A conversation with Nicole Richard, Director of Product Owners At National Instruments.
“I think the facilitative approach to leadership it’s all the good things about leadership like bringing active listening skills to a group, being able to encourage and generate participative discussion and groups. Help stimulate creative thinking through different brainstorming and idea generation processes. Help people work through different problem spaces. Being able to draw out the opinions of people in objective and non-judgmental ways, be able to create that psychological safety. Help shape more powerful and strategic questions that teams can explore, but being a manager for so long, I’ve intuitively developed these skills, like really worked on building better empathy and better listening skills, but I haven’t found a structured approach to really developing myself in that. It’s more like gut intuition and just practice, and finding this more structured, tangible skillset of facilitation has been really empowering for me here. I was like, there are actual tools and different techniques that you can learn and frameworks that you can develop yourself and to become better at all these things as the leader.” –Nicole Richard
In this episode of Control the Room, I had the pleasure of speaking with Nicole Richard about her ample experience leading product teams, developing STEAM programs for children around the world, and studying the nuances of facilitation. She shares how to get colleagues to try new collaborative approaches to work and potential pitfalls. We then discuss her facilitation training and the importance of developing the language and narrative to share your professional aspirations. Listen in for more reasons to give yourself more grace at work.
Show Highlights
[1:45] How Nicole Got Her Start Leading Product Teams.
[14:40] How To Build Confidence Leading Co-Creation.
[22:20] The Value Of Creating Meeting Artifacts.
[30:10] Why To Anchor Yourself Into Purpose.
Links | Resources
Nicole on LinkedIn
About the Guest
Nicole Richard is a Product Director at NI, leading an organization of Product Owners that shape the design and direction of a broad portfolio of software products. With nearly two decades of experience leading diverse software and product teams, Nicole is known for her facilitative approach to leadership. She thrives on engaging and leading groups through the co-creation process, drawing out the diversity of different perspectives, and building upon each other’s ideas to bring forth something uniquely new that no individual contributor would have envisioned or accomplished on their own.
During NI’s partnership with LEGO, Nicole spent a decade managing the development of the LEGO® MINDSTORMS® and LEGO® WeDo robotics software platforms for kids. This serendipitous opportunity to leverage her engineering degree towards developing toys sparked a passion within Nicole for helping children discover and develop an interest in science and technology. She’s traveled far and wide to places such as Cambodia, India, and South Africa to help various non-profits create sustainable LEGO® robotics programs that foster technical literacy in children who would otherwise never have access to these types of learning experiences. In 2014, Nicole co-founded Science In A Suitcase, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that blends the worlds of art and technology to engage kids in learning critical STEAM skill-sets in new and exciting ways.
About Voltage Control
Voltage Control is a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.
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Full Transcript
Douglas: Welcome to the Control The Room Podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control, and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing the structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting.
Thanks for listening. If you’d like to join us live for a session sometime, you can join our weekly Control The Room Facilitation Lab. It’s a free event to meet fellow facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real-time with other facilitators. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. If you’d like to learn more about my new book, Magical Meetings, you can download the Magical Meetings quick start guide, a free PDF reference with some of the most important pieces of advice from the book. Download a copy today at voltagecontrol.com/magical-meetings-quick-guide.
Today I’m with Nicole Richard at NI, where she leads an organization of product owners helping to shape the design and direction of a broad portfolio of software products. She’s also the co-founder of Science In A Suitcase, a nonprofit focused on helping children and underserved communities build their technical literacy and self-confidence through team-based robotics learning and friendly competition. Welcome to the show, Nicole.
Nicole: Thanks, Douglas. Thanks for having me here.
Douglas: Of course, as always, we’re going to start with how you got your start. How did you get into this world of helping children with robotics and product owners realize their dreams and managing people to do better stuff in the world?
Nicole: Yeah, so as I reflect on it, as far back as I can remember, I have always been enamored by the process and energy involved in groups of people collaborating together and co-creating together. So from being a little girl, organizing all the neighborhood kids to co-create these different games that we play to, as I got older, pulling my friends into co-creating all these different types of events and gatherings to benefit various courses, to pretty early on in my career, falling into a management role, leading teams, and co-creating different products and services to provide value for users.
In recent years, I’ve really been in the inquiry of how do I, as a leader, really create the right conditions for and provide better structures around a guiding team through this process of co-creation. And back in 2019, another division of my company had hired one of the facilitators working for Voltage Control to lead a workshop. And one of my colleagues in product design helped co-facilitate that, and I just had a really great experience. And my manager encouraged several of us that were interested in facilitation to sign up for the 2020 Facilitation Summit that you guys put on and so I did. And I signed up for that one-day master facilitation workshop that you, Douglas, and Danielle Stillman put on, and yeah, it was amazing. That was really my first introduction to the world of professional facilitation. And here was this group of incredibly skillful people talking about how to design different ways to intentionally lead groups through these series of spaces to draw out the diversity of different perspectives in the room and explore problems in new ways, and co-create a new path forward to ultimately get to these richer and more engaging outcomes.
And it’s where I first learned about things like liberating structures and different narrative arcs for designing agendas and learned about all these different energizers and warm-up type techniques. And I was just really drawn to the whole experience and left with like, who are these people? And like, how do I do this? And it was really fortuitous time actually because it was right before the pandemic hit. One of the last in-person events that I attended that many people, I’m sure, attended before everything shut down. And at that time, there were so many facilitators that had to figure out how to quickly pivot their business models and their different techniques to be successful in an online world. And I was so impressed with the way that this community came together to support each other in that so many people were putting on webinars and workshops and sharing ideas and coaching each other, and all of that was made so accessible to people interested. And I personally was able to jump into a bunch of different sessions, online training sessions, and discussions.
And I remember times being in these Zoom meetings and these breakout rooms with people from all over the world, having these really beautiful connecting conversations on these global topics that were impacting all of us like the pandemic, like mental health, social justice, and all of this during a time that was so isolated in so many ways. And so I don’t know, tapping into its community and learning these new skill sets became a real outlet for me over the last couple of years. And just been trying to take everything that I’m learning and apply it to the everyday ways that I’m working with my teams, especially in this time when we’re all working in this remote world.
Douglas: Well, it certainly brought up a lot of memories there. When you were even talking about coming to the conference and some of those pre-conference workshops, I was like thinking to myself, oh, wow, that was right before the pandemic hit. And then you started talking about all the shifts we made during the pandemic to support the community and how the facilitation community even responded, just globally folks were leaning in and it’s not surprising because if you think about the principles of facilitation and the core values we all hold, of course, we would lean into those kinds of behaviors, right?
Nicole: Yeah. I was really, I don’t know. I was just really impressed and inspired by all of that, that community really coming together and connecting in so many ways.
Douglas: It’s interesting as I’ve watched your journey and you applying this work internally. I’ve just been fascinated by how it’s infectious, right? Like you told the story about, wow, this is like this discovery process of just realizing that these things are out there and then taking those to your people. So I guess I’m just super curious to hear. I’m sure a lot of the listeners are, what are you finding that your teams and your colleagues are seeing the most value in or immediately connecting to?
Nicole: Yeah. I have just been really trying to take everything I’m learning, all these different skills and techniques, and apply it to the way that I’m designing and running my meetings because so much of company culture really happens inside of meetings. And so much of the work we do happens inside of meetings, and just been challenging myself to design the programs that I’m designing and meetings I’m running and modeling for others and coaching others to run on my team, just how do I make those more engaging, more interactive, more energizing. And with colleagues that are interested in this and really leaning into these more structured facilitation techniques and mindsets, really looking at how can we invite people into those spaces where they can be more playful, more connected, be more of themselves, and so do better work.
And how can we start normalizing these little microwaves of putting humans and connections first through things like different energizers and warmups, but also create opportunities like using breakout rooms to break people into small rooms, to engage in different ways and small groups before sharing back with the entire group or opportunities to do some solo work and get their thoughts out first, embracing visual collaboration tools like MURAL to engage people through different mediums and way of thinking and just make the conversations and the collaborations richer? And so, I don’t know, I’m just really hoping and the people really embracing this are hoping that these new ways of working will bleed into the other experiences that people are having, the way they start showing up in their teams and the meetings they’re running and just slowly start nudging the culture forward in different ways, new and different ways.
Douglas: Yeah. It’s amazing. I’m curious as you’ve started to share this with your teams and test things out in everyday meetings and design sessions and whatnot. Are you finding certain things or certain situations to be more challenging than others?
Nicole: Yeah. I think definitely just normalizing. So many meetings are run from habit like we’ve inherited the ways that these particular meetings have been done like project status meetings, mostly recurring meetings. We just have inherited patterns for doing those that weren’t well necessarily designed in the beginning. And often people just getting together to talk to figure out how to move forward without really a lot of structure to it or bringing PowerPoints and talking through a presentation where half the people are engaged, and some people dominate the conversation, and the other half of the people check out.
And so trying to nudge people to just try new things. First of all, building more energizers and moments for connection into the ways we’re working to just break up the monotony of the back-to-back meetings that we’re all in. And in our company, we experience for sure so many things that other people experience with the sudden move to remote work where we were trying to translate all the things that we were doing in-person to the digital world, and that only worked for so long.
And our employees were definitely experiencing screen fatigue, and with calendars being full of back to back meetings and the constant context switching that required, and the lack of those natural enter opportunities to connect with people socially in between meetings, and the strain that video calls put on having to work so much harder to process these non-verbal cues like facial expressions and body language and pitch of voices and just all of this on top of the trauma everybody was dealing with in the world, like people trying to manage to work at home with kids, for example, just balancing a life that everyone was just exhausted and frustrated with the inability to get deep work done.
I was filling it, my colleagues were feeling it. 2020 was definitely a bit of a grind, and as we were all just trying to figure out these new ways of working and living. And so yeah, this past year, we’ve launched an initiative called the Workplace for Everyone. We’re really looking at what the future of work looks like as we embrace these more hybrid and flexible styles of working. And inside of that, a group of us have been really exploring how we might transform a nice meeting culture to make the ways that we collaborate and do work together just more effective and energizing.
So Douglas, inspired by your Magical Meetings book, we’ve created our own set of meeting mantras, things like really challenging employees to be clear on the purpose for their meetings. And if they really need to have the meeting in the first place, can they accomplish their goals and more asynchronous means of collaboration. And when they do need to have a meeting, can they think through different ways of structuring that meeting to be more engaging, more inclusive, more connected, and overall more effective?
I know it’s also been really leaning into our partnership with MURAL. That’s been a game-changer for us and helping just global teams stay connected and collaborate effectively while working remotely and MURAL has just been an awesome company to work with. We’ve teamed up with one of their playmakers to put on the series that we’re calling MURAL Makeovers where people will come and bring the MURALs that they’re working on and have an opportunity to get feedback from a facilitation expert and a MURAL expert to not only feedback on tips and tricks on how they can organize the information inside of their MURALs but also how can they restructure their meetings to make them more effective and just different tips and tricks to handle nuances that come up along the way.
I don’t really want to lean into these types of things and create more programs, and interactive trainings for people in the company to help people reimagine their existing meetings and to expose people to different ways of structuring interactions beyond these convention approaches like presentations or status reports or these open discussions and sharing more facilitation tips and techniques to help meeting leaders be more effective.
Douglas: What have you noticed on the team as you’ve introduced the workplace for everyone initiative and even seeing MURAL get introduced and the makeovers, have you seen any new behaviors emerge for folks in how they’re showing up in the meetings?
Nicole: Yeah. Absolutely. People are really embracing. I’ve seen more and more people embracing the idea of visual collaboration and thinking through how we can structure the ways we’re thinking about different topics and interacting around different topics in different ways and using MURAL in different frameworks and techniques to make sure we’re engaging every person in the conversation, in the dialogue, in adding ideas, in brainstorming, and building off of each other’s ideas. And I’ve watched other meeting leaders people leading meetings to feel more effective in driving towards the outcomes that they care about.
Douglas: Wow. Yeah. That brings to mind this notion of confidence and giving people some sense of a playbook or a sense of like here’s some moves or some considerations. And then once they experience a little bit of the benefits or improved outcomes, then that confidence builds, and it builds, and there’s the snowball effect, right? And it sounds like there’s a little bit of that dynamic starting to happen. And certainly, we built the certification program around that concept and I know you just came out of that program and would love to hear some of your thoughts around how practice is playing a role in this confidence building for you personally, as well as others at NI.
Nicole: Yeah. Well, first of all, the cohort, the certification program was a great experience. It was a great journey to go on with this group of really dynamic, incredibly talented people who are all in this inquiry around narrowing in on the unique value. Each one of us wants to cultivate and provide as a facilitator and developing our own powerful narratives around that. And so this program just, first of all, gave me a better language for facilitation and feel for the different flavors of it and the skill sets involved and helped me develop and further develop and clarifying my own narrative around who I am as a facilitator, my why, what’s calling me forward into this space and what’s different and unique about the temporary worlds that I’m wanting to create and invite people into. And in that, what are the skill sets that I want to better develop in the service of the value that I want to provide.
And so, for me, where I’m at in my journey right now, I’m not serving as this neutral third-party facilitator helping other teams get to these outcomes. I’m mostly facilitating the teams that I’m leading, but I really got in this program how much I’ve adopted a facilitative approach to leadership. I always have, I just didn’t know to call it that. And I’m fortunate to be surrounded by just these brilliant highly capable people. And I am rarely the expert in any meeting that I’m running. So I’m always looking at how I can actively engage and organize others such that their talents, their diversity of perspectives, and thought and contributions are fully leveraged in these increasingly complex and nuanced problem spaces that we’re working in.
And for me, just build my own clarity and confidence. What I keep coming back to for myself is this concept of co-creation like, I just love the energy and aliveness present when groups of people are co-creating together, building off of each other’s ideas to bring something uniquely new forward that no single person could have envisioned or ever accomplished on their own. To me, that’s magical. And being able to put language around this and honing in on the skills that I want to better develop and service to that, has been a really powerful outcome of the program.
Douglas: That’s amazing. I want to just jump in there, and I’m curious. The thing that jumps out to me is your statement around this realization that you’re a facilitated leader. And for those that may not have heard that term or may not be as clear to them what that is, maybe define that for them. And also, I’d be curious to hear what your advice would be for a director or VP that is trying to take on this new way of leading. What might they start to consider, and how does that approach it?
Nicole: Yeah. I think the facilitative approach to leadership it’s all the good things about leadership like bringing active listening skills to a group, being able to encourage and generate participative discussion and groups. Help stimulate creative thinking through different brainstorming and idea generation processes. Help people work through different problem spaces. Being able to draw out the opinions of people in objective and non-judgmental ways, be able to create that psychological safety. Help shape more powerful and strategic questions that teams can explore, but being a manager for so long, I’ve intuitively developed these skills, like really worked on building better empathy and better listening skills, but I haven’t found a structured approach to really developing myself in that. It’s more like gut intuition and just practice, and finding this more structured, tangible skillset of facilitation has been really empowering for me here. I was like, there are actual tools and different techniques that you can learn and frameworks that you can develop yourself and to become better at all these things as the leader.
And that’s where you’re really trying to… I guess, the mindset of a facilitative approach to leadership, you are not the expert. You’re really trying to develop yourself as that expert in the process and being able to bring out the expertise of your group and help them move forward in more productive, engaging ways to get to better outcomes. I recommend for any leader, like any leader, any manager, I absolutely recommend developing yourself and some of these facilitation tools and techniques. This has been an eye-opening and game-changing experience for me personally.
Douglas: Yeah. It’s really fascinating to hear that it was just intuitive for you. You found these approaches, but this discipline, this world, this community gave a new set of vocabulary and also a community of practice to be with and to experiment with and to learn with, because at the end of the day, if the facilitation community were to claim to be the experts, then they wouldn’t really understand facilitation. And so, I think it’s going to be an ever-growing feeling that never stagnates because of just the core principles of facilitation in itself.
Nicole: Yeah. Absolutely.
Douglas: I’m curious to hear what your thoughts are as far as how that begins to permeate through to your team. It’s clear that you’ve really embraced this and embodied this as a way that you approach as a leader, but I would imagine that the team is seeing that because you’re modeling these things and then it shows up in their everyday meetings because then they’re like, well, that seems like a better way to do these things. Have you seen any examples of where you’ve not even had to train someone or tell someone, hey, this is what we should do, but just through your leadership and your example that people just start mimicking or copying these moves or these styles?
Nicole: Yeah. Absolutely. So and there are several other colleagues that I work with that are embracing more of these techniques. And one example is building in energizers and warmups into the ways we run our meetings. And so, more broadly, my entire org has adopted this. And a lot of us are mostly using MURAL to run our weekly reoccurring meetings. There’s a visual artifact that we’re constantly creating and constantly rallying people around to capture the conversations we’re having and building. It’s just expected now that we start every meeting with some type of way to connect with each other on a more human element, a more social way through different types of energizers. So that’s one example like my org has really embraced that, and they’re running those in their meetings.
Another example is just the adoption of MURAL and using visual collaboration tools. I’m really trying to lean into that as much as possible and provide good examples for how to structure and organize content within MURAL, especially how to use it for asynchronous collaboration as well to be able to design canvases that people can find their way through easily and figure out how to contribute to and structure a combination of both asynchronous collaboration around that and synchronous collaboration. Figuring out how to draw conversations out more over time and let people build on each other’s thoughts and have time to think through their thoughts and then culminate by bringing everyone together to discuss everything that has been unearthed through that process.
Douglas: Yeah. It’s really cool, and the artifact of a meeting is the beginning of the next meeting like we don’t have to start over from scratch with another conversation about what we remember or what might be may be documented in a project management tool, but that there’s this visual that’s ever-expanding, ever-growing, I think I love that y’all are experiencing that and lean into it because it can really game-changing for an organization.
Nicole: Yeah. Absolutely. Keeping momentum alive between meetings, letting people continue to contribute to that artifact over time. It’s been really helpful in terms of being able to capture more information, more thoughts, more perspectives, and in different ways.
Douglas: The age-old advice has been to always collect action items at the end of the meeting and never end a meeting without action items. And in recent years, I’ve come to the realization that if we’re doing the work in the meeting, we don’t have as many action items at the end. And these visual prototypes or these MURALs or these collaboration outputs, there might be little tweaks, and people are going to own little aspects of them, but they’re not like go figure this thing out or go own this thing. It’s like, oh, I’m just going to go do what I do because this is my job, and my job is to do this particular piece, and I’m going to go polish this piece. And it’s very clear what I need to do because we’ve visualized it all together, and there’s a lot of clarity. So it’s almost like nature and biology where organisms are working symbiotically, and they just go and do their thing. And there’s like, the coordination is at a real atomic level.
Nicole: Yeah. I also think that… Actually one of the big things I saw for myself in the facilitation program, the certification program, was just getting more space around, not always having to get things to such a neat and tidy place all the time. Like having these like action items at the end. Again, I’m not necessarily acting as a third-party neutral facilitator with teams. I’m leading the team teams that… I’m facilitating the teams that I’m leading, and I’m more attached to the outcome. So I’ve always like felt this pressure to find a way to make progress, have the team make progress, and get people in action, having accountability.
I just realized how important slowing down and making time for the collective sense-making of a messy problem space, how important that really is, like surfacing where people are, bringing things that were in the background to the foreground, and this in itself is such an important action and outcome that gets the group to a point where they have better clarity, that pragmatic actions can come from. And I don’t know MURAL makes that, it facilitates that process so much better. Like really being able to capture where we are, help with that sense-making and help teams naturally see how to move forward.
Douglas: I just want to jump in there real quick because I think MURAL is a great enabler and it’s a platform that can make a lot of things possible, make it a lot easier certainly, and more durable, but definitely want to give a big shout out to you and credit where credit’s due because just like any technology, a car can get us to work, but we got to get up and stay motivated and get in there and get there.
And so, just like any tool, I think it takes intention, and it takes like they know-how, and it takes the diligence. And so I just want to come back to that point you made around that pressure that you were feeling to have all the answers right. And I think that realization and being okay and being vulnerable and being brave enough to walk in, but with it being okay so not tidy everything up at the end, that’s a strong leadership shift, strong leadership move.
And I just want to say, don’t give all the credit to MURAL. I think that’s amazing that you got there. And also, it’s good modeling for the team because if they see that shift in you of like, oh, wow, you’re sending that signal. You’re giving them permission to not have everything be so tidy. And let’s explore a little bit to see what we learn and what that might open up. And when we need to tidy stuff up, we can exercise those skills. It doesn’t mean we’re unable to tidy things up. It just means that we don’t have to tidy them up every day or every moment.
Nicole: Absolutely. Yeah. I think being able to bring grace to a group of people who are fumbling through an ambiguous, uncomfortable set of spaces and help them become more comfortable with being uncomfortable is a facilitation superpower.
Douglas: I think that word grace is such a great word to describe facilitation because so often we have to like you say, go into situations where we’re fumbling, or that’s awkward or just like not great. If we knew that it was going to turn out that way this morning, we might have been tempted to call in sick, but here we are, and it’s happening, and to use your word, we’re going to deal with it with grace. I think that’s 100% the hallmark of fantastic facilitation.
So my last question here before we maybe peer into the future or wrap up here is, what is your advice to other directors, VPs, that need to explain this to senior leadership executives because the problem I see is that there’s a lot of talk of culture and the importance of culture and culture-rich strategy for breakfast and all this, but rarely do people actually realize that culture means the people and how we’re working with the people and positioning the people to do good work. And how do we convey these things and help senior leaders understand the power of facilitation and working in these ways?
Nicole: That’s a great question. I think as much as we can do to just have them experience these things. When you are in a room or in a Zoom meeting with a group of people, and you feel the space shift like you feel that collective energy, and you can sense the richness in the conversations and be able to get to these outcomes in these more effective ways and look at problems from different perspectives that you may have done in the beginning. Again, there’s certain aliveness and energy and magic that gets unearthed in that. And I think when you have people experience that, they know that something different, they can’t necessarily put their fingers quite on it, but they experience the power in that. I think that’s important to just create opportunities for senior leaders to experience these types of collaborations more and more.
Douglas: Yeah. It brings me back to this leaf around the storytelling, the narrative, and even facilitating them because as a facilitative leader if you’re doing this for your teams, is there a way to facilitate up, to offer to facilitate something at your peer group or above? Facilitate something for your boss. Facilitate a meeting that you and your peers are in. I think those are great ways to demo that to your point because they have to experience it. And the only way to experience it is either through the storytelling of what you accomplish with your team or actually doing it in front of them.
Nicole: Yeah. Absolutely.
Douglas: Fantastic. Well, that’s I think maybe a wrap for today, but I wanted to make sure to give time for you to leave our listeners with a final thought. What should they be keeping in mind as they hit the end of the podcast here and go about the rest of their workday?
Nicole: I think we’ll leave with a final thought around one of the other big takeaways that I got out of the facilitation certification experience. And that was really around the power in being deeply anchored in purpose and re-anchoring to that purpose both in more overt and subtle ways throughout the gatherings and events that you’re designing for. I knew this, you’d never have a meeting without a clear purpose and an agenda, but I just internalized this on a completely other level like digging deep and really clarifying that purpose is critical for every aspect of designing your gathering. Who you’re inviting, where you’re holding it, the activities that you build in.
But also when I’m clear on my purpose, I have such a deeper level of conviction around the uncomfortable spaces that I’m asking people to lean into and the new activities I’m asking people to try, which is critical for me because I’m new at trying so many of these things myself and it’s also just critical to be able to articulate that purpose to the people I work with, and how I’m inviting them in to get their buy-in and how I reinforce that purpose in the different ways I’m framing various points along the way. And so personally, I’m working on building this constant narration and threading of purpose into everything I’m doing as a regular part of my limited leadership and my facilitation. And that’s really helping me elevate how I’m leading different meetings and how I’m showing up.
Douglas: Incredible. Well, that’s amazing self-discovery work and great advice for everyone who’s listening because it’s hard work. And also, I’ll say this, facilitating purpose can be really difficult because it’s difficult for a lot of folks to even go there because it’s soft, it’s fuzzy, it’s super concrete all the time, right? It’s easy just to repeat the company slogan or the jargon or the team charter and not really dig deeper. And what is that core purpose, right? People don’t like to do that because it also can seem like a waste of time. It’s like, well, we already identify what this product is about, why do we need to talk about purpose? Because if they don’t experience the value of when we really unlock a deeper, deeper thread, it’s easy to discount it as like, oh, that’s hocus pocus or whatever or woo woo or whatever, right?
Nicole: Right.
Douglas: And so kudos to you on that journey. And also, it’s difficult at so many levels because you mentioned being aware of its importance and not getting deep, deep to the point where you’re like rarely digging into it, and it’s a spectrum and not only for us facilitators but also our participants. So that’s a rich, rich topic to explore. I’m not even sure that you can find the end of it. Excellent. Well, I really appreciate you joining the day, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. Hopefully, we’ll be talking again soon.
Nicole: All right. Well, thank you for having me, Douglas. It’s been really great talking with you.
Douglas: Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control The Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. And if you want more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.
