament around the world.
Speaker 3:I wouldn't even fill a big US football stadium. And there are, in major cities, around 300 mayors that sort of are sort of leading populations at the local level. So if any of you are in tech, you think about addressable market size. This is an addressable market size from the political point of view.
Speaker 1:And your guys' newsletter is over a quarter 1000000 people now. Is that true?
Speaker 3:Our membership at apolitical is more than 270,000 public servants around the world. That's right.
Speaker 1:I was just running the math. Right? And the numbers, it sounds like, have changed slightly since I read them, but at 6,500,000,650 k is 10%. You're at 260k in your newsletter already. That's remarkable.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We have a lot of work to go, and we're really excited. I'm actually excited by the struggle. I like that it's so hard. I love the real hard grindy part about building things.
Speaker 3:Like, that gives me pleasure.
Speaker 2:And I think give yourself credit, Lisa. I think you do know how to have joy in the moments where we do succeed. But I think for both of us, we're really drawn to that challenge. I don't think we would be satisfied with our work if it was easy.
Speaker 1:Lisa, I've heard you talk about I don't know if family motto is the right word, but there's sort of a 3 part statement of how to approach life. Can you share that?
Speaker 3:Yeah. In our entryway, where all of the smelly shoes from my teenage boys are now, and it is like a you have to walk through it and, like, yeah. It's cool. They're alive. We have a mirror.
Speaker 3:And on the mirror backwards, when you look at yourself in the mirror on the way out, it says be kind, work hard, and have fun. And that's really, really what we want the kids to go out every day and ourselves, to be kind, work hard, and have fun, and to look yourself in the mirror to make that dedication every single day.
Speaker 1:It's interesting. I have a tattoo on my side that is my takeaway from my grandfather who was really, like, the 1 well, not the one. 1 of 2 people in my family that I really got to look up to and idolize. I grew up with my grandparents, and the tattoo says aspire, work, live. And the intention behind those words is really identical.
Speaker 1:Right? It's like find the challenging task, do the thing that people say you can't do, work really hard, and make sure to, like, live and enjoy it along the way. And I just really connected with that when I read it.
Speaker 2:Skippy, I can't help but notice. Do you have Citizen tattooed on your
Speaker 1:I do. Wow. I sure do.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Citizen, full stop as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Full stop is what we call period in Australia.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Sorry. But there is. Thanks for translating.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Wow. The reason I'm doing the wow. We are not living in our countries now.
Speaker 1:It's one of the things I really wanna talk about.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's really and I think both of us have really interesting ideas about what identity means when you're not living at home. What does home mean? So when I meet people who go all in for their country, it's a fascinating thing. Right?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. It's a real I don't know what it is. It's something that's anathema to an Australian, for example, I think, unless it's to do with sport, and then it's completely fine.
Speaker 1:An anathema to be so committed to the place?
Speaker 2:Yeah. To be proud, to big yourself up, or big up the place you're from. That's very it's called I guess everyone calls it tall poppy syndrome. Like, if you grow too tall, you'll get cut down.
Speaker 1:So I am super curious about this. What was it like to make the decision to leave your home country? And how does that or does that not relate to your work at apolitical? Lisa, for instance, I've heard you talk about some interest, possibly one day of running for office, but that you would only do it in Washington. So I'm curious about that.
Speaker 3:It's really interesting. I was born on July 5th. My mother went into labor with me at a demolition derby on July 4th at Evergreen Speedway, where my uncle had a demolition car. So if you're listening and you don't want a demolition derby, it's basically it's like you take cars and you crash into each other until you're the last one standing. And that was my entry.
Speaker 3:Like, I came in literally with a bang.
Speaker 1:That wasn't the pit crew you were part of because you're also in a pit crew.
Speaker 3:I did pit crew later. I worked in a pit crew later. There's a there's a lot of a lot of racing and banger up, but I being born on the 4th, 5th July, I kinda always thought the holiday was for me. You know, there were a lot of fireworks, but I also had this crazy sense of patriotism. And a lot of the same way, Skippy, you were talking about, it was more about the idea than the particular politics, this notion of all of us coming together, the imperfect place, the pursuit of happiness.
Speaker 3:And for years, I was the Statue of Liberty in the 4th July. For Halloween or different places, I was in the 4th July parade. So I had this very sense strong sense of being an American in the most it felt inclusive to me, but it just was a particular way. And when I left, I spent a year abroad in college, came back, and I'm very involved in American politics. And I went to Whistler in my mid twenties, met this hot guy skiing, and 26 laters were still together.
Speaker 3:And he's German. And when we came to Berlin 13 years ago, it was gonna be for a year or so our kids could have a little bit of experience living abroad, and we've stayed. And I'm definitely in the process of trying to understand what not living at home means. What is home anymore? And I wouldn't run anywhere but Washington state.
Speaker 1:I don't need to be a politician to feel secure and full as
Speaker 3:a person, but I'm still really politician. Even despite how hard it is right now, I'm still really drawn to it.
Speaker 1:If I look at your website, it seems like, if I'm wrong, please correct me. It seems like there's less going on in the USA than in other parts of the world. Europe, in particular, Africa, Asia, Middle East seem to be the center of gravity and descending order. Do you feel any kind of way about not touching your home country slash market as much as other places?
Speaker 3:Well, for the company, there's a lot going on in the US. I'd say the US is our 3rd largest market, although, proportionally, it's it's a space we're gonna do a lot more work in. But on the on the foundation side, politically, you're right that we've spent less time in the US, and there's a couple reasons for that. One is there's a lot going on already in the US. You know, I think entrepreneurship and you intersect it with whatever that is, political entrepreneurship is what I call it, has been sort of alive and well in America maybe since the very beginning.
Speaker 3:That's kind of what we do. I cofounded what we now call a political leadership incubator 30 years ago, and it's up and running. And then that model went to something called Emerge in America, which is for women. And so I feel like I've touched and been part of that. There's more innovation and more scale to do, and we would love to work with more people in the US.
Speaker 3:This work that we're doing in the mental well-being space, which I'm sure Kim will talk about, we wanna touch back on the US. So it's more that there's a lot going on there already, and what we're trying to do is be responsive to extraordinary people who find us in different parts around the world and help them where there's less kind of support, philanthropy, innovation, and politics in these particular models.
Speaker 1:And then, Kimberly, you mentioned that having sort of a deep connection or soul connection, not soul, s o u l, but singular, to country in Australia from a political perspective is less common, and yet you seem to have really dedicated your life early on to public service. And so I wonder about your orientation to that. Was it AUS centric for you, or did you develop a citizen of the world type mentality from a young age? And if so, how?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think I developed a citizen of the world type mentality rather than it being in any way overtly political or directed towards politics. I think I come from fittingly quite an apolitical family. So that was really never something that was talked about or, you know, that came up in my home life. But I think the inspiration for me on that is is my dad, who is just the most wonderful person he kind of raised me.
Speaker 2:He was my mom and my dad from 16. So my mom sadly passed away. But he was this world traveler, hippie type that went all over the world when he was a young man and just always regales us with his stories of the different people that he met and the different ways of life. And I think that just gave him such an attitude and an openness to people that I always really admired, that he was really able to talk to anyone and kind of appreciate and accept anyone because I think he'd had all of these experiences around the world when he was young. So I always wanted to do that as well, and I did.
Speaker 2:I I traveled a lot when I was after high school, during university. I mean, I took 7 years to finish university because I was always off traveling and taking breaks.
Speaker 1:Australian of you.
Speaker 2:It's very Australian. And for me, moving was not because I didn't like Australia. I didn't think that it had so many great things going for it, and I do love Australia. But I always liked Australia more until I got to Berlin, and I thought, actually, this somehow feels like a place that I like more than my hometown or or Sydney where I was living. You know, this feels like home.
Speaker 2:So that was what drew me to live overseas was just that feeling more than a rejection of Australia or those sorts of things. But I have to be honest, I was working as a lawyer in commercial litigation when I was in Australia. And I think I was trying to escape that as well because that was not a career path that I should have ever started, but I didn't wanna continue down. So for me, it was a real pause and time to reconsider what I wanted to do with my life.
Speaker 1:What was it that drove each of you into a life of service, public service? And when did you decide to actually do it? I think a lot of people are wanting to make a difference, but the truth is when you look at that option objectively, it generally doesn't look like a particularly secure bank account. There's generally not a very clear path. I mean, they say 5 different projects you've had to start.
Speaker 1:Like most people, starting one project would be challenging. So, yeah, how did you guys find your way into that?
Speaker 2:For me, I think I've always been really interested in fixing things. So for me, it came from this idea of of trying to fix things. And so I think that's why I initially became a lawyer, because that to me seems like a very obvious way to essentially help people fix things. You know, you you help them win their civil litigation or win their case, but I was quite disillusioned with that. So then I when I moved to Berlin, I was studying, and I went and worked in first in Haiti and then in Burundi in the nonprofit space and was really focused on sort of training and thinking about how we can use education to help people and to fix things, how you can improve people's lives that way.
Speaker 2:And then I came back to Berlin and then met Lisa and had this opportunity to work with Apolitical. And it just made me realize that if you really want to fix things, which I've always been drawn to, the best, most effective way to do that is through government and through politics because it has then the ability to scale, and it has real power in it then. I'm so in awe of people who stick up their hand to go into politics because they wanna fix things generally. In our experience, the people that we talk to and meet, that's why they do it. And so being able to support them and work with them is just really rewarding.
Speaker 1:Why Haiti, and what were you doing there? And I I asked that because it's relatable to me. I've spent time in Haiti. I've been down there a number of times. I've never plopped down and worked, but I've helped a number of projects from cousins and friends.
Speaker 1:I'm familiar with the landscape.
Speaker 2:Nothing too extraordinary. I followed a boy there to Haiti. So There's a big
Speaker 1:pattern amongst you ladies.
Speaker 2:My my boyfriend at the time got a job working with UNDP to the United Nations Development Program. And I decided because I love traveling and I love these experiences that I would go to, and I managed to get a job whilst I was there with an Irish nonprofit actually and worked with this wonderful Irish man who taught me a lot of different things. And I was there for 6, 7 months, and it was hard. It was really, really hard. It was such a difficult experience for me.
Speaker 2:We couldn't walk the streets. We had to live in a compound. You know, every time you went out, you had to lock the doors of your car. And I say that knowing that's incredibly privileged. I mean, I just can't imagine what it must be like being in Haiti right now, especially.
Speaker 2:But it made me realize that there are just so many different ways of living and so many different problems around the world that are extraordinarily difficult to address. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. And for anyone who's listening and unaware because of this election bias of the news, if you ever take for granted what government can bring, the small and large ways it improves our lives every day through its invisible functioning, please Google what's happening in Haiti right now with effectively the complete breakdown of all forms of government, and it's pretty terrifying.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Very scary.
Speaker 1:Lisa, when you were hiring Kimberly, I'm curious about not what Kimberly was doing in Haiti, but did the simple fact that she was a person who chose to go somewhere like that to assume those risks to do something unconventional, did that figure into your thought process about her fit for the organization?
Speaker 3:A 100% and more. I mean, I I'm gonna reveal my a little story, couple little stories about Kim, and I'm I'm so honored to be on this podcast with her. We've been working together, I think, 8 years now, and it's so fun to be in a duet with someone you respect so much. I was just reflecting on this theme that Kim and I have about following boys who then I hope grow up to be men. And I think it really comes from our deep love of life and our love of people.
Speaker 3:I think that's we we really share that in common, and and I think we do what we do because of love. But, anyway, at the time, I was running apolitical here in in Germany, cofounded the company, and I needed to hire someone. And what she didn't tell you about her history is she was also a tour guide in Berlin. And I love this background of, like, a former lawyer who, by the way, tried to defend someone. They were sued for not being funny.
Speaker 3:I just thought that was so funny. Someone who had worked outside.
Speaker 1:Sorry. Can we just pause and explain that very quickly?
Speaker 2:My one and only case that I was really truly proud of, I have to say, it was a a comedian, actually, who was sued for essentially not being funny enough, but legally for breach of contracts. Somehow the contract stated that he was going to be funny. We won. The other side lost. He managed to get a whole bunch of damages, and then he made his next, comedy show that he taught around about the lawsuit and about the case.
Speaker 3:So she had done this lawyer thing, stepped away from it, had this funny case. Then she had done this sort of work and other hard settings around the world. She had done tour guiding, and I was like, this person is just a curious, alive human being. I wanna be with curious, smart, alive human beings. And it's funny.
Speaker 3:She worked for the company, and then I moved over to the foundation, and she went and had a baby in the middle of that, beautiful Isabelle, who is just a firecracker of a creature. I mean, this girl, oh my god. She's fierce. And right as I was moving over, I gave Kim a call while she was on maternity leave, and Kim swears that I was going to fire her. And instead, I said, I'm gonna start this new thing.
Speaker 3:Will you please be my chief operating officer? And what did you say, Kim?
Speaker 2:I said, hell no. No. I didn't. I said yes. Absolutely.
Speaker 2:I'll go anywhere with you, Lisa. But I did genuinely think you were gonna fire me, I have to say. It was the middle of COVID. We were in lockdown. I had a, what, 6 months old or something.
Speaker 2:And a lot of the work that Lisa and I had done together at apolitical was actually this sort of deep engagement with people by running events and workshops, where we would bring together people from inside government, people from outside government to essentially work together on a particularly tricky policy topic. So early childhood development or clean air or mental well-being, we were doing it even back then. And I just thought, oh, that's obviously dried up now. So I didn't know what was going on, but I'm very glad it turned out the way it did.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Me too. It's interesting to talk about the transition of adding the additional vehicle of the foundation. And I was wondering if you could kind of take us back through the iterative process. Really, Lisa, they started with you when you're 25.
Speaker 1:Am I doing that math right? Yeah. So you started 5 individual organizations. And without getting too deep into each one, I'm imagining, knowing you and how you operate, that there were learnings along the way. But there are things that you can do within an organization to shift its focus, and then there are times when you really need to create something new in order to shift the focus.
Speaker 1:So can you kind of walk us through the chronology of those organizations, what they focused on, and then what you learned that caused you to go to the next phase, taking us up to but not into the addition of the foundation? Because we'll get into that a bit more deeply.
Speaker 3:One of the things I was thinking about, how bad at decision making I am, and what I mean by that is, like, I don't make decisions. Like, just it just becomes so clear that that's the next thing that needs to happen, and I really embody the feeling of it. Like, I don't I'm not one of these people who sits down and makes pros and cons lists. It's just clear to me. It's like these moments.
Speaker 3:Like, the the moment I decided to move to Berlin was set off by me being on my bicycle in New York City. I was riding my bike down 6th Avenue with heels and a skirt, which is what, like, almost every day. I tried to avoid pencil skirts. It doesn't work so well on on bicycles. And it was almost like this Newtonian apple moment.
Speaker 3:I'm not comparing myself to him, but don't mistake activity for progress.
Speaker 2:Because he wore
Speaker 1:a wig. It's totally different.
Speaker 3:Wig. Exactly. Maybe he wore heels. I don't know. But it was like, don't mistake activity for progress.
Speaker 3:And I knew at that time that I needed to kinda cocoon to rebuild, right, to get to this place where I wasn't just busy doing things. I was actually building things. So my point is it's very hard for me to, like, explain the process of these things because they're just so clear. But maybe let me just start off at home. So I came back from university, and a weird why in my life, I was either going to go teach English in Japan or go get a law degree, and my mom's like, you'll be a really bad lawyer.
Speaker 3:I was like, mom, how do you know I'll be a really bad lawyer? She's not a lawyer. She made toilet paper for 45 years. She's just I just have this feeling. And my mom had never has never done an intervention to tell me not to do something.
Speaker 3:Like so it's like, god. You gotta listen to your mom when your mom talks. And she's like, I just think you should come home. So I came home, and I started working, and I started getting involved in local politics because it's just it's so in me to be part of something bigger than myself and really triggered by my love of winning in sports and my sense of spirituality. If you love winning and helping people, you go into politics.
Speaker 3:And I realized at the time, I was working for a leadership training organization. We were doing deep transformational. We called it servant leadership at the time. Work at the Chamber of Commerce, and I was looking at what we were doing in politics locally in Washington state. And I realized we weren't doing transformational leadership work.
Speaker 3:We were getting people elected. And so it just made clear to me that, like, we've gotta fix this, and so we created this thing called Institute For Democratic Future. And then I got this strong sense, partially driven by a guy and this instinct, my the same guy. Well, first, I moved to DC around 2,000 to work for a bunch of NGOs, about a 150 women's organizations around the presidential, and decided to move back to California for a guy, the same guy that I'm still with and I met skiing. That worked out.
Speaker 3:Thank goodness. I thought, oh, we can replicate this model. That was the first time, Skippy, and a lot of people in the world talk about scale, scale, scale. I had never really thought about scale. Like, I wasn't trained to be an entrepreneur.
Speaker 3:I was I really wasn't trained to be anything. I just keep following my gut, and I was like, oh, how can we impact more people? That was what I thought scale was about. So we started Emerge California, which ended up doing a lot of scaling around the US. I've started many other things, and it was never that I wanted to be an entrepreneur.
Speaker 3:I just saw a need, opportunity, people, and I love doing things. Like, I love getting shit done. I love sort of solving problems. And so and I could see in starting apolitical I was having dinner with a guy in New York when I was running this company called Fenton, the first ever public interest strategy company. And this guy named Bill Moyers, who some of the American listeners may or may not know him, but he's, like, a legend of public media PBS.
Speaker 3:And he said something to me, and this was around maybe 2,006, said something like, once we swallow the pill of cynicism, it's very hard to unswallow that. We were talking about sort of our belief in our country, our belief in our politics. This is the US. And I thought, oh my god. There's so much to not be cynical about.
Speaker 3:There's so much that is working. The context we were talking about, so many places don't have any freedom, any rights. How do we build on our assets and not just tear down what is broken? That really triggered the beginnings of what then became this partnership with this extraordinary technology entrepreneur, a woman named Robin Scott, who's my cofounder at A Political, to really sort of what are the assets we have in government, and how do we build on the assets? How do we not tear everything down instead of build on what we have and fix things in between?
Speaker 3:So I I call myself an entrepreneur because I don't want else to call me, but I just listen to that instinct to follow opportunity and love hard work.
Speaker 1:How much of your success and when I say your success, I mean, the projects that you want to breathe into the world work, they're received in some way, do you think comes from that hell yes mentality? I asked that and I share that from the perspective of myself. I think where my insecurities or pathologies emerge is on the way to a hell yes. I have, like, a thousand little yeses. I, like, wildly overcomplicate things, and then I eventually narrow it down to what I probably could have predicted in the future because it's harder for me to discern in some ways what that is.
Speaker 1:And what I hear you saying, and correct me if I'm wrong, is like you don't struggle with that. You have a natural ability and probably cultivated through succession of successes, through evidence, ability to wait until something is, like, really pulling you. Do you think that that's critical to your series of successes?
Speaker 3:I'm gonna make a binary that might help prove a point. I'm kind of going through, a deep analysis of who I am and how I work right now. Like, every 10 years, I go through that. It's what brought me to Berlin. But I think there are kinda 2 types of people.
Speaker 3:There are people who make simple ideas and complicate them, and there are people who take complicated ideas and make them simple. And I am either because I'm not that bright or I'm just so focused on the inspiration and the opportunity that I first take complicated ideas and make them simple and shiny. I really can see okay. We don't have to figure out all the details now. That, we can figure out later.
Speaker 3:But if we have us shining toward the same light, going toward the same place, believing in the possibility, having audacious joy about it, then we'll figure out the details along the way. And I think that's been my accidental superpower. It's, like, not overthinking the details. That can be a problem down the line with execution. Right?
Speaker 3:You have to have things worked out. It's why I hire people like Kim, chief operating officers, who has a lot of audacious joy in her too. But a lot of the details, the business models, that is not my superpower. I can get into the weeds operationally, but my superpower is much more taking this complicated thing and making it possible. Like, we can do this.
Speaker 3:Because I didn't come from supereducated people, because I don't have a PhD in any of this, sometimes in my journey, I've been like, well, I don't really know what I'm doing, and I overcompensate, and I read more than everyone, and I listen more and I study more, and I show up more prepared. And now I'm kinda letting myself go and just, like, trusting. That's what I'm really good at. It's okay to be really good at that. I don't have to, like, have a chip on my shoulder that I don't know everything about everything.
Speaker 3:I can just own that I know enough. That's what you need. You need to know enough, and you need to know what you don't know, and then be that conductor. Right?
Speaker 1:So, Kimberly, I'm curious from your perspective on the other side of that. How does that core DNA trait of making the complex simple show up in the organizational culture or in, say, a project, if you could make it specific, at a political? And one of the other things you talked about earlier is shared leadership. And so what I'm hearing Lisa say is you guys are complimentary in some way. And what I'm inferring from that is in this way, she's sharing leadership with you on some of the back end stuff.
Speaker 1:So I'd love for you to talk about how that presents. And if it doesn't, this will be a great time for a peer to peer intervention.
Speaker 3:I'm ready. Give it to me, Kim.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I've waited all this time, Lisa. No. I would. I completely agree with what you said, Lisa.
Speaker 2:You're our I often call you our hype woman, and I mean that not in a superficial way, but, you know, coming in with ideas and the inspiration. I think when you do the work that we do where it is easy to get quite cynical or negative or bogged down in the details of what are often quite complicated issues or topics, then we need that. So I think how that shows up in our organizational culture is we are ruthlessly practical, and that that is something that's kind of one of our key principles of how we work. And that comes from a place of, I think, from Lisa's superpower. It also is how I approach life as well, and I think very similar kind of background of quite working class family.
Speaker 2:You know, I went to university, obviously, but it's about that practicality. You have to bring that to things. But also, you know, we work in a world where we have to raise funds, and we have to work for every euro or dollar. So you have to make each one stretch as far as you possibly can. So I think as an organization, I mean, we're quite small, the foundation.
Speaker 2:There's well, we have 12 people now, and some of them have hard time. We do so much. We do such a huge amount of work, and it's really good, if I can say so. I'm so proud of all the work that we've done. Because we focus on what is practical, but also what's kind of joyful and hopeful.
Speaker 2:And think about the feeling that it will bring to people as well as the evidence and the rigor behind it as well. And I think that how that's shown up recently, I mean, I can bridge to this. It's very relevant for this podcast is around our mental well-being work, where we really just wanted to drill down on something that we saw hadn't been addressed really in any kind of significant way in terms of research. And the work that you've been doing, Skippy, on this is you're, as far as we can tell from around the world, one of the pioneers of this. Thinking about the mental well-being of our political leaders and thinking about it because they're humans and deserve good mental well-being, they're people too, but also that how that might impact us all as citizens because they're making decisions that impact our lives every day in so many ways.
Speaker 2:And so we went out. We talked to a 150 people. So experts from all different sectors. We interviewed, we surveyed, and we did the research. And then we turned that into a report that we put out.
Speaker 2:But I think to be really practical, we also made sort of a a resource database where people could just go and search for things that might be relevant to them in their country or state or whatever it is. If you're someone in politics, in government, and wanna do something about this, then you can find that. And you don't have to go through our very long report, although I encourage people to. You can just go to our website and find something, search for it, and it might be relevant to you. And, also, we like to kind of highlight the people that are already doing this this work, which is how we came across to you, Skippy, because we can't do it by ourselves.
Speaker 2:But I think to be pragmatic and practical, you have to realize that you all need to to do this together. It's not one person or one organization.
Speaker 1:What I'm hearing you say in that is a few different things. Shared responsibility means building a team that is not a mirror of yourself, that has complementary parts, puzzle pieces that fit together, that complement one another's skills, where you trust in the other person to do the thing that you recognize through self awareness is not your superpower without over constraint or over management so that you not just feel but are empowered and part of the team and bought into the end goal. That having a cheerleader, for lack of a better term, is actually a really great and important role in that team. And then you shared a number of ways in which you've taken this sort of big vision and then chunked it up into actionable steps, resources that can be shared that offer benefit to the receiver, and then creating partnerships or things like, I mean, the 26 trailblazer organizations, the 100 best. That seems to have been a very effective technique for you organizationally to grow your network through the acclamation and affirmation of others.
Speaker 3:I think it's true. And if I could double click on that last one, I think what's super important about we're very practical, but we also see ourselves as a platform, like a humble platform. So, you know, we talked about how the business is an impact everyday company. So as we do impact, it's good for the company. And sort of as we platform other people, it's good for them, and it's good for us.
Speaker 3:So how do you create sort of this win win? Because, you know, when you tell people, hey. You know, we we run a a foundation that helps build 21st century political leaders. Most people look at you like you're nuts. Right?
Speaker 3:Like, why would you even do that? And what we need to do is sort of build space and place and spotlight and sort of raise other people in the field because we have those skills and capacity to do that. They're doing extraordinary things in Togo or the Arctic, but we can sort of create this platform and this space for them to thrive, and that is really important. We really consider ourselves field catalysts, like people who can catalyze both through the hype and the structure, a field that really helps people in their local context with deep respect, sort of address issues of governance and democracy and freedom in their own way. So that platforming is really that's underneath everything we do is how do we build spaces for other people.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I'll share how it feels for someone on the receiving end of that as a of ELC and now this podcast. When I became aware of your work, I was going to share it because I think it's remarkable. And I recognize that it's gonna take thousands of organizations like ours to meet the need when the totality of our world wakes up to how it will benefit all of us. And I also see very practically and pragmatically how the act of putting us on the list that makes us feel good, that makes us feel validated and seen, encourages me to do that even more, because now sharing your work is accrediting our work, which is then, like, linking back to you.
Speaker 1:And so it creates this beautiful feedback loop that I think in moments where maybe it would have been out of sight, out of mind, it's a subtle reminder to continue to do that. And that's really how we shift the conversation from, you're helping politicians? The fuck are you doing that for? To, oh, yeah. I've heard of that, like, 3 times in the background this week, and just tell me more about that.
Speaker 1:What's that about? Right? Because you're hearing it from multiple angles and so I think it's it's super smart and I wonder if that could be a jump off point to talking about the growing of your organization. You've gone from 0, although you certainly weren't at 0, you're coming in with 4 previous organizations, those networks, but effectively 0 in this organization to the largest newsletter that I know of to elected officials anywhere. And but 8 years, which is actually quite a short period of time.
Speaker 1:So if you were to identify the contributing factors to that, both the daily grind contributors, what are the things that you do every day that don't yield big turnover, but, you know, if you continue them, we'll make sure or close to ensure that the trajectory is up into the right? And then some of those phase change choices where it may have been those, like the creating of the list of the top 100, where you are able to grow fairly rapidly, fairly quickly for a single input.
Speaker 3:Really, it's this combination of relationships and practical use and platforming of what we do. So, you know, I think back about all the people who have helped us along the way build apolitical, and there are so many, both the foundation and the company. And I think what that comes back to is just such like a first principle about life. Be genuinely loving, kind, and curious and generous to people, not because you're ever gonna need them because it's the right thing to do. And if you're building something meaningful, they're gonna show up for you.
Speaker 3:Right? And I just think about how many people have showed up for us in so many different ways, whether that's investors, whether that's someone who put us on their newsletter, whether that's donors, whether that's politicians who lent us their name early on, whether that's someone who opened the door, whether that's journalists. I think so much of the success of what we're doing is a really good idea and really good execution. But the reason why people really love us is because we have this open heart and generosity about it. I know that sounds super hippie, but it's true.
Speaker 3:Let me just tell you a quick little story. When Robin and I decided to cofound Apolitical, we were trying to figure out what is the biggest pain point we can solve for public servants around the world, these bureaucrats. Right? 200,000,000 of them. 200,000,000 public servants.
Speaker 3:And we thought you know, we're gonna be really clever. We thought the most important thing we could do for them is give them real time access to the most innovative and effective evidence based policies. What they wanted first was to feel appreciated, to have a sense of community, to have these, you know, quote, unquote soft skills, whether just essential skills. Like, how do I communicate? One of our largest communities online at apolitical right now, right after AI and and governance and sort of how to use AI in government.
Speaker 3:The second most is know our diversity in government. Like, these people are people too. And I think because we fundamentally see people as people and care about them as people, then they become users, customers. Right? We don't have transactional relationships with people.
Speaker 3:We have real service and supportive relationships, and I think that's why we've done so well. It's like no one and nothing is transactional. Everything comes from a deep transformational place. And, yes, you have to have the great engineering, and, yes, the technology has to work, and it has to be, you know, beautifully designed and timely and operational excellence. That all can exist, but unless it comes from this, like, real place of trust and cocreation, it won't work.
Speaker 1:Well and it speaks to the way that you show up that people told you that initially, like, that they told you it wasn't about the policy. That was certainly my journey as a young person. Like, I was very enthralled with policy and the politics and the strategy, and I thought that was it. We've just got to create these great policies and then great systems to force and cajole and push people into doing them. And then once you get into a role, or I should say, once I got into a role, you realize, oh, yeah, everyone knows all these things.
Speaker 1:This is not an issue of facts. These are very human problems. These are problems of personalities, of fear of speaking out, of not fitting into the group, of being personally threatened, fearing for your children, little things that are not very little, like, can I go to the grocery store and have it take less than 6 hours? And that's a little bit hyperbolic, but not really, unless you, like, forcibly end a conversation to leave, you really could be there that long. And so it really is that softer stuff.
Speaker 1:And the fact that people told you that right off the gate tells me that they knew they were in a safe space where they weren't under the microscope, where you weren't going to go criticize them publicly or out them for not being good at their jobs or being weak or all those other things. And I think that says a lot about the organization. And the other thing I just wanna comment on is you talked about non transactional relationships. The other reason to just be kind is it feels good. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It just feels so good. And, you know, I hope one day we're in a place where we don't have to say, oh, it sounds hippie, and it's just like, this works. You're gonna feel better. You're gonna sleep better. You're gonna enjoy your time with your family better.
Speaker 1:You're gonna be better at your job the next day because you're gonna have come from a day of wins rather than losses. I was out on a run 2 days ago, and this is now telling this is gonna ruin this this for me. But I was out on a run-in New York City, and I was just crossing an avenue. And there was like a little, like adorable little old man in a wheelchair who would like really looked like he was struggling and the light was about to turn. And you you never know what's going on in someone's life, but I was just like, hey.
Speaker 1:Do you need a hand? And he was like, yes. And, you know, I just turned and got him halfway across the street and ran back across, and that was it. I'm telling you, I felt so good for 48 hours. It's just like something simple of, like, I just did the right thing and that guy's smile, like, I can still see it.
Speaker 3:Kim and I talk a lot about this, like, the difference between being nice and kind, though. Totally. Because I think this is really important. What is the edge of kind that actually propels humanity forward? So, Kim, can I I have a feeling you might be thinking the same thing?
Speaker 2:I was gonna say the exact same thing. This conversation we've had so many times and trying to differentiate kindness from being nice. I think it's maybe easier to be nice, because it's somewhat and I I think there was an article maybe that you shared, Lisa, that we read, and we were just thinking about this for the team as well and just how we show up. But it's somewhat easier to be nice, because that that is in some ways, kind of a selfish act. Like, you are being nice because that makes you feel good only.
Speaker 2:Whereas, kindness is thinking about the person that you're directing that towards or the people. It has this kind of human centered focus, and and you're putting the audience at the center, let's say. And it requires a little bit more nuance or a little bit more thought to go into it to say, what does this person actually need right now? What is it that they want that will make them feel happy or motivated or whatever it is? Not what I wanna do or what I can do or what will make me feel happy about myself.
Speaker 2:And I think that's a skill that some people have naturally, and for others, it's something that you have to learn and you really have to be conscious of and adapt to.
Speaker 1:The thing that popped into my mind is you're sitting at a mall in a food court, and someone says, hey. Would you take my picture? And they've got some food on their face. Nice is they ask you, like, how do I look? And you're like, oh, honey.
Speaker 1:You look great. You take the photo. You walk away, and your friend, you're like, did you see that person? What a slob. Right?
Speaker 1:It's not honest. It's not true. Kind is sure. I'll take the photo, and, hey, would you be open to me sharing something that might be a little uncomfortable, but would help you? I would.
Speaker 1:Okay. So there's permission. I've respected you as a human. Hey. You've got some food on your face.
Speaker 1:Do you mind if I give you a napkin to wipe that off before I take the photo?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Sometimes you have to be a bit harsh or what might be interpreted as harsh to be kind.
Speaker 1:One of our favorite sayings is clarity is kind. And then the analogy to that is clarity creates velocity.
Speaker 3:Well, Skippy, we think a lot about that in inside the culture of our organization and throughout it, and so does Robin Scott, the cofounder of the company and the foundation. I mean, we spend all of us spend a lot of time thinking about our own mental models, how we show up. We're not perfect. I mean, I get tired. I sometimes get lazy.
Speaker 3:But one thing that's really helped me is I have a background in applied behavioral science, so I think a lot about how communications hits the brain and how do you move people from a state of threat to a state of openness. Not manipulating at all, but, like, asking for permission, you know, being really open and clear about it. And one of the over COVID, one of the things I did is finally went and got my brain based neuroscience coaching degree, and it was really helpful. And if there's one thing I took away from it was this. It's called SSG, which is how to be succinct, specific, and generous in conversations with people.
Speaker 3:And I find that really helpful in being kind because generosity is saying, hey. I don't understand what you just said, and I don't think that's gonna help you in this conversation with the next person. I really want you to go back and think about how you might formulate that. Would you be open to that? Might I help you?
Speaker 3:Might you come back to me and try it on me again? And so this succinct, specific, and generous. And what I find fascinating, just to go back to this notion of healing our politics, we spend so much time we did some analysis that in the United States, I think it was in 2022, corporations spent, like, $89,000,000,000 on the professional development of their staff, everything from these, quote, unquote, soft skills to the hard skills. And we look at the amount of professional development, leadership training, interdevelopment work, wellness work for our politicians, the people who make decisions about our lives, how we spend our money. There's basically nothing.
Speaker 3:And I'm not equating interdevelopment work or skills development only with money, but it says about what we prioritize. And I think we really need to build a movement to say, in a representative democracy, we put extraordinary people forward who raise their hands bravely. Now some of them shouldn't be there. They're egomaniacs. I agree.
Speaker 3:But the majority of people who raise their hands are people like you, Skippy, who deeply care. How are we investing in every way, not just them for the sake of it, but them as a with, Right? Them as with our society. And I think until we have these conversations in parliaments, in city councils about, how are you doing? Have you tried SSG when you talk to people?
Speaker 3:Like, what are the skills and framework that we can be great leaders? I think it's gonna be very hard to move our societies forward in a productive way. So I love that we're having this inner conversation about ourselves, but how do we scale this out? That's exactly what we're trying to do.
Speaker 1:The stat that you alluded to, I've heard Kimberly talk about before, which is and these are rough numbers. I'm sure that they've changed over time. But US alone, $80,000,000,000 invested in self development or, you know, executive development in the private sector, then worldwide for political leaders, $15,000,000. And and here's the bridge that I found most fascinating. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation does amazing work, touches every continent, I believe, and we think of as having a bottomless budget, has a smaller global budget than the smallest education only budget of any state in the US.
Speaker 1:And I'm like, what do you think Bill and Melinda's personal investment in self care and education is? Maybe it's as high as the entire world's political. And why do they do that? Because it's a leverage function. It makes them better able to do everything else.
Speaker 1:Lisa, you and I both grew up as athletes. Kimberly, you may have. I'm not sure. But you will never meet a successful athlete who only watches game tape. Like, that would be crazy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, they're in the gym doing other things that will translate. They're building camaraderie, hopefully, with their team. That's the difference between winning and losing as being a star player or being a team. They are doing when I was in high school, not high level, and a long time ago, we were doing visualization work because it works.
Speaker 1:It's science backed, and it's just wild to me that we are frankly so far behind what is, at least to me, seem very obvious. We want our leaders and not just our leaders, our I mean, you use the word bureaucrat that's got a negative tinge in these parts, but our our public servants to do their job well. Doesn't everybody wanna go to the DMV and be greeted by a cheery happy to see you person? Don't we complain when that doesn't happen? Why do we think it's not happening?
Speaker 2:One of the stats that really struck me when I first heard it, and we put this out in some of our things as well, is if you compare other roles that have impact on all our lives, like a psychiatrist or a lawyer or a doctor, just the numbers of years of training that that person has to have, but then also the ongoing kind of lifelong learning that they're required to undertake. And then you look at political leaders, and there's there's nothing. There's there are no requirements, and very often, there are no opportunities even to take that up if people wanted to. And one of our advisers on the mental well-being work that we're working on so Ashley Weinberg, he's one of the leaders on the mental well-being of politicians. He made this great analogy.
Speaker 2:We care about the mental well-being and the skills and the training of pilots. Why don't we care about it for politicians as well and for people in government? I found that just shocking thinking about all the years of training I went through as a lawyer and, you know, needing that desperately. But to be in such an important role as as an elected leader and not have that,
Speaker 3:it's a
Speaker 2:little bit scary.
Speaker 1:We universally want the person flying one individual plane to be well resourced, but we don't want the people determining if planes can fly, where they can fly, when they can fly, how they can land, what type of bags are allowed on them. If your dog can come, we would really like them to not be resourced when. It's kind of a crazy thing.
Speaker 3:Skippy, Skippy, we're gonna change that. It's happening now.
Speaker 1:We're gonna change that. Now.
Speaker 3:I just wanna say that, it hasn't happened. There may be nefarious dark forces that don't wanna have it, but oftentimes, I think change hasn't happened because we haven't set our target on it. And that's what we're seeing around the world, that we're changing the norm. We're changing the belief. Now I'm sitting here kids sitting here buttressed by people around the world that say we're gonna make this different.
Speaker 3:Just because it hasn't been doesn't mean we can't have a different story. We can't have a different way of being, and we're seeing it happen. This is why I love being an athlete. Like, you have a goal. You set a target.
Speaker 3:You start practicing. You lose some games. You build a new muscle. You get some new teammates. You do what you need to do, and then you can move towards it.
Speaker 3:And I am seeing it all around the world. We're gonna change this. I really honestly, like, in my bone of bones gonna change it. We're gonna do it.
Speaker 1:Thank you for that pattern interrupt. I really appreciate that. Thank you for calling me back into what is possible and what we're doing, and I 100% agree with you because there's no other option. That is the only option. And I'm a firm believer in the adjacent possible.
Speaker 1:We solve the problem immediately in front of us, societally speaking, which inevitably creates a new round of problems that we couldn't have predicted. We did have a problem of mass corruption in most countries, and it made sense to pass laws that restricted the relationship of individuals who are engaged in those actions. No one could have seen that down the line, it meant that relationships broke down. We dehumanized one another, and we found ourselves in a place where we were no longer able to effectively manage those roles. Now we're becoming aware of that, and we're gonna solve that problem next.
Speaker 1:So thank you for that. Okay. Bridging into the Mere Mortals Report, organizationally for a political and apolitical foundation, eitheror, you take it, what is the single biggest challenge that you all have observed in terms of the personal experience of people working in the organizations? And what have you guys put into place to work on that?
Speaker 2:The single biggest challenge that people and I would speak more to the foundation, I think is there are so many, but we tackle them every day. I would say that it is this idea of breaking down what are complex, incredibly interwoven topics into actionable parts. So the work that we've been doing around the mental well-being of politicians has bled into in a really wonderful way the other work that we do, which is about how do we help and support more women to go into office, and how do the mental well-being aspects of that come into play? Then there's work that we're doing around, how do we change the norms around violence against politicians? Why is it okay to harass someone online or attack them physically just because they've been elected to a role?
Speaker 2:And then that links to the work we've been doing around, citizen participation and how we help or support more current politicians to know about citizen assemblies or participate in budgeting and how to do them. And that allows them to better connect with their citizens, which builds trust, which means maybe violence will go down. So everything is really interwoven in the work that we do. And I think that what we've tried to have within the organization and within the team is that you have to accept that. You really have to accept the complexity and kind of the systemic nature of what we're doing.
Speaker 2:But that then you break that down into really what can be boring, although some people find this really exciting, you know, work plans. It's a spreadsheet, and you look at that and you work through that, but then you have to step out every so often of that spreadsheet to say, this is the big picture. This is the system that we're changing, and then you go head down back again, because it's not either or, it's not one or the other. It has to be both. I think when we hire people and when we work with people and when it works really well, is there people that can do that switch?
Speaker 2:That sort of detailed to the big picture, knowing that everything is really tightly woven.
Speaker 1:So what I'm hearing in that, at times, it can feel difficult to parse out which constituent part of a larger goal is the right place to go. Where are we meeting people? Where are we connecting or not? What's going to be understood or accepted, how will these things go together. And from the interpersonal experience, that can feel confusing, overwhelming, destabilizing.
Speaker 1:It could lead us to question if we know what we're doing or if we're right or if our skills match this highly complex ecosystem that we've found ourselves in. And the way that you've chosen to address that is several fold. And I always go back to the way I think about mental health, which is the state of being aligned, connected, and safe with self, others, and environment. That is the state of being mentally healthy is aligned, connected, and safe. And so when we're disconnected, when we're misaligned, or we don't feel safe either within our own head, external world, or with others, that's when we see the presentations of those challenges in the form of, initially, stress, anxiety, and then it can build into more significant or extreme presentations.
Speaker 1:What I'm hearing first is you're really focusing on alignment. So you're hiring people into the organization who have the skill set to deal with some of that known ambiguity. You are cultivating a sense of safety by aligning expectations, including to the unexpected the unknown the known unknowns. You're making it safe and normal to not have an answer to that organizationally and within people. And then you're helping connect the dots by strategically crafting time and process so that people can both be in the micro of the constituent parts, the macro of the larger conversation, and be working together with their various skill sets to bring those things into focus as you iterate forward.
Speaker 1:Am I getting that correct? Is that true?
Speaker 2:You put that much better than I did. I think that sounds exactly it. And I think what we have to remember is we're not perfect. We're all people who have various things going on in our lives as humans, and so we're always going to be learning and trying to improve that type of process. But that at least if the intention is there and the awareness that needs to happen, for me and my experience working in other workplaces where that awareness wasn't there, you've already gotten a huge way down the line to that really working well.
Speaker 2:But I think that humanity and knowing that we're people and that we can bring that to the workplace is really key as well because you have good days, you have bad days, you have various things going on in your life that do affect how you work. And I think in many places, that can be ignored, and so performance changes over time. And I think especially and this is something maybe this is too much information, but something we've talked about a lot. We're a women led organization, so we've been talking about how our hormones impact us. You know, we're kind of going through perimenopause or having children or whatever it might be and really owning that and being honest as much as we feel comfortable about that in terms of how we show up and how we're able to do those things, I think, is really key to any of those processes around big picture, detail, stepping out, feeling that you're knowledgeable, intelligent, and capable enough as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, it's such an important thing, and it's a huge part of being a human and a woman. I was having a conversation on the subway recently, which is news to me, and they were talking about advertisements in the US, and how it was illegal until fairly recently to advertise for, say, a tampon, because it was associated with a female sex organ. But you could go advertise for Viagra, and that was fine. And when trying to figure out how that was the case, I have a close friend who, runs a female health care product line, and she I mean, this is, like, very recently.
Speaker 1:And their justification in law, codified in law, was that a man's erection was required for procreation, but a woman's pleasure wasn't. And so it was understood under, like, the auspices of biblical law that anything that was in that region for a woman, and you hear that, and I just recoiled. I had never thought about it. As a privileged man, I'd never crossed my mind that I hadn't seen one of those ads, but I can imagine very strongly in this moment, had I known that, how that would infuriate me and the idea that that wouldn't show up in every other part of my life.
Speaker 3:We have 2 investors, Wendy and Christina, who started something called the The Case for Her, and they invested in apolitical because they really see sort of period justice or menstruation justice being something we we really need to think about. And there's a lot of work, and this just goes back to politics, around you need to have people representative from all types of life, either as politicians or engaged in the political process, or else it's not your fault, Skippy. You don't think about our periods. Right? That's not who you are, but what is we're all obliged to is to make sure that we have representation around the table of all different types of life.
Speaker 3:I mean, one place we see massive underrepresentation, and Kim and I are doing work on this right now, is in people with all types of different abilities or disabilities. We're not seeing them around the table. And in places like Europe, if, you know, you're sitting in the US, we have this great movement called Americans with Disability Act, which means there's curb cuts and elevators and access to bathrooms. You come to Europe, and none of that exists. Right?
Speaker 3:Because so we need to sort of think about diversifying. If I could just answer quickly this barrier question, less about our organizations, but more about the broader movement of people trying to make politics work for the 21st century, is really money. And what's very interesting about it is it goes back to this core sort of two beliefs that I think it's important just to say a little bit about because I wanna challenge people as they're listening to think about how the this sits with them. So the first is we get things like, oh, politics is so broken. You can't fix it.
Speaker 3:Right? The cynicism that anything can be different. And so we've been doing a lot of work around how to break down cynicism. So three things that you can do to break down cynicism that we try to do in our work every day. Number 1, a sense of community.
Speaker 3:How do you build community in everything you do? Because it's hard to be cynical in a group. 2nd is gratitude. So if you have cynicism and gratitude, that can help. And the third is joy.
Speaker 3:And so everything we think about, like, how do we do gratitude, how do we do joy, and how do we do community? The next thing we hear why people won't give us money is that why put good people in a broken system? And we keep saying, how do you change the system unless you get good people in the system? So we try to expand this binary thinking to the both and thinking. And and I see I try to think about it in my life all the time.
Speaker 3:Where do I have binary thinking, and where is there both and thinking? And then the third is people say, well, I can't be political. And we talk about little p political infrastructure investment. Just like you invest in infrastructure in all types of places in our societies, roads and clean air, we need investment in little p political infrastructure so that big p political infrastructure actually works and is democratic and goes forward. So I just laid those things out that people aren't investing, like, literally putting money up into this space.
Speaker 3:And until we invest, until we put money in it, it's you can make great changes without money. I'm not saying but it's really hard to have the sort of the scalable change that we need.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The way that I've always thought about it in the scope of the ELC and building that is we are in the political dust bowl, and we have, like, desertification of the soil, and the soil is toxic. It gets filled with all these chemicals that we've put into it, etcetera. And there's option A, which is to say that that soil doesn't work anymore. We're not going to use it, and it will spread, and eventually there will be famine, and the end result is no one's going to have anything.
Speaker 1:Option b is kind of the approach we've been taking. It's the put one, quote unquote, good plant, and I have some misgivings about that whole framing, but good plant into the bad soil. But what happens when one plant is alone there? It withers and dies, and then you say, oh, proof. It doesn't work.
Speaker 1:Or you could do what we actually did, which is regenerate the soil. But you need a critical mass of new plants at the same time. And when you do that, you can introduce nitrogen back into the soil. You can regenerate it. And over time, if you start at the ground level, in this case being like local politics where things aren't quite as corroded, although that's going the wrong direction at this moment in my observation, that grass moves up to the brush level and eventually up into the old growth forest level.
Speaker 1:And we'll look back 25 years ago, having seed the seeds we planted.
Speaker 2:I love that you mentioned that. We had a really similar metaphor for the work that we were doing around seed, soil, and gardeners.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And I think just to add on to your metaphor that you painted beautifully is also how do you find the gardeners? How do you find those people already in that system that are supportive, that are reform minded, that are doing the good work? Because we know that 6,100,000 elected leaders around the world, the vast majority are doing good work. How do you find them to help them ready to soil and help those seedlings and things to grow into the things that we need them to?
Speaker 1:And now a quick break from our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is supported by Elected Leaders Collective Foundation super supporters, truly super supporters, Ray and Lou Stover, who have invested in not just this podcast, but healing our politics broadly, making sure that tools of transformation and healing are available to leaders across this country based on need, not ability to pay. We couldn't do this without you, Ray and Lou. We are so grateful to be on this journey with you. If anyone else wants to follow in Ray and Lou's footsteps, if you like this content and wanna hear more, please visit electedleaderscollective.com.
Speaker 1:Click the donate button where you can receive a 501c3 tax benefit and do some real good. So you talked about that which is unseen, and I think that's a great end to the mere mortals report. I'd love for you to first just open it up with what is the mere mortals report. How did you choose the title? And then what are some of the things unseen by most that are contained within it for someone who hasn't read it?
Speaker 2:So the name of the report that we put out after about a year of research is mere mortals, the mental well-being of politicians and why it matters. And the name mere mortals came from our wonderful colleague, Rebecca Ison, who wrote the report with me after our research, and she is just this phenomenal wordsmith. And so she came up with that, and it has really stuck, and I think is incredibly apt for what's inside. So as I said, we spent about a year researching the state of mental well-being, the different aspects of the role of being a political leader that will impact mental well-being. And so we interviewed, surveyed about a 150 people from both within politics, but also occupational psychology and political scientists and people in political parties about this topic and in different places around the world.
Speaker 2:And we wanted to see what we could learn from around the world and actually how we could apply that and adapt that to the US context. So that's where kind of the funding and the support for this work came from an organization called Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, who are really forward thinking, I think, in that sense of how do we think about the mental well-being of politicians because it could well impact the mental well-being or the well-being generally of their citizens and their communities. What we found, which was fairly disturbing, I would say, is that 41% of the politicians that we surveyed had low or very low mental well-being. And we used a scale that's being used in many other professions around the world. So in doctors, it's being used with nurses, with emergency services employees.
Speaker 2:It's been used in whole countries. So we could compare, but it'd never been used to to measure the well-being of politicians. And 41%. So that's worse mental well-being than police officers and ambulance officers, nurses during COVID. And what we discovered at the same time though was when we asked political leaders about their functioning and what aspects of their job were suffering because of this lowered mental well-being, very few reported, and it is self reported, that they weren't showing up for their constituents, that they weren't voting, they weren't standing up to speak.
Speaker 2:So it shows this incredibly high functioning group of people, but who are really struggling. And about just under 70% of them strongly agreed that they desired more access to resources, to support, to enable them to do their job better. And that was very much sort of the words or the sentiment was, this is a privileged position. I get to serve my community, but I don't think I'm doing the best job I can because I work 70 hours. In some instances, in the US, for example, at at the state level, I don't get paid.
Speaker 2:This is a voluntary position. And then one of the huge negative influences on mental well-being that is universal is this incidence of harassment. So online violence and harassment and in person as well. And that's worrying for democracy because it's turning away prospective political leaders, especially women, especially people from minority groups who aren't represented in political power so often. But even if they are brave enough and resilient enough and all of these things to run and to win, people are leaving.
Speaker 2:And so you're getting the silencing of these diverse representative voices because on top of the stress and the the pressure and the long hours, you are now becoming victim to online harassment and violence, and your family is as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I wanna pull out a few facts, and then I wanna go back to the methodology. 70% of people said that they were less likely or unlikely to run because of fear of those things that you mentioned, so that's a massive removal of our population from the potential playing field. You talked about overwork and underpay, and I think this is something that gets so little airtime and is so important to think about. And, actually, as one of the things that, at least in my personal experience, because we talked about pay increases when I was still serving in office, and there was a huge part of the public that was very for it.
Speaker 1:It was the elected officials who feared the potential people who would be against it, The image of looking like voting for yourself a raise that actually stood in the way of something that there was a lot of strong public support for. But you talk about Germany in particular, where the average I don't know if MP is the right language there, but the average it is. Okay. The average MP is working 70 hours a week. The maximum allowable by law in Germany is 48 hours a
Speaker 2:week. Exactly.
Speaker 1:So I did this math in COVID. COVID elected life was even crazier than normal elected life in so many ways. I wanted to do the math. I worked in a place where I got what would have been considered high compensation for someone on a city council. And granted, we did stuff that major cities did, not what small towns do, which is who our comparative set was by population.
Speaker 1:But I was making $6.20 an hour when I did the math, and minimum wage at the time was 12.56. So I, like, I know just so personally. Psychological violence against women elected, 80%. 4 out of 5. I mean, it's staggering.
Speaker 1:So I wanna get into some of the specifics of this. 1st and foremost, you talk about using, to use astrological terms, the standard candle. Right? A comparative modeling set of measurement. But I wonder what really goes into that.
Speaker 1:When I'm reading someone has moderate, low, or high well-being, what are the things that make up that being, and then how are they weighted together to arrive at a score?
Speaker 2:So the scale we use is called the Warwick Edinburgh scale, and we use the short version of it. So we wanted to make our survey as, user friendly as possible. We know that our audience is time pressed. So it's 7 questions that they need to answer, and it's about how they've been feeling in the last 2 weeks. And it asks questions like, I've been feeling hopeful about the future.
Speaker 2:I've been feeling like I am contributing or I am able to make decisions easily. So it asks these questions and it's been developed, as I said, over the years and refined and replicated in a lot of different contexts across different countries, as I mentioned, across different professions. And then it's incredibly easy to use because they provide you with a score sheet. So you get everyone's answers. You plug that into a sheet, and it actually produces for you the scoring.
Speaker 2:So we, thankfully, and we are not mental well-being experts. I studied psychology, but I am not a psychologist. We're not the experts on this. So we wanted to use something that was user friendly that could be compared with other cohorts, but that also could be used again in the future. We would love this thing to to stay out there, and we've left it up and live so that other people can use it as well to keep checking on this.
Speaker 1:The term psychological violence, what does that mean?
Speaker 2:It's any violence that is nonphysical, so it can range from sexual harassment words that are directed at someone through to I think in the US, is it doxxing? Is that the term that
Speaker 3:you use?
Speaker 1:Publicly listing somebody's location or home so that others potentially show up and physically intimidate somebody.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And even if that doesn't happen, it's the threat of that.
Speaker 1:Yes. The
Speaker 2:fact that might happen in order to produce, you know, a reaction in that person.
Speaker 1:Does psychological violence include you're a jerk and your policy is shit?
Speaker 2:That would be on the border on the line, I would say. I think we should, as citizens, be able to critique and criticize the policy outcomes that our elected leaders put into place. What then starts to go over the line is when you confuse or conflate the policy position of a person or a party with that person as a human, as a person in their entirety. So saying you're a jerk maybe slightly goes over. Although, I mean, I'm sure many politicians have heard much worse.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:But we need, for the good of democracy, to still be able to critique and question our political leaders. It's not about saying you're all excellent no matter what, and you're all doing a wonderful job all the time. But it's about that sort of personalization of critiquing the outcomes in our societies.
Speaker 1:What do you think the most surprising finding was to you in the report?
Speaker 2:I think for me, it was that and this was our hypothesis, so it shouldn't have been surprising, was just how affected the mental well-being of everyone that we interacted with in the research was. And this is going from women of color state legislators in the US through to members of the African parliament through to relatively old conservative farmers in Wales.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:That this was a universal experience, and there are different stresses and influences, but many of them were the same. And that for me was surprising. I guess I thought that it wouldn't be that bad. The other side of that though, that I think was also surprising, and we put this out without trailblazers list and our list was there are people and organizations around the world that are thinking about this and actually doing something about it. So the fact that we got to 26 on that list, I was also surprised because when we first started looking, I think we googled therapy for CEOs, and you get pages of results.
Speaker 2:We googled therapy for politicians, and there was one result. So we thought, oh, we're not gonna find anything here, but we did. So on the one hand, the the issue, the problem, and on the other, the fact that there's there's kind of hope and there is a real opportunity, an evidence based opportunity in terms of some of these interventions that can really benefit politicians, and therefore, I think, their citizens.
Speaker 1:Are there particular groups that you found to be more or less affected or more or less inoculated from these conditions?
Speaker 2:Not really. We didn't find a gender difference. We didn't find any other sort of groups, and we did ask people, although they could choose not to answer that question. I think and this is anecdotal only. This didn't come out necessarily in the hard data, is that people from groups typically underrepresented in in politics were more resilient.
Speaker 2:They'd already had to put up with a lot of setbacks or challenges in their lives that actually gave them either self care processes or support networks or tips, tricks, approaches that they could use in that role.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:That was anecdotal. So, no, we didn't find that difference in our work. There's been some other research again from one of our academic advisers that showed that in certain places, certain parliaments around the world, women just have a higher emotional load that they are required to put into the role. So I think it goes back to a lot of stereotypes around caregiving, around taking on unpaid tasks, like being the note taker or being the secretary, or naturally being empathetic and listening to your colleagues and their problems. And that was James Weinberg in the UK.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But we didn't find anything vastly different in our group.
Speaker 1:Now there are pretty significant differentiators in terms of the initial conversation around this country to country. The UK has an entire mindfulness process with their MPs. It's basically a decade in, in the US. It seems this conversation started 48 months ago. I wonder if the data demonstrated implicitly the efficacy of those efforts.
Speaker 1:Did we see better well-being amongst politicians in the UK or places where there were pre existing resources than places that didn't have resources?
Speaker 2:Not in our work, and I would say not yet. I would say that despite the fact that in the UK, for example, it does seem to be much further ahead. It has mindfulness training within the parliament. It's a less polarized issue to talk about as a political leader, although there's still very much stigma associated with it. There hasn't been a huge amount of action.
Speaker 2:There's been a lot of awareness raising, and I think also societally in in the UK, there has been over the years, really good public mental health and well-being campaigns. So
Speaker 1:the
Speaker 2:everyday person just has the language to talk about mental health and mental well-being in a pretty sophisticated way. They know how to name their feelings. They know how to name certain conditions, and that's just very accepted. And I think that has actually influenced the politics there, but it doesn't mean that a huge amount of action has taken place. The mindfulness in parliament is a huge step forward, and it has a lot of scientific evidence to show that it does help.
Speaker 2:And I know that group that is undertaking that work, the mindfulness initiative, is expanding that to other parliaments around the world.
Speaker 1:It's interesting because you never know I'll give a weird metaphor, but affordable housing is an issue pretty much everywhere in the US right now. And as far as mountain towns like mine look, we are far and away the highest density per capita of affordable housing, any mountain town. I mean, we're far outstripped, and we started way earlier. You could think then, oh, well, so the housing problem must be less, and it's not the case. It's just as bad.
Speaker 1:Well, okay. How does that all make sense? The problem arrived here earlier, so we started on a solution earlier, and we've sort of kept up. As the problem has increased, the solution has increased, but we haven't really narrowed the gap. And so I wonder about somewhere like the UK if the problem, quote unquote again, I actually question my own language about the use problem, but the challenge that emerged just emerged earlier.
Speaker 1:And so they had been working on it, and it sort of kept pace. Or if they genuinely, for some reason, culturally or otherwise, were able to arrive at that conversation earlier. Do you have any insight into that?
Speaker 2:My hypothesis and I met with the head of one of the largest mental health charities in the UK a few months ago called rethink mental illness and mental health UK. And he actually worked on this campaign, this challenging social norms and public narrative campaign around mental health and how to get help. And I do think that moved the dial in terms of how political leaders spoke about this issue and made it more normal, let's say, to talk about. What I think though happened simultaneously, because this was about 14 years ago, was the rise and increase of social media use. So you have more language to talk about it, more acceptance, but you also have this ever increasing weapon that is used against everybody, but that is also increasing the pressure for politicians.
Speaker 2:So while there was a movement earlier and maybe actions being taken to help improve mental well-being, you have this unforeseen element come in that has, by all accounts, really changed the game. And we interviewed, I think I mentioned, a senator from Wales, and he's from the conservative party. He's been in politics for decades. And he said, I used to get an email or a letter before that even once a week telling me that they didn't like my policy or they didn't like me.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And then it increased with email, and I'd get a few emails. But now for the younger generation, they're getting the same message over and over again, thousands of times a day, and I never had to experience it. And he really acknowledged that he thought the job was much harder for them than it was for him.
Speaker 3:It's important to point out though that it's not just that politicians are suffering under the pressure of this increased attack. I think it's important to note that a lot of it is constituent driven. A lot of it is foreign states. Right? We know that bots are doing a lot of this.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. But people are paying with their lives as well. A good friend of mine, Jo Cox, was murdered out when she was talking to her constituents. We had another politician in the UK murdered. There have been attempts on people's life in the United States, and Mexico was the highest amount of murdering of candidates or politicians.
Speaker 3:So this has reached a tipping point. And in no other industry, profession, is it socially norm that people can get threats. Oh, that's just being a politician these days. You gotta put up with it. No.
Speaker 3:We're better than that as people. Yeah. You can disagree and be human about it. And this acceptance of hate speech is out of control, and we will all pay the price for it, right, with the disintegration of how we deal with problems with one another. And so we're doing a lot of work on how we change those norms, but it is not acceptable.
Speaker 3:And I know it's possible to change them, but it is very hard because it's become normal to hate politicians and many other people. So we have a lot of work to do on this, but we're going deep into the evidence, not just on the mental well-being, but how do we change the norms about how we think about politics? I mean, one thing we talk about a lot, and I'd be curious, could be from your perspective, is you have the right to protest in our political systems, but you also, in my belief, have the obligation to thank or parade when things go well. And I'm just wondering, when you were in office, did you get thank you notes, or sort of people calling saying, hey. Thanks for sticking your neck out, or thanks for doing the job.
Speaker 1:I didn't ever get a thank you note, although I know you have a practice of writing thank you notes, love letters, if you will, to politicians on Valentine's Day, which I did this year inspired by you, which is really fun. I got a lot of thank you for what you're doing, thank you for speaking us, we think you're doing a great job, thank you for your social media channel, I haven't known what's going on in a long time, I did. And if I'm being truly honest, it's amazing how 5 of those is immediately wiped out on your brain by the first, like, very negative cutting personal attack, and it is without training, without a practice to shift that natural and normal inclination, it's like a 20 to 1 ratio. Right? One negative can wash out 20 positives, and I don't know anyone getting a 20 to 1 positive ratio.
Speaker 3:We are in deep discussions with the Australians who have taken on very much esafety is what they call it as something that they've been testing and wanting to scale and how to help politicians of all types sort of prepare themselves exactly for that. So there are technical things that you can do, and there are human resources things that you can do. And then there's personal preparedness
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:In order to do that. And we really need to scale that. I got into politics not to deal with the symptoms of problems. I got into it to deal with the upstream. So we're going to keep working with the upstream of hate.
Speaker 3:But until we can figure that out, we're going to try to, as much as we can, partner with innovations to help politicians not deal with it front and center. So be on the lookout for us to be doing more in that space.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's amazing. I couldn't agree with that more. I mean, sure, we are social primates. Everything is contagious, right?
Speaker 1:COVID and kindness, and when we experience incoming hate, we have a tendency to respond in a particular way, often a way that mirrors that back out. We become defensive, we become angry with other people, and we wonder why we see that coming in as citizens. It's also true that it doesn't have to be the case, and it is definitely true that the identification with the attack is also something that has a lot of work to be done on the politicians' side of the street. So often we come in with our own insecurities, our own pathologies, which are just normal and part of being human. But without anybody making it personal, we make it personal.
Speaker 1:We make it about us. And that's also a recipe for disaster. And you can't change anyone else's behavior, but you can absolutely change the way that you receive it, you understand it, you process it, that you respond to it rather than react to it, and there's a ton of training to be done there. So I'm really curious, In in the report, both in the quantitative and qualitative data, you did a lot of interviews as well, so some of this may have come from that. I'm curious what the key contributors are to lower states of well-being that are observed.
Speaker 1:Do you see common inputs that are leading to poor outputs?
Speaker 2:I would say yes and no, unfortunately. I think that's a classic academic answer, although I'm not an academic, and we are not. There were about hour long interviews, and we conducted around 60 of them. And that was with a combination of current and former political leaders, but also academics, practitioners. And so we ended up having, just under 30 politicians that we interviewed.
Speaker 2:And we really focused on asking them about what they thought the impact of their job was on their mental well-being, on their ability to perform their job, and sort of what they already did to support their mental well-being or what they wish they had more of. In terms of the factors that came out that seemed fairly consistent, and the people that we interviewed came from different continents, different countries, different political parties. There were men and women. They came from different backgrounds. So it was somewhat representative, although a small number.
Speaker 2:Something that came out that was consistent in terms of impacting their mental well-being was, as I think I've mentioned before, this really heightened level of scrutiny and harassment, both online, particularly, and in person. And that seemed to affect all of them in one way or another. And they all dealt with that differently, and they all saw that differently, I would say. Some, for example, a politician in France that we spoke with and several other people said they just no longer engaged with social media because of it. And that was how they coped with that impact on their mental well-being of that harassment.
Speaker 2:Whereas others, and I can think of 2 women actually from state legislatures in the US, really saw social media as their way to connect with and have a voice directly to their communities and their constituents, knowing they had limited budgets, they couldn't pay for huge ad campaigns. So social media was this way to have kind of a direct voice and a direct interaction back and forth. And so saw social media as a positive that they just couldn't do away with despite the death threats and despite the harassment and the trolling that they received. And they both dealt with that in very different ways as well. 1 woman, and it was very striking, said, whenever she receives a death threat, she just laughs.
Speaker 2:She thinks it's quite funny, which I think shows a level of resilience and detachment that probably most people don't have. But I would draw that out as the one that seemed to come out from most of the people and was held in common.
Speaker 1:It's interesting. In the US, there are legal restrictions to what you can and can't do to insulate yourself from some of that negative feedback loop. So, for example, if I'm Seth Godin, right, one of the most famous bloggers in the history of the world, no commenting. That's just his policy. He's figured out that's what's best for him, and he's figured out a way that he can interact with his audience.
Speaker 1:But that is not always the case for elected leaders who are often restricted in their ability to limit or control that feedback. Did you guys see that show up, different approaches to rules about public engagement show up in people's internal response to the stimulus?
Speaker 2:It's a really interesting question. It's not something that we looked at or that that came up. The rules that were associated with it were either not people weren't aware of them, or it wasn't something that was front of mind that they were that they talked about.
Speaker 1:And I
Speaker 3:think, Skippy, this speaks to such, like, the constant thing that we know and shouldn't surprise us but does every time. It's just how little training and support people have to run for office and be elected officials. So these are things that, like, in a perfect world, they're not even in a not in a very imperfect world, you know some of these things, like what to do, what exists, but you're often just you throw yourself in or you're thrown in and you're left there. The one one thing I wanted to bridge to solutions is not solutions, just some framework that Kim and I have been thinking about around this because we have this very interesting time where just today, Kim shared in our internal messaging that another woman is stepping down. She just can't handle the toxic city, right, in the UK.
Speaker 3:Like, it's just like every day, like, this is happening. So democracy is getting gutted. At the same time, citizens have low trust in government in most places and feel like it's not as responsive to their needs. So, right, like, their pathway to have responsiveness is going down while they want more. So one of the things we are thinking about is how do you marry the mental well-being of politicians with the increase in some people call it democratic innovation, but what it really means is, like, structured engagement with citizens that have better outcomes than people just yelling.
Speaker 3:So this is structured participatory budgeting, structured citizen juries, structured citizens' assemblies, and many other sort of much more chosen, structured, formulated ways of engaging citizens so that they feel more heard and the politicians feel less exposed to the not helpful feedback. And so we're gonna be exploring how to package those things together. We don't want politicians to turtle in. Right? They need to have ways, and they want them.
Speaker 3:Like, they really do. They just don't want them with the gun pointing down their neck. Right? That's not literally and figuratively. So I'm excited for some innovation that we wanna explore to bring the well-being.
Speaker 3:And what we know from citizens is from research, is that when citizens engage in their communities and democracy, their mental well-being goes up. Right? It is a sense of agency in their own community. So I'm really excited to explore solving the problem through more engagement.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'll give you a little micro example that comes to mind from a recent talk that I did. I think it was at Colorado Municipal League, and I spoke to an elected official, a woman. I believe she's from a rural Colorado town, and they have the problem, as many people do in the room in council meetings, of people just unloading, just screaming and being personal and all of that. And they adopted a new policy, and I'm I'm interpreting a little bit what she said, so forgive me if I'm not getting it precisely correct.
Speaker 1:But effectively, they took on the approach of training people how to treat us, and they developed a new rule set, but they communicated that rule set and they said, Hey, this type of ad hominem attack, loud volume attack, is not welcome in this room. You are welcome. Your opinions are welcome. Your divergent opinions are welcome. In fact, they're sought.
Speaker 1:We want to hear that, but we want to hear it in a respectful way so that we can actually hear it and do something with it. And if you're not able to do that, take a deep breath and come back later. But if you come into this room and do that, you won't be permitted to speak for x amount of time, say, like, the next two meetings. And she said after implementing that, they really saw a shift. And so that to me is a tangible example of what you're talking about in the room, but then now how do we expand that out to the digital space into all those other areas?
Speaker 1:So I just really love that. Like I said, I am very excited to see what else you guys come up with, and I'm sure many listeners will want to hear that. I wanna come back to additional intervention ideas. But before I do, we're talking about the external inputs that are causing the negative internal response at the moment. There are also internal behaviors that cause negative internal responses.
Speaker 1:I'll give you an example that comes up a ton in our work, in our coaching work with electeds and actually with staffers and everyone is there seems to be a very high prevalence of, I will say, the challenge of saying no. Servants wanna serve, and they will often serve themselves into the ground, serve themselves away from what they really care about, serve themselves into being distracted and unable to focus or deliver, and ultimately hampering the ability to do the things that they showed up wanting to do. What other, let's call them internal behaviors, did you notice that were common that led to challenges of mental well-being?
Speaker 2:So, I think what you've pointed out actually came out as the key determinant of whether someone felt they had good or bad mental well-being. And this especially came out in the interviews that we did. That people who felt they had some sense of control over their work and their work life balance and what their job involved and how long they did it for each day and how many days a week they did it and where they did it, that really spoke to whether they reported that they had good relatively good mental well-being or lower mental well-being. So this sense of control and this kind of autonomy or at least a feeling of autonomy really came out as something not just having a negative contribution, but also going the other way and having a really positive contribution when people felt that they had that down. And that would fluctuate, obviously.
Speaker 2:But at the time that we spoke to everyone, it really became apparent that those periods when they felt more in control, they reflected on them more positively as well.
Speaker 3:I wanna pick up on one of the things that Kim is saying, and you led in this notion of service. And one of the things that we're thinking about that's been prompted by a good friend of a political foundation, a guy named John Alexander, who wrote this book called Citizens. He has challenged me and I found it very helpful that maybe public service is not the right frame. That maybe we need to be calling it public facilitation. Like, meaning, like, are we at a time where one person can serve the constituent or should it be about a facilitating communities to do some of the work themselves or facilitate bureaucrats or multi stakeholders?
Speaker 3:Like, should the actual framing of what this is change? And would that attract different people, change expectations, all of that? And I think it's a really interesting question. I don't wanna parse words. That's not what I'm doing.
Speaker 3:But who do we attract and what do you feel successful? How do you operate, I think, is a really interesting question.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:I think that would be a live debate in this area. That would be very interesting. Because the flip side of that is what we found. Seeing this job as an act of service and that the leaders were contributing that to their communities was also the one thing that stood out as having a positive influence on mental well-being. And we know from other research that's being conducted in Pakistan, for example, that leaders with these pro social motivations, they tend to implement better policy or policy that's more aligned with what their electorate wants.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's it's funny.
Speaker 2:And one of the leaders that we interviewed, and I I think this is something that you've mentioned too in the past, Skippy, is that she had this heart centred approach to how she led. And she really believed that was the buffer for her from burnout. She wasn't doing it for the title. She definitely wasn't doing it for the money. She was doing it for the community that she grew up in and was now serving as she put it.
Speaker 2:So I wonder what that change in framing would bring, but I also wonder what it would take away.
Speaker 1:It's so funny because as you were saying, if there's a argument to be had, I was thinking, well, I'm already having it. So I think maybe a future episode would welcome him and some of those ideas. I'm curious. Were you able to pull out any commonly used practices or approaches that elected officials are currently using for their well-being that seem to be working and could be implemented or attempted by others looking for a resource?
Speaker 2:Yes. So one thing that came out fairly strong, both in those interviews, but also from the survey and other people's work on this that has come before is really the importance of your immediate circle. So your family or your close friends and relying on and connecting with them as much as you can and maintaining those connections seem to be something that really helped people. The flip side of that is it becomes challenging when you're working long hours or if you're travelling a lot. So those that had the awareness that those relationships and maintaining those relationships were important reported that was very beneficial for them.
Speaker 2:The other thing that came out quite strongly was also exercise. So having some sort of physical activity routine ideally set up and made as a habit maybe before you get into office or before it's election time, whatever it might be. That was also something that came out pretty strongly among quite a few people to that really helped them getting out of your head and getting into your physical body.
Speaker 1:It's always the first domino for me. If I am not moving my body, everything else goes to shit, I think, is the technical term. Yes.
Speaker 2:That is the scientific explanation for that for sure.
Speaker 1:That's right. Peer reviewed. So we have this recognition that people are struggling, that there are avenues to improve our condition and seek support, and yet, as in many places, not everyone's choosing to take those actions. What are the barriers that you guys identified in terms of getting from point a, I recognize I have some challenges, to point b of, I'm doing something about them?
Speaker 2:The barriers that we saw came in a few different packages. 1 was around the stigma, the fear of the reputational cost of being public about your struggles or being public about accessing support. So about a quarter of the people who answered our survey said that they just wouldn't access support because of the the fear of this reputational cost. And yet at the same time, just under 70% of people wanted to access more resources to help their mental well-being. The other hurdle that came out pretty predominantly was just feeling like they didn't have enough time or money, particularly in the US context from the people that we interviewed.
Speaker 2:That this was something that they couldn't afford to do because they worked so much or weren't getting paid a particularly large amount. So it was outside their ability. And it wasn't something, again, in the US context, for example, that was included in their health insurance or in the package that they had for being a legislator. So that was about 50% of the people that we surveyed actually said, too expensive. Around 65% said, a lack of time.
Speaker 2:And the other aspect that we found and that people expressed was that this just wasn't the culture or the norm in that setting. And people who worked in other sectors, in the private sector, one, for example, had worked as a teacher, said it was much more welcome and much more open discussion about these types of things in their previous roles. So the conversation just wasn't there Mhmm. To even know who to ask, where to start, where to begin, to know what to access, or what you could access.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I'd be remiss if I didn't editorialize a little bit, which is to say 70% are looking for some kind of support, 65% are saying time, 50% are saying money, and so 25% say reputation. And we don't know which parts are coming where, but that leaves potentially very small slice of people of those 70% who want support and are actually getting it. And you don't have to be bound to being one of those people struggling in the dark. Doesn't support you.
Speaker 1:It doesn't support your community. It doesn't support your family. Maybe your worst fears will be realized, but maybe they won't. If you don't try, it's the only way to guarantee you can't succeed. If you do try and you confirm your worst fears, okay, well, then you'll have some sense of satisfaction that I was right, but boy, if you were not correct about that, your life will be meaningfully different.
Speaker 1:And so isn't it worth a shot how I think about it?
Speaker 2:I think that's right. I think the anticipation of all of the negative consequences, as with so many things in life, are worse than the actuality of doing it. And I almost think it it has to be an awakening moment for everybody. I'm not just talking about political leaders of realizing that you deserve this. The people around you deserve you accessing support or getting help or doing whatever it is that you need to do in order to be the best version of yourself or in order to be well.
Speaker 2:And adding another layer on that for political leaders, several of them had this moment where they realized that in order for them to serve the best way they could, in order for them to do the best job and just be a really kick ass legislator, it was an act of service getting the support, or it was part of their being a servant of the people having mental well well-being therapy or whatever it might be. And so I think that's almost a real mental shift that has to happen.
Speaker 1:Shifting gears just slightly, we have a understanding of the report. If people wanna see the report or wanna read it in all of its glory, where do they go?
Speaker 2:To our website, which is ww.apolitical. Foundation. And we have all of our reports toolkits that we have ever put out available. They're free to access. And it has a Creative Commons license, so we really encourage people to take it, adapt it, use it as well for their own purposes.
Speaker 2:That, for us, is the real goal. And as well as that, on the same website, we have the list that I think I mentioned earlier, this database of interventions and resources that people can search through and see if there's something there that might be relevant for them in their context that they could adapt or that they could look through.
Speaker 1:How would they navigate that? So are they able to navigate it by use case, like I'm having a problem with x, or is it just a list with descriptions that they would read through? How do they way find to the appropriate support for their needs?
Speaker 2:So the way that we structured the database is around first of all, they can people can search via region and location. They can also look at the level of influence on their mental well-being. So if you're thinking I'd like to access therapy, so that would be at the individual level. If I'd like to see what's being done around the world to change how a parliament works, how have they improved the working conditions, that would be then at the institutional level. And then we have different types of initiatives.
Speaker 2:So physical health, different policies and recommendations, psychological interventions. So there's 4 different ways that you can search through that database. And we're actually we've also left that open, so we're very open to people submitting interventions as well.
Speaker 1:Beautiful. And they would submit just on the website?
Speaker 2:That's right. There's a submit an intervention button. Super easy.
Speaker 1:Beautiful. I wanna wrap with some of the actions that we could take if we wanna see this shift occur, if we wanna invite better well-being and thus better performance into our political space, if we want to invite back trust and reduce cynicism, all the things that we've talked about today. We've spoken directly to and around what public servants, my word, I think you guys use a different word, but people who work in staffs, administrations, etcetera, and politicians themselves can do, applying the work themselves, finding resources, being in peer groups, following some of the resources available on your website, becoming aware of the report, etcetera. But there are other groups involved as well that you speak to in the report. You talk about academics, and I would say that in my observation, this is an area where they've really picked up your mantle.
Speaker 1:I've seen 5 or 6 new rigorous reports come out in the last year. I've seen a number of major universities open, labs or schools specifically looking at this. So I think that's happening. The areas where I have seen maybe I've directly seen less action or I've seen less clarity about what we can do are citizens, just normal humans, and individuals in the media. And so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about those 2.
Speaker 1:Give us, like, a bulleted how to guide of what you could do if this conversation resonates and you'd like to have some form of meaningful impact on improving the well-being of our political systems.
Speaker 2:As a citizen, for all of us, we're all busy. We all have our own lives. And unlike us, Skippy, I think that many people aren't spending their daily lives thinking about politics and politicians, where you have the space, the time, educating yourself more about politics in your local area, about who your local representative is or even your national level representative, and thinking and learning about what powers they do and don't have. Because the more information you have, the more you'll be able to still realistically critique and scrutinize the work of your leaders without it it may be bleeding into generalizations or statements like all politicians are the same. All politicians are terrible.
Speaker 2:So that education, and that does come with privilege of time, potentially, but it's something we could all do more of. I think really also holding in your mind that politicians are people too. And they have kids, and they have partners, and they have hobbies, and putting yourself or maybe one of your loved ones in their place. And really thinking about the reality of the fact that we know from evidence that most people go into public leadership in order to serve. And they're called public servants for a reason.
Speaker 2:They're not always gonna get it right. They're not always going to be perfect. But that's just as we are as people.
Speaker 1:Can I focus in a little bit on educational resources? Because I'm here getting to know the system is important, and we're a long way from Schoolhouse Rock. The Internet is a deep and cantacorous place that is hard to trust. It's hard to find down the line resources that are not academic dry and tough to follow. So do you have one or more places that would be good starter points for someone at square 1 so that they don't search around in the dark for 10 minutes, get frustrated, and leave?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it would definitely depend on your context where you are in the world. But, say, in the US, for example, you can find out fairly easily by knowing where you live, who your local member of the city council is, the state legislature, and then at the national level. So all of these people have websites, and they have pages that you can go to to find out who they are, what their manifesto is, what their policy positions are. Another group that I think does quite interesting work in this area is the Congressional Management Foundation.
Speaker 2:And they actually work both with members of Congress, but they also work with interest groups and groups of citizens and communities to educate them more about how Congress works and how they might best interact with members of Congress in order to express their problems or the great things that have been happening in their districts or within their communities. So that's just two examples in the US where you can learn about the who and also a little bit about how it works.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is there anything else that we haven't touched on that you feel would be really important to share with the audience?
Speaker 3:I guess I would like
Speaker 2:to make the point about the media as a group, as an amorphous blob. And all media is not the same, but that the importance that media coverage plays in our attitudes towards political leaders and in perhaps how political leaders behave and some of their fears and the impact on their mental well-being. And I just think there's so much more space and there are groups around the world doing this for more constructive and solutions focused journalism. So you've got the the Solutions Journalism Network, there's the Constructive Journalism Institute, and how we think about the types of narratives and stories that are being put out. And this is ignoring social media, but thinking about legacy media and how it can really play a role in shaping what we think.
Speaker 2:And so therefore showing some of the positive stories, showing the human side, of political leaders is really important. And there's really useful resources out there for members of the media on professional codes that might help this type of work to get off the ground as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's right. I mean, behind the veil of ignorance, this is the best time to ever be alive as a human in so many metrics. And yet when we turn on that doesn't mean there aren't awful things happening, but when we turn on the news, it can often feel like this is the worst time to live, and that discontinuity drives stories in our head that have us then focus on those things and removes our sense of joy and agency in a way that's unnecessary. So really salient thing to point out for yourselves, for Kim, for Lisa.
Speaker 1:If some of this data is showing that what we want is a sense of control, but also a belief in the unfolding of things, both control and trust. What are some of the approaches, practices, daily rituals, morning routines, anything that you have individually found in your own lives of service that have been particularly helpful in you maintaining a state of mind that you seek? It gives me 1 or 2 things, but things that really stand out for each of you.
Speaker 3:I have 2. I have many. I have a practice of having practice, meaning that I'm reflective and thinking about which ones. But I get up every day. Sometimes I'm better at than others and tell myself don't mistake activity for progress.
Speaker 3:And why that's really important is it helps me prioritize the things that are most important to drive progress. That can be anything from making sure that I'm healthy. Like, I took nearly 2 hours out today to get acupuncture in the middle of the day because I feel my body, like, really needs it, all the way to sorting through busy work because you can get caught up in that. So that that sounds like overly first principally, but I do find that really important. And again, this isn't rocket science, but and I feel a little out of touch right now.
Speaker 3:Luckily, literature helps me feel in touch, but I go back to the why that I'm doing it. I just finished when I can't be, like, in communities really talking to people. Because Kim and I kinda work at this global democracy level and we talk to people, but I'm not like down in the streets talking to people every day. That's my why is to make better people in the planet. And one thing that has helped me is to do that.
Speaker 3:But also I spend a lot of time in literature, which is really helping me get feel in my sinew. The why I just finished Barbara King solvers, demon Copperhead, which anyone who is particularly wanting to know the situation in America and just beautiful writing brings back these stories of the challenges that we systemically have around poverty and around drugs and love and life. And and I find the practice of slow reading literature really grounding for me.
Speaker 1:Beautiful. I'm just gonna restate that because it's so good. Don't mistake activities for progress. It's almost the modern, more eloquent, sorry, ex president interpretation of the old Eisenhower quadrants. Right?
Speaker 1:The difference between the immediate and the necessary. I love that.
Speaker 2:I'm envious of Lisa being able to read literature at the moment with a
Speaker 1:I wish there was a comma point there ending on read.
Speaker 2:I just can't.
Speaker 1:Punctuation matters.
Speaker 3:For me, it is
Speaker 2:something that I've adopted relatively recently through actually the work that we did a few years ago around addressing polarization. And that was really going and drilling down into what my values are and reciting those and repeating those to myself. And it goes to Lisa's why I do what I do, but also how I do what I do. And that is backed up by evidence in science that leaders who can acknowledge and know what their values are can go back to those when it's stressful, things get tough. And it really helps to ground you and give you a reason to, I don't know, go into that spreadsheet or go into that difficult conversation.
Speaker 1:When do you read that or recite that? Let's just say remind yourself of those, and how do you do that if you're gonna get very tactical?
Speaker 2:Have it on a sticky note, not a physical sticky note, but a Apple digital sticky note in my phone. Wow. It's everywhere now. I have Apple products still all. So I have that on a sticky note.
Speaker 2:I have the the top 3. I mean, it's not completely conclusive of every value, but I think the top 3, which is and I can tell you that connection, fairness, and accountability. And I would say it's not a daily practice because I can remember them. But sometimes if I feel like I need a black and white reminder, then I go and look at the sticky note. So depends once a week, sometimes once every 2 weeks, I would say.
Speaker 2:The other thing is gratitude, which is also not anything new, but is also backed by science and evidence. And having a small child, we find that really important. So we do that at the dinner table every night.
Speaker 1:Do you go around in each chair? What does that look like?
Speaker 2:Yeah. We we go around in each chair. Your rose and your thorn. So your best part of your day, the worst part of your day, and what you're grateful for. We do peach and pit.
Speaker 2:Oh, there you go.
Speaker 1:And those values shown through the work product of the organization as well. Closing question, same for everybody, which is our listeners, as are the people you work with, are not passive observers of this. Right? These are the humans in the arena. And so if you were to leave them, and you guys can cheat by each getting one answer at this, I suppose, unless you just agree on everything, if you could leave them with just one thing, one thought, one quote, one practice, one program to attend, one newsletter to jump on, really, any one thing that would best resource them to be a personal vector for healing our politics, what would it be?
Speaker 3:I'm not one to, like, idolize people very often because I think it's quite a dangerous thing. But there is someone who I've really looked up to, and his name is Danny Kahneman, Daniel Kahneman. He was a, Nobel Prize winning economist. He really brought he wrote this incredible book Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow. And my background is trying to apply some of those lessons to politics and policy and making the world a better place.
Speaker 3:And when he was interviewed by someone, he said something that has stuck so deeply with me. And it's when they asked him, what's the one thing that you've learned your entire life? Going at the heart of behavior. Right? And economists is give people a break.
Speaker 3:Like, people are doing the best they can. You know, it's really easy to judge. It's really easy to dislike. And for some, it's easy to hate, but people are doing the best they can. And if you can start by meeting them in their best they can place, then everything else becomes so much easier.
Speaker 3:And I struggle with that because I have super high expectations. I'm impatient. Mhmm. But if Danny Kahneman, someone that I just find so brilliant and kind can do that, I can too. That's my advice.
Speaker 3:If you can start at that first principle, I think life's pretty beautiful.
Speaker 2:Mine is to, as much as possible, be hopeful. And hopeful or having hope for me is quite active. It doesn't mean that you're just a a blind optimist who think everything will turn out. It means that you have hope, but that you also are working on making that happen, that hopeful goal or or that point in the future, and also in the present. I mean, you're hopeful that things will stay the same, get better, but you are still working on that every day.
Speaker 2:And so I think having hope, for me, is key. And finding your way, if that's nature, if that's family, if that's sport, if that's salsa dancing, to try to maintain that hope, I think, is very important.
Speaker 1:Beautiful. Well, I just wanna thank both of you so much for spending a significant amount of time with me here on the Healing Our Politics podcast. I just adore your work, how you both show up in the world, what you do. I am so grateful to live in a world where you are helping steer this ship because we are all gonna be better off for your work, and I just can't wait to see where it goes.
Speaker 2:Right back at you, Skippy. Thanks, Skippy.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for joining us today. If you wanna put what you've heard here today into practice, sign up for our newsletter, the leader's handbook, where each month you'll receive just one email with a curated selection of the most useful tools and practices discussed on this podcast today and over the course of the last month, delivered in simple how to worksheets, videos, and audio guides so you and your teams can try and test these out in your own life and see what best serves you. And lastly, if you wanna be a vector for healing our politics, if you wanna do your part, take out your phone right now and share this podcast with 5 colleagues you care about. Send a simple text, drop a line, and leave the ball in their court because the truth is the more those around you do their work, the better it will show up in your life, in your community, and in your world. Have a beautiful day.