Embracing Change: Resilience, Intentional Living, & The Circular Economy With Christine Yeager
Welcome to the Change Cycle Podcast, your guide to embracing change!
Change is uncomfortable—but it’s also where growth happens. On Change Cycle, we’ll explore stories of people who’ve faced and driven transformation, sharing insights on navigating discomfort and inspiring action. In this first episode, Christine Yeager turns the mic on herself. You hear about her career in Consumer Packaged Goods, her passion for the circular economy, and how her values led to a bold move to Golden, Colorado for a more intentional life. Plus, she shares how she drives change—from leading sustainability efforts at Coca-Cola to guiding companies through Extended Producer Responsibility with Circular Action Alliance. Get ready for real stories, actionable insights, and the tools to embrace change in your own life. Let’s dive in!
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Embracing Change: Resilience, Intentional Living, & The Circular Economy With Christine Yeager
Christine Yeager Shares Her Experiences With Change, How She Lives With Intention, And Why We All Need To Embrace Change
Change Cycle Podcast: Confronting Discomfort
Welcome to the first episode of the show. In this episode, we're hoping to confront the discomfort that comes with change and learn from it all under the surface of driving, a circular economy, better environmental future, and societal change. All of the above in an Ideal World. I wanted to start with a little bit about myself because in this show, I'm hoping to interview people in the service of understanding how they have confronted the discomfort that comes with change, what they've learned from it and what we, as an audience, can learn from their stories.
Also, I'm going to go deep and to some vocabulary because if you've been in the sustainability space for a little while, you realize that there's a lot of vocabulary. There's a lot of acronyms and a lot of things that maybe you've never heard before. In this show, we're hoping to talk a lot about the circular economy, extended producer responsibility, and other recycling, regenerative practices, and a bunch of different types of concepts tied to reuse, recycle, and reduce, and where possible we might expand out beyond that to other topics but all in the service again to influence change.
Who am I? I'm Christine Yeager. I am super excited to begin this journey. I am a Texan. How do you know you've been a Texan? It's because I've already told you. I'm a Leo. I’m born in August. I was also born in the Year of the Ox. Bullheaded and sometimes stubborn and I'm sure there's other good traits, too. I'm an extrovert. If you can measure it, it's like if 90% extroversion, if that's a real thing, which is debatable. Also, I've found out I have ADHD and attentive ADHD more so than the hyperactive, which means that I can get hyper fixated on things but also I can be a little much.
I also love Flair. One of my favorite holidays is Halloween and other one is Mardi Gras. I love to throw parties. Somebody said to me, “You're not a Wallflower.” I'm not a Wallflower. I practiced being quiet so that I can let other speak, but that's because it doesn't come naturally to me. We’re talking about this topic because I have been in the consumer packaging goods industry for a long time. I started out studying basically commercial printing. The title of the degree was Graphic Communication.
I got out of college and got a job working for a company. You may or may not know this, but there's a lot of steps between creative and printing packaging and that company did all of those stuffs. I was acutely aware that I was making trash so much so that I started a Twitter account which didn't go anywhere, but I just was accepting like I'm making beautiful trash and it's exciting. I feel a lot of pride when I see the work that I do show up on the shelf. Nonetheless, it's going to be thrown away.
EPR Legislation Transition And Responsibility
Thus, began my being cognizant of the impact that the work I was doing had on the environment. Fast forward, I've been an impact consultant working directly with Circular Action Alliance. I will have another episode to go deep into this vocabulary word, but the vocabulary word is Extended Producer Responsibility or EPR. This is a legislation that has passed in California, Colorado, Oregon, Minnesota, and Maine.
This legislation effectively shifts the funding mechanism of the end-of-life management of a product, in this case paper and packaging, away from local governments and municipalities and onto the brands that make the package. Example, Coca-Cola, which I use because I worked there for many years. In that world and in that work, I've been focused on trying to make sure that producers or those that are obligated under the legislation understand their obligations and comply.
Through that, I've learned a ton about EPR, and the challenges that come with improving the recycling infrastructure. Generally, once a bill becomes a law, how much left there is to decipher, determine, and define? Therefore, how much black of clarity there can be for those that are trying to prepare in for that legislation? As I mentioned before that, I worked for Coca-Cola and I hold many various roles across the organization beginning with a supplier to Coke in the packaging space, then I went into point of sale.
I did five years in master data, if you know what that is, then I ended as the Director of Sustainability Program Management office or PMO, where I was focused on operationalizing sustainability. I bring all of this up to say I had an incredible experience at Coca-Cola. I learned a ton and I want to talk through a little bit of the things that I learned and not so much the specifics about my experience. You can go check out my LinkedIn if you want to see what roles I held and all that stuff.
One of the things I learned that comes up a lot in the sustainability space is, if it was easy, somebody probably would have done it by now. That came up a lot of Coke. There's a lot of smart people at Coke. What did I learn at Coca-Cola? I learned that Coke was filled with a lot of resourceful and very intelligent employees. I learned over and over again, that if it were easy, somebody would have sold it by now. Somebody would have done something about it and fixed the problem. If there were silver bullet, somebody would have figured it out.
If it were easy, somebody would have solved it by now. Somebody would have done something and fixed the problem.
Assuming Best Intent In Collaboration
This is something that comes up a lot in the ability space. It comes up over and over and over again that people are always like, “If we just did this, then we could solve this problem.” The reality is probably somebody tried to do just that and there were a lot of challenges to get that to become the silver bullet. Another thing that I learned is that there are a lot of people who are very resourceful and they come up with unique and resourceful solutions to their problems. Which then can be hard when you are trying to do enterprise-wide solutions and process changes or some other type of change at an enterprise level.
It can make those one-off type of solutions to everybody's little problem. It makes the scale much more challenging because you have a lot of things to maybe unwind or a lot of things to maybe integrate. Again, this is a learning that also applies to this sustainability space, because sustainability challenges and solutions can be very hyper-local but yet you need the impact to be macro and scale. This constant tension between being resourceful and solving your problem, then having something that can be a solution for the total problem or organization or country or nation or world makes it very difficult.
Another thing that I learned along the way and I was influenced by books I read or just the culture different people we're trying to set is this idea of assuming best intent. By assuming best intent, you can potentially diffuse a lot of frustration and defensiveness very naturally and because a lot of times, people are not trying to be malicious. In fact, they might care too much and that's why there's this disconnects between you and that person. It's also possible that they've tried a solution that you are, in fact, recommending, and they fail.
They're trying to shield you from that type of disappointment or something. Maybe not in a good way. It's often that also maybe they're a little jaded because they've been recognizing or shouting from the rooftops this problem for decades or years or whatever the time frame is and nobody was listening. I find that if you assume best intent and you’ve come at it from this perspective that it's likely that this person is trying to do what they think is right, then you can defuse that tension and perhaps move forward together.
If you assume best intent and approach it with the perspective that the other person is likely trying to do what they believe is right, you can help diffuse tension and potentially move forward together.
Understanding Decision-Making And Supporting Talent
Another thing that I learned at Coke for a couple of different ways is in order to drive real change, you need to understand who holds the purse strings. This can be true at the senior leader level. It can be, we need to understand the concerns, incentives driving and the decisions for the CFO of the organization. It can also be true about who you're trying to sell to. It may be that you're trying to get teens, in many cases, Coke is trying to catch consumers at the teen levels so that they keep them for life.
The decision-maker is often the parents. You have to market to the right audience who's going to bring that package home. It's all about who holds the purse strings. This is also true if you're trying to get a grant for something or sell to a business. You've got to think about how the thing that you're offering drives value for the prioritization of how they're going to spend their money. Another lesson I learned is that publicly traded companies make decisions differently than private companies. Sometimes, it can feel shortsighted at public company level.
It feels like private companies can sometimes make longer term decisions. This is something that I personally ran into challenges with when it comes to my final role around directors of sustainability, which was trying to operationalize sustainability. Again, at the end of the day, they have fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders of the company. While that is how our economy works, I have a lot of personal drive to support B-corps where the fiduciary responsibility is beyond shareholders and includes the environment and society.
One of the final things that I learned at Coca-Cola was to lift others while you climb. I have an incredible network from my time at Coke. I learned a ton from my time at Coke. I saw that the people who lived in the teams around them, and focused on supporting top talent were the most successful emotionally and financially in their titles. Trying to bring people along on the journey and not trying to take everything and all the credit for themselves.
Again, lifting while you climb is something that has been a guiding light for me, especially in this space of independent consulting and thinking through, how do I pay it forward? How do I think about how I can support others in being successful in their journey and their goals, especially when it comes to sustainability?
One of the things I'm going to ask all my interviewees, therefore, I feel as though I should answer. It’s, how do you live with intention? This is something that's been important to me, especially in the recent years. In March of 2023, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity. You might not think this is lucky, but it was lucky for me. I was able to opt-in to a reorganization that Coke was having. That came with a comfortable lump sum that I could use as a financial cushion to think through, how do I want to live my life with intention?
My husband and I thought through our core values, how we wanted to spend our time, and what was important to us. We decided to make a shift and move to Colorado, where we could have a view of mountains every day and most mornings, I get to see the sun's surprise because my kids get up early but also, it's over the mountains. We have access to green space right behind us. where we can go hiking or bike down town. We have access to a smaller town community. We also have access to good food in downtown Denver.
We also already had a few people here that were part of our community, which was important to us. We weren’t starting from scratch in a new place. This allowed me to also think about how do I want to spend my time professionally. I got hyper focused on the fact that I want to take action. I want to drive material action in the marketplace related to the circular economy or positive environmental impact. Through all of this, I became almost obsessed with this idea that change is constant.
You get a lot of commentary from folks about, “Don't have too much change in your life. It can cause you to maybe make decisions that are irrational or something like that.” The reality is, a lot of change you can't control. It just happens. You need to be able to be resilient through it and make decisions that are tied to something to help you or you get a bit frozen.
Here I am forcing change upon myself but also second-guessing things like, am I going on my life for no reason? Change is constant. It's always happening, and is something to be learned from. It's something that you can do with resilience, focus, prioritization, and intention. How have I influenced change? I've been a part of many enterprise-wide initiatives at Coke. I mentioned the five years of master data. That included massive implementations of new technology, new processes, and new capabilities.
Driving Change In Professional And Personal Spheres
I was influencing people to change processes, tools, technology, and the way of thinking because let me tell you, a lot of people have a lot of things to complain about master data. Talk about something that everybody feels like they could have fixed or they tried to fix and they couldn’t it. Through the years and through various roles, I’ve narrowed it down to a couple of steps that I take when I approached professional. Sometimes, I use this for personal change as well.
Step one, define the vision. For personal that can be the core values. For professional. It's usually tied to objectives, but it's like, what's the why behind the change? Why are we doing this? What's the value it's going to bring? What's the vision that we're trying to achieve and crystallizing that? I try to think about, who are the stakeholders? Who's impacted by this change? Map out to the change. What are the changes that are going to happen? What does it look like? What needs to change in order to make it successful? How do we make this smoother? What is the path of least resistance to this change?
Articulate the change in the context of what matters to those various stakeholders. What matters to those stakeholders that are impacted by the change? How do I contextualize the why in a way that matters to them? Meaning back to who holds the purse strings, I need to explain to them why this is going to bring value and why they should put their money here.
For somebody else who's having to maybe shift the amount of time that they're spending on something, I need to explain to them how this will potentially improve their skill sets and build their resume or whatever the positive personal impact might be for that person because maybe they don't care as much about the value it's bringing to the company.
It's more about like, I have to shift how I'm doing this, and I'm used to doing it. If it wasn't broken, why fix it? That type of mentality. You got to personalize the change to the stakeholders. That also allows you to improve your plan to accommodate their potential concerns or criticisms, which makes your solutions stronger. Most importantly, celebrate the outcome. Even if it's a bad one. Celebrate the positive results, and the inches forward you made even in the face of failure and then adjust if necessary.
Use the failures as a learning opportunity. If you can do that together with all of the people that you're trying to push this change on or involve in this change, or our impacted by this change. People start to feel this level of ownership of the progress that you're making together. It starts with the vision. For me, that's started with core values. Again, professionally that's starts with core objectives. What are you trying to achieve? What are the metrics you're trying to drive? What are the benefits that's going to happen to the overall business?
Change: Celebrate the outcome—even if it’s a bad one. Celebrate the positive results and the small steps forward, even in the face of failure. Then, adjust as necessary and use the failures as learning opportunities.
If you were to map out perfect best-case scenario, what does that look like? What is most important to that vision? In the case of Circular Action Alliance, early on it was an organization set to revolutionize the recycling industry. How exciting is it when you feel that vision? You're like, “Yes, I can jump on that change train because I believe in that vision of revolutionizing the recycling industry,” which is hard to do and has a lot of challenges. Maybe I can sift through that mock because I believe in the vision.
It gives you something to anchor back against. Again, in the face of concern, which I'll get to in a minute. Second, I break down like who will this affect and how? I try to think through where they are on the spectrum of full support versus fully against. Where are they? What would bring them closer to full support? What are the things that are holding them back from supporting the change? I start to map this out and I do a lot more documentation professionally than personally.
Believing in the vision gives you something to anchor to in the face of uncertainty.
I even did this with my children when we were moving. It’s a lot of unknown. My child was only not quite three and he was concerned that we were going to not bring any of his toys. He's like, “Every time we go on a vacation, you don't bring all my stuff. Why are you going to bring my stuff all the way to Colorado in our suitcase? There’s a lot of explaining and trying to break down how this change was going to impact him to bring him along the journey.
The reality is, even if you're in full support of this change, everyone feels discomfort that comes with change. I felt it. I was like gunning for this idea of moving to Colorado, and yet every like barrier, I was like, “Are we making a terrible decision? What am thinking?” The same thing happens professionally. You hit a barrier and you start to question, is this worthy effort? Are we pushing up too heavy of a boulder up a too steep hill?
Change Management And Personal Growth
That's where these this vision becomes so critical, because you can go back and say, “Yes, this is all in service of reaching something that I truly believe will be better than it is. I can see it and it will be hard but I can feel the trajectory. I believe in the vision or in the core values that I have set for this. I can use that to guide me and to squash the doubt.” This takes us back to the third step, which is to consider the point of view, feedback, and concern from the affected people. It's so critical to bring that into effect while you're squashing the doubt of yourself because they're having that same doubt as well.
They're not as close to it as whoever is pushing for the change. An example, I've done a lot of process change specifically, and I've learned that the easiest and most successful process change is something that fits neatly into existing process and neatly into an existing way of doing things. Something that the change itself isn't so dramatic that it's like, “I need to add a step within this series of steps that I already do.” It's much easier to slide in than to get somebody to completely change direction or start something new.
This is also true for habit forming. If you've ever gone to physical therapy, or even my allergist was like, “Do your inhaler when you brush your teeth.” Th same thing, I need to stand on one leg for a minute. Now, I do my inhaler then I stand on one leg while I brush my teeth. It's like attached on to something I'm already going to do every day. It makes it so much easier to make that shift and I start to see the benefits.
Finally, you've got to celebrate. Again, even if it's not a success. One of my favorite things to do, which is super nerdy, is to do a retrospective. My favorite form of retrospective is liked, loved, longed for, and lacked. That way, you can think through, what did I like about this process? Even if the thing was a failure. We didn't hit the mark. We didn't get the results we were looking for but there's had to have been something that you like.
Reframing Failures As Learning Opportunities
There's probably at least one thing that you loved about the experience. This is reframing that point of view that it was a failure. No, there were things that were a success. Inch by inch, it's a cinch. Yard by yard, it's hard. You got to focus on those inch-by-inch wins. There's likely something that you longed for. It was probably out of your control or something beyond. It puts a new frame of mind onto like, “That would have made it much easier.”
Therefore, it's something you can learn from, then there's things that might have been lacking. Overall, we don't need that or this was missing. It puts you in this frame of mind of recognizing the successes, identifying what you learned and what you can do differently next time then you can go and try again. That approach can diffuse a tough project. If you're working on a project and everybody's mad at each other at the end then you go in and you do a retrospective. You give everybody an opportunity to share their experiences, positive and negative in this format.
I, first hand, have seen it diffuse and rebuild a team mentality around the vision and the execution. I've been applying these steps to my work in general and then also, at Circular Action Alliance. Again, I'll talk a little bit more about what's Circular Action Alliance is, what extended producer responsibility is in other episodes. At the end of the day, it requires the companies who are considered producers, have to understand their obligations, and take actions to be compliant.
We used this approach to help ground and educate producers on what their obligation is, what the steps that they're going to have to take, and what EPR mean for their business. It's complicated and it's evolving. One of the other points I want to make is that, if you get back to that idea of assuming best intent. We did a lot of conversations with producers where they were allowed to ask us questions but we didn't have the answers because things were complicated and they were evolving.
We had to do a lot of, “I hear you. I am taking note of your question. I will work to get you an answer. Nonetheless, I need you to do X, Y, and Z steps because these are the steps I know you have to do. This is the information I know of and we will have to stay focused on these steps then move forward and we can talk about those other things.”
All in this spirit of like, I hear you, understand you, and listening to you. However, I can't do everything you're asking me to do. It's a balance of withdrawing boundaries on what you can and can't do and showing that your empathetic and listening to what their needs are. We've been doing this and evolving it at Circular Action Alliance as we get more information and we're able to share more information. If seen it, diffuse frustration in the middle of a meeting.
Embracing Change For Personal Growth
We get these questions and then we remind them. “We are sharing the information as confidently as we can as early as we can. We appreciate your questions. We take them in to help us guide our guidance and here's what we know.” I have seen the comments to fuse. Showing that empathy, listening, and being very transparent about can be so effective in influencing change. Why do I embrace change? We mentioned I have ADHD, which apparently comes also with this desire to not be bored. Therefore, sometimes when things are too repetitive, I get a little bored.
Beyond that for those that aren't wired that way, I love change because it pushes me to think differently and gain a new perspective. The first time you do something, it's uncomfortable and I can feel it in my belly. You do it again and it's more comfortable. The uncomfortable becomes comfortable and the same is true for anything that you need to change. I mention the routine thing. That is hard for me. It is hard for me because I'm so anti-routine, it's hard for me to change my routine to take an inhaler every day.
By embracing change and the discomfort that comes with it, it feels easier to me and then I feel like I can push through to, hopefully, one day make a real impact because then I know I'm no stranger to change. That's why I embrace change. It helps me grow and I like that. I like being able to feel like this constant cycle of change is making me better and helping me drive more meaningful impact on the society. That's a little about me.
In the next episode, I will go deeper into circular economy and then we have a slew of interviews. We'll cover similar type of questions. I will adjust based on the conversation flow, but the key things that I'm trying to understand from folks is, how do you live with intention? How do you influence change? What advice do you give to others who are trying to influence change? Why do you embrace change? Why embrace the discomfort? Thank you. I hope you enjoy and continue to read. Like and subscribe. All the things.