What's Blocking Your Potential? IFS Coaching Explained | Janet Livingstone

Transcript – What's Blocking Your Potential? IFS Coaching Explained | Janet Livingstone

[Roger Kastner]
Do you ever have parts of yourself that get in the way of your performance and relationships?

Whether it’s the inner critic, the saboteur, or just something that stops you from taking that next step to getting what you want.

Today we’re talking about Internal Family Systems, IFS Coaching, psychedelic integration, and holding space for others so they may heal and get going after their goals.

For those on the path to discover your superpower, unlock your potential, and create your impact, deepening your understanding and relationship with yourself is big accelerator for performance.

And today’s guest, Janet Livingstone, helps others develop that deeper understanding of themselves.

Janet is an IFS-informed, executive coach, an organizational  development consultant, and facilitator.

And in this conversation, she gives one of the best descriptions of what IFS is, and the difference between using IFS in therapy and in coaching.

Her superpower is helping others heal, and she shares her experiences as an IFS coach and a trained integration facilitator for clients who have gone on guided psychedelic journeys and want help in making sense of the new neural pathways they’ve created.

Hi, I’m Roger Kastner and I’m the host of the What Do You Know To Be True? podcast. I’m glad you are here. Let’s dive in.

[Roger Kastner]

Hey Janet, thank you for joining me today. I'm excited that we're able to get together and have this conversation.

[Janet Livingstone]

Hey Roger, it's so great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

[Roger Kastner]

I know you to be an IFS or Internal Family Systems Informed coach. In fact, you're one of the first IFS credentialed coaches which I'm really excited to learn more about and how you have integrated IFS in your coaching practice. I'm excited to learn more about your superpower of helping others heal.

And I wanna give a quick shout out to Suzanne Weller who because of her, we met a couple months ago and she was a recent guest on this podcast. So hi Suzanne. Hi Suzanne.

But before we get into all of that, what else is important for us to know about you?

[Janet Livingstone]

I am based here in Seattle. I grew up on the East Coast. So I'm a bi-coastal product, I suppose.

And I am an executive coach and I'm a facilitator as well. And I have done a lot of program design for leadership development. And I do a bunch of other stuff like literary translations sometimes because I lived for a really long time in Slovakia and I speak the language and I do music.

[Roger Kastner]

And yeah, I do lots of stuff. Now, I mentioned Internal Family Systems or IFS. How would you describe IFS to someone who is not familiar with it and how do you use it in coaching?

[Janet Livingstone]

So Roger, that's a great question. And the reason I say it's a great question is that it's actually challenging to explain Internal Family Systems to someone just as a concept, because IFS really hits when you do it. To have a really full understanding of IFS, Internal Family Systems work, you ideally will be a client, but I will do my best.

So basically Internal Family Systems is a therapeutic, it's a psychotherapeutic model that was developed about 40 years ago. And it draws on all of the main sort of psychology streams from starting from the late 19th century, right? So Freud and Jung and Bern, transactional analysis, stuff like that.

The differentiator, the key there in that stream of thought over the centuries is multiplicity of mind. And what that means is that we are not just one mind, right, walking around as people. We are not just, I am me.

I only have one way of doing things. I only have one set of beliefs that I never waver from, whatever, like big time identity. Belief is that we are actually an amalgam of parts of multiple sub-personas in our psyches, and you could say in our hearts.

And those parts have positive intent to keep us going, to help us get through stuff, to help us survive. And they come up or they recede depending on the situation. And they are to be led and sometimes managed by a compassionate self.

So the self is the core and that self is what we feel when we're in flow state, when we're feeling good, when we're integrated, we're compassionate, we're calm, we're clear, we're confident. All the Cs, all the juicy good Cs. The philosophy is that is who we are.

That is the internal family that we have, all the parts and the self. The goal here is for the person to manage them, to get to know their parts, to understand what the parts are doing, how they're protecting them, how they're making them behave in certain ways, how vulnerable they are, to get to know them and to show them some compassion and help them not be so crazy active. Because when they're very, very active, we tend to be more emotional, less regulated.

And the goal really is for there to be enough management and enough space for self energy that we achieve good emotional regulation. I'm going to stop there because it becomes a full on presentation after that.

[Roger Kastner]

Well, I'm applauding because that's one of the best definitions I've ever heard anyone talk about internal family systems. I'm actually in a program right now at the end of a six month program where I'm learning how to integrate IFS into my coaching practice. And I haven't heard anyone else describe it as well as you just did.

We're talking about parts. Could you give us an example or two of what you mean by parts?

[Janet Livingstone]

For a recent presentation on IFS, I identified three parts. One, the first one is a manager. I call her flustered manager girl.

She's about 12. She sweats a lot. She's very anxious.

She has a clipboard. She runs around all day long going, you gotta do this, gotta do this, gotta do this. She has like a huge list, right?

And you know, before you do this one, you have to do that one. It's like program manager mode. But at 12, that's the thing that a lot of people don't know that parts can be any age, right?

Some of them are younger. Some of them are not. And the age they are sometimes corresponds to a particularly difficult period that we had in our past.

And so they come out of that. Let me tell you the little story behind it. So I am the first child in my family and I had two parents.

I was blessed to have a nuclear family, you know, functional. But you know, I carried all the energy of both my parents who were fairly diametrically opposed in their approaches to the world and how they manifested their stuff. And I was that kind of kid who really, really, really felt like she needed to make both of them happy.

And so it was a heavy burden for me. So that organizational piece is activated a lot of the time. So there's flustered manager girl.

She looks a little bit like me, glasses, sweating, nervous. And then, well, I'm not sweating and nervous at the moment, but anyway, the second part is what I call my anger monster, right? And people who know me in professional circles don't usually see that part because I try very hard to manage it.

But I do have a fairly strong anger kind of thing that rises. So visualize my anger monster as a cloud of dark gray, noxious smoke with yellow eyes. Okay, and he rises behind me so fast before I even know what I'm doing, right?

When somebody really triggers me and then I raise my voice and he has a sidekick who's a hyena with a really strong jaw and big teeth. And that hyena gets ahold of that thing that makes me angry and doesn't want to let go. So then I ruminate, right?

Right, the manifestation of that is raising my voice, ruminating, being like annoyed for too long. And that has receded over the years, thankfully. So those are two parts that are very key for me.

And they fit into the larger category of protector parts. Those parts do what they do because they're motivated to protect me and to help me get through life. Now, the third part is what we call in IFS an exile.

An exile is basically a very vulnerable child part. And that child, we call them exiles because they're so vulnerable and so open to harm that they get suppressed in our systems inside. They get pushed down.

We don't let them bubble up very often because it's scary for them to bubble up because when they're vulnerable and they come close to the surface, we can be overwhelmed with emotion, right? Tears, fear, panic, whatever. So those protectors are doing their thing to keep the vulnerable children hidden and okay.

My vulnerable child is very interesting and I will discover more. I'm quite convinced over time. My vulnerable child came to me in my very first IFS session as a client.

That's how I started. I wanted to experience it first. So I was the client and I was flabbergasted that my mind went straight to her.

So she's about seven or eight. She's sitting in a chair and she's like, you know, got her head down and she's like just stuck in that chair. She's paralyzed and very shy.

She has her head down, eyes kind of not very open. And what was so weird is that she looks like an anime girl, like a Japanese anime character. Oh, by the way, all my parts come to me as cartoons, which is cool.

It's entertaining. I love it. So she has a glossy black hair, you know, and perfect cloth and she's stuck in the chair.

And when I first met her and I tried to make contact with her because that's what you do in an IFS therapy session is that you try to connect with your parts. So I was like, I'm here, very quietly, right? I'm here.

Can you see me? And at first she didn't react. And then finally, after a few minutes, she went like this, one eye.

So I was acknowledged by my child. So that's an explanation of the three kind of main types of parts that come up. Two in the protector category, the managers are less extreme.

The firefighters, my anger monster falls into that subcategory of firefighter, right? Firefighters are very extreme because they think there's a fire. Literally, they think that you're in danger for your life.

I like to say that the firefighters have a direct line to the amygdala. Like they have the red phone, that the presidents used to have before everything was implanted in our brains and on our wrists. And so the firefighters come with a giant hose, like, okay, where's the fire?

Yeah, so protectors, exile. And then inside is the self that's always there.

[Roger Kastner]

Beautiful description of the parts. And thank you for sharing your parts. There is this idea that coaching and therapy are two separate things.

And there's this idea of the hard line and therapy's about everything that happened in the past and coaching's about everything in the future. And I'm using this voice to demarcate that that's not the case. I'd love to hear your response to this idea of the hard line between therapy and coaching and how IFS as a therapy model is effective in coaching.

[Janet Livingstone]

Yeah, thanks for that question. That's a really important question. ICF and IFS have recently come together and ICF now recognizes IFS as a valid coaching method.

That's a real relief because IFS is very powerful as a coaching method. And so when you do IFS-informed coaching with somebody, the idea is that you bring all of the knowledge of the methodology, but you're not there to run a therapy session. It's really a combination of ICF and IFS that you're doing with the client, right?

Begin by contracting, begin by asking, what's your goal? What's coming up for you? What would you like to take away from this session?

All of the normal standard stuff. It requires a little more listening because what you're aware of during the session is openings, opportunities to invite the client as they're talking about their particular thing, whatever they're bringing, to invite them to turn inward and look at that behavior or that reaction that they had in a situation, to look at that as a kind of a part of themselves. And they may say, and this is how they came up with this whole methodology in the beginning.

The client may say, just as we all say sometimes, like, yeah, part of me really wants to do X and the other part of me like totally wants to do Y and I don't know which way to go and I'm torn. That is the IFS coach's opportunity to say, oh, cool. So you have a part that wants to do X.

Can we look at that part? Are you okay to like look deeper at that part of you? So it's really, you have to be gentle, right?

We don't wanna push loose on people because there are lots of people who don't want to look deeply into their own stuff. The past versus future orientations of the two types of coaching is a fascinating question because IFS coaching can access parts and parts are rooted in our life experience, including our childhood and our past, which we carry with us through life regardless. I believe that we carry our full selves, including our lives and all our emotions and everything that's in our psyche around with us because we are whole people, right?

I am not going to unscrew parts of me and put them on the shelf because I know I'm gonna be sitting at a desk all day. IFS access allows clients to access parts so that they can feel better now and they can be more empowered to move forward, right? The goal of IFS-informed coaching is the same as ICF coaching.

It is to help the client move forward, take action, feel better, feel more regulated, be more empowered and in control of themselves and ready to achieve their goal. It's intense for the client. So we only go so far, but even just getting a client to think about, oh, that's just a part of me is very, it's good.

It's healing.

[Roger Kastner]

Yeah, yeah. For them to be able to identify and create a relationship with that part separate from thinking it's themselves. Yeah.

Just that awareness is super powerful. I mean, my original coaching training would talk about, you know, do the things you need to do to make sure that you are most centered so you can hold the container for your clients. And that was helpful.

But I think IFS actually gives us language to understand, okay, what parts do I actually need to really actually be aware of when it's coming up in the conversation. And in our program, where I'm learning about how to integrate IFS, when we are practicing with one another, there's exercises for the coach E, the person who's being coached, and then there's practices for the coach. And it all starts with identifying the parts that show up, the part that wants to be the super coach for the client.

There's the part that doesn't wanna ask dumb questions. There's the part, and I'm revealing my parts right now, but there's, you know, we have this constellation of parts that show up. And so my practice now is the, you know, the five, 10 minutes before a session, I go and have those conversations with those parts and see what do they need right now.

And, you know, am I, what needs to happen for me to allow those parts to just feel recognized, feel appreciated, and allow the session to unfold the way it needs to without them jumping up on stage and stage diving all over the client's conversation.

[Janet Livingstone]

Yeah, stage diving. That's cool. I like that term.

Yeah, absolutely. This is so, it's so key. I can't even, the whole thing of us, of us learning how to take care of ourselves, like it's multi-multi, like we have to be able to not only prepare for a session by doing that, and your description is beautiful, but during the session, we have to be aware.

We have to be conscious, like I'm having this thought, oh, there's that part, that part, oh, there's that impatient part that wants to move this forward, or there's that self-credit that is thinking, oh, you're not doing a good job because they're not, you know, they're not responding in the way that you expected or whatever. And you have to be aware both of what the client, what's happening with the client and what's happening with yourself. And that's a skill that you have to develop.

It's not, you know, we may have certain natural levels of that skill, but you can really develop it by practicing it. And here's one point that I really wanna make is that holding space, even for longer periods in silence with a client is hugely valuable. I've had so much feedback from clients where they say, oh, I really needed that.

I really needed somebody to just be there and not interrupt me, but hear me going through my process. And, you know, we use this term so much, right, in facilitation, in coaching, in many instances, we talk about holding space. But in my experience, there are a lot of folks who also culturally, they're not comfortable with silence, right?

Here in the US, we don't really, we don't love it because when there's silence between us, we interpret that as meaning, oh, there's some tension or we're bored. We don't have anything to say to each other and that's bad, right? There are a lot of sort of cultural beliefs that come in, but clients, we're all people.

We need time to process stuff. So if I'm having a client, you know, with a client who's having a real insight and it's important, they're gonna be going like, okay, wow, I never thought about that. Well, what does that mean?

Wait a minute, did I know that before? What, you know, they've got all these questions in their head, right? If I'm talking the whole time while they're doing that, they're not gonna be able to get the processing that they need.

[Roger Kastner]

The allowing for the unfolding to happen. And I love how you call that out, the holding space. And it's in the latter example, you're holding silence.

But I think part of that is also holding ourselves and knowing, you know, being able to recognize when a part of us is activated in session, being able to quickly acknowledge and let that part know, you know, like, hey, thank you. I'm glad you're here. I've got this.

[Janet Livingstone]

Yeah, exactly. I see you. I love what you do for me, but I've got this.

[Roger Kastner]

I would love to hear what you do in that moment. I know for myself is something that we talked about before around breath work. And I know when that part gets a little activated, I acknowledge it and I send it a big breath of air.

And that seems to be just taking that breath. And it just, my whole system mellows a little bit when that happens. And that part's like, okay, I feel seen.

Yeah, you got this. Go ahead. What do you do when you, is there a practice that you can share with us that when you feel a part get activated in session?

[Janet Livingstone]

Good question. So when I recognize that there's a part activated, I do take a couple of breaths. I don't, I love your thing about sending them a big breath of air.

That's really nice, like a tropical breeze. I try to understand which part it is and just kind of say, hey, yeah, I know you're there. You're okay.

I'm okay. Thanks. I'm doing this now.

I'll be okay. I actually try to create that silent envelope for the client. It sounds weird.

This is the first time I've ever expressed it in those words, to be honest. I just try to pull back and just enjoy the client's process. Just watch them, but not too intensively.

Like not like, right? Like the psychiatrist is like, what is going on? You know, but just like feel the beauty of a client, finding stuff out, feeling stuff.

It's beautiful to be human. We spend so much time trying to fix ourselves, change ourselves, suppress ourselves, shape ourselves into something we think other people want. Act, you know, behave professionally.

Like, oh my God, what we do when we coach and when we use IFS to coach and just coaching in general, those things need to reveal themselves and ultimately fall away a little bit to free up the client so they can talk about their real stuff and come to a conclusion like, okay, cool. So I was like, I was acting this way because I thought I really have to, but I don't really want to. And maybe I don't need to.

Maybe I can be regulated enough to get through that meeting, even if it's a little bit annoying or a little bit activating. I know now that that part gets activated and I can say, hey, it's okay. It's all right.

[Roger Kastner]

This is why I think that age question is so valuable. When you ask a part how old it thinks you are and it says something like six or 12, and you're like, I'm not six or 12 anymore. I have decades of knowledge, of wisdom, of experiences.

I am so much more resourced now than I was when that part got its job. And then you have that conversation with the parts like, hey, like I'm a little bit older. I think I can get, I think I can handle this now.

Can now me handle this versus the six or 12 year old version of us?

[Janet Livingstone]

Yeah, absolutely. And the ages are different. The parts think we're different ages, right?

Some parts think we're teenagers. Some parts think we're babies even, like babies.

[Roger Kastner]

Yeah, because one of the threads I wanted to pull on, you talked about psychedelics and plant medicine. And we're, so we're bouncing around a little bit. We've got a lot of different methodologies and modalities of IFS, and we got the psychedelics, and I introduced breath work.

So there's a lot of things that we could do to help us heal, but getting to your superhero, your superpower of helping others heal. And you mentioned psychedelics. Could you tell us a little bit more there?

[Janet Livingstone]

Yeah, sure. So I also studied psychedelics for 12 months with the Psychedelics Today program. The program's called Vital, and it's fantastic.

And so I have an understanding, not, you know, I'm not an expert, but I have a way better understanding than I ever did of what medicines there are, what they do, what the mechanisms are in the brain, what indigenous peoples use and have used for centuries and what wisdom we can get from that, and what it means to help somebody integrate their psychedelic experiences. So this is the thing. A lot of people are now using either mushrooms or ketamine or other medicines.

Sometimes it's legal above ground. Sometimes it's underground. There are states where you can, in Colorado, it's legal to use psilocybin mushrooms, for example.

And there are ketamine clinics, legal ketamine clinics all over the place. When somebody takes a psychedelic journey as a healing journey, like a therapeutic dose, right? It's not, oh, I'm gonna pop a mushroom and go and walk in the forest and have a great time with my friends.

That's recreational use. That's a different thing. No judgment.

I think it's great. I mean, people have fun. When you do that, it creates neuroplasticity.

It creates a period, a window where your brain is creating new neuron, new parts of neurons, dendrites. There's like a little branch on your neurons. And that is a real phenomenon that the research is revealing and it's hugely beneficial.

And so when you come out of a psychedelic journey, you've got this beautiful openness in your brain. You don't feel it. It's not like, it's not like it goes, ping, you know.

But, you know, you feel, you may feel generally physically different. You may feel lighter. You may feel better.

You may feel less anxious, whatever. But it's very important to help folks integrate. That's the word that the psychedelic community uses.

You can help a person process their psychedelic journey in the days following the journey. You can help them use the neuroplasticity that they now have from that journey, and they're gonna have for a few weeks, depending on the dose, to make sense of what they experienced, what they saw, what they're feeling. And it doesn't have to be like, oh, I saw that thing and that means X.

No, it just means journaling about it or doing IFS and say, oh, I felt this and I did that, and yeah, and I wonder, and that activated this part and that part, you know, was doing this thing during the journey or making art, right? Activating both sides of the brain. So, you know, seeing a part, identifying a part, it uses your full brain.

It uses cognitive, it uses emotional, and it's also somatic. We feel parts in our body. You can draw on all of that to help someone integrate.

There's psychedelic experience. So you can do IFS with them. You can ask them to journal.

You can do art with them. Ask them to draw. It doesn't have to be, oh, I saw this thing in my journey, so I'm gonna draw it.

They can draw whatever they want and abstract. I mean, I've seen gorgeous stuff that people create after journeys, beautiful. That all helps the brain keep that neuroplasticity, use it.

It's hard to explain, but there's research now that shows, for example, that emotional support for processing ketamine use, safe ketamine use, is producing way better outcomes than if somebody just goes to a clinic and gets the ketamine treatment and goes home by themselves and doesn't do anything else.

[Roger Kastner]

And there's tons of studies that are going on that talks about, especially in the treatment of PTSD for veterans, where there's a study out of Johns Hopkins that talks about just two guided therapy sessions with veterans with PTSD, where they're able to talk about 80 to 90% alleviation of symptoms. And some in the psychology world are using another C word, cure, when talking about these medicines. And you talked about how some of these plant medicines have been used for 5,000, 10,000 years.

More people have studied and experienced these medicines than the medicines that we get prescribed at the psychiatrist's office. There's more people who've been, you know, there's the field, the field trials and the investigations and research, more people have taken psilocybin and have been studied for a longer period of time than the drugs that our psychiatrists are giving. And they've only studied the effects of it for six years, I mean, six months, and people are on it for decades. So, you know, there's a little bit of stigma when we talk about psychedelics and plant medicines.

And, thank you, Richard Nixon, and thank you, Nancy Reagan. And we did ourselves, we put ourselves probably 50 years back.

[Janet Livingstone]

Yeah, it's unfortunate, there is fear around it. But the medical research is showing us how beneficial this can be. And the key is using substances safely and legally.

So, yeah, I just, I get really moved and happy that finally, finally, some of these people who've been suffering for so long, are getting some relief, and it's being documented, and it's being talked about. Now, there are backlashes that come in, right? The FDA was doing research on MDMA, right?

Ecstasy, or Molly. And that looked like it was going to lead to approval by the FDA for therapeutic use. And at the last minute, it didn't get the approval.

And the psychedelic community was very disappointed with that, because MDMA is also shown to have therapeutic effects. So my hope is that eventually, we'll get there, you know, where there are more substances like this that are approved. And I don't know how it's going to go, it's up and down.

But the main thing here for me is, if you're going to do it, find a way to do it safely with somebody who knows how to help you with it.

[Roger Kastner]

So who or what inspired you to have the superpower of helping others heal? My Slovak girlfriends and mushrooms.

[Janet Livingstone]

That is my answer. Allow me to explain. I lived in Slovakia, which is former Czechoslovakia.

I lived there for a long time. I was married there to a man from there, about 16 or 17 years. And I have two kids who are bicultural.

And so we're talking Central Europe, 60 kilometers from Vienna. So coffee and going out for coffee and talking over coffee is a religion. And I would go out for coffee with my girlfriends and just whatever, just have fun, talk, blah, blah, blah.

And they would tell me about their stuff. And then a couple hours later, after I was home, I'd get these text messages like, oh, you helped me so much. Well, I feel so much better.

And I'm like, I just drank my cappuccino. What do you mean? What do you mean I helped you?

Like, I didn't do anything. And I understood that they were experiencing being with me, like being able to talk like that as therapeutic. And I later understood that it's also because the cultural norm there is for people to talk at the same time and not fully listen to each other, which is the norm in many cultures.

So they're constantly telling you, you can't do it that way. You've got to do this. You have to.

You must do it. It's like this kind of instructive culture, this like, I know, or I'm anxious and I'm going to tell you how you need to do it because I'm, you know, there's a lot of cultural anxiety because of that region and how it, there's so many wars and, you know, so much power jostling, right? So it comes out, it's normal.

That motivated me to become a coach period. So that's when I went for my first ICF coaching, right, for my coaching certification. And the mushroom work that I have done, you know, myself in a therapeutic way showed me that I could heal.

It's my own experience of healing myself that really motivated me to help others heal. Being coaching client with a great coach, using mushrooms in a safe way, in a guided, in a legal retreat, guided way. I shed 50% of my anxiety, which was my constant companion through my twenties and thirties and halfway through my forties.

It vaporized, not all of it, but I mean, I cannot explain what a relief that is. It's just really hard. And it, that's the first point.

The second point was losing a lot of that anxiety and understanding that I felt better allowed me to feel way more compassion for other people. And for me, it's that compassion piece that allows me to really do this work more fully and to take, I don't know, to, you know, feel enormous gratification when one of my coaches, one of my clients feels better. Like for me, that's the prize.

Like what better thing? Like I feel better and I'm helping you feel better. And now you feel better.

[Roger Kastner]

Yeah.

[Janet Livingstone]

I don't, I don't have a lot of eloquence here. It's just beautiful. And we need it.

We need it. There's so much roiling and, you know, bad feeling everywhere and anger and hatred and stuff happening. Like, wow, we need to heal.

[Roger Kastner]

And I think it is hard to put words to because it's a feeling. It's not a thinking thing. When we are able to see, witness, and experience someone else's healing, it's the best.

Yeah. It heals us. Yeah.

To be in that space where others are healing.

[Janet Livingstone]

Exactly. It is a spiritual experience to witness someone else healing.

[Roger Kastner]

Oh, you might've just answered the next question. No, no, no, no. Let's, let's keep it rolling.

Thank you for sharing that though, Janet. I really appreciate hearing your story, but what do you know to be true about your superpower of helping others heal?

[Janet Livingstone]

I know it's true that helping others heal is valuable because they go on in their lives and they create more. They feel better more of the time when they feel better. They're probably most likely able to have better relationships at home and in the workplace and it multiplies.

[Roger Kastner]

So what did you believe early on about your superpower that you've come to learn to no longer be true?

[Janet Livingstone]

When I started coaching, I think that I saw coaching as work and like this kind of very linear, like I got to be a good coach and I'm going to bring value and I'm going to help leaders and leaders are going to do better and they're going to be results and this kind of thinking about it as if it were a project or a task and then I have to be good. I have to have a good reputation and people, you know, this kind of like achievement, this is my success. And when I started doing it more, when I got better at it and I started more feeling more comfortable as a coach, I understood that it was a, it was more of a healing process.

It was, it's an, it's an intimate thing to have a really deep coaching session. So it went from like, oh, here's a tool that I can use in my career to, oh, here's a service. Here's a thing that helps people.

I guess that's kind of a shift. I hadn't thought about it before. Thanks for the question.

[Roger Kastner]

So Janet, what's next for you and your superpower of helping others heal?

[Janet Livingstone]

So what's next for me is to develop my own practice with IFS and I'm, I'm having, you know, seeing more and more clients coming in. So that's really great. And also developing ways to bring IFS to teams in the form of facilitated group sessions, probably preceded by some coaching.

If that, if that's possible, I think that's the best combination is to at least coach the team lead first and then do some facilitated sessions where the, the concept of IFS is gently introduced. Like we're not here for group therapy. We are here to work on our team dynamics.

We're here to become more creative, more productive, more whole as a team, more integrated as a team. Did more and more people know about IFS? I was recently at a conference where I said the word and everybody was like, and I was blown away because I thought, oh, nobody will care about my session.

And then, then they had to bring extra tables in because there were too many people. So that was fantastic. But this is, this is my, one of my visions and goals right now is to bring IFS to the workplace and I am doing it.

Yeah.

[Roger Kastner]

Oh, I, I think we could probably do a whole session on that. Cause I'm really interested in what IFS for teams could look like. Just real briefly within using IFS within teams, is it kind of like where it's, you're exposing different parts and it's like, Roger, you're, you're Stryver showing that or tell me a little bit.

[Janet Livingstone]

Well, we don't want people to use their parts as a way of shaming them in a team discussion. I really think it's about way deeper, helping people achieve way deeper self-awareness, but IFS is individual. IFS is like, I have a part and you know, this is my part and it does this.

And so part of, I think what unlocks this benefit for teams is learning how to speak for a part instead of from a part. I have, part of me is kind of annoyed here rather than, God, I'm so annoyed. I can't deal with this.

I need a break. Right. That's a completely different, completely different thing.

[Roger Kastner]

Oh no. I, so now I'm getting a better understanding of it's, it's not, it's not necessarily exposing the parts of, of what, what can show up in meetings, like when we're dealing with like healthy topic, a healthy conflict or maybe accountability, but having each individual understand which parts come up when those topics come up so they could better regulate those parts and have a more productive conversation.

Am I kind of picking up what you're, what you're laying down? Absolutely. Okay.

[Janet Livingstone]

When they're better regulated and they can talk to someone else using parts language, if they choose to, they can just have much less tension and many fewer barriers to communication and collaboration. It opens the door to all kinds of new levels of healthy vulnerability together with trust. I mean, it, it will engender a huge amount of trust.

It's a lofty goal, but I think it's worth pursuing.

[Roger Kastner]

Oh yeah. Oh, I'm so excited about that. I'm really excited to learn more and see what you're able to do with that.

So if an audience member wanted to ask you a question or follow you, where would you want to point them to?

[Janet Livingstone]

Yeah, definitely. So audience members can email me anytime. I have a website that's called cultureiskey.coach. And it's all one word, cultureiskey.coach. And the email associated with it is just Janet at cultureiskey.coach. Find me on LinkedIn under my full name, Janet Livingstone. Yeah. Reach out anytime. Anybody who's interested in talking about IFS, anybody who's looking for an IFS informal coach, or who wants to talk about IFS for the workplace, I'm around.

Love that.

[Roger Kastner]

Thank you so much, Janet. It's been such an honor to have this conversation with you. I really appreciate not only your courage and bravery to share everything you're doing about being an IFS informed coach.

And my goodness, I am so excited that we are friends. And I get to witness the growth and how you're bringing IFS to heal people and to just be rocket fuel for your superpower of helping people heal. So thank you.

[Janet Livingstone]

Rocket fuel. Cool. Roger, it's a pleasure. It's really great to know you. Thank you so much.

[Roger Kastner]

Okay. Take care. Bye-bye.

[Janet Livingstone]

Bye. You have this beautiful purple glow around you.

[Roger Kastner]

I wish I could bring it with me everywhere.

[Janet Livingstone]

Whatever you've done is working. Your face is lit quite evenly.

[Roger Kastner]

And yeah, it's good. It does help having a kid who went to film school. Okay.

That's great.

[Janet Livingstone]

Age and wisdom also takes care of some of that.

[Roger Kastner]

And yeah, several guests have gotten to that point where the jar of fucks gets a little depleted, and we no longer give a fuck about that.

[Janet Livingstone]

It's good practice. Yeah. That's good.

I like it when the jar gets emptier.