Patty’s guest Karen Sergeant joins the podcast and it’s a great conversation!
You’ve got to hear how Patty and Karen met, it’s a “magic moment” that Patty brought into her life.
Both Patty and Karen are fans of the Kolbe Assessment tool. One of the topics that Karen explains is the bottleneck concept. Karen helps people learn how to identify the places where we can give up control.
It’s about working your edge. Find out how to identify what that means for you, and how you can use that to maximize your impact. Karen shares how using a “swooper tracker” helps you gain clarity.
Listen for the 5 why’s to help you identify patterns that do not serve you.
Kolbe breaks down our learning styles into 4 key categories. None are better than others. It’s about understanding where you excel and how to use that to your benefit.
- Quick Start
- Fact Finder
- Follow Through
- Implementer
Karen and Patty also discuss the difference from maintaining control and staying safe. It’s not what you think. It’s going to help you frame where you can cure your bottleneck.
Resources:
Cure Your Bottleneck Plan (free gift)
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Transcript
0:00:04.3: Welcome to the Space for Magic podcast, where people who are led by their hearts come to learn the secrets to receiving all the gifts the Universe has for us. I’m your host, Patty Lennon. I’m an ex-Type A corporate banker turned intuitive coach. Using a blend of common sense brain science and just a dash of magic, I’m here to help you create abundance in every area of your life and business. Welcome. Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of the Space for Magic podcast, which is also the last episode in 2020 and I think if you’re like me, the last of anything in 2020 is a good thing, right? So I know you’re going to love my guest today, I guess I’m so excited to share with you my very meeting of her and with her has been a completely aligned manifestation of what I always talk about when we create space for Magic. So I’m gonna talk about that in a second. So I have Karen Sergeant here with me, she is going to be talking with me about the learning styles, behavior styles, why we get in our own way. How to get out of our own way.
0:01:22.7: Her mission specifically is, I love this rescue genius from the daily grind, she works with CEOS to help them clean up their bottlenecks, cure their bottlenecks, and really thrive. That isn’t specifically why I asked her to come on. The reason I asked her to come on is I think in so many ways, so many of us have realized where we’re getting in our own way, and that’s what we’re gonna talk about and how the Kolbe relates to in just how our habits of needing to stay safe, usually keep a small. But here’s the cool story about how Karen and I came to meet. So we both recently joined an online member networking group, there’s more to it than that. I won’t go into it, but we just were brand new members of this new group until we were just introducing ourselves, and we set up Connection calls with a few people in the group, and Karen was one of them, and we were talking and I was talking about maybe bringing her on the podcast, now we had scheduled that call the week before we spoke, the morning we spoke, I realized I had a tremendous amount of frustration in not having the right team members on my team for where we are gonna go in 2021.
0:02:32.0: I just know were not organized properly, and I just couldn’t figure out how to even figure it out, and that morning I said, Alright, alright, God, great, divine, you need to send me someone to help me, I cannot figure this out on my own, and this is what I talk about all the time, Just surrendering a problem is what creates the space for magic lo and behold, get on the phone of Karen. Don’t even know this is what she does. I had a sense of what she does, had no idea she could exactly be the person that could help me, and she was… So Karen and I are gonna set up separate time so she can help me, but right now I’m gonna welcome her on, so she can help all of us. So welcome, Karen. Oh, that is such a great story. I love hearing it, I’m so happy to be here. Yes, yes, yes. So you know, a token say like you and I have a love language called Kolbe, so I believe in the Kolbe assessment. You probably know way more about it than I do, but it’s gonna be one of the things we talk about today, just to jump in, tell someone that’s listening a few things about you that you think will help them understand you beyond just this bottleneck cure of CEOS…
0:03:41.5: ’cause just from talking to you, I know you’re so much more…
0:03:45.5: Well, I feel like I’m an incurable systems thinker, I think that would be a very apt description, so I feel like in my life experiences and all the things that I’m interested in, I’m always casting a really wide net and then bringing points together and connecting them, so I have… My very first work experience was in Silicon Valley and software in the 90s during the dot com boom, then I moved into the government… I worked counter-terrorism during the Afghan War. I got burned out. Now I help CEOS because I don’t feel like leaving my armchair during the day and I wanna work anywhere, there’s Wi-Fi, and so I kind of took all of those transferable skills that I was learning along the way, and all the things I’m reading and all the things I’m interested in, and I feel like they all kinda come together in a maybe magical way if I could steal your word, and it helps me be present to CEOS who are trying to get out of their way and grow a business…
0:04:42.9: So we have a wide array of audience members and plenty are not CEOS and have zero desire to be CEOs… But I love, I think what you talk about this bottleneck concept, we all become bottlenecks in our life… Right. In just so many different places. And for this last podcast of the year with this space for magic, that’s essentially what I’m talking about, is we have to clear the states, we have to hand over control, and in the case of what you do for a living is you help people figure out where they can let go of control and hand it over to people so that they’re not that bottleneck. Right, that.
0:05:21.8: Is the most apt description I have ever heard of what I do.
0:05:25.0: Yes. Awesome, so what I love, ’cause you used the word, and I already mentioned in the intro, we were talking about why people create these bottlenecks and how the Kolbe relates to it. So in a minute, we’ll talk about the Kolbe, but do you remember the word you use, ’cause I think it’s the reason we all closeout space for magic, was it navigating safety… Yes, yes, yes, that we’re always employing these strategies to keep ourselves safe, and in doing so, we close out all these options, and we close out all this opportunity… I agree I do agree. Working our edge is some of the bravest, bravest work we could ever do.
0:06:06.5: Well, I think it does a couple of things, right, so it’s surrender school, working your edge, and acknowledging how you’re wired and yet how you also wanna show up is really surrendering. And I think all of that works together, and.
0:06:19.7: I think 2020, more than any other year certainly that I’ve lived in, has really, I think squeezed us at our bottlenecks, it’s really put us on our knees in places where we wanted to hold on to control, to keep ourselves safe, we want to do our strategies to keep ourselves safe and 2020 kept saying nope, no. Here’s a pandemic for you, here is political unrest for you, here’s lots of things that are just going to make it impossible for you to keep pretending that your safety comes from the strategies. How do you feel about that?
0:06:55.1: 100%, yes. And I think that is bewildering and very, very scary. For most of us, even those of us who have done some surrendering in our practices, I almost feel anxiety when you paint it that way because it is so confronting and I just feel like maybe it’s how I was brought up or the world that I live in, here in the United States, and I just feel… Things tell me, people tell me ads, tell me… Everyone tells me that I should be able to master what happens to me and how I can make myself feel better, I can make my family safe, all of those things, and when you’re confronted with the fact that they’re just not true, it’s quite something…
0:07:41.1: So when you’re working with CEOS, poor people, the reason that they create bottlenecks is simply, or I do, is simply because we’re a person, there are people trying to stay safe.
0:07:57.0: Agree. And with the combination that at least some of that behavior, probably most of that behavior was successful in the past, for instance, some of the hustling that you did as a solopreneur, as a very young business where you have your hands and everything, where you’re making last-minute adjustments where you’re jerry-rigging things, all of those habits are successful habits when you’re quite young as a business, but when you get to a certain size and you don’t wanna run at that pace and you can’t touch everything and you can’t make adjustments at the last minute and so suddenly what was successful last year is actually bottleneck behavior this year, and so the two combined, one is you feel safety when you do certain things, and the other things is you’ve gotten great feedback from the world that this particular behavior was successful, and so you kinda keep butting up against that same wall.
0:08:52.0: So what do you do… And maybe we need to segue into the Kolbe now, so when you’re working with someone and getting them to hopefully release their safety blankets, right. Their wobbies, their control freak wobbies – That’s so good. So what process do you use, and let’s talk about in terms of that anyone can use, whether they’re the CEO or they’re the mom, they can’t hand the shit off to her husband or her wife, or the parent that has children that are old enough now to do things but just can’t get past it. Or the person with the aging parents that is still trying to micromanage them, what’s the process to… I don’t know. Rip those safety measures.
0:09:43.9: So it’s the same for all of them, and it’s close, it’s close inspection into the behaviors. And so when I work with the CEOS, we have something called a Swooper Tracker, which is really just a fancy way of noticing when certain behaviors are occurring for my problem set, it’s micro-managing or swooping, it’s just… It’s the bottleneck behaviors, but in your examples, it could be any time that whatever behavior you wanna change, notice it each time and ask the five why’s, why am I doing this and why do I feel that way? And I’m doing it because… And you just sort of walk it back a little bit, I really suggest journaling and jotting it down, because when you come back later, you’re gonna be able to pattern spot very much so… And so you’re gonna start to see, I call it the near occasions of swooping, but it’s the near… Okay, it’s how you feel just before you did the behavior and why it felt so justified right then because we always choose even when we’re doing something that we’d rather not do, we’re doing it because it makes sense in the moment, so if we can walk that back and figure out why does it feel right, right now that I do the behavior that I’m trying to drop, and that’s what you need to ID so that you can make some daylight happen there.
0:11:02.9: This is so fascinating, ’cause Karen, you and I just don’t know each other that that well, and you’ve certainly never heard any of my previous content as far as they know that further back, but what I always talk about with people is you’ve gotta find your wound, bring it to consciousness, and then when you can actually look at it… That’s when things start to shift. You’re seeing it. This is so fascinating ’cause there’s so much synergy, one of the tools that you use is the Kolbe assessment, right?
0:11:34.0: Yes, so I ask folks to… For instance, the CEOS that I work with, a lot of them are high quick starts, and a lot of them, many of them actually are high fact-finders, and some of the times it is not the absolute score that is the problem, it is… I would call it the indulgence of that that can cause a problem. So for instance… Let me give you an example of what I mean.
0:11:58.3: Let me interrupt you. So let’s go through the four. Let us describe because people listening probably don’t necessarily know the Kolbe, so there’s four aspects to the Kolbe, and any one person has a range on any of those four things. So why don’t you talk a little bit about them? Sure.
0:12:14.7: So the two that come up the most for me are the high fact finders and the high quick start, so the quick starting is the how likely a person is to take risks and how quickly they want to move to something new, and if something gets a little boring, think of them as like adrenaline chasing, it’s sort of that quality that they’re talking about.
0:12:36.6: And I will also add ’cause I am a high quick start and the 10 quick start or 9.9, it’s also… I’ve heard it referred to as fire aim, whatever the third one is a… Yes, Fire ready aim. Yeah, there we go. See, I can’t even retain that body, what is that? But also because we don’t learn until we’re in the mid like we needed to start, for us to start our learning process, so it’s different for us, so the risk-reward and starting without all of the readiness isn’t risk for us, the way it is for someone else.
0:13:12.3: That’s the… I know it when I see it. Yeah, so you need to get it kind of started in order to really see it up, another aspect is the fact-finder, and that is how comfortable the person is with details, and so some people are gonna be immersed in the details and some people just want to either want the great takeaway or they just kinda want the bottom line only, and it’s where you fall in that sort of dictates kind of how much research you’ll do on something or how much you need to know about something in order to make a decision…
0:13:43.7: Yeah, so high fact-finders are those people who are going to read all the books they’re going to… They’re always gonna rely on data or data makes them data is their woobie. Lots of data makes me feel safe and yet I don’t have enough yet to move forward, I’m gonna connect more.
0:14:03.2: Yes, I could very easily see the paralysis part of that, right, even when we’re just trying to have a neutral description of it, we are already highlighting what it might be to be a high fact-finder isn’t the problem, but to indulge in fact-finding over moving forward. Then we have a problem, so that’s how…
0:14:24.1: And then there’s follow-through, and I.5… I think I’m a three.
0:14:34.6: It’s how much structure people prefer… So it’s not necessarily… Sometimes it bugs me how it’s titled because it’s not about literally following through, like if you say you’re going to do something, it doesn’t mean that you’re not apt to go follow through, but it’s how much structure you prefer when you walk through something when you’re dealing with something…
0:14:53.3: Yeah, and for me, it toes up to where it’s just once I get something going, I really only wanna take it to the 50% mark and I really need a finisher, I will finish. I’ll force myself to finish, but that’s a discipline. My natural instinct does not is to move on to the new thing.
0:15:12.0: But I think that because you like your fires with the idea and getting traction, initial traction on the idea, and then just sort of just tying a bow on it isn’t as sexy to you as it could be to somebody else. Yeah, true. And then implementor is the last, is the last one, and that is the model in the real world is creating something, concrete solutions, prototypes versus an abstract thinker or someone who can visualize and then just move on to the next thing.
0:15:42.2: Yeah, so like engineers, architects, like an actual physical designer, and that’s the one that I’m like a 05 on, I cannot… For anything, you can give me a room that’s finished and I’ll be like, Yes, I’d like it changed. I have no idea what that means. I can’t visualize it, I can’t eat. I mean nothing. It may give me a VCR to program. No. No. Alright, so everyone has their strengths. What I found so fascinating too, was that these are our learning styles, so those of us who are quick starts and fact-finders well fact-finders did better in traditional schools, and certainly, if you have high follow-through, you do really well in academic settings, and that was the designer, Kathy Kolbe, originally created it to help her understand her kid better, and then ultimately created this whole system for all of us to learn from, so talk about how those ways of being… Create sense of safety, but then also limit us… For sure. So this is where it starts to become really useful, so let me go back to that example idea.
0:16:52.6: So I once worked with a CEO who was a high fact finder, extremely high fact-finder, and she came to me because she was trying to work the bottleneck issue which is, how do I find more time in my day and my week, and how can things move without me touching them constantly? And so we began to work and she used her high fact finder as this sort of get out of jail free card for diving into details that she due to how big her company was and what her goals were… She has no business being in. And what she would say is, Well, you know, I’m a high fact-finder, that’s just how I am, and that we were sort of… So instead of actually a get out of jail free card, she was putting herself in high fact finder jail, which was, I choose to spend my limited time diving into details that I’ve already asked somebody else to herd, and what she couldn’t see initially was the fact that indulging the way she was wired was the problem, so I was asking her to reframe how she says things instead of… Well, you know, I’m a high fact finder, like This is how it’s gonna be…
0:17:57.7: She would say, I feel safer when I dive into the details. It feels risky to have somebody else do that diving and to take what they have to take their conclusion that they come back to me with, and right there, we haven’t changed anything except we’ve reframed it and suddenly there’s some daylight, suddenly there’s a room to work…
0:18:21.0: Yes, I do wanna stop there ’cause I want every one of you listening, if you’re listening, I want you to think, you might not know the Kolbe, you might not know they are a fact finder or father or whatever, but think about one time. Just in the last week or so, where you said, I can’t give over control for whatever, to someone else whether it’s… I can’t surrender to the divine, I can’t let my partner help ’cause he or she won’t do it right, I can’t leave my kids to their own learning because I’m afraid they’ll fail, and just notice that really what’s going on there for you is I need to do this because it makes me feel safe and it feels too risky to hand it off, I really wanted to drive that home Karen ’cause I could see someone listening, it’s like, Well, I haven’t taken the Kolbe yet, I don’t know what I am to really miss that jewel right there, that you handed them. So I love that because that’s it, like everything we do that keeps us from having the most expansive experience of life, it feels scary to me, and I wanna stay safe. 100%.
0:19:29.3: And we don’t just use Kolbe, we actually will take Enneagram or Myers-Briggs and experience that you always sort of almost like your pet excuses.
0:19:37.5: If you just think about, Well, that’s how I’m built. If you ever have said that or thought that in any way, that’s how I grew up, I grew up that way. And if you can reframe it and just say, That’s how I navigate safety, I just feel safer. I feel safer when I make the plane reservations. Not my husband, I just feel better ’cause I know how I am, and just acknowledging that it’s a safety vulnerability issues, it just starts to play, it’s just you get some daylight and you get some… You hope that it moves on to some relaxation every once in a while. Of the grip.
0:20:14.1: Yes, so if someone is listening right now and they’re looking back over 2020 and they know like, Look, mom mechanisms, my coping mechanism is my safety mechanism, this did not work, ’cause this was 2020, and they’re really… They’ve been broken open to maybe take more risks in terms of stepping away from their safety when you’re working with CEOS and they start to bring this consciousness to you or and into their own relationship with themselves. What’s the next step after that?
0:20:47.7: So the next step is actually to see the behavior happen less or to have sort of an interim… To use the same example. So my gal would say to folks, the team would bring her some conclusions and there would sort of be this half thing where we would allow her a little dip into in showing your work a little bit because we knew that she was more comfortable with the details but we were slowly weaning her away from the deep dive, and so if you could take that example and sort of extrapolate it into all the sorts of ways that we’re trying to navigate that particular Edge, which is, hey how about a baby step in the direction of not indulging that. Whatever that behavior is. Yeah, So.
0:21:31.8: Weaning… So the next step is weaning yourself from the safety measures, love it, and then then what’s possible, what’s possible once you start to wean yourself from the woobie, from the safety woobie.
0:21:45.0: Hopefully you’re getting positive feedback from the universe, right. So back to my example, if she spends the hour not digging into the details, but trusting her folks, she gets to be off the clock an hour earlier or she can watch something, whatever the decision was, the decision ends up being excellent. And then she goes, Wow, my teammate made a great decision, and now the trust is building, so there’s so many things that can be built with the bravery, the bravery of weaning yourself off of the default behavior…
0:22:17.1: Yeah, because then in that example, what’s happening is, so she’s finding new safety now she can… Now she feels safe in that trust, he feels safe, having help, right? Yes, yes, but it’s not this dysfunctional addiction to a fake safety and it’s actually just feeling safe, being well cared for, and then staying in your lane. Awesome, so I know you primarily work with CEOS, and why don’t you define… ’cause I don’t think everyone that you work with would define themselves as a CEOS in case someone’s listening and they’re like, Oh, I wonder if Karen can help me, why don’t you talk about who a CEO is for you?
0:23:01.1: Yeah, that’s a such a great point because I don’t want people thinking like, Wow, she works with these big corporations and these big companies, I’m talking about entrepreneurs, probably folks just like, Just like me, where I’m a company of one, I’m just one gal. And I just have something that I’m trying to put into the world. And I’m talking… Most of the clients that I serve are very small businesses, maybe a handful of folks, like five or less, and they’re not even full-timers, they’re just folks who maybe their side hobby has sort of turned into a money maker or might be turning into a moneymaker, and then they’re growing the business on the side, so really small sort of usually digital entrepreneurs, those who are doing their business over the internet are the folks that I serve.
0:23:49.1: Nice, and then I wanna wrap up with some last thoughts for 2020, but before we do, if someone wants to find you, where would you like them to go? Yeah.
0:24:00.4: So I think a really great step would be to go visit me on my website, which is KarenSergeant.com, I’m also on Instagram, and that’s also Karen.Sergeant. I think we’ll be able to drop a link below…
0:24:15.1: Yeah, we’re gonna put the links in the show notes, and then if someone does fall into the realm of who you help, then if they go to… I think it was Karen Sergeant.com/blueprint, you got something for them there that can get them started. Right, and if they’re not at the stage where they’re ready to, call you up… And by the way, sergeant is S-E-R-G-E-A-N-T, will put that in the show notes. But.
0:24:39.2: That’s why I was asking if the show notes would have it because asking someone to spell the last name is… It’s almost a job too much.
0:24:46.6: Yes. You won’t have to spell it, just click the link, alright. So as we are wrapping up this year with this podcast, I’m curious what it’s been like for you with you having… With your clients, you have this eye on where are you leaning into these… Creating safety for yourself as opposed to going after what you want… How has that played out for you?
0:25:12.5: That’s a really good question. So it has definitely been a year of a struggle for me, so I have to watch my anxiety, it’s a condition that I have and it’s activated mostly because of the events of this last year, but also because I’m a single mother to a puppy who has really drained my batteries in general, I love him to death, but it’s also quite a new… There’s a tap to my time that I wasn’t expecting necessarily to last this long, and so I have to be quite careful about how I maintain my energy. I have scaled back even more than the pandemic has asked me to, the quarantine has asked me to, and that’s because my batteries have to get refilled, so a lot of introspection, a lot of meditation for me, and a lot of just quiet time so that I can stay resourced as I try to work my business and serve my clients…
0:26:04.2: Yeah, and I love that that’s what you’re doing because I think that’s what this year asked of us was slow down, go within, see what your truth is, and make choices from that place. Yes, yeah, that’s beautiful. Well, Karen, thank you so much for being with us here today. And do you have any last words of wisdom you’d like to share with the listeners? Well.
0:26:28.5: It’s my pleasure to be here. Words of wisdom. Let’s think, I think working… The surrender is life’s work, I don’t think it’s about business, I don’t think it’s about entrepreneurship, I don’t probably think it’s about parenting, I think it’s actually what we’re called to do here on the planet is to surrender to the divine… You’re calling it the divine, I call it the beloved, and I think that’s our life’s work, so if we think about it with that lens, hasn’t 2020 been a gift…
0:26:58.6: Yes, I’m not gonna see one more word except those, to say that’s where I wanna end the podcast… Exactly. Thank you so much, Karen. This has been so wonderful, it has been fun. Thank you, bye everyone. Hey, thanks for listening. If you know someone who needs to hear this message, please share this episode with them, and if you’re feeling really generous, I’d love for you to leave us a review at your favorite podcast app, it helps us reach many more people and it fills my heart with so much joy when I hear what you have to say about what I’ve shared. I’m cheering for your success, have an amazing day, and don’t forget… Always create space for Magic.
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