THE SYNCREATE PODCAST: EMPOWERING CREATIVITY
HOSTED BY MELINDA ROTHOUSE, PHD
WELCOME TO SYNCREATE, WHERE WE EXPLORE THE INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN CREATIVITY,
PSYCHOLOGY, AND SPIRITUALITY. OUR GOAL IS TO DEMYSTIFY THE CREATIVE PROCESS,
AND EXPAND THE BOUNDARIES OF WHAT IT MEANS TO BE CREATIVE.
SUBSCRIBE / FOLLOW US ON SPOTIFY, APPLE PODCASTS, YOUTUBE
OR WHEREVER YOU GET YOUR PODCASTS
HOSTED BY MELINDA ROTHOUSE, PHD
WELCOME TO SYNCREATE, WHERE WE EXPLORE THE INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN CREATIVITY,
PSYCHOLOGY, AND SPIRITUALITY. OUR GOAL IS TO DEMYSTIFY THE CREATIVE PROCESS,
AND EXPAND THE BOUNDARIES OF WHAT IT MEANS TO BE CREATIVE.
SUBSCRIBE / FOLLOW US ON SPOTIFY, APPLE PODCASTS, YOUTUBE
OR WHEREVER YOU GET YOUR PODCASTS
EPISODE 23: THE CORPORATE MYSTIC - ARCHETYPES OF LEADERSHIP
& CREATIVITY WITH STEPHANIE CRAIN
LISTEN TO THE FULL AUDIO EPISODE HERE:
WATCH THE FULL VIDEO VERSION HERE:
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Episode 23 explores the archetypes, personas, and roles we embody in our work life and beyond, beginning with the archetype of The Lovers. My guest is The Corporate Mystic, Stephanie Crain, an Austin-based leadership / ethos coach and innovation consultant. She’s the founder of Tapas Innovation, and a Certified Master Jungian Coach with a Success Mindset specialization. She works with executives, creators, and entrepreneurs to realize their full authentic expression and value activation. Our conversation focuses on the Corporate Persona Archetype Test that Stephanie developed to help people better understand the roles and personas they adopt in the workplace, develop greater self-awareness, and embrace their full professional potential.
Our Creativity Pro-Tip for this episode invites you to take the free Corporate Persona Archetype Test and to consider the ways you show up at work, in your leadership, and in your wider life. Where do you shine? Where are you holding back? And how could you step forward with greater authenticity and confidence?
Credits: The Syncreate podcast is created and hosted by Melinda Rothouse, and produced at Record ATX studios with in collaboration Michael Osborne and 14th Street Studios in Austin, Texas. Syncreate logo design by Dreux Carpenter.
If you enjoy this episode and want to learn more about the creative process, you might also like our conversations in Episode 11: Leadership, Values, and Criminal Justice Reform with Attorney Dylan Hayre, Episode 15: Leadership, Burnout & Personal Sustainability with Dr. Katherine Semler, and Episode 16: Creativity, Innovation & Leadership with Robert Cleve, PhD.
Our Creativity Pro-Tip for this episode invites you to take the free Corporate Persona Archetype Test and to consider the ways you show up at work, in your leadership, and in your wider life. Where do you shine? Where are you holding back? And how could you step forward with greater authenticity and confidence?
Credits: The Syncreate podcast is created and hosted by Melinda Rothouse, and produced at Record ATX studios with in collaboration Michael Osborne and 14th Street Studios in Austin, Texas. Syncreate logo design by Dreux Carpenter.
If you enjoy this episode and want to learn more about the creative process, you might also like our conversations in Episode 11: Leadership, Values, and Criminal Justice Reform with Attorney Dylan Hayre, Episode 15: Leadership, Burnout & Personal Sustainability with Dr. Katherine Semler, and Episode 16: Creativity, Innovation & Leadership with Robert Cleve, PhD.
Episode-Specific hyperlinks:
Tapas Innovation
Stephanie Crain / The Corporate Mystic on LinkedIn
Free Corporate Persona Archetype Test
Tarot Cards
Personality Tests
Emotional Intelligence and Leadership
Gallup Poll Data on Employee Turnover
Stephanie Crain / The Corporate Mystic on LinkedIn
Free Corporate Persona Archetype Test
Tarot Cards
Personality Tests
Emotional Intelligence and Leadership
Gallup Poll Data on Employee Turnover
episode transcript:
Melinda: Welcome to Syncreate, a show where we explore the intersections between creativity, psychology, and spirituality. Our goal is to demystify the creative process and expand the boundaries of what it means to be creative. I'm Melinda Rothouse, and I help individuals and organizations bring their creative dreams and visions to life.
So my guest today is The Corporate Mystic, also known as Stephanie Crain. She's the founder of Tapas Innovation here in Austin, Texas. She's also a certified Master Jungian Coach with a Success Mindset specialization. And she works with executives, creators, entrepreneurs to realize their full authentic expression and value activation.
Love for you to say a little bit more about that as you like, but kind of our focus for today is the notion of archetypes. And I want to get into what that means. And specifically, you've developed a Corporate Persona Archetype Test, which I've taken and we'll kind of get into the meat of that. And so kind of figuring out, you know, what kind of roles you play in a professional or work context. So I think maybe a good place to start, for people who may not be familiar, is what is an archetype?
Stephanie: Yeah, I think that's a great place to start. And so archetypes, the ideal of archetypes really grew and developed into psychology and looking at philosophy even through Carl Jung. Archetypes are universal. So some people might, I think we sometimes confuse stereotypes with archetypes. Because there is some stereotyping that happens with an archetype. But if you think of sort of universal archetypes like the parent archetype, for example, whether you actually have a child or not, all of us can tap into that parent energy, or the hero, for example, you know, that hero archetype of what that looks like.
And so these are universal experiences that any human can express or any, I sometimes call it universal energy, that anybody can tap into or access. And we see them throughout history and mythology and stories and all of that. These archetypes get brought up for us to learn from.
Melinda: Yeah, and they're, as far as kind of Carl Jung, who sort of came up with this idea of architecture, they're part of the collective unconscious. They're these kind of universal structures within our psyche, and they're helpful because they can allow us to maybe bring out certain aspects of our being in different ways at different times. So it's not like you just have one that you relate with, but maybe at a certain point, it's the parent, as you mentioned. At another point, it's the lover, the leader. There's so many different ways that these can express themselves.
Stephanie: That's correct. What happens, often, is early in our development, very young in our development, our ego is developing, which is a very important part of who we are, and our ego develops to help us survive. And it will sometimes attach itself to a particular persona or particular, so that you may be always show up as the parent. You're always taking care of other people's needs and not your own. And so the idea in working with like universal archetypes is to be able to open yourself up to the fact that as a human, you have access to any of those archetypes. And sometimes through conditioning or through survival needs, trauma, various things that happen, we get very attached into specific personas. And then that's all we express.
Melinda: And then we, yeah. So maybe from an early age, somebody told us, oh, well, you're so…whatever it might be. Oh, you're so sweet and kind, or, oh, you're such a good athlete, or you're such a good this or that, or maybe sometimes negative as well. And we internalize that. And we kind of take it on as our identity, when in fact, there's such a broad palette to who each of us are.
Stephanie: It's a combination of what we take on, and then also what we're pushing, actively pushing away.
Melinda: Yes, what we're resisting.
Stephanie: Exactly. And that gets into kind of the shadow space of, you might not even be aware of certain behaviors that you exhibit or certain things that you push away. And a lot of this comes back to sort of these archetype expressions.
Melinda: Yeah. So given that this episode is coming out around Valentine's Day, we kind of wanted to play with some of those. And specifically, there's an archetype of The Lovers that comes out of the Tarot. Tell us more about that.
Stephanie: So it's interesting. And going even back a little to Carl Jung, he established four primary archetypes. There's hundreds of archetypes that you can see; they're innumerable. We should say that. But the four primary was sort of The Warrior, The Mystic, The Parent, and The Lover. And so as you mentioned, The Lovers also show up in Tarot. And The Lover archetype, it expresses a particular type of unfetteredness, wildness, kind of very expressive. In Tarot, it really relates to choices and decisions that we make. So there's a lot of that aspect of The Lover archetype and what we kind of dive into versus what we shy away from, what grabs our heart, and just really pulls us in. So there's that passion that drives us, I think really comes up through that archetype.
Melinda: Absolutely. And in a recent episode, we were also talking about the connection between sort of creativity and passion and life force energy, right? And that also relates to our, you know, our sexual energy as well.
Stephanie: Very much. I mean, that's the center of our creative space. And sexual or otherwise, all of our creative energy builds from that space. And then it's how we express it. So, you know, are we expressing that through a heart-centered space? Are we bringing that up? Are we expressing that maybe through fear, or not expressing it at all? Right. Maybe we're holding it back, you know?
So, that's part of what really fascinated me about the archetypes themselves is because in most corporate, I shouldn't say not corporate, in most tests, personality tests, things like that, and a lot of them are based on, like for example, the Myers-Briggs is based on Carl Jung's archetypes, all of the, whatever your four letters are, and I think they've added now the T and the A, and so there's extra letters, there's always extra letters. That's based on archetypes and a lot of personality tests are. But the thing that I found always find frustrating about them is they feel very limiting. Like I have been putting on to this ENFP box.
Melinda: Right. Enneagram and you're a 4 or whatever it is. And then you think that's like, OK, that's who I am.
Stephanie: Exactly.
Melinda: Rather than, you know, in a lot of these kinds of personality tests and assessments, I mean, I would think that the ultimate goal is to find balance. So that you can utilize these different. resources within ourselves at different times.
Stephanie: That's exactly the goal of why I put this test together. Because whenever somebody takes a test, I have I cover six archetypes in this test. I developed my own set of corporate archetypes. And so I came up with about 50 of them. And then I narrowed the, so some of the archetypes that didn't make it onto the test, for example, the office spouse.
Melinda: Uh-huh. Yes.
Stephanie: Like we have that archetype, right? You know, or the office gossip, right? That's an archetype. So there's these different, I even created one called The AI Overlord, right? Because that's a part of our psyche now and our psyche and what does that look like? And for each archetype, I developed the overall, kind-of, this is what this archetype looks like and then I developed the persona characteristics which would be sort of their light, how they express themselves in light ways. And then there's shadow characteristics which might be sometimes what we perceive as the stereotypes, which is why we get triggered by some of these archetypes.
Melinda: Yeah, so how did you narrow it down to these main ones?
Stephanie: Yeah, I chose these for very specific reasons. I chose The Office Parent, The Big Boss, The Analyzer, The Entrepreneur, The Networker, and The Creative. I felt like, one, I felt like the archetype roles were diverse enough to express, kind-of, different personas in a real clear way, real defined way. I also felt like that these were roles that had stereotypes attached to them, very strongly. People have ideals of what they think it is to be The Office Parent or The Big Boss, right? And so that was part of my process in selecting these. And I put, in particular, put The Entrepreneur in there, even though this is a corporate persona archetype test. My experience, I am an entrepreneur that has worked in many corporate environments, and I have worked with many entrepreneur-energy people.
Melinda: Right.
Stephanie: And so I wanted that to be in there because I wanted to just have that space to show the distinction between, and the core distinction, The Entrepreneur and The Big Boss actually look very similar. I'm curious if you would guess what you think is the core difference between the two. They have a real key difference.
Melinda: Well, I don't know, but this is a great question. But I kind of associate The Entrepreneur with The Innovator.
Stephanie: Mm-hmm.
Melinda: And then The Big Boss is like more assertive, possibly aggressive.
Stephanie: Their biggest difference, they actually both have Big Boss energy, but The Big Boss needs a lot more logic and a lot less chaos. And The Entrepreneur is able to pivot and go with ambiguity.
Melinda: Yeah, able to play with, yeah.
Stephanie: And that's kind of the real key there is that ability because they both really have that Big Boss energy. They both want to get things done. They have a vision. They're starting a biz. They have to rally people around their vision, all these things. But it's really that Big Boss needs numbers, needs reports, needs to understand this logistical, you know, everything is working according to plan, whereas The Entrepreneur is like, “Hey, we have an opportunity. We need to pivot and move towards that.”
Melinda: More flexibility, more uncertainty, comfort with uncertainty. Okay, so I noticed when we were talking beforehand that you have these kind-of broken out based on, I guess, the results that you've gotten in from different people, and you invited me to take the test and we'll talk about that when you were kind of beta testing it. And now it looks like you've gotten some data back as to kind of how people tend to break down into these different archetypes. So tell us more about that.
Stephanie: It's been very interesting. And I'm going to open with one question I don't ask is gender. So I'm not asking anybody to tell me if they're male, female, or other. And the highest percentage of persona type is The Office Parent. And the next one is The Big Boss. And so we've got 27%, almost 30% of the people taking it are The Office Parent, 22% The Big Boss.
Melinda: And The Office Parent, like, could we liken that to the kind of like, if we're putting it into a more feminine, the mama bear, the one who kind of takes care of everyone.
Stephanie: So this is one of the things I find really interesting. Yes, we could liken that. That is the stereotype, for sure.
Melinda: But there's more to it, I gather.
Stephanie: So my experience has been by a pretty vast majority men are showing up as The Office Parent.
Melinda: Interesting.
Stephanie: And they are very upset by it.
Melinda: Interesting. How so?
Stephanie: They really respond, because of the stereotype. So the stereotype of the office parent really is kind of, you described the mom and nurture parent type, but then also think about the busy body who's kind of knows everybody's business, knows what's going on. making sure that everybody's needs are getting met, but also kind of has their own agenda, right?
Melinda: So there's like a caretaking, but also maybe a controlling.
Stephanie: A little bit manipulative, a little bit. And I think that, again, you know, I'm not tracking for gender, so these are experiences I'm having with consultations with people, right? And it started to really surprise me. I would say that more than 60% of that 27% is male.
Melinda: Interesting.
Stephanie: And what's also interesting, I chose images to represent these archetypes. And I used AI to create them. And I wanted to go against type, right? I wanted that intentionally. So my image for The Office Parent that I chose is actually, maybe 50s Hispanic man who, he's relaxed, he's moving towards retirement, he's got wisdom, he's kind. Totally not the stereotypical female office parent, right? Like and it turns out that apparently that is actually what I found.
Melinda: It's so funny, because as you mentioned, I just pictured somebody who immediately came to mind that kind of fit that. So I can relate with what you're talking about. And I'm sure it also, you know, you could have called it something else and it might've carried a different. resonance, right?
Stephanie: Perhaps.
Melinda: But that's really interesting.
Stephanie: Yeah, it is interesting in the context of, you know, the positive aspects of the office parent, or they really do care about making sure that people's needs are met, you know.
Melinda: Yeah, they care about people’s well-being.
Stephanie: And they tend to have wisdom, they tend to be mentors or somebody they confidants, people can go to them, express themselves emotionally to this person, where they're not typically able to in corporate environments. You know, which was something else that came up in a really interesting way, you know, in terms of how we repress or suppress our emotions in corporate spaces.
Melinda: Yes. And I want to get into that. So let's just talk a little bit more about these percentages, because we were talking beforehand, you know, you have The Analyzer, about 14% percent, Entrepreneur 13%, Networker 12%. And then the lowest percentage score, so the lowest number of people, fall into the Creative category, which is what our show is all about. So why do you think that is? That so few people put themselves into a Creative.
Stephanie: It's really interesting. I honestly, that data, for me, surprised me. Obviously I show up strong Creative, right? I show up 37% creative, right? So for me, I'm just like assuming, obviously everybody's like me. And like, no, of course that's not true. And, you know, the test itself, I don't, I think that some of the answers let you know that you're answering sort of a Creative, but not all of them do. And so it is, there's a little ambiguity in that. And so it did surprise me that it came out so strong, right? Like so low in that one. But really, people really do struggle to see themselves as creative.
Melinda: Well and you also, and you know, there’s a playful component to it also. And, you know, maybe we're playful outside of work but we kind of suppress that part of ourselves at work or you know maybe there's always like the joker, right, that's another kind of archetype.
Stephanie: That is actually, that actually is one, the comedian, the office comedian.
Melinda: Exactly but many of us may, kind-of, put our more playful side, you know, kind of put that away when we're in a work environment.
Stephanie: Yeah, and it's interesting. So the question about playful and creativity was just simply, do you allow yourself to be playful or creative? Right? It's very open-ended in terms of it's not specifying where or how. And nearly 30% of all of the respondents said no, or very, they struggled to do it. You know, I think the breakdown on that more specifically was like, there's a large number of like 18%, that literally said no, they're not creative at all. They don't allow themselves to be creative or playful. And so it wasn't qualified, at work, even though they're taking a corporate test. Most of the questions that are asked are really more generalized. They're not specific to like how you act at work. They're more just like how do you act?
Melinda: How do you show up in the world?
Stephanie: Yeah, how do you show up in the world? And so it surprised me. It really did.
Melinda: Yeah, well, I was just going to say there's also kind of this, sort-of, logical versus emotional, or sometimes we might use the language of, sort-of, left-brain versus right-brain, something like that, which is an oversimplification. But, tell us a little bit more about that. What place do emotions have in the workplace?
Stephanie: Yeah, that's a really good question. Well, we've been told none. We can start there.
Melinda: Traditionally,
Stephanie: Traditionally. We've been told that, you know, I have, messages I have been given are, “All emotional problems in the workplace can be solved with a process.” Right? So if you're having an emotional breakdown in the workplace, it's obviously a communication issue. Let's build a process around it. These two people don't have to talk anymore. Boom, problem solved, no more breakdown. Okay.
Melinda: And if it were so easy.
Stephanie: If it were.
Melinda: Because emotions are real and they're visceral, and they're messy, and you can't always put them in a nice box.
Stephanie: But about 30% of my respondents do. They say that they completely, or almost completely, suppress all emotions, and that is very specific, in corporate spaces. I asked, do you express or suppress? And they had a variety of ways that they could answer that question. So they could say, I do a little of both, or I'm overly emotional, or I'm not. And a large percentage, 30%, said that they always suppress emotions.
Melinda: Well, and this is fascinating because more and more of the research on leadership is coming out to say that we need to have emotional intelligence.
Stephanie: Absolutely.
Melinda: We need to appreciate and sort of acknowledge emotions in ourselves, in other people, and then we can better communicate, you know, and it's not just all systems and processes.
Stephanie: So it's interesting, when we're talking about suppressing our own emotions like this, and we relate it back to the personas, right? So the personas themselves, you know, they all have, but like I said, these light expressions and then these sort-of negative expressions, that we tend to hide away. And what happens is we suppress those things because we don't think they work for us, or we judge them as bad. But when we do that, that's when your emotions are gonna come out in ways you literally can't control. You know, so maybe you're just simply gonna be a passive aggressive person. You know, maybe you're saying nice things in unkind ways or, you know, whatever.
But I've seen in a corporate environment, in a very conservative corporate environment, I have seen a man walk out of his office in a rage and attack another colleague in a rage, over a business problem. And it's not an exaggeration. He lost his job. And for us to have been in an environment where we're not taking into account everything that was going on in these people's lives. And there were a lot of extenuating things that were happening.
Melinda: Of course.
Stephanie: But we expect people to show up with this persona and be the person that you're being paid to be.
Melinda: Yeah. And it's interesting also because in leadership work, we really emphasize authenticity and building relationships and building trust, right? But then there is also this kind of old expectation that, you know, we leave all the other stuff at home.
Stephanie: I sort of align it and it's, you know, I think we have different types of leadership and there, so we have, like on the far end, I think, like military leadership, right? Where it is very critical that you're putting your life on the line. You're putting yourself in a situation where other lives are at stake, and the training and the leadership that goes into being in survival mode in a way that you're responsive, not reactive, this is critical, right? Because being in survival mode, for most of us, is just a reactive mode. But when you're in the military, you are being conditioned and trained and led to be in that space so that you can do your job. You can get the job done.
Melinda: It's life or death.
Stephanie: It's life or death, it's critical. But I have seen marketing managers in survival mode, missing a deadline, thinking that their life is in a life or death, I mean. Is that good for creativity? Is that good for innovation, and problem solving, in a corporate space? Right. Do we need to be in survival mode in corporate environments at all times?
Melinda: Exactly.
Stephanie: And I think that we have sort of taken certain aspects of certain types of leadership styles that work very well in certain environments, and we've applied them into other environments, and they just don't work the same.
Melinda: Right, and I think there's a shift in progress, but we're not quite there yet.
Stephanie: I also want to make a point to say that I believe that the military leaders have very strong emotional skills in what they're doing. It's just how they're prioritizing and how they're able to utilize that. It's interesting, Mark Cuban did a podcast interview a couple of months ago and they asked him, as an entrepreneur, what's one thing you would wish you would have learned or changed. And his answer was, I wish I would have been more kind. Right, I wish I would have been more kind. I didn't have to just be such an (asshole), you know, like really. And I think that that's relevant to sort of our, how we've been conditioned to be leaders in our society. You know, that we have to demand, we lead from a space of fear, you know, it's very dictatorial in many ways, but.
Melinda: And the research shows that is actually ineffective and we're starting to learn that. You know, that it's those soft skills that actually make all the difference, that make people want go above and beyond. That, you know, the leader has your back. There's a sense of trust. We're a team. We're in this together. You know, efficiency and productivity go way up under those circumstances.
Stephanie: Substantially. The Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, right? My favorite quote from him: “Soft skills are hard to learn.”
Melinda: Yes. Right.
Stephanie: They're not so easy. And they're not. And the thing is, is we have kind of a generation of leaders that really haven't been taught them. And I'm a big believer, like nobody ever wakes up and says, God, I want to start a toxic business, or I want to be a crappy middle manager. Like, I can't wait to get there. You know, it's like, no, we want to be successful. We want to build successful things with healthy cultures. We want to, you know, we want to leave a legacy. We want to have purpose in our life.
Melinda: For sure. And we have to often overcome the coping mechanisms and survival skills that we learned from a very young age that may have worked for us up to a point, but then they're not going to necessarily work in a leadership role.
Stephanie: I think it's a combination of that and the fact that we have poor leaders being trained by poor leaders. And so really it's a lot of people that have been conditioned into a management mindset, which is, you know, it has its place, but I believe in managing things. So I believe in managing money and time and projects and processes. I don't believe in managing people. I believe you lead people. People should be able to manage themselves. You know, I have, I've never, you know, I mean, all the people who have ever worked for me were actualized adults. And that's...
Melinda: Who could be trusted to do their job.
Stephanie: And that was the expectation, you know? And I always found that if, I mean, it's been interesting. I've definitely hired people who were...I've always worked in creative spaces, and marketing and sales and things like that. And I have a lot of skills. I'm a graphic designer. I have a lot of creative skills, but I've definitely hired people who had skills I didn't have.
Melinda: Of course, which you want to do, you need to complement your skill set.
Stephanie: Well, correct. But I'm still capable of leading those people. Right? And I think it's kind of a... I think a lot of people, a lot of very skill-based people in our society, we have a problem in corporate America with sort of career growth. And you can be a very, very exceptionally skill-based person without any leadership skills, but you can only grow so far if you aren't, if you're not willing to take on management, right? And I've seen a lot of... you know, SME, subject matter experts, so, you know, attorneys or accountants or even creative people, who are great at what they do. And then the minute they get put into management, that job ends in like a year.
Melinda: Well, and the problem is, it's we're not really taught how to be a leader, even in business school.
Stephanie: And some people don't want to be leaders, though. I mean, some people don't want that.
Melinda: Right, but that is the sort of career growth arc.
Stephanie: I'm a big believer in co-leadership. I actually believe that real technical teams should always have co-leaders. There should be that subject matter expert that they are there to mentor that technical skill. And that there should be that leader that's able to deal with the more soft-skill aspects of the team. And that those co-leaders should be aligned and working together. And it's something in our corporate world that we just don't look at, these sort-of, I think, opportunities for collaboration and growth that don't look traditional maybe, but create more opportunity for real innovation, for real creativity. Because when you take your senior level, best technical person, and then you make them miserable.
Melinda: Right. That's not helpful.
Stephanie: And then, and so, you know, the cost of turnover, right? There was a study done by Gallup that showed last year, 2021, I believe, $1 billion in costs for employee turnover. And for a small company, the cost was anywhere, for an employee turnover, the cost was anywhere from $600,000 to $2.5 million annually.
Melinda: Yeah, and there's not only the monetary costs, but there's all these other costs in morale. If you've got a lot of turnover, if you've got a lot of unhappy people that are leaving, that affects team cohesiveness. It affects culture and climate, there's so many aspects to it.
Stephanie: And productivity, creativity, and innovation take a hard hit when that happens. We really become less able when we are constantly stressed, when we're constantly in survival mode, when we're constantly in this space of like, one of the things, what keeps you up at night? And I had... eight answers and 46% of the respondents said unresolved problems and uncertainty. And I would say that right there could be addressed by reducing stress, allowing us to become more connected, allowing us to be more in touch with our own intuition, and to become naturally more creative problem solvers. We would reduce that number alone. Like just by allowing ourselves to go into more creative spaces. Because I believe that unresolved problems and uncertainty happen because you can't think outside of the possibility of what's right in front of you. You're just stuck in that. This is the problem. Right?
Melinda: And you don't see the possibilities. Yeah. You know, there's again, a much broader range of, of things that could happen, but we do tend to get really focused on, well, these are the only options and then we feel stuck and we feel helpless. And yeah.
Stephanie: It becomes a cycle, and that happens as individuals; that happens for us in businesses as an event. And then it happens for companies too. At an organizational level, companies will get stuck. And that what's how do we move forward?
Melinda: Or they become trapped in their own systems. And then it becomes really, really hard to turn the ship.
Stephanie: Yeah, exactly. Or they work against themselves almost.
Melinda: So I want to bring it back to the assessment itself. And I'm curious, you know, how you developed it, what kind of research went into it? I know you put a lot of work into this.
Stephanie: I did, and I'll be honest, I used AI as supplemental knowledge, right?
Melinda: How so?
Stephanie: So I came up with all the archetypes on my own. I developed a framework for what I thought the archetypes were. And all of that came through. I have 30 years experience reading tarot. I've always been super fascinated with symbolism and symbology and mythology and just everything related to this. And so this is just a part of what drives me and what I love. And then as studying Jungian psychology and getting more of an understanding of like, the archetype aspect of our psyche, right? How our ego and our persona works and how we sort of like come from a higher-self perspective. We can be accessing all of those persona energies, you know, if we do that.
And so, you know, for me, all of that was natural. I had this stuff in my head. As I started really developing it out and I started to, I wanted to, with AI, prompts are critical, right? And so once I had figured out the six archetypes I wanted to work with specifically. I actually did the test for 10 total, and then I filtered four of them out and ended up with.
Melinda: And were they the ones that just had the lowest number of responses?
Stephanie: No, no, before I ever published it. Yeah, I designed for 10, but I felt like 10 was too many. Yeah. It was just going to be an overwhelming.
Melinda: It starts to get confusing.
Stephanie: Because it's not a short test. It takes you about 20 or 30 minutes to take it. And it is fairly comprehensive. And so I wanted to narrow it down. And there was enough, once I was able to get the data, I could see where there was enough overlap that I could say, this one is not quite as distinct from that, or whatever. But once I came down to these six, what I would, the questions I also developed on my own, okay. So I developed all of the questions and then I created--this is also a stereotype, even though I don't really want to use that word--but I created the persona of what each archetype would be. And fed that into AI, so the AI understood who the archetypes were, and asked AI to give me more information about these archetypes.
Melinda: So you were kind of refining your thoughts as you go along.
Stephanie: Correct. I was using AI to help me refine that data. Then, when I actually came up with the test, once I developed the full archetypes, this is like an example of what they would look like. Once I developed the full archetypes with the shadow characteristics and their persona characteristics, I fed the full archetype into AI. Then I would go in and say, how would each one of these archetypes answer this question? And AI would give me my answer prompts that are on the test, right?
So I used AI to help me develop the actual. prompts that you would select. And there were still some of those that were of my own making, for example, the emotion / logic question. I wanted to know. you just have to answer either or it's A or B. Are you emotional or logical?
Melinda: And sometimes it's hard to say, like I'm a little bit logical and a lot emotional or whatever and it's either or.
Stephanie: I know, I did that on purpose to, kind-of, a little bit of a trickster for people. And it's the question when I was going through the beta testing that I got the most frustrated feedback on, because everybody wanted me to add “I'm both.” And I'm like, but then everybody would say that. So, and it's interesting in the test, it comes out basically 50-50. You know, it's 49% logic, 51% emotional. I ask this question a lot when I present, of my audiences, live presentations. It is almost always 100% logical. There might be like three people out of 100 that would answer that they're emotional. So it's really interesting how we judge logic and emotion when we're in public. You know, we're judging emotion.
Melinda: Especially in a professional or work environment, where we think we are supposed to be logical.
Stephanie: Correct. Very much so. You know, I was speaking to a big boss the other day, right? We were doing consultation. And he kept telling me, he said it like three different times. He's like, “Yeah, and I'd run this through my logic brain.” And he's having a hard time hiring people. And so we started talking about his process, right? And he kept like referencing, like running this through my logic brain, running it through my logic... And I go, “Well, when do you run it through your intuitive brain? When do you run it through your heart center?”
Melinda: Like, what?
Stephanie: And he literally was like, “I don't know how to do that.” And I go, “Well, as a big boss, you should.” Because the reason he can't hire, and he said it point blank, he doesn't trust the people he's interviewing. Well, the reason he doesn't trust the people he's interviewing, he doesn't trust his own intuition.
Melinda: Exactly.
Stephanie: Therefore, he is projecting that lack of trust onto the people that he's interviewing. It's always going, he's always going to hire the wrong person. He's literally always going to have that cycle, until he gets into his own emotional center, and starts identifying these triggers that come up for us that we can feel in our bodies sometimes. You know, like that little, oh, I don't trust this person. I don't like what, you know, and so it's having that awareness of yourself that lets you become more aware and more intuitive with other people.
Melinda: Yeah, back to the emotional intelligence piece. So, I'm curious how this, you know, there's so many assessments out there, right? There's so many leadership tests. There's so many personality tests and assessments. So what would you say, kind-of, distinguishes your corporate persona test? Or, I mean, another way of asking the question is how can people use this in a way to enhance their self-awareness?
Stephanie: I think what distinguishes my test is that I'm not trying to tell you who you are at all. I am trying to show you the possibilities of everything you can be. And I am showing you maybe things that you might be pushing away, or things that might trigger you emotionally that you're not even aware of. So for example, if you show up as the big boss, and then your lowest score is the office parent. Right? Well, as The Big Boss, you might be emotionally triggered by somebody who's running around getting into everybody's business or who's like, you know, paying too much attention.
Or, you know, a lot of like, The Analyzer, there's a lot of these opposites, like The Analyzer and The Creative. You know, I did a consultation with somebody who showed strong as The Analyzer and her job, very analytical job. Very, very analytical. She scored zero on Creative. Okay. Zero creative. And I told her that and she started laughing. She's like, that doesn't surprise me in the slightest. And I'm like, okay, but you know, one, how are you defining creative? That's my first question.
Melinda: Yeah. And that's a central, you know, topic of this show because there's this misconception that either you're creative or you're not, which I believe we're all creative.
Both: We express it in different ways.
Stephanie: Exactly. And she made the point that she said that her partner was actually an artist. And I thought, well, that's fascinating. Nice balance, right? She went on to say that she helped her partner create a business. And I go, well, that's quite creative.
Melinda: Yeah. Entrepreneurship. That is creative.
Stephanie: That is quite creative. You know, so, you know, it's again, like really helping people see that how they're defining themselves is a lot of times the conditioning of how, again (either through early life or even throughout our life), you go into spaces, you start to pick up the value systems of the spaces that you're in. And you're in, as people, we're trying to adapt. And so we're negotiating our values too. It's important; we have to. We're negotiating them through our whole life. And in these spaces where we're doing that, if we know our values, if we are real clear on what they are, then we can negotiate from a space where we're not going to put ourselves in jeopardy, or we're not going to dishonor ourselves.
Melinda: Or compromise our own values.
Stephanie: We can still be willing to kind of say, okay, this is the value system of this space, and this is my value system, and this is where they meet together, and this is where I need to create boundaries. And that can happen.
Melinda: Or, even for job seekers, in coaching, whether it's leadership, career, whatever it might be, we do a lot of work around values. And that's so important because if you're applying for a job at a company whose values are completely oppositional to your own, well, that's never going to work.
Stephanie: It's not.
Melinda: You know, so you really need to find an organization where there's alignment, right? Or as you're saying, okay, where do we meet in the middle and how do I set boundaries?
Stephanie: It's, you know, and if that's even possible because to your point, there are some unnegotiable things, and that's fine, too. But nobody knows this, and so my experience with most people is that they don't know what their values are until somebody offends them.
Melinda: Until it's challenged.
Stephanie: Yeah, that's right. And so, you know most people will express that way, but I am very, that's why I talk about value activation, because I am very much about like how do you proactively activate your values, so that you're expressing them naturally all the time? You know, and it's authentic and you're not apologizing for your values. You know, you just, you own them and you're okay with that. And to me, it makes it so much easier to make choices about my own life. And in business, when businesses have truly activated values in business environments. So business values are a little different than individual values, right? But values in business environments for a long time have not really been, I would say like, they're like words on paper.
Melinda: They're kind of given lip service.
Stephanie: Yeah, they're not always deployed, right? They're not always, what I would say, modeled, right? Like, and so leadership drives culture, and culture drives your brand, right? And if there is a breakdown in that culture, that's gonna be projected through the brand out to your client, and your employees are also gonna experience that pain. And so it's always got to go back to leadership in terms of re-evaluating the value structure, determining where there's misalignments, and then truly activate, is that a real value? Are you just saying it's a value, or is it a real value? Because like it is, we need to put a strategy around how not just the leader can activate that value, but literally everyone in the ecosystem is able to activate that value and act on it. And they're empowered through that.
Melinda: Absolutely. So important.
Stephanie: It is critical. It is.
Melinda: So we've talked a lot about some of the archetypes, like The Big Boss and The Office Parent. We've kind of touched on The Creative and The Entrepreneur, which you and I both score highest in.
Stephanie: We do.
Melinda: And so just using maybe us as a guinea pig, since our scores are quite similar (not exactly the same). But so for somebody who scores high in Creative and Entrepreneurship, let's get into like, well, what is the shadow side? What is the learning? What are the ways that are not necessarily showing up, or how could we utilize our potential better?
Stephanie: I'm curious what you would think, what feels like shadow for you in the creative space?
Melinda: Yeah, so something that I've really worked with for a long time, I work with a lot of leadership clients using an assessment called The Leadership Circle Profile. And it looks at both, kind-of, what's considered creative leadership competencies, positively correlated to leadership effectiveness, and then sort-of reactive strategies, which are in summary: complying, protecting and controlling. Right, so people pleasing, moving toward; moving away, being distant, critical, maybe arrogant; and then controlling is like moving against, you know. Micromanaging, perfectionism, overly ambitious, things like that. And then there's different subcategories.
So when I was first taking that assessment, I scored higher in one aspect, not in people pleasing in general, but in passivity. And I thought, I don't see myself as a passive person whatsoever. So how (and this is a 360, so people are giving you feedback), how am I showing up this way? And I did a real deep dive into it, and a couple of things. Number one, I'm kind of allergic to aggression and those kinds of like “My way or the highway,” kind-of leaders.
Stephanie: Hardline rules.
Melinda: Yeah, and, you know, and I do a lot of meditation, and things like that. And so I was kind of looking into the psychology literature, and I was like, okay, well, what is the psychological definition of passivity and what is like the opposite of that, that's something I can connect with. You know, and what I came to was compassionate assertiveness. Right? So not aggression.
Stephanie: Yeah, absolutely.
Melinda: But compassionate. And I thought, okay, I can do that. You know, I can assert myself, I can communicate more directly, I can state my needs, you know, and I know you've talked about The Big Boss as being more logical, right?
Stephanie: That is one aspect. I describe that as being a key difference between The Big Boss and The Entrepreneur. But with The Big Boss, it is very much visionary, authoritarian, not necessarily, there's kind of the positive side of authoritarian and the negative side of authoritarian. So, you know, kind of having that confidence of authority, right? So holding space for authority, is something that Big Bosses do. Now, you can do that in a real negative way, but it's not inherently negative to be that. And so some of that Big Boss energy is they are very data-driven, absolutely. They're very process-driven towards vision. So there's a key there, where they can see how, they can see possibility for sure, but then they have a very logical, step process of how they're going to get there. And so those elements, and more constrained, more conservative.
Generally speaking, they tend to be a little bit more conservative in their decision making. And, you know, even they, by far the Big Bosses show up typically low on Creative. They really do quite frequently. Those two roles tend to be opposite each other quite often. Not always, but quite often. For us, it's true. For us, we're both high on Creative. We both score low on Big Boss.
Melinda: Yeah. So I'm conscious of time, but I'm feeling moved to ask you like, what's the biggest thing you've learned in developing this test, getting results back, working with people on it?
Stephanie: Yeah, the biggest thing I've learned, this has been an incredible learning experience overall. And I think the biggest thing I've learned is about my own biases. You know, whatever stereotypes I held in the process, whatever things I thought might show up, you know, I thought, for example, you know, that we would get way more women as Office Parents, and that was not true, you know. Most of the Big Bosses are women, actually, you know. Like, it just is very interesting, those aspects of just how we perceive things, you know, I perceive things.
It's expanded and allowed me to understand the real challenges that people are dealing with. They're really struggling and, you know, they want to break out of this conditioning. Like, so many people really feel it, and they feel the constraint. And like it says, you know, they're uncertain. They don't know how to solve this problem. And so there's a lot of work to do out there to help people. Not just heal emotionally, but then really kind of embrace the, you know, like we have so much stigma to reduce around emotional care, mental health care, you know, emotional behaviors, and how we perceive that. Emotional strength and what we think that looks like, you know, and, and there's just a lot of work to be done there. And so this, for me, has just given me so much data to understand even myself better, just through looking through the lens of others.
Melinda: Yeah, and I think any kind of assessment like this, it's a tool for greater self-awareness and then ultimately self-development.
Stephanie: That's the goal for it, really is. Ideally I want people to be able to look at this and go, wow, okay, so I showed up as The Creative and my shadow is The Big Boss, but wow, how powerful could I be if I was a Creative Big Boss? Like, oh my God.
Melinda: And that's the thing back to kind-of bringing it full circle around archetypes. We can draw on these different energies, and these different roles, at different times. And the more we broaden our palette, the more resources we have available in any given situation.
Stephanie: That's absolutely true. We do not have to be stuck in these persona types at all. You know, we can be fully actuated humans, and all of that universal energy is available to all of us. You know, we just have to have that awareness, and then the ability to tap into it.
Melinda: Exactly. So how can people find out more about the assessment, about your coaching and leadership work? Where can they find you?
Stephanie: Thank you. So I am on Instagram. I am corporate_mystic. And also my website is tapasinnovation.com. The test pops up right on the website. You can also access it from my Instagram feed. And I post a lot of content every single day. So there's a lot of really good information out there for people. I'm really trying to help people raise awareness that we can make changes, even if it feels like we're shifting the Titanic. We can start to make that turn. We don't have to, you know, head on. And there's just so much opportunity for us. I think really, to me, it's very exciting where we're at. I know it's frustrating for some people, but it's in that conflict that possibility really arises and that we can be truly creative. And that's what I get very excited about, just that potential.
Melinda: Yeah, beautiful. Well, thank you so much. It's great to have you on the show. This has been fantastic.
Stephanie: Absolutely.
Melinda: And so I usually finish each episode with a Creativity Pro-Tip. And I think what's arising for me today is around your Corporate Persona Test. So that's available on your website. If you're curious about your own corporate persona, go to Tapas Innovation, and you'll see it pop up. And, you know, just an extension of that, whether you take the test or not, really think about the ways that you show up in the work environment, in leadership roles, and in your wider life. You know, are there certain roles that you tend to embrace, or ways of being and how might you broaden your palette?
Stephanie: Pretty much. I love that. Yeah.
Melinda: At Syncreate, we're here to support your creative endeavors. So if you have an idea for a project or a new venture and you're interested in our help, please reach out to us about one-on-one coaching, or join our 2024 Syncreate coaching group starting in April. You can find more at syncreate.org. And as far as the podcast, we're available on all the major podcast channels. So please follow us and subscribe. We're also on YouTube, both in audio and video, and we're now on Patreon as well. And you can find us on all social media. Thanks so much for listening and see you next time.
So my guest today is The Corporate Mystic, also known as Stephanie Crain. She's the founder of Tapas Innovation here in Austin, Texas. She's also a certified Master Jungian Coach with a Success Mindset specialization. And she works with executives, creators, entrepreneurs to realize their full authentic expression and value activation.
Love for you to say a little bit more about that as you like, but kind of our focus for today is the notion of archetypes. And I want to get into what that means. And specifically, you've developed a Corporate Persona Archetype Test, which I've taken and we'll kind of get into the meat of that. And so kind of figuring out, you know, what kind of roles you play in a professional or work context. So I think maybe a good place to start, for people who may not be familiar, is what is an archetype?
Stephanie: Yeah, I think that's a great place to start. And so archetypes, the ideal of archetypes really grew and developed into psychology and looking at philosophy even through Carl Jung. Archetypes are universal. So some people might, I think we sometimes confuse stereotypes with archetypes. Because there is some stereotyping that happens with an archetype. But if you think of sort of universal archetypes like the parent archetype, for example, whether you actually have a child or not, all of us can tap into that parent energy, or the hero, for example, you know, that hero archetype of what that looks like.
And so these are universal experiences that any human can express or any, I sometimes call it universal energy, that anybody can tap into or access. And we see them throughout history and mythology and stories and all of that. These archetypes get brought up for us to learn from.
Melinda: Yeah, and they're, as far as kind of Carl Jung, who sort of came up with this idea of architecture, they're part of the collective unconscious. They're these kind of universal structures within our psyche, and they're helpful because they can allow us to maybe bring out certain aspects of our being in different ways at different times. So it's not like you just have one that you relate with, but maybe at a certain point, it's the parent, as you mentioned. At another point, it's the lover, the leader. There's so many different ways that these can express themselves.
Stephanie: That's correct. What happens, often, is early in our development, very young in our development, our ego is developing, which is a very important part of who we are, and our ego develops to help us survive. And it will sometimes attach itself to a particular persona or particular, so that you may be always show up as the parent. You're always taking care of other people's needs and not your own. And so the idea in working with like universal archetypes is to be able to open yourself up to the fact that as a human, you have access to any of those archetypes. And sometimes through conditioning or through survival needs, trauma, various things that happen, we get very attached into specific personas. And then that's all we express.
Melinda: And then we, yeah. So maybe from an early age, somebody told us, oh, well, you're so…whatever it might be. Oh, you're so sweet and kind, or, oh, you're such a good athlete, or you're such a good this or that, or maybe sometimes negative as well. And we internalize that. And we kind of take it on as our identity, when in fact, there's such a broad palette to who each of us are.
Stephanie: It's a combination of what we take on, and then also what we're pushing, actively pushing away.
Melinda: Yes, what we're resisting.
Stephanie: Exactly. And that gets into kind of the shadow space of, you might not even be aware of certain behaviors that you exhibit or certain things that you push away. And a lot of this comes back to sort of these archetype expressions.
Melinda: Yeah. So given that this episode is coming out around Valentine's Day, we kind of wanted to play with some of those. And specifically, there's an archetype of The Lovers that comes out of the Tarot. Tell us more about that.
Stephanie: So it's interesting. And going even back a little to Carl Jung, he established four primary archetypes. There's hundreds of archetypes that you can see; they're innumerable. We should say that. But the four primary was sort of The Warrior, The Mystic, The Parent, and The Lover. And so as you mentioned, The Lovers also show up in Tarot. And The Lover archetype, it expresses a particular type of unfetteredness, wildness, kind of very expressive. In Tarot, it really relates to choices and decisions that we make. So there's a lot of that aspect of The Lover archetype and what we kind of dive into versus what we shy away from, what grabs our heart, and just really pulls us in. So there's that passion that drives us, I think really comes up through that archetype.
Melinda: Absolutely. And in a recent episode, we were also talking about the connection between sort of creativity and passion and life force energy, right? And that also relates to our, you know, our sexual energy as well.
Stephanie: Very much. I mean, that's the center of our creative space. And sexual or otherwise, all of our creative energy builds from that space. And then it's how we express it. So, you know, are we expressing that through a heart-centered space? Are we bringing that up? Are we expressing that maybe through fear, or not expressing it at all? Right. Maybe we're holding it back, you know?
So, that's part of what really fascinated me about the archetypes themselves is because in most corporate, I shouldn't say not corporate, in most tests, personality tests, things like that, and a lot of them are based on, like for example, the Myers-Briggs is based on Carl Jung's archetypes, all of the, whatever your four letters are, and I think they've added now the T and the A, and so there's extra letters, there's always extra letters. That's based on archetypes and a lot of personality tests are. But the thing that I found always find frustrating about them is they feel very limiting. Like I have been putting on to this ENFP box.
Melinda: Right. Enneagram and you're a 4 or whatever it is. And then you think that's like, OK, that's who I am.
Stephanie: Exactly.
Melinda: Rather than, you know, in a lot of these kinds of personality tests and assessments, I mean, I would think that the ultimate goal is to find balance. So that you can utilize these different. resources within ourselves at different times.
Stephanie: That's exactly the goal of why I put this test together. Because whenever somebody takes a test, I have I cover six archetypes in this test. I developed my own set of corporate archetypes. And so I came up with about 50 of them. And then I narrowed the, so some of the archetypes that didn't make it onto the test, for example, the office spouse.
Melinda: Uh-huh. Yes.
Stephanie: Like we have that archetype, right? You know, or the office gossip, right? That's an archetype. So there's these different, I even created one called The AI Overlord, right? Because that's a part of our psyche now and our psyche and what does that look like? And for each archetype, I developed the overall, kind-of, this is what this archetype looks like and then I developed the persona characteristics which would be sort of their light, how they express themselves in light ways. And then there's shadow characteristics which might be sometimes what we perceive as the stereotypes, which is why we get triggered by some of these archetypes.
Melinda: Yeah, so how did you narrow it down to these main ones?
Stephanie: Yeah, I chose these for very specific reasons. I chose The Office Parent, The Big Boss, The Analyzer, The Entrepreneur, The Networker, and The Creative. I felt like, one, I felt like the archetype roles were diverse enough to express, kind-of, different personas in a real clear way, real defined way. I also felt like that these were roles that had stereotypes attached to them, very strongly. People have ideals of what they think it is to be The Office Parent or The Big Boss, right? And so that was part of my process in selecting these. And I put, in particular, put The Entrepreneur in there, even though this is a corporate persona archetype test. My experience, I am an entrepreneur that has worked in many corporate environments, and I have worked with many entrepreneur-energy people.
Melinda: Right.
Stephanie: And so I wanted that to be in there because I wanted to just have that space to show the distinction between, and the core distinction, The Entrepreneur and The Big Boss actually look very similar. I'm curious if you would guess what you think is the core difference between the two. They have a real key difference.
Melinda: Well, I don't know, but this is a great question. But I kind of associate The Entrepreneur with The Innovator.
Stephanie: Mm-hmm.
Melinda: And then The Big Boss is like more assertive, possibly aggressive.
Stephanie: Their biggest difference, they actually both have Big Boss energy, but The Big Boss needs a lot more logic and a lot less chaos. And The Entrepreneur is able to pivot and go with ambiguity.
Melinda: Yeah, able to play with, yeah.
Stephanie: And that's kind of the real key there is that ability because they both really have that Big Boss energy. They both want to get things done. They have a vision. They're starting a biz. They have to rally people around their vision, all these things. But it's really that Big Boss needs numbers, needs reports, needs to understand this logistical, you know, everything is working according to plan, whereas The Entrepreneur is like, “Hey, we have an opportunity. We need to pivot and move towards that.”
Melinda: More flexibility, more uncertainty, comfort with uncertainty. Okay, so I noticed when we were talking beforehand that you have these kind-of broken out based on, I guess, the results that you've gotten in from different people, and you invited me to take the test and we'll talk about that when you were kind of beta testing it. And now it looks like you've gotten some data back as to kind of how people tend to break down into these different archetypes. So tell us more about that.
Stephanie: It's been very interesting. And I'm going to open with one question I don't ask is gender. So I'm not asking anybody to tell me if they're male, female, or other. And the highest percentage of persona type is The Office Parent. And the next one is The Big Boss. And so we've got 27%, almost 30% of the people taking it are The Office Parent, 22% The Big Boss.
Melinda: And The Office Parent, like, could we liken that to the kind of like, if we're putting it into a more feminine, the mama bear, the one who kind of takes care of everyone.
Stephanie: So this is one of the things I find really interesting. Yes, we could liken that. That is the stereotype, for sure.
Melinda: But there's more to it, I gather.
Stephanie: So my experience has been by a pretty vast majority men are showing up as The Office Parent.
Melinda: Interesting.
Stephanie: And they are very upset by it.
Melinda: Interesting. How so?
Stephanie: They really respond, because of the stereotype. So the stereotype of the office parent really is kind of, you described the mom and nurture parent type, but then also think about the busy body who's kind of knows everybody's business, knows what's going on. making sure that everybody's needs are getting met, but also kind of has their own agenda, right?
Melinda: So there's like a caretaking, but also maybe a controlling.
Stephanie: A little bit manipulative, a little bit. And I think that, again, you know, I'm not tracking for gender, so these are experiences I'm having with consultations with people, right? And it started to really surprise me. I would say that more than 60% of that 27% is male.
Melinda: Interesting.
Stephanie: And what's also interesting, I chose images to represent these archetypes. And I used AI to create them. And I wanted to go against type, right? I wanted that intentionally. So my image for The Office Parent that I chose is actually, maybe 50s Hispanic man who, he's relaxed, he's moving towards retirement, he's got wisdom, he's kind. Totally not the stereotypical female office parent, right? Like and it turns out that apparently that is actually what I found.
Melinda: It's so funny, because as you mentioned, I just pictured somebody who immediately came to mind that kind of fit that. So I can relate with what you're talking about. And I'm sure it also, you know, you could have called it something else and it might've carried a different. resonance, right?
Stephanie: Perhaps.
Melinda: But that's really interesting.
Stephanie: Yeah, it is interesting in the context of, you know, the positive aspects of the office parent, or they really do care about making sure that people's needs are met, you know.
Melinda: Yeah, they care about people’s well-being.
Stephanie: And they tend to have wisdom, they tend to be mentors or somebody they confidants, people can go to them, express themselves emotionally to this person, where they're not typically able to in corporate environments. You know, which was something else that came up in a really interesting way, you know, in terms of how we repress or suppress our emotions in corporate spaces.
Melinda: Yes. And I want to get into that. So let's just talk a little bit more about these percentages, because we were talking beforehand, you know, you have The Analyzer, about 14% percent, Entrepreneur 13%, Networker 12%. And then the lowest percentage score, so the lowest number of people, fall into the Creative category, which is what our show is all about. So why do you think that is? That so few people put themselves into a Creative.
Stephanie: It's really interesting. I honestly, that data, for me, surprised me. Obviously I show up strong Creative, right? I show up 37% creative, right? So for me, I'm just like assuming, obviously everybody's like me. And like, no, of course that's not true. And, you know, the test itself, I don't, I think that some of the answers let you know that you're answering sort of a Creative, but not all of them do. And so it is, there's a little ambiguity in that. And so it did surprise me that it came out so strong, right? Like so low in that one. But really, people really do struggle to see themselves as creative.
Melinda: Well and you also, and you know, there’s a playful component to it also. And, you know, maybe we're playful outside of work but we kind of suppress that part of ourselves at work or you know maybe there's always like the joker, right, that's another kind of archetype.
Stephanie: That is actually, that actually is one, the comedian, the office comedian.
Melinda: Exactly but many of us may, kind-of, put our more playful side, you know, kind of put that away when we're in a work environment.
Stephanie: Yeah, and it's interesting. So the question about playful and creativity was just simply, do you allow yourself to be playful or creative? Right? It's very open-ended in terms of it's not specifying where or how. And nearly 30% of all of the respondents said no, or very, they struggled to do it. You know, I think the breakdown on that more specifically was like, there's a large number of like 18%, that literally said no, they're not creative at all. They don't allow themselves to be creative or playful. And so it wasn't qualified, at work, even though they're taking a corporate test. Most of the questions that are asked are really more generalized. They're not specific to like how you act at work. They're more just like how do you act?
Melinda: How do you show up in the world?
Stephanie: Yeah, how do you show up in the world? And so it surprised me. It really did.
Melinda: Yeah, well, I was just going to say there's also kind of this, sort-of, logical versus emotional, or sometimes we might use the language of, sort-of, left-brain versus right-brain, something like that, which is an oversimplification. But, tell us a little bit more about that. What place do emotions have in the workplace?
Stephanie: Yeah, that's a really good question. Well, we've been told none. We can start there.
Melinda: Traditionally,
Stephanie: Traditionally. We've been told that, you know, I have, messages I have been given are, “All emotional problems in the workplace can be solved with a process.” Right? So if you're having an emotional breakdown in the workplace, it's obviously a communication issue. Let's build a process around it. These two people don't have to talk anymore. Boom, problem solved, no more breakdown. Okay.
Melinda: And if it were so easy.
Stephanie: If it were.
Melinda: Because emotions are real and they're visceral, and they're messy, and you can't always put them in a nice box.
Stephanie: But about 30% of my respondents do. They say that they completely, or almost completely, suppress all emotions, and that is very specific, in corporate spaces. I asked, do you express or suppress? And they had a variety of ways that they could answer that question. So they could say, I do a little of both, or I'm overly emotional, or I'm not. And a large percentage, 30%, said that they always suppress emotions.
Melinda: Well, and this is fascinating because more and more of the research on leadership is coming out to say that we need to have emotional intelligence.
Stephanie: Absolutely.
Melinda: We need to appreciate and sort of acknowledge emotions in ourselves, in other people, and then we can better communicate, you know, and it's not just all systems and processes.
Stephanie: So it's interesting, when we're talking about suppressing our own emotions like this, and we relate it back to the personas, right? So the personas themselves, you know, they all have, but like I said, these light expressions and then these sort-of negative expressions, that we tend to hide away. And what happens is we suppress those things because we don't think they work for us, or we judge them as bad. But when we do that, that's when your emotions are gonna come out in ways you literally can't control. You know, so maybe you're just simply gonna be a passive aggressive person. You know, maybe you're saying nice things in unkind ways or, you know, whatever.
But I've seen in a corporate environment, in a very conservative corporate environment, I have seen a man walk out of his office in a rage and attack another colleague in a rage, over a business problem. And it's not an exaggeration. He lost his job. And for us to have been in an environment where we're not taking into account everything that was going on in these people's lives. And there were a lot of extenuating things that were happening.
Melinda: Of course.
Stephanie: But we expect people to show up with this persona and be the person that you're being paid to be.
Melinda: Yeah. And it's interesting also because in leadership work, we really emphasize authenticity and building relationships and building trust, right? But then there is also this kind of old expectation that, you know, we leave all the other stuff at home.
Stephanie: I sort of align it and it's, you know, I think we have different types of leadership and there, so we have, like on the far end, I think, like military leadership, right? Where it is very critical that you're putting your life on the line. You're putting yourself in a situation where other lives are at stake, and the training and the leadership that goes into being in survival mode in a way that you're responsive, not reactive, this is critical, right? Because being in survival mode, for most of us, is just a reactive mode. But when you're in the military, you are being conditioned and trained and led to be in that space so that you can do your job. You can get the job done.
Melinda: It's life or death.
Stephanie: It's life or death, it's critical. But I have seen marketing managers in survival mode, missing a deadline, thinking that their life is in a life or death, I mean. Is that good for creativity? Is that good for innovation, and problem solving, in a corporate space? Right. Do we need to be in survival mode in corporate environments at all times?
Melinda: Exactly.
Stephanie: And I think that we have sort of taken certain aspects of certain types of leadership styles that work very well in certain environments, and we've applied them into other environments, and they just don't work the same.
Melinda: Right, and I think there's a shift in progress, but we're not quite there yet.
Stephanie: I also want to make a point to say that I believe that the military leaders have very strong emotional skills in what they're doing. It's just how they're prioritizing and how they're able to utilize that. It's interesting, Mark Cuban did a podcast interview a couple of months ago and they asked him, as an entrepreneur, what's one thing you would wish you would have learned or changed. And his answer was, I wish I would have been more kind. Right, I wish I would have been more kind. I didn't have to just be such an (asshole), you know, like really. And I think that that's relevant to sort of our, how we've been conditioned to be leaders in our society. You know, that we have to demand, we lead from a space of fear, you know, it's very dictatorial in many ways, but.
Melinda: And the research shows that is actually ineffective and we're starting to learn that. You know, that it's those soft skills that actually make all the difference, that make people want go above and beyond. That, you know, the leader has your back. There's a sense of trust. We're a team. We're in this together. You know, efficiency and productivity go way up under those circumstances.
Stephanie: Substantially. The Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, right? My favorite quote from him: “Soft skills are hard to learn.”
Melinda: Yes. Right.
Stephanie: They're not so easy. And they're not. And the thing is, is we have kind of a generation of leaders that really haven't been taught them. And I'm a big believer, like nobody ever wakes up and says, God, I want to start a toxic business, or I want to be a crappy middle manager. Like, I can't wait to get there. You know, it's like, no, we want to be successful. We want to build successful things with healthy cultures. We want to, you know, we want to leave a legacy. We want to have purpose in our life.
Melinda: For sure. And we have to often overcome the coping mechanisms and survival skills that we learned from a very young age that may have worked for us up to a point, but then they're not going to necessarily work in a leadership role.
Stephanie: I think it's a combination of that and the fact that we have poor leaders being trained by poor leaders. And so really it's a lot of people that have been conditioned into a management mindset, which is, you know, it has its place, but I believe in managing things. So I believe in managing money and time and projects and processes. I don't believe in managing people. I believe you lead people. People should be able to manage themselves. You know, I have, I've never, you know, I mean, all the people who have ever worked for me were actualized adults. And that's...
Melinda: Who could be trusted to do their job.
Stephanie: And that was the expectation, you know? And I always found that if, I mean, it's been interesting. I've definitely hired people who were...I've always worked in creative spaces, and marketing and sales and things like that. And I have a lot of skills. I'm a graphic designer. I have a lot of creative skills, but I've definitely hired people who had skills I didn't have.
Melinda: Of course, which you want to do, you need to complement your skill set.
Stephanie: Well, correct. But I'm still capable of leading those people. Right? And I think it's kind of a... I think a lot of people, a lot of very skill-based people in our society, we have a problem in corporate America with sort of career growth. And you can be a very, very exceptionally skill-based person without any leadership skills, but you can only grow so far if you aren't, if you're not willing to take on management, right? And I've seen a lot of... you know, SME, subject matter experts, so, you know, attorneys or accountants or even creative people, who are great at what they do. And then the minute they get put into management, that job ends in like a year.
Melinda: Well, and the problem is, it's we're not really taught how to be a leader, even in business school.
Stephanie: And some people don't want to be leaders, though. I mean, some people don't want that.
Melinda: Right, but that is the sort of career growth arc.
Stephanie: I'm a big believer in co-leadership. I actually believe that real technical teams should always have co-leaders. There should be that subject matter expert that they are there to mentor that technical skill. And that there should be that leader that's able to deal with the more soft-skill aspects of the team. And that those co-leaders should be aligned and working together. And it's something in our corporate world that we just don't look at, these sort-of, I think, opportunities for collaboration and growth that don't look traditional maybe, but create more opportunity for real innovation, for real creativity. Because when you take your senior level, best technical person, and then you make them miserable.
Melinda: Right. That's not helpful.
Stephanie: And then, and so, you know, the cost of turnover, right? There was a study done by Gallup that showed last year, 2021, I believe, $1 billion in costs for employee turnover. And for a small company, the cost was anywhere, for an employee turnover, the cost was anywhere from $600,000 to $2.5 million annually.
Melinda: Yeah, and there's not only the monetary costs, but there's all these other costs in morale. If you've got a lot of turnover, if you've got a lot of unhappy people that are leaving, that affects team cohesiveness. It affects culture and climate, there's so many aspects to it.
Stephanie: And productivity, creativity, and innovation take a hard hit when that happens. We really become less able when we are constantly stressed, when we're constantly in survival mode, when we're constantly in this space of like, one of the things, what keeps you up at night? And I had... eight answers and 46% of the respondents said unresolved problems and uncertainty. And I would say that right there could be addressed by reducing stress, allowing us to become more connected, allowing us to be more in touch with our own intuition, and to become naturally more creative problem solvers. We would reduce that number alone. Like just by allowing ourselves to go into more creative spaces. Because I believe that unresolved problems and uncertainty happen because you can't think outside of the possibility of what's right in front of you. You're just stuck in that. This is the problem. Right?
Melinda: And you don't see the possibilities. Yeah. You know, there's again, a much broader range of, of things that could happen, but we do tend to get really focused on, well, these are the only options and then we feel stuck and we feel helpless. And yeah.
Stephanie: It becomes a cycle, and that happens as individuals; that happens for us in businesses as an event. And then it happens for companies too. At an organizational level, companies will get stuck. And that what's how do we move forward?
Melinda: Or they become trapped in their own systems. And then it becomes really, really hard to turn the ship.
Stephanie: Yeah, exactly. Or they work against themselves almost.
Melinda: So I want to bring it back to the assessment itself. And I'm curious, you know, how you developed it, what kind of research went into it? I know you put a lot of work into this.
Stephanie: I did, and I'll be honest, I used AI as supplemental knowledge, right?
Melinda: How so?
Stephanie: So I came up with all the archetypes on my own. I developed a framework for what I thought the archetypes were. And all of that came through. I have 30 years experience reading tarot. I've always been super fascinated with symbolism and symbology and mythology and just everything related to this. And so this is just a part of what drives me and what I love. And then as studying Jungian psychology and getting more of an understanding of like, the archetype aspect of our psyche, right? How our ego and our persona works and how we sort of like come from a higher-self perspective. We can be accessing all of those persona energies, you know, if we do that.
And so, you know, for me, all of that was natural. I had this stuff in my head. As I started really developing it out and I started to, I wanted to, with AI, prompts are critical, right? And so once I had figured out the six archetypes I wanted to work with specifically. I actually did the test for 10 total, and then I filtered four of them out and ended up with.
Melinda: And were they the ones that just had the lowest number of responses?
Stephanie: No, no, before I ever published it. Yeah, I designed for 10, but I felt like 10 was too many. Yeah. It was just going to be an overwhelming.
Melinda: It starts to get confusing.
Stephanie: Because it's not a short test. It takes you about 20 or 30 minutes to take it. And it is fairly comprehensive. And so I wanted to narrow it down. And there was enough, once I was able to get the data, I could see where there was enough overlap that I could say, this one is not quite as distinct from that, or whatever. But once I came down to these six, what I would, the questions I also developed on my own, okay. So I developed all of the questions and then I created--this is also a stereotype, even though I don't really want to use that word--but I created the persona of what each archetype would be. And fed that into AI, so the AI understood who the archetypes were, and asked AI to give me more information about these archetypes.
Melinda: So you were kind of refining your thoughts as you go along.
Stephanie: Correct. I was using AI to help me refine that data. Then, when I actually came up with the test, once I developed the full archetypes, this is like an example of what they would look like. Once I developed the full archetypes with the shadow characteristics and their persona characteristics, I fed the full archetype into AI. Then I would go in and say, how would each one of these archetypes answer this question? And AI would give me my answer prompts that are on the test, right?
So I used AI to help me develop the actual. prompts that you would select. And there were still some of those that were of my own making, for example, the emotion / logic question. I wanted to know. you just have to answer either or it's A or B. Are you emotional or logical?
Melinda: And sometimes it's hard to say, like I'm a little bit logical and a lot emotional or whatever and it's either or.
Stephanie: I know, I did that on purpose to, kind-of, a little bit of a trickster for people. And it's the question when I was going through the beta testing that I got the most frustrated feedback on, because everybody wanted me to add “I'm both.” And I'm like, but then everybody would say that. So, and it's interesting in the test, it comes out basically 50-50. You know, it's 49% logic, 51% emotional. I ask this question a lot when I present, of my audiences, live presentations. It is almost always 100% logical. There might be like three people out of 100 that would answer that they're emotional. So it's really interesting how we judge logic and emotion when we're in public. You know, we're judging emotion.
Melinda: Especially in a professional or work environment, where we think we are supposed to be logical.
Stephanie: Correct. Very much so. You know, I was speaking to a big boss the other day, right? We were doing consultation. And he kept telling me, he said it like three different times. He's like, “Yeah, and I'd run this through my logic brain.” And he's having a hard time hiring people. And so we started talking about his process, right? And he kept like referencing, like running this through my logic brain, running it through my logic... And I go, “Well, when do you run it through your intuitive brain? When do you run it through your heart center?”
Melinda: Like, what?
Stephanie: And he literally was like, “I don't know how to do that.” And I go, “Well, as a big boss, you should.” Because the reason he can't hire, and he said it point blank, he doesn't trust the people he's interviewing. Well, the reason he doesn't trust the people he's interviewing, he doesn't trust his own intuition.
Melinda: Exactly.
Stephanie: Therefore, he is projecting that lack of trust onto the people that he's interviewing. It's always going, he's always going to hire the wrong person. He's literally always going to have that cycle, until he gets into his own emotional center, and starts identifying these triggers that come up for us that we can feel in our bodies sometimes. You know, like that little, oh, I don't trust this person. I don't like what, you know, and so it's having that awareness of yourself that lets you become more aware and more intuitive with other people.
Melinda: Yeah, back to the emotional intelligence piece. So, I'm curious how this, you know, there's so many assessments out there, right? There's so many leadership tests. There's so many personality tests and assessments. So what would you say, kind-of, distinguishes your corporate persona test? Or, I mean, another way of asking the question is how can people use this in a way to enhance their self-awareness?
Stephanie: I think what distinguishes my test is that I'm not trying to tell you who you are at all. I am trying to show you the possibilities of everything you can be. And I am showing you maybe things that you might be pushing away, or things that might trigger you emotionally that you're not even aware of. So for example, if you show up as the big boss, and then your lowest score is the office parent. Right? Well, as The Big Boss, you might be emotionally triggered by somebody who's running around getting into everybody's business or who's like, you know, paying too much attention.
Or, you know, a lot of like, The Analyzer, there's a lot of these opposites, like The Analyzer and The Creative. You know, I did a consultation with somebody who showed strong as The Analyzer and her job, very analytical job. Very, very analytical. She scored zero on Creative. Okay. Zero creative. And I told her that and she started laughing. She's like, that doesn't surprise me in the slightest. And I'm like, okay, but you know, one, how are you defining creative? That's my first question.
Melinda: Yeah. And that's a central, you know, topic of this show because there's this misconception that either you're creative or you're not, which I believe we're all creative.
Both: We express it in different ways.
Stephanie: Exactly. And she made the point that she said that her partner was actually an artist. And I thought, well, that's fascinating. Nice balance, right? She went on to say that she helped her partner create a business. And I go, well, that's quite creative.
Melinda: Yeah. Entrepreneurship. That is creative.
Stephanie: That is quite creative. You know, so, you know, it's again, like really helping people see that how they're defining themselves is a lot of times the conditioning of how, again (either through early life or even throughout our life), you go into spaces, you start to pick up the value systems of the spaces that you're in. And you're in, as people, we're trying to adapt. And so we're negotiating our values too. It's important; we have to. We're negotiating them through our whole life. And in these spaces where we're doing that, if we know our values, if we are real clear on what they are, then we can negotiate from a space where we're not going to put ourselves in jeopardy, or we're not going to dishonor ourselves.
Melinda: Or compromise our own values.
Stephanie: We can still be willing to kind of say, okay, this is the value system of this space, and this is my value system, and this is where they meet together, and this is where I need to create boundaries. And that can happen.
Melinda: Or, even for job seekers, in coaching, whether it's leadership, career, whatever it might be, we do a lot of work around values. And that's so important because if you're applying for a job at a company whose values are completely oppositional to your own, well, that's never going to work.
Stephanie: It's not.
Melinda: You know, so you really need to find an organization where there's alignment, right? Or as you're saying, okay, where do we meet in the middle and how do I set boundaries?
Stephanie: It's, you know, and if that's even possible because to your point, there are some unnegotiable things, and that's fine, too. But nobody knows this, and so my experience with most people is that they don't know what their values are until somebody offends them.
Melinda: Until it's challenged.
Stephanie: Yeah, that's right. And so, you know most people will express that way, but I am very, that's why I talk about value activation, because I am very much about like how do you proactively activate your values, so that you're expressing them naturally all the time? You know, and it's authentic and you're not apologizing for your values. You know, you just, you own them and you're okay with that. And to me, it makes it so much easier to make choices about my own life. And in business, when businesses have truly activated values in business environments. So business values are a little different than individual values, right? But values in business environments for a long time have not really been, I would say like, they're like words on paper.
Melinda: They're kind of given lip service.
Stephanie: Yeah, they're not always deployed, right? They're not always, what I would say, modeled, right? Like, and so leadership drives culture, and culture drives your brand, right? And if there is a breakdown in that culture, that's gonna be projected through the brand out to your client, and your employees are also gonna experience that pain. And so it's always got to go back to leadership in terms of re-evaluating the value structure, determining where there's misalignments, and then truly activate, is that a real value? Are you just saying it's a value, or is it a real value? Because like it is, we need to put a strategy around how not just the leader can activate that value, but literally everyone in the ecosystem is able to activate that value and act on it. And they're empowered through that.
Melinda: Absolutely. So important.
Stephanie: It is critical. It is.
Melinda: So we've talked a lot about some of the archetypes, like The Big Boss and The Office Parent. We've kind of touched on The Creative and The Entrepreneur, which you and I both score highest in.
Stephanie: We do.
Melinda: And so just using maybe us as a guinea pig, since our scores are quite similar (not exactly the same). But so for somebody who scores high in Creative and Entrepreneurship, let's get into like, well, what is the shadow side? What is the learning? What are the ways that are not necessarily showing up, or how could we utilize our potential better?
Stephanie: I'm curious what you would think, what feels like shadow for you in the creative space?
Melinda: Yeah, so something that I've really worked with for a long time, I work with a lot of leadership clients using an assessment called The Leadership Circle Profile. And it looks at both, kind-of, what's considered creative leadership competencies, positively correlated to leadership effectiveness, and then sort-of reactive strategies, which are in summary: complying, protecting and controlling. Right, so people pleasing, moving toward; moving away, being distant, critical, maybe arrogant; and then controlling is like moving against, you know. Micromanaging, perfectionism, overly ambitious, things like that. And then there's different subcategories.
So when I was first taking that assessment, I scored higher in one aspect, not in people pleasing in general, but in passivity. And I thought, I don't see myself as a passive person whatsoever. So how (and this is a 360, so people are giving you feedback), how am I showing up this way? And I did a real deep dive into it, and a couple of things. Number one, I'm kind of allergic to aggression and those kinds of like “My way or the highway,” kind-of leaders.
Stephanie: Hardline rules.
Melinda: Yeah, and, you know, and I do a lot of meditation, and things like that. And so I was kind of looking into the psychology literature, and I was like, okay, well, what is the psychological definition of passivity and what is like the opposite of that, that's something I can connect with. You know, and what I came to was compassionate assertiveness. Right? So not aggression.
Stephanie: Yeah, absolutely.
Melinda: But compassionate. And I thought, okay, I can do that. You know, I can assert myself, I can communicate more directly, I can state my needs, you know, and I know you've talked about The Big Boss as being more logical, right?
Stephanie: That is one aspect. I describe that as being a key difference between The Big Boss and The Entrepreneur. But with The Big Boss, it is very much visionary, authoritarian, not necessarily, there's kind of the positive side of authoritarian and the negative side of authoritarian. So, you know, kind of having that confidence of authority, right? So holding space for authority, is something that Big Bosses do. Now, you can do that in a real negative way, but it's not inherently negative to be that. And so some of that Big Boss energy is they are very data-driven, absolutely. They're very process-driven towards vision. So there's a key there, where they can see how, they can see possibility for sure, but then they have a very logical, step process of how they're going to get there. And so those elements, and more constrained, more conservative.
Generally speaking, they tend to be a little bit more conservative in their decision making. And, you know, even they, by far the Big Bosses show up typically low on Creative. They really do quite frequently. Those two roles tend to be opposite each other quite often. Not always, but quite often. For us, it's true. For us, we're both high on Creative. We both score low on Big Boss.
Melinda: Yeah. So I'm conscious of time, but I'm feeling moved to ask you like, what's the biggest thing you've learned in developing this test, getting results back, working with people on it?
Stephanie: Yeah, the biggest thing I've learned, this has been an incredible learning experience overall. And I think the biggest thing I've learned is about my own biases. You know, whatever stereotypes I held in the process, whatever things I thought might show up, you know, I thought, for example, you know, that we would get way more women as Office Parents, and that was not true, you know. Most of the Big Bosses are women, actually, you know. Like, it just is very interesting, those aspects of just how we perceive things, you know, I perceive things.
It's expanded and allowed me to understand the real challenges that people are dealing with. They're really struggling and, you know, they want to break out of this conditioning. Like, so many people really feel it, and they feel the constraint. And like it says, you know, they're uncertain. They don't know how to solve this problem. And so there's a lot of work to do out there to help people. Not just heal emotionally, but then really kind of embrace the, you know, like we have so much stigma to reduce around emotional care, mental health care, you know, emotional behaviors, and how we perceive that. Emotional strength and what we think that looks like, you know, and, and there's just a lot of work to be done there. And so this, for me, has just given me so much data to understand even myself better, just through looking through the lens of others.
Melinda: Yeah, and I think any kind of assessment like this, it's a tool for greater self-awareness and then ultimately self-development.
Stephanie: That's the goal for it, really is. Ideally I want people to be able to look at this and go, wow, okay, so I showed up as The Creative and my shadow is The Big Boss, but wow, how powerful could I be if I was a Creative Big Boss? Like, oh my God.
Melinda: And that's the thing back to kind-of bringing it full circle around archetypes. We can draw on these different energies, and these different roles, at different times. And the more we broaden our palette, the more resources we have available in any given situation.
Stephanie: That's absolutely true. We do not have to be stuck in these persona types at all. You know, we can be fully actuated humans, and all of that universal energy is available to all of us. You know, we just have to have that awareness, and then the ability to tap into it.
Melinda: Exactly. So how can people find out more about the assessment, about your coaching and leadership work? Where can they find you?
Stephanie: Thank you. So I am on Instagram. I am corporate_mystic. And also my website is tapasinnovation.com. The test pops up right on the website. You can also access it from my Instagram feed. And I post a lot of content every single day. So there's a lot of really good information out there for people. I'm really trying to help people raise awareness that we can make changes, even if it feels like we're shifting the Titanic. We can start to make that turn. We don't have to, you know, head on. And there's just so much opportunity for us. I think really, to me, it's very exciting where we're at. I know it's frustrating for some people, but it's in that conflict that possibility really arises and that we can be truly creative. And that's what I get very excited about, just that potential.
Melinda: Yeah, beautiful. Well, thank you so much. It's great to have you on the show. This has been fantastic.
Stephanie: Absolutely.
Melinda: And so I usually finish each episode with a Creativity Pro-Tip. And I think what's arising for me today is around your Corporate Persona Test. So that's available on your website. If you're curious about your own corporate persona, go to Tapas Innovation, and you'll see it pop up. And, you know, just an extension of that, whether you take the test or not, really think about the ways that you show up in the work environment, in leadership roles, and in your wider life. You know, are there certain roles that you tend to embrace, or ways of being and how might you broaden your palette?
Stephanie: Pretty much. I love that. Yeah.
Melinda: At Syncreate, we're here to support your creative endeavors. So if you have an idea for a project or a new venture and you're interested in our help, please reach out to us about one-on-one coaching, or join our 2024 Syncreate coaching group starting in April. You can find more at syncreate.org. And as far as the podcast, we're available on all the major podcast channels. So please follow us and subscribe. We're also on YouTube, both in audio and video, and we're now on Patreon as well. And you can find us on all social media. Thanks so much for listening and see you next time.
