Lessons - Why the Most Successful People in the Room Are Also the Most Miserable | Tina Berger - F500 Advisor & Author of Coming Around

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In this lessons episode, discover why meaningful change requires more than replacing one system with another.

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Understand how goals can distract from deeper purpose.

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Explore why deep listening and space for spontaneity create better collaboration.

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And uncover how balancing action with reflection can lead to more creative, human-centered solutions.

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What's the model for what, so you advocate for systemic reset of a system that's entrenched.

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It's not easy, right?

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So let's look at the model.

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Is the model somewhere else in the world for how we should do business, how we should collaborate, that we should refer us to engineer?

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I so love the question because it's a question, it's a delicious question because it's the, as somebody who works with change, I know that people don't like to let go of things that they love or that they're comfortable or that they know without having the next thing to grasp onto and say, this is a better way.

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And I also am aware that we don't know the answer yet.

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I'm not pointing at a different system and saying we should adopt that system.

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And part of the challenge is that's what we want.

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It's that we want a certainty about the future that's not really possible.

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So we keep grasping for that and asking for that and say, I'm not letting go of this until you show me.

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with all of its destructive, damaging impacts until someone delivers us the actual better solution.

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Well, I could come up with a better solution probably, but would it be a better solution for long?

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Is it the better solution?

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No, I believe that what we need is a driving vision

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which is not a goal.

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That's different from a goal.

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Even if you stick, it's much easier to talk about these things if we look at the individual level, because everything that's true about the individual experience is also true about the collective.

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So if I say, oh, you know how we ask people that are just coming out of of high school what they want to do for their career, and then we make them choose, and then they go to school, and then they study that thing?

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And then they get in that career and they go, oh, I didn't want to do this.

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This isn't what I want.

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Well, this happens to people that are not just in school.

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This happens with people's careers in general.

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It's like there's something we like about that.

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So we say that's the goal.

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And maybe it's a five-year thing and we start driving in that direction.

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And we get a lot of flags along the way that this isn't really quite it.

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There's something I like about that.

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But this was my goal, so I have to drive here.

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Okay.

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Instead of taking the hints along the way and going, what was it about that?

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I want to be in service this way.

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I have a gift to bring this way.

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This is me, but this part's not me so much.

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You know, I've done that in my life many times where, because that's what I learned to do to be successful, was to get your goal and grind that out.

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And then I get there and I go, I don't want to do this, you know, for this is it.

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And I've had so many conversations with senior leaders and executives inside of corporations.

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And they say, yeah, you know, I'm here.

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This is what I spent my last 15 years trying to do.

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And is this all there is?

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This is it?

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We're just not.

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And it's like we're not good at doing.

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inspired vision and inspired business.

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You know, inspiration comes from being still and going, what serves?

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And what serves, what I think serves right now is not a bad question to start with.

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What are we trying to serve?

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What are we in service to by saying every year these large

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global corporations need to be another 4% or 5% bigger on the bottom line.

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Well, we're in service to, at this point, it's right.

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So you said, first of all, you nailed it.

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Like the individual, you look at the individual situation and then you just extrapolate that and that's the collective situation.

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So you see, you know, the individual has the goals and the KPIs in the organization and those goals and KPIs are aligned with the organization's goals and KPIs, which are usually...

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to the shareholder, right, to the stakeholder.

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And even if the company is private, the end goal is to exit and achieve a higher valuation or have a positive ROI for the investors until they IPO.

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So it's always about the shareholder or the stakeholder.

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That's what drives everything right now.

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That's possible.

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I mean, but for a privately held company, if you look at like a Patagonia,

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like where that's owned, I can't remember the guy's name, but that one dude, and he gets to say whatever he wants to say.

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You know, he'll get big, you know, pages, front pages on the New York Times or whatever, saying what he wants to say about Indigenous rights or what he wants to say about

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gay and trans rights or whatever he wants to say about what the government should or shouldn't be doing.

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And I've had people say, well, how come they can do it?

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And I'm like, no, that's not a publicly traded company.

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It's a privately held company.

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And publicly traded companies, in my view, I don't see anybody really owning

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the decisions made by those corporations.

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Because a senior leader, a CEO says, I'm doing what the investment behavior of the market tells me it wants, which is to grow this bottom line, to grow the profit line.

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That's it.

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And the reason I know that is because that's the only thing that consistently drives investors to buy this stock.

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And I'm not sure if I'm not

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It's fair enough.

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That's true.

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But I think people are unconscious and the general public is unconscious about our investment behavior and how it drives those decisions.

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So we don't think of ourselves as owning those decisions just because we own stock.

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But when we sit down at the end of the year and either decide by ourselves or with our advisors, what are we going to invest in next year?

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The question is, well, what's going up?

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It's not what does that company do and do I really feel aligned to it?

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And even my experience, it's what's going to make me the most money so I can get out of this misery faster now.

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This misery might have been perpetuated.

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It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy almost.

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It's totally like that.

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It's completely like that.

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And so it's kind of a crazy, it's kind of a, it's a certain kind of crazy.

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And, you know, and I feel like the work that I'm doing right now, the work that I'm getting to do right now, to come back to the question of what do we do different, because I didn't really answer that.

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I do believe we have to learn how to engage with each other in different ways.

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I do believe that, so if I say there's a bias towards the assertive in our culture, and that's basically this logical, rational, this need to plan things, this need to have everything be predictable.

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This need to build things and grow things, and this need to get your point into the room and to win at something.

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these are not terrible instincts.

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These are not terrible.

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This is not a terrible aspect of being a human that we want to be known for what we do, that we want to be heard when we speak, that we want to plan things and be able to have some predictability in life.

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that we care about our individual needs and the needs of our particular families, that we're interested in those things, that we really want to move in the world and build

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and feel the earth under our feet and get things done, but they're out of balance with the whole other aspect of who we are as humans.

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So the other aspect is really listening deeply so that we can hear from other people that have different lived experiences, different gifts, different capabilities, and different perspectives on the same challenges and problems.

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And that's really like deeply listening, not like how we typically listen where we're rehearsing what we're going to say next while the person is speaking.

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It's really taking that person in fully, learning how to allow space for spontaneity instead of having everything be planned out and this push for this constant push for action and this constant push for action.

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Efficiency takes all of the space out.

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It takes all of the space for breathing out of our systems.

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And so there's no space for spontaneity.

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There's no space for the emotional understanding that you need to get things to be different.

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Taking into account the emotional impacts that we need to get.

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and really holding what are our systems perpetuating in the world?

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Are we really fully aware, like emotionally, of the pain that that's causing?

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Because we are not just individual, we're also fully connected with everything on this planet.

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There's no way to separate us out completely, because we're living both of those things.

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Both, yes, we're having an individual experience, but we're also impacted by knowing

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And you can see it in our, like I can see it in my kids, and they're part of why I speak about the things that I do.

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But they know who makes their smart devices, and they know the situations those people are living in.

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I didn't grow up knowing that.

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It's painful for them to know that.

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So I'm not surprised by the fact that so many young people don't want to plug in and continue to do things.

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what I grew up doing.

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You know, so we have to hold the emotional also at the same time as the intellectual.

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It's not just a matter of putting money in the bank.

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It's at what cost.

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And

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you know, what does it mean that we're doing that?

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And, and also this, this, this focus on structure, overflow, and this lack of space for just being, being and, and being in a receptive, quiet mode is one of the ways, you know, that we become receptive.

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So we have to figure out how to do these as individuals first, and how to acknowledge and make space for them.

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And, you

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When we do this in a group, when we learn how to do these things individually and we bring them to a group, different things happen.

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And much more creative, much more inspiring, much more integrated, much better solutions are possible when we can do that because we can bring at that point the full value of the gifts in the room.

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In a way, we can't do it if we are doing what we call collaboration, which is eight people sitting around a table advocating for the thing that they already knew they wanted to happen when they showed up.

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Thanks for tuning in.

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