Psychological Safety with Erin Thompson

11/03/23 • 59 min

Erin Thompson shares her leadership experiences, anecdotes and lessons learned about psychological safety in the work place. Erin and I share a lot of similar experiences, and we dug into some examples of environments where safety was not the top priority. We examined potential causes or reasons this is so prevalent in an industry that touts care, warmth and empathy - at least toward its customers.
We also explored practical tips and approaches to create psychological safety and trust within teams.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Level Up Leadership Podcast with James Lee and guest Erin Thompson. Please also check out Erin's podcast "Aspire for More with Erin".

Previous Episode

Purposeful Pause

Nathan Jones is a former college football coach turned senior living advocate. Nathan was introduced to the world of senior living just out of college, and from the moment he first stepped foot into a senior living community, he was hooked. Since that day, Nathan's mission has been to change the negative perception surrounding aging & senior living through sharing authentic stories of older adults. He does much of this work through his company, Dash Media.
In a prep conversation together for a different episode topic, I learned that Nathan hadn't been returning my text because he was in the hospital. It led to an important conversation together about the nature of work, self-imposed hustle, and the need for purposeful pauses - especially as an entrepreneur in a passion-fueled industry like senior living.
The pressures of keeping up with and responding to everyone, talking about how we're feeling, taking breaks, being a good leader... these and so many more factors of running a business can easily become a compounding snowball of depleting mental well-being.
For content creators like Nathan and me, it is also challenging to experience impactful moments without our brains shifting in the moment to how this will translate to a good story. Ironically, this pulls us out of the moment and fully experiencing it.
This was an important conversation about entrepreneurship, content, mental health, and everything in between.

Next Episode

Consistency and Discipline with Chris Heinz

What are the building blocks of consistency? How disciplined are you at...discipline?
Leaders have the double-duty of being disciplined and creating discipline in their organizations. I looked to Chris Heinz from Westport One in this conversation to discuss consistency and discipline in some key areas of leadership.
Some key discussion points gave us opportunities to discuss:

The building blocks of discipline
Where does passion really come from?
Tying discipline to your motivations not your outcomes
Creating processes and automation that help with consistency
Not letting "great" stand in the way of "good enough" (FOMO)

I believe that in a lot of cases "lack of discipline" is actually a misalignment between a person's true motivations and their work. It is nearly impossible to have discipline in the long run about things that don't deeply connect to your WHY.
Thanks for listening!