Tiziana Casciaro is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at The Rotman School of Management and the holder of the Marcel Desautels Chair in Integrative Thinking at the University of Toronto. Tiziana’s research explores how structural and psychological forces jointly shape behavior in organizations. Her work on organizational networks, power dynamics, change implementation, and professional networking has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Management Science, and Harvard Business Review, and featured in the Economist, Financial Times, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, USA Today, Forbes, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, Fortune, and TIME.
Tiziana served as Senior Editor at Organization Science, a trade journal that publishes fundamental research about organizations, including their processes, structures, technologies, identities, capabilities, forms, and performance. Her most notable awards include the Outstanding Publication in Organizational Behavior Award of the Academy of Management and the Thinkers50 Radar list of the 30 management thinkers in the world most likely to shape the future of how organizations are managed and led. Tiziana has worked at three universities in three countries, influencing thousands of students and future leaders along the way.
Read the show notes here: https://bwmissions.com/one-away-podcast/
Transcript:
Bryan Wish: Hi, Tiziana. Welcome to The One Away Show.
Tiziana Casciaro: Thank you, Bryan. So good to finally connect here after some circuitous route around it, we found each other.
Bryan Wish: We, did. I remember when your book was shared, Power, for All, in September and I immediately reached out to you. I’m so glad we’ve been able to build such a beautiful relationship the last few months and yeah. Welcome.
Tiziana Casciaro: Likewise, Bryan. As I told you already, you are one of the best things that this book has brought into of my life. So thank you for reading it and for being… taking the initiative to reach out.
Bryan Wish: Oh, of course. Well, it works both ways. So I’m excited to dive in. So tell us Tiziana, what is the one away moment that you want to share with us today?
Tiziana Casciaro: I thought about it a lot and I kept going back to an overnight train ride to independence. That was my one away moment. And it’s not the midnight train to Georgia, it’s more the 8:00 PM train to Milan, Italy. But there was a pretty important moment. It happened when I was 18. I lived at that time in the very deep end of the heel of the boot of Italy. If you picture Italy in your mind, it is shaped like a boot and it has a heel. And the toe is Sicily. The top of the boot is Lombardy, Milan right underneath the Alps. And my father comes from a very small town deep in the heel of the boot, basically across the sea from Albania and Greece. And there’s Mediterranean sea everywhere there it’s that deep down.
And I didn’t grow up there. I grew up near Milan, more precisely on Lake Como, a beautiful spot and had the life of a Northern Italian girl, I intended to go to school in Milan and do the Milanese things. But my dad insisted on moving the family back to his hometown down there. And this is an area of Italy that is very beautiful, but very isolated and kind of backwards. Not necessarily in a mean way it’s just that there are very few opportunities there. It’s kind of a death of enterprise in a place like that. You can go on a gorgeous vacation, but living there, especially when you’re young and you want to expand your horizons is actually a perfectly good way of narrowing your horizons. And I spent three years there, the last three years of high school, and then a moment came to decide what I was going to do with myself.
And, it was a really difficult choice actually because my mother, who had always been the pillar of my life, the person that I could lean on, who understood me, who was there for me at all times, wanted me to leave. And I wanted to leave because we knew that it was not enough for me to live there. That there were bigger and better things awaiting me, but living there I should say, would’ve meant abandoning my mother in a place that is not very good for women. It’s a very patriarchal, but Italy as a whole is not particularly good to women and women that have opinions about what they want to do with themselves. But certain areas that are a little more backwards are more so. And it was a first time that I really had to make a choice about pursuing my path while severing ties with my past and where I had come from.
And it wasn’t an easy one. And I remember taking this train so that… Italy is very long and this train ride from where I was to Milan is like a 12-hour train ride and you do it overnight, typically. And I remember taking that ride and crying my eyes out on this train compartment. I was the only woman in a company of six people. And there were these five guys, middle-aged. I was 18 and I could not stop crying. It was irrepressible sobbing and these dudes didn’t know what to do with me. They were look at me like, what are we going to do with this girl who can’t control herself? And that the reason why I was crying that badly was that I knew that, that was it. I had left, I had left my family. I had decided to make this move. And you realize on occasion that you’ve got to take the leap.
And even when it’s scary, even when you are really torn about the consequences of you taking the leap for others that you care about. And it’s a severally that can be quite painful, but as you know, from your own leaving in your life, it’s necessary at times. And it was the beginning of my finding my path forward. And there were other moments of departure afterwards, but that was the very first and the next ones were complex too, but I had done it before at that point and I knew that I could.
Bryan Wish: Wow. Wow. Well, I appreciate you sharing such a formative period right? Of growing up and taking that leap on your own and on your own terms. And I think what’s interesting as well is you are talking… In the United States, right? It’s high school. You’re expected to go to college. And so it’s kind of [inaudible 00:07:32] it’s scary, but it’s not as it’s just expected. And I think what’s so interesting about what you’re saying is maybe it was bigger than that for you not to compare, but it was a next page in your life and where you had to leave your mom and what you had known in the last three years to really start a new. So-
Tiziana Casciaro: Right. For an American, it’s just part for the causes, but pretty much everybody does if they can afford it, of course, which not everybody can. And in Italy, it’s not quite that obvious, but you’re right that there were special circumstances where you… It was not just my taking the leap, it was who I was living behind and what I knew would mean.
Bryan Wish: Right. And like leaving your old self behind truly, right? Because you knew the world was much bigger. I’m curious, you have a bold and beautiful kind of presence and I have to imagine growing… I’m curious, like growing up, were you constantly maybe pushing boundaries? Were you constantly never maybe “sallow”? What was childhood like? Were you maybe had that inner urge clearly to leave what you knew there was something pressing for something more. So I’m just curious how you describe growing up to that point and kind of the person that you were prior to the first departure.
Tiziana Casciaro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I mentioned earlier that this train ride was a one away from independence. And I think that was a big driver. I always felt that I had to be my own person that I had to stand on my own two feet. And part of it was a result of having observed around me. What happens to people when they don’t have their own. God bless the child who’s got his own, the song goes. And it was evident to me that being in a dependent situation really curtails a lot of people’s dreams. A lot of their ability to find what they’re good at and find a way to make a contribution and grow and learn and become better. So, the awareness that I had to pick up and leave despite the very, very strong bonds that they were holding me in place was really driven by this.
I’m allergic to a feeling of dependence. Which is interesting because I learned afterwards that I am allergic to both directions of dependence. I do not like to be dependent on others, but I don’t like others being under my thumb either. I don’t like to be the driver. I turned out to… Actually what I really aspire to and, it’s driven me to different places to different roles to different aspirations is, I’ve learned that most people thrive in being mutually dependent on others. Where I have something that you need, but you also something that I need.
And in that interdependence, when we embrace it, we understand it. And we decide that it’s a good thing. The best things humanity does reside. It’s not in the asymmetry where you hold me under your spell or I hold you under mine, that we do the best things we can do. It’s when we realize that we need each other and we can learn from each other and we can help each other. And that’s when I can do my best work and you can do yours. But it took me a while to get to that point, the first instance, instead of being independent and not being subjected to anybody’s whims.
Bryan Wish: Yeah. Wow. That’s powerful. I love what you said about interdependence and both people have something of maybe equal power or access that is shared and valued where it doesn’t create a codependency or dependency from one side over the other.
Tiziana Casciaro: Yeah. That’s right, and there’s a big difference actually. Thank you for mentioning that because, co-dependence and mutual dependence are actually very different emotionally. Co-dependence is really when you are unable to take flight on your own. You are fearful, it’s a fear based reaction. Mutual dependence is a gross aspirational reaction. It is a collaborative reaction. And they have very different effects on how we act and what we are able to accomplish. So bad co-dependence, very, very bad. Mutual dependence very, very good.
But it’s very hard for people to recognize it because you jump right away into thinking, oh, that means that everybody’s equal and it is egalitarian. It all cost approach is a dream that cannot be realized because the world is not equal. People are not equal, they’re going to be differences. And absolutely it’s true. There will be differences, but the mutual dependence can hinge on the different kinds of things that we help each other with. I may be good at this particular task. You may be good at this particular emotion and both are needed, right? It doesn’t mean that we give up on the idea of being distinctive. We’re still going to be distinctive, but we’re going to be distinctive in a harmony and mutual support.
Bryan Wish: Totally. Yeah. I love the way you differentiated that because I think, its great context for my next question. You hear like language and architecture are [inaudible 00:14:20] it’s healing and powerful at the same time and to distinguish that is great. So for you mentioned that, this train ride metaphorically was a train ride to independence, but before you were able to do that, you clearly knew the feeling of being curtailed or constrained previously. What did that feel like for you and maybe how did that show up for you prior to taking that train ride?
Tiziana Casciaro: Yeah it was an awareness that the context in which we live and grow up shapes us so much and that you’re not just an island, you’re not in control of your options and your fate. Your context drives so much of it, and for me this move from the bustling North of Italy. I grew up in one of the most dynamic parts of my country to one of the most sleepy and really isolated parts of my country. And that immediately showed me that the context changes everything. And I saw it. That’s the way, the feeling of constraint or actually potential constraint. Because while I was there, I was a teenager in high school. How much constraint is there really? You do your thing, you go to school, you study or meet people, you make friends.
And it was okay. But I knew that the future was going to be very constrained if I stayed there. And I was right. Actually it was a lot of young people leave these areas, you go to a place like that you don’t see them. And because they understand that you got to find the space where the opportunities, where the stimulation, where the people around you, allow you to grow up and grow into a better person. Sometimes you just grow up to be wealthier and which is for many ambition, but it was really more the question of extricating myself from a context that could only do so much. That could only open up a certain path and many others would be foreclosed.
Bryan Wish: Mm-hmm (affirmative) yeah. I love how you described I think the context. It was very… You could just kind of see it and the… You’re right, I do think certain environments you do just feel that sense of constraint. And that I think also shows growth as well and awareness that there is something deeper or bigger in the world for you or that your soul kind of needs to go find. So-
Tiziana Casciaro: [crosstalk 00:17:26] People like you and I are very lucky because we get to make those choices. We get to pick up and leave. And there are people who can pick up and leave or when they do, end up in some refugee camp. The recent news on the front is when the tennis champion Novak Djokovic was detained in Australia. He was put in this hotel where people who had tried to leave a very bad context, very limiting context if not dangerous, for many of them, are stuck! Go from one stuckness to another stuckness. And even though you did your best, you tried your hardest. And I cannot even imagine the difficulty of arriving to a hotel in some city in Australia, trying to make a life for yourself to escape something terrible and fearful. They don’t get to go anywhere, right.
In that sense, what I mean context, we are at the mercy of our context and we have a little bit of degree of freedom. And the question is for us, what we do with it. But we don’t determine how much of it we have. You and I got some, many, many people get much less. But the good news is that we took it. We took whatever freedom we had and we did something with it.
Bryan Wish: Totally and like yourself, which we can get to, you have used some of your knowledge and your learnings to give back through your latest work in a very impactful way. But I think you’re right, it’s very important to acknowledge privilege. Not everyone’s able to maybe take a journey in a profound way or multiple journeys because of their environments. And so for the people that do, it might even bring more responsibility for them to go out and help others do the same. So let’s move to the post train of independence. So we diagnosed kind of the past a little bit here, which has been fun. But for you, you took this train, you had no idea maybe what was next, where you were going to go, how you’re going to get there, or who you were going to meet along the way. What were some of the first moves, after that train ride that you look back on and… what happened?
Tiziana Casciaro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, there’s an aspect of what happened right after the following few years that… I like to share because I see a lot of people that, especially young people that really struggle to find their path. And, I mean it in a very concrete way, what should I study if I go to college? At that level of who am I? What do I want to do? How do I see myself five year, 10 years from now? And when I took that train, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do at all. I had struggled mildly to decide what on earth I was going to study in university. I couldn’t study all kinds of different things. I considered a million things, really everything from industrial chemistry to oriental languages and anything in between I considered as something that could have been interesting.
So, I was not the type who had a vocation that knew what to do. And I had somebody right next to me, my older brother, who was the opposite. He had a vocation, he knew exactly what he wanted to do by age 15. And that was be an art historian. And the level of love for that in his life is unmatched. I once asked him, “so if you had not been an art historian, what would you have done?” And he just stopped cold his tracks and hesitated, and then said, “I can’t imagine my life without it.” So we are very different, all of us, in terms of the clarity of what we want to use our skills and our abilities for. Some people have clear vocation, good for them, lucky them because it gives them a movement forward that is not as conflicted.
But I was not like that. I could have done a million different things. So, the first few years after that train ride were just putting my head down, doing this course of studies that I had eventually picked up, not knowing exactly what I would do with it. And it was a series of serendipitous encounters and ideas and stimulations that led me to want to become an academic. Something that I had no idea I would want to do, even when I was well into my university, my college studies, it came up really…
A university, my college studies, it came up really by itself, over time. And, so, to me, that is encouraging to anyone who doesn’t know exactly what they’re about and how they may invest their energy. It’s okay. It’s okay. You will find it. If you keep looking, you keep searching, you keep thinking, and maybe keeping in touch with what gives you a little more satisfaction and what tickles your interest.
But you don’t have to be super duper passionate about something, or… I really find it just daunting, this notion, “Oh, you should do the job you’re passionate about.” Well, what if I don’t have such a passion? What if I need to do well, to do something good, and over time find what’s nice about it. Maybe for others. Maybe what kind of an impact that can have. Maybe what kind of legacy I can build. But don’t ask me to be passionate right now because I may not be.
And, it makes me feel, it makes a lot of people feel inadequate. There’s something wrong with them, that they don’t have a clear-cut thing they’re all about. It’s all right. Most people don’t, in my assessment. Rejoice in the fact that there are multiple paths possible and, one way or another, something will work out. But you have to keep exploring. Then you have to give yourself license to learn about yourselves enough that you can explore and, eventually, fall into something that gives you satisfaction.
Bryan Wish: Follow it. And I love what you said about the license, giving yourself that license to explore, and knowing it’s okay to not have it all figured out right away. A question I have for you, though, is this… I was in such a rush, too, finding the thing, for a various reasons of the past, but…
So, I’m going to ask this question from a place of personal context. For you, if you gave yourself that license to explore, but what were maybe some… How did you determine, or what were some of the signals or clues when you knew, “Hey, this is a direction that I should keep heading down,” versus, “Hey, this is a direction that maybe I should not keep heading down.” How did you follow the signals of maybe where the journey was supposed to take you versus forcing what it maybe should have been?
Tiziana Casciaro: Right. I’ve learned, and, actually, turns out that the research in these emotional reactions to different circumstances, it tells us, that you have to put yourself as close to the decision point as possible because your gut, which is your emotions, will tell you if that’s the right path.
So, I’ll give an example. I was, literally, thinking that I should study Oriental languages, and Oriental languages, in Italian, there’s a way to represent, but that’s East Asian languages. That’s really what it means and we are still using, sometimes, old fashioned, politically incorrect, labels for such things, but there’s a wonderful department of East Asian languages at University of Venice. War renowned and that comes from a lot of history of trade between Venice and the East.
And I really considered it. I really thought that’s what I wanted to do. And, to sort it out, I went and visited, which I know a lot of people in the United States when they decide on college they go and visit. And those are very good things to do because you put yourself in that context. Where you would have to be if you go down that path. You talk to people in that context. The people that you would have to interact with, work with, study with, if you were in that context.
And, even just the ambiance, even just the visuals, the smells, the conversations, will give you a reaction. And their reaction is an emotional reaction that is very informative for your decision. They will tell you much more than some more abstract or distant contemplation of that option. It is more cold and rational. It’s not close enough to give you a gut reaction.
And so that’s what I did. I just went. I went and visited and smelled the air and looked at my surroundings and felt better, or worse, in different places. And that’s when I knew. And that’s when I knew that which one was the right one. And I’d done it, actually, afterwards all the time and it was the research tells us that’s true.
I have a very, very, very dear friend, a professor at Wharton. Her name is Sigal Barsade, who has studied emotions in beautiful and deep ways. And she always tells us, her colleagues, or friends, or students, listen to your emotions. Pay close attention because your emotions are carrying a lot of information. And that’s what I mean when I say if you put yourself closer to that context, that what you’re considering, your emotions will give you the information you need to know.
Bryan Wish: Yeah. That’s beautiful. I think it’s so neat how you… I mean, that just phrasing “you got to put yourself in the context.” Right? It’s like, “Why do you take college tours?” or, “Why do you live in certain areas or study certain topics?” And what you’re saying is, from some of the emotional work, it’s like, you got to listen to like maybe guide the compass. And then it’s like use your head to make the plan to go do it, to pressure test if the smell right, feel right, conversation’s right. Whereas, I think, when you’re not mindful or tuned into your emotional areas, like you just try and forcefully plan without understanding how to be guided by yourself-
Tiziana Casciaro: That’s right. Decision making from the neck up is insufficient. You need to involve all of you in the decision making. And I think that, especially when it comes to professional choices, we tend to be biased toward the rational. And to think that it should be, in fact, from the neck up because it’s part of be professional, not your personal.
Your personal life can be the heart, can be the soul, but the work has to be, the studying has to be something, no, not at all. The two things come hand in hand and we live as whole beings. We’re not just cerebral. Of course, we’re also emotional and bringing the emotion, and the spiritual, if need be, to bear on those more work and study related choices is essential. Sometimes we live in a culture that does not necessarily remind us of that all the time. We are reminded that we should be very much with our head, nicely planted on our neck, before we make any professional choice. That’s very limiting.
Bryan Wish: Yeah. Living from the neck up, evoking, it’s great. Man, we are getting lost in the trance here. This is wonderful. I’m like, “Where am I coming back to? I don’t even remember.”
Tiziana Casciaro: I managed to confuse the heck out of you, huh? Already.
Bryan Wish: No, I’m tracking with you but sometimes, while I like to go off course on these episodes, I always like to bring them back to… Can share the story, kind of, but I’m so in another world that we got to figure out where we want to come back to. So, it’s great.
So… Oh yeah. Okay. Now I remember where we were. So, you were getting a lot of stimuli information, trying to understand what was right for you, and how to navigate. The fact that you didn’t know so early, like so many people did, but kind of taking that time to get different experiences and learn. You said, “I figured out,” or you learned along the way you wanted to be an academic, but you had no idea going in. What were some of those, maybe if you look back on the journey, kind of, first memories that said “This is right,” or “This feels good,” or “I met that person there smelled like this,” that said, “This is for me,” what were some of those why moments in the earlier days?
Tiziana Casciaro: Yeah. It’s always a bit of trying something and see how you fare and how you feel. There’s another very wonderful scholar, in my field called Carl White, who has a theory what he calls enactment. What does it mean? It means that you have to take action. You have to enact something, you actually do it, so that you create a response. Right? I don’t know what’s going to be if I push this button. The only way to know is to push it. And when you push it, you get a response and that response will give you the answer you’re searching for, essentially. And, so, for me, it was that I tried out different things. I tried to study different subjects and some I hated just completely. I couldn’t stand them. And others, I found myself totally energized by.
And that’s when I got my enactment. I tried it out. I went there. I did it. And I got a response from the system who told me this is actually interesting. And then you do the same thing for the things you’re capable of and you think you’re not capable of. You try things that you turn out to be really terrible at.
And, yes, we can always learn. We can always grow. But up to a point. There are going to be some things that happen to be particularly hard for you, given your whatever neck or head or rest of your body configuration, that are not going to be good for you and others, where you need to feel a little bit more at home and you think, “Oh yeah, this is a space I can inhabit.
This is an activity that can bring out the best in me. And I had those glimpses along the way. I was thrown into a classroom to teach a bunch of executives. Believe it or not, I was like 24, I want to say I, and I had read some stuff on decision-making that I thought was really cool and really interesting. It wasn’t even the thing that I really was an expert in. And I just brought to these guys and I had put them through some stuff and they resonated and we had a great time and they learned, and I learned, and I thought, “This is something that I really like. I really like this interaction.” I learned something. And then I figured out a way to bring it to other people.
And it works. It requires a certain understanding of what it means to learn that thing. I mean, that’s part of the awareness. What does it mean? Well, when I learn something what happens in my brain? When I have a hard time learning something, what’s the obstacle? Because once you understand that, you can teach it to somebody else, because the obstacles you experienced, likely they’re experiencing, too, and you can mediate, you can take them there on the path because you went down it yourself.
So, it’s a bit of emotional intelligence, a bit of understanding your audience, understanding what they’re going through in that moment. Are they getting it? Are they not? What’s the problem? And I just did it in practice. And you learn as you do it, that you’ve got some potential there versus other things that not so much and you get feedback along the way. People tell you, “Oh, the thing you did with was really excellent” and, other time, they don’t talk to you because they don’t want to tell you how bad it was. And then you know from that input the way you should go.
Bryan Wish: Yeah. The enactment… I feel like every time I ask a question, you bring it back with something really with a architecture around it that just makes even more sense of what you’re then going to go say, it’s like a beautiful way of answering a question. I don’t know if that’s intentional, but it’s good. I mean, what’s the quote, “Every reaction has a reaction” or “Every action has a consequence.” I mean, something you said, it’s like, you swing one way you’re going to get input and stimulus back. And that’s more data for you to process and interpret and feel around to give you the quote unquote signals of, “Is this right.” And what I think, what’s neat about what you’re saying is, it’s pretty universal, right? It’s universal to a job, a place to live, a relationship, big life things can be unsettling until we, maybe, feel more aligned. And I think what you’re saying is, the best thing to do is, kind of, listen and take action. See how you respond and then figure out how they just take more steps.
Tiziana Casciaro: And I like the way you put it, Brian, because this idea… You’ve got to swing though. You got to swing. You cannot just sit there and be entirely-
Bryan Wish: Paralyzed?
Tiziana Casciaro: Theoretical about… And I talk as an academic, it’s all about theories. So, actually, I should be the last person to say this, but you got to swing. Meaning, you got to take that move, make that step, try it, as opposed to just contemplating it in your head. It’s just not good enough. And that’s why, when I learned about you traveling west, I recognized that swinging.
And, sometimes, the swinging can be painful. In fact, actually, it’s often painful because you don’t know what’s going to happen when you swing. But you know what you live behind. You don’t know what you’re going to find and the uncertainty can be so overwhelming because we all, we say this in the book, we all really long for a sense of safety and we long for a sense of worth.
And when you swing, you know that you might make yourself unsafe and you have no clue if what you’re going to find is going to make you feel worthy or stupid or incompetent, it’s a risk. You are really going out on a limb and those two basic needs of safety and self worth are threatened potentially. Yeah, I mean, if you find them, yay, right? That’s a good news, but no wonder people don’t swing sometimes because they’re not secure enough in the sense that they are worth something.
And it’s okay to take a risk. And it’s okay to feel unsafe for a bit of time because there will be a way out at the end but it takes having grown up and being supported and being validated enough that you have the strength to do that. And some people are deprived of that security. They’re deprived of the sense that it’s okay to take risks. That the world will turn in the right direction, eventually, because you’ve seen it turn in the wrong direction too, too much, and you don’t have faith anymore. So, it’s a vicious cycle, potentially, or virtuous, if you’re lucky.
Bryan Wish: Yeah. I was thinking about what you were saying, I know you talked about the journey that I’ve been on, but on the flip side of that, right, I there’s the…. You talked about not leaving, or not swinging, or not taking the train of independence, that you took and I’ve taken multiple times, there’s a lot of… Another side of that though, there’s that other immense amount of comfort in that sense of control when you don’t do that, or maybe you’re placing worth, or you feel powerful because that’s the all only environment or construct that you know to be true.
And sometimes it takes a life force to really kind of unearth you to say, not to run, not to take a swing to run away from yourself, but take a swing to run closer into yourself. And, so, yeah. I mean, I’m validating what you said, and I think you’re right. Sometimes the unknown is much scarier than the known and the comfort of what is to be true and to constantly live like that grow and evolve is not for everyone. A lot of people are comfortable in their way of doing things for decades. So, I love how you’re putting it together for us.
Tiziana Casciaro: Yeah. And it also speaks to, not only our journey as an individual where you take comfort in that control in that predictability, it speaks actually to the development of people who lead others and how they lead them. Because when you are in need of control, because it’s too scary to let go, you end up hoarding your power and lording it over others as a reaction to your own insecurity, really, to your inability to see that you don’t need all that control. That you can be happy with who you are and change who you are. And it’s okay. You have enough. You sorted yourself out enough that it’s okay to relinquish some of that control. And that can mean swinging, swinging for yourself, picking up and taking the train, or it can mean giving some autonomy in some leeway and some sense of independence to your people. The people that you lead, the people that you manage, that it takes a big person to be able to do that.
And, one of the things that I would really, really, really like to see is, as an outcome of this book, I’ve written with my dear friend, Yudibathi Lana, is to show people, who have some measure of power, that their aspiration should be to not need to hoard it, which is our natural tendency. Because of this fear of lack of control that you were describing earlier, that’s what leads somebody who gains some power to just grab onto it and not letting go with a tight fist. And that is bad for everyone. It just does not work well. And you just wish you could tell people just like we said, it’s okay. It’s okay to swing. It’s okay. I wish we could educate everyone in a position of power that it’s okay to distribute that power a little bit more.
Bryan Wish: Yeah. Well, I want to build on this, I actually want to… Love to dive into the book now just to, kind of, what led to it and some of the key parts of it just because I think it’s a very powerful book.
Tiziana Casciaro: For lack Of a better word.
Bryan Wish: And just to even be vulnerable here. Like what led me to your book was the fact that… So, my mom always told me growing up, “Keep your power.” And I never understood what that meant or “Hold your power.” And she’s a strong woman, but I didn’t understand what that meant. And then I remember having conversation with someone back in April. I was like, “I would love to talk about what it means to have authentic power.” And I kind of wrapped my head or contextualized, like actually what that meant. And then as I left West, and a lot of unearthing, I realized worth was very low and how, I was…
…low, and how… I’ve been giving my power away my whole… As the book would say, or what the terminology goes, almost my whole life in a lot of ways, and not even realizing it and understanding why. And so when your book came out, it was like such the timing of it was like really profound, because I was finally at the stage of understanding lack of worth and power and why, but not like, okay, what does this mean moving forward? And so I remember going to the Barnes & Noble in Salt Lake City as I was passing through, and I just bought it on the spot, like 10 minutes later. It was a very quick, like, I got to read this. In getting to Oregon, and it was the first thing I read, and it was just like, wow.
Anyways, I wanted to share that. I don’t know if you said that openly, but it was from a place of this could be so helpful, and then reading it, it wasn’t this like rah-rah-whoo-whoo; it was a practical and objective book that can help in life and leadership in so many ways. The thought that went into it was unbelievable. So I wanted to say thank you, live, and I want to know from you what led to writing it with your co-author. Let’s start there.
Tiziana Casciaro: First of all, thank you. I am just, partly in disbelief, that it is still possible for somebody to walk into a bookstore, see a book, and be drawn to it, buy it on the spot knowing nothing about it, really, and reading and finding something valuable in it. It’s a miracle of literature. It’s the miracle of the publishing industry that I think we should celebrate, because we are at the point now where we consume knowledge and insight so quickly sometimes, and from sources that are really sometimes all over the place, and it’s beautiful to see that the books still can do their magic. So thank you very much for telling me how you found Power For All, but why did Julie and I write this book?
We encounter a lot of people, different kinds. It could be the typical business school professional. It could be the social entrepreneur who wants to innovate to make people’s lives better. It could be the healthcare professional who wants to do better for patients and create a system where people are not left in dire straits. It could be many, many, many different kinds. The leader who wants to revolutionize a company, an organizational institution, and runs into obstacles.
We knew from working with them, teaching them, that very often the reason why they could not achieve these very positive goals was that they misunderstood power. They knew they needed it, but either they recoiled from it because they had this idea that power is a nasty little thing; it’s about manipulation, coercion, being bad, so that they just don’t want to engage. Or they do see the potential to shape the world, but they don’t know how it functions well enough to be able to embrace it and do good work through it. And so we had to write it, and we had to write it in a almost like a small to big and big to small kind of way. You have to look at it from the perspective of its mechanics, and the mechanics work in interpersonal relationships as much as they work in international relationships.
The mechanics are always the same. It’s kind of remarkable how simple it is at its core. But then we have to also deal with the personal development, so that there’s a psychological component of it, there’s a philosophical component of it. What does it mean to want power? What does it mean to- What did your mother say? Hold your power? No. What is it?
Bryan Wish: Don’t give away your power. Keep your power.
Tiziana Casciaro: Don’t give away your power, keep your power. What are those things like for you as an individual who is trying to find your own relationship with this thing? And this thing, by the way, is everywhere, no matter what you do. Bertrand Russell said power is the essential law in human behavior, as much as energy is essential law in physics. You cannot behave as a human being without understanding power. It’s just as simple as that. Because power is the energy to influence the world around us, and anything you do, you want to influence the world around.
I want to pick up my phone and read the stupid phone, I need power of the eyes and the muscles to do that. It’s a simple action. I want to change my work environment, because I don’t think it’s functioning the way it should. I need power to do that. I want to stop the world from going off the rails and seeing our little species go to hell. I need power to affect the changes necessary. So it really permeates every single aspect of our world. And we were finding that there’s a lot of books on power, different aspects of it, but none was connecting all these dots the way we wanted to connect them. And so we said, “Well, we’re going to have to write our own,” and so we did. It was a labor of love, though. It took a lot out of us. It gave us a lot, and it also took a lot.
Bryan Wish: And it’s continuing to give a lot.
Tiziana Casciaro: I hope so. Thank you for validating that it’s doing that. It makes me feel very good.
Bryan Wish: Yeah. I think the beginning of the book talked about, if I remember, it’s been a couple of months, but the people think of power as a bad thing, and I love what you said, but to have influence in a world, let’s just say in an impactful and a good way, you need power. And you need to understand what that represents. What you said about human behavior, to think like for 28 years, like I moved through the world without understanding the definition of this and what that meant. That’s crazy. When you said that, it made me [inaudible 00:53:07], and I think you’re right. It’s fundamental to understanding how we move through the world.
Tiziana Casciaro: But you’re only 28, so you’re ahead of the game, Bryan. Don’t worry about it. You’re doing very well. Actually one of the typical reactions are coming from people that are well down the path of their career, and some of them are on the edge of retirement, or they’re retired. And they say, “I so wish I had had this when I was young and I was trying to figure it out, and I really didn’t get it.” For them, it’s more a retrospective look. And then there are many young people like yourself who hopefully they will get it. They will put it to use. And there are people midway that have done a bunch of things but now maybe have a second look at how they’ve done the things they’ve done, and they can do them better.
Now, of course, once you are given a tool, you also need guardrails to use it properly. Because the power is a double-edged sword, like every tool. You can use a hammer to just put a gorgeous picture on your wall, or you can use it to smash somebody’s head. It’s still a hammer. Power is the same way. So that’s our hope that you’ll also learn through this way to think about power, not only how to gain it and keep it the way your mother advised you to do, but how to deploy it, for what.
Bryan Wish: Absolutely. I love what you said, because when we first chatted back in October or September, I brought up Robert Greene’s work. I know he’s an influential person in this space, but also like, it’s kind of sheepish a bit. We connected over that, I remember. Let’s not spend time there. I just wanted to acknowledge that. For you and Julia, I feel like you defined power in the book very explicitly and very well that really made it kind of stick. So just for the audience’s sake here, how would you define power? How do you know if you have power? What does that mean?
Tiziana Casciaro: Power is quite simply the ability, the capacity, to influence the behavior of others. And whether you influence it through persuasion or coercion, you’re changing the way they behave. You’re influencing them to doing something differently. And where does it come from? That’s really where the mechanics of power come into play. You are able to influence others when you control their access to something they want. So you got to have something that they want, and they have to go through you to get it. They cannot get it easily elsewhere. If you have something they want, and it’s not so simple for them to get around you to get access to that thing, that is you control their access to that thing, then you’ll be able to influence their behavior. Why? Because they’re dependent on you for something.
Now, this all sound a little bit ominous, because I told you about my overnight train to independence, and all of a sudden I’m talking about being dependent on somebody and power as the inverse of dependence, but the dependency can be based on different kinds of valued things. I can be dependent on you for something very material, money, or even a certain privilege, or I can be dependent on you for helping me feed fundamental needs that are more emotional, psychological, spiritual, through you, I converse with you, and I derive from the conversation a sense of competence or a sense of independence of mind, of autonomy, of thought, a sense of relatedness that you understand me, I understand you, and we are connected as human beings.
These are all resources. They sound a little bit ephemeral, but it turns out that human beings actually value such ephemeral things very deeply, well beyond material resources. So when I say you have power over somebody when you control their access to something they value, things they value take many forms. Some of which are gorgeous and some of which are not. And it depends very much on our growth as individuals to value the right things and not be so concerned about others. I think that a Buddhist monk would tell us exactly the same things, even though we didn’t write this book as Buddhist monks. I’m not that good. I’m not that wise, unfortunately, but they talk about cravings and the fact that it is grasping for resources that is at the root of a lot of our suffering, and you know this work and this philosophy better than me, what they’re telling us is that you can live in a power relationship much more functionally if you’ll clarify for yourself what are the things you value? What are the things that the other person values? That’s where your interdependence emerges.
But it better be about things that should be valued as opposed to the ones that distract us from what actually satisfies our deeper need for safety and self-worth. That’s when it becomes more psychological, the trick, but the mechanics are just like that. So any power relationship is defined by four elements: Do I have something you want? Do you have alternatives to me to get it? And then the reciprocal, do you have something I want? And can I get it from someone else that is not Bryan? These four things are always what you have to think about when you say, how are we relating to each other on a power-dependence level? Again, you and I at this point are mutually dependent, because you have something I really value, the ability to take me to think about things that are important to me, to my existence. And I don’t find many people that can do that for me.
And maybe, well I’m assuming that you find some value in talking to me, otherwise, you wouldn’t be doing it, reveal preferences as an economist would tell us. So we are this in this mutual dependent relationship. Is it a nasty power play, power game? Not at all. Not at all. But it’s still a power relationship, because it is still on a focus on what are we offering to each other, and how many alternatives we have to achieve this wonderful thing that we are striving for? It’s still about power, even though it feels like a soft and fuzzy type of incarnation of power.
Bryan Wish: Yeah. It’s so good the way you guys put it. It’s funny, I definitely have thought about relationships more from a power perspective, not in a manipulative way, but about, so drive decision-making in a way that’s beneficial for all, and it’s been helpful to have the lens. So when you shared with me about how you see our relationship, I never thought about actually that; I just thought about, oh, I really like what you share, and I think the root, something I was kind of thinking about as you were talking is, to understand the dynamic of power takes a ton of self-awareness and then emotional intelligence, to be aware of others, yourself, and the relationship between the two and how that needs, not needs, but how that could play out or should play out over time because of… Anyway, I just like that rooted awareness to even have an idea of power, I think is so important, that I’ve been reflecting on as you were talking. So just thought I’d point that out.
Tiziana Casciaro: Yeah, and I will say, I think it’s important also that we make clear that the self-awareness, you can actually detach it from an understanding of the mechanics. There are people in this world that understand the mechanics of power very, very well. They have a nice big radar for what people fear, what people want, and they use it to accomplish nefarious goals. Every autocrat in this world, every mafia boss, every manipulator at work, knows how power works very well. So you can understand the mechanics, but then the self-awareness is what allows you to use those mechanics for constructive purposes versus destructive. Because the people who need to use power to extract things for themselves are very needy people. Unfortunately, they’re very smart in terms of utilizing the mechanics, but they have not sorted out themselves enough to know that they don’t need to be grasping for the extra billion or the extra power perk.
But many people are still very much driven by that. That’s what makes them feel safe. That’s what makes them feel superior. That’s what makes them feel good about themselves. It’s a wild chase for something that will lead them to die alone and unhappy, but they don’t know it because they haven’t sorted out the self-awareness that you describe. But you could, you can actually, you can understand power from the neck up and just be very smart about it, but then when you, comes to deploying it and using it, you don’t know what to do with it. You’re all about accumulating more of it because of the sense of control we talked about earlier, that some people desperately crave.
Bryan Wish: Something that’s really profound in what you’re saying is, and this is also my own experience as of recent, so I don’t want to say something that’s not right, but I think what I’m hearing you is there’s people very smart who know how to [inaudible 01:05:18] fears of others, they know how to abuse, pickup power, this and that. However, though, when used destructively or used to just obtain more, there’s actually a lot of suffering. I wrote down there’s a lot of suffering from that. And I would argue, and I’d love your take on this, like actually the more you desire power or the more you want to obtain, actually maybe long-term is a very weak position. Because I think it’s a very powerful position when you surrender to the wanting, because you don’t come across needy.
Tiziana Casciaro: Yes, absolutely. It is very true that you… I observe it in the leaders that I work with and interact with, study, the ones who don’t need to hold on to the power position are often seen as much more centered and profound and good by others. The issue is that we also observe in our environments, a lot of people who “succeed,” meaning they achieve very high rank positions, very influential positions, in the manipulative dark way in which power can be used. And so people look around and go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. You sound like a utopian, because I see that some of my bosses got there, not the way you’re saying we should get there. They got there in all the wrong ways,” which is totally true. It can happen, because this is a… Wanting access and control over those resources is a very good predictor of you obtaining access and control over those resources.
When you want it really badly, you will likely get it, because you apply all of your capabilities to it. So I want to be in charge of that budget. I want to be the CEO. I want to be the boss. And so you do all the deployment of your talent and capabilities toward that goal. So you could obtain it potentially, but it doesn’t mean that you are embracing power in a way that will make you satisfied, make you happy with the work and its impact on yourself and others. They’re very different things.
Being in that position, being able to… Fine, you have satisfaction and you may be able to keep me under your thumb and make me do things and work me like a puppet, and just make me feel inferior. You enjoy that. Good. Enjoyment is fleeting. Just like people who keep track of the likes they get on social media, how happy does it make you to see that you got, whatever, a thousand followers, 10,000 followers? And how long does it last, that happiness? That’s what we’re talking about. You can get the 10,000 followers, a hundred thousand, the million followers. You can, if you apply yourself and for the hundred thousand, the million followers you can, if you apply yourself and you really single-handedly pursue that goal. But what will it do for you in the long run? That remains a question and this is more a personal thing.
Bryan Wish: Yeah.
Tiziana Casciaro: Then we have the big thing. What has it done for humanity that some people have pursued profit for so long with no qualms? They have created an enormous amount of wealth for themselves at the expense of the sustainability of our climate and for our species. Good for you, you are a gazillionaire. In the meantime, we have deteriorated our ability live on this planet, the way we have. All in the pursuit of something that is very short-term, very attractive to some people. But long run, not really. What will it do for you once you die? Because we all will. So it’s an interesting… Again, it goes back to… You cannot exercise power in your environment, therefore influence the world around you. You cannot do it well if you ever sorted yourself out. That’s the bottom line.
Bryan Wish: Fascinating. Hits home very well. What you were saying and what I wrote down, right? You chased money, you chased the followers. That’s external position, that’s external power, right? And it’s more fleeting. It sounds like… Or how I would, I’m thinking about it. Whereas the sense of internal power, the not needing the followers or the relationship or the money or the job title, that’s a more internal and whole place of power that maybe has more permanence. Is that fair?
Tiziana Casciaro: I think so. It is fair. And it actually, when you’re articulated that way… I’m confronted with the fact that, as social scientists, we end up in a place that is not too different from what a Buddhist would say. These are people that when you ask what is the meaning of life, what’s the purpose of life and those big existential questions, they talk about you are making the world better, right? Achieving happiness by leaving a positive impact around you, whatever that means. Maybe I’m paraphrasing a little bit too much, because again, I’m not particularly skilled as a student of those philosophies, but that’s roughly the idea. And what you’re describing as fleeting external manifestations of power really has to do with that.
Is it about you pursue something for yourself because you haven’t found what you really need and want. You’re scrambling. You’re kind of desperate. Why would you want to want another billion, honestly? And I know that a lot of people that listen to your show, including myself, were not in the billion category whatsoever, but what I’m saying is that it can become so dysfunctional and so misguided the pursuit of power that it comes down to I want to be the biggest dude on this block, no matter why. Why do you need that? And so the more internal your view of it is am I able to harness power and use it in a way that increases happiness, mine and yours, which is a really much more non craving view of power. It’s always power, power doesn’t change. It’s always the same thing.
Bryan Wish: Right.
Tiziana Casciaro: It’s really how you use it.
Bryan Wish: Sure.
Tiziana Casciaro: What, what do you use it for?
Bryan Wish: Yeah.
Tiziana Casciaro: And that’s the hope humanity will be so much better off if more of us have figured out that you don’t need to run after the self-aggrandizing, the extreme control, the sense of greatness, because you get to put other people down and hold them down. Some people find the sense of control in that, in controlling others. And that is a very sad state of affairs, except that we’re surrounded by so many. And what I see that the best leaders I observe are the ones who are completely comfortable say, “I do not need, I do not need to control everyone. What I need is to see my organization thrive, do good work, innovate, change people’s lives a little bit, put better, maybe make things a little bit more functional, a little bit more interesting, a little bit more creative. Ah, that’s my satisfaction. And to accomplish that, I will give power to anybody who can contribute to that goal. And everybody will be happier as a result.”
And there are some readers who do that. I like to talk about Ed Catmull. If you’re heard of this guy. Yes, you have.
Bryan Wish: Yeah.
Tiziana Casciaro: Because you are on top of cool leaders, but a lot of people don’t know who he is, even though, of course, they would know who Elon Musk is, or they would know Tim Cook, Steve Jobs. They don’t know Ed Catmull who has been the leader of Pixar Studios for a long time. And you wouldn’t know about him because he doesn’t need to be known. He doesn’t need to take the credit for it all. At least as far as I understand from the account of him, that I gather from my friend and colleague Linda Hill at the Harvard Business School. This is a kind of leader who understands that you influence others by creating a stage on which they can perform their best.
You don’t need to be on the stage. You don’t need to show off. You don’t need to be the one presenting your latest creation and taking the credit, essentially, because that’s what happens when these guys go on stage and present their latest blah, they put themselves as the face of this contribution. He doesn’t need to do that. He lets the work speak for itself. And the joy there is to enable these very creative, very technically proficient people to step up and improve and learn new things and collaborate and find that mutual dependence that we were describing earlier, that where we do our best work collectively. It’s beautiful. Those are the people that we should celebrate more than the ones who feel the urge to be on stage.
Bryan Wish: Yeah.
Tiziana Casciaro: Yeah.
Bryan Wish: I think what you said about leaders who can let go and put their people on the platform to do their best work, hit home. And I think it’s scary at the same time for a leader to let go when they like that sense of control. It’s just with everything that this book’s about. When I left this summer, I was so scared and nervous that it was all going to fall apart because I had to take my hands off the wheel. Not that I didn’t put an effort, but it was just a forcing function of the journey. And everything just started almost like walking into place much better in accelerating faster. The less I was trying to force it to be something it wasn’t supposed to be.
And it’s made me reflect on everything you’re saying. Even though you might be in the position of power by title or this or that, like the internal power of not letting it, letting it be what it’s supposed to be without forcing it to be something that’s not is, I think, a hard lesson, but it’s really like the natural order of what’s supposed to happen. And I think it’s that tight gripping of that control is such a comfortable place for leaders because that’s how they, like you said, attained maybe those in the first place. And so, it’s so fascinating. I keep coming back to what you said about, you can only really obtain or see true power you’re talking about. Once you’ve settled the past or figured certain things out about yourself, because how can you have the awareness to it? It’s just fascinating.
Tiziana Casciaro: And I will say also that I’m not denying. In fact, actually I want to remind everybody that there is your own personal journey as a leader and as a manager of others that you have to come to grips with your need to be in control or whatever. But then you could not have left Brian and let your team fall in place and find their way of operating without you being there every day if you hadn’t empowered them in the first place. So you need to give them the tools, the resources, the confidence, the technical expertise, the experience that they need to be able to function without you. So that ultimately what empowering really means. It’s not just, “Oh, off you go, baby. I delegate to you. I don’t need to control. I don’t need to oversee. I don’t need to keep you in check. I trust you.” Well, up to a point, you cannot trust if you haven’t given them the resources they need to do the work. You need to give them the resources. You need to get them there and help them find their power as you mentioned earlier.
Bryan Wish: Yeah.
Tiziana Casciaro: So there’s a substance to all of this. Competence, intelligence, expertise, learning, all of those things are things that you create by empowering. And the learning is often reciprocal. You left and you learned a lot about yourself and you given them space to learn about their work and, and how to do it without you being there all the time. But you see it’s reciprocal.
Bryan Wish: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Tiziana Casciaro: And it’s not in a void. You cannot just kind of let go of control before the things are in place if you lose to be able to do that.
So, I don’t blame leaders who are not ready to give autonomy if that’s because they don’t think the people are ready to drive. Right? The problem is that a lot of leaders are not ready to give away control because of them personally, they’re not ready, not because their people are not ready. And so you have to sort out which is which. Are you not delegating because you haven’t done enough work to develop them, or you’re not delegating because you personally are not confident enough that everything will be fine, we will accomplish our goal? There’s something collective we’re trying to accomplish and it’s not just my own grandeur. That’s the self-awareness you were describing earlier.
Bryan Wish: Yeah.
Tiziana Casciaro: That’s what it comes down to.
Bryan Wish: Well, Thank you. And what I think so fascinating, and maybe an insight that I wasn’t expecting from your book is to show with that whole sense of power is really directly tied to leadership. And then I wasn’t expecting the book really to be a leadership book. It was a book on power, but through a lens of leadership. And I wasn’t expecting that, but it took me on an unexpected journey for sure about myself. And I think there’s a lot of leadership books out there, but it wasn’t disguised as that. I didn’t think it was a leadership book going in, but the takeaways were about leadership. And I thought that a brilliant part of the book was the leadership lessons I learned without going into it, thinking I was going to do it. So it caught me by surprise. And I think that’s a beautiful thing of a good book. You walk away with things you never expected to get going in.
Tiziana Casciaro: That’s right. And, we situate those leadership lessons in this bigger picture of how come, why is it that power is so unequally distributed?
Bryan Wish: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Tiziana Casciaro: What creates those hierarchies, where some people are the top, some people are at the bottom and they all get stuck there. And it’s so self-perpetuating. What happens? That’s more of a bird’s eye view of what power is made of in our social context.
Bryan Wish: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Tiziana Casciaro: And then the question becomes, what is the leadership of joining forces with others look like when you’re trying to change those big systems that make some people really dependent and a few really advantaged. And we don’t seem to be able to get out of those things. You see tendencies, like what we’re observing now through the pandemic. Inequality has increased in most parts of the world.
Bryan Wish: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Tiziana Casciaro: So in crisis, there was supposed to be “Oh, we’re all on the same boat. The pandemic doesn’t look in the eye, but it doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor.” That is not true. That is not true. And so part of the what you need this book for is to see why do we find ourselves in those dynamics? And then what the leadership required to get out of it. And sometimes the leadership require is just too personal. You and your organization, your company, sometimes isn’t the joining forces with others. It’s where you cannot do it alone. You cannot, you just, it’s too big. It’s too embedded and structured in our environment that if I don’t coalesce with others, it’s never going to happen.
Bryan Wish: Yeah.
Tiziana Casciaro: And so we see some of the movements out now, people fighting for different rights, for different freedoms, for different sustainable ways of living. All of those things that we see people fighting for require more collective way of exercising leadership, as opposed to the heroic view that sometimes we ascribe to it.
Bryan Wish: Yeah. Well, on that note I think it’s been a self check for many people from a more privileged perspective to develop that awareness of a lot of the inequities in the world, and to realize by having to “sit in place for a couple years”, some of the people who truly have it worse and why? And to face that if they’re ready to take that in. And I definitely created more of a conscious for some that’ve been willing to receive it way of living and understanding.
And in your book, it does. I think towards the end or halfway through, it talks a lot about why, right? And the power dynamics of how we came to be where we are and what needs to change. And so I love how you address the message, thinking about all the society and the book power for all and what that means. So, I just want to say thank you for the work, the path, the messiness of it on, and sharing it. It’s such a gift and I’m sure or hopefully, it’s just only the beginning for you and your co-author, it’s a really beautiful piece of work.
Tiziana Casciaro: Thank you, Ryan. The gift is reciprocal because you have read it with the insight and the perspective that allows this book to have its value. And we hope that many will join you. And, maybe together, we are going to be able to shift a little bit of mindset that we all have around power. Sometimes it’s a little too destructive, a little too dark for our own good. And even though that exists as a perspective, but we have to be aware that power is much bigger and much more better than that. And so more power to you.
Bryan Wish: Well, thank you. To close to Tiziana, where can people buy the book? Where can people find you? Where can all the things?
Tiziana Casciaro: All the things! Well, what is saying? “Wherever books are sold” Anywhere, you secure your books, you went into the Barns and Noble that time. We do like the independent bookstores that have been suffering so much and they do such good work. And of course, you can get it online pretty much anywhere. The easiest way to track us down and see how we have applied this book to different things that people might care about. The ranging topics from the return to work hybrid to how do we, what’s a post pandemic world going to be looking like, what does it mean to lead? All of the things. What does it mean to find a job when you’re looking for a job from a power perspective. The easiest way is to go to our book website, which is called aptly powerforallbook.com. And there, you can find the information about us and even contact us if you so wish, because we love to hear from people who engage with this set of ideas.
Bryan Wish: Amazing. Congratulations for being the longest interview on the podcast.
Tiziana Casciaro: God! I hope that’s not a horrible thing.
Bryan Wish: No, it’s funny. An hour is a good format, but I had nothing on the calendar this afternoon, which I think was great because I think we’ve been able to build a lot of rapport up into this moment where usually I go in blind on most. And, so given the rapport, we could really connect and I thought it was really nice. So, thank you for coming on. It was beautiful every minute, second, millisecond of it and appreciate it.
Tiziana Casciaro: Likewise, Brian, I cannot believe we spoke for as long as we have, and I am grateful that our respective calendars were… I think we knew deep inside that this would happen.
Bryan Wish: Right.
Tiziana Casciaro: So we kept our calenders open, but thank you. Thank you so much for having me, for allowing these ideas to reach the people that listen to your show. That is excellent.
Bryan Wish: Well, thank you.
Tiziana Casciaro: I am very grateful.
Bryan Wish: Well, we’ll chalk it up to the universe. Thank you.
Tiziana Casciaro: Thank you so much.