SPEAKER_01: 0:01

Welcome to the Fulfilled Leader Podcast, the podcast to strengthen your emotional resilience and find fulfillment at work. I'm your host, Jean Balfour, master certified coach with over 5,000 hours one-to-one and tens of thousands of hours in groups. I've coached incredible leaders like you to overcome their biggest work challenges and go on to lead resiliently, finding the type of fulfilment they never knew possible. They are leaders people want to work for and organizations want to hire. In this podcast, we have conversations about the psychological and emotional struggles of leadership. You're going to hear neuroscience, psychology, leadership models, and evidence-based approaches that all have an impact in helping you be a resilient and fulfilled leader. Every week, you learn ideas and tools that will shift the way you lead and live your life, making change possible. Let's start the show. Hi, and welcome to The Fulfilled Leader. I'm delighted to welcome Dr. Katie Vest to the podcast today. Welcome, Katie.

SPEAKER_00: 1:16

Hi, Jean. Thank you so much for having me with you.

SPEAKER_01: 1:19

Oh, it's really good to have you here. Katie is the founder and director of Katie Best Associates, a leadership development consultancy, and she works with executives, senior leaders, and business owners in private and public sector companies. In addition, she's a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, where she heads the MBA Essentials Executive Education Programme, and she is a visiting senior research fellow at King's College London. She is also, most recently, the author of the 10 toughest leadership problems, which is a practical and engaging self-coaching handbook for leaders at any level. And welcome, Casey, and we're going to talk a lot about your book and congratulations on it.

SPEAKER_00: 2:11

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01: 2:12

That's a big journey writing a book.

SPEAKER_00: 2:16

Yeah, absolutely. It's been quite the journey, but I would say in all the good ways. Good, brilliant.

SPEAKER_01: 2:23

Before we dive into the book and the wisdom that you're sharing in the book, could you just tell us a bit about how you came to be doing what you're doing?

SPEAKER_00: 2:32

Yeah, absolutely. So, as you've already said, I'm a leadership coach and consultant, and I've worked with business schools and leaders within those business schools and clients of the business schools for a number of decades now. And what I was finding was that firstly, leaders were often coming to these, no matter what level they were at or what their background was, with a very similar set of problems. So whether it was their personal effectiveness or engaging their team or getting their head around the strategy, these things just kept being repeated, no matter what format, whether I was doing a workshop or coaching, people wanted the same things because everyone faces the same problems. Secondly, I found that I was using a very similar internal model to work with those people and to coach them through it or to design workshops to lead them through it. So what I decided to do during COVID, instead of just researching my family tree, was to put together a proposal outline of a book that brought both of those things together. So using and kind of formalising the framework that I'd been using to help people solve their problems, which I've now labelled the SOL Framework, which has got an acronym we'll dig into in a bit more detail, and applying that model to the 10 toughest problems that I think leaders come to me with regularly. And I chose the word tough quite carefully because I wanted them to be problems that were common but also difficult. So all of them I think hit that sweet spot between most leaders could read the book and identify with the majority of the problems, but they're also difficult ones to solve.

SPEAKER_01: 4:04

Yeah, it's certainly true for me. When I read it, I thought you'd got them right. They're the problems that leaders come to me for coaching for as well. It resonated really well with that, and we'll talk about some of those in depth. Yeah. And before we dive into the book, how was the experience of writing a book?

SPEAKER_00: 4:23

I really enjoyed it for the very, very most part. It was lovely. It was great that quite early on in the process, I realized I'd got lots of friends who worked in the publishing industry, so they could help me figure out what to write in the proposal, and then quite quickly got an agent, which was fantastic, and then moved on to getting a publisher. I don't feel like I hit any big obstacles along the way. It was just a long process, if anything, as opposed to being a difficult process. And I made sure with the writing, I was very organized. Anyone who knows me will know that's definitely one of the areas that I lean into. So the process was really organized. It didn't feel too painful at any point. Um, and it's so funny because people go to me, oh, it must have been so tough. And I was like, it it kind of was because I knew it was a long process, but in itself, on a day-to-day basis, it wasn't ever too bad. And how did it feel when you first held it in your hands? Very exciting. But the funny thing is, you get given a very rough-shod copy very early in the process to check that you're happy with the way it's laid out and everything on not great paper. And so you're like, this is the book, this is amazing. But then what's really exciting is when you open the box from the publisher when you've suddenly got 20 copies of the book and they're all looking shiny and glossy and amazing.

SPEAKER_01: 5:43

Fantastic. Well, congratulations. It's a really great addition to the leadership books out there. I think it's one that many, many, many people will come to time and again to help them. So let's dive into it. Let's start with the soul framework, which is the framework that you use in a very structured and helpful way throughout the book. If you could introduce us to it, that would be great.

SPEAKER_00: 6:07

Yeah, absolutely. So if your listeners can envisage the word solve written capital letters S-O-L-V-E, and each letter stands for a different element of the framework, and we work through them in order. So S O L V E. The first one S is state the problem. And when we're talking about this, it's getting people to summarize their problem into a maximum of two or three sentences, not worrying at that point about cause, but just thinking what is the problem that they're observing or experiencing, and also thinking a bit about the consequences of that. So, for example, I've got a team who are really disengaged and it's starting to impact performance. Or I feel really confused about what my bosses are asking from me, and I feel as though it's starting to make me not like my job. They'd be really good examples of problem statements. Secondly, once you've got that piece, second stage, oh, open the box. So that's where you dig much more deeply into the problem. What I really wanted to do with this model, with the open the box stage, is encourage leaders to be researchers. Too often we just use what we've got at our fingertips to try and make a decision about what to do. But we all need to tap into those observation skills, those talking to people skills, reading Harvard Business Review, whatever it might be, to try and really understand the nature of the problem that is being faced. And when we talk about some of the problems later, we can unpack a bit more what that means. Then L is lay out the solution. So hopefully by that point, because leaders have done all this research, they've already got a sense of some of the things that they might be able to change or what they might be able to do to make progress on their problems. So it's the writing it down or the organizing it in their head in terms of these are the actions that I'm going to take. The fourth stage is B, venture forth. So that's where you start to take that action. Importantly, here though, we've got to recognise that leaders will run into more problems at this point very often. There are unintended consequences to the solutions that we try to apply. So it's thinking through what some of those obstacles or roadblocks might be and considering what you could do to handle those. So, for example, if you decide to solve an engagement problem by running more team building exercises so that people feel more reliant on other team members, you might then receive complaints that you're overstretching people, they don't have enough hours. So then how do you deal with that knock-on problem? And then finally, the E stands for elevate your learning. And for me, again, this is a really exciting part of the model because so often problem-solving models stop at the point that you solve the problem. But what I think with leadership problems is very often in solving them, leaders have learned new skills or gained new knowledge. So, how can they elevate their learning? How can they use what they've learnt to deal with this specific problem much more broadly in their work? So, if, for example, they had a problem with personal effectiveness, they were really struggling to focus, how can they use that new skill to help maybe their team learn to focus? Or how can they use it outside of work to improve their running time, for example? So, where can they tap into that skill that they've developed? So the idea being that you work through the five stages in a self-coaching style, and by the end, you should have a problem that's solved and also these new skills to work with.

SPEAKER_01: 9:43

Fantastic. I really love that last bit because it kind of taps into double loop learning, doesn't it? It's like let's keep learning from the experience, let's not just stagger forward. I think it's so often missed at the moment because of the pace that people are working at. They're kind of just wanting to just move forward and taking that time to pause and reflect and say, how do we take that learning further? And possibly even what other areas of the business could we apply the solution to? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 10:12

Yeah. And as you'll know as well, Jean, from your own coaching, so often that's what coaching space gives someone is that time to slow down. So it's nice to build that in, even for people who maybe aren't having coaching right now, to think about how they can take the time to reflect and build on what they've learned.

SPEAKER_01: 10:29

Yeah, yeah, it's really important. So in the book, you go on to identify these tough leadership problems. And we're not going to go into them all in depth today, because I think it's good for people to have a chance to read the book and to do that. Because my focus is about how we help leaders to be emotionally resilient and to experience greater fulfillment at work. I thought we'd do a deep dive into four of them, four of the leadership challenges, and then we can go through that. So let's start with the first tough challenge that you described, which is personal effectiveness. And I was really struck by how this reflects the daily reality of what holds leaders back from how they can be effective. So I'd love to hear from you. What are the issues that are holding people back or stopping them from being effective? And then what can we do about it?

SPEAKER_00: 11:24

Yeah, absolutely. So I think there's a whole range of things that goes into this bucket, and I try to unpack as many of those in the chapter as possible. I think the one that we have to initially think about is that we might just have too much work. So personal effectiveness might not actually be a problem that sits with us, it might be a problem that sits more generally in the organization. And then to deal with our personal effectiveness, it's more about pushing back on unrealistic workloads or demands of other kinds. If it's not that the company's putting you under pressure to do that amount of work, but actually you're putting yourself under that amount of pressure, that's another type of problem almost entirely. And I'm not sure how many of your listeners will have heard this expression, some of them definitely will, but the idea of the insecure overachiever. So I believe the initial research was done in professional service firms, so law firms, accountancy firms, etc. And the idea being that if you're someone who is really smart, but who is made to feel insecure or as though you're constantly in competition with your colleagues, you just work harder and harder and harder to try to remain at the top of the pile and for people to say that you're doing a good job. And people like that often just don't know when to stop and when to say, I've done enough. I've done as much work as a human can possibly do. So recognising if you're someone who's like that can be also another way of unlocking this as a problem. Slightly different, but connected, is the idea that you could be maybe a workaholic. And I know that expression gets thrown around in quite a light-hearted way, but you can genuinely be addicted to work and think that if you don't get things done, something terrible will happen, or you'll just be your own worst enemy by putting yourself under all this pressure that isn't coming from anywhere else. So there's a lot there around needing to manage overwhelm, but working out initially whether that overwhelm is self-generated or whether it's coming from external pressure and being very honest with yourself about which it is.

SPEAKER_01: 13:34

So this is so important, I think. Uh we are living in times where people's jobs are generally too big. I don't I haven't met anybody for a long time who would tell me that they've got space in their job. So I'm really pleased to hear you say, let's start with saying, have we genuinely got too much to do? And what can we be doing to reduce that workload? And that's an organizational problem as much as it's an individual problem. So I think it's really great that we start there because I'm trying to encourage us to talk more about it. I think leaders are taking a lot of personal responsibility for it, and it's a systemic problem in most organisations, and AI has just made that worse, actually. So the leaders I'm coaching are saying, you know, now I also have to learn and implement AI on top of what was already an enormous job. And, you know, there's a lot of pressure there. And I know from the coaching I do that so much of the time there's also a lot of that internal story that's impacting how we're approaching. And even the challenging of the overwork in the organization, the job being too big, is an internal story. Because if I don't feel good about myself or I feel that I'm insecure, so I need to keep working, I might not observe that there's actually objectively too much to do.

SPEAKER_00: 14:53

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. It's one of the things. So when a company asks me to come in and run personal effectiveness workshops, I always have a difficult conversation with them to start with, to ask what their work culture is, because I don't want to be another tool that is being used to drive people into the ground. I will only go in and run a workshop on personal effectiveness if a company has genuinely got a good culture around not propagating overwork.

SPEAKER_01: 15:19

Yeah, I think that's really, really important. I think all we yeah, anyway, I could talk about this for a while. I think we see a lot about um, you know, mindfulness workshops, for example, and things like that. And they're putting a sticking plaster over the problem because the problem isn't leaders being more mindful. The problem is leaders have got too much to do.

SPEAKER_00: 15:38

Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 15:40

But we can do a lot about it. Okay, let's go straight into the second one, and this is about influence. Um so I really see influence as being connected to a lot of angst for people, for leaders particularly, but for people generally at work. It's to do with the connection to personal relationships, it's to do with how complex it is to influence people. And we also see that because organizations have changed so much, flat structures, matrix organizations, influencing is even more important than it perhaps was even 10 years ago. So can you talk us through this challenge?

SPEAKER_00: 16:19

Yeah, so I think often influence is particularly difficult because what we instinctively feel is the correct way to influence someone isn't necessarily the right way. So we're taught repeatedly that using data will get people to do what we want them to do. But the research shows that that's not true. Data's part of the picture, but actually having a good relationship with somebody and trusting you and liking you is far more of an indicator as to whether you will successfully influence them or not. So you have to put data in the picture, but you shouldn't rely on it. And so one of the things I think that stops leaders being really influential is that over reliance on data. Secondly, because our organizations are increasingly flat, and that means two things, really. That means that we have less layers in the hierarchy, but that also the psychological perception of how much more senior our boss is to us has been chipped away at probably for the good. Yeah. So our cultures and you know, it differs from country to country, but certainly within the West, we have an increasing expectation that our boss will more be on a level with us and won't pull rank. So it means that as a leader, it's very difficult to just get someone to do something because you're in charge. The best that you can really hope for in that situation is that someone will begrudgingly comply and do the job. Whereas if you use nicer forms of influence, so inspiring people and them seeing you as a role model, you know, all of those nicer, softer skills, you are so much more likely to get them to do something very willingly and to give much more of themselves to that task.

SPEAKER_01: 18:10

That's true. That's so true. So, how can people develop that and lean into being more effective in that?

SPEAKER_00: 18:18

Yeah, so I think there's two things. First thing is recognizing influence as a long-term characteristic rather than a short-term tactic. And so you want to work on building high-quality relationships with the people that you're going to need to influence, whether they're senior to you on the same level or junior, throughout the year. And that can be things as simple as walking into the office and going, How was your weekend? Or doing a coffee run every other week. Those sorts of things build up those relationships and help people to see you as someone who's nice. The other thing is to try and find things in common with people, particularly those people where you feel like you're very different. Working to find common ground can mean that you trust each other a lot more and they're much more open to being influenced by you. I think the second thing then in the moment is recognising what type of tactic is going to be most helpful. So if you've got that really strong relationship, people are more likely to want to do things for you anyway. And then you're not going to have to think about it so much in the moment. But if it's someone where you haven't established that yet, what's the kind of nicest, softest way that you can use to get them to do that thing? Because you want to avoid hard types of tactics like telling them to do it or trading favours as much as you possibly can.

SPEAKER_01: 19:37

Yeah, you definitely do. I really love how you're approaching this because it puts relationships right at the heart of it and then says, let's layer on to that some skills, some approaches, some different things that we can use, but they only work in the context of the relationship.

SPEAKER_00: 19:54

Yeah, absolutely. And in the book, I unpack it in quite a lot more detail. It's in fact, it was the most difficult chapter to write because all the research on it is fascinating and there is so much research, and boiling it down into one chapter was a lovely challenge to have because it's just so well evidenced how these techniques work.

SPEAKER_01: 20:14

Yeah, great, brilliant. Good. Well, that's a good one to dive into for people when they're reading it. So let's come on to the third one, and this is about managing individual performance, I think. This is the, and I'm going to quote a quote that's in the book where somebody says, I hate performance management. I think it's partly because measuring performance is so hard and partly because I hate having those difficult conversations. And I can't tell you how many times this comes up. So even the most senior leaders will avoid difficult conversations because it's a personal thing. You know, we don't want to offend people, we're worried about it. And when people are having to do it, it will keep them awake at night. And you know, it really bothers people, I think it sits on their minds. So, how can we help people approach this really key part of performance management, which is often some of the toughest things we do as leaders?

SPEAKER_00: 21:16

Definitely. I think the first and most important thing is trying to have a lens shift. So rather than seeing it as a difficult conversation, that's all about you and making it about how you're going to feel uncomfortable. What I think leaders should try to do is think about how important for the life, the career, the development, this conversation is going to be the other party to that conversation. So I would say the vast majority of conversations that get labeled difficult aren't actually inherently difficult. You're not firing someone, you're not telling someone they're absolutely dreadful and that they're completely not self-aware. It's normally somewhere on the better side of that. And what you're trying to do is give them developmental feedback so that they can become better at what they're doing. So having a huge amount of empathy and going into that meeting, seeing yourself as being in service of the other person, I think is the most powerful way that leaders can handle it. Someone I used to work with a few years ago used the most amazing analogy for this. So he talked about you want to be like a personal trainer, because if you're going to get paid as a personal trainer, you don't want to go to someone who's just, you know, let's say someone can normally lift 30 kilos and then on a particular day they lift 20 and they just look really disengaged. As a personal trainer, you are not doing your job if you go, great job, that was fantastic. You know, you need to say, what's going on? What's happening? Talk to me about why today 20 feels difficult. And then it might be that 20 is the right number for that particular day because, and actually, they've done brilliantly because everything's going on in their life and their muscles are sore and everything else. But it might also be that as a personal trainer, you've got to say, Come on, I think let's give it a go. I think you can actually do your personal best today. Let's add on another kilo to the 30. Let's make it 31, and then you're going to feel so much better about everything. And I think keeping that analogy in mind can be really helpful just to remind leaders that it's not about you, it's about the other person and about being kind to that person by giving them the feedback that they need to have.

SPEAKER_01: 23:26

Yeah, wow, I love this. It's about intent. Our intent is to help people to grow. It's coming at this with a gross mindset and helping them think about that. And if we do that, it's great. I've also come to the belief that if we're not offering the feedback or the observations, we're not being honest either. So we're not giving that person the chance to change or to see the truth, and we're not serving them. So I really agree. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 23:57

Yeah, absolutely. I think you put that beautifully as well, Jean.

SPEAKER_01: 24:01

Yeah. I've kind of really struggled with this myself, both because you know it can be hard to do it, but actually, time and again I've learned that if we lean in to our own discomfort and have honest conversations with people, we're being adults with the other person. And people value being treated as an adult 95% of the time.

SPEAKER_00: 24:22

Exactly. And that 5% you can't control anyway, that's just going to be a difficult conversation, no matter how you handle it. And that's again far less about you as a leader and much more about the other person. It is, it is, it really is.

SPEAKER_01: 24:36

Yeah. Okay, so the fourth tough challenge is culture and values. And you do talk a bit about this in the book, and I'm kind of intrigued about where we are around toxic cultures and talking about toxic cultures and value misalignment. And I think there's a few things happening. So I think we're hearing more talk about it because there's so much pressure on leaders that I think a lot of leaders are derailed, actually. And so their behaviour is not at their best. And we've also got some leaders who are not behaving well, and we've got people who are not in leadership roles, not behaving well. So it would be great if you can share how we help support leaders to create strong values-led organizations, particularly at the moment where I think things are really challenging.

SPEAKER_00: 25:28

Yeah, so I think we have to be careful not to put too much pressure on the shoulder of an individual leader with this, because remembering that if they're working in an organization with upwards of 100 people, their role, unless they're the CEO, is not the be all and end all of the organizational culture. That said, we would all like to be working in cultures that are nice and kind, you know, with good performance too, but that get the right balance between those two elements. So I think for leaders, it's about good behaviour, essentially, and just being a good human being. So if you're under time pressure, the organization's values, you can probably occasionally let those slip, but you don't want to let your being a good human being slip. That needs to stay there solidly. And then when things are less pressured and less stressful, you can bring in the other elements of the organization's culture and its value. So I'm trying to think of a value that sits outside the realm of being a good human. Maybe something like um being innovative. You know, if you're having a really tough week, maybe it's okay to shelve that, unless you're the director of innovation. It's probably okay to shelve it as long as you're being a good person. I think the toxicity comes in when we disregard what it means to be a nice human.

SPEAKER_01: 26:55

So right. And then I hear from so many clients. In fact, I have an increasing number of clients coming to me for coaching because they are wanting to know how do they stay emotionally resilient in the face of what you might describe as not very human behaviour, you know, just language that's not kind, overly critical, dismissive language. And you know, they want to lead, they want to protect their teams, and how do they do that when they're in that place? So I think it's great to say, let's think about what it means to be a good human and see if we can stay inside that, because we all know what that looks like.

SPEAKER_00: 27:34

Yeah, definitely. And there can't be a culture in the world, or certainly not one that anyone would want to work for, that doesn't have being a good human sitting right next to the values, if not right in the values.

SPEAKER_01: 27:47

Underneath the values, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 27:49

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 27:50

So, what about when leaders do get derailed? You know, leadership is full of pressure, and sometimes a leader will behave in a way that they later regret because of that experience. What can they do about that and how can they kind of manage the impact of those moments on their teams?

SPEAKER_00: 28:08

Yeah, so something that I think runs very central to this kind of work, and which I also talk about in the book quite a lot, is how you need to fit your solution to your context. So, in some organizations, putting your hands up and saying sorry will be exactly the right course of action with this. And, you know, hopefully that's in a growing number of organizations, and then people can find it within themselves to forgive you and move on. And we recognise that leaders are vulnerable, just as all of us are, and it actually acts as a very good role model behaviour. However, there are then organizations where doing that would make you seem incredibly weak and might potentially expose you to the wrath of a boss who goes, Oh, you mean you stepped out of line? I can think of a company that I worked with a couple of years ago that definitely fit into that category. In fact, they're not around anymore because the culture was so toxic, they got themselves into serious trouble. Um I wasn't aware of all of that when I was working with them. But you know, running workshops, people would say, we're told to be vulnerable, but the moment we're vulnerable, the CEO clamps down on us. So you've got to fit that to your context. If you're in an environment where you've got derailed but you can't own up to it, then just move on. Move on for yourself and just think, you know, the next hour it's a new hour, tomorrow's another day, I will demonstrate better behaviour going forward. And hopefully my team will pick up on that.

SPEAKER_01: 29:34

Yeah, so they'll see me being back to my usual self. And I think if leaders are mostly consistently human, people do forgive, even without somebody saying sorry, they'll say, Oh, look, that must have just been a really pressurized moment.

SPEAKER_00: 29:48

Um, and I think you can, yeah, sorry, I was gonna say I think you can talk to that pressure as well, even if you're not gonna say sorry and admit that you made a mistake, you can say last week was a very difficult week, wasn't it? In a team meeting, and that potentially is enough for people to go, oh, okay, they're admitting that they did something wrong without actually admitting it.

SPEAKER_01: 30:09

I think the other thing is that I think we all have to give our leaders permission to fail and to not be perfect, because of course we aren't, none of us are, yeah. And we can't hold leaders to a perfection standard.

SPEAKER_00: 30:23

No, I think that's the mark of a good follower, isn't it? That you can actually give your leaders space to do that. But I do think unfortunately, people have an expectation that they are going to have perfect leaders.

SPEAKER_01: 30:37

Yes, there's a desire for it. We're projecting it onto everyone. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 30:42

Yeah. And it's almost like we say we'd like to see vulnerability in our leaders, but then for some people, when the leader makes a mistake, they it it's a funny one, isn't it? Because all the research increasingly shows that we like vulnerable leaders. But then just sometimes in the moment, when we see the halo slip, it gives us pause for thought about how that leader's doing. And yeah, we just need to be better as followers at not thinking like that.

SPEAKER_01: 31:11

I think sometimes that can lead to a bit of fear. And people think if the leader's not coping and they're vulnerable and they're struggling, are we all right? I think that's sometimes where it can come in. It kind of leaves that sense of insecurity, maybe in that.

SPEAKER_00: 31:26

Yeah, and I think also inconsistency can be stressful because if we don't know how another person is going to react, it's a bit like a cat, isn't it? You stroke the cat three times and the fourth times they bite you. And then you're like, which type of cat is this cat today? Is this cat in a good mood or a bad mood? And I can't tell.

SPEAKER_01: 31:43

Yes, but where if it whereas if it's 10 times or 12 times and the 13th time they bite you, you think, okay, something's going on with the cat. Yeah. This is something no good. Yeah, that's a nice way of looking at it. Great. So those are just four of the 10, and I'm going to leave the rest as a teaser so that people are encouraged to reach out and read the book. But as we draw to a close, we know that leadership is hard. And I'm committed to really supporting leaders to be fulfilled in their leadership journeys. So in those moments where it's hard, what have you learnt about how we can help leaders to find that fulfillment in their leadership journeys?

SPEAKER_00: 32:25

Yeah, I think it's about finding roles, organizations, and teams where you can be a version of yourself that you want to be at work. And really feeling as though you can stand behind whatever it is that the organization or the team or the function stands for, and that there's a good connection between that and who you naturally are as a person.

SPEAKER_01: 32:49

Yeah, that's great. So it's being in your lane in an organization that fits your lane, basically, so that you can align that. Yeah. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00: 32:59

And I think sometimes you can be an outlier, but it can still be great. So I worked recently with a law firm partner who's in a very conservative law firm, but she's their leading art lawyer. So she's connected into every big name that you could possibly imagine in British art. They all know her. She goes to all the parties, and she's such an outlier in the firm, but people respect her so much, and she gets this real satisfaction from the type of law that she does. So it works, and she likes turning up to the meetings in you know, amazing outfit, amazing clothes, and with these stories of these people, and the much more conservative lawyers find her really interesting. So it's about finding what works for you. It doesn't mean that everyone in your organization needs to be a cookie cutter of you, but it means your organization needs to be able to accept you and you feel happy in it.

SPEAKER_01: 33:53

You need to be valued in what you're bringing to work. Yeah, exactly. Great. Well, that's a great moment for us to finish on, Katie. Thank you for joining me today. And we will put a link to your book in the show notes. Saving so people can find you and congratulations again. It's a really practical tool that people can use, both through understanding those ten tough challenges, but also the soul framework, I think, has some really good wisdom and insight in it. So thank you.

SPEAKER_00: 34:28

Thank you so much, Jean. It's been lovely to talk to you today.

SPEAKER_01: 34:36

Thanks for listening to The Fulfilled Leader. If this episode resonated, share it with another leader or friend. And don't forget to follow the podcast so you never miss an episode. You can even rate end review. You can find more support and resources at genebalfur.com or come and say hello on LinkedIn. Take care and keep leading with heart.