This is the transcript full of insights and stories! It is Part Three of a Four Part Series of Conversations between two self-described Champions of TED* (*The Empowerment Dynamic). If you’d prefer to listen to the audio podcast, you will find the 14.5-minute sound-bites OR the full 48-minute audio episode via my YouTube channel links:
Susan Dunlop: Welcome to episode three of our series on the Transformative Power of TED*® and the 3 Vital Questions®. In this episode, we’ll explore the challenges and triumphs encountered while integrating TED*® into an organisation’s culture and how it has shaped growth and development. We’ll also discuss the future of TED*® and how it can continue to make a difference.
I’m excited to welcome back Sheri, who will share her insights and stories from her journey, including navigating challenges and imagining the future. Let’s get started.
Welcome Sheri.
Sheri Lawrence: Happy to be here.
Susan Dunlop: We’re back again!
So, Sheri, we’ll first discuss executive resistance and transformation. One challenge that many organisations face is executive resistance to leadership programs. Often seen as something for others rather than for themselves. We touched on this last week in terms of one manager who resisted the training. You’ve also stated a few times that there’s a need for the executive to embrace this work and lead the way.
Have you got a story about an executive in your organisation who has initially resisted TED*®?
Sheri Lawrence: Yes, I do. I’m glad you’re asking this because we all know how busy everybody is, especially the executives. And they need a lot of times to close themselves off, to get things done that are critical to running the business.
I think it’s easiest for them to resist and say, I simply don’t have time. This is a very busy time. I’m in the middle of a project. Lots of resistance. Some executives believe that they got to where they are by learning, reading books, and doing the things that got them there. And so they no longer need it. However, they’ll see in their team that someone needs it. For something like TED*® to work in the organisation, it really is important for everybody to go through it.
We had an executive whose main excuse was that she just didn’t have time, and I kept at her, kept at her, kept at her. Eventually, this executive just got tired of me reminding them more than anything, probably, which is okay if they get to the learning. And so they went through it.
They realised that the learning was valuable as they went through each piece of it. We can all read a book and walk away with a couple of takeaways, and that’s it. However, implementing TED*® within an organisation is more than just reading the book.
So, being able to go through the entire learning path surprised this executive.
What really surprised this executive was how they were able to sit down with their team during their weekly meetings and frame their conversations based on this learning. They were able to have those conversations with understanding if somebody was in the Drama Triangle or The Empowerment Dynamic.
Just using the language we learned, this executive could develop a stronger relationship with their team, work better with their team, be more productive when working on projects together, and actually show more empathy. They were able to have conversations using a common language.
I don’t think we have too many more people in our company who resist it because they get all of these stories. And so now, if somebody is starting to resist it, they just say, “Hey, VP, you know, go talk to them about this.”
Susan Dunlop: Can you give me an indication of how it works where you are? How much time does it take out of their week?
Sheri Lawrence: The way we’re doing it takes two to three hours a week.
Susan Dunlop: Okay.
Sheri Lawrence: That’s not two to three hours straight. None of us can sit still for three hours anymore. There’s the learning, there’s the practice. I love the way doing this a little bit every week; you really make it practice-based.
You’re learning, practising, and working together on integrating it. When people go through something like this together, there’s a stronger relationship from bringing them together to learn.
Susan Dunlop: And as you said in last week’s conversation, when you brought that whole team together. You could do what you did in one day, such a big team, that you all had outcomes and baby steps! You’ve saved time massively just from that one day’s effort because you use TED*® and the 3VQ frameworks.
When people say they haven’t got time, they will gain a lot more time if they start using this as part of their action planning.
Sheri Lawrence: You’re so right. The time that companies win back, not spending on drama, is amazing.
And if you think of something simple: One person sends an email to somebody else, and they take it the wrong way. They drop into the drama triangle. Then they go talk to somebody else and tell that other person, Hey, so and so sent me this email, and you know, I can’t believe they treat me like this. We automatically become emotional and take it the wrong way.
If you think of all the time wasted and the emotional impact people have from going through that drama within an organisation, it is unbelievable how much time you get back to be productive.
Susan Dunlop: And that’s part of this program. We start with the costs of drama, all sorts of drama costs.
I think Gallup quoted that managers spend 25 to 40 percent of their time managing drama. So that’s a lot of time to win back. If you can reduce that from 40 percent to 25 percent, or even 25 down to 10 percent, that would be quite a shift in what people are spending their time on each week.
Sheri Lawrence: Yeah, absolutely. Think about every time you lose a couple of hours to drama, taking care of something. Now you’re behind. It’s like the snowball rolling downhill. It starts rolling, and then there are more and more people involved in it. It’s time-saving, and people enjoy working more when they’re not dealing with all that drama.
Susan Dunlop: Yeah. And the flow on effect to home if you’ve had a day like that. I know when I’ve had days back in the past when we had drama happening with our team, I remember walking through the driveway gates to the house and I couldn’t drop it but I had to start to practice letting it go so I could show up as me in my own roles at home so I didn’t bring that energy into my house. The roll-on effect is massive if you stay in drama.
Sheri Lawrence: Yeah, it absolutely is. And good for you for catching yourself and saying, okay, I’ve got to leave this in the driveway and not take it in. It’s really hard for a lot of people to do.
Susan Dunlop: I do not sleep well when things like that happen… I usually come up with the best plan by four o’clock in the morning. And usually, the best plan is to cut the drama, cut to the chase of what’s really happening here.
What I love about this work, too, when you’re talking about that in the two to three hours a week, how you’re delivering it, the curriculums that David and Donna created, are so well thought out, it is a formal curriculum that we have available to us that lets people see that we’re not just making stuff up, it is in sequence, it shows you the key learning points, it shows you how it connects to the message from last training to the next training, it gives you practical application to do in the time together, so it’s such a smart use of two to three hours.
Sheri Lawrence: Yeah, you’re exactly right. And it’s really easy to take the situations in your own company and use them as examples, which is so important. We’ve gone through learning in the past where it’s another company talking about, Hey, this was great for us, and you’re like, well, yeah, but you’re in this industry that’s totally different from ours. So I can’t even see how to apply it.
That’s the great thing about this work—it applies everywhere. You can take scenarios that happen in your own organisation so everybody can relate to them, and you automatically start working on improving things because you’re talking about them and being really honest, right?
One of the things that we talk about is: What’s the current reality?
Susan Dunlop: Yeah.
Sheri Lawrence: And we can talk about reality in a way that is non-emotional. Then, we can actually make progress.
Susan Dunlop: Some of those applications depend on how the session feels and who’s in it. I’ve used the idea that they can choose what they want to apply. Did they want to share their drama story about something from their personal life or what’s going on at work for them right now? I can see the magic happening with letting the people talk, as people to people all experiencing the same situations, just maybe just a little bit off to the left or right. We all get it because we’re all just basically, we’re people, we’ve all got stuff going on, and it’s nice to see that other people get it.
Sheri Lawrence: You’re right, and something you made me think about, too, that’s so important. In our organisation, we have our corporate or home office, and then we have several locations throughout the United States with teams running those locations. At first, we had this gap between the team members in the field and the home office, and everybody thought, well, I deal with this at the home office. You don’t deal with that in the field and vice versa.
By having those conversations as we were going through this, everybody started making those connections. We all deal with the same thing. It just might look different, right? It might be that I’m guest-facing, so it’s a little different than at the home office. You’re with another team member, but it’s the same situation. All of a sudden, like you, just said we all realise we all go through the same thing.
Susan Dunlop: It’s different situations.
Sheri Lawrence: You told me about the group you worked with in Hong Kong that you only had to take them through a little bit of the journey, right? Now, they’re already saying, “We want this throughout our entire company.” I think that’s a great example because it’s a simple concept—difficult to do, but simple to understand. And then, of course, it applies to everything. So, it’s not just for a certain industry or just for executives or new managers.
It works for everybody.
Susan Dunlop: You see a lot of organizations like not-for-profits who’ve got this passion for delivering on what they see as important, but they scramble around, and they go in the cycles of drama because they’ve got so many inputs and so much red tape. I would love to bring this work to not-for-profits because I think it would help them rise above that and hopefully get to their outcomes sooner, because in the end, they’re helping people out there in the community make change in their lives.
Sheri Lawrence: Yeah, I totally agree.
Susan Dunlop: So, moving on, we’re going to go on to overcoming challenges and your lessons learned. Integrating TED*® into the organisation’s culture can come with its own challenges and surprises. And you’ve shared a few of those over the past two episodes. These next few ones I jotted down in prep for today:
The board members and executives need their fears addressed by people wanting to bring such work to their organisations. There’s:
- the fear of insufficient ROI;
- concerns about disruption to daily operations; and
- apprehensions about the sustainability of change.
Could you describe a significant obstacle you and your executive faced, if not those, and what was the challenge?
How did you overcome it? What lessons did you learn?
Sheri Lawrence: I’ve definitely had all three of them to look at. And I think ROI has always been tough when it comes to learning because it’s not as easy as looking at, “Here’s our goal for sales. Here’s what we brought in. Yay! We made more or we made less.”
When it’s not those numbers—not that they’re easy—it becomes harder. And everybody does it a little differently. I know a lot of companies use different measurements that I don’t particularly use, and that’s okay. Well, I think the message there is:
Are you currently measuring the learning that you are doing? If you are, then don’t remake the wheel. Take this and apply it to how you’re measuring learning right now.
If you’re not, then there are lots of things you can certainly look at. You’re not only going to have those investment pieces: the expense of doing it, the expense of pulling people away from their job for whatever time they’re learning.
There’s also an expectation with TED*® about the reduction in drama.
One of the things we looked at was how much drama we think we’re having in a given month. Then, we applied some basic numbers to it. There were two situations that involved the entire leadership team and burned 18 hours.
Okay. Well, what was that worth? Right. That’s easy to figure out. And then we could go back to our executive team and say, Okay, just in one month, this is what we spent in a couple of drama issues. Now think about it: this is not the only drama we have. So think about this across the entire organisation. Weigh this month after month after month. because we also know that if we don’t do something about drama, it’s going to continue to get worse. People will leave.
There are lots of things that will happen based on drama in an organisation. I think that piece is so huge. When you want to talk ROI, that’s really the biggest piece. I mean, there are certainly the values that we see in supporting team members, giving them this learning and all of that, but that’s more of what we call in the world, soft costs. But that real true ROI, just measure the drama within the organisation and you’re going to be able to see that this is going to help tremendously.
The disruption to business: We just looked at it and said, “Okay, how much does it really take?”After we went through the first class and figured out, okay, it takes this much time each week for this many weeks, it was pretty easy to justify doing it. You have to invest in your people.
Susan Dunlop: You’ve said all along it’s a consistent practice. Even having invested that time, away from work, the person who walks out of that training is uplifted and thinking differently about going back to their team. That energetic shift would change for the people involved in that training.
Sheri Lawrence: Absolutely. You can’t really argue when you have team members who aren’t going through the training but work with somebody who is, say, Wow, you’ve really changed. Or, Wow, you really understand. That in itself is so valuable. Can I put a dollar on it? That’s really hard to do. I think all executives understand how powerful it is when people enjoy working with each other, and have noticed changes in people who have gone through this.
Susan Dunlop: David Emerald, Jennifer Herold, and one other of the peer trainers created a scorecard review. It was about your leadership, the organisation, and yourself as a team, and the questions were quite clear. There are probably 20 questions. The end result is that on one end, you need a complete intervention, through to, wow, you guys are a great company. you win awards. You just need something else that lifts your people up to feel, I would never want to leave this company. This is so great. So you can see the scale of one to ten. That’s quite a good starting point. It’s then also a good way of checking in.
Sheri Lawrence: I totally agree. You’ve brought the conversation back to the three Vital Questions earlier. Sometimes, it’s simply asking yourself and the organisation, where are we putting our focus? Are we truly focused and moving in alignment with each other? Or are we all over the place?
If the answer is you’re all over the place, then you need something to help bring everybody back to the same focus, and then you can step into assessing it more.
Susan Dunlop: And so the apprehensions about the sustainability of change. how’s that for you?
Sheri Lawrence: We didn’t have apprehensions about sustainability because when we approached the organisation to do this we already had our champions committed.
However, what we did run into was change itself. That’s what we wanted to do. We wanted to implement this, integrate it, and then say, this is going to change the organization for the good, but it will change.
Some of the questions that we had to walk through were: what are you going to do? How are you going to handle it when you have people that resist and don’t want change? There are a lot of people that don’t like change. That helped lead us to what we called our beta test, where we took a mix of leaders and asked them to go through it first so that we could, number one, get their feedback. Number two, they would be then champions in all the different areas of the organisation. It would also help us identify, through their feedback, what are the good changes that are going to come from this.
So we could speak to that. With experience and from people who had gone through it.
Susan Dunlop: Ah, that’s really smart. One of my clients did the same thing. They were going to have the whole 50 staff go through it in one classroom with me on Zoom so I didn’t know how that was going to work. They all had masks on, you can’t see people interacting. We ended up that every staff member had the option to read the book. As they took a break, they got copies of the book, they could do the audio book, whatever they wanted to, they weren’t forced to do it.
Then the leaders said, “If you would like to do this, when we come back together for the next big team meeting, we’ll have David Emerald come on as a keynote speaker. He’ll deliver a presentation on TED*® and 3VQ. And then from there, let’s see where we take it.”
It was a little bit open to where we were going to step next.
I recommended to them that the first person who comes back and says, I love that book. I totally get it. Add them to your champions of TED*® list. And we got 10 there. So, there were leaders and a few other people that became the champions or TED*® champions and they owned it. They were the first people to go through the program.
And then, halfway through that training, they started helping me with the full group training we were starting by leading the breakouts. I was giving them a way to express it differently so they could start talking about it, honouring the processes of expressing thanks for someone having spoken up and deep listening that are part of that training. Asking people to take a moment, pause, and all of that type of thing. So it was really beautiful; it was like a flywheel. You could see there was a beginning, and then it just got bigger and bigger as it expanded through the company. Now, they’re looking to become certified as internal trainers because that will be sustainable for them.
Sheri Lawrence: That’s amazing. I just love that. And that’s why we did it here: We knew that we had talked about the five-year commitment we had made. Then you start thinking about it, and you think, well, how are we going to make sure this sticks day in and day out through different classes?
It made sense for a couple of us to become certified so that we could manage it and be more flexible with classes. Some classes might need to be longer than others. We might need to take a pause, as we’re in the film industry. So if there’s a big movie, sometimes we got to take a couple of weeks’ pause because we’re extremely busy.
It allowed us to make it work better for us. But we also realised that, out of that, the credibility even went higher because now our people look and they go, this is something that the company has decided is going to be part of the culture, and they have gone and got certified. And keep their certifications up and keep doing the work.
It sent a strong message to all of our team members that we’re going to keep doing this.
Susan Dunlop: I saw that at the Center for the Empowerment Dynamic, leading the community of practice back when I first met you. You committed to being part of that bigger community that David and Donna created.
It’s a license to be able to train it, it’s not something that you read The Power of TED*® and then say, I’m now going to teach my organization TED*® because you’re not licensed to do so. If people could follow the curriculum and be guided and keep training themselves to become better at it, that’s where I think sustainability also comes from taking that so much more seriously as an internal or external trainer.
Sheri Lawrence: I totally agree.
Susan Dunlop: Long term cultural impact.
I read in the first episode’s introduction that you were recognised in 2022 as one of the top 50 women leaders in Dallas and the top 50 learning and development professionals. That’s pretty incredible. It’s something to be amazed about.
By that stage, you had fully immersed yourself in bringing TED*® and 3VQ into your life and work. Can you share a story that highlights the long term impact of TED*® on your organisation’s culture and the ways it has contributed to the company’s development and success?
Sheri Lawrence: Well, thank you for that. I appreciate those words, but I don’t always like to talk about myself. I know this work has become part of the culture. This is part of who we are as a company. we believe in helping our team members be the best they can be.
We hire a lot of 16, 17, and 18-year-olds, and we know that they’re going to go on to do different things in their lives. But we take it very seriously that for the time that we have them, we owe it to them to show them what it’s like to work in an organisation that cares about its people, holds its people accountable for doing a great job, and teaches them along the way.
And that’s just ingrained in our culture. We all believe that’s what TED*® and 3VQ do.
I think everybody can benefit from this, but especially young adults who always seem to get stuck in drama. Being able to teach this to them at an early age and have them take this with them is a huge benefit, not only for them but for the company, because we get to see people change from a standpoint of the heart, you know, the culture and the heart.
It is an amazing program that only improves the culture and everything related to it. From the business aspect, people are more productive. There are stronger communications because they understand how we all impact each other. We understand what our normal human operating system is and how we have a choice of changing that.
From a business aspect, it improves the bottom line. We know that this improves our guest interaction as well. We can see it in how our team members interact with our guests and handle situations. Every company, if you interact with guests, is going to have some unhappy people. That’s the way it is. And having those interactions with our guests where we sit and listen. I just can’t imagine working in an environment without TED*®.
Susan Dunlop: We talk about the ripple effect. Like, you were awarded or recognised for what you’ve done and what you continue to do.
So even if you think you’re the one person in that organisation who keeps on choosing to show up as this person and bring TED*® into people’s lives from a young age, that young person will go on to do that and bring that into other people’s lives and into their relationships as they get married or have children.
The ripple effect is massive for an organisation like yours based on what you’ve done.
Sheri Lawrence: Yeah, it really is. Thank you. I think about all the team members who no longer work for us. Now, they can share it with the people they interact with. So it can have that huge ripple effect and just benefit people, even if they take one thing, even if they just take away the fact that the drama triangle is real and I don’t want to be there. If that’s all they take away from it, that’s huge.
Susan Dunlop: Yeah. They don’t want to participate in it, even if it’s someone else’s drama, and to see what role they were playing before, that they were enabling that to keep happening if they were part of that as part of their family. Just the small things that someone could take away can make a big change.
I’ll have to ask David sometime. How many organisations have integrated it to such a depth as you have? I know of a few large organisations I hear about, but there’d only be a handful who’ve embraced it. So there’s much more room to create a wave, not just a ripple across the world.
Sheri Lawrence: Yeah, I think you’re right. Every day, people run across it and think, Huh, what is this? The more we can talk about it, like we’re doing here, the more we can spread the word and get people interested, especially organisations. The bigger an organisation gets, or the more spread out… When you’re all in one place, it’s one thing. Then you open your second place and your third place. Now you’re not in that location all the time. Just being able to set this as part of your culture and the foundation for how you interact and understand each other will help any company be more successful.
Susan Dunlop: All the issues around inclusivity, diversity, and gender imbalance can be managed better by having outcomes-focused conversations that come from this training. There are organisations that say that they’re going to do that, but beneath the surface, other conversations are going on. Everyone knows that’s happening.
So if you can go, you know what, that’s all just a load of crap. How about we make a change in this place? Let’s all step up to the table and say, let’s practice the Empowerment Dynamic. Let’s look at the 3 Vital Questions and see whether we can really show up as the leaders we would like to be in the world.
Sheri Lawrence: Absolutely. I wrote down something when I ran into L&D leaders or other company leaders. And of course, I always share this. One of the questions that I asked them was, How much do you think drama is costing your company? Would you like to reduce or even eliminate it? If you don’t know how much drama is costing your company, there’s a high likelihood that it’s a lot. If you don’t have any, then, somebody call me… ‘cause I bet somebody’s practicing TED*®!
Just that alone. If we just say, Hmm, what’s going on and how much is it costing us? That alone is a great place to start.
And usually, when I mention that, a lot of companies say, I really don’t know. But then they can start thinking of things that have happened that they can label as drama and then it kind of goes from there. So that’s a great place to start if a company is even thinking about it. Just ask your team how much drama is costing us.
Susan Dunlop: I ran a program with a healthcare organisation in New South Wales, and the person who coordinated for me to do the workshop said we don’t really have any drama here. And as I started, we talked about the cost of drama. That was the beginning of the workshop. And I said, can you describe the drama that you are seeing?
Every person had a really good drama story going on, whether it was theirs or just the impact of the hierarchy. It was good for them to all just be sitting listening, going, “Oh, Oh, you too.” “Oh, okay.” So it’s not just me. It was a good thing to see. These people were leaders. All of them were leaders in strategy. So it was pretty important for them to see that they’ve got drama. Then, how will they successfully deliver what they’re trying to roll out to the stakeholders beneath them because they’re going to get hit with a wave of drama-fuelled pushback at their ideas and innovations?
Sheri Lawrence: It’s true. And you made me think about, yeah, there are times where all of a sudden people start talking about, well, we had drama last week, and we had drama this week, and then you start adding it up. And the other thing is that if you’re trying to push a big initiative, half the people in the room are having drama with the other half, it’s not going to get off the ground or it’s going to really go through some obstacles. Because, we’re all emotional beings, when the drama starts, that’s what guides us, right?
I remember a story from one of our people that was just like, they got into such a drama issue with another manager they were working with that it got to the point they would say no to anything that manager wanted to do. There wasn’t a good reason for it. It was just because of all the drama. That is not good for any organization.
Susan Dunlop: No, it is not a good strategy.
When you spoke earlier, back to ROI and all of that, I was thinking about the cost of retention and then having to reemploy…
How many times I’ve seen everyone breathe out when the person who’s a problem has left the business because it’s not been managed well. Full of drama. Everyone goes, thank God that’s over. But I always used to watch and think who’s going to step into the place next because someone else is going to become the next person who’s going to be the problem. This cycle of unresolved issues.
In the industry I served, I watched new clinical managers come on board at a hospital, and they’d be saying, thank God we’ve got a new manager. Surely enough, something else would start to creep in, and then that clinical manager was causing problems; everything would fall apart; they’d lose all their staff, another hospital would gain all their staff, and I’d be replacing staff at that hospital again. I watched this cycle every single day in every organisation that I served and even within my own organisation. If the healthcare and aged care sector could have TED*®, it would make an amazing difference.
Sheri Lawrence: Yeah, absolutely. Where I’ve gotten, and you’re so right about that person that causes problems, and then they’re gone, and everybody takes a sigh of relief. And then it’s like, Oh, now the next person has stepped in. Now I say, who’s left because a lot of times… and there are times certainly when there is somebody that just does not fit the culture and leaves and then things get better. But a lot of times, 90 percent of the time, I think it’s fair to say that there’s something going on with the culture in the company. And that person just happens to be louder than other people. And so when that person leaves and you think all is well, be careful, because it might be that it’s drama in the culture.
Susan Dunlop: There was a quote by a woman I follow on Instagram. She’s called Rebel Thriver. And she said, Who knows why we were taught to fear the witches, and not those that burned them alive. Or those who stood by, watching. (by Affinity Soul via ellahicks.com). That gave me goosebumps to think, yeah, where’s the focus?
What’s the story with those people who thought that it was right to do that, to treat people that way?
Sheri Lawrence: I love that. I’m going to find that quote. I’m going to use that.
Susan Dunlop: So we’re going to move in the future direction. This is where we’re closing out pretty soon.
Looking ahead and thinking about your plans for the future regarding TED*® and 3VQ, if there were no limitations, what would Sheri wish for when it comes to TED*® and 3VQ for you, your organisation, the world?
Sheri Lawrence: A lot of people will say, yeah, of course, she was going to say that, but it’s true.
I truly believe, in my heart of hearts, that everybody needs TED*®. 3VQ is the next step but I think you have to start with TED*®. There are times when an organisation really needs some help, and maybe 3VQ is the first step. But I have seen so many people have that light bulb moment to say, “Oh my gosh, I’m the cause of all of this craziness. I had no idea.”
At that moment, understanding that we have the power to manage how we react and what goes on in our life to an extent!
I’ve told David and Donna before that one of the most amazing gifts they have given is to put this little story out there. If you implement it in your life and you practice it, it will make you a more empathetic, caring person. You will understand other perspectives. You don’t have to agree with them, but you will understand. And I honestly think it would make us a better world if we all took a step back and realised that just because somebody disagrees with us doesn’t mean anything.
It’s okay, right? If we all live in the Empowerment Dynamic, that’s good.
Susan Dunlop: What age would it be appropriate to introduce it? Or is it the parents that you have to introduce it to first? Or through school?
Sheri Lawrence: I think I would love to see a TED*® for Kids book. There are many parents out there like you and me, well, all of us in the TED* community that have taken it, had conversations with our young children, and tried to put a little bit in there.
Now I’m going to answer your question. I think it has to start with the parents, much like it has to start, I really believe this, that it should start with one person in a company that says, “Oh my gosh, this is amazing. I’m going to take the course.” But, for it to get integrated and really go through the organisation, I believe it’s got to be with the executives. They have to buy into it. They have to do it. And I think with the parents, too. Because the parents also have to stay out of the drama triangle.
Susan Dunlop: And I think, as we are parents, I remember the time when your children get to that 17, 18, and they’re about to be set free, and you’re about to possibly get discarded as no longer needing to be the manager, but become their trusted advisor, TED*® would be ideal to have in place during that stage.
You said your son was 12 or 13 when you started talking to him. It would help navigate those rocky teen years a lot easier rather than trying to pick up 10 books on parenting.
This is just being a human being and trusting the other person that they are the creator that they are and not treating them as something less would be a good place to start. So not necessarily parenting; it’s about human beings being human beings
Sheri Lawrence: You said that perfectly because it is common sense. If I want to be treated well, don’t be a bully, right? Don’t be a persecutor. Don’t be a victim. I need to be able to understand that, especially in the teenage years, when there can be so much of it. If you’re on a sports team, if you’re in any group in school, there’s always so much drama.
If we can teach the children how to manage this on their own, think of what a better way, better experience they will have in school, but think of what a better world it will be by the time they get into the workplace.
Susan Dunlop: So we just need that added to the Center’s agenda to write another book maybe this year or next year!
Sheri Lawrence: There you go.
Susan Dunlop: So we’re about to wrap up, so I’ve only got a couple of other questions that we didn’t touch on, which I was thinking in relation to your organisation again.
Have you got any innovative ways that you envision evolving and expanding your use of this work in your organisation and beyond that you’re not doing yet?
How can you continue the learning that way?
Sheri Lawrence: In our first conversation, we talked about how we’re breaking this up now into snippets for our younger team members. We also consider how deeply we can take 3VQ into our hourly team members. What can we do there?
We are also spending some time on the coaching side of it because now, what we want to do is take some of our leaders, have them read the coaching book, and teach a coaching class internally to help them take it to another level so that at some point in the future, we can have each leader teach this on a daily basis.
Instead of us doing the classes. We needed the classes, but now we’ve had enough people go through it. I would love to see our leaders doing this on a regular basis, so when new people come in, they can put them right into it. I mean, we put them right in from day one orientation.
Susan Dunlop: It’s a beautiful course that Donna has created. I did the foundational course last year, and it was deeper; it went into the feminine and that real heart space of this work. It took it beyond what I’d already learned.
When I first met Donna and David, Donna was running the Stop Rescuing, Start Coaching webinar. I was like, Oh, okay. How many of us are rescuing? So now I’m supposed to start coaching. So that’s my new role under TED*®; I’m going to be the coach, but what if we don’t know how to do that?
It’s worth putting the effort into obtaining the next level of coaching education to become a coach in that space.
Sheri Lawrence: Yeah. And our leaders want it. You know, our leaders want to take this to the next level. They want to learn. I mean, we’re a learning organisation. We embrace everybody taking time for learning, whether 15 minutes a week or whatever. It will really help us drive it even faster through the organisation as we grow.
Susan Dunlop: Yeah. And there’s training now, isn’t there? Donna is putting out expressions of interest for people to join her next cohort round for coaching. It’s worth checking out if someone’s interested in going to that because it was just beautiful. As we all do when we do coaching courses, we coach ourselves first, and it was a definite change for me when I did that round of training.
Sheri Lawrence: Yeah, I agree.
Susan Dunlop: So, it is time to wrap up Part 3.
Sheri, I know you’re creating and arranging the logistics for your organisation’s annual conference while showing up here fully with me. Your presence makes me feel relaxed and inspired.
Once again, thank you so much for being here.
Sheri Lawrence: I always enjoy speaking with you.
Susan Dunlop: It opens up my mind every single time.
Next week, we will conclude this mini-series with insights and advice for the sceptics, for the leaders, listening, considering, navigating, and bringing the Power of TED*® into their workplace or personal relationships; it’s worth listening to next week’s episode.
As Sheri said to that one manager last week who avoided training for so long, just give me four weeks. It only took two weeks for her to see the difference in him and for his wife to see the difference in him.
I’ll look forward to concluding the conversation next week in episode 76.
Thank you for being here with us again.
Trust that you are blessed even when you forget that you are blessed. Take care of yourself. I look forward to being back soon. Bye for now.