Dr. Laura Ciel is an experienced executive and leadership coach with a rare combination of business psychology and coaching qualifications. With over 30 years of experience, Laura is passionate about empowering individuals and teams to increase their positive impact at work while feeling good. A major focus of Laura’s work is to facilitate a healthy alignment within the team, as well as within the individuals on the team. In this episode, she dives into how important one’s mindset is to their work and to the path that they are on. This episode is one you do not want to miss!
Transcript:
Narrator: [00:00:00] Creativity and a learning mindset are essential to succeed. Learn how these innovators put these skills to use to become the best in their fields. Welcome to Innovators to know brought to you by ideamix.
Sam Jayanti: [00:00:15] Laura Ciel is an experienced executive and leadership coach with 30-plus years of experience with leaders and teams across industries. She has a relatively rare combination of business psychology and coaching qualifications, and her passion is to support individuals and teams to feel good while doing good in the world. Laura welcome to the ideamix podcast.
Laura Ciel: [00:00:40] Thank you. When you say 30 years, I’m like, Wow.
Sam Jayanti: [00:00:45] Well, if it’s gone by quickly, this is a good thing.
Laura Ciel: [00:00:49] It’s more like, Am I really that old?
Sam Jayanti: [00:00:53] I think someone said this to me the other day. 45 is the new 30. And then you could just translate that right up the chain. So well, so feel good. Do good and preferably make a difference. This is one of the phrases that you’ve used with frequency. Is part of the reason that you do what you do and that you have this focus that the profit motive at companies and among teams consequently often simply takes over at the expense of other organizational values, team dynamics, individuals being cared for.
Laura Ciel: [00:01:39] Right. And, you know, the truth is, it’s a business. It needs to make money. I mean, that’s if we talk too much, I mean, I think we can go too far the other direction. Right. It is important. It’s a critical piece. And there’s research now that shows that a lot of the aspects that maybe have been ignored for a while having to do with the human component actually are you know, they’re starting to show how it is tied in to that, how it is tied in to, let’s say, sustainable growth or innovation or engagement of your team members. And that all connects back in to how the company, you know, serves its its customers and therefore how it brings in money and what that what that profit is, what those revenues are. So it’s I think it’s a and rather than one or the other, it really is important to to look at both. And I think people are starting to become aware that the human component is is as critical as other aspects of the business.
Sam Jayanti: [00:02:43] Yeah. You know, you’re reminding me of a story that I happened to be discussing with a friend last night over dinner about a CEO in the health care industry for evangelists who is now retired. But he was telling the story of how ivermectin was a medication that was discovered by their team of scientists at Merck when he was there. And the company sort of said, Oh, you know, this cures river blindness. Like, who cares about that? There’s no market for that. Right? So let’s just we’ll just we don’t need to publicize this drug or market it actively or do much with it. And the scientists protested and said that absolutely is unacceptable because this is a disease that affects some portion of people, even though that might not be a profitable market segment. And they forced it to go to market and they acted, you know, in their capacity as a key stakeholder of the company. Of course, later on, this had a whole bunch of unintended consequences. It became behind penicillin, the second most important drug in terms of impact on humanity. Right. Because then it was applied to lots of other diseases. And it’s been a killer. for a lot of different things. And I think it goes to this point of the stakeholder based model that that you, I think, spend a lot of time thinking about and focusing on where companies and organizations and teams and individuals ultimately work best when there is alignment among the various voices and they’re heard and and listened to. And it isn’t sort of a one sided equation constantly.
Laura Ciel: [00:04:28] And I love that word alignment as something that we use a lot in our work. And because there are a lot of different aspects of an organization where you can look for and you can fine tune that alignment and and when things, you know, simply if things are not aligned, we’re not accessing as much as we can and that could show up in many different ways in an organization. But what you’re you know, the example that you gave is there was some alignment with the scientists around what they were doing and what their bigger picture impact was at the company, which and they felt that it would be out of alignment not to say something or not to move this forward, push it forward. And I think there’s such a great opportunity there for so many companies right now, especially because the world is changing so rapidly. We don’t know what it’s going to look like in 12 months. I don’t even know what it’s going to look like in six months. So the way I think about it is we have all this incredible energy available in a lot of different forms. And if we are scattered, we lose impact. When we are aligned, we really focus that impact. And I think that that’s an opportunity right now for leaders and and companies who are asking themselves, how can I show up in this really rapidly changing world? And. And make a difference. And I’m talking about profit as well as people like that and make a difference, have a positive impact and in multiple ways.
Sam Jayanti: [00:06:16] Yeah, absolutely. So important. So one of the foundational ideas or underlying your nine Q methodology is that we talk a lot about problems and not enough about solutions. I think this is a problem that is afflicting most of our society at this point. It isn’t merely limited to organizations or teams. We see it a lot in our business. Customers come seeking coaching because they don’t just want to talk about the problem, right? They want to talk actively about solutions and have a roadmap and act on it and be held accountable. Tell me what made you come to this point of view?
Laura Ciel: [00:07:02] Okay. Well, it’s a pet peeve of mine just to focus only on the problem, because what that does is. It, unfortunately. And let’s just say fortunately at the same time, because, look, I’m a human. I’m all about human behavior. That’s just been my background, right? We do things. We actually do things that might seem kind of strange for us to do because we are gaining some value from it. So when I say fortunately, unfortunately, when we point to the problems, we are putting ourselves into a victim stance a victim energy. And the fortunate part of that, say and in quotes, is that you’re not responsible. It’s someone else’s fault. Someone else has done something. Some group of people, an individual. What a company. However, whoever it is that you feel has done this to you, the really and I say fortunate in quotes because there is a little like, I don’t have to deal with it. It’s that if that person or that group would change, then I’d be good, right? But the unfortunate piece of that is, and this is why I’m so passionate about it, is you completely give up the ability to make any change yourself.
Sam Jayanti: [00:08:19] Yeah.
Laura Ciel: [00:08:20] And that doesn’t first of all, it doesn’t feel good. It feels really bad.
Sam Jayanti: [00:08:25] Massively disempowering.
Laura Ciel: [00:08:27] Yes, completely disempowering. Well, why should you? You don’t need to look at your piece of it if it’s someone else has made this happen. Right. So I am such a firm believer in this is where the empowerment. So, you know, our company’s big purpose is empower people. That’s that’s big. But it’s this idea of when people recognize that they do have the power over many different things. Not everything. There’s there are things external that we don’t have control over. Then you start to get to look for the solutions. So then that’s piece one, and then piece two is how. Right. So I think it’s first shifting that mindset from a victim mindset to really looking at what what can I do, what is my piece of it, what can, what kind of change, positive change can I drive forward? And then the second piece is how how do I do that? So you might have someone who wants it probably at your right people, potential customers, they’re wanting they’ve made a little bit of that shift. They’re wanting to know how do I move forward on this now that I’ve made this shift? There are a whole lot of people who are still stuck in that mindset of a victim place. And and they’re, you know, moving forward isn’t going to work until that there is an acknowledgment that there’s something that they can have some control over something.
Sam Jayanti: [00:09:56] I couldn’t agree more with you. I think you were almost at a really difficult societal point where this victimhood idea has taken root to the point where it is now the explanation for, you know, just so many things that go on, whether it’s individually or societally and. They really prevent us from focusing on what what is the core problem and how do we get to a solution set for it. Right. Because. As you said, you just sort of hide behind. Oh, these are circumstances beyond my control because somebody did this to me. And it’s deeply, deeply unconstructive, if not destructive.
Laura Ciel: [00:10:44] Yeah. And then, you know, you add the piece and this is something we talk a lot about. And I think it’s has really increased since the pandemic hit. And it’s continuing is when you are in more of a victim stance, you there is usually some there’s usually some anger, frustration and fear in that. And when there is fear and we all know this intuitively, we might not put it into words, but when there is fear running through your body, you’re actually physiologically you’re being cut off from the multiple solution solving component of your frontal cortex. And so that’s the other piece is if you’re in this reactive fear based state, you’re already just physiologically going to you’re not going to be able to access all the potential solutions. Right. You lock into maybe one or two response sets that have been, you know, have been a part of you for a long time and you lose access to. So that’s another reason why for us, it’s individually 100%, but it’s also collectively. So if you’re speaking within an organization, if you have a leadership team, which we have had before, where you have, let’s say, post-merger and you have someone who is in a very much of a fear state about the other people right from the other company and very reactive and a victim stance, the possibilities of what that leadership team and thus the organization can create are they’re just they become so few. Right. Where if you can shift that and if you can help everyone to align with the bigger picture, which you know, hopefully for most companies what their bigger purposes, you know, why they’re there, what they’re doing and shift that. Ooh I have some sense of empowerment around what this looks like going forward. Then we have this. We have so many more potential solutions that we can assess moving forward 100%.
Sam Jayanti: [00:13:02] Do you think, Laura, that. For many of us. I mean, I think back on my own experience, which is this is just bear with me for a second as a purely anedoted point. Right, But. We all go through difficult moments and periods in our lives. Some super traumatic even. And. At some point you will almost confront this question. I mean, I certainly did at a point when I had been through a fairly traumatic thing of. Am I going to be a victim or am I going to emerge from this with strength? And it’s almost like this kind of weird, bimodal sort of outcome and. I think when you make a decision to try to solve the problem rather than. Kind of wallow in the problem itself. There’s a muscle memory that develops around. Okay, I see the problem. It sucks, but I’m going to begin to solution it. And I may or may not get that right, but I’m going to keep trying until I find a viable solution. How for people who fall into that victim mentality, do you help them develop that muscle memory around, Hey, here’s this different approach that actually is a lot more productive?
Laura Ciel: [00:14:26] Yeah. I’ll speak I’ll speak to individually first, because again, when you go collectively, if it’s a leadership team or any team, you have all the different individual factors, right? So it’s you know, there’s a certain amount of aligning within each individual before helping a team align. So. You said something really interesting in your anecdote. You said you could see. And you made a decision, right? You could see, am I going to stay in this or am I going to shift out of it? Not that that’s step one. And it’s quite challenging for some people to get to that point. So there’s two. There’s two. So based on what you said, I would say you’ve had some in your past, you’ve had some ability to take a challenging situation, take a step back and ask yourself, what am I going to do with this? Or how do I want to move forward? Right. So I know just based on that short piece that you have had some success or at least some practice in doing that and not ever you know, some people don’t. So it’s you at that point, you’re starting to build on it. And it’s a little bit easier. If I were working with someone like that, then you can start to connect back to that past experience, right? This happened, therefore this, this. And it’s like, you know, for anyone listening, it’s not like you make a shift and then everything works out perfectly right.
Sam Jayanti: [00:16:03] It’s a constant work in process.
Laura Ciel: [00:16:05] Yes. And I think I honestly think this is part of our life learning. I you know, I think that historic you know, for me, when I was younger, I somehow had this weird illusion that if I did everything right, then everything would turn out all right. That is not true. And, you know, I think that’s one of the things that age brings that a different perspective of what we actually have. So going back, I was shocked at one point that I was doing everything right that wasn’t working. So I had to shift. You know, those we all have these. Different constructs that we’ve developed over our childhood, and that’s from family and it’s from school and it’s from society. And each one of us has a different one based on you know, based on who we are based on their environment we grew up in, based on, you know, where we grew up in the world, all these things. But we all have that ability to take a step back for us. Part of the training is to pause. It’s really important to pause because when you don’t pause, you’re in that reactive. You’re in that fire fighting. Got to take this. I got to take. And then you that can go on forever the way the world is set up. So it’s really helping people to trust themselves that pausing for brief moments and then we train our our super basic level training for everyone has to do with some really simple habits that help you to pause. And this is all done pretty quickly. It’s not like you have to go out and meditate for 10 hours. But to pause, to connect with you, you know, and to connect with what’s important to you, what matters, what are your values? What are you grateful for? You know, just to reconnect with and then to move forward from that state? Because if you’re in more of a state of pause, I would say proactive setting intentions and clarity around who you are and what matters to you, that’s when that mindset starts to open up a little bit. You’re like, Oh, maybe I could do something differently. Maybe there is. Maybe this could look, maybe I could change this. Maybe if I, you know, and and that’s when those those potential solutions start to open up. So a lot of our initial training is really about getting to that state of mind where you’re not reacting and you’re in touch with again and this doesn’t have to be real woo. It’s just like who, who am who am I in the sense of what matters to me? Right. Look, my mom died suddenly. This was one of those learning lessons for me 20 years ago. And one of the things I the one of the gifts that that gave me was. I could die tomorrow. I could die tonight. Im I doing right now? What really matters to me. And not everyone thinks that way. Because we all do it. We don’t want to think about death. And I would say it’s probably the freshness of that after 20 years is a little bit less, obviously. But there is that was a lasting gift that my mom in her death gave me was. We don’t know how long we have. And if that’s the case, when if you can any one person listening to this, if you can pause and just ask, you know, what really matters to me. Meaning what matters to me? If this were my last day on planet Earth. It shifts the way you look at things. It really does. And you become way less reactive. You become much more grateful and you realize it all. The other thing it does is it puts some of those really stupid, annoying things into perspective. You know, the things that seem to really. I don’t know. Sometimes I have things in the back of my mind. I’m like, Just stop. It’s not a big deal. And for some reason some part of me is latched onto it. But the more that we can let go of the things that really don’t matter, then we’re letting go of some of that stress and anxiety, which then opens up again. Possibilities. What might it look like going forward?
Sam Jayanti: [00:20:31] Totally. So Laura a really key element connected to reframing how we think, right and taking time to think as you’ve described, which is so critical. Is the role that coaching and mentorship play in our lives. I think that many people have this misconception that. Somebody mentors you like, it falls into your lap like some bolt out of the blue and, oh, I found this amazing mentor and I was so great. But it actually takes an active seeking out of mentors at different times in your life. You have different mentors. Sometimes they are also your friends. At other times they might even be your partner, whatever it is. But it’s a it’s a dynamic and shifting role that that plays in our lives. And I suspect you have had strong coaches and mentors, as I have had. And the singularly most useful thing that I have found is there, particularly in instances where. They were disconnected from me. Other than that, I knew them, but they weren’t. There was no bias, in other words, in there. It wasn’t like a boss mentoring me, you know, that there was great value to that very objective advice. And coaching in a sense is that same thing. It’s this objective advice from a trusted third party, even though you don’t know them super well. Right. What is the role that that’s played for you?
Laura Ciel: [00:22:20] So I feel like I have a little bit of an unusual. Journey in this area in that. I noticed at. A very young age that the questions I was asking and. The insights that. I would share. We’re pretty intense.
Sam Jayanti: [00:22:50] How young are you?
Laura Ciel: [00:22:53] Well, I mean, I remember being four and being I was overtaken by a feeling that there was suffering in the world. And I and I felt like I needed to do something. And I couldn’t put it into words, you know, I couldn’t put it into words at the time. And, you know, oh, my, I had amazing parents, but all they really knew was I never slept. I never stopped asking questions. So I was like, Oh, okay, can we just take a break? But and I don’t know if this was the time period that I grew up, but being female and being very, very intense seemed to people kind of wanted me to. Well, let’s just say play the game I was supposed to play. Okay? So periodically I’d have little glimpses of in my mind who I think of, what I think of when I think when I. Especially when I was younger. Yeah. Mentors, brief mentors that they probably don’t even know the impact that they had. Right. And, you know, one of them was a high school teacher and I thought I was failing the class. And it was it was a speech class. And I didn’t love. I was very, very shy. And we were doing a leadership practice thing in a small group. And I was listening to the other people in my group and in my mind I’m thinking we need approaches differently, right? Like, I had all these thoughts, but I had learned at this point, well, don’t show up too big or too intense, because then people will just go, Whoa! And so I was listening and listening and a teacher stood by me and he just said. Okay group. You know, just remember, the leader is not always the most talkative person. Okay? I felt it in my bones. I was like, Oh. Almost like he knows I’m thinking about things. So super tiny example. And then as I got older and look, you know how my doctorate in psychology, we do a lot of our you know, we’re encouraged to do a lot of our own exploration and therapy and so lots of practice with a lot of different people. And one of the things that I learned is. And I want anyone listening who thinks that they might be to something to hear this. Not everyone could work with me. And in fact, most people who I talked to were felt. I can reflect now. They felt so challenged that they lost the ability to hold the safe space. And this is what I think as coaches and psychologists as well, like we’re holding a safe space for people to do their work. We’re not doing the work for them. And sometimes we might be directive, but we’re not telling them everything. We’re creating a really vibrant, safe space. And so to anyone out there who maybe hasn’t done much in this area because I doubted myself for a long time, I just said, well, no one understands me. I’m just going to have to do it myself. There was really this sense of I had to do it on my own. It took a while for me to go, Oh, no, I just need to keep looking for the right person. All right. So if there is a matching, that’s super important when you’re seeking out and I would say the same thing for, you know, a mentor, anyone who you’re look at, you want to. And again, different if there’s that personal relationship like like you mentioned you don’t have the same. Autonomy, too. But if you’re choosing someone who’s not, doesn’t have that other relationship with you, you know, search and you will know it inside because you will know that you can show up 100% as you are without fearing that you’re too much or too whatever. Right. Not to whatever it is. I mean, there are a lot of those. A lot of those too much. I think a lot of people have that sense that somehow some point in their life they were to whatever it was. Right. But you need to find the person who can be and create that really safe space. And the same thing is true when we work with leadership teams. We’ve got, you know, several high-level, very bright, very, you know. Have their own opinions and their own experiences. And the goal is to create a safe space that the team can co-create something even better that any one person could create on their own.
Sam Jayanti: [00:27:39] That’s the key. I think it’s like that one plus one is three, right? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Laura Ciel: [00:27:45] And it can only happen if each of us do our work. Yes, right. But there’s the individual piece. There’s the collective piece.
Sam Jayanti: [00:27:52] Totally. All right. I want to take a quick look at a short video that you sent us about living in Flo. Here we go.
Laura Ciel: [00:28:01] What do we mean by flow State? Flow is when you feel great, your energy is focused and intentional and everything seems to move effortlessly. When you’re in flow, you’re fully engaged in highly productive and inspired action. It’s the opposite of nonproductive busywork. Think about a time you’ve been in flow. Remember how good it felt and remember the results you experience. This training will help you learn how to achieve this state more consistently. And more importantly, when you fall out of flow, you will learn how to quickly move back into this yummy space. The more you practice this training, the more empowered you will feel.
Sam Jayanti: [00:28:45] So could you quickly summarize the nine Q method and particularly the terms flow, grow and create for our listeners here?
Laura Ciel: [00:28:56] And we’re playing around with this, the third one, the naming of it to create, innovate. So, so, so flow, grow, create is really the basis of our method. So we see Nike solutions as the how. Right? So we’ve got all these problems in organizations and we can identify a good chunk of them, but how are we going to move forward? And that’s what we feel. We answer that question. So the flow framework is the foundational piece which I mentioned just a little bit earlier. This is about each person individually being able to get into their own state of flow. And for anyone who hasn’t heard that term, you know it intuitively. It’s when you feel everything’s lining up, you feel like what you do is done really efficiently and in less time than normal often. But there’s a sense of, oh, you feel free, you feel creative, you feel good, and that you’re creating from that space. Again, back to multiple solutions, right? An open mindset and and a curious mindset. So it’s what the individual does to pause and get out of victim stance, pause and get out of a fear based or reactive stance. It’s what they do to set themselves up. And it’s interesting because even with people who have trained for quite a period of time with us, we do some private executive coaching. A lot of our work is with organizations, teams. But even when they have gone through multiple levels of leadership training, we ask what has been most valuable? It’s been this flow piece because without it, the rest of it you can’t access the rest of it. You can learn it right? You can learn the knowledge of it, but you can’t really access it and integrate it in a powerful way. So I like to think of as this is how you get yourself set up to really, you know, nail it. And when you get thrown off, which so the world doesn’t really happen, it’s not like you, it’s not like you check all the boxes and then you stay there, unfortunately. But you can reboot because one of our habits is reboot. So it’s about recognizing you could be in the middle of a meeting and get triggered by something and you have the skills to be able to reboot and get back into that flow zone. So supercritical and super simple, right? And it’s the foundation of everything we do. The second framework is grow. And this is simply if you think like big picture, we’re all meant to evolve and to grow and to expand, you know, I mean, that’s something I feel really strongly. You can look at nature. It’s always evolving, it’s always expanding. There’s always something new and fresh and different. You know, like the recent rains in California have been unbelievable. We have poppies, which is our state flower beyond anything we’ve seen in years and years and years. So there’s it doesn’t stay the same. You know, you think it stays the same, maybe, but it doesn’t and we’re the same way. So the great growth framework is really helping each person to look at all aspects of who they are. And in our training, we connect them with elements. So you’ve got the element of of Earth. And for us that’s connected to your physical quotient. So all the things are, are you sleeping? Are you eating? How, how are you physically doing right. And is there are there opportunities to grow and expand in that area? And then we have IQ, which is beyond just IQ, your IQ. It’s really that mental. It’s the mental training, it’s the knowledge, it’s the hey, you know, are you learning how to use A.I. right now? Because it’s going to be in our world, right? It’s like, what? What are the different aspects that where I can stretch my mind, not partly for my role at work, but also partly for me. You know, like I love languages, So I’m on Duolingo learning a couple of different languages because it stimulates my mind. It’s not specific to work, but it stimulates my mind. I love it. And it gives me a different perspective. When you’re learning another language, the way that you communicate is very different in that language than it is in my primary language. So I love that that expansion. And then EQ most people know about emotional intelligence. This is really, you know, how is your relationship with yourself doing, and then therefore, how are your relationships with, you know, family, loved ones, colleagues and nurturing? And monitoring and really attending to that. And then we and that’s the fire elements, that connection. And I should mention that IQ is the water element. It’s just it’s like research based scientific. It doesn’t have a lot of emotions to it. It’s just knowledge. And then after that fire element, that connection, that EQ SQ, which we call either service quotient or spiritual quotient, you know, just depending on what people are comfortable with. The idea is this is how are we bringing who we are and our unique gifts out into the world in many different ways. And so, you know, someone could be working really hard at building their IQ, but maybe they’ve neglected reaching, you know, how am I serving the world that can be at work and to be outside of work? It doesn’t you know, it doesn’t matter. And then nine Q, which we call energetic intelligence, and this is in the void. And the void is kind of everything and nothing, right? And so nine Q is about it’s much less tangible than the other elements, but it’s about alignment. If you look at all your different quotients, how aligned are they? So that framework is all about looking at where have we been, what have we been neglecting and where do we have opportunities to grow. And it’s not a once and done either. It’s an ongoing. And then the last framework is the creator, which I think we’re now calling it Innovate framework, which is you’ve got to have those other two in place, right? And then the magic happens because this is where you actually create, whether it’s creating a new product, whether it’s building a new business, whether it’s developing a new relationship, it can be in a painting, a painting, creating a song, anything. And it’s not so much that we made it. It really is just what happens. And we just put words in a and a, you know, a framework to it to make it so that you can you can leverage it. And so you’re looking at each of those elements that I just went through. Yeah. And you’re looking at the flow of an innovative creative method and you’re going from imagining something to declaring what it looks like to being clear that you have all the resources, the knowledge, the training to execute, to checking in and looking at why does it matter, that’s the fire element and then executing it, which is in the wind element. And that’s like, let’s go do it. And pulling back into the void and checking and see what’s working, what isn’t working and what are we going to do going forward. And that’s it’s just a super fun. You can look at that as a yearlong project. You can look at it in a very small, you know, before a meeting or after a meeting. You can do it. So yeah, that’s as brief as I can go.
Sam Jayanti: [00:36:43] Well, I’m smiling because I feel like in this conversation we just closed the circle and it’s always wonderful when we do that, because everything you’ve described. Is, in a sense, the answer to where we started, which is that a framework like yours really empowers an individual and then over time a team or it can be applied in various settings, right to. Take ownership of their own self esteem, motivation and confidence and then hold themselves accountable for the fruit of their labors. And if each individual unlocks their ability to do that, then you can see how it has such wide applicability across not just teams and organizations, but families, you know, groups of friends, whatever it may be. Right? Any kind of collective communal setting that we can think of. So it’s fantastic. I have one last question for you before we wrap up. You know, particularly among. Young college and post college young professionals. And we see this a lot in our business that they. Are often struggling, even though on the outside all seems well, but they’re often struggling on the inside with, you know, I call them kind of the big three, which are stress, anxiety and a lack of self-confidence and. There’s this. I mean, we can you know, obviously there are lots of things we can do to dissect the reasons why there is this inconsistency between the external and the internal self. But it affects a lot of people these days. What what would be your advice to individuals in those situations in terms of both the importance of reconciling that internal and external self and how to do that?
Laura Ciel: [00:39:00] Well, there’s a couple different layers on this. You know, the first thing that I think of that I just feel compelled to say is. This age group that you’re talking about. I have such incredible compassion for them. It’s not like I didn’t have my hard times. But the world is changing so fast they don’t even know what to look forward to or what to set as goals. For the most part, because it’s changing so fast. And I think it’s just really fascinating. And I think of them as these incredible. Warriors for change. And they can be really. Again, this is a generalization, but as a whole can be really challenging for older generations. Because they’re not going to tolerate what we have tolerated. So that’s why I think of them as these warriors for change. And and and I believe that some of what many of them experience is. There’s a lot of inner turmoil because there’s a lot of outer turmoil. And one of their. So this is my belief. I think one of their incredible opportunities that they have with all the gifts that they’re bringing. Is. They the opportunity is to really get clear about who they are and what matters to them and be very proactive and very clear and proactive because they’re going to be most likely, given what I see, most likely they’re going to be asked, you know, by the external events to quickly more quickly change more quickly, make job changes, life changes, maybe even location changes than any other prior generation. That’s what I believe. I don’t know. I’m just saying I think that they are coming in. They have a unique. As a general group have a unique piece in this evolution that our planet is going through. And and in order for them to be as impactful in a positive way, they really need to do the internal work, probably more so than anyone in my generation. So what I would say two things. Wow. Super courageous beans and. Please. Because we we all know the records of. Substance abuse and suicide and all these other mental health issues that may not get to either one of those, but still negatively impact their lives. With all of that increasing, we have evidence that they are probably dealing with way more. You know, some of it is my generation didn’t disclose it. Also, maybe some of it is that we don’t know how much, but I believe it’s it’s happening a lot more. They need to start taking care of themselves and really ask what it is that they need.
Sam Jayanti: [00:42:42] That’s great advice.
Laura Ciel: [00:42:45] You know, and I don’t know, it might mean. It might mean doing something that maybe someone in society or family doesn’t understand. We can’t figure it out for them. We can support your exploration and we can support their decisions as parents, as elders in the community, and potentially as guides and coaches. Right. But it’s like they need to.
Sam Jayanti: [00:43:19] Path to tread. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Laura, thank you so much.
Laura Ciel: [00:43:26] You’re welcome. Thank you so much for having me on here. Iit’s a joy to talk big picture as well as, hey, what could be a path forward right?
Sam Jayanti: [00:43:39] Totally. [Thanks for listening. Please subscribe wherever you listen and leave us a review. Find your ideal coach at www.theideamix.com. Special thanks to our producer Martin Malesky and singer songwriter Doug Allen.