ļ»æKumar Dattatreyan here with Agile Meridian and the Meridian Point. And my guest today is Matthew McCarthy. He is the founder and president of Questful, a personal coaching and business consulting organization focused on the continued quest towards mission and purpose. I love the name, Questful. I feel like I'm quest-full, but I never seem to achieve my quest. His business consulting is underpinned by 25 plus years in business transformation related roles at organizations of all sizes across nearly a dozen different industries, as well as by an MBA from Penn State. In parallel, he spent well over 10 years studying achievement, well-being, and health from the perspectives of psychology, nutrition, neurology, physiology, and mindfulness, making connections between these diverse fields to help others on their quest. His latest project is the culmination of 5 years studying the reasons we get stuck achieving our goals and how we break through those.
Alright. So without further ado, I'm gonna invite Matt to the stage here. How you doing, Matt? I'm glad you're here joining me and I hope I did that intro well. I hope I did it justice.
Thanks so much. It was great.
Okay. Excellent. So what inspired you to start Questful and focus on helping both individuals and businesses? So we'll get to where Questful itself comes from as a word, but honestly, I stumbled into it. Part of it was just taking on consulting roles independently where I could help companies achieve their transformational goals. The name Questful came along later, and honestly, it was more related to a quest toward mission and purpose as you said in the intro. That's effectively where it got its start. Okay, it's evolved recently, but we can get there later.
Alright. Sounds good. Okay. So, Questful, like anything else, it's an evolution, right? The name, the purpose, the mission changes. I remember with my own companies, you know, I started in 2015 with a company that didn't have a very clever name. And of course, the name does signify a lot. And I love the name Questful because it conjures up images in your potential prospects' and clients' minds about what that is and what that can mean for them. And certainly, your approach seems to be very broad and deep at the same time, right? It looks at many factors that affect people, their lives, and certainly people, their lives, and business. So can you talk a little bit more about the holistic perspective that you use and how you use it to impact and help your clients?
Yeah. So looking at a business perspective, there are some commonalities that underpin pretty much every company. They all have certain specific needs, and within each of those needs, be they accounting, marketing, operations, any of those areas, there are 3 underpinning concepts: the people, processes, and technology. And specifically, what I do with companies is I work within those 3 frameworks to help tie them together to give them a transformational result. It still sounds a little bit vague, but if you talk about the people, it's ensuring that they are the appropriate people and they are appropriately skilled to do the processes. It sounds like a no-brainer, but that's not always the case. When it comes to process, there are so many different ways to make a widget, so to speak, and some are much more efficient and/or effective than others. So being able to dissect the process, make sure that it's taking advantage of all the possibilities is critical. And technology, which we all think about a lot, is really about how to not make technology center stage, but how to use technology. What are the right tools at the right time to enable the right people to do the right process? And that should result in you getting the most effective output in whichever part of the company that you're looking at.
It makes sense. So people, process, technology, and certainly, these are sort of big areas, big buckets. Can you speak to maybe an example of how you use this framework, if you will, to help a client tie their people challenges to their process challenges and, finally, the appropriate technology that's used?
Yeah, sure. I worked with a global security company. Their operations, and I'm going to narrow it down, their field operations were having difficulty because they were doing everything manually. There was not a whole lot of great communication between field techs, the main office, the customers, et cetera. And so I worked with them to implement technology. Yes, it became center stage at that point. Had to reel it in so that it worked with the process and people as well, but built a holistic process where new field ops requests were coming in automatically. They were automatically pinging the right people who could smartly assign the right people, and the system was then able to track the technician, ping the client with information about which technician was coming in, photo, when they're expected. They're geotagged, so when they were within 15 minutes, "your technician should be on site in about 15 minutes." Client would get notes, operations would get notes, everything flowed in all the right manner. And that enabled a much higher amount of bandwidth, so to speak, for those field techs.
That's impressive. So you're able to help them really solve a business problem and improve the service that the organization provided their clients and certainly make the company, the organization, more responsive, more nimble through this process.
So you are also a personal coach, not just a business coach. How does that play out when you're serving a business? Do you find yourself sort of coaching the leaders or coaching the people? And how do you balance that with the need to help the overall, you know, holistic approach that you're trying to put into play?
So this will sound a little bit interesting, but in a corporate environment, the personal coaching is a little bit more Trojan horse. I'm sneaking it in to help in ways that are possibly beyond scope. And I'm doing it ad hoc, just using skills that I have. A lot of the coaching that I do is actually on an interpersonal level without the corporation involved, without the company involved. It's on an individual basis. And it's really being able to marry together the various aspects of their life: work, personal. And it's also looking at the various aspects of their personal life, which all need to knit together well. So that's the physical, it's their activity and their intake. It's their emotional and mental health. It's about, believe it or not, soul, spirit, whatever you want to call it, that inner sense of having a sense of purpose, having a sense of belonging, having a sense of "I'm not the only one in this universe." Being able to marry those together and help them do more in the process or help them do less if less is the goal.
Yeah, that sounds really interesting. Is this sort of related to the research you've been doing over the last 5 years or so?
The research has grown out of that. So I've taken it a little bit further. There's a set of people in, I'll call it, our culture that have a more difficult time achieving goals than others. It just seemed odd. Why are some people getting stuck? It was a question I was wrestling with. And to be honest, I was one of those people who was continually getting stuck on progress. And I had to investigate, had to understand what was going on. And I went down a lot of different roads. Is it mind, body, soul, and spirit? Is it a sense of how somebody's eating? Is it a sense of the activity? Is what they need, what is going to move the needle? But I stepped beyond that and looked at root causes.
I came across a bunch of scientific research around trauma. And I found a few things. One, trauma actually creates physiological barriers in us doing different things or to doing more when we're used to not doing so much. Or to doing, it tends to keep us in the same rut as we've been in, making it harder to jump out of it. So that research, the studies that I'm looking at, they look at it from the perspective of how it impacts your mental health. And it really does, I mean, hands down. They also look at it and explain what takes place in neurological pathways, the HPA axis, your amygdala, your fight or flight response. And that all made sense. They explain what happens to your hormone cascades.
So I understood the physiological, understood some of the mental health barriers. So I was able to make a leap with all of that to look: this isn't just a mental health issue. This isn't just a physiological issue. And mind you, it really is a physiological issue at the core of it, but this is also a life issue. Those who have gone through trauma, who haven't been able to effectively process through it, and even those who have, will still struggle with this to some degree. They will have barriers on their way to accomplishing more or to achieving what they are setting out to achieve.
Okay. So maybe you can elaborate a little bit, you know, when you talk about trauma and how that might affect an individual's ability to set and keep goals, personal goals. What sorts of trauma are you speaking about here? And how does it have that kind of an impact on both the physiological, the mental well-being, and different aspects of a person?
Yeah. So, in terms of types of trauma, there's some aspect of this effect, from what I've found, to each type of trauma that I've encountered. If you look at PTSD, the emotional health impact is always very clear. How does that impact a, let's use the case of a soldier, comes back to the states, is now trying to live a normal life, and is dealing with PTSD? Even the simple part of disturbed sleep is going to make that person less effective. But they also have a heightened alert. You hear stories of people who, they'll see a plastic bag blow across the road and they'll think it was an animal, or there's an object in the road when they're driving and they're wary that it's an IED. So that kind of person is not going to be able to respond or achieve goals. They're merely trying to keep themselves under control.
Another type is what you might call developmental trauma. That's not a recognized term currently in the literature, though there are efforts being made to make that a recognized diagnosis. Developmental trauma would be the things that are happening in a child's life, typically before the age of five. So typically pre-memory, that may be something like abandonment. It may be they went through a traumatic event during that time. It may even be pre-birth.
I'll give you an example, and this is kind of where I unwittingly became the reluctant hero, for lack of a better term. So my backstory, I won't give the whole thing. It's awfully long. It's, well, decades old. But my backstory, I was adopted. I was adopted as a baby. What I found out recently, in fact, this past year, as part of my research, turns out my birth mother endured some major traumatic events while she was pregnant with me. What happens scientifically is there's a rush of hormones that goes through the mother. It's heightened adrenaline, cortisol, and a number of other stress-related hormones. So when that happens, it doesn't just stop with the mother. It gets fed into the baby, me. So I had this heightened influx of hormones that I don't remember, but my body does.
So that was one. Then, I mentioned I was adopted. So I was placed in what I think they consider a receiving home. It's kind of like a temporary orphanage where I was cared for between when I was born and when all the legal documentation can be done for the adoption. But during that time, there's no parental caring. You have attendants, people who are making sure I'm changed, et cetera, but there's really not that parental caring. Turns out that that kind of almost an abandonment issue can have negative mental health impacts down the road. There was a massive study of tens of thousands of children who went through what they call adverse childhood effects, excuse me, and they were shown to have a much higher incidence of anxiety, depression, and a number of other mental health issues. So that would be a great example of developmental trauma.
You can also have generational trauma, which is in things that took place maybe a generation, two, three back and continue to be passed along both culturally in your family and even epigenetically. So it comes back to the physiological.
And then last one that I would mention is cultural. So a great example of cultural trauma, COVID-19. We all experienced it differently, but you can't deny that we all experienced some trauma through that, or the Great Recession, or other major events like that.
Absolutely. So you have all of these events that affect people, whether it's things that you can't control that happened even before you were born or while you were gestating, as the case may be in your case, to things that happened after you were born, but again, you still have no control over because it's generational, passed down through generations, it's epigenetic. You know, it's a genetic component.
So I would say that for you, it was a journey in self-awareness to understand how these effects affected you. I'm curious about how you first, of course, gained insight into these things that influenced you and your psyche and your outlook and the way you interact with people. And then what did you do to change that or to maybe shift the story or change the dynamic a little bit so that you were able to achieve your goals? And maybe you're still on that journey. I don't know.
Yeah. I'm under the assumption I'll be on this journey for the rest of my life. But understanding it was a huge light bulb for me. So, like I said, I went through about a 5-year process, researching all these different avenues. And I'd like to say it was skillful that I landed on it at this time. I think it was more usually luck or process of elimination because, frankly, I went through so many different lines of thought in terms of what could be my barrier. And so it took a long time to get to that.
And what have I done to cope? To be honest, it is a lot of different things, but there are some commonalities. One is that I need to be aware of that short-term alert. So in the foreground, if something stressful is going on, I can feel it in my body. I can feel it sometimes like just a knot in my stomach. I can sometimes feel it almost like electricity going down my arms and legs. I can feel brain fog coming on. And people who may have not gone through major trauma may also feel these things, a lot of stress. So what I'm talking about is somewhat applicable to them as well.
But what I would do is literally take a moment out and do some deliberate breathing. That seems simple, and we all breathe all day, every day. But when you're under a stress situation, you're breathing more heavily through the mouth. You're breathing more quickly. You're breathing more shallowly. And by disrupting that through slow breathing through the nose, even holding, you're teaching your body, "Okay, this situation, it may seem stressful, there's really no danger."
And that doesn't fix everything, obviously. There are a lot of long-term approaches that I've needed to take. One big one is creating some additional space in my life. Consider it maybe like a buffer. Think of it this way: if you have, let's say, a million dollars sitting in a savings account, are you going to be worried about investing $10,000 in a stock? Probably not so much. If you have $10 in a savings account and you're not sure about your income, you're going to be very worried about an investment. It could be the most fantastic investment, but you're going to be worried about it. So in the same way, creating a buffer of time, creating a buffer of mental energy, and creating even an emotional buffer. And that emotional buffer is there to protect you from the heightened stress alert. So those are two major things.
Yeah, very interesting. So it sounds actually quite similar to an approach by Shirzad Shamim, the author of the book Positive Intelligence. I don't know if you're familiar with that work. And what he states is that we all have our saboteurs, and we have our sages, and our saboteurs, you could think of them as perhaps the trauma that you either are living through or lived through or trauma that's affecting you in some way in one of those categories that you mentioned. And it's just becoming more aware of them and then taking steps to quiet those voices or being aware of the triggers, as you put it. I don't think you used the word triggers, but I heard triggers. And then being aware of them and then doing something, right, about it. And so in your case, it was maybe some mindful breathing to bring your body back into a state of calm so that you can deal with whatever the stressor was in a more meaningful way.
So it sounds really interesting that your research kind of led you to this self-realization. And, yeah, you're right. It's a journey that lasts forever. You know, for me, I think we all have certain traumas that we grow up with, and we have to overcome. The more aware we are of what they are and the triggers that limit our ability to reach our potential, the better off we are in our personal and professional relationships.
So I guess what do you hope to do with this research and the work that you've done on yourself? How will you bring that to the public in some way to help others?
So, absolutely, I am bringing it to the public, and I'm starting slowly by getting on podcasts like yours where I'm able to share this information with people so they may have that light bulb go off in their lives. On the other hand, there may be people who haven't really had that stressful of a life. They're out there somewhere, and they may see others in a different light as a result of this. And so they may say, "Look, that person's struggling. Maybe they're not just, to use the language, not just a loser, but maybe there is something physiologically going on with them." And they may have more understanding, may be able to work with them, maybe as a leader or in their family.
But beyond that, I've actually developed a coaching program, a one-on-one coaching program that I'm starting to work with clients on. I plan on building an online course around this to teach others who may not be able to engage in a one-on-one long-term program, but who may still want the information. And I'm also at the beginning stages of producing a book. I want to reach people where they are and hit them where their abilities are. So I'm trying to cover it in that way.
Yeah, that sounds great. I love to, when you start to release elements of this, I'd love to be, I'd love to know so I can check it out. I'm curious, you know, you're sort of this transformational coach. You help organizations in their transformation efforts. I know that you're familiar with Agile, Lean, all those frameworks, and you've used them in your past. And the research that you've been doing or been exposed to has led you to this point where you have this, you're on the cusp of releasing this new work to help individuals, right? Work through their own individual traumas, or at least recognize people that may be going through trauma in their personal lives and as a way to raise awareness of people that are at least outwardly well-adjusted to help the people that are maybe less so. That's great.
How does this, or does this apply to like a corporate entity? Does a corporate entity have trauma that maybe manifests itself in ways that can be identified through some workshops and exercises to help a group of people sort of become more aware of that trauma?
You know, that's a really, really good thought and something that I think I'd like to dig a little bit deeper into. I think that resonates very much. Any company of any substantial age will have gone through major events. I mean, I brought up COVID. Every company had to deal with COVID in its own way. Each time you have some micro or macroeconomic event, it has an impact. Changes in leadership will have an impact. Not all of these may be traumatic, but I think that impact has to still be viewed as something that needs to potentially be addressed. If you have a change in leadership, even if it's positive, it's going to shake up some people. And you have to look at how to cushion the blow for those people.
One of the, there are two attributes that really contribute to an event being traumatic. And I think this can apply both at the human level as well as the corporate level. One is a sense of helplessness. So there's no agency. There's no ability to take yourself out of the situation. Back to that soldier with the IED in the Middle East, they have to follow orders. And as soon as that IED is spotted, there's nothing else they can do. It's either going to go off or it's not. They can't stop it.
The other side or the other attribute is the lack of ability to be soothed. So either there is nobody there to help soothe the person experiencing the trauma, or the person is not able to do so for themselves. As a kid, they can't be expected to soothe themselves. As an adult, somebody who's well-adjusted may have learned that, and that keeps the event from being truly traumatic.
So if you look at that from a corporate perspective, if there is an event that hits the company and all or part of the company, the employees feel a lack of agency, they're going to likely feel that as traumatic. And then if there's no leadership at any level of the company that's providing soothing, may not be the term we think of in a corporate environment, but providing that sense of support, that sense of encouragement, a strong sense of positive leadership, yeah, you definitely can have something that will give you, we'll call it a toxic environment.
Yeah. I tend to think that this certainly works at the individual level because, well, you know, we're complex creatures, I guess. And we have many things that influence us, shape us, shape our thinking, shape our responses to stimuli from the external, from the outside. And certainly, our past has an impact on that, you know, how we respond to certain things. And we can gain awareness and gain insight into how our minds work and how we react. We can be more aware of our triggers, and we can do all of those things and be a better version of ourselves, right? Through coaching, through self-awareness, things like that.
And I feel that these same things can apply to a corporate entity because really the behaviors, the cultures, they are really just a collection of the shared set of values and practices and behaviors and, you know, I guess rituals that people go through because they work together, right? They do things together. They go, and again, in post-pandemic, it's different because so many people work remotely. So culture is harder to measure at the corporate entity level because people are working from home. And so culture doesn't seem like it's, it seems to be eroding, company culture, per se, if you call it that, seems like it would be less impacted by these types of things, but I don't know. It seems like your program could be applicable for sure in both instances.
I don't know if I have a question there except to say, except maybe a comment that maybe something for you to think about, you know, how you might apply this at the organizational level, because that could, you know, for me, and this is just me, I'm going to switch to this kind of a mode, so it's more, we're just conversing here. For me, it's, I don't know if I get my train of thought here, but it's more about how you apply these types of frameworks, paradigms, whatever, to many, right? Because you can help many people at the same time. One-on-one coaching can go really deep, but if that person is stymied by the culture around them, they may fall back into the place that they were before. That's just a thought. I don't know. How do you feel about that?
So, no, that makes a lot of sense. The culture of an organization does, well, frankly, it can be traumatic. I was aware of a podcast out there that they had a series which was "Corporate America, I Think, Was Broken." And there's a sense that the culture can be stifling to anyone. And without resolving that, that itself becomes like long-term trauma. Imagine it like being in a neglectful household as a kid. It's the same thing. You're investing, say, 40 hours a week, probably more, at this organization, and they're not supporting you.
The hard part is that it absolutely has to be handled from a top-down perspective. You can have grassroots improvements in areas of culture, but unless they're supported at the top and disseminated by leadership, not just disseminated, but modeled by leadership, it won't become pervasive throughout the organization. It just won't.
Good point. So you've, you know, you've been studying this for a long time, all these factors and how they all intertwine, right? Achievement, well-being, health, psychology, nutrition, all of these things. What should, from an individual standpoint, what drives fulfillment for an individual, do you think?
So I think there are a handful of things. A couple of things that I'll say don't drive fulfillment, and not everybody likes hearing this, but what we buy, what we earn, what we make from a financial perspective, even scientifically, it's proven doesn't really drive fulfillment. What does tend to drive fulfillment are a few things. One is a sense of purpose. You're doing something good that's helpful for others that you feel good about. One is a sense of community, and that's less about purpose and more about connection to others. A sense of awe is something that people don't think about a lot, but you can get that whether it's through a religious or spiritual practice, being out in nature, just a sense that you are not alone. You are a small part of a huge whole, W-H-O-L-E.
Those are some very important things. Relationships and family go into the community aspect of it. But I think those are the things that lead more to fulfillment. The possessions and the finances, those are tools that we use for how we live.
Yeah, that totally resonates with me. I get my fulfillment from the things that I love to do. And some people are lucky. I consider myself lucky. I love to do what I do, and I get paid pretty well for it. But not everyone is in that situation, right?
So thinking of it in those terms, fulfillment is purpose, connection, and a sense of awe. If you think of it in those three terms, what should companies do to provide an environment that fulfills those needs for people? Because I tend to think that if you are able to give that to people in their place of work, they're going to be happy. They're going to be much more productive individuals. The company is going to make more money, right? I mean, not that money is that important, but from a corporate standpoint, a company exists to provide value to their clients and customers and return more to their shareholders or their owners, depending on how big the company is. What are your thoughts there?
Well, I think you hit on something when you backpedaled a little bit, not that the money's... In a lot of corporate environments, the financials are the most important thing that they do. Their mission statement aside, their mission statement is usually paper and it doesn't hold up, but what they're there is to increase shareholder value. I think companies who really succeed at culture and who really succeed at helping their employees find fulfillment are ones that have an underlying purpose, an underlying mission, something that goes beyond the shareholder value piece. Sure, they can still return shareholder value. And you're right, they're more likely to because they're in alignment with their own mission, they're more likely to be successful as a company.
But one of the things that I think in a previous conversation, you and I talked a little bit about this, one of the things that I encourage companies to do is to measure their own mission. So whatever the mission that you are striving to more, whatever the problem that you're out to solve, use that as your benchmark. Watch your profitability and make sure you can afford to keep doing that mission, but use the mission as the benchmark.
Absolutely. I love that.
Alright. So, we're getting up into the 40-minute range, and this is where I ask if there's anything that I haven't asked that you'd like to share.
So I think I was able to get a lot out there about the impacts of trauma on goal setting. That's really what I was hoping to communicate. So I appreciate the opportunity to do that.
One thing that I have done for your audience is I've created an assessment. I'd like to call it a gift, but it's, you know, it's difficult. But it's an assessment that helps anybody listening to look at their lives and look at whether trauma is their barrier to achieving what they are trying to achieve. So it's just a one-page assessment, tried to pare it down. But anybody who would like, if they text "assessment" to 33777, they'll get it by email, and definitely encourage you to review that, at least see if the light bulb goes off for you. If it does, that may mean that there's a different approach than just the grit, guts, gumption, growth mindset, brute force method.
So text what again? Assessment?
Text the word "assessment" to the number 33777.
Alright. Yeah. So that's what you want to do. So those of you watching, just do it now so you don't forget. Text the word "assessment" to 33777 and you will be able to take that assessment. I'm going to do it as soon as I get off this call to try this assessment out.
Well, Matt, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. If there's any information about the upcoming book or the course or the program, just share those links with me, and I will make sure they're part of the show notes for the show. And if people, the audience, if you have any questions, you know, just please feel free to reach out and post them on whatever platform you're either watching or listening this to, and one of us will be sure to respond to you. Thanks so much for coming. Appreciate you being here. Have a great rest of the day.
Alright. Thanks so much for having me.
