Ep. 4 | Orienting Towards Courageous Community (with Karen Kimsey-House)

9:45PM Oct 6, 2023

Speakers:

Heidi Brooks

Keywords:

coaching

cti

world

leadership

henry

experience

people

laura

create

work

collective

step

business

designing

called

lived

organization

co active coaching

reinvent

conversation

I'm Karen Kimsey house in the house. This is exciting for me. I am really delighted about this conversation in this connection in the presence of this woman in my life. Karen has been my personal coach, my teacher in long term immersion Leadership Program, and a dear friend Karen Kimsey house is the co founder of the CO active Training Institute CTI which she co founded with her husband Henry and Laura Whitworth. CTA was founded in 1992. And today, the CO active Training Institute is the largest in person coach training organization in the world, delivering courses in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. She's also a co author of CO active coaching and collective leadership. She's one of the pioneers in the coaching world, which has been a big help today. Today, we're going to talk about three times the coach training institute almost shut down. We're gonna talk about transformational learning. We're talking about how to reinvent yourself. I hope you enjoy.

No Miss Heidi, it's good to see you.

Hey, hey, Karen Kimsey. House. Welcome.

Thank you very much, Heidi Brooks.

Well, so I met you through the coach training institute, which you co founded with Henry and Laura. You know, I'll just say a bit about how I found my way to to CTI, you know, I was coming out of my PhD, I went to Brown and then to UC Berkeley to do a PhD in psychology, and found myself with hopes for the world that traditional academia had hadn't really known how to answer the spirit of and the call of there was, at the time, not quite the kind of spirit of positive psychology that might be accessible to some people now. And I found myself not quite having finished my dissertation wandering my way through, you know, the internet, as it was, at the time wondering, what else could I do besides clean my house and avoid my dissertation. And I found my way into a kind of conversation in in Chicago, that was a CTI hosted kind of exploration of coaching, and I was I was I was sold, did the coach training series. And then, shortly thereafter, I signed up for leadership where you were my leadership leader. And so really woke me up to the possibilities that kind of filled in some of the spaces of the formal PhD and kind of a way of knowing and being so deeply grateful for what you have offered to my life and my way of being and my way of impacting the world, you went on to coach me personally, and we've stayed in good touch over the over the years. So some of the spirit of this podcast in this early invitation to you is, is one of gratitude and acknowledgement of my learning through experience, and also a kind of bid to the world to acknowledge the many ways that we learn through experience. So that's a very long way of saying, Tell me a little bit about how CGI came to be, and how, what inspired you tell us a little bit about that story.

You know, I love your story, Heidi, because it is not dissimilar from mine. So many of us kind of were wondering, and our own little bit of wilderness looking for some kind of a frame to put around a truth that we sensed was was there, but couldn't find any form to give it or any way to any structure for application of it. So I'd started this Learning Annex program. And I was looking for what was next I considered going back to school to learn a family therapy because I wanted to work with people in a positive and helpful way. But again, when I looked at the academic structures, they didn't quite meet the direction that my heart wanted to travel. So I was searching and they did a number of different things. And then Laura Whitworth, my co founder, who who has since passed away in 2007. And I found ourselves in a course called design your life. It was a course in life planning. And we thought this was a brilliant idea to do life planning. We thought wow, why not plan your life. So we became life planners and time went on and the person who taught life planning went on to found his own coach training program called coach you, Laura. I read a book by Sir Thomas Whitmore called coaching for performance, which was really I think, the beginning of the conversation about coaching. And she said, You know, I don't think like planners is the best word I think we should call ourselves coaches. And right around that time, other people were starting to call themselves coaches too. So I don't claim you know, the founding of the idea, but it's certainly was revelatory to me, we went to the dictionary, and we look up the word coach. And a coach is someone who gets you from where you are to where you want to go in style. Hey. So we became coaches, Henry, who was not my husband at the time, moved to the Bay Area to start a coaching practice. As Laura second client, he decided that he wanted to leave the world of acting, and he has his own story about that. And so we were all creating our coaching practice together, Laura and Henry, quite successfully. Me not so much. And Laurie started bugging Henry to do a course to do a class in how to coach and how to do what we were doing. And Henry didn't want to do it. He went, it's now No, no, no, no, no. Because if you've ever known, what else would you do, and finally fell, okay, so the this is little course called basic training for coaches. And I remember sitting in this in this course, and this two and a half day training going, Oh, my God, this is it. This is the way that I want to work with people. This is what I want to know. And it was like somebody had both put a big, beautiful frame around my heart's desire, and also lit it completely so that I could see it. And I was so excited. I couldn't sleep when I went back to my house that night. And the next day, I took the two of them out for lunch, a big business luncheon, who knows pizza? And tell them that they should make me a partner. So wow, that's how CTI started.

Wow. Okay, so the title of your books are collective coaching, and collective leadership, to really great things for people to know about. But can you say while we're in this conversation, I mean, I know when you know, but like what is collective coaching.

It's a process of working with a client. It is client centered and client based, that really focuses on the natural, creative, resourceful, and wholeness of the client. So collective coaching coaches, the person, not the problem, and really stands under or believes that we all have within this what we need to thrive in this world. And what we need more than anything else, is an positive, open and supportive space, a safe and courageous space, where we can consider and look at the big questions of our life. So in CO active coaching, the client really leads the way and the coach is behind the client, supporting, championing and encouraging the client, as opposed to me coming into a coaching relationship and saying, you know, here's my 10 point plan for improving your life. And here's the boxes that you need to check in order to be a great person.

How's coaching different than therapy, let's cover some of the basics here.

Really great therapy employs coaching skills. And I think really great coaching can be therapeutic. So there's definitely an overlap between the two. I think part of the big distinction between coaching and therapy, is the reason that the client enters into the conversation. In coaching people come into the conversation, because they want to move forward in their life, they want to accomplish some objectives, they want to make some things clear, they want to step into a bigger, fuller life. By and large people enter therapy, because they want healing. They want to find their way to wholeness, so that the process is more about sometimes looking to the past and about past lived experiences and how that impacts our, our our behavior today. It's not exclusive that coaching doesn't do that. And again, I think really great therapy is forward looking. But that's the primary distinction that I see between the two practices.

Interesting, like both coaching and therapy are about learning through different kinds of experience. So you know, I'm a psychologist by training, but I've never been in the treatment room professionally out of my training. I've been entirely in management schools and in leadership development kind of advisory modes. But I think the common question comes from this kind of base of unleashing potential for humans to kind of be their best selves. And where's the collective Training Institute right now?

I've stepped down from the day to day operations. I'm now on the board of CPIM. The it's a global company with operations in so many different countries. We have a book called co active coaching, which has been translated in all the major languages coactive is a network that really spans the globe, and a community of dedicated people who have studied this thing called co active coaching and collective leadership, and are applying at as professionals as professional coaches. Because the profession of coaching is now like, you know, really established, it's a global profession at the time, it was nothing but it is now. And they're either working as professional coaches, or they're applying the principles of collective coaching. And they're managing management and their leadership and their teaching, and their parenting in their day to day lives. You know, all around the world, we're on every major continent, and in most of the major countries. Never in my wildest dreams, what I have imagined, that CTI would grow to this place, never,

the road to success was not always smooth. I talked to Karen about some of the hard times she faced. And we so let's let's go with like some of the hardest experiences to learn your way through. You know, I'm curious what comes up for you, when I talk about learning through experience and learning through lived experience? Do you have a kind of moment that comes to mind or a story or an experience that you might be willing to share in that zone in vain?

Sure, do you want a difficult one? Do you want me to share one that was more challenging, or one that wasn't as challenging,

which which I definitely go dark and deep.

Okay, dark and deep. So there were there were countless times. There are at least three different occasions that CTI as an organization should have ended. And the first of those was in 2008, when the big huge recession hit the United States, the housing market dried up all over the place. And we were all sort of scrambling for cover. And coaching was really starting to blossom throughout the world, but was also considered something of a luxury. And so both are practitioners, people who were coactive coaches, and people who were thinking about coaching, training, and organizations that were thinking about, you know, bringing coaching into their organization all went, you know, and so it looked like it was going to be curtains for CTI. And we discussed how we might go about responsibly shutting down the business. And that's how far it went. And I was completely torn up about it. And I lived in a place by the ocean called Dillon Beach, California. One morning, I went for a long walk on the ocean with my dog before I drove into my office. And I just sort of said, help me. I'm on my knees here, what needs to happen, show me the way I'm willing, I'm so willing, and I don't see a way forward. And somehow through the course of that process, it was important that I was moving my body. And I learned from that, that that's a way for me to discover and explore. The next step was to get into motion. And it just really came to me that this was an opportunity to reinvent the organization. And so I went into the office, and I called my people together. And I said, you know, we're we're not shutting down, we're reinventing ourselves. And one of the steps we had to do to reinvent ourselves was was to go lean. That's exactly what happened. That organization that came out of that downtime was a different kind of an organization. It was more financially savvy, it was more grounded, it was more responsible as a business to itself. That's one example that I can think of.

Yep. You mentioned that there were three times that the corrective Training Institute almost shut down. What were the other two times that CTI almost shut down?

Yeah, early on. Just as we were getting started. Laura Henry, and I had a really, really massive fight. And we almost broke apart. And it was really only through our will our dedication to the work and to CTI that we did the hard work of doing what we call it CTI designing our alliance, which is kind of a pet phase for a lot of pushing against each other and a lot of redefining who we were and how we were going to work together. And I believe that had we broken apart at that time. CTIA as we know, it would not come into existence, I believe that needed all three of us. And the other time was in 2015 When my husband and I decided that we wanted to step back from the business. And we made a really poor business decision to adopt a process by bringing in an outside investor, who we thought really understood the vision for CTI and about a little more than halfway, we came to discover that that wasn't accurate. And the business was being suffocated and dying. And so we had to take the business back from this navigation, the navigation of this business deal in a very public and very humiliating and very challenging way, especially for a business that talks about how it's a relationship based business. Here's a breakdown The relationship that's on display for all the world to see. And I thought we were gonna lose the business. And we didn't? Well, there's

a lot of, you know, as we, as we speak, there's a lot of reinventing and downsizing happening in organizations around the world as, but on the individual level of people kind of reinventing themselves, whether they've been kind of excused or fired from from work or decided to, to quit and move on to a different shape of work. Any advice out of that period for people, you know, how did you dig in to actually are going to reinvent, rather than give in to whatever the forces might be on the other side?

Of that question, it is a disorienting time isn't it has been for a little bit now. I think there are a couple of things that are important. It's vitally important to follow your heart, and to wait for the resonant truth to arrive from inside of yourself. And then follow that, even when the circumstances look like they're calling for something else. So you have to believe in your own inner truth. First, you have to stand there first. That's the first step. And then the second step is to be completely open, to receive wisdom from the rest of the world, right? Not just like, This is my truth. And I'm going to close my eyes and yours to the rest of the world. And never mind what anybody else says. You start with what's true for you. And then you open yourself to the wisdom that comes to you from the rest of your world, from your spirituality, if that's a source from you, from codified learning, if that's a source from you, from other people, if that's a source from you, and you let that flow into you, not abandoning your own inner truth, but allowing that input from the outside to hone and shape and solidify what's happening inside. And then you take the courage to follow an iterative process, knowing that you don't have to know every step of the way. You just need to start stepping. Okay, what's right in front of me, that was resonant? Let me step there. And what's next, that's resident, let me step there

are just that, you actually have to kind of listen to yourself first and come to understand and hear and heed your own truth. And then get curious about what external messages might make sense for you to heed. It's a it's a pretty noisy world, how do people even hear themselves? How do you hear your own truth? What does that mean? You are walking on the beach and moving moving your body? And that opened you up somehow and kind of story that sets us in this direction? What does that mean for others?

Yeah, I think part of a really important developmental place for people to go through as they mature as adult human beings, is to be curious about their own process, and to discover what works for them. For me, nature is a huge source, it helps me quiet the noise of the world. And that helps me find not physical stillness, because I need to be moving, but emotional and intellectual stillness. So I can begin to hear my own voice. So I didn't just you know, I wasn't just like 12 years old. And I knew that was how I needed to process, I discovered that because I paid attention, other people meditate. That doesn't work. For me, nothing comes, I've just irritated at the end of a half an hour. And I've experimented enough to know that that's, I don't mean to dismiss meditation, I think it's really powerful. That's just not my way. So I think really experimenting with different practices and discovering your way to as you say, which I love the way you save to quiet the world, so that you can hear your own internal voice, you know, that's the first part of the practice, I think the second part of the practice is trusting your own internal voice.

Because I love that as separate steps, like just like, let that kind of, like unshrink that a little bit. Because this first thing of actually quieting down enough to let yourself have an experience in which you might hear something is a pretty big ask and today's very noisy, fast moving high stress world that has lots of agenda for you. So there's, they're, you know, in a podcast called learning through experience, part of this is actually just let yourself have experiences and notice the impact on you. So what works and what doesn't, you know, I'm regularly trying to talk people into, you know, into try some sort of practice that grounds you, and it's not clear what that practice might be. But the grounding is really important. And there are a whole bunch of people who have your kind of reaction to to meditation. And of course, a whole bunch of people have a very different reaction to meditation, which you might only know by trying it out, and then noticing the impact on you.

I love what you're saying because, you know, as we find our way to quote, stillness, so there's so much presentation out there that this is the right way to do it. And the way you should do it doesn't work for everybody. Beautiful.

How was the field changed? What have you as the as you see it, you've got the purview from beginning to now, what do you see that matters to you? Well, it's

interesting, it's gone through quite an evolutionary process. And I would say today, coaching is such an accepted practice, that I see it everywhere I see it in social media, I see it in television shows, people have coaches, that's not an uncommon thing. And what excites me the most is that there is I perceive a new opening and awareness, or relationship based, humanistic approach to living and working together, I think the pandemic was a huge gift to the both the profession of coaching and also the principles of coactive. Because the fact that we're interconnected, you know, and that what happens in other parts of my world, are a part of my world became completely clear. It's like we couldn't deny it. Right, it was absolutely in front of us. And so moving out of that, what I'm finding is that organizations understand that relationship matters. Understand that, you know, the greatest value of an organization is, is its people, you know, understand that process, and meaning and purpose, really underlie and support any major initiative. And so there is openness, not only to coaching, but also to this, you know, humanistic approach that I call coactive. In a way that's never been present before. In your book,

collective leadership, you redefine the idea of leadership. Why is that important?

Because I think the way that we hold leadership doesn't really harness and unleash our human potential. I think that we think of leadership in a very narrow way, as the person in front. And I don't think that it's inclusive of many different styles of leadership are many different opportunities to lead. So I think finding a new definition offers a new way of thinking about leadership. And I think we need to think about leadership differently. Because leadership is something that's available to every single one of us, it's not just the purview of those people that we've nominated, or elected or selected or have been promoted to a top position. And what is your definition of leadership leaders are those who are responsible for their world, which means everybody, everybody is responsible for the world that they are creating in their own lives, whether they're aware of that or not, whether they're consciously creating it or not. They are the one who actually creates their life story. Yes, experiences and events and different lived experiences come to us all, this is true. The meaning that we make of that and the story that we tell ourselves about our lives is ours and ours alone, that belongs to us. And so we each have an opportunity to be in relationship with the circumstances of our life in a way that creates a powerful story. That's, that's more conscious leadership. Or we create a story that's disempowering to us and to the world around us. That's less conscious leadership. But everyone has the ability to create that story, and the possibility of crafting a story that is resonant and works for them. You did a lot

of designing and growing CTI and many other things that you've been involved with, that are related to coaching, but not exactly coaching. I want to ask you a little bit about teaching and creating learning space, how do you think about a met not just think about but how do you kind of create a space where people can craft this kind of understanding that you're pointing to? And by understanding, I think you're not just talking about cognitive understanding? That's, that's not how I'm hearing you Exactly. Right. You speak to?

Yeah, if you think about it, I think about it like computers to know, like, there's lots and lots of cognitive understanding and lots of information that is really, really useful and helpful. And I think of that kind of like the software. What we really focused on at CTI was transformative learning, which changes the system, the operating system of the human being. So when I say who I was at the beginning of CTI and who I am now is different. That's what I mean. It doesn't mean I have new information, although I do and I have access to different information, although I do I mean that the way that I see the world and engage with my world has shifted fundamentally in a transformative way. So how do you create that kind? of learning for people, how do you create that kind of transformative shift? In an experience, whether it's a three day workshop, a 10 month Leadership Program, or, you know, family gathering, right? By crafting a story experience for people. So you need to take people on a journey that begins with what we call a disorienting and event, something that happens that takes the people that are in the environment, from whatever story they're in about what they're doing, into the story that you want them to be. So for example, in our fundamentals course, the first thing that happens is you walk into the room, and it's there's no tables, they're not in rows, very disorienting. The second thing that happens is that there's a main goal that asks What's your dream. So anybody who thought they were coming to sit with a notebook and learn about the principles of collective coaching, and take notes, is immediately disoriented to that, and put into a different story that is about dreaming, and purpose and values and mission, and about supporting people in those things. Then as the course progresses, the way that people learn collective coaching is by doing it, by coaching themselves. And by being coached. So that by the end of the two and a half day, introductory course, who the person is that's thinking about the profession of coaching, or how they might apply their coaching skills, is sitting in a different place, not exclusively, for some people, it takes longer. But for so many people, you know, you start you start, I usually left fundamentals because you started fundamentals that that's the the iteration now of basic training for coaches. And everybody's sitting in their seats, madly thumbing through their manuals, because they don't know what else to do. And by the end of the course, Sunday, they're they're like, hanging off the rafters and laughing, raucous Lee and doing lots of exercises that are really outside the box for them. So they lead the course really, in a different relationship to themselves, and how they see the world and how they think about the world.

And maybe even about how they learned.

Maybe you know if that's true, I haven't thought about that. But that's really true.

Yeah. So what are the experiences that you had, that kind of opened your heart and mind and spirit to transformational learning to kind of learning through exploring?

Well, it began with pursuing a career in the theater. In the theater there, there are a number of different approaches to acting, but to be really to make it really simple. There's the outside in adopting the mannerisms and the characters of a person, then finding your way to the character. And then there's the more academic Inside Out of really understanding that the human being of the character you're portraying, and how you carry that to an audience in a way that involves and engages the audience, even though the third wall is really there in most theatrical performances. So as I begin to experiment, and play with different characters, and come to understand them, I both learned through the experience of being that character. And I also learned, how I learned, which is the returns that I needed to really become the person that I was portraying, and find aspects of that human being, whether close to me or far from me, inside my own persona in order to bring it forward in a realistic way. So that was the beginning of it. And I think that the theater and our theater backgrounds, my husband, Henry has a theatre background as well, underlies so many, so much of our design principles, because it really is about both the human experience and understanding and appreciating both the similarities of our human experience and the unique lived experience of each human being. And also understanding how to bring that forward and create an experience inside a play, or a show for an audience.

So you've often been involved in lots of different kinds of training and leadership development, developmental experiences, how much are you bringing in explicitly that kind of theater techniques?

We didn't realize that we're bringing that in until we look back at how we designed and created and then we said, oh, that that really came from the theater? Do you know we were each committed to something different Henry one at an educational experience that that that stepped away from mirroring his own educational experience as he went through school. He never went to college, Henry, he never He doesn't have a college degree. Because there was no place for that. And I know you know, my husband, so you'll understand when I say this, there was no place for that big, huge, wide expressive, you know, vast exploration of that mind inside a standard educational experience. And Laura, our partner wanted something that would be really would would change the way that people thought about themselves and about the world. I wanted to create intimacy and relationship and love in an environment. So those three rivers flowed together to really create the foundation of our design. And we would spend a tremendous amount of time designing our initial programs, and loved and thought and argued we'd create something we, we think of an experience. And then we they tried it on me, I was always the guinea pig. So they'd say, Okay, so we're going to do a future self visualization, let's say that's something we're going to do. So close your eyes, Karen, and I would do the pitch. And I'd say no, that's too long. And that's too much. And that doesn't work. And they go, okay. And then we, so we, we, it was a very iterative and very experiential process of design. And then as you begin to think about how we did what we did, we set out you know, so much of this is based in our experience, from the world of theater.

So or were you the kind of guinea pig because of your like, why I make up that you were the guinea pig because of how you experience the world, kind of, in a felt sense in like with kind of empathy? And is, what would you say about that? Why, why he was the guinea pig,

I would have never articulated it as clearly as that. And yes, I that's how I experienced the world. Laura was more the idea feeder, Laura read everything she could get her hands on. And if Laura was designing CTI courses alone, everything in the world would be in there, and you couldn't find anything, you know, with a flashlight. And Henry really understood the the dramatic art and how to create and shape the experience for people. I was the one who is more the felt experience kind of person. So I was a really good guinea pig to try things out on because I could tell you how it felt. Whereas Laura, not so much he wanted to talk about and think about it. And Henry didn't really care so much how it felt he was just really paying attention to is the whole shape and the thing. Wow, great team. Yeah, it was we were lucky. You know, I say we were brilliant. But we weren't we just stumbled into each other and kept going. Well, there's

a kind of brilliance in kind of finding a synthesis that leads to a kind of synergy that produces something useful for the world. And it's I think it's worth acknowledging the kind of brilliance of synthesis that comes together from combining energies beautifully, and then making it work finding a way.

It was mega fun. It was so fun. That's one thing I will say about my journey with CGI, it has been challenging, at times terrifying and heart wrenching, difficult, challenging below I'm beyond belief at times. And through it all has been a thread, the most fun and delight and creativity and self expression that I could ever imagine. For me, CTI felt like this huge canvas that I got to paint myself on. And then I had people come and give me lots of other colors. So that's why I say I feel really grateful.

What What would you say about the work that you've been doing and some of these ideas as it applies to work of racial justice, just a wandering together. We've wondered about this a little bit together before. And so I'm just bringing it back into our conversation here.

I love what you're pointing. You know, I think where to start, I think there's been so much harm, and so much separation, that we're just beginning to speak about the pain and allowing that to be present in our world and allowing it to come to the surface is actually helpful. At first, when the whole thing started blowing up, I wanted to kind of put us all into good conversation with each other and have us be really curious and learn from each other. And we may not be at that step yet. We may be at the step called just expressing the pain and the harm. I know for CTI as an organization, we were actually speaking and structuring our programs in such a way that we're exclusive and intentionally. So we meant to be inclusive, but we were actually taking parts of people's lived experience and excluding them from the conversation. So we've done a whole big reevaluation of both of our coaching and our leadership curriculum, to make sure not that we change the experience, but that we set the proper context so that people feel invited and included. And I think that that's the best thing that we can offer to the to the issue of diversity, equity and inclusion at this time. Is to be as curious He says possible about our differences, and as willing as possible to stand in the fire difficult conversations, to let things become really personal with each other, and take them personally as little as possible. And I say as little as possible, because sometimes things feel intensely personal. And so I think we have to do the best we can, you know, if you can, if you can hold a conversation, and be the one that holds it with equanimity, do so. You know, if you have to be the one that is upset and taking it personally, well, that's the part for you to play in the conversation right

now. Wow, that feels like such a big ask to, like, take things personally. And like, like, let yourself be impacted, feel things, join people see them know that the world matters, and that people are real out there. And yet, like don't make it about you. Exactly.

It's a paradox almost. It's

a paradox. It's a paradox, that there's, there's a tension there. That's a poem by paradox, like what we mean is an apparent conflict and apparent conflict, which if you can kind of live with both of them, you probably can navigate. But the idea that it actually that these things are in conflict that that take it personally, but don't make it about you seems in conflict might actually keep you from be able to step into this, that's that's that space, it's, it's a really nice place to look, given what we've worked on what we've done together over the years, and what you've talked about today, to be a place a pointing up, I'm completely convinced, by the way that racial justice work in the US is so hard for us that if you can do that, you can do almost all of these other things, it requires us such a high demand for for groundedness and inner work and curiosity and looking at your values and caring about the world in a way that where you're willing to put yourself at risk. And we have to learn our way through and different demographics have different experiences and different perspectives. And so there's all of this collective work. So I thank you for, for traveling there with me,

we have everything to say about how we hold that we can either hold that as an impossible challenge, or as an exciting opportunity. And let ourself travel back and forth between, you know, between the in between those two things.

So great. I mean, you know, at the end of the day, I'm interested in, you know, walking my own kind of truth, which is for me about, I'm not sure what the verb is, but it has something to do with a courageous community. Whether I'm cultivating or inspiring or building or mourning. I'm oriented towards courageous community. And for me that the process is very much one of of this, can we be with what's in front of us? And if we can, can we be with it with with curiosity? And if we can be with it with curiosity, can we wander into what's possible with our choices might be? And if we can do that, can we then actually maybe risk ourselves 10% beyond our comfort zone into the possible? And then if we can do that, did we survive? And are we okay, probably, we're more fine than we ever would have anticipated, and we're more fine. Now our risk zone is expanded. And that's how we grow towards each other and towards a different future. I love that. Cool. Well, Karen, we are we are at an over time. Is there anything that we've skipped that you want to be able to say?

Oh, no, gosh, I would talk to you for about a day and a half and three days in the year miss it, Brooke so no, nothing else that goes missing.

Well, you've rekindled a yearning for me to be sitting in your presence designing something, so I really I will I will see if I can talk you into letting me show up in your living

room or something. Anytime. We'd love it. So awesome.

Thank you so much. So much love to to you and to Henry and maybe to Cosmo who I think I may have heard in the background there.

Sorry about that. Puppy wonder.

Your puppy wonder? Yeah, awesome. Okay.

Very, very big feelings.

His big feelings. Awesome. Just the right dog for you. All right. So thank you so much, Karen. Until soon. Thank you, Heidi until soon. Bye bye. This has been an episode of learning through experience. I'm your host Heidi Brooks. This podcast is produced through the Yale School of Management. The editor is Miranda Schaefer. Please like and subscribe to learn more through this experience with me and the wisdom of the guests who join me to talk about our learning our way through the experience of life.