Episode 75: Being Thoughtfully Fit with Darcy Luoma

What You’ll Learn

• The six components of being Thoughtfully Fit
• Hear stories about how to be more intentional about how you show up in life

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Resources

• Darcy Luoma’s website
• Episode 52 with Darcy Luoma: How Multi-tasking Decreases Productivity
• Ask a Manager blog
• Darcy’s Book: Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

Weekly Challenge

Strengthen your core. When you find yourself in a difficult situation pause, think, and act. Listen to the episode to learn more. Share your experiences in the comments below. We’d love to hear from  you!

Transcript

Feel like reading instead of listening? Download the free transcript or read it below. Enjoy!

Transcript for Episode #075: Being Thoughtfully Fit with Darcy Luoma

Amy Climer: Welcome to The Deliberate Creative Podcast Episode 75. Today’s episode, I have a special guest on the show, the first person to be invited back to the show for a second time, Darcy Luoma. Darcy is a dear friend, a colleague and an amazing person. She is going to share with us a model that she developed about being thoughtfully fit. This model really emerged out of her coaching and consulting practicing, but Darcy is a master coach. I have never met anyone who can ask such good questions as Darcy. She is amazing. In her work with teams and individuals, she developed this model to really help people be more effective and be more of who they want to be in their lives. When I first saw the model, I thought this is really good stuff. I need this on the podcast because I wanted to share it with all of you.

Darcy and I decided to do things a little bit different on this episode. We decided to really push ourselves out of our own comfort zones and be more creative, if you will, and we did this episode on Facebook Live. Darcy has been doing Facebook Live chats every Thursday, but it is usually just her talking. So she said, “Hey, what if we did this interview on Facebook Live?” And I thought, “Ooh that is a really cool idea.” I have never done Facebook Live before so that was a challenge. There were a lot of tech details to figure out and making sure it was getting recorded as a podcast at the same time. I hope you like it. Let me know what you think. I would love to get your feedback.

I also wanted to share that Darcy has been on the show already, which I said a moment ago. The first interview she did was on multi-tasking and really the myth of multi-tasking. If you want to listen to that episode, it is Episode 52 and you can find that episode at www.climerconsulting.com/052. Head on over there if you want to listen to Darcy’s first episode. It was great. She shared some great insights and stories about multi-tasking. All right everyone, here is Darcy Luoma.

Darcy, Welcome to The Deliberate Creative podcast. It is so great to have you on the show.

Darcy Luoma: Thanks, Amy. It is so good to be here.

Amy Climer: Can you start off and tell us a little about yourself, your background, who you are and what you do?  

Darcy Luoma: Absolutely. The first thing I think about when I think about who I am, I am a mom. I have two beautiful daughters who are nine and eleven and the joy of my life. In addition, I have a company, Darcy Luoma Coaching and Consulting, where I do speaking and do a lot of workshops and training and consulting and then also do individual and executive and team coaching. In addition, I am the lead instructor for UW-Madison’s Professional Life Coaching Certificate program. That is an intense nine-month program to train people to be life coaches.

Amy Climer: Awesome! You have spent a lot of time in the last year working on developing a model to help teams work better together and to really be more fit. Not so much physically fit, but thoughtfully fit. We will get into the model in a moment, but first, I am just curious if you can talk about how did this model emerge for you?

Darcy Luoma: It was very organic. How it really emerged, what I realized I started to have former clients call me or email me or I ran into them at the grocery store, whether they were individual people who I had worked with in the past or executives or teams, and they would say, “Darcy, I was going to call you because I was stuck. I had this problem and I did not know what to do and I was going to call you to get some coaching. And then I thought wait a minute, what would Darcy say? She asked me some powerful questions. What would she ask me? And so I asked myself those questions: what is hard about this? What are the obstacles? What do I really want as an outcome? And I did it. I coached myself and I am sending you this note or I am excited to tell you that I worked through it.” They were thanking me for developing those skills to be able to coach themselves through problems. And I had this aha moment like this is great. I want to be able to coach people to lead and live a life that they love. That is kind of how it was designed.

As part of the process, I looked at what are the themes that individuals and teams and executives come to me with over and over and over. And I took thousands of hours of coaching and hundreds of clients and started to categorize what are the problems that they come with? And I came up with six essential areas that are the key problems. Three are internal, like our own saboteurs, our gremlins, our thoughts, and then three of them are external. When I have a challenging relationship with someone or there is conflict or there are external obstacles. I have been working for about, I do not know now if it has been 18 months or so, on developing this Thoughtfully Fit model.

Amy Climer: I love it. I love that you — oh, there is so much there — first of all, that you are pointing out that people know you well enough, they know what you are going to say well enough that they are like, “Okay, let me just like put on my hat as if I’m Darcy and then let me see what would Darcy would say.” That is so awesome because then they do not necessarily need you there every step of the way. They are getting this big resource from you, but they can do it themselves. And that is so empowering.

Darcy Luoma: You are right. One thing I want to just highlight, Amy, the reason they can is because coaching is very different than having a mentor or a consultant or a teacher or an advisor. There is one key key component that is different. In coaching, you are the expert. Now, as a teacher, as a consultant, as a mentor, I am the expert. Let me help teach you or give you a framework to solve this. But in coaching, it is all about sort of creating the space to think about things to create new awareness and then from that new awareness you design your actions. That is why people can coach themselves because it is all about just asking themselves powerful questions because people truly are the expert in their own lives. They know what they want and need.

Amy Climer: Yeah, that is sort of the essence of, at least, good coaching, right?

Darcy Luoma: That is right. Good point.

What Thoughtfully Fit Model is About [06:58]

Amy Climer: Very cool. You talked a bit about the internal components and the external components in the model. Before we dig into the model, what is this based on? You have talked a little bit about this philosophy around coaching that we are experts in our own lives. Is there anything more, any underlying philosophies or principles that the model is about?

Darcy Luoma: Yeah, absolutely. I have been studying leadership and team building and conflict for 20, 25 years and what is underneath this model, in addition to using coaching philosophy and all that comes with that, there is a lot in here around leadership. There is a lot that draws from the thought leaders, from Stephen Covey, from team building — Patrick Lencioni. There are things in here around emotional intelligence and Daniel Goleman’s model about how you have to have self-awareness and have to be able to self-manage and understand your own emotions and be able to understand the emotions of others so you know how to show up. It draws from appreciative inquiry, which is all about what you look for is what you find. When you are looking, i.e., asking the powerful questions, you are looking at them through the lens of what is possible?  What do I want? It is sort of always future-oriented instead of past-oriented or being a victim or blaming others.

I also love and bring in a lot of research from Brené Brown who talks about vulnerability and shame and happiness, and then also a lot about positive psychology. I cannot get enough. I am a junkie. I love, love, love reading books, self-help books, listening to podcasts, webinars. And so I am kind of packaging it in a way and helping to send it out to those people who want to have a life they love but keep getting stuck and these are the themes of where people get stuck. Hopefully, it is in a way that helps people to break through those obstacles.

Amy Climer: And really when you talk about all these people that you are building on their work, it is like standing on the shoulders of giants.

Darcy Luoma: Absolutely!

Amy Climer: This work could not have happened 20 years ago or 50 years ago. But because of all this recent research and everything that has happened and our understanding of humans and teams, it is like now you can keep building on that.

Darcy Luoma: Right on.

Amy Climer: Yeah, I love that. All right, let’s get into the model. Let’s get into the details. What are the components of the Thoughtfully Fit model?

Practices of the Thoughtfully Fit model [09:32]

Darcy Luoma: There are six what I call practices. Just to lay a little bit of a foundation, you think about being physically fit. Nobody would decide tomorrow that they want to run a marathon if they have not been training and practicing. Or nobody would assume they could go out and hit a home run or a hole in one without a lot of training and practicing. In a similar way, this is about training your mind, your thoughts. It is about being able to be thoughtful and mindful in all of your interactions, both with yourself and with others.

Similar to how I talked about coaching has a core. If we overly simplify what is powerful about coaching, it is two things: one is you are the expert in your own life, and two, there are three steps that have to happen for powerful coaching. You have to create the space. A lot of times I will have clients say, “Gosh, I’ve never talked about this before.” Or, “This is something I’ve really never thought about in this way.” You have to create the space then you raise awareness through powerful questions and then there is always action and accountability of coaching.  In the same way, Thoughtfully Fit has a core. In the core of the model you have to pause, you have to think and then you have to act. Any given situation that is what is core in order to be Thoughtfully Fit. You pause, you think and you act. That core then is seen throughout all of the different practices, no matter which one you are working on, whether it is internal or external.

Amy Climer: I love that. Pause. Think. Act.

Darcy Luoma: What is so interesting is, as I have been working on this model, how many times in my life I am out there and I am ready to react and then I am like, “Wait, pause, take a deep breath. What is needed in this situation?” When I am about to get triggered or I am frustrated or I want to do something and think what do I need? What is hard about this? Whatever those questions are, and then act from that new awareness. That is at the core of the model. Then there are the three internal practices and the three external. Do you want me to just give a phrase for each of those, Amy?

Amy Climer: Sure yeah, and then we can go deeper in a moment.

The Three Internal Practices [11:52]

Stillness

Darcy Luoma: The first one is about stillness. That is just quieting the mind. Turning off the ding. Stopping yourself from filling every single moment of every day with meetings and activities and going nonstop and then when you have a moment of stillness you rip out your phone and start to look online. That is essential to be Thoughtfully Fit.

Strength

The second internal practice is strength. This is not about physical strength, this is about mental strength. This is about being able to consciously choose how you show up in your life. Having the mental strength to know that the only thing you have control over is how you interact, how you respond, how you act in any given situation.  

Endurance

The third internal practice is endurance. That is all about overcoming obstacles. If you want to get somewhere in your life, you want to do something, you better believe that there are going to be obstacles. Sometimes they are internal: your own saboteurs, your limiting beliefs, you are not good enough, sometimes they are external. Endurance is all about being able to overcome those obstacles and keep going and embracing a growth mindset to know that change can happen if you are committed.

The Three External Practices [13:09]

Flexibility

The first one is flexibility. For a lot of people, this is the hardest because flexibility is all about being flexible enough to accept others as they are. Fully and unconditionally accepting someone as they are. Not trying to change them. This is a theme that comes up in my coaching clients all the time. If only my boss would change. If only my husband would be different. If only somebody else would be different. Flexibility is this notion you have to stretch for full and unconditional acceptance. If you cannot stretch to accept them, then at least it is stretching to accept the fact that you cannot change them.  

Balance

The second external practice is balance. Balance is all about creating harmony in your relationships by balancing your wants and needs with mine. And looking for that sweet spot where the harmony is instead of coming in as a bully and being dominant or backing off and saying, “Oh I’m not going to say anything.  It is okay.”

Agility

The last one is agility. Agility is all about when something is thrown at you that is unexpected, somebody is angry and they come in and they shoot you an angry e-mail or they come into your office yelling at you, how do you respond thoughtfully instead of reacting by default?

Amy Climer: This is so great. Gosh, I have so many questions as I am listening. I’m wondering if you can just start off and — do you have any examples of how either you personally have used any of these elements within your own life or maybe with a client that you have coached or worked with or a team?  Any examples of like what does this look like in action?

Examples of Being Thoughtfully Fit [14:53]

Darcy Luoma: Yeah, tons of examples. I will give one, a personal example that happened this spring at the end of the school year. I told my daughter in the morning — she normally takes the bus to school and takes the bus home, gets home at 3 o’clock — in the morning I said to Josie, “I’ve got a special birthday treat for you today.  I’m going to take you to get a birthday massage.” She has been doing volleyball and hockey and all of this and I was really excited. I gave her a note to give to the teachers and to the school to say that I would be picking her up instead of taking the bus home. The appointment was at 3:00. In order to get to the massage, I had to pick her up.

I pull into the parking lot at 2:30 and I am sitting there and I get a phone call. I pick up the phone and I start talking. As I am talking on the phone, I see the buses start to pull away and I was like, “Oh crap! Shoot!” And I go running and I see the teacher standing by where the bus just pulled away and I say, “Where’s Josie?” And she said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot. She got on the bus.” And I look and I see Josie and I am trying to wave her down and she does not see me and I am like, “Darn it!” And the teacher said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I could not even be present with her in that moment because I was just so angry at myself, mostly, for being distracted and multitasking and being on the phone.

I hop in my car and I try to follow the bus and it is a disaster and all I can do is drive home and sit in the car and wait for the bus to come. It is now 3:00 o’clock. Josie gets out of the bus, I am standing at the bus. “Hey mom, what are you doing here? Oh mom, I’m sorry. I forgot. I forgot. I forgot.”  I am like, “That is okay. All right, get in the car. Let’s go.” I was just short. I was impatient. I was frustrated. I hate being late. I paid a lot of money for a massage and the whole way there I could not get a grip on my attitude.

We get to the massage. We are 25 minutes late. We go in, I have got this just ton of negative energy, the massage therapist could feel it. When kids are under 16 you have to stay in the room so the therapist says, “That is all right. We’ll do what we can.  I actually don’t have another client right afterwards so we’ll go a little later.” She puts on the music and it is calm, the lights go down and in that moment, oh my God, it was like I am being so incredibly not thoughtfully fit. That created the pause for me. And when I paused and started to think about how I am showing up, it is not at all how I want to show up. I was short and impatient and annoyed. And so I start thinking, “What is it that I want to switch here? How do I want to show up for my daughter, for that teacher, for the massage therapist?” And then I was able to adjust and act differently.

When it was done, I apologized to the therapist. I said, “Josie, I am so sorry. That was my fault. I didn’t come in.” I went back to the school the next day and connected with the teacher and I said, “That isn’t who I want to be. That wasn’t your fault. I was on the phone.” It is just in the moment it is like that default that we go back to. Just as with physically fit, you have to practice. You have to train. I, in that moment, was not able to pause and to think about how I wanted to consciously show up. I was not really demonstrating strength at all. There was probably also a moment of anger and frustration at the teacher for not keeping Josie, Josie for not remembering. I was blaming and all of a sudden I realized no, this was totally on me. And I acted differently.

Amy Climer: Awesome! We have all done that. We have all gotten angry in the moment and reacted in a way that we did not like later, but you recognized that fairly quickly, within an hour, and then you went back. To go all the way back to the school to the teacher, I imagine that teacher was very grateful and very graceful too. That gives her some grace with you and vice versa. Do you feel like that is the act part of the pause, think, act of like okay, let me slow down?

Darcy Luoma: Right. Because with that “think,” that new awareness, then you can have access to different actions. I think you make a really good point because just like being physically fit, you want to ultimately be a runner, you start where you are. You just have to start where you are. There is Couch to 5k programs. I recently have gotten back into fitness after taking a year off for lots of reasons and I had to start with two minutes jogging and then two minutes walking and it was like painful because I used to run marathons. That’s all you can do. But now I can run the 10K.

Same thing, you make such a good point that the more you practice being thoughtfully fit, the shorter that feedback loop is. I was able to catch myself in the moment. Ten years ago, I would have spiraled in that negativity and I would have brought it home with me. And the goal would be that, obviously, as you practice and become more thoughtful in your lives, that I would have been able, in the moment, to pause and to think and to act differently and say, “Hey Josie, I’m so excited for your birthday massage. We’re late. I called. They’re going to hold your appointment.” I would have showed up differently. Ideally, the more you practice the easier it gets.

Amy Climer: Yeah, absolutely. I love that. Since we are on Facebook Live, there is a comment here. Someone mentioned that multitasking is a myth. I wanted to just interject that this is the second time Darcy has been on The Deliberate Creative podcast. The first time was Episode 52 and she talked about multitasking and how it is a myth. Great episode. She shared some great nuggets there. The link for that is www.climerconsulting.com/052 if you want to listen to that. I just wanted to jump in there since you were talking about multitasking and share that resource with folks.

Darcy, I love that example. That helps kind of bring this model to life. Can we go into a little more depth with maybe not all six of the areas, but one or two of them? I will let you choose which ones do you think would be most valuable to talk more about.

Darcy Luoma: With being thoughtful you start small and think big. And the easier it gets when you are able to, in the moment, in the grocery store line, pause and instead of reacting to the person that is in front of you that you are angry with how long they are taking, you can think, “Huh! This is a moment for me to just take a breath and to be present in my world.” You can act differently. When you practice on a small scale, then what happens is you can make big changes in your life on a big scale. Whether that means you ultimately want to get out of a job that you do not love or get out of a relationship that is holding you back.

One of the places to give a specific example, when I am working with individual coaching clients whether they are executives or leaders or people who just want to have a bigger impact in their life, one of the places that I see people get really challenged is in having really difficult conversations. There is some conflict. There is something not going well in their life, it is a full range. They just want to be the victim, they want to blame. They want to say, “If they would change. If they would do something different.” Part of being thoughtfully fit with balance is really looking at how do we create harmony by identifying what is the other person’s wants and needs and what are yours. You slow it down and you start to get curious. Okay, what is needed here?

I was working with an individual who had a difficult relationship and she just kept avoiding it and not having a crucial conversation and hoping it would change. And as you might imagine, it did not. If anything, it got worse. She got more resentful. We started to work on balance and she went back and planned and had a conversation. She reached out to the person she was in conflict with and said, “Hey, this is hard for me. I’m feeling really vulnerable reaching out, but I’m wondering if we can go have coffee to talk because I’m not feeling good about our relationship right now and I’m scared to talk to you about it, but it is important to me. Are you willing?” The other person was absolutely, not only willing, they said, “Oh my God, me too! This is awful. This is not good.” She started then to ask questions and to step into curiosity and they had some really tough conversations and were able to redesign their relationship based on what kept getting in the way.

When you talk about what is this based on, The Gottman Research Institute has done a lot of research on relationships and teams and they say 67 percent of problems are unsolvable. They are perpetual. It is like maybe you, Amy, are an extrovert. You want to go to the party and stay till the very end and your partner is an introvert and she wants to just pop in, deliver a bottle of wine and go home and read a good book. That is not a solvable problem. It is not like one of you has to become extroverted or the other one has to become introverted — it is a problem and 67 percent in our relationships are perpetual unsolvable problems.

So what do you do? You have to step into balance. How do you create the space for harmony in that relationship? By asking and talking about what your needs are and what mine are. And it may be you say, “Hey, let’s go to the party together. We will drive separately. You stay for an hour and leave and I will stay till the end.” Or whatever it might be, without trying to change the other person or blame them. It also requires flexibility. You have to fully accept your partner that she does not want to stay till the end instead of being like, “Oh this always happens. This is so frustrating.”

You can see with these practices they all kind of interweave together, but I have broken them out for teaching purposes, for coaching purposes, to help people identify where do I get stuck. What is hardest for me? For some people, stillness is easy. For others like me, I have got a lot of endurance. I know how to overcome obstacles. I have had to work really hard on stillness. This model does not assume that you have to look at all of the practices in the same way. It says where you want to improve and grow and where you are getting stuck, that might be where you want to do some work.

Amy Climer: I want to go back to this comment you made about these unsolvable problems. Because I think that is a very interesting phrase, this idea that okay, my partner and I have different ideas, extrovert and introvert, for instance, but in an essence you provided a solution. You solved the problem. It just might not be we are solving it by changing each other, but instead there is a solution. It is interesting they used that phrase unsolvable because I am thinking, “Well no, it is solvable.” I do not know. Why did they use that phrase? Do you know?

Darcy Luoma: Because it is sort of like your core of who you are. You are not going to solve it by changing who someone is and all of a sudden, “Oh okay, this is easy to solve. You’re going to stay at the party till the end.” In a corporate setting, it might be the person who is on the innovation team and they are charged with being really creative and innovative for the company and they go into a meeting with someone who is on the accounting team who is all about having to reduce and rein in expenses. At its core, it might seem like that is unsolvable. Balance helps you to look at how do we create harmony? Given that we have different goals, different outcomes, different ways of being in the world, how do we create harmony by staying in dialog to be able to balance what you need with what do I need?  

Instead of shutting down, instead of stonewalling, instead of criticizing or blaming, where the relationship ultimately gets into really contempt and there is defensiveness and all these toxins that come in, you can stay in a place of healthy conversation.  Because as you talk about teams, the strongest teams and the strongest relationships — people wonder, and let me ask you, what do you think, Amy, if the strongest relationships and the strongest teams have a lot of conflicts or not a lot of conflicts?

Amy Climer: I would say there is kind of a nice medium in there. In that they are not having a ton, you do not want to have conflict about every single thing, but it is also the type of conflict. We are not getting in conflict around our personality or identity, but instead the conflict we are having is more around the ideas or the process or the work that we are doing. There is this term called Creative Abrasion, which that is what creative abrasion is. We are going to have a disagreement or we are going to kind of dig into the ideas and the concepts, but I am not going to have conflict with you because you are introverted and I am extroverted or because of our identities. That we have that grace around each other’s personalities, but we can still keep it real and not get into this like, “Oh, I’m not going to bring this up, it’s a little uncomfortable so I’m going to avoid it.” That is not helpful.

Darcy Luoma: Exactly. Right. Just bottom line you said, there is conflict in teams or relationships. Because any time you put people together, they are human, they have different approaches, different styles, there is conflict. The difference is how do you handle the conflict. Is it healthy? Is it respectful? Are you communicating? The strongest teams have a lot of disagreements and that is where the best ideas come. It is scary if you get into an organization where people do not want to, say, to disagree with the leader or the boss and say, “Oh, no, no, no, we do not.” That is a company that is not going to be sustainable and a team that is not going to be able to look at all the obstacles and be able to work towards them in a positive way. That is what balance is all about, is saying yup, there is conflict and instead of having it be toxic and dysfunctional, it is going to be healthy.

Amy Climer: Right, let’s have the conversation.

Darcy Luoma: Yeah. Conflict is not negative. It is an indication of something trying to happen in that relationship or that system.

Amy Climer: This is reminding me there is this blog that I am familiar with.  My sister was on it; she wrote a blog post for it. I think it is called Ask a Manager. They have got like a million views. It is this huge blog. The author of the blog said — basically, the way it works is people write in questions and she answers them — some crazy number like 90 percent of all the questions she had were basically about how do I solve this problem without having a conversation. And her answer was always have a conversation. Like go have that conversation with your boss, your colleague or whoever. It is like there is no way around it.

Darcy Luoma: That is right. One of my most popular trainings is about balanced conversations and how do you step into that in a balanced way. Because most people default to one of two extremes. There is the bullies, the dominant, the aggressive, like I am going to go in and tell them what I need, and there is like this carnage left behind, and then there is people who are more hesitant to say, “I do not want to have the conversation. It’s okay, I’ll just let it be.” You have to step in and in order to have a balanced conversation, you have to balance inquiry with advocacy.

Tips on Engaging in Balanced Conversations [30:57]

Amy Climer: Can you give maybe just a tip on what is one thing someone can do to engage in that balanced conversation where they are nervous about it, it might be kind of difficult for them. What is one tip you have for them?

Darcy Luoma: One tip I work through with a lot of clients and teams is to create a message triangle. A message triangle is just saying if you put your topic in the middle and you think what are the main three things that I want to say in this conversation, and then takes some time to sort of craft what are the main three things that I want to say that I want to have as an outcome. Ideally, once you have identified those three things, you figure out how to have a soft start off.

How a conversation starts indicates, to a huge degree, how it is going to end. If it starts, “You know what, I need to talk to you because I’m frustrated. You didn’t get that report to me done by noon,” or “you didn’t take the garbage out,” you can imagine where that is going to go. Versus going in and saying, “Hey, do you have a minute? I’m feeling a little frustrated because you had promised this and I didn’t get it. I’m wondering if we can have a minute to talk.” And then you have your thoughts really clear on what it is that you are going to say in that conversation. That is the tool I love. I use all the time for myself as well as with individuals that I work with.

Amy Climer: I love that. I have not heard the term “message triangle” before. That is great.

Darcy Luoma: That is from my political background. Politicians use message triangle so they really can stay on message.

Amy Climer: That makes sense. I love it. I am going to start using that.

Darcy Luoma: Cool.

Amy Climer: You said something; one piece there is the message of the actual like what are the topics you want to discuss and so much of it too is tone of voice and that is are you coming in kind of hostile, like in your example earlier with the teacher, or are you coming in from a place of stillness and calmness and balance and like can we sit down and talk.

Darcy Luoma: Absolutely. When I do the full training, just to take this one step further, we identify first, on the courage part. Like if you really were going to have candor and be direct and say what you needed, what are the main three points? Then you go back and look at it from the compassion side. How do I want the other person to feel when I am done? What is needed in this conversation for them to hear me and not get defensive? Then you adjust the main points based on that part of the equation so that you have both respect and candor. You have both courage and compassion. That is how you get balanced conversations.

Amy Climer: I love it. Great. That is really helpful, Darcy.

Weekly Challenge [33:42]

One of the things I like to do as I end the podcast each week is to give listeners a weekly challenge to help them apply immediately what they learned. We have talked about a lot. You talked about the whole Thoughtfully Fit model, you gave a couple of examples, we kind of dug into it a little bit. What is one challenge you would suggest for listeners based on everything you have talked about?

Darcy Luoma: Easy. I want you, listeners, when you leave today in your life, to practice the core. Strengthen your core. Pause. Think. Act. When you get home from the office and you had a tough day with your boss and the traffic, maybe you sit in the car for a moment and you pause and you think about how do I want to enter? What is the energy I want to bring? And then you act from that place. Instead of coming in and saying, “Why are the shoes all over the floor here?” Just sort of bringing all that negativity with you, just take a moment to pause, think and then act. Right now, today, that is something that your listeners can do and start to implement.

Amy Climer: Awesome! I love it. It sounds so easy, but I know it is not.

Darcy Luoma: No, it is not.

Amy Climer: Darcy, where can folks get a hold of you if they want to learn more about what you do?

Darcy Luoma: Thanks, Amy. My website is www.darcyluoma.com. I have blogs on there. You can sign up for, I do a monthly newsletter that talks all about emotional intelligence and leadership and team building and Thoughtfully Fit. And then, also, I invite your listeners to join me every Thursday I do a Thoughtfully Fit Thursday live video. Today, because of the technology, I am actually doing it from my personal page. Normally, it is on my business page, which is www.facebook.com/darcyluoma. I invite people to subscribe and get my videos and interactive with me in that way as well.

Amy Climer: Awesome! Thanks, Darcy.

Darcy Luoma: Thank you so much, Amy. I love that you wanted to jump in and try something creative for your creative podcast today.

Amy Climer: Yeah, it was definitely a bit of a challenge. A lot of checking the tech and I think we have all learned a lot in the process. I will just share for those of you who are listening at Darcy’s page that if you are interested in learning more about The Deliberate Creative podcast you can go to www.climerconsulting.com. Darcy’s episode will come out in two weeks. It is the 75th episode so there are a lot of episodes out there. It is all about helping team leaders, executives, managers, how to lead teams to be more creative. That is what I do. I do trainings and consulting around that. You can also find the podcast on iTunes, Google Play or Stitcher so you can listen to it right on your phone. It is real easy. So subscribe. If this is your thing, write a review. I would love to have you be a part of the community that has reviewed the podcast.  It helps other people find it.

Thank you so much, Darcy, for being on The Deliberate Creative podcast.

Darcy Luoma: Thank you for having me, Amy. It is absolutely a pleasure.

Amy Climer: Cool. Bye.

Darcy Luoma: Okay, bye-bye.

Amy Climer: Thank you, Darcy, for being on the podcast. Such good material. Great content, insights, stories. Love, love having you on the show. If you are listening, thank you for being here. If this is your first time listening to the podcast, welcome. You can subscribe to get episodes every other week where I either interview guests or I share research and talk about creativity, innovation in teams. The intent of this podcast is really to help team leaders, managers, executives, even team members, to help them make their team be more effective and more creative. It is all about innovation in teams. If that resonates with you, you can subscribe on iTunes. Leave a review on iTunes as well. It just takes a few moments and it helps other people find the podcast.

Thank you so much for listening. Also, if you want to participate in future Facebook Live interviews that I do, you can head on over to www.facebook.com/climerconsulting and follow me there. I will have shownotes as well for this episode and you can get the shownotes at www.climerconsulting.com/075. In there, I will put links to any references that Darcy made and some other resources. I also transcribe every episode and so you can get the transcript there as well.

Thanks again for listening. Have a wonderful creative week and I will see you next time. Bye.

Note: The links on this page may be affiliate links. That means I get a small commission of your sale, at no cost to you. However, I only share links to products that I or my guests believe in. Enjoy them!