IAM1057- Executive Therapist Works With Leaders on their Internal Worlds

Dr. Melissa Briggs-Phillips is a Clinical Psychologist with a non-traditional career path. After completing her PhD she spent years serving as Project Director, Executive Director, and Chief-of-Staff in various settings. She never stopped teaching as an adjunct professor and maintained a part-time commitment to clinical work. In 2014 she decided to blend her diverse background (managing people, teams, and budgets with her therapist self) and launched Next Generation Behavioral Health. She is an Executive Therapist who works with leaders on their internal worlds so they can show up as their best selves in their professional roles. Her teaching these days is speaking and presenting at conferences, with the hopes that people leave thinking about something from a new angle, and action items to use immediately in their lives.

• CEO Hack: Journalling- one sentence gratitude process and writing things down
• CEO Nugget: People with a solid personality are a differentiator
• CEO Defined: Having a community of people that share a collected vision

Website: http://www.behaveforward.com/

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Transcription

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00:49 – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

01:16 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I am CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have doctor Melissa Briggs Phillips of Next Generation Behavioral Health. Doctor Melissa, it's great to have you on the show.

01:28 – Dr. Melissa Briggs-Phillips

Thanks for having me, Gresh. Looking forward to it.

01:31- Gresham Harkless

Definitely excited to have you on as well. And before we jump in, I want to read a little bit more about Doctor Melissa so you could hear about all the awesome things that she's doing. And doctor Melissa is a clinical psychologist with a non traditional career path. After completing her PhD, she spent several years at serving as a project director, executive director, and chief of staff in various settings. She never stopped teaching as an adjunct professor and maintained a part-time commitment to clinical work. And in twenty fourteen, she decided to blend her diverse background managing people, teens, and budgets with her therapist self and launch Next Generation Behavioral Health.

She's an executive therapist who works with leaders of their internal worlds so that they can show up as their best selves in their professional roles. Her teaching these days is speaking and presenting at conferences with the hopes that people leave thinking about something from a new angle and action items to use immediately in their lives. Doctor Melissa, great to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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02:28 – Dr. Melissa Briggs-Phillips

I sure am.

02:29 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Well, let's do it then. So to kinda kick everything off, I know I touched on a little bit when I read your bio. Could you take us through what I like to call your CEO story? We'll let you get started with all the awesome work you're doing.

02:39 – Dr. Melissa Briggs-Phillips

Absolutely. You know, I I bet a lot of people are gonna relate to this based on your audience. The number one value that always came up for me when I did little career surveys and interests and personality assessments was autonomy and self-direction. I I value autonomy and self-direction, and I pursued that, by going straight through school. But what I found was that higher education and some of the employment experiences that I had didn't actually allow me this thing that was a core value. So when I went off on my own, I realized that I was kind of flanking toward that thing that had been with me all along. And I think that when folks are business building, you have a heavy entrepreneurship listener base, I think.

They'll relate to that, that you are willing to eat fire if you're doing it for yourself, and you can work those sixteen, eighteen-day hour days when it's your baby. And I think that ultimately the reason I went off on my own were those core values. And the content of what I do is certainly a blend of everything I carry with me along the way. You're you know, where we are right now is a caravan of all of the the places we've been. So, yes, I'm a clinical psychologist and I finished that work a long time ago. And then just through a series of kind of serendipity, I ended up serving in operational leadership roles on some complex projects.

So I'm a therapist as my professional identity, but my jobs, if you think about a career as an arc and a job is a thing you do for money, but a profession, your identity, for me, I've always held on to clinical psychologist as an identity, but I've had several jobs as chief of staff, restructuring a research department, as an executive director, as a project lead, as an owner's rep. Essentially I functioned as an owner's rep on a huge construction project at a large land grant university.

So I've had the experience of making a million dollar decision pressing a button and spending money with a lot of zeros in it. And I've hired, probably a few dozen people in my lifetime and managed teams, and had to work with a zero-based budget. So I'm a therapist, but I've had all those other experiences as well. And I kinda sit in that pocket, I guess, when I sit with my clients and when I'm working with teams or presenting at conferences. So I kinda have both lenses when I speak with folks.

05:14 – Gresham Harkless

And so I know that's a lot of, like, what you kinda talk about with clients. Am I correct about, you know, having those conversations? Well, I guess, could you touch a little bit more on how that goes and then, what you feel may upset your party is your secret sauce?

05:29 – Dr. Melissa Briggs-Phillips

Gosh. That's so great. I'm always well, first of all, I'm always a little bit skeptical of anybody who says they have a secret sauce. I have always raised an eyebrow. I always am, and  I think that it's good to be an informed skeptic in life. Not cynical, but just a little bit skeptical. So I would not prefer to have a secret sauce, but I do have, I think, sort of a one way of packaging some age-old constructs in a way that makes them actionable for people. So you use that phrase holding space, which I love because we hold space for others and we need to hold space for ourselves. So let me ask you. What do you do to hold space? Because that's a great term. So do you have a daily ritual or practice or how do you do that for you?

06:26 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. And I'm glad you asked that. And that's something that especially, like, during this, you know, transformational time, I've been more aware of where and how I have been spending my time and energy. But for me, like you mentioned, journaling, that's something that I don't do nearly as much, but I need to incorporate that even more. But I do meditate. I pray. I go I don't know if going to the gym actually qualifies, but I know it's definitely someplace that I hold space Yeah. To kinda get out that energy. But it's those actionable things that I feel like when I don't do them, I know because my day just doesn't seem like it's going as I wanted to go.

07:00 – Dr. Melissa Briggs-Phillips

Yeah. No. The gym actually absolutely counts. And I will tell people sometimes, like, hey. You can pay me or you can maybe join a a CrossFit gym or hire somebody to come walk your dogs or clean your house or what you need is to poach minutes back. That is a higher and better use. That's gonna have a more therapeutic impact than me for six months. I mean, I absolutely believe it's not always sitting in a room and talking to someone. So I have a little suggestion about journaling. So this is what comes up for me a lot with people. It doesn't have to be and if you are a drip if you are a type a, if you are a successful person, if you're a driver, then you want whatever you do, you wanna do the best.

And so what I tend to have are folks who are like, well, I tried to journal, but I just can't do it because I can't allocate the time, and it's so overwhelming. And what if I have nothing to say? And I'm like, time out. Time out. Here's how you do it. You get a day planner or a place where maybe you write down the to-do things for the day. I'm you know, I'll be forty-eight this year, so I'm still old school. I like a pen and a piece of paper. How about you, Gresh? Do you write things down or are you all electronic?

08:15 – Gresham Harkless

I'm a little new age and old school. I do miss writing down and I'm I'm terrible with paper, so I use a digital kind of writing, not a planner, but, a tablet that I can write on like it's a book. So I'm a little bit in the middle.

08:30 – Dr. Melissa Briggs-Phillips

So you're in the middle. Okay. So I like my old school planner, and I make it nice. I have my spouse got me the New York Times planner for twenty-one and had my initials, like, monogrammed on the front of it, and so it's, like, pretty. It's this pretty leather-bound thing. And in it, I have a key, and there's a very basic key that you can use. So I have a one-sentence gratitude practice, and it's not every day. But when something good happens that I have a moment, I appreciate it. I write the date, and I write, like, one or two sentences, and I draw a square around it. K?

If I have something that's just a big idea or a thought that I think might be useful later, I write it down and I draw an asterisk next to it. And if there's something that's a task that I need to get done, I draw a triangle next to it. So there's my gratitude journal, there's my big idea journal, and then there's my task, and to-do list all in one spot. And it's just a visual cue so that you know when you go back. So I have a practice at the end of the year where I go back at the end of December of whatever the year, and I go all the way back to January, and I leaf through. And it's a way to remember that good stuff happened in the middle of the chaos.

09:51 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. I love reliable narrators and that ruthless kind of questions that you can ask because I think so many times and I was gonna ask you for what I call a a CEO nugget, and this might be right along the lines, which is kinda like a word of wisdom or per or a piece of advice. Is it that, you know, being able to, of course, ask those questions, and that is one of the questions that you gave us, but also, I guess, we're talking about space, creating space to have that introspection be able to ask people of that because I feel like it's harder for ourselves to look in the mirror and sometimes say exactly what we see. Whereas sometimes if we have that environment, those people around us, it allows us to kinda see with a little bit less tainted lenses.

10:31 – Dr. Melissa Briggs-Phillips

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's not always easy to hear the truth. I mean, that's you know, and to be frank, some people can't. You know, their personalities are so defended or they're so fragile or they've been so wounded. You know, I kinda think about, some of the best leaders have pillar personalities versus scaffolding personalities. You know, they're just solid. And you may not like everything about their solidity, how solid they are, but you've you feel safe with them. Does that make sense?

Versus a scaffolding personality where you know it's sort of this piecemeal, Gosh. They tend to be the leaders of seagulls. You know, they swoop in with the big idea and plop it on the floor and then swoop out. And the whole team is like, what? What just happened? Right. That would be sort of a manifestation of more, like, scaffolding versus a pillar. And it can be hard to get feedback about those sorts of things, but I do think it's a differentiator.

11:40 – Gresham Harkless

I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different “CEOs” on this show. So, doctor Melissa, what does being a CEO mean to you?

11:51 – Dr. Melissa Briggs-Phillips

I was, I was on a panel last week and a younger woman in her mid-twenties is the CEO of a company, and she shared this anecdote about pivoting her business at the start of the pandemic. And her awareness that the decisions that she was making were going to have an impact on her entire team, her executive staff, her management staff, her production facilities in another country halfway across the planet. And her self-possession that, okay, this decision needs to happen. She made it in twelve to twenty-four hours, and yet she was aware it was connected to other people's lived experiences.

So to me, it is not about living in an isolated way, because as much as I want to be autonomous and self-directed, what I care about is having a community of people that at some level shares a collective vision. And whether that I think most people, whether it's Starbucks or, my tiny little boutique and private practice, what you are committing to is, fidelity to your cause and bringing people with you along the way. So I think that can happen at a really large scale and a really small scale. So that's what it means to me.

13:31 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, doctor Melissa, truly appreciate that definition again. I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and, of course, how best they can get a hold of you and find out about all the awesome things you're working on.

13:47 – Dr. Melissa Briggs-Phillips

Yeah. You know what? I have a homework assignment. So I have a routine practice of asking my clients to identify their, moral code or another way of putting it is their life precepts, kind of like rules to live by. And they can be informed by the faith tradition you were raised in. They can be informed by the wisdom traditions that you may be aware of. And write them down and every day, or at least once a week kind of remind yourself, like, am I acting in alignment with my core, my moral code or my life precepts? So they can be evolving. So three life precepts for me right now, just because you can does not mean you should. My second one is whatever you do, do it on purpose.

And my third one is to seek to find the balance of truth and love. So those are currently my core life precepts. They help you make decisions. When you are in that flooding midbrain, if you can come back to your moral code or your life precept, it gives you just a little bit of nudge in the right direction. So it's harder than you might think. When I ask people to do this, they usually struggle with it because they tend to list, like, values or ethics, and that's not what this homework assignment is. It's a moral code, and I like the, like, three, five, or seven. So have I I think that would be a fun homework assignment for your listeners. And, I'm in Central Ohio and Columbus, Ohio. My website behaves forward dot com. And I am I am findable if I can be useful as a resource?

15:32 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. Well, I definitely appreciate that, doctor Melissa. You definitely are a great resource, so I appreciate you for dropping so much knowledge and information for us today. We will have the links and information in the show notes, and I love that kinda last homework assignment because I think, sometimes it could be difficult because we never ever flex those muscles. And if you don't take time to kinda do that, the first time it usually probably always is. So I appreciate you for reminding us of that, of why we're doing what we're doing, which we can definitely get lost in. And, you know, putting that pen to pad, so to speak, or even if you're using, a tablet like I am, you can write it down there. So appreciate you, doctor Melissa, and I hope you have a great rest of the day.

16:10 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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