The show’s guest in this episode is Claudia Aronowitz. She’s a personal development and relationship coach. She also works with people in leadership. And she’s passionate about helping people feel good with their whole self and helping them to create strong and positive relationships with others.

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Tools to Create Sincere, Peaceful, and Harmonious Relationships in Your Professional and Personal Life with Claudia Aronowitz

Hello, everybody. I’m Melanie Parish, it’s so great to be here with you live today on the experimental leader podcast. It’s Election Day in the United States. And as a dual citizen, I’m voting for the second time this month. So, I voted in a municipal election in Canada a couple of weeks ago, and, and my candidate didn’t win. But as somebody I knew who I loved voted for the candidate that did win. And I felt strangely comforted by that. I didn’t feel like I had to get it. All right. I felt like it was okay. That someone I cared for picked a different candidate. In that case, I really wasn’t sure who I wanted to vote for. And I know sometimes we’re surer. But I think there’s a leadership place around elections right now in the world. I think there’s as a systems worker, and someone who is thinking about what’s trying to happen in the world. I’m, I’m super curious. I know, there’s some elections where my candidate, the person who speaks exactly for me wins. And that feels really good. And then there’s sometimes where a candidate who doesn’t speak for me, wins, and it feels kind of bad.

And I’ve been very curious about like, what is it that someone else sees what is it? I’m really committed to democracy. Above even my own opinion, I really believe in democracy. And so today, as I vote as election results are coming in, I’m curious about what’s trying to happen in the world and whose voice we’re trying to hear. And I’m just super curious about that. I’m also going to vote because I hope it’s my voice. And I hope it’s your voice. And I hope it’s everyone’s voice. But I, I know that it can’t be everyone’s voice. That’s sort of the other part of democracy. It can’t always be everyone’s voice. In a in a consensus model, or some kind of other model, there’s ways to hear people’s voices. And I’ve been thinking a lot about just dialogue in general. I was hanging out with a couple of 80-year-old Baptists this weekend, and I was really curious to hear their thoughts, and they were very reticent to share them, because you wouldn’t want to talk politics, that’s not a good idea. And, and I, I think that we’ve gotten in the habit of not talking to each other, because we might have differences. And I want to continue to embrace differences to have difficult conversations. And I want to just say that for myself, one of my places of leadership is to have difficult conversations, where differences are not difficult for me. I want to be able to hear things that are not my ideas repeated over and over again.

Anyway, I’m really excited about our show today. And we’re going to talk more about relationships. I think I am really excited to have Claudia Aronowitz on my show. She’s a personal development and relationship coach. She also works with people in leadership. And she’s passionate about helping people feel good with their whole self and helping them to create strong and positive relationships with others. 

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Claudia, I’m super excited to have you on the show. Welcome.

Thank you. I’m so happy to be here with you.

Yeah, it’s great to have you. And well, I would love to know how you are experimenting in your life and work right now.

I am experimenting by just doing things that feels scary, and just doing them anyhow. Without any attachment to the results. So, I’m reaching out to people to be in their podcast wanting to write for others, and I’m just reaching out regardless of the outcome. And that’s an interesting experiment.

And, and why are you reaching out? What is it that has this be the time for you to reach out?

Because I think over the years, I’ve gained a lot of expertise that are very useful for others. And it was just the fear of you know, is it good enough that it wasn’t permitting me to just start saying it and writing about it and say, you know, my thoughts are interesting. You may disagree with them, which is perfectly fine. You may not, but I have something to say.

That’s great. And what do you think is the most important thing for people to think about when they’re trying to improve relationships in their lives? How do they create more peaceful, sincere, harmonious relationships?

And I was hearing your introduction, and you talked about career curiosity about what the other person? And why, why, you know, why is it that they think that way? And that’s, to me one of the most important tools, I like to call it like my curious hat on, it’s just having conversations and be willing to be surprised, doesn’t mean you have to agree, you can still have your own position. But what happens if you can really listen to it and see why they’re thinking that way? Or whatever is happening, instead of listening to respond? And you know, that’s why I was hearing your mic. Yes, curiosity of other people could have curiosity, the world would be so different.

Well, I think I think it’s so true that we often we often listen, and we’re thinking, you know, our first, you know, I meet someone. And often, you know, for me, it’s somebody who has a more right-wing perspective, that’s, these are the people that I have to really, I have to really work to, to be curious about. But I start to listen for what I disagree with, instead of what I agree with, or listen for, you know, where there might be a fence or where I might need to walk away or protect myself. And when it comes down to it, if I listen for alignment, or I listen for ideas, they have interesting ideas. And, and, and it can, it can just be a really interesting dialogue.

I’ve learned over the years now that I can acknowledge what I’m hearing, and it doesn’t mean I have to agree. And that the moment that the other side can feel listened and heard, they’re also more willing now to not only give me their position, but to try to understand mine. And then we can walk away and totally disagree. But I need to acknowledge so what I’m hearing you say is that, you know, this is what you’re going to be voting for, because that’s important to you. Okay, I disagree. I’m going to vote exactly the opposite. And you do, but I am acknowledging that that’s what I’m, I think I’m hearing you say, and it’s amazing. If I do that, how suddenly made maybe the other side might be willing to listen to my opinion. And we still disagreed, but at least we learned something from each other.

If you're really going to go deep, and have the conversations that are needed, there's going to be times that it's going to be an uncomfortable, difficult conversation. Share on X

Okay, now, I want to play devil’s advocate. Yes, go for it. I want your expertise on this, because there’s a couple of places where I’m really good at this, that lots of places where I can be curious. And then there’s places where I don’t do so well. So, I, you know, I my family is an LGBTQ family. And that’s one of the places that I can’t just agree to disagree. And so that’s one of the places where if somebody starts to say, you know, they don’t want my family to have equal rights, or they don’t want my, you know, queer marriage, or whatever it is, I don’t want to hear that I I’m not interested in that. so and so. So how do I do that in a workplace environment? Or how do I keep myself safe? Because this is my identity. It’s not we’re not just talking about an idea. We’re actually talking about identity. And I’m not just talking about for me, but others as well. How do people keep themselves safe, and also not continue to be open?

So, first of all, is we have topics that trigger us because they’re important to us. They’re part of our you say, my values, my identity, and I’m going to protect them because this is who I am. And it’s perfectly fine. So, one of the things that I like to say is, and I hit the boundary, if I feel you’re attacking me, I believe it’s okay to say, you know what, I’m having a really hard time having this conversation, because this is who I am. And you’re attacking me personally with my values. But I still want to be curious. The other people just can’t take that because it’s only I took everything. No, they were trying to push on to me. And I can say, look, I’m hearing you. And this is how it’s affecting me because this is my identity. And it’s very hard for me to hear that my life is less important than yours. Can I and then from there, we continue the conversation. I and I do believe that I can be curious and set boundaries. If you’re talking to me or you’re yelling at me, I can easily say I want to hear you. But if you, you know that tone of voice, I’m going to walk away because I’m not able to hear you, not attacking you. But I’m not asking you to not engage in the conversation when somebody else is yelling at me. And we all have the areas where we’re allowed to say, unless we change to the tone, I’m not going to learn about you, and you’re not going to learn about me, and we still live in the same place.

Yeah, I think these are interesting places. And I think, you know, I think that we’ve gone a little too far into those areas, like, oh, your ideas are different than mine, let’s not talk about it. So, I do think we should be expanding again. And I think it’s important that people do also have ways to keep themselves safe.

I think that when we talk about curiosity, I heard somebody once say that it’s like double clicking in Google. If we only stay in our positions, and we say, We’re curious, we’re not really curious, because we not talk, we’re talking about a position, the interesting conversation is never about the positions, if I do an essential conversation or remediation, I tried to get so curious, they forget their position, whatever they were fighting about, overdoing, discussing, because the interesting exchange of ideas, where solutions might be possible, is always underneath that position. So, it’s more about asking, so what makes you think about that? What are your values? You know, why do you think that if I have this type of life, what is it affecting you? What is it changing about you, and we almost completely forget the initial topic, and we start talking about the things that are important to them. And that’s when it’s easier to have a conversation.

I wholeheartedly agree with you. I think one of the great privileges of being a coach and being, you know, actively in someone’s life is if they say something I get to clarify, I get to say, oh, what do you mean by that? And go deeper with them? And what do you mean by that, and just to keep, you know, peeling back then, the skin of the onion, until I get to something in the middle, that’s really different than what I thought I might have heard at the beginning. It isn’t as and as you peel back the layers; you find so much more similarity of thought than difference of thought, you know, everybody loves their family, everybody, you know, values, safety for their family ever, you know, there’s so many themes that are exactly the same as you peel things, back to the essence of it.

And to me, it’s also about finding the common problem, because sometimes we were even discussing not the common problem. You know, I had a conversation, before the pandemic with one of my clients, she kept on saying, you know, as an organization, they won’t let her people work from home because one of the leaders doesn’t want to know it sounds ridiculous, but it was very important to her at the moment. And they kept on arguing and I challenged her to say, find out white, he’s against it. It I don’t think it’s about working, working from home. When she got curious, she came back and said he didn’t know how to keep people accountable if he couldn’t see what they were doing. So, we changed our whole conversation around accountability. And how do we keep our people accountable? And what does it mean accountability? And as we were walking out, we just said, oh, he just looked around and said, oh, by the way, I have no problem having people work from home. Because the whole conversation centered around something that was a common problem that we both could discuss, regardless of our differences.

I do think it’s kind of ironic that accountability is actually an issue right now, after people have all gone.

Wait, this wasn’t this was some time ago. But it was such an amazing idea.

I hear you. I think it’s been such an interesting time, because so many people were committed to so many things. And it’s, it’s hard to know, now people are going back to the status quo. My doctor just went back to not doing phone appointments. And I was like, that was such a good thing. You know, that worked so well. What else should people be thinking about as they are creating peaceful harm? I actually have a different question. I have a better question for you. As a leader, how do you foster creative, peaceful, harmonious relationships in your team?

I think it’s in your team and your families. To me. We’re relationships between humans doesn’t matter where we’re standing. And we know we talked before we got on the call about imperfect and how you do it live because it can be imperfect. I think one of them is by showing up with our imperfections, and not trying to show up as perfect and I know everything because you’re imperfect and imperfect and every other human being is imperfect. And that’s perfectly fine. To me, the second one is the concept that we need to have more conflict. We need to have more conversations by not engaging in uncomfortable conversations, we lose the ability to know each other, we lose the ability to find the common solution, we lose the ability to think differently. And we’ve been for so many reasons, maybe there could be a whole, you know, area, why am I only seen on one side of the equation, we are kind of people are very uncomfortable with conflict. There is nothing wrong with a conversation that makes us uncomfortable. It’s how we manage that later, I can be very respectful, and still be able to look at you in the eye and be very uncomfortable with a conversation we’re having. And that’s fine. It’s part of it.

Yeah, I think that’s, I think that being able to go deeper into what’s not working, to negotiate through problems, we sort of walk up and we touch it, and then we run away really quickly. We want it to be harmonious without knowing how to dive in and do the work.

Harmonious becomes because we’ve learned how to have discussions. It’s not because it’s always harmonious. I actually think that if somebody comes and tells me, I have the best relationship, we never disagree. I think it’s a superficial and not a good relationship. Because if you’re really going to go deep, and have the conversations that are needed, there’s going to be times that it’s going to be an uncomfortable, difficult conversation. Nothing wrong with them, they’re part of it. I like to say you can have very difficult conversations in a very nice tone of voice. And they’re still difficult because they triggered your knee for whatever reason. Yeah, I guess the invitation is let’s not run-on subjects that make us uncomfortable. I don’t have to be in there completely. I invite them, I invite you to have a little bit more of curiosity, a little bit more of encounter. And then if you need to walk away if it’s too triggering, but at least keep the door open.

I've gained a lot of expertise that are very useful for others. Share on X

And how can people find you?

They can go to my website. It’s claudiaaro.com. And I will be happy I write a blog every month on these topics because I’m passionate about it. And I would love them to get in touch and learn more about how to create this. better, stronger, imperfect relationships.

What are some of your blog topics? I’d love to hear a little bit about your blog.

I’ve talked about my favorite words, and how my favorite works. Some of them are the word and the word no, we think no is a very positive word. Actually, in my write about that. I’ve talked about silence, and how using a few seconds of silence is such an inviting technique to let the other person speak. Um, you know, we scared of silence that we catch on to them. And I’m like not the same as this great means the other person’s thinking what you’re saying, give them a chance to decide what they have to say. I only write about things that I believe in or control. I talk a lot about, you know, knowing what you want to say, I have people that say, you know, I want to feel respected or acknowledged or work. And when I asked them, Okay, so what does the other person need to do? What are the behaviors they need to do for you to feel that way? They go blank, and they say, I don’t know, that’s the other person’s problem. I’m like, Well, no, it’s yours. Because if we want the other person to understand us, then we need to tell them exactly what we need.

That’s awesome. It’s been great to have you here today.

My pleasure.

It’s really great to have you. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you. And thank you for your book. I really enjoyed it. And for having me as your guest.

Oh, well, it’s been such a nice time. And well, I wish you all the best of work of luck out there working with all the people who are deepening their relationships.

And the best of luck to all of us.

I wanted to read you just a little bit out of Chapter too. We’re doing book club in November; we’re doing chapter two. We’re doing book club this year, from the experimental leader via a new kind of boss to cultivate an organization of innovators, innovation, creativity and reactivity. Most leaders assume their roles without a roadmap of any kind. They survive based on their innate abilities to think on their feet and learn on the job. Regardless, it’s no secret that seasoned leaders repeatedly exhibit the same overlapping set of skills and practices, self-care, listening, emotional intelligence, and the ability to develop people, people over time, new leaders might not get to see these practices up close, however, as intentional mentoring and excellent models of business leadership are rare in anyone’s leader, anyone leaders career, and because today’s leaders work under constant pressure to innovate and disrupt, they sometimes end up using strategies, strategies and behaviors better suited to times of crisis than day to day Wayfinding.

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It’s been a real pleasure being here today with Claudia Aronowitz, I loved that she was talking about “NO” as a word to learn. I often tell my clients that “NO” is a two-letter word that will change your life. I also challenge you to look for places that you can use “NO” without explanation. So, you know, we soften “NO” sometimes for people by explaining all the reasons why we can’t do it. I’m busy. I’m this, but I really challenge you this week to look for a place to say “NO”, I can’t do that. And let it sit. Because it’s incredibly powerful. Because it allows you to sit with “NO” being an option for no other reason. Then you choose it. That’s my challenge to you this week. It’s been great being with you here today. On the experimental leader podcast. Go experiment!

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Claudia Aronowitz

Claudia Aronowitz is an accomplished leadership coach, mediator and trainer with extensive experience in both the health and not-for-profit sectors. After more than 20 years in senior management roles she transitioned into coaching, and has since worked with leaders in a variety of industries.

Claudia is known for her holistic approach to maximizing both personal and professional potential. She guides and supports her clients through change and transition, developing critical thinking and finding new perspectives. Claudia has a proven ability to bring clarity to complex situations, working closely with leaders on their communication style and conflict management skills to strengthen their relationships and teams.

Claudia holds a Master of Public Health, specializing in behaviour change. She is certified with both the International Coach Federation and the Coaches Training Institute. She holds a certificate in Positive Psychology and is trained in Organizational and Relationship Systems Coaching. Having studied and resided in numerous countries, Claudia understands how different cultural perspectives affect communication. She is fluent in English, Spanish and Hebrew.

 

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