Elevating Executives Through Psychedelic Informed Coaching

Brett Hill: 00:00:03

The Mindful Coach Podcast. So welcome to this edition of the Mindful Coach Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Hill, founder of the Mindful Coach Association.

I'm really excited today to talk with Janet Livingston, who I became aware of her work in executive leadership and development, and now her work is informed by working with psychedelics as well. And I thought, wow, this is going to be a really interesting conversation. So welcome to the show, Janet.

Janet Livingston: 00:00:34

Thank you, Brett. It's so nice to be here with you.

Brett Hill: 00:00:37

Thank you. I want to just give a little bit of a blurb about her work to kind of set the context here.

She's a master facilitator, executive coach, and leadership learning program architect. She spent eight years at Boeing, Boeing no less, developing leadership programs for over a thousand aviation leaders in China and India.

And before that she was an independent coach and consultant in communications and team performance. And currently her coaching is enhanced by a study of psychedelic medicine as well as internal family systems. Wow.

You put those together, then you've really got an interesting combination of skills. And so these are what she calls two powerful avenues for healing and improving mental health. It's been the focus of her career for a while now.

So I want to hear all about this. Janet. So how did you first get involved with, you know, leadership, leadership development at all? Like, how was it that you wound up on that track?

Janet Livingston: 00:01:37

Well, I was, I began as a program manager for a big ngo and the NGO had offices worldwide.

And at a certain point they understood that those offices needed to become much more sort of self standing, independent and make themselves sustainable. And in order to do that, they needed to go through a strategic planning process.

And since I wrote the grant that covered that process for them, I got to deliver or go over and facilitate in Kenya and Zambia and some other places that process of them doing strategic planning.

So I was in a room for two days with the leaders from a local health office that were rolling out, they were rolling out major HIV programs, HIV prevention and child health programs. And that experience led me to facilitate more, which morphed into me becoming basically a trainer. And then it's kind of a longer road.

Then separately, I understood that when I would, you know, have conversations with some of my friends over coffee, that they were somehow experiencing me as therapeutic because they would send me text after I got home like, God, I feel so.

Brett Hill: 00:03:02

Much better than so much better.

Janet Livingston: 00:03:03

You helped me so much. And I was like, what are you talking about? Drink a cappuccino. It hit me.

Yeah, it, it hit me like, oh, actually, I guess These people are not used to being listened to somehow.

Brett Hill: 00:03:21

Well, exactly right. And so here you show up and you're actually paying attention, and they're going, this feels great.

Janet Livingston: 00:03:29

Exactly right. And you know, add to that. So I'm a big. I'm big into intercultural competence. And so I lived in. In Central Europe for 16 years. Oh yeah.

Brett Hill: 00:03:42

May I ask what part of central Europe?

Janet Livingston: 00:03:44

In Slovakia, which is former Czechoslovakia. Right. So in the capital, Bratislava. Yeah. Which by the way, is really close to Vienna.

A lot of people don't know that, but it's right in the middle of Europe.

Brett Hill: 00:03:55

You know, if. If we could push pause on here and have another podcast, I'd love to hear all about how that cultural embeddedness, you know, kind of reframed.

Did it, you know, cause some reframing in the way you engage with people.

Janet Livingston: 00:04:07

Yeah, we can plan that. We can plan that for later, Brett.

Brett Hill: 00:04:13

Okay, so. So continue, please.

Janet Livingston: 00:04:16

Yeah, so what I wanted to say around that. The reason I'm talking about Slovakia is that Slovakia is the sort of culture where people communicate.

They're used to communicating in a certain way verbally, on an everyday basis. So they often speak to each other at the same time. They interrupt each other a lot. They're very much about advising, telling.

There's quite a lot of judgment. This is common. I mean, you know, most cultures, we have this piece. It's fairly strong right there.

Brett Hill: 00:04:51

Yeah, I think I've seen that around.

Janet Livingston: 00:04:53

Yeah, right. Yeah. These behavioral norms.

And you know, for me, what was really hard about living there was that, you know, everyone for me was a sentence finisher finisher. I would start and they would finish, and that was. That was difficult.

And so I guess for my girlfriends to be able to talk to me and not have me interrupt them and not tell them, what are you crazy? You can't do that. Like, for them. That was, I guess, liberating.

So then I was getting these reactions to people and I realized, oh, maybe I should do something with this. So then I went and I got certified as a coach.

Brett Hill: 00:05:30

Nice. That's the story modality. Do my mind me asking if there's a. Yeah.

Janet Livingston: 00:05:36

ICF accredited program in Prague. So we had a really robust overview over 10 months of all the coaching techniques, you know, including Gestalt and co co active coaching.

And yeah, it was great. And. And so I came out of that as a certified coach and I have an ACC credential under icf.

And yeah, so all of these pieces of my career have been put together because they're all kind of overlapping. So when I became a coach, I felt more empowered to help leaders and managers. Right.

Because of my background in running retreats, facilitating discussions, and so forth.

So now I felt like I was more in a position to help leaders and managers handle their everyday workplace issues, what they were struggling with, managing their people. Right. Because coaching is about, also about emotions and emotional intelligence. Yeah. So it all kind of fit together. I'll stop there.

Brett Hill: 00:06:45

Oh, that's amazing. And so, so you, you, you started to do this work and then you wound up at, at Boeing.

I mean, that's a giant company designing leadership programs for them.

Janet Livingston: 00:06:58

Yep, I ended up at Boeing.

,: 2015

So that means airlines and other government. Government partners, like regulators in China. We were exclusively, our team was exclusively focused on China for a few years.

And then when Covid came, we expanded to interact with the Indian aviation audience and also some countries in Southeast Asia.

Brett Hill: 00:07:57

And so what was your role in all of that?

Janet Livingston: 00:08:00

I wore a few hats. So I began purely as a facilitator. And before COVID we would receive groups in person from China for a week or two, sometimes even three weeks.

And I would facilitate those programs, you know, basically almost every day for 10 hours a day. Helping flow.

Brett Hill: 00:08:22

This is technical training of.

Janet Livingston: 00:08:24

Well, I was specialized in leadership development training because I'm not a technical person.

But, but as part of our leadership program programming, we would have Boeing subject matter experts who would come in and talk about, you know, revenue generation, revenue management for airlines or fleet. Fleet management or.

Brett Hill: 00:08:44

So this is Boeing, Boeing doing leadership development for their partners and associates and government agencies that they connect with.

Janet Livingston: 00:08:53

Yeah, so the idea behind it was pretty simple.

So when Boeing would have sales campaigns, you know, the sales managers would go and, you know, have their discussions and their ongoing interactions with the airlines.

When they got to the point where there was real interest from an airline in buying airplanes, the salespeople could include these kind of high level leadership development programming into the sales deal as an extra bonus. And the Chinese airlines were very, very interested in this.

We were lucky that they were very interested in that because it meant that they could come to us and not only be in a room with me and a bunch of going subject matter experts, but they could also spend a few Days at the University of Washington Foster School of Business and having like a really high level MBA mini course and they would have the honor of visiting Boeing and going to the factory in everybody.

Brett Hill: 00:09:58

This gets them access in ways they couldn't otherwise get.

Janet Livingston: 00:10:01

Yeah, exactly. So for them, for them it was, it was really a big deal.

In fact, the chairman of those airlines who came would personally nominate the people who got to come to our programs, which is kind of mind blowing when I think about it. But we would, we would get sort of mid to senior level leaders it dependent on the program and the subject matter.

And the idea was that they would get that from us. Sometimes they would get it before buying, sometimes they would get it after buying the airplanes.

And the idea was that if we upped their management skills, they would manage their airlines well and then they'd buy more planes and then we'd come back and buy. Exactly right.

Brett Hill: 00:10:44

It makes such a sense. It's like I love this because this is like such inside baseball. The world doesn't even know this kind of stuff is happening.

So I just love the, to hear this.

Janet Livingston: 00:10:53

A really smart strategy, I think on Boeing's part. And it was really a win, win for, you know, win for both sides.

Brett Hill: 00:10:59

I have, you know, I relate to that somewhat. I did a similar sort of role with Microsoft. I was in the Microsoft for a while.

I was worldwide partner technical readiness manager for Microsoft Online.

Which is a lot of words to describe going out and training people how to use, training the companies that sell Microsoft products, how, how to market them by showing them the cool new technical features, you know, and showing their value. So I, I have a little bit of a resonance with. Yeah, okay.

So we're going to go out and enable our partners to do well so that we can buy more product and very interesting stuff. So you're, you're not working at Boeing now, is that correct?

Janet Livingston: 00:11:42

Yeah, I left Boeing. That's correct.

Brett Hill: 00:11:44

And so now you're on your own and you're still doing a coaching business and somehow or another your practice got as you say, informed by, you know, psychedelics and, and the people that might be interested in those. So that's a very, kind of, seems like that's like on the other side of the Grand Canyon. So help us build a bridge here.

How that, how'd that show up for.

Janet Livingston: 00:12:06

Yeah, yeah, it, it sounds like it's on the other side of the Grand Canyon, but it, it's actually, it's a trail that's a little bit far.

Brett Hill: 00:12:15

It's just a parallel trail.

Janet Livingston: 00:12:16

Yeah, thanks for the great metaphor. Yeah. So I'm. I have my own independent practice now as a leadership development person and executive coach.

And I got interested in psychedelics because it started popping up kind of in the news and I had a couple of friends who started to experiment with mushrooms and I had met somebody who was looking to develop a startup to help psychotherapists understand more psychedelics.

So I really started to feel interested because the potential of psychedelics for healing as a kind of modality, like a parallel modality to psychotherapy turns out to be really, really high. It's really powerful. And since I come from a kind of therapeutic background, my father's a psychiatrist, psychotherapist.

So I grew up with that mindset of wondering, you know, why do people behave the way they do, what's behind it? And you know, how can, how can people feel better and how can people change, you know, these kinds of questions, even as a kid.

So when psychedelics came up and I started reading a little bit about it and I started to understand that there's a safe way to do psychedelics, I thought I want to know more about this. So I looked around for programs that would allow me to become educated as well as opportunities. I will admit to try taking psychedelics.

Brett Hill: 00:13:59

Well, sure.

Janet Livingston: 00:14:00

And I found a program called the Vital Program which is under the organization called Psychedelics today. It's a 12 month program and I'm just at the end of it now. We're just finishing. I gave my final presentation just actually yesterday.

Brett Hill: 00:14:14

And the program is, it's, it's.

Janet Livingston: 00:14:18

Yeah.

Brett Hill: 00:14:19

What's the program?

Janet Livingston: 00:14:20

Program is called Vital and it's from, it's psychedelics basically from A to Z.

So it's comprehensive education about what psychedelics is, what the medicines are, what where plant medicines come from, what the traditions are from indigenous peoples through what the neuroscience shows about the psychedelics. Psychedelics effect on the brain through psychotherapy, aided by psychedelics, through retreat, facilitation, sitting, everything.

It's just huge amounts of knowledge. This is a year studies. Most people who experiment with psychedelics do it recreationally. Yeah, right.

That's been going on for decades, even centuries.

But right now what's being developed is a much more kind of integrated, safe, therapeutic approach to using psychedelics of all kinds for various mental health problems which are very widespread. Depression, anxiety, PTSD even maybe ocd. There are all kinds of discoveries that are happening. So it's really exciting.

Also from a medical standpoint, it's really exciting.

Brett Hill: 00:15:54

The research on this is coming out rapidly and there does seem to be, from what I've read, because I love to read research because I'm a technical guy and I like the science behind this stuff. The. It does seem to be pretty promising and already there's some substantial evidence. But.

And this is hard evidence from, you know, hospitals and psychiatric field.

Janet Livingston: 00:16:18

Yeah. There's research happening in. In many countries across the globe.

Very really important research happening here, happening in the uk, in Australia, in Germany, in Israel. I believe in many places.

There are quite a lot of people around who've heard lots about psychedelics and who are curious and want to try, but they feel uncertain. You know, they don't know how it's going to feel. They don't know if it's going to feel safe for them.

Brett Hill: 00:16:54

Sure.

Janet Livingston: 00:16:54

They don't know what effect it's going to have on them.

And so I really want to offer people like that an opportunity to go through a process with me that would also be guaranteed and informed by a psychotherapist that I would work with. Right. I'm not.

I don't pretend to be qualified as a medical person to deal with, you know, deal with crises, but there's a kind of a way to vet people. Right.

Brett Hill: 00:17:25

Sure.

Janet Livingston: 00:17:25

To have conversations with them up front about their history, their medical history.

Brett Hill: 00:17:30

Because not everyone is a good candidate.

Janet Livingston: 00:17:31

Mental health history. Right. Not everybody. Not everybody is a good candidate and for different reasons.

You know, a lot of people take antidepressants and for example, they're not good candidates to have a real psychedelic journey.

I mean, real in the sense of a really active, intense experience, because the antidepressants act on the same neurotransmitters as the psychedelics do. So the psychedelics will not have the desired effect on somebody who's actively taking antidepressants on a regular basis.

Somebody like that would have to wean themselves off their medication first and then have a psychedelic experience.

Brett Hill: 00:18:19

And that could, for the people who are listening because, you know, we have listeners all over the place. What about the legal concerns around this?

What would you advise people to do if they're interested, but they're not certain if this is like, okay, where they are?

Janet Livingston: 00:18:33

Well, it's mostly, you know, I'm working specifically with psilocybin so far, and I'm looking at working with ketamine. Ketamine is completely legal.

There are a number of client ketamine clinics in Washington state which are working to help people with their mental health. Psilocybin mushrooms. Right. That's that.

Psilocybin is the active psychedelic substance in mushrooms is decriminalized in Seattle for the purposes of enabling research that's happening around, including at the University of Washington. Preparation, which consists of basically having a coaching session or 2 or 3.

Recommended 3, is ideal to understand what their concerns are, if they have concerns, what they hope to achieve, what their intentions are, if they want to talk about specific intentions for their journey, and then to help them in what the psychedelic community calls integration.

Brett Hill: 00:19:49

Yeah.

Janet Livingston: 00:19:51

Which. So what's your, what's your understanding of the word integration? But I want to ask you, because there are many understandings of it.

Brett Hill: 00:20:00

The notion of integration.

Janet Livingston: 00:20:02

Yeah. Psychedelic integration.

Brett Hill: 00:20:04

Psychedelic integration.

Well, I think it's kind of the same for non psychedelic integration in the sense that neurologically your brain requires that you make sense of any experience that you have.

And so if somebody just jumps up out of the street and starts, you know, saying you're Satan or starts being mean to you, you walk away from that experience in some way. You have to make sense of it. Even though it's kind of illogical and unreasonable. You, oh, they're a crazy person.

You don't know what's really going on. But your brain requires that you make sense so that you can have a coherent notion of your world.

Now, when you toss in psychedelic into the biology of your system and you have an out of, I'm going to call out of band experience, meaning it's not a normal experience, your brain struggles mightily sometimes to make sense out of that so that it can incorporate the experience into a framework that, that, that you can be comfortable with. Some of these experiences in my experience are so big that they kind of break your rules about what is so.

And they require a readjust, a significant readjustment about your world view and who you are in order to accommodate. So you get a little bit bigger in an ideal world. And in some cases they can be fairly challenging to integrate, depending on how rigid you are or.

And how big the experience is. So that's kind of my tabletop summary.

Janet Livingston: 00:21:45

Your tabletop summary is brilliant.

Brett Hill: 00:21:48

Well, thank you, thank you.

Janet Livingston: 00:21:50

Thank you very much. Yeah. The idea of integration is it's complicated. And if, even if you ask a psychedelic expert, well, what really is integration?

You'll get, you know, you'll get a different answer with each person you speak to.

But you described it really well that, you know, our human inclination is to want to make sense of things that happen to us, to want to interpret them somehow. And with psychedelics, since they, they work on parts of the brain that are can be, you know, normally sort of sub subconscious.

We're not conscious of all of what's happening inside our heads. Right. That makes it extra challenging.

And so for me, given my study with the VITAL program and my own experience journey with psychedelics, the best approach to integration that I currently know of is to approach it from several different angles. A, to do the sort of verbal narrative, kind of coaching things. So what did you see? And you know, does it remind you of something?

And what kind of what can you describe the visuals you had and do you assign any meaning to that and you know, what part of you came up? If we're going to talk about ifs maybe in a moment.

Brett Hill: 00:23:14

Right, right.

Janet Livingston: 00:23:15

But that's only a piece of it because so much of what happens to us during a psychedelic journey can be somatic, can be body.

Brett Hill: 00:23:23

Exactly.

Janet Livingston: 00:23:24

Body centered. Right. So and, and so much visual and enhanced auditory. Right. With music.

Brett Hill: 00:23:32

Right.

Janet Livingston: 00:23:33

So really other pieces of integration include expression through art. And that can be super useful close to the experience. So when you come down and maybe a half an hour later you sit down to draw. Right.

And the drawing can be, you know, a lot of people come with, you know, spontaneous, beautiful, very expressive things. Right? Yeah, even. And movement. So dancing, free dancing to music, any other kind of movement that feels good, that feels needed.

For me, it's very important to allow the person to really do what calls them.

Brett Hill: 00:24:21

Yeah.

Janet Livingston: 00:24:22

Do what they feel is going to help them. And you can give them ideas if they're, if they feel stuck, you can say, well, hey, we can do this and you can do it with them.

There are all kinds of ways you can help somebody. And then as the days and weeks pass, it's great to have check ins. It depends on how many the client is willing to have or would like.

But to have sessions to do more verbal stuff and this is kind of where the application of the ISF modality of psychotherapy, the internal family systems therapy can be really useful.

Brett Hill: 00:25:06

Steve, that sounds really powerful, particularly to facilitate. Sometimes I think of it just like energy that wants to move and, and that there's in.

My background's in Hokomi and there's a, there's a thing they call organicity that there's an intelligence in, in our system that knows what it needs if you just get out of the way and let it do what it wants to do.

And so I love very much what you say about let happen what support spontaneous emergence is the way I think Ron Kurtz would have said it back in the day, whatever wants to occur spontaneously and just say yes to that.

Janet Livingston: 00:25:48

Yeah, yes. Spontaneous emergence.

And so for me, this is what distinguishes psychedelic integration coaching from the classic kind of executive coaching that we learn. Executive coaching is more, it's more formulaic, it's a, it's a little bit more directive in that we attempt to establish a goal with the. We. Right.

We ask the client for a goal up front and then we will return to the goal somewhere in the middle to check in. So how are we doing, you know, now as opposed to when you began all this kind of stuff?

Whereas from my study of psychedelics, you know, let me qualify from what I've done and studied the more the spot, the spontaneous emergence approach for people who are doing psychedelic work is more effective. Right. Because there, there's all manner of complicated and beautiful or disturbing things that come up from the subconscious. Right.

So we're dealing with experiences that are far more intense, that are very, it's, it's very different. So the idea of holding space that we learn as executive coaches has to be greatly expanded and becomes really the key element.

It becomes far more important than the pillar of coaching. Yeah. So if you take executive coaching or any kind of coaching, the two basic, most important pillars are active listening, deep listening.

As a coach, this is what we do. Right. We listen deeply and we ask powerful questions.

But asking powerful questions can, if you do it too much with somebody who's coming off psychedelics, it can be, it can be.

Brett Hill: 00:27:55

Oh, right, you go. Because they go. Yeah, they go all the way in.

You know, whereas most people are just hearing the words and, and then the subconscious kind of responds with a. Well, I feel a little funny about that.

But when you, when all of that neural structure that's normally there is present, it's just like a depth charge that goes farther, harder, faster than you were planning.

Janet Livingston: 00:28:22

Yeah, there's, there's a lot going on. I think the key, the key here is really to get experience.

Brett Hill: 00:28:31

Yes.

Janet Livingston: 00:28:31

To get experience doing psychedelics yourself. To really understand what it means to have a consciousness raising moment.

Brett Hill: 00:28:44

Yeah.

Janet Livingston: 00:28:47

And not just once.

Brett Hill: 00:28:49

I want to interrupt you right there because I want to just blow that up a little bit to have a consciousness raising moment. What do you think that means?

Janet Livingston: 00:29:02

So there are many people who have described their psychedelic journeys. You know, the spectrum is very large. Some people who do higher doses of psychedelics experience what's known as ego dissolution.

I personally have not experienced that.

But the stories about it are that one ceases to feel one's own individuality as an ego, as a as a person and becomes part of the cosmos, becomes part of a much greater whole. Yeah, yes. So imagine, I mean, what you have to be mentally stable and grounded enough to be able to handle an experience like that. Yes, right.

That's why people who do serious journeys need to be vetted for mental health conditions. But so that's the peak experience. And up to that there are any number of experiences where one can tap into old memories that have been suppressed.

Right. That is a form of consciousness raising.

You're, you're seeing something that's inside yourself that you would never have been able to see without psychedelics.

Brett Hill: 00:30:33

And also in ways that you, you might know it's there, it's alive in dimensionalities, in ways that you. That might sound frightening to some people, but it presents like, like I mentioned before, in a way that the organism can relate to.

So we need to head towards the end gate here. So I wanted to ask you, what would you say to coaches or others out there who are interested in learning how to facilitate like you have.

What would you. And you know, realizing that people are in different states with different sorts of resources, where would you have them go?

What would you tell them how to begin?

Janet Livingston: 00:31:13

Well, I would definitely recommend taking the long term approach. I mean, it, it takes time. It really, really does. And everybody says that up front. And you might think, yeah, come on, it can't be that complicated.

You take the drug and you have an experience and someone helps you with it.

No, there's really a lot to learn from, you know, philosophy, through history, through medicine, through psychology and psychotherapy and facilitation techniques and all this kind of stuff. So it's a lot. So I really recommend, if you're serious about it, find a program that you're willing to take. They can be expensive.

Some of them offer scholarships. So it's good to sort of investigate all of them. Taking a program is absolutely legal. Right.

It doesn't involve, it doesn't involve taking a drug that may be illegal in your state. And then there are places where you can go for retreats where you can have guided experiences in, in an environment where it's fully legal.

Costa Rica, Jamaica, parts of Colorado, or maybe the full, sorry, Colorado in general, I believe.

Brett Hill: 00:32:42

What about Washington State?

Janet Livingston: 00:32:44

Washington State, There are cities where it's decriminalized.

Brett Hill: 00:32:51

Oh, want to be, we want to be clear that we're not advising anybody to do something that's illegal.

Janet Livingston: 00:32:56

No, absolutely.

Brett Hill: 00:32:57

And you know, we would advise people to just look up the rules in your area and see what they are absolutely abide by them and then find ways to educate yourself yourself that makes sense for you. And that might mean you have to travel, it might mean doing online services and all that.

Janet Livingston: 00:33:13

So absolutely, yeah. The course I'm taking is online and it's been hugely valuable.

Brett Hill: 00:33:19

So that's one another way people can go. How can people reach you if they want to connect with you and find out more about your work?

Janet Livingston: 00:33:25

Yeah, so they can reach out to me. I have a new website that's under reconstruct. Sorry, Reconstruction. Under construction.

Brett Hill: 00:33:33

Perpetual reconstruction.

Janet Livingston: 00:33:34

Doesn't exist yet. Under construction. So I'm directing people to my current website, which will be the old one. And that is. That is CultureIsKey Coach. That's one word.

CultureIsKey Coach. They can also email me at JanetultureIsKey Coach and you can find me on LinkedIn under my full name, Janet Livingstone. I'm based in Seattle.

There, I believe there's more than one Janet Livingstone on LinkedIn, which is interesting. There's a nurse.

Brett Hill: 00:34:12

We'll put all this in the show notes too, so people don't need to write it down, but so people can.

Janet Livingston: 00:34:18

Find out if you want to talk. If you're interested in classic executive coaching.

Anyone in the audience listening today, I'm continuing to do my classic leadership development and executive coaching work side by side because both are just endlessly interesting to me and I believe that they are important.

Brett Hill: 00:34:42

Have you. So thanks again. And so for listeners, you know, check out the show notes. Connect with Janet.

If you're a coach or helping professional values mindfulness in your life, check out the Mindful Coach Association. You can list your services there for absolutely free.

Because I'm a crazy person and I put this website up and I decided we want to elevate all the coaches in the world who are trying to do good work. Doesn't cost you a dime and people can find your work there. So thank you so much and we'll talk soon.

Janet Livingston: 00:35:13

Brett, you're not a crazy person. You're a generous good heart.

Brett Hill: 00:35:16

Oh, thank you so much.

Janet Livingston: 00:35:17

Thank you so much for having me on. I really enjoyed it.

Brett Hill: 00:35:20

Y podcast is a service of the Mindful Coach Association.