Leading With Light, With Jennifer Mulholland And Jeff Shuck

Discover the transformative power of Conscious Leadership Growth with Jennifer Mulholland and Jeff Shuck, co-founders of Plenty Consulting. In this episode, they explore how connecting with your inner light can revolutionize your approach to leadership and personal development. Delve into the concept of “leading with light” and learn why traditional leadership models may fall short in today’s complex world. Jennifer and Jeff share insights from their book, discussing the importance of self-awareness, alignment, and intentionality in becoming a more effective and fulfilled leader. Uncover the four guiding lights that can help you navigate your professional journey with greater ease and purpose. Whether you’re an established executive or an aspiring leader, this episode offers valuable perspectives on harnessing your authentic self to create positive change in your career and beyond.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcast/jennifer-mulholland-and-jeff-shuck.

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Leading With Light, With Jennifer Mulholland And Jeff Shuck

Co-Founders Of Plenty Consulting And Co-Authors Of Leading With Light

My guests are Jennifer Mulholland and Jeff Shuck. They are the Cofounders of Plenty Consulting, which provides coaching workshops and retreats to help leaders and businesses grow. Jennifer is an author, strategist, alchemist, and executive coach. Before becoming Co-owner of Plenty, she was the Chief Innovation Officer at SunGard, which is a Fortune 500 company.

She founded several businesses focused on bridging the gap between information and impact in healthcare technology and holistic wellbeing. She lives in Park City, Utah. Jeff, before co-founding Plenty, was a Cofounder and CEO of an event fundraising firm, Event 360, raising nearly $1 billion over the years for charity. Jeff lives in Indiana with his wife, four kids, and two dogs. Jennifer and Jeff, welcome. Thanks so much for doing the show with me.

Thank you so much for having us. It’s great to be here.

Thanks for having us.

Let’s start with a brief overview of Plenty. Can one of you share an overview?

We help conscious leaders and organizations grow. We work with executives, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, teams, nonprofits, and social impact investors to help them figure out how they do good in the world and how they grow while they’re doing it. We’ve been in business for several years, working together as co-principals of the company. Through that work, we have worked with thousands of wonderful people across the country here in the U.S. and across the globe, helping them figure out what they want and helping them get it with ease and fulfillment.

I mentioned before we started recording that my focus with Pathwise is more B2C oriented. Are you B2C, B2B, or a mix?

The Blend Of Personal And Professional Growth

We do both. We have a leadership retreat. We do executive coaching for executives, managers, and leaders from all over who come to our retreat center in beautiful Park City, Utah, at the base of the ski mountains. We access nature and go deep into individual work of personal growth. That is professional growth. It’s all one. We love to say at Plenty that we don’t live a personal life and a professional life anymore. We live one life because we are that common denominator that got blown out of the water during COVID.

We do a lot of individual growth work, but we also have an appetite, strength, and love for doing work with teams and organizations at the strategy level and culture level. That works with lots of different businesses for profits and brands that you would be familiar with, and as Jeff mentioned, nonprofit organizations, the cancer space, feeding the hunger, and cleaning the oceans. It’s quite a diverse business. That’s what makes it interesting and juicy.

What’s the shape and size of the organization besides the two of you? What does your support crew look like?

We have a beautiful, mighty team. We have about four of us in the Plenty center of the universe. We work with outside consultants and agencies as we need different support. Jeff and I facilitate the curriculum and our business models, and we coach the people in the companies that we work with.

I would add that there’s a quick story in the book about the conscious process that we used after both being in our professional careers for several years a piece of wanting to unwind the team that we had and changing the direction of the company and having tensions with the team that we had to work through. It’s always nice to have large teams. It feels good to have a small and mighty group.

The two of you knew each other, went your separate ways, and came back together. It would be interesting to have each of you briefly share the stories and how you came back together.

We worked together for several years. When we first met, I told my kids about the first technology boom when everyone was trying to get things online. We worked at a company called Campus Pipeline that was seeking to web-enable colleges and universities, which now seems trite, but at the time, it was a huge process. Jen and I were part of the early team in that startup world.

The dot-com world was new, exciting, fast-paced, wild, and nuts. As always happens, fate intervenes, and it intervened in my case in the death of my mother, who died of cancer when I was about 29. I felt a calling to do something else. I left that company to talk my way into fundraising. From there, I started a larger company called Event 360, which I was the CEO for over a decade. We raised money for causes like charity or causes like cancer, Alzheimer’s, AIDS, and a number of other things. That was my reaction to things. I’ll pause there and say I left, but Jen stayed on through the tremendous growth of the company.

That young part of my life was climbing the corporate ladder, and I loved my job. I went through several mergers and acquisitions. I was given an amazing opportunity to head up innovation for the company. I led the consulting services organization. It was a lot, but for several years, I enjoyed the tech part of it, the professional services aspect of it, until I had my own fateful moment. My body started to speak to me and say, “You need to pay attention. Is this what you’re here to do?”

I talk a lot more about that in the book, but it led me on a path of self-discovery and getting back into alignment with what could be possible. I left and started several companies in the field of executive coaching and building a tech platform for local communities around the country to share what works around being healthy, happy, and whole.

As I was in the midst of that, we had a mutual friend who reconvened us by inviting us to a mastermind. Jeff and I reacquainted and hit it off once again. We had stayed in touch over the years and had paralleled paths but never crossed or unified the path. It was one of those moments when we were doing different things, but the intention, vision, and wanting deeply to make a positive difference in the world and make this world a better place through people and change brought us back together. We decided to merge our companies into what we call Plenty Consulting.

When we’re talking with people who are trying to build their careers or trying to figure out what’s next in their careers, it feels like the advice everybody gets is to network. We’ve all heard that to make connections and meet people. It can sound slimy, like, “Am I supposed to meet people for the sake of meeting them and using them?”

A Fresh Perspective On Networking

There’s a deeper thing behind networking that’s about meeting people, staying in touch with them, liking them, and being interested in them. In a lot of ways, Plenty and Jen and I’s working relationship is a testament to that. We didn’t stay in touch because we were both trying to get something from the other. We were friends and interested in what each other was doing.

When a third friend said, “Let’s get together,” I didn’t think either of us thought, “This is going to help my career.” It was about being in a relationship and community. The coaching that we always pay forward is the idea that networking doesn’t need to feel gross or slimy. It’s finding people you care about and are interested in and seeing if you can stay in touch with them.

We offer a course on networking and have all sorts of content on our site about it. Whether you listen to Keith Ferrazzi or Dorie Clark, we’ll all tell you that this is a mutual benefit thing. If you’re doing networking and it’s too much focused on you, it does feel slimy on both parts.

One of the things to follow that thread that we talk a lot about in our new book Leading With Light is listening for the yes. It’s like listening for your own knowing. An imitation like that, do you hesitate? Do you have to run it up through your thinking and rational mind to weigh the pros and cons? Is it an intuitive yes? You lean in, and you open. That was a great indication of not only following the invitation for the mastermind but it’s how we run our business and teach people. How do you know when you know something is on or off?

It doesn’t take much time. When you are trying to process the pros and cons intellectually, we say, “It’s time to wait.” Your intuition, knowing, and wisdom are instant. Your body will tell you it’s a yes. That can apply in a career as your readers are contemplating the shifts that they may be experiencing or what feels good in the environment that they’re in, and what doesn’t feel good is to come back to where it feels like I’m leaning in and where does it feel like I’m procrastinating. I want to do anything other than what I’m here to do or being asked to do those things.

You talked a bit about Leading With Light. You talked earlier about connecting with Jeff. You brought that up in the context of networking. One of the key things I got right at the beginning of the book is about you connecting with yourself. Jennifer, you talked about that moment when your body was telling you you needed to pay more attention. What you’ve talked about in terms of some of the other things you’ve done and what you do at Plenty is about connecting with yourself. This is my putting words on it, but it’d be great to read in your own words how you think about that concept and how it fits into the broader themes of the book.

The Concept Of Conscious Leadership

One of the things we talked about is what a conscious leader is and why you care to be a conscious leader. We talk about the idea of being aware, aligned, and intentional. That is what a conscious leader is. It’s what a conscious leader practices. It’s not an end state. We are practicing that all the time. Leading With Light book is much more about helping you discover who you are and who you’re meant to be rather than learning a set of rules that some other leader has set forth that are principles that work for them. We learn to apply it for ourselves. We’re all unique and different.

This is not a leadership book that talks about what you need to do. It’s about helping you discover what works for you. How do you know when something is in alignment? We call it your light. That could be your soul, essence, vibe, personality, or preferences. How do you know when things light you up and when things don’t?

One of the practices in the book that we talk about is listening to our body’s signals. We’ve all been given the most unbelievable coach, guide, and guru. That’s our physical body that uniquely speaks to us and tells us something is safe, open, interesting, and curious, or something is risky or not meant for us. Those signals are on all the time, but often, especially in the corporate world, we’ve been trained to live in our heads.

We disconnect from those signals. We forget to listen. My heart rate is increasing here. I’m starting to breathe in a shallow way because I’m stressed, nervous, or anxious. Those kinds of signals are all cues that can help the conscious leader attune to where we are in alignment with our best selves, with who we are, who we’re meant to be, and when we’re not in alignment with that. Hopefully, that tees up. I’ll pass the baton to Jeff to expand on how these principles apply to navigating the decisions we need to make as leaders. What does it mean to be a conscious leader, and why does it matter in this world?

Connecting With Yourself As A Leader

J.R., you hit it. I like the way you summarized it. You’re hired. We’ll take that way of connecting with self. Before I directly go where Jen was saying, to come back to that idea of connecting, in our careers, we all learn to study people who have gone before us. We all get where we’re going because we have mentors. We learned from their mistakes and teachings. We can read a lot of those things.

Jen and I were cut from that cloth. A lot of the seminal works in leadership we’ve read and supported. When you write a book on leadership or do any leadership consulting, you have to feel like you have something to say, like, “Why add to the noise?” There’s been so much written and done on this subject. For us, it was coaching people who were partly through their career or at a plateau in their career and life because those two things are related, and we realized, “I’ve gotten to this place where there’s no model for this anymore. There’s no role model. There’s no mentor for this.”

At a certain point, learning from others can only take us so far. We get into a situation where there’s no analogy. We found we were working with people in teams and businesses that were, at that point, a crisis point or a huge point of opportunity. One or the other was all the previous models. There was nothing left to read. There was nothing else to learn. In those moments, we have to learn to connect with ourselves, to your point, and Jen’s.

This idea of conscious leadership is as much as we’re all trying to do things and accomplish things, there are habits we can learn and study. At a certain point, we also have to know who we are, what we care about, and how we even know when those things are being supported or not. A lot of us become successful in our careers by pushing through the signs of stress, anxiety, and fear. That’s great. That’s sometimes part of getting through difficult times. At other points of opportunity and crisis, we’re better served by listening to those things. I’ll stop there, but the idea of connecting with yourself is core to what Jen’s talking about in terms of conscious leadership.

Hitting on a couple of things from what both of you have said, you think about pushing through versus listening to yourself. You can push through to a degree. At some point, it doesn’t work anymore. The trajectory toward burnout is an example of a non-linear path. You will be able to manage. Something will automatically shoot you up, and you hit a wall. We’ve all been there. I would imagine most of us who’ve worked long enough professionally have hit some point where we’ve hit a wall for one reason or another. It’s because we’ve deliberately been ignoring it. We’ve been tuning out the signals.

The other context you bring up in the book is a simple example, but the idea of reacting with anger, taking that pause and connecting to the thought of anger and saying, “I’m angry, depressed, or afraid.” Putting a name on it and thinking about what’s behind that. When you do that, you build more self-awareness. It comes back to what Jennifer is saying about the fact that they’ve got awareness, alignment, and intention. That’s what I took away in terms of this whole idea of conscious leadership.

The Power Of Awareness In Leadership

That’s a great example of becoming aware of your thoughts. With awareness, what we talk about a lot is most of the game. One of the things that I don’t think many of us have been taught is that feelings come from digestive thinking. I’ve heard all statistics of everything from 70,000 to 90,000 thoughts a day, which are the ones that we pull down. If you imagine, they’re floating up above our heads. It’s like a cherry. We pick it down, put it in our mouth, chew it, and digest it. When we digest it, it not only gives us nutrients but it emanates a feeling.

When we have low feelings, those feelings often come from attachment to a lower-quality thought. I’m not good enough. I’m overwhelmed. I don’t have the answer. I don’t fit in. I’m scared. Whatever the human thought is, since we all have these thoughts. Creating more space happens when we have more awareness to catch ourselves. I am unconsciously digesting these thoughts. Do I want to consciously do that? Can I give myself space and say, “I’m feeling overwhelmed, confused, and lost, but that’s not who I am. I can be skeptical. Are those thoughts even serving me? What’s the point of having those thoughts and not trying to dismiss the negative thoughts we all have?”

It’s natural to have a monkey on our shoulders and an inner critic alive and well. Sometimes, that voice is louder than others. Bringing more awareness to how I am serving myself at work. How am I serving myself? Throughout the day, am I choosing empowering thoughts to pull down and digest? Am I unconsciously on this hamster wheel that I self-perpetuate a state of stuckness, a perception that I don’t have a choice or a feeling of burnout?

What’s interesting in the self-care industry is what’s happening now. We’re becoming more aware that we want to change these things. There are many tools that are coming at us to fix the things we want to change. We often forget that awareness. What if awareness was 99% of it? If we became aware at this moment, I tune into my body. I’m feeling low and overwhelmed.

Sometimes, when we bring awareness to it without trying to fix it, force it, and mask over it by bringing the awareness of it and leaving it alone that it’s not us, but it’s a feeling state that we’re going to have and we can count on that feeling state to change, all of a sudden, we find more freedom. If we change the subject, go outside, or go into nature, we give ourselves more space. Guess what happens? That feeling state changes on its own.

I wish we hadn’t been taught more of this as we were growing up in our careers. We didn’t have to be tactic-driven or hacky about these things that we need to fix ourselves when we’re having the normal human confused state of navigating our careers. I love what you said. It’s never linear. It only makes sense in hindsight. We call that our yellow brick road, which has some beautiful intelligence and magic to it once you look back on your life. It sometimes makes sense. When you’re going through it, and you’re confused about what next step to take, it can feel daunting and scary.

The bulk of the book talks about the four lights. You’ve made a passing reference to that idea earlier. Do you want to walk through what the four lights are and how they all come together?

Introduction To The Four Lights

The idea of the four lights is not a set of things that you need to do or memorize in our checklist. It’s four ideas that we ask people to read and consider. Four guideposts is another way to think of it. The first is the easiest way to get your head around, which is leadership, which is about being a light. You are a light. Leadership is not about title or role. We’re not talking about that leadership. We’re not talking about authority or management. We’re talking about the way that we positively influence others.

Leadership, at the most basic level, is about being a light. When everything’s going well right in the daylight, you don’t need a lantern or candle. You can even see it. Leadership is called for in times of uncertainty, darkness, and navigating challenges. That’s when we’re all invited to step up. A lot of that first step of awareness that we talk about, as Jen’s talking about, comes from connecting with your own light. What is important to me? Not what I was told was important, what my company says is important, or what my relationship is, but what my peer group says is important, but what do I care about? What’s authentic to me? It would be another way to say it. That’s part one. A leader is a light.

The second idea is that the light is always on. It is a beautiful bridge. When we have those down days, and we’re not feeling good, and we wake up in a low mood that we can count on, our light is on, no matter how we’re feeling. We reference that light. You can put your own words in it, but that essence and presence that you bring to any boardroom, meeting, and conversation is beyond your body, beyond what you say, and beyond how you dress.

It’s about beyond what you look like, the color of your skin, or your gender. There is a presence you bring. What would it be like if you could trust that not only are you a light for others, but you’re a light for yourself? Regardless of the up-and-down journey of feeling and being human, that light is always on. That’s the second principle that leads into the third that I’ll let Jeff tee up.

This one is harder for people to get their heads around. When we start with light one, a leader is a light. That seems like a basic metaphor for leadership. Think about the fact that you get laid off from your job, but several months before, you had the best performance review of your career. The day you get laid off, you still have all the strengths, aptitude, and ability you had several months ago when you got that performance review. Nothing has changed about you because your employment status has changed. That is a reframe for people that send them to reflect more.

The third light goes even deeper. We say, “You only have to see what’s right in front of you.” The metaphor that we use is to imagine that you’re walking on a path in the dark and you have a lantern with you. If you held a lantern above your head, it would only light a circle right around you. You wouldn’t be able to see too far ahead. You wouldn’t be able to look back.

All the time, we can only see what’s next. Often in our coaching with leaders and people in transition and teams, they’re crippled by choice. It’s hard to know where to focus and what to do next. They’re uncertain about the options available. We say, “Think of what’s right in front of you.” We don’t need to think about what’s going to happen in a week, two years, or ten years. You can’t predict any of that. What you can get clear is what feels great right now and what your next decision would be.

That’s not to say that planning, goal setting, and intention setting aren’t important. That’s to say, “None of us predict the future.” This was a difficult point for us to make until COVID and the aftermath of COVID. All of a sudden, we had this willing audience to the idea that my strategic plan was out of date the moment I wrote it. My Excel forecast is laughable several months after I created it. We’re inviting people into the idea of being aware and present to what’s here and making your decisions about what you see, not what you imagine. That takes us to the last light.

I would underscore the present piece because that’s where the practice is. We get hijacked all the time with our thinking and responsibility of having to predict the future. For some of us who are in those roles of doing budgets and strategic planning, you’re guessing, or you’re doing your best with the data that you have to make sound decisions.

What we’re pointing to in terms of what a conscious leader can do to practice is to be attentive and attuned to your body signals, wisdom, and intuition. The things that are coming up right inside the light, the synchronicities that are happening, the person that calls, the meeting you have, and what’s showing up right in your field. When you do that, you can interact with it in your full presence, which helps you take the next step. When you take the next step, guess what comes? The lantern light comes with you. It’s with you by your side, above your head, step by step, to help you navigate and walk your path.

It takes the pressure off. That’s what it did for us. It’s how we came up with it. It was relieving this idea that we don’t have to, as leaders, be the predictors of the future. That leads us to the fourth light, which is getting a little bit deeper in this idea that there’s a larger light guiding us. We are part of the whole. We are part of something bigger than ourselves.

Whatever you name it to be is wonderful. You may call that light God, Jesus, nature, divine math, science, or the void. Whatever it is, we’re part of this universal symphony that is benevolent. It’s good. We believe whatever this is, it has our back. It’s ushering us to the highest possibility and growth, and that is why we’re here.

These guideposts create touchstones along how a conscious leader can navigate not only their work path and career but their life and how they’re leading themselves and their loved ones in the spirit of they are light. Their light’s always on, no matter how they feel. They only need to see what’s right in front of them. There’s a larger light guiding us. What would it feel like if we could rest and trust that there’s a benevolent force we’re a part of? We matter, and we’re meant to be here. Allowing that light to draw that wisdom forth within us.

The first one is relatively straightforward. The idea is that all of us have a light within us, whether you are a leader in the traditional sense of the word leader. All of us have the ability to be leaders irrespective of role and title. That one seems fairly straightforward. The second one is about your light always being on. Part of me, when I first read it, thought, “That feels like a high bar that your light always has to be on.” As you said, Jenniffer, there are days when you do not feel it. What I came to realize is that it is a reminder that even on those days, that light is there. You have to find it. It may feel dimmer that day, but it’s still there. At the end of the day, it doesn’t go out until you’re no longer alive.

The third one is around seeing the light right in front of you. One of the questions I wanted to ask you is, to your point, you don’t have to be able to see 5 or 10 years into the future. Most of us can’t. We can have some vague idea of what we would like to do, whether it’s in a different industry, but who knows what curve ball life may throw us? You have to find your way along that meandering path. It felt like a reminder to live in the moment and not get so far mentally in front of the here and now or the near term that you lose sight of the joy in the here and now. Was that part of your thinking as well?

It’s wonderful to hear your interpretation of it. You can tell we’re not people who are going to tell you you’re wrong if you have a different interpretation. I love that.

There are no wrong answers.

How would we pursue our careers if there was nothing to get wrong? It is a great question. The idea of being present in the moment is where the information is. It’s not only where the joy is and where life is. It’s where, as a leader, whether you’re leading your own career or 1,000 people around you, all the action is in terms of information. It’s not to say that scenario planning can’t be useful, and debriefs about retroactively looking at performance can’t be useful. The information is here and now. It is what we were getting at.

When we’re working with teams, but I would say with people, we will be asked to facilitate strategic planning, which we do a lot. We’ll be asked to facilitate team alignment. The team isn’t aligned because nobody is right here. Everybody has created a plan and PowerPoint in their sector of the building and built it in a silo. Some admin has put it together. There’s no time spent saying, “What is this? Do we even believe this?”

We had an experience where we met with an extremely high-performing team of a billion-dollar organization that had not sat down and walked through their products. Someone brought up in the planning, “Not all of these are working for us.” That led to this incredible day of line-by-line walking through every SKU and saying, “Does this deserve to be here? Do we like making this? Does this product work for us?” It was this incredible lesson in the corporate presence of being here to say, “What is the information that we see?”

I’ll stop there, but it’s partly about the joy right here, but also all the data right here in the moment. Are we updating our information and beliefs and the way we see the world to see what’s here right now? Are we carrying around something that maybe we learned several years ago or something that we hope will be several years from now? It’s not a great way to lead. Something more fulfilling is what we’re pointing to.

I would add that this is one thing everybody readers can practice. It’s the superpower. It’s where it all happens. It’s where change happens. It’s where connection happens. The data that Jeff is talking about is practicing presence increases performance. What I want to make clear is that, as business people, managers, and professionals, a lot of people will hear information as intellect. We are good at using our brains to process data. We’re not talking about that. That’s one tiny piece of the practice of presence. Full body presence is dropping in. Do you know how your body is feeling in a situation? What cues are you picking up energetically?

People say, “We have more than six senses. Our senses are increasing in capacity.” We’re multisensory beings. How much information can we take in that we don’t need a label for, we don’t need a word for, and we don’t need to understand? We have this innate ability to connect the dots in a multisensory way, where we can take more information. It helps to inform quicker, more effective, and more efficient decision-making.

When we skim the surface and go from one task to another and get interrupted, our presence is being hijacked all the time, which is normal in this world. If we are not practicing and bringing ourselves back, it’s like, “What’s right in front of me? How am I feeling? What am I taking in? He seems happy, or he’s saying happy words, but I don’t get that vibe from him. What’s going on? There’s something that is incongruent with this conversation.” With that information, we don’t compute it to our intellect. It doesn’t make sense. Our bodies process it.

It’s practicing presence and learning to bring yourself back to this moment. The easiest hacker tool is to check how your body is feeling and what you’re taking in so that it can inform you of a great decision. If you don’t know what to decide or what to choose at that moment, wait because the information will come in that practice of presence.

The last parts of the book are about choosing abundance and tapping yourself. Let’s start with choosing abundance. What do you mean by choosing abundance?

The name of our company is Plenty. We believe in a world of plenty for everyone. We have three ways or three core ethos of how we describe what we mean by that. The first is this idea that there’s more than enough to go around. We perceive that we’re competing with each other, but we believe that we are competing with a mindset of scarcity. The idea that there isn’t enough to go around. We have to compete for more and whatever that more is. It could be more money, sustenance, food, relationships, or love. What would it look like in a world of plenty for everyone where there is more than enough to go around?

The second idea is that we have enough now. Everybody’s circumstances are different, but feeling enough invites us to look around our surroundings, workplace, and loved ones and be grateful for what we already have. If we’re always trying to get more and we’re always dissatisfied with where we are, we are constantly going to be perpetuating a state of lack. When we bring gratitude for what is already here, we usher in more things to be grateful for. With the idea of abundance, what would it look like if there was more than enough to go around? What would it feel like if I had enough myself?

The last gets deeper. It’s the idea that I am enough right now. I don’t have to be more, do more, or have more to feel that I have a rightful place and I’m here. I’ll let Jeff chime in about abundance. It’s our come from and our way of viewing the world as a world of plenty and connection, and we have a right to be in it. Jeff and I are practicing the principles in the book. We do not have this ace of constantly trying to remind ourselves that we are enough and helping others feel that in the places they are as they usher in new environments they would like to be in.

I am curious about where you were taking us, J.R., by tapping yourself because it’s the natural follow-up to this.

Do you want to go into tapping yourself, and what does that mean?

How we end the book and how we end most of our engagements is with encouragement for anybody who’s reading it or anybody who’s working with us to decide for themselves what they want from life. There’s an analogy that we use throughout the book about the river. The river flows where the river goes.

What we mean by that is there is this flow of life that we don’t control. It’s a hard concept for people to get their heads around, but sooner or later, everyone meets it in their career or their life. They get laid off. Their company gets bought, and they get shown the door. They lose a parent at an early age, like I did. They find out their spouse is cheating on them.

There are these things that confront us with this idea that there’s all this stuff out there that I don’t control. When we’re faced with that, we can try to manipulate our environment and our world. We do control it. We can try to channel all that water of emotion and event into a little thing that we can get our hands around, or we can realize that we have to be okay with this flood of stuff around us with the political environment, business environment, and the economic environment that’s always changing. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have agency.

Even if I’m on this raging river, I still have my raft and a paddle. I get to decide where I go. I get to decide how I feel about the events around me. I get to decide what I choose to be a part of and what I don’t. For people midway through their career who are getting to a certain point and saying, “I don’t know where to go next. I don’t see any opportunities out there for me.” We encourage them to choose their own number. Call themselves into the game.

We even tell a story briefly. I relate to coaching an executive who’s named CEO of a large company who came to us a couple of years ago and said, “I’m frustrated. I’ve accomplished a lot. I have this great family. I have a great career, but I’m ready for something more, and there’s nothing out there for me.” We asked him to explain that. He said, “I’m looking at LinkedIn. I’m talking to all these recruiters. They’re bringing me stuff, and none of it works for me.” We said, “Think about it differently. What do you want?” He was angry. He said, “No, you’re not listening to me. There’s nothing out there for me.” No, we’re not saying what’s on LinkedIn. We’re saying write down what you want. What would it be?

He writes out this whole list. He said, “I want a revenue company with a large team and multinational opportunities for equity. We said, “You know what you want. Instead of taking what the world is giving you, what would happen if you started to walk towards that? What would happen if you found a hundred companies that fit that description and started to meet people in those companies? What would happen if you started to follow those companies on LinkedIn?”

The point is not that we can necessarily create our world, but we certainly create our experience in the world. That’s what we mean about tapping ourselves on the head, raising our own hand, choosing our own number, and picking up our own paddle. It’s not to say life is easy or effortless, or we always get what we want, but what if we always got what we needed and could decide what to do with that? That’s how we end the book and all of our work with that idea. What would it be like if we all created the world we wanted to see? Would that end up being a world that’s better than the world that we complain about having now? We think it would be.

In theory, if we all worked at it, it would be, but it’s much easier to complain. We’re going to run out of time. I want to ask one last question. What’s ahead for the two of you and Plenty?

We’re doing some fun book tours with our clients, hosting us around the country, and doing workshops on Leading With Light. We’re fortunate to work with the larger institutions and their teams and strategies. That feels fun as we lean back in and also into our strategic planning and culture work. It seems like there’s such a need right now for team alignment, for people to be seen, heard, and respected for their opinions and facilitated in that weave.

We love playing in that space and helping the team enhance and create the culture. Speaking of wanting, they need to get clear on the culture they want and make sure that aligns with what the business needs and wants. We’re both parents. We’re juggling busy summer schedules with kids in college, high school, camps, and traveling and trying to make that all work. As I imagine, your readers are also juggling a lot of plates.

People ask me often, “Where do I find the time for everything?” I said, “Wait until your kids are on their own. You have lots of time back.

I don’t want to wish for that yet, but I’m also trying to keep it in perspective when it feels too much.

Thank you for doing this. I appreciate it. I’m glad we were connected. It’s an interesting conversation. The work you’re doing is uplifting, and you’re helping thousands of people. My hat is off to you.

Thank you, J.R., for your graciousness, for the work you do in the world, and for inviting us into it. We appreciate it.

Thanks so much.

I want to thank Jennifer and Jeff for joining me to discuss their work at Plenty Consulting, how they came together, the idea of conscious leadership, and what it means to lead with light. If you’d like to learn more about this topic, you can check out their book Leading With Light. If you’d like support on other career-related topics, visit PathWise.io. You can be a member. Basic membership is free. You can also sign up for our newsletter on the website. Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Thanks. Have a great day.

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About Jennifer Mulholland and Jeff Shuck

Jennifer Mulholland and Jeff Shuck are the co-founders of Plenty Consulting, which provides coaching, workshops, and retreats to help leaders and businesses grow. They are also the co-authors of Leading with Light: Choosing Conscious Leadership When You’re Ready for More.
 

Jennifer is an author, strategist, alchemist, and executive coach. From a very young age, she has been dedicated to raising the consciousness of people on the planet. Before becoming co-owner of Plenty, Jennifer was Chief Innovation Officer at Sungard, a Fortune 500 technology company. She also founded several businesses focused on bridging the gap between information and impact in healthcare, technology, and holistic wellbeing. She is a certified Reiki and Theta healer trained in shamanic and energy medicine. She has a B.S. degree in Exercise and Sports Science, Psychology, and Coaching from the University of Utah. She was a two-sport Division I athlete and captain at the University of Delaware, playing both field hockey and lacrosse. She lives in Park City, Utah.