Melanie Parish, MCC

  The show’s guest in this episode is Dr. Kim Alexander. She is a Canadian Obstetrician/Gynaecologist specializing in HPV Disease and Vulvar Health. She is a Certified Facilitator for the OWL: Our Whole Lives comprehensive SexEd curriculum and the curriculum designer for GrownUps: Your Sexual Self, a week-long workshop for adults exploring healthy sexuality. Dr. Alexander is the author of an upcoming book on sexual health and writes the monthly Savvy Sex Ed column for the Medical Post. —   Listen to the podcast here  Experimenting with Learning about Sexuality with Dr. Kim Alexander Hello. I’m Melanie Parish and...... Read More

  The show’s guest in this episode is Gül Sönmez. She is an Intuitive Healer & Transformational Coach and Mindfulness Trainer, internationally renowned for her ability to find and heal people’s past traumas and buried memories, so they can overcome anxieties, self-doubt, stress and procrastination in order to live aligned, purposeful lives. With 15 years of experience working in big multinationals (including P&G, Coca-Cola, Amazon), She has transformed her working life by learning deep healing techniques and finding alternative solutions to her own struggles. Since then, she has used her incredible gifts, to not only radically change her own life,...... Read More

The show’s guest in this episode is Josselyne Herman-Saccio. Josselyne is a transformative coach and course leader with over 30 years of experience, wearing multiple hats as an author, CEO, former pop star, community activist, founder of a non-profit, and coach. She’s worked with diverse individuals, empowering them to live the life of their dreams NOW. —   Listen to the podcast here  Living Your Dream Life with Josselyne Herman-Saccio Hello, everybody. I’m Melanie Parish. I’m one of the hosts of The Experimental Leader Podcast. Hi I’m Mel Rutherford. Nice to be here. Yeah. And I have been thinking...... Read More

  —   Listen to the podcast here Sh*t Happens Hello, and welcome to the experimental leader Podcast. I’m Melanie Parrish, your host. And it’s great to be here with you today. I’ve been thinking about knitting and picket fences and I wanted to talk about that a little bit today, and kind of how they relate to business. When we moved to Hamilton, Ontario 20 years ago, my lovely husband Mel sent me with his, his down payment, that he’d been saving for his whole life to have I owned a house in Colorado, and he said, you know,...... Read More

Elevate the dialogue around leadership. Give people a clear path to help them try new things, and create space for innovation with experimental leadership methods.... Read More

Being a leader is challenging work. When I first started working with clients, one of the biggest surprises for me was that almost every leader (with only rare exceptions) suffers from some kind of imposter syndrome. It is ubiquitous. The more success the leader is having, the more imposter syndrome they seem to feel. I believe this happens because they are stretching into new territory–taking up a little more space than they took up before–and it leaves them feeling exposed. Imposter syndrome isn’t a pleasant feeling. When it happens, we want to try and make it go away. Even though it is ubiquitous, imposter syndrome is still scary and uncomfortable.... Read More

“Leadership can be lonely experience. This situation is that on steroids. Whatever best practices we have are designed for a world from the past, “ shares Parish. “To counterbalance the challenges this poses it’s critical that we all shift towards an embracing of the exciting and sometimes nerve wracking world of experimentation.”... Read More

Everyone is already experimenting with the global pandemic right now. Many people are trying new things as they respond to working at home and having kids home. Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister, is single parenting alone at home while his wife is quarantined in another part of their residence. He is experimenting with so many new things, as are all of us. What is important is to see them as experiments and to collect data to decide what is working and what is not. This helps to minimize overwhelm and helps us improve over time. Every time we try something new as leaders, we are experimenting. We need to remember our experiments are not permanent. We can collect data and make a decision about how our next experiment needs to be different.... Read More

Having an experimental mindset helps leaders and teams open a variety of possibilities and a free flow of ideas. Seeing the things you try as experiments orients you to collect data and evaluate whether the experiments or things you try are working or not. Sometimes a team will luck into things that work but many times they don’t. When things don’t go as hoped, we fail. An old friend of mine says, “Education is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.” And education can feel like a consolation prize in the race to innovate. It isn’t about whether it feels bad to fail (it does), but how to emerge resilient and ready to experiment again. To fail better, experiments need to be safe-to-fail, small enough to iterate often, and there needs to be a plan in place for data collection and decisions about the next steps.... Read More