The BLISS Roundtable: Generosity & Animosity in Times of Change

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Welcome back to the show. Today, we're having a very special roundtable discussion on a topic that affects all leaders and change agents, how we navigate generosity and animosity in times of change. Change is a constant in business and life, and I think we're seeing a lot of that now, but why do some people embrace it while others resist it?
How can leaders remain self-aware, emotionally intelligent, and effective when facing resistance? To explore this, we have an incredible panel of experts joining us today. Let's go around the room and have each of you introduce yourselves and share a bit about your work in leadership and change. I also want to ask you to share why you think this conversation is important now, especially with the emotional challenges society is facing. We've got the growing impact of AI on jobs, and there's economic uncertainty, and just a broader need for human connection in times of disruption like that. So, let's start with Jose.

**Jose Leal** (1:25)
Start with me. I thought we were going to start with Lisa. She's more important. My name is Jose Leal. I've been doing this, I can't remember, but it started with Doug a few years ago, reaching out and having a conversation around. For me, I'd done six startups, and got acquired, got into corporate, did 10 years as VP and went, oh my God, I can't do this anymore. I quit the industry, I quit the job, and really just went and hid off for a little while until I could figure out what it was that I wanted to do with myself. That led me back to California, back to the Bay Area, got introduced to Doug, have no idea how, but thank God I did, because it really just changed the way that I started thinking about how we were going to deal with this. I was thinking that we needed to fix the organization and fix the way we were doing the organization.
Over the last, it's too many years to count. It's been a bunch of years. I've come to the realization that what we need to do is really rethink how we've organized society and our structures and the way we see ourselves and life. As Tullio said earlier, I'm the philosopher in the group.
And I think that we need to really re-think humanity before we can even think about how to organize organizations. And so it's how do we dig deeper? That's interesting to me. The topic is critical. Change is always happening, right? We talk about change as if it's a thing that happens periodically, right? And so how do we even recognize that change is a constant and understand that change is a part of life, not a part of the story we call our systems? And that's where I think the two fight. It's we think of change or talk about change from a story perspective, the structures, the ideologies, the concepts, and forget about the humanity and the life before it. So that's what I'm here about.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:11)
I love it. I could geek out on this for a while here. Let's go to Lisa first to introduce herself.

**Lisa M. Brazelton** (4:17)
Thank you. Thanks, Stephen. I'm Lisa Brazelton. I would consider myself to be a very passionate entrepreneur. I have about 30 years, started eight companies and that turned my journey into just absolutely loving what I do now, which is coach and consult executive leaders.
As I was saying earlier, I think that it is in the space of as a leader myself, and I'm happy to, I guess, not to be managing people anymore, because it's a very lonely place to be. It's hard to be a leader. And I would say even harder to day with all the things that, we mentioned at the very beginning of the podcast, and to take a different approach to why this conversation is important. And I think that when we can take a step back and understand how to cultivate our consciousness and start to have some awareness and understand the emotional journey that individuals are on, and as we encounter all these, the technological shifts and dynamic changes that are happening within the workplace, and maybe there's talent shortages, and just expectations of the different generations that are working together. As Jose said, change is a constant, it's fluid. And how can leaders navigate this fluidity that we call change? And I think it's through having emotional awareness, and that emotional awareness is how I define it as being aware of the emotional internal drive that happens. And I can, I call this like, how do we have emotional literacy? And once we understand how to have emotional literacy, that is where I think new leaders in this next, I'll use the word new earth, the new way of doing business is actually going to be one that brings about higher consciousness through the tools of things like intuition, different spiritual sciences, and it's about time we have the conversation.