From Acupuncture to Corporate Success: Meet Jade Duggan, the Expert Changing Organizational Dynamics
This podcast recording was an interview from We Are Medicine Women, a project I was developing from 2020-2021.
The recordings are the recognition of how powerful we are. I trust this will be good medicine for you.
Enjoy!
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[00:00:00] Mary: Today I'm feeling a lot of up energy in my body. I'll call it excitement because the work that my guest Jade Duggan is doing in the world is amazing, but incredibly effective. And I want more people to receive the medicine from our conversation today. Welcome Jade!
[00:00:20] Jade: Hi, it's so good to be here with you.
[00:00:22] Mary: I'm so excited for our conversation. But I want to brag about you a little bit. Before we get into the nitty gritty. I was researching I'll tell people that you call yourself a corporate culture and wellness expert. We'll talk more about that.
[00:00:40] You also have a Master's in Acupuncture and you're licensed to acupuncture, and that's really interesting based on what we're going to be talking about. And, you had some really great examples of your success in what you do. Where there's breakdown within the culture of an organization. You take that and turn it around to help the bottom line of the business, but also more importantly is to get the people working well together through some skills you have developed over the years. More specifically, your successes have been with the NSA, the National Security Agency and with the CIA.
[00:01:19] And you've had a private acupuncture practice. You've trained healthcare providers. You've provided 25,000, probably more acupuncture treatments a year for one of the most underemployed neighborhoods in the U S The format you do this and you've named it The Duggan Method.
[00:01:40] And you say that you'll increase the effectiveness of a team by 200%, reduced turnover and burn out by 30% and say $1 million within one visit. And. I love you're a high school dropout. So we have a lot to talk about.
[00:01:59] I was actually reflecting well, okay. I want to say this first. For me, you are inspiration, transformation and deep love.
[00:02:09] I really hope you get that I love that we're speaking today, together.
[00:02:14] Jade: Oh love. Thank you.
[00:02:15] Mary: I was also reflecting on how I know you and that comes from the work of your Dad, Robert Duggan, Bob. And Dianne Connelly, your Mom. They were on a team that created the first accredited acupuncture school in the nation in Maryland.
[00:02:33] That's my Alma mater as well as yours. I remember being invited after graduation. I graduated in 2010, but , it must have been 2013. I remember being very dissatisfied with my practice. And I remember thinking about what I've learned at acupuncture school. It was much more than just learning points and meridians and all that valuable information, but there was something within the school that felt very intimate and learning that how you deliver the medicine is as important as the medicine. I was thinking like one day. I'm so unhappy. And then I get a message from your Dad saying, Hey, Mary, I remember you resonating with the deeper work the school was offering. And will you join this apprenticeship program? And before then, I hadn't really met you. You had already graduated, I believe. What year did you graduate?
[00:03:27] Jade: Let's see, it was 2000. It must be 2007.
[00:03:31] Mary: When I was invited to this apprenticeship the office that you shared with Bob and Dianne and Susan. Bob ended up remarrying your parents divorced, remarried to Susan, and you all have this acupuncture practice in Columbia, Maryland. And I remember the first gathering I attended. I was so happy to be back inside this conversation of the body as wise and the body knows how to heal. So let's start there. You work within organizations, teams, corporations, for the most part. But you have a background of Chinese medicine. How does that
[00:04:13] Jade: Let's see. I think you've given so much background. Here's what I'm really up to these days is that small businesses around the size, maybe five to $12 million a year are in the position to create economic stability. They always have in say a city like Baltimore or DC. These smaller businesses are actually what create local communities in some ways, because everybody knows each other. They work together. And they're small enough that you still know everybody's name usually inside of the company. So there's still human scale companies. A lot of them fail. A lot of these small businesses don't make it past a certain stage or a certain size. And part of that has to do with organization development, which most business owners don't even hear or think about until they're above $5 million a year. Much less leadership development, I think, starts to come into people's lexicon a little bit sooner which is why I use that language. But really I'm looking at creating larger scale social change through helping small businesses really scale with their values intact.
[00:05:19] And to also help them overcome that first to second generation skip. Which is a mission-based business. A lot of these smaller mission-based, mission-driven companies, they don't make it past the visionary founder stage. And you probably saw that even with the acupuncture school that my parents started where even with all of the organization development capacity that they had all of the amazing leadership skills. There was structurally some stuff about where it sat in the larger industry and where sort of the makeup of the board and the makeup of the visionary founders and how those things all went together or didn't.
[00:05:59] It changed the dynamic. I know that people who would go to that school now would say it's different And to the point where my father didn't want his name attached to it anymore before he died.
[00:06:08] So that's like a big piece for me how they go together is they were really cultivating. And my parents were really good at recognizing that social change actually happens interpersonally. I might say that again, social change happens interpersonally. Even with some of the big scale things that you see acupuncture some of that history. Acupuncture didn't exist as a profession in the U S in 1977, it was an unregulated in all but two states. Around 1982, woke up one morning to some of the Korean acupuncturist in California being arrested for practicing what essentially had been family medicine up until that point. And suddenly they were being arrested for practicing surgery without a license. So recognizing that cultivating some version of structure around it was really important. All of the acupuncture boards grew out of that. Not without the difficulty of having to figure out how do you take something that is holistic in its nature and fit it into a model that requires it to fit into allopathic medical model.
[00:07:14] It's an ongoing challenge. I'm sure we see all of the acupuncturists now trying to figure out do I to participate in the insurance system, knowing that the insurance system forces you into some boxes that may or may not actually fit. And even the school is had to abide by that, to get Middle States accreditation so that the school could be a fully fledged Master's degree granting program, you have to abide.
[00:07:34] You asked how they go together. Usually there, I will tell the story about how years ago, the Rouse company came to my parents and said, you're doing something it's not about the needles. The Rouse company is a big development company, responsible for a lot of those malls that we still see not knowing what to do with themselves and going under. Also responsible for the planned city that I grew up in. And, we see these amazing examples of people trying to do a circular economy and trying to create a town that has this circular economy or looking at how to do structural and social change in different ways. And the city I grew up in, which was where the original acupuncture school was chosen because it was a planned city, and it was intended to bring people of all backgrounds, all classes, all colors to one community where they could actually live in and work together and get to know each other and create communities.
[00:08:22] I've gotten around in a number of circles, but he was a developer and he said to my parents were doing something with that doesn't have to do with the needles, and we need you to teach it to us.
[00:08:31] But really what's true is acupuncture, the history of acupuncture has always been about leadership development has always been about organization and change. Even the way we talk about the meridians are talked about as officials in a sort of a government type of system.
[00:08:47] Mary: That's true.
[00:08:48] Jade: And yeah. And even the way we talk about acupuncture. If you were to give somebody a diagnosis and say, but I actually don't think it's really in the classical traditions that way. If you were to say, okay, you've got a little stagnation over here. This river is not flowing well, they might also recognize that doesn't start inside of the body. The body is a mirror to the external world, too. All of acupuncture was originally predicated on the cycle of the seasons that we are a microcosm of nature. And nature includes our social systems and our social structures. For me, it really is an extension of I've worked in the microcosm so long to know that most of the issues are not originating there, with the individual people. We came to these skills, actually from thinking, over the thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of all put together, people that we've either taught or treated or talked to, or been inside of organizations working with, if people had a few skills, interpersonal skills for social change, what would they be? What would keep 70% of those people out of the medical system and out of our treatment spaces. That was the other thing is that I found for a period of time, I had a pediatric practice and I got referred quite a lot of psychology cases and people would send me their most difficult cases. Which is a good use of me as a clinician. But most of the acupuncturist that I was training and talking to and teaching. were one by one, helping people learn, really what I think of as basic humaning skills. How do we be in our bodies when somebody says something we don't like? How do we speak to them when we're scared?
[00:10:31] You've been in a room where somebody you love comes in and they go "let's talk". How do you feel in your body in that moment? It might depend on what their face looks like. It depends on how you're reading the situation, all of these things. And we just didn't have those skills. I realized that 70% of what was in the medical system prior to COVID was mostly stress-related illness and that was mainly because we no longer had ways of grieving together, speaking together. And so I decided that the medical system should be reserved for those more intensive cases and that we needed to bring the medicine back into the boardrooms and the bedrooms and the taking down the treatment room walls as my mother would say.
[00:11:11] Mary: That perspective that you just called it's really helpful for our listeners. When I was in the apprenticeship, the Duggan Method, it wasn't called that, correct? That's something that you developed as to further your Dad's, your parents' legacy, is that correct?
[00:11:29] Jade: Yeah. Actually, in the apprenticeship, I think we called some of the parts of it Navigating Living. Some of it was patient empowerment through the Art of Questioning and the Art of Curiosity. Actually many of the skills are the same and afterwards I thought, okay, it needs a name that connects things in some way. And actually, I don't love the name. I've been considering calling it Humaning Skills, which will be the new website actually is Human Well.
[00:11:50] But it is essentially the same series of skills, but it's applied inside of companies in different ways. I don't know if I actually finished saying that, right now, what I'm really working on is a swarm, if you will. I don't know what a gaggle of companies would be. Gaggle of smaller companies that can show us what's possible when we allow our internal culture to do well, that we can all thrive and we can actually create massive social change via using our businesses as a vehicle, our resources. When I say a stable economy, for me, economy is not just cash money. It's also community money. It's how we be together and support each other, so we have enough to eat ,enough to be, and we've got literally water and food and and each other.
[00:12:30] So that's one end of it. The other end of it is, I do a few select projects with big companies. Fortune 100 maybe fortune 500 depends on the company with somebody who is really willing to use it to create some massive structural change and to to look into the possibilities of how to really reshape from that side of the economy, too, so that we're coming from both sides of what we see as this widening gap. And looking at how to come closer together with it.
[00:12:59] Mary: What I'm thinking about is you have a lot of organizations, corporate nonprofit culture, trying to affect social change, if your internal culture, the dynamics between the humans is not working well. There's a lot of breakdown, or there's enough breakdown where if skills were employed, the social change that they're actually doing the world could actually take on quicker, faster, better. Is that right?
[00:13:30] Jade: Yeah. Yeah. I'll give you two examples, one from one end of that spectrum and one from the other end of the spectrum. Just today, I have a client she's the owner of the company and I'm supporting her and her leadership team, and they had a client come in with a concern. What happened was the client had an upset. I thought things were going to be like this and it turned out that they were like that. This goes on in every household, every company, every, every configuration of humans. I thought it was going to be like this and it wasn't.
[00:13:57] And so they bring that upset to one person whose job it is in some way to mitigate that. This person goes, okay how do I deal with that? And then they go I was very clear. I've done all the things. I already did all of the things, now what? And thankfully we've been working together a little while, so that person at least stopped the upset from spreading.
[00:14:17] But they used to spend so much time on these things internally in the company. They're starting to actually, each of them, be able to stop it where it is. But I started that by working with the actual company owner and saying to her, okay, what is the possibility that's showing up. Right. If this person's got an upset in their body, it's pointing to something that they value that matters. Can you see the concern? Now having said that you don't have to see all of the concerns. Question is, is this concern one that you are willing to support them with? And if not, then what? And that's really always the case. Is there an upset and if so, what are we going to do about it?
[00:14:56] I can either take effective action, or I can throw a tantrum, which is oftentimes what I think when people say they're burned out, there's often it's this, I don't know what to do about this. Or if there's anything I can do, and I'm still upset about it.
[00:15:14] Physician burnout right now. There's all of these things. I wish this could be different. And I don't know how to make it different. Even before COVID and now even more so.
[00:15:22] Mary: What I was thinking of if you said earlier, everything is a mirror. So you have people and families. And then people have jobs or go to schools and we're constantly interacting with people and their stuff and their upsets, or their joy or their whatever. But the things that get that have the most area for making a difference is working with the things that are upsetting to people, because that's where there is some type of breakdown. Because we're seeing breakdown everywhere and Western culture and all over the world. So what I'm seeing you do is starting with the, as you said, the engines of the economy, because for social change, for businesses that really want to create social change, you have to deal with at home first in your place of work.
[00:16:16] Jade: Yeah. And even with the individuals in your place of work. He gets used as an example all the time. Dan price runs Gravity Payments. And they decided that minimum wage is $70,000 a year. And since then, there's all kinds of changes that have happened in the company because the individuals are resourced in that particular way. So just financially resourcing a small company is really an important factor for its wellbeing. And thus, also a factor for the wellbeing of the people inside of it. Oftentimes a small company who's, just in that sort of $3 to $5 million range is going well, we can't afford to pay people that much and I'm going well, can you afford not to?
[00:16:53] Because that's what opens up for people when they can feel settled and for some people, not all people, this is what helps them feel settled can make a huge difference.
[00:17:01] But it comes out of chicken and egg. When people are calmer in their nervous systems and they can go, oh, wow. You seem like you've got a lot of joy today. That's exciting. we still have this thing to attend to. Can we do that, too? Because joy can be just as distracting, honestly.
[00:17:16] And I don't think the upset is the most important piece of things. What I think is our bodies are still attuned to it, that we tend to do two things: One is we tend to try to avoid it, which makes it persist. But also it's where our bodies actually respond. We are noticing our body's response when we are upset. It's the one place where if people don't quite yet have a, an awareness of what joy feels like in their body, I can usually begin to help them cultivate a vocabulary for their sensory experience if we start from the end of where they get upset. because most people do know something about, oh yeah, my shoulders were tense after that meeting. And they can see then, can then make the ties to how long did it take you before you were able to talk to that executive again. Because if you can't talk to the executive again, for two more days, your company is going to have a lot of downtime via this. The example that I was going to share with you about the, uh, Mary, you might've been here. One of those apprentice days, there was a woman sitting in the front of the classroom. And, she'd come in as a guest, as a conversationalist and she had Bell's Palsy. Maybe she'd had a stroke or maybe it was Bell's Palsy. Were you there?
[00:18:28] Mary: I was there.
[00:18:29] Jade: As we were going through the parts of the conversation, if we veered in one direction, her whole face lit up. And that sort of parylization as it were disappeared totally. And if we veered back into another part of the conversation, it would freeze up again.
[00:18:46] And you could watch this in real time. As shocking as that sounds, it's not unusual.
[00:18:53] Mary: That's right.
[00:18:54] Jade: And that was one of those moments where I thought, okay, really everybody needs access to this skillset to do with each other. Cause that's exactly, that is a physical representation of what happens internally. Right now, another company I'm working with, one of the employees got upset about a new hire. It was a role she had wanted and she didn't get it.
[00:19:17] The fallout to the company has been disasterous. Because she didn't have the skills to talk it through, to move it through her body. And so it started coming out in all kinds of ways. She started dropping the ball on other projects. She started not showing up fully in certain things, being late to meetings.
[00:19:34] And it was just one of those things where she it didn't have the skills. I don't fault her at all. I don't think she had the skills to recognize what was happening and to catch it early enough to really say here's what's going on for me. How can I know that I'm valued and honored and that my skill sets will be used well in this company?
[00:19:53] Because I really what's at stake. That's what people want to know.
[00:19:56] Mary: What I want listeners to get is that are bodies are an amazing, entire body sense organ. And that we receive information through our sense organ, through our bodies. And we're either relaxed or tense. It's not black and white, but you're relaxed in a situation or you're tense and tension can still equal joyful attention. It's a more of a discerning. So that's where the skills and your work comes in. When we bring this body to work, your reverberating. you're not just keeping this to yourself. We think we are. But you're embodying the energy that the sensations. If you started out the day with your partner or your kid and it didn't go according to plan and you're noticing your shoulders are tight, or maybe you don't even notice and you go into an office or you get on a Zoom call, and you're still in that bodied sensation, that reverberates out. And as you were saying with this example this woman, expected something to go a certain way. It didn't happen. And she didn't have the skills to understand how she could let go of the tension , how she could turn it around for the health, not only the health of yourself, because when you're upset or tense, your blood pressure has gone up. There's biochemistry happening in your body. But you're also sending that out. We affect each other all the time. What you're trying to help people navigate using their own body to speak up about something. Maybe you're feeling relaxed and in a meeting, you train people to notice when you're not. Or when you are that kind of back and forth. And when you're tense, let's just call it that for a moment, how to work with it. How speak up or ask a question or get clarity or.
[00:21:51] Jade: Yeah. So, Yeah, so the first layer of skills is how do I notice it? I always think of it as, my Dad used to talk about it as a light switch. I actually think it's more like the dimmer. And how do we know when I go from a four to a six and from a six to a four on any scale. As I go, can I create even more nuance around that vocabulary in my body? Is this Is scared I should speak or is this scared I should not speak.
[00:22:10] Those are important distinctions to make. make And so when you notice that and say a meeting, question is how much time do we have to spend in the discomfort before we can go, oh, I recognize this sensation. It means this is the next best action for me to take or to not take. Oftentimes this will show up specifically in certain equity conversations, in a meeting and somebody will use a term that is inappropriate. I will be the one person, you'll see other people's faces go.
[00:22:40] Mary: And they're looking at each other.
[00:22:41] Jade: Yeah. And, who's going to be the person who can settle their own nervous system and enough to say with clean, clear, but powerful, this is not okay here. Here's how come this word is not okay to use. And if you want some more resources, here's what you do next. So that you can actually come from a place of not frustration or anger ,or irritability, but actually powerful, fierce, love almost.
[00:23:05] But that takes skill and practice and it's noticing first, what are the noticing in my own body? Then noticing they used the word, it landed as medicine in my body in a bad way or a good way, or I liked it or didn't like it as irrelevant. I And now, what is the request I have? So how can I turn this?
[00:23:23] Every upset is a request or demand in disguise.
[00:23:25] Mary: Let's say that again.
[00:23:27] Jade: Every upset every, so when I say upset.
[00:23:30] It's a funny word to use, but it's anytime I'm resisting the universe. Anytime I'm like, I wish this car wasn't going so slow in front of me. It's also every time I wish I already knew what I was having for dinner tonight. As well as, how come this person didn't send that email yet? as well as, why is my spam filter doing whatever.
[00:23:50] Mary: Resisting what's so, maybe.
[00:23:52] Jade: Yeah. Yeah. Resisting what's so. And I trust that all of those are wise teachers. When you said you were so glad to come back to a place where you knew that the body was wise, I trust the body individual and I trust the body social. Every resistance is pointing either to some unexamined assumption I have, oh, emails are supposed to go in my inbox and not my spam box. Okay.
[00:24:15] Or it's pointing to a value that I have.
[00:24:19] And it might be that underneath that the value is I really want to talk to Mary. I want to make sure that her emails come into my inbox and not into my spam box. How quickly though, can I go from whatever the upset is to how can I make that happen?
[00:24:36] I want to share a little example of how this works in a very big company. I once did a training. I did about five or six hours of training. Did some pre-work with them. I did some sort of site visits and some leadership work. I did some work with the directors of about 10 or 12 parts of the company. And they had thousands and thousands of downline workers from them. And I taught them five skills. I taught them how to notice their body, right? You probably know this skill is Upset as Optional. Some of my clients will notice the Light Switch.
[00:25:07] I taught them Mood Design. So Mood Design is not quite intention. It's actually how can I be in the background regardless of what emotion? So it's not about trying to control the emotions. It's actually, how am I going to hold all of the emotions I'm bound to have in a day's time you know, or a month's time or whatever.
[00:25:23] And I taught them about Requests. How do I go from upset to seeing what is the even is an actionable request to noticing all the body stuff we have about making requests even. And I taught them about breathing. Not some fancy, Here's how you do the 4, 8, 10. Square breath. You're laughing cause I'm sure you know this
[00:25:43] Mary: yes. I say it all the time in practice.
[00:25:46] Jade: Yeah. You're treating all of the acupuncturists and the yogis and you're like, okay, so notice your breathing. And suddenly they assume the position. If you breathe 20,000 times a day, cause apparently that's about the number. That's an average number. How many of them are you awake to? Notice how many of them are you aware of are even happening.
[00:26:08] Here's what happened. I'm going to give you this before we move on. For two years straight. Year over year for two years straight, the accidents went down 50%.
[00:26:20] Mary: Wow.
[00:26:22] Jade: In all of the the domains that were represented in that room. And there was a control. One of the leaders was not in the room and that site did not have the same change in accident rates.
[00:26:37] That was worth millions and millions of dollars for that company. Not to mention for can you imagine the families who might otherwise have had family members with broken elbows or I don't know
[00:26:47] Mary: or the
[00:26:47] Jade: of accidents exactly. And so for me, that was also a turning point in recognizing. But also, I got a little bit disillusioned with working in companies that size, cause I realized I could help people be more mindful, which matters. But it wasn't going to ultimately change the structure of the company and how it relates to our society which was at the root of a lot of the other kinds of stress issues.
[00:27:13] Um, And we had this conversation early on, my Dad and I, about how, if you train somebody to pay attention to their body and they work in a big, stressful environment, is not going to work. You're not actually going to ultimately save that company a whole lot of money because what's going to happen is people are going to go, this is not humane.
[00:27:30] Mary: This sucks.
[00:27:31] Jade: Yeah. this is, maybe that could be a good thing. We're seeing it now. People are deserting, horrible work conditions at left and right. So
[00:27:38] Mary: might hold.
[00:27:39] Jade: Maybe it is
[00:27:40] Mary: Yeah. Maybe that's the answer. People are realizing, oh my God, I feel like shit at work.
[00:27:45] Jade: Yeah.
[00:27:46] Mary: I don't need to go back to that.
[00:27:48] Jade: But that's why I decided to really focus on the smaller companies and recognizing if whoever's going to grow to be the next bigger companies like that, I really want them to know that it's possible to do so and build the structures that are humane along the way to support that kind of culture design as you go through from here to there.
[00:28:05] And it's also why I agreed to go back and do a couple of bigger corporation, but only when I have full buy-in from leadership. To really play with what's possible and do it structurally. Because know, a a lot of this stuff lives in our policy even. I had this happen in acupuncture school. I was pregnant with my third child.
[00:28:24] I thought I need to take a little time off. I said can I just take a little time off from this and from classes, but I'll stay in clinic. They said no, you you can't do that because XYZ thing. It was funny cause it was a policy. I ended up graduating acupuncture school with an extra 26 credits. it's like almost a whole other degree.
[00:28:42] Mary: Wow.
[00:28:44] Jade: it's like 29 credits to go on and get the doctorate or something. I know. But whatever. you know, Thank goodness I had the skill to go, okay, that's not that useful here. I'm going to finish my degree either way. So we've been all over the world here.
[00:28:57] Mary: You know what strikes me as you're speaking, I'm thinking about smaller organizations that I've certainly worked in, so I'm very familiar with the environment. Certainly have my own business where, it's me, but I have a lot of support with virtual humans. When I was doing leadership work through my MBA program. It was the first green MBA program, a master's program in the U S that I was part of. It was innovative. We were attempting to model leadership by looking at nature. What is nature doing? Yes. So you are doing the same thing because when you first started talking, I was thinking about a beehive.
[00:29:37] Everything works together. And I just was reading about how a couple of bees got stuck on some honey and people are like, whoa, was I going to die? But let's just pull them out, and leave them the honey. And the workers ended up coming and cleaning them off. Community. What I hear you doing is very powerful. I know in the leadership stuff that I was doing in green business, I wanted to work for Patagonia or Ben & and Jerry's. I wanted to be their sustainability director. This was in my thirties. But then when I was running nonprofits, environmental nonprofits in my background, what I saw was it's really hard to get people to do any change from the bottom up in a large business. What happens is they greenwash. They give lip service to those principles that I was so passionate about, and they said that they were too.
[00:30:29] But what I hear you saying is you're working with these smaller businesses because yes, they are the engine of the economy. And you can actually access the leaders, the people that actually make the decisions. And it might come through somebody who said, oh, hey, I know this work of Jade Duggan. She's doing this. There's the access points to creating change are, they're easier to get to.
[00:30:55] Jade: Yeah. There are a lot of different leverage points. There are drawbacks too, of working with smaller companies, of course. One of the things that I think a lot about is, now that so many of these smaller companies are online they're actually really, well-poised also to serve as reparations in a way. Those local economies are now global, even though it's only 50 people, it be 50 people spread around the globe. And if a leader actually understands that their role is supporting somebody to shift a whole community where they're located and to actually think about that, there's actually a lot of power that's possible. And on the financial side of things, the global north and the global south, and how colonialism has extricated so much wealth from that part of the world that we're actually also in a position to begin to give back. And have it be community building in some way rather than community costing in the ways that it used to be. Yeah and small business owners are also really well poised to build teams that understand this kind of work. And if you do it when the company is small, before it gets to a hundred people, you almost can never lose it cause it will replicate with the new people because the new people will be inculturated as they come in. So it's actually much easier to do it when there's a team of 20 people then when there's a team of 150 people.
[00:32:15] Mary: Yeah, that's really important.
[00:32:16] Jade: Because these are habits. You know this right? The skills that I teach are habits. They're actually what people might call micro habits in most cases. Where how many times a day can I really rewire myself to be paying attention in a different way? I'm not taking the time to do something else. I'm just doing it in a slightly different way. And so because people, we have these neuronal networks as it were, we do that with each other, too. The thing that most people think of as empathy is actually us just going, how do I calibrate with this other human being? And this happens even on the internet. Um, And it actually happens not just, at the, at the observable level of interaction and ROI et cetera et cetera. But it also happens where you watch hormonal changes across groups of women that work together online even when they're not seeing each other. It's really fascinating.
[00:33:03] Mary: I'm thinking about or wondering about the changes that you offer people within the organization. And, we've touched on this a little bit, but this doesn't stay within the culture or within the business. These skills, they come back to families, right? Another type of organization.
[00:33:21] A lot of what's useful with your skills, I'll say, it's quick. When you start employing the skills that Jade teaches, the turnaround time is immediate once you start employing them. And then, it's also bringing it home and realizing that how your family dynamics might not be working, you could also take the same skills and apply it. It doesn't matter. There are no walls here, communities community, whether it's work or family.
[00:33:53] Jade: Yeah. And to be fair, when I was of really focused in the corporate side of things, it was because they were going to pay to teach people something anyway. And I thought, okay. because I tried getting this into school systems and any number of ways. But this was one of the ways in which actually it was taught to me by one of my students She said they're paying for us to do this leadership training, and yours is so much better.
[00:34:13] Mary: Right.
[00:34:16] Jade: And we'll just do it this way then. Before that we were trying to use the wellness and health care budgets inside of the companies.
[00:34:22] Mary: Your style of leadership, most people, let's take a leadership course, a weekend a month long whatever. And as far as I know, I'm not aware of any embodied leadership
[00:34:35] Jade: know, There are. It's, It's interesting because I did have one client who said, they also did the leadership program at Georgetown and they said there's a lot of similarities except they don't have any of the somatic stuff. And then there's a whole book on somatic leadership, I think there's a lot going on, but it tends to come from the end of be aware of your body and then use it in these prescribed ways. People are getting that conversation around somatic awareness and how important that is. My best clients are people who already have a lot of somatic awareness from either some high end athletic training or some kind of intensity in in the world that they come from. What I actually really helped them do is take that level of nuance, somatic awareness, refine it even further and then begin to use it to design their body differently so that they become like a gong, when you ring a gong, all of the other little things will also ring, too. And the question is when you walk in a room and you feel that feeling, the question is, who's being the gong? Somebody being the gong. It might as well be you.
[00:35:33] Mary: You can be the one that interrupts the spread.
[00:35:35] Jade: Yes. You can before an upset happens. And this is where I've evolved the work some from where my Dad. My Dad would would say let your body tell you when you're in an upset. Pay attention to your body and let it tell you.
[00:35:46] I actually have taken the approach that it's preemptively notice all of the time over and over and over again, 10, 20, 25 times a day, because then you get the level of nuances that aren't even available because otherwise you got to wait. Like, And if you're very well-trained, you might catch it pretty early, but why not train you on the way? . If I, if I not only can notice where I feel the upset, I can also notice where I feel the gift and the juice and the joy, and I can intentionally cultivate that body and bring it to the space. It's one of my favorite things to do with leaders now is to go well, what about the body? When you know, you are, you know, on fire with a group of clients and you're loving what you're doing and they're loving it and they go, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that body. And I go well tell me what it feels like. And, And you know, they've got seven or eight different bodies that they're using fluidly. And okay, great.
[00:36:35] Well, What other body might you need to design to navigate this moment, too? And when they begin to develop that vocabulary for themselves, it's super powerful because that's also contagious. You can't resist somebody who can walk into a room and go, oh wow. Everybody's crying. I don't feel upset.
[00:36:53] I'm just going to be here and can actually hold, hold the space and then shift it to another way. Pretty powerful.
[00:37:01] Mary: It's really powerful. You know, connecting you with you recently, cause I want to go back to how this is instantaneous, I got ahold of you again, cause I was listening to another podcast and in my body I felt, ah, oh wow, breathe, deep breath, spaciousness this up like energy that felt, I'll say spacious again, because it's such a key part of every decision I've ever made in my life.
[00:37:30] If I look back over the major decisions of my life, whether it's acupuncture school or joining your Dad's apprenticeship or going to MBA school or moving to Washington DC from the west coast. All that came with a very expansive body. And I trust that body because I know it. And having the skill, honing it the way you are describing it, I trust that body most of the time, I would say 95%. And then I was always like this bit of like, Hmm, let's double check this. I trust that body and that's what you help cultivate and have people begin to trust the body because I think that's what I've learned throughout my training, even in acupuncture school and furthering with the things your Dad was up to and you are up to, is learning to really trust because someone's helping you pay attention to that awareness.
[00:38:20] The other thing is when I was, uh, scheduling you to be on this podcast, I was noticing some movement in my body. And I could have called it nervousness, but, no, I've been listening to Jade more often on her Instagram and so I'm very much more aware of my body, using my senses to slow down and, this is excitement.
[00:38:48] I can have all the things, but the label I want to be different, is different. I'm calling it excitement, which helped keep me, you know, uh, from tensing. This is going to be fun. This is gonna be a reunion. I want to share with people.
[00:39:04] Jade: I wish I could see how big the grin is on my face right now.
[00:39:08] Mary: I have done a lot of work in my life on myself and, and I have to tell people that I started out embedded in the acupuncture school that helped point me in this direction of my quote unquote healing work. And now 11 years later, I've done a lot of different trainings and acupuncture, Chinese medicine. All have been interesting and fun, this'll be going to the 12th year.
[00:39:37] I'm like nothing has made more of a difference then what I learned in the apprenticeship program. I want to go back to that as how I do my medicine. So I want people to know that you don't have to come into an acupuncture clinic cause you probably won't find how I do the medicine. You'll find different, uh, iterations of it, certainly around the DC, Maryland, Virginia area, DMV. But, um, I love that you are doing leadership training because it goes beyond the treatment walls, uh, as you said, into having people recognize that if you can hone the skills of having this body awareness and use it to have work, really be a place of meaning and joy and making a difference. This is the work to do. I have to say that, your work is, I say, it's critical.
[00:40:39] Jade: Thank you. I'm always committed to lurking for where the leverage is. And I sometimes tell people this, maybe you've heard me say it before. When I went into acupuncture school, I knew that I wasn't going to just treat one person. I was intent. At the time it was, I'm going to treat Jay Z because Jay Z treats a lot of people every day. So I'm still, essentially on that same mission. I'm going to treat the people who treat so many other people every day and I'm going to do it in the most root way possible.
[00:41:13] Mary: What do you recommend people if they want to get a sense of sensory awareness in our body, the science behind it, or any books or resources? Do you recommend anything like a 1 0 1 primer for people to further understand?
[00:41:32] Jade: It's so interesting cause you asked that question in two ways and I realized one is how do they get that in their sensory body? And that one I would, what would I have them do? I don't think I'd have them read something. I think I might have them go, not even watch my Instagram, but go to your favorite play, or go listen to your favorite music and notice how many bodies you inhabit during the course of those few minutes. That's what I would have you do as an experience. As for those of us who like to understand the things, there are a couple of places, um, that I would go, and that's not so much to understand so much the sensory body. There's a book called Ivan Ilitch In Conversation. And Mary, you know, Ivan was a mentor of mine, mentor of my father's, a historian, a social critic.
[00:42:22] He's sort of a grandfather of, um, the unschooling movement, of slow medicine and slow food. He was knee deep in the conversations about genetically modifying things. And, he's a forefather for a bunch of the different conversations that I still find to be sort of at the edges of where human interest is now for me.
[00:42:39] And another one that comes up is that I was thinking about is because I don't think we always think much about how public health and medicine and how it dovetails with conversations of equity. Their's a book called Body and Soul. It's actually the history of the Black Panther party in medicine. Alondra Nelson is the author of that book. It talks about community and how community and wellness go together. And thinking about public health and what does it mean to be in community. And where are the people that we don't always think of as public health purveyors, so to speak.
[00:43:10] And then to actually understand, the biology of cognition. The first book I read about the biology of cognition, uh, was the Tree of Knowledge by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. And, it really talks about how we take in language. It may be a little bit dated now. I haven't read it again in a little while, but it was one of those seminal moments for me.
[00:43:30] I don't know if Candace Pert Molecules of Emotion. Candace Pert was the researcher who found that emotion is molecular. Taking that out of a holistic context, we began to think that all of our emotions and mental health was undesignable by us.
[00:43:45] We didn't catch the other side of it that actually, we can design those molecules. And it's actually kind of one of the things that I'm doing. If you've got your molecules wired to have these receptors this way right now, how many times a day do we need to do this other practice until we rewire it?
[00:43:57] It 's a lot of what I'm doing. Which is also, something that works for PTSD and all kinds of different places as well. The other piece that I really love. I was reading recently a book called the Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford. She goes really quickly into how bodied, right? We think of AI as being disembodied, but she goes very quickly into how we are all interconnected and how bodied really, producing technology, is. And, uh, so I haven't finished reading yet, cause I keep thinking about sensory perception.
[00:44:32] I think if all of the humans I keep meeting have very little say so in their sense perception, who's training these computers.
[00:44:41] Mary: Oh, that's a great question.
[00:44:46] Jade: I see all these kids who have these sensory processing disorders. And yes, there's lots of information, but also know, we either think, oh my, my sense of smell is too acute or it's too, not acute or something, instead of thinking, how do I make it more and less acute when I need to. We don't even have the capacity to calibrate our senses much less use them well. I'm super into that, that niche of the intersection of AI and human sense perception and, you know, technology. I've always been. You'll see this in the, in the Ilitch book, if you read the Ivan Illitch In Conversation book. The history of humans is essentially the history of us inventing technology and then having it shape us again. Right. And then inventing a new technology and having it shape us again.
[00:45:30] Mary: Wow. You've just expanded my mind tenfold. Thank you for spending time with me. And I really wish you the biggest success possible for all the things that you're up to with small businesses.
[00:45:50] Jade: Thank you.
[00:45:51] Mary: But before we go, what is your medicine?
[00:45:56] Jade: This is such an interesting question. It's so many things, but I realize it really is so related to this, is that for me, having a vision. The fact that I know what I'm doing in the world have this idea and I don't know how I'll get there. I don't know exactly how it will show up. I don't know. But knowing what it is I'm working on really, really helps me. It helps me sort of let go of all of the things that are not related. It helps me let go of all of the tiny things that I could feel caught on or frustrated with. And so, so having that kind of a vision is really, really amazingly medicinal for me. Um, But also making sure to play. It's playing with it is really important to me. Having fun with it and making sure that I am somebody that most people come to for being willing to be in the suffering or the difficult places.
[00:46:41] Mary: Again, thank you so much for your time. This has been so wonderful. And for people that are interested in learning more about Jade's work, they can get ahold of her on social media, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. @N S FW leadership.
[00:46:56] Jade: That's right. Yep.
[00:46:58] Mary: Yeah, I can get ahold of her there. And thanks, Jade
[00:47:01] Jade: Thank you. Mary has been fantastic.
