Empowering Individuals for Peak Performance with Tania Luna

Join Tania Luna, the co-founder of Life Labs Learning, as she flips the script on leadership. Uncover how managing conditions, not just people, propels individuals to peak performance. Prepare to be inspired! Show Notes | Transcript "Managers should be role sponsors, focusing on creating an environment that allows individuals to thrive and be at their best." - Tania Luna Meet Tania Luna, a passionate advocate for turning leadership on its head. She is the co-founder of Life Labs Learning, an organization that has empowered over 350,000 individuals at influential world enterprises, to become more compassionate, skilled, and confident leaders. Her role extends to being a researcher, educator and an advisor to Alt Protein start-ups. Tania understands that the key to successful leadership isn't in controlling people, rather in creating conditions for individuals to become the best versions of themselves. In this episode, you will be able to: Demystify the complex nature of leadership, breaking it down to practical skills. Grasp why effective leadership is about crafting environments, not dictating people. Cultivate a leadership perspective that views yourself as a designer of circumstances. Gain insights on benefits of feedback and development in fostering individual growth. Appreciate how leadership skills can be an asset in all walks of life. Related Live. Love. Engage. episodes you may enjoy: The Power of Authentic Leadership: Inspiring Others through Your Purpose Image, Presence and Leadership with Marcella Scherer How Vulnerability Empowers You for Success with Jessi Shuraleff Resources: Connect with Tania here Learn more about Life Labs Learning here Learn about the Pig Placement Network here Join the Soulful Women's Network here Send me a message here ☕ Support the podcast here ❤ Love this episode? Leave us a review and rating here Connect with Gloria: LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 - Gloria Grace Rand You're listening to the Live Love Engage podcast. On today's show, why great leaders need to focus on community building rather than control. Stay tuned. 00:00:14 - Gloria Grace Rand I am Gloria Grace Rand, founder of The Love Method and author of the number one Amazon bestseller Live Love Engage How to Stop Doubting Your Yourself and Start Being Yourself. In this podcast, we share practical advice from a spiritual perspective on how to live fully, love deeply, and engage authentically so you can create a life and business with more impact, influence, and income. Welcome to Live. Love. Engage. 00:00:49 - Gloria Grace Rand Namaste. I am so glad to be joining you for another episode of Live Love Engage. And I've got a lovely guest who I just can't wait to get started in our conversation because we've already been just having a good time before we even started recording. So I'm going to tell you all about her, and I did not double check to make sure how to pronounce your first name? I'm guessing it's Tania. 00:01:14 - Tania Luna Ding, ding, ding. 00:01:16 - Gloria Grace Rand Okay, good. I just want to make sure Tania Luna. So you know what? I'll just go ahead and welcome you to Live Love Engage, and then I'll read your bio. So welcome, Tania. 00:01:24 - Tania Luna Thank you so much. And I'm already having a great time because you're one of the few people that got my name right on a first try. 00:01:31 - Gloria Grace Rand Oh, yeah, okay, good. 00:01:33 - Tania Luna I answered to all versions of my name. 00:01:35 - Gloria Grace Rand All right, excellent. Well, anyway, so let me tell you all about this lovely woman. She is the co-founder of Life Labs Learning, and she's the author of The Leader Lab, Core Skills to Become a Great Manager Faster and co-host of the podcast Talk Psych to Me. And she is also a researcher, an educator, advisor to Alt protein startups, and a partner at Columbia University's Elab, which is an accelerator for entrepreneurs who increase equity and access in education. And her company, Life Labs Learning, is a real go-to training and employee development company that has helped over 350,000 people at some of the world's most influential companies, including TED, the TED Talks Folks, Yelp, Tinder, Slack, Reddit, JetBlue, and 2000 plus others. And she's helped them become more confident, competent, and compassionate leaders. And I know we're going to be talking a little bit about leadership today on the show, but I always like to well, not always, but I would say 99% of the time, I love to ask our guests to start off with telling us about what your journey is, what got you interested in leadership and really helping others with that to become better leaders. 00:03:02 - Tania Luna Yeah. Oh, man, I wish I had an honest answer to that question. Like, this thing A happened and then B happened, and then C happened. It's more like I woke up one day and I'm like, oh, 99% of the things I'm thinking about are people skills. And I really think of leadership skills as skills we need to lead, whether we have formal leadership authority or informal leadership, if you want to get something done, if you want to catalyze change commitment, if you want to help others through interacting with others. I put that in the category of leadership. And really, I just increasingly, the more I studied leaders, the more I worked with leaders, the more I became frustrated by the fact that we seem to act like leadership is this really mysterious thing versus really breaking it down into tangible practice. And once you figure out what are the specific behavioral units and skills of leaders, then it can be very easy to become more effective and to make those skills more accessible to everyone, not just the small number of people at some metaphorical top somewhere. So I can answer your question more biographically if you prefer, but the truth is I just tumbled into it and became more and more passionate. My background is in psychology. I ran a few different businesses and I just saw leadership again and again coming up as both a pain and an opportunity. 00:04:26 - Gloria Grace Rand Well, I love the honest answer because that is interesting because I think sometimes we do just sort of stumble into something because that's just what we're doing. Leadership has become something that's interesting to me when I became an entrepreneur and having to really think about what does that entail? And yet at the same time well, at one point I was invited to participate in one of these multi author compilation books and it was about leadership. And I started looking at leadership is not just about business. I mean, there's been opportunities or times in my life where I've had to be a leader in all sorts of different parts. I mean, if you have a family, you have to know how to lead your children. 00:05:19 - Tania Luna All the time. Yeah. So at Life Ops Learning, at my company where we do leadership training, we hear this constantly from managers in particular. They'll go, oh, it's the strangest things. We have a workshop on leading effective one on ones. So how do you set up your one-on-one conversations with direct reports with your team to increase engagement? You would think it's the most work-related topic, but then we have people coming in the following week because we do kind of programmatic learning. It's not just one and done. And they come back and they go, I set up one on ones with my spouse. Or we'll lead a feedback skills training. And even within the workshop, they're supposed to be focusing on work and they're going, can this work with my kids? Or they'll come back and they go, I've been terrified of having this conversation with my roommate, but I did it, it worked. And it's been amazing. And I think that's wonderful because these skills are not in… Our lives are not little boxes, little compartments. You close a drawer and all the stuff from work stays there and all the stuff from home stays there. So it's wonderful. We think of using the workplace as a laboratory to develop those skills. Every day I come into the workplace, something that can feel like a challenge and a frustration can actually become this wonderful development opportunity for skills that transfer over into every area of life. So absolutely agree with you. 00:06:35 - Gloria Grace Rand Yeah. And it's interesting too, I think, what the last couple of years showed us. And certainly the first year of the pandemic when suddenly work was at home and having to, it's like yeah, you couldn't compartmentalize it anymore because it was right in your face and you had to figure out ways to be able to make it all work. Tell me a little bit about, well, let's see, I'm trying to think where's the best way to go here? There's so many different things I want to ask you about. 00:07:04 - Tania Luna I can also try to talk in shorter sentences so we can cover more ground. 00:07:09 - Gloria Grace Rand Hey, you're doing good. I've had some people who just keep going and going and going and God bless them. And it's fine usually because it's interesting, but it's like once in a while I would like to get a word in edgewise. So you're doing well. I want to ask you, one of the things that when I was doing research about you and getting ready for this interview is you talk about something that you believe like great leaders should create conditions that bring out the very best in people. So I guess maybe start off with a little bit about, well, I guess we kind of know why that's important, but then maybe give some ideas about how people, how that can be accomplished. 00:07:53 - Tania Luna I can see that. I think that you're right that we should know that that's important. I would argue, though, that so often when we go in and we do workshops with companies and we go,...