Bernadette Wesley on bridging inner and outer transformation

Lisa: So Bernadette, welcome and thank you for being on the podcast with me.

Bernadette: Thank you.

Lisa: I thought we could start maybe by talking about something that I’m really excited to discuss with you because I know that you’re interested in it as much as I am, which is this kind of inner work—the part that happens within us if we’re moving from, let’s say, like traditional organizations to another way of working and being together. So what for you has been and is a way in when you’re working with organizations? How do you kind of help people have a self-interest for doing the inner work? You know, what’s the sell?

Bernadette: That’s a great question because that has been my challenge, I would say, over the many years because I started out with really focusing on the inner work and being a Mind Body practitioner, a therapist, and then moved into the organizational work. And I began just compartmentalizing them like, “No one wants to talk about their inner work in that environment, you know, so let’s just keep that outside the door and we just won’t—we’ll slide it in, you know, when appropriate.”

And so what I’m finding now is that the world is much more ready to talk about the bridging of the inner development work with the work of being in an organization, of creating something together. So that’s a relief to me and it’s very exciting what’s happening, it’s pretty rapidly—like with the movement of the Inner Development Goals bridging that with Sustainable Development Goals. So the IDGs bridging with the SDGs, that the internally external cannot be separated anymore and that we’re starting to see that as a collective, which is really lovely to see.

And so I’m opening my voice more and coming out of the closet, so to speak, and bringing in some of these ways of thinking and being that really felt like it would be sort of a success killer or career killer if you talked about those things. So here we are. Even going to have a conversation about it more publicly is good because it’s time to bring these things out. I think we have no choice in a way—all hands on deck. We have to bring everything forward that we can that will help us move through these times.

Lisa: I wonder if you could say something about IDGs actually and how you’re seeing the IDGs as a way of perhaps starting conversations or kind of helping people make tangible some of this stuff because it can be to some people, I think, a bit fluffy or a bit abstract, you know.

Bernadette: Well, I have to say, the increasing visibility of the organization—I mean just its presence gives some credibility to the movement. So sometimes the first thing I do is send the link to the—it’s just called Inner Development Goals, I think .org. And I’ve done that with some non-profits in the U.S. working around food systems, and it really helps land it. And many of them hadn’t even—of course they work around the SDGs, and I prefer to work with organizations who are obviously moving in a direction of being, you know, doing generative practices. So the SDG mindset and framework is there.

And many of these organizations were not aware of the IDGs. It is fairly new. So the entrance point is just bringing it into the room, and I’m finding people super receptive like, “Oh really, that’s out there? There’s a framework now? I didn’t even know that.” And they’re so receptive. So it’s really just awareness, and I’m not finding it difficult. It’s opening doors, it’s opening conversation. Suddenly anyone I speak to almost is interested in bringing in the inner development conversation into the room. So it actually feels really alive and actually sort of really fresh in this moment—like happening now, you know, in these last months I’m feeling something shifting around this.

Lisa: Yeah, so this is kind of a fresh conversation. I mean, to go there, it’s not like everyone knows what even IDGs are or that they existed, this framework. So I think you’re going to start seeing it become much more prevalent in the dialogues more and more and in conversations in coming months and year. I wonder if you could give an example of one of the IDGs or how you’ve used them as a kind of jumping off point to start exploring, you know, how do you then put that into practice?

Bernadette: A lot of people can relate to just the waters that we’re swimming in, you know—VUCA, so volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Everyone can relate to how stressful it is right now and the rate of change just seems to be palpable, increasing the speed. So there’s this tension.

So if we start there, what are the tensions, what are the challenges? I’m hearing even really progressive companies saying, “Our people are saying that this is becoming a burnout factory,” especially in tech, in software development. And that just breaks my heart that, wow, we’re still there, you know.

So really the beginning of the conversation is what’s not working, you know, what are these pain points, where are things breaking? Even with the best of intentions—I’m not even saying in traditional organizations who haven’t even begun to address it. I’m saying in those who have said, “We want a flourishing environment for humans in our organization.” It’s still really sticky.

So I think that conversation around the context, the rate of exponential change externally, and that internally as human beings, the call is—it’s not people feel like, “Oh my God, I have to keep up, I have to develop, I have to grow,” but it’s more about integrating the learning mindset and everything that we do so that we can have an unpredicted outcome. In other words, that’s what exponential kind of offers us is that this non-linear curve.

Because I think there’s this fear of like, “And now you’re putting all the responsibility on us—we have to grow to develop to save the planet.” It’s like, actually no, we have to actually shift our consciousness. We don’t know how this works, we don’t even understand exponential change and what that means. Our mind can’t grasp it.

So the people who are attracted to this work are beginning to sort of sense that if we can embed these practices in meetings, in our family conversations, in everything that we do, then we have a chance. We don’t even know what that can look like. There’s this hope of like it has this ripple effect, it has a chance to get us to where we need to be to come up with innovative solutions, to do things differently, to shift our consciousness—that it’s not so daunting.

So anyway, that’s more about the conversation, the doorway in. Again, it’s about that context. So does that answer your question? I mean, I can go more into like the IDG framework, but not sure where you want to go from here, if that might have sparked for you.

Lisa: I’m just thinking about people listening who maybe haven’t heard of the IDG framework yet, or have heard of it but don’t really know what to make of it, and to kind of get a bit of a picture of how I might, as someone in an organization, engage with them or use that as a point to start exploring something different.

Bernadette: Great. There’s basically in the framework—just to name it so people know what we’re talking about—there’s five different areas. And it’s going to be limited because we can’t, it’s so hard to put this down on paper, but it’s a starting point.

The first area is called Being—it’s like your relationship to self, your self-awareness.

The second one is Thinking—our cognitive skills, how we can think through complexity. That’s a big attractor because people say, “Oh great, I don’t want to do the self-awareness part, but I’ll do the cognitive part. Help me think through complexity,” because it really appeals to the intellectuals. But it is a really key part of it—how we do sense-making, how we move through contradictory perspectives.

The third is Relating—how we care for other and for the world, connection, empathy, compassion, those kinds of things.

The fourth is Collaborating—our social skills. So you could say some of the emotional intelligence movement falls in there, but it’s also about mobilizing something together. So these are not all—it’s not all inner work. It’s bridging the inner with the outer—how do we build trust in teams, those kinds of things.

And then the fifth is that bridge to the outer with Acting—how do we drive change, that sense of courage, creativity, optimism, and perseverance that might be needed to get behind what it is you’re here to do and where you want to contribute, what you want to steward in your sphere of influence. These don’t have to be big acts. It’s small everyday acts that add up and make a difference.

So those are the five areas. Is that helpful to kind of give that just overview of the framework?

Lisa: Yeah.

Bernadette: And then we can go into the developmental organizations and how to start embedding this, but I just want to see how that’s landing for you.

Lisa: Yeah, I’m thinking now about developmental organizations and DDOs and how the IDGs fit with that, and what a developmental organization means to you. Because that movement has been evolving over the last few years, and I interviewed Brian Ungard some years ago, but I’m curious how you see that developing and how those things come into play.

Bernadette: The DDO—deliberately developmental organization movement—and the book “An Everyone Culture” by Kegan and Lahey, just to give people a reference if they want to read that, really caught my attention because for me, it felt like a bridge to what I had, the tension I had been holding between the inner work and the organizational work. So I really thought, “Okay, good, finally.”

And whenever you say Harvard research is behind something, okay, good—all of a sudden everybody pays attention. So it was sort of what some of us in the shadows were waiting for, you know, like, “Okay, we need sort of this spearhead.” That’s how the world works, and that’s okay. So now we have it, now let’s use it.

So for me, it gave a really good landing place with the research to back it around developmental practices that can be embedded into an organization and that it’s not separated from the business. So it used to be that you would go to off-site retreats, you would do coaching outside of the organization, and it was always—it feels to me, I use this word “shadows”—around the side. I always felt like it was done in the shadows, like, “Well, when we’re out of the office, we’ll go do those things, but don’t bring it back.”

Even if the goal was to bring it back, you bring it back and the problem is this business-as-usual mindset, this program of industrialized work is so strong that even with the best of intentions, we’re going to fall back into those patterns. And they’re deeply ingrained in our subconscious mind, and we’ve been programmed and trained since birth to show up a certain way—in society in general, even in our families—to belong, to be okay. No one wants to be rejected or be an outsider, so we’re really good at it.

And then in organizations, especially when your livelihood depends on it, you have a boss. And even in progressive organizations or where you do have a purpose-aligned business, which is a group that I work with, I found it was even harder to some extent, which really caught me by surprise because it meant so much more to me, you know.

It was like when I worked for a corporation, I could compartmentalize and it made sense. It was like, “That’s survival, you know, you’re going to show up your best self, you want to go for the promotion, make more money.” That was years ago, but that was the mindset and still is today in many places.

But now that I’m in purpose-aligned work, then it brings up all of the “Wow, this is so important to me.” And so then you don’t want to jeopardize that by bringing your whole self, even though that’s part of the model. For a DDO, it’s to get out of this business-as-usual mindset of preserving and enhancing our standing and covering up our weaknesses. That’s kind of the theme in the book.

They say that everyone’s doing a second job for which no one gets paid. So we’re using a lot of energy and creative resources to keep ourselves looking good. And the cost is great, and there’s just no time for that anymore. It’s sort of like, “Let’s get on with it,” right? Even though it’s easier said than done.

Even my father—I was raised, he was sort of my work success hero, and he worked for Sears and Roebuck. We moved every two years growing up. He was just like—I mean, he worked his way up from the paint department without a college degree. At that time, it was you don’t tell anyone that—all the way up to the home office in Chicago. And he always said, “Never mix your personal life and your work life.” Like it was a mantra.

So I think I’m in this work because it’s still really a challenge for me, honestly. I want to show up looking good. It’s just in my DNA, it’s in my family of origin value system of success. So it’s still my learning edge, honestly, even though in other settings, no problem, but at work, it’s still really, really a challenge for me.

Lisa: I wonder if this is a good bridge to talking about self-organized developmental organizations, or SDOs, because that was something that excited me about you and your work—sort of bridging those two worlds in a way, the kind of developmental organization and then this kind of self-managing, self-organizing approach.

And listening to you talk about being surprised by how challenging it is in a purpose-aligned organization still to sort of let go of or be mindful of this need to look good or—you know, it becomes high stakes. I really resonate with that, and I speak to lots of people in self-managing organizations who are really surprised to discover that, “Oh, I don’t have a boss anymore, and I’m still, you know, on the edge of burning out,” or “I’m still really stressed,” or “I find it so hard to have honest and open conversations with my colleagues because I really don’t want to let them down or because I don’t want to let the organization down.”

So it’s sort of a cruel joke in a way that even when you get rid of that, you know, oppressive, sometimes bureaucratic traditional hierarchy, new challenges emerge, you know, where it’s still a human challenge of how to be together in another way, even if you’re doing meaningful work together, even if you’ve changed the structures.

Bernadette: Yeah, exactly. And it lives within us. It doesn’t change when you change the structure. I always say my fear is we sort of—it’s same prison, different walls. I mean, we change the packaging, we change the structure, and we think that’s going to fix everything.

And it does do a lot. I mean, yes, when you do a round where every voice matters and every voice is heard—already, yes, you’re setting the conditions, and that is—I am not underestimating that—huge impact. But it’s not the end of the story. It doesn’t stop there because, “Oh, now you want to hear my voice. Okay, so what voice am I going to share with you?” And what comes up for me when now I suddenly have the floor and people will listen to me?

I mean, that’s for the people who, like myself maybe, stayed the quieter people who stayed more on the sidelines. There’s challenges. And then there’s challenges for those who would always take the spotlight as well.

I mean, that inner—I really lean on Otto Scharmer. You said, “How do I introduce”—I was going to say the IDGs, but I also really lean on Otto Scharmer’s work because he just says it so beautifully, you know, our inner perceptions, how we think, believe about ourselves and the world is what will influence the world that we co-create. So they’re inextricable. We cannot separate them.

So how I show up in that meeting is going to affect how the meeting goes, how good I feel about it, what I’m able to produce together. So this piece of in the IDGs, that first piece of self-awareness, that’s where I focus a lot because that’s where I spent most of my developmental journey—around self-awareness. And Otto even says this is our greatest point of leverage—is our inner perception and the inner work. It’s really the only thing that we can control. And I find that really reassuring because that’s what I’ve always felt intuitively and through my spiritual practice. That’s what I believe.

But to have it sort of grounded and spoken, that actually, yeah, and then science can back it now with studies around quantum physics and how thoughts influence physical matter. So these are the times we’re living in where this self-awareness, it just feels paramount to me. So that’s where I spend a lot of time as well, focusing on that so that I can co-create the world that I want to see. You know, that’s where my power lies.

So when we talk about power with structures like sociocracy, you know, they really will only work to the extent that someone can feel power within themselves and the world that they’re creating—if they even do have that understanding that they have influence over the world that they’re creating. That would be a first step. Like, how much is that even part of your worldview? And if not, why not? So those kinds of questions.

I mean, the question of empowerment is a really deep one, I find, and complex.

Lisa: Yeah, there’s so much that I want to unpack in what you’ve just said, but I’m going to go with what’s current, which is even this nature of power. And many people don’t like the word “empower” or “empowerment” because it seems to imply that someone can choose to give it and they can choose to take it back, you know. So the language is a whole other topic that we could talk about, of course.

But I remember when I saw you speaking at the sociocracy conference, that was one of the things I wrote down where I was like nodding furiously when you said you cannot have power with without power within. And I wonder if you could unpack that for us a little bit, because I find that this relationship to power and self and others is so tricky and deep and challenging, and I feel like it’s a real learning edge for me.

Bernadette: That is a big question. I’m like, “No, I don’t know if I can unpack that,” but let’s see.

The work that I’ve done—I always use myself as a lab, a living laboratory. It must start with me. I never ask anyone to go anyplace that I haven’t ventured into the dark woods on. So in my experience with my own living lab and with my clients, the place to begin, I feel like, is just these places where we just feel powerless. And it’s like the patterns that we keep bumping into over and over. Like, you know, we learn, we read books, we wake up, we keep working on things, but at some core level, we don’t feel like we’re making traction in that area.

It could be—usually a lot of times it’s in our most intimate relationships where these really embedded patterns get seated because they often reflect a family of origin and early childhood pattern. So I’ve been starting to call this “early patterning,” just starting to find an accessible phrase because it really all does go back to the early programming where we formed our core beliefs about ourselves and the world.

And so even though we don’t want to go there, it’s like kind of seems like the dark shadows—like, “I don’t know, what is under there? And I don’t want to know.” And then the word “trauma” has kind of been stigmatized to not talk about that in work settings. And so I’m very careful not to, although it’s becoming more acceptable now. And people are realizing that we actually can’t keep that out of the room either because we are, from my perspective, the walking wounded. No one has escaped being hurt in some way, because it’s not what externally happened. You know, you can’t compare it to a very—what might seem like a very small thing compared to a large trauma. There’s a whole range within there that affects everyone differently.

So it’s really taking a much more compassionate stance toward what my life experience has been—compassion toward ourselves first and what really formed me, and then how am I still bringing that into the room? How am I still bringing that into a meeting? How am I still—how is that still holding me back from really taking a stand for what is mine to steward, you know, connecting it with purpose?

For me, that is where our power lies—when we do the two steps of clearing the things that are blocking us and holding us back in really effective ways, not just affirmations or trying to think our way through it. We have to bring in somatics. We have to bring in the trauma work at whatever level. It can be a very simple level. Doesn’t have to be deep and scary. It’s highly liberating, I have found, and bridging that with—I forgot I was going to say bridging the—what was I saying about the internal—the trauma work?

Well, with how I show up, I forget what I was going to say with the second part.

Lisa: Connected to what we, what you started saying at the start around—

Bernadette: Oh, and our stewarding with purpose. That’s what I was going to say. Yeah, that what we personally feel called to do. And that doesn’t even mean some huge mission that you’re going to go off and start your own company, but just in every moment, you know, what do I value? What do I value in this conversation right now with you? You know, am I aligned with what I value?

And even how we took a few minutes to check in before we came on this recording was valuing what we needed as human beings, which was talking about, you know, being nervous and showing up and showing up even though it’s scary, and, you know, the fears that come with that, and that we show up anyway. And even just sharing that out loud does something to our nervous system. It connected us to each other and hopefully did something to the field between us now and to whoever will be listening—that it does. Those micro moments make a difference. And that to me is purpose-aligned.

So it used to intimidate me when people talk about “purpose-aligned”—it’s like, “I don’t know—stop asking me, ‘What’s your purpose? What’s your purpose?’” Because my purpose would be always huge and abstract, and then I couldn’t get it down to, you know, “Assist in the global awakening,” you know, these grandiose things. And it’s like, I’ve realized it comes down to these micro moments, and they do matter.

Lisa: It’s very alive for me at the moment because I’m kind of exploring in my personal and professional life—I mean, it’s all kind of intertwined—in therapy and in my relationship with my partner and with my colleagues, there’s this theme of being kind of, I guess you could say, like disempowered within myself, of how I’ve just in the last few days come to think of it. It’s like telling the truth.

I’ve been—I’ve conditioned, I’ve been conditioned, or conditioned myself, to pretend very well that I’m calm and I’ve got it together and I’m competent and reliable. And even with a group of colleagues, for example, where we have lots of practices where we come together and talk openly about all things that we’re learning and that we’re struggling with, it’s taken so long for me to let down that kind of pretense of having it all together.

And it’s amazing, like, and it really makes me empathize with people that I speak to in self-managing organizations as well who say, “You know, we’ve given everyone permission to self-manage, so why aren’t they doing that?” And for me, it’s like, “God, it takes so much more than permission to really live it.”

And I’ve experienced that myself over a number of years with amazingly supportive people and all of the kind of supportive co-leadership structures. And still, it takes so much courage and practice for me, and I’m only just touching the very beginnings of what it’s like to really be honest and authentic and truthful and show up kind of a work in progress or a bit of a mess, you know. So it’s so interesting how much time and commitment and energy it takes for us individuals and us collectively to explore that, I think.

Bernadette: It does. And I think the people’s fear is, though, that it will take so much time to do this developmental work inside a work environment. “We have all these other things to do.” And when you were just sharing about how much energy it takes to start moving in these directions of not hiding, I’m aware of—and I can’t even quantify it—but I have this felt sense in my body of because I’ve lived it over 59 years, you know, it’s like, oh, the tremendous amount of energy, though, that I have expended keeping these, I call them limiting beliefs, in place, you know, that I have to show up a certain way in order to be successful or to belong.

It’s—I don’t even think we can compare. Like, it feels like it takes a lot of time and energy now to sift through because it’s new, it’s different. It’s sort of like, “Wait, you’re not supposed to do that here.” And so we’re a little bit bumbling around with it, you know. It’s a little awkward.

But I have a feeling that as we keep moving in this direction, what else is possible? You know, a question that I love to ask—“What else is possible that we’re not even seeing yet?” Because we don’t know because we haven’t lived into it. But we do know that that other way has cost us tremendously. Oh my gosh, I mean, it hurts my heart to even just think about it and to actually let that in—the cost of hiding these beautiful beings that we are for the sake of, you know, some fear of being rejected, really.

So we have—I have found doing—I will go into some of the practices, but one of them is working with sort of these core assumptions and beliefs. And I’ve sort of narrowed it down to there’s around five that we all share. And I’ll share them in a moment. But the pain that I’m feeling in my heart right now is just that cost of like, the “I’m not enough.” “I’m not enough” is one of them, and everyone has their own version of it. And of course, it relates to our worth, our value of contributing, self-doubt. Those all fall in that. What’s the cost of that staying in place, you know?

And this is not conscious. I’m not saying—you say that to someone, they’re like, “I don’t—that’s not me.” And I totally get that. And some people will gravitate more toward one than the other of these core five. But these are not conscious. That’s the problem. They’re below the surface.

And one of my heroes is Bruce Lipton. He’s a biologist who wrote “The Biology of Belief.” And he works with epigenetics, you know, above genetics, saying that the internal and external environment can determine what genes turn on and off. And in the biology of belief, he talks about these power of thought, you know, and how that influences what we’re creating. So it’s like, what is the cost? And he says that 95% of our actions and behaviors are dictated by the subconscious mind.

And that is, I know, daunting, because like, “Well, how do I even know?” But it’s through transparency. We start—every time we share a limiting thought or belief with someone else—it doesn’t have to take up a huge part of the meeting. It just could be like, you know, you’re trying to create something together, something comes up for you. Of course, that’s that self-awareness piece. You feel something in your body, usually first. Your heart is racing a little bit, or you feel constricted, or you just want to move away, you know. Our body will tell us first. That’s, you know, the language of trauma, as they say.

So you’ll feel it first. When you name it—this is not taking up more time in the meeting, which is our fear—it actually unlocks something. So I name it and someone says, “Oh! Oh my God, I have that too,” on some level. And it’s sort of like it’s turning on the light in the room so that collectively, as we each do this and take that risk in that micro moment, we don’t know the impact that that will have. By just naming it, it changes the neural pathways in our brains. It opens up a field between us. It opens up another possibility that didn’t exist before. This is the playground that we need to play in with the challenges that we’re dealing with.

Lisa: It makes me reflect on what I was describing in terms of like the energy and the time and so on that it takes. It’s probably more accurate to say that that’s the energy that it takes to sort of resist what’s sort of natural and what has been conditioned, or what has been that kind of protective shield that’s been developed. So it’s kind of a wrestling with that in the beginning, I think, at least in my case.

And then it is such a relief and so freeing when you let that down and when you dare to say something that’s in that other realm. And you’re so right, like I’ve experienced that many times, that someone can just name something and it changes the energy in the room, and totally different conversations are possible because of that.

Bernadette: It gives me gives me hope, and it’s worth taking the risk then. Because none of us really want to—we have sort of a natural immunity to change, to use that word from Bob Kegan. There’s a book on that if you’re curious to learn more about that. But I find it a really powerful framework to talk about this because there’s a risk involved. There’s a part of us that will fight us to the end. It’s like, “Uh-uh, we’re not doing that.” And that’s just how we’re wired.

And to know that that’s natural and that it has a purpose—it has protected us, it has served something. It’s just that now, do we want to make a choice to serve something else? It’s increasing our choice over that. But to know that the resistance is 100 percent understandable and we all have it, and that there are steps you can walk yourself through to sort of walk alongside yourself compassionately rather than making yourself wrong, you know, which is really the trap as well. Which is one of the five—“There’s something wrong with me.” Everyone has a version of that.

So fortunately these things are becoming more transparent and acceptable language and taking it out of the therapy sessions and into manageable ways to do this together. Because that’s also where I have found the greatest momentum. And when I do work with organizations and in the organization that I’m in, we get the greatest—I have experienced the greatest gains in relationships.

So I can go do something—I do a lot on my own, and that’s actually my comfort zone. No problem, I’ll go do my work. But it’s in relationship with others, and that’s where we can—the potential for some exponential change can happen is when we’re doing this in relationship. That’s where the real healing comes. I mean, that’s where the wounds were formed, and that’s where they’ll be more quickly healed and re-established, is through relationship.

Lisa: I love that. So you sort of gave us a sneak preview of some practices. So what can we do? I mean, I’m also sitting here thinking if so much of this stuff is in my subconscious, you know, how do you know what you don’t know?

Bernadette: Well, first, I mean, there’s three I’d like to cover if they fit, but I’m drawn to going to the—how do you know? Well, we could go with relationship, which would be the first one, which is peer learning spaces.

So let’s—but I’ll name the three so you can help me track if it still fits. The second one would be to talk about immunity—the immunity to change process and parts of ourselves. And the third one would be somatic—easy and highly effective interventions, like EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), tapping. So those are kind of three that really stood out to me as the most effective that I have found in my work.

Lisa: Oh, I’d love to hear something. Wherever you want to go.

Bernadette: Maybe the one in relationship—was that the first one you named?

Lisa: That was the first one, yeah.

Bernadette: Okay, so in our organization, one of the groups I work with is Friendy. And so we’ve developed this practice called peer learning spaces. That’s the language we use with clients. But internally, we actually call them developmental pods, or dev pods for short. But one of the colleagues joked around—we kind of stopped calling it dev pods because it sounds like death pods, like the “th.” And he’s like, “This is like—but it is kind of a death.” This is the death of the ego. It’s like, “No, let’s stop—let’s not go there.”

So peer learning spaces is an easier way to take it in. But it’s where we learn together. So it’s a place within the organization where—from the “An Everyone Culture” book, you could call it home. There’s like these places—Home, Groove, and Edge—like you’re working on your learning edges, but you need kind of a home-based place to work on those. Yes, you want them embedded in meetings and practices and everything that you do throughout the day, these micro moments that I talked about. But it’s also really helpful to have this home and a crew.

So this is a place where you can take a deep breath and digest. And everyone uses them in a different way, and just to name that there’s no right way. This is all an experiment. This is all a co-creation. So when creating your peer learning space, if it’s within an organization—and we also do them with, like, senior leaders who have something in common, like all CTOs or something like that.

So that’s one premise—is that you have a center of gravity together. So it’s different than, like, a self-help group, let’s say. It’s not that—just to differentiate because people think, “Oh, what are we going to do there? That sounds like a self-help group. But that doesn’t sound very fun.” But we have found that it can be really light. Development doesn’t have to be heavy and serious—it can be even playful.

So the first thing is that when you’re creating these inside your organization, you just find a sort of smaller home base of, say, four to eight people. You get more than that, it’s a little bit—how you want to break that into then two groups then. And you just are coming together to start playing around—what are your developmental edges right now? Where are your learning edges? What’s challenging for you?

And we do keep it personal and work, of course it overlaps, but we do keep that sort of center of gravity—that why we’re in this room together is around, you know, Friendy, or it’s around this project. So it does provide a context, always a touch point back. So how does that relate to how you’re showing up?

If someone does go into something that feels unrelated, it’s okay, it’s welcome, but then we—the group helps bring them—“Well, how does that relate to how you’re showing up with us or here in your work?” So we come back to that center of gravity, and that keeps it grounded. It keeps the container, you know.

And then if there’s something else that’s needed outside of that, of course that’s encouraged, and we would help find resources for that. So the first thing is that you have that center of gravity, you’re co-creating it together, and it’s an experiment. Those are like sort of the ground rules that we have found. And then we engage in questions together.

I’ll pause there because maybe that’s enough. I can give more detail about it, but I’m wondering how that’s landing for you.

Lisa: No, I’m curious to know more because it sounds really rich.

Bernadette: Well, I can give some examples of questions that we hold in the group, and that might be helpful because it’s like, where do I start? People don’t know.

One of the questions we hold and that we started the group with is, “What is development to you?” So really get all voices in the room. That’s the beginning of the co-creation. We don’t come in with assumptions. We do encourage still to have, if you can, two co-hosts, ideally that have some experience with holding these kinds of spaces. So there is still container holding, even though those two people can also participate as members. But it keeps the kind of integrity.

And especially in the beginning, what we’ve experimented with is doing eight sessions with the co-host presence, and then the group goes on by itself after that. And that’s—we have found that to work pretty well.

So “What is development?” We start setting up some agreements—“What are some things that help you develop? What are some things that would help us develop?” And again, you’re just sort of making these laundry lists. Great if someone can take notes.

So there is some structure in the beginning, especially so important to set the container in the environment. So we go into breakouts, like, “What are some best ways that we can help each other?” And all we do is then break out and maybe have a listening exchange. You know, just share a challenge you’ve been having, try that out. The other person’s going to listen or do whatever they feel compelled to do. When we come back in, we’re going to share—“What worked well for you? What did they do that felt good to you?” You know, just start with the basics.

And so you’re creating the group culture from the group. There’s no pre-imposed rules or how we’re supposed to do this, because that can be so intimidating. So starting with simple things like that, and then listing, “Here’s what worked well, here’s what I could use more of.” Now you’re creating your agreements by just trying it out together and then giving feedback on that.

And we just continue to hold questions around, “Well, what is our responsibility here if something comes up that’s between two people in the room together?” And often we say, “If your learning edge is—often the learning edge is asking for that space for that person to have that feedback conversation that’s difficult, and that’s what you’re going to do. That’s what you’re going to—that will be your learning edge—is to ask that person for that conversation outside of here, or asking for support if you need a third person there.” In other words, we don’t have to do it all in that space. It just is too much, you know.

And if we see systemic patterns in the organization showing up through us—we’re all fractals—so we often see, “Well, what patterns are we seeing of similar challenges between us and in the system that we’re a part of? And what’s our responsibility there?” And we don’t answer that. We don’t know. It’s an in-the-moment, ongoing question that we live into. It depends.

But those are just some things we’ve been playing with.

Lisa: I really like that. It feels like such a useful and practical example of a space and a practice that complements some of the like external structures work that people tend to do when they’re experimenting with new ways of working. And people tend to look at like how we make decisions and how resources are distributed, or how we do salaries, or whatever.

And then there’s always this kind of bucket left over of like kind of relational stuff and how we want to be together that feels trickier, I guess. It’s less visible, less tangible. And this feels like a really rich way to sort of create a space where you can start to bring in some of those themes, you know, where the purpose is development. I really like that.

Bernadette: That’s a good way to put it. Yeah, it does make the space for that because the micro moments do matter, and this place where you can immerse yourself into that intention in a specified time and space feels really good and really makes a difference.

I mean, we meet around every six weeks or so. We found that’s good. So it doesn’t have to be super time-intense. It does a lot just even just that amount of time. And we meet for two hours. So we do go into the, you know, swim in the waters for a little bit. It’s not like a quick thing. But you, again, you make it up for what works for you.

Lisa: I like that. So what else? Where should we go now?

Bernadette: So the others were immunity to change and—what was the third one? I forget.

Lisa: It was the more somatic intervention.

Bernadette: Yeah, like EFT, tapping.

Lisa: I am interested in that.

Bernadette: So then I can just speak briefly to the immunity to change because it kind of—it does actually flow from this peer learning space. Because immunity to change, the process—the first step is to kind of come up with an improvement goal. And which sounds so like, “Oh, please, not another improvement goal.”

But we’re trying to get to something that would really make a difference, you know, like out of a scale of one to five, it would be a number four that would really make a difference for you in making your life better, making your work life, your personal life better. They usually overlap someplace. You know, you can get help with that if you have someone walking you through the process to get to what would be a good change goal to put down.

But it’s nice because if you have an awareness of that framework—like we don’t do the immunity to change work in our peer learning space because it requires another space to go through with a small group and usually facilitated, or you can get the book and you can walk yourself through the table if you want to do that.

But it’s nice if you have that language because you come up with what your growth edges are, what your assumptions are. And for me, the assumptions are really—it’s those limiting beliefs, like, “If I do this, then something bad will happen,” you know, like, “If I put myself out there, I will be rejected.”

And again, when you go through the table with some deep reflection and presence of someone walking alongside you, it really helps you see those blind spots, that unconscious part. Because if you just do it with your—I’m just going to, your left brain, and “I’m just going to—oh, I’ve done these exercises before, blah, blah, blah”—you don’t really get to these subtler hidden places.

And so even though the table looks very simple, it’s like, you write down your improvement goal, the counter-commitments—in other words, like, it’s like having your one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake at the same time. And that’s why you’re not making progress. It’s like—part of me really wants this, but part of me—like, for example, part of me, on mine, I want to show up and speak more out and, you know, stand in what feels important to me. But I have a counter commitment (that we talked about) of looking good.

So I’m not going to do that. I’m actually not going to do this podcast. Or whatever—a year ago, I would not have done this because the risk is too great that I might make a fool of myself or somebody will judge me, or all of that. So in other words, that’s why I take compassion and slow pace to get to some of these deeper places that we really don’t want anyone to know about. “Best not to—let’s not go there,” you know.

So, but there’s just that table that walks you through it—the worry box and then your assumptions. And then you test small experiments, small and safe, that you can do like in the next week to test your assumption. Like, “If I do this LinkedIn post, will I get some weird comments back and be judged?”

And that was my first on my immunity to change developmental sprint, you can call it. We go through it, and I just remember literally with my group, I said, “Okay, I’m going to make a LinkedIn post.” It sounds so silly. That was the small experiment. And that was not even—I don’t know, it was within this past year. And it was a way to test—“Does, do I get rejected? Do people think—?” No, none of that happened.

But you need to kind of—it reprograms your brain. It seems so simple, but it really does have a powerful effect. And then you start getting maybe other feedback—“Oh, actually—.” Like you told me the other day, “I really like your LinkedIn posts.” Like, “Oh, okay.” You’re like a scientist. You’re just testing those assumptions with small experiments, and it does start to rewire your brain and in small, doable ways allow you to move through that subconscious resistance. Just a summary of it.

Lisa: Thank you for that. I’ve sort of dabbled with immunity to change maps now and then, but there’s something very clear about the way you just walked it through actually that reminds me how valuable it is. It makes me want to go and update my map and choose some experiments.

Bernadette: Let’s do it. We could do it together if you want.

Lisa: There we go. And then finally, then, the third practice, which is a more kind of somatic practice. Say something about that.

Bernadette: Right. So I don’t know if—I think we talked about it, you had heard about it. A lot of people have heard about it a bit more, but it’s been around for, oh my gosh, 40 years, but it’s been kept really sort of again on those sidelines. It’s called Emotional Freedom Technique, or tapping.

I’m finding more and more people have heard of it, but 10, 15 years ago, I would say it, people would say, “What is that? And that seems really strange,” you know. So again, I was compartmentalizing and keeping them apart. And now I’m synthesizing it into my consulting practice, and it feels really good and getting good results because it’s highly efficient and—so it’s fast and effective. It actually works.

And the reason is because—so what we’re doing, what it is, is tapping on the end points of meridians on certain places on your face and upper body to clear where a somatic response might be living, as well as it soothes the nervous system. It helps your brain switch from fight-flight-freeze-or-fawn into higher functioning, bringing the blood flow back to your prefrontal cortex.

So all this to say that it can take like three to five minutes to tap on these points while focusing on something that stresses you. And you want to do it on something that really brings, like, a heart racing or really a somatic response. You know, go for that, you know, because it’s only going to last a few minutes. You can do it. And then you tap on these points.

And it’s being used for refugees to reduce their trauma response—a simplified version. So I think it’s really becoming, might be becoming more acceptable because it is just weird to—like you can’t be like in a meeting and start tapping on these points.

So I kind of wanted to talk about how we can integrate this into organizations and into more mainstream settings for people who are not ready to integrate the body that much. I mean, it’s even hard to integrate any kind of movement in an organizational setting, like, “Let’s all stand up and stretch and put our arms up in the air and look up,” which actually has a huge impact on the nervous system and the brain. There’s ways you can just get your right and left brain back online easily when there’s sort of system overload when you’re doing brainstorming.

So I’m hoping that these can become more acceptable and make them not so taboo or weird. But one of my practitioners gave me some of these tips that I’ll share with you that you can do in a meeting that no one will know you’re doing it. So I thought I would share those.

One of them is that there’s also acupuncture/acupressure points on the inner side of your nail bed on each of your fingers. So you can just take your thumb and just—you can try it now—just hold that inner nail bed. Or you can tap or just—but I just prefer to press because it just takes less energy. And then you can just go—you could have your hand under the desk, no one will see you.

So if you notice you’re feeling triggered by something that somebody says, or you feel yourself reacting like, “Ah, there it goes, I can feel it”—we all feel it. I mean, and you get better and better at noticing it in the moment, but it’s usually pretty visceral when we’re triggered—we feel it in our bodies.

So I work with breath a lot—check your breath. No one can really see that you’re doing that. And then you can hold these points on your hand with your thumb, or you can just take your other hand and just hold each of the ends of your fingers. And it will send a message to your nervous system. It interrupts the signal—that fight, flight, or freeze signal that’s happening in your body. So it’s a really easy one to do.

I do that in highly charged situations where I know I can’t do some of the other interventions, like I really need to stay there, you know. Other interventions are walking away or naming it. But if it’s like, “I can’t even name it because that’s just going to send this person—” I can’t. So I just tend to my nervous system so that I can stay present.

While you’re holding these points, then you can slow things down, which always works for me as well. It’s just—just slow things down. Start with basics of repeating back what you thought someone—“Okay, let hang on. Let me just make sure I heard what I think you said. Is it this?” It buys you time because what we need is time when we’re in that reactive state to not just escalate and perpetuate a fight-flight conversation or worse. We don’t want that.

So it—and it’s not about, you know, always sort of calming. I mean, there are places for being messy and for erupting. It’s not about sort of control, which I could be accused of—like, using these things to control, right? So it’s a both/and, you know. There are times when just name it and just let it come out messy. But these are interventions when you really even can’t do that, right?

Another one is pressing down your big toe on your feet. So you can try it now, and you just do one and then the other. So no one can—I’ve done that during meetings as well. And it can just buy you some time to say, “What do I want to name here?” instead of just—like, “Okay, I’m going to take the risk. I am going to be transparent, but I just need a minute.”

And then for people who are a little more introverted or more sensitive, which I’m one of them, I just need a moment, you know, and I don’t want to stop the whole room to give me that moment. So I can do these somatic interventions that buy me that time that I need.

Those are two. And another one you can do is just really tap on your heart center. So you can try that right now. So, you know, in a lot of these circles, we talk about shifting from head to heart, but we don’t need to take a moment of pause, which are beautiful, and I love doing that, but we can’t always do that.

So even right now, I’m doing it. You can’t see it on the camera. So I can tap on my heart and just send my body the signal, “Hey, let’s drop in. Let’s drop into the heart and what would happen then.” And if nothing else, to create that field of safety in my own body, bring me back to my power so that I can, as well, you know—again, we’re not always going to be there, but where I have choice to be in my power, I prefer that. Let’s just—I prefer that. I want to create a world in which that’s real and that’s happening more and more. So I want to use this for myself as much as possible so that I’m not perpetuating old patterns. That’s me. We can all choose whether we even want to do that or not.

Lisa: I love those. Thank you. I’m going to log those away. That’s really helpful.

Bernadette: And I use the full tapping sequence just even every day for what I call emotional hygiene. Just, you know, we brush our teeth every day, but we don’t take care of our emotional body and which is connected to our energy system as well.

So you can use them to just tap through. You can even look—or I can share a resource afterwards of the—what are the tapping points. And you can just do simple tapping where you tap through the points once a day. And just—why not keep up with it instead of letting it all backlog, and then it’s a huge event? You know, so I’m an advocate for that as well—emotional hygiene.

So all these little hacks, you know, that I think we need to bring everything online now. It’s sort of like, “All hands on deck,” like I said, that whatever works. And it’s going to be different things that different people gravitate to. So just putting out there different possibilities so that however your brain works or your body works, you can find the things that work for you because there’s really no one right way. I use the things that work best for me and then let others bring in the things that work best for them, sharing the resources.

Lisa: I guess in sort of wrapping up our conversation, when you think about people listening to this who are—they tend to be people who are on a journey of some kind towards new ways of working and being together—what kind of words of wisdom or things would you like to say to them that perhaps you haven’t said yet, or you would feel sad if you didn’t get a chance to say?

Bernadette: I think biggest learning for me in the last year—and I didn’t mention it, so I’ll mention it here—has been diving deep into something called internal family systems. And it’s been life-changing for me, even with all, you know, 20 years of other tools. This one—there’s just something different about it. It integrates it in a different way.

So it’s that inner compassion and understanding that we all have parts. Like I never—I hadn’t put it in that language before. And now this language is being accepted in adult development research circles, which I’m a part of. So this is something—this is very exciting to me.

It’s like, we all have parts. Really, it’s not a diagnosis. It’s not that something’s wrong with me. These are parts of ourselves that we have had to manage, and different parts of us will take over at different times. It was for survival or protection, to function, really. So they all serve a good purpose.

But now it seems to me the work is to sort of bring that self with a capital S even more strongly online to compassionately work with those parts and help them find a new job. This is part of the shift that I’m seeing and part of the work to be done. And then that comes back to our power when we understand our own internal system, our own internal complexity. Like I call it VUCA squared—we are a VUCA system ourselves as a human being inside a VUCA world.

So the more we can—that point of leverage that Otto talks about—for me, relating to the parts and understanding who those parts of me are and what their purpose was, and reassigning tasks in a loving, compassionate way—and doing the somatic work to integrate why they were doing it, not just rushing over it, helping them feel safe and secure and stable in this new world that I want to live in—then my S with a capital, self with a capital S, you know, can be in charge of the whole system. And then I’m in my co-creative power.

And that’s where I want to be. But it’s not about making any of those parts wrong. It’s about integrating them for this higher alignment. So I just felt compelled to share that because it’s been so pivotal for me, and it gave me a language and a permission. And I’ve heard it come up in conversations super unexpected, like, “Yeah—oh, yeah, tell me about that ‘parts’ thing I’ve been hearing about,” or, “What is that?” And then just explaining it, and people feel so relieved. It just opens kind of this little window.

So it just felt important to bring that in because it does connect to that power within, and that we can’t have power with unless we have power within. So it’s that both/and—coming back full circle to where we started. It was like combining the internal capacities with the external structures like sociocracy or self-organizing systems. So that’s that self-organizing developmental organization, bridging the capacities with the structures. And I really feel this is going to make this—it’s where I want to focus my attention. Let’s put it that way.

Lisa: Thank you so much for this conversation. I’ve learned loads, and I know I’m going to read this into it again and again, I’m sure. So thank you for how you show up in the world.

Bernadette: Such a pleasure.

Lisa: Thank you.

Bernadette: Such a pleasure, so much fun. Thank you.