Praise for The Art of Being Human at Work

Work does not have to suck. What is more, work can even be a dojo for joy, learning, and immense personal growth. Let Ali—who is both a horse and human whisperer—show you how. —Dan Harris, author of 10% Happier and host of the 10% Happier podcast

"Compiling over ten years of coaching expertise and a lifetime’s worth of wisdom, Allison Schultz’s The Art of Being Human at Work provides a guide for managers, and all of us really, to bring our heart and our humanity into the workplace, creating the possibility for a more compassionate and awakened sense of being at work." —Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and Real Life

As a co-founder of Reboot, Ali Schultz has spent a decade on the front lines of leadership development. This wonderfully well-written book is a collection of reports from the front, all of them exploring the art of being human at work. The reports are brief but packed with insight, each of them worthy of taking time for deep reflection. If you are looking for leadership literature that goes beyond tips, tricks, and techniques to speak to the heart of the matter, this gem of a book will serve you well. —Parker J. Palmer, author of Let Your Life Speak, A Hidden Wholeness, and On the Brink of Everything

This must-read book for all leaders and aspiring leaders will show you how to learn from your difficult emotions and most challenging life experiences. With clear examples and powerful reflection prompts, Allison Schultz proves that the fearless willingness to engage in radical self-inquiry is the ONLY way to become an authentic leader. —Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy, co-authors of No Hard Feelings and Big Feelings

"In The Art of Being Human at Work, Allison Schultz provides a challenge to any would-be leader, namely: we can take a person, or a project, only as far as we have traveled ourselves. Accordingly, identifying, listening, examining, confronting, and dialoguing with the plethora of voices within that are laying claim to our choices is the first step toward responsible leadership and legitimate authority over others. Schultz’s work is helpful to each of us in this summons to accountability." —James Hollis, Ph.D., author of Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life and Living an Examined Life

"The Art of Being Human at Work is a delightful, poignant, and wise spiritual friend. Allison invites us through urgent questioning to move from the superficial into what is tangling us up. What she calls radical inquiry is the essential, often uncomfortable, transformative process of facing one’s own shadows, building community with others, to become who we already are. Get this book for yourself and your team!" —Koshin Paley Ellison, Zen teacher and author of Untangled: Walking the Eightfold Path to Clarity, Courage, and Compassion

Ali Schultz’s understanding of the complex psychology of entrepreneurs is truly remarkable. I’m not sure if anyone has thought more deeply about the intricate psychological landscape that entrepreneurs and their leadership teams navigate. This book is a testament to her exceptional ability to connect with and understand entrepreneurs on their journey. Open any page and you will quickly feel recognized, understood, and skillfully guided toward wiser life choices by Ali. This book is an incredible gift to those who believe better humans make better leaders. —Sebastian Ross, co-founder and Director of IESE School of Founders

If you’ve ever spent much time talking to Ali Schultz, you know that she just gets things on a level that few others do. These essays, like Ali, are deep and soulful and poetic. I frequently say to my clients, ‘This would all be a lot easier if you didn’t care!’ This book is a valuable map for leaders who do care, who want to go beyond ‘business as usual’ and engage with what it means to be human (and humane) at work—with all the joy and pain that brings. —Heather Jassy, executive coach and former SVP at Etsy

"The Art of Being Human at Work is a compelling guide for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs looking to create successful, purposeful organizations while also focusing on their own personal growth. Schultz demonstrates how embracing discomfort, facing fears, and cultivating vulnerability can lead to a more authentic and courageous self, as well as foster the trust and communication that form the foundation of conscious leadership." —Khe Hy, founder and CEO of RadReads

"We are shaped by stories. In The Art of Being Human at Work, Allison Schultz gives us tools to understand the stories we carry and questions that lead us toward fulfillment. Both curious and kind, it approaches work as an invitation to be connected—to our communities and ourselves." —Benjamin Perry, author of Cry, Baby: Why Our Tears Matter

"In my work with patients, I’ve often seen how hiding our true selves can lead to chronic stress, burnout, and a range of physical ailments. The Art of Being Human at Work offers a holistic approach to leadership, emphasizing the importance of self-care, mindfulness, and embodiment. Allison Schultz’s wisdom and experience will guide you in creating a workplace where individuals feel seen, heard, and valued, ultimately leading to greater fulfillment and success for all. This is a must-read for every professional who wants to bring more compassion and authenticity into their daily work." —Linnea Passaler, author of Heal Your Nervous System

Right away, you get the sense that being more yourself and being a great leader are the same endeavor. Through provocative chapter headings, quotes that make you pause and close your eyes, and questions that pull at you to answer them, Ali helps you ‘know thyself’ and find the leader you want to be already inside yourself. —Akshay Kapur, head of coaching at Automattic

Entrepreneurship has high-highs, low-lows, and everything in between. It’s a rollercoaster ride for one’s heart. These essays normalize the human experience every entrepreneur faces. Reboot’s impact in entrepreneurs’ lives over the past decade—with podcasts and free content that speaks right to the heart of the matter—is always timely and an essential accompaniment for the leader’s journey. —Brad Feld, partner and co-founder of Foundry

"The Art of Being Human at Work gently reminds us that we’re always in the never-quite-figured-out messiness in between order and mystery, in between the safety of what we know and the potential of what could be. Yet that’s where growth happens, as long as we never stop the radical self-inquiry that helps us get to know and accept ourselves, helping us be more human and more ourselves at work and in life." —Evgeny Shadchnev, author of Startup CEO Succession

This book is for everyone who wants to become a better leader and a better person. People at all ages and stages of life will benefit from reading this book. The specific stories and essays organized into key leadership themes makes this book unique and practical. Allison integrates numerous quotes and resources that add even more value to her content. I will buy this book for my coaching clients at all levels. Since there is no finish line for the art of being human, this is a book that is timeless. The shelf life has no expiration date. —Jann E. Freed, PhD, author of Breadcrumb Legacy: How Great Leaders Live a Life Worth Remembering and Leading with Wisdom: Sage Advice from 100 Experts

In these pages you will find yourself reading raw relatability with the rhythm of poetry and the pull of your favorite novel. Allison has compiled for us a collection of windows into understanding what it is to be a leader. This can be read from cover to cover or simply open to any page; inevitably you will find yourself less alone and with practical prompts to reflect on. —Miriam Meima, CEO of the 2 Million Leaders Project

What a gift to be reminded that the work of being a leader cannot be collapsed into checklists and strategies, but rather involves our hearts and souls—the expansive wholeness of who we are. Ali’s collection of essays invites the reader to go on a journey of uncovering one’s fierce and tender self through incisive questions and deep-time wisdom. —Chrystal Bell, executive coach

In this collection of smart essays, sprinkled with important questions to get you reflecting and scribbling, Ali takes us on a journey of exploration and self-discovery toward being more human at work. She’s there as our honest guide, inviting us to figure out not only who we are as leaders, but who we are as humans. Helping us to show up in the fullness of our lives, find the courage we need, and lay a foundation of trust with others, this book is an essential compass for personal growth and development. —Ian Sanders, storyteller, author, trainer, and coach

Copyright © 2024 Allison Schultz

All Rights Reserved.

hello@reboot.io

Creative Director: Saeah Wood

Production and Editorial Manager: Amy Reed

Editorial: Amy Reed, Terri Armstrong Welch, and Matthew Hoover

Design: Ivica Jandrijević

Author Photo: Peggy Dyer

This book was made with love by humans and does not contain any AI generated content.

Paperback ISBN: 979-8-9903452-0-1

E-book ISBN: 979-8-9903452-1-8

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Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It is precisely that simple, and also that difficult.

—Warren Bennis

The unexamined life is not worth living.

—Socrates

And if you choose to live an unexamined life, please don’t take a job that involves other people.

—Parker J. Palmer

Imagine if we measured success by the amount of safety people felt in our presence.

—Jonathan Louis Dent

I scarcely know where to begin, but love is always a safe place.

—Emily Dickinson

To the emerging leader: may you trust that the process of becoming more you leads to the fortitude, resolve, grace, and magic on the roller coaster of life.

This book is dedicated to your heart.

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Part I

Making Peace with Your Shadows

Why Tracking Your Shadow Is Essential to Being a Leader (and a Better Human)

A la Mode

Our Inheritance, Our Legacy

Looking Askew

Part and Parcel

Hitting the Wall

Fate and Destiny

Where Your Loyalties Lie

Exile Nothing

The Popular Vote

Finding You in The Thick of It

Part II

Unfolding Your Authentic Self

Emotions as Data Points

Since Feeling is First

The Turning

Spirit Meets Bone

The Stress of Work Life

Red Light Moments

An Inside Job

The Perils of Perfectionism

Opening Doors

Sacred Pause

The Great Rewilding

The Sound of Settling

The Truth About Who You Are

L-I-V-I-N

The Only Life You Could Save

Part III

From Fear to Courage

The Thing About Hard Things

Getting Curious

Aftermath

Risking Significance

Comparison Steals Joy: Tracking Your Personal Records

Unfolding

Wherever You Go

Warrior Stance

No Going Back

The Compulsion to Work: Do You Work Too Much?

The Other Side of Fear

Wondering About Wonder

Gentle Strength

Part IV

Embracing Change

Fresh Tracks

Unfinished Poems

The Beauty of Not Knowing

Passing By

When Life Comes at You

Betwixt

Thresholds of Change

Hello, Butterfly

The Practice: Personal Growth is Essential to Business Growth

Part V

Laying a Foundation of Trust

An Alternative to Fear-based Leadership: A Brief Case for Love 

The Space Between

Expanding Our Potential

The Gifts of Relationship

Radical Honesty

Building Bridges

A Good Ear

Congruence

Show Me You Care

Red–Yellow–Green

The Big Reveal

Part VI

Embodied Leadership

Bodyfulness and Wise Action

Wholeness and Leadership

The Perpetual Undoing

Working Well

Spiritual Crisis, Spiritual Opportunity

The Secrets of a Successful Entrepreneur

Seeing How Far You’ve Come

Conclusion: At the Heart of it All

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

About the Author

Foreword

The Struggle to Be Human

By Jerry Colonna

Rumi taught that the experience of being human is like a guesthouse where we should welcome a joy, a depression, a meanness as an unexpected visitor. As true as Rumi’s teaching is, the welcoming of it all can be quite a struggle. This being human is hard.

We see this difficulty in the ways folks try to mitigate the struggle by obsessing over the practical realities of leading and growing up. We see the efforts to lessen the difficult tasks of leading, managing, and adulting by fixating on the how of leadership. And, as important as such efforts are—and to be clear, they are important—learning the skills of managing does little to relieve the struggle of being a fully human leader.

And so we see, time and again, folks turning to trendy hacks to bypass and shortcut their way to relief. They’ll turn to age-old proven techniques for radical self-inquiry—practices like journaling or meditation, for example—in an attempt to quickly fix their way to relief. They’ll consume ’shrooms or perform superficial versions of other forms of ancient wisdom without the accompanying insight necessary to further their development into adulthood. Unfortunately, rather than using these practices as entry points into real radical self-inquiry, what often happens is that they’re used to bypass the struggle and, more importantly, the work it takes to grow into our full selves.

I think now of the young man who came up to me recently at a book signing. How can I be fully actualized? he tenderly asked me, his eyes welling up. I was struck by the incongruity of his simple, somewhat intellectual question and the felt sense that behind his question was a dull ache of self-dissatisfaction.

Tell me more about your question, I responded, leaning in a bit so I could both hear and sense him better. All I really knew at that moment was that he was in his twenties and came from a family of very successful parents and grandparents. From our brief conversations prior to this moment, I knew he didn’t want to screw up the legacy he’d inherited—a legacy of both success and wealth. Tell me more about what needs to be actualized, I continued.

He spoke about all the various life hacks he’d been reading and hearing about. Podcasts and books that spoke reverently of the ways one could optimize one’s sleep, fight inflammation, meditate away one’s anxieties, or even medicate one’s way past the dull ache of self-dissatisfaction. ’Shrooms and journaling, I imagined him wishing me to advise. Take two and call me in the morning.

Instead, I pressed him in a different way. Tell me what needs to be made better, made whole, what might be in need of actualization, I said, wary of the proclivity of so many to bypass the work necessary to finally feel that they belong. His tears flowed more freely now. What if you’re already actualized? I asked. His shoulders, which had been close to his ears, let themselves down and his heart seemed to slow.

He handed me a copy of my book Reunion for me to sign. On the blank page near the front, I wrote his name and added Remember...you’re already actualized. You always have been. Love, Jerry.

What if you’re already actualized? How would that change your experience in this life you have?

In this wonderful collected work, these are the types of questions that Ali challenges each of us to contemplate. Reflect on, struggle through, wrestle with, and, in an act of deep self-compassion, bear witness to instead of skipping to the very end.

Carl Jung famously said that the whole person isn’t merely one who has walked with God but one who has also wrestled with the devil. This wrestling is the pre-work necessary to enjoy the art of becoming and being a fully actualized, fully whole human—in the workplace and beyond. Even though it feels so hard, this wrestling is a form of self-compassion. For that is the essence of compassion: to be with the feelings, no matter the challenge, and to welcome them all in. In this way, we turn the struggle into an art by bearing witness to it all.

This is, to me, the best part of The Art of Being Human at Work. Indeed, it is the meditative aspect of this collection of short but powerful essays that makes it so effective. You are now able to read these meditations, not over the course of years as they were first published, but as a whole. And in this way you can see Ali’s art at work, how she circles around the essence of being human, of being with the human part of ourselves. The result is a guidebook that shows—rather than tells—how one might create the space of our humanity while preserving such space for those whom we are privileged to lead—so they may be their human selves as well. Think of this book as an accompaniment, and think of Ali as your companion, on this journey into your own humanity.

Ali and I, as well as our colleagues at Reboot, are famously known for the tears we can invoke. As often as not, they flow from the simple but powerful questions we often ask of ourselves and of those with whom we work. How are you? we ask, not as a throwaway line but as an empathetic bridge—one heart connecting to another. How are you and, more importantly, how has your wish to love and be loved, to feel safe, and to belong motivated your frantic push to be the best leader and the best adult you can be? And further, how has that wish led you to a whole series of self-defeating thoughts and actions? Hanging around Reboot folks, one can expect tears to flow. And those tears flow mostly because our simple but hard questions create space for that human to be seen, held, and respected.

For more than ten years, Ali has not only been the voice of Reboot but the voice of those who struggle with the art of being human. From organizing our very first bootcamp—where it was evident that this way of coaching, of releasing people from the self-imposed burden of stories they hold about who they should be—to the release of this collection of her best writing, Ali continues to lead us in making sense of our broken-open hearts. For all that time, she has given voice to and chronicled the part of being human that is too often overlooked and, therefore, bypassed in a vain attempt to ward off the terrors of leadership. The resulting dehumanization of ourselves and our colleagues is the consequence of valuing output over people in order to ignore the devil instead of wrestling with it.

Ali resists the temptation to fix, preferring instead to take the coach’s stance of bearing witness while ever mindful of her own journeys and struggles. She offers her own radical self-inquiry in service to, and in support of, your journey.

Perhaps this is the ultimate expression of the art of being human: to acknowledge our own struggle while staying connected to the struggles of others. In this way, as with so many other bits of wisdom from elders such as Rumi, the art is a function of the practice. The art of being human then, is the practice of welcoming it all in, and in doing so, finally seeing that you’ve been human all along.

Introduction

Better leaders are better humans and better humans are better leaders. Leadership lessons then, at their core, are lessons in humanity.

—Jerry Colonna 

The inner landscape of an entrepreneur is where inspiration and the practical-tactical meet the realities of building a business. There are ups and downs, and some quick turns—much like a roller coaster. It’s a ride that we opt in to (though, sometimes we forget that it’s a choice)—one that sometimes makes us feel like we’re soaring, and at other times makes our stomach churn.

Most twists and turns are beyond our control. The pandemic especially has taught us that. The key to riding this roller coaster well is finding a way to metabolize the ups and downs as they occur.

For many people, founding and running a business (or working at a scaling startup) puts life on full throttle. Big sacrifices are made in the name of mission statements and promises of big returns that often take a toll on our health, our relationships, and our mental well-being. When we sign up for this entrepreneurial roller coaster, there’s as much foreboding as excitement: it’s a wild ride in this work/life amusement park as we discover our own twists and turns.

When you boarded the roller coaster of entrepreneurship, what is it that you signed up for? What did you leave behind? What did you assume about the ride you chose? How did your assumptions and beliefs about work influence your choice? Looking at things now: What or how might you choose differently?

What would be different if you approached your work choices from a place grounded in a sense of self-worth? How many of the choices made around your job, company, or career are based on a belief that you are not enough or not valuable outside of your accomplishments and bank accounts?

How we consider work within the scope of our whole life is a perspective that can take us off the roller coaster.

Enter: Transformational Coaching

Coaching clients come to Reboot with a varied set of pain points such as bullying executives, misbehaving board members, CEOs struggling to step away from the day-to-day as the company scales, imposter syndrome, and challenges with delegation and trust. Many of these are people issues, as much as they have practical-tactical components. Many of these are part and parcel of the growing pains encountered as a company grows and the leader grows—or is forced to grow—into their role.

In most cases simply knowing what to do only solves half the problem due to the human dynamics at play in any situation. The human factors make for a complexity that often isn’t touched by simply applying best practices, new systems, and methodologies. Each scenario is a unique case that requires a sensitivity to nuance because of what’s really happening at the human level. This is where the how you do it comes in.

As coaches, we know it takes both practical skills (operational know-how) and radical self-inquiry to address most issues fully. When it comes to success in building/running/leading a business, you can’t have one without the other. Radical self-inquiry on its own can skew towards aloofness and turn you into the proverbial philosopher on a log. Practical skills only may deny the human experience, the heart and the humanity of what it means