Connecting with Authenticity
The first Uncover the Human! Co-hosts Alex Cullimore and Cristina Amigoni discuss the central theme of the podcast: Authenticity. Episode Notes can be found here at uncoverthehuman.wearesiamo.com
Credits: Raechel Sherwood for Original Score Composition.
Links:
YouTube Channel: Uncover The Human
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wearesiamo
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wearesiamo/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WeAreSiamo
Website: https://www.wearesiamo.com/
Alex Cullimore:
Welcome to uncover the human where every conversation revolves around enhancing all the connections in our lives,
Cristina Amigoni:
whether that's with our families, co workers, or even ourselves,
Alex Cullimore:
when we can be our authentic selves magic happens.
Cristina Amigoni:
This is Cristina Amigoni.
Alex Cullimore:
And this is Alex Cullimore.
Both:
Let's dive in.
Guest:
Authenticity means freedom. Authenticity means going with your gut. Authenticity is bringing 100% of yourself, not just the parts you think people want to see. But all of you. being authentic means that you have integrity to yourself. It's the way our intuition is whispering something deep rooted and true. Authenticity is when you truly know yourself, you remember and connect to who you were before others told you who you should be. It's transparency relatability, no frills, no makeup, just being.
Alex Cullimore:
Hello, everybody. I am Alex Cullimore.
Cristina Amigoni:
And I am Cristina Amigoni.
Alex Cullimore:
And we are the Co-hosts of this new podcast uncover the human by Siamo, which is a company we started together. We started this podcast because we really wanted to explore the ideas of authenticity, as it relates to the workplace, home life, just participation in various groups and communities, we might be a part of. Something that's been incredibly interesting to both of us.
Cristina Amigoni:
And, just to kind of address a few elephants in the room. Siamo is our company and it's stands for "We Are" in Italian. Again kind of driving that authenticity of "We Are". And also, my last name is Italian and you don't have to learn how to pronounce it. We can just stick with Cristina. It's easier.
Alex Cullimore:
Yeah, my last name is Cullimore. And while it does sound like how it's spelled, it's still a really difficult name to go come across. So please don't worry about it. We're just Cristina and Alex,
Cristina Amigoni:
exactly we are Alex and Cristina, whichever it is.
Alex Cullimore:
Whichever way you want to go alphabetically. One of the things that got us working together was we have lots and lots of jokes about not existing in a workplace. And so when we started a company, especially around people and authenticity, and being human in the workplace, we really wanted to bring that idea of existence in there. And so when Cristina came up with the term SIAMO, we both knew that was exactly the right fit. That was that was the word choice. SIAMO, meaning We Are in Italian was really the direct plugin for existence and meaning for both of us.
Cristina Amigoni:
Yes, we have lots of instant messaging conversations regarding whether we feel like we exist or we don't exist, or if we live in the matrix or not. So it just seemed to fit in when I had a dream, and the name came to me, somehow, it seemed to be the right message to give out.
Alex Cullimore:
And that brings us to the idea of Uncover The Human in general. Uncover The Human, the title we've given this podcast really came about because when we started to talk about while we were working together some of the common themes that work and don't work in the workplace, and projects in general, whatever project you might be on whatever type of engagement or whatever type of work you're doing, and not even necessarily work in the corporate nine to five sense, but work in your life, in your family, etc. Whatever it comes down to, we started to see similar points of failure and similar points where things can definitely be improved. And it always seems to circle back to the human portion of it.
Cristina Amigoni:
Bringing humanity back into the workplace. It's one of the big things, humanizing technology, especially having worked in technology settings, and just humanizing everything right now seems to be what's needed. And by humanizing, what we mean is the fact that, well, we're all unique, and we're all different. And we all are humans, but do we do have some equal needs, which we'll discuss in this podcast, and in future ones, when it comes to being heard, knowing that we exist, knowing that our contribution matters, being appreciated, feel like we belong, and not for the mask, or armor, or whatever we have to put on at the moment so that we can be accepted, but for who we are, for our true selves.
Alex Cullimore:
Yeah, and in short, that's where we got right back to authenticity, we wanted to really bring that piece forward in this podcast, because we started to see that it was what most people start to feel is missing when we start to see lack of engagement, when you start to neglect some of the human aspects of this. And we definitely saw that play out in teams, people will just get assigned to a team and then are expected to just work together and there's no real engagement of how are these people going to work together, they can be total all stars in whatever they do, but the second they come together, they are still going to have to work together in a team setting, and they're going to have to be comfortable doing that. And we started to look for ways to make that comfort manageable, able to be nurtured and more present.
Cristina Amigoni:
When you talk about teams it really amazes me, I almost want to cry and laugh at the same time. It's one of those feelings. It is possible to have very different feelings at the same time. But the team's piece amazes me because we all know sports, most of us love sports in some ways, or if it's not sports, it's music, symphonies, and all of those community activities that we do together. And if you think about whether it's a football team, a symphony, a Broadway show, you don't just put all stars, like you said Alex, together in a room and expect them to just go on stage. Tonight is the premier and you just showed up, because your name is on the Billboard, and you know exactly how to perform together. And if you talk about football, or baseball, or any sports, these are athletes, professional athletes that go on for weeks and months, and hours, before the season even starts to learn how to play together, they don't learn how to play football, at boot camp, they learn how to play together, because it's very different. And in business, there's this assumption that you can put a bunch of names on an Excel spreadsheet or in an email group, and call them a team. And all of a sudden, while everybody's swimming in their own lanes they are expected to win the championship. No, that's not how it works.
Alex Cullimore:
Yeah, I think that probably starts right away and right from the get go of hiring people, because we go out, and we have a very specific idea for what position we're filling. And it's as if anybody who has the list of prerequisites, you've got your three to five years of experience in this, you're good at managing this, you've seen what x tool does, you know how to work with Google AdWords, whatever it is, whatever the pieces are, we write these descriptions with the assumption that anybody who happens to fit that bill would plug in like a puzzle piece, just exactly how we anticipate and that is exactly the missing piece on this team. And we'll just put them in there and everything will just hum nicely.
Cristina Amigoni:
In addition to that, when things change within the project, the team, or the organization, or whatever it is, and things always change -little spoiler alert- they never go as planned, then there's this tendency to stay rigid to the original plan, while the original plan says that you are going to do THIS. And even though THIS does not exist anymore, because the client changed their mind, you're still gonna be forced to do it, w ich makes no sense.
Alex Cullimore:
I actually love that you brought up change in general, first of all, because honestly, that becomes one of the huge things that all businesseses have to do a bunch of change, and lots of people are trying to create change in their life and what they're doing with their families. There's always change going on. So how do we get more comfortable with that, but there's also the idea of change at the human level, like we hire people, and we can't expect them to just be the same person for the next, you know, two to 40 years that they might be in that company, they, you can't expect that person to want to do that. And we shouldn't want them to do that, we should want them to b able to move on. And we want t continue improving as a busines that we have that growth for th people. Otherwise, we start t lose people off the other sid of things, we've hired you b cause you had a skill set, bu
Cristina Amigoni:
Yeah, very, very good points, it's like the we're not really acknowledging hat you may want to do somethi g different now. change is always there. And one of the principles that we learned in my coaching training was, "We grow or We die". And that works for both people and companies and products and everything else around this. And we know that when it comes to a technology or a product, or service, we are constantly finding new ways to pivot into things differently. And the ones that don't, well, anybody remember Nokia? That's what happens. Or Blockbuster? There's two to name a few that didn't want to pivot and change. The same thing happens with humans, it starts with the humans.
Alex Cullimore:
That's what happened with Kodak, digital cameras came out of nowhere. And that's that, that was the game, but people weren't really willing to see it and change with it. So how do you get comfortable changing that? And that's actually when we started to really feel the human element of that, as well as just how we interact with people at a human level so that they will be open for something like that when a company does need to change when the market changes. Our personal social lives all got changed, when the pandemic hit, and we all went into quarantine, everything had to change at that point. So how do we experience that? And how do we go along with what our natural human reactions are going to be to that? And we saw that happen in the workplace. We saw that happen personally, I think another couple of examples in the workplace. We've seen that happen with employee engagement surveys, people are just kind of nominally asked how they're doing, but there's either lack of feeling that there's actual anonymity or nobody's actually listening to the answers when they're given. You start to miss the actual human engagement pieces when you don't consider that you're working with humans and that it should be working with humans.
Cristina Amigoni:
But it's funny that you bring up anonimity. While I understand that there's a safety component in that, which I think is necessary. And I'm not saying that it shouldn't be there. However, it can't be just that. Because the whole point is to actually understand what matters to each individual, personally, so that you can engage them in a way and meet them where they are, not where everybody else is. And so when only do what's in employee engagements, where you don't have that personal piece, then you're missing out on how to actually do something that matters to me, Cristina, or matters to Jake, or matters to somebody else. Because you didn't ask me, or listen to what I have to say that matters to me.
Alex Cullimore:
And when you ask, you have to also be willing to ask again, under the assumption that it may have changed, what was interesting today or before may not be interesting now may not be interesting tomorrow or may become interesting in a week. So that's why we ended up really wanting to start on the uncover the human theme, because we really saw that as one of the gaps that just shows up over and over again, in the lack of communication and communication gaps. And when when things are not reported accurately, both like mega status point of view on projects, and you see all kinds of projects where things are supposedly in the green status for a very long time. And they're right up at the end of it. Oh, no, here's a bunch of red flags that we haven't raised the whole time and things like that. When you start to see these gaps, and you start to boil down to what was really missing, there's usually things like lack of safety, people don't feel like they can bring up issues, there's lack of addressing people as people. And so we default to all the behaviors that people start to default to, when they feel like they're not being listened to, they will start being disengaged, they'll start dropping out of meetings, or not bringing up things in a timely manner. So even if you ignore the human, you're going to then suffer the consequences of how humans will react when they have been ignored.
Cristina Amigoni:
Very true. It's all connected, there's no getting away from it, there's no getting around it. It's not something you can skip. The humanity piece in the workplace and communities, in schools and everything we do, and how we treat each other. It's like change management, which I also related to dental hygiene, you can choose not to brush your teeth twice a day, and floss and go to the dentist every six months, and you'll end up with no teeth. You can't get away from taking care of your teeth. you can choose how you do it. You either do it consistently in a good way the whole time and monitor whether it's working or not, or while you've suffered the consequences on the other side.
Alex Cullimore:
it's a great metaphor for a number of reasons like for one, because you may not see those effects right away. And I think I've seen definitely, in my experience in various companies. And in doing consulting projects, you see certain people who discount their employees, discount the human elements, they essentially get away with it briefly. It's like your teeth, if you haven't taken care of your teeth, no, the next day, your teeth aren't going to start falling out, you still, however, do need to get back to brushing and taking regular care of them. If you want them to stick around, you may not see the rot starting to happen immediately. You may not see the adverse effects, but they will be there if you don't reengage and retouch up.
Cristina Amigoni:
I never thought about that. That's excellent. It is like that. Any dentist listening to this will be very happy about that.
Alex Cullimore:
Dentists, we've plugged you.
Cristina Amigoni:
We touched on our previous experience a little bit and how we got here and what motivated us. Just very quickly, I come from a consulting, learning and development kind of world. I've always been people oriented, whether it's training, teaching, change, management, culture, coaching, you name it, anything people related. I love technology. And I have this weird thing about data too. I'm not quite sure how that fits in. But mostly for me, it's about connecting all the pieces and really coming back to the people, that organizations don't exist without people. And so focusing on the people, even as half as much as we focus on technology and processes would be a huge win right now.
Alex Cullimore:
And that's actually data points actually interesting thing that we should bring up as well, because that's something we want to bring into this podcast. And we want to bring into the work in general, we want to talk about some of these data points of why these things are important, the numbers behind why these work and not. But we'd also like to bring in, we both have some data side of us that would like to bring those numbers in and really show some of the more hard facts, if you want to call them that, about why these things are important and why they work.
Cristina Amigoni:
Well, you love data more than I do, but we like to look at that, because it makes it real.
Alex Cullimore:
That's a little bit about my background as well, I jumped in here from consulting, I've done a lot of like software development work. I've always been interested in math and data. But it's never been as interesting if you don't start to apply that to humans. And if you think about, basically every technology solution, you're going for something that is going to be interacting with humans, you might have a few, one off projects to get something automated, get whatever, but either way, even if you're automating something, you're then touching somebody's life, and that you're changing what they're going to be doing, how they're interacting with something, maybe it's making it faster moving, it's changing where they start on their day to day process, if you don't remember and focus on whoever that changes impacting, it's easy to lose sight. And it's always more interesting to keep an eye on the human anyway, which if they also let us do this, we really liked the technology, really likes projects, and we started to see what happens when you actually encourage that human aspect of it.
Cristina Amigoni:
It's kind of funny, it cracks me up. Because as you were talking about that, it reminds me of how many times I've heard the line of, yeah, we have this change that we're doing and it's all this technology and process changes. But we're not sure that there's a people component that needs attention. And I'm like, wait, wait, how does that work? Exactly. So you're telling me no human is actually going to touch the process and technology ever. Because that's the only way that the people component can be just pushed aside.
Alex Cullimore:
Until we have robots building robots. And none of us, I guess, do any work at all. I'm not sure how that's even remotely possible. Everything always ends up having humans.
Cristina Amigoni:
Exactly, at the very least, it's the humans that are actually configuring the change. Yes, configuring the technology, some human has to be involved, because unless we went into some futuristic Star Trek reality, I don't know how you can do this without a human component.
Alex Cullimore:
I think even in an AI project, you're building some artificial intelligence, if you go through the actual lifecycle of it, tthere's many points at which it's touching a human. And I think one of the things that you and I both come from very much distrust is anytime anybody's like, well, it just impacts XYZ people, because it never isn't just that, the ripple effect is always there, there's always way more touching that one thing than anybody thinks. And then you find out later if you don't investigate that up front, you find out the hard way, this was attached to a whole bunch of other things. And the number of times that we've been at conference tables, across from clients, or customers who start out with we're just going to be changing these things. And then somebody who they all work on the same, the same company, they work next to each other day to day, somebody will say: "oh, actually, I do that this way". And that actually has to talk to the accounting department, and everyone else in the table is totally blown away. Just surprised by this information,
Cristina Amigoni:
I like to call it the six degrees of change impact. Because there's always a next level of degree, it never just impacts one person or just impacts two people or just impacts this department, because even just the fact that this department now has to learn how to do their entire job, or even half of their job completely new in a new way, it impacts everybody else that's gonna interact with the department, because now they may not have the time to dedicate to other questions, they may take longer to produce what they need to produce, while they're going through the learning curve of the new system and process. They may be frustrated. And that leaks out. They may go on vacation, and then somebody else has to learn it. There's a million reasons why the impact is not just
Alex Cullimore:
Anytime that word just comes out yet, I get the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It's just that it's never JUST that.
Cristina Amigoni:
That's a little bit of our background, and kind of like we see the lack of human coming in workplace, and also outside of the workplace and how, why we wanted to uncover the human. So the connection to authenticity for us is really because the first step, if we were to do it step process here for authenticity, is to to uncover that the human is to understand and give the space of to be people who they are. And why is that important? You know, like, why is it important for people to not take on, you know, put on the Halloween suit, or their consulting suit or their whatever suits at the moment, but instead being able to be themselves. That's what we are here to talk about and, and discover and learn together.
Alex Cullimore:
And I think that the idea of putting on different suits is really important here, because that's for a couple of reasons. First of all, because I think we can all relate a little bit to the idea of having to wear a lot of different hats or present ourselves in different ways. And the farther we get from something that is comfortable for us, it's like a physical suit a physical outfit, like there are some outfits you're going to feel more comfortable in that you just feel like it reflects you a little bit better. And if we aren't engaged in that, both in ourselves and in the people that we either work for us or we work with, it's a lot harder to make that connection and for them to feel engaged. I think you have the stats on that, Cristina, something like 60-70 or 80%, I can't remember now, of people are actively disengaged at work. Is it? Is it 40%? I can't remember.
Cristina Amigoni:
It's both actually, it's I think it's around 70% in the US people are actively disengaged at work, and 80%, globally. And what's really scares me about that statistics, is that if you think about it from the receiving end of something like "I'm going into surgery right now, let's say heart surgery, and I, you know, as I'm closing my eyes and counting back from 10, I look around, and I think that 80% of the people in here are going to be completely disengaged while doing my heart surgery. How does that make me feel? Yeah, not great.
Alex Cullimore:
That's immediately more nerve wracking.
Cristina Amigoni:
And that's the thing, so why is it acceptable in any other industry, anywhere? Really.
Alex Cullimore:
It seems to come down to people don't know how to make that space. And I think that's what we wanted to explore. And what we wanted to bring out both with this podcast and just in our work in general, is how do you encourage those things. So I think, from what I see, there are some people who understand that it is important, but then they have no idea how to implement that.
Cristina Amigoni:
And I think one of the things that we did when we started thinking about, we love podcasts, we have a lot to talk about, we spend a lot of time talking to each other about these things, so maybe it would be nice to have conversations with other people about them, hence the podcast. And but it was also about what is it that really comes back to it? What is it that we're doing ourselves to find that energy to find the things that energize us to find the engagement to find solutions to all these problems that we experience ourselves first, and there are out there, and a couple of things that have come up where it's the fact that first of all, we have to look at what matters, like what attracts us about authenticity out there. What inspires us that we see out there in pop culture or and thought leaders out there in the world, and then look at ourselves and figure out like what has worked for me, and what hasn't worked for me.
Alex Cullimore:
That's interesting point, you bring up some of the pop culture pieces, because I think there are big characters that everybody knows. And one of the reasons since we started talking about authenticity, I feel like so much of life connects back to it. But this is one thing that I've seen a lot, especially since thinking about authenticity more. I think we connect to characters that especially display authenticity and comfort that people that we really gravitate towards have that.
Cristina Amigoni:
I would definitely agree. I mean, it's one of my pieces that I'm a huge sci fi, geek superhero geek anything superheroes, Star Wars, Star Trek, Avengers, DC Comics, I've seen them all over and over. And and when I think of l a character that I find extremely authentic from the beginning, as she goes through her journey is Princess Leia. She's fearless. There's one characteristics about her that is just the fearlessness. She's fearless from the very first moment when she's pushing Chewy out of the way and calling him a walkingrug or whatever she calls him to when Darth Vader is threatening to kill her, she's still fearless, nothing wavers. And to the end of the saga. She's still that person. She goes through her growth, her heart aches, but the fearlessness is her authenticity.
Alex Cullimore:
I think that's exactly accurate. I think that we see that in a lot of characters. And the interesting part is exactly what you said that there is this unchangeable core, this, like fearlessness is something that goes throughout, but the character still changes. And I think we really gravitate towards characters that specifically hold on to a set of values, despite the hardships and while they're growing as characters as people as well, in the storylines we're watching. There's still something core to them. And to me, I think there's characters like Jon Snow from Game of Thrones, very much has a personal value set. He's always working to live up to it or making hard choices because of it. And then the other much more lighthearted example I have is Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec. I think he's just a very authentic character that he's on l the libertarian end of the political spectrum. And that might not be a super large party in general, but I think most people just really love and enjoy his character because he is it's a very funny show, but he's always authentic, living up to his own specific values, growing and changing here and there, but really dedicated to his own belief system One thing actually you were talking about earlier this week was the West Wing, we both started re-watching the West Wing. And that's a huge part of the first season is that the movement to be- hey, look, we got elected here. And we were x y&z type of people during the campaign. But we've entirely drifted from that. And spoiler alert for a season that was 21 years ago. This one, they start to find their footing again, when they decided to, quote let Bartlett be Bartlett and Bartlett's the presidential character. And that's, that's where they find their footing again, they find who they are, and why they were there in the first place, and everything starts to move better for them.
Cristina Amigoni:
And two key things that I'm sure even in parks and rec and in all these pop culture pieces that we see is, is the fact that not only there's that courage to just say "this is who I am, this is who I want to be. And I'm going to show up like that." And I have support around me when I do that. I'm not doing it alone, because we can't really do
Alex Cullimore:
And that's something we like to see in anything alone.
Cristina Amigoni:
Yeah, I have seen Scrubs. And it's true. Like shows as well. I think that's again, not to bring up parks if it is one of the things that I really liked about it was the you haven't seen it. But I think you'd like to see like authenticity as much like there is a community feel they're all in it to help each other. And another show like that would be Scrubs. They're all different personalities, different people, but they're in it to help each other. Be nice, be more comfortable with each other. Even though there's jokes flying, there's still that base layer of connection. fact that everybody was just themselves and they were still together. And they were still friends and they could disagree, they could scream at each othe and have fallouts but ther was a baseline of just the conn ction is always there, the rela ionship will always come firs . It's not about agreeing. It's about being ourselves and acce ting ourselves in valuing ours lves for that.
Alex Cullimore:
And that's a hugely important part, obviously, valuing yourself, but actually, I really like your story from the coworker that we used to have. Joe, you had a great story with that, that it's not only you finding that comfort, but other people can kind of help discover that comfort with you and encourage that for you. I don't know if you want to talk about that. But that was I think that's a great story of authenticity.
Cristina Amigoni:
YesI love that. That's one of the first pieces that I looked back to when I was trying to figure out like what has worked for me on the receiving end from a leader and from a workplace and an environment where it allowed me to flourish and to really show all my potential and keep going in and be fearless, really take on that Princess Leia type
Alex Cullimore:
And that definitely went on to save the fearlessness. And Joe was a huge part of that. Because Joe not only included me in a lot, but he always pushed me to go outside of my comfort zone. But he didn't do it in a way of just go do it and call me if you need me. He did it more in a including me, even though I wasn't like everybody else, and I didn't have the same experience as everybody else. And every time I had a doubt about that. And I went to him countless of times about it. Because every time I was in a room with other people that he wanted to include me with I didn't understand what they were saying for the most part, I had no idea what was going on for a good portion and a few weeks. And I also didn't think the same way. That was a big thing for me, I would go to Joe and say "I don't understand why you want me to be in this room. I don't talk the same language. I don't understand things the same way. I don't see things the same way. I don't have the same background. Why am I here?" And he's answer over and over and over was that's why, because we need somebody that's not like us in here. We need the diversity, we need that different perspective, we need the questions that you ask, even though they may seem stupid to you, because nobody else is asking them, we need those questions to be asked. day, many times when there'll be people just plowing down some project path. And then asking questions like well wait, how is that going to get to x departments? Or does y department know about this coming change? And just how often the answer would be "Wait, no, we hadn't thought of that. Or, yeah, that's a good point." These are the times where it really, really pays to have that. And it's kind of kudos to Joe for both seeing the gap and for encouraging time and time again, to be specifically different. Different in that context. It was so authentic to what you are, but different from what the team was and the absolute necessity of having that.
Cristina Amigoni:
And it's interesting, what you say, that I know you and I have talked about, is how our own authenticity is not a finish line. And so we definitely have to keep doing the work to figure out of what does it mean for to be ME, and what would allow me to do that, but also accepting that it may change over time? And what that looks like?
Alex Cullimore:
Yeah, absolutely. That change part, I think is incredibly important that the idea that it's not going to be the same, but day after day, moment after moment, saying that they can be talking about some of the hiring pieces, and you hire somebody for a specific job. But that person is quite a change. It's a person it's a, it's somebody who both probably wants to change wants to season career growth, maybe he wants to see just new experiences, new things. I know, that's something that you and I have also just bonded over, we both have the personality type to think "I've done this a couple times, I really want to do something new. I want to see what else is out there. I want to I want to feel that" and that's very engaging to feel like there are new things, and simultaneously, very disengaging when it starts to feel like there are no new things
Cristina Amigoni:
Yes, exactly. Or even another facet of disengagement is when you see that you can do and help what's out there with the problem, or things that are not quite working as well as they could and you're not allowed to because that's not your swim lane.
Alex Cullimore:
That's huge. Like feeling like you aren't restricted to a swim lane, when you feel like you could contribute something else can be incredibly disengaging.
Cristina Amigoni:
And engagement is a huge piece. I mean, we talked about it at the beginning of the podcast, but that's how a lot it chips away at everything in productivity, it chips away at enthusiasm, it chips away at wanting to work hard.
Alex Cullimore:
I actually heard some study. And if I can find the study, I'll put it up in the details of the, or the description notes of the podcast. But there's one talking about employee engagement, or at least just, I guess it was even just human engagement in whatever you're doing. And everybody has like things that they like to do certain things that may be work better at or just happen to enjoy more. And maybe that happens to be communicating with other people that happens to be drawing flowcharts or coming up with a new process or development, or developments, whatever it is, there might be things that we're particularly interested in. But this study that was done was about working in flow states and working with things that make you enter flow states. And for those who don't know, flow is that a psychologists term for the feeling when if you're doing something you love, it doesn't feel like work or time flies, when you're having fun. You have this almost blended experience where you're not thinking about the clock, you're not thinking about what has to be done or not done. You're just in a state of flow, because you're just engaged in what you're doing. You want to see it through, you want to see what's happening. That's kind of the psychological term for flow. But the study, to get back to my long winded response here, the study was about what happens when we don't experience those flow states. And how quickly does engagement start to drop off if we can't access things that interest us that keep us feeling like we're growing and moving? And the answer was something shocking, like two days, that if you went two days without something that was going to be keeping your interest levels of depression started moving up, people were much more anxious, there was more and more and more disengagement right away. Two days.
Cristina Amigoni:
I could probably relate to that. If not faster, I go very fast. I have a very low tolerance for being disengaged.
Alex Cullimore:
I feel that way too. And the second time, you feel it like it goes, it goes so fast. Like you start to feel like well, this isn't quite as interesting. And then within maybe half a day, suddenly your way, I feel anyway, like way down. Oh, no, there's nothing, there's nothing here.
Cristina Amigoni:
Well, and that shows, because as you know, we've seen, everything impacts us again, we are different humans. And we all have different things and we see the world differently. But we're all human. And one of the things that impacts how we show up is our emotions. So if our emotions are down in the basement, because we just lost engagement, well, we're not going to be agile to change, we're not going to respond to customers well, we're not going to engage the team, we're not going to be productive, we're not going to be very pleasant to be around at home. It just leaks everywhere.
Alex Cullimore:
That's what we see time and time again, start to sink, larger projects and sink company's ability to make change and personal ability to make changes once you start to lose that engagement, then the team's not really firing on all cylinders. And it doesn't matter whether they have the skills or not, they're not going to be able to apply them effectively. And you start to risk this change resistance and you start to risk just push deadlines and everything else that comes along with the group in engagement and willingness to be part of the mission.
Cristina Amigoni:
So true. And it keeps going. It's really painful to watch. And the amazing thing is that it really doesn't take that much All it takes is actually caring for people in a way of even something as simple as, everybody says Good morning, and now that we're remote or even when we're not remote, you get on slack if that's what you use for instant messages, and you say Good Morning, and treat each other as humans. Simple things like that can happen in various ways, asking every week asking after every task or things like, are you still engaged? What works? What's not working? What's energizing? What's draining your energy?
Alex Cullimore:
Yeah, if we're allowed to do something that we are more engaged with, it doesn't even have nearly 100% of the time, there is some amount that we we feel enough engagement at, and it's much lower than you think.
Cristina Amigoni:
It is, I think it was a study that Marcus Buckingham did with the ADP Institute, if I'm saying that correctly. But basically, you just need to have 20% of what you do something that energizes you. So something that as they call it, it's your strength, which is not defined as something you're good at. Because, just because you're good at accounting, you may not want to do accounting for the rest of your life. But it's something that energizes you, that's your strength. And so all you need is the 20% of whatever you do has to be aligned with one of your strengths, the 80% will be fine.
Alex Cullimore:
And that's, I think the part that's missing here, too, that a lot of people start to hear things like, even this podcast, that we're talking about really engaging in humans and making sure you're talking to them as people. It's not about trying to create this workplace where everybody can just do whatever they want all the time, that's obviously unrealistic. And there's going to be things that have to get done. But there's a shockingly low bar to getting a fantastic engagement, where both the employees and the company feel like they're growing, the employee feels like they have a life, they're living more than just a job they have. It doesn't mean the other things that we all know have to happen in the little pieces that have to happen aren't going to get done, they'll just get done a lot better. And they'll get done with a lot less like foot dragging.
Cristina Amigoni:
Exactly and it starts with understanding the WHO. Ask people, it's the simplest thing ever. Ask what are you passionate about? And what energizes you? If anybody asks me what energizes me, it's this, it's conversations, it's connections with others, it's helping people, it's having the relationship. I've done a number of different assessments that explain what my strengths are, especially in a work environment. And the top one is relationship management. The second one is decision maker. And the bottom one is implementing and if you ask anybody that has worked with me, and actually knows me, as me, will definitely agree with that.
Alex Cullimore:
I think that's an important part too, is that relationship management and we both came from, like a consulting background. And so there's relationships are super important and consulting, you want to have that level of trust and that level of engagement, both with the customers and just with whatever project and your work you're doing. And it's just beneficial for a number of reasons that have to do with the general consulting model. But one of the easiest ways to engage in that and to be good with the relationships, a good relationship management, is to have that level of comfort and authenticity, like when people can sense that when people can relax, when people can have that just flowing conversation and be willing to bring up what's right, what's wrong, what they hope for, what they want to improve on, that is so much more conducive to a successful project, a successful engagement, and just generally happier people. These things go hand in hand, rather than being at odds with each other. You're not making a sacrifice on productivity to get employee morale up, you're boosting both.
Cristina Amigoni:
Yes, exactly. That's so true. The whole happy employees piece, it does matter. It's changing and it's nice to see that it's changing, but I think there's still a stigma around emotions and work. And it's interesting to me, because unless we have robots that work, you're not gonna get away with checking emotions at the door, you can pretend to, but as you know, as I've heard in a podcast in the past not dealing with emotion is dealing with them. It's very clearly dealing with them.
Alex Cullimore:
And there's many times where we might cover that up, but I don't think any of us can really point to a lot of experiences where you cover some larger emotion and it doesn't come out in other ways. I think, firstly, for me, definitely, if I if I fee I've covered something up that is just digging at me or something that I keep ruminating on or thinking about, it'll eventually come out in some other way. It might eventually be that I am frustrated with something at work and eventually, I might make that known, but if I don't address that, it also could easily come out in just the relationships that people outside of work, it might be an entirely unrelated context where suddenly that pent up emotion that you tried to check at the door is there. And it's now either damaging or changing a relationship that had nothing to do with wherever it started.
Cristina Amigoni:
One of the things that is you said, it leaks everywhere. We are not splitting ourselves, we can't do that. It's not possible. We're whole human beings at home, at work, at the restaurant, at the grocery store, when we're driving, you name it, and so another thing that really helps with creating that authenticity and uncovering the human and understanding, how to humanize communities and workplaces and decisions, and everything out there is understanding how we show up and what triggers how we show up.
Alex Cullimore:
Now, there's a huge portion of understanding both how we're showing up and both ourselves and to have that kind of understanding and generosity of listening and empathy for others, or how they may be showing up and not expecting that XYZ person has been happy for month after mont after month, but they seem eally down now. And I just wish hey'd get back to their happ er self, that's not really a fair expectation, it would be mo e fair to expect that they wi l have some ups and downs and to work with them on that, bec use they can still be and will bviously be just as much i not more helpful, if they're ac nowledged for that.
Cristina Amigoni:
The acknowledgement piece is huge, it's that feeling you're not alone? It's one of the worst feeling ever, I just had this conversation on LinkedIn actually with a connection and how it's just traumatizing, and so deeply, physically, and emotionally painful, to feel alone.
Alex Cullimore:
And the feeling of pain, they've done enough neuroscience studies, like the feeling of emotional pain is registered in the same part of the brain as physical pain, we often draw that distinction in our language, and in our conceptions of how we interact with the world, that there's the mental level, and there's a physical level, but they're inexorably tied, both in just how we behave, but also neurologically, they're the same. Everything is a projection of the physical body anyway.
Cristina Amigoni:
It's one thing, it's a holistic view. And part of that is our need for belonging, which is definitely a topic for a whole other podcast that we'll need to address.
Alex Cullimore:
Yeah, belonging is a huge one. And I think that's incredibly important for this piece. And hopefully this gives a good overview of exactly why we're interested in this topic, and why this has become so important in every aspect of life. And what we've seen and what we have been able to experiment with both in our own lives and workplaces, as well as we watch happen on TV shows, as well as anecdotally, from other people's experiences. That's why we wanted to make this podcast. So this podcast will really have lots of conversations between us and talking about books and different strategies, and even assessments, coaching materials that we come across that have been especially important in shaping our understandings of authenticity, but even more we're going to spend a lot of time doing a lot of interviews, bringing on guests getting a lot of other perspectives on what it means to really be authentic and how people are finding the benefits of showing up in that way.
Cristina Amigoni:
Yes, can't wait to have weekly podcasts that come up. And if we have a ton of material, we'll we'll look into doing more frequently, but hopefully, we'll be entertaining enough every week or whenever you want to listen to us.
Alex Cullimore:
As we hope you join in on this journey, we can see we're very excited to be taking it. We've seen this be this the cornerstone of so many exciting possibilities. And something that seems so close to being within reach for the workplace for people, it's right there. And we would love to be part of understanding how to get to that and connect to it. And not in the finish line sense like we were joking about before that we've made it to authenticity, things are done now, kind of way, just the getting to authenticity as a journey. Authenticity is more of a journey where there is not a goalpost like that and it's not that it's frustratingly being moved away from you. It's not like Lucy in the peanuts, pulling the football away at the last moment. It's just that you're always on the pursuit of it. And that's that is the journey.
Cristina Amigoni:
I could try to think of what the finish line of authenticity looks like in my head as I create my movies, because that's what I do. I create movies of concepts in my head and it's like running the New York Marathon, which I will never do so I admire anybody that does, but having lived in New York, getting to Central Park and moving to the finish line and somebody gives me the "you reached authenticity metal" and all I can think about is "What am I supposed to do now that I have this? Yeah, it's not quite like that. I don't think
Alex Cullimore:
I think that's one of the misconceptions to kind of focus on a little bit too. Hey, we're looking to get better at continuing to build authenticity, it's not going to be like the end of a romantic comedy, where it's just the cameras pulling away, and they're gonna live happily ever after sure they had fights before now, but clearly, from this exact moment that the credits start rolling on, everything's gonna be fine. Everything's totally perfect. It's not a bad understanding. It's the understanding that life goes on. If you followed Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks after they had the you've got mail chats for a long time, there's a lot of obstacles to overcome in that relationship, mostly revolving around trust, I assume that is not just a happily ever after after story.
Cristina Amigoni:
I'm sure somebody is leaving dishes in the sink.
Alex Cullimore:
Which is not to say that there aren't things to learn, and then check points to get in touch with but we'd really love to really be on the journey and understand the long term, the long term effects and the long term desire to be close to this as a practice
Cristina Amigoni:
and create more human workplaces and communities and just see each other as humans a bit more
Alex Cullimore:
Create that happiness that comes along with that kind of authenticity. And so actually, on that note, we wanted to be able to end our podcasts, especially with guests and asking them what authenticity means to them. And I think we should explain what it means to us, I think that would be a good way to wrap up this first episode.
Cristina Amigoni:
Sounds good to me. So what does authenticity mean to you, Alex?
Alex Cullimore:
Authenticity, to me, really comes down to profound comfort, I think that comfort comes up every time I think about authenticity, because it is both the comfort of being yourself, where you feel that just relaxed nature of just existing, you're not fighting for some type of identity that you haven't expressed up to this point, you're not fighting to look like you have identity, you're just comfortable being you. And then that comes out in other portions too. Because in two other ways, I think, importantly, the first being that you have to feel that comfort in the groups you're in to really have bring your authentic self, you have to feel the comfort that the group is also going to be supportive of that. Otherwise, you're likely to spend more time putting up walls and being a little bit more defensive, wearing a mask. And the last portion that's important would be that comfort that you feel, allowing that comfort to spill out onto other people, the authenticity comes out in you feel it from other people, you feel it for yourself, and you give it to other people, you allow for the space for other people to have that level of comfort, we have that real trifecta. That to me is the ultimate, you found authenticity, you found comfort.
Cristina Amigoni:
I love that. And it's very similar to my definition.
Alex Cullimore:
What's your definition?
Cristina Amigoni:
My definition of authenticity is a social contract between finding the courage to be our true selves. And knowing that when we do that, we are accepted, valued and appreciated. So there's a safe space for us to do that. I find myself really itching to be able to be myself, but I will shut that down very quickly if I get punished or I feel punished and excluded when I do that.
Alex Cullimore:
Yeah, that's a great way of putting it like that, you can immediately be shut down on the outside and the inside, we shut it off from ourselves and if we shut it off for too long. And it's hard to re-access.
Cristina Amigoni:
Exactly. And then we don't even know where it is. We need a coach, we need the guidance, we need the safe space to shine the light into it: "What am I looking at?" Because I don't know what that is anymore.
Alex Cullimore:
And that brings up the other side of it, which is all we have to gain when we do access that when we have that authenticity, we can feel that authentic space. What can't we do at that point, and the real benefit and the true excitement and the flow that you can achieve from that as somebody that I think we're both kind of pursuing as something we'd like to bring out through work like this.
Cristina Amigoni:
For sure. One of the best moments that I have experienced this seeing the magic in the room when people are being themselves because they feel safe doing so and they come together on solutions, on obstacles, on challenges, on creating something that didn't exist before. And there's actually studies from neuroscience, I won't get too technical on, but basically they've actually watched brains, waves of people that are in conversation where they feel safe to be themselves, and the waves will actually start moving together. And there's these bits and pieces that have sparks that happen with a combined brains that they call magic.
Alex Cullimore:
And that's exactly it really accessing those moments, which I think if we're lucky, we've all seen pieces of those can understand moments where there has been that kind of a connection. And it's this fleeting goal that you get to experience now and then and then what if we could really make that happen more often, or we can understand some of the basic building blocks of that and move towards that kind of synchronized magic, root thoughts, where everybody is contributing beyond their original skill set, where it's a group of people that have come together to be greater than the sum of the parts.
Cristina Amigoni:
Truly, beautiful. Well, I think that's a good place to say our goodbyes, and thank yous.
Alex Cullimore:
Thanks, everybody. We will see you in the coming weeks.
Cristina Amigoni:
Thank you. Thank you for listening to uncover the human, a Siamo podcast.
Alex Cullimore:
Special thanks to our Podcast Operations Wizard Jake law and our Score CCreator Raechel Sherwood.
Cristina Amigoni:
If you have enjoyed this episode, please share, review and subscribe. You can find our episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.
Alex Cullimore:
We would love to hear from you with feedback, topic ideas or questions. You can reach us at podcast at we are cmo.com or on our website. We are cmo.com LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook. We are cmo is spelled w e ar e si mo.
Cristina Amigoni:
Until next time, listen to yourself. Listen to others and always uncover the human
Listen On
