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We need a new definition of success—one that harmonizes meaning and money.
Imagine diving into your workday with renewed energy, leaving behind the exhaustion or dread of a monotonous grind.
Traditional beliefs about success and the root cause of burnout are the same:
Prove yourself.
Work harder.
Take care of the business, and it will take care of you.
We’re recycling the mindset and practices that keep us stuck. Our souls need a jumpstart into The Age of Humanity.
Tune in for a new way of working that honors our nervous system and the bottom line, using knowledge of the brain, the Bible, and business. We’ll discuss timeless truths that amplify growth, ignite change, and reshape the world of work. No corporate speak or business BS. Let’s get to the heart of a rewarding career and profitable growth.
We speak human about business.
What’s in it for You?
Value, Relevance, and Impact (VRI): No, it's not a new tech gadget—it's your ticket to making your work genuinely matter to you and your company.
Human-Centric Insights: We prioritize people over profits without sacrificing the bottom line. Think less "cog in the machine" and more "humans helping humans."
I'm your host, Rebecca Fleetwood Hesson, your thrive guide leading you into the new Age of Humanity. I’ve navigated the highs and lows of business and life, from achieving over $40 million in sales, teaching thousands of people around the world about leadership, trust, execution, and productivity to facing burnout, divorce, raising a couple of great humans (one with ADHD), and navigating the uncertainty of starting a business.
I’m committed to igniting change in the world by jumpstarting business into profitable growth with the timeless truths of our humanity.
Sound crazy? It’s only crazy until it works.
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Want insight and advice on your real career and business challenges? Connect with me on social media or email me at rebecca@wethrive.live. Your story could spark our next conversation.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:00:03]:
Welcome back to the Business is Human podcast. I'm your host, Rebecca Fleetwood Hession, and we're here to bring you episodes that blend meaningful work with profitable success. Here to steward what I call the age of humanity. I believe if we transform the way we work, we can transform the way that we live. As always, my friendly request. If you like what you hear, hit subscribe so you don't miss any episode and leave a review to tell the other humans that they might like it too. Always looking to help you and connect with others.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:00:41]:
All right, let's get into it, shall we? Y'all aren't ready for this episode. Oh, my gosh. I barely got words to give you an introduction. Lori Hodges has spent 30 years in the emergency services and emergency management fields, and so she understands about chaos, and she understands it from the perspective of childhood trauma as well as the career that she's built today. But I love an episode where we can build in the start of a career at a Grateful Dead concert into a published book that will serve anyone who reads it. Oh, my gosh, here we go. Lori Hodges, let's go. Lori Hodges, welcome to the show.
Lori Hodges [00:01:18]:
Oh, thank you. Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:01:20]:
This conversation I've been excited about, because you don't realize I'm taking up conversation with you about a topic that I've been coaching on for years, using a metaphor that basically asks Lori to step in and tell us what we need to know when we're in trouble. Because here's the deal. I say to my clients, and I've said it on the show a million times, when we're faced with something, anything, whether it's big, small, whatever, the first voice that shows up is the little bitch in our head. It's the critic that's like, this is bad. It's really bad. Like, why are we doing this? And we gotta really just put her in the passenger seat with a seatbelt and a snack, because she's always gonna be there, but we just gotta tend to her lovingly, but not let her drive. Right? And then I say, the voice you want to respond to is the first responder voice. The first responder, the firefighter EMT shows up on the scene of whatever you're going through, and they don't say, what are you, stupid? I mean, even if they're thinking it, you're trained not to say it.
Lori Hodges [00:02:26]:
Yeah.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:02:27]:
And the first responder says, are you okay? How can I help you?
Lori Hodges [00:02:31]:
Absolutely.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:02:32]:
And if we can say that to ourselves, we have a much better response. And so when I saw your profile, you literally are a first responder, and you're going to talk to us about trauma and what do you do when you're faced with it. And so you're going to give us, you know, the real life experience that I've been talking about metaphorically forever. So I'm excited.
Lori Hodges [00:02:57]:
Great.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:02:58]:
Tell our audience a little bit about the dynamics of your background being a first responder and just give us some context of who you are in that regard.
Lori Hodges [00:03:06]:
Well, I've spent the last 30 years in emergency response and emergency management, So I spent 10 years as a paramedic, and then I've spent the last 20 years as an emergency manager, responding to disasters, wildfires, floods, and those kinds of things.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:03:19]:
When did you know you wanted to do this as a career?
Lori Hodges [00:03:24]:
Well, I struggled after high school, I was your basic C student, and I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I moved to Las Vegas and spent six years just kind of wandering. And then I was at a stoplight one day, and an ambulance drove by running emergent. And all of a sudden, I saw a path. I didn't really want an office job. I saw something that maybe I could do, so I told myself I'd give it a little bit of time. And then that weekend, I went to Grateful Dead concert, and a woman at the Grateful Dead concert had a seizure in front of me. And I didn't have any medical training, but I just tried to protect her head from hitting the metal railing.
Lori Hodges [00:04:00]:
And then the medics came and they took her to the medical tent, and I followed them. And for the rest of the show, I watched them. And so I took that as a sign that this is what I was meant to do, because I didn't see any judgment in what they were doing. They just wanted to get people up and about and able to enjoy the show. And so within 30 days, I had moved back to Colorado and I was enrolled in EMT school. And from there, everything's just worked out.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:04:22]:
I had no idea that was going to come out of your mouth. And I am so glad that it did because we've just met. I know about your book. I know about how you teach people to respond to trauma, which is what we're going to talk about today. But you have also. Oh, my gosh, I'm. I'm emotional about you saying that because you have just illustrated the Thing that I most want people to feel is that you have a path and a purpose, and it doesn't need to follow the societal expectations and norms that people have been just drumming into our heads for years. And often those are the things that keep us from being on our path.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:05:00]:
But you just wandered around and listened to and paid attention to this. And everybody here knows that. I'm always looking for God's signs. And to me, God will be at a Grateful Dead concert in a New York minute to take you where you need to be, girl. I'm a live show junkie, so I've had a lot of spiritual experiences at a lot of concerts.
Lori Hodges [00:05:19]:
Well, I think also if people are really trying to just follow the path that they believe they're supposed to follow or somebody told them to follow, they are going to miss those signs, too. So you just got to keep your eyes open.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:05:30]:
I think, oh my gosh, we could do an entire episode on that. What other people would see as successful roles as CEOs and high level leaders will say to me in their quiet moments, what I really wanted to do was right. And it just breaks my heart because they feel like they're too far into whatever they're doing to make a change. Some of them have and are willing to, but you're exactly right. We can get stuck into thinking what everybody else thinks is best, and that's not a thing. And so you've gone from this experience at the Grateful Dead show to now, all these decades of experience, and you've culminated all that into a book that you wrote called Shaking in the Forest, Finding Light in the Darkness. Tell us a little bit about how that came to be that you even wanted to write the book.
Lori Hodges [00:06:21]:
I'm an avid journaler. I have been my whole life. And so I was looking back at my old journals from when I worked as a paramedic, and I was looking back at some of those calls. You know, you forget some of the stuff that you went through. So as I did that, I decided I wanted to write a book. And at the time, it was just a simple book with maybe some humorous stories. Start with a call that I ran and then add some humor into it. And then it ended up being one more about lessons learned about life.
Lori Hodges [00:06:47]:
And so each chapter starts with a call that I ran on. They're not all humorous. There's a lot of trauma in it.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:06:54]:
Deep in there.
Lori Hodges [00:06:55]:
Yeah, yeah. And I was, at the time I was writing it, I was also working through childhood trauma in therapy. And so the two of those Kind of melded together in the lessons I learned about trauma and how trauma helped inform my life and how it actually strengthened me and how it really became who I am today. The book really kind of interweaves that trauma and kind of what I've gone through in my life along with those calls. And just some lessons that I learned about being a medic. Kind of like you mentioned about, you know, in business, how do you thrive when you're going through bad things? Right? Or, or how do you make sure that you have a most fulfilling life? And I think all those lessons, even in the most traumatic times, helped me to develop some skills in that. In that regard.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:07:37]:
No idea. When I read your bio that they proposed you as a guest on the show, that we were going to literally walk through an affirmation of every point that I talk about with my coaching clients. I'm literally blown away right now because I walk clients through an exercise and it's called fall in love with your story. And I asked them, you know, what have you learned? But I asked them, what have you overcome and the resilience and lessons that came from it? Because Bible says he'll use it all for your good. And who better to handle trauma than somebody that's faced childhood trauma and had the guts to, to address it and go into that place and learn about it? Oh my gosh, this is the best day ever. And so there are deep lessons in these calls. When you think about, I don't want you to tell all the stories because I want people to go buy your book. But when you think about all of the stories and all the things that you've learned, what are some of the nuggets that you want our listeners to take with them today that you think will help them not only in perspective building, but in action and how they respond to things?
Lori Hodges [00:08:45]:
I think a primary one is we have a rule as a paramedic, no running, no yelling. And what that rule means is if you run into a scene or like, if you're yelling at folks because you're amped up and your adrenaline's flowing, the entire scene can get out of control. Because then everybody's energy gets up, everybody gets more anxious. And so if you think about that in a leadership perspective or a business perspective, when I work, I work obviously in a high stress environment. So when I walk into an emergency operations center, I have to take time to stop before I walk in the door, take a deep breath and walk in calmly and with a smile on my face. I joke around a little bit. And the best thing in the world for me, the feeling that I think is the best is seeing the temperature of a room come down because of how the leader is portraying themselves. And I could be just as stressed as everybody else is, but I've learned that I spent most of my life with my amygdala activated in a fight or flight mode.
Lori Hodges [00:09:43]:
Right. Because of childhood trauma. But I also developed a thriving career off of people's, like, thinking that the bottom's gonna jump out or come out. And so from the lessons I learned as a paramedic, I learned to be a watcher. And I watched as scenes would either go horribly awry or really well, depending on how the leader was acting. And so that's the lesson, I think, for everybody, is you have to take the time, you have to slow down. I'm still working on slowing down, but you really have to slow yourself down. And if you do that, you can actually see the stress start to decrease.
Lori Hodges [00:10:17]:
You see the stress and other people start to decre. Decrease, and then it makes for a more productive, you know, environment.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:10:23]:
Oh, so good. So good. When I was with the Franklin Covey organization, we taught some things around leadership and execution of strategy. And that was one of the things they taught us to share with our clients is in the ER room. Slow is the fastest way to solve the problem, to get to the root of things, to really understand. And it is so counterintuitive in our go, go, go, busy, busy world. But I think there's really something to the fact that when you show up, people assume that you are prepared to handle what's happening. Is there anything in your book that talks about that? Just the sense of, yes, go slow, but also the confidence of being prepared to handle.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:11:14]:
None of us are prepared to handle chaos. It doesn't say in your planner on Thursday that you're going to have some traumatic, chaotic moment, whether it's business or home or the kid falls and breaks an arm or whatever. But I think there is some internal preparedness and confidence that we can draw from. Does that resonate with you?
Lori Hodges [00:11:34]:
Yeah, we call it command presence in our world. And I truly believe that you can teach command presence. Some people are like, oh, no, you're born with it. But in my teaching and my mentoring, the key is to you exude confidence, obviously, but it's that calm demeanor coming in, but then it's how you present yourself to others. It's that confident feel. I had an employee who every time he would speak in a large group of people, his voice would get really soft, and you could barely hear him. And it was a lack of confidence, right? So we worked through that to where when he went into these rooms, I just started to tell him, I want to make sure you project your voice, make sure everybody in the room can hear you. And just from some of those small things now, you have never known that he's just a great speaker.
Lori Hodges [00:12:15]:
He works on a facilitation team. And so the key, I think, is, again, I think being a watcher is very good. Watch the people that you would like to be more like and see some of the traits that they use. That's what I did as a paramedic, is I watched the paramedics in the room that had the most presence and the ones where patients, even if I was the one in charge, and I walked in for a long time, my partner Matt, people would look to him, and for a while it really bothered me. And then he said, well, you don't look like you're in charge. And as soon said that, I was like, okay, that makes sense to me. So I started to watch and see. And within a year, all of the patients would look to me and not to him.
Lori Hodges [00:12:52]:
And he's like, okay, I don't like this change. But, yeah, it was just about kind of seeing what are those traits that make people want to follow somebody or want to look at them and then in really stressful situations, all of those traits help you to stay calm, to react appropriately to what's going on, and to also decrease the stress in the room for everybody else.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:13:12]:
That's so good. There's a humble confidence that commands that kind of presence, when in fact, the opposite is true. If you're commanding presence from an ego control perspective, you're going to shut that off. But what you're saying is command presence, that I know what I'm doing, I'm here to help you, is a very different vibe and energy than command presence. I'm here to control you, right?
Lori Hodges [00:13:41]:
And it's not through words, it's through your energy. Like you said, it's how you present yourself to the room and how you present yourself to people. In a lot of cases, it is having that smile on your face, looking people in the eye, asking them how they're doing, just those small things. People start to really resonate with that. I had an incident commander who was just excellent at what he did. And anytime he walked into a room, even if he was an incident commander, everybody just shifted their eyes to him. He just had that presence. But he had Zero ego.
Lori Hodges [00:14:09]:
He was just a good guy who was very confident in what he did, but he didn't push it on you. It's just kind of how he was. But it's also because he cared about people. He was always asking you, how are you doing? Are you taking care of yourself? You know, and that made all the difference to people because then they wanted to follow him because he was just a really good leader.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:14:26]:
Oh, it's so true. I'm thinking about an episode that we did a few months ago with my business partner, Eliza Kingsford, who's a neuroscience expert. And she talked about all of our thoughts come from love or fear. And I teach people how to go on stage and talk as well as just lead meetings and just that command presence piece. But if you walk into a room and you look at that room and you think, I care about how my message reaches these people and I'm prepared is very different than walking in and one either not caring and just delivering the message because you think you're right. And the opposite of that, the cousin of that is I'm prepared, I care about you, and I'm going to command this presence. I'm not afraid of being here. I'm ready to connect with you and give and receive.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:15:13]:
If we could teach everybody to do that, if there was a shot for that, we'd all be in way better situation. You get there by being prepared. And I love the example that you use. The guy said, oh, I don't like this anymore, that you're now commanding the presence in the room. I love that because I talk to a lot of women in business. I try to explain, like if you walk in a room and you think you don't belong there, everybody feels that before you open your mouth and it doesn't matter. Well, you've got to prepare yourself to go into that room. So how, how did you do that? How did you make that shift from nobody's looking at me to him going, being like, oh, pull back there, sister.
Lori Hodges [00:15:57]:
Well, you know, I get the question a lot from folks about how do you work in a male dominated field? Or how have you been successful in a male dominated field? And I always answer it that I've never thought of it as a male dominated field. You know, it's a field that I belong in. I'm doing the job just like anybody else. And so that goes kind of to the heart of it is I can't come at it as if I don't belong. I gotta come at it as I'm a seat at the table just like every other person in this room. But then also, like I said, I watched the people that I admired the most and those who had the abilities that I probably lacked, and I watched what they did and how they did it. And then I tried to mirror that in my own way, though, because I mentored a dispatch supervisor once who's very different than me in personality, and she really tried to be me, and it completely bombed because it's not her personality. So you have to find the way in which your personality fits with the traits of the people that you admire and find that path that helps you the most.
Lori Hodges [00:16:54]:
So I do try to tell people, you know, don't just try to be that person, because I can't obviously be that person. I'm going to try to find the stuff that I like, the nuggets and then figure out how it works for me. And just over time, I just started doing things a little bit different. When I walked into a room, like I said, I walked calmly and I walked with presence. I gave eye contact with a patient, with the family, and that started to just really make a difference. Cause then I'm the first person that they see and interact with. And I keep that going throughout the call. And over time, it became more natural.
Lori Hodges [00:17:23]:
And then when I walked into a room, it was more of. I didn't have to do or say anything. I'd walk in with everybody else, and people would look to me. And that's when I knew that I had made this shift, that my energy was actually matching the actions that I was trying to portray.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:17:36]:
And there is that energetic Spidey sense when you're not being authentic, when somebody's trying to pretend like they're somebody else.
Lori Hodges [00:17:43]:
Absolutely.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:17:43]:
Gain confidence. People don't know why they don't like it. They just. You see them kind of like, that's weird. That doesn't feel right. It has nothing to do with the words or anything. It's a feeling you get when people aren't being themselves.
Lori Hodges [00:17:55]:
Yeah, absolutely.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:17:56]:
That's so good. Oh, my gosh. Just keep going. Tell us more stuff. This is really, really rich. What's one of the stories that has significance to you personally? These are all great nuggets. But what's the one story in the book that maybe hits home to you based on your experiences as a child, or just the one that really kind of locked in with you personally?
Lori Hodges [00:18:20]:
Well, there's so many, but one of them is. I kind of start the book with this, but I was a rookie emergency medical Technician. So I was straight out of school. I had zero confidence, and I had a lot of adrenaline. And so we went to a family that their car had gone into the river. River. So it was a drowning call, but they had moved to a house nearby. So somebody had pulled them out of the river and moved them to the house nearby.
Lori Hodges [00:18:44]:
Well, I was just really amped up. I was excited about the call. It was a big call for me. And so the paramedic I was working with said, hey, get the medical bag and the equipment, and I'll meet you inside. So he just went inside. And so I got all that stuff, and then I was running. Like, I said, no running, no yelling is the first lesson I learned in emergency services. And so I ran into the room, and there was a lip on the bottom of the sliding glass door, and I tripped on that.
Lori Hodges [00:19:09]:
And I just flew into the room. Kind of yard sale with medical equipment flying the patients, and everybody just kind of pushed back, and they had no idea what was going on. But, yeah, I just made that seem so much worse. And then my paramedic, he was like this old, gruff paramedic who'd been around for a really long time, and he just shook his head at me, and then he ignored me the rest of the call, like I wasn't worth his space. And so that was the most embarrassing probably call ever, because I made so many mistakes, you know, just along that path. But I also never forgot that. And from there, I always made sure that I never ran and that I didn't yell. But that kind of started how I approached calls.
Lori Hodges [00:19:50]:
And then there was a guy named Bob, a paramedic that I worked with, and he was the slowest person I've ever met in my life. He was very methodical. He thought about everything, but he was super slow. And it used to drive us nuts. But then I started again to watch him, and I watched how there was a reason why he was so slow. He would be thinking the entire time about the call and what was needed as he was moving slowly. But he would walk into a room. Then he already had a plan in place, and the patients did better because of that.
Lori Hodges [00:20:20]:
Even though you would think, he needs to go fast, he needs to get there quickly by him preparing and planning. In his head, as he walked in calmly, I saw how different those patients reacted to that. So that's one call I started with that was just kind of an embarrassing call.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:20:34]:
That's a great story. And you don't forget those moments. In fact, your brain stores memories based on the amount of emotion associated with it. So the sheer embarrassment of that logged that right up there at the front where any other day you're like, oh, don't do that, because remember, that was bad.
Lori Hodges [00:20:52]:
Right, Exactly.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:20:54]:
So we don't really get to use even the. Both the good and the bad parts of our lives for good at some point. And it makes me think of. My dad is an engineer and very methodical, and my mom and I often joke and say he over engineers everything. We'll be doing projects together. We love to do home projects. And my mom and I are like, you know, measuring with our arms and, like, not paying attention to studs in the wall or whatever. And my dad's just so like, well, let's plan it out.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:21:20]:
And I'll be like, help me move this big piece of furniture. And I'll already have my half picked up and be standing there, like, holding it. And. And he'll be like, where are we putting this? Can we just have a conversation before you start frenetically moving around? And I'm like, like, okay, fine. So I feel like you and I have that in common. The adrenaline and the excitement and the. Let's just go.
Lori Hodges [00:21:44]:
Yeah.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:21:45]:
So how are you wiring that in as a practice to help you go against the kind of normal tendencies that you feel?
Lori Hodges [00:21:53]:
Well, that's what I work on. I am in therapy for childhood trauma. And one of the things that I'm working on the most is I talk fast, I move fast. Everything to me is, go, go, go. And so I'm learning that if I can do some exercises where I take myself kind of out of my head a little bit, or at least a different part of my head, get more into the prefrontal cortex instead of my amygdala, then it'll start to rewire my brain. And so some of the exercises, one of them that I really like is if I'm in a meeting, and this is good for people who suffer from anxiety. I'll try to feel the hair on my arm, or I try to see what the pressure of my foot against the floor feels like, and just really try to concentrate. And what it does is it takes that brain out of the fight or flight, and it takes you into a place where you're hyper aware of one thing.
Lori Hodges [00:22:40]:
Another thing I like to do, it takes longer. It takes probably 20, 25 minutes, if you do it right, is to scan a room from one side to the other. I don't know if you know this exercise, but it's to look at the Textures, to look at the colors, look at everything that's in that room to think about it. You know, like I have a lamp that my grandfather made that case to it and everything. So anyway, you go through the room and it takes a long time if you do it right. But all that that's doing is just slowing down the brain to. To slow you down. And I'm not somebody who can easily think of nothing.
Lori Hodges [00:23:09]:
Like, meditation is hard for people like me who are go, go, go. So this is an active thing where I'm actively thinking about something and working it through it in my brain. But it just takes my brain into a different place. So those are some tricks that I've learned that I just do anytime that I feel like it or that I have the time. And all it's doing is helping me to slow down a little bit and to get my brain into a place to where I don't automatically react. And I take the second that's needed to say, is this reaction appropriate?
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:23:36]:
You know, I love that so much. I can't stop thinking about what you said about feel the hair on your arm.
Lori Hodges [00:23:44]:
Yeah.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:23:44]:
Did you come up with that? Or just like that is profoundly different than where all your other thoughts are going to be. Like, where did that come from?
Lori Hodges [00:23:54]:
Well, that come from therapy. She's given me some tools just to try to slow my brain to take a second, you know, because I used to play pool. And so I was in a pub and I was playing pool and two people got in a fight in there, and I was outside the door in the parking lot before I even knew that I had reacted. Because I come from an abusive childhood, Right. I didn't react rationally because they were nowhere near me. I wasn't at risk. But something in my body said, you need to leave this situation immediately. And so what my therapist is trying to do is getting me to take that second to determine if that action is appropriate.
Lori Hodges [00:24:29]:
Right. If you're really in threat, you're going to react to it. But in this case, I wasn't in any immediate danger, but I completely dissociated and just was outside. And then I'm like, why am I outside? This doesn't make any sense. Right. So me just kind of trying to learn those tools and why do I react the way that I react? And some of it is trauma based. And so working through that has been good for me.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:24:50]:
One, I think we should have been friends growing up because I used to hustle pool with my boyfriend in my 20s. I'd go into the little hole in the wall places and call the game because they'd look at me like, yeah, she's fine. And then he'd come and I was actually a good pool player, but he was even better. And then we'd like run the table, take our money and leave and go to the next little town. Made my beer and cigarette money that way. Girlfriend back in the day. Okay, so this is important for the business community because there is a habit. There's this thing that happens that we treat business decisions like they are fear and trauma and physical danger and oh my gosh, I've got to react right now.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:25:31]:
And I will often say to clients, you don't save lives or cure cancer. I mean, you make tires or you create software, like let's just take it down a notch or two. And I think a lot of times, if you haven't been a child of childhood trauma, which I've got several of my high achieving clients, that that's the case. Because that's what happens oftentimes is you take that adrenaline and you put it into overworking and over producing and being really productive. And it works well for a while. But. So if you're not that person, but you're just in that situation where you treat everything with hyper vigilance, this is a great way to those exercises you're giving to just take it down a notch and treat it with perspective. You alluded to this.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:26:19]:
The more you do that, the more it becomes the habit. Right.
Lori Hodges [00:26:23]:
And you know, one of the things that I think this is true for a lot of people, they take their trauma and they create a very productive career from it. It, you know, but one of the things that I struggled with quite a bit was the fear that if I slowed down, I could never speed back up because there are times where I need to be able to go pretty quickly and make decisions quickly because it is life and death. Right? So this doesn't change that you still have that ability. You're just creating some new tools so that when you're not on, you don't have to be on all the time. And so I think a lot of folks who are in this business and react the way that I do probably have that same fear of if I slow down, I'm never going to get back to where I was or I'm not going to be as productive when really you're just creating new tools for a healthy life. You're taking these lessons learned, you create the tools and then when you need to be on, you're on, but when you don't need to be, you turn that off and you can be a little bit more productive in a different way.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:27:13]:
Referencing back to Eliza Kingsford's episode, she calls that creating the capacity that you need. Yes, and I think that's very true, that there's this feeling of if I stop achieving, even to rest, that that'll be it. It I won't be able to get back to that space. So we just keep going. But the opposite is actually true. You only have so much capacity and eventually all of that starts to break down. You're not effective even if you want to be.
Lori Hodges [00:27:39]:
Absolutely.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:27:40]:
What I'm trying to help people not get to that burnout stage. So when you sat down to write the book, what was your hope about the impact of this book? What did you want it to be?
Lori Hodges [00:27:52]:
There's a couple things. The first is that I want people to see that. I'm not saying that tragedy is good or that trauma is good. What I say in the book is that there's always beauty within the bad. Whatever bad happens, you don't have to look at what happened as if it's good. I'm not expecting people to do that in any way, shape or form. But the lessons that you take away from it and the growth that you can take away from it can be beautiful. And you know, I mention in the book that one of my favorite things during a wildfire is a wildfire, sunset or sunrise that you only get because something horrible is nearby, but it's the most beautiful thing you've probably ever seen.
Lori Hodges [00:28:29]:
So there is this beauty and chaos and if you seek it out and you try to find the beauty, you're going to have a more fulfilling life because that's where you learn those lessons. There's a lesson in everything that we go through, whether it's good or bad. But the bad teaches us more, I think, than anything else because it is a life altering experience. Right. It shakes you up and you have to look at life a little bit differently. We do this all the time in our fear field. We call it after action, where we look at whatever happened and we say what worked, what didn't work, what can we do better? And you learn from it. Well, if you do that in life too, you know, what was good, what was bad, what did I learn from it? You can take that forward and then you can thrive and you build up that resilience that you need to handle kind of the bigger stuff as it comes along.
Lori Hodges [00:29:11]:
You're going to have those tools so that you're better able to go through it and to move through chaos instead of trying to control it.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:29:17]:
Move through chaos instead of trying to control it. That would change the world, right?
Lori Hodges [00:29:25]:
Yeah, exactly.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:29:26]:
And I love that you use that example of the sunrise and sunset near Wildfire is the most beautiful one. Oh my gosh. That's going to stick with me for a long time. Thinking about.
Lori Hodges [00:29:37]:
Yeah, I always take a second, regardless of how busy I am, to watch the sunrise or sunset during a fire. Yeah.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:29:43]:
Oh, not even during firebach. I try to do it every day. It's funny, my neighbor said to me yesterday she had posted a picture of the sunrise and I didn't. I always put new day loading when I post a picture of the sunrise because I love that feeling of no matter what happened yesterday, no matter what's going on around us, we had a new day to try it differently, to do it differently. And that's how I manage getting through the chaos that exists around us.
Lori Hodges [00:30:12]:
The other lesson that I have in the book is that it's okay not to be okay. And that's a big part of it is everyone's going through something. So even if you think nobody will understand what you're going through, everybody goes through something bad. And it's okay to not be okay sometimes. But you want to seek help when you can.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:30:27]:
Yeah, 100%.
Lori Hodges [00:30:29]:
Oh my gosh.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:30:29]:
I'm enjoying this so much. I just. So good. Okay, I have a question and the answer may be no. But I'm curious, when you look around at others in your line of work, other first responders, is there a theme of those that have had some sort of early trauma in their lives for this role?
Lori Hodges [00:30:51]:
I do think that people who have suffered from early childhood trauma go into fields of helpers. So whether it's doctors, nurses, emergency medical technicians, paramedics, firefighters, I think you see a lot of people who won. The hyper vigilance is something to where for me, you know, I was always thinking the bottom was going to drop out. And now my entire career is to try to plan for when the bottom drops out. So I created a career around it. But yes, I think that it creates a helper mentality. And also the hyper vigilance creates empathy because you're more aware of the people around you because you are being hyper vigilant. You're picking up on stuff that a normal person who didn't go through this wouldn't pick up on that stuff.
Lori Hodges [00:31:33]:
So I do think that it creates empathy and it creates the helper Mentality. So, yes, it's in our field, all over the place. Military, I think, too, would be the same.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:31:41]:
Interesting. Because I think traditionally people think that military is. I just want to be in charge. I just want to be strong. I just want to be in control. But you're right, the helper aspect of how God wired us, it needs to come out somewhere. Okay. This is going to be a harsh example, but even a drug dealer will probably think they're helping somebody by providing them with the drugs they need.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:32:02]:
Right. The helper mentality is a hardwired. We just need to use our powers for good, not evil. And so I love that reminder and thought for our listeners that hyper vigilance does. You sense things, you feel things that other people are not picking up on, which is a beautiful thing. As long as, as you said earlier, you've got some sort of habits or patterns that you use for yourself not to stay in hyper vigilance the majority of the hours of the day.
Lori Hodges [00:32:38]:
Yeah. And it's also another example of finding the beauty in chaos. Because the hyper vigilance came from trauma. And I can use it in a good way or a bad way. Right.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:32:49]:
Which for your nervous system, because you're looking at that sunrise and knowing that there's a fire, but you're saying to yourself, that's beautiful. I know what to do. I'm safe. I haven't prepared. Yeah. I think it's a great reminder because too often people think, think, oh, my life has to be free of problems and stress in order for me to be okay, y'all. I don't know anybody that that's the case.
Lori Hodges [00:33:15]:
Yeah, we all do deal with chaos, you know. Yeah.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:33:18]:
Unless they're just overly medicated and just ignoring what's going on around them. I don't know. I guess that's an option, but I'm not one I'd choose. Yeah, we're all going through something every single day.
Lori Hodges [00:33:28]:
That's a key thing, I think, for leaders, too, is to understand that not only do you need to look out for your people, but you need somebody within your people that's looking out for you. Because I do have a story in the book about that incident commander that I told you about that I admired so much. He ended up committing suicide. And he was always the guy who was looking out for everybody else. And I wondered after his suicide how much people were asking him the questions he was asking them about. Hey, are you taking care of yourself? Are you hydrating? Is there anything that you need? And so I Think everybody just thought he had it all together, that he didn't have any problems because he always exuded this confidence. Right. And so with my team, when we're under stress, I reach out to them, but I also ask them to reach out to me, like, let me know if they think I'm starting to get a little bit too stressed or if I need a break.
Lori Hodges [00:34:16]:
If I'm sitting at my desk too long, make sure that they're telling me that. And so that's important as a leader to one, it lets people know that you're just as vulnerable as everybody else is to stress. And then two, it creates that trust with your team to look out for one another.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:34:31]:
That's so beautiful. I'm so emotional because when you are the one who's in charge of everything, or at least you've put yourself in that situation, you believe that to be true. And I've spent a lot of years of my life not being vulnerable enough to ask for help and just wishing somebody would offer. And I to am a journaler, and I was able to go back and read my journals and realize that was a thing for me. And I made some significant changes in my life and prayed for the kind of people to be around me that I could be vulnerable with. And now I have the kind of friends that if they don't hear from me in a couple days or if they just know that I'm going through something, just to get the text that says, what do you need? Let's get together, let's have coffee, let's, you know, I'm emotional because it literally is a life changer phenomenon. And what you're saying is, don't wait to hope those people come along. Create that condition for your team.
Lori Hodges [00:35:39]:
Right?
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:35:40]:
So. So we'll say that again, because when you opened up this lesson, you said it very profoundly. Say that line again.
Lori Hodges [00:35:46]:
Like, don't just be the person who's looking out for your team. Make sure that your team is looking out for you as well. Because if not, you're not taking care of yourself, and then you can't take care of your team. So that's one of the rules of the about paramedicine too, is you got to take care of yourself first and then the patient, because if you don't, you become two patients. And so from a leadership perspective and from that experience with that incident commander, I just learned that I might not know that I'm not okay, or I might not know that my stress level's gotten too high and I'm starting to impact people in the room or I'm impacting myself. So if I'm looking out for my team, the best thing that I could do is tell my team also to look out for me and to let me know if they're picking up on some signs that maybe I'm stressed or maybe I need to take a break or hydrate or whatever. Whatever.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:36:29]:
Is it that simple that if you ask your team to take care of you, does that helper mentality take over? Because is it really that. I hope so. Is it that simple just to say to your team, hey, make sure I'm okay too?
Lori Hodges [00:36:45]:
You got to build a culture, I think, where that's okay, because, you know, we're in a society where failure is not appropriate. And so in part of our culture, with our team, I make sure that they understand failure is okay, because that's the great learning ground. That's where we learn the best lessons. But also that every one of us, like I said, goes through something none of us knows the entire life or what's going on with people in their heads when they're working with us. And so we just have to be aware and give them a little bit of grace to talk to them and make sure that they're taking care of themselves. And when you do that, they might not share with you, because a lot of people aren't going to share. But then they know, maybe this is somebody that I'm safe with. If I'm not okay, I can tell them.
Lori Hodges [00:37:24]:
Them, hey, I need a break or I need to do something. So you're starting to create this culture. It does take time, though, so it can be that simple. But I also think it needs to be this learned behavior with leaders where it's constant, and then also back up the action. If somebody comes up to me and they say, hey, you've been sitting here forever. And I'm like, no, no, no, I'm okay. Well, I need to be like, okay, thank you for that. I appreciate it.
Lori Hodges [00:37:45]:
I'm gonna go take a walk around the block. I'll be back in five minutes. And then that tells them, hey, you know, I was a good teammate, and I helped this person. Maybe they'll help me when I need help, you know?
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:37:55]:
Yeah. Receiving the feedback, receiving the help is what builds that culture. That's huge. Like, it's as simplest as inviting. It is a starting point, but then follow it up with action so that they know that you're. You're serious. Because receiving help is difficult. Yeah.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:38:11]:
Yeah. And. And there have been times that people. Now that I'm in a situation where people do say, hey, how can I help you? Too often I have deflected that because I wasn't accustomed to receiving help. Help. And now when I hear that, it's a trigger to pause and go, how could they help me? Like, let them. Because they wouldn't have offered if they didn't think I needed it or want to help. And so even things like when I'm inviting people over to my house, people used to say, well, let me bring something or how can I help? And I would be like, no, no, no, no, no.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:38:43]:
I got it, thinking I'm honoring them. And then I'm stressed out and they get there and I'm tired and it's not fun. And now I'm like, okay, you bring this. What I've studied in the, like the art of gathering is a book, is that people want to participate. It doesn't feel as comfortable to just be not involved in what's happening. And so what you're explaining there is leaders have to invite that, right?
Lori Hodges [00:39:07]:
And you know, in disaster psychology, they teach this, that, you know, when you have something big happen, if you're in a group of people and you've just gone through something big, some kind of disaster, and you're trying to figure things out, the most stressed people tend to shut down sometimes. But if you give them a task, you say, can you do this thing for me? Can you watch this child so I can go take care of this person? It gives them a task and then that gets their brain working again and it gets them going. So again, I mean, that's a extreme example, but it's the same thing that you were just talking about, where if somebody offers assistance and you say, no, no, no, their stress can go higher depending on the situation. If you give them something to do now, they're a helper too. They're part of the solution. And then they feel better about what they're doing. So that. And then you could just do that in your day to day life.
Lori Hodges [00:39:52]:
You know, when somebody says, hey, how can I help? Give them something to help you with.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:39:55]:
You know, my gosh, so good. I'm thinking about the millions of dollars that get spent in corporate America for training and development and how powerful it would be if some of those dollars were channeled into hiring people like you and, and others in, you know, disaster psychology. And how do you deal with trauma in these situations that gets it out of the business context and gives it a deeper meaning. Because the Application is significant to the. The improvements that can be made because it's humans running your business and how they respond to things, whether they perceive it to be physically dangerous. And it's really just a missed deadline. It's not as bad as we think. But the response to it as a human has gotten to the point where it's like, okay, let's just all.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:40:47]:
Oh, so I'll take it down a notch. Yeah. So good. So good. So how can people stay in touch with you? One, I want everybody to go buy the book because the application that you have just illustrated from this brief episode is so profound. I just think it would be an amazing, like, let's read this book as a team and then let's talk about the lessons that come from it. I think would be great. It's called Shaking in the Forest, Finding Light in the Darkness.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:41:16]:
And just the way that you present things, I can already tell it would be an amazing read for people. But how else can they stay in touch with you? Do you go out and talk to teams and do things like that if they wanted to have you in for, like, a keynote or a session with their teams?
Lori Hodges [00:41:31]:
Yes, I do speaking. And I'm an executive coach, so I do coach businesses too. And then my website is just lorihodges.com so L O R I Hodges. I'm not really big on social media. I have some social media. LinkedIn is probably the biggest for me. And so I am on LinkedIn and then a couple of other places, but I don't really have, like, a huge following on those.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:41:53]:
You don't need that impact in what you're doing with your clients is what matters way more than the story you're putting online. I wish more people understood that too.
Lori Hodges [00:42:01]:
Yeah, it's true.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:42:03]:
I am thrilled that we've met. I hope that we can stay connected. If there's anything that I can do to support you and your business. Do you have another book that you're working on or anything that we need to know about for the future?
Lori Hodges [00:42:14]:
No, I am in a PhD program right now, so I'm doing my dissertation. So I can't write a book right now, but I hope to make my dissertation into a book eventually.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:42:23]:
Can you tease us with it?
Lori Hodges [00:42:25]:
It's about chaos and chaos theory and how we take the principles that business leaders have used to deal with disruptive environments. How do we take those into other areas like public sector or other businesses to be able to deal with disruption. So it's the same theme because complexity and chaos are two things that I study quite a bit in my field.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:42:44]:
God, I love you. Because you know what? If you loved Grateful Dead, you loved you. Some chaos, right?
Lori Hodges [00:42:51]:
Exactly.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:42:52]:
And so that chaotic environment that you love so much in your youth is now this thread of good that you are spreading in the world. And I just wish you all the best in that, because the world needs more of Lori Hodges.
Lori Hodges [00:43:06]:
Well, thank you very much.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:43:07]:
I appreciate it. That's good. Okay, so you're gonna come back when the next book's out. That's just.
Lori Hodges [00:43:12]:
All right, sounds good.
Rebecca Fleetwood Hession [00:43:19]:
Thanks for being here. You can follow us on Instagram. Business is Human or TikTok Rebecca Fleetwood Hession. It's a great way to share some of the clips with your colleagues and friends. All right. Make it a great day. Love you, mean it.