Unlocking Why Smart Leaders Weaponize Resilience With Nikki Langman

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Timestamps:
00:00:00 – Cold Start & Intro
00:05:07 – The Maritime Story That Changed Everything
00:07:56 – Why Near-Miss Reports Doubled
00:13:06 – What Psychological Safety Really Means
00:15:07 – When Leaders Weaponize Resilience
00:20:41 – Can Emotional Intelligence Make a Leader Worse?
00:22:36 – What Pressure Reveals About Your True Self
00:24:57 – Why Charisma Isn’t Emotional Intelligence
00:37:45 – The Legos That Unlock Hard Conversations
00:42:11 – The Book & Where to Find Nikki

Nikki Langman (00:03)
If you’re a business leader and you want people to feel like they are psychologically safe and that they have the right to speak up, to dissent, to share their opinion, to share an independent thought, or disagree, and there won’t be any kind of harm that’s done to them. Leaders think twice about what you do when that happens. So, when somebody brings you bad news, when somebody has an idea that is not compatible with your own, when somebody pushes back, your reaction is somebody else’s next move.

Skot Waldron (00:42)
When I’m not hosting Unlocked, I’m speaking at events all over the world. I’m helping leaders and I’m helping teams communicate better. I’m helping them build trust faster and actually enjoy working together. I’ve spoken for companies like The Home Depot. I’ve spoken at national architectural firms. I’ve spoken for pharmaceutical company offsites. I’ve spoken at associations, you name it.

With 99% of attendees of all those events, over 1800 people have reviewed me at this point. 99% of them saying they got some value. That’s pretty awesome. Even the caterers have thanked me. And if they are thanking me and they’ve heard a lot of talks and they’re busy doing their jobs, that’s saying something. If you’re an event planner looking for a speaker who’s really easy to work with, trust me, I want to be the last thing you’re worried about on event day. I’m going to take care of you. And who actually delivers value for your audience that they are going to use on Monday morning when they return to the office, then let’s talk.

There’s some terms that we use a lot in business and our culture of business. We use a lot of words anyway in business, but the culture words we use. Psychological safety, we use that a lot. Resilience, we start to use that a lot. Vulnerability, like, the, all the can kind of well, we talk about “soft skills,” words that we use when talking about culture and leadership development and people at work. Another one of those is emotional intelligence or self-awareness. We talk about those things a lot. And we’re going to harp on those things today with my guest, Nikki Langman.

She is an international speaker, author, and emotional intelligence expert who helps people think clearly, communicate courageously, and lead effectively when pressure is high and conversations matter most. Combining emotional fitness, psychological safety, and refreshingly honest storytelling, Nikki’s engaging, relatable style leaves audiences thinking differently and ready to act. She’s a Triple Silver Stevie Award winner for Women in Business. She’s a featured speaker at Yale School of Medicine. She’s named one of NBC4 Washington’s Top 25 Global Women Thought Leaders. And she’s ranked #1 in Maxim’s Top Eight Keynote Speakers to Watch in 2026.

So, if you’ve had the privilege of seeing Nikki out there on the stage or engaging with her, you know what I’m talking about. And if you haven’t, then get ready because we’re going to talk about things. And here’s the thing, y’all. We’re going to push a little bit on some buttons and some typical ways of thinking about things. And I want you to contextualize these, put these things in your place and your place of work and the way you think about things. Because I think the way we think about emotional intelligence and self-awareness, it’s really important to how we govern ourselves because that is going to impact the people around us. Ready? Here we go.

Nikki, thanks for being on the show. It’s been a long time waiting and you’re finally here. I appreciate it.

Nikki Langman (03:52)
I’m so happy to be here, Skot. Thanks for having me.

Skot Waldron (03:56)
I always give a little extra love to my people that are in Australia, because of how late you have to stay up to do this show. So, you get props for that and everybody, whether you want to listen to this or not, you have to now because you know that Nikki’s sacrificing for you. So, you know, put a little sacrifice for yourself, right?

Nikki Langman (04:16)
That’s right. That’s right. But you know, if we ever do another podcast together, we may have to flip the script and have you record it one o’clock in the morning instead.

Skot Waldron (04:25)
Yeah, is that what I should do? Just to feel it a little bit more. Well, you look great for one o’clock in the morning. I’m just going to tell you that. So good job.

Okay, so we’re going to push against some terms today. We’re going to push against some of the thoughts and whatnot. But I love your approach. You said to me earlier, I mean, before we started recording, that you do it with empathy, right? And understanding and a human aspect of things. So, I’m anxious to get into this a little bit more. But let’s set this whole thing with a story. You worked with a maritime company and worked at all levels of this thing, but this was all about, like, self-awareness, emotional intelligence, things that you were doing with this company. Give us the layout of that story. What happened?

Nikki Langman (05:10)
It’s actually a remarkable story. So, I was working for a global company that did transportation on ships. So, they handled about half of the equipment that’s on ships in the loading and unloading equipment and docks. So very high-risk industry, very big machinery, and about 90% male across the entire corporation.

So, in Australia, we had 137 employees, and I was the head of learning and development. And I convinced the HR director and the vice president to allow me to do a emotional intelligence development program because I wanted to address things with people about having difficult conversations, managing conflict, because safety was so in, you know, so core to this business. It was really important for me to show that, you know, how we behave toward each other, how we show up for work, what kind of state we’re in can lead to a snowball effect. So, it’s not just about technical training and PPE.

Anyway, they eventually said yes, and I did a 12-month program where I captured every single employee, all 137 of them from the apprentice to the vice president. Everyone was a student in this program. What was really significant about it is that in that 12-month period, we saw a decrease of lost time injuries by 86%. That was huge. We went from seven lost time injuries the year before to one lost time injury. And to clarify, lost time injury is one full day of work lost, up to and including anything that’s, doesn’t kill you. So, it can include some serious, serious conditions where people don’t come back to work. So that was really special. And I don’t take full accountability for that because I think, you know, it has to be a combination of circumstances. It has to be kind of a lot of hands in the business doing good things.

So, they did improve their safety training that year as well. They improved their risk assessment process. They did technical training. And I think that all of those factors combined with the emotional intelligence training that I did had a positive collective impact. So, I never take responsibility saying that my program created this result. But what I think was even more fascinating than reducing lost time injuries by 86% was that we doubled our near miss reporting. So near misses, those are the things that almost happened but didn’t and they get swept under the rug and people don’t report them if they don’t feel psychologically safe to do so.

If they do feel safe in their environment, then that’s where we’ll see people actually doing the right thing, doing the paperwork so that the “almost” incident can be, you know, if it involved a piece of machinery, it can be fixed, it can be addressed, the hazard can be taken care of. But when people sweep things under the rug, then leadership never knows about it. And it can become, you know, something very different, a lost-time injury in the future. So that, I loved that result more than any of the others because to go from 18 reported near misses the year before the program to 36 reported meant that we were doing something right in the space of psychological safety.

Skot Waldron (09:07)
That’s pretty cool. I mean, when you think about that and the business impact it can have, that’s pretty amazing. Now, first of all, I’m amazed or not amazed, but I’m proud of the leader who, when you came to them and said, “hey, I want to do some emotional intelligence training,” they were like, Okay. And it’s going to take 12 months. And they were like, Okay. Like people aren’t usually like, I don’t know. I don’t hear that thrown around a lot and people are like, cool, let’s do some emotional intelligence training, like inside this maritime company thing we’re doing.

So, props to that leader for giving you the go, giving you the green light to do that. And I think that that is an example of leadership in a sense of like believing in you, the person he’s hired to do this learning and development stuff and believing in the cause and supporting you in the effort to do what they did.

Nikki Langman (10:02)
Absolutely. And this was before COVID. So I think we have seen a lot of adoption or a trend toward realizing that the human skills, the core skills like emotional intelligence and psychological safety are fundamental and we can’t do without them. But I think prior to COVID it was a real struggle. I felt like, you know, the little chihuahua scratching at the back door for years being an expert in this area, but I couldn’t get traction with it because it was frivolous. You know, that’s a nice to have, but it’s not essential.

Skot Waldron (10:38)
Yeah, exactly. And there was, I was hearing and I don’t remember off the top of my head all of the details of it, but Amy Edmondson did some research and was studying some things about this, right? And what she was talking about was let me see if I can get this right in my head. They were talking about high performing teams and what creates high performing teams, and she was measuring different aspects of high performing teams, and she noticed that high performing teams, like in a hospital system, the injury or the injury rates or the mistake reporting was actually up, right? In those high performing teams that they were making, there was evidence that they were making more mistakes. But it wasn’t that they were making more mistakes, it’s that they felt more safe reporting those mistakes in a high functioning team.

And so, the reporting showed we were making more mistakes, but in reality, it was because there was more of that trust built and that emotional intelligence and the psychological safety that was created in that environment to make it okay to report the mistakes.

Nikki Langman (11:46)
That’s right. And so, if you’re a business leader and you want people to feel like they are psychologically safe and that they have the right to speak up, to dissent, to share their opinion, to share an independent thought, or disagree, and there won’t be any kind of harm that’s done to them. Leaders think twice about what you do when that happens. So, when somebody brings you bad news, when somebody has an idea that is not compatible with your own, when somebody pushes back, your reaction is somebody else’s next move.

So, it really psychological safety is much bigger than just having the, it’s okay, we can speak up here, you’re not going to lose your job if you do. It has to be the evidence of the reaction or the actions taken afterward because every, when one person speaks up, everybody else is taking notes.

Skot Waldron (12:51)
This is true. This is true. So where does psychological safety actually end and personal responsibility begin, right? When you’re working with teams or what’s your belief about that? Should I be able to feel, should I have permission to be uncomfortable? Like should I never be uncomfortable because I create a psychologically safe environment? Like I don’t know. I want to make sure that we’re clear about what psychological safety means. Cause some people will weaponize it. Okay. Some people will throw it out there, be like, I don’t feel psychologically safe.

Nikki Langman (13:28)
Right, right. Yeah. Though it’s an excuse or a justification. So psychological safety is not comfort, it is not endless agreement, it’s not lowered standards or protection from consequences. So even if there is true psychological safety where people have the right and the freedom to speak up and it is handled well with actions and emotional intelligence, you know, from the other side. Even still, that doesn’t absolve responsibility. So, you know, you can’t use it as your trump card or your ace up the sleeve. It’s about, you know, being able to make mistakes and to do the right reporting for it, you know, rather than sweeping it under the rug. But accountability, accountability is a big part of it because it, yeah, it’s not a get out of jail free card just because you feel comfortable saying something.

Skot Waldron (14:39)
Okay, so when we’re talking to people, and I’ll say, let’s transition this a little bit from psychological safety. So, one part of it may be people saying, I feel uncomfortable. I don’t feel psychologically safe here. And then on the other side, a leader could, I know you talk about this, this is interesting, I want to get into this. weaponize resilience. They’ll say, you just need to build more resilience. You just need to learn to be more resilient. Because I’m going to give you feedback and you seem to not be able to take it very well. You just have a resilience problem. What do you say to that?

Nikki Langman (15:21)
Show me more or let me be a fly on the wall during that conversation. Because it is one thing to have personal ownership and to build resilience and to bring you know your best a-game to your workplace or the job that you do. But there’s also another aspect where sometimes it is systemic failure that where too much pressure, too much load is put on somebody. So, in any business, pressure happens. We can’t avoid that. Pressure happens; stress happens. That is not a bad culture, that is not bad management. But when too much is put on somebody or the person allows too much to be put on them by constantly saying yes and taking on too much where they know that they’re overcapacity, then we’ve got a bit of a different problem.

So, you know, in a situation like what you’re describing, it’s impossible to say, yeah, that person does need to build more resilience unless you hear how the other person was behaving as well. So, you know, it’s not always the onus shouldn’t always be on the individual to change. It might need to be looked at from an individual perspective as well as a systems perspective.

Skot Waldron (16:50)
And how do you know it’s just not an excuse for bad leadership? Like what are the signs of that? Or how do you, you know, work people through that? I mean, you talk about self-awareness. I mean, is that’s obviously a self-awareness thing, or is it just kind of a lazy, I don’t want to be intentional thing?

Nikki Langman (17:12)
You mean from the leader’s perspective or?

Skot Waldron (17:17)
Yeah, yeah, I would say from the leader’s perspective.

Nikki Langman (17:24)
Well, okay, self-awareness without ownership is self-justification, just more sophisticated. So, I think leaders need to set the pace for what is acceptable. They need to be able to feel safe enough to raise their hand and say that they made a mistake. Because guess what? If you’re a human being, if you have a heart that beats, you know, then you’re going to make mistakes. That’s inevitable. But, and honestly, I will trust the person who comes forward and says, you know, I did something really stupid just a few minutes ago. When they own it, they take responsibility for it, they do the right thing, they follow whatever procedure needs to be followed to, you know, to log that incident or you know to share the right information with the right people.

But leaders have to go first. They have to demonstrate it. And where I see that there’s a real imbalance is when we have one-on-one conversations. So, you know, let’s say it’s a performance review conversation, you know, your annual you know, targets and performance evaluation. So you go into a closed room, it’s just you and your leader across the table. And the leader will expect vulnerability from you. They will expect that they’re going to go over all these points. And if there were some areas where you’re not measuring up to standard, that they’re going to get vulnerability from you and accountability and ownership and, you know, commitment to make things better, if that’s where the conversation wants to go.

But if the manager sits there or the leader sits there and maintains a stoic appearance where they don’t meet them in the same place of vulnerability, then the balance gets completely thrown off and that’s not safe. So that’s probably one of the most common things that I see where, you know, psychological safety is a great idea, but it goes terribly pear-shaped unless both people are operating in the same, you know, values level.

Skot Waldron (19:35)
Yeah. I mean, I think that’s and that’s why I think company values or hiring people that believe what you believe or whatnot is so important. Because when those moments do happen, making sure we have some foundation of alignment is so critical, right? And having some of those conversations.

So let me go here for a second. You teach a lot of self-awareness, a lot of emotional intelligence stuff going on here, right? And I feel like the best way to be emotionally aware of others is to be more self-aware. And like that’s the gate to understanding others well, is understanding yourself well. If there’s a bad leader out there, right? You’re going to say someone who maybe becomes more self-aware, maybe starts to have built some emotional intelligence of others, but they just maybe the integrity piece isn’t quite there. Maybe a lot of self-preservation’s creeping into their life or whatever. How can you think emotional intelligence make them a worse leader or make them more dangerous? Do you ever see that happen?

Nikki Langman (20:50)
Yeah, yes, I do. And yeah, it’s frightening when it does happen because people can weaponize soft skills. They can weaponize emotional intelligence and psychological safety. Emotional intelligence is a capacity; it’s not a moral virtue. So some people can recognize vulnerability, emotional cues, they can read a room, understand motivation, and then use that information to manipulate, control, or manage appearances. I’d like to say it’s rare or not as common as somebody who becomes a better version of themselves with more self-awareness. And I fully agree with you, Skot, in order to understand other people, we have to understand ourselves first. It’s a prerequisite because you know, if you don’t have self-awareness, then you really shouldn’t be managing people, point blank.

But the real test is not how put together somebody looks or how much charisma a leader has. And oftentimes when we see somebody who has a lot of charisma, we might think they also have a corresponding high level of emotional intelligence. But not always. The true test of a good leader with strong emotional intelligence is what happens when they are challenged, when they’re embarrassed, contradicted, or under pressure. Because you know, our true selves really come out when the stress heats up.

Skot Waldron (22:43)
I agree. I agree. I think it’s when your true character will be revealed is when of those stressful times. It’s really easy to be the really self-aware, the emotionally aware, the “I’m a good person walking around high-fiving people.” When things are great, we don’t worry about it so much. I don’t even, you know, check the P&L that much. I don’t check on which teams are underperforming that much. I just kind of like, go along, because everything’s great. But then when everything’s not great, we start having hard conversations and we start, you know, analyzing the spreadsheets a little bit more. We start having more meetings of accountability and we start like, you know, drilling people because we need to lay down the hammer, y’all. We need to tighten the leash. We need to, all the stuff starts creeping in. And I think that’s where I think you’re talking about the emotional intelligence thing becoming almost like I start manipulating things based on what I need people to do because I’m aware of how you react to certain things. Am I right?

Nikki Langman (23:44)
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And that’s where the integrity piece really comes in. So emotional intelligence without action is just highly informed observation. But emotional intelligence without integrity can be highly informed manipulation. And I think leadership is not revealed when those values are easy to perform. It’s revealed when pressure makes those values expensive.

Skot Waldron (24:18)
Expensive. That’s true. Because we all get concerned when things start getting expensive. You know? That’s a big deal. That’s a big deal. What about in the emotional intelligence space? We would think all of it’s great. I think there are a lot of people who throw around key terms of emotional intelligence. But what behavior do you think gets praised as emotional intelligence, but actually really isn’t what you would consider emotional intelligence? Do you have anything out there that kind of, like, strikes you, when people start talking about emotional intelligence that way and you’re like, that’s not totally what I mean by emotional intelligence. Anything come to mind for you?

Nikki Langman (24:59)
Well, the first word that comes to mind is charisma. So, when somebody really has from appearances the right ingredients. They’re personable, they’re credible, and they just generally look like a very nice person. Again, charisma is not emotional intelligence. They don’t go hand in hand, necessarily. I know some very charismatic assholes.

Skot Waldron (25:32)
Don’t we all? Don’t we all?

Nikki Langman (25:35)
What separates the really true emotionally intelligent people from the ones who just perform emotional intelligence is that you see them sometimes feeling awkward because the truth is awkward at times. Telling people, you know, being vulnerable with people, sharing with others, especially if you’re a leader and you’ve got more on the line, you know, share being vulnerable, sharing some personal details with others to let them see that you have, you know, a life outside of work. There are things, you have challenges too. Sometimes that mutual understanding, you know, can really help camaraderie and, you know, help the culture when you see that I’m not the only person that’s struggling with outside issues. You know, my boss is too. And that makes me feel comforted.

But if the person who’s trying to say, “I’m not okay, and I’ve been under a lot of stress, and I don’t feel like my behavior has been the best it can be.” That person might kind of stumble through that admission, but that they may have the highest intelligence, emotional intelligence in the room. So, they may not look the most charismatic or the most put together, but they’re not performing. They’re actually telling the truth; they’re sharing the truth and that can be awkward and weird.

Skot Waldron (27:05)
In what way?

Nikki Langman (27:10)
I’ll give you a personal example. I was talking to a friend of mine a couple weeks ago, and she said, “I noticed at lunch yesterday you didn’t eat very much. How are you doing? How are you feeling?” And because I’ve had some health problems earlier this year, and sometimes yeah, it’s hard to eat. So, I drink a lot of protein shakes. But I said to her, “I’m actually not doing okay.” I said, I’m seeing myself going back down the path of overworking, pushing myself too hard, not getting enough self-care time, you know, not going to the gym because I have a you know, an email that I’ve got to knock out real quick, or I’ve got a client I have to call, or I have a Zoom meeting in 15 minutes, I don’t have time. And, you know, that’s something that I do is, you know, I get into this because I’m passionate about the work I do.

So, I’ll get into this zone where things are really humming and flowing, but then I allow my personal life, you know, my relationships and my health to suffer. Admitting that to my friend when she said, how are you doing? And I know that she really wanted an honest answer. I was very clumsy through that conversation. And I’ve been studying emotional intelligence for more than 25 years. So, you know, but it was still awkward and uncomfortable.

So, emotional intelligence won’t make you more suave, more you know, have more leadership presence or more charisma. And psychological safety doesn’t mean that it’s always going to be comfortable or that there won’t be pressure.

Skot Waldron (29:03)
So, what does psychological safety or I would say emotional intelligence, what does that bring to the table? What commonly gets misunderstood? By the way, thank you for sharing your story. It’s a good illustration of what you were talking about. When we talk about emotional intelligence as a nice to have, what do we get wrong?

Nikki Langman (29:32)
We get the reason why it’s important. You know, some people think that actually not some people, most people think that they are very self-aware. In fact, I think statistics and studies have been done on this where if you asked a room full of people, it doesn’t matter if they’re 10 people, 100 people, 1000 people, if you said raise your hand if you believe that you have pretty high skills and self-awareness, most people will. About 90% to 95% of hands will go up.

But there’s one factor that makes a big difference and that lowers that number down to about 10% to 15% of people actually are self-aware. And that is how your behavior impacts others. So those who think that okay, we can spend our money on things to actually help the bottom line for the business, some you know, some technical training or AI adoption or something that is going to affect the bottom line and help people. We really don’t need to be putting our money toward people talking about their feelings and being able to recognize their own thoughts and emotions. But it goes much, much deeper than that.

So, you know, how you show up influences everybody who comes into contact with you that day. And a good example of that is, have you ever had something really important that you’ve wanted to talk to your leader about and you’ve gotten almost to their office door, you’ve taken one look at them through the glass and done an about face and gone, nope, okay, I’m going to come back later because I can just tell it’s the wrong time. You know, we give off energy. And if you, if we can’t see that, if we’re not sophisticated enough in our skill development to see that aspect that most people miss. How does my behavior, how does the way I show up and the energy I bring influence the environment? Then, you know, that’s what makes it a big deal.

Skot Waldron (31:44)
Yeah, I’m working with some people and at times we’ll talk a lot about business problems, you know, solving business problems, solving business problems, solving business problems. And underneath it all are always people. And I often will look at it and say, you say you have a business problem, but you have a people problem. Like that’s the problem. And we always want to treat this surface level business problem as a thing and then we like, tie somebody to it that we can blame and point to but at the bottom of it all is a, you know, it’s a relational culture people problem that we have, I think most often in businesses. Do you see anything like that happening?

Nikki Langman (32:32)
Yes. Absolutely. And you just brought another really important thought to my mind and that’s around empathy and the difference between empathy and things like compassion or sympathy. They’re not synonymous. They mean very, very different things. So, what I see most often is people will listen to you know, so again, let’s say I’m a leader and I’m talking to somebody who is underperforming. Now I’m listening to them, I’m listening to what their challenges are. I’m putting all of my you know, thought and energy into not responding or interrupting. I really want to listen and understand. But then I come back with, well, if I were you, this is how I would do it. Or these are the changes that I would make. If I were you. But that is not empathy. Empathy is actually being able to see their situation through their eyes, not through your eyes if you were in their shoes. Critical difference.

Skot Waldron (33:40)
That’s a big deal. Yeah, I think it often gets misunderstood as well. Let me ask you two lightning round questions. Are you ready? It’s going to tie into this same idea. Okay. And it’s going to be basically the same question, just reversed. But empathy without accountability equals what?

Nikki Langman (34:00)
So, empathy is, if I take the definition I just gave you, being able to see a situation through somebody else’s eyes as they’re experiencing it. And again, assuming I’m the leader and that is actually what I’ve been able to do is to see it from their perspective, their situation through their perspective, not what I would do if I was them. There’s a shared accountability there. There might be some things that as a leader, I need to ask them to adjust or change. And, but I have to meet them halfway too. I have to create the conditions that allow for those changes to be manageable for them. If I don’t do that, if I don’t meet them halfway or meet them in their space or whatever the situation actually takes, if I don’t participate in it, all I do is just nod and put myself in their shoes and listen but don’t provide anything or hold any accountability myself, then the authenticity is out the window. We’re performing, we’re not leading.

Skot Waldron (35:08)
So good. Okay, let’s flip it. Accountability without empathy.

Nikki Langman (35:15)
Well, extremes, martyrdom or I don’t want to say narcissism, but something in that realm. Martyrdom definitely.

Skot Waldron (35:31)
Martyrdom. I wouldn’t have necessarily thought you would say that. Why do you say martyrdom?

Nikki Langman (35:38)
Because leaders often absorb responsibility or ownership when they shouldn’t. It’s often thought, and I see this, in fact I saw it on LinkedIn tonight when I was just scrolling through just a couple hours ago, that you know, a leader’s job is to admit mistakes, own the failure, praise publicly, etc. But I don’t think that leaders need to absorb all the fault and take all the responsibility when something goes wrong. I think there is, you know, a healthy dynamic, a healthy culture will involve shared responsibility. It could be a 90/10 shared responsibility or an 80/20, but it shouldn’t be put on the leader to do that. And I see a lot of leaders that will. They will protect their team, they will back their team, and they will put themselves in the position to be the fall guy. And you know, to me that’s accountability without you know, without that empathy. So, taking responsibility for something that is not 100% yours to absolve or absorb, sorry, is martyrdom.

Skot Waldron (37:00)
Which in turn will end up creating some resentment and some bad feelings on the other side. You know?

Nikki Langman (37:09)
Hmm. Could.

Skot Waldron (37:11)
You’re carrying all the weight. I do this for everybody else. Why is anybody pulling their weight when I’m doing so much for everybody else? Like I’ve just seen it spiral and spiral. And it becomes bad. Bad, bad, bad. So, gosh, this is really good. This is really thought provoking. I hope that this is like, you know, stinging some people in the brain a little bit because that’s what I like. I want to like, you know, make you go. Wait, what? Hold on. Yeah. So, I like that. So, I like it. So, thank you for bringing it.

You do something really interesting. I want to talk about this for just like a minute because I think it’s so fascinating to me. Is that you use the, like, the Legos. You have this program called UNBRICKABLE®. You use Legos in your workshops. I mean, sure, Legos are fun. But people like, get really into this thing. Like, what is that about? Why’d you bring the Legos into it? What does that do?

Nikki Langman (38:03)
It makes things that are challenging to talk about much easier. So, a lot of the work that I do will involve you know mental health and wellbeing, or it will involve how to have difficult conversations, managing expectations, delivering bad news, managing conflict, a lot of those things. So, a lot of the negative stuff and also grief. So, you know, in a workplace, that is actually something that really needs to be addressed at a whole staff level is how do you, how does your organization deal with grief in the workplace? Because somebody is always going to be going through it.

And so, what my workshops do is, I bring in the bricks and that guarantees 100% participation. There is no way you can sit there around a table or a boardroom with Lego bricks spread out everywhere and not be participating. It’s just, you know, you can, but I’ve never seen it actually happen. Some people will come in arms crossed and sit there very staunch, but after about 5 minutes, they’re building the biggest tower. So, it is one way to get people very engaged. But the thing I love about it the most is it’s neuroinclusive. So, we use our hands and our imagination and don’t rely on emotional literacy. So, you don’t have to have the biggest vocabulary or the best synonyms for, you know, different types of feelings or experiences. You just have to, you know, build something that makes sense to you and then we debrief it, but we don’t debrief it about, you know, tell me, I’ll say something like, tell me about that red brick. Why is that red brick touching the blue brick on that edge, but not touching any of the other bricks? And the response might be, well, that brick is very angry.

So, they have one friend in the organization and everybody else is kind of at a distance. And I never ever will allow it to be brought back to the self. So, the brick is angry. The brick can be furious. Brick can be self-righteous for, you know, for all intents and purposes. But if you say, I’m angry, I’ll stop you because we’re not talking about you, we’re talking about the red brick. And that makes it sometimes a lot easier to deal with. And the other thing too is it gives a kind of that visual.

So, I have a three-step process, you know, build what is, what is the current reality, and then break what cannot continue. So, what are the things that need to change? And you literally take whatever you have just built, and you smash it to pieces. But then using those same pieces, you can’t touch any other pieces or have any new pieces. The third part is to rebuild it with an action plan. So, rebuild it with the next steps. What are we going to do to get this situation closer to where it’s going to be a win-win or get you closer to the position that you would like to see yourself in instead of your current reality.

Skot Waldron (41:31)
Nikki, Legos are deep. I didn’t realize Legos went so deep. Look at you. Oh man, that’s amazing. That’s cool. I never meant to think about it. Now every time I build Legos, I’m going to be wondering, what does this mean? What is going on with my life? You know? It’s going to be good. I’m going to take a picture and send it to you. Nikki, coach me through this. What’s going on with this thing? Really cool, really cool.

So, you do talks all over the world as a keynote speaker, super cool. You wrote a book. Where can people get a hold of the book? Anywhere kind of thing? Like anywhere you buy books, or do I have to go to a website or what happens?

Nikki Langman (42:11)
You can definitely use that big company that starts with an A, but if you’re in the States, the company I would prefer, the one I like to steer people toward is bookshop.org. And Skot, if you can throw this in your show notes, the link to it. I’ve got a site or my own page in bookshop.org. Now what they do that’s different is they take a large procession, percentage of the proceeds and they give it, donate it to brick-and-mortar bookstores. So, you know, the mom-and-pop bookstores, the independent bookstores, you know, the bookstores that are still stuck in the 60s and reading Jack Kerouac aloud, you know, on Friday nights, with candles lit. You know, those places that would have gone out of business, especially during COVID, bookshop.org supports them and I love seeing that. They’re a big company, but I think they’ve donated, like, a collective $46 million toward helping bookstores stay alive. And the price of my book on bookshop.org is significantly cheaper too than other companies.

Skot Waldron (43:31)
There you go. Wow. Yeah, I mean, that’s really cool. I have never heard of that. I’m going to check that out and look at it as a platform to put my book on. So that’s really that’s really cool. I love that.

Thank you for being here. Thanks for hanging out with me. This has been great. And people want to talk to you more or they want to hang out with you more. Like, what do they do?

Nikki Langman (43:54)
Connect with me on LinkedIn. Send me a direct message or an Inmail. I’m on LinkedIn every single day. It’s more reliable than, you know, email or any other social media. But what I’d love to know is what did you think about this episode? Some feedback. What landed for you? What really made sense? I think that and then, you know, I’ll definitely feed that back to Skot too, if you do connect with me, but love to have some chats if this really resonated with you.

Skot Waldron (44:25)
You’re awesome. Thank you. You should try to go get some sleep.

Nikki Langman (44:28)
I told you you’d know that. I said that.

Skot Waldron (44:31)
I know, I know, I doubted you a little bit, just a little bit, but you know. You delivered. Thanks for hanging out, Nikki. Good job.

Nikki Langman (44:40)
Cool.

Skot Waldron (44:43)
This quote, y’all, “self-awareness without self-ownership is justification.” Self-awareness without ownership, self-ownership, ownership is justification. Awesome, hello? I love that. Think about that. Let it just seep in. That’s what, I loved this idea. too, that emotional intelligence is about capacity. Interesting, capacity. The more we understand, the more we develop, I think the larger our capacity. We always are wanting more capacity out there. I hear a lot about capacity, and people feel so strapped for the literal capacity of time or energy or things like that.

Emotional intelligence, I think, helps us in that way. I don’t know if Nikki talks about it in that way, but the more emotionally intelligent I am, the more self-aware I am, the more emotional intelligence I have, capacity-wise, the more I can give, the more I can relate, the less friction will be created. And her experience of the maritime example that she gave, a huge percentage of people were able to keep working. Now, is that a capacity thing? Yes, it is a capacity thing. That’s literal capacity, y’all. More people at work enable more work to be done, which it creates less burnout for others that have to take on the work of the people that are gone. I know what you, I know you know what I’m talking about because this happens to people all the time.

So, this is really good. I hope you understand how your behavior impacts other people. That’s what really what we’re talking about. That is emotional intelligence. How does my behavior, how do I understand other people well? How do I understand how what I do affects other people? That, if we had, wouldn’t that be great if we had a little bit more of that? I think it would. And I hope you’re going to work on it just a little bit more now that you’ve heard this.

If you want to find out more information about me or check out the show notes where there’s going to be more information and links to the things referenced in this episode, visit skotwaldron.com. And lastly, I’m asking for a little bit of love, just a little bit. So please take a moment, follow, rate the show. The algorithm is like that; it helps me get the word out. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. And until next time, stay Unlocked.