Last week Ellen Griley gave us the framework. This week she gets personal.

In this Between the Seasons episode of Why Does It Feel So Wrong to Be Human at Work?, Pinaki Kathiari and Chris Lee are joined again by Ellen Griley, founder of Equilibrious Communications and creator of Internal Calms, to dig deeper into what it actually looks like to be human at work when everything around you is already on edge.

Ellen gets vulnerable — about the meeting where she cried advocating for thoughtful AI adoption, about the privilege that lets her show up that way, about learning to co-regulate in real time. Chris names the thing about corporate comms that nobody says out loud: the relentless pursuit of perfection is actually making everything less psychologically safe. And Pinaki closes with a story about sitting next to a professor who researches horrific things for a living and asking: how do you stay positive?

The answer: we're just humans. We're just here.

In this episode, they discuss:

• Why assuming employees open your email with 100% cognitive and emotional capacity is the root of most communication failures

• The New York Times tells you it's a daily paper — why doesn't your internal newsletter do the same?

• Ellen on being human at work when not everyone has the same permission to show up that way

• Code switching is exhausting — even for the best of us

• The power of awkward silence in a room that's about to derail

• How to give people agency when everything feels like a 'because I said so' world

• High school, kindergarten, and the corporate ecosystem — why they're all the same social experiment

• Pinaki on the base layer of relationships that has to exist before strategy can land

• Bree's advice: find one moment of joy each day. Just one.

We're all just four-year-olds with tablets trying to figure it out. This one's the reminder you didn't know you needed.

Check out Ellen's work: https://www.equilibrious-comms.com/
Read Shifting Ground: https://www.equilibrious-comms.com/sh...
Connect with Ellen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/internal-calms/

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Connect with Us

Pinaki Kathiari – LinkedIn | Local Wisdom

Chris Lee – LinkedIn | Gallagher Communication

Bree Bartos – LinkedIn | Local Wisdom

Special thanks to digital communication agency Local Wisdom (www.localwisdom.com) for really believing in our mission and making this podcast possible.

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