--- title: "Emotional Agility In Action" episode: 184 date: 2025-11-21 guest: "JD Walter" canonical: https://inclusionbites.co.uk/podcast/184-emotional-agility-in-action audio: https://cdn.seech.uk/podcast/episodes/ibs-184/audio.mp3 --- # Emotional Agility In Action Joanne Lockwood is joined by learning and development expert JD Walter to explore emotional agility at work, and why emotional intelligence and resilience are central to healthier, more effective workplace cultures. JD shares how his early focus on organisational structure and process shifted after leading a high-conflict HR service centre, where fear, misaligned expectations, and poorly supported change created tension and breakdowns in teamwork. From that experience, he explains why “fixing the org chart” rarely addresses the root causes of conflict, and why leaders need to understand the human dynamics underneath performance problems. Across the conversation, they unpack what authentic empathy looks like in practice (not performative caring), how vulnerability and trust enable productive conflict and collaboration, and why creating safer spaces for people to speak honestly depends on resilience in the face of stress and scrutiny. They also discuss modern communication challenges, belonging and polarisation, and JD’s approach to stepping back from surface-level disputes to uncover the underlying fears and needs driving behaviour. Listeners will come away with a grounded perspective on emotional intelligence as actionable behaviour, and a clearer sense of how teams and leaders can build more resilient, connected environments where people can show up as humans—not just roles. ## Chapters - 00:00 — Introduction and Welcome - 01:30 — Understanding Organisational Dynamics and People - 04:42 — HR Conflict and Leadership Struggles - 09:26 — Emotional Intelligence and Resilience - 13:33 — Authenticity Builds Trust and Innovation - 15:10 — Resilience Through Emotional Intelligence - 21:05 — Being True to Yourself - 24:17 — Resilience Over Seeking Agreement - 26:58 — Fear, Conformity, and Incongruence - 28:53 — Hyperconnected World Fuels Polarisation - 34:15 — Building Trust and Embracing Perspectives - 36:35 — From Extremism to Understanding - 39:15 — Rethinking Society's Funding Models - 44:45 — Polarised Thinking in Politics - 48:33 — Understanding Root Causes, Not Symptoms - 52:49 — Human Skills for Organisations - 54:13 — Inclusion Bites: Join Us ## Key takeaways - The pitfalls of relying solely on organisational structures and processes to address workplace conflict and disengagement. - How authentic emotional intelligence and resilience empower team members to navigate stress, change, and interpersonal challenges. - The limitations of superficial approaches to empathy and the necessity for vulnerability-based trust in effective leadership. - Strategies for moving beyond binary, polarised thinking towards collaborative, inclusive decision-making within teams and organisations. - Navigating the imbalance of emotional intelligence within teams—and practical methods for levelling emotional awareness to strengthen group cohesion. - The influence of modern, asynchronous communication on misunderstandings, and approaches to mitigate misinterpretation and foster clarity. - Practical techniques for disarming conflict by uncovering core fears and motivations, enabling teams to realign around shared, foundational human values. ## FAQs ### What is emotional agility and why is it crucial in today’s organisations? Emotional agility refers to the ability to navigate one’s emotions with resilience and adaptability, particularly within complex and dynamic environments. According to JD Walter, emotional agility allows individuals and teams to manage stress, respond rationally, and avoid being overwhelmed by environmental pressures. It is pivotal in fostering authenticity, trusted relationships, and genuine collaboration in organisational contexts. --- ### How does emotional intelligence relate to resilience and peak performance? Emotional intelligence underpins resilience—the capacity to recover from setbacks and manage ongoing workplace tensions. JD Walter emphasises that well-developed emotional intelligence enables individuals to withstand scrutiny, be vulnerable, and forge authentic connections. This, in turn, facilitates higher engagement and productivity, promoting peak performance, especially when individuals are emotionally connected to their work and the organisation’s mission. --- ### What causes conflict within teams, and how should leaders address it? Conflict often arises when people are placed in unfamiliar roles or asked to perform tasks outside their experience—a phenomenon illustrated by JD Walter's experience running a service centre (see transcript). Leadership measures such as organisational restructuring or changing processes rarely address the root causes, which are fundamentally human. The solution lies in understanding individual fears, creating safe spaces for dialogue, and refocusing on the lived experiences and aspirations of team members. --- ### How can emotional intelligence be developed in managers and teams? Both Joanne Lockwood and JD Walter agree that emotional intelligence is not innate—it can be learned and strengthened. Managers and team members require targeted development beyond superficial empathy campaigns. Effective training should focus on authentic behaviours, vulnerability, and the practical applications of empathy and emotional awareness, leading to sustainable culture change rather than performative gestures. --- ### What challenges do asynchronous communication channels pose for emotional connection? Modern reliance on digital and asynchronous communication has eroded immediate emotional cues—body language, tone, and context—which previously underpinned synchronous, face-to-face interactions. Joanne Lockwood notes that messages can be misinterpreted, leading to unintended conflict and a diminished sense of consequence or accountability. Emotional agility is particularly important in bridging this gap, ensuring communications are clear, mindful, and appropriately contextualised. --- ### How can teams level out imbalances in emotional intelligence? Imbalances—in which some possess high emotional intelligence and others low—can breed frustration and misunderstanding. JD Walter suggests that the key lies in accepting diversity, reframing the question to focus on personal growth and aspirations, and cultivating mutual resilience. Everyone’s goal should centre on their ideal self and how they want to be experienced, rather than enforcing conformity or changing differences. --- ## Transcript Joanne Lockwood: Foreign. Welcome to Inclusion Bites, your sanctuary for bold conversations that spark change. I'm Joanne Lockwood, your guide on this journey of exploration into the heart of inclusion, belonging and societal transformation. Ever wondered what it truly takes to create a world? Remember, everyone not only belongs, but thrives. You're not alone. Join me as we uncover the unseen, challenge the status quo and share stories that resonate deep within. Ready to dive in? Whether you're sipping your morning coffee or winding down after a long day, let's connect, reflect and inspire action together. Don't forget, you can be part of the conversation too. Reach out to jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk to share your insights or to join me on the show. So adjust your earbuds and settle in. It's time to ignite the spark of inclusion with Inclusion Bites. And today is episode 184 with the title Emotional Agility in Action. And I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome JD Walter. JD is a learning and development expert, helping organisations achieve peak performance by investing in people as humans, not just assets. When I asked JD to describe his superpower, he sees his ability to reframe emotional intelligence and resilience as tools for collective empowerment. Hello, jd. Welcome to the show. Thanks, JD Walter: Joanne. It's absolutely a pleasure to be here. I look forward to our conversation today. Yeah. You're Joanne Lockwood: based in the us, I believe. Yes, I am in JD Walter: the Sunshine State of Florida, so I'm about as close to the Caribbean as you can get without actually being Caribbean. So southwest Florida, outside of Naples, and it is sunny. Joanne Lockwood: And is that near the Gulf of America? JD Walter: Well, I still call it the Gulf of Mexico, but yes. Joanne Lockwood: Yeah, yeah, the. The Gulf. The Gulf. Anyway, the Gulf. It's been the Gulf JD Walter: Mexico since I was a kid. It's going to stay that way as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, yeah. So Joanne Lockwood: we had the unfortunate event that the Pope died last week, a week before, wasn't it? And his funeral was on Saturday. Is that a big thing in America, watching that? JD Walter: I'll be honest, I don't know. I mean. Oh, it's in the news. I actually, you know, I don't really. I try and stay out of the news as much as possible. I try not to kind of fall in line with what everybody's talking about. Wow. Joanne Lockwood: Yeah, fair play. I completely relate to that. There's a lot going on in the news, but probably a good segue on to talking about the topic of today, about this resilience. Emotional. Emotional intelligence. What got you into this? Where where did it all start? So JD Walter: I think so my background, so education wise experience. I am a former member of the US Navy and I really was, I was more of a strategist early on. Um, I had more of an interest in how organisations are structured, how work is organised, processes. So I was very, very style organisation and I think that experience and that focus, while very beneficial for my career at some point couldn't resolve what I was sort of dealing with in an organisation. So I had a couple of instances where I was running programmes, had a large group of individuals working for me and I wasn't at the time prepared to kind of see the human dynamic clearly. I was so into the, well, I can fix this by restructuring, I can fix this by changing the process. We can, we can reallocate work, you know, we can organise in a way, but those things, at some point they break down and they don't actually solve what is ultimately happening inside of an organisation. And that is people being people, right? Like. And so I had a very specific situation where I was running a large scale human resource service centre out of 20 people and it was rough with conflict. I was, I lost about 50% of our staff in six months. And there was just so much conflict in HR, you know, complaints, et cetera, et cetera. And I looking in at this organisation and I'm thinking that's why, how do I, how do I even attempt to fix what's happening here? Because it was so much, it was so personal to so many people and the conflict was so heavy and I, and I brought in several external folks to say, hey, observe this and tell me what you think. And they kept coming back and saying, well, you need to fire your manager, get rid of your. And, and I can't. And I couldn't resolve like in silent, my head. I like just getting rid of a couple of managers doesn't change what's ultimately happening. That's too superficial. That's like, that's when you fire the coach from your sports team, right, because you're not performing well. It's not the coach that's out there on the field, it's the players. So that's who you should be looking at. And so anyway, I, I decided that I was not going to accept everybody else's perspective that it was a management problem and I'm going to dig and I was going to find something more fundamental. And so, so what I ultimately did was I went back and I sort of reconstructed the whole project from the time we set up the contract. We bid on the work and the contract. And then we started to set it up and I realised two things very quickly. One, that we hired a bunch of really great subject matter experts and we told them what their job was going to be. But on day one, we asked them to do something different, something not just different, but something they've never done before. So we hired all of these HR professionals who were used to performing transactions, processing work, benefits, payroll, promotions, those sorts of things. And on day what we asked them to do were to build standard operating procedures and processes. And they had never done that. Those things had always been given to them. So that was hurdle number one. We, we said, hey, come have this job and here's what you're going to do. And then on day one, we, you know, we pulled the rug out from underneath him and he said, oh, but you have to do this first. So that was the beginning of the vibration. And then secondarily we had to implement some technology, a ticketing system. None of them had ever worked in a ticketing system before. And now they were not only being burdened with having to learn a system, we were trying to design it as we go and it was not a very good. Our partners. And so we weren't able to build the technology. So that was sort of hurdle too. So you take that and I, and I re. What I realised, I was like, okay, now we've done, we put everybody offensive. They're all afraid if do well they're going to get fired. This job, you know, and you just extrapolate out the fear. And of course it makes sense to now that everybody's fighting and there's lots of complaints. And it's because everybody's in this heightened state of awareness. And it was in this moment that I really, you know, to get to your. The light bulb went off and I was like, man, I have got to learn to address organisations differently. And so my wife was doing some doctoral work at the time. She was researching emotional intelligence. She was throwing a lot of stuff at me to read. I did a bunch of, you know, kind of research on my own, read a bunch of books, did a bunch of, you know, academic journals and, and finally came to this place where I was like, you know what? We, I need to completely rethink how I approach organisations. And so that, that was the switch where I said, okay, I'm, I'm a human agent at this point, right? Everything that I do for custom, all about the lived experience of the employees, you know, it just, it ancillarily, you know, organisations Are abstractions. They exist on paper, may have buildings. But what makes an organisation is the collective of individuals that have come together to do something under that umbrella. So. So at this point, once I started to understand emotional intelligence and I really started to understand the relationship between human psychology, it really just kind of changed perspective and experience in conflict zones. And I was interested in the idea of resistance, right? Resistance to collaboration, you know, why, you know, we're so easily avoidable, et cetera, et cetera. Now thinking about resilience as this ability to manage stress, overcome kind of wear and tear of, you know, tension over time. And it really started like I said, you know, you know, this is the key here. If we want to. If we want to strengthen ourselves, if we armed to avoid being drawn into where is going on in our environment. So our environment want to choose, want to be rational, we want to respond in an appropriate way. And resilience for me is really what that's all about. And so I use resilience as anonymous. We can talk more if you want about, you know, all those aspects. Yeah, Joanne Lockwood: I'm keen to find out a bit more about the team dynamic you observed in your. And the epiphany time when you did that. Because people, as you say, people blame the manager. Sometimes it's appropriate. But often I find managers haven't been trained to be managers. They're promoted from the ranks without any tools, without any success and then something expect them for being a great engineer to being a people person and a people leader is often unfair. But we hopefully we can train people and I think emotional intelligence is something that personally, in my own experience is once you become aware that it's a thing and you start to focus on it, it becomes something you can develop skills in. Is that right? Yeah, absolutely. So I think, JD Walter: you know, there is. So example, right? I'm a great. I made a manager. There's a development, right. Management is a very specific skill set and we haven't trained to it. And we go, oh, well, okay, what is that? Right. It's to developing managers tends to be this very superficial effort. Oh, we'll be more empathetic. I'll be a better leader. Okay. Again, I don't know what these things are, right, as concepts. Now you can spell them out and you can put a little post around the wall. But it doesn't tell me as an individual how to behave. How do I inform my behaviours based on that? What does empathy look like as a behaviour? How does empathy show up authentically? And. And that connection is so it like a superficial was a destruction image than if I just would have said, yeah, I don't really care about your personal life, get back, right. Like it's almost like we can deal with that better than this sort of fake caring. And so, so what I think, when I think about emotional intelligence, what I think is about this capacity to be authentic, but it requires us to vulnerable, right? So vulnerability. And I always like to mention Patrick Lencioni. He's five behaviour to the team. He lays vulnerability based on building results oriented team. For me, I act resilience or emotional intelligence as the founder. Because if we don't have the capacity to withstand scrutiny, tension, stress in the environment, we can't actually be vulnerable. Vulnerable is we're actually starting to be authentic. And when we're authentic now, we're building trusted relationships. Patrick says that if you don't get a chance to weigh in, you can't possibly buy in. And he's talking about productive conflict. We all run away from conflict. But the argument is important because that's how we get to innovation, right? That's how we evolve our organisation, you know, into the future. So the ability to authentically connect with people is incredibly important. And it doesn't have to be the authenticity is more important than sort of the 10, let's say in their environment, people are keeping on as they're looking for that they're looking talk engagement all the time. What is it that's an emotional connection to this thing that I'm doing. And, and we have programmes like oh hey, we have fundraisers. That's rise. The engagement. Engagement isn't about whether I like the organisation, whether I like the people I work with. It's about can I emotionally connect with this work that I'm doing with the mission, you know, the thing that I do, the task that I do on a daily basis. If so, then I'm going to be too productive as possible. But what stops the noise around me, all the drama around me, all the change that's constantly happening. So if I'm constantly reacting to all of these things happening in my operating environment, I'm never actually able to get to being a peak performer. So again, it's the resilience that comes from, you know, well developed emotional intelligence competency that allows me to be vulnerable and it allows me to. And what we're really talking about is I have a root of who I want to be yourself. I'll draw from, you know, concept of human psychology, real self is who do I want to be in the world. And if I have a measuring stick, then I can make decisions in the moment how to be cave. So in that exchange, No, I'm distracted. There's this thing, what I want to be able to do, be able to connect with you that your facings I've ever faced. Maybe I can't truly be empathetic, but I can certainly be sympathetic. But what I commonly do is I can use space. I can say, you know what, you need to take the day off, don't worry about it, go home. You know, if you need anything, let me know. But go take some time, go take a walk, do whatever, you know, whatever it is that you need to do instead of driving towards. Well, that's too bad you feel that way. You work the law in that. That latter scenario is tenfold. Take until day. I mean, we don't work eight hours a day anyway, so it's not like we're, you know, we overblow the loss of production because we assume that eight hours is being worked every day. But we know that's not true. Joanne Lockwood: In team dynamics, in leader team dynamics, I imagine there has to be a kind of a, a normalisation of a balance of emotional intelligence. Because if you're not careful, if you're imbalanced, one person has high emotional intelligence and one has low or, or not aware of it. That can create frustration on both parts. You know, someone's trying to be empathetic and listen and manage you and look after you. You know, you're neurodiverse or your, your empathy levels are low. You're. You're kind of, yeah, you're, you feel uncomfortable in that situation. So how do we kind of try and level out this imbalance? Sometimes step away from an JD Walter: organisation, Just look at the world and I think about all the craze on a daily basis. The world is ripe with. That's the first thing that doesn't matter that we're at work. Our lives are our lives and they're filled with all of these. Right. Whether it happens within the bounds of the organisation or not. Um, I've done a lot of work with public servants in the United States. If you've read news, you know that there's a big move to total number of federal employees in the Federal Government or in the government in the United States. That's not necessarily a bad thing. But unfortunately, the narrative that goes along with it is these people aren't being productive. They're not great professionals. These guys, you know, they're not really doing that. They're lazy they're this, they're that and those things couldn't be any further from the truth. But that's an. That is going to necessitate this. We step back and we kind of, you know, we protect ourselves from this. This criticism. Right. So I think you know, when you imbalance in. In a. When you have the imbalance you can. I'm trying to think of the best way to say it. If I look out into the world and I see of the drama based that sort of more it's shouting match. Everybody's trying to be heard. There's no more focus on bringing in evidence and proving a truth. It's because you're in. It's. There's just so much vital in the world and. And it's exactly what you just being. So look at it from that perspective. What I think I can commit myself to not be distracted by all of the stuff that's coming after me. I'm maybe not be as negatively impacted by all of the stuff and ultimate world a much nicer place. We'd all get along a lot better. And I think that's ultimately what we really need to be doing is we need to be acknowledged. We're different. Right? We're all diverse in all the different ways you can be diverse and numerous others come from someplace different. We all approach life different. We have different beliefs, different opinions, you know, different desires. But it's all okay because there isn't a right. And I think this is where the emotional intelligence and I think emotional intelligence in that scenario that you're talking about. To be where you are. Okay. Do you want to be better? That's really the question. It's not do you agree with me? Do you? What are you shooting for in your life? What. What is your goal? What is your ideal? Where are you trying to get to? Who are you trying to be as a human being? Let me help you realise that. And if we do that I think all the rest of this stuff just kind of starts to fall into place. But it. It requires strength, right? A resilience within you to be able to put yourself out and say this is me without apology. This is who I am. You can be who you want. I take no offence to celebrate you be who you want to be. But let's, let's do that in a way that we're not trying to change each other. We're not falling on a flag not we're not saying your role is only good if go back to that ideal self idea what, what that is all about. Is deciding who we want to be as individuals. How do I want to show up in the world, how do I want people to experience me if that's the most important and frankly the only measuring stick that will letter to us? Because everything else is an abstraction. It's everything else is some third party creation. The ideas of success that are printed in magazines, the commercial, the political rhetoric, everything, everything that goes on driving towards no, no, I have the answer and you need to follow me. And it's not about following people, it's about being authentic. And so. Joanne Lockwood: We live in a world where a lot of the communication we do these days is asynchronous. We social media, we're hiding behind keyboards, we're sending a message. That message then travels through space and time and someone will read it and then reply or not or whatever. But in the human evolution, most of our communications was all synchronous. We were talking to a person with a person. We could judge their reactions, we could judge their feelings, we could judge their state, what they were doing. Whereas now we've got no idea where the person is at the other end, what they're doing, what they're thinking of, what their emotional state is, what their happiness quotient is, whatever. And we're sending this message and they interpret it in a completely different way often which is intended or we don't have consequence in what we say anymore. Is that part of the problem we're getting here? Yeah, I think JD Walter: so. I think it's a desire to interpret what somebody is saying. And I don't know, I would probably argue that we've lost some of our command, the ability to speak clearly, concisely, to say exactly what I mean without an agenda. If I tell you you're not here in Florida, but if I sun is shining today and it's 85 degrees, okay, you can me, you can go look on Weather channel or whatever app and and find out if that's true or not. It's an easy piece of information for us to then conversation about. But if I say the weather, it's not about facts anymore. Fact get proven. That's an opinion. So what happens is we fall to opinion much more than actually just exchanging bits of data that we want to then comment on or talk about address. So what happens instead of saying like you know, my silly little weather analogy instead of just 85 degrees from we typically things with an agenda I personally you do agree with. So I have to convince you the weather's better here. It is point of that it doesn't it doesn't change anything in the world, right? It just makes us feel better because somebody agreed with us potentially. All of this goes back to this idea, right, of resilience where it's like I don't have to be right. No one has to agree. I'm perfectly okay in this world if absolutely nobody agrees with me. Now I might want to consider my beliefs if absolutely nobody is agreeing with me because maybe there's something that I'm missing so I should consider that. But at the end of the day, the point isn't to be the same as or different. To have my own perspective based on my lived experience and then to let everybody else have the same thing. So to grant that courtesy or that say listen, your, your lived experience, it's all on you. I'm. You need. I'm not not care. Because who am I to make the rules right places. But that comes to, right, like come back to a comfort level. Are we confident enough? Are we secure enough in ourselves? Can we, you know, positively overcome other. We have. I'm afraid of not being liked. Okay, okay. We need to understand, right? And, and is the thing that you're putting out there to try and get people to like you, is that authentic to you or is that kind of what you. You grabbed? Because I think people, well, people like people like this. So now people like people. I'll get a sports like people that, you know, make six figures. So I'll go get a job that makes six figures or whatever it happens to be I in the world. If I sit back and I'm complete selfish observation of the world it is. We're so concerned about not fitting in, right? We're so afraid of not being accepted. We're so afraid of somebody not, you know, wanting to give us the job, not doing well enough in school, fill in the blanks of whatever it is that we subordinate all of our kind of hopes and dreams for us ourselves as people. And we say, okay, well this is what's going to sell, right? And so that's it. That's who we become. In psychology, this is called incongruence where the ideal self and the realised self are no longer are not aligned. For me, that's what I would say. Happiness. Happiness is alignment between the ideal self and the realised self. If, if you are at least on the track too becoming that person that you want to be, showing up the way you want to show up, having people experience you the way you want to be experienced, then I think everything's okay. And all the Other stuff doesn't matter quite as much. But we live in a world that is very much driven towards what somebody else thinks we should want, have or do. And often it's motivated by their own greed to line their own pocket, sell their cars, you know, get us to give to their, their special cause, you know, elect them to office, whatever it happens to be. And we don't want to live in. This, as I say, we Joanne Lockwood: live in this hyper connected world now. So again, going back to our primaeval days or prehistoric days, if we were isolated in our views in our, in our small little village group, we were pretty isolated on our views, we would homogenise around the majority for safety and protection. But now we can almost, in our infinitely connected world we can find someone who's going to agree with us somewhere and we build these networks of people who agree. So we create our polarised affinity groups and tribes out there online, whatever it may be. That means we don't have any human bounds on the validity of these ideas or the trying to work out what tolerance is. And we become very intolerant of difference. And you're saying become polarised and it's too easy now to fit in an us versus you. I'm right, you're wrong because everybody behind me says I'm right. And that's what's propagating this kind of conflict we have in the world now in my belief. JD Walter: Yeah, absolutely, I think so to go back to that, let's go right back to the very beginning. You know, what are the defining attributes of humans, right? There's hierarchy, right? Someone has to be in charge, someone has to be accountable for the decision. We want to live in this beautiful idealistic, you know, dream world where we all get to say, but that's not the truth, that's not as a species, it's never been that way. Yes, there is an opportunity to contribute, yes there is an opportunity to weigh in. But at the end of the day someone has to be accountable, right? Someone has to make the final decision. So hierarchy is always going to be a part of who we are as a species. So is division of labour. We can't all be warriors, right? Some of us have to be berry pickers. But guess what? Those berries are vital to our nutrition and we can't just eat the animals that we've killed, right? Like as a, again as an animal we need multitude of nutrients and they need to come from different sources. And so if we want to maintain health and wellness and be able to continue to propagating the species that, that berry picker is. I think early on we understood divisions of labour much more intimately and much more rationally. Rise of mass agriculture in the Mesopotamian valley, you know, the, the advent of leisure time, the rise of the arts. And now we have this, like, competition for what's most important, what brings the most value, and that's where we are now. It's just, it's a competition there. It's not about the thing anymore. It's all, it's just about winning. It's just about the competition. It's about being right. I think that the human species most significant competitive advantage is our ability to collaborate. We are a social animal. Collaboration is the key to our evolution. We talk about it incessantly these days, particularly in a business environment. Oh, collaboration is the key to success. Yes, it is. If we're so lost in the end of the collaboration, we miss the value of the collaboration, because that's not collaboration anymore, that's exploitation. No, no. Be on my team, think my way, do what I say to do, and then this is what we're going to achieve. And isn't that great? Look, we're going to raise the trophy. Okay, hold on. I'm not interested in the trophy. Right, because it's not about, why are we here together. It's not about the value of collaboration. It's about the output. And the output is all. Ultimately, it's incredibly selfish. Someone wants it. Now there's a mistake where we say, oh, well, that's the problem with hierarchy. No, no, no, no. Hierarchy isn't the problem. It's that someone has defined the outcome and now we're all being forced to buy into that rather than saying, what, what do we want to accomplish together? Hey, let's get together now. We're this group. What do we want to accomplish together? Well, I want to do this. Okay. I want to do that. All right, well, let's, let's, let's work on this. Let's find the, the common thing that we can go do together. And then the value of the collaboration is in the collaboration because of the power that it gives us as individuals to achieve something. So I wonder, I think ultimately, when I think about collaboration now, I love that we talk about it so much, but I don't think we understand what it really means. I think we assume, unfortunately, that collaboration is. No, no, we're all on the same team. We've all agreed to be on this team and this is what we're doing, but we don't spend the time and the energy along the way to make sure everybody is being heard, that everybody's being able to, given an opportunity to weigh in and ultimately contribute to the collaboration, which again is more important than the outcome itself. You used the word trust a few times and authenticity. Joanne Lockwood: And the challenge sometimes is being able to let your guard down, isn't it? We talked about this, wanting to be right, wanting to have your own opinion, building a tribe. How can we lower our defences sufficiently to be able to be able to listen to another perspective? Because that's the challenge. We've got to do with the emotional intelligence of resilience. We're going to have enough self confidence in our own beliefs or our own arguments, our own why to better entertain funny about someone else's why? Because otherwise it would just be seen as a, I'm letting you attack me. So how can I create a safe space for me to engage with you that has different opinions or different views? Well, I don't feel that I'm going to be, I don't know, set upon. I wonder sometimes if JD Walter: we maybe hold our beliefs a little too hard, you know, too close to, you know, white knuckle in these beliefs of what, whatever they happen to be. So it becomes very difficult to be curious if our identity is so rooted in this one thing. And I can't let it go, oh, my God, what if I'm wrong? I'm wrong. Evolution is all about change. We talk about this is like everything that we talk about in business now. It's all about accommodating change because change is constant, the markets are volatile, the pace of change is increasing, you know, et cetera, et cetera. It's just ramping up. But it's not a new phenomenon. Change is innate in the universe. I mean, there's tension is natural. That's what keeps the universe together, it's what keeps our bodies together. So some tension is good. It's about the fear of changing our mind because of the perception that we think, oh, if I change my mind, someone's going to look at me and they're going to criticise me. They're going to say, hey, you know, you used to think A, now you think B, what? Well, there's nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with changing your mind. There's nothing wrong with adopting a different position. There's nothing wrong with living a life, having experiences, taking in information, being curious, engaging with other people and coming to a new way of thinking. Right. History is replete with these wonderful examples of people who started out on a very disruptive way of thinking. White supremacists, right? Let's just take this as an example. Someone who is a hardcore white supremacist. They're a member of, you know, white supremacist groups and they are all about this. And then over time and through experience, they come to realise that there's an error in the. In the logic of their thought, right? And they come and they meet people and they engage with people and they find that there's this wonderful energy if they. If they take that old way of thinking and they put it on the shelf and they say, I'm going to adopt the new way. But what happens in that instance? And that person is now ostracised from every community that they were ever a part of. And the people that they're leaving behind aren't mad because they've lost a member. They're mad and they're afraid because the individual that had the courage to step away and say, I'm going to change my mind is. Is now a threat. And that's the way we're perceiving it now. We're saying, oh, I can't think this way anymore because I could be wrong. We're so afraid of not being the same start to finish. And it is antithetical to life, to, you know, being a human being. Right? The whole universe changes on a daily basis. You know, I got a sunburn the other day. Layers of skin are peeling off my shoulder. That is me changing. My biology is fundamentally changing. There's no way to stop it. So I think we're lost in this space where we're so afraid of the possibility of change that we fight and resist everything. But if we didn't, we would be freed to just experience this big, beautiful, wonderful life in a. Just such a, I think, an open and honest way that we wouldn't be afraid because somebody looks different from us or somebody thinks different from us, or somebody wants, you know, somebody wants, you know, I want income tax. No, it's. I don't want income tax. Okay? It's not. There's an argument, there's a conversation to be had about that topic, that thing, but that shouldn't be the defining factor of who we are as individuals. And that shouldn't create an impasse necessarily for us to not be able to get along. So, you know that Joanne Lockwood: example you gave there about income tax? We need to step away from the minutiae to the overall objectives, don't we? So what do we want? We want a society that's safe, productive. I want to go about my life. I want to have this, I want to have freedom, I want to have happiness. In order to have that, I recognise I need to contribute to the running of society. I can either do that this way or I can do it this way. One of these ways is income tax or I can trade income tax with effort, I can do whatever. But somehow, if I want to share resources, I've got to contribute to that pot of resources. So if we can get people to talk about the problem we're trying to solve or the reality we're trying to create, and this is just a vehicle to get us to that reality and we have a different perspective on the best way of funding that reality, then we could talk about what would be a better way of funding it. Well, we'd all love it if food was free, water was free, sunlight was free and we'd have to pay anything. We'd all love that. But actually where we are today is here. So how do we solve that problem? And it's trying to take it away from the politics of the little and talk about how do we achieve our big objective. And that's we're sometimes bad at. We get locked into this minutiae of solutions, not the challenges we're trying to fix. Yeah, I think about. JD Walter: So we talk about self awareness as a component of emotional intelligence, but there's two, two ideas. Awareness and mindfulness. Right. And I've always sort of talked about them this way. Right. Awareness is the macro. Right. I see. I know what's happening in my environment. I'm, you know, it's not necessarily head on a swivel, but I know what's going around, on, around me. I'm. But I'm not paying immediate attention to it. Right. I know I'm walking up to a corner and there's cars, there's traffic on this corner. I'm not looking at every car coming down the road, but I'm aware that there's traffic and I know that I need to stop at the corner and make sure that the road is cleared so I can cross it. Awareness is just knowing that there's traffic. Mindfulness is the moment that we stop and we say, okay, those cars are far enough away and I need three lanes, I can make it. Right. I bring this up because I think that's what. What happens. What you're talking about is we are so lost in the weeds. You said minutia, but we are so focused in the micro, as if the micro is the thing that, you know, tips the needle to success or failure. And it isn't. Right. It's the bigger stuff. But the bigger stuff are made up of all of these. But we get so wrapped around the axle about one issue. And this is politics in a nutshell, right? There are those that have taken up an issue and subordinate everything else. I like guns. I vote solely. I don't. I do, but I don't vote. I'm using this as an example. I like guns, and I will only vote for somebody that is pro gun. Okay, but what about all the other ways that they think about things? Are. Are we. Why are we willing to say it's okay, all right, this guy is going to fight for guns, but doesn't like anybody that's not straight, white, male. Okay, well, I can't get behind that. Right? I can't. I can't subordinate, you know, one to the. These two are very, very different things. They're not related. But we've created a system where they become related because they're all in somebody's platform. And we have to distil all of our beliefs down to left or right, you know, liberal or, you know, conservative, Republican or Democrat in this country anyway. And there's. There's no way to. There's no way to exist in that sphere called politics if you aren't going to live in the binary, you know, And I'm not. I'm like, I absolutely. I refuse to join anything. I'm not a joiner because I am confident that no matter what I join at some point I will disagree with. And that is something that I'm not going to try and reconcile. I can't join a political party. I'm not going to file. I get. I struggle with people's agendas. Like, you shouldn't. You shouldn't tell me everything that you feel right up front. No, your job is to represent me. What we should be doing is we should say guns. Let's talk about guns. Okay? In a vacuum, this is guns. Here's how we think, done, move on. Here's what we think about income tax. But instead it all gets lumped together. So politics is really, you know, these agendas, they're stew. And you can't. You can't weed anything out. And then, of course, in this country, oh, my God, the way they write legislation, it's just. I mean, these bills are just so big and there's just so much stuff in them. It's no wonder nobody can ever agree on this stuff because there's just so much in it. There's no way you can possibly agree with every little thing. So I think we've, we've gone to this place where it's like all or nothing, right? So we talked about, like, we focus so much on these, the micro. Like you were saying, we're here and we're intently focused on the minutia, but then we just, we throw it away. We don't want to have that conversation. And it becomes about, well, are you, you know, are you left or right? Well, if you're right, you gotta love guns and you, you know, you gotta hate, you know, gay people. Well, that's stupid. That's a completely archaic way of thinking. Why can't I be economically conservative but like socially liberal? Well, there's no place for me in the US political spectrum if that's my belief. So what are my options? I either have to subordinate one of my beliefs or I just step away, which is what I've done. I just, I just don't vote. I'm not going to be a part of it. There is, I believe there are other ways that I can show up as a human being and advocate for the things that I believe in. Right. Everybody gets a choice. Make your life choices, whatever they are, I will celebrate all of them and I will champion you. I can't do that inside of a political spectrum, so I have to step away from it. But again, this goes back to that fear I'm comfortable not belonging to. But if we are, if we're afraid of being alone, if we're afraid of being out here on the fringes and not a part of the, in group, we're never going to be honest with each other ourselves, sorry about what we really want and who we really are and how we really want to show up. So we're constantly being manipulated and drawn into somebody else's argument. But the upside is that if we all just ignored the argument, the argument goes away. Right? We don't, we don't actually have to get into the debate and that's what we don't realise. I think often there are those that say, well, you have to have an opinion. No, I don't. I don't actually have to have an opinion on everything. I don't have to have a belief on everything. I have to have opinions and beliefs based on my lived experience and what works, you know, what's right for me. But to do that, I have to concede that you get the same thing. So that's what liberty really is all about. And I've kind of gone down a Rabbit hole here. But the very idea of liberty I find fascinating because liberty says that I get to make all my own decisions, but the freedom to make all of those own decisions comes with an obligation to care for everybody else's liberty. And we don't remember that here in this country anymore. We've forgotten what liberty actually is. Liberty's more about constraint than it is about expression. But we don't want to talk about that anymore because we want. Our liberty is all about do whatever I want, whenever I want, and you can't stop me. Well, that's reckless and dangerous and it's rude because you're not caring or considering anybody else's perspective. So I, you know, I could go on and on about this because I think this is, this is fundamentally, it's broken in society and is our willingness to stand on our own and our willingness to let everybody else stand. So when you're going into organisations, Joanne Lockwood: when you're working in, let's call them, conflict zones, I don't mean battle zones with armies and tanks. I'm talking about conflict zones in organisations where, much like the one you describe right at the beginning, how can you get people to disarm, lower, lower the threat levels? What sort of techniques do you use? Well, I think the first thing is JD Walter: to recognise that what we're reacting to is probably a superficiality. It's more of a symptom. So we're not actually talking about the root of what the matter is. So go back to my example about the service centre that I was running, that management. That was very much a, a symptom, right? Like, let's just fix this rather than go and figure out what the root is. Why are people vibrating? So what I try and do is without, without any aggression, right? What, but creating a safe space, but allowing people to step away and helping walk back from the point of, like, we're butting heads over this right now, but what are we really, what are we really struggling with? What is really causing us to adopt this particular position? Where are we as human beings in this moment? What are we afraid of? And if we talk about that, if we can acknowledge that, then we can get past it, right? Then we can say, well, you know, you know, if you don't do this and, and we don't produce and, you know, this project isn't done on time, we're all going to get fired. Oh, okay, okay. We have a much more fundamental fear here. But are you afraid of getting fired because you're going to lose this job? Nope. It's deeper than that. This money that I make through this job funds a lifestyle. Now there's probably a family behind me, children, there's dependence right on me as an individual income earner. So the. The fear of losing my job isn't even about losing a job. It's about losing the ability to take care of the things that I am supposed to take care of as a father, as a husband, let's say. And that is more in tune with the ideal that I have for myself, where I am. I'm a good parent, I'm a good husband, I'm a good provider, I am dependable. People can count on me. The people that I love can 100% count on me. And I will always be there to take care of them if that's what's going on. And so that argument about the project not being done on time often is rooted in something much more fundamental. And so I think we've got to get back to that. We have to have that conversation like, okay, yeah, got it. All right. How do we protect ourselves? So what we're doing right now, this project isn't even about this project because somebody else decided what this project is. But our job is to make sure that it's successful. Okay. Are we really going to get fired if we're not on time on this project? Potentially, yes. But more often than not, we're probably not going to get fired. We might get a bit of a chewing, right? We might hear about it, but we're not actually going to get fired. Right. And so I think we need to. That's what I try and do. I try and step us back to where are we at? What's really going on in our heads? What are we really afraid of? What are we really rejecting? What are we really reacting to here in this moment? Because that foundational stuff, we're much more aligned on that. We all can understand that. Oh, yeah. We all have responsibilities. We're all parts of families, units, friends. There's so much more similarity there at the foundational level. And it's much easier for us to get on board with an idea at that level. Right. Like now, you know, how we fix this project, how we. What do we need to do to get this project back on track and in budget? That stuff is tertiary at best. Right. In those moments of conflict. Joanne Lockwood: Jg, this is fascinating. I. I could talk to you all day. This is. This is really up my street as well. I have. I. We share a perspective on this. So this is. This is really interesting. How could People get hold of you if they want to find out more. Check out my website. It's JD Walter: Walter W-A-L-T-E-R-I C dot com. There's a way to chat with me through there, send me a note and, and, you know, I'd love to talk about anything and everything from a business perspective. Right. Like, we're really focused on the learning and development components of an organisation and our orientation is towards the human skills, so emotional intelligence, leadership, strategic thinking, team building, those kind of competencies. But we're, you know what, at the end of the day, why we do this is really about how do we. How do we help improve the lived experience of our fellow human beings? We do it through the lens of an organisation because we all show up in organisations and it's this commonality, but it's broken. It's broken across the board. There are no perfect organisations, there never will be, because perfect can't be achieved. But. But we can make them better. But we make them better by recognising our own humanity and allowing others humanity to show up in those environments as well. And stop subordinating our humanness to this abstraction called, you know, Company X. Yeah. Joanne Lockwood: Amazing, jd, thank you so much. As we bring this conversation to a close, I want to express my deepest gratitude to you, our listener, for lending your ear and heart to the cause of inclusion. Today's discussion struck a chord. Consider subscribing to Inclusion Bites and become part of our ever growing community driving real change. Share this journey with friends, family and colleagues. Let's amplify the voices that matter. Got thoughts, stories or a vision to share? I'm all ears. Reach out to jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk and let's make your voice heard. Until next time, this is Joanne Lockwood signing off with a promise to return with more enriching narratives that challenge, inspire and unite us all. Here's to fostering a more inclusive world one episode at a time. Catch you on the next bite.