Welcome to the show, where we expose new perspectives on our ever evolving world through the lenses of various industries, cultures and backgrounds.
Our guests are disruptors, united by a common goal to bring their purpose to life.
Whether they’re from the commercial world or third sector, from the Global North or the Global South, expect an inspirational journey that will transform your perspective on just what is possible.
My name is Philippa White, and welcome to Thai Unearthed.
It happens when the life you built no longer feels like your own, when success looks right from the outside, but internally, something feels disconnected, exhausted, out of alignment.
And perhaps even more importantly, what can nature teach us about finding our way back?
About resilience, about balance, about living in rhythm rather than constantly pushing against ourselves.
Welcome to episode 117 of Thai Unearthed.
Today I’m joined by Nick Whitnall, leadership coach, facilitator, former corporate executive, and the founder of Daring Works and The Natural Network.
After years in senior leadership roles, burnout forced Nick to stop.
But what followed wasn’t a dramatic reinvention or a perfectly packaged transformation story.
It was actually something far more honest, a slower, messier journey back toward authenticity, toward self compassion, toward understanding the difference between resilience that strengthens us and resilience that slowly disconnects us from who we really are.
Today, Nick works with founders, leaders, and teams, helping them navigate complexity, leadership, and change.
But in a way that puts humanity, nature and deeper self-awareness back at the center of the conversation.
And in this episode, we go there, we explore why so many high performers lose touch with themselves in modern working culture.
The tension between authenticity and attachment, why vulnerability may actually be one of the greatest leadership strengths that we have, and what nature can teach us about resilience, cycles, growth, and actually living more intentionally in a world obsessed with speed.
We also talk about burnout, trauma, nervous systems, parenting, modern societies, disconnection from natural rhythms, and how small shifts, what Buckminster Fuller called trim tabs, can create far bigger ripples than we realize.
But underneath all of it sits 1 core question.
What does it really mean to live and lead in alignment with who you really are?
So if you’ve been questioning the peace of life, reassessing what success actually means, or searching for more grounded, intentional ways to move through the world, then this conversation is for you.
3:07
Integrating Marketing Skills with Deep Self-Awareness
Hi, Nick, I’ve been looking forward to this conversation.
Thank you so much for joining me.
How are you?
I’m very good.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for having me.
3:14
Looking very tanned following your time at the farm.
I think it’s a mixture of trying to be outdoors lots, you know, just literally about an hour ago I was sat just next to the cucumber plants we just planted, trying to work on my laptop to pull together events.
They’re also doing.
So it’s very much a blended existence that I lead, I’m around, they’re kind of helping where I can to heal the land, which obviously heals me as well.
So there’s that kind of reciprocity that comes through.
We’re very much also focusing on building things, offerings to people that are also more in the kind of corporate world, which is where I came from.
So that’s a beautiful segue.
Do you want to just say where you’re actually sitting right now?
I did ask you just.
I’m based in the UK on the South Coast, just near to Bournemouth.
You have grown up predominantly in this area.
I used to travel quite a lot to London for work and I think that was part of my own kind of journey towards someone that’s burning out, the sort of travel that came with that.
So now I very much feel very lucky and very fortunate to be living so close to the sea.
I’ve got the New Forest just above me, I’ve got the perfect just the other side of me.
And then we just got stunning scenery all around, so I can see that I was always meant to be here.
So perhaps you can just bring to life what does your work look like at the moment?
Maybe a little bit about sort of where you came from.
Yeah, yeah, no worries too.
Yes, I mean my route into marketing, so I ended up studying marketing.
That was a big part of my corporate career came via sociology and anthropology and looking at the why we do the things that we do, the belief systems that behold, that led me into marketing just through necessity.
I kind of need needed to find probably a more viable route towards why I understood how people made money.
That was kind of what led me into that world and I enjoyed it, the creativity and I did some really cool stuff and we’re very grateful for that time as well as it being difficult points.
But now what I do is I just integrate all of the knowledge that I had.
So those early years of me being brought up very much in a kind of free thinking spiritually, kind of a warehouse hold.
I feel like I’ve come back to myself through this path of also picking up the skills along the way around marketing, around big corporate things, commercial things, the kind of world in which we operate.
So I can think I’m able to bring depth of understanding of those things, but also a real clarity of ourselves so that, you know, now I trained as a coach.
So that was kind of my path into this.
Obviously, a lot of things around sustainable and ethical business.
I’m not very good at those kind of elevated pictures.
I’m not very good at my Seos is complicated because it’s hard to put me into a particular box.
But I think for me, the joy comes from the fact that I am operating on the fringes quite often.
So, you know, I do 1 to one coaching with leaders of businesses or leaders in their kind of roles to all the way through to running events on a regenerative farm, which is I’ve just been earlier on today.
But the thread that ties it all together and also help businesses as well to kind of create business of the future is fundamentally the fact that there is another way.
I think that I saw this kind of, you know, people are sensing more and more that there’s challenges that we’re facing.
People’s nervous systems are fried, like their belief systems are being questioned.
The world is getting weirder and weirder.
And I worry that people aren’t really tapping into that.
You know, you can call it intuition and call it gut instinct.
So what I help is help people to really tap into the power that we all hold in a way that house balances the business pragmatism, which, you know, you know, we all have, you know, pay bills and put the bins out if that’s the way we want to live our lives.
But also there’s this deeper calling that I sense when I work with people that are just waking up to this idea that it didn’t have to ever be this hard.
But somewhere along the line we’ve been convinced that that’s the story you want to live by.
And I just, I’m, I refuse to believe it, if I’m honest.
So that’s kind of my my curiosity has allowed me the the scope and the flex and the play to say, actually, we don’t have to operate in this way.
We can choose a different.
6:39
The Body Keeps Score When Authenticity is Lost
Path and the way that you help people kind of navigate that weird world that we’re sort of living in, and it just keeps getting stranger and stranger.
What tends to sit underneath these moments when people come to you?
I mean, there’s so many different, you know, insights that we can use to find this, but they often talk of a similar truth.
You know, you can go through beginning right back to like, you know, shamanic principles of thinking, like, you know, this idea of the soul and you kind of you’ve got a blueprint and it’s like, or you can go into Carl Jung type of approaches of saying the first half of your life is to build a healthy, you go to second-half is letting go of it.
And then there’s like, you know, the things around theory.
You there’s there’s so many theories that you could almost pick any book off of a shelf and a different modality or a different approach.
But fundamentally, I think there’s just this thing that people through necessity, you have to build a certain way of survival because of the system that we’re in.
That leads to a certainly the idea of, I feel like I’m talking through a library of books, but on the idea of the body keeps the score kind of thing.
It’s like our nervous system is constantly sensing something and the further we drift from that truth, that was obviously within us somewhere.
So whether that be what we’re doing as we were kids or what we were doing when we dreamed about being an artist when we were 18, we’re encouraged to lose our authenticity to attach to the system that is most prevalent.
And in my opinion, the system that we attach to is deeply flawed and very toxic in many ways.
So that’s not to say that we are stuck.
That’s not to say that we don’t have any agency within that.
But what I then start to see is that when I had on paper the most in averted comes out the big job big all the things that came with that, I felt deeply powerless.
And I think that’s from seeing from people is that they feel that they have no choice because their mortgage gets bigger, because they’ve got a bigger job.
They have expectations from family members that think they’ve got to keep progressing in that way.
So all Ioffer people is just this opportunity to remember that they were doing something much more aligns to something deeper within themselves before they start to believe the stories.
And that kind of leads me back to this idea of just remember that we were always enough.
And that freedom then comes from even if I want to stay in my big corporate job, which I never say to people, I’m not dealing on it to anything.
You know, it’s always up to what we want to do.
Just the re contracting and understanding what we get from that role gives the power back.
So even if you hate the role and you think, you know, literally stuck, I don’t want to be here and all these things.
And then you actually have a conversation and say, well, what the positives that you might get from the preached, if inquiry can come to do that.
I’m saying, well, actually, I like the fact that gives me the money.
I have to go and do the things that I want to do.
And that’s the bit where you then you become more tethered, you become more scrounded in something.
And I think about these things about, you know, the balloons that might drag us away.
But if you let go of the balloons, then you can actually actually, I don’t mind having a few of the negative things that come in my life because I like the positives.
But if we don’t have that reckoning, we feel like we’re being dragged and it might not be true.
And people just get stuck in that.
And that’s where I was.
You know, I could have at any point, I could have changed job, I could have done these things, but I didn’t because I didn’t have the awareness to say that I don’t have to live this way anymore.
So powerful and that reflection is so powerful.
I mean, I over the course of a couple decades now of doing the work that I do, it’s really interesting just the importance of that self-awareness because it’s so easy for us always to be stepping out and sort of wanting those external solutions to solve whatever we might be feeling.
But actually what needs to happen is that internal awareness and that reflection so that you can start to live your life intentionally like that intentional living is soapy, but it’s just not talked about that much.
And like you say, just jumping from one job to the next, if you’re still not totally clear on what you’re about, what it is that you’re needing, then you just jumping from one place to the another.
That’s never ever going to solve anything.
You’re just then going to jump to the next thing again.
And so oftentimes, I mean, it might be changing the job.
It might be, but that’s not necessarily the answer every single time it’s you know, or to stepping out of the relationship or whatever it might be.
It’s like, what is it that makes you you?
What is it that makes you tick?
What is it that gets you excited and maybe not in the role that you’re in right now, but maybe it is in another place within the business or doing something else.
Or what is it that gets you excited?
And talk to your line manager about that or talk to whoever you know, I’m interested about you in that journey that you went on.
So obviously you were part of the big corporate world and corporate marketing and we’re doing very well.
And now it’s sort of sustainability and obviously the coaching.
And I’m just curious as to what were those moments that then nudged you off that path that you thought you were meant to follow?
11:04
From Armored Survival to Authentic Self-Discovery
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
No, I think that’s probably we’ll start with going backwards before we come forwards.
I suppose with that is to give the context.
I was brought up by my mom was a very much AOG feminist hippie, very progressive and things she talked about the things I was, you know, brought up in and household of free spiritedness and a deep introspection, deep kind of thinking.
Unfortunately, she died when I was 17 and that led to me then having to learn overnight how to in any other way adult in essence.
So I had to learn how to live on my own.
I had to learn how to pay bills, get through my A levels, get to a degree.
So the armor that I put on myself and the trauma that I held.
And I think trauma is a huge theme that doesn’t get talked about enough in the business context because it has this sense of there’s something wrong with someone who’s got trauma or there’s something, you know, kind of deeply scary about it.
For me, my trauma became my super skill.
It became the strength that I had where I could sit in a board rooms and I could work out what was going on in these rooms because I I was so highly sensitive that I could sense what was happening.
I could then understand how I then adapted.
I then became so masked and lost and wasn’t willing to show my vulnerability.
If I did that, I would have once not made it through to the next part of my life.
So I had to armor up in essence.
So I had to drop all of that authenticity.
I never would have gone into the corporate world, in my opinion, if my mum hadn’t have died the way that she did.
But what do you do when you’re at the point where you just need money, you need security, you know, you don’t know what degree to do so you just follow a path of sociology.
I didn’t get, well, my A levels are just about past, so I’ve just about gotten to a marketing degree adjustable.
So it was always burning patterns, burning platform rather than actually saying what do I want exactly?
Back to your kind of your question, what do any of us want?
And I think that magic that then came from me where, you know, I did just keep going.
Unfortunately, there was another heavy situation that kind of happened in my life as well.
So that then led to other things where you’re just like questioning, questioning what is it that I truly want from this?
And again, this idea of the body keeps the score.
My mind was convincing me you want this, you’ve got nice.
Well, how do you pay your mortgage?
How would he But all these things and my soul was saying was screaming at me literally like what are you doing?
This is not who you are.
And at some point those things are going to end up becoming impossible to survive together.
So I then basically just had a reckoning where I had I wouldn’t, couldn’t carry on.
So I literally just kind of left that world.
I kind of fully burnt out.
I had to choose a different path for myself.
I had to do the inner work, like you say, the deep inner dark heavy, you know, sort of letting go of everything, letting go of the nice things, the salaries, the posh cars.
It was, it’s not a lot of people talk about these career pivots as some kind of whimsical, you know, we’re just going to shift into another life.
If your salary goes from big to pretty much nothing, you have to work out that there’s some compromises to be made.
And I would make those choices again every within a heartbeat.
Not to say that they weren’t difficult, not to say that I often thought, what the hell are you doing?
Because I was stepping outside of what a regular person might do.
And that became, I think this route into back to who I always was going to be so that the blueprint was there.
And I just had to nurture that enough to start listening to my own voice.
And it’s, you know, some beautiful poems, not Mary Oliver.
She starts saying this of we just have to go long enough to start hearing the voice of ourselves again, to drop the voices that are no longer helpful.
And I think that’s what my journey was.
That was where I had no choice because it was always going to happen this way.
But that becomes the work.
Like you say that there’s so many ways to avoid doing the inner work that the corporate world is very good at letting you hide.
You can, you know, mask up.
You can create personalities for be the comedian.
It’s tiring.
And that’s where you get impostor syndrome marketing.
That’s where you get this idea of, like, constantly having to not be you and that businesses often talk about psychological safety.
How safe is it if someone truly turned up as an authentic version of themselves?
I wonder how many businesses truly mean that.
And that’s, that’s just a question.
I’m not, I’m not kind of, you know, I don’t have any data.
I don’t have any kind of insight really.
But it just feels that it’s scary for people when you are actually a natural form of yourself, which is if you look at a tree, sometimes trees are stunningly beautiful.
Sometimes they don’t look as sort of flourishing and sometimes they fall over and then something else grows.
So that, that’s the bit that I now see is that, you know, we have to accept that there’s a duality in things.
There’s an impermanence of things, but we have to get used to that God.
15:07
Deep Roots and the Power of Saying No
What a beautiful analogy and segue to.
As you know, I’m resilience is something that I’m really fascinated by and I’m wanting to spend some real time just kind of diving into it to sort of understand a little bit more about it because I find it so interesting just how people respond to different challenges and what that looks like.
And you know, there’s a lot of conversation around it, but it obviously it can swing between extremes.
You know, I’m just curious from your perspective, what is grounded healthy resilience?
There’s different ways of talking about resilience.
I’m just curious to know what are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, yeah, no, 100%.
It’s something that is really took quite a lot of focus of myself a few months ago.
Actually, I really looked into it because resilience is becoming more of a requirement of all of us because we are entering times when the volatility is just off the chart.
Therefore, I avoided the word resilience for a long time because my experience of resilience when I was in the part of my life where I was really quite struggling, resilience became this historic toxic, like just carry on, don’t say anything.
And if you looked at me in many ways, I would have stood up and said, look, how resilient I am from the age of, you know, when I had deep trauma to doing all the things that I did.
You could say, look, I’m the car resilient.
I am.
And everyone would have thought that’s great inside.
I was breaking and I was, you know, shattering.
And I think that’s the bit that for me, what resilience becomes is when you look at that within the natural setting, resilience is the deep roots that we need to hold to have the ability to access things like vulnerability, things like the period where we can just, you know, sort of go into true deep compassion for self and not require ourselves to present in a way that appears as OK.
And I think that’s the bit that when I, when we look at so much of my work now comes from this idea of compassion and resilience and compassion to me are so closely aligned.
So self compassion to the point of saying I’m OK even if I’m not.
But actually resilience, when we look at it through a natural lenses, what environment we’re putting ourselves in, how are we moving from where we are?
Because often we could just say to someone be resilient, cope in the environment that you have.
But it goes back to that analogy of saying what soil you’re in.
So actually the most resilient thing someone could do is to put in a hugely deep boundary and say no, I’m going.
And that’s what I found is the research that I did was to say that actually the art of saying no can be the most resilient thing that anyone can do.
But that goes against most of the kind of dogma that would say you endure.
And endurance to me is not resilience.
Endurance is a way that you could end up completely destroying the thing that keeps you within in the 1st place.
So again, this idea of, you know, fierce and soft compassion and starting to see that kindness then falls into this as well.
We start looking at often we talk about this idea of be kinds of things.
We constantly think actually sometimes in my the hardest thing could be that I just want to lie in bed for 3-4 days and people looking and think you’re broken.
You say this is compassionate what I need, but at some point you might then say, I need some fierce compassion, which is to say, I know that long term I need to get up, I need to do those things.
But it’s like nature, nature does this.
Nature will look for a period of time where it’s completely, you know, a piece of lock is rotten and then it composts down and then it’s incredible thing grows up and then you think I was being resilient.
But all the time that a human would look at it, we would look at it and say, oh, look at that.
It’s all mushed up and harmful.
And I think that’s the bit that from my experience, again, I’ve just, I’ve just noticed this thing where we’ve got such a sort of a desire to appear as if things are OK, resilience is to just say I’m going to be authentically me and I will trust that I’ll attach to the things that I need to.
I mean, you’ve referenced Gabor Mati, obviously, the last time we spoke and just now.
I mean, I find him fascinating for so many reasons.
What incredible man.
18:36
Navigating the Tension Between Self and System
But I’m curious about that, actually.
So the idea that he has the tension between attachment and authenticity, how does that play out in leadership?
Yeah.
So it’s been so much of my work.
It’s it’s pretty much a core principle.
I often talk about the seesaw as I kind of imagine it, where you’ve got the attachment authenticity.
Obviously, when we come into the world, our number one need is to attach to our primary caregiver.
And then over time, we learn that the more authentic we are, our attachment has to drop.
So when we look at leadership and we look at the way that we focus from businesses, if I went into work tomorrow, if I worked in my bucket, I’m being back to my work in this corporate roles and I was truly authentically me, I would run the risk of that audience community, try whatever you want to call it.
They might push me out.
They might say, actually, you’re being too authentic.
I don’t like the fact you’re talking about expose that.
I don’t like the fact that you dress in these clothes.
I don’t like the fact that you are challenging the status quo.
So all the time I’m having to swallow my authenticity to attach to the system that I’m part of.
And I think that’s the biggest dynamic that we have.
And that was one of the biggest traumas that can often occur is that we end up with people.
They know intuitively that what’s going on is like the Empress new clothes, that kind of thing.
Isn’t it Like how many of us just not along in a business meeting, you know, afterwards?
I wouldn’t agree with that at all.
And you think, why did you do?
Why didn’t you say something?
Exactly.
And that’s to me how it plays out where we have to get to the point where we might be willing to do that, but there is always a compromise.
And that’s the rub that occurs in our lives within our businesses if we’re not willing to stand up.
And I’m not saying we all should.
I’m not, I never, you know, I don’t believe in shaming anyone to doing anything.
But that’s where you start to get those small cracks forming in your soul of like, that wasn’t my integrity.
That didn’t operate in the way that I would like it to have done.
And when you come home at night, that’s why you wake up in the middle of the night and you think it doesn’t sit right, It’s not feeling right.
But then what do you do about it?
And that’s the bit that a lot, you know, my business is called daring works.
You know, that was I’ve got to the point of we have to be daring.
We have to be willing to dare to operate in a way that is truly ourselves, but also be have the grounding within ourselves, the resilience within ourselves to know that might be uncomfortable, the courageousness that’s needed to stand up and say, I’m not going along with that anymore.
And I think now within our businesses, within society, within our communities, we have to speak the truth.
Otherwise what do we have?
Otherwise, there’s going to be a new algorithm that says that if you talk about this on LinkedIn, you reach decreases if you talk about this and then you think, OK, so therefore I have a choice.
Again, these are all decision tree type moments.
Do I want to swallow down my authenticity to attach to the algorithm or do I want to be myself and accept that I might not get as much work?
And that’s the rub.
Again, I’m not saying there’s an easy answer because the system will want us to continue paying our bills and paying off the mortgage and things like that.
But our own inner landscape is saying, I don’t agree with this.
I don’t want to go along with this, and we don’t want to look different because that goes back to, you know, Gabble’s sort of approach is we need to attach for our own safety.
That’s what this behavior is.
21:23
You said it earlier, just how the body keeps score, and it does.
I mean, I mean, Gabe Orbate talks a lot about autoimmune diseases, cancers or illnesses and that inner work to truly understand who you are, how you show up, what is it that you want out of your life?
And it can, I mean, you know, it’s finding the right companies as well.
You know, I, I work with a handful of companies that they are very purpose driven.
They want people to think differently.
They want people to question, they want people to push back.
They want, you know, it’s the only way that you can innovate and think and grow, But you want to find the right place that fits with who you are, you know, and, and that takes work too, right?
Yeah.
I, I think just to build on that, it’s just sort of come to mind.
There is around the Sony, those amazing businesses.
I suppose my reflection on that is around how they can begin to operate how they really want to, because if you look at the founders of those businesses and the owners and leaders of those businesses, they are amazing human beings.
They’ve done it differently because they believe in something different.
But often they can get caught up within the perception of I need to change because I’m now a leader.
I need to change because I’m a founder.
So I can’t go off and encourage my people to spend half a day on a farm or I can’t spend my encourage my people to go off and do these things because that isn’t what leaders do.
Or I might be perceived as doing something.
And I think that for me is the question.
It’s the article.
Most of ourselves is we are a point where the models we’ve lived by aren’t working any longer.
We can continue with this sort of model that we’ve got around forcing, pushing, hustling.
But actually, like you say, the most effective businesses that I’ve seen, the most flourishing businesses that I see are the ones that are truly operating from their own hearts, from their own viewpoint.
And that’s to me becomes this kind of everybody’s business language, the USP.
It’s the like, it’s the thing that becomes the brand equity that you can start to build.
But really go for it.
Don’t don’t half go for it.
Don’t kind of say, you know, we’re going to push out a social media post saying we really care about our people.
We’re going to spend some time, you know, doing something, actually live it.
Like say, if you’re not productive, then call.
You’ve done a great day today.
Like I’m going to help you find something to do.
And then that becomes the joy, that becomes the playfulness of curiosity.
It’s finding that balance.
You know, it’s funny, my mom always said growing up, she always said too much of anything is not a good thing.
And actually that brings me to because we talked about it and I just found it fascinating because it’s something that has played on my mind quite a bit, particularly because I had this issue with my youngest at school recently.
And it’s that conversation around different generations and relating to challenge.
And it’s that balance, even with how we raise children of is it just like, just get on with it?
No limits, just fluid and oh, it’s fine.
Freedom to sort of overprotection and crazy boundaries and too many limits.
And I’ve, you know, I’ve got some pretty strong opinions about this just because I’ve sort of been going through just an interesting dynamic in the classroom and just the way that the different parents have managed it.
And back to this resilience question, what are we getting wrong right now when it comes to building resilience in ourselves, but also in the next generation?
24:32
Learning from Nature’s Pace and Necessary Challenges
It’s a very good point.
I’ve got 2 teenage boys going through exams and both of them are neurodiverse, so we’ve got, and it’s really interesting to see there.
Yeah, their journey through mainstream UK state schools, you know, it’s kind of been a really interesting one.
I think so much of my work goes back to this idea of the kind of Mother Earth, you know, kind of nature as a concept and start looking at the coaching sort of training that I had was very much aligned with some ecopsychology.
And I’ve got, you know, Kate, you want to do the events with the farm, She’s training in ecotherapy as well.
So, so much of our perspective is a bit around this idea of how we drifted so far from nature.
So if you think about the human psyche, we were closer to that not that long ago.
So my Nan coming up actually to a year ago that she passed away, but she was 104, which is quite incredible.
So she was a very little about resilience.
She was incredibly resilient.
She was incredibly free thinking.
She was incredibly aware of, but she’s also aware of natural cycles.
So she would often say to me, I mean, I’d be like shopping and I cleared for towards the end of her life, this idea of she’d say, is there strawberries yet?
And I’m like, no, no, there’s strawberries all the time.
You can have strawberries whenever you want.
Whereas for her, that meant that she was waiting for something.
She had to prepare for something.
If she needed something to be delivered, she would ask me about how she got hold of something.
There was the pace that allowed us to remember the natural cycles of just going slower.
And there’s obviously that idea of slower living now.
And we’re kind of using it as a, you know, approach to life.
You know, you can read books about it.
You can go on retreats probably to teach us how to live more slowly.
You’re like, this is what we were doing not even 2 generations ago.
We were more resilient because we were able to slow down enough because that’s the way the system operated.
We’ve speed up so much.
This is not natural.
The way that we are operating is fundamentally unnatural because there’s nothing in nature that grows this fast.
If anything did, it would collapse because it wouldn’t have the strong enough roots.
There’s nothing around us that means that we should be able to buy what we do with over consuming things.
We are and if we enjoyed it, I’d be out.
Fair enough, but we’re not.
We’re also our mental health is deteriorating rapidly.
So again, we’re like we’re buying more, we’re feeling less connected.
We’re pushing against our own inner wisdom.
We’re burning ourselves out.
So it it really begs the question to me of well, who’s benefiting from this?
Because it doesn’t seem to be ourselves.
It doesn’t seem to be us as as the citizens of this kind of structure or even the businesses where you’re trying to, you know, grow the businesses that you know, have all the right values, have all the right approaches.
But yet we’re operating the way that in January, we tell everyone that you have to go off and create these, you know, extremely great hustle approaches to like tell it to your business and start growing.
That wouldn’t happen in nature.
That’s when we would be wintering and slowing down.
So that to me becomes back to this thing of just thinking like my Nan, if that’s what it has to be, just being like or Nana D, she would, you know, slow down.
If she was tired, she’d have a little rest.
She wouldn’t be on a phone.
She didn’t have a phone.
Like, I’m not saying have to go back to these dark ages, but it’s this thing of that’s where the light is to me.
That is where we allow technology to replace humanity.
And that’s, I think, the challenge that we have.
Yeah.
It’s interesting, though, just you keep coming back to nature.
And in my book, I, I talk about an example which I really like.
Just you mentioned, you know, if trees grew that quickly, they fall over, you know, they need to have the roots and you know, it takes time and to to be strong.
And there was actually a test where there it was like the Dome and they tried growing these trees and they did manage to get them to grow really quickly.
The problem was they didn’t have enough resistance from things like wind and the wind and the toughness, if you like, of the external experience around them didn’t allow them to be strong enough.
And what made them strong was that tough experience.
And the analogy, if you like, I think plays in our worlds as well.
And it’s finding that balance.
And back to what my mom says, you know, too much of anything isn’t a thing.
You know, too much of a different difficult moment, time that brings in trauma and that brings in, you know, you don’t have enough time to reflect and think and decide what you want to do.
But at the same time, if life is too easy and if you get everything too easily, if you don’t have to work for something or if you don’t feel the pain of quote UN quote failure or you know something doesn’t work out and you have to work through what does that mean for you?
And you need to take the time to kind of make sense of things.
That’s how you build character.
That’s how you build your values.
That’s how you build who you are and all that kind of stuff.
And I think it is finding that balance, isn’t it?
I just, you know, when we’re thinking of the younger generation, I just think everything, it’s so easy and they have access to everything.
And if they have a question, it’s sort of immediately there.
And, you know, if there’s a challenge, their parents fly in and sort of sort it out for them.
And that’s not going to create very resilient people either.
Suppose it’s back to your your question on what is resilient.
I think there’s also a dynamic which is more self-awareness of people that are our kind of generation who are doing the work to not allow the intergenerational trauma to continue.
Because we talk more now about the things that would have gone through as, oh, that’s just, you know, you don’t talk about that.
But don’t go there.
Yeah, don’t go there.
Stiff up a lip, like don’t access that.
And they’ve also seen more and more people burning out.
So they’re seeing the thing about this experience for my kids, they watched me go through that time.
So therefore, they need the resilience to kind of almost not go down that path if that’s not what they want.
But also the fact that they also have this social media kind of, you know, constant barracks had covert chucked in the mix.
And so if we think about what they’ve experienced, that is definitely heavy.
There’s also, I entirely agree around that point of how do we then find the way that we don’t just kind of sweep in and avoid the pain that we have experienced.
Then also seeing it, which then is could become a whole other podcast series.
And I think there is that point, though, around the acknowledgement now of being real.
I think that’s the bit that we can now experience.
And I think, you know, the nature things, probably one of the most powerful ones I was that was around the Lotus flower.
You know, it’s a Taoist and Buddhist or approach of like no deeper the mud, the more beautiful the flower.
It’s like there’s no mud, there’s no flower.
And I think that’s the bit that we do need to accept that those points are there.
And that’s so the strength comes from which comes back to I think, you know, kind of the theme of your work very much so is the amazing exploration of what makes us human.
How do we leverage that in a way that becomes a really amazing way of growing the businesses that really matter?
Because I think for too long we’ve seen these folks dualities of you’re either amazing resilient, you know, again, and that, you know, the sort of reversed commerce just keep going with that or I’m someone that is weak and I’ve had to be vulnerable.
And so I think what I’m seeing is that exactly to your point is the way that we can bring them together in a way that for younger generations and future generations, they can hopefully grow on from what we’ve taught them.
But also not be too harmed by the way that we might have put our own traumas and our own kind of things forwards because they’ve had to deal with a lot.
And I think that’s the bit that I really hope for is that we can just navigate a path that is an integration of all of those things.
31:08
How Tiny Actions Create Massive Ripple Effects
When we spoke, he talked about Buckminster Fuller and.
I mean.
Your favorite?
I know.
And yeah.
And you do this in a few minutes.
I’m not sure, but it’s like there’s a lot there.
But his idea that we’re all trim tabs, those small forces that can shift much larger systems.
And I just wonder, where do you see that playing out today?
And how can individuals step into that responsibility without feeling overwhelmed?
Yeah, I was trying to keep it very brief because he is definitely one of my well.
I I know that that could be a podcast on its own as well.
It could maybe I’ll do that, but it actually is.
It is also the name of my weekly newsletter that I write Cauldron Tabs.
It started quite a while ago, just around this concept of I think I was feeling quite overwhelmed.
I think I was working more and more on sustainability inverted commas.
You know, I trained B leader, so I used to help companies more and more with B Corp certifications and things.
But what I was seeing is that there’s so much of this sense of we need to change everything.
Like, you know, if we can’t change the system, if we can’t change our company, if we can’t change the economic model, then we’re stuck.
Whereas obviously, what Prime Minister Fuller talked about is obviously that idea that the smallest part of the rudder system, which is the trim tab, can turn.
You know, he wrote it when the Queen Mary was the biggest ship around at that time.
That ship turns because of that tiny trim tab.
So any one of us could be the reason that something incredible happens.
And that means in our businesses, it doesn’t have to be some big profound, you know, shift of societal norms.
But back to this idea of our authenticity.
If we operate, and he talks a lot about integrity, if we operate with our own integrity, we can begin to see that actually our actions may never make much sense to us in that moment, but that can turn something quite significant as time goes on.
And that comes back to this idea of culture within business.
How likely are we to allow those people that are thinking like a trim tab to speak up, You know, because they might turn around and you could be having a full program.
You spent £1,000,000 on a new software process.
Everyone knows it doesn’t work, but you don’t want to admit that because it’s been 10 years in the making or whatever it is.
If someone was to put the hand up and say, you know what, I think I found a way that maybe we could just tweak this bit and be better.
How willing, And that’s the question for all of us is how willing would we be to listen to that truth?
Or would we just say, actually, that’s inconvenient, I’m going to carry on anyway.
And then we end up with this kind of position where it becomes this sort of unspoken bizarre process.
Whereas actually for trim type approach at that any point could have been that bit just to nudge something just the tiniest degree that could change the whole trajectory of a business.
It could swing around and that could be the answer.
We have to be willing to be able to.
And I think coming back to, you know, my mom left me with this amazing book of shouldn’t know it.
She just I found this a book from when she was growing up and it’s all those quotes and things like, and one of the quotes I always come back to is just get busy your own little corner.
That’s what I do within the stuff I do at the farm.
You know, I used to start looking at how do we, you know, leverage change, get MPs, do this, get politics.
And I think that’s all cool.
And if that’s what you want to do that, that’s great.
But for me, getting busy in my corner is just hail some land that I’m part of.
And that becomes enough for me.
That becomes the trim tab in that that means more people will come to the land.
That means that they can go off and do whatever they need to do.
And that means I don’t have to keep thinking 10 steps ahead, which again, when you’re coming from a place of complex or trauma and things, you can start to, you know, analyze everything.
So I just think actually I just want to help in the way that I can with the way that I have the skills that I have available to me and.
I mean, just to capture that because I think it’s so important for all of us to do that work because whatever our thing is, and I, I talk about this at the end of my book, actually, it’s like the world needs what you have.
You have more power than you think you do.
And the time is now.
And The thing is, is I really believe that we all have our own special thing.
And I think the more we can tap into that one, the healthier we will be.
But actually, the more that you spend time on that, the more you can impact others around you.
And like you say, even if it’s just a farm in the local area and you’re touching people’s hearts there.
But what is the ripple effect on that?
There is a ripple effect.
And The thing is, is it’s powerful, and we need to recognize that it is powerful.
I think just to kind of build on that and if I can squeeze in one more apartment, the fuller reference is he talked a lot about the idea of procession.
He used a lot of engineering and physics and metaphysics type analogies and it was something I found so fascinating to talk exactly to that point is when we look at something in motion going forwards, we considered the force to be forward.
So if a bicycle wheel spins, that’s going forwards, the actual energy and the sort of Newton, I’m no physicist at all, the force is actually going at right angles to that.
The force is actually coming out through the hub away from the forward motion.
And that’s what he talks about a lot of exactly like a ripple.
And if you look at it as an allergy that he used to use around bumblebees, where he said that a bumblebees goal is to go and get food, its actual outcome is to pollinate.
It wouldn’t know that it was pollinating because the bee is constantly in motion just doing what it’s doing just to get a bit of food.
And that’s kind of where I think a lot of us have the opportunity to just follow our hearts.
The more that we do, the more we pollinate because we are just constantly in in motion.
And I think that’s the bit that you begin to start seeing things in a different way.
36:08
Practical Steps for Reconnecting with Your True Self
Because he was so ahead of its time.
In many ways, it was the answer to so many of the challenges that we face.
It’s got such deep explorations to it and such curiosity.
And I think that’s become such a big part of my own learning is that none of these things are new.
You know, we talk a lot about, you know, what are the things we need to we need a new model.
And it’s, you know, if you think right back to the social principles and the kind of earliest soul level expressions of things, we had the truth in many ways.
Then we then went through these different people that would go through to the point of finding the ways we operated and behave.
Things like Bucky Fuller, where he would get a thing in the 80s for the world Games where he found the answers to all of the things used to work with big Browns.
He and there’s my story, the fact that there would be no Apple computers without Bucky Fuller.
And he featured in the video for Think Different, and we don’t think about that.
He’s kind of vanished into obscurity.
But he was one of the people that basically was one of the foundations of modern business and modern thinking.
But because he eventually ended up getting to the point of challenging the norms because he was always constantly a trim thab and constantly honest people didn’t like what he was saying by the end of it because he would write books about how we were using massive businesses to cause massive harms to people and planet.
So these are those things where the answer is always there whatever way we want to focus on that.
And in many ways, it’s just remembering that we were enough and we would always be enough.
If someones listening.
Feels that sense of something isn’t quite right in how they’re living or they’re leading, but they don’t know what to do.
What’s the first step back to themselves?
I think my answer again is probably become a sort of a common theme is just slow down and whatever that that means to you is to just really just kind of give yourself the self compassion and in many ways nature becomes the place that many people do that so they begin to just step outside.
You don’t have to.
I’m doing too complicated.
It’s just often find somewhere that brings you joy and just try to nourish your nervous system that the challenge is then I speaking from experience again, myself is often the thing that we know is most likely to bring us more comfort is the thing that we forget to do when it matters.
So we end up kind of trying new things.
We end up kind of, you know, moving away from stuff.
But I would say for people, it’s just to genuinely try and remember that you are enough.
And if I’m honest as well, it’s reaching out.
It’s that thing of finding people that have either trodden the path or have been trained in certain things that are relevant to you or can just become a guide to finding that.
And obviously for myself in a therapy has been a huge part for me.
So not all of my stuff has been deep spiritual hippie stuff and land.
It’s also been deep shadow work that’s been guided through therapy and that’s been an incredible, incredible journey.
I just hugely love.
And again, it’s one of those things that often modern businesses don’t like to talk about because they’ll put a sticking plaster on having a bit of, you know, emotional support, mental health first aiding and things like that.
But again, for me, it’s like I’m doing the most interesting on the most capable part of my own career that I could ever have, but I’m probably unemployable because I think for myself.
So that’s the kind of irony that I feel is that I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to get a job again because of the fact that I care so much about keeping true to who I am.
But there’s an irony in that of thinking I’m the most evolved and most integrated.
I’m not.
I’m not in any way so that I’m, you know, finished because it’s a life’s work.
But that’s an irony to me.
It always sits to me as an irony to think that if I went through some kind of psychometric testing, which I’ve done in the past, if I went through some big leadership program, which I’ve done in the past, they would look at me like I was some kind of crazy.
But I know inside that I’m the most capable as I’ve ever been, that I don’t fit into the boxes that I would need to fit into to be a senior leader again.
And that’s what I think I bring to the clients I work with, the people I work with is the daring work, the daring idea of just deeply connect to something.
I’ve been in those seats.
I can empathize, I can have compassion for that.
But equally, I’m going to slightly nudge things a bit because that’s kind of what I’m here to do.
I’m trying to try and be the Toronto for your business.
Because if I’m not, then we’re just going to carry on in the same way.
And there’ll be another conversation in five years time where more people have left.
Where?
More people have given up, and that’s not the way that no one wants that.
And we all go to work to do a good job.
That’s what I believe we all do.
But somewhere on the line, we get caught up in the kind of fear of being found out.
40:21
If you could leave people with one thought or idea or truth or quote, what would it be?
I think it would have to be to do with love.
I’m not quite sure what my quote would be, but just that, you know, and the idea that I think it probably is the Mary Oliver approach.
What would we do with the one wildlife?
And that’s what I kind of feel is we are not going to be here for a huge amount of time done on your beliefs.
Just love what you do, love yourself, love the people around you.
But that has to be the answer because without that there was nothing.
And it was something my mom always taught me.
She filled me up with love.
That was what she did.
And I think that’s the thing that has kept me true even in my darkest moments, the idea that there is love out there, there are good things out there.
And I think that’s the way that I would continue to find hope and joy when everything around us feels heavy and dark.
We have to find the light in the darkness, otherwise we may as well give up.
And I’m not prepared to do that.
41:15
Embracing Reciprocity and the Light in Darkness
Is there anything that I haven’t asked you that you’d like to tell our listeners?
To me, I’m always curious, and I’m very grateful for this opportunity to talk with yourself who’s still involved more and has more involvement with those bigger businesses.
Because I’m really grateful and also curious how my work stays relevant to the audiences that are deeply entrenched in those systems.
Because I’m also aware that there’s opportunity for big change to happen when those bigger businesses do also wake up to that.
So for me, I always be very grateful for people that if things have resonated, let me know.
If things sound absolutely crazy, let me know.
That’s my answer really is just to have that reciprocity of information.
This is what I’m finding from my field notes of where I am.
I’d love to have that as well from other people that are also in different places and different perspectives because so much of our time we get caught up in these forced dualities or these forced judging or shaming and so much of the sustainability.
What I left became so dogmatic that I would love to just talk to people that are seeing things differently for me.
And that would be why we will keep learning and changing and growing.
Absolutely.
For our listeners, if any of this resonated, then 100% I think it I I actually want to get your newsletter.
I’m excited about getting the trim tab inspiration.
Thank you.
Now it’s a weekly newsletter which just gives me the opportunity to share where I’m up to.
And it’s.
Yeah, it’s always great to to to practice, practice writing, which is new things.
That’s good.
Yeah.
Well, thank you for your time.
Thank you so much for joining me.
And I look forward to staying in touch until next time.
Thank you.
Hey everyone, it’s Philippa again.
I hope you enjoyed listening.
Now if you’d like to dive a little deeper, why don’t you check out my book Return on Humanity Leadership Lessons from all Corners of the world.
It reveals how putting people first is actually the smartest, most competitive business strategy of our time.
And if you’re ready to breakthrough disengagement, spark innovation, and build agile, purpose driven teams, let’s talk.
Whether it’s workshops off sites, keynotes, or full scale leadership programs, we’ll shift paradigms and create the change you’re looking for.
Visit philippajwhite.com to learn more or get in touch.
A huge thanks to Benna Vieira for the music and to Pete Morgan for his help with the editing.
Until next time, and I hope we’ll meet again soon.
