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The Agile Within
Providing agile insights into human values and behaviors through genuine connections.
The Agile Within
You're Not Going to Think Your Way Into a Wave with Stephanie Ockerman
Discover how the vast, unpredictable ocean can teach us about agility and leadership as I sit down with Stephanie Ockerman, a renowned business agility and leadership coach. Stephanie takes us on her unique journey of blending surfing with agile practices, revealing how the ocean's natural ebb and flow mirrors the complexities of business environments. Her vivid stories illustrate that truly understanding agile principles is akin to riding a wave—it's about being present and engaging with the experience. Join us as we explore how the lessons from the surf can transform our leadership capabilities and help us navigate the ever-changing tides of business.
We tackle the ongoing struggle between traditional planning and genuine agility within organizations. Stephanie uses surfing as a metaphor to spotlight the shift from reactive to creative leadership. By emphasizing the importance of presence and openness to learning, we challenge leaders to transcend beyond mere compliance with agile methodologies, urging a more holistic approach to managing uncertainty and complexity. Our conversation invites leaders to embrace a mindset that values sensing change and responding creatively, leaving rigid plans behind.
Our discussion wraps up with the introduction of the Agile Leadership Surf Camp, a transformative experience in Costa Rica that combines surfing, yoga, and leadership development. Stephanie shares insights on how this unique blend can cultivate personal growth and enhance one's ability to embrace uncertainty gracefully. This episode promises to inspire, offering a fresh perspective on agility and leadership, rooted in the serene yet challenging environment of the ocean. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to learn how to ride the waves of change with confidence and creativity.
Connect with Stephanie on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephanieockerman/
Check out Stephanie's website, subscribe to her newsletter, and find out about offerings including the Agile Leadership Surf Camp in Costa Rica:
https://www.agilesocks.com/
Read Stephanie's book, "Mastering Professional Scrum":
https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Professional-Scrum-Coaches-Challenges/dp/0134841522
Follow us on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-agile-within
Welcome to the Agile Within. I am your host, mark Metz. My mission for this podcast is to provide Agile insights into human values and behaviors through genuine connections. My guests and I will share real-life stories from our Agile journeys, triumphs, blunders and everything in between, as well as the lessons that we have learned. So get pumped, get rocking. The Agile Within starts now. Well, hey there, welcome back to the Agile Within. This is Mark Metz. I hope everybody is having an absolutely fantastic day out there today. I certainly am, because I have a guest by the name of Stephanie Ackerman, who I've been following for quite a while, and I'm very honored to have her as a guest. So, stephanie, welcome to the Agile Within.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:So Stephanie is from Columbus Ohio as our typical icebreaker here on the show. If I were coming to Columbus Ohio for a day and had never been there before, what's one thing that I just absolutely could not miss doing?
Speaker 2:My sense is that, especially knowing a little bit about you, you got to see Ohio Stadium. It's really impressive and I will say you don't even have to be a football fan. I took a friend of mine there who's like not even like from the States, like is not into college football, and even she was super impressed, just like seeing it. It's a pretty cool site.
Speaker 1:All right, I'll take you up on that. Capacity is like over 100,000, right Right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So we're talking big scale here, big scale, big scale, cool architecture and then just it's right on campus too, so like you get the full college vibe. It's not like it's like several blocks away, which I think you see sometimes with some universities.
Speaker 1:Can't wait to come up there and visit and and see a college football game. You get tickets and I'll be up there.
Speaker 2:I wish I could get you tickets. It's hard to get tickets and expensive.
Speaker 1:So Stephanie is a business agility and leadership coach. She's a consultant, a professional scrum trainer, an author and an entrepreneur. She helps teams and leaders use evidence-based approaches to unlock customer value, create spaces for innovation and harness the power of collaborative teamwork. Stephanie's also the co-author of the book Mastering Professional Scrum. I can't tell you enough If you haven't read this book, go out and get it. It's just as good of a read as it is a resource material for later. Thank you for coming on to the show. Our title for the show here today is You're Not Going to Think your Way Into a Wave. That's an interesting title. What in the world does not thinking about yourself into a WAVE? What does that have to do with agility?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so just to give a little context for those who maybe don't follow my writing, you know I've worked in kind of traditional organizations, starting with project management, moving my career towards agility, and so you know I've been in kind of the product development and agility world for quite a while now. What I have recently discovered in the past few years is how surfing is a powerful access point to more deeply embodying agility and also like truly recognizing and being able to understand myself as a leader so that I can show up in ways that are both more influential and impactful, but also more ease for myself as well. And so this idea that, like you're not going to think your way into a wave, it's a surf lesson, and I have a lot of different surf lessons that I actually incorporate into everything I do, how I teach, how I work with clients, what I write about the connections I make, because I do feel really strongly that when we access different modalities of learning, and especially when it's in an embodied way and it's something that's like outside of our normal day-to-day stressors and also the ability to truly disconnect from like a drama and the constant distractions, to like really immerse ourselves in that type of experience, we just can unlock so much more for ourselves in a lot of different ways, and so for me, that connection between agility and our own leadership as change agents has been huge through surfing the past few years, and so when we say you're not going to think your way into a wave, it really touches on a number of aspects of agility, but one of the core things is this idea of sensing and responding. If you've learned Agile theory right, like we talk about this idea of we're doing complex work, right, we're doing creative work in complex environments that are unpredictable and we're navigating ambiguity Things are going to change and we need to be responsive to change. You'll hear sometimes like this idea of like sensing and responding as like a leadership approach. There's different theories. You can see out there that they use this terminology, but I'm like, do people really know what that means? Like, including myself, did I really know what that meant when I first learned it? And I would say not really. I don't think so. Like I knew what the words meant, but to really be able to embody this idea of sensing and responding, we talk about emergence a lot in the agile world. Like we need emergent solutions. Do we know what emergence means, and so the ocean, to me, is the perfect natural emergent system for us to relate to. That, I think, really does mirror. I'll keep using my surfing analogies. The waters we swim in are business worlds, right, and really all aspects of life where we're navigating complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity, this you're not going to think your way into a wave is about.
Speaker 2:I can learn the theory. I can even practice some of the skills. I can watch surfing instruction videos. I can go out on the beach and practice my pop-up, I can practice my paddling. But the reality is, until I'm actually out there trying to catch waves and like feeling what is happening in the water, what's the speed of the wave? What's the energy of the wave? Is there a current? What's the wind doing? Like, how am I feeling my body on the surfboard right? How do I sense my body on the surfboard? How do I sense the right timing to pop up? Yeah, I need to know the theory. I need to have some lessons and some coaching to help me do it in the moment. But you really only learn it through just getting out and paddling out, getting in those reps, and that means a lot of not catching waves as you try to catch waves.
Speaker 1:So I'm thinking of another metaphor. So you and I have talked, stephanie, I'm a big sports guy, but sports don't necessarily resonate with everyone. I've been told that, as I do over sports analogies. But I think all of the listeners out there I'm pretty sure that everybody, or most everyone, has either ridden a bike or helped someone ride a bike, or at least seen someone learning to ride a bike as a child. You can read books, you can read magazines, look at articles, you can watch videos, but until you actually get on the bike yourself, feel what it means to balance, how you have to pedal the pedals, what it means to go uphill, what it means to go downhill, your sensing and responding and that's where I see this relationship between surfing and agility is that there's so much unpredictable. You can try your best, your darndest, to learn all the different techniques away from the water, but until you actually get in the water and are doing it yourself, you're really not going to learn. Is that an accurate way to compare the two?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think so, and I do really like the learning to ride a bike metaphor as well, because what was coming up for me was like and then you hit gravel and you have to adapt to how you're riding. You hit pavement or different type of concrete. You know you got to go over a curb, right? So there it's. I think it is a really useful analogy as well to use, and what's interesting to me about it is that we talk about this idea all the time of you know we can't perfectly plan. We don't even know what the solution looks like, so we need to affect and adapt our way towards figuring out the solution. Yet when you look at what actually happens in a lot of organizations and teams, there's still this belief that we have to have the answer. We have to know exactly what to build and we got to like plan it out, and we might wrap Grom or other agile practice terminology around it, but we're still doing predictive, plan driven work. It's not a methodology, right, like we figure out the process that works best for us. I don't think there's like one way it's supposed to look, but it's more like getting curious about why are we working the way we're working Like are we doing? Are we just taking kind of these old patterns that we've had around planning, predicting, and like wanting to know more before we build something? Or like not really being okay with failure, not really believing that, like it's okay to say we can't lock in a date because I mean we could, but then that means go past the fluctuary, the truly embracing, like what agility means.
Speaker 2:It's hard because these patterns, these beliefs, these ways of doing things have are ingrained in us from pretty much all the systems that we've been immersed in our whole lives, right From our family systems to education systems, to various professional development and how organizations typically work. There's this idea that we can talk about agility a lot and we can even be using the practices and the frameworks, but are we really working in a way that is honoring emergence, that is honoring this idea of sensing and responding? For me, like there's another piece of this that comes into play. So this idea of you're not going to think your way into a wave, like another way to think about that is am I connected to my full body intelligence or am I in my head?
Speaker 2:I bring this into a lot of my work, this idea of creative versus reactive leadership. What I mean by that. So creative leadership meaning. Am I open and curious? Am I present right? Am I truly present, sensing what's happening and committed to learning Versus? If I'm reactive, I'm more closed, defensive, judging probably myself, myself, but also others, judging the circumstances right.
Speaker 1:I would think of it as you have your mind made up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and like I'm, committed to getting it right and I'm like forcing and driving right. And so this creative versus reactive just to give you an example of how it shows up in surfing and I'm guessing you'll be able to see how this plays out in almost every interaction we have throughout our day it's like I could be out going for waves and just be getting frustrated with myself because I haven't caught a wave in 30 minutes. I'm like, oh my gosh, I can't believe I still haven't caught a wave yet. And I'm watching these other surfers and they're catching waves and it's like I get madder and more frustrated every wave they catch. And I'm just in my head, right Like, and then I go for a wave and I miss it because I'm not sensing anything, right Like, I'm not really sensing the energy of the wave, I'm not sensing where my body is on the surfboard and the right timing to pop up, so I'm probably going to keep missing waves.
Speaker 2:So when I get into that reactive state I'm not going to catch any waves. I'm also not learning anything because I'm not really sensing what's happening. I'm in my head, right Like I'm not thinking. I mean I'm saying, think your way into a wave, but it's really I'm judging and spinning stories in my head about this ocean, like I don't know why the conditions are so bad, or comparing myself to other surfers, or just judging myself, for you know, not being better than I am right now. Right, and that doesn't help you catch the wave. So that's another way that the surf lesson shows up. You're not going to think your way into your, into a wave. It's this idea that I need to not just be in my head in that state of assumptions, stories, judgments and truly just whoo, like let me breathe, let me be more grounded and calm and be open of, like, what's available here, like how do I get present and really start sensing? Because that's when you're going to catch the wave.
Speaker 1:I love the image that I'm getting here, because the image that I'm getting, if you're thinking about how not to do this, I can think about you, stephanie, giving a surf lesson and you giving the advice to don't think yourself into a wave. So one of your students gets out there, they get on their surfboard, they jump in the water and they're going and they're like well, I didn't plan everything. I'm doing what Stephanie said. I'm not trying to think myself into it, but over and over, I'm not successful. Why am I not successful? I'm doing what was told. But there's doing what was told and there's the word that you said that I like is are you embodying that? So, are you truly sensing, are you learning from what you experienced before? Because the mindset of, well, I'm doing what I was told, I'm doing it right. Well, are you really? Are you really? You may be going through the motions, and that's where we can do Agile by the book and think that we're doing things right.
Speaker 2:Are we truly learning by the book and think that we're doing things right. Are we truly learning Right? Yeah, and this you know the way you're describing it. It's funny to me too, because it's like this is how you learn to surf right, like you learn the individual, like kind of micro skills I like to call it right and we all have micro skills and all the work we're doing all the time out in the world, and it's like you got to be able to put them all together like intuitively in the moment, like that's when you really learn to surf, and then conditions are different and then you're not going to be good at these other conditions, right, until again you get out there, you practice, you put that together, you start to, you start to get like an intuitive wisdom around how you will respond in the water the next time the conditions are like this, respond in the water the next time the conditions are like this. And so it's very similar, like when we're dealing with like conflict and in our organizations we're dealing with failure or some extra uncertainty, some something's happening and people are worried about it, all of those things in our real world, work environments, or just like the stress of like somebody wants we have to give them a date, like the client wants a date. Those things all kind of draw the same type of reactivity that you might experience out in the ocean, like a little bit of fear, a little bit of worry, a little bit of oh my gosh, I got to get it right. Why am I not getting it right? But the other thing that was coming to mind for me, as you were describing that is yeah, that's why you need people to help you. You know, when you have a surf coach, that person is there to help you get the timing right. They're there to tell you like, okay, start paddling now, start paddling now, pop up like stand up, stand up. During that experience, in this what I'll call creative state, for your body to also then be learning the feeling while the person has helped your brain understand what you're doing in the moment. And I think it's very similar to kind of what we do in the world working with teams and creating products. It's important, I think, to have that support and it doesn't have to be like a formal coach, always right. It can be helping each other in terms of like, what skills I have, what skills you have, and where we're trying to grow our capacity. But also sometimes you do need like hey, we need an actual person who can be here and tell us like okay, paddle harder, paddle harder. Like stand up. One of the things for me that is really helpful is when somebody else is pointing out my reactivity in a way of like breathe. So like you'll notice like you might be getting a little constricted on the surfboard and it's like your surf coach is going to know that and just be like hey, you're doing great, but you need to breathe. You've got this look of determination. What happens if you smile right Like let's not take ourselves too seriously out here?
Speaker 2:And I think that's another really core leadership principle and I think I first heard that I don't remember if it was like co-active or conscious leadership group. Not taking ourselves too seriously is so important in leadership and I think it matters for I mean like the actual concept of working in agile ways too. I think it matters for I mean the actual concept of working in agile ways too, because it's like when we start taking ourselves too seriously, that puts us right back into. I need to get it right. We can say that we believe failure is learning and we should fail fast all day long. But the question is do we really believe that and do we live into that? What I see a lot of times is that we don't. And I'm including myself in that.
Speaker 2:I'm an entrepreneur, I run a business as well and I work with teams and organizations and I, even though I do this for a living like I teach this stuff for a living it's like there's no end point with your leadership, like this is a journey, this idea of surfing.
Speaker 2:It's introduced like really core, embodied things that I now can see the patterns more clearly and I can notice like, oh, like, what happens when I get reactive.
Speaker 2:Well, I notice when I'm in the ocean, I have thoughts like this and here's how I respond and here's what it feels like in my body, versus when I'm out there just treating this surf session as like wow, look, how awesome it is that I get to be out here on this beautiful day looking at the mountains and the palm trees behind me and out here having fun and learning, and like every, every way of attempt is an experiment and we see what happens and we inspect and adapt.
Speaker 2:And you know, oh, I wiped out. Well, my friend just saw me and we're going to laugh about it and I feel like, if we can take that approach to our work, stresses and challenges as well, right, when we stay open, we are more likely to see more opportunities right how we can adapt. What did we learn from that? To see more opportunities right how we can adapt. What did we learn from that Versus just being in this really constricted state of reactivity where we're just like worrying or panicking or like doing things that are actually going to hurt us even further?
Speaker 1:Does Shuha Ri come into any elements of your lessons of learning to surf and applying those to leadership? It's an interesting I mean I think it can kind of apply to surf and applying those to leadership.
Speaker 2:That's an interesting I mean. I think it can kind of apply to anything right Like the concept of shuhari. I will say, though, like I am not like teaching people to surf, that is not my like. So me running an agile leadership surf camp I am responsible for the leadership programming and like weaving it all, weaving and experience through surfing and yoga, and like leadership programming, actual people who are certified surf instructors are the ones who do the teaching. But what I will say is, when I'm out there, like with friends, we can support each other.
Speaker 2:I also have a relationship with the person who's been coaching me for years, who I first learned from where like also, by the way, like get a formal surf lessons I reach a peak and I'm kind of like I don't know, man, I just can't seem. I feel like I've reached this point and or maybe I'm going backwards. I need a coach to just like help me for a bit, so I'll get some coaching. But I see my coach out in the water all the time, what I always appreciate and this is actually, I think, an important lesson for leadership and agility too. He will ask me if I want coaching, like if he sees something. He always asks for my consent before, like he just starts coaching me, always asks for my consent before, like he just starts coaching me, and I think so. Like coaching is like a whole profession, right, and I do think that in the agile world, what I see a lot is not necessarily being fully in alignment with the profession of coaching and more treating it as a person who is an expert and is going to teach people and consult and maybe facilitate, and there isn't as much true coaching as there could be.
Speaker 2:And so I think that's an interesting piece that we've stumbled into around, like this idea leadership we haven't really established this. We're all leaders. We take responsibility for our impact. We're all co-creating our world, right. So I don't think of leader as just a position of authority or a job title. I think we're all co-creating our world, right. So I don't think of leader as just a position of authority or a job title. I think we're all leaders and we all have the ability to kind of co-create our world. How we show up is going to create an impact, and so if we show up in a reactive way, that has impacts versus showing up in a creative way.
Speaker 2:This idea of coaching and consent I think it's important that we're clear when we are working with teams. What is my role? What hat am I wearing right now? Because sometimes, especially like if you're a scrum master, you might be a person who facilitates, teaches, coaches, maybe is involved in doing some of the work as well, depending on what hats you're wearing, and so I think it's useful to think about talking about when are we coaching, when are we advising, choosing the right thing, and I think it's an intuitive choice to some degree of like what's happening, what's at stake, what's important, but also me not deciding what's best for everyone. What's at stake, what's important.
Speaker 1:But also me not deciding what's best for everyone. Context matters when it comes to coaching. And I would imagine, when it comes to surfing, you would say conditions matter, whether it be atmospheric or weather or ocean conditions, or even your own personal health conditions, that all matters. And it's very similar that you can't just go in and say, ok, I've got my five steps, I'm going to go in and coach this person.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, exactly, and I do think a lot of us, you know there's something to be said. When you first are learning things, you maybe learn a process, you learn a set of steps. However, the more we practice this and practice intentionally, so we're like very clear about what I'm doing, I'm being, I'm being very mindful of reflecting on okay, how is this going? Okay, do I need to do something differently next time? Right, so that's what I mean by intentional practice and that's what you know. You do that out in the ocean to get better, but we do it out in our real world as well, with the teams and leaders that we work with. Then it becomes more intuitive and you kind of have like this big bag of tools that you have, that you just kind of sense. Oh, I see what's happening here and I feel like this might be the challenge and I'm going to try something and I might get it wrong, and I have to be okay. I have to be not attached to that decision. I mean I have to fully commit. I got to go all in. This is true of surfing. You cannot halfway commit to catching a wave. You can, you can, I should say and you will fall. It's like you got to go in, you got to fully commit to when you go to for that wave and go to stand up, but you also can't be attached to the outcome. That's an important piece of agility that helps us remember we cannot control outcomes, can't? We cannot guarantee an outcome, and I think that's one of the things that leads us to not creating goals that are based on outcomes, and we see goals that are more like outputs. How many features can we deliver in this? Release right and measuring velocity and all sorts of things that actually lead to a lot of unintended consequences. I think that happens because we're afraid that if our goal is something we can't control or guarantee, I can't have that as my goal, because then I can't guarantee my success, and so that's another piece that has really come to life for me in the ocean as well is realizing where I'm attaching my worthiness to some version of how we measure success. Or I can have an intention of I'd really like to try to catch 10 waves during the surf lesson. Okay, great, but if I only care about 10 waves, that doesn't tell me about how I improved since the last time. It doesn't tell me about how I'm adjusting in the moment, based on the conditions, it doesn't tell me that, hey, that wasn't even possible today because the ocean was so chaotic and it was actually amazing that I even caught three waves. So there's just so much available in that, as we're talking through this, I'm hoping the through lines are coming through of where we utilize certain practices in the agile space, like talking about outcomes over outputs. So there's tools that we can use that will help us live into some of these surf lessons.
Speaker 2:But we have to really be conscious of it. And then we have to really be doing our own inner work to start recognizing like, oh like. Where is that showing up for me? What is preventing me from staying open and curious in this moment? What is my trigger? How do I start to notice those patterns, recognize sooner, so that I can shift if I'm ready to right?
Speaker 2:It's not all about like I always have to be in this creative state of being as a human being. Your brain is not wired that way, you know. Again, it's not the goal of like, always being in a creative state of leadership. It's recognizing. Where am I more frequently, being more aware and be oh wait, I just realize, and maybe you sense it through your body, like I know. For me it's like my shoulders tightening up. Sometimes, depending on what's happening, I'll feel something in my stomach Like I'll just have like a knot in my stomach. I can feel my face getting hot One. It felt safe to find those patterns outside of my work context, but then what I realized is that, oh, those patterns are showing up in other parts of my life and now I can start to recognize them sooner and I can go back to the ocean in my brain, in my body, even if I'm like in a Zoom session with somebody right, like I can kind of have that like oh, okay, the ocean, remember the ocean.
Speaker 1:I'm going to say something and tell me if you agree or you disagree. But part of the metaphor that you're setting you're talking about patterns and you're talking about different tools that you can use when surfing and relating those to leadership and agility and coaching is that those patterns are great, the tools are great, but unless you actually use them, they're not going to be of any value to you. And just because you use them doesn't mean you're necessarily going to use them correctly or in the right situation. So I'm thinking of a different metaphor of if I'm using a tool to fix something. If I'm using a pneumatic gun that hammers nails, until I actually use it and get proficient with it, it's probably not going to be effective to me, but that doesn't mean I use it in every situation. I don't go in and maybe try to use a nail gun in my home to nail a picture, because I'll probably punch a hole through the wall If that's the only tool in your tool bag.
Speaker 1:And I see that because I had someone talk to me about a situation where they were working with a customer and the customer came, or the this person came into a new company and they installed safe Because that's what they knew that's what they were comfortable with, that's what they had seen successful before. So they installed safe. But guess what? This was a company of like a hundred people total and the it department was like maybe 30 or 40. Are you really using the best tool in the right situation? So, as you're practicing these different tools, techniques and looking at these patterns when you're surfing, it's not that you know how to use them, it's when to use them right.
Speaker 2:Right. It's that idea of like purposefully practicing and you're sensing right. The sensing and responding still comes into play there.
Speaker 2:So, you're like understanding and getting feedback of like oh, I tried this, here's what happened. Okay, here's what I. I'm going to try this other thing right, because now I sense something different is happening here. You could even say, like picking the right surfboard for the conditions. That brings us back to the tool metaphor. It's really interesting, Like where I surf it's it's not a beach that's really good for shortboarding, yet there's a lot of people who are just insistent on shortboarding at this beach and they can do it Like don't get me wrong, they can do it and I'm not judging that they're choosing to do that.
Speaker 2:But it's interesting to me and I was just having this conversation around, what's the surf lesson here?
Speaker 2:And it was like there's this idea of like a soul surfer. I learned about this when I first started like to really surf and there was this dude out there who was in his seventies or something and this man could wave any single way. I was like he's so good and I was. And then that's when I learned he used to be a professional surfer a while ago and he was so kind to me, like and I'm out there just learning and failing, all over the place. He was always so supportive of me, but what I always noticed is that he would ride that wave all the way to the beat and it was like he just like would flow on it, Whereas a lot of times a surfer will like kick out of the wave early so that they don't have to paddle as far back out or something, and like some days you need to do that like if it's real big, you need to make choices about that, because that is like a real, a real thing. But this idea of he just wanted to like use what the ocean was giving him fully, and it was like an interesting idea of like you're dancing with what's happening, creating with the ocean, creating from what the ocean is giving you, Versus if you are on a shortboard in waves that are not very powerful, you kind of got to jump on the board to like force more speed for you to keep going. I was just kind of like thinking. I was like, oh, this is really interesting, this idea, and to me this again relates to both leadership and agility what is here and am I resisting? What is, or am I creating with what we have today? Right, so we might get challenging conditions in front of us. Right, we can look at.
Speaker 2:The pandemic was obviously like a big example, a big disrupting event. It's like what organizations created with that versus who was just fully resistant and not recognizing the need to do something different, to change. And I don't mean that to say like, oh, if a business went under during the pandemic, they were resistant. That's not true either. Sometimes you just fail. You can do everything in your power and you don't get to the end desire, but it's like can you look back and say we did everything we could, we were observing, we had this data, we tried this, we tried that.
Speaker 2:To me, it's like this idea that you cannot guarantee your success when we really get comfortable with that and really live it. To me, that's when you unlock the benefits of agility because you're able to look and see what are the opportunities, what's really happening. I'm not attached to this thing. If it's not working and we're running experiments and seeing that it's not working, then we're going to do something different. It's a really powerful tool to embrace that. You know we can't guarantee the outcomes and you know I talk about this other surf lesson like we cannot measure our success by how many waves we catch, and that is hinting at like things.
Speaker 2:Like we need to measure outcomes, not just outputs. But it's much bigger than that. We need to change our relationship with even the idea of measuring success, because that sends us straight into like judgment and scarcity and feeling at threat. Then we're leading from reactivity again. So like we don't want to attach like our worthiness or happiness to anything like external from us. Like that, and especially in the agile space where we talk about, you know we can't guarantee, we can't control. It's like, yeah, but are we?
Speaker 1:actually acting that way. All right, Stephanie, this has been a great conversation. I want to leave a few minutes for the end here and want to make sure that if our listeners out there want to get in touch with you, that they can. What's the best way for them to reach out to you?
Speaker 2:I have a newsletter. That is the perfect place if you want to read more about my content. You know I like to write about you know a wide range of topics. There's always a connection to agility and leadership, but also, like kind of to me, that's life as well. So my website, agilesockscom. You can sign up for my newsletter there and you can also connect on LinkedIn. I am fairly active there as well.
Speaker 1:Great. We'll put those links in the show notes to make it easy for everyone to define those. So, stephanie, I understand you've got an Agile Leadership Surf Camp, so you have registration open right now. Tell us a little bit about that. That's interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this is really kind of the culmination of it all for me is I was like how, like, how can people experience what I'm experiencing? Right, I'm writing about it, I'm talking about it to people. They're like, oh, this really resonates. And I was like, well, how about I create a leadership experience for people to actually come out and use the ocean as a playground to learn about their leadership? If this does sound like intriguing, if this sounds fun to people, you can only take so many classes, right, like so we can learn the theory.
Speaker 2:But this is a very different learning style. You aren't going to leave with like a list of things to change or do when you get home. Like this is an experience like you go home, change, right, because we've had this embodied learning. And so Agile Leadership Surf Camp it's a week in Costa Rica, a small town on the Pacific side. It's happening in April and enrollment is open right now.
Speaker 2:You're going to walk away really feeling more connected to what I call your inner leader, feeling more ease and confidence in your ability to navigate conflict, to navigate the uncertainty, while also still finding the beauty, the joy, the fulfillment, enjoying the journey. And so we've got a private surf and yoga lodge. You'll be learning surfing and yoga from like highly qualified instructors the same ones who actually taught me several years ago and each day we're going to weave together the leadership learning. There'll be leadership programming in between the surf and yoga sessions. And yeah, just check it's on my website. You'll find it there. And really, just have a call with me. I'll answer questions anybody's questions about it, just to make sure you get a sense of what this is and if it's really the next right stop for you in your own leadership growth journey.
Speaker 1:I can think of many worse places to go than Costa Rica.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like one of the so like one of the taglines I've got is like grow your leadership in paradise. Right, Like, why not, you know?
Speaker 1:So if you've never been to Costa Rica before, I'll just say that it's very easy for those of us that are born and raised here in the States. The states. You have a very familiar experience, a lot of people speak english and it's just very easy to travel. So you almost don't even feel like you're in a foreign country, except for the absolutely amazing scenes that you'll see there yeah, and we make it even easier too.
Speaker 2:so this is a really great trip if you're like I. Also don't want to deal with, like you know, the travel logistics. It's like you come in to the airport, where you stay at a hotel nearby, where they pick you up at the airport, and then our private shuttle comes and gets you and brings you to the, to the town on the Pacific side, and then you know you're in a kind of a private space that like pretty much everything's handled for you, and then we take you back to San Jose on that shuttle at the end of the week. So the idea is to make it simple so that you can just really be like stress-free, show up, enjoy nature, you know, soak it all in and just really be like present and in the flow.
Speaker 1:That's incredible. Well, Stephanie, thank you so much for coming on the show. I just it's a privilege and an honor to have you here. Thank you for spending about a half hour with me here, and for our listeners as well. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm glad we finally got the timing to work out.
Speaker 1:Great, all right, that's it for another episode of the Agile Within. This has been Mark Metz. We'll see you guys next time. Thanks for joining us for another episode of the Agile Within. If you haven't already, please join our LinkedIn page to stay in touch. Just search for the Agile Within and please spread the word with your friends and colleagues until next time. This has been your host, mark Betts.