We recently connected with Judy Ryan and have shared our conversation below.

Judy, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Everyone has crazy stuff happen to them, but often small business owners and creatives, artists and others who are doing something off the beaten path are hit with things (positive or negative) that are so out there, so unpredictable and unexpected. Can you share a crazy story from your journey?

One time I was starting a culture change process with a client of 550 people. The CEO contracted me to take their 20 top executives through our “deep-dive”, yearlong, guided culture transformation process. Our immersive implementation process required them to do individual work (online training and filling out a workbook and post-training reflective survey), then lead small groups on a rotational basis to review, discuss, and practice what they learned, then mentoring each other (in peer and reverse mentoring) on what they learned, their barriers, fears, and how and when to apply it if they determined they would. This was about 4.5 hours of their time per month for 12 months. About 2 months in, the CEO said, “I change my mind. I don’t want these 20 to have to do any individual work or fill out a workbook or survey, or be prepped and lead small group discussions and practice, or spend time in mentoring. I just want you to lead all 52 of my leaders (now everyone with direct reports, from supervisors up to the leaders in the C-suite) every other week, for 6 months. I told him what he would gain and lose. He was ok with this change in plans.

In their first session, I taught them a tool called the MIND TRUST. It was one of two tools to eliminate gossip. In it, they would face one another in a one-on-one, eye-to-eye manner, and make four commitments to one another. These are:
1. “I commit to you I won’t say bad things about you behind your back.”
2. “I commit to you I will come to you if I have any issues with you to directly work them out.”
3. “I commit to you that if someone comes to me to say bad things about you, I’ll stop them (maybe offer them the other tool called healthy venting).”
4. “I commit to you to try to get the person to go to you directly and work the situation out with you so they won’t hold onto the grudge or take it to others.”

They all loved this tool and agreed they would do this with each and every one of 52 leaders, one-on-one. Two weeks later, at the next meeting, they all said they had done this.

Now fast forward to the end of the program. One of the Directors called me and says to me, “I lead 8 managers who were all in the LifeWork Systems program with me. We have learned so much from you (over 30 concepts and tools) and yet we are struggling with how to apply what we’ve learned and are still having significant interpersonal problems with each other. Can you come in and work with us for a week or so?” I said, “I happen to be meeting with your CFO today to see about funding some other work. I’ll ask her if there is funding for this.”

When I called the CFO, who’d also been in this training, and asked her about funding the work this Director wanted from me for him and and his managers, she said, “Oh, he really needs help! He was saying such terrible things about me at a meeting with his managers the other day. It was so bad that two of them came to me to tell me what he was saying about me.”

I asked her, “Did they stop him? They have a MIND TRUST with you, right?” She said, “Oh… I didn’t even think of that.” I said, “I guess you didn’t ask them if they went directly to him to discuss this because they had a problem with him over this and have a MIND TRUST with him?” She said, “No, I didn’t think of that either.” Then I said, “When you discovered you had a problem with him for breaking his MIND TRUST step 1 with you by talking bad about you behind your back, did you go to him to work it out per your commitment to him per your MIND TRUST with him ?” She said, “No. I actually went to his boss (a SVP) and tattled on him and then found out that the SVP was also present at the meeting and he didn’t stop him either.” (He was also in the training). She then said, “What is wrong with all of us?!!”

I said to her, “When you got tools like the MIND TRUST it was like I gave you a tennis racket and you thought it made you all tennis players. To learn tennis, you must study it, learn the relevance of and your honest decision to commit to the game and the rules and commitments, get out on the court, practice, receive coaching and support, fall in love with the game, develop muscle memory and then you MIGHT be a decent tennis player. The same is true of the tools we provide. You were not expected to take the time to reflect on and write about those 4 commitments in the MIND TRUST which are not easy to live into. If you had, you would likely discover you were not as eager as you thought to make those commitments. You did not discuss this tool as a group or try this on in a review session where you shared your individual writings, thoughts, and other considerations, You did not review and practice or discuss this tool within your mentoring and really stay on top of your living into it. That is why when you needed the MIND TRUST, you did not even think about it. There were 10 of you (all leaders) and none of you remembered it. This is why an immersive implementation is vital. While this may not be the craziest story (we have many), it is a very memorable one.

Judy, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I have always been drawn to unorthodox methods for forming authentic community and developing people into good citizens. For over 30 years, I have turned my interest into an obsession and in 2002, a business consulting and training company specializing in culture change and leadership development.

My work started when I was a young mother in my 20s and wanted to be a better parent. I came upon a psychology model applied in a parenting program that has been and continues to heal my own childhood developmental trauma (everyone has this to some degree) and nurtured me into the kind of mother I knew was best for myself and my family. I determined to help my children develop as leaders AND followers, and I intentionally created so many ways to help them feel empowered, lovable, connected and contributing rather than afraid of their power and unable to use it in intentionally positive ways.

I knew intuitively that what I was learning in applied Adlerian psychology (Alfred Adler was around during Freud and Jung and coined the phrases “inferiority complex,” “social interest” – caring about what we cause others – and “spitting in your soup”) I knew that his work was something that would help people in and outside of parenting and a vision began to grow in me to eventually take this model into the larger world anywhere there is hunger and willingness for much-needed positive change. I knew this work of mine was out ahead of its time and now it is beginning to converge with what is being promoted by thought leaders and major consulting houses like Deloitte and McKinsey Health Institute.

Here are key questions that have led to liberation in my life and in the lives of many people I have worked with over the years:
• How can we shift our civilization process so rather than diminish people and demean the human spirit, each person is supported in expanding into their wholeness?
• What can we do to create a world in which it feels safe to be powerfully influential, inventive, vulnerable, and collaborative?
• What does a home, school, workplace or any other organization look like in which people thrive rather than simply survive?
• How do we avoid that which makes us feel and act like victims and rebels and adopt that which makes us feel empowered, lovable, connected, and contributing?
• What conditions and conversations bring about mental wellness and healthy social functioning.

When Beethoven looked at the piano keys, he saw a symphony. When Michael Jordan saw a basketball, he saw greatness. When I meet people, I see powerful, amazing human systems. I see the unseen, the story that is more powerful than the surface. Instead of holding onto it, I share that understanding about what makes people act their best, with everyone I meet in order to help them move from fear to freedom; to see a path forward that is hopeful, harmless and helpful.

I believe that at their core, (unless they are acting from a serious mental illness), people are and want to be great and when they are not acting great, they are discouraged. And more than ever, that story – the one really happening under the surface when we are at our best – is what each person needs to see and embrace and be able to replicate. Not the story we scare ourselves with from limitation and fear and conditioning. I want people to reframe their self-perceptions that inspire shame, so they can access their wisdom and intuition and have fun creating a bright future.

The old ways of understanding human systems are not working anymore – the way of superior versus inferior or management versus employee or parent versus child. These are win/lose and while they are wildly promoted and modeled and held sacred, they are very costly and crippling to so many people who then struggle internally and externally. Actually, those warring philosophies never did work, not without serious consequences. I saw a yard signs one time that said, “Be a parent, NOT a friend!” That is only necessary to believe when we use control version responsibility based systems. And I decided we need such new systems to create authentic relationships, equality and reveal the brave people we really are.

We need to be more human – as leaders, educators and parents. In order to do this, things must get real. We need to consider our process when feeling frustrated, confused or paralyzed; the days when people are not getting along, when life or work is failing to thrive, or when you see people with a dull expression on their face? Maybe it is you wearing that expression. Your bold life is within reach it takes you must reach within, past the protections that keep you from addressing real issues. I have always known that people have a good reason for what’s happening and that it is not their fault.

It is clear now more than ever that our current human systems are not working well. News headlines make us all too aware of the meaning of the term dysfunctional within schools, families, businesses and institutions. Schools struggle to effectively educate. Many businesses, marriages and families are in a state of crisis. Then there’s the current state of mental health, the economy, welfare, our judicial systems, the environment, and governments (to name just some).

Mutual cooperation and collaboration are essential as we become ever-more technological and global. The speed of change is growing faster which creates greater stress and a pressing need to be more inter-dependent and streamlined in our evolution. What once took years and even decades to create, now takes only months or days and our outdated human systems cannot keep up with our present or future.

In my work, the answer is and has always been a responsibility-based model in which people share power, are equipped to co-create change, and independently self-govern so that everyone can blend to create rapid, effective change that meets today’s needs. Then each person is first and foremost purpose-oriented and focused on evolving values and high vision. Next, everyone can harness the creativity, gifts, initiative and talents available in themselves and in the groups in service to that purpose and the greatest expressions of it.

Then people act by a set of principles in which power is shared, knowledge and initiative are distributed at all levels (no matter the age, title or tenure), and self-governing, socially and emotionally intelligent individuals and teams work to accomplish their goals with faith in each other to deliver their part. Imagine personal and professional settings in which everyone in them learns to share decision-making, problem solving, and whole tasks are delegated to individuals and teams like my first 4 children doing the grocery shopping alone when only 5-12. While today I might be arrested for letting them do such a thing, it was through experience at the cash register, handing over hundreds of dollars because they had been trained and trusted that they became role models for their friends and other families. This and so much more can and does happen, interdependently.

In my responsibility-based system, internal motivation, accountability, emotional intelligence and authentic teams are top priorities that replace conventional control tactics. Only then does joyful participation from passion and purpose become the norm. I have successfully created this very system in my own family, my own company and in many client sites, including businesses, non-profit organizations, churches and schools. An example of the holistic approach in this was found in our school reform work when we involved parents, teachers, administrators, STUDENTS, and members of the community all simultaneously. We won awards for our multi-year, multi-school reform work in bringing our innovative model to them.

The job of a good leader (whether at home, school or work) is to help each person become able to respond to their life tasks (responsible) in their life and work; to help them by transferring responsibility to them in such a manner that they discover their own purpose and how to live from it. This is freedom and the only REAL fulfillment. Then they can do the same for others.
We live in exciting times with tremendous opportunities to expand and I continue to be passionate about all that I do, seeing it is now needed more than ever. Win/win is seeking to be born and win/lose is often holding on with a death grip but it will not win.

As a woman leader, I believe men and women are called to lead side by side in a balance of strength and collaboration, focus and nurturing. This is why my work has been described as trauma-informed, creates psychological safety, results in appreciation of differences and inclusion to a high degree. Our model is Teal (the word in organizational development for the latest evolutional model for shared power, freedom WITH responsibility, purpose and values-based functioning, with leader/follower agility or flexibility as a priority, where critical thinking is promoted, and holistic authenticity and consistency is practiced.

What I’m most proud of is that I have created a comprehensive, scalable, consistent, sustainable, proven culture model that elevates all people out of a sense of inferiority so they feel honored for their power and guided well in the use of it. I like that it can grow with any family, school or organization and be self-managed so that people all share a common way of building trust and effectiveness in their life and work together. This is my mission, “To create a world in which all people love their lives!”

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

For me, I think it’s aligning my purpose and values with a vision that feels super aligned and full of joy and “rightness” to me. For example, when I first started my company in 2002, I was very focused on developing clients in multiple markets but I also had a huge heart for helping others like me with children such as parents and educators. When I was living from this very unconventional parenting process I was using, I often felt like the outlier I was. My neighbors would wonder why I was not rewarding my kids for a good report card and why I used this tool redirecting negative behavior rather than just punishing them for poor behavior. Sometimes I felt alone in this because most of my friends, family, my children’s teachers and the neighbors did not know what I was doing.

One day I wrote a vision into my blueprint (a tool we teach) in which I was working with all of the stakeholders in the life if children and including the children themselves. I wrote a happy story of working with schools where every adult and child in the life of the child (plus the students) had a common set of concepts, terms, tools, and processes and could understand and support one another in ways I had never been provided.

At that time, we were working in many school districts but only in one-off projects in which we did a full or half-day professional development workshop and that was about the extent of it. There was this one woman in the St. Louis Public School District over all of Alternative Education. In the St. Louis Public School District, there were 110 public schools and she was a frequent advocate for us. I was in the neighborhood and stopped by to see if she might be there. I wanted to simply thank her for her support. She was there and when I went in and thanked her, she said to me, “I’ve been hearing great things about your work. I have a strange question for you: What would you do if money was no issue for you?” I thought it strange but I had a ready answer, and I said, “Oh, that’s easy. I just wrote a vision on this. It was to work with parents, teachers, students, administrators (counselors, everyone) and some of the neighborhood training and coaching them and helping them to have family and classroom meetings and helping the kids learn all the same tools too so everyone would be on the same page.”

To my surprise, she turned around and grabbed a paper and handed it to me saying, “I like what you just described. This is a grant application for the Walton Foundation (Walmart) and it’s for $300K. It’s due in two days and I don’t have time to write anything. If you want to take a stab at it, and I like what you write, it I’ll sign off on it and submit it.” I was astounded. I went home (never having written a grant application) and created a 40 page proposal with likely more like $600K of services for training and coaching for all the parties I mentioned in 6 schools for 3 years. Within a month, we had been awarded this $300K and could start the project the next school year. We are a for-profit company so this would not have been possible if the school district did not act as the fiscal agent.

A few years later, we were told of an $800K project in school reform for private and public city schools. This was for projects funded by a tax called Proposition K for kids. One of the initiatives was to help more inner city high school students stay in school and graduate. We partnered with a non-profit who basically handled the finances and provided some meeting space and we won that multi-year, multi-school money and won an award (the Vanguard Award for Innovation from the St. Louis Mental Health Board who was overseeing our project) for our work in helping more teens stay in high school and graduate. We received the largest endowment a for-profit company than ever before.

A few years later, we almost were given a partnership with Build-A-Bear Workshops (BABW) which are headquartered here in St. Louis, Missouri. I was friends with the Director of HR who was raising her kids with Adlerian psychology-based parenting and loved it. We proposed a cause marketing and new profit center for BABW to the then-founder Maxine Clark. She said yes to a set of services called “Build-A-Healthy-Family” (parenting) and “Build-A-Healthy-School” (parallel classroom management, etc.) After our meeting, my friend and I were super excited. She said she was surprised because BABW was still recovering (this was 2011) from the recession of 2008. They were barely out of the red she said. A few weeks later the founder sold the company.

This past year, we delivered a global mental health talk and from it met a woman in the UK over two private high schools. She told me that not only was she interested in a mental wellness culture model for her two schools, she had a vision to take such a model to all the schools there. We have a proposal out to her.

This September, I was asked to present to all the leaders in the global organization Parents as Teachers who also invited a proposal. My point it this: When I have aligned with a vision true to my mission and values, they keep giving for year. The same was true when I wrote a vision for my online training center and our comprehensive culture process. Clients and contributors to that process were coming out of the woodwork in ways I had never anticipated. So… the alignment and the writing of purpose/mission, core values, and visions, then if you need to, setting goals, procedures and roles from that forward, has been the most effective strategy in growing our clientele and our business.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

I have never really considered myself a writer but I have written two successful grant applications, a proposal that almost got us a global partnership with BABW and have to date a published book “WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH WORKPLACE CULTURE CHANGE?” (not self-published) and over 260 published articles. I still write monthly for one of 2 columns I’ve had (one was on “Emotional Intelligence” in THE WOMEN’S JOURNALS and another on “The Extraordinary Workplace” in THE ST. LOUIS SMALL BUSINESS MONTHLY.

We have also had the great good fortune to have people videotape interviews, customer testimonials, panel discussions, and case studies which have all supported our credibility in the marketplace. I have also been invited to present as a public speaker on local and national and global (virtually globally so far anyway) stages. One time I was presenting to a group at a conference called The Working Women’s Survival Show. My topic was “WHY WE GOSSIP AND WHAT TO DO INSTEAD.” This event was sponsored by a TV station. When they saw the name of my topic in the program, they invited me to do a TV interview on the subject.

From that, I received 4 more invitations to do TV interviews with other stations and have been interviewed on “Redirecting Negative Behavior”, “Emotional Intelligence.” “Repairing Strained Relationships”, “Productivity,” and “Male Gossip.” I have also been invited to speak on podcasts and radio programs pretty frequently which has all helped build my reputation and that of our company. To date, we do not find any direct competitors delivering our type of culture model in our immersive way.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.lifeworksystems.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/judy.ryan1/ AND https://www.facebook.com/lifeworksystems
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/judy-ryan/ (16,300) AND https://www.linkedin.com/company/lifeworksystems/ (1,800)
• Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/lifeworksystems
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/judyryan888
• Other: We also have an LMS site where we house and sell our online training programs. https://www.courses.lifeworksystems.com I also put both the personal and professional Facebook and LinkedIn sites in the spaces above. My personal LI has over 16,000 connections and my company about 1,800.