065 – How to Say ‘No’ in Non-profits: Lessons from Julie Boll

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast. I’m your host, David. And in this episode, we’re going to be talking about leadership and how to have those really hard and difficult conversations. And I’ve got Julie Boll here with me.

Julie teaches non-profit professionals how to lead and live more courageously using the “Dare to Lead” framework developed by Dr. Brené Brown. Julie is a former grant professional with a $10 million track record in awarded grants over her 20 years of experience in the non-profit sector. Julie, thank you so much for joining the episode today. Really excited to have you talk about and give everybody some insight around it: hard conversations.

Hopefully, our conversation is not going to be a difficult one today.

Julie Boll: Yes, I don’t believe so. So yes, thank you for having me. And this is a really fun topic actually to talk about.

David Pisarek: So what’s the relationship between the work that you do in strategic planning and the marketing side of things?

Julie Boll: Yes. So it’s so interesting that we’re going to be talking today because, yes, I do strategic planning and I do the work of Dr. Brené Brown, which is really leadership development. So we do strategy, where’s the organization going? And then we get into the nuts and bolts of how is the organization operating. Are we doing what we need to be doing? And are the people interacting the way they need to?

But on the strategic planning side of things, what we do is we go in right away with an assessment called ICAT, the Impact Capacity Assessment Tool, is what it’s called. And nearly every time we go in with a non-profit and we do this tool, one of the very top issues that come up is awareness of the organization.

So this marketing piece is so critical and it very often becomes a priority when we do the planning process because people need to know who you are. They need to know why they need to support you. And so we get really clear on vision, goal, mission, and all that stuff translates over to the marketing work as well.

So yeah, I do want to give a shout-out to why that’s so important to have that marketing piece in place, to be visible, to have that awareness because people can’t support you or find you if you don’t.

David Pisarek: And I think some of the hard conversations come from doing that research and digging in. The board, president, executives, VPs, they might have their own opinions as to, “Okay, well, yeah, we should be marketing this and doing that”. Well, are they the experts in that?

Julie Boll: Exactly.

David Pisarek: Maybe quite possibly, right? But can you talk about how you can support non-profit leaders who need to make big decisions, potentially changing the direction of the marketing, just as an example, and how those conversations can happen more freely?

Julie Boll: I’m so glad we’re going to talk about this because there are some tools in this “Dare to Lead” toolkit that I just think are really, really helpful in a non-profit setting.

When you think about making an investment in marketing and say you’re going to do a website, you’re going to have to put dollars behind that. You’re going to have to get somebody that’s experienced and knows what they’re doing so they can drive the results that you want, and that costs money. And so there’s sometimes this reluctance to spend money on these ancillary things like they’re extra when they’re really critical to the mission and the delivery of the mission.

So having a conversation with a board that might not be in the frame of mind of “Marketing is a top need and something that we need to do”…

One of the things that we can do is this really cool tool in “Dare to Lead”. It’s called The 5 C’s of Strategic Thinking.

And so whenever I work with non-profits that are dealing with these bigger issues (we’ve done this around a non-profit that was needing to move away from a big fundraiser that the funders were really excited about, but it didn’t align with their mission anymore). So we unpacked it with this five C’s tool and really got context around why are we making this decision.

And so when you use a tool like this or this tool in particular, you can get down to some details and some perspectives that might not be considered. And so you have your own narrow lens that you put on when you’re trying to make a decision and you’re trying to convince somebody of your side, but this helps you unpack what are some of the other variables that are here.

So that’s one of the first things that I would do is invite people to think about the five C’s of strategic thinking and go through this worksheet and go through this exercise before actually taking the decision to the board or taking the question to the board of, “Can we do this? Will we do this?” So if you’re good with it, I’m going to go ahead and unpack what this is, and we can play with what that looks like if you’re going to be making an investment in the website.

So I’m going to roughly run through the five C’s: So colour, context, connective tissue, cost, and consequence.

And Consequence is one of my favourite ones. Here’s the question behind it: What are the consequences of not doing this? Of not being out, not being seen, not being known by the public.

Sometimes that alone can help drive the decision-making. So colour, what does “done” look like in this case? What’s the full picture? Set a clear intention and assign a level of importance. When you’re doing something, especially after you’ve done the strategic planning process and you’ve said “Awareness is a key issue for us”, you’re setting a level of importance here and you’re saying, “What does “done” look like? Well, we want to be known to our target audience and we want funders to know about us”. So this is a critical piece and this is why.

Context: what else is going on in your organization that you need to consider? So how does having a website in this case or investing in your marketing strategy impact everything else that’s going on in your organization? So being able to speak to that so that you don’t come in with a blind spot of here’s the other dominoes that are in place that you’re not aware of.

So setting the context, really looking at the connective tissue, how does this project solve or amplify what’s already happened or what’s happening now? How does it lay the groundwork for what hasn’t happened yet but is part of the vision for the future?

And I love this piece: how does it connect in some cases to the values of the organization? Connective tissue is something else that you dig into and think about.

That values question really came in. In that example, I just gave an organization that needed to move away from a fundraiser that no longer aligned with their values. So as an organization, inclusivity was really important to them, but this was a really exclusive event that just didn’t work anymore. It didn’t fit those values.

So sometimes that values question can be super helpful when you’re thinking about a project. What’s the cost to do this? Obviously, we know there’s an investment here, but what else has to come into play? What time are we talking about? Bandwidth, focus, priority shifts. And is this cost understood and agreed upon and communicated? And who has a say in what that cost is?

And then this last piece that I mentioned at the very beginning, the last C here is Consequence.

What are the consequences of not doing this? Of not investing in this marketing and this website that we need to be seen and visible and known to the community? What’s at stake? And what are the consequences of getting it wrong? Are there any unintended consequences, changes paid or problems solved now? So I love this when you’re thinking about taking a decision to the board because it really forces you to flush out your thinking and consider the bigger picture in some cases and what other perspectives might be coming from the board as well to think through that.

David Pisarek: I think it’s important to take the time and really strategically go through, not just on your own, but pull your team together and have the conversation and be like, “If we do this”, it’s going to cost $50,000, $2 million, whatever it happens to be, “Okay, what are the consequences of that?” I think consequences is a really key one.

I think the people that will be coming from the decision-maker’s standpoint will be like, “We can’t do that because X, Y, and Z”. If you’ve already thought through what those issues happen to be or might potentially be, you’ve got already one step ahead in the conversation where you can be like, “Yes, we’ve actually thought about that”. Maybe even presenting it as you’re pitching it and going, “Here are some of the potential pitfalls of doing this, like $2 million dollars, we won’t be able to do this program for the next year and a half because we won’t have the funding to do it”.

Maybe you might be able to get some buy-in because you’ve had those types of conversations internally before you’ve been approaching them.

Julie Boll: Exactly. And if you are in any big decision or project that you’re looking to undertake, you’re considering variables other than the money. So the time, the bandwidth, the focus, and the priority shifts that are going to come with it, because that’s just the reality. If we want something new to come to the table, it is going to have an impact. And what’s that impact going to be and are we prepared to absorb that expense that cost?

David Pisarek: Absolutely. I love that. And you said something right at the beginning, just before you got into the five C’s, which was about an investment. Framing costs as investments in the organization will do a big mind shift in the people that you’re talking with.

People are expenses, but without people, you can’t run the organization.

Investing in the right staff or the right consultants or the right software or the right computers or the right location for your business, maybe you want to be in a really highly densely populated business center, it’s going to cost you more than being further out from the core downtown of whatever city.

There are reasons and rationales for spending the money as long as you can explain the intent and the purpose of it. Thinking of it as an investment will help shape that conversation.

Julie Boll:

Sometimes there’s this notion that we can do it ourselves. We’re doing fine, we’ll hire an intern, we’ll do this little extra thing, we’ll throw this thing up. But the cost of doing something when we don’t actually have the expertise, there’s such a learning curve there, and you’re the brunt of that learning curve.

So strategic planning, I got into it actually. I was a grant professional before I got into this line of work in consulting. I sat on a strategic planning committee for two years with high-level faculty members at the university level and deans involved. And we spent so much time and energy doing something we had no business doing and we had no idea of what we were doing. If we would have added up the dollars in that room that went into it, that cost would have been triple what pulling in an expert would have been.

What’s the cost of what you’re doing right now? Because there’s a cost of that, too.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. I remember when I was working in the non-profits having meetings and bringing in VPs, and being like, “Your salaries are disclosed publicly. If we break that down on what a per-hour cost is, having four of you in the meeting, plus me and some of my colleagues there, we’re looking at $15,000 an hour”. You’re not thinking about the cost of time because they’re already there.

Julie Boll: Yes. And attention. How fractured is that attention of that VP or the executive director? What’s the cost of adding one more layer to that person’s plate? So yeah. Attention to.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. Not to toot our horns as consultants, but… Hah, I’m saying “but”, right? The key to it, though, is by bringing in an expert, whether they’re there for a day to talk with you and maybe workshop something or to actually bring in for a couple of months to help through a solution for a problem that’s happening, bringing in the expert gives you that shortcut.

You can bypass that learning curve. I do believe in the “Fail frequently, fail often” mentality, like, you got to give things a shot and all of that. But once your organization that’s not necessarily on the line but in need of something, sometimes it’s not even worth the brain power and brain capacity when you can just have a conversation with somebody and maybe they’re $2,000 an hour, but having them come in for half a day to sort through something or to talk or whatever it happens to be, they might set you on a different course than what you were thinking, and that would be the right direction.

Julie Boll: Absolutely. And literally can save years of struggle to have the right person advise you. It’s interesting when we work with non-profits, they have to invest in infrastructure. So these investments are happening and you would never dream of bringing someone in, that didn’t have plumbing experience to do the plumbing for the building. We expect this level of experience and knowledge when we bring in professionals. We need it on all fronts in this space as well.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. Okay, so moving along a little bit, how can non-profit leaders stay in a hard conversation with board members when they don’t agree with the board member?

Julie Boll: That’s why I love this “Dare to Lead” work so much. Dare to Lead is a courage-building program. And you think, why do we need courage building and leadership? Well, it’s exactly this.

How do you stay in a hard conversation without getting triggered?

o we have this toolkit again. What you’re doing is you’re managing your discomfort and vulnerability. Vulnerability is defined as the emotion you experience when you’re facing risk, uncertainty or emotional exposure. So you don’t know. You can’t control the outcome of this conversation.

How do you manage that feeling of that vulnerability? And so there are a few things that we can do, and I’ll just unpack a few of them just to offer to the listener. But one thing is just getting really clear on your why of why you’re in the conversation, what’s most important to you, and setting ahead of time what your definition of success is.

I think sometimes we get fixated on the only positive outcome is “I win”. “I win the argument”. But really, it comes down to (I love this phrase that comes from the “Dare to Lead” work) “Clear as kind”. Was I clear? Was I in my integrity when I shared my work? Did I stay in my integrity? Did I say what I needed to say? So sometimes we’ll whip out when we’re in a conversation and just, “You know what, I’m out”. And so as long as you can set your definition of success ahead of time, I think that can help anchor you when you’re there to remember, “Here, clear as kind, here… I’m here to educate, I’m here to inform”.

And the other piece is we really encourage people to lean into curiosity. So you’re in this conversation to learn more from the other side. Another thing I really love about “Dare to Learn” is we actually practice what she calls a Rumble, which is, let’s see the definition… Is a discussion, conversation or meeting defined by the commitment to lean into vulnerability, to stay curious and generous, to stick with the messy middle of problem identification and solving, to take a break and circle back when necessary to own our parts.

So going into a Rumble could be this conversation where you are two different viewpoints on an investment that you need to make, which is a big deal. If we make an investment here, that means something’s going to get cut somewhere else, or something’s going to have to be delayed somewhere else. We expect people to be passionate about something of that nature. So tools to stay curious in a conversation are called Rumble tools.

Some sentence starters that you can use: “I’m curious about”.

Get information back from the person that you’re talking to instead of having your bulletproof armour (And here are all of the things that I came up with in my five C’s), but we want to actually get back from the other person’s information.

So curiosity, lean into that curiosity. “I’m curious about… Tell me more”. And I love this: “That’s not my experience”. If we’re at a point of difference, “I’m wondering, help me understand”. So sometimes we blank out in these hard conversations. We don’t even actually have the language and the words to say what we want to say. So that’s why I love that we actually practice this.

We need to practice having conversations and leading conversations and staying in tricky conversations with this language. So “Tell me more. That’s not my experience. I’m wondering”, just starting. “I’m wondering, help me understand. Walk me through that”. And “What’s your passion around this?” Or “Tell me why this doesn’t fit or work for you”.

So that’s a big piece: Stay curious, ask questions, and think about what you’re measuring your success on.

You can’t control the outcome. You can’t control, ultimately, in this case, the decision that’s made. But you can control how you show up and whether you meet your own criteria for success.

Did you say what you wanted to say? Did you stay in your integrity? That really does define success. And then in that definition of a Rumble, she talks about the circle back. You can always ask for a circle back. And that is something that has been really empowering to know that we have that tool available to us.

If we get to a point in a conversation where we can’t seem to move forward and we’re stuck, we can ask, “Can we circle back on this in 30 minutes? Can we circle back at this on the next meeting and try again when we’re not so deeply invested in the issue?”

David Pisarek: I think something else that is important for people to also remember is that it’s okay to take a pause. You say something, the other person says something, take a moment, stop for a second, think about what they’ve just said, take it in, and think about one of these tactics that Julie just mentioned and use that.

Take a moment, it’s okay. If you don’t have an answer to something, that’s okay. Like you just said, circle back. “Let me look into that. I’ll get back to you next week or tomorrow” or in an hour or whatever. It’s okay. We can’t be the encyclopedia of everything all the time. Sometimes we need to go back and talk with our team and get some additional insight or feedback or thoughts, right? And that’s totally fine.

Julie Boll: Yeah, absolutely. And give yourself some grace. If this is hard for you to have this conversation, there’s passion. That means everybody’s really invested in this mission and this organization, and that’s a good thing. So if you are feeling that sense of anticipation, that’s a natural feeling to have when you’re invested in something and deeply concerned and committed to an organization.

David Pisarek: And that’s what brings everybody together. They care about the cause, they care about the work that’s happening.

Ultimately, everybody at the organization is there on the same team to try to make things better or help or raise money or fight cancer or whatever the goal or the mission is. Everybody should be there on the same path moving forward together. Sometimes you can veer off and people have their own agenda, but I would say a good 90% or more are there. It’s a matter of having an open dialogue in the conversation to really make everybody part of the team.

Sometimes it might just be level setting at the start of the meeting, “Hey, we’re all here because X, Y, and Z. Let’s make the most out of this meeting and let’s deal with this specific thing”. That in and of itself would be a hard piece to talk about, a hard conversation starter. But I think it’s important that you don’t want to say “No questions or stupid questions” because then it just brings everybody down. But we’re all here together to figure out the next move we need to make in our marketing. Let’s brainstorm and then talk through it. And bridging that gap, I think, really helps.

Julie Boll: Yeah. And people want to be heard. So I also facilitate the strategic planning work.

I do something called compression planning, where we get people together for five hours and we knock out a lot of work. The only way you can do that is if you’re super, super disciplined and targeted about what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it. But people will tell us in advance, “You need to look out for this person. This person is really difficult”. And it just got to the point where it doesn’t matter because in the process, we are inviting everyone’s ideas and everyone’s ideas matter and everyone’s ideas are heard.

So if we lean into that curiosity and essentially hear out what some of the concerns are and what some of the root causes of these concerns are, sometimes that’s enough just to be heard. And so that’s something important to you to realize when we’re having these conversations that there’s more than just our side of it.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. It’s unfortunate that people will approach somebody who’s coming in from a strategic or for a strategic session. And go, “Hey, watch out for this person”.

Julie Boll: Oh, yeah.

David Pisarek: Come on, blank slate: we’re all here. Let’s just deal with the topic that we need to work through. I meet with a lot of people also, we can see really easily where there are things. You don’t need to let people know. If you’re conducting a survey, you want it to be a scientific-based survey, you don’t want it to lead people. By giving somebody any heads up, if that’s what we’re going to call it, it destroys morale.

Julie Boll:

Might be considered a disruptive person, often it’s just somebody who wants to be heard.

Thankfully, when we are curious in these conversations and we do make space for people to be heard, some of that can be dispelled.

David Pisarek: Okay, so you’ve mentioned Dr. Brené Brown a couple of times, and I mentioned her right in the intro. Why is her work so relevant for non-profits in leadership?

Julie Boll: As I said before, she teaches courageous leadership. She is a best-selling author and she’s a researcher. She spent 20 years studying shame and vulnerability in the last seven years studying courageous leadership. What she has been able to determine is that courage is measurable, teachable, and observable.

So for those of us who do struggle in our leadership to lean into a hard conversation, for example, we can actually build that skill set. So that’s like the good news out of all of this leadership-building curriculum stuff. The reason I think it’s so important for non-profits is if you think about the way that we’re designed, more often than not, you’ve got a board making major decisions and influencing decisions that are typically privileged and definitely affluent.

So you’ve got this decision-making that’s happening on behalf of an underserved population, and there are going to be times when there are conflicts there. And so as a non-profit leader, you’ve got to rumble to go back to Brené’s definition. You’ve got to rumble with some of these conversations where there may be some influence happening because dollars are behind this voice, but it’s not what’s best for your community. And so those types of differences… I think this courage-building work is incredibly helpful and valuable to helping address.

David Pisarek: I think that’s really key, building the courage. It takes a certain part of your personality to come forward and go, “You know what? I am amazing at this, and I want to do this at the next level and bring an organization forward”. Whether it’s for profit, not for profit, it doesn’t really matter. Being an entrepreneur, working for yourself, there’s a certain level of courage that has come from it. You need to be out there. You need to be trying to meet with leads, meet with donors, and have those conversations.

Maybe you do event planning on the fundraising side. You need to go to venues and meet with different vendors and have conversations with them, and there are difficult conversations that happen there, especially if you’re dealing with having to pay for things, right?

Julie Boll: Exactly.

David Pisarek: You want to get the most bang for your buck, totally get that. But how do you have those conversations? Leveraging this type of insight can help you have those conversations in a way that might give you a more positive outcome leveraging those five C’s, I think, is really key.

Julie Boll: We want our non-profits to be bold. We want them to be advocates for the people that they serve. Sometimes that means that they have to make decisions that are unpopular with even donors. So we want our leaders at the home of these organizations to have some of these tools to help keep them grounded and anchored when they need to lean into a hard conversation or make a decision on behalf of their organization that isn’t popular. Yeah, absolutely.

David Pisarek: Okay, so, Julie, you’ve met with me. I’m on the board. You said “We need to do X, Y, and Z”. And we say, “Well, we don’t think that that’s the right thing, but you’re the expert, Julie”. “All right, fine. Go for it. Let’s see what you’ve got”. You’ve gone down that road. Didn’t quite turn out how you wanted it to, so you had a little bit of a fall or fail with it. How do you get back up after that when something didn’t turn out the way you had anticipated or you had told people that it would?

Julie Boll: Yeah. So I’ll give you an example, actually, because the arena is a metaphor that Brené uses a lot. It’s based on this poem back here, “Man in the arena”. And if you think about doing something hard, you can think about yourself in the middle of this arena that all eyes are on you and you’ve had this fall, you’ve had this stumble.

I had an experience that was like this leading compression planning, which I mentioned before, which is this accelerated planning process. I led my very first compression planning session with a board after I left full-time employment to be a consultant. And we just breeze through the first four hours of this session. It was beautiful. Everyone was in synergy and happy and laughing and everything was great. And we hit a roadblock and the mood shifted in the room. And I had a board member get real confrontational with me and say, “What are you going to do about this? How are you going to fix this?” And I had just this immediate physiological reaction of like, “Oh, my God”. And then you can’t think and you have this stunned, in the headlights thinking, That was my fault.

Because what I did at that point was like, “You know what? I don’t know”. And I hurried up and finished the session and got out of there as quickly as I could because I was so hijacked by that experience.

That’s something I would call a fall. You went out there, you tried something for the first time, you did something hard, and then it didn’t go the way you wanted it to go. It’s so easy for us to get stuck in those setbacks and say, “I can’t do it anymore”.

In this Brené Brown, “Dare to Lead” work, we teach people, “Okay, you’re going to go out there, you’re going to do brave stuff, and you’re going to have those falls. How are you going to get back up from that?” If you did that, you presented it to the board, it was beautiful. Then you had a deer in the headlights moment, you had a fall. It didn’t go the way you wanted it to go. One thing that we would teach you in this “Dare to Lead” work is to really start to get honest with yourself about the story that you’re making up during that fall.

For me in that during the highlights moment, I made up a story instantly. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m a complete failure”. What is that story that you’re making up, which she calls an SFD (a Shitty First Draft), we actually teach people to write out their SFDs, and it is such a powerful practice. So if you have one of those moments where you went out, you did something, it was hard, and you face-planted, we want you to write out what your SFD was, what that Shitty First Draft in your mind was when you had that deer in the headlights moment, “What were you telling yourself?” Put it on paper.

And when you put it on paper, you’re going to realize more often than not, this story doesn’t really add up. You know what I mean? So we want you to try that out, write out your SFD, and then start challenging the thinking that’s on there. So if you do it in a writing exercise, what do I absolutely know is true? Well, I absolutely know that I was prepared for this meeting that we did. I absolutely know that the first four hours went great.

I absolutely know that everyone in this room was invested in the org. I can start going down that list of what I know is true, and then eventually, through this process, get to the end, which is a new story of what actually happened. And then with that new story, I’m more willing to go back out and try again because I’m not keeping that old story, which was that instant panic-driven narrative that doesn’t serve anybody.

David Pisarek: No, I think it’s really important to have that positive outlook on what actually did go well. I don’t think you shouldn’t forget about what didn’t go well. You always want to do a bit of a post-mortem and go, “Okay, I wasn’t prepared for this and this and this”, or “We worked through this really quickly. They hired me for five hours. We did it in three. What am I going to fill this time with?” Having that backup plan, thinking about it and working through it is really critical to growth, whether it’s for yourself or for the organization.

Julie Boll: Absolutely. And if you can’t do that if you’re stuck in the shame spiral around it, you don’t get to move past it. Absolutely, being able to do that post-mortem, if you will, that review of what happened, what are your key takeaways, and what are you learning from this? You learn from every hard experience that you have. What are you going to take away from it?

David Pisarek: Yeah, definitely. “What is that lesson?” And that lesson could be a hard lesson. “You made a really bad investment. You lost $10,000”. Or the lesson is “I need to spend an hour before going into a meeting like this and reviewing my notes so I’ve got a more clearer understanding of our past conversations”. Spending the time doing that, it’ll just make you a better person.

Julie Boll: Yeah, I agree completely. Thank you for asking.

David Pisarek: Yeah, so “Dare to Lead” sounds like a really amazing program. How did you get involved with it?

Julie Boll: So as I mentioned before, grant writing is my background. I spent time in the non-profit sector, for 20 years, started in marketing, ended in grants, and decided to become a consultant. And as a consultant, all of my clients were non-profits.

At the same time that I was making that leap from full-time employment, which you’ve done, to self-employment, I was listening to Brené Brown’s data lead work and really, really leaning into the work because it is terrifying to become your sole supporter and become a self-employed person.

So I became just a huge fan of Brené’s work while I was in that transition. I found out about a year into self-employment that she was training people and she was looking for people in particular who served non-profits. Well, with a great background, that’s all I serve. And so I could prove that I have this track record and this is what I do.

When I went down to Texas, I got to meet her and found out I was going to have to get up in front of people and facilitate this work. So it was this very weird shift from being behind the scenes in Grant’s world to being in front of the room.

But her work is so valuable and I think our non-profits need it. So one of the biggest things in “Dare to Lead” is like leaning into hard conversations. People have a hard time with that. And there’s also this myth that if we’re polite, we won’t have a hard conversation. And I think that politeness is a sometimes I’m trying to think of toxin in non-profit spaces where we’re not actually saying what needs to be said. And I’ve just been in too many non-profit environments where we needed to speak up, we needed to talk real and people will leave an environment where you’re not willing to confront issues. I just think we need it in our non-profit spaces.

David Pisarek: I think it’s important to note, just to your point,

You can be kind and firm at the same time.

Part of that also comes down to the way that we speak and the way that we use intonation in how we speak. You want to end a sentence in a complete sentence, not with an upswing where it sounds like a question. You need to be clear on how you’re speaking, not just what you’re saying, but how you’re also saying it.

Julie Boll: Yes, clear as kind.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. Julie, amazing insights around difficult and hard conversations. I hope everybody listening has been able to pull at least one thing. I think there were tons and tons of great insights and thoughts and information that you provided and great advice today.

Is there a challenge that you could issue everybody who’s listening to this episode, maybe within the next week, something that they can do?

Julie Boll: Practice a Rumble tool, and this is one that I didn’t share: Rumble Starter. And this is the most powerful one, and I didn’t mention it because it doesn’t work really well with boards. I don’t think. The story I make up… So when you’re in a hard conversation, practice using the story of makeup. What that does is it sends a message to the other person that this isn’t a final thing. That’s what I would invite your audience to do. Our listeners: try that Rumble starter, curiosity starter, or the story of makeup when you’re in a hard conversation and see how that helps.

David Pisarek: Cool. If anybody wants to get in touch with you, what do they need to do?

Julie Boll: The easiest thing is daretoleadworkshop.com. I love running these workshops. I love teaching the “Dare to Lead” work, and that is a real direct way to find out what workshops are coming up, and how you can actually be trained.

And something else that I wanted to just offer is we need to just get started and do something. There’s a really beautiful “Dare to Lead” assessment that you can do with the Brené Brown website. What I’m offering is to do a 90-day plan with you.

If you want to do the Daring Leadership assessment, find out what your strengths are, find out what your opportunities for growth are. We can hop on a call and we can map out a 90-day plan for you. I love this. I can do this all day long. So if you want to do something like that, you can go to the website, JulieBollConsulting.com/Plan and find out how to do a daring leadership 90-day plan.

David Pisarek: That is an amazing offer. Everybody, go sign up. JulieBollConsulting.com/Plan.

Thank you so much, Julie. It’s been great having you on the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast. Everybody listening, if you want any of the links or resources that Julie provided, just head over to our podcast page at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. Click on this episode for all of the details.

And until next time, keep on being successful.