The episode—from the Water in Southern Alberta podcast miniseries co-hosted with Bob Morrison which originally aired in June 2025—brings together legal and planning experts to unpack how Alberta’s water law and water market function, especially in southern Alberta. Arlene Kwasniak, a long‑time scholar of water law from the University of Calgary, outlines the complex legal framework governing water, starting from the Canadian Constitution’s division of powers between federal and provincial governments over issues like fisheries, navigation, federal lands, Indigenous lands, and provincial property in water. She emphasizes that alongside federal and provincial statutes, Indigenous law, common law, international law, and policy all influence water management, but her focus is on Alberta’s Water Act and water‑use rights. Before modern legislation, common law riparian rights gave only landowners adjacent to water bodies limited household and “extraordinary” uses, with built‑in equity and sustainability because all riparians shared the same rights and could enforce them in court. These rights were largely extinguished by the Northwest Irrigation Act, which vested ownership of provincial waters in the Crown and introduced the prior allocation principle—“first in time, first in right” (FITFIR)—where licence priority is determined by date of application and senior users are fully satisfied before juniors in times of shortage.
Arlene traces the evolution from the Northwest Irrigation Act to Alberta’s Water Resources Act and then the Water Act, noting that groundwater was brought under Crown ownership and FITFIR in 1962, replacing the old rule of capture. The Water Act introduced major river basin divisions and approved water management plans—currently for the South Saskatchewan, Battle, and Milk River basins—which must be considered in key regulatory decisions like transfers. It also created statutory authorizations: household and agricultural exemptions with quantified annual volumes, and licences that grant diversion rights for specified purposes (municipal, irrigation, commercial, habitat enhancement, recreation, water conservation objectives, and others) typically on renewable 10‑year terms, while older licences have no expiry and are easily renewed. New licences can include water conservation objective (WCO) conditions that allow the director to restrict diversions when flows fall below set thresholds, whereas older licences may have in‑stream objectives (IOs) that are generally less protective. Arlene contrasts both WCOs and IOs with scientifically determined in‑stream flow needs (IFNs), arguing that WCOs and IOs are more politically set and often below IFN levels, limiting ecosystem protection.
Assessing the Water Act against an idealized water law, Arlene finds major shortcomings. She notes that while there are some tools to curb impacts for new licences, existing licences are strongly protected, there is no expropriation power for water rights, and cancellation is only possible when rights have gone unused for three years with no reasonable prospect of use. The Act offers only limited mechanisms to secure sufficient in‑stream flows, does not recognize or secure Indigenous water rights, and does not integrate quantity and quality regulation, conjunctive management of surface and groundwater, formal watershed governance, clear rules for alternative sources (wastewater, rainwater, stormwater, saline water), or climate change mitigation and adaptation—though the government is proposing amendments on some of these fronts. Household use has the highest priority, partially securing basic human needs. Overall, Arlene would grade the Act a “D” and says she would not pass it, arguing Alberta could have moved away from FITFIR toward more equitable systems like those in Saskatchewan, Australia, and New Zealand, but powerful sectors—oil and gas, municipalities, and agriculture—resisted change. In practice, Davin McIntosh—a water rights consultant and broker who specializes in facilitating water transfers in Alberta, with prior experience as a planning and municipal development lawyer and involvement in a significant proportion of water transfers in the Bow River Basin and Southern Alberta—points out that priority calls under FITFIR are rarely made, with Alberta preferring voluntary reductions to avoid cutting off junior users, especially municipalities whose licences are technically subject to FITFIR but whose drinking water cannot realistically be curtailed.
Davin then explains why and how water transfers were introduced. As recognition grew in the 1980s–1990s that full exercise of long‑standing rights could push rivers below environmentally sustainable levels, the Water Act added transfer provisions, and a 2007 moratorium on new licences in many areas made transfers the main mechanism for reallocating water. He describes an eight‑step process:
* finding a suitable right (difficult because rights are rarely advertised and cancellation risk discourages signalling non‑use),
* negotiating price and contracts despite uncertainty of approval,
* confirming the licence is in good standing (including compliance checks and sometimes costly reconstruction of works to match old plans),
* submitting a paper application,
* responding to extensive and discretionary requests for information from the director,
* publishing mandatory public notice and handling statements of concern, possible public meetings, and finally a decision. He highlights the director’s broad discretion and evolving, often unwritten policies—such as disallowing transfers “around a corner” in a Y‑shaped tributary, apportionment rules limiting how much can move from a mainstem to a tributary,
* partial good‑standing determinations, and
* the 10% conservation holdback that created government WCO licences but is now proposed to be scrapped due to limited overall transfer volumes.
With only about 400 transfers approved since 2007, roughly half being arm’s‑length, the conservation holdback has not significantly boosted in‑stream protection.
Throughout the discussion, we stress that enforcement of ecological needs and federal powers has been weak. Arlene notes that IFNs are not directly recognized in the Water Act, that WCOs and IOs fall short of IFNs, and that private in‑stream flow licences are not currently allowed, though government can and has issued WCO licences to itself.
Bob Sandford introduces himself to the Concerned Citizens on Climate Change (4C) group, in February of 2026, as a long-time Alberta-based water and climate expert who now serves as senior government relations liaison for global climate emergency response at the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, noting that his institute recently launched a major global report on “global water bankruptcy” at the UN General Assembly. He frames his remarks within UN principles and Indigenous rights, emphasizing that all cultures contribute to a shared human heritage. From his vantage point as an Albertan, he criticizes the UCP government’s libertarian direction, arguing that its policies undermine healthcare, education, and environmental protection while flooding the public sphere with divisive, misleading messaging that distracts from deeper crises and an apparent agenda to dismantle democracy and separate Alberta from Canada. He warns that amid these distractions, a long‑advancing global water crisis has become an even more immediate threat than accelerated climate warming, which Alberta’s government largely denies.
Sandford explains the UN “global water bankruptcy” concept as a post‑crisis state where societies persistently withdraw more water than renewable flows can support, depleting natural capital such as snowpack, glaciers, wetlands, and groundwater that provide “liquid income.” The report shows that even water‑rich countries like Canada, and regions such as southern Alberta, are not immune and may be nearing water bankruptcy, prompting initiatives like the Canada Water Agency. He argues that Alberta has failed to “repay” nature through forest, watershed, and biodiversity protection, and that maladaptive responses—creating weak watershed bodies, building more dams, drilling deeper wells, and diverting rivers—temporarily mask insecurity while deepening insolvency. Nature, he says, is now “initiating foreclosure” by shutting off water, as seen in glacier loss and shrinking snow and ice, and each drained wetland or logged headwater further erodes resilience beyond what engineering can replace.
Summary continues before this news update!
WOW: Did you see Hoekstra on Ryan Jespersen’s Real Talk?
With water bankruptcy—and the West Texas Intermediate system collapse on the horizon—can you believe what is coming out of Pete Hoekstra’s mouth?
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Civil Society Summit on the AI Industry
Season 3 · Episode 27
Monday, June 15, 2026 • Duration 41:36
The episode of The Gravity Well podcast features Jessica Chung from the Council of Canadians, focusing on AI data centres, their environmental and social impacts, and emerging cross‑Canada resistance movements.
Jessica introduces herself as a water and climate campaigner, formerly a Line 5 pipeline organizer with Sierra Club Canada, living in Guelph with her family. She shares a story about activist Kim Bradshaw lending her a car so Kim could travel by train to glue her hands to an airport tarmac in an anti–big oil action, illustrating “community in action.”
Jessica describes her unusual path into activism: she left law school after being diagnosed with fibromyalgia, then became a yoga teacher, which shaped her ability to “hold space” in movements. This conversation came after I watched a pro‑pipeline “Build Ontario Strong” ad promoting gas for AI infrastructure and wanted an Ontario perspective. Jessica recounts a recent two‑day Civil Society Summit on the AI industry, with 270 attendees and panels on Indigenous data sovereignty, environmental harms, gender‑based violence, labour, war, food systems, corporate accountability, and AI in media and arts. She stresses the summit was not about shaming everyday AI use (like email summarization) but about how AI is being used as a “front person” for oil and gas, justifying continued fossil fuel expansion under nationalist competition narratives.
Jessica frames AI as a neutral tool—like a hammer—whose impact depends on who controls it, what rules exist, and how power is exercised. I echo this, arguing AI can be used for “pro‑social” purposes such as organising toward a water‑centred economy, minimizing energy use, and keeping systems local rather than controlled by foreign entities. I link AI expansion to abandonment of international law and corporate accountability, warning of ecological collapse and citing examples of water contamination and freshwater loss in places like Texas and Louisiana.
Jessica explains that civil society is trying to reclaim the AI narrative from “tech bros” who have captured political attention, and to invite everyday people into the conversation. She notes that youth, highly adept with digital tools, are at the forefront of resisting AI data centres and can mobilise quickly even within short public‑input windows and confirms summit recordings are available at . I highlight , an Instagram group with over 3,000 members in under a month, and describes coordinated rallies in Alberta and Ontario, including a Unity rally and anti‑AI rally in Calgary, and a previous provincial‑wide day of action with thousands in Edmonton, Calgary, and [21] other locations. Check out @Solstice’s video from the main event in Calgary .
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Behavioral Health and Safety Education
Season 1 · Episode 2
Thursday, January 25, 2024 • Duration 01:09:43
Welcome and Introduction to Brad Chapin
Jenny:
Here. Thank you so much. Okay, Alex, why don’t you take us away, please?
Alex:
Hi, my name’s Alex. Welcome to The Gravity. Well, where we break down heavy ideas into small buckets anyone can handle in our work and at play, we seek the wisdom of elders, individuals, and communities that share our knowledge to care for our water, air, land, life, and resource needs. Caring for our homeland will be our guide.
Jenny:
Thank you for that introduction, Alex. Thank you everyone for joining us. Really appreciate you being here. Hi Michele. Thank you so much for being here. I am excited about this conversation today. Just going to take a moment though to reflect on last week. Angie and Merrill, thank you so much for being here. We had a great conversation. We spoke about why we’re doing The Gravity Well. We spoke about our mission statement, then we talked through what we see. Hi Dion. Thank you for joining us. We talked through how we want to handle problems that come up in conversations. We wanted to work through our method, the method that Alex and I took in this complex decision-making course, which helps us work through the six W approach to all of the problems we want to talk about in this room. Both Angie and Melanie helped us talk through building a community agreement, making sure that we have space for people to offer suggestions, and making sure that we’re using the tools in this room.
Brad, for your information, if you hold down on your image, you can do things like add emojis or images or things like that to help kickstart, just show support of a comment or anything like that. Awesome. Great job. We’re just going to use the tools in the room. There is a chat in the bottom left feature as well. Hi Merrill, thank you so much for being such a great supporter. and for being here. We’re going to use those tools to help us work through these conversations. And if we have any challenges, we’re going to look to our community and to our rules to make sure that we stay on course. This particular conversation has been a long time coming, not necessarily for Brad, but certainly for me. I met a woman that is from Calgary and she offered me her story.
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"The Gravity Well" Pilot
Season 1 · Episode 1
Thursday, January 18, 2024 • Duration 58:54
Welcome to “The Gravity Well,” a podcast where hosts Alexander MacGillivray and Jenny Yeremiy tackle heavy ideas in manageable segments. They aim to provide information, ideas, and skills to positively contribute to listeners’ lives. The podcast was born from a conversation during an election campaign, where the hosts realized the importance of preparing for potential negative outcomes, much like the Apollo missions. They emphasize the need for community rebuilding and fostering a collaborative mindset rather than opposition. The hosts discuss the importance of respectful behavior, understanding different perspectives, and creating a safe space for open dialogue. They also explore their own personality traits and how these influence their collaboration. The podcast aims to address various crises by opening dialogues and encouraging contributions from diverse viewpoints.
About Your Hosts
I, Jenny Yeremiy, am a geophysicist and liability (oil and gas site clean-up and restoration) expert turned social and environmental economic activist.
Alexander MacGillivray studied Arts, is a jack-of-all-trades, an independent researcher and has a passion for bringing people together to learn and communicate big ideas.
In this first episode of The Gravity Well, I draw learning and inspiration from two thought leadership branding coaches trained in Positive Intelligence — Angie Alexander and Melanie Richards. Angie and Melanie share their recommendations for defining the ground rules of The Gravity Well community.
I have known Angie since our time at Apache Canada. Angie and I never worked directly together, but peripherally, she has been a steady ally in the roller coaster of our oil and gas careers. She and I had lengthy careers in oil and gas development, Angie as a reservoir engineer and me as a geophysicist. Geophysicists like me work with geologists to identify drilling locations and abandonment recommendations. Reservoir engineers like Angie work hand in hand with a production engineer to determine the economics and producibility of a well or oil field.
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Alberta's Eastern Tales
Season 3 · Episode 26
Friday, June 12, 2026 • Duration 30:36
I threw a microphone on my spouse Chris last week—you may recognize him from Season 1, Episode 5 or the Leadership Training series in Season 2. Our conversation explores common Alberta narratives about other Canadian regions and the federal government, and then connects these narratives to environmental policy, resource extraction, and changing provincial values.
Albertans often view Quebec as a “taker” province that receives special treatment, keeps its wealth, and benefits from federal transfers while restricting Alberta’s ability to develop oil and gas. Quebec is perceived as having different values—linked mainly to French culture—and as opposing Alberta’s oil and gas interests, especially around pipelines and environmental protection. At the same time, I note that Quebec’s stronger climate stance and bans on practices like frac’ing are seen as positive environmental leadership, even if they clash with Alberta’s extractive priorities.
Chris explains that many Albertans misunderstand equalization, believing Alberta should get back exactly what it pays in federal taxes, when in reality the federal government redistributes funds based on national priorities, meaning Alberta may not see a direct return on every dollar. This feeds a perception that Quebec and Ottawa benefit from Alberta’s wealth and block its development, reinforcing grievances that fuel separatist sentiment.
Comparisons are drawn between Alberta’s oil sands and Quebec’s large-scale hydro, mining, and industrial projects; many Albertans feel Quebec gets easier federal approval and preferential treatment for its projects, while Alberta faces more scrutiny. I question whether this perception is actually true, emphasizing that it is a narrative rather than a proven fact.
The discussion then shifts to Ontario and the idea of “Laurentian elites,” described as longstanding political and industrial power networks in central Canada—families, capitalists, and industrial behemoths concentrated along the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence corridor, historically shaping national decisions. Alberta’s story about Ontario includes a sense that central Canada is the political center that decides national outcomes because of its population, leaving the Prairies feeling numerically and politically sidelined.
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Little Town, Big Data in Olds, Alberta
Season 3 · Episode 25
Thursday, June 4, 2026 • Duration 23:48
This episode focuses on water, cumulative impacts, and long‑term consequences of AI data centres, rather than just short‑term economic promises. Olds resident, concerned citizen turned leader of a local resistance around water sovereignty and now AI data centers, Janey Olson, joins me to explain.
From my perspective—as a geophysicist and oil and gas environmental liability expert—what’s happening in Olds is both shocking and emblematic of a wider pattern: residents are blindsided by huge, high‑impact projects—Synapse and Data District—framed as “done deals” by local and provincial economic arms before people have real information or a meaningful say. Janey highlights that Synapse is a 1.4‑gigawatt project—equivalent to adding about one million homes’ worth of power demand—and that there are two data centres proposed in her small town. I note more proposals appearing near Calgary, in Bonnyville and Fox Creek, and Wonder Valley in Grande Prairie.
A 1.4 gigawatt facility is like adding 1.4 million homes to Alberta’s grid “suddenly” and will affect everyone’s power costs and the province’s competitiveness, and it risks turning Alberta into a “sacrificial lamb” for a federal AI and data‑centre agenda. I explicitly connect this to a push to monetise natural gas and build massive fossil‑fuel‑driven power infrastructure—hundreds of diesel generators, turbines, and chillers running 24/7—just to feed these centres.
I outline who stands to gain from these AI data centers in this conversation with Charlie Angus on Meidas Canada.
Note: Wonder Valley is backed by UAE (https://www.theenergymix.com/70b-wonder-valley-project-still-a-mirage-as-olearys-ai-dream-stalls-in-alberta/) while Kuwait and Qatar are partnered with Brookfield’s Investment partners for Synapse.
Water is at the heart of our concerns. We stress that rural residents are already facing “very scary stuff” around water access and control, and that these data centres are “high draw water users” arriving in a context of growing scarcity. I explicitly thank Janey for “following the water” and say that water is “central to everything we want to have in this world,” making it unacceptable to hand it over to AI data centres “to compete with China” for something that doesn’t add value to the common good. I bring in the warning from UN water advisor Bob Sandford about us being on the “cusp of ,” and argue that this is precisely why cumulative water‑impact safeguards are being stripped away—because honest assessment would stop “this obscenity.”
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CBC's Eagle Andersen Questions Updated Info Related to Proposed Wonder Valley AI Project
Season 3
Wednesday, June 3, 2026 • Duration 13:09
CBC Reporter, Eagle Andersen called me to hear my thoughts about the updated information provided by Kevin’s “O’Leary Digital” team in advance of their open house slated from tomorrow, June 4 from 4-7 pm at Grovedale Community Hall in Grande Prairie.
I criticize the new newsletter about a proposed data centre project for omitting key information about what powers the facility, assuming it will rely on natural gas and arguing that this leaves out major parts of the electricity, water, and contamination story. I highlight that the project is expected to use about six billion liters of water per year (six million cubic meters), which is roughly equivalent to the annual allocation for the Greenview District, effectively doubling municipal water use for a single project and with no guarantee that usage would remain capped at that level. I also note concerns about power demand, citing examples like Lake Tahoe where residents were reportedly told they could no longer get grid power due to a data facility, and emphasize that a seven‑gigawatt facility would be a massive addition, equating five gigawatts to the power needs of five million people.
I argue there is “zero benefit” to Canada and Albertans, claiming the project offers only limited construction and operations jobs and primarily serves U.S. government interests, which they accuse of trying to push Canada toward violating international law, climate obligations, and stability. I add that, especially after the war in Iran and anticipated resource shortages, leaders should make “extreme choices” to limit use of fossil fuels and ensure benefits do not accrue mainly to fossil fuel interests.
When asked what information the company should provide, I say the full scope of the project must be disclosed, including how power will be generated and the associated infrastructure, pointing to the example of Olds where oil and gas workers understand the gas turbines, roadways, and infrastructure needed for such projects. Drawing on personal experience working near Grande Prairie, I speculate that a large gas cap over an oil field might be used to extend the life of a field instead of addressing environmental cleanup obligations, calling this a likely costly error. I also reference the prime minister’s recent statement that the U.S. is misleading and argue Canada should not follow a “mega pipeline drill, baby drill” agenda.
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Participatory Democracy at Work in Alberta
Season 3
Monday, June 1, 2026 • Duration 31:20
Thanks to Raul of Charlie Angus / The Resistance’s Meidas Canada, I am thrilled to share the presentation that University of Calgary Public Health Professor, Lindsay McLaren, and I gave at the Public Interest Alberta (PIA) Common Purpose, Collective Action 2026 conference in Edmonton last month. The presentation outlines our backgrounds, a better vision, our experience, an action, and how to join us! Lindsay and I outline the need to recenter Alberta and Canada’s economies around public and planetary health. That comes with:
* Recentering decision-making around water and land restoration, not energy growth.
* Recognizing we are in a polycrisis: seeing multiple and additive crises with the common root causes: extraction, accumulation, and exploitation.
* Unwinding the neoliberal playbook of manufactured scarcity (cutting of public services), division, deregulation, private wealth accumulation, and stunting of our imaginations.
* Reclaiming the term “economy” as “caring for one another”. Own the economy you wish to foster.
* Grow alternatives which include principles of reciprocity, solidarity, and equity.
We hope to have a similar meeting in Calgary this fall to continue this effort, stay tuned! A special shout out to TheBreakdownAB for all of Nate Pike’s help in gaining support for recalls.
Should you wish to join Lindsay and I in shaping a well-being economy in Alberta through the PIA Democracy Task Force in Alberta, please email Brad Lafortune of PIA here: brad.lafortune@pialberta.org. Help Brad (or I) know what you’d like to see from the Democracy Task Force.
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Matilda Wants ABE to Flow Free
Season 3
Friday, May 29, 2026 • Duration 08:07
I sat down with Matilda, a grade 10 student at William Aberhart High School, today, on Menstrual Hygiene Awareness Day. She shares her project to install free feminine hygiene product dispensers in the girls’ bathrooms so that no student is ever left without supplies when they need them. And explains that her motivation comes from a personal experience of getting her period at school, finding no products available, and recognizing how stigma keeps students from openly asking for help or even naming what they’re going through. Matilda has turned that experience into advocacy, launching a change.org petition and promoting her work through her Instagram account “@AbeFlowsFree,” where she’s also organizing a bake sale to support the cause. Beyond menstrual equity, she speaks candidly about broader problems at her school, from overcrowded, noisy classrooms without enough desks to packed yoga classes where 35 students can barely move without bumping into each other, underscoring how urgently students need better learning conditions.
Jenny: Okay, thank you for joining me today, Matilda. Let’s start with who you are, what you’re up to and just a little bit about you for people listening. Thank you.
Matilda:
Yeah, thank you for having me. My name is Matilda. I’m a grade 10 student at William Aberhart High School. And yeah, this is my project to get free feminine hygiene product dispensers in the girls’ bathroom.
Jenny:
Excellent. And remind us, today’s a special day, right? What’s today for folks who don’t know?
Matilda:
It’s Menstrual Equity Day and Menstrual Awareness Day. A day to make people aware of people that have periods and how they deal with them and the barriers that are in their way and just kind of an advocacy day.
Jenny:
Amazing. Out of curiosity, is there anywhere people can go to find information about that on today?
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Frequency of Contact with Alberta Premier:
Admits that he talks to Alberta Premier Danielle Smith “maybe once every three or four weeks” and speaks with her representatives in Ottawa “at least every week.”
Lack of Expertise on Canadian Perspectives:
States: “I’m not an expert on Canadian citizens or why they think the way that they do or what drives them and those kinds of things.” This is Pete’s job.
Acknowledgment of the “No Need for Canada” Position:
Confirms: “He says we don’t need Canada” — acknowledging that the president has made this statement on the record.
The Sales Approach:
Expects the Canadian provinces to “put on your sales hat” and actively pitch why buying from Canada is beneficial, rather than expecting automatic trade relationships.
Bob and Water Bankruptcy continued
Looking ahead, Sandford urges Alberta to formally acknowledge water bankruptcy risk and adopt transparent, fair rules for sharing scarcity, with participatory processes and strong social safety nets—conditions he says are absent under the current government. He links water security directly to food security and broader sustainable and circular economies, noting that water is often the only issue warring or divided groups can agree on, citing examples from the Middle East, the Northwest Territories, and transboundary agreements with Alberta. He highlights emerging climate science from James Hansen suggesting another El Niño and accelerated warming that could push global temperatures toward 2°C in the 2030s, with Canada warming at twice the global rate, implying severe drought, reduced snowpack, year‑round wildfire risk, and deep social and economic disruption in Alberta by 2027 and beyond. He likens the current moment to “Munich 1939,” arguing that Alberta is unprepared for three degrees of warming, with unpredictable precipitation, concurrent floods and droughts, and increasingly manipulated water licensing.
Politically, Sandford and other speakers connect water to a broader project of “rescuing, reviving, and restoring democracy” in Alberta, suggesting that the looming threat of water bankruptcy could galvanize citizens across issues like education, healthcare, and food security without relying on existing political parties.
TAKE ACTION
Join Public Interest Alberta’s, “No thanks. We choose hope.” Campaign!
Jessica cites Hamilton and Burks Falls (Ontario) as recent examples of local resistance, noting that some victories—like projects stopped before shovels hit the ground—are under‑reported but real. In Burks Falls, two 20‑year‑old women organized opposition that led the city to take a data centre proposal off the table. She emphasizes that activism often slows rather than fully stops projects, buying time for alternative paths to emerge. I agree, it’s a David‑and‑Goliath struggle where our wins are measured in delays and vigilance.
I describe Alberta communities organizing against massive data centres, including one 1.4‑gigawatt project (equivalent to 1.4 million homes’ energy use) that drew over 1,100 statements of concern. I criticize incomplete accounting that ignores upstream gas extraction and frac’ing, pointing out that water used in fracking is permanently lost. She mentions strong pushback in Grande Prairie and multiple sites near Calgary, with communities sharing strategies and resources like the airesistlist.org website.
Jessica tells me municipalities are key battlegrounds because AI data centres intersect with zoning, real estate, and venture capital. She describes efforts to support youth organizers who want June 27 to become a national day of action, prompted by BC Greens leader Emily Lowen. With only 16 days’ lead time, they are building a decentralized toolkit tailored to the Canadian context and engaging about 200 people across sectors to define what civil society should be in this moment. She argues AI threatens the entire political spectrum and cites Mark Carney’s “AI for All” strategy as essentially focused on ensuring adoption, not democratic consent.
I underscore AI is unifying issue across left and right, tied to water, surveillance, safety, jobs, and environmental destruction. I cite the Wonder Valley project, which she says would be the largest heat source in the world, and name large AI data centres “gas guzzling” and resource‑wasting infrastructure serving billionaires, contrasting them with low‑power, everyday AI uses. Jessica clarifies that “AI” is often used as a monolithic term, but the real empire project is the race toward AGI—machines outperforming humans on all tasks—requiring massive power to scrape the entire internet. She notes AI can also be small‑scale and community‑oriented, such as tools for preserving local languages. However, she argues current dominant uses deepen social inequity rather than reduce it.
I give a concrete example of AI‑enabled monetization: vehicles from 2026 onward reportedly requiring subscriptions for features like heated seats and full radio use, effectively taxing people’s own property and widening divides. I support national coordination and cites Taiwan’s Audrey Tang using digital tools to achieve 90% public support for policies before voting, as well as the town of Olds exploring people‑driven economic planning instead of elite committees. I link AI data centres to centralized power generation, arguing that renewables’ strength lies in decentralization and security, especially as wars make large {oil and gas] facilities, including AI centres, potential military targets.
Jessica reflects on a broader shift from “power over” to “power with,” calling solidarity a “miracle” given humanity’s long, often violent history. She notes that people now show solidarity beyond shared language or appearance, citing global concern for Gaza as an example. She argues big‑tent movements should not require full consensus and asks how much agreement is really needed to work together, given our survival is intertwined. She references Maud Barlow’s warning that within about 10 years there could be a 40% global water shortfall, stressing the urgency as billionaires continue extracting both resources and power. She highlights that many US AI data‑centre fights are led by everyday people—barbers, teenagers, young adults—and frames this as a moment where “the box has crumbled,” asking who we want to be.
I agree that anyone who cares can participate and recounts narratives that divide provinces: Alberta stereotypes about Ontario’s “Laurentian elites” and Ontarians allegedly seeing Albertans as backward “bow hunks” needing outside guidance. I warn these stories hinder cooperation even as shared threats like AI data centres and looming “water bankruptcy” (citing UN water expert Bob Sandford’s work) demand unity and ecological restoration. I ask Jessica how these narratives look from Ontario.
Jessica says her view of other provinces is primarily relational, shaped by people she’s worked with rather than media narratives, and she feels “unplugged” from many ads and stereotypes because she doesn’t watch organized sports. She acknowledges that separatist movements and social media algorithms fuel judging and generalizing about entire provinces. She stresses that relational work is “everything” because elites benefit when people are easily controlled by pre‑packaged narratives. She cites reports that first‑year university students struggle to finish full papers due to social media’s impact on attention, warning this undermines future capacity to read complex bills or arguments. She argues that change will come less from perfect arguments and more from thousands of people building relationships and community resilience as crises—especially in the Global South—intensify. She frames “divide and conquer” as a deliberate strategy of those in power and calls for stretching our capacity to see each other freshly, beyond conditioning.
I point to Gaza as both horrifying and inspiring, noting that people there have not turned on each other despite extreme conditions. I see this as a lesson in solidarity. I recall a Chinese government representative describing an “inevitability of peace,” which she finds a hopeful framing for this transition from power over to power with. I believe stopping further system deterioration would itself be a remarkable achievement and feel encouraged by emerging resistance.
In closing, Jessica emphasizes that activism is deeply personal and often happens in quiet, internal moments: noticing when we react to flattening narratives, asking who benefits if we believe them, and cultivating a habit of reflection. She calls this “life finding its own intelligence” and stresses that activism is not only public action but also slowing down with ourselves, questioning anger and manipulation before acting. I connect this to spiritual practice and “micro moments” of discernment—asking who is speaking, for whose benefit, and whether a message is truly for us—suggesting such practices are becoming more common.
Her name is Mary. She’s a mutual friend of Brad and I’s. And Mary grew up in Ontario. She moved to Alberta and had an accident on her bike almost immediately after moving to Alberta. And that accident put her life on a different course. One of the things that it meant for her was that she could no longer afford to drive or ride her bike because she was hurt. She took the bus and while using transit, ended up getting, she had, what ended up being, a stalker for quite some years, or certainly a significant amount of time. And the threats that this person put on her caused her tremendous PTSD. Mary was suffering from PTSD and started to get suicidal thoughts from that experience. And she thankfully wasn’t successful in that, but was because she was struggling with this for so long and she decided that she was going to just research and understand what she was going through.
She researched, and Brad, you can help me expand upon this story if you know it differently. She researched for years, or at least for a significant amount of time, and found Brad and Brad’s work. What Mary described from learning from Brad is that she was able to see what was happening to her in real-time, like physically. She said, that she remembers Brad walking through a diagram, which I’m going to share with you once I stop talking here. I’ll put a link in this chat so you guys can see the images that Brad presented to share for us to walk through today, but that his work changed her life and she feels that this work is vital in terms of helping people work through their fears and helping them shape a healthy life and make sure that we each have the tools to look after ourselves. That’s what Brad’s work is trying to do. I’ll stop there. Brad, if you please unmute yourself and just introduce yourself a little bit and what you’re hoping to bring to the conversation today, as well? Thank you.
About Brad Chapin and his behavioral health/self-regulation work
Brad:
Yeah, thank you Jenny for that introduction. Thank you for telling Mary’s story. I work with a lot of people from all over the United States and other countries too, but Mary’s story sort of sticks with you and we’ve stayed in contact for a number of years and she’s just been such an advocate, just a passionate advocate for mental health. And just also I think one of the things I’ve gotten from her, and it really pushes a person like that, pushes professionals to do work better too. She’s a motivator for me, but just to hear a person with lived experience and how the system is difficult for them to navigate and get where they need to be and how can we do things better for people who are looking for ways to help themselves. That’s really where I’ve spent the 20-some years of my career in the applied setting. I don’t sit on a university campus somewhere and tell people how we’ve been doing things for the last hundred years. And I think I appreciate those people and I read those journal articles and the work that they do, but there’s definitely something to be said and working in an applied setting. I don’t know, Jenny, if you want me to introduce myself a little bit here or
Jenny:
Yeah, please, Brad, if you wouldn’t mind. I have you in, is it Topeka, Kansas? Is that how you say it?
Brad:
It’s Topeka, Kansas, yes.
Jenny:
It’s great. Yeah, if you just wouldn’t mind speaking a bit about what you’re doing right now would be awesome.
Brad:
Sure. I’ll just share a little bit. I wish I just had to say right up front, I wish I had Alex’s voice. It would probably sound so much better. I probably could listen to him just report the weather. But for me, I’m a master’s level psychologist and spent a number of years at the beginning of my career doing therapy and psychological evaluations for kids and adults. And then 13 years I worked in what we call here, community mental health centers. Those are places that people go that don’t have very good insurance, sometimes no insurance, and we are set up with some government funding to help those folks be able to afford mental health care. That was 13 years. And then the last eight years I’ve been director of clinical services for large healthcare systems, behavioral health department. I oversee 52 inpatient psychiatric beds, 20 for kids and 32 for adults.
And then we have full outpatient services that we do for behavioral health. We do about 35,000 hours of mental health outpatient services a year for Topeka and the surrounding counties. We go from Frontier, what we call Frontier. Those are very rural areas, also a high Native American population. And then to urban areas, which Topeka, we call it urban. It’s about a hundred thousand people, but not massively urban. But by Kansas standards, it’s urban. That’s what I’ve been doing. And then my biggest passion though is self-regulation training. And I think that’s kind of what Jenny wanted me to come and talk here about, which is getting basic skills. You hear this language around mental health literacy is big right now. It’s getting basic information to people that they can use without having to wait on a list to go see somebody for therapy or maybe not understand what they can do to help themselves. How do we break these skills down into meaningful chunks that people can apply in their lives and see results very quickly? That’s my background.
Jenny:
Yeah, thank you. The piece that has stuck with me, Brad, is the fact that your work, as you’ve noted, is a person only needs six hours of training to have a significant change in their life knowing this work. Is that correct?
Brad:
Yeah, it’s so amazing. We started with kids with these skills because I mean, who doesn’t want to get there earlier? And I started my work with adults and it was just like, gosh, what if we could have gotten to this person 25, 35 years ago? Would they even need to come see me at this point in their life? We worked on developing evidence-based skill training guides for teachers and school counsellors to use with kids. We have an elementary curriculum, a preschool curriculum, and a middle school, and high school curriculum. And then I was reading some, and I knew this all along, but just the basic logic that was telling me, what if the adults aren’t doing well enough to get these skills to the kids? What if the teachers aren’t feeling well enough themselves? We had data to show that our teachers who were able to apply these skills in their own lives, the kids benefited from that, their scores, their self more than those who weren’t applying it in their own lives.
Our data is showing right now. I’ve done, I don’t know how many, we, of course, I’ve done training in 38 states and Canada, five or six times in Singapore, but we have data on over 5,000 kids and adults. But more recently, in our adult data, we’ve been focusing on educators and healthcare professionals. And a lot of that was brought on by Covid. Our health system, we have about 6,000 employees, and we’re a Mayo Clinic. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the Mayo Clinic here in the US, but a large healthcare system, Mayo Clinic care network partner. What we do is teach resilience and self-regulation. And of course, about three months into the pandemic, we realized that our healthcare professionals were not doing well, managing everything they were trying to manage. Our one-day training on self-regulation skills has been yielding a 40% reduction in what we call perceived stress.
And if you think about that concept, it’s really important. That’s how much control you feel like you have over your stress level. It’s not going to magically take your stressors away, but what we’re after is what can we put into your hands in a day so that you can walk away and feel like you have more power and control over the level of stress I’m experiencing? And I was like, what a wonderful way to spend a day. And then just the stories that we hear after the day, just some of the anecdotal stuff like I don’t fight with my teenage daughter anymore, my husband and I are getting along better. We’re having conversations around things that we were angry about before that we couldn’t even sit down and talk about meetings are going better. Just some of these really practical applications when people can manage themselves a little bit better. Some of the other stuff fixes itself to put it short.
Jenny:
Awesome. Before we go too far into your work, I want to just quickly take a moment and let Alex introduce himself as well. And Alex, if you wouldn’t mind just offering what you’ve done a bit of research on Brad’s work too, or just some of your perspective, some of what you’re bringing into this conversation. I’ll stop there.
Alex:
Sure. Won’t dive too deep into it, but I too am a person with lived experience and I’ve had to lean on professionals from time to time to overcome my obstacles and my stress-reactive tendencies. I was looking a bit into the history of some of the work that you do, and please, Dr. Chapin, correct me if I’m incorrect, but is the origin and developmental systems theory? Is it based on the human ability to simply at first acknowledge that there is a physiological stress reaction and in that acknowledgement the developed tools to at least manage or overcome those?
Brad:
Yeah, I love simple and you’re correct. Systems theory has a lot to do with this, and we know from systems theory that organisms systems do perform better when they’re balanced and systems will also seek out balance. It’s just, are the ways that they find healthy or unhealthy? I don’t want to get too deep into that, but yes, since you opened that door, that explains the first domain. We teach skills in three areas, physical regulation, emotion regulation, and cognitive regulation. And I think where you were going with that one was the physical balance of our biological system for great.
Who needs behavioral health/self-regulation training?
Jenny:
Yeah. Thank you. Okay, let’s get into this. Who needs self-regulation training? If you can just sort of expand on, as you’ve already done, you’ve touched on that this is children, this is adults, but just expand on who needs it and a bit more as to why it’s important just before we dive in.
Brad:
Yeah, sure. One of the first things I say in my opening line in my training is that if you’re not experiencing any challenge in your life or you’ve never experienced a challenge or won’t ever experience a challenge, you can probably go ahead and tune out. Experienced challenges in going to regulate in a healthy way or an unhealthy way in the face of challenge. There’s no way around it that I can see. It’s going to happen. And that’s what I think is interesting about when we work with kids. It’s like, well, we don’t have time to teach them or we don’t have time to do this. It’s like, well, they’re going to do it one way or another. They’re going to learn these things. They’re going to learn healthy ways to manage challenges in their life or unhealthy. And that’s as simple as I can put it.
To me, it’s a human skill. I love this topic too, because it’s unifying. If you’re a human being on this planet, you’ve experienced challenges. And also chances are you weren’t formally taught how to do that, especially how to manage social-emotional challenges. I think you probably what happens is if we don’t have a formal system for managing challenges, what we do is we absorb a whole bunch of vague advice or we dish out a bunch of vague advice. And I’m sure many of you on the call can relate to these kinds of things. Oh, for example, if people aren’t getting along, let’s say some people are polarized around an issue, some of the advice we might say is, why don’t you just get along? We all be nice. Let’s be nice. Everybody, be nice to each other and let’s get along and it’ll be just fine. We hear all kinds of vague advice when things aren’t going well, just hang in there, make better choices, and do better next time. I think we can do a lot better than that, but that’s what I hear a lot as far as solutions.
Jenny:
Thank you for saying that. Just so you know who’s in this room, a little bit of colour for you. Brad is Angie Alexander hosts a room on Thursday mornings in Clubhouse. And all of the participants in the audience here are regulars in Angie’s room. And one of the things that we talk about is often, you talked about two things there I just want to send back to you, which is number one that we say a lot of this is what we need, this is what we should be doing, this is what we want. But there isn’t a lot of the show that seems to be absent from what we’re doing. I think that’s what you were touching on. And then the other piece, I was actually, I’ll just stop there. If you could just talk a bit about how this system offers, like you said, some action around that because okay, my other thought was around the reason why we’re having these conversations is precisely because we need to lean into the challenges we’re facing. And like you said, if we’re in this position where we have people that disagree, well, we don’t have the option to just, as you said, get along. We have to talk through the issue. That’s precisely why I wanted to help start our conversations off in a healthy way by understanding a bit more about what you, I’ll stop there. Thanks.
Brad:
Yeah. Can I ask you how to get the little party thing off of me, is that just permanently stuck to my image?
Jenny:
No, it’s just for today, unfortunately, it’s basically celebrating your arrival on the app. Congratulations on joining Clubhouse. It’ll be gone. And actually, it’ll come back annually, just so you know, it’ll be an anniversary thing.
Brad:
Okay. Okay. I didn’t know if you’re recording this, but sometimes not everything we talk about is pleasant and I just didn’t want my picture always with the little party thing.
Jenny:
Yeah, excellent point.
Brad:
I like it, but it might not always be appropriate. I’m sorry, Jenny, you said a lot there, could you, yeah.
Beyond Vague Advice
Jenny:
Thank you, let me frame that up. Yeah, I’ll frame it a little better for you here. As you’re saying, we often are told that we just need to get along, and that’s not giving the how-to, that’s not, that’s not saying we’re going to get along by doing X, Y, Z. Do you know what I mean? I think that’s fine, thank you for clarifying. Okay. I’ll stop there.
Brad:
Yes, thank you for doing that. I probably started to feel a little bit threatened because that was a trigger or a challenge for me. I go to a lot of training too. I don’t just do training. I listen a lot, and I probably shouldn’t say this, but I go to big conferences and I sometimes challenge my listeners to say, Hey, write down how many pieces of vague advice you hear over the next two days of this conference, and then come back and report to me as far as how many hash marks you have. And that’s probably not fair to do to the other speakers, but there is so much of that. And there’s also what I like to talk about, there’s a big difference between knowing and doing. I’m super hooked on the word intentional right now. When you have a skill that you can practice, and I think this is just one of the biggest things that biggest hurdles to get over with people in schools and other systems is that if you don’t see behaviour number one as a skillset, you’re not going to be able to teach it. We see behaviour oftentimes as an expectation of others and without the skill training. I always think, what if reading was that way?
If we just had a poster on reading or like they do for responsibility, for example, there’s a poster, here’s how you’re supposed to be responsible, but no one’s there to teach you the skillset, but the expectation is always there. That’s kind of how it is with self-regulation. I think Alex used the word reactivity, and that’s kind of the opposite of being well-regulated is reactive. And what we know is that reactivity doesn’t work well. If you just take the logical step back from there and say, what is it that helps target reactivity and what are the skills you need to practice to reduce reactivity? I mean, that’s really how simple and logical we’ve kind of made the system. Yes, we don’t need more information and more vague advice. I usually don’t hear people say, yes, please give me more of that. It’s the how-to and intentional practice. Yep.
Jenny:
Okay. Alex, did you have Go ahead?
Alex:
Yeah, I think you kind of touched on something as I’ve been reading through this general systems theory. It introduced key concepts such as open and closed systems, stressing the role and importance of context and environment or the way systems could reach the same goal through different paths and hyper more systems, structural or behavioural or developmental features that are shared across, shared across systems. People may have different approaches to reach the same consensus. Have you found that when you’re working with people in your scope of practice that emphasises that in some cases people are, they may think that they’re arguing with each other, but they’re coming to the same resolution? And once they figure that out, it’s almost like a, how would I describe it, a short circuit. It’s like they’re both speaking English and they think that they’re arguing with each other, but they’re both saying the same thing differently.
Brad:
We see that quite a bit, especially when people are activated. When the fight-or-flight system is activated, they’re really engaged in that fight sometimes just to be engaged in the fight so that the content gets lost because of the process. They start to equate the other person as a threat instead of the content as threatening. That’s one of the benefits that we see when we can calm those two systems down, that becomes a lot more clear.
Jenny:
Yeah, I love that. It’s funny, I think Alex is making, he’s sort of hinting to our work style because Alex and I will find, make a comment on sort of a flip comment on something that’s in the news, and I’ll pause and say, well, what do you mean by that? And he’ll give an answer and I’ll say, well, but I think it’s this, and next thing we’ll find quickly that we agree. But the words he used or perhaps the person, that’s the other thing is potentially making it about an individual rather than an idea itself. I don’t know.
Brad:
Yeah, I think what’s challenging, and just to focus on those first two skills that we teach in self-regulation, the recognition of when or flight is engaged, and then how to create safety to turn that system off so that we can use our whole creative brain that makes us human beings and not a lizard. Yeah.
The skills to behavioral health and self-regulation
Jenny:
Can you walk through that a bit for us, Alex? Oh, sorry, Brad. That would be a great time for you to do that. Thank you.
Brad:
Yeah, for sure. Those are the first two skills we teach in self-regulation training. And this is inside what we call the physical domain. We’re just talking about how our body responds to challenges here, and there are only two skills we teach. The first one is just that self-awareness. What do I feel like physically? What can I notice about myself when I feel threatened when I experience threat? Do I notice my heart rate increase? Do I notice my face feeling hot and red? Does my voice increase in volume? Do my shoulders get tight and tense? Does my jaw get tense because I want to say all these things and I’m holding it in? Does my stomach feel upset? These are real tangible things, and our research shows that three-year-old’s can start to tell us this kind of stuff. I know adults can do it, and I always tell people, if you don’t know what yours are, ask somebody who lives with you.
I bet you they can rattle off three or four of your warning signs in about five seconds. Increasing self-awareness around what those warning signs are, that’s number one. That’s the first skill. Those drawings that I sent you, Jenny, those pictures, those were done by nurses who’ve taken our course, and I’ll apologize, they probably put too much emphasis on the gastrointestinal system, but they are nurses, so that’s where the conversation always seems to go with them. But yeah, what we do is have people label those. What are the two things that you notice about yourself early on in the situation? The challenge. We know that our fight-or-flight system’s kicking in because it’s such a primitive system, it only has one goal, and that’s to eliminate the threat. I usually ask people, Hey, have you ever said terribly hurtful things to somebody that you deeply care about when you’re upset?
And people are reluctant to raise their hand in the room, but if they’re honest, probably everyone would do that. I’ll ask the question again. You guys have said something terribly hurtful and mean to maybe your favorite person on this planet, and they’ll say, yeah, yeah, we’ve done it. And I’d say, well, thankfully it’s not just a Kansas thing. I think my guilt is absolved a little bit because we all do that. But the next question is why? Because I’ll say, you guys look so smart and so empathetic and compassionate. I mean, you care about people, your teachers, your nurses, you care about the planet, you care about animals, you care about the people you work with, your family, you love these people, these compassionate, well-educated people are repeatedly hurting their favorite people on this planet. That logically doesn’t make any sense.
The explanation is that when we have this fight-or-flight system, that’s how powerful. That’s a really good, I think example of how powerful the system is. It can cause you to hurt your favorite person on the planet, and that’s powerful. What else can it do? This is where referencing back to Mary, this is where Mary became a real advocate for how powerful this system can drive someone to suicide or block them from hope and some of the things that could get them out of a suicidal situation. What we know is that, and I don’t want to go too deep into brain science, but when our fight-or-flight system is activated, the bottom part of our brain becomes extremely active. That’s the fight-or-flight, that’s survival mode. And the top part which we need for creativity, problem-solving, compassion, relationships, all that high-level stuff, that higher cortical area of our brain shuts down when we become upset.
This explains a lot of the behaviors we see when people are engaged in fight-or-flight when we feel challenged. And it’s really scary for me in my profession because somebody who’s experiencing anxiety or depression or lots of challenges or lots of failures, maybe a DH Ds driven them to a lot of failure in their life and a lot of restarts and lost relationships. We have people experiencing fight-or-flight. They’re down in that bottom part of their brain and sometimes we’re left with these questions. They do something to hurt themselves, and we’re like, why? They were such a nice person. They had so much potential and all these things going for them. Well, all that information is locked up in that top part of their brain, which they’re not able to access when they’re experiencing that level of challenge. It explains a lot of the behaviors we see, and you can see how it directly relates to people in conflict. Because if you’re sitting across the table from somebody who has a different view from you, different beliefs, different ideas, that’s immediately perceived as a threat by your body, your brain. You are going to behave differently in response to that threat. It’s so predictable. Systems are pretty predictable. Predictable, and human beings are pretty predictable as far as how we respond to threats.
The cure for that, what we talk about then, that’s skill number one, is to become more aware of that system for yourself and practice that identification of that skill. Number two, then how do you cure that threat response we promote safety because you can’t feel threatened and safe at the same time. That next question, what we practice is experiencing or creating a sense of safety so that we can access that upper part of our brain, be compassionate, be empathetic, be problem-solving, have insight, creativity, all that higher level stuff that gets us where we want to be.
Jenny:
Amazing. Okay, what I heard is you start with this training in terms of self-awareness, helping us understand individually how stress shows up for us or how when we’re faced with a challenge, what it looks like for us. And then once we get clear on what that looks like, being able to do it physically, I think I heard you say emotionally and mentally how it shows up for us, then it’s all about promoting safety. Is that right?
Brad:
Yeah, and the cool thing about safety is you can be proactive with it. You don’t have to wait around and say, oh, I’m the token mental health guy for a large healthcare system. When they want to do things like de-escalation training, they call us and say, Brad, can you do de-escalation training? Well, my response to that is, sure, we can do de-escalation training, but wouldn’t it be cool if we could do de-escalation training? If we know some things that promote safety ahead of time, why wouldn’t we want to do that throughout the day? Or if we know we’re going to start tackling a difficult issue or people are going to come into conflict, what can we do to promote safety upfront instead of waiting for people to get escalated and then try to de-escalate it? That system is well-designed to respond to threats. It just makes so much sense to be proactive and try to get ahead of it.
How does behavioral health and self-regulation education set us up for success?
Jenny:
Right on. I’m just going to, before I go on, just offer Michele who’s in the audience, a registered nurse and is focused on psychological safety in the workplace. If you do want to ask us any questions, I’m sure Brad would be happy to hear them, Michele. Thank you for being here. And then, the next thing is around where our self-regulation system takes us. I’ll tee off a question here unless Alex has one, but how does self-regulation, being able to, like you said, have this preemptive safety mechanism, how does it help us be successful in life?
Brad:
Yeah, I think I probably already alluded to that, but what we find is the fight-or-flight system was good for handling existential physical threats like five, 6,000, 10,000 years ago. Most of our threats were physical threats, and there are still definitely areas where people’s threats are still physical a lot of the time, but in today’s world, most, the majority of our threats for most of us are social and emotional threats. And honestly, most of those threats are created internally for us. These are things like self-doubt, all these anxious ruminating thoughts that we have, all the what ifs that we have, all those are threats. We have the interesting thing, human beings have the capacity to not only bring threat for today. Not only the two threats that I have in the next hour coming at me, but I also can bring a threat from three weeks from now, this challenge that I have out there on my calendar that I’m like, oh my gosh, what am I going to do about this?
But okay, that’s not even enough for us human beings. I can drudge up threat from two years ago. I remember what you said to me two years ago, and I can bring that in to today’s threat too. One of the key issues that we promote is something similar, and it doesn’t have to be this, but the one that we’ve had the most luck with is mindfulness, stress reduction training. That’s one of the ways that we promote safety is staying in the present, this practice of staying connected to the present, which I think, and I’ll plug mindfulness based stress reduction here, I was trained formally about 10 years ago in that, and we use it in our health system. I use it daily. I have a formal practice, but we use it with our patients who are suffering. And it’s just a great way to promote safety.
It also promotes gratitude, which fits into our third area of skill training, cognitive regulation. But I think, so Jenny, to answer your question, the best way for us to see success, I really don’t think people, I just don’t think you can be successful without regulating well in the face of challenge. What it brings is success in the face of challenge. And I thought about this a lot as an administrator in a healthcare system during covid. One of my favorite self-regulation or dysregulation stories comes from my wife is also a nurse, and she told me a story from the health system we worked at previously where a nurse had stayed over a shift because the weather was bad. The next shift couldn’t come in, couldn’t make it in. She was doing this really big favour by staying over, she’d already worked a 12 hour shift and happened to be surgery that was taking place in the morning.
The surgeon walked in and she accidentally called the surgeon by the wrong name. He interpreted that as a threat to his ego, or somehow interpreted it as a threat, and started to make some sarcastic, belittling comments toward her. Now she’s experiencing threat too. Now he’s sinking to the bottom part of his brain, and she’s sinking to the bottom part of her brain, which is this lizard brain. And you have a patient in the room who happened to be, this was a procedure that you could stay awake for. They’re listening to this whole thing, where do you think they’re going in their brain? Now you have three in a room with a surgical procedure about to take place and three lizards operating on this person. I think to me, that’s just a really good example of what I worried about during COVID-19, or what I worry about when people are trying to solve big problems is that they need to be in that cortex of their brain to have a chance at getting through complex issues. And when I see people in lizard brain trying to solve problems, I don’t think there’s a shake-my-head emoji on here, but it doesn’t have a very good prognosis.
Jenny:
Do you have a question to ask, Alex?
How does behavioral health and self-regulation education help us in our work?
Alex:
Yeah, I won’t take up too much of your time, but I have a background in heavy-duty construction services and private security services. Part of my detail was to do early morning patrols facing attics in whatever circumstances they happened to be in. In terms of de-escalation, what I was trained to do was always just make sure that I gave them one thing first, which was an acknowledgement of their existence, and then maybe even took some extra time to hear their story and understand their circumstance, who they were, how they got there, what was going on so that I could help facilitate how I could help them. At the same time, my fight-or-flight instinct was always there because I was alone in a dark alleyway with nothing but a stabproof vest, a flashlight and some charm with no backup. The threat metric was extremely high. And having done that for so many years, I found that even though I’m not doing it anymore, I just occasionally have this physiological reaction where my external life, everything that’s going on in my life could be butterflies and unicorns, but it feels like the other shoe is going to drop, right? Because I’m always trying to plan for the worst, but expect the best. And I have difficulty shutting that part of my brain down. I was just wondering if you helped anyone in those occupations too?
Brad:
Yes. I think nurses, so like ER nurses, trauma nurses, and first responders are such a fascinating group to work with on this self-regulation system because what we talk about, is one of the most powerful elements for creating safety and for turning off that fight-or-flight system is predictability. And so when I talk to nurses, when I work with first responders, the gentleman that I teach resilience for or with in the health system where I’m at now, he taught the resilience program for the military for six years. And so that predictability, so you guys are drilling and training and practicing these really intense situations just so, and to me, what that says to me is that you’re practicing that so that it becomes more predictable so that you can stay up in that top part of your brain in those challenging situations. And that’s exactly what we’re trying to do with other people, is to be able to have that level of predictability so that I know I have this confidence that I’ve been through this before. I know what to do if this happens because I’ve practiced it and I’ve been successful at it. It adds that layer of predictability because of the practice. That’s why we’re so hung up on skill development and meaningful intentional practice because it adds that sense of predictability. That to me equals safety.
Jenny:
Amazing. Yeah. Thank you for joining us, Michele. It’s so nice that you have, I’ll hand over the mic to you in just a second. I just wanted to say back what I heard. Yeah, Brad, my husband is also a city firefighter, which is why I think Mary’s work was so resonated with me so much to your point about seeing trauma and quite frankly, being a part of trauma regularly has impacted not only my husband, but others that we know. We’ve lost friends to suicide as Mary has pointed out and how this happened. Yeah, I have a question, but I think I’m going to pause and just see if Michele has one ready for you. And please introduce yourself, Michele. Thank you.
What are the long-term consequences of an engaged fight-or-flight system?
Michele:
Hi, good evening everyone. My name is Michele Thomson. I am a registered nurse. I’m also a leadership coach and consultant, and my goal is to create psychologically safe workplaces that people will never want to leave. The question that I have for you, Brad, and thank you so much, this has been a really enlightening conversation. I’ve quite enjoyed listening as a nurse. I think that what I’ve seen definitely exacerbated by the pandemic and to the scenario that you spoke about earlier around people working a lot of long hours and short, often we’re seeing a lot more compassion fatigue, caregiver burnout and moral injury. And what I’m seeing is a little surprising to me that people seem to be more apathetic, which I think is giving maybe the impression that they’re emotionally regulated, when in fact people are so tired and burnt out that they just kind of feel like I just have it in me. And I’m wondering potentially if you have any thoughts about what the long-term consequences of that would be in terms not really displaying any external capacity of showing that someone is in distress. An employer may not know what to look for to support an individual, employees might not know how to support their colleagues. I’m just curious if you have any thoughts about that.
Brad:
Oh, Michele, I have a lot of thoughts about, thank you so much for that question. I was waiting for you to give me a good one there. This is an area near and dear to my heart. And so I said fight flight. There are also other options here that an organism does when it’s experiencing threats. What Michele’s describing there is what we consider toxic stress, this level of, because this fight-or-flight system originally was designed, and I’m talking like I’m the creator of this, but I’m not. But it was originally designed as an acute response. I see a bear, the system kicks in, I resolve, I either get away or I fight the bear, whatever happens, and then my system returns to baseline. And that all happens within a matter of minutes or at most a few hours. What we’re seeing with a pandemic, which is a physical threat, it’s a physical threat and a social, brings a lot of social-emotional threats, too.
We have a loss, we have unpredictability everywhere. There wasn’t a script for this, especially in healthcare or education. I mean, there were scripts, but they weren’t near what we needed to have for this. What we have are people who are experiencing this level of my fight-or-flight system has been activated since March 2020. And so you can fight for a while, you can flight for a while. And the last sort of another option when an organism is tired of fighting, not able to fight or can’t get away, is this sort of shutting down mechanism. Organisms will shut down, try to conserve energy. And I think you brought up just such an interesting dichotomy with healthcare professionals. It’s the same way for therapists. I spend most of my time supervising therapists these days, and it’s like, how can I as a therapist or as a healthcare provider stay compassionate enough to where I can stay in touch with all this suffering around me and not have so much get on me that I’m constantly in fight-or-flight mode?
And that’s such a delicate balance. With you on that, just because someone is quiet does not mean that they’re well-regulated. Just because they’re not making a lot of noise and don’t look really, really reactive on the outside doesn’t mean they’re not an absolute wreck on the inside. And I have the same discussion and encouragement for teachers, and one of my answers to this is screening people. We do quite a bit of screening in our system for social-emotional stress issues. And I always, here in the United States, it’s recommended that they are screening kiddos three times a year for social-emotional issues. What we’ve found, what research says is that sometimes we’ll catch some of those, what I call internalizers or those people that are struggling, and that might not say anything to their supervisor. Sometimes they will indicate that on a screening tool, and so we can catch them and reach out to them with some tools.
But I totally, that’s why I think we’re seeing so much burnout. It’s that the fight-or-flight system has been activated for so long that it becomes that toxic level and people are pulling away from the profession. This numbness can occur when you don’t look like you have any response period at all to anything. And that’s just such a dangerous place to be. I still think though, there’s hope here. Safety, what you’re doing, promoting psychological safety, not waiting for people to get bad and reach for it, but get that to everybody because I don’t know a person that wasn’t impacted by a significant level of social, emotional or physical threat. Everybody experienced loss, we all had change. You can’t go wrong by promoting that across the board, not waiting for people to get ill and then do it with just this group or just that group.
I like what you’re doing there across the whole system, but also there, and I don’t want to lose sight of this, we have two other skill training areas in this system. Emotion regulation and cognitive regulation, are an entire framework for a reason. For example, emotion regulation has three skills in there. And so one of those skills is ownership of emotion and healthy expression of feelings. Those are skills that what are we going to do with all that emotion they’re carrying around? What’s the outlet for that? What’s the healthy mechanism? What’s the skill for getting that out? I don’t want to lose sight. The first two we talked about and one hour is probably enough. I do six-hour full-day seminars on this. To be able to cover it all in an hour is not going to happen. But I do want to tell you that there are other skills other than those first two that we talked about.
Jenny:
I didn’t mean to be rude there. Sorry, Michele, can I just make sure that answered your question before I move forward?
Michele:
Yeah, it did very much so thank you so much. That was wonderful. And I think that you sort of began touch on another soapbox item for me, which is really around the language we use, and I hear it a lot in the healthcare space around resiliency and people feeling further triggered and burnt out by that word in that if they are feeling challenged by their emotions or overwhelmed by their emotions, we have kind of I think created some language similar to self-care that alludes that if I could just develop more resiliency or be more resilient, how come everybody else is doing okay? I guess I am not resilient enough. That sense of having to take ownership for the fact that people just don’t understand that your brain is not hardwired as you’ve stated, to stay in a constant state of fight-or-flight, and it’s just not sustainable. When you start to feel the effects of that, that’s your brain telling you it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do, which is to protect you. Thank you.
Brad:
Yeah, absolutely. And that was one of the things we talked about with our leadership at the beginning of this, my partner and I was that we have to be really careful about this term resilience and going to a group of people who have just been working super hard, nonstop through an incredible experience and making sure that that message is not coming across, that they’re not resilient. These are the most resilient people I’ve ever met. And so to acknowledge what they’ve been through, to acknowledge the challenge, to acknowledge the suffering, and then also to come alongside them with some tools though to provide some hope. And what we’ve found, healthcare professionals love science, they love logic, and they will listen to those things and they’ll give it a shot. When you’re alongside someone practicing along with them, it’s been great. It’s here’s one more thing that you have to do to be more resilient. I agree with you. The messaging is important.
How does our belief system affect our ability to self-regulate?
Jenny:
Awesome. I have a question. I think sort of in this realm, how does our belief system come into play with respect to our fight-or-flight system? I’m going to use the pandemic as an example. There are a lot of people that are just too burned out, as you say, broad from a first responder standpoint to even sort of talk about it anymore. And so it seems like when you talk about the science and people wanting to come together in data, it seems like a void in the system for that. And so I’m using, in this case, I’m using the pandemic as sort of the similar problem we have with the transition that we’re facing. We have this social, environmental, and economic crisis, and we’re talking about it in terms of healthcare in this particular case, but the same thing you could say is happening in other disciplines where people aren’t being set up for success. You’re describing Brad, we have people who repeatedly have to be a part of or their fight-or-flight systems are being challenged. And so I guess the first question I’ll ask out of this is, I’ll back up and ask how does our belief system comes into play. How does it impact how we self-regulate?
Brad:
Yeah, great question. Skill six in this framework of cognitive regulation is about identifying and regulating our beliefs, identifying extreme beliefs that are causing us a lot of pain and seeing if we want to keep those that way. You can use religion, you can use movies, you can use opinions. The basic premise of how beliefs relate to threat is that our beliefs define what’s threatening to us. It’s basically like you drawing a line in the sand in front of you, that’s your belief, whatever it is, whether it’s politics, religion, pandemic, whether you think Star Wars is the best movie ever, whatever that is, if your belief is extreme on that idea and you believe that, and then somebody challenges that, that’s going to be perceived as a threat. And so there you go. That’s the connection that’s going to set off that entire physiological response, and it doesn’t matter. It’s the cool thing about it and what we teach is that who has control of that line? Who’s the only person that controls your line where that’s at? You have the power to adjust that line however you want to. That’s the,
Jenny:
In that example, you used your wife, this patient, and three people in a reptile brain. I know you’ve talked about prevention, which is obviously where we want to lead, but when we’re there when we’re stuck, how do we get ourselves out of it.
Brad:
In fight-or-flight.
Jenny:
Right. I’m picturing that room and I’m picturing everybody sort of in their reptile state. What does your training help people in a moment, in a challenge if your belief systems are being challenged in the moment, if you are feeling threatened in whatever way, what does the skill training teach you to do in those moments?
Brad:
Yeah, so one of the things I want to be really cautious about here is that I get calls all the time, Hey, I have a 15-minute staff meeting can come to help people learn this stuff and be all better? That’s not going to happen. You’re working against a system that’s evolved for thousands of years if you don’t practice. I get emails from teachers that say, Brad, I tried to teach these kids how to calm down when they were upset and it didn’t work. You don’t teach people skills when they’re upset. If you haven’t practiced how to create safety and calm for yourself ahead of time, the chances of you being able to turn off a system that is evolved for the specific reason to keep you safe and to go from zero to a hundred in 0.6 seconds to keep you safe from a bear attack is not good.
Brad:
Prevention to me is really, really important. The other thing is early recognition of those warning signs. I can tell you right now, that one of my biggest warning signs is that I will feel myself in a meeting if someone says something that’s crossing one of my lines, I’ll feel myself start to disconnect and want to shut down. I won’t want to participate. And I know that goes back to some of my belief systems as a kid saying if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. I know those two are connected.
Jenny:
That’s a big part. That’s a big part of it though, right? Because I think to your point, I think we’ve been raised to, as you said, just get along and raise to just let it go and not engage in religion and not engage in politics. I think this is trying to say, well, this is what you do when we have to, or this is the result of potentially not having skills to deal with those things when we need to.
Brad:
For me, if that happens to me and I can just only really speak for myself, everybody’s plan is a little bit different. Safety looks different for different people. People’s fight-or-flight feels different to them. People who go through the course, end up with their personal plans for each of these seven skills. But for me, if I recognize that, oh my gosh, my jaw’s getting tight, I just push myself back from the table, my head’s down, I’m not even paying attention anymore. I’ll ask for a break. I also am pretty good after 10 years of practicing mindfulness to be able to calm myself without making too much of a scene, and I can do it in the space that I’m in there, but that’s practice at doing that. Intervention is possible. Then I’ll find a way to move through the other skills.
I’ll identify I’m angry, so that’s labelling that feeling. And then how do I want to express that? Do I want to say something about it now? Do I want to say something later? Do I want to write it down and think about it? How do I want that to come out in a healthy way? And then later I’ll of course reflect on that to see if I want to adjust my line or not about what was threatening to me when I’m reflecting on that. But that’s kind of how you step through that process at the moment. But without the training and practice, that’s darn near impossible.
Jenny:
Right. Go ahead, Alex. I think, and this will probably be our last question for you, Brad. I don’t want to keep you too long. Thank you so much.
Alex:
Sure. Well, actually, with what you just said, I think that’s a crucial thing in terms of being self-aware. To be cognizant of the fact that maybe it just woke up on the wrong side of the bed and you’re in a mood. Sounds are a little louder, you’re going to be a little more testy. And then just when you’re around the other people that you care about and you don’t want to be testy with them, you just give ’em a little warning just like, I’m sorry, I’m in a mood preemptive, I’m just going to isolate a little more maybe today just because I don’t know what it is. And I found that in de-escalation practices, just being honest enough with myself so I can be honest enough with other people to say, I don’t know why, I’m just a little impatient today. Something’s not right and not make it into something that is putting an onus on them to walk on eggshells or making them feel threatened.
Just helping them to be aware that it’s like, Hey, I might need to just duck out and listen to a song that’s going to reset me. You know what I mean? I found in terms of dealing with my trauma, that using music to program and reprogram myself has been a great asset. It’s been a motivator. Yeah, I think a lot of what you had to say is extremely valuable. And frankly, I just want to compliment you because we’re limited in time on this conversation, but I’d like to shout out another invite if possible.
How do we create safety or “put more fuel in the tank”?
Brad:
Yeah, thank you, Alex. I appreciate that question, and I love the fact that you mentioned that I love it when my wife can give me warnings like that. I’ve had a tough day, so that gives me a choice that I can either say, okay, I’m going to the garage for the rest of the night. No, I should never do that. Usually, the right thing to say would be, how can I help? How can I be supportive? We have a couple of lessons that we do with kids, one called Lengthening my Fuse, and it’s just like what you just said. It’s okay. Let’s say I did wake up on the wrong side of the bed, or I know that my capacity, how I explain that is we only have so much capacity to deal with threats. It’s not unlimited. How do we put more fuel in the tank?
How do we create more capacity to manage threats? And Michele could probably chime in here though by, how do I add safety? And music is one of yours, Alex, and we promote music a lot because it’s patterned, rhythmic, and repetitive. I bet you listen to the same stuff you probably listened to for years. It’s predictable the words. It’s your go-to the rhythm, the beat, all that is patterned, rhythmic, repetitive. Your brain hears that, and it’s like, I know what’s coming next. All that feeds into safety. Predictability is one of the most powerful ways we can create safety for ourselves. Music’s a great one. Exercise is another great one. Walking, being in familiar spaces, sometimes we just need those things. And if you can recognize when you need it, wow, I can’t think of a better way to meet the definition of self-regulation. And yeah, I would love to come back if you think this information is helpful or specific ways to expand on it to help you all meet your goals.
Jenny:
Amazing. Thank you so much, Brad. Before we do a round a wrap-up, I’m just going to, well, actually I’ll offer some closing takeaways, but also, Michele, if you have an additional question or comment to expand on what Brad was just suggesting in terms of safety tools that you go to, please lead us off. Thank you.
Michele:
Oh, thank you so much, Jenny. That’s very generous. Yeah, I won’t take too much time. I mean, I think that Brad’s the expert here. Some of the things that we look at in terms of psychological safety in the workplace to help people are just creating safe spaces. Spaces where people can go to talk about what they’re experiencing. Helping managers understand what it means to have an open door policy where they are not depleting themselves by literally having an open door policy 24/7. There can still be some healthy boundaries there, but they can offer support and guidance to people on what to look for in terms of when people might be struggling. Again, we already spoke with that a little bit, and coworkers as well. I think that we do a lot of activities between coworkers to understand how they can make someone feel validated and seen and heard when they are struggling and talk a lot about what that looks like.
And like I said, just I think the culture is, this is how we show up for each other. It’s okay if you’re not at a hundred per cent. It’s not normal for you to be at a hundred per cent every day. If you can come at 60%, you’re still valued and appreciated for being here. I think those are kind of the things in terms of self-soothing, we do encourage people to take regular breaks and to do just breathing exercises to do what they find helps to settle them. We know that two and a half minutes is all your brain needs to kind of self-regulate. I think I mentioned in one of Angie’s rooms too, one of the things that I learned in doing some research of other people’s research is that somebody chewing a hard can or sucking on a hard candy brings back a reflux that we had when we were an infant, when we would suck, and we lose that reflex as we grow because it’s no longer necessary for us.
But when you can suck on hard candy, it brings back that reflux or reflux, which helps to calm the central nervous system. I think just coming up with really simple creative things that people can do, we’ve also given out adult colouring books and people on their breaks have coloured, and that has been popular. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to chime in. And I guess my just question to wrap up would be for Brad where can we go to follow you and the work you’re doing and learn more about the amazing work that you’re putting out into the world?
Brad:
Probably the best way, I don’t know why I picked LinkedIn, but I put a lot of stuff out on LinkedIn. I’ve done similar to a masterclass video series for AccuTrain. It’s called AccuEd, and I don’t know Jenny if you want to share some of these links, but my basic website is selfregulationstation.com. There’s also, I’m super excited. I’ve spent most of my time working with people on how to get self-regulation skills to kids, and have an adult book coming out. This will be the first time targeting just adults coming out. This, it’ll be done this summer. We’re on the final rounds of edits right now, but basically, it’s a seven-week self-study course. You could do it individually or with a group of people, and it’s one skill a week. I’ve worked hard to keep it under 70 pages just to make it nonthreatening and manageable in plain language, leaving out all the jargon, and just straight to the real applied skills in the framework in the order that we talked about here tonight. Super excited about that. But I would, Michele, I’d like to hear some more information from you. I think we could probably do a whole session on psychological safety. We’ve got a lot of what you just talked about too, and then some other things. And I bet you’ve got more information there too.
Michele:
Well, please, you can feel free to reach out through Jenny. It would be an honour. Thank you.
Key Takeaways
Jenny:
Yeah, we’ll make sure, Brad, that we’ll include all of your links in our, we’ll do an accompanying blog with this recording as well. Thank you so much. I’m just going to offer some of my key takeaways from this. Angie and Melanie, I know Meryl, you’re mostly a listener, but if I’m mistaken, you’re welcome to come up and quickly offer your thoughts as well. But just for myself, I’ll just offer the key things that I’ve heard. Again, trying to understand your skills in terms of the conversations that we’re trying to host. The key takeaway for me in that regard is being able to acknowledge when we are witnessing people in fight-or-flight, not in an offensive way of course, but in a way that we can just sort of help each other know that we’re not able to see, like you said, from our human brains, from our human perspective, but rather we’re in a place where we’re not able to see.
We’ve talked about gaining perspective with others in conversation. That’s just an opportunity that I see out of this knowledge. Thank you. And the other thing is the predictability piece. That is something that Alex and I are trying to build into this process is to have a regular framework of how we host these discussions so that people can be at least predictable in the topics that we’re having and in the methods and in the way that we break them down for people. I think those are a couple of ways we’re trying to, that we might be honing some of the skills that you offer. Thank you for that. Alex, I’ll offer if you’d like to offer some closing words, as well.
Alex:
Well, the one that I’ve lived by my whole life is planned for the worst and expect the best. I’ve lived in a constant state of running the worst-case scenarios, but I’ve discovered that in most cases, reality doesn’t reflect those things. And through some training and hopefully additional training, I’m just going to become better and better at managing those types of personality traits so that I can just maximize how I can be of benefit to other people. And I think this conversation was extremely valuable and interesting. It didn’t take on the shape that I necessarily thought it would, but I think it gave me a lot to reflect upon. I just want to thank everyone involved, Dr. Chap. And I also want to thank you personally for taking the time, especially in different time zones for coming out and giving your contributions. And I look forward to future dialogues with all of you, whether you’re just listeners or want to contribute directly. There’s a lot of first responders, there’s a lot of people out there who need your help, and I think you’re well on your way to helping us all do that. Good night.
Jenny:
Yeah, thank you so much, Brad. We’ll leave the closing words for you. And yeah, I’m going to try and link this up to some of the first responders that I know as well as in the city here. Yeah, please close us off and thank you again. As Alex said, we really appreciate you doing this with us.
Brad:
Yeah, thank you so much for the invitation. I’ve spent a lot of time sharing this information, and I think like Alex just said, there’s no shortage of people suffering. And if you can give people practical tools, support them with a little bit of education, some room to practice and understanding along the way, this basic information, it goes back to Mary because you opened with Mary Jenny. That was one of the things she told me, is that when you can take some information to understand yourself a little bit better and understand that this is normal, human beings responds to challenge, really follows some normal patterns that is game changing for a person who’s struggling. I appreciate you allowing me to share this further and look forward to future conversations with you all.
Jenny:
Thank you. Hail Mary. Yeah, I’m glad that she connected us. Brad, thank you so much. Okay. Feel free to unmute everyone and say goodnight. Thank you so much for your time, and have a good one.
Angie and I have identified shortcomings in the executive leadership style — a traditional “command and control” approach that does not allow for debate. Angie became a coach to leaders to support their transformation to Sage Leadership, her coaching brand is based on the Positive Intelligence training system created by Shirzad Chamine.
In the fall of 2022, Angie could see I was struggling with putting myself in public view. We met for coffee and she invited me to her weekly conversation. Have a listen to my first conversation in Angie’s Clubhouse Room. I was hooked the moment I joined Angie’s room as a regular, Thursday morning, 8 AM MST in Clubhouse. Thank you, Angie and my fellow Sage Leaders!
About The Gravity Well Podcast Season One
Alex and I agreed all issues in Alberta are on the table and couldn’t decide where to start. We agreed to take the DelftX Creative Problem-Solving and decision-making course to create a structure and flow to the conversations. Have a listen to the season one program outline here.
Welcome and Introduction to The Gravity Well
Alex:
Welcome to The Gravity Well, what we’re trying to do is tackle heavy ideas in small buckets that anyone can handle. My name is Alexander MacGillivray. Jenny and I have joined forces to bring you information, ideas, and skills with the goal of positively contributing to your insights.
Jenny:
Thank you, Alex. As you said, thank you, Angie, for noticing that we have the welcome message in our chat. We included that for everyone. Alex and I have spent the last four months working together. He and I met at the doors, it’s, I’ll be clear, the doors means, well, during the election when I ran in the election this year, last year, I door knocked. I had the opportunity to knock on Alex’s door, and I had been messaging consistently before and leading up to it that we were in the Apollo 13 moment that we needed. This province needs to put all of its resources on the table and have a discussion about how we’re going to do all the things we want to do. That was my message for months.
Jenny:
And people would hear it and say something interesting about it. But it wasn’t until I started talking to Alex that he said, yeah, but why Apollo 13 was successful? It was because of Apollo 11, and what he meant, I said, “Go on.” Alex said that it’s just like if you follow Michael Phelps, they anticipated negative outcomes and made plans to adjust based on those potential outcomes. For example, if we ran out of oxygen, what would we do? If, we were feeling a pressure change, how would we adjust if we were off trajectory, how would we fix direction? And because they took the time to do that because they took the time to learn what-if scenarios, they were ready when Apollo 13, they were faced with the Apollo 13 moment. That’s the opportunity I saw when I first reached out to when I first met Alex.
Jenny:
It was, “Wow, this is someone that just added a whole new dimension to my thinking”, and it helped me. I was like, wow, I’m reaching out to that guy no matter what happens out of this election. That was probably the best conversation that came out of it. It’s just been like that ever since. I would say that it’s just the way Alex is. He operates with a good heart. He has a good intention, and when he challenges me on something, we’re able to work through it because we both were operating from that place of best intention. That’s why we’re working together. And then what the purpose of this conversation is to, we want to rebuild the community. We have what I feel is a big gap in society where we have, we’re expected to take positions or be in camps and work potentially on opposite sides of the table. All of these things that we say, and it’s expected that we’re in opposition to each other, and that’s not where we need to be. We need to think in terms of “we’re all in this together” type of thinking. Yeah, please go ahead, Alex, add to that. Thank you.
Alex:
Thank you. Yeah. There’s a common saying when people just want to deflect, they say, “There are two sides to every coin, black and white, zero in one, these binary systems of thinking. But they are forgetting there are three sides to a coin. There’s the edge, and that edge is crucial. The edge is what holds the coin together, and it’s these dichotomies.
Jenny:
We’re all in this together.
Alex:
What we’re seeking to do is learn from other people who have varying views and who normally would be dichotomised in terms of opposing sides, and just kind of maybe make an attempt to bridge some gaps and creatively find a way to compete with each other rather than in competition solely that we make a difference over the long term. I mean, it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s worth a shot.
Jenny:
Yeah. Yeah. I like the idea of winning with each other. This concept is that we’re stronger together. Like I said, you give me more view of how I’m seeing something and others, I see Colin is in the audience. Thank you, Colin, for joining. Colin has been an amazing ally that Alex has now had the privilege to meet. Excited to be working with him.
Alex:
It was very nice to meet you, Colin. I’m sorry we didn’t have more time to chat.
Introduction to Angie and her Sage Leadership Crew
Jenny:
We’ll have Colin on in a few episodes. This is exciting to be building things with real people, with real connections. I can speak a bit about Angie. The reason why we have Angie and Melanie here today, and Carol, thank you for joining us, as well, is to speak with this group that I’ve worked with. Angie has a room in Clubhouse. Angie, when you are done with your dinner please pop your Clubhouse link into the chat somehow or tell me how to do that for you, I can do it. But yeah, Angie hosts a clubhouse room on Thursday mornings. I started in that, geez, I guess it must be just over a year, I want to say a year and three months, maybe a year and two months ago. But it’s been such a steady reinforcement of the principles that we’re trying to foster. And Angie, let me get a little bit more background, is Angie and I have known each other for more than a decade. We started working together at Apache Canada, one of the oil companies in Calgary back in, geez, I started there in 2005. Angie was already there, and no, I feel like we both were gone by you by 2009. Maybe you can say when you speak. But anyway, the point is,
Alex:
Did you work for the Apache Oil company or did you make the helicopters? That’s what I’m wondering.
Jenny:
Yeah. Yeah. I haven’t even said yet, but I’m a geophysicist. The oil company, and thank you for clarifying Alex. And yeah, Angie is an engineer, we worked together a little bit and just managed to become good allies throughout the years. I’m super grateful for that. Melanie participates in Angie’s room regularly, as do a few hours that I’m hoping might join pop in for a little bit of this today, too. Merrill, thank you so much for joining us.
Alex:
Welcome.
Jenny:
Merrill is a regular in Angie’s Room. Amazing. Thank you so much for being here. Okay. I guess just a couple more things, we’ll just add, we’ve got some time to just a little bit more about what we’re trying to do. Again, trying to have conversations about the crisis that we’re facing. However you see it, if you see it as just an economic crisis, a financial crisis, or if you see it as a social crisis like health or just belonging, whatever that looks like, or if you see it as an environmental crisis, the climate crisis is here, we need to be talking about it, and we need to do it in a way that’s open and honest. And so go ahead, Alex, your turn.
Alex:
Ultimately, if we’re going to be frank with each other and with ourselves, we’re faced with a polynomial crisis. There are crises on multiple fronts, and it almost becomes exorbitantly confusing to face all of them simultaneously. Why The Gravity Well is important is what we’re trying to do is just pick one and even a small bucket and start locally and open the dialogue so that these crises become manageable. And the more open the doors become, the more brilliant people from all walks of life can contribute, sorry, to whatever capacity they can. It’s a difficult message. It’s something that people who are much more powerful or influential than us trying to approach. There’d be many. Why not give it a shot? I figure the more the merrier. That’s just kind of where we’re trying to open up the dialogue to other people too.
Jenny:
Well, and to your point, thank you for saying that. Alex and I are trying to create a space that anybody can participate in. If we’re experts, people are feeling, “Well, I’m not an expert in that”, no, this is an everyone problem, which means that we need to make space for everyone to be able to feel like they can participate. We’re, that’s why we don’t need to be experts because we’re trying to bring ideas forward and gain that conversation around these problems. We took a course together. Alex and I took a complex decision-making course together, and the intention was for us to have a common language. That’s what we’re going to walk through today, is the common language that we’ve built ground rules. This structure of conversations, which, by the way, we’re referring to a slide in the presentation that we’ve attached to this meeting.
Jenny:
There’s an image of our rules of engagement. That’s what it is. First of all, start with the why we’re talking. Today we’re talking about rules of engagement and why we’re talking about it. Well, because we need to know how to operate in a way that’s safe for people to open up and be able to share their opinions, their questions and concerns in the space. Let’s just start with the who. First of all, Angie, thank you very much for joining us. Can we just take a moment and let you introduce yourself? What we’re going to do, Alex and I will frame the first question as we want people to show up with respectful behaviour. We’re going to describe what respectful behaviour looks like to us in these conversations.
Jenny:
And if you’re willing, we’d love your input on that. Thank you. Okay. Starting with that, I like to model myself. I’ll start with myself and say, respectful behaviour to me looks like we’re using adequate emojis like Angie just did. That’s one of the things I love about Clubhouse is that if you hold down your photo there’s an option to use emojis, which I’ll just give one of those back to Angie, and then there’s an option to do gifts. We’re going to use the tools that this room offers us to help make sure we’re, thank you, Angie, for using the space in a positive way, but make sure that people are moving in the right direction. Respectful to me looks like listening to what somebody’s saying and reflecting on what they’ve offered it is taking a moment to say, “Okay, I hear what you’re saying.” And then taking a moment to say, “And this is what I think you’re trying to”, how we can try and come together on it. To me, it’s showing up in this room and not bringing dialogue that might be offensive. It is making sure that we’re supporting each other like we just did. And so, yeah. Angie, why don’t you weigh in for us on, as a coach, what would you expect from people in terms of your facilitating ability? And Alex, maybe we’ll, both mute at the same time.
Angie:
Yeah, for me I love that you called out using the emojis. We love Merrill down in the audience because we know he’s listening and always giving us the emojis to let us know that he’s here with us, even though we’re not hearing his voice. So respectful. That’s what we’re talking about. I think it is allowing everyone the opportunity to speak and be respectful in how we respond to each other in that case. The other thing that I think as a moderator when you’re leading these conversations, you can create, and you’re doing this, Jenny, being very clear on how your room runs in terms of, and creating that. All of you that come to my room now, I think have that feel of how things go. That helps create that safe place and the respectfulness of it. I do love that when we can challenge each other because that’s where we grow.
Angie:
And having that curiosity from Jenny, this and the others in the room who are PQ trained, the yes and or everything that someone has to say has 10%, at least 10% is right. Being able to, even if we have that initial response, someone is saying something and it’s like, oh, I don’t agree with that at all. If that’s our first response to think, what is it about what they’re saying that I do agree with? Yes, what I like about what you’re saying is this and what it makes me think of. And I think that can create a lot of respectfulness, letting people know that they’re being heard. One thing that I’ve noticed, I don’t spend a lot of time in other rooms anymore, but I have had the experience of being in a room where I’ve spoken and not being acknowledged, had my, and then the moderator says, hardly even says, thank you, Angie. It’s just, okay, Alex, let’s hear from you. Yeah. Having that moment to acknowledge, and thank you for your contributions. I am a fan of reflecting a little bit on what I heard from you. I don’t think that has to be the case, but as a minimum, acknowledge that someone has spoken and that you appreciate their thoughts. I think that’s everything.
Alex:
Thank you for your contribution. Was I supposed to say that?
Jenny:
No, no, I think, as we’re saying, it’s this “pass the torch” type thing, Alex, that Angie is good at. She takes the time, she acknowledges what has been said by somebody, and she allows them the space to potentially say what they haven’t finished saying She’s a very good moderator. And yeah, appreciate your insights there, Angie. Thank you for that. Alex, our next question here was about perspectives versus perception. Did you want to ask Angie this one?
Perception Versus Perspectives
Alex:
Yeah, I’ll just say it real quick. When I was in art college, we’d sit in a studio full of 25 people and we’d be given a single sculpture in a room and asked to paint it. And when you walked around the room, everyone had a different perspective on what that sculpture looked like, but the sculpture itself didn’t change. I’m wondering what your views are on perception versus perspective.
Angie:
Is that for me, Jenny, or do you want to?
Jenny:
I can expand on that a little bit. Thank you, Alex, for you, this. Yeah, I’ll expand on it for Angie a little bit just to give her a little bit more colour on our thinking here. Alex is saying anybody, like any one sculpture in a room like that, wouldn’t be the same. It’s saying that the way we determine what we think is truth, fact, whatever is this construct that only really we have. We’re trying to create a place where people don’t take a position like that sculpture looks like this and say that that sculpture can’t look any other way, but rather say it’s a sculpture and it has these things. We’re trying to create a way to make sure that we’re not being positional versus being able to honour that somebody is just looking at something from their perception or their position.
Jenny:
We’re trying to separate those two things. One of the thoughts I have in that is to just potentially look to another person in the group. I know you do this sometimes, Angie is you’ll say, oh, I don’t know Michelle. If somebody comes in with a question, I disagree with that. You’ll say, what are people thinking? What do we want to say back? Anyway, I’ll just stop there. What are some ways to try and separate people’s position or the word perception, whichever you prefer, versus allowing them to gain some perspective?
Angie:
Yeah, interesting. I love this perspective. It’s great. For me, just my first thoughts around the difference between perspective and perception is that the sculpture, if I think about the sculpture idea, or we’ve probably some of, you’ve probably heard the parable about the elephant in the blind, men blind. It depends a bit on where you’re standing and what you’re looking at. That would be, I guess, your perspective. I can be standing on one side and I see it a certain way, and I’m looking at the same thing as you are and feeling the same thing that you are, but you’re on a different side of it. Your perspective is going to be different where you’re standing and looking at it, the perception could be coloured by my experience.
Angie:
What I’m seeing is maybe I’ve never seen an elephant before. I’ve never seen a sculpture like this before. My description and what I perceive it to be might be different. I think for me, when it comes to that, it’s really about curiosity and being open to say, well, this is what I see, and I know that that’s what I’m seeing and explaining even where I’m coming from. My background is this. I think it’s important when we know in some of the other rooms that I do around with the PQ coaches helping, where are you calling in from and where are you on the PQ journey helps us understand a little bit of the perspective that they might be bringing from that. The more that you know about me, “I live in Calgary, I have an engineering background, I’m a coach.” “This is how I know Jenny” or “how I know people.”
Angie:
All of that helps other people understand where I might be coming from. I think having that openness to share, without judgement, of myself or other people, and consider] what that might look like. And then to your point, I’m describing what I’m seeing, feeling, and perceiving from this experience, and then be open to understanding that someone else is seeing it differently, and how can I start piecing those together? The elephant in the blind men is someone over here talking about, well, it looks and feels like this, and someone over here is, it looks and feels like that, and none of them is fully correct. We don’t have the full picture. Being able to start piecing that all together, and I think especially as moderators being able to be listening to that and creating that picture for others in terms of, okay, I’m hearing this from all of these different perspectives and I’m creating a picture for myself. Let me test it out. Let me see if this is resonating and being open to that. I’ll stop there. I think that was.
Jenny:
No, it’s amazing, exactly what we’re looking for.
Jenny:
Alex, now let’s play the game. Let’s do, as Angie just suggested Angie does, can you parrot back a little bit of what you heard from Angie? Can you offer her some of the things you heard?
Alex:
Well, I found what she said, as per the emojis “a hundred per cent on point”. And I think strangely, in our justice system, for instance, that’s why we have juries because we need at least a minimum of 12 people’s different perceptions of what went on so that they can determine what’s closest to the fact beyond a reasonable doubt. And I think, yeah, here we’re a hundred per cent on point, it’s really important to know other people’s perceptions and perspectives on things based on their backgrounds. And I mean, other than that, I couldn’t add to anything that you said because I truly do feel that you pretty much hit the nail right on the head.
Jenny:
Yeah, I agree, Angie. Thank you. Okay, let’s move forward. Let’s talk about being stuck. I look at this as I said, we could get in a place where it could get positional. Let’s use it because we just described what positional is and trying to make sure that we understand how our experiences come into… Actually, and next week’s conversation, we’re talking to a psychologist who focuses on self-regulation training. I’m excited about that conversation. It’s a conversation, a long time coming anyway, but the point being, as Angie was saying, how our perceptions are a result of our experiences and our perspectives can also be a result of where we are physically in the world, but also where we are emotionally and mentally as well. But understanding those two things, understanding where people are coming from, that’s the opportunity in these conversations. When we’re potentially stuck, when we’re potentially having difficulty, what Alex and I have talked about is we want people to use the tools in this conversation.
Jenny:
Again, we need our participants to help us if we’re getting in trouble. For example, if somebody’s running long, I’m going to go into gifts and I’m going to pull up a clock, but try and do it in a way that’s sort of funny. We’re just wanting to give space for other people to talk. If we can just use, yeah, thank you, Angie. If there’s, and this is just an idea, but I’m curious, especially from Angie’s perspective, we haven’t tried that in your room, Angie and I are playing this out. But I do think I have every once in a while, again, in a helpful sort of funny way, to try and help. Anyway, go ahead, Alex.
Alex:
Sorry to interject as the mediator, but does Melanie have anything to contribute or does Merrill have anything to contribute?
Jenny:
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for suggesting that. If you guys did want to come up on stage, there is the option, in the bottom right corner, there’s the hand you can ask to come up on stage. Yeah, Melanie, of course. Yeah. Thank you for reminding me, Alex, we’d love you to come up and say a few words if you have anything to add. One thing that Melanie offered when we went through our dry run with the PQ coaches is this idea of making sure that we’re doing a feed-forward loop, that we’re making sure that we’re serving not only ourselves, but the people that we’re trying to work with in this, make sure that this positive feedback or feed-forward loop is happening. Thank you for that. That’s been something that Alex and I pull forward still. But anyway, when we’re stuck, we want to use the emojis as we said, but I’m also thinking that we need to look to others either in the audience or on stage to weigh in. Again, just to try and gain some perspective, as we were saying, if two people are sort of stuck in the same position, if you will, then we have to look to a third or audience member perhaps to offer something in the chat. What are your thoughts on that, Angie?
Angie:
Well, these are such great questions. Things that I am like, oh, what do I do in this situation? Because partly with our group, we don’t typically run into some of these problems. The running over the thing I think is always a challenge for me because I’m mindful that sometimes I feel like someone’s taking too much time, and I might backchannel someone when I had a co-moderator, I’d be like, should we be stepping in here? And I’d often get there, no, no, they’re saying good stuff, let it go. And watching what’s happening. If people in the audience are dropping off, that’s often a sign. But I love the idea of setting up the ground rules around using an emoji to kind of let people know. And part of that as we’re doing now, is being clear upfront that that is what we’re we’re going to do. I mean, I’m also a fan of sometimes to maybe step in with somebody, and at times you sometimes have to just kind of be like, okay. Yeah, that’s great, Jenny. And as a moderator, this is the other thing, you can always close my mic. If it gets to that, you can always close my mic, which can be kind of funny too.
Alex:
Thank you. Angie, may I, as a moderator, just would it be wise, just if someone’s going on and on, just suggest like, Hey, maybe we can take that up in the break room.
Angie:
If there is a break room.
Alex:
If there’s a break room.
Angie:
Yeah. Yeah. I think much of it is setting the stage ahead when you even invite people to speak to say, oh, give them some instructions on what it is that you’re looking for from them. And you’ll learn, especially if you have regular people coming into the room, you kind of get to know them a little bit. But I do think that sometimes my experiences with people especially, and you start to sense too when they’re getting a bit of a head of steam. If I were in person, you can sometimes feel when that person is that you can see it in their body language. Like, oh, they’re, they’re going to get up and start walking around because they’re now in lecture mode, for example. But even listening in and being prepared, and it’s a fine balance. It’s like, is this on topic? Is it getting disrespectful?
Angie:
Is it getting judgmental? Are we staying? Being able to come back to the rules that you’re setting, I think is great to be able to, you might need to step in and depending on your own, I hate stepping in. It’s not my favourite thing to do, but I’ll, because when you start to feel like it is being disrespectful to other people, I’ll just say, Alex and I might say it a couple of times, “Can we bring this back for a minute?” And clubhouse can be glitchy too, because sometimes we walk on each other without realising it or someone’s talking and someone else is like, you don’t know. But there are ways to do that. I love using the emoji. I think if you’ve set that up with people, that’s something I hadn’t thought of, Jenny, if you set that up with regulars in your room, somebody who’s going on too long is one aspect that you talked about others.
A moderator’s role in respectful conversation
Alex:
I’m just looking for advice as a moderator so that I can make sure that we stay on point, respect everybody’s time, and have the discussion that was intended. I genuinely appreciate that advice. Thank you so much. Sure.
Angie:
Yeah. Yeah. And ultimately also being flexible, right? That’s the other thing, Jenny, that you’ve probably, there are times when, and this is your room, and you get to decide how it goes and what the topic is. And if you have a topic that you want to stay on tonight to be able to speak to that, especially at the beginning, we’re going to try and stay on topic. We have a very specific thing that we’re working through tonight or, Hey, this is where we’re starting tonight. We’ll see where it goes. Sometimes even setting that at the beginning can be helpful.
Jenny :
Yeah, that’s a great intention. The intention of these is to give people some notice in advance. And Melanie, thank you so much for joining us. I’m going to try and tee up a question for you here first if that’s okay. And then we’ll let Angie weigh in again. But yeah, the intention is that we want to give people information in advance about these conversations, again, expecting as you do, Angie. Just to be clear, Angie does a similar thing with her room right now. She’s reading a book and she’s breaking down the chapters. I have no intention of reading the book because Angie’s doing a great summary of it for me. I get to just enjoy this weekly exploration that she’s doing, whereas others are going to read it, and that’s amazing. She leaves space for this whole range of participation, which I just think is important.
Jenny:
Just some thoughts. I’m trying to frame a question for you now, Melanie, as we’ve said we want to put forward an idea. For example, next week we have a psychologist, like I said, who is focused on self-regulation training. Helping people understand how to regulate themselves and the value that it adds to our well-being and our ability to overcome fears. Because a lot of what we’re dealing with right now is that people are afraid. Some people are financially struggling, people who are experiencing health issues, or people who are concerned about water in our neck of the woods. Let’s be clear, we have a big water shortage concern right now. It’s something that I’m working on and Alex and Colin, for example, who were in the audience earlier are working on it as well to try and bring awareness around this and to try and get people talking about it.
How do we invite people into difficult conversations?
Jenny:
That might be a conversation. The idea is that we give people information in advance of the conversations, take it or leave it, but to be able to work through a specific idea, talking about rules of engagement, what ways do you think is setting up, and this is what I think is a good question for you specifically. You are a very good bridger. You know how to help people get excited and connect with others. How do we help people understand that this is an invitation for something positive rather than this potential burden of information that is heavy for people to take in? I hope that’s a clear question and I’m happy to clarify if you need. Thanks.
Melanie:
Nope, it is. I think just as Angie suggests from a moderation perspective, maybe consider setting up community agreements. There’s a positive intelligence community of practice that I’m in. And one day something subtle happened that made a couple of first-time guests, including myself, a little creeped out. I’m the type of person, I’m going to go back and see if it clears. And then somebody went to social media without, maybe they were overly stimulated, so to speak. In response, a bunch of discussions happen, and there is now a community agreement, and the community agreement is shared at the top of every meeting. It could be a link that you pin at the top of the room, it’s there for people to view, it’s there for a reset, it’s there, maybe it’s on a Google Drive, for example. I think that’s what they do. And it’s shared for general knowledge. It talks about how complex conversations may happen with respect for privacy, with respect for others. And it frames what the standard of conduct is. I haven’t seen this anywhere else before, and it’s quite the same way. And it was something that they created in response to somebody’s creepy comments on social media, for lack of a better word. It might be a suggestion if you’re expecting difficult conversations.
Jenny:
I think it’s brilliant, Melanie, thank you so much. I think especially to set an intention that it’s a community agreement. Yeah, and I love it, like you said, it can be something that we go back to during an episode if we’re stuck as we were trying to describe, right? Is to say, “Remember, we have a community agreement here.” What would our community tell us? Or how does our community weigh in here? At the end of the day, it’s a shared experience. That’s why Angie’s Room is successful for us because we share that room. Right, Angie, do you have some additions to that? Thank you so much, Melanie.
Angie:
Yeah, I think that’s a great idea, especially if there’s a chance that you don’t always have the same people in the room. You always have new people joining. Having that something you can point back to in an in-person type facilitation, you would have them on a flip chart or the whiteboard or something, and you could subtly as a facilitator, if things were getting a little off the rails, I would move myself to be standing by those rules just to bring everybody’s attention to them. And I think you said Jenny earlier, that also it doesn’t have to be just the moderator or moderators that necessarily step in. Sometimes someone else in the room can bring the voice of reason or the question, because oftentimes, if I think about when we get stuck in positions, a good question or two can often pull the group out of that or pull the two.
Angie:
If there are two people, it’s digging underneath the position. That’s the explore power of the sage, as those of us in PQ know to be able to be curious and ask questions and understand what’s important underneath that position. There is a lot of opportunity there. And I think putting it in, I love the idea of pinning it to the top and reminding you can always, it’s good practice to reset a room anyways at some point. Just remind people, if you’ve got new people in the room, here’s what we’re doing. Here’s what we’re talking about tonight. If you want to click on the document, you’ll see the rules of engagement or what we’re doing as well as the topic that we’re talking about. Yeah, I’ll stop there.
Alex:
Melanie. Yeah. Wow. It sounds like there is some weight behind your experience and reasoning behind why you’re setting community standards. I was just wondering if you were willing to email us a sort of draught, like how you kind of set your ground rules so that maybe we could understand how to save face and stay safe at the same time while maintaining kind of open dialogues for a constructive end.
Melanie:
Be happy to ask one of the co-chairs of the committee to have a chance to reconnect with them next Thursday. One publicly and one privately. I’ll try and get back to you by the 19th.
Addressing Our Saboteurs
Jenny:
Yeah, that’s amazing, Mel. I mean, even a public website is enough for us to get that from you. Thank you. She provided in the chat, just in case you didn’t see Alex, what it includes, and I took a picture of it. I’ve got that for us. Melanie, I asked you a question, but is there something that you wanted to offer thinking we could explore our PQ? Both Alex and I took our saboteur tests so we could talk a little bit about that. But before, I assume otherwise, do you have something more to add in terms of what we covered already?
Melanie:
What you’ll love, since you both already took it, is that those community agreements occlude the need to create a space for PQ reps as part of a discussion. I’m glad you’re both in good hands and very familiar.
Jenny:
Heads up. We were talking about Alex and I taking the course together sometime soon. Cool.
Angie:
Yeah.
Jenny:
Think about that timing and won’t be for a little bit, I don’t think. But yeah, we can talk a little bit about Alex and my personality types. Carol, I know Merrill has probably already looked it, but I’ll just say there is a PQ saboteur quiz you can take to find out what might be holding you back, because ultimately what we’re hoping to achieve here is helping people reach their full potential. When we worked together, when we were collaborative and able to solve problems that were stretching our ability, we were reaching a further capability than we thought we could do on our own. We’re looking at our saboteurs together today to talk about what are the things that might be either A, holding us back or B, helping each other, complimenting each other. I’ll start with myself. What we’ll do, and then Alex, if you don’t mind, after, I’ll let you sort of walk through your personality style because in the basis of us trying to make sure that we create a space, like a community, sorry, a community agreement, that we’re doing it from a place of really honouring, understanding ourselves as well as we can and owning sort of our shortcomings and being ready to be humble, if you will, when we need to.
Jenny:
God, now that I say that, my top saboteur is controller, which I hate even saying out loud, but it’s something that creeps up for me, which is as Alex said, I’m excited or hyper about trying to make sure that people are connecting the dots. I have this intention for a meeting, let’s say, and I can get sort of controlling of the style of that discussion. It’s hard for me to let go of, for example, and then hyper achiever. I guess I’m just driven to solve problems in my case, that’s how I’d describe it. But anyway, restless. Yeah, I mean, I don’t do much sitting around. And then yes, I would say that’s where I get more argumentative with people, picturing my hyper-rational self coming out. But yeah, I mean the benefit of [knowing] these.
Jenny:
Angie, since you’re with us, I’ll let Alex, oh, and conversely, I’ll just say a little bit about Alex, which we talked a bit about, and then I’ll let you do the same. And then Angie, maybe when we’re done, you can kind of just say what are some of the takeaways we can talk about in terms of our personalities? What do we do with this knowledge? I’m going to offer, because I’ve already taken this course with Angie a little bit about, what this does for me, and Alex even knows this it helps me look at what Alex’s strengths and potentially the saboteurs are, being hypervigilant is a great trait. Being hypervigilant to a fault is sabotage. With Alex, if you notice, I don’t have hypervigilance as a high saboteur, it’s not something that comes up for me. Alex is vigilant in our working relationship because he’s able to, that is a strength of his, but also when he’s getting frustrated with me, it can be a sign for me now knowing that it’s his hypervigilance. I’m doing something that’s sort of just flip and not clear and we need to be more accurate or more precise in what we’re discussing. That’s just one example of how I think looking at, anyway, I’ll stop there. Go ahead, Alex.
Alex:
Yeah, I scored a 9.4 out of 10 on the hypervigilance categorization. I suffer from continuous and intense anxiety. I’m a reverse engineer. I look at all the worst-case scenarios and hope for the best, but I’m always looking for the worst outcome. And it becomes disabling when it gets in the way of me being able to just extend trust to other people. And as long as I keep it in the reins and acknowledge it for what it is, then I’m quite capable of accomplishing great things. It’s a constant battle there in terms of, it’s like a razor’s edge, walking between hypervigilant and productive. I’m also a pleaser. I try to gain acceptance and affection. Sometimes it’s to a fault, but where I disagree with the synopsis is it becomes resentful. I don’t become resentful, I just kind of beat myself up even more and probably go back to the hypervigilant thing. Those are the two main ones. I mean, I can go on and on through the pages, but those are the two main saboteurs that I’m struggling with on a day-to-day basis. And if I don’t manage it properly, it can become paralytic.
Jenny:
Yeah, thank you, Alex, for being open. But the thing is it hasn’t been crippling, like let’s be clear, just to frame things for people is Alex has been extremely diligent and has been forthright and very collaborative and has, we set out to spoke in August and we said we were going to be launched by January, and we’ve done it and it’s been piecemeal, one bucket at a time, if you will, back to the gravity well message and it’s gotten done because, well, I mean quite frankly, vigilance is a very strong quality in Alex too. It’s kind of this, again, going back to this concept of the two-coin thing what’s our strength? I think a strength of mine is also being able to appreciate others’ perspectives and trying to be able to make sure everyone feels welcome in a space and their input is valuable and that can be controlling sometimes, but I think with the right intention. I don’t know, do you have, just before we hand it over to Angie to give us a little bit of feedback, Alex, do you have anything to offer on what you’ve learned from me based on my personality profile? And do you have it handy here for you to look at?
Alex:
Yeah, I think one of the things that’s been challenging but fascinating about you is you’re a driver. You set out to do something and you have a specific outcome in your mind. And even though we’re both speaking English, sometimes it can be very difficult to translate. And that’s been an amazing challenge. And I would not have taken a course at a Dutch university on the other side of the world if it were not for you driving and motivating me to challenge myself beyond what I maybe my saboteur thought I was capable of. It’s been a real blessing. And I mean it’s only been since August of last year that we set out to do this together, and I’ve learned much and I’ve acquired many new skills and I’m grateful for having the opportunity to have met you and set about something completely different because a little bit of backstory for me if I don’t take up too much of your time, is I was a ditch digger and a security guard and a construction worker and a cook, and learning to code and build websites and stretch out into a new horizon has been a real challenge.
Alex:
But Jenny and her driving forces strangely helped me allow me to utilise the anxiety to do something I didn’t know I could do. And it turns out that her drive helped me succeed so far. I’m looking forward to the future.
Jenny:
Wow, man. Thank you so much, Alex, I just had to weigh in there briefly. Thank you so much. Okay, Angie, can you give us some feedback? What can we do with all this?
How Saboteurs Play Off Our Strengths
Angie:
Yes, I would love it, I’m excited. How much time do we have? A couple of things. First, just a reminder for all of this, for all of us and those who are PQ coaches, this subtle language change. I’m not a pleaser, I have a pleaser saboteur, I’m not a controller, I have a controller saboteur. I think that’s important to just remind ourselves of that. Secondly, it was so interesting because as you were talking, I was pulling up some notes that I have about the different saboteurs. The reminder that our saboteurs overplay our strengths, and Jenny, you said it, there’s nothing. What I’m going to correct or adjust is there isn’t anything good about hypervigilance, but there is a lot of strength in vigilance. There’s hyper achievement, not great, but achievement, high achievement is great. Thinking about the fact that when our saboteurs are dialled back down and we now access those strengths, we call them our sage strengths, and you both talked about them.
Angie:
I just want to remind you what those are. Jenny, first of all, I’ll just go, Alex was talking last, about what you described about Jenny and her ability, she’s a driver, and she’s getting stuff done. If I read to you the strengths that a controller saboteur is overplaying, confident, action-oriented, decisive, persistent challenges, self and others, ability to do the right thing, even if it’s not popular, seeing possibilities and activating self and others towards an outcome, has a can-do spirit. Sounds a lot like ar Jenny for sure. And then the other one that she has high up is a hyper achiever. Again, hyper achiever is not great, that’s the saboteur, but when we dial it back, we’re into that high achiever. Characteristics, strengths, driven, adaptable, self-directed, capable of growing self and others to achieve full potential. That’s all the sage strengths that you were describing, Alex of Jenny.
Angie:
What happens, and I think having listened to Jenny’s stories that the combination of the controller and the hyper achiever saboteur, when they take over, that’s when you see, I mean Jenny is driven and sure that what needs to be done and that can be trying to control all the things and all the people and all the things and this drive to win, do the best, be the best, and get the accolades for that. That’s all those avatars that are at play. And Jenny’s done a lot of work and we’ve seen a lot of being able to dial back into those strengths that we’ve just seen. I think that’s awesome. And then let’s flip back over to Alex. Did you talk about hypervigilant and pleaser? I think those were the two. Hypervigilant, the strengths. Again, vigilance is a good thing. Being able to be heard is one of the strengths, being sensitive and aware of the true risks and dangers to self and others, guardians of the community and institutions. They’re the reliable ones, making sure everything’s okay, taking care of everybody. They feel safe to be around, they’re loyal, dependable, hardworking, capable of perseverance and consistent work towards objectives. They have a seriousness and firmness about them, and we feel good and safe when we’re around them. Again, if the saboteur overplays, it’s into that anxiousness that you were talking about, Alex that always wondering, always wearing, always like, right? And that spills over into the people around you.
Alex:
Thank you. Just might interject a little bit here. Yeah, it’s the anxiety, trying to predict all the variables can be paralytic, right? There’s always going to be a variable that I don’t see. What I’m trying to do is scale things back and just kind of look at what’s at hand so that I’m not overextending variables, that no information provides. I mean, right?
Angie:
Absolutely.
Alex:
I can go to the moon and back, but it’s like really all I have to do is just build a bloody website,
Angie:
Alex. I think there’s absolutely some learning to understand that saboteur and asking yourself some really good questions about what would happen, what’s the worst that could happen, what if it did happen? Kind of coming back to that. Lots of conversations that we can have there. I just wanted to speak to the pleaser also because one of my top saboteurs has strengths that the saboteur is overplaying. Again, it’s taking all these things that we’re good at and overplaying ’em, empathetic, loving and giving, tuned into others’ feelings and needs, emotionally self-aware, and likely has pretty high emotional intelligence. All of those things are probably things that have drawn you and Jenny or Jenny to you. And that is often the case that when there’s a good partnership, it’s the opposite attraction sort of thing.
Angie:
And I think just that reminder of, I thought it was interesting that you said one of the things that didn’t resonate with you around the pleaser was the resentfulness. Because for me personally, with that pleaser saboteur, that is 100% when I know that my pleaser has completely been overplayed because I’m giving and giving and I’m doing things for people, and then all of a sudden I start feeling like, why is it that I do all of this for everybody else and then I have to go pay to get coached? And why is it that as soon as that voice starts to run in my head I’m like, oh, there’s the resentment I give and give and give and I don’t get anything back. Yeah,
Alex:
And maybe this is wrong of me, but resentment, I have a history of addiction. Resentment is the poison that I take to kill the other guy. It’s a futile endeavour. In a strange way, I’m very fearful of it. I just choose to let that person go and move forward and forgive ’em at the same time. Much to my detriment. But no, I just don’t have a place for resentment in my life. It’s bad. It’s a vampire.
Key Takeaways
Jenny:
Yeah. Thank you so much. I see we’re past the hour. Angie, you gave us lots there to take away. I’ll just say the things that stuck with me from this conversation are just really getting clear on what are the good qualities of our personalities and understanding when they’ve overplayed like you said, rather than thinking that it’s who we are. It’s a behaviour shift that has happened. And just acknowledging that Melanie, thank you again for offering your thoughts around setting up a community practice and rules of engagement and membership suggestions. Yes, thank you. I’m going to make sure that we have a space on our website to include some suggestions in that space. Carol or Marilyn, if you have any other suggestions, thank you so much for being here and hope that you will catch some of the other episodes. I’ll just say thank you and that’s my sort of, we’re going to always do a positive and negative and a takeaway in each of these things. That’s my summary and I’ll let you, Angie, I don’t know if you have something quickly to add before, and then we’ll just go around the room.
Angie:
Yeah, thanks. Yeah, great job. And I think even over the hour that we’ve been together, I’ve seen the rhythm starting to build between Jenny and Alex and how you’re going to run the room. I think that’s been great and the openness that you’ve shown to bring us in and sharing your thoughts. And I’m excited to see where this goes for you and happy to be here to support you.
Alex:
Just want to say thank you to all of you for taking the time to listen and contribute where you, me, if you choose. And I do feel that Jenny and I are starting on something quite important and I look forward to learning from all of you in the future. Thanks again.
Jenny:
And Melanie, we’ll leave the last word for you. Thank you so much for joining us.
Melanie:
I’m trying not to cough. In chat, I say thanks for the opportunity to join you and Alexander, my three hypers are part of my top four now with the avoider. And just hang in there. Your transparency and your vulnerability will help continue to lighten the load and thanks for doing that in a safe space.
Jenny:
Amazing. So great. Thank you for being a part of this. This is something that, like Alex said, we feel is special. Thank you for helping us get started. Thank you very much, everyone. Have a great evening. Bye
I recount past experiences of Ontarians viewing Alberta as backward or insignificant (e.g., being asked if Edmonton had paved roads), contributing to a feeling that Ontarians see Albertans as beneath them. Today, Chris notes that Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government is more moderate than Alberta’s United Conservative Party, and that Alberta Conservatives may not see Ontario Conservatives as truly conservative. I highlight that Ontario’s premier has recently adopted more Alberta-like rhetoric on pipelines and natural gas, suggesting some current alignment around resource development.
Despite these political dynamics, many Albertans still believe people in Ontario don’t understand or care about life in Alberta. I challenge the assumption that Ontarians broadly look down on Albertans, suggesting many Ontarians may share similar distrust of government and Ottawa, and that the “they think less of us” story may be overstated.
Narratives about Ottawa in Alberta center on the belief that the federal government is “handcuffing” Alberta, imposing rules that don’t make sense locally and preventing the province from thriving. Chris uses the example of federal restrictions on strychnine for prairie dog control, explaining how the poison moves up the food chain and harms predators and other animals, and how federal scientists pushed for restrictions to protect biodiversity. Political pressure from farmers led Ottawa to loosen these rules, illustrating tensions between private property rights, environmental science, and federal regulation.
We argue that private land use must respect “natural law,” especially in sensitive areas like riparian zones and creeks, where leaving buffer strips and protecting vegetation can benefit both farms and ecosystems. We frame riparian areas as critical infrastructure that reduce flood risk and protect surrounding lands, and suggest that better protection of such areas could have solved many environmental problems.
I advocate for nation-building projects focused on ecological restoration—re-willowing riparian zones, restoring wetlands, and headwater forests—as nature-based solutions that reduce long-term costs from climate-related disasters like severe hailstorms in Calgary, which cause billions in damages and higher insurance costs. Chris notes that current infrastructure spending tends to favour hard engineering (rocks, culverts, road works) because that’s where the money is, while the benefits of ecological approaches are poorly quantified.
Turning to the Maritimes, Albertan narratives often claim that Atlantic provinces have too many federal seats relative to their populations and that residents work just enough to qualify for employment insurance, reinforcing another “taker” stereotype. I recall the older concept of “have-not” provinces and the idea that wealthier regions should help those with fewer opportunities, and wonders if this solidarity has eroded.
Chris explains how the collapse of Atlantic cod fisheries transformed the region: scientific warnings about declining stocks led to calls for quota cuts, but political backlash weakened restrictions, and combined with technological advances and corporate consolidation, this drove overfishing and ultimately a catastrophic stock collapse that has not recovered. This history is used as an analogy for Alberta’s oil industry: I suggest Alberta could face a similar collapse if it over-extracts, especially given constraints like water transfers between basins, risks of over-pressurized formations, and evidence of freshwater contamination near Cold Lake. We argue that while private capital may sees Alberta oil and gas as a good short-term investment, environmental limits and potential catastrophes could force a rapid shift.
Our conversation concludes by tying these regional narratives back to Alberta’s internal identity. Chris says some Albertans behave like a family member who insists on having their way all the time and refuses criticism, even though Canada’s strength lies in its diversity. As a lifelong Albertan, we feel the province has changed: where Alberta once invested in campgrounds, forest rangers, wildlife protection, and a sense of balance, economic development and in-migration have shifted priorities toward making as much money as possible, often at the expense of natural infrastructure that will eventually need repair. This reinforces the broader point that many Alberta narratives about other regions and Ottawa are shaped by political messaging and economic anxiety, and that rebalancing toward environmental stewardship and interprovincial solidarity may be necessary.
Do you agree? What did we miss or where did we go wrong?
The removal of environmental impact assessments is, to me, one of the most alarming pieces. I echo Janey’s point that environmental impact assessments—which check cumulative impacts of water and power—have been removed for both Wonder Valley and Synapse, leaving the AUC to look only at project‑specific issues rather than the bigger picture. I call this “critical” at a “critical point in time” and say it’s “quite obvious” that these safeguards have been “thrown out the window” precisely because they would block such “obscene” developments.
Janey notes a deep contradiction between years of carbon‑tax pressure on ordinary people and the sudden willingness of governments to green‑light massive, round‑the‑clock fossil‑fuel power plants for data centres, without robust cumulative environmental review. Janey describes how, after years of being “plagued with carbon taxes,” governments are now “throw[ing] the doors open” to polluting projects in order to “beat China” and make Alberta the “sacrificial province,” and I explicitly underscore that framing for listeners. I emphasise that this is “very big stuff and not something to be taken lightly.”
At the same time, I’m inspired by the scale and quality of local resistance. Janey explains how a small kitchen‑table group in Olds has grown into a record‑setting intervention at the Alberta Utilities Commission, with over 1,100 people stepping up to participate in proceeding 30732. I stress that the AUC staff themselves seem to be trying to do their jobs well and help residents navigate the process, even as higher‑level political decisions strip away environmental safeguards.
Take Action: use Little Town Big Data’s Guide to submitting a Statement of Intent to Become an Intervenor
To amplify these local efforts, clarify timelines and tools for public action, and connect the dots for my audience between Olds, other proposed data‑centre sites, and broader provincial and federal policy directions, Janey walks listeners through the significance of the 1.4‑gigawatt load, the AUC proceeding number (30732), and the steps for filing a Statement of Intent to Participate, and I commit to following up so the public can “jump in when it’s most helpful.” Janey also encourage people to contact the province and the premier directly to demand a moratorium or slowdown so Alberta doesn’t become a “data‑centric guinea pig.”
Here’s the Premier’s Email: Premier@gov.ab.ca.
Olds fight as part of a larger pattern Alberta has seen before—like the coal‑mining battles—and standing up for water is critical for everyone, not just Olds. I call Janey and her neighbours “heroes for Alberta” and emphasize that these projects are deliberately sited in smaller communities where there are “fewer voices to be heard,” which is why broader provincial support from you and me is essential.
On public engagement, I describe significant opposition in Olds, describing “major outcry” and strong grassroots organizing, including people handing out posters and flyers and encouraging Albertans to file statements of concern against the project. I mention an upcoming open house in Olds on June 24, to be attended by the premier and local MLA Sawyer, and question whether Grande Prairie has been given a similar opportunity. For the upcoming open house in the Grande Prairie region, they say they hope the project is “shut down immediately,” arguing Greenview County should prioritize supporting farmers and the agricultural economy and focus on water restoration and cleanup operations instead. I suggest stopping the project now to limit any damages O’Leary’s business could claim, referencing the Grassy Mountain coal project as a precedent where the answer was to “settle.”
I explain my participation a recent webinar through Public Interest Alberta was to inform the public about environmental liabilities and the impacts of data centres on water use, cybersecurity, and water security, describing these facilities as “non‑starters” and noting similar projects have been stopped elsewhere. I see data centres as another face of fossil fuel expansion and argue that carbon capture and storage is not a genuine climate solution, based on their industry experience. I insist fossil fuel expansion for hydrogen, LNG export, or data facilities—especially those they say could benefit “nefarious actors”—must not proceed, and that public opposition and on‑the‑ground action are the only ways to stop such projects.
Regarding the webinar’s reception, I report that hundreds attended and feedback was “really good, really strong,” and they mention a planned follow‑up interview on their platform “The Gravity Well” and further efforts by environmental organizations to keep sharing information. I warn that data centres should not be appealing to Albertans because they bring in large corporate and billionaire interests that do not help the province through challenging times.
When asked why I care, I explain how this is about “our present and our future,” citing their two children and Alberta’s role as a headwater province that should focus on restoring water rather than extracting more fossil fuels. They reference the “keep it in the ground” philosophy and carbon pricing as concepts originating in the oil and gas industry, arguing that remaining resources are not worth extracting and would cause irreparable harm, which motivates them to do this work even without pay.
Here’s the link to Eagle Andersen’s article, please follow him as he will be attending the open house tomorrow and hopes to gain a statement from the Sturgeon Lake Chief. Jody MacPherson of The Missive is following the Wonder Valley story closely: https://www.theenergymix.com/hidden-wonder-valley/.
The Gravity Well | Public Interest Alberta Collaboration
I had the pleasure of joining Brad Lafortune of PIA in co-hosting a webinar on the Artificial Intelligence (AI) data center explosion happening in Alberta, across North America, and the world. Locally, the United Conservative Party of Alberta did not run on a platform of AI water and power consumption or foreign surveillance intensification. The webinar features Representative Melanie Sachs of the House in Maine. Melanie created and passed a non-partisan AI ban bill, ultimately vetoed by a single elected official. Melanie shows the specific project at play in her area and its derelict conditions.
It’s vital Albertans follow the success, and learn from the failures, of other jurisdictions in order to stop AI data center construction in Alberta and Canada.
Stay tuned for more updates on this from Brad, Lindsay and I.
Well, there’s a website that I like or an Instagram account called The Period Purse. I follow them. They’re a Canadian-based organization and they have a lot of good information.
Jenny:
Amazing. Thank you so much for that, Matilda. Okay. You’re trying to make sure that feminine hygiene projects are free for any student that needs them in high school, at your high school, correct? Yes. And so what does that look like? Why are you doing that? What’s the rationale behind the project?
Matilda:
Well, I just thought that it kind of started with a feeling that I had when I got my period in a bathroom one day and there was nothing there. I was like, “Well, there’s got to be other girls like me.” And it was a really, really bad feeling and there was nobody else there and I didn’t know that my school had stuff, which they don’t. I was like, “Well, I want to do something to stop this.”
Jenny:
Yeah, that’s nuts. I can actually remember a very similar scenario, not just once but many times when I was in high school where I felt I forgot to prepare myself. And yeah, it’s also something that we don’t talk about enough because it does feel like it’s your own thing that happens and not really just an understanding of what it’s like for before it comes kind of thing.
Matilda:
Yeah. Especially in high schools, there’s lots of stigma around it. People will just say, “I’m not feeling well. I need to go home to a teacher instead of like, I’ve got my period. Nobody will ask each other for products when they need them.” And people will just pretend they don’t have it or they’ll laugh about it like, “Ha ha, I got my period when it’s a serious biological thing.”
Jenny:
Yeah. I’ve heard there are certain cultures that will celebrate it and it’ll be a big moment for people and you’re right. That’s amazing to hear that it hasn’t changed much since I was in high school because I remember having all of those same experiences of shame almost with it or like trying to hide it or just make light of it and not take it seriously. And a lot of problems come with it too. I remember having lots of pain and in some cases where it was debilitating. So yeah, it’s something we should really understand better and be okay with talking about, right?
Matilda:
Yeah, definitely. And that’s like a tangent to my project, of course, my main thing is to get the feminine hygiene products, but I also want to increase awareness and increase people talking about it at my school.
Jenny:
Amazing. So important. I really appreciate you taking this initiative. So how can people help? What can people do to get involved? Let’s start with adults like me and then we’ll talk about students.
Matilda:
I have a change.org petition. So you can go on their website and search for William Aberhart and my petition will pop right up and you can sign that. You can reach out to if you have kids or if you know people who have children at schools, you can email their principal or the administration to ask what their kind of situation is. You can get involved in parent councils or you can email school board trustees and MLAs.
Jenny:
Amazing. Thank you. Those are all awesome and I will try to make sure to give as much information as possible when I post this conversation for folks. What about students? How can students get more involved in what you’re doing, Matilda?
Matilda:
When you’re at school and you have something you can first of all just talk about it, even if it’s a friend or two friends, that’s people that know about it. You can mention it to your guidance counsellor in their appointment. You can insist with your teachers and your principals and your assistant principals tell them that this is something that we need because the more students that bring up this issue, the more likely they are to move forward with it.
Jenny:
Yeah, absolutely. And you’re right. It’s something that we should be expecting of our classrooms, our schools, I should say, because the thing that we think is important is the thing that we will start feeling is okay and safe to talk about, things like that. Amazing. I can see the value in what you’re doing. It’s wonderful stuff. So can you talk a little bit about the state of education for you, Matilda? What’s it like these days? Do you have concerns? What are your thoughts for people?
Matilda:
Yeah. So schools right now, the class sizes are so big that, for example, in my math class, half of the students needed help in the trigonometry unit, but the teacher could only help a few of those students because there wasn’t enough support for all of them and all of their questions because each student had multiple questions and they needed the teacher to go over it multiple times. It’s just crazy. It’s too big and it’s always so loud and sometimes there’s not even enough desks in the classrooms for everybody to sit at.
Jenny:
Thank you for saying that because I’ve heard people try and tell me online that that’s not true. And I had heard that William Aberhart was one of those schools that there literally was not enough seats for students to be in in some classes. It’s crazy.
Matilda:
Yeah. It’s ridiculous. And even in classes like yoga, there’s not enough space in the yoga room for like 35 people to do yoga and not crash into each other every pose we’re doing.
Jenny:
Right. I can just imagine. I’ve been in a yoga class that’s packed and that 35 is nuts. That’s a huge room that’s required for that. Wow. Well, thank you so much, Matilda. Is there anything else you want to add before we close? I’m hearing that people should go to change.org. They should check out your petition. They should talk to the schools that their students go to, make sure that this is accessible and that students should talk about this amongst themselves and with their guidance counsellor and with their teachers and make it a priority. Anything more you want to add?
Matilda:
Students can talk to their parents too. And if you support me, follow me on Instagram at @abeflowsfree and I believe we’re doing a bake sale this month or maybe next, so I’ll follow up
Jenny:
With that. Excellent. So they can look to your Instagram, which is ABE Flows [Free]. Is that correct?
Matilda:
Yes.
Jenny: Great. So @Abeflowsfree on Instagram, find out about the bake sale that’s coming up shortly. Thank you for all you’re doing, Matilda. Make sure you poke me when you’re doing that so I can make sure people know to get out there and get some baked goods with you, support the cause.
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