When You Leave the Room: What Legacy Are You Living?

Alex Cullimore: What does this mean to me? How is this making an impact? How much can I feel and trust the feeling of this is different because of what I'm doing, because of what I can contribute, or I feel that this whole thing is making a difference, so I'm going to make a difference to it.

[INTRODUCTION]

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.

HOSTS: Let's dive in.

Authenticity means freedom.

Authenticity means going with your gut.

Authenticity is bringing a 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.

[EPISODE]

Alex Cullimore: Hello and welcome back to this episode of Uncover the Human. It is just Cristina and I today. I did it. I said just. I did it. I did it.

Cristina Amigoni: You did it.

Alex Cullimore: I feel right into it right away.

Cristina Amigoni: You said just. That’s it. That’s it.

Alex Cullimore: I said just.

Cristina Amigoni: Episode is over.

Alex Cullimore: Pause, cancel recording. We're over.

Cristina Amigoni: You should know better than saying just.

Alex Cullimore: I should not have done it. I should just do better.

Cristina Amigoni: And we're done.

Alex Cullimore: We've been thinking a lot in the last couple of months about a topic that we wanted to discuss today. We are looking to find hope for ourselves along this journey. What we wanted to talk about is the impact of individuals, so the idea that one person can make a difference. We have a myriad different examples of this in life for better and worse that there are – there are a thousand ways that people can make a difference. It's something that I think personally, I'm looking for hope in this, because the world seems a little crazy right now. It feels chaotic. Sometimes it feels like it's too big to approach the problems to be able to make a difference, feel too small in the space of things. Let's talk a little bit about what is the impact of individuals. What does that look like? What is it?

Cristina Amigoni: You're looking at me for answers?

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. If you could just fill in those gaps, provide hope for the entire listenership, that would be great.

Cristina Amigoni: Well, it's a good thing that it's not the entire world listening.

Alex Cullimore: No pressure.

Cristina Amigoni: I thought you were going to expect me to provide hope for the world. I'm like, “I don’t know about that.”

Alex Cullimore: We're about to find out.

Cristina Amigoni: We're about to find out.

Alex Cullimore: I guess, the reason – we can talk a little bit about why we came to this topic. We've had a couple of different changes that are in professional circles, as well as, obviously, the world is under some large-scale stress and change currently. We've noticed in our own experiences, actually in the company that we met at, we've noticed the differences, when people are coming, when people are leaving, you can feel the difference, an individual. There's a couple of different sides of the coin. Sometimes there's relief, when somebody has felt an obstacle, then there's sometimes relief for people. The person can certainly make a difference if they have been feeling like they're roadblock, or they've been difficult to work around, work with.

This is within a professional context, but I think people probably feel this plenty in their personal context as well. Then there's the other ones that we've seen. We've seen a few people do things like, retire, or leave for other companies. There's true feelings of grief and loss in that change and that overall shift. There is a huge impact felt of individuals, and sometimes we forget. That is the feeling, that is the impact.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, it definitely is. It's interesting, because I know I felt it on the receiving end. It gives a self-esteem, a boost, I guess, when you realize that you are also that individual to make the difference. If the difference is not that you want people to go through grief and loss. But that is one way to actually know that we can make a difference as an individual when we do leave. Especially when we leave and people want to follow us. That's also a big indication that the presence wasn't just arms and legs. It was much deeper than that. It does also align with what a lot of data shows and a lot of human-centric and people-centric information is out there is that people stay and leave because of their manager, or people stay and leave because of the people they work with. That the tasks themselves are not enough.

You could be doing something that it's fully aligned with what you want to do, but if the people around you are not fueling that and that's the social influencer, if we go back to iPEC’s CORE Dynamics, that's going to drain. It's not going to be enough. Yes, individuals do matter. How we show up does matter. That's when we can choose how we show up. Do we want to make the difference? Do we want to be the person that gets celebrated when you leave the room? Or do we want to get a person that's just missed when you leave the room?

Alex Cullimore: They can both be celebrations, just in very different ways. It's like a celebration of life, versus a party.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Yeah, they can both be celebrations, because that's the other piece is like, when you are the type of person and when you leave the room, people are grieving and they feel the loss. They also celebrate what you brought. Also, the other side of the coin, which is the, “Oh, thank God. They just left the room.”

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Yeah. Are you leaving a hole that people are glad is gone? Or are you leaving a hole that people need to fill?

Cristina Amigoni: Exactly. Exactly.

Alex Cullimore: Sometimes I think about this when we foster kittens a lot, and it's inevitably a temporary thing. Well, we have a few that lasted longer, but that was a totally different issue. There's over 50.

Cristina Amigoni: Your numbers triple. Yes.

Alex Cullimore: Sure. Sure. If you consider it on the whole of the 50 to 60 cats that we've fostered, and only three of them stuck around, it’s pretty good.

Cristina Amigoni: Or.

Alex Cullimore: Well, that one was a choice. The other three we took on based on a disease that take a very long time to treat, but.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Yes.

Alex Cullimore: The goal is to socialize them. You want to, obviously, we take on a few of these cases that there's some rehabilitation for sure. There's the health portion of it. But you're also there to have these very young kittens spawned and be, that we tend to socialize them well enough that they get adopted very quickly, because when people walk into the kitten room, these kittens have learned to adjust to humans. They come running up to the human. It's always painful, because you know you're going to have to detach from all of these kittens, but you also have to pour in enough effort to make the connection.

There is the risk, essentially, that I think sometimes people can back away from pursuing in the workplace is that you have to be willing to show, engage in a way that will create some amount of attachment and loss when you leave. My microphone just fell off. God.

Cristina Amigoni: Even a microphone makes a difference.

Alex Cullimore: Even the microphone feels it. Just plummet off of my – Going through different change curves. This has been attached for months. What happened here?

Cristina Amigoni: Point made. Even objects can make a big difference.

Alex Cullimore: Objects make a huge difference, especially in recording a podcast, that object’s a microphone.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes.

Alex Cullimore: Okay. We’ll end with that. I'm not going to touch that now. No. I have to guess, our editors are going to take that one out of the track for a second.

Cristina Amigoni: Or not. It makes the point.

Alex Cullimore: Yes, a big impact.

Cristina Amigoni: Let's go back to the cat track, instead of the microphone track.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah, the cat track.

Cristina Amigoni: The cat track.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Cat as a metaphor. You do pour in attention to make them attached and to make them socialized. The point is to help that be a socialized cat, so that they are very adoptable. They understand humans are force of life. Someone that you turn to for food. Sometimes you can absolutely need and find attention. We tend to send back some pretty talkative cats. We let them be, pretty related to humans. It’s painful on the human side of things, because you know every time you have to let them go right when they're really just – they've grown into their own. They're really excited. They're really goofy. They really are just like, that's, A, the most adoptable portion. When they're finally ready to go be spayed and neutered and they have enough weight on them to do that, you still have to go work and create that connection.

Think it's easy to – it's good to do. It's easy to feel the difficulty of that. It took a while to get used to the like, you almost don't want to get attached because you know you're going to have to let go. I think for a human connection, it's similar. We pour a lot in and that's what makes the connection. That's what makes it painful to leave. That's where we can make an impact. We do have a difference in people's lives, because they just feel different when we're around.

You've done a good job of identifying some of the things we might see in retrospect, like, what kind of celebration is happening when you're in the room? That's definitely one.  how do we note the impact to maybe sustain ourselves in, in the present? How do we know that there's, there's help? How do we, how do we feel some of that or, or start to understand what our reputation might be. Short of giving false notice and being like, “I'm gone, I'm here. I'm gone, I'm here,” and see what people do.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. That's a good question. To go back to the cat analogy, since we're on cats –

Alex Cullimore: Now that we're talking about human impact, let's go cats.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Cat impact. I don't know that I have an answer, but one of the things that I was thinking about is our cat, Luna, who was one of your fosters, and how before the tripling of the existing cats in your household, she really enjoyed spending time with your other cats. She grew up with them. She grew up with Gus and Patch and really, you watched over her a couple of times when we were out of town and she really enjoyed that time. It was good. Then, the situation changed. One cat made a difference. The next time around, that may or may not start with an M, and she was miserable. She spent two weeks under the bed and couldn't wait to come home, basically, right now at the door when I went to pick her up, and then yelled at me for two days for leaving her in that situation. Even in that sense, one cat made a huge difference.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. Yeah. We definitely see it. It's easy to see, sometimes, I think, around us. I could tell you who in a room I definitely have gravitated towards. I can tell you who – I try as best as possible to be grateful and proactively, instead of just when people are leaving. Obviously, when people are leaving, I try and – you always want to express gratitude for whatever they've done and whatever they've met for you in your life, but I try to do it a little bit proactively. It's a good practice just to be in, and I think people instinctually know, even if they haven't done it, even if they don't actively do it, they know who they turn to. They know what that person means to them at some level. Which still provides the question, how do we know our own impact, so we can know that? I don't know that I have a good answer for that. I guess, if we think about what we see in other people, what do we look for and what would we want to be seen for?

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. I'm thinking about two different things that could help, or at least two different things that helped me. One, you mentioned it, which is learning to be grateful in the moment, not just at the end of the story.

Alex Cullimore: The journey.

Cristina Amigoni: The journey. That also is echoed in a million and a half memes and posts that at least show up in my Instagram feed, which they're really about, even the little things. If you have something nice to tell them, tell them in the moment you think it. Don't keep it to yourself. Which could be anything from, hey, great shirt that you're wearing today, or thank you for your help this morning, or anything like that. To being aware in the moment. If we think about Eckhart Tolle, and how the only thing that exists is the present, the past and the future don't actually exist. In the present, can we actually be mindful, and then do something about that in the present? And so, that it is in this post, more than thing, this legacy thing afterwards. That's one piece.

What helps me being more aware of that is my gratitude practice, which I've been doing, as I mentioned, many times for now, six years, where every day I write down three things I'm grateful for. In those pieces, I would say 99% of the time, I'm grateful for the people. I always mention people in that and how they've shown up and what we've done together and the experience. Then, turning that around and making sure that I'm like, “Do they know?” Asking the questions like, do they know? Because I write it in this and I don't publish it. It's not like I send it out after I write it, and it automatically goes to the person that was mentioned, but do they know? Then, yes, it is a vulnerable thing, because you could get rejected, or it could backfire.

Alex Cullimore: Just feel weird to start sometimes, but it doesn't – Usually, it's received well when you're telling people like, “Hey, I'm grateful for this.”

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, exactly.

Alex Cullimore: Hopefully.

Cristina Amigoni: We bring all sorts of traumas from our past and experiences from our past into that. But getting into that muscle of saying that, even if it's a text message. That's the other practice that I've started is when I communicate with my friends, even friends that I communicate every other day, or every single day, I try to always end with, I'm grateful for you, I'm grateful for this. Again, it's that people hopefully will know, will hear it more often than not. Don’t want to assume it.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. I think that's good. I think it's great to hear. It's always helpful to have some of the external validation. Where we can provide that, that's always helpful to help other people see that. Sometimes I get tripped up. I have a friend from coaching school, actually. His name is David. He's great at ending conversations like that. We will both express whatever we're grateful for, just that, “Hey, we got this time together.” I'll stop to comment that we put an hour of time to just get together and we almost inevitably end up talking two and a half hours. It's just one of those things, you can just, yeah, okay, we can talk for a long time.

We have a good practice of sharing the gratitude at the end of that. It's good to have some of those pieces. I can sense it myself, and I need to get better at fostering that internally. Because one thing that many people have mentioned when they work with us is that we seem to laugh a lot. We've gotten that comment from so many different –

Cristina Amigoni: We never laugh with the podcast. That's not a thing.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. No. This is a very serious medium. I know that our relationship doesn't expect that from us. We've got that from many people fairly quickly into knowing us, just being like, “Oh, man. Actually, these meetings are more fun. This is entertaining.” I think that, A, that's really nice to hear. Sometimes I lose track of – it's so commonplace. That's just how we interact, that you almost start to, at least for me, sometimes that just fades into the background. It's just like, oh, yeah, that's just a thing. You start to take it for granted. Or be like, yeah. That's good. I'm glad people feel that. You start to maybe lose what impact that could have on other people.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. That's a very good point.

Alex Cullimore: I need more internal ways of reinforcing that. Maybe this is something that people need as they dive into a world that is enormous and seems always too big for one person to do much. Unless, it's negative. Sometimes we all have a person we can point to and be like, “That person made a really bad impact in my life.” I mean, that's just negativity bias. But fostering that internal positive track can be challenging.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. I think one way, and it's still about what's be mirrored, but we can – I think it's not just waiting for the mirror to show us, or waiting for the validation. It's more about being aware of what happens internally for us. We've all felt that energy shift when certain people are in the room and certain other people that are in the room. It could be that it's one group and then one person arrives, or one person leaves and the energy shifts completely, whatever way it is. More tension, less tension, more openness, more laughter, whatever it is. You can feel that.

I think if we can quiet our own self critic, which is we are our worst critic, and go back to focusing on the present and starting to notice, I'm walking in the room, what is the energy that I'm bringing to the room? How is that impacting the energy shift within the room? Making maybe a mental note of that, or a feeling note of that and realizing like, “Oh, okay. I can be a little more aware of my own presence.” It's not about just hearing people, getting validation and words, but it's just really at a much more visceral level of understanding what's happening here.

Alex Cullimore: I like that a lot. It's sometimes hard to document the energy shift if you don't know what it's coming from. I guess, in the day and age of recorded video calls, you can see what happens if you happen to join later, but see if that might be influenced by whatever's happening in the painting, whatever. I think most of this comes back to trying to keep in touch with what this really feels different, because it's hard to know these things. It's something that we have to hold on to, because that's just what – I guess, we have to take some amount of, I guess, leap of faith in it to decide whether this is – what difference we're making and hope that we're right, and I guess, try and keep some track of it. With, like you say, even the critic at bay a bit as best as possible.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. It does take being really in touch with our body and what the signals are, because our body feels before our mind can actually tell a story around it. I recently saw a list and I saved it and I have to find where I saved it, but there's different things, when we think about our own beliefs and values and what matters to us, different body reactions to it, to that. They changed by person. So, understanding how our body, what the signals are that our body are telling us is a big thing. One of the things that I know is that when something feels – I feel decisions. I don't think decisions. The way I feel decision is because when something feels off and something I shouldn't be doing, it's a gut thing, but it's a stomach thing. I will feel nauseous.

Realizing like, “Oh, I'm feeling nauseous at the thought of this, or when this happens,” that is the signal for me that says, “Hey, there's something off here. Maybe consider a different alternative. It's not feeling well.” Or, when I feel like I can – my voice doesn't matter, that's full-on throat closing, or cotton feeling in my mouth. Journaling maybe that and realizing in situations, that's how I can figure out what the energy shift is. When I walk into a room, I know I'm showing up in a certain way, or how do I pick up the energy? It's a feeling. It is a full on, do I feel at peace, or are my shoulders now my new earrings, and my fists are closed up and my throat is closed up, because I know that something is off in this room.

Alex Cullimore: I like that. Yeah. I think you have to just, I guess, document that and get comfortable with listening. Because that's definitely a part of – I was just reading, I think it was just on LinkedIn or something, but it's this brief summary of some of the work that Dan Pink has been doing in his book, Regrets. He talks about a lot of regrets are things that people didn't do. I think there's some power in thinking about that and taking decisions based on some gut feelings, because most of the ones we regret when we make a decision are things where we kick ourselves being like, “I knew better. I knew that there was something back now right about this.” It's when we don't listen to our guts that we tend to have, or we do something, we're like, “Yeah, I wish I would have done that other thing, because that's what was really calling me.”

Yeah, there's a huge benefit to getting better in touch with what was that voice saying? Where is that voice? Then getting, I guess, over time more comfortable with either documenting all the times I didn't listen to that voice, and thus, that was a problem, or getting in touch from a fresh plate of like, what does it feel like now? Then trying to document. Yeah, you have to have some, I think, exercise and self-compassion for the times where you mess up and you end up doing something where you're like, “Yeah, I knew better. Now, I need to be better in tune with that voice.” I think a lot of that comes to those, how in tune are you with those voices and how much do you trust that that is the authentic voice that you should trust.

Cristina Amigoni: Definitely. Now, we're completely off track on, can one person make a difference? Yes, they can.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. If we think about one person making a difference, when I think about this in the terms of the current global context, we've got a lot of systems that feel difficult to challenge, and that feel they maybe aren't, at least personally, I don't feel they're working the way that I would love them to work, or that they could be a supportive –

Cristina Amigoni: Not for the people.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. Yes. Difficult to say that it's for the people that, in my mind, these should be intended to serve. The system should be intended to serve. Yes, I'm talking about the government and politics. I'll just say it. I don't think these are serving the things that everyone –

Cristina Amigoni: It’s for the people. Not for the money. That would be good.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. Oh, my goodness. This is going to be a totally different personal rant, but the idea that a government should be run like a business is ridiculous. Businesses, especially in the American sense, are here. Until we make all businesses B corps, you can't run this like businesses.

Cristina Amigoni: People first businesses. Yes.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. You're not supposed to have the most perfect budget. You're not supposed to grow. You're supposed to provide services, law and order benefits for citizenry, not for a certain set of them, for all the citizens that are governed by this.

Cristina Amigoni: It’s the whole point of society. Otherwise, we would all be living on our own, and yes.

Alex Cullimore: In that way, to bring it back to our topic, we definitely have a few actors who are fairly famously in charge of making things more, I would say, selfish and more directed towards where's the money going to go to them and how's it going to stay with them, rather than support the people and they're using the government for that. In that way, yes, an individual immediately makes a difference. From this side of the table, if you're not in the cabinet, if you're not in these discussions, I'm looking for better ways to help people understand that the impact they can make in this, and that you as an individual continue to matter and that you can do things.

I think that relies on going out and connecting with people, so that you do feel that energy shift. That means going out and being part of community calls, being part of whatever community. A lot of people talk about going to make impact in your direct community. I think that's where you can feel and retain some energy. If you're going to engage in both that and a larger scale, then find the ways that you're going to retain some energy, at which point you're going to need to get back into the practices that we've talked about of what does this mean to me? How is this making an impact? How much can I feel and trust the feeling of this is different because of what I'm doing, because of what I can contribute, or I feel that this whole thing is making a difference, so I'm going to make a difference to it.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, that's a huge one for sure. As you were talking about that, I was reminded of, even what we do as a company, which is very intangible. Yet, it's almost always when asked if whether it was a coaching session, or a training session, or just a meeting, if it was helpful, the answer is it's not even a decision. It's absolutely yes. Making those connections, and one of the big feedback, especially from our leadership program that keeps coming back two or three years into it from different types of groups in different ways is that feeling of, I'm not alone. This was helpful, because now I know I'm not alone, which really ties back to what you talked about, being out there, making connections in the community. I may not be able to make as big of a difference as I would like to, practically speaking, but how is that feeling of not being alone in itself helping?

Alex Cullimore: I think the other part that makes this difficult to attach to is immediately, is that these also take time. I mean, we didn't have this trust. We took time to build the leadership program. We took time to run through the leadership program, and going through that takes several weeks. These people find these connections over time. Even if we look at something and we look at a situation and we can say, this is wrong. These things should change. We should do this. Even if we were like, “If I had all the power, I would do these things totally differently.”

You might be right about diagnosis. You might even be right about solution. The actual process of making that change is time intensive. That's something just difficult from human biology standpoint to grasp. We are trying to hold on to long terms, and we are not great at doing that. I think it's that metaphor that you used about flying planes. If you're flying a little Cessna, you move the joystick and you're immediately turning left and right. You fly a commercial airliner, you've got to be making decisions way in advance. You can travel five miles in a matter of seconds. You've got to be thinking way in advance. It's a different type of thinking for people. 

It's not something we can't do, but it's not something we do necessarily naturally, and it's something we always default to. We all know that if we work out for long enough, we're going to feel better, but we don't necessarily do it, because the first day is hard. The other days are hard. The feeling is difficult. The progress is slow and it's hard to – we have to find the ways to sustain ourselves, I think, in any of these efforts. I think those practices of getting better in touch with this, so we can trust this, trust the feeling, even though the results and the outcomes won't be the immediate results and outcomes.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, definitely. It takes a lot of patience, which I have very little of, especially when I see things go down a certain path and I want to control that they won't go down that path. It also takes realizing that it doesn't work all the time, and that sometimes we may see something, or we may pour into something, that then after a while, doesn't work out anymore. That not retreating and say like, “Well, then I'm done. I'm never going to do this again, because I poured into whatever it was, being out there in the community, connecting, doing this thing and waiting for the results and it went the opposite way.” Maybe next time, I'll just be isolated and not do it. It's an option. It's not a great option.

Alex Cullimore: The benefit of the option, same way we talk about the benefits of things like a level one energy is that you might be able to recover a little bit of your energy. Is stepping back into it is the important part. Making sure you don't stay disconnected forever. Reserve energy, figure out what you'd like to do differently and figure out what. Again, I think it comes back to sustaining. If you poured that much and it is that hard of a hit, it's A, you really did commit and jump into it, and B, you may not have built up support to maintain the effort.

Something that I learned a lot more trying to just do in a very specific silly tangible example, when I was trying to do things, like when I was running half marathons, or triathlons, you have to just get better at form. You have to get better at that low intensity. You have to play in low intensity for longer periods of time and get used to just doing things for a while, having the mental stamina to do it, as well as having the physical stamina to convert oxygen in a much more efficient way. You have to mentally just be ready for like, if I'm going to be running for two hours, what was that actually like? I mean, when was the last time you sat at your desk for two hours? Two hours feels like a long time. You’re going to sit in a movie for two hours. Get ready for what? What are you going to be doing mentally? How do you allow yourself to do this sustainably?

It did come down to – I mean, I've just started this at, I guess, a somewhat early enough age that I still had a lot of bad habits left over. Just push. Just lean into it. You can push yourself a little bit more into it, and that's not a feasible way to get into endurance. You have to do things right. You have to do your form much better, because as opposed to a sprint, we are running what, a few hundred steps. You're talking about running thousands of steps. Those better be good steps. Those better be sustainable steps. You better be able to figure out how to comfortably do that if you're going to be able to sustain it.

I'm definitely guilty of a lot of decent famine mindset internally, of jumping in pretty full and trying to get as much out as quickly as possible and do as much as possible, and having so much energy to do it, that I don't meter that out more. I indulge in the fact that it feels very energizing, and use up the energy much faster. It's hard to remind yourself, there's a much longer game to play. Until you've done it a few times, and then you start to remind yourself better internally. You’re like, “Oh, God. I'm about to run off a cliff here.”

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, that's a great example. The recovery is a big part of that. You can't just go running 24 hours a day for where you can then run on a marathon. You actually have to recover. The recovery is a big piece of that. I lost my track, so it's gone. I went down the recovery path and yes, and disconnected to something else I was about to say.

Alex Cullimore: It's just recovery and sustainability. It is very necessary. You don't just run forever. Recovery is at least as important as doing the rest, which is decidedly reinforced to. We all keep telling people to sit at the desks, work for eight hours, work for whatever. Even, I remember consulting, they would be like, no, we're realistically looked to be building about six hours a day, because you're not going to be able to do eight hours of good work in a day. You look for maybe six. But we just designed that at some point back in the assembly line days. Now, we're all holding ourselves to a standard of like, I should be at maximum outfit for eight hours a day.

The more brain intensive, or weird you're getting, the harder it is to sustain that, or the more you need some burst and some rests to come back to it. We don't have a lot of necessary structures to keep us in a way where we will be making that impact long term. We know, to bring us back to our theme, our individual impact on a longer pressing time scale.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's good. You found my train of thoughts that went somewhere else.

Alex Cullimore: I figured if I just talked about it enough, random things, something will seed.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, exactly. It's that piece of realizing that knowing what our impact is, it's not a sprint. It's not, oh, we do something once and we get a trophy. Or, we do something once and we get the gratitude. Or we do something once, and for our own selves, we feel that we made an impact. It's a marathon. It's 15 marathons. It's a hundred marathons. it's knowing that it's the next day and then the next day and then the next interaction and then the next day and the next thing. Then, maybe, eventually, it builds up into the self-knowledge of that. Not just the outside validation of it. Going to sleep at night and thinking, was this a good day? Did I show up as well as I could today? Not every day is going to be the same, but did I show up as well as I could today?

Alex Cullimore: Then, hopefully, you get the breadcrumbs of the ripple effects that are felt later. I think today, we even got one, because we built that whole leadership program and we had people take a subsection of that and run it for their people. Then we saw people that we have not interacted with at all using our acronyms, using these things that we threw out there, these little models of ideas of how to interact and how to do this and people were still excited about it. We haven't personally delivered as much of this. We've done bits and pieces for other companies, but within this big organization, we hadn't done anything for a year that was specifically this.

These people are still resonating with it. It's something that we throw a stone in a pond and every once in a while, you get to see the ripple effect and that's always exciting to see. Sometimes it's a little ways between the waves.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Sometimes it's just still water. There's no water. If there is, it's, yeah, keep looking.

Alex Cullimore: Am I under the water? Is my head above water? Can I get my head above water?

Cristina Amigoni: There's been a drought, so all the water is gone.

Alex Cullimore: They’re in a desert.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. You throw a stone and a bunch of mud comes back.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. I can relate. Metaphorically, it's all of those experiences.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. Yes. An individual does make an impact.

Alex Cullimore: Yes, individuals absolutely make impacts. We know it by the other individuals that we see, that we know, and when they leave our lives, we feel the grief of. We need to find perhaps better ways to know that about ourselves and sustain that in the time. Because it's not a continual, just like, yeah, you're doing good. You're doing good. You're doing good. Then even if it was, you're not going to be feeling that internally. You're just going to get reliant on that being external. Finding those internal ways, which I advocate for for other people as well as myself, because I know that I'm not finding that sustainability.

Cristina Amigoni: Indeed. Also, knowing that we control that. Yes, we can't control a lot of what happens around us, but we can control how we show up in what's happening around us. We actually control the impact that we want to see. We just have to understand what that is.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. We control what we're putting out there. We can't always control what people are going to respond. We can't control at all what people are going to respond with. But we can know over enough experience that us showing up in a certain way tends to lead to better outcomes. That's again, back to the documenting.

Cristina Amigoni: Or worse outcomes. I mean, it's –

Alex Cullimore: Sure. Yes. The outcome, one way or another. Sure.

Cristina Amigoni: Sometimes, I wish you all consistently has really bad impact.

Alex Cullimore: I was speaking up, it must have been the hoping that we are going for that. I'm hoping we're going for positive.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Maybe, let's not put our head in the sand when we started seeing that.

Alex Cullimore: Maybe. What if it's only mud around? What if you're throwing more than you throw and then there's just mud?

Cristina Amigoni: Then open up the dam. Why is the water not flowing?

Alex Cullimore: It’s a great question.

Cristina Amigoni: What dam have we built to prevent the water from –

Alex Cullimore: There's the real moral.

Cristina Amigoni: - from flowing. Because we built it.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. Yes. Yeah, as they say, I think, I might have even seen this on from your Instagram feed. As they say, a lot of their problems in life may not be your fault, but they are your responsibility.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Yes. Yeah. If we want to feel a certain way with our lives, and if we want to actually make an impact, or make a positive impact, let's say. A constructive impact. Not a destructive one. If we want to make a destructive one, I'm sure that a lot of us can do that.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. It's almost easier to make the destructive one. I think we, given just the negativity bias for humans, it's a little easier to see the times where one person can absolutely make a negative impact.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Yeah.

Alex Cullimore: We all probably have memories of that one manager who yelled too much. That one manager who just made us feel like we couldn't do anything. For those stick with us, it's an impact. I guess, the question is the impact you – is that the impact you want to make?

Cristina Amigoni: Exactly. Yes. I remember. I still remember the managers and the people I worked with that made a very positive impact. I think I remember them actually more than I remember the negative ones. The closest, the negative ones, I left. I don't have a lot of patience for that. I'm like, “Yeah. No, I'm done.”

Alex Cullimore: We talked about this with Justin, open door for that teachers can make a huge impact. I think a lot of people have that. One of the people who they would list as a positive influence tends to be, if you're lucky enough to find one of those just really great teachers that will stand up for you, advocate for you, tell you like, “Yeah, you can do this.” It happens with managers, too. We do remember those people just as much, which is another example of knowing the impact and how often are we reaching out? Even if we thank that person, even if we a couple of years later thank that person, that person has made an impact for the rest of our lives, whether they know it or not.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. Do they know? Have we told them? Can we share that? Right. Well, lots of questions. Good luck.

Alex Cullimore: Look for ripples. Find your own energy. Keep yourself sustained.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes.

Alex Cullimore: Break down your impact in advance.

Cristina Amigoni: Make an impact and make sure that's the impact you want to be remembered by.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. Preferably, one that's a positive impact on other people.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Preferably.

Alex Cullimore: I can navigate for a little something.

Cristina Amigoni: Thanks for listening.

Alex Cullimore: Thank you for listening.

[OUTRO]

Alex Cullimore: Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Uncover the Human. Special thanks to Rachel Sherwood, who helped produce our theme. Of course, our production assistants, Carlee and Niki, for whom we could not do this, or could not publish this. We get to do, basically, the fun parts. Thank you to We Edit Podcasts for editing our podcasts.

Cristina Amigoni: You can find us at podcast@wearesiamo.com. You can find us on LinkedIn. You can find us at Uncover the Human on social media. Follow us. We Are Siamo is W-E-A-R-E-S-I-A-M-O.com.

Alex Cullimore: Please feel free to reach out with questions, topics you'd like addressed. If you'd like to be on the show, reach out. We're around. Thank you, everybody, for listening.

[END]