You can't lead a team through a hard moment if you can't manage yourself first. That's the core of Dr. Becky Kennedy's work. The clinical psychologist and founder of Good Inside built a global movement teaching parents how to navigate the hardest moments with their kids. It turns out those same skills are exactly what the modern workplace needs. This week, Dr. Becky joins Jessi in the studio to translate her parenting playbook for managers, leaders, and anyone who's ever had to deliver hard news, hold a line they didn't fully believe in, or hold it together when someone on their team fell apart.
In this episode, Jessi and Dr. Becky discuss:
- Why conviction matters more than confidence, and how to tell if you actually have it before walking into a hard meeting
- The AVP method (acknowledge, validate, permit) for regulating your own emotions before they spill into the room
- Why self-regulation isn't a two-minute fix, and what Dr. Becky calls "the road to reactivity"
- How to separate behavior from identity when giving feedback, and why conflating the two is what makes hard conversations go wrong
- Why sturdiness is the key to managing a team through uncertainty and layoffs
- The sentence structure to use when you don't have all the answers but still need to show up as a leader
- Why empathy requires boundaries, and a tennis court visualization that keeps other people's feelings on their side of the net
- What anger is actually telling you, and how to use it productively instead of letting it drive the conversation
- Why Dr. Becky is skeptical of the feedback sandwich, and a feedback method to use instead
- A simple question managers can ask every week to make upward feedback feel safe and specific
This conversation was originally recorded live and broadcast to LinkedIn Premium members. Premium members can watch the extended version here.
Follow Dr. Becky Kennedy and Jessi Hempel on LinkedIn.
