Principles for Aspiring Allies: Keith Edwards on PYP 618

Rhys Paddick is a Noongar/Scots-Irish Australian who walks two worlds — and who has built a business teaching people how to get off scripts and speak from somewhere truer. We talk about the strange afterlife of Australia's "acknowledgment of country" ritual, what "country" means when you capitalize the C, and why every performative ritual eventually collapses unless authenticity is at the center of it. This one stretched me. I came in with my Westernized brain trying to wrestle indigenous wisdom into the shape of a concept I could hold, and Rhys, very gently, kept handing me back something I had to feel instead. By the end I was a little tired, a little eager, and weirdly grateful — which Rhys then named for me as a thing I'd remember. What We Discuss The acknowledgment of country, and how a good thing got hollowed out In Australia, "acknowledgment of country" started around 2005 as a way to honor the traditional custodians of a place. Twenty years later it's at the bottom of every email and the top of every 9am Thursday meeting. Rhys's take: the words are fine. The problem is that nobody is given any context for the concepts behind them, so people perform the script and quietly worry about getting it wrong. Country with a capital C In the Western sense, country is geography plus political borders. In the Aboriginal sense, country is geography plus political borders plus a spirit — alive, conscious, holding law and story, doing the teaching and the healing. Often imaged as a mother. You don't have to be in the bush to be on country. You're on country right now. Why I keep asking the wrong questions I confess to Rhys that whenever I encounter indigenous wisdom, I have the sense of asking questions built on broken assumptions — like asking someone to describe the taste of a pear when I've never eaten fruit. He offers me the concept of liyan — spirit, the thing that magnetizes you toward something, the thing that knows before the mind catches up. Knowledge = head + feet The Noongar word for knowledge, understanding, and experience all translates roughly as Kaatidjiny — head, together-with, feet. Knowledge isn't a thing you store in your skull. It's something that has to travel from brain to fingers to feet to expression. A whole epistemology in three syllables. Ditch fear This is the heart of Rhys's work, and I think it's the heart of this episode. Most acknowledgments of country happen out of fear — fear of offense, fear of saying the wrong thing, fear of the binary right/wrong frame people impose on themselves. Rhys's intention isn't to give people a better script. It's to name the fear, talk about it honestly, and help people locate their own courage to speak from the heart instead of the head. White guilt — does it serve you? I asked Rhys, awkwardly and honestly, what to do with the white progressive guilt of having benefited from historical atrocities. His answer surprised me with its directness: yes, you can choose to identify as white, liberal, ally, footy supporter, whatever serves you in the moment. But the real question is does this guilt serve you right now? If it does, keep it. If it doesn't — and for most people it doesn't — ask instead: who am I now, and how do I show up? Come as you are Rhys says Aboriginal people tend to be interested in you first, before they're interested in the labels you bring. The "ally" identity, with its performance checklist, often gets in the way of just being a person showing up with intention. Success is a feeling Rhys doesn't run his business on KPIs and conversion rates. His measure of a successful workshop is whether the room — and he — feel good at the end. He invokes the Maya Angelou line: people don't remember what you taught them, they remember how you made them feel. A useful corrective for any of us in the thought leader business. The journey from acting to acknowledgment Rhys grew up in suburban Perth — Sega Mega Drive, glasses, musical theater. He studied Aboriginal performin

Leadership coach Keith J. Corbin and I talk about what's missing from mainstream leadership advice — and why the inspirational messages we see on LinkedIn and in bestselling business books often obscure the structural realities of work. And that’s putting it way too nicely. What We Discuss The Simon Sinek problem Keith tells the story of working for a CEO who was a devoted Simon Sinek fan — who quoted Start With Why constantly — and then did a massive layoff right before IPO. How can you believe in "taking care of your people" and then respond to investor pressure in ways that contradict that belief? The answer: leaders aren't free agents. They operate within systems that constrain their choices. Why "Start With Why" landed when it did The book arrived in late 2009, just as the economy was recovering from the 2008 crash and entering a long hiring boom. Caring about employees became structurally important because retention mattered. The message was real — but it was also enabled by market conditions. Missionaries vs. mercenaries Leaders love to say they want people who believe in the mission, not people who just want a paycheck. But we're all both. And when people over-identify with the cause, they can neglect their own material interests — which allows the system to extract more from them. The problem with universal advice When someone on LinkedIn says "here's how to stand out" or "here's how to push back on your boss," Keith asks: who is the particular person being turned into the universal? It's usually someone with privilege, social capital, and easy job mobility — and the advice doesn't transfer to everyone else's lived experience. Fakey language I remember reading Chip Conley's book Peak (I forgot the name during the conversation, but my Amazon orders list always remembers) about treating hotel customers as "guests" — and realizing that guests don't get a bill at the end. Keith shares Simon Sinek's story about a happy Four Seasons employee who also worked a second job at another hotel — and Sinek never asked why he needed two jobs. Individualism vs. solidarity The dominant message in coaching and career advice is about individual optimization — how you can get ahead. Keith pushes back: if you're standing out to get ahead, you're getting ahead over someone else in your same position. How do we think about showing up in solidarity with coworkers rather than competing for scarce resources? The rise and fall of DEI Corporate social justice movements — from BLM to Me Too to DEI — operated on the margins. DEI was often less about decreasing inequality and more about making sure inequality was evenly distributed. When it got tied to profitability ("diverse teams are more profitable"), it became easy to cut once it didn't deliver on that promise. Freedom vs. choice, solidarity vs. individualism Keith draws on the French Revolution's ideals — equality, liberty, fraternity — and argues that freedom has been replaced by consumer choice, solidarity by individualism, and equality by an even distribution of inequality. Democracy in the workplace If we believe in democracy, why don't we bring it to work? You don't choose your manager, you often don't choose what you work on, and you certainly don't vote on layoffs. Keith advocates for employee representation on boards, more democratic structures, and greater worker power — especially as AI reshapes the landscape. AI and the future of labor The same de-skilling forces that have shaped blue-collar work since the Industrial Revolution are now coming for white-collar knowledge workers. This could create new precarity — or new opportunities for solidarity and collective action. The archeology of the future Keith shares Fredric Jameson's idea that instead of forecasting from the past, we should look for "the archeology of the future" — finding undeveloped seeds in the present moment that could grow into something radically different. Resources Books Start With Why by Simon Sinek Peak by Chip

I thought this conversation was going to be about meetings. And it was. But it turned out to be about something much larger: a fundamental redesign of power in organizations. Sheella Mierson, PhD is a scientist-turned-organizational-consultant whose whole practice is built on a simple, subversive premise: meetings are a window into culture, and if you can fix the meeting, you can fix the culture. Henry Herschel brings a complementary lens — a business background helping packaged goods startups navigate the journey from entrepreneurial chaos to IPO — now applied to the fascinating challenge of governing a Jewish co-housing community in Berkeley called Berkeley Moshav. And I came to this with skin in the game. I spent nine years in co-housing myself, in a 22-household community in Durham, North Carolina. So I know firsthand how quickly idealistic visions of communal living can devolve into parking disputes, pet policy standoffs, and festering factions. What Sheella and Henry are describing — the governance framework called Sociocracy — is the most elegant answer I've encountered to the question of how groups of passionate, opinionated people (and let's be honest, co-housing and startups both attract people with very strong opinions) can make real decisions together without anyone losing their mind or their dignity. Sociocracy was developed by Gerard Endenburg, a Dutch electrical engineer who looked at a traditional organizational chart and said: I would never design a power system this way. There's no feedback loop. You can't steer it. What he built instead is a system of distributed decision-making, structured rounds, consent (not consensus), and built-in review cycles that treat every policy as an experiment rather than a decree. After this conversation, I've been thinking about what a Sociocratic world might look like. The question that keeps haunting me: what could Google or Meta or Microsoft contribute and stand for if all their talented, idealistic people had a real say in what they built? Topics We Cover Meetings as Cultural Diagnostics "Show me a meeting and I'll tell you what your culture is like" — why fixing meetings is a route into fixing everything The difference between meetings that drain and meetings that build

Ohio therapist, EMDR trainer, and consultant Tom Zimmerman is doing something I find genuinely thrilling: taking one of the most promising trauma treatment approaches in recent memory — the Flash technique — and grounding it in a rigorous neuroscience framework called predictive processing. The result is a model of healing that is both deeply humane and almost startlingly elegant. What if you could help someone process a traumatic memory by barely touching it? What if the brain's prediction machinery — the same system that keeps trauma locked in place — could be gently tricked into releasing it, a micro-slice at a time? Tom connects Flash to Bruce Ecker's work on memory reconsolidation (which long-time Plant Yourself listeners will recognize, and if that's not you, check out the link to my interview with Bruce below), to the neuroscience of rumination, and to the possibility that modern trauma therapies may be rediscovering what ancient communal healing rituals always knew. And he's building a Cleveland-based nonprofit to study all of this formally. This conversation left me buzzing. I hope it does the same for you. Topics We Cover What EMDR Actually Is (and Isn't) Why "eye movements" is a misleading shorthand — the real mechanism is present-based bilateral stimulation EMDR's "admission cost": why some clients can't tolerate slowing down long enough for it to work

Today’s conversation explores one of the most urgent questions of our time: What would our world look like if our economic system prioritized human and ecological wellbeing instead of endless growth? I’m joined by Omer Tayyab, researcher and collaborator with economist and author Jason Hickel (Less Is More). Omer works at the intersection of economic theory, political ecology, and democratic reform — with a special focus on degrowth, post-growth futures, and how societies can thrive within planetary boundaries. We met at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, where he’s currently based, and this episode turned into an expansive, energizing exploration of how we might redesign the systems that shape our daily lives — from work and wealth to democracy, technology, and community resilience. If you're curious about how to build a world that actually works for people and planet, this one’s for you. We cover: What Degrowth Actually Means Why “degrowth” is not austerity or “living with less”—but a pathway toward more wellbeing, more leisure, more connection, and more equity. How our current growth-driven system is structurally incompatible with ecological stability.