Episode 13 – Designing Inclusive Performance

Clare Kumar: You're listening to episode 13 of the Happy Space Podcast. Today I'll be explaining why I'm zooming out, expanding the focus of the podcast. I'll also give you a teaser to the upcoming episodes. There's a lot to look forward to.

Welcome to the Happy Space Podcast, where we talk about designing inclusive performance through the lens of a Highly Sensitive Productivity Catalyst. Uh, that's me! Executive coach, speaker and brand collaborator, Clare Kumar. Join conversations with authors culture shapers, space designers, and creators of products, services, and customer experience, as we highlight astonishing contributions, tempting a more tender world.

We know that diversity leads to richer results, so let's accept that productivity is personal and commit to designing with respect for humanity. I aim to leave you with ideas to better support your family, colleagues, customers, community, and not least of all, yourself. For everyone including you, deserves a Happy Space. 

Hi there. This is a solo episode I'm doing to explain the transition a little bit, the expansion of Focus of the Happy Space Podcast from highly sensitive people to designing inclusive performance, which means, it doesn't mean I'm leaving highly sensitive people, behind have no worry.

I'll always be looking from that lens, but I hope you'll tune in, not only to understand why I'm making this shift but also to have a bit of a heads up about the upcoming next six episodes, which I'm really excited to share. There's some amazing stuff there, so I hope you'll enjoy this episode. Today's episode of the Happy Space Podcast is sponsored by clarekumar.com with sensitivity, curiosity, and courage.

I serve three groups asking the tough questions that lead to meaningful answers. Number one, I coach ambitious leaders to design for well-being and achieve next-level work-life integration. Number two, I might drop thought balms. That's balms as in B A L M S in keynotes and workshops, helping organizations achieve the business imperative that is inclusivity. And three, I collaborate with brands concerned with respect for well-being on product design, marketing, and PR.

If any of this piqued your interest, come find me at clarekumar.com. I'd love to speak with you. Designing inclusive performance together will lead to the richest results.

Hi again, and thanks so much for listening. Thanks so much for tuning into the Happy Space Podcast, for sharing if you find an episode relevant for someone else and for doing your part to invite a more tender world where more people can make their richest contribution. In this episode, I really wanna explore and explain to you a transition I've decided to make for the podcast from being exclusively around highly sensitive people to being focused on designing inclusive performance.

So have no fear. It's still all about everyone deserving a Happy Space. That absolutely continues and is the big goal here. Why? Because if everybody can find themselves in a comfortable environment, have a great Happy Space mentally, and have a great Happy Space from a schedule point of view, from social connections, all of these things can really then fortify the foundation for a person to be making their most rich contributions.

And I think we're living in a time where we are seeing low unemployment, we're seeing an aging population, and we know that people have been marginalized from the workforce. We have a real opportunity now to focus a little more broadly on the inclusivity that's been missing. We, uh, you'll hear me talk about later, I don't wanna just look at low-hanging fruit here.

I wanna be really zooming out a little bit from the lenses of a highly sensitive person of deep noticing of seeing what's going on. From the marginalization of neurodivergent brains, high sensitivity and ADHD and autism, and all of the different kinds of beautifully diverse ways of being in processing that is out there.

And so many other reasons too, that people are marginalized. Ageism is a huge one. I mean this idea that at 65 your world should just all of a sudden shrink and you have nothing to contribute. Nah. And we don't wanna subscribe to the all-or-nothingness of most work constructs. So what can be done to invite more people, no matter what the challenge, to be able to be giving of themselves to society, to really be able to design that fulfilling life?

I think this is the big opportunity that's before us, but it does require some mindset shifts. So if you're listening to this, this is my call to action, my invitation for you is: if you notice someone who's perhaps marginalizing a group or who could benefit from expanding their thinking around culture or the design of an environment, or an event, or a product or experience, please, please invite them to have a listen here, uh, to a specific episode.

Go through the episodes that I've done and stay tuned for what's coming up, because I'm sure there's something for anyone in the culture space, in the product design space, experience, design, customer service, all of that, it all needs to evolve to be more inclusive. So, uh, I will just reassure you again that this is always coming through my lens, which will always be a highly sensitive lens, and I'm always going to be advocating for what I'm really motivated to do, is have this bigger, broader conversation about inclusivity and specifically, expanding inclusivity.

So, you know, high sensitivity and a neurodivergent way of thinking is definitely my experience. I also, as some of you will know, have an invisible disability, and it's one of these things, it's an autoimmune disease, multiple sclerosis, which I don't talk about often.

I think it's really important. Um, I took seven years to be able to actually say it out loud to more than a small circle of people. I was afraid that no one would hire me. I was afraid that I couldn't even count on myself in the early days of the disease. I had five attacks in five years or four years, and they come and they go and every one was different.

So what led to... It led to a little bit of uncertainty about what I could provide and when. I have been blessed through, I think for sure, lifestyle change and also potentially medication that I'm taking now, I don't know, hard to tell. Uh, but the combination possibly and commitment to reducing stress has meant that I've been attack free since 2016.

And I have to live differently. My capacity is different. What I need to do to manage my life and honour my well-being is different than somebody else. And I want to also be able to step in and talk about that more freely. And I'm, what I've realized is that every time I talk about it, somebody says, “oh, that was my mother, that's my good friend, that's my daughter, that's my boss”.

Um, so being able to have more of these conversations to build awareness about respecting capacity and breaking barriers, not people, and inviting the flexibility that we need. This is what I'm really, really excited to do. I love being an individual conversation through coaching.

Fabulous. I love working with teams. I've been giving for three years workshops on the leadership, mindset, and skillset that's required for the way work is evolving. And gosh, if you hear that and think, “yeah, we'd love to have Clare speak”, reach out because this is, I think my greatest work is to really inspire leaders to make a difference.

So I'll talk more about that later. But, uh, yeah, the goal is then really, continually to invite the flexibility that invites the richest contributions from as many people as possible. So, going back in my history, I work corporately for about 15 years, and now with coaching and working with organizations, having visibility to what's going on, I noticed there's a lot that's still continuing from when I was in the corporate world.

We talked about culture change, we talked about work-life integration. Well, we talked about work-life balance, which I think is fleeting and rather futile. So work-life integration. And there's another organization, uh, in the world now talking about Blendification and I'm looking forward to meeting them and hopefully having them as guests on the show.

This concept of, “yeah, it has work and life has to be integrated”. We talked about it, and I was so thrilled last year when one of my clients agreed to call one of my talks beyond lip service because I think for many years we weren't able to see everybody show up as themselves until the pandemic when we landed in everybody's living room, and we didn't really go far enough in understanding what flexibility ought to look like.

Basically now I say you can't unsee, you can't unsee all of the things that we've experienced through the pandemic, through having Zoom meetings with people's pets, who you might see. Theo and Ellie have been camped out on my desk for most of the last couple of days. Um, we can't, we can't see… unsee the challenges that people are going through.

I look at what's happening now with some of the leadership in the world. If I look at Bob Iger at Disney, if I look at Howard Schul at Starbucks, you can catch some of my posts about this on LinkedIn. There, Goldman Sachs, um, there is a hankering for some old-school leadership to say, “I really need you back in the office and I think we really need to get at this conversation and what biases are at play and what marginalization is going to continue if flexibility isn't really more broadly understood and delivered”, and also the impact on the environment. It's the unspoken consequence of many of these decisions. There are economic effects on our cities. We need, this to be the point of continued redesign.

We've understood as workers, “Boy, we can redesign our work and life experience. We were forced into it and we did it.” And now if I look at Staples Canada Research, for example, um, they have a study on the future of work. I'll put a link in the show notes. Uh, it shows that we're quite evenly split in Canada with the desire to be in the office a hundred percent of the time, at home

a hundred percent of the time, or some mix between the two, the true hybrid employee if you will. And so if we try and mandate anything, rather than design it and make coming together something people really wanna do, we're gonna continue to marginalize. We have to be so much better at designing a compelling reason to connect.

And a compelling reason to come together. And we need our workspaces to be able to be conducive to thinking straight. So it's a tall order, but I think that there's opportunity for all of these things, starting with the mindset shift. So, you know, before the pandemic, I think it was four to 5% of people working from home.

And we saw that, of course, dramatically expand, and now it's coming back down again. But clearly, you heard me say one-third of people want to work from home consistently all the time. And then it's split. So it's about half people wanna, you know, be at home, um, half the time. So there's a lot to maneuver, um, here.

And the benefit of flexibility is going to give more opportunity for people to better integrate work in life. And we know that definitely relates to taking care of self. So this tug of war that's going on, this tension between leaders and employees is serious. There are a few beliefs, I think, which are conflicting leaders.

You know, there's a, a disconnect in the belief about where people can be productive. Still, surprisingly, there's uh, sometimes a leadership bias that the way I work should be the way you work. And there are also trust issues still at play. So I think lots to explore there. As I said, the other piece is even if we've got this sense of we wanna go back, we have to recognize we're not the same people.

We are not the same people. It's, if I think back to April 2021 and Adam Grant really calling it in a New York Times article, the word of that moment was languishing. While in April 2022, I wrote that, you know, languishing started to look pretty good. And we have purely moved into a period of fragility because we're not sweating the small stuff.

There's no small stuff with a war. Uh, Russia's waging on Ukraine and the defence now at play pulling more and more countries in as we need to look out for. The world in this moment, looking at climate change and the number of disasters that are happening. Just most recently looking at California and the incredible rain that's been falling there with roads washed out, sinkholes and cars falling and it's, there's a catastrophe.

Um, and of course the economic challenges right now with inflation, which are not insignificant and really squeezing people who in many, uh, many in large numbers had financial stress beforehand, so, whew, there's a lot. And we have to recognize that our teams, our colleagues, our customers, our family, everybody's been through and continues to go through challenges and because of that we need more tenderness, not only in our environments but in how we deal with each other and how we deal with ourselves. If you're a leader, I imagine you've been seeing this on your employees' faces and you've been dealing with the challenge. This is, it's not a time to back away from being compassionate and being curious.

These are all things I talk about in terms of leadership, skill and mindset to show up with. We can hold onto it. We can create that psychological safety, neurological safety in the workspace, physiological space, in uh, safety, in the workspace, and really have that invitation then for people to contribute and keep people dancing without applying unnecessary pressure.

I love to explore looking at how we get to this, this performance, designing human performance. From two angles, from the bottom up and from the top down. So from the bottom up, and this is, you know how I started as well, with the early episodes of the Highly Sensitive Podcast. Our Happy Space podcast is to look at skill building, to recognize who we are and for highly sensitive people this is recognizing the trait of high sensitivity and how it shows up for. It's recognizing how anxiety shows up for you, how past trauma.

Um, just to be clear, when I mention that word, I am not a therapist and so I fully believe that finding the right therapist, because I've fired therapists before, uh, finding the right therapist to work with, to move through deep issues that can, can really unlock performance and really move on in practical ways… super critical.

But also then coaching on designing your world so that you're setting yourself up for success. That's kind of where I play. It's, it's working with people to look at, you know, what are, what are their values-based goals and ambitions and what are you aiming for the first thing, right? To know where we're aiming and get that clear on that because if we're not knowing where we're aiming, there's so much lost.

So where are we aiming? And then how to manage self so well and, and control what we can to set ourselves up for success. And what does all of that look like? Loving that piece. It's regulating our world, controlling what we can definitely at play for highly sensitive people for sure. But everybody with whatever is happening.

And what needs to be accommodated, um, preferences, perhaps a broken ankle. A redesign is always required when these things shift. So what does that design look like? And then of course, my belief is that if we can find our voices and find a way to play graceful defence and advocate in a way that makes the point...

The points we meet. And I love, I love, love, love Tamsen Webster’s “Find Your Red Thread” because she talks about anytime you're trying to persuade or make an argument and she's got massive TEDx experience. She's, she's a brilliant thinker. If you can start with a valuable, aligned position as the opening, you're gonna make sure people are listening to you.

If you come out swinging with anger, how many people stop listening? So I love that Tamsen’s approach starts with an alignment of values. And I can't think of a leader out there right now, or a product designer or a mayor of a town, which wouldn't say, “I want my community, my city dwellers, my condo dwellers, my customers, my students...

I want them to be feeling safe. And able to perform at their best. I want their best performance to come out.” There's nobody who's gonna disagree with that, and that's the opening of this designing inclusive performance transition is aligning on that piece. And then inviting conversation, curiosity, and exploration from there.

So the top down, that's the top down piece. When now I want to be more than ever connecting with leaders and people that are really doing incredible things to invite this tender world, to invite this neurological safety and psychological safety, physiological safety, and create that space and the culture that really invites that performance, you know?

Just coming to highly sensitive people. And our role here, I really notice, and you'll see that in the upcoming episodes, that the highly sensitive people are out there connecting the dots, driven by high empathy. And these are the people that you find trying to change the world. And I think there's just so much, uh, to pay attention to there.

And to, to really, if you're thinking about becoming one of these people or making a difference to find your voice and step into that… boy, the world can be a richer, more beautiful place. Though we see this tension play out now and I'm really excited to be a voice advocating respect for humanity and, uh, anchored in that high sensitivity.

So I mentioned earlier that inclusivity, it's not just about the low-hanging fruit, it's really not. This podcast is for highly sensitive people. Absolutely. It's also for anyone who's felt marginalized in the world, whether it's, you know, I've talked about things before. I talked about my father's experience.

He had double bypass surgery and wanted to reduce his work commitment. And the system that he was part of, the other people in the system wouldn't support that reduction in capacity. Therefore, he was invited out. Essentially, it's burnout or opt-out, burnout or opt-out, and I tend to think we need to be more creative than that.

I've talked before about a flood that happened in my basement when I lived in Montreal. I was six months pregnant. And my nanny had just quit. And knowing that I would be the one to have to manage the repairs of the flood damage, which basically gutted the basement, we had to get the basement. I knew that my load was great.

So I had a massive shift in capacity at that time again. So having experienced differing degrees of… I'm gonna take a sip of my tea, hang on.

Differing degrees of compassion or absence of compassion from leadership or for this system that we're in. Throughout my life I've always been, and, and I think I saw my parents too advocate, and they were both highly sensitive, both highly sensitive people as well. I've sort of seen that through my life and, you know, totally motivated to keep in that vein, and now expanding compassion and leadership and inclusivity beyond… to things beyond that low-hanging fruit of what we, what is visible to us, the visible disability, the visible, um, skin colour, gender things. I love the focus that we're seeing and that we're seeing in diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

And now belonging in that as well. We're seeing in those initiatives more concrete actions. Slowly, slowly, but I'm seeing more focus. Um, but I wanna speak up for the unspoken inclusion that needs to happen. And this is a radically different mindset shift of not just looking for labels, not looking for boxes to tick, but anticipating the barriers that people might face, really from a moment of empathy, imagining yourself in somebody else's shoes, if they have shoes, and thinking about what life would be like for them and what might they need. And I think every leader needs to think about the people on their team as fully as they can to be able to ask, you know, “what do you need to succeed?”

Um, I talk about that a ton. This is the mindset shift. I'm really inviting leaders to be in this constant curiosity and anticipation of what life must be like in someone else's shoes. A commitment to recognize talent, to figure out, you know, how to be creative and invite that person to shine and contribute to an organization.

Um, if you've listened to the first episode of the Happy Space Podcast, you've heard the story of me finding my way out, in a rather bumpy fashion, of the corporate world, you know, the irony of working for a telecommunications company, making the technology to enable us to work from home, having a job that was 90% completed over the phone, but being denied the time privilege of working from home 50% of the time and coming in for any meeting, any meeting that I needed to be in for, total commitment to be in for. But, uh, no, it was not, uh, the flexibility wasn't there. And what's kind of cool is I pitched to radio back in 2008, to CBC radio and, uh, I pitched it as a story saying, you know, uh, I think there's something here to explore and I gotta, “no, that's not a story.”

And last year, I don't know how many I've interviews I've done, and thank you to CBC radio for having me numerous times to talk about the future of work, flexibility, inclusivity, productivity, all these things I love to talk about and specifically around how, you know, flexibility is going to be a tool and how the future of work, the four day work week, all of these things are elements that we need to consider and I'm hoping to bring a leadership perspective as to the benefits.

The last, the last CBC radio, uh, shows I did talked about the International Labor Organization's most recent report, which actually talks about the holistic benefits to employees for sure, but also to the business of flexibility, the benefits to retention, to instilling loyalty and commitment to the organization.

And, uh, in a low employment situation, uh, a low unemployment situation, pardon me, we need this as leverage. We need to be striving to be more flexible, and then really being loud about it and being magnetic about it for employees that'll benefit from that flexibility. So it's really exciting to see what they offer and to see the minds that are coming to it, which I just adore, you know?

And I guess the other thing to point out is this is not new for many organizations. I think back to my corporate career in the 1990s. My first job was writing about the business case for video conferencing, right? And how it was going to save, uh, eliminate the need for so much to travel. Well, if we could have only imagined Zoom in that moment, rather than the tens of thousands of dollars needed to put video conferencing in office.

It's really amazing how far we've come and I really think we are on the cusp of great change if we can look at human energy and attention as resources worth protecting. I often talk about not running out of STEAM. STEAM is an acronym I use for resources. Space, time, energy, attention, and money. Space, time, energy, attention, and money. 

If we're gonna not run out of STEAM as people and organizations, we have to think about protecting our resources and we can’t ignore that someone's going to spend three hours a day getting to and from work, that, uh, the caregiving requirements will get let go of because we have to now better commute in that somebody has a great ergonomic setup at home and can take the required breaks and maybe lie down horizontally to relieve lower back pain.

Uh, that someone can navigate enough movement in their day being in a more flexible environment, or maybe that we build in rest rooms at work so that people can take the pauses and the stop thinking breaks that they actually need as human animals. Boy, if we can really get closer to understanding human physiology, neuroscience, all of that, and design work for well-being, huh! We will then have sustainable work.

Right? Yesterday I was watching the news and in Montreal, it has really saddened me. There are a group of nurses who are doing, performing a sit-in, in one of the hospital emergency rooms, effectively shutting it down for any new patients coming into the emergency room and other emergency rooms are already under pressure.

And you might be quick to think, “well, nurses just why are you doing that?” But here's the thing, that hospital mandates overtime. You can't say no to being told to stay after a 12-hour shift. So one of the workers they were talking about worked three 16-hour shifts in the four days prior, I think. It's not safe.

It's not safe for the patients. It's not safe for individuals, and we wonder why people are leaving that profession. We have to look at what we're designing, and I was really saddened that defence, that boundary setting, that defence that they have to play had to get to that extreme where it is affecting care, but care is being affected anyway.

It's just that no one's paying attention and no one's changing systematically the system that's causing this situation. So more hiring of staff capable of doing this. Maybe bringing older workers back on shorter shifts. It's going to be more complex. I often talk about on LinkedIn that #hybridisharder.

It is. Flexibility is harder. It's nuanced, it's complex. And the one thing that leaders, I think, really need to step up to is patience for planning and thinking about with greater intention, this design of work and what it's gonna look like. It's going to be definitely more complex, but the rewards we can reap through the sustainable performance of everybody involved.

I think it's too great an opportunity to not look at it. Yeah. So when we think about collaborating and connecting remotely and thereby offering more people to be included in the workforce, what an opportunity it is, um, beyond work culture, right? To think about bringing people back to work. What does it look like?

How much of that experience extends beyond the work culture to design and designing your environment, and designing the way we come together? There's so much opportunity. It extends as well to product design. So, for example, one of the challenges right now in many jurisdictions is modified car exhausts to make noise for the sake of noise.

And I, you know, I'm, maybe I'm starting to understand this because, don't laugh here at me, I like the sound of my cats purring. It's this low-level rumble. Jacques, my love, does not like the sound of cats purring. But he loves the sound of his car's engine. His son loves the sound of his car engine.

And I'm thinking maybe there's something physiological. There's something deeply embedded in that low-rumble sound. My point is, you've gotta figure out how to have these joys in life without bringing down the well-being of someone else. And my cat's purring will bring down Jack's well-being if he's trying to sleep.

So we ask them to go somewhere else, or we put earplugs in and those car exhausts. I mean, sure. Can we modify our reception of sound? Yeah. I could sleep with earplugs. I've tried Loop earplugs and, uh, they do, they do a great job, make a difference and are much cheaper than noise cancelling headphones, in case you wanna give them a try.

I am gonna put them on my product page. Uh, so I'll put a link there and, uh, making a note to self to do that, um, so that you can find them easily because we can do things to modify, but wouldn't it be better if we didn't, you know, have every jurisdiction in North America scrambling to try and figure out how to enforce noise pollution?

We can have noise cameras. But the technology is, I don't believe really great there. I'm, I'm part of the, looking at that. A colleague of mine is looking at that and, uh, we have too much noise in Toronto going on. I came up with that name to hopefully mean it's, you know, it's easy to understand what this is about, this initiative to quieten down the city, but it can also translate to other jurisdictions.

So hopefully that work continues. Uh, my friend, Ingrid is doing amazing work there. You can find her on, uh, Twitter @sippindata, S I P P I N D A T A. She's super savvy about collecting and managing data. So that aside, what if we went to the source and we said, “you know what? Shops that are doing these modifications, you don't get to, you get fined if you're going to augment the, or bring down the noise reduction that's built into a car. 

What if you got fined? We know that there are fines, I believe for… It's illegal, pardon me, illegal to modify the car's noise to be louder than when it left the factory. And so some cars are naturally allowed in the way the engine functions.

This is really talking about A) is that okay in the product design itself? B) stopping the modification at source and this would also be stopping modifying it at home. But what if we can look at how car manufacturers are actually treating this and their sense of well-being while Dodge, I'm taking you to task because you think the Dodge Charger and putting out an electric vehicle, which is modified to be loud is a good thing.

Whereas Kia is designing an electric vehicle and they're proud of how powerful can also be quiet. So can we look at design a little more holistically and take care of our entire population, not the few who want to get the jollies out of a big noise at the expense of other people around them?

So this is the kind of thing that I think highly sensitive people, in particular, can get loud about, quiet and hopefully, um, inviting some change there. I mean, it's a really interesting look, I looked at Xlerator® Hand Dryers, went to their website recently, and they will fully acknowledge that customers have asked for a quieter machine.

And if you think about those hand drying machines, um, I will say that I'm thrilled that during Covid there was a recognition that blowing around bacteria in a bathroom is probably not a good idea. So I saw at Pearson Airport, which used to be, you would be getting your luggage and you would be just listening to the hand dryer noise come out of the bathroom repeatedly.

They've changed a paper and so I'm happy for that evolution. But there are still a lot of places where accelerator hand dryers are in. And my gosh, a 13-year-old, I think it was, did a study. Uh, she's a western Canadian young girl, who was analyzing the sound decibels and young kids' ears were right at the dryer level.

It just is absolutely really obscene what we were, what we allowed to have to happen from product design that is not respecting humanity. We, you know, we look at, um, understanding the measures of sound and light as well, but, we have not kept up in safety and our consideration of safety for humanity with the way technology has evolved.

If we look at decibels, for example, which is, I went exploring, uh, into what is the decibel, and it's a measure. It's actually one-tenth of a bell, which is the base measure named after Alexander Graham Bell, who of course was behind the invention of the telephone. In acoustics, it's a unit of sound pressure level.

But what's interesting and maybe people don't know, is that it's not a linear relationship, a straight line, it's a logarithmic relationship, which means it goes up dramatically. So to explain this a bit more clearly, 10 decibels have a power ratio of 10. Let's say 20 decibels have a power ratio of 100. And 50 decibels has a power ratio of a hundred thousand.

So if you see something that's 82 decibels and it goes to 83, it is not one 80th increase. It is significantly and dramatically increased. So I think measurement, um, understanding measures as individuals and expecting our governments to keep us safe and our product designers to think about safety and the design of products is something we should expect.

It's interesting, as our noise level has grown, the sound of a siren has had to increase over the decades to now being 110, 120 decibels. Extremely startling, and in times before it didn't need to be so loud. So what are we doing as we allow the volume of society to increase? And can we do something about that by being more intentional, right at the top-down design?

Light’s the other piece as well, I talk a lot about, um, colour temperature and was interesting deep diving into that recently and finding out that it's not just colour temperature that isn't in fact, not a measure of the actual wavelength that is coming into your eye. There's looking at photopic versus melanopic versus photopic ratio, and this needs to be calculated and that is what's gonna tell you how much blue light you're getting.

So you can have a light that's looking like it's a warmer colour temperature, but still might be letting blue light in is what that all means. So we need actually manufacturers to really talk about the consequences to humans on the package. And we are so not there yet. So you can kind of make an attempt to reduce the blue light, but unless you have that next measure, you won't really know if you are or not.

So, so much opportunity here. And finally, my biology degree makes sense and I can say that even with my biology degree, I could not read all the articles and make sense of all the formulas. When I was reading about melanopic and photopic ratios, but getting the sense of it and, well, here's an example, here's another example that might appeal to you more in terms of understanding measures.

Canada just came out with new, um, guidance on alcohol, and previously it was roughly two drinks a day, was okay for women, and three drinks a day was okay for men. It's been revised to two drinks a week is safe, three to six drinks is moderately safe, and seven or more is not safe. And so the question then became, what's a drink?

Can you tell me what a drink is? And can we have some indication on the packaging to tell you what you're serving? We look at wine or craft beers. The alcohol percentage can vary greatly. Uh, there's a great Globe Mail article that just came out.

I'm sorry, it's probably behind a paywall that I'm gonna post about it on LinkedIn because I think the point that measures, um, we need information to make good decisions and we need to expect that our governments and that our product and experience designers give us that information.

To the issue I had with noise at the Nashville Conference for the NSA speaking convention. There's, I would've loved to have read that the Gaylord Opryland Hotel is a noise-fest in there, and what are the relative noise levels, um, and different times during the day?

Having that information would've been a, whew, “hard, no, not staying there”. I was looking at the hotel near Graceland, and it was only because I could watch a video that actually took me through the hotel that I could hear their piping Elvis music 24/7 through that hotel. I'm like, “oh my gosh. I Love Elvis's voice. Love it. Just can eat it all up. But 24/7 of anything, I'm out”. 

So how do we start talking about our neurological safety, physiological safety? How do we make that more outwardly expressed when we are in a place of product and experience design? So super excited to be diving into that and having conversations and exploring more of that.

Um, that's my big mission. I'm gonna continue to interview companies and brands that get it and shine a light on inclusive design. I wanna talk to leaders believing in designing buildings and cultures that people wanna be a part of. So if you see a space, if you see an organization, if you talk to someone and they really get this, let me know.

Maybe there's an interview upcoming where I can shine a spotlight on them. Um, I also, you know, wanted to talk more to people who have been marginalized before and have something to offer us, um, in terms of how to approach it, how to advocate, how to fight, invite more success in the way we live? 

I have several people in mind right now to talk with, so I'm so excited to bring more content, like I said, bottom-up individuals designing their sustainable performance and top-down leaders and shape-spacers and culture-developers designing inclusive performance from the two angles.

Boy, we can, we can work the magic. Um, in the next few episodes, then you're going to be hearing from some fellow HSPs, I realized, uh, that are doing amazing things. So first up, it's Paul Shepherd. He's a UK-based mindset coach. The UK favours very heavily, you'll see in the next few episodes of the podcast, and I'm not sure why. I think I'm sensing, and I'm not sure, there's no measure of this.

I'm thinking there's a bit, there may be a bit further ahead, more vocal about inclusivity and neurodiversity in particular, and, uh, just more initiatives going on, not sure, but, uh, in any case, Paul is out of the UK and he's got expertise and experience with anxiety. He's gonna share practical ways to effectively calm it down.

And if you're highly sensitive, like I am in like the average, the population out there, anxiety has definitely, um, been at high-high levels because of the pandemic and what we're coming through. Um, you'll definitely wanna tune into this. He's got, he shares practical ways to calm it down and shut down the rumination that we can go to as deep thinkers and maybe get stuck in analysis paralysis and getting stuck somewhere.

Some real practical things that, uh, sensitive people and people suffering from anxiety can really use to come out of that situation. We'll then take a fresh look at the sensitivity and I'm really, really pleased to have co-author of the new book “Sensitive: the Hidden Power of the Highly Sensitive Person in a Loud, Fast, Too-Much World”.

It's really time that HSP, the trait, the highly sensitive person, is really widely understood and this fresh perspective I think is going to help with that. So I hope you'll tune in. This is, this episode's gonna drop right around the book launch at the end of February. And, um, yeah, you'll love meeting Andre.

He's just a delightful soul and really enjoyed chatting with him. So you'll like that from there. I'm so privileged to have had some time with the iconic Tom Peters. Now, if I talk to some young folks out there, they're like “Tom, who?” but anybody my age and, and with depth of experience in the corporate world probably recognizes his 1982 book, “In Search of Excellence”.

Tom Peters has been Champion-championing Extreme Hu-Humanism. Oh, let me say that again. Tom Peters has been championing extreme humanism for no less than 45 years. He has written his latest book, which I was really happy to talk to him about.

This is the “Tom Peters Compact Guide to Excellence” inspired by his last book, which was “Excellence Now, Extreme Humanism”. It's compact, but it's not a lightweight book in any figurative sense. It's full of provocative thoughts that really deserve consideration. It's got Tom's thoughts and also other thought leaders.

And I would invite any leader to pick this up and use this as the fodder for exploring how you're getting work done with your team and some of the principles. It's amazing, an amazing read. I go from there to talk to Alex Hirst and Lizzie Penny, also from the UK and they are co-authors of a book called “Workstyle”, and they want workstyle to be a new word that is on the tip of your tongue.

So the way we have lifestyle, they want you to also define your workstyle. And this is where designing work comes in, you know, self-design and, hopefully also, as a leader designing work experience. Early days yet on what they hope will be a full revolution. The full title of the book is “Workstyle: A Revolution for Well-being, Productivity, and Society.”

So you can see why my eyes lit up right away. It proposes the total redesign of work to accommodate the individualized work. So never mind hybrid, never mind flexible. They say neither go far enough. So you'll wanna listen to that episode and grab yourself a copy of “Workstyle” if you're thinking about what could work look like if we were really catering to individuals.

Lots of food for thought there. Another company out of the UK. Not Workstyle, but WorkTripp is up next and I talked to Sally Page. Now, Sally has an amazing background. Uh, you might recognize Blinkist? I think they have 17 million subscribers around the world now. They summarize books, such a cool company.

The company she's co-founded with Sophie Bailey is WorkTripp and it's striving to be the Airbnb of corporate events, building events that people really wanna be part of. And as a speaker, I'm like, “hello, pick me.” I would love to come and speak at an event which is in a place which is designed for that inclusivity and rich experience.

It's bringing in collaboration as well as content. Uh, so I really invite people to tune into what Sally's talking about there, because I think there are lessons to be learned for all organizations in figuring out what does, when we're asking people to travel, and boy we've seen travel being not for the faint of heart over the past year, for sure.

We're asking a lot. So the payoff had better be good. And what does that look like? You're not gonna wanna be coming to meetings and just be on your computer talking to everybody else. What does it look like? How do we manage hybrid? What do we design here? So, so great. So my invitation and ask to you is to say if you've got a question or idea, let me know.

If you've got someone you'd like to hear from an organization, a product, service or an experience that really would benefit from some spotlighting in the world to really show their brilliance. Please let me know. You can reach me at clare@clarekumar.com anytime. I'm in the socials as in the episodes, so I know that our guests, we tag them wherever they are, so I know they would love hearing from you. If you listen to an episode and it particularly resonates, drop us a comment in the socials or even better, leave us a review and let us know how the podcast impacted you, what you're taking away from it. Leave a review, it helps other people find the show and will help this mission to create that more tender world. 

Together we can really make that difference. In that more tender inclusive world where everyone gets the opportunity to make their richest contribution, you know it. Everyone deserves a Happy Space. And with that, I will end and just wish you a wonderful rest of your day with sincere thanks for continuing to tune in. Have an awesome day, everyone.

Thank you so much for listening. You can find all of the Happy Space Podcast episodes over at happyspacepod.com. That is also where you'll find a link to our online community. Please leave a review over at Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you tune in. And if you like what you heard, please share.

After all, doesn't everyone deserve a Happy Space?