What would you do if you want to be promoted in your job? You would most likely change the way you speak to your boss. You would do things that you normally wouldn’t do. Now, you may get that promotion but are you truly being your authentic self? Learn how to get that promotion while still being yourself. Join your host, Stephen Jaye and his guests, Cristina Amigoni and Alex Cullimore, on how to be your authentic self. Cristina and Alex are the hosts of the Uncover the Human podcast and the Co-Founders of Siamo. Understand how you can create your own personal values and boundaries so that you can find your true self.
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A Discussion With Podcasters Cristina Amigoni And Alex Cullimore About Being Our Authentic Selves
One thing that I sincerely believe is that we are in a period of transformation. We are embracing a new way of thinking. Some of these new ways of thinking involve what we believe as far as potential competitors and collaborators. In the old days, people would say oftentimes, “If you want to do something new, you have to either be unique in your idea, bring something completely new to the world or you need to outcompete anyone else that’s doing anything similar, that traditional view of competition.”
We are looking at a lot of people that are doing similar things in this world and saying to ourselves, “We can collaborate because not everyone reaches the same audiences, the same people with the message like how musicians can have similar lyrics but in different genres and bring the same message to different groups of people. They are not a person that appeals to everyone.”
One thing I say about my particular show is that I’m trying to encourage people to broaden their horizons, open themselves to new ideas and go for the things that they care about. That’s all of you in the audience. Whatever your idea is, I want to encourage you to consider following your true passions.
There are a lot of people out there doing it. Tony Robbins has been doing this for years but Tony Robbins isn’t reaching everyone the same way. Pitbull isn’t necessarily reaching everyone with his From Negative to Positive podcast but he’s reaching a whole new audience. To embrace this kind of frame of mind, my guests are podcasters, Alex Cullimore and Cristina Amigoni. They cover topics quite similar to mine. Their podcast is called Uncover the Human. I would like to welcome you to the show.
Thank you so much, Stephen.
Thank you.
The first question I want to ask is, how did the idea of Uncover the Human come together? What made you decide that you were going to do this and bring this message to your audience?
Honestly, it started a lot over a bunch of happy hours. We started working at a company for a long time and we kept talking about, “How do we make this a little bit better experience for people?” We kept coming back to the people’s side of things. “How does this relate to how people interact with each other on a day-to-day basis? How can we bring that more into the workplace?” The more we talked about it, we came up with all of these concepts and tons of research. I have a bookshelf full of books that we put together in the first six months there and we have continued adding to that list.
We enjoyed talking about, “How do you bring more people to this?” We want to do consulting or coaching in that space and that started to grow. COVID happened and that shut down. We had always wanted to launch something like a podcast or write books around these topics. The podcast became the go-to method to get the message out and talk more about interacting as humans.
In my show, I always begin every episode, “Your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less.” For Uncover the Human, what would you say is your core message that you are trying to get to your audience?
When we were thinking about the topic, the overall umbrella of the podcast, the theme of authenticity kept coming up, when we are allowed to be our true selves, our full selves and when we find the courage to do it because it’s not just about being allowed, it’s figuring out who we are, who that is and bring it forth, we shine. We can do way more than we can when we are trying to mold and try to figure out like, “Who am I supposed to be in this situation? How am I supposed to repress the rest of me?”
Talk to people, listen to them and see what they have to say and empathize with where they might be at. Click To TweetOne of the things that the pandemic brought forth was the fact that, “Everybody is a whole human. They are not just employees. They are employees with kids. They will show up in the middle of their podcast or with cats that will walk across in the middle of a meeting.” That authenticity came a little bit more to the forefront of everybody’s mind. The overall theme is like, “How do we help people create more authentic lives for themselves and create space for more authenticity for others?”
As we generally are going back, reengaging in a lot of the activities and some people are going back to the office, a certain part-time or even some full-time levels, what is the number one or the top barrier that prevents people from being their authentic selves every day in their lives?
Two things strike me that we continually come across the more we try and explore the topic of authenticity and how to both encourage it for ourselves and others. The two key things, especially interactions between people, come down to listening and empathy. The more you listen to people, the more that there’s an actual ability to share who we are and connect to that.
You hear that a lot when we are talking about how to re-approach going back to an office. If you are going back to an office, one huge portion of it that everybody tries to highlight is to talk to people, listen to them, see what they have to say and empathize with where they might be at. It was easier to empathize with people throughout the pandemic because there is this large-scale shared experience we were all going through. Both of these help push it to the forefront of the mind but if I was going to boil it down to a few things as possible, those have been some key elements to getting shared authenticity.
If someone is deficient in listening and in empathy, what do you think causes that? How do you think that manifests in authentic life?
It’s probably different for every person. My guess is a lot of times, they are lacking the courage to be their authentic self, to begin with. They are emulating what they have seen happen in the past, whether it’s work or not. If they have worked with very command, control, systemized types of managers and they have seen those managers grow to directors, VPs and CFOs, then they think that that’s the trajectory. They are clearly successful in their career, even though from a human being we don’t know, whether they are successful or not. That’s the way to go.
It’s a struggle. When you are not in your authentic self, you are not in flow so you are constantly struggling with your own values. You may not have identified your values but there’s a disturbance. You know there’s resistance when you are doing things. Phrases like, “Deep in my heart, I know that’s true but I don’t know how to apply it so I’m going to act this way.” That’s one of the ways that I have seen it come up.
A lot of things that people have been talking about focusing on what you can control. Oftentimes, we spend tons of time focusing on things that are completely out of our control. What we can control is not what happens to us but our reaction to it. If someone is in an environment where they have a lot of command-and-control type of thinking, a lot of what I oftentimes refer to as a fear-based organization, everyone is always trying to prove themselves and prove how loyal they are by not setting boundaries at their work. If someone says, “I can’t make my organization that I’m working with than what it is. I can’t make the people around me any different than who they are. All I can do is focus on my reaction to it,” what can someone do to use that knowledge and still create a more authentic life in the place they are now?
You have hit on two interesting pieces of it. First of all, fear-based is a good way of describing it because that is where a lot of command and control comes from, this fear of losing control and not having that. That also translates to fear in the people being commanded and controlled what’s going to happen next when somebody else has control over my destiny. The second portion you put there would be the first solution I would lean towards, which is boundaries. You are looking for ways for yourself to create limits.
There’s plenty of people and workspaces that will happily violate those boundaries or they will have to be reinforced many times. It may be to the point where you realize, “I’m not going to be able to set this boundary and this is important to me so I’m going to have to look for another place.” The first step is figuring out, “This is a hard line for me.” If that’s going to be a problem, then we need to talk about that in dialogue. “I have a problem with this but you say I can’t have a problem with that.”
That’s effective. No gaslighting.
It feels like sometimes there are incentives in this world to violate boundaries because of the way our benefit structures are. Having one person work 60 hours a week is oftentimes more advantageous in some situations than having two people work 30 hours a week apiece. When someone is encountering that fear, let’s say it’s Thursday and someone knows that their boss is going to try to, either get them to do work plugin over the weekend or is asking them to do tasks and they are saying, “I have made plans with my family. I made plans with my friends. I need some time to relax.” Whatever it is, we are all starting to understand that these needs are all valid.
It doesn’t have to fit into a set defined like, “You have a doctor’s appointment. Therefore, you can go,” whatever it is you need for your mental health, which is crap in this country in a lot of situations. As someone is encountering that, their heartbeat starts racing up and down. They know they are disappointing a co-worker or a boss by saying, “I’m not going to get this done by the end of the week because I don’t have the capacity and this other thing needs to happen.” What should someone be doing or thinking as their heartbeat goes up in pace and they are getting nervous about setting that boundary?
I love the fact that you brought up the heartbeat because one of the things that we have noticed and I have learned as a coach is that the physical reaction is way faster than the mental and emotional reaction. Your body reacts to something that’s misaligned with a value or something important to us way before our brain realizes what happened. It’s true. It’s the heartbeat, throat closing, fist sweating or closing, shoulders and the neck hurting. That happened before.
The more you listen to people, the more there's an actual ability to share who you are and connect to that. Click To TweetIt sounds cliché but the first thing to do is breathe. As we get into that heartbeat situation, it means our adrenaline is up, which means we are in a threat conflict. In a threat conflict, our tunnel vision goes to survival. One way to stop that is to realize it. Name the feeling and be like, “My heartbeat is racing. My neck hurts. My throat is closing. What just happened?” Take a few seconds to name it, break the reaction cycle and then understand why did that happen. “I was asked to work on something that I know is going to take me twenty hours and it’s Thursday, which means that if they want to do Monday morning, I have to work over the weekend. I had plans. I wanted to relax. I have kids. I wanted to Netflix binge. I do not want to work on the weekend.” That’s the reaction.
The next step, I will take this from our friend Gail, is to yes, and. It doesn’t mean, “Yes, I’m going to do it.” It means, “Let’s continue the conversation. I’m not going to shut you down or I’m not going to feel like I have to shut you down to protect myself and understand how we can come to a mutual understanding.” It could be anything from, “I understand that this is important. Can we talk about the deadline? We only have one day and a half of working time before Monday morning and I want to make sure that we can do this in that timeframe.” It doesn’t have to be about what’s happening over the weekend. It just has to be, “This is the workweek. Let’s establish that in case somebody forgot about it.”
That seems to circle back to the idea presented at the beginning of this discussion about listening and empathy. In this situation, if the employee can say, “I’m going to take a deep breath but I understand and I listen to why they may be asking me this. Maybe the leadership is worried about losing this client or maybe something else is coming on.” The leadership also, if they can take a deep breath, listen, have empathy and say, “I understand that this employee is not my resource but a human being.”
That can lead to possibly the two sides working together to find a solution as opposed to being adversarial toward one another and trying to punch back and forth. Do you see this response as happening more frequently in different work environments? Do you see work going back to the way it was before the pandemic and even before that where people are trying to crank out whatever?
Two different sides are going on. The WeWork CEO came out and was trying to say, “Anybody who doesn’t want to go to an office is not as dedicated. That’s what the Chase CEO is also saying. They’ve got highly publicized and highly mocked for it. For one, WeWork is very easy to see that that’s clearly serving his business problem particularly. With Chase, everybody was like, “That’s all well and good for a finance company that was petitioned.” I don’t know if it was their company but there was a finance company where the workers were petitioning to keep their weeks under 100 hours.
There’s highly publicized debate but on the personal level of the smaller companies that don’t have every headline, I have seen a little more dialogue and a lot more understanding. Especially if there’s the availability of things like remote work, there are a lot more calm discussions. It also sometimes depends on where the trajectory of the company feels because as the economy comes back online, people are feeling a lot more confident. It’s a lot easier to feel like customers are going to be coming in. In that situation, it’s a lot harder to feel the stress that would lead to trying to shut other people down on both sides of it, either from the company’s point of view or the employee’s point of view.
I also want to get your input on this idea of the culture of urgency. I have written a LinkedIn article about this and had many discussions about the one aspect that I’m seeing as key to letting people live their more authentic lives. In some situations, that means people working different hours that suit them better or setting themselves up to where they can focus better at work, which is a big thing. If you have constantly having Slack, email, everything distracts you because people need to talk to you right away, how do you get in that flow state?
I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on my in-the-works hypothesis that one of the keys to letting people have their freer, more authentic lives and happier, more fulfilled lives, filling all their other needs, whether it be an interpersonal connection with other human beings, exercise or whatever. Fulfillment doing their side projects is to rein in this culture of urgency and say, “I need to talk to you about something,” rather than just pinging you and saying, “I’m expecting you to respond right away. I’m going to set up a meeting with you tomorrow and prepare for it.” You can expect that for your tomorrow and you can plan your day accordingly. Is that a key part or is this just more of a minor side of the thing that I have thought of?
It’s huge. It brings up a couple of things in my mind. One of the things is that every once in a while, I have nightmares more than dreams of having a job interview, applying for a job, going back into the corporate world and working there. I envision how would I answer the question that typically comes up, which is, “What’s one of your weaknesses? What is one of your areas of improvement?” That sense of urgency is one of my areas of improvement because I get very excited about ideas. Alex knows this very well and he’s patient about that. Also, new things and shiny things.
When I get that excitement, I want it to happen now. It doesn’t matter what else we are doing. It doesn’t matter if it’s the weekend, the holiday or Christmas Eve. It’s now. It’s in my head. I have a whole story. I have a whole movie created and it’s going to happen. I have had to work on slowing down, writing it down, finding a way to not lose the idea and then think about it. “Does it have to happen now? Is this just something that could possibly happen in the future if we get there or could happen in a real future that we can plan for?” That sense of urgency is something I need to work on, for sure.
From the outside, the other thing that comes to mind is the need for instant gratification that we all have about everything. It’s something that does need to change because there’s this myth that we can multitask but we can’t. The brain does not multitask. If we think about something, we have to do that thing. We cannot think about breathing if we are thinking about breathing and doing something else. Pinging people and wanting their sense now is a problem because you are expecting people to multitask. It takes about twenty minutes for somebody to go back into what they were doing. If you are constantly interrupting them, they are not getting anything done.
For those serial multitaskers out there, the people who can’t sit on a Zoom meeting without opening up a web browser, looking at their email or handling another task, what can you do tomorrow morning or even today to get on the path, get out of this habit and become more present in the one activity that you are doing?
One thing I found especially useful is the idea of batching your tasks in two areas. When we are talking about scheduling a meeting for tomorrow, you are talking about like, “Let’s change when we are going to do this and let’s change when Slack is available.” Slack isn’t instant Messenger, which sounds great until you have to context switch every fifteen minutes because somebody needs something else. It’s the idea of setting aside specific times to get these things done.
One that’s popular in creative circles is called the Pomodoro Technique, in which you set aside either 20 or 25 minutes at a time to set through a task and then give yourself either 5 or 10 minutes at the end of that, which is just a break. Reset, recharge and then do another little sprint. It’s easier sometimes to batch those things. “I know I’m going to get to these emails.” They are not hanging in the back of your head like, “I know I have five things I need to answer but I’m working on something else now.” If you don’t open your email until those 25 minutes, then you can get through those, finish those out, close it down for another two hours, have other types of tasks and come back.
Your physical reaction is a lot faster than your mental and emotional reaction. Click To TweetWe naturally have some sort of urgency set aside in our heads. As soon as you see that notification, whether it be on your phone or on your computer, you’ve got a Slack message that either says @YourName, @Channel, or @Home, those ones that notify everyone. The same thing can be gotten for email, phone calls, texts or anything like that.
First of all, preemptively decide, whether you can handle that distraction. If it’s a task that allows you for multitasking but allows for quick ease of switching context, leave it on and then say, “I will get to you in ten minutes. I’m finishing something,” if that allows it. There are tasks where that’s not allowed. “If I need to be in focus, I need to be in focus. I cannot have any distractions.”
One of the things that we have seen work well with our teams is to announce that on Slack and say, “I’m going heads down for the next two hours. I’m going to turn notifications off. If there is an emergency, text me.” Thankfully none of us are saving lives so there isn’t an emergency. At least there’s a limitation on how I can be reached.
Once one person does it honestly and hopefully the leader is the one that talks about that in the team building and in the team environment so that they know that that’s how it is, everybody will emulate and respect that. On our side of like, “I have this urgent thing. I need to tell Alex and he’s offline for the next three hours,” then I get to do my own self-work of like, “Is it urgent? Are people dying?” We had a friend who always said at work, “Will any kittens die if I don’t talk to him now about this and I wait for three hours? If the answer is no, then take a note, jot it down, even write, when you get back, ‘Can we talk about this?’”
Some of the best work anyone has talked about flow. Some of the best work happens when you are headed down and you are in the moment. For me, it usually happens in what I refer to as 90-minute power sessions and that’s pretty common that that’s how long you can maintain that deep focus but it only works if you are not even noticing anything else or nothing else is coming in and distracting you, which is easier said than done for a lot of people.
How important is it for people on the leadership side of this equation to set an example and even temper their own, “I am the leader and you answer to me,” type of mentality and say, “I’m going to live according to this? I’m going to go heads down for two hours and not be distracted. I’m not going to respond to your Slack message for one hour and a half and that’s okay in this organization.”
It’s especially important in leadership. That’s not only for the leaders that would have that feeling of wanting to get that answer immediately just because they happen to be leading or have the traditional power. Even if a leader is incredibly enthusiastic about something but if they are not diligent about setting that example of respecting both other people’s time when they take it and taking time for themselves and even if it’s said that it’s okay to do these things but if it’s not an example, people aren’t going to believe that’s truly okay. We were talking about the open-door policy. They are like, “Anybody can come in.” There are so many places where nobody is coming in. We started calling it the Glass Door Policy because it has transparency but nobody is going through it.
There are a lot of measures out there that you see sometimes performative or statement-only. What they do doesn’t match what they are saying. How common do you think that is present-day in our world?
It’s too common. I don’t know if I want to laugh, cry, scream or all three. It’s interesting to me because it’s the definition of lack of integrity when what you say and what you do, do not match. We are all human so it happens. Accidents happen. One of the ways to counteract when it happens is to acknowledge it and apologize. I have read this quote many times, “Once, it’s an accident. When it happens twice, it’s intentional.”
If you are going to put integrity on your website or on your wall, please know what that means. For the love of all good things, practice it because nobody can trust you if you don’t do that. If you don’t want to because you are afraid of authenticity, vulnerability, losing your job and losing the client, practice that and lead by that all the time, then don’t put it as one of your values.
For most of this show, I have been focusing a bit on work and how work causes us to be a little bit less than our authentic selves, fear of not getting the project, not getting the promotion and getting fired. Are there any other areas of life that we need to highlight and talk about like other places where people experience a lot of challenges in being authentic?
Every area of life becomes a challenge here and there. If you think about things like family relationships, it can be challenging. Boundaries are harder to establish sometimes when you have people you are very close to or have known for a long time. They know everything about you. You know everything about them. They can feel harder to have that level of like, “This is who I am,” especially if you start to go through either some kind of change or something that starts to be important to you that they don’t know about you. It’s natural for people to expect other people to behave in a certain way. When you start to change, it can create tension. Even if it’s not conflict, it can still create some amount of tension in relationships.
There are lots of areas of life, in which it’s difficult to establish those. One of the ways we have seen that so you can underpin how to keep yourself top of mind is by establishing and living with your own personal values. If you know those, it’s easier to decide when you are going to set boundaries and how you are going to set boundaries. Those values apply across all the different domains of our lives. There’s the family domain, the hours when we are alone and working on something that only we want to work on, the work domain and all of those areas are influenced by that base level foundation of our personal values.
What can someone do to make sure they know what their values are? A lot of times, I see people who have personal values and I wonder, “Are these your personal values? Are these your organization’s values? Is this your core social group, a tier of society or political organization?” How does someone go about making sure that they understand, “These are my personal values, not the values I think I should be having because of some external thing that I mentioned?”
There's this myth that you can multitask, but you really can't. The brain does not multitask. Click To TweetThe shortcut to that, if there is one, is to hire a coach. The self-work still needs to be done. A coach can help you but it’s only a guide. The first thing to do is recognize those moments when that heartbeat beats faster. Start journaling or jotting down, at least making a list of like, “When do I feel disturbed?” the disturbances of heartbeats, neck ache, stomach aches, nausea, can’t sleep. Those physical symptoms of, “Something is off in this situation.” Go through the questions. “What happened?” Objectively, tell the story of what happened. “I was asked to work over the weekend on something that’s going to take me working over the weekend,” for example as we used to before. “What did I feel about it? I felt that I had to sacrifice my time alone or my time with my family.”
Start recognizing those pieces like, “What does that mean? It means that I value time with my family. I value time off. I value well-being. I value nature,” whatever it is. That can already give you a clue of, “Self-care or family time is a value of mine.” The opposite way, which is also just as valuable and it should be done, is to recognize the times when you are crazy excited about something. When you are in flow, when you are working seventeen hours straight and you forgot to eat but you never even thought about it, you are only stopping because everybody else is leaving and going to dinner, not because you want to stop.
Start examining those and be like, “What was I doing that was energizing me so much that I didn’t want to stop? I was talking to people all day.” Connections to humans are a value. “I was brainstorming and problem-solving. I love problem-solving and strategy. I was listening and empathizing. Whatever it was that I was doing that’s connected to a value, that’s important to me. I need to get more of that in my life.”
You can feel Cristina’s passion for that one.
You can always feel it in the tone of voice. You can always tell when someone is being monotoned like, “We will give you a 5.4% rate of return.” I would be pretty thrilled getting a 5.4%, to be honest, so I’m not even mocking that. If somebody is thrilled about getting 5.4% for themselves or their clients, I’m happy for you. I didn’t mean to throw any shade in that direction.
I’m observing around me and hopefully, through the people following both your podcast and my show, a lot more people are paying attention to a lot of these issues of how can you be truly human and truly authentic. Do you see this as a widespread movement? Do you feel like, for lack of a better way to put it, “I’m just in my own bubble here in Denver?”
It’s funny we joke between Cristina and me because she will send me at least one article from McKinsey a week and thankfully, they have done the research. They are establishing something that we are, either positive or would love to see happen. There are things like the rise of the chief person officer. There’s building a human-first culture. Those are things that are coming out in Harvard Business Review and McKinsey.
We even saw that they had gotten some of the CEOs together and established that maybe the most important thing is not stakeholder value anymore that the employee is in. The beginnings of feeling the wave and when the entire globe shuts down because people are getting sick and worried about their loved ones, tend to push the narrative even faster.
We are better together that there is no reason to compete because we can lift each other if we work together. Click To TweetSome of the more cynical people said, “People are going to be so quick to go back to the world before the pandemic.” One of the things I couldn’t picture us going back on is this idea of health. I couldn’t picture us going back to the idea of people feeling pressure to show up to work when they are sick. Even when they declare that no one is in the hospital anywhere in the world from COVID, this whole thing is over and there’s not a new pandemic, there’s still going to be the idea of when you are sick, stay home. I can’t imagine people going back coughing and being like, “If I get on the 7:30 train, I can show that I’m dedicated.”
Given that some of these shifts are shown to be legitimate by companies like McKinsey that pull across large spectrums of culture, not just me and other people that attend TED Talks in Denver, what do you see the world of 2028, many years down the road, looking like? How do you see that looking different from what we had now or what we had prior to the pandemic?
My dream world is there’s a whole new leadership in all sorts of ways in approach to leadership. All approaches to leadership are humans first. They are about empathy, listening, caring, not about command and control. The old leadership is gone at that point, either because of age retirement or the workforce hasn’t tolerated it. It’s done. “As a company, leader, team and project, we are not going to do business with you. You are not going to have the revenue.” The bottom line is going to be a huge hit. It’s not acceptable anymore to not treat people like humans. That’s my dream. If that will happen by 2028, I don’t know.
I do also tend to get a little bit impatient about some things, too. I was like, “People should have realized many years ago that this new service sector work is not the same as an assembly line. The correlation between your hours and your value is much diminished from the assembly line. Why didn’t the Baby Boomers realize this when they were 25? We are trying to figure this out now.” I tend to be a little bit impatient and crazy. For the benefit of my audience, I want to have you tell us how people would get ahold of you, your services, as well as your podcast.
Our podcast is called Uncover the Human. Its episodes are about authenticity. We have talked a lot about different ways of doing a lot of the things we have discussed here like getting yourself out of fear and getting yourself into a little bit more authentic mindset. You can find that on any of the regular podcast directories, Spotify, Apple. In any of the apps, it should be available. If you find one that we are not in, we would be happy to try and fill that.
We are at UncoverTheHuman.WeAreSiamo.com. Siamo is the company we have that is the holder of the podcast, for a lack of a better term, that’s where we do a lot of our coaching and consulting work. Our website is WeAreSiamo.com. You can find our newsletter there. You can find us on LinkedIn, Alex Cullimore or Cristina Amigoni. You can find us, DM us or message us. We are always around and happy to talk. We are also on Instagram and Facebook @WeAreSiamo.
Do you have one other message for everyone that has been reading this conversation about noticing our heartbeats or patterns when we are acting out of fear or when we are being inauthentic? What would be one last final message you have for everyone reading that wants to be more authentic and wants to find a way to live in alignment?
The message that comes to mind is what we stand for as a company. Siamo is Italian because that’s where I grew up. For We Are, what we found is the fact that when we work together, find that safe space, those safe people that allow us to show up authentically as ourselves, then we get the courage and vulnerability to do that. A lot of the things that you said at the beginning about collaboration versus competition because we are similar shows, stems from my true core belief that we are better together, that there is no reason to compete because we can lift each other if we work together. That expands in all sorts of lives and works. It’s not just this industry or this podcast. It’s everywhere.
Look at the vaccines. I’m losing count of how many vaccines are out there for COVID. It was because everybody worked together instead of competing against each other. We have miracles. I say it all the time, there is no way we would have gone to the moon if it weren’t for a team of people that put their egos aside, stopped competing and started working together in diversity with belonging and accepting other people’s perspectives. Not just accepting but by looking for them and requiring them in the room. If you look in a room and everybody looks like you, talks like you, has the same background as you and has the same education as you, you are missing something huge. You are missing 90% of what could be in that room.
There are a lot of people who surround themselves with themselves. It makes people comfortable. As we go out back in the world, we will recognize someone who has missed the point when you are outside a bar and you see someone yell Moderna and the other person yell Pfizer and then they start punching each other in the face.
At least they are vaccinated.
It can be a maskless fight.
Those bloody noses will show up because they are not behind a mask.
That’s the new mask. It’s the name of the vaccine that we have.
Alex and Cristina, thank you so much for joining me. I hope that we continue to have a collaborative relationship as opposed to a competitive one. I’m not fighting you for readers. You are not fighting me for readers. I want to thank everyone out there for reading. Stay tuned to the show where I interview more people who decided to do something they care about as opposed to what other people expected them to do.
Thank you, Stephen.
Thank you.
Important Links:
- From Negative to Positive
- Uncover the Human
- LinkedIn article – The Single Most Important Factor in Creating a Work-Life Balance in 2021
- Spotify – Uncover the Human
- Apple – Uncover the Human
- Alex Cullimore – LinkedIn
- Cristina Amigoni
- WeAreSiamo.com
- Instagram – We Are Siamo
- @WeAreSiamo – Facebook
About Cristina Amigoni
I am a human experience architect, a coach, a consultant, a problem solver and a creator of space where people can flourish as their true selves. As I took on various roles, titles, and jobs, I learned that my “why” didn’t change – helping people connect with themselves, the people around them, and their organizations.
When people truly connect, teams shine, solutions are found, and new ideas take flight. In short: magic happens. I believe that each person has enormous untapped potential, that the true role of leaders (in communities, organizations and within the family) is to foster and celebrate the strengths and passions of each individual and uncover their authenticity.
About Alex Cullimore
I am a writer, comedian, and data and analytics developer (the classic triple threat). From an early age, I loved sharing my experiences through writing, including a grade school paper on being bored at school that the teacher lauded as “5 paragraphs on boredom that never lost my interest.
”In the years since, I have developed a passion for learning and sharing information regarding authenticity, privilege, and social justice. Combined with a career in data and analytics, I love the challenge of bringing in new figures and visualizations to support the journey to equality and living a deeply human life.