American Thought Leaders - We Are Treating Each Other as ‘Political Abstractions,’ Chloe Valdary Has a Way to Fix That

Episode Date: July 16, 2024

Chloé Valdary is the founder of an alternative model to the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training programs found in many corporations. Her alternative, called the “Theory of Enchantment,��� first emerged from her work educating people about anti-Semitism and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. “They would say to you, ‘You are a white man, and therefore you are privileged. And therefore you belong to the ’oppressor class.‘ I, as a person of color, belongs to the ’oppressed class.' And we are—you and I—locked in a Manichean struggle from now until the end of time. There’s no escape valve,” said Ms. Valdary.“There are three principles to the theory of enchantment. [The] first principle is treat people like human beings, not political abstractions. Second principle is criticize to uplift and empower, never to tear down or destroy. And third principle is root everything you do in love and compassion.”We discuss concepts such as supremacy, identity, outrage, race, and religion.“We are a Protestant nation. Protest is our founding religion. And so, we are confronted with a great challenge, which is the challenge of growing up. We are a very young nation, and I think that all of these ‘culture wars’ are an invitation to engage in some self-reflection, collectively, and grow up,” said Ms. Valdary.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

They would say to you, you are a white man and therefore you are privileged. You belong to the quote-unquote oppressor class and we are, you and I, locked in a Manichean struggle from now until the end of time. There's no escape valve. Chloe Valdry is the founder of an alternative model to the diversity, equity and inclusion, DEI, training programs found in many corporations. Her alternative, called Theory of Enchantment, first emerged from her work educating people about anti-Semitism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There are three principles to the Theory of Enchantment.

First principle is treat people like human beings, not political abstractions. Second principle is criticize to uplift and empower, never to tear down or destroy. And third principle is root everything you do in love and compassion. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kellek. Chloe Valdry, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you so much for having me. Chloe, you said something provocative a little while ago that really caught my attention. I want to start with that.

You said, all humans have had supremacist thoughts through all time, including today. Yes. I think there's a lot of people who might be unhappy to hear that. Well, just tell me what you mean here. Well, I've experienced the full range of what it means to be human. I experience joy. I experience rage. I experience anger. I experience love, which is actually more about a state of awareness than an emotion. But I experience all these things as human beings. There's a great film that's out right now that's exploring this called Inside Out Part 2.

This is true of all of us. And what is supremacy? Supremacy is an overcompensation for feelings of insecurity. So when I am feeling insecure and I don't have a place or a way to holistically relate to that feeling, I will unconsciously project it out onto another human being in order to feel good about myself. A very simple example of this is if I'm driving and someone cuts me off in traffic, I feel unsafe. If I'm not conscious of my feeling, I will project that feeling of unsafetiness

onto the other person who just cut me off, and I will see them as fundamentally less than me, and I will curse them out. That's a moment where I see myself, I perceive myself as superior to that person. But what's going on is I have a need, that need was not met. So I have a feeling that's attached to that unmet need and then I project it onto the other person in order to feel safe. And so I, like all other human beings, experience that in a number of different contexts. And it's totally normal, in a way, to feel that.

Except that feeling superior briefly and then coming back and going, well, hmm, maybe that wasn't quite right. Or actually, maybe I had a role in that even, right? Supremacy, that's something different. It's something, I guess, more stable, maybe? You are suggesting that perhaps it's longer lasting. It's like an approach, almost. I mean, this is me thinking. I want to hear what you're thinking.

I think it is an approach, but it's an approach conditioned over time. It's an approach that one takes as a result of constantly using that sort of experience that I just described. Let's take an example that's more head-on in terms of what people actually think about when they think about supremacy. Arno Michaelis is a former white nationalist and he fell into white nationalism as a teenager. Why did he fall into this as a teenager? Well, as a young child, he was actually born into an alcoholic family, so he didn't have a space of security as a child. He didn't have the necessary social, emotional sustainability as a child that he needed to thrive. And he didn't have the tools to deal with that insecurity. He didn't

have the tools to deal with that scarcity. So he defaulted to a heuristic, a way of thinking, a very black and white form of thinking that said, all the people who look like me are good, and all the people who don't look like me are bad. But what we have to understand was that was a tool or a heuristic that he adopted to deal with the chaos in his life. And so he overcompensated for that feeling of insecurity by becoming a white supremacist. Now, in this schema, as I've painted it, supremacy is actually a coping mechanism for pain. Just as it was in the example that I gave where I'm cursing someone out who just cut in front of me.

It's also the same for Arnold Michaelis as he was growing up. And it was all unconscious, right? But I think what is key here that we're trying to get people to understand that theory of enchantment is that hatred, of course, supremacy is a form of hatred. It's not this mystical thing. It is a coping mechanism that we reach for as human beings to deal with pain, to deal with insecurity, the same way we might reach for alcohol addiction, right? The same way we might reach for drug addiction to deal with pain, hatred, or supremacy is serving the same function. But of course it doesn't actually work. It's a coping mechanism.

And Theory of Enchantment serves to sort of interrupt that cycle and give people other tools, more holistic tools, more tools, I would describe them, of integration to deal with pain and suffering, which we all experience as human beings. Well, then, of course, it can be abused by people to, you know, I don't know, catalyze political causes, for example, and so forth. That's the kind of context that I think of it in most typically. Sure, yeah, absolutely. And often I would say that even the people who are often abusing or exploiting, let's say, the insecurities of others, and I think of gangs or terrorist organizations. I think of terrorist organizations as gangs, actually. They're in a similar category in my head. Oftentimes, these gangs are filled with the same people or the same type of people who experience in their childhood some form of insecurity that they didn't have the tools to deal with in a holistic way.

And then they then defaulted. They gravitated towards each other because of this shared experience. And instead of it being one individual, now it's a group. I can't help but be thinking right now about Rwanda. It doesn't even need to be people that look particularly different from each other. Sure. Right? And it's very interesting because often we think of supremacy as being something related to race.

And here we just had different tribes of people. One of them decided, again, egged on by demagogues to do the unthinkable. Yes, absolutely. Rwanda is a great example of the fact that all of us are or have the capacity to be supremacists, regardless of our skin color or our gender or our socioeconomic status or the country that we reside in, our national origin, etc. You know, you, of course, mentioned Theory of Enchantment, which is both your organization and your, I think, method. Why don't you just give me an overview of it? What is the method here? Sure. So we focus on inclusion and belonging, and we help companies train their employees in the necessary skill sets that they must have in order to have psychological safety in the workplace, which means that you're free to disagree, you're free to make mistakes, you understand the importance of having a resilient workplace or workforce.

It means that your staff is not constantly being tripped up over things that they're reading in the news or on social media about identity. Their identity is sort of both stable enough and flexible enough to endure conflict and to navigate conflict in healthy ways. And there are three principles to the theory of enchantment. First principle is treat people like human beings, not political abstractions. Second principle is criticize to uplift and empower, never to tear down or destroy. And third principle is root everything you do in love and compassion. So all the workshops and all of the products and services that we deliver to our partners, our customers, are meant to train them in modeling those principles.

Can you walk me through a little bit? Of course, I'm not going to get you to give us a full session here. Sure. So we begin all of our engagements with organizations with something that's called a sprint, which is a 90-minute workshop where we explore the first principle, treat people like human beings, not political abstractions. People might think to themselves, well, what does that mean? Of course I'm a human being, Chloe. I'm not a tree or a rock.

So why do I even need to do this? Well, the reason why we need to do this is because we take for granted what it means to be human, and we reduce ourselves to stereotypes. So oftentimes when we talk about the problem with stereotyping others, we think about it as directed externally. But in fact, if I am stereotyping someone else, I'm simultaneously stereotyping myself. What do I mean by this? If I know that in some contexts I am hardworking and in other contexts I am lazy and I'm able not only to accept that but to give thanks, to express gratitude for the full complexity of that, I will be less likely to

project the stereotype of lazy onto another group of people in order to feel good about myself. So we open our sprints with a practice called the Who Am I practice. And it's a very simple practice. You put a timer on for three minutes and you ask yourself the question, Who am I? And for every answer that comes to you, you say, Thank you. And there's two challenges in this practice. The first challenge that I've observed is that most people aren't even accustomed to giving thanks for the things that they do like about themselves. A lot of people are, I would say, majority of people I've encountered through this practice are hyper judgmental towards themselves, hyper hard on themselves. And you can bet they project that

onto others unconsciously. But of course, another hard challenge is expressing gratitude for the things that they don't like about themselves. And the observations that I've gotten from people include, you know, oh, this is strange to do this exercise. It feels weird. It feels awkward. And that's totally normal. We are not conditioned to give thanks for all the aspects of who we are as a human being. But if we engage in that practice on a regular basis, first of all, we will come to discover that we will never get to the bottom of who we are. Because this is what it means to be a human being. As human beings, we are inexhaustible. You could do this practice from now to infinity and you would never actually get to the bottom of who you are.

So you are constantly changing, constantly becoming, constantly transforming. That is what it means to be a human being. And so if you translate that into a sort of capital T truth, which says that if you can witness all these different aspects of yourself coming into being, all these different emotions, for example, if you can witness them and give thanks for them without over-identifying as them, then what will actually emerge is a kind of a state of joy and a kind of a state of grace that you will be able to direct both internally and by definition externally as well. What you're describing makes me think of

thanking God. Yeah. You get to do this in lieu of other kinds of diversity training as I understand it, right? Which is which is really really interesting right because you mentioned identity earlier yes and a lot of diversity training these days is focused on identity well I would actually argue that we we are also focused on identity but in a deeper way in a more profound way we're not focused on the superficial identities that we carry. Not only that we carry, but we over-identify us. I think in the current zeitgeist, at least as commentary, we don't just over-identify with our emotions. We over-identify with certain immutable characteristics that we think are the end-all be-all of what it means to be human. But as I said earlier,

you do the who am I practice, you'll never get to the bottom of who you are because you're constantly changing. But yes, we are very distinct from other branded DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs out there in the sense that many of those other programs tend to reduce human beings to their immutable characteristics. So they would say to you, you are a white man, and therefore you are privileged, and therefore you belong to the quote-unquote oppressor class. I, as a person of color, belong to the quote-unquote oppressed class. And we are, you and I, locked in a manichean struggle from now until the end of time that we could brand as oppressor oppressed and now what what that does actually is put us both inside of an inescapable prison because this is all that we are this is all that we

have ever been and this is all that we will be and so there's no escape valve from this sort of ideology or worldview one has to dispense with that worldview entirely and see it for the reductive thing that it is and not just a reductive thing the um it's a failure to apprehend the awesomeness of the human experience we often look to pop cultural icons to communicate some of the human experience. We often look to pop cultural icons to communicate some of the things we're trying to communicate. Kendrick Lamar is one of those pop culture icons. And in his song DNA, he says, I got power, poison, pain, and joy inside my DNA.

And I love that because it's capturing what we're trying to get people to realize about what it means to be alive, what it means to be themselves, and to really wrestle with and be in awe of this human experience, which the oppressor-oppressed paradigm cannot capture. In another lifetime, I was working in genetics. And one of the things that you learn along the way pretty quickly or becomes obvious if you're looking at DNA and genetic diversity is that there's a lot more common genetic diversity between us than the stuff that makes us different, for example, among between races. How did you get into this? Well, buckle up. Here we go. So you mentioned that this sounded

very much like thanking God. So I grew up in a religious family in New Orleans, a Christian family that observed Jewish holidays. So very atypical Christian family that observed Jewish holidays in a Roman Catholic town. Granted, my, I guess, iteration of Christianity that I was raised in was very much anti-Catholic. So it was deeply Protestant and very much because of its anti-Catholicism, the belief system was, oh, we have to observe all of the holy days in the Old Testament. We need to go to church on Saturday, not on Sunday. And we need to keep Passover and Rosh Hashanah and Sukkot and all the other holy days that are mentioned in the Old Testament because Jesus was a Jew and he observed all of these. We consider

ourselves followers of Jesus, therefore we must do the same. So I grew up with a kind of insider-outsider relationship to both Christianity or various forms of Christianity and Judaism. This is relevant first of all because it gave me a spiritual outlook you know in life in general and although I no longer subscribed to that iteration of spirituality it definitely shaped the way I perceive what it means to be alive right. The second reason why it's relevant is because of that upbringing I developed a very strong allergy to anti-Semitism, which influenced my decision to major in international studies at the University of New Orleans in college and to study the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a conflict that seems to be erupting as of late. And the theory of enchantment actually was originally a response to that conflict. So the first three principles originally were not treat people like human beings,

not like political abstractions, but treat Israelis and Palestinians like human beings, not political abstractions. If you want to criticize, criticize to uplift and empower, never to tear down or destroy, and root everything you do in love and compassion. I was very much enmeshed in or focused on that conflict from about 2012 all the way to 2017, 18, to the time I formally created Theory of Enchantment. And I graduated college in 2015, which is when I moved to New York. And between 2015 and 2018, I was working on this concept called Theory of Enchantment. I was perplexed by the threat of anti-Semitism because there was no response to the conflict in college.

And I'm very grateful for the education that I received. But there was no response to the conflict that was explicitly rooted in love. And so I had this question, how do we learn how to love? And then the next question popped into my head, which was, well, what are we already in love with? And maybe I can use that as a template to work backwards to discover how to love. And from there, I started to study pop culture. So I started to study Disney. Again, shout out to inside out to an incredible

film that just came out a few few days ago um i started to study uh apple i started to study beyonce i started to study brands that have quasi-religious like devotion from millions of people and i started to look for patterns in these brands to see if there were common denominators, common themes. And the common theme that I found was that all these brands were basically transmitting the story of some imperfect, flawed human being goes through a series of obstacles and overcomes some challenge and becomes a hero. It's like the hero's journey. Some version of the hero's journey. Some version of the hero's journey, right? And from there, I developed the three principles.

And after that, I actually lectured on college campuses in the United States, Europe, and South Africa on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And I applied those principles to the conflict. And then in December of 2018, my contract was up. I was working for a non-profit at the time. I was trying to figure out what to do. And all the advice that I was getting from mentors and friends and family were like, you have something here. Why don't you take the principles, turn it into a full course, try to see what you can do there. And so I did that. I worked on fleshing out the course in 2019. I started speaking at a lot of high schools, actually, on the East Coast, Connecticut, New York, that sort of region.

And increasingly, people were receptive, people were responding, and then 2020 descended upon us like a hurricane and all of a sudden there's this interest in diversity equity and inclusion if i were to steel man it racial reconciliation reckoning with our history as a nation and obviously there were very specific approaches to that question that were both popular and toxic in 2020. I would point to Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo as sort of the two models of that popular yet toxic approach. And that actually motivated companies and other organizations to look for an alternative. And many of them found Theory of Enchantment. I'll just mention for those of us that are watching, the viewers that don't know the concept of steel manning,

it's sort of assuming the benefit of the doubt in a sense, right? Yes, absolutely. We have to remember that in 2020, we had COVID-19. People were inside. People were craving community. People were craving a sense of belonging. And you had the murder of George Floyd. It was sort of a perfect powder keg in that sense, right?

People were very much seeking things that we as human beings need to thrive. Unfortunately, some of our emotions were hijacked along the way, let's say. But I think it's really important to steel man. Otherwise, we will be caught in a never-ending Manichean battle, which is what we're trying to ultimately transcend. I want to jump in on that also, because you said Manichean struggle earlier. Thank you for reminding me. I was going to say, let's talk about what that is. Well, just super briefly, Manichean struggle. What is that? I mean, my understanding of it is a kind of never ending war between good and evil. It's sort of like perceiving the world as a never ending struggle between good and evil. There is probably some evidence that it comes out of certain forms of Christianity.

Certain forms of Christianity would come to the conclusion, or have come to the conclusion, actually, that all of reality can be reduced to a kind of good versus evil mindset. The forces of good versus the forces of evil. And if that is the only sort of thing that characterizes your worldview, it's the only metaphor which you experience the world, then in order to be a good person, you have to win. Every argument, every debate that you have

on social media, for example, or anywhere else in order to prove that you're good, in order to prove that you're worthy of salvation. And you can hear the religious language there. You have to conquer, overcome your opponent. And this requires a perception of your opponent as inferior to yourself. Well, if I can use your term that we keep talking about, you treat it as a supremacist. Yes. Right?

Yes. Yeah. Yes. So you can see how there's excess in everything, right? I said I was raised in a religious environment, and I'm very grateful for that. It came with both beautiful things and inclination to curiosity, for example, something I've learned and gained deeply from that religious upbringing, but it

also came with dogmas, right? Like everything has its excess and its balance. And so more to the point of still manning, still manning is my attempt to find the balance and get rid of the excess, which is, I think, all around us these days. It's interesting that you're talking about this because recently I was looking at Angel Eduardo's write-up on sort of taking steel manning to the next level, which he calls star manning. And I'm a big fan of David Bowie, so I like that. I like that construction. But it's basically not just assuming the best possible argument, but assuming the best intentions of the person. Yeah.

Right? Yeah. That's that compassionate aspect, right? Yeah. And central, I think, to the Manichean struggle, as I understand it, is this sort of oppressor-oppressed dichotomy. Sure, yeah. Yes, and I would like to just stress, I don't say this to be hyper-critical of Christianity. It's just, it is the, not only the, you know, my roots,

but the roots of our civilization, certainly in America, the United States being a Protestant country founded by Puritans escaping religious persecution in Europe and perceiving in a way that was both founded and I'm sure in ways that were unfounded, England as oppressive and seeing themselves as the righteous oppressed. This sort of script is very much within the roots and the and the guts of what it means to be an american we are a protestant nation protest is our founding religion right and so we are confronted with a great challenge which is the challenge of growing up. We are a very young nation. And yeah, I think that all these quote-unquote culture wars are an invitation to engage in some self-reflection collectively

and grow up. I don't know if this is steelmanning exactly, but the central feature of Christianity is the forgiveness, is the ability to be redeemed from all of those terrible things you did or all the supremacist thoughts or behaviors that you may have had. There's actually a way out. Yes, that's sort of the escape valve. So I'm very much influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr, Protestant theologian of the 20th century who Dr. King studied and whose, I would say, version of Protestantism was very much that more enchanted version.

And so we have, you might say, two different versions, not to overextend the metaphor, but at war with each other in the psyche of the United States of America. And the one is the Nibiru version that's very much capable of transcending infighting. And the other, which is also very much a thrust in our society, just over-identifies with the war itself. And this is a kind of classic thing that happens sometimes in trauma responses in human beings, where if a human being or group of people have been persecuted for a long time, just somatically, the nervous system finds that persecution familiar and therefore finds the defensiveness against that persecution familiar. So it's very difficult for

the nervous system to then overcome that without intentional deliberate practice, right? This is very true on a neurobiological level. So for example, if I am conditioned to believe that I am, I'm just taking an example, inferior to a man, and I was conditioned to believe this as a matter of salvation. Not because I am, you know, so gleefully in love with this belief, but because this belief is familiar to me, right? It feels like home. And if I'm not aware of that, then I will actually seek out a partner that repeats that same pattern. Not because that is objectively good or objectively safe, it's because my nervous system confuses what is familiar with what is safe. And so we have a legacy of, again, founding members of this country, Puritans, escaping religious persecution, but over-identifying with it. And there's a great book called The Witches, which is about the Salem witch trials,

which is written by Stacey Schiff, Pulitzer Prize winning author, wrote another book about Cleopatra, which everyone should check out. But it really sort of explores that aspect of the American consciousness. And it's fascinating because the patterns that were happening in the Salem Witch Trials, I see it present in our culture wars today to a T, and we're all walking around unconsciously repeating the same patterns that our ancestors did without realizing it. So speaking of culture wars, this idea of diversity, there's a whole bunch of folks out there that think it's incredibly important. And there's a whole bunch of folks out there that feel like it's a weird concept that's being imposed.

Right. But just let's just take the concept in and of itself, not the politicized versions. Right. Yeah. Is this actually something we need to address at all? Sure. So I want you to imagine a forest and imagine that this forest has only one crop. So it's a monocrop forest. I've been in a few. Okay. So I want you to imagine that some sort of natural disaster hits this forest. The likelihood that this forest will be able to be replenished is very slim because it only has one crop. However, I want you to imagine another forest with the diversity of crops in it. And the same natural disaster comes, let's say there's corn and tomatoes, you know. The natural disaster wipes out the corn, but the tomatoes, it turns out, are actually resilient against this natural disaster.

And so there is enough fertility in the forest to actually create the seeds of replenishment, even in the face of that natural disaster. All of which is to say that diversity actually creates resiliency. So let's bring it to a human level. Let's say that I am a person who thinks big picture, vision oriented. I see things in dreamlike fashion. And you are someone who sees things very data oriented, right? Very much we need to track things. We need to make sure we're surveying our customers, getting feedback, iterating on the product. It is better for the company to have both of us than to have just one of us. And in fact, the company would be incomplete if it only had one

of us, or if the majority of the people in the company were like me, or if the majority of the people in the company were like you. If the majority, or if the company lacked the diversity, the type of diversity that I am describing, its team members would not have the necessary oppositional sparring to actually create magic. So diversity is necessary, in short, if you want to create magic or resiliency or trust or any of the other conditions that are necessary for human flourishing. Not to be pedantic, but not unlimited, obviously, right? Like within the framework that you're kind of interested in. Of course.

Yeah. Can you give me some examples where you've had successful implementations of enchantment theory? Yes. So one of our partners we've worked with is a company in California. And again, all of the products and services that we deploy are meant to train employees how to embody those three principles. So one of the things we teach is how to navigate conflict and how to recognize when you've left the present moment,

when you're in conflict with someone else. So let's say I'm in conflict with you, and I say something using a certain tone, and for whatever reason, the tone that I just used reminded you of your mother. And so you start thinking about your mother and some baggage that you have with your mother, and you've exited the present moment. Even though you're still here physically,'re not seeing me you're not having conversation with me you're having conversation with your past that takes up time and energy and wastes

a lot of other what would otherwise be efficient use of your time right so there are certain tools and exercises that we have in place that train people to recognize that, to recognize the fact that that is often unconsciously affecting them, clear it out so they can come back to the present moment. So we had someone in this company who was encountering an irate customer. And this customer was yelling at them and really upset. And there's a particular lesson in the Theory of Enchantment lexicon that's all about recognizing the pain point behind the expression of the pain. So let's say I'm blaming you for something.

Brene Brown, who is most famous for her TED talk the power of vulnerability says that in the research that she's done blame is actually a way to discharge pain it's actually perceived as a way to discharge pain so if I'm blaming you for something there's a pain point behind the blame now if you're trained in the theory of enchantment and you witness me let's say yelling at you you're able to emotionally theory of enchantment and you witnessed me, let's say, yelling at you, you're able to emotionally bypass all of the yelling that I'm doing towards you and look for the pain point and then address the pain point directly. And if you do that, I am far more likely to come back to my senses, which is a term that I love, that we take for granted, to come back to my senses, to return to my senses, my embodied state here in the present moment. And the reason for that is because by acknowledging the pain point that's actually, let's say, causing me to yell at you, I feel seen now.

And I feel heard. And I feel like I belong. But let me keep this out for a moment, because I'm just imagining kind of a funny scenario. So, you know, you're saying that I made a mistake, which cost the company a bunch of money. Yeah, you're blaming me for making that mistake. I've made that mistake. But I'm not thinking about that taking responsibility. No, still thinking to myself hmm she must have some issues with her mother I guess right and then I tell you that now that would probably make you angrier well sure but that's not the pain point in that in that scenario I'm just right okay I don't know I don't know so in this scenario that you just described the pain point is I need you to get things done and you're not getting things done.

So let's say, you know, I'm a manager, you're a frontline worker, you're not being accountable. I need accountability on my team. Otherwise, operations fall apart. Otherwise, things get neglected. It negatively affects the team throughout. Now people are also looking at me to take responsibility because you haven't taken responsibility like that's the pain point right but you get distracted by the fact that i'm yelling at you and you internalize it and you feel let's say slighted right because i'm yelling at you

then you're probably gonna roll your eyes or become passive aggressive or yell at me back and now conflict is escalating. Whereas the conflict would have been short-circuited if you would have just been able, been trained to recognize the root of why I'm showing up the way I'm showing up and addressing it directly. And we've had examples where people who are trained in the Theory of Enchantment were able to recognize that, respond to that and it immediately changes the energy of the conversation the other person who was yelling apologizes right asks the other person how they're doing because they were seen and heard for what was actually present and causing them to discharge that pain and let's say not the healthiest

way possible has it ever not worked out when you're trying to do this? Because I'm inclined to believe that this is going to work all the time because the principles are there. I think the caring for the other person, which is, I think, a central part, as you've described it, is there. And I think that is transformative. But have you found it doesn't work out sometimes? Oh, absolutely. It doesn't work out all the time. And usually it doesn't work out when there's a lack of buy-in from the necessary stakeholders. So we could have someone at the very top of the organization bought in, but if they haven't gotten buy-in from their peers,

their colleagues, and they try to push ahead without getting their buy-in, that actually fosters the seed of resentment. And that is a situation that is not ripe. So you can tell I'm using a lot of agricultural gardening metaphors here. But I find that very useful. The soil has to be tilled in order for these things to actually penetrate. Otherwise it won't work. But that's more of a structural issue than anything else. There has to be the right amount of buy-in from people because the people who you want to train, they have to be able to take ownership of the experience because ultimately at some point,

our partnership is going to end, right? And they're going to have to carry that mantle forward. So it really does require having the necessary structural conditions in place so that these things can actually take root. You have to still have like a significant 10 to 15% of, let's say, initial champions cohort that you're going to train and will take ownership of the project and then be the coaches for the rest of the organization moving forward. There has to be that. Otherwise, it's not going to work.

Yeah. I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about living in this technological world. Because all of this, you know, directly applies, right? Yeah. We've talked about this offline, that there's, in different ways, often when we're communicating. Like, I love doing these episodes in person. Yeah. Because even if you're doing it across a screen, there's already a kind of a filter, something mediating, right?

And then in our communications, we're doing texting. So there's another filter. You can't see the face. You can't see the body language. And then we get into sort of mass social media communicating to large groups of people. We could be interpreted in all sorts of different ways. Sure.

Right? Because you don't know who you're actually communicating with in the first place. So I just think this is highly relevant. Yes. Right? Yes. So one of the barriers to inclusion and belonging, which I think people are hungry for, is living in a world in which our primary means of communication are disembodied, right? We're not meeting in person necessarily, people have Zoom fatigue, and people are at work for the majority of their lives, and if they're forced to sit through Zoom meetings for the majority of that

time that really takes a toll on connection right and we are wired to connect as human beings so that's like level one level two is social media and level two is far worse than say something like zoom fatigue because social media basically makes us think we're connecting. We're actually not connecting at all. Certainly not connecting in deep ways. I'll say that. Connecting in very often superficial ways. And I say this as someone who's very active on social media.

I say this as someone who loves certain aspects of social media. I think social media is a platform where you can be very creative, actually, in terms of the messages that you want to transmit. And because of the capacity for emotional hijacking, social media actually gives me an opportunity to try to be as thoughtful and intentional as I possibly can. However, at the same time, the social media algorithms are not designed to have us get along with each other. They're not designed to have us create

societies of human flourishing. They are designed to have us spend as much money on advertising dollars as possible. And the currency is our attention. The reason why all these social media platforms can be free is because we are the product. Our attention is the product. And the thing that holds our attention very long are the things that make us outraged. And so the algorithms on social media are set up in such a way that they are incentivized to show us things that make us outraged. What are the things that make us outraged? Things that might bring us insecurity. Things that might bring us a sense of a lack of psychological safety. Anything that is an affront to our values makes us outraged. So imagine being constantly exposed to things that are against your values. Always, 24-7, as long as

you're on social media. This is what social media is often feeding us if we are not intentional about how we use our time on social media. And it's not purposeful in a kind of like sinister way, I think overall. I mean, obviously there are bad actors. There's this great book called Outrage Machine, which goes through this, that everyone should read. The folks in Silicon Valley didn't set out to ruin the world, right? Many of them were very much empathetic to the suffering of human beings. But one of the things this book talks about is that empathy is actually an emotion that can be easily hijacked. And if I feel empathy for you and your plight, then I will feel outrage against all the people I perceive as being against you. So my empathy for your plight can easily be hacked into outrage, antagonism against your enemies.

And you scale that up and you have the culture wars. Yeah, it's just basically a vicious cycle of increased polarization that you're describing. You know, I've been reading Andre Mir's work in post-journalism, and he has another fascinating book, which I haven't read through yet, but more recent than that. But he would say that polarization is actually the software of today's media, the very nature of how media works today, given the current technological realities and this emoting that you're able to transmit without shared sense of reality or value system. Yeah. The other sort of deception that takes place with social media

is sometimes the people we think we're connected to, who we've never met, we haven't actually gone through any shared experience. Not really. We've gone through the shared experience of being on Twitter,

but that's not a real shared experience. We haven't even had a meal together, let alone gone through any seemingly insurmountable challenge, which actually helps, you know, bind people together and build trust and build resiliency. None of that is present in this conversation. It's like, oh, I liked this post about how this political, you know, group sucks and you liked it. And now we are bonded and now we feel close and now because you liked it also the dopamine receptors in my brain are firing and wiring and it becomes like this addiction loop

and we confuse that with connection and it really just creates a cascade of problems if we are unconscious of the fact that this is how the algorithms work. I've started looking out for more content that will specifically teach me something. I thought to myself, I'm going to repost more content that teaches me something valuable as opposed to something that I, let's say I'm outraged about. Yeah. Right? And I actually saw the feed over a few weeks now respond to that way.

This is in Twitter. It's quite significant and quite obvious that it responded positively. I hadn't really thought about it, but I'm wondering if that's a good sign. Yeah. Right? Because it could just be like, no, no, we like, if that's a good sign. Yeah. Right. Because it could just be like, no, no, we're going to keep feeding you the outrage. Sure. I also noticed that when I started to look for these long form threads on Twitter that are talking about like

the wonders of the world or like different cool places to visit around the world or just cool photographs from history. Twitter has been showing me more and more of those as I pay attention longer to that type of content. So I do think there's some co-creation happening. And of course, there's also external pressures, there are conversations between government and tech about the adverse effects of social media on mental health and things of that nature. So there's a lot of factors that are involved in the shaping of these apparatuses. But I think overall, I would just say we need to be, in general, far more intentional

about how we direct our time and attention. And as a society, we need to incentivize that, those habits more. Well, this has been an absolutely wonderful conversation. Any final thoughts as we finish? Just to say that if anyone's interested

in the Theory of Enchantment, they can check out theoryofenchantment.com. And if you would like to work with us, please reach out. I would love to work with you as well

i have a lot of fun designing for different organizations and learning no matter what ecosystem theory of enchantment is dropped into how can we create a environment of human flourishing like that's the ultimate question that we're trying to answer. And also, I do believe that the answer is that if we can come back to a state of grace, which is to say, come back to a state where we are expressing gratitude, space of gratitude for what it means to be alive, for the full range of the human experience, then we will be in that state of grace and we will be in that state of enchantment. And it will extend out to everything, who we speak with, who we relate to, our friends, our family, our colleagues, everyone. It will extend out from there. And that's an awesome project to be a part of. And I will just say also that you want to ask yourself, how can you create a resilient team, right? How

can you create a resilient culture of employees that are able to problem solve productively, that are able to achieve the objectives that you want the company to achieve, and also that arrive every day to work in a state of flow, in a state of gratitude, and a state of joy. If your employees are arriving in a state of work in that sort of set of emotions, then the likelihood that you will be successful is just tenfold compared to your employees coming to work and feeling like they're being misjudged or they can't speak out honestly, openly, and transparently about what they think. They're not actually giving their input. They're not able to take ownership of what's actually happening in the organization. Those two states are like night and day. And I would invite you to come work with Theory of Enchantment to see what it's like to be

in that state of gratitude and of joy. Well, Chloe Valduri, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you all for joining Chloe Valduri and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kelek.