Courtney Smith: Enneagram Coach and Author

25:16Courtney Smith:But I do think that's a gift of mine. And I think also another gift of mine, which I think I brought to Planned Parenthood, is this idea of what is our five, 10-year vision? And then how do I come back down to an immediate decision that we've got to make here about a particular board member or about a particular budget and that being able to hold a vision and then being able to then come back down into how does it inform very particular specific decisions? And can we do both, have the vision and then also be down in the here and now in terms of what we're going to do next? So talk to me a little bit about that decision that you made around getting a master's in public health from NYU.

26:02What was the experience like for you? And was the reality what you had envisioned?

26:09Courtney Smith:Yeah, I mean, I think for me, I mean, I really, really care about reproductive justice. And so to be able to work in a field where I was so committed to the mission, I mean, that was an amazing experience for me. And being a mom with really small kids and not working, I mean, I think one of the things we've been talking about is I'm certainly aware of the external voices around status, sunk costs, making the money work, all of these different voices that inform our decisions. And at the same time, you know, the voice within is hard for me to ignore. And the decision to not work or not to do paid work as a young mother, it ultimately became very hard for me and really was a great opportunity for me to really look at like, why had I made that choice?

27:01Courtney Smith:Why had I opted out? And I had done it because I thought it was the right thing to do for my family. And one of the things I learned was, yeah, but if I'm not happy over here and I'm getting resentful and I'm feeling obligated, I start showing up as a mom that's actually not in service of her family at all. And so there really was like a year of coming to terms with what I was doing, quote, in service of my family, because it was not also in service of me, was ultimately backfiring. As I kind of came to that awareness, I had gone through the experience of doing some school for medical school. I could feel how intense that was.

27:43Courtney Smith:That didn't seem like the right fit. At the same time, I loved my work for Planned Parenthood and I loved being in that field. And so it really did allow me to see kind of a new path, which was public health. Public health really is this intersection of business and medical perspective with a really strong mission of serving populations. My experience getting the master's at NYU in public health, I mean, it was really, really wonderful because I think, I mean, I love mathematical economics. I loved going to law school. And I would have said that my conviction about being at NYU, getting a master's in public health was the highest it had been in comparison to any of my other educational experiences.

28:30Courtney Smith:And I was really just kind of fully lit up by every single one of my classes. And I knew how to take a class on the social determinants of health that was very abstract. But because of my experience at Planned Parenthood, because of my McKinsey thinking, I knew how to take that class and go after a problem that was interesting to me and to write a paper that was interesting to me. And so even as I loved law school and even as I loved studying economics and it's informed a lot of who I am. My master's of public health was probably the place where I just was the most engaged. And I think it was because I was an older student.

29:11Yeah, you were an adult making an adult decision. And now you're addressing this with the full scope of everything you know as an adult, opting in, understanding what this really means, what time away from your family means, where you're going with this, how it has application in the real world. Like, no wonder you loved it. That sounds dreamy.

29:32Courtney Smith:Yeah. I really want to champion that extended decision-making process and that it felt really different for me to make that call as a 33-year-old than the decisions I'd made as a 23, 25, even 27, 28-year-old. Meaningfully different experience. So talk to me a little bit about what you were working on with that master's. Did you have a clear vision of how you wanted to use it? Or did you feel like it would unfurl down the road? I was really interested in reproductive justice, in particular, women's health more broadly. That was really the content that I was passionate about. And then, you know, there are a bunch of core skills, qualitative research, social determinants of health.

30:19Courtney Smith:You know, there's all these different classes that you take that are foundational skills that because I was so interested in women's health, as long as I could connect each one of those skills to this is how I can link it to the field of women's health. And I was still doing volunteer work at Planned Parenthood. By this time, I had three children. And as part of the final project there at NYU, I ended up getting a job in the population health department at Maimonides, which is a huge safety net hospital in Brooklyn. And so that became kind of the culminating project where I combined all of these different skills I'd been learning in public health.

31:01Courtney Smith:And I eventually ended up working there for a couple of years. At what point then does COVID hit? Yeah, I'm winding down my public health degree at NYU. I'm now working at Maimonides. and specifically at that moment in time, this is like 2019, 2018, the Affordable Care Act has been passed by Obama a few years prior. And part of the Affordable Care Act was a provision that certain states could take federal funding that they had been already receiving and they could use it to create innovative projects that actually were in service of long-term healthcare outcomes, rather than just sort of the standard fee-for-service model that most of healthcare is built upon.

31:49Courtney Smith:And New York State applied for a really big grant from the federal government under the Affordable Care Act to do some of that innovative systems development. And when they did that, Maimonides became one of the hubs through which those innovative programs were piloted and extended into the broader Brooklyn healthcare market. And so I began looking at some of those innovative healthcare projects, again, from this intersectionality of how do we make this work from a business perspective? What are the new regulations that are coming down? How do we pay attention to those and translate them to an operational context?

32:32Courtney Smith:How do we get doctors and nurses who think of themselves very much in terms of mission as opposed to business process? How do we get them on board? And then from a mission perspective, what populations is this in service of? And are we actually able to deliver on that? That was a really, really meaty project for me that I was really, really lit up by. At the same time, our family decided that we wanted to move to California and landed here just a couple months actually before COVID hit. And then COVID hit and I was all of a sudden running like a little school for my three children. So I ended up not working again for a little over a year as I supported my kids.

33:13Courtney Smith:But one of the things that was really interesting about that for me is this decision to go back into the workforce. As I had made that decision five or six years ago, you know, I was really supported at the time by a lot of coaches and really started doing my own kind of personal growth, personal transformation work. It really became sort of like a side hustle of this work really changed my life and really helped me make much better decisions. And because I was running that work a lot in the background for myself when COVID happened and I couldn't continue to do my public health work, I came out of COVID with people starting to ask me more and more about coaching and personal transformation.

34:00Courtney Smith:And that became yet another organic pivot for me, which is I've always been a consultant and I've always helped organizations and people make decisions. And now another lens that I'm providing to that is not just the lens of like regulatory legal issues, medical issues, but from a human perspective, from a personality perspective, what's getting in the way inside you of making the right decision and how do we unlock and work with that? And how do you unlock and work with that? Well, that's what I do. I have a bunch of tools. One of them is this thing called the Enneagram, which is a personality system that I've become extremely passionate about.

34:46Courtney Smith:I've been studying for well over a decade. I really look at human beings through the lens of what are your habits of personality, your habits of showing up in the world. And when we can name those habits, we are able then to see in what ways you're showing up out of habit versus showing up with intention. And so that's one of the big things that I do when I work with folks individually or in team contexts is help them learn those patterns so that then they can pull away from those patterns 15, 20 % of the time, because that means that they're being more intentional, which is what most people are looking for.

35:31How did you first learn about Enneagrams? And also for anyone who is not familiar, who doesn't listen to Amy Poehler's podcast, where she discusses this on a regular basis, can you explain a little bit more about it?

35:46Courtney Smith:So the Enneagram is a personality system. It has a lot of very old documents that go back several thousand years in terms of Western traditions, in terms of studying what it means to be a human being. And so it's a very, very rich tradition. It comes to us in the last 50 years, however, as a system of personality. And some people might know Myers-Briggs, some people might know Gallup Strength Finder. There's all kinds of different personality systems out there. Under the system of the Enneagram, at the highest level, there are nine different types of people. And then it gets more complex and more nuanced if you want to get into the weeds of it.

36:27Courtney Smith:But at the simplest level, there are nine different types of people. And where I think the Enneagram has a lot of its oomph is it is looking at traits like, how extroverted are you? How punctual are you? How organized are you? How spontaneous are you? It's looking at some of those outwardly manifesting behaviors to help figure out which of those nine types you are. But even more importantly, it's looking at what are the habitual stories that you tell yourself about the world that cause you to manifest those traits. And it's looking at personality, not just at the level of observable behavior, but the underlying foundation of habitual thoughts and feelings or stories that support those traits.

37:21Courtney Smith:And so each of the nine types, we talk about it as different personalities, but you almost might think of it as like different worldviews, different ways of making sense of reality. And a little bit like that David Foster Wallace joke, like there's an older fish who's swimming by a younger fish and he says like, how's the water boys? And the younger fish are like, it's great. And then, you know, he swims off and the younger fish look at each other and they're like, what the hell is water? And the Enneagram really understands that there's all of these often unspoken, almost pre-verbal assumptions that we have that we don't even know that we have about how the way the world works.

38:05Courtney Smith:We all have those scripts and stories. That's part of the human experience, but because they are unquestioned and kind of taken for granted, they end up limiting and constraining us in a way that we're not even aware of. And so the study of the Enneagram is to begin to get some language and awareness of what those limiting stories are so that we have the flexibility and the range and the ability to see the world beyond them. does someone's Enneagram change over time or is that fixed? Yeah, this is a great question. I've got like a couple different layers of answers. The first is, of course, nobody really knows.

38:48Courtney Smith:Most people who study and work with the Enneagram think that your type is fairly static. And I'll answer it in the context of what I was just describing, which is when you think about the idea of like default programming in the brain of what are sort of absent, you know, doing work, slowing down, being intentional, what are the default grooves, the key stories that you use to make sense of the world. When you think about like how that happens, like at a brain level, it is possible to get movement and flexibility, but it's very unlikely that you're going to develop a new set of default stories.

39:27Courtney Smith:And that's really what the Enneagram type is all about. So, I mean, my whole vocation at this point is predicated upon the idea that people can change and people can grow and evolve. And so there's a ton of room and flexibility within your Enneagram type to look healthier versus less healthy. But kind of the default programming that you're working with is there. You got what you got. And there's lots to do within that, but you're not going to get a new program. The other thing I'll say is, you know, these online tests, even though I use them as a starting point when I work with clients, you know, I don't think that they're particularly accurate on their own.

40:06You mean you get what you pay for, which is if you're getting something free out of context on the Internet, maybe it's not the fullest expression of it. Is that what you're suggesting? Right. And I get it.

40:16Courtney Smith:I get it. Like, let's start somewhere. But sometimes the question around like, well, my Enneagram type keeps changing. It's because of the inaccuracy of the tests, as opposed to you, your Enneagram type itself is all over the place. Got it. That makes sense. Wait, can you tell me what yours is? Yeah. My type is called the loyal skeptic. And, you know, I sort of think of each of the nine types as there are different parts of what it means to be human that we are all wrestling with as human beings. and you can think of each type as having like a preoccupation with one of those particular questions.

40:51Courtney Smith:And we look at all of them, but there is one that we keep returning to over and over and over again. The key question for the loyal skeptic is how do I make decisions in the face of the unknown? And there's a part of me that leans into skepticism as a tool for pushing back and examining and kicking the tires on information, sources, traditions, points of view. And I'm doing that so that I can make a better decision. And at the same time, there's a part of me that is loyal to, I want to make a good decision. I want to make a good decision that is good for me, is good for the people I care about, is good for the world at large, is good for the community and the organizations that I'm part of.

41:42Courtney Smith:The loyalist is about, I want to be of service in my decision-making. And then the skepticism is about how do I trust information to guide me in that decision-making? And so even as I've made all these different changes in my life, like if you were to listen to the conversation we've just had, you can really feel like one of the core themes of my whole life has been, how do I make good decisions? And how do I help others make good decisions? And that's what I mean. Like my traits have changed and evolved, but the core question that I keep returning to over and over again is that one. That's so interesting.

42:20So you had said you'd been studying this on your own for quite some time. How do you go from studying Enneagrams in the system to actually becoming an expert to using that in coaching work, in consulting work? How did that happen?

42:36Courtney Smith:I mean, the first thing is I am lit up by ideas and I am lit up by learning. And so when this became a system that I got interested in for myself, I just started being really compulsive about it because that's what I do. And so I started reading exhaustively. And then there are a ton of teachers and experts within the field. I started going to their workshops. And then I was really lucky because when COVID hit, I reached out to Russ Hudson, who's one of the premier people in the field. And I got to spend some one-on-one time with him because he was not traveling and teaching nearly as much as he historically had been.

43:10Courtney Smith:That really upped my reps on my learning, being in one-on-one conversation with him and also just having done my work. And then, you know, it kind of organically unfolded. When do you decide that you're going to be an expert in something? And I think for me, the other thing that was really interesting to me about the Enneagram is, as I was sort of describing to you, it is a map for nine different lenses on reality. But ultimately, the way I hold it is it is a tool for change. It is not just a tool for describing who you are, but it is also a tool that is designed to support your unfolding. And there's an assumption there, right, that part of what it means to be a human being is to evolve and to emerge.

43:56Courtney Smith:And because of that, as I was learning the Enneagram, I was also very compulsive about what were the tools, what were the coaching modalities, what were the coaching techniques that when combined with the Enneagram really unlocked change. So I started working with Conscious Leadership Group, Diana Chapman, Jim Detmer, Byron Katie, Katie Hendricks. I just started getting really compulsive around like, what were the tools for growth that worked for me? And if they worked for me, I wanted to like kind of go all in on them. And part of why I think I started getting traction with others in terms of like, there's a distinctive way in which you hold and teach the Enneagram is because I've been so passionate about combining it with a tool to help you make change so that it doesn't just feel like...

44:51Diagnostic and nothing.

44:52Courtney Smith:Right, right. Now what? Now what do I do with it? So walk me through how you work with a client, whether that's an individual or a small leadership team at a company. Yeah. So a lot of my practice is word of mouth at this point. And either the organization or the individual is feeling stuck in a particular way. And so they're seeking information, guidance, advice, a lens that can unstick themselves. So people make change either because they want something that they can't get, or they're experiencing suffering or pain because of the way they're currently organized. We call that the change formula, but most people, I can help them a little bit with that, but that initial impetus needs to be there.

45:40Courtney Smith:That's one way people come to me. The second way people come to me is because of my expertise in the Enneagram. If that is an area of curiosity or an area of interest for you, oftentimes because of this dynamic growth-oriented approach that I use to it, I end up building a relationship with them. But initially they come because whether at an organizational level or at an individual level, we think that this lens will help us, you know, like see the team more clearly, see our strengths and weaknesses, help us have more collaborative communication. It's that kind of question. And then what is the process like when you start working with someone?

46:19Courtney Smith:When I work with small senior administrative teams, oftentimes, you know, that's done like kind of retreat or workshop style where there'll be like a full day on the Enneagram. And then we might do a half day on some tools, some coaching tools that you're going to use in combination with understanding your type. And then I like to be in regular contact with the team. And usually I need a champion, someone who's going to really lead that growth work that I work with individually. That's what it looks like at a corporate or organizational level. When I'm working with people one-on-one, we meet usually anywhere from every other week to once a month.

46:57Courtney Smith:And I sort of hold the perspective of you're coming to me with a particular area of your life where you want change. And I want to hold ourselves accountable to you feeling change. And at the same time, I want to have a bigger picture that this problem with your boss or this problem with your child or this problem with your partner is really here for you to understand yourself more clearly and more compassionately. And so I use the Enneagram or I use some of these coaching tools, not just to get immediate change or immediate shifting in the particular situation, but I want you to actually have a different lens on how you see yourself because that then creates the ability for us to get more sustaining change.

47:52Courtney Smith:That's not just about the particular. It's about I'm actually changing how I show up in life and I'm actually holding myself differently. The goal is for you to feel more resourced and to build your own capacity and capabilities. And so if two or three years from now, you feel like you're in a good place, that's a goal of mine. That not only have we solved the immediate problem that you came here for, but you have a whole broader toolkit that you can use. That's my goal. I love this. It's very exciting to me. Also exciting to me is the fact that in addition to the coaching work, you're also a writer.

48:34So you co-authored the book, Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness, and you also write an amazing sub stack newsletter called What We're Really Up To. Talk to me a little bit about the decision to expand in this way and how sharing your expertise in non-one-on-one or face-to-face settings enriches or changes your day-to-day.

49:00Courtney Smith:Yes, that's a great question. So Choosing Homeless Over Goodness is a book I co-authored with a woman named Elise Lunan. Elise Lunan wrote a book several years ago called On Our Best Behavior. That first book she wrote was a national bestseller. what Elise was looking at in her original book on our best behavior were the stories around gender that we have all inherited and the ways in which those stories end up limiting us. And when she wrote that bestseller, her audience came back to her and said, now that you've helped me see these assumptions that I didn't know I was subject to, what do I do about this?

49:36Courtney Smith:And so choosing wholeness over goodness is really taking the same tools that I use one-on-one with my clients in conjunction with the Enneagram, but now applying them to the stories around gender. And the upside of writing a book is that you do get to reach people in a way that face-to-face contact, there's just only so much scale you get out of that. Okay. So one thing that we like to do on this podcast is we ask everyone the same three final questions. And the first one is about mistakes because everyone makes mistakes in their career, but the world we live in is very Instagram highlight reel.

50:15Everything's perfect all the time. And that's not real. And I think it's really important for women to hear stories of other women making mistakes and then coming back from it. So I'm hoping that you can tell me about a mistake that you've made at any point in your career and what you've learned from it.

50:32Courtney Smith:So, I mean, I think one big mistake that I make over and over again in different ways is just because something isn't right doesn't mean the first thing that you come across as an alternative is the right thing to do instead. I see you. So, and this could go like all the way back to like growing up in Omaha and knowing I wanted to leave the Midwest and then my undergraduate degrees from Wake Forest. I don't think that was the best place for me. You know, I really made that decision from the place of like, it's not Omaha, so it's going to be great. And similarly, like the decision around going to medical school, which is like, this is not for-profit driven, so it's going to be great.

51:13Courtney Smith:So slowing down, I think for me is one of the big lessons. And the broader lesson is really about trust, trust that we can make mistakes, trust that we can pivot, trust that we're learning. I think that one thing that happens over here is kind of tolerating discomfort and tolerating pain or tolerating this situation isn't working for me for a long time. And then it kind of gets to a breaking point where it's like, I got to get out of here. This isn't going to work for me. And then you just kind of like jump. And this was kind of like a panic based decision rather than speaking up earlier, slowing down the whole process, not just around the decision to leave, but even earlier than that.

51:59Courtney Smith:What's my experience with this? In what way am I co-creating this? Could I speak up? Could I try different things? Considering myself an agent in shaping any career environment rather than just sort of taking it as is. And then my only decision is whether I stay or I go. So a lot of the folks who listen to this podcast are in their first lives and maybe they want to stay in the same industry, but do something different, or maybe they want to switch industries altogether, but they're scared. They're nervous about making that pivot. As someone who seems pretty fearless about pivots, what advice would you give someone who's feeling that way to help them move through it?

52:42Courtney Smith:I mean, I really get it. First of all, it is funny looking back on my life, like there's been a lot of pivots, but I really want to name, like I'm scared a lot of the time. One piece of advice I would give, and this is like kind of foundational to my coaching practice, is we are not going to make fear go away. I would sort of say fear is the intelligent response of the body in the face of the unknown. And so if we are going to learn and grow and take risks, part of what allows us to do that is shifting our relationship to fear in the first place, not expecting fear to go away, but holding fear differently.

53:20Courtney Smith:And so my advice would be, in what way am I letting fear drive my decision-making? And then to ask the question, if I weren't scared, what might I do differently? And then can I toggle back and forth between the two of them. Myself and often clients, both of those voices are important. Fear says, well, we don't know about this and we don't know about that and I'm scared this could happen. That makes a lot of sense to me. What does this person say who doesn't let fear drive? She says, we're going to learn so much. The only way we're going to grow is if we try this. And actually the truth is we could go backwards.

54:01Courtney Smith:And I would actually go back and forth like that, give these voices their due and also let them talk to each other, honor both of their perspectives and see what happens when they're allowed to be in dialogue rather than just going back and forth. I love that. Okay. My last question is my favorite question, which is if you could get into a time machine and go back in time and give your younger self some advice, what would you say? get out of your head and get into your body as quickly as possible and let your body be a voice in how you make decisions trust your body i love that courtney this has been such a pleasure on so many levels thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with me i have enjoyed every minute of this and i feel like i have like 47 000 more questions for you so please just continue to do interesting things so we can come back and do this again.

55:00Courtney Smith:This has been so fun for me to tell my life story. I really appreciate you being such a good listener and I hope it's been of service and valuable to others. Thank you.

55:15That was Enneagram coach and author Courtney Smith. For more inspiring interviews with women like Courtney, head on over to secondlifepod.com where we have so many more for you to peruse. If you like today's show, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to rate and review us. We love seeing you spread the word on social. And now you can tag us in your posts. We are at Second Life Pod on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. We always want to know who you're interested in hearing from on the show. So send in your requests to hello at secondlifepod.com or you can DM us on Instagram.

55:55I'm at Hilary Kerr. The show is at Second Life Pod. Our DMs are always open. I'm Hilary Kerr, and you've been listening to Second Life. This episode was produced by Hilary Kerr, Summer Hammeris, and Natalie Thurman. Our production assistant is Grace Ingram. Our audio engineers are at Treehouse Recording in Los Angeles, California, and our music is by Jonathan Leahy.