Constructive Dialogue: How Listening Leads to Better Decisions – Ryan Moody

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Today, I’m talking with my upstairs neighbor, Ryan Moody. Ryan is a chemical engineer and she works on hydrogen fuel cell development for cars here in California. She’s also someone who really enjoys being involved in community. And so I’m looking forward to hearing her thoughts on leading and following both in a technical industry like engineering, but also beyond.

Ryan, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. I’m excited to talk with you today. Great.

So I want to kind of start with something a bit more mundane. You work on hydrogen fuel cell technology, which I didn’t really know about before I met you. So I wonder if you could just give us a brief overview, like what is it that you do and what’s your kind of day-to-day work life? Yeah, sure.

So I’ll tell you a little bit about fuel cell vehicles first and then what I actually do in the industry. But a fuel cell electric car or a fuel cell vehicle is electric in a similar way to how a Prius or a Tesla or another car is electric, except those are powered by batteries and these are powered by hydrogen-fueled cells. And so what you do is similar to a gasoline-driven car. You’ll drive to a gas station, except it puts hydrogen gas in your car instead.

And then there’s a chemical reaction that goes on inside of the car and that chemical reaction produces the electricity that runs the car. But the cool thing is that out of the tailpipe only comes water. And so it’s environmentally friendly in that way that the only tailpipe emissions are water and not CO2 or other particulates and things like that. And so my role in the industry is I’m an operations manager.

And so I manage these hydrogen refueling stations. And it’s a bit difficult just because it’s new technology. They haven’t been around for all that long. So there’s lots of technical challenges, lots of personal challenges.

And it’s really cool just being a part of this growing energy industry that hopefully will make the environment greener. Thank you for that. I feel like you’ve just given us this little sneak peek of the future, which is coming a lot faster than we might think. And we’re all going to be involved in it, this transition to new energy sources in one way or the other for sure.

I want to ask you about your work in operations. I get the sense that you work with a lot of different people at various levels of the organization. Can you tell us a little about how you see leading and following come into some of those interactions? Yeah.

So there’s a lot of different people I work with in my kind of day-to-day jobs. There’s maintenance technicians that I would say in some ways I’m in a leadership role because I sort of maybe approve the maintenance rate that goes on, but they are really the experts about the way to specifically do different things. But I’m also part of a team, so I’m not the only operations manager of stations, but there’s other people who… California is the only state so far that has hydrogen refueling stations for commercial vehicles or vehicles that you or I could buy.

And so I have a counterpart in the north part of California, so she manages the stations there in San Francisco and we work together. And then there’s sort of this global piece that we’re plugged into. And so our boss sits in Germany and, yeah, we want to make sure that our stations are running somewhat similarly to the ones that are in the UK or in the Netherlands or in Germany and other stations like that, right? So they can develop similarly.

We share similar technologies. We learn from each other’s mistakes and overall can kind of progress through the energy transition faster than we might otherwise. Those do seem to be three pretty distinct levels of relationship you’re describing, but at the same time, I can definitely see how they all stack and impact one another. Yeah.

So I wonder if you feel like there are certain parallels among them in terms of how the leading and following energy flows. Yes, there very much are. And I think in the ways that maybe in a more traditional setting, right, it’s hierarchical. And so your boss tells you what to do and you do that.

And that’s at least not been my experience at all. So my boss, because he sits in Germany, he pre-pandemic was maybe in the U. S. one to three times a year and then in the pandemic, absolutely not.

And so I make a lot of judgment calls that maybe in a different world or a different environment would be ones that I would turn towards him to make instead. But because I know my area the best, I’m at the station every single day and I get to see what makes the most sense in terms of an engineering solution or a financial solution or something like that. And so that’s just it’s a different way of interacting than I have been more used to. Because in my last job, it was much more command and control structure and much more hierarchical in that way.

Yeah. I’d love to ask you to just go a little deeper into the experience of that. Yeah. You know, as you described it, a kind of non-hierarchical leading and following.

I mean, maybe let’s take that the interaction between you and Germany, just since that’s the last one you mentioned. I am really interested in this idea of leading and following being like actions or behaviors rather than just fixed titles. Because as you say, I think that’s a lot more of what our real experience is like nowadays. Yeah.

I think one way in which I would have expected him to lead, but I find myself leading more, is when it comes to larger group initiatives that have to do with what we think kind of makes sense for this continuous improvement long term. So there’s these day-to-day projects that you work on. And at the end of that project, it’s kind of finished. It’s out in the world.

It’s building a new station. And so that’s kind of the end of that one. But there’s these longer term initiatives that we kind of bucket as broadly continuous improvement that I would say that they are most often proposed by me or my counterpart who’s in Northern California. So one that she proposed, for example, was she wanted to get us actually a new layer of leadership, like a new boss.

She thought that it would be really helpful to have somebody who is regionally focused, not just one who is globally focused over everything going on. She was just like, I’d like to have a little bit more leadership experience and have somebody who kind of holds that role. One that I proposed was that the way that we track a lot of our maintenance currently is handwritten pieces of paper, sometimes Excel files. And so a maintenance technician might go out there and say, Hey, this pump’s broken.

I’ll just call a guy that I know to fix it. I’ll write down what needs to be done or what was done. And then you lose that receipt or it goes somewhere else. And so you don’t really have this history of what’s gone on at the site.

And that makes it harder in the future when you’re saying, Hey, did this thing break down last week or last month or last year? It makes it hard to track. Like, is this pump performing the way that it should or is this dispenser dispensing the way that it should? And so I proposed the solution to sort of have a longer term way of tracking it through a computer program.

And in both of those examples, it kind of sounds like something maybe that our boss should have intuitively known. Of course, you want to have somebody who’s a regional manager who can give you more day to day guidance. Or of course, you would want to track things through a computer. But I think the reality is if you’re not living it day to day, if you feel like as the official boss or the boss on paper, that you are getting the results that you need, you don’t think about maybe how hard it was to achieve that or what it took to get there.

And I think that we were just in a better position to support to identify that. And so we said, I think this needs to be done. These are the resources we need. We either need money, we need to carve out time in our day that we can spend on this.

We need to give us more people who can work on this. And then, yeah, it was able to kind of happen from there. That’s a really good point you’re making about leadership coming out of lived experience. I think it’s almost like something I’ve heard a lot, but it bears repeating.

It’s like really when the solutions are coming out of something you see every day that you have that kind of boots on the ground experience with, it’s almost always more meaningful. And it sounds like your official boss in Germany is open to receiving those, which would be, I guess, bringing in the followership piece, right? Whether it’s an official title leader or someone who you would think of as a follower is the ability to follow, to listen, to receive these solutions is really important. Yeah.

Could you describe that part a little bit either as you observe it in your boss or moments that you’ve been in that role yourself and like the importance of that? In any way kind of longer term, there really has to be consent on the person who is following. I mean, maybe in a very short term or really kind of your under the gun type scenario, you could force somebody to do what it was that you wanted in the workplace or something like that without their buy-in. But really, I mean, if you wanted it to be a kind of longer term thing, it would require that.

And so one thing that that kind of made me think of was relating to the maintenance technicians. So I can very clearly tell if the station is not online because there’s lots of customers outside saying, Ryan, I need hydrogen fuel. My car is not going to go without it. Please turn the station back on.

But really beyond that, the maintenance technician is much more knowledgeable than I am. I would kind of consider the domain in which that I feel most empowered to make decisions is things that are consistent trends across all of the stations in Southern California, for example, or things like where might be the best ways to spend our budget over the next five years. But in terms of the specific reason why this pump is vibrating and it’s moving out of tolerance of the vibration range that we programmed or why the concentration of methane in parts per billion is a little bit too high and how we need to fix the filtration system to sort of accommodate for that, that is absolutely domain in which the maintenance technician is much more knowledgeable. And so he will say things to me like, Ryan, we need to keep two spare hoses on site because I know that the way that the manufacturer says maybe they should last for 10,000 cycles, but the way that customers use them, they only last 5,000 cycles.

I’ve been there. I understand that. And so I think that we should buy this part. And that requires consent on my part to say, yes, I will follow your direction here.

Let’s order the part together. Because if he sort of banged on his drum and continued to say that and I did not, if I didn’t sort of buy into that idea, I didn’t sort of allow myself to follow in that way and admit that I am not the expert in that area. What we either do is I would never have conversations so that I can hopefully learn in that area and become better over time. We might not order this part.

And so then when the hose breaks or we have some kind of issue, the station is down for much longer because we never listened to him and we started the buying process later. Or I guess in an alternative, maybe he kind of goes rogue and buys it anyways. So none of those probably create workplaces that you would want to work and certainly don’t create workplaces that I would want to work in. And so there’s absolutely that like in the communication, you have to agree to follow.

You’re not sort of just put behind somebody or put alongside them to follow their idea, but you have to agree and sort of want to in some way as well. I really love the connection you made between followership and consent. That’s not a word I think I might have immediately chosen, but it really resonates for me because it reminds me that even if you’re in a following role, even for like five minutes, you’re agreeing to be there. You actually have agency there and it’s a choice that you need to make.

And if you don’t make it, there are consequences. Absolutely. Maybe not immediate, but it has an effect. Your choice to consent, to listen, and to, as you said, be willing to acknowledge someone else’s domain expertise.

It’s like a very consequential decision I think we sometimes overlook. Yeah. No, I mean, it makes me think of something that I had read, and this was a while ago, but talking about accountability and how accountability sort of also requires consent that like, I can’t hold you accountable to a thing that you did or a thing that you say if you don’t sort of also buy in and say, yeah, I did this and I sort of agree and I’m going to maybe try to do something restorative in the community to sort of make up for this, or I’m going to do some education on my own or something like that, that just maybe shouting at somebody, labeling something at somebody, tweeting at somebody is not true accountability, right? It requires their follow through.

And I think same thing for followership, I should say, is that it does require more of a conversation than you might imagine. Followership is obviously something you have thought about or raised your own awareness around as part of this dynamic. I wonder if you could say anything about how you did that, like how you learned this. Was it just natural for you?

Does it come from some other part of your experience and then you brought it into your work or I don’t know, where did that come from for you? I think conceptually, I didn’t have language for it until somewhat recently, but conceptually, I think I learned about followership through the practice of in the lessons I kind of learned in the social justice space, because I think, for example, in racial justice work, that a lot of the conversations that are coming out now are talking about how white people should be learning to listen to the experience of black people and other people of color and what it looks like and feels like to be a good ally. I would say same things in the LGBTQ space that straight people are sort of requested to listen to and follow ultimately the ideas of what would bring about a more just world in that space and not say, no, I have one black friend, I have one gay friend, I have one disabled friend, I know what that should look like. And so that’s kind of how I was introduced to the concept, but yeah, I didn’t have language for it at the time.

I really like thinking about being an ally as a follower role. And by that, I mean as an active and equally valuable partner to leadership. So that as a white person, for example, I can be a follower in partnership with those who are leading the movement for black lives or the movement for black liberation. And that this is not a lesser position, but it is a different position.

And that generally it’s the more useful position for someone like me to be in. And so I experienced that almost like a relief to understand that doing something meaningful and impactful doesn’t mean necessarily being the leader. Although that’s, of course, the message we’ve all absorbed from our culture. But it’s not really true, especially in an example like this, where if I want to be an ally to members of a community that I am not part of, then really the only way for me to do that and to be effective is to find a way to occupy the follower role.

I think it’s so easy to feel either enraged by societal injustice or to feel empowered to take action. It’s so easy to sort of charge in there. And I don’t know if it’s do the wrong thing, but do something that maybe is not in the best interests or desires necessarily of the community. And I feel like listening is a key part of that.

Two identities that I think I had just never given enough justice to or given enough space sort of in my mind relate to the issue of fatphobia and ableism, where I don’t think I had ever thought about size privilege or thin privilege that much growing up, even though most of the, I would say, girls and women now I knew had body issues in some capacity, but I thought it was kind of an even-handed thing. Like we all struggle in the same way that I’ve had white people say to me, oh, we all have felt excluded for some reason. Why is it worse that you got excluded that you’re black as opposed to some other reason? So when I first learned sort of about fatphobia and also ableism, I thought, oh, I know the right way to include people.

I would say an example in ableism is that I called people differently abled for a while. I thought that was sort of the most respectful way or a person with disabilities, I thought using that sort of, they call it person first language, was more recognizing of their humanity. As I’ve delved a little bit deeper into disability justice work, and this is, terminology is literally only one way that you can try to make a difference. But as I’ve kind of delved a little bit deeper, I started listening to some really awesome podcasts with disability rights activists and with fat activists.

They’re in two separate spheres, but sometimes there’s overlap. And I heard a lot about the community embracing the term disabled and that it’s something that they, in many cases, obviously you should ask people what they’d like to be called the same way you should ask for people’s pronouns. But in many ways, people found being called fat or being called disabled to be empowering or just a statement of fact. They didn’t see it as either insulting or not insulting, but it’s just it’s a fact about who I am in the same way that black is a fact about who I am.

But I wouldn’t have known that because previously I had sort of charged in with this idea that’s like, no, I will always call people, people with disabilities. I know not to say the phrase handicapped, but I’ll use people with disabilities because that’s the most helpful thing. And this is what they quote unquote, because in my privileged ride, I thought obviously they’re always a monolith. And it has shown me so much in that regard, both about how I can be the best in terms of an ally, but also how I can have just like a more rich lived experience.

Thank you so much for sharing that example. I think it makes really clear for me how the act of listening can literally change what we see around us, what we say, what we do. In a sense, it changes who we are. And that’s something on the one hand, you know, listening sounds like such a simple thing.

But on the other hand, it just never ceases to amaze me how it actually changes our outcomes. And so I do feel that followership and the follower role is very much about listening on a fundamental level. Speaking and listening is an analogy I use a lot, speaking being the leading side and listening being the following side. And that’s something that humans do very organically, just like we’re doing here.

And so I believe it’s something we can then translate out into more complex forms of relating and working together. You know, part of what your story reminded me of is that there’s a need to slow down when we put ourselves in that role, whether it’s in a social justice space, learning about a community or a set of identities we’re not familiar with, or even, you know, in work, like, I don’t understand what’s wrong with this pump. Let me slow down, listen, right? And then make a decision or then, you know, support a decision.

And that’s slowing down. There’s a lot of resistance around that. You know, I feel that in myself, I’m like, I just want the answer. I want to fix it.

You know, I want everything to be good and I want everyone to be happy. And it just, it’s not like that. I feel like increasingly, the more I learn myself that I just need to really be okay with time. Yes.

And I think listening does teach you that and deliberately putting yourself in what I would call a following role where you’re taking in information, you know, you’re receiving that takes some time, but it’s, it’s really worth it. Yeah, no, I fully agree. And I think as you sort of take that in sitting with the discomfort that not taking action or not moving quickly requires in you, I have learned a lot about myself and the way that I process and ultimately a lot more about whatever issue it was that I was trying to, to learn about. And so, and at least for me, I don’t know if others feel this way, but for me, it has always felt super comfortable to have an algorithm of like, or a list of these are the do’s, these are the don’ts.

This is the exact way to do it. But like real life has so many more complicated situations, like at least through the lens of race, it’s like, it’s more than just don’t say the N word or don’t openly be barring people from opportunities because of skin color, right? It’s so much more complex than that. But it’s funny because as you were saying that and sort of being okay with taking more time, it was just reminding me of either the way that I have now tried to learn or try to learn with my partner, how we like take vacation because I think the way that we vacation is a little bit differently or different, I should say from one another.

I am somebody who, who really likes planned fun. And I know that sounds very like not fun, but I, if I’m on a vacation, I really want to like maximize this time. So I might be, Oh, we’re going to do this for breakfast. It’s for lunch.

This is the activity after lunch. This is how much time we need to let it rest before we go into the pool. These are, you know, all this kind of stuff. I very much plan these activities well.

And my partner is very much a like mosey-er. And when I do mosey, I feel like I plan like, okay, we have two hours for moseying. I am not really one who, yeah, just kind of wings it. And I think probably in part, honestly, because our society allows such little time for this vacation, right?

That I feel all this pressure and this like scarcity mindset of like, I must maximize every second. And so two years ago, we were having our anniversary and we decided to go on a hiking trip together because we’re not really much fun for like expensive gifts or fancy restaurants or anything like that. But we love to spend time together doing things we haven’t done before. And so we were going camping to this place called Enchanted Rock in Texas, and we needed to light the fire for the night because that’s how we were going to both stay warm and cook food and that kind of stuff.

And so we got to the campsite and we realized that we didn’t have any logs. And at the beginning of the national park, there was this box where we could buy logs. And so we get to this box where you can buy these logs and the box is locked because we’ve now come a little bit too late. And then we drive to the closest station and we say, okay, we’ve got to leave the park.

Unfortunately, the box with the logs was locked, but we can go to the closest gas station. I’m sure they have it because they’re right by a national park. And so we get there and they said, oh, sorry, you can’t get any because we are out. And then we go to the second place and the second closest gas station that we’ve now found on Google and our battery is going a little bit low.

They say, oh, we do have some, but we only take cash. We don’t have an ATM on site. Maybe you can go somewhere else to go to the ATM, to get some cash, to get some logs, to go back to your campsite. And so we’re doing all this and I am sort of, as we slowly go through barrier after barrier after barrier, just to meet our basic needs of heat and food in this one moment.

And this anniversary trip is supposed to be fun and special, not so much just trying to scramble to get our basic needs met. And so I’m getting internally frustrated about why didn’t he plan this? He knows he’s been camping before. He understands what a person needs to go camping and all this kind of stuff.

And I’m thinking about it. And as I got frustrated, I sort of shared that feeling with him and he said, I understand. And I think, yeah, you’re correct that I could have planned this better, but sort of what is the rush? It is the middle of the day.

It’s not that close tonight. We’ve got some sacks in the car and the cooler. And frankly, all we wanted to do this weekend was just spend some time together. And so this will be probably looking back a funny moment that I guess I will share with my downstairs neighbor of the podcast, right?

But yeah, it was like, and as he said that I was just thinking, you know what? I really don’t have to make everything so efficient. I don’t have to turn on my engineering brain at all times. I don’t have to move that quickly.

It is okay to just pause and enjoy the moment. And in that case, to follow him because he was the person who had planned this trip and arranged this trip that, you know, looking back, I’m super grateful that he wanted to sort of take that leadership role, right? I often feel like I’m a bit type A and then I’m in charge of this planning stuff. And so that he had wanted to do this nice thing.

And then I was sort of really zoned in on the fact that one small detail that ultimately was not as time sensitive as I was mentally making it was going on. And so I think over time now that we’ve been together a little bit longer, and also we try to meet each other in the middle and get better with the leadership followership, especially when we are doing things that are maybe outside of whatever the normal routine is or our domain, right? It’s like maybe he often cooks, but like the times that I cook, hopefully he’s a little bit flexible to like, Oh, she didn’t make me the steak the way that I wanted her. Oh, she didn’t make it.

But like, it’s okay. And similarly, you know, if I’m always the person who drives us, maybe he tries to get, you know, not upset if I’m not following the exact most quick path on Google maps or something like that. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that story.

And now, you know, I hope that now you can look back and have a chuckle over it. But it also reminds me that, you know, although, okay, this example might seem to be, you know, light years away from your technical experience managing stations. But on the other hand, it also kind of reveals like an internal process, right? That leading and following are actually internal processes that we all have access to.

And in fact, we can choose, you know, although we might not be as practiced at the following side or the listening side of the allowing side, just because culturally it’s not celebrated, right? But it’s always there and we can choose and practice it. And that there’s, there’s benefit in doing that, you know, like, you know, you could sit there and, and be frustrated, right? Because it’s not going the way that you, your leader brain would have done it.

Or you can switch into follower mode, which if I reflect on my dance experience, that role or that way of being even is very much in the moment. It’s a very embodied state. I’m super aware of all sorts of sensory information coming toward me. And I’m enjoying that process, almost like a heightened state of awareness of being aware and perceiving what’s going on around me in my immediate environment.

Yeah. Whereas when I feel like I’m in my leader brain, so to speak, it’s more like bigger picture, the coordinating, you know, making things, arranging things. So I think that’s valuable. And it’s a way that I’m kind of thinking of our listeners now, like if people don’t think of themselves as followers, right?

Because again, culturally, that’s not something we learn. It’s a way to start to get there and to understand you have these two aspects of yourself that you can harmonize. Absolutely. And I think the opportunity, as you were describing it in a dance context, I think the opportunity that I see there, because I feel very much that I was trained that in the same way that we were all socialized, that leader is what you want to be.

Everybody’s looking for a leader. Nobody’s really looking for a follower. But for me, my experiences following have allowed me to be more present and soak things in more. So I follow the technician and I get to learn how something works more instead of be worried about if I’m going to fix it that quickly or on my anniversary trip, it’s like I can just experience and look around and yeah, I get to soak things in more.

Yeah. And then invariably, I imagine, I mean, you’ve already, I think, given us some great examples of like when you are there and able to soak things in or take in information or just, you know, acknowledge the fact that someone else has a piece of information you might not, it invariably strengthens your own leadership capacity, not only your own pleasure and like contentment maybe in the moment, but then your own ability in the future to act from a more informed place. Have you seen that dynamic happen either in work or in community? Yeah.

No, absolutely. I mean, in both contexts, honestly, I think initially I was thinking about a work example where I was able to follow this maintenance technician. And then, you know, the next time when somebody new from the team was joining, I felt comfortable sort of leading them around the plant and showing them what things did. Nice.

But yeah, there have also been sort of facilitation examples in some of the community projects or groups that I’m a part of. One thing that I do for a community group that I am a part of is that we will pack food for some undocumented families, some low-income families that are, that do have citizenship here in the local area. And so we will pack food, but some of the food that’s donated ends up rotten or expired or not good for some other reason. And so I often will sort of act as the compost drop-off person.

And so I will collect the compost, I will drop it off at the compost collecting center. And then if people want, I will drop off compost dirt to them as well. And I think while I was leading that for a while, I think a cool aspect was that a couple of times that I happened to be out, I was required to sort of follow after somebody else where they said, Hey, this is the way that I did it. And from there I learned a couple of more efficient ways to sort of run the driving route that I was normally running, which was pretty cool.

But also I was able to pick up some tips from them because they happened to, and I would have never known about this connection beforehand because they, I had never sort of handed over that responsibility. So they had never had the opportunity to share with people there, but they got to the compost site. They realized that they had somebody who normally sort of does the composting process that they happened to know. They got into a conversation about community gardens because of that conversation that we ended up coming back.

And this person now who was filling in for me was offering me tips on sort of building my own urban garden and things like that. And so as a result of that, I’m now growing some sweet potatoes on my porch, which is pretty cool. But yeah, so it’s like this knowledge share, this chain of people who sort of made their way back to me might not have happened. Maybe they would have run into each other at some other point in time, these sort of old friends and that kind of stuff, but maybe it wouldn’t have happened, right?

And yeah, so… That’s beautiful. I now have this image in my mind of the follower mode, opening this channel of knowledge that flows and then creates other things including plants to grow out of it. Yeah, this like portal of new experience and new…

Sometimes what seems to be kind of coincidental or like spontaneous connections, that wouldn’t normally have happened if we had just not been open or said like, no, I know how to do this root. I’m just going to do it the way I’ve always done it and I know best and so forth. And for sure there’s a time for that, for the decision making, which is the leader mind, which shuts out other options and there’s for sure a need for that. But there’s at the same time, if it’s only that, then that’s limiting.

And so I think the followership is that thing that opens other possibilities and it’s like you could turn it on like a hose almost and be like, okay, we need a little bit of water here now. Okay, that’s good for now. Now let’s make another decision. Yeah, no, definitely.

And I think one thing I enjoy about your podcast in particular is that you particularly focus on the followership piece because I think it just doesn’t get a lot of air time and other aspects of society where it’s like, yes, both are good. But I think it’s helpful to have one that focuses more heavy handedly on the followership piece just because they’re, best I can tell, right? And at least in my lived experience, I don’t often see that promoted. Thank you for that.

And maybe since you mentioned that, is there anything else kind of here as we’re like getting to the end that you’d like to share about followership, anything else that’s just sort of emerging now from the conversation? I think for me, having grown up in a family slash society where I feel like leadership was so heavily emphasized, I felt like it was initially kind of difficult to get in on understanding how to do followership. And then also feeling like it was a skill set that was worthwhile investing in and developing. And I guess if I was to offer a piece of advice sort of in that vein, if anybody else has had a similar lived experience to me, is that I was able to start by asking questions, which I thought was initially very helpful.

But also after sort of that initial phase of just you stand there with kind of like an open vessel and you’re just like, pour knowledge into me, pour knowledge into me. That pretty quickly after that, I found that it was really cool to sort of to learn alongside people and sort of it felt more of that like sort of flat structure than that hierarchical structure where maybe I get a tiny piece of it and I give back a tiny piece of leadership or knowledge or advice. And so that was sort of the process that I followed. I’m certainly still learning and growing and in my comfort, right, as a follower, but I really like it.

And this conversation is a really good reminder of just continuing to develop that skill set, right? Because it is a skill, a skill that you should practice. So. Yeah.

Thank you. I love how you described learning alongside people. And I do really believe more and more that that’s, you know, that’s more of our authentic state is where, you know, we all have something to share and then always also something to learn. And that’s such a valuable insight.

And, you know, anywhere, wherever you are, just to see the person in front of you, no matter what their identity, their age, their background, they know something that you don’t. Yeah. And so if there’s an opportunity, right, again, we know there’s a time for decision making and not taking in more information. We can’t do that all day long, but if there’s an opportunity just to know there’s always something there to learn and to share that feels like that natural flow of leading and following, which, you know, just produces more goodness, you know, better relationships, like better solutions, you know, more, more holistic ways of working.

Totally agree. Thank you again. I really appreciate your willingness to explore this across, you know, so many different realms, like the professional, the personal, the social. It really does bring it together for me in a new way.

Thank you for having me. You have been listening to the Lead & Follow podcast. Special thanks to Glover Gill for composing our music and a huge thank you to all of you who support the show. It really means a lot.

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