Amy Sandler: Chief Content Officer - Radical Candor, LLC

An enlightening conversation with Amy Sandler: professional speaker, executive coach, and corporate mindfulness trainer. Amy was one of the first 30 people chosen by Google in 2007 to deliver the mindfulness based emotional intelligence training program Search Inside Yourself. She is currently serving as chief content officer and coach at Radical Candor. 

An early adopter of mindfulness and spiritual development in executive coaching, Amy has since built a career from sharing these practices. In this episode of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee, she explains how important it is to catch what a purely rational approach to coaching would otherwise miss.

Of course, encouraging CEOs to open their hearts and invest time and energy on spiritual development can be a challenge. During their discussion, Amy talks about how she meets these people where they are, often using data and science to justify more spiritually-inclined activities.

One of the topics Amy discusses with Coaching.com CEO Alex Pascal is her work with Radical Candor, which basically asks “how can I succeed at work without being a jerk?”. According to Amy, it’s all about finding the right balance between caring for people and challenging them. 

Care and challenge may look different to different people, though. Talking through the Radical Candor framework, Amy shares examples of how obnoxious aggression, manipulative sincerity, and ruinous empathy show up at work.

Relating these ideas to the coaching industry, Amy and Alex talk about the paradox that coaches face: coaches have to be liked to keep clients; however, being liked isn’t always the same as being effective and achieving results. 

To learn more about how Amy herself is working to overcome people-pleasing and perfectionism through her own personal spiritual curriculum, listen to the full episode.

Transcript

Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee - Amy Sandler

(interview blurb)

Amy: Coaching is really I think foundational to each of them. How can we help people grow? How can we give the kind of guidance that supports where they’re doing well, where they need to be improved, how can we help them take a step in the direction of their dreams? And how can we coach the individual so that we’re actually working together, amplifying each other’s strengths so almost co-coaching each other as team members?

(intro)

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of coaching.com and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is a professional speaker, corporate mindfulness trainer, and executive coach, currently serving as Chief Content Officer and coach at Radical Candor. She’s a Harvard MBA, certified breath work meditation teacher, six-time firewalker, and certified teacher of the Search Inside Yourself program. Please welcome Amy Sandler.

(Interview)

Alex: Hi, Amy.

Amy: Hey, Alex. So excited to be with you today.

Alex: I’ve been looking forward to our conversation. I think we’re going to have a lot of fun. So, let’s start where we always start on Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee, which is really the question of what are we drinking today, Amy?

Amy: What are we drinking today? Well, I will give you — first of all, this is my morning beverage of choice. This is not meant to be a product placement, I’m just being authentic to my venti Pike coffee from Starbucks. If people are just listening, I was just holding up a very large coffee cup. 

Alex: Very large.

Amy: But I do transfer it into — I feel like a product placement person, into my Yeti just to preserve the heat. I have found I really like a hot cup of coffee, it seems, so both hot and rather large seems to be my preference in caffeine beverages. What about you, Alex?

Alex: That’s awesome, yeah. Starbucks is the new sponsor of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee.

Amy: This is brought to you by Starbucks and Yeti. And, by the way, I should say it’s a venti — I used to be known as grande Pike, like I have found that I always live very near a coffee place so they start to know me but my name did change a few years ago from grande to venti.

Alex: Well, it happens. 

Amy: It happens. 

Alex: I never really got the Starbucks sizes. I’m a Blue Bottle Coffee kind of guy. Yeah, I love Blue Bottle but I have an espresso machine too that I stole from the office. When we decided we’re going to go fully remote, I took the espresso machine with me. It’s property of coaching.com but it’s sitting there in my counter. So I actually had a coffee earlier today and I can’t have more than two so what I’m doing is I have this dandelion powder that is just delicious. It looks like coffee, and it tastes like coffee. So I added a little bit of cold brew and then hot water so it’s a dandelion Americano with a splash of cold brew so it is — I’m sorry, I couldn’t run and go to Starbucks. That was my plan. I wanted to match you —

Amy: No. Well, now I want to go get some dandelion powder and try it out. I think that’s — I’m very excited. We’ll have to share recipes at the end of this.

Alex: We have to, so we’ll put that in the resources for the podcast too. It’s Dandy Blend, which potentially a new sponsor for the podcast, now that we have —

Amy: Just a few minutes, we’ve already got multiple sponsorships so this is a very fortuitous connection.

Alex: It’s unbelievable, we’re already off to a great start. Love it. Well, it’s so great to have you here. We have so many things to talk about. So let’s start where — we typically start after talking about coffee or drinks and, believe it or not, we’ve had people choose wine and beer. Usually, it’s in the morning for me so I appreciate when it’s something like non-alcoholic, but, hey, you gotta go. So, let’s start with your journey into coaching. When did it start? Do you remember the first time you heard about coaching? How did you decide to start doing coaching yourself? Let’s start there.

Amy: Yeah. It sounds great, and even just the word “coaching” I think is interesting to unpack because there’s sort of more formal coaching training and then there’s this idea even in what I’m doing currently, Radical Candor, where kind of manager as coach and taking on coaching attributes. So, in terms of my own journey into becoming a coach, my current role is actually lead coach. I had been working in a variety of different learning organizations, more in marketing and communications, and when I went to business school, I graduated from business school about 25 years ago, there really wasn’t sort of this world of coaching, this world of emotional intelligence and mindfulness. I was kind of an outlier in that way. And so I was really having almost two lives in parallel process, one where I was following my career and the other where I was pursuing a lot of separate personal development, spiritual development, leadership development, and so I would be in organizations like I was at UCLA, I ran communications there, I was in a few different other education organizations, one that was more therapeutic for teenagers, and then when I started working at YPO, which was at this point about 15, 16 years ago, Young Presidents Organization, as you’re very familiar with.

Alex: I’m a member. I love it. It’s a great organization, yes.

Amy: So, this CEO peer networking organization, my role was in, again, marketing communications, that had been my background, but being in an organization that was really committed to lifelong learning to coaching, I had access to a lot of the opportunities that we were sharing with members, teaching members, such as, for example, forum, this very small peer-led groups of inquiry and kind of member-to-member coaching in some respects, and so I was aware that was really my interest, that had been my interest, and so even though my sort of day job was really around the marketing communications, I continued to pursue coaching. I did a variety of different trainings, especially around mindfulness, emotional intelligence. In 2014, I was selected to be one of the first 30 people to teach the Search Inside Yourself program from Google. This was really one of the first mindfulness-based emotional intelligence leadership training programs of its kind, and so that really started my career in terms of sharing these practices, becoming my own coach. From YPO, I went on to Vistage, very similar organization, we talked about San Diego, that was how I got to San Diego, and Vistage, as another executive coaching organization, really launched me into doing my own coaching and speaking. So, from there, at this point, we’re in 2015, 2016, I was speaking and I was coaching full time. So, at this point, it’s been about eight years sort of on my own or now with Radical Candor and then the lead up had been probably about five, ten years as sort of a ramp into the coaching world before then.

Alex: Thank you for sharing that. It’s so interesting people’s stories into the foray of coaching, we’re in that stage in the profession, the industry where it’s still a nascent industry so there’s no standardized path to coaching. so it is always nice to hear people’s stories. In your current role, I know you’re all about Radical Candor and it has a great ring to it and would like to unpack that. What does it mean, what does it stand for, and how is it applicable to coaches?

Amy: Yeah, it’s a great question. Radical Candor is an executive education training company based on a book by Kim Scott. Kim and I actually went to Harvard business school together. We didn’t know each other at the time. We actually met back when I was at YPO, probably like 15 years ago and that was actually how we were connecting each other at the time. We were bringing in this idea of kind of forum circles into the Lean In organization and bringing those sort of coaching circles and so that was one area that we connected. Kim wrote the book at this point now four or five years ago, Radical Candor, and it’s really this simple idea which is how can I succeed at work without being a jerk, basically. We tend to think we either at work have to care about people and be really caring on one side or we have to be challenging and we can’t do both. And so the radical idea here is that we can both care and challenge the people that we work with. For me, what’s most exciting about radical candor is it’s about building relationships, one-on-one relationships with the people that we work with, through being kind and clear. And I feel like it really is a coaching model. So when we think about, for example, three parts of what a manager does, one is to create kind of a culture of guidance, a culture of feedback, so, really, the spirit of guidance, which we prefer the word “guidance” to “feedback” because it does have more of a coaching, doing this to be helpful, but there’s also how can I help my team members grow to their fullest potential. So, in the book, we talk a lot about career conversations. There’s a book by a Russ Laraway who coined the term “career conversations,” if people are interested in that as well. And how can we get stuff done together? How can we effectively collaborate? So those are really the three kind of jobs or responsibilities of a manager, and you look at each of these and coaching is really I think foundational to each of them. How can we help people grow? How can we give the kind of guidance that supports where they’re doing well, where they need to be improved, how can we help them take a step in the direction of their dreams? And how can we coach the individual so that we’re actually working together, amplifying each other’s strengths so almost co-coaching each other as team members?

Alex: That’s wonderful and you took me back to my CCL days, the Center for Creative Leadership, and the model that I use for my dissertation, which was looking at the impact of managerial coaching behaviors and manager as coach on employee engagement. Still too traumatized to talk too much about my dissertation in a couple of years but the trauma is real, but then people get to call me doctor, which makes me very uncomfortable sometimes, it’s like I’m just a dude, I’m just a YPO member entrepreneur, but sometimes I forget I have a PhD. But the trauma will probably go away in a few years. So, I became intimately involved with these RACSR model at CCL. So RACSR stands for relationship, assessment, challenge, support, and results. So this idea that coaching to be effective needs to have the right combination of forming the relationship, doing an assessment, understanding where the client is, but really balancing the challenge and support variables is very important. And as you were talking about radical candor, what sticks out to me is that balance between being kind of task oriented and challenging people but doing it in the frame that is collegial and it’s relationship driven and if you find that right balance, then you can really be effective. So, to me, the way you described radical candor just resonates a lot with the way I grew up in the profession, thinking about the balance of challenge and support. And that is, I think, an area that has so much to be explored within coaching because, in my experience, and I know, obviously, so many coaches and I have a lot of intimate conversations with coaches, whether it’s the podcast or whether it’s over wine at dinner, people tend to be either super challenging and sometimes not as supportive or they tend to be super supportive and become really good friends with their clients and their clients love them but they’re not necessarily challenging. And that balance between challenge and support, to me, is one of the most important aspects of coaching that needs to be balanced. And, to me, when I think about someone being an incredible professional in coaching, they tend to have a really good sense of when to challenge, how to challenge, but also support and tie it all together in a way that flows, because we tend to more lean into one or the other and, sometimes, it’s a little awkward when we get out of that space so I think what you were talking about really is about creating the foundation so that you can move between those in a way that is effective, whether it’s a manager or a coach.

Amy: Yeah. So well said. I love hearing your reflections from the Center for Creative Leadership and acknowledging the accomplishment of the dissertation as well as the unraveling of all of the stress with that. What you’re describing is spot on to how we teach radical candor. So one of the things that Kim Scott did that I thought was brilliant was when you look at radical candor, this very simple idea, care personally, challenge directly, what you’re talking about, sort of challenge and support, what makes it radical is that it’s so rare, because we tend to make a mistake in one direction or the other and so if you can imagine I’m sort of painting an imaginary two by two, Kim worked at McKinsey and we both went to business school so if you have any problem, just put it into a two by two matrix so that’s like the message. So if anyone doesn’t have an MBA who’s listening to it, consider yourself a newly minted MBA, just throw the problem into a two by two matrix and on one side, you’ve got on one axis, care personally, on the other axis, challenge directly, and what’s really helpful is to think about what happens when you’re not acting in these ways. This happens all the time. So we’re challenging and we’re not caring, we call that obnoxious aggression. This is sort of the bottom right quadrant so the high challenge, low care. And what happens, we start going through these mistakes that we make when we’re not both caring and challenging and we tend to think, “Oh, this person’s a real jerk,” and, in fact, Kim was going to call this the asshole quadrant but she didn’t for probably two important reasons. One is we all make these mistakes. The point of this framework, at least when it comes to conversations, guide your conversations to a better place. If you realize I’m going so far out on the challenge, I need to move up more on the care. But also, we don’t want to use this framework as sort of a Myers Briggs Personality Test, putting people into boxes, because these are behaviors that we all can change and so what I like about this framework, it’s very action oriented, it’s very — you realize, like, “Oh, gosh, I’m going too far out on the challenge, I need to move up on the care,” and so one of the things we’ll do in our workshops is kind of share stories when I’ve acted like a jerk and I wrote that really obnoxious email and I might have CC’d the chairman of the board and all of this and you realize what was it that made that so obnoxious? Why didn’t I just go directly, one on one to that person? So one example of obnoxious behavior is public criticism, rather than going sort of one on one to that person. And then often, after we’ve acted like a jerk, rather than moving up on care personally, we move over into what we call manipulative insincerity, which is sort of the most toxic of all workplaces. By the way, if you’re watching a TV show over the weekend, these are like the shows we love to hate. It’s like the office backstabbing and the gossip. But this is really — and, as a coach, and folks listening, this is really the most painful parts of work where we are not caring and we are not challenging. And for me, I had an example where I had been working on this technology project for a really long time. I’ve been doing all this research and I had been trying to share all this research and I finally moved off of that project and was doing something different so a new project owner came on board and said, “The reason why this project didn’t work was because there was no research.” Well, I’m sitting there, I knew there had been research, I just spent years, speaking of trauma, years doing it, years trying to explain it, and rather than caring, and rather than challenging, I just was like, “Good luck with that, sounds good.” And I share that story because I know the kind of person I want to be and I know how I want to show up. And, for me, that was a real self-coaching look in the mirror of why am I acting in a way that’s not aligned with my values? And so often, in groups, we’ll talk about why do we act this way, like why don’t we say that thing, why do we talk about people and not to people, and, often, it’s things like fear of conflict but there can be — maybe there’s a lack of safety, you feel like nothing’s going to change, you’re just burnt out, and so I think having these names in these quadrants of these mistakes gives us permission to kind of look at what’s underneath it, why are we not saying the thing, why are we not caring, why are we acting one way or another, and then I can pause or I can share sort of the final mistake that we make, which is the mistake that I certainly make the most, we see the most, ruinous empathy, high care, what you would say support, support, support, and we’re not challenging. And, for me, this is really the impetus of someone who’s a very high care person, looking at the cost where there was someone who was a great performer but every so often would blow up, I didn’t know why this was happening, and this was a really important relationship. I considered it, like you said, with your coaching clients, people that have coaching clients that are good friends, I considered this person a friend and I was so afraid to hurt this person’s feelings that I didn’t say the thing until, finally, it all blew up and my boss said, “If you don’t say it, this person is out,” and so I now had to say it months and months after and they never really forgave me for that and understandably so. And so, for me, it was this idea of if you really want to be this kind person, often, the kindest thing, in the Brené Brown spirit, clear is kind, and we talk a lot about being kind and clear. I needed to tell that person. And the last thing I’ll say about that story, again, why so much self-awareness is needed with radical candor is because part of me didn’t want to tell that person because I didn’t want to hurt their feelings, but there was another part of me that would be more that manipulative insincerity. I didn’t want to be like the bad guy. I didn’t want to deal with this other person’s potential emotion. I didn’t want to deal with the conflict. And so I think part of what’s really instructive about a very sort of seemingly obvious simple framework is that it really gives us sort of a lens into all of these behaviors and sort of the fears underneath it.

Alex: Absolutely. Thank you. So many things to unpack and frameworks are powerful. I mean, you can go and spend $250,000 to learn how to use frameworks in an MBA, but we all use them and coaches are well equipped, not to dish MBAs, my dream was to get a Harvard MBA when I was a teen and then life took me in a different direction.

Amy: I will be the first one to diss an MBA, went to film school and became a meditation teacher. And I’m very grateful. But, yeah.

Alex: But I love that because it gives you a foundation of a way of thinking and then you can go and not do the typical Harvard MBA thing too and I think actually those programs with creativity post program lead to amazing results and I think you get groomed, through your Harvard MBA, you’re supposed to go on a specific set of paths, so go into investment banking or go work in a consultancy but, sometimes, you do that and you burn out or you don’t even do that and then you leverage that understanding of frameworks and models from an MBA to do really cool, creative thing. So I think it’s part of the process. Isn’t that what they sell when you go into the MBA program because they’re producing people to think in a certain way for industries that need those people, but if you do your own thing after, I’ve always found that very powerful. One of the things that you said that struck a chord with me was really aligning ourselves with our values. The world is very messy and we need to be comfortable with sometimes seeing ourselves in our behavior distancing from the way we want to come across, the way we want to be, and there’s this discomfort of the way we see ourselves and the way we want to be and the way life drags us in different directions, where sometimes there’s a misalignment of values, and I think it’s just a fascinating topic. I don’t think there’s anyone that can always stick to their values. In fact, it seems disingenuous to stick to your values in certain situations and what is actually human is to be able to reflect back and say, “Wow, the way that whole thing unfolded does not align with my values. How do I learn from that? What is this uncomfortable experience that I have by looking at myself acting in a way that doesn’t align? Who am I, the person that is feeling off about the misalignment, the person that acted in the misaligned way?” I mean, it is a really nuanced, complicated issue, don’t you think?

Amy: I really love that. One of the things that I’ve been exploring, I’ve been wanting to write my own book, I’ve been teaching Search Inside Yourself, Radical Candor, and really trying to put together what I’ve learned over decades and one of the biggest ahas for me and things that I want to really share with people is exactly what you were just talking about and really actually loving all of those parts of ourselves, so not just the part of me that’s caring and challenging and living fully aligned with my best self but really also honoring that part of me that felt scared and didn’t want to say the thing because maybe I was worried that someone was going to yell at me or someone wasn’t going to like me. I mean, sort of underneath that are these very sort of human fears and wanting a sense of — these very core human needs, we want to belong, and so maybe people are gossips because that’s how they’re bonding with people. It might not be the best way to do it but it reveals what you value. I value being part of this community, I value being safe and enough and all of those things. So I think if we can speak about those parts of ourselves that are a little more embarrassing. For me, I am trying as a recovering perfectionist to talk about the mistakes. When you go to Harvard and Harvard Business School, for me, the biggest kind of work I’ve had to do was let go of that as my identity and be okay messing up and not being sort of this idea of what success or achievement was. And, luckily, I’ve been doing it for decades now because there weren’t the kinds of jobs that I wanted. But it’s really a practice and so I think for anyone who’s got that sort of overachieving, people pleasing, perfectionist, sort of wanting to do your best, learning to love those parts of yourself that are kind of like, “Ugh, that’s embarrassing,” I think that’s really where the meat is, I think in all of this.

Alex: It sounds to me like you’ve perfected the art of getting over being a perfectionist. 

Amy: Well, I think that’s a real trip. I’m not going to agree to that. I will say it is a work and a play in progress. I think play is a big part of it. But, for me, that really is the ongoing — I mean, we just did a podcast yesterday talking about layoffs and sort of looking at shame and sort of the emotion and stigma and how much we identify with our jobs and our roles and I was thinking even like I’m a Starbucks person, I’m a Blue Bottle person, just the way in which as humans we tend to do that, and what I was talking about was I was laid off at one time and that was just such a huge blow and I think there were things around financial concerns and there were things around sort of social network and belonging and probably some sense of betrayal but, most of all, was the identity and I had to go show up, I was a mentor in an organization and I think people who are coaches and you see yourselves as you’ve achieved some level and now I had to show up at this mentor training without the, “I’m Amy and I’m X, Y, Z.” It was like all of the stuff that we do as coaches to train to show up as sort of our full selves and all of it and I really had to put that into practice and so I do think it’s a practice, especially in a world where we are lauded and applauded for all of those additional maybe letters after our name or dollars in our bank account and all of that. That’s a continual work in progress.

Alex: Absolutely. I was just thinking about how hard it is when you lose your identity, whether it is work or status and then you have to just be — it’s almost like you’re naked as you’re there and it’s always better to be the naked king, I guess, but sometimes, although apparently not. I’ve been hearing that a lot lately, the naked king. It must be something about kind of where we are in human history and the nature of power or maybe the fact that been watching too many Netflix business documentaries when I’m on the elliptical at the gym. It turns out they have Netflix on the cardio equipment at my gym so I’ve just been watching a lot of business shows so I watched the one about Bernie Madoff and then I watched the one about the Nissan CEO, Carlos Ghosn, I think you pronounce it, so I’ve been hearing a lot about the naked king, but when I think about identity, the way I relate to what you were saying is really — it really struck a chord with me when you were talking about going to this group and you used to be the coach and now you’re there and you need some support. Sometimes in life, you’re up, sometimes you’re down, and how do you connect that with your identity, how do you go away from those feelings of shame or remorse, those are very strong feelings and, as coaches, I think we get to experience that through our clients very often. And bringing it back to that balance between challenge and support, I think we need to get really good at being super supportive and we really need to get good at being very challenging and finding that cadence of being able to combine both. And, again, to me, it’s I think one of the most challenging things and talking to a lot of friends that run coaching practices in large organizations, one of the things that I hear about a lot is a lot of coaches just tend to look for satisfaction in their clients. So they want to make sure the clients are satisfied with them, that they like them, and then there’s this fabric of the relationship that is based on being liked because, “Hey, it’s survival. If they liked me, they’re going to want work with me.” But sometimes, it’s better as a coach to be known as being an effective coach and it’s not always going to be feelings of rainbows and butterflies and I think that is one of the challenges of the profession today. As we start really understanding how to measure coaching impact and understand which coaches lead to better outcomes, I think this balance between chance and support becomes integral. We are getting a lot more data points from coaching engagements with the use of technology so I think, for coaches, it will be a challenge in the future that the coaches that seek more of the satisfaction scores, it’s like, “I love working with my coach,” but are you effective? If you focus on that, I think over time, you will be exposed as a coach that doesn’t necessarily lead to better outcomes and that is, I think, an exciting, promising component of where the field is going but also could lead to that naked king moment where it’s like, “Oh, I’m such a great coach,” well, it turns out that you are living in your own world and people love working with you because you don’t challenge them. But there’s other coaches that balance that better and lead to better outcomes and you can see it in the data. So, to me, that’s kind of where the coaching profession is today. We’re combining advanced data analytic capabilities with these ultimately soft skills that we experience as humans and now we have a way to track that and to understand how that impacts coaching impact. To me, it’s fascinating and it’s also scary at the same time. Does that resonate with you, Amy?

Amy: Oh, yeah, it totally resonates. I think when you look at, again, from a radical candor perspective, care personally, challenge directly, one of the things we say is that radical candor is measured not at the speaker’s mouth but at the listener’s ears. So, in other words, I might have thought I was being kind and clear, how did it land for you? Maybe you thought I was being a jerk. Maybe the challenge wasn’t clear. Also it takes two to tango. It takes two to have a radically candid conversation and one of the things that we like to do to start any relationship, especially if we have some power over that person, especially for a manager, we lay the power down by starting by soliciting feedback, by getting criticism, “What can I do to be a better thought partner for you?” “What’s one thing you wish I’d done differently to make your job easier,” etc. So we do it in the workplace but a lot of these questions are really coaching questions and so we start by getting criticism, we move on to specific and sincere praise and then we get to criticism and the point of this is so that we are starting to build this relationship, kind of the deposits in the relationship bank, so that when we are giving them our challenging guidance, even though it might sting in the moment, people realize we are doing this from a place of being helpful, of helping you grow, and one of the things we’ll often do is I’ll share a story about a time when I received radical candor and I’ll outline what is care and challenge mean for me, because it’s going to be very different what that looks like how I think of care and challenge than you so, as a coach, really important for me to understand if I’m coaching John over here — and we also like to call it compassionate candor. What’s really interesting is that people started misusing the phrase “radical candor.” There was a lot of air quotes, Alex, it’d be like, “In the spirit of radical candor,” and then that just gave you permission to say whatever you wanted, which would be the spirit of obnoxious aggression, like, “You’re an idiot, everyone on your team hates you,” like that is not radical candor. 

Alex: That’s one quadrant. 

Amy: Yeah, exactly. So compassionate candor is really a better way to think about it but from what I’m hearing you say, the typical maybe mistakes that coaches might make that we certainly see in the workplace is this ruinous empathy, “I want my coaching client to like me so I’m gonna kinda sugarcoat and it’s really hard to kind of say the hard thing and it’s all going along well.” For me, as a coach, I want to get folks where I’m not seeing them. I see everyone as empowered. I look at this also, I do a lot of energy healing and a lot of meditation and I think we are our own greatest source of wisdom and I am just there to help you get back to that inner knowing, that kind of wiser self, so if we have a couple of sessions and we’re done, for me, that is really wonderful, then people will often come back and maybe like a fine tuning. But I think as a coach, it’s really important to look at like what is my intention here and, again, with some real compassion and grace, if my income is tied up to this, like there might be an intention that’s not fully aligned within the best service of what this person needs and that’s certainly been something that I’ve, especially in teaching mindfulness, trying to sometimes decouple those kinds of practices from my income practice.

Alex: One more question around radical candor and then I want to talk about the energy healing side of your practice, talk a little bit about spirituality meditation, which I think will be a fun aspect of our conversation today. So, we have a strong partnership with Ray Dalio. We certify coaches for PrinciplesYou, which is a really great personality assessment that I’m a big fan of so that’s something we’ve been doing for the past year and I’m super excited about and one of the things that I know Ray Dalio is famous for is radical transparency. You’re nodding so it sounds like you’re familiar with it. Is there a difference between radical candor and radical transparency? Do people get those confused? Are they similar? Different? Like what’s going on there? Is it just the use of the word “radical” or are there some similarities?

Amy: I feel like it’s probably the use of the word “radical” and sometimes the word “transparency” with being clear. I am certainly not an expert in radical transparency. It sounds like if you’ve got a partnership, even your own definition of radical transparency I’m really curious about. What I will say is that my understanding is that what may be missing is as much of that emphasis on the care personally on that transparency at all costs to the extent that it might take away from a one-on-one relationship. So we are focused on things that are going to build one-on-one relationships through compassion, through caring. So, for example, we are not going to promote public criticism. If I need to tell someone, “Hey,” maybe they weren’t prepared for a meeting, I’m not going to embarrass them in the meeting and say, “Hey, Alex, why didn’t you show up for this meeting in this way?” I’m going to pull you to the side. That’s very different than having a rigorous public debate where we’re debating ideas and is it 10 percent, is it 20 percent, that’s very different but that’s one example. Again, I’m not an expert in that other philosophy but what I am aware of is that we really want to build the one-on-one relationship and it is going to put someone into fight, flight, freeze, sort of trigger that stress response if we are having public criticism. So there’s kind of, again, a balance of transparency. We’re big believers in Jason, our CEO, we’re a very small team, constantly being transparent about where we are in terms of budget and especially when the pandemic happened and here’s where we are. So we are big believers in that kind of transparency but when it comes to personal behavior, personal work product, those conversations are private.

Alex: Yeah, I think there are some interesting things to explore around how do you embed transparency in larger ecosystems and in the organizational culture. I think it’s a fascinating topic and it’s certainly controversial. Some companies want to provide more transparency, some less. In companies that have a lot of transparency, sometimes, people may feel like they’re exposed by a mistake so I think how do you create that fabric where mistakes are okay and what’s not okay is to keep repeating it. So there’s some — I mean, I’m glad we’re in a stage of managerial science where we really are thinking about what works, what doesn’t work, what aligns with the best of our human values, and how do those values create more effective, efficient businesses. And, at the end of the day, efficiency leads nowhere if we don’t have a sense of purpose and —

Amy: And safety, yeah, and I think something like with salary transparency is huge. It’s so important to help folks who are underrepresented to have more equity by realizing what the things like pay transparency are real good. Another thing about, just before we move on from radical candor, with mistakes, we have a little exercise, this sort of like a “Whoopsie, Daisy!” just some — when a leader acknowledges a mistake they make publicly, we want to create that environment where it’s safe to make mistakes but the leader really has to model the safety and really start there.

Alex: Absolutely. Well, we’re in an interesting place in the world where we have all these capabilities yet we’re not necessarily seeming to move in a direction where conflict is the thing of the past, we can’t agree on how are we going to be more mindful of how we impact the planet. I mean, there’s so many things that we need to be better at. So, to me, that’s a bridge between the conversation we’re having and that other realm of spirituality, energy healing. I mean, there’s so much out there in the world that the rational, efficiency-driven world does not necessarily understand. It’s like they’re very different parts of a quadrant, if you want to use that kind of way of thinking about things. So, tell us a little bit more about how do you embed, you mentioned like energy healing, how do you think about that kind of spiritual side with the fact that you’re a Harvard MBA? I find that fascinating because they seem to be very different worlds. So, how did those come together for Amy Sandler?

Amy: Yeah. Well, I mean, this is probably my favorite question because it’s been how my life unfolded. I had my 25-year business school reunion last year and it was actually delayed because of COVID and I was sitting in this Adirondack chair, it was so beautiful, the brick buildings and the trees and I was aware that like when I was at HBS, I would never have imagined the direction, trajectory of what would have happened in terms of spirituality, mindfulness, energy becoming my number one priority and it got me also thinking how do I want, in my 50th reunion if I’m there, hopefully, what world do I want to have and how do I want to look back? And so what was so interesting, I go to the reunion 25 years later and you’ve got conversations around mindfulness and emotional intelligence and being an empathic leader and stuff that was certainly not on the curriculum in the mid-90s. And so, for me, again, this idea of these sort of parallel paths and leading these kinds of double lives, when I was at business school, I realized I was attracted to women, which was definitely not on the sort of path, I didn’t see any examples and I started getting really interested in spirituality and in energy and that was also not something that someone had — certainly not what I had been trained for or how I was wired to think. And so a lot of those following years were really about having to learn. There was no book, there was no path, and so I spent so much time going to yoga, going on retreats, really creating for myself my own curriculum. I think the amazing thing that I couldn’t have imagined is that now, 2023, there’s kind of this embarrassment of riches for people that really want to go on this sort of path. That is really exciting and probably even more exciting for me is that we can even have this conversation in the workplace. So it really hasn’t been until probably the last five years where I felt comfortable even sort of coming out as someone who’s into this stuff, even doing Search Inside Yourself, bringing mindfulness to CEOs and executives, it was very much based on the science and very much based on, “Here’s the numbers and here’s how this is gonna help your business,” and you’re sort of coming — like I have this other intention of, “Gee, maybe you can open your heart a little and maybe you can find a little more peace.” But, with YPO, as someone who did marketing for YPO, telling a high-driving, high-achieving CEO that you’re going to spend an hour, two hours, three hours revealing your deepest, darkest secrets to a bunch of other CEOs in a room is not going to be something that’s going to be really appealing to them until you’ve gone through it so you talk about a board of advisors, you talk about — you kind of have to meet people where they are.

Alex: They’d rather walk through fire than open up their heart.

Amy: Right. And, luckily, I’ve done that seven times so we can talk about that as well. Yeah, and so you really have to kind of know where your audience is and, for me, the audience at this time being sort of the workplace in the world, people are more open to these ideas and so that gives me kind of enormous hope and what I can share when I talk about, and I can get into sort of the nitty gritty of some of the practices, is that you talked about a quadrant, I thought that was great. For me, I feel like this healing journey is really almost more of like a spiral or like a loop-the-loop and it’s two steps forward and one step back and I think coaches can really relate to that because it’s not like a linear journey of sort of like 45 degrees going up, there’s all of these twists and turns and I think what anchors you are practices that do open your heart, do help you manage your attention, your focus, do help you realize, “Oh — like for most of my life, the first half, my body was just this thing to carry my head around because I got told how great my brain was and so for people that really identify very much in the mind, to start to do practices, whether it’s yoga, whether it’s even like massage or acupuncture to realize like, oh my gosh, there’s so much wisdom in my body if I just start to listen to it. and there’s a lot of science around it too that we can talk to people if that is a better way to meet them. So, starting to tap into your body, to emotions, and then, from there, you realize we are these energy systems, it’s happening all the time, it’s starting to fine tune the awareness through different practices.

Alex: Don’t get me started with spirals. I love — like spiral dynamics, that kind of way of thinking about development, I think it’s fascinating. Recently, through YPO, I did this — it was fun because it was at my gym so it’s always nice to go to activities where you’re like in your home turf so that was fun. It’s a really cool gym in LA, I know you live in LA too, like Heimat on West Hollywood area. I recommend it. Love it. Good Netflix on the ellipticals.

Amy: Oh, wow. Back to the partnership.

Alex: Yeah, I know, like sponsored by Heimat. So we did this YPO event where it was really about breath work and breath work leading so it was like two hours of breath work that would lead into an ice plunge, which I’m sure you’re very familiar with since you walked on fire. I think it’s like the same crowd that likes to submerge themselves in ice and then walk on fire. I mean, I have to tell you, love the breath work and I’ll tell you a little bit more about that experience, never doing an ice plunge again. I mean, it was two minutes and as soon as I got in there, it was like mostly ice, it was way worse than I could ever imagine. I just got in there, I was like I can’t. But there was a facilitator there that led me through the two minutes and then got into the hot tub after about five minutes and that was great but I don’t think I want to do it again. But the whole point of the breath work was use the breath when you really want to get out of the ice plunge, and I’m an avid meditator, I’ve been meditating for a long time, I can get into very deep states of meditation, which, honestly, some of the best experiences that I’ve had in my life have been meditating. It’s just I want to unpack that with you a little bit more but it’s fascinating. But the breath work, it was all YPO folks and CEOs and such and their spouses and so we’re laying there, there’s about 50 people, and I was really inspired by what happened there because you start breathing and then you do some breath work and then you hold your breathing for one minute, then you do a little bit more kind of high-intensity breathing and then you hold your breath for a minute and a half, and then kept doing that until we got to two minutes. I had no idea I could easily not breathe for two minutes. So, it was really — and you experience all these emotions towards the last couple seconds of that, you start feeling kind of emotional, but you get very in tune with your body. So I’m sure there’s a lot of different practices around and approaches to breath work but I had one of those where it’s intense breathing and then you hold your breath for up to two minutes. I think being a meditator really helped because I really felt like I got into that state but it was very empowering to not breathe for two minutes and feel great. So I really enjoyed it. So, when you do breath work, is it like a similar experience? Tell me a little bit more about that.

Amy: Yeah. Well, I love hearing your experience and I think the most important thing in this book I’m writing is really like all of these different practices are available. There’s so much available. So part of it is finding what works best for you for your nervous system. And, by the way, some practices that might work at one time sort of picking them up, putting them down, for me, having had this very sort of off and on practice with mindfulness, knowing very much about how important it was, being very kind of ADD, having these breakthrough moments and then not really building the muscle, about probably 12, 13 years ago, I started practicing breath work with my teacher, David Elliot. This form of breath work is lying down and it’s two parts and so the first part is kind of more active breathing, breathing into the low belly and then breathing into the upper chest so this is on the inhale so it’s like and then you exhale out and it’s all done through an open mouth. And James Nestor wrote a great book about breath, a lot about the benefits of nose breathing. This is a specific exercise and what I found doing this kind of breath work, I had done a version of holotropic breath work probably five, ten years before that where I really experienced these expanded states of consciousness and holotropic breath work, if you’re not aware or listeners aren’t aware, was founded I believe by Stan Grof and this was in response to when drugs like LSD had actually been used in therapeutic settings, they were illegal so they used this form of breath work to kind of access this kind of consciousness so I had tried that probably 20 years ago, experienced it, doing a bunch of different other things. When I found this breath work with David, that was one of these like instant, “Oh, okay, I understand, I can feel my energy, I can sense my energy,” there’s so much stuck emotion being released. There’s tears and there’s laughter and there’s all of this processing. And so, for me, it was, as someone who likes instant gratification, it was like, “Oh, I kind of get it. I get what people have been sort of talking about, what I’ve sensed is possible.” And so that’s always been a go-to practice for me, the active part, so let’s say it’s a 20-minute practice, you could do maybe 10, 15 minutes of the active breathing and then the receptive part, you’re just lying there, it’s like more of a Shavasana for yoga practitioners, breathing through your nose, and there’s music, the music sort of takes you on a bit of an emotional journey and this is when you might see different patterns, hearing things, whatever kind of you’re more intuitive, nonlinear part of your brain starts opening up. And this really is a heart opener. What happens is, and what’s really interesting in this kind of breath work, is that when your heart open, sometimes if they’re stuck energy, people’s hands might end up being clenched, we’re holding stones, and just to your point about sort of doing this with YPO and CEOs, I have done this kind of breath work with CEOs several years ago before things like Wim Hof and the ice baths and this sort of became super popularized, I have found too, it’s for people that are maybe more analytical, for people that are very active, having this very active breathing and sort of this opening into this conscious. It can be a real game changer. So I totally get the experience that you described how powerful that can be.

Alex: That was very powerful. And I remember the first couple of times I started meditating, I was in my early 20s, and I remember being able to spend four hours a few times just meditating and I’m someone that I need to be on the move and coffee is probably not good for me because I’m like — in my family, I’m known for just being a little hyper, so my parents were shocked that I could meditate so deeply but I just have this access to this space and the space that meditation brings is incredibly powerful. I mean, it’s some of the most wonderful experiences I’ve had. To know that you can go into a state in your body and induce it where you barely have to breathe at all and you have this one single-pointed focus, it is really similar experience to — I don’t have really a lot of experience with psychedelic drugs but I think even there’s research showing that the brain looks very similar under certain states of meditation and drugs, such as LSD and such, so it is really a very empowering thing that you could, with your breathing, access these realms, this portal to a higher understanding and all it is is really getting away of that monkey mind and being able to say, “Yes, I wanna focus on one thing,” or, “I wanna focus on nothing at all,” and then see all these passing thoughts. You tap into this knowledge of yourself and things around you that is, to me, is the most spiritual experience that I’ve ever had. I resonate when you say that you just want to get instant gratification. It’s interesting in meditation because I think after some of the biggest experiences that I’ve had, I find myself craving that feeling of absolute bliss when you get into a very advanced state of meditation and then that recognition that the wanting of that state is preventing you from being in that state, it just opens this wisdom around understanding that then you can apply to business, to relationships. I think meditation exposes you to some fundamental truths about the nature of relationships. Everything’s a relationship, whether it’s in the physical world, in biology, in chemistry, in the human condition, in human relations, and in business, so, to me, it opens this portal for a deeper understanding and I just wish I could be a little more regular. I look up to the people that have a regular meditation practice. For me, meditation is one of those things that, “Oh, I feel like meditating now,” and it could be six months and then I meditate every day for a month and then I don’t meditate for a year, like I need to get more regular but you and I are fans of meditations so hopefully just having this conversation and having some people listen to it be like, “Oh, that sounds interesting, I wanna look into it.” I think there’s no greater gift or there’s few greater gifts than just starting to do meditation and understanding what it’s all about. Very helpful for coaching practice because you focus on your breathing even when you’re talking to a client and being able to tap into not wanting to provide too much value is hard for me at least as a coach, so I’m sitting there, I’m thinking of a question, if you get in that state where you focus on your breathing, the right question, the right comment will come out and you’ll get in sync with your clients, like meditation is so applicable for coaching. So I’ll stop there because I’m going on a meditation rant but I think it’s so powerful for coaches. What do you think?

Amy: Oh, no, I love that meditation rant. I mean, you said a few things, just to amplify, one is, how to sustain a regular practice. I am someone who also admires like super disciplined folks and, for me, I know this is foundational to my wellbeing and to really kind of living my purpose and so I teach the things that I think are important to hold myself accountable, so I teach radical candor, I did a little experiment the end of December where it was free, like for three weeks, I said people are going to come 20 minutes, do whatever practice nurtures you, and for me just kind of holding the space for people in that way. The practice that I chose was Qigong, I’m going through a Qigong teacher training now, but, for me, I will take whatever I can to have that sort of success partner accountability. I am just the consummate like signing up for this or that course, to my own peril somewhat, but I just kind — like going back to kind of acknowledging that’s a part of me, it’s hard for me not to judge it, not to feel like, “Oh, well, I should be easily sitting an hour,” but that is very much that kind of self-critical voice and so bringing gentleness to that, again, that care personally, challenge directly, where do I need the support? Where do I need the challenge? Maybe I need the challenge of like actually teaching it? Maybe I need the challenge of doing this class? So I think for each person, finding what works for you. In my coaching, I use breath work. I also use — I’ll do a guided meditation and just do exactly what you were saying where you are able to synchronize, the mirror neurons are wiring with that other person, you can tune in, one of the amazing things about Qigong, the specific Qigong that I’m working with, is you actually can start to sense other people’s energy systems. I’m not quite there yet with the Qigong but when you do kind of a shared meditation practice as a coach, for me, that really drops me into what’s underneath for this person and then I, as Amy, as the coach, I don’t need to do a lot of heavy lifting. I can allow this sort of higher wisdom to come through me and trust that it will come through me. I do this as a speaker, as a coach. When you are knowledgeable enough in something, then you can actually throw the script out and just show up to whatever’s happening and trust that you can just be the channel to let it go through you.

Alex: You know, one of the things that I really like about people that get into this way of exploration with the mind is that there is this space that you can create, like just looking at your bio when I started preparing for our episode today, I got the sense that we’d have this kind of conversation and the cool thing is it transcends the physical space. So, right now, I feel like we’re connected, we’re in sync, talking about this, and I’m pulling these — you know, sometimes when you talk to someone, you are able to access things in a different way. To me, one of the most powerful things in human connection is when you relate to yourself differently because you’re exploring this space with someone else and it’s so nice to see that that transcends the physical realm and we’re here on video and I’m feeling that connection and tapping into this space so I think being able to master that and to expand the amount of people you can have that kind of relationship with and then leveraging that with your clients is powerful. I only work with clients that I can create this space with and it’s one of the things — well, I don’t have a lot of time for coaching and my income doesn’t depend on coaching so I guess if I was a full-time coach, I would probably work with people where I don’t create this space necessarily, but since it’s like a side gig for me, because I love it and I’m busy with other things at coaching.com, I’m able to do that. And when I find a client where I get this kind of space, I’m like, “Yes, let’s do it,” because that space is so conducive to having amazing conversations, to be able to challenge people, to support people. So I just had a great time with you, Amy, in this conversation. So I want to thank you for joining us on Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. Any final thoughts to close out our episode today?

Amy: Well, it has been — I’m with you, such a pleasure, and I just love what you were sharing. I feel like there’s the quote that’s been attributed to Viktor Frankl about the space between stimulus and response and that’s sort of our greatest freedom, whether that did or didn’t cut — the spirit is there and I love what you shared about, for me, coaching is about playing in this space together and how can we create more spaces like this so that that’s the trajectory of where the world is, that we’re expanding that co-creative space. So, thank you for inviting me, for allowing it, and for us to be able to kind of play together in this beautiful space.

Alex: Absolutely. Thank you so much for bringing all of yourself to our conversation. Looking forward to continuing the conversation sometime soon.