The Foreseeable Now Lu Hanessian

What is conflict trying to tell us? What's the "wish" behind criticism? How can conflict be a portal to connection? Dr. Tammy Lenski is one of my favorite experts on conflict. She really gets the dynamics of conflict which means she deeply understands the heart of connection and our universal human need to be seen. She is masterful at inviting us into the questions, and helping people understand how the past is present and the present moment holds our potential and power to "pivot" and write a new story. She says that the "relief" that comes from working through our conflicts comes "from the now, not from the past."

She is a conflict resolution educator, speaker, author, coach, and mediator. For more than twenty years, she has helped individuals, teams, and groups navigate disagreement better, understand and dissolve interpersonal friction, and consider different ways of seeing to build alignment.

I love how she says "good questions and good listening are the rock star duo" of conflict resolution, and that these can get us "80% of the way". The rest, as she explains, is the work we do with ourselves.

In this deeply human, clear-eyed, provocative, and hopeful conversation about conflict and its painful hooks, I've come to realize that Tammy Lenski is truly an expert in cultivating the "willingness to see something different."

We talk about how our conflict stories can become what Tammy calls our "stuck stories" (the "movie trailer of the conflict"), how the past is present, and she explains her six conflict hooks. We explore the pain and potential of distancing spirals, the wish behind criticism, and her three conflict pivots.

The good news is that we can rewrite our conflict stories by exploring our own needs, wishes, and values, find our strengths, and cultivate connection in our relationships with others - and ourselves.

Jennifer Dulski says yes. To change. To risk. To connection. To empowering people to live their potential right now. To be in conversation with her is to open a door into a world of possibility, to see people as human portals to shared values and co-creating vision with purpose and meaning.

Her career is storied and immense in its depth and scope. For more than twenty-five years, she has been leading winning teams at companies including Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, as well as Change.org.

In this conversation, we talk about what we really need at work. We talk values, vulnerability, and future-oriented presence. She shares her insights on two kinds of resilience: everyday resilience and crisis resilience. And explains why she lives and leads from a place of yes, fearing less, and connecting more.

Jennifer Dulski is the founder and CEO of Rising Team, a leadership development platform that creates and provides tools and training, through "blending experience and science to help leaders at all levels ensure people on their teams feel valued, motivated, and connected" - especially in our present remote and hybrid work realities that we've all been trying to understand and re-imagine.

If you've wondered how a highly successful global leader can be both focused and open-hearted, powerful and empowering, confident and humble... a leader who knows how to, as someone once told her, "run her to do list by her vision," you'll find this conversation revealing, clarifying, and deeply re-affirming of just how powerful we are in this very moment.

We’ve all heard the phrase "forgive and forget." We might negatively associate forgiveness with 'letting someone off the hook'. No wonder so many of us can feel so resistant to forgiveness. The truth is, the hook is in us. Not the other.

Dr. Luskin is the world's foremost authority on forgiveness. Which means he's a global expert on grudges, grievances, and gridlock. What's fueling our grievance stories and resentments? What's beneath the bitterness that turns our hearts, minds and bodies sour to life, to another, to the possibility of something better?

Dr. Luskin says that a grudge is an "objection to the past." And holding onto grudges is a defense against our own vulnerability.

In today's episode, he explains that one of the negative effects of holding onto grudges, to our grievance stories, to our hooks, is that we're then "constantly paying this pain forward" in our lives, toward others, spilling over into every situation. Because we perceive that everything becomes related to our pain.

Since we all have nervous systems so tuned to our built-in negativity bias, he says staying vigilant to threat means that "our very basic perceptual mechanisms are constantly misperceiving things."

In that state, we perceive threat everywhere. And when we're stuck in that place, in that story, he says, we lose gratitude. Our capacity to even notice goodness and kindness around us. Our capacity to feel loving, to feel loved. And to love in return.

Dr. Luskin explains that, when we begin to realize that forgiving is not about letting go of who and what hurt us in the past, we realize we have "infinite choice" to free ourselves NOW, in the moment, from the pain and suffering caused by that hook inside us that keep re-wounding us as we try to move forward and can’t.

In this deep, direct, and paradigm-shifting conversation, we talk about the purpose and power of forgiveness, why we get stuck in our stories, and why grudge-holding is dehumanizing. We talk about the difference between grief and grievance, between forgiveness and reconciliation — how the impact of a very painful experience can be a rupturing of “something that we use in order to feel safe in the world." And why holding and harbor our grudges and resentments which become hazardous to our health.

Ultimately, forgiveness is a kind of resilience. Grieving and forgiving help return us to the very essence of what makes us feel human, alive, and capable of living healthy lives.

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Rick Miller is a multi-hyphenate wonder. A multi-disciplinary artist, multi-media, multi-lingual writer, actor, director, educator, musician, singer, and podcast host of the intergenerational series "Xing the Gap."

Although he graduated with two architecture degrees, he always dreamed of the stage. His first small role was in a Shakespeare-in-the-park production of Macbeth. He never imagined that a play in a park would inspire him to create his first solo show. And not just any solo show. His gift for uncanny spot-on vocal impersonations, performance, writing and lightning speed delivery fueled the creation of MacHomer, his one-man version of Macbeth with 50 characters from The Simpsons. All played by Rick. (And blessed by Simpsons creator Matt Groening.) It premiered at the Montreal Fringe festival in 1995. And then ran for 17 years in different countries. (Yes, he slips into a few Simpsons' voices in our conversation!)

Over more than twenty years, Rick has conceived extraordinary worlds and critically acclaimed productions. He has become one of Canada’s most versatile stage performers, from classical theatre to avant-garde creations, from his smash-hit solo shows to collective ensembles.

He has performed his own work in more than 200 cities around the globe. In 5 languages and on 5 continents. Entertainment Weekly once called him one of the "100 most creative people alive..."

His latest tour de force is a trilogy. Three explosive solo stage shows chronicling 75 years of history: BOOM, BOOM X, and BOOM YZ collectively and chronologically documenting the music, politics, cultural milestones and generation-defining events from 1945 to 2020 - woven with personal stories. 75 years, 300 minutes, all written, directed and performed by Rick himself.

I caught up with Rick, between shows, between breaths, between then and now, to explore the world wonder between his two musical ears.

We talk about the future of history, generation maps, minding the gaps, the brain as a time machine, nostalgia and attention...and what he calls "our magic powers as human beings" to imagine possible futures in the present moment.

A creatively rich, captivating, warm, entertaining, and profound conversation with my longtime friend Rick Miller.

Resilience. What does it really mean? How do we know we’re resilient? What are the factors and practices that determine resilience as a trajectory after adverse events and experiences? Is resilience something we learn or something we earn?

George Bonanno is a Professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia University's Teachers College and internationally recognized for his pioneering research on human resilience in the face of loss and potential trauma, listed as one of the top 1 % of the most cited scientists in the world. He is the author of The Other Side of Sadness, and his most recent book The End of Trauma.

As a boy, he dreamed of adventure, of traveling the world, sleeping in fields, reading books and painting.

By 17, he hit the road, hitchhiking, painting, and working across the United States. Soon, he found himself taking care of people, juvenile offenders, older adults, at one point working directly with severely psychotic patients at Northampton State Psychiatric Hospital. That made a profound impression on him, he noticed that some of the patients recovered surprisingly quickly after leaving the hospital.

Nine years after finishing high school, he got a scholarship to study at Hampshire College, and was soon designing his own psychological experiments - which led to his first peer-reviewed publication.

He went on to get his PhD in Clinical Psychology at Yale University. Years later, he founded the Loss, Trauma, and Emotion lab at Columbia University in New York City, expanding his research to include the study of resilience following 9/11, military combat deployment, traumatic injury, life-threatening medical events, natural disasters, disease outbreaks, divorce, and job loss.

The lab has been doing groundbreaking research on what he has discovered is the key process underlying human resilience: flexibility.

In this episode, he describes the research behind the Flexibility Mindset, and the flexibility sequence. One of the most fascinating aspects of the science of flexibility and resilience-building is what happens in the ‘right now’... what we have the opportunity to harness and practice in the present moment that both integrates the past and opens up the vista of our future.

This conversation is fascinating, hopeful, and packed with the science and practice of resilience from one of the most renowned researchers of our time.

My guest today is Katharine Manning, an attorney and victim's rights advocate for the past 25 years training and consulting on effective empathy in difficult times, and the author of the acclaimed book "The Empathetic Workplace: Five Steps to a Compassionate, Calm, and Confident Response to Trauma on the Job" (HarperCollins Leadership 2021).

In this timely, grounding and generous conversation, she shares some of her deep insights on the perils of fear-based leadership versus the generative effects of empathy-based leadership.

She explains how the vulnerability of sharing our difficult stories with others is not necessarily in the content of those stories, but in the need for reciprocity. We need people to bear witness to us, to listen. That’s the L in her powerful LASER Method. And as you’ll hear, that’s not a skill many of us have in our back pocket. We talk about MeToo, the necessity of a response to our story, and what gets in the way of truly seeing and hearing other people in their pain.

And when we are listening to people’s stories, she describes the challenge of trying to stay present, to quell our own anxieties, and why it’s so hard to hold off on jumping in with quick fixes and solutions they didn’t ask for and don’t need from us.

We discuss why it's so important to shift the workplace mindset from trauma denial with an exclusive focus on productivity to trauma literacy and the need for us to be more proactively curious about people as human beings. What does a workplace look, sound and feel like when we trust that people know what they need…when we trust that we can respect those needs enough to trade defensive barriers for good healthy boundaries?

As a Senior Attorney Advisor for fifteen years, Katharine guided the US Department of Justice through its response to victims in cases ranging from terrorism to large-scale financial fraud to the exploitation of children and domestic violence.

Katharine Manning is a beacon of wisdom and compassion, a voice of grounded empathy and tireless advocacy. She has witnessed how the power of story can help people reclaim voice, restore a sense of safety and dignity, return us to ourselves and each other...and recognize the possibilities for healing and growth that can emerge through empathy.

She is the founder of a company called Blackbird, DC in Washington - as the Beatles lyric goes… "take these broken wings and learn to fly…"