Joyce Chen - Conscious Leadership (Part 1)

How can conscious leadership transform your career and personal life? Join us for an eye-opening conversation with Joyce Chen, a certified coach from The Conscious Leadership Group, who brings her impressive 20-year journey in marketing and advertising, including her stint as Global Head of Production at Meta, to the forefront. Joyce shares her path from the high-pressure creative industry to the tech-driven realm and how her passion for understanding fulfillment led her to conscious leadership coaching.

• Click HERE to order The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership 
• Click HERE for The Conscious Leadership Group website
• Click HERE to connect with Joyce on LinkedIn

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Chapters

• 0:06 Conscious Leadership Transformation With Joyce Chen
• 10:35 Navigating Leadership Consciousness and Choice
• 19:26 Navigating the Drama Triangle

Transcript

John Broer: 0:06

Well, a warm welcome to all of our friends out there in the Bossh ole Transformation Nation. This is your co-host, John Broer, and joining me on this amazing day is my friend and business partner, Sarah Best. How are you doing, Sara?

Sara Best: 0:21

John, I'm awesome. I'm real good. I think my voice is a little better than yours today, I might add. I know you have good reason though.

John Broer: 0:28

We were cheering on our Columbus Crew in the Championship Leagues Cup victory last night, so that was pretty awesome. That is awesome, yeah, yeah. But hey, talk about victory and getting excited about something. You have lined up a truly amazing subject matter expert for this episode today. So who are we talking to?

Sara Best: 0:49

John, we welcome to the podcast today Joyce Chen, and she is a certified coach of the Conscious Leadership Group.

Sara Best: 0:56

There's a book that I stumbled upon a while back called the 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, and I've come to find it to be incredibly useful, not only for myself and for creating what she'll describe as full aliveness for myself, but also something to share with clients.

Sara Best: 1:15

But Joyce is a phenomenal human being and I'll just share, if I may, John, a quick bit about her professional experience. She is a certified, we'll call it CLG, as in Conscious Leadership Group, CLG coach, but prior to that she was in the marketing and advertising industry for 20 years and she will talk a little bit about her experience. But she was a global head of production for Meta and was responsible for the brands Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger, all the big brands and she now coaches clients like Apple, Airbnb, Amazon, Google, Microsoft. She even still works with Meta. But what's so great I think our listeners will enjoy about Joyce is the very simple and pragmatic way she delivers these tools, and they are tools we are going to learn today about some very simple things anyone listening to our podcast can start to deploy. I certainly recommend that they order the book from Amazon or wherever they buy their books as soon as they get this podcast.

John Broer: 2:16

And it'll be in the show notes. It'll be in the show notes.

Sara Best: 2:19

She brings to us her personal transformation and her real-life experience, helping others find meaning and fulfillment, which, as you know, we dig a lot. So what do you say, let's go, John?

Speaker 3: 2:37

The Bossh ole Chronicles are brought to you by Real Good Ventures, a talent optimization firm helping organizations diagnose their most critical people and execution issues with world-class analytics. Make sure to check out all the resources in the show notes and be sure to follow us and share your feedback. Enjoy today's episode.

Sara Best: 2:57

Joyce Chen what a privilege to have you today. Welcome to the Bossh ole Chronicles.

Joyce Chen: 3:06

Thank you so much for having me. It's a privilege to be on with the two of you.

Sara Best: 3:10

We have some really important stuff to get into today, and I'm especially excited. Maybe some of our listeners are aware of the commitments of conscious leadership, but if they're not, today will be a wonderful introduction by way of you, Joyce, and your experiences, and that's where we'd love to dig in today. You are an executive coach. You're a certified CLG coach, but you have a wealth of experience 20 years in the marketing industry for a little company called Meta. Tell us about your journey and what led you to be the source of influence you are today.

Joyce Chen: 3:46

Yeah, thank you for asking that. It might help to start just by talking about my current role. So I'm a coach and facilitator with the Conscious Leadership Group and we are an organization that exists to support spreading conscious leadership to as many leaders and organizations in the world as possible. And so before I became a coach, I was actually a client of the conscious leadership groups. So I spent 20 years of my career in marketing and advertising. So I worked on the agency side, I was a producer, so I produced commercials, and then I moved to the brand side where I was the head of production, the global head of production for Meta.

Joyce Chen: 4:24

So when I moved over to Meta and I would say, actually before I moved over to Meta when I became a leader I was really passionate about people's fulfillment and what drove people to be happy and have career satisfaction. And the reason for that is because I came up through a really creative industry. So marketing and advertising we got to show up every day and come up with crazy ideas and work in these incredibly like rich, like culturally rich, artistic environments full of interesting people. And yet I looked around inside that industry and saw so much happiness, so much lack of fulfillment that when I became a manager and a leader, I started to want to dig into what drove people to be happy or unhappy at work. If you were really to know me, I've always been a personal and professional development junkie, so I'm a bit of a seeker. I look for, I read every book, I check for every kind of like new modality that's out there. I got coached by lots of different types of coaches. I'm willing to try anything to scratch that itch of curiosity around what it looks like to have career satisfaction or fulfillment.

Joyce Chen: 5:29

When I went into tech, I saw something very similar, except for it became more pressurized. So I went from working in a very creative business to working inside of a creative business, inside of an engineering company. That was high performance, high pressure. Everybody was moving against big goals. We were working with the best of the best in every role, whether it was engineering or decision science or marketing. They tend to hire really high performers there, so it makes a bunch of high performers together and then you try to build a creative organization inside of an engineering organization and there's pressurization, and so what we saw was people on my team.

Joyce Chen: 6:04

I had a large team at the time, I think at the largest. My team was around 150 across four regions, and it was global production for Meta, the parent company, and all of the brands that sat inside of that, including Instagram, facebook and WhatsApp. So we had people from all over the world, a large team, and a lot of people were asking the question am I on purpose in my career? Do I have a sense of congruence? Do I feel fulfilled? Am I doing the work I most enjoy? Why am I so stressed out or anxious inside of the work that I'm doing now? And so those questions were being asked in a million different ways by many different people, and I was looking for answers as the leader, because I knew I couldn't possibly go talk to every person and try to make it better. That would just sink me, and so I was reading lots of books.

Joyce Chen: 6:51

At the time, all the light bulbs went off in my head at once. It was like this is it, this is it. This is so many of the principles that I had been following in spirituality and leadership, and a lot of the big ideas that I really believed in that were distilled into a really simple, really easy to use set of business tools that anyone could learn, and so I brought conscious leadership into my team and I started to teach my direct reports conscious leadership chapter for chapter on, like a in a weekly meeting, and then that was so successful in giving them a sense of empowerment, showing them what radical responsibility could look like if they were to become the creators of the experience of their careers they most wanted. That became so successful. They started to tell other people about this and then other people started to ask me to if I could teach them and it became a class that I taught at Metta in the four years that I was there, where by the end we had trained over 200 leaders at Metta through this program that I designed around conscious leadership, and I would say the experience was a lot results in a short period of time and could actually lead to that feeling of peace, fulfillment, satisfaction, whatever they were looking for.

Joyce Chen: 8:22

Because a big part of conscious leadership is about self-awareness, where we notice how much we're placing what we call the locus of control the cause and control of our lives outside of us and we think that the world is happening to us and conscious leadership principles invite us to check how much we're doing that and to locate the cause and control of our lives inside of ourselves.

Joyce Chen: 8:45

So how, through some of the self-awareness, understanding how we're being in relationship with the content or the issues of our life or work, and then how to take responsibility, if we were to be the creators of our lives, what might that look like? If we start noticing there is some control over here, and what am I willing to do about that? Well, eventually it turned into my career, so I got so many requests to do this kind of work and I was. You know, I'd been trained by Jim and Diana for many years. I took their coaching certification program and it was just. It was a calling for me. I saw such results inside of my team improved satisfaction. We took health metric measurements of how the people were doing before and after this course, which was remarkable. That being able to bring this to as many leaders and teams as possible now is just so fulfilling. It's very on purpose for me.

Sara Best: 9:35

And I can absolutely see why. I love the visual by the way, people running towards you. You have this food like come and eat. I think that many leaders may not know that they're really, really hungry. They know something isn't right and I think the questions you identified that you sought to answer for people, those are the common questions and they're good questions to ask. Am I being fulfilled? Am I crazy? Is stress this normal? Like, should I be operating at this level? Is there a different way to do this?

Joyce Chen: 10:03

Yeah, a big question I hear also is is this it? I work with a lot of really successful leaders who from the outside they look successful. You know they have good salaries, they're working in good companies, they've been in a career for a certain number of years, but they're just scratching their heads asking like is this it? Did I do all this work and climb these ladders and push myself so that I could be here? There's something missing. And when people ask that question I get really excited and I usually want to work with them.

Sara Best: 10:34

Naturally that makes sense.

John Broer: 10:35

What I find interesting, Joyce and we have this conversation a lot you started out the word happiness was sort of inserted there and happiness, as we know, we'd love people to be happy, but happy is incredibly subjective and it's almost impossible to keep your finger on the pulse of how to keep everybody happy. But meaning and fulfillment totally different In our world. When we think about, we talk about the head, the heart and the briefcase. We talk about alignment and people being optimized in a particular role. They bring their skills, they bring their behavioral cognitive wiring, but they also bring their core values and passions. I think that's that's where meaning and fulfillment shows up.

John Broer: 11:14

And at the same time, we are with all of the noise out there for leadership, development stuff. Disengagement is at an 11-year high, according to Gallup, and to your point, this gets very personal. A word that came to my mind was people are feeling ownership. Ownership through this methodology to say I can latch onto this and this feels like something I can deploy and at the same time find that that meaning and fulfillment. I just wanted to get back to the elusive aspect of happiness, but meaning and fulfillment are very, very practical and plausible.

Joyce Chen: 11:51

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And another word I would I would use is aliveness.

Joyce Chen: 11:56

Oh yeah, I like to ask leaders at any given point in time, like how alive do you feel in your role and can you notice the areas in which you're feeling your aliveness is feeling tamped down are about noticing that we all have a life force that's moving through us. It's what we call aliveness, and there are lots of things that we do, that we learn through our conditioning, our lived experiences, through coming up in corporate America or whatever we learn in the business world that begin to like kink that aliveness. If you imagine a hose that just has a kink in it, imagine a million little kinks in that hose and then we wake up one day and we wonder is this it Right? Or why do I feel so dissatisfied or unfulfilled? And step by step especially if you read this book, each of the commitments is a different way to unkink that hose and get that light moving back through us.

Sara Best: 12:53

Another great visual for us, and I think you described the 15 Commitments as tools that people can put into their toolbox. Tell us about when you first were introduced to the commitments. You read the book.

Joyce Chen: 13:06

What did you grab onto what I grabbed onto the most was which was very confronting for me at the time because, like when I listened to you guys talk about boss holes, I think I was always a nice manager and a thoughtful manager, but there was boss hole that lived in me and I can talk a little bit more about what that looked like. But the essential tool or framework that we use inside of conscious leadership is we like to imagine there's a line that lives inside of everybody and at any given moment we're either being with the content of our lives work, family, personal things, the job, whatever from above the line or below the line. So that's what we call context. So content is the stuff of life. It's what we're talking about every day. It's usually like the issues we're facing.

Joyce Chen: 13:51

Context is how we're being in relationship to our content, that when we're above the line, we're in relationship with our content from a place of curiosity, trust, acceptance and just seeing life as a game of learning. And I would usually say that being above the line also has like a somatic experience. It feels open, it feels free. Usually it could feel playful, and when we're with content in our lives from below the line, we are in a state of fear, threat, resistance being closed off, feeling defensive.

John Broer: 14:21

Scarcity.

Joyce Chen: 14:22

Scarcity, and so, at any given moment in time, some people ask can I be on the line? And we say no, it's a binary model.

Joyce Chen: 14:30

In one breath you could be above the line. In the next breath you could be below the line. That's how quickly it can change. Because we're just human beings whose egos sense threat out there in the world. And if our ego sense any kind of threat to the three core wants of our ego, which is approval, control and security, the natural reaction as human beings is to dip below the line. And sometimes we go two miles below the line and sometimes we go 200 miles below the line and you can actually feel the difference in reactivity. And so what happens when we go below the line is we actually contract our three centers of intelligence, which I heard you talk about like head, heart and briefcase. Over here at the CLG we talk about head, heart, body. So the three centers intelligence head, heart and somatic intelligence those actually begin to contract when we're in a state of reactivity and that starts to contract, either a little or a lot, our ability to access those three centers of intelligence. So when we go below the line, it's a natural human reaction. That's not bad. We never graduate from doing this. We all do it, every leader does it, no matter how enlightened or developed they are. We just don't have full access to those three centers of intelligence.

Joyce Chen: 15:41

So what that means is when we react to the content of life or work from below the line, there's just a lower probability of the best possible outcome. So an example I like to give is if you were asked to solve a really difficult work problem and somebody threw a brief in front of you and said solve this in the next hour, but by the way your house is flooded, all your valuables are underwater or your house is on fire and your pets and family are inside, would you be able to solve for that brief? Probably, but it wouldn't be your best work. So that's a really extreme example of what happens when we feel contracted and these days it doesn't have to be something so major, it usually isn't it's the way somebody talks to you, it's the way somebody wrote that email, it's somebody saying placing a limit on where you think there should not be a limit inside of your work situation. And so then we contract and we just don't have that full access to solve what's in front of us, which inhibits creativity and inhibits innovation, collaboration, and we're not fully present. We're just a little closed off or a lot, it depends.

Joyce Chen: 16:51

And so knowing this framework for myself was everything, because I started to notice how much I was below the line and had no idea what would show up when I was below the line. Everybody has different patternings, so for me, something that showed up a lot when I went below the line as a leader was overachieving. It was a way that something I developed in my childhood, that when I was feeling fear or threat, I would react by doing more, trying to be perfect, achieving more and as a leader, this actually was really destructive for my team and I got some feedback around that I was role modeling really unsustainable behaviors by running at a pace no one could keep up with, including myself. I was pushing myself to the point of toxic burnout. I was setting a standard that people felt demotivated by because it wasn't realistic, and I was in everybody's shit all the time Not all the time. There was some micromanaging or just being. I wasn't as trusting as I could be when I shut up from below the line and that's just what below the line looked like for me. That would push me into some boss hole territory.

Joyce Chen: 17:48

So having that awareness of just like, oh, I think I'm contracted right now, I think I'm below the line around this conversation, this project, this reorg, that awareness started to give me some choice.

Joyce Chen: 18:01

Do I want to keep leading and solving from this place, knowing it's lowering the probability of the best outcome for me and my team and the company, or do I want to shift, and how might I shift in order to drive a better outcome? Having that choice is everything, because so much of the time when we're below the line, we feel at the effective like we're shoved in a corner and there's nothing we can do about it, and not having a sense of agency or autonomy over our lives or work is very demotivating and it can feel helpless, it can feel powerless and so noticing oh that's just a victim consciousness. I was in when I was below the line and actually I can choose to stay here and that's very much a choice if I'm aware of it. Or I can choose to shift if I want to. And I always say with awareness comes choice and with choice comes freedom and with freedom then we have the ability to go about and support other people to get free.

Sara Best: 18:55

Yowza, that was such a great explanation. It just flowed so beautifully. And as you and I talked, Joyce, before this interview, we know that people aren't born to be Bossholes. No one wants to come into work from an above-the-line context and wreak havoc. No one wants to do that. So what helps you when you found yourself and find yourself in that below-the-line context? You talked about shifting, that being a choice, that moment of choice. What are the things you do and have done to help you shift?

Joyce Chen: 19:26

One of the most important tools we use after we locate ourselves above or below the line in conscious leadership is getting on something that we call the drama triangle, which I think is a really helpful tool because the drama triangle? In the 1960s there was a psychologist named Steven Cartman. It's called the Cartman's Drama Triangle and he theorized essentially that anytime we go below the line, he didn't use that term, but when we go below the line we take three different postures and we tend to wrote like recycle around these three postures and it creates drama. It's what we call like energy expensive, it can be very draining, and so knowing how we show up on the drama triangle is another huge self-awareness tool that we use. So I actually have the cards where I can explain it.

John Broer: 20:11

And to learn about the drama triangle, make sure to tune in next week for part two of our discussion with Joyce Chen. Already, we've had amazing insight from her and I promise you in part two you will get even more. Great having you here. Make sure to check out all the show notes that are available and we will see you next week.