The Truth Of How We Choose To Show Up With Marcy Axelrod
The significance of how we show up extends beyond personal boundaries, influencing not only our individual experiences but also shaping the environment around us. In this episode, we have visionary leader and award-winning author of How We Choose to Show Up, Marcy Axelrod. Engaging in a thought-provoking dialogue with Tom Dardick, Marcy draws upon her wealth of expertise to explore various topics, such as the future of work, how people approach their work, and the profound realm of personal development. Together, they explore the concept of "showing up" across various roles and its ripple effect on those around us. The conversation transcends individual actions, delving into the critical domains of collaboration, the essence of human connection, and the intricate interplay of individuals within the fabric of society. Join us for an insightful journey as we unravel the layers of responsibly showing up with Marcy Axelrod.
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The Truth Of How We Choose To Show Up With Marcy Axelrod
It's my great pleasure to welcome Marcy Axelrod to the show. Marcy's book and her approach is choose to show up. She has a great amount of guidance as it relates to how we focus and how we can think about ourselves in terms of how we show up in the world. We'll get into a whole host of the ways that we can expand our personal power by being aware of what it is that we're doing at the moment and how we're framing things. Welcome, Marcy.
At the moment, we're not true to ourselves, true to our heart and what our heart wants to do, which is to take care of others. The moment we turn against that, we now have to justify it. The great example that they give that we can all relate to or that most of us can is that we have a newborn infant. They're crying in the middle of the night. We don't want to get up and we're like, “Do I have to get up?” The moment you decide I'm not getting up, then you have to justify. “My spouse over there. She or he's not getting up. They aren't getting up, and they didn't get up yesterday either. Why should I get up if they don't get up?”
We blame and then we're in a spiral because the moment you look at them and they see that you're upset with them, they then respond to that. Instead of, “You're my loving, wonderful partner who helps me,” often, they respond with defensiveness, concern or fear. Now we're in a spiral of self-deception and justification.
Showing Up In Different Roles
It happens all the time. “Why should I share the insight that I have from my team with this other team over here or with this other person? The person on my team's not pulling their share of the work and therefore, I'm feeling negative against them,” and we're in this. The reality is the moment we go into the self-mode. When I talk about showing up, I point out that what evolution has always told us is true. We're not just selves. We're in three roles. Yes, we're individual selves, but we're also in a situational role.
We have to choose how we show up in that moment. What a situation is, most people get wrong. A situation isn’t me on a podcast or with my coffee or in my 9:00 AM Monday meeting. A situation is a reverberative back-and-forth process where your expression Tom right now is literally changing how I'm showing up. The tone of my voice, my cadence, not just my verbal, like my worded content, but the 90%, that's the rest of it, which is beneath the words, that's what you're responding to.
It's this back and forth but it's also out there, the environment. Am I cold? Is there someone walking by? Is the sun out there? Am I hungry? Everything is showing up to us. Our situation is creating what's going on as much as our interiority is putting it out there. We're a self, an individualized self, yes but we're within a situation that is co-creating us, and we're a member of society. All the rest that's out there. The values, the norms, tell me what to wear so that I feel good about myself. It tells me what my “job” should be so that I achieve. It tells me what car to drive. It tells me everything, how to stand, how to speak, what language to speak. It tells me everything.
We are in three roles. We ourselves experience life through a situation which is a very active reverberative process. We are a member of a society. It can be a school group, a religion, a community, an ethnicity, or a race. Our society is all of these things. That's a big part of showing up. When you think about that, you say, “Marcy, why does it matter that I'm in these three roles?”
We can't truly choose how we're showing up if we're an individualized self with our mirror facing us. Tom, on your radar chart, you have somewhere that self-focused mode. A big part of showing up is once you know you have two more roles and you’re impacting the world, your mirror starts to turn. It starts to turn outward.
I'm going to put some numbers on this for you, Tom. Are you familiar with the work of Nicholas Christakis? Nicholas Christakis is the head of human behavior and neuroscience or something like that group up at Yale. He's been there many years. He was at Harvard before that. He is the one who showed how our behavior flows through society. I'm going to explain this right now.
The people we spend the most time with, Tom, are literally 45% more likely to do what we do by virtue of their time with us. They absorb it. The intensity of our listening, how we feel in their presence, or what we do. Are we eating? Are we walking around? How are we standing? Are we showing care? They absorb all that. Let's say it is your partner. What's your partner's name, if you have one?
The people we spend the most time with are 45% more likely to do what we do by virtue of their time with us.
My wife's name's Kathleen.
Kathleen is 45% more likely to do what you do. Kathleen is on a Zoom, let's say, with someone named David. David is someone who she works with often.
She has a brother named David and so do I. That's funny that you picked that name.
Let's say right now her brother David. He is 25% more likely to do what you do, Tom but it doesn't stop there because David has a daughter and she's on the varsity soccer team in high school and she's a senior and she's waiting to hear back from colleges like many of our kids are. She's stressed and her name is Janet. Janet is 10% more likely to do what you're doing, Tom, because it goes through David and through your wife.
Can I pause you for a second there, Marcy? My brother goes by his middle name Scott. Everyone calls him Scott, but his actual first name is David. His wife's name is Janet.
What's the likelihood of that?
That's pretty wild. Anyway, keep going.
I call this an omen. You can go back to the book The Prophet where the omens are all out there and they direct us.
There's more than meets the eye in the world, at the very minimum. Let's agree to that.
We were meant to meet and we were meant to have this discussion. Bringing it back, those numbers, 45%, 25%, 10%, they were measured with all sorts of objective things. They were measured by whether you vote, whether you get to the gym, whether you stay married, whether you get divorced, your body size, how much you drink, and whether you engage in other risky type of behaviors like gambling. The bottom line is the specific things measured, Tom, we’re so vast that you can generalize that what we do is simply absorbed by others.
Let's look at that word, do. What we do is created by how we feel and what we think about how we feel. Now you've got thoughts, feelings, and actions. People aren't just doing what we do. They're thinking what we think, and they're feeling what we feel because we're doing it. I emphasize this in all of my keynote speeches and in all the leadership consulting that I do because most of us turned down the dial on thinking or knowing how impactful we truly are. Whether we hop out of bed or push that snooze button or don't smile at the first person we see, we think it doesn't matter. Tom, are you now convinced? It matters.
You've stirred up a hornet's nest of thought in my mind here, starting back at your topology of the showing up in three ways, self, situation and society.
Those are our three roles. You can't leave them behind. You can't shove them in the closet.
They're there no matter what.
You're impacting the world no matter how crappy you feel, no matter whether you want to take outrage on the person in the road in front of you. It loses you like it is incumbent upon us to be responsible now with our power.
Roots Of Our Belief Structures
That's speaking my language there. The thought that came to mind while you were laying that out, Marcy, is a self-situation society almost can map to the idea of the triune God in the Christian tradition where the self could be thought of as the traditional God of creation. The situation could be thought of as the passion of Christ, the Christ story, the travels of through life of mankind and what the lessons are there.
They're universal. It doesn't matter what your traditional religion or your values are, it's this truth aspect of what we all have to face. In the tradition there, it'd be the Holy Ghost to society, which is that which allows us to connect those things together. That triple topology that you're pointing to is something that's very psychologically true down to the very root. It's order chaos that would tell the difference between the two. It's force surrender and knowing which to apply at the moment. It's all these things happen. That's another example or expression of what's very deeply true. It seems that the utility of it is coming from the fact that it's so rooted deep down in terms of what reality actually is.
There's so much wisdom in what you're saying. The root of so many religions and belief structures happens to be the same thing because this is evolutionary. When you picture humans, the first humans living in caves, we were still individual selves within a situation and members of something larger. It has always been true. It is irrefutable. When you see how I depict it in the framework of how nature designed us to show up, it's a circle with a peace symbol with self as 30% situation as 30% and as 30%.
A lot of the problems that we're having, a lot of the pain, a lot of the sorrow is. I ask people to draw a pie chart in the workshops that I lead, and I say, “How would you distribute the amount of time that you actually think or feel of yourself more as an individual self than as an active participant within a situation or as actually a member that's impacting all of society?” People are not happy, but they draw a line in the middle and their self-role is half of it.
A lot of people are like, “I don't like this, but my truth is that myself is 80%. I'm worried about my daughter with a mental health issue. My relationship with my spouse feels still. I want to be the best parent, but I'm hitting up against a wall of this teenager and this is my truth.” What I offer then is something that's obvious once you know it, which is that in addition to the three roles in which we're always showing up, there's actually a skill that's that corresponds to each. It's nature. I didn't create this model. It simply surfaced out of what is.
In our self-role, the skill is to be grounded, to know who we are and why so that we can reset ourselves. We can recognize what's a tendency that's coming up from the past that doesn't belong right here. What am I interpreting in the right now that's actually something from the past or some fear-based thing, which is very much the core of your model, Tom?
For our situational role, what does readiness look like? How do we ready ourselves to walk in for this person, for this moment, for this analysis I need to do for work, for this thing that I’m procrastinating about? What does readiness look like? I talk about that. There’s a visualization exercise that I very much recommend. For our societal role, connected is the term that everyone uses. I don’t happen to love that. I think that’s hackneyed and it doesn’t work.
The word that I offer is actually alltelligent. It's a word that says, “Let's care about each other,” because the telligence that we've been taught, it's not just inside of us. All the skills and knowledge that we need to succeed, it's not inside us. It's not an outtelligence either. It's not in all the books and other people and media. It's in all because it's also in nature. It's in how we relate. The skill for our societal role, you could use the word care, care about each other, but I trademarked the word alltelligence because it encompasses the symbiosis and the reciprocity that we're all responsible for. Self-grounded, situationally ready, societally alltelligent or caring. That's the model.
When you're talking about the alltelligent, it reminds me a little bit of some of the things from Carl Jung because as he delved deeper into what's psychologically true for people, he saw pretty quickly that it isn't a single thing. It's the collective unconscious. He talked about the shadow and why we have struggled with some of these things he pointing to, but he recognized what you're pointing to there, where we aren't this island.
It's not just you as an individual. We are connected. I like to think of it as if you look at any island string. They're clearly separated by water and they're their own individual thing like we're our own individual people. You drain the water away and the island's no longer island. Right now, it's mountains. Now it's a mountain range and we can call it the Himalayan Mountains. We can call it the Alps or call whatever mountain range but it's now one thing. It's connected.
It always has been. You drain the water and there's no island. It's just land that goes up and down.
Maybe that explains why earlier on when you're talking, you're picking out an example to walk us through a thought experiment. You pick out the name David and the name Janet. They happen to have meanings in my life, like when we just met. Stuff like that, if people are wondering about why stuff like that is happening and the other thing you pointed to earlier, I want to circle back to it, I want to go there now because I don't want to lose the thread. You were talking about Nicholas Christakis.
I mention him in every talk, even though I also talk about a lot of other things.
The Butterfly Effect And Care
What I was thinking about there was, the word that came to mind is the butterfly effect where little things spread out super far. What that means is there are two things that I think are worth underscoring there. One thing is that thoughts have a lot of power. There are viral thoughts that both empower and enslave. We have to be very good stewards of those thoughts that rob us of our power because they're not really our thoughts. They're things that we're presented with in the world. They live. They live past societies, they live past time, they're out there. If you accept, you go down in power. If you reject, you go up in power. That's one thing. The other thing that you pointed out that I underscored here is how important we all are. I'm going to start crying.
I wish everyone would cry about this because we need to viscerally feel it.
Everybody matters.
We're designed to care. Dacher Keltner, who runs the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley wrote a book Born to Be Good. It's hundreds of pages about how our brain is structured and our body works and how the world works. Every sentence is supporting. We're designed to care for each other. We are interlinked. We like mwe, that's a word invented by Dr. Dan Siegel, who is the creator of Interpersonal Neurobiology. He shows through our brain, that we are truly we. We're not human me.
We're designed to care for each other. We are interlinked.
Even the illusion that we think we're an I is a total illusion because you are trillions of cells that are not human DA. We are factually a collective of dynamics. An energy pattern is what we are.
Tom, such wisdom. We are physics. The flow of behavior that we spoke about through society, the moment you drop a pebble into a pond, you see it. Anyone reading who thinks that the concentric circles that they see in the water are just in the water and that it's not our behavior through society is now hopefully connecting our behavior is the water through society. Maybe our society is the water. Maybe that's the way to think about it.
Humans flow. It's that energy that you mentioned. There is a flow. It is not separate. Everything that we see in nature with the leaves in the trees flowing in the breeze, that's exactly what happens with our behavior, which is the external manifestation of how we feel and what we are taking in from the outside. We have an interior world. You can call it an interiority or we can call it the stuff we feel. There's the external world. Our behavior is the connectedness between the two.
The more we start to talk about like, “What I'm feeling from you now, or what I'm sensing from you now, or is it right that, or do you mind sharing with me what I'm sensing from you or why did you choose this word?” The more that we interact at the level of what's beneath the words, the more directly we are connecting. That's when you start to be the parent who you want to be. That's when you start to be the leader that you want to be.
What we put out there is the 10% of what's inside of us that often we don't give voice to. That's our truth. That's our 90%. That should be on the table more often and out there more often. The moment we do it with care, hopefully, we can break down the barriers and the fear that we all know about that's built into your model. That's what your work is very much helping us with.
I'm smiling because you can't see it on this, but if you look at the four corruptions in the action towards society, which I call the purpose quadrant, the corruption of that quadrant, I call it carelessness, which is not being careless, but not having care. What you're pointing to is the actual getting out of that. You're guiding people away from that corruption essentially is what you said, the way I hear it using my model. We're in total agreement there.
I love this because all of us are trying to help the world in the same way with different words and frameworks. All of our frameworks are going to be what resonates for different people. What I'd love to do is put a simple model on all of this. It's so easy because we always show up with a level of quality. Everything in life has a level of quality that's affiliated with it. High, medium, and low is often used. If you picture a continuum, there are three levels. It goes red through green. Red is barely there. Most people are like, “I got it.” You're burned out. You've had enough, you need a break, you're exhausted. Maybe you're ill or grieving. There are a lot of reasons that are very valid and real for us to show up, barely there.
There's what 80% of us do 80% of the time, according to my 20 years of research and that is we just show up. We know what that is. We go from one thing to the next. We want to do our best. We're there with a level of presence and sometimes it's deep and what we would hope. Other times, it's superficial and we're thinking about this or that and that pops up and this pops up and we're hungry for lunch and we need a break. It's the best that we're doing. There's this buzzing going on because we're in more of a busy mode in our left hemisphere than in a connected open mode.
That's just showing up. There are so many quotes from interviews in my book with people saying, “Marcy, by the time I get the kids out the door and I'm at work, I'm happy if I have half my wits about me at 10:00 AM. You better bet I'm trying to show up.” It's like what I’ve got is what I’ve got. It's honest and it's real, but it's just showing up.
What I call truly showing up is when we've been able to take that break. We've been able to reset our nervous system. We've been able to visualize and prepare ourselves what's about to happen and how am I choosing to show up to what's about to happen or what's going to happen next week. When that person who irks me walks in, or when I see my spouse or teenager again.
You can ground yourself in your self-role. You can be ready for the situation and you consider how you're impacting that person in the world. That is applying the truth of how we show up. Self-grounding, situational readiness, and societal alltelligence. It's all that you've done is take a break, but your nervous system has to calm down because you're engaging your right hemisphere, which is your open attention. This is the only way, Tom, that I can read the language of your body. I can see your expression like you're interested. You're leaning in. It's the only way that I can truly be with and for you in this moment.
The Art, Skill, And Science Of Energy Management
Another whole bunch of thoughts you stirred up with your knowledge bomb you laid there. The idea of showing up, because you're showing up. You're there. Wherever you go, there you are. It's not an optional thing. The question is, how much are you going to turn your dial? How much are you going to allow people to turn your dial? How much are you going to turn it yourself? What do you do to turn the dial?
A couple of thoughts. It seems to me like we are made evolutionarily speaking to conserve our energy. Our default is let me do the littlest amount so that I have the biggest reserve. If the danger comes, I’ve got the reserve to use. That's baked into the cake. It's not a character flaw, it's not a problem with design. It is just the way it is.
In our modern world, it's not appropriate to be conserving our energy because we're going to be mauled by a lion. There are dangerous areas where it's war-torn or something like that. It's not that all places are safe, but in general, over the course of modern civilization, that topology is not as useful as it used to be. That's one thing.
The other thing is what seems like what you're talking about there is the art and skill and science of energy management. How are we presenting? It's related to what we were talking about earlier about thoughts. You gave an example of what I would call a viral thought where it was, “I don't have anything left.” There's lots of research, there's lots of people have studied this.
When you say you have nothing left, if you're at the end of your rope, according to somebody like David Goggins, probably about 40% of your gas tank is used and you probably have about 60% left when you think you're done. You probably have 60% left at that point. When we tell ourselves things like, “I just don't have anything more to give. I'm tired. It's the end of the day.” As I give myself permission not to exert the energy to adjust my state, it's a lie. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it's actually not true. We're taking this fairy tale and giving ourselves the option to conserve our energy and not show up at that true level. Maybe it's aspirational. Is there anybody that you know that is at the true level 100 day in, day out, no matter what?
We're always moving up and down this continuum. Every hour of every day, we are.
It's an aspirational thing. We've got to give ourselves a little bit of grace and build the habits and the skills of being able to turn that dial when we know the situation or the circumstance calls for it. If I'm not feeling all that, you and I have an appointment, how I'm feeling has nothing to do with what we're trying to do together. I should not give that any power if I can. There are physical limitations. My question is, with the system that you've laid out there, the three levels of presence there and your guidance, are you giving people the tools to be able to adjust that energy management skill? Is that what we're talking about?
I like that you've put that frame on it. What I like to think about what I'm doing is I'm simply putting a framework around our evolutionary truth about how we're designed to show up. We're going to show up at some level of proficiency, some level of quality, whether we want to or not. Three levels, barely showing up, showing up or truly showing up simply give us a language so that when you're in a meeting and you're trying to assign roles to different people on your team, there can be a safety by asking them, “Who can truly show up to this?”
You're talking about a cultural impact where we have a shorthand, a language that allows us to acknowledge because positive change always begins with awareness. I'm not trying to barely show up. I'm not trying to just show up. It's because in the habit, in that mode, and I lost sight of the prize there for a second.
Show Up Continuum
The continuum, what I call the show-up continuum, can be used for different purposes. It's a communication tool. It's a tool for accepting yourself because it's okay to just show up. It's better if you show up 60% of the time than 80% and that you can try to truly show up more often. It's a process of noticing when you're just showing up and prompting yourself to reset. I have two ways to do that. Before we get into the two ways, the tool lets us be human and it lets our inner critic go on vacation. It's okay to just show up. In fact, you have to show up a good portion of the time because the glucose and oxygen that we have in our brains is going to get exhausted. We need to refuel. We need to pause. We need to step back.
We're designed to switch between our right hemisphere which connects us and shows us the wonder of the world and helps us be inventive. We need to switch between that and the, “Let's just get it done.” There's a berry in the bush, I need to grab it. I need to feed myself. I also need to stay alive. We are designed to switch back and forth from our left hemisphere to our right. We very much need to do both. What I am hoping the model of how we show up does is it puts it in our mind in a salient way in the forefront so that we don't forget and show up for 80% of our day and that we can start to pause and reset to show up optimally more often. That's what I'm trying to do.
We are designed to switch back and forth from our left hemisphere to our right.
I'm reminded of the movie Click. Remember the movie Click with Adam Sandler? Christopher Walken, I guess he played some devil-type character where he gave him a remote control. He's encountering the things in his life that he doesn't like so he can fast forward past them. He gets into this habit and he finds himself in a reality that is nightmarish because what he thought were the things that he wanted to skip past were the things that mattered most in life. It's not a great movie, but the premise of it in this way is very illustrative of the dynamic you're pointing to there, Marcy.
I call just showing up default mode. Unfortunately, as you're saying, it becomes default.
In that movie, when he clicks, that's what he's either barely or the just. That's what everyone in his life is encountering, the version of himself that he's not present in. That's what they're encountering. That element of it, that aspect of himself. That's what leads to him losing his wife, his job and all the rest of it.
This is the ripple through society. This is the ripple right there. You just show up and it ripples through the people you're with. Why? They're not feeling your care. You aren't receiving them for the core of who they are, which is, that they're human beings on this planet just like we all are with the same needs. We all want to feel loved. We all want to feel accepted. We all want to feel peace. We all want to be healthy. We're here truly for each other. When we show up in that left hemisphere, unfortunately, the humanness flies out of wherever we are. They become more objects to be acted on. “I need my colleague to agree to do this. I need my spouse. She should do this. He should do this. I need this done.”
Now we're dealing with objects and we're not caring anymore. They reflect it back for us. We fall out of love with ourselves and that critic shows up and now we justify and now we're angry. Our ripple goes out. It's hard to stop because now we're in a cycle. The moment that we can pause, and I’ll give you a way to do it now. Is this an okay time? Can I mention the two ways?
Yes, please.
Our brain is only doing one of three things at any time. What we have to do is choose. Either we are directing our attention or we're wandering, our mind is off somewhere, or we're sensing something. It's that sensing that resets us. Take your palm and two fingers on the other hand like a big marker. On your open palm, draw a three for level three. Level three, truly showing up. This is how we want to be. Now feel your palm. Your palm is absorbing this choice of truly showing up. What you're doing is you're resetting into your sensing mode because you're feeling something now. You can do this at any moment of any day. You can do it even when you're in a heated thing with somebody, or you're sad.
The moment you do this, you're feeling something. Your self-criticism, anger and sadness evaporate because now you're in your body. You see how powerful this is. Often, what people tell me is they say, “Marcy, I started to breathe more deeply.” Now you're more present. Once you're calm, then you see the options. You've reset into your right hemisphere, and the world has gone from this narrow tunnel into something so much bigger. You're seeing the options. You're feeling the humanness around you.
You've opened up the spigots of your true self that can see the true self of another person.
I'd like you to use the word feel, or if you want to feel, feeling with. Four, instead of two. There are 2 with and 4. When you're getting stuff done, you're two. Everybody, they're objects. The moment you reset into your body, now your body's feeling. It's in receiving mode. It's in an open-hearted mode. Now you are truly interlinked with one another. You're feeling them and they're feeling you. You've now merged, which is truly the way our body works. With a one-second touch to a stranger's forearm, even if you can't see them, what the study shows is over 60% of the time, in fact, I think it's 68% of the time, you can guess their emotion. You’ll know if they're feeling gratitude, love, compassion, frustration or anger.
This is actually one of the studies cited by Dacher Keltner at the Greater Good Science Center. In fact, I think they conducted it. There was a velvet curtain between two strangers and someone's forearm was put out there. The person on the other side of the curtain touched the forearm for literally one second and guessed with over 68% accuracy how they felt. The likelihood of guessing right was 8%. We feel each other even when we don't know the person and we can't see them. Those emotions literally go through the air from person to person, right through our skin, right through our skulls. Our body doesn't stop at our skin in our skulls. As you say, the energy, it's out there.
Marcy, would you say, before we had some of the language that you're sharing with us and the notions that have crystallized through our modern research apparatus in the past, where we call it our gut feeling, or we might call it vibe, we might say it's something that's always been there, but we didn't have the language to think about it and use it as a tool consciously?
The Truth Of Showing Up
Yes. Thank you, Tom, for that. This has always been there, which is why I call it the truth of showing up. All I'm doing is creating a language in the lexicon to explain what has always been the truth of human beings on this planet for all time. We feel each other. We are designed to be with and for each other.
Show Up: All I'm doing is creating a language and lexicon to explain what has always been the truth of human beings on this planet for all time. We feel each other. We are designed to be with and for each other.
That seems like the center of the bullseye to me in terms of what it is that matters most. That's it. Neglect it at your peril, put your effort towards it and watch yourself bloom.
I love that. If I could, though, I would very much like to point out how we ended up this way because the language of business, the language of society, and the language of our media have wired our brains against this. Look at our education system. We are pitted against each other. The job market. We are competitive. We compete against others. What truly led our species to survive, it's not that we're the biggest or the strongest, or even what Wayne Gretzky said, “I skate where the puck is going to be.” That's all great stuff.
However, the reality is, we survived because we could coordinate our activity. Let's face it, a tiger against us, the tiger's going to win. The tiger against five of us working separately, the tiger's probably going to win. The tiger against five of us working cooperatively, maybe with some tool has far less of a chance.
We're going to survive. We survived because we can work together cooperatively with each other. That is our power. That disappears the moment you compete and go against each other.
The business has a hierarchy and I'm the boss and you report to me, or you're the boss and I report to you and I have to make you happy. Our jobs are designed in these little boxes. I need you to do this and not that. I need you to pass the buck over there. You don't own the whole thing. You own this little piece. By the way, what you're doing has nothing to do with feeding your soul or helping you feel like you're creating the legacy you want on the planet. Our society is based on code and we're living on the map, not the territory.
We've abstracted everything. We've got our statistics and our charts. That person walking across the street, that's a statistic about deaths on the roads. That's a human being. We're designed to think more about them as a person, not as a statistic. This is part of why we're having the issues that we have now with people working against each other and feeling separate and the mental health crisis. We're feeling separate and lonely.
Fifty percent of CEOs are lonely, 50% of teens feel, “I'm depressed and anxious,” and are on some version of SSRI. On and on. The reason we have all of this is because society uses a language that separates us. Even business and leadership now that starts every other article in the McKinsey Quarterly and Harvard Business Review is about compassion, leading with care and being your authentic self and being safe. It's starting to catch up, but it's so much simpler. Get to know people. How are your kids? It must be hard that they're struggling with it. Be a human being. Be human to human. All of a sudden, people will want to do what needs to be done.
Just be human to human and all of a sudden people will want to do what needs to be done.
I think that is the direction of the world. I actually do believe that that's where we're going. I think that it's driven by technology and things are not linear. Everything has the seeds of potential and things for growth and it has traps and things that can poison and wither and cause problems. There's a maturation process. The model that I use a lot in conversations like this, Marcy, is from Ken Wilber. He calls it spiral dynamics. Are you familiar?
Yes.
Spiral Dynamics
We're coming up on time so I'm not going to go into the whole model of spiral dynamics, but what it is we need to be more open to the fact that going forward is not always looking like things are getting better. No matter what level we're talking about, whether it's our person, our family unit, our neighborhood. Sometimes we can be making progress and it feels like we're going backwards because things work in a spiral. If you think of a car garage going up the ramp, at times it feels like you're going down in a way. The plane is tilted.
You're going up, but then you're going down, but then you're going back up again. It's like that. These levels emerge. You can get off at this car at the parking lot level. Each level, the biodynamic piece of it is that we have to solve the problems at one level to be able to stay at the next. Otherwise, those problems pull you back down.
The kinds of things we've been talking about all along are the lifelines that pull us up and allow us to operate at the soul-filling, real growth, real authenticity, real love, real connectedness, real creativity, real meaning, whatever the words values you want to put on it. That's those things that move in that direction.
The things that pull us down are the exact opposite things. It's the fears. It's the carelessness, it's the condemnation, it's the othering of things. It's these dynamics. That's what we talk a lot about. The Eye of Power model deals with all of that. We've been talking about the same thing all along here. I love the fact that it can take these different forms and the fact that you've got down to three things for people to remember, that's fantastic. Obviously, people who read this and like what we're talking about can buy your book, How We Choose to Show Up.
I'm not here to sell books.
They get more so they want to keep going.
I’ll send them the book. Go to my website, which is ChooseToShowUp.com. It says Connect with Marcy and reach out if would like to read your book or see the book. What I'd love to do is put the images out there. I'm going to send you those, what the continuum looks like because once it's in your mind, what I'm told is, “Marcy, it pops into my mind all the time. It helps me show up the way that I want.” I will send you that. A teaser, we briefly spoke about what a situation is, which is this very live co-creating thing. I'd like people to understand what a self truly is and what society truly is because those also are not what people think necessarily. The moment you read it, you think, “That makes so much sense.
Thank you, Marcy. I’ve enjoyed our conversation immensely. I feel like I have a new kindred spirit. My tribe should increase by one or more. One of my favorite feelings in the world is to connect with fellow travelers like this. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much. I look forward to continuing and getting to know you more offline or whenever you'd like.
Awesome. It's my great pleasure to have discussed all of these things with Marcy and we spent so much time talking and I think we're going to talk some more in the future because I think what we're doing has so much synergy. She's perhaps a little bit modest or humble about some of her accomplishments. She’s been very accomplished in the world and is going through some tough times now. Not necessarily with the work area, but family area. For her to marshal herself and show up the way she did here for us, she has my admiration. I'm glad to have found a new friend in Marcy. Thank you so much, Marcy. I appreciate it.
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About Marcy Axelrod
Marcy Axelrod is a visionary leader, award-winning author, TV Contributor, 2X TEDx speaker and management consultant. Her approaches have been tested and proven through projects with some of the world’s largest high-tech companies (e.g., HP, SAP, Cisco). With a background on Wall Street (Lehman Brothers) and in Silicon Valley, Marcy’s work has been highly praised by professors at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Cornell.
Based on 20+ years of research, Marcy’s latest book, How We Choose to Show Up, presents in 3-D nature’s model of how humans are designed to Show Up to thrive. The resulting model is helping thousands of people connect more deeply with themselves, others and their experiences, adding meaning to their lives, and helping companies around the world to innovate and grow.
Showing Up integrates neuroscience, psychology, behavioral economics and evolutionary biology with top consulting strategies and leading business practices, to help people, companies and societies succeed.