Hello friends, my name is Tammy Simon, and I'm the founder of Sounds True, and I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge.

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You're listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Amelia Elizabeth Lati.

Elizabeth is an awarded educator, applied psychology researcher and the founder of CISU Lab, which builds communities and organizational cultures based on everyday leadership

as an expression of both courage and compassion. Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, Business Insider, BBC and Forbes.

Originally from Finland, Elizabeth Lati is the author of a new book with SoundsTrue. It's called Gentle Power, a revolution in how we think, lead and succeed using the finish art of CISU.

Elizabeth has a remarkable story to tell, how she wanted to understand CISU from the inside out by setting herself up with a nearly impossible feat,

and then how she combined what she learned from her inner experience without her qualitative research in order to come up with a series of insights on how we can each turn adversity into fuel in our lives,

accessing what she calls Gentle Power. Here's my conversation with Amelia Elizabeth Lati.

Elizabeth, you're joining us from Helsinki, the capital of Finland, and of course Finland is the birthplace of CISU, which is what you and I are going to be talking about today.

I'm excited to learn more about CISU. To begin, can you define this hard-to-define word in English and also tell us how you first encountered the notion as a finished person?

Thanks so much, Tammy. Yeah, CISU is a bit of a paradox because when you look at it, it's a small word might look a bit unassuming for letters, and it's one of these words that has been described most integral to the finished culture.

It's even been said that you can't understand Finland or Finland without understanding CISU.

The word denotes this kind of embodied internal fortitude. It is extraordinary determination and courage in the face of extreme adversity.

So it's not just your some kind of a minor setback or being annoyed about something little, but it really is this point when we feel that we have come to the edge of our preconceived or our assumed capacities.

And when we stay with ourselves, when we don't give up just at that point when we feel that there's nothing more left, that's when we enter this, you know, you could call it the zone of CISU or a second wind.

And it's something that lifts us. That's why it's also kind of an existential topic to speak about because it's sometimes very hard to describe these events when we've had them as humans.

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