Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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.
Hit subscribe to never miss an episode, and leave a review to help other listeners discover our show.
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.
[00:00:00] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Not coming down. I never locked it on the ground. I'm not coming down. I wanna go higher, higher, higher. 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 a meaningful work with profitable success here to steward what I call the age of humanity.
[00:00:24] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: 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.
[00:00:41] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: All right, let's get into it, shall we? Welcome back to the show. Today we're gonna talk about competition and because business is human, we're gonna talk about competition and how it. Impacts our nervous system. And this has been a topic that's been on my mind for a while as I'm researching and writing right now, but also I ran into this TikTok that really hit home, and I'm gonna play a bit of it for you just to show you the context.
[00:01:17] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: So this is a gal that she used to work for, American Eagle as their social media person. And no longer is there but is dropping some tea on the company. And that's not why I am sharing it with you. But what she has to say is very true from a nervous system perspective. And I'm gonna break that down after I have you listen to.
[00:01:39] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Unfortunately, I am the former social media manager of American Eagle. I really thought that I would come to a point to talk about my experience working there, but I'm just glad that we are now. Here at a point hating on this brand together. Part of the reason why I had such an issue when I worked there was because it was extremely clear to me that everyone in the senior leadership had no idea who demographic or the customer was.
[00:02:11] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And just as some background, I worked at an American Eagle store while I was in college like 10 years ago, before, well, more than 10 years ago, before I had even worked in corporate, my light just turned on. So I had an extremely. Good idea of who was buying the clothes coming into the store, likes the product.
[00:02:33] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And of course, you know, as a very avid social media user, I had worked in social media professionally for seven years before I had gotten that position. So I was set up, or success I coming into the position when I got hired that the senior leadership wanted was to be better than Abercrombie. Only thing I heard from the second that I got there until I quit was, how can we be Abercrombie or better?
[00:03:04] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: They didn't really care about, you know, whether the product was good, whether it was a good representation of who was actually buying the product. They didn't care about any of that. We were, that's what I wanna talk about. This is where we get into a problem, because at first. Competition can feel like focus, let's beat the competition.
[00:03:29] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: It gets people riled up and excited, but actually it is a threat to our nervous system. It sends a signal that has significant impact on our nervous system, which then has impact on our culture and connection overall. So this. TikTok goes on to say that the social media team didn't ever talk to the influencer team.
[00:03:58] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Also a problem that they're not collaborating on messages that go out to the public about your brand and. The more I listen to or talk about this issue with American Eagle and, and wanting to just beat Abercrombie, that competitive nature has infiltrated their culture. And when that happens, you know, people hoard ideas, they cover their bases, they stop sharing.
[00:04:29] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And that's a nervous system response because that's what your body does when it feels like it's under attack. And so when we're not focused on the customer, you're focused on beating another company in your industry. That competitive mindset turns departments against each other. And actually, you know who becomes the enemy?
[00:04:55] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: She said it. It's the senior team. So your nervous system is designed to connect. And so when we feel like we're. Contributing and helping and serving other humans. That's what makes us feel good. That's what makes us feel safe. That's what makes us feel human. And if we're not doing that, it feels like a threat.
[00:05:25] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: So when you're serving a customer. You are in what's called the ventral vagal state, where you're calm, you can be creative, you feel connected, but when you're competing, it's fight or flight. It's survival mode. And even though the competition for this example was another company, it ends up becoming the culture and then later she goes on to talk about the competition that was happening internally.
[00:05:55] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: So. You can't collaborate as a team internally if your nervous system thinks you're in a battle. If it's a war zone, if the meetings are about beat the competition, beat Abercrombie, beat this other company, that's the way that our nervous systems are gonna respond to each other. Inside the company as well.
[00:06:18] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And so again, serving activates empathy and regulation and creativity and the good stuff, the stuff that we want to come to work and do, and competing triggers stress. And disconnection, and we could just get tunnel vision on the competition. So we're not biologically designed to thrive in prolonged states of competition.
[00:06:42] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: It hijacks our focus from the customer and ultimately creates these internal silos. This is gonna be really blunt, but just is what it is. If your culture is built too heavily around competition, whether it's internally or externally. Eventually your teams will turn on, the system itself will turn on you as the leader will turn on the company.
[00:07:09] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And it's not because they're bad employees, it's because their bodies are wired to survive. And so there's this displaced threat. Aspect of, of the science in trauma, and it says the brain doesn't differentiate between external rivals and internal tension. It just sees it all as a threat. And so if leadership or the system is creating that threat, either with unrealistic goals, pressure, lack of clarity, the nervous system assigns that threat to your company, to the system.
[00:07:49] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: To either your manager or another department or the leadership team. There has to be a villain in the story, and then people start to respond by either quitting, ghosting, just no longer responding, or worse they stay and fight and try to sabotage the system. So, I know it's harsh, but it's science. It's our biology.
[00:08:23] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: So what we don't want is, what this TikTok was explaining was groups that go against each other. It's often talked about as internal silos, which are individual groups that aren't working well with others. Many times it's not that they wanted it that that people want it to be that way. It's a natural byproduct of these protective behaviors.
[00:08:54] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Instead of collaboration, I gotta huddle together with my team to survive because this is where I feel safe. It's the others that I don't feel so safe with, and we hear it all the time. As a coach and a consultant, I have been hearing it for years, and now I understand it with more depth because I understand how our nervous system works.
[00:09:20] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: We don't want the hyper competitive cultures. They may boost performance in the short term, but they burn out people. They build internal enemies that I've seen situations that that part of the culture continues for years. Even with new leaders and new people, it just, that just sustains over time and it's not what you really want.
[00:09:46] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: So what starts out as, Hey, let's go beat the competition really becomes, I gotta go beat my colleague to get recognition or your system itself becomes the enemy that people try to outmaneuver and. And really emotionally check out. So let's flip the script and create nervous system safety in the organization.
[00:10:14] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And we do that to, we do that by creating shared goals, communicating the why, not just the what. Why it ma, who is it for and why does it matter? And using storytelling about the customers and humans across all functions to remind people that everybody's on the same team. Now, I love when our stories of the storytelling includes both the customer who we serve as a company.
[00:10:51] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And the stories of the internal employees and the culture, how we're serving the customer. That should be one through line. It shouldn't be separate. Here's our culture story and here's our marketing story. You are just one story. You exist to serve a customer. The only inherent right that you have to exist as a company is to help other humans, your customer, and then they pay you in some way.
[00:11:15] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And so if we can make sure that story has a through line of this is why we exist, then our nervous system thrives on helping other humans on clear communication and the context of who it's for and why it matters. So. Now, look, I'm not saying competition is inherently bad. I mean, if I go to a sporting event, I want there to be a win winner and a loser.
[00:11:42] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: But I am saying that if we only have competitive mindset and language without real connection, that's a landmine for our nervous system. So. If we want sustainable performance, we need a shared purpose. We're all working together to serve this customer and helping them either solve a problem or capitalize on an opportunity.
[00:12:07] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: We need leaders who have regulated nervous systems and can go in and have conversations that make people feel safe and calm, focused, ready to go, ready to do good work. Ready to work hard, but calm before that, and cross-functional collaboration. The different departments need to know. How they work together.
[00:12:32] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: When, unfortunately, most of the time organizations are communicating based on the org chart, which visually looks like a tower, which is top down. And the way that work actually happens is department to department. Think of it more like a Relay track team. We're handing off the work from one department to a next to the next, and the most important part of a relay.
[00:12:59] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Race is the handoff. And so it's the department to department collaboration that has the most challenges, the most dysfunction. And if you can work to solve that, everybody wins because that creates even more nervous system safety. I know we're all working together for this shared purpose, so people don't need for you as a leader to.
[00:13:25] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Be perfect. That's an unrealistic expectation, but they do need to feel safe. So safety starts when we stop talking and implying that every team is just for themselves. So here's some reflection questions for you based on this topic of competition. Where is your team operating in survival mode, because that is triggering to your nervous system.
[00:13:56] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Second question is, what's your company's dominant narrative? Is it connection or is it competition? I know that's the one. That's one I want you to reflect on by observing the language and the way that people are talking about things. What messages. Are either spoken or unspoken? Are you sending about competition?
[00:14:23] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: This is just a chance to get better, to be reflective. Another one is, how does your leadership style cue either safety or stress? And then how are your department set up to collaborate or compete? And this is one of my favorite questions, is your customer. Feeling the effects of your internal silos. Wah, wah, that one's tough.
[00:14:53] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: But if you, if you solve that, I promise you that your sales and your profitability will follow. And how often do your teams co-create, collaborate versus compete? Even if you think it's in a friendly way, the more times we set up competition, just be thinking about what are the unintended consequences of that.
[00:15:16] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: All right. I hope those questions are helpful as you move through your days to come to help you decide if there's some places that you've, again, unintentionally probably created more competition than our nervous systems need. All right. If you need help with this, I would love to talk to you about it.
[00:15:37] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Help you by even facilitating a session for you between various departments or your, your teams. Really understand more about how to collaborate. All right. Thank you. Make it a great day. I'm not coming down. I never locked on the ground. I'm down. Thanks for being here. You can follow us on Instagram.
[00:15:59] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: 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.