Karen Judd Smith, Ph.D. has been a powerful voice of social change in the international arena for more than twenty years. She has taken her experience supporting NGOs navigating the process of working with the UN, and honed those tools to share in her Transilience Quotient framework. Her work supports change leaders and organizations with a mission of social change as they navigate our volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. 

In this episode, she joins Susi Vine to talk about:

• Distilling universal complexity down to fundamental physical properties,
• How ideas grow into change that leads to revolution,
• The four components of the Transilience framework,
• The social engagement of our younger generations,
• The 3 drivers of human behavior,
• Operating within and beyond our perceived limits,
• And one of Susi’s favorite topics, the power of play!

Don’t miss Karen’s favorite stress-busting exercise that she shares at the end of the episode!

Learn more about her work at www.KarenJuddSmith.com

Enjoy her weekly streaming program, Xceptional.tv, every Wednesday morning (where Susi is a guest on an episode…her turn to sit in the hot seat!)

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Watch the episode here:

The Power Of Social Change‬ 

Karen Judd Smith is an advocate of good trouble. We discuss the process of change and the value of a “mountain top” perspective in our wide-ranging conversation about social groups from the micro to the macro-levels, from her childhood on a farm in Australia to navigating the UN, and all the questions of philosophy and physics in between.

I’m happy to be with you. I’m joined by a special guest that I have met, and I’m so inspired by the work that she has done and continues to do and share with the world, also in helping shape the direction that leaders are taking to make good change in the world or good trouble as Dr. Karen Judd Smith likes to embrace. Let me introduce you quickly to Dr. Karen Judd Smith. She is a bestselling author, mentor and host of exceptional TV online series. She connects the human elements of challenge and change across our diverse endeavors, communities and planet within stories from today’s leading changemakers.  

She’s originally from Australia, but a longtime resident of the US. Karen holds degrees in Physics, History and Philosophy of Science and Theology. She is the author of three books, Change !t Up, Making Your NGO’s Advocacy Powerful and United Nations Unlocked, which cover key elements of personal-level and organizational, and global-level change leadership. Stepping away from almost twenty years in the global policy and advocacy work in crime prevention and criminal justice, she’s focusing on the pivotal social and tech entrepreneurial communities to 10x their leadership capacities.  

Karen is passionate about supporting the competent, resilient change leaders that are the key to our collective future. She consults, coaches and trains leadership teams and entrepreneurs in what she calls transilient leadership that builds the four major capacities of unstoppable adaptive leaders. Karen lives in the Bay Area where she closes out her workdays with the preferred daily VR fitness regimen of Beat Saber, and she loves sharing meals and game time with her husband, family and friends. Thank you for joining me. Welcome, Karen. 

Thank you for having me, Susi. 

I’m fascinated by this diverse selection of your focus of study. I love people who are intrigued and follow where their curiosity leads them. How do you feel that those areas of focus weave together? 

Growing up in the country, on a farm, part of what you have to do is figure out how to do everything, so it’s a practical environment. I enjoyed Math in school. I didn’t like History and things like that, so then I got into Physics. One of the key aspects of Physics is that you look at the universe in all of its complex diversity and you distill it down where possible to the most simple, elegant, essential formulae. That process was ingrained in me from a young age. I look at the stars but I want to understand what was there, I try to imagine and all of that sort of stuff.  

Then you go on into university. I studied that there and then you realize, “That’s nice but there’s this whole human element of life. The universe is there.” I pivoted a little into the area of History and Philosophy of Science. Of course, you start to look at the areas of ideas, how ideas change, and how they’ve revolutionized their life, ideas, whole paradigms. That was looked at through the lens of science at the time. All of these things are going on. While I didn’t go to church a lot from an early age, even though I explored Buddhism being in Australia, I explored a lot of the spiritual and religious movements from meditation to Buddhism, Hinduism, even transcendental meditation. This was back in the day.  

All of that was part of my life one way or another. From Physics to History and Philosophy, it wasn’t such a big pivot to go to Theology in actual fact, so then I went in that direction. Life happens and I got my Master’s there. I didn’t do my Doctoral program until a number of years later on Peace and Justice. I did work a lot in the interreligious arenas, mostly at the international levels. As I came over to America, I then got involved around the United Nations. That’s a long journey from the middle of nowhere on a farm to where I would look up at the sky and see a little plane flying over.  

My best friends were the willow tree, the kangaroo, dog and chickens, to where I was walking down Fifth Avenue going into the UN buildings, and beginning to deal with international level issues. It was quite a journey and there was a lot of stuff in between. For me, there were these threads that connected all of that at least, so that was that. My native desire is to always look and find the most quintessential simple elements in anything. That is still there. I learned that in my science training and it’s still with me now, which is where the kind of thinking and distillation process that allowed me to come up with the transilience framework that I included in my book, United Nations Unlocked.  

That enhances that understanding of where we are in our global society because it has four main dimensions to who we are and therefore, the attention we need to pay as leaders and as leaders of institutions. The institutions can be small or they can be large. As human beings, we are social creatures, so we always make these little groups, little organizational segments. Sometimes they’re systematic and sometimes they’re not. They could be corporations, governments, local book clubs or whatever it is. We’re social beings.  

We function in these clusters and understanding the dimensions of our life, even active in whatever entity that we’re in because we’re always moving forward and always endeavoring. We’re always changing anyway. Part of what change leaders are, which is my focus, is that we’re endeavoring to make an intentional change. Often, we’re driven by our passions but then we have to also understand, “What are the pieces that we’re dealing with? Am I forgetting something? Am I paying attention to all elements? Am I overlooking something that perhaps is right in front of my face, but I’m not seeing it?” 

That speaks to the power of perspective. You talked about the way that we tend to organize ourselves into groups and models of society. You grow up starting out and more in isolation where you have this room to form your own ideas and work perhaps outside or without the restriction of being within tighter, more restrictive communities. Continue along your journey of curiosity and examination of how these things come together, move apart, and form and shape our society. Our history is shaped by the progression of religion. I love that that curiosity has been the thread that continued through your whole process. 

I’m still insatiably curious. I can’t help myself and sometimes, I undo myself because of my curiosity. I don’t take my focus on the things right in front of me because I go, “What about this?”  

It is worth exploring, in my opinion, but yes, my to-do list never gets shorter, so I can relate to the double-edged sword of being led by curiosity. Did you expect to go into the United Nations like that?  

Absolutely not. Ending up in New York, there’s quite a journey there. I’m all over the world and I ended up in New York, but I did go one time to the UN. I still remember clearly, I was there to hear a speech one night. I remember exploring as I do, and there are a number of big conference rooms in the UN, so conference rooms 1, 2, 3 and 4, as well as the main General Assembly hall. The main meeting I was going to was in conference room two, so I walked around and I was curious about where everything was, and I peered into one of the other conference rooms. As I opened the door, there’s always often a negative or positive pressure in a room. There was this little puff of air and it was almost like the puff of politics blew out on to me. My gut reaction was, “Don’t ever make me work here.”  

Up about two years later, I was working with an international women’s organization that was applying for its economic and social council status, and I was coming into it. I was asked to be the secretary-general of this organization. Part of what I did was to help with the outreach and the advocacy for that organization to be accepted as an NGO, Non-Governmental Organization with general consultative status. I was representing it going to speaking to the diplomats, etc. Lo and behold, be careful of what you say you will never do. 

It’s a big word. I remember in one of our first conversations, you were talking about your mission to help NGOs know how to navigate the playing field, if you will, of working within the UN or getting their support, so that’s where that all began. You got through the route of NGO. 

I still work with NGOs and with those working in the nonprofit realms, but I also have shifted that and included in my arenas those who are working who have a strong sense of social change mission. It’s not just the nonprofit realm. The UN is such a complex beast. Even those who work there for years don’t know all about the UN everywhere. They’re always focused in that little area, which is sometimes way too siloed and all kinds of issues there.  

I still remember the first days that I would go into the UN other than having conversations with diplomats, which was fairly simple because we were mostly talking about what I knew at that time initially. I would go into the meetings and I would be sitting in there and I’d be listening to the conversations. People would be speaking about the different topics about development or women’s issues or peace and security, or whatever the topic was at the time. I’m sitting there thinking, “I’m smart. I speak English and I’m listening to English. What on Earth are they saying?” It has its own language. Each word in that context almost has a whole world around it based on when you’re speaking to 193 countries and not just one, America. When you’re speaking about global-level issues and considerations at that level, not at the national or the local community level, you begin to realize you have to change your perspective about what you’re listening to, even about the topics that you’re speaking about.  

It’s not a simple process for a passion-driven individual who is attending to the desperate needs, in many cases, of people around the world. Be they internally displaced, be they dealing with human trafficking or just plain cybersecurity, or whatever it might be. Driven by their passion, they go into that level of engagement and seek to make a difference, want to help uplift our global awareness, and bring their solutions to the attention of that community. It’s a complex process. I know the process I went through and in fact, it took years. There are quicker ways of doing it and I can help people even sift and sort quickly what it is that they want to do, and test out all the different ways I’m trying to do it. It’s still a new area that people wanting to make an impact at the global level do need to pay attention to and have to take the time to learn a little bit of the language and the dynamics at that level of engagement. 

I can imagine that investment and that foresight pays off in spades because once you finally get the attention of the people that you want to be in conversation with, you don’t want to be going back and revising in order to better fit their own goals and objectives, so that’s tremendous. I love that you’re helping this because that’s the spark. That’s the change that we want to foster. They come, I can imagine, with so much hope and optimism, and you don’t want them to lose that momentum. All the better prepared they can be and know what’s coming around the corner. 

You have to be strategic there. In any organization, no matter how big it is, you still have to be strategic in your endeavors. It often comes back to clarifying, “This is what I do well. This is what I think is good for the world.” You have to understand, “What is the world already doing? What happens when somebody with your plans and initiatives comes to it? What kind of journey do you have to take them through to understand the value of what you’ve got?” 

There are many dimensions to it. It’s both exciting and boring at the same time. Part of the value of it is a little bit like taking a journey to the top of the mountain. If you get to the top of the mountain, then you have that mountain top perspective. You don’t live on the top of the mountain all your life. A few people do, but the majority don’t. It’s not made for living. Having seen from there and you come back down the mountain and still, you’ve got that vision and perspective, understand you bring that with you into whatever it is that you do. 

It might confuse the issue sometimes, but having that perspective does change the way you look at things at the domestic level and at the community level. You always know that there are these other elements going on, or you even just simply think, “I’m having a tough day. I was talking to this young woman who is helping women and children with basic education in the world’s largest floating slum.” It’s like, “My situation, a little perspective here. I’m good.” 

We need to maintain that power of perspective. It always comes back in so powerfully to put us in relation to we are a global society these days. 

Increasingly, we always have been but now it’s in our face. Now, we can see it. I see you and you see me and we’re not in the same room. That capacity has changed the way we engage and the way we think about and therefore, the way we even act on a day-to-day basis. That’ll play out differently in the policies, decisions and choices that are made. It’s constantly impacting all of us to larger and smaller degrees, to some that we’re fully aware of and others that we are completely unaware of. 

That plays such a fundamental role in how our younger generations have grown up with this as a given. They’ve been connected by the digital age from the beginning of their awareness. Whereas, we, the non-digital natives, have learned how to use these tools. This is the world that they’ve been born into. The world is so much smaller for them. I love to see the mission that they seem so passionate about to solve issues that they see that need addressing. Is that where your transilience program comes from? 

I want to reach in a way to allow the benefits of what I know to be passed on to some extent to those who are younger because they are absolutely the future. We need one another. I need to understand their perspective, and it’s valuable when they also get some idea of what our perspectives are. That intergenerational component is essential for all of us all the time. Because one of the things that are not going to turn around backward is Mr. Time or Mrs. Time or whomever time is because life moves forward.  

You don’t believe that you’re going to be the one with the gray hair. It’s just the way it is. My inner kid is still strong. I still love to play and I have my VR sports and stuff like that. Especially those who are in the spheres of technology that are leveraging change massively need to have that perspective of the scope of the change that is going on. I would like them to be thinking about also getting a mountain top perspective. They’re going to be doing that creative, innovative work. The tide of technology is not going to get turned around. It’s not going to roll back.  

The question is, how is it going to go forward? Other ways that mountaintop experience, that larger global perspective and not just the global on the phone perspective of things might change the way they do things and the decisions they make. Even the programs that they develop, the apps they make, the types of rules and algorithms they put into place. There are many ways in which that kind of thinking can impact at a practical level in our day-to-day lives. Having that global, longer-term perspective is critical. Time is a key element of everything and part of my transilience framework is this paying attention to the time because you’ve got windows of opportunity. Timing is important.  

Beyond that also, even for our own health and our lives where everything has a push button and become immediate, having the capacity to sit still, be quiet, and have that experience of boredom, even in our nervous system, we’ve got synaptic spaces. It’s essential to our health and the functioning of the whole system. In our days, creating space in our lives, relationships and for others to grow and develop and not just stuck in the box that we put them in like, “I’ve decided who you are, whether you are or not, you’re in my little box and there’s no room for you to move.” Space is important.  

Space, in that sense, requires a little bit of time because that’s how we travel through our lives. We create that space where we have body-based creatures. It takes us time to go from here to there. Space is intimately linked with time, so that’s a piece that we have to pay attention to and be aware of, even from our own health. We need to sleep at night, regenerate, and breathe in and out at every level. We need that in our relationships and in our organizations. We need those elements to have a place as well in all that we do.  

That’s important to keep in our perspective because in this instant gratification world that we’ve managed to create for ourselves, we’ve lost that ability to wait, expect results and understand that there’s effort and then there’s the reward. That’s not just pushing the button and get what you’ve ordered up every time.  

It’s not just the kids who respond that way. I am now that way, so I have to pay attention to my own annoyance when things take so long. It’s the old adage, how many fingers are you pointing at somebody else and three are pointing back at you? I’m not preaching to anybody else out there. How do I know these things? I’ve observed them in me.  

Those are the lessons that are important to share. That’s why I love the way that you’re putting this together and making it available because we get so much benefit from the perspectives and the life lessons from other people. We don’t need to start over and discard history. We need to integrate what we have so we can keep on making the progress that we’re capable of.  

We always live with this strange combination of needing to learn the lessons ourselves and learning to stand on the shoulders of others. At some level as individuals, we start as babies and we’re not born CEOs or leaders or anything else, maybe leading their own life as a baby. Each human has to go through this life journey of learning. When we talk about whether it be our families, organizations or institutions, that’s where then the culture of those organizations carries with it and can bring with it the legacy of what has been learned before.  

It’s especially through our organizations that we can both encapsulate the best of what has been learned and bring that with us into the future. The organizational component of everything is something to pay attention to. Even right there, you’ve got to say, “As individuals, we need time to learn everything. We weren’t born with any knowledge of nothing.” We do have to learn our way, especially our social institutions and our organizations. One piece of attention that is good for leaders to consider is their culture and therefore, what is optimal for that culture? What can they allow people’s shoulders to stand on in their organization?  

It’s important. It has to resonate, speak to and support the culture from which it’s coming. What are some other aspects of the transilience that you share?  

The main other pieces are going back in recognizing that there three main dimensions in addition to time, and that is we’re always looking for the difference. Change is always happening but sometimes, we want to make a massive change. Sometimes, we just want to make a little bit of change. Sometimes, we just want to sustain and then sometimes, there’s the deconstruction component to it. Sometimes, that’s needed. It’s not necessarily negative. There’s this continuum of kinds of change. Even sustaining the status quo takes energy.  

It’s a matter of saying, “Where on that continuum of change? If I’m trying to make a big change, I have to realize, the further you go out along that axis of change, the greater the resistance like a rubber band kind of thing, but there will be to that change.” You have to factor those things in. Energy required time and attention, what you expect to get coming back at you because of what you’re trying to do with all the various stakeholders who are at play. The other dimension is more understanding that we were at the individual level, then there’s the small community, whether it be a family or a small group or the school or the local community or the local government or the state government.  

There’s the nation, and then there’s the world. You could say there’s the planet and then there’s the solar system. Understanding that when you target your efforts, where are your objectives so that you have to pay attention to the organizational structures at those various levels and to know that you can’t just leap there. Effort is needed to be made. The other one is the more interesting from the human side or the human element which are what I call the drivers, and that’s understanding who we are as humans. The way that I’ve used to articulate that is I call them L1, L2, L3 just for simplicity. That’s understanding that at our fundamental nature, we have our survival system.  

Our body is our base for everything that we do. It’s tied up with the amygdala, the whole fight and flight, and all of those things, the basic ways our bodies function to keep us alive. Then there’s this limbic system that we have, the L2, which is about our social part. It’s the emotional realms. It’s the social drivers so to speak. We don’t grow up and think, “I want to be a social person.” We tend to just grow up saying, “I want to relate to this person.” It’s not a learned thing. It’s built into who we are. That interrelatedness, our emotional systems and the limbic system, which are pre-rational, we don’t think about them and we don’t think about our emotions. There’s a response that happens because of the context and triggers, and this, that and the other thing, but beyond going into that.  

You’ve got that limbic system, the emotions that drive us and markets that know well. We make decisions at the emotional level and we rationalize it later on. There’s that L3 level, the logical level, the neocortical level about functioning, through which we think and talk, and that’s our language center. That’s how we communicate with one another at that level. We communicate visually and see our body language. We get a lot of feedback at those levels, but we’re not always thinking about the body. We can learn to think about and read the body. You’ve got these three levels going on, these three drivers in us as human beings.  

Unless we pay attention to all three, we’re overlooking something and under-utilizing aspects of us. Also, in terms of when we get to the challenges in life, whether it be people dealing with trauma or loss and grief, death of a loved one, things that have happened to us that have created difficult, bad memories or when we’re dealing with depression or whatever it is. We can’t think our way out of things. We have to address all of these aspects of ourselves. Our organizations, education, health system, or whatever it might be needs to pay attention to all of these different levels. Some of them are pre-rational and by nature, they’re more difficult and messier to work with or at least messy for the logical mind.  

We can’t wish them away. We can’t say, “I’ve evolved past this point and I’m completely rational in my actions.” No, we are reflexive beings and we have to continue to train ourselves to find the power and perspective to change our reaction to things because fundamentally, we just want to snap back. We tend to run into the same struggles when we come from that response. That’s insightful to look at how that influences the way organizations work. You mentioned healthcare. We try to operate at certain levels in other organizations. I don’t know why I picked on that, maybe a pet peeve but neither here nor there.  

We do try to pretend that all we need to solve is this. If we address this aspect because it’s easier or it’s definable, this is all we need to solve the system. Unfortunately, there are many layers that have to be examined in all of these issues. It may be where the difficulty comes from when people operate in this black or white world, this yes or no. There are two options only. There are layers that have to be explored and the way that things interplay in order to get to the root of things.  

That’s why we see a lot in the world this oriental medicine or these new and emerging medicines or traditional medicine. There are special words like allopathic or whatever. There are different words that there are, but there’s a slightly different focus. When you look at it through that framework of the different drivers of who we are as human beings, we didn’t get into the concept of spirit and what that means, and I’m not going to go there. That’s a whole other discussion. Even just understanding that there are these different ways of looking at who we are, are we dealing with, “I broke my arm, this is a mechanical thing, this is highly bodily functional?”  

Are we dealing with emotions? What do we mean by dealing with emotions? Can a drug impact it? Yes, but is it dealing with the whole thing? Maybe or maybe not. It’s a little bit like a computer. Computers are at fundamental levels. They’re on-off switches. Looking at the screen, it’s hardly an on-off switch. There are color and movement. You build these layers and it becomes more complex. That’s part of what life is. By the time you get to the emotional lives of human beings, it’s not just a matter of a physical impact even by a drug. It’s not everything about resolving the human element of the problem.  

We can take things to the extreme degree and say, “It’s complicated. We can’t do anything.” The interesting thing is as we look and look, there are little things that can be done that somehow speak to all of those things. Somehow, out of this chaos of the universe, we’re speaking and understanding one another. Maybe we understand the same words differently, but there’s some level of connection and communication. We are able to, as human beings, tease out of these extremely complicated world ways to connect in simple ways. In our lives too, there are simple things that we can do that do make a difference. Searching and finding those more quintessential and more essential components that make the biggest difference. What you’re probably searching for, what most of us are searching for, what science searches for, what doctors are searching for in all of these things. We’ll get further along that journey every day.  

We’ll keep following our curiosity and seeing where it leads. That’s a beautiful analogy. I could see how you’ve come from philosophy and religion to cybersecurity in your path. Your description there was so elegant like, “All the layers and the interplay and all of that.” There’s so much at work and it’s such a fascinating puzzle when you give yourself the opportunity to look at it through the macro lens and the micro lens, and how the layers come together.  

Sometimes people ask me, “What is it you’re doing?” I go, “Today, yesterday, which one of my lives?” They are diverse. I’ve been an extremely lucky person in my life. It hasn’t always been easy, but I’ve had a remarkable broad set of experiences. In the end, I’m a simple human being. I like to be happy.  

There’s another conversation. We could book a couple of episodes. People tend to look for an easy solution, “I want to be happy,” and they’re not willing to look at the layers and pieces that come into this. It’s not always an easy solution. Sometimes, you have to put a little bit of effort into being happy. You have to cultivate this emotion. This isn’t what we were wired to do. We were wired to save ourselves. We have the skill and the capacity. Neuroplasticity is fascinating. Positive psychology is juicy. That’s where we can keep on moving into. The more we understand, we’ve just found more limits we can push in terms of bringing in more happiness, play and creativity on the best of life.  

Some of my friends are like, “She always wants to have fun.” Fun for me doesn’t always mean not hard work. Hard work is sometimes the most fun because it’s fulfilling and it’s meaningful. I’ve distilled it down to a three-letter word that sounds like it’s thin. For me, fun needs to be meaningful, pleasing, satisfying and all of those things. I do like to have fun and laugh, but a lot of that is in moving your body. When you’re the happiest, the natural thing to do is to get up and dance. It’s a bodily thing. I like to remind people that our body is our base and it’s wonderful. Our bodies are amazing.  

Highly improbable and miraculous beings.  

That was driven home when I first went through the process of becoming a mom because I knew, “If it was up to this part of me, that baby would not have come into the world. There’s no way it would have happened.” Somehow, all of the stuff that is needed to make, allow, prepare for and then to go through, birth, and then live with them. I love my kids. That process of creating a new life was absolutely stunningly miraculous. My hat is off to my body. Our bodies are amazing. 

If we operate within our own perceived limits, we’ll never have any idea of what we can accomplish. We do have to open up and let the experiences come through us and be able to respond, support, facilitate, and let the magic happen.  

Sometimes, it’s allowing the magic to happen.  

We’ve covered some ground in our conversation. Is there anything else you’d like to share in terms of maybe how you restore yourself at the end of doing all that you do and all of these different things that you’re called to share?  

An important part of it, since my second son introduced me to VR a number of years ago, Virtual Reality gaming, and then got me and my husband a headset for Christmas a couple of years ago, I played VR, is that movement and energy. Each night also, it’s going back over the day and remembering those key points of gratitude for the day, making that as a discipline in the mornings, and making plans for what I will do. I know that one of the questions that you like to bring in your show was, what is some tool you have for relieving stress?  

I wanted to bring this one that plays into the whole concept. Our limbic system doesn’t function through language as much as it does through images that it’s kind of language. Many times, a lot of our stress and our strain are holed up in our limbic system and in the emotional realms. Usually, stress is associated with another person. A way of dealing with that is to simply imagine that person or a situation, picture it, and then shrink that way down until it’s tiny, even if their voice goes commensurately up to the point where they disappear. It takes 2 or 3 seconds, and then breathe in and breathe out.  

Put your stress in perspective. Make it small. You have the power to do that. It’s simple. It’s just one little tip. It’s not going to solve every issue in life. Sometimes, there are those moments where you just need to get a grip on something and get it out of the way, so you can get on to the next thing that is important for you to do. You shouldn’t be walking into the next meeting like this. That’s a little exercise that you can make yourself some time.  

That’s terrific, putting stress in a perspective way far away.  

Something that you can flick away because a lot of it is how we feel. Even the stress, if we can reduce it in size and make it smaller, we can.  

It is all in our mindset and our approach. The more empowered we are to feel like we have control over the way stress affects us.  

Part of that having control is doing something, even if it’s just a couple of seconds utilizing images.  

Your gratitude practice is one, from many different sources, that come back time and time again. People tend to think, “What can a little bit of gratitude practice do?” It is supporting that neuroplasticity. It’s training your brain to look for the things that we’re grateful for.  

Part of what it is that as you feel the gratitude and you take the time to feel the gratitude, that’s something you do in your body again or it impacts your body. As you take the time, it’s a discipline, “This is the time.” You think the thoughts, write them down or whatever it is. If you spend that moment feeling gratitude, that has a calming effect on your body as well. It has real hormonal chemical consequences, and that’s good.  

Back to the relevance of time and space, and putting those emotions. 

Allocating that time to do that and pay it that kind of attention. If we don’t have time to do even that, what are we making time for? What are we allocating our time for in our day? Time is something we can never get back. It’s the currency of our lives. It’s more important than the dollars and cents because we can’t trade dollars and cents for time. What we do with that day, how we allocate that time, and do we have enough even just for that kind of focus and attention? It’s another way to take a breath. We need to breathe. It’s healthy for us. It’s helpful and it makes us happy.  

We all want more of that, so call that in. Thank you. I appreciate you joining me to share this episode. I look forward to talking with you again in the future. 

Thank you, Susi. It’s been meaningful and enjoyable fun. Stay well. 

Thank you. 

Important Links: 

• Dr. Karen Judd Smith 
• Change !t Up 
• Making Your NGO’s Advocacy Powerful 
• United Nations Unlocked 
• Beat Saber 

About Dr. Karen Judd Smith

Karen Judd Smith advises and coaches techs and entrepreneurs, specializing in next-generation performance skills for those in high-stress, high-stakes jobs. Her approach is to train tech teams in the art and science of high-performance teams as the antidote to stress’s slippery slope and business’s burn and churn. 

Her High-Performance Solution has five integrated areas of focus and draws on her leadership intelligence framework (Transilience Quotient TQ™), the essential mindset needed to reach any goal, a solutions GPS that’s as handy as the one on your phone that helps you iterate your way to solutions, developing a personal crisis response plan, and a newly developed evidence-based program to actively address the symptoms of stress and burnout.

Karen has worked in the international arena for more than twenty years, working with and engaging heads and former heads of state, diplomats, global change agents and thought leaders, NGO activists and religious leaders in Africa, Asia, Europe, Oceania and North and South America.

Karen has brought the voice of innovative NGOs into UN environments, worked with Member States representatives to change UN conversations and trajectories of thought, provided visionary yet practical ways forward for the UN’s ICT Network while consulting for the UN’s CIO, and focused on finding pathways to meaningful change in the areas of cybersecurity and violent identity-based extremism for those tasked with global governance.

She is a thought leader and “don’t just talk about it” activist. So when she works with individuals and teams, she helps you discover, then utilizes, resources you didn’t even know you had and makes it happen faster than you might think possible. She not only provides perspective and insight but also proven tools and the support needed to rise to the challenge.

While teams are her passion, she knows that each person is a potential powerhouse and that you cannot have stand-out teams without stand-out individuals. So she ensures you have the core “soft power” skills you need. As an emotional life fitness (elf) trainer she helps you excel in today’s work environment that has VUCA written all over it—Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous.

Now you have access to this physics major come history and philosophy of science turn theologian and international peace and justice activist (with some business and years of ocean-time thrown in.) She is not your average coach. With her at your back, you will uncover resources, strengths, and meaning and laughter that will change your life.

As the New York Chair of the Alliance of NGOs on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, the founder of the NGO-Academy.com is the author of her bestselling book “United Nations Unlocked,” is an early adopter of VR games and uses Beat Saber and other VR games for her daily fitness regimen.