Jennifer Selby Long
speaker
698 appearances
14 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Jennifer Selby Long’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yes, absolutely. And people have asked me, why is it so hard to make this judge go away? And I say, we don't necessarily want to make the judge entirely go away. That's almost impossible. It's a neural network that's in there. But boy, can we weaken that judge. And the reason I say we don't necessarily want the judge to completely go away because that negative feeling, it's like a warning sign.
It's just a little warning sign that there's something you need to attend to. But it's like a hand on a hot stove. You want to feel it. You want to feel the pain. You want to feel that negative emotion of the pain so that you recognize there's something you need to attend to. But as soon as you feel it,
It's important to just call out, oh, that's my judge versus I can't believe I made that mistake. Oh, stupid. What am I going to learn? It is, by the way, it is no better to be a judge of yourself and not of others than to be a judge of others and not yourself. It's all the judge. It's all negative, right? It all is contagious. The judge energy is contagious to others.
no matter which direction it's headed. And so it's so vital to call out and recognize, oh, that's my judge versus it's me. There's something wrong with me. That's my judge. And then you can weaken that judge in so many different ways. One is to gently make a little fun, like you would with a little kid. Oh, I see you. I caught you, right? I found you, hide and seek.
You can be dismissive of your judge and go, oh, judge, you're so late to the party. I can't believe you didn't bring me down earlier. You can do all kinds of things, but the most important thing is call out that judge. You can just respectfully say, hey, judge, thanks. I don't really need that help. I got this, right? So literally it is having these conversations with yourself.
Because one of the things that the judge does is the judge also calls up what's called an accomplice saboteur. It's another saboteur or two or sometimes three that have taken root in the fertile soil of your brain and wrapped themselves around whatever your gifts are. I had a client who went into his first CISO role ever. A number of my clients are in their first C-suite role ever.
That in and of itself is a huge personal change to manage. And then they're having the surprise of what they learn as they're in that role. And in this case, this client had gone from a highly regulated industry to a fairly regulated industry, which is a whole different ball of wax. And then Vince, as if that weren't enough,
He discovered that his organization, which he inherited, which had a 44, 0% attrition rate and had many people who were actually too junior for the roles that they had. There was also, they were swept up in a company wide quote unquote optimization effort, which is to say cost cutting headcount reduction. He actually needed to replace people.
He needed to spend more because he needed to hire more senior people to manage them. And there was this huge pressure on him, which was particularly being driven by a guy who was a peer of his, who had his boss's ear and who drove him nuts, which is to say he tried. triggered my client's saboteurs.
So we spent the first three months of our coaching completely focused on recognizing the saboteurs and weakening them. Because one of the things his accomplice saboteur, a hyperachiever, was telling him was pretty much, I have to win. And the only way I can win at this change is if this guy loses because this guy is my enemy. What was that going to do?
I can guarantee you my client is sharp and this guy was right and he was going to win. But what was the cost going to be in that organization? Right. What was that cost going to be? So with him, we worked on calling out when his judge was judging this guy. If only that guy weren't here. I could do everything I need to do, right? We focused on calling out his judge when it was judging him.
Geez, if only I were a better CISO, we wouldn't have this problem, right? We called out his accomplice saboteur who was saying, in order for me to win, that dude's got to lose. And so instead of that, we did something which is the, it is the kryptonite to the judge, right? which is empathy. We called up empathy for this poor colleague of his.
who was having a highly unpopular initiative and frankly wasn't doing it in a very effective way and was triggering people all around him. And my client really, truly put himself in that person's shoes. In one meeting, I even had him speak as that individual to me so that he was completely in that guy's shoes and he was able to make his case
and build his argument in a way that was compassionate, right? That was not competitive. That wasn't even about this other guy. The end result was that my client was much happier day in and day out. He was much more successful.
Not only was he able to fend off this drive to cut costs, he was able to get the several million dollars additional funding that he needed to do that, the higher level headcount that he needed to add. He was able to slow his attrition
a great deal and get that under control and this is not something that would have come for him so quickly with such success he becomes the guy who has the boss's ear where he becomes the guy whose organization is turning around and performing how did he not really face that judge and that talk with saboteur and weaken them by calling them out
And then in this case, calling forth his empathy for someone who was, in his mind, incompetent. And to really deeply have empathy so that he's not trying to compete against this guy, but to just get the right thing done.
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And we've had a couple of those. One that comes to mind had such a surprising conclusion in that what I came to recognize was that this leader fundamentally did not want to change and grow. And as a result, we would make a few steps forward and then a few steps back. Interestingly, that particular leader was very strong in some other areas.
And the individual that person reported to, I guess you could say, was my core client. actually concluded that he needed to go find a better opportunity for this guy. Because this guy was absolutely not going to change in his own style to what was needed there. And he wasn't going to change in his fundamental beliefs about what the strategy should be of that division.
And I learned a lot from that, from watching him, because he was an extraordinary role model of... not letting that judge and that hyperachiever neural network drive you to do something stupid, right? Instead of trying to force this guy to go along or to try to butt heads with him endlessly, he saw that he had tried that and it didn't work.
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