It's a very great pleasure to share with you the conversation I co-created with Betsy Reed. Betsy has spent the past 18+ years working as a sustainability expert, running big advocacy campaigns, working for corporates, running her own sustainability consultancy, lecturing, and being invited to write and publish her first book, 'Communicating Social & Environmental Issues Effectively.' Above all, Betsy is a lifelong social justice activist who wanted to grow up and become a lobbyist (and did). She's spent years honing her skills as a meditation and yoga teacher, as well as embracing and becoming more comfortable in her range of changing identities to give her perspective, empathy and power in herself. Her greatest labour of love to the world right now is her podcast, The Discomfort Practice, which was birthed from the quiet that a 3-month Barcelona covid lockdown created in spring 2020. It's created a space for her to explore and knit together the themes she's been studying, becoming an expert in and teaching for several years, from mindfulness and system change to anti-racism activism and hosting nurturing conversations. As work has started to flow again in 2021, her work has become solely focused on leadership (both self-leadership and more formal Leadership) for a new paradigm, which incorporates diversity & inclusion, holistic sustainability, shifts in power and influence and the pressures of leadership following a pandemic and the unfolding crisis of social inequality and climate change. Betsy's intention is to live a life that inspires others, to do work that inspires others to better lead themselves and others to create big collective change that makes society and the planet a place where all beings can thrive. This conversation is playful, confronting, joyful and (of course) touching on topics that maybe uncomfortable for some, maybe including you. We look forward to hearing from you via our socials is there's anything you would like to share in response to this conversation. Betsy is mainly active on Instagram, and Tim primarily hangs out in LinkedIn so drop us a comment or a message in either of those platforms if you'd like. Key out-takes from this episode; Defining Self - Finding real freedom in not being defined by what I do - Finding yourself doing something, something that fits, that meets you where you are and draws you on - Focus on alignment and you end up where you need to be - Worked so hard at being good in the system I was in, and it was never enough - People don't know how to connect to themselves, they don't know how to speak emotion, they have lost touch with themselves as humans in the workplace - To become truly myself I had to break up with old ways of being Reflections on this moment - What I've been training and developing for the last 20 years is now what the world wants - I'm really excited about where we are - What I got was a chance to be still. It was really squirmy at first, uncomfortable as an ambitious, action-orientated person - What a gift to my creativity quiet was Systems thinking - I no longer have to explain to people that social & environmental is part of sustainability - In order to build sustainable systems they need to be sustainable for human beings, they need to include sustainability, diversity & inclusion and be cognisant of wellbeing - I'm still entwined in these systems which have created our world - Shareholders don't exist as some separate entity to the planet, everything exists as part of the same whole - There's cognitive dissonance everywhere, as people haven't realised they are part of the systems that are breaking ...