Alexandra Jamieson & Bob Gower: All-In Conversations in Good Faith

Tami Simon: Welcome to Insights at the Edge, produced by Sounds True. My name is Tami Simon, I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I’d love to take a moment to introduce you to the new Sounds True Foundation. The Sounds True Foundation is dedicated to creating a wiser and kinder world by making transformational education widely available. We want everyone to have access to transformational tools such as mindfulness, emotional awareness, and self-compassion regardless of financial, social or physical challenges. The Sounds True Foundation is a nonprofit dedicated to providing these transformational tools to communities in need, including at risk youth, prisoners, veterans, and those in developing countries. If you’d like to learn more or feel inspired to become a supporter, please visit soundstruefoundation.org.

You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guests are Alexandra Jamieson and Bob Gower. Alex and Bob are partners in teaching and in marriage. Alex is a success coach for driven women and she’s been featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Martha Stewart Living, and also was the cocreator of the Oscar-nominated documentary Super Size Me. Bob is an authority on lean, agile, and responsive organizational design and he’s worked with Spotify, GE, and many other companies. Together, they’ve written a new book, and it’s about “all-in conversations.” They call the book Radical Alignment: How to Have Game-Changing Conversations That Will Transform Your Business and Your Life.

In this Insights at the Edge episode, Alex and Bob and I talk about the four-step method that they’ve created, and how beneficial it is to help people—whether it’s working within your family, dealing with difficult issues like in-laws, finances, and sex, or whether it’s in the context of a leadership team, trying to find a way for people to align around a project—how this four-step all-in conversation method that they’ve created builds understanding, deep empathy, and what they call Radical Alignment. Here’s my conversation with Alexandra Jamieson and Bob Gower.

Right here at the beginning, by way of introduction, I’d love to know how you came up with the AIM—All-In Method—for game-changing conversations. You’re a married couple and of course I’m curious, were you having challenges in your marriage and you realized you needed to have some type of approach to having conversations about difficult topics or how did you both come up with this?

 

Bob Gower: Well, it actually came up when we were teaching a workshop together. I think we were a little … How to say … We were a little ambitious when we were early on in our relationship. We were like, “Let’s teach workshops and …” Because we both had a background of that and we had this idea for a workshop and we invited a few couples over and we did it a few times. And each time we did the workshop, we found that the couples that were coming to the workshop, some of them were having a bad experience in the latter half of the workshop. And it was often because intentions are misaligned or they just didn’t know enough about why they were there together.

So we developed this methodology, really, just almost as a throwaway. It was something at the beginning of the workshop in order to get people to feel more aligned, to feel more present. It was the first thing that we did.

And then slowly we found that we started using it ourselves for almost everything. We used it when we went to see stressful family members. We used it when we were planning work projects. I used it as a consultant. Alex used it with her clients and it was something that, I think, just over the years, we realized that it had slowly become one of the most valuable tools in our own tool kit, and also the thing that we were getting the most calls about from other people.

 

Alexandra Jamieson: Yes, Tami, we were a little slow to realize how powerful this method was when we kept getting texts and phone calls and emails from friends and people we had shared it with in the workshop saying, “What was that four-step process again? What was that thing, because I have another conversation that I need to have.”

So we realized we should put this in a Google Doc so we can just start sharing it with people and not have to re-explain it every time. And the more we shared it, the more rich it got. And people are sharing what the topics were they needed to address. We realized, “Oh, we’re using it everywhere in our lives and work, so are the people that we’re teaching this to. This is a thing now.”

 

TS: Now you refer to the All-In Method as a blueprint for having conversations that are difficult.

It sounds like conversations that are important, conversations we feel we need to have. Go ahead and share with our audience the blueprint itself.

 

AJ: So the first step is really the pre-step, which is setting the scene—and that means everything from how you invite someone to have a tough talk. We really recommend: do not say, “We need to talk.” Because that is usually a cortisol booster. Nobody likes to hear, “We need to talk.”

But instead, invite someone in. “Hey, I’d like to talk about this specific topic with you. Can we find a time that works for us both? And I’d like to use these four steps when we talk about it.” So just getting really clear, and inviting a scheduling to happen so that it’s about a specific topic and that’s a really great way to set the scene.

 

TS: I get what you’re saying. Someone says, “Hey, we need to talk immediately.” It’s like someone says, “Hey, I have some feedback for you immediately.” I’m flushed. But even if somebody said, “I’d like to set a time for us to talk about some feedback I have about something or some difficulty I had in that meeting with you.” I think I would still have that same cortisol rush. I’d be like, “Tell me more. I don’t want to just set this appointment up in a week. I want to know what you’re thinking now.” I think I still might feel anxious.

So how do you do that in a way where you’re really putting the other person at peace with getting ready for the conversation?

 

BG: Yes, well, I like to set it up not just saying like “I have some feedback for you” or “I had a difficult time,” but it’s more we just sort of pick the topic. So let’s pick a challenging topic that couples might have, sort of the typical is being, maybe, finances, sex, or in-laws potentially, right?

So we say, “I’d like to talk about …” I might say to Alex, “Hey, I’d like to talk about our finances.” And then, if this is the first time—obviously, Alex and I have a long experience with this. If this was the first time, I might say like “… so that we’re saving responsibly and we can both feel like we are living in a world of abundance or we’re able to spend what we want to spend.”

So it’s not necessarily talking about like, “Hey, I have some specific tensions about this that I want to share with you.” Those will come in the course of the conversation. But really, setting the conversation up with topic and reason and making that reason very inclusive, inclusive of the other person’s needs, not just your own needs.

 

TS: Very good advice there. OK, let’s move into step one for our blueprint for our conversation.

 

BG: Sure, and let me just give you maybe even a quick overview. So the conversation has four steps. It’s four buckets. It’s really important, you can kind of tune the questions, the prompt questions. We use this in a variety of circumstances. I’ve used it with boards and leadership teams of some big nonprofits and big for-profit organizations. And like I said, we also use it in our personal life. So the questions can kind of change subtly, but the topic of each bucket is always the same. And the quick overview, it’s: intentions, concerns, boundaries, and dreams. We’ll just kind of go over quickly what we mean by each of those.

So the intention is, let’s say we’re talking about, well—Alex and I used this when we wrote the book together, right? And we were very cautious, we’ve been together for many years as intimate partners and co-parents and maintaining a household and all of that before we decided to do a work project together, and we both had a lot of concern about that.

So when we entered into this, we were like, OK, let’s click. We used the process to talk about writing a book about the process. And so our intention was that this could be good for both of our businesses. It’s always nice to have a book out there; it’s a way for people to find you. So there’s sort of a business component to it.

We also wanted to try—or I wanted to try, I’ll speak only for myself in this conversation—but we also wanted to try doing a creative project together, right? So the intention is really very simple. It’s sort of what gets you in the door—why are you doing this at all? It’s not about how great it’s going to be, like my intention is to do something to improve my business. I’m not yet talking about how much I’m going to improve my business. We get to that later, but it’s really just identifying what are those things that you value that cause you or motivate you to do the thing that you’re talking about and do the thing you’re doing.

 

AJ: And the next piece after you share—you each share your intentions. And by the way, this actually hearkens back to setting the scene. We have a few basic kind of rules of the game, rules of the conversation to how you interact together. We each take turns, and we often even time ourselves. Or we ask the other person if they’re really complete so that you feel like you have some space.

So let’s say we each get two minutes to each share our intentions, and we ask for no crosstalk, no commenting while the other person is sharing. It’s not the space to argue, it’s just really the space to put all your thoughts out on the table, which really helps both the listener to be present, and the speaker to share more vulnerably.

So after you go through your … You each share your intentions, then you go into concerns. And you each share your concerns, your fears, your worries—which is actually easy to come up with, but sometimes hard to express. Our brains are worry machines, and we encourage you to not take any concerns or fears personally that somebody else is expressing.

And as we shared our concerns for even writing this book together, Tami, we both had the same basic, huge fear which was both of us had been in romantic partnerships that then involved business or creative projects that went terribly wrong. And we both had the same fear that writing this book would lead us to fight and get divorced and die alone eventually. But this is actually the space to share those fears that you even would define as crazy or “I know this isn’t really going to happen.” But when we speak it out loud in a safe space, it actually helps the brain, the amygdala, and your nervous system calm down.

 

BG: Yes, and of course, as soon as we set our intention to do something, the concern just kind of pops right in. And as Alex said, our brains are worry machines. We have a very strong negativity bias in our brains. Our brains are just wired to anticipate and notice things that are negative in the environment, or future trip and notice things that we think might go wrong.

So intentions stimulate concerns and then the concerns then stimulate the next piece, which is really our boundaries. And again, this is also a place that a lot of people have difficulty talking about. And I use this in a work environment a lot, and I think in a work environment, often we are taught not to have boundaries. We’re sort of taught that work comes first like, “I’m sorry: work. I’m sorry, I have to work.” It’s the sort of universal excuse to get you out of anything personal, to excuse your neglect of your personal relationships, in many ways, in our overworked culture.

And I just think it’s very challenging for people, sometimes, to express what their boundaries are. It’s also challenging in a personal environment. So the way we like to phrase it in a work environment, I often phrase it as: What is it that helps you be your best? We can’t work 24 hours a day. As a matter of fact, I tried to bring in some research that says that most of us have probably four to six hours a day of prime cognitive spend that we can use on something that’s meaningful, something that’s purposeful in the day and for a lot of us, that comes at different hours, right?

So for me, my prime six hours or so is from like 7:00 or 8:00 a.m. until about noon, or maybe 2:00 p.m. at the latest, just sort of when, if you want me to do good work, that’s probably when you need me to do it. And so I try to schedule my meetings, my perfunctory meetings kind of outside of that. And we’re just trying to get at those, tease out those little boundaries together. And it also gives people an opportunity to talk about maybe the other commitments they have, both personal and professional, because often at work, we’re on multiple teams at one time, and this project could be third priority for me, but first priority for you—and we can just tease all that stuff out.

And that some of us have family commitments—we’re taking care of elders, we’re taking care of children, we just have to … Or we’re committed to … We are turning off our phones after about 6:00 p.m. every day, meaning that if you email me at night, I probably won’t see it and will get it the next day. And then in a personal environment, we just try to say, again, actually Alex, you have this wonderful way of describing this for the personal environment, for how we do boundaries there.

 

AJ: So I like to think of these two prompts that really, for me, cover everything. Boundaries are: What do you need to feel safe? And what else do you need to be your best? And those are two very interesting ways to come to, energetically, different boundaries. The things that I need to feel my best can be things like sleep and the right working environment and movement and how I feed my body. The things I need to feel safe may be very, very different, like avoiding alcohol or not hanging out with a certain person anymore. That may be a boundary that comes up. So you’ll get very different answers from those two things.

 

BG: I love that you brought up safety, Alex, because I think in many ways, what we’re trying to do with this entire method is to engineer something that’s called psychological safety or team psychological safety. And if you’re familiar with the work of Amy Edmondson, who’s at the Harvard Business School, who has been researching team functionality and how it—team performance—for about 40 years.

One of the things she identified is that one of the most important things we can have on a team is that each person on that team assesses the social environment of the team as a safe place to take an interpersonal risk. And the reason this is so important is we think about, like, a medical team that often makes mistakes because a drug doesn’t get prescribed or the wrong dosage gets prescribed. The medical team needs to be checking each other. And usually, the way medical teams are organized, right, is that you have the high-status doctor, and the lower-status nurses. But often, it’s the lower-status nurses who might notice the error, and if they don’t speak up, then the error might just sort of pass its way, pass on through.

And in Amy’s work, actually, she’s identified that teams that have psychological safety, they make something like 40 percent fewer errors than teams that don’t. And she has a wonderful book called The Fearless Organization, which kind of goes into this in great detail. But I think, sometimes, like safety, the reason I tell this story is because I think safety can often be seen as this sort of nice-to-have thing like, “Oh, isn’t that nice that you feel safe?”

But what I know from my work with teams, and what we know from our work with couples, is it’s really, really just like this critically important thing to have if we want that to be a healthy, creative, high-performing team and also a co-supportive, co-creative couple or a family, where people are feeling really supported and really present and having a good relationship with each other.

 

TS: Yes.

 

BG: So Alex, are we on to the final thing? Oh, I’m sorry Tami, did you have something?

 

TS: Well, just to say, I think there’s a lot more to talk about here that I’d like to ask you about, but let’s just lay out the model first. So the fourth step.

 

AJ: OK. The fourth step is really my favorite, Tami. The fourth step is where you share your dreams. And for some people, this might feel a little … It’s funny, it may feel a little vulnerable in a silly way, but I tell you what, this piece is so important and we intentionally have it at the end. You share your dreams: what, if this thing were to go wonderfully, even beyond my best expectations, what would be true? What would be true for me, what would be true for you? What would be true for us as a group, and even the people that might be impacted by what we’re going to do?

And this dreaming portion really brings out your imagination and your creativity. I also can release some oxytocin, which is an incredible bonding and love chemical, and it’s what brings us into that alignment, because it’s hard to hear someone’s dreams and not want that for them. And so when we share them together about a specific topic, we’re able … If it’s at all possible for this thing to happen, it’s because we shared our dreams together and then we’re more able to work on the concerns and the boundaries together as a team. So dreams is my favorite part.

 

TS: Now one question I have is the attitude that people need to bring to this process. It feels to me like if you have an attitude of “I want to have a fight with you about our in-laws,” or about the frequency of sex or our financials, that you’re not really going to have the same kind of result as if you have a different emotional orientation, if you will, right at the outset, when you come and you sit down and you say, “Let’s do this process.” So what attitude creates the best results?

 

AJ: I love that you asked this, Tami. There’s two things I want to speak to. One is what I like to call “in good faith” and the other is not knowing, not needing to know the answers. So in good faith, and believe me, I have been involved in a couple of really tough conversations in the last couple of weeks, and what I realized was that in one situation, the people were willing to meet me in good faith, that they were willing to come and actually even be changed, right? So to really listen, we are going to listen to each other, and be open to actually being changed by the other person. So that’s what we mean by in good faith, like we’re going to truly meet each other.

And the other situation, it was automatically—as soon as the topic came up, it was combative. It was so restrictive like, “This is the only way I will interact with you. I will not engage with you in this four-step process that you want to engage in.” So that just told me, “OK, this person is not ready.” And that conversation is now not happening anymore because they weren’t able to put down their weapons, really, to put down their armor.

So maybe someday we’ll be able to try again. And even in our relationship, with Bob and I, there will be moments of tension where we need to take a break or hit pause like, “You know what? If either one of us is angry, we pause. If either one of us is hungry or tired, we pause.” Because we’re not in the right frame of mind and we will come back to it again when tempers are calm, or we can … We just need to come back to this at another time.

But the other part of it for me is, I used to think that I needed to know the answer in advance, that I had to somehow have the solution to something before I could engage someone else in a tough topic. And I realized that was actually keeping me from having to have conversations because I either didn’t know the answer or I wasn’t sure that my answer was the right one. But using this format—and really, share it with the person or the people before you’re like, “Hey, I would like to try this four-step process with you to talk about our topic here.” Take a look at it, let’s meet in a couple days about it.

Me now knows that I don’t have to have the answers, because we’re going to get there together. And that helps me relax so that I can really be present and listen and, like I said, be willing to be changed by the other person.

 

TS: Now in a kind of casual way, Alex, you made this comment not to have these conversations, especially difficult conversations, when you’re angry, hungry, or tired. But actually that’s a really, really important point and that a lot of us get into trouble when we try to steam ahead when we don’t really have a good, calm composed sense about us. Almost like part of us wants to go ahead and puke or process or whatever like, “OK, you want to know about it? Here we go. I’ll tell you.” I think it’s really important. You’re really talking about a kind of physiological awareness.

 

AJ: Yes, and Bob and I are both pretty open. We’ve both been in 12-step work individually in the past and we learned the acronym HALT: hungry, angry, lonely, tired. If either of you is any of those things, we agreed—and in our relationship, “Oh, we could have totally avoided that fight if we had just eaten food first.” And we changed it up a bit because the most important ones in our work have been angry, hungry, and alcohol. So if either of us is angry, we just pause, “You know what? We don’t need to have this conversation right now. Let’s wait.” Walk it off, wait until tomorrow.

We actually have a new rule in our relationship that flies in the face of some of the most common relationship advice. We will go to bed angry because you know what? If it’s ten o’clock at night and tempers are high, I am not a good conversationalist. I am not able to be fair because I’m cranky at night. And if either of us have had even one glass of alcohol, and a tough topic comes up, we, either of us can just say, “You know what? You had a glass of wine, or I had a cocktail, let’s have this conversation tomorrow.”

And it truly honors that we are human animals. Our brain is connected to our body if we’re any of those three things angry, hungry, or had even a little alcohol—we’re not going to be really present and empathetic.

 

TS: OK, another question I had, just about the entirety of the method, is why you call it the All-In Method, A-I-M, All-In, why All-In? I mean, a lot of times, I’m not all in, that’s the challenge. I’m not all in on this issue, I feel somewhat opposed. So anyway, I think that’s interesting.

 

BG: Yes, well, I think that’s the promise of the method or that’s the ideal outcome. If we’re talking about, let’s say, our financial life or our sex life as a couple or if we’re talking about launching a new project or a difficult new initiative at work, we want to get to a place where everybody—all the players—are all in, not just going along with the crowd, not just “not a no,” but an enthusiastic yes or a hell yes, right? To whatever it is that’s happening.

But I think you raised an interesting point that we’re not always going to be all in for everything, and as a matter of fact, it probably makes sense not to be all in for a lot of things in our life, right? To be a solid no. And I think what we like about this method and what we’ve seen it do for people is that it identifies sometimes where you’re actually all out, right? Where it’s actually—you realize that whatever it is we’re talking about, we’re actually so misaligned. I can give you an easy example, let’s say we’re going on vacation and I really want to go on something that raises my adrenaline and gets a lot of, has a lot of adventure and excitement and brand new sensations around it.

And I’m talking to somebody who I’m going to go on vacation with, and they’ve been working, six to eight weeks, straight for a month, and what they really need is to like relax on the beach with a Mai Tai or something. It may be that we can reconcile that, or it may be that we figure out that separate vacations might be the way to go, that might be the best outcome.

And so what we’re really trying to do is push to get enough information. I think Alex hinted at this before. So a solution, a natural solution might emerge, something that we haven’t thought about each other, we’re not coming in with a solution in mind, we’re just trying to get sort of a broad informational landscape.

And I want to point out to you, Alex used the word which I love, which I think really sits at the heart of this, which is empathy. And empathy is sometimes understood as being, as approving of somebody else like, “Oh, I get where you’re coming from. I’m so with you on that.”

But empathy is really simply being able to take perspective and understand where somebody else sits, and not actually necessarily even approve of it.

One of our favorite authors is a guy named Chris Voss, who was a hostage negotiator for the FBI for many years, and he talks about the value of tactical empathy being the most important thing as a negotiator for you to get what you want.

So going back to your question about the attitude that we want people to come in with. I sometimes will use that story about Chris Voss to get people to come in with an attitude of listening—people who might not normally, hard-nosed business folks, it might be like, just give me the facts, those kinds of people, or who come in with a very strong agenda themselves.

Because what we’re not trying to do, necessarily, is force things one direction or another with this method. What we’re trying to do is to surface all that information that sometimes just is hidden, or at the end, it’s like a landmine that you stumble over and you didn’t know it was there and then things—and the project is blowing up or the relationship is blowing up in your face.

And so what we’re just trying to do is identifying. We’re just trying to get all of our cards on the table. So from there, we can then build a good plan, build good intentions, build good rules for our relationship just so we relate better, so it’s more productive in the end.

 

TS: OK. So I definitely get how by following this four-step method rather than doing it when you’re not angry, hungry, or tired. You’re going to put all your cards out and really get to know your partner, your conversation partner, your team in a much, much, much fuller way. I fully get that.

But what if what’s revealed is that, really, the only way forward—even using the example you gave as the vacation—is something that’s like a compromise. Like, “OK, I mean, I’m somewhat in. I do want to go on vacation with you. You want adventure, I want to lie on the beach. I don’t want to take separate vacations, I want to be together. We’re going to spend half the time doing what you want, some of it, whatever, and I’m sort of kind of going to go along with my compromised situation.” OK. Yay. Hell yes, kinda sorta.

 

AJ: I think that’s not a bad outcome as long as you both agree, “Yes, I am good with this compromise.” I think part of the magic of this process is, because you’re developing empathy for each other and you share your dreams, that even if you do compromise, you want for the other person to have what they want. That’s what I have found over and over again with this. So it really kills resentment, which Tami, I’ve got to say is one of the most beneficial parts of this for me in my life.

It is almost a 100 percent resentment cure. It’s not like I’m, “All right, I’ll go along with it.” It’s, “Oh, I see.” You really want to break out and experience new things and now I really want that for you. I understand what that will do for you.

 

TS: So it’s really interesting. So the 100 percent resentment cure comes from taking the other person’s position, from really understanding why they want what they want and wanting them to have that from a sort of natural generosity?

 

AJ: I think so.

 

BG: Yes, I’ve been really—I think one of the things that showed up for me early on when we were using this process a lot in our relationship is how often, when we would get to the dreams section and when we talk about dreams, one of the ways we often phrase it, or what we’re asking for is: How are you going to feel? What are you going to be seeing? What are you going to be doing? What are you going to be experiencing at the end of this?

Let’s say this was the best experience. We’ll go back to the vacation example. Let’s say this was the best vacation ever, and we’re on the flight coming home, what’s that like? How are we feeling? And one of the things that shows up for me again and again in these situations is that actually, my dream often has a lot to do with how my partner is feeling or how my counterpart is feeling. So even if we go into the vacation wanting different kinds of experiences, we’re both coming home feeling satisfied, feeling closer to each other, feeling more in love than we ever have been before, that kind of thing.

And I think, so I think we can actually be— It sounds a little oxymoronic perhaps, but we can be all in for a compromise as long as we don’t feel like we’re losing something in the compromise. As long as it’s not like, “Oh, I’m giving up this.” Or, “You have to give up that and we’re both sort of getting a mediocre experience.” What we’re trying to do is craft something that is actually kind of beautiful and amazing for both of us or for everybody who’s in the process together.

We also really strongly believe that we want to get to a solid yes or we want to go to a solid no, but that kind of like maybe placed that kind of like, “Well, let’s give it a try and see how it feels and see how it goes.” For a vacation especially, that’s probably not setting us up to the best experience.

 

TS: So then what would you do if people went through this process, laid all their cards out and at the end, they got to this slightly wishy-washy place together? How would you help them further clarify, intensify the dream part of the conversation?

 

AJ: I think you could agree on, “OK, where did we run into trouble?” As we laid everything out on the table through our intentions, concerns, boundaries and dreams, what were the points of contention?

So maybe there’s one or two specific things where we’re like, “Oh, these are …” Like, “OK, there is some deeper stuff in this slice of this experience that we need to go deeper in on.” And by the way, Bob and I have been in an ongoing conversation about one particular topic and Bob, I hope it’s OK for me to mention going, whether or not to go visit your mom for her 90th birthday. And this was not a one-and-done conversation, because there are so many pieces at play, so many people to consider, and it’s kind of an evolving—the state of the world is evolving.

So it’s OK to have the conversation more than once. There are, I would say, more than half of our conversations where we use this method—do not need to have a solution in the moment. It’s really, it’s helping us get clear. We’d like to say that this helps us uncover any emotional landmines so that we can either avoid them or kind of detonate them in a controlled way. So it’s OK to go back and have this conversation again in a more nuanced way. “OK, we uncovered this piece. Let’s talk about this piece using the conversation again.” Like that.

 

BG: And what we’re trying to uncover is what’s really important. Because there’s lots of things that are important, but what we’re trying to understand is what’s more important than the other thing, and we’re also trying to take maybe a, let’s call it a … We might be taking a risk because I think all great things in life involve some degree of risk.

So let’s be conscious about the risk we’re taking. Going back to the vacation, we might go ahead and give it a try, but let’s reflect on it after or even during and see how it’s going with each other. We might create a little bit of a guideline, “Hey, let’s check in every other day.” And just sort of have the conversation again and/or have a different kind of conversation, like what’s going well and where are we getting stuck and is there anything we might do differently and sort of dynamically steer and see that everybody’s getting what they want.

For Alex and I, when we wrote the book, she said that we realized our relationship—we were both concerned our relationship might suffer because we were writing a book. So we created a rule that just said, “Look, our relationship is more important than any project we might do together. So either of us has the full authority to leave the project at any time.”

And then if they do, the other person can continue the project on their own as an individual project if they want to or not. Just to make it as sort of feeling as fair as possible. But we reached that agreement because we were able to say, “Look, the project is important, and our relationship is important.” But what’s really important is our relationship, right? That’s the thing that trumps everything else. And so it just gives us an opportunity and I think, for us, I’ve never … I’ve done this in workshops in some highly contentious situations, and almost always you will have a solution which will just kind of appear very, very, very naturally.

People would be like, “OK, now that we have the information, this is what I think might work.” And then people are actually in a generative space to figure out those rules together that might work for them.

 

TS: I’m interested in—I want to thank you, Alex, for bringing up an in-law example, because I think for a lot of people—I want to thank you because it was clear that you were sharing something vulnerably here with our podcast listeners, so thank you for that.

I think for a lot of people, resentment and in-laws go together. So when you say “being 100 percent resentment free,” that really got my attention. In relationship, like wow, that is high value, really high value, and I think people would really want that.  And now we’re going to use that “100 percent resentment free” and “in-laws” in the same sentence. And so I’m curious, what have you discovered in working with the All-In Method with an in-law situation that might be helpful for people?

 

AJ: Bob, do you want to share what we’ve discovered through our particular journey here?

 

BG: Sure thing, yes. So I’ll just give a little background. I still have maintained a relationship with my family over the years, but it was touch-and-go there for a little while. There’s some kind of some, let’s say, long-standing issues with my family of origin. I think probably many people can identify with that, and I know many people who have decided to cut things off with their family, and I made the decision not to.

And also, we live closer to my family than we do to Alex’s family. Alex has a much closer relationship with our family, we’re much closer geographically to my family. And so when we would go visit them or when we do go visit them, as I think happens to many people, I get stressed. I become probably not the best version of myself and yet, it’s also important to me personally that I maintain this relationship, because I feel like I learned a lot from it.

And so over the years, we’ve had to experiment an awful lot about how to make the trips down to see my folks or my mom as easy and as pleasant and as sort of relationally generative as possible, right? Something that would actually lead to better outcomes. And it was very interesting, when we got to the dreams conversation about this because often, well, what would be my dream for going to see something which I actually find difficult? Isn’t just surviving your dream?

And I would realize actually, what I wanted from it was for Alex and I to feel closer, right? I wanted to go see my family and there’s a certain obligation, there’s a certain maintenance of that relationship which is important to me, and what I didn’t want it to do was to negatively impact my relationship with Alex.

That was again, that was what’s important. And we also realized, we also noticed some patterns over the years as well. So we’ve generated a few rules. One rule is that when we go, we don’t stay with family, we stay in a hotel. We try to take time away from people, we make sure that we take time to be in nature and walk either alone or just the two of us, maybe take my mom’s dog with us sometimes and our child.

We might, what are some other rules we have? No alcohol or perhaps no more than one glass of wine with dinner while we’re there—and my family can be under heavy drinking—but not to join in on that because that sort of … That way lies madness. And it’s really helped us. Alex, do you want to add? I feel like you’ve been such a keen observer, it’s such a help to me in developing actually really good boundaries with my family so that we can maintain this relationship.

 

AJ: Yes, there’s two things I wanted to add and Tami, you might be shocked to hear this, but we’ve actually recently decided that we don’t take my son anymore to visit. We got to that point recently because it wasn’t a good place for him to be. It didn’t feel safe for Bob to expose his stepson to toxic personality and conversation styles that he had to endure growing up, and he’s like, “I can’t protect him from these things unless he’s just not there.”

But what was really cool was we actually had the conversation. We used the conversation structure with our son over the last couple years while we were on visits there to help him understand why Bob was stressed out or sad, why there was tension in the room, why we were now making new decisions about not bringing him with us.

So I have to say that was unbelievably transformative in our relationship with me, Bob, and my son. Our son is like light-years beyond, at 13, where we were as young adults, in terms of being able to have tough conversations or just hold space for other people to talk about hard things.

 

TS: It’s very helpful. Thank you for the specific example. It really brings it to life. Now, I have yet to try this four-step process, so I’m just feeling into it myself, having read the book, Radical Alignment, and listening to the two of you. And when I imagined the intentions, I think, “OK, I have experience with that.” And the concerns as you said, we’re all naturals at that, we’re worry machines—that part sounds easy. And now we get to the boundaries section. And I thought it was really interesting, in the book you write, “In many ways, boundaries are the crux of the whole conversation and often the most unfamiliar to people going through this exercise for the first time.”

And what I thought of is: Why is it so hard often for people to know, “Oh, these are my boundaries”? Or they use their boundaries as their artillery in the conversation like, “I’m not doing that. Blah-blah-blah.”

And I noticed when you shared your two questions: What do I need to feel safe and what do I need to feel at my best? That was a very clarifying and it put boundaries in a different light for me. So I’d like to hear more about this. Why are boundaries tough for people?

 

BG: I think they’re tough for people because many of us are raised without them or not expected to have them—and it can be as simple as children being forced to hug relatives that they don’t know, and those kinds of things. A lot of research has been done recently about adults who have good boundaries and who understand that bodily autonomy—were taught that at a young age.

And then also, when it comes to the way school operates as well—just be quiet and do what you’re told—that we’re conditioned into a world where, and I think maybe that’s appropriate, having somebody else set boundaries for us when we’re young or tell us what the boundaries are is highly appropriate. But the challenge is that a lot of us don’t necessarily, as we grow and as we mature, really develop a strong sense.

And I know for myself—I’m in my 50s now—I don’t know that I really started asking the question in a real way until I was in my 40s, until about ten years ago, maybe 12 years ago and really saying, “Well, what is it that makes me feel safe?” And even prioritizing my own safety. And what is it that helps me be my best? And being able to prioritize all of that.

You also mentioned, and I really, really love this, Tami, that you talk about boundaries being used, they’re almost weaponized sometimes in conversations and I think that’s, in some ways, a natural result of people who are not used to setting boundaries finally setting them for the first time. And so the first few times or early on in the process, you can become very, very rigid in your boundaries, they become this “do not cross this line.” And I’m just going to stand up for myself here. And we can become very focused entirely on ourselves and forget how our boundaries or how our behavior is impacting those people around us.

One of the things I’ve learned as a parent, coming to it a little bit later in life, is that boundaries are important. You’ve got to set boundaries for kids, but they also have to be flexible and it also helps if they’re playful. And I think that’s something … Actually Alex, I’ve learned from you so much, right? Is that a boundary does … You don’t have to express it with anger, you just have to express it with a degree of firmness. And doing it with some playfulness and doing it with even an explanation can be super helpful. I feel like I’ve talked a lot because Alex, you have so much to say, I think, about boundaries. I know it’s a core to your work. I’d love to hear what you have to say.

 

AJ: Well, I will paint with such a broad brush here and I’ll just go ahead and speak for all women. We are socialized to be quiet and take direction. Hopefully, things are changing as the younger generations are coming up, but I can speak to my own experience growing up in the ’70s and ’80s that there was still a ladylike behavior that was expected and also an unspoken availability expected.

Girls become very aware, around the ages of eight to ten, that they are now sexualized creatures and we are being judged constantly about our sexual availability. And so we’re taught these two very conflicting messages that you should be sexually available and yet, you should be sexually pure. And so to be a … Like Bob said, nobody ever asked us what our boundaries were or taught us what it even means, although we have really exciting news to share with you Tami—I’ll come back to that.

But also, the messaging that we get from everywhere—parents, family, friends, media—is that conflicting message that our boundaries are not really respected or not really … If you stand up for yourself, you’re a hard-nosed you-know-what, and now you’re not a nice woman, now you’re not a good girl.

So it’s very hard for women to come to that self-knowing. My real hope is that this book does get out there into the hands of younger women and into families so that children grow up with that sense of, “Oh, my feelings of safety, my feelings of physical autonomy are important, and will be respected.” That is so huge.

 

TS: Well, I have a follow-up question for both of you about having our boundaries and clarifying them. Bob, you talked about how it’s now shown that in terms of our best creative cognitive power, that perhaps we have four to six effective hours at work. And I know you work in a lot of organizations as a leadership consultant and trainer. And I can imagine if somebody said to me, “Hey, I’m really good between eight and two, but then that’s it.” It might be a little bit like, “What? That’s all you got?” I mean, that there’s pressure at work to be on for a lot more than a four to six good performance hours. I know you were talking about you can do other things, email and stuff, but what I’m trying to drive at is, I don’t think people necessarily want to come forward and share their limitations, their creative or cognitive power limitations with the team. How do you make it safe for people to do that?

 

BG: Well, that’s really what we’re trying to do with this process, is to engineer—I talked about this idea of psychological safety. And psychological safety, team psychological safety is—there’s a lot of data behind it. Google has been doing a lot of work on it and also this woman Amy Edmondson at Harvard and a lot of people have been really cataloging. It’s not just psychological safety, but there are some things that kind of roll up into that.

And what Google discovered, actually, when they started looking at how their team performance is, they found the two factors that were most important were teams where people spoke roughly the same amount—they call it equal speaking time—that if one person dominated the conversation, or a few people dominated the conversation, that was generally a sign that there wasn’t psychological safety present. That’s one of the reasons we’ll sometimes use this to set a timer. So everybody speaking in roughly the same amount, and I’ll even go into the research ahead of time.

And then the other thing that Google discovered was something they called social sensitivity or basically, this is the idea that if somebody asked you how your teammate is feeling, that you can be that … And then you say, “How do you think they’re feeling?” You’re generally accurate about that, right? People are actually paying attention to other people. And I think there’s a lot of stuff that sits underneath that—maybe it’s empathy, maybe it’s understanding each person’s story a little bit.

And so I once ran this methodology in kind of a tough situation. It was an organization that was actually devoted to doing some very good work in the world, but their leadership team just had a lot of toxicity and a lot of difficulty expressing their boundaries with each other—kind of sticking to a clear process, clipping to, sticking to clear domains of authority and that kind of thing. And so they brought me in to help rectify this. And I asked people to tell stories. The first story I asked them to tell was really the intention, of course, because that’s the methodology. And the intention prompt I used was: Why are you part of this organization?

And the person who was causing, let’s say, the most fear in the organization—he had the most power, but he also had the most volatile personality. He spoke up first and he began to share a story of actually feeling very profoundly unsafe as a child, about having been abused as a child. And this was a nonprofit devoted to sustainability and nature. And he said, “I’m drawn to protecting nature or protecting natural systems because nature was what was safe for me as a child.”

And, I mean, we were 15 minutes into this exercise, and we were all in tears. And this was an organization that had a lot of deep emotional tension ahead of time. Once we got through that, we felt like we were in a safer space. I think everybody felt a little bit of a safer space to begin to express what their boundaries were.

The challenge is, it’s not so much people, I think it’s on both sides, right? We want people to feel—we always say when you’re speaking and you’re running the process, do your best to be courageous, right? Do your best to be vulnerable and be courageous and also use your best judgment about what’s safe to share in this particular environment, right? We make that assessment, but likewise, when you listen and when you are on the listening side of things, be really aware that the way you listen, the presence that you have when somebody else is speaking can make them feel safe to be more vulnerable or it can shut them down.

And so we just want to really sort of set the intention to stretch things a little bit. We don’t need to go to 11 the first time through with the process. We don’t need to go all the way there, but taking a little bit of a risk can be really valuable.

And speaking to boundaries specifically, I think I often speak to leaders about this, people who are managing teams who have hiring and firing power over their teams, which often we don’t we don’t appreciate as leaders. And I’ve been in this position many times myself and still am, that we don’t appreciate how scary something we … This is an idea that we throw out casually can be taken as an order from somebody, by somebody who’s a subordinate to us. It’s just a natural human way of relating to power. And so in some ways as leaders, we have to set the tone and we have to go out of our way to make others feel safe to share what their boundaries are.

And what I always say to leaders to kind of get them to bring this home is like, “Well, why wouldn’t you want your people to be at their best at their work? Why wouldn’t you want your people to be doing the most important work at the time of their day when they are most capable to do that work—when they are most present, when they are most energized, when they are most enthusiastic, when they are most engaged (to use the word that we’re using in corporate America all the time now)?

Why wouldn’t you want that? And you don’t know that. You can’t force that for your people. Your people are the ones who know that about themselves and maybe they even need to learn that about themselves. So we need to listen to them and we need to create a space where they are able to bring more of themselves, more of their humanity, to work. And we need to be willing to discover and maybe willing to hear some stuff that doesn’t make us very happy initially. But in the end, you’re going to get a better team, you’re going to get a better product, you’re going to get a better service, you’re going to get a more engaged organization.

 

TS: I love that Bob, especially how you’ve just reframed the whole conversation just to say that again, in terms of helping people be at their best, what helps you be at your best. I just, I feel inspired by having that conversation, whereas if I was sitting down with someone and said, “Tell me about your boundaries.” That makes me think, “Oh, they’re going to be kind of protective.” But what helps you be at your best is, “Oh, we’re thriving.” So it’s a great reframe.

Now Alex, I also want to ask you a question because I know that you coach and work with a lot of very driven women. So what have you found in your experience helps high-achieving women when it comes to being open and vulnerable about what their real boundaries are? I mean, I know a lot of high-achieving women, and as one myself, I often have to get to the point of collapse before I know that I’ve hit a boundary. That’s the nature of being a high achiever.

 

AJ: Yes. Oh Tami, you are so right and I have seen this again and again and again and women, my MDs, my PhDs, my organizational leaders, my top-performing sales people, these are women who would just blow you away with their skills and their work in the world. And a lot of us fall prey to a few of the same things.

One is, it doesn’t matter how much achievement or outer success we have, we’ve still got that slice of imposter syndrome on the inside, which tells us we’re not quite good enough or people are going to see us for who we truly are, which is that we’re not worthy, which keeps us washing and running over our own boundaries time and again in an effort to try to prove how good we are.

And there’s also the very—and I don’t even know if this just applies to women, but I can only speak as a woman and the women I’ve worked with—that we try to be everything to everyone. And so a lot of us are mothers and/or partners, and in these driven, highly successful positions. So we’re trying to … Which is a wonderful thing. We’re trying to be the best at everything, but again, we’re doing everything for everyone.

And we’re not so great at asking for help or we’re over-relying on our very skillful type-A personalities to just push through and get everything done. And then like you said, we collapse because we have not done the work of asking, “What is it that I need to be my best? What is it that I need to be?” And when I say feel safe, I think that can also go to how’s my nervous system? How are my adrenals? Do I have an existing thyroid condition?

How do I keep those aspects of my body safe so that I can still perform, maybe not at 110 percent, maybe at 95, maybe 95 percent is OK.

 

TS: OK. And the last point in the all-in conversation process that I want to make sure we go into a little more is this idea that at the end, we share our dream, we invoke our imagination, and that power to visualize, really, our heart’s dream in any situation.

And I want to address that person in a conversation. He says something like, “What’s the point? What’s the point in dreaming my big dream, let’s say, with my partner, related to this thing and my family? I’ve been disappointed so many times. I just don’t know if it’s going to happen. I don’t believe in fantasy land, I don’t have the energy to dream the dream right now.”

 

AJ: I’ll give you a seemingly silly example. Bob had this exact conversation with our son before seventh grade started, and it turned out that his dream was to have his first date. He wanted to ask somebody out on a date in seventh grade and you can think of like, “Oh, that’s childish.” But by speaking what he wanted in his heart, that thing that just pulled that like, “Oh, I really want that thing.”

You could think of it as a goal with some really juicy emotion around it. Maybe that’s a different way to frame it. What’s your goal? What’s your big goal? If dream feels too ethereal, what’s your happiest outcome? If we can’t be brave enough to say it, I just don’t know … If you’re just relying on luck and the powers of the universe to guess what you want, then I don’t know if it’s possible.

 

BG: Yes, I always think of … I think it’s a Wayne Gretzky quote, right? That you miss 100 percent of the shots that you don’t take, right? And so sometimes, a little bit of a challenge like that can bring somebody, bring their imagination to the table and I’m also willing to, I think as Alex said, pull the conversation back or pull it back a little bit.

We’re not talking about the thing that’s going to make you act like a fool and be like Tom Cruise dancing on Oprah’s couch—if anybody is old enough to remember that reference now who’s listening to this, but that it’s … We’re not asking if you necessarily be silly. I mean, some people get inspired by being silly or being playful, but sometimes in a work environment, or as you hinted out, an environment where things are a little more challenging and you’ve been disappointed in the past. You might be able to pull the conversation or pull the question back a little bit and say, “Well, what would be a good outcome? What would make it feel worth it to you that we had gotten through this?”

And I use this conversation for myself. I was getting in a lot of arguments on social media a few years ago and so I actually had the conversation with myself about my use of social media and I was like, “But what’s my dream?”

I was like, “Well, I don’t have a dream, I just I hate getting in arguments I don’t want to get into anymore.” And I realized that actually, my dream was that I would feel closer to people, my friends or my acquaintances, or just people in general, the people I interacted with. And I suddenly realized that the way that I was interacting on social media actually wasn’t ever going to lead there, and so it caused me to leave. I left Twitter and Facebook the next day, I was just like, “Oh, these tools aren’t aligned with the dream that I have, and that sort of unlocked it.”

 

TS: Now interestingly Bob, you mentioned doing this process with yourself, and so far, we’ve been talking about having these all-in conversations with others, but someone could go through this four-step process in a journaling way, something like that, yes?

 

AJ: Absolutely. It’s actually one of the tools that I teach to my clients regularly. Go through this by yourself for either a very personal topic, or go through it by yourself, journaling it out before you meet with your partner or your colleague about it.

And you can give that out in advance to everyone who you’re inviting to a conversation, “Hey, we’re going to talk about these four things. Think on it tonight before we meet up tomorrow.” But I use it on my own for work projects, for possibly contentious situations with friends that have come up in the past. It’s a great personal strategy.

 

TS: And just to end our conversation, and this is a little bit of a curious question on my part, this four-part all-in conversation process that you’ve created formalizes, it creates structure for something that I think is intuitive in human relating. It has to be, it has to be natural to us to understand each other, to approach each other in good faith, to come up with creative solutions.

I’m curious, what do you think underneath? Is that sort of natural? Human? How would you describe that process of working together that this four-part structure helps bring forward?

 

BG: I really love that you brought this up because we haven’t really touched on this, but this is very much a … Let’s just kind of gender this, right? This is a masculine process, right? It’s very linear. We’re dividing things into buckets, we’re going step by step, we’re bringing out a timer. It can feel very unnatural to people and so and it feels unnatural to me sometimes and it still does.

We think of it very much as if we’re playing our scales, just like a jazz musician is going to practice their scales and play their scales, and being deliberate, doing deliberate practice of something can actually make you more intuitive and more natural when you improvise later.

And for instance, for us, this process is just like a very natural part. We still run through the process in a formal way every now and again. Actually, probably once a week about something, but we much more often will just sort of drop in and out of it, maybe even not even with using the words: intentions, concerns, boundaries, or dreams, but we might just be like, it has become a much more natural part of our communication.

When I think of what it is, that sort of thing that sits underneath all of this, this sort of natural human relationship, it’s like we humans, we are so social, we were like for the first—what? —100,000 years of homo sapiens being on the planet, we were living in groups, probably 50 to 150 maximum, and most of them were kin, most of them are people that we related to. So and it’s only for about the past 7,000 years or so that we’ve been experimenting with urbanism and knowing a lot more people and, of course, that’s happening much, much more now. So our natural inclination is to find a group and be a part of a group, and to align with that group. And that happens on a biological level via something called entrainment, where our biological rhythms kind of naturally tune to each other.

So I think what you’re talking about, I love the question so much that as we’re talking about something that’s very, very, very deeply human in terms of just being with other people, and being on the same team with the people that we are with, working toward some kind of outcome and, like we say, it could be work like you’re working on a work project, or it could be at home which is just like building a wonderful and supportive and hopefully a beautiful and abundant home life, or raising a child, or all of these things.

I had to use the word “term project” because it makes it not as magical as I think they actually are, but yes, doing these projects, doing this work together.

 

AJ: I think at the heart of it is we want to be known and we want to really connect with others. And in order to be courageous enough to truly—you know that expression “bare your soul”? I was just musing on that today. To bare your soul has that body language to it. It feels like I am literally opening up my chest to possibly be shot at. I am showing you my most vulnerable physical and emotional parts and to do that, especially now in such contentious times, is so challenging, but we sit at the heart of the human experience. I want to know who I am and I want to share that and I want to connect with you and I want to be accepted for who I truly am.

And we have got to create some structure of safety and shared empathy so that we can do that. Without it, it seems to be nearly impossible, but I’ll tell you what, it may feel like a weird process, but it works. It’s weird, but it works.

 

TS: I’ve been speaking with Alexandra Jamieson and Bob Gower. They’re the authors of the new book Radical Alignment: How to Have Game-Changing Conversations That Will Transform Your Business and Your Life. They have developed a method, the All-In Method for having these types of bring-your-true-self-forward, bear-your-soul conversations and thank you, thank you both for bringing your full selves forward to this conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it and benefited. Thank you.

 

AJ: Thank you Tami.

 

BG: Thank you so much Tami, it’s been a pleasure.

 

TS: Thank you for listening to Insights at the Edge. You can read a full transcript of today’s interview at soundstrue.com/podcast and if you’re interested, hit the Subscribe button in your podcast app. And also, if you feel inspired, head to iTunes and leave Insights at the Edge a review. I love getting your feedback, being in connection with you, and learning how we can continue to evolve and improve our program.

Working together, I believe we can create a kinder and wiser world. SoundsTrue.com: waking up the world.

 

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