In this episode guest Rebecca Hawkins joins Dana to discuss the culture of the Regenerative Workplace. What is a Regenerative workplace you may ask? It is an organizational culture that recognizes and meets the core needs of their employees as human beings.
People have been studying human needs and how they translate to the workplace for a while now. You've probably heard of Maslow's needs hierarchy of needs or McGregor's theory X and theory Y. Maybe you are familiar with more recent takes from the likes of Dan Pink and others. The consensus is when employee's core needs are met, they will be better, more productive employees.
Rebecca has made it her mission to help organizations recognize in order to succeed in the future, they need to recognize we are in the 4th stage of industrial revolution, one based on knowledge, technology, and sustainability. Rebecca has plenty of science to back an organizational strategy based on the earlier revolutionary stages is increasingly both unhealthy and unsustainable.
Dana and Rebecca get deep as to why so many industries and organizations are so reluctant to adopt a new method that the innovators like Zappos have already proven works. Enjoy our 80'th episode as we dive into the Regenerative Revolution.
Find Rebecca Hawkins here:
LinkedIn
Regenerative Workplaces
Connect with us:
Email the podcast.
Join us on Instagram - we appreciate your support!
Dana Dowdell - Boss Consulting - @bossconsultinghr - @hrfanatic
In this episode guest Rebecca Hawkins joins Dana to discuss the culture of the Regenerative Workplace. What is a Regenerative workplace you may ask? It is an organizational culture that recognizes and meets the core needs of their employees as human beings.
People have been studying human needs and how they translate to the workplace for a while now. You've probably heard of Maslow's needs hierarchy of needs or McGregor's theory X and theory Y. Maybe you are familiar with more recent takes from the likes of Dan Pink and others. The consensus is when employee's core needs are met, they will be better, more productive employees.
Rebecca has made it her mission to help organizations recognize in order to succeed in the future, they need to recognize we are in the 4th stage of industrial revolution, one based on knowledge, technology, and sustainability. Rebecca has plenty of science to back an organizational strategy based on the earlier revolutionary stages is increasingly both unhealthy and unsustainable.
Dana and Rebecca get deep as to why so many industries and organizations are so reluctant to adopt a new method that the innovators like Zappos have already proven works. Enjoy our 80'th episode as we dive into the Regenerative Revolution.
Find Rebecca Hawkins here:
LinkedIn
Regenerative Workplaces
Connect with us:
Email the podcast.
Join us on Instagram - we appreciate your support!
Dana Dowdell - Boss Consulting - @bossconsultinghr - @hrfanatic
This episode is brought to you by Boss Consulting HR and our downloadable products. We launched downloadable products in 2023 and I'm excited to share them with you through the Quirky HR podcast. If you head over to Boss Consulting HR and navigate to the downloadable section, we'll, of course, make sure that it's linked in the podcast description. There you can find resources for small business owners, hr departments of one, new business owners who are not quite sure where to go to get started, all for purchase. Our goal is to provide all the resources and tools for small business owners so that you can make sure that you are doing right by your employees and running your HR function appropriately. With that, check them out over on Boss Consulting HR and we'll get right into the show. Hey there, welcome back to Quirky HR. I am joined today by Rebecca Hawkins, and she is the founder of Regenerative Workplaces. Rebecca, welcome to Quirky HR.
Rebecca Hawkins:Thank you. I'm excited to be here and I'm excited to hang out with your listeners today. This is going to be a juicy conversation, I can tell.
Dana Dowdell:We're very lucky to have you, as we do with all of our guests. Tell us how you got started and what you're doing, how you landed in this talent management HR sphere.
Rebecca Hawkins:You know, what's funny about my story is I often say there was a meme actually on Facebook once that I really resonated, that said my life can be summed up in one sentence "it didn't turn out how it was supposed to and that's okay. I remember when I first saw that meme I wasn't really on board with the, and that's okay part of it because at that time I was actually going through some pretty major trauma and life events and reinventing and loss and I wasn't okay with some things that had happened to me. But I share that from the get go because I haven't had like a straight line to anything. I've really just fallen into the spaces I've fallen into. But I had got first half of life up until I was about 40 when I started two different businesses with two different husbands, one of which made a ton of money, one of which brought us to bankruptcy. So a lot of weird experiences, nonprofits and doing a lot of work in the community. And then I started over and kind of hit reset during my second divorce when I turned 40 and had lost everything and I was starting over again.
Rebecca Hawkins:I had background in sales, customer service, like I said, entrepreneurship and leadership, but didn't have a career. And then I really say I won the lottery when I got a really great job at a large Fortune 100 company, but starting at entry level I was doing customer service and sales on the phones in a call center and that was 15 years ago. And that company I say I won the lottery because the culture at that time was wonderful, they were really invested in their people and I had some great leaders and was quickly developed into leadership after three years and as a leader I had been asked by one of my employees right away like so what kind of manager, what kind of leader are you? And I had to think about what is the answer to that question and all I could really come up with at the time, especially after having just come from three years in operations and frontline work doing the grind on the phones with customers. I said I'm the kind of leader who believes my number one job is to make you love coming to work every day. And that became my North Star for the next 10 years of my career.
Rebecca Hawkins:And from there the company paid for me to get my master's in organizational leadership and I started to actually learn about the science behind why organizations should create an environment where their employees love coming to work every day and how to create that kind of environment. And just really couldn't get enough of that science. I found Bernie Brown and Daniel Pink and Simon Sinek and some of the great thought leaders in that space and began to apply that as a people leader in the call center. And then from there I just had a brand of being an innovator, a trendsetter, a rule breaker to change how employees experience work and I moved into executive communications and then I moved into sales strategy and learning and development and change management. And then I learned, landed in HR and so I ended my career at that company really in HR, because I loved people and cared about people and really isn't that what the heart of HR should be. So I spent my last three and a half years at that company as a culture enablement consultant, doing employee and organizational culture for our company.
Rebecca Hawkins:What a rad title. Yeah, it was a rad title. I like I had been stalking that job for a while. When the position came up I was thrilled to apply and thrilled to get accepted. But it was interesting because I had no HR background. I just had a background of understanding people and actually believing in the power of organizational culture and creating great culture wherever I led and wherever I worked, and so I had a great brand in the organization and I had really good relationships cross, functionally cross departments, and that's what got me that role, was those connections, those relationships, which I really think is the cornerstone of the career, and unfortunately it was in those last three years.
Rebecca Hawkins:The company got a new CEO. There was a significant change in culture and direction. We also experienced the pandemic, we experienced some serious regulatory issues in our company and the company really had a downward turn, which is still on, and so I won't mention the company's name, but I left in a massive layoff and departments being eliminated. All throughout, hr, including the culture team, was completely eliminated, which really is what has launched me into my dream job, which is now doing my own thing as an HR consultant, a people consultant, executive coach and helping other companies create environments where employees love to come to work every day. My tagline in my business regenerative workplaces is when employees thrive, companies thrive and the world thrives. Because we're ready for this, the world needs energized and energizing workplaces.
Dana Dowdell:So we are absolutely going to talk about burnout and the wave and all of that stuff, but I do want to ask, because you lived it. It sounds like right, like we hear about these incredible employee focused organizations like Zappos. Right, and they were so strategically aligned.
Dana Dowdell:And Then there was the new leader within your organization and then it sounds like it took a turn. Can you maybe speak a little bit about how quickly or slowly you saw the culture shift from the appointment of that new leader? And from a personal opinion standpoint, like that culture shift and its strategic impact, do you think that there could have been a resiliency within the workforce had the culture stayed the same?
Rebecca Hawkins:Yeah, and I often will say the organization itself, which is over a hundred years old, is a resilient organization and I believe it will eventually bounce back. But really what I boil the pivot down to is fear that we really ushered in an era that was because of some regulatory scrutiny, particularly that the company was under, and because of the economic pressures. Everyone knows the changes in the inflation in the economy influenced a lot of companies and unfortunately that drove a culture of fear that trickled down from the top, and by fear I mean a results, results. Results results matter and as soon as you are an organization that overindexes on results above relationships, your culture will begin to erode. And so we saw that.
Rebecca Hawkins:But also fear of failure, fear of challenging leaders, fear of speaking up. There was just a whole environment of we have to get it right and we have to get it perfectly and that caused an erosion. And it was hard because even now there are still great employees within the organization trying to make a difference in pockets, and I saw that on our culture team that we were making a difference in pockets. But if, from the top down, you have leaders who are driving through fear, through control, through command and control, through rigidity, you can't make a huge difference culturally at the grassroots level, unfortunately, like you can make a difference in pockets. But as part of why, going forward with my business, I work exclusively with CEOs and founders and presidents of companies, because this has to be bought in from the top of the organization.
Rebecca Hawkins:And I saw it deteriorate rather quickly and unfortunately, the pandemic accelerated it because, as many companies are battling with this issue, this company also battled with the whole return to office movement and the fact that we had senior leaders who, all honesty, are of a certain generation, of a certain demographic that has a certain understanding of work and of productivity and of what makes work, and they fundamentally believe that involves having bodies and seats and buildings, and so those prejudices and opinions literally were more valued than data and the research and the employee experience, and there was a heavy handed, forced return to office movement that massively accelerated the culture breakdown, in my opinion and it's witnessed it firsthand.
Rebecca Hawkins:So it's a combination of economic pressures and fear and then the control getting people back into the office without good reason, without good data, without good communication and collaboration with employees that caused a huge breakdown and they have lost I can't even tell you thousands and thousands of incredibly talented legacy talented people at that company in the last couple of years, some of which who were eliminated by their positions and some of which left willingly for better opportunities. But I think the company will bounce back.
Dana Dowdell:No CEO lasts forever, say so Sure, it's so interesting, I think about what you were speaking about, these moments that we experience at work as leaders, as HR professionals. They're so granular, and I think that we don't place enough emphasis on the importance of those granular interactions. Management civility is a term that I'm familiar with just this idea of saying hello to your team and you're walking through the office. I think we sometimes lose sight of those things and, though it might seem like it's such a granular thing, like it's such a simple thing, the impact of doing and not doing can be massive, massive, yeah Right, and I think it's so interesting that we know all these things, we know the data, we know the anecdotal experience of the employees, but yet we still choose to do different for some reason, isn't that?
Rebecca Hawkins:insane, I was struck. So Daniel Pink, in his TED Talk of motivation and in his Dying dive.
Dana Dowdell:I know so the person who books a lot of my podcast guests on my team. His name's Brandon. He tried to get Dan Pink as a gift to me. He did not tell me that he was doing outreach and unfortunately he wasn't available. He heard back from him, but he is amazing. His approach, his philosophy is incredible, and so actionable.
Rebecca Hawkins:Actionable and foundational and based on decades of research. And he often says, or he said in his TED Talk businesses don't do what science knows. And that has been one of my taglines for the longest time. This is not new.
Rebecca Hawkins:I talk a lot about McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y, which was published in 1960, which was this idea that most managers come with this Theory X, that employees are inherently lazy and they need to be motivated through threat and through reward or else they won't produce what actually humans are inherently love to work and perform and succeed and Dan Pink calls it mastery and we don't need to threaten or punish them or even necessarily just focus on rewards.
Rebecca Hawkins:We need to get out of their way and create environments where they will naturally succeed. That mindset is still here 50, 60, 70 years later. Companies still have this adversarial relationship with their employees that I think is at the root of some of these culture issues. So leaders see employees as inherently lazy and needing to be motivated or threatened, and or they see them as a cost on their balance sheet and not an asset, even though how many companies have you heard say employees are our biggest asset? But they don't actually see them as assets. They see them as liabilities, whereas really that relationship, that leader employee relationship, needs to be collaborative and mutually respectful and science has already proven that over and over again.
Dana Dowdell:I think it's an ego issue, like the ego gets in the way of what we think we know. I say this all the time as an HR practitioner Everyone thinks that we can do human resources or they think that they know how easy it is to do HR and even just think about your career path. But, like all the different seats that you sat in and those competencies and those skills brought you to being ready for an HR role. Hr is not easy, it's challenging, and I think there's just so much ego in this idea of the control mechanism. I know best employees are going to conform and it doesn't pay off.
Rebecca Hawkins:Yeah, and I won't touch like 60% of HR, like I'm not going to be a talent acquisition specialist, I'm not going to be a payroll and compliance specialist, I'm not going to be those technical skills. Those are incredibly hard to learn and stay on top of compensation, all of those things benefits, total rewards. Those are not my areas of expertise, but I understand how people actually function and it is complex, but it also in some ways is incredibly simple because, at the end of the day, all humans inherently want the same thing we want to be seen, heard and valued, we want to have meaning and connection and we want to have safety. And if you can provide those three things and apply those three things to all of your people, practices, your policies, practice procedures, your mindsets, you can transform your workplace to a place where humans thrive.
Dana Dowdell:I wish we all were like striving to attain that that everybody was on the same page that we were all right. So you talk about this tidal wave that's coming. Can you elaborate on what you're seeing, what you're anticipating? Yeah, and.
Rebecca Hawkins:I was amazed at first really recognize it during this return to office kind of debate that happened in the hybrid and the in office and remote debate, because it looked like there was really literally this divide. There were these certain companies that were going hard on forcing their people back to the office, and then there were a lot of companies that were leaning hard into flexibility and how can we give our employees more options and keep them at home the right way at the right amount of time?
Dana Dowdell:And I heard someone refer to it as the future of the workforce looks like choice.
Rebecca Hawkins:Yes, yes, because humans value autonomy. It's one of our core needs, according to, again, dan Pink autonomy, mastery and purpose. And so giving choice is huge and taking away choice to see a road's trust immediately and it doesn't create thriving workhorses and it really accelerates the whole quiet quitting movement. Why should I invest myself fully in this organization if they don't trust me and aren't going to invest fully in my adult ability to make the right choice? So that was like the first, like for me, the breaking point, like isn't it interesting this divergence that's happening, that there's this difference and there's not a lot of middle. It's kind of like one or the other. And as I thought about it, and I thought about particularly Gen Z, the coming future talent as that generation grows and starts to take over the workforce and their core values and their prioritization of their own well-being, and I realized that companies that are stuck in the command and control, fear-based, hierarchical, outdated ways of running a company that really haven't evolved since the industrial evolution, they aren't going to be around in 50 years because the future of talent and what we now know about humans isn't going to be sustainable. On top of that, as we kind of just know, we're in a massive global well-being crisis, like the amount of mental health problems, as evidenced in increased addictions, increased shootings, increased suicide rates all of these key societal indicators that we are unwell, and the increased statistical research around burnout in the workplace like the World Health Organization ultimately had to define burnout in the workplace as a workplace hazard and how we need to address that growing element, that growing phenomenon. Those are all things that are just basically demanding change.
Rebecca Hawkins:The workforce, the way it is being currently run, is not sustainable, not just for companies to retain their talent and to have thriving talent and high-performing talent, but for the world, for the society can't really sustain workplaces that are burning out people, because then you go home depleted on a Friday, you try to live through the weekend and regenerate a little bit, only to go back on Monday and do it all over again, but you're taking it out on your spouse, your kids, your community, your just exhaustion mounts over time. So I see these markers that indicate there's a shift coming and then I'll tell you. The real cherry on top of this for me was actually your podcast last month with Stella and Solange, because I had not heard of them or their work, and now I can't get enough of them. But I learned through that podcast I didn't realize there also was legislation coming that is going to demand the companies are transparent about their human capital performance and exactly how much they're investing in their people and what economic value that investment is getting for their shareholders and their investors.
Rebecca Hawkins:And that has already passed in the unit in the European Union for companies that are publicly traded there. That will go into effect next year and it is coming through the SEC as well in the next few months their first recommendation for this. So that was to me the final straw that it tied away. It was literally coming and companies that don't recognize the centrality of their employee experience will not be around in 50 years.
Dana Dowdell:So I teach global human resources at the local university and a lot of what we talk about is that, our understanding of this archaic view of what work needs to be a 40-hour work week. That idea is not a global concept. And then, when I pair that with what I see on the legislative front, where a piece of legislation comes up that better supports employees or provides them a benefit, obviously the employer or the business reaction is cost, administrative burden and they often fail. So as a society, here in the United States in particular, is it going to get to the point where it will have to have forced our hand to do these things? Because you do hear about these little silver linings of these amazing organizations, and maybe that's what you mean in terms of a wave, but do you think that this shift is it will ever get to the point where it's culturally, as a society, that becomes a norm?
Rebecca Hawkins:I think it's a phenomenal question, dana, and it's so interesting because there's a lot of complexity to this shift. First of all, we have multiple systems built on this structure, this way of looking at work and schedule, and 40-hour work weeks. It's not just the workplaces, it's the school systems, it's day care, it's so many other things built into this format and this formula. And then also it's our own upbringing, it's our internal DNA as human beings in this country and, to your point, it's very Western. It's not necessarily global, but this is also where I grew up so it's all I've ever known where we have kind of this Puritan work ethic wired into us, where work, hard work, is equated with moral good and so the harder you work, the better person you are. So we equate our value with our exhaustion. We really do, and so I just I stumbled upon a book called Do Less by Kate Northrop. I don't know if you've heard of her phenomenal book I highly recommend. I'm obsessed with Kate Northrop now, and she talks about Adding it to my list.
Rebecca Hawkins:Yes, her own entrepreneurial journey and how she realized, you know, she was able to accomplish just as much in her business as an entrepreneur working 20 hours a week as she was working 60. And that was part of her awareness. But she also just really leaned into the research around nature and other countries and globally that this idea of eight hour day, 40 hour work week does not align to anything in the world. Like trees don't grow that way, animals don't function that way. You know nothing in life. Is that rigid 365 days a year productivity? Like we all know seasonality, the moons, the moon cycles as women are Lutio, hormonal cycles, like there's a lot more rhythmic, energetic productivity evidence than there is this rigid approach to work which, frankly, is pretty masculine and patriarchal. We could talk about that for a while. But but I also then stumbled just this week on Cal Newport's book slow productivity. If you've heard of that, I just bought it so I haven't read it yet. I just heard him on a podcast. He's been writing for a long time so I'm just like a slow learner. I don't didn't hear of him before, but his book also unpacks specifically this idea of productivity as we've defined it in the western world, especially based off of factories and mills. You know, 100, 150 years ago, and we never translated over into a knowledge economy and knowledge work. So we're trying to drive knowledge based workers by a schedule and a measurement of productivity. That doesn't apply to knowledge work. It only really applies when there's machines involved and you're actually producing widgets, and then you can measure productivity and you need people running the machines. So I was my mind was just completely blown open by that whole idea as well, and he also did the research.
Rebecca Hawkins:Going back to well, what did knowledge workers do in the 1800s? You know, like Jane Austin and Darwin and scientists and writers and artists and researchers how did they produce great work 150 years ago, before factories were as big really, and it was seasonal. They would have burst of productivity and then periods of rest, and burst of productivity and periods of rest, and there is really no less productivity when you do that. In fact, there's probably more productivity than when you're trying to grind through a 40 hour work week and you actually can't get as much done because of this level of exhaustion and what Cal Newport talks about is this overhead.
Rebecca Hawkins:We have all this digital overhead that sucks our time away, that we're not actually getting anything done in meetings or writing emails or responding to emails and that overhead is reducing our productivity. And when we can actually commit to doing less we have less overhead, we get more done. So the net net for companies to start to realize and for humans to start to realize to answer your question, because it's going to be individual accountability, boundaries and ownership of our own wellbeing and systemic change at the organizational level is wow, we actually can still do great things, do great work, produce amazing results and work less and have less exhaustion and burnout. It's not going to cost our bottom line at the end of the day.
Dana Dowdell:Oh, my goodness, I'm having like so many anecdotal things come up around, like employees advocating for themselves in terms of schedule structure, flexibility, right, and then that gets paired with nobody wants to work anymore, right, and I fully believe it's a leadership issue and it goes back to that idea of like these incremental changes that we as individuals, as leaders, as HR practitioners can do and continue to kind of like slowly unseal the envelope like inch by inch of like what is possible, right? These books seem fantastic.
Rebecca Hawkins:So thank you for your recommendations.
Dana Dowdell:You also mentioned burnout, right. So if we think about what some of these things that came because we came as a result of the pandemic great resignation, quiet quitting, burnout how do you define burnout and why do you think that we continue to kind of reward it right, like oh, they work so hard to your idea of like productivity? Is the hours that you're physically there not necessarily like what you're actually producing? Why do we continue to do it poorly?
Rebecca Hawkins:Yeah, it's such a hard thing to change, I think at this point because it's so ingrained in our society. But work drives it and actually the World Health Organization has defined burnout as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. So, underneath burnout, is this, what is workplace stress right? And workplace stress is defined as basically having a lot of uncertainty and lack of control, and there's this element of trying to get our handle on the spiraling out of control amount of information, amount of work that needs to be done around connection, like meetings and emails and all of that stuff. And we're programmed to think that it's normal. That's when I say I wanna end the normalization of burnout. So that's what I think is at the root of this is that we have sort of become complacent and just accepted this is the way it is. It's the way it will always be. I hear that from a lot of employees that do this, give it up. Well, this is just the way it is, and I say fuck that, it doesn't have to be this way, like it wasn't even always this way.
Rebecca Hawkins:For hundreds of thousands of years of evolution of humanity we didn't have these rigid constructs of an office and a factory and these eight hour work weeks and eight hour work days and 40 hour work weeks and the digital flexibility to then actually work outside of that. So when you can work from anywhere and you can work at any time, you feel like you should be working from anywhere and anytime because we equate our value with our productivity. So, as long as we see our worth and our identity and our value equated to our productivity, and as long as we define productivity as being busy and being active and, in some cases, literally being present so showing up in meetings or whatever that might look like, or responding to emails we're gonna have this constant, what I call the hamster wheel. We're on a hamster wheel where we're spinning, spinning, spinning, but we're actually not getting things done and we're just burning ourselves out. And it's not designed for how humans actually function and that's the other piece that sort of fascinates me is that, deep down inside, what our brains want, what our biology wants, what our survival instinct wants, is to be seen, heard and valued, to feel like a human being, right To do something that is important and meaningful, to make a difference in the world and to be safe, like we are wired to be safe and to gravitate towards safety. Our brains don't like uncertainty, don't like danger and like risk or wired for that survival instinct. So we're always on the lookout for problems and always guarded. So we're in this hyper state of self-protectiveness and everyone goes into work and into our even day-to-day life guarded, protected, braced. We're activating our fight or flight system, we've got cortisol and adrenaline running through our systems and all those are recipes for massive health crisis, like the World Health Organization also identifies heart disease as the leading cause of death and stress is the leading cause of heart disease. So stress is literally killing us and it will take a lot of systemic change and courage and bravery.
Rebecca Hawkins:And so I work with partner, with a lot of people who and I do some personal work around personal wellbeing. I'm a yoga instructor as well. I have a whole practice around mindfulness and I do my Gallup Strengths coach, so I help people identify the core of who they really are, what makes them tick, and those are things you can do to elevate your own personal wellbeing. But I really wanna focus personally on the systemic, organizational piece, because there's a lot of practitioners working on the personal wellbeing, personal resilience, how you can personally overcome burnout yourself through self-care, through self-compassion, through mindfulness and those things.
Rebecca Hawkins:Those practices are all important, but I'm going after the systemic problems, the organizational problems, the micro stressors within the workplace that are built off of outdated systems and outdated science that are causing burnout. So if you're one of those companies that you added a wellbeing program, your people have access to yoga or they now have an EAP or they have this really cool app, but you're actually the cause of their stress. That's like putting a bandaid on a slit or at an artery. So we have to help organizations identify how their meeting structure, their performance management processes, their decision-making, their communication like the systemic pieces and their flexibility, how they schedule, how they do time off management those things are causing stress because they don't align to core human needs, and then just tacking a wellbeing strategy on top of that isn't going to solve the problem.
Dana Dowdell:Okay, I'm gonna ask you to put your coach hat on, if you can, not only for myself, but I am surmising for many of the people that are listening. It's a systemic issue, right? And yet there are many people that exist in corporate, in organizations, that practice the things necessary for this shift. How do we, as individuals, continue to exist when the environment does not line up with what we're practicing? Right like that's? I feel like that's gotta be so freaking hard it is it?
Rebecca Hawkins:is really hard. And it depends on your role also because, like when you're an individual contributor and you feel like you have very little choice and very little power control, how do you continue to exist in that environment as an individual contributor? But then there's the leaders. There's both mid-ledible and senior leaders, and if you are already sensing within yourself a disconnect and you want to make changes, you want to make change and you are a leader but maybe not aligned with the whole organization, maybe not able to influence the organization, how do you continue to exist as an executive, as a mid-level manager? So I think it boils down to and this is where coaching comes in.
Rebecca Hawkins:I love that you call out coaching, because coaching is all about tapping into your own inner wisdom and your own inner expert. So my job as a coach is always to guide people to true self and guide people to their own inner compass through curiosity, empathy and holding space for that exploration. So I can't say for any one person what's the right path for them, but I can ask them provocative questions. So, like what are some of the biggest challenges that you're facing right now at work, in your environment, in your relationships? Whatever it might be? What do you believe about those challenges. So I like to get first at the belief level. What's some of the thoughts that are going around in your head when this challenge comes up? And then digging a little deeper where did that thought come from and how true is it for you? And could you try on a different thought about it? And what would that different thought look like for you? And so some of those questions can lead you down a path of deciding for yourself.
Rebecca Hawkins:What is my role in this place? Is it to leave? Like is one of the thoughts? Is I'm stuck here, I have to stay? Well, is that true? Do you have options? Can you leave? What if one of your thoughts is well, if I speak up, I'm gonna be punished, I'm gonna be humiliated, I'm gonna get fired. Is that true? Are you gonna be punished or humiliated for speaking up? Or could speaking up potentially actually begin to cause a chain reaction where other people feel inspired?
Dana Dowdell:There's no one to feel that's the braveness, right Like that's being brave and courageous.
Rebecca Hawkins:Exactly that's what it's all about, and I'm a big fan of Elizabeth Liz Gilbert's book Big Magic, where she talks about really having a big life, and that involves making fear a companion. She calls putting fear in the back seat Because, like I mentioned earlier, we all have this self-protected automatic response. We are a fear-driven species. That's how our brains are built. Unless you're gonna take the amygdala out, guess what? You're gonna feel afraid. So we have to recognize fear when it comes up in our bodies.
Rebecca Hawkins:What does that feel like for me, when I'm feeling afraid of something?
Rebecca Hawkins:And then it takes practice to be aware of that feeling and that that fear is either real or imagined.
Rebecca Hawkins:There's either a real danger In some cases we need to get the hell out of there or it's an imagined threat and there's not actually a real danger.
Rebecca Hawkins:And in those cases, can we shift our focus from what we're afraid might happen that's the fear, it's a belief that something bad's about to happen To what good might happen instead and say well, can I push through this fear and that's where the bravery and the courage comes from by putting like we're always gonna have fear with us, but can we make it someone in the backseat instead of the driver seat of our lives, To where we use fear as a motivator, as a self-awareness moment instead of I can't do it because I'm scared, it's never gonna make a difference.
Rebecca Hawkins:So I am calling on individuals to be brave while I'm working at the systemic levels. It's like organizations also need to create more safety for people to be brave, For people to be brave and actually Brené Brown is the one that brings up this idea of bravery in her work, because we talk a lot about safety and she has said in her research and she's spot on it's never gonna be actually fully safe, Like there is no such thing as a completely safe space. So it really requires us to find our own inner bravery in those moments.
Dana Dowdell:Yes, oh my God, I feel like I just did a business coaching session and a therapy session and chatted with a friend. So you're amazing. Thank you so much. Where can listeners connect with you?
Rebecca Hawkins:So I would say the best way to connect to me is on LinkedIn, cause on my LinkedIn profile, which I think there'll be a link in the show notes, there's a schedule time with me link and operate at the top of my profile.
Rebecca Hawkins:So I offer a 30 minute free discovery session for anyone interested in one-on-one coaching or in discovery session for organizational consulting, and I'd love to meet with you to talk more about your needs and your challenges. So start with LinkedIn. I also publish a newsletter there called Workplace Wellbeing Now Exclamation Point, cause I'm impatient and I really believe it's time to end the normalization of burnout and workplace stress, and so we have to talk about it in order to do that. So the first step is acknowledge it's really a problem. Acknowledge it's a systemic problem, acknowledge there actually are ways to solve it, and so start owning our part of that. So I'd love to connect with you on LinkedIn and if you wanna check out my website, it's regenerativeworkplaces. com, and there's also some information about the type of services I offer there in place to connect with me there too.
Dana Dowdell:You are fantastic, Rebecca. Thank you so much for joining me on Quirky HR. I really appreciate it.
Rebecca Hawkins:You're a thank you for having me.
Dana Dowdell:And, as always, you can check out all of the places to find Rebecca in the show notes. I highly recommend that you connect with her on LinkedIn, not only from a practice perspective, like if you need her services, and a networking perspective, but she is fricking, killing it on like the business development side of LinkedIn. So if you are in the coaching sphere, you need to connect with her because it's incredible. So check out the show notes for all of that information and, as always, thank you for tuning in to Quirky HR Music playing.