From Trauma to Transformation: How Inner Work Shapes Better Business Leaders with Amy Elizabeth Fox

Mobius Executive Leadership CEO Amy Elizabeth Fox discusses how addressing trauma and fostering personal growth creates more effective business leaders and healthier corporate cultures. Learn how combining psychological insights with leadership development drives sustainable organizational change.

Key Takeaways:

💡Sustainable leadership change requires addressing underlying trauma and psychological patterns

💡Creating psychological safety is essential for organizational transformation

💡Leader self-transformation is key to facilitating broader organizational change

💡Personal trauma influences executive behavior and team dynamics.

💡Trauma-informed approaches to leadership development yield better long-term results

💡Personal healing work translates to better business outcomes and ethical decision-making

💡The pandemic of superficiality in corporate culture hinders genuine connection

Quotes:

🎤"To be a vessel of others or societal transformation, one has to place oneself in a constant process of self-transformation."

🎤"Until you can step back and turn back to pay attention to what were those defining events and start to integrate them, both the memory and the emotion - you're really inhibited by the footprint of those events in your psyche."

🎤"There are two big secrets in corporate life. The first is the level of trauma and regression that senior leaders are making their choices from... The other secret is the precious gold mine of spirituality that's under the conference table."

🎤"You don't have to teach people how to love. You don't have to teach people how to open their heart... You just have to get rid of the conditions that live in organizations that are hindrances to those things."

Keywords: 

✅ Vertical Development

✅executive leadership development

✅organizational transformation

✅trauma-informed leadership

✅corporate culture change

✅business psychology

✅leadership coaching

✅emotional intelligence

✅workplace wellness

✅personal development

Hashtags: #LeadershipDevelopment #OrganizationalChange #TraumaInformed #CorporateCulture #ExecutiveCoaching #WorkplaceMentalHealth #BusinessTransformation #EmotionalIntelligence #PersonalGrowth #LeadershipTraining

🙏 Thanks to: @amyelizabethfox, @mobius-executive-leadership

Show Links:

🔥Mobius Executive Leadership

🔥Mobius Executive Leadership YouTube Channel

🔥The Next Practice Institute - 2025 Gathering

🔥Look: How to Pay Attention in a Distracted World (Christian Madsbjerg)

🔥Trauma Informed Coaching Program

🔥The Male Dilemma (David J. Fox)

Disclaimer:

***The information, opinions, and recommendations presented in this Podcast are for general information only and any reliance on the information provided in this Podcast is done at your own risk. This Podcast should not be considered professional advice.***

Credits: Written, produced and hosted by: Mary Schaub. Theme song written by: Mary Schaub. Mixing Engineer: Dylan Yauch

Contact: Shobukai_Shift@mschaubadvisory.com

Website: M. Schaub Advisory (MSA)

** Shobukai Shift is a MSA Production **

Chapters

• 2:51 Cultural Shifts in Leadership Development
• 4:28 The Impact of Personal Background on Professional Choices
• 7:59 Transformational Leadership and Personal Growth
• 12:57 Building Trust and Psychological Safety in Organizations
• 17:00 The Role of Vulnerability in Leadership
• 20:15 The Journey of Self-Transformation
• 24:55 The Story of the Cold Executive Whose Heart was Unfrozen
• 26:49 Healing the Inner Child
• 33:12 The Impact of Trauma in Leadership
• 35:07 Transformative Trauma Work
• 46:58 Embodying Love and Service

Transcript

Mary Schaub (00:10)

since 2005, Amy Elizabeth Fox has served as the founder and CEO of Mobius Executive Leadership, a global firm advising Fortune 500 companies on transformational leadership. She's a psychotherapist, trauma-informed coach, and she leads the groundbreaking Trauma-Informed Coaching Certification Program. Amy is also on the guest faculty for the African Leadership Institute's Desmond Tutu Fellow Program at Oxford and the University of Chicago's Leadership and Society Program.

Amy, welcome and thank you for spending time with me this morning.

Amy Elizabeth Fox (00:41)

It's a joy to be with you, Mary, and talk about these topics that we both have such passion for.

Mary Schaub (00:45)

Indeed, I

wanted to just start from how I came to know you. Three friends and former consulting colleagues attended a Mobius leadership course about a year ago, and they came back reporting being absolutely blown away by the experience. And I remember being struck by how emotional they were and it sparked my curiosity, so I dug in and did some research. And I came to learn...

that Mobius's niche is at the intersection of business professional development and personal growth. My friend's reactions made more sense to me.

Amy Elizabeth Fox (01:16)

that's a beautiful way to put it. I sometimes describe it as the nexus of best practice and next practice, by which I mean sort of integrating the best of traditional thought leadership around organizational learning and adaptive leadership and systemic change with really avant-garde practices for adult learning like somatics and expressive arts and devotional practices. So it's beautiful the way you said it.

Mary Schaub (01:22)

Yes, that's so beautiful.

Thank you. Was

there a defining moment in your life that shaped your decision to focus on this unique blend of transformation work?

Amy Elizabeth Fox (01:49)

I sometimes tell the story of the inception of Mobius, which was I had the great privilege for a number of years to be one of the people teaching Harvard Law School's Difficult Conversations content through my sister's longtime lectureship at the law school. And there was a trend just before we founded Mobius together that was the two-day training is fabulous, but what could you do in a one-day training? And the one-day training is terrific, but what could you do in an hour-long lunch?

And my sister and I looked at each other and thought, you know, we can't spend our life just doing hollow info-marshalls. We really wanted to make a big difference in the world. We wanted to make a big difference in our clients' organizational culture. We wanted to make a difference in the lives of the executives that took our programs. And so we decided to go counter trend and create a firm that was interested in deeper transformation in, as you said,

really significant personal growth and bringing the best of psycho spiritual understanding of what it means to mature someone as a leader into a business context.

Mary Schaub (02:51)

I'm so excited because I feel like you were so ahead of your time in the early 2000s thinking about this. And I wanna come back to your perspective on the cultural changes which have happened in this time because I think in so many ways you were so ahead of where we are all now today. But first I wanted to touch briefly on your origin story because I was excited to learn we're both Jersey girls. Where did you grow up? Same.

Amy Elizabeth Fox (02:55)

Hmm.

Here we are. I grew up in Northern Jersey. I am

a Bruce Springsteen fanatic and still my favorite meals are Jersey diner meals. have to admit.

Mary Schaub (03:23)

absolutely,

yeah. And I try here in New York and it's just not the same. And of course, I'm from Montville, which is about 45 minutes northwest from the city. And I interviewed someone last week who was from South Jersey. And of course, we had this familiar language, which parkway exit and what kind of colored cheese you like. And it's deeply ingrained in our Jersey culture.

Amy Elizabeth Fox (03:27)

Hahaha!

My

sister likes to tease me that I learned to sell at the premise park mall.

Mary Schaub (03:47)

yep, was Willowbrook in, well, later Short Hills when I could afford it, but yeah, it's fantastic. I love reading about your early childhood. You describe growing up in an enriching environment with two terrific, loving, and attentive parents, which, yay, refreshing to hear those stories. They were academics focusing on school diversity in New York City. And as you mentioned,

Before, your sister, Erica Ariel Fox, with whom you'd later partner to found Mobius, was trained as a lawyer and built her own successful career, and teaching negotiation skills. Can you speak about the values you grew up with and how your childhood might have informed your career and professional decisions?

Amy Elizabeth Fox (04:29)

what a generous question. I mean, I think there were a few things that were pillars of my parents' values that live very deeply in Eric and I and all of our sisters. One was the sort of notion of looking for ways to serve the evolution of society. My parents were both on our...

elementary school board, on the temple board, spent their lives working with new teachers in New York City school systems, as you referenced, were very interested and involved in civil rights and women's rights. And so I think all of us got inculcated with the notion that

It wasn't a career wasn't so much about personal ambition as it was about a chance to make a difference in the world. That was one very big thing. My father wrote a book in the early 60s talking about being ahead of his time about the importance of fathers being involved in

their family lives called the male dilemma. And he was a very engaged and very generous parent. And I think having him as a champion for each of the four of us to believe we could be anything we want to do, anything we wanted, encouraging the curiosity of our minds and the young passions of our heart, which for me was an enormous fascination with ballet and dance and movement. I think that gave us a sort of confidence and a sort of maybe even a courage

to go out and pave our own paths and to do things that were less traditional with our careers and our lives. And then there was just this quality of caring and love that you referenced, which was the sort of most important dimension of our family life. And it is a blessing to have that in your childhood. And all four of us are still very close and very connected. And I think as somebody who didn't partner and doesn't have children, like having my sister ecosystem has been an enormous gift in my life. And it also taught me to really try

my godchildren which I do very actively and joyously.

Mary Schaub (06:16)

That's so beautiful to hear. as you're speaking about your family, I'm just struck that not everyone has been lucky to come into a family like yours. And yet we benefit by it because you're sharing that love and insight with the world through the work you and your sister do. And so it has this multiplier effect, your parents' influence coming through you and your sister and sharing those gifts that many people didn't have.

Amy Elizabeth Fox (06:44)

I think it works both ways, honestly, Mary. think if you have certain graces or blessings, like the one we're pointing to, that becomes a resource and a fuel for your contribution later. I think that's true. But I think it's equally true of the people I know who've lived through trauma and difficulty and hardship and found a way through that, through a healing path and a healing journey. That also becomes a resource of inspiration and fresh possibility for people. And I think everybody's life has both, you of course.

Mary Schaub (07:12)

Yes,

well, and I will come on because I want to speak about your trauma work I'm coming from it, from that other experience, which is, okay, I'm going to do the opposite and I'm going to find that and create what I didn't have. And I'm grateful for the work that people like yourself do because as you're saying, it is a resource for all of us to share.

You wrote, even at the very beginning, it wasn't about creating a firm, was you called creating a consciousness movement. And I'm just curious what cultural changes you've observed since founding Mobius, because there's this feeling in the air that certainly there's a lot of...

There's a lot of things going on, I think individually and collectively. So I'm just curious in the last 20 years what your observations are about cultural shifts.

Amy Elizabeth Fox (07:59)

I mean, I think as a field of executive development, we've come to understand over time how deep the transformational work has to be oriented in order to actually change behavior. So there was early in the field of industrial psychology, a sense of if somebody was doing behavior A and you wanted to have them do behavior B instead, you simply had to coach them and give them a reorientation and they would make that adaptation. And that of course, hit a quick

wall. Somebody who's doing a behavior out of an unconscious historic survival strategy can't simply choose to and sustainably deliver the alternative behavior. And then there started to be an understanding that you had to go a little bit deeper what my our mentor Chris Argers called look at the frame that's shaping the action that they're taking in his field of action design or what McKinsey would later call looking at the mindsets versus the behavior.

and what in some personal growth circles that talk about underneath the waterline. So what's driving the behavior that you see above the waterline that's underlying. And all of that started to give people an orientation to their needing to be attention to the belief systems and the emotions and the unmet needs that people carry that shape their behavior. And I think that started to season.

and enhance the ways we were thinking, not just about coaching, but about adult development more generally. And it started to point us towards more psychological interventions, the importance of self-awareness at a systemic level, the need for psychological safety that keeps people from moving from a reactive state into a generative and creative state.

My sister's work, Winning From Within, really took that one step deeper, which is to say, if we're encouraging people to have a heightened sense of self-awareness, what dimensions of self are we asking them to start to pay attention to? And so she created this seven archetype model that's very intuitive, very practical, and very universal, and gives people, I think, a...

a cartography of what to get to know and investigate in their self-exploration journey. You asked about cultural trends. think post-COVID, there was also a renewed understanding or a sort of refreshed understanding of the gravity of mental health stress that people were under, the need people had to have a sense of affiliation with an organization that had a purpose that inspired them, that brought them meaning.

the importance of building intimacy and community at work and sort of the movement for belonging. And of course, the connection between maturing leadership's consciousness and the ability to have a workplace that was welcoming, inclusive, diverse, ready, and future ready.

And I just posted this week on LinkedIn what I really a call for us standing by those convictions, even as the collective zeitgeist appears to be changing. There's a bit of a backlash now against some of those initiatives. And I think those of us who are advising leaders and advising clients about what thriving organizational cultures require. It's a moment for us to stay steady to what we've learned about what it really takes to help somebody get free of habits of

reactivity and executive derailers and to insist on not just the time that it takes, but the depth of intervention that is required.

Mary Schaub (11:42)

You wrote something and you're such a beautiful writer and speaker. I recommend everyone follow you on LinkedIn because unlike many people who use LinkedIn, I find your posts very thoughtful and vulnerable and very poignant. It's not just marketing and thank you for sharing that with us. A quote I want to read from you is coming up in my mind as you're speaking about

Amy Elizabeth Fox (11:45)

Thank you.

Mary Schaub (12:06)

the importance between personal transformation and broader success, particularly in the business realm. I spent most of my career doing what used to be called the hard side of change, I know that trying to explain what we're talking about to some C-suite is very, difficult. You wrote, quote,

I have come to understand that to be a vessel of others or societal transformation, one has to place oneself in a constant process of self-transformation. I'm curious in the early days when you were launching Mobius, if you found it hard to convince people like these C-suite folks very focused on the bottom line of the importance of personal development relative to leadership success and improved business outcomes, because often to sell a piece of work or to...

get buy-in for a large transformation work, they want to see the metrics.

Amy Elizabeth Fox (12:57)

It certainly has gotten easier over time because now I have thousands of testimonials from individuals who've been through this process and found it life-changing. So it's easier now than it was then to connect the dots for people. many of the outcomes people, our clients are bringing us in terms of their objectives of a leadership program. We need people to have more honest conversations. We need people to give each other more direct and candid feedback. We need people to

think more creatively and disruptively. We need people to start to have an enterprise mindset and think about the whole. I could go on, but all of those business outcomes require shifts in the fundamental orientation of the leaders.

who are supervising others doing the work. And so it's not all that hard to say, yes, we can deliver all those outcomes, but we need to give you a little bit of guidance about what's required to actually make those changes embedded behaviors or de facto orientation. So for example, you can't have psychological safety when you have a high degree of fear and a leader can't simply declare that everybody should be less afraid. They need to have

done something inside themselves to lower their level of fear so that they can become a nervous system that others can template off of and respond to that can stay grounded in the midst of chaos and confident in the face of uncertainty. So that would be an example where it's very obvious if you want people to do what Amy Edmonds and my colleague at the business school calls teaming, you really need to equip them with the ability to lower the level of fear in a group of people.

And there are very wonderful, very easy practices that help teams sustain that level of trust and openness and mutual generosity, which by definition helps people to start to think beyond the scope of their own deliverables. When I care about you, I'm interested in helping you. When I care about you and you make a mistake, I'm not looking for how to affix blame. I'm looking for how do we learn together? So those shifts become

competencies that are relevant to the business outcomes and relevant to the business's ability to innovate.

Mary Schaub (15:08)

This is what's so exciting about this from my perspective having.

worked in executive roles around change is that it's finally the middle useful constructive ground of what everyone is trying to figure out. Here's our mission, vision, value statement. It's on our webpage, it's on LinkedIn. And here's all the things that we want you to do. And there's no tangible way for many people to link those things together. And there really isn't a way to assess, hey, here are some behavioral norms in the culture of this organization,

We have maybe turnover and executive changes every six, 10 months. People are mainly focused on survival. That's bringing up a lot of these survival instincts that is having this downstream effect on trust, for example.

And there's really no way in the day-to-day world of that company to unravel that and explore it and then to give everyone a vocabulary to go back to their desks for the rest of the year, to be aware of where that's gonna come up and practice how to avoid that happening. And I think that's why I'm so excited about the work you're doing is because it feels finally like something tangible. There's lots of.

culture projects out there and they're well-meaning. And it might be an employee breakfast or lots of these fun kinds of things. And I can imagine to my question about convincing folks is that you're the real deal. You're bringing science and behavioral insights and a deep understanding of how business works to bridge that gap, which I think.

Amy Elizabeth Fox (16:26)

Yes.

Mary Schaub (16:39)

some executives have felt somewhat skeptical and cynical about because it's like, all right, we bought everybody bagels on Thursday and that's great, but is this really gonna lead to teaming and people feeling collaborative? it's not, it's nice. And I'm not saying we shouldn't do those things, but I really appreciate the work you're doing, because it feels to solve that missing piece.

Amy Elizabeth Fox (17:00)

Yeah, mean, absolutely that's its intention is to be the bridge. And I just wanted to make a couple of comments off of what you said. You said a lot of rich things. One, there's a kind of pandemic of superficiality in most organizational cultures. And so the solutions that we've had historically to these leadership gaps is exactly as you said, contrived social engagement, but that doesn't actually deepen trust. doesn't deepen connection. It doesn't create love in the workplace.

Whereas the antidote to the Machiavellian self-ambition, self-orientation, self-obsession is the softening of the human heart and the dropping of the shield through which we have most social conversations. And leaders...

are very well aware that they're operating inside of a shielded environment in which there's a false bifurcation between personal and professional. I have many leaders who come together as intact teams into my programs and say, I've worked next to this person for 15 years. I had no idea they had an autistic child.

I didn't know they were once a week going to visit their mother who has dementia. I never heard their immigration story. I never understood what scares them at night. And that alienation or sense that we can't disclose the more meaningful aspects and facets of our personal life mean we can't really come together in the fullest potential for co-collaboration and collective intelligence, I believe. And you mentioned the sort of Machiavellian sort of way

thinking

about people in the workplace as replaceable, fungible resources. That piece has to be sort of addressed at the level of structure, policy, and process. So they go hand in hand. One can't do soft change and ask people to be more vulnerable if you're sending them back to an organization that doesn't.

commit to their career path, doesn't have an investment in their growth, isn't going to tolerate their learning curve, isn't deliberately developmental in its orientation. So the cultural imperative and the individual development work with senior leaders has to go side by side. And people have to see it role modeled at the top or they're not going to invest their own.

risk taking in taking the journey you and I are describing of really melting that shield and showing up in a whole other level of vitality, embodiment, investment and care.

Mary Schaub (19:23)

I've seen some organizations add a...

another variable to performance, which is like almost like a good citizen. And there's a whole bunch of things that are embedded in that. In some cases, it might be as simple as attending events. Some of these informal events might mean keeping your mentorship appointments and getting reviews in on time and things that often would fall to the wayside with the priority of commercialization being above everything else. And I do think those successful organizations recognized exactly what you're saying.

all agree in a room that these things are nice, but you need a little bit of carrot and stick here to make sure that they're reinforced through, you know, particularly like performance measures.

Amy Elizabeth Fox (20:01)

Yeah, and that also says to everybody in the company, this matters to us. And we believe this is a pivotal part of our commercial success. It's not a nice to have on the margins. It's part of how we weave ourselves to become an organization.

Mary Schaub (20:15)

I'd like to take a step just to share something personal about me and how I came to, I mean, I've always cared about these types of things. I studied psychology in school and I wanted to be a therapist, but I couldn't afford the long journey getting certified. So I ended up working in consulting. And as I said, over the years, I became this transformation change management expert, but I never lost my love of psychology. And so I've continued my self study in conjunction with my own personal work.

and maybe it's the proverbial midlife crisis, but over the last couple of years, I came to a reflecting point that maybe what I'm doing just isn't right anymore. That my career persona had become misaligned to the person I was becoming. There was this tension I couldn't negotiate myself out of it anymore. So I started my own advisory business and this podcast.

I read somewhere that new business applications have more than doubled since you started Mobius 20 years ago. And you've written that you feel we're in a moment of time where collective trauma is exposed and visible. Hopefully, I'm leading you a little bit that there's a hopeful answer at the end of this, but do you think that people seeking more fulfilling career paths and talking about mental and spiritual wellness might be indicative of a larger awakening?

Amy Elizabeth Fox (21:32)

100%, I think that I absolutely believe that. think partly there's many consultants who have made the turn that you're describing for the reason you named in one other. They make that turn because their own inner life becomes so vital and so important to them that they can no longer use their energy to create tactical solutions. They need to do something that really will make a difference more deeply, much the way that Eric and I started Mobius.

But I think they also start to see the ineffectiveness of change initiatives that don't have the quote soft skill embedded into the way that they're approaching larger adaptive change. And they correctly assess that bringing both skill sets is actually the holistic answer to what's needed now. And so there's many former management consultants who now work with Mobius as facilitators and executive coaches for exactly the reason you're describing, Mary.

In terms of the awakening, I think that there is post-COVID a meaningful alertness to some of the frissures in the scar tissue of humanity and that those live also in the boardroom and also in organizational dynamics and also in many, many, many group processes and that if we turn a blind eye to them, we're recapitulating the trauma over and over. And when we turn a willingness,

to look and to engage and to have tough conversations. We have the possibility of something reparative and novel happening. And I think that's a trend that's happening inside of organizational life. And it's also happening inside of global culture. And I think there is also a recognition that most people have had some kind of a trauma.

I've done thousands of interviews with the most successful people on the planet, from top team members to board chairs, to consultants that are serving very significant leaders in the public and private sector, and virtually universally in their life narrative and in their family story, you see all kinds of impossible to metabolize traumatic events, addiction and alcoholism.

being sent to boarding school too early, absent parents who were emotionally numb as a result of their parents having been part of World War II, forced migration, racism, colonialism, illness, sudden death, accidents, many, many, societal dynamics and historical violence, growing up in poverty, being economically insecure, being physically unfit, disabled, many, many things.

And those early traumas become developmentally formative and they shape the way people experience themselves and their own potential. They become the lens through which people interpret life events and relationship experience. And until you can step back in a really significant moment in time and turn back to pay attention to what were those defining events and start to integrate them, both the memory and the emotion.

You're really inhibited by the footprint of those events in your psyche. And I believe much of the reactivity and hostility and stuckness that we experience in the world of business is because of untreated trauma and executives that haven't done their inner work and haven't had an invitation or a calling to do that work. I often share this one story because it was so poignant to me and it's so I have permission to share it.

One executive came into our program and he was a very successful person. He was very high performing, but he had been given feedback and coaching for 20 years that people didn't feel him. They found him cold and aloof and they didn't really know where he stand in and they didn't trust him that easily. And they didn't, he didn't inspire followership because he wasn't, he didn't have a lot of overt emotional intelligence.

And on the last day of the program, it's a five day program, on the last day of the program, he stood up with a flip chart and on the flip chart, he drew a safety lock box and inside the box, he drew his heart. And he turned to the group and he said, I want to share what I learned this week. He said, when I was 11 years old, I lost my brother and it was a tremendous grief for me and for my parents. But my parents were so overwhelmed that I felt like I didn't have room for my feelings.

So I put my heart in this lock box and I've kept it there for 30 years. And this week I had a chance and an opportunity and an invitation and a safe holding companionship to open that box and feel that grief. And I'm leaving feeling full of love, full of joy, full of possibility and tender and soft, you know, because of course the grief isn't over in four days.

And I thought he will never again get that feedback. But it couldn't possibly have been solved through, you know, take your team out to a drink or take everybody out to a baseball game. He needed a really safe, sacred place to go back for that 11 year old's pain. And having found that and had the courage to receive that invitation and use it for what it's intended to offer.

he'll be free the rest of his life and a different husband and a different father and a different leader. And that's sustained change. That's not a moment in time epiphany.

Mary Schaub (26:49)

That's so beautiful. I'm envisioning that picture of the adult with the small child in them and there's so many beautiful pieces of art to reflect the wounds we carry, the unhealed parts of ourselves.

Amy Elizabeth Fox (26:52)

It is, it's a beautiful process to watch.

Mary Schaub (27:10)

And we're bringing all that to work in the office. Like if we could imagine each one of us has a little inner child that we're bringing, you can imagine a floor of an office building filled with hurt, scared, angry little children. And it's all happening on some plane that we don't recognize. And we talk so much about culture and high performance, but you really do need to...

heal yourself. The tagline for this podcast is you are the change you and the world are waiting for. And my idea of transformation has very much been informed, Jungian and Buddhist psychology the outside is a reflection of what's inside. And if you think about a toxic environment, it's exactly what you're describing. A lot of hurt people that's sort of reenacting and working itself out. And this is what's happening in the

world today more broadly, right? how do you change the culture of a 200,000 person company? You need to start, I imagine, person by person.

Amy Elizabeth Fox (28:04)

You start person by person and every single one of the 200,000 can build a different ecosystem around them. From anywhere in the organization, you can start to be a promoter of love and care and vulnerability and authenticity. I totally believe that. I said in a keynote presentation I gave a couple of years ago, there are two big secrets in corporate life. The first is what you just alluded to, the level of trauma and regression.

that senior leaders are making their choices from and that shape the behaviors they exhibit every day. another way to say that is those inner children are running the show. And if we don't help receive them, hold them, nurture them and care for what scares them, we will continue to make unconscious and dysfunctional and destructive behaviors and choices. And we can see that on the world stage quite grandly and painfully at the moment.

The other secret is of course the precious gold mine of spirituality that's under the conference table and tapped far too little. I think one of the ways that we

deaden people in the workplace is not only the sort of siloing of people's personal life, but the disembodiment and the exhaustion and the information saturation in which everyone works. not in nature, we're not reading each other poetry, we're not pausing to listen to music, we're not celebrating each other's milestones, we're not tapping into a sense of mutual inspiration on a regular basis. We don't paint.

We don't create symbology for the moments and thresholds of accomplishment. There's many ways in which we're operating in a disembodied, numb way of working. And that comes, I think, at a great cost, not just to individual happiness, but to collective enterprise and potential.

Mary Schaub (29:49)

it's gotten so bad, we're not even giving each other our full attention, our presence. I have been in a number of meetings and in certain cultures, this is very normal, where you're having a conversation and someone's texting or responding to an email at the same time. I once was in a meeting for 30 minutes with a senior partner who did not look up the entire time.

there's a lot lost when you're not paying attention. a friend of mine, Christian Madsberg, just wrote a wonderful book called, Look, How to Pay Attention in a Distracted World. I just finished the Da Vinci documentary by Ken Burns and I was struck throughout the whole course of it. Just his brilliance was his ability to be so hyper-focused and present with things.

so many of his inventions, his artwork, were derived from him watching birds for several hours, from him watching someone move and their muscles contort. And we would have been robbed of that gift had he had a cell phone, most likely. But there's so much out there, that we're not picking up on. There's so many levels of awareness that are hard to access even when we are paying attention.

So you just imagine we're all skimming at the surface, how much we're actually missing.

Amy Elizabeth Fox (31:04)

Yeah.

Well, and you're pointing to several costs that are worth maybe enumerating, Mary. One is there's an information disconnect, right? I literally don't get all the data that you're giving me because my attention is not capable of capturing everything that you're giving me. I don't hear the music underneath your words, so I stop getting any subtle cues about what's important, what's a hypercharged word, where's your blind spot might be. I also don't

cross-translate from one discipline to another discipline and harvest fascinating insights from the tangential dimensions of my attention. So I go to an opera and all of a sudden something occurs to me or I watch birds in flight and something occurs to me or I take a dance class and something occurs to me. Like we're not in a sort of cross-disciplinary fertile ground on a regular basis. But I also think to speak more mystically for a moment.

were missing non-local intelligence, were in so much motion that the world of intuition and the world of sort of ideas kind of dropping like diamonds from the sky, that happened to Da Vinci so often, the world in which really avant-garde artistry becomes possible for a business leader.

That requires stillness, not just presence of attention, but spaciousness. And I often talk about the pandemic of space scarcity that most of our senior leaders are in. And I think of leadership development programs, one of their purposes is to create rest and renewal for the body and white space for the creative mind.

Because absent that, the brand new concept or the fresh horizon or what's sometimes called the blue sky strategy will not reveal itself.

Mary Schaub (33:12)

This leads me to the next topic I wanna dig in a little bit deeper with you, which is trauma. When I was younger in my career, about midpoint,

I was starting to rise up the ranks and of course with that comes some insecurity and imposter syndrome and all of that. And at one point, I was working a lot, not because I needed to, but because I wanted to, because that stillness that you're describing felt intolerable to me,

I was called in because one of my colleagues, someone who was reporting to me, was finding me very overwhelming. I was sending emails on the weekend and everything had a sense of urgency and there was this perfectionism and I had no sense of awareness about my behavior at all. and the three of us sat down and they described what the employee was experiencing.

and I immediately recognized that that was my father. And I started to cry and I didn't cry because I was upset and I was in trouble there was probably some shame and embarrassment there for sure, but it was like, my God, I made her feel the way my dad made me feel. And it was just so clear in front of my eyes and I could feel myself dissolve and soften as you've described.

And it was a great reflecting point. unfortunate to rise up there at work. But had that not been brought to my attention and had I not set out on a path to do this personal development, I would have been that executive that you described getting 30 years of feedback about being.

unapproachable and I'm not saying I have it all figured out by any means. That's an aspect of me that's still there that I am befriending and trying to understand. I think like the case study you mentioned, there's a protective element there that interject to help protect me. That I'm gonna be so ahead of this and no one, my father would never have to tell me I've done anything wrong because I'm gonna so overdo everything that I'll always be the good girl.

Amy Elizabeth Fox (34:54)

Yeah.

Yes.

Mary Schaub (35:07)

And so this leads me to trauma. And as you can probably read between the lines, I'm a trauma survivor myself. So this has been a deeply personal area of study for me. Certainly drove my interest in psychology and my work in writing and of course my gravitation toward Buddhism. Over the last few years, I've started to notice parallels between psychological concepts of trauma and the dynamics that we're talking about in corporate culture and organizational transformations.

And I'd love for you to spend some time talking to us about the Trauma Informed Coach Training Program that you've created.

Amy Elizabeth Fox (35:41)

Well, first of all, thank you for your story. It's such a touching story and what a gift they gave you by giving you the feedback in a way that you could hear it and was kind and turned you towards the work that you had to do. And, you know, how brave and meaningful that you chose to do that. know, many leaders get that feedback and scapegoat the person who's giving them the feedback and don't turn inward in the way that you did. So it's a very inspiring story that you shared.

My feeling was that the more I started to become alert to how pervasive trauma experience is inside the executive tier and how formative it is inside executive behavior and team dynamics, I started to realize that for any of us to be consulting or coaching senior leaders without at least an attunement and awareness of the trauma dynamics.

is futile. It's just we're going to be ineffective. We're going to be making interventions that don't point to the heart of the source of the behavior exactly as the story you just shared with us so lovingly demonstrates. And we're going to be blaming people for using survival strategies they needed in childhood that are just antiquated and they don't know to drop them. And they don't even have an awareness that they're repeating them exactly as you said.

And so I got really interested in trauma training for coaches and facilitators and consultants. And I've had the enormous privilege for the last decade of studying with a world expert on trauma, Dr. Thomas Hubel, who wrote a wonderful book on healing collective trauma and a more recent one on emotional attunement.

and Thomas and I have been working together now for a long time. And so we co-led this program for 200 coaches and facilitators last year. It was the first of its kind. There are a lot of trauma literacy workshops that are sort of three hours long and claim to give you a sense of the enormity of what there is to study about trauma. But our feeling was quite the opposite, that this is a real...

exploration in psychological dynamics and organizational learning dynamics and team dynamics and how do you coach people in regressed states? How do you spot the post-traumatic stress dynamics inside executive behaviors and routines and repertoires? So we created a year-long program. We had the privilege of hosting some of the world's experts on trauma as part of our faculty as well as luminaries in the field of organizational change.

And I think what people felt coming out of that program was a few things. I think coaches and facilitators that were with us in that cohort started to realize how essential it is for them to do their own psychological healing work and to be really looking closely at their trauma dynamics and their projective dynamics and where they get caught or stuck with a client and can't see clearly or can't share in an open way their assessments and observations.

And that was one of the cornerstones of the program was that the importance of using yourself as an instrument of the change. I think the second thing that became clear is how important it is to study the neurobiology of trauma, what we know about adverse childhood impacts and their longitudinal symptoms. And then finally, how relevant all of this is to the fields of organizational psychology and transformational change and adaptive leadership.

So all three of those pillars, the self-development, trauma literacy, and the relevance of all of that for organizational dynamics and organizational evolution, I think were the sort of outcomes of the program. And I feel more comfortable than ever, honestly, Mary, to say to a client, you can get leadership development that's expansive and meaningful for many different providers. But if you want this kind of...

deep transformation, real vertical development. You need an organization to partner with that's trauma literate, that knows how to do trauma screening and make sure that people are, the program is in contraindicated for anybody or gonna be dangerous for anybody. And you need to invest the time and resource to create a real refuge place where people can do that kind of deeper psychological work. It can't be done casually, it can't be done in the workplace, it can't be done in a lunchtime slot.

And more and more very senior organizations are very significant organizations are choosing to take that time and make that investment and make that priority. And my finding is that even if people come to a program a little bit scared, a little bit resistant, a little bit walled off, you don't have to teach people how to love. You don't have to teach people how to open their heart. You don't have to teach people how to sing and dance and write poetry and meditate.

You just have to get rid of the conditions that live in organizations that are hindrances to those things, that are inhibiting of those things, and create a microclimate or a little bit of an ecosystem in which something else becomes the norm. And by Thursday night, everybody is holding each other. Everybody is witnessing each other's life stories. Everybody is sharing things that really matter to them. And they are woven together as a group for life.

These cohorts stay together for years and years as friends, as co-journeyers supporting each other, as peer coaches to each other. And I am confident to say that it is a life-changing experience to take those few days out of daily life and invest in yourself in that way.

Mary Schaub (41:04)

That's so beautiful. And trauma work can last 10, 15 years, a whole lifetime. It's changing your entire operating system. So what you're offering is actually, it's a very tangible start to doing the work that is absolutely gonna make you a better leader, but also a better spouse, a better parent, a better friend, and the best gift you could give to yourself to unlock.

everything that you're describing for the rest of your life that is often unavailable to you because of this trauma.

Amy Elizabeth Fox (41:33)

Yeah, I was speaking a week ago with somebody who took the program a year earlier.

And he was saying to me, up until that week with you, Amy, I was really focused on me as a performer. And what was it? What did it take to get it right? And what was it right to be perfect? And what was the next ambition and milestone that was going to confirm that I was getting it right and sort of soothe the part of me that didn't feel good enough and had deep insecurity and anxiety? And he said, I really feel like I've moved from the mode of doing to the mode of being. And I'm so much more accessible and I noticed so more

much more what's happening with the people on my team. And I see so many more creative possibilities in the workflow. And it was beautiful to hear that. And you said another thing, Mary, that I just want to acknowledge. Of course, a week like this is the beginning of a lifelong path. Yeah, it isn't the path itself, but it at least begins to turn somebody's awareness from looking away to looking towards, from looking out to looking in.

And it invites people to move in adult development terms from what Keegan and Leahy would call a socialized mind where all of my orientation is on what society will approve and the threshold of, quote, success and achievement to being self-authoring and really sourcing from their own gifts, their own sense of purpose and calling their own.

things that will fulfill them and make it possible for them to be much happier and in some ways much more contributing.

Mary Schaub (43:02)

Oh, absolutely. I'm thinking of Fromm's book, The Art of that we're human doings, we're human beings. And certainly in the corporate sphere, it's often been very rewarding to be a doer and a performer And your value is often distilled down into that. And I think what we're seeing in the workplace and what people's process of re-evaluating their relationship to work.

Amy Elizabeth Fox (43:08)

are

Mary Schaub (43:30)

is exactly what you're describing. And there is this middle ground. We do need to work and have businesses, but we can do that and operate in a healthier, more grounded, and more ethical way

Amy Elizabeth Fox (43:42)

Yeah, and I love

this last piece that you added, Mary, like it's about wholeness for the person, but it's also about ethical alignment. And if I'm acting from that sort of unconscious repertoire of emotions that are driving me, the willingness I have to step outside of the boundaries of my own ethics and principles and even the organizational values, it's much higher, unfortunately, because I'm in a sort of fugue state of motivation that I don't even understand. Whereas when somebody is really

embodied and present as you were describing and available, then the choice is more bare before them and they can make more aligned choices, more noble choices, more generous choices.

Mary Schaub (44:21)

Wonderful. I wanna close today with a segment I call the protagonist's questionnaire. It's inspired by the French journalist Bernard Pivot and the wonderful late James Lipton of the actor studio. great. So I'm just gonna run through some questions. What person or people first showed you your own power?

Amy Elizabeth Fox (44:25)

Hmm?

of whom I am a big fan.

Beautiful question. My sister Erica would be the first one who really encouraged me to move from the world of psychology and social activism into social entrepreneurship and working with business leaders. So for sure she would be my first mentor.

I think all of my spiritual teachers, Ram Dass, Thomas Hubel, Linda Cicera, Patrick Connor, Shai Tubali, I've had the great privilege of being with some of the most extraordinary and wise beings on the planet. And whenever somebody of that magnitude comes into your life and takes the time to shepherd your development and your healing process, it's a great grace.

Mary Schaub (45:15)

When I found out about Ram Dass, I had to stop myself I really, think you're gonna have to come back and talk because there's so many more things I wanna talk to you about. But what film do you find most inspiring?

Amy Elizabeth Fox (45:26)

Gosh, there's so many. I mean, psychologically, would say goodwill hunting moves me to my core. And lyrically, I would say out of Africa.

Mary Schaub (45:35)

What is your favorite character from literature or film?

Amy Elizabeth Fox (45:38)

Dali Levi from Hello Dali, a Jewish psychic matchmaker.

as played by

the glorious Barbra Streisand who inspired me when I was 11 years old

Mary Schaub (45:49)

What song do you play to psych yourself up?

Amy Elizabeth Fox (45:53)

I sometimes play Hindu Kirtan, which is the chanting of mantra or the various names of God as a practice to open your heart. Or I might play Jerusalemma if I want to dance.

Mary Schaub (46:03)

What is your favorite comfort food?

Amy Elizabeth Fox (46:04)

White cheddar popcorn.

Mary Schaub (46:06)

What sound fills your heart with joy?

Amy Elizabeth Fox (46:08)

The sound of someone crying the tears they've held for a long time.

Mary Schaub (46:13)

What is your spirit animal?

Amy Elizabeth Fox (46:15)

Rabbit.

Mary Schaub (46:17)

what is your favorite quote?

Amy Elizabeth Fox (46:20)

The first night that I met Thomas Whoble, he said the following quote. He said, not until you're at perfect peace with your past, can you virgin birth the part of the future you came into life to give.

Mary Schaub (46:34)

Wow,

Amy Elizabeth Fox (46:36)

because it gives the hope that one could be at perfect peace with their past.

Mary Schaub (46:41)

Well, and finally, how do you wish to be remembered?

Amy Elizabeth Fox (46:46)

I really hope that I'm embodying the three principles of my first root guru, Neem Karoli Baba, who said, love, serve, remember.

Mary Schaub (46:58)

That is so beautiful. I am going to remember this interview as you embodying those ideas. I feel that from you when I read your LinkedIn posts and I should also note you're very generous with the materials you make available for everyone. So we're going to put in the comments, links to the YouTube channel. And I think Thomas also has, has a podcast. There's lots of great resources. So obviously Mobius and Next Practice Institute.

Amy Elizabeth Fox (47:19)

Yes.

Mary Schaub (47:24)

but also you're just so generous wanting to share and heal the world. And you found your icky guy. You're doing something that you're great at. You're doing something what the world needs. You're a very successful business woman. I'm grateful to know you and thank you for what you do.

Amy Elizabeth Fox (47:33)

Hmm.

I was going to say the same, Mary. This was an extraordinary conversation and it feels very much to me like you're doing exactly what life was asking of you as well. And it's such a joy to be with you.

Mary Schaub (47:51)

Well, I'm trying

and I think this is the coalition we're trying to build with so many like-minded people. We need to stick together. So I'd love for you to come back and talk about Ram Dass with us too. Wonderful. Thank you, Amy.

Amy Elizabeth Fox (47:55)

Absolutely. Absolutely. I'd be honored to do that anytime.