May 25, 2021
This is the Handle with Care: Empathy at Work podcast. I’m your host, Liesel Mindrebo Mertes helping you build a culture of care and connection through empathy at work.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
Welcome to Season 2. Empathy matters. It isn’t just some squishy personality trait, it is a set of skills and a capacity for connection that you can develop, if you have the desire. And that is what season 2 is all about. I am going to introduce you, in each episode, to a leader that is purposefully building connection and engagement at work. They will share best practices, the ways that have grown and their occasional failures.
My guest today is Scott Shute. Scott is the Head of Mindfulness and Compassion at LinkedIn, which is this great role that sits at the intersection of ancient wisdom traditions and a technology company. He is also an avid photographer, a musician, and, most recently, a published author. His book, “The Full Body Yes” launched in the middle of May. His mission is to change work from the inside out by “mainstreaming mindfulness” and “operationalizing compassion.”
This was a deeply enriching conversation about how to build up mindfulness…and in a year of so many distractions, don’t we all need a little more attention and mindfulness? And how to operationalize compassion, which is right up my alley.
We began talking about his book. I got to read an advance copy and enjoyed a passage so much that I called my 13 year old daughter into the room one morning to read it aloud to her. It was that spot-on.
Scott Shute
I was saying what you just said about response is what has been typical, like what I'm not getting is I send the book to my friends and they're like, oh, hey, cool. Got your book. Thanks. Not getting that. What I'm getting is like, oh, my God, Chapter eight, like, we got to talk about this because blah blah, blah, blah, blah. And and there is at least one story in there for everyone that's been super meaningful and has moved the needle on their life just a little bit or something that resonated with just a little bit or a lot.
Scott Shute
And so that's been super gratifying.
Liesel Mertes
Absolutely. Well, and as someone who prizes the craft of storytelling, I enjoy just all the places that the full body. Yes. Took me from Japan to Kansas to dealing with bullying in your adolescent years and back again. So I enjoyed both the wisdom but also the delivery of it. And I I have some questions to ask about certain sections of the book. I can't wait to jump in.
Liesel Mertes
What is your personal connection to why empathy matters and why it specifically matters in the workplace?
Scott Shute
And thank you for that question and thanks for having me. It matters because we don't work in isolation. We work with others, we live with others. And so to me, empathy, I talk a lot about compassion and I'll separate the two a bit. So I define compassion, is having an awareness of others, a mindset of wishing the best for them, and then the courage to take action. And some people say that compassion is empathy plus action.
Scott Shute
And so if you're talking about these first two pieces, it's first being aware of others and then having a mindset of wishing the best for them or a mindset of kindness. And why that's important in the workplace is, yeah, we don't work by ourselves. We work in teams. And what we've discovered, what science has shown us Project Aristotle at Google has shown us is the number one factor in creating a high performance team is, well, it's not their IQ, it's not what school they went to.
Scott Shute
It's not even the level of diversity in technology or overall diversity. It's psychological safety. This ability to say, hey, can I can I be myself in front of you guys, can I can I fail in front of you and know that you have my back, but actually even harder? Can I succeed? Can I win in front of you and know that you have my back? So if we're on a sales team and I just made two hundred twenty percent a quarter with two weeks to go and my friends at eighty five percent of quarter, are they really going to help me out.
Scott Shute
Are they going to look at me the same way. Am I going to look at them the same way. So this idea of empathy, this idea of being aware of others and having a mindset of wishing the best for them, really putting ourselves in their shoes builds powerful work environments where we end up being more creative. We end up with better solutions. We end up delivering something much better for our customers.
Liesel Mertes
I love that. Just touching on the data points, some of the business case that's there, I'd like to dig a little deeper. Would you tell me about a time in your work experience where you think, man, I was not OK? I was really going through a hard time and this person's care, attention, what they did or said really made a difference and paint that picture for us.
Scott Shute
Sure. Great question, I think for me, I'm trying to find a specific one, but for me it's that feeling of connection. I, I felt the sting of isolation in high school. You know, I had a really great junior high. Some people hate junior high. I loved junior high. But my first two years of high school were really painful or really hard. And they were, upon reflection, upon a lot of years of reflection.
Scott Shute
I realize this because I felt isolated, that I felt loneliness, that I felt, you know, other than and I eventually ended up changing schools. And what was so great about finding a new school, as I found people that I connected with, people who enjoyed me for who I was. And this is the antidote to loneliness, this is the antidote to isolation and this being connection, and when we feel like we're connected to others. And so I've what I appreciate about your work is that, you know, a lot of stuff when we're going through it, it's about that isolation.
Scott Shute
Sometimes it's about the isolation we feel about ourselves, like we don't feel good about ourselves. That inner critic, that obnoxious roommate in our mind is going crazy and we just feel gross. Sometimes it's feeling a disconnection from others. Sometimes that can be about performance, right? If I'm if things aren't going well, then it it comes back to feeling disconnected, feeling like, oh, well, are they going to throw me out of here? Am I going to lose my job?
Scott Shute
And so anything that builds that connection, whether it's a manager's kind words or a cross-functional partners kind words or just having a friend at work that you can go take a walk around the block with or, you know, now assume call and and say everything you want to to. That is such a meaningful thing because it's like, oh, here, here it is. I can remember again what's really important and what's really important are these relationships. What's really important is feeling connected to myself, but also connected everything else
Liesel Mertes
That that reminds me of a passage from your book, The Full Body Yes.
Liesel Mertes
Would you mind if I would it be OK if I read aloud to you just as a section you're talking about this process of discovering what your dream job would be. And you're write, "If companies were more conscious, they would treat their customers better. There would be more integrity and trust in the world. If companies and their leaders were more conscious, they would treat their employees better. There would be less trauma and stress. There would be more healing, more creativity.
Liesel Mertes
People could be whole. We wouldn't need to think of our work life as bad and the rest of our lives as good. We can bring compassion into everything we do at work, not just because it makes others feel better, but also because it's a better strategy for success. The research bears this out. We just haven't quite caught up to it in practice yet."
Liesel Mertes
I feel like that echoes what you just said, and I would love to hear in your position and scope of influence.
Liesel Mertes
Tell us a little bit about your role at LinkedIn and how you've gone about being part of actualizing some of those beautiful sentiments. And I love for you to also include some of the pain points along the way from concept to reality. There's oftentimes some stretching that goes.
Scott Shute
Sure, sure. I've been at LinkedIn for nine years and the first six of those, I was the VP of Global Customer Operations, which was essentially customer service and a lot of other functions that are customer facing outside of sales. And part of me is I've I was able to bring my mindfulness or my contemplative practice to work, starting about two years in as a volunteer for my for my other job. And I've been in this this role now for three years as a full time role, Head of Mindfulness and Compassion.
Scott Shute
But what does it mean? So there's two parts of my role, mainstream mindfulness and operationalise compassion and in mainstream mindfulness, we're just trying to make mindfulness as meditation really and overall mindfulness like self awareness, just as normal as physical exercise. So you can think of it like mental exercise and physical exercise, because our employees, they're almost all knowledge workers. Right. We don't need to run six minute miles or lift heavy things, but we do need to stay mentally focused and emotionally balanced and all those sorts of things.
Scott Shute
So this is why it's important. And what it means is we offer things like meditation sessions. We have, well, pre pandemic. We had 40 to 60 a week across the globe. LinkedIn is about a fifteen or sixteen thousand person company. We offer an app called Why Is It Work, which we really like from our partners at Wisdom Labs. And every year we do a 30 day challenge involving that app, usually in October, where we get people to use it and the challenges, you know, meditate or, you know, use the app 20 times within the month of October and we'll give you a T-shirt of this year.
Scott Shute
We give Hoodie's said, never, never underestimate the power of a free hoodie on behavior.
Liesel Mertes
Absolutely. I'd do much more for a hoodie than I would for a t shirt. That was right.
Scott Shute
Right. It was pretty good. We do things like mini retreats if people want to go further. Speaker series, again, just trying to make these mental exercises and these this idea around self awareness just as commonplace as physical exercise. Now, for that part, and it's been super successful, you know, every year we have more and more and more people, but also as a percentage of our population taking part in these things.
Scott Shute
And during especially during COVID time, during quarantine time, you know, there's been an uptick because, one, people can come to it. When now when I lead a meditation session, I'm getting people from all over the world instead of just, you know, the people from my building on fourth floor on Thursday at four thirty in the afternoon. And the second reason they come is because they need it like we're we're all having challenges in our own ways.
Scott Shute
And so that those challenges are forcing people to go inside.
Liesel Mertes
I also want to hear about that part that you said operationalising. Yeah, and it is because it makes me think of another quote you have in your book that we don't rise to the level of our expectation would fall to the level of our systems, which is something that I do. Yes. And my training and consulting all the time to move from good intentions and thoughts and prayers to actually how do we have replicable systems of care and training that make us good instead of poor in these issues.
[Liesel Mertes
So I'd love to hear more about that.
Scott Shute
Let's talk about that. So I first talked about all the things we're doing with mindfulness. The second part of my job is operationalizing compassion. And look, I think mindfulness is interesting and it's all about self development and it's really powerful. And that's going to happen with or without me. There's a huge move towards mindfulness, but compassion, compassion, I think, is where the juices, because this is how we work. It's how we work together.
Scott Shute
It's how we work with our customers. So if you think back to my definition, three parts, you're building capacity to be aware of. Others have a mindset of wishing the best for them and then the courage to take action. Now, put that in the context of a business context. So as an example, this and what I would say is I'm not the one making LinkedIn a compassionate place. It was already like that. It evolved that way.
Scott Shute
This is why I have this job. The more my role is to codify it, to say, how did we get here? You know, if the executive team was going to leave LinkedIn and go to any other place, like what would the top three or five or 20 things that we would do, like how would we bring the magic somewhere else? And so this is what I mean. And I'll share some examples. So as an example, our head of sales will stand in front of whatever five thousand salespeople at sales kickoff and say something like, look, hey, our job as salespeople is to provide long term value.
Scott Shute
So don't sell something our customers don't need just so you can hit your quota. Hmm. Right. And that's I was a salesperson too at 25. That's not how I was taught. Or in product development, you know, every week we have four or five or eight product reviews, and this is kind of like Shark Tank without the attitude, you know, a product manager will come to the product executive team and say, all right, well, here's the next revision of my product and what we expect to happen.
Scott Shute
And something like, OK, Will, if we do X, Y and Z, we're going to result in 13 percent more engagement. In other words, 13 percent more clicks on the site. And the first question, if the person doesn't answer it themselves, the first question is always, all right, well, how is the member experience and the customer experience? And if the answer is, oh, well, hey, did I mention it was 13 percent more clicks than the meeting just stops and then it becomes an object lesson on our first principle, our number one value, which is members first.
Scott Shute
And so these types of things are built into our culture. But it goes back to this to I have the capacity to be aware of others and wish the best for them and then the courage to take action, meaning sometimes, you know, we deeply understand our customers. We deeply are trying to solve their problems. And sometimes I need to do something for them. That's not great for me either. The company in the short term. But I know that over the long term, it's going to be better for both of us.
Scott Shute
We're going to provide long term value and in the long haul will be more successful financially and as a company in general. Right.
Liesel Mertes
You know, the question that that prompts in thinking about operationalising and also potential pain points, I find sometimes in company cultures there can be a focus on the customer, the member, whatever the title is, and that sometimes that happens at the cost of the employee experience. You know, where we're driving, for results, you know, whatever whatever metric is held up there. How are you taking some of that same degree of intentionality, especially in a year that has been so full of disruptive life events, death, job loss, relationship transition and operationalising internal compassion in those shows?
Liesel Mertes
And and I assume that, like everybody else, it's kind of been a finding your way in the midst of that.
Scott Shute
Yeah, there's I think business is best-run not by writing in a thousand places, a thousand sorry, a thousand page playbook, but by these high level things. And then each situation is different. So compassion goes back to it's a balance for all of the stakeholders, not just the shareholders, meaning a company who takes care of their customers, as we described, but also takes care of their employees as described, you know, have an awareness, a mindset of wishing the best and courage to take action and the shareholders.
Scott Shute
So you have to stay in business in order to meet your vision. Right. In addition to the broader environment, you know, the community that you work in, the broader global environment you live in. So when we're creating this, when we're moving from me to we thinking, I think that has compassion at the roots of it. And each situation brings up a different set of solutions.
Scott Shute
There are sometimes where we need to do absolutely the right thing for the shareholders, you know, and there's sometimes we need to do absolutely the right thing for the employees or the customers or our neighbors and next to the buildings where we work, whatever it is.
Scott Shute
But if I'm trying to do something that for the long term is best for the whole, that's when we win. So what does that mean on the ground? Well, let's say that we have a call center in India and in the city where they're in. They can't even get to the office or they can't. They're worried about their health. There might be a time when we just need to close our customer service center for a day or several days knowing that it's not great for our customers, but our employees need to take care of themselves.
Scott Shute
And sometimes the opposite is true. Sometimes employees need to work extra hard to take care of our customers, but it's finding the balance over the long haul that is important.
Liesel Mertes
What are you taking away as valuable lessons from a leadership level of what, supporting people well, during disruption, looks like?
Scott Shute
Sure. Well, it for sure starts at the top at the language that people are using. So there's a couple of things that have happened. One is, you know, when we do company meetings in the old days, like every other company, C levels are standing on stage. Everybody else is kind of watching and there's a separation between us. Well, now we do the company meeting and the same sea levels are at home. You know, we're on Zoome or whatever the technology is.
Scott Shute
We see their dogs walking by or their kids or, you know, we have technical failures. They have technical failures, just like we all have rain. And it has humanized it has equalized us in terms of that. We're all people like we're all humans first and workers somewhere second or down the line. And so as a leader, if I can be conscious about this, it's it's being more vulnerable. It's talking about my own challenges, but it's also a recognition of everybody else's challenges.
Scott Shute
And, you know, early on, our leaders were very clear and saying, hey, look, you and your family, your health, your physical, your mental health are the most important things to us. So please do what you need to do. The work will be here when you get back, you know, and that was the that was the messaging. But then it was also in our policies and everything that we did that supported that messaging.
Scott Shute
So I think this is it as a leader, be vulnerable and then be aware and treat people as people, treat them like you want to be treated like if your grandma or the person you treasured most in life worked at this company, how would you treat her?
Liesel Mertes
Yeah, there's a good grounding question. What is
Liesel Mertes
So pulling back a little bit in your book, The Full Body. Yes. And in your work and mission in general, building compassion in our lives and our workplaces, I imagine that there could be some pushback that you receive from other people who have risen to executive positions within their companies. What is some of the most common pushback that you hear when you talk about building compassion at work?
Scott Shute
Right. I think usually it's a misunderstanding of what compassion means. People often think that it sounds soft or it's just about loving each other or some like they put you know, they even make that. They even make that voice. It's soft. It's about loving, you know, airy fairy. And they have their hands in the air while they're doing them. And this is not what compassion is all about. Right? It takes real courage. Like, I think it's much harder to be a compassionate manager than to be a command and control jerk manager.
Scott Shute
It's super easy to stand up on your pedestal and say, just look, I told you what to do. Just do it. Come on, why haven't you done it? And then scream at people when they don't do. Exactly. You know, it's managing out of fear. That's super easy. That takes no skill, but to be compassionate means you deeply understand other people means you have to take the time to listen. And sometimes compassion requires a strength that you really have to work up to.
Scott Shute
Right that strength to have the hard conversation. You know, if somebody's struggling, the strength to really find out why and to in some cases either coach them up or eliminate their role or move them on to another role, these are things that require a strength of our own character and conviction and values. And it's not easy at all. So usually it's a misconception of what it means. And then when you get down to it and we say things like like I was talking about the salesperson or the product person, they're like, oh, yeah, well, of course you put customers first.
Scott Shute
But then when we really dig into the conversations, like, do you have the courage to put the customer first when it's hard? Yeah, it takes real courage. Do you have the courage to put your employees first when needed to? You know, so it's a lot harder than it sounds. It's easy to understand, but it's hard to put into practice.
Liesel Mertes
Right. I'm a I'm reminded when you you talked about that somewhat easy default behavior that can happen. That's an avatar that in my training's I'll introduce people to one of these default behaviors that we go to in the face of other people's pain, because it's how we've had to survive some of our own psychological, emotional, spiritual pain. And that my character I term the the Buck-Up Bobby, the just have to keep going. And whether it's, you know, a Commiserating Candace or a Cheer-Up Cheryl, these these postures that we take on to avoid some of the the skill of going deep, of being present.
Liesel Mertes
You know, you you mentioned in your book and I deeply resonated with it, that our deepest need is to be seen, heard and acknowledged and both in our successes on our average days and especially on the days where, you know, everything feels like it has gone sideways.
Liesel Mertes
In your capacity as a worker, as a leader, how did you personally skill up? Because your book is, you know, sprinkled throughout are anecdotes of having meaningful conversations with, you know, someone who worked under you, who is deciding, you know, to start a new relationship or to pursue graduate education.
Liesel Mertes
Do you remember feeling out of your depth and like you needed to skill up? How did that process go for you as you acquired the skills necessary to get where you are?
Scott Shute
Sure. So part of it I always wanted to be a manager. Like I. I was always interested in psychology and the way our minds work. And I tended to be when I was an individual contributor as a salesperson, I tended to be somebody that people would come to ask for advice. And so it took me a while, but I figured out how to start being a manager. I had to change industries, you know, to be a manager.
Scott Shute
And I remember that job was the most stressful job I ever had. And I was 29 and leading a team of, I don't even know, eight people or 10 people. And that I was that was a job I was freaking out the most in not leading a thousand people organization, but leading eight for the first time because you have to figure out like oh whoa, this is totally different. Like this person's career is dependent on me. There a lot as dependent on me.
Scott Shute
And I felt that weight and it didn't happen all at once. But, um, but in every conversation, you know, you get that feeling in your stomach like, oh, that went really well. Or I know that could have gotten better. Yeah. And so over time I scaled up by you know, I got coaching certified. I took extra trainings on how to be a manager, how to be a better listener. And I was just also reliant on my I've always had a deep kind of personal development bent.
Scott Shute
So reading books and, you know, going to classes and just continually trying to learn to to be better at it. So it seemed like most things it comes with a failure. And I don't mean that in the big way, but like doing something and walking away from it, going that could have been better. Yeah.
Liesel Mertes
Yeah. At its at its worst it can be the, the unrelenting voice that is always desiring improvement that you have both give space to you as a potential for good, but also reign in in those moments. That's right. Leave me alone.
Scott Shute
That's right.
Liesel Mertes
It was good enough.
Scott Shute
Well this is this is one of the hardest challenges in development in, you know, how do we be a hard charger, whatever you want to think about that, how do we be super successful and how do we have a mindfulness practice or be a good person or continuing developing, you know, on these softer skills?
Scott Shute
And I struggled with that for a really long time because
Scott Shute
I have been at other companies where I'd look up at the roster of the C suite and think to myself, oh, my God.
Scott Shute
Like, do you have to be a jerk to be a VP here? I'm like, is this that's I don't want to do it. And and then I had have now had the luxury of working at other companies and especially LinkedIn, where in fact jerks are not allowed. I could look at the entire C suite and go, I'd be proud to be any one of those people or to work for any one of those people. And realizing that some companies and some leaders and some organizations have figured this out, like there is a way for each of us to be successful and to be a good person.
Scott Shute
They are not mutually exclusive. In fact, I do think they go together at the highest levels.
Liesel Mertes
Well, and what what I have found also as I have worked with companies domestically. Internationally, in a small, medium, large, especially over the last year, is that. There's there's still an element almost of permission that is needed to be able to see people in top levels of influence and scope being able to have these moments of weakness, you know, not not failure, but to but to say like this actually is really hard. Like we we have our kids schooling at home.
Liesel Mertes
And I feel like it's just kind of overwhelming or I just want to bury someone within the last week. And I'm not fully OK for this meeting because there's only things that people are in the hard driving cultures where leadership hasn't purposefully wanted to be more connected and more human. There's a tremendous amount of just having to absorb stuff, defer those messy, both bodily feelings and also emotional ones, which just wreaks havoc. Yeah. In the long run,
Scott Shute
These, I'm going to reframe the weakness to vulnerability.
Liesel Mertes
Yes.
Scott Shute
When we express our vulnerabilities, it's actually a real, real strength as a leader when you know, when done appropriately. Because people want to identify with the people that lead them, right? And if someone is they see as perfect or, you know, then it's like, oh, I'm not like them. I can't ever become like them. But if they see leaders as, oh, wow, I really see myself in them and I aspire to be someone like that today, I aspire to be more like them today.
Scott Shute
That's really, really powerful. And it is accelerated by these leaders ability to be vulnerable, to be real. It's actually counterintuitive, but but showing some vulnerability now and then is a real strength.
Liesel Mertes
Yeah, I like I like that pivot towards vulnerability. Tell me you introduced the concept near the end of the Book of microcompassions in the workplace. I really liked that term. Tell me more about some of the power that you're seeing of microcompassions in the workplace.
Scott Shute
Sure. Well, we're probably familiar with micro aggressions, right. So I was trying to figure out what the balance of that is. Not that it solves every microaggression, but a micro compassion is just this idea that compassion doesn't have to be complicated. It's just the simplest, simplest things like smiling at someone or saying, hi, you know, so you're in the grocery line. And instead of just being lost in our phones or we're waiting to check out, like, why not say hi to somebody and ask them a question that gets them started?
Scott Shute
Because going back to what is one of our deepest needs, our deepest need is to feel connected, to be seen, to be acknowledged, to be heard, ultimately, to be loved. And we don't have to go all the way to love right there in the grocery store. But how about seen and acknowledged and heard to feel connected? And so we can do this at work by saying hi, by smiling, by remember someone's hobbies, you know, it's like, oh, hey, Colin, did you have you been surfing lately or, you know, have you been fishing lately or whatever?
Scott Shute
Knitting, you know, what's the what's the latest project you're working on? Or ask about their daughter or their son or something they're excited about. It just shows that you remember and you are seeing them as a person. And let's see what's another or you know, sometimes we have these meetings either by Zoom or we're in person and somebody hasn't said something for a long time. It's just bringing them in like, oh, Katie, we haven't heard from you for a while.
Scott Shute
I'd really love to hear what you have to say about this topic. Anything that we can do to create more of the we and less of the me moves us forward and helps people feel connected.
Liesel Mertes
Well, and creating these cultures of care. Yeah, I talk about how. It's a competitive advantage for you, it comes out in employee attraction and retention and how people are able to survive, stabilize and return to thriving when things go sideways. I imagine at Linked In, as it is so much about connection at work, you actually know that the numbers behind the LinkedIn matrix are seeing what are being reported in jobs reports, which is that companies, especially right now, as we are in May of twenty twenty one, they are looking to hire.
Liesel Mertes
You know, we're ramping back up. It is difficult to find people talk a little bit about. I'd love to hear. Yeah. Just compassion and a culture of it as the competitive advantage and how you succeed and how you pull in the right people to accomplish what people classically talk about. As you know, the the more business-y ends of your your profit and loss.
Scott Shute
Sure. I will get there. But first, I'm going to digress into the history of work for just a real quick second.
Liesel Mertes
Yes. I love a good digression.
Scott Shute
So we started start, I don't know, at some point there were kings and slaves, like when we were building the pyramids 5000 years ago and workers were not highly regarded. And we had the agrarian age for a long time where you had landowners and slaves or non land owners and workers were not highly regarded. And then in the industrial age, you know, you imagine a factory where with a thousand seamstresses or people on an assembly line all making the same thing again, workers not highly regarded.
Scott Shute
Well, now you fast forward to today and a company like LinkedIn and not everybody has gotten are not everybody's in this position. But at LinkedIn, we don't have any hard assets. Right? We're not selling cars or copper or commodities. All we have is information. And so that means that the number one asset we have are the employees. And so we want our employees to have we want them to be at their best, i.e. the mindfulness programs.
Scott Shute
And then we want to create an environment where they can do their best work, where they where they feel wanted. Now, as a worker now in Silicon Valley, the power is in the workers hands. Right. So an engineer in Silicon Valley can write their own ticket. They can work wherever they want because they're in such such high demand. This is the opposite of where we were 5000 years ago. And so people want to work in places where they are valued.
Scott Shute
They want to work in places where their company is doing good things in the world, you know, where they are trying to make a difference, where there's a purpose driven. They want to work for good leaders, people who care about them, people who are honest and have the same set of values that they do. So this whole idea of creating and we don't even have to use the word compassion, but a culture where people are valued, where it's about the we instead of the few me, where it's about the we of the world instead of just the me of the company.
Scott Shute
People want to work in those environments and over time they'll vote with their feet. You know, people don't leave jobs. They leave managers. Right. But they also will be disenfranchised by companies who are, you know, not that honest or they're doing bad things or create an environment where the bad seeds get bigger stages. So it is it's a competitive advantage over time in the talent that you attract. But it's also a competitive advantage in terms of the quality of products and services you end up offering your customers.
Liesel Mertes
Absolutely. I appreciate the added coloring of the history of work, and I like that I like that to thank you for that digression.
Liesel Mertes
You've written this book. You've launched it in the midst of pandemic time. Still tell our listeners a little bit about The Full Body yes. And what made you write it when you did?
Scott Shute
Sure. Well, I've been thinking about writing a book for 35 years since I was a 15 year old in my ninth grade English class. I always knew I'd write a book. And every time I sat down or virtually sat down to write it, it wasn't there.
Liesel Mertes
Can I ask, did it as like, did you know what kind of book was it? Fiction or poetry? It was just going to be a book.
Scott Shute
I just knew I would write a book. Like, I just I just had that knowing and and I figured it would be something about my life journey. But, you know, when you're 15, you don't have much of a life journey to write a book about. So I got to go live first. And then in December of 2019, I'm coming home with an from an event with a friend and my friend is driving and I'm in the passenger seat and gets this funny look and he goes.
Scott Shute
The universe has told me to tell you it's time to write your book. Yeah, and I kind of checked in. It's like, wait, does it feel right? It's like, oh, yeah, it does. It does feel right. And the timing was just, of course, just, you know, it all lined up. I found an editor. She helped me create an outline because I never wrote a written a book before to turn my hundred stories into 35 or 40 stories and put them in order.
Scott Shute
And then I just started writing. And then exactly at the time it was time to start writing is when the quarantine happened. And so I traded commuting time for essentially meditating and writing time. And the book came in 10 or 11 weeks, which, according to my publisher, is extraordinarily fast. But it was time. And then, you know, now it's a year later. This is the wild part about the publishing industry. It takes a while to get it out there.
Scott Shute
And so releasing of, you know, kind of hopefully towards the end of the pandemic when they can actually. Yeah. You know, the people can actually get out. And but but I think that what I'm talking about, these things that I'm talking about are universal. It's talking about really finding our true selves right. When we when and when you are deeply aware of our own selves, our own values, what's really important to us. And then we make decisions based on what's important.
Scott Shute
This is, I think, what we're all going through. I mean, in the last year, how many people do you know have moved or they've gotten divorced or ended their relationships or started relationships or changed jobs? To me, it seems like those big life events are on turbo. And, you know, part of it. Yeah, it's the challenge, the crucible of what we've gone through. But part of it is people are getting they're like, no, I know who I am.
Scott Shute
And I I need to be something different than who this is right here. I'm making a change. And that's what this book is about.
Liesel Mertes
Well, and even in that story of some of the, you know, writing with a colleague who who spoke that it was time, there's a thread that goes through of a paying attention to to the concrete, to the mystical, to the range in between of what is going on within our life story. So even the story of that, the final nudge from a pandemic and from a friend that are in line with some of the themes.
Scott Shute
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that, you know, in my own life, I believe that, you know, science from the universe, whatever you want to call that thing, the divine, whatever are all around us. You know, I see signs in billboards and fortune cookies and license plates in front of me not all the time, but they'll glow. I call it the golden tongue wisdom. Like, they'll just light up and the message will just match, like something I've needed to hear.
Scott Shute
And because I believe it and because I then act on some of those insights, like more of it happens. And so I believe that life happens this way. But or and if someone believes that life doesn't happen that way and there are no science and it's just the way it is, then, you know, that's how their life happens. I believe that's true to me.
Liesel Mertes
I deeply resonate with that. The the receptivity and the expectation leads to a very different level of attentiveness and receiving. That's true.
Scott Shute
Yeah, receiving and then action, I think, you know, so if we get a message and then we're like, I'm going to do anything, well, then I think it's less likely that we'll be, you know, that the science will show up the next time. Yeah.
Liesel Mertes
Well, thank you for for sharing in The Full Body, yes, as listeners, if their interest has been piqued as they are paying attention to their life and even to this moment as they're listening and think maybe this is for me, where's the best place for them to go to get a copy?
Scott Shute
Sure. Well, you can get a copy wherever books are found, Amazon and Barnes and Noble and everywhere else. I learned something new in the process, like if you have an independent bookstore that you love, you can actually buy online at bookshop.Org. And if and if you designate your local bookstore, they will get the profits from that book from online. I think that's really, really cool. I did not know that coming. If you want to know more about me or the book, you can check out my website at Scottshute.com or the fullbodyyes.com either way, or follow me on LinkedIn for kind of daily updates.
Scott Shute
And where else? Oh, if you're into meditation, I'm on INSIGHT. Timer And about every two weeks I do a live event on Insight Timer where you can do a I often am talking about compassion and compassion practices, but that's another place to find me.
Liesel Mertes
And Scott, as you are paying attention to your life, do you have a sense of the what next? I realized that you took a year ago and that is now out in the world. And we might think that this is your current work, which I know it's a part of your current story, but we're particularly excited about right now.
Scott Shute
It's in this moment I'm first I'm giving this book some time and time and attention to breathe. I'm taking and taking a couple of months away from LinkedIn just to focus on the book release and then I'll go back. But I'd love to spend the next part of my career really diving into the operationalising of compassion, because there's there's I think that's my unique place in the world. Like I've spent time as an executive, but I've also spent time in a really deep way as a seeker and as a, you know, a cleric.
Scott Shute
I'm a member of the clergy and there's not that many of us. And so I'd love to find a way in really simple and secular terms of how to bring. These divine concepts, really, of compassion and love into the workplace in a way that everybody just goes, oh yeah, like, yeah, why aren't we doing it that way?
MUSICAL TRANSITION
If you are interested in getting The Full Body Yes, finding out more about Scott and his mindfulness offerings, or even seeing some of his beautiful photos, those links are in the show notes.
Here are three key takeaways from our conversation
- Practice micro-compassions today.Asking a colleague about their life outside of work, connecting with a smile or small talk. These moments of connection are incredibly powerful.
- Compassion is a competitive advantage for companies, especially in today’s knowledge economy where people have options and are, as Scott noted, voting with their feet.What are you doing to create a culture where compassion, this empathy-in-action, is given and received regularly?
- I like how Scott broke down what compassion looks like at work.He described it as “How should I act at work if my grandma or if someone that I loved most in the world worked here?” This is a good guiding sentiment for the day.
OUTRO
Links:
To find out more about Scott and The Full Body Yes: https://www.scottshute.com/
Resources to Operationalize Mindfulness:
- From Wisdom Labs: https://wisdomlabs.com/Mindfulness-Kit/
- More on Mindful Workplaces:https://www.mindfulworkplacemovement.com/playbook