Laura Gallaher  
I don't think that fear gets the most out of people. While it's a very, very strong motivator, you're never going to get the same level of performance out of somebody who's driven by love than somebody who's driven by

Jeff Ma  
Hello and welcome to Love as a Business Strategy a podcast that brings humanity into the workplace. We're here to talk about business. We want to tackle topics that most business leaders shy away from, and we believe that humanity and love should be at the center of every successful business. I'm your host, Jeff MA and as always, I'm here to have conversations and hear stories with real people about real business, real life. My guest today is Dr Laura Gallaher. And Laura is an organizational psychologist, professional speaker and a true inspiration for driven individuals looking to achieve more while making life easier. She's accomplished some incredible things in her career, including working with NASA to transform their culture following the Columbia incident, collaborating with Disney to revolutionize performance management for their leaders and inspiring global teams at Yahoo to seek transformation from the inside out. Dr Laura is also a USA Today and Wall Street Journal, best selling author, and her insights on radical self acceptance have been featured in Forbes Psychology Today, Huff Post and TEDx. So it's a wonderful honor to have you on the show here today. Laura, how are you doing?

Laura Gallaher  
Jeff, I am so excited for this conversation. Thank you for having me

Jeff Ma  
awesome. I find that these 30 minute episodes require me to jump right in. 

Laura Gallaher  
 Yeah, so do it. 

Jeff Ma  
So I have to ask my first question, which is personal, but what is your passion and where does it come from? Two parter,

Laura Gallaher  
my passion is around inspiring introspection. 

Jeff Ma  
Ooh, 

Laura Gallaher  
yeah, I just think that we have such a tendency as human beings to walk through the world in such an unconscious way, and some of that's necessary. We need our subconscious to help us make a lot of decisions, but then often, we will start to blame the world and blame other people for our own bad feelings, instead of actually looking inward. And I think that if more people did that, we could live in a very, very different world.

Jeff Ma  
 I love that answer. Can you define introspection by just, just like, as opposed to, I feel like it's a word that people may not even have the self awareness to understand that they're not being introspective. That makes sense so 

Laura Gallaher  
totally. 

Jeff Ma  
But what? How would you define it? Maybe differentiate it from like reflection or just like passive thoughts about yourself. What does true introspection look like to you? 

Laura Gallaher  
To me, true introspection is about turning the microscope inward and really reflecting on a deeper level. What is, what is motivating me to behave in the way that I do, and specifically where I think the introspection gets really powerful as we start to look at fears, we we have a workshop that we do with all of our clients, and when we ask everybody to do their introductions, we do some of the typical staff. Tell us your name, your role in the organization, and we ask them, any fears, any fears you have, and it's really intriguing for me as a psychologist, to listen to the answers that people have, because it ranges from anything to like, Hmm, I'm not really afraid of anything. I don't have any fears. So total denial of the impact of fear on their lives, to who I actually had, a participant in December in a workshop, say just, you know, all the simple terrors of simply waking up every day. And I was like, okay, this person is heavily aware of their own fears, but the truth is that fear drives absolutely all of us in ways we don't understand. So introspection, to me, is not just I know my strengths and my weaknesses, and so I'm self aware, but do I really understand my triggers? Like, what are some of those thorns that are being, you know, pushed up against? And how am I actually contributing to every situation in my life, even the ones that I claim to be unhappy about. That kind of deep introspection,

Jeff Ma  
I love that 100% aligned to what you're saying here, even when we were writing the book, Love as a business strategy, we were constantly referring jokingly to its kind of alternate universe, kind of bizarro world book, Love as a fear strategy, because the exact inverse of everything, like, and we would still, you know, lovingly, kind of refer to other businesses who you know, if you're not practicing Love as a Business Strategy, if you're not applying that, then you're really letting fear drive, yes, everything. Which is, which it does naturally, right? Like we, you know, we don't want to, fear of getting in trouble with the boss, fear of not, not, yeah, hitting the quota, fear of not living up to our own standards. Absolutely, our motivators, yeah,

Laura Gallaher  
and fear is a strong one. It's a really, really strong motivator. But it's, it's, it's motivating us from a survival place, and the vast majority of the time, thank goodness. We don't actually need to be in survival mode. We're actually very much safe physically most of the time, and our brain is just not operating in that spot. Yet. It just has all these interpersonal fears and all these intra personal fears, and they hang out in our subconscious, and we blame other people for it, instead of looking looking inward.

Jeff Ma  
Sure. Do you think what's your kind of take on fear as an element of like? I think we all naturally feel fear, just, you know, in our own minds and our own beliefs. But then there's also fear, like as a somewhat more intentional tool, maybe through leadership, through corporate structure, through rules, and you know, all these things, sorry, maybe unintentional as well, right? Can you talk a little bit about that element in the workplace? Specifically, because I do struggle with kind of balancing this concept of fear and how much of it like is the leader? What is the leader's job when it comes to fear, and is it, you know, in terms of reducing it or alleviating it, or using it like, what? What is what? What is the element of fear, kind of in a leader's role?

Laura Gallaher  
So I don't want to be rigid or dogmatic. So I want to say this intentionally. I will say I am rarely an advocate of intentionally using fear. I don't think that fear gets the most out of people. While it's a very, very strong motivator, you're never going to get the same level of performance out of somebody who's driven by love, as you know, than somebody who's driven by fear, but so much fear, like you pointed out already, it's inherent, you know, evolutionarily speaking, it was so useful for us to be afraid. I joke about back in the day, if I'm walking with a friend and that friend says, oh, there's a saber tooth tiger over there. Do you want to go pet it and say hello? I might go. You know what? I'm gonna hide behind this rock. You go say hi. Let me know how that goes, right? And so in that kind of instance, being fearful and focusing on my physical safety allowed me to survive. And so my descendants also grew up with that fear, and they learned that that fear kept them safe. So conceptually, I totally get why we exist with so much fear, but society and business has evolved much faster than our brains have evolved, and so we've got this really strong fear mechanism within us that's still focused on just trying to survive. Jeff, have you seen office space?

Jeff Ma  
 Of course, 

Laura Gallaher  
of course. Okay, thank goodness. I was gonna say, you've gotta watch it if you haven't. He's got such a great line. Peter, the main character, protagonist, when he's talking to the Bobs the consultants, and he talks about the fear of being or, you know, if you're getting in trouble or fired or whatever. And he said, you know, the problem with that strategy is that it gets people to work just hard enough to not get fired. And it's so true. Yeah, and not only is it not going to be as motivating, you know that, like, Oh, I just don't want to get fired, I'll just be above the bar, obviously, you're going to motivate somebody a lot more if you can get them to, like, believe in a vision, feel like they're contributing to something meaningful, right? Actually see all the gains and moving with love, but when you're using fear, it has a lot of unintended consequences as well that just drop the vibe of everybody in the office and creates a lot of distraction and actually hurts productivity. And then even if you've got people who are like pumping stuff out because you're so afraid it is a short term strategy, they are going to burn out real fast, and your turnover is going to skyrocket.

Jeff Ma  
I find that working with leaders, there's a huge often, lack of self awareness of the fear that they create. And sometimes I would even argue they're not, you know, they're not technically doing anything that creates the fears, just, it's almost as they're just not addressing it head on. It exists, whether it's them or somebody else, or any you know this,

Laura Gallaher  
it's co created. It's totally co created, absolutely and, and I agree with you, Jeff, I and I, I am one of those leaders, and I have been one of those leaders that doesn't recognize some of the ways that I am contributing to people on my team, feeling theater. I, as you know, I worked with NASA following the Columbia accident, and we were primarily focused on the. Teaching the leaders how to create psychological safety, because without getting super deep into the weeds of it, psychological safety was not strong enough for the engineers to continue speaking up even in a life and death situation. And of course, self deception played a huge role. Right? It's more complicated than what I'm saying right now, but there I was this PhD in psychology, coaching these leaders on psych, psychological safety, and then I moved into a leadership position, and I completed one of those 360 assessments, which I have a lot of opinions about now, and I got feedback from I mean, my feedback was mostly positive, right the my internal customers were really happy with me, my leaders were happy with me, my peers were happy with me. But I remember turning to this page, and we were like, on a lunch break in this leadership training, and I turned to this page that's talking about these negative leadership influence tactics, and there were, like, two people on my team who indicated that they felt that I would sometimes bully them intellectually, oh, like, gut punch. Total gut punch. I was horrified. I don't know what my face looked like, but I was talking to my coach in the program later that afternoon, and she was like, Oh, I saw your face when you're looking at the report, it was hilarious, like, I'm glad you could laugh at my pain and my horror, but I was so horrified. At no point in time, Jeff, did I ever say, like, I'm just gonna bully them intellectually until they agree with me, right? There was no intention of that. But being passionate, having strong opinions, wanting to maybe prove myself, because I was still, like, mid 20s at this point, I had all kinds of defense mechanisms that were popping up for me that led me to contribute to fear on my team. And I was like, Oh my gosh, I am supposed to be coaching other people and creating psychological safety, and I myself I'm struggling to do that with at least a couple of people on my team. So it's not enough to know. I can't just know about these topics. That's why I say. You know, my passion is to inspire introspection. Have to be able to, like, go deeper and understand how are some of my own fears contributing to some of these behaviors that are not at all effective.

Jeff Ma  
My story just mirrors yours so much. I mean, I didn't take a 360 and I have thoughts of that as well. But for me, there's a term we use called intellectual arrogance, and it's, it's born out of partially, like a mindset, partially out of, you know, just passive, passive behavior, elements of how you it's just so present in a lot of leaders that I've, I've met, but in myself, particularly just this idea that, you know, you're not intentionally bullying people around, like you just mentioned, but just kind of like being really strong minded and really feeling like you have the right ideas, yeah, and kind of that fixed mindset and unwilling, kind of unwilling, to just unlearn,

Laura Gallaher  
yeah, unlearn, see their perspectives. My even 1% wrong exactly,

Jeff Ma  
and yeah, that. That was a journey I've I'm still on, to be honest 

Laura Gallaher  
absolutely, yeah. I mean, running a business I can get I take it, I take things very personally, I think, by my nature, and so learning to be aware of my emotions and not overly attach or identify with those emotions in a moment is super important for me to maintain an awareness of, does my intention match my impact right now? And some of that's going to be on me, and some of it's always going to be on the other person that I'm talking to. Like, it's always co created. Like, was that, was I a bully as a label? I wouldn't think so. Were there behaviors that somebody might label as bullying? You could and I definitely thought it was useful feedback, and I was able to learn from it and grow from it. And the people who indicated that as feedback, some of that is what they bring in to the conversation. It's their own fears, yeah, right, it's maybe they didn't feel equipped to engage in healthy conflict or debate me on a particular topic, because they felt like I knew more and I was leveraging some of my knowledge in that conversation. They didn't, Oh, I feel bullied intellectually, which, by the way, it's not like they wrote that in it was just like one of the options of like, oh yeah, sometimes she does that. And so every situation is co-created. I assume you're similar, Jeff, we put a lot of extra responsibility on the leaders, because they impact everything disproportionately,

Jeff Ma  
yes, 100% and I love, I love this term you keep using of co-creating, because it implies collaboration and relationship to some extent. And that's such a powerful way. To frame it, because I agree with you, and I do put a lot like it starts with leaders. Leaders set the tone. Leaders have an outsized influence. But at the same time it's it is a relationship, you know, whether intentionally or unintentionally built. So that idea of co-creating these these relationships, is really powerful to me. I think that's a great that's how I'm going to frame it from now on, to be honest, stealing it, it's mine.

Laura Gallaher  
Good. Please use it. I want more people to understand it. It's such an important mindset to have, like, when something goes wrong, which things go wrong? Hey, Murphy's Law, things are going to go wrong when teams adopt a mindset of everyone is 100% responsible and no one is to blame, that is the essence of recognizing co creation. So it doesn't become a game of like, well, it's like 20% me, but 80% you. Like, we don't want to play that game, because then defense defenses go up again, and now here we are in this space where information stops flowing, communication shuts down, and we try to solve the problem, but we don't even really understand what happened, because people are too busy trying to cover their own butts rather than actually, like, explore what was contributing to this. 

Jeff Ma  
So let me dig in there a little bit. I I love that, but I find that to be one of the hardest things to practice right to actually. You know, if someone comes to me and says, Hey, you were wrong or you did something wrong, you know, my knee jerk reaction is defensiveness because of fear. I don't want to be called out, I don't want to be wrong, I don't want to look bad, I don't want to be embarrassed. And so what is your kind of approach, or advice on how to shift that into something that's more again, like you said, co created, or something more healthy?

Laura Gallaher  
Yeah, well, I can speak to that my perception of it from both the giver side and the receiver side. I would probably not advocate that somebody go up and say, like you're wrong as a starting point in a conversation, or really at any point, instead of you're wrong, a statement of, okay, I see that differently. I'd like to explore that together, right? You're wrong is a little a little harsh, and is often going to trigger defensiveness from somebody, even if they're higher on self acceptance. So from the giving side, if I want to start the conversation, and I in my mind, I'm kind of thinking like, oh, this person screwed this up, right? Or they're wrong, or they've made a mistake. If I can embrace the idea of co creation, then what I want to do with my introspection is ask through my action or my inaction, right something I said or didn't say, something that I did or didn't do, any any contribution, action or inaction. How did I prevent a solution to the problem? What was my contribution? There's always something like literally always something if you get blocked in trying to answer that question, then that tells me that self judgment is super high, self acceptance is super low, and you're unwilling to see that you have contributed to what's happening, and that's a very disempowered place to be, because if I cannot find anything that I did or didn't do to contribute to exactly what happened as the outcome, then I can't do anything different at all to make it different in the future, I am completely useless in that moment. Most people don't want to feel that way. Most of us want to feel like we're empowered. We want to feel like we know what to do in order to make something better in the future. So you want leaders to be able to look in and say, what was my part? Even one thing now, when I start a conversation with somebody, that's what I lead with, Hey, I noticed that we missed the deadline here on project A and I was thinking about it. And there's probably a couple things that I could have done to prevent this happening. I think that our check ins probably weren't frequent enough, and I may have dropped the ball on that. Might have been more useful if we were talking every week instead of on a monthly cadence. And I also wonder if maybe the expectations that we set out in the beginning were a little bit less clear than I bit less clear than I thought. What's your take? What do you think's contributed to us missing this deadline? I'm just making stuff up. But if I start the conversation that way, when I lead with self accountability, I'm a lot more likely to get self accountability from the other person in return, because that's self accountability, that's that's vulnerable, yeah, and that vulnerability is courageous, and courage is contagious. So it really changes the whole nature of the conversation when I can start with self accountability,

Jeff Ma  
love that now the other person's perspective.

Laura Gallaher  
Okay, so wait, what was I just talking about? Then I was talking about giving. That was the giver, yeah, okay, so I'm on the receiving end, and someone comes out to me and they says, they just say, like, You're wrong. You're wrong, Laura.

Jeff Ma  
Or maybe they took the middle ground. I was being provocative with my example. Uh huh. Maybe, maybe it's someone, you know, it's somebody that's, you know, with good intent and not being, not being abrasive, they're just saying, hey, like, you know, maybe they didn't go all the way to where you said and then started with vulnerability. Maybe they weren't, you know, starting with their own role in it. But I don't think they're being, you know, abrasive. I think they're just pointing something out. But it's my natural reaction to be like, Oh crap, I'm being called out to want to

Laura Gallaher  
defend for sure. Well, so what you're talking about that defensiveness comes up that is like the work that I think underlies most of what we do with our clients, and it's literally a journey that I'm still on. And for your listeners who aren't watching, I'm pointing to this tattoo I have in my wrist. It's a journey, because it's a constant journey. Our defense mechanisms exist for a reason. The way that I talk about defenses, it's never actually my interest to be defensive. I'm always going to be more effective when my defenses are down and I'm in a collaborative space, collaborative headspace. But my defenses have an origin story. So there's, like, a short term way that we can look at, how can I not respond defensively? And then there's a long term way to say, How can I reduce my defensiveness overall? Short term, like in the moment when it's happening, I actually would recommend that you acknowledge it and notice. So give yourself a moment pause, take a breath and say, oof. You know, I noticed that I'm having a bit of a reaction to that, and it's just because I hate the idea of having screwed something up. So I do want to understand your perspective. And I just noticed that I'm feeling it's feeling a little rough at the moment, something whatever, like, I don't want to give people a script, but actually acknowledge it, because if you try to power through and pretend that you're not feeling stuff, it's going to ooze out of you in ways that you're probably not even aware of. And then they're going to make up a story in their head about what's going on for you with all these like, non verbals, they're picking up, and it just becomes extremely muddy. So even if it feels strange, pausing long enough to acknowledge, oh, I'm feeling something, can help to change the tone of the conversation, because they'll recognize now, like, Okay, you're feeling something. It's also vulnerable. People kind of attend to that. They tune attune to that. And then I love the 1% rule, like my mind loves to jump to why I'm not wrong, or why I'm right or why it's somebody else's fault. It's that ego that wants to defend itself. But if I can, instead of thinking I'm 100% right, lean into is there even 1% truth in what this person is saying. It's really hard for me to say no to that. I'm pretty much always going to be able to find at least 1% truth. And when I keep the door open a crack, even 1% then I start to see, actually, more and more and more how much truth there is to what they're saying. And it doesn't mean that it's not my fault. It just means that I'm able to step into my own self accountability, right? So 1% rule and giving yourself a pause, I think, are really important to change that, like initial defensive reaction, long term, the antidote is self acceptance, and I would say radical self acceptance, which is my favorite thing to talk about.

Jeff Ma  
Well, let's talk about it.

Laura Gallaher  
Yeah, like being so okay with who you are right now, with all of your flaws and all of your imperfections, that's all it is. Radical self acceptance is very simple in concept, but most of us do not practice a lot of self acceptance. Most of us are embodied in self judgment, especially the high achieving people and the leaders that I work with, they have a tendency to be really focused on how they can grow and improve themselves. But it doesn't matter how much they improve, they still struggle to actually accept themselves. They have a raging inner critic who can constantly point out things that they're doing wrong. They tell themselves, Oh, I'm harder on myself than anybody else, and they always focus on the gap between where they are and where they want to be as evidence that they're not good enough. Do you know anybody like that? Yeah, I sure do. Yeah. And so for a lot of people that I work with, this idea of self acceptance is really new and kind of scary, because people get attached to that inner critic they think. They need that inner critic. They think the inner critic and judging themselves, they think that's why they get better, which is coming back to that idea of fear being the driver instead of love. And so I'm usually working with leaders, first and foremost, to help them recognize that just because you practice self acceptance doesn't mean you're going to stop improving yourself. Like these are not opposites. The opposite of self acceptance isn't self improvement. The opposite of self acceptance is self judgment. So you can focus on self improvement from a self judging place, or you can focus on self improvement from a self accepting place,

Jeff Ma  
yeah, as you're as you're talking about self judgment and defining it, for me personally, definitely resonating that person I knew was me, yeah,

Laura Gallaher  
yep, but in a way as well,

Jeff Ma  
in a way like self judgment broadly, feels like, like, safe and warm to me in a weird way. It's like, oh yeah. It's like, as long as I'm kind of critical of myself, as long as I'm, like, holding myself to this higher standard that I can't achieve, I'm it feels like the zone I need to be in. It feels like it feels like me, you know, yeah, oh, yeah. And it feels like stepping outside of that is like, who, who is that even like, I don't even absolutely

Laura Gallaher  
feels really, yeah, challenges your identity, yeah, yeah, yeah, big time. And that's what I find so often when I'm working with people. And so the first hurdle that I usually face is even getting high achieving people to recognize that self acceptance is worth pursuing, that it is a useful practice, and that it's not going to simply lead somebody to become complacent. What you're talking about, Jeff, you're hitting on like the deepest work, which is identity, right? So who am I if I don't have my inner critic, who am I if I am not really hard on myself? And I think it is worth asking that question and specifically looking toward if fear isn't my driver, because fear self judgment, is rooted in fear. If fear is not my driver to improve, is there anything else that drives me to improve? Is

Jeff Ma  
there even 1% of anything else that's driving me to improve?

Laura Gallaher  
Yes. What's true for you? Jeff,

Jeff Ma  
oh, man, I feel like, I feel like, when it comes to like work and monetary achievements. It's like, it's like all fear, but I'm able to step in different places when I think of like who I want to be as a father or who I want to be as a friend or a human, those types of things soften those edges for me personally. And I'm less. I'm less thinking in terms of of what I'm not, but thinking of where I where I want to go, not because I'm lacking, because I want to do better. Yeah,

Laura Gallaher  
yeah. So you're inspired to be that the kind of father who exactly, and you know, I'm, I'm looking at your book behind you, there on the shelf and and I would argue that throughout your book, you have actually captured the point that I'm making right now. I think maybe you're applying it now to yourself in a maybe a new way. But love is a business strategy. Applies so much to self concept, even when you're talking about work, even if you're talking about finances, if you're talking about the impact you want to have on the world. Yes, there's fear. There's fear of not being enough, fear of not having enough, fear of feeling like you're failing, fear of judgment from other people, all of that. And so those things can be motivators. If you let go of all of that, people are thinking, nothing will drive me forward. But I would argue there's this entire cloud over here that's grounded in love. Is there love that inspires me to want to have an impact in this world, that wants people to change their relationship with themselves so they no longer go through this journey constantly feeling like they're not enough? You can have a much bigger impact when you let other things take the lead. I did this talk a few years ago where I was describing fear like, literally fear in the driver's seat of a car, like you probably have an idea of if fear is actually driving, like how they drive. Picture them kind of like white knuckled and kind of spastically, like looking around and like checking the blind spots and just like, oh nervous wreck. The car is probably kind of shaking back and forth, because they're just Oh fear all the time. That is not a pleasant ride. I'm probably going. To get car sick if I'm going to let fear drive, and fear doesn't have to leave. Fear has a place. Survival is real. But if we just have fear, hang out in the back seat instead, and we let love take the wheel, much smoother ride. And we're still moving. We're still going in the direction that we want to go. And not only are we still going in that direction, we're going to get there faster, and we're going to enjoy it more. And so radical self acceptance works in that same way.

Jeff Ma  
Love it. It's like you it's like you knew the episode was reaching its time, and you were just like, let me put a bow on this. And there it is. Yeah, thank you so much for all of the insights, all the amazing kind of perspective you've added today. I think it's going to be a really valuable way for people, you know, listeners and others, to really understand better about this concept, because I think, I think this self acceptance concept is something that I'm sure you know, but as I'm processing it is. It's just hard to really comprehend for the average, yeah, person 

Laura Gallaher  
i and that's why we call it radical. I don't want it to be radical, but it is. And you know, that's part of why we created the free quiz that we created that I invited you to participate in, because so if your listeners are interested and like, you know, where, where am I right now, in this moment, you can just go to self acceptance quiz.com hopefully the easiest URL to remember. Self acceptance quiz.com takes three to five minutes, and you're gonna see right now, based on how you answer the questions, where do you fall in? This sort of two by two of self acceptance and self improvement, because those things coexist. They are not opposite. And so when you complete the quiz, you'll get a report that shows you, where are you right now? And then you'll get several coaching emails as a follow up to really help you begin to explore this for yourself, because a lot of people have a similar reaction to you, Jeff, of like, who am I if I'm not being self critical, but the research is actually pretty clear that when people are focused on self improvement to the lens of self acceptance, they do actually grow faster. And so it's a huge counter intuitive move for most of my high achieving clients to recognize, like, oh, I don't need this, this inner critic to be raging in order to actually grow and improve. But rather, I'll grow faster if I can change my whole relationship with it.

Jeff Ma  
I love it, and I hope everyone does take advantage of that. I did take it earlier this morning, actually, so got my results. We'll talk about it later. Self acceptance quiz, selfacceptancequiz.com, I'll put it in the show notes as well. So hopefully everyone takes advantage of that. And Laura, thank you so much for joining. I think this was great for me personally, but I know it's also gonna be valuable for anyone listening. So really appreciate the time you had today. Thank you for having me, Jeff. To our listeners, thank you so much for sticking with us. We hope you enjoyed this, and we hope you keep checking us out. Every other week we'll be here, and please check out the book. Love as a business strategy. Don't forget and we will talk to you next time you.