S.O.S. (Stories of Service) - Ordinary people who do extraordinary work
From the little league coach to the former addict helping those still struggling, hear from people from all walks of life how they show up as a vessel for service and drive for transformational change. Hosted by Theresa Carpenter, a 29-year active duty U.S. naval officer who found service was the path to unlocking trauma and unleashing your inner potential.
S.O.S. (Stories of Service) - Ordinary people who do extraordinary work
Killing Busywork and Reclaiming Your Brainpower | Juliet Funt - S.O.S. #244
Imagine trading a wall of meetings for a calendar with white stripes where thinking, planning, and decisive action actually happen. That’s the shift we explore with Juliet Funt—keynote speaker, author, and founder of the Juliet Funt Group—whose work helps teams cut busy work and create the bandwidth to do their best thinking.
We dig into why white space isn’t idleness; it’s a performance tool. Juliet shows how modern work confuses motion with progress, burying judgment under email, back-to-back calls, and task churn. She shares simple, sticky tools that change behavior fast: the wedge (short breaks between commitments that let you digest and decide), the yellow list (batching non-urgent asks to slash message sprawl), and the re-entry day (protecting the first day back from leave so real disconnection is possible). The throughline is practical: waste less, think more, and reinvest saved time into the work that moves the mission.
We also examine a striking divide in the military: absolute precision outside the office versus sprawling inefficiency inside it. Juliet connects the dots between sleep, judgment, and readiness, arguing that saved hours only matter when they’re translated into training, rehearsal, and strategic thought. She makes a case for intact-unit change, embedding skills in PME and ROTC, and building norms that outlast leadership rotations. The goal isn’t fewer meetings for their own sake; it’s better decisions, stronger teams, and outcomes people are proud to ship.
If you’ve ever felt trapped by your calendar, this conversation offers a way out—and a way forward. Listen, steal a tool, and start small. Then tell us: which meeting will you shorten, and what will you do with the time you win back? Subscribe, share with a teammate who needs breathing room, and leave a review to help others find the show.
The stories and opinions shared on Stories of Service are told in each guest’s own words. They reflect personal experiences, memories, and perspectives. While every effort is made to present these stories respectfully and authentically, Stories of Service does not verify the accuracy or completeness of every statement. The views expressed do not necessarily represent those of the host, producers, or affiliates.
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What if you could go in time and look at all the things that you've accomplished within your lifetime and say, all those things were meaningful, they mattered, and I knew how to manage that time efficiently. Well, I gotta tell you, I don't think any of us can do it very well. But thankfully, there's people like Juliet Funt who work with companies, work with organizations, work with people to try to find that way to break free from the busy work that we always love to engage ourselves in and open up that space for more creativity. So, Juliet, how are you doing today?
SPEAKER_02:I'm great. It's it's fun to finally, finally be together. I've seen your stuff and we have such a line viewpoint. So it's going to be great.
SPEAKER_01:Awesome. Well, welcome everybody to the Stories of Service podcast, ordinary people who do extraordinary work. And I'm the host of Stories of Service, Teresa Carpenter. And to get this podcast started, as we always do, kick off it with an intro from my father, Charlie Pickard.
SPEAKER_00:From the moment we're born and lock eyes with our parents, we are inspiring others. By showing up as a vessel of service, we not only help others, we help ourselves. Welcome to Echo West, Stories of Service, hosted by Teresa Carpenter. Here from ordinary people from all walks of life who have transformed their communities by performing extraordinary work.
SPEAKER_01:And Juliet's work with your dad. Yes, yes.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, how adorable. And he has a good reading voice, too. Yeah, he's a uh voiceover or something.
SPEAKER_01:He he was a voiceover uh artist. Yes. Yeah, he was the voice for WNCI radio from 1960 to 1970. He was a DJ. He went to Armed Forces Radio and Broadcasting. Then after that, he was a freelance commercial announcer for a lot of the local supermarket back home, a lot of different local commercials and other things.
SPEAKER_02:So he surprised me 2%. That's amazing. I'd love to meet him someday. He's adorable.
SPEAKER_01:Well, he's he's about the kindest person you'd ever want to meet. He doesn't know a stranger and he always has a story or an antidote about something. And I I always am in a good mood when I'm when I'm in his presence because he's got such a positive uh personality. So all right. So your work echoes through broad boardrooms, leadership summits, and the pages of global media outlets. And as a keynote speak speaker who pairs warmth with straight talk in a way that makes even the busiest executives stop and listen, she has become a sought-after guide for Fortune 500 leaders who are drowning in tasks yet starving for the space to think. And as the founder and CEO of the Juliet Funt group, she devotes her career to helping organizations reclaim their most undervalued asset, not budgets or tools, but bandwidth. She challenges those teams to break free from the busy work that clogs creativity and smothers innovation. And her approach consistently earns some of the highest audience ratings at major speaking events. Companies like Spotify, Nat Geo, Anthem, Vans, Abbott, Costco, Pepsi, Nike, Wells Fargo. Oh my god. This goes on and on. All of them. I will read them all. I'm just gonna stop there. Have all brought uh brought her when they need to be able to do that.
SPEAKER_02:You forgot my favorite, the military. We have to talk, like that's what brought us together is my bat brand new adoration for people of uh all branches. It's um we'll talk about it, I know, but that's really uh I gotta tell you, of all those big ones that you read, I've never had as satisfying a time as the last two years with Army, Air Force, Special Ops, Army Corps, engineers. I I have not done Navy, and I know that's your background, but boy, do I love these people.
SPEAKER_01:That's awesome. And I think it's amazing when people like yourself, who are so accomplished in this thought leader space, take the time to work with the military and do this kind of high-level executive coaching because our teams need it. We have some amazing people who serve, but then we also, like any other organization, we have, and I talk about it a lot on the show, we have a share, our share of leadership challenges as well. And so to have the opportunity to learn from people like yourself and the expertise that you bring to the table, it's such an honor. And I'm so honored that we were connected and that you agreed to come on the show. So, first off, as I always ask all my guests, and I won't say what inspired you to join the military, but I will say where were because normally that's that's the question that I start the shows with, but um where were you the other day?
SPEAKER_02:I said the other I'm sorry, tell me the question person that no, I said the other day around my teenage boys, since I've been in the military, da da da and they all jumped on me and said, You're not allowed to say that. And I meant with the military, around the military, but I don't I don't get to say that. Sorry, what was your question?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I I would say that you are an adopted military liaison, military friend.
SPEAKER_02:Um, I'll go with that.
SPEAKER_01:Um, but first off, where were you born and raised? And what got you on the path to executive coaching?
SPEAKER_02:So we should probably do some terminology because I actually don't do any coaching. And it's a big world of all sorts of different transformational work, but we do consulting, we do training, and I do speaking. And the reason I separate out coaching is that one-on-one coaching has never been something that I've done. I don't really know that it would be my skill set, but we like going into organizations and trying to change the whole beast. We enjoy that end-to-end. Can we really make a difference? Can we change the norms? Can we make the standard ways of working and cultural map different when we leave? And that's really the passion, is the problem solving of entire units or organizations. What can we do that kind of goes end to end? We have fantastic coaches that we refer because I really do believe in coaching and I have a high performance coach myself, but it's not my it's not my area of expertise. So I was born in New York City. And what got me on the path? You know, I was very lost in my 20s. It was not linear at all. I was a caterer, I was um a restaurant manager, I was trying to figure it out. And then I started doing speaking as a result of being a meeting planner. I was doing corporate meeting planning, which came out of catering. I started booking keynote speakers for those meetings, and I was looking at those people, going, I think I could do that. And they and what I liked about it was it was similar to acting, which I'd studied in college, but it was not pretending to be another person, it was just being me and talking. And then slowly I developed bodies of content and areas of expertise. We're trying a 25-year trajectory now, and um about 15 years later, found myself very, very well treated on the keynote circuit and had developed a lot of IP around uh time management, operational efficiency, leadership skills, and then we started a company to take it outside of myself at that point. And then my first military human that I met was two years ago. I was on a military podcast the same week as my book was put number one on a military reading list by a fairly high up person, and those two things happened at the same time, and then all of a sudden, people in my LinkedIn had flags behind them, and I had never been exposed to this world before, and I had no military. I came in very cold, no boyfriends, no family, no history in the military. So it's been it was a gigantic learning curve, gigantic acronym learning curve for about a year, and then um stabilized into some of my favorite work.
SPEAKER_01:Wow. So what was it about leaning into busy work and time management that attracted you in the in as the topic or as the the central theme of your work? Like what why why that subject? I mean, every person that that is a um, I don't know if it thought leader is the right word, or or who goes into the public speaking space, they usually do like my friend Scott Mann, he his thing is is storytelling and and warrior storyteller, let's say. And so everybody has when I think they want to become a public speaker or an author or anything else, they they focus in on something in particular. I do it even with my podcast with truth tellers and things like that. So, what was it for you that made you say this is the path in the ex in the leadership space or or in this space that I really want to dive into and study and research?
SPEAKER_02:I think it was two things. They always say that you teach what you need to learn. So I am an unbelievably high energy, fast-moving person. My husband calls me the energizer bunny. So I am I am always solving my own problem. And I I say in the book, I'm the sickest rat in the experiment. And I really, really, really, really believe that. And so part of that is just an endless fascination with how hard it is for me to take a minute to think, to have my space to maintain margin. And so I'm constantly curious and constantly ever, I probably for the rest of my life will be resolving my own problem of the draw of constant activity. Part of it is anxiety, which is part of my story, and part of it is high performance, and part of it is um a really busy brain, and part of it is being from Manhattan, and there's an awful lot of there's a lot of different pieces in there, right? But I'm I never stop being curious because I'm always solving my own problem. And then what happened was over the years of teaching white space and margin and bandwidth, I've been teaching white space so long that I hold the trademark on the term white space. So that is a long history. People have heard of this now. But um there was a point where we realized that individual human beings could never create margin and white space by themselves. They had to be in organizations where norms supported the possibility of that. And so that's when we started getting smarter about what were the tactical or metrics-based or business-based things that would need to change for an environment to be conducive to the possibility of white space, as well as look at it. Waste would have to be reduced, people would have to be honest, they'd have to learn how to say no, uh, work would have to be intentional. And so uh meetings and emails would have to be tighter, people would learn to have brevity. There were all these things that fell out from the individual challenge of having a life where you could actually have a creative thought or actually have strategic thinking. And so that was the birth of the consulting work was solving those problems.
SPEAKER_01:I relate so much to that. There really is so much to needing to solve your own problem. And often when we go into a research area or decide to write a book on something or or start a podcast for a particular reason, we are searching for that truth within ourselves.
SPEAKER_02:And and and I think that it's very common among all sorts of experts. You start looking for the thing, and it took me a long time. You know, I taught presentation skills for years and years. That was my first thing because I came out of theater, and I still have some of that. We do it every once in a blue moon, but it took me a while to find the groove, and white space was definitely the catalyst for that. Um and I was gonna say something else and I lost my train, but uh it it is um an endlessly, oh, I was gonna tell you about the military. It's an endlessly challenging scenario in both corporate and military, but in different ways. And I had dinner, I was telling you, about three days ago with some Air Force guys in DC after a beautiful change of responsibility ceremony that I sat in on. And they one of them was saying that they worked a 17-hour day in the Pentagon the day before, and a 16-hour day before that with an hour commute each way. And what is striking about the story and how he talked about it was that the people around him and the two-star he reported up to did not find that odd. And so we are in the military version of this fighting against an enormously sacrificing, baked in culture of so much work and so much what we what we call a heroic acquiescence. This sense of I'm a heroic personality, I'm just gonna do what you tell me, even if it's terrible for me, even if it's actually bad for the work because I am so fried and I sleep four hours a night, even if it's bad for critical thinking that's supposed to be keeping our country safe, I'm still gonna do it. I'm still gonna work 17 hours. And so that is just an endlessly intriguing conversation about how you could shift that.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. Juliet, is there a way that you can lift your mic up just a little bit? I don't know if it's possible. There we go. I think it is.
SPEAKER_02:How's that?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, that sounds much better. Evelyn uh Moy is a fellow PAO and she said, I can hear you loud and clear, but oh, there we go. Let's see.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, uh it's not staying, but let me try to tighten it here a little bit.
SPEAKER_01:Awesome. All right, how's that? All right, yeah, I mean I can hear you.
SPEAKER_02:Let us know how it is.
SPEAKER_01:I can hear you just fine either way, but uh, I always love those comments in there so I can make those quick changes in real time. So I think that you're absolutely right. And the military is is a definite area that I am so happy that you decided to deepen into for that very reason. We often see hours in the office as a sign of productivity. And I can tell you that attending a two-hour meeting that doesn't really do anything but allow every person to talk incessantly doesn't necessarily lead to a better outcome or a better product later on.
SPEAKER_02:It's incredible to see the the the thickness of the bureaucracy and the protocol. And so what we noticed when we first started coming into military would was that when you were out, you, I'm gonna say you, military, you, when the when the military folks were outdoors, they were the most intentional people that I had ever seen. When they have to fuel a plane, load a gun, reps and sets, repetition, detail, specificity, intentionality, intentionality. And then a really fascinating thing would happen when they would cross the threshold to return to offices in garrison, in offices, at desks, and that sense of precision seemed to just go away. And the emails were overwritten and the meetings were overinvited, and the taskers had no logical flow of any kind. And I sat for really the first year and said, this is interesting. This is almost like two different personalities that these people have, where they just take the pain in the office, and then on the field or outdoors, everything must be laser-like. And I I I persist in seeing that particular split. And I think that is a huge problem for readiness and lethality and all the things that you're you have to care about right now in a very intense and intense and focused way. There's millions of service member hours that are going to other things, and that's that's very scary.
SPEAKER_01:Oh man, Julia, you're you're just speaking my language. I mean, I I just came from a NATO command uh last year where that was a prevailing uh point of irritation was this focus on meeting after meeting after meeting. And you bring up such a great point when people are outdoors and they're doing their job, whether it's flying the plane, driving the warship, conducting the exercise, running the press conference in my case, we're in our element and we're doing our job. But people in the office environment, we we're not intentional about the time spent in the office. And I think some of that is is is just the the programming, the it's a cultural bias that we've had. Um anybody who's who's who's worked at the Pentagon or who's worked in a combatant command can tell you like that's just that is the that is the structure of your day is around meetings. And I can tell you, I I mean, our our three four-star admirals, they stay in meetings all day long.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, I know, I know. I uh uh um chief staff of the Air Force Ken Wilspock is a friend, and I got to see him for one minute in DC and thrilled for his taking command. I I can't even describe the joy I feel seeing that he and his chief, David Wolf, um SimSAF. But he he his team was uh at the dinner that I was telling you about, and they said he's been uh first of all, he he's been in the uh Air Force for 40 years, but never had a Pentagon position, which is unbelievably unusual. So they're onboarding him for a hundred trillion things at the same time, and his day is bananas, just unsustainably bananas, even for a hero, even for his level of discipline and rigor. But then again, you go to other offices, and my friend on the other side of the bar, I told you, we've worked a 17-hour day, so it's just crazy. And I've been normalized. What's being missed, it's been normalized. They can do it physically because, like any muscle, they've built the muscle so they can manage it physically. And what's being missed is that, as one example, sleep is the number one most uh foreground scientific focus for health, vitality, clarity, creativity. Sleep is everything if you look at people who are trying to create holistic high performers. So there's no respect, obviously, for sleep as an example. And then it trickles down to all sorts of other lack of self-care. And I was joking when we were together saying, I am never so stressed as when I am on a military unit and they're in charge of my day. This happened um a couple months ago at Fort Leavenworth. And I just I get there and then they take over my body and they sure I can't, there I can't get a glass of water. There's no time to pee. There's like I can't prefer prepare for what I'm doing because the way that they're used to pulling you around is is inhumane. It's just crazy.
SPEAKER_01:The admirals, they of course, as you know, they've got those aides, the loops that are running around with them and and just managing every single aspect of their day. And that's why I'm so happy to hear that you've been embraced at at these higher levels within the military, so that we can hopefully uh one day change that culture. Because I do believe it's changeable.
SPEAKER_02:It's absolutely it absolutely is. If we can look at intact areas, this is the magical word intact, because whole communities need to change together. If you have one unit and you have a little subset. Of a unit who wants to do things differently, they will quickly be absorbed by the larger, more macro culture. But the conversations we're having are about if you can wrap your arms around one co-com or one big command, and you can say, we are going to find ways to share new ways of working holistically in our in processing, in our professional development, in our leadership stuff. I deeply believe that things can change. And the most hopeful thing that I can share to military people is that your the predisposition that just because the boss leaves every two years, that everything is impossible is not true. And I'll tell you why it's not true is that rules can be wiped out in one day by the next guy or gal, but skills and mindsets cannot. So if you focus on teaching skills and mindsets, it's not the same as the rules that will be changed right after the change of command. Skills and mindsets persist. They become part of the person. And so each of the conversations we're having, SOCOM, Air Force, Special Um, and you know, all the regular Army, sure, now Army Corps of Engineers, it's about teaching those skill mindsets that will just become part of the way that people work. And then they will not be able to be removed just with the swipe of a pen of another commander.
SPEAKER_01:I agree. I absolutely agree. Because what you're doing there is you're changing hearts and minds versus just changing policy. And when you're able to tap into that and hopefully help people see that things like sleep, like white space, like pulling out from the day to have some freed up bandwidth to be more productive, uh, to focus on impact versus just counting numbers. Then I think that you're going to just come up with better products that people are proud of producing that actually bring forth a tangible or meaningful change. And I think that's what frustrates a lot of us. I mean, that that is why you're what we're seeing the some of the retention issues that we're seeing across the surfaces.
SPEAKER_02:I think so too. Especially I had a wonderful conversation with a young man who, I'm sorry to cut you off. It's just a very talented young man who is who left the military specifically because of what we're talking about. And you lost that service member, and he was brilliant, but just who would want to feel that way all the time. And I, you know, as you're describing it, the white space, the margin, what's really important to caveat, especially with a uh alpha audience, is that the prejudice is that white space sounds as if it is about rest. And it has a rest component, but that's actually only 25% of the way that people use white space. The open time is a time for digestion of what you have ingested. So as an example, and if you're in meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, it's like eating a meal and a meal and a meal and a meal and a meal. But if you're not actually digesting the meal, you're not applying it, you're not taking it to a next step, you're not figuring out the so what of the information you learn. So, in some sense, the brief is almost wasted on you because it's just you're on to the next. And so it's not just physical recuperation or being gentle on yourself. That's a little piece of it, the humanity of resting or pausing or seeing the sun for five minutes. But it is a business tool to make you sharper and to make the application of what you're ingesting um more valuable.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I can tell you when I had a very high stress, busy job, that that same NATO job at lunchtime. Sometimes I I would close my door, my office door, I was a branch head, and I would literally just kind of sit in the office and and think for maybe 45 minutes, 50 minutes. And then I knew like once I opened the door, there was gonna be the line of people that come through public affairs and need something. But it gave me that opportunity to just de-stress for a little bit of time so that I could get my thoughts together for how we were gonna solve whatever issue was gonna come through that door because there was always something, something that somebody wanted. And it was constantly a battle of who we say yes to versus who we don't, and how we offer self-help services or other ways to get projects done. And I think that there aren't enough leaders within the military who value that because, like you said, they've grown up in this environment where it's meeting after meaning after meaning, it's 16 to 20 hour days. And the more senior that you get, the more pressure you feel to conform to that norm. And if you're not someone who believes in it, which I never was a person who believed in it, you're gonna butt up against that cultural um expectation that you're somehow not as dedicated if you don't go to all the meetings. You're not as dedicated if you don't stay until 6 p.m. And so we create a culture within our offices where we marginalize the people that don't buy into that culture. And I think that's another thing that we have to get away from because I can tell you that the people that would perform the best for me were the people that when their work was done, or if they needed time to go do something else, they were always very loyal to the mission. And if the mission was accomplished, I I wasn't worried where they were accomplishing the mission. Sure. Especially in a job like public affairs.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, I've never said this, but I'm amazed that more geos don't have heart attacks and strokes. I I'm just amazed that there isn't, I don't even understand how they work a 16 and then a 17 and then a 16. And I I I certainly don't believe that I could do it. So the physical impact, the physical stamina is magnificent, but I want to I want to connect it to a so what, and then I want to teach a tool that I think people need to hear after what you what you shared. So the so what I want to connect it to, I mentioned, which is readiness and lethality, the two words that the military cares about for the for the next foreseeable amount of time. I want you to imagine take that thinking time and take that reduction in waste and then take it to the next level, which is okay, let's say we save 10 hours a week in meetings, which is probable and possible. That's great, but it's not a uh a return on investment yet. The return on investment is okay, then could you teach people to use the found time, partially, yes, for recuperation, a little more sleep, but the rest of it, how do you become more ready? How do you become more lethal? What do you need to think about? What do you need to practice? Maybe you get so efficient that you leave the office two days a week three hours early and you go out and do physical exercises. The the next step is yes, let's reduce emails, meetings, taskers, garbage, I am outlook, you know, BS in the military. Right, the Bureau of the United States. But then not just to get the time. The question is then, okay, now if you have the time, what could you do with that time? What is the opportunity cost of not having it? And without that next layer, you're not having a sophisticated conversation about adding efficiency and adding time management because you've stopped short of the win. The win is translating that found time to the actual most specific goals of your modernization efforts currently, your readiness efforts currently.
SPEAKER_01:I agree. And I think this now comes down to do we have people that are willing to roll up their sleeves and get a little dirty and work on some of these systematic problems that need to be fixed. So in a lot of our organizations, there are these long-standing, I would say, rocks, hard rocks, for an example. I can go back to NATO, they could not figure out how to hire interns or how to bring interns to London. There were certain in England, there were certain laws that some uh had thought were insurmountable. Um, I don't think that they were. There were other NATO commands that seemed to get interns just fine in other countries, but I think that if we could free ourselves up from the busy work, we could work some of the systemic issues. Or let's put together a 24 a month or 12-month communication strategy outlook. Well, I don't have a leadership that is that prizes that because everything is fly by the seat of your pants. Oh, by the way, let's do this now. So we don't do that long-range planning to get those results that I think that we would get. So, to take what you're saying one step further, I believe there's a lot of systemic problems that stay ignored because we're too busy doing the busy work.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. Yes. I mean, there it's everywhere. So let me teach a tool that your audience needs to know because you talked about your 45-minute uh white space, which is the advanced, advanced, advanced, advanced class. And it would, it's so advanced that it might dissuade people from even considering the tool. Most people cannot sit still for three minutes, and I I'm challenged to do that myself. So the tool that I want to teach is called the wedge. And the wedge, if you imagine just a little wedge of open time inserted in between two things in your schedule that previously were connected. So in between finishing one project and picking up the next, in between a meeting and a meeting, in between driving in your driveway and actually walking in the door. Inserting these little wedges of space, one, three, five, seven minutes, 30 seconds. This is the manageable application of creating space. And we analogize it to if you're building a fire, you have to have oxygen in between the things you want to catch on fire, or the spark is never going to be drawn into a blaze. So that oxygenation happens in the wedges. Why that's so important is it's really manageable for people. They can imagine a minute, they can imagine three minutes, and you would be shocked at how much transformation actually happens in a person in three minutes. Now, what does that look like in your meeting calendar then? We don't have graphics today, but if we had a meeting calendar in front of us, you'd see the pre-meeting calendar, which looks like a paint swatch. It's just color, color, color, color, color, color, color. And then you'd see the other one would have white stripes because it would have five and 10 and 15 minute breaks. And those stripes are where the digestion happens, where the application happens, where people re-fortify themselves. And so uh I had a high up person say to his um new exec after change of command, like, go get me some stripes. And I thought that's you know, that's my dream, is they they are aware of it, they see the benefit. And then once you start living it, once you have a command where people have wedges and then they allow wedges, and then they respect wedges, boy, you just wait. It feels like a totally different universe of work. So I just want to give something concrete that people can try.
SPEAKER_01:What has been your experience working with military versus working with corporations and nonprofits? Has there been some unique aspects of the way that we work that you didn't see in your previous work with other organizations?
SPEAKER_02:Yes, many actually. So acronyms would be first. Um inability to spend money would be second, I think. You know, just sure they go get those two out of the way. But I would say, so first of all, personality uh-wise, the reason I'm so giddy and fangirly all the time is I've just never seen anything like these people. Uh the heroic, mindful, introspective, read, book reading, development hungry, humble. I've just no, who wouldn't be in love with the way that people show up in the military? And I I know I'm probably really spoiled because I I don't think I've ever even met a captain or below. So I I've not been in the world of out in the military. I'm very, very privileged that commanders are bringing me in to do work with their command team. And so the level of intellect, the level of honorability, the whole thing up there is magical. Uh, I'm sure that, you know, there's some rough and tumble people in the military because I've read a DOX before and I know that stuff happens, right? But I'm so I'm in love with that whole thing. That is not present in the corporate world. That service aspect, that I don't care what hotel I stay in, that willingness to keep looking inward and keep iterating your own personal development and read books just because it is not common in my world. So that's one of the things that has entranced me so much. On the opposite side, though, um, that thing I called heroic acquiescence is a real problem because there's a learned hopelessness of this will never change. And even if I change it, the new guy will come in in two years. So why bother? And I'll just get up the next day and start deleting Flatcom BS from my inbox. And so getting people to believe has been very hard. Getting them to execute and do experiments and try pilots has been very hard. And it's interesting, we did, I did get to sit with uh an admiral who was very, very intrigued by this work, but he was one of the um um administrative um releases who's no longer no longer with the Navy. So we we will at some point meet some Navy and Marine folks, I'm sure. Uh we have some Space Force conversations starting. They're all the same. They all they all need it. I think the Space Force guys and their uh cool wearables are probably gonna go faster than anybody else if I can meet the right people.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I love the fact that you've been able to get into those rooms and have those and have the spaces um at the top at the highest levels of the military. And that is a tough group to to break some of those cultural barriers. I think that the ones that are coming up even behind myself, they they do see the utility in a lot of the things that you're saying. And I think that there's things that the younger generation just won't settle for. Absolutely. Quite frankly, yes, quite frankly, we just we were like, well, we just got to suck it up. This is the way it's always been. But then the kids that are coming in behind us, uh, there's certain things that they just won't, they won't do uh because they know that it's not going to be productive or that it's not going to be conducive to accomplishing the mission. And and so I think that there's definitely that room for that transformative change and growth that the military needs. And with our return to that warrior ethos uh that this new administration is pushing, it's all the more needed that we create environments where people are excited to come to work. They're happy to be there, they're not, like you say, sitting in meetings all day with 17 hours in front of them, but they're building in those intentional times to to think and to discover and to be creative on how to solve problems. And I one of my biggest pet peeves of the military is when I hear a military person tell me that they're not a creative, and I I say everybody is creative. And when you're designing a war plan, you are being creative.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. Creative is problem solving, creative is taking anything apart, putting it back together. I I agree entirely. And those self-definitions, you know, can really be a problem in people cross-training within teams where they're not going to push themselves outside of their comfort zone. Uh, I do also want to talk about a couple of other tools and ways to access this space because we're getting close on time. It's really important to know that people have how. So the wedge is number one. Number two is a concept called the yellow list. So, very important. A yellow list is a document that you keep for people that you work with frequently, not for occasional strangers. And when you're about to add more weight to the digital channels, you're about to send an email, you're about to send an I am or a text, you just train yourself to pause and say, wait, what if I just jotted this down on my yellow list for that person and talk to them about it when it got long or the next time I saw them? And as you consolidate off these digital touches that now are not going to exist because of your new impulse control, you radically can curb the amount of email going in and out. So we say email has babies and those babies have babies and those babies have babies. And so if you cut it off at the source, you're not creating all that volume. Yellow list can make a giant and immediate change in the amount that people are using. Um, another favorite tool that I have, because I'm so passionate about disconnected leave and having people really be on leave when they're on leave, is called a re-entry day. And maybe this will be the last one that I give. I just want to give you at least a couple. Re-entry day is when you plan your leave, way before you leave, the day that you actually plan the time, you go to the first day back and you block the whole thing so that nobody else can get in there with re-entry activities, with uh two one hour with my commander, three hours on email, two hours on TMT or whatever your task management is. And you're putting the time in to attack the volume that accumulates when you're gone. So you don't have to be checking every morning in the lobby before the kids wake up on vacation because that is what keeps us from actually having the leave that regenerates us. And so I could go on and on and on with tools, but I'm a big how person. I want to make sure people have stuff to try, and that's very important to me.
SPEAKER_01:No, I love it. And I love the fact that the things that you're suggesting are those minor baby steps because this is a very overwhelming cultural shift if you try to take it in big pieces, but just doing the wedge or the yellow list or or smaller things like that too. Begin to bring about that balance, I think is incredibly important. What would you love to see going forward for the military? Are there any like projects that you're working on or any any particular initiatives?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I mean, to be honest, in a safe, friendly place, there needs to be one how do I say this? The unit by unit experimentation that we're doing that is very gratifying. There are units in each of those branches. I talked about trying stuff. But what really needs to happen is one much larger commander branch needs to say, let's do this right. Let's take two years to do piloting, learn from the piloting. Also, hey, by the way, we should infuse this kind of thought leadership into PME because we're raising service members who don't have high performance talents who aren't taught. They're not taught how to work. I was interviewing him and he goes, ma'am, they don't teach us email. So they don't know how to do it. And so I think honestly, I think there are several different bigger conversations that are starting to brew. And I think one of them will turn into a more kind of doing it right program instead of this little piecemeal stuff that we're doing right now.
SPEAKER_01:You brought up an excellent idea about incorporating it into PME because PME is sort of the make or break when we're creating those next level flag officers or general officers, because we get it at the 04 to about the 06 mark. And it's that great time to start to look at, okay, if you're going to be leading thousands and thousands of service members, what are some of the tools that you're going to take into that job that you want to institute at a mass scale that is really going to make that organization be dynamic and adapt and be and be this very lethal and this ready force with people who want to be there and are excited to serve. And if you can instill that at that mid-grade level, I really do. And the other place where I think this could really help is at the um the NROTC or the ROTC reserve officer training corps level or at the academy levels. Yeah. So I think so too.
SPEAKER_02:They don't have any of it. We just, I just had an academy conversation. They don't teach time management. There's no, there's nothing. You just figure it out, you look at other people, and then at the pre-command course, the ratios are very off between inspiration and tactical. There's everything, you know, you we want, you want to hear, I'm sure, the geo stories, but not uh eight hours for five days. You know, they they are hungry for what do I do? How do I do it? How do others do it? The how, how, how is always the to me, the the meal that everybody can't wait to be served.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. Well, Juliet, I want to thank you so much. I I if there's anything that I haven't covered down on or anything that you have in your notes that you want to put out before as we're winding this down, uh please let me know. But if people want to know more information or how to find you, where can they find you?
SPEAKER_02:Yes, our military website is theefficienteam.com. And they can also find me on LinkedIn. And I would love for your folks to connect with me on LinkedIn.
SPEAKER_01:Awesome, awesome. Well, thank you so much uh for joining the Stories of Service podcast. I don't get an opportunity very often to have professionals like yourself on the show. And so when I do, I'm always so honored and so blessed. And I just I love having this kind of conversation. It reminds me, even in retirement, how I need to balance things a little bit better, try to work more on those long-term goals, whether those be things with my husband or or things that I want to do professionally with my podcast or with just community service. It's just a great reminder that we all have to take that step from the day-to-day grind or the tactical jobs and try to do that long-term planning or that moment to think and to recharge so that we have that space to think through those, those, those more systemic issues that we're trying to fix.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. Well, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_01:Awesome. I will meet you backstage to say goodbye as I go full screen.
SPEAKER_02:Right. Sounds great.
SPEAKER_01:All right, guys, that is a wrap. Another podcast done this week. This is my third this week. So this we're talking about busy work. I I put in four shows this week. I usually only try to do one or two, but sometimes I get very excited and want to talk to more people and do a few more. So I've got one more on Saturday, and then I'll be taking a week off and having some of my own white space uh on another cruise ship. So, with that, I hope you all enjoy the rest of your evening. And as I always end these calls, please take care of yourselves. Please take care of each other. Bye bye now.