Judy Ryan is a CEO, Consultant, System Developer, Author/Columnist.
She tells us that, “I have owned LifeWork Systems for 22 years and provide a comprehensive, responsibility-based workplace culture transformation process as well as leadership development and personal and professional development services to individuals and organizations.”
What were your initial years of growing up like? Tell us about your life before starting your professional journey and what inspired you to choose this career.
I have always been an idealist seeking to create a world in which all people love their lives. I started by working to improve my parenting skills and came upon a model that radically re-parented me and set me on my current course of work. When I learned how to align my best self with my core values and set out visions, miracles happened. While I came from a typical family, what was missing was faith in me and my siblings as noble individuals with our own path and wisdom. As a result, they inadvertently made us doubt our own internal knowledge which had a price to it. This is happening everywhere. It is the neglect of helping people feel seen, heard and a cause for delight.
Was there any turning point in your life that changed your journey? If so, what was it? Please tell us the backstory behind it.
As I learned what makes a person trust their personal power and how to help them to use it for positive intentions and with the right kind of support and experiences, I fell in love with the model we use. By the time my children were 5-years old, each of them could run a family meeting. We learned and taught them alternatives to punishment, bribing and otherwise controlling them so that they would feel empowered, lovable, connected and contributing. When my company does this in any setting, the results are the same. People become fully engaged, responsible, wise, trustworthy and caring with each other. Also, when I first started my company and defined our purpose – to create a world in which all people love their lives, I wrote my aligned values and then some aligned visions. One of my first was to help parents and teachers, and school administrators and neighbors and STUDENTS all learn this model together. I did not specify how but started with small projects in numerous school districts. One day, a woman I stopped by to thank at the district level over 110 schools asked me, “What would you do if money was no object?” I said, “Oh that’s easy. I just wrote it in one of my visions.” She said, “I like that idea. Here’s a $300K grant application. It’s due in two days and I don’t have time to write it. If you do so and I like it, I’ll sign off on it.” Within a month, we had a $300K project and in a few years more, an $800K project and we are for-profit! Anyway, I felt the alignment of my work with my calling and I’ve been passionate ever since.
Tell us about your goals, interests, and role models.
My goal is to develop a larger cadre of oversight consultants who learn our culture change process and help organizations to scale it within their businesses. They help prepare people at every level to participate in mixed groups where everyone takes turns leading small groups in a review of topics they learn individually. Then they further reinforce these concepts and tools by mentoring each other. The oversight consultants make sure they understand the model and tools, apply it properly and are able to sustain it ongoing. One goal we have is to build a 365-day mobile app with all of our tools in a reference section and then daily reminders of what they learned in our CultureEX transformation model.
Everyone has their own set of challenges when starting an entrepreneurial journey. Still, the most essential part for others to learn is how you deal with those. Would you like to share with us your challenges and your coping mechanisms?
One of the biggest challenges I face is helping people to learn what they don’t know that they don’t know. Also, even when prospects recognize our culture model, they don’t know how to begin to effectively implement it. We help them with both. So… getting the word out is still the biggest challenge. I cope by continuing to do the work and that helps me to stay motivated. Helping people to shift into truly happy, emotionally intelligent and trustworthy people (often who seemed they could not change and grow) is deeply satisfying. I also cope by talking with other thought leaders and change agents and learning about their work.
What impact do you feel you have been able to create with your work so far and how would you want to grow in the next few years?
We have helped otherwise struggling organizations (including massive school reform projects) to stabilize and experience both ROI and non-ROI improvements and outcomes. We have had stakeholders from all parts of an organization develop friendships and collaboration not possible before we brought our work to them. Most people in corporate or non-profit or government organizations say that what they learn helps them at home with their parenting and marriages. When we work with parents, teachers, students and administrators, they say that the skills we bring for kids help them with their coworkers. I want to scale what we have built based on best practices in education, assessments, and mentoring, and build on a digital platform so that it can be utilized with our oversight in any part of the English-speaking world, where there is openness to share power and develop all people at every level.
Would you like to share with our young budding women entrepreneurs the change you would like to see in the world if given an opportunity?
Women want and need to rise. We have a different preference for using power. Rather than power-over and power-under, win/lose and zero-sum, most women (and healthy men) want power-within, power-between, power-with and power-for. Until we all work toward that definition of power in emotionally and socially intelligent thinking and behaving, we will not be able to do the good the world needs. My hope is that every woman honors the call and learns how to celebrate, manage, support and guide power towards loving, creative and innovative ends. Then the world will come into balance. Then I will be living my purpose of creating a world in which ALL people love their lives! My primary vision is to do this in partnership with other like-minded, like-hearted thought leaders and change agents worldwide.
Women are a growing force in the workplaces worldwide, standing shoulder to shoulder with their male counterparts. There are cracks in glass ceilings everywhere, with many women breaking through to carve out a space right at the top of the pyramid. What are your thoughts about women’s leadership today?
The book – The Power Code is about the fact that when women don’t end up in executive roles in the numbers they are needed, it’s because we want the model of power-within and power-between mentioned above. As women know how to bring real systemic change, those millions and billions of people ready for win/win and mutual respect among all, will recognize HOW to do this and WHY to do this and we will bring about real, lasting, systemic change. We must be a huge part of helping bring about balance and the best of head and heart, people and processes, freedom with responsibility and holistic, purpose-based thinking and behaving. Then we will co-create creative, innovative and life-giving solutions and innovations.
With your grit and determination, you are making a considerable impact, breaking through, and serving as role models for many budding entrepreneurs. What would you want to say to our young women leaders/audience reading this?
Seek to put your stake in the ground for who you are most authentically at your best and know that this is what you CAUSE in the world. Then align your ways of being and behaving to always cause this for yourself and others. This will always be creating what you love and being who you like yourself to be the most while doing it. Then align your visions with this so that in that alignment, (with what ultimately is love when coming from who you are at your best) so that you create miracles that are not possible otherwise. Learn about real power and how it is not win/lose or zero-sum but can be practical applications of love instead.