Episode 272 with Divya Ramachandran: Elevating Business Using Self-Aware Leadership

Join me on this episode of the Ready Yet podcast as I chat with Divya Ramachandran about the importance of self-awareness in leadership. We’ll discuss:

• How to handle complex tasks and daunting conversations
• Overcoming fear-driven mindsets for effective leadership
• Strategies for broadening your perspective, embracing curiosity, and trusting your intuition
• Improving your leadership skills and personal growth

GUEST RESOURCES

Divya Ramachandran, a seasoned leadership coach with a background in computer engineering, helps tech startup leaders navigate complex challenges. Born in Salt Lake City and raised by immigrant parents, she transitioned from technology to coaching, leveraging her emotional intelligence to guide leaders toward personal and professional growth. Divya specializes in building emotional clarity and fostering resilient teams, emphasizing the importance of self-awareness for authentic leadership.

https://www.divyalalitha.com 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/diramachandran

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Transcript

Episode 272 with Divya Ramachandran: Elevating Business Using Self-Aware Leadership

Transcribed by Descript 

Erin Marcus: All right, welcome, welcome to this episode of the Ready Yet podcast. I'm excited for today's guest Divya Ramachandran, who we were having so much fun talking about how we're all responsible for our own catastrophes. That whole thing about this self awareness that as we've grown up, we realize adults don't have it figured out.

Erin Marcus: None of us have it figured out. And I can't wait to get into, all right, if none of us already haven't figured out what we could, what can we do to at least make our worlds better in the process. So before we get into all of it, why don't you tell everybody a little officially who 

Divya Ramachandran: you are and what you do.

Divya Ramachandran: Thanks so much, Aaron. It's really great to be here. So yes, a little bit about me. I help leaders do hard things. That's my, in a nutshell, what I do. So specifically, what I'm doing is I'm helping leaders find clarity on these big, complex, ambiguous tasks, right? Trying to figure out how do I move forward on this?

Divya Ramachandran: But also the other hard thing that leaders have to do is get other people to do hard. It'd be easy if 

Erin Marcus: everyone just did what you told them, right? 

Divya Ramachandran: Exactly. But that is hard and that can always, that can consistently be hard. And so what I'm helping leaders do is have that hard conversation they need to have, influencing up the ladder across their peers, help their teams, the people on their teams do the things they need to.

Divya Ramachandran: So it's just helping everyone move forward and do the hard things they need to make progress and primarily I work in the tech industry, I have a background in tech the leadership problems are the same, whether you're in tech or anywhere else. And that's what I do.

Divya Ramachandran: Love it. Love it. Love 

Erin Marcus: it. It's so true because I think this is one of those truthfully. I watch this in the entrepreneur world, right? I come out of corporate, I had the big fancy corporate leadership job, and then I was in entrepreneur world, am in entrepreneur world still, and these problems are pervasive.

Erin Marcus: However, my opinion, it's almost worse or harder or potentially more damaging when your ability to maneuver through these relationships and be a leader has such a direct impact on your income. Like we all know leaders who get to still be leaders at their job and they still get the paycheck. But when you own your own business, that leadership skill, it's not just team, right?

Erin Marcus: It's not just your direct reports, it's vendors, it's clients, it's prospects, it's joint venture partners. Like it's everything. 

Divya Ramachandran: Yeah, it is just so much pressure. To have to hold on to that just as an entrepreneur, you're coming in and you're right. As soon as you're connecting every conversation, every little win with is money going into the bank ads automatically are like, the default is to just be in that scarcity mindset, right?

Divya Ramachandran: Just thinking it's not enough. I need to get this. I need to win this. And when you operate from that place of pressure though, You just don't get the results you need to. So it just, it's like you have to be able to have the skill set you need to find abundance find all that openness and confidence that you need to have those conversations.

Divya Ramachandran: To actually put the money in the bank. Great. 

Erin Marcus: It becomes multilayered. Not that it's not multilayered in corporate, but it becomes multilayered because you've got to do that inner work. But then you need the tactical skills. This is, like we were chatting, one of the funniest pieces of awareness, things that I became aware of as I got older, was I really expected that there was this is so stupid, but I really expected, in hindsight, that there is this magical age Where eventually you grew up and were mature, and what I came to realize is, no.

Erin Marcus: It's almost worse because you're, you've now gone longer in your pattern. You've now gone longer in your habit. 

Divya Ramachandran: Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh, you're so right. I'm still waiting for that age to come. I'm 54. It hasn't happened. It's still evasive. And I think it's both empowering and intimidating at the same time to realize that so much is in your own hands, right?

Divya Ramachandran: When you realize that Oh, this is my pattern, my belief. That is causing this. Yeah, it's oh, shoot, it's on me. And it's really hard to hold that. But at the same time, you're like, oh, but it's on me. Like I can change this. I don't need four people around me to change. I can change the situation by actually working on myself and building, building that self awareness.

Erin Marcus: And that was so hard. I will tell you the moment, the first time I learned that concept, I was in my, I was in my mid thirties. I was getting my MBA and it's a dual focus in marketing and executive leadership. And so I was in one of those leadership classes and facilitated by a woman who's an executive coach for NASA.

Erin Marcus: She's like the coolest person ever. And she's telling us that every relationship we have is our own fault. Now, here's the thing, I was just coming out of a divorce, and the last thing I was interested in hearing was how any of this was my fault, right? Yeah. Totally. But, to your point, it took me a minute, it is now the most empowering thing that I know, right?

Erin Marcus: That I can control my response, that I get to choose how I think, is the most empowering thing that I know. 

Divya Ramachandran: It really is. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. There's a little I guess a little thing that I learned in my leadership training program as well. Just this phrase that all conflict is self conflict. And when you realize that, when you realize that, okay, I've had this colleague that I'm constantly butting heads with, there's constant tension here and it's their fault.

Divya Ramachandran: When you're, you come, you My clients come to me talking about this person is just they don't see it they're doing it this way, I know, I've been here before, I know the right way, and you're just coming in with this lens that I'm right, they're wrong, and all of that conflict.

Divya Ramachandran: When you break it down and look into it, you're like, okay what let's talk a little bit about your perspective here and why are you the one that's right? And what are you afraid of about? 

Erin Marcus: That's the worst question in the universe. What are you actually afraid? Cause it's always that.

Divya Ramachandran: Yeah. 

Erin Marcus: And as someone who has always had a fair amount of self confidence, like the last thing I used to ever want to hear was that this, it was all fear underlying. Because that was very opposite of who I saw myself as. 

Divya Ramachandran: Yeah, it can be really hard to recognize.

Divya Ramachandran: Yeah, recognize that there's just a lot of our own fears or our own patterns, our own, beliefs, all of these things that are under the hood. It can be really hard to dig it up. And again, so empowering. 

Erin Marcus: The other thing is I'm thinking about how this comes out to play. One of the things that I used to do was teach generational communication processes, because each generation does communicate differently.

Erin Marcus: And one of my clients had boomer mechanics. millennial female at the front desk and then they just function differently. So what's interesting to me is each generation has their own way to fight against it, but the problem is the same. So you can complain that a younger generation doesn't have the resilience to handle the conflict, but at the same time the older generation was taught, the white male older generation thinks they're correct by default just by existing, but at the end of the day the problem is the same.

Erin Marcus: Yeah. 

Divya Ramachandran: Yeah. It this is it. This is, you were asking me, in our conversation earlier before we started, you were just chatting about what's top, what is the current issue that I'm thinking about? I'm like, oh yeah this is the current issue, but it's not, there's nothing current about it.

Divya Ramachandran: It's age old. It's age old issue. When we have strong connections of trust with other individuals, we. feel better, we get more done we achieve more and when we don't, when we are in conflict or have tension with another, let's just say a colleague in the work context, when we have that, we feel stressed, we burn out, we feel pressure we want to quit, all of that, and it's just, it all comes down to like, how are we able to understand other individuals, whether they're, whether they're the same generation or others whether they're our boss or direct reports.

Divya Ramachandran: How are we able to understand them? Are we bringing curiosity to those conversations? Or are we just constantly judging them? And are we caught up in our own judgment and our own beliefs? Are we wearing these glasses and say, these are the only glasses one can look at a situation with or not?

Divya Ramachandran: And so it all comes down to 

Erin Marcus: that. And to bring it back to something you've already said, when you now add. a direct tie to your income, right? The desperation and the insecurity. I watch this manifest in people saying yes to clients they should have said no to because they want the money or they're convinced they have to say yes.

Erin Marcus: As opposed, in corporate world, you're pretty much trapped. And it's a different stress. But in the entrepreneur world, you're somewhat trapped as well if you're being driven by, I have to make that sale. 

Divya Ramachandran: And 

Erin Marcus: so now, to like you were saying, you're going to end up stressed and exhausted, your satisfaction goes down.

Erin Marcus: So okay, instead of thinking you're quitting your job, you're like, do I really even want to do this business? And it's all really rooted In what? A lack of self awareness, a lack of a toolkit to do anything differently. 

Divya Ramachandran: Yeah. As humans we're hardwired to need to protect ourselves and that's just our biological need, right?

Divya Ramachandran: When we're if we go back, to when we really didn't have all the resources we needed or that we have now, the only things we were thinking about was how can I, survive? Is this a threat to my life? And and do I have people around me because again, if I don't have people around me, it's also a threat to my life because I need this community.

Divya Ramachandran: And so the two, our two most fundamental fears are around insecurities around, ultimately when we start about, start thinking about insecurity related finances, what we're concerned about biologically is, am I going to end up on the street and die? Because I have nothing. And then the second piece of it is, do I have people do people approve of me?

Divya Ramachandran: Do people, understand me, do people accept me, right? Because you want that sense of belonging. And so our deep fear is about being ostracized socially. And these are all our fundamental biological needs. And I'm bringing this up because it's that's what we're hardwired to. And so it's very normal for us to default to that kind of neediness or desperation in every situation.

Divya Ramachandran: The problem is, When we are driven by that kind of energy inside of us that is all focused on that fight or flight. Can I get through this? What we're doing is we're narrowing our entire vision onto the one thing that's stressing us out the most. Exactly. This stresses me out. This meaning, I need to get it done.

Divya Ramachandran: This, like, all of our vision is on there, which means we lose sight of the bigger picture. We don't see what our alternatives are. We don't see what our options are. And so are the work that really helps leaders and entrepreneurs at this time is to actually, when you build that self awareness, it's not just about admitting your mistakes, right?

Divya Ramachandran: Like the idea of self awareness is you notice like, Hey, I'm in this. scarcity mode. I'm in this like fighting, flight, fleeing mode and I'm not looking at my other alternatives. But if I did, I could actually I have all these other options for me that are actually way better for me. Like not closing this client, but focusing all my energy over there on that one is actually going to be better for me in the long run.

Divya Ramachandran: And you need to be able to practice that or build that skill set to be able to make it happen. 

Erin Marcus: And I think that's an important distinction because I think there is. all too many times of poo pooing of this type of stuff because an assumption is being made that you just want me to admit everything I do is wrong and that's not what we're talking like no that it's not to make you wrong or bad it's actually opposite you said the exact same things that I say all the time and to me it's give yourself a break you're up against neuroscience 

Erin Marcus: You're not wrong or bad it's neuroscience it's how it works But are you going to choose to be stuck as a victim to chemicals?

Erin Marcus: Yeah. Or are you going to choose to be in charge of your outcomes? 

Divya Ramachandran: So well said. I love that word choose. I think that's the whole point, right? You build awareness and that unlocks your choice. You realize I'm at choice. I can choose for this relationship to continue to be sour and to be the bane of my existence and make me want to quit.

Divya Ramachandran: Or I can choose to try something else out. to make this actually work better. 

Erin Marcus: And then if it goes too far, you can do what my brother and I both tend to do. We've learned it's a personality glitch directly related to my dad is when I know you're a jerk and I know how to push your buttons, I will do it on purpose to entertain myself.

Erin Marcus: My brother and I do the same thing. So this is the downside of self awareness. So I got to know, like, how did you, how did this become your thing? Why this? 

Divya Ramachandran: Yeah so I actually have a background in tech, so I studied engineering in college and actually got into my dream school for grad school. I wanted to go to Berkeley, I wanted to get a PhD, it was in the computer science department, I was like all set on this goal.

Divya Ramachandran: And I got to Berkeley and started my research and realized that there was no topic of interest to me. I was not interested in making computers better, I was just not interested in Technology problems. And I hadn't realized that until then. I was just, 

Erin Marcus: you were a kid. That's what it 

Divya Ramachandran: looks like.

Divya Ramachandran: Who knows what they actually want to do when they're 12. Exactly. Exactly. So that was like my first big, it felt like a really early life crisis where I was just like, wow, I thought it was my dream. I thought it was what I wanted to do. Anyway, that's when I realized what I cared about more was people problems.

Divya Ramachandran: And so I identified. Part of the department, which was really working on how do we design products to help people. So we're really studying how people work, how people think, and then really thinking about how do we now design products in that space. So for several years after that was I got my PhD in that space, but also then worked for a decade or more at several Bay Area startups thinking about San Francisco Bay Area 

Erin Marcus: startups.

Erin Marcus: I studied before about geography. 

Divya Ramachandran: But really I was thinking about user experience design and product management, and this is what I was doing. Finally, when I was leading a team of user experience and product managers, and we were working on this complicated AI product, things were tough. And I ended up working with an executive coach to see how can I deal with some of the conflict and how can I improve some of the management of my team.

Divya Ramachandran: And just right from the start, I was just enamored by the whole process. I was enamored by the concepts and the tools that I was learning and Long story short, I ended up leaving that job quite burnt out and was shopping around trying to figure out like, I know that's not the right role for me. So what should I do next?

Divya Ramachandran: And so I signed up for a coach training program almost on a whim. And from day one, it was so clear that this was it, this was what I was going to do. So it was just like this flash of intuition, like absolutely. Isn't 

Erin Marcus: that amazing? Like it just Dissect those feelings, like even just you telling the story, the energy or like the light bulb, this is it, is so different than yeah, that was not for me.

Erin Marcus: And I think people don't realize you have permission to follow the lighter energy. 

Divya Ramachandran: Totally. Yeah, there's just so many rules, so many beliefs that we have, so many kind of expectations. I would just say parents expectations. I was 12 years old, I had the whole plan out, so that's the one I have to follow.

Divya Ramachandran: No, but you really don't, and it's been it's I still feel very, it still feels very fluid for me. There's just so many different possibilities, different ideas and being able to find that comfort and to listen to the intuition, but also feel comfortable doing that is that's ongoing work.

Erin Marcus: And then So you say that and it's something that I recently discovered at least putting some language around it about myself because I have a very segmented past where I, whether it was school or jobs where I stayed at a certain job for X amount of time and then I left, and I'm even making changes in my business right now that to many people they're like what?

Erin Marcus: And what I realized is I was telling myself I was wrong for not sticking with one thing forever because that's what people are like that's what you do. You figure out what you're doing. I'm a lifelong learner. And it finally clicked that once I learn how to do something, I don't want to play with it anymore.

Erin Marcus: I don't, I'm not competitive enough to where like I gotta make millions and millions of dollars and that means I know what it is. And just getting to that point where you can trust yourself enough to know you'll always be okay. You can trust the universe enough to know about the abundance.

Erin Marcus: And then let go of all of the expectations. Yeah. Of what other people's definitions are of doing a good job, not doing a good job, or any of those things. 

Divya Ramachandran: Yeah, all of those, all of the above. I just completely agree with all of it. And I'm, I feel the same. My business is still in flux. The way I think about it, the ideas, and my mindset's also in flux.

Divya Ramachandran: There are times when I'm looking at the rules, and looking at other people, and thinking, oh, I should be doing it this way, that way, and I'm, shitting on myself. And, ultimately, I, have to work alongside my clients on nurturing that this is my path. I get to find it. I get to figure out what's my intuition, what's my intuition telling me and follow that.

Erin Marcus: And one of the things you said earlier was, can you learn how to go into the conflict, go into the conversation with from a standpoint of curiosity, but what if you do that for yourself as well? 

Divya Ramachandran: Yeah. I think curiosity is, it's probably the, it's the antidote. It's like the answer to everything.

Erin Marcus: Totally. 

Divya Ramachandran: 100%. Conflict. Go in with curiosity. Try and understand what the other person's thinking. And then judgment towards yourself. When you're judging yourself, just get curious about it. Why am I feeling this way? And most likely it's because there's some belief that I'm holding on to. Who's, the source of that is, for it only knows could be anything.

Divya Ramachandran: It could be anything, but it's a long time ago and it's actually irrelevant. And yeah, just to get curious about what's another way to look at this situation. 

Erin Marcus: I love it. So if people want to continue this conversation with you and learn more about you, how to get ahold of you, all those things, what is the best way to find them for them to find you?

Divya Ramachandran: Yeah. So LinkedIn is the place where I love to connect with people. So please find me there. You'll be sharing the link. Yes, we'll put the links and the correct spelling of your name and all of it. 

Erin Marcus: Yes, 

Divya Ramachandran: but please find me on LinkedIn, connect with me, send me a note, tell me you heard me on this podcast and I would love to chat.

Divya Ramachandran: And then I have a website, DivyaLalitha. com, which hopefully you'll be able to show us. And over there, there's an there's a place where you can actually Sign up for my newsletter. I send a little newsletter once a week. And I also have a little free download for you as well that you can get a look at from the show notes again.

Divya Ramachandran: And this is a little one so it's a one pager that helps you think through how do you have hard conversations and steps you through a path to, Get from kind of a place of emotional clarity to being able to have a conversation that's clear. So I love it, 

Erin Marcus: and I think that helps. I think having a crutch, a tool makes you brave.

Erin Marcus: Yeah, totally. I love that. Don't have the hard conversations. Love it. Thank you for hanging out with me today and sharing all of this. I love this type of conversation. It's changes everything. It's one of the most important things that you really can do for yourself. So thank you. Thank you for having me.

Erin Marcus: It was a really great chat.