Healing Organizational Conflict with Sarah Watson

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Listen to Lead Podcast Transcript

Sarah Watson Interview with Lucia Brizzi

"What I've really learned is that these difficult personnel moments is the system, not the people, but the system saying that something has got to change. I just kept seeing this time after time. I ceased to see the people as problems. I started to see them as intelligence."

Hello and welcome to Listen to Lead. This is your host, Lucia Brizzi, and on this podcast we talk about all things helping you become a better leader. Today we have on the podcast Sarah Watson, a former advertising executive, Chief Strategy Officer for BBH USA turned consultant and coach.

Her mission is helping heal organizational conflict at the root- transforming the conversations that no one wants to have into the unlock that everyone is asking for. We talk about:

• Reframing difficult people as organizational intelligence

• The potency of witnessing and how sorely needed that presence for one another is

• Building businesses around who you are, not who you wish you were

• Using language as a surgical tool for healing deep wounds

Her personal journey of turning her own wounds into her mission.

This woman's words have the power to open things up in you. To learn all about what she's up to, you can go to www.sarahwatsonluminouscoaching.com and to find out all about the work that we're doing to support you on your journey, head over to www.the-next-level.com. Enjoy this conversation and keep on listening to lead.

Lucia: I'm thrilled to have you here and I would love to start off by just asking how you came to do the work you're doing today.

Sarah: Thank you for having me. I worked for 24 years in creative advertising agencies in London and New York. These are pretty high octane environments with a lot of big characters, a lot of focus on really doing great work. I absolutely loved it and I had the time of my life, but about five years ago, I got really clear that I wanted to get closer to the action.

Closest to the action for me means the human relationships that actually power organizations, and especially creative organizations, because I saw time and time again that you can have these amazing plans and visions, but if the people on the team aren't getting on, if people actually don't believe in the leader and aren't following them, there is no point in it all.

And this is really what interests me. So about five years ago, I left the industry and these days I'm a coach and advisor. I mainly work with founders, leaders and CEOs in the creative and media industry. A real specialism of mine is difficult team dynamics, conflict resolution, difficult talent issues, because I love what we learn about the organization in that moment.

Lucia: You're so crystal clear on what you do. I wanted to talk about how you came to understand your way of seeing and how to work with that skillset.

Sarah: I'm really interested in the actual human lived experience of what is really going on. So I'm not interested in the theories and the philosophies. People are so well equipped these days with a lot of beautiful vocabulary - therapy vocabulary, which is actually very helpful in a lot of ways. And it can stop us accessing the truth of what is actually happening in the room, in the human bodies. I like to get right down to that actual experience. And language is a really big part of that for me.

I studied English literature at university. And I never really understood why. But as my life has unfolded, I understand it more and more because I'm interested in how language creates reality for us. And I guess that's what I was also doing in advertising, how we are constructing a reality in language. But now I suppose that's part of the tools - my primary tool really, of how I work with people.

Lucia: There's a resonance to words and that's why, in Buddhism and so many spiritual practices, you hum a mantra. We all do that. We are saying mantras to ourselves with the words and the potency of the words. That specificity with language.

When you come into a group, say you're coming into a team that's having people issues, how do you set the foundation to create a space where you can be that clear?

Sarah: The word I am going to use here is witness. If I'm working with a team experiencing a difficult dynamic, probably 95% of the work to help them resolve that is going to happen before we get in the room. I'll schedule an hour with everyone who's going to be in the room. To create container that is going to hold this discussion, I have to use words that witness the experience of every single person entering that room.

So that immediately they feel heard. If I'm about to kick off a session, I will basically do a speech, a sermon, a poem. I will speak words that make every single person in that room think, "Oh, she understands it. I'm going to be okay because she has seen me." Because the moment we are not witnessed, we are back in our trauma, in our fear. This is foundational.

Lucia: You're hitting on something so core - that early experience of being seen and it's okay that you are how you are. Every single human on this planet has experienced not getting that, and that is triggered in people very quickly. And also to realize that you came to that, as you said, through your own process. So is there a mistake or a misstep that you made that really taught you?

Sarah: I think probably my whole life actually is why I've got here. It's funny that I find myself now doing a lot of conflict resolution because anyone who worked with me throughout my whole career might tell you that I'm absolutely conflict averse. And I think that's why I'm so called to it now because I know what it's like to bend yourself out of shape to accommodate other people's conflict.

And so if I was very comfortable with conflict, then it's like, "Okay, well we're just going to have a conversation about it. No problem." But that doesn't honor the truth of what conflict does, how it resides in people's bodies in a team. And I think this is probably part of how I'm able to set these containers because I understand when I walk in there, it's excruciating to be the person who is really...

And I think there's something that I always come back to is we can't speak on top of people's listening. If people have a thought inside themselves that they just want to say, and we've all been there, there is nothing you can do until they have said the thing or someone has said for them the thing that they want to say. For me, this is the witness part.

Let's bring into the room the thing that needs to be said. Once we've done that, that's 95% of the work. Once we've said whatever needs to be said in the way it needs to be said, and we've heard it and we've witnessed it, and we've dealt with whatever that is, we can just do the work. You can get out the whiteboard and say, "Okay, what are the next steps, what do we do?"

A friend of mine was doing a workshop with me recently and he'd actually never seen me in my process before. And he said it was like watching a bullfighter. They put darts in the bull and disable it dart by dart. He and I were collaborating on the most difficult conflict resolution I have ever seen - people who could not be in the same room together because it had been decades of toxic conflict, of mismanagement. And that was his analogy. That is what witness enables.

Lucia: You spoke about getting closer to the lived experience, and I've seen this many times where leaders don't want to deal with the people aspect because they feel like it'll drag them down forever. And what you're speaking about is clearing things away so that you can do the work rather than avoid that roadblock.

And also there's this beautiful thing about life, where our mess becomes our mission. What we have to learn, we become really skilled at teaching. If it's innate, we don't really know how we do it. So someone who's just born able to speak the truth and have these kinds of conversations, but having to get through that portal to be able to walk other people through it and know how uncomfortable it is, and honestly how terrifying it is. The fear of being disliked or rejected by the tribe is primal - it runs very deep.

And I feel it's also a challenge to be able to see more than other people. You probably came into the world perceiving a lot and not wanting to be punished for perceiving what you perceived.

Sarah: What I'm really grateful for now is that I was a leader in businesses. I had to deal with the difficult team dynamic and the difficult performer, and again, because I'm conflict averse, I'm probably someone who let these things ride a little bit longer than they should have done because a lot of the time things do resolve themselves. And the system resolves itself, and then a lot of the time it doesn't.

And so I really relate very strongly to what it is to be a leader who is under pressure to solve things quickly and make the problem go away rather than going to the source, which is really hard.

Having been both the leader who has convened this session and the person in the room who is not being heard, I can see how if we are not careful, people can feel gaslit. They think, "Okay, we've got something difficult in the team, we're all going to get together. It's going to be resolved." Then it's not resolved. That makes things very difficult and things fester.

The way it shows up in my body is that I can't rest until it's like there's a knot and I want to see it untied. And that's such a kinesthetic experience. And sometimes we don't have the words because it's not clear yet. But we feel that tension if we are alive to our experience.

Lucia: You speak about how the thing you're avoiding, the thing that's in the way, is actually the way and there's an unlock there. Is there any story or example you want to share around what you've experienced with being able to break open one of these conflicts and actually see how there could be fruit there?

Sarah: This might actually be my life's work, my whole mission. What I've learned is that when leaders call me - pick up what I call the red telephone to say, "We can't go on like this. There's too much conflict in the team. This individual has become toxic" - what I have learned is that virtually a hundred percent of the time this is the system screaming that something has to change.

It's like if you are getting headaches and you take a tablet and the headaches come back, because the headache is your system screaming. Something's got to change. You need to sleep more. You need to drink water, you need to get glasses, you might need to see a neurologist. This is your body. The symptom is the system screaming. And what I've really learned is that these difficult personnel moments is the system, not the people, but the system saying that something has got to change.

I was working with a big conglomerate that had bought a brand. They were all in the same category. There was deep conflict within this brand team and the ask was "there are difficult factions here. Can you get the factions to get in line? We can't move forward. There's so much conflict. Can you please make sure everyone can learn to communicate and get on the same page?"

But what turned out to be true was that the difficult faction, the people who were being difficult, were the people who were closest to the supply chain of this particular brand, which happened to be different from the conglomerate that had bought it, even though technically they're in a similar category. The products were more complex, and so the people they needed to get in line were representing the truth about the system.

And so here, what we didn't need was for them to get in line and learn to communicate. What we needed to do was to completely change the system so that we put their voices at the heart of things.

I'll give you another example. I was called about a person who was causing a very difficult situation with their team. They were very business critical, but the situation needed to change. So I get on the phone with this person. In all these instances, I'm always nervous because I've heard all the stories of how toxic this team is, how toxic these people are, how difficult their behavior is. But what I always find is that they're completely reasonable and they have insight about something that the system needs to know about itself.

So in this instance, I'm speaking to this difficult person who was very senior within this organization. The CEO had decided to take this consultancy into a more strategic direction and had started selling in projects that were more strategic. On the leadership team, my client, the person I was charged with helping was the only person who actually had deep experience in what it looks like to really put deep strategy behind the project.

But of course, what that looks like in the moment is saying no. Saying, "No, this work isn't good enough. This isn't on strategy. This isn't on brief. You need to go back." But because the system had no tolerance for rejection, they were rejecting the individual, whereas the individual was actually only delivering on the CEO's vision.

The conversation we needed to have was not, "Can we get this person to stop behaving in a toxic way? Can we get them to communicate better and have better zoom etiquette?" The conversation was actually how can we build a system that can deliver on what the CEO is asking?

And I kept seeing this time after time. I ceased to see the people as problems. I started to see them as intelligence. Why do they feel they have no choice but to behave like they do in order to deliver on their job? That is showing you something about the system.

Lucia: That's fascinating to think about the tension, the conflict being a symptom and to look for the deeper cause. That's so simple and clear. And it also helps us lean in rather than shrink away when someone is coming with negativity. It's interesting because in our mind there is that negativity bias where negativity shows up more, but we also don't want to feel that at all. So we would rather be with people who agree with us, and that is when the worst decisions get made.

Sarah: And just to name check someone I was working with on all of this - I have an incredible teacher called David Bedrick. He worked with eating disorders and addiction. As I was coming to this conclusion in my own work, I found him and spent a year working with him. His whole method is, yes, we need to stop the eating disorder, but let's go back into the intelligence. What is the system craving? Let's ask about that. I learned this on the level of the body. I'm now applying it to the system of the organization.

That's how I experience these organizations, particularly founder organizations. I experience them as an extension of the nervous system of the founder. If I'm talking to a junior person in a founder led organization, you can almost feel in the body of the junior person what is being held by the founder - where they hold the tightness. Because it's a projection. It is a system. It's like a body. We're getting a bit deep here.

Lucia: Well, let's get vulnerable because why bother otherwise? The company that I now own, Next Level Leadership, was founded by my mother, who's now retired. As you're talking about the DNA, the life force of the founder, creating the life force of the organization and now it's in my hands. How would you go about unpacking what might be residual from the previous incarnation of the organization to the current? Is there any questions you would ask or any guidance you would give me?

Sarah: Oh my goodness. I mean, let's name the truth of what's happening here. You are living in the extended nervous system of your mother. Like you are she. But once we clear that out of the way, we can now have a conversation of how to move forward.

There was obviously something magic and brilliant about her, as there is with every founder. To step out on your own from the safety and security of a salaried role, particularly back in the day when I imagine your mom set up her business, she must have had some genius. So let's start there. This is the life force of your mother that is now translating into these client relationships, and so now we can have a conversation about, okay, what of that is helpful to me? What of that suits Lucia?

Lucia: The whole company is based on the idea of - basically she was working one-on-one with women to help them be heard at Bell Labs, before AT&T. She realized that bringing them together, they would start to have this awakening that there was a system at play, it wasn't a them problem, and that by coming together they would have that connection.

So that's our history. What my mom has taught has always been how she has led our company, which is, it's all about that web of connection. And she's the kind of person who after a training can go out and have dinner and drinks. And I'm the kind of person who after training, I'm like, "That was my whole battery. I need to be with myself now."

So we are very different. And the thing that I want to really pull from her is that creativity through conversations and all of the insights and ideas she's had for the company, all the tools that I still use, came from listening so well and being so engaged with everyone. All of her clients are her friends.

I want to bring more of that energy towards the organization. I also hold more of that executive functioning type A personality. I don't love that part of myself. It's not my favorite mode, but I can be that way. And my mother is a brilliant creator, but she always had a lot more anxiety and discomfort with the businessy things that I don't mind. I don't mind being structured.

Sarah: The things that come up for me from that is you have to forgive yourself that you are not your mother. You will build a different business than your mother did. Even if it's got the same name and the same entity, it's going to be different. And when you describe her I just get community. Here is someone who comes alive in connection with others - building women together. Dinner, friends - and that is not you.

I'm sure you make beautiful connections, but it feels they're much more deep, they're much more one-on-one, they're much more intense. And that's okay. The work I would be doing is to think about where the boundary is between the two of you, where she starts and where you begin. And what that means for the business. Because it is very messy to be inheriting something like that and this family and everything. And it's very beautiful and empowering that you now get to do this your own way.

Lucia: The distinction between the crowd to the one-on-one is a cool one for me to further explore. And when you're working one-on-one with each individual as that witness, do you place a particular emphasis on working with the leader? If their DNA is in the whole system...

Sarah: The decisive factor in how successful any coaching engagement is going to be is the commitment of the leader. It's only going to work if you have a leader who says, "I want to get to the bottom of this." This is an extraordinary leader that can do this, but they do exist. Whatever I hear I'm going to deal with. No one's punished for what symptom they are expressing.

Lucia: There might be someone who's listening who says, "Okay, and there is a person I'm working with who is uncoachable, who actually has a problem." What happens when you get to that place?

Sarah: This is really interesting and I've thought a lot about this. There are some people who - the wrong person was hired for the wrong role and we need to just move on very quickly. Those are not the phone calls that come all the way to me because I think leaders can tell if someone is just wrong and we need to move on.

People call me when they know it's more complicated than that. When they know they can't actually afford to lose this person because they're so important and obviously they are very, in their own way, very productive and successful within the business. So it shows that the relationship they have with the system is not one simply of rejection. It's a bit more complicated than that.

Lucia: And I think that's a great point that, if there is a will to get in the room and do the hard work, it's because the leader knows these are people we want to keep on our team.

Sarah: That's right. Exactly. You don't invest if this isn't the future.

Lucia: So I'm going to give you a funny challenge. You get a phone call from the Trump administration to come in and work with their team. What would a first step be for that team?

Sarah: I don't think I could take that call. Putting all ideology aside, there has to be a shared foundation of commitment to integrity. Because you're dealing with a charismatic leader who is not committed to a specific foundation of integrity within their leadership.

Lucia: What you're speaking to is being discerning about the investment of your energy. We don't want to pour in energy when there's a personality type that isn't available for the work. And that shared vision, that shared mission. If that doesn't exist, then what are we doing here? And I think people go to work in many places and think, "What are we doing here?"

Sarah: There isn't a leader who wants to know the truth of their team. This is not a leader who is specifically concerned with empowering the system to deliver to the best of its own ability. That is my answer to the hypothetical. They're not calling, so don't call.

Lucia: Many people listening might be in a team where they feel something is off and they don't know how to put words to it. The things that bother us, there's so often no words for. And so when micro inequities came onto the scene, people could say "Oh, that eye roll 12 times a day has made me feel like I'm worthless." And that's a real experience. But before that, it was just, "I'm being crazy and nothing's happened."

So when we're experiencing something feeling off or tense or bad, sometimes we really don't know what's going on. How would you coach someone to identify and get clear on the words for what's happening?

Sarah: To hold my post in life to do the work that I am doing here, I am really interested in the leaders who have the opportunity to put the system right. And I think in my work, I don't ever want to gaslight the people who are having to deal with the toxic system. And I think this dynamic has led me to the coaching philosophy that I have now, which is that I refuse to charge the individual with responsibility for something that is actually bigger than them.

So all that said, I would go into the specifics of the experience. How does this show up exactly? What happens in the room? How does it show up for you?

Sometimes we put that title on something and it stops us from actually figuring out what's really going on underneath. Things like imposter syndrome. I've never met someone with imposter syndrome. I've met lots of people who've said that they feel they have imposter syndrome. When we get right down to it, it's something much more specific and tangible that we can work on. In that instance I would be working on exactly what is happening here and therefore exactly what can we, if anything, do about that.

Lucia: I feel like this has been such a discovery process of how you really can serve. Is there a moment you can pinpoint where you got one of those breadcrumbs of like, "Oh, this is the direction I want to go further"?

Sarah: One of the very early Netflix shows was this show called Chef's Table. They did this travel log and followed all these different chefs around the world. My husband hated it because he said it looks like CNN, it's just expensively shot food images. But there were a couple of those that were radiant in a completely different way. For me it was the ones where it wasn't just about the food, you could feel the vocation. There's one in particular, which is the Korean nun.

She cooks these vegan meals in this Korean monastery. She left home at 11 years old or something, and it was this deep process of reconnection with her family. And I just thought that is what vocation is - when through our work, we are healing something in ourselves on behalf of other people.

And I got very clear in my mind that's what I wanted for the rest of my life. To be deep in my vocation. Not doing a job. Obviously I needed to earn money, but I wanted it to be radiant. Animated with healing.

What I have come to learn over time is that there is something about these teams and the dynamics within the team and the person who is misunderstood. And there is something about my place in my family and the system of my family that I'm healing. I've never said that out loud.

Lucia: So exciting to hear that. And to say that, to own that - this radiance you have from being on the edge of your own breakthroughs while serving. And I feel like that's the beauty of leadership development - it's personal development through service. So it's not just in your own bubble, it's like you're showing up to serve. And the thing we really can help people with is the thing that we have uniquely struggled through.

Do you want to open up a little bit about how you sat in the system of your family?

Sarah: Let's see. I didn't get in trouble a lot when I was growing up, but I got in trouble a little bit. And I was never naughty though. I never, ever intended to be naughty. But I still, just a few times got in trouble. And I think every single one of those times just left me with "Wow. This is so unfair."

And I think ultimately I walk in these rooms. Wow. This is the first time I'm saying this out loud. I walk in these rooms and I'm connecting with little Sarah. Who people have said, "Oh yeah, you got... This behavior's got to stop. This language has got to stop." And little Sarah is really just trying to show up and do her best. I think you've just unlocked that whole thing.

Lucia: You're saying it out loud... that's awesome. And so that sense of giving a voice to the person who's being shut down is in you and that sense of fairness, creating that sense of fairness in the room.

And it's fascinating too - we both do this leadership development work. So oftentimes I will leave a session and think there was that one person who wasn't talking. And it's so easy with the time ticking and your client in the room and this goal you're trying to achieve, and everyone else is very vocal. It's easy to overlook that person. How do you bring that person in?

Sarah: This is why I always insist that whenever I'm going to do a group session, I have connected one-on-one with every single person so I know the backstory. The emotional location of every person in that room. This is how I create the space. I almost think of it as a physical thing now. I metabolize every single person, their location, whatever they've got, I create the space out of that knowledge and they are in it already.

That sounds very out there. But that is my experience of what I do. And so it will be very easy for me to bring that person in because I will know exactly where they're at in that moment.

Lucia: So while you're standing there, you're holding all this, you have all this understanding that others don't have of each other. How do you begin to bridge that understanding across the circle?

Sarah: I think that's part of this act of witness that I do at the start of my sessions. I create it. I will write it and rewrite it and then I will deliver it. I'll commit it to memory. It is just an opening speech to welcome everybody. But in that welcoming, everybody will have heard the thing that they need to hear. There will be no more elephants in the room because maybe this is my own conflict aversion. I can't deal with that being an elephant in the room.

But I know that it's too hard for the people to say it, the stakes are too high for them. But the stakes for me... I can say the thing that nobody can say. And I think this is where language and poetry comes in. I can say those words for the first time. Often. Sometimes this thing has never been said. These people have never been physically in the room. These nervous systems have not shared a space and heard this truth.

The thing that's coming up for me - I once read about something that used to happen in Ancient Rome, which is called shriving. It still remains in this term, "short shrift." "Oh, she gave him short shrift." Which my parents' generation would use, which means you were very dismissive of someone.

But shrift, short shrift comes from shrive. And this used to be something in Ancient Rome where somebody would stand up, say something terrible had happened, or we were sent to war for the wrong reason. Somebody would stand up and say, "This happened. People died, people suffered."

And I think this is partly where a lot of theater comes from as well. It's the speaking out loud. A lot of the ancient Greek tragedians, the people who wrote the tragedies were themselves veterans. They'd been to war. So a lot of it is about the witnessing. The Iliad is about going to war, and the Odyssey is about coming home from war. These are all how we integrate war and how we integrate veterans. Look what's happening to veterans now. This is what healing looks like in a society. And I guess it's a small version of that I'm doing when I gather a team - I shrive.

Lucia: That's so beautiful. Because I think we skip this step because it's so hard and because we think it's not that valuable. We think that just the witnessing, just the saying, "I see you," just speaking to the truth of what people have experienced - we think that one, it's uncomfortable, and two, it's not that helpful. When actually it is incredibly valuable.

Anyone who's been listened to well knows how that feels. What a healing experience it is to just be heard. My boyfriend spent a week with my family for the first time and just having him see the dynamics, I was like, "Oh my gosh. That was so healing." And it was just even him pointing out like, "This is bad." I was like, "That is so healing. Thank you for telling me." The power of witness.

And I feel right now with so much horror happening constantly that we're all just seeing on the news all the time and not having a way to impact it often. How do you see the idea of witnessing being able to help us on the macro level?

Sarah: I remember when Joe Biden got inaugurated - we were really in the dark days of COVID and one of the first things he did, I'll never forget this. He goes out to some reflecting pool in Washington. Him and Kamala Harris and they honor the dead from COVID. And it was like for the first time someone is saying, "This is really hard. People are dying. We see that you are dying. We honor your families."

And the way I think about this stuff, you very quickly get into the power of ritual and I think about spells like magic spells. When you utter the right words, you can physically change that room. We come in and everyone's on edge and no one talks to each other. And by the time we are done, we are in different bodies. Different shared nervous system through words. Stupid words.

I think this is again, my whole life. "Oh, Sarah, you're all talk, you're just beautiful words." Do you know what? Yes. This is me. I am all words. I am all talk. That is literally all I've got is words like a very powerful witch.

Lucia: That's really profound. The most basic human things that when in stress response are skipped, like a real conversation. So right now, somebody is working in a place where the leader is not calling you in and they want things to feel better and they want to practice using their words to speak what's true more, how would you advise someone to do that in a way that's also not going to create trouble for them in their career?

Sarah: The thought that I have around all of this is integrity. In a way, all you have is your integrity, the boundaries that you draw around who you are and what you will and won't do, and how you conduct yourself. And so ultimately because I do work with people in that situation and often it is, "Where is my walkaway? What can I tolerate and what I can't?" And making a commitment that I will show up no matter what is going on around me, I will show up with integrity. I will not take the bait, I will not be part of the lack of integrity around me and the toxic behavior.

The conversation that I increasingly have with people that complicates this now is that to walk away in this economy is very different from what it used to be. I respect the fact that a lot of people are just clinging on. I see a lot of people putting up with a lot worse than they ever would've put up with before.

I do think there is something new being born here - we do ultimately have to relinquish the idea that our lives will just be going from job to job and salary to salary. We have to get very clear about what we offer and in what ways we offer that. Just like you and I have done - we don't have salaries. We've had to get very clear about what we bring to the world on our own terms. The journey we've been on these last years to get to that, I do think lots of other people are going to have to go on a similar journey.

Lucia: On the last podcast we talked about this idea of the thread that you hold onto as you move through your life. And other people might not be able to tell where you're going, but you're holding onto that thread. And I think finding that thread is essential because when you look at your resume when we all retire, if we ever retire, there'll be this lattice. But to be able to see "this is what I was really doing." And that takes the reflection process to see that.

Sarah: Brilliant. Very well said. What a wild time to be talking.

Lucia: Any final advice to the creative founders that you're called to work with and support?

Sarah: It's a bit like what I said to you about forgiving yourself, that you're not your mom. I'm obsessed with the Billy Joel documentary that just came out. There's one big moment where he says he read that Neil Diamond had a big revelation when he said, "I have to forgive myself for not being Beethoven."

And Billy Joel said a light bulb went off in my brain when I heard that, "Oh my God, I'm not Beethoven, but I actually want to be Beethoven." So he writes a classical album. But I would say a version of that, forgive yourself for not being somebody else. Because you really aren't, you are you, and I think a lot of founders in particular get tripped up by this because they think "There is something I have here. Some sort of genius, some sort of brilliance and I can monetize it because I've seen lots of other people monetize it."

And yes, you probably can, but you might not monetize it in exactly the same way that somebody else has. And if you try and do that, you will crush yourself. And so I do work with a lot of brilliant creative founders on forgiving themselves for what they're not, and therefore building a business around what they are.

Lucia: That's a beautiful assignment. No matter what sphere you're working in, to forgive yourself for whoever you might be holding in your mind. It took until about 35 to realize that I was waiting to grow up to become this person that I don't even look like. It was some thought form that got in my head of this very successful woman that has nothing to do with anyone I ever have been or ever will be.

Sarah: We all have one of those I think somewhere.

Lucia: We do. Thank you so much Sarah. Thank you for being you and not Beethoven.

Sarah: I'm definitely not Beethoven!

Lucia: And thank you all for listening to Lead.

How great was that? You are not Beethoven and you are the only you. To learn more about individual coaching opportunities and our fabulous time-tested results-backed programming, head over to www.the-next-level.com. I look forward to continuing to support you on your journey.