107 - Dr. Kim Perkins-Changing the Model of Leadership From "Command and Control" to Support and Empowerment.mp3 - powered by Happy Scribe

Ruthless Compassion is a podcast about how you can turn your emotional shit into fertilizer for success and see your darkest moments as opportunities to transform into a powerful kindness warrior. If you enjoy this podcast, please leave a review wherever you listen. Welcome, Dr. Kim Perkins to the Ruthless Compassion Podcast.

I'm so happy to be here.

Yeah, I'm very excited to speak to you, too because I think the things that you're interested in are very much along the lines of the things I'm interested in.

I love when that happens.

For sure.

So the first thing I always like to do is to ask my guests to introduce themselves, say a little bit about yourself so that the listeners know who you are and what you do.

Sure. I'm an organizational psychologist. I'm a positive organizational psychologist, which means I look at leadership and work and motivation and organizations from a strength based perspective in terms of what's going well and what are we doing right and what promotes human growth. And before I became a psychologist, I was a speed skater. I was a professional inline speed skater, and I got to travel all over the world and race all over the world. And it was a really fun way to spend five years. But in that period of time, that's kind of how I arrived at the way I work with organizations with the same way I work with skaters as a coach, which was working on individual skills, working on team dynamics, and also working extra with the leaders because they're the ones that everybody's looking to. So I still use that model in organizations now.

Oh, I have so many questions I'm already thinking about. But before we do that, I wanted to ask you, how did you become a speed skater?

So my sport was in line, and that's racing on rollerblades, basically. And that's something that if you just watch the Beijing Olympics, nearly all of the American skaters and a lot of the Canadian skaters did before they went to ice. So it gives you a really strong preparation for that. But in line, it's not actually in the Olympics. And so people would change to ice for that. And so rollerblading was kind of a big thing back in the day, and I really like to do it, but I've never really considered myself an athlete. I just thought I was a person who like to do dangerous things. So I tried training for a running race with a friend, and I discovered how racing is really cool because you're out there under the sun and it's going to be cheering you on. And it's a beautiful Saturday or Sunday morning and a beautiful place, but running is terrible. I hate running. So I wonder if they do this on roller blades. I like roller pain, and sure enough, they did. And I had already been skating for ten years at that point, so I was pretty good at it.

And then, of course, I had to relearn to do it in more official athletic capacity, and that went far beyond what I ever imagined I could do with that.

Funny. I have something that's a passion can turn into a job.

Yeah. I think that's something that we all sort of secretly hope can happen, and that's what happened for me.

Nice. So you're saying that you learned a lot of things about how you're dealing with organizations. So I know that you have an upcoming book, right. Or has it been released yet or is it still upcoming?

It's not been released yet. It will be out later in 2022. And it's called Winner Take None.

So maybe you can talk about the book in the context of the things that you discuss around leadership.

Sure, so part of the premise of the book is I've been studying competitiveness and competition for a long time. My master's thesis, which I did with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Mihai and Jeanne Nakamura about flow in competitive situations, was kind of the beginning of it, and I was not able to turn it into my dissertation for a variety of reasons. A dissertation is a very specific thing, but I had all this research on competitiveness that I really wanted to talk about and that I use in my work as an executive coach and is working on team dynamics. And so even though it grew out of my own experiences going from the geeky kid who got picked on to being a really serious jock, which is not a thing I would have expected to happen. So I felt like I had been on both sides of the spectrum here in both ways of thinking about competition. And so the way this ends up happening in the leadership sense is that a lot of times people come at work because we often describe it in-game terms or in war terms of thinking of work or in other ambiguous situations is definitely a competition.

And I've come to believe that that is absolutely wrongheaded and very limiting belief and tends to create a lot of toxicity in our organizational cultures, as well as stress for the leaders who tend to think that way. So a lot of my book is about what has brought us to here to thinking about business as a competition, as a war, and the ways that people are kind of getting out of that so that they can work together in a more cooperative and truly co-creation kind of way and still make it fun and still get some of the motivating qualities that competition can bring out without so much of the downside.

Right. They can be motivated without being aggressive.

Yes, exactly. And you can have fun by putting a boundary around what we're doing a little bit more anything goes in certain ways without having to get out of hand or be 24-7.

So I like this title Winner Take None, do you want to say a little bit more about where that came from.

Let's see, where did that come from? Well, a lot of brainstorming to try to encapsulate it here, but the idea being that we are used to the idea that winning is winning and that it's always better. And we're in a period now where things are very decentralized, where cooperation and constant creativity and constant co-creation are what we need to do and what we need to do in business where there's not really a hierarchy, there's not a corporate ladder decline in a lot of ways, the way there perhaps was in the 80s. And so it doesn't make sense to, when you're thinking about winning a lot of times, what is winning now or winning in a small sense ends up being a very pure victory because of the huge costs incurred in terms of mental stress and bad feeling. Well, there's just so many things, and there are so many examples in our culture of ways that people when people stress winning above all things, that they fail to see the big picture and that end up losing instead.

So why do you think people are so keen on this model of competition and winning and war in the workplace? Where did that come from in your research?

Well, for one thing, what we think of as the basic organizational model, where you have an org chart and you have people in positions of legitimate power, all of that comes directly from the military. That is what organizations were modelled on was military effectiveness. And so a huge amount of organizational research to this day comes from studying military. They are the biggest consumers of organizational research in the United States and also the biggest producers of organizational research. I think it's only natural, especially in an area where it has been very much controlled by men and had the pace set by men and had the version of what good is very much in a masculine direction. That is the soldier mentality is definitely what we've come to have. And in that you're sort of subordinating the needs of the body and the needs to affiliate, shall we say, and the needs to take the idea of taking into account others needs, that's all subordinated to achieving fairly abstract goal that was set by other people. And that's what you do in a military campaign with orders that come down from on high end cannot see questions. And that way of organizing is the legacy of how people would create alignment among large groups of people. And that just doesn't really match the world that we're in at this point.

No, I absolutely agree. So what do you think the consequences are when you impose that model upon workers today?

Well, we call that the command and control model, and that's something that people perceive as a very out of state model. You're in a command and control situation when people are saying or asking you to subordinate your personal needs to the organizational needs, or to do things that are perhaps take a few wild chances with ethics, for example. Or if you're progress is measured by how many hours you spend at the office, which, even though that sounds in today's climate, a little antiquate, it gets still, a lot of the way that people get ahead at this point is by demonstrating their productivity by working themselves to death. But these are the companies that are, or I should say not the companies, but the bosses who believe in command and control are the ones that people are leaving in the great resignation and higher numbers. They're creating the kind of cultures that people don't want to spend their precious hours on Earth helping to flourish. This is not how people want to spend their time.

No, it's such an interesting thing because one of the jobs that I do is I do psychiatric assessments on people who are off work. They're on disability leave because of mental health reasons. And sometimes they're off work because of stuff that's happened to them in their lives. And a lot of times they're off work because of stuff that's happened to them in the workplace. So I've been learning so many things about the way that people are treated in the workplace. One woman told me something which I will never forget. She said that she had a severe postpartum depression after her first pregnancy. And aside from the fact that her elderly male family doctor told her that that was normal and she should just wait and it would pass, which I have things to say about that. But then she went to work and she was crying all day, and her boss told her that if she wouldn't snap out of it, she would be fired.

And I was just thinking, wow, the system has failed. This person coming and going, and I just felt like, wow, what kind of a workplace where you're going to work and you're having postpartum depression and you're crying and you're having a mental health breakdown and you're told that you're going to be fired. And this is a disability where if the person came in on crutches.

They would...

...broken leg.

The boss would never dream of saying, I'm going to fire you if you can't carry those boxes. But this person because it's a mental health thing and her GP is dismissing it, she has no rights whatsoever, it really got to me. I felt so terrible for her, and she had postpartum depression for all three of her pregnancies. So imagine she had to suck it up three times in a row because she got no treatment each time. And her employer at the time was absolutely unsympathetic.

Absolutely. Oh, my goodness. There's so much in that story to unpack. But the stigma around mental health. Part of a legacy at work is that you're supposed to shape up or ship out. And certainly here in Los Angeles, where I live, the industry is entertainment. A lot of the prevailing thought is I can have ten people in doing their job tomorrow. So figure it out or I will do that. And that's how a lot of companies expect things to go to. Right now, because the labor market is so much in favor of job seekers rather than employers, we have a little bit more flexibility. They're really trying to keep people. But when the market swings a little bit in other directions, that message tends to come right back.

I think of it as very bad management because these people go off work. Well, first of all, there's low morale and poor productivity. And then eventually people go on disability and their insurance rates go up because they're paying for so many people at work. So it's bad business to mistreat your employees because in the moment, it seems pushing them is going to get the immediate results. But...

Right.

...the long-range there's so many consequences of poor productivity.

Poor morale and presenteeism and then absenteeism.

So much of these things where they're trying to sort of use a domination tactic of getting it together is your problem? Not my problem. Those really come back to haunt people because there's no using the domination tactic without there being a backlash the moment somebody has enough power to do so.

Even the backlash, which is that I can't do it anymore and the person goes off work, and then they're having to pay higher and higher insurance rates, and they're like being squeezed in a different way.

Exactly.

I want to talk to you about toxic competition. Toxic competitiveness, because I know that's my favorite theme. Toxic excellence, you call it. I think that's such an interesting. It's like my concept of ruthless compassion. They seem kind of contradictory is that. I'm sure you're going to have lots to say about it. So why don't you share what you mean by toxic excellence and why that's not so good?

Sure. So toxic excellence. It's something. The last company I was working with a bunch of consultants. It's a phrase we used to use when we would see an organization or a Department even that was meeting its goals, making lots of money, getting a lot of good work out there. But everybody hated each other and would want to quit, to be a yoga instructor in the second that they would have some opportunity to do so. That's exactly what they would do. So this is a situation that I saw at a lot of both tech companies and entertainment companies where there's such an emphasis on short term results and on performance, but not on relationships. And in these situations, people could be really flourishing by all the usual business metrics and yet spending so much time on office politics and so much time repressing their natural reactions to things and having so much trauma that even though the business was flourishing on the people's side, they would be absolutely at the bottom of the barrel.

You talk about trauma, right?

Yeah.

When I've interviewed people who are off work, it really did sound like they were traumatized by their experiences in the workplace.

I really believe that is understudied and not talked about because, okay, so I'm not a clinical psychologist, but what I see in the workplace a lot of the time are people getting very stuck in trying and trying and trying to make sense of something that seems absolutely nonsensical and oppressive that happened to them. And that, to me, looks a lot like when people are trying to make sense of something and they have some PTSD and they just go over it and over it and over it, over it, they get really stuck. And therefore anything that looks like, even if it's in the same zip code as the thing that happened ends up feeling to them like they're reliving the same thing. Again, whether that's true or not, to me, that's very much a traumatic reaction. And a lot of the things that can spur that are being betrayed by co-workers, which happens all the time, especially if you get into the higher echelons of the company or having the company say they're not going to do lay offs and then do them or say they're not going to kill projects and then kill them and basically doing things that people have a lot of feelings about and that they're powerless to change their position on.

Yeah. There's a feeling of helplessness and overwhelmed. And then the people who are supposed to protect them, like the HR Department or their managers, fail them repeatedly. Like you said, their colleagues are toxic and they can't do anything about that. Their boss is toxic, and the company would rather retain the manager then recognize that the manager is causing trauma to multiple employees.

Exactly, exactly. And then the command and control culture, that's a no-brainer. There's a very productive manager who can be and they'll call, say just a bit abrasive or likes things a certain way. And that can be code for yell at people until they cry. Then until recently, that manager would always be kept in, never the underlings. And there's a little bit there's been a movement to change that. But I still find that the mentality is very prevalent in cultures where the only thing that matters is performance. And how you get there absolutely doesn't matter. That's where sociopaths thrive.

So we're talking about toxic excellence. What's the other side? What's the opposite of toxic excellence? What's the thing that you want to encourage?

There needs to be a feeling of on a team or an apartment that you're getting support from above, that people will see you as a person, not just the quantity or quality of work that you put out. And honestly, a surprisingly little bit goes a long way, especially if your culture has not been that way. Being able to balance a little bit of caring for humans as humans, meaning that they're not just agents of productivity. They are people with feelings and bodies and things they do when they're off the clock and feeling like that gets supported. There's a story recently, for example, in a DEI sense that I was reading about a woman who was in a training class for people starting a new job. And they were saying, in this one, we need you to not have a weird hairstyle. Somebody pointed at the woman who was black and said, well, what about her hair is weird? And she just had it up in a ponytail. It was not weird. So they immediately they stopped the class for a minute, and they went and fired the person who said that she had crazy hair and came back, apologized to her, and went off the class.

And that made her feel incredibly supported as a human as opposed to just an agent of productivity. She said, I'm going to be loyal to people forever. They didn't look at that, but they actually showed that they had a zero tolerance policy for racist remarks. So that example sticks out to me. But that's not something that everybody has to do, but just a little bit of care and concern. I've been in companies where I literally offered somebody sitting there who was not a lowing by any means, who had obviously been working at the company for five years, and I offered them a cough drop. And they were so taken with gratitude, they said, nobody's ever done that for me before. I noticed I was coughing and offered me a cough drop. Wow. And it's like, wow, I'm really sorry about that. Nobody offered any bits of humanity to you to see you as a person and to see what you need to make you feel welcome. And just little gestures like that can go a really long way.

I'll share a story from another patient I interviewed. I've interviewed a lot of people who work in call centers. And one of them was saying they were complaining because they have these quotas of how many calls they have to make in a certain time. And the person was saying, I couldn't even take a bathroom break or these people were yelling at me and I had to hang up and immediately get back on the next call. I couldn't even take literally 20 seconds to just kind of process the abuse I had been experiencing.

Yes

And I bet you if these people had just had like 30 seconds between calls to breathe, to have a sip of water, to go to the washroom, they would have not been off work speaking to me, taking months of disability pay.

Yes, exactly. And it's small things. And people on the lower levels are the ones who really get the premises because those are ones that are very much considered command and control because people are expecting that people there's this expectation that people on the front lines don't want to do their jobs and will need lots and lots and lots of control in order to make them do their jobs. And in fact, it has very much a backfiring effect. I noticed this a lot because as I came out of graduate school and started working in fancy settings, I kept being struck by how different it was on this side. And I think about my brother, my brother-in-law, and other people I know who did not have fancy jobs and were more working on the front line of things where they needed to buy their own uniform, pay for their own uniform. And I'm over here and people are throwing $30 lunch at me, and I can't not notice that I can't feel a weird pull about the ways that businesses are transacted depending on who you are, you know.

Yeah. When you said people need to be treated like they're humans and not just cogs in the...

...interchangeable productivity units. Yeah.

And I think the joke is that if people are treated like humans, they are much more productive in the short term and the long term than if they're treated like productivity units in quotes.

Exactly. And we're getting to a point as we think about what AI can and can't do as we get more robots doing things that humans can do. What I want is for us to rethink what humanity can do and should do and be able to really treat the humans like humans and not treat the humans like robots in training.

So you talk about human superpower, our human superpower.

So is that the ability to work through conflict and change?

Our human superpower is definitely the ability to change. And that's contrary to what a lot of people believe. The conventional wisdom is that humans don't want to change. They don't like change. They resist change. And I don't really see that much evidence that that is the case. What I see instead is that humans have become the dominant species on the Earth because they are willing to do whatever it takes locally to make a life for themselves, and then also to justify it by saying this is the one too good way that we should all have been doing it all along. And so for me, if you want people to change, it has to start looking like learning and not like change for change's sake. So if you make it like learning that we now know better and we can do more things and we can have more autonomy and have more of the things we want, we can have less stress. That is a way to do change that doesn't end up feeling painful.

But people do resist change. Right? There's often resistance to change as a person who's done psychotherapy for decades, I certainly have noticed some resistance to change on the part of my patients. And I have always been of the mind that when you change, there's loss. So when you talk about change involves loss, I'm going, yeah, okay, she gets it.

Yeah.

So why don't you talk about your thoughts about loss around change? Because I think it's important for people to be aware of that. It's important, it's necessary, but it's not always easy.

Yes, that's a good point. So let's try that again. So whenever you're going to make a change, it means you're going to not do something in a certain way. Even if it's kind of irrational, people are still kind of attached to it. So a story I tell a lot is about being in a company where for chat, they had maybe eight different systems going and some of them were AOL, and it was like the mid 20 teams. So they're still using their AOL chat names that they probably made in the 90s. There's people on ICQ, there's people on Messenger, there's every different possible chat program. And the company, for various security reasons, really wanted to get everybody on the same chat that people were resisting. So if you think about change as loss, then it means that there's a certain amount of identity or attachment to the way we did things or investments that is going to go away. And also, if there were people around the company who created those changes or made the platforms that you don't want to have anymore, then that means that their work, their relevance, in a sense is over and nobody wants that.

So what we did was we made a way for people to say it's kind of like Marie Kondo. Say goodbye to the things that was going to have to change and thank it for its service. And having a little ritual like that can be really fun and so important to actually getting people to change. So we ended up making a really big replica poster of the AOL running man and putting it in the lobby of the building and had a sign up saying, everybody put your AOL screen name on here and say goodbye to it. So you can be saying, "Thank you in sync 1989". That way everybody could see it and really deal with letting it go one last time. And we did this and we left it up there for a couple of days and we had some really fun games played with it on Slack to get that across, and then had everybody switch over in that time it took.

Oh, it's relatively painless with just a little bit of intervention.

Surprisingly small amount of intervention to get people to focus and do it. But there was something about having a ritual moment, but also a moment to appreciate what was great about that all these years. And so I guess that's a lot of context. And if it's a structure that somebody created a company that we're not gonna use anymore, just even taking a moment in the meeting saying, okay, we're going to switch from using that Google drive tree to drive everything. We're going to switch into Base Camp. And I just want to say, Amanda set all of that up back into 2014, and we used it so well for so long. And thank you. And then everybody can applaud for Amanda for a minute, and then Amanda can feel better about the fact that her work was seen and used and appreciated. And now we can all move on.

Yeah. Again, I just want to reinforce that such a little bit of intervention to make such a big result in terms of embracing change. And I think that's such an important lesson for companies and corporations to understand that it's very little work required to create change.

But they have to do it.

Yes, exactly. And it's not always rational. We should be able to just know that obviously we use this for a long time. Obviously it helped us. But having the knowing and acknowledging because there's nothing more demotivating than feeling like your work has come to not. And you put all this effort into something and now it's going down the tubes. Nobody likes that. But on the other hand, business strategy requires that happening all the time. You try some stuff, it doesn't work out or you find a better way. And so just a little bit of acknowledgement and understanding that maybe people would like to pay attention to the fact that people put in a lot of effort to make something happen and it's not going to work out. It just goes a long way.

It's amazing. If companies were willing to just put that little tiny bit of energy into things, they could create so much more goodwill to improve the morale, improve productivity. So there's change required for the leaders, right?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And so you can say I tried to do it myself because I was first not at all a competitive person. And then I realized at a certain point that if I was going to play this sport that I love, that I'm completely in love with, it wasn't going to be just me against me. It was going to be me deliberately against other people because it's a group sport and it's about order and not about raw time. It's not like running where you just see how fast you can do this. There's group dynamics involved, and you have to work with the pack in a way. It's like bicycle racing where you're having to sort of misleading out smart people all the time. And I was absolutely terrified of this when I first started racing and I had to change and get a new mindset that I could do this. And little old me, who was last picked for gym class, could figure this out. And then when I went into business, it was time to abandon that. And I had to figure that out, too, that this thing that had served me well, I was going to have to dial back my competitiveness because it was no longer serving me.

When you work with leaders and you're trying to help them change.

Yeah.

How do you do that? Like, what if they're super old white men, stereotype, these very rigid leaders who have been doing the same thing for a long time, regardless of the fact that it's not working, their productivity is down, the morale is low. There's a mass exodus of workers, and they're still gridding their teeth and gripping with their fingernails. And they're, like, holding on because it's all they know. How do you work with people like this to help them embrace change and see things differently?

Well, for me, it's very much about trying to promote actions that make a difference and tolerate symbolism. I was working with a company a couple of years ago where they had a really bro culture. They come back to bite them in a certain way because they had, shall we say DEI reached an incident that happen and it didn't look good. And women in the company were really rebellious. So at that point, you can think about, well, I can change some of the cultural symbolism so that we don't say certain things or so that we can look like we're slapping the bro guys on the wrist or something like that, or we can get it so that it's really a more female-friendly place without the symbolism. So what we did instead was we managed to promote, get a whole slate of women who had not who were overdue for a promotion, get them promoted. We figured out that there are a lot of women who are heads of things that due to a certain way the company was organized, they weren't invited to the strategy meetings because of some technicality. And we changed that rule so that they would be invited to the strategy meetings.

Oh, my God, we did so many different things. But basically what we did was we took some actions. So rather than teaching people about why this was wrong and what they needed, the language they needed to use instead, so they still went along saying they're bro things, but we changed it so that there would be larger numbers of women with having more power. And part of how we got away with this is the fact that the CEO acknowledged that if they kept up their bro culture since a lot of their customer base was women, they were probably miss out. And so in this case, the senior management was not comfortable having more women around, period. They were very clear about that. They were like, we don't see why we should change just to have more women around rather than trying to tackle that head-on. We worked around it and made some substantial changes that were going to make things happen. Regardless of what the people at the top of the company said they wanted to work with.

Very strategic on your part.

I'll just tell you that meant that we had to sit in a lot of meetings where we would be wincing and wincing and wincing because of the symbolism of the language.

But we knew that these were the actions that were going to make a difference.

And you also talked about workers who are competing with one another, who are undermining one another. I've certainly heard of people who have stolen ideas or sabotage the work of someone else. So what do you do with people like that in the workplace? Obviously, these are troubled people. They might have a personality disorder if I'm looking at them. Right. They're pretty toxic people. They're very disruptive. What do you do with people like that? Do you get rid of them? Do you try to work with them? What's your thoughts?

If you are serious about changing the culture and keeping in mind that a culture change is a multi year process, it's not something you can do in two months. But if you're serious about that, you're going to have to get rid of any toxic leaders you have. If you don't, nobody will take your culture seriously. That's a hard truth, and that's hard for people to swallow sometimes they say because also the people who are in that category of mistreating people under them often they're really good at sucking up the boss. And so the boss has no idea that there's anything wrong. And everybody else in the company knows this. And so the boss is very unwilling to get rid of them. But a case has to be made. And that's, of course, where you're going to need a lot of measurement assessments and you have to gather a lot of information. But long before I became a consultant, when I was working on a magazine a long time ago, I watched this happen and got a person who hired me turned out to be a very toxic leader, and everybody knew it, and there was a way, and it took a couple of years to get them out of the company.

But as soon as they did, the rest of the company really flourished.

Always. Like you take off, you cut out the rot and surprise, surprise, they're flourishing. What a shock.

Yes, exactly. But the thing is, it's difficult sometimes because people feel loyalty to somebody who served them well. And toxic leaders are very good at making sure that they're serving the boss well. It takes some hootspa, I'm using a euphemism to do it, but I've never seen it go wrong. I've never seen them not have a productivity and loyalty surge after doing it.

Amazing. Well, there's a lot of really important things that you've shared today about some very common sense ways to improve organizations. But also, I think it extends beyond the workplace. Right.

It can really go into the political arena. It can go into the community. It's a way of human beings seeing one another, and dealing with one another differently.

Yes, exactly. I'm a systemic thinker. For me, once you start putting it down to personality, there's no solving it. And of course, some things like the toxic leadership we're talking about, sometimes that is personality. But for interpersonal conflict, if we think about what's driving them to do X, which is getting on minors, which is causing me to do Y, that makes it solvable, whereas we just say, oh, that's just the way they are, then you can't solve it.

Yeah. You have to make changes. You have to take action. So if people are looking to learn more about the work that you do or hire you to bring it to their company, where can they find you?

They can find me at at kimperkins.com.

And so when is your book coming out?

When can people find it?

Right now we're expecting in the fall. But if you go to Kimperkins.com and you want to get on my mailing list, you'll know exactly what it's coming up.

Fantastic. And just before we wrap up, I thought that it would be nice for you to give a call-to-action for the listener, something that you would encourage them to consider or to try based on our conversation today.

Great question. So one of the things that I have found well, let's go back to competition. So one thing that I found is that sometimes people, especially women leaders, are feeling competitive with somebody or feeling a little bit of rivalry with somebody and they don't like it and they feel taking sense that it's undermining things. So I have a really quick way that people can help eliminate that feeling for themselves. That is to start making a list of the differences between that person that you feel that rivalry with and yourself, because rivalries come as a result of feelings of similarity. So people like basketball teams, when they get in rivalries, it's fourth and fifth. It's not fourth and 20th or it's people who are in the same geographic area or people who just remind you of yourself in some ways. So by making a list of things where you're different than that person, it helps you to get out of that rivalry feeling. And also it helps you figure out how to work with them better because you can see what they might need and you can supply them and vice versa.

That's cool. Cool call to action. Well, listen, Kim Perkins, it's been really a pleasure talking with you, and I wish you great luck with your new book. I think it's a message that people really need to take to heart.

Thank you. Thank you so much. It's been really fun to talk.

This is Dr. Marcia Sirota. Thank you for listening. Please leave a review and your comments wherever you listen to podcasts. And don't forget to sign up for my free newsletter at Marcisarota Md.com, where you'll learn about upcoming online events as well. Also, we love getting referrals from our listeners about future podcast guests. So please email us at info at MarciaSirotamd.com.