Shandel Sutherland 00:03
Welcome to lead for clarity where we help you, your organization and your team get to their next level with clarity and focus. We are back for I don't know what season we're in Melanie, I feel like it's Season Four does that sound right? Season Five,
Shandel Sutherland 00:21
oh, my goodness, well, it's fall, fall is in the air, I love fall. And I love the smells. I love hiking, I just, I'm into it.
Melanie Montgomery 00:29
I love it, too. It's just pretty, and you still have a little bit of sunshine, but you get some storms, I
Shandel Sutherland 00:35
love the heat during the day, and then you're freezing at night. It's great. So we are kicking off our season. And this is pretty exciting for me, because we're going to be talking and hopefully bringing some people in to share their experiences on the process of sustainable growth.
Melanie Montgomery 00:52
I love this framework. And it really helps us to consciously think through how we grow. And to make sure that we're growing in the right direction, that we don't lose focus that we don't lose momentum that we don't become stagnant.
Shandel Sutherland 01:07
Yeah, and there's, we basically say, when we introduce this process, what we call it is that there's two ways a company can grow, they can grow in a healthy way that leads to sustainable growth, or they can grow in an unhealthy way. That is going to be quick, it's going to be you know, maybe they get quick results, but the sharp roll of glass and all sorts of stuff, and that they leave in their wake. And there really is no long term, goodness to that, or long term results. We call the unhealthy cycle the cycle of misery, because that's exactly what it feels like, doesn't it? Yeah, definitely.
Melanie Montgomery 01:45
When I recently was given this framework to a team, they were seeing parts of the unhealthy cycle in their parenting. And it was like light bulbs all throughout the room of I could be doing things differently to help my child grow in a way that suits them versus how I want them to be
Shandel Sutherland 02:07
Melanie, You're freaking me out. Because just an hour ago, I had a very similar conversation with a mom, and I was talking to her about, hey, you know, delegation, in the workplace is like parenting, like you never want to do for your kids what they can do for themselves. She goes, Yes, but I love doing things. I love treating my kids like my little girl like a baby so that, you know, because it makes me feel good. Like I'm helping her as a mom. And I was like, oh, gosh, I know how that feels, you know, and I said, but we got to do what's best for the kid. And so it's funny that you and I bowl, in this business, executive coaching training, have this experience.
Melanie Montgomery 02:44
That's one reason I love leadership development, it's really all about making you the best version of yourself. And then you're able to grow in all aspects of your life to be a better parent, a better friend, a better spouse, all of those things. And it's so life giving to be able to help people through these processes, and really figure out where they may be struggling where, where they may be stuck.
Shandel Sutherland 03:05
I love this process. And we've been using it at Shandel Group for almost 20 years to and I remember I was at a Starbucks and Madison Park, Seattle, Washington. When this came to me, I was doing it for an IF for spiritual reasons, I was teaching a bunch of ladies about our spiritual growth, how we do that, and healthy and unhealthy ways. And then I realized, oh my gosh, it's exactly what we do in business. And just like we're talking about Melanie, it's parenting, it's relationships. And it's basically the six stages that you can anticipate going through, anytime you're going to grow. And when I look at it, it helps me is kind of looking like a spiral staircase. So let's just say one of the walls is red. And then you go through a blue wall as you're kind of moving around the staircase. Well, every time you get to the red, you think, oh my gosh, I'm back here again. And it can be so depressing. But when I explain people, oh, no, you have just gone up another level, there's the red wall again, like it's really it can be encouraging to people versus discouraging. And here's the reason why the entry point of any growth cycle is pain. You know, that could be an opportunity. That could be a challenge. Like it doesn't have to be negative, but there is a pain point, Melanie, you and I know for sure that we definitely get called in the pain point area. That's kind of where we enter into it. And as a really good leader. And as we're going to teach you, you will immediately go into the connect phase you got to connect to yourself, your values, you got to connect to your team, what people do and the unhealthy cycle is they get to that pain point we call off ramping the off ramp right over into the cycle of misery. And that leads to numbing the pain. And so this should already be resonating with a whole lot of people. Right, Nappanee?
Melanie Montgomery 04:54
Yes, definitely.
Shandel Sutherland 04:55
So there's so ways that before we get into the six stages is that of the process? You can't even get around that cycle until you have some essential parts of it? Do you want to pop in and share? But a little bit about that?
Melanie Montgomery 05:10
Yeah. So I think one key here is that when we're in the healthy cycle of growth, everything is centered around our values. And really understanding what those are and what we're here for, whether it be as an individual, a team, and organization, what really is important to us and focusing on that, during that pain point. A lot of teams come to us and they haven't quite figured out what their values are. Or maybe they have organizational values, but they don't really know them that can be a key and trying to discern, what is the pain? What is the struggle and really digging into well? What are those values that as we move into that connect phase and start to give tools to help with these different pain points, they're focused on those values. One thing that we do is we off ramp into the unhealthy cycle when we're centered around something else. And we say we're centered around a victor. So it's really about me, or winning or being right, or our ego, whatever that looks like, if I'm looking at my pain in terms of I want to be right, I want to have all the right answers, or I want to be better than everybody else, then we're going to be in that unhealthy cycle. And we're not really going to be able to dig deep and be vulnerable to work through some of these tools. And Shandel, I'll make sure to put a PDF of this in the show notes that everyone can see what we're talking through as we're talking through it.
Shandel Sutherland 06:36
Awesome. And why don't we just go ahead and put it up on our screen to for those who are listening on YouTube, they could just follow along with us. What I love about this is the visual love, it helps us see like, Oh, I definitely have off ramp and we'll talk about off ramping up in a future series. Yeah, Melanie is so amazing that most pain points come because people either don't know their values or their lives not living by them. And I know for myself, every issue I have in my life will come back to me compromising one of my values. I mean, usually I don't know that I am like, health is one of my major values, like maybe not my top five, probably six. And I'm not honoring that right now. And all of my issues are kind of around that. Like I'm just kind of going in. I don't know, maybe that's way down the list right now. And the cool part is that when we realize that when we look at that Victor, I just want to be in charge in my own life. Like I don't want health to ruin me right now. And I'm kind of rebelling against my own values, if that makes sense. And so what I know now is I look at the chart, and we really talk about I'm like, Okay, I'm done, numbing my pain, and I need to get back to my value because that pain is telling me something's not right. I mean, pain is a wonderful gift when it's utilized. Because it tells us there's something not right. As I look at that thing, I go, Okay, I need to connect, what am I connecting back to, I'm connecting back to, you know, health really is important to me, and I know what I need to eat, I know how I need to sleep, I know how I need to work out and I need to stop pleasing other people and do it. This there, how all these tools kind of fit together, do anything to add there.
Melanie Montgomery 08:15
Yeah, I can definitely relate to on that, if I'm struggling, I have to go back to am I really live in my values and focusing on what's important to me, I'm putting my time there. And we're gonna get to this part in a little while and you go through the cycle a lot over and over and over. And depending on the different components of your life, you could be in the cycle and many different aspects. One thing I've noticed, as I've been really focusing on growing professionally, and personally, I've realized that I've hit the pain point I've gone through this cycle to really get to a healthy place. And then once I'm getting into the more successful stages where I'm really seeing that profit, I start to uncover a new pain point that I didn't know is there, then I have to go back into the cycle to start over with this new thing. And I think in the past sometimes what I would do is when I would find a pain point, instead of looking inward and saying let's be vulnerable Melanie, let's really look at how we can grow I would want to just say oh well I don't have that problem or put up a wall because it's hard to do that work it's hard to look inward and say I can grow I can be better that's one easy way I think we often is that we recognize something in ourselves and we're not ready maybe to take that step to fix this so we lean into that armor which leans into that Victor of I don't feel like I'm in a place where I can really address this I'm just gonna close off and that can really get us into that unhealthy cycle as well. And looking back I could see where I definitely put up armor instead of saying no, we're gonna face this head on.
Shandel Sutherland 09:50
Yeah, I love the way you said that to the you know, we have this Victor in the middle of the unhealthy cycle because it's such a antithesis of living by your values you just don't know I just don't want to lose the war, I'm tired of losing the war, I'm just gonna numb out. So I stay in charge, you know. And really, that is not leadership. Leadership is taking a group of people around a vision mission value statement that you believe in, and we all off ramp. And I think that's the hope of this sustainable cycle of growth is so we know how to get back to being healthy, versus the unhealthy where we just keep trudging through the muck and the pain. Mm hmm. Yeah. So let me just quickly for those who are listening, and again, we will offer that PDF, but the six stages are this, you enter into this process, because you have a pain point. And then you go into connection, like where you really connect back to your values, you have purposely connecting with your team, you're purposely connecting with whoever it is, whatever it is. And then you go through another stage called planting, how we designed it Shandel Group, this cycle, is it every other stage is kind of hard. And then the other ones are easier and kind of fun. It's not fun to be in pain. So what we want is your brain to now say, oh, okay, I see I'm in pain, I needed to kick right over into connecting. And we'll give you tools to do that as we go through this season. All of a sudden, life is a little hard, because you're in the planning phase. And that's where you're in a lot of unknown. You don't know it is the hard work, wouldn't you say? Melanie, this is one of the hardest phases yet a lot of do a lot of hard work.
Melanie Montgomery 11:36
When we're going through change. It's hard. It's scary. We don't know what's happening. But I feel like there's such a sense of satisfaction in the stage, because you see all your hard work really turning something up.
Shandel Sutherland 11:47
Yes, we call that progress. But that next stage is happening. And the problem is like people don't celebrate. So we need to learn in the progress stage, which is another good one, that you do got to do two things, you got to concentrate on these two things. One, you have to make sure that you're celebrating milestones. Because isn't that is just such a thing. I see leaders and myself not DO WE WANT like, I'm not done. So we just keep pushing and pushing and pushing. So the progress phase, it forces us to celebrate milestones. And I think Melanie, you're really good at setting milestones. I really appreciated that about you. Do you want to talk a little bit about in the goal setting, setting those milestones up? Yeah, definitely.
Melanie Montgomery 12:30
So when we start goal setting, one thing I like to do is start to look at how do we make a goal on a smaller scale versus this huge scale? How do we set something where we can see the progress consistently so that we can celebrate that progress? And in my coaching program, what I do is I every week, talk through what were your wins, what did you do? And how can we celebrate those, a lot of times when we're working on a goal, we don't see that these little steps that we're taking are worth celebration, as much as achieving that final goal. I really learned this as I was getting into running, I started realizing that if I would celebrate my progress every quarter of a mile instead of every mile or hitting that final 5k, or 10k, or whatever it was, I wouldn't be able to get excited every single quarter of a mile, which then gave me endorphins, which then excited me to keep going both physiologically and then mentally I was able to get excited and feel good about what I was doing. If you wait until the end, then you don't have that excitement, you don't have that thing that's pushing you. Now I apply that to business where we're gonna keep celebrating every little thing. And if I have a client that says, hey, I did something wrong, but I caught myself right after I'm gonna celebrate that because a month ago, you probably wouldn't even recognize that that didn't fit your values, we have to be celebrating every step along the way.
Shandel Sutherland 13:54
Unless so good. Well, well said. I think the other thing that happens in progress is that we think sometimes we've arrived, you know, and so, like lay out, we all go okay, this is great, which then the next stage, which is pruning, which is another hard one is going to disappoint you because pruning comes along and again, is one of the harder stages but it's so good because it takes out the floss it makes you realize what you have and you pare down and you get rid of stuff that doesn't serve you anymore. And I think that is one of the greatest honors of growth is that you are going to find things that absolutely just don't work for you anymore. It's kind of like your closet. Like when I when people start getting healthy and it doesn't mean no it doesn't even mean they lost weight or gained weight or anything. It's just when they start getting healthy they want to clean their closet out because no longer do I need those things. They don't define me anymore. That's one of the funniest thing that ever I think is so great when I hear a client start clean up their claws and like all right, sounds like we're making some real changes. That's a steal A example of really what's happening in the pruning phase, I really look forward to taking you listeners through that stage. The last one is the you have arrived one, but it's only for the moment. The profit, we say, you know, what, hey, business runs, because you are profitable, you know, you put more in than what you got, there is a profit for it. And so that you can do more business as the same thing here. Like, you should be able to see that you were profitable, and that that pain that you went through had a purpose, and a meaning. And reason that we really want this acknowledge is so one, you realize you have reached your goal. Because a lot of us, I would be guilty of this, we don't even stop to celebrate the goal, we don't even realize because we got a new goal that we're going after. And the second thing is sometimes we don't celebrate really big wins, because we're so fearful that the other shoe is gonna drop. And then we're on this mountain top, and we're gonna go tumbling down. And so now we just go hack life is great. I love this thing. I love the profitable, yay. And we're going to have another pain point. And when it comes, it's going to be that next stage where we get we go to the next level. So yeah, who like it changes? And I think, honestly, Melanie, in the almost two decades that I've been playing around with this model, that one probably means the most to me personally, because I think before anything that was good happening to me, I was just waiting for it to go out again. And now I'm like, Oh, sure, yeah, heck yeah, I'm not, I'm not dead yet. So there's going to be the next pain point. And so I'm just going to sit here on the mountaintop and enjoy it, even if it lasts for a day.
Melanie Montgomery 16:45
So I think it's important to also pointing out that profit is not always monetary, it shows up in a lot of different ways. So it often is monetary, when I look at an organization, and it can be maybe some change that we want, it is now set in our culture. And that's how our organization functions. Or we have good relationships, we have a high functioning team, you know, that profit stage can really be seen in so many different ways, including actual monetary profit. Yeah, we're
Shandel Sutherland 17:15
gonna spend a whole season going deep diving in, and I, I just can't wait to get people's questions on this, because it's going to be interesting to hear what those questions I can already anticipate a few after doing this for a few decades.
Melanie Montgomery 17:28
Yeah, I love it. And I'm really excited for the season to talk through how to apply this growth process to all aspects of your life and how to really get the most out of what you want to accomplish and get to where you want to go in a positive wing. keep that momentum going.
Shandel Sutherland 17:45
I love it. I love it. Well, let's land this plane. And I think what I'm going to tell listeners is Melanie is I'm gonna do a shameless plug for your 12, your 12 session coaching program perfect. Yeah, and people are being so touched by that I know, Scott, my husband went through, it really helped him with so many tools. And this is the time between now and the end of the year we're at we're at the end, it's September, all the kids are back to school, we're in the fall, we've got another quarter, and it's the holidays. And so this is the time, this is a time to invest in yourself is the best time to invest in your leaders and potential leaders that are coming your way now is the time to get them trained. So there's my plug for you, Melanie, because I just seen the huge transformation and people, do you have anything to tell our listeners as we leave the healthy cycle of growth? The process?
Melanie Montgomery 18:42
Yeah, I think just a reminder that growth, healthy growth is uncomfortable. And we have to remember that and we have to really push ourselves into that discomfort. Because when we don't, and then we start to do those numbing devices. That's when we end up in the unhealthy cycle. And we're not really growing in a positive way. So just a reminder that if you're feeling uncomfortable with something that you're working on, whether it be with yourself or your team or your organization, lean into that discomfort because you're going to be very happy that you did when you get on the other side of that discomfort. I love it.
Shandel Sutherland 19:17
I love it. All right, you all you can find us at Shandelgroup.com We'll have the PDF link in the show notes. And until we meet again, be the best you can be today.
