Can You Do This Work Without It Hurting You? Coach Emily Fanjoy on Burnout Recovery

TRANSCRIPT: Can You Do This Work Without It Hurting You - Emily Fanjoy on Burnout Recovery

[Emily]

I did this service work for a decade and for the last two years, I was really invested in this question of can I do this work without this work hurting me? And the answer that I came to felt really disappointing because it was no, not right now. And I wanted to continue to be of service in that way.

I had built my reputation and my career on the social service work that I had done and I needed to take a step back and that was terrifying.

[Roger]

Do you ever feel like the reward for doing great work is being asked to do more of the same? You say yes, you deliver, you get recognized for it, and then you get asked to do the same thing. That feels fine until you realize this isn't your most important work and it comes with a cost.

Today's guest, Emily Fanjoy, calls that the competence cage where you fall into the trap of doing the thing you're great at but not the thing that's your most important work and it's costing you. This conversation is about the trap that high achievers fall into, about the burnout that results, and about how listening to our inner authority can lead us to our most important work. Hi, I'm Roger Kastner and this is What Do You Know to Be True, a series of leadership and personal development conversations for those who are discovering, building, and living into their possibilities and their purpose.

I'm glad you're here. Let's dive in.

[Emily]

Hi, I'm Emily Fanjoy and I'm the owner of Fanjoy Coaching and Facilitation. I do coaching and facilitation. My coaching is one-on-one whole person somatic experiences for anyone who identifies themselves as being in an inflection point.

They're recognizing like the way I've done things isn't working and I'm not really sure how to do things differently to move forward. So those crunch points are where we focus and where we expand together. My facilitation work is with groups and organizations who are interested in outlining strategy, designing a work plan together in an inclusive and collaborative way.

So I like to tell people I take your goal and I turn it into an event and we use the event to move together from where you are to where you want to be.

 Q: What is the competence cage?

 [Roger]

So Emily, you've worked with many leaders who find themselves caught in what you've referred to before as the competence cage. Can you tell us a story about a high performer who discovered they were in their own competence cage and what helped them break free from that cage?

[Emily]

I had a really notable client who was incredible at getting things done all the time. This is one of my very first clients and this is what made me kind of aware of this competence cage. You know, the way that we're trained through school, through work to do things well, to do them as close to perfect.

Some people still think perfect exists. I try to disabuse folks of that notion. Perfect isn't real, but a lot of us are trained to think about how do we do this perfectly?

How do we do exactly what we're supposed to do? And when folks perform at that level, they're often given more assignments, more responsibility, more challenges. And at some point, a lot of those folks get really worn out.

They get really tired. They get really irritated and resentful about what's happening in their lives. And so we work on the competence cage.

How do you consciously sign up for the things that you want to do and create boundaries so that you do the things you don't to do when it's necessary, but you don't overly volunteer? So the competence cage is, it's like that metaphor of when you stick a frog in a pot of water, the frog doesn't notice that the heat's getting turned up. That's a form of a competence cage that happens with us humans.

As we learn to do things well and to do them right and to be, you know, perfect and the best employee and our lives suffer, our work also suffers. And our community misses out on the best parts of ourselves. We miss out on the best parts of ourselves when we're stuck in the competency cage.

[Roger]

Was there a time when you found that you were stuck in a competency cage? And what did that look like? And like, what did you do to dismantle that cage?

[Emily]

I grew up with a very deep service orientation in my family, in my training, in the Catholic religion that I grew up in. And my competency cage was being so good at service that I ignored the necessities of my own life for long enough that it became a big problem. I had a chronic injury.

I wasn't paying attention to the realities of my finances. You know, my competency cage was just be there for others over myself all of the time. And it was a really pivotal and really painful lesson to learn.

I was a Peace Corps volunteer right out of college. I spent two years living and working in the highlands of Guatemala. And when I came back, I came back with this service-oriented mindset.

And I was trying to fix problems that were so much larger than myself and control systems or cross-sector systems to coordinate and collaborate and expand access and services for people who really needed it. The goals were noble. The actions were unreasonable.

My level of responsibility, the responsibility that I was taking on was unreasonable. I did this service work for a decade. And for the last two years, I was really invested in this question of can I do this work without this work hurting me?

And the answer that I came to felt really disappointing because it was no, not right now. And I wanted to continue to be of service in that way. And I needed to take a step back.

And that was terrifying. I had built my reputation and my career on the social service work that I had done. It was rather niche.

And I was so confused about how do I repackage my skill set so that they are accessible to a broader audience and a broader audience understands why I might be useful for them on their teams, in their workspaces. And a really scary process of leaving the work that I had been in for a decade, stepping back, doing some assessment, and moving forward with a new idea about how I could be of service.

[Roger]

Once you discovered you were in that competence cage, what did you do to help yourself break out of it?

Q: Can you work with a coach and a therapist at the same time?

[Emily]

I got teachers, I got help. That's about the time I started hiring a therapist, hiring coaches. What that meant for me at the time was getting conscious about what I was signing up for and getting conscious about how my idealized version of the world wasn't the version I was living.

And the pain was coming from the conflict between like the world that I wanted to be living in the way I wanted to be living in the way I was actually doing things. And so getting conscious about the choices that I was making helped bring me back into alignment with my values, my purpose, and the way I wanted to be showing up in the world. And everything changed as a result of that.

[Roger]

And it's interesting that when we are at those pivot moments, we turn to coaches and therapists and mentors to help us make sense of it. But the answers tend to be within us. It's not necessary that we're shown a new destination.

We already know that destination. We're just engaging in other people to help us illuminate the path to get there. Has that been your experience as well?

 Q: What is the difference between clean pain and dirty pain?

 [Emily]

Yeah, that really resonates with my experience. And I would say skilled help are people who are willing to ask questions that made me very uncomfortable. I was already uncomfortable, so getting a little bit more uncomfortable was really par for the course.

But there's this idea that I like to talk to clients about. Rez Momenica brings it up in his book, My Grandmother's Hands, about clean pain and dirty pain. Dirty pain is a pain of like avoidance, denial, obfuscation.

Clean pain is I'm looking at it, I'm feeling it, this is not comfortable, and I'm addressing the challenge. And kind of the difference is the dirty pain can last, you know, kind of forever. The clean pain, it has a lifespan that's limited because you're working through it, and you're making sense, and you're creating a supportive story about the what and the how and the why sometimes this happens.

So I've engaged with coaches and teachers that were not very skilled at asking difficult questions, and in fact, came through as like the authority, and I disengaged with them very quickly. And so that's become my criteria of working with people like, are they the expert in me? Or am I the expert in me?

And I think part of my competency cage, and I don't think I'm unique in this way, I think this is what I see in my clients as well. The competency cage is effective when we outsource our authority. And so the danger of looking to you to tell me what to do is that when you stop, how do I know where to go now?

And what if you're wrong? Like you don't know every detail of my life, right? And so I'm very sensitive about coming in and not being the expert.

And this practice of working with people to meet them where they're at in a way that matches their style, because each of my clients is pretty unique in the way that they approach coaching, even though I use the same framework, the way they access it is very unique and different based on how they think, how they process, and just dropping my expectations of how they should show up to allow them to show up just as they are.

I think it allows me to enjoy my clients more. It allows me to be kind of in awe at the novelty of my work because I get to engage in the uniqueness of each person. But yeah, when we outsource our authority, that's part of what helps keep that lock in place on the competency cage.

So breaking out of that requires standing in one's own authority. How do you show up as the biggest, boldest expression of yourself in a way that feels good, that feels enlivening, that is resourced when you run into painful situations? Because we don't get to like game them out of our lives.

I used to try to do that. I spent a lot of my 20s trying to never repeat a painful situation, not factoring that we're humans and we're going to have painful situations unavoidably, unexpectedly forever. So it's about being resourced and knowing how do I learn these tools and then practice them and use them.

And that's part of what the coaching does is I give people very active ways to experiment with beliefs and behaviors that are different than they were using before. Because as I said, I work with people at an inflection point and they know what I was doing before is not working. I am not feeling satisfied.

I'm not feeling happy. There's something else I want. There's something else that is wanted of me by the universe, I would say, not by those external authorities, and helping them uncover what that is and then work to live in alignment with that.

 Q: How do high achievers learn to trust themselves again?

 [Roger]

The language that you use, the words that you choose to use, there's a lot about emotions and feelings in there and the felt sensation of what it's like to have those feelings. And so I know as a coach, you do somatic and embody work with your clients and you've said that knowing what's right isn't just a thought process, it's a felt sense. But for someone who's built their entire career on being the smartest person in the room, how do they begin to trust a signal that maybe they've been ignoring or didn't trust?

[Emily]

Great question. How do they begin to trust something they've been ignoring or didn't trust? This is where the belief in behavior change experiments come in.

I do speak a lot about feelings, a lot about emotions. I want to say I'm a really big fan of Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication. I learned about this in my late 20s.

It sort of blew my mind looking at how our human, especially in the Western world, the vocabulary we use to describe emotions is like limited to sad, happy, angry, frustrated, very limited. And if you just take a quick search and look up nonviolent communication feelings for needs that are met and needs that are unmet, the list is so long. So to have a deeper understanding of naming those feelings, and there's a lot of neurobiological studies to back this up.

Dr. Daniel Siegel talks about staying in the prefrontal cortex requires us to name what's happening in us so that we can stay in our prefrontal cortex where reason and logic and decision making happens rather than his hand-brain model being triggered and collapsing into our tiny little amygdalas where we're just reacting, reacting, reacting. So I love to tell people the why. That's why I talk about emotions.

That's why I talk about feelings. That's why we try to expand the vocabulary. When you expand the vocabulary of your feelings, then it's easier to get in touch with and be aware of the nervousness and the discomfort of trying to trust something that you didn't trust before, behave in a way that you haven't behaved before, to say the thing even if your voice shakes.

And then part of coaching is giving them a place to process collaboratively, how was that? What happened? How are you feeling now after?

And that's where people can begin to feel and understand and see in their lives the difference between the dirty pain of being in the competence cage and staying there and how that creates this resentment, this residue that kind of filters into all domains of their life. If it's happening at work, how it messes with their enjoyment of their life at home or their life with their families or their friends versus the clean pain and how things can dissipate more quickly. And what is the impact in the other domains of your life?

And how do you feel in yourself being your own advocate? And so it's about doing the thing anyway with awareness of how you're feeling before, during, and after the process. Being able to name that, that helps create wiring for new behaviors, for new beliefs.

[Roger]

Oh, that's interesting. The idea of being able to connect to the feelings before, during, and after. That's new for me.

That's something I'm going to have to try.

[Emily]

There's this mindfulness principle called name it to tame it. And I love it. Like name it to claim it is a way that I had a colleague kind of take it and use it in a different way.

And I was like, that works too. But the name it to tame it is this idea of the dirty pain just keeps swirling as long as you avoid it. If you name it, it starts to have less power over you.

And then once you name it and you recognize it's there, you're in a place to take action. Like awareness precedes choice and choice precedes action. So we start by naming.

What's not working? What do you want instead? And then it's tracking the feeling states, tracking the nervousness, where it lives in your body, what the emotional response is, and how do you feel now?

[Roger]

And that gets me thinking about some of the work you do with clients, with your facilitation clients and coaching clients around trusting the wisdom that's already there, that's within them. So I'm wondering, when did you discover this idea of being able to trust the wisdom in others and then trust the wisdom that you had your own answers?

[Emily]

I learned this idea about trusting the wisdom in others in my work with survivors. Because there's so much they can't say. From shame, embarrassment, a variety of different circumstances and pressures, that it was the first time I was trained to work with people, giving them a menu of options and letting them react and letting them tell me like, what is it they want or need?

What is it that would work for them? And just trusting their answer. And it was really hard, because you know, people are actively being harmed, even as you're sitting with them and doing this work.

But I started to expand that idea out in a lot of areas of my work to think, okay, well, what if they are the expert in their own experience? And how can I give them that grace? Then I talked about my own competency cage and my own inflection point where I was in service to others, because I had this idealization about the world.

I wasn't trusting my own inner authority as I was working to trust other people's inner authority. And that conflict became very apparent as I went into a really deep phase of we could call it burnout. We could call it an inflection point.

It required a lot of deep introspection. So then I had to live through the process of learning to trust my own inner authority. So this kind of echoes back to something you said earlier, a question you asked earlier about how do I work with clients to trust something that doesn't feel trustworthy or to behave in a way that's different, that makes them nervous moving forward.

I had to do it myself. I had to experiment with what if I actually know what I need and want? What if I am the inner authority?

I would say my whole lived experience trained me out of acknowledging my own inner authority for a lot of reasons. Growing up a female in this society, in the Catholic Church, one of eight kids, my background trained a lot of things into me. And I believe everyone's backgrounds train a lot of things into them.

I grew up going to Catholic school where martyrs were the ideal. You literally needed to die to demonstrate your dedication to a cause. And I think about that now just wide eyed with heart.

That's so horrifying. But I had to learn to trust my own inner authority in a very uncomfortable and often painful process of coming back to myself. And I have to work on it still to this day all the time.

It's a practice. It's not an arrival at a destination. And I want to say, as you were speaking before, this whole sort of matrix kind of clarified in front of me, which is this competency cage and the clean pain versus dirty clean pain ideas, I think are connected in.

Dirty pain also includes when you're trying to control other people's lives, behaviors, ways of being. I am a trained yoga instructor. And when I went through that training, I had this recognition of I couldn't have done this six years ago because I would have been too concerned with people coming in and listening to the instructions that I'm giving them.

And when I was in the process of becoming a yoga teacher, I realized I'd been through my own chronic pain injury and I was working through a lot of things in my own body. I'm going to give you some ideas about what you can do. And if they don't work for you, I want to invite you to listen to exactly what your body is asking you to do.

I just created the invitation. Dirty pain is trying to control other people's behaviors and the outcome for everyone. And what's tricky about that is that also creates a competency cage where one can do that from a place of authority in an hierarchy.

One can do that from a place of power and privilege. And for a lot of us in that competency cage, trying to control the outcomes outside of us is actually the most direct route to burnout you will find. Because if I'm trying to control the outcomes of the political situation, our environmental collapse of the off-the-rails AI expansion and what's happening there and people's fears about it, that's a losing game.

I will be in the competency cage if I think that's my responsibility. I'm a sensitive body moving through the world and that will crush me. I know that.

I'm a sensitive body who can do a lot of hard things physically, emotionally, mentally. And that's a losing game and I know because I've been there. And again, I'm not unique in this.

This is how so many of us are trained. And this is how supremacy culture and patriarchal culture actually works. We have the people who are authoritarian, who know, not authoritarian, they're authorities rather.

They know the answers. They give them and they give orders and those orders trickle down the chain. And if I as an individual don't know why and how I'm showing up in that space, I am liable to get caught in a competency trap where I'm working for other people's whys.

I'm doing it according to other people's hows. And at some point there's going to be a conflict between what I need and want and what is asked of me outside. And so I think it's important to paint those pictures.

And for me, it was a really painful process of extending this grace of inner authority to other people long before I ever could understand how to use it in myself. If I bring my focus and my attention back to my inner authority, if I work on what's in front of me, it can feel small and insignificant, but it also has absolutely got ripple effects. I did it for myself and I watched my friends in social service and my close friends do this with other jobs and relationships in their lives also.

And they told me, I watched you do this and I thought I could do it too. And that's how humans work. The beauty of mirror neurons is if I watch someone do something that I want to do, I am one step closer to being able to do it.

That's why so many coaches, athletic coaches specifically, always talk about visualization. Can you imagine yourself doing this? Can you walk through mentally the steps required to perform this feat that you want to perform?

Being able to imagine it, being able to see other people get close to or achieve what you want to achieve actually makes it more possible for you. Then I became really acquainted with, oh, this thing that I've been told is selfish and self-serving, focusing on myself because that was my training growing up, is actually in service. And I had a teacher tell me that at one point.

I just wrote a newsletter about this yesterday to my mailing list. It's like, when you do your own work, that's in service to the greater good. It's actually not a shameful, guilt-inducing, selfish, navel-gazing thing.

It's actually where all of your power lies.

[Roger]

What I have found in almost every conversation that I have with people about their superpowers, the origin of that superpower is actually an unmet need, usually early in childhood development. That could be something that was just absent, and it could be something that was traumatic for them. The superpower starts to show up as an action that begins to feel like healing, that feels like beginning to understand a little bit about that trauma.

So people want to do that action more and more. And as you do something over and over again, get more reps at it, you get better at it. It becomes a talent.

I think it becomes a superpower when it's in service of other people. When you get so good at it, and you orient it towards, okay, this has been healing for me, and it can be healing and positive and generative for other people. But that interesting thing about that, when you're making that pivot, part of that comes from addressing that harm, that unmet need.

But it also requires you to identify not only the positives you're going to get out of it, but what you're saying no to. And you're saying, to some extent, saying no to that dirty pain and the things that re-harm from that dirty pain. That's what came up for me in that response.

[Emily]

Yeah, I really resonate with that. The question, can I do this work without this work harming me? Because I would go to community meetings, and I would get in my car, and I would cry all the way back to the office.

I just like feeling actual physical pain based on the unmet need and the disconnects that I was seeing in the world that I was working in, and how I was working so hard to try to push things that were beyond my control. When I made this pivot, thinking about how do I continue to be in service? Service is actually still the center of what I do.

I actually think about Andrea Gibson so much, the former poet lawyer of Colorado. I don't know if you're familiar with their work, but they said something, and I don't know the exact quote, but it was asking, can you see your own rage? Can you see your own anger?

Can you see it as love? Can you see everything you do as love? I just love people.

I love the world. I have so much love and joy for who I get to know in this lifetime, where I get to be present. Physically, I live in a beautiful part of the world.

I live on the North Oregon coast, and I'm enamored of the trees here. I am kind of overflowing. For a long time, that was really overshadowed by the overwhelming sense of unrealistic responsibilities I had put on myself, that competency cage.

I would do the work to enjoy and to love it. I would take vacation and go on backpacking trips and immerse myself there. I'm working from this idea of it's not an either or.

It's not a better or worse. It's a both and. Recognizing what is true, what is a real constraint, a real challenge.

There's a lot of things happening politically that do not align with my values and beliefs, and I find them, frankly, horrifying. Am I going to focus on those and let it drain all of my energy, or am I going to show up with my family, with my community, with my clients in a way that I'm coming from this place of service, and I'm going to hold all of the complexity? That's the work.

It's not to ignore one for the other. It's actually to recognize. I said this thing about joy and grief earlier.

I think of it as like a rubber band, and the further I can stretch in one direction, actually, the greater elasticity I have to stretch in the other direction as well. The deeper I can go into the grief and actually acknowledging, naming to tame the feelings that I'm having about what's not working, what I don't like in this moment of reality. Also, the further I can go into joy, gratitude, appreciation, and recognition of the things that are exquisite and just awe-inspiring that are working in this moment.

I think that's the basis of a lot of what gives me energy to show up in service of other people. That's a lot of what I talk to other people about doing in facilitation. I talk about it a lot in coaching.

In facilitation, it's more about how I show up and how I direct a conversation because it's not as focused on the individual. It's like, how do you help a room move through all of this? That's where synthesis comes from.

That's where the power of listening comes from. Yeah, I'm one of eight kids. I love getting to heal myself by listening deeply to other people.

Q: Is self-care selfish?

[Roger]

There's something about how we have so much admiration for being in service and demonstrating giving love to other people. That seems to be so valued. What seems to be less valued is this idea of being in service of ourselves, of being in love with ourselves.

But I don't think the two are disconnected. I think to be in service and to demonstrate love of others requires us to be in service and in love with ourselves and actually is a form of being in service and love of ourselves when we're able to do that for others.

[Emily]

The way that I would talk about that is that my capacity to show up in service and with love for others is directly limited by the amount that I give to my self first. So if I don't spend some time loving and caring for me, I have less capacity to do that for other people. And sometimes, you know, it is like a minute of breathing or it is eight breaths, deep inhale, long exhalation.

My capacity to show up for other people, to be present, to be deeply listening, to provide the synergy that is my superpower that helps to clarify things expands. So it's not at all mutually exclusive. They're deeply intertwined.

And I think it is a missing key for so many of us because of the way that we were trained to show up in the world. And we can untrain ourselves. We can retrain, rewire, realign.

Real self-care actually means not doing things you want to do sometimes. I sat in a group yesterday where a friend was so devastated and just really coming to terms with the fact that they wanted to go on this retreat and their life has so many things crushing them right now that it didn't feel available to them. And I was like, that is not cowardice.

That is not showing up. That is courage to do the thing that your body is begging you to do right now in spite of what your mind would like to be able to do. For me, it has come across as, you know, I wanted to show up for a friend who had lost a parent and I was coming off a week-long travel for work and I had no capacity.

My body hurt at the thought of getting in the car. Self-care was being honest with that friend, making a later date, not showing up in mass with the others that were going to support them after the loss of their parent. I hated that.

That's not the answer that I wanted. Just like the answer that I wanted when I said, can I do this work without it hurting me? I wanted the answer to be no.

I wanted to be a superhero in what I was doing because I knew a lot and I felt so competent and capable. Self-care is doing what's hard sometimes. And in our culture, that is not valued.

Like deeply personally challenging without the external reward. That is a form of self-care. And it's not popular to talk about it.

I can't sell you anything for it. It's decision-making from inner authority. Maybe I can sell you coaching if you're interested in talking about it more.

But it's a really challenging practice.

[Roger]

You were just talking about synthesis and deep listening, and that's your superpower of synthesis and deep listening in the service of getting shit done. Could you tell us a little bit about that superpower and then what or who inspired that superpower for you?

[Emily]

Yeah. So it took me a long time to recognize what my superpower was. And in fact, I offer this assignment to other people because it's so enlightening to me.

I had this assignment given to me when I was in my MBA certificate program called to enter MBA. And I used to think that I was terribly lazy and I actually just needed to hide this big secret from everyone. I'm just so lazy.

And I'm afraid they're going to find out my big secret. And I was asked to reach out to people in my professional and personal network who I regarded highly, who I trusted, and asked them what my superpower was. There was this flood of responses of how I helped get shit done.

I made things happen. We moved goals in all these different places that I participated on, nonprofit boards, in my work, in my community. And none of them said that I was lazy.

None of them said that I was lazy. And I realized like, oh, I think I'm telling myself stories. And I do like to rest.

I do like to take care of myself. And that's not being lazy. You can rest and take care of yourself and also get a lot of shit done.

And through that, I was looking at like, well, how do I get a lot of shit done? It's through this synthesis of deeply listening to different viewpoints, different ideas, and understanding where can we meet? Where can we moderate the conversation until we can come to some sort of agreement?

And then how do we create a plan to move forward from that? That's my superpower. That's what I bring to the world.

That's how I am in service. The deep listening, I think, has been inspired by an earlier part of this conversation, the desire to be deeply listened to and deeply seen in me. In desiring that, I think, you know, I have a natural curiosity and a curiosity that was fostered in my upbringing about the world and people, about books.

And I'm someone who just wants to know as much as I can know. I never tire of people's stories. I never tire of meeting new people.

I do have to sometimes take breaks and rest. But then I'm like back on it. And I would love to meet you and hear all about your life and your story.

And I have these visions of myself at summer camp, which is this experience of showing up and just meeting all these people you've never met before, hearing all these stories. I was fortunate enough to go to camps where we had counselors from other countries coming in and working to, you know, better their English and learn about the United States. But it was a cultural exchange where they would share about where they were from, right?

My curiosity for the world has made me attentive. And what has fostered that curiosity is like the beauty of the people in the world that I have been exposed to kind of at every stage of my life. And then sought out educational opportunities that really emphasized staying open, staying curious.

And then my personal inquiry is, I think, enabled by the fact that I was taught to stay open and to stay curious. And then that inquiry becomes in service to the people that I'm working with.

[Roger]

There's some research that just came out about AI. And I'm sorry if I'm making this all about AI. I'm the one who brought it into the conversation.

So my apologies. It could be because I read this article this morning.

[Emily]

It's up, so it's fine.

[Roger]

You've heard of this?

[Emily]

A little.

[Roger]

Anyway, there's this research that was talking about the people who are using AI more effectively than others. And what they talked about, the people who are using the high, they referred to them as the AI achievers. They are using AI less than the low AI achievers.

They are spending more time understanding and working with the responses and curating, massaging, what they refer to as bot sitting results to be able to produce something using their own expertise and judgment and discernment about coming up with a better outcome. But they're spending less time using AI than the low AI achievers, which I thought was really interesting. And through that human discernment, they're applying their expertise to the data.

They are experiencing less what the research refers to as bot shitting. They are producing results with higher quality, higher relevancy, because they're investing the time that they are spending with AI to question and use critical analysis and deep thinking of, okay, does this make sense? Is there examples?

Even using AI to question its own results. I think everything in AI is just emblematic of our own human experience. If we write that first draft and were to submit it as our final work, quoting Annie Lamont, if we use our shitty first draft as the final draft, it's not going to be high quality.

To actually produce better work, we have to be better editors of our own stuff. And AI is no different. So the results, while, of course, love the words of bot sitting and bot shitting, it only makes common sense that the more time you spend with the work in questioning the assumptions, questioning the data, questioning the relevancy, it's going to be better.

So that's true of AI. That's true of everything we do. I think it's also true of ourselves, of are we investing the time in understanding the story we're telling?

Are we noticing the patterns that we're following? Are we questioning why do we do the thing we do to be able to provide that as guidance? And then the other thing we've been talking about is what do I need to best show up in the way to affect the change I'm trying to create, either in myself or with others?

[Emily]

The theme out of everything that you just said that I hear is this is how conscious am I? And what am I going unconscious about? That makes all the difference.

And that goes back to the beginning of this conversation, where am I making intentional choices and intentional decisions versus externalizing my authority? AI is just another way to externalize authority to something that is a trained machine. Also, it's got all kinds of tricks and bells and whistles to make you feel good.

It's very affirming, kind of to a ridiculous degree. That's also not going to challenge you. So when you talk about growth happens in the discomfort zone.

All of this is how consciously am I showing up? And where am I going unconscious?

[Roger]

Emily, in this moment, what do you know to be true about your superpower of synthesis and deep listening in the service of getting shit done?

[Emily]

I know that it works. I know that it's healing. I know that it's the only way that I can show up in the world.

And I know that it's based on my commitment to being conscious, as fully conscious as I can possibly be. And that's how I'm going to deeply listen and synthesize the most difficult and painful things as well as like the most joyful and incredible celebratory things that I experienced and that I witnessed in people around me.

[Roger]

What did you believe early on about your superpower of synthesis and deeply listening in service of getting shit done that you've come to learn is no longer true?

[Emily]

I think first of all, there was a layer of like, I don't have superpowers. What are you talking about? I'm just grinding away over here.

This girl does not have a cape. She just gets things done. Like we just got a lot to do.

So keep going. And then when I identified these as my superpowers, I was like, what's the value of that? I identified them as things that were important to me that mattered.

Again, I didn't identify them as superpowers. And then kind of softly, I started to step towards like thinking that maybe it could have relevance and importance and considering that as I moved through engagements with people and looking at how my presence, my synthesis, and deep listening could shift and change things. And I also saw how my lack of presence, my reactivity shifted and changed things in a way I didn't like.

So the opposite was also a teacher. And now this is what I'm doing. This is what I'm bringing to the world.

And it sounds like coaching and facilitation, but that's what you get underneath.

[Roger]

So Emily, what's next for you and your superpower of synthesis and deep listening in the service of getting shit done?

[Emily]

It's a great question. And I think it is twofold. One, continuing to offer my services, which start with a complimentary call for anybody who's interested.

It's called a threshold call for those who are in an inflection point, coaching curious, I say, or if they're interested in the facilitation component of what I do, inquiry calls. So there's really building my skills to get myself out there because being a business owner is a really different skill than being a coach and facilitator. And so I'm really learning the business side of my work.

And I tell people all the time, I'm in Q3 of year two. So there's a lot I know and a lot I don't know. And some things I don't even know I don't know.

And that's one component of it. The other component that I'm deeply excited about that came up first when you asked this question is I'm involved with this group that is a school of humaning. And it is a continual self-practice for understanding how I show up in the world, what my actions and reactions are, how to be in collaboration and community because I work by myself.

This is a professional development opportunities that I've signed myself up for so that I have the experience of still being in relationship and collaboration and doing work with other people where I'm getting feedback on myself. And so I'm still humaning and that's very much next for me. And I'm very excited about what that's going to bring up this year because it's going to be uncomfortable sometimes.

And it's also probably going to be a lot of fun.

[Roger]

Emily, if an audience member wanted to ask you a question or follow you.

[Emily]

I'm on LinkedIn under Emily Fanjoy. I'm on Instagram under my full name, which is Emily Rose Richardson Fanjoy because I just didn't knock anything off at any point in my life. And Emily at efanjoy.com is my email. You can catch me there. And also I do the threshold calls if you want to ask more than one question. And I'm happy to communicate with folks.

If anything here resonated with you, I'd love to hear from you.

[Roger]

I love the name of your intro calls, the threshold call. I love that visual of standing at the threshold of what's next. At least that's what I'm referring to.

You might refer to it as something slightly different, but that's the marketing angle I'm putting on it.

[Emily]

No, that was the intention. That was totally the intention. And those are meeting in service.

It's no strings attached. Nobody has to sign up for any more time. My goal is that people leave with more clarity about a topic than they showed up with and that it's useful to them regardless of their decision.

So it's a lot of fun for me to get to meet people and hear their stories in a container and then send them on their way with something that was less clear for them when they showed up.

[Roger]

Emily, this conversation has been really powerful for me. I really have enjoyed getting to know you a little bit better and to become inspired by you and just the journey that you've been on. I love how you went through that experience of asking other people what your superpower is.

As someone who talks with people about superpowers, I have found that asking friends, asking colleagues is just a wonderful way of learning more about how you're perceived in the world, how do you show up. And they're usually a better person to be able to share with you, to identify what your superpower is than ourselves. Because we got a lot of voices, we got a lot of experiences, and we tend not to know exactly how we're showing up in this moment.

We've got a lifetime of experiences that we bring into that conversation. I've also heard maybe not ask if you know a teenager, maybe a child, your child, don't ask them because they'll give you some kind of smart ass response. And maybe your partner might not give you the best response either, but ask a good friend or a colleague.

I resonated so much with your superpower of the synthesis and deep listening to get shit done. And whether or not it has the lazy component or not, I really resonate with that, because that feels very, very familiar to me. So thank you for being here.

Thank you for being you and being brave and courageous enough to share your superpower with the world and the changes and impact that's happening with others. Thank you, Roger.

[Emily]

It was great to get to talk to you. I love expounding on these ideas and sharing ideas. And I'm excited to know how you're breathing before your sessions goes.

Let me know if it opens anything up for you in the way of enthusiasm rather than anxiety and dread.

[Roger]

Emily, thank you. Take care. We'll talk soon.

Thanks, Roger. Thank you all for being in conversation with us. And thank you, Emily, for sharing what you've learned to be true about discovering our inner authority and how that leads us to do our most important work.

What do you know to be true is a Three Blue Pens production. And I'm your host, Roger Kastner. We are recording on the ancestral lands of the Duwamish and Suquamish people.

If you want to learn more about how to discover your inner truth, check out this conversation with Steve Siporn on trauma response and nervous system regulation. And while you're at it, you might want to check out this conversation with Lisa Hallett on what she discovered when she accepted being ordinary. Okay, be well, my friends.

And as always, love you, mean it.

QUESTIONS THIS EPISODE ANSWERS

Q: What is the competence cage?

A: It's Emily Fanjoy's term for the trap high performers fall into when competence keeps earning them more work and responsibility. Like the frog in slowly heating water, they don't notice until they are worn out, resentful, and missing the best parts of themselves.

Q: What is the difference between clean pain and dirty pain?

A: Emily draws on Resmaa Menakem's My Grandmother's Hands. Dirty pain comes from avoidance, denial, and trying to control what you can't. Clean pain means looking directly at the challenge and working through it, so it has a limited lifespan.

Q: How do high achievers learn to trust themselves again?

A: Emily works with clients to expand their feelings vocabulary, run small belief and behavior experiments, and track how they feel before, during, and after. Naming the discomfort keeps you out of reactivity and builds trust in your own signal.

Q: Can you work with a coach and a therapist at the same time?

A: Yes. Emily says many of her clients find the two symbiotic: therapy addresses deeper psychological pain, while coaching offers a place to process the day-to-day and build plans to move forward.

Q: Is self-care selfish?

A: Emily says no. Doing your own work is in service of the greater good, and real self-care sometimes means the harder choice: listening to what your body needs even when it disappoints you or others.