Be Wilful. Go Astray. Feel Your Way – Adulting Rules for the 21st Century

ContraMinds Podcast (00:04.526)

Hi Jillian, welcome to the Contra Minds podcast. It’s really lovely to have you as a guest and I’m really looking forward to this conversation. The 10 Permissions is something that deeply resonated with some of the values and philosophy that I carry about the future of work, the skill that people need in the future. So I’m really looking forward and thanks for joining in.

Jillian Reilly (00:31.646)

Swami, it’s an absolute pleasure to be here with you and you don’t know how satisfying it is to hear from you that elements of the book resonated with you. I admire your work and I admire the kinds of conversations that you’re hosting here, so I’m looking forward to exploring what that resonance is with you.

Q1

ContraMinds Podcast (00:52.6)

Great. Jilian, one of the most interesting questions that came as I read the book was this concept of the fixed world and the fluid world that you spoke about. How do you think this is going to affect people, their skills, way they work and the workplaces of the future.

Jillian Reilly (01:25.716)

Hmm. Yeah, obviously, that’s a big framing concept at the beginning of the book, which is what I described as the great unraveling that a lot of the kind of norms, the conventions, the ways of operating that held us in place and told us how to behave and what was allowed and what wasn’t have unraveled for better or for worse. Many of us are experiencing this is a time of freedom, a time of liberation, you know, I get to do or be more than, for instance, my parents could. For others, it’s a very unsettling and confusing time where, you know, we don’t know what right or wrong is anymore. We don’t know what’s normal and what isn’t normal. So I think we are we are living through that we have been for some time. And, and as I described in the book, I think it places tremendous opportunity and tremendous pressure on the individual.

So we used to be able to look externally for guidance. There were a few fixed paths that we were told to follow and we largely did because we were rewarded for doing so. If we think about our personal identities, our sense of, know, if you take leadership, for example, there was sort of an agreed understanding of what that function looked like and now it’s much more complex. 

We are all, navigating sort of a broadening of our identities and what’s possible within them. Tremendous amount of choice, which as I say in the book, we love when it comes to our coffee, we might be a little bit more overwhelmed when it comes to our own identity. And we’re overwhelmed with opinions and ideas about, you know, what what the right thing is, what the right way is. And I mean, that’s true whether you’re a leader, whether you’re a parent, whether you’re a young person, some of the beliefs and the instructions, if you will, that we used to hold firmly to about how to behave are now up for grabs. So, you know, people are now trying to decide whether university is a worthwhile investment. That was not a conversation we were having even 10 years ago.

So I think what it’s doing is opening up a lot of possibility for us to potentially create far more fulfilling paths, explore a much wider range of our own capabilities. But it’s also requiring us to lean in far more to our own agency to make those choices, to decide for ourselves in a way that we didn’t have to very you know, in the very recent past. You know, that fluidity is requiring a degree of adaptability. And quite frankly, we haven’t been raised to be adaptive people. We’ve been raised to cherish the status quo and to avoid change. I wouldn’t say at all costs, but you know, to treat change as I have to do rather than I want to do. So, yeah, I think it’s presenting amazing opportunities for us and it’s also requiring us to become far more adaptive than we ever have been.

Q2 

ContraMinds Podcast (04:52.846)

You also talk about an interesting concept called the adult operating system. Can you help us understand what is an adult operating system and what does it mean in the context of the fluid world?

Jillian Reilly (05:15.96)

Mm Yeah, 

I think we all have a sort of conscious, but largely unconscious operating system. And let’s call that the rules that we live by. The ways that we behave that we believe garner us rewards. And that operating system for most of us, or the one that I think is most familiar was really born out of the 20th century. 

And the kind of post-World War II world where corporate life became the frame for the majority of people, in which case you made decisions, you sort of shaped your own sort of identity around a fairly fixed set of offers, you know, and you operated according to an implicit set of rules, which were kind of, you know, go to school, get a good job, find a partner, get a house, you know, and hold on to that for as long as you can, because at the end of that, you’ll be rewarded. And throughout it, you’ll be rewarded. So, you know, one of the things that I do with people who are working with the 10 permissions is to get them to tap into that unconscious operating system. You know, what are these imprinted assumptions and rules that shape my behavior and my choices? And which ones of them are potentially outdated because the reality is that we are living through an unraveling of that sort of social compact, aren’t we? 

Where if I am loyal, if I work hard, I will navigate my way through a single corporate hierarchy or one within a certain profession. And the hierarchy is collapsing. The professions are now outsourcing a lot of these same functions and the middle management functions to AI. So it is going to require us to update our understanding of how we should operate in order to succeed within this society. A lot of this is about making a lot of our unconscious rules of behaving into a more conscious one that we are choosing, that we are routinely updating, and that we are interrogating is too strong a word, but closely observing to make sure that it actually serves us and that we haven’t just defaulted to it because it was, you know, the one that was sort of handed to us at birth..

ContraMinds Podcast (08:00.686)

So therefore, if somebody is not looking at this adult operating system in a way, I think in a recent July 21st newsletter you had written, you called it the whole body intelligence, right? So therefore, does the adult operating system have to have some kind of a whole body intelligence saying, know, what’s my instinct? How should I trust it? Is that becoming more and more important in the context of how the world is changing?

Jillian Reilly (08:38.262)

Yeah, I think that’s a perfect example. you know, previously we operated on data and facts and tradition and convention. We had those at our disposal and we trusted them. We either don’t have all the facts right now, we don’t know if we should trust them. 

A good example would be right now, you know, trying to make choices about career, for instance in a world where we don’t know what the jobs are gonna look like in five years time. 

So what do you rely on in order to make your decisions? And obviously what I’m pointing to is the fact that in that fixed world, where we could look outside and find something that we trusted to tell us what to do, we now either have too many people or too many sources of information, and we don’t know which ones to trust.

We don’t know what we believe in. So the urging in the book is, and the way I frame it is to sort of find your way rather than following a default way. And within that, yes, I believe that instinct and intuition are going to become more and more recognized as an incredibly valuable, powerful tool in finding your way because you won’t always have all the facts.

You will often be overwhelmed by potential opinions about what right or wrong is for you. And we’re going to have to come into ourselves ever more and say, this is what I believe, this is what I feel. I’m going to follow that not with the assurance that it will be successful, but that in so doing, I will learn something more that will help me to continue to sort of find my way.

So yeah, that sort of elevation of that form of intelligence is a perfect example of we have to operate differently because our old way of operating, we might find either deficient now or inefficient. We wait too long. We need too much information. We’re not willing to kind of act on that feeling. So yeah, that’s a great example of a way of operating that might have previously felt, you know, you’re, you’re acting on your instinct. That doesn’t sound adequate, whereas now I think a lot of us are going to have to use that more in our decision-making processes.

Q3

ContraMinds Podcast (11:02.734)

So how does that affect me, you know, if I was a lawyer, if I was an accountant, if I was say a consultant, if I’m a father, if I’m a mother, how does it affect and can you just explain the way I should then start behaving and processing information and how should I be approaching life and work?

Jillian Reilly (11:34.08)

Yeah, that’s a great question because I think a lot of us are going to find ourselves over the next decade having to reflect on this question of how do I find my way forward in this world? What am I meant to do? And I think the idea of, you know, beginning to create this adaptive, slightly more adaptive path for me starts with my first permission, if I dare say so.

We might as well start with number one, which is be willful and look at desire. I think in finding your way forward, you have to know kind of, where do I want to go? And what do I want to do? And I think one of the offers that’s becoming available to us right now, there are two elements that I think are really interesting, which is the concept of the portfolio career, for instance.

So if I am one of these people who might feel that my role or my profession is under threat, that I am about to be replaced or that I might no longer be relevant in 15, 10 years time, what I might start doing is looking at how I could apply my whole lifetime of experience and my wide, vast set of skills and capabilities to a variety of different contexts.

So for me, there’s three pieces of that, which is maybe I want to start diversifying my understanding of how I could apply myself in different industries, in different ways, that I’m allowed to want to do or be more than one thing. This was unheard of 20 years ago. Now I think it’s going to have to become more of the norm.

As part of that, I would say to start to kind of view yourself through what I describe in the book is that I can versus I am mindset. 

So if I’m a lawyer, let’s say, and I’m sitting there going, well, I’m a lawyer, that’s all I know how to do or be. 

And maybe I’m worried that a good part of my value in the world is about to be taken over.

I would start to sit down and say, okay, I am a lawyer, but within that broad identity, I can do a variety of different things. I can apply that knowledge in a variety of different contexts. So I would start to get more, I would start to think about my capabilities in a more agile or adaptive way to say, I might soon have to think about how I’m sort of taking this and applying it in different settings in different contexts. And I think that sort of, you know, separating of identity from profession is going to be a big thing going forward that, you know, we will not have the luxury, if you will, of being able to say, I am this one thing and that’s all I am or will ever be. 

We might need to be a little bit more fluid in our understanding of what we’re capable of doing or contributing. And I think as part of that, you know, I sort of, when I work with younger people, and I’m going to say this to midlife people as well, I sort of tell them to imagine that they’re walking around with a big toolkit. And if they’re heading out of university or heading into it saying, you, all you’re doing is accumulating capability over the course of your life.

And I would love for you, if you’re in a midlife situation, to do an audit of that and to say, okay, these are the things that I’ve learned. And then to compare that to the emerging landscape around you and start to ask and answer the question, how do I want to start to apply my know-how in this changing world? And that for me would be a starting point to start to just loosen up my sense of what’s possible and to potentially give myself permission using my language to see myself in a wider variety of contexts that has, I think, greater potential for relevance moving forward.

Q4

ContraMinds Podcast (15:50.702)

So I’m coming to your concept of permission, right? There is an intent and then there is an action. And what you really say is between intent and action is really where permission lies, which is the permission that you give to yourself, right? Can you uncover and explain what does permission mean?

Jillian Reilly (16:18.54)

So I’ll tell you a short story about how I came to it because I think it’s relevant, which is that my background is in social change. My background is in sort of international development. I’m not a life coach. And I, at a very young age, I’m American, came to South Africa, started to work all over Africa in very complex change situations.

So in every single one of them, I was present with people trying to navigate profound change in their lives, either because they wanted to or because they had to. And quite honestly, frankly, coming up short, despite the fact that I you I worked for very well-funded organizations with lots of information, facts, tools at our disposal, 

…we’d often, you know, try and sort of catalyze or engineer change and find, huh, people are not responding. They’re not acting.

As you say, we have an intent of helping them. They are not acting right in the middle of that, as you’ve pointed out, is them giving themselves permission to follow our advice, to take our lead. 

And I found myself at a young age sort of going, listen, I can give people everything under the sun. I can’t give them permission. You’ve got to decide for yourself how you’re going to change, whether you’re going to change. Do you want to?

And are you going to deal with the consequences of that action? So, and as I say in the book, it’s not that I think a lot of adults sit around going, I need, you know, Swami to give me permission to change. It’s not a conscious waiting for it per se, although I think there’s tremendous amounts of unconscious waiting for it. It’s that they’ve never explicitly given it to themselves. They’ve never elevated their own sense of personal authority to the level of saying, yes, I am, I can make change. And I am going to make this change. 

So as I described in the book, I think in a time of rapid change and consistent change, embedding this sort of permission mindset into your way of operating to tie some of this together is really critical because you’re gonna be forced with a lot of things and you need to act quickly.

And you need to act in ways that might feel unfamiliar. And so if you are sitting there kind of frozen, hesitant, flat-footed, going, I don’t know, wanting somebody to tell you whether or not what you’re doing is correct, you will be very slow to move in the face of rapid change. So, you know, the book is about kind of encouraging people and inviting them to get a little bit more intentional about the permissions we give ourselves in this rapidly changing world.

Q5 Personal Resourcefulness

ContraMinds Podcast (19:16.078)

So clearly you talk about a concept of personal resourcefulness, right? Which is really around how do I prepare myself? How do I have an adaptive mindset? That’s something that you spoke about, that you write about and you speak about, right? How do I measure that I’m getting better at it?

Jillian Reilly (19:23.904)

Mm.

Jillian Reilly (19:41.568)

That’s a great question. think, you know, so there’s a degree of self-awareness that I think is built in here that so much of the self-permission is about a degree of self-awareness, right? And a conversation with self. So it’s sort of, how am I managing change? How am I navigating change? And if, you know, I would… encourage people and I talk in the book and you reference that sort of sort of whole body intelligence, you know, I would say that somebody would be observant of their own thoughts and of their own choice, you know, kind of decision making patterns. So are you stuck in a cognitive loop around things? Are you burdened by indecision? You know, are you are you replaying sort of fearful thoughts or confused thoughts? 

Are you you know… is your brain sort of running on overdrive, but not taking any action? 

You know, one of the things I talk about in the book is that permission is a gateway to action. So I would say that anybody who is, is trying to measure their own resourcefulness would be looking at how much am I thinking versus how much am I acting? Right. And if I’m just sitting in my own thoughts, then I’m not gaining any greater degree of resourcefulness. I need to be out. I need to be experiencing new things as a way of of sort of, you know, catalyzing my own learning, I then look at my feelings. And not with judgment, not with the analysis of some sort of therapist, but you know, with the care and kindness to say, how am I feeling as I’m going through this? Am I feeling a sense of deep anxiety or insecurity or precariousness? Or am I feeling – you will feel afraid you will feel uncertain, you will feel all those things. 

But if you are able to kind of carry those feelings forward and still be acting and reacting out in the world, then you’re doing okay. You know, you’re not looking for the absence of complex emotions, you’re looking for the presence of them alongside some forms of action that you’re taking to move yourself forward. And then lastly, you know, I talked so much about gut.

I talk so much about instinct and I would really encourage people to say, you know, how much am I listening in and acting on that and feeling that sort of sense of almost a virtual cycle, virtuous cycle of, you know, instinct and action. And, you know, you see me coming back to action a lot. So for me, the biggest thing would be that I’m out in the world.

encountering new or different things. They don’t have to be huge, but they are kind of new for me or different for me. And I’m, I’m finding my way through it. I am, you know, coming out of them having, as I said in the book, I can moments like, Hey, I did it. First time moments, never done that before moments. So it’s, it’s not a ruminative process to become more resourceful. It’s earned through action.

And so, you know, how much time am I spending doing new things? How much time am I spending out in the world learning and experiencing? That would be really important for me. And then I would check that against my own sort of internal process in the ways that I’m dealing with that.

ContraMinds Podcast (23:13.378)

Very nice. So literally what you’re telling me is if I’m a lawyer or if I’m an accountant, for example, or if I’m a technologist…if AI is actually all about reasoning, then my ability to understand philosophy as a technologist becomes very, very important. Therefore, I have to learn new things as a technologist because it’s not about just rules and algorithms, but there’s a lot of reasoning. Therefore, I start thinking about one of the permissions that you talk about in the book, which is take it outside.

Right? So therefore, if I am somebody who is a biology professional, I have to become a biotech professional. If I am a finance professional, I have to become a fintech professional. Okay? So clearly, take it outside is one of the permissions that you speak about. So is that something which is becoming critical for each one of us?

Jillian Reilly (23:53.772)

Mm.

Jillian Reilly (24:05.397)

Mmm.

Jillian Reilly (24:22.124)

Yeah, 100%. I mean, again, that’s so I’m going to take us back to our operating system, which was, I learned something, I apply it, I apply it for the rest of my life, I get sort of narrow and deep. And that’s how I gain success. That’s how I garner security. That’s what I’m rewarded for. And that execution on a familiar, and known set you know, of variables and ideas and capabilities was how we worked. And what you’ve just pointed to is the fact that we already know much of that, anything that can be replicated like that will be replaced. So that’s why, you know, in the book, I say you need to see yourself as less of an executive and more as an explorer. And by that, I mean, you’re not executing on the known because anything that can be executed on is now easy pickings for something else. You want to dial up your exploratory ability, that sort of willingness to step into and outside of your frame into other spaces so that you become a little bit more receptive to the unfamiliar. Your curiosity continues to get fed. 

You know, all of these human capabilities that previously when frankly, we were rewarded for behaving like robots. Now we’re gonna be rewarded for behaving like humans. So that curiosity, that receptivity, that adaptability, I am an ongoing learner. I am feeding and driving my own learning process. And I think that sits at the heart of all of this that… you know, if my old operating system told me that I went to university or I went to some sort of, you know, tertiary training, learned what I needed to know, and then executed that for the rest of my life. Well, then you’re in trouble. 

Your new operating system has to tell you that my ability to continually gain new understandings, new awarenesses, new capabilities is my competitive edge. 

And, and I would start in that again, I’ll go back to my first permission.

Be willful. So in the first instance, what’s interesting for you? What do you want to know more about? 

And that can be super informal. That can be you sitting on your weekends looking online learning. AI is an amazing education tool. So start teaching yourself. It doesn’t have to immediately escalate up to, now I need to go and get another degree or I need to do a certificate course. So yeah, that teachability, that learnability, that desire to learn and continually adapt and upskill and diversify my portfolio of knowledge and capabilities, that’s critical right now.

Q6

ContraMinds Podcast (27:23.374)

The other permission that I found interesting, two of them in fact, one of them was the permission to experiment and the permission to think small, right? Because for the last many decades we have been talking about thinking big.

Jillian Reilly (27:35.724)

Yeah.

ContraMinds Podcast (27:44.79)

Right? Now we are talking about experiment and think small. So talk to me a little bit about these two permissions and how is it applicable to the work that I do today.

Jillian Reilly (27:44.94)

Mm-hmm.

Jillian Reilly (27:57.608)

Hmm, yeah. Again, operating system turned on its head. 

Former operating system was I have big plans, I have long range vision, and I act deductively to decide how I move forward from here. I mostly take decisions on the basis of predictable outcomes, which have obvious upside.

So nobody was encouraged to experiment. That was not a part of the adult operating system. It was risky. It was ill-advised. Now, in a fluid world, I, Swami, like, I often think of this in terms of sort of like physical navigation of something. And for me, it’s like the difference between walking on a paved path in a national park, up a mountain, to walking through unpaved, uncharted territory.

So your posture will be very different, won’t it? You’ll go from, okay, I see the end of the trail up there. I can see the summit. It’s all been paved. I need to just follow. I follow directions. I figure out my path from here on back. I don’t need to try anything. I just need to stay the course versus I’m finding my way. So in that situation, I take much smaller steps because if I’m running, I’m going to fall, I’m going to not learn what’s happening around me. I’m sort of working in a much more inductive fashion. Okay, and in that inductive fashion, I’m my primary goal is learning, looking around, picking up cues, figuring out what I need to know in order to keep paving my path forward. And I might try things within that I might experiment and say, well, let’s try going that way.

And once I find out that it worked, fantastic. Now I’m 10 times more capable to keep going. But I also have to quickly say, if it didn’t work, fine. But it probably taught me something. And it probably made me a little bit more aware or even wary of what my environment is like. So if we come back to the fact that our aim is to be more adaptable and teachable, then those two things are critical because experiments are how we supercharge our learning quickly and at low stakes. And so I say in the book, take lots of small bets rather than like three big ones. So try little things. And then, you know, don’t be afraid to work in smaller mindsets. Like you don’t have to have a five year plan. And I hear that a lot from young people who feel like there’s something wrong with them because they don’t have some grand big plan. I’m like, it’s okay. You’re working in a very fluid environment. You can’t. And by the way, maybe you don’t want to because you’re discovering in real time. And by remaining open to discovery, you potentially are going to find things that if you tried from where you were standing to, you know, figure out exactly where you want it to be, you’d miss out on everything that you were finding along the way. So for me, it’s both practical, it’s strategic, and that it keeps you open to possibility. And frankly, I think it’s the only way. And it’s hard because we’re not used to this. We are used to, as you say, everything was think big, go big. That was what good was. 

And I think there are a lot of people who might be you know, creating, gestating, learning, pivoting in small steps quietly as they sort of find their way rather than going with a splash and trying to kind of make big things happen all the time.

Q7

ContraMinds Podcast (31:58.958)

Very interesting, Jilian. So I have two follow-up questions to the permissions. I’m not specifically talking about all permissions, but I’m picking up ones that can stimulate a conversation and a chat between us. When you want to really experiment, be adaptive, think small, have a desire to do a few things. Are our institutions preparing us for it? Say the schools, the colleges, the workplaces and therefore how do you think they should prepare us for this fluid world?

Jillian Reilly (32:47.06)

Yeah, I mean, I’m going to hop on the education is outdated bandwagon. I think it’s becoming crystal clear. And obviously that’s a blanket statement about a global enterprise of preparing young people for the world. 

So I had somebody say to me the other day that they felt like where we were, that schools were like blackberries. And I thought that that made that brought it.

It’s like you were walking around with a Blackberry right now and you thought that was amazing. Like that is the literal equivalent. It’s functionality is so limited in a world that is actually requiring and desiring and enabling so much more functionality. And I think that’s the point, right? It is still telling us and rewarding us for behaviors that frankly the world is not rewarding us for. 

So the whole concept of sit down, shut up and learn a subject and then get tested for what you know is so outdated. It’s ridiculous. I don’t think we know yet. And if I’ll use my language, I don’t think we’re giving ourselves permission yet to think about alternatives because this is deeply imprinted on us that this is how you prepare young people for the world.

I think we also have a big challenge because for us it feels safe and they feel under control. And I think I’m about to say something, you know, that I think our desire to control kids is overriding our desire to prepare them. So when we start to think about other ways of preparing them, it makes us feel out of control.

And that’s true for all of these things. mean, every single piece of this is that’s what happens to people and change. But I think particularly when it comes to adults and young people that we immediately feel like, yes, but so, you know, if we framed learning around questions and interrogation rather than, you know, judging them based on acquiring knowledge, well, then it would be a free for all. You know, then the kids… well, maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t. 

But I think that we need to start looking at how we embed questions of agency into the classroom as a very basic starting point. Young people need to start to activate their agency and their desire to explore and their desire to create much earlier. And I think what happens is that

many, many schools at a young level and at a primary level are comfortable with that. But the minute that we start looking at teens and preparation for work, we get uncomfortable with that. And so that’s where I think the real sticking point is, is that, you know, intelligence is being devalued in real time. Knowledge is being devalued as we speak. And so what do kids need to know how to do in order to use that that is available to them now to create value for the world. 

That is a radically different question than sort of what knowledge do they need in order to navigate the world effectively. So yeah, I think, you know, there’s a whole growing movement around agency based education, which is really just kind of preparing kids with a set of capabilities to question, to make informed decisions, to run experiments, to create things, as opposed to sitting and being tested on knowledge. And I think it’s going to be very exciting. I’m going to frame it positively. It’s going to be very exciting to see what innovators in that space start doing in the coming years to advance this discussion around preparing generations for. And I don’t even want to say a world of work because I think that that’s incredibly narrow a world of being citizens and contributors to this bigger world.

Q8

ContraMinds Podcast (37:03.372)

Interesting, which brings me to a question where some of these structures are going to take a lot of time to be dismantled, right? Whether the way schools are structured, the way the workplaces are structured, which means that what do you think, say as parents, how do we prepare kids for this? That’s the first question. The second question is, I work in a company. Even there, the structures are pretty rigid.

How do I prepare myself, okay, for the future that you’re talking about? Because, you know, they may not prepare me for it, right? So therefore, how should I take small little steps to do this? So I would like you to answer the kids first and then the workplace next.

Jillian Reilly (38:03.979)

Mm-hmm.

Sure. And let me just say, wouldn’t, no matter who I was or where I was, 

I would not sit around and wait for somebody to prepare me for this. 

One of the key themes of the book is you are your best security. And if you think that an institution of any kind, whether it’s a school or a government, and that might sound, there are gonna be people who are raving red flags about how that’s hopelessly individualistic and I’m… you know, taking the burden off society. And I certainly hope that institutions will begin sooner rather than later to catch up, but I wouldn’t put my faith in that. I would start to say, this is my responsibility. This is my life. So let me start with being a parent myself. I’m under no illusions about what the school that my kids are going to right now is doing. It is not doing any of the things that I think it could be doing.

So the preparation is going to have to start at home. It’s going to have to start in our conversations that we have in the ways that I begin to reward agency in them in the rest of their lives, how I begin to hold my conversations with them, the expectations that I have again, the choices that I let them have. I mean, there’s tremendous scope within everything outside of school to begin to support kids to intentionally make choices, back the ones that they make, begin to lean into their own individual interests and capabilities, look out into the world, use AI to earlier rather than later start to create, start to build that portfolio that I’m talking about now.

That has nothing to do with school. That has everything to do with you and this younger human that’s with you. So I think there’s a lot of scope and trust me, I’m a parent. So I’m not saying this is easy or that I’m on top of it. But I’m saying that I’m absolutely aware that I have a responsibility to my kids to the best that I can within the scope of our relationship, prepare them for the world and not, may I say, saddle them with 20th century expectations of what good looks like. Because that’s the worst thing we can do for them.

Q9

ContraMinds Podcast (40:31.884)

So Jillian, can you give me some practical examples of how, I may, as an audience listening to this conversation, do it beyond the school, for example. Say, how do you prepare them for this, what I call as a curious, an agency that you need to build in them? How do you, so what are the small little activities or work that you believe and you are also somebody who does this transformation work, change related work, you do keynote speeches. So this is something that you do as you are a change leader, right? So therefore to that extent, what are the activities that you believe we need to embed in this thought process of how you explain you got to kind of raise these kids and prepare them for this world.

Jillian Reilly (41:35.06)

Yeah, let me say one thing first of all, which is that I don’t believe that it needs to become yet another layer of activities that modern parents need to add to their to-do list. So let’s not make this yet another thing, you know, because we had coding camps and we had, you know, this and, and I can absolutely see a modern parent being like, my gosh, now she’s saying I need to run activities to build agency within my child. This is not an add on.

This is an integration into an existing relationship. And what I want to say is let me go back to the 10 permissions. So let’s start with be willful. Now everybody knows that the willful child was the difficult one, the one you didn’t want and you tamed that will. So I want us to sit back and maybe allow our kids to be more willful in appropriate ways and in age appropriate ways than perhaps we have in the past. So conversations about what do you want? And this is not what do you want for dinner, chicken nuggets versus spaghetti bolognese. You know, this is because we all know that was a kind of woke parenting, but let’s talk about more meaningful engagement around their desires that are not telegraphed by us in the first place. You know, what are the kinds of things that you want to do… start with basic things on a weekend as it relates to your leisure time together That’s you know a great space and when you ask a question of what do you want? And again, I have a little bit of teens on my mind because I think that that’s where it starts to get sticky. Accept the answer. So honor some of their desires don’t immediately squash them and as we elevate up to the conversation around you know career and work and life. 

Don’t immediately be suspect of or worried about the things that they say they want. Because I think we are very worried about teen interest and teen desire. We kind of go but… but I know better so conversations around desire and a willingness to engage with it and give it an appropriate level of responsibility so you know, if you want to go to the mall with your friends, maybe we stop, you know, being the fearful hovering people, and we allow them to make informed choices about things they want to do and then hold them accountable to those things. So appropriate levels of desire and decision making, I think are really important. 

Going astray is the second one. Are you? Are you somebody that thinks that every single time that your child voices an opinion, has an idea, disagrees with you, that this is problematic because compliance is associated with goodness. And I really, really want us to get at that assumption. 

Okay. Because it, when you were preparing them to sit in an office or work in a factory, saying yes sir, no sir, even when they didn’t agree, they were rewarded for that, but they’re not anymore. So again, I’m not suggesting that we have these, you know, arrogant, out of control teens, but I do think having informed conversations where they’re allowed to disagree, allowed to disagree with you, allowed to have different opinions and you respectfully explore those with curiosity rather than assuming that those are inherently wrong because what do you know? You know nothing. You’re just a kid. 

Let me finish this up by saying, you know, when I do talk to kids, not my own, but you know, it’s the same with my kids. But in talks that I do, I do keynote talks with young people in schools. One of the biggest things that I hear from kids when they come up to me afterwards is thank you so much for noticing and honoring the fact that I have agency and authority over myself. Because I actually say to kids, you are the authority in you. You are, we all are, we are our own authorities. And so many kids are brought up to believe they know nothing, they can’t make decisions, they have no wisdom, they have no instinct.

And I actually think we’re not doing them any favors by suggesting that until there’s some magical age of 21 where they suddenly develop this, you know, ability out of nowhere to go out and navigate a world that we don’t honor the fact that despite their age, they have intelligence, they have knowledge over themselves. And we need to cultivate that, not to raise a bunch of entitled jerks. But in order to raise people who back themselves as they know how to go out and head into a very, very overwhelming world. We are not doing them favors by suggesting that protecting them is the best thing we can do for them. We’ve got to prepare them. And the more resourceful they feel, the more capable they feel, the better decisions they will make. Yeah, those are just two examples.

Q10

ContraMinds Podcast (47:10.638)

I think you picked up three or four permissions and beautifully integrated them in the approach that we are talking about. I now go back to the workplace where I probably grew up in a fixed world.

Now I’m in a workplace, I’m in a mid-career situation. Now how do I use these permissions? Can you pick up two or three examples of permissions that you talk about in the book and then apply it back to say, you know what, this is the way probably you will then start owning up these permissions for yourself and then start building it. So how would you help us uncover this?

Jillian Reilly (47:28.428)

Mm-hmm.

Jillian Reilly (47:33.324)

Mm-hmm.

Jillian Reilly (47:57.152)

Yeah, I mean,

I think the workplace now is a very contested space. We’ve got five generations in workplaces, each of whom is coming with their own expectations of how we’re supposed to work, how we’re allowed to work. And so I think, you know, let me come back to feel your way. I think we need to give ourselves permission to show up to each other as humans and have good conversations about how the world is changing, how it’s affecting us, how we’re different. We’ve gotten into this kind of, “okay, boomer” and, “Gen Z is useless” and “don’t get me talking about the millennials”. We’re sitting in these very judgmental spaces where we think every other generation is ridiculous. 

Guess what? Every generation is a response and an adaptation to the circumstances that they grew up in. So yes, you grew up in a fixed world and therefore you operate in a certain way. You can’t help that. So I want to encourage us to approach each other with a little bit of feel, a little bit of empathy, a lot of curiosity and have fruitful conversations about organizational culture, about what the rules are because they’re changing in real time. And I think leaders need to be far more intentional about organizational culture and continually kind of engaging with it. And lead that not from here of you’re just an entitled fool or you’re just a stuck in the mud idiot to, hi, you know, I’m Jillian and I want to know more about what it is that you have to offer to this workplace. So, you know, let’s start there.

I’m going to bring up another one because you haven’t talked about it, which is look for trouble. I think in a world of profit and productivity, we’re always looking for quick fixes. We’re always looking for, we’re kind of skating past each other a lot. And I think there are a lot of issues, interpersonal, operational, strategic that, you know, feel hard right now. And I think we’re afraid of engaging with them because it’s going to slow us down because we’re going to get into a fight because it’s going to just waste too much time. And I’d rather just finish my to-do list. And I think, you know, we need to kind of be willing to go towards some of our biggest challenges in the workplace.

And as I say, look for a teacher and not a fight. Because there’s enough fighting. But more of sort of what can we learn together when we sit down and try and figure something out together? Again, whether that’s a super practical issue or a technical one that’s really, we’re really struggling with because I think that when people come together to try to examine an issue a problem or a challenge there’s a really interesting connection that’s forged there’s so much learning that takes place your empathy and your curiosity and all of these things that i’m talking about come to the fore quite naturally and i think you know we need to not be afraid of some of the most problematic things that are facing us and i think the past ten years have made us all sort of walk around with each other kind of worried about whether we’re going to get into trouble, whether we’re going to cause trouble. And I actually think we should own it, engage with it, acknowledge it, and allow it to teach us and allow it to connect us perhaps in a way that it hasn’t before. So yeah, those are a couple things that come to mind.

Q11

ContraMinds Podcast (52:04.376)

Beautiful, beautiful. think you captured the concept in the book with how you can apply it back in the real world when you feel the way is a great way of building an analogy of how to apply it in the workplace. And if I may add with your permission, the fact that today we work with interdisciplinary teams, right? So I have.

Jillian Reilly (52:24.748)

Mm.

Jillian Reilly (52:29.356)

Mmm.

ContraMinds Podcast (52:30.626)

person working with a creative person, a creative person working with a, you know, say a supply chain person, and each of them come with their own perspectives. So an ability to kind of bring that together, right, is also the whole thing of feel the way is a great mission that I should give myself, because we come with our own perspectives and our own thinking. And how do you how do you

Jillian Reilly (52:40.737)

Yeah.

Jillian Reilly (52:44.01)

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Jillian Reilly (52:54.988)

Mm.

ContraMinds Podcast (52:58.67)

you know, bring them together is really what I thought the permission concept of yours really made a lot of sense. And coming to the final set of questions in our conversation, your book is going to be available in September. And can you tell me a little bit about what’s the process to pre-order? And then I’ll get into the final set of rapid five questions that I have.

Jillian Reilly (53:25.708)

Sure, yeah it’s available for now on for pre-order now on Amazon US. So anybody who’s willing and able to order it via the US can get it now. It will be available for sale in US bookstores and on Amazon from September 16th. It will be available on other Amazons and in bookstores certainly in Europe in November.

And then I think it comes online in the other Amazons in the sort of months to follow. There’s a sort of, you know, knock on effect with the national Amazons in the months that follow. But for those who are able to get it through the U.S., it is available now. And I would encourage everybody to preorder it because preorders feed the Amazon algorithm. And that, you know, is a great help to authors like me.

ContraMinds Podcast (54:20.994)

great.

Q12

The first question is, in a world that you’ve envisaged where we need a new adult operating system and we need to give ourselves permission, what does success mean to an adult going forward in the future?

Jillian Reilly (54:43.05)

Hmm. I think we’re already seeing it. I think, you know, there’s a degree of sort of adaptability or flexibility, autonomy, and ability to continually create and reinvent in ways that remain relevant that I think will be hallmarks of success. So, you know, I think we’re going to be looking at people who find a way to continually add value in a changing world.

How you measure that beyond the monetary benefits of which I think there will be because that’s how you will create value and, you know, be rewarded in this society is through your ability to invent and reinvent your capabilities. But, you know, I think we’re going to be working much more as we touched on before the recording as free agents, where we are going to have to and want to and be able to continually shape and shift our offer.

And so I think success is going to be measured even more around relevance and sort of ability to adapt that relevance than necessarily, you know, believing you have a fixed offer that will continue to be of value over time.

Q13

ContraMinds Podcast (56:03.926)

If I were an 18 year old studying in a university and listening to this conversation, what would be your advice to them?

Jillian Reilly (56:12.756)

Hmm. I’m going to go back to permission one, which is, know what I want kids to start with. What are you most deeply curious and interested in? Okay. Like, please don’t overlook that because you think that if you can put it down and outsource what you want to some idea of what you think is going to be valuable in the future, because the truth is you do not know now what’s going to be valuable in the future. 

And as you alluded to earlier, some of those things that you used to think wouldn’t be valuable might show up and be very useful moving forward. So please, please, please listen to your inner guide, listen to your inner voices, telling you what’s interesting for you, what lights you up, what makes you want to know more, what makes you want to do more. You know, as I said in the book, I would rather you right now be a completely fired up and passionate history major than a really checked out sort of accounting major.

Because that desire is the thing that’s going to keep fuelling you moving forward. And if you check out now, because you just are going to sleepwalk through school and gain some degree that you, that degree is worth so little. The only thing that is of value to you right now is how much you learn and how much your learnability and teachability continues to get fed. So please do not just go for some degree that you are hoping is going to pay off later.

Go for the things that really interest you and trust that you will find a way to use those and apply those moving forward.

Q14

ContraMinds Podcast (57:48.056)

Fantastic. What’s one piece of advice, I’m sure across your long working career, you would have got a lot of advice. What is that one piece of advice that remains with you even today, which you believe is extremely valuable?

Jillian Reilly (58:08.2)

That’s a very, very good one. I’m gonna reach for something that might kind of veer towards cliche, so forgive me, but it has been sort of useful. But I think sort of being as true to myself as I possibly could be, and I wanna break that down into micro moments, where to the extent that I could be, I was true to my own opinions and ideas and let’s put it there. My greatest regrets have been when I’ve stifled my best ideas and my strongest opinions.

And when I have taken a risk and shared either one of those, I have never regretted it. Even when the outcome was not in the short term positive and that it created a conflict or it ruffled feathers or whatever, I don’t regret it. You will not regret being true to yourself. And so to the extent that I have tried to show up with the truest expression of my ideas and opinions, I think that has served me well.

And when I’ve stifled them, I’ve betrayed myself and ultimately I end up regretting it.

Q15

ContraMinds Podcast (59:31.278)

If you were to have a dream dinner with say set of people, who would you like to have on the table and why? And they may be living or you know, dead, that’s fine. But at least a couple of them you think it will be great to have them on the table for a dinner.

Jillian Reilly (59:58.252)

Mm. I’m going to again go for some old favorites, but I live in South Africa. I came here because of the elections that saw Nelson Mandela into power. And I have to say I have to say Nelson Mandela. feel sad. I feel sad that my kids have not been alive while he’s been alive. I feel grateful that I was alive while he was because his model of leadership was extraordinary, mind-boggling. His ability to show up to people as humans and to kind of draw from a wide range of his own capabilities I think was extraordinary. I’m going to choose him. I’m going to choose Eleanor Roosevelt because I…I think at a time when, you know, certainly first wives, women were ornamental, she wasn’t. But she did it in a way that again felt real and true to herself. So I’m gonna pick her.

I’m thinking, I’m going through a list of, want to think of like a singer and I’m going to say something really crazy and pick like Elvis. And I’m going to stop at Elvis because, you know, an entertainer who went out into the world and created that kind of reaction, the permission that he gave to himself, and I’m not going to get into his personal life, but the way that he showed up at that time in a world that was very suspect about it. And I think the permission that he gave a lot of people to begin to interact with themselves and their own sort of love of music and movement and frankly their sexuality and their passion, I think he was a really fascinating figure.

Swami, I have no idea where those three people just came from out of my head, but there you go. That’s going to be a really wild dinner party having those three sitting with me, but I have no doubt it’ll be interesting.

ContraMinds Podcast (01:02:20.27)

I just can’t imagine Elvis and Nelson Mandela…

Jillian Reilly (01:02:28.044)

I mean imagine the permission slips that we could write for ourselves. And let me go back because Nelson Mandela, I think, wrote this country a massive permission slip, right? That it was allowed to not be beholden to its past, that it was allowed to not see itself as fixed, that it could be fluid, that it could reinvent itself. Now, obviously the reality of that is so much more complex than anything, but the country needed somebody at that time who actually made them believe it was possible and vested authority in each individual to decide how he or she was going to do that. So, yeah, the all three of those people in their own weird and wonderful way were permission givers to the societies that they lived in. And that for me is like, yeah, super interesting. Let’s sit together and talk about concepts of permission together and see what comes up.

Q16

ContraMinds Podcast (01:03:26.222)

beautiful. And my final question to you is, what’s one thing you believe in that others don’t really give you enough credit or, you know, don’t really agree with you?

Jillian Reilly (01:03:44.288)

Wow, that’s interesting.

Huh, I’m gonna say something like, 

I honestly believe that we would all be better off spending more time on our bodies and less time, you know, working on our brains and on our wellbeing. I think that we could, and by that I don’t mean, you know, whatever, CrossFit or, I mean, I think we’ve been, we are obsessed with how our minds work and we have lost connection to the role that our bodies play in our wellbeing. And I think a lot of people could do themselves tremendous favors and solve a lot of their problems if they started moving more. Like leave a lot of things behind and start going for walks. Go outside, know, start just moving out into the world.

And the workbook that people get with the book, which there’s a QR code for a getting started workbook, is a lot of that. It’s like, listen, I don’t want you to sit inside and ruminate about permission. This is not a good idea. This is not a meditation. This is about you moving out into the world. That’s what permission, it’s permission to do. And by doing, you start being differently. And I talk a lot about, know, can’t think your way into a different way of being. You have to act your way. So I think we need to let our brains off the hook a little bit and start to just allow our bodies to do some of what it knows how to do, but has not had to do that for some time. So yeah, I think we could correct a lot of what’s wrong if we moved more, danced more, got outside more, were in each other’s spaces more.

I don’t know if that’s hugely controversial or disagreeable, but I think I’m hoping to see the pendulum swing in that direction towards, you know, a greater understanding of how movement in the body shapes our general wellness and well-being.

CLOSING

ContraMinds Podcast (01:06:02.222)

On that note, allow me the permission to thank you. It was a fantastic conversation, extremely authentic. I felt it came from your heart. The fact that you were able to integrate it with real life examples of how to apply it is something that I didn’t think we spoke about it earlier, but… it came out of what you really talk about, is instinct and getting a certain feel of what you write and what you believe in. It came out in the conversation. So thanks a lot. It was lovely talking to you and thanks for your time. It was great interacting with you and I had a lot of learning about the kind of permissions that I need to give myself. Thanks a lot.

Jillian Reilly (01:06:58.198)

Swami, it was an absolute pleasure. I enjoyed it thoroughly. You asked great questions and you’re right. You kind of, if I can say, put me on the spot, which is a good thing, to force me to kind of, yeah, but honestly go into my own sort of instinctive answers around things and that’s a great thing. I love that because it’s, I think we need more of that right now in our public conversations. So thank you. It’s been a pleasure and an honor to, yeah, be a part of these bigger conversations you’re having. So thanks.