Unlocking Resilience and Authenticity in Workplace Cultures
JD Walter unpacks the nuanced practice of emotional agility, exploring how authentic resilience and emotional intelligence empower collective growth, foster trust, and transform organisational conflict into compassionate collaboration.
Foreign.Welcome to Inclusion Bites, your sanctuaryfor bold conversations that spark change. I'm Joanne Lockwood,your guide on this journey of exploration into the heart ofinclusion, belonging and societal transformation.Ever wondered what it truly takes to create a world? Remember, everyonenot only belongs, but thrives. You're not alone.Join me as we uncover the unseen, challengethe status quo and share stories that resonatedeep within. Ready to dive in? Whether you'resipping your morning coffee or winding down after a long day, let'sconnect, reflect and inspire action together.Don't forget, you can be part of the conversation too. Reach outto jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.ukto share your insights or to join me on the show.So adjust your earbuds and settle in. It's time toignite the spark of inclusion with Inclusion Bites.And today is episode 184 with thetitle Emotional Agility in Action.And I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome JD Walter.JD is a learning and development expert, helping organisations achieve
Joanne Lockwoodhost
peak performance by investing in people as humans,not just assets. When I asked JD to describe hissuperpower, he sees his ability to reframeemotional intelligence and resilience as tools for collectiveempowerment. Hello, jd. Welcome to the show. Thanks,
JD Walterguest
Joanne. It's absolutely a pleasure to be here.I look forward to our conversation today. Yeah. You're
Joanne Lockwoodhost
based in the us, I believe. Yes, I am in
JD Walterguest
the Sunshine State of Florida, so I'm about as close to theCaribbean as you can get without actually being Caribbean.So southwest Florida, outside of Naples, and it is sunny.
Joanne Lockwoodhost
And is that near the Gulf of America?
JD Walterguest
Well, I still call it the Gulf of Mexico, but yes.
Joanne Lockwoodhost
Yeah, yeah, the. The Gulf. The Gulf. Anyway, the Gulf. It's been the Gulf
JD Walterguest
Mexico since I was a kid. It's going to stay that way as far asI'm concerned. Yeah, yeah. So
Joanne Lockwoodhost
we had the unfortunateevent that the Pope died last week, a week before, wasn't it? And his funeralwas on Saturday. Is that a big thing in America, watching that?
JD Walterguest
I'll be honest, I don't know. I mean. Oh, it's in the news.I actually, you know, I don't really. I try and stay out ofthe news as much as possible. I try not to kind of fall in linewith what everybody's talking about. Wow.
Joanne Lockwoodhost
Yeah, fair play. I completely relate to that. There's a lot goingon in the news, but probably a good segue on to talking about thetopic of today, about this resilience. Emotional. Emotional intelligence.What got you into this? Where where did it all start? So
JD Walterguest
I think so my background, so education wise experience.I am a former member of the US Navyand I really was, I was more of astrategist early on. Um,I had more of an interestin how organisations are structured, how work isorganised, processes. So I was very, verystyle organisation and I think that experienceand that focus, while very beneficial for my careerat some point couldn't resolve what I was sortof dealing with in an organisation. So I had a couple of instances whereI was running programmes, had a large group ofindividuals working for me and I wasn'tat the time prepared to kind of see the humandynamic clearly. I wasso into the, well, I can fix this by restructuring,I can fix this by changing the process. We can, we canreallocate work, you know, we can organise in a way,but those things, at some point they break down and they don't actually solvewhat is ultimately happening inside of an organisation. And that is peoplebeing people, right? Like. And so
JD Walterguest
I had a very specific situation where I wasrunning a large scale human resourceservice centre out of 20 peopleand it was rough with conflict. I was,I lost about 50% of our staff in six months.And there was just so much conflict in HR, you know,complaints, et cetera, et cetera. And I looking in atthis organisation and I'm thinking that's why,how do I, how do I even attempt to fix what's happening here? Because itwas so much, it was so personal toso many people and the conflict was so heavy and I, and Ibrought in several external folks to say, hey,observe this and tell me what you think. And they kept comingback and saying, well, you need to fire your manager, get rid of your.And, and I can't. And I couldn'tresolve like in silent, my head.I like just getting rid of a couple of managers doesn'tchange what's ultimately happening. That's too superficial.That's like, that's when you fire the coach from your sportsteam, right, because you're not performing well. It's not the coach that's out thereon the field, it's the players. So that's who you should be lookingat. And so anyway, I, I decided that I wasnot going to accept everybody else's perspective that itwas a management problem and I'm going to dig and I was going to findsomething more fundamental. And so, so what I ultimately did was I wentback and I sort of reconstructed the whole projectfrom the time we set up the contract. We bid on the workand the contract. And then we started to set it up and I realised twothings very quickly. One, that we hired a bunch of reallygreat subject matter experts and we told them what their job was going to be.But on day one, we asked them to do something different, something not just different,but something they've never done before. So we hired all ofthese HR professionals who were used toperforming transactions, processing work, benefits,payroll, promotions, those sorts of things. Andon day what we asked them to do were to build standard operating proceduresand processes. And they had never done that. Those thingshad always been given to them. So that washurdle number one. We, we said, hey, come have this job and here's whatyou're going to do. And then on day one, we, you know, we pulled therug out from underneath him and he said, oh, but you have to do thisfirst. So that was the beginning of the vibration.And then secondarily we had to implement some technology,a ticketing system. None of them had ever worked in aticketing system before. And now they were not only beingburdened with having tolearn a system, we were trying to design it as we go and it wasnot a very good.Our partners. And so we weren't able to buildthe technology. So that was sort of hurdle too.So you take that and I, and I re. What I realised, I was like,okay, now we've done, we put everybody offensive. They're all afraidif do well they're going to get fired. This job, you know, and youjust extrapolate out the fear. And of course it makes sense tonow that everybody's fighting and there's lots of complaints. And it's becauseeverybody's in this heightened state of awareness. And it was inthis moment that I really, you know, to get to your. The light bulb wentoff and I was like, man, I have got to learn to addressorganisations differently. And so my wife was doingsome doctoral work at the time. She was researching emotional intelligence. Shewas throwing a lot of stuff at me to read. I did a bunchof, you know, kind of research on my own, read a bunch of books, dida bunch of, you know, academic journals and, and finally came tothis place where I was like, you know what? We, I need to completely rethinkhow I approach organisations. And so that,that was the switch where I said, okay, I'm,I'm a human agent at this point, right? Everything that I dofor custom, all about the lived experience of the employees,you know, it just, it ancillarily, you know,organisations Are abstractions. They exist on paper,may have buildings. But what makes an organisation isthe collective of individuals that have come together to do somethingunder that umbrella. So. So at this point,
JD Walterguest
once I started to understand emotional intelligence andI really started to understand the relationship between human psychology,it really just kind of changed perspective andexperience in conflict zones. And I wasinterested in the idea ofresistance, right? Resistance to collaboration,you know, why, you know, we're so easily avoidable, et cetera, et cetera.Now thinking about resilience as this ability to managestress, overcome kind of wear and tear of, youknow, tension over time. And it really startedlike I said, you know, you know, this is the keyhere. If we want to. If we want to strengthen ourselves, ifwe armed to avoid beingdrawn into where is going on in ourenvironment. So our environment want to choose, want to berational, we want to respond in an appropriate way.And resilience for me is really what that's all about. And so Iuse resilience as anonymous.We can talk more if you want about, you know, all those aspects. Yeah,
Joanne Lockwoodhost
I'm keen to find out a bit more about the team dynamic youobserved in your. And the epiphany time when youdid that. Because people, as you say, people blame the manager.Sometimes it's appropriate. But often I find managershaven't been trained to be managers. They're promoted fromthe ranks without any tools, without any success andthen something expect them for being a great engineer to being a people person anda people leader is often unfair. Butwe hopefully we can train people and I think emotional intelligenceis something that personally, in my own experience is once you becomeaware that it's a thing and you start tofocus on it, it becomes something you can develop skills in. Is thatright? Yeah, absolutely. So I think,
JD Walterguest
you know, there is.So example, right? I'm a great. I made amanager. There's a development, right. Management is a very specific skill setand we haven't trained to it. And we go, oh,well, okay, what is that?Right. It's todeveloping managers tends to be this very superficial effort. Oh, we'll be moreempathetic. I'll be a better leader. Okay. Again, I don't know what these thingsare, right, as concepts. Now you can spell them out and you can put alittle post around the wall. But itdoesn't tell me as an individual how to behave.How do I inform my behaviours based on that? What does empathy looklike as a behaviour? How does empathy show up authentically?And. And that connection is so it likea superficial was adestruction image than if I just would have said, yeah, I don't reallycare about your personal life, get back, right. Like it's almost like we candeal with that better than this sort of fakecaring. And so, so what I think, when I think aboutemotional intelligence, what I think is about this capacity to beauthentic, but it requires us to vulnerable, right? Sovulnerability. And I always like to mentionPatrick Lencioni. He's fivebehaviour to the team. He lays vulnerability based onbuilding results oriented team. For me, Iact resilience or emotional intelligence as the founder. Because if wedon't have the capacity to withstandscrutiny, tension, stress in the environment, wecan't actually be vulnerable. Vulnerable is we're actually starting to be authentic.
JD Walterguest
And when we're authentic now, we're building trusted relationships.Patrick says that if you don't get a chance to weigh in,you can't possibly buy in. And he's talking about productiveconflict. We all run away from conflict. But theargument is important because that's how we get to innovation,right? That's how we evolve our organisation,you know, into the future. So the ability toauthentically connect with people is incredibly important.And it doesn't have to be the authenticity is more importantthan sort of the 10,let's say in their environment, people are keeping on as they'relooking for that they're looking talk engagement all thetime. What is it that's an emotional connection to this thing that I'm doing.And, and we have programmes like oh hey, we have fundraisers. That'srise. The engagement. Engagement isn't about whether I like theorganisation, whether I like the people I work with. It's aboutcan I emotionally connect with this work that I'm doing withthe mission, you know, the thing that I do, the task that I do ona daily basis. If so, thenI'm going to betoo productive as possible. But what stops the noise around me, allthe drama around me, all the change that's constantly happening. So if I'mconstantly reacting to all of these things happening in myoperating environment, I'm never actually able to get tobeing a peak performer. So again,
JD Walterguest
it's the resilience that comes from, you know, well developedemotional intelligence competency that allows me to bevulnerable and it allows me to. And what we're really talking about isI have a root of who I wantto be yourself. I'll draw from, you know, concept of humanpsychology, real self is who do I want to bein the world. And if I have a measuring stick, then Ican make decisions in the moment howto be cave. So in that exchange,No, I'm distracted. There's this thing, what I want to beable to do, be able to connect with youthat your facings I've everfaced. Maybe I can't truly be empathetic, but I cancertainly be sympathetic. But what I commonly do is I can use space.I can say, you know what, you need to take the day off, don't worryabout it, go home. You know, if you need anything, let me know.But go take some time, go take a walk, do whatever, you know, whatever itis that you need to do instead of driving towards. Well, that'stoo bad you feel that way. You workthe law in that. That latter scenariois tenfold. Take until day. Imean, we don't work eight hours a day anyway, so it's not like we're, youknow, we overblow the loss of production becausewe assume that eight hours is being worked everyday. But we know that's not true.
Joanne Lockwoodhost
In team dynamics, in leader team dynamics,I imagine there has to be a kind of a, a normalisationof a balance of emotional intelligence. Because if you're not careful, ifyou're imbalanced, one person has high emotional intelligence and one has low or,or not aware of it. That can create frustration on both parts. You know,someone's trying to be empathetic and listen and manage you and look after you. Youknow, you're neurodiverse or your, your empathy levels are low.You're. You're kind of, yeah, you're, you feel uncomfortable inthat situation. So how do we kind of try and level outthis imbalance? Sometimes step away from an
JD Walterguest
organisation, Just look at the world and I think about allthe craze on a daily basis.The world is ripe with. That's the first thing that doesn't matterthat we're at work. Our lives are our lives and they'refilled with all of these. Right. Whether ithappens within the bounds of the organisation or not. Um,I've done a lot of work with public servants in the United States.If you've read news, you know that there's a big move to totalnumber of federal employees in the Federal Government or in the government in the UnitedStates. That's not necessarily a bad thing. But unfortunately, thenarrative that goes along with it is these people aren't being productive. They're not greatprofessionals. These guys, you know, they're not really doing that. They're lazythey're this, they're that and those things couldn't be any further from the truth. Butthat's an. That is going to necessitate this. We step back andwe kind of, you know, we protect ourselves from this.This criticism. Right.So I think you know, when youimbalance in. In a. When youhave the imbalance you can. I'm trying to think of thebest way to say it. If I look out into the world and Isee of the drama based thatsort ofmore it's shouting match. Everybody's trying to be heard.There's no more focus on bringing inevidence and proving a truth. It'sbecause you're in. It's. There's just so muchvital in the world and. And it's exactly what youjust being. Solook at it from that perspective. What I think Ican commit myself to not be distractedby all of the stuff that's coming after me.I'm maybe notbe as negatively impacted by all of the stuffand ultimate world a much nicer place. We'd all get along a lot better.And I think that's ultimately what we really need to be doing iswe need to be acknowledged. We're different. Right? We're alldiverse in all the different ways you can bediverse and numerous others come from someplacedifferent. We all approach life different. We have different beliefs,different opinions, you know, different desires. But it'sall okay because there isn't a right. And I think this iswhere the emotional intelligence and I thinkemotional intelligence in that scenario that you're talkingabout.To be where you are. Okay. Do you want to be better?That's really the question. It's not do you agree with me? Do you? What areyou shooting for in your life? What. What is your goal? What is your ideal?Where are you trying to get to? Who are you trying to be as ahuman being? Let me help you realise that. And if we do that I thinkall the rest of this stuff just kind of starts to fall into place. Butit. It requires strength, right?A resilience within you to be able to put yourself outand say this is me without apology.
JD Walterguest
This is who I am. You can be who you want.I take no offence to celebrate you be who you want tobe. But let's, let's do that in away that we're not trying to change each other.We're not falling on a flag not we're notsaying your role is onlygood if go back to that ideal self ideawhat, what that is all about. Is deciding who wewant to be as individuals. How do I want to show up in the world,how do I want people to experience me if that's the mostimportant and frankly the onlymeasuring stick that will letter to us? Because everything elseis an abstraction. It's everything else is some third party creation.The ideas of success that are printed in magazines, the commercial,the political rhetoric, everything, everything that goeson driving towards no, no, I have the answer and youneed to follow me. And it's not about following people, it'sabout being authentic. And so.
Joanne Lockwoodhost
We live in a world where a lot of the communication we dothese days is asynchronous. We social media,we're hiding behind keyboards, we're sending a message. That messagethen travels through space and time and someone will read it andthen reply or not or whatever. Butin the human evolution, most of our communications was all synchronous. Wewere talking to a person with a person. We could judge theirreactions, we could judge their feelings, we could judge their state, whatthey were doing. Whereas now we've got no ideawhere the person is at the other end, what they're doing, what they're thinkingof, what their emotional state is, what their happiness quotient is, whatever.And we're sending this message and theyinterpret it in a completely different way often which is intendedor we don't have consequence in what we sayanymore. Is that part of the problem we're getting here? Yeah, I think
JD Walterguest
so. I think it's a desireto interpret what somebody is saying.And I don't know, I would probablyargue that we've lost some of our command,the ability to speak clearly, concisely,to say exactly what I mean without anagenda. If I tell you you're not here inFlorida, but if I sun is shining today and it's 85 degrees,okay, you can me, you can go look on Weather channel or whatever app andand find out if that's true or not. It's an easy piece ofinformation for us to then conversation about. But if I saythe weather, it's not aboutfacts anymore. Fact getproven. That's an opinion. So what happens is
JD Walterguest
we fall to opinion much more than actually justexchanging bits of data that we want to thencomment on or talk aboutaddress. So what happens instead of saying like you know,my silly little weather analogy instead of just 85degrees from we typicallythings with anagenda I personally you doagree with. So I have to convince you the weather's better here.It is point of that it doesn't it doesn't changeanything in the world, right? It just makes us feel better because somebodyagreed with us potentially. All of thisgoes back to this idea, right, of resilience where it's like I don't have tobe right. No one has to agree. I'm perfectly okayin this world if absolutely nobodyagrees with me. Now I might want to considermy beliefs if absolutely nobody is agreeing with mebecause maybe there's something that I'm missing so I should consider that.But at the end of the day, the point isn't to bethe same as or different.To have my own perspective based on my lived experience and thento let everybody else have the same thing. So togrant that courtesy or that saylisten, your, your lived experience,it's all on you. I'm. You need.I'm not not care. Because who am Ito make the rules rightplaces. But that comes to, right, like come back toa comfort level. Are we confident enough? Are wesecure enough in ourselves? Can we,you know, positivelyovercome other. We have.I'm afraid of not being liked. Okay, okay.We need to understand, right? And, and is the thingthat you're putting out there to try and get people to likeyou, is that authentic to you or is that kind of what you. Yougrabbed? Because I think people, well, people like peoplelike this. So now people like people. I'll get asports like people that, you know, make six figures. So I'll go
JD Walterguest
get a job that makes six figures or whatever it happens to beI in the world. If I sit back andI'm complete selfish observationof the world it is.We're so concerned aboutnot fitting in, right? We're soafraid of not being accepted. We're so afraidof somebody not, you know,wanting to give us the job, not doing well enough inschool, fill in the blanks of whatever it is thatwe subordinate all of our kind of hopes and dreams for usourselves as people. And we say, okay, well this is what's going to sell,right? And so that's it. That's who we become.In psychology, this is called incongruence where the idealself and the realised self are no longer are not aligned.For me, that's what I would say. Happiness. Happiness is alignmentbetween the ideal self and the realised self. If, if you areat least on the track too becomingthat person that you want to be, showing up the way you want to showup, having people experience you the way you want to beexperienced, then I think everything's okay.And all the Other stuff doesn't matter quite as much. Butwe live in a world that is very much driven towardswhat somebody else thinks we should want,have or do. And often it's motivated by theirown greed to line their own pocket, sell their cars, you know, getus to give to their, their special cause, you know, elect themto office, whatever it happens to be. Andwe don't want to live in. This, as I say, we
Joanne Lockwoodhost
live in this hyper connected world now. So again, going back to ourprimaeval days or prehistoric days, if we wereisolated in our views in our, in our small little village group,we were pretty isolated on our views, we would homogenise around the majority for safetyand protection. But now we can almost, in ourinfinitely connected world we can find someone who's going to agree with ussomewhere and we build these networks of people who agree. Sowe create our polarised affinity groups and tribes out thereonline, whatever it may be. That meanswe don't have any human bounds on thevalidity of these ideas or the trying towork out what tolerance is. And we become very intolerant of difference.And you're saying become polarised and it's too easy now to fit inan us versus you. I'm right, you're wrong because everybody behind mesays I'm right. And that's what's propagatingthis kind of conflict we have in the world now in my belief.
JD Walterguest
Yeah, absolutely, I think so to go back to that, let'sgo right back to the very beginning. You know, what arethe defining attributes of humans, right?There's hierarchy, right? Someone has to be in charge,someone has to be accountable for the decision. We wantto live in this beautiful idealistic,you know, dream world where we all get to say, but that's not thetruth, that's not as a species, it's never been that way.Yes, there is an opportunity to contribute, yes there is an opportunity toweigh in. But at the end of the day someone has to beaccountable, right? Someone has to make the final decision.So hierarchy is always going to be a part of who we are as aspecies. So is division of labour. We can'tall be warriors, right? Some of us have to be berrypickers. But guess what? Those berries are vital to ournutrition and we can't just eat the animals that we've killed,right? Like as a, again as an animal we need multitude ofnutrients and they need to come from different sources. And so if we want tomaintain health and wellness and be able to continue topropagating the species that, that berrypicker is. I think early on we understood divisions of labourmuch more intimately and much more rationally.Rise of mass agriculture in the Mesopotamian valley, you know, the, theadvent of leisure time, the rise of the arts. And now we havethis, like, competition for what's most important,what brings the most value, and that's wherewe are now. It's just, it's a competition there. It's not aboutthe thing anymore. It's all, it's just about winning. It's just about thecompetition. It's about being right. I thinkthat the human species most significantcompetitive advantage is our ability to collaborate.We are a social animal. Collaboration is thekey to our evolution. We talkabout it incessantly these days, particularly in a business environment.Oh, collaboration is the key to success. Yes, it is. Ifwe're so lost in the end of the collaboration, we miss the value ofthe collaboration, because that's not collaboration anymore,that's exploitation. No, no. Be on my team, think my way, do whatI say to do, and then this is what we're going to achieve. And isn'tthat great? Look, we're going to raise the trophy. Okay, hold on.I'm not interested in the trophy. Right, because it's not about, whyare we here together. It's not about the value of collaboration. It's about theoutput. And the output is all. Ultimately, it's incrediblyselfish. Someone wants it. Now there's a mistake where we say,oh, well, that's the problem with hierarchy. No, no, no, no. Hierarchy isn't the problem.It's that someone has defined the outcome andnow we're all being forced to buy into that rather than saying, what, what dowe want to accomplish together? Hey, let's get together now. We're this group. Whatdo we want to accomplish together? Well, I want to do this. Okay. I wantto do that. All right, well, let's, let's, let's work on this. Let's find the,the common thing that we can go do together. And then the value of thecollaboration is in the collaboration becauseof the power that it gives us as individuals to achieve something.So I wonder, I thinkultimately, when I think about collaboration now, I love that wetalk about it so much, but I don't think we understandwhat it really means. I think we assume, unfortunately,that collaboration is. No, no, we're all on the sameteam. We've all agreed to be on this team and this is whatwe're doing, but we don't spend the time and the energyalong the way to make sure everybody isbeing heard, that everybody's being able to, given an opportunity toweigh in and ultimately contribute tothe collaboration, which again is more important than the outcomeitself. You used the word trust a few times and authenticity.
Joanne Lockwoodhost
And the challenge sometimes is being able to let yourguard down, isn't it? We talked about this,wanting to be right, wanting to have your own opinion, building a tribe. Howcan we lower our defencessufficiently to be able to be able to listen to anotherperspective? Because that's the challenge. We've got to do with the emotional intelligence of resilience.We're going to have enough self confidence in our own beliefs orour own arguments, our own why to better entertain funny aboutsomeone else's why? Because otherwise it would just be seen as a, I'm letting youattack me. So how can I create a safe spacefor me to engage with you that has different opinions or differentviews? Well, I don't feel that I'm going to be,I don't know, set upon. I wonder sometimes if
JD Walterguest
we maybe hold our beliefs a littletoo hard, you know, too close to, you know, white knuckle in thesebeliefs of what, whatever they happen to be.So it becomes very difficult to be curious ifour identity is so rooted in this one thing. And I can't let it go,oh, my God, what if I'm wrong? I'm wrong.Evolution is all about change. We talk about this is likeeverything that we talk about in business now. It's all about accommodatingchange because change is constant, the markets are volatile, the pace of changeis increasing, you know, et cetera, et cetera. It's just rampingup. But it's not a new phenomenon.Change is innate in the universe. I mean, there'stension is natural. That's what keeps the universe together, it's what keeps ourbodies together. So some tensionis good. It's about the fear of changing ourmind because of the perception that we think, oh, ifI change my mind, someone's going to look at me and they're going tocriticise me. They're going to say, hey, you know, you used to think A, nowyou think B, what? Well, there's nothing, absolutely nothingwrong with changing your mind. There's nothing wrong with adopting a different position.There's nothing wrong with living a life, having experiences, taking in information,being curious, engaging with other people and coming to a new way of
JD Walterguest
thinking. Right. History is replete with these wonderfulexamples of people who started out on a verydisruptive way of thinking. White supremacists, right? Let's just take this asan example. Someone who is a hardcore whitesupremacist. They're a member of, you know, white supremacist groups andthey are all about this. And then over time and through experience, theycome to realise that there's an error in the. In the logic of their thought,right? And they come and they meet people and they engage with people and theyfind that there's this wonderful energy if they. If theytake that old way of thinking and they put it on the shelf and theysay, I'm going to adopt the new way. But what happens in that instance? Andthat person is now ostracised from every communitythat they were ever a part of. And the people that they'releaving behind aren't madbecause they've lost a member. They're mad and they'reafraid because the individual that had thecourage to step away and say, I'm going to change my mind is. Is nowa threat. And that's the way we're perceiving it now. We're saying, oh, Ican't think this way anymore because I could be wrong.We're so afraid of not beingthe same start to finish. And it isantithetical to life, to, youknow, being a human being. Right? The whole universe changeson a daily basis. You know, I got a sunburn the otherday. Layers of skin are peeling off my shoulder. That is mechanging. My biology is fundamentally changing. There's no way tostop it. So I think we're lost in this spacewhere we're so afraid of the possibilityof change that we fight and resisteverything. But if we didn't,we would be freed to just experience this big, beautiful,wonderful life in a. Just such a, I think, an openand honest way that we wouldn't beafraid because somebody looks different from us or somebodythinks different from us, or somebody wants, you know, somebody wants,you know, I want income tax. No, it's. I don'twant income tax. Okay? It's not.There's an argument, there's a conversation to be had about that topic, thatthing, but that shouldn't be the defining factorof who we are as individuals. And that shouldn't create animpasse necessarily for us to not be able to getalong. So, you know that
Joanne Lockwoodhost
example you gave there about income tax? We need to step awayfrom the minutiae to the overall objectives, don't we?So what do we want? We want a society that's safe,productive. I want to go about my life. I want to have this, I wantto have freedom, I want to have happiness. In order to have that,I recognise I need to contribute to the running of society.I can either do that this way or I can do it this way. Oneof these ways is income tax or I can trade income tax with effort,I can do whatever. But somehow, if I want to shareresources, I've got to contribute to that pot of resources.So if we can get people to talk about the problem we're trying to solveor the reality we're trying to create, and this is just a vehicleto get us to that reality and we have a differentperspective on the best way of funding that reality, then we could talkabout what would be a better way of funding it. Well, we'd all love itif food was free, water was free, sunlight was free and we'd have to payanything. We'd all love that. But actually where we are today is here.So how do we solve that problem? And it's trying to take it away fromthe politics of the little and talk about how do we achieve our bigobjective. And that's we're sometimes bad at. We get locked into thisminutiae of solutions, not the challenges we'retrying to fix. Yeah, I think about.
JD Walterguest
So we talk about self awareness as a component of emotional intelligence, but there's two,two ideas. Awareness and mindfulness. Right. And I've always sortof talked about them this way. Right. Awareness is themacro. Right. I see. I know what's happening in my environment. I'm,you know, it's not necessarily head on a swivel, but I know what's going around,on, around me. I'm. But I'm not payingimmediate attention to it. Right.I know I'm walking up to a corner and there's cars, there's traffic on thiscorner. I'm not looking at every car coming down the road, but I'm aware thatthere's traffic and I know that I need to stop at the corner and makesure that the road is cleared so I can cross it. Awarenessis just knowing that there's traffic. Mindfulness is the moment that we stop andwe say, okay, those cars are far enough awayand I need three lanes, I can make it. Right. I bring this upbecause I think that's what. What happens. What you'retalking about is weare so lost in the weeds. You saidminutia, but we are so focused in the micro,as if the micro is the thingthat, you know, tips the needle to success or failure. Andit isn't. Right. It's the bigger stuff. But the bigger stuffare made up of all of these. But we get so wrapped aroundthe axle about one issue. And this is politics ina nutshell, right? There are those thathave taken up an issue and subordinate everything else.I like guns. I vote solely. I don't. I do,but I don't vote. I'm using this as an example. I likeguns, and I will only vote for somebody that is pro gun.Okay, but what about all the other ways that they think about things?Are. Are we. Why are we willing to say it's okay,all right, this guy is going to fight for guns,but doesn't like anybody that's not straight, white, male.Okay, well, I can't get behind that. Right? I can't. I can'tsubordinate, you know, one to the. These two are very, very differentthings. They're not related. But we've created a systemwhere they become related because they're all insomebody's platform. And we have to distil allof our beliefs down to left or right, you know, liberalor, you know, conservative, Republican or Democrat in this countryanyway. And there's. There's no way to. There'sno way to exist in that sphere calledpolitics if you aren't going to live in thebinary, you know, And I'm not. I'm like, Iabsolutely. I refuse tojoin anything. I'm not a joiner because Iam confident that no matter what I join at some point I willdisagree with. And that is something that I'm not going to try and reconcile.I can't join a political party. I'm not going to file. I get.I struggle with people's agendas. Like, you shouldn't. You shouldn't tellme everything that you feel right up front. No, your job is to representme. What we should be doing is we should sayguns. Let's talk about guns. Okay? In a vacuum,this is guns. Here's how we think, done, move on.Here's what we think about income tax. But instead itall gets lumped together. So politics is really, you know, theseagendas, they're stew. And you can't. You can't weedanything out. And then, of course, in this country, oh, my God, the way theywrite legislation, it's just. I mean, thesebills are just so big and there's just so much stuff in them.It's no wonder nobody can ever agree on this stuff because there's just somuch in it. There's no way you can possibly agree with everylittle thing. So I think we've, we've gone to this place where it's like all
JD Walterguest
or nothing, right? So we talked about, like, we focusso much on these, the micro. Like you were saying, we're here andwe're intently focused on the minutia, but then we just,we throw it away. We don't want to have that conversation. And itbecomes about, well, are you, you know, are you leftor right? Well, if you're right, you gotta love guns and you, you know, yougotta hate, you know, gay people. Well, that's stupid. That'sa completely archaic way of thinking. Why can't I beeconomically conservative but like socially liberal?Well, there's no place for me in the US political spectrum if that's mybelief. So what are my options? I either have tosubordinate one of my beliefs or I just step away, which is whatI've done. I just, I just don't vote. I'm not going to be a partof it. There is, Ibelieve there are other ways that I can show up as a humanbeing and advocate for the things that I believein. Right. Everybody gets a choice. Make your lifechoices, whatever they are, I will celebrate all of them and I will championyou. I can't do that inside of a political spectrum,so I have to step away from it. But again, this goes back to thatfear I'm comfortable not belonging to. But if we are,if we're afraid of being alone, if we're afraid of being out hereon the fringes and not a part of the, in group, we're never going tobe honest with each other ourselves, sorry about what we really wantand who we really are and how we really want to show up. Sowe're constantly being manipulated and drawn into somebody else's argument.But the upside is that if we all just ignored the argument, theargument goes away. Right? We don't, we don't actually have to get into thedebate and that's what we don't realise. I thinkoften there are those that say, well, you have to have an opinion.No, I don't. I don't actually have to have an opinion on everything.I don't have to have a belief on everything. I have to have opinions andbeliefs based on my lived experience and what works, you know, what's right forme. But to do that, I have to concede thatyou get the same thing. So that's what liberty really is all about. AndI've kind of gone down a Rabbit hole here. But the very idea ofliberty I find fascinating because liberty says that I get to makeall my own decisions, but the freedom to make all of those owndecisions comes with an obligation to care for everybody else'sliberty. And we don't remember that here in this country anymore. We'veforgotten what liberty actually is. Liberty's more aboutconstraint than it is about expression. But we don't wantto talk about that anymore because we want. Our liberty is all about do whateverI want, whenever I want, and you can't stop me. Well, that's recklessand dangerous and it's rude because you'renot caring or considering anybody else's perspective.So I, you know, I could go on and on about this because Ithink this is, this is fundamentally, it's broken in societyand is our willingness tostand on our own and our willingness tolet everybody else stand. So when you're going into organisations,
Joanne Lockwoodhost
when you're working in, let's call them, conflict zones,I don't mean battle zones with armies andtanks. I'm talking about conflict zones in organisations where, much like theone you describe right at the beginning, how can you get people todisarm, lower, lower the threat levels?What sort of techniques do you use? Well, I think the first thing is
JD Walterguest
to recognise that what we're reacting to is probablya superficiality. It's more of a symptom. Sowe're not actually talking about the root of what the matter is.So go back to my example about the service centre thatI was running, that management. That was very much a,a symptom, right? Like, let's just fix thisrather than go and figure out what the root is. Why are people vibrating?So what I try and do iswithout, without anyaggression, right? What, but creating a safe space,but allowing people to step away and helpingwalk back from the point of, like, we're butting heads overthis right now, but what are we really, what are we reallystruggling with? What is really causing us to adopt thisparticular position? Where are we as humanbeings in this moment? What are we afraid of? And if we talk about that,if we can acknowledge that, then we can get past it, right? Then we cansay, well, you know, you know, if you don't do thisand, and we don't produce and, you know, this project isn't doneon time, we're all going to get fired. Oh, okay, okay.We have a much more fundamental fear here. Butare you afraid of getting fired because you're going to lose this job?Nope. It's deeper than that. This money that I make throughthis job funds a lifestyle. Now there's probably a familybehind me, children, there's dependence right onme as an individual income earner. So the.The fear of losing my job isn't even about losing a job.It's about losing the ability to take care of thethings that I am supposed to take care of as a father, asa husband, let's say. And thatis more in tune with the ideal that Ihave for myself, where I am. I'm a good parent, I'm a goodhusband, I'm a good provider, I am dependable. People cancount on me. The people that I love can 100% counton me. And I will always be there to take care of them ifthat's what's going on. And so that argumentabout the project not being done on time often isrooted in something much more fundamental. And so I think we've got to get backto that. We have to have that conversation like, okay, yeah, gotit. All right. How do we protect ourselves? Sowhat we're doing right now, this project isn't even about thisproject because somebody else decided what this project is. Butour job is to make sure that it's successful. Okay. Are wereally going to get fired if we're not on time on this project?Potentially, yes. But more often than not, we're probably notgoing to get fired. We might get a bit of a chewing, right?We might hear about it, but we're not actually going to get fired.Right. And so I think we need to. That's what I tryand do. I try and step us back to where are we at? What'sreally going on in our heads? What are we really afraid of? What are wereally rejecting? What are we really reacting to herein this moment? Because that foundational stuff,we're much more aligned on that. We all can understand that. Oh, yeah. We allhave responsibilities. We're all parts of families, units, friends.There's so much more similarity there at the foundational level.And it's much easier for us to get on boardwith an idea at that level. Right.Like now, you know, how we fix this project, how we.What do we need to do to get this project back on track and inbudget? That stuff istertiary at best. Right. In those moments of conflict.
Joanne Lockwoodhost
Jg, this is fascinating. I. I could talk to you all day. This is. Thisis really up my street as well. I have. I. We share aperspective on this. So this is. This is really interesting. How could People get holdof you if they want to find out more. Check out my website. It's
JD Walterguest
Walter W-A-L-T-E-R-I C dot com.There's a way to chat with me through there, send me anote and, and, you know, I'd love to talk about anything and everythingfrom a business perspective. Right. Like, we're really focused on the learning and developmentcomponents of an organisation and our orientationis towards the human skills, so emotional intelligence, leadership,strategic thinking, team building, those kind of competencies.But we're, you know what, at the end of the day,why we do this is really about how do we.How do we help improve the lived experience of our fellowhuman beings? We do it through the lens of an organisation because weall show up in organisations and it's this commonality,but it's broken. It's broken across the board. There are noperfect organisations, there never will be, because perfect can't be achieved.But. But we can make them better. But we make them better byrecognising our own humanity and allowing others humanity to show upin those environments as well. And stop subordinating ourhumanness to this abstraction called, you know, CompanyX. Yeah.
Joanne Lockwoodhost
Amazing, jd, thank you so much.
Joanne Lockwoodhost
As we bring this conversation to a close, I want to expressmy deepest gratitude to you, our listener, for lendingyour ear and heart to the cause of inclusion.Today's discussion struck a chord. Consider subscribing toInclusion Bites and become part of our ever growing communitydriving real change. Share this journey with friends, family andcolleagues. Let's amplify the voices that matter.Got thoughts, stories or a vision to share? I'm allears. Reach out tojo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.ukand let's make your voice heard. Until next time, thisis Joanne Lockwood signing off with a promise to return withmore enriching narratives that challenge, inspire andunite us all. Here's to fostering a more inclusive world oneepisode at a time. Catch you on the next bite.
In this episode of The Inclusion Bites Podcast, Joanne Lockwood welcomes JD Walter to discuss the transformative power of emotional agility within workplace cultures. The conversation explores how emotional intelligence and resilience serve as vital tools for fostering authentic human connections and navigating organisational conflict. Joanne shares insights into leadership challenges, while JD reflects on his own journey from process-driven strategist to an advocate for people-centred leadership. Together, they unpack the importance of collective empowerment, genuine empathy, and vulnerability as drivers of meaningful change across teams and communities.
JD Walter is a learning and development expert whose approach centres on elevating people as humans, not merely assets. Drawing upon his background in the US Navy and extensive experience in organisational design, JD brings a wealth of practical wisdom on dealing with conflict zones in the workplace. His superpower lies in reframing emotional intelligence—moving beyond superficial platitudes to actionable behaviours rooted in authenticity, self-awareness, and resilience. JD’s work includes helping organisations unearth the root causes of tension and facilitating environments where diverse perspectives can thrive, enabling individuals and teams to flourish irrespective of background or beliefs.
Throughout the episode, Joanne and JD address the pitfalls of superficial managerial development and highlight the need for vulnerability in building trust and fostering innovation. They discuss the impact of imbalances in emotional intelligence within teams, the challenges of asynchronous communication, and the tension between individuality and belonging. JD’s Socratic reflections reveal how unspoken fears and unmet needs often underpin workplace disputes, emphasising the critical role of emotional resilience in unlocking authentic dialogue, engagement, and collaboration. Listeners are reminded that organisations are shaped by the lived experiences of their people, and that emotional agility underpins both peak performance and wellbeing.
A key takeaway from this episode is that genuine organisational transformation begins with recognising and honouring our shared humanity. By nurturing emotional agility and resilience, leaders and teams can create safe spaces for authentic connection, productive conflict, and personal growth. For anyone seeking practical ways to foster inclusion and belonging, this episode offers rich, actionable insights to ignite meaningful change.
The views and opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Inclusion Bites, SEE Change Happen Ltd or Joanne Lockwood. This episode is shared for general interest and discussion; we accept no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of any statements made.
