Hi everyone! Welcome to Episode 17 of the Negotiate X in Rewind series, where we revisit standout conversations from the Negotiate X Podcast. In this episode, Leading with Compassion & Purposeful Play, Nolan and Aram sit down with Belinda Chiu, founder of Hummingbird. Together, they explore how mindfulness, compassion, and intentional play can make leaders more centered, creative, and human in a chaotic world.
Aram opens the episode by asking how Belinda balances her many roles. Belinda shares that her path has been anything but linear — a “squiggly career” shaped by luck, mentorship, and curiosity. Living between worlds, she learned to see connection everywhere — between academia and business, between people and ideas. That in-between space, she says, is where innovation and empathy thrive.
When Nolan asks about her “compassion strategy,” Belinda redefines compassion not as a “soft” or idealistic trait, but as a neuroscientific skill. Compassion, she explains, activates the brain’s capacity for awareness and empathy in action. In a time of political division, social tension, and environmental uncertainty, leading with compassion means acknowledging complexity while still showing humanity and courage.
Aram explores how mindfulness fits into Belinda’s framework. She describes centeredness as the ability to direct attention intentionally — to stay grounded even amid chaos. Far from being a retreat, mindfulness is a leadership practice rooted in neuroscience. It enables leaders to make wiser decisions and manage relationships more effectively.
As Belinda notes, “What’s soft about working with human beings?” The challenge isn’t knowing the data — it’s managing ourselves.
Aram then brings up purposeful play, a core component of Belinda’s approach. Belinda explains that purposeful play isn’t about being frivolous — it’s structured experimentation. Through improv and creative exploration, leaders learn adaptability, resilience, and openness. Play teaches us to navigate chaos with curiosity instead of fear, challenging our assumptions and seeing problems with a beginner’s mind.
Leadership today demands more than intellect — it requires compassion, presence, and play. By staying centered and experimenting with purpose, leaders can manage uncertainty with grace and connection. As Belinda reminds us, it’s not about perfection — it’s about leading with heart, curiosity, and courage.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this episode. Write to us at team@negotiatex.com. If you enjoyed the show, please rate us on Apple Podcasts to help others find Negotiate X and support our growth.
Thank you for your time!
The first question I had for you is with everything in your bio, everything you’re doing, how do you find time to even visit with us today?
Because you’re wonderful and I love talking to people about this work, and I love people who also recognize that my dog, who, yes, queen Amygdala just came back from a two week, two and a half week trip and she, most dogs like, we want that welcome and they kiss you that welcome all. She literally ran by me three times and she wouldn’t look at me for about 22. So mad at me.
I’m sure she’ll get over that fairly quickly this afternoon, evening. So, I hope so anyways.
So, thank you again, Belinda, for joining us. So you and your company Hummingbird bring together this wonderful combination of academic research with real world coaching and consulting. Can you share with us a little about the journey that has taken you to where you are today in the work that you’re currently involved with?
Yeah, absolutely. I think, boy, how much time do we have? No, I think a lot of folks and colleagues that I work with, engage with probably would have a very similar answer in that nothing’s fully ever planned.
As one of my dear coaches usually talked about the squiggly career in many ways. And so I think that’s been both a combination of a lot of luck. And, a great deal of being very fortunate to be around some incredible mentors and colleagues and just people who have supported me along the way.
It sounds really cheesy when I say that, but it is actually very true. And so being able to really merge a lot of my interests both, I’ve always sat in the inbetweens, like my whole life, I think has been deep in between, whether it’s in between cultures, whether it’s in between, spaces or whether it’s the corporate world and that academic world.
I’ve always I always say when you don’t belong anywhere and you’re raised where you’re not, you don’t belong. You end up belonging everywhere. And so that’s what I’ve always embraced is just being, being comfortable in that space in between and not willing, quite probably my need for a lot of different interests and things like that.
And short attention span, that all helps in terms of not having to give up too many things quite yet.
I would assume that allows you then to be able to fit and fill spaces with a lot of different types of organizations and people as well. So my guess is it serves you incredibly well in the work you do.
Yeah, I think in some ways it’s not easy. I’m still trying to figure it out. I’m still always trying to figure out what I wanna be when I grow up. And I do think there is sort of space and need for all types of individuals in terms of, for some folks, and I’ve always admired those who really know where they’re at.
One thing that they just grab onto. And I have such admiration for that and I remember when I was in Paris, I thought that’s what I need to do as well, grab all that one thing and I just couldn’t do it. It just didn’t quite feel right to me until I really started to appreciate how we do need every, different pieces and so even though, at sometimes I’ve definitely am still trying to work through that, but more and more it may seem disparate, but there’s so many dots and what one thing, I love doing and this kind of perhaps align with that spaces in between is how do you connect the dots?
Because the academic world and the corporate world we think are so different. Or C-suite leaders versus, these young activists that I just came off this two trip of, you think they’re different, but we’re not. We’re all dealing with such similar struggles and fears and issues and it’s how do we connect the dots, not just amongst people, but also the, this greater world in which we live in.
A major focus of the work that you do with students and clients revolves around this concept of a compassion strategy. Can you tell us a little bit about what that is exactly?
Yeah. I mean, it’s really interesting because the word compassion has always been in some ways, part of how I grew up. But not really understanding what does this mean? And I think I probably always, and I continue to investigate.
A lot of times there’s this misunderstanding that compassion is this, as I say, soft, squishy concept of okay, we’re all, going to go meditate on a mountain top and be friends forever. And while I would love to have us all be friends forever and play with dogs all the time, I think in cartoons.
I think one of the key pieces as we know right now, whether it’s the state of politics, whether it’s the state of our environment, whether it’s the state, about race relations, all of these things that are very real compassion. And as we now understand more from the neuroscientists who are studying this.
It’s not just a nice to have concept or this sort of fluffy thing, but a very real neurobiological sort of steer that we should all cultivate, so that we can acknowledge the good, the bad, the ugly that is in front of us, not shy away from us, but still be able to show up with humanity and show up with really applied empathy, right? Empathy and action towards, again, not just human beings, but of course all the others, sort of beings that, not that we inhabit and everything that we do impacts others and gets all of that.
Yeah, absolutely. And one thing that we’d love to do is dive more deeply into the components of your compassion strategy. The first is centeredness, or what is that exactly? And why is it difficult for so many leaders?
Yeah, so centeredness, it’s interesting because this is a phrase that Bain actually started to use and I like alliteration, so the three C’s. But really when we’re talking about centeredness, it is, it’s my opinion plus.
And I know in the last, I would say five years, maybe even more than 10 years, mindfulness has become much more accepted in the workplace because, I think before that it was oh, it’s again, something nice to have in a retreat center or you and the large important spaces.
But more and more there’s this greater acceptance that this is absolutely critical to how we lead and how we show up in the workplace. When I think about working with leaders and also being in that role myself a couple times, I will say that the ability to understand how we choose where our attention goes and how we choose to show up for ourselves and others, and how do we become more comfortable with what’s going on inside, right, requires us to be present.
And I think, and it’s not so simple as in being present, of course it’s being present in the moment, but it’s beyond that, right? It’s really having choice of how do we bring our capacity to really consider what’s the wisest decision in this moment that I can make, right? Because when we think about, and there’s more and more we’d like Dan Goman, for example, before I’ve had the honor of work with the others, have shown that technical skills will only get us so far.
So I started my career as a consultant. I was an econ angel as a political philosophy major, right? But learning how to mock those are things that I learned in the workplace and I was very fortunate to have a great environment that wouldn’t do that. And so the technical skills we can learn, we can teach these other aspects of how do you manage yourself, how do you manage others around you?
Those are all the things that are not always taught in school, right? Those are, and to me, one of my pet peeves is that it’s called soft skills. And my thing is what is soft about working with human beings? What is soft about managing all the, think about all the stories we tell about ourselves, all the things that trip us up in terms of being able to make wise decisions cause as leaders, our decisions don’t just impact us.
It has this huge ripple effect on all those, not just around us, but those longer term impacts years down the line.
Yeah. Nothing soft there at all. And that’s, it’s hard because even where to start sometimes and pulling back the layers of that onion, which is myself, and so difficult, the things that get in the way of me being present.
Absolutely. I love that analogy. Also said about purely back the onions, right? Because there’s this, interestingly, a pushback. There’s been a recent article about how mindfulness is really selfish. And I think this is where compassion has to come in because I think sometimes there’s this misunderstanding too that mindfulness is self-awareness.
I’m aware of myself. And so then we can get really internal right about the work. But compassion really allows us to actually, it’s about showing up. It’s about action, right? It’s about seeing this being mindful is the root is search inside yourself which it started at. And Google really looked at mindfulness is really the foundation of it.
Now it’s how do we then use that in action? Because it’s not just about the internal self, but it’s about how do I internally understand what’s going on so that I can impact others in the world around me in a way that hopefully leaves it better than not.
You talk about the centeredness seen in your work. This idea of purposeful play as a component of centeredness, as you define it, as mindfulness plus. And I can imagine that some of the clients that you work with or students are like, Hey, listen, I’m a manager of people. I don’t have time for play, Belinda. So what do you mean by purposeful play and how does that equip us to lead others and lead our organizations more technically.
Absolutely. It’s funny ’cause that word playing I will say, took me probably a while to fully embrace that part of it because it’s always been very important to me. But when I’m 20 something years old and, trying to be taken seriously amongst mostly, male dominated, I’m scared, wasn’t gonna be like, oh let’s play but as well.
And think about where we are. In this world where there’s so much chaos, so much uncertainty, we don’t know what’s gonna. We don’t we have no idea what’s like day by day. I’m like it’s gonna show up now in the news. And a lot of times we forget to play in this. And it’s, remember it’s purposeful play. It’s not playing just for the heck of having fun, which is also important. That’s, but maybe not in the workplace. But this sense of play is critical for us to be actually, to actually be open to this chaos that is around us.
And as I was saying to someone yesterday, it’s not about being chaotic as leaders. We have to actually be able to manage chaos. And in order to manage chaos, there has to be order, right? In order to be able to play, we have to have structure. So that’s why it has to be a very intentional purpose because until you can’t really experiment unless you understand your core, right?
Just like you can’t really think about, improv. So I do study improv as well. I’m not very good at it, but I really enjoy it. But improv is so important. Like I keep doing it because it keeps my skills or I try to keep my skills really sharpened so that I can respond in the moment. And I always encourage any leader, take an improv class. Just take an improv class. And I remember we had one session where we had tell the leaders that it was an improv class. ’cause we say that people would run away. So we just called it a leadership session. We had so much fun, right? We had a lot of fun.
But there’s actually a real sort of skill building around it. And Robert Quinn, who’s a professor, has really talked about these four fundamental states of leadership. And so much of leadership is being other-focused. It’s being result focused. It’s really being able to play in that way of creating, innovating.
And creating, innovating isn’t creating something out of nothing necessary. It’s taking what we have and seeing the possibilities so that play becomes critical. That, again, play is not without intention, it’s intentional play, but it also enables us to also come to different situations and with people with an open mind ’cause when you look at children, they don’t have preconceived notions about things.
They just see something. They’re like, hey, let’s like, whatever. And there’s that famous study of the marshal, the spaghetti or the marshmallow test, right? Where they take MBA students and they take kindergartners and who does it better?
The kindergartners, right? Because kindergartners like, oh, let’s just figure it out. And we just have to be, and we have a strategy and we have to think about and they get tripped up, right? And we all do as we get older. So part of the play is to invite us to look at things with that beginner’s mind. Which is connected to mindfulness of course, and centerness, but how we approach things with a different mind so that I’m challenging those stories and assumptions I have about myself.
I have about you. You have about me, right? Think about the listeners here, right? We all have stories now created already about what I’m saying. About what you’re saying. We all have stories. How do I interrupt those?
Hey, thanks for listening to today’s episode. If you could please rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast, we’d greatly appreciate it and we’ll see you in the next episode.