0:00:00 Paula: Welcome everyone to TesseTalks with your host, Tesse Akpeki, and co-host me Paula Okonneh, where we share with you top leadership and management strategies. This is a journey of discovery where we learn that leadership is personal and professional. And so we invite you, our listeners, to walk with us in this adventure.
0:00:26 Paula: Today we are talking about overthinking. And with us to do that will be our wonderful guest, Dr. Jolene Church. Dr. Jolene. I love the strap line of your book, which is because overthinking is killing your vibe and your relationships. So, let me tell you a bit about her. She is known as the workplace culture whisperer, and she’s a leadership expert and sought after keynote speaker who helps teams and organizations build cultures where people feel seen, heard, and valued. She’s had over two decades of experience transforming teams across government or Fortune 500 companies and global nonprofit. And she brings a human centered approach to leadership that fuels engagement, belonging, and real world results. You know, I could go on and on about her because her bio is so impressive, but why don’t I stop here and welcome her to the show, and anything that I have left out, she will fill in. So welcome to TesseTalks, Dr. Jolene Church.
0:01:45 Jolene: Thank you so very much. It’s so wonderful to be here.
0:01:50 Tesse: Thank you, Dr. Jolene. We are so delighted to have you on TesseTalks. The first time I met you, for me, you were a shining star that lit up the room, the virtual room, but it was just as attractive. And I’m really curious about the key messages in your books, stop overthinking it. And in an invitation to curiosity for me is for you to say a bit more about key messages that people need to, or would be really gifted with by listening into when they either read your book or when they’re in conversation with other people who have. What are the key things that emerged for you about overthinking and why is it killing our vibe?
0:02:35 Jolene: Well, I think that when we’re talking about overthinking, a lot of times it’s just simply we’re getting in our own way of connecting with people from our true, authentic space. We want to be everything to everyone, or we’re trying and we think we know what they want us to be or need us to be. So, this all started because I changed schools 33 times, K through 12. So when you move that much, when you shift schools that many times, you just become a chameleon. You become that easily adaptable human if you want to survive. And so for me, it was survival, connecting with people quickly, because I didn’t want to be alone at lunch. That’s the last thing you want as a kid, for that bell to ring and go out to the playground by yourself, or go to lunch by yourself. You don’t want to be alone in that cafeteria.
0:03:28 Jolene: And so it was that survival thing that really honed this in me. And I realized how many times I was catching myself, stopping myself from having that conversation, from engaging. And I had to become very self-aware of that so that I wouldn’t stop myself. And so I could stop overthinking and just enter into that relationship because I didn’t have much time. I might have three or four months to build a relationship and then move on. Now, some of my oldest relationships are from my childhood days. So that seems weird that I changed schools that many times and I stayed connected with these women in my life that, you know, I was nine, eight years old, 10 years old, 12 years old. And those are some of my dearest friends. Because of that willingness in myself, to open myself up, to stop overthinking and just enter into that relationship and not thinking, oh, well you’ll only be here four months.
0:04:30 Jolene: There’s no reason to go into this relationship and get connected with someone because you’re just going to leave them anyway. But instead, I looked at it in a different way that I needed to make that connection because my survival, my ability to thrive in that moment was based on me connecting. And I’m so grateful that I did. Now does that mean that I don’t overthink things and have figured this all out? No, I’ve overthought things throughout my whole life, but it’s that self-awareness that is so important for people to realize. How many times are you stopping yourself from stepping into your best self?
0:05:12 Paula: I absolutely love that. Especially when you said you, between kindergarten and 12th grade, you moved 33 times. And I have lived a life where you notice off camera. I told you I met Tesse because we were the foreign kids who entered middle school, like the equivalent of 10th grade and felt different. But when I heard you had moved 33 times, what was my problem? I only moved four or five times. So, I could relate to you.
0:05:44 Jolene: It’s still hard, still hard. It doesn’t matter whether you move one time or a hundred times, it’s still hard. You leave what you’re comfortable with and you have to step into something new.
0:05:58 Paula: Yes, yes.
0:06:00 Jolene: And what a great lesson that I learned through all of that. Because it’s really set me up for success in who I am, how I work, how I connect with people. And really that ability to be self-aware and check in with myself and really recognize, hey, you’re doing that thing again. You’re stopping yourself, you’re muting yourself. I don’t want to be muted.
0:06:26 Paula: I totally get that. And talking about being muted and self-awareness and checking in on yourself, how would you especially, okay, so I’m going to pull it back to the times that we are living in. What would you say would be one of your top tips to people now in this particular time? For people to stop overthinking? If they had to choose it. What would you say to them?
0:06:57 Jolene: That there’s power in the pause. We have to be able to stop, stop spinning in our heads, stop thinking about what could happen, what happened in the past. Pause. Because there’s so much power in our present moment. And power in that pause between every problem and solution is a space. And we can’t get to that space unless we pause to realize I’m here. Change only happens right now, doesn’t happen in the future. It will happen in the future. If I choose now to change something, I can’t change the past. I have to get into that present moment. And so I have to pause so that I have that power.
0:07:45 Paula: I love that there’s power in the pause and change doesn’t happen. And the future, it happens now so that it can happen in the future. That’s a key word. Thank you for that tip. Tesse?
0:07:57 Tesse: I love that Victor Franklin’s work is one of my favorite. So, it’s so favorite that I have so many different copies so I can give and then buy some new ones and taking that forward and the power of the course and the gap and the consciousness in that gap. What struck me as I read your book was when you talked about being seen, being heard, being felt, and I just had my heartbeat in a soothing way by reading your story. Elaborate please about the power of being seen, heard, felt, and how we can see ourselves and see others. Feel ourselves, feel others, hear ourselves, hear others. Beautiful. Dr. Jolene. Beautiful.
0:08:46 Jolene: Well, I think of it this way. When someone says your name, so they say, Tesse, you perk up, right? They’re talking to you, they see you, they recognize you, they value you. So, when you hear your name, there’s power in that. My husband has a gift in this area, just like you were saying earlier, before we began recording. When you know someone’s dog’s name, their kids’ names, their birthday. When you remember those things about people that makes them feel very special. And my husband has this gift, if you meet my husband, he will ask about you, learn about you, and then he is going to learn about your partner and your animals and your kids. Next time he sees you, he’s going to ask about something interesting about what he learned about you. Now, my trick with that, because I don’t have that gift to remember all of these details, I’ll remember a lot, but I don’t remember.
0:09:52 Jolene: Like he does, he remembers people’s names a thousand times better than I do. And it’s not because the person is not important. It’s just I don’t have that gift of remembering people’s names. And many people don’t. So what I found, when I would go to speaking events, different conferences, and I would ask for a business card, I wasn’t just saying, can I have your business card so that I could give them mine. Instead, I want their business card because I want to put a note to remember that person by. And so last year I was at the SH RM conference in Chicago speaking, and I was on the bus going over to the convention center, and I was just waiting for somebody to look up from their phone. You would think you have all these human resource professionals in a bus. It would’ve been chatty Cathy time. No, it was not. Everyone was staring at their phone.
0:10:43 Jolene: So I’m just itching, itching for somebody to look up from their phone. Well, this bold redhead looks up from her phone. I said, hi, I’m Jolene. And all of a sudden it began. So she told me her story of the day before coming to the conference, and she said, I was born in heels. I can run laps in heels. I don’t know why yesterday was different, but I got to the hotel. I couldn’t check in on time. I’m dragging my suitcase around town. She said, finally I had to go buy some more comfortable shoes. So that stuck in my head. So when I took her card, I wrote red head shoe debacle, check in debacle. And when I got home, I sent her a card, a handwritten card. This is something I do after every time I go to a conference, I want to write something special to that person.
0:11:36 Jolene: And if I just collected business cards, I wouldn’t remember how exactly I met that person. I might remember their company, but I wouldn’t necessarily remember something special. And I want to make sure I capture that. So it’s a cheat sheet for me to make sure that I capture that really important information because I know that people not only want to hear their name, but they want to know that you remember them. And I remember her, and I tell her story frequently because her experience touched me. I could relate. I can wear heels anywhere. I can run laps in heels. And to hear that she had to go buy shoes had to have been frustrating. And I got it. And so we have to connect with people in a way where they feel that you really care. You’re not out for something for yourself that you truly care. Very important.
0:12:30 Tesse: Wow. The power of connection. Yeah. Paula.
0:12:35 Paula: Yes, I think it was Dr. Maya Angelou who says, people don’t remember all about what you know, but they remember how you made them feel. And that is so true, what you said, recognizing that you didn’t have the gift or you don’t have the gift like your husband does, but there’s a way to work around it makes a world of difference because people really, you’ll be surprised at how good it makes them feel when you remember something about them. No matter how minute, like, oh, is your hand still paining you? Like you remember that? Sort of like asking about their pet kitten. They remember those things.
0:13:18 Jolene: Yeah. It’s very important. And I don’t think we realize just how important it is when we’re connecting with people to truly, again, go back to that first date analogy. We have a first date. And if I’m just talking about myself, and I’m not asking you about you, and I’m not responding to what you are saying, we’re not having a second date. That’s our first and our last. And so it’s so important to think about those little things. Even if they just got a new kitten. It doesn’t matter what it is, how small it is but just to remember. Even to say, how’s the weather on your coast? I see you again. I’m going to ask, hey, I saw on the news you’ve been having some terrible weather over there. And you’ll remember, oh, she remembers that I live on the East coast. It’s so important, yet it’s so simple. And we can overthink all these strategies to remember stuff. I don’t need to do that. And I definitely don’t need to fall on excuses that I don’t remember people’s names like other people do. Like my husband does. I don’t have to fall on that excuse. Yeah, well, I just, I’m really bad at names. Okay, we’ll find a workaround.
0:14:35 Paula: I chuckle because now when I read somebody and I get the telephone number, I put something to remember them by. Like oh, we met on the bus on July 1st. And she was wearing, or he was wearing, or they were wearing. Because if not, when I go to search for them, I don’t find them. But if something stood out about them or their group or whatever, it’s so much easier to remember them that way. So, yeah. But tell us a bit about the Women’s Leadership Support Network that you launched recently.
0:15:09 Jolene: Well, that has been a huge passion project that I never intended to undertake. It just happened on January 21st when DEI was eliminated from the federal government, a women’s leadership training would be eliminated as a part of that. And I would’ve never imagined that step back. We’ve seen many things in women’s rights and such over the last several years where women have felt that they’ve taken this step back. And there’s been controversy over that. But this, I don’t believe that there’s any controversy around the fact that women do need specific areas of boosting and assistance when it comes to their training in leadership. And that’s because as women, women stepped into leadership in the workplace, in a male dominated world, leaders were men for forever. Yes, there were women leading in their way, but from this formal recognized presence that really in the last several decades has taken a foothold.
0:16:36 Jolene: Yet women are still talked over in a meeting. Women have to, when they choose to have a child step out of the workplace for even six weeks back when I had kids, you had six weeks, get back in. But those who decided to take longer breaks, now all of a sudden they’re making less because they haven’t been in the workforce all that time, though they have the same years of experiences as their male counterpart. And so these things wear on our psyche. And so when these programs were eliminated, I didn’t just want to bow down and say, all right, there’s nothing we can do. I wanted to make sure that women’s Leadership training was free and accessible to women around the world, period. And so I got together with a group of other women around the US and in Canada, and we came up with a game plan to come up with 12 video trainings, put them out on YouTube and release one every two weeks.
0:17:39 Jolene: And so we’re now on video 10 is releasing this week and two more to go in the series. But covering things like imposter syndrome and the power of your network and networking your presence, all of these different things are so important when we look at them from a specific women’s lens. And we didn’t want our male counterparts, our male allies, to be left out of this equation. So we make sure that we not only spotlight a female leader in each training, but also a male ally, someone who’s done something to say, these are our peers, this isn’t us versus them. We’re all in this together, all. And many men don’t know exactly what to do for their daughters, their wives, their sisters, their friends. And so this was something, the messaging was so that everyone could get this message to understand the nuances and the differences between just leadership training tenets, and the specific nuances that we bring into that training for women to, again, stop overthinking it, to get out of their own way and to not buy into what society has taught us over the years. So it just became this big passion project and it feels really good. I don’t know what I’m going to do after I’m done with 12, but I’m not done.
0:19:18 Tesse: That’s awesome. And it’s generous leadership, and it comes back 100%. I love how you’ve been very creative in co-designing that and collaborating with other women. And what I love even more is the fact that everyone’s part of this jigsaw, the allies, the champions, the sponsors. I just love that model. And I was reading your book again, and I love thought leadership, that you have these amazing, groundbreaking frameworks, the golden bridge, the core colors, pray as Shakespeare would say, tell more.
0:20:00 Jolene: Well, when I build a framework, I’m looking for simplicity. And I’m going to give you one that everyone will remember because it is so simple. When I’m talking about connection, when I’m teaching emotional intelligence, when I’m teaching communication, everything boils down to one thing, intentional relationships. So I call this my IRS, and in the US there’s this, not so great thought about the IRS. So, it sticks in your brain like a mind worm. Oh, the IRS, what was that framework? She said, IRS, what did that stand for? Intentional Relationship Strategy. If I think about everything. So every time I build a framework, I want it to be as simple as possible. Don’t overthink it, just take it down to the core. And with that Intentionality around all of our relationships, when I have a conversation with you, if I’m teaching emotional intelligence, I’m looking at the other person, are they okay? Do they seem out of the norm?
0:21:14 Jolene: Intentional? I need to know them to know if something’s out of the norm. So intentional relationship means that I have to be very conscious and very intentional about having conversations, getting to know people in a deeper, more meaningful way. So important. And when it comes to communication, there’s no way for me to communicate with you effectively if I don’t know what you need to hear. I might be telling you what I want to tell you. What do you need to hear? So, intentional relationship strategy is one of my frameworks that I use throughout, just about anything I do. But it’s so simple. I think that that one clearly defines from any of my other frameworks are just as simple, because I like keeping things just as what I used to call breaking it down Barney style. Remember Barney, the dinosaur, the purple dinosaur. Just break it down Barney style, keep it as simple as possible. And so with that, anytime I introduce a new framework, I just want to drive something home so that people remember, this is what I’m supposed to do. Keep it just as, as easy as possible. Don’t overthink it.
0:22:29 Tesse: Gorgeous. Paula, what thoughts are going through your man? I’m finding all this very accessible, very compassionate, very connecting, and very implementable. What your thoughts?
0:22:40 Paula: Wow, I like how intentional. I mean, I like how you broke it down, Dr. Jolene, into this acronym that in the United States at least is going to stick IRS and how it works in practice, intentional relationship strategy. And I know that you’re all about keeping things simple. I wonder if you can just give us, before we close, you have to wrap up very soon, just one story that where you’ve seen that work, work in practice, because I know you’re all about not overthinking it, but making things applicable and simple and impactful in people’s lives.
0:23:23 Jolene: Well, I had a supervisor come to me just a short time ago, and she was with the Department of Defence and she was in the finance division. She was struggling with her team getting the message to them that she would create a business process and they just couldn’t follow that business process. She said, I documented it, I’ve given it to them over and over, and they just can’t get it. I’m at my wit’s end. They’re frustrating me. I’m having to do work for them. I’m having to explain it over and over. And I said, well, what are you doing to intentionally understand their needs? Well, I know that they don’t know how to do it. Okay, but what do they need from you? What are they not getting? Well, that’s what I don’t know. Well, have you asked them? So we all know that there, people learn in different ways. Some people are visual, some people are audio listeners. So, it just depends on what they need.
0:24:27 Jolene: And so I asked her, go back and ask, when I give you this in a written form, in the documented process, what part of it doesn’t resonate with you? What would success look like if I were to be able to teach you something new? What would success look like? Investing the time in people to truly understand their needs is a part of that intentional relationship strategy. In addition to that, beyond the business process, it’s how was your day? How was your week? How was your weekend? Did you do anything fun this weekend? Having that water cooler talk, which kind of went away with the pandemic. Because we went virtual, so we lost the ability to run into somebody in the break room. So, it’s so important to think about the intentionality around everything. Everything speaks. So, when I get to know them, get to understand what they need, not what I want to accomplish, then we’ve just hit that out of the park. That strategy works every single time.
0:25:38 Paula: The words continue what life keeps Life in soul. Just relate to people as human beings as they would like to be related to. Wow, I can’t believe we’re almost out of time. So I want to thank you so much Dr. Jolene, for coming on to TesseTalks. And then now to our amazing audience. We thank you for tuning in and we ask that if you have not yet subscribed to TesseTalks that you head over to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever else you listen to podcasts and subscribe to us. And if you like what you just heard from Dr. Jolene Church, please write us a review. Of course, if you’d like to be on the show like she has, please reach out to us on our website, which is Tesseakpeki.com/TesseTalks to apply. Thank you so much.
0:26:35 Jolene: Thank you.
0:26:35 Paula: We’ve learned so much from you today.
0:26:38 Jolene: This has been a beautiful time. I love the two of you. You’re fabulous.
0:26:43 Tesse: We love you right back. You read it. Such compassion, such love, such joy and such knowledge. Thank you for the gift of your presence with us today. We love you. Please come back.
0:26:58 Jolene: Well, thank you again.