Kay Miller: Welcome to Uncopyable Women in Business. I’m Kay Miller, also known as Muffler Mama. I’ve been the number one salesperson in a male-dominated industry, a successful entrepreneur for over 30 years, and now my mission is to help you build a business and brand nobody else can compete with. If you’re ready to break out of the pack and create your own uncopyable advantage, stay tuned. My guests and I are here to help. Today I have the pleasure of talking with Anna Lecat. Anna is an intimacy and conflict consultant, TEDx speaker, and author of the new book Loving Conflict. Anna helps leaders and teams turn tension into trust and real connection. With decades of global business experience, she proves that conflict isn’t something to avoid. It is a powerful tool for better relationships, leadership, and collaboration. Anna, welcome to the show.
Anna Lecat: Thank you.
Kay Miller: You have a very interesting background, a very international background. I would like to start with that.
Anna Lecat: Yes, thank you so much. I’m Ukrainian. I was born in Ukraine, and I lived there until I was 17. At 17, I left and went to China. I actually got into a Chinese university and studied there, then stayed for 15 years. I built several businesses there. I speak Mandarin fluently. In fact, if you speak to me on the phone and you are Chinese, you do not know I am not Chinese. I have no accent. At 17, I was so young. I really wanted to fit in and understand, and I absorbed everything in China. I learned about history, mentality, philosophy, and literature, and I read Chinese. But forever, my dream was to become an American and live in America. It took me many years, but through China, after 15 years there, I was finally able to move to the United States. I received my American passport, which I was very happy and very honored to have. I lived in San Francisco for 12 years, so that was my second immigration. Then about six years ago, I moved to Paris, France. My husband is French, and now I am French as well. So three immigrations: China, the United States, and France.
Kay Miller: Well, and those languages, being fluent in languages. I’m actually taking Spanish, I hate to say it, on Duolingo. They do a great job of gamifying language learning, but it is so hard. I really respect the fact that you can speak several languages. When you were 17, you said there were a couple things that motivated you. One of them was to go out and explore the world, and of course there were some political considerations too. With your background, I am obviously interested in your new book, which is right behind me, Loving Conflict. What a great title. That is what I would like to dig into. How do you love conflict? Why do you love conflict? And as I mentioned, I would love some specifics that listeners can take away. Do you want to tell me about the book and your philosophy?
Anna Lecat: When we grow up, we are taught that conflict is bad and that we need to avoid it and be nice to each other. I was brought up the same way. My mother always strived for balance in the house: be quiet, don’t say anything, let’s keep peace no matter what. But having traveled all over the world and built several global businesses with multinational teams, I noticed that people who are not afraid of conflict, who do not avoid conflict but instead go through it, are much better off. Their teams are better, their relationships are stronger, and their families stay together. So I started studying that. How come there are people who do not avoid conflict? What skill set do they have? How do they actually do it so well that at the end of the conflict, they have more trust and more collaboration in their teams or relationships? I have spent my life studying it, and I developed the framework for loving conflict because I believe that whenever we do something well, whenever we practice a lot and do something well, we end up loving whatever we are doing. For me, engaging in conflict is like a muscle that I practice every day. It is very difficult to practice because we are so conflict avoidant, and it makes us inconvenient for other people. But what happens is that when we know how to do it nicely, kindly, and gently, we end up learning more about ourselves, and the people we conflict with also learn about themselves. We end up with a better relationship.
Kay Miller: I am fascinated by one of the many things I am fascinated by with you, which is that you built multiple businesses when you were in China. Before we dig into the conflict piece, which I have questions about, what made you want to start businesses, and what were the businesses? I am curious.
Anna Lecat: What made me start businesses was that I was young and naive, and I thought I could do anything. I think entrepreneurship is like that. We don’t know what we don’t know and what we cannot do. I was full of energy and ideas. In China, it was, and still is, so easy to start businesses. Chinese people are so entrepreneurial. Having a team of people who are all starters and willing to work hard and create new things is a wonderful thing. So it was not just me. I found an amazing business partner in China who taught me how to do business there. It felt like I could do whatever I wanted. I could build things. Then slowly, I started learning that I have limitations. Now I am 50, and I realize it is harder and harder to start new things because I understand how much I don’t know, how much I am dependent on other people, and how much I need a very strong team to accomplish anything.
Kay Miller: The fact that you are 50, which of course you do not look 50, and I am older and I don’t look my age either, but the fact that you met other people to help you move ahead is great. I do think, as you said, as we get older, we know more about how much we don’t know. I started playing piano a couple of years ago, and I said to my piano teacher, Grace, who is younger than me, “I just feel like there is so much I don’t know.” She is a composer and composes for indie films and things, and she said, “I don’t know anything either.” She is so good, and yet there is a world ahead of her. That comes to mind when you say that.
Anna Lecat: I think it is great because understanding that we don’t know many things keeps us humble, which is one of the pillars for me in conflicting and connecting with people. Staying humble pushes me to ask more questions and be more curious about other people, which in turn connects me with other people more. People love to share. People love to share what they know. I am always the one who asks questions. I am that person on the plane who, if you are flying next to me, at the end of the flight, depending on how much time we spend together, I know everything about you. You end up telling me, “I don’t understand. I have told you more than my husband or my mother knows about me. I don’t understand what just happened.” For me, it is like reading books. I love reading. I read all the time. But every time I spend nice quality time with another person who is willing to share, it feels like I have just read an amazing book, and it is alive and right there in front of me. It is full of emotions and sensations, and it enriches me so much and makes me even more humble about my own experiences. I have been doing that ever since I was a little girl in Ukraine, then in China, and then in the States. Every time I stay humble, I quiet my mind. I quiet my opinions, and I am willing to change my mind. I listen with the quality of being willing to change my mind. I get to learn so much more about the other person, a different point of view, and a different culture than if I came in with a very strict idea of myself and what I think and what I know.
Kay Miller: I think being curious is such a wonderful quality for anyone. For my news, I get a whole bunch of sources, from conservative to liberal to everything in between, because I feel like I need to have an open mind. I cannot say that I know it all. I think it is really inspiring that you say to keep yourself humble, even with all the accomplishments you have had. So let’s talk about actual conflict and how you practice it, because I don’t like conflict either. How do you practice it in business, and maybe even personally? Tell me about conflict and how it works for you in business.
Anna Lecat: Every time I feel tension, tension in my body, tension between me and the other person, or tension in them, anything where I see that they are skipping words, holding back, or something is happening, I notice. I am also very body aware. I am constantly checking with myself how my body is feeling. There is this practice of body scanning that I do. I know that for me, when I get tense and things get uncomfortable, my neck and shoulders tense. So I am constantly checking: how is it going? How is my neck? Is there tension? What is going on? Is it something they said or something they did not say? Then I dig into it softly, kindly, gently. I am not going to leave it on the table. I am going to say, “Oh, there was something there just now. Could we go back into it? Was it something I said that made you uncomfortable?” Or, “There was something you said that made me uncomfortable.” Then it is all about me. I bring it up. I am not scared to bring up hard conversations because I know how to do it. I know how to do it with fear. I know how to stay humble and curious about it and how to listen ready to change my mind so that people can express things they otherwise would have hidden. In business, the way it works is, for example, I am still a CEO of my company where we produce products for American companies in China. I started 25 years ago, and I work a lot between China and the United States, with U.S. teams and Chinese teams. Every day we have uncomfortable conversations. There is so much propaganda against each other. There is a trade war. There are tariffs. There is so much mistrust that people are receiving from media sources and stereotypes. Every time I see that somebody is making a decision because they have a stereotype, for example, I work with American teams that say, “Well, Chinese people are like that,” whatever stereotype you can put in there, I will dig into that. “I know that you probably have heard that about Chinese people. Can we look at that?” Because I am not afraid of discomfort or tension, I know how to feel it in my body, recognize it, acknowledge it, verbalize it, and then we address it together. So in business, every discomfort, every tension, I go into it and we resolve it together. In personal relationships, it is the same. I have three kids. They are 9, 12, and 15. They grew up in California, in San Francisco, and then moved to Paris, France. So they are trilingual. They speak Russian, French, and English fluently. You know how Ram Dass said, “If you think you are enlightened, go spend a week with your parents”? I think that if we want to practice conflict, the hardest thing to do is to conflict within our families. I do it every day. I live with my parents. My Ukrainian parents lived with us in the States and now moved with us to Paris. So we have all those cultures: French culture, Ukrainian culture, Californian culture, my kids, all together. You can imagine how much we bump into each other and have issues. We all know that whenever there is tension, we are going to slow down. We have family meetings every week where we bring up those issues. Even my 9-year-old daughter Fina knows, “I have an issue. I have a topic for the family meeting.” Then during the family meeting, she will say, “Yesterday, this is what happened. My brother said this, and this is how I felt. I would like to bring it up, and I have a request.” We have a process: this is what happened, this is how it made me feel, this is why I think it is happening to me, so it is about me, not about them, and this is what I would like to request going forward. It is not blaming the past. It is not blaming them. It is not attacking who they are. It is about her needs, because of who she is, and making a request for how she would like to be treated going forward.
Kay Miller: That is really powerful. This is turning into parenting advice too, which I love. What an advantage your kids have to have that kind of background. It will be interesting to see what they choose to do. That is a great example of how bringing conflict up improves the situation, the understanding, and gets everyone on the same page with a solution. There is that saying, “Don’t bring me a problem without a solution.” That is really great and opening my mind a little bit here. In business, you mentioned stereotypes about different countries. That would be something that comes up, and to me, that would be a pretty obvious way to say, “Wait a minute.” But what are other areas in business where you might notice conflict? Do you create conflicts, or do you just notice when they come up? What do you do to bring those to the surface?
Anna Lecat: I think we have conflicts every day. I work with many executive teams and companies where there are silos. Companies bring me in if they notice that there are silos and the silos stop talking to each other. A common one is a sales team and marketing team, or a marketing team and engineers. Different language, different cultures, different ways of being, different behavior. When they talk to each other directly, it is like they speak different languages. So I come in and translate them to each other: what he is actually trying to say is this. Often people will say, “They are not listening.” Okay, then you have an experience of not being listened to. Then I teach the other team: how would you listen? How would you give them feedback? How would you simply repeat back, word by word, what they just said? These are simple tools for listening so that the other person feels heard. We are not taught this in business schools and technical schools. We are not taught simply how to listen, which means we cannot collaborate because the other team did not feel listened to. That is low-hanging fruit: coming in, watching how people interact, seeing what the listening capacity is, then teaching and practicing that. Another one is how people question each other. Are they saying, “Don’t you think so?” or, “Wouldn’t it be better?” versus asking a question where it is clear that you are ready to accept different facts. Fully open, curious questions. We remove all of that. That is easy communication that has not been updated for a long time. Another one is how to give feedback without putting people on the defensive. Feedback is great. It is very important. That is why I say I love conflict. Sometimes I come into organizations and they are very polite to each other. It is so soft, all soft and beautiful, and I am like, “Oh, bankrupt.” What is under the surface? Then they have meetings after meetings. People come out of the main meeting and then discuss it anyway, but we do not record it. We do not know what happened. We do not have feedback from those meetings after the meeting. So I facilitate and say, “No, we are going to bring everything in here. We are going to be gentle with each other and remember that in front of you is another human being.” We do this exercise where we see the six-year-old inside this person. If you are in front of someone and you really dislike them, are afraid of them, think they are going to take your spot, or feel a shortage of resources or power, if you are not in an abundance mindset, how do you get back to seeing that this is a human being? How were they when they were six? For me, if I get stuck and do not see the human being in front of me, and I just see the political party or somebody who threatens me, then I imagine them at six. There is this feeling in the body of, “Oh, they are also afraid. They also have imposter syndrome. They are also afraid they are going to lose their position or their power. Or they are hungry, angry, tired.” It is all okay. Or it is like imagining that I am holding their heart in my hands. How would I talk to them while still giving them feedback? Because giving feedback is kind. We are helping them. I do it when I go to restaurants or stores. I had a fashion brand for many years where we had stores all over California. I was that store owner, and I loved customers who came in and said, “Who is the CEO? Who is the owner here? I need to talk to them.” I would be on the floor as a salesperson and say, “Tell me.” They would criticize something. They would say, “I think you should do this better.” And I was so grateful because they were giving me a gift of how to serve them better. So I do it in restaurants and everywhere, but I do it in a way that is loving, gentle, and appreciative because I know it is a gift to provide feedback so that they can get better.
Kay Miller: Wow, that is really great stuff. I have been taking a few notes here. It is interesting that your book says Loving Conflict because to me that means you would love to face conflict, but you could also create loving conflict, so it is not confrontational. A lot of it is communication, empathy, and valuing the other person. When I saw conflict, I thought, wow, I hate conflict, but you are framing it as a really good thing. You said that you were a salesperson, and I have to throw this in because so many business owners say, “I don’t want to sell. I don’t like to sell.” But you are the COO and you are selling because that is the way it is. If you have a business that is selling something, you need to be behind it. So that is really interesting, flipping the script, as they say, about how I would imagine conflict and how you are creating a different universe for that conflict. I want to recommend your book again. It is coming out soon, Loving Conflict. As we were talking about before, people can get it at Amazon or independent bookstores, right? Do you want to talk about where to get it?
Anna Lecat: Yes, absolutely. It is coming out March 31, and it is going to be available everywhere books are sold. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that you talk about my book. This subject has been very important to me for a long time, but now even more than ever because, as a Ukrainian, there is a war in my home country. I feel like I am in the middle of several major geopolitical conflicts in the world. As a business owner in China who works with U.S. companies, I am in the middle of that conflict, the trade war, the separation of those two powers. And I am Jewish. I have family in Israel, and I have dear friends and partners in the Palestinian community. So I feel very much involved in the conflict in the Middle East. Every day, I see these discussions. In the United States, we feel very much how polarized the world is. Even if we try not to follow the news, we still feel it in our family gatherings and when we are with friends. I see this shift where people try to talk less and less about the things that matter to them so that they do not get into conflict. I want to flip the script and say, no, no, no. If you do that and you know how to do it gently, you might not change somebody else’s mind, but you will create trust between you and them so that you can hold hands through all the troubles, through all the hardships. I feel so sad when I see people stop talking to their parents or their best friends because they do not agree on the same points, and they think they are doing better for their political party, movement, or activism. I actually think it is the opposite. Every time we stop talking to someone because they have a different view, we actually help their point of view because they do not get to receive feedback from us. They do not get to have that back and forth, and it is in that back and forth that we find better ideas. I really appreciate that you invited me and talked about my book because I want to do everything possible. Somehow, on some level, I feel like I am contributing to peace in my home country the more we talk, the more we are willing to sit in discomfort and learn that when somebody is angry, I can still go talk to them, as long as it is physically and mentally safe. I am not saying go into unsafe environments. But as long as you can keep it safe, go listen to them, because maybe behind their anger, after their anger, there will be tears. Maybe they will tell you what is moving them to this anger.
Kay Miller: I have to say, I fall into the category of someone who does not discuss politics with others, and you are shedding a whole new light on that because that will keep us siloed, as you said. I can’t wait to read your book. Does your book apply to all those areas of life? I thought it was mostly business-oriented, but does it address all the conflicts potentially in your life?
Anna Lecat: Absolutely. It is for business and personal life. I tell many stories in my book. It is partially a memoir of my life. I tell stories from China, from the United States, from my business life and personal life, where I learned how to conflict better. It is quite entertaining. I wanted to keep it in a storytelling format. And yes, the principles apply in personal life. You were talking about how you expose yourself to different news, and that is one of the pillars in my framework. I ask people to pop the information bubble around them and to keep that friend, or to reach out. If you do not have friends who are from different political parties than you or from different points of view, you do not know enough about the world. I think we need to reach out to people who are different from us and keep that discussion going because we will learn. Even if we only learn to express our points better, even if it gives us that practice, it is already a big plus.
Kay Miller: It sounds like you have stories, and stories are huge. We all love stories. You also have frameworks, like you explained with your kids. I am sure you have lots more in the book, specific things we can do. Like I said, you have enlightened me. Being the person you are talking about, who is open and willing to discuss in a civil manner for understanding, that will definitely make the world a better place, maybe a smaller place because we are more connected. This is a very powerful topic, and talking to you is really inspiring. I really appreciate you being on the show and sharing your wisdom and your story. Thank you very much.
Anna Lecat: Thank you so much for having me, and thank you for doing what you do.
You can find out more on Anna’s website at annalecat.com.