Peggy Guest guides people on a journey of self discovery | The Vance Crowe Podcast | Episode 39

Vance Crowe [00:00:00] This is Kate Crosby in the Central Valley of California, quantitative geneticist, data scientist and agronomist, and you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Each week I interview an expert to try and reveal what is it that they know about the world? How did they develop their discipline? And you know, things come up that we just wouldn't even imagine. This week I am interviewing my executive coach, Peggy Guest, who is a woman that, during my career, helped me understand where I wanted to go and what I wanted to accomplish. And it really changed basically everything about my life. So I'm not gonna give anything away about that interview. You should just know that this is a conversation that was wide ranging and parts of it made me pretty nervous for a couple of different reasons. One, Peggy gets me to open up in a way that I don't normally with other people. I think of myself as a relatively open person, but she has a way of getting me to challenge my assumptions. And with that said, there were some things we talked about that I know in general, popular culture, some of these topics are really hard to discuss and people get really upset about them. So I'm gonna let you listen to it and let me know what you think. But it was a fascinating conversation. I feel like I learned a great deal about myself while interviewing Peggy, but I hope that you will find her to be as interesting as I do. Just a couple of quick bookkeeping notes. We are going to be doing the book club podcast or the the episode where we all get together and talk about it. We're gonna do this on YouTube, and we're gonna do it on February 4th, which is a Tuesday at 7:30 PM I'll post a link on Twitter, so if you want to get to it, or you can just come to my YouTube channel and, and make sure you subscribe and hit the alert button, because that'll let you know that we're doing the YouTube live.

Vance Crowe [00:01:46] But we're gonna do it at seven 30 on Tuesday, February 4th at seven 30. And we're gonna be discussing all Quiet on the Western front. I have heard from dozens and dozens of people that have read this book, so I'm really looking forward to the way we do this. I will post a few questions and some thought provoking ideas on Twitter and on the Facebook page sometime this weekend. So you can go and take a look at those and try and reflect so that way you're ready to have a conversation in, in the YouTube system. You can do a lot of typed comments, which we couldn't really do very well on the Instagram, so it was good that we tried it there, but I think YouTube live is going to be a lot better. If you're looking to get a jumpstart on next month's book, we are going to be reading my all time favorite book, a book that my father gave me just before I went to the Peace Corps. And I read it, I found it to be profound, and then I never came back to it, but I would like to go back and read it because it is a book that I think is prescient and is able to describe so much of what is going on today in the world, why we see the rise of things like environmentalism or veganism or other forms of religion and ideas that people can attach themselves to. So the book is called The True Believer, and it is by Eric Hoffer. Just as a quick aside, Eric Hoffer is a profound philosopher, but his writing is extraordinarily simple because he was a blue collar worker. He actually worked as a longshoreman in San Francisco, which is one of those people that goes into the cargo areas of a ship and helps carry off the cargo, unload it, and put it on the docks, or take stuff from the docks and put it onto the ship.

Vance Crowe [00:03:29] Back in the day before, we had as much machinery and equipment that we do, this required men to be brute men that could lift huge amounts of weight and be able to carry it on their backs or on their shoulders. And so it is incredibly surprising that a person that came out of that environment was as prolific of a writer as Eric Hoffer. And his book, the True Believer on how mass movements get started has fundamentally changed how I see how people individuate themselves, how they think about themselves apart from the group, and why they attach themselves to mass movements. He talks about what happened after World War ii, specifically why people followed Stalin and Hitler, but he also goes into other aspects of religion that while I read, makes me a little bit uncomfortable, it kinda gets me out of my comfort zone. So it is a fascinating read, and I am very excited for that to be our February book of the Month. I'm in under consideration for some other books for March. They will probably be a little bit older than the last couple of books that we've read, but these books are in excess of 80 to 90 years old, so they have a lot of wisdom in there, and they have stood the test of time. So if you're looking to pick up the book for February, that's the True Believer by Eric Hoffer. Not to be confused with the Nicholas Sparks book, Travis Liebig, my buddy from St. Louis Bank, pointed out that there is a book by Nicholas Sparks, and I'm not trying to encourage that book. I'm trying to encourage Eric Hoffer. And then also, just a reminder, 7:30 PM Tuesday, February 4th, we'll do the all quiet on the Western Front Book Club.

Vance Crowe [00:05:05] Everyone is welcome to join even if you didn't read the book, we're just excited to have you. I am always glad that you're here. So without further ado, we're gonna head on to the interview with Peggy Guest. Dr. Peggy Guest, welcome to the podcast.

Peggy Guest [00:05:21] Thank you. And it's just Peggy Guest. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:05:23] It was. I actually had to ask you before we got started, what your education was. And it's really startling to me that that's the case because most of the time if you deal with a psychologist, I feel like they are kind of letters first. And and you never were that way. You were just like, hi, I am Peggy Guest, I'm Peggy. And that's the way that I've known you. But you have a set of expertise that has, when you and I work together, you change the trajectory of my life. So,

Peggy Guest [00:05:51] Wow,

Vance Crowe [00:05:52] I am really excited that you could be here and I have no idea where the conversation will go, because I never knew with you. It's, you're one of the very few people I've ever met in my life that is a dramatically better listener than anyone else I've ever met. You're very, very astute. And so it's, I'm, I cannot imagine where this conversation will go.

Peggy Guest [00:06:11] Well, thank you. Let's see.

Vance Crowe [00:06:12] So when I say executive coach, I think a lot of people think, rah rah, let me jump in there and give you some enthusiasm and talk to you about connecting better with your coworkers. But that is not at all you.

Peggy Guest [00:06:28] No, it's not. I don't know where the co term coach came from for this work, but I think a lot of it was modeled after sports coaches. And I, I think of myself really as a thinking partner. And the, and the work I do is usually pretty deep thinking. And when I have people like you who love to do deep thinking, it's, it's extra rewarding, gratifying work for me.

Vance Crowe [00:07:01] I would imagine. So in your work, people come to your office and they say, Hey, I'm, at least in my case, I came to you. Can I just give you the experience from my end of coming to your office and

Peggy Guest [00:07:11] Meeting? Oh, please do. That'd be cool.

Vance Crowe [00:07:12] I, so when I was offered this opportunity, it was an honor from, from a, from a superior at Monsanto that I think was trying to help me, right? It was like, you're the career thing that you're moving on the tr there is no director of millennial engagement. Next step, we wanna know what you wanna do next. So we've gone out and found somebody that really helped me in my life, and so we wanna connect you with this person. And when they told me this, I was like, it's an honor. But I was kind of laughing at the idea of having an executive coach. Like I was not really very interested at all in coming in when I came in the first time. Could you detect that?

Peggy Guest [00:07:51] I think I remember you to be questioning like, why would I choose to be here, convince me? And I, and I, and that wasn't in an arrogant kind of way, it really was a serious question, what would I be doing here? And I, I don't really remember that first session that clearly because it became so rich moving forward. But I think that, you know, I was thinking about this today 'cause you had asked me earlier the question of how is it that you listen so well to people? And it's that I, I think that the people, or how is it that they trust me?

Vance Crowe [00:08:34] Right?

Peggy Guest [00:08:35] And I was thinking, I think that people who are leaders, and I don't really use the word executive, even though that's my title as much as leadership coach, but I think the people who are leaders are very used to sizing people up. They, they are required in their jobs to hire people, to give them tasks, to figure out how to inspire them, to figure out how to keep them going, to figure out how to do more than that person thinks they can do. So they're very used to sizing people up. And I think that when a new client comes to my office, the ones who know what I do and maybe know me or a friend referred them, they are not so questioning. But other people are kind of like, what am I doing here and why with you? And they can tell that I'm really interested in who they are. And I think the quality that mostly shines through is respect. I, I respect people in the midst of struggles, and I am, I'm, I'm expecting that they will find their own answers. So I listen to what the struggle is. Often what I'm adding is this sort of contextual viewpoint. Like I ask people, give me a wider lens, tell me more about what is bringing you here.

Peggy Guest [00:10:08] Tell me about your environment. Who are the people you interact with? How are those interactions for you?

Vance Crowe [00:10:15] So I think that this, I I, this is almost profound for me because I can remember the first time when I started, when you started asking me questions about what was going on around me, generally speaking, when I talk with a random person, there's a struggle for the conversation. And when I think of an executive coach, I think this is a person that's gonna come and try and tell me how to think.

Peggy Guest [00:10:38] And

Vance Crowe [00:10:38] So when you, and when you started asking me about, you know, tell me about what's going on, and then give me this wider lens, which I know exactly the types of questions you asked there. I remember for the first time being like, wow, this person is actually interested. They're not trying to wrench the conversation away from me so that they can tell me something interesting about whatever they're into. And that's a very, very rare occurrence for me. And I think it's probably a rare occurrence for a lot of people, particularly even higher up levels than, than me, when most of the time when a leader's talking to somebody, they're looking to get something from that leader.

Peggy Guest [00:11:15] I, you know, I, it's interesting 'cause I, I never really have asked much about what people expected when they come to coaching or why they hired a coach. I mean, most people, I think when I ask them why they hire, they hired a coach, it's because I wanna learn something. And the implication is, I expect you have something that I'll learn that you'll give to me. But my kind of education isn't a sort of pouring in the learnings as much as it's in conversation, just like we are right now. That, that flows from what I hear your, you are seeking. And what I think might kind of plug in there as helpful. I don't usually enter a coaching relationship with a curriculum. When I do a workshop, I enter with a curriculum and I'm, I'm frankly not as good at that as I am at the conversations I have in coaching.

Vance Crowe [00:12:20] But you have to, on the very first meeting with somebody that is clearly moving in their career, they have figured out how to make things work, but they come from very different formats. Right? Right. Somebody maybe got there from being angry and always wanting to prove something. Somebody else may get there because they're a task oriented type a person. But every person that walks through the door within the first meeting or two, you have to make them feel some level of connection. Otherwise they, why would they give you anything of value in their conversation? Right.

Peggy Guest [00:12:52] Really in the first five minutes.

Vance Crowe [00:12:54] Five minutes,

Peggy Guest [00:12:55] Did you ever read the Malcolm Gladwell? I think it was Blink about intuition. You know, he, I can't remember. He says it happens in much less than five minutes. But I think there's a, a willingness to connect that happens within a very few minutes.

Vance Crowe [00:13:12] I think that's true. You know, when people are doing public speaking and they tell a joke in order to, to get the audience connected with them, one of the things that I've observed is the person that's confident that they have something to say there, the jokes seem to be much more attuned with what that, that tribe needed.

Peggy Guest [00:13:30] And

Vance Crowe [00:13:31] It's because they're much more present than the person that is trying to do it. Inauthentically. They're like, I know I need to insert a joke, so I'm just gonna put one here. And maybe you get a laugh, but it's disconnected from the rest of what you're doing. Well,

Peggy Guest [00:13:43] It's kind of an ice, I think people see it as an icebreaker, but I think you're exactly right. Unless the icebreaker has something to do with the audience, it, it doesn't work. But at least it gets, it gets the speaker started. I, I have never done jokes as a, a beginning, but, and in my old company, the Kramer Institute, the guy who taught what we call power and presence, a class about high impact speaking, he always engages the audience with something like, imagine this. So he's saying, before I tell you anything, get in a picture with me.

Vance Crowe [00:14:28] Oh, that's really interesting.

Peggy Guest [00:14:29] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:14:30] Wow. Are those recorded anywhere?

Peggy Guest [00:14:33] His classes? Yeah. I don't know.

Vance Crowe [00:14:36] I think so. They would be something I'd

Peggy Guest [00:14:37] Be very

Vance Crowe [00:14:37] Interested in seeing.

Peggy Guest [00:14:38] Well, you would really like meeting him and just talking to him about how he teaches presentations. This was a course that the Kramer Institute developed with the Actors Institute in New York. Oh,

Vance Crowe [00:14:51] Yeah, I worked with them. They

Peggy Guest [00:14:52] Oh, did you? Yes. Okay. So then you've been in the program.

Vance Crowe [00:14:56] That was very, very helpful to me. It

Peggy Guest [00:14:58] Was, it's really transformative for people.

Vance Crowe [00:15:00] In fact, just yesterday I was in Des Moines, Iowa. I was at this giant conference called the Land Expo 2020. So it's the people that are buying and selling land to build large agricultural projects on. And I'm, I'm up there and I'm giving this talk and I'm thinking about a couple of things. But one in particular was to stop and make eye contact with individuals in the audience as opposed to looking out on them. Like a massive group.

Peggy Guest [00:15:29] Right. One thought, one person.

Vance Crowe [00:15:31] Right. And that allows you to be present in the moment. Yes. You're not speaking to the crowd, you're speaking to another person. And that is this like, you know, I, I often describe it, you and I talked about it, that to me speaking is like being on a wave, you know, surfing.

Peggy Guest [00:15:47] And

Vance Crowe [00:15:48] That's what that moment is when you make eye contact. So you were a part of those types of classes?

Peggy Guest [00:15:53] I was, although I, I never did really well at, when I took them, I SubT taught a couple of times, but yes, mostly they were taught by John Davis and his wife Kathy Kramer, who died a couple of years ago. So he, I, I'm sure he still does some, he does some on his own. But Kathy Kramer and Gifford Booth, who's the head of the Actors Institute in New York, are the people who developed the program. And the idea was to connect the psychology of connecting to your audience, which was Kathy's part of the curriculum development. And Giffords was acting techniques to connect with audience. So the whole idea was exactly what you said. One thought, one person to deliver your talk as if it's a conversation and you're engaging the people with you not just speaking to them.

Vance Crowe [00:16:51] Right. That it is, it's that edge of chaos between you have something to say and you don't know how they'll react. And, and you're the opposite for them. They, they don't know how they'll react and they don't know what you're gonna say.

Peggy Guest [00:17:00] Right.

Vance Crowe [00:17:01] So one of the things that I always tell people when they're gonna go to a counselor or, or somebody that's gonna help them is I always say, ask the person what their orientation is. Right. You should know how they think the mind works and how they determine whether or not you're making progress. And when you would know that you're done. Is that a fair question for somebody to ask somebody like you?

Peggy Guest [00:17:25] Oh, of course. It's fair. I mean, and it's a good question to ask somebody. I think that probably most consumers don't know what it means. The people who are going, and I, and I don't mean to sound like it's so erudite or something, it's just that the distinctions can be subtle and I still think they're important. So for instance, my, my passion and what I have followed as an adult, developing as a psychologist has been positive psychology. And it's different from the medical model of looking at what's wrong, what's diagnosable, what needs to be healed. And that's a lot. When I was studying, a lot of the education was based on that. So you asked why I didn't like to be called doctor. I, I don't like it to be my work to be connected with a medical model. It's more of an education model. Counseling is my, my master's degree and my PhD is in counseling, which is actually an education degree.

Vance Crowe [00:18:35] This seems to me to be humility to the point that it probably harmed you financially, right? Like if you put yourself in the position where you're saying, I want to be your counselor, I want to be somebody that listens versus I wear a white lab coat and when you come see me, I can heal you and make you better. Like, I think there's a, at at least a cultural sense, and I could be wrong, that that one is more serious than the one that you're describing.

Peggy Guest [00:19:04] Well, you, you have to remember, I'm a child of the sixties and the seventies. So when I was getting my master's degree was kind of the beginning of the women's movement.

Vance Crowe [00:19:16] Oh,

Peggy Guest [00:19:17] And I, with a couple of other friends started a collective known as the Women's Counseling Center. And we had endless conversations about what we called ourselves, what we called our, the people who came to see us and kind of what all that meant. And there was a book written called Women in Madness around that time in like in the late sixties that was demonstrating how poorly women who were mentally ill, like seriously, and even not so seriously mentally ill, were treated in the medical profession. And to be fair, I, you know, we didn't have nearly the kind of treatment available then that we have now. I'm talking like the forties and fifties and early

Vance Crowe [00:20:12] Sixties. And when you say treatments, do you mean like psychiatric medicine or,

Peggy Guest [00:20:15] Yes. Well, I mean, then there wasn't that much medication, but because what, the medication that there was was for seriously ill people, a lot of people got overmedicated.

Vance Crowe [00:20:27] So you'd have somebody like on lithium

Peggy Guest [00:20:29] That really didn't need that.

Vance Crowe [00:20:30] Okay. But

Peggy Guest [00:20:31] We didn't have antidepressants at the time that I'm talking about it. At the time the book was written, I, I'm actually not a good historian about this. I'm, I'm more talking from,

Vance Crowe [00:20:41] But this is fascinating. I I didn't know anything even about the, that there is a narrative to be had back in that time.

Peggy Guest [00:20:46] Oh, definitely. So at any rate, at the Women's Counseling Center, there were about 20 of us. And we talked really a lot about the notion that we were on a journey. We were in a cultural transition. Women's lives were changing, women were choosing to have their lives changed. This was in the early seventies by now. And I graduated from my master's program in 73, and that's when we started the Women's counseling center. So we, we wanted to be what in corporate world they'd call a flatter organization. We didn't want to be doctors and patients. We wanted to be counselors and clients. And so we,

Vance Crowe [00:21:36] Why would that be a distinction? That would matter

Peggy Guest [00:21:39] Because the medical model at the time, and we as feminists, critic, critics of that medical model where it's too higher up, the doctors tell you what to do. It's sort of like what you were talking about with

Vance Crowe [00:21:53] Physical.

Peggy Guest [00:21:54] Well, I meant the model of telling people what they need rather than hearing from them what they need. So another area that was changing at that time was childbirth and the notion that women could own their own experience of childbirth rather than turning themselves over to doctors and medication. What do

Vance Crowe [00:22:15] You mean?

Peggy Guest [00:22:17] You

Vance Crowe [00:22:17] Mean like water births and home births and things like that? Well,

Peggy Guest [00:22:20] Well those things, I don't necessarily mean those, because those were not even thought of then, except for looking back at sort of tribal customs or old customs. But, but the, what was written about there was a woman, I mean, there was a book then put out called Our Bodies Ourselves.

Vance Crowe [00:22:39] I've heard of this book.

Peggy Guest [00:22:41] And it was like, how can women be partners in their medical care now, it's so much part of the lexicon that you're even surprised that it, that it existed the way it did. It kind of reminds me of when I had my, my kids watch with us, the Eyes on the Prize and they saw the civil rights movement. They, they couldn't believe how people were treated. They went to school in New City. They were in

Vance Crowe [00:23:07] Yeah, very mixed mixed

Peggy Guest [00:23:09] Groups. Very mixed groups. And they, they just, it, it was almost like a fairytale to them. But, you know, it wasn't that long ago, both civil rights movement, which also deeply affected me at the time I was in graduate school. And that's another reason that I wanted the playing field to be experienced more evenly. That it's not the people up above doing to the people down below. It's a partnership. How do we

Vance Crowe [00:23:38] Accept being treated?

Peggy Guest [00:23:39] Right? And how do we, how do we educate, how do we take part in our own education, whether it's about leadership or medicine or voting, how, how do we all get on the same page with respecting one another?

Vance Crowe [00:23:57] So, you know, this is uncharted territory and I'm always a little nervous about talking about it. But the thing, the person that you are, the personality that you have, you know, very respectful. You listen very carefully. You're, you're extraordinarily humble. When I think of what I see being represented as a feminist on television today or on YouTube, the people that I'm seeing represent what would be held now as the feminist movement seemed to be antithetical to your way to, of approaching the world. They seem to be yelling and angry. And it, I, I'm intimidated to engage because I don't want to have a fight on the level. But if you were talking about something I, I clearly, I'd sit right down across from you and hear what you had to say. Are they the same movement?

Peggy Guest [00:24:46] Yes. I mean, and that was true then too, that there were a number of strident, angry expressors. And, and one would understand that they had lots of stuff to be angry and strident about. And that the angry and strident people did make a difference. It just wasn't who I was. And it wasn't what we did at the Women's Counseling Center. We really, I guess you could say we coached each other. We were thinking together about what does it mean to live into the expectation that you and your husband are going to decide things together if you're married, that lesbian women are going to couple and, and decide things together. Also, when I first started at the Women's Counseling Center, I was, I dunno, 28, I guess I, I'd never known there was a such a thing as a lesbian. Really?

Vance Crowe [00:25:50] Yeah.

Peggy Guest [00:25:50] Now I knew there were such things as gay men, but I really didn't have much exposure to it.

Vance Crowe [00:25:54] Meaning that you didn't know. Like I know lots of lesbian women, lots, maybe six or seven I could call up without any hesitation and they'd be like, what do you want Vance? You know? Right. But, but I could, but I can't imagine not knowing that they were all that it existed. Yeah. That there, it's a certain percentage of all the people I know are gay. That's just the way that it is.

Peggy Guest [00:26:14] Yeah. Well it wasn't the way it was when I was

Vance Crowe [00:26:17] A, a kid. No kidding. That's actually a cultural,

Peggy Guest [00:26:19] And I was 28. That's a huge cultural change.

Vance Crowe [00:26:23] I nev it never really dawned on me how far that's come. 'cause we are not that different in, I mean, we're different, but we're not, we're different eons

Peggy Guest [00:26:30] Age. I know it's not Ian's I mean, so much has changed since 1969. I I've been aware since this is, this is the, this was the 50th anniversary of 1969. Yeah. So there have been a lot of movies about 50 years ago. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Selma, the one about the NASA Space Station and the women who contributed to that. I'm trying to think what else. But there have been so many look backs at that time. I just watched the one about miss the second one about Mr. Rogers and what they were talking about is his demonstrating to people that children have feelings. And honest to God, people didn't think, I mean, people thought children really wouldn't get upset about things and so, or or it wouldn't last long. So there's been so much social and cultural change since 1969. It's just astonishing. So astonishing that you look astonished when I talk about this.

Vance Crowe [00:27:37] I I am I, you know, I I'm actually kind of gazing off into the abyss thinking about the fact that Mr. Rogers, a sweater wearing little skinny guy putting on his shoes, ushered in a new layer of culture or at least a new wave. Oh,

Peggy Guest [00:27:53] Absolutely. And

Vance Crowe [00:27:54] I never thought about him as being such a cultural icon. He just was always there. It's just Mr. Rogers,

Peggy Guest [00:27:59] Did you see the movie this this summer of the documentary? I didn't one you should go back and watch it. I mean, it really, he was an astonishing person as Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It's so sort of like we know them now or we know about them, kind of like the later parts of their career. And Fred Rogers died of course. But, but to know what they were moving into is when they were 30 is just so interesting. 'cause it was a very different world.

Vance Crowe [00:28:29] And she is a, I mean, she's in her nineties

Peggy Guest [00:28:32] I think. So, you

Vance Crowe [00:28:33] Know, it's interesting because I'm realizing a big blind quadrant as we're talking, which is I see people of a per certain political persuasion, the Democrats or the left hold Ruth Bader Ginsburg up like an idol. And in the same way that I don't care if anybody lifts Donald Trump up as their idol. I I don't really care to know very much about other people's idols. But it's probably because I'm not realizing there's a lot to learn there. She didn't get held up as somebody for other people to aspire to by accident. She, she was a part of a big change represents something real. Right.

Peggy Guest [00:29:10] Well, and I think what you're talking about is not realizing how much of a change there really was. That the world really changed from let's say 1960 to 1980 in terms of what people expected as social mores and values. It really changed a lot.

Vance Crowe [00:29:31] And so when you're at 28 and you're at this women's counseling center, what's going on? How good were you, were you an expert good enough to be giving counseling advice? Do you look back and see? Well,

Peggy Guest [00:29:45] I was just out of my, so, so the group that I was describing are the people who were counselors who made a commitment to give a certain number of hours a week to this. Cause most of them had day jobs. I had a day job.

Vance Crowe [00:30:01] Oh.

Peggy Guest [00:30:02] And so what I was describing to you was the conversations we had about what we wanted to represent. And then in addition, I offered counseling to clients who came to the Women's Counseling Center. And so was I qualified to do that? Well, I had the degree

Vance Crowe [00:30:25] You're smiling about this,

Peggy Guest [00:30:27] You know, something, I think I was a counselor when I was 10.

Vance Crowe [00:30:30] Yeah.

Peggy Guest [00:30:30] So it's just in my bones. It's

Vance Crowe [00:30:32] Is there, do you have an archetypal, is there a character that, that matches you in the, when you look at the archetypes?

Peggy Guest [00:30:40] That's a great question. I don't know. Maybe the great mother, the good mother. I, I hope the good mother.

Vance Crowe [00:30:49] Can you explain archetypes in a way that other people could approach it if they know nothing at all about Carl j or these ideas?

Peggy Guest [00:30:56] You know, it is hard to put language to it. And I, I think that's what he was trying to do. And you, you do notice, it's not like in the regular lexicon. People don't talk about it very often 'cause it's kind of hard to grasp. But the, and I think the best way to understand it is the way he explained it, which is the, the sort of fairy tales and myths and lore that, that make stories about what human beings over time have sought. So they've sought to be loved by the, the archetype is the great mother. It's not always a mother who loves like that. But that, that's the archetype of sort of unconditional love and expectation that children would grow into their best selves. And then the terrible mother is the one that is envious of a child who is becoming himself or herself and seeks to destroy that. And so a lot of times fairytales, like say for instance, sleeping Beauty will have the witch and the good mother and the witch wins for a while. And then the good mother comes in. Really interestingly, in sleeping beauty is, is the, in the form of a prince, not a mother.

Vance Crowe [00:32:31] Oh.

Peggy Guest [00:32:32] So, but most of them are about love and death and love and, and the challenges of getting to what you love, whether it's

Vance Crowe [00:32:45] What you have to sacrifice along the way

Peggy Guest [00:32:47] Yes. And what you have to learn.

Vance Crowe [00:32:49] Yeah, that's right.

Peggy Guest [00:32:50] So most of fairytales are about sorting, like trying to figure out what do I need? What obstacles do I need to surmount in order to get to the prize?

Vance Crowe [00:33:03] What, what, gimme an example. Do you remember the, what, what sleeping beauty needed to get over in order to be kissed by the handsome prince?

Peggy Guest [00:33:13] I guess she needed to get away from the witch. But you know, that didn't it, it I probably didn't give a great example

Vance Crowe [00:33:21] If I can't remember. I

Peggy Guest [00:33:22] Clearly enough. Well, I it's

Vance Crowe [00:33:23] Something to do with, with falling asleep or not being conscious or,

Peggy Guest [00:33:26] Yes. Oh good.

Vance Crowe [00:33:27] Something like that. Thank

Peggy Guest [00:33:28] You.

Vance Crowe [00:33:28] Because she did go to sleep and, and you know, so this probably a good time to revisit my experience with visiting your office. So we end up having a few sessions and I come to the conclusion that the things that you're asking me to do, which is think about the relationships you have at the office that are the most valuable to you. You know, write down scenarios where you feel like you're, you're finding satisfaction with your work and some things when you're not. And when I started going through that process, I was like, well, whether or not she's, you know, like a granola, eating hippie, it doesn't really matter. This is a good exercise. And then when we would come back and I would have whatever, I don't even, I may not be even representing the homework properly, it doesn't seem like, but, but I would have something to show you. And I wanted, by the time we made the second or third meeting, I was excited to show you what I had written down. And is that a common experience that people have now that they've been reflecting? They wanna share it?

Peggy Guest [00:34:30] Yes. Yes. So what I usually tell my coaching clients is I'll have something in mind when you come to my office, when we have an appointment that I'd like to share with you or teach you or suggest that you read, or we'll do an exercise together that will demonstrate something, I'll have something in mind. And I want you to come with what has come up for you in the office that might be relevant to what we've been doing. And so about half the time in coaching is spent with each of those sides, or each of those tasks, or each of those parts of the conversation. So the answer is yes. Most people, it's not so much that they wanna show me something that might be true, but they wanna talk about how they moved in the last, I usually see people about every three weeks how they moved from that last session to where they are now. Like, what occurred, what made it worse, what made it better? What do we still need to work out? What's exciting? And what I'm always tracking is the thinking and feeling pattern of the client so that I can name it, here's what you did to make that happen. 'cause when people come and say to me, here's what you Peggy did to make my life better, I always wanna say, and here's what you did to make it happen.

Peggy Guest [00:36:10] It's, I, I want it to be really clear that the work is the work of the client. I'm a thinking partner and I give them some ideas, but they're the ones who do the work. So if they have to do something more courageous than they've done before, they're the ones who use that courage.

Vance Crowe [00:36:28] Yeah. That's something that I, I, I definitely can relate with it. You would have a challenge that I would arrive at, like, you should think about something in this way. And then meeting with you was like the end of a chapter in a book or the beginning of a new one. Right. And so it marks time because it, on those three weeks, you go back on your rate, I go back to my adventure, my whatever I'm working on. And then when you and I would stop and come up for air, then you could kind of sort and process through that. And that kind of goes back to the archetypal the stories,

Peggy Guest [00:37:03] Right? Because

Vance Crowe [00:37:04] I, I mean, the more that I learn about Carl Jung, the more that I feel like we are all inside of our own adventure story,

Peggy Guest [00:37:12] Right.

Vance Crowe [00:37:12] And

Peggy Guest [00:37:13] That we're all creating a story.

Vance Crowe [00:37:15] Okay.

Peggy Guest [00:37:16] So one of his concepts is the concept of individuation. That it's our really sacred gift to be ourselves and our sacred responsibility to become ourselves. So that requires kind of a deep dive into selfness, you know, like what made me who I am? What have I already done so far on the journey, and what do I need to do more of? And what are the values that drive that so that I'm, I'm really exploring who am I and what do I need to do to be more me in a very humble way. Because the idea of individuation is it's the most important thing you do, and the least important kind of to the universe.

Vance Crowe [00:38:09] That sounds very eastern, almost like meditation.

Peggy Guest [00:38:12] It is very eastern. I mean, he studied in the east and came up with some of his ideas there. I realize it's been a long time since I did that deep dive into learning from his writings and from the writings of then current day therapists and, and practitioners in Jungian psychology. But I, but I do know that a number of his ideas came from the east. And one of them I think was the idea of transcendent function. That when you have a conundrum and you have sort of two sides, like the good mother and the evil mother, or like, you know, you wanna do X and you wanna do Y or you wanna do X and you have a bunch of obstacles that are in the way. He proposes that somehow you mind will create what he calls a transcendent function that transcends the conflict and allows you to move forward. So symbols are often the symbol, symbols are often the symbol of the transcendent function. In other words, you find an image or a set of words or a poem or a fairytale that helps you think differently about what you've been thinking about and move forward.

Peggy Guest [00:39:45] So I suppose that in coaching, the thinking partner is somebody who listens to you and provides some feedback that may for you be a transcendent function.

Vance Crowe [00:40:01] This mentor that I have named Pete, he's 99 years old, and he exposed me to a lot of art. And it was something that I did because he wanted me to do, but I didn't really get it.

Peggy Guest [00:40:13] And

Vance Crowe [00:40:14] It sounds like that is precisely what you're describing to me, is the experience of having someone expose you to ideas that it's not take this thing and think of it exactly the way that I do. It's take this representation and learn the wisdom from it so that, that you can Yeah. Move on. Really. Like, and I think about that in terms of Charles Bukowski. Are you familiar with this author?

Peggy Guest [00:40:40] No. So

Vance Crowe [00:40:40] He's a poet and he's this like, you know, if he reads his own poetry, you can hear the gargled smoke cigarette smoking voice, and he's, he's, you know, vile and spends time with loose women and, you know, wastes his time. But he has these poems about taking on life and you only have this one chance and keep going even when it's hard. Anyone could experience that, that whether it's today or a hundred years from now, as long as the language would translate and feel moved by it, it, it would make them want to carry a heavier burden.

Peggy Guest [00:41:19] And

Vance Crowe [00:41:19] That's what the symbols are that you're talking about. Things like the cross or the yin and yang sign. Or am I putting words in your mouth like you

Peggy Guest [00:41:27] No, no, but what I was thinking, I think you, you read my face because I was thinking that it, it isn't quite true that everybody would respond to a given poem or a given piece of art. It's more like we all have something we respond to.

Vance Crowe [00:41:44] Okay.

Peggy Guest [00:41:45] And

Vance Crowe [00:41:45] Yeah,

Peggy Guest [00:41:46] Very. So for me, it might be a poem for you, it might be a piece of art for me, it might be a film for you, it might be a walk in the park. But one, another concept that comes from Jungian thinkers is the idea of synchronicity, which this woman I read called it the art of meaningful coincidence. And often your transcendent function will come from that. You know, you're

Vance Crowe [00:42:12] Putting two and two together,

Peggy Guest [00:42:14] Right? You connect the dots, you have something come in front of you, you know, like you did with the coaching with me. And like I often do in that wave phenomenon and talking to you, it's like people give you ideas that spark your thinking or feeling or thinking and feeling or movement and you go with it.

Vance Crowe [00:42:41] Yes. I mean, what you're describing is actually kind of scary for me because as I left Monsanto or Bayer essentially, and started in this job where I'm speaking and consulting and I'm meeting a lot more people and all of a sudden you can start putting together, oh, I could introduce this person to that person and they can work together. But you start seeing how big the projects could be and how hard it will be to actually accomplish it. So this thing that you're talking about, the transcendent function, I don't think it's all like smiles and laughter and happiness. It's like you coming to the realization that if you want to get further up the mountain, you've got a lot of work to do.

Peggy Guest [00:43:25] Right? Really, the transcendent function comes into play when you're struggling.

Vance Crowe [00:43:30] Oh.

Peggy Guest [00:43:32] So it's it, and you might not even know you're struggling. It might be unconscious. So you, you suddenly decide to go a new way. And, and it's not until later that you say, wow, I didn't really realize how unhappy I was then.

Vance Crowe [00:43:45] Yeah. The unconscious mind is something that I've blown off for a long time. But when you hear, I, I listened to a series of Carl Jung's lectures and he started talking about the dreams being, if your unconscious mind doesn't have any other voice, that's the only, let's just imagine that that's the only way that it can get out. Wouldn't you at least wanna write them down? Like, wouldn't you at least want to, to sort through them? What do you think of dreams and dream interpretation? It gets pretty wooey pretty fast, right?

Peggy Guest [00:44:15] You know, it just, it was one of those synchronicities that just came to me when I first started studying Jung and reading about dreams. And I start now, this was very ballsy of me. I started leading a dream group and I led dream groups for, oh, probably 10 years, maybe 15. They were very, very meaningful to the people in the group. So it was really, really hard to stop doing it. But I did stop doing it. And I, but I loved it and I learned so much. And one of the things,

Vance Crowe [00:44:55] What goes on in a dream group, well,

Peggy Guest [00:44:57] Hang on one second. One of the things I learned is really how differently people are wired and how they dream differently. You know, what kind of imagery and what kind of drama. It was so interesting. I, that was a wonderful part of my life. So what goes on in a dream group? IWI was the leader. I read, I think I told you one of the books I read was called The Jung and Sono Dream book. And I read a lot about dreams, but I had never been in a dream group and I had never had really very meaningful dream work that somebody else did with me as a client. Okay.

Vance Crowe [00:45:43] But

Peggy Guest [00:45:45] The way the group worked is I would have oh, six or seven people, they were consistent. I mean, I, the first couple of times I did it, I did it over a summer and ran it for six or eight weeks. But, but after I got into it and got into the swing of it, most people would stay and then there for a couple of years. And then there might be space in the group when two or three people left.

Vance Crowe [00:46:10] I would imagine the people in the group would be very selective about who they want in the

Peggy Guest [00:46:15] Group, in the group

Vance Crowe [00:46:15] Hearing their dreams. And

Peggy Guest [00:46:17] Well, the thing that was so interesting to me is that, so let me backtrack. I, what would happen is a person would tell a dream and then the Jungian Oid Dream workbook is basically a workbook that helps guide you to, you know, sort of what kinds of questions would you ask and what kind of symbols are you looking at and how do you, how do you encounter the dream and think about it with other people. And, and so when you said people wouldn't want, they'd be very picky about who was there. The thing I found so interesting was that you got to know the people at a really deep level, but you didn't necessarily know them

Vance Crowe [00:47:03] On a social level,

Peggy Guest [00:47:04] On, on a sort of daily life. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:47:05] You,

Peggy Guest [00:47:06] You could have somebody in Dream Group and not know very much about what they do and what their life is like.

Vance Crowe [00:47:12] Oh wow. What an, what a different experience. Yeah.

Peggy Guest [00:47:16] It was that, that's something that really surprised me. But over time, I mean, one of these groups I had for probably three or four years, and over time, of course you got to know each other and then they would get together outside of Dream Group. But it wasn't a therapy group. It wa it was really to, to seek to understand dreams. It wasn't to make people better or heal them or anything. It was simply to work, to play with really dreams.

Vance Crowe [00:47:49] And how do you, how do you make sure that when you're playing with dreams, you're not the same as a child walking through life that's two years old saying airplane firetruck, you know, like, you know, you can identify it, but you're not really saying very much. You're, you're just, I, to me, something about dream interpretation feels very, very woowoo.

Peggy Guest [00:48:13] Well, what does woowoo mean? It sort of scares you. You mean

Vance Crowe [00:48:19] Not real? Or something that only superstitious people might believe. Have

Peggy Guest [00:48:24] You ever done it?

Vance Crowe [00:48:25] No.

Peggy Guest [00:48:26] Okay. Well, I thought what you meant by woo woo is it for when people do it, it might take them aback because it, it rings true for them. So

Vance Crowe [00:48:46] That's what talking with you is like that, that you would say things that would be like all the way in like deep and you'd be like, whoa, so go on. I, I now understand what you're saying. So

Peggy Guest [00:49:00] I think that people who don't believe that it's viable or a thing just would never come to dream group.

Vance Crowe [00:49:07] Okay.

Peggy Guest [00:49:08] I mean, or if they came, they wouldn't stay. It would be annoying. I mean, not so much woo woo, but just like not speak to them. Right.

Vance Crowe [00:49:15] Okay.

Peggy Guest [00:49:16] Like the

Vance Crowe [00:49:17] Same way that poetry might speak to you or me or different kinds of poems or different writers. Right. Okay. Fair

Peggy Guest [00:49:22] Enough. And so the people who were in the group were very, very moved by the experience and found it to be insightful. Now, I never pretested or post-test it or asked people. I mean, it was very clear to me how meaningful it was to the people in the group. But I never said, how did you change because of this? Or what did this wasn't

Vance Crowe [00:49:52] That temptation

Peggy Guest [00:49:53] For you, did this do for you? I

Vance Crowe [00:49:54] Mean, I would think this

Peggy Guest [00:49:55] No, because I'm not basically a scientist. I should do more of that in all of my work. I should say. What were you like when you came in and what were you like when you left? But I don't, I don't tend to do that because I feel like I can see it, but I don't, I don't ask for verification and particularly not a measurable verification.

Vance Crowe [00:50:20] So I'm totally ambivalent right now because on the one hand I spend a lot of time understanding the rigor of science and replicatable studies and you know, what, what does it take to really know something? And then on the other hand, I think about the value of you being 100% present in the moment. I mean, I think that that's the gift of not looking back to do research and trying to be like, now how far did you progress and how did we get it? Was that your great gift of listening requires a hundred percent presence as far as I can tell. I mean, you put all of your intellectual capacity, or at least you put as much as I have know anybody can put into a conversation, you are entirely there.

Peggy Guest [00:51:03] That is true. And I do rely on other people to do the studies. So I read, I read really a lot. And so I could read like say for instance about dreams, I could read 10 books that tell me how to do it and what it meant to the writers of the book and how they studied it. But I could also find 10 books that I chose to not read, or articles that say, this is who we, there's no such thing. Your brain doesn't really do that. We have brain studies that show the opposite. I think you can do that about anything in science. You know, this is the truth. No, that's the truth.

Vance Crowe [00:51:50] Yeah. But you can't do it in things like mathematics. I mean, the further that you No, that's, you get away from mathematics and, and physics. You're like, we know it all the way until it breaks down here. But I'll give it to you that I think that each one of these layers, you know, from math, from philosophy to math, to physics, to chemistry, to biology, to biochemistry to psychology is probably the order, you know, I'm probably missing some, but your level is no less important. It's just abstracted. Right. You, you're required to, in order to find out what makes a mind work, you have to know a whole lot about a lot of things. And the, and and at the end you're standing on top of a lot of assumptions.

Peggy Guest [00:52:34] Yes. And at the same time, I am seeing what the biologists and the neuroscientist and the physicist, if that applies, has to say about what I'm doing. I mean, I do read it, I just don't do it myself. Okay. And I, I know that I'm an unusually intuitive person and I, and I found myself, I migrated to a career where that was a benefit. Is it, it's also a drawback. I mean, you know, like psychology, PhDs are scientists and I would never have passed through that, that the eye of that particular needle, I wouldn't have been able to do that kind of education. 'cause I don't have that kind of mind. At least I think I wouldn't have been able to, I mean, you know, maybe, maybe the mind molds to what it's exposed to. So maybe if I was in a PhD psychology program, the way it's now taught, which is really scientific and neuroscience, I would do well if, if I were 20, 22. I don't know that that's sort of the road not taken. But what I do know is the mind I have developed is very intuitive listening yin and the mind that a friend of mine who's a neuroscientist has developed is, is just different.

Peggy Guest [00:54:20] One of the things that really helped me in my work, I was working then as a therapist, was the notion, the theory of multiple intelligence that, of Howard Gardner and that people are basically wired such that they think differently and that the new city school here teaches to that theory. So they teach children to know themselves well enough to know what kind, what kind of thinking strengths they have. I think the, the equivalent for adult life now would be the strengths finder.

Vance Crowe [00:55:00] Okay.

Peggy Guest [00:55:02] But, and, and a lot of programs in corporate leadership are teaching people to understand how differently the people on their team might operate. So the disc, the Myers-Briggs.

Vance Crowe [00:55:16] So I, when I saw HR programs and I worked at the World Bank on, in the HR leadership programs.

Peggy Guest [00:55:23] And how long ago was that?

Vance Crowe [00:55:25] I was in my late twenties, so I was maybe t maybe 2010.

Peggy Guest [00:55:31] So not that long ago. But, but really a lot has happened in leadership programs in businesses in those 10 years.

Vance Crowe [00:55:42] Really?

Peggy Guest [00:55:42] Well they didn't really used to exist that much.

Vance Crowe [00:55:45] I mean, they would show these like graphs, right? And it'd be like, there are four quadrants and the person is extroverted and da da da. And I mean like, it was so painful and slow. But you've seen, you, you, you find those two have been helpful to people. I mean, that's not fair for me to say. Like I I just described like the worst case scenario. But you're saying, you know, corporate HR programs that are teaching leadership development and they work.

Peggy Guest [00:56:15] Yes. And it's not the same as coaching.

Vance Crowe [00:56:18] Okay.

Peggy Guest [00:56:19] So in, in a leadership program that a business takes on for their whole business, they need some way to enter the arena and, and some reason for doing it. So I think the reason for doing it is to help the people higher up in the food chain and the hierarchy understand better how to inspire their workers and how to attract and, and keep workers. So this is moving from 20 years before that a top down model where you just did what the boss said and you kept your same job for 40 years and there wasn't any questioning or any self-development as a result of work unless you were just extremely lucky or you moved up that food chain yourself. But, but the idea that I, I think what corporate leadership programs were teaching to is helping leaders understand what we now call emotional and social intelligence. In other words, understand who the people are that you're, that you want to produce the work of the organization and what will motivate them to do that well and what helps them be more productive. So the typologies are ways to shortcut helping leaders know that you have to learn to appeal to workers who are going to deliver in different ways.

Peggy Guest [00:58:03] And you have to learn how to give them feedback to teach them what you want. So if you want, if it's really imperative for your workers to get things done on time so that the next team can take it to the next step, you have to be able to give people feedback because only a certain percentage of people are genetically by, by, by the way they were born tend to be on time.

Vance Crowe [00:58:33] Okay. That's me. Yeah.

Peggy Guest [00:58:35] And then the rest of 'em have to be, have to figure out what would motivate them to like twist their personalities in order to be on time in certain settings. And in certain ways,

Vance Crowe [00:58:47] This is striking to me, my wife, the aerospace engineer, perfect. Like she is one of the greatest human beings alive, cannot be on time to save her life. And it drives me insane.

Peggy Guest [00:59:00] Well it sort of goes against my concept of what an aerospace engineer would need to know in, in other words, I think of that kind of mind as being, having an easier time being on time. But people are always surprising.

Vance Crowe [00:59:14] Well, I think that it has something to do with, and and I see this happening for me on, on finishing a consulting, you know, job or getting ready for a speech. When, when you start running out of time, then you reprioritize things and you start making decisions. And I think she doesn't like making decisions because she wants to keep as many options open as possible. 'cause she's planning for contingencies. So

Peggy Guest [00:59:38] I

Vance Crowe [00:59:39] Think she's just, and then loses all track of time drives me nuts.

Peggy Guest [00:59:42] Well, it, and so what life asks of you is to understand it and to, and to widen the lens to look at, you know, what are the things I do love about her? What makes her wonderful? And recognize that if she changes her, her relationship to timeliness, it's not gonna be because of you, it's gonna be because she has found some motivation to do it differently.

Vance Crowe [01:00:11] Oh, that's interesting. That's,

Peggy Guest [01:00:14] And she still may not do it.

Vance Crowe [01:00:17] So this brings up a a good point. When you are talking with executives, people are coming to visit you that have moved up in the organization, usually in some competitive, very complex businesses and and companies. What is the difference that you see or what's the scope of things that motivate people? Because I, the common construction is you move up as an executive 'cause you want money or power. But it would seem to me that that would not be how you would describe what motivates people.

Peggy Guest [01:00:48] Well, it does motivate some people at, but that motivation doesn't guarantee that people actually move up. So I, I think it's kind of a complex thing. It's, there are a whole lot of variables. And I also think that the paradigm in business has shifted over, or I'm gonna say 30 or 40 years from the old sort of militaristic top down. I'm the boss, I know what you should be doing, I'm gonna tell you what to do. And there can be very little variation. And I, I think part of that is demographics. It's that, well, first of all, there are more people in the workforce who were not raised with that model. Parents don't act like that.

Vance Crowe [01:01:40] Yeah, that's right.

Peggy Guest [01:01:41] And so people, I mean, this is what the big complaint is about the millennials. They, they, that they think they can do what they want to do. Well, they kind of can because the workplace has changed. And so there's, you know, there's more of an attempt to attract and retain those individuals as workers. So now I've lost my train of thought. Well, I, I'm, I, I'm, I'm basically saying it's very complex. It's not, there's not a simple answer to what motivates people to move up and to what's the right ground in which they can move up. So what are the company mores and what are, it was the company culture, what do they groom in their people? So when I was talking about the change over a number of years, I remember somebody giving a talk from Monsanto about how leadership was needing to change because they had this new matrix model of having different segments of the company need to collaborate with one another. And collaboration was not, it wasn't even a word then. I mean, of course it was a word, but it wasn't a word that was commonly used. How do you, how do you have all the cogs of the wheel match up so that the wheel keeps going?

Peggy Guest [01:03:12] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:03:12] To put it in, in perspective, you could have a company that does breeding for the plants, and then you have another group that does GMOs, the, the genes that you wanna put into those plants. Right? And you would think they work really close together, but they're doing very different models. They're doing very different jobs, but yet they need to work together, right.

Peggy Guest [01:03:30] In order

Vance Crowe [01:03:30] To share information. But the people are reporting up not over. So if you don't have a reporting relationship with solving the problems of the person that's across the hall from you in a different department, then it's sometimes difficult to get people to cooperate because their financial incentives are set up such that they only want to report to the person that can change their bonus. That maybe that's not the only result.

Peggy Guest [01:03:52] Well, that's, well actually that's what Monsanto did. That was such a genius thing at the time that I heard this woman speaking, which is they bonus people for developing their people.

Vance Crowe [01:04:03] That's right.

Peggy Guest [01:04:04] They

Vance Crowe [01:04:05] Definitely do

Peggy Guest [01:04:05] Bonus people for collaborating across, and they move people around a lot. So they'll, you know, somebody who was on this side of the business is now on this side of the business. So they, they learn and they, they value collaboration. They value knowing people in other parts of the business. In fact, I remember that was one of the things that people wanted you to do, to use coaching for, which was to under, and a lot of people have to do this, especially scientists, to understand the value of meeting and greeting people in all parts of the business, really knowing who they are, what they're doing, what they stand for, what they wanna make happen.

Vance Crowe [01:04:49] Yes, that's exactly right. And, and it seemed so disjointed from where I was going. And I remember you saying, well, that's, they're telling you very clearly what the path is. Right? And if you want that path, that's what it is. This is where it goes. This is what it looks like. And you maybe your transformative moment, or these are my words, but like my, what's the Jungian thing of, of moving on to another level?

Peggy Guest [01:05:18] Transcendental function?

Vance Crowe [01:05:19] The transcendental function was if you, you have a choice, you can either change to adapt to that, or you can change and do something else. But you can't be mad at them for not giving you the situation that you want. That's not one of the options.

Peggy Guest [01:05:34] Right. And

Vance Crowe [01:05:35] I was,

Peggy Guest [01:05:35] Or it'll, it'll just take a lot of your energy.

Vance Crowe [01:05:38] Right? And are you sure that that's what you want to do?

Peggy Guest [01:05:40] Right.

Vance Crowe [01:05:41] The, and you, you could only come to those conclusions with deep listening. And I, I keep coming back to this, but how do you not have a night with too much wine the night before and have trouble concentrating because you have to be 100% on. At least that's what it feels like to be able to be this insightful. Or maybe not. Maybe it's just easy for you.

Peggy Guest [01:06:07] No, I think, I think that's true. I mean, I, so I, I practiced for a long time. I think I'm somewhat that way by nature then I've, I had good teachers, good mentors, good colleagues. I mean, one of the things I've been very, very lucky about is I have really friends who are mentors and friends who are colleagues. When I, when I worked as a therapist, you, you couldn't really talk about your work, I mean, individual people that you worked with. But we talked about ideas and we talked about best practices. And it's one of the things that made me want to become a coach, because I wanted a different contract with the client. I mean, confidentiality is important, but it's not quite as sacred as it is in psychotherapy. And I, I wanted to be able to think with my partners about how do we, you know, what is it that we're doing with our clients and why is it important? How is it that it makes such a difference? And it was very clear to me that it makes a difference. I mean, I, and one of the nice things about coaching also is that I kind of work with the village. I know people's assistants. I know some of the people on their team. I know their bosses. I know the HR people.

Vance Crowe [01:07:38] 'cause you take on somebody as a client, like for me, right?

Peggy Guest [01:07:41] Not

Vance Crowe [01:07:42] Only did we meet twice or three times, and then you said, okay, put together a list of, of people that you interact with, people that you, that are in your direct line of reporting people that you respect people from. And there were, there was no shortage of very, very competent, intelligent people. I really respected. And then you go and talk with them about me. And then you came back and you had feedback. And I would rank that with one of the most uncomfortable things. You know, you hand me a report and then you say, go look over this, and then the next time we'll get together and talk about it. But did you gimme high level overview before I took it?

Peggy Guest [01:08:27] Before you took the report? Before

Vance Crowe [01:08:28] I took Yeah. And read it.

Peggy Guest [01:08:29] We did it together. That's

Vance Crowe [01:08:30] Right. That was scary. And I,

Peggy Guest [01:08:32] Well, I think it was traumatic for you because I hope it's okay if I say

Vance Crowe [01:08:36] It. Yeah, this is fine.

Peggy Guest [01:08:39] Because you were in a controversy. You were, you were trying to figure out what you were gonna do next and what the career trajectory was going to be. And they were trying to figure out how they would fit you into their career trajectory because what you did wasn't exactly what the other people did.

Vance Crowe [01:09:02] Right.

Peggy Guest [01:09:03] And so people, the people I interviewed were perplexed and, and, and had a variety of ideas about what you should do to be successful there. They wanted you to be successful, but some of the things they suggested you didn't really wanna do.

Vance Crowe [01:09:22] Yeah. Like supply chain and finance. It was like, I mean, and now when I first got it, it's like

Peggy Guest [01:09:28] Guessing me to be an accountant.

Vance Crowe [01:09:29] Right? And I was so offended because I was like, I'm working on this thing. I think it's the most important thing in the world. And that's when I realized they don't think that. And that's okay now. But at the time I was like, but guys, look at it. It is the most important thing. And I think that our experience was me waking up to what matters to you doesn't necessarily matter to other people. They have other things they're working on and

Peggy Guest [01:09:58] It just, right. And it, it doesn't fit with the company culture.

Vance Crowe [01:10:01] Right.

Peggy Guest [01:10:02] So I bring that up to say, you said, am I remembering this right? And I'm like, no, but I'm not surprised. Because when I give those, I call 'em stakeholder feedback reports, what almost all overachievers like you and me and leaders do, is focus on what, what people are having trouble with and what's called for. So the report is very heavily laden toward what's going well, what do people appreciate about you? What do they see in you that they really value? Why are they working so hard to keep you there? And most people forget that part.

Vance Crowe [01:10:51] Oh yeah. You just skip right past that and all the,

Peggy Guest [01:10:53] All the, and by the way, I sat with you while you read it.

Vance Crowe [01:10:57] That's

Peggy Guest [01:10:58] Right. I would never have sent it. That's

Vance Crowe [01:10:59] Right. You're

Peggy Guest [01:11:00] Right home with you. You're

Vance Crowe [01:11:01] Right.

Peggy Guest [01:11:01] And I never send them in cyberspace because I think of them as reflective of a moment in time. I don't want it to live beyond that

Vance Crowe [01:11:09] Moment. There's no other document on earth that's like that. Right. That that is a reflection that people gave you, mediated through a person that cares about me. Or, or Right. You know, has a, has my best interest in in mind.

Peggy Guest [01:11:23] And so did they

Vance Crowe [01:11:24] And they did too. That's right. But you're talking about things of like, this is a dragon we see you need to face and you don't see it. But when you look at it, it might be pretty scary. Yeah.

Peggy Guest [01:11:34] And

Vance Crowe [01:11:34] That's what that experience is.

Peggy Guest [01:11:35] Well, and so that's why you remember it

Vance Crowe [01:11:38] Like yesterday.

Peggy Guest [01:11:39] Oh

Vance Crowe [01:11:39] Yeah.

Peggy Guest [01:11:39] That in that way. Yeah. And I, and I've had people that I've delivered them to who, you know, put 'em in a drawer right after and never look at them again. Or it sort of becomes lingo around the company like, oh, I've been 360.

Vance Crowe [01:11:55] Oh, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

Peggy Guest [01:11:56] It's sort of like, I had to eat my humble pie too.

Vance Crowe [01:11:59] So does everybody have to eat humble pie or are there people that get those that it's just marvelous?

Peggy Guest [01:12:04] No, because the company wouldn't pay to have it done if it was gonna be just marvelous. And I wouldn't accept the job if it was gonna be just marvelous. I mean, the idea is to say you're at a turning point. The company is spending a lot of money to figure out how to get you past this turning point. You have to take in some feedback that we have not been able to successfully get you to see.

Vance Crowe [01:12:32] Right.

Peggy Guest [01:12:33] And now that's their point of view, or at least one or two people's point of view that they've given you feedback, they want you to see something, you haven't seen it, and they, and they can't move you forward without your understanding it. So it's only done under those circumstances.

Vance Crowe [01:12:53] And I, I think that there, there, I, I don't know how to describe this, but my wife and I have this terminology of, you know, I have a lot of friends that are somewhere on the spectrum. They're highly logical people, but their ability to interact with socially is not always that great. And Annie and I talk about sometimes people do stuff and you're like, why did you do that? And then we always like look at it and we say, you know, really what I think they're trying to say is, friend, friend a friend. I wanna be a friend. And even though it feels weird to you, look at it from that context and you can see that other people don't always know how to communicate. So when you were first explaining this to me, like there's some advice that they need to tell you that you're not getting, I thought it meant that they told me and then I just wasn't listening. And so then I'm sitting there being like, they never told me this. And what you realize is an org, a corporation is not designed to be able to speak clearly with one fluent voice. They don't even always know until you sit down and say, well, what other areas do you think he could work on? Where would you suggest he goes? Like, you are helping other people think through the situation in that environment in some way. Like the way that you're helping the, the person you're coaching. Would you agree with that?

Peggy Guest [01:14:09] Oh yes. 'cause I'm working for both. I mean, and that, that's a hard job to have. I'm working for the people who have asked for this help for you and with you. And so I need to be able to get your agreement about how you're gonna communicate to them that you do or don't wanna do what they want you to do.

Vance Crowe [01:14:36] Yeah, that's right. I I, it took me a long time because, and I think that this happens and anytime you're in an organization when you need to have that transformative event, when you need to have that transcendent event, the reason that you're struggling is because you haven't accepted what you, the lesson that you need to learn. Right.

Peggy Guest [01:14:59] Well, you haven't accepted that they want you to do something you don't wanna do. You have, I mean, one of the reasons I love this book called thanks for the feedback.

Vance Crowe [01:15:09] Okay. I

Peggy Guest [01:15:09] Don't remember if I shared that with you. But essentially what they say in the book is feedback is a gift. People are telling you what they need from you. And some people do that more or less artfully and more or less articulately and more or less clearly. But they're trying, 'cause it's their job. It's really important that they convey to you what you need to do to move forward in the job.

Vance Crowe [01:15:37] I mean, I remember being really offended, you know, this is why when I came in and the very beginning of our conversation, I'm very suspicious of you because I'm like, what's going on? That they can't just tell me, you know, just tell me what the rules are or whatever.

Peggy Guest [01:15:51] Well, and can I trust you to talk about myself in a way that won't get translated wrongly back to them? Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:15:58] Absolutely. And

Peggy Guest [01:15:59] So what I tell my clients is I'm not gonna tell anyone anything directly that you've said to me. And, but I'm gonna help you do that because I want, I want there to become a better understanding between what you wanna have happen and what they wanna have happen. That

Vance Crowe [01:16:19] That's right. And you know, I, I think about this. Like, I expected that when I came in, we were gonna have like a therapeutic relationship that it was like they were saying something was broken in me and now you're gonna like counsel me through it to fix it. And when I began to realize that, it's like, no, you're kind of trapped in a way of thinking. And we need to give you a way to explore that box that you're within from different angles. And eventually you're gonna have a better perspective of its size and shape and what you can do within it. And we'll go from there. But first you need to be able to see the size and shape of it. So, you know, it wasn't like you're not able to get along with your coworkers. People are angry with you. It's like,

Peggy Guest [01:17:02] But that is true for some of my clients,

Vance Crowe [01:17:04] Really

Peggy Guest [01:17:07] A lot of them

Vance Crowe [01:17:08] That people are an because they're bad communicators themselves.

Peggy Guest [01:17:13] My client.

Vance Crowe [01:17:14] Yeah. Well, I mean, like, yeah. What, what, what other challenges do people have? I only have my perspective for the challenges that I had.

Peggy Guest [01:17:20] Oh. I think a lot of times people who are very stressed about deliverables get cranky and they,

Vance Crowe [01:17:28] Oh,

Peggy Guest [01:17:28] You know, they get impatient. They say negative things, they, to the people who are not deliver, delivering at the speed they want it to be. So I, I need to help them see alternatives and also see how what they're doing is landing on people in a way that is making people too stressed and uncomfortable. So the leader's stress is bleeding into the worker's stress and things aren't getting delivered. So learning how to inspire in a positive way, rather than berate in a punitive way, is a big learning. And, and I, I'd say a lot of my early work was doing that. I think more and more companies have made it clear we need to keep our workers and nobody can berate each other. You have to learn ways to

Vance Crowe [01:18:28] Communicate. Oh yeah. I mean, if somebody yelled at me at work, that would be shocking. It would be, it would,

Peggy Guest [01:18:33] It wasn't shocking 15, 20 years ago.

Vance Crowe [01:18:35] That's interesting.

Peggy Guest [01:18:37] And, but it's, or even not yelling, but belittling, you know, that that's not, you can't do that in a workplace.

Vance Crowe [01:18:48] I can't even imagine a time, I mean, I worked in, in like landscaping work and paving work and you know, the hard scrabble work, those rules aren't there. You, you can berate people, you can yell at people. It's not as common probably as it once was, but that still went on. But in the corporate world, that never happens. If you did, you could get up and walk down to HR and be like, you know, the person just yelled at me and Right.

Peggy Guest [01:19:14] Something would happen, said this belittling thing or Right. Yeah. So people have learned alternative ways, which is good. So when you talk, we were talking earlier about leadership training at the corporate level. That's one of the things that the training covers is how to speak positively to your workers. They don't say, don't yell, but that's the subtext, you know?

Vance Crowe [01:19:38] Yeah. You're, you're right. I guess I, I guess it's one of those things, like you were saying before, it's a cultural difference that has happened so starkly to somebody my age. I've never even seen the opposite of

Peggy Guest [01:19:49] You. You haven't had the other kind of behavior. Right.

Vance Crowe [01:19:51] That's right. Yeah. It seems to me like you have an appreciation for freedoms that I don't have. Right. Like you were describing this concept of, of moving women towards more equal treatment. Really what it sounded like to me was women becoming conscious of their autonomy or their ability to exert their will on the world. And that, that, that wasn't always the case. But as far as I can tell, that's a cultural change that's always been there. Hmm.

Peggy Guest [01:20:23] Well, I, yeah, and I was talking about the, then in the sixties and seventies, one of my earliest experiences in graduate school was a couple of my classmates made, what did they call it? A stimulus film. And the, there were two films and it was, and they were aimed at women, kind of 30-year-old women, 40-year-old women then who were considering going back to work after having stayed home to raise children or having never worked. And the films were going to be little vignettes of people telling them why going back to work wasn't a good idea. And so, you know, then the phraseology was very clear to all women. I mean, it always is to the underclass, you know, like what the words are that convey superiority of the people, uttering them and inferiority of you.

Vance Crowe [01:21:28] Is that real? Can you give me an example of that?

Peggy Guest [01:21:33] I probably could. I have to think, I mean, like, I'm thinking of these stimulus films and one of them was a husband who was saying to his wife, and it just shows the husband, not the wife, but honey, you, I, I don't want you to go back to work. I make x amount of money. I'm, I make enough money to, you know, raise our children and have our home. And if you go back to work, you're not gonna make enough money to pay for daycare. They didn't even call it daycare then, you know, who's gonna take care of the kids is basically what it was. But it's, it's sort of saying all these stumbling blocks for the wife going back to work and saying it in a very sort of snooty way. Like how could you even be thinking this? So yes, women of that era could come up with those, you know, five in a minute

Vance Crowe [01:22:29] Okay.

Peggy Guest [01:22:29] Of that kind of phraseology. And actually women and people of color can do it right now today about what happens in their workplace now. It's just much more subtle.

Vance Crowe [01:22:41] It's very good for me to hear you say this because when I hear you say it, I'm probably more open to it than I am when I see the people screaming on social media about the wrongs that have happened, like to me it's so bam bombastic that it's hard for me to even stop and want to hear what they have to say. But when I hear you describe it, I'm sitting here thinking like, wait a second. I would really wanna know

Peggy Guest [01:23:10] If

Vance Crowe [01:23:10] There were things that I were doing, but I don't want to put myself in a position where somebody can just come along and hit me because I'm, you know, a a white guy in of a certain age and, you know, like, it, it, I feel a tension there. Do you un do you understand that tension?

Peggy Guest [01:23:25] Oh, sure, sure. And I, I have always felt that it's not, you don't get human beings to move by being strident. It just, it, it doesn't really happen that way. Individual human beings, the ones you're married to or that's your boss or you, you have to be able to imagine their point of view and approach them in a way that they can hear. And, and most women in's work world don't want to do that because they, they don't want to bring it up because they don't, they don't want it to be part of their own c career trajectory. I actually don't know the motivations. I just know that it, it happens. Like I've had several clients for whom their bosses did not really fully respect their maternity leaves and would make critical comments about it before they went out on maternity leave and call them, you know, with questions while they were on maternity leave, call them into work, expect them to work at home during maternity leave. So, and you know, women are who are home alone or even with a husband or their own mothers, they're barely getting enough sleep, they're nursing every couple of hours.

Peggy Guest [01:25:05] They're exhausted. They can't be working. And so I think that's one of the most common,

Vance Crowe [01:25:15] It seems like there's this really terrible dichotomy or choice, right? So let's say you're a woman that has a career, you've been very driven and done well. So there are a lot of responsibilities on you. And then you finally decide, alright, I'm gonna have children now a little bit later. I'm more tired, I don't have that 20-year-old energy. And they, they have the child. And now taking care of that child becomes real for how much energy it takes to do it.

Peggy Guest [01:25:45] And

Vance Crowe [01:25:45] So to return to their job and try and be who they were before they had a child is not very, very few people could do it,

Peggy Guest [01:25:53] Right?

Vance Crowe [01:25:54] If, if you're, if they are bearing most of the weight of that child, or even, let's just say 60% would still be a lot on you more if it, it was just a little bit more than half, it would make a big difference. Do you see why there is a, a wage gap? Because like inherently, people that are trying to both be an executive in a corporation where things are fast moving and one of them has a child that they are the primary caregiver for and the other one doesn't, it seems like the person that's making the choice to work all the time for the business is being more productive for that business. So what do you think about that Dicho? We don't want to pay men and women differently.

Peggy Guest [01:26:36] Well, you're talking about kind of the top of the food chain and I, I think the wage gap exists at every level.

Vance Crowe [01:26:46] Oh, okay.

Peggy Guest [01:26:47] So I've

Vance Crowe [01:26:48] Not heard this before

Peggy Guest [01:26:50] And I, and you know, I'm not a numbers person. I don't know the statistics and I,

Vance Crowe [01:26:55] I won't hold you to it. I mean, I like the, the idea of it,

Peggy Guest [01:26:59] But I do think that women being mothers is one of the early contributors to wage gap thinking, which is she won't be able to work as much as her guy counterpart and she won't give our company as much as her guy counterpart because she is really doing two jobs, which even for women who don't have children, is actually statistically and researched true

Vance Crowe [01:27:34] That they do more work than their male counterparts.

Peggy Guest [01:27:36] That women do not more work at the office, although that's also true, but more work at home. So even if a, a woman doesn't have children statistically, I don't mean this is true of every couple, but statistically she does more of the remembering you need to roll a toilet paper of inviting people to dinner of cooking the dinners. Just she does more of the household management plus her paid for job. And there's also research that shows that women who are,

Vance Crowe [01:28:16] So I'm, I'm struggling to believe you on this, but I have no reason. I have no like counter this is very healthy for me because this is not things I encounter very much that that, that I would be like, I don't think that's right. I think men probably do half the housework, but I have no idea. I know,

Peggy Guest [01:28:32] Well, you don't think it through when I think men of your generation do probably do have the

Vance Crowe [01:28:36] House housework. I do a lot.

Peggy Guest [01:28:38] I know my sons do. And, and, and an half of the childcare or child, you know, a lot of childcare, especially when they're a little bit older, is thinking through what the kids need.

Vance Crowe [01:28:52] The logistics.

Peggy Guest [01:28:53] Like having it in mind. Yes. Having, so it's a matter of having your mind go to several different things in any given day so that you're managing, even if, if you're calling the plumber, calling the nanny, ordering your food from Whole Foods, you know, even if you're doing those things, you are the one who's thinking about it. And

Vance Crowe [01:29:16] All of the pressure of it breaking down is all on you.

Peggy Guest [01:29:20] Well, in families that have that agreement, right? But somehow families, you know, figure out the, what we call the chore wars and, and usually figure it out in ways that work idiosyncratically for that family. Now what I say to my clients is, you have to do this, like probably when your kids are young, every six months you have to sort of rearrange things or check in, is this working because the kids need changes?

Vance Crowe [01:29:54] Yeah. They're gonna be updated on their schedules, right. And how much sleep they get and right where they're going and

Peggy Guest [01:29:58] What's, if it's soccer season or baseball season, that kind of stuff. And so it, it, it has to be renegotiated a lot. And I do believe that in your generation, more people share those responsibilities and, and they talk about them more. So when I did my dissertation and I graduated with my PhD in 81, I did an interview study of two career couples. And so I was doing the interviews in let's say 78 or 79, and I think it was 79. And I actually had a hard time finding what I had defined as two career couples to interview because it wasn't, you know, somebody had a part-time job. Like one part of the couple, al almost always a woman had a part-time job teaching preschool and the husband was

Vance Crowe [01:30:56] The primary breadwinner.

Peggy Guest [01:30:57] Right? And he was on the faculty at WashU or he was, you know, in a law firm or something like that. It had to be two people who thought of themselves as committed to careers who had children. And my my my interviews were about kind of before you were married, how did you talk about this? How, how did you name your hopes and dreams about having children and working after you were married and before you had a child? And now that you have a child, most of them had then children under, certainly under 10, but I think most of 'em were under five at the time. So how my, what I was looking for was how do people talk about it? And my findings were that the more people talked about it and actually planned the, the more successful the adventure was and the more successful the marriage was. I mean, I interviewed people in my own community, so I knew who after my study got divorced and usually knew why. But, but it was because what I started to tell you is there were very few candidates for my study. I needed 10 couples. And in those days, St. Louis is a pretty conservative city. This was like 1978.

Peggy Guest [01:32:28] There were not a lot of career women that I could easily identify who would, who would be interviewed. Now I will say that almost everybody, I mean, not almost everyone I asked wanted to be interviewed. People wanted to talk about this experience because it was so unusual.

Vance Crowe [01:32:46] And what did you learn that you didn't expect to learn?

Peggy Guest [01:32:51] I don't think I learned anything. I didn't expect to learn. Although you fear PhD Canada, you shouldn't say that because

Vance Crowe [01:32:57] Yeah.

Peggy Guest [01:32:58] But what I learned is that the people who talked with each other about what they were doing, no matter what they chose to do, how they divided up the chore wars, the people who talked about it fared the best. And then I broke it down into three groups. One was called pioneers. They were people who very purposely wanted to do something their parents had not done, that had not been done in the main part of the population who wanted really to have two careers into each respect the other person's career. Now these people were then like between 30 and 40. So they hadn't really hit the big time yet. They're

Vance Crowe [01:33:50] Making it

Peggy Guest [01:33:50] Work. Several of them were physicians and I, and I think actually for physicians, they were very taxed in the amount of work they needed to do. Several of them were attorneys and they were also in a maximum of taxing time. And a few of them were corporate people, but they hadn't, I mean, they hadn't really super moved up the ladder yet.

Vance Crowe [01:34:16] And so the demands on their time are not the same because as you go up higher, there's more meetings later nights. Right.

Peggy Guest [01:34:21] Their demands on their time and their demand, their demands on their ability to focus.

Vance Crowe [01:34:28] Yeah. Okay.

Peggy Guest [01:34:29] So, so there were the pioneers I just described and then I can't remember what I called the people who made an agreement that one of the careers would be less important and that they, and that the person with the highest earning power or the most passion for what they were doing would take the front seat in their career. And the person in the less of that would take the backseat. And actually, I mean I, it, it wasn't, it must not have been all about earning power because one of the women who worked, what she considered to be halftime was a cardiologist. She was a physician. And basically her day was from four or five in the morning until about two in the afternoon. So she could be home with her kids. And she gave the, I don't remember what her husband did, but his was the real career and hers was gonna be the career, but still part more part-time. Or she thought of it as part-time. I didn't think of it as part-time.

Vance Crowe [01:35:43] And do you, you get into a situation like that, do you have a, an emotional connection with that? Like, you know, you're saying she didn't see it as full-time, but I did is do you have a poll there? Do you have a, you want to have families have that equal chores or do you not care? It's they can do whatever

Peggy Guest [01:36:02] They want. Well, I was doing a study

Vance Crowe [01:36:03] That's right.

Peggy Guest [01:36:03] So my job was to be neutral and to hear it and to, and to learn. I mean really, I, I really wanted to learn how do people think of this? How do they do it? What, what are the things that they're talking about? So of course I had an emotional response, but I was mostly trying to be neutral about getting the information when I, when I had clients who were in this position, you know, mainly my job is to listen to what they need and what they want and help them make that happen. For these families who were in that, I think, oh, I know what I called them, the traditionalist who wanted a traditional women have more family responsibility and less work responsibility than the men.

Vance Crowe [01:37:01] Okay. And

Peggy Guest [01:37:02] They agreed to that while still the woman was in a career position. 'cause they had to be that to be in the study. So I I I, and then if I had the, and then what I was saying is if I had those same kind of people, I wouldn't have done it with those people. But if I had those same kind of people as clients, I, I mean I saw my job as helping them clarify what they wanted for themselves. And I'm, I'm actually was and am ambivalent about how to answer that question. You know, like how do you live a life where you are developing the career you want to develop and responding to the needs of your profession. And at the same time being in a family with love and integrity. That's, I think it's hard to do, but it was especially hard to do then in St. Louis because the tra it's a very traditional city and the traditional expectations were that women would not work.

Vance Crowe [01:38:17] Yeah. And when you're a kid or you're even in your twenties, you don't understand that. You know, somebody says, oh, your parents, you know, give you a hard time about that. Or your neighbors or your, you know, you think, oh, just blow it off. But that's actual pressure because you're trying to met out like how are we fitting into these communities? Right. And if we don't fit in because we're doing something really different from them, we may not be a part of that community 'cause we're doing things differently.

Peggy Guest [01:38:42] Right. Exactly. And there was a lot of tension among working and non-working moms. I think there probably still is.

Vance Crowe [01:38:49] What do you think that tension is as a result of

Peggy Guest [01:38:53] Who's living the best life? I mean, like

Vance Crowe [01:38:55] Yeah, that's right.

Peggy Guest [01:38:56] Sort of like it's a competition.

Vance Crowe [01:38:58] I I, one of the thoughts I've had while you're speaking about this is many of the families that I know where you have two career people, where they had children, at least as far as the story they have told us, our family, in most cases, the woman wanted to reduce her time and, and spend more time with the kids. And even if she entered the situation thinking I'm gonna go back to work in a month or two when it came time and they didn't have to, she chose to stay with the children, but I could be in a really small subset. And that's definitely among people that have the choice. Not everybody has that choice.

Peggy Guest [01:39:33] Right. Not everybody, especially now experiences themselves as having the choice.

Vance Crowe [01:39:38] That's fair. That's fair. They could choose something else, but among the options that they want, they feel like they don't have an option. Right.

Peggy Guest [01:39:44] And women who do work now work a lot more and have a lot more responsibility than women of my generation did

Vance Crowe [01:39:54] Really.

Peggy Guest [01:39:55] And it was considered a treat to go to work, you know, to have a job. And

Vance Crowe [01:40:01] Then how did you come out as this person? Did you grow up in a crunchy granola family?

Peggy Guest [01:40:09] So what are you equating crunchy granola with?

Vance Crowe [01:40:11] You've not heard this term?

Peggy Guest [01:40:12] Oh yeah, I have. But I mean, what does that, what's the leap you're making about, we're talking about

Vance Crowe [01:40:21] Well, like your family, like you are a working professional, right? You, you, I, I don't know if you can

Peggy Guest [01:40:26] In the family I raised,

Vance Crowe [01:40:28] Yeah, I don't know about

Peggy Guest [01:40:29] It, but it actually was true in the family that I grew up in. Now my mother didn't, my mother had six children. I was the oldest.

Vance Crowe [01:40:35] Okay.

Peggy Guest [01:40:36] And she didn't work for pay. I, I think I was in late grade school. So like in sixth or seventh or eighth grade. My, my youngest sister is 12 years younger than I am. So maybe it wasn't until after she was born, but my mom went back to teaching, which she had done before. And then she got a PhD in English and taught at the college level. Oh,

Vance Crowe [01:41:09] This is a very different sort of woman then. That's, that's not the average

Peggy Guest [01:41:13] Right.

Vance Crowe [01:41:14] Person.

Peggy Guest [01:41:14] Right.

Vance Crowe [01:41:15] And so did you grow up with the expectation that you would work?

Peggy Guest [01:41:20] Yes, but I also grew up with the expectation that I would have a husband who would be grander than I, whatever way that would be. So yes. But I, I mean, you know, I was a kid. I didn't think through the contradictions.

Vance Crowe [01:41:35] So were you thinking that you, you were kind of taught like you're gonna play second fiddle and that's just the way that it is.

Peggy Guest [01:41:42] I wasn't just taught it. I was taught it. It's the way everything was around me, but I romanticized it. I thought that was a really cool thing.

Vance Crowe [01:41:52] Okay.

Peggy Guest [01:41:53] I remember one time my mother, I was saying something to my mother about ra, the era of raising children. And I was saying, I must have said something derogatory about women who did that without working. I must have said that. Something like that to my mother. 'cause she said I was every bit as hip in my day as you are in yours.

Vance Crowe [01:42:22] So I want to go back to the family. Like you've really opened up my eyes to like, I may have assumptions even in my Annie and I meet once a week, we have family meeting, we do it. At first it was a burden. We didn't like it. And we'd be kind of bickering with each other. And now it's like, oh, it's family meeting time. This is when you line up what our calendars are, what are we working on? These kinds of things. For people that don't have that, but they want to start having conversations about the, you know, their hopes and dreams to make sure that they're on the same page. How does a couple do that when they, when this hasn't been a practice?

Peggy Guest [01:43:00] Well, I think the first step is recognizing that they need to

Vance Crowe [01:43:04] Okay.

Peggy Guest [01:43:05] Because either they're sniping about it, about, you know, stuff not getting done, or you didn't tell me that, or, you know, that kind of stuff. And they realize they need to check in with each other more, or they need to make more decisions together about what they're gonna do. Or they have some milestone change. Like I don't, I mean the, the most obvious one is having kids, but they're also like, the kids go to school or the kids leave home. You know, there are things that require a different take on the lifestyle. So that would be another way. And a third way is just hearing your friends talk about it. That they do it. You know? Oh, I, I heard that so and so, like, I have some friends who go on a yearly retreat someplace wonderful. And I proposed that to my husband years ago. He said, I'm not doing that.

Vance Crowe [01:44:08] Oh really? I

Peggy Guest [01:44:08] Wanna be on vacation when I go on vacation. But they go someplace beautiful and spend three day weekend together and talk about

Vance Crowe [01:44:17] Their relationship,

Peggy Guest [01:44:18] Their relationship, the state of their relationship, their hopes and dreams for next year, what's making the relationship good, what's making it challenged? And you know, the, what I call the chore wars, the decisions about who does, what gets folded into that. It's sort of like, are you satisfied with the way we're doing things? So what I'm saying is you might hear from friends that they have a certain way of having those conversations and say that you want them.

Vance Crowe [01:44:51] When Annie and I were getting married, we wanted to get married in the Catholic church. And so we had to go to their catechism class for marriage. And we had to, we had this class where you're with other people that are about to get married and they give you a questionnaire about some things that they would think that you had thought through. And some of them we laughed at. But then you start asking like really good questions, like how much money can the other person spend without telling you about it? And then when you come to the group and you put that together and one person's like $25 and another one's like a thousand dollars, you're like, whoa, you guys have a long ways to go. Like one person thinks this is how we manage finances. And the other one, this other poll, and they did it on all these domains and we were not guilt free. Right. We, there were definitely ones that we had not thought of, but a lot of people get married and they're not prepared for the conversations they have to have.

Peggy Guest [01:45:48] No, that's correct. Although I do think now so many people live together before they get married. And so

Vance Crowe [01:45:54] What do you think of that?

Peggy Guest [01:45:57] I don't really have an opinion about it. I'm talking about it as a demographic that's just, I, that's happened and I, so I, what I'm really trying to say is that those people have a lot of practice before they decide to get married.

Vance Crowe [01:46:13] Yeah, that's true. And

Peggy Guest [01:46:14] A lot of people don't decide to get married until they're, until they're gonna have children or have children or are pregnant.

Vance Crowe [01:46:21] Yeah. There's definitely, and and I live in two different ecosystems because in one, I can be in New York where a good friend of mine is having a child with a woman that he's been dating for seven or eight years, they're not planning on getting married.

Peggy Guest [01:46:35] Whereas

Vance Crowe [01:46:35] If I go out into the countryside and I'm speaking at a farm organization, that would be like, maybe not, maybe not repelled, they wouldn't like kick them outta the group, but it would definitely not be celebrated.

Peggy Guest [01:46:47] Yeah. The social mores are very different,

Vance Crowe [01:46:49] Very different

Peggy Guest [01:46:50] Across the country.

Vance Crowe [01:46:52] I think that that has more potential for conflict than people realize. Because I think that

Peggy Guest [01:46:58] You mean choosing not to marry when you have children? Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:47:01] Like, you know how you were saying before, sometimes working moms and, and non-working moms have conflict. I think you have people getting married and people not being married and having that, I don't think they encounter each other very often, but those are two very different models for how the world works.

Peggy Guest [01:47:16] Right.

Vance Crowe [01:47:17] One is you commit and pair and you, you announce before the public we're, we're following these rules. And the other one is a different game. So this has been an absolute blast. I will kick myself if I don't ask this question. And I don't know how long of an answer it is, but I, this is the one that I'm, I'm, I think that most people, when they look around at the world around them and they see these corporations are run by people, those people seem to, I don't know, I think a lot of people think executives got there by accident or somebody handed them power. They just, but I don't think they get to see the inside of the struggle that they're going through to get where they're to the top of an organization or, or higher up in an organization. What have you learned over time about what it takes to be a leader or a person that's able to climb that ladder that people on the outside wouldn't know?

Peggy Guest [01:48:15] Well, I don't know if it's true that people on the outside don't know. And it depends on how outside we're talking about. But I think there was an Harvard Business Review study that we used a slide from, and I can't really quote what the study where, you know what it was. But essentially they were looking at leaders ability to commit to something passionately, to care about it deeply and to know what they cared about and then to stay focused on what they needed to do to meet that purpose, to meet the purpose that they're so passionate about. I think a third piece would be to find yourself in a company that has a mission that aligns with yours. And to have leadership and then to become a leader, that, that demonstrates both the value of purpose and focus. And so

Vance Crowe [01:49:26] Purpose and focus. That's a very good way of thinking of that.

Peggy Guest [01:49:30] And so a lot of what I do with coaching is have, is talk to people about why they're doing what they're doing. Why is it important to them? Who are they that these things are important to them, kind of by who are they? I mean, what's their life story? How did this come to be so important? How is it kind of in your bones that this is your purpose? That goes back to the Jungian sense of individuation.

Vance Crowe [01:49:56] Oh wow. Okay.

Peggy Guest [01:49:56] Kind of like, I'm the perfect person to be here doing this work because of my commitment and my, my marriage to the commitment of the company or the organization. So now I do think one could also have purpose about how they lead, in other words, leadership processes that don't necessarily, they don't necessarily sync with the purpose of the company. So if the purpose of the company is to make widgets, and you could make this widget or that widget, and it wouldn't matter to you. It's the, it's the process of leading and creating a company culture that's important to you.

Vance Crowe [01:50:49] That's right. Yeah.

Peggy Guest [01:50:50] And then your focus is what are the things you need to do that are going to improve the company's ability to deliver that purpose? And what are the things you need to do to, to, to improve your ability to stay on purpose. So as you move up the ladder, you know, like in the beginning stages, usually what you're doing is doing the work, developing subject matter expertise, knowing what you need to do, what the work is and what you need to do to deliver the work. And then as you begin to manage people, you have to add to that you're still developing subject matter expertise. You're still part of a company culture that you have to learn and you have to be on purpose about that. You have to be asking yourself the question, is this where I want to be? Does this company have the culture that I want to be part of? Sometimes people leave at the point they ask those questions and

Vance Crowe [01:52:08] Because they discovered that that was not the path for them. Right.

Peggy Guest [01:52:11] And finds something else that aligns with their purpose. But the, so the first set of focus is about developing subject matter expertise later. It's about influencing people that you're managing and helping them know how to deliver, helping them know how to be subject matter experts. And there's two areas of subject matter. One is process of getting stuff done, and one is whatever your subject matter is, making widgets, creating

Vance Crowe [01:52:44] The craft of the thing, right? Yeah.

Peggy Guest [01:52:46] The craft of the art or whatever it is that your, your company is doing. So then the next stage is managing people who manage people. And you're, you're thinking a little higher level. You're beginning to be required to be strategic. And this is where I get called in for coaching a lot because peop I think a lot of people don't understand that strategic thinking is a skill and it's, it's a, it's sort of a quality of how your brain works. And

Vance Crowe [01:53:20] When you say strategic thinking, what do you mean by that?

Peggy Guest [01:53:24] I mean, thinking about what you want to make happen and kind of envisioning what it's gonna look like to get there.

Vance Crowe [01:53:34] Yes. Okay.

Peggy Guest [01:53:35] And then imagining what needs to get done in order to get there. And I call it high level thinking or sort of going to the balcony thinking it's like, it's thinking above the list of deliverables.

Vance Crowe [01:53:53] This is a, this is a relationship. I could relate it to my brother. So my brother Dan Crow is, he's a details guy. And I am the think about the way the world could be.

Peggy Guest [01:54:05] And

Vance Crowe [01:54:05] Over the years we've been able to figure out how to take his details and connect it with my bigger picture thinking. And it allows us to do stuff that I could not do on my own, you know, thinking through all those details. And I never really thought about it. But the people that are at the higher and higher executive levels, they can manage both of those things or find a way to be able to manage both of those things simultaneously.

Peggy Guest [01:54:32] Well, I would say sort of, so when I talk about this level, you're managing managers. You're having to do strategic thinking with your managers about how they're gonna manage their managers and what the subject matter expertise is, what needs to move in the subject matter. So those people are carrying the details. If you know that you don't do details well, and you've worked yourself up here in spite of that, then you're doing strategy for the people who are gonna deliver the details. You have to recognize the details. But if you get pulled into the details, either because you don't understand them enough or because your people, you don't trust them enough aren't delivering That's right. Or you don't trust them enough, then you can't stay up here. Because what up here requires is that you apply yourself, you use yourself for the things that only you uniquely can do. And that's even more true of the next stage where you're, where you're leading an enterprise.

Vance Crowe [01:55:48] Okay.

Peggy Guest [01:55:48] Those are the executives, I think you were talking

Vance Crowe [01:55:50] Right about

Peggy Guest [01:55:50] The top executives. So one could start out here thinking, I'm going to, I'm looking at the all

Vance Crowe [01:55:58] The always corner

Peggy Guest [01:55:59] All and think I wanna be up here. And somewhere along the way discover or not discover somebody discovers it for you that they have not like developed the skillset that is necessary for the next rung. So when I said I get called in for coaching a lot, I get called in for managing people in a way that doesn't inspire them.

Vance Crowe [01:56:28] Okay.

Peggy Guest [01:56:29] Is somehow having a negative impact. And then the next thing would be not being able to think strategically. And then the next level is not being able to understand that the people below you at this last level don't know how to think strategically. And you've got people who made it up to that level. I think that's the old idea of the Peter principle.

Vance Crowe [01:56:52] Yeah, that's right. You've

Peggy Guest [01:56:53] Got people who excelled down here who made it up here, who really don't know how to do strategic thinking. And I had one client a couple years ago who was here, she was on the executive team. She wasn't the head of the company, but she was on this executive team and she just couldn't get it that the people on her leadership team, only a few of them were strategic thinkers and she wanted them to plan the strategy for the whole division, which was appropriate on her part to want that, but they didn't know how to do it. So sometimes you can teach people to do strategic thinking, especially

Vance Crowe [01:57:37] Give them a process that allows them to be creative.

Peggy Guest [01:57:39] Right.

Vance Crowe [01:57:40] Okay.

Peggy Guest [01:57:41] Well to think high level,

Vance Crowe [01:57:43] High think high level. Yeah.

Peggy Guest [01:57:44] And sometimes you can't, so at, at this stage that I'm talking about, which is like the executive team, but not the executive, there's a lot of responsibility that is for knowing the whole system down here and what needs to be happening to move the company to the next stage. So that's the looking down part. I don't mean looking down on people, I just mean looking

Vance Crowe [01:58:18] On the ladder Yeah. Down the organization. Yeah.

Peggy Guest [01:58:20] And the looking up part is to work with everybody at that executive level, including the top executive to to vision, to name, where do we want, what do we see as the next best thing that we're gonna do? How does it align with our purpose and how do we stay focused on it? So the focus part is at every stage that I just described to you, the individual needs to be able to know what do I need to deliver at that level.

Vance Crowe [01:58:54] Yeah, that's right. Because if you don't know, you'll just spin right in circles, you'll, you'll try things and you won't learn.

Peggy Guest [01:59:00] Right. And then people will be frustrated at you and you'll be sent down to the next level. So, so that's why I said even if you have the hope and imagination that you're gonna just keep moving up. You only move up if you do it on purpose. If you, if you look around and you learn and then, you know, by this stage most leaders have some resources with which to learn what we're talking about.

Vance Crowe [01:59:32] Okay. Being able to bring somebody in and say, Hey, we need to work on this as a team, you mean?

Peggy Guest [01:59:39] Well, no, it, it's, it's sort of like if they see that they're not focused enough on their purpose or

Vance Crowe [01:59:47] Oh,

Peggy Guest [01:59:48] You know, that they need some new skills to deliver at their level. I'm saying by the time people get up to either the managing managers or the next stage, they, they know that there are resources where they can develop.

Vance Crowe [02:00:06] Yeah. I think that the challenge between knowing you have resources is, and this is the second time I've referenced this, but Jung talks about dragons, right? The facing the thing that you fear the most and in a work environment facing the reason that people aren't getting done the stuff that, that they're supposed to be getting done and coming to the realization that you have an impact. Yeah. That, that's hard. And, and, and really in effect, it's the great realization of, well, the only thing you should care about are the things that you can have an impact on. So if there's something you are doing that's making these other people not be able to get there, that's the, you should be caring about that. That should be something that you're tightly aligned to.

Peggy Guest [02:00:49] Well, and that is something you have the power to do something about. There are also a lot of dragons along the way that you actually don't have a lot of power to do something about.

Vance Crowe [02:00:57] What do you mean?

Peggy Guest [02:00:59] Well, like who else is in the leadership positions and how they behave and

Vance Crowe [02:01:04] Oh yeah. I guess that's right. And

Peggy Guest [02:01:06] Then also changes in the economy such that Right.

Vance Crowe [02:01:12] Your

Peggy Guest [02:01:12] Widget is no longer desired or another company takes you over and has a really different way of, of

Vance Crowe [02:01:24] Working their system. Right. Who they want in leadership. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Peggy Guest [02:01:28] So there are a lot of things that happen along the way that you don't have control over. And so the other thing that is required besides all these sort of actions is, I don't know how to describe this. Sort of like being able to know what, what you can have an effect on and what to do when you can't. Like do you leave? Do you stay and watch the trajectory for a while? And

Vance Crowe [02:02:10] I had

Peggy Guest [02:02:10] See how long that will stay. And, and then also the same thing applies to sort of the inevitable conflicts about the economy, about what it is that you're producing about the people who've come up in the team. I mean, you could end up with a whole set of people coming up to the managing manager stage that are either stellar or awful or a combination of those. And you up here at this have to figure out what's the best way to handle this.

Vance Crowe [02:02:48] Yeah. I mean, it, it seems, and

Peggy Guest [02:02:50] That's not really of your making right?

Vance Crowe [02:02:52] This, this is just dealing with what is Right, right. And then you having an ought, I think things ought to be different in some way. Right.

Peggy Guest [02:02:59] And

Vance Crowe [02:03:00] Figuring out what you can do to, if, if it is possible for you to change that ought into an is.

Peggy Guest [02:03:04] Right.

Vance Crowe [02:03:06] So I think we should, we should wrap up. But I, I want to say that this has been fantastic. Just like I expected that it would be when we rounded out, when, when I was kind of coming to the conclusions on what I would do next. You came to see one of my talks and I was giddy about this. This was like something I was quite excited about because I really cared about your interpretation of what I was doing. And afterwards, through a long story that I probably won't go into, you pointed something out about like the thing that you're doing up there, Vance, because I kept describing it to you as I'm surfing. You were asking me, what are you doing when you are speaking? And I said, I'm surfing. And you said, no, I don't think that's what you're doing. Do you know what you said to me? You said,

Peggy Guest [02:03:55] I do remember saying something, but I don't remember

Vance Crowe [02:03:57] What it was. You said you were spending time, like your passion there, you're not surfing. The, the presence is you're waking people up. And so much of my life clicked at that moment because you're right. Like I, I, I love getting up and speaking about ideas that I think will help people come to the realization that they are conscious, that they're capable of changing the things in their life that they want. And you are the very person that kind of handed that ember over to me. And I, I'm really, really grateful for it because I think that you are the type of person that finds a way to believe in others and understand and recognize and help them find their archetypal story. And, and I, I think the world should be grateful for that. I know that. I certainly am. Thank so, I'm so glad. Well, thank

Peggy Guest [02:04:42] You. Thank,

Vance Crowe [02:04:43] If

Peggy Guest [02:04:43] People

Vance Crowe [02:04:43] Wanted to get ahold of you, how would they do it? Where, where would they find out about your, your business?

Peggy Guest [02:04:49] Well, I have a website which is www aspire asp e.company and

Vance Crowe [02:04:57] Aspire.company.

Peggy Guest [02:04:59] Yep.

Vance Crowe [02:04:59] Okay. And then.com.

Peggy Guest [02:05:01] No, and that, that is sort of a mixed blessing. So when I was looking for my Don domain name, actually my daughter-in-law helped me with this. I think aspire.com was taken or there weren't any.com. Anyway, I ended up with.company.

Vance Crowe [02:05:20] Okay.

Peggy Guest [02:05:21] Which she thought was gonna be to my advantage. And in some ways it is 'cause it's different. But when I, when I go to say Nordstrom's to order something online, they'll say We only accept Real

Vance Crowe [02:05:34] Domains.

Peggy Guest [02:05:34] Domains.

Vance Crowe [02:05:35] Oh no. Oh no.

Peggy Guest [02:05:37] And so it's, but yes, the answer is, it is.company company fully written out.

Vance Crowe [02:05:44] Okay. Well I hope that people that have the, well, what types of challenges are you open to having? I mean, you have a very busy schedule. Are you taking,

Peggy Guest [02:05:52] My biggest challenge is having time to take anyone new. I'm, I'm really happily busy with my clients and it's, it's going really well. So yeah. I'd, I'd be glad to talk to somebody and help them find somebody. And it may be that I would have a spot or two for people, but I, I mostly don't have any time right now.

Vance Crowe [02:06:16] Well, I can tell you, I would take any recommendation from you. So thank you. This has been wonderful. Thank you so much for coming by. Thank

Peggy Guest [02:06:22] You. You.