Making Intentional Choices by Listening to Your Instincts - Featuring Dr. Lindsey Godwin

In our personal and professional lives, we all spend much time pondering problems, but focusing excessively on them may not help us overcome a challenge as quickly as we wish. 

The guest for this episode of Pity Party Over is Dr. Lindsey Godwin, one of the most influential voices for appreciative inquiry, emotional intelligence, and experiential learning theory.

Whereas problem-solving focuses on deficits, appreciative inquiry is an approach to positive change that leverage strengths. 

For Dr. Godwin, inquiring means paying attention to our thoughts, emotions, and bodily signals to make intentional choices on what is important to us.

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TRANSCRIPT

Stephen Matini: I would like to know something about your upbringing, if there were any special people, events that somehow have shaped and contributed the most to where you are today?

Dr. Lindsey Godwin: I would say my upbringing and yeah, the people in my early life had a tremendous impact on who I am and how I see the world completely. I grew up in a small town in West Virginia, sort of rural Appalachia, West Virginia Buchanan, West Virginia, where sort of many generations of my family were from. So it's sort of a lot of roots there too. Right. 

My grandparents were from there. My parents, you know, I was born in the same hospital my mom was , sort of all of that. Small, you know, small town sort of life where everybody knows everybody. So had a very sort of close-knit family where I had my, my grandparents were, both of my grandparents were sort of sets of, my grandparents were very active in my life. In fact my, my one grandparents were literally my next door neighbors.

So we had like dinner together, like a multi-generational dinner together every night. Which I realize now is not always, is not necessarily a typical normal thing in our modern world. And so I had a really sort of beautiful intergenerational upbringing. And part of that too, the closeness of our family and even the having my grandparent feel close. 

I'm the oldest of four children, and so that also impacts, I think, my personality, right? The sort of the oldest child and all of that stuff is true. , all of that oldest child stuff, I think is totally true. 

And I had two younger brothers and a younger sister, and my most immediate younger brother when he was three months old, he contracted infant botulism and through medical, different medical issues and actually some medical accidents at the hospital, some medical malpractice issues that happened at the hospital, when he was in the hospital recovering from his illness, he actually lo lost oxygen to his brain and, and different things. 

And so he ended up being profoundly mentally and physically impaired. He basically was permanently sort of mentally three months old. And so, although his body continued to grow normally, his cognitive ability was stunted at, at three months of age. 

And so he was non-verbal you know, couldn't feed or walk or talk. He basically communicated and interacted like a three month old so he could recognize voices and he would, you know, could laugh and, and and reacts again, much, much like you imagine like a three month old baby interacting. And so our whole family was really focused around his care and his needs. And so from a, I was three. I was three. I'm the oldest, right? And so he was three years younger than me. 

And so, and then my other siblings are younger than him. And so our, our household really learned that taking care of other people is something that we just do inherently without asking. And sort of the idea of, you know, looking at, at the needs of other people around us, I think was something that we saw day in and day out. 

And also the fragility of life, right? We saw that sort of day in and day out because he did have sort of fragile health. And in fact, he when I was, I was a senior in high school, so I was about 18 and he was 15. He had a massive seizure in his sleep and passed away at our, our house. So he al we always lived with us, right? And so even just the going through that right as a family and losing losing anybody is traumatic and, and such an impact on us. But I think that that all of that totally obviously had an impact on me. 

Also growing up, my grandfather was a, a Methodist minister, two uncles and a cousin who are Methodist minister. So there was a lot of also sort of this idea of, you know, again, focused on taking care of others and how can we sort of be servant leaders in the world, I guess is really from both, literally in my household, you know, being so focused on being such a, a primary caregiver to somebody who had special needs to growing up in a family where service and sort of asking, you know, how, how can we help other people? 

You know, my mother, my grandmother were teachers, my dad's a pharmacist. So there was a lot of , a lot of sort of service, service to the world. And so I think that I realized, I realized it then, but I definitely realized it now looking back how much that was an imprint on me in terms of A) believing that I can be of service first of all, right? So that self-efficacy belief of like i, I can be of service and of help in the world is hardwired in me, I guess, to where it's you know, I've seen in other situations. 

There was also a unique optimism in my family where, you know, this, this is, it is in so many, it's a tragic story, right? What happened with my brother? And it could easily sort of rip a family apart, right? I mean, I saw that with other families. So, you know, leading to divorce, leading to all kinds of things. And if anything, it made our family stronger. Like I said, my grandparents, you know, lived right next door to us, were so involved in helping to, to raise us and stuff. 

And so there was also, it might sound paradoxical in the face of something that really was quite tragic, was that there was a lot of optimism, and not, not optimism, but like he was magically going to be better, but optimism in the sense of we can still create a life of love and goodness and, and stuff. And so, so I think that those things really just were so hard. So yeah, not hardwired and lived day in and day out in my household. 

And so when I find myself now being called into like education, higher education, and then my work with appreciative inquiry and sort of, you know, positive psychology and all of that, and working with organizations to try to help them be their best self, right, leverage their assets and stuff, I realized, you know, that that comes from a very primal place in me, if that makes sense.

Stephen Matini: This event made your whole family a family of service. How did you find out what was gonna be your specific way to be of service to people?

Dr. Lindsey Godwin: Oh, that's a great question. And I, being in this space where I saw you know, my, my brother had unique attributes, different than other people and stuff, but I also became very aware of my own abilities too, right? In the face of, of having such different abilities than my brother. 

And so I was a really good student. I was a straight A student. I was valedictorian of my high school class. I always knew that I wanted to, I had a long, a long vision of myself going all the way in school. It was no question I was going to college. I was like, gonna get like higher ed degrees. 

Again, back to remembering that I lived in this, in, in West Virginia, in this town where I would say the majority of my people that I graduated with, a lot of them were first generation to go to college, some of them, right?

Where I grew up in a, in a family where education was my, you know, my grandfathers both had higher degrees, which wasn't the norm in terms of the population that I was living in. And so education was a very, was a very valuable thing in our household as well. Cuz I think my parents also realized that that was the path to having options, right? To having different options in the world and, and things. 

So I was this straight a student and knew that I wanted to go all the way, and I had a, I knew I wanted to get a PhD. I had no idea what I wanted to get a PhD in. That didn't matter to me. I was just like, I'm gonna get a PhD. And I had visions of being a professor. 

I started off as a genetics major. Actually. I was gonna be a genetic counselor because that was part of my like, oh, I can help other families, I could help other families. And I have that sort of empathetic experience that I could bring to that. And, and maybe, maybe there is genetic things that could help, you know. So I was in this