Toni Aspin - Guest: 0:00

This is Toni Aspin, and you're listening to One Hour to Doors.

Jon Stone - Host: 0:09

This is One Hour to Doors, a podcast about the business and soul of the festivals and events industry. I am your host, Jon Stone. Every episode of One Hour to Doors explores the people, issues, insights, and trends impacting the enterprise of bringing people and communities together in common cause. This week's episode is part two of an extended conversation with Toni Aspin. Toni's thinking and questioning have influenced me deeply over the years, and this conversation offers you a seat at the table as we exchange ideas on leadership, the nature of boards of directors, pride versus ego in the workplace, the challenges of enabling a real growth in our organizations themselves, and more. Throughout every topic runs a common thread of transformative learning, a passion and scholarly pursuit of Toni's. If you have not yet listened to the part one episode, I highly recommend you do. Let's jump back into the conversation, picking up where we left off last week. I gave a one-sentence overview of your current consulting practice in the intro, but could you describe it in a little more detail? What kind of projects are you working on these days?

Toni Aspin - Guest: 1:24

Yeah, I'd love to. I love the work that I'm doing right now. So my consulting practice has flowed and morphed over time because it's now my almost my 12th year of working for myself. I launched this consulting firm at about the time I was starting my PhD program. So in 2011. And one of the things that helped me launch it was when I exited One Reel and I uh had a contract with One Reel to do some follow-up consulting work. And that gave me really the confidence to say, I can do this because it's you know, working for oneself is is a big uh shift in perspective. So now I've gotten to a place where I'm really interested in helping nonprofits be as impactful as they could possibly be. And so I've decided there's many ways you can look at that. You can you can come at that through strategic planning or operational stabilization or all kinds of things. But I decided to come at it through boards of directors because I have had so much experience with boards actually impeding the progress of an organization, or at the very least, just not being a factor at all. And so uh that's where I um that's where I come from these days. What's really interesting is we know everything's connected. So what comes up there is that there's rarely a a board chair that comes to me and says, Wow, Toni, we could really use your help, because boards don't really think that way. And so it comes through executive leadership, and they'll say something like, they'll reach out to me and say, Can I talk this over with you about what's going on? And then I work that way in the sense that um I can see after a conversation with an executive director or a chief financial officer that the issues that exist are far beyond the thing they've right they've said, as as you've had that experience as well. When somebody says, Boy, we're just our cash flow is just not there to support and or whatever the story is, and you find out that, yeah, cash flow is probably, you know, something to deal with, but that's not the root of it.

Jon Stone - Host: 4:10

Yeah, no, it's it's uh uh the analogy is somebody saying, Hey, I've got a flat tire. Can you help me fix the flat tire? And you're like, Yes, of course. And then you get to the car and it's like, yeah, it's got a flat tire, but it's also blowing off oil and the windows are busted out and any other number of problems. So yeah, I get what you're saying.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 4:29

That's it. And so that's how um clients find their way to me, is that it's typically through executive leadership that comes for something. My favorite work is when someone in the organization sees the wholeness of it, meaning, if in fact, my I keep clear my goal, my goal, my drive, my guiding light is to help nonprofits achieve the greatest impact they can possibly achieve. And so that means getting clear on what impact is, and then how it is that you're gonna deliver on that impact. And when we get there, now we can fix all the operational issues. That's easy, and I'm out of there by then. The staff can be capable of doing that. And so that's my favorite work. And I'm time and time again, I'm shocked at how the problem that presents itself to me is never what the problem really is.

Jon Stone - Host: 5:33

I know exactly what you're saying.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 5:35

Yeah. Yeah. And so that's what I do. I spend my time. So what that ends up being is like um going back to the wholeness approach, the holistic approach. That usually entails deep conversations. And I'll use the term coaching because I also happen to be a certified coach, executive coach. And so I end up coaching the executive leadership, typically starting then from there with the board, with the board chair. And now we get this feeling of like, oh, I understand we need to work at this from an all points place. And and then I get to really get in. I had a conversation with a client yesterday and said, okay, when you're ready to turn me loose on your board, you let me know. And that's and that's how that goes. And then, because what's kind of been shaken out over all these years is that you can't help any organization unless you have absolute commitment from the chief, whoever that is, executive director, CEO, whatever, and then from the leadership team, and then from the board chair who creates the culture in the entire board. And then you can make a difference. And uh I'm grateful to say I don't work on gigs where I don't think I can make a difference anymore.

Jon Stone - Host: 6:57

I'm trying to think if I can say the same. I'd like to say the same. I don't know if that's true, though. A lot of times my work tends to be more of long-term embedded work. Not always, but probably 40 or 50 percent of my contracts involve embedding myself into the organization so that I can actually I just find it's really the only way that I get to the root of whatever what's going on, of whatever the issue may be.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 7:30

Being in the middle of it is very helpful. Is very, very helpful. And because you uh dive into the deepest things often operationally, you have to see it happening. I can just sit in on a board meeting or two and observe, or I can sit in on an executive leadership team meeting and observe and be able to figure out what's going on pretty quickly.

Jon Stone - Host: 7:58

You've heard those songs enough that you can more or less recognize them when sung. Yeah. Yes, yes, yes. You have had so many significant leadership roles over the years, and with those roles comes inevitably a lot of weight, a lot of stress. What techniques have you used over the years to make sure that all along you're taking care of yourself as best you can?

Toni Aspin - Guest: 8:24

I guess first I'd have to say that I've become aware of the fact that that's necessary. And that that can't be minimized because when we're 40 and 50, we can just keep pushing. And uh and what that means is if I just put my all my effort into this, I know I can turn it around. But at what cost? And is it worth that effort? So I have gotten to a place where I can say, wow, some of the approaches that I took of just putting my shoulder down and working wasn't helping me be objective about what the big picture is of what can be done. That's just a learning situation. But in that becoming more self-aware, I discovered yoga and meditation. Out of desperation, maybe at first, I dabbled in yoga in the 70s and then got serious about it in the 90s and have been a serious yoga practitioner. I'm using yoga in the terms of not postures. Yes, postures are involved, but our Western world, when we talk about yoga, they're talking about somewhere kind of close to calisthenics. Right. And that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the yoga of understanding oneself. And so that's it's a daily practice that I have of just quieting myself so I can hear my own voice. And when we can hear our own voice, then we can make some real decisions. We have more stamina. We can say this is this particular activity or action is moving me closer to what I want to get at, or it's not. I think that's just been learned over time. And uh certainly the reason we call it a practice is because it's never done. It's never done. But that's been, I think, central is having a mindfulness practice. And that just grows your emotional intelligence, period. If you just decided that you were going to meditate every day, I can guarantee you that your emotional intelligence will grow as a result of that. Because at the core of emo emotional intelligence is awareness, self-awareness and awareness of your surroundings. Without that, you can be the smartest person in the world. But if you don't have that self-awareness, you're you're not emotionally intelligent. Period. It cannot happen. Uh you can be smart, you can be all kinds of other things, a good strategist, but you're not emotionally intelligent. So that just happens, it's like a lovely result of mindfulness and awareness practices. And so now suddenly you have a tool, emotional intelligence as a tool to make decisions, to support others, to create a path that is moving you where you want to go. And I think just that tool of emotional intelligence helps then be able to uh identify all the other kind of leadership qualities that you want to bring to the table. And they just become, they come to you, they become apparent when you do this. Again, it's about it's not chasing the idea of developing my leadership style. Maybe at first you have to, and I ask my students this all the time. I give them lots of things to read and then ask them to describe their leadership style. And um, they struggle with that, and they use words out of the journal articles I give them, and it has to come from within. Like that's where it has to come. It's like when I'm interacting with this person, how do I feel when that's happening? What am I getting from them? Is it an exchange? And are we experiencing respect for one another? All of those things come to you. That's the only way you can get there. You can talk about authentic leadership and all kinds of things, but the practices, though, of mindfulness then open up doors for other ways that you can reduce the stress. Mindfulness, for example, allows you to consider the idea of letting go of your own ego. And when we have too much ego in the mix of things, uh, it ruins everything for everyone. And so, how do we do that? What's the balance of what role does a healthy ego play in what you're doing? Stress comes when you think it's all on you and you're the one driving it all. And without you, nothing would happen. And that's not true. And if that is true, you haven't been a good leader. So I think those are the boy, that that idea of um managing the things that all the stresses that come with uh having people's lives in your hands, more or less. Um I think the only way you can get at that is by letting go of who you think you are and letting the the real opportunities come out.

Jon Stone - Host: 14:06

You know, you talk about ego, and as soon as you said the word ego, um it begs the question of like what's the difference between ego and and pride, especially when we're in it, we have an there's an enormous amount of pride that can kind of maybe blend into that ego bit a little bit and get confused internally.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 14:25

Yeah. Yeah.

Jon Stone - Host: 14:27

I mean, you have you have to have a tremendous amount of pride in what you're doing. Yeah. Uh in order to be effective in this sector.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 14:36

Yeah. Well, I would ask you to define pride and maybe consider whether it's a great deal of satisfaction from work done well. Pride to me is a term that pridefulness is not a positive term in my in my vocabulary. Say more about that. Well, here's one way to think about it. What is that famous term? It's like pride comes before the fall. Have you heard that?

Jon Stone - Host: 15:05

Yeah, I think so.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 15:08

I guess coming from there, pride to me seems like I'm taking credit for everything. Like I'm proud because I did that. Now you might think I'm proud of our team, or or I'm proud of the organization for achieving this, but it's just that pride lingers. There's a lingering thing of self-accomplishment or something like that that's not inclusive. I I don't know. I can't, I don't know if I can describe it. And it might be just something that I've experienced when I hear people say, I'm proud of this, and I think, okay, yeah, it occurs to me that there is something that's exclusive about that.

Jon Stone - Host: 15:51

Okay, there you go.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 15:52

Yeah.

Jon Stone - Host: 15:53

I was just going to add that to me, the definition of pride depends on what altitude you're defining that from. When I think of that ground level, that weeds level altitude, I can't really differentiate pride from ego. And you're right, pride has a little bit of a negative feeling to it, counterintuitive as that may seem. But when I go up in altitude, somehow that it kind of softens and is a little more inclusive. I think, yeah, I think your exclusive remark kind of gets to the point there. Pride in a in a bubble is very in a very exclusive, not necessarily constructive thing.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 16:41

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The sense of it is that I've set us on a path and we've walked that path and arrived at a place that gives me a great deal of satisfaction. That's the sort of the essence of it. But pride from anybody feels like they may have had more to do with the arrival than they did. But it should be an effort that everyone feels satisfied with. And I don't know if I could place pride as a word to describe that.

Jon Stone - Host: 17:17

I suppose it's just as much as it's about altitude, it's about which way are we pointing that? I'm asking myself as I'm listening to you, because like, what am I proud of? Have I ever been proud of anything? It's like, yes, I am proud. I'm so proud of my sons. I I can think of so many moments that just can't have been flashing through my mind in the last two minutes about some of the teams that I have been privileged to work with over the years and how proud I am of the work that they accomplished, the impact that they made in whatever endeavor we were chasing at the time. I haven't thought about this until just now, but pride to me is kind of an external thing. I'm proud of other people and other things. Have I ever felt really proud of myself? I don't know how to answer that. I'm gonna have to reserve that question and think on that.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 18:09

Well, it could be that again, that word is something that we stumble on. Like things that you've done that you feel proud of. I would interpret that as being incredibly grateful for the opportunity to have participated in something like that. Like I say that about my um my PhD program, the whole program, and selecting a program that I knew was going to be incredibly challenging to me because I knew no language around it at all. I mean, you know, set me in an organizational development PhD, and I already know the language. I walk in and I understand the language and I understand sort of what we could be going for. But I was in this program where no one was a business person. Everyone was a social scientist or a human scientist, and I chose that purposefully. And so when I think about navigating how lost I felt at the beginning, the first year, and then what I learned going through that and how I was able to apply the learning, I feel one could say proud that I did it, but I don't feel proud because I feel like it was nothing, it was some kind of uh greater being than myself that was able to sort of keep me on track. And I feel just hugely grateful to uh have experienced that and learned what I learned. Now it's interesting you say, Oh, I'm proud of um my children, and I I have that same feeling. And I use that's the one time I probably use the word pride when I when I'm having a conversation with my sons, and uh yet talk about having no control over anything. I mean, really, you just set some kind of a foundation and then they go off and do what they're doing, you know, and you have no control over that.

Jon Stone - Host: 20:09

No, but in a perfect world, you've had a lot of influence. Yeah. I like to think that I see little bits and pieces of myself, good bits and pieces of myself in my children from time to time.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 20:25

Yeah.

Jon Stone - Host: 20:26

Uh, but I feel equally as proud of them when I see characteristics, uh, things that they do, ways that they act, or that doesn't look familiar to me at all.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 20:35

Yes. Yeah.

Jon Stone - Host: 20:36

Where the heck is that coming from? But man, is that is that neat to see? Yeah.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 20:41

Yeah. But that makes me think, Jon, of like, it's like a wonder to you, to me. It's a wonder to a parent to look and see how this being has emerged, you know?

Jon Stone - Host: 20:56

I guess my sense of pride is really centered around my contributions, not so much around my accomplishments. Maybe that's the best way that I can articulate that. Let's go back and revisit budgets as a form of storytelling. Yeah. This is an idea that I preach all the time. And it surprises me how well received that particular big idea is.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 22:03

Something more. It has to be more than just a bunch of numbers. And so what is that story? But being able to get people, like the way to practice that is to look at some set of financials, some projections, some budget, whatever it is, and asking people to just extract the story and tell it cannot do it. They do the elevator thing. Well, this goes up, if that goes down. And they cannot, and that's not the story. It's like um the the your ability to either to zoom in and you know, look at the all the numbers and then zoom out and see the implications of that. And that's what's difficult for, I mean, that's that's what I find is that most people just get stuck on that thing. And I virtually cannot look at financial statements anymore without the zoom out first. I have to do the zoom out and see what it is. What and it's also my feeling that I get when I look at financials. And this is probably because I've looked at so many financials that they bore me to death. Sure. But uh, but so it's a technique that I've used that helps me get a the personality of whatever the financial statement is. I think people want that, but they don't know how to practice it. And all it takes is practice. So they can say, well, look, if you show trends, this is the best uh way to get people to look at stories, is to show uh like a four or five year trend of financials or budgets or whatever you want. And they'll do that elevator thing. Well, revenue went up, and then this administrative expense went up. And this is that they talk about the ups and downs. That's what they do, and they're missing the whole story about that. I wonder sometimes if it's because we're so unused to using creativity when we look at numbers and quantifiable things that we can't get to anything else because it's so connected with quantifiable that we can't get to anything. So I've asked students to just um make things up that are not even true, just to practice using the sentences there around a trend in a financial, something like, okay, why would revenue go down? Right? That's what they have to think of is why would revenue go down? Well, a new CEO came on board and nobody uh liked that CEO. And so everybody got together and decided they were going to stop buying this one particular product that they were offering. Just make something up. I think that practice of that creative practice of making things up and not not worrying that they're not true, but just trying to see if you can make a story up that hangs together. I think I'm kind of good at that because I started doing that with my sons when they were little, is that we'd go to the park and we'd sit at the park and we'd look at people and we'd make up completely random stories about the people that we were seeing. Yeah. And it helps create that part of your mind that allows you to just explode.

Jon Stone - Host: 25:29

Yes, absolutely. But you don't typically find that in accounting. The notion of creativity in accounting is kind of a uh negative thing.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 25:39

Yeah, yeah.

Jon Stone - Host: 25:40

You're not supposed to do that. So I wonder, you I think you might be on to something there. I also am sitting here wondering if it has anything to do with the fact that in an organization, your budget responsibilities tend to get allocated out to departments. And so your department A is really dialed in with the portion of the budget that's associated with department A, department B, department C, so on and so forth. But it's really only a handful of people in the organization whose job it is, responsibility is to look at the thing as a whole. And of course, you can't tell a story without considering the whole. So I wonder if this method of budget responsibility, budget allocation per department might be kind of its own worst enemy in some ways. That gets into your corporate culture. It does. As well. Are you compartmentalized or not?

Toni Aspin - Guest: 26:34

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It also uh gets into it is culture again. It's how do we describe to those that we want to collaborate with on putting a whole budget together? How do we start with the story? How do we start with a story? So we create a picture for anybody that's responsible for any aspect of the budget. We start with the story of what we're seeing, and it goes back to the difficulty people have with the scenario planning, with the what-if questions. But if we present the financial picture as a story, now even if you're uh doing one little section of the budget, you can ask the question: how would this scenario, how would this story that we're creating that we've developed about the next year or three, the financial future of the organization, how would your area be impacted if this story were to play out? So you start with a story instead of start with a list of account names and balances in there and asking you to what do we do? We usually say review all the transactions from last year and look to see what ones were unusual and if we, you know, need to revise those in any way or if the same thing is gonna happen this year. And what do people do? Yeah, probably the same thing. So there's no creativity in a print and repeat. Yeah, that's it.

Jon Stone - Host: 28:03

Strategy versus tactics is all that is. Yeah. So many people, most people, think that they're developing strategy when they're really just refreshing tactics, I should say.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 28:15

That's it. That's it. That's a good phrase for it, refreshing tactics. So somehow we have to get people onto the story. And in some organizations that I've worked with, it's sunk in. One nonprofit that I work with that's an international nonprofit, and their United States element is located in a small town called Ohio. And I was on the board at the time, and we developed something that tells the story. It's actually a form that you go through, but it includes telling stories. So you develop stories about the various areas of what's happening, all linked back to the impact, what the organization overall is wanting to do. And everybody tells their story, then the numbers start after that. And then what the questions are how does this decision that you're making and this number that you're putting in for this line item, how does it support the story? And if it doesn't support the story, then back to the drawing board. So starting with story is helpful because it's very hard for people to unwind all the quantitative and get to something further. But you see how this develops this the brain uh with regard to strategy and generativity.

Jon Stone - Host: 29:40

Absolutely. Starting with storytelling, that's a new catchphrase. Now, starting with a story makes so much sense. And at the same time, that's just not how everything works. I know. It's just not how everything works. Yeah.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 29:56

But only because we're stuck. Nobody knows. We're stuck in our ways. That's

Jon Stone - Host: 30:01

It's reminding me in this weird tangential way. There is this gentleman named Monty Roberts, and he was a professional horse trainer. I don't know if he's still alive or not. He's professionally known as the horse whisperer. There was a movie that was made loosely based on. I I actually went to one of his clinics back in my horse days in Monroe at the fairgrounds. And people would pay top dollar by the hundreds or thousands to go see a two-hour Monty Roberts clinic. And he developed a he gets credit for developing this revolutionary way of training and working and being with horses. I learned over the years that yes, he was a developer of that. He wasn't the only one. There were a number of other folks, Pat Pirelli and some other really smart folks. But the I could summarize it by saying that up until this era, the kind of the classic way of training a horse was breaking the whores. It's basically forcing them to heed your will. And when they resist, you just keep at it until you mentally break their will to be horses. And that's just the way the horse world has always worked, for presumably since the domestification of horses. But Monty Roberts and these other practitioners developed a very different approach and kind of garnered the nickname the horse whisperer. But now I'm I'm seeing a new I'm seeing a new seminar tour, and it's the financial storyteller. Tony Aspen, the financial storyteller at the Monroe Fairgrounds. $80. I don't know what the demonstration looks like, but it'd be pretty cool. Yeah. Just a new way of thinking.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 31:48

Yeah, I would imagine. Um, what would it be like? I would imagine that we'd get people somehow um give them some overarching topic and have them practice telling a story about it. Because that's where the chops need to be built. You have to build your chops for being able to think beyond what you currently do.

Jon Stone - Host: 32:08

It would the presentation would start with this the presentation of a budget for something. It could be something real or something fictitious. And so it would be like a classic boardroom kind of uh overview, five-minute overview of this thing, a project, uh a building, a festival, uh it doesn't matter what it is, just something, using just the classic numbers technique. And of that, some percentage of the audience would be able to follow that, and some other percentage would not. And then you'd do it over again using the storytelling methodology, and people would, the difference would be stark. All of a sudden, everybody would would understand it.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 32:51

Yeah, in the storytelling, what we get out of that is the ability to bring in other aspects besides just the number aspect. You cannot sum up an activity like an event with just numbers. It's impossible. So you miss the whole human element of it. And it's certainly looking at the numbers says something. I mean, it'll say, Did I hit my revenue goal? If not, why not? I mean, you can develop those kind of stories, but they're still just completely centered on, you know, the direction the numbers are moving. Are they positive or are they negative? And all of these are assumptions that we're making. And so so stories say they put the qualitative aspects in, they center the qualitative aspects along with the quantitative aspects. And it takes it's more work. True. It's more work. True. So no no CFO is gonna want to do that.

Jon Stone - Host: 33:59

There's no denying it. Yeah, absolutely. It is the the harder road.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 34:03

Yeah, yeah. At first, anyway, until you start seeing in in stories. And then suddenly you have, oh, wait, I can't go anywhere until I understand what the story is. And then when the story comes, now you can you can respond to it and you can put numbers on it, but you have to start with a story. And it's only hard at first. Once you're good at seeing a story, then it's not hard anymore. I mean, when you think about your life, John, and you think about how you envision your life to be 10 years from now, how does that come to you? Does it come in images or does it come in what what visually visually? Mm-hmm. And then from there, uh you maybe examine those things. Like if you say, I want to be um wildly wealthy, and then in your mind, perhaps an image of a property where you're living, and these other things come in, and then you examine those things and say, you know, what is the cost of that out of my soul and out of my pocketbook? And then you start putting some. Oh, I guess if I actually want that, I'm gonna have to put some dollars there. And now you can start putting, you can start adding in. And that's the same for an organization.

Jon Stone - Host: 35:31

I'm thinking of the quarterly, the monthly financial report, right? And so you tell your finance department, give me the detail for this, this, this, and then we ask them to put a top sheet on it that's just got the super summary. And that we should start saying on top of that, put the one paragraph story. Yeah. What would happen if everybody required the top sheet to be this a narrative form?

Toni Aspin - Guest: 35:55

Yeah. Yeah. That wasn't an elevator analysis.

Jon Stone - Host: 35:58

Yeah, but that it was really like No, the only the only rule would be you can't actually mention the numbers at all.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 36:05

Yes, exactly.

Jon Stone - Host: 36:06

You have to tell a story some other way.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 36:08

Yeah, exactly. Or even though that would be a fun experiment. You can't even uh mention the line items, even. Right.

Jon Stone - Host: 36:14

You know, but you're gonna tell that would be a great you'd have to tell a story, a paragraph or two from the customer's perspective.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 36:23

Uh-huh. Okay. Yeah. I don't know. Wouldn't you like to hear it from the CFO's perspective or from the CEO's perspective?

Jon Stone - Host: 36:32

There's all sorts of different perspectives, and I wonder how much that story would change. Yeah. Given the same person writing from all these different viewpoints. That would be an interesting exercise.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 36:43

Absolutely. This is how we start to learn our own perspectives, because these embedded assumptions that we have are invisible to us. We can't see them because we just presume and we don't notice that we're presuming because it's using some other part of your brain. That's why this recent work that has completely enthralled me is Robert Keegan, who talks about why we can't change, no matter how much we want to change, what are the challenges of change? He's not saying we can't, he's in fact saying we can. But he uses the example of the cardiologist who tells seven of his patients that have severe cardiac issues, and he tells them if you don't do the following things, you will die. And one out of seven can make those changes, even though they know that they're going to die if they don't.

Jon Stone - Host: 37:44

Really?

Toni Aspin - Guest: 37:44

Yeah. One out of seven. And so that tells us that it's not for lack of motivation, because you know, most people are pretty motivated to live, but they cannot make the change. So he's talked about how uh making change requires setting a goal that you want more than anything else, like identifying what that is, which throws most people off right off the bat, right? Because they can't think of, they can't land on one, but you have to land on one, and it has to be uh something that you care deeply about. And then we practice walking through what are you doing instead of that? So you can start getting to what the assumptions are. Because what we do is instead of changing, we immediately busy ourselves with other things so we can say, oh no, we can't make this change because I'm too busy, you know, eating uh red meat or I don't know, whatever the thing might be. It's a little more subtle than that. But you you formulaically dig out those underlying assumptions so that you can see what your beliefs are hidden to you that are keeping you from making this change. To me, it's just about he put it in the context in his book, uh Immunity to Change. He put it in the context of organizational change and team change and like that. But to me, it's life change because at the crux of it, it is transformative learning, right? Because what we have to do is see what is keeping us, what is the thing? So we're trying to have a disorienting dilemma in a way, because we want to say, oh no, I believe that if I don't eat meat every day, for example, uh, the of the cardiac thing, if I don't eat meat every day, I'm not having a complete meal. Let's put it that way. Like that's an assumption that you have because that's been embedded in us for so long. And then if you dig into that a little bit more, maybe that has to do with prestige in a way, of maybe you've lived in a in your youth with not enough food to eat at all. And so to you, it was prestigious to eat a steak. See, that's these things get uncovered in that, and then you realize, oh, that's what's keeping me. It's not the fact that I can can't stop eating red meat, even though it's killing me. It's that that underlying assumption is if I don't eat red meat, I somehow am poor. Right. And so we have to get at those as subtle as they are to be able to say, I can choose what I want.

Jon Stone - Host: 40:28

This is fascinating. Staying on the cardiac study. We just talked about why the six out of seven are like they are, but what about the one out of seven that who can change? Like, what's that all about?

Toni Aspin - Guest: 40:41

Yeah. Who who knows? It could be like willpower. Do you believe in willpower? I don't know if I do.

Jon Stone - Host: 40:50

I don't not I don't think I do. Most of my life I have, uh-huh, but recently I've started to question that. Yeah.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 41:01

Yeah, because what is it anyway? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.

Jon Stone - Host: 41:05

Yeah. Point two willpower. Yeah. Where is that at what organ generates that? Right.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 41:12

I mean, if anything, it's the brain, and the brain does whatever it's been programmed to do. So we're talking about at this moment, what if you want to change doing what the brain is telling you to do? It's like you're working against it. What makes that happen? I mean, in that case of the one who made the change, the only thing I can think of is that they actually were able to see that by doing what they were doing, they were on a path to destruction. Why can one person see that and not six others? Very fascinating.

Jon Stone - Host: 41:50

Well, I don't know that the six others didn't see the path. I mean, what I think in that specific example is I think everybody can is capable of seeing the path. It's just an inability to do anything about it. Yeah.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 42:03

Or the perceived inability to do anything about it. Because we can't willpower is like I'm going to will this into being. That's what it seems like. It's just do it, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's it. It's just do it. Just do it. And then and that might hold for even a few months or a while. But if you haven't reached the underlying issue, it's gonna go, it's gonna spring back to where it was because you haven't really changed the circuitry.

Jon Stone - Host: 42:36

I think of the pursuit of weight loss. There's really no mystery left anymore, scientifically, around what causes weight loss, what causes weight gain. Right? The only mystery is why can't we do anything about it? And so many people with willpower, I think, yeah, but willpower, I'm going to reduce the amount of calories I take every day. I'm gonna cut sugar out or whatever, whatever it is, right? I'm gonna stop drinking coffee. Any one of us can do that for a day or a week or a month. Uh, but I use the example of weight loss because we it's we now understand pretty well that willpower isn't it's a false hope that your body will fight back against you. And just depending on the strength of your willpower or the strength of your body's chemical reactions, that battle may go on for an extended period of time. It could go on for a lifetime on one end of the scale, or that battle could be over by the end of the week. Uh and maybe you can choose to start that battle over again. But yeah, I don't know about I don't know about willpower.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 43:44

Yeah, I don't either.

Jon Stone - Host: 43:45

It's intense I mean really there's intention. I certainly believe in intention. But whenever will we think about willpower, it's usually we're usually using that in the context of against what our own body is trying to do or trying to tell us in one step into that end. I don't I I don't know if that's a real thing.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 44:05

Yeah, and if that if that could ever materialize really on a permanent basis, there are probably cases of that. There are probably some cases of that where you can say, you know, I'm not going to do this anymore. I'm not going to behave change behavioral change. But mostly we know that we need to do some rewiring in our circuitry. I mean, that's how smoking clinics work.

Jon Stone - Host: 44:30

I was just thinking about uh alcohol. Yeah. I know many people personally over my lifetime that have had problems with alcohol. And a very small percentage of them, they wake up one day for whatever reason, they say, enough's enough. I'm gonna stop. By God, they do.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 44:51

Yes.

Jon Stone - Host: 44:52

I'm thinking of one fella I grew up with, and he said, I'm done 35 years ago, something like that. And to the best of my knowledge, hasn't touched the drop. Yeah. And hasn't even really appeared to struggle with it that much either. Interesting. Just said all of a sudden you can flip that switch. Yeah. And of course, the vast majority of everybody that I know that is not the case at all. And they want they want to so badly. Yeah. But willpower alone isn't going to get the job done. And I'm talking about these people, they're I consider them to be powerful people. Yeah. Yeah. Extremely powerful people. But somehow willpower doesn't kind of fit into that same power gradient.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 45:38

Yeah. Well, I want to go back to that, to thinking along with Jack Miserow and the disorienting dilemma, the fellow that you know that just seemingly woke up one morning and said, No more, I've had it. Something happened that shifted his mindset. So he may have had his own quiet, private, disorienting dilemma, something that he believed to be the case, thought absolutely was true, and then learned that it was not. Some kind of a disorienting dilemma like that. And it just maybe wasn't apparent to others, but that'll that's the thing that causes you to change. It's a shift in your perspective, a complete shift in your perspective. Not a little bit, not a like, well, I thought it was rose colored and now it's actually ruby or something. It's not like that little thing, it's like a big thing. Have you ever had anything like that?

Jon Stone - Host: 46:38

You know, I'm thinking of an experience right now, but I I it's more of a it's a it's a trauma experience. And I don't know that that's the same thing that we're talking about, but uh it was a warm summer afternoon, and I was in my early twenties, and I was living with a bunch of friends at a house in Everett, and it was early spring, and it was unusually warm. And all of my friends, it was we'd gotten off work, all of my friends said, Hey, let's go. They wanted to go somewhere and do something. I'm like, you know, I've worked all day and tired, I'm just gonna sit, I'm gonna stay here and enjoy this weather. And so they all left. I had the house to myself. I was sitting on the front porch, and this beautiful the cherries were blooming. That's how I remember what time of year it was. It must have been February, March, early, one of those early springs that we sometimes get around here. And it was just ideal. And I had a rolling rock beer, which was my beer of choice at that time. And in that moment, just sitting peacefully under the blooming cherry tree with my rolling rock. 100 feet away from me next door, there was a little corner neighborhood market. This is a residential area. Little corner neighborhood, mini mart kind of a thing, mom and pop. And then beyond that, there was an intersection of an arterial and then a side street and uh traffic light. And as I was sitting there sipping this late afternoon beer, I could hear the vehicle coming speeding down the street. I couldn't see it because it was behind buildings, but I heard it and it's like the accelerator, it just kept accelerating, going faster and faster and faster and faster. And then it hit the steel telephone pole, the light pole that was out there. And again, I couldn't see the actual impact. It was hidden behind the building. But this it was like a little Dotson, one of those little Dotson pickup trucks at the time. This is early 90s. And uh it hit a steel telephone pole that did not go anywhere. Probably, I don't know how fast they were going, but it was, you know, it was probably, I don't imagine it was any less than 70 miles an hour. And so there was just this explosion, and then there was silence, and then I remember seconds later, the sound of parts raining down out of the sky, glass, metal, and then there was just kind of silence and this this metallic rain falling, and it stunned me. But then after some period of time, I got up and I I ran to the intersection, and there was nobody out there, and to this day, that still strikes me as odd, but there just wasn't anybody else out there, no other traffic, no other cars. But uh, I could see, you know, then I come around the corner of the minimart, and there's the the car there, and it's literally wrapped, they use the phrase wrapped around the light bulb, but it was wrapped around that, and there was steam from the radiator and oily smoke everywhere, so I couldn't see very well. And I looked around, it's like there's no other cars, and I ran over to that car to help, and I put my head in the window so that the driver side, so I could see what was going on, and that was uh that was one of those things that nobody should ever uh see that kind of thing. And uh there's a driver and a passenger male of uh probably 30s or something like that, and they had alcohol in the car. I don't know if they were if that was the cause of the accident or whatnot, but they had there's lots of containers of beer, and a lot of those had cracked open. So there's just this smell of of what the insides of people smell like, and motor oil and gasoline and and antifreeze, coolant, uh steam, and then beer. It's really strong sense though. The beer is almost the strongest sense or strongest scent that I could pick up. And then anyway, that I I I realized pretty another little shocking kind of moment, you know, taking that in visually and through all the senses. And then I figured it was obvious they were both deceased, uh, clearly. Uh then the responders got there and and I told them my observations, and that was it. And then I eventually went back to that porch I was sitting on, and my rolling rock was still sitting there half empty, and I went to to pick it up, and that smell of beer hit my nostrils, and I couldn't touch it. And to wrap up my long story, I couldn't, not that I chose not to or didn't want to, but I couldn't drink alcohol again for I think three years. No kidding. It was just like, you know, like if you're walking around on a carpet and there's a lot of static electricity, and if you're you get zapped enough times, like your muscles like won't let you touch something metal, you know what I'm talking about? It's that same kind of thing. It's not that I didn't desire to drink beer, it's just that I could not physically cause myself to drink alcohol.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 51:58

Wow.

Jon Stone - Host: 51:58

Or get or even be anywhere near where that odor was. It was such a negative reaction. Wow. So that's a that's a trauma response, which isn't what we were talking about initially, but yeah, it was an example of maybe it was an example of subconscious willpower. I don't know.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 52:15

Yeah, maybe so. Maybe it was, yeah. I think that um, yeah, a trauma response is unique in that way, where you you know it gets you at a very guttural level. And I think that's the same idea as a uh disorienting dilemma in the sense that it's it it is meant to be something uh as Mesarot describes it, it's meant to be something that virtually changes your mind about something. Has this happened to you? I mean, it's happened to me several times where somehow I just mistakenly thought something was right. Like, uh even if we use it the simplest thing, so-and-so's lived, no, so-and-so's lived in Seattle their whole life. And then someone pipes up and says, No, they didn't. They they haven't lived in Seattle their whole life. They uh spent the they were born in Arkansas. I know because I met him when he was, and this completely changes your mind about this person in some way. It completely like something you believed you knew, like that. Like, no, they're they've lived in Seattle their whole life, and then evidence comes to your attention that is counter to that very strong knowing that you thought you had.

Jon Stone - Host: 53:35

I've I've experienced that through uh my own memories, like my like early, earlier life childhood memories being incorrect, having become corrupted over time. I've experienced that, but I can't think of an example where I've experienced that just based on belief, mistaken beliefs. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 53:57

Yeah. Interesting. Yeah.

Jon Stone - Host: 54:00

Well, since we are here in Sunny today, Port Townsend, I would actually like to hear about some of your best memories from your time at Centrum. How many years were you at Centrum?

Toni Aspin - Guest: 54:12

Seven.

Jon Stone - Host: 54:13

Seven years. Yeah.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 54:14

It's the longest I've ever worked for any employer.

Jon Stone - Host: 54:17

I was gonna say that's a little bit of a long stretch.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 54:19

Yeah for you. Yeah, it is. I loved that job because it was, I was just soaking up everything. I was learning so much. I was coming from, it was still very early, not long after the American Civil Liberties Union. So I had started thinking differently about how I could use my skills, but I still always thought within the context of financial stuff. The founder of Centrum, Joe Wheeler, one of my uh one who I consider to be my mentor, he he hired me from a a random letter that I wrote to him when I got to Port Townsend, kind of not totally happy about being here. I was trying to hold a failing relationship together. So I reluctantly agreed to come to Port Townsend. And when I got here, I thought, oh, what am I gonna do here? And I knew about Centrum because they produced the Jazz Festival and you know that. And I knew, I knew about the writers' conference and such. So I thought, well, it's the only place I'd ever even consider working, is at Centrum. So no job opening, nothing. I just virtually wrote a letter to Joe Wheeler and said, this is what I do. And I know I know that I would have focused mostly on financial turnaround stuff, because that's where my mind was at that time. Yeah. And so I wrote him a letter and he essentially said, This is what I do, and I'd like to do it at Centrum. Well, serendipitously, that letter landed on his desk the day after a board meeting, and they had just completed a capital campaign and uh rebuilt the performance hall. And as you know well, um, capital campaigns almost always cause a deficit. Now, approaches have gotten far more refined these days, but in general, people say, absolutely, I won't let this impact my annual gift or anything like that, but it does. So they had a deficit, and it was significant for that size organization, which was barely a million-dollar budget. Okay. And so the board chair said, Wheeler, you need to get some financial expertise in here. This is a story that Joe told me much later. You've got to get some financial expertise. He was a brilliant fellow, uh, PhD in music. Okay. And a musician. That was his love. Uh, and jazz particularly. So he thought to himself, he said, I have no idea how to even talk to a financial person. Yeah. And he comes to work. That happened at the board meeting the night before he comes to work, and there's my letter sitting on his desk. And he told me later that he said, There must be a God. So he called me up and we hit it off really well. And he didn't know exactly what how he wanted me to work this because he had a long-standing accountant that worked there. And she was still using recipe cards for various things like registry. It was like really not at all. So I had to go about this very carefully because, of course, I didn't want to muck around in the day-to-day recording entries, but I needed her support in order to be able to get to the bottom of why things were, you know, happening as they were. So that was my number one lesson. But it was like getting to the bottom of things. You need to have people be able to speak with you honestly about that. And there I was, you know, uh trying to guide the way. My favorite part then, it grew and grew and grew. And Joe was a registered lobbyist. He was a gifted money whisperer, if you will. And so he taught me the ropes there. He took me to Olympia. We had funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and for the state from the state superintendent of public instruction. So I learned the ropes. He took me to Olympia with him and showed me the ropes, and I learned effectively how to go about working within the legislative system and many other things that he taught me. Many of the lessons I learned from him were not to do things the way he did them. Yeah. But he really gave me full reign when it came to learning board dynamics and what I felt like I could sort of instinctively and by watching him uh with the board, I felt like I could make some changes in the way that worked.

Jon Stone - Host: 58:47

How much overlap time did you have with Joe?

Toni Aspin - Guest: 58:51

Oh, four years. Okay. Wow. Yeah, four years. Because I was I was just working. He I was hired as a contractor. Okay. So I was doing financial consulting. And then after about a year, 18 months, he made up the position of managing director and made me managing director. And then I worked with him for another two and a half years or something as managing director before I became executive director.

Jon Stone - Host: 59:17

So yeah, I when he made the managing director, did he make himself the artistic director? Is that the no?

Toni Aspin - Guest: 59:23

He kept executive director. Okay. Oh, yeah. He kept executive director. Yeah. So we didn't change any of that, the structure. It was just he was still the boss, but giving me managing director allowed me more purview beyond just the financial aspect of it. So then I got to start learning programming and, you know, all of that stuff from very talented people that were there. So that I have such fond memories of that, of staying up all night finishing a grant for the NEA. Of our season started really early in springtime, although we had a chamber music festival. In the winter. And then we had a tiny jazz festival in the February because it kept all the vendors, all the merchants in town like alive. Right. And then the summer season started, and we had festival after festival and ended up with Maristone Youth Symphony Orchestra here. So it ended in about September. I have so many great memories of being out. I mean, in those days, and in small nonprofits, you did everything. So even though I'm a managing director, I'm going around to the clubs during jazz and collecting the door from there. And the man that owns this little Thai food place, he could see the drop at the bank, you know, he would watch over me. So he would see me dropping money in the bank and making sure I was okay. And then he'd always have a meal waiting for me at the end of the at two in the morning, he'd stay open through the festival so he could make me food. It was fantastic. Wonderful memories. Yeah, yeah. And also gave me a real feel for what event management is like.

Jon Stone - Host: 1:01:09

Where did you go after Centrum? What was the poll that uh made you leave that wonderful beloved environment?

Toni Aspin - Guest: 1:01:16

Oh gosh, it was the hardest thing ever. But what I got to, and this is a good um uh lesson for people that are dealing with beloved founders. So he was very much behind me, as was the board, in making me executive director. But after serving in that role for almost two years, I realized that I would the organization would never flourish because everybody saw me as Joe's pick.

Jon Stone - Host: 1:01:43

Okay.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 1:01:44

And this often happens. There's always kind of a lame duck, if you will. Yeah, I know what you're saying. I won't call myself a lame duck because I think we did a lot, but it was always still, there was kind of that generator on it, you know, that uh governor, let's call it, that said, like this is still Joe's organization. So I just didn't know what I was gonna do, but I thought I've got to let it go. They've got to go through a national search, right? And they've gotta, they've gotta grow up. So I resigned without knowing. And I resigned before they had really seriously undergone the national search because they weren't even doing anything. They couldn't believe I was actually going. And you know, this happens often. It's just like, no, no, and oh, we have time, and they were underestimating what it was going to take to actually replace someone. So six months notice I gave, though thinking it was gonna be plenty of time. So I finally just had to go. And they finally went through a national search and they stumbled, but they found somebody, and I had to just let them stumble. It's one of those things, you know, that's often, you know, the old adage if you love, you have to let go. So I cringed a little bit at all the stumbling that happened, but they're solid now and have been for a long time.

Jon Stone - Host: 1:03:05

What is your favorite sound?

Toni Aspin - Guest: 1:03:09

Water. Say more about that. Uh the sound of water flowing. Uh so that could be waves, it could be a river, it could be a little trickle. That's my favorite sound.

Jon Stone - Host: 1:03:22

Same with Chris Weber. Really? Listen to his podcast, exact same answer. Who do you think you are? A pupil.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 1:03:37

What do you believe? Well, at the risk of sounding corny, I believe in love. And that love guides everything we do.

Jon Stone - Host: 1:03:51

Toni, as always, it has been wonderful spending time with you making conversation. Thank you so much for making the time.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 1:04:00

Oh, thank you, Jon. And as always, uh, we never uh fall short of things to talk about. I'm so glad that you're working on these podcasts. I think it's important, and I think that you'll bring some real insights into the industry.

Jon Stone - Host: 1:04:16

It feels good. That's how I know that it probably is good.

Toni Aspin - Guest: 1:04:20

Yeah, yeah.