Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating podcast. I am your host Roberta. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into. And by the end of this episode, please remember to subscribe, give a rating and a review. Now, most of the time, we always think that the other person has upset you, the other person has made you angry, the other person has been the one to trigger you.
00:29
But is that really the case? My guest today, Carissa Karban, who is a leadership consultant and coach, is here to talk to us about inner work and what you can do to empower yourself in how you handle situations, in how you can become a better leader and a better human being overall. And before I go any further, please help me welcome Carissa. Hi Carissa.
00:57
Hello, hello, Roberta. Thanks so much for having me. Really excited to be here. Thank you for being on the show. I'm being excited as well. Please tell us a little bit about yourself. Sure, absolutely. Yeah, you got it. I'm Carissa Karban, as you said, leadership coach and consultant. I am really passionate about helping people to heal from our past and to unlearn a lot of our conditioning and those old stories that we have. Cause I really believe that.
01:24
as each person comes home to themselves and remembers the magic inside of them, then we can change the world. The magic inside of us. Remember when we were kids and all the things we were excited about, the world is your oyster, and this is what gets me going, we were carefree. Where and when do we start losing that?
01:47
Very early on, unfortunately, we've seen studies of kids as young as three who are starting to pick up on social cues, dynamics about what's acceptable behavior, what's unacceptable behavior. It has to do with the compliments that we give young kids, thinking about the way we compliment young boys versus young girls. We start to really internalize, okay, this is what's happening and here's how I succeed in the world around me. Starts very early on.
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We are sponges, you know, I'm sure if anybody has made a mistake saying something inappropriate around a kid and that kid immediately picks up on it and starts repeating it, much to our chagrin, we say kids say the darnedest things. Right. We are sponges. So we're constantly looking for those cues and those signals about how do I get love? How do I belong here? And what is acceptable and how do I not become ostracized by my community, essentially? The basic human needs of
02:45
feeling seen, heard, validated. You've got it. That's where we attach everything that we experience. Absolutely. The hard part, right, is that as children, we don't have the cognitive ability to understand the complexity of the people we're interacting with or the world around us. So the stories that we internalize about who we are, our place in the world, those stories are created by young children. And so we say, for instance,
03:14
Okay, I was always rewarded for getting A's on my report card. Well, as a child, unfortunately, if we get only those types of signals about performance and achievement, then we internalize a belief that I must perform, I must achieve in order to get love. So then we become adults who are hyper-focused on...
03:36
achieving, going, we don't slow down, we have to earn, without realizing it's because we have created a subconscious belief that our achievement makes us worthy of love, or it will earn us love. And so that story created by a four or five year old that gets written into our subconscious now gets played out as an adult in how we show up at work or in any other domain in our lives. Is that why we bought into the idea of
04:03
In order to be successful and happy, get the house, the husband, the dog, the picket fence, the car, the vacation, to the islands. Is that why we buy into that? Because that's the do good and be rewarded mentality we adopted as kids.
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That's definitely a symptom of the conditioning, right? As we zoom out and we think about the system we live in, we are conditioned to believe there's a one size fits all approach to happiness. And so those are the signals that we pick up, right? Oh, you have to do well in school. You have to do sports. You have to participate in extracurriculars. We don't have time for playing, for imagination, right? We have to get to work really hard. And that's where we start to lose that. We start to, okay.
04:50
If I want to belong in this society, in this construct, I have to show up a certain way. I have to do certain things because we're taught that fitting in is what's most important. And that is very different than feeling a sense of belonging. But aren't we tribal by nature? Don't we want to be part of the tribe and not feel alone? Because that's what we say as well, the reason people are afraid of public speaking. You feel like you're alone and the tribe is looking at you.
05:18
It's like such a lonely place. Yes, yeah, we're wired for connection. You know, you think about when we were back in the Savannah hunters and gatherers, right? We as human beings, we are not the fastest. We're not the strongest. We don't have the sharpest teeth. We don't have the sharpest talons. So it's really our ability to connect with one another, to communicate and collaborate in that community, that tribe setting that gives us our evolutionary advantage.
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And so for us, because of how weak physically we are against predators, if we were caught alone or if we got pushed out of our group and we were on our own, that meant almost certain death by predators. Yes, but now in order to fit in, a lot of people do the whole thing we've been sold, that do this and do that and we'll get you to this happy stage. And sometimes they find that that's not necessarily true for them. It might be true for some people. Sure.
06:16
What has been your experience regarding that? Yeah, you know, Roberta, it's so funny. I was very much, I like to say, plugged into the matrix. For anyone who knows that old movie, I love the metaphor of really being plugged into the system versus being unplugged and being autonomous, thinking for ourselves. So I grew up and I will say, I was very, very good at checking the boxes. I was an A student, constantly on the honor roll. So I identify as-
06:44
As cis, I identify as white. I enjoyed a lot of privilege growing up. So I was very successful at checking those boxes. So I thought, this is great. I'm well on my way to success, happiness, fulfillment, got the college degree, got married three weeks after I finished college, had the house, the car, the dogs, was on my way to the 2.5 kids and the white picket fence. And I got to this stage and I said, wait a second.
07:13
I'm completely miserable. I'm doing everything that I've been taught to do, everything I'm quote unquote supposed to be doing. And I hate it. My life is not fulfilling. I feel like there's something wrong with me. And my husband agreed that there was something wrong with me because in his mind he was on that track and that was good. And that was exactly what worked for him. So to your point, that path does work for some people. It was working for him and it was not working for me.
07:41
So that was really a turning point for me where I said, wait a second, maybe, just maybe, it's not me that's wrong, it's not me that's broken, maybe it's the message, maybe it's what I've been sold, maybe that just doesn't work for me. So I started to go inward and I started to get really curious about what is it that brings me joy? What is it that fulfills me? What is it I wanna be doing with my life?
08:06
And that led me to getting a divorce 10 years ago, leaving a PhD program. And really what felt like at the time, jumping off of a cliff, not sure if I was gonna have wings or a parachute on the way down, but I got to the point where I realized I can either face this incredibly scary unknown of crafting my own life, or I can be miserable for the rest of my life. And my friends started to see
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I was losing that joy for life. I was resigned. I said, I guess this is it. I guess this is my life. And it was really through that work that I said, no, that's not good enough. I know that I'm capable of creating a life that I really enjoy. Fortunately, somewhat courageous. I look back at 10 years ago and I say, thank you to 10 years ago, Carissa, for having the courage to embark on the unknown and say, I don't know where I'm headed, but I know that what I'm told is not it.
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That is so amazing because anybody listening to your story would think she had it all. What could potentially make her miserable? What more does she want out of it? You know, especially when people don't have the marriage or the kids. So you have everything, lady. You are so ungrateful. What do you think was the what you describe as being miserable despite everything being checked? Well, I think that's the thing, right, is when people say you have everything, why are you miserable?
09:29
Well, I have everything that somebody else wanted. These aren't the things that I necessarily want. I've been told to accumulate these things or check these boxes. And so for me, being miserable was not feeling connected to my husband. It was not feeling seen, not feeling heard, not feeling like I had a sense of belonging anywhere, not knowing my place in the world. And so externally, I had those trappings.
09:57
But internally, everything felt misaligned. Everything felt wrong. If anybody's listening, they're wondering, does that mean you never got married again? You didn't seek any of that? What was the problem and how are things different now after doing the internal work? Yeah, I think that's such a beautiful question because I think that oftentimes when we...
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sort of reject or we go a different path, we think I'm gonna be the opposite, right? We allow the pendulum to swing in a very big way to another direction. So when I left my first marriage, I said, I'm never getting married again, never having kids, never doing that. And then I will say that I met the love of my life. So I'm happy to say I've been married for four years now.
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And for me, it wasn't about simply out of hand, rejecting the institution of marriage, right? Yeah. For me, it was about leaning into the complexity of the institution. It was going deeper and not taking things at face value. So instead of vilifying the institution of marriage, instead I started to say, well, if I were to get married again, what's the type of partnership that I want? What's the type of relationship that would fulfill me?
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And so there are aspects of my relationship that work really, really well for my husband and for me, but would not work for another couple, would not work for other people because we are doing it our way. We are carving our own path and creating a marriage that works for just the two of us. Right. It doesn't matter what works for everybody. Because you have the two people in the marriage to begin with. Exactly. Yeah. So that means the carissa of the first marriage was different and obviously,
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a different type of partnership and husband than the Carissa of now. 100% different, absolutely. Yep, wasn't the idea of marriage necessarily right? Because if I turned around and said, I'm never getting married again, that's living my life in reaction to something I don't want as opposed to living into what I do want. And so I could have said, I'm never getting married again.
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But then I would have missed out on the incredible love and connection and partnership that I have with my husband that I, through my inner work, decided that is really important to me. I want a long-term partnership. So it wasn't by saying, this is what's expected of me. It was by me saying, I do really want that partnership. I want to build a life with somebody. It's just not going to look the way it did before. Yes. So it's the self-awareness and the fact that
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you identified the problem was within rather than the institution of marriage itself. You know, I think there are a lot of external problems. So I'll say not everything is internal, right? Because I think that just the very notion that there is a one size fits all, this whole message that we've been sold is built on a system of control. As we think about a hierarchical patriarchal society, it's all about top down. It's about empowering the people at the top.
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and essentially using the people below them to feed their wealth, their power, their happiness, as opposed to creating an egalitarian society where every single human being has the opportunity to find love, happiness, fulfillment, partnership, all of those things. So our system is based on control.
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And if we think about the industrial revolution, right, as we were training people to be on the assembly line, we're making widgets in the factory and manufacturing, they didn't care about employees, right? It wasn't, oh, are you fulfilled as you're making them? Because we could use command and control. We could use a fear-based system to get people to do what we wanted. And so it's really the system of control. If we think about now this notion of go to college,
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get the corporate job, think about who that benefits the most. It benefits the people at the top of the corporations the most. Whereas if we said, hey, you know what? Go inward, find what brings you joy, do whatever it is that fulfills you. Now we see the emergence of the gig economy, where people are doing freelance work, doing odd jobs. It's really just about getting enough money in order to support the lifestyle that people want. But when people do that,
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They don't contribute to those larger organizations or there's larger entities because they're off doing their own thing. And so we lose people, those cogs in the big machinery of society, we lose people in those cogs when they decide to be free and go do their own thing. I think it's an amazing thing and I love it. That people are getting their power back. The idea of being trapped in this capitalism mission. Listen, I have nothing against.
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ambition and money and chasing whatever fulfills you. Yes. But being sold the idea that it's the only way, I think that's what we're trying to break away from. And even just the notion that profit is more important than people. We are all human beings and I believe very firmly that we need to be focused on helping human beings, not just focused on how do we make more profit and how do we make the rich richer.
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which is why leadership coaching is one of the top three ideas that are being pushed, ideas that are being searched on Google. When it comes to coaching, leadership coaching is right there at the top. Why do you think that is, especially since we are talking about the industrial revolution just now? Yes, absolutely. I think the industrial revolution is a great segue into why people are searching for coaches right now, because the world that we live in today, the post pandemic world, if you will,
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looks very, very different than the world we had even five years ago. But as we think about all the influences of the industrial revolution that are still at play today, we have seen over the last three years how incredibly outdated these systems are, these modes of working. For instance, as we think about this relic of the industrial revolution, one idea is that.
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Leaders are more knowledgeable. Leaders are supposed to have the answers because leaders in the manufacturing plant were the ones who knew the equipment, knew what needed to be done. They were the holders of the information. So you needed your boss in order to get your job done. Today, our environment doesn't look anything like that. We live in a world where bosses typically can't see their employees. We can't look over your shoulder to monitor the work that you're doing. So we have to create a lot of trust.
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that people can be autonomous, they can get their work done. And that's where my style of leadership coaching comes in, where if I get promoted into a leadership position and I think I'm supposed to have all the answers, then I might get triggered or threatened when a new employee on my team pitches a new idea. If I've been taught that managers are supposed to have all the answers. So that's where the internal work comes in. Instead of saying to your point earlier of you made me,
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Oh, you made me upset. You made me angry. So I'm gonna shut down your idea. I'm gonna control your behaviors instead of saying, huh, that's really interesting. I wonder why I got so upset when my new employee pitched a new idea in our team meeting. I wonder what's upsetting me about that. It seemed like a really good idea. And as we go deeper, as we unpack what's going on, we say, oh, it's because I have a story in my head that I believe.
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that leaders are supposed to have all the answers. So instead of shutting down the new idea, now I can say, well, is that a story that I wanna hold on to in the world that we live in today? No, things are ambiguous, things are complex. It's impossible for a leader to have all of the answers. So instead, I'm gonna now reorient my internal belief system. Next time an employee shares a new idea in the team meeting, now we can celebrate that idea because we're no longer feeling threatened or triggered by that old story.
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Yes, if they bring a new idea, because remember, if you're a leader, you have quite a few people reporting to you, especially if they do it in front of their other colleagues. Sure. It's a huge attack on your ego. And that's why sometimes things get shut down. Exactly. Exactly. However, if I've done that internal work to say, you know what, I want to be the sort of leader who celebrates new ideas, who goes out of my way to connect with someone who comes from a different background, right? We think about diversity and
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One of the phrases that I think is so funny is, we hire for diversity and then we fire because we're not all the same. It's so powerful because, okay, we have an imperative, right? Where we need to go out, hire diverse candidates. But if as a leader, I'm not going inward to say, what are my biases? What are my beliefs about certain groups of people? How do I challenge the assumptions that I'm holding? Even if it's based on statistics or your own lived experience or the news.
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Exactly. Oh gosh, that's the worst. I don't think we should base anything off of the news. Even if we look at our own lived experience, right? If we think about in the world of data, our lived experience is a sample size of only one person. So it's really about looking at other people's experiences, collecting data, challenging our own assumptions, so that when we do hire that diverse candidate, we're not constantly frustrated. You know, if you come to a one-on-one with me, for instance, and
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You're chit chatting about your weekend, your family life. You're telling me who you are as a person, but I have this notion as a manager that everything needs to be focused on work. I might be frustrated with you. I might say, I don't think Roberta's really dedicated to work because every time we have a one-on-one, she just wants to chit chat and talk about her family. In that case, it's not that you're wrong Roberta for wanting to talk about your family. And in some industries, in some cases,
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The leader is not wrong for wanting to focus only on work, but it's really about the neutrality of both existences and saying, okay, it's not that you're wrong and I'm right, or you're right and I'm wrong. It's there's a difference here. There's a cultural gap or an expectation gap, whatever it is. So let's look at that gap and figure out how we can close it so you and I can connect and work effectively together rather than me saying.
20:23
Well, I really wanted to hire someone from a diverse background, but they're just not fitting in, so I need to push them out of the company now. Speaking of culture, isn't that what we're workplace culture comes in? Because if we're going to have all these diverse employees in our team, what are the practicalities of being able to accommodate everyone? So how do we create a workplace culture that we will adapt to?
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while also taking that into account. It sounds like very murky waters and very complicated. Yeah, I mean, workplace culture is incredibly complex. And I believe that that is often what gets us in trouble is we tend to oversimplify. But workplace culture is incredibly complex. And when we try to say, okay, we wanna hire someone who fits in, right? We want cultural fit. Well, here we're just oversimplifying. And what we're essentially saying is,
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I want someone who makes me comfortable. I don't want someone who challenges me, who pushes me out of my comfort zone. If I'm hiring someone who fits in already, that means I'm hiring for the status quo. I'm hiring to stay in my comfort zone. Whereas if I say, I really want people who contribute to the culture as opposed to fitting in, then we're thinking intentionally about what skills do we need? What do we not have in our team that would make us more well-rounded?
21:48
Where are our obstruction points? What are we not seeing? Well, if everybody looks the same and has had the same experience, probably not gonna be able to see around that corner. But it's very complex because this is where I believe that encouraging people, guiding people, helping people to go inward is really important because in that culture creation here, now I can say I'm intentionally.
22:13
going to hire someone who I know is probably going to challenge me. They're going to push me out of my comfort zone a little bit, but my priority is not comfort. My priority is connection. My priority is contribution. My priority is business impact. And so it's really about what are we prioritizing comfort or growth? Which then brings us to the fact that one, since the pandemic, a lot of businesses are now global. There's a lot of zoom meetings.
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And everybody's talking about Zoom etiquette and digital empathy and trying to understand each other with all these nuances just coming in in the last two years. How do we navigate that? Go inward. Yes, again. I'm nothing if not consistent in my messaging. So here's what I'll say to that, right? When the world outside of us is accelerating in complexity, only becoming more and more complex every single day.
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We live in a society that prioritizes the external experience. So most of us have not been given the tools, have not been guided on how to go inward. So our view of ourselves and our own internal world is oversimplified. We don't have necessarily the tools to talk about our emotional nuance. Right. Brené Brown talks about how the primary emotions that people are taught today are mad, sad and glad. That's very rudimentary. Right. We're talking about.
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trying to describe, let's say, a thousand crayon, Crayola box of emotions that we have available to us using only the primary colors. So we are oversimplifying ourselves and our own internal world. So I believe that by going inward, by leaning into our own complexity, by getting curious about who we are, by learning to accept the parts of ourselves that maybe we don't always like, by creating that love acceptance internally,
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we create the ability to have love and acceptance for people outside of us. By leaning into our own complexity, we can now engage and embrace complexity outside of us. But if I'm forcing myself to color using only primary colors, then I see the world outside of me and how complex and how deep and how rich it is, I'm going to be overwhelmed. And I'm probably frankly gonna be terrified of that world and how complex it is, because I haven't leaned into my own complexity yet.
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Go inward, because everything then becomes how you internalize the experiences and how you're going to respond to them and how you take the power back. Because I think a lot of the time when you say, oh, Carissa upset me, my mom did this, my colleague made me upset. It's always the external telling me how to respond or telling me what my life experience is supposed to be.
25:07
Yes, exactly. And when we do that, when we say, you made me angry, Roberta, right? There's a degree here where I don't have to take responsibility, so that makes it easy. That makes me want to blame you, because if it's your fault, then it's not my fault. Of course. And so we live in a world, right, where we say, well, who's to blame? It's not necessarily, in my opinion, it's not about blaming. It's about saying, okay, I can't control the emotions that get triggered, because oftentimes, the way I describe it is,
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the adverse experiences we have as children, whether it's little T trauma, big T trauma, any experiences that we have that we don't feel, we don't heal from when it happens, we repress those experiences. Any child, right, who's been told, stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about, right? That's a child who hasn't had their experience validated. So in that moment, let's say especially a little boy who is crying receives the message.
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Stop crying, boys don't cry. So now that little boy has created a belief, I'm not a man if I cry, if I show emotional vulnerability, I'm not a man. So they repress all of those experiences. And what I say is that's what becomes calcified into our buttons. So when someone pushes a button, right? So in that example, carrying that example along, if that little boy becomes a man and let's say he gets triggered emotionally and before he knows it, a tear slips out of his eye,
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but he has that belief still that showing emotion is not family, then he's probably going to blame the person that triggered the emotion and the tear instead of rewriting that story and rewriting that belief. So it feels good to say, you made me angry. You're the reason I'm not showing up like a man right now. It's your fault. But as we go inward, there's definitely a heavy degree of responsibility that takes place.
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And it's incredibly empowering to take back that power, to say, you know what, I've had an emotion that's been triggered, but you don't get to say how I respond. You don't get to control how I show up in this moment. I get to choose that. For me, that's been incredibly powering. It's been life-changing. So that means when the leaders we report to at work, if they say, you made me angry because you didn't submit the report on time.
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they are giving the power first to the subordinates and they haven't taken the time to realize what their power is in the situation and that they can respond differently. 100%, yes, absolutely. So in those moments, oftentimes I've had several not so great leaders, so I've been in those shoes, right? Where I've been talked to a certain way. Something that really helped me in those moments is instead of getting personally attached to feeling attacked, I kind of trick myself and...
27:58
When someone's taking it out on me, in the back of my head, I have a little voice saying, wow, look at how powerful I am that this person just gave me their power. Look at that. Wow. I've never heard a pink phrase like that before. It almost sounds like, you know, the affirmations from the secret. It almost sounds like you are reprogramming yourself with a certain affirmation of, hey, I'm powerful. Look how much I trip. I don't know.
28:23
To a certain extent, yes, you know, I think, and that's where so much of it for me is going below the surface, going into the complexity of it. Because if someone listening were to just say, Oh, I'm going to do that now. I'm going to use that trick.
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and they just say it a bunch of times, but they don't actually believe it, they're not connected to the belief behind it, then just saying it isn't gonna change the experience. If I say, oh, this person just gave me their power, I'm powerful, but I still have a lot of beliefs running in the background that I'm not worthy, I'm not powerful, I have to perform whatever it is, then just layering a new message on top is not gonna change everything that's running in the background.
29:03
Speaking of which, that's where a lot of people wonder why they're not manifesting. You know how the secret orders, you manifest and you visualize and you affirm, but the stuff doesn't happen. What is the one element you think is missing? I believe that if we think of ourselves as that iceberg, we hopefully at this point, we all know the metaphor of what's above the surface or below the surface. I believe that most people are living our lives and in the world above the surface.
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And so we've been taught that what's above the surface is all there is, that's what's important, that's all that matters. And all that stuff below the surface is messy, it's woo woo, it's emotion, it's not important, it doesn't matter. So I believe that having the courage to go below the surface is really what's gonna be the game changer. So what are some tips when it comes to the inner work? The...
29:57
I need to question a lot of these beliefs. What are some things that we can do starting today? Great question, Roberta. I think there are so many things that we can do. There are, of course, books out there. I mentioned Brene Brown. I love Brene Brown's work on shame and vulnerability. All of her books are incredible. So I think education is definitely a first step that we can take because we don't know what we don't know. So starting to lean into some of those books, starting to gather information and educate ourselves.
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But then I think getting curious, you know, next time we get triggered or next time someone challenges the belief of ours, instead of just defending the belief, being able to get curious and say, why is it that I believe that? Where was I taught to believe that? Who benefits from me believing this? You know, getting curious and starting to play with the belief instead of just running the program on autopilot, if you will, and just reacting as we normally do, if we can interrupt it and say, well, wait a second.
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I want to get a little curious. I want to know more. Why do I believe this? Where did it come from? And is this serving me? Is this how I want to show up? Is this how I want to continue to believe? So those are some very quick tips. I think journaling is a great practice, right? Just giving ourselves the opportunity to explore our inner world by ourselves. Because if we're talking to other people, it's really hard to oftentimes be completely vulnerable, be raw, be open.
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because we're worried what the other person's gonna think of us or what they're gonna say. But as we start to get curious, as we start to just explore the depths of who we are and say, wow, there's so much more here that I haven't explored, then that's where we can also lean into things like coaching, right? Or therapy, depending on where we're stuck, depending on what happened to us as kids, having that support, having another person, especially someone who has the tools, hopefully has done the work themselves.
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If you hire a coach who has never worked with their own coach, run away. Right. That coach is not great. Coaches need coaches, getting curious about ourselves and then looking for support, you know, a group coaching program, one-on-one coaching. There are so many people out there who are really doing this work and showing up in service of others because we've seen the transformational capability of doing this work in our own lives, in the lives of others, I can say 10 years ago, when I left my first marriage.
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I was miserable and now I'm happier than I ever thought I could be. That is amazing. Just one last example, before we wrap up, do you have a leader that you coached who actually said because of the work you did with them, what is the one awareness you brought them to? Oh my gosh. So one story that immediately comes to mind is, I was working with a leader and
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She was getting really attached to this promotion. She wanted this promotion, had been told she was qualified, was really excited about it. And then come promotion time, she didn't get the promotion. So as we were doing that work together, she was frustrated with her leader, upset about the situation. And we started doing some work about her attachment to the promotion. And as we did some work together, she was able to create distance between herself and that decision.
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Because what she realized was that she was attaching her identity. So it wasn't just a job at that point. She was identifying with the job title, with the status, with the salary of that position, she was saying, I am that position and getting really identified with it. So as we started to create that distance and she realized.
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Okay, it would be great to have that job, but I am not that job. He said that was completely life-changing for her because she was able to really create some distance and become less attached to all of the attachments in her life that influenced her identity. So whether it's her religious belief, whether it's her racial identity, starting to look at that and say, that is part of me, but that is not.
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Who I am. Right, exactly. Because while we introduce ourselves, we don't just say, I am Carissa Carban. That's it. As in that is full stop, enough, sufficient, done. The leadership consultant, the leadership coach, this, that, the titles are what we've come to believe that's what makes us who we are. Or even beyond that, right? I could say I'm Carissa.
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I'm silly, I'm fun, I'm loving. Oh, we don't say that. I'm empathetic. We don't say that. We say, I am. And then we fill in all the roles. I'm a sister, a wife. You know, we always speak to those roles instead of, but who are we really? The internal ones, which fun enough is the soft skills that companies are now looking for since they're more human and people driven. And those are the things we never mentioned when we talk about ourselves. Yep.
34:58
Absolutely. And you know, so many people think hard skills are good, soft skills are not great, but we need both, right? We live in a world of duality. We need the hard skills. We need to drive the business and we need to be able to relax from our masculine into our feminine. We need to be able to feel, we need to be able to connect with one another. We need both. We certainly need both. One last tip, Carissa, before we wrap up, what can you tell us about the inward work?
35:27
It's so worth it. It can be uncomfortable. It can be challenging. It can bring up a lot of old things that we didn't want to think about. We didn't want to feel and heal from, but coming on the other side of a lot of this work, I'm never done. There's no finish line by any means, but having been through what I've been through, I can definitively say it's absolutely worth it because here's the thing, right? The way that we're living, we're essentially...
35:54
creating the definition of insanity where we're doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, right? So here's my challenge, my invitation to anybody listening is what have you got to lose? Clearly what we're doing isn't working, so why not try it? Try going inward, just try it. What have you got to lose? I know, and it's so scary for so many people. Whatever they think the horror story they tell themselves is when it comes to going inward, it just seems like such a scary idea.
36:22
But like you said, it is certainly worth it. Thank you so much, Carissa. This has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you for being on the show today. Oh, thanks, Roberta. Really, really appreciate your time. Thanks everyone for listening. This has been an absolute pleasure. Really appreciate it. And before you go, please tell us where to find you on the socials. Absolutely. If you can get the spelling of my name right, my website is carissacarbon.com. I'm easy to find.
36:47
I am very active on LinkedIn or Instagram at Carissa Karban. So come find me, keep the conversation going. I'd love to hear from you. Excellent. Carissa Karban, the leadership coach and consultant based in Denver was here to remind us how important and actually crucial it is to do the inner work whether personally or professionally. Don't forget to subscribe, give a rating and a review. Thank you for listening.