--- title: "Adversity And Authentic Leadership" episode: 88 date: 2023-12-07 guest: "Samreen McGregor" canonical: https://inclusionbites.co.uk/podcast/88-adversity-and-authentic-leadership audio: https://cdn.seech.uk/podcast/episodes/ibs-088/audio.mp3 --- # Adversity And Authentic Leadership Joanne Lockwood is joined by executive coach and strategic advisor Samreen McGregor for a wide-ranging conversation about adversity and authentic leadership, set against a backdrop of global uncertainty and everyday personal pressures. Samreen unpacks how adversity can show up both externally and internally, and why the language and stigma around trauma can prevent people from recognising its impact. Drawing on her coaching work and research, she describes trauma as a deep “wound” that can influence behaviour, relationships, and performance over time, and explains the value of creating safe spaces where people can notice and work with these patterns. Both Joanne and Samreen share formative experiences that shaped their sense of self-worth and belonging. They explore how childhood messages can drive perfectionism, validation-seeking, and boundary issues at work, and how these dynamics connect to psychological safety and inclusion. The discussion also moves into identity and belonging across different contexts. Samreen reflects on growing up across cultures and languages, and Joanne shares her journey of gender transition and the ongoing challenge of feeling included without necessarily feeling a deep sense of belonging. The episode closes with Samreen introducing her book, Leader Awakened, and her invitation for leaders to slow down, reflect more deeply, and broaden leadership beyond purely cognitive approaches to include emotional and embodied awareness. ## Chapters - 00:00 — Welcome and Introductions - 02:20 — Navigating adversities, authenticity, and connecting with others. - 07:27 — Corporate trauma during mergers, digital transformation. Pandemic. - 10:30 — Understanding trauma's dual impact on resilience. - 14:03 — Understanding trauma and its impact on life. - 17:04 — Persistent use of word "stupid" impacted childhood. - 22:01 — Individual experiences impact organisational culture and inclusion. - 25:42 — Identity confusion from multicultural upbringing, language impact. - 27:26 — Struggled with identity, felt like "citizen of world". - 33:15 — Found love, inner peace, and harmony. - 34:29 — Struggling to fit in male and female groups. - 39:42 — Reflecting on personal, family and spiritual growth. - 42:54 — Exploring new spirituality, transforming deeply, feeling different. - 47:23 — Visual person envisions journeys to find happiness. - 50:54 — Embracing diverse thinking, change, and detail importance. - 53:43 — Stories showcase impact, encourage leadership and reflection. - 56:25 — Book available in multiple formats, various retailers. - 58:57 — Seeking guests and feedback for podcast. ## FAQs ### Who are the hosts and guests featured in this podcast episode? The episode is hosted by Joanne Lockwood and features Samreen McGregor as the guest. ### What is the main focus of this podcast episode? The main focus is on adversity, authentic leadership, diversity, trauma, and empowerment. ### What personal experiences do the hosts and guests share in this episode? They share experiences related to identity, belonging, trauma, corporate transitions, gender identity, childhood experiences, and professional journeys. ### How does language impact a sense of belonging and identity? Language plays a significant role in shaping a sense of self, with examples of multilingual upbringing, struggles with language use, and the manifestation of belonging. ### How does trauma affect personal and professional experiences? The guests and hosts discuss the impact of childhood experiences, reinforced messaging, self-critical beliefs, and the role of trauma in shaping behaviour and emotional responses. ### What are the main themes related to authentic leadership in this episode? The themes include embracing adversity, navigating trauma, authenticity, removing masks and barriers, and understanding the impact of trauma on individuals and organisations. ## Transcript Joanne Lockwood: Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and I'm your host for the Inclusion Bites podcast. In this series, I have interviewed a number of amazing people and simply had a conversation around the subject of inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better place for everyone to thrive. To join me in the future, then please do drop me a line to jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.ukl, that's S-E-E Change Happen dot Co dot Uk, you can catch up with all of the previous shows on itunes, Spotify and the usual places. So plug in your headphones, grab a decaf and let's get going. Today is Episode 88 with the title Adversity and Authentic Leadership, and I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Samreen McGregor. Sam reen describes herself as an executive coach and a strategic advisor to leaders and organisations. And she encourages others to see diversity and trauma as a catalyst for empowerment. When I asked Samarine to describe a superpower, she said it is her unique blend of multicultural insight and transformative executive coaching expertise that she brings to the world. Hello, Samreen. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Jo. It's great to be here today. Pleasure. It's really great. I've had a great time chatting to you in the green room before we've gone live here. I can't wait to find out more. Really excited about this. So Samreen adversity and authentic leadership. What does Samreen McGregor: that great. Great start. Well, look, there's two different words there I guess I want to speak about. One is one that's very core to me and certainly been core to me in my conscious life over the last six or seven years. And that's diversity and in the current backdrop that we all share, whether it's the last four or five years before and during and after the pandemic, or whether it's the very current, what I would call polycrisis of a sociopolitical economic, environmental, health, all of those factors in the current reality are volatile. They're changing, they're significantly altered. And although that may have been true 100 years ago, for those who lived, our access and our experience of those factors are particularly magnified at the moment. And so adversity is really something that I would suggest not many of us escape. And those adversities can span from being very personal, very internal, very intrinsic to us all the way through to quite externally driven and manifest in how we live, in our behaviours and how we work. And I feel that the skills needed to learn how to navigate adversities and live with them and work with them are truly critical at this time. And then authenticity. Well, I work with many people across many industries and many organisations and businesses, and I have done for well over 2023, 24 years. And throughout that time, whatever the context, I have experienced a number of factors that get in the way of how we connect with one another. And to use some psychological terms like masks and even metaphors like shields, we bring them with us to the places that we socialise. We work even in our own homes, in our own families. And there are very legitimate reasons why these masks or shields or barriers support us at times and that can get in the way of us being our true selves. And so I think if I combine the two words and not necessarily force them together, I think they both play an important role in how I learn about how I study and research and how I work with the people that I work with as an executive coach, as a consultant over the years and as an advisor and even as a friend and as a mother or wife. In all those contexts, the adversities that I face are a part of what make me me. And I would suggest that the same thing would apply for most of us. That's a beautiful Joanne Lockwood: start. I love what you're saying there and we don't think about some of the things that go on our lives as adversities necessarily. We hear a lot of people talk about resilience and if you're old enough back I think it was the 80s or 90s, we talked about bounce back ability, didn't we? That kind of the ability to be knocked down and get back up again. So what you're saying is we're all going through something and whether it's on a macro or micro level, we're all having to exhibit that resilience and deal with the diversity we're facing. Because I'm just thinking about what's going on in the world at the moment. We look at what's going on in the Middle East, what's going on in Ukraine, what's going on in other parts of the world. Politically, there's a lot of challenges that many people are facing that is causing psychological. Samreen McGregor: It is. If I were to reflect on what I've learned just through my own life journey and how I see my experience with people day to day today in the current context, I would say that the word trauma has two just to simplify it, really. But it's not as binary as this, but two different reactions. One is to embrace it and to be curious about it and to work with it and to get help if it's causing effects that are getting in the way of our livelihood. But there's also an avoidance for it, towards it and a fear of what it is or even a negative connotation associated with it. There's a stigma in many cultures. It's very much associated with weakness, which isn't easy to be with. And I do see more and more and I think that the wake up call for me was right in the midst of the pandemic. I was working within a big corporate organisation going through a fairly significant set of transformations. One was a merger and the other was a digital transformation. Not just for the business itself, but it was attempting a transformation for the industry as a whole and the impact that that traumatic organisational experience was having on its people. In addition to the Pandemic and us being in lockdown. I remember sitting, as I was, working with quite a few teams at the time, and individuals and some of the leaders across the organisation, and just noticing that we were all living amongst some fairly unprecedented conditions. And that was a trauma that we were all experiencing in that moment. And so I started to explore and try to understand what is trauma? And I was very inspired by and supported by the definition that Dr Gabor Mate gives, which is that trauma in the Greek language is defined as a wound. And it's not necessarily a catastrophic event or, know, unexpected. It's what happen within our bodies, not just our psyche, but within our bodies. And unlike physical wounds that form scar tissue and that hardens, they stay with us. But they're very deep. They're very, very deep wounds and they're a form of trauma, psychological trauma, even physiological trauma, they interact with how our neurology works and how our physiology works. So, yes, in this current context, I would say many of us are holding and carrying these effects. Joanne Lockwood: I've heard people liken this psychological load we carry. As if you think about a sheet of a four paper, brand new out of the packet and you scrunch it up, even though you can flatten it back out again, it's never without the lines, never as perfect as it was. So even if we fix ourselves as much as we can, we still carry, as you say, those scars, those creases, those scrunch marks of that trauma that we've been through. I guess it's how we process that, because some of those are battle scars of resilience and some of them are maybe unhealed wounds that we have to process and deal with over time. So it's how we can move on from that scarring. Yes, I think that's Samreen McGregor: really palpable metaphor and it's very helpful because you just see the permanence and the impermanence of that, if that makes sense. It's both, isn't it? And I would say that in my experience, there are aspects of trauma that are incredibly supportive and they challenge us. In fact, they stretch from a neuroscientific perspective. They help us form those elastic possibilities in our synaptic activity and enable us to do more. So that's sort of the biochemistry of the resilience that you were mentioning earlier. But equally, there are layers of us that are affected either more shallow or more deeply by some of these traumas. And the quality of how we resolve or work with or understand the effects becomes increasingly important. The more I work with people and teams, the more I see that I often am coming up against. And they share and we're talking about symptoms and we're talking about undesirable effects that they're living with, that the coaching creates a safe container and a challenging space to work through. And I think the thing that I've realised is that the hidden effects, the unseen but felt effects of those unresolved aspects that live within us can be quite obscure, really subtle. But when we start to notice some of the connections between how they live within us and then how they influence our reactions, our responses, our behaviours, the actions we take, even how we feel, generally, the more I realise how important it is for us to truly understand some of these connections and the possibilities that come from learning how to not necessarily resolve them. Because sometimes they're not fully resolvable, but it's actually acknowledge them and notice they're there so that we can regulate how we are responding and acting and behaving. Yeah, I can imagine where Joanne Lockwood: if you're constantly having reinforced messaging through trauma, it can affect your sense of self. You internalise a negative state of who you are, your emotions, and they become self fulfilling. This internalisation could become self fulfilling, hard to move on plays into impostor syndrome or limiting beliefs or triggers anxiety when certain scenarios are relived. And that must be really I guess everyone's going to be different on this and the way people deal with that, but it's going to exhibit itself in stress different ways of communicating, less responsive, the emotional intelligence takes a hit and they may not be as self aware of their behaviours. All these kind of things kick in when you're trying to maybe work through those traumas of the past even though they're maybe subliminal. You don't know you're going through that trauma or reliving that, but there's something. That'S triggering it is I mean, Samreen McGregor: I recently did a talk and I'll share the story that I shared during that talk because it was one that came to me as I was preparing and classifying different versions of trauma. And I think it's important to notice that some of us might respond and go I've never been traumatised because I've never really had anything really significant happen to me. But I started to explore that spectrum. You've got these moment to moment events that happen. Some of the typical contexts for that are childhood and during childhood we experience adversities traumas challenges. They could be anything and they form an imprint, they form some sort of imprint and the extent to which those imprints are negative or a wound that can sort of follow on later on in life will determine whether it's a trauma or not. And then we've got these incidences throughout our lives when we're perhaps more mature or have far more conscious ability to work with them. But even then they leave imprints. And these imprints again, have characteristics around how we respond to those imprints. And sometimes they're connected to our childhood, sometimes they're just connected. And so I'll share two stories that maybe brings this to life. But the first story, the one that I mentioned in the talk. My dad is a very bright man. He's Indian. He's from India. Because I'm half Venezuelan, half Indian. My mother's from Venezuela and I was born and raised there. But my father, he came from a family of nine siblings. He was the eldest boy and he was born through the turmoil of the Second World War. And when his two youngest brothers were born, his father had already retired and he was burdened with this mantle of responsibility that he would have to and in those families, it was a Muslim family, it was very important that the eldest brother, the eldest boy, looked after. There was second kin and his grit bore fruit because he incredible. Got a full research fellowship to Stanford University in the US, took a boat, a big ship, and went to Stanford and ended up with a PhD, a master's and then a PhD, rather. And then he did another PhD, by the way, later on. This is what my dad's like. And by then, his family had been forced out of India through the partition. And so, thankfully, he was able to provide quite a lot for his family. Now, the relevance of that story is the weight of a word he used towards me throughout my life, and the word was stupid. I know it sounds a bit embarrassing to even say it, it's, like, so trivial. It seems really ridiculous, actually, when I even say it out loud. But throughout my childhood, he did call me stupid a lot, and he still does, by the way, and I'm nearly 50, so it's that kind of it's gone on and on and on. And I remember in my teenage years, and maybe early 20s, when I'd get really angry and say, why do you keep calling me that? It doesn't matter what it is. Whether I've stacked the dish wrong and my dad's quite OCD in the kitchen, or whether I've answered an algebraic equation wrongly, or whether I've made a decision with a boyfriend that wasn't one that he'd like. All of these different examples were all classified for him as stupid. And what I realised later on in life, and again, this has taken quite a lot of personal work, is that my relationships with bosses, often male, I would go above and beyond my call of duty to make sure that I didn't come across as inadequate or stupid. So I'd work myself, solidly my ambition, sometimes gets the best of me, and I would do anything to get the acknowledgment, the feedback that not only was my work complete, but it was outstanding. And the more I got this positive feedback, the more I'd see out these challenges and relationships. And it was extraordinary. And to the detriment of my relationships, as in friendships, even my relationships at home, I'm a mother, I've got two children, and at times my ability to be a good parent. But at work, it was my ability to set boundaries and manage them. So it's a very trivial word, used frequently and often. And look at the impact it had on my behaviours, professionally. Listened Joanne Lockwood: to you speak. And I, too, am a survivor of the word stupid. Throughout my life, my father used to use that kind of word, or if not that word, but trivialised my contribution to something, my effort, my attempt. I went through a cycle where he would never let me write anything in ink until I'd written it in pencil first. He checked it was okay, and then I could ink over the top of it. So if I was writing an application form for a job or something when I was in my teens, or if I was writing some homework for school, I had to write it out in pencil first, make sure that it's done correctly, and then I was allowed to ink it over because there was no trust. I wasn't allowed to make mistakes. And I think we think talk about things like psychological safety. You need to allow people to make mistakes because you don't learn by getting things right first time, every time you don't know where you're going wrong. So I have a similar history in trying to prove everybody else wrong about me. It's driven me, but it also manifests itself as in procrastination, I won't start things unless I can finish them perfectly. And I've had to recalibrate perfect to being good enough. And I've started to understand that good enough is good enough. And, yeah, unless you're a brain surgeon, perfect is the only outcome, but good enough for most things. It's the 80 20 I've had to learn about 80 20. I've had to learn that perfection is the enemy of progress, et cetera, et cetera. But it's taken me a lot of my life, and I still have those flashbacks of not being able to do things unless I can do them better than anybody else. And I also seek a bit of validation and personal validation. And I don't hunger for well done, but I want people to know that I'm the best I can be, even if it's just them giving me a nod or talking to me or treating me in the way that go, yeah, Joanne's really good at this, or Joanne's top of the class. And I end up gravitating to senior roles purely because I want to keep testing myself and testing myself. Testing you've got what you're saying there resonates. I can see that. And all of Samreen McGregor: those examples are I really connect with. And it's interesting that in an organisation or in any sort of corporate context or organisational context, we've got individuals who are coming with these sorts of versions of these sorts of experiences and whether they're a deep wound that affected them, some people are less affected, and there might be other factors. Know who they know. Carl Jung would say that their disposition would be different. Yeah, but actually what's interesting is that in many know there's an intent to set psychological safety and create those sorts of messages, narratives, conditions, expectations but this part of the puzzle plays a significant role. It doesn't matter how many times you expect leaders or cultures to shift in line with some of these factors and conditions that are needed to invite for example, inclusivity or a sense of belonging. And I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about belonging, because I've certainly had real challenges belonging in many contexts throughout my own life story. And all of these expectations are only one part of the equation. And the part of the equation that involves the individuals themselves truly understanding how to receive that message, how to engage with it, how their own personal story, like you and I have just shared, might interfere with their ability to adapt in line with some of these expectations. It's quite Joanne Lockwood: challenging, it's quite hard. Yeah, you mentioned belonging and I often talk about belonging and to try and give context that belonging isn't the same as inclusion and in the same that being alone is not the same as being lonely. There's nuances and you can be included yet still not feel belonging. How does that manifest itself with you? I've got my own anecdote but I'd love to hear your manifestation of belongingness if you like. How do you know? So, look, Samreen McGregor: as I explained my sort of national background, my father, in the end, married a Venezuelan woman, who he met at Stanford, actually, and then he followed her to Venezuela. And he was lucky because he was a petroleum engineer. And Venezuela is a very rich oil well, has been a rich oil country for many, many well for many years. And I was born there, along with my brother. He was seven years older than I was and we went to an international school because both my parents had studied in the States. So they wanted us to learn English firsthand and be bilingual and have that international. So the teachers that taught at the school were highly likely to be American because of the geographical location of Venezuela. And I found know it was great in many respects because there's lots of different cultures but those who were Venezuelan and who were in the international school tended to have some international flair to them many of which also continued to have a Venezuelan more of a Venezuelan background. But then you had Americans who came from the States would come and live there or any other nationality. Some would travel and be either diplomatic children and would travel and live elsewhere. But the effect of all that was I ended up having quite a mishmash of an understanding of what my core identity was nationally. And to make things even more confusing, and this was very confusing, my father had been persuaded by a medic that it wasn't advisable to teach a child more than one language at a time. So although I was learning Spanish and English at school and I was living in Venezuela, so we all spoke Spanish at home, we were only to speak in know see, my mother mother tongue is Spanish and we weren't allowed to speak Spanish. And to this day, it's really interesting, Jo, because my brother and I never speak in Spanish together, even though both of us are fluent. My mother and I was in the car with a friend the other day, in fact, on Sunday, and I called my mum and we were talking in English and she goes, do you know? And she was Dutch and she said, do you ever speak to your mum in? I'm like, well, actually, sometimes not really and it's that kind of thing that happens often so this language thing has really impacted me and not in a bad way necessarily, but I'm very conscious of it, so that's one bit. The other thing is that having grown up in Venezuela and then moved to London when I was 14, went to a similar kind of school. So, again, quite sort of disparate, I never genuinely felt I had, as I said, a core identity of who I was and from where. So I used to speak to my dad a lot and say, So what are we? What am I? And he'd say, oh, you're a citizen of the world. And although that sounded really and nowadays we see all these Third Culture kids or certainly it's more talked about, I'm sure that they existed back then, like me, how clearly I did. But it was quite destabilising and disorientating. And I never felt I belonged anywhere because I was always the weird one. In fact, I remember joining an organisation for the first time in my early 22nd time in my early twenty s and I introduced myself as a mutt. And people would look at me and say, why do you call yourself a mutt? So that was my experience of it and my sort of existential crisis growing up. And it sounds a bit dramatic, but genuinely, it was quite confusing. And then, I think, as I've gone through life, I'll tell you one other thing, is I'm married to a British man and we have two kids, a boy and a girl, and 16 and 13 now. And they have very British accents, all three of them. And I do get corrected often. And, yeah, the references are different. Sometimes it just feels a bit you know, I can't go back to Venezuela. The situation there has been, unfortunately, not great. We have travelled to yeah, I'm never quite like everyone else, I don't know. If Joanne Lockwood: that makes sense ask a question so what's your internal in your head language? What do you count to ten in or add up or do you dream in? Do you dream in English or Spanish? Yeah, but I have Samreen McGregor: dreamt in both if I'm in Spain or in Venezuela or in a Spanish speaking country, I will dream. It's funny, it's a conversation I've had recently because we were in Spain last summer, two summers ago, and I was dreaming in Spanish by the third day because I'm very. Yeah, so Joanne Lockwood: you can drop into native mode without having to translate. People Samreen McGregor: who only know me as speaking English see me speak Spanish, because my whole mannerisms change. And I'm totally Latin, so I do have both. Yeah. I don't use it as much, though, sadly. I think it's fascinating that Joanne Lockwood: you communicate with your mum, who is native Spanish speaking In English I find that when I find with a group of multinational people at a conference or around the world, everyone tends to gravitate to English. And I've noticed this. I was having a conversation with a couple of Dutch people and I stepped out the conversation and the two Dutch people kept talking in English and they looked at each other and said, can we just swap to Dutch? Is that okay? Everybody? We need to have a proper conversation, though, in Dutch. And I think as a native English speaker, and that's my only real language, I'm very privileged that a lot of the world will default to English in the absence of any other common language. And you don't realise how lucky I am of being in. Even if it's not the most popular language in the world. It's quite a dominant language. It is the majority, isn't it? It's Samreen McGregor: definitely in working life. Joanne Lockwood: I promised you my story. I suppose, so I didn't realise about belonging for a long time in my life. I suppose I marched through life hunting for something that I could never find. It was like this. You're turning every stone, turning of each rock, looking for something more, getting yourself into things, hoping that the destination or the end of this journey would be the thing I was looking for all my life. And I kept hunting and hunting and hunting and never found it. I think when I got into my mid 40s, that's when my gender identity kind of started to become quite dominant in my thinking. And also it started me thinking about my I had an It career. I ran It companies for 20 odd years. It started me realising that that wasn't my destiny either. I fallen into this in my early 20s as a hobby that turned into a career. It was never something that really, really excited me. And I think if you've heard the Japanese word icky guy and that sweet spot in the middle and I started to realise, even though I'd never heard of that word before, that I was always missing the thing that you love. I could earn money. The world needed it, I was good at it. But I never had the thing that I loved. I was dominated by making money and I was good at it. And people said I was good at it, I think in my mid forty s. And that's what struck me, is that you have this midlife crisis, you wake up and go, Hang on a minute, I'm now old enough to say no. And I think I did. I just stopped and said, hang on a minute. So I explored my gender identity at that time and took the decision to gender transition at the age of 52, much to the dismay of my family, I'm still married and I've still got great kids, so it's a happy story there. And I sold my It business and I became a professional speaker around inclusion, belonging and also trans rights, trans awareness as well. And suddenly I discovered that I was in alignment. All four of those boxes were now ticked. I was now doing something that I love and I was the person that I'd always been missing the bit never fitted before, I was always in the wrong queue, I was always never quite figuring out why it was going wrong. And now I always describe this as I went from a period of my life where my head had noise in it, there was two conversations, there was arguments, there was debating with this kind of this masculine feminine energy in my head, always trying to have another thought, another conversation, another secret or something. And I can only describe it as silence. When it's silent, it is truly silent and it was never silent in all my life. And I could sit in a chair with no music, no noise, no nothing to stare into space and my head is empty and I can either wander off, I can ideate, or I can just let time go by without thinking and I could never do that before. Somehow I found that sweet spot in my life where everything kind of fits. But what I've also realised is that I haven't rediscovered where I belong. I realise that whilst I'm included in events that my male friends put on, they go for a drink, they go from real, they go to the horse racing, they do all these sort of things and I'm invited, I turn up and I have a great time but I leave without a sense of fulfilment. I leave feeling that wasn't me. I tolerated them, if you like, it's not them, it's definitely me, it's not their fault or anything they're doing, it's just me. I realised that I don't belong in that male culture and that's what I found before I gender transition, that I was in that male culture and it was rubbing me, which is why I never felt and I didn't realise till I left it what was going on. But I also have a struggle is I've been out with female friends, we've been bricklane in London, we've gone out drinking and stuff and I haven't quite found my belonging in a group of female friends. I don't have the same shared. Lived experience. I don't have the same growing up at school, all the kind of things that young girls, young women, teenage women go through, I haven't had that experience. I'm trying to find my new sense of belonging in that environment and that's really, really tricky as well. So I'm kind of caught on this middle ground between not feeling I belong here and not feeling I belong here, yet I'm included in both. And it's not a worry, it's not something I play about, but it's something as I'm talking about it now to you. It's something I do conjugate and play with in my head occasionally, trying to find the secret source of trying to solve this riddle of puzzle, of how I rediscover my belonging. So, yeah, that's how I would say. What an amazing Samreen McGregor: story of belonging. Gosh, it's really got me in here. I'm holding my heart for those who can't see me. It really has. And I guess some of the questions that are coming up for me around what does belonging feel like? What has belonging feel like? Felt like, rather not feel felt like. And I guess, what are some of your expectations about what belonging feels? And I think expectations are interesting things, aren't they? Because, yeah, they are. Joanne Lockwood: I can't write down the piece of paper what belonging means. It's very ethereal, very kind of undescribed. I can give some metaphors. The metaphor I often use to people is I know when I walk into a coffee shop, if this coffee shop is for me, whether it's the way I'm treated, the way I'm served, the blend, the brand, the colour, or just that nice sofa. And I sit in this corner with a nice sofa, and I just feel kind of cosy and comfy and safe and relaxed. But I know if I walk into a different coffee shop, I don't feel that. And it's not a familiar coffee shop, it's knowing that the coffee shop I'm in, wherever in the world that may be, it just feels like my kind of coffee shop. So that's all I can describe. I know instantaneously when I put this coat on, when I put that pair of shoes on, when I sit in this chair, it's for me, that's how I describe it. And I often use the if you remember the sitcom Cheers, there's a bar where everyone knows your name and I always listen to the theme tune and it just brings that sense of belonging. You walk in there and it's my place. And that's how I describe belonging, that I don't have to think about anything other than just being me and being who I am. And it kind of works. Samreen McGregor: But it's the essence of what we feel. I mean, gosh, that song and the theme tune and that yeah, I can imagine that's. Well, I can feel it. I can definitely feel it. I can see. I think many Joanne Lockwood: of us felt that if you ever watch Friends and Rest in Peace, Matthew Perry that Central Perk, the coffee shop they were in, that was their happy place, their sense of belonging. It was kind of them, wasn't it? And I think that's, I think, the root of that, I think that's why so many people resonated with that sitcom, because it was that created the belonging that's in you. You wanted to be in that flat. You wanted to be in that and no matter Samreen McGregor: what happened, it was containing the mole, wasn't it? It was just a really safe. Joanne Lockwood: They drop in if it's one of them or two of them, or someone will come in and join them. Samreen McGregor: Very much. So thank you for sharing that. Joanne Lockwood: Yeah. How do you hunt down belongingness, then? Do you have a similar feeling? There are a few things that came up as you were talking, actually, because Samreen McGregor: I'm going through not a midlife crisis, I don't know whether it's that or I'm actually going through this real sort of very different experience, a bit like you, actually. My job has been my hobby and mainly because I've loved the work I do, and I continue to, by the way, I do really enjoy the work I do and I would count myself in maybe 15% to 10% of people who really, truly enjoy what they do. And I do feel that my family is just really sacred to me and for lots of reasons, actually, we had a very big upheaval six years ago when my son wasn't well, and this is part of what I'm about to say, but we had an unexpected paediatric cancer journey to go through with my son. And so when you said you wouldn't want the brain surgeon to not be precise and make mistakes, it was a brain surgeon who saved my son's life. As a result of the last six years and us shifting and changing the constellations of our life, I've become really aware of my physiology, coming back to the whole concept of trauma and adversity of the impact that those psychological imprints have on our physical life, for obvious reasons, because my son was nine when he was diagnosed. So I'm eternally curious about why. What is it that contributed to that? Because it wasn't genetic. So I've been on a journey personally in going down that whole psychological, embodied consciousness route and also become quite spiritual, not in a religious sense, but there's something greater than me that I'm sort of trying to understand and I'm doing quite a lot of work in mental health. I'm dipping my fingers in lots of different approaches where we alter consciousness to truly go deeper into ourselves. Breath work is one of them more recently. And I'm toying with another other things. And the more I experiment with some of these forms of understanding myself, going a bit deeper. Healing, actually, from my childhood as well as my recent trauma as a mother of a nine year old and a seven year old daughter who felt very abandoned for two years while all of our attention was on our son. And then coming back and repeating myself back up again and trying to get back into professional life. All of that healing that I'm doing now, every time I go deep into that kind of work, I feel a form of alienation from the status quo and I go back into a corporate environment or I go back into work. My normal work. Normal? And I don't know how to whether I can even use the word normal, but what I've been doing familiarly for many, many years. And then there's this whole area over here that I'm learning about, that I'm becoming more and more curious about and actually being blown away by that depth, that spirituality, that deep mental health kind of work, not just for myself, but with others. And yeah, belonging starts to get I really connect with how you describe that because I'm not sure I fully belong in this familiar place, but I'm definitely not fully here because I'm integrating with people who've been there on this path from it whether it's indigenous tribe members or whether it's people who are working with body work and yoga and breath work and mindfulness, which I haven't. I mean, I've done this, but I've not practised it or used it as part of my profession. So, yeah, I don't know whether that sort of resonates. And then, of course, I bring it home to my husband and my kids and they go, what's happening to you, Mummy? What are you doing? And there is some sort of transformation happening and it's extremely deep. Joanne Lockwood: Do you find yourself in an eternal battle, trying to find the why and the reason for something? Or are you able to have a self affirmation? You can step out of the why, not needing to know why. It just is, I would say, when. I'm in my little Samreen McGregor: why is this? Everything was fine. Why am I having to sort of ruffle my own feathers, put it that way, or the feathers of my life? And then there are times when I just feel it's absolutely right. It feels like this is my calling, I'm seeing things. My vision for the next 20 years is clarifying at a fairly rapid pace and I don't even need to know why. It just feels like it's. Yeah, I was going through my Joanne Lockwood: reinvention reboot, however you want to describe it. A lot of my trauma and pain and confusion, all those kind of words, were driven out of trying to rationalise because I was a logical person, I had to solve this problem. Why? Was I trans? Or was I trans enough? Or was I just kidding myself? Can I just shut the lid and get on with life? Just don't be silly. Get on with it. I went through some dark times over a few months, never depression. But yeah, certainly crying, can out of bed understand who I was, couldn't sleep. And it was just the affirmation. I am. That was the answer to every question, every self doubt, every confusion I had. It didn't have to have a why, it just was. It just is. And even now when someone says to me what's being trans all about? And I say, I don't know, I can't explain it, I just am. It just is. There's no reason, there's no logic. You can debate with me all you like around this biological fact or that biological fact or this opinion that I just shock my children to go that's fine, I don't need to have that answer. I just am. I can't explain it. And for me that's put me in a happy place. Not in denial, I haven't brushed it under the carpet. I've just realised I don't need to solve that question. I am is enough and it's more than enough. And maybe that's part of the affirmation that I needed to get on with life and tackle things in a different way and enables me to feel that sense of self empowerment, I think. But not everyone's able to find that, are they? I think that's kind of the when we're talking earlier about the trauma, the diversity, we get locked into that place where we can't find the light at the end of the tunnel, can't find the combination to the lot. I'm Samreen McGregor: just curious. That's what people are struggling with, perspective. I'm just asking, so how did you find your I am? Where did it come from? How did you meet it? Joanne Lockwood: I'm a very visual person. When I'm asleep and I'm ideating when I'm thinking, whatever it may be, I imagine myself walking down a path. If I'm going to do something tomorrow, I will play through what the road looks like, what the car looks like, what the journey looks like, what the car park looks like, how I open the front door, how I get into there. So I visualised the entire journey in my head and I think what happened was I was doing all of these scenarios and all these permutations trying to find the door that would open. I think I just got to the point where my brain sort of said, you're okay here. You don't need to find a door. You don't need to get out of here. You just got to find your happy place. You just got to find yourself now. And then I think just that one realisation. Then everything just disappeared. There was no doors, there was no barriers, there was no fence. There's nothing holding me in anymore. I was now free of those mind barriers that I had because I didn't have to justify myself to anybody. And I use another metaphor example. In the first Matrix film, right at the end, right at the end, after all of the film, keanu Reeves and Neo is flying through the air because he sussed out that he isn't governed by social constructs and rules. He can just be him. And once he freed his mind and freed himself, he was able to take that control and manipulate the world around him. I'm not saying I want to manipulate the world around me, but what I mean is I'm now no longer manipulated by the world. If you like, I can step out of that and I think that combination of thinking is so empowering, it's gorgeous. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, Samreen McGregor: that's my life. Similarly, I do often use those two words and I often encourage my daughter to yeah. Joanne Lockwood: And you don't need to find I mean, I know everyone wants five. Whys? To find the solution. And yeah, sometimes it's useful to drill down onto things in the business world. But actually, sometimes there is Samreen McGregor: no things to ground. Some of this transformation that I'm going through and transition I'm going through from the cognitive to the less cognitive, and that less cognitive does include things like emotions and psychological and spiritual. I do encourage us, my clients, to notice a lot more how much we rely, even in the workplace, on our cognition rather than on so many other things that we, as humans, have available to us. But since I would say since the Industrial Revolution, where far more of the scientific method evolved and the far more mechanistic approaches to how we make things and sell them and transaction on them, that focus on our mind has really, really served us strongly. And there is a space for us to amplify that and expand it much more now beyond our cognition. I Joanne Lockwood: fully recognise the world needs to be made up of a diverse ways of thinking and just in the fact that I'm happy with not knowing everything about me and why. We do need people to challenge, we do need scientists, we need people who want to do the detail, we want people to evolve and change things. I think what I did was I stepped out of a world where that was me wanting, being in It computing. It was very binary, very black and white. It worked, it didn't work. If it did work, it should work again, type stuff. And I realised that I thought I had attention to detail, but actually I don't. I like there to be detail and I like there to be a process, but I don't necessarily want to be the one who has to find it or follow it. And I stepped out of that, forcing myself to do detail that I wasn't really cut out for. So we do need we need it all different personalities, different ways of thinking. And now I found my way of thinking, I'm quite comfortable going, that's not me anymore. No, I don't need to play that game. So you wrote this book year or so ago, published for about a year. Tell me a bit more about the book. So the book Samreen McGregor: called Leader awakened. Why? Accepting adversity drives power and freedom. And I remember at the very beginning when I considered writing the book, I really thought about my target reader who was that person picking up the book and getting something out of it and what experience I wanted them to have. Look, I think that it served three purposes for myself and my aspiration, is that it catalyses something for the target readers. I think that the first purpose it served for me was it was a really important catharsis. And the catharsis for me was because I believe that in order for us to be alive and well and maintain a healthy well being, but also do the things that really motivate us and be aspirational and sort of have some sort of proportion between those different forces in our lives. I felt it was important that people recognise what are the things that happen in our life? Stories that then have an imprint that guide us through life, consciously or unconsciously. So that was the second purpose and it's articulating it by telling a story. And there's several stories about me, there are several stories about the clients I've worked with and that's individual clients, as well as organisations within which I've worked, as well as specific teams. So there's some really lovely cases in there that bring to life a lot of the concepts and then there are trends and research topics in there that have formed my professional suite of interventions. Not all of them, but a lot of them. And so really, the third thing for me was the purpose was to showcase how I work and the impact it has and the difference it makes with those individuals and those teams and groups that I work with and organisations with whom I've worked. What I really want it to bring the reader that picks it up and immerses himself in the stories and in some of the topics is to look in the mirror, but not just to allow that image or that light to bounce back, to go a bit deeper. I introduce a concept called refraction, which is a physics concept, a bit like reflection, but if the speed at which the light hits the surface is slower, it can actually shift the angle of the outcome of that refraction. So I'm encouraging leaders. People, and I believe most of us are leaders in some context, whether it's a parent, whether it's a professional in a functional context, whether it's, I don't know, someone in a current government position in one of the current well, I don't know, nations that are certainly going through quite a lot of challenge. We're all leaders in our own right. And so I'd really encourage leaders to slow down, to take the space, to really refract and understand themselves at a deeper level, to also step back and look at the context around them and the bigger picture. So I offer things like systemic thinking to help really understand and amplify how you might understand the context around you. And most of all, it's really a compassionate companion for people wanting to understand themselves and their relationships and their own health and well being. Wow. Wow. I'll have to go and buy the book now. Joanne Lockwood: I presume it's on Amazon, is it? Well, look, there's Samreen McGregor: several ways to get it. It's now also on Audible, so if you like to hear them, you can get it on Audio version as well. But, yes, it's available on Amazon and in most retailers. I've got a website, Leaderawakened Co UK, that if you visit that website, there's lots of different options that you can buy it, but also gives you some information about it. And it's got the first chapter for free, if you'd like to read that before you buy the book. And, yeah, we do have a leader awakened on LinkedIn, as well as on Instagram, if you want to see little snippets of content that either are found in the book or things that I'm doing and my team is doing, and our work with people. Joanne Lockwood: If anyone wants to get in contact with you, what's the best way to. Samreen McGregor: Definitely look me up on LinkedIn? It's Samreen McGregor. And you can also, as I said, visit that same website and there's links there you could get in contact with me through that. Fabulous. Well, I know I've Joanne Lockwood: got six audible credits left. I'm going to invest one of those in a minute and cheque out your book. And next car journey. I'll put that on. I'm off to Up North next week, I think, so I'll have that. I've got a couple of hours in. The I would love Samreen McGregor: that and I would love to hear, especially given the stories we've exchanged today. I found them really heartwarming. So thank you. Joanne Lockwood: Yeah, likewise. Thank you. Well, brilliant. I mean, if you're listening, you could probably tell we could carry on this conversation all day and all night. So this has been an amazing conversation. Thank you. And we got quite deep at times, which was really, I don't know, quite cathartic. I don't know if you felt the same, but yeah, definitely cathartic. So, thanks, Amreen, and I'm sure you, the listeners, must be taking lots away from today's episode. It's been fantastic. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for getting to the end and staying with us. Thank you. If you're not already subscribed, please do subscribe to keep updated on future episodes of the Inclusion Bites podcast. That's B-I-T-E-S. Share the love. Tell your friends, tell your colleagues. Find us on itunes. Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, we're everywhere. Leave us a review, please leave us a review. Give us five stars. Tell us how much you love us. I've got a number of other exciting guests lined up that I'm sure you'll be equally inspired by. Over the next few weeks and months. And, of course, if you're listening and you'd love to be a guest, I'd love to have you on the show. So please drop me a line to jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk. And if you've got any suggestions on how we can improve, I'd love to hear those as well. And finally finally, my name is Joanne Lockwood, and it's been an absolute pleasure to host this podcast for you today. Catch you next time. Bye.