Summary
Brett interviews Carla Pineyro Sublett, CMO and SVP at IBM, about how emotional awareness work transformed her leadership, family life, and sense of self. Carla describes being an intense, cerebral, theory-driven executive who had learned to suppress emotions as a survival strategy — first as a woman in the South, then in 90s tech culture. A pivotal week-long retreat (“Groundbreakers”) broke her heart open, revealing her full capacity for love that she’d been disconnected from.
The transformation was immediate and energetic — people around her felt the shift before she could describe it. She discovered that what she thought was “serving others” was actually managing and manipulating everyone’s emotions. When she dropped the role of manager, remarkable things happened: her 17-year-old son spontaneously planned his father’s birthday party, her teams began using group intelligence to reach better outcomes than she could have dictated, and colleagues began expressing vulnerability and love openly.
Carla shares practical shifts: stating wants and needs rather than assigning actions, asking open-ended “how/what” questions from genuine curiosity rather than leading witnesses, owning triggers openly in meetings, and recognizing that her own wants and needs mirror those of her organization. The result is deeper connection with her children, more effective teams, and a life without separate work and home personas.
Key Concepts
- Managing others avoids own feelings
- Dropping roles creates space for others to step up
- Suppressing emotions impairs decision making
- Owning triggers out loud creates psychological safety
- Stating wants over assigning actions unlocks group intelligence
- Your wants and needs are the organization’s wants and needs
- Emotional openness gives others permission to be authentic
Key Quotes
“I realized that I had lost meaningful connection to my husband and children.”
“What I was doing is managing everybody and managing everybody’s emotions and trying to keep everybody happy and letting go of that has been massive because what I didn’t realize is that wasn’t fun or enjoyable for the people that I love… it was a form of manipulation.”
“Joy is the matriarch of all the emotions and her children are fear, grief, and anger. And in order for her to live in her house she has to be with her children.”
“How cool is it that your body shines a light on the very thing that you need to deal with.”
“I wasn’t meeting people’s needs at all. I wasn’t validating their needs at all. I was just trying to fix it all the time.”
“As I was going up on stage one of my peers grabbed me and he said hey Carla I want to tell you something and I said what and he said I love you. And that just doesn’t happen.”
Transcript
as I was going up on stage one of my peers grabbed me and he said hey Carla I want to tell you something and I said what and he said I love you and that just doesn’t happen it’s wild but since doing this work not only have I felt differently somehow it’s given people the permission to be their authentic selves and be open with me welcome to the art of accomplishment where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease all right everybody today I’m speaking with Carla Pinero Sublette I’m really excited about this conversation Carla is the chief marketing officer and Senior vice president at IBM she’s also a recognized leader in building a better Society by the Aspen Institute serving on their Board of Trustees and as a member of its Henry Crown Fellowship class of 2016. the following year she was named a woman to watch by Inc magazine wow yeah that’s a lot Carla hi Brett it’s good to see you yeah good to see you too so tell me a little bit about your journey and I’d really love to dive into something in particular that you’ve learned about yourself through doing this work that has impacted your life and your business and really just changed your world there are so many things um I have to say this work has really changed my life both personally and professionally and I had no idea coming into it how big the impact would really be uh but I I’m truly grateful because it is transformed every aspect of my life and and really had a very positive impact on the relationships that I have tell me a little bit about what what Carla was like prior to encountering this particular form of development of exploration and what brought you to it what what brought you here yeah so I was already at an inflection point leading up to the work but prior to that inflection point I would say I was a super intense individual Theory driven very defined by my work and my job um in 2017 I came to the realization that I was disconnected from the people that mattered most to me and I realized that I had lost meaningful connection to my husband and children uh and in that moment decided to quit my job unenroll the kids from school and travel the world so that was leading up to this work uh and and surge of connection to my heart it was about at the end of that Journey where someone introduced me to Joe and uh and I began working with Joe and Ernest in the months that followed and for me it was the culmination of that search for connection to my heart that brought Joe into my life what was it that you learned about yourself in in those first interactions that made you recognize that this was going to be a fruitful Avenue of exploration well for starters I will say um my first one-on-one with Joe about five minutes in I said holy you’re a therapist and I hate therapy I hate anything over pertaining to or I used to anything ever pertaining to it and I felt like it was self-indulgent and I was really the sort of person that that gleaned value from providing for others and putting others needs before myself so initially going into the work once I first got to know Joe I have to tell you I was extremely resistant Brett and and I felt like I don’t have the time for this I’m a mom I’m working I need to be spending time with my team and my family and I know I don’t need to dwell on all this stuff so um so I put up quite the fight going in it was really interesting to see how Joe responded to that but I eventually came out the other side and I’m so glad that I did tell me a little bit about that moment of having of coming out the other side when did this really start to crack for you and the thing that I’m kind of pointing to here is this resistance to self-indulgence and this is this is something that’s very common that people have which is I I don’t need to spend the time on myself I don’t need to spend resources or or indulge in in exploring and becoming more aware of who I am and aware of what my wants are because you know what’s more important is I’m taking care of everyone else in my life and it seems like that’s a flavor of the resistance that you brought into it what what started to crack that open for you for me the significant shift happened at a week-long course that Joe holds called groundbreakers and uh he calls it a retreat but we joke with him that there’s nothing Retreat about it it’s definitely an intensive and it was during that week that my heart literally broke open and I realized my full capacity for love and I know that sounds ridiculous but up until that point even though I was searching for connection to my heart I was very much operating from a place of mind and gut and I think if I’m being really honest I was always holding a little piece of myself back whether it was for fear of being hurt I don’t know that I fully appreciated and understood what my full capacity for love was both for self and others and that shift happened during that week and the impact that followed was really profound in my life what does that mean for you to have been mostly operating from your mind and your gut it means I was totally disconnected from my body every move that I made was cerebral and intentional and thoughtful in a way but I wasn’t really listening to my feelings or my emotions I’d really decided to push those down and what was pointed out to me is that from a very young age we’re trained out of our emotions and particularly for women in the South you know don’t get angry um don’t cry and then growing up in Corporate America and particularly in Tech in the 90s that was just exacerbated you know if you are a woman and emotional that was just the end of your career and so I had learned to operate from that place as a way of surviving or at least that’s what I told myself and so long as I could separate myself from what I actually felt that it was impossible for me to be my most effective in my job and how wrong how very wrong I was and I realized that in the the weeks and months that followed groundbreakers tell me a little bit more about how that suppression of those of those emotions a lot of it being societal much of it sort of specific to be being a woman in the South and then exacerbated by being a woman in Tech especially in the 90s how was that impacting the way that you made decisions and the way that you showed up professionally and also how did that impact your personal life so I made decisions based on what I was gonna what was going to serve my family over myself so I put my own needs on on the back burner but then something really interesting had started to happen Brett as I got older and and more recently was I started to realize that decision making became difficult I started a loop and get stuck and I I learned through this work that that was a sign of emotion that needed to be moved and it was extremely clearing for me once I had let myself have access once I was able to once I learned to have access to things like fear and grief and anger it was immensely clarifying and it enabled me to make better decisions and and it was a massive gift and with that came along a tremendous amount of joy and love so you mentioned at at this groundbreakers Retreat that your heart broke open and it sounds like this was a rapid experience that happened sort of in a moment and suddenly you became aware of how much capacity you had to love that had already been there all the time but you just hadn’t been connected to and I’m curious in that moment what was it that opened up in you what did you what did you see that you hadn’t seen before and how did you come to see it so I can explain what happened to you and then I can explain maybe Brett what happened after the fact it’s a little bit hard to describe but um after the exercise that we did um we were moving we were moving grief and anger came up for me I should say rage came up for me which quite quite surprised me it shocked me and I had a pretty significant emotional release and at the end of that release I was I was laying on a mat and I looked up to see one of my colleagues come into the room and his face looked like that of a little boy and I stretched out my arms to him and he came down on the mat and curled up in my arms almost like a child and this is someone who’s much larger than I am and throughout the week he’d mentioned to us that he had a lot of trouble sleeping he was strung with insomnia and as soon as I held him his whole body collapsed and he went boneless and started to snore he fell completely asleep and we started to laugh about it after the fact when we were debriefing I expressed the fact that I felt my my heart had broken open and that I just was really feeling this overwhelming sense of love and my friend and peer in the group said and I was the first recipient I felt it wash all over me so it wasn’t just something that I was feeling the people around me were feeling it too and the response was really beautiful and then coming out of that week the very first thing I kind of broke the rules we were supposed to kind of do a slow reentry and I went straight into hosting an off-site for our CEO and my peers uh remotely via Zoom because it was in the middle of coven and so there I was at 6 30 in the morning from Tahoe rounding everybody up on the suit call and doing a check-in and we get to me for the check-in and Brett I’ll be damned if I didn’t burst into tears I mean huge sobs and prior to this I would say I’d cried maybe three times in the last 15 years the birth of my children and the death of a friend so to have this sort of emotion on this call was pretty remarkable so in response to those tears one of my colleagues on the on the call said hey I’d really like to hug you right now would it be okay if we hugged you and everybody went up to their screens and hugged their cameras and then we went on with our day it was really powerful and even my boss’s coach was on the line and he texted me on the side and was like holy cow what did you just get out of did you have an Ayahuasca experience you’re like totally transformed and uh he was like your energy is so different and it’s beautiful and uh at the end of that day we were doing a checkout and one of my peers said I just want to say how much I admire Carla and whenever I’m stuck and trying to figure out what to do I think about her and what she would do and again I started a ball again and the closeness that that brought from that team moving forward was really really powerful it was also my realization that I needed to leave that job and my boss saw straight through me in that moment so that’s what the work looked like yeah what was that like to have had that realization and also have your boss see straight through you I assume that what you mean by that is he saw that you saw that you needed to leave that job yeah as soon as the meeting ended he called me and he said what time do you land and by the time I landed he was at my front door the next day we went on a walk and I don’t know that I fully come to appreciate that I needed to leave my job at that point I will tell you on that walk I was able to State my wants and needs very clearly without any shame which was super empowering and I will say that since when the time did come for me to leave I felt like I had spoken my piece so um it was a tremendously clean and high integrity way to exit a role and and I felt really good about it and I also maintain relationships with that team to this day and funny enough I ran into members from that team at my first speaking engagement coming out of covid and as I was going up on stage one of my peers grabbed me and he said hey Carla I want to tell you something and I said what and he said I love you you know and that that just doesn’t happen you know it’s it’s it’s wild uh yeah that moment that you had described at groundbreakers were you know a grown man you said colleague was it was he actually a work colleague of yours or a colleague in a program he was part of the l12 group so I’m part of uh Joe Hudson’s l12 group so it’s me plus 11 other folks that he coaches and it was one of our l12 colleagues so it was a colleague in the program not somebody that you work with but you had you had the experience of a grown man curling up in your lap and you seeing him as more than just a grown man but as a child and Finding Your Capacity to love him in all of what he was in that moment clearly other people saw it and they felt it and they described it and I’m curious how that impacted the way that you see how you saw your boss for example when you came back and when you went for that walk with him how did you show up differently having had that experience with a tremendous amount of compassion and understanding and patience now when I see that people are in fear in the workplace or that they’re grieving something or that they’re angry about something I can see it for what it is and not be triggered by it and not take it on and show up in a way that that holds it for them if they need me to but it’s not consumed by it and I think you know Brett when one of the other big changes in me was going into the work because you know I saw myself as always giving to others but in reality what I was doing is managing everybody and managing everybody’s emotions and trying to keep everybody happy and letting go of that has been massive because what I didn’t realize is is that that wasn’t fun or enjoyable for the people that I love and you know I thought I was serving them all this time but in reality I was it doesn’t feel good to admit but it was a form of manipulation yeah I’m curious how how much dropping that projection dropping that that way of relating makes it so that others could show up and tell you hey I really want to tell you that I love you yeah because they might feel that that is something that you might receive uh and not be contrary to whatever plans or management you have for them that’s exactly right I mean when you get out of the way it’s really remarkable for example I just came back for my second long intensive uh with Joe and while the movement wasn’t as significant there during the week-long as it was for groundbreakers the movement after the fact was really significant for me and it was because a big part of the week was dropping rolls the roles that we play and manager is one of them for me and managing to outcomes and during that week it was my husband’s birthday coming up on Friday and I was going to fly back Friday and was running the risk of not making his birthday and all the years my husband and I have been together I’ve never missed his birthday I always make a really big deal out of birthdays and funny enough because I was in the week-long I just didn’t get to planning anything and rather than feeling shame or guilt around that I just let it go and the wildest thing happened as I was away I started to get text messages from my 17 year old son hey Mom could you send me Dad’s friend’s contact information uh hey Mom I grabbed your credit card is it okay if I buy dad a new golf club hey Mom I’m gonna order a cake for Dad and some barbecue and I’m gonna invite his friends over on Friday so with me stepping out of that role and dropping that roll I’ll be damned if my 17 year old son didn’t show up for it in a way that I never would have thought to ask and he uh showered his dad in love and made it a really big deal and my husband in return never felt more loved because his own son planned everything so it was really really special and I’ve seen that happen in the workplace too but just at home that was really wild to see and really gratifying yeah I’m really curious about the the difference of the experience of your son from you know you you doing all the planning and like asking your son to do a certain to-do list of things and him just coming up with these ideas and taking full ownership of them yeah I mean it was better than what I would have come up with so and I’m sure it felt a lot he initiated it all and you did it from a place of love and what he wanted for his dad yeah and so now now I’m curious about how if you if you find yourself no longer taking the management role or being aware of when you’re in that role of being the manager and the the overseer how do you relate to perhaps the fear that might have underlied that which is that if I don’t manage everybody around me things won’t get done or everyone else will have to do everything for me and then they’ll resent me how has that structure shifted or evolved I’ve had a slightly nuanced flavor of it Brett so my flavor of that has been I really kind of zeroed out at that Retreat I had lost all the rules and one of the things that that Joe said to me coming out of it is don’t build back too soon and we’re almost two months out and I still haven’t built back and um the fear for me has taken more of a flavor of wow do I not care anymore am I disengaged am I depressed is this okay but then what’s really wild is I’m starting to see it play out in really beautiful ways like when I get out of the way it gets replaced by something better and I was on a call probably a few weeks after the The Retreat and it was probably one of my favorite meetings to date in this new job and we had about eight people on the call and it was people early stage career Veterans of the industry discussing the new brand of the company that we’re going to roll out and I just asked questions and view format so how what questions vulnerably and partially with empathy and wonder and through that something which I’ve recently learned to be called group intelligence took over and the group began to push each other and challenge each other and debate and push further and title didn’t matter level didn’t matter and we got to the best possible outcome and all I did was just facilitate I asked I asked questions so that’s what it looks like now versus before I would start the call with hey here’s what we need to achieve before this call is over this is what I think we should do blah blah blah blah and really start to dictate and this was very different and it was what came out on the other side was much better than what I could have envisioned or what I would have played myself and it really did Leverage the group so the the some of the parts were greater yeah how much how much have you seen that trickle down in the teams that you manage and then the way that they show up to the teams that they manage how has that permissioning of letting go of that role and facilitating the group intelligence how has that percolated through the through the team or through the company if at all uh regardless of others having contact with with this work directly through Joe or just just being in contact with you and experiencing your change it’s a few different ways I had a peer tell me early on probably well a few months in I offered to give me some feedback and I said yeah of course please and he said I love your feminine Vibe you have brought this energy to our team that we really needed we were just a ton of testosterone and now you bring humor and you laugh at yourself and You’re vulnerable when you don’t understand something and if you don’t get something right you say how you’re gonna fix it and and he said and you’ve given us all permission to do the same and it’s been super fun to have you on the team and I’m grateful that you’re here and that for me was just like wow that was the most that was the ultimate compliment that felt amazing the other way that I’ve seen it show up is interestingly enough I’m triggered when people don’t ask questions when people talk at each other and I’ve started to say it out loud and so now members of my team and my organization are starting to ask how what questions even though they haven’t been through view they’re starting to see me do it and they’re starting to model it and then the last part I would say Brett that I’m seeing is I’m starting to see more emotion and love and openness with emotion I just pulled my team together for the first time in person and the first thing that one of the people on my team noticed was wow there is a lot of emotion in the room and I said absolutely and that’s awesome you know people are really expressing themselves vulnerably and I almost wonder if it’s not just related to me in the work but also related to this time that we’ve just been through and it’s just these two things coming together at the perfect time which is people are are also really longing for connection so I think that makes people more open to me in this state with the way that you’d seen people in that role having that role Fall Away now it sounds like you’re able to see a deeper level of what people want and what they need rather than just seeing what they want or need from a to-do list standpoint or from getting things done you’re also seeing a deeper layer of what their emotional needs are and the underlying social Medallion need for connection that we all have and that’s it sounds like that’s really helping you to really see more of the the value and the potential in a team as well as show up in a way that brings people together to be communicating in a more effective way yeah and I’ll I’ll even add something to it Brett so I’ve come to learn that my wants and needs are the wants and needs of the organization so I feel that it’s my responsibility to express them whereas before I push them down right and now when my team is expressing their wants and needs and sometimes I have to pull it out of them I literally validate them by saying hey if you are feeling a certain way it’s because your team or your organization feels that way and you owe it not only to yourself but to them to say it out loud it doesn’t have to be perfect it can be messy but let’s talk about it the other thing that we talk a great deal about is and this was something that one of the l12 colleagues said that has really stuck with me how cool is it that your body shines a light on the very thing that you need to deal with so if there’s discomfort in your system if you literally don’t feel good about something if there’s resistance or friction in you that’s a thing we need to go deal with let’s go unlock that and uh and I’ve made an open invitation for folks to bring those things out into the open it sounds like that Journey Through the fear of self-indulgence has unlocked your ability to see others needs as valid whereas when when you were living in living in the belief system that your needs getting your needs met doing therapy with yourself would be self-indulgent and that you needed to take care of others they also seem to be this way that you saw others as not being able to take care of their own needs and if they did that might be self-indulgent perhaps and that projection started to fall away when you started to really let yourself have needs and let yourself honor your feelings as something pointing to some deeper Truth for you that is good for your entire company or your family found Brett I had not realized that I had not realized that until you just said it but it’s very true and I’ve seen it my own children I’ve never felt more connected to my kids than I do right now whereas before if one of my kids would throw a fit or be upset about something or cry I would try and make them feel better but now I sit with them in it and if they feel like crying let’s cry and flooded out if they feel like having an anger session let’s whale on the bed with the tennis racket and it’s been transformative and I never realized it until you just said it that’s so crazy I wasn’t meeting people’s needs at all I wasn’t validating their needs at all I was just trying to fix it all the time and I think that’s why the response to me has been so different wow thank you that was just a question yeah no there was an Insight in it yeah yeah so I’m curious what advice you would have for somebody who’s been listening to this who feels connected to to that that trauma that you described of not feeling like they can indulge in their own feelings or that it’s safe to or that Society will allow it or that it’s even good for them or for others around them and they don’t have the availability to come to a course maybe they could do one of the online courses but you know maybe they’re not going to make it to a groundbreakers and have the experience that you just described but what would you have to say to somebody who feels that way what advice would you have for them to to be able to feel through this and move through this on their own from learning from your experience so Joe says something really beautiful that a quote all the time which is Joy is the matriarch of all the emotions and her children are fear grief and anger and in order for her to live in her house she has to be with her children so I think it starts with giving yourself permission to feel all the emotions and to access them and to reconnect to them because in that there is Clarity of decision making and it can also bring tremendous Clarity to to wants and needs which is the second part of my advice which is get clear on what you want and need and articulate it because that gives permission for those around you that you care about to articulate their wants and needs and it’s one of the the best ways to drive a true meaningful relationship with someone whether it’s a work colleague or or a friend or family member and I think the last thing is get curious ask lots of questions in particular When In conflict if you’re in conflict with someone or something get curious get into Wonder ask a ton of how what questions uh it’s unbelievable if you have an open mind what you’ll learn and unlock and sometimes the very thing that you thought was a point of contention actually ends up being a solution how do you experience the difference between asking a asking an open-ended how what question from Curiosity a curiosity that’s deeply felt in your body with true openness to to what you might get back versus asking how what question formulaically as a defense or from from an unknown trigger how is that something that’s shifted for you and what are some breadcrumbs that you could offer for for others who might be walking that path I think early days when I was learning The View format trying to ask how what questions and wonder I was missing the impartial part because I was trying to drive to an outcome with my questions I was trying to to get people to see a certain point or to change their mind and that’s not the process the process is to literally get curious and to remove your your partiality from it so for me the difference is asking questions from a place of huh I wonder what this person is really feeling what about this particular issue is creating fear in them and that makes all the difference if you’re not trying to lead the witness or drive to an outcome or trying to prove a point or change somebody’s mind what you can learn is really profound yeah the impartiality is often the trickiest part and I think you you pointed to it there when when you were talking about being curious about what they might be afraid of I find that I’m unable to be curious if someone else’s fear unless I’m aware of my own and so part of part of coming to that impartiality is finding out what what makes me want to drive a conversation towards a particular outcome and then what’s the helplessness that I need to feel to let go of that particular level of attachment to outcome so that I can be curious if I’m allowing myself to feel my fear then I can allow myself to feel and be with their fear that’s interesting because that is the other side of the coin right I mean if you are triggered in a conversation and you take a moment to check in yourself and with yourself and and try to understand what is it that I’m feeling is it that there’s something here that I need to deal with that’s unrelated or related or do I have a boundary that’s being crossed or what what’s happening in my system right now doing that check-in before you start to try to impact the other person is so valuable and that’s another skill that I’ve learned that has been tremendously powerful as a Latina I’m pretty trigger happy yeah the circles back to something you said earlier about the way that you showed up in your team where you found that you became triggered when others weren’t showing up curiously or when they were just talking at or past each other and that you said that now having having had this gone through these this work this process you’ve been owning that trigger not being triggered you’ve been calling it out which is different than not being aware of your trigger than trying to change the world around you but just saying hey wow I’m triggered right now what I want is I don’t know how do you do that when that comes up when you’re when you’re in a meeting and you feel that trigger and you’re wanting more curiosity in the room what does that exactly look like internally and then externally there are a few phrases that I’m starting to employ pretty consistently you’re bringing my attention to them one is oh wow I need to call out that I’m triggered right now here’s what’s happening in my system help me understand x and x and I’m just really open about it and then the second is I’ve started to say hey I need to be vulnerable right now and here’s here’s what I’m feeling using that language interestingly enough I’m starting to see the people within my organization use that language that even people outside of our organization even even partners and vendors have started to use that language with me which is super interesting oh wow and it softens the ground for the conversation because you’re like oh wow this person is afraid to say what they’re going to say right now or they’re they’re Unsure how it’s going to hit me so I’m going to treat them with some compassion and uh and it’s been super fascinating to see it employed yeah that’s fascinating there’s a couple things going on there that I see one is that by naming the vulnerability that it is for you to own your trigger and bring it consciously into the space and first of all people are gonna either they’re gonna notice you’re triggered anyway and that might trigger them or they’re not going to notice you’re triggered and also not notice that they’re triggered and then you’ll both be in a dynamic and so speaking to the vulnerability that it is for you to shine light on the trigger that is already in the room already impacting people then that permissions them to do the same for themselves it does and it’s it’s wild to even see the body language when you say those phrases so you can see people go from tense to relax you can see shoulders drop you would think it would be the other way around but people soften to the conversation when you’re that open and it creates an environment of trust I also noticed something something about the way that you describe this this language and the way that you the way that you bring the trigger up is that I don’t feel any implication that somebody needs to change it for you there’s an owning of the trigger and it’s your trigger it’s there’s something going on in my system right now and it’s telling me something you know I want I want to know more about what it is that you’re saying to me I want to know what’s what’s underneath that I’m and there’s a there’s a way that you’re curious about it because you’re not avoiding feeling that feeling and demanding the Curiosity or you know whatever it is that is bringing that trigger up in you and that seems that seems like a really powerful thing because if you bring if you bring trigger into the workspace but it’s unowned then that can create a lot of unsafety and if you bring it in the way that you described then it’s just a permissioning for people to be humans and to have their have their feelings be present in the room and then you get that higher higher bandwidth communication with people that happens when feelings are welcome exactly and I want people to realize yes there are going to be things that trigger you every day all day and this is a safe place and you can tell me if I’ve triggered you if someone else has triggered you um it’s information it’s been really fun to watch people open up in that way I think the other thing that I’ve done Brett is um I used to free this work I used to say okay there’s an action here I want to give an action and here’s the action and here’s who has to do it now I just say I want a need X yeah how does that how does that land in people differently from the first way the first few times it was interesting no one picked it up and because they were so used to my saying there’s an action here uh but now it’s really happening which is super cool is folks will respond with instead of me kind of giving an action to somebody that’s aligned to their job function now folks who actually want to take on the challenge regardless of their function will jump in and be like oh that’s what you want me to I think I can help I got you or even better sometimes I’ll have multiple people say you know what Carla we’re going to go work on that together and we’ll come back to you which has been super cool to see too yeah that seems like it it lets go of some of the requirement for you to coordinate the room and allow more of that group intelligence to come up exactly where there’s an Impulse on somebody they can just jump in exactly yeah that’s fascinating so to close this up I’d love for you to tell me a story of how you showed up in your family in this new way that you bring your triggers into this space either your own Trigger or maybe somebody in your family who is kind of modeling this uh or who kind of picked this up or was permissioned by the way you showed up to to really own a trigger in a way that was super healthy for the for the relationship well I’ll tell a funny story and then I’ll tell the real story when I when I first started to do the work my daughter would get upset at things and if I would start to manage her or she would stop me and say you told me to express my emotions I’m trying to express my emotions and uh and so it was really sweet because she would call me out on it if I would ever revert back I think the the biggest response was what I said earlier Brett was the dropping of rolls has created space for my husband and daughter and son to step into different roles the family Dynamic is different and there’s a lower level of anxiety in the family Dynamic and I feel extreme extremely connected to my children I even find that my children are more affectionate with me than ever before we’ve always been an affectionate family but it’s a big deal when you’re 17 and 14 year old are still affectionate with you and there’s a real deep connection there and I think the last piece and this is probably one of the ones that is the most special to me is my kids are really honest with me they talk to me about stuff that most teenagers don’t talk to their parents about and there’s this mutual respect and openness there that I always dreamed of having with my kids but now is actually playing out wow and we talk about all the things you’re not supposed to talk about with teenagers and really openly and it’s really beautiful yeah that’s that’s amazing I’m curious how how rapidly that shift occurred in your relationship with your kids coming out of the first groundbreakers it was immediate much like my friend and colleague described my love washing all over him I could see that happening with my family and I could see their response to me so you showed up and without having created any new history of experience with them they just saw they felt you in a different way and that allowed them to that permission them to open up yeah it was energetic and then coming out of this second one I would say the shifts have been even greater and it’s just accelerated been really really huge gift for me personally and professionally because we’re one person that’s the other gift of all of this is you know there’s no work Persona and home persona it’s all one person yeah we take all this stuff from home into the workplace and vice versa yeah and if we if we don’t own that we bring our personal life into the workplace we pretend that they’re separate then we just show up with a bunch of unspoken subtext that gets in the way that’s right and undermine ourselves in our teams well thank you so much Carla I really really love this conversation and I’m so glad that you joined us thank you this has been such a gift Brett I really appreciate it thanks for listening to the art of accomplishment if you enjoyed what you heard today please subscribe and rate US on your podcast app we’d love your feedback so feel free to send us questions or comments you can 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