Do you ever like life is simply “out of sync”? In this episode, Jimmy interviews Rachel Richter, founder of Inlign, to learn how to establish and maintain balance in our personal and professional lives without sacrificing your principles.
Episode Keys
- How to empower your emotional quotient (EQ) over your intelligence quotient (IQ) for greater control in life.
- Why it is critical to alignment in life that you understand and clarify your intentions before taking action.
- When you are building a team, it is important to align your vision and the team’s actions to achieve ultimate success.
- Why it is important to avoid perfection and focus on optimizing and thriving in your life and career!
- How to achieve greater efficiency in alignment with your team by removing the friction existing from misunderstanding of intentions.
If you wish to achieve greater alignment in life, request the free newsletter from Inlign!
Podcast Transcription
JW:
Good morning. Aw, man. Another beautiful day here in the greatest nation on the planet, the us of a, and we’re coming into August rapidly. I gotta tell you folks another great weekend here for Jimmy Williams, as your host for live life by design. I am just so excited. The summer has been great. We’ve only been averaging about 104 to 108 degrees folks here the last week. It’s been a little bit hot here in the Heartland of America, but I’m gonna tell you what’s even hotter. The guest I have today, folks, you’re gonna be so amazed, shocked, and you’re gonna have a resource. When we conclude this episode, that’s gonna help get you in alignment with your team. And that’s the first hint before we get started, are you feeling like some days you wake up and you just don’t get things in sync? Are you feeling like you just are outta rhythm with what life has in store for you? It happens all the time at Live a Life By Design. One of the things we want you to do is we want you to have a bigger, better and bolder you on your own terms. And the best way to do that is by controlling our attitude and our mindset, right? If you’ve listened for very long on 58 countries of listeners, the one thing we get is information back, how this helped you. Whatever was said in the episode to gain a little clarity, to gain a little more control of life. Well, after today’s episode, I hope that you’ll have another tool that you can utilize, and that helps you get in alignment and get your life with greater clarity, gives you more peace and wellness. So saying all that it’s an honor today to have with me, a young lady that is just nailing it to the wall in world of success. I’m gonna give you a little bit about her background. She’s a founder and managing partner of inline, the premier alignment advisory and coaching practice for teams and organizations seeking to rectify misalignment and enable optimal functioning. Her background includes innovating and delivering billions of dollars. That’s with a B folks. We don’t like to use small numbers here on live life by design. We like to large ones in value for shareholders and the public for over 15 years in both publicly traded companies and federal agencies, she delivered where many thought innovation or even agreement was impossible by leveraging her creativity and unique blend of EQ. We’re gonna talk about that in a moment and IQ to secure buy-in and aligned stakeholders. She’s one of the few holistic mentors who dedicates time to support individuals in their journey to thrive while working with organizations and teams through her advisory and coaching practice. Welcome this morning, my newest best friend from the Washington DC area. Rachel Richter. Welcome.
RR:
Thank you so much, Jimmy. It’s an honor, and a pleasure to be on here with you and with your listeners.
JW:
You know, I have this uncanny neck, Rachel of just hanging with people that just inspire me. And I want you to know don’t wanna embarrass you here on Live a Life By Design your first appearance. And I mean that it may not be your last by embarrassing you with those great accolades, cuz you deserve that. I’ve read your bio. I’ve read a lot about your companies. I am just innovated to the mindset that I need to get some alignment. So let’s help our listeners today. How about that?
RR:
I love that, let’s dive in. So I’ll ask you the very question that I ask clients and people that I work with all the time. What calls to you in your own life, where you would like more alignment?
JW:
Oh, that’s a great question. You know, folks right here, I test this early on a Monday morning. I don’t know if I studied for this or not Rachel, but lemme give you my heartfelt expression of, of response. The one thing that keeps me in alignment is, is, is I am a Christian man. I love to get my, my attitude, my gratitude, and then also the Beatitudes all in line. So, you know, I try to be kind to people. I share kindness all over. One of my attributes is the spreading of peace and kindness to the world. That’s just Jimmy. I’ve never had a bad day in my life. I’ve had some that were better. But Rachel, I can tell you, my entire team experiences this along with my wife of 35 years, this September, and this is not caffeine or drug induced, Rachel, this is just pure. Jimmy, just pouring out to you today. Did that answer your question?
RR:
Yes. I, I totally get that. And what has you intrigued about the concept of alignment? Right? Cause we can dive in. There’s so many, it’s a foundational practice and there’s so many ways to enter it. And so I’m really curious what calls to you. Cause I think that would probably also call to your listeners.
JW:
Yes, absolutely. Well, one thing I know our listeners experience right along with you and your team, I’m certain, is this thing called a pandemic? Have you heard of it? Yeah. Right.
RR:
Little bit. Yeah.
JW:
Far more than we want to hear of it. And I don’t want another one. I’ve had all I want for a lifetime. No one thing that intrigues me about your story and your company and how you help people bring great value is that this pandemic got us a little disjointed. Some people were working from home for the first time. We’re using virtual meeting space now in all types of ways. And then also how do we get that culture? So, so one of the things I’m working on now is I have some team members that are newly hired in our company and I’m trying to instill in them the culture that we always did in an in person type relationship. How do I do that online? So that would be one of my first questions for you.
RR:
And to sum up that question in one sentence, it is how do I accurately reflect my culture and my company given all of the changes that have been going on?
JW:
Yes, you did a great job. That’s it?
RR:
Awesome. Thank you. So here’s the thing a story, a little story comes to mind. I have had a client, one of the I think it was the VP of sales of a, a company I was working with and we were working through creating greater alignment in the organization from the top down. And he literally on this zoom brought over a four foot by six foot poster board that he was somewhere in his office. He goes, look, Rachel, we did it. We have culture. And it was a list of things that the company I’m I’m literally my hand is kind of going down these bullet points, right? There is a list of things that this culture was supposed to encapsulate. And he said, we did the culture exercise, but nothing came of it. And I said, okay, that’s right. That’s why we’re here.
RR:
You have written down your intention as a company of what you would like your culture to be. But those are just words at the end of the day. And while words matter a great deal and we can get into the importance of language and all of that. Along with words, there needs to be priorities and actions. If you don’t have that, they remain words and what’s worse is that they’re just sitting there. And so then people start to think that those words don’t matter at all and they don’t infuse that. And so yeah, go for it.
JW:
No, you’re absolutely right. I’m just thinking the old adage, right? What I tell my team way back in the day we first started ’em there was just three of us, by the way, at that time, talk is cheap. Action is the loud speaker to the words, correct?
RR:
Absolutely. And so when you have those words, you know, I’ll go to the definition of alignment. I think this is a good place to kind of Wade into that alignment when actions accurately reflect priorities and intentions to put it another di way when actions, priorities and intentions, don’t connect there’s misalignment. And so we liked the practice of alignment is essentially if you think about it, culture in action, because if you don’t have the action and the priority to follow up with your intention, your culture, what happens, nothing.
JW:
That’s exactly it atrophy, right? Atrophy. Exactly. You, you accomplished nothing of your mission, which was to help the world be better at whatever it is you bring to it in your case, helping them to thrive and help them to build more. If you will unified groups or teams to help meet the objectives of the organization to, to solve the problems of the world.
RR:
Right? Exactly. And unless those priorities reflect that intention and then the actions of your team, regardless of where they’re geographically located and how they’re set up, reflect that, then you don’t see that happening. And that’s where problems really begin.
JW:
Oh goodness. Now you used the term. We don’t use such propane words as problems. We use challenges. Rachel, we are all about challenges here, but folks she’s new to our show. We’ll let that one go. No, I’m just kidding you, Rachel. Hey, real quickly though. Tell me a little bit about yourself. How does a talented young woman get into alignment of cultures and actions in organizations?
RR:
That’s a beautiful question. So I am 36 and throughout my entire career, I have been doing alignment work since the beginning or when I graduated college, but I didn’t call it alignment at the time. What I called it was doing a good job.
JW:
There you go.
RR:
I’m not, I’m not, you know, as 22 years old in a company, lowest person on the totem pole, how do you influence, how do you affect change? You have no authority. You have no legitimacy. You’ve been hired to do something and that’s it. And so the only way that you can create the real change that you know needs to be there, right. To solve the keyword that we don’t talk about.
JW:
Yes, yes. That’s correct.
RR:
Do that. You need influence, but that influence is not coming from your title, your age. I’m a woman. So certainly not my gender. I mean, let’s, let’s be clear. There’s a lot of subconscious stuff going on sometimes with companies. So it’s gotta come from somewhere. What it comes from is giving people what they want. If you are able to solve every single person’s issues and what you’re doing, they’re going to say yes to whatever it is you want to do.
JW:
That is, that is great words right there. So they’re gonna say yes to everything you want them to do, because you are aligning them with what he is really their defined goals. Correct. So awesome.
RR:
Yeah. And so I always thought Jimmy of alignment as table stakes to do the quote unquote, what I used to think of as the real work, the real work being systems, transformations, tech transformations, financial work, like all of that stuff, all the technical stuff. And what I realized is over time I have a, I have a math background as well as a finance background.
JW:
I like you already go ahead. Sorry.
RR:
Oh, don’t apologize for that. Like attracts like, man. I see you.
JW:
I’m a numbers guy, Rach, come on. I’m a numbers guy.
RR:
Exactly. And so that’s where I cut my teeth originally was in finance for a publicly trade company back back in the day. And the thing is I started to see, regardless of project or initiative, size scope, industry, number of stakeholders, number of dollars, whatever it was, the things I was working on were successful. And as I got older, I felt, wow, that’s an anomaly because I had for fun, got my project management certification as well. And I realized a lot of stuff fails a lot. I mean, statistically way more than 50%. It’s kind of it’s, it’s fascinating. Really.
JW:
You’re gonna laugh, Rachel. I actually try to fail more often and why I use that old adage. What did Edison say? I didn’t find 141 ways to fail at getting a light bulb filament to work. I found 141 ways that it wouldn’t function properly the way I wished. So think about failing, right? When you talk to your teams, I guess you talk to ’em Hey, you didn’t really fail. You learned how we are not going to do it. Is that kind of the approach you take?
RR:
Oh, completely. But the interesting thing is when you see the abject failures around you and you don’t see people learning from them, but they repeat the same mistakes over and over and you go, well, gosh, I’m not experiencing that. What’s the through line. What am I doing differently than everyone around me and why? And it was very strange for me because I am a huge fan of failing forwards and failing fast. And so when I saw this, I sat back and really thought about what it was that I might be doing differently than the people around me who were just as well intentioned as I was. And so that’s where the practice of alignment was born was I realized the things I was doing consistently repeatably and without fail in that space. And in those regards needed to be codified and then created as a practice.
JW:
Oh man, that’s, that is a great story. I’m hinting to you, but you need to get someone on your press team to get that into a book. All right. That sounds really good. My whole philosophy of our team. You’re gonna laugh when I started way back when I was I left the international world of, of working for an international CPA firm after about five years. And I said, you know, I just have this gut entrepreneurial feeling. I just need to go create something and see what I can do on my own. I came from parents that were very low education based. My dad had sixth grade education, but he was an entrepreneur. He made his way and he worked hard, but he was in one niche that just really worked for him. My mother had a G E D and then went back to school after I had gotten in school public school and got a, got an associate’s degree in business. But other than that, you know, so what drives me is education. And I learned one thing. I listen to Zig Zeigler, Jim bro, Tony Robbins. I read everything I can get. I’m a sponge. And one of the things that Zig Zigler said that we’d adapted as our core alignment for us starting our first CPA firm, right out of that international firm is if we just help enough other people get what they want, we’ll get everything in life that we want. That was our whole philosophy. So we were working our tails off. So tell me a little bit about your life as a child. So you’ve told me a little bit about starting your career. What, what made you think of this as a career path to you as a child? I know you like math, but what else was it fed this?
RR:
So I laugh because what you just said by the, the way I would say that we’re both just to kind of put a fine point on what you just said, cuz I love it. We’re in the business of making things better.
JW:
I agree.
RR:
That’s what it is. And so when I was a kid, I felt I felt very confused and it covered everything else up. And the reason was you talked about your parents’ background, which I deeply respect and I and it, it, it’s a beautiful thing, what you’ve been able to do and, and, and create from all of the learning and from your parents’ being able to model and show you, you know, behavior that you’ve been able to just, you know, leverage and run with. What I had as a child was picture this a PhD in math, marries a PhD in theater and they have a daughter. I am caught between two worlds. There is the creative emotive EQ part of me. And then there is the pure logic, math reason, almost task master like approach to life, very rigid. And I kept vacillating between these two worlds and I didn’t know how to reconcile my extreme interests in both until, and I always thought of it as almost like a, like a bad thing. Like, oh, if I could have just picked a thing and liked it, that would’ve been enough. Right. And I never, I was never able to get there because I have such interest in, in both parts of this world, EQ and IQ, if you will. And so as an adult, what’s so interesting is that very thing that was almost out of alignment, my own way of thinking that I had to pick one or the other became the linchpin of inline, the linchpin of not only my success, but more importantly, why I got into this other people’s success, being able to help people succeed by being able to move fluidly between both worlds and more importantly connect concepts that people didn’t think were previously connected.
JW:
Wow. So at the end of the day, parents PhDs, mathematics and theater gotta ask, did you add up to a lot of drama? I’m sorry. That was a terrible joke. But as a child, I love
RR:
The answer would be yes. To me, the answer would be a resounding yes. Great, great on you. That was it. That was
JW:
Right. Sorry. I just had to go there cause I have a daughter, a daughter working on her BFA. She’s a senior at the university of Oklahoma now and she’s finishing up her BFA and gonna get her masters and, and I’m always teasing her, her around my wife. She’s 21 now. And of course at 21 of keeping mind, I don’t know about your team, but everybody becomes OmniGen they know everything at 21 or at least I thought I did. Right. So I did no. So, so, so at the end of the day, you know, I’m telling my daughter, I go, Hey BFA, great. Where are we going with this? Cuz dad’s a numbers guy, accountability. I set benchmarks. I reach goals. I mean, I’m talking BHAGs and I’m sure your team has BHAGs that’s big, hairy, audacious goals, right? Stretch things. Well, anyway, I’m talking to her over coffee at her. One of her coffee stops up in, in the great city of Norman, Oklahoma. And, and she says, dad, here’s on my plans. Boom, boom, boom. And I’ve got these goals, boom, boom, boom. And she puts numbers to them and she does dates and she does timelines. And I’m going, you’re a BFA major and you’re doing business really? She’s doing business goal setting. Is that not cool?
RR:
I, I love it. I mean, one of the things that I’ve discovered early on between my interests in, in merging all of these worlds is, you know, you need at the end of the day, no matter what you’re doing, you can look at the most successful artists that are pure artists. They hold themselves accountable. Measurability enables accountability. And so it’s incredibly important that whatever we do in whatever we practice, we’re able to quantify it in a way that supports us and not suppresses us or puts it in a box.
JW:
I love that. So let me just drill down a little deeper on inline cuz this company fascinates when you started back in 2019, I believe was a starting date for this baby of yours called inline today. And I wanna ask you a quick question. You have a, you have a statement that’s out that says we work with enterprise level C-suite and business leaders in diverse industries to address misalignment dissolve silos. Now keep in mind in our world, we had these silos partner manager, staff. You had everybody in their own little silo, but I love this part promote optimal functioning within teams and across departments. What does optimal mean to inline in terms of an organization?
RR:
The reason we, I love that question actually, because the reason words matter, we chose the word optimal there because things you should never strive to be perfect. Perfect is unattainable. And it will constantly, if you set your happiness benchmark to that, you’re, it’s always gonna be across the horizon. So you’ll never be able to meet it optimal. However, is it changes as you change as the goals change as the intention changes as the priorities change. And so you can continue to optimize as a practice. And the key is the words across departments, because we have a little nasty habit in this world of othering people who are either not like us or who are in other departments, for instance, other countries, other practices, other politics. And that is what we do at inline is we do the opposite of othering. We help people connect to themselves at a deeper level on pointing to my own heart and to one another. And so when we do that across departments, we can solve for the challenges that cannot be solved within one area or a couple areas of focus. It takes everyone.
JW:
Do you usually utilize pronouns? Like they, or them in your business or do you do what we do? So we have this little swear jar and it’s not really a swear jar our office. If you’re in person, if you’re virtual, we send you a note on our inner office teams that you gotta put a dollar in next time, you’re in for a team meeting, which is about every three months, but we have this swear jar if they use a non-inclusive pronoun and what I mean by this, and I’m not getting hung up on this pronoun stuff. But what we say is, is we’re a team it’s always a, we it’s always an us. We never say, well, they in the marketing department or those people over in operations, cuz what that’s doing is building walls. Right? And your job is to build bridges. Is it not really with Inlign? You’re just building those communication bridges, operation bridges, you’re building the leadership bridges so that everybody is inclusive on the team going for one target goal. Right?
RR:
That’s exactly right. And instead of the word, I would use the word goal, but I would also bring it up a level to intention. What is the intention of the company and does your individual intention as a person, cuz you always get to choose what your intention is, right? Is it either the same or mutually beneficial? If it is then you can do great things.
JW:
That is awesome stuff. Let’s talk a little bit deeper dive now rates. This is a, an early Monday morning, but I’m sorry. I hope you had your coffee. We’re gonna dive in a little deep here. You use some you use some words or acronyms like EQ now don’t laugh. I’m a mathematics guy. So I know greater than signs. You remember the alligator eats the smaller, right? So what I do is I always said EQ is greater than IQ for hiring purposes, but EQ equals IQ or EQ plus IQ equals greatness after you’ve started your career. Give us a little background on EQ and its importance to alignment.
RR:
That’s beautiful. So one of the key parts of EQ emotional intelligence is being self aware so that you can engage with others in a way that promotes whatever you want to do and how you want to show up. And so if you think about the definition of alignment, when actions accurately reflect priorities and intentions, the first question someone might ask themselves is okay, if actions accurately reflect priorities and intentions, what’s my intention. It really elevates someone’s own self-awareness of something they might never have asked themselves before. And here’s why people don’t necessarily recognize how much choice they actually have because an intention, unlike a company goal or objective is something they, we all get to choose what is my intention? And so when you think of EQ and building bridges and connecting with yourself and other people, it’s through intention that we can create agreement and we can have a place to build off from that is mutually beneficial. If you’d like to create misalignment or have a fight, don’t start with intent, start with action because you can always disagree all day on the, you know, the right or the wrong next step, right? It’s pretty hard actually to disagree at the intention level, if you’re on the same team or with the same organization or the same objective, because either the intention is the same or it’s mutually beneficial. And so the other part of EQ that’s really critical to this practice is knowing how to use language in a way that promotes those bridges. And we, we can go into what that is and, and all of that, but I’ll, I’ll leave it there for now.
JW:
No great explanation of emotional quotient. I will tell you that I have a great team. I am surrounded by extraordinary professionals and they just happen to be a female. But I’m saying to you, it is wonderful way that they’ve helped me as a leader, communicate with a little bit more comprehensive nature. When I first started in this career, I may be talking to, I did the old drive by delegation. I may be talking to you in your office and then just get an idea and walk out while I’m still talking kinda the old George Castanza. You gotta follow me into the men’s restroom to get, get all the information I did that. I don’t do that anymore. But my emotional question is so much higher than when I was 29 years of age. Mm-Hmm I won’t, I won’t tell you how old I am. Guess how old I am. Rachel, how old do you think I am?
RR:
Oh goodness. I did not try to look this up. I’m gonna save 45.
JW:
Oh boy. You’re gonna be on the show for the next three weeks. Okay. Folks. She is a wonderful lady. I’m I’m 57 and a half almost. So I’m holding my youth. Well, yeah, holding my youth. So my emotional quotion has developed and grown as everyone should. We don’t stay the same. We’re not dormant people. Right? So give me a little bit more depth on emotional quotient use in gaining the alignment and not just gaining, but retaining that alignment as we grow our organization. Cuz that’s the real key, right? None of us. And I say this to people, companies are just like human beings and they’ll look at me funny and I’ll go, you’re either progressing or you’re regressing in life. There is no status quo. A human being has time transpiring, whether you like it or not, I can’t stop it. So you’re either moving forward or going backwards. How does emotional quotient work in alignment for purposes of companies?
RR:
That’s a great question. It’s to me it is almost two sides of the same coin. We talk about connection, alignment and connection matter because our core belief and I think you’re one of your core beliefs. It sounds like is that people are meant to thrive. Well, that’s great. You could just go around and tell people you should thrive and they’ll be like, cool. How do I do that? The attainability of thriving is where the rubber meets the road, right? And so it’s through understanding how to leverage EQ it’s through understanding how to connect it. And alignment is the foundational practice for that. And so what I mean by that is I’m gonna go on a teeny little bit of a tangent cuz it circles right back to what we’re talking about. If you think of EQ as a way of understanding yourself and others at a deeper level, being able to connect, being able to accomplish things together that are so much bigger than you ever able to imagine, right?
RR:
It takes talking literally talking to a person, right? You use language to do that. Now this language that we’re all using English it’s really, if you think about it, the language of a conquering people, old English, middle English, modern English. I have a friend who’s an English teacher. He was required to actually look at old English and middle English texts. And I laughed it. It literally looked like a completely foreign language. There is very little similarity to it. Why? Because all of the wars throughout human history have created this version of English that we speak English itself was never the language of people who came together peacefully and integrated and collaborated happily across borders. No, no, no. Let’s be clear. There were wars involved, lots and lots of wars. And so when you have a language and this is by the way, much like many other modern languages. So I’m not singling out English, but English itself has a pretty RI history of this. And when you have a history of a language that is steeped in war, what do you get for a dialect? Well, let’s go back to quantitative stuff right now. If you look up the number, the sheer number of synonyms, for the words, power and control versus collaboration and thriving, you will notice that there are far more words to use to talk about power and control and suppression than there are thriving in collaboration. Now why does this matter with EQ? If we have a language that has physically less words and words that have far more, we’ll call it energy and weight beyond face value that might not actually connect with our own intention of what we’re trying to bring to the moment we have a language that’s not set up to help us connect and collaborate and build bridges. And so if you are using EQ and coming to an organization is the full expression of yourself to help others and to connect right, to do all of the things that we’re talking about, the use of your own words matter because they carry that weight and energy beyond face value. English has a history of suppression of workers, gender, ethnicities, emotions, lots of stuff. And so our challenge really not problem at all with Inlign was how do we take language English and create a subset of words to use, to help people speak to each other in a way to answer the following question, someone says to me, so I really wanna get stuff done, Rachel, I don’t see a lot of that happening around me. So I come off as a, know-it-all a bully, the rigid one, the bossy one, right? But that’s not my intention. What do I do differently? It’s actually about the words that we use and the way that we speak to each other. And that’s actually a core part of how we, again, EQ the rubber meets the road, how we take EQ and interpret it to build bridges by using language that helps people connect to one another.
JW:
You know, I’ve got the feeling to be honest with you RA this may be a part two of inline on our podcast, cuz I wanna dive deeper than we probably have time today. That is some awesome information. And I love the way that you’re using that to help bring the alignment of each on the team that has a whole different background maybe a different education, different cultures. You know, we are very diversified in our group. I have ethnicities of different mainly probably every one of our people has a different ethnicity than my own. And I love that because it gives us such opportunity to learn from one another. And that again, as a company grows, right? So talk to me a little bit about a couple of things. So you got into a business far different than your mother and dad who were your mentors to get in this line of work? I mean, who did you look up to?
RR:
Hmm, I love that. So a couple names come to mind because of the, the quotes that I have deeply resonated with because of these folks, but I’ll, I’ll start at my nuclear circle, which is my mom. She showed not told something very fundamental to how I practice life, which is show up no matter what’s going on, no matter anything going on in your day, who you’re connecting with, what, you know, doubts, creeping, whatever it is, your responsibility, your job, your light through the tunnel is to show up. You do that. You win, you just show up. And so-
JW:
So now, is mom theater or the mathematics?
RR:
She is the theater.
JW:
So, so, but think about what she’s telling you though. I think that’s a great, great piece of advice in the theater, whether you feel good, whether you don’t, the show must go on you, you’ve gotta show up and be your best you to give of your best yourself so that those can be touched in a way that it, it brings change to the audience. I love that.
RR:
Yes. And so that was my, and you know, she, she actually passed away sadly in my, in my twenties.
JW:
Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.
RR:
Thank you. And I never got to thank her for that, but after she passed away, I, I became very reflective about my life with her and just feeling so grateful that I got to know her as a, as a person, especially in my twenties when I no longer thought I knew the world better than everyone around me. And so I got to be able to thank her in my own way for that, because that’s actually the biggest gift I think I’ve ever received was the modeling of showing up to the world and what that means, which allows me to be able to do the things that I’ve been able to do. And as a corollary to that, there are two quotes that I if there are ever a mentor, right, be the change you wish to see in the world. If you’re in the business of making things better, Gandhi’s on your list.
JW:
Gandhi. I, I gotta tell you back Gandhi, a young boy came to him that was hooked on suites. This is in India, right? India, pretty impoverished country at that time of his, of his leadership. And he’s a very passive change maker, right? So he didn’t bring an ax, a gun. He brought his mind to this process and he sat down and this mother brought him up there and said her little boy needs some guidance, direction, something profound to help him learn in life. And he looked at the little boy and he said, come back in two weeks and I will have for you the information that will help your life. He leaves, he comes back in two weeks and the mother says, you know, I, I brought him up here. What why’d we have to wait two weeks. You’re the great, you know, my hot ma Gandhi you’re, you’re the man of all knowledge for India.
JW:
He said, well, I had to have integrity to speak to your son. She said what? He had to go for those two weeks and get himself off of sweets. So he could then tell this young man, how to change his life. You see, without integrity, your mom said, the one thing that really shined on you show up. She didn’t feel great all the time. She still showed up. You know, I do this for our team. I seldom seldom will call in sick maybe once or twice in 10 years. Have I called in sick? First of all, I worked for one of the meanest guys in town, Rachel, but anyway. I say that to people to go, well, who is it? Who is it? And I’ll go look in the mirror every morning. I shave, I have this disagreement or argument or discussion anyway. So, so my, my point to mentors look how that helped shape your life. And I’m a big believer that mentors play a role. Not that I want you to duplicate or assimilate your mother. I want you to take what she told you and be a better Rachel. Right? And that’s what you’re doing. Gandhi. Another good one. So I gotta ask you though, if you didn’t have this career, what other career in the world, any career in the world, what would it be if you didn’t do what you’re doing now as a passion?
RR:
So I had actually thought about this a while, cause I, I always ask myself these thought experiments. And I think the reason you’re asking the question, I’m kind of, kind of interested in your answer on this too.
JW:
You don’t wanna read my journals. I’m telling you I could be anything under the sun, man. I have so many passions and I, I do the same thing in my journals, but you go right ahead with yours.
RR:
Exactly. So couple answers come to mind of what I wanted to do before I discovered this. Because again, when you create something that didn’t exist before, it’s not like you grew up thinking that you were gonna, you know, eventually create this. I, and didn’t just have a thought drop into me when I was five and said, you’re gonna run a firm about alignment that changes everything like that didn’t happen. Right. Right. And so I thought, and again, cop between two worlds, right? Interior designer, hedge fund, quant, math professor, those would probably be, or a writer. Those would be the things you could see. It’s like polar opposites. Like there is very little in common between a hedge fund quant and, and an interior designer or between a writer and a, and a math professor. And so now my answer to that question would vary very differently, knowing everything I know now, my whole life, right? If I wasn’t doing what I’m doing now, I think I would be a peace negotiator.
JW:
Ooh,
RR:
The
JW:
Exact that’s big.
RR:
Yeah. It’s the exact skillset that we show up with at companies. These are the same languages, tools, processes, everything that you would do in peace negotiation to make things more effective in how to create agreement and help people see and hear each other and not other each other. Cuz that’s where problems start on big scale and small skills.
JW:
I don’t want to get too deep on this on being peace negotiator, but I’ve got a pre prepaid flight for you. It’s only one way until you get the job done, then I’ll send you the ticket to return. But could you go to your crane in Russia and talk some sense to these people? Not gonna get there in deep. Just wanted to mention that to you.
RR:
I love that. Well, so what I would say though, honestly, Jimmy, I love that. That’s the hilarious, and also there’s some truth to it, right? But here’s the thing. Unless, so if you think about people’s intentions, cuz that’s where we would start, Putin’s intention is far different than the intention of, I would say most of his countrymen and most of you Ukraine. And because of that, if you don’t have an intention where you can create agreement, either that piece would have to be negotiated around that person or you, or that intention would have to shift that person. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make a drink. Yep. You’re showing up with an intention that is completely not mutually beneficial or the same as someone else. How do you start that? Then you take other peace negotiation tactics, which are not, you know, right. Direct around language and, and, and seeing and hearing each other. Cuz there is none of that,
JW:
You know, you brought up peace negotiator, dear. And we just go wherever we want to go on this podcast, it’s in script derive. So my apologies if I got you away from a line. Oh my
RR:
Gosh, no that I thought about this. That’s why I that’s why I was able to, to go there. It’s it’s it’s intention. What is your intention? If it’s mutually beneficial, then you can create
JW:
Something. Yeah. So it come down to an emotional level for me because I had a trip to Europe playing with my lovely wife to spend a month in Europe. And one of my stops with St. Petersburg guess what? I don’t necessarily feel like going to the, the wonderful country of Russia right now with all this turmoil. So I’ll wait till you report back. Okay. You get on over there and I’ll, I’ll get you report back to Hey, real quickly. So couple of questions, you know, they, they have this saying in my world that the Cober children has no shoes, right? They, they have no shoes on. How do you keep yourself in alignment? You’re you’re a busy professional. You got a personal life. You’re starting new companies. You’re just doing all of this to how do you keep yourself in what I call Rachel alignment.
RR:
I love that. So there’s a couple of questions I ask myself and it’s the same thing I would encourage you and your listeners to do, which is I start and I ask myself, what is my intention? I get to choose it. I’m not the victim or the warrior or any other character in a story. I’m the author of my life. What is my intention that can then help me understand what my priorities and actions need to be on any given day or moment? The other thing that I do is I ask myself, where are my actions not reflective of my intention and being honest about it because here’s the beautiful thing. When, when we define alignment in the way that we do notice that the person is never mentioned it’s action, priority and intention, this is on purpose. Like the way that we crafted this definition is this way, because it allows white space for a person to be able to be reflective of their own actions, without feeling blame, shame, or judgment of themselves. And so, because of that, you can start to make real change when you’re not beating up on yourself. Because if your actions aren’t really reflective of your intention, then you can shift it. You can choose to do that. And it’s all about choice recognizing how much choice you actually have, which we can get into a whole conversation about why that’s important. But that, that is, that is a big tenant of what we do is helping people recognize their own choices and that they have choice.
JW:
I tell you what I am gaining more from this than then, than you could imagine. So, so Rachel, let me say this in my journaling, which I’m, I’m just prolific about it. I, I just journal every day I’ve got volumes and none of my family has read them. No one’s eyes have seen them except mine. And I put it, I put in my trust documents for my kids and, and my wife knows is no one’s to read them until I’ve, I’ve gone on. And because it gives you some insight to my brain, my way of thinking, why, why I smiled all the time? You know, life was not always good, but I made it better is they see where the difference is. It’s all controlling this, right? So in your way of speaking, you say that basically, what is my intention? This is another way of asking that question is what were my activities that could be improved from this day? I learn every day, what could I have done differently that would’ve made the situation better? And then what lesson did I learn that I could use tomorrow to grow from that? Those are my two questions I put in my journal every day. I know it’s kind of deep, but that’s kinda stuff talk about. Great.
RR:
Yeah. I love it. It’s it’s continuous improvement. I, I will tell you Jimmy and I guess everyone now listening to this will know my dirty little secret cuz I have one that it is,
JW:
Oh, wait a minute, folks. This is getting juicy. Pay attention to this. All right, go ahead.
RR:
So I had keyword had, because I eventually fessed up to this and decided to recycle these. I had probably six journals lying around all kind of half-ish or less maybe somewhat much less finished. I had every intention in the world when I was younger to journal and it never really materialized, but you know, the one thing that I did right about all of that is a, I found a way to make it work for me. So now I actually have an app on my phone that I can text myself the journal entry and which makes it way easier. But before I discovered this, the one thing that I wrote down that changed my entire course of my life, along with showing up was when I was a freshman in college. And on the first day of my honors program orientation, I felt so grateful to be there because my family too placed a huge, important, fun education. And the Dean of the honors programmer the president at the time, he said one sentence and I wrote it. He said many sentences, but there was this one sentence and I wrote it down in my journal. And I think that was the one entry for the first couple of months of my grant. And it was strive for what’s above you or succumb to what’s around you and sink to what’s below you. I’ll say that again for everyone.
JW:
That’s awesome. Yeah,
RR:
Yeah, yeah. I real, right. Like it really, it’s profound strive for what’s above you or you’ll succumb to what’s around you and sink to what’s below you. And if you think about that, what comes to mind to me? I’m curious about what comes to mind to you when I think about that sentence, I think, huh? If I audit my actions, right? You’re a CPA. I’ve always used the word audit there by the way. So yeah, if I audit my actions to this intention, this idea, this belief, then I have no artificial ceiling and no artificial floor because suddenly the only thing that I’m ever doing is looking at myself in relationship to myself, there is no more toxic comparison between me and other people. I will never be the king of an aunt hill or so tiny that I can’t reach the first step.
JW:
That is powerful. So to me, all of that really goes into my thriving, which I want ask a little bit more about your thrive approach. I know you have the capability for people to go and subscribe to a newsletter on thriving and those things. And I wanna talk about that a briefly, a moment, but that statement is so profound. I’m gonna include that in the show notes folks. So everybody can get that down, but think about those three areas. So if you’re striving and continuing to grow and seek growth every day, you don’t get bogged down and mired into the, the mud and the muck where all the mediocrity is, right? You see where I’m going. The you’re, you’re striving, you’re growing and you’re getting, what’s considered to be the best of the best out of your life. Man. I tell you what, you may have to have him on the podcast with statements like that.
JW:
That man may be somebody I need to talk to. But anyway, let’s talk about thriving. So, you know, I’m a, I’m a thriver from way back. I’ll be honest with you. If you looked in my early journals, when I had not a penny, I left undergrad school with 3000 something dollars saved. I bought two suits, don’t laugh, five white shirts, several ties of different colors. I was in the going back in 1987, dear that got you in the race. Yeah, but I had no reserves of money. I had no assets outside my own vehicle. I lived in an apartment and married a beautiful woman that said, Hey, I am banking more on your potential than your current net worth. And that worked out for me.
RR:
Clapping for you.
JW:
So let me, let me talk to you. Talk about how we can get people involved in thriving and understanding that concept as you presented at inline.
RR:
Absolutely. So that’s the whole goal. The only reason we focus on connection and alignment is so that we can thrive. That is my core belief is that people are meant to thrive. And that organizations also teams of people are meant to thrive. The rubber meets the road in the attainability of it. And so to attain a life where you prosper and a work where you prosper, it is alignment. It’s literally, what is your intention? How do you prioritize those things that align with your intention, connect to it? And then what actions are you taking? And then you look at that on an individual person scale and then across a team and across the organization, and then also in your own life. When you think about what alignment really looks like, it’s what feels good to me and what doesn’t nourish me. That, that word nourish.
RR:
I, I like more than it feels good because sometimes things temporarily feel good. But if you think about the word nourish, that’s where it’s at, because I will tell you right now I’m 36, thinking 10 years back, my life, way more thriving now than it was at 26 years old. And it’s primarily because things were out of alignment and the attainability of thriving is in the, the rubber meets. The road is the how the foundational practice of alignment helps make thriving attainable at a very real level because it’s about action. Just like that culture poster board, that, that one of my clients very honestly brought up onto the zoom call and showed it to me and was like, see, we have it. We have all these words. We just what’s the issue. Cuz they’re just words.
JW:
I love that.
RR:
Follow it up with action. You can’t get there. And if you can’t get there, how the heck can you thrive?
JW:
You know, we have four corporate attributes and it’s on our logos. It’s on our all the stuff that we can put on letterhead. It’s on everything in the office. It’s on little placards throughout the office and we choose a word of the year for these four. So we use these four, but we choose a word of the year to augment those four attributes and show them in a brighter light. And this year, guess what? You know, I couldn’t help. But a pandemic came out. We had a great year last year, even with the pandemic cuz where there’s disruption in chaos to us, there’s opportunity. And so an opportunity to serve opportunity to help, you know, whatever it takes. This this year’s word. So our team, I had all this laminated for my daughter said, dad, you don’t have to put stuff on paper anymore. You know, we don’t need to save the tree. I get that. But don’t don’t anyone write back, took me negatively, but I put these all on paper and had ’em laminated so I could put ’em on everybody’s office while it was a weekend. I go down, I put this on everybody’s desk and on the virtual team, I had it mailed to ’em ahead of time said, get it on that same Monday. They all walk in at the same time. Cause we have a Monday morning briefing. And so we, they all sit down and they go, what is this? And I had the word elevate written in so many different ways, typed up, you know, on this nice demonstrative aid. And they go, well, what’s elevate. And I said everything, our kindness, our, our resourcefulness, our unity, our communication. So I just went through this whole. And as you said, words are powerful. And the team said, so the, this is our word of the year. And I said, yep, this is the word of the year. We’re gonna elevate everything we do. And then I ask the team to judge me. So I don’t know if you do this. I do something unique to most leaders. I get evaluated by my team at least once annually on a very it’s it’s I don’t know who does it. It’s just a, a, basically a Google doc that’s sent to me by each of the team. I don’t know who sends what they put it on the server. I don’t know who sent it, but I do get an evaluation and I take those to heart. Cause I want to be in line”” to use your company name with my team. That alignment’s important to me to be a leader of an aligned team. So talk a little bit about how we can use some of those words, Rachel, like you’ve talked so much about on this episode, how can we use some of those roads to empower our team to alignment?
RR:
So using words to empower our team, I’m gonna go with the things that don’t sound empowering. Are you ready? Cuz then you can really see
JW:
It. I’m ready. I’m an optimist. But go ahead. Now I’m gonna take notes. All right, go ahead.
RR:
Okay. So must have to, no choice need to, what, if you come over the top, I’m literally taking my hand and putting it over my head. Right? Kind of throwing the ball. If you come over the top like that in a rigid way, how can someone think outside the box to help you get that thing to fruition and done it, it doesn’t happen. Right? And so language itself, the way we show up, if you show up without the language of allowing of curiosity of choice, what happens, I’m just, I’m curious. What do you think would happen if you showed up? Not if you showed up the opposite. So not allowing very rigid, not curious, more commanding controlling. And like would you prosper? Would you even
JW:
Meet your yes, no, no. I think your be very Frank, your company would regress to the point that you’d lose valuable team members and you’d see value go out the door of which you invested thousands thousand, tens of thousand dollars to get to this point in their career and you’d see, ’em leave. So, so I, I think that is powerful, powerful stuff. So we wanna work on our vocabulary and work on our use of our language. Now I’m a big believer in nonverbal communication, as you know, that’s the larger of the two pieces, verbal smaller that’s. And so I never, you’ll never see me cross my arms in front of my team at a meeting or you’ll never see me cross my legs. As a lady sometimes does she sits in the chair, you know, I’m not, don’t take this wrong ladies. I’m not just stretched out as a chair and lay back like I at a, at a an evening concert or something that out in the, out, in the, in the grassy Knoll, somewhere to park. But I am sitting upright and paying attention and want people to know I’m here to hear you. And I’m here to listen and observe you, but I wanna do the same to them. So I want, I want both parties having this communication, not a dictation. Does that make sense?
RR:
Oh my gosh. Absolutely. In fact, one of the things that certain clients of mine are working on at the exact moment that we’re talking right, is there’s weight and waste. Why am I talking? Why am I still talking? Another one is listening to understand instead of listening to respond. And that’s one that it’s is really difficult for a lot of people because we’re raised in environments. And we’re surrounded if you think about like the talking heads on the news, right? Do they listen to understand each other?
JW:
No, no, they do not. I don’t think they listen. Period. You could have stopped at that sales period. Yeah.
RR:
Right. They listen to respond. If anything, as in they’ll take whatever word they wanna latch onto. And then kind of go in their own direction. If you do that, you’re not making any connection with the other person. You’re not making any change happen. You’re not creating value together. And creating value is literally the definition of innovation. And if you’re not growing, what are you doing?
JW:
Absolutely. And true leadership, as you know, and I know us spouse is too Rachel with your team. True leadership for me is to get a team member to accept a certain action or a need for a client or something that they’re not real passionate about, but take ownership of it and create a passion around it. Absolutely. That to me is the leadership. I try to instill in our team. I’m not always a hundred percent successful, but I always strive or thrive in your term to do that. So I’m gonna talk to you about something a little more personal. Is that okay? You’re 36 years of age. You’ve seen a few things in life, right?
RR:
Yeah. I could summarize my existence to a great extent as I got really good at being really resilient, Jimmy, and then I realized I wanted more,
JW:
Hey, I love it salmon. They don’t get life spawned for further procreation by staying in this easy water, they climb over the rushing water in reverse. Right? So that resilience pays off. I wanna ask you this, what has been in your 36 years of life on this planet, the most fulfilling event in your life?
RR:
Mm. You know what? My answer yesterday would be different than today.
JW:
And great. I love that.
RR:
Yeah. Literally, this is, this is a perfectly timed you know, kind of universally timed podcast. Because this morning my partner came to me and told me he read, he read through, I think it, no, this happened. I’m trying to think this happened last night. And then this morning, it like continued. He read through a post that he had posted on Reddit about a realization and a breakthrough that he was working on for the last year and a half. Like a lot of people during the pandemic, it shook him to the core on a lot of things and had him questioning a lot of stuff. And so he’s been doing a lot of deep transformational work with himself. No one would ever know it from the outside. Right? It’s all, it’s all internal. And he read this post and I swear to you, I literally not ugly cried, but I started having, like, I started tearing up because I realized the very work I might get really choked up.
RR:
Now, the very work that I have been doing with people and with myself, all of these years led to me being now, we’ve been married for seven years. Having a partner who I’ve been able to support through that same work, that same process, and seeing this come to life in such a real way for a person that I deeply care about having him be lit from within have more inner joy, more capacity to lead in a way that connects deeply with people, I think has honestly, up until this point, there are many things that I’ve done that I’m incredibly proud of seeing that change in someone in real time and actually seeing the conclusion of it. Right? Cause it’s been a year and a half and that’s been a, it’s been a thing that has been so internally, incredibly fulfilling. I think it’s one of the reasons I’m here is to do this with, with, with people, with myself, with, with the people around me,
JW:
Man, that is awesome. And it goes proven folks for those of you listening that are female. And we have a lot of female listeners, I don’t understand how the engineer gets these stats. So who’s what particular, but I do want the ladies to understand that we men are not all orators, but we are good listeners and can be trained Rachel trained this gentleman to no, I’m just kidding. But my, my wife has often told me as my father told me as a young lad, when he heard me listening to people that were speaking, I just love people that are good speakers. You know, you’re Ronald Reagans that could command a stage. You’re Tony Robbins, it walks on fire and just does stuff like this. Well, I have been told since I was about six as the earliest I can recall it may have been before then, but that’s all I can recall is I had two ears in one mouth, Rachel.
RR:
Mm. Yes.
JW:
The problem is the mouth has greater muscle capacity. That’s all I can tell you about that while we’re on a podcast. Hey, real quickly, a couple things where I let you wrap this up. What you, you do a lot of things, man. You’re a busy professional woman and you got family and all that. What, so what’s your daily routine? Like give our listeners an idea of what, what’s it like, when do we get up? What do we do? How do we make all this fall in to use your term alignment for you on a very microcosm, a daily basis?
RR:
I love it. So one of my strengths about myself is that I’m very pattern oriented, meaning over the time of my life, I can see what I’m doing and kind of re-engineer reverse engineer. Why I might be doing the things that I’m doing, maybe choose better things, things that are more optimized for my own functioning and for the functioning of my company and my life and those around me. I personally, again, it has a lot to do with the words and where words come from, the words work the words, routine, those are things that I personally, it doesn’t resonate with me. And so what I do is what, what nourishes me in my life as a routine, as a practice, as a way of collaborating with others, I use that word a lot more than I do work. And so in my own life it really is me recognizing on a daily basis at the beginning of, of the day and an end of the day, what is my intention?
RR:
Did I fulfill this intention? How could I fulfill it more? And, and that can change on any given day. So I, I leave given the way that I work and the way that we’re really steeped, right? Our responsibility is steeped in thought leadership, right? I leave myself room for a lot of white space, probably more traditionally than a lot of other professionals would because of the very nature of the work that we do. And so, yes client engagements you know, alignment, coaching are experiences with companies they’re all scheduled and they’re on the books. I work around that to give myself white space, to think and create, but then also connect with my team. And so on any given day, my schedule could look wildly different, but it all is in support of the intention that I have. And that also means I hold myself accountable. So if I end up doing something early in the day, that is not work related and I have to work until 10:00 PM as a result. So be it, I’m going to make sure that by the end of the day, the things that I need to get done are done. And so that, that like lack of structure, but intentional structure is probably the best way I would say it, that white space is, is what I align around so that I can show up as, as my full self
JW:
Man. That is powerful. Rachel, I got the feeling that I’m probably gonna talk to your press group I’m, I’m gonna have to have you on again. We’re gonna have to dive a little deeper in another episode. Will that be okay?
RR:
Oh my gosh, this is so much fun. I, I would, I would welcome this. I, I love the way you think. One of my favorite things about conversing with you is the questions that you ask and what comes to mind for you. It’s really fun.
JW:
So if you’ll go to our website@livealifeby.design slash Jimmy’s top reads, you’ll see some of this stuff I feed my mind with on there. I gain no, no money from the books. It just link. You can go on Amazon, get them. And one of them is, is, start with why I always love assignment. And I shared the stage in Las Vegas. I spoke with a conference a few years ago. That book alone probably changed a little bit of my team’s thinking, cuz we require our team every quarter to read a book that’s gonna bring value and greatness to their life. And then the second one is, is the answers are in the questions. Yeah. And it was written by an MIT professor. And I love that because I just started thinking in my line of work, I just need to ask questions. A lot of clients like yourself though, may be able to talk and get the, the concern that you have out in verbal form.
JW:
So I can understand and communicate. A lot of people hold it close to the vest. They just they’re afraid to show weakness and they think, well, if I show weakness, I’m gonna get something bad happen. That’s not the case here. And I thank you so much today for helping us as we learned to thrive and get our own lives, not just our teams into alignment with our own core beliefs and attributes that has been so helpful. I wanna give a shout out her website for teams alignment. If you wanna look up her services is www dot get G E T inline. I N L I GN that’s G E T I N L I gn.com. And they’ll be glad to get with you and give you some good information. She actually has a free, I believe newsletter, is that correct?
RR:
Yes, that’s correct. It’s the alignment newsletter.
JW:
That’s you know, your creativity or lost me on that one kiddo. I thought it’d be something like, you know, jive and thrive or something. But anyway, the creative alignment, the, the alignment newsletter, excuse me, alignment newsletter. Or is it alignment? How do they get there?
RR:
Yeah. So if you go to getinlign.com, that’s where we work with leaders and teams on creating greater alignment within organizations and with their own selves and the alignment newsletter. We thought we’d keep it simple because we’ll be releasing other things that have that exact same kind of terminology. So just make reducing cognitive load is also another tenant of what we do. And so we figured we’d go with that approach.
JW:
You did great. I’m just picking on, you know what, Rachel, I gotta tell you, I use this as one of my dogmas in life. I only pick on people. I like, so I like,
RR:
I love it.
JW:
So thank you so much for joining us, Rachel Richter of Inlign, the corporation to help you and your team become more in alignment for greater wellbeing, happiness piece, and yes. Accomplishment. That’s the goal. So Rachel, thank you so much for being here.
RR:
Oh, you’re you’re so welcome. It’s been an honor and a pleasure and I look forward to doing this again. This has been awesome.
JW:
It certainly has for us as well. Wow. What an opportunity today to learn how you can take your life, your approach to your business, your approach to the company you work with to the next level, by implementing just a few of these thoughts and strategies about your emotional quotient, how you can take this opportunity to be a bigger contributor to the value you bring to the world. The folks at inline have done an outstanding job. I’ve not worked with them before, but the people I have talked with are just so bragging on them as to how well they created a great value and alignment in their organization. So I encourage you today. If you get an opportunity, look in the show notes and go online, get the free newsletter. It’d be something I think that’d be very beneficial. I know we’re gonna be doing that for our own company. And then as we always say, the challenge this week for you is to look within yourself for a few moments each day, determine what you’ve done. Well, determine what you can improve. Take that time to improve and bring your better, bolder and bigger self to the world. The world is expecting it from you and need your contributions. And with that, I hope that you, this week can Live a Life By Design.
