Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: We may be on the verge of true hornified nervous systems, but sometimes it's hard to tell those that are doing it to survive versus those that are truly hydrophobic systems that will never accept hydration again. Coherence is what defines us, and to create conditions to where we no longer yearn for coherence would be a tragic thing.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: This episode of Roots to Fruits is produced and distributed by Be Connected, a social media management firm in northeast Wisconsin.
[00:00:39] Speaker A: All right, you ready for another episode of Roots to Fruits, Chris?
[00:00:43] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:00:44] Speaker A: All right, well, let's do what we always do. Let's take a nice big, deep yoga breath.
Let the shoulders fall down, let the throat soften.
Let's get into. Let's co regulate so we can get into this thing.
So before we get started, once again, I have my favorite friend and co host for Roots to Fruits, Chris Schaefer. You have been a delightful addition to my vision for this show and something that I was thinking about recently, teaching a yoga class. Every once in a while, I'll bring in the chakras of the system and. And one of the things about Rise, you know, increasing your energy is getting to that self awareness and part of self awareness, I call it becoming increasingly unflappable, meaning you still get flapped in your day, in your week, in your month, but it's how long it takes you to let that purge, let it roll off you so you can synthesize the feelings that those emotions. But you are someone that I call on the path to being unflappable because you really do let things roll off your back. You metabolize things very well. And I've just always noticed that about you. But just in a recent yoga class, I thought of you because what I was preaching, you're kind of like my poster child for the person that is that. So just wanted to share that with you, Kelly.
[00:02:11] Speaker C: Thank you, that's very kind.
I will tell you, one of the things that helps me the most is just realizing a lot of the things that come in as negative energy is so much more about the event or other people than it is about me. And that's really helped me just to kind of let things like just roll off my shoulders.
I really do enjoy this time these topics with you.
I have shared this with you and other people. I feel that you are a true, like industry evangelist. You're a connector and there are some strong messages that are amazingly important. So very happy to. Very happy to be here.
[00:02:53] Speaker A: All right. So, Chris, today's a big day.
[00:02:55] Speaker C: It is a big day.
[00:02:56] Speaker A: Tiny Hands, a soft power model, is officially released. The ebook that is the soft cover and hardcover editions drop on September 15th. The audiobook will land sometime between now and then. I'm getting close to having that finished, but as you can see behind me and here in my hand, I just received my advanced soft cover copies and I love it. Very, very happy, very excited. But this episode of Roots to Fruits, yes, it is about the book, but not in the way you, as listeners might expect.
It's not a pitch. It's. It's a pulse, really. It's a signal meant to reach people who've already felt something and they're kind of searching for a resonation around it that'll make sense in a moment. But even if they didn't find it or look for, there's the language system that's missing. And that's really what this is about. Because Tiny Hands just isn't something to read. It's something to remember. It's a language system for naming what your body already knows.
Signals that show up in the boardroom, in the break room, in your fascia, in your family.
Whether you manage supply chains or guide meditations, this model speaks to systems from the inside out.
Chris, you felt it. You walk into a room. Maybe it's your company, a client, a classroom, or even a casual get together.
Everyone's smiling. The small talk does flow, but you can sense that something's off. The air's thinner. Everyone seems braced or ready to brace.
The jokes don't always land, even the good ones.
It's not hostile. It just kind of has that dry feeling. And you feel it in your shoulders and your gut and your breath. And before your brain can really name it, your body already has.
And that's the language we're here to remember. Soft power is new, but the search that led to it started for me 25 years ago with the question that I called the ultimate human dilemma.
And it took me that long to see the through line.
And when I finally did, I realized it's all somatic.
Because what we call burnout, misalignment, resistance, or disconnection are often just symptoms of dehydrated systems, individual nervous systems, overheating. And then you plug those into networks of other braced and overheating systems. It just percolates until the whole organization just starts to begin to seize flow.
The company, the team, the brand.
It's not just a structure, it's a somatic garden, a collective field of nervous systems. And when that field dries out, or worse, gets Saturated in oil.
There's no amount of DEI training or innovation funnel that will restore that flow. Because oil repels water, and water is life.
Water is signal. Water is coherence.
So when an organization begins to thirst for regeneration, for greener supply chains, for more truthful leadership or actual sustainability, but it's still operating in a hydrophobic container.
It has two choices. It can either continue to pretend it's working, or it can begin building islands outside of itself, bridges to hydration, places where resonance can be restored and survivors can later be transported.
Because you can't water a desert sealed in plastic.
And maybe restoring that flow in ourselves and our companies doesn't come from behavior charts or culture decks, but from reopening hydration valves.
These valves aren't abstract. They live in fascia, in breath, in your gut instinct.
They shape how we lead, how we establish boundaries, and how we metabolize pressure.
But no one gave us the words.
That's what soft power offers. A language system to map the valves that govern coherence, the lifeline of our bodies, our brands, and our collective future.
Some of the dichotomies we'll explore today are biological, like hydrophilic versus hydrophobic. Others are cultural or organizational, like enzymatic leadership versus control from fear.
And together, they form what I call the hydration ladder, the spine of soft power model.
So today, Chris and I are going to riff. We're going to riff on the valves, the traits, the dichotomies, the tensions that reveal whether a system, whether it's in your body, in your team, or in your brand. Is it bracing, or is it ready to flow?
A few more that we'll explore will be CO regulation versus CO isolation, flexibility versus hornification, composting grief versus accumulated residue.
And we'll show you just how one coherent nervous system, just one, can begin to rehydrate an entire room.
You know, Chris, like a yawn. You see it, you feel it, you do it.
That's Fascia's WI fi. That's what we've been missing. This episode isn't about learning something new. It's about remembering what your body already knows and finally having the language to name it.
Because once you remember, you don't just hear the world differently. You begin to feel coherent again. You start to connect to it.
So let's begin.
[00:08:43] Speaker C: All of what you said absolutely, intuitively makes sense. There's some new language here that we should go into. So before we go into those dichotomies, one of the things that is important to mention are really the Hydration valves. And part of that language you've introduced includes things like hydrophilic hornification, hydrogen bonding.
And of course, we all feel those in our bodies, even though we haven't really defined them that way. The best grounding is really the hydration ladder.
How does understanding that help us make sense of what we're actually experiencing in our lives, in our teams, in our leadership?
[00:09:26] Speaker A: It's so important, and it is a set of valves. So I'm glad you said valves and ladder, because it's a ladder of valves and they're all related to hydration in some way. So let's go deeper into those, because if. If we're going to talk about soft power, we have to start with water.
Not as a symbol, as a system.
The. The hydration ladder is the architecture life follows to stay alive, to stay soft, adaptive and connected.
It maps almost perfectly to the nervous system and to the lived experience of any human system, from a body to a brand.
So that first level is bonding versus binding. And this is where connection begins, with hydrogen bonding. How water joins things together, not by force, but by offering those tiny hydrogen hands. They're reaching, they're gentle, and they're reversible. It's how your DNA stays together.
It's how trees stand up. It's how trust is built between people and within teams and even within societies. Bonding is what allows a system to move with others without fusing or fracturing.
Binding, on the other hand, is what happens when that connection becomes control. It's a latching on, a locking in. It may hold, but it doesn't flow make sense. So you're locking it. So that next level is hydrophilic versus hydrophobic.
This is the valve of receptivity.
Hydrophilic surfaces pull water in. They're ready for connection.
Hydrophobic ones repel it, like oil on a nonstick pan.
And it's the same with people.
Some absorb presence like a sponge. Others deflect it. They armor up, they stay dry and distant. You felt it that moment. You walk into a room, it's either welcoming or it's walled. One draws signal in, the other keeps it out. Next level of the ladder is hydration versus dehydration. This is where coherence becomes kinetic.
Hydration isn't just moisture. It's flow, signal, flow. Remember what we hear and the vibrations of our favorite song. It's all made possible by water's ability to resonate energy.
It's how breath flows. It shows us how emotions flow. So in your body, it means fascia glides. Right in teams it means responsiveness, not reactivity.
Dehydration is where that flow collapses, where purpose gets replaced with performance and people check boxes instead of checking in collaboration slowly becomes co located isolation.
And the system, whether human or organizational, starts to seize.
And that leads us to the next level, which is flexibility versus rigidity.
This is where hydration enables.
Can it bend without breaking a supple nervous system, A culture that can stretch, absorb and realign.
The opposite of that is bracing like a tree without give look strong until the first windstorm cracks it in half.
Flexibility is the hallmark of health.
Rigidity is just fragility in disguise.
And then we have that final rung and I call it the cliff Hornification.
This is the collapse point. Hortification is what happens when hydration doesn't just decline, it disappears. Chris the last molecule of water always shuts the door on its way out.
Signal will never reenter. Re enter.
No invitation, no resonance, no repair.
Think jerky. It doesn't rot, doesn't hydrate, it just persists.
So hornified systems still operate, still comply, but the life in them are gone. You can't yawn in a hornified culture. You can't cry in a hornified family. And a hornified nervous system, I don't even think it can feel the sun.
So each rung on this ladder is a valve. And every person, every team, every system has its own hydration profile, shaped by what it survived and what is stored and where it has been seen or not seen in its path. And here's the catch. You can't skip steps. You can't hydrate a system that still repels bonding. You can't build flexibility on a dehydrated foundation.
You can't lead with resonance from a hornified core.
The hydration ladder isn't just a model, it's a mirror.
It shows you exactly where flow was lost and what it will take to let it back in.
So that's the fundamentals of the hydration ladder.
[00:14:14] Speaker C: That is a very good foundation for us to talk about, I'd say some real life experiences with these dichotomies and talking a little bit more about them. For me, there is a hierarchy to all of these.
And for me, I feel like the base is really the enzymatic leader versus the command and control. So, so let's start there.
[00:14:39] Speaker A: So you can think of it as catalyzing systems versus coercing them to perform. So enzymatic leaders, they don't force outcomes. They generally, they're conditions creators. They understand proximity and conditions for which catalysis or change can happen. So you generally don't hear them, you just see them. If you're looking like enzymes in the body, they lower the activation energy for change, which has to do with a lot of things. Chemistry, proximity, hydration.
They're those people. They activate it from within.
Control from fear is the opposite. Where it extracts it, it provides it applies pressure, it forces compliance, so it doesn't cohere. A system. It manages symptoms and enforces the silence. You know, if you want more eggs, you can stress the chickens to a certain point, but eventually you're not going to get more eggs. So. So when you. When you. When you think about the enzyme, they're a gardener. They understand that if you want to grow fruit, you don't focus on the fruit. You focus on the soil and the roots in the soil.
So these enzymatic leaders are basically somatic gardeners. They understand people. They. They respond to them, and they just lower. They lower it. You know, one composts grief, the other spikes cortisol. I mean, that's the easiest way to explain it.
[00:16:00] Speaker C: I have been fortunate in my career to have a number of enzymatic leaders, also the reverse.
But what I will say about the enzymatic leader is that I find that they bring an environment where everyone has a freedom to be a catalyst for change, to enact things, to execute, so that there's always this focus on action.
So there's such a power to that because there are still deadlines, there are still project plans, there are still metrics that need to be achieved. Yet the enablement of the team as individual and collective leaders, it's proven to work, and I've experienced it. I hope you have as well, and other people, because it really makes such a difference versus the reverse.
[00:16:54] Speaker A: When I look back at my career, I think the ones that stand out that undeniably were enzymatic leaders were the mentors.
[00:17:02] Speaker C: Right?
[00:17:03] Speaker A: And when you look at what is a mentor when you're in business, like a young engineer, learning your way through, like I was, these were people that. I wasn't the only one seeking their input. Like, they had a certain energy about them that was inviting. So they ended up mentoring lots of people. But, you know where you never found them?
Senior leadership.
They were never there.
Where you want to foster gardening, where you want to foster soil health, they were in the organization. They were respected and liked, but they were never in those positions. But there's one in particular that really stuck out to me, and it's advice I give people often that have found themselves in really, really difficult situations with a cortisol spiker leading the team or just on the team or on the committee or whatever it is.
There is always a question that you can ask that will stop the emotionality of whatever it is.
And if you spend your time in self reflection and not reaction, just try to figure out what that question is. Because when you find it, in my experience, watching this person perform this masterclass in it is generally the person never answered the question. They didn't have to. The gravity of the question itself moved things forward. So I look at that, I'm like, boy, that is man. That is a gardener with a killer tool in his toolkit of being an enzymatic leader because he was just so masterful at it.
So I just look back to those people in my life and they absolutely were formative for me because they were enzymatic formative.
[00:18:45] Speaker C: And then taking all of those good traits to other experiences, I just feel like it has the multiplication effect, which is amazingly positive.
[00:18:57] Speaker A: And basically the mentoring that they do, hopefully those people like me from them, you know, is. Is my outcome a result of that mentoring for coherence that I've carried forward in my life. So in a lot of ways they're the kind of nurturing future enzymatic leaders through that mentoring process.
[00:19:14] Speaker C: Callie, at the beginning of the episode, you and I did a.
A breathing exercise just to release and to do a little decompression before we jumped in.
And that to me is our co regulation versus CO isolation.
So what can you share beyond that grounding breath?
[00:19:34] Speaker A: I think that that's kind of what led that final through line that I described when I was looking at the ultimate human dilemma and studying that. I mean it was nothing of. It was wrong. It was all there, clear.
But what was missing from it, I think is this one, the importance of this one.
In Homo sapiens, because we won the ice age, we survived. And say one, we survived the ice Age not because we were the fastest or the strongest, but because we co regulated, we, we stayed warm, we stayed.
Our fear was able to reside through connection, through coherence. So our central nervous systems are always yearning for that connection. And when it's not there, it will take a fake to replace it because that's that need that we have. So co regulation, nothing. Ha. Nothing positive can come from emotionality. So the first step in a busy day, your team, whatever, is just to take the time to breathe, to rel.
No one here is trying to take anything from you like this is the moment of trust building and sharing. So, so CO regulation is like the simplest thing to do and no one does it because they're too busy. So there's a joke, right, that everyone should meditate 20 minutes a day and if you're too busy, do it two hours a day. Right?
Right. So, so it, it is a lot of that. It is breathing, breathing with others, but it's really about getting that nervous system to settle down so that it doesn't try to hijack your, your thought processes. So CO regulation versus CO isolation. Because everybody's trying to regulate themselves through, through hornifying conditions wherever they are.
And when you're in those hornifying conditions, sometimes it helps to have that, that mentor, that other person that sees you.
So, so you do see some CO regulation, usually pockets within the environment where that's the role that they're serving each other. But we're just not able to get the whole team, the whole organization to that same point of, of it.
[00:21:39] Speaker C: And that's one of my favorite key points about all of this, is that the magic of it is you could have one person, just one person with that coherent signal and they really become essentially the pulse for the entire room. And, and the energy changes.
[00:21:57] Speaker A: Is, it is crazy, isn't it, when, when somebody that there are those people that just their presence entering the room, the energy in the room changes.
Yet there's people that don't believe the somatic side of, of us exists. But look, it's true. Mass, mass and energy is duality. So you know those people, certainly they, they radiate. One of the first steps is building trust. Well, you can't build trust when you're braced. Are you you right? So, so those leaders, generally, the first thing they do is make trust accessible again. Because if it's not perceived as accessible, your central nervous system will prevent you from, from trusting others.
So, so there's a really solid, energetic undertone to, to CO regulation that I think is incredibly important, especially in our world, right where we're trying to chart, we're trying to form circles of sustainability around systems that were built to be a pipe that's long and metal and extractive and never intended to form a circle. And we're all trying to grease it, to flex it into a circle.
Boy, some CO regulation sure would help us get there.
[00:23:05] Speaker C: Kelly, this is such a great point to talk about vulnerability versus fear and the way that this is a hydration valve. If you could share with us, I.
[00:23:19] Speaker A: Think this is the one that, that really had A palatable connect. When I realized the opposite of fear isn't fearless or bravery, that it's vulnerability, that was a really important connection for me because of my yoga training. So I'm going to real quick just put it into that context because when you're born your root chakra is that's your root that so up to about 10 years old you're selfish. It's all about you and your survival and your, you know, your unit sacral is the next one. And that's where you start becoming curious about other people, other sexes and you know, so that, that other people exist in the world. Right. And you start moving up and we spend a lot of time in the solar plexus, which is where your truth is. That's where your confidence of knowing your truth comes from. And a lot of people are going around with, with truth. It's really just ego based performance.
Not true.
This was because it. And it basically it's sitting in your 10 year old self. What was it about your 10 year old self that excited you, offended you, irritated you?
That person is you today.
And generally when people refine that they can start to love themselves because their truth is so resonant. It's so clear that that's when you start making those changes in your life, people that drain your energy, you start creating more distance from. So to me vulnerability is a really great word for this because when you get to that point that you love yourself and then the next one up is the heart chakra where now you have that desire to love others and then you speak it through your throat. But vulnerability is a silly word because being vulnerable, it doesn't make any sense because you're just speaking your truth, you're living your truth. So I find the opposite of fear where you really are resource guarding everyone, everyone's out to get you and you know in the world that's so reinforcing money is made by reinforcing that energy collapse into dense mass. But when you get to that point where you know your truth, you're not being vulnerable. So, so, so it is vulnerability versus fear that I think we don't realize just to what extent our life is being consumed about where we fall on those two.
[00:25:33] Speaker C: Agreed. And you make a great point. The vulnerability side, there's such strength in it. And what I also love about it is there's such a genuineness to it because it's really a declaration of this is me, this is the situation, essentially this is the view.
So there's a genuineness, there's an honesty to it, even though it has a descriptor that almost seems like it's counter to that and softer. It's not.
[00:26:06] Speaker A: It's complete strike where we started, where I said, you remind me of what I sometimes teach in my yoga classes about being unflappable. Unflappability comes from that, right? You don't, you're not getting knocked around and flapped every day and managing the dispersing of those emotions because you don't need to prove anything. You're just.
Your truth is there. So in business it's interesting, right, because you get large global shareholder driven, you know, know they need to do something different, such as in our world of, of sustainability and packaging. But they're fond with fear of being wrong.
It holds the industry hostage in groupthink. You know, over 90% if not 100% of large global chemical companies, their, their R and D is 100% customer driven. Even their market driven programs, there's a customer at the end of it because they have fear doing it if there isn't.
So, so it's that fear. It's the fear of being wrong. Fear that no one else is doing it, reinforcing the group. Think of why no one's doing it. Where in all acts, what we're actually witnessing is industry is stuck in fear and not able to embrace vulnerability. So they're stuck. Their, their chakra energy is stuck. If you were to look at it through that lens.
[00:27:31] Speaker C: Excellent point. I think this is a good place to go right into composting grief versus accumulated residue.
[00:27:40] Speaker A: Boy, I love this one in the book. And I said we weren't going to talk about the book, but I'm talking about the book for just a moment.
There's a part in it where. And this again, just a real resonance for me because you and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get packaging waste into compost to where it becomes earth digestible and addresses entropy and all those things. And it's such a, a complicated thing because it was never built to do that. But the reason why I think we're looking at that wrong, we talk about end of life. It's not about the end of life of something. It's about where everything starts.
Carbon starts in the compost, in the renewal. Our ability to grow fruit is the soil in the company. The people form the soil within that organization. And if you don't treat that soil, so how do you put compost into that soil? We know how to put compost into organic farming. It comes from the compost facilities. It's the same analogy. It's the same metaphor here. Grief is not sadness. Yes, if you lose a family member or a close friend, that certainly is grief. But grief is the daily stuff, the stuff that never gets metabolized. Look, you are not what you eat. You are what you metabolize.
And we are not metabolizing so much that eventually that leaks out of the basement for which we stuff it through the.
The walls of our internal system for which we're trying to hold it in. So. So that when I talk about composting grief, that's a big part of what's holding us back is we are so drowning in the grief because we're ashamed to address it. We're. We're performative. You know, suck it up, move on, show strength. No, it shows someone that's. That's gaining weight of grief.
So that accumulated residue is. Is. Is really, really tough for. With. And if you look at an organization of a hundred people or ten thousand people, you are building off of all of that grief.
You're building a big grief mountain.
And you have no idea you're doing it because no one is catering to that soil. No one's. So to me, compost is where it starts. It is where regeneration and renewal begins. So we shouldn't be talking about it as an end of life. It should be the beginning of life. It should all start there.
[00:30:03] Speaker C: That is exactly it. One of my favorite parts of compostability is the regenerative cycle and the context. There is really a healthy regenerative cycle. There is something that has essentially decomposed. It's contributing to new. A new growth cycle.
So applicable in concept and in reality.
[00:30:30] Speaker D: Yep.
[00:30:30] Speaker A: We want macro micronutrients in that soil to grow fruit.
[00:30:34] Speaker C: No doubt.
[00:30:37] Speaker A: Sticking our grief in the basement is not the way you do that.
[00:30:40] Speaker C: No doubt. It's got a process.
[00:30:42] Speaker A: It's got a process.
This is a really good point for.
[00:30:45] Speaker C: Us to go into reverberant versus performative.
So really the idea here is the coherent transmission versus managed optics. So if you can share a little more insight here.
[00:30:59] Speaker A: Boy, this. This one is pro. Is my most recent discovery of. Because for me, I'm like, so the latter is the ladder. The book empowers the ladder. But this is more into how do you apply it, how do you see?
And everything is a dichotomy. And this is that one dichotomy that.
[00:31:18] Speaker D: I always felt and never could quite put my finger on it.
So we're going to break it down now. So it's the difference between again, coherent dream emission and manage optics. So we kind of touched on it with the enzymatic leader.
So the way to really think about this is a reverberant system. Reverberant meaning energy reverberant. That's a system that feels safe enough to always scan inward first and then broadcast from Truth, not performance is based on fear. So you can feel it in the pauses, not as performance, but as coherence moving through the body. So when you're asking a really deep question, there's the pause to really think about that question and to speak from a basis of truth about that question or suggestion that maybe the question is not exactly the right question versus the pause to simply figure out how to quickly scramble the words together to fuel.
[00:32:20] Speaker A: The performative optics for which. So there's a shallowness to. To the pauses that. That I think is one of the clues.
You know, one scans in and then radiates out. The other scans out and shapes in. So they're forming their inside to match the. The external.
I don't know.
Do people come to mind that you think of in your career and in your life, Chris, that would fit that, yes.
[00:32:50] Speaker C: And I actually have seen a couple of very positive modeling, I'd say, experiences that I'm happy to share. And one of them was with someone who, when presented with a question that was a great question.
However, it was clearly a surprise, accepted it and actually said, I need a moment, took a pause and said, I actually need a moment. It's a great question. I really need.
I need a bit of time to be able to give you a thoughtful response. And I thought, what a good way to just acknowledge it. I mean, we see it, we take the pause, we see it in other people, but this was a verbal acknowledgment of it. So I have used that sense because I think that's very positive to do.
[00:33:38] Speaker A: And, and you'll see it like, with new people that you meet and, you know, like it'd be a customer or, you know, and. And you're, you're. You're giving them your view of things and you're sharing with them. You're. You're pouring hydration into them.
And one of the signs that you'll know that, that hydration was received is. Is when they'll circle back and say, you know, you said something before that triggered something, and they want to share what that triggered. Like that's somebody who's scanning inward versus, you know, we were all taught the Scientific method in school. The scientific method is very straightforward.
Learn, come up with a hypothesis and go test it.
But you don't prove hypotheses right, you prove them wrong.
What do people do? They come up with, with an explanation and they go seeking reinforcement for it.
So when that person is gaining outward, they're not listening, scanning inward and then reporting back out. They're simply looking for what fits the narrative, what fits their view.
[00:34:38] Speaker C: Right.
[00:34:39] Speaker A: So you don't, they're, they're not reverberating, they're performative. And something else on the performative side. Again, we don't see mentors in senior leadership. We don't see enzymatic leaders in true leadership. We see them as mentors in, in the soil, trying to protect the soil.
But there are so many people that I've met in my career that are in management that it are responsible for sales or product management, R and D or whatever it is. And you can see that their somatic system wants hydration, that wants a hydrated environment to operate in, but they're not in one. But they want to maintain what they have, their income, their position.
They're just trying to survive. So as they start shutting down their internal valves to preserve their own internal hydration, you can see it in the way they carry the stress of being performative in a, in a, in a hornified world because private equity owns us and we've had three bad quarters and all those pressures that come, it's just this reinforcing hornified environment. It's like, it's like trying to irrigate inside a vat of oil.
[00:35:46] Speaker C: Right.
[00:35:47] Speaker A: It's really, really hard to do. And, and I feel for those people because I feel like they genuinely are hydrated, reverberant, but they can't be to, to any real noticeable level because they have a certain performative side. They have to keep up. So, so I, I look for that and sometimes I see it and it's really hard to tell somebody that's performative because they feel they have to be or they're performative because their central nervous systems are already down the path of what I think is the next race of human Homo sapien is going to become Homo hornificus to where they really don't need eyebrows anymore. They're that just stasis and scale and performance.
Jerky, look, jerky doesn't rot, but you can't put it in a glass of water. It no longer absorbs it. So we may be on the verge of true hornified nervous systems but sometimes it's hard to tell. Those that are doing it to survive versus those that are truly hydrophobic systems that will never accept hydration again.
[00:36:49] Speaker C: Well, hopefully we'll not go to that because I think there are some powerful words, some powerful things that are shaping the world. And your book, I believe, is one of those. And these podcasts and any interaction that you have will make sure that that can't happen. That would be too great of a peril.
Can't even imagine.
[00:37:11] Speaker A: Can't imagine.
[00:37:12] Speaker C: Can't imagine.
[00:37:13] Speaker A: Look, coherence is what, what defines us.
And to, to create conditions to where we no longer yearn for coherence would be, would be a tragic thing.
[00:37:23] Speaker C: Absolutely.
All right, so let's go into. Now, I know this is one of your favorite dichotomies, and rightly so, because there's a lot of power behind it, which is mass versus energy.
[00:37:35] Speaker A: This was what unlocked the ultimate human dilemma into soft power. And how that book more or less percolated, rather crystallized rather quickly was the mass versus energy, because that's the fundamentals of quantum physics is that all matter is both mass and energy.
And there's the double slit experiment with an electron or a photon that proves all of this. And it basically says that we're both of those things. And so when you think about, well, what does that mean? Again, we all begin with mass, literal mass. A body, a root system, a survival machine.
The child has got to first take food, safety, attention. It's not dysfunction, right? That's, that's formation. That's what's forming that, that child.
But mass isn't just the starting point. It's not meant to continue to stay heavy as we grow. We're met with attunement and rhythm and safety and challenge. And we start transmuting that mass into higher resonating energy up towards the pineal gland, our third eye. That's where truth rises, emotion flows, insight sparks. We begin to resonate, not just react.
So that's the soft power path, right? It goes back to the chakra energy of root, sacral, solar, heart, you know, all it. So you're going from mass to energy.
And what we're seeing today is so, so if a 6 year old stops developing after, you know, so if a child stops developing after six years old, let's say we would call that a problem.
But in business it's fine, it's normal.
Because we've grown capitalist businesses based on extraction, like look, extractive capital. We know all of this.
That's not really the Problem. The problem is they're still stuck in root chakra thinking, resource guarding. Covet your relationships with your vendors and your suppliers and your customers. And it's just all that protective fear prevents them from truly going up in energy. So we kind of have this almost increasing the density of mass versus energy.
So when Einstein's telling us on the chalkboard, solving for black holes and the cosmos with E equals MC squared, I just want people to realize that that's not just that manic grin and wild hair on a chalkboard. And some of his great quotes. Look, that is the equation that, that is the somatic understanding. Homo sapiens have somatic needs that are being wholly underserved.
So that C is not the speed of light squared, it's coherence squared.
Because in 1 gram of cellulose, there's 10 to the power of 21 hydrogen bonds. That's a billion trillion little connections that I can whisper them apart one by one. But if I try to take them all at once, I can't. They're too strong.
So they're soft bonds, but they build strong.
And it's the same with people. So if you can start building coherence network, you can start living that need of somatic balancing. You start creating really strong things through connection. So equals MC squared is actually coherence squared in the way I look at it.
And I feel like that's what we haven't been doing enough. Look, empaths, the, the, the, the truly resonating, coherent.
I call us professional worriers, not professional warriors.
So we don't organize, we stay, we attune. So if we recognize this about ourselves in our situations, and we were like, I want to be a part of that. I want to build a coherent network. At least now you have the language to understand it. You can see it and now you can do something with it, because you see it and you understand it. And now you realize that those relationships you already have in your life, either at work or not, those are nodes of coherent connection. Stop using it for therapy and start using it for purpose. Right? Put the car into gear and do something with it.
[00:41:50] Speaker C: Oh my gosh. I love the concept of doing something with purpose.
I love that that came out as a concept. And one of the things that has always resonated with me when you and I have talked about this is that there is a danger to density.
Because, and this is one of your quotes, and I wrote it down because I love it so much.
It was never meant to carry that much unprocessed signal, like the design isn't there to do it.
[00:42:21] Speaker A: And certainly when you're stuck having to regulate, self regulate so as that that energy and how does it happen? How do we keep turning that into more and more dense? It's. Look, money is made by reinforcing fears. So there's a lot of things that are trying to drive us to. To fear everybody else and to not want to be coherent. Coherent can be dangerous in the wrong hornified hands. Right, right.
But again, once you realize that, my God, I've been dismissive to half the people in my life for the last three months. I didn't want to be that way. I'm just reacting to I'm having to protect my own internal hydration valves so it's okay to close them. Just be self aware of what you're doing so that everyone else doesn't feel that the reverberation from it.
Because we're all in the same situation. We're all trying to maintain hydration, find sources some of us like. For me, it's why I'm doing the podcast, why I wrote the book I self hydrate by the poor.
The more I hydrate others, the more hydration I receive. I'm a hydration machine, which is funny because I don't swim very well. I displace water.
[00:43:39] Speaker C: Kelly, this gives great purpose and this inspires purpose if nothing else.
That is one of the greatest concepts that came out of this conversation on mass versus energy. So thank you for inspiring it.
[00:43:56] Speaker A: Thank you, Chris. And thank you for being a sounding board when I had something I had to get off my chest, for being one of the first to actually read the book and give me the feedback that I needed. That actually if you remember, it started as a series of white papers that we decided there's a book here. So I couldn't have done it without you.
[00:44:18] Speaker C: Thank you, Kelly. I appreciate that. I feel that you could. But thank you for the acknowledgment. Very kind.
[00:44:23] Speaker A: You're fantastic. So with that another episode under wraps, More fun stuff to come. We're going to start weaving in some industry people at some point here soon. But right now we're just getting the, the legs on, on the message and the language. And again the. The book drops September 15th. You should be able to pre order it in the next week or two, sometime by early August. You should be able to pre buy it for September 15th. And as I said, the ebook is available today and the audiobook is coming. So I'm working on that right now. So until next time. What do we say?
Bond soft and build strong.
Till next time. Thanks.
[00:45:03] Speaker B: Thanks for tuning in to Roots to Fruits. If this conversation resonated, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and share it with someone who's ready to grow with us. Let's build something lasting together.
