Welcome to the struggle bubble. I'm Chad Kutting And I'm Craig Surgey. We're excited to welcome a special guest today, Lisa Mims. Lisa and I have worked together back when I was at PayPal. PayPal had a great program through Skillsoft where we were able to connect with a career coach. And at the time I was becoming a new leader within the company and really trying to find myself as a leader and within the company. And Lisa was instrumental to kind of rerouting the way I was thinking about and approaching professional life. And I thought it'd be great to have her on the show to offer her expertise, some background, and maybe help anybody else going through a similar situation. Lisa, thank you for joining us today. Thank you guys so much for having me and it's so good to see you again, Chad. It's great to see I know it's been what seven months, eight months, it's been a lot of months. I mean, almost a year maybe. I'd say December we were wrapping up and then we spoke in the winter at some point, I think, after you had left PayPal, Yeah. Yeah, so let's actually start there, Lisa, on, I'll go through my journey and then we'll kind of rewind all the way through your professional journey and getting into coaching. For somebody like me, I had been in the professional space for about 15 years and had been big company after big company, Facebook, Salesforce, PayPal. And as new leaders, often you come in a little untethered to reality. You think you know what leadership and management entails. either through good leadership or bad leadership. And then you try and find who you are as a manager, as a leader. Talk to us a little bit about the approach that you take meeting new clients, meeting new executives, and kind of breaking through the initial facade. Well, that's a great question. think a lot of people when they start a new job have an idea of what they think it's gonna look like to be successful at that job. But they don't spend a lot of time thinking, who am I gonna be as a leader in this job? What is that gonna look like? And so working with someone in coaching actually gives them a space to think about that. on a regular basis and then try and go back out into their team, practice and kind of tweak how they are showing up and really then come back to a coaching session and reflect on that. So it's a wonderful chance to partner with someone over a period of time and then really watch them grow, watch them have that space to self -reflect. go out and test it, and then come back and do more reflection. Do you see a lot of leaders coming in that are able to separate the home life and the work life when they initially show up? Because that was one of the things that you and I worked through. You don't just show up as an executive and a lot of what we're learning through this podcast is your whole life is with you at all times. You're not really able to do a great job siloing. How much of it is overlapping in what you see and what you initially need to? and peel back. I think that, you know, for almost everyone I work with, it is a mix of their professional life and their home life and how they are managing that. But I think it's, you know, it's become so much more extreme, this need to be able to manage this balance. I think first, you know, it's a hard transition just going from being a single worker to being a parent and working. mean, just that transition is incredibly hard. And then you layer on the advent of so much technology to make it hard to separate from work. And then COVID, when so many folks are now working hybrid and from home part of the time, as an entire, another layer of complexity to managing this balance. So it's definitely on everybody's mind. I personally think a lot of it is, thinking, spending some structured time thinking about how do you want to be showing up at work and at home, and then holding yourself accountable to doing that, to setting the boundaries that you need to set. And then So I work a lot with folks on that, like what sort of boundary setting needs to be happening but isn't yet. And then it's like, how do I do that? How do I set a boundary? How do I communicate about this with the folks I work with? And that's really hard. People aren't really good at that. It can be a very difficult conversation. Can I ask a question about a double -edged sword? What happens if you're both executives, you and your husband, wife, partner, whatever? Let's give you a nice scenario, Lisa. Let's get straight into it. You're both executives. You both travel, let's say 50%, and you have three children, five youngest, 12 eldest, so you've got middle school all the way down to elementary. How the hell do you balance that? Well, I think, again, this is like, okay, what's important to you and your spouse partner as a family? What are your family values? And that's where the conversation has to start. Like, what does it look like to provide for your family? Right? Like if one of the values is I want to be able to financially provide at a certain level for my family. Okay. So, Are we doing that? Can we do that with making a sacrifice or not? Or then is another value being present at all the soccer games or is it not? Like what are those? It really starts at that very high level conversation and then a drop down into the specifics of how you're gonna actually achieve that. So it's a full on layer cake. Right, you start with the icing and dive all the way in. we don't as, and this gets a little bit into like how I ended up being a coach, but I think as younger people, we often are thinking about achievement and what's next, right? Like checking boxes and moving forward and gaining experience. And we're not thinking about those bigger picture questions of what do we want from this life, from this marriage, from this family, from my career in general. so coaching is really starts with those big picture questions. And it can be really uncomfortable for some people because it's so foreign, because we don't spend very much time asking those questions. love that. I think we talk about this a lot on the podcast of, I don't want to point fingers, but parents kind of pushing their kids in a direction, right? Be that sports or whatever. And part of that for me as obviously a coach as well of like the chance of making pro is so slim and it could be as simple as you're the best player in the world and you trip over the cat walking up the stairs and you break your knee. Like there's nothing. you can do about it, And then, so I see that all the time and then I 100 % agree. Like our generation was high school, college, degree, job, get up the ladder, stay in the same company for X amount of years. Silicon Valley's a little different, I think people's life, shelf life is 18 months to 36 months depending on roles, company site, all that stuff. And then you realize, and I'm seeing this now at 40, like, wow, there's parents younger and older than us at certain ages, preschool kids, you you're having the first kid at 43 or whatever, and they're having this, crap, like, standpoint in their life, like, my God, like, I wish I'd done this 10 years earlier. I could have taken the back seat on the career and had a kid, you know, all those different variations. So it's really interesting that you're living. and helping people through that. I think it often takes, unfortunately, it often takes a crisis to start thinking about this, whether it's getting laid off, whether it's a kid who's really struggling, whether it's a marriage that's really struggling. I think those are often times when people really start to reflect on what's really important. it's becoming more common to start thinking about this more proactively at an earlier stage. There's a wonderful course that you've maybe heard about at Stanford called Designing Your Life. They have a whole book that is written to take you through the course. It's like the most popular course for freshmen. And it really does start with all these big questions as you start to think about what you're gonna do. And that there's not just one path that's right for you, but there's many paths. Cause when you start to really look at the big picture, you realize there's actually very few things that are really truly important. So, yeah, exactly. a lot of it is the dog catching the car, right? You've chased big dreams. You've been told, you know, go to college, get a good degree, follow this path, get the good job, get the promotion, chase, chase, chase, chase, chase. And there's a moment in time where you then accomplish that or don't, both sides of that. Mm sitting there to yourself, this what I've worked for? like psychologically, you're just saying, well, this is what I worked for, therefore it must be important, therefore I should be happy. And as Lisa and I work together, there's always a gnawing feeling, or for me, there was always a gnawing feeling of, is this it? Why do I not feel fully fulfilled? And using the, you know, some scaffolding, some techniques, you're able to then start asking the big questions that Lisa mentions. Why? And that was the exercise, right? Simon Sinek, if you center on the why and continue to pull back and ask yourself, why is this important? Why, why, why? And create some groundwork. And then it's building back up from there. Once you are able to do the exercise and dig into that why, starting to put it together. Lisa, think help our audience go through as you're working with your you know, executives and you start to see the light bulbs going off and they're they're answering really difficult questions. What is what is your technique or tactics to then branch out and help them see further outside of that little bubble? Yeah, so a lot of the beginning work is centered around some of these big questions and I call it like the foundational work that I do with my clients and it's typically the first like two to five sessions that we do that those types of big questions also really understanding kind of what gets in your own way, how you get in your own way. So there's some exercises around that as well. So again, building self -awareness, then it becomes like, okay, how do we translate what we've learned here into some goals that you wanna set for yourself? And then how do we go about helping you, whether it's like learn new skills to help you practice these goals? So like, for example, the work -life balance, if it's about. boundary setting, getting better at boundary setting, then it's like, okay, maybe we need to really do some reading around what does boundary setting look like? What are some boundaries, like coming up with ideas of boundaries you actually wanna set for yourself? Then it's about helping hold them accountable to trying some of these, actually setting the boundaries, having the conversation with your spouse, having the conversation with some people at work, and then really. holding themselves accountable to turning off the phone at night or whatever it is. So that's sort of the process. And then every single client I work with, it looks different. It looks different on what they wanna, what they're working on. How long historically does it usually take for somebody to be fully invested and bought into coaching? Because I've seen it kind of splinter in a couple different ways where there's a recommendation of coaching from the company that they're with or friends and family, and then you're kind of dragging your heels a bit. And we talk about, part in the French, right, shit in, shit out. If you're not in, you're not going to get anything out of it. And then there's others that are, you all in and try and jump in. I tried to be that way and try and get as much out of it. But the cycle when we first started is, know, six months to 12 months, depending on how the conversation and what you want to get out of it. How have you seen the approaches and what are some of the tactics that you can recommend to people as they think about coaching for themselves? Yeah. So I think there's a couple reasons why it doesn't go well when it doesn't go well. one is actually that it's just not a great fit between the coach and the client. Like I think so what the one of the most important things is that there's a that a space can be created that is safe to be vulnerable in. But also, there's mutual respect. And that can include having fun and joking around and all of that. But there really has to be that mutual respect. And so sometimes, if a client comes and it's just not a good connection, there's some things that you just can't control. I think that can end up not making a good match. I would encourage anyone who tries coaching and it's like, it just really didn't feel like it was for me. Go meet with like three or four coaches before you decide which coach you want to hire and see where the connection is. Cause I assure you that you probably will find someone where you find a really cool connection and listen to your gut and go with that person. So I think that's really important. then I think, yeah, I think showing up and doing your work. mean, that's that. To me, how a client shows up when I work with them, that's how they're also showing up at the office, in their marriage, with their kids. Like it's typically a reflection of something more. So if somebody I am working with an extended period of time is coming and not doing their homework regularly, to me that becomes a question that I need to dig into more. Like I'm noticing that you're not, able to come having spent the time to do this. Is that something that happens in different parts of your life that you're showing up without having done the work that you actually needed to do? I love this, because this is exactly what we talk about in sport all the time. Right? All the time, because I would say it doesn't matter what team you're on, it's who your coach is. Right? You're gonna get most of it from your coach in training, and the game day is the result of how much effort you put in in the training. Then on the secondary side of that is you get X amount of hours with me a week, you need to be doing more at home. Right, and some of the past podcasts we've done, I have one little girl on my soccer team, the goal was to do 10 soccer, know, juggle the ball 10 times by the end of summer. She comes back with like 70 something, then she wins a juggling competition, she hits 90 something, and everyone's like, my God, I'm like, guys, it's super easy. She just stood there and she practiced. Day in, day out. every second and that's why she's so good. There's no special know juju juice on this like she just practiced simple. So I love that you're repeating that in the the in the the working world as well and the coaching world right the the world that you're in like if you don't go and do the you preach right what you you're doing you practice what you preach so if you can't do it with me then I'm pretty sure you're not doing it in the rare areas that we're supposed to be working on. So I love hearing that, that it transitions from the sporting world into the working world as well. It's taken me a long time to like call that out with folks that I'm working with, but I did hear last year at a conference, somebody say, another coach said, if you're not asking the question that could get you fired, you're not being a good coach. Yeah. boundaries. have that sitting, the chirping in my, in my ear when I, when I'm thinking something and, and I feel after five or six years doing this on a lot of having a lot of clients, I can now say, okay, I trust my gut when I, when I see what I see. a guy that I speak to in the UK and he talks about healthy disrespect all the time. So you see professional sports athletes shatting at their coach while the game's going on. It's just healthy disrespect. I have an opinion, you have an opinion. They're both alphas, right? So they're both gonna basically claw and fight to the death on what they believe in. And he calls it healthy disrespect. Because if you're in a safe environment, if you're in an environment where that is a healthy everyone can speak their mind, you're gonna go for miles and miles and miles. And it's super important, but to your point, it's really difficult to get there, because you are gonna piss off a lot of people along the way to get there. But that's where, to me, the A players keep finding the A players. You're gonna drop down, Cs, Bs are gonna just fall because they can't take that hit, or they can, and then they grow with you as well. So I... Again, I love hearing that, that it's... We need more of this in the working world, I'll be honest with you. I do think that the creating that safe environment, like I said, is so crucial to being able to call someone out because truly and the mutual respect, because truly when I do work with someone, I only want to keep working with them if I believe that they are capable of doing whatever they're set out to do. And I think that's so true in sports. Like when you have a coach that you believe believes in you, believes in your abilities, you are so much more confident, right? Like that really, you can feel that. And so. I had it all this weekend. I turned to my girls and I said, you just have to believe in yourself. Like through all your, and this, know we're going off topic a little bit, but there's seven and eight where people are shouting and like, that was no good. And I'm like, guys, knock this shit off. Like, only encouragement. Cause by the time they get to 12 and 13 and we're really competing, their self -confidence is so low that when they can see two or three goals, they don't believe in themselves. Now I have to bring them all back up. to believe we can find success, it's really hard when we're starting way down there rather than somewhere up here. That safe environment is super interesting as you create that environment as a coach and then expect as a leader and expect that environment as an IC or a middle level manager. Same in the sports world. If your coach is, this is the way it's done. It's the only way it's done. If you don't do it, you're off the team or you're not going to start. You don't have that feeling of empowerment to help go up. And this has gone, bounced around the Valley quite a bit of the micromanager of You know, I know everything you're going to work this way versus the culture builder. there's, you know, it's there's ins and outs, bobs and weaves in there. I'm curious, as you've seen different levels of executives come in, Lisa, how have you seen the difference in approaches to fostering that, right? The values, the culture, the empowerment recently versus, you know, 15 or 10 years ago. Yeah, think it's, I think psychological safety is a much bigger deal. It wasn't even a term that people knew about 15 years ago. I think. there is an awareness from any person I've coached in the last five years of what that means, that operating under a incredibly stressful, fear -driven approach, it just doesn't work anymore. I think there's pretty much uniform consensus there. When I think back to my days in strategy consulting, That was not the case. mean, we had partners that were horrible and made people cry all the time. And it was just a fact of life. It was an accepted fact of working in these environments. And I think the transition has been really difficult. I think it's for the best, but I do think there are folks who feel like unsure of how to adapt with the change in how to motivate their teams. I have a client right now who works for the federal government and he's probably a few years from retirement and he's really struggling as he manages this team of folks in their 30s and 40s. It's a really different culture that he's being asked to operate in. But I do do you think that's where the quiet quitting started? Like people were just sick of it and you know what, I'm just gonna quietly escape rather than throw a flag and kick off. I also think the quiet quitting, think I'm sure there was some quiet quitting about that, about, you know, just I've had enough with this boss or that boss and I'm not being heard. I think more people now feel like they can go to HR and they can raise their concerns about a manager who is not. who's leading solely in a fear -based way. But I think a lot of the quiet quitting was actually about, because that was really around COVID especially, I think a lot of it was about understanding like what's more important to me. I think a lot of people with COVID started to ask some of these bigger questions about what's really important. was going to ask that Lisa, did your business accelerate through COVID? Yeah, I thought it would. Zoom, I was already using Zoom. I didn't meet with clients beforehand either, but it it skyrocketed during COVID, not the first six months, but after that. Yeah, I can imagine people sitting there with their desk like, there's a fear factor in there. know, people are watching my calendar. Am I on enough meetings? Am I on, you know, all those variations. And then at some point people go, like, I'm literally on this camera for 12 hours a day. This is insane. I'm not seeing sunlight. I'm not getting oxygen. I'm not eating correctly. Like, what am I doing with my life? That's That's right. If that gets back to like, what are my values? How do I want to live? A lot of people said, I don't want to live in San Francisco or Boston or these big cities anymore. I want to move to the middle of country. I'm okay if I end up like, yes, I'm remote now, but if I'm not, I'll still figure it out later. You know, a lot of people started asking these big questions about what's important. I think that going from a post or a COVID to post -COVID world of figuring out what's really important and also spending the amount of time with family or friends at home really helps you refocus when you have a kindergartner that's trying to learn on a tablet right outside your office and you're giving them the Heisman saying, hey, I can't talk right now. I'm on a really important phone call talking about God knows what, because I honestly don't remember what it was. in March of 2020 that was so important. It starts to refocus your purpose. Do you see us returning to a pre -COVID mindset? There's a lot of talk of the return to office and we're not having the culture, we don't have that. What are you saying? I think that it is inevitable with smartphones that we, and just the pace of life in the United States, that we will get to a more pre -COVID existence again. I just think that it's really hard to... to. bring yourself out of the weeds and look at things in a big picture way on a regular basis when you are as busy as we all are. So I think it's gonna be a challenge. I think all of us who went through it are, you know, you know, I feel like it will stay with us, right? But when you look at like, you know, the next generations coming up behind. I think it's inevitable. I'd be curious what you guys think. You're in the heart of the Silicon Valley and That's why we've taken matters into our own hands and we start our own companies and podcasts and try and start with that why. And for us, it is around being around our family, within our community. We're volunteering many hours in leagues and coaching because it's rewarding. And I think it goes back to what you were saying. What motivates you, what fulfills you, what fills the bucket, what are you proud of? What I found myself, the mantra a year ago or year plus before we met is, I'm going to survive today. There's a lot going on, but I'm going to survive. And then head hits the pillow and you wake up and you do it all over again. I'm going to survive. And you wake up December 31st, January 1st. And yes, you survived 365 days, but did you live? Did you do what you wanted to do? Did you do what's important? And I think if we all can ground ourselves in what that approaches what that philosophy is, and you find passionate person after passionate person doing the things that they love. We're in a better world. The problem is where the reality, especially where we're living, right, there are mortgages to pay, there are bills to pay, there's a lifestyle that you've built up, and that's part of the evaluation. But me personally, I don't want to go back into the clock in clock out mentality. want to follow that passion. Yeah. there's definitely the golden handcuffs in this area for sure. That's exactly what it is. I'm gonna see a lot of you can see a lot of headstones with people's LinkedIn profiles on Yeah Yeah, was thinking about and thinking about this talk, I was thinking about a Ted talk that I watched really early when I became a coach and I tell a lot of people to watch it. I don't know if I told it to you, Chad. It's by a philosopher named Ruth Chang and it's called like making difficult choices and I recommend it to both of you. She went back and went to Harvard Law School and became a lawyer and then decided afterwards that she actually really wanted to be a philosopher. And she went to the University of Oxford and Oxford University and became a philosopher. And now she's a professor there. And she just talks about how when you're making, like a hard choice is a hard choice because there is no right answer, right? And so it really is about who am I and who do I want to stand for. When you're making a hard choice, that's what you're asking yourself. And, you know, I think that's, I love that way of framing it. It's like, take the pressure off. Like, it's a hard choice because there's no right answer. It's a hard choice, because it's a hard choice. Also on top of that, I can't imagine the conversation with parents of after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on law school, I'm going to be a philosopher. Right? There's parental pressure outside of it. There's cultural pressure. And you're right, if you can extract that, how should I feel? How should others think that I should feel? Right? All of the things that really don't matter and focus on what's at its core. We have a few minutes left here. At least I would love asking this of each guest. There are people out there listening that are grappling with major decisions in their life. It could be a career choice. They've been at a big company. They're not super happy, but they're afraid to detach. They're afraid to start the new business. What advice would you give on starting to think through those big decisions? If you were bringing them into your office for a session, how would you? help them focus. Well, one of the first exercises I do with clients is think about what are my values? What are the things in life that are most important to me? And we do that for a session or two. And we don't even just think about what those are. also have my clients rate themselves on how they're living them today. Like on a scale of one to 10, how are you living this value? If you're living it at a five, what would a 10 look like? I want some examples of what a 10 actually looks like. And that's a way just to, I think a lot of times people are like, but I'm, I'm like, okay, I don't really have anything to complain about. Like I'm, I'm kind of unhappy, but then they start talking themselves out of, of making any changes, right? And this is a way to try and like remove that and just like dream for a little bit, right? Think big. Think big, what could it look like if you were, all the things that were important to you in your life, you were living at a 10. What would life look like? And that vision setting is really important and gets people excited about what's possible. And then it's managing the fear, managing the fear, managing the outside voices, whether they're actually physically outside, they're your spouse, they're your... parents or whether they're just the outside voices that you're hearing in your head and how to really, you know, put those to rest. Absolutely great advice. And Lisa, one thing I want to make sure we talk about before we leave. It's not like you've been an executive coach forever. You've had jobs in the real world just like us that followed a trajectory. It's the things that you trained for and you went on. You were also a president and the owner of, was it Maude Green? So you were out there experiencing Talk to us just a little bit about that, your own trajectory of getting in the corporate world, navigating, understanding who you were, following a little bit of your own self discovery, and then why get into coaching from there. Yeah, well, yeah, I was, I had a lot of different pretty typical business jobs. I worked for a bank. I worked for the CFO of Kate Spade for a while. I worked in strategy consulting and then I started my own business. We made upholstery fabric and wallpaper that was all environmentally friendly. And that was, that was in like the early 2000s. So kind of when organic was relatively new. that those experiences, I think I built a lot of confidence during those experiences in that they were pretty intense environments. I also went and got my MBA. And like, I did well in all of those experiences. So I met lots of people. built a great network, built a ton of analytical skills and marketing skills that I still use today. But then I took a period of time off when my kids were young. We moved for my husband's job across the country. And it was during that time when I was home with my kids that I feel like I got another education and it was much more relational. and how to motivate others, especially others who might not want to do what you want to do, aren't as on board about the to -do list. And I started to hone a different skill set. And so when I was ready to go back to work, I really wanted to use both of, kind of integrate maybe all of the things that had been important to me in my life. coaching felt like kind of a natural way to do that. And yeah, it's been, I've never looked back after I went to my first training session. It was like, this is for me. I love this. So, Richard, well, I appreciate you getting into coaching and everything that we've worked together on just was able to provide a framework for me and my thinking after so many years in technology and reframing that. So, the struggle bubble thanks you because this was not possible without refocusing that passion and focusing on the why. So, really appreciate it and thank you for. volunteering to come on the show today and meeting with us. Well, I loved being here. It's fun. I was thinking before, when I'm in the coach chair, I'm the one asking questions. So it's kind of fun to be on this side. Very different. So thanks. Nice to meet you. Well, really appreciate it. can do it all again. We can really start dialing in the questions hard. you some Q &A from the listeners. Yeah, that's our next big thing, Lisa, we're thinking about having a live session in the upcoming calendar to see if that would be interesting. I think that live, we never know what somebody is struggling with. That's the other part of as a coach, as a manager, you just don't know what people are bringing to that day, especially working with kids, right? That one conversation on the playground can detract from the rest of the day and you're wondering why they're not focused and Meeting people where they are is really a big theme that we're trying to bring out, have some empathy for what everybody's going with. And a lot of people are going through the same things or same struggles that you are and bringing that to light and some solutions or potential solutions are really helpful. Yeah, one of the great things about coaching can be if you really help people see their struggles from other perspectives. And so I think sharing perspectives is a great way to do that. Yeah, I love that. are going to continue to share different perspectives and all the different struggles in all different form factors throughout life. Love the time today, Lisa. Really appreciate you joining. For everybody following along, please continue to follow us if you haven't already on Instagram, the Struggle Bubble Pod. And we look forward to seeing everybody in future weeks. A great slate for the next couple of months and continue with awesome guests. Thank you again, Lisa, and we'll see everybody next week. Adios!