Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: And the difference between a person and a company is actually not so different.
Because a company has a birth record, it has a death certificate, it's liable, both criminally and from a tax perspective.
And it has a personality like a person does. It's called a culture.
And when that culture starts to reinforce dehydration, there will be a point that that company reaches a hysteresis. And a hysteresis is like stretching a rubber band to where it no longer can recover back to where it started. You get to a point of brittleness that you can't. It becomes unreceptive to hydration. And I really worry that we're in that place with a lot of global companies, that they have become so dehydrated that they, like a vampire, reject a pail of water to be poured into them.
Um, that's. That's worrisome. But the hope that I have is that within those organizations or companies, there's a lot of. Of people still hydrated, still resonant, that want to soft bond and build strong, but they're being held back from doing it. So by being aware that this exists, it helps those that really do still have, you know, big reserves of energy, soft bond energy, to do something better, do something different.
This episode of Roots to Fruits is produced and distributed by Be Connected, a social media management firm in northeast Wisconsin.
You probably think you know what I'm going to say, that I'm here to talk about packaging or compostables or maybe mindfulness. If you know me from yoga, maybe you expect something gentle or inspiring.
If you know me from the industry, you're bracing for material sciency stuff. Or maybe a new hot take on carbon. But that's not what this is.
Because the most important thing I've ever learned didn't come from a lab.
It didn't come from a factory.
And it didn't come from sitting in, still in meditation.
It came from noticing what no one else in the room seemed to be able to see or name.
That we weren't tired from working too hard.
We were tired from bonding too little.
We weren't burning out because we lacked resources.
We were burning out because truth had nowhere to land.
I started seeing it everywhere.
Smart people in brilliant teams quietly drowning in meetings where no one said what they meant.
Sustainability strategies ridden by cultures too dehydrated to repair anything.
Families, teams, even movements falling apart, not from conflict, but from silence.
And then it hit me.
The systems we live inside aren't breaking. They're dehydrating.
And just like the fascia in your body, when a culture loses its hydration, it stops flexing, it stops adapting, it stops feeling until all that's left is friction.
But here's the twist.
You can't brute force your way out of dehydration.
You can't lead your way through it with charm.
You can't KPI your way through it with spreadsheets.
You have to dissolve something first.
You have to soften the armor.
You have to remember what it feels like to be held before you can hold anything else.
And no one teaches you this.
Not in business school, not in strategy sessions, not even in therapy sometimes.
But your body knows, your nervous system knows, your cells know. Because life isn't held together by force. It's held together by bonds. Gentle ones, flexible ones, reversible ones.
Like the tiny hydrogen hands of a water molecule that bond nature, that hold DNA together, that hold you and the plants and trees outside together.
And the moment you reject those tiny hands, the moment your system says not now to feeling is that moment the collapse begins. Not loud, not sudden, just a quiet drop in signal.
And only the hydrated can hear it.
So no, this isn't about sustainability.
It's not about strategy.
It's not about branding or alignment or team culture. It's about remembering what it feels like when the bond holds.
And if you've ever walked into a room that looked fine on paper but it felt wrong in your gut, then you already know what I'm talking about.
So if part of you has stayed soft after all the pressure, then you're really tuned in.
In the first episode, we introduced the concept of soft power by telling the backstory of its roots in the ultimate human dilemma.
Now we want to apply it in the cascading loops. From self, the individual cascaded out to teams, then to companies, to organizations, and even to entire industries, even societies. And there is no one better to help me do that than my good friend, who is a patient listener, a steadfast defender of the environment, and has a gift at seeing and feeling energy in the room. Chris Schaefer. Chris is a sustainability advocate and tenured marketer and materials that have a positive environmental impact.
But most importantly, Chris grew up with composting in her family's organic garden and is passionate in building not only healthier people, but to do so on a healthier planet.
Welcome, Chris, and thank you for staying on this journey. Journey with me for another base building episode of Roots to Fruits.
[00:06:23] Speaker B: Kelly, thank you so much. I'm very happy to join this. And that was A very lovely introduction, I would say what you are saying, it's so relatable. And I think you're right. It's not really the collapse that really hurts the most. It's really just that moment when the signal drops and nobody really notices.
[00:06:44] Speaker A: You know, it's wild. It's all. All we felt, you know, in our bodies and our teams. That quiet moment when you go from things that are connected to more mechanical. And I think that's the lens that we need to bring today. Because what we're really talking about here is it isn't burnout or culture or strategy. We're really talking about hydration.
So in the first episode, we walk through what that background is. Now we want to take you through the loop.
[00:07:09] Speaker B: I've been in those rooms too, the ones that really look great on paper.
They feel very brittle.
I've never really had a language to explain it before until you really coined it.
It's really the dehydration, the hornification, even grief that didn't compost.
So, Kelly, for those of us just learning and just understanding the term soft power, can you walk us through those nested loops you reference?
What do you mean when you say coherence moves from to system?
[00:07:50] Speaker A: And this is really kind of like the big wake up moment for, for me in putting it all together is, is understanding cellulose, paper products and realizing that humans and trees and plants have the same percent water. The only difference between chlorophyll and hemoglobin, the enzyme that gives us life. One has iron in the middle, makes it red, the other has manganese in the middle, making it green. But we're all built the same way, with those tiny hands of moisture basically holding us together. Holding our bodies together is the hydrogen bonding of water and the molecules that they bond together.
So when you start to feel dehydration in the body, what do you feel? Soreness, tightness. You feel those pinches, those little points where the muscle feels bad? Today, those are crunchy little dehydration points in the physical body.
And if you think about our fascia, the fascia, it is the bioelectrical grid. It is the communication platform of how our central nervous system communicates to the body. So if you start hornifying pieces of it, it starts to affect the ability to function.
So you just take that through. Now let's look at emotions. So physical dehydration and hydration is important, but it doesn't stop there. It's emotional, it's energetic, it's organizational, and it's absolutely measurable because when you start to feel that dehydration physically, it starts to affect your dehydration emotionally. And all of everything is based on dichotomies. Trust, fear, afraid, confident, you know, they're all dichotomies. If you look at the stacking of those dichotomies, if it's open, if you're, if you trust that flow is open, if you fear that trust is closed. So those open and closing are all of our internal hydration mechanisms for us both physically and emotionally and energetically.
So when you take a hydrated person and put em into a dehydrated environment, they may start unconsciously locking some of those bowels.
And then it starts to reflect in not being present, being dismissive, being quiet when you should speak. So the individual hydration, dehydration is critically important because everything cascades from there, which is naturally how it extends into, into teams and other things. And one more point on the individual I think is important, and this is where the roots from yoga training come in, is that I use chakra. So chakras are energy centers of the body from the tip of the tailbone to the crown of the head. There's seven of them. And these are scientifically proven locus of energetic activity. A lot of communicative activity happens in these. But they develop throughout your lifetime.
And the root chakra is up until about 10 to 12 years old, that's when that forms. So in that moment you're selfish because all you know is yourself and your immediate family. So that that is where your roots are formed. And then they start to grow out and form a tree and then branches and you grow the fruits, which is the third eye, the pineal gland.
And all mass or all matter is both mass or energy at the same time. So you can relate that to human development, chakra development.
Because root would be dense matter, resource guarding. It's about me. I protect myself above and beyond anyone else. You get up to that third third eye, pineal gland operating through pure self awareness. You tend to want to be a part of something greater where that high energy seeks other energy.
And you can take that same framework and apply it to individuals, to teams, to organizations, to companies. So there's multiple layers that you can apply to those. But from an individual perspective it starts with what valves are open and what valves are closed. What valves do you want to be open and what valves are being forced closed by your environment.
[00:11:44] Speaker B: I really love the metaphor of hydration valves and how that relates both physically and emotionally. What Would you say would be a good tool set for someone that recognizes that to actually make that something very positive in practice?
[00:12:05] Speaker A: I think the most important thing, because I feel like we're all in dehydrated environments today.
So I think the most important thing is to not let your dehydration environment, whether it's at home or at work, to start shutting your valves down. You can shut a valve down out of protective measure to maintain your own hydration, but don't let others shut it to where it manifests into you shutting it down altogether. Because what you want to avoid is being dehydrated yourself. So conserve your hydration by letting those valves close because you understand the environment that you're in.
And then you go find sources of hydration outside of that environment, which is what you're ultimately seeking.
[00:12:52] Speaker B: You also mentioned that systems really break down from a person first.
How would an organization make space for someone that is metabolizing that without becoming overly individually focused? Because there is a team environment.
[00:13:11] Speaker A: So that's great segue into how this cascades to teams, right? So you think of a team, it's not a company or an organization, it's a team. You know, it could be a few people, maybe a dozen people.
You're either formed naturally because you self organized to, to to do something that there's a shared belief in, or your company tells you you're on this team and this is what you need to do. And I've seen a lot of really high performing teams suddenly go to unhappy teams. And generally it, it is just lack of awareness of what a dehydrated person does to a team and the cascading negativity that it brings.
You get to a point where shame spirals start to happen.
Silence and surface talk emerge. So you're talking but you're not saying anything. You're not sharing what you truly feel.
So for me, the team alchemy is absolutely based on the alchemy of its constituent parts. So the people you're building the team with, you have to look at them through the lens of hydration versus dehydration.
But all of that cannot happen. So you could have, everyone on the team could have its own fair share of dehydrated valves.
The leader is what's the most important is that leader dehydrated. Because if they're dehydrated, they're going to be based on results and performative measures, not on enzymatically unlocking performance in the team, finding the places that need hydration and finding Serving that role of hydration. We look at leadership as command and control, but really they're gardeners. They're enzymatic leaders that just see. See these areas that need hydration, and that's what they hydrate. And then when you do that, these. These teams, they. They don't speak very often. They don't have to. They're on the same page. And when people say we need to get on the same page in a meeting, it always frustrates me because I know that dehydrated on that team, the page that they think is the page depends on their current state of circumstances or what they think in that moment. It's not a page because they're not looking into a future greater than self. They're looking at what have I been asked to do and what's the minimum I have to do to do it, or whatever the baggage that comes around that. So I feel like that's really. When you look at team chemistry, it is understanding the individuals you're building that team with through the lens of soft power.
[00:15:36] Speaker B: Exactly. That's such a good point.
Which makes me interested to know how would a team really build a collective practice to support hydration so that they are building that coherence rather than just really having, let's say, a reliance on an individual hydrated member?
[00:16:00] Speaker A: I think that's why this podcast was created, was to start giving the tools and the techniques. I've got the book coming out, Tiny Hands, the Soft Power Model, which explains all of this, including field guides for how to use it in practice.
But it's a tough one, right? So I feel like, and maybe this takes us to the organizational loop a little bit, because I feel like, and I've felt this way for 23 years now, that. That the CEO is an important role, and we know what the CEO does, and we know that the CEO sometimes has to do things that are unsavory. And there's a certain expectation of just focusing on shareholder value and we don't have to get it, but that we get it. It's a tough place to be. HR used to be called Personnel Department. Now it's not even called human resource. It's called hr.
It's a defense layer between corporate decision and the people that work for them and the industries that they serve, when in actuality, what you need. Because if you think of what does a cell do to survive, it procreates, it communicates, it defends itself, and companies do that.
But what companies fail to do is repair themselves, like our bodies do when a cell goes rogue, the other cells absorb it and dissolve it. We don't have that repair function. So I've always felt like within governance there should be a cheap synapsing officer, you know, somebody whose organization is meant to enzymatically unlock dehydration in the organization so that it doesn't continue to become brittle and eventually it breaks.
[00:17:30] Speaker B: I think that's such a really great way to go into the next section. I really love how you just very naturally talk about the alchemy of a team. So let's, let's go into that.
[00:17:41] Speaker A: When policy replaces trust, scripts replace spontaneity, stage gate rewards resemblance versus real vision.
So I feel sorry for our current state of affairs.
When we talk about corporate governance, publicly traded companies, global companies, CEO structures we have built ourselves around extract, make, sell, create conditions to repeat process.
And now we're in this place where we need to think differently, be think circularity. And we see a lot of challenges with trying to bend into a circle something that's very rigid.
I think when, when you look at hornification of a company, let's first talk about a company.
So I like to quiz people, and I won't do this to you, Chris, but if you ask somebody what's the difference between a company and an organization, do they have a prepared answer? Because we kind of use them interchangeably.
But here's the way I separate them. An organization technically should be a self organization around a purpose or a goal to do something. People are coming together.
But we call organizations that aren't that, they're for profit companies.
And the difference between a person and a company is actually not so different because a company has a birth record, it has a death certificate, it's liable both criminally and from a tax perspective.
And it has a personality like a person does. It's called a culture.
And when that culture starts to reinforce dehydration, there will be a point that that company reaches a hysteresis. And a hysteresis is like stretching a rubber band to where it no longer can recover back to where it started.
You get to a point of brittleness that you can't. It becomes unreceptive to hydration. And I really worry that we're in that place with a lot of global companies that they have become so dehydrated that they, like a vampire, reject a pail of water to be poured into them.
That's, that's worrisome. But the hope that I have is that within those organizations or companies there's a Lot of people still hydrated, still resonant, that want to soft bond and build strong, but they're being held back from doing it. So by being aware that this exists, it helps those that really do still have, you know, big reserves of energy, soft bond energy to do something better, do something different. They just need to organize around how to do that.
[00:20:31] Speaker B: That is very relatable. I would say that I have experienced that a number of times. I've been in meetings where it looks like alignment, but the alignment is really just in words. You can tell by the body language, you can tell by the engagement and the participation. It's really just not there. Might just be checking a box.
So if teams are where these signals start to break, how, how do you, I'd say layer that up into an organization so that it really does have that positive reverb.
[00:21:10] Speaker A: I think maybe that's easy, easiest answer or maybe easier for me to explain in the context of purpose.
So if, if a company's purpose or a piece of its purpose is let's. And maybe this is our segue into the industry application of it. So maybe a piece of that corporate agenda is sustainability and they're trying to solve for sustainability and it just feels like a dead end road of continually getting to the same, the same place. Like, so what's wrong with that? Well, you're trying to apply regenerative hydration to a system that's not receptive to it yet. You have to look at it through that lens like, well, composters aren't accepting packaging. Well, how do we solve that for them in a different way?
Well, they say that the cellulosic products aren't breaking down the way they should. Well, let's look at the hydration of what's going into it. So there's multiple ways that you can unlock it. But I really think it depends on what the purpose is. Because unfortunately, if it is a checkbox purpose with no genuine cohesive or coherent energy behind it, I'm not sure there's much you can do other than save the souls that are in it that are still hydrated so that they can build greater energy. I feel like there's just.
You're not gonna, you're not gonna hydrate the unhydratable. Just like, you know, let's look at what hydrocarbons are, what fossil materials are the same.
High molecular weight. The sugary strings of life, the cellulose, carbohydrates, sugars are all the same thing. It's a molecular weight difference. A sugar is a Sugar, carbohydrates like this and cellulose is like really big version of that. And that's what makes trees and plants and everything else.
That's what hydrocarbons are. So we go from something rich in oxygen that allows hydrogen bonding, that creates life in our bodies, life in the trees and plants, outside our windows, in the ground.
After millions of years or hundreds of thousands of years of dehydration or a horrifying environment, they become what complete, fully rejection of water hydrocarbons. They become so hydrophobic that they will never receive water again.
We're not there yet, but if we don't start addressing hydration in people, in teams, in organizations and in industries, in cultures and societies even, we're going to continue to face this.
We're being turned into hydrocarbons.
[00:23:48] Speaker B: What I'm taking from what you are saying is at least what is resonating with me is every step is additive. Any positive movement towards a person, a team, being hydrated, being healthier, having the coherence, it's going to make a difference, even if it's not really that visible at the time. Everything is additive.
This may be the best time to really go into the industry.
Certainly I'd love your take on the state of the industry in our case, packaging and materials.
[00:24:26] Speaker A: Within this context, you know, similar to, you know, the organization or the team side of it is that when you're fully hydrated, team or organization, your immune system is strong.
So you're able to battle things, adapt, adjust. Just like, you know, we get sick, we get better. If you don't have a healthy immune system, you get sick, you get really sick.
So thinking about the immune system from the entities in an industry, so that would be the companies, the organizations, and all of their many teams and all of their even more many individuals.
When you get to that point about, you know, the, the hydration side of it, the first thing I would say is to, to look at.
If you're in a company right now that is in an industry that's trying to change to becoming more regenerative, you got to really stop and look at it through the lens of hydration. You just have to. Because we're in a very complicated spot here, right? Because we have built an industry extracting fossil plastics because they did such a good job, because they don't like water, because they're pristine and have been homogenized to nothing but carbon and hydrogen. We've built all of these things around it. But there's a term in engineering called entropy. It's the second law of thermodynamics, it's what chaos theory is based upon, is that everything changes. So like when a hot cup of coffee gets cold or gets to room temperature, that's entropy loss.
So entropy is always happening, it's always flowing.
If you start pulling dead carbon out of the earth and dispersing it at a high rate into a natural environment, entropy promises AI would have told us this, this in 1970 if we plugged it into AI if it, if it existed, that, that creates, what would be the way to say it? An unresolvable complexity. We'll say it that way because you can't. So the ocean plastics became the plastic problem. We could see the microplastics is we can because entropy is cascading it further to that level. So for those of us in the industry trying to say, you know, the only real solution is true regenerative where we are creating packaging materials from the same materials for which we're growing the food from so that nature can take it back. It all sounds good. No one disagrees with it. The problem is we built these extremely large now.
So let's look at the size of the problem, right? So when, when you and I started our career in this field, there were large packaging manufacturers, but what we call a large one today, completely different scale.
Same with raw material companies. Global chemical companies went from, you know, these guys make adhesives in New Jersey, these guys make coatings in Berlin.
Now one company does all of these things.
So as companies have gotten bigger through mergers and acquisitions, they have not exactly hydrated themselves because the first thing you, you, you recognize when that happens is yes, they have people in the downstream market that have 30 years experience in a specific field, but the organization doesn't have dexterity to that information that, that realism of the market.
Worse on the other side, they don't do discovery research, they don't do basic research anywhere near what they used to because they expect that because they're such a big potential customer that everyone will just knock on their door with innovation.
And the problem with innovation is if you have anti visionary dehydration in charge of innovation with a stage gate process, again you're removing hydrated innovation and replacing it with dehydrated lookalike.
So you kind of create your own problems. I feel like our size and scale have also created our problem of so hysteresis. We've created hysteresis and we're trying to get back to the rubber band that we can form a circle out of and we're struggling to do that. So I feel like the answer isn't to try to do what's in, what may be impossible, but to just build it new. You know, build it with a rethinking of how. How it all comes together, which again is reflected in the book.
But I feel like we're. We're hitting our head against the wall trying to create a circle out of something built to be very linear.
[00:28:59] Speaker B: I'm so glad you said that.
I think it would be super helpful to go into some very, I'd say, functional examples of what that connects to. So for instance, I have heard you talk a number of times about this supply chain echo chamber. Can you tell me and give me some insight about that?
[00:29:21] Speaker A: Yeah, Supply chains.
People know me that I may have a bad view on recycling.
And let me explain my view on recycling. It's not that recycling is bad. It's that you can't do it at the scale we're trying to do it because of entropy.
If you want to truly manage recycling, you have to shrink it down. So because of fossil plastics that allowed us to do some pretty extraordinary things in one location that can serve literally a global. A global market.
What do we do with paper? We treated trees like a fossil fuel.
We stick it in the fire and we beat it with a stone. And we create this extremely dehydrated fiber that is made in one location, dried to a bone, shipped to another continent to re water it, to make paper, dry it again. And we ship that across multiple continents. So we've created these extremely long supply lines that the global recession in 2009 was one warning flare. The global pandemic was another. The next one could be the catastrophic kill that these supply chains are not sustainable. So how do you change that? So if you can start thinking of making packaging material science happen in the region for which the food is grown and packaged, then you're creating resilient cell can now control the disbursement of those packaged goods in such a way. Now you can do things like recycling because your radius isn't entropically too large to manage.
Or you just make everything earth digestible and then you. It's all. So to me, the compost is not where things end, it's where everything begins.
Because we have been poisoning farm fields with synthetic fertilizer since 1950 and wonder why we have seven new flavors of autoimmune and IBS that we're dealing with because of ultra processing and failing nutrition.
If we started to rethink that from a packaging perspective, it should be more locally grown, locally sourced. And if you can turn those material waste into packaging, then that's how you solve it.
[00:31:34] Speaker B: It was very early into the time when you and I had recently met. We became industry collaborators. And I heard you talk about earth digestible and digestibility in terms of a property for materials. And because that's really one of your hallmarks, I really like some more insight into that.
[00:31:54] Speaker A: I kept seeing the same problem.
Well, it's not certified. So compostability to me categorically addresses entropy. That's all that it addresses. Regeneration is really what we're talking about. So to be regenerative, it means sustainability is missing a letter called N sun stainable. So if the sun didn't help make it, we should really question why we're using it.
So if you then go from sun stainable materials. And so the concept of earth digestible is I don't care what happens to the waste. I don't care what goes to the landfill and what doesn't. What I absolutely know is it will escape Entropy promises that wasteful. Large brands know this. They're not looking for certified home compostable. They're looking for a solution to litter.
And so to me, her digestible is the design parameter. Design it to be consumed by microorganisms no matter where they end up, without worrying about how long it takes them. Let's just start there. That's plugging the hole in the boat.
Then you take it a step forward and realize that, you know, the, the carbon cycle starts with the compost. The food nutrition cycle repair starts at the compost. It all starts at the compost. You start to realize that the compost facility becomes really the footprint for what a future biorefinery looks like, where we're valorizing those materials from sun stainable solutions to do these everyday things that doesn't go well to large global centralized manufacturing. It almost promises decentralized distributed manufacturing, which is what we have to do anyway because we're operating on a body. The human body has 30 trillion cells in it. We go about our day every day without worrying about those cells. We get hit in the side we walk on and we're good. If you punch in the side. Our industry, which has like 30,000 cells, each one shuts down a port, cuts off the supply chain. It's not. We're not built for resilience, we're not built for repair.
So I feel like it's just a matter of time before what we built will crumble the question is, what do you replace it with? And I think soft bond energy gives you a lot of clues into how.
[00:34:11] Speaker B: You build that soft bond energies. And also one of the phrases that I find new to me, but it really resonates is really this material honesty.
[00:34:21] Speaker A: What I see a lot happening is we're taking molecules from nature, we're hitting them with the same, putting them in the same caveman fire, hitting them with the same caveman stone, and making them do things that we did from hydrocarbons before that.
Regenerative means the sun grew it, humans modified it to do what it needs, and the earth takes it back.
That's material honesty. And I think the next level of material honesty is because of technology, we can use things like blockchain to manage the identity of these materials all the way through. So a lot of the problem is how does extractive capitalism buy into something that is, if it's not considered waste, it's close enough to call it waste when it's not. So how do you turn waste into a feedstock? We're not going to change the 1979 law, the Rick Raw Law, Resource Conservation and Recovery act that says it's the state's problem, but we can make it palatable to capitalism. And you do that by making materials honest and trackable and traceable and sellable and valorizable.
[00:35:30] Speaker B: I also remember when I first began in this industry, I'd say more the sustainable materials industry.
I remember it giving me such energy and such enthusiasm, and I was like, oh my gosh, as soon as everyone knows about this, like, it's going to be hard to keep up. I just really thought the adoption would be accelerated and people would see what you and I see how this is really transforming, although the pace has been very slow.
What would be your, I'd say, recommendation for companies that are considering transition?
Although haven't really put a lot of.
[00:36:11] Speaker A: Work into it, I hesitate a little bit because I feel like there's a lot of companies that genuinely want to do the right thing. They do, and they're confused and they're. They're worried that whatever decision they make, they may change that decision with information. So like, like everyone's kind of burdened with what they don't know they don't know, but subordinated enough to appreciate that there's things that they don't know, which is a good place to be. I call it positive paranoia. Should always be humbled by what you don't know.
And I think a lot of companies, including global chemical companies, they're kind of stuck. They've got the resources to spend in a direction, but they don't know what that direction is.
So when we talk about in that context, it's hard because the system isn't set up to be hydrated.
It's only set up to control dehydration of all of its component parts. So it's a tough one.
I don't know that there is a golden answer other than to I feel like you find solutions when you understand the problem.
And these are ways to understand the problem in a way that you hadn't thought about before, which may help find ways around it. Again, if you take the garden hose to a sheet of glass, it's going to run right off of it.
But you can water a garden.
[00:37:33] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:37:34] Speaker A: You can't water glass.
[00:37:37] Speaker B: So really the work is to rehydrate any bonds.
Human organization, industry, really, for all of that to begin one loop at a time.
[00:37:51] Speaker A: And you know, I love the connection to composting grief. Right. If you think about what the word grief, grief doesn't mean loss, it doesn't mean sorrow. It means grief.
You're grieving from something. It's either frustration in the team, it's frustration with your company, it's frustration that no matter how hard you try and how much social networking and soft bonding you build, it isn't making a difference. That's grief.
Don't let the grief start shutting valves down. Compost it regeneratively. Compost it into hydration.
Just like compost piles do. They take that waste and turn it into something that is magical for macro and micronutrients and soil health and growing nutritious foods. Like, what's the equivalent here for that?
It starts with the individual. And the individual cascades to the team, and the teams cascade to the organization, and the organizations cascade to the industry and the industries cascade to society.
Now, what we can't fix are the vines. So you look at a healthy root chakra, you're growing roots, you're. You're so you.
Emotional abandonment, emotional abuse, all those things can damage a person's root chakra.
We may have actually created maybe a bigger problem than we realize because, you know, we tend to over parent and overprotect letting. We don't let young kids really, truly experience executive function flexing at a young age. So maybe we've actually hindered root development generationally. Possibly. But the point of that is, if you look at what's rewarded in organizational business, it's not empathetic hydrators and enzymatic leaders don't get rewarded rewarded. They may actually be viewed as too soft.
So we reward the control, focus on the results.
Bottom line, shareholder value.
And when you put vines in charge of, of teams, you're, you should expect what you get from it.
So until we start changing the leadership to enzymatic leadership, I feel like hydrators have to keep moving to where they can, they can thrive.
And it's just, it saddens my heart to see so many hydrated souls end up in companies and organizations and on teams that just continually, year over year, just keep dehydrating them when they've got so much to give and so much to offer.
And their hopefulness keeps them there. Really what we need to do is start building those lattices outside of those places. I believe the future of work should be self organizing. Right, right. We should. No one should own our, our employment.
But that's for another episode. We'll dig into that another time. Chris.
[00:40:41] Speaker B: You brought it up. So I would really love to know what would an enzymatic leader look like? How would we recognize one?
[00:40:47] Speaker A: An enzymatic leader doesn't boast. They don't brag. They really just tune in. They're, they're in tune with their people and they can sense, they can read the curve before the data is present.
They feel it. And when they feel it, they know how to conscientiously, you know, hydrate that person or give that team a break or give, you know, so that they, they do all the things that enzymes do. They go in, they open up the hydrogen bonding, they let things happen catalytically, they let it come back together and then it goes back to business. That's an enzymatic leader. They garden the performance of their teams. They don't dictate it, they don't demand it, they don't want it one on one it every week and expect something different.
They're enzymatic. I, I mean that, that's, that's what we're missing is enzymatic leadership. From team level to organizational to C suite, we're, we're missing that and I don't think we're going to get it. I don't think the system that we built allows it.
So how do you succeed in lieu of that fact, right, that there's a good chance that you'll never replace all the CEOs in the world from opportunistic vines to enzymatic gardeners.
But within those organizations, they can start at least helping to start to turn that by looking at who you select to build these teams and run these teams, you should be looking at it through the lens of enzymatic leadership capabilities.
[00:42:16] Speaker B: I really like the concept that you brought in there, which is really the cultivation.
So yes, it's not something that can be a quick transition, but it can be a cultivation. And those things again are additive. They build in a positive way over time.
Kelly, this has really been a very insightful, a very thoughtful conversation and I would love for you just to kind of recap with the high points.
[00:42:42] Speaker A: So hydration and in the body, in the physical body, in the energetic body, and in the way we bond to other people, it's all tied to hydrogen bonding. That's the self bonding. So once you understand your own current level of hydration and how different environments either hydrate you further or dehydrate you from that, just understanding that I think is incredibly important.
As you get into teams. Understanding the effect on your hydration, your valves, do they open or close in that environment, Extremely important for the individual, for the company leaders out there. You got to start looking at your organization through this lens. You could start looking at your leadership. Are they vines and hydrophobic? Are they watering gardeners and enzymatic leaders for entire industries?
We've got to sort this out because where we're trying to go is not what we, what we built to get us to where we currently are. So making that jump is going to be a big move. Hopefully this allows us a pathway to get there.
So it really comes down to again, tying together physical science and biology, physics, meaning the duality of matter is both mass and energy and pulling in those yoga principles of energy centers in the body and how that translates outside of your body. I think it all comes together and explained perfectly through the soft power model.
[00:44:17] Speaker B: Beautifully said.
[00:44:21] Speaker A: So with that, I think we'll, we'll. We'll call it a show. Chris, thank you for helping me get this out and to. And for having spent the time to understand it yourself and see the power of it.
It's been very, I'm, I'm grateful. Thank you for, for being such a great partner here and helping me get this out.
Any last comments from yourself?
[00:44:44] Speaker B: Thank you very much for creating this, for giving concept to the things that many of us talk about, think about, importantly, have experienced and really just for encouraging that growth.
So it's, it's been very insightful. Happy to help anytime. Thank you so much, Kelly. I am also grateful.
[00:45:04] Speaker A: Thank you, Chris. That means a lot. Definitely means a lot to me to hear that. And let me let you know Episode three will be coming.
I'm not going to tease the title today. It's still in in progress, but it'll be a continuation of what you've heard.
So until then, bond soft, build strong. We'll talk to you soon. 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.
