IAM1492 – Coach Helps Companies Create Emotionally Healthy Cultures

Nancy R. Burger is a workplace communications strategist and coach who guides executives and teams to foster emotionally healthy cultures. A certified leadership coach, author, and seasoned researcher, Nancy brings her 10+ years of communications expertise and research in psychology to elevate workplace connections. She works with C-suite executives, heads of HR & training/recruiting, managers, business owners, and team leaders across many industries. Nancy also delivers workshops and talks to universities, leadership organizations, and networking groups, all with the aim of cultivating clear, effective, and productive communication dynamics.

• CEO Story: Nancy was a writer for 30 years, but in the last 15 years she became really curious about why we do the things we do, why we get on our way, and why human beings get stuck. And so she did a lot of research on the neuroscience of fear, how the brain is wired and Nancy was really curious about helping herself get unstuck, and through that journey, she became compelled and interested in helping people get unstuck.
• Business Service: Individual coaching and helping companies cultivate emotionally healthy cultures.
• Secret Sauce: Weaving together different skill sets – language, ability as a community, research, and communication skills. Communication with ourselves.
• CEO Hack: Book mention: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck. When we start letting go of having to do everything ourselves that’s when we start to flourish.
• CEO Nugget: Don’t believe everything you think. Every thought you have is a choice you make. You can choose thoughts differently, choose what serves you.
• CEO Defined: Having the freedom to decide how you want to affect change. It’s about creating a pathway forward.

Website: www.nancyrburger.com

Instagram: nancyrburger

Facebook: nancyburgercommstrategist

LinkedIn: nancy-burger-commstrategist

Fear Formula online course information:

http://www.nancyrburger.com/course

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Transcription

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00:21 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:49 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Nancy Berger of nancyrberger.com. Nancy, super excited to have you on the show.

00:59 – Nancy Burger

Thanks for having me Gresh. Happy to be here.

01:02 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, it should be a great conversation. Before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Nancy so we can hear about all the awesome things that she's working on. And Nancy is a workplace communication strategist and a coach who guides executives and teams to foster emotionally healthy cultures. A certified leadership coach, author, and seasoned researcher, Nancy brings 10-plus years of communications expertise, research, and psychology to elevate workplace connections.

She works with C-suite executives, heads of HR and training recruiting, managers, business owners, and team leaders across many different industries. Nancy also delivers workshops and talks to universities, leadership organizations, and networking groups, all with the aim of cultivating clear, effective, and productive communication dynamics. Nancy, excited again to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:54 – Nancy Burger

I sure am.

01:55 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Well, let's get it started then. So, we kind of kick everything off. I know I touched on it a little bit when I read your bio, but I want to hear a little bit more about how you got started with a car, and your CEO story.

02:06 – Nancy Burger

Yeah, so the story is probably not unlike a lot of people who start their own businesses. It comes from a personal place, right? So I've been a writer for almost 30 years. But in the last 15 or so, I became really curious about why we do the things we do, why we get in our own way, and why human beings get stuck, mostly because I was stuck. So I started to do a lot of research on sort of the neuroscience of fear and how the brain is wired. And I got really curious about helping myself get unstuck. And through that journey, I became really compelled and interested in helping other people get unstuck. And that's really why I started my business.

02:51 – Gresham Harkless

Nice, I absolutely love that. I love that you use the word curious because I always feel like when you follow through on that curiosity, there are really phenomenal things that kind of come along when you get those solutions and figure out those things. But there are so many great things that come from being able to kind of give yourself your own medicine, be able to serve yourself, create something that helps out you, and realize that that also impacts so many more people.

03:15 – Nancy Burger

Absolutely true. And it is so empowering to find your own way. And after that journey, I just felt like, well, my goodness, if I could help 1 other person figure it out, wouldn't that feel great? And that started the whole thing. Then I started helping individuals and then teams and companies, businesses, and entrepreneurs. It's just been a great ride.

03:39 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's something that so many times when you're trying to take that next step or go to that next level, I'm sure there's so much confusion and frustration, so many different, you know, words that come about with trying to understand exactly what that is. So I love that. Obviously, you've been able to help yourself out, but I love that you've been able to kind of take that baton and run with it even more.

03:58 – Nancy Burger

Yeah. Yeah. Feels good to help out, right?

04:02 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. So I wanted to drill down a little bit more and hear a little bit more on how you're helping out. Can you take us through a little bit more on how you're working with and serving the clients that you work with?

04:10 – Nancy Burger

Yeah, so I do coaching, I do individual coaching At any level or function of an organization, I also became certified as a leadership coach because I wanted to have that skill set to offer. And what I really do, and you touched on it, is I help companies cultivate emotionally healthy cultures by honing in on their communication flow and dynamics and seeing where knots have developed and how I can help untangle those knots. So I spend a lot of time, and the coaching work really aligns beautifully with that because sometimes communication knots can be sort of narrowed down to a certain flow between individuals or between a leader and his teams. Sometimes it's from the bottom up. But when you can identify where the knots are developing, then I can help them identify where the work needs to happen.

And so it's really a case-by-case basis. But I offer coaching, I offer group coaching, I offer individual at the junior level coaching. I'll do team workshops and talks to facilitate conversations to get things flowing a little bit better. And I also have an online course that I use as an adjunct to that work. If a certain number of people or maybe 1 individual in a company is just getting in their own way they just need to understand more about how they're showing up. We dig in that way.

05:36 – Gresham Harkless

I absolutely love that, you know, the different ways that you're able to kind of, you know, come to and meet and serve the clients that you work with. I love it so much that I don't know this analogy or I don't know if that's a word or metaphor with a not because I almost feel like that's something that just sometimes comes up and crops up over time, overuse. You know, you're thinking about shoelaces or any things that over time that happens and that kind of, it can impede the progress of an organization. And it's so important to kind of figure out where that is so that you can leave that and figure out how to keep the flow going.

06:07 – Nancy Burger

Absolutely true. And, Gresh, I was reading a recent study about this that canvassed 300 business leaders. And 95% of them said that communication is essentially the backbone of the business and they also 86% of them said that their teams were struggling with communication. So you know when you have a knot, you know when your shoelace is knotted and you think, well, I'm just gonna pull the heck out of both sides of this and it'll just untangle and it just gets tighter and tighter. So you have to kind of be willing to get to the middle of it and start to jiggle it a little, you know? And that's sometimes what I do. We get to the middle of it.

06:50 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And it's almost like, you know, it kind of just reminds me of, you know, the same way that you had the knot tightened is not the same way you're going to kind of unloosen it. And I think you have to have a lot of times, that's why I love the work that you do, that different set of eyes, that perspective, that obviously the knowledge and experience that you have to be able to kind of look at things, I think differently to get those knots untied is probably gonna require what it didn't require to have them tied.

07:15 – Nancy Burger

I love that you brought that up because what you just touched on is what we call metacognition. A lot of times we are in it and we can't notice that we're in it because we're in it. So it's not necessarily that, and especially as a coach, I am not prescriptive. What I do is I facilitate that awareness by by giving information so that people can start to notice their own habits and their own patterns and that's when real change can happen so I'm glad you brought that up.

07:47 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome awesome awesome So would you consider that to be what I like to call your secret sauce? This could be for yourself individually, the organization, or a combination of both. But is it your ability to perceive that and see that and, of course, provide solutions? Do you feel like that sets you apart and makes you unique?

08:02 – Nancy Burger

You know, I think what sets me apart is how I weave together my different skill sets. So as I said, I've been a writer for so many years. So language is a really important part of my wiring and the power that I bring to what I do. But what I have woven together is my command of language, my ability as a communicator, and all of the research that I've done. Because it always comes back to science for me. It always comes back to evidence. These aren't my opinions. I'm weaving together the research that I've done over the last 10 to 15 years and my communication skills to present to clients sort of a roadmap for them to build a better, you know, flow of communication and a healthy culture. So I think that's what my sort of discerning factor is how I weave together all of that to build my service offerings.

08:58 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes so much sense. And I imagine just from your experience and obviously your mastery of written language as well as probably being able to communicate as well too, that we sometimes can think of communication in like 1 way. And I think by not being able to kind of look at it holistically, looking at it in different ways and have that research and knowledge that you have, it probably can again, be like some of those knots that are impeding the success that organizations and people within them can have.

09:28 – Nancy Burger

And not only that, Now that I'm listening to you, it brings to mind a really important part of what I do. A lot of the view of communication is how we're showing up, and how we are expressing ourselves to others. But the communication that I work on also is the communication we have with ourselves. Because it all starts with that. The words that are in our brains that we hear as young children. And a lot of people kind of poo it a little bit, as I roll, we're going to talk about my childhood. But I will say this, those words that we hear as young people help us develop our sense of self. And then they become our inner dialogue.

And that impacts the words we say to other people, how we show up in interactions, whether it's at work or at home, it doesn't matter. And today, you know, the lines are so blurred, work, home, you know, we're all in all places at once. So when people can kind of tap into how they're communicating with themselves, And again, that metacognition piece, noticing their patterns. Boy, can it affect huge change in the way they interact with others in the workplace and everywhere?

10:41 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Well, I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. You might have already touched on this, but this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have. But what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

10:54 – Nancy Burger

Well, I have a lot of favorite books. 1 of my favorite books is Mindset by Carol Dweck for The New Psychology of Success. A lot of people have read that book, but I always reference it because it's so powerful. But 1 thing I will say that may be really helpful to your listeners, When I started letting go of having to do everything myself, that's when I really started to flourish. So what do I mean by that? When we're young, when we're entrepreneurs when we're new CEOs when we're building our businesses, we're so worried about, are we covering our costs? All the sort of life skills, like what's the balance sheet? What's the income statement? How am I doing?

I tried to do everything by myself for a long time because I wasn't generating revenue at the beginning, which none of us were. And I started making a lot of mistakes, costly mistakes because I refused to hire any help. At 1 point, I lost 50 harder-earned email addresses because I just didn't understand the platform I was using for CRM. So a hack that I have, maybe if you would call it that, is trying to let go of that holding on so tight to every detail of your business because you will make costly mistakes. Know when it's time to get a little help, even if it's very gradual. Today, you can find virtual assistants everywhere. Have them for a couple of hours a week just to help you, right? But don't resist that, oh, until I make this amount of money, I'm not going to hire any help. That is a mistake, I think.

12:36 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So it's a little bit more word of wisdom or a piece of advice. I usually say it might be something you would tell your favorite client, or if you happen to do a time machine you might tell you have a business. So okay that's easy don't believe everything you think.

12:50 – Nancy Burger

You know because For so many reasons that's my favorite expression. Once I stopped doing it things changed in my life in a big way and it started with understanding that every thought you have is a choice you make Every thought you have is a choice you make Feelings are not choices feelings happen and we can't control that But thoughts are choices. You can choose differently. You can choose thoughts that serve you. Don't believe them just because you have them. Question them. Shift them. Reframe them. That's a lot of how I started in my work and I still do that with clients.

13:31 – Nancy Burger

And I'm still sparked every time I see somebody's face kind of like light up when they get it. Oh, you mean I don't have to hold on to that thought and I don't have to let that thought manifest in all these ways that it tends to manifest. It's such a powerful thing when you understand you don't have to believe your thoughts.

13:53 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. So I want to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which I'm sure you'll appreciate, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And our whole goal is to really look at this differently. So we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So Nancy, what does being a CEO mean to you?

14:09 – Nancy Burger

It means to me deciding how you want to affect change, having the freedom to decide how you want to affect change, and then setting about to affect that change. That's what it means to me. It's much more than having my own business, which I love. It's more than being able to call my own shots. It's about creating a pathway forward that really sparks me and then living that journey.

14:43 – Gresham Harkless

That's what I mean. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Nancy, truly appreciate that definition. And of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I wanted to do now was 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 people can get out of view, and find out about all the awesome things that you're working on.

15:00 – Nancy Burger

Thank you, Gresham. You can, Everybody can find me on my website, nancyrburger.com. And you can find out about the work I do. You can find out about the course, my online course that's available. It's a self-paced course on how to reframe fear-based thinking, you can just send me an email. I'm very responsive. I will get back to you. You can book a discovery call that's complimentary if you just want to hear more about what I do. You can also easily download a one-page or that kind of outlines my services, and what I do, you can print it

15:34 – Nancy Burger

out. And it just is a little snapshot of my business, if that will be helpful.

15:39 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. And to make it even more helpful, we'll have the links and information that show notes to so that everybody can follow up with you and find out about all the awesome things. But absolutely love, you know, obviously the time you took today. But I love the work that you do. I think it's so important that, you know, a lot of times we think that the worst pain is the pain of failing or fear and all those things. But I think regret is 1 of those things where we don't take that step. We don't take that lead.

16:04 – Gresham Harkless

We don't figure out what that might be on the other side. That's really the worst thing that we could do. Truly appreciate you tremendously, my friend, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:13 – Nancy Burger

Thank you so much, Gresham, for having me.

16:16 – 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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