Nippin Anand 00:00
It’s raining again here. Yeah, it’s yeah. You were talking about raining, and it’s raining now in Aberdeen. Is it like it’s moved from from Edinburgh to to Aberdeen now? Welcome to Embracing Differences with me, Nippin, and I’m joined by three very very good friends and very kind human persons, Catherine, Kelly, and Linda. Kelly, you are here for the first time in this series, so I think it would be great to to start with a little bit about yourself and see where the school is.

Kelly Landsman 00:38
Well, it’s great to see everybody, and Nippin, thanks for bringing us together. I guess I want to start maybe with when I read your book in the introduction of myself, because I think it was one of those backdrops that helps explain some of my story. So I’m just a passionately curious person, always have been. Professionally, got moved into many different areas, but all surrounding problem solving or problem management. So I started out in the world of engineering and became infinitely frustrated that we were never able to solve problems, and ended up adding nursing to my background. So I work in healthcare, and the reframe that that has offered to everything I see has been incredible. I live in the United States, which I give it for context on many of the views and how they get translated in my mind, but I lacked very much so the words and the forum to try to integrate my engineering and nursing backgrounds. So coming back to your book, I think a lot of this language and this community has helped me make a structure to integrate those two experiences.

Nippin Anand 02:09
Kelly, I think maybe we should slow down here, and this could be a great starting point. Be interesting to hear you said reframing that you have experienced after moving out from engineering to to where you are, perhaps we should talk about that. What can you say a little bit more about that? I think that would be very powerful.

Kelly Landsman 02:30
Yeah. Again, you know, I’ve spent the last couple of years processing my experiences and trying to find words. So I’ll say it as it comes out. It may not be right, but one of the things that I read about nursing and the founding of nursing was this concept of body work, right? So, and it has a very storied history around moving away from bodied work, around women’s work, or things that are just expected from human care to being a profession, and that transition has been quite-I don’t know-quite chaotic in many ways. But nursing as a whole has gone towards being a science, right? So caring science, being a profession. There’s a lot of talk right now in the U.S. about nursing professional status being taken away from the government. So you see this transition, right, of something that was just human, something that we were born innately to know how to do, to to love each other, care for each other, to survive. That was then turned into a profession. So that’s the story of nursing in a in a very tight nutshell. On the other side of it is engineering, right, where it is very very cognitive. We think through everything. We analyze everything in detail. If you have too many constraints, you can’t solve a problem. If you have too many unknowns, you can’t solve a problem, so there’s a lot of parsing things into, I’ll say just black and white, right, one binary to another. Whereas nursing is again these shades of gray, all of the things and how people show up, and so in order to go back to the question on reframe, reframe on so many levels, right? What is science? What does it mean to be human? How do we show up in our regular life and in our professional life, right? So, as a nurse, I was trained to care. It’s a caring science. It has an ethics around it. There are professional development around it, but then many nurses actually don’t care for themselves, or they don’t show up with their full experiences. Right, so you would be in a patient’s room taking care of the patient fully immersed. Talking about how you’re going to arrange all these different services, and then you come back to the nursing station, and one of the nurses would start talking about their own family and how they couldn’t find care, or how it wasn’t working out, and you would just think like, like this doesn’t fit. So you know, people talk about like lived experience versus on paper. So again, that reframe is just-it’s been living all of these things, going from problem analysis and and solving in engineering to problem analysis and solving in nursing. Is

Nippin Anand 05:33
that an expectation that you had from nursing that kind of surprised you when you enter into the profession, what was the dilemma here?

Kelly Landsman 05:44
You know, I went into nursing, so I did med device design and development, right? And I worked with nurses, so worked on patient care devices, just to you know parse them out from like implants, things like that, like things you used to care for people. And we would go and talk to nurses, and we’d watch them. And my family was nurses, and I would ask them all the time, like, “Tell me, what do you need? How do you need it? Whatever. And they would say, “Well, it depends. And I’d be like, “Okay, engineer, like, it depends. I can figure this out. Tell me, you know, you’re not going to hurt my feelings. Like, let’s talk about this. And eventually, the conversation would end in, you know, Kel, you just don’t get it. So I’m like, okay, well, I don’t know how to get past that. I just don’t get it. And so I went to nursing school. I tried to figure out what this thing was that I just didn’t get. And you know, my first shifts on the floor when I was responsible, it was like, yeah, I just didn’t get it because it went from being, you know, very mind-oriented, rational thinking process to being completely immersed and embodied. And again, I go back to you know when I read your book and I saw the embodied mind, and I was just like yes because you know you would ask even nurses on the shift you’d ask a simple question and think okay it’s gonna take two seconds they’ll just tell me an answer and we’ll move on and not interrupting and it would almost always end in them saying okay just let me show you because I couldn’t tell you, and so again, that it depends became in the words I’m trying to find for it that whole embodied way of being, of acting in the moment, of not having that time.

Nippin Anand 07:37
Fascinating. Yes, yes. You, you, you, you actually introduce something very powerful, and I’ve been struggling with this for some time now, which is what does knowing even mean? Yeah, Catherine, what what are your thoughts listening to to Kelly?

Catherine Logie 07:58
Well, first of all, thank you for having me here on this conversation. It’s it’s always an absolute pleasure to talk to you, talk to you all, and having met Kelly and Linda again a lot by listening to them and learning from them. I’m kind of smiling at a few things that Kelly is saying. I’m not a nurse, but I’ll share something personal that I was brought up as the daughter of two doctors. Growing up in the family environment, the conversation was all about care, patient care, and the discussions around the dinner table were about patient care. And my parents were staunch supporters of the National Health service, yeah. So when I hear you saying things like nurses don’t care for themselves, I think that’s absolutely known. That doctors also don’t care for themselves on their own health, and it reminded me of something I mentioned in the last podcast, which was who cares for the carers in shipping. We have people carrying the the weight of responsibility for all the crew on board the vessel, as well as for the vessel and the commercial risk. So I think there’s a kind of a theme there about the people who are absorbing all the time, absorbing the stress as the world is becoming more complicated, maybe more stressful, more challenging, and things are changing in the world. And there are people who maybe are struggling more. So while we’re talking about care, I think we really do need to have this conversation. We don’t necessarily have the answers, but it’s so important to to bring this into focus. So I work in the shipping industry, in the maritime industry, I’m not a seafarer, but I’ve worked with many seafarers, and I love to listen to their stories. It’s one of the most interesting things because you hear about all their their cultures and their backgrounds, and I think as somebody who’s come from outside the industry, albeit it was nearly 30 years ago, so I do think of myself as a. Person, and when you come from outside the industry of the non-saving background, you don’t have any. You have suspended your agenda. You don’t have any context to bias you one way or another. So I was just like a blank sheet, really listening to what seafarers had to say, and and I think there was a lot of maybe it needs to be heard by some people. Like I’ll give you a little story that we used to do some language assessment, which involves traveling to crew supply countries, crew supply countries where people come from, seafarers come from, and we would be doing these English language assessments with seat bearers and cadets as a practice training for crew managers who are going to be using this approach for assessing English spoken English language competency. So we would sit side by side and model how to do this spoken English language assessment and show the importance of body language and creating space for people to talk, and how to elicit, and how to allow time without speaking, and how to allow silence so that people could process language. And in the course of doing these model interviews, we noticed repeatedly that people would start to become quite emotional sometimes when they talked, and there were cases when even some Filipino cadets would break down in tears because they said, “Nobody’s ever spoken to me like this before. Nobody’s ever asked me these questions. Nobody’s asked me about myself, and we were doing it purely for language purposes. But you know, you saw the whole person there, so my background was English language testing, English language assessment, cultural awareness, and working with people to bring out this what Linda described as latent potential initially in language. But I think you can transfer that to any any aspect really of whether it’s management, whether it’s leadership, whether it’s teamwork, it’s all built on these relations that we we we need to foster in teamwork. So that was a bit of a a long answer to your question, but I think it maybe links some of the things that Kelly was saying into the maritime industry.

Nippin Anand 12:21
Yeah, and you know, just listening to you, and I did say this last time, and the thought still is bothering me. There was this an investigation held, and in the middle of the investigation, the investigator decides. You know, it’s always the investigator who decides when to take a break or a coffee break, never the one who’s been interviewed. That’s another thing. But he says, “Let’s go for a coffee. And he, during the time while they’re having coffee, the investigator then asks the question. So, how is things with you at home, John? And John responds by saying, “Now, what to tell you? My my wife just got diagnosed with cancer, and after a very brief pause, he said, “And by the way, this has nothing to do with this accident. And you start to wonder: Is that that that arbitrary divide that we have created between personal and professional life? Where do we get that from? And and funny enough, it’s not coming from the investigator. It’s actually coming from the person who is involved in the accident, and he’s saying that. So how far have we gone with our models and methods and ethics when it comes to understanding human beings? That even people who are involved in an accident do not see the interaction between what’s happening in their personal lives and what’s happening in their professional lives, and that thought keeps bothering me because I have been looking at the past 510, 1520, accidents, you know, in in the in the maritime domain, which is where I come from. None of them give me a clear boundary between this is how you should work outside of work, or this is how you should function when you get into the into the organization. And I think sometimes we, you know, we have created a. I don’t know where it comes from, but we genuinely believe in this myth that when people get to work, they should leave their their whole selves out completely at the at the entrance of the office and just bring their their their their professional selves to work. And I think in some ways this is a complete delusion, absolute delusion. But funny enough, everyone is convinced that it is it is true. Funny enough, yeah, Linda. What what what are your thoughts? And I think it’s it’ll be interesting to hear you, Linda.

Linda Hamilton 14:51
I I have so many thoughts from the really insightful stories that you’ve all told. I. I too am still thinking about this idea of the reframe, and what came to my mind spending so much of my time in the environmental health and safety and or laboratory worlds is is especially in environmental health and safety because it is so rule and Regulation dominated. Is my my mindset was I am required to know the regulations, to know the rules, to know the institutional policies, and then to enter into a space and impose them. That’s my job, and as I was young in my career and began doing that, there was this ever-present disturbance in me with that way of being, and it wasn’t until around 2015, for a number of reasons, I began to rethink that. I began to think more critically about why is it that I feel like I’m living like I’m separated, like I’m divided. I’m I’m living in two different worlds. This professional life that I’ve been asked to enter into is requiring me to be someone that seems to perjure my soul every time I act in that way. And as I got older, I decided whether or not the culture and the social arrangement calls for that. I want to be different. I want to begin showing up differently, regardless of the consequences of that, because I’m not aligning with the the culture, and that that reframe for me really began this journey towards learning more about spore, towards thinking more critically about bringing my whole self to the workplace, and seeing the other, being curious about the other, listening differently to the other, and then applying my leading with humanity, knowing that I’ve got the rules and the regulations in my back pocket and can introduce them in a way that cares for the person and doesn’t denigrate them or doesn’t detract from their dignity as a human being. So for me, as I was listening to Kelly and to Catherine and to your story, Nippin, I was thinking that for me, that the way the language that I can find for that reframe in this moment is, it’s a shift from showing up the way I’m expected to show up, based on the culture, to showing up as myself who leads with respect for the dignity of the of the human person that I’m encountering, and that’s still a work in progress, as it will be until the day I die, and and I’m recognizing those areas where, quite honestly, my ethic of care is still in its infancy, still being developed, still being I’m still being informed about the ways that I don’t do that, and and in that journey, there’s a couple of things that I have really wrestled with the way I make meaning of. One is love. How how do I make meaning of love? And for me, currently, it’s ascribing worth to others, even if it costs me something, and then this idea of care-a care ethic, or even I’m grappling with it as my purpose, all of our purposes in life-is like I said last week-to be a person who tends to the latent potential of someone else, or the environment, or you know the animals, or whatever, but expressing care in that way of tending to the latent potential within. So those are all the thoughts that are coming up.

Nippin Anand 19:13
Yeah, so beautiful, beautiful, and and and be interesting to hear what what Kelly thinks? I’m just processing a few things in my own mind, but in the meantime, let’s let’s hear from Kelly. Kelly, what what are your thoughts as you listen to Linda and Catherine? I’m

Kelly Landsman 19:31
curious. With another question, was having this conversation with several people recently when I started nursing, they they was like I don’t know how to say it without I’m not trying to be minimize anything, but there was like all this fluffy language, right? There was like all this dancing, and I would get lost, and then the conversation. And one of the things that would be said all the time was, I would like to. Space for, and in my engineering brain, I was like, “What does that even mean? We’re gonna make space for like whatever. And as I went into this caring space, like now I find myself saying it all the time, like, “Let’s just make some space for that, or you know, someone will say, “Thank you, thank you, thank you. You did all these things for me, and I say I didn’t, I didn’t do anything. All I did was create space. So I’m wondering as I’m hearing this latent potential, if if that’s kind of the same thing. And someone described it to me recently as like this duality of mindsets, right? So whether you call it domination partnership, where you call it fear and separation versus love and connection. You have to, and I think on some of the podcasts with Rob, he he puts it in the hyphen, right? In that that space, right? Is that this inner connection, right? Like none of us exist in and of ourselves, and once you’re willing to open that connection, who knows what might evolve? So you make the space to let things grow. So I don’t, I don’t know. I’d love to hear, but that’s what I kept coming to my mind when I heard the latent potential, or even the listening, Catherine, when you were talking about the emotional response of of the seafarers is like what happens when you when you open that space for people. Yeah, thank you, Kelly. I mean, I think this we’re all kind of circling around the same thing, which is how to connect with people. And again, I draw heavily from my background in teacher training in English because this is what I know best, but it was a vehicle also for an opportunity, perhaps, to work with teachers as well of maritime English all over the world, and I think what you’re calling space, creating space, I used to think of it as time, allowing time for people. So when I hear

Catherine Logie 22:00
this to be quite an American phrase. Let’s make space for it. It’s entered common parlance now in the UK, as you hear all the time. But it still feels relatively new to me, and I’m not. It doesn’t kind of come naturally to me. I just talk about allowing time to connect with people and ways to reach people. So when I was working on teacher training methodology, we try to use this kind of approach from the humanism into language teaching, perhaps in the 1970s, which is about the affective domain, which is dealing with people’s feelings. It’s their interior world because when you can lower this affective barrier, as it was described as in language teaching terms, then people are relaxed. So there was a lot of psychological theory that was developed about how to put people at ease, and that was one of the things that we kind of liked to experiment with quite a lot in the field of English language teaching. There was all kinds of innovative stuff done, like playing Baroque music or having comfortable chairs or getting the lighting right, but it was all an experiment with how to relax people so that the effective barrier would reduce. In other words, there wouldn’t be stress or self-conscious, and then they would start to relax, and then they were primed and ready for learning, for language learning. So taking that idea through for me, it was always just been about, you know. I don’t want to be an intimidating person. I want to be an approachable person. I want to create a rapport with people. So I realized that actually, even teachers who are there to bring out this latent potential do not always focus on creating rapport. So we put quite a lot of focus on rapport. What is it? Some people just do it naturally without even knowing they’re doing it, and other people don’t seem to see the importance of it, even as teachers. So we focused a lot on that importance of allowing space or allowing time to create rapport, reduce this effective filter, put people at ease. In other words, an allow people to come towards you, and I think that’s really important as a starting point. It’s you know how do you create a little moment of time? It doesn’t have to take long. I think there’s a fear that all this stuff about building relationships, yeah, it’s important, but it takes a lot of time to build trust. It doesn’t. You can do it in seconds. You can do it. You know, in almost in a glance of an eye and or a facial expression. It doesn’t take time. So I think it’s just about for me. It’s that simple. It’s just how do you create these little moments of time or space or both to connect with other people, regardless of what you’re doing. To me, that’s where the magic

Nippin Anand 24:47
is. Yeah, but I wonder, you know, the ease with which all three of you are talking. I think there is there is a there is a kind of an assumption we. We tend to because you know we see the world through our own experiences. There is no other way to see the world. So I wonder, this openness, this vulnerability, this being your own self, this talking with so much passion about, as you said, self awareness. And all of you use words like that. I wonder if that is something we take for granted in a world that is increasingly moving away from all of this. If that is what is creating or making it so difficult to come from a position of caring for many people, and I say that through a very crude example, my own self-live experience. You know, Aberdeen, where I live is probably one of the most masculine cultures that you will ever encounter. It’s and it has a history to it because it’s traditionally been very granite and fishing and now oil and gas oriented, a very masculine industry, a culture, if you like. Even in that culture, I have lived and worked with many engineers who were very competent in their work, extremely intelligent people who had the ability to put themselves into the shoes of their clients and say, “Listen, this is going to cost you money. This is going to give you a lot of pain. But if you did this, this will be the repercussion of you if you didn’t do what I am asking you to do as a regulator, as as as as as an experienced person. This is going to happen, and I don’t know whether you call it empathy, you call it care, you call it you know professionalism, but they were able to to put their message across, and the client would get it. Yes, what he or she is saying is important, and I must do this. I think we are slowly moving away from all of that. That there is much less, you know, relationships are becoming a lot more transactional. We have people don’t come from that position of care and empathy. In fact, I met one of my one of my ex colleagues at in the supermarket last week, and he said, “We are not incentivized to do that anymore. The biggest incentive is to bring more business, to to to sell more, to to create that urgency and and objective hard data to prove that you you really need to listen to me, and I think in some ways that is also problematic for many people that it doesn’t land very well with the other person that what you have is a message of caring. We don’t we have we have, you know, we are saying all the right things. We are quoting regulations. We are, we are, we are giving parameters. We are saying that you are outside the boundaries of normal, safe operations, and you must do this. But somehow the message does not land because of the the the ethical framework underneath. People would rather trust you if you set it from a position of tacit experience, knowledge, embodied knowledge, as Kelly said, and they get it, and the message lands very naturally, very very beautifully. I wonder if if anyone has any thoughts on that.

Linda Hamilton 28:16
Nippin, would you repeat the question that’s coming out of what you just said, there was a lot of points that I connected with, but I’m having trouble focusing. So, what what is the question?

Nippin Anand 28:28
My question is that when we talk about care, and I think what is it about care that is so difficult to for for people to to understand why is the message of care becoming so so fake?

Catherine Logie 28:54
I agree with theories, but they’re not they’re not researched or anything. It’s just my my personal view. Of course, I I don’t know if I agree with you entirely. I think that people know exactly what it feels like when another person cares for them and is genuine with them. I think there’s more and more of a desire for people to be authentic. You hear this word “authentic” used all the time now, and when people are themselves, you know it. You you you feel it. It is embodied. There’s a reaction you you get. Okay, this person’s serious. This is a is a sound person, as we say here. So, yeah, I hear you saying that we’re becoming more and more transactional. I think I wonder if people are becoming more transactional, or if it’s just that the systems are becoming more sophisticated, and there’s more and more data, and the ability to analyze data, and there’s more machine learning, more AI, and more perhaps process thinking in the workplace. It doesn’t mean that people care less. I think people care as much, and I think the need is still there to be cared for. So people know it when they feel it, and yeah, I’m trying to understand. I’m trying to think of your generalization that we are becoming more transactional, as you mentioned, and I’m trying to link that to examples. I guess I’m struggling a little bit. I hear what you’re saying, but I’m trying to connect. Yeah,

Nippin Anand 30:27
yeah, yeah.

Kelly Landsman 30:29
Can I offer a, I don’t know, maybe a perspective that might help, and it’s contextual as well. If you read about after, I think it was either the plague or the Spanish flu. Nippin’ back to what you taught me, we know a lot about being human. There were a lot of the same repercussions, right? We lived through a pandemic. We had forced isolation, and now we’re living through an age where everything that we have been encouraged to believe, for whatever, since the beginning of the Dustin Revolution is falling apart. Right. So AI is challenging our perception of knowledge, of data, of the things that were brain centered. Right. Nobody really knows what’s true. You can live in your echo chamber. Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s not true, and so I think that you see this emergence of people starting to to care more or seek more from their heart and their gut and less from their head. Right? Like I hear what you’re telling me, but it doesn’t feel or sound authentic, or I don’t know that it’s real, but when I see your face or I can interact with you, I have a feeling, right? We talk about like the rise of autism or neurodivergence. Like some people also believe that that is a human evolution to this way of feeling the world through other parts of your, of your body, so I think you know it’s this destruction. It’s a destruction of of a of a culture where you know we gave so much credence, and and I think what you had said earlier, Nippin, was incentive to to have these relationships built on thinking and rational thought, and now this need for like, you know, I don’t, I don’t feel that like it’s not aligned, or I can’t believe that because I see all these other alternative things in different places. And so, is it that you know we’re questioning what it means to have interactions with people or to believe that they’re being authentic?

Nippin Anand 32:44
Linda, what are your thoughts?

Linda Hamilton 32:48
So many thoughts. How do I make them coherent? My first thought was, who we are as humans. I I believe that we are wired for connection, that we do long for genuine human interaction, and yet there are so many external pressures leading us more into a transactional way of being. That I think it’s almost disrupting when we find ourselves in a context where we’re being asked to think more adaptively and relationally than we are technically and rationally, and I say that because I recently facilitated, assisted with facilitating a workshop where EHS professionals were asked to think about the adaptive challenges in in our work versus the technical problems that we’re trained and practiced in solving, and some of the feedback was, “This is exhausting. I I stop. You know their their brains shut down after a period of time. Yet we can think technically and problem solving solve solvingly all day long, and it the the energy expenditure is much less. I think we have. I’m not a neuroscientist. I don’t think any of us are. But I think the neural networks that we’ve developed to be transactional and to be someone who can, with more ease and less energy expenditure, solve a technical problem. We’re pretty good at that. Yet, my words, my beliefs, who we are at a at a deeper, more emotional, more relational level, really craves moving into the area of connection a little bit more, and I think. As as as I sort of zoom out and apply that to the my experience in the United States at the moment, I think what we’re seeing at a a high level of denigrating the idea of empathy and seeing transactions for the sake of one, as opposed to all, that the circles that I travel in are speaking more and more loudly about this desire to move into the relational spaces and to be with one another in a new way. So I’m I’m really curious about about this liminal space that I find myself in at work as a citizen of the United States, knowing that there’s so much power in that space between individuals, if we if we can just begin to move more in that direction and open ourselves up to what’s required of us, and it’s going to be hard because we we got to develop new neural networks. So that’s again, that’s just my personal thought life and personal experience, not based in research that I could cite. But I’m curious, Nippin. Now that you’ve heard all three of us respond to your initial thought, I’m curious what you’re thinking?

Nippin Anand 36:21
Yeah, I’m actually interested to hear from Catherine, and and we’ll see where this goes. But I’m having, like you, I’m having very random and and very dispersed thoughts at the moment, so very hard to to reconcile all of this. Yeah, Catherine, what are what are your thoughts?

Catherine Logie 36:40
I like how you dodged Linda’s question there. I mean,

Nippin Anand 36:44
I seriously can’t can’t make sense of some of this.

Catherine Logie 36:48
Yes. Oh, is it is it too fragmented? And I think that’s what’s so interesting for me is bringing this interdisciplinary group together. And like that, social psychology of risk draws from different domains, and so the common theme for me is just looking about ways to create human relations, no matter what sector we belong in. To me, that’s what makes for really exciting, and it’s also actually what makes the shipping industry very interesting because it is multicultural, it’s multinational, it’s multilingual, and we have. Is it just

Nippin Anand 37:23
me having a problem with listening, or

Catherine Logie 37:27
is it about having a problem with listening?

Nippin Anand 37:32
Your voice seems to be. Is it just me, or is it everyone?

Kelly Landsman 37:35
Yeah, there’s a delay.

Linda Hamilton 37:37
There’s an audio problem. It could be this form.

Nippin Anand 37:42
Could be, yeah.

Catherine Logie 37:44
Can you hear me? Okay.

Nippin Anand 37:46
Yeah. Now we can. Yes. Yes. No. I’m just. Yeah. Can you please repeat that, Catherine? Because I think we lost you in between.

Catherine Logie 37:55
Yeah. Sorry. I guess what I was trying to draw together as a theme was the importance. Can you hear

Nippin Anand 37:59
us? Yeah. Yeah.

Catherine Logie 38:06
Hello. I’m just chatting away.

Nippin Anand 38:08
Yes. Now we can hear you. It comes and goes sometimes. It’s probably the rain.

Catherine Logie 38:14
Oh, sorry. Okay. If I if you don’t hear me this time, then you carry on without me. Is that okay now? Yep. Okay. So I was saying that this is why I like the social psychology of risk because it because it is interdisciplinary, and we’ve got people from all these different sectors coming together with a common theme of how do we create more of these places or spaces for people to connect, and I tie it together with thinking about sustainability. So, if you’re thinking about environmental sustainability, it’s the same principle of caring for the planet, caring for people, and I think that this desire to connect is very, very important right now. As Linda just said, we’ve got a number of geopolitical problems. We’ve got huge environmental problems in the world, and really, if I had a penny for every time I go to a conference in the industry and hear people saying we must collaborate because no one organization can solve these problems alone, we need to collaborate. This word is being used again and again and again in industry, and I think it goes way beyond maritime to other sectors as well. So, social psychology of risk for me is a great example of this type of collaboration. It’s not just you know people like us sitting around scratching our heads and talking for an hour or so about you know nice problems, or and then going back to the the day job, I think we have to do something very practical and focused with this understanding that people need to connect more. There are problems to be solved, and that technology alone is not going to solve these problems for us. So I realize that’s maybe not a specific enough answer to your question, but it’s a very strong sense I have of the the growing importance that people recognize to connect and to tackle some of the the issues that are in front of us. And you see it in the younger generation that they’re not happy with you know what’s happened to environmental destruction in the world. They have different values, different culture, different way of working together, and I think we need the next generation coming up as well to inform us about the things that we should be doing differently.

Nippin Anand 40:46
So where does that leave us now, as we approach the the end of this podcast? What what is the question that we should be thinking about? How do we put you know what? What is care? What does care really mean? How do you? And I’m not suggesting any definitions, but how do you? How do we create a shared understanding of what care is about?

Catherine Logie 41:17
I’ve talked a lot. I’m going to hand over to Kelly or Linda.

Nippin Anand 41:21
Yeah, yeah, and yeah, absolutely. Anyone can say.

Kelly Landsman 41:25
I want to answer your question, Nippin, but I do want to connect a few dots because there have been some themes I think that continue to emerge. You know, as we started the conversation, and I’m not sure it was recorded, but we were talking about balance, and we were talking about showing up as your whole self, and this you know separation versus connection, and I think you know Linda, to your point, you know the retraining it requires the bodily involvement. A lot of the the spaces I’ve been recently been talking about you know certainty to uncertainty, you know, and all those things that transactional, like it’s certain. There’s a beginning and an end. So you talk about some cultures where you know time or or processes are linear versus like cyclical. So I think there is this emotional investment, but it’s re-integrating. It’s re-integrating your head, your heart, your gut. My journey was a reintegration of those two things. I can’t tell you how many nurses and engineers are actually married. So I don’t know if that says something about like having to bring together those pieces to be whole and to be able to find to find that balance, but I think that the question around caring is no different than the same question we have around words like leading or innovating. They they are no longer rational words spoken thinking words, right? Like they are these feelings that I think collectively we’re starting to feel and to share. So, Catherine, to your point, co-creation, synergies, solving these polycrisies, these wicked problems-like it is emerging in every field that I can find that people are getting. That yeah, you could grow a really, really tall tree, right? When conditions were good, but when conditions are bad, you got to reach out to that underground network and send up the tree wherever the conditions will allow it to grow. And I think innately, as humans, we’re starting to get to that too. And the last point I want to make to where do we go? Is back to Linda’s point around this learning, this re-integrating. So there’s a lot of research right now going into co-regulation, into how our own nervous systems can collaborate to co-regulate one another, and that you really can’t even get to like rational thinking or self-control or any of those things until you have like this baseline regulation. And so, even in our business worlds and whatever, you have to have that underlying like I’m gonna be okay. I’m gonna be able to handle this situation before you can do any of those other, you know, higher order thinking processes. So I guess I’ll wrap it up by saying, coming back to the the thing I’ve heard from everyone is, how do you show up as your whole self? And I ask my colleagues this all the time. I’m like, we’re designing all these care processes. We’re trying to care for people. What would you want as a patient? And why can’t you show up thinking if this was for me or if it was for my mom or for my kid, you know what would success or what would you know wholeness look like? And people are struggling to do that. To your point, Nippin, about you know what you’re supposed to and not supposed to. You hear all the time like, am I supposed to say that? Can I say that here? Oh, you’re not supposed to have emotion at work, or you’re not supposed to do these things. So again, that unraveling of of some of the toxic enculturation, of the different connections, and those are some of the themes and the next steps that I see Nippin

Nippin Anand 45:15
Yeah, and and I I you know thanks to all of you for for making some of the things that I was totally confused about a few minutes ago, and it’s starting to become a little bit more clear. I think one of the big things, and we have come to a place where being an individual or being individualist has almost become akin to to to who we are. People find it difficult to think that we are connected with each other. Extremely difficult. That, and I think some of it comes from the the problem that we have in connecting with our own selves. So I think even before we talk about can I see myself in Catherine? Can I see myself in Kelly or Linda? I first need to ask myself: To what extent am I connected with my own self? I think that’s that’s a huge problem. I think that’s the starting point that many of us are living in the heads, and we are not connected with ourselves. You know, we we are split. The moment we come to the office, the moment we we face a lot of people, we are already split between who we are and who we want to project who we are. And I think that causes, in Jung’s word, psychosis, neurosis, mental health problems, all sort of issues, but the starting point is not a connection with another person, but to become a little bit more connected with ourselves. And through that connection emerges a beautiful connection. You know, we do this ritual at the start of every workshop: that who am I, and what would I like to share about myself? And the moment the whole self reveals, you know whether I am a father, a mother, somebody who’s been molested, raped, whatever during my my my childhood, I’m bearing braces and I’ve been bullied during my schooling, and suddenly you see that other people can see you in your whole self, and I think many of us are running away from articulating who we are because we do not know who we are. We do not spend enough time discovering, let alone articulating who we are. And when we when we do that, we create a connection not just with people around us, but also with the environment. As Catherine mentioned, the whole idea of sustainability is that to some people, it must be so far away from the idea that I can be connected to the tree which is plant planted outside my house. It is totally outside their imagination because they have never actually connected with themselves.

Catherine Logie 48:09
I think there’s another aspect to that which is maybe slightly different. Where maybe I’m speaking for women in maritime, I don’t know, or just for myself, perhaps. But I think there’s a lot of masking and people trying to fit in, like Linda mentioned it earlier, because high-risk industries, traditionally heavy industries, have been traditionally male, and there’s a lot more diversity now. But I certainly felt I had to try to fit into the industry for a long time when I first joined it. You know, I would change my clothes and try to, you know, perhaps change my behavior a bit, but now I’ve realized, as Linda said earlier, that the older you get, the more you realize actually I can probably be more effective if I am a bit more myself, and that the people I gravitate to are much more relaxed and they’re much more themselves. And now I think we’re in a new phase now, where maybe post COVID, where people have relaxed more and they are more willing to show themselves, and you know, bring your whole self again. Another more of an American phrase that we’re hearing: How do you show up? Yeah, so I’m quite optimistic actually about the fact that people are relating to other people more naturally now. I see it. Yeah.

Nippin Anand 49:25
Anything else? Yeah,

Linda Hamilton 49:27
Nippin. I just wanted to add prior to recording, we had some emails go back and forth between the three of us, and Catherine expressed an difficulty in remembering stories about times she had expressed care. I’m sorry if I’m divulging something you didn’t want divulged, but Kelly and I both had the same thought about that. Is that at least our impression? And Catherine, I’m talking about you, so you can weigh in. Our impression. Question is, Catherine, Catherine’s innate way of being is expressed through an ethic of care. She’s generous. She’s gentle. She’s curious. She really listens, and yet, at least from her comment, my assumption was that she’s blind to that? So that question, “Who am I? might really help someone recognize my way of being is is disposed. I do have a disposition towards the other, towards moving into a space with the other where their latent potential can be released. So maybe the question is: We ask ourselves, “What is my disposition towards myself and towards the other? And just begin to live in that question and look for data, look for evidence, look for the habits that we have to begin to answer that, and then you know that can take us on a path of growth or a path of recognizing I can’t do this this caring profession because I’m not predisposed to care for people. But to not know that could could just lead you down this path of a transactional way of being. So I think I think living in the questions, living in that question of what is my disposition towards people, would be a good towards myself and others would be a good a good question.

Nippin Anand 51:38
How interesting that so many people have lost any faith in in something as simple as personality test. You know, the first thing a lot of people tell me when you talk about temperament, listening, or personality test is that it’s not scientific. Well, it was never supposed to be scientific, and I think this could be a wonderful question to to to lead to the next podcast, which is how do you know yourself, and how many ways of knowing have been dismissed as being pseudoscientist, scientific or non-scientific. Let’s just explore that, because I think there is something very powerful in what Catherine said-that the world is slowly coming back to realize that there is no running away from the self. There isn’t. So, how do we? How can we help people to get in touch with the mirror before they face the window. I think that could be a really nice continuation to this. That maybe we should call it mirrors and windows.

Catherine Logie 52:56
Like it.

Nippin Anand 52:58
I think it’s you know in Sikh investigations, what do we do? We start by asking, “Who am I? How how how can I know another person if I cannot know myself? And I think, yeah, let’s think about this. That could be a great great way to think about the next next session in the series. I will stop here. Yeah. Yeah.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai