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Sh*t Happens

Hello, and welcome to the experimental leader Podcast. I’m Melanie Parrish, your host. And it’s great to be here with you today. I’ve been thinking about knitting and picket fences and I wanted to talk about that a little bit today, and kind of how they relate to business. When we moved to Hamilton, Ontario 20 years ago, my lovely husband Mel sent me with his, his down payment, that he’d been saving for his whole life to have I owned a house in Colorado, and he said, you know, go buy a house for us, we had looked together, and we didn’t we put offers in, but they didn’t work. And we decided that his desires for a house were a subset of mine, and I was way pickier than he was. So, I had looked for a whole pile of houses to look for I flew in on a red eye, and I got into Toronto at like 7am drove to Hamilton, and looked at about 20 houses, and by the end of the day, had found my dream home. And I was pretty sure he would like it to it’s a brick Victorian from 1867, which is the year of Confederation in Canada, whatever that means. And I loved it, I couldn’t believe it was on the market. I kept asking the realtor like what’s wrong with it, I made him come back at five o’clock to see if it was a busy street because I couldn’t tell because kind of a wide street. It’s not a busy street. It’s a beautiful, beautiful place on two acres in the middle of the city. And we’ve been so lucky to live here. But one of the ironies being queer, and, you know, moving here was that it has a white picket fence, which we just thought was hysterical. I don’t know if any, any of you have ever lived with a white picket fence. They’re fussy. They’re, they’re a labor of love. And much in the same way as quilting or knitting, or any kind of handwork. They don’t make sense. picket fences aren’t economical. And any way they aren’t a good, they don’t make financial sense. They don’t make time sense. But they are lovely. And so, this is the time of year, usually it’s August or September, that my husband has me go out with a red sharpie marker and put an exon 10 to 20 pickets. And he replaces 10 to 20 pickets. This year was tough, because he’s busy. And, and I actually had to put an X on a post, which he was horrified by, because posts are really hard to change out. As I we discussed for days. And but what I love about our picket fence is that it is it is a labor of love the 10 pickets and changing the posts.

It is something that is always in constant movement at our home, his commitment to continually updating it, he paints the pickets as he puts them on. So, the fence is always getting a portion of it painted, sometimes we paint a big chunk of it when it needs it. But if we didn’t do a little bit all the time on the picket fence, it would soon be in disrepair. And then we would have to replace it. And it would never make sense to install it again, a picket fence around two acres is a lot. And so, we do the picket fence, he does the picket fence, I just put the x’s and try to make there be food at the end of the days when he works on it. And I I am a knitter and I had taken a hiatus mostly because I learned how to knit European, and I can’t follow a pattern. But I realized I’ve started a project. And I’ve realized that knitting is much the same. It doesn’t make financial sense. You can buy a sweater for $30. Or you can make something with your hands and businesses are the same way. If everything has to make financial sense all the time. You can’t build something with a long road ahead. You can’t make a 10-year timeframe. So, what do we invest in? So, I’m very curious. My question for you is what is your picket fence? What’s your quilting? What’s your knitting project, what’s the thing that you look with a 10-year timeframe, and work toward a little bit at a time without hope of immediate return. And today is a day that we are experimenting at the experimental leader podcast. As many of you have had to pivot and shift this year, so have we with a live podcast, sometimes we have guests who have things that come up. And we’re going to talk about that later. I’m actually going to bring on Christine in a few minutes. And we’re going to talk about some of that.

But before we do that, I thought I still want to do all the things that we do on our podcast. And I wanted to actually dive into Chapter One of the book because we’re doing book club right now. So those of you who want to join every month, we are going to do a different chapter of the book. So, we did the introduction last month. And now we’re doing chapter one, the climate of innovation. And we’re going to talk about each chapter. And so, I actually thought, since we have a little time today, I thought I might do a little book reading, it seemed like a fun thing to do just a little bit on the first part of the chapter. So, I’m going to read a little bit of the experimental leader book, here we have it, the experimental leader, be a new kind of boss to cultivate an organization of innovators. In the organizations I work with in all corners of the globe. I meet smart, committed driven leaders, but nearly categorically, these leaders aren’t quite sure how to lead in today’s climate of innovation. They do know, however, that they need to be doing something. And fast, because we live and work in a relentless culture. And they understand that if they’re not fostering a culture that creates something new, their organization will become obsolete. For leaders in an already successful organization. Creating something new means knowing the marketplace and the competition, and looking for ways to leapfrog forward, all while conducting high quality business. As usual. I think this is so interesting to think about, because innovation is so difficult to do, as we’re doing the thing that we’re already doing to generate revenue to keep the lights on to try to figure out, you know, the day to day, and then somehow, we’re trying to do something new on the side. So, if we’re a large company, and we have lots of investment funding, then we might have teams that do that. But when we’re not so large, and we’re trying to create a new tomorrow, then we burn the candle at both ends. And it’s really hard. So, I just wanted to talk about that I wanted to get into chapter one just a little bit. It’s one of my favorite chapters. Because I think the speed of innovation causes leaders, all sorts of challenges, it wears us out, which means we have to focus on self-care. And we have to think about that.

And I have an amazing person who works in my business. Her name is Christine Rodriguez. And she has agreed to come on fairly reluctantly, has agreed to come on as my guest today just so we can have a conversation about what we have to think about in order to do this live podcast. And she’s amazing. She is a full-time tech person. And I am super happy to have Christine here. 

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So, Christine, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Melanie, for having me.

It’s great to have you here. And thanks for jumping in. I think it’s so useful to have a dialogue like I’m, you know, we’ve gotten you can live now for a year. And it’s just so interesting to try and think about like what do we how do we think about having a live show? What principles do we need to stand on when we have guests when they cancel when they have health issues when we have you know when we’re living in a global pandemic and we’re trying to do a live show. We had a COVID cancellation today, so it was completely legit, And I guess I’m curious, you know what it’s like, on your end, when you get the email and have to tell me like, hey, our guest isn’t here. What goes through your mind? Because you’re leading a part of this to?

Um, to be honest, I feel I just feel relaxed sometimes when we receive those cancellations. Because we all know we can as we have talked, as you have talked about the book, we can innovate something that this is the good thing about technology right now. And then having streams, like you are far from each other, not the person production of, of live shows or live podcast. So, the good thing is that you can, you can innovate, you can. You can tweak something since they since they can come. And that is also reasonable. We also considered that, because it’s a valid reason. And of course, the thing here is that just to innovate, just to calm down, relax and innovate on what you do.

Well, and I think it’s interesting, because, you know, there’s a whole bunch of stages, you kind of go through, and you watched me go through those because I got to the show, before I knew that we didn’t have a guest. And I’m thinking about, like, sort of what I went through, because I think these are really normal things. So, it’s like, oh, my gosh, okay. And then, you know, now what, so we have to have a plan. I had 14 minutes to figure out what the plan was, I happened to be a little early today, which was great. And, and so thinking about that, but it is exactly this thing in chapter one, that fast pace of innovation. I have 14 minutes, what will we do? And, and I think it’s just really interesting to sort of look at that in real time. So, you know, there’s, there’s like, you are even I even found myself like, oh, you know, can we blame the person? And then I was like, looking through my list of is there anybody who could pop on and be like, an emergency guest? And 14 minutes? I think it might be just a little too short for that. Except, here you are, and we can have that conversation. And then it makes me wonder like, the world has these live platforms, and then and, and they’re enticing. So, I’m curious what you think in terms of social media, or you know, because we go live on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, and YouTube. So, if we’re going live all these places, what do you think the value is of us going live? Like, why is it important that we go live?

Okay, so they weren’t that is that the connection we build to our listeners to our watchers of the stream is in that way we can connect to them, we can interact with them in real time, because we can answer questions to it, you can answer questions to it, they can inquire us anything, because in every week, we have different topics to talk about. And also, as of as of this new season, we have this of the integration of the experimental leader book. So, as you know, it is it is in Amazon, it is a digital copy. So, whenever they have, they have questions, or they have something that you want to have a deep, deep understanding about any passage, or they would love to share their thoughts about the book. They could because we have that we have that platform we integrate that platform on the weekly podcast show. And then at the same time for those people who are not much into videos or visuals they get specifically the auditory people who are who loves only to listen, we get we also produce the podcasts on different platforms for like the traditional, traditional podcast like for iTunes, or Spotify and other things. So yeah, that is the good thing of the technology right now.

Well, and I loved when we went live, and the reason is, I feel like from a value perspective, for me, it’s a more authentic experience of dialogue with my clients. It’s much more like what a conversation might be with us. Client with the people that I talked to. And relationship is super important to me. And so, it’s worth the risk to me of a missing guest or, you know, the nervousness of whatever might happen live, to have that impact, to have that deep relationship. The win is so huge for me to be able to be real with people. And it’s so much more fulfilling to me, when you have a podcast that you can edit. It’s always about how you might look rather than just being in the moment and saying, what’s in your heart. And so, it’s really important to me that when I’m talking to people, we’re all talking about what we’re actually experiencing and giving and giving people a chance to be viewers of the conversation, rather than putting on a show for the people that are there. Thanks, Molly. I agree the show must go on. It’s great. Yeah, I don’t I don’t know if there’s a whole lot more to say other than, you know, I am really committed to, to what we’re doing this year about really trying to have deeper content for our listeners, I know you’re committed to that as well. And I think this has been a really good opportunity to talk about that a little bit. Is there anything else you want to say before we sort of close here?

I’m there, I’m having a show. Really, sometimes there are things that we can’t control. But of course, it’s like Molly, the show must go on. It’s like how she said that. And of course, there are things that we can control the only thing that we should do is that we had to calm ourselves down, we had to innovate, so that everything will go well,

Well, and I just want to say, you know, Molly books, all of our guests on our show, and does an amazing job. And Christine does the technical part of our show. So, they have, you know, it’s fun that I’m getting a chance to make both of you visible today. Because you do every bit as much as I do on the show, I get to be the face of the show, which I always find incredibly funny that at 54 years old, I’ve become the face of a brand. You know, in my middle-aged ness, it’s funny to be the face of a brand. But it is lovely to have you and thank you for jumping in and just talking about this with me, it’s way more fun to have a conversation than for me just to talk about it on my own.

So, thanks so much, Christine, I really appreciate it.

You’re welcome, Melanie,

 

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Well, this has been super interesting. And if you want to think more about leadership, or any of those things, I’d love to invite you to go to my website, which is melanieparish.com. You can learn about individual coaching, you can learn about our Leadership Essentials Program, you can get a copy of the book. And it’s interesting to pivot it’s interesting to pivot live. I think anytime things happen in a fast-moving world. It’s important to take a minute, I took you know, five maybe to think and Christine watched me think for a while today and to figure out like oh, what are the principles I want to stand on? What are my values that I wanted to stand on? And today it was authenticity like this happen, but also a chance to be in dialogue with you about what’s happening in real time. So, my challenge to you is what’s your authentic leadership that needs to shine through as things don’t always go exactly the way that you want them to. It’s been great being here with you today. Go experiment.

 

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