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Experts get in the way of their own discoveries!
Carol Sanford is a positive contrarian who believes that no matter the outcome, it can be a meaningful one. As a professor, Carol ensures never to use the same idea twice, which provides a space for creating useful and valuable evolution in her thinking. Being an expert blocks people’s learning, as she emphasizes and Carol does not class herself as one.
Carol believes that discovering who you are, takes a lifetime - the secret is not in deciding who you are, but rather discovering it. We all have work to do, we show up for our businesses, whether we like it or not, and we will discover new things every year. We do not necessarily need to strive for new content, but rather an extension and evolution of something useful to the world.
You cannot do this alone - grow your capacity in a developmental community!
Notes:
👠 Carol doesn't view herself as an expert: experts get in the way of their own discovery. 3:36
😇 She's a positive contrarian: for Carol, no matter what the outcome is, she makes it a meaningful outcome. 8:56
👩💻 She has a School (with a capital S) where she works with business leaders. 10:53
🤓 Carol always disrupts certainty: in every book, workshop, or podcast, she disagrees immediately. 17:21
💡 As a professor, she never repeats the same idea she used before. 20:40
🧠 A mental artist: creating useful, valuable evolution in her thinking. 23:16
💎 Don't think about building something for you as a woman but for all humans. 28:22
💲 You make more money, because you make more of a difference without trying to make money. 33:23
😇 You can't do it alone: in a developmental community, you can grow your capacity. 34:53
Links:
Notes:
👠 Carol doesn't view herself as an expert: experts get in the way of their own discovery. 3:36
😇 She's a positive contrarian: for Carol, no matter what the outcome is, she makes it a meaningful outcome. 8:56
👩💻 She has a School (with a capital S) where she works with business leaders. 10:53
🤓 Carol always disrupts certainty: in every book, workshop, or podcast, she disagrees immediately. 17:21
💡 As a professor, she never repeats the same idea she used before. 20:40
🧠 A mental artist: creating useful, valuable evolution in her thinking. 23:16
💎 Don't think about building something for you as a woman but for all humans. 28:22
💲 You make more money, because you make more of a difference without trying to make money. 33:23
😇 You can't do it alone: in a developmental community, you can grow your capacity. 34:53
Links:
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Creators & Guests
What is The She Leads Podcast: Real Conversations with Women Entrepreneurs?
The She Leads Podcast, hosted by Adrienne Garland, is the podcast for women leaders and women entrepreneurs who are sick of sugar coating what they say and how they say it. Each week, Adrienne explores entrepreneurial stories, businesses, and challenges that women entrepreneurs face with a wide range of guests who are open to sharing their authentic stories in a refreshing and real way. For far too long, women have been sugar coating our voices, thoughts, and opinions, but that stops here and now! The She Leads Podcast, formerly Sugar Coated, is the place where women leaders can express their brilliance without sugar-coating anything. This podcast offers a platform for super-practical, actionable advice for women to overcome challenges and to make a significant impact on our families, our communities, and our world. Adrienne Garland, CEO of She Leads Media - entrepreneur, media producer, and adjunct professor rejects the notion that women must be deferential to those currently in power and pull back our opinions. Join Adrienne as she dives into raw conversations with brilliant women leaders and entrepreneurs - sans Sugar Coating!
Adrienne Garland (00:00.834)
Hi, everybody, and welcome to the She Leads podcast. I'm so excited to welcome my next guest. Her name is Carol Sanford, and she is a prolific author, and she is the she's a positive contrarian. She is the founder of Interactive, I'm sorry, InterOctave, Inc. She is the author of seven bestselling books.
She is a community developer. She has the best, she has the business second opinion podcast, or Genitive Business Development Community with over 45,000 members. And she is just a force to be reckoned with. I cannot wait to talk to Carol today. We're going to get into everything, and especially about education.
and what needs to change. So I just want to dive right into it today. Welcome to the SheLeads podcast, Carol.
Carol (01:06.317)
Thank you, Adrienne. I'm looking forward to it.
Adrienne Garland (01:10.17)
I cannot wait. One of the things that just struck me about your bio is that you are a prolific author and business leadership expert, and your books are required reading at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and Google. So let's wind this all back. How did you get into doing what you're doing? And you are a great writer.
are so involved in building community and thinking about things in a completely different way. How did you sort of start this work in the first place?
Carol (01:50.677)
Well, first I have to say, I'm not an expert. Thank you. I always know that's intended as an honor, but I believe it's a wrong epistemology and it has to do with how I got into this work. I have a grandfather who's of the lineage of Mohawk native peoples. I think it's a gene that has me have the face texture, but I have his blood. And...
Adrienne Garland (02:18.083)
Hmm.
Carol (02:18.933)
What he did is he's a person who taught about living. And so when we were taking care of his pigs or his farm, he would teach me what he called work ideas, I ought to work on myself. It was more of a Socratic process. I never felt judged by him, although I did by my father. So I had this strong contrast.
of what it's like to learn one way and to learn another. My grandfather was never an expert. He was always a learner. He was always an explorer. And so I, from a young age, I was attracted to that. I ended up in school at UC Berkeley in the middle of the 60s, where you had the free speech movement, the civil rights.
And I stood with a guy named Thomas Kuhn, who wrote a book on the structure of the scientific revolution, how science gets validated and changes. And he was a quadratic teacher. He sat now after class with us in the basement of the Raskiller, and we would ask him questions, and he would ask his questions back. So.
From a young age, I learned that being an expert was of very little use to people learning and it blocked their learning. It got in the way of their own discovery. And the other thing these people all did for me is made me look at myself while I was engaged. Like when a kid gets in school and they get denied something.
that I learned to watch what happened to me and how I interpreted it. That that was more important than any action out there. They always made it a discovery. So that's how I kind of got into this.
Adrienne Garland (04:20.363)
Mmm.
Adrienne Garland (04:24.738)
Mm-hmm.
Adrienne Garland (04:28.969)
Oh my gosh.
Adrienne Garland (04:33.13)
Okay, I love this so much. And how lucky were you that you had a grandfather like that? I mean, that just warms my heart to begin with. And then the fact that you got to experience this through your own education. And I believe that the Socratic method of teaching is the best way to learn, right? And to learn about ourselves and how
Carol (04:38.283)
Yeah.
Carol (04:43.627)
Yeah.
Adrienne Garland (05:02.054)
we react to things, I think, is it is the lifelong journey of learning. And it's so funny because before we even got on this, and it's so interesting, I think, like life is so interesting. So I was a little late to get this started here because my equipment was sort of messed up because I brought my equipment to Texas with me and I was talking about my son.
The reason I brought my equipment is because my son had to do something for this advertising school and whatever I brought it for actually was a little bit of a disappointment. He didn't get what he had really put his heart and soul into doing. He actually did something that was really creative. I'm his mother. I think he deserved to get what he wanted. It was really good.
But one of the things you said to me, Carol, is it's not so much the outcome, it's how he deals with the outcome. And that is the biggest lesson in life. And he was mad, he's mad that he didn't get into this advertising school. And I can understand that, of course, I sympathize with him that he didn't get in, but.
Having the perspective of going through these disappointments in life, and you know, I'm an educator. I teach at Rice University and also at NYU. And, you know, I say this, even though I instruct there, this stuff doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It's what you do. You know, I said to my son, don't worry about it.
Go get an internship, go get your hands dirty. If you wanna be in advertising, you can be in advertising. It doesn't matter that you went to the, that you're in this advertising school at the university that you're in, who cares? You can do anything you want if you really want it. And I don't think that young people today,
Adrienne Garland (07:18.11)
I don't think they understand that. I think they think that they have to follow a certain thing to do what they want to do and that is just not true anymore. It's just not.
Carol (07:27.149)
So it's not a part of how we do education. Education is about facts and knowledge out there, not about knowledge of being here and the way I react and how I need to grow and learn. And it's one of my biggest concerns is we have adults now who were kids for the last 50 years in school and they were only memorizing.
what someone else wanted them to know, not how to find their own answers, not how to develop their own thinking, much less how to understand who they are and how they're creating the reactions around them. So, you and I are contrarian. My grandfather named me the Positive Contrarian. And the reason he did is he said,
Adrienne Garland (08:12.439)
Yeah.
Adrienne Garland (08:22.561)
Aww.
Carol (08:25.437)
you've always got a contrarian view, but it's going towards something better. And so, as an example, what you just said, our view is it doesn't matter what the outcome was. What really matters is what happens inside. That's a positive contrarian because it gives a direction that's the opposite or very different.
Adrienne Garland (08:31.475)
Mmm.
Carol (08:53.781)
But it has a meaningful outcome. Not a, I can check off the box outcome.
Adrienne Garland (09:03.381)
Do you think that is taught or learned or do you think that that's something that's innate?
Carol (09:13.685)
No, I think the capacity is innate, but not the capability. So we're born with it. But in this country and in our school system, it's not capabilities, not be able to use it. So I'd say there are schools with the capital F's had to be created separately. So I have a school, a capital S school where I work with business leaders on both.
Adrienne Garland (09:19.262)
Mmm.
Carol (09:43.797)
the inside and the outside, the influencing and exerising. So for example, yesterday, I ran a community event for four hours on why we can get rid of racism and genderism and all the other isms. And that we started with a personal reflective exercise, not a lecture of here's what I, it's your expert.
think you should know, but here's how you can examine yourself and see how you're doing what we're going to explore today. Don't apply it to anyone else but you. So for half an hour, the head of university executive teams and small businesses and mid-size doing this exercise on themselves. They learn how to do that.
how they notice when they're reactive, ego-driven, or purposeful for themselves. And now they can do it with others. And then we talked about what really are the four major domains and errors that cause us to have racism and so forth. But again, always applying it to themselves. That's a very different way to teach.
And what I was bringing is the capability to exercise the capacity. And we know that the, the innate capacity we'll call it is there because we have oxytocin. Oxytocin is, you know, a mother. If we look directly back and forth with a baby, we build a bond. And if we don't, they get separated. You have to.
Rebuild that oxytocin. Well, it's true in business, that sounds weird. Not just with parents, but everyone we know. And we would judge everybody in isolation so we don't build the connection. If people can learn to understand how their capacity to make sense of themselves.
Adrienne Garland (11:44.353)
Mm-hmm.
Adrienne Garland (11:58.85)
Hmm.
Carol (12:09.837)
and work with other people to develop, then each of us, you, me, all people are teaching. And I teach at university level also. If we learn that, now we can grow that innate capacity into a capability. Sorry, I have a lesson, so I get out of breath a bit easily. So sorry to be gasping here.
Adrienne Garland (12:30.316)
Hmm
Adrienne Garland (12:34.974)
Yeah. Oh, no. No, you're not at all. No, this is all so fascinating and I completely agree with you. It's so funny. At MYU, I teach an entrepreneurship class. At Rice, I teach an entrepreneurship class too. It's slightly different. I was just in Panama, as I was saying before too, I take students
these global field experiences. So we get out into these different countries and we work on projects that are in the startup ecosystems in these different countries. It's so beautiful and fascinating. I just, oh my God, I love it so much. But in the class that I teach at NYU, I think it's a little unexpected because the students come in and they've,
Carol (13:16.949)
Wonderful.
Adrienne Garland (13:30.37)
course think that they're going to learn how to start a business, which they do. We get there. But I do a lot of work on the inner part first because I say, you show up in your business, whether you like it or not. And so we have to understand who we are before we can start a
Adrienne Garland (14:00.39)
I didn't know I was coming to therapy. But you do need to know that because if you don't understand where you kind of even sabotage your own self, you're going to sabotage your business. We really don't want to be doing that. We find these parts of ourselves and it's uncomfortable.
Carol (14:03.287)
haha
Carol (14:21.153)
Yes.
Adrienne Garland (14:30.271)
a lot of times for these students.
Carol (14:33.549)
Well, and even more so, not only do we sabotage, we don't realize our potential. Because I'm so appreciative that you told that Surin, that you did that work. I yesterday introduced the idea and most of my people are, my company's are entrepreneurial. I said, if you want to know who you are, you have to get to your identity.
Adrienne Garland (14:40.371)
oh yeah
Carol (15:02.001)
not your identification. Because we tend to get trapped in what we identify with. This group, this religion, this ideology, this set of friends, and we don't have an identity that's based on our essence. And if you look at yourself, you have two aspects. One, you learn from the world, and when you probably come in with it.
Adrienne Garland (15:04.078)
Mmm.
Adrienne Garland (15:20.898)
Yeah.
Carol (15:31.285)
Who knows, but the difference between essence and personality. Personality is conditioned by your family, your church, your neighborhood, your nation, and I work all over the world also. So I really appreciate that aspect of your work too. But if we don't learn how to discover our essence, we never find that and realize it.
But that's why my grandfather said to me, you're a positive contrarian. Now, I learned early to annoy people with a better idea. The other thing about my essence is I disrupt certainty. So every book I have, all my workshops, every podcast I run, I disagree immediately. I don't even know I'm gonna do it. Like I said,
Adrienne Garland (16:05.709)
Yeah.
Adrienne Garland (16:29.06)
Oh no.
Carol (16:29.809)
I'm not an expert. And then people go, what? Wait, is that a good thing or bad thing? So I wake people up. It's the core of who I am. It runs through everything I do. And it makes a huge difference in how I can engage and what people can discover. So I think your message, Ray, you can't do anything until you know who you are.
Adrienne Garland (16:51.822)
I love that.
Carol (16:58.801)
And it takes a whole lifetime to figure that out completely. It's an odd design.
Adrienne Garland (17:01.166)
Yeah, yeah, it's so funny. Yeah, yeah.
Carol (17:08.001)
And one last thing, it's not decide who you will be, it's discover who you are. And that's a big difference. I'm sorry, go ahead.
Adrienne Garland (17:15.502)
It's so true. No, I'm just like nodding because yes, yes. I mean, it's like every year that passes, I'm like, oh my gosh, I thought I knew. And you get older and older and you're like, okay, I don't know anything anymore. The older I get, the more I realize that I'm not.
Carol (17:34.189)
Friends.
Adrienne Garland (17:45.002)
I just don't know what I thought I knew. I'm even more open to discovering and learning now. I almost like it more. I like not feeling like I know or that I need to know.
Carol (17:49.983)
I ain't.
Pfft
Adrienne Garland (18:14.018)
bear the burden of being an expert. I mean, if you call yourself an expert, you have this identity to maintain like that you know it all, right? And so it's like easier to not call yourself an expert because you're always learning. It's easier.
Carol (18:33.293)
So let me describe to you the process I use because I'm on the same wavelength. I have a slightly different path to get there than you said. So let me add my thought, which is I believe that it also stops you learning when you think you're an expert, but it stops everyone learning. And I call what I do when I'm really doing my great work.
Adrienne Garland (18:54.56)
Agreed.
Carol (19:02.829)
long thought thinking. Now let me describe what that means. I believe each of us have some kind of work. I don't believe in personal purpose. We have work to do. And my work has always been from a young age, thinking and consciousness, because of how I was raised and the trials and tribulations. I consider it that my entire life and I'm about to be 82.
Adrienne Garland (19:05.57)
Mmm.
Carol (19:33.085)
has been about that and I've been building and every year I know something different and more and more complex and more useful and more valuable and I tell myself I can never write or use the idea I used last year. I have to have a new evolution of it. And if I'm a professor with a class.
I can't use any curriculum notes. I can't use any PowerPoints. I already have. I can't pull out my past books. I'm never allowed to do the same thing twice because I'm not pushing. And I'm not useful to the world. And so I have people who've been in my community, my membership community for 40 years.
And the reason they show up over and over is they never hear the same thing twice. All the people who were with me yesterday got my whole new evolution in thinking, which I demanded I come up with. And it's scary because what if I don't get anything new? Well, then you're useless. You may as well let go. I am demanding that I create an evolution.
in my work. Therefore, I call it long thought thinking, not over my lifetime, because it could be the same thing and not just new content, but an extension, an evolution of something useful to the world.
Adrienne Garland (21:18.891)
And that's really interesting too, because it doesn't have to be transformational change, even if it's slightly different or looked at from a little bit of a different perspective. It's still evolution, right?
Carol (21:36.333)
Well, we can talk about that. I've got a process I teach people in my community. It's a, you don't ever know whether something will be transformational. What you know is what you have is more complex understanding, not knowledge, not just piling on, but you can see what you used to think was incomplete. And so if it feels more complete.
Adrienne Garland (21:47.36)
Mmm.
Adrienne Garland (22:01.268)
Hmm.
Carol (22:04.985)
and more complex because life is. And you can see how things relate to each other. You can see before. Or you can see things are nested. You can understand that they were related before. So there are some criteria for me, but you've got the idea, which is I am really trying to create useful, valuable evolution.
Adrienne Garland (22:13.775)
Yeah.
Carol (22:34.085)
in my thinking that I can share with others they can build on or go a different direction. So it's not accumulation which would mean you could go to tons of perspectives. You got to ask yourself is it useful? Is it valuable?
Adrienne Garland (22:56.331)
You know, you know what you sound like. I don't know if you know what you sound like to me. Do you know what you sound like? To me, you sound like an artist. Do you know that?
Carol (23:03.118)
I dubbed here. What?
Carol (23:11.881)
I do call when I do art sometimes. The only difference is.
Adrienne Garland (23:14.57)
You sound like you, you sound like an artist. That's what you sound like to me. Yeah.
Carol (23:18.581)
Yeah. Well, writers are one form of art. Uh, I don't, I, it's interesting. I'm disabled so I can't even use my hands very well. Uh, but I can use my mind. So I'm a mental artist.
Adrienne Garland (23:23.305)
Yeah.
Adrienne Garland (23:30.656)
Ah.
Adrienne Garland (23:35.134)
You are, you're a mental artist. It's funny, I'm reading some book, it's back there, I can't even recall the name of it. And it is sort of about this like concept of evolution, but I also take an art class. I love art. And, you know, sometimes you're working on something
and you're so close to it and it's kind of a mess. And you have to look at it from a different perspective or put it far away from you and you take a step back from it and then you can see something that you haven't seen before. And all of a sudden it opens something up to you that makes you think about things in a completely different way. And I'm listening to you and I'm like, wow, she's an artist.
Carol (24:09.333)
Yeah.
Carol (24:17.397)
Yeah.
Carol (24:22.422)
Yeah.
Adrienne Garland (24:33.07)
I don't think she knows it. Ha ha ha.
Carol (24:35.337)
Well, I understand what you mean. I have a particular kind of art. If you let me take your metaphor here, which is a metaphor of work, an artist at work in a context. So it's not me and my art. It's watching the subject, call it in a value adding process. So I'm watching the idea and how it works with people.
Adrienne Garland (24:50.123)
Yeah.
Adrienne Garland (25:04.512)
Yeah.
Carol (25:06.025)
I do white papers live instead of writing. I do things and watch how people react. That's what they do with it. How do they change how they're thinking? That is a kind of art, because you don't know what the picture's gonna look like when you start, and you don't know what you're thinking. I couldn't sleep last night. I was so excited with new ideas that came from watching.
Adrienne Garland (25:13.198)
Hmm
Adrienne Garland (25:18.605)
Mm.
Adrienne Garland (25:23.614)
Yeah.
Carol (25:34.721)
people to use what I offered yesterday. Not as truth, not as knowledge, but as a process to discover. So that's why I agree with you. It's art, but it's not just me. It's the community painting together.
Adrienne Garland (25:53.858)
Yeah. So what can, you know, the thing that I am focused on with the She Leads podcast, I have a conference, it's all focused on women and women growing businesses and starting businesses. One of, I guess, my, you know, theses is, is that I believe that women,
should, I don't know if that's a good word or not, but women should start their own businesses because I do not believe that the way that corporate America is structured today is positive for women. I think it's not made for women. I don't think that women can thrive in corporate the way that it's structured today. And so I think that women have the opportunity to
businesses that allow them to thrive. But I don't think that women have figured out how to do it in a way that benefits them yet because we keep building businesses based on a model that worked for men in the past. So we just keep recreating the same thing. And it's why like women don't get past the million dollar mark and all of it. And I do not have an answer. But how can some of these concepts
potentially help women to start and grow businesses that do benefit them. I don't know. I don't even know what I'm asking, but there. Okay.
Carol (27:27.412)
Hmm.
Carol (27:32.297)
So I do. And that was yesterday, what I was working on. Although I would say, they don't work for me neither. They think they do because they've been told that it works. The kind of organizations and businesses and governing and everything else we build don't work for developing human potential. So I have never worked with women separately as I believe that all genders.
Adrienne Garland (27:54.35)
Hmm.
Carol (28:01.821)
And by the way, there are 72 of them listed in the IRS return, what's your gender? So I don't believe there's such a thing as women and men and a long list. And so the reason is the whole structure is broken. And if you're folks want to get the white paper I'm writing about this, you can join my newsletter.
Adrienne Garland (28:20.876)
Yeah.
Carol (28:32.085)
either on Substack or on my website, carolsandberg.com. Now let me add a bit more. The other thing that I reason out is I work with women. It's impossible to them come identified with something else than their own essence. We lose our identity and think of ourselves as a woman business leaders, as opposed to me personally.
Adrienne Garland (28:57.73)
Hmm
Carol (29:01.413)
and my business is creative. And I have, I don't know what gender I am. I gave up years ago when my friends who were transgender and gay and all the other things said, well, I don't relate, I said, because you don't relate to you. You don't relate to what you can personally create. Don't think about building something for you as a woman.
Adrienne Garland (29:09.678)
Hahaha
Adrienne Garland (29:21.592)
Yeah.
Carol (29:29.853)
or you build another isolated bifurcated system that works maybe for women. We need for it to work for all humans. And the work system don't work because of three things. Behaviorism is controlling everything. Survivalism with Darwin competition. And...
Adrienne Garland (29:39.618)
Humanity. Agreed.
Carol (29:57.533)
logical positivism with science, which says everybody has to work on their own, being isolated individually. So I'm writing more about all this, but the identification rampage we have right now has men, white men identifying with being white men, and everything else is the other. And we don't want
Adrienne Garland (30:25.099)
Yeah.
Carol (30:26.661)
anyone doing that. We want us all looking at human and then all life. How do we build businesses, work for life? Like when you're in Panama, you're near the jungle and you're near indigenous people. I work a lot because my grandfather was more. So I would say the world doesn't work in business for at least the last hundred years.
since we got rid of craftsmen and became, and it's not because they're large, it's because they dropped out essence. Now, I have taken large parts of corporations and redesigned them without identification, without having to, I don't try and undo the bad stuff. I don't try and think about how to get women.
Adrienne Garland (31:00.395)
industrial.
Carol (31:25.349)
and people of color and people of different abilities. I don't divide them. I wrote in my last book is about what we did in South Africa in the middle of apartheid and how Mandela gave us an award for integrating eight tribes, the Afrikaners, the Ingles, and the native Chinese who had migrated or immigrated there.
and broken down all the barriers and redesigned works. So if you wanna, we don't have time today, but you could read in that one book a lot about how you write this and that, and you could get more of my writing on Substack. It's the only podcast I've ever run. So I'm probably wandering around a bit there, but did that help?
Adrienne Garland (32:00.042)
Mm.
Adrienne Garland (32:16.62)
Yeah.
Adrienne Garland (32:21.962)
No, that's amazing. I'm fascinated and I definitely want to read about all of it. This is amazing. It's so funny because, well, thank you. But.
Carol (32:30.698)
Boy, you're amazing!
I can hear what you're doing, I can hear your intentions, I can hear your questions that matter. And so all I'm trying to do is offer you personally, believing you're probably reflective of your group, some more contrarian ideas which I think have a positive path.
Adrienne Garland (32:53.57)
They do. It's hard because they don't resonate. I don't know if they don't resonate, but they don't monetize, which makes… I don't know.
Carol (33:09.569)
Oh yeah they do. My clients make 35 to 65 percent increase revenue per year. Don't tell me they don't make money. You make more money because you make more of a difference without trying to make money. Yeah.
Adrienne Garland (33:17.14)
Really?
Adrienne Garland (33:21.602)
Mm.
Adrienne Garland (33:26.158)
Yeah, I definitely need to learn how to figure that out because I know that for me personally, my intentions are in the right place, but I haven't figured it out. And I think that has become a source of frustration to me. And it's funny because I started my business 10 years ago because I don't think that there is fairness in the corporate
Carol (33:41.481)
That's fair.
Carol (33:46.794)
Yeah.
Adrienne Garland (33:55.682)
world. At the time, I definitely was like, well, men, women. Over the years, I have come to see that it's not about men, women, and that it is about humanity. Yet, the whole premise of my company is about she leads, women leading and everything. I don't want it to be just about men and women. I talk often about how it's about humanity for all.
Carol (33:57.057)
Yeah.
Carol (34:22.794)
Yeah.
Adrienne Garland (34:24.274)
And so I struggle with that a little bit because it's not just about women. And in fact, I don't think that the world would be better if women ran the world. I don't. I think it needs to be balanced with everybody.
Carol (34:41.761)
Well, it doesn't even need to be about people with specific gender. So the thing you're missing, your next step, is you can't do this alone. You can't do it by interviewing. You have to do it by being in community. That's why I've changed agents, several hundred of them, who meet every six weeks for a weekend and several times in between. And what they do is they come.
Adrienne Garland (34:51.606)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Carol (35:10.861)
to explore and I give them exercises like you heard me describe yesterday. And they reflect on and hear each other. Every book I end this time, you have to do whatever you're working on in a developmental community. Not a learning community, but a developmental one where you grow your capacity and all those around you to see the world.
Adrienne Garland (35:31.198)
Yeah.
Carol (35:38.985)
in a more accurate way to not polarize, to not divide and chop up things. I have seven first principles. I learned from my grandfather and anyone who would like, I've got that on Medium channel. If you look up my name on Medium, I've read about seven first principles and seven disunited ones.
Adrienne Garland (35:47.287)
Mmm.
Carol (36:07.473)
and why they keep us either moving forward or stuck. And they would probably be very helpful to you, but the best thing is to join with others who are asking the same important significant question and are trying out things.
Adrienne Garland (36:26.366)
Yeah, we're going to include all of that in the show notes so people can read everything, join everything. And I see that you have a community that has 45,000 people. Is that something that people can also join? Is that on your website? How can people kind of follow you, join you, read everything that you have out there?
Carol (36:51.957)
Well, and that's made up of the number around the world who's sitting with me currently or recently. And so if you're a change agent, like you're a teacher or a consultant, then we have something called Seed Communities, S-E-E-D, havi And there's a group of people who meet there, the corporate ones.
Adrienne Garland (36:59.511)
Okay.
Carol (37:23.494)
It's on caro And you can find there some podcasts and so forth. But also, We Meet Together. Those people joined me from three to five years, although now I have ALSM, dying in the next couple years. But I'm not gonna stop until I can't breathe. No, I'm not afraid of dying. I'm running workshops on conscious dying.
Adrienne Garland (37:42.282)
No, don't say that.
Carol (37:51.165)
Also, you can go to calcindra.com and see all my books. You can go to Substack. And all of these people are members that can. I know it's probably over 50,000. That's an old number. But Substack is where I'm currently, and Medium I'm publishing in between books. I'm working on book 89 right now.
Adrienne Garland (37:51.213)
Yeah.
Adrienne Garland (38:20.194)
Wow.
Carol (38:22.189)
So if you just get on my newsletter, you're likely to get notified of things that are happening in books that are being released.
Adrienne Garland (38:32.782)
Wow. Listen, Carol, I am so happy that I got to meet you and talk to you. I am so inspired by everything that you're doing. I love that you're a positive contrarian. It's a new word in my vocabulary. So thank you for that. And I just really appreciated meeting you today, actually. Like, today was like a perfect day to meet you. And I can't wait to share this with my son.
Carol (38:59.201)
Yeah.
Adrienne Garland (39:02.314)
as well. Hopefully he takes in a little bit of this lesson. And I am going to just follow you and read all of your stuff. And I hope that we can have another conversation soon because I really do love the work that you're doing. It really resonates with me. And I hope that I can continue some of the work that you're doing because I think it's beautiful and it is needed. Our world, I think, needs to heal.
And I think we need to do things in a different way so that we can continue on as human beings and not kill each other off because that's the way we're going.
Carol (39:43.445)
Let me tell you one last short story for your son. I meet with my grandson, who's 24, and to be with him, in fact, today is the day, every Wednesday, with a reading he brings on the principle of self-development. And we talk about it. He picks what we read. I gave him a bunch of books. And we talk about how it applies to our lives, mine and his. And that process keeps him
Adrienne Garland (39:46.094)
Sure. Yeah.
Carol (40:13.577)
discovering who he is. Because I have faith your son has all that same capacity and he's young and all he has to do is commit to discovering who he is and he's going to be fine.
Adrienne Garland (40:27.642)
Oh, thank you so much for that. I appreciate it so much. And yeah, he's a pretty wonderful guy and you know, it's like they're just young and they just need to do the work to get there. But thank you so much. I really appreciate you. And I would just love to keep in touch with you, Carol.
Carol (40:35.37)
Yeah.
Carol (40:38.689)
Yeah.
Carol (40:42.109)
Yeah, you're welcome.
Carol (40:47.777)
Thank you, Adrienne, and thanks for inviting me. Bye bye.
Adrienne Garland (40:51.23)
Okay. Take care. Thank you.