EP 122
Welcome fellow confidence crusaders, neuro nerds and success equalizers. This is your podcast, Real Confidence. I'm your host, Alyssa Dver, and I'll be sharing a bit of basic brain science, some surprising social secrets and a touch of tough love. Why? Because I believe confidence is everyone's fundamental right and choice. So let's get to it.
Alyssa:
I have met a new friend, made a new friend, I should say, and I'm really, I'm excited to have this interview, even though the topic could be a little bit sad, frightening. I don't know, even know the right words, but Debra Woog is with me, and her title is that she's a crisis navigation partner, and people
are like, What? What? What is that? So, Debra, maybe Welcome to the show. Of course, let's just what is that?
Debra Woog:
Thank you, and thank you for asking. And if you don't know, that's okay, because I made it up. So if you haven't heard about before, that's something that I'm working on now, as I start to promote this. So a crisis navigation partner is a person who helps someone in any phase of crisis, and I'll get into that more, whether the crisis is personal or professional or organizational. So what my team and I do is a company. People walk with them through whatever difficult thing is going on. Sometimes we work on a retainer basis through an organization, and sometimes people hire us individually. So it's both. We work with a lot of leaders, and by leaders, I mean they're corporate leaders, or they're leaders of the local PTA, or their leaders of their family, they just that they recognize they have agency, even under the difficult circumstances that they're going through.
And just to a little bit more about this, tell me, if it's too long, there's a two main roles in a crisis that I see. One is the what I call the person zero, kind of like the ground zero, you know, the person who is lying in the hospital bed, who is ill on the other wall is the point person who's the person who loves that person very much and is managing their care, not necessarily the daily activities of living, although it could be, but also helping them figure out where to go for treatment if there's a medical or mental health condition, for example. And so we work even more with those point people, because based on my own experience and our experience and all the clients I've been working with over the past 30 years, the experience of being a point person can be even more challenging than the experience of being the person zero in the crisis.
Alyssa:
Wow. All right, well, I met you because my very good friend lost her husband a couple of years ago. Was very it was an accident, very unexpected, and she has five children, and she's been muddling along and muddling, maybe a generous word, because it's been really hard. And then she has this wonderful experience where you came in and it was nobody was in person, zero situation. She's just trying to figure out, what do I do? And you're like, where are your taxes? Where is this? Where's that? Let me help, right? So the crisis doesn't have to necessarily mean somebody who's sick in a hospital, right?
Debra Woog:
Right? It could be so many different things. It could be someone who's organization is going through downsizing, and they have to tell everybody they're getting laid off. It could be someone who's going through a divorce or a loss of a level and loved one like your friend had, or somebody who is a parent of a kid who's having issues in school. Or could be somebody who's the daughter or son of elderly parents, and they need to figure out what's next for where they're going to live. So to me, a crisis is something where there's a lot of urgency, there's decisions that have to be made quickly, and where the decisions really matter. You know, it's not what kind of ice cream are we going to have tonight? Because that's maybe urgent, but, you know, in the big picture, I love ice cream. That's maybe not the most important thing. That's going to stick with them the longest.
Alyssa:
Yeah, that makes it important. Sorry to interrupt you for a second here, because, you know, one of the things that when I read about you, I was like, well, you're kind of a coach, but a coach doesn't deal with those that kind of urgency and, and, you know, literally, life dependent, you know, yeah, life changing, but not life dependent. And so what, how do you? How did you get to be in this role, and what kind of training, or what kind of credential, you know? So, yeah.
Debra Woog:
And it was unique, until six months ago, when I brought these associates and trained them. So my background, I studied psychology and at Wellesley College and psychology and American Studies, and then I got my MBA at MIT Sloan. And I was always really interested in where psychology and business come together. So everything I've done in my career has been about that. But between business school and college, I worked at Harvard Business School doing research in the organizational behavior department, and I first had my own business during that time, and so ever since then, I've been an organizational change consultant and organizational change researcher and leadership and career coach, and I have had leadership roles where I've helped to bring about change to organizations. And it was only about six years ago, where I realized this had been a theme of my work all along that I most wanted to keep pursuing and narrowing down my business. So my business is just turned, I think 27 years old. No, it just turned 26 years old.
Last month and six years ago, I refocused everything on being a crisis navigation partner. So in terms of credentials, I registered that trademark, and now it's a credential that I am developing as I'm teaching other people to do what I do the profession really comes from my own strongest skills and interests in my life, I've wished I had a crisis navigation partner, even though, when I was wishing it, I didn't know the name of it. I wished it when I was going through divorce. I wished it through when my son was diagnosed with type one diabetes when he was 10, and I was a solo parent and trying to deal with running my business and my other kid, and the kid who was literally in the hospital those first four days and then he was released in our lives were all different in terms of, you know, how we had to take care of him. So many times I've wished for this, and I feel so passionate about making sure that people don't have to feel on their own when they're going through really difficult circumstances. So that's how I came to do this.
What I do with my clients, I help them. There's emotional support. But I'm not a therapist, and I'm a big believer in therapy, so I recommend therapy when people need that. I recommend therapy to everybody. Who am I kidding? I think everybody can use therapy at any time, but I'm not pretending to be a therapist or a like a crisis hotline. What I do is partner with individuals and walk with them over time through what they're going through, so I get all the details of their story, and they can talk to me for as long as they want, and just use people's first names, and I know what they're talking about. Close friends can do that too, but when you're in a crisis, sometimes close friends and family members don't have the time capacity to do that, or it gets draining, or you don't want to complain about the same thing over and over again to those people, but beyond the emotional support, I combine that with a lot of practical things. So I'm a researcher, and you can outsource research projects to me, and I'll go find the information you need quickly in order to make a decision, put a pin in that. I can give you an example of that in a minute.
Another thing I do is work with people to strategize for difficult conversations, because another hallmark of crisis, aside from intersecting urgency and importance, is a lot of decisions have to be made, like I said before, and usually there's a lot of difficult conversations that come up in the process, too. I will go with people to have those conversations. I will advocate with for them and with them going to like a special-ed team meeting at a school, for example. And I connect. I'm just a natural connector. My business is called Connect to Corporation. Nothing makes me happier than to connect people to each other who can bring each other joy or professional services or comfort. So I have a lot of well vetted resources. I connect people to those, and that's what Maria and Cindy, my associate crisis navigation partners, do too. So hopefully that answers your question like, What do I really do?
Alyssa:
Very fully. So, you know, yes, I think we all should have therapy, and I think we should all have a Debra in our lives. So you're a psychology person too. So I, I feel very comfortable saying that, you know, there is this need for people to have this safety, security, psychological safety, all that good stuff, but during a crisis, you know, we also know that our brains go into survival mode, so we're not really very rational or innovative for that matter. And I can imagine that people are like deer in headlights. They don't even know what to do. So you know when, when you get called in to help. How long does it take before or maybe a dozen? Maybe it's like you do come in with a checklist, like, how do you get them in a place where they can start to think again and feel more confident that okay, Deborah's going to help me? I right, because they're in that.
Debra Woog:
That's a good question. Yeah. So I try to meet people wherever they are, but very often they are, as you just described, like the friend that you have, who is my client. I started working with her a few years after her husband passed away. Yeah, I am really good at executive functioning. Like I'm an executive over functioner With my mind so often in a situation like she was in, it wasn't that. It was the urgency of the grief. At that point, she was trying to organize life for herself and her five children after they'd gone through the initial time of mourning and handling all the urgency with her, there was less urgency and more importance. I came in and I said, okay, let's make a laundry list of everything that's on your mind, because when I first met with her, and I always meet people for free the first time we first met, and I said, Tell me what your thoughts are. What are you struggling with? And she said that she had so many things in her brain that she knew had to get taken care of, a lot of which her husband used to take care of, and now no one's taken care of them for a few years. And I said, Let's get them all out. So we often start with a laundry list. I organize the laundry list into categories while people are talking to me, I've done three of those this week with people, and they just like empty their brain, and then they feel relieved, and then we say, okay, what's most important to do this week? Which of these things can you do? Which of these things do you need help with? What can I do for you? So maybe I can take this off your plate and go find a person who can help you with this aspect of what's on your laundry list. And hopefully by the end of that process, the person feels relieved because they're no longer holding on to all of it up in their brains, and they know they're not holding it alone. And then we revisit that together over time. So the executive functioning piece is really big. That's often where people need to start.
Another example, I have a new client I just met with for the first time today. She came to me because her wife has three medical diagnoses that she's received recently, and they're trying to figure out where she should go for medical care that's at the intersection of these three different fields, medical sub specialties, specialties, and so that's where we started today. I had them identify, okay, what are the Give me up to three questions that you feel like you most need the answers to now, now being last week when they reached out to me, and then we'll meet on Thursday, and I'll bring you what answers I have, and then we'll go from there. So that's what we did today. So I just trying to meet people where they are. If it's we have to get answers to these questions, that's where we start with the research. If it's I have to have these really scary conversations, that's where we start with those preparing for those conversations. If it's I have to get these one zillion and three things out of my head. That's where we start, and then it we continue to do that, all that work, and sometimes it changes, you know, week to week or month to month. So I try to be flexible with people too. You can work with me for just one hour and never again. You can buy 10 hours with me and get like, 10% discount and or some people do, like, a six month, like, really intensive program with me, but I just, what I'm saying is, I'm trying to be flexible, so that, because every crisis situation is unique.
Alyssa:
absolutely, I would imagine, so, while they are unique, I can imagine, you know, every crisis has its own, its own identity, like a snowflake. You know, do you see any patterns in terms of type of people or, or, you know, like, it, does this happen with everybody? Or is it, you know, like, tell me a little bit. I mean, again, you'd probably reflective of your client base and network, but at the same time, I'm, I'm curious, like, who, who calls you in? Are there are. Are they? And when they call you in it sounds like they've admitted that they need help, which is a big deal for some.
Debra Woog:
Yes, that for sure. And not only admitting they need the help, but being having come to the determination that it's okay to have some, that they deserve to have some, because a lot of times people want to be like, I've got this myself. She's my wife. I will handle this all alone. And it's interesting, when I talked to that couple this morning, it was the wife who was more of the person zero, who has those three diagnosis. She brought up to me, she's like, oh, you know, my wife is this is harder for her. It's harder for her to be the person taking care of me than it is for me to go through this. So, oh, that I was sharing with you because.
Alyssa:
Because the kind of person is like, even my friend, the one that is your client, she kept saying to me, I got this. I shouldn't be asking people for help. And I had a really long conversation, whether we talk about a lot. Maybe she even brought it up in the pool that it's like when you ask people for help, not only because you really need it, but it actually makes the other people feel useful. So start asking for help. And she was like, liberated, right? But there is this sense of guilt, like, I don't deserve to be helped. Like, what is that?
Debra Woog:
Or I should have this all by myself. And honestly, I want to answer your question about what do I notice that people have in common? But honestly, I feel like just living in 2025 if you don't have a crisis, personally going on is overwhelming. There's so much that we're doing as family members, working professionals, trying to just juggle all of life. Then you throw what I think of as a meteorite that just landed in your yard on top of it, people are I'm seeing maxed out right now, even when they're not in crisis. So I feel like everybody needs and deserves some support. And if I can use aspects of my brilliance or my team members brilliance to lighten your load, then I feel that we are doing what we're meant to be doing. What I noticed these tend to be they're not always. Most of our clients are women. Most of our clients are very bright people. Most of my clients are really used to handling everything for everybody in all aspects of life already. They're not usually people who come to me as like puddles on the ground, and it was the first time they've ever tried to come into formation to accomplish anything. These are usually very accomplished people who are now beyond maxed out when you throw in the crisis that's come into their lives. So smart, working professionals, loving people, and for whatever reason, they tend to be in over adulting mode a lot, even before this crisis happened. So they tend to be people are usually so good at getting things done, they're like, too good at it for their own good, which I call hypercompetence. So they're often hypercompetent women, professionals.
Alyssa:
I can see that. And, you know, part of it, you know, we did a podcast a while ago on enablers. And, you know, the question is to was to people, are you enabling others to be dependent on you, basically, and then you get mad when they don't do their thing, right? That's probably a personality type of people who like you're describing, where you get to a point where you're like, I can't help anymore. I can't help anyone else anymore, because I need the help. But maybe in a lot of cases, they don't know where to look or don't feel like they deserve it. And I'm glad to hear that you're out there, and maybe we can help some other people listening to say, look, you know what? It's not even an oxygen mask at this point. You know if you if you're at that point where you can't help other people, that may be a time to call Debra.
Debra Woog:
Yeah, I had someone talk to me yesterday morning and say, My husband said that I'm addicted to helping other people and I'm not ever helping myself. And I was like, well, that's a pretty interesting insight that he had. What do you think about that? Just like, yeah, I help other people because I avoid dealing with my own stuff, because that's just too hard. It's much easier for me to give to others. And I said, I see that in you, and you deserve support too.
Alyssa:
Yes, yes and yes and yes. So here's what I'd like to do. I'm going to give just a few seconds to our sponsor to introduce themselves, but when we come back, I don't think you can necessarily predict crisis, or should try to predict crisis, but I would love you to share some ideas on Is there something somebody can do to be better prepared, as if they're. Person zero, person one, or person two, for that matter, because you know, having your name in their Rolodex, great, but is there something else that they could be doing? So we'll be right back.
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Alyssa:
Debra Woog, my new not just friend, but my new, hopefully best friend, because I love you. You are fabulous in so many ways, and what you do is so inspiring and wonderful, but before somebody is at that point where they have to call you, so to speak, is there something that all of us should be doing to be better prepared for what could be, you know, a flatlining of our own ability?
Debra Woog:
Yes, because I agree with what you said before the break. We can't predict when our crisis will be, but we can pretty much count on we all go through them, these inevitable, big challenges in life, they will come up. We just don't know which ones and when. So to me, there are three keys to navigating a crisis as effectively as possible. They are three Cs. I'm going to tell you what each word is, but these are all things to answer your question that I think you can work on now while you're not in crisis, and so you'll be in a better position when that inevitable, big challenge hits. So my three things are communication, capacity and community. And I could talk about each one of those things for hours. We don't have time for that.
So I'll say communication. Shoring up your communication skills and your building the muscle to say things that are hard to say is something you can work on at any point in life, whether or not you're right in the middle of having to have big, hard conversations. And I have a tip I can give you about that we can come back to in a second. So that is communication.
Second one capacity. If you are already walking around this earth completely maxed out and never replenishing your own fuel tank, we need to help you figure out how to expand your capacity now, because if you're maxed out as it is, what happens when the crisis, the meteorite hits? So you can work on in terms of capacity, looking at how you're spending your time, what is essential, what is not essential? How can you add to your life to make time feel like it expands. For me, for example, I love getting cranial sacral therapy. It lasts an hour when I get off the table, I feel like I just have, like, a five hour nap, even if I was awake through the whole thing. So there's things that you can do for self care, even that help expand your capacity. You have more space when it ends than you did when you started it.
And then the third thing is community, really identifying who are your extra pairs of hands, eyes, ears, the extra brains that you can turn to. I'm a very big believer that everyone, every single human on this planet, is brilliant in their own particular way. So if you can understand what your brilliance is, and then which is something I love to help people figure out, and then, better yet, you know what the brilliance is of the near and dear ones around you, then you'll have a better idea of how to turn to your community to support you when the meteorite comes down.
So those are three things, communication, capacity, community, and I do want the quick tip on the community. I love it. Yes, right. Okay, there's something called ring theory, where there's a set of picture a set of concentric circles like a dartboard, and the Bullseye is, in my parlance, the person zero and the person on the first ring right outside that Bullseye is the point person who's helping manage whatever is going on for them. And then the second ring out is maybe the point person's best friend or sister, or it could be anybody, somebody who's really close to the point person. Ring theory says, in terms of communication, you can complain to the outer circles from the person zero, but you're only allowed to comfort in towards the bullseye. So comfort in complain out, for example, if you this is a story someone told me during one of my talks, just like, oh man, that's really resonates with me so much because I was diagnosed with diagnosed with cancer a couple months ago, and my sister is all. All she can do is tell me how scared she is that I'm going to die, and I just can't handle that right now.
So in that scenario, the sister needed to talk to her best friends or other people who were not the ill sister, and share all those feelings there. But when she was with the person zero, really focus on how she could serve, how she could help from her brilliance and get all the emotional support that she needs and deserves from other places. This one tip about ring theory I have felt like helps people go, aha. I know what to do differently now. So when you were upset that your friend lost her husband suddenly in that accident, I imagine just having known you as little as I have that you are not the person to say, I have so much grief over your husband help me through my grief. And instead, you were able to come from your your own brilliance, and say, this is what I can do that's easy for me. Let me help you pick one of these five ways. How can I help?
Alyssa:
Yeah, it's great. Debra, this is only the tip of our conversations. I know for sure, but right now we're going to have to wrap up with letting people know best way to reach you and you know, for no other reason, I think I've served the community well just by bringing you to their attention. But if they do need your help and they want to get to you, what's the best way?
Debra Woog:
So my website is ConnectTwo.com so the number 2 spelled as a word, ConnectTwo.com you can go there to learn all about what we do. You can schedule appointments with us. You can follow us on LinkedIn. At connectTWO. You can follow us on Facebook. We're on Instagram also, and you can also email me if you want to reach out. [email protected].
Alyssa:
Oh, great. Carry on with this amazing mission work that you do. I'm so glad we've met and thank you for being on today's podcast.
Debra Woog:
Thank you so much for inviting me and having me. I'm so glad I got to connect with you.
Alyssa:
Before we totally wrap up. I want to let you know that full transcripts and show notes for this and other real confidence episodes can be found on www.AmericanConfidenceInstitute.com/podcast. I also want to remind you once again that the best way to get confidence is to give it to others, and you can do it just by liking and sharing this episode on your preferred podcast and social media channels. You can even give me some confidence by noting topics you'd like me to consider for the future. So for now, this is Alyssa Dver. Thank you for helping to bring more confidence to the world.
Master editing done by Ben Weinstein with original music performed and composed by Jeff Mitchell. Real Confidence is a production of American Confidence Institute. All rights reserved.
