Welcome to Inclusion Bites, your sanctuary for bold conversations that spark change. I'm Joanne Lockwood, your guide on this journey of exploration into the heart of inclusion, belonging and societal transformation. Ever wondered what it truly takes to create a world where everyone not only belongs, but thrives? You're not alone. Join me as we uncover the unseen, challenge the status quo and share stories that resonate deep within. Ready to dive in? Whether you're sipping your morning coffee or winding down after a long day, let's connect, reflect and inspire action together. Don't forget, you can be part of the conversation too. Reach out to jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk to share your insights or to join me on the show. So adjust your earbuds and settle in.

It's time to ignite the spark of inclusion with Inclusion Bites. And today is episode 138 with the title Embracing Full Potential. And I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Clare Payne. Claire is a partner in an international law firm, a tribunal judge, a non exec director and an academic. And when I asked Claire to describe her superpower, she said that she is fascinated by people, their stories and potential, and that she holds space to allow people to explore who they are and step into their own power. Hello, Claire, welcome to the show.

Hello, nice to be here.

Absolute pleasure. We chatted a couple of weeks back, I think, and I've twisted your arm to come and come on the show, so I'm looking forward to this. So, Claire, tell me a bit more about embracing your full potential and your passion.

So I think for me this probably goes back if I can take you back to 2016. With myself, I'd gone up quite a fast career path in the corporate world, made it up to partner in the legal capacity very, very quickly and I'd done all the things that you were supposed to do to be successful. And I think at or around that time I sort of got to the stage where I was getting increasingly frustrated at a management level with going around in circles with the same conversations and meetings. And I'd also got this feeling of, you know, having got to where you're supposed to get to, was that it. And everything felt very much constricted. And I think for me, I sort of looked around myself and I'm always somebody who looks around and thinks, well, surely there's a way we can do this better, what's missing? And around about that time I became very heavily involved with the Chartered Management Institute and in particular looking at diversity. And one of the things I went out and started having conversations with other organisations about was what does diversity mean to you and what impact does it have in your organisation? And now statistically at some of them, I was finding on paper they had the same credentials, they had the same numbers of people from different backgrounds, but some of them were seeing huge benefits from this and others, absolutely not. And that was sort of stepping off on this journey of realising, what's the difference here? And it actually all came down to the culture, it came down to how much they allowed people to be themselves and bring themselves to work.

And so that set me off on what's been a whirlwind of a journey which after many years of doing lots of work with lots of different people, landed me sort of a couple of years after that in a field surrounded by wolves, looking at. So where exactly did humans learn to collaborate and where did this idea that we needed some diversity in our groups in order to be able to innovate and reach our full potential come from? And the answer actually comes from about 100,000 years ago, when we first started interacting with wolves.

Because when we think about wolves, we think about a very hierarchical society. But that's not what you found, is it?