Elaina Davis is the Chief Community Officer in her new role (at the time of this recording) at a senior living consulting firm, primarily serving the Richmond, VA market.

In this special episode of Level Up Leadership Podcast, I had the opportunity to get into the coach's seat with Elaina in the learner's seat.

We reflected on Elaina's learning journey of where and how she learned the skills to equip her to lead others today. More simply, how we do acquire the skills to make the transition from an individual performer into a leader of others who perform?

Few organizations have formal or informal coaching structures to teach, mentor, and grow people beyond a "supervisory" or "task completion" de facto management relationship.

In this episode, Elaina and I dug into areas such as:

• Evaluating one's own strengths
• Having the right environment that is conducive to your learning and development
• An insight that our weaknesses are actually our strengths overdone
• The concept of aligning strengths to job responsibilities and outsourcing or delegating those responsibilities we're not well suited to execute
• The value of focusing on strengths more than we focus on our weaknesses

We delved into many universal themes of self-growth and strengths and weaknesses, and we hope that you take your own nuggets of wisdom away from our conversation together.

"No founder has it all." Christie Stukenholtz, the co-founder and CEO Senior Care Finder, is mindful of how critical it is for any organization - but especially an entrepreneurial endeavor - to assemble an All Star caliber team.

From her extensive experiences in a professional HR Consulting company to talent management, market research and now the co-founder of a growing business in aging services, Christie has had a lot of different looks at forming high-performing teams.

Christie shared so many insightful perspectives, approaches, and mindset in how she works to put together great teams. From "hiring the empty seat" to "creating an environment where people will stick around when times get hard" and "finding a team where you find belonging" we covered a lot together.

Connect with Christie in any way you'd like to engage with her or Senior Care Finder.

Website: www.SeniorCareFinder.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FindTheBestSeniorCare

LinkedIn (business): https://www.linkedin.com/company/senior-care-finder/

LinkedIn (personal): https://www.linkedin.com/in/cstukenholtz/

Instagram: @seniorcarefinder

Twitter: @SrCareFinder

Michael Emery's career spans a wide range of healthcare roles starting from ICU nursing, to advanced nurse practice, senior operations roles, and now serves as the Executive Vice President of Senior Living for Curana Health. He is also one of my most memorable classmates from the University of Texas' Executive MBA program at the McCombs School of Business.

On our episode, we spoke about what it is like to learn and lead in healthcare organizations. The conversation delved into what organizations like Curana Health actually do (concierge healthcare), the interrelated work of healthcare and senior living, the GUIDE Model by CMS, what Value Based Care means, why we chose to continue our education at McCombs (an MBA vs. MHA), the role of mentorship in growing leaders, and so much more.

Michael Emery's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-emery/
Curana Health: https://curanahealth.com/

James Lee's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seniorlivingguy/
Bella Groves: https://www.bellagroves.com/

Join the Think Tank: https://www.bearwiseconsulting.com/thinktank

What are the building blocks of consistency? How disciplined are you at...discipline?

Leaders have the double-duty of being disciplined and creating discipline in their organizations. I looked to Chris Heinz from Westport One in this conversation to discuss consistency and discipline in some key areas of leadership.

Some key discussion points gave us opportunities to discuss:

• The building blocks of discipline
• Where does passion really come from?
• Tying discipline to your motivations not your outcomes
• Creating processes and automation that help with consistency
• Not letting "great" stand in the way of "good enough" (FOMO)

I believe that in a lot of cases "lack of discipline" is actually a misalignment between a person's true motivations and their work. It is nearly impossible to have discipline in the long run about things that don't deeply connect to your WHY.

Thanks for listening!

Erin Thompson shares her leadership experiences, anecdotes and lessons learned about psychological safety in the work place. Erin and I share a lot of similar experiences, and we dug into some examples of environments where safety was not the top priority. We examined potential causes or reasons this is so prevalent in an industry that touts care, warmth and empathy - at least toward its customers.

We also explored practical tips and approaches to create psychological safety and trust within teams.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Level Up Leadership Podcast with James Lee and guest Erin Thompson. Please also check out Erin's podcast "Aspire for More with Erin".

Nathan Jones is a former college football coach turned senior living advocate. Nathan was introduced to the world of senior living just out of college, and from the moment he first stepped foot into a senior living community, he was hooked. Since that day, Nathan's mission has been to change the negative perception surrounding aging & senior living through sharing authentic stories of older adults. He does much of this work through his company, Dash Media.

In a prep conversation together for a different episode topic, I learned that Nathan hadn't been returning my text because he was in the hospital. It led to an important conversation together about the nature of work, self-imposed hustle, and the need for purposeful pauses - especially as an entrepreneur in a passion-fueled industry like senior living.

The pressures of keeping up with and responding to everyone, talking about how we're feeling, taking breaks, being a good leader... these and so many more factors of running a business can easily become a compounding snowball of depleting mental well-being.

For content creators like Nathan and me, it is also challenging to experience impactful moments without our brains shifting in the moment to how this will translate to a good story. Ironically, this pulls us out of the moment and fully experiencing it.

This was an important conversation about entrepreneurship, content, mental health, and everything in between.

Season 3 of the Level Up Leadership Podcast kicks off with a rather provocative episode: “Do People in Aging Services Perpetuate Ageism?” [YouTube vide of episode.]

It’s a long title, but I thought it deserved the full weight of the question.

I was SO fortunate to interview Ashton Applewhite. In my readings and study on this topic, I couldn’t find a more compelling and articulate activist than she.

Ashton’s Ted Talk, “Let’s End Ageism” is a masterful storytelling experience that gives audience an opportunity to examine “a prejudice that pits us against our future selves.”

I read her book, “This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism” while on vacation. I’m grateful I had a moment in time without normal distractions to become engrossed in this book. Our episode delves into some really intriguing questions and possible self-examination for those of us in aging services. I hope you enjoy and will reflect on this conversation.

"Don't just think positive thoughts. Feel positive feelings." This is just one of many golden nuggets of wisdom I gained from my conversation with Dana Garnett, a conflict management strategist and professional mediator. Dana is an insightful conflict expert who helps businesses and teams clear the deepest rifts to working in harmony fast. Founder of The Mindful Strategy she applies her vast business and life lessons learned to help improve business and social dynamics.

In this episode, we explore what causes conflict to exist - both in individuals and on teams. She shares her insights on the elements of a successful team and how conflict arises when one or more of those elements is not in sync with the others.

How does taking someone else's position actually help you? What's the harm in leaders ending conflict with "let's agree to disagree"? Can leaders actually get better at managing conflict or is it something you troubleshoot when it comes up?

Let's dig in. Your conflict management strategist is dialed in.