Wendy Smith

How can, as another example, how can our acceptance of who we are exactly as we are right now enable our growth rather than us having to make a choice between the two of those?

And what we say in the book and what we talk a lot about is that

If you talk to people who are meditating, the very first practice is just focus on your breath.

Start with your breath.

In thinking about both anding and really appreciating these synergies and interwovenness, the first step is just changing the question, noticing that we're asking these either or questions in our lives and changing them into both ands, into an and question.

Heather, I'm so glad you brought that up.

One thing that I want to lift up and just make obvious, because as we wrote this book, we thought, is this point that

Thinking about both ends is both really critical in our personal lives, it's really critical in our organizations and our leadership, and we see it all the time at the level of politics and national relationships and society level.

And so one of the challenges we had in writing this book was thinking about how to apply it to all these levels, but I'm so glad that you're doing it here and thinking about how does it impact our career decisions and how we show up in the workplace, but it also really impacts

how do we, and we've been thinking a lot about this, this question of how do we have conversations at the national level where what we have is people either, there's this polarization.

And so what we talk about in the book is that the ways in which our individual either ors lead us down these vicious cycles.

So first our own individual either or gets us stuck in one position or another.

And so on the Roe v. Wade discussion, we could see how people get in

incredibly committed to one side or the other.

Then they start reinforcing that side.

We talk about it as going down a rabbit hole.

We start reinforcing that perspective.

We start, it's confirmation bias.

We look for the information that confirms our point of view.

We talk to the people that confirm our point of view.