Podcast
Getting On The Therapist’s Couch From The Comfort Of Your Home: A Personal Development Platform For Execs Who Want To Wake Up With Curt Dowdy
Have you ever experienced a time in your life where externally everything looks pretty good yet it feels like there’s something missing? What if instead of trying to bury those feelings of emptiness under a mountain of work you, could do something about it? You don’t even have to book a session with the therapist down the road. You can just as easily find a solution to everything to do with your personal development or mental health with a few strokes of your keyboard. Interplicity is the online forum every growth minded business owner and professional has been looking for – a veritable lolly shop of programs delivering deep transformation in the comfort of your own home office. It’s the brainchild of someone who has a passion for seeing individuals reach their potential so they can make their personal dent in the world and to tell us all about it. Give it up for CEO Curt Dowdy as he joins us on Wake the F*** Up!
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Getting On The Therapist’s Couch From The Comfort Of Your Home: A Personal Development Platform For Execs Who Want To Wake Up With Curt Dowdy
Have you ever experienced a time in your life where externally everything looks pretty good? Your life ticks all the boxes. You have a nice house, the family, all the toys and yet it feels like something is missing. You ask yourself, “What do I do with this feeling of emptiness?” You may also ask yourself, “Who am I to complain when there are so many people in the world struggling to feed their kids? Why am I such an ungrateful prat?” What if instead of trying to bury those uncomfortable feelings under a mountain of work, you could do something about it?
I’m not talking about booking yourself into a therapist down the road but where you could find a solution to everything to do with your personal development or mental health, from how to fill in that inner void to having that difficult conversation you don’t want to have with a work colleague, all with just a few strokes of your keyboard.
InnerProfessional is the online forum every growth-minded business owner and professional has been looking for. It’s a veritable lolly shop of programs delivering deep transformation in the comfort of your own home office. It’s the brainchild of someone who has a passion for seeing individuals reach their potential so they can make their personal dent in the world. To tell us all about it, it gives me great pleasure to welcome Cofounder and CEO, Curt Dowdy. Curt, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Janet. Thanks for having me here.
Let’s go straight to the chase of this. What’s the biggest problem you see facing Corporate America? How are you doing your bit to solve it?
COVID and other forms of uncertainty that keep being thrown our way have put people into a place where everything that they know functionally is being challenged and they have to find a way to navigate through these uncertain waters. A lot of new things are being thrown at them. When we just rely on the functional knowledge that we’ve got from school or work, the technical skills that we developed, when these uncertain times pop up, we sometimes lack the core human ability to deal with the things that are being thrown our way.
The things that pop up are we hear lots about awareness around mental health. People were experiencing a mass exodus from the workplace as people have decided that they like working from home or they want to relocate to a different place and maybe find a different company to find something with more purpose.
To me, what it speaks to is finding the core purpose and skillset of what some people call soft skills. I like to call them humanistic skills because I don’t think the skills of self-awareness, interpersonal communications of relationships, and emotional intelligence are easy skills to learn. One of the things that’s part of our mission is to impart more of those skills.
You mentioned the word purpose in there. The purpose is so important but it’s a word that’s almost been commoditized a bit like freedom. These words which mean so much lose their meaning in the work-career context. How would you define achieving a sense of purpose, Curt?
For many years in my professional career, I struggled to figure out if I had a purpose. I was with a big multinational, one of the largest computer companies in the world. I had been there for many years. It led me to question, “These products that I’m in charge of and these things that we are putting out, is this fulfilling me?” It did for a while but I found that as I engaged in more personal exploration, what I needed as the purpose was something that felt more like contributing to make the world a better place.
When you say contributing, is it volunteering or giving of yourself in that way? What contribution are you talking about?
Human Experience
I had many years of experience, education and wanting to apply that towards something different. The thing that called out to me was things that represented making the world a better place. One, I cared a lot about the environment. For a while, I was into environmental activism. After experiencing the political headwind against a lot of the environmental movement, it came down to, “Let’s understand why people are pushing back.” That led me into a place of wanting to know more about the human experience, what makes us tick, and more open to doing things that would be better for our own wellness and well-being.
You went from addressing the superficial symptom to the root cause.
I like to think that efficacy. It’s still an experiment underway.
Maybe that’s a common journey because the symptom is the most visible with it. It’s what exists in the physical realm. The house is on fire but what’s creating that combustion and inferno? At some point, putting a garden hose is something that’s a much bigger problem. It’s interesting how COVID has accelerated what you are talking about. It has divided the inner work in your business and your profession speaks for that.
What about people who say that to get to the root cause of the problem and let’s say addressing that on an individual level, getting to what makes us tick personally? For a long time, people were saying deep transformation could only happen working one-on-one with a therapist in their room. With COVID, that hasn’t been possible. What have you seen during COVID in terms of a total change in how we do this transformational work?
There’s an element of COVID itself or call it nature will present us with challenges. We have to learn how to deal with those challenges. That’s bringing up visibility for a lot of the issues that I was speaking about. The mission that we are on is to provide transformational training. We have courses and one called Coach Your Self Up. It’s a course about how do you become your own coach. It revolves around self-awareness. How do I manage my attention and noticing where my attention is focused at any particular moment?
It’s not necessarily judging it but taking away the a-ha moments of, “If I shifted my attention a little bit.” It might be something like, “I’m having a thought. This thought pattern is going on. It’s a story that I’m telling myself and that story may not be true. It may be a story that I’m making up because I don’t have any other information.” If I ask myself, “Do I know this to be true?” I might divert my attention in some other way.
Let’s play an example. I’m making this up. This didn’t happen. Let’s say I sent Janet an email and I didn’t get a response. I send another email. I didn’t get a response. I’m starting to think, “Is Janet mad at me? Does Janet not want to work with me?” I can start drawing inferences that might be based on some subliminal belief that I have that if I’m more aware of that, then I won’t project that stuff to the situation. When we project into the situation, it also leads us to behave in certain ways that might aggravate the situation. These are examples of things that we are trying to impart to people.
It’s so important and easy to get caught up in the drama of it all. One of the things I remember as a six-time business owner myself was how tornadic my days were. I was very good at filling my time with stuff to do that I can do because there were always fires to put out. How difficult have you found it to get time for CEOs to devote this time to themselves if there are so many ready and seemingly important excuses for them not to do the work? How do you get around that?
First of all, one has to realize that if you are not doing this work, you are being inefficient. Another one of our courses is titled Resonate and that’s about executive presence. How do you resonate? How do you recognize when resonance is happening? You resonate with an idea, another person, project or mission.
Challenges
The instructor in that course talks about effortless effort that as you start gaining some of these skills, it becomes less effortful. We are always going to be facing challenges. Challenges are always going to come our way but it’s how we choose to deal with those challenges and what kind of skills we employ in dealing with them that will determine how much resilience we have and how much stress we experience around it. Those are the things that we are trying to get across.
The other thing too is that, expression lonely at the top plays true. I remember one of the things I hated as a business owner was managing pain. I was very bad at it. What would you say to a business owner or CEO who is sitting in that office all alone going, “I wish someone would extract all the people from this business, and then everything would be fine?”
You are playing pretty well into our course catalog here.
This is unintentional. I’m just remembering the issues that I had as a very unaware, emotionally unintelligent boss.
We have courses on these topics. One is called the Leading a Coaching Culture. Also, our Resonate Course talks about it. When we are managing a team, we have to find the place where we are all mutually in alignment. We can be out of alignment a lot of the time but there’s got to be some core elements where we are in alignment. It’s not just about the task of the moment or the frustration of the moment. We need to step back and take a bigger picture of, “What motivates that individual? Why are they here? Why did they join us? What are they hoping to get out of this experience? What am I hoping to get out of this experience?”
Based on that knowledge, then we can have a conversation. We can enter into difficult conversations where “I know your objective is this and my objective is this. We are seemed to be aligned in these places but I feel like we need to come into more alignment. Is this possible?” If we can do it in a nonjudgmental way, part of what happens is judgment gets in the way of our communication sometimes.
If we can be direct, specific, and non-punishing with a lot of judgment, then we will probably get better attraction with our teams. Sometimes we have to be realistic that humans are human. We have to permit them to be human. The only thing that I can do is develop my skills and try to communicate to the best of my ability.
It does start at the top because I know there are a lot of self-judgment too in that business owners’ place. I’m probably very much a product of the ’80s and ’90s. The emphasis was not on the inner world but the external world. I remember a business coach saying to me once, “Janet, what do you want?” I looked at him and then looked at my blank piece of paper. I felt like breaking down because I had no idea what I wanted from life. My mind went straight away to all the toys. “I wish I could have a bigger car, a bigger house, more in the bank,” all of that thing. We get misaligned with our own values.
When that’s the case, when we are so off-course, how on Earth can we potentially guide others with any form of wisdom, consciousness or awareness? That’s one of the reasons I created this, having that in the feet of the business owner. I created the quiz called The Magic Triangle. For anyone who is new to this show, with every interview, I always invite the guests to do this quiz with the aims to get more clarity around what it is that personally, we want and also to demonstrate how simple it is to figure ourselves out. It doesn’t have to necessarily involve months of deep, difficult and painful introspection.
In this quiz, what came up for you, Curt? The idea behind this is to isolate. This was moving from the mental space where we go for what we think we want to more of the intuitive space where we go for what we feel we need. You can see the difference there. We are talking more about abstract notions rather than physical goals.
What came up for you were three things, family, prosperity and wellness. To interpret this and do a reading on this triangle, what I would like you to share with me is what each of those means to you. Why did they make it as the top three? Let’s start with family. Any of these words, you could interpret in 100 different ways. What does family mean to you?
I took some liberty among the word choices to project my meaning upon them. Thanks for the opportunity to talk about it. For me, family means more extended family. For one thing, my girlfriend and life partner passed away. I’m single and I don’t have any children. I do have my family of origin, which I am somewhat close to. I think about an extended family in terms of people that I would invite in to be family, so close friends, the people that I have the closest relationships with. I aspire to have a life partner again as well. At this juncture, it’s pretty high on my list.
Let’s speak to prosperity. Prosperity is an interesting concept that’s often misunderstood. What’s your take on it?
Prosperity With Purpose
I struggled with this. When I noticed the list of available words, one of the first ones I would have chosen was the purpose and that wasn’t available. I can see that your paradigm is around finding purpose out of these other choices. For me, prosperity with purpose. There’s a Buddhist mantra, “May my practice benefit all beings.” That is the first part of it.
May I do something beneficial to all beings and humanity specifically? I also aspire to be prosperous in contributing to the world. By doing well and good is part of my definition of prosperity. In the US, we have the so-called B corporation, a Beneficial Corporation. One of the things that we aspire to is to become a Beneficial Corporation.
The one that made it to the top of the triangle, a little bit like the star on the Christmas tree is wellness. Tell us about that.
For me, vitality, wellness and well-being are important. I want to be healthy. I tend to try to live a pretty healthy lifestyle, eat right, get plenty of exercises, good sleep, balance my time during the day, make sure that I’m allowing time for myself to recharge, be grounded, and not go flying off into your storyland. I want to be vital.
One of the reasons these are powerful, a popular effect that you have chosen them is they haven’t been thrown at you. These needs most often speak to something that we have been missing out on something that we have lacked. The pain of lack defines the need. That’s why I trust these as pointers in terms of our truly aligned life direction because we know the pain of not having them. That’s why they speak to us. The triangle works on two levels. The goal of the triangle is to satisfy these needs from an inner perspective first. They speak to the inner self.
What I discovered was that uncannily, the two needs at the base of the triangle are what you need to fulfill the need at the top. You could even describe this as a simple, personal mission statement. Say your vision is wellness. That’s your highest value, the most important thing to you at this moment in time but the way to get the mission is through family and prosperity. In other words, if you turn that into a mission statement through family and prosperity, I achieve wellness.
That’s nice and very insightful. I appreciate the chat.
That’s my pleasure. The other thing I realized too is that when we bring these needs into our life, they become values and what you stand for. When we talk about an authentic life, that’s staying true to these things because we have known the pain of not having them. That’s where this loyalty for the need comes from. It’s also how you project yourself in the outer world. What I realized is that what’s at the top of the triangle becomes your why. It’s the thing that gets you out of bed. In your case, that’s wellness.
It’s the thing that you might not ever articulate to the public but it’s your personal why that gets you out of bed to create a sense of vitality and physical wellness. I imagine that also covers mental wellness and wellness in all the realms. That’s your purpose. I’m suggesting here too that it could also ultimately be how your work benefits others. What you bring to the table is prosperity. By achieving this personally, it’s also the gift that you have to give to others. In other words, let’s define it as you did the prosperity of doing good in the world but also receiving.
Living in exchange, giving up what you do best, and being rewarded accordingly, whether that’s financially or from a sense of fulfillment but living in this dynamic state of constant giving and receiving. I’m thinking about the platform that you have created. That’s essentially what you are offering your coaches and facilitators who are teaching as part of that platform. It’s a way that they can focus on what they do and in turn, live a prosperous life through their form of giving and receiving.
In fact, we have a whole section on our website about collaboration. What we are essentially doing is building a collective of what we like to think are great teachers that are imparting skills to make us better humans.
That’s a nice segue to the final piece, which is the how and that’s through the family. Taking your broader definition of family and extending it even beyond that definition through encompass, all the people that make up the family or the tribe that is connected within a professional. It’s not just for the people working behind the scenes but the people who are on the website offering their products and services. That’s how you deliver prosperity, how they are delivering prosperity to their clients in turn and with the overall higher purpose of making sure that all is well with the world. That’s what the triangle has to say to us. That’s what it’s sharing.
I’m glad to be a part of the family, too. This is symbolically our collaboration right here.
That’s collaboration in action. What I found was I’m totally informed by the pain of self-portrayal. I have spent most of my life not doing what I was passionate about. I have had to spend time in that particular prison cell in order to appreciate my newfound freedom. Through this process of analyzing what we need based on our want, it leads them indirectly into the cause of what’s getting it. That’s the work that I do.
I love helping people in the same space. Growth CEOs show up as their most effective selves without any risk of self-sabotage. I see that these programs all seem to complement each other. That’s the other thing, too. Before we wind up, I like to ask you one more question. What’s your final message to the CEO who is struggling with a bunch of issues feeling alone, disempowered, and maybe even thinking, “Can someone get me out of here?” What do you say to that lonely guy or gal?
Carve out some time for yourself somehow. If it’s five minutes between a meeting, if it’s a half-hour a day, an hour a day, if it’s going on vacation for a couple of days, it’s like shutting everything off and giving yourself time to hear yourself. As you are out in the world and you notice some energy, I will use the term resonance again around a particular topic. Maybe it’s another event, a subject or an idea. We get these messages all the time intuitively. What we have to learn and how to do is listen to them.
When I first left the corporate world, I had this burning desire to go mountaineering in the Himalayas. Most people said, “That’s crazy. Why do you want to do that?” The people were like, “You have a 1 in a 100 chance of dying on a mountain there. Why do you want to do that?” For me, there was a heart-burning and heartfelt desire. I needed to go do that and carve out that space for myself, which then led to a cascade of other events that led me in a different direction that I needed to go. In some respects, I call it the heart compass. When we feel something strongly, especially when people say it’s crazy but we still feel it, go with that feeling.
Thank you so much for that. That’s great advice. As a reformed workaholic, I know how that seemingly simple advice is hard to take. The lore of the wakeup will decree that if you don’t listen to that heartfelt self, you are going to get well-trained in the head sooner or later anyway. The messages are only going to get louder. Curt Dowdy, thank you so much for joining us on the show.
Thank you, Janet. It has been great.
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About Curt Dowdy
Along his professional career, Curt Dowdy experienced moments when he wished for better influence or more harmony among his colleagues and constituencies. Seeking out coaching and self-training, he realized that his functional experience, plus facts and data, were insufficient to sway people at times. He found that personal and interpersonal awareness skill building was indispensable toward realizing the goals and life contentment that he strived for.
Helping others improve professional/life fulfillment and satisfaction at scale is now Curt’s personal mission. As CEO and Co-founder of InnerProfessional.com, he leads a leading-edge e-learning production team, partnered with a collective of expert authors, consultants and trainers, to deliver break-through online leadership and professional development training. Their catalog of online courses strives to educate and inspire professionals toward their highest level of conscious, authentic contribution.
Curt’s background includes executive leadership in global technology corporations plus co-founding three media startups. With past professional experience in providing services to social media companies like Facebook and Twitter, Curt is a strong proponent of online peer-group social networking as a crucial element to get the most compelling experience out of online training programs.
