How To Impact Large-Scale Change: With Dov Baron [Podcast]

Why do people do what they do? How can leaders impact large-scale change? Top 30 Leadership Guru, Dov Baron, has been researching this question his whole life and offers some compelling answers.

Dov Baron is the founder and CEO of Dov Baron International. He is a preeminent expert in helping leaders create life-and-work meaning. His models and strategies of the Emotional Source Code and the Anatomy of Meaning are used by leaders in business and government worldwide.

“Those who control the meaning of the tribe control the movement of the tribe.”  – Dov Baron

What’s In This Episode

• What inspired Dov at age 14 to get out of the ghetto in the UK where he was born?
• What is the Anatomy of Meaning?
• What is the emotional Source Code?
• What are the five levels of Emotional Source Code that predict lasting behavior change?
• How do we explain the behavior of current political leaders, suicide bombers or Neo Nazis?
• Why are we so lonely?
• The power of belonging, and the impact on productivity.
• How do we create cultures of belonging?
• What is Dov’s religion? Why does it matter?

How To Impact Large-Scale Change Highlights

Listen To The Audio

Read The Transcript

Dr. Nate Regier:

Are you a leader who cares deeply about a positive and trusting work culture, but also wants to keep a laser focus on performance? Do you ever feel pulled between the two? Good news, you don’t have to choose. My podcast is dedicated to the belief that compassion and accountability are met to work together. Never before in our history has the need for Compassionate Accountability® been greater. Everything from our personal wellbeing to our collective survival depends on it. So I share wisdom, stories, and best practices from experts who are in the trenches, making Compassionate Accountability a reality. I’m Nate Regier, our host for On Compassion with Dr. Nate. I’m also the founder and CEO of Next Element Consulting and author of four books about compassionate work, including my new book, Compassionate Accountability: How Leaders Build Connection and Get Results. I’m a husband, dad, competitive barbecuer, woodworker, and avid outdoors person. Thank you for joining me, and I hope you’ll implement the tips and tools in this show. If you benefit from my podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review to help us reach more listeners. Also, be sure to visit my website at next-element.com, and go to the podcast page to access the notes and links for each show.

I am really jazzed about my guest today. We’re going to be talking about the kind of stuff I tend to geek out about: deep psychology, human behavior, and how to impact big scale change. Dov Baron is the founder and CEO of Dov Baron International. He’s a preeminent expert in helping leaders create life and work meaning. His models and strategies of the emotional source code and the anatomy of meaning are used by leaders in business and government worldwide. Dov has been named a Top 30 global leadership guru five times and an Inc Magazine top leadership speaker twice. He’s the creator and host of two popular podcasts, including Leadership and Loyalty, which has been named the number one podcast for Fortune 500 executives by Apple Podcasts. And I’ve had the good fortune of being on there a couple times. And his second podcast, Curiosity Bites, has featured hundreds of hours of interviews with top leaders, scientists, theologians, military intelligence officers, and artists.

I always appreciate Dov’s curiosity, his passion, and his depth of knowledge, and today we’re going to learn really about that. Dov is a prolific author. He’s published several bestselling books about purpose and loyalty, and written for multiple media outlets. In fact, his expertise is sought out by organizations like the United Nations, the Department of State, the World Management Forum, and the United States Air Force, just to name a few. And I know that Dov’s obsession with meaning started early in life, and we’re going to hear a little bit about that shortly, and that included a near-death experience that helped form his philosophy of leadership and life. So Dov, thank you so much. Welcome to On Compassion.

Dov Baron:

Thank you, sir. It’s a pleasure and an honor to be here. I always love talking to you, Nate. It’s always a really genuine pleasure. You are doing great work in the world, and I salute you for what you do, and I appreciate it.

Dr. Nate Regier:

Thank you. Thank you so much. Well, something we definitely have in common is raising the tide on great leadership, helping people find meaning and purpose. And boy, it’s never been more important than it is now. And I really want to dive into some of your current thinking around this, but I want to go back, and let’s start at the beginning. You have an interesting past that has shaped who you are today and what matters to you. Would you give us a brief-

Dov Baron:

“Interesting” is in quotes, right?

Dr. Nate Regier:

Yeah, really interesting. Well, I guess our listeners can decide how interesting it is, but I think it’s really fascinating. Would you share a little bit about some of what formed you?

Dov Baron:

Yeah. It’s interesting because it’s twisted and turned. I started out… I was born in the United Kingdom, born in a ghetto, what would be today considered a ghetto, a city within a city and a slum area within that. Grew up extremely poor, surrounded by crime, violence, addiction, all those kinds of lovely things, and made a decision pretty early on to get out. And when I say that, it’s like being born in a prison and deciding to get out. Everything around you says, “This is where you are born. This is where you belong.” And at the age of 10 years old, I walked into the living room, and I saw my mom crying. And she cried and pushed the glasses out of the way to wipe the tears. “What’s wrong, Mom?” And she pointed at the TV set and said, “He’s dead.” I looked at the TV set. It was certainly nobody I recognized, and he didn’t seem to be a famous soccer player or somebody off the telly that I knew. So I listened, and all of a sudden I heard, “I have a dream that one day…”

And his voice echoed in my heart and in my soul, and I didn’t know who this man was. And I was fascinated by the idea that this Black man, to a 10-year-old kid, on the other side of the world who was a Christian minister, was making my mom, a poor Jewish woman living in a ghetto, cry at his loss. And it was profound and it awoke something within me that said, “There’s a bigger impact than where you are.” That this man was making my mom cry, and it was like the death of somebody she loved. So, I had this sense that you could make a bigger difference. I didn’t know what that meant, not by any stroke of the imagination, but at 14, I made a commitment that I was going to get out there. And I told everybody, including my family, and everybody thought I was mad, and it’s not going to happen. And I did. I traveled the world to study with different spiritual masters, studying different religions. Vedanta, which is Hindu philosophy. Buddhism, the Dao, Gnostic and Coptic Christianity, and Kabbalah.

Got sick of that, not because I didn’t like it, I loved it, but I got sick of meeting people who could tell me which way my chakra spun, but couldn’t get their puna pile to hold down a job or a relationship. So, I started studying psychology. I became a Jungian psychologist. Yes, I’m wacky. I am a polymath. I study many different things. I did that and was very good at it, but really got sick of people complaining but not doing anything. So, I started studying what was then called, in the very early eighties… Yes, I am that old. In the early eighties, I started studying something called the psychology of excellence, which today is called leadership. And then in about ’83, ’84 stumbled into quantum physics and neuroscience, which were in their very early days. Certainly neuroscience was in its very early days. And started to put all that together, and then wrote a thesis on something called the emotional fields. And then from that, developed what is the emotional source code, which is what I do. I find the emotional source code of individuals, of organizations, and of nations.

I did one for the United States. I did one on England. I’ve also done them on Vladimir Putin when he invaded the Ukraine. And I did them on Donald Trump and said he would be the president and why he would be the president. And by looking at those things that drive human beings below the simple psychology, what’s driving them underneath that, and then what drives us collectively, we can determine where our company’s going even though it’s not obvious. It’s where it’s going and where it will actually end if we don’t recorrect that course, and how we can turn that course into something incredibly positive because one of the key features of it is that trauma becomes a driving force for good or not so good. That’s up to us and our awareness of it. Without the awareness, it’s not going well.

Dr. Nate Regier:

Wow, thank you for sharing that. What an interesting journey.

Dov Baron:

Sorry, it was a bit of a long answer.

Dr. Nate Regier:

No, I think many people have those formative influences, but those critical moments where you made a decision, it’s like, “I want to make a bigger difference.” So, fast-forward, what is the nature of your business now? You said you help organizations. So, who do you work with, and to what end?

Dov Baron:      

Right. So, at an individual level, these are people who are… My clients are incredibly successful, very often as individuals make many millions, let’s just go with many millions, many millions and often more as personal income. But they’ve gotten to a place where they’re like, “Yes, I’ve done amazing things. I’ve got all the accolades. I’ve got the PhD. I’ve got the house. I’ve got the yacht,” whatever it might be. “Something’s missing, and I don’t know what it is.” So, those are the individuals, and I help them to get in touch with something that is the emotional source code purpose. It’s not the why, it’s the why of their why that’s driving them unconsciously. And to have a really deeply fulfilling life and create a legacy that is beyond them. So, when you ask me about my purpose, I will always say part of my purpose is to impact the lives of the people whose names I will never know and who will never know my name.

So, it’s having an impact, helping people have an impact that will far outlive them. When I go into companies, I do it at a level of what they call purpose, but it’s more than purpose, as I said. And it’s what is the collective emotional source code of the group, and how does that form into something that creates a community? Because now more than ever, as we have this epidemic of loneliness, people want community. We used to run businesses based on, “Well, right person on the right bus in the right seat.” Very nice. Good idea, except it no longer works because fitting in will not keep your people. We need to make sure people belong in all of their forms. And what that means is we have to dismantle the cult of specialization. So, I go into companies and help them to design that purpose from a place of emotional source code, and then design a culture around it that is inclusive, and not just inclusive in the traditional sense, but where it’s belonging.

It brings in cognitive diversity where people think differently, and we embrace that. And then I do that for the organizations. And then at a national level, it’s like, “What is moving our people, and why are they moving in the wrong direction? What have we lost touch with, and what do we need to bring back, get in touch with, to bring our people back online so that we’re all working towards a common cause and not so divided, not so tribal. So, a lot of the work is breaking down the tribalism. And as you know, I did a lot of work in breaking people out of these cults and those kinds of ideas.

Dr. Nate Regier:           

Yeah. Wow, a lot of stuff to unpack there. And you mentioned two important things here that I want our listeners to really understand first, and then maybe we can go to some examples of how you’re doing this. So, you’ve mentioned anatomy of meaning and emotional source code. You’re really big on how important meaning and purpose is, and you’ve said that most business and political leaders really don’t understand this at a deeper level. So, what is the anatomy of meaning? You’ve talked about this. What is it?

Dov Baron:      

Yeah. So, let’s think of it very simply like this. You’ve got your emotional source code, and we’ll come back to that, and that’s kind of your emotional DNA. But what comes out of that is the anatomy of meaning, and it’s the meaning you give to things. And there are a subjective meaning, so if I say to you, “Nate, what is love?” And then I ask Charlie over there, “What is love?” And I ask Susan over there, “What is love?” We might get some crossover in the vectors, but we’re all going to have our own subjective meaning based on our own biases. That’s subjective meaning. But the anatomy of meaning is why we give it that meaning. What is it that drove that meaning for me? And why do I keep adding emotional investment to it? Because it’s filtering and changing everything I do and how I see the world. So, my quote is, “Those who control the meaning for the tribe control the movement of the tribe.”

So, whether that tribe is your family, whether that tribe is your organization, or whether that tribe is a nation. Let’s give you one simple example. January the 6th. You know exactly what year I’m talking about. That was somebody controlling the meaning for the tribe that controlled the movement of the tribe. Now, whether you agree or disagree with that situation is not my concern here. I just want you to understand it from a place of understanding the anatomy of meaning. So, there are people today who are in jail for doing things which was, in some cases, just being on site because somebody tampered with their anatomy of meaning. Somebody tapped into their anatomy of meaning and had them in a place where they would get arrested, and now are serving jail time because somebody else controlled the meaning. If we don’t control our own meaning, we will end up going down paths of deep regret.

Dr. Nate Regier:

I want to break something down there because when I was studying some things you’ve written, I didn’t catch this nuance, which is yes, those who control the meaning control the movement of the tribe. And I took it as if, “So, that’s what we’re supposed to do.” But what you’re saying is be very careful because that could take us down the wrong path. It’s not necessarily bad to try to control the meaning, but we need to really understand our own anatomy of meaning as well and where it comes from.

Dov Baron:      

You’ve absolutely got it. So, we need to understand this at a national level, at an organizational level, but we have a responsibility at a personal level because the anatomy of meaning you have is not the truth, it’s just yours. I want to put a pause there so people pay attention to what I just said. The anatomy of meaning you have is not the truth, it’s just yours. It’s not right, it’s not wrong. It’s neutral, but it’s what comes out of it that can be very positive or very negative.

Dr. Nate Regier:

So, what we’ve talked about so far is how important meaning is, and that meaning, there’s a subjective experience of that. And it comes from a deep place, emotional source code, which we’re going to talk about here in a little bit. And we really need to understand this, where our meaning comes from, because if we don’t and if we don’t have control over our own anatomy of meaning, then we’re susceptible to some of these really scary things that can happen, or big movements where we end up doing things and finding ourselves in places because we let someone else define that for us.

Dov Baron:      

We’re going to get manipulated. That’s the simplicity of it. And if you want to understand it at a simple level, as I said, you can look at January 6th. But you can also look at it at a social media level. So, I wrote a piece about last year I think, and it was called Algorithms of Rage that I wrote. And on that I talked about how the algorithms are determining the meaning for us, that we’re allowing that. We’re allowing this clickbait imagery to come at us and say, “Well, that’s the meaning,” and we don’t hang around enough to say, “Is that true for me?” So, we see this guy with orange type skin and a bad hairdo, and we go, “He’s a bad guy.” Well, is he?

I’m not saying he’s not, but is he? And we see this other guy who goes up against him and competes and we say, “Well, he’s a good guy.” Well, is he? Or is there nuances in there that you will have to not be lazy about? So, that’s part of the problem, is we’re intellectually lazy and the algorithms have made us this way. So, we have to pay attention and say, “Hold on, take a minute.” Because sometimes my wife looks at me in a way that I feel like she’s really pissed off at me and she’s not. She’s just got gas. It’s an interpretation, it’s not truth.

Dr. Nate Regier:

This might be a good segue to emotional source code because in our work, we talk about Compassionate Accountability, and a lot of it comes down to I think that humans are also emotionally lazy, which means we don’t want to take full responsibility for our anatomy of meaning. And that means to own it, to examine it, to declare the narrative, to challenge the narrative, to talk about our narratives. So, let’s go deeper. Will you share a little bit about what you call the emotional source code?

Dov Baron:      

Yeah, thank you for asking. I appreciate it, Nate. So, it seems like it’s very complicated, so there is complexity to it. But at a simple level, here’s what it is. So, right now as you take this down, you can take it down in five simple notes. So, at the top level is behavior. So, people say, “I want to change my behavior.” And behavioral experts, I’m trained there, I did that stuff for people, and found it didn’t stick. And people go, “Why didn’t my behavior stick? I went on the diet. I lost the weight. Why did I go back to donuts?” So, it’s a behavior. Behavior, if you change it, rarely does it stick because it’s not enough. So, we go, “Okay, so what’s driving that behavior? What’s below behavior?” Well, below behavior is beliefs and values. So, beliefs and values. And you’ve also got paradigm. So beliefs, values, and paradigms. So, a paradigm is a collection of beliefs, and a value is the emotional investment you have in that paradigm. Now, unfortunately, most of our values are societal.

They’re not maxims which are subjective. We don’t deeply examine them. We go, “Well, I value family.” Well, okay. What does family mean? Because I value family, too, but it doesn’t mean anything to do with blood in my case. In your case, you might go, “It’s absolutely blood.” And it’s not right or wrong, it’s just different. So, below behavior is the values and belief systems. And people go, “Okay, well can I do values work?” Yes, you can do values work. “And I can do beliefs work.” Yes, I’m an NLP master. I can teach you how to do that. “Will it stick?” Sadly, no. “Oh, well, what do you mean?” So, what’s below that? Well, below that is identity. Now, you know this, Nate, better than most. Below that is identity. So, identity is so deep and powerful that this happens. When you think about identity, and you might go and say, “What’s your identity?” And you might struggle. You might say, “I’m a Christian.” You might say, “I’m a CEO.” But all these things are labels. They’re not identities. Identity is so powerful that it matters more than life itself to you.

Now you’re going, “Oh, that’s ridiculous, Dov.” Hold on a second. Have you ever heard of a suicide bomber? And they go, “Yeah.” So, what’s more important? Life or identity? “Well, that’s not true for me.” Isn’t it? Isn’t it? At a deep level, it is. So, it’s really understanding that identity is what we cling to as our life. We can’t bear it. The people who go through deep, deep regret and sadness is because their identity didn’t work out. They come to a place and going, “I thought I was on this path of meaning and purpose and blah, blah, blah, and now I’m 70.” Doesn’t mean anything because the identity was false. The identity was given to them, and they clung to it. “I’m a PhD. I’m a doctor. I’m a billionaire. I’m a something,” and then you’re not. So, there’s these falls from identity that happens to people all the time. I was teaching in Tennessee last week with a very Christian group, and we were talking about the fall of Jimmy Swaggart back in the day.

Here’s this great Christian guy, and he’s speaking all the things, and then we find out, well, he’s snorting coke off hookers. And it’s like, “Hold on a second. That identity fell apart.” Well, because it’s not real. It’s an identity. So, we have to examine the identity. Now, below identity, there’s two more levels, and we have to go now from… So we’ve gone 5, 4, 3. Now we’ll go to 1, and we’ll jump back up to 2, and then we’ll run upwards. So, we go to one, is emotional source code. The base of emotional source code, which is what you were born into and what you’ve marinated in. So, you’re born into an environment, and you get a set of beliefs from that. And in order to survive, you take on certain ideas and you go, “Well, I had a lovely childhood.” Yeah, but you still had to survive. Your mechanism inside of your brain, your neurochemistry is designed to help you survive. And your parents are the god and goddess of your life when you’re little. They tell you when to go to bed and when to get up.

Even if you’re not tired, but you got to go to sleep. You go outside. You got to get up. They tell you when to eat even though you’re not hungry and tell you when to stop eating even though you’re still hungry. They have a lot of power. They know why the sky is blue and the grass is green. So, you see them as god and goddess. So, everything that’s in that environment, including people of power and authority, not just parents, it could be older siblings or grandparents or kindergarten teachers, they form your emotional source code about the way you feel emotionally about the world and how to stay alive and survive in it. From that, you form the anatomy of meaning, your original anatomy of meaning. So you say, “People with mustaches are scary.” We’re like, “That’s totally irrational. Why would you say that?” They don’t know. But early on in those formative years, somebody with a mustache was very mean to them. So, we form these irrational senses of meaning.

That sense of meaning now stacked on top of the emotional source code tells me who I need to be in the world in order to be safe. So now, I’m back in identity. And because this is who I need to be in the world in order to be safe, I’ve got to adopt these beliefs and these values. So, “I’m a right-wing Neo-Nazi because that’s the only way to survive.” Not because I ever thought about it, not because I’m a horrible human being, but because this is how it’s evolved out of the original emotional source code. “And as a result, I wear a swastika and I do a Sieg Heil salute.’ Is that because of who you are, or is that because of this stack of your emotional source code? That’s what the emotional source code is in the simplest form I can give it.

Dr. Nate Regier:           

Well, thank you. I get it. And I appreciate you going down and then back up. Man, triggers a lot of things for me, a lot of things that I’ve got swirling around, but a lot of things. I can’t wait for an offline conversation about this. So, you shared a couple examples about how you’re applying it in business. And one of the dynamics we’re seeing, and I’d love for you to speak to this through your lens, is more than ever through the pandemic, it revealed to us that we have to attend to both compassion, we have to tend to the human being, but we also have to get stuff done. And never before have these two seemed to be in so much tension. How do we reconcile this human relationship side of workplaces with this ever-increasing push for productivity and results? A lot of people think that these two can’t coexist, or somehow you have to choose between them. Where does this come from?

Dov Baron:      

So, where it comes from is the fact that we are tribal. It’s a great question, by the way. I just want you to know that it’s a great question. I expected a great question from you, by the way, because I know you. Basically, human beings are tribal. It’s not my opinion. That’s psychology. We’re tribal. We grew up in tribes. We’ve lived in tribes for as long as we’ve been around. Okay, so we are looking for a tribe. The pandemic made it evident how lonely people were. Now, people go, “Well, so that was the pandemic. All the isolation.” No, no, no. The isolation just made it pronounced. Before that, people were deeply lonely. They just were so damn busy they could distract themselves from it. The distraction went away, and they suddenly realized, “Oh my God, I feel emotionally isolated, and I don’t have a tribe. I don’t feel connected.”

And when we sat at home, we went, “Why the hell am I going to work again? I’m trying to get a bigger house and a bigger car? I don’t care. It suddenly it doesn’t matter as much as I thought it did. And I’m going to move out of the city and I’m moving into the country, and I’m going to live out there because I can buy a house at half the price. And I can have my kids run around, and I can actually spend some time with them. And I can take my kids to school because I have time for that now.” So, the personal value system woke up, and we realized that we’ve been deeply lonely. The challenge is we still are. We’ve done some things about it, but we still are. And we realized that going into work, into workforces, we were required to take off our personal head and put on our professional head, that we were not allowed to be ourselves and we were meant to fit in.

Well, you know me, Nate, I love a pretty shirt. I like a nice shirt and I like to buy nice shirts, but if I’m going to buy a nice shirt, I’ve got to pull something out of my closet to put it in or else it’s going to get wrinkled because I’m going to have to fit it in as opposed to giving it a place to belong. And that’s what’s happening with our corporate cultures. People have felt like they had to fit in, so they’ve hidden parts of themselves. They’ve disenfranchised themselves in different ways to fit into this tribe or this organization. People don’t want that anymore. They’re not willing to do it. And this is why I’ve created… I’m writing a book right now called Creating Cultures of Belonging, and I’ve done a course called Creating Cultures of Belonging. It’s very much for companies and organizations, but it’s very much a personal development training because you’re realizing, “I’ve got to belong.”

Now, the interesting thing about it is when people belong, they’re far more productive. They become evangelical for the organization. “Come work here. It’s great.” Because this idea we, in our generation, have had around work-life balance is complete BS. Careful there. It’s complete BS because it doesn’t exist, and millennials and Gen Z know that, so they want work-life blend. What is that? “I want to be working with my friends. I want to bring my friends to work here.” And we used to worry that they’re not going to be productive. They’re 23% more productive when they’re working in an environment where they belong. So, it can come together and must come together. And it is our responsibility as leaders to create these cultures of belonging where people can be extremely productive, but know that they’re home.

Dr. Nate Regier:

Yeah. I guess one of the positive outcomes of the pandemic is revealing some of these things and starting these conversations, and giving opportunities to talk about it. The emotional source code and anatomy of meaning makes a lot of sense in theory. And I’m curious, when you’re just having a practical conversation, you think about some of our listeners. They’re like, “Okay…” What would you suggest the first thing people start thinking about, start reflecting on, or start working on if they want to apply some of this?

Dov Baron:      

So, at a very simple, practical level, I’m going to tell you my religion. And I’m going to try and convert you to my religion. Are you ready? Now, some of you’re ready to switch off right now. Just breathe and be with me for a moment. My religion is curiosity. If you want to put this all into practice, embrace curiosity. And by curiosity, let me be clear. Curiosity is not asking questions. Sure, that’s part of it, but it’s not it. Too often we’re asking questions in order to validate that we’re right, or to validate that somebody else is wrong. That’s not curiosity, that’s questioning. Curiosity is discovering a deeper meaning in the thing that’s happening. So, when you get an answer, it’s like, “Oh, really? Tell me more about that. Oh, why is that?” That will lead you to empathy. And you know this better than most, it will lead you into deep empathy. It will lead you into deep compassion for that human being. And you can sit with somebody who completely disagrees with you on some fundamental part and find out what you have in common.

Find out where you connect. That’s where it really comes together is we like to do this tribal nonsense and say, “Well, everybody’s so different than me or our tribe is…” No, no, they’re not. I promise you, they’re not. The fundamental Christian, screaming at the top of their voice is no different than the fundamental right wing, Neo-Nazi or the fundamental “Save the planet” person on the left. There’s something driving them that you have in common. And maybe you call it family, and maybe you call it our culture or whatever you call it. But finding that commonality, that’s where we start to create cultures of belonging, is looking at what we have in common. So, it’s not isolating a tribe, but creating these cultures of belonging. You can do this in your own family. Think about somebody in your family. Thanksgiving’s coming up. That person, you’re going, “Ooh, I don’t know if we can invite them.” Invite them, and instead of listening to their opinions, listen for what you have in common.

Dr. Nate Regier:           

Preach. Preach on. I’m convinced. So, your curiosity is what ignited this passion for you at age 14 when you wondered. And instead of dismissing, instead of judging, you wondered and you went on a learning journey. And now, you’re helping. You’re preaching the message of curiosity as our way through. People often ask me when we’re working, it’s like, “Oh, we got so much struggle and suffering in the world. How can we get rid of it?” And I often tell them, “The purpose of life is not to get rid of the struggle. The purpose of life is to find the meaning through the struggle with each other.”

So, I love your message of belonging, and it comes back to the way we define compassion, which goes back to the Latin root, which means “with suffer.” It’s about we have to do these things together. So, thank you for your message. There are so many different angles we could go, Dov. And I hope people get in touch with you, and you have so many great resources, too, with your podcast and with articles people can download. You mentioned your analysis of Putin. It’s a fascinating article, looking at the emotional source code and making a lot of sense of what’s going on. How can people get ahold of you, learn more about what you do?

Dov Baron:      

Thank you for asking, Nate. Appreciate the opportunity. The easiest place, of course, is my website, which is D-O-V-B-A-R-O-N.com. Dovbaron.com. Easy to find. My name, Dov Baron, if you search me, there’s no other Dov Barons. I’m going to be easy to find. I have two podcasts, as you said, Nate. You can find it on Apple. Just put in my name. And I also do about 40 interviews a year, so you’ll find me there on other people’s shows. I write for LinkedIn. You can find my newsletter on there. Every Tuesday, there’s a brand new article, and it’s pretty in-depth and definitely dives into some of the geopolitical explanations of this as well as the cultural pieces around it. And I also write for Medium. I also have a platform on there called The Curious Leader, and my new course is called Creating Cultures of Belonging. So, Creating Cultures of Belonging. You can find that on CourseifyX. Spell the word “course” and then put if “ify” I-F-Y on the end, forward slash “belonging.” Courseify.com/belonging. You can find out about my course. Right now, it’s in soft launch, so it’s actually available at 50% off.

So, it’s really great and it works for individuals and it works for organizations. So, those are all the resources that you can get a hold of me. And you can also do something really crazy. You could email me. Dov@dovbaron.com. I know it’s crazy. That’s my email address. Write to me because you know something, Nate puts together this podcast. I have two. I know the work that goes into it. And he puts this on, and it’s a pretty much… As a podcaster, I know it’s a one-way street. Oftentimes we don’t hear back from people. You are one of the thousands of people listening, and you don’t realize that Nate is like, “Well, is this having an impact?” You have to write to him. You have to tell him. You have to write to me. Tell me what you got out of the show, what you’re going to do with it. Go on iTunes, go on Apple Podcast. Go on wherever you listen to podcasts. Write a review. Say something. Share it with others. Don’t hoard. Share the resources with others. Make a difference. Nate puts a lot of time and energy and commitment into bringing you these resources. Appreciate that. Recognize that. Write in to him and do the reviews. Share it with your friends. It’s important.

Dr. Nate Regier:           

Well, thank you. And we’re going to have all of those links in the notes, so you can just click on them and go to all those different resources. Dov, as always, your passion, your enthusiasm, and your incredible depth of knowledge and thinking about this is really, really amazing. Thank you for sharing your gifts with our listeners.

Dov Baron:

Thank you, sir. It’s a pleasure and an honor.

Dr. Nate Regier:

Here are my top three takeaways from this deep and inspiring conversation with Dov Baron. First, fitting in will not keep your people. Humans are tribal and need to belong, but we are extremely lonely, and the pandemic only exposed how bad it was. The cult of specialization at work and forcing people to keep their work and personal lives separate creates a culture of fitting in, which is the opposite of belonging. Instead, Dov argues that we need to make sure people belong in all their forms. He quoted research showing that when people feel they belong, they’re 23% more productive.

Second, those who control the meaning for the tribe control the movement of the tribe. In recent years, we’ve seen evidence of this, a tribe moving in dangerous directions because someone else controlled the meaning of that tribe. If we don’t control our own meaning, we can end up going down paths of deep regret. We will get manipulated. So, it’s important that we understand and own our own meaning and realize that it’s not the truth, just our own truth.

And finally, curiosity is not asking questions. Most questions just seek to validate that we’re right. Curiosity is about discovering deeper meanings in the thing that’s happening between people. This leads to empathy, compassion, and learning what we have in common. Cultures of belonging start with finding what we have in common. And Dov urged listeners, this holiday season, when you’re gathering with people you might not like, focus on what you have in common instead of their opinions on things.

Hey, everybody, I hope you enjoyed this episode of On Compassion with Dr. Nate. If you haven’t already, I invite you to buy a copy of my new book, Compassionate Accountability: How Leaders Build Connection and Get Results. Buy multiple copies and unlock some great bonuses, like a free keynote presentation. When you buy the book, you’ll get access to a host of resources to bring more compassion to your workplace. Find out more at compassionateaccountabilitybook.com. If you’ve already read the book, I’d really appreciate an Amazon review. Thanks!