Ignite Your Business Podcast - Laura Cooke - 138 - founder and CEO of Positive Foundry - How Positive Psychology Can Build More Successful Business Leaders

Hello, and welcome to episode 138 of Green Crest Ignite Your Business podcast. Today we are talking with Positive Foundry's creator and CEO, Laura Cook. Laura is a positive psychology consultant and speaker who is passionate about personal growth and helping people and businesses flourish. Positive Foundry brings a comprehensive and holistic wellness program based on the science of positive psychology that provides business owners and leaders strategies and tools to foster a more joyful, healthy, meaningful, and accomplished life and create a more productive and profitable business in the process. Laura, you and I met a little over a year ago when you spoke to my Women Presidents Organization group, and I am so looking forward to our conversation today. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much for inviting me and for providing this space for leaders to learn from each other. I've actually really enjoyed listening to your conversations with other guests, so thank you for the podcast. Wonderful. Thank you, Laura. So, Laura, much of the work you do is helping leaders refocus on fostering positive relationships, leading with mindfulness and managing energy. And at a high level, what can you tell our business owners and listeners about the field of positive psychology and what we need to flourish? So, the field of positive psychology was created in 1998. It's actually younger than the internet. And the field was created because the entire field of psychology at the time was focused on really diagnosing mental illness. And Martin Seligman, who's considered one of the founders of positive psychology, was the president of the American Psychological Association and said, well, yes, there is a part of our population that's struggling, but there's also a part of our population that isn't necessarily struggling, but they aren't thriving either. And so we need a pillar of research dollars to go towards the question of how do we thrive? So positive psychology is actually the scientific study of what enables individuals and communities to thrive. And according to Seligman's definition, we need PERMA-V. So PERMA-V stands for positive emotions. And I want to be careful because it's not the absence of negative emotions. This is not like happyology or toxic positivity, but it is true that we need positive emotions in order to really be flourishing or thriving. We need to be engaged. That's the E in PERMA-V. We need to be engaged in what we're doing. We need to have strong, positive, meaningful relationships. We need to know our purpose or have a sense of meaning about why we're here and why we do the work that we do. The A stands for accomplishment because we need to feel successful in order to be thriving. And then lastly, the V stands for vitality, which is our health. It's really all about how do we eat, move, sleep, and reflect. And I think it's so important for everyone to understand this science. There are so many tools and simple techniques that we can build into our lives, make just a slightly different choice that I think enables us to show up to other people better, it enables us to show up to work better, and it just enables us to be happier and healthier within ourselves. So one of my favorite lessons you shared and one we still talk about today in our WPO group is the magic ratios based on Stephen Covey's book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. So when we interact with people, we have the opportunity to make deposits and withdrawals is what you told us. And can you give us some examples of deposits and some examples of withdrawals and then expound on these magic ratios with respect to our workplace, our spouse or partner, and friends for our listeners? Sure. So if you think about it, every time we interact, there's sort of emotional experiences that we have. So some examples of a deposit might be really listening to someone or doing something kind or surprising them in some way. Something that would really be perceived as like a positive interaction with another person is the way we think about those deposits. And a withdrawal, actually the number one withdrawal in the workplace is venting. So a withdrawal is when we take away from that relationship or that emotional connection in some way. So if we don't listen or we break a commitment or we walk into someone's office and we don't ask permission and we just sort of dump and vent to them. And what happens is, as human beings, we subconsciously keep track of these interactions that we have with people. And ultimately, that kind of determines how we feel about them. It also determines how much trust is in that relationship. And because we're wired for negativity as human beings, right? Like we are wired to see the negative and we're very quick to go to the negative. Because that's our wiring, it is not a one-to-one ratio for when we make a deposit or when we make a withdrawal, we just make one deposit and the account goes back to neutral. In fact, different psychologists and social scientists study this. Marcelo Sada studies high-performing teams and his research shows that in workplaces, the ratio is actually three to one. So if we make a withdrawal from someone that we work with, say we ignore them or somehow we do something, we break a commitment, then it requires three deposits with that person to bring that account back to neutral where that relationship feels like it's on neutral ground. Because we focus so much on that negative. With our partners or spouses, the ratio is five to one, according to John Gottman and his Love Lab research. And then with our friends, it's six to one. So Barbara Fredrickson studies that ratio and those interactions. And because we expect our friends to bring us more positive and more joy, when we make a withdrawal, it requires six deposits in that emotional bank account to sort of bring that account back to neutral. So interesting. It's just, it makes a lot of sense, but we all just find it so interesting. And so like I said, we bring it up again and again. So fun. Oh, I love that. Such a fun fact. I love that. So, in the work that you do, you touch on the importance and impact of listening. So how can business owners and leaders do a better job of listening? And what tips do you have for our listeners on how to improve in this area? Oh my gosh, listening. It is probably one of the hardest skills. And I think there's so many reasons for that, right? We're living in this sort of distracted society where it's really easy to have our attention on 50 different things. We're moving really quickly, we're overwhelmed. And so a lot of times, I think that the challenge inside organizations is just the fact that we don't stop to really listen to each other. So there's one technique that we teach called 140 bits of attention, which basically just breaks down this idea that we have a certain amount of attention capacity in our listening ability, and that a lot of times we can do two things at once. So we can have a conversation and we can be thinking about what we're going to say back. We can be listening to someone and thinking about what we're going to say back. We can be listening to someone and make a grocery list in our head while we're listening to someone. And when we do that, they know we're not listening, right? I mean, we know when someone is really honed in and listening. And so some of it is just recognizing that we have this ability to manage our attention and giving someone all of our attention. That's kind of step one. The idea about recognizing sort of the different biases that we might have when we're listening. So there is the closeness communication bias, which I think often happens at work between a manager and an employee, or at home it might happen between a child and a parent, where we kind of believe we know what the person is going to say next. And so we just tune out. We ask a question, but we sort of tune out and we aren't really listening. So again, kind of recognizing that and the other biases that might get in the way of our ability to listen. And then lastly, there's that tool called active listening, where when you're having a conversation, someone shares information with you and you repeat back what you heard before you share what it is that you think. But what's interesting in today's world with conversation is I think everyone expects things to go like ping pong, like we're all moving really quickly and it's like, let's have a very quick conversation and it's back and forth and back and forth. And if I'm really listening to you, I can't be ready to speak because I will be listening to what it is that you have to say, and then I need a minute to process. And so we like to say we have to like be a sloth and like slow down the pace of conversation. The challenge is that we don't have a ton of time in our day and we're all trying to work really quickly. So how do we listen in the workplace at the same time we have to get all these things done and we also have to tell a lot of people a lot of things. And that's really just the trick. But I think that this idea that we really need to give people all of our attention and slow down and have slower conversations, what we might find and what we do find is that you end up saving time from the round and round and round that happens because we're moving too quickly and not really listening to each other. So yes, listening is an important skill. It's an important part of fostering positive relationships. One of the skills that we teach and it can be really hard to do because most people find it more fun to talk than to listen. Especially business owners, right? And you know what? My favorite quote is Sir Richard Branson is a very, very successful businessman who said he takes the acronym LISTEN and he said, first of all, he said, nobody learns anything by hearing themselves talk, right? So the way that we learn is through listening. But he said to listen, you have to enlist yourself to be silent. Those words, just the letters all switched around. And so sometimes we just have to remind ourselves, like take a pause, give them the floor, hear everything they have to say before responding. That's good advice. Thank you. Sure. How do vulnerability and trust impact leaders? And why is each one of those important in team building? What does vulnerability based trust mean? And how does trust and vulnerability grow greater team performance? Oh, I love this question. It is fascinating. One of my favorite stories comes from Southwest Airlines, a successful company, a great culture that Herb Kelleher built. And the story was about Herb in a hallway and an employee walking up to him with an eight page sort of report and saying he needed him to read this and get his thoughts on it because he wanted him to make a decision. And in about three minutes, Herb kind of scanned the report and asked the employee a couple of questions and made the decision while standing in the hallway. And he had a great relationship with that employee and he trusted that employee. And I think we all know that we work faster and we are more efficient when there is a high level of trust. We can be much quicker to know that each person is playing their role, that the team is gelled together and that we're all on the same page moving towards the right outcome. And what gets in the way of that, I think, is when we don't have that trust. And what's challenging about trust is that the vulnerability is required to build trust. And when we talk about vulnerability, I always find it fascinating that the definition of vulnerability in a system is weakness, when in relationships, vulnerability is strength. We can't actually build a relationship and trust someone else if we don't make ourselves vulnerable. We have to take that chance to share something that somehow might come back to hurt us. And then when the other person doesn't hurt us, we know we can trust them. But someone has to take that vulnerable step. So one of the things that we do in all of our programs at Positive Foundry is really help people understand how to create a safe place to have those moments of vulnerability, nothing too deep in the workplace, but deep enough that you can really learn to trust each other. And when we do that, it's magical because not only does the belonging and connection increase, but the team dynamics and the productivity and the efficiency increases. But it all really just starts with having conversation and trusting each other by giving yourself that chance to sort of expose yourself just a little bit so that you can build that relationship. So vulnerability... really is required for trust. And trust is really required for healthy, strong relationships. It's like this dynamic. And I think what's amazing about the world today and especially looking at our teenagers and the way communication is going, it's like, you know, people say they're talking, but they're really just texting. Like talking actually means texting, but that's not really talking. And then we have Snapchat relationships, which are these like really quick. And it's like, that's not vulnerability, right? Vulnerability is having those moments where you're talking about the challenging things in life or where you might need help or how you might be working on yourself or what you might be worried about. Like those are the vulnerable moments. And I just don't see how those are gonna happen on Snapchat. I think we've gotta be a person. So I'm kind of encouraging my children to do more FaceTime than Snapchat, but I don't know how well it's working, so. But you have a good point there for sure. In one of your lessons, you talked about active, constructive responding or letting others kind of savor their good news. So how does the reaction of business owners and leaders to good news shared by others impact them? And what are the magic words that most people just wait to hear? Oh, I love this. First of all, I love that you remembered so many of the things that we chatted about in your WPO group. That was such a fun couple of days. So active, constructive responding is the, so let me start with, I already kind of shared, we're all wired for negative. So we are two times more likely to have a negative conversation than we are to talk about something positive. So we're quick to kind of have conversations about challenges or where we're struggling. And we're less likely to say, here's what's great that happened in my day today. And then when we share the positive, we spend way less time on that topic. We're very quick to say, so you tell me you went on a great vacation and I say, oh my gosh, that's wonderful. I hope you had a great time. And the conversation's over, right? Like, it just ends. And that's pretty typical in conversation. So what active, constructive responding is, is it's the idea that we can let other people savor the good things that happen in their life just by the way that we respond to them. And the way it works is when we notice that someone is sharing good news with us, we need to have a little alarm that goes off in our mind that says, ding, ding, ding. Oh wait, this is good news. I've got to stay on this a little bit longer. And then we seek to extend that conversation. So we try to ask questions that enable them to live in that moment a little bit longer and let them savor. And the three magic words that we use are, tell me more. And really it's just this idea that if you notice that someone's telling you something positive that has happened in their life and you take that moment and you say, tell me more, they might have a chance to tell you a little bit more that they wouldn't have if you would have said something like, congratulations. And we teach this concept in a variety of ways in workshops and through videos. But one of the workshops that we were in was super rewarding because there was a woman in the class who we taught this concept to. And at the break, she texted her daughter back. And at the end of the workshop, she came and showed us her phone. And what had happened was her daughter told her about something great that had happened at school that day. And she wrote back, I'm so proud of you. And then after we had this little lesson, she went back to her phone and said, actually, tell me more about that. And she showed us her phone. And it was literally scrolls of a text with the details behind what had happened in her child's day. And I think that we miss this all the time in relationships to really let people experience their positive moments longer. And it gives all of us some more positive emotion in our day. And when we use that with employees and coworkers, I believe it's just another way to sort of build that positive environment, that positive culture, and also build that stronger relationship. Because I don't know about you, but I'm going to go back to the person who wants to know more about my vacation and tell them my next good news. Because we all want to be talking about the good things that have happened in our lives. I love that. That's great. So mindfulness is a word that has been used in a lot, just used a lot in the last few years. Can you provide our listeners with your definition of mindfulness, why it's important, the benefits of practicing mindfulness, and how mindfulness and EQ work together, and then the RAIN acronym you use to bring it all together? Oh, gosh, yes. Loaded, loaded question. Tara Brach's the main, Tara Brach is the RAIN acronym. I believe that's the researcher who came up with that whole concept. OK, so mindfulness. I think the easiest way to explain mindfulness is to quote Viktor Frankl, who wrote a great book called A Man's Search for Meaning. And in that, he survived the concentration camps, actually four or five of them, including Auschwitz. And he, in his writings, and one of his famous quotes is, between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space is your ability to choose your response. I think I said that slightly wrong, but you get the gist. So in between, yeah, in between stimulus and response, there is a space. So what's interesting about mindfulness practice is when we practice mindfulness, specifically mindfulness meditation, or really any form of breathing technique, what we're doing is we're bringing our attention to our breath or to a sensation or to a sound. And when we pause and we give our mind a rest and we purposefully train our mind to find space, that's sort of our ability to choose our emotional response as well. So mindfulness, by definition, is really the act of noticing what is unfolding moment by moment as it arrives. And we're the only species that has the ability to conjure up the past, the present, and the future all in the same moment. And so it can be really hard for us to be present. And mindfulness is about being fully present in the moment with whatever it is that you're doing. And so emotional intelligence has a lot to do. There are four separate skills of emotional intelligence, self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. But sometimes the hardest part is the self-management or managing our own emotions. And when we practice mindfulness on a regular basis, research shows we actually can change the structure of our brain. And we can give ourselves that space where we can feel an emotion coming on. And we don't necessarily have to react to it because we have this moment where we can process it. And that really just comes with practice, with a mindfulness practice. And so RAIN is a technique that Tara Brach developed for how to sort of deal with difficult emotions or deal with really any emotion. And it stands for recognize. So first thing we have to do is recognize that we're feeling something. A stands for awareness. So we have to be aware of what it is or what the situation is. The I is we have to investigate it with kindness. So we have to kind of go in and say, okay, wait, why am I feeling this tinge of shame right now? Or why am I feeling guilt right now? Or why am I feeling sad right now? And then the N stands for nurture. So it enables us to sort of get through difficult emotions with this like step-by-step process that really all just stems from being fully present. And the thing about emotions that I think is most fascinating is that emotions come in and out of our body in 90 seconds. They just, it's physically, that's what happens. And you can get people who are very, very emotionally intelligent can tell you, I feel anger in this part of my body. I feel shame or hurt in this part of my body. But most of us are walking around just reacting to our emotions because we're so busy and we aren't present and we're going moment by moment. So the person cuts us off and our first reaction is, you know, to honk our horn or flip them off or whatever it is, and we just react. And mindfulness gives us this space to not react and instead choose a response and be calm throughout the entire process. So that's why I just think mindfulness is probably one of the greatest wellbeing tools we have. And it's fascinating to me because it's been around for thousands of years and it is only because of positive psychology that it is now coming to the forefront of all of our news and information because there's so many studies to back up the benefits of it. But people have been doing it for thousands and thousands of years. You know, when I think of mindfulness too, and I didn't hear you describe this, but I'm sure it's a part of your description as well. But, you know, mindfulness to me is also being aware of other people's situation. So if you're trying to deal with a leader or with a busy entrepreneur or whoever it is, your children, a coach for your children's soccer team or whatever it might be, being aware of that person's world. You know, did they rush to come to the field from work? You know, did they just come back from the meeting and their mind is full of, you know, ideas or, you know, they just had the conversation with a customer and it didn't go well. You know, so is part of mindfulness also being aware of how when you enter into somebody else's sphere, so to speak, what's going on in their world? Yeah, so I relate that a little bit more to emotional intelligence, right? It's being socially aware of, it's being aware of other people and their feelings. And also to what you're saying, it is also just assuming positive intent, right? We don't know anyone else's situation. We don't know what's going on in their world. And if we're just operating from a place of compassion for everyone, the world would be better, right? Like, and in Lead With Mindfulness, in that module, we actually teach a concept called compassionate management, which is exactly what you're saying. It's having a compassion and an understanding for the other person and what it is that they might be struggling with or managing in that moment and giving them some grace in that process. Thank you. I really appreciate that. That's, that was well said. Thank you. Well, thank you. I love that question. I love the way you're thinking about that too. They're definitely all related, mindfulness and emotional intelligence. Yes. You know, I personally loved the story that you shared, the making of a corporate athlete. That article compared the conditioning of a professional athlete with a working professional. And you also talked about the four dimensions of energy. Can you share with our business owners and leaders listening today, the concept behind the article, the four dimensions of managing energy and the four ways to renew energy? Yes, absolutely. Yes, absolutely. So it's interesting. So the concept behind the corporate athlete is just that athletes spend 80% of their time training and 20% of their time performing and they have world-class nutrition and sleep and all of these things supporting them. And their whole career lasts a lot of times five to 10 years. Whereas in corporations, you know, we're spending 10% of our time training and 90% of our time performing and we're supposed to do it for 40 to 50 years, right? So the four dimensions of energy, we use the PIES acronym. There are all kinds of different acronyms, but in essence, the concept is that we all have the same amount of time in a day, but we don't all have the same amount of energy. And there are really four dimensions of energy. We have our physical energy, which is really like how big our battery is. We have our intellectual or our mental energy. We have our emotional energy, which is how well we're connecting with other people. And then we have sort of our inner spirit or our spiritual energy. And what is interesting in our world today is that we don't spend a lot of time necessarily renewing our energy. And there are all kinds of rhythms, the circadian rhythm, there are all kinds of rhythms throughout our day and research that shows that when we don't. take breaks, our performance decreases. And when we think about our perfect energy management, it's when we are eating right, we're putting the right nutrition in our body to have the energy that we want physically. We are moving our bodies on a regular basis. And I'm not just talking about, you know, getting in 10,000 steps a day, but it's also about flexibility and stretching and strength. It's like using your body so that we can actually create a bigger battery when we exercise and we move our bodies in the right way. And then sleep, most of Americans are walking around sleep deprived. It's really hard to manage your emotions at work when you're tired. We all know that we're not gonna make as good of a decisions when we're tired. When we lose that willpower, it's a lot harder to make the choices that we wanna be making for our long-term goals. And so enough sleep is really important. And there's so much research about how to do that in the right way and make sure that we're getting enough sleep and turning off our devices at night and making sure we have a dark enough space and all of those things. And then we use reflection as a really important way to renew our energy and just for our own personal growth. Research shows that having a journal and spending time journaling every day is a great way to manage energy, help us follow through on the choices that we wanna be making in life and accomplishing the goals that we want. And also just processing emotions in a journal is a great, great wellbeing technique. So we say, eat, move, sleep, reflect are the sort of wellbeing techniques that go along with finding a way to sort of maximize that energy and manage our energy on a daily basis. But it is really, really important to be thinking about also just as a business owner or a business leader, like when are you at your best? And I think it's interesting that we can really sort of construct our day in a way that works best for us. So I know a lot of people that exercise first thing in the morning because that's the best time for them to exercise. I do my best thinking and reading first thing in the morning. So I structure my day so that I spend the first two hours thinking and reading. I don't do any meetings usually before 11 because my energy starts to wane around 11, 12. And I can have meetings with less energy. I can't do some of those bigger projects and harder think time with less energy. And so also kind of crafting your day around your own rhythms and your own sort of way in which you perform at your best is a really important sort of way to apply to that manage energy technique. You know, we could talk for days on this topic and it's been great reconnecting with you today, Laura. I wanna thank you for sharing your important insight with our listeners. But before we sign off, I do want to see if you have any other advice or any parting thoughts you'd like to share. And also if you could tell our listeners how they can reach you and how they can find out more about the work you do at Positive Foundry. Sure. So I think what's, I guess I would leave you with the idea of when you invest in your employees and their wellbeing, they know that you care as a business owner. And we had the opportunity to do a survey of 500 employees that we trained at Positive Foundry. 500 employees that we trained at Positive Foundry that went through our program. And we had an open-ended question asking them what they took away from this year long program. And the most common response was, my company cares about me. My company cares about me. It was open-ended. And they said, my company cares about me. Most of them kind of came away with the same thing like, oh, I remember active constructive responding or I remember the emotional bank account, but also I feel cared for that we did this program. And I think, I'm so sorry. It's hard to put a dollar figure or return on investment on this idea of like increased loyalty or investing in the wellbeing of your people. But I know that it's the right thing to do. And I know that when we help employees show up better at work, they're also showing up better at home and it's doing good for the entire world by just giving people little things that we can incorporate into our day-to-day life. And I just think it's one of the most important things that we can be doing inside corporations is taking a moment each week to talk about wellbeing. And Laura, how can our listeners reach you and how can they learn more about the work you do at Positive Foundry? Thank you so much for asking that. Our website is the best way to reach us, www.positivefoundry.com. We're also on Instagram, Positive Foundry. We're on LinkedIn, Positive Foundry. And I would welcome the opportunity to talk with any companies about how we might be able to work together and talk more about how we do this inside corporations. Thank you, Carly, so much for your time. It was great seeing you again and reconnecting. I really appreciate it. Thank you, and I appreciate your time and for you sharing your insight with our listeners. To all our listeners, we appreciate you joining us today. I'm Kelly Borth, CEO and Chief Strategy Officer at Greencrest and host of the Ignite Your Business podcast. We invite you to visit greencrest.com to access all of our podcasts and blogs, sharing business and marketing advice with leaders and business owners from a variety of industries. We hope to see you in 2024, but until then, let's remember the wise words of Zig Ziglar, who said, positive thinking will let you do everything better than negative thinking will. Thanks for listening.