Erika McKellar chats with Dr. Elena Emma, a crisis coach, entrepreneur, and educator with a passion for humanizing organizations. They discuss Elena's journey from financial controlling to coaching, her innovative diagnostic tools for organizations, and the challenges of entrepreneurship.
Host: Erika McKellar, Host and Conflict Resolution Seeker
Guest: Dr. Elena Emma, Crisis Coach, Entrepreneur, and Educator
In this episode, Erika McKellar welcomes Dr. Elena Emma, a crisis coach, entrepreneur, and educator, to discuss the pervasive issue of unproductive meetings, with over 55 million held daily and up to 70% deemed ineffective. Elena shares her journey from financial controlling to coaching, emphasizing her apprenticeship approach to entrepreneurial education. They delve into innovative diagnostic tools that view organizations as living organisms, using methods like the vital sign test and human body scan to assess organizational health. The conversation highlights the importance of regular check-ins and continuous feedback over traditional annual surveys, stressing the need for ongoing evaluation to maintain organizational well-being.
Elena's experiences as a serial entrepreneur provide valuable insights into the addictive nature and inherent risks of entrepreneurship, as well as the lessons learned from multiple business ventures. She recounts a dramatic pre-meeting incident to illustrate resilience and decision-making in the face of unexpected challenges. The discussion covers strategies for handling long-term stress, the importance of adaptability, and maintaining authenticity in business. Elena also touches on the metaphorical significance of rainbows, symbolizing the multifaceted nature of identity and the beauty of embracing diverse aspects of oneself.
Key Time Stamps:
Notable Quotes
"Meetings are a skill. Communication is a skill. And working together, those are things that are not just, you're not just born with those things. You have to work on them just like anything else." - Erika McKellar
"You need to set the example of how willing you are to change and adapt to a changing environment that might require that you change your habits or ways of working." - Dr. Elena Emma
Resources Mentioned
Diagnostic Tool:[OCS Diagnostics](http://ocsdiagnostics.com)
Dr. Elena Emma's TED Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB_gn9a6dn4
Erika McKellar (00:04.238)
Believe it or not, over 55 million meetings are held daily across the globe. That's a whole lot of potential for greatness or a whole lot of wasted time. Here's the hard truth. Up to 70 % of meetings are considered unproductive by the people who attend them. Be honest, when was the last time you sent an email in a meeting? And how often have you left a meeting and thought, well, that could have gone better. On Bad Meetings podcast, we're not here to judge. We're here to embrace the awkward, the weird, the boring.
and everything in between when it comes to professional and sometimes not so professional get togethers. Erica McKellar here, conflict resolution expert. I invite brave souls onto Bad Meetings podcast to share their stories of meetings gone well, a little sour. We start by being curious about what happened. We uncover hidden opportunities and at the end, we finish off with actionable insights on how to have better meetings. The truth is all conflict has something positive to teach us.
if only we're brave enough to explore it. Thanks for listening. Hey there, Erica McKellar here, welcoming you to Bad Meetings podcast, where we share stories about our common and not so common workplace encounters and share tips for more engaging experiences at work. And today we have a very special guest with us, Dr. Elena Emma, who I have known for a decade and who shares our passion for bringing humanity back to business. Hi, Elena.
Hello, Erica. Thank you for having me. thank you again for coming on my podcast. We tried to do our first demo recording a few days ago, but had some audio issues. So we get a round two, we get a second try at this. And Elena, it's not that common to get a second try at something, right? Maybe we just haven't discussed everything and we need to, we didn't get enough of this, you know, so we just need to, we need to do more.
We need more. That's for sure. We need more. We need more. So Elena, I'm going to talk a little about you for a second, if that's okay. Because I have so many great things to say about you in our own personal experiences working together. But I want to just talk a little bit about who you are and what you're working on. So Elena, Dr. Elena Emma is a crisis coach, entrepreneur and educator who has dedicated the last 12 years to humanizing organizations and advocating for
Erika McKellar (02:29.198)
an apprenticeship approach to entrepreneurial education. And that one more time, an apprenticeship approach. And Elena, I want to ask you, where were you during my master's degree? Because I got an MBA in entrepreneurship, and it definitely was not an apprenticeship approach that I wish it was. And in quite a lot of places, or in majority of places, it still isn't.
And it's because I didn't have it the way I wanted. And when I ended up being 24 and in a complete mess in business, I was like, who would have taught me that in school? I have two degrees, what happened here? And so that was the beginning of the idea that maybe we should do it differently. And here I am many years later. Said like a true entrepreneur, I had a problem that nobody could solve. So I decided to solve it myself, right? And I'm still solving it. It's one of those things where.
you first have to educate the market. The market doesn't know they have a problem or they don't, they know it, they don't recognize it as a problem yet. They're still too attached to the old approach. And so we're educating the market to introduce things to the market. Well, I think that's the way that humans have been for all of time. And I know that there's a very famous entrepreneur, Henry Ford, who said,
people, if you were to ask people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses, right? Not cars. Not that I respect all of that, but historians' personal opinions on life. However, that's a very good quote, right? Because people often don't know what they need. So it takes people like entrepreneurs. Yeah, wasn't it Steve Jobs? I always quote him, I think it was Steve Jobs who said, how can I do a market test for the market that doesn't exist yet? Right? Sometimes you just have to take the risk.
And then there is a business school and there we teach you that there you should solve for a problem. There should be finding you should find a problem first and then solve that problem and do the market test fast enough. And if it doesn't work, don't roll out the product. Doesn't it always work that way? It's so easy. Just follow the steps in business school. Just follow the rules and then you're going to end up in an entrepreneur if you follow all the rules, right? Right, Erica? my gosh. Absolutely not. Well,
Erika McKellar (04:53.998)
I think that actually leads us perfectly into, well, first of all, because I always want to say that anyone I have on a guest on the show, it doesn't mean that they're, you know, highly accomplished, although you are. It doesn't mean that they all work in communications with which they don't. I love to have a variety and a diversity of people. The one thing that everyone has in common is that we all have something, a meaningful experience that we share together so that you and I have shared. And...
So you've been doing this for 12 years. I met you about 10 years ago. So that would have been at the beginning of your journey. And I'm sure a lot's changed now, but you came into my startup with my business partner right after we had raised our first round of investment. And with that round of investment was the stipulation that we had to have a financial controller. And, you know, I'm a creative and so was my business partner. We were both entrepreneurial creatives and we interviewed.
so many financial controllers and we were just bored stiff by all of them and said, my gosh, does this person have a personality? I'm not trying to stereotype and say all financial controllers are like that. However, we just didn't connect. And then finally we met you and you were just such a normal and normal person, a human person. And you helped us so much. And by the end you were not just our financial controller, you were our...
our coach. And I want to ask you, how has this journey been for you over the last 10 years? So when I met you was exactly the beginning in a sense that I was still what I was doing was still financial controlling and financial things. So I came from that angle, because I do have quite a lot of years of background and that but I was already transitioning in that was part of psychodynamic groups already and I was looking into coaching already and I was
unofficially trained in it already by then. Official training took later. And I've realized that when I come into the startup, I come with a task to build systems so that the startup can run their finances and report. But what we really do when we talk to small business owners, we help them navigate all the challenges and hold their hands in a way and have a lot of all these other conversations that...
Erika McKellar (07:17.838)
have nothing to do with finances and have everything to do with how do I handle life with all of this? And so that was the beginning of my Manage Like a Human approach. More an observation side of things rather than implementation just yet. So yeah, that was my observation stage. Okay, and so that was the observation stage. And now 10 years later, if it's okay that I share this,
You are on the cusp of releasing a or launching a new theory and diagnostic tool for organizations. And you have an amazing Ted talk that I'm going to put in the show notes so that everyone can take a look at it. But can you talk a little bit about what you have coming and give us, let's say, the elevator pitch for it?
So in the past 10 years since that moment, I've been developing this theory that, and I put it as part of my doctorate research, that organizations are not flat, like we like to put them. Their structure is not flat, but they're actually living organisms and they function like human beings. And if we accept that axiom, then we can say that all the departments within the organization can be split into the organ systems. And so every one of them has a function and a role.
that fulfills a much bigger picture of running a human or this human organization in the world. And I took it even further and I said, if that's the case and large organizations are adults, then maybe all the startups from idea stage to late startup stage, they would develop like children. And there are stages of development in psychology and biology of children. And so I put some analogies there of how startups develop the same way.
And there is research that shows that we attach to our startups the same exact way as we do to our children. So putting all of that together as a theory, I did two things. I started building a different incubation program for under -resourced entrepreneurs. And we are testing it now in business schools as a one -year program and three -year programs for bachelor's and master's. So that's on one side, on the educational side of things. And on another side,
Erika McKellar (09:35.502)
I came up with two diagnostic tests that pretty much like a health check tests. One of them is a vital sign test and another one is a human body scan for the organization. So you take a simple questionnaire and you can get a report that says kind of where are your signs off. And from that point on, you can take it to all the experts and do whatever the hell you want. But we function as a health lab to give you your preliminary examination.
So just like somebody would go in for a full panel blood test and see how am I doing? Am I deficient in minerals? How's my vitamin D? How's my calcium? This is how you would do that for an organization. And it doesn't matter the size. It's just that everyone has to take it. And you have to take it regularly, just like you would go to, I mean, when you go to a doctor for regular checkup, I don't know about, well,
I don't remember how it is in the US, but in here in Spain, you just go in and they say to go do a blood test. They don't even touch you anymore. They just give you a piece of paper that takes it to a blood test, right? Or worst case they might do if you walk in into urgent room, they might take your vital signs and then look at things, right? If they don't see anything obviously wrong. So we say do it regularly. And if you do it regularly and you keep monitoring what's going on, you can monitor the progress.
Also, because we're talking about the organization, not necessarily just the human, right? We can say you can take your whole team and have them take the same test at the same time, which gives the opportunity for everyone to see how they view the organization from a health perspective. And if nothing else, this is the beginning of a group coaching for conflict resolution coaching, maybe next level coaching for the team. You and I see the same organization.
that we are in on a daily basis from a completely different angles. What can we do about that? And I love this because I firmly believe that you need to be constantly checking in with the people on your team and your employees to see how they're feeling and how they're perceiving things. And, you know, once a year, you know, annual employee surveys just aren't enough. And that seems to be a standard across the board.
Erika McKellar (11:52.494)
So I love this idea of constantly checking, constantly taking the temperature of the team or the individual, right? So if it's an entrepreneur, a solo entrepreneur, they could take this test themselves and do their own organizational health check. And there could be a bit of an adjustment, like for example, with an employee questions, if they don't have employees, it's hard for them to answer that, but they always work with somebody, they have some suppliers they work with.
they usually have contractors they would work with at least part -time or on as needed basis, right? So you can make your own mental modifications towards what's going on in your company or say, you know what, I don't trust this data because I don't have employees or I don't have enough data yet to show this. But in general, you could take it on a regular basis to see where your company is. And you and I mentioned it before, but I'm a believer that they have a once a year.
testing because most of the diagnostic tests out there are super complicated, extensive, expensive, take forever to prepare and have the reports and you need to have a big name behind them with a lot of market tests. And we strive for completely different kind of testing. We go and say it's going to be a cheap download, simple questionnaire, it doesn't take long and it doesn't take a lot of effort and you can do it as often as you need. It's like a self...
self -check, you know, it's the lab coming to you to the home.
And I think that's really important that it's something that's available all the time or at any time, because if you're going through something with your company or work, it's really easy if things are going worse or better the week after that you completely forget about it. So having that time to sort of reflect in the moment on what is happening today, right now, I think is really important. And once a year, I mean, you miss so much that happens in between those times. Great.
Erika McKellar (13:49.454)
So very exciting and I can't wait to see that released. And is there a, if we want to learn more about this diagnostic tool, is there a place that we can go to learn more about it? I mean, the answer is yes and no. For one of them, we do have a tool already. So for a vital sign test, we do have a tool called ocsdiagnostics .com. We have a bit of a bug at the moment, but hopefully by the time this gets released and, and,
The viewers are going to start to be interested in this. We're going to have that fixed. For the human one that's still in development for the next few months. So probably my TED talk and an article on LinkedIn are the two closest things that you can get to understand the concept behind it. Great. I'll link those in the show notes. Thank you about that. So Elena, one thing that you and I both do have in common, and we talked about this last time, but...
we had a bit of a disagreement maybe on the right word for it. And I say serial entrepreneur because I'm, I know it's kind of a dirty word. However, I think, I think that serial entrepreneurs sort of own it in a different way. And like, I think that both of us fit in that group. What would you say?
Yeah, and we didn't have a disagreement. I just said that to me, serial entrepreneur sounds like a serial killer sometimes. Maybe because I'm becoming one for sure. I'm like, I'm not sure I want to qualify myself as that. And I mean it in the sense that as a serial entrepreneur, it's an addiction.
I don't know if it's a good addiction or a bad addiction, but it's an addiction. It's an addiction for risks. It's an addiction for building projects, for looking to do different opportunities everywhere and all the time. Surrounding yourself with people who don't make logical sense, but yet somehow they make things happen. So yeah, this term exists and I think we do both fit in it. And of course, certain accomplishments do bring you to that perspective to say, you know what, I have enough failures and some successes. And it's usually exactly like that. I have enough failures.
Erika McKellar (15:58.094)
And some successes that bring me to the point where I can say I'm a serial entrepreneur, I keep doing it on a regular basis. And that becomes more comfortable because the uncomfortable, you have to get used to the uncomfortable being an entrepreneur, right? You know, I say sometimes for some of us, our discomfort zone is actually being comfortable.
So when somebody says, you have to get out of your comfort zone all the time, for some of us, it's actually entering a comfort zone, is getting out of a comfort zone. We're so used to the chaos and changes and chaos and challenges. And, you know, like we wake up in the morning and you don't know what's going to hit you that when you say, things are stable and calm and, you know, and peaceful, that's this comfortable.
that's wrong. Something is off with that. I don't feel good. I feel excited. We got to mix it up a little bit, right? We got to mix it up a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Well, because this is called bad meetings, and this leads perfectly into your story. Why don't we go there? Because we you have a bad meeting story or a bad pre meeting story that I think can perfectly lead us into some really great lessons to take home. So why don't you set us up here?
Yeah, I mean, I would say maybe it was a bad meeting too. I just don't remember much about that meeting specifically. But what happened a few months after I moved to Barcelona, I think it was like two and a half months or something. So I decided to move to Barcelona out of nowhere with nothing waiting for me here, true entrepreneurial spirit. And so when I got here, I'm like, I'm gonna, yeah, I'm gonna build a business here, you know, an extension of my consulting coaching arm.
It's going to work because I've done this. Right. And so I hired this first associate literally in the school of my kids who came to bring his mom and his brothers, you know, and they didn't speak English. And so I hired him literally on a spot waiting for the kids. He was like 25, I think. And I'm like, dude, I'm going to build a business. We need to start running the city, right. To, to, to figure out how we're going to get connections. He goes, where is our office? We're sitting in a cafe. I'm like, this is your office. This is how real entrepreneurship starts. So, you know.
Erika McKellar (18:10.446)
the regular things, right? Educating on the spot. Anyway, so he finally gets us like a month and a half. Apprenticeship based entrepreneurship, right? Exactly. Apprenticeship based entrepreneurship, mentorship based entrepreneurship in a cafe, whichever one is open at this hour, right? Anyway, so about a month and a half and after we started, he actually finally lends us a really solid couple of meetings, first ones in Barcelona. And I'm super excited and of course anxious. It's like literally starting things.
And so I walk out of the house, the first one is at like 10 o 'clock in the morning and I walk out of the house and I leave in arena next to the arena shopping center. It looks like a arena, the former bullfighting arena. And I'm walking and I'm of course rushing, right? Then there is a lady walking very slow about 10, 15 meters in front of me. And I don't want to kind of bypass her, but I'm getting a bit irritated that she's walking in front of me so slow.
And then all of a sudden, we both hear something like a noise when something heavy is falling. We turn around and about 10 meters right before her, there is a man that just lands on the floor.
Whether he was dead or not, I didn't know back then. She kind of stepped to the side. There was a body that landed on a floor. Like falling from a high building. Falling from a high building. Either he was kicked off the roof, it's a pretty high building, or he fell himself. I don't know. My kids asked me later, mom, did he scream? And I don't remember. So maybe he was dead before that. But that wasn't...
I mean, it was the point, but that wasn't the weirdest part of this whole thing. And so this woman kind of goes to the side and I look at it and you know, you get into the state of shock where you don't even know what to do sometimes. So they call it a freezing stage or whatever this is. And I'm in Spain for a month and a half. I don't even know the equivalent of 911 and my Spanish is equal to zero. And I'm looking at this and there's only one thing that I remember. I remember that he had...
Erika McKellar (20:20.238)
a hole so the shoe fell off and there was a hole in his sock and that hole in the sock I will never forget. So those details. It's the details of course in state of shock it's the details and I'm looking at him and I see that people start gathering up so I kind of backed off a bit. People start gathering I see somebody on the phone so I realized he's probably getting help if he even needs one at this point and that was the moment where I go well what do I do? It was literally by my house. Do I go back to the house to get over this or do I go?
to my very first Barcelona business meeting. Because I have somebody waiting there, not only the person we have meeting with, but also my associate to whom I'm supposed to be a leader and a mentor and everything else. And so of course, it would be a lie if I said that I consciously thought about all of these things in depth. No, I think it was more of a background thinking. And so two minutes later, I decided that, like I looked at this and I went straight to the metro station. I got went to the meeting, I walked into the meeting, we had our,
whatever number of hours meeting, I don't even remember. Very intense, a lot of conversations. We walk out of there and I look at my associate and I think it really hits me. And I go, dude, I need coffee. I'll explain to you in just a second. And maybe my face said it all. He goes like, I see a cafe right there. Why don't we let their coffee is on me.
Yeah. And then what happened? How, once it hit you? Once it hit me, well, I came back home. So we had another meeting after that. I came back home and the American side of me goes like, my God, I've got to check what happened here. Right. So I look at the local news and there's nothing in the news. I look around the arena to see if anything is happening. Nothing completely like nothing happened.
And my kids were joking, they go like, mom, are you sure you didn't hallucinate when this happened? Like, you didn't imagine all of this. And you know that moment where you can't for sure say if this happened or not, because it's so, like they call it guess lighting, right? I think it's like, it's so shocking that you can't even understand that this actually happened. And it took me a few days to realize that I live in a different country with different rules. And it was a big, pretty big.
Erika McKellar (22:34.414)
fancy shopping centers. So of course, they don't want any rumors and any issues because people would be in shock as well. So it was before the opening hours, they probably figured it out. You know, emergency took it. And that was it. That was the end of the story. But yeah, that story stuck with me for a bit. It's like, welcome to business in Barcelona for real. I'm great apprenticeships there. I mean, talk about like, you know, a big something unexpected coming out before.
a very important meeting. Wow. Yeah. And it's a moment of choice. You know, you and I were kind of talking about it briefly. But for me, there are several times like that in my life, in business life, personal probably as well, but in business life. And I think it happens to every entrepreneur at some point. There is this moment where you have to make a choice. Do I go forward or not?
And usually at that moment, there's going to be an obstacle that makes so little sense that you almost want to back away because it's so weird. And I look at it as the world's letting you know that maybe something big is coming. Are you really ready for it? Kind of testing for you. What choices are you going to make? And for me, it was that moment. It was really, it was really that moment that, you know what? I can't help him, but I really.
take that risk and I choose to go forward with my business life here because I made a decision that I'm going to make it happen. And you know, Elena, that's a really, really interesting point because I'm thinking about it. And a lot of people would have made a different decision there or they would have looked at it and said, this is a bad sign. You know, this is something that's this is too much. And if you're already nervous, you know, as an entrepreneur, you're constantly going into.
situations and meetings like that where you're not really sure what to expect. You don't really know the person that's gonna be across the table from you. You're probably gonna be asking them for something, whether it's money, help, or something else, just seeing if they might be a good fit for you, a good partner in some way. And it's really easy to take that out, but you have the perspective of, no, you know what? I was given, this fell on me, literally, out of nowhere.
Erika McKellar (24:58.542)
It's out of my control. What's the decision that I'm going to make? Am I going to say, nope, and, you know, be afraid and say this is a bad sign or am I going to move forward with this? And I think not that it's so dramatic in everyday life for entrepreneurs, but many days do feel like that. It's super heavy. And it might be dramatic in a different way. This is a big external event that really happened.
and it feels, my God, you don't have dead bodies falling over on your head every day, right? But how many times in our everyday life we have, I don't know, you have a child, I have two children, our child gets sick, all of a sudden in the morning when you have this very important meeting and they have a fever and you don't know if they're half dying because they have this flu or...
They just don't want you to go away or it's a typical flu that they have every month and a half or so because they go to kindergarten, right? How do you make that choice? Or you forget the presentation or a computer doesn't turn on for the presentation and you have to freestyle it completely. I'm sure you've been there as well.
So is that a bad sign? Hundreds and times. Is that a bad sign that I have to freestyle it and it's never going to happen or it's one of those resilience things? And for me, it's the concept of resilience. What are you willing and ready to handle to make some cliche to make your dream happen, but also to make what you wish happen and wish for me is a bit different than a dream. What is the price that you're willing to pay? What is your resilience? What are you ready to handle?
And how quickly can you bounce back from tough situations? And how can you even recognize what it is or stay in a tough situation? I wish all the situations were like, it happens like this event. You know, it happened. I have to bounce back and life goes back to normal. How many times do we have a situation where it doesn't go back to normal and you can bounce back and you have to stay in it for a while because it's there to stick around? Welcome to Corona. Welcome to bankruptcies.
Erika McKellar (27:08.654)
That's true. So welcome to layoffs. Welcome to layoffs. Welcome to losing investments. Welcome to cash crisis. So Elena, what is your recommendation for people who are not in a situation that is maybe sudden and traumatic and that just happens in the moment, but something that takes a long time to work through? How would you, you know, using the example that you ran into,
How could we apply that to something that's maybe longer and more stressful over time as an entrepreneur? Well, event that I had is actually easy. It's weird as it sounds. It's an accident. It's no one's fault. It just happened. It just happened. And you don't have any control over it. There are some things that are just accidents. Corona, for many, was an accident, long -standing, but an accident that entered our life.
Accidents are very different from patterns, from norms, and from long -term complications. So accident is like, you know, it is what it is. Get over it. I don't know, have a drink or a joint or whatever you do to let it off your system, a meditation if you're there, and move forward whenever you're ready. Hopefully talk to a therapist if you can, if there is a reason for that, right? Long -term things, I'd say,
Know your priorities, whatever is important to you in the moment. And for me, honestly, when I go, because my immigration was one of those periods for me. Bankruptcies at some point was one of those periods for me and my partner at that point. When you try to launch a product and you go through fundraising and it doesn't happen and it doesn't happen and it doesn't happen and you are kicked back all the time and it goes on for years, those are the hard stages.
For me, asking myself every morning, what is my priority today is what keeps me balanced. Sometimes it's literally for that one day. And so I would sit and say, what is my, what is important for me today? And if it is you and I are going to finish and I'm going to go to the beach for a walk, although I have tons of work to do. Like, you know what? It's a Sunday. I'm going to go for a walk. It's not logical because I have too much work to do. For somebody, it might be, you know what, I actually want to get things off my plate.
Erika McKellar (29:30.03)
I want to sit down and grind. And that's what makes what is my priority today. Without bargaining. When you have a long term period of heavy issues, bargaining is not helping. And what do you mean by bargaining? Bargaining with the destiny, bargaining with the outside world, bargaining with, I shouldn't be having this because life is not fair to me. And,
You know, I've been in business for so long that I should have bargaining with yourself, bargaining with your family members who say, I want dinner now. Sometimes giving in actually saves energy. Sometimes bargaining with the world, you know, I'm failing, I can't let it, you know what, maybe giving in is going to give us some time to rebound. So this is fighting for too much. I don't have energy in me to bounce back.
So this is not just recognizing when you need to push forward and move on and move ahead. It's also recognizing when to step back, right? And to take a moment for yourself. So it's either or. It's making the choice in that moment. And give in. It doesn't sound sexy. For us entrepreneurs, it sounds terrible. What do you mean give in?
We don't give in. We don't. Just look at every meme on Instagram. It's like entrepreneurs, we give up. You gotta grind. You gotta grind. You gotta do this. Until you die. And this is the fine line where if you're not ready to die, but you feel like you are about to, maybe it's time to give in because that might be your biggest gap of opportunity. And it's the hardest part.
I am all for grinding and I used to have stages in my life where I worked 16 hour days, six or seven days a week, three years ago, I promised myself I'm not going to do it. And I stick to it. I try not to work 16 hours a day. And this year I'm hiring more of staff and help not to do it because I realized I just don't want to anymore. Maybe I'm aging, maybe I'm becoming wiser. I don't know. But grinding is important and that's the way through.
Erika McKellar (31:40.622)
I always say that we as entrepreneurs are passionate and we start out of passion. And if you're not passionate, being an entrepreneur is really hard. If you're not passionate, you really have to love money. You really have to love money. Because it's either or. Usually there's nothing else there, right? You're either passionate for what you're building, whatever you're driven by. Or you're passionate about money. Or you are more dependent so much, like attached to money so much that it drives me.
But let's say the money side we'll talk about at some other podcast. But even when you're so passionate, at some point, passion burns out and there's only work that keeps it going forward. So grinding is definitely a huge part of, you know what? We need a second episode. We wake up on a Sunday morning and we do this because this is what we do. End of story. But that doesn't always work either. Knowing when to stop or step back is super important because grinding can become addictive as well.
I'm doing something. And so I feel like I'm useful and sometimes it's helpful and sometimes it takes away from creativity, from recognizing opportunities, from looking at the bigger picture. You know, this speaks so personally to me because that has been what, and I don't know if something that something that clicks when you turn 40, but once I turned 40, I realized that I really had no idea when to turn on and off the switch.
And when it's on, it's all the way on. And when it's off, it's like I shut down and need to like close the door and turn off the lights for a full 24, 48 hours. And, you know, sometimes, sometimes that's the way life goes. And, you know, sometimes it's recognizing when you need to take a step back or when you need to keep pushing and also to recognizing what kind of person you are. And if you are an all or nothing person, being OK with that.
and making room for that in your life. And that's sort of where I've decided to, rather than trying to find this perfect balance all the time, it was stressing me out so much that it made me be more off balance rather than just accepting that, hey, you know what? I'm an entrepreneur. I grind it hard sometimes for seven days straight. And I make sure I have Monday, Tuesday off to go get my nails done and sleep all day if that's what I want to do. And that's okay too.
Erika McKellar (34:01.646)
And what type of person you're becoming. I just turned 40 a few months ago as well. And it's like, you realize I used to be, I'm all grinding, I go all the way, but we're also changing. And I'm not sure if it's just aging or maybe it's just changing as well. I've had that stage and now to, you know, as they say, to live a life you never had, you should do the things you never did. So if I want to have a longer life with different stages and different experiences, maybe I should.
question, what am I becoming? I used to be, for example, an all or nothing person, but maybe what I'm becoming is no longer an all or nothing person and therefore, you know, even my work ethics might be changing with that. Or maybe where I got an inspiration for my work ethics is no longer there because it served its purpose or because I've proved to the world what I needed to prove or I've proved to myself or.
or I got what I wanted and that worked. And it's like food in the fridge, right? It's getting stale at some point, doesn't matter how long it's been there and how fresh it was. At some point, it just serves its purpose. And it all comes down to self -awareness and flexibility with that self -awareness and identity, right? So what is it?
how do we really see ourselves? And we talked a lot about identity and especially for entrepreneurs and how it relates to their business. And I thought that that was a really interesting topic and you have a lot of interesting things to say about identity. Yes, and we were talking about actually more of a corporate environment than identity for entrepreneurs that quite a lot of times, you know, we say, there's nothing personal, just business.
and I'm a lost person who believes in that probably. I'm a big believer that you are who you are and you can apply it everywhere. But the problem - Someone said, finally, thank you. But for a lot of us, we feel that whoever I'm at work, it's gonna be one person and whoever I'm in person, I'll have as another person and I always look at it as undiagnosed, unofficial, right? But a way of a split identity, which if it's not addressed,
Erika McKellar (36:29.07)
it becomes an issue. You literally become two different people and eventually that comes out. There is a conflict and that conflict might come out in your body where you physically feel one way and work another way at home. It could be with your confidence and your significance where well over there I'm recognized because I'm an executive and a director and here in my own house they don't even listen to me.
And maybe that's okay, right? But finding balance in that where, you know what, maybe they don't listen to me as well either. And that's a good thing sometimes. For me, identity has multiple levels, multiple layers. And we, entrepreneurs are just better at exploring it because most of the time we don't fit in the standard norms. And so we are almost stuck with no other options.
but to explore things, explore our identities, bring ourselves everywhere. Ourselves are way too much for a standard environment. Corporate people have much better way of splitting it and segmenting it. And for me, it's a very interesting coaching work all the time. I work a lot with coaching. When I coach large organizations, I work a lot with authenticity. I work a lot when they come for personal brand. They go, can you help me build personal brand? I'm like, okay, sure. Who are you?
The hardest question to answer. I'm a marketing director of 15 years. I have all of these projects that I'm like, yeah, that's awesome. And who are you? I'm a mom or I'm a father. Yeah, but who are you?
I work a lot with this because from that point, that seed, you can bring yourself into your parenting, into your management, into your trade, into your craft, into your business. For us entrepreneurs, our businesses are usually the reflection of us and our values. And that's it. There's the identity right there. And if there is no identity, there is no identity in the business. Coming back to the human side of businesses, right?
Erika McKellar (38:43.47)
always coming back to it. And if we could, I'd love to close out this Sunday morning. Thank you again so much for spending some time with me again this morning. What is something about you? And I'm leading into this because I know what it is. What is something about you that you would never usually say in a professional conversation or interview like this?
And how does that relate to your identity, to you as an entrepreneur and to probably a lot of other entrepreneurs out there? Well, there are two things that we were joking about it. One of them, I don't know how to ride bicycle. I'm 40 and I don't know how to ride bicycles. So that's in my to -do list. That's charming though. It is charming. Probably at 40 it's charming, right? I mean, a lot of people go, we can just ride bikes. I'm like, no, we can't. I don't ride bikes. I don't know how to do it.
So that's in my to -do list, but jokes aside, I'm fascinated and almost obsessed with rainbows, which have nothing to do with LGBTQ community at all. Rainbow goes way back before LGBTQ has claimed it. And I used to have a nonprofit project under which I was doing quite a lot of coaching work, authenticity recovery work, through coaching with people. And quite often I still do it.
just has a different name or different name for a project right now, but it was called Generation Rainbow. And for me, Rainbow is about multiple colors of our identity. And then we have so many different sites to ourselves that if you allow.
to play with it, it can become just as bright and it can become just as unique as rainbow is. And you can only see it in certain scenarios and certain environments. And sometimes it is based on manmade things, right? So if the light hits the window or CD in the right way,
Erika McKellar (40:46.126)
There has to be a window or a CD that reflects it so that it falls on the floor and there has to be a surface to do it, right? So there's going to be a manmade aspect and there's going to be an external environmental, for me, I would call it a godlike, right? But a world -like aspect, universe -like aspect in that as well. And for me, it's that constant reflection where there's some light coming in and part of my identity starts shining in a certain way that gives not one color.
reflection, but a multiple color reflection with a lot of bright and cool ideas. I am a big believer in polymathy, in identities with a lot of different parts to it. You can be quite a lot of different things in exploration of all of those parts. So every time I see a rainbow, I'm like a kid. I'm taking a photo of it. I'm chasing it. I'm looking at it.
Yeah.
Well, I think that's beautiful. And yeah, I think we're, I think, again, as entrepreneurs, we're always chasing that rainbow, aren't we? And it's that moment of opportunity, right when the rain goes away and the sun starts to shine. And I love that sort of duplicity going back to our whole conversation on the, you know, the tough choices and the time to shine for and the time to step back. And I think it's, that's what it's all about, because you're never going to have the same rainbow in the same situation ever.
you know, but it's, it's always an opportunity to, to be looking for wherever you are in the world, right? Whether you're living in the U S whether you're living in Barcelona, Morocco, Sweden, and I think again, global expats even add a whole nother layer to it, which we could talk about for, I'm sure another hour. It's another, another thing, but it's like, isn't it this very human aspect where right in the in, in between.
Erika McKellar (42:39.95)
proper amount of challenges and rain and emotions and everything else. And right where some release comes, we shine the most in the multiple colors. And this is the beauty and the magic that gets out from us. I love that. In our businesses, in our personalities, personal lives, and quite honestly, in large organizations as well. I'm still a big believer that this is possible. And that's why my tagline for everything that I do is humanizing organizations is that,
especially with artificial intelligence coming in. I mean, we as humans still run organizations that might as well make them what we think they should be, not the other way around. Yeah, right. I think there's a lot of fear out there when it comes to AI, and that's definitely a topic I want to explore more at some point. And how can we sort of go about it with more of an entrepreneurial perspective, right? Like, how can we use this to improve our interactions? And...
how to use to improve ourselves. And I think there's a lot of opportunity out there. And I think people, when they see things they don't understand or don't know, or they see change, they fear it. And rather than fear it being curious, I think that's the MO of most entrepreneurs out there. I know that's how I try to approach things when I'm conscious about it, right? The fear is the first natural reaction. I don't know that, you know, that's something I've never tried or never done, or I might be bad at it or I might fail.
But as entrepreneurs, we failed so many times that it stops. It stops becoming so dramatic. It stops stopping us. It stops stopping us. Well, that's beautiful. And I want to thank you so much again for your time today. And, you know, I want you to go out on this beautiful Sunday, walk on the beach and chase that rainbow.
It hasn't been raining here in a long long long time, so I don't think Barcelona has any rainbows anytime soon, but I'll have my own. Come to Sweden. I'm professional pursuit, yes, I miss rainbows. We have like wind, rain, hail and sunshine all in the last 24 hours. Do you have rainbows? You know, honestly out of the window that you can't see it, but off to my right there is often
Erika McKellar (44:55.15)
And I wonder if they did this on purpose, these beautiful Stockholm buildings, on top of it, there are always rainbows coming and hitting the tops of these buildings. And I can for sure guarantee that the architect built it in that way, for that purpose.
That's so very cool. So double rainbow outside my window. I would say on a weekly basis. I'm jealous right now. Good jealousy, but I'm jealous right now. We as entrepreneurs are allowed to be jealous of each other so we can do better things and become better humans. Right? As long as we admit it. And then we still cheer each other on in the process. We're like, God, I'm so jealous, but good job. But it's a good jealousy, right? I'm so jealous, but I want you to have it. I want you to have it. Yes. I want you to have it, but send me a picture. No, I'll send you a picture.
time for sure. Thank you, Erica. Thank you for having me here. It's a great pleasure. Thank you so much. It's been so much fun talking with you and we will connect soon. And just one time before we go, can you say the name of your company so that people can look out for it when it is ready? The diagnostic tool we talked about. Davina Lab. Davina Lab. Okay, great. So we're going to keep an eye out for that and I'll put all the links in the show notes that we talked about. And thanks so much. Thank you.