“Happiness, success, creativty, innovation, collaboration, and more are our natural state once the drama is gone.”
Research has shown that the average employee spends nearly 2.5 hours per day in drama – gossiping, tattling, withholding buy-in, resisting change and stepping down from accountability. Drama is emotional waste – any unproductive thought or behavior – and like any other waste in the workplace, drama can be eliminated through great mental processes.
Our guest this week, Cy Wakeman, has turned her life’s work into giving leaders tools to recapture that emotional waste and upcycle it into results. She started Reality-Based Leadership in order to teach leaders and individual contributors ways to lead in reality that diffuses drama in the workplace. She’s formed that into an organization that does leadership development, speaking and training, and publishes unconventional tools and leadership programs to use to diffuse drama in the workplace.
“The more conscious we become of how we are feeling and the assumptions we’re making, the more we can make intentional choices about how we want to behave and use our energy.” – Cy Wakeman
Cy Wakeman is a drama researcher, global thought-leader, and New York Times best-selling author who is recognized for cultivating a counter-intuitive, reality-based approach toleadership. Backed by over 25 years of unparalleled experience, Wakeman’s philosophy offers a new lens through which employees and executives alike, can shift their attention inward, sharpen their focus on personal accountability, and uncover their natural state of innovationsimply by ditching the drama.
Deemed “the secret weapon to restoring sanity to the workplace,” Wakeman has helped companies such as Google, Facebook, Viacom, Uber, NBC Universal, NASA, Pfizer, Johns Hopkins, Stanford Health Care, Keurig Dr. Pepper, AMC Theatres, White Castle, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and countless others learn to navigate our rapidly changing world using good mental processes to harness energy wasted in workplace drama and reinvest that effort into achieving profound business results.
As a highly sought-after conference headliner, Cy Wakeman holds a Certified Speaking Professional (CSP) designation from the National Speaker’s Association, placing her within the top 3% of speakers. She’s a regular contributor on Forbes.com, Success.com, The HuffingtonPost, and Arianna Huffington’s Thrive Global. She’s been featured on the TODAY Show, the AskGaryVee Show with Gary Vaynerchuk, Cheddar TV, The New York Times, Business Insider, The Daily Muse, SHRM.com and many more. Cy Wakeman was voted in the top 100 leadership professionals to follow on Twitter for 7 years in a row and in 2021, she topped the Global Gurus list of Top 30 Leadership Professionals across the globe, coming in at #1.
Wakeman has published four books, the latest of which is Life’s Messy, Live Happy: Things Don’t Have to Be Perfect for You to Be Content (2022). Cy also hosts her own No Ego podcast and adds bi-weekly video content on YouTube to address leaders’ biggest challenges in the workplace. For more information, please visit Realitybasedleadership.com or follow Cy on social at @cywakeman.
On today’s show, we talk about the importance of managing energy versus managing people, the powers of non-judgment, detachment, and impermanence, and how to hold people accountable and create non-negotiables amidst workforce shortages and the great resignation.
