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Galen Low: Is it normal for work to trigger fight or flight? Is this just agency life or have we normalized something that's actually broken?

Abigail Jones: I would say it is common, but that doesn't mean that it's normal or sustainable. The way that the world is situated is such that ignoring our bodies has become normal.

Galen Low: What happens when people aren't having a discharge dance party? They're taking on the problems that they're responsible for, but aren't doing anything with them. How does that come out?

Matthew Fox: I remember I was working in big agency. I felt like I had this huge weight on my chest. I thought I was having a heart attack. I go into the ER, they run all these tests. And they're like, Nope, you're fine. That was just a panic attack. I can tell other stories about that, where my body was talking to me, I just wasn't listening.

Abigail Jones: Where's time and money invested? What is a value and worth here?

Matthew Fox: A lot of people will spend time trying to gain wealth, and then they spend their wealth trying to gain back health.

Galen Low: Welcome to The Digital Project Manager podcast — the show that helps delivery leaders work smarter, deliver faster, and lead better in the age of AI. I'm Galen, and every week we dive into real world strategies, new tools, proven frameworks, and the occasional war story from the project front lines. Whether you are steering massive transformation projects, wrangling AI workflows, or just trying to keep the chaos under control, you're in the right place. Let's get into it.

Okay, today we are talking about the impact of listening to our bodies and developing strategies around our body intelligence to become better leaders in an increasingly technology dominated world of team collaboration.

My guests today are both leadership coaches and operation specialists who happen to be on similar missions to help senior agency professionals become more effective leaders by tapping into what their bodies are telling them and arming them with strategies to leverage those responses instead of ignoring them.

Abigail Jones is an organizational design and development strategist who serves dual roles as Founder and President of Lead with Abigail, as well as Chief Operating Officer of Southleft, a boutique agency specializing in design system development and AI driven web applications for enterprise clients.

She implements custom operational frameworks and leadership programs for agency owners working with organizations like Big Sea and Stratosphere Digital to develop strategic facilitation skills and operational excellence in emerging leaders through assessments, coaching, and experiential learning.

Matthew is a senior project manager, operations leader, coach, and trainer with a strong background in competitive public speaking and conscious leadership. Matthew is also one of our DPM experts sharing his knowledge with our members through workshops, coaching sessions, and his signature reading recommendations.

Abigail, Matthew — thanks for being with me today.

Matthew Fox: Excited to join you Galen.

Abigail Jones: That was absolutely excellent. You have such a great radio voice.

Galen Low: Thank you, which I will now turn off. I'm told that I turn it on and off for the intro, and then I just go into regular mode, which I do not notice. But thank you, and thanks for both coming on the show.

I love these conversations where we can have two guests because we can get multiple perspectives. It's a bit more like a panel. I'm even gonna make it a little bit spicy. I'll come in and play devil's advocate a little bit, but I'm truly excited about this. I know that this topic of conscious leadership and understanding our body intelligence, like in a work context, it's a pretty broad and complex topic.

It could send us down a couple of unplanned but high value rabbit holes, but just in case, here's the little roadmap that I've sketched out for us today. To start off, I wanted to just get one big burning question out of the way that like uncomfortable but pressing question that everyone wants to know the answer to.

Then I'd like to zoom out from that and talk about three things. Firstly, I want to explore what conscious leadership is and why it matters in today's world of work. And then I'd like to dive into some practical examples of how someone could tap into their body intelligence to improve their leadership.

And lastly, I'd like to put that all through the lens of AI, where I'll play the devil's advocate, pushing back against body intelligence and conscious leadership. Maybe we can get a little bit of a debate going. How does that sound to you?

Abigail Jones: Excellent.

Matthew Fox: Sounds great.

Galen Low: Awesome. Alright. Here's the question I really wanna start with, and I want you guys to both be like brutally honest.

Is it normal for work to trigger fight or flight? Is this just agency life or have we normalized something that's actually broken? And then if it is happening to you regularly, what is your body trying to tell you? Abigail, why don't I hit you up first?

Abigail Jones: Normal, I would say it is common, meaning that we've made it a repeated pattern across agency life, the macro culture, but that doesn't mean that it's normal or sustainable. And the thing I'm gonna bring in here, the word culture is something that I look at both micro and macro culture. But Ed Schein has a definition of organizational culture that is very long, but I honestly think is worth reading. And culture is the pattern of basic assumptions a group has invented, discovered, or developed.

In learning to cope with its problems of external adaption and internal integration, and has worked well enough to be considered valid and trained to new members. And so that's where I think we've trained each other. It's been a response to how agencies have to work with enterprise and contractors. The way that the world is situated is such that ignoring our bodies has become normal.

Galen Low: That's really interesting. Like in other words, we may have developed it by accident because of these patterns, it becomes normalized. We think it's normal, but it's not necessarily natural and it's something that we could change even if we kind of developed it by accident or I mean in the agency world on purpose.

That's really interesting. I love that. That's a great definition. And honestly, because culture is such a squishy word to a lot of folks, I think that's like worth framing this whole conversation around in terms of the habits we build and like the sort of unspoken contracts that we build between one another.

That is the notion of work, that is the notion of teamwork and how our bodies play into that.

Abigail Jones: I love Oliver Sacks. He's a qualitative medical doctor who describes maladaptations quotes as brilliant ways of coping that have been needed maybe in the past and have served us potentially at one point, but that doesn't mean we need to carry on that way.

Galen Low: Very interesting. Matthew, what's your take, fight or flight? Have we normalized it? Is it agency life, culture? And if it's not something that's as great as we thought it was over the past couple of decades? Where can we go with it?

Matthew Fox: It's an interesting question because I think we've evolved from a standpoint of living in a world of constant danger.

So we evolved from that. You know, we have to survive. We have to put food on our plate. We have to find a safe place to live, and we're actually living in a period of time that our nervous system hasn't adapted to because we came from a situation that if someone was yelling at us or if there was a perceived threat in our environment, we had to be reactive.

We had to do that in order to survive. Now, thankfully, we live in a world where you can generally walk down the street in most places and feel safe, but those threats still feel very real to our bodies in work environments. And so it's very easy for our brains to jump from this perspective of the world is a scary place and I have to survive to a client is not happy about something.

And what am I supposed to do about that and should I be reactive? Well, 99.9% of the time, whether it's someone at work yelling at us or even someone at home, our nervous system feels like we're in threat. And so I think that's where a lot of that reactivity comes from and to the great points that Abigail brought up.

A lot of that is baked into agency culture. I would even argue it's baked into work culture. I've been in those environments where I can remember I was a lifeguard at a pool, very innocuous. Like there was certainly life or death situations that would happen if someone was drowning, but 99% of the time people aren't.

And a manager came in and they, I could just tell they were angry. Something had happened and they had walked up and thrown their keys across the room. They didn't throw it at any one person, but. My system didn't know how to react. At that point. I was like, something is happening and I didn't even have the tools that I have available now.

I just knew inherently that danger was present. It was mainly that another person was having an experience that my nervous system wasn't acclimated to or ready for. And I think that happens a lot with work pressure, where so much of agency life is built around delivery. It's built around performance.

It's built around metrics. I even think it's a extension of being a consultant, and consultants hold themselves to such incredibly high standards where you will have a breakdown after a call of what went right, what didn't go right. And although it's a feedback oriented culture, it can steer us into something is wrong and my body reacts because of it.

It's hard to say if it's the environment inherently causing it. It's hard to say if our nervous systems just haven't adapted yet. I do think that there's a very real piece where not a lot of leadership happens in agencies, and I say that from the standpoint of there's very little leadership training.

There's a lot of very passionate people trying to solve problems, and unfortunately a pretty big gap exists there.

Galen Low: That's really interesting. So I'm picking up what you're putting down. We've evolved this way to sense danger. But in this day and age in work, it's not the same danger. Our bodies respond to it because someone walks into a room and throws their keys or yells. That's, you know, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution triggering us.

But we also need to like be aware of the fact that it's probably not a life and death situation at the agency in the boardroom, and we need to manage that.

Matthew Fox: It's unconscious. Like this isn't something where we're tracking that, where we can walk in and, you know, we're in a very expanded state until something happens and then we contract.

I have a quick visual aid for that where if you imagine like a hoberman spear and we're going along and then someone yells where our nervous system reacts before our brain has a chance to say, oh, well this person is having an experience over here, or I'm not in threat. I think it's much more about self-awareness.

I think Abigail, you had something to add?

Abigail Jones: Yeah, well, just thinking about the feedback loop that you talked about in debriefs, when what went wrong, what went well, and there's chemicals, cortisol, flooding through our bodies, adrenaline, which can be helpful if we need to respond quickly, which maybe we've had to do in the past, but it might not be serving us.

But I think the conversations around that we have and the language that we use fuels it in ways that are subtle. Particularly around the pushing through and the badge of honor and sort of overriding our body awareness and the subtleties of the information we're getting. We tend to say, oh, I only got six hours of sleep last night with a big smile and like, oh, it's so.

I think there's these subtle cues that are reinforcing the feedback loops to incentivize emerging and current leaders to keep operating in these ways that are unhealthy too, which just a plug for, there's small things we can do to say, I took a nap today and that feels indulgent and counter-cultural and minuscule, but that's a drop in the bucket towards, I think taking care of your body that can go a long way.

Galen Low: That's really interesting.

I love how it ties back to your definition that you shared earlier of culture and Matthew, the thing you said about some of this is unconscious. It leads us to building a culture where this is sort of normalized in terms of ignoring our body. I thought maybe we could take this opportunity to just zoom out a bit, because both of you have talked with me and members of my community about becoming better leaders by tapping into your body's like innate intelligence.

But for listeners who might be skeptical or maybe new to this concept, can you each define what that actually means, like in plain language?

Matthew Fox: It goes back to that self-awareness piece of how am I showing up in any moment? And then recognizing again, to use the Hoberman sphere. If I am here and something happens to my body and I'm contracting or I'm going down, can I have enough awareness so that way I can say, oh, my chest is tight, or my shoulders, I notice they're really tense.

So I'm leaning forward and I'm, maybe I'm. Not leaning forward from a sense of engagement, like I'm leaning forward because I feel like I'm under danger or threat and it's almost I, one of the examples I use, so I have a background in Toastmasters and I spent a lot of time working on evaluating other speakers.

Can you put a blindfold on and just listen to what's happening with the external world, and then can you go back to your internal world? And I think that's an interesting way to practice. The habit of self-awareness, because more often than not, especially as project managers, we live from the head up and it's figuring out how to go from the head down into the body.

And Abigail, I'm curious about your perspective.

Abigail Jones: Yeah, that was a great concrete example of using your body as a tool then to rework your nervous system. But I think at the subtle level, body intelligence just involves noticing when your jaw is tense, noticing when you're shorter of breath. When things are different, and then you can use that as information to perhaps pause before you make a decision or wait a moment before you send a Slack message when you're feeling some kind of way.

And I think it's very interesting that our body then can also be a tool. There's a body of work, a book called Second Circle. First circle is if you just turn your toes in, your whole body sort of orients your gaze turns down, and there's times to be in first circle when you're doing introspective work.

It's the do not disturb. We all need that time. Then just turn your toes out and you orient, and it's this Amy Cuddy power pose. Hands on your hips, you're ready to do an interview and you can use your body to. Amp up your energy when you need to give a speech or talk to a client about going over on their budget or what have you, but that conversation, likely what could best require is second circle, which is where your feet are parallel and you're balancing your internal and external awareness.

You're understanding and reading facial cues in the room and what have you, but you're also, maybe you can feel your heartbeat and notice. What's going on? And there was this interesting study about folks on the stock market. They took a random survey of if they noticed their heart rate throughout the day, that they could sense and feel their heart rate, their performance in.

Investing was wildly higher than the folks who were unaware of their body. So I think it's both the knowledge and awareness and then being able to refine and use your body and physiological systems as a tool over time.

Galen Low: What I find it super interesting is that it impacts decision making in other words, right?

Like, Matthew, you mentioned that we often think from the head up we're sort of ignoring or suppressing what our bodies are telling us, but actually we're doing it, we're leaning forward. Our heart rate is increasing. You know, we were sweating and those signals are actually the things where we're not necessarily going to make the same decisions as we would when we're in a state of lower stress.

And being aware of that's like that tie into the leadership bit, which is that yeah, you're gonna make different decisions, sometimes poor decisions under duress, whereas you could probably make a better decision if you gave yourself a moment to sort of be more aware and present. I think that's really interesting, that notion of like the external world, the internal world, and Abigail, that thing you mentioned about like the circles, which I will include a link to in the show notes.

For those listening, I'm like trying to do them as Abigail's talking. I'm like, okay, I'm pointing my toes in, I'm pointing my toes forward. I'm pointing my toes out. I'm putting my hands on my hips. And there's this like physicality that actually makes a lot of sense in terms of making us aware of the way that we are feeling or responding to the outside world, especially in stressful work situations.

I wanna kind of get into the benefits from there. Like that's actually a really good jumping off point because I think that makes it really clear. But I'm sort of at a loss for like examples. And I'm wondering if you could maybe each give me an example of like what conscious leadership looks like in practice and maybe if you can walk us through like a specific moment or scenario where you've seen this at work or where you've seen people not doing it and it's actually like caused problems.

Abigail Jones: Yeah. I was working closely with a leader who was about to hire a new person on the team. And so there had been a recruiter involved and hundreds of interviews to go through to find the right candidate. And there was at first a confidence and excitement in rolling motion to have this person on board.

And it got to the last interview and just in a sort of side informal conversation, this leader said, I just don't feel right about it. Like something. Doesn't sit right and I, everything on paper suggests that this person would be excellent. There's something not right, and I double taped and said, let's pay attention to that.

And it turned out that this person was not emotionally available, particularly to jump into a new work environment, a high stress sales role where this could happen. So it saved the company tens of thousands of dollars to not make this hiring decision. And it's hard because there's a sunk cost of working with the recruiter and bringing on the right person where.

You can get into the fallacy of thinking that you should just keep moving forward because all of the theoretical data makes sense, but not trusting that intuition can make or break. A lot of dollars at the end of the day.

Galen Low: That's an interesting example because there's almost both in there, right? There's the person making that hiring decision and sort of trusting what we call gut instinct.

But you know, that's also a squishy term, but also even like the candidate themselves, right? Like if you were the candidate and being aware that maybe this high pressure sales role, it's probably a bit of a stretch. You might not be in the right head space, but you're gonna go for it anyways. Which could also lead to many months, if not years, of, you know, being unhappy in a role.

Your employer's unhappy with you, you're unhappy with them. There's this sort of dance, and it's interesting the way you frame it. 'cause we say gut instinct, trust your gut. We say that all the time, especially in agency land, right? We're like, yeah, I just gotta go with my gut on this. We don't have time to do the statistical analysis.

We don't have time to do the research, especially in the hiring process where, you know, a lot of folks are doing like disc profiles, you know, the sort of psychographic analysis, making them do like a take home assignment. And you're right that all the data might line up and yet your body tells you something different. And sometimes that can pay off.

Abigail Jones: Which is also valid data. We don't tend to think of our body sensations as valid, and I think we can change that even just by talking about it and putting it down on paper as this should be in the budget line item or the decision making framework.

Galen Low: That's a fantastically good point. It's like the validity of it we kind of ignore. We're like, ah, it's not valid. It's just my feelings, my gut instinct. You know? It's not data. I like that framing that actually it is.

Matthew, do you have any sort of examples, sort of stories from the world of conscious leadership and how it's done and what happens when it's not done right.

Matthew Fox: I am sitting at my home office back in early August and I'm having a conversation with a coworker named Bob. He is a very talented creative director, and I could feel something was off. We're chatting and we have a particularly challenging client call, and I could just tell that Bob wasn't his normal self.

Bob was this type of person, very engaged, very loved by everyone on the team. The type of person that when they walked into the virtual room, the whole room would light up. It was almost as if they were bringing the sun, which is very funny because they lived in an area where there is a lot of rain and we're sitting there throughout the week going back and forth on Slack.

I'm checking with Bob. Is everything okay? And he keeps coming back with, it's fine. I'm just stressed, nothing to worry about. And finally I got him on a Zoom call and I go into him and I say, Bob, is everything okay? I noticed that was a particularly challenging client call and he came back. I, it's fine.

There's nothing to worry about. I could tell after engaging with Bob that again, something was off and in going back and forth. I used a specific tool with Bob to help him move again, and I'm using the Hoberman spear as an example. Like I can tell like he had powered down or he wasn't showing up and the client was noticing.

The team was noticing. After going through the coaching exercise, we checked in the following day and Bob was back. He was a completely different version of himself. That light, that inner life that we have, and you may have experienced this when you're working with people where one day they come in and it was in that moment.

Instead of trying to fix him, I simply held space for what was going on and he was able to get in touch with his body. He was able to come back to me with any fear, challenges and other issues that were going on at that time. And it was through using the tools that he moved through. And again, it was watching people's body language.

It was paying attention to what was happening for him. And I can even think back to myself in a time where I ignored my body signals. Agency owner and I had a conversation before a client call, and I thought I was being clear and telling them, here's the scope, here's what we're doing, here's what we should agree to, and not we get in the client call and the agency owner and a desire to make the client happy was over promising.

And so I am, my body was immediately reacting as the project manager because, as the owner promised timelines that we couldn't hit and scope that we didn't agree to, I noticed my shoulders were incredibly tense and I had this like almost overwhelming sense of like adrenaline that was dunked into my body.

And instead of waiting after the call, like I immediately called him after the call and expressed my frustration and anger and it came out completely in a way that I didn't want it to. Like I was completely in that reactive mode. I was completely in that mode where I was totally closed off. I wasn't seeing the possibilities that were available.

I was in this narrow mindset and it is certainly embarrassing to talk about now, especially as someone who wants to be able to like live and say there's a perfect way to do it. But if I could go back and do it again, I would take that pause. I would actually take a breath before providing the feedback so I could give it in a constructive way.

Now, thankfully the owner and I have a very longstanding relationship. It was received in the spirit and not the way it was delivered, but it's a really good example of how I wasn't seeing what was happening. I was completely reacting and operating from that place of reactivity.

Galen Low: I appreciate you sharing like such a vulnerable story and also it's so relatable.

Like who among us has not had that moment where, you know, we were reactive and then kind of regretted it. What I like about both of the examples is that moment of pause to kind of gather yourself and figure yourself out can do a world of difference. The other thing I like is that frankly, I was expecting you to say, oh yeah, I sat down with Bob for a week and we did like four hour sessions every day to teach him about this thing so that he was armed with the tactics.

No, none of that. You were like, I'm holding space for your feelings. I recognize this. I am aware of a change in you, and I kind of wanted to check in. Even just giving that moment, you know, maybe that's not the long and short of conscious leadership, but like, even just that moment where it wasn't like, Hey, let's do hours of training, let's do this activity together.

It's just like a quick thing and kind of getting them back on track can make a world of difference. And again, these are things where we're like, we don't treat this as data, but all of that stuff that both of you described is data.

Abigail Jones: And I think that's a brilliant thing that even emerging project managers can use when I'm mentoring folks who are newer to this field.

Doing exactly that, Matthew, where they have a sense that something is off, either because they're noticing body language or they get a sense that the client or somebody on their team is off and saying, Hey, can you meet for a quick second? Hopping into a separate space and. Even if they're like, oh no, I just had a bug in my throat or whatever.

And it could be nothing, but it could be something, and just giving somebody the time and space to be seen and heard for just a minute can be hugely powerful and anybody can do it. That's what I love about it.

Galen Low: It's really interesting.

Matthew Fox: I think one quick thing to add on to that, there's a couple things, like trust is a huge part of it.

I think that was something I, it took a little bit of work to like push through that. It's like, I don't know you, we've never been in the same room. Like I only know you from this little window that I'm seeing you from. And having that empathy piece, I hear quite a bit from project managers that we are arm share therapists.

I think that's a very challenging position to be in because then one of the things I'm playing around with is that. If energy can't be created or destroyed, we're taking on that energy. If we're acting as that armchair therapist for people in the organization, and then that's an unhealthy place for us to be, and so how can we create that space without taking on all that energy?

Abigail Jones: Discharge dance parties.

Matthew Fox: Yes. As my mentor, Julie Caldwell calls in like having like a freakout party or having like, like, oh no, everything is going crazy. And then you just like, you could have a minute where you're like, okay, you can turn your camera off, but like for the next minute, like just freak out.

Abigail Jones: Yeah.

Galen Low: I wonder if we can go there. I'm jumping around a little bit, but I think it's very relatable. That notion of like carrying the emotional baggage for the team. You know, being that therapist, whether you're a project leader or just a team leader or anyone really, any sort of professional in the situation could be really like absorbing some of this like emotional energy and not being aware of it or thinking it's their job and not really being like, okay, well I need to do something with it.

Like it's just like it accumulates inside. I like that idea of like having a freakout session, but like, are these like, you know, like official tactics, like where can somebody start dealing with or finding an outlet for the sort of emotional stress that they've been burdening themselves with from external forces like the team or other circumstances?

Abigail Jones: One tactic I'm working on with a group of leaders I'm doing a workshop series with is. A bio break and using timers as a facilitation tool for yourself. I have a watch, but you can do it on your phone. And Siri sent me a timer for two minutes and we're already taking bio breaks, drinking water, using the bathroom, and so typically you don't have to go right back to your screen.

Set a two minute timer and let your body move in whatever way you want, and you can dial between slow, medium, and fast and know what kind of pace you need. If you are discharging intense energy, maybe you need to jump around and do some jumping jacks, or if you need to amp up your energy, you can just do whatever you need to do in those two minutes.

It could be lying completely still and you still check the box and held that container for yourself to see what you need and move in a way that feels. Good, and I think that's a good start. That requires that you have some buffer. Which you typically have more buffer, I think, than we often think. But coming back to the organizational culture and how could you tell that a team is doing this is there's time between meetings.

There's 25 minute and 50 minute meetings scheduled instead of 30 and 60 minute that are just off the shelf. We just do that because it's the way that it's been done. But I notice and I've heard feedback of, I so appreciate this 45 minute meeting or this. Arbitrary amount that's more dialed into what we actually need to do to discuss and get the thing done, and gives me time to be human in between.

So I think that's a tangible, visible artifact layer of culture that you can see in a person or a team if they are making time for themselves to properly deal with emotions and to just be a body. We are so physiologically animal that we tend to just disregard and stay heads up and that's all we see over each other, so.

Galen Low: I even like the phrasing of bio break because we use it colloquially anyways at work right now to being like, okay, we gotta listen to our bodies 'cause we probably have to go to the bathroom every now and again. But why would that be different about listening to the rest of our body, right? It's like not just whatever, not just going to the bathroom, but also taking a moment to like listen to our body, to take care of our body.

And actually, Abigail, when you said it earlier. Discharge dance parties. I was like, oh, that's so funny. You mean actually discharge dance parties? This is a thing that like that one can do, especially if you're remote or can find a space shut off your camera or find a room, lie still dance. Like listen to what your body is like telling you to do as an outlet for some of the energy that you may have absorbed.

Abigail Jones: So there's a pretty hilarious video of a police officer singing and dancing to shake it off.

He's singing the words of the song, but talk about needing to emotionally discharge. And so I think having fun with it and making it a regular practice of a space you're already gonna be in your car.

Why not blast music and use that as an opportunity to, we'll edit out and say what you feel and just make more space to be more human.

Galen Low: I really like that. That's interesting. I wonder if I can maybe put you both on the spot in terms of stories about that because A, I'm so far like surprised, impressed that, I don't know.

I kind of came into this conversation thinking, oh, I'm gonna need to do a bunch of training. We're gonna need to like restructure how work is done. Around this idea of conscious leadership so everyone can kind of be more aware of their bodies. But so far, they've all been like pretty micro. Not in an insignificant way, but in a very organic way.

It's like add some extra time, hold space, be aware. Listen to your gut. These are not like massive structural changes. But I'm wondering if maybe we can like talk through some examples of like what happens when people aren't having a discharge dance party, you know, and they're sort of taking on all of these.

I keep saying emotions. That's not the only thing, right? I mean, yes, stress is an emotion, anxiety, but you know, the kind of like. Taking on the problems that they're responsible for but aren't doing anything with them. How does that come out?

Matthew Fox: I like to use the analogy of a cup, and similar to as this cup is filling up, it can overflow at a certain point, and our bodies are energetic containers.

And what can happen is that. As we're taking on energetic inputs, like right now, for example, there's a lot of anger and fear coming in from mass media here in the states. Well, if our bodies are taking that on and then we're bringing that into the workplace, if we as project managers aren't resourced and or our team isn't, if we do have that challenging client situation, if we do have that scope, budget and time piece that starts to go sideways, or it can simply be that maybe we got cut off on our way into work.

Starbucks didn't have our Frappuccino, whatever the heck latte. All those things add up, and it's almost like a sense that we overflow similar to that cup, and if people aren't taking care of this I know this used to happen to me all the time. I remember I was working in big agency with huge accounts, millions of dollars on the line.

I got to the end of a Tuesday and I was just so stressed out. I needed to do work, but I decided to take a self-care break. I went over, I got a massage, and I felt more stressed after the massage and went back to work because I was holding on to so much emotional burden and so much emotional energy.

The massage didn't do anything to move that energy, like it kind of felt nice. But I was still holding onto all that stress, and because I was still holding onto all that stress, I just brought that back into the workplace and it just continued to exacerbate things. And I even remember, and this is a topic that I wish people would talk more about.

I was working at discover Card at the time, and we had, I don't even know if I've told this story publicly before. We had a huge meeting and my manager happened to not make it to the meeting. I remember feeling an intense pressure of, am I doing it right? Did I say the right things in this meeting, my boss's boss was there, their boss's boss was there.

They were asking very direct things to me. So I got home later that night and I just, I felt like I had this huge weight on my chest and like I thought I was having a heart attack or something was going on. So I go into the er, they run all these tests and they're like, Nope, you're fine. That was just a panic attack.

And I can tell other stories about that where my body was talking to me. I just wasn't listening and I wasn't, I didn't have that awareness of listening.

Abigail Jones: I appreciate you sharing that. I've seen some ER visits and long-term effects in heard of leaders losing their vision for short or longer periods of time as a result of long-term stress and not dealing with it.

And it's emotional contagion, it leaks down. So I worked with one leader this summer who was only Slacking the team between 6:00 PM and 1:00 AM on Thursday through Sunday. And then the team was just bewildered and we had so many conversations about why this was not working. And one of the people, the directors, was getting frustrated with his kids.

There was ripple effects into the community that is. Unintentional, but that behavior has consequences. So I think it's important to recognize that, and I think it's very important to say in this conversation that there are different levels of tolerance and risk equations for when people can feel and to be cognizant.

That you are not always afforded the opportunity to feel your feelings at work, to have these breaks to discharge in ways that feel safe and good, and there's more options than we think. And people have unique circumstances for a variety of reasons that puts them at different parts of the playing field for when and how this is accessible.

Galen Low: I really like that. It's funny because it's such a murky and complex subject. At least it was for me coming into this conversation. But what I like about where we've gone so far is it actually makes it quite simple. We opened with this like definition of culture. We start talking about listening to our bodies and how we've evolved and how we sort of manage this.

Matthew, I really like that notion of capacity, right? We are a cup. We can only be so full, it's gonna overflow if you start at like 90% full. Then you only have 10% capacity before you overflow, and then you might need to do something about it. But you can see, and like tying back to Abigail, your story about, you know, somebody slacking at night where I thought you were gonna go with it was a culture thing.

I thought it was gonna be, this individual started setting the tone where people thought, okay, this is the way our culture is. We should be working between 6:00 PM and 1:00 AM. But also you flipped it, which is that everyone was like worried about this person. They're like, what is going on? And Matthew ties back to your Bob story, right about like actually being aware of other people's behaviors and emotions and your own.

And kind of recognizing it so that we don't perpetuate a culture that we probably built by accident of like agency, and I say agency, but what I really mean is like hostile culture. And I think it's a lot of organizations are suffering from it. They celebrate it knowingly and sometimes unknowingly, you know, we're like, oh, I'm back to back.

And we're like, yeah, badge of honor. Or Oh, I only got three hours of sleep last night. Kind of badge of honor. And yeah, it is rare, Abigail, for me to hear someone say, I took a nap, or I got a massage in the middle of the day. And then even the folks who do like again, and like you mentioned, Abigail, like drop in the bucket in terms of change.

It kind of ties back to me. I almost wanna just, it's making so much sense to me right now that I almost wanna bring it back to like some of the practical steps. And I think like we've talked a lot about sort of the individual bits and like team levels of stuff, right? Like setting up a meeting that has some extra time in between, you know, giving yourself breaks, listening to your body.

I wonder if we can go into like the organizational layer as well in terms of like deliberately creating a culture that is not. Ignoring our persons from the neck down in terms of listening to our bodies. There's two places I want to go with it. One, I'm just interested in like where to start and then I wanna go into like how to measure if it's working, maybe I can throw that over to Matthew first.

Just in terms of like where can an organization start at an individual level. I think we've given some examples, but if an organization wants to actually get away from this like toxic hustle culture. What's the first step they should take?

Matthew Fox: Awareness, I think is the first one. There is something called organizational trauma where there are things that have happened in the history that still informed how people operate and focus on a day-to-day basis.

And I would love to say I'm an expert in that area. I am not. But it is very interesting just in journaling, doing 360 reviews, having some baseline awareness of what's happening within the organization. I think more where I go to is I think it's okay to see most, if not all agencies have some of this. So instead of focusing so much on diagnosis, I just say, bring in the tools.

And I look at that from a standpoint of something I aspire to do, I haven't quite done yet is to start all meetings with my team of, again, are you in a contracted or expanded state? And if you're in a contracted state with the Hoberman sphere. Can we create space for that? Or is it something where, there's another organization where they used to cancel meetings, so if anyone came in and they were contracted, they would say, great, we're not gonna hold the meeting until you're able to get back into an expanded state.

Now that's a bit of a luxury because you can't do that all the time, but it can be, and I do this with project management teams that I lead. I'll go in and I'll say, where is everyone? Or how are people doing? And you can do like a thumb meter where a thumbs up is everyone is great. A thumb in the middle is something maybe up.

And a thumb down is, okay. Someone's in a tough spot. Managers can use these tools, any leaders can. There's a another tool that I'm happy to elaborate on later called Sensation, Emotion, Want that my mentor, Dr. Julie Caldwell, brings in and that's another great way to start to introduce it. Again, I think from my perspective, people do spend a lot of time with the diagnosis, and this isn't so much a medical thing though.

It has very real medical implications. It's not so much a disease though. There is a lot of this ease that is happening. I would much more champion the tools and bring those in because I think there's benefits to them and it brings an awareness regardless of whether a company is at a place of a lot of in researching for an upcoming talk.

There was a ton of EOS shops that I talked to, or entrepreneur operating system places, and I would bring up certain things about conscious leadership and they'd say, oh, well we don't have an issue with accountability. We don't have an issue with responsibility. So to your point, I think the tools and the space for them are as if not more important.

Abigail Jones: I'm gonna dovetail off that. You can build into the EOS scorecard metrics around body awareness or buffers and that kind of thing. I think that's a good place to start measuring and creating your own customized metrics that makes sense for your team at the moment you're in, that you're checking in on a regular basis at your L 10 or your level 10 weekly meetings.

But backing up a bit, I love the check-in question, and one I've found works well too is what's the weather like for you today in your world? And that can give people this abstraction and this layer of. Keeping confidential and not having to say too much and just saying It's stormy. It's stormy, and leaving it at that, which I found to be useful.

Coming back to Ed Schein, our culture definition fella. He has an iceberg model of culture that you can see the artifacts just below the surfaces. Your values, which is both the espouse, but also wheres time and money invested. What is a value and worth here? And then the basic assumptions. So a team could scrappily do a quick, what are the current artifacts we see?

What is current state, what is ideal state? What is the gaps? And just do an in-house quick assessment of where they are, where they wanna be, and what might be needed to move towards the ideal state. The other more tactical tool I've used is the Leadership Circle Profile 360 tool, like you're saying, to get a snapshot of self-awareness, how you rate yourself on creative competencies, reactive tendencies, how other people see you.

You get 15 to 25 people to report and then you see that in a single diagram overlaid to see is how I think and understand myself, think about myself the way that others see me, and I find it less that. The less valuable over the years of doing this assessment that a leader is high creative capacity and low reactive tendency.

It's more that they're in line and of understanding how they see themselves and how others see them, and they're coming to grips with where their downfalls are, can be even more powerful than being a high creative capacity leader.

Galen Low: That's so interesting. I like that. And it ties back to what Matthew was saying about the sort of like internal world and external world, right?

And if there's alignment or awareness about how you're seen or how you're perceived and the ways that you react, like it's not necessarily this journey to become a more creative leader and rank more highly in these things, but just have that like alignment. I wondered if maybe I could just like take it one step back because Abigail, you raised a really good point that especially in the agency world, we've built up this hustle culture, you know, where we are almost always at capacity and we're back to back and like even just like I understand the argument of like some of these tools are useful and simple to implement.

But even starting that conversation, I would find a little bit difficult. How do you tell somebody who's like for years, been like ignoring their body and just like pushing through and has been like celebrating themselves as that person who can just grind and is resilient, doesn't need a lot of sleep, and just like has very strong work ethic.

How can you explain to them that suddenly spinning on their heels and paying attention to their feelings is actually going to make them a better leader?

Abigail Jones: It's funny because a lot of leaders come to me and say, my team needs leadership development. They need to pause. I'm good.

Galen Low: Huh?

Abigail Jones: And they're the example.

Galen Low: Interesting.

Abigail Jones: I had a conversation with a leader of such team this week and just said, it's like, what kind of support are you getting? And just keeping it casual and informal, and that can gauge where they're at in terms of readiness to change or talk about it. And it may not be the right time, but a question I got asked this week is, what do you wanna be known for?

That helps me zoom out and think about long-term legacy. And I've been doing some futures thinking and Training Institute of the Future around strategic planning, but the recommended view to think internally and externally is 10 years. It puts us in a third person state of mind rather than a first person.

Where you can set goals that get you outside of your current reality and you can think about what you wanna be known for. And I think having that timeframe of a conversation with a leader can help connect with their values and see if they're living today in a way that's gonna get them to what they wanna be known for long term.

Galen Low: That's interesting. I like that sort of, yeah, almost third person perspective on it in that timeframe. Matthew, I'm imagining you've gotten some pushback from some agency folks and other folks that you work with where they're like, yeah, Matthew, that's fine for somebody else, but I'm not that person. I do want it to say on my tombstone, didn't sleep much, always responded to Slack.

You know, Hey, is that okay? And like, you know, or if it's not, then how do you start that conversation with someone who might not even be aware that they've got room to grow as a leader and thinks that everybody, you know, to Abigail's point, everyone else has a problem. I'm fine.

Matthew Fox: I love the heart of this question, it ties back to like, I wanna make a loose analogy here.

I've always been curious about what gets someone to buy or take action or I've got a history in a variety of different communities. I used to be very involved with adventure racing, and we would sit at a booth and try to get people to sign up for our club. It was very low investment on cost, but it was a high investment on time and some people would be interested and others would just be like, oh, that's nice, and they would just keep on walking.

I think the same thing applies to this, where this isn't for everyone. There are some people out there, and I forget the technical term for it. Some people aren't in touch with their body or emotions, and it goes beyond the difference between feeling numb and being out of touch with them, and then just simply not being able to recognize them.

I would say pushing that audience group aside, you also have. And I wanna make sure I use the right terms here. It's sociopaths and some even psychopaths that are in the professional workplace. I hope if anyone is listening that you don't work for one of them because you will probably recognize pretty quickly if they just walk all over everyone's emotions.

That would be something that I think would be, I would walk very carefully around that population. Because I'm not equipped to handle someone if they are operating from that standpoint because they will outmaneuver or outwork any of the tools that I recommend or bring in. So I, those are extreme examples, but I mentioned that in the spirit of if someone is willing and interested in doing this type of work, I assume, or sense there's an openness there.

And if they're not, it's something again that Dr. Caldwell goes back to. If someone is willing to shift and be aware, that's great. But the point is less about if someone is willing and more about awareness. And that's usually where I try to start, is teasing out I was working with someone who had some challenging dynamics with another coworker and offered up the tools and we walked through them and they came out of it and they're like, yep, this, I don't really get it.

Like I'm gonna have to go back and do my own thing. Again I go back to something where it's been a mountain, if you will, like, I'm out here in Denver. We have mountains all over the place. It's been a mountain for me to climb and try to figure this out for myself because I have a dad who was a drill sergeant in the army.

Both my parents were from the East coast and acted like emotions didn't exist, and I grew up with that model of. Very little emotional awareness, very little emotion literacy. And if I am running into someone else at that point, again, I'm gonna start with awareness. I'm gonna start with are they recognizing how they are showing up, or is there any type of sliver of safety that I can create in a conversation where they'll recognize and come back and say, oh wow.

I didn't realize the impact I was having on other type of people. It can be something as simple as their body because if someone is walking around with constant headaches or back tension, or one of the feelings that we go back to a lot is fear. And if you have a constant stomach ache or digestive issues or something else going on, the medical world is very quick to say, okay, well you have IBS, you have, let me pathologize it.

Let me figure out what's wrong with you. Instead of simply going back and saying, are there any danger or threats to your world right now? Can we take some time and explore that? Because a lot of the time cognitively, people will distance it like you're referring to, but they can't ignore their body. And a lot of people will spend time trying to gain wealth and then they spend their wealth trying to gain back health.

And what ends up happening in that dynamic then is people will pay attention to health, people will pay attention to like. I can't sleep. I get like two or three hours of sleep at night and if you can crack the door open and help them recognize what type of impact that's having, then I think it comes back and it shifts the conversation from the tools and all these other things to, hey, there's very real visceral things.

And if you give these tools a chance, then you might notice that again you go back into that place of expansion.

Galen Low: I like that idea. A underwriting that, yeah, this might not be fair everyone, but also, I mean, it can start with awareness more than the willingness. And it is our bodies and we all have one, I think. Fair enough. And safe enough to say, yeah. Yeah.

Matthew Fox: I don't think AI and like the machines have taken over. If you're ai, if you're listening to this in digesting this in the future, if you have feelings, come talk to us. We would be very interested in that. That'll be a whole different conversation.

Galen Low: I'm actually ai, like actually just from here below, it's just Cyborg.

Oh. I wanted to dive in with that AI lens and maybe play a little bit of a devil's advocate because ai now we're talking about it. It's everywhere in our work. It's changing the way that we work and things that used to be very squarely human interactions with emotions and what have you are arguably being abstracted away.

I know folks who are using LLMs to sort of rinse or deify their like knee jerk reaction to something, right? So they don't go in and throw the stapler so that the email doesn't come back, you know, T and angry and become a career limiting thing. In some ways it's like. Giving us a bit of emotional support, maybe positive feedback, maybe sycophantic positive feedback, but you know, positive feedback nonetheless.

And in some ways it's keeping us like arms lengths from some of the stressors, such as like being isolated or blank page syndrome and imposter syndrome. Some people might argue that AI is teaching us to be better humans in terms of communication and maybe acting as a bit of like this, like emotional lubricant that reduces the need for us to like be spending so much time paying attention to our bodies.

Just to play the devil's advocate. Conscious leadership, love the idea, but like, isn't it now out of date in the age of ai, aren't we moving away from the sort of early evolutionary stage where like it's like survival and instinct and emotions and aren't we now actually just head people from the neck up?

Like what if this is not the thing that drives us into the future because we don't need it anymore?

Abigail Jones: AI can rewrite the email and craft your language in such a way that can deliver the tone that you're looking to convey, but it can't tell you when to send the email. The timing is crucial and being able to gauge the right format and the rights.

Way to deliver the message is never gonna be dehumanized. We're going to need to stay reading body cues and bringing that information as valid data into the equation.

Galen Low: It's really interesting about the timing thing.

Matthew Fox: I think AI is really great at making sense. A lot of information and data except for emotions.

Emotions, although they are information and data are the one thing that I think will always be a gamble for ai. We as humans and Stantec and one of my favorite attachment people talks about how we moved from stick and rock and tree to trying to describe the complexities of what's happening in our internal world.

And good luck. Most people, myself included, there's a sender and a receiver in communication. And no matter how perfect I am on the sending side, if I do all the things correctly, there's still a receiver and I cannot control that. And that's the same thing with ai. AI will never be able to control how things are received, regardless of what happens.

Galen Low: Interesting. Even if I were to kind of go along with that, I think the one thing that's sort of nagging at me is this notion of time spent. We were talking earlier, Matthew, you mentioned some organizations will do a little pulse check at the beginning of a meeting, and if not everybody's in the right head space, they'll cancel the meeting.

And I'm just going in my head. Wow. Like, how is work gonna get done? We are spending so much time being therapists for our employees that we need to build a culture where meetings just might not happen, even if something is due within that week. It seems to me like maybe some of these tools and tactics slow us down so much that we actually won't be competitive anymore.

I'm wondering, like prove to me what is the business case for this? Like how is this a worthwhile investment from a business standpoint, not just a being good human standpoint?

Abigail Jones: My mind goes to flow states and how that can be a huge fuel for productivity and acceleration and giving somebody agency to make decisions that maybe they need to take a nap in the day, but their heads down work that doesn't involve other people can happen between seven and 10:00 PM and that's what works for them, their families.

That can be a huge way to, validate them making decisions that are best for their bodies long-term and is best for the team delivering the product in a maybe faster than the traditional nine to five way than was originally expected.

Matthew Fox: I'll quickly add on a couple things with that to borrow something from the fitness world. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast, and there's very much this concept of something you've alluded to quite a bit earlier in the call.

It's not that this is a huge investment. There is a little bit of a learning curve, but the results far outweigh. Like we're not human doings. We're human beings. And the more we come back to that, especially in an age of ai, the more we're allowed to connect. If you and I have a great relationship, for example, like we've met in person, I'm more willing to work and achieve and do things for you because I know that relationship foundation is there.

So I look at these as foundational things that to some of the points that Abigail was mentioning about music earlier. I dunno if it's doctor, but I know it's Ethan Cross has done a lot of research around emotions out of Michigan and goes into the state change that music can provide for us, and that's happening over seconds or minutes.

It's not like this is days or hours of work. It can simply be, Hey, I had a really rough meeting. I don't have enough time to create space for this, but I can put on some music to help shift my state early until I do have space to acknowledge and. Address what was coming up because it's not always about dealing with it in the moment.

A lot of it can be dealing with it when we do have time and recognizing the value and coming back.

Galen Low: I know I'm supposed to be the devil's advocate right now, but I'm like, that's resonating really well with me. A) Abigail, your notion of like these leading indicators of like, is there a correlation between people working regular hours and spending time with their families and our performance as a sort of lagging indicator and Matthew that like slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

The idea that. Actually, I don't know if there's that many people out there who would say, oh yeah, it really worked, but I freaked out and threw a stapler at somebody, and then we kept going and like, yeah, we're so high performing. This is such a good, usually there's like even just sitting down with HR slows you down.

You almost hit somebody. We need to sit down and deal with this that is slow and it's not smooth. Whereas slow is smooth and smooth is fast. That's really interesting. Gosh, this is such a deep topic. I would love to dive deeper, but instead of making this like an epic episode, maybe what I'll do is have you both on, again, honestly, this has been so much fun and very insightful and hopefully insightful for our listeners as well.

Before I let you go, where can folks learn more about you? Abigail?

Abigail Jones: LinkedIn is a good place to find me. Abigail Jones, there's a lot of us, so you can search San Diego or UCSD, our executive coach. You'll find me.

Galen Low: Amazing. I'll also put your LinkedIn profile link in the show notes as well. And Matthew, where can folks find out more about you?

Matthew Fox: There's a couple places. LinkedIn, definitely, of course, I gotta say The Digital Project Manager. There is to create a quick plugin because I believe project management is often misunderstood. I'm creating something called project leadership circles, and you can find out about more in the DPM community.

And last but not least, The Bureau is another place that I hang out if you wanna come talk about these topics more.

Galen Low: Awesome. Love that. I will link all of those things in the show notes for folks.

Abigail, Matthew — thanks again for coming on the show and spending time with me. I really appreciate it.

Matthew Fox: My pleasure.

Abigail Jones: Thank you. Thank you for having us.

Galen Low: That's it for today's episode of The Digital Project Manager Podcast. If you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to subscribe wherever you're listening. And if you want even more tactical insights, case studies and playbooks, head on over to thedigitalprojectmanager.com. Until next time, thanks for listening.