Christina Luconi: Scale With Soul

Seek the stress. Scale with soul. Embrace your uniqueness. These are just a few of the pearls of wisdom flying fast and furious when Christina Luconi, Chief People Officer at Rapid7, visits with Host Chris Schembra on this episode of Gratitude Through Hard Times. Her self-awareness, strength and positive vision have not only been central to building out staff for some amazing startup companies (from inception through IPO). These are also the traits that have defined her full and fascinating life – whether taking her teen-aged daughters on a transformational trip to Tanzania or snatching life-giving lessons from a life-changing cancer diagnosis. This is a woman who brings her whole, authentic self to every interaction and in the process offers connection and empathy to others. You’ll learn about how Christina expresses gratitude and the powerful benefits it confers, rippling out in how she frames “negative autobiographical experiences.” Where did she find the courage to reinvent herself at the age of 14 without erasing who she was before? When did she realize that she held within her the ability to embrace things in tension and turn them into opportunity? Christina shares her journey and explains how she has been able to bridge her reality as the lone woman in many C-suites by staying true to her core values: “If you work hard enough, there aren’t a lot of boundaries you can’t overcome. IF you’re committed and drive towards that!” Tune in to find out why this Bostonian dynamo hopped in her car to pay Chris a visit. It’s a very special episode chalk full of “news you can use” and that you won’t want to miss!

Interested in hearing more from Christina? She offers a treasure trove of interesting perspectives in more than 200 LinkedIn posts you can find at this link.

Check out this brand new website to learn about the keynote topics and workplace leadership trends that are top of mind for Chris these days! And if you’re interested in having a 7:47 Virtual Gratitude Experience or subscribing to our newsletter, please visit this link.

Click hereto hear more fascinating conversations with Fortune 500 CEOs, professional athletes and entertainerswho have shared their human stories on Gratitude Through Hard Times.

KEY TOPICS:

• If you could give credit or thanks to one person in your life that you don’t give enough credit or thanks to – that you’ve never thought to thank – who would that be and why? Although she’s always been very intentional about sharing her appreciation, she still feels she couldn’t possibly have thanked her parents – whom she so admires – enough.
• Using the Right Words: About the power of expressing gratitude in language that resonates with the recipient.
• Breaking Rules: How Christina reinvented herself at the age of 14, figuring out how to expand her world and thinking in ways that have served her well ever since. 
• Three Options for Managing Through a “Negative Autobiographical Experience”:
• Ignore it, pretend it didn’t happen and just move on.
• Talk it out with a therapist or by journaling and then move on.
• Specifically assign positive benefits that have occurred as a result and give thanks to it for becoming a beneficial part of your life story, a practice known as "grateful processing."
• Why Not Me? What Christina has come to understand about our ability to challenge our self-imposed limitations through humility, determination and drive.
• Breaking the Ceiling: How Christina figured out ways to leverage being the only woman in the room to break boundaries and elicit vulnerability in C-suites full of male entrepreneurs. A superpower!
• Buck the Statistics: Why it’s important not to get trapped by what is and surrender to a victim mentality rather than pushing the envelope and making change!
• Leading With Empathy: About the importance of understanding other people’s experiences and perspectives when navigating corporate culture and decision-making.
• Be the Change: When living with unresolved conflict impacts others with forms of entitlement and hearts at war.
• How Trauma Lands: Why every person’s threshold is different.
• Scaling With Soul: How to stay authentic under even the most stressful circumstances, like taking Rapid7 from being a startup with 75 employees to a publicly traded company with more than 2,000 global personnel.
• Christina’s World View: About the role of challenge and seeking while also keeping balance through life experiences that promote openness and awareness.
• Observing Versus Engaging; Empathy Versus Sympathy: It’s all in the perspective!
• Hope & Healing: How an attitude of gratitude – not found in comparison – yields very real mental, emotional and physical rewards. 
• 365 Days: About Christina’s decision to write – and post publicly – her thoughts and experiences by pretending no one was reading them! It was about seeking connection with others and by putting herself out there, she did exactly that.
• When In Rome: How pasta and all its associations creates magic for Chris and Christina!
• Three Things From the Conversation:
• The power of Mudita, the dharmic concept of joy that comes from delighting in other people’s well-being (as Christina experienced in her chemo encounter).
• Christina lives life in a dialectic posture, embracing black and white as well as the gray. She is able to hold things in tension.
• While she’s open to therapy, what Christina finds most helpful and healing is candid conversations like this one with Chris!
• Timing Is Everything: How, when and why Chris and Christina connected.
• Honor the Moose: About the concept of aligning individual and team collaboration as part of the core corporate ethic at Rapid7.
• The 3C Model of Collaborative Leadership: Connect, Collaborate and Champion.
• In Parting: What it was that inspired Christina to get in her car and drive 3.5 hours from Boston to NYC in order to connect and share meaningful conversation with Chris!
• Closing the Gratitude Loop: Christina’s message for her parents and daughters.
   

QUOTABLE

• “Life is about connections … For me what has made the work that I’ve done or my life interesting is the connections I’ve made with people. It makes my world expand.” (Christina)

• “There’s something beautiful about (not) turning your back on the past but looking for the positive benefits in it and keeping it as part of your life story.” (Chris)

• “Everything I have lived through is an opportunity. There are things that I’ve screwed up or am not proud of, but I don’t dwell on them. I look at what I can take away from that moment and do better.” (Christina)

• “If you work hard enough, there aren’t a lot of boundaries you can’t overcome. IF you’re committed and drive towards that!” (Christina)

• “Life is not about avoiding bad things happening to you. Life is about avoiding a negative mental attitude when those things occur.” (Chris)

• “Scaling with soul is about how you keep the essence of your value set and what you’re trying to be … You can still be a really great place!” (Christina)

• “You can observe or you can engage. And those are two really different things.” (Christina)

• “There’s good in everybody. You just have to be open to finding it and open-hearted to know that just because someone is different from you doesn’t make them better or worse. We’re all just humans.” (Christina)

• “Hard times don’t have to create loneliness. Hard times can create meaningful moments of connection.” (Chris)

• “All the best things in my life have happened when I’ve said ‘yes,’ versus ‘no.’ ” (Christina)

LINKS/FURTHER RESOURCES:

• Click here to learn more about “Taking Care of Business? Grateful Processing of Unpleasant Memories,” the study conducted by researchers at Eastern Washington University.
• "The Anatomy of Peace: Resolving the Heart of Conflict," by The Arbinger Institute.
• More about the many benefits of an attitude of gratitude available at this link.
• "No One Wins Alone," by Mark “the Moose” Messier.

ABOUT OUR GUEST:

Christina Luconi leads Rapid7’s strategic people initiatives as its Chief People Officer. She is responsible for the entire employee lifecycle, with critical focus on recruiting stellar talent, building and inspiring corporate culture, acquisition integration, and “scaling with soul.” Prior to joining Rapid7, Christina was the owner of People Innovations, an independent consulting firm focused on the creation of innovative people strategies for startups and high-growth companies, primarily in the high technology industry. Christina also served as Chief People Officer at @stake, a professional services security firm that she helped build from the launch through its acquisition by Symantec. She also played the role of Vice President of People Strategy at Sapient Corporation. Joining the company prior to its public offering, she was responsible for building the people-focused side of the company from the ground up, aligning business strategy with people needs. Christina also played a critical role as a member of the senior management team, focusing on the strategic and operational direction of the company as well as executing acquisitions, from due diligence through integration.

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ABOUT OUR HOST:

Chris Schembra is a philosopher, question asker and facilitator. He's a columnist at Rolling Stone magazine, USA Today calls him their "Gratitude Guru" and he's spent the last six years traveling around the world helping people connect in meaningful ways. As the offshoot of his #1 Wall Street Journal bestselling book, "Gratitude Through Hard Times: Finding Positive Benefits Through Our Darkest Hours,"he uses this podcast to blend ancient stoic philosophy and modern-day science to teach how the principles of gratitude can be used to help people get through their hard times.

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