Showing Up Fully Human: The Value of Understanding Yourself As A Leader

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  00:28

Reggie, Kent, welcome to the show.

Reggie Marra  04:41

Hi, thanks. Good to be here.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  04:42

Yeah, it’s really nice to chat with you both. I’ve been very excited about this because on this podcast, we’ve talked a lot about the idea of coaches. We’ve had so many guests, so many executives come and talk to us about the idea of having a coach how it’s been super beneficial. And I don’t know that I’ve talked about this before on the show. But obviously, I also believe in this. And so for the audience listening in, I’ve had a coach for several years now. And Reggie is that coach. And so one of the things was, I’ve kept him a secret for a very long time. But I figured that it’s, I’ve learned so much from Reggie that it made sense to bring him on the show. And him and Cantor, obviously, partners, and wanted to talk about all things coaching, all things, human development, executive development. And so lots of great topics to talk about today. But I thought maybe a good place to start would be to talk about the type of coaching that you both do. So it’s called integral coaching. And it’s different. And so I’d love for whoever wants to take that question to describe what integral coaching is,

Reggie Marra  05:53

yeah, they’ll jump in and can’t do can complement what I say. So, specifically, we were speaking about integral coaching as it was taught at integral coaching Canada, which is based in Ottawa, and it’s a coaching methodology that’s grounded in Robert Keegan’s developmental method, subject to object, where I’m looking through as I developed becomes what I am, I can later Look at that. So my biases become something I can see outside of me. And I can grow through that, to begin with, you know, speaking about somebody’s current way of being how they are when they show up for coaching. And then we aspire to end with a new way of being, how they aspire to be. And we focus very specifically on a coaching topic. So while there is some situational coaching that goes on, so something happened last week, and the client shows up, we have a trajectory toward a destination of success in a given coaching topic. And that’s a real quick synopsis of a fairly complex methodology. Ken, why don’t you jump in, because you’re

Kent Frazier  06:54

beautiful, I love the kickoff. And again, Aydin, thanks so much for having us. Let’s start with integral and what we mean by integral in that from our practices means whole or as as inclusive as can be. So we’re working with the whole human expression, not just a part of it, we’re not just working with someone’s beliefs or views or their values or their relationships or their emotions or their behaviors. We’re looking at the totality of a human expression. And as Reggie said, in a topic that deeply matters to them that they need to make some new move

07:31

around. Right. And so,

Kent Frazier  07:33

the methodology, as Reggie mentioned, based on Robert Keegan’s subject, object theory, is a powerful transformational lens. So, gosh, it’s hard to describe in a couple of short sentences. You’ve been through it? Yeah.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  07:51

Yeah, it’s very interesting, because obviously, I have a lot of fun doing this podcast, but my full time occupation is running fellow, which is a software company. And so yeah, I mean, I can share kind of some of the things that we went through for the audience, just kind of maybe give an example of where we you know, how the coaching started. And there’s obviously this can be a long, ongoing thing. But Reggie, when you and I started, I guess we started with, I think, our first session was me just complaining about all sorts of things. I’m like, This is wrong, and that’s wrong. And all these things are wrong. And at first, I think you were very graciously listened and ask them more questions. And, and then you went back. And it was really interesting, like, you took all of the things that I was complaining about all the problems and everything, and you kind of just put them together into a pattern. And it was almost like a delivery session where you said, your current state of being is like, and the example that we use for the audience, it’s kind of funny to say out loud, I don’t think I’ve shared this before. But we called it my current way of being as being the shadow runner. And that was what I used to be. And then we kind of develop this example of what I wanted to become. And then so we talked about that, and then you, you went back, and you came up with what that is, and I think like, we landed on, was it the great young Sequoia or something of that nature, right, which was to represent growth? And then now the question is, how do you get from like point A to point B, and that’s where the entire coaching practice was about. And I can say that over that six month period, the change in myself, just like behavioral change in myself, and this is all largely work related, right? This was all around how can I be a better CEO? How do I be a better founder? How do I interact better with my team? And it was truly transformational? And yeah, I think like those are like the concrete examples of where someone starts and where you can end up and it’s different for everyone.

Reggie Marra  09:59

Yeah, And then I love the way you what you chose to capture their aid. And I’m gonna just add one other thing that was in the back of my mind when we began working together. And that was the primary differences between the shadow runner which for me was this guy who was successful, moving really quick and constantly looking over his shoulder at the shadows that were trying to catch up with him. And what this acquire gave you a young Sequoia was this idea of being rooted. So rather than being running and moving and trying to get away from things being rooted, and growing up, and obviously we picked acquire, because it’s a big, strong, impressive tree. So is it that move from being running from running away from things and, and shadow stuff into this rootedness? And confidence in knowing yourself? That was the idea behind just to flesh out the metaphor? Yeah. For anybody listening to Aydin did, he worked really hard and did good work, though, otherwise, I wouldn’t have stayed with it.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  10:56

Oh, and you know, just to bring this home for the audience. What’s interesting about this is it wasn’t really like, Oh, these metaphors, and it’s, I can understand, they might be hard to relate to, for, say, the audience. But these were like very personal, my situational like way of being at work. And then every week or every two weeks, you would give me homework. So you know, the next time that you’re in a meeting, and you’re in this type of a situation, notice when you’re doing this, and so I would write down and I would say Reggie, the mistakes we said I wouldn’t make I made them again. And then there would be another practice. And there was journaling involved. And like it was a very active sort of process. So it wasn’t, you know, we meet once every two weeks, and then off you go, I actually had to work hard at this. And it’s one of those things, but it was really, really, I think, a big and important part of my development that time. Thank you. Yeah, yeah,

Kent Frazier  11:52

listen, in just a quick build on this, you know, just to draw an analogy or metaphor that might be helpful for folks, it’s a lot like getting a personal trainer and go into the gym, hey, I come into the gym, with a certain way of being, I have goals, and I want to be able to leave after six months, I want to have develop different muscles so I can make different moves. So the coach Reggie or I, we don’t have the answers, right. And so just highlighting eight, and you have the desire to want to develop yourself and your willingness to do the practices. And the exercises that Reggie prescribed, much like a trainer would to develop those muscles. So credit goes to you for putting yourself in that developmental context and being willing to try different and new moves and be uncomfortable. So you can make that from to shift.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  12:41

Yeah, and I think the other part was really understanding. And what’s nice about these metaphors, is because they kind of give you this visual of what the end destination looks like. And I think that’s why it was powerful. But again, very transformational in a business context. And I know I mean, you folks, Coach executives all across the world. And I know a lot of our audience is in tech. And so you work with a lot of companies like AWS and a lot of other fast growing large tech companies and executives there. But I also wanted to maybe talk about the CIO, you guys, and you have a third co founder, and you have all created this organization called fully human, where you do a bunch of different work coaching training. Before we dive into some of the topics that I think like the audience would really love to talk about. Just tell us like in a couple of sentences, what is fully human and what kind of work you guys do there.

Kent Frazier  13:37

Maybe I’ll take Yeah, thanks, Reggie. So fully human was born out of a very personal experience of mine. In my work expression, I wasn’t happy with my current way of being Aidan much like you were describing in your way of being and I was experiencing suicidal depression. I mean, it was horrific. For years and years and years, I was like, I could no longer be the person I wanted. I felt like I had to be in the world. And so I asked for help. I called Reg, I said, Reggie, I need a new way of being we need to create a new way of working. And so fully human is really that it asks a question, Who do we have to become in order to meet increasing and accelerating changes? You know, volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. VUCA is the acronym we work with. And who do we have to become in order to meet a rapidly changing world around us? Gita, Krishna Murthy, an Indian sage really was the I would say the spiritual inspiration that that moved me to make this shift. I went from complaining about my life and the way the world is much like I heard you say, Hey, I came to Reggie at first and I started complaining about a bunch of stuff. Well, one of the moves we make in coaching and this comes from Keegan’s work, as well as we take those complaints and we transform them into something we’re deeply committed to. I’m complaining about X, because I really care about and I’m deeply committed to y. So, in my experience of depression, I got present to GE to Krishna Murthy these offer which was, It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. So you can pick your dataset around how you want to measure the health or pathology of our collective society today. But in that moment, it occurred to me What if I’m not sick? What if what I’m having, that we’re labeling as depression is actually a powerful immune response to a pathological society that I have been conditioned to want for and reach for and strive for only to achieve and find out that it’s an illusion. And so from that point, we said, oh, gosh, we started playing around with how do we want to name this work, and we played with depression in the age of not enoughness. We played with things like mental agility in a VUCA world. And then I was calling back to a colleague who I’d worked with for some time, and I asked what’s the lasting impression of the work that we did when we were at this particular company? And she said, Oh, it’s so easy to say can’t you taught us it was perfectly okay to be fully human at work. And I started crying, because I felt seen and heard and understood in a way I never had been before. And so that became the expression how do we all honor ourselves and the full expression of our humanity, we all have light, beautiful angelic gifts, and talents. And we all have these shadows or demons or dragons, wherever we want to call them, that we have to navigate and grow through. And so this way of naming our work as fully human gave me space to breathe and honor, oh, I can be suicidally depressed, and I can be the most exuberant, joyful, blissful person. And it’s all in a human one human life. It doesn’t mean I’m broken, or there’s something wrong. I’m just growing up and learning how to hold more of my full humanity, so that I can hopefully be more skillful and serve people. So I’ll put a pin in it there. See if Reggie wants to add anything? Or if you have any questions there, Aydin?

Reggie Marra  17:18

No, I have nothing to add to that, other than to say, we’re not saying that there isn’t real trauma, and depression and suicidal ideology in the world ideology, because ideation in the world, because there is. So we’re not saying that that doesn’t exist. But we’re saying perhaps a lot of it. A lot of our complaining and our depression and or anxiety is, in fact, a healthy response to an external world That in itself is not healthy.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  17:47

Yeah. And I think that’s a good jumping off point. And thank you for explaining that. So one of the things that we were talking about, before we hit record, was just around the differentiation between the internal and the external. So maybe we can talk about that. What is your thesis around how someone works internally with themselves? And like how that relates to the external world?

Kent Frazier  18:15

I’ll take this one, Reg. Yeah. So

Reggie Marra  18:16

you know, the shorthand response to that is basically given a world you know, and the world can be my family, my company, my industry, my country, or the world itself, given a world that I really can’t control, right, I’ve got a sticker for myself, I haven’t been able to control my country, or any particular industry so far. But given a world that’s, you know, ambiguous at times, it’s volatile at times, the move that we firmly believe in to better be able to operate in and on that world, is not to go out there with our hammers and our other tools and try to tack the world into the shape we want it. But it’s to be increasingly better able to shift. I’ll just speak in first person, my own perspective, in such a way that I can better navigate a world that I can’t control, so I can navigate it in a healthier and increasingly healthy way. And as much as human change is not necessarily easy, simple. It’s, I have found in Canada, I have found and I think Aydin, you have found in our work together, that shifting our respective interiors in order to deal with what’s out there is a good first step in terms of really trying to change what’s out there. Because if enough of us do that, if our values and our perspective shift, then we can begin to really impact the externals that seem less healthy.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  19:51

Yeah, I think that’s really really well put. So if you were to think about an example maybe that relates to you know, someone In the workplace, or someone managing a team or an organization, what’s an example that would really outline the differences between an internal and external and like, maybe how people maybe by default tried to deal with something, versus how you would help them see that they should do something differently? Yeah,

Kent Frazier  20:20

I’m happy to take that one of the lenses we use in our work to help move people from complaints to commitments is something we call the Cartman Drama Triangle. And so a lot of times we’ll so I was working with a client the other day. And it was this is very consistent and pervasive tension that your listeners will relate to, you have a sales team that goes to a customer and sells something, we’re gonna have x to you by such and such a day. Then that sales team goes and tells the delivery team, hey, we told such in such a client that you have to build this thing by this day. And then that other team says, well, we can’t do that. You just sold something we can’t deliver. So therein starts the are we going to fight each other and blame each other? Or are we going to say, Okay, well, how can we relate to what’s happening? There’s what’s happening, we said we were going to do something that we can’t do. Oops, that’s what’s happening. How we’re relating to that situation is where we intervene. Because the way we relate to what’s happening is where all that crap comes to the surface. It’s my need to be right versus Reggie’s need to be right versus Aydin’s need to be right. It’s my need to be safe versus Reggie’s need to be safe versus Aydin’s need to be safe. It’s my need to belong with my need to control it’s my need to be all those things. And so when, inevitably, in any project, where important outcomes are at stake, something’s going to go the way we didn’t expect it to go. And then the blame game starts and the cover your ass game starts, and the complaining and the whining, right. And so our work is to transform all of that, so that people can relate to from my interior, I can relate to what’s happening out there from a place that gives me health, that gives me vitality, that gives me pads and possibility. And that’s honoring all the various stakeholders wants and needs. Those are the conversations we help people to create, how can we relate to what’s happening from healthier and healthier places?

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  22:34

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Reggie Marra  23:51

Before you do that can because you can build that out further, even when you and I worked together. And yeah, as you jokingly said, You shut up and just complained for the first session or whatever it was, what we really worked on them for six months, because they were real things in your world that you were struggling with. And as you know, I’m not a business coach, I don’t build business, and I’m an educator by background, what we did was work on your relationship with the things you were complaining about how were you in relationship with this or that or that person or that event? Or whatever it was? That’s really what the coaching does. So it impacts your relationships, which would count just alluded to it. I’ll shut up now. So can you you can flesh out that example.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  24:32

Yeah, so I guess Yeah, I mean, that’s very true. Because it’s, when you do that deep work, it really helps you understand, and we’re gonna get to the operating systems that, you know, we all have in our own operating rhythms. But yeah, just to go to this example. So if you’re a delivery person, you know, what are some ways that maybe you perceive it and say, post, really digging in and doing the deep work? Where might you end up?

Kent Frazier  24:58

Yeah, so some of the A language that we modeled in this session with the two people, right there was the head of sales and the head of delivery were in this meeting together. And so the move from blaming someone, Hey, you did this, and it’s making my life like this, we invite people to become, take the perspective of the challenger. So rather than the delivery team saying, hey, sales, your jerks, you made us look bad. You know, the DA, the language that we offer is, hey, I’m going to challenge you next time, before you commit to something with a customer that you check in with me to make sure we can deliver what we’re saying we’re going to deliver, can I have that commitment from you? And what are you going to do? What do you expect me to do when you don’t do what you say you’re going to do? Now I’m in a different kind of conversation. That’s about commitments and agreements, not about blaming, and trying to be safe. And in order to do that, we have to be present to our own ways of relating to other people and what’s happening. And we have to start calling our own fouls. I’m sorry, Reggie, I was just attacking you. Because I was feeling defensive. Because when you said such and such, I felt that it up but like, that’s not. And that takes a lot of courage and a lot of practice, and a lot of trust and psychological safety within teams. And so the work that we’ve been doing the last three years in COVID, you have all these remote teams, they can’t work together. So how do you build trust? And how do you build psychological safety, and presume positive intent, and be generous with your assumptions? These are all the kinds of things that we’re working with people on, and it all unfolds through language, the way I see things gives rise to the way I think about things and the way I talk about things. And that gives rise to the actions that we are strategies we choose to employ. And they’re either coming from stress and drama, or they’re coming from an inspired outcome that we’re all equally committed to creating.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  27:06

Yeah, and you know, what’s interesting about, you know, what you’re saying is, the same event can happen. But obviously, these two people in this example, the head of sales, have delivery, different people, different contacts, you know, different background coming at it from a different place. And, you know, a lot of things are maybe unsaid until they are said, until we use language to actually communicate those things. I know, I’ve said this to Reggie before, which is my brother, and I, for example, we could watch the same movie, and then describe it completely differently, which is crazy. And so people have these different lenses of the world and the same event that happens. And I think like part of it is really deeply understanding how the other person sees what it is what happened and like seeing it from their lens, like you mentioned,

Reggie Marra  27:55

even that’s perfect, I love that you use the word lens, because until I know until each of us knows what if I know what my lens is, or what my lenses are, I really can’t tell what the other person’s lenses are. Because I don’t know what’s mine and what’s theirs. So I the sort of first step has to be my own work to get really clear on my biases in my lenses. And so I know I’m seeing clearly, oh, this stuff is mine over here. And I don’t want to let that get in the way. And now that I can see clearly or at least increasingly clearly, it’s easier for me to understand well, lenses of the other person. But if I don’t know my own good luck with that voyage, because that’s going nowhere, it’s going around in circles or to the bottom of the sea or something.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  28:42

Yeah. And what I really like about what you’re mentioning is like, this is where, you know, specifically when it comes to leading teams, this is where a lot of that comes from. So when you’re a leader, you know, part of your role is you want to influence and you want to help make things happen. But before you do that, maybe you’re in a situation where hey, I’m telling the team to do this, and they’re just not listening to me something seems to be off. Maybe the trust isn’t there, maybe something is just not working the way that I want to and, you know, maybe the knee jerk reaction is to say on this team, they just don’t listen. But actually it starts from let me understand myself. And, you know, maybe this is a good segue for us to also talk about if you think it makes sense to talk about the the operating system and like the internal operating system that each of us has, that maybe we’re not even fully aware of

Kent Frazier  29:36

all speak to what led to, you know, I’ll build a little bit on what gave rise to this expression of our work. So, you know, for a period of time in my life, I was under the influence of an operating system that’s looked and sounded something like I have to just continuously go faster. I have to get more. I have to continue to achieve I need more money. I need a bigger one. House, I need fancier cars, I need a younger partner, right? It was all about what I was going to get, how I was going to win, and what I was going to achieve. And as I exhausted myself doing all of that, all of a sudden, I was inhabiting a life that I didn’t want to inhabit anymore. I was like, oh, and it was a fundamental shift in my own internal operating system, from what I would call generally a me operating system to a Wii operating system. Oh, my gosh, other people in the world aren’t just here to satisfy my cravings. I’m actually here to be of service in some way, shape, or form that helps me come more alive and feel like I’m adding value. And it serves a deep need that we have in our, in my communities that mattered to me. And so that shift in my I mean, a lot of people might call that the dark night of the soul, that particular operating system shift. And those progressions continue to happen. As we continue to work on understanding what we as Reggie names, cultural Givens, what I was given for my family and cultural origin. That’s the playbook of what I was told how the world is and who I am and what I need to be. And as I look at those and assess which of them are still true or not, oh, I increasingly take more responsibility for how I see things and think about things and talk about things and take action and work and effort, such that my wake in the world does more good than harm.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  31:38

I think this definitely helps clarify the other thing that I would would sort of add to this and just thinking about some of the things that I learned in the process was some of the and I think I’ve talked about on the show, one of the things that I consistently have trouble with, is, for example, being really good at communicating positive feedback. So not as much difficulty with the, you know, critiques and you know, saying how we can get better at something. But the other stuff I really struggle with and have for a long time. And, and now I have all these hacks, where I have a journal, I think I’ve mentioned on the show before I have a journal in the mornings, and one of the questions I asked myself every day is, did anyone do anything that you appreciated? And if you ask me a question, I can answer it. And so that is the my prompt to get better at this. But when we kind of dug deep into why, you know, I operate in that way, and why it’s different, you know, it turns out and you can go far back and you look up in your upbringing and various events, and culturally, and you kind of find out, Oh, I’m like this, because of all these other things that happened. But if those things that hadn’t happened, I could have been this other way. So why not just be the other way. And but you don’t really see it until you kind of investigate and figure out where the root of you know, some of these operating system rules come from. And then you can upgrade right? We’re supposed to upgrade software all the time.

Reggie Marra  33:07

Yeah, I mean, one of the statements that I use for my own ongoing development and clarity, slash sanity, is simply that everything is a story. Everything is a story. So at any given time, any one of us can choose to. And this is not this is easy to say it’s not that easy to do, especially if it’s a deeply ingrained story. But I can always revise my story. I can let a story go, I can write a new story, at any time in my life, as long as I’m moderately healthy, but it’s all a story. Some and some stories are more or less true and accurate. Some stories are not so true and accurate. And we can claim to either kind of as you’re

Kent Frazier  33:55

saying this Reggie, I love the Mary Catherine Bateson, quote that you introduced me to. Yeah, and she offers something that goes like there’s many ways we can tell our stories. It’s not that one story is true. And another is not true. It’s a matter of emphasis and context. And the choice we make around what we emphasize and what we’re in the context that we’re emphasizing that in determines what we can do next. And so what we’re offering people is there’s an invitation to revise, emphasize and contextualize your stories at any given time, such that they serve you and what you’re up to in the world, not perpetuating unnecessary suffering. Yeah,

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  34:34

yeah, I would remember Reggie, you would ask me all the time, I’d go on a monologue. And then you would say, what story? Are you telling yourself about the situation? And then it would make me think, oh, yeah, I am telling myself this story. And it is a very one sided story that I’m telling myself and but yeah, it’s very, very cool. We didn’t say that we would talk about some of this stuff, but it just reminded me of this topic, you know, from our code. Qin Reggie, where you had this exercise, which was like the the different voices, and it just goes to this internal development, right? We all have these almost like internal voices. And each one of them is useful in different contexts and they come up in, in different situations. But I’d love for you to maybe describe that what you mean by internal voices and kind of just maybe describe to the audience what the exercise might look like. So they can get a sense of that, too.

Reggie Marra  35:29

Yeah, sure. So specifically, what you’re talking about is a body of work called voice dialogue. It was developed by a husband wife team in the 1970s, how and Sidra stone. And for anybody listening, voice dialogue, something called parts work, and something called internal family systems work are similar things are not identical, but they’re similar. But with voice dialogue, which, which I’ll speak to because I’ve been trained in it. It’s different voices, or different sub personalities with different selves within us. So virtually everyone, as what we call a protector, and it tries to keep us safe, we will have a controller that tries to control the other voices and the world at large, we have an inner or vulnerable child, there are many kinds of human sub personalities that we all share. But in doing the voice dialogue work as you and I did a little bit of that Aydin, we ask when you would say something. And I would ask you to try to identify what voice that came from. And you remember, we had some fun with it. Because one of them is okay, if I share this. Yeah, go ahead. Because he was one of them, you knew like putting names to him. So in terms of making decisions at times in your position as a CEO, sometimes there was this indecision that kept emerging. And so you refer to that part of yourself as indecisive, Igor. And that always stayed with me. But it allows us to do and we’re talking again, we mentioned keygen, subject object move, it allows us to see that there were these different legitimate parts of ourselves that have competing needs, and they do different jobs for us. And none of them are wrong. Right. Some of them are more appropriate in a given moment. But they all belong. And the last thing I’ll say just really quickly, is we tend to have some primary voices or primary selves, which most of us will refer to as, it’s who I think of when I hit the name Reggie, or what Ken thinks of when he hears cancer, Aydin, when you hear Aydin, those two are primary cells is how we see ourselves in a world where the real work gets done, is in the disowned selves, those sub personalities that will either you know, pick one either in the attic or in the basement, but they still try to get our attention sometimes. And they’re not unrelated to the idea of shadow, you know, the part of ourselves, we’re not aware of that we’re that we deny. So, having conversations, learning to recognize, oh, that’s the voice of my inner critic, or that’s the voice of my antagonist. That’s the voice of my state negative, that’s the voice of my loving father. Because you know, those of us who have kids, so we have all of these voices and learning how they interact with our primary self, can be really helpful in understanding our responses and reactions in a given moment.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  38:23

Yeah, and I remember we went pretty deep on this one. And obviously, like, as a CEO, you know, decisions, and I obsess about decision making. It’s one of my favorite topics of all time. And yeah, there’s this personality, one of my inner voices that we labeled indecisive Igor, like you said, and there were many other personalities that we named as well. And what’s really cool about it is like, when you do things like this, and you can give different thought patterns, labels, A, it allows you to talk about them, it allows you to notice them. But then you also realize, like, when is it useful to like Summon, you know, different voices, it’s just all part of self awareness. And I think a lot of this, when you’re interacting with a team, if someone gives you negative feedback, the way that you react to that if you feel like your work was not recognized, or if you feel that this situation was not celebrated in the way it should be all of these things, you know, trigger different emotions. And it’s really cool to understand your individual thought makeup. And if you can do that, I mean, the one thing which was really interesting in the work that we did there, Reggie was when you talked about some of the disowned cells, just because something is not maybe useful today doesn’t mean so one of my things was let’s kill indecisive, Igor, let’s obliterate it. So it doesn’t exist. And you’re like, No, actually, that’s like, all the voices can be useful. You just have to understand. And each one has kind of like a counter voice, like you mentioned.

Reggie Marra  39:58

Yeah. And that’s a great example. Yeah, we don’t In none of those methodologies again, I only know voice dialogue reasonably well. But even in parts work and internal family systems in none of those is it recommended that you kill any of the voices? So we don’t, we definitely don’t want to do that, because they have a role to play in with virtually no exceptions. The role at some point in our lives is to keep us safe.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  40:22

Yeah, no, that’s awesome. And so I know we’re getting close to time. And for the audience, like, I really wanted to expose everybody to this idea of integral coaching. Obviously, Reggie and Kent are awesome at this. And it’s just like some of the different frameworks and things that that are used have been super helpful for me. And that’s why I wanted to make sure that I could share these types of practices with everybody. And of course, you can find them. What is the website for fully human, fully human? Us? Okay, that’s pretty easy to remember, as we all

Kent Frazier  40:59

know, we hold it as I think it really is done us. But we changed it to mean like, Hey, we’re all just fully human.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  41:06

Yeah, I love it. Super easy to remember. So. And I did want to say the one question, and I mentioned to Reggie that I was going to shout out his book as well. So it’s not necessarily on the topic of coaching. But Reggie, you you have a new book, as well, that you recently published, right?

Reggie Marra  41:25

Yeah, yeah. So it’s actually a look at the history and psychology Ken’s actually holding it up. It’s actually a look at the history and psychology of the United States of America. It’s a very specific American based book. It’s called Healing America’s narratives. The subtitle is the feminine, the masculine, and our collective national shadow. And what it really does is I use a lot of the tools that we’ve been discussing, as my as my lenses. And I look at the history of the country. And I make an argument that basically where the United States is now, and it’s a very polarized divided nation, is really inevitable. If you understand its history. If you look at the psychology and historical and cultural aspects of this very young, country’s 240, going on to 47, it’s turning 46 years old. But again, it’s healing America’s narratives. And it’s not about coaching. But the narrative is definitely informed by a lot of the tools of coaching for sure. So thank you for the mention of that hidden.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  42:24

Yeah, of course. And so yeah, I mean, definitely check that out if you are interested in how these things relate with each other, and like using an entire country and nation as an example, to analyze in that way. And the final question that we always like to ask everybody who comes on the show is for all the managers and leaders constantly looking to get better at their craft, are there any final tips, tricks, resources, or words of wisdom that you would leave them with? Maybe I didn’t know who wants to go first.

Reggie Marra  42:56

So I’ll just jump in quickly got a couple of things I wanted to just say. And they’re kind of high level, as opposed to a specific place to look, although I’ll give you one or two specifics. So as a manager or leader, the first thing I would say, is model what it is you want your direct reports or your teams to develop or grow, and you model it, so do your own work. And then model that which not in the sense of, I want you to be more like me, but model your own vulnerability or development. And then the second one is, there’s a great methodology, you already mentioned voice dialogue, which you can learn to practice on yourself. But there’s another great method to others I would mention, one is Robert Keegan’s Immunity to Change, which you can read that book and get information on it’s very, it’s actually very, very powerful methodology when applied correctly. And in Byron Katie’s process of for question inquiry, simply called the work, if you Google or search for the work, it’ll actually come up under the name Byron, Katie. And both of those are really, deceptively simple, and nice when it’s a very powerful methodology. So learn about oneself, and their views.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  44:07

Yeah, those are awesome. I will make sure we leave those in the show notes and can’t.

Kent Frazier  44:12

Yeah, the age old wisdom, know thyself, and you know, is front and center. And in that way of knowing oneself, I’ll offer the Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, if anyone’s familiar with that. And those four agreements and knowing ourselves might are don’t make assumptions. Don’t take things personally. Always do your best. And be impeccable with your word.

Aydin Mirzaee (Fellow.app)  44:39

That’s great advice and a great place to end it can’t Reggie, thank you so much for doing this.

Kent Frazier  44:45

Thank you a welcome.

Reggie Marra  44:46

Thank you very much Aidan, as well.