What if resilience isn’t about powering through, pushing harder, or staying unbreakable but about knowing how to bend, recalibrate, and return to center without losing yourself in the process?
That question sits at the heart of my conversation with Dr. Ute Liersch, a German psychologist, leadership coach, and resilience expert who works with high-performing leaders, especially those navigating burnout, anxiety, trauma, ADHD, or major career transitions out of corporate life. She has more than a decade of experience at the intersection of mental health, leadership, and neurodiversity. She brings a rare blend of clinical depth and real-world pragmatism, drawing from evidence-based approaches to help leaders build psychological flexibility, resilience, and purpose without sacrificing wellbeing.
Today, she shares some of that wisdom, explaining the truth behind resilience, why emotions are neutral data, and she describes how “nice-looking” rules can actually prevent the necessary actions that leaders need to take. It’s a wonderful conversation with so many nuggets for wherever you are on your leadership journey.
To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Listen in for…
- Why resilience isn’t a “demolition derby,” but the ability to return to equilibrium after stress
- How emotions can be treated as neutral data points, not problems to suppress or judge
- What emotional regulation looks like in real leadership moments and why leaders who regulate their emotions create calmer, more trustworthy environments
- How overly inclusive decision-making can backfire, and how to balance empathy with decisiveness and boundaries
- How leaders can disentangle past trauma from present-day decision-making to lead in more values-aligned ways
“If you want to become more resilient, one of the things you really need to learn is to be courageous and brave and curious enough to start noticing how am I right now? What’s my body doing? What are my thoughts? How am I positioned in the situation? An honest reflection of HOW you are, not who.” — Dr. Ute Liersch
About Dr. Ute Liersch, Chartered Counselling and Coaching Psychologist:
Dr. Ute Liersch is a Chartered Counselling and Coaching Psychologist based in the UK, with over a decade of experience working at the intersection of mental health, leadership, and neurodiversity. Her unique blend of clinical expertise and coaching insight supports high-performing individuals—particularly leaders, professionals, and creatives—who navigate anxiety, trauma, burnout, or ADHD.
Drawing from evidence-based modalities like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), EMDR, and emotional intelligence frameworks, Dr. Liersch empowers clients to build psychological flexibility, resilience, and purpose. She is known for her pragmatic yet deeply compassionate approach, often challenging mainstream psychology with philosophical depth and a touch of humour. Her latest book is A Minimalist’s Guide to Becoming Resilient, full of no-fluff micropractices, reframings, and toolkits
In addition to her private practice and workshops, Dr. Liersch speaks internationally on topics like mental health in leadership, high-functioning anxiety, and creating neurodiversity-affirming spaces at work. She is passionate about helping people redefine success on their own terms—without sacrificing wellbeing.
Connect with Dr. Ute:
Website: drute.org
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/drute
Instagram: instagram.com/dr_ute_
YouTube: youtube.com/@DrUteLiersch
Book: A Minimalist’s Guide to Becoming Resilient: amazon.com/Minimalists-Guide-Becoming-Resilient-Psychologist-ebook/dp/B0F95Z82XF
Connect with Maria:
Get Maria’s books: Red-Slice.com/books
Hire Maria to speak: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross
Take the LinkedIn Learning Courses! Leading with Empathy and Balancing Empathy, Accountability, and Results as a Leader
LinkedIn: Maria Ross
Instagram: @redslicemaria
Facebook: Red Slice
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Maria Ross 00:04
Welcome to the Empathy Edge podcast, the show that proves why cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive. I’m your host Maria Ross. I’m a speaker, author, mom, facilitator, and empathy advocate, and here you’ll meet trailblazing leaders and executives, authors and experts who embrace empathy to achieve radical success. We discuss all facets of empathy, from trends and research to the future of work to how to heal societal divisions and collaborate more effectively. Our goal is to redefine success and prove that empathy isn’t just good for society. It’s great for business. What if resilience isn’t about powering through, pushing harder, or staying unbreakable, but about knowing how to bend, recalibrate, and return to center without losing yourself in the process? This is the heart of my conversation today with Dr. Uta Lirsch, a German psychologist, leadership coach, and resilience expert who works with high-performing leaders, especially those navigating burnout, anxiety, trauma, ADHD, or major career transitions out of corporate life. Dr. Uta is a chartered counseling and coaching psychologist based in the UK, with more than a decade of experience at the intersection of mental health, leadership, and neurodiversity, she brings a rare blend of critical depth and real-world pragmatism, drawing from evidence-based approaches like acceptance and commitment therapy, EMDR, and emotional intelligence frameworks to help leaders build psychological flexibility, resilience, and purpose without sacrificing well-being, she’s also the author of the new book *A Minimalist’s Guide to Becoming Resilient* And she’s known for challenging mainstream ideas about resilience with philosophical insight, compassion, and just the right amount of humor. In our conversation, we explore why resilience isn’t a demolition derby, but the ability to return to equilibrium after stress. How emotions can be treated as neutral data points, not problems to suppress or judge. We talk about what emotional regulation looks like in real leadership moments, and why leaders who regulate their emotions create calmer, more trustworthy environments. She shares how overly inclusive decision making can backfire, and how to balance empathy with decisiveness and boundaries. And finally, we discuss how leaders can disentangle past trauma from present day decision making to lead in more values-aligned ways. This was a nuanced, practical, and deeply human conversation about what it really takes to lead with resilience in a complex world, without burning out, shutting down, or losing your agency. Take a listen. Welcome, Dr. Uta, to the Empathy Edge podcast to talk all about resiliency and your new book Minimalist Guide to Becoming Resilient. We love minimalist guides, so welcome to the podcast.
Dr. Ute Liersch 03:12
Thank you so much for having me. It’s wonderful to be here. Thank you.
Maria Ross 03:17
And before we get started, I’m just going to ask the question I start with all of my guests. Is you know we heard about your successful work in this field and as a psychologist and a coach. How did you even come to this work, and how did you come to the topic of resiliency? To come to psychology, I think I came to it at a later age, and it was predominantly driven by becoming really curious why people develop in the way they do
Dr. Ute Liersch 03:44
because the predictions I had how people would develop they were all wrong. I’m not saying I got better in predicting, but I think I got better in probably explaining why we do things differently than we thought we would. It was predominantly curiosity, curiosity about seeing why do we do things we do, and why are we sometimes so obsessed to do the same things, even though we know they don’t work again and again. When you
Maria Ross 04:13
figure that out, you will make millions of dollars because I think all of us have asked ourselves that question at least very close. Yeah, very close. So, and then, what specifically got you so interested in resiliency?
Dr. Ute Liersch 04:30
So that’s interesting. In a sense, I chokingly say it’s because I’m German and I live close to where they build these beautiful cars. The reason is I do love language. I work. I analyze language very quickly when I speak with people, and when people use the word resilience, what they were actually talking about was demolition derby. You know what demolition derby is, right? You know I do. They so they throw these cars in, and then they bump into each other until a car does. And when I work with my leaders or when I work with my clients, they do most of the time that following movement. You can’t see it, guys, but what I’m doing is I’m I’m kind of cleaning my my shoulder when people speak of resilience. So what this actually means is I shouldn’t be bothered about getting a hit, and this is how resilience was sold for many many years, which is utter nonsense. And this is where the car industry comes in now. Yeah, there is a really there’s a clear link to it. What resilience actually is is when it is when you test material. So what people do is they clamp, let’s say, a sheath of metal between two hands, and then they stress the metal. Then the metal is yielding its bending down, and resilience is tested by the material’s ability to come back to a state of equilibrium. So, if we look at what resilience truly is, we need to, of course logically come to the following conclusion. Number one, in order to develop resilience, life has to give us quite a lot of weight in stress, so that we cannot hold it any longer, and we have to yield. Number one. Number two, yielding under stress is a normal, a helpful, and a healthy reaction. Number three, only in the coming back to a different state we learn a new set of resilience skills. So, if you want to do the bumper car resilience thing. I can give you a prediction. The prediction is you’re going to break. There’s no question about it. You know, if you have a better chassis, fair enough. You might drive a little bit longer, but somebody is going to drag you off the floor. That’s not resilience. If you want to be resilient, you need to have an understanding of how the process of resilience is, and because I was really detail driven in understanding how that process works, not in a theoretical point of view only, but also seeing how my own life has developed with resilience. This is what brought me to the point to write something which is very pragmatic, doesn’t do a lot of fluff, take you to the point. It is actually measured in being able to read one slot of data between two tube stations in London, so you can get the dose of resilience on the way to work, or when you bring the kids to school and then you go home. Because at the end of the day, I need to bring it to people so they can do something with it in the time of need.
Maria Ross 07:55
Okay, so that is really profound because I know there was probably an episode. I want to say maybe it was a couple years ago, or maybe an article that I tried to research around how do you build resiliency outside of feeling the pressure. What if you know you need to build the skill as a leader so that you can be a more effective leader, but you’re not feeling pressure right now? How do you actually build that skill? And what I’m hearing you say is that you can’t necessarily, but there must be a way to build that muscle before you actually need it. Is that correct?
Dr. Ute Liersch 08:31
Can I say yes and no?
Maria Ross 08:33
Yes, you can. I know. I’ve chosen right.
Dr. Ute Liersch 08:39
Let me give you a different metaphor. Of course, you got to pack a parachute before you jump out of an airplane, right? Sure, we need to learn to pack the parachute, but you only understand jumping when you jump. So yes, we can learn and we can train a couple of behaviors, which are incredibly important to build resilience, and they will really serve you very, very, very well the moment that weight falls into your life. But how you are managing that pressure in the moment you are under pressure, you can only do in that moment. Let me give you a practical example,
Maria Ross 09:24
please. Yes,
Dr. Ute Liersch 09:26
I in the world of psychology, one of the big names is Carl Rogers, humanist, client-centered therapy. I think most people know it. And Carl Rogers said one thing that he said: the beginning of change is accepting where we are, really, truly, honestly honor Carl Rogers. I think he’s got it fundamentally wrong. Change starts with becoming aware of what’s going on, and we run through the world not being aware. Even more, we are running through life. Trying desperately, not being aware of the stuff that is difficult, he’s so good in avoidance. Look, I avoid. There’s nothing wrong with avoidance. It becomes a problem when this is our go-to behavior. So, if you want to become more resilient, one of the things you really need to learn is to be courageous and brave and curious enough to start noticing how am I right now? What’s my body doing? What are my thoughts? How am I positioned in the situation I am? An honest reflection of how you are, not who. Forget about the who. Who cares about the who? How you are in this moment? No judgment, because the judgment is already pulling you in a direction which is quite often created by culture, by outside forces, by conditional regard, and so on. When you work with me, what you need to understand is what’s going on right now, and then we can link it to values, to purpose, to where you want to go, to goals and so on, and direction. But without this awareness, you are trying to find something really precious in the dark. So, when you talk about the things that you can do to prepare to pack your parachute, in other words, I
Maria Ross 11:29
assume a lot of that is in the book. Can you share one or two practices that people can say, “Okay, I want to know that when I hit that moment,
Dr. Ute Liersch 11:38
yeah,
Maria Ross 11:39
my bag is packed. What would some of your go-to ones be?
Dr. Ute Liersch 11:43
So one of the go-to ones is allowing yourself to notice difficult emotions and stop believing they are positive and negative emotions. I think one of one of the big categorical crimes psychologists have done is to label positive emotions and negative emotions as if anxiety, as if disgust, as if sadness, as if anger is negative. I mean, that’s nonsense. They’re difficult, sure, but they are equally important to understand life as we live it Today, look. Every emotion has a function, right? Emotion is nothing else than a data point of how we are situated in life in this present moment. What’s the function of anger?
Maria Ross 12:34
It’s usually something underneath anger. I find
Dr. Ute Liersch 12:37
can be if it’s secondary anger, but primary anger is very often linked to noticing something is going wrong, and is not fair nor just. Right? I pose the following: Gandhi wouldn’t have existed without anger. It’s not aggression. It’s not hate, but anger is an emotional attunement to an unjust situation. Yeah, what is the function of sadness? It’s that we’ve lost something or someone that is really important to us. Yeah. So these emotions, because we have coined them as negative, we are now doing what, of course, is normal to do. We try to get rid of them through multiple things, but what we are what we are actually now denying is the trueness and the honesty of how we are living life at the moment. You are running to work angry every day, and you are not facing up that this is truly what’s happening. You are wiping out data, and that’s one of the hardest things for people to do is to actually face the true data pool of their lives.
Maria Ross 13:57
Wow, you’re making me, and this is so at a different level than what you’re talking about, but you’re making me think about the Disney movie Inside Out and the fact that the emotions had to coexist, even when Joy thought there was no place for sadness. Yeah, there was a place for sadness, and I mean, I love that they’re trying to educate children on this concept because so many many of us adults have a problem,
Dr. Ute Liersch 14:22
yeah,
Maria Ross 14:23
accepting it. I want to go back some more to your point about emotions as
Dr. Ute Liersch 14:28
data, yeah.
Maria Ross 14:29
And what are some of the therapies that you do with your clients to help them get past the judgment part of emotion, to help them see emotions as data and as neutral information.
Dr. Ute Liersch 14:43
Yeah. So from a ontological perspective, the way I’m trained, when I did the training, I’ve I’ve alluded before that I’ve started psychology when I was older. I had two very fulfilled careers before. My first career was in hotel management, so I traveled the world, right? As a very very young woman, and then my second career was in education, where I had private learning institute,
Maria Ross 15:07
and
Dr. Ute Liersch 15:07
then I started to train in psychology and to study in a much later age,
Maria Ross 15:13
which
Dr. Ute Liersch 15:14
is kind of
Maria Ross 15:15
helpful.
Dr. Ute Liersch 15:16
So when we when we look at the different therapeutic modalities, they actually give explanations in a different way around these data points. But when we go into something which is probably not a therapeutic or a Western therapeutic modality, let me go to Buddhism. There is an interesting training on the path to enlightenment, because what the Buddhists say is, look at yourself in the mirror, and see what truly is without judgment. So, I’ve taken this very literally often. Well, and it’s hard. It’s not. It’s like just because you say it doesn’t mean we can do it. So that’s why I’m curious of what have you done with leaders and professionals that you’ve worked with to help them see it as neutral. So I do, for example, a mirror exercise. That’s why I said I take it quite literally. I go with them in front of the mirror, and I ask them what they see, and very quickly all the judgment comes up because we, in our world, we are of course trained to judge ourselves and to critique ourselves as something of a higher ability or cognitive cognitive level, but what we are not then doing is having the bravery to see what is without the judgment. So when I then have a mirror exercise, and I call people out and say, “Is this now a description or is this judgment? What comes very quickly is sadness, right? And then we pause. What we normally do is we run away, we laugh, or we pretend, or we we do a joke, or we are hiding our face. What I then do with people is I say, and now we pause, and now tell me exactly as much as you can what’s going on in your body. Take me into your world, and then very often for the first time, people can start observing what this sadness actually is. So what I’m now bringing in is curiosity. The beauty around curiosity is that we are starting to investigate, not judge. And then, what we want to do with this data depends on where the person wants to go. Yeah,
Maria Ross 17:40
if
Dr. Ute Liersch 17:40
you have a leader, and many leader are trauma, also have trauma in their life. When we work with trauma, I do a lot of trauma work because it it influences decision making quite negatively. We look at how these emotions inform the trauma in the present moment, and what this actually does to decision making. So rather than going into look, I do act, or I do compassion focus theory, or I do humanistic, or I do existential, and I am trained in two different ontological modalities. One is behavioralism, and one is existential philosophy, where everyone says, “But how can you keep this in one head? I said, “I don’t know, but I do. It’s about
Maria Ross 18:30
pausing and seeing what does this give us in the moment. What you have to be able to do, as somebody who gives counsel to a leader, is you have to be able to hold that bag of emotion safely, I love that. I love that. So, for someone listening right now and realizing, being self-aware enough to realize that they have challenges with resiliency, whether it’s I have a hard time bouncing back from criticism, or I have a hard time dealing with navigating change at the rapid pace. I have a hard time getting out of my comfortable patterns when change is called for. Yeah, where does the link come in what you’re saying in terms of the self awareness and then the ability to make the ability to see your emotions as neutral. What’s the link there that leads to increasing your capacity for resilience?
Dr. Ute Liersch 19:29
Yeah. So emotions are not making us neutral, right? They are creating a whole lot of physiological reaction in us, which of course then translate into behavior, but what I’m saying is we have to stop seeing emotions as positive or negative. We they are of course some of them are easier and some of them are harder. Look, we all love joy, right? But we don’t like grief. But if we can’t grieve, we cannot. Love either, right? So the the link is that we have to stop being afraid of these difficult emotions, because when you are afraid of anger, I promise you your conflict skills are not very good, because what you are basically avoiding when you come into a conflict situation is a so-called negative emotion. If you have the sadness of having been rejected out of whatever reason, and you are carrying that trauma with you, you are firstly and again, I’m not having a crystal ball. I’m just telling you about human behavior and why I’m so fascinated by psychology. You will have a problem with trust. This will probably translate into how you manage people. So micromanagement is big on your agenda. Your control behaviors are probably through the moon, which means your stress levels are on a higher threshold. Because not looking at everything in detail gives you anxiety. But of course, we are not allowed to be anxious, right? Because leaders got to be cool and not anxious. So now you are avoiding the next so-called negative emotion. The moment you switching, and that’s not a switch like a light switch. That’s a process. That’s a training. That’s about a 20. It’s a 20 week. It’s a 20 week training because it takes time to have this momentum. The moment you are switching from fighting that what is uncomfortable to seeing it as this data set, which has information about how I manage it, and then by definition manage others, then you are probably going away from being a good manager, which is called a leader, to a proper leader with calm authority.
Maria Ross 22:02
Yeah, I mean, we can think back to all the leaders that we may have had in our lives that we, you know, were those special leaders, those ones that we would follow to the ends of the earth. We felt seen, heard, and valued by them. And I know for me, many of them, the the common trait now that I do this work and I look back, was their ability to emotionally regulate, not deny their feelings, but emotionally regulate their feelings, and that there was space to have your feelings and for them to have their feelings and be human, without it impacting things in a negative in a negative way, meaning there wasn’t an environment of fear created. There wasn’t an environment of drama or conflict, but the feelings were just a natural part of the ebb and flow. And so, when I think of resilience, and maybe this isn’t the true definition, but I think of someone who is able to navigate and regulate through the highs and lows, and sort of stay steady. And that doesn’t mean they’re, you know, not extroverted or they’re not passionate or they’re not. Because I think sometimes we equate that with emotional regulation. I know I do because I’m a hot-headed Italian redhead, and I have always equated emotional regulation with being more, more calm and serene. And I’m like, wow, I could never be that. But we can still keep our passion and our drive and our excitement while still regulating our emotions in a productive way. So when you work with clients who are who have recognized that they are judging their own emotions, they recognize that resiliency comes hard for them. That they’re they it’s hard for them to adapt to change in a again for lack of a better term in a graceful way.
Dr. Ute Liersch 23:58
Yeah, what
Maria Ross 24:00
could you share with us maybe what is like a epiphany they have, or what is something that becomes a game changer for them in that process? So they’re already at self awareness of I know this is an issue and a block for me, and we can talk in a minute about what do you do for someone that doesn’t realize that. But once they realize that, they’re coming to you. Can you give us an example of like a game changing moment or a game changing event that gets them to the other side of like oh and not perfectly not every time yeah but where they have that breakthrough of here’s how I can maintain passion and maintain momentum and still be emotionally regulated
Dr. Ute Liersch 24:39
yeah
Maria Ross 24:40
that’s kind of a long question, but hopefully you understand my point.
Dr. Ute Liersch 24:43
Yeah, I give you a an example. So this is somebody who is taking over a company, and it’s a company that has been in the family for a long time. So everyone who is listening and is in the same position, I can hear how the stuff drops into your belly and. You think, oh dear! We know the complex situation, and it’s also a company that is co-owned with the sibling. One of them is more business orientated; the other one is less business orientated. But they are also co-owning it half-half. Wow! That’s so that’s the thing. So the person who is driving the business also has a value of including everyone and educating everyone who is in the meetings for at the same level, so that everyone is on the same page. Which whoever listens, you would say now. Yeah, that’s really cool. That’s really beautiful. My question was, is it? So my question was, what’s the function of that rule? And what it turned out, the function of the rule was to be so constrained and so performative patient that the other sibling who came late was not informed. Does not do that stuff because it’s simply not what they want to do. Then, of course, ask questions, and the meetings got longer and longer and longer, which cut into the working time of the person I’ve worked with. So, something that sounds really great from the outside. I’m patient. Everyone needs to be on the same page, and so on. Messed that person up big time. And once this link was given, shown, made so clear, the next step we could work on was how to set boundaries, because one thing is one thing people must know. Just because I know that I have to make a different choice, and I know that the other choice is probably more helpful for me, doesn’t make the difficult emotion go away. The only difference is that you will have a different outcome, and the outcome you will have is more steered by you because you now take agency. So epiphanies very often come, if you allow me to use that word. Sure, epiphanies very often come when we are taking a rule and we are asking for the function of the rule, and especially nice-looking and good-sounding rules work so well in our environments.
Maria Ross 27:30
Their function is not always helpful, right? And this is when people sit and say, “Wow, had not seen this coming. Yeah, there’s a story I share in the recent book about a client I had years ago who, yeah, and I hear this a lot from different people in organizations where sometimes the leader is overly democratic, yeah, because they want to be empathetic, they want to be inclusive, and all of those are wonderful things. Not when they leave everyone else in limbo because they cannot make a decision because they don’t want to upset anyone. Yeah, and not every decision has to be a decision by committee. And that’s the thing: is being a leader is knowing which decisions require input and being able to synthesize that input in a fair way, but then make a decision swiftly. But also to understand that this no, this is a decision I get to make.
Dr. Ute Liersch 28:27
Yeah,
Maria Ross 28:28
and I don’t have to have six months of conversation that drives everyone in my organization bananas because they’re just like I don’t know how I’m supposed to move forward because you have not made a decision yet to the client that I worked with to the point that their team, their executive team, confided in me that they didn’t care anymore. Yeah, they were just so desperate for a decision so they could put this to bed and move forward and have plans and set targets and take action. And I know that it came from a good place, and so to your point, you know, sometimes we have those behaviors as leaders, that script that we’ve told ourselves. Yeah, you know, well, I I want to be thoughtful, and I want to take my time, and I want to get input from everybody. And yes, and there’s a time and a place to you know to realize that things need to keep moving. When I’m working with people who are, you know, offseed startup, for example, one of the questions I ask since when is hierarchy a dirty word? And process, by the way,
Dr. Ute Liersch 29:36
a good hierarchy. Yeah, a good hierarchy gives you safety,
Maria Ross 29:41
yeah.
Dr. Ute Liersch 29:42
So I’m coming back to what is that? What you’re doing in service of not the story we tell ourselves and the leader you described. Yeah, of course we we want to be democratic and we want people to be. With us, but I promise you, if we dig a little deeper, the avoidance that you’ve just described, yes, and fear of not being liked,
Maria Ross 30:12
and not being right, and the fear of not being right-I think that was-that’s the issue. Because, not to interrupt you, but just that that point is so important because I always tell my audiences there’s no such thing as a decision that’s going to make everyone happy. There’s also no such thing as decision as a decision that’s a sure bet is going to be 100% successful. And so when when we’re trying to optimize for those two things, it’s really hard. And that’s why the funny part about that client example is the team said we’ve given all our input over and over and over again. We just keep talking about it. Yeah, and that was classic avoidance. That was classic. I don’t. Yeah, I don’t know if I’m going to make the right move here.
Dr. Ute Liersch 30:56
Can I come back to your decision point?
Maria Ross 30:58
Yes,
Dr. Ute Liersch 30:58
because the decision point also links really beautifully to resilience. How many people are stuck in? I can’t make a decision. And look, I’m not talking about bread roll or breadstle. I mean that’s decision to make the really difficult stuff because people say, but I don’t have enough data to know what the right decision is, and then I often say, you will never have enough data for important decision. You do not know the outcome before you make the decision, and I’m putting it even, I’m pushing it even further. I think you can evaluate the rightness or wrongness of a difficult, important decision three seconds before you die. Let me tell you why I say that. Imagine you’re getting married, beautiful wedding, right decision. 16 years later, you realize it doesn’t work any longer, and you go through a brutal divorce. So the decision 16 years before you could say was the wrong decision. You’re going through this divorce; it nearly kills you. You lose everything. The divorce was the wrong decision. You’re coming out five years later. You’re rebuilding your life, and you live a life which is fundamentally different, but more aligned maybe with how you are now. Oh, so it was the right decision. Oh, and by the way, and getting married was the right decision also, because without that, you wouldn’t have had this process. So, in an existential perspective, because death only gives us meaning, the evaluation of the rightness or the wrongness of a decision can only come shortly before we have no more life to live to get more experiences. So it is really important to own that and to say, I have to make a decision. Kirkegaard says it’s a leap of faith in many ways. Yes, there are, I would say, certain parachutes we can peck for these decisions. But at the end of the day, allow me to be a little bit witty. I hope you don’t bite in a banana. If you just look at it and let your executive team tell you how it tastes, you have no freaking clue how a banana tastes. You got to bite into
Maria Ross 33:33
it. Right, right. Well, and I think this is so closely linked to resilience because when we talk about the skills that that people are looking for in leaders now to deal with this onslaught of change and uncertainty in the world that we live in, they’re looking for resilience because they’re looking for the people that can make decisions. And if they’ve made a less than ideal decision, I’m going to say, yeah, can they pivot? Yeah, can they rebound from it? And first of all, can’t to your point about awareness. Can they admit they were wrong?
Dr. Ute Liersch 34:05
Correct. Can
Maria Ross 34:06
they actually say it without judgment? Of I made the you know that was the wrong call that I made with the decision I the information I had in front of me at the time. Here’s what I’m going to do about
Dr. Ute Liersch 34:16
it. Exactly
Maria Ross 34:17
right. That’s the skill. I was part of a conference where, or at a think tank when I was listening to investors and PE firms and folks talking, they said, you know, lots of people have really great business plans. Like you can go to ChatGPT and come up with a really great business plan. What’s separating people is the leader. Can this leader take a plan and implement it and make decisions and pivot when they were wrong. Can they admit that they were wrong and say, “Who do I need to bring onto my team to write this? Who knows more than me? So all of these things we talk about empathy, you know, putting aside your ego, but that’s resilience. That’s the ability of like I’m not going to just drive myself off the cliff. Because I made a wrong decision, it’s okay. What? How do I look at this to figure out a new way around it, or a way to correct it, or not even that? What am I going to do next? Would you say that that’s an accurate view of it as well?
Dr. Ute Liersch 35:14
Because what you’re speaking of is the yielding. Yes, you know, you speaking of the yielding, and then once we have yielded, we have to bounce back. Right, but you can only bounce back, and with the bouncing, I really mean it. Such it’s like an it’s such a beautiful word because it gives you the momentum, it gives you movement. Yeah, you know, it’s
Maria Ross 35:37
effective.
Dr. Ute Liersch 35:37
Exactly. So when you do the bouncing, you have to take agency. You’re not driven by something; it’s your agency. But very often, especially, let me come to the fail. We are denying agency of our own failures. I’ve lectured for I don’t know how many years at university, and every year I got more and more acutely aware that people have a problem with failing. I think the worst thing we can do, the worst thing we can do, is to not allow people to fail, right? Because you’re not learning anything. If you look at how children learn to walk. They not good at it. Actually, use my language. They suck. Right, right, and they fall down. They fall down. They bleed. They cry.
Maria Ross 36:32
Right.
Dr. Ute Liersch 36:33
If children at this age, if the if kids around one and a half, two years would have an understanding of failure as we have at the age of six, we all would crawl, and that I find I find quite dangerous. If we are not learning to fail, we do not learn to stand up. But if we don’t learn to stand up, then we are not yielding, but we are breaking. Yes, we can come back from being broken, but that is that’s a very different catalog fish, Maria. Very different fish, right?
Maria Ross 37:12
So, as we wrap up, what sort of a final thought you have for leaders listening to this that are like, “Yeah, I know I have a challenge, even adjusting to change,
Dr. Ute Liersch 37:23
yeah, to
Maria Ross 37:23
admitting I’m wrong, to course correcting, to you know, everyone joked during the pandemic the word pivot was uttered a million times,
Dr. Ute Liersch 37:32
yeah.
Maria Ross 37:32
And what if someone’s listening, going, Yeah, I know that’s a struggle for me. Where do I start?
Dr. Ute Liersch 37:37
Yeah, being courageous to admit to yourself I do struggle. I think that’s important, and I believe you need somebody who gives you counsel. This is not about therapy. Therapy is a tool, right? When something becomes more clinical, but I think it is good to have counsel. Somebody who, in Bavaria, would say gives you a nice thing up your backside, a kick in your backside. Let’s put it that way. Yes, who keeps you moving? Right. Who holds you safe, but does not let go. So you got to walk, maybe from time to time through hell in order to understand. Actually, it’s not as helly as I thought it is. 100% right? Yeah. Doing that alone, the reason why I say this is not going to work is because you only have your own brain, and that’s not really to be trusted. Yeah,
Maria Ross 38:37
especially if we’re telling ourselves these scripts, we need someone to break to interrupt the pattern and to interrupt the cycle. We’re not. Yeah, we’re not aware.
Dr. Ute Liersch 38:44
We’re not aware of them. Unaware. We’re simply not aware of them when they have been around for a very long time. Interestingly, they can be non-verbal, and this is why. Again, I come back to emotions because you feel something. You know there is a guy,
Maria Ross 39:03
yeah,
Dr. Ute Liersch 39:04
and and then you’d run away. Why? Because you’ve been doing it for 2030, 4050, 7080, 120 years. I don’t know for how long. Of course, you’re gonna run away. But you know the people I’m with, I say stop. Not running. Invite me into your world now. Tell me what’s going on, and then change happens because it creates space. And when we have space, when we have more data, we can make we can make a decision. We have choice. Yes, I know we have always choice, but you know, 95 to 5% is not a proper choice. At least at 6040. Okay, exactly, exactly. And if you run around with these automatic scripts, many leaders do that. This is the 95-5% choice. It’s not a choice. Not a proper one, anyway,
Maria Ross 40:03
Dr. Uta. Thank you so much for your insights and your wisdom today. A lot to think about. I really want to encourage everyone listening to check out her book, A Minimalist Guide to Becoming Resilient. And we are going to have all your links in the show notes. But for anyone that’s on the go, where’s the best place they can find out more about your work.
Dr. Ute Liersch 40:21
Probably the website it’s www.dr for Doctor UTE for the weird German name.org.
Maria Ross 40:31
I love it. I love it. And you mentioned that you also post a lot of micro lessons on LinkedIn, so folks can follow you there.
Dr. Ute Liersch 40:39
Absolutely.
Maria Ross 40:40
We it’s been such a joy to talk to you today. I could talk to you so much longer. I love this heady stuff. It makes me stop and it makes me think. Thank you for your time.
Dr. Ute Liersch 40:49
Thank you for having me. And I really, truly hope everyone can pause from time to time a little bit more.
Maria Ross 40:57
Love it, love it. Thank you for listening to another episode of the Empathy Edge podcast. If you like what you heard, you know what to do. Please rate and review, and share it with a friend or a colleague. And until next time, please remember that cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind. For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy. Visit theempathyedge.com. There you can listen to past episodes, access show notes and free resources, book me for a keynote or workshop, and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news, and events. Please follow me on Instagram at Red Slice Maria. Never forget, empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place.
