Sweet On Leadership (Tim Sweet)
Explorez tous les épisodes de Sweet On Leadership
| Date | Titre | Durée | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 15 Nov 2023 | The Power Of A North Star - How to Achieve Your Vision | 00:58:33 | |
In this powerful episode, Tim talks with Debbie Potts of DAP VA Limited about her inspiring story of resilience. Debbie describes how she kept her dreams alive by keeping her anchor or north star in view at all times, even while adapting to remote work during the pandemic, battling ovarian cancer (twice!), and navigating the chaos of moving to a new country. Her tenacity, vulnerability, and never-ending positivity will both inspire and motivate any listener who needs encouragement to pursue their dreams without letting obstacles get in the way or define them. Debbie’s story shows listeners how powerful you can be when you advocate for yourself, discover your goals, and trust your instincts. Tim shares the main lessons he’s learned from working directly with Debbie and following her achievements, including how to keep your vision clear, break down impossible tasks into manageable pieces, and keep your momentum going against the odds. You’ll learn about the importance of positivity and a little bit of Swedish coffee culture along the way. About Debbie Potts | Founder of DAP VA Limited Debbie Potts is the entrepreneurial force behind DAP VA Limited, where she stands as an Online Business Manager and Executive Virtual Assistant. With a rich tapestry of experiences spanning over three decades in the corporate legal sector and educational management, Debbie's multifaceted expertise is matched only by her grounded, go-the-extra-mile ethos and her passion for the Swedish concept of 'fika'—taking a break to savour coffee and company. Debbie's philosophy centers around the notion that exceptional business support should be within reach for every entrepreneur and business owner. She extends this support across the globe, offering services that include website redesign, social media enhancement with a particular knack for leveraging Pinterest for Business, and comprehensive executive assistance—all tailored to help her clients reclaim precious time. Beyond her professional endeavours, Debbie dedicates her energy to advocating for two cancer charities. As a survivor herself, she generously shares her journey to uplift others and advance the mission of these organizations, which provide crucial support to those touched by cancer. Resources discussed in this episode:
-- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Debbie Potts | DAP VA: -- Transcipt: Debbie 00:01 We need to believe that we are stronger than we think. We are more resilient than we think. And we absolutely can achieve. Yes. It's hard as you said, yes, the trajectory to the dream is tough. And I was pushed down that mountain 1000 times that I got up, I kept going. So it isn't so much about failing, because I did. But it's how do you pick yourself up after failing? Tim 00:31 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you my friend, or a leader, and this show is all about an all for you. Welcome to our 20th episode, this is the Sweet on Leadership podcast.
Tim 01:04 Hey, everybody, welcome back to Sweet on Leadership. Thank you very much for joining me, I am absolutely over the moon to be talking and bringing to you one of the most amazing spirits that I have encountered on this planet. She is somebody that I have a great deal of love for. I never knew when we met how much I would jive with you and how much I would feel an immediate connection with you. And I really just can't wait for everybody else to experience a little bit of Debbie because it's the vitamin D and never knew you needed. And that's coming at you today. So welcome Debbie Potts, to this podcast. And thank you so much for taking the time to join me and sharing your amazing story.
Debbie 01:49 You're welcome, Tim. And thank you for inviting me. This is amazing. And yeah, I jive with you, too. So it's, it's mutual. And I have a lot of love and respect for you, too. So great. Let's let's do this.
Tim 02:04 Oh, yeah. So Debbie, I'm going to ask you to introduce yourself, let people know what you're all about. And then I've got some really big curiosities as we talk about your journey. And so yeah, please let everybody know who you are.
Debbie 02:19 Oh, sure. My name is Debbie Potts, as Tim said, and I am the director of a virtual assistant business, which is a business based in the United Kingdom. And registered in the United Kingdom. I serve my clients in all sorts of ways I provide services, to help them run their businesses, I do social media for them, I've fixed their websites, I redo their websites. Basically, I turn my hand to anything. I really plus myself as not only a business owner, but also a survivor and a conqueror of two-time ovarian cancer. So for me, that's kind of my biggest achievement. It doesn't define me, but it is something that has made me who I am today, and I'm so happy to join you.
Tim 03:07 I appreciate it. And in case you're wondering, dear listener, Debbie helps me all the time, and she's brought an entirely new level of control, and he's around my own business. But that's not why we're here. Today, we're not to talk about the power of an amazing assistant, although that is something we're going to get into. And I don't even think of it as an assistant, I think of a power of an amazing collaborator who rounds off your edges and supplements, your leadership style or your business in ways that you can't even imagine. Okay, that's part of it. But let's talk about the journey I'd love you to, to lead us into the story of The Red House. And I think for all of the leaders that are listening, this is an amazing parable around or amazing example of what happens when you set a vision and you achieve it and how it can have what I see from the outside being a profound effect on a person's trajectory. Notwithstanding Yeah, notwithstanding the the battles that you've been through, and I think that's part of the story. But the metaphor of the red house to me is just so inspiring. So that's what I'm really hoping that we can get into today. So could you give us a little bit of a background in terms of what the red house is, take us up to the lead-up of what was happening where you first had this dream.
Debbie 04:36 Okay, so basically my dream about living in a red house in the middle of the countryside near the forest and near the sea, started way back decades ago, really, when I first came to Sweden, and we took a trip into the countryside and I saw all these little red houses dotted around everywhere and the colour of these red houses is specific only to Sweden and it's called “Falu Röd” (Falu Red). So I had a dream to live in a follow red house. So there so at the time, Dan and I, my partner were living and working in London. And I thought, How on earth am I going to make this happen? I work in a school, I don't work remotely, I have to go to school every day. I can't, you know, work in London and live in a red house. It's just not going to work. What should I do? It was a lot, a lot of knockbacks. At first, I applied to many positions here in Stockholm thinking, Okay, I'll just change my job. But of course, not speaking the language was a big sort of negative. So every job that I applied for was a “no.”
Tim 05:49 Just to back us up. When did you have this vision? What year was that?
Debbie 05:54 Oh, my gosh, that would have been 2009.
Tim 05:55 2009?
Debbie 06:02 Yes. The way I sort of drifted was after my visit to Sweden, I went back home and I printed a picture, any picture Tim of any red house, and I stuck it on the wall above my computer. And obviously, I would look at this, whenever I came to sit at my computer, I would see this. And it would just keep sort of the cogs turning. Okay, so how do I turn that picture into a reality? First, was job so that I could work in the country that I want to live. Second was, while I need money, houses don't fall from trees? Yeah, I've got to have some money. And of course, I'm working with my partner, Dan, on this dream. So you know, we decided to for now do sort of a feasibility study and look at where could we possibly live? Because a dream can only become reality to me when I physically see the possibility rather than think it or see it virtually.
Tim 07:08 In the late 2000s, you start to think of this. And you when you put these pictures out behind your computer as a bit of a vision board, you're approaching it practically you're not approaching it with a distant dream, you're bringing it close saying, ‘Where could this exist?’ The default being Sweden, obviously.
Debbie 07:28 Absolutely. And I did have that dream aspect as well. I mean, I would go to sleep dreaming about The Red House, I would talk about it at work with my colleagues, I would talk about it with my friends and family. So and that's all I was obsessed by. Everybody kind of knew, ah, what does Debbie want? She wants to live in a red house that's been known for years.
Tim 07:49 So the red house was this picture, this avatar for something. What did the Red House represent to you?
Debbie 07:56 Oh my gosh, it represented freedom, it represented achievements. It represented living life on my terms. And obviously, I love nature, as you do. And it just represented, you know, being able to be close to nature and, you know, completely do a 180 turnaround of my life. You know, I lived in a big city, London, full of people full of traffic full of everything. And I've now completely reversed that. And you know, I've told you about this before in our conversations, there's, you know, this little village I live in, there’s 10 plots, but only eight houses. And that's us.
Tim 08:40 And eight families that are collectively a community. When you think about that, then the red house was such a clear delineation, was such a clear, step off what you knew. It there was a polar opposite from that perspective. I do remember you sharing with me at one point, the red house was just a representation, and you'd identified all of those outcomes you were looking for. That could have manifested in a bunch of different ways. Right? You could have found nature somewhere else, you could have found peace somewhere else.
Debbi 09:12 Yea, but it also was my love of Sweden anyway. And because I love the country, and because, you know, so it was a whole mind shift change, because not only did I have the picture of the red house above my computer, but I also enrolled myself in London to have Swedish lessons. So then I could start learning the language. Okay, so sort of ticking off all the things that I needed to do for myself to be able to achieve this dream.
Tim 09:42 So you were putting in the small things in place.
Debbie 09:45 All the little bits and pieces. Yes.
Tim 09:49 Okay. So, late 2000. You're coming up with these plans. You've got this vision, you're starting to tick off the small items. What happened then what was the next thing that happened?
Debbie 09:59 It just became an impossible dream. If I'm honest with you, if I'm genuinely honest. Yeah, prior to the pandemic, it became an impossible dream.
Tim 10:09 It was never gonna come close.
Debbie 10:10 No, I could not see myself finding a job that would, you know, give me enough money to achieve this dream, nor could I see myself finding a job in Sweden and then achieving the dream.
Tim 10:23 The clarity around it started to take you farther away from it. The reality starting to pose, you know, real concrete frictions with your current life. Okay, all right, so, so you went through these exercises, then you faced this hero's journey of now the challenge was starting to appear as impassible.
Debbie 10:46 Absolutely.
Tim 10:47 This is pre-pandemic. And pre-battle with ovarian cancer.
Debbie 10:54 Pre-battle. I was healthy, Debbie, you know, working living in London enjoying life. And what I decided to do was I thought, okay, I'm not going to give it up totally. Because it's, you know, when you really want something, and you just are not prepared to kind of compromise or give it up. I thought, okay, these battles are here for now. Let me just plod along with my work. And you know, think about how do I overcome this obstacle of living in London, but I really need to be in Sweden? And there's a lot of little things you've got to do. I had to research, how do I get a Swedish visa? How do I you know, legally, all of these other little things? How do I get a bank account? How do I do this? So I thought, let's just do those little things. I started a spreadsheet and, I’m a spreadsheet queen, and honest, I had all the things I needed to achieve with a box, you know, tick off, okay, that done and then notes on the side that tell me, okay, so for a visa, you need to do this da-da-da-da-da. And I just sort of left that slide and kept going. I also subscribed to a property selling website marketing site, and they would just, yeah, I’d just look every morning. That's the first thing I did. I didn't check my work emails, I didn't do anything, I would just spend 15 minutes looking to see what's on the market.
Tim 12:18 So, even though part of your conscience was telling you that this is not gonna, let's say the logical part of your brain is fighting you, saying this is not logical use that okay, broke it down to the little tasks, you know, you could action. And I mean, for any of you who've worked with me on Working Genius, which is Patrick Lencioni’s new piece. This is very clearly the genius of tenacity, right? It's pulling things into manageable chunks that we then are going to accomplish,
Debbie 12:50 But also not giving up Tim. Because lots of people give up. And they just say okay, it's not gonna happen and they shelve it.
Tim 12:58 And where you disaggregated it down to its constituent parts that could start, instead of going for that great big island off in the distance. You swam to this sandbar, and then this sandbar, and then this sandbar, and slowly the island is coming a little closer and a little closer.
Debbie 13:17 That’s right, yeah. And in English, the saying, you know, I had all my ducks in a row. So I spent nearly five years putting all these little ducks in a row, you know, finding out okay, how, you know, what do I do to get a bank account? Okay, if we lived in this area, how far away is it from the airport? You know, in case I've got to travel back to London or anywhere, for that matter. How do we get broadband or internet connection to a house that's in the middle of the forest? What do I do?
Tim 13:46 I don't want to get into this too far. Because I think that's fodder for another conversation. But this is so you. I mean, this is what you do for me all the time. When I'm feeling, when I'm feeling overwhelmed. And I've got too many things on the goal. You're like, stop, Break it down. Let's get this into into the easiest thing you can do next, what's just the one easiest step you can take? Which is...
Debbie 14:11 Can I just add a little bit more, just so that we can get to the Red House now.
Tim 14:16 You got it, go for it.
Debbie 14:17 So far, all of this happened and I sort of like okay, I'll just do these bits and find out so that I'm totally prepared. If and when they're… not even if, when the time comes. So fast forward to 2020. 2020 Okay, it's 20th of March 2020. The whole of the UK shut down completely. And I was like, oh, now I have to work from home for my school. This is great for me who absolutely loves tech, and absolutely loves working from home. Now my red house popped up front and center because it's, I soon clocked on that, oh my god, if I can work from home for my school, I can work from anywhere. This is it, I got my answer. It's, it's that's it, I got my answer. So in the middle of the pandemic, I decided, okay, I had a conversation with my executive head. And I said to her, Would you be happy? They knew I go to Sweden, you know, six, seven times a year, would you be happy for me to work remotely, from Sweden, for the schools? I supported four schools at the time. Of course, she said, “No, we need you here, Debbie physically.” So that's a no. So I thought, okay, what do I do then to make this remote working dream become reality? Since we're in a pandemic, people have now understood that you can work remotely globally, as you and I do. Yeah. And I decided, what job can I do that will allow me to be able to do this? And I researched, I Googled, I watched so many podcasts, or listened to so many podcasts, watched videos. And finally, yeah, why don't you be a virtual assistant on your own terms? So on the fourth of August 2020, during the pandemic, I started my own business.
Tim 16:24 You had to step away from your…
Debbie 16:27 No, I did it simultaneously, because I needed the income. But I started because I don't know if my business is going to be a success. Of course, I'm going to put everything into it. But I thought, okay, I can do it on a part-time basis. I was lucky enough to have fantastic training, I found this amazing VA Mastery Course, with this lady called Amanda Johnson. I absolutely adore her.
Tim 16:48 We can put a link to that.
Debbie 16:50 Yeah, totally. Yeah, I did her course. And that's what changed everything for me completely. It then made the steps to the Red House, achievable. And I knew it's gonna happen, there was absolutely not one iota of doubt in my mind that this was going to happen in the next two years.
Tim 17:11 Okay, so 2020, lockdown happens, suddenly we have this new reality of working remotely, and that opens a door that you're ready to step through.
Debbie 17:21 100% I stepped through it. My business did take off really well, which was great.
Tim 17:30 Right, I remember that’s when we met.
Debbie 17:32 Yes, something had to give because I couldn't continue with my full-time school job, and run DAP VA limited. So I had to, in February of 2021, I then handed in my notice, and the period of notice I had to give was six months. So, I said to them, You know what, don't worry, I'll give you until the end of this academic year ie July 2021. And then I'm gone. Not only will I work full-time on my business, but I'll also be leaving the country to move to Sweden. So up pops another spreadsheet, because now I have to do all the removal costs and all that sort of you know, get the van or the lorry come and take all what will we be taking them since we are left Europe and and you know, Brexit happened. So we classed as a third country to Sweden, so I have to pay import charges, all of these things. Whereas before you could just literally drive your whole house to Sweden, and that would not be a problem.
Tim 18:34 So what's amazing about this to me is you made this decision, the move starts the unhooking from life, as it was, begins. Although I mean, you still do have deep connection to London. Your Hill was getting steeper, not more shallow. I mean,
Debbie 18:52 Yeah. But it looks achievable to me. I don't know.
Tim 18:55 Oh absolutely. It was achievable. What I mean is that the difficulty level went up. That didn't stop you. It wasn't as easy as it would have been a few years prior. But that didn't stop Debbie
Debbie 19:09 That’s true. This point actually, is spot on Tim, because a few years prior, I wouldn't need a visa nor would I have needed to pay all those 1000s of pounds in imports.
Tim 19:19 You had momentum at this point. And that inertia was carrying you up that change curve. That wasn't the end of your struggles.
Debbie 19:29 No, not at all. So obviously, you know, the beginning or the first half, I'd say of 2021 I was working so hard with two jobs and being a school business manager is a stressful full-on job even though my contract was term time only. So I thought okay, you know, I will have vacation time or holiday time and I will work on my business during those times and I'll make it work somehow, Tim, I always make it work. So it was full of excitement, anticipation. If I could literally, you know, see and touch the dream. I'd set up house viewings for Dan and I to go, and you know, view all these beautiful houses. The next visit we had to Sweden. So it became it started becoming, you know, when you can just taste something and you just have a little taste. It's so nice. You want to eat the whole thing. That's what was happening. So we did all these house viewings, and we listed the our favorites and blah, blah, went back to the UK, started winding down, packed up all our stuff in boxes that we wanted to bring to Sweden. Found a company that was great that would come and pick it off from door to door. And literally, one day before we were due to fly to Sweden, or the move, I'd applied for my visa at this stage as well. And they said, Look, you can come to Sweden anyway, even if it's isn't quite granted yet. Because, you know, you can stay on the 90-day rule that the UK nationals are allowed to stay in Sweden for 90 days per year. And your visa should come during that time. So it all was good. So you can come now, I was like, okay, great. Everything's great. One day, Tim, the fourth of August 2021. We had our British Airways flights booked on, on Thursday, the fifth of August, we were going to meet the removal van in Stockholm on Friday, the sixth of August. But on the fourth, I should just back up a week or so I went for what I thought was a routine scan and had the scan and left it and it usually takes about 10 days before you find out the results. I got a call from my GP on the fourth of August, saying the morning of, no sorry, she found me on the Monday. So that was the fourth was a Wednesday. She phoned me on the Monday and said, Debbie, I don't think you'll be going to Sweden. And I said now of course I'm going everything's sorted. We flying on Thursday. She said no, we have your scan and it's you have cancer basically. So I'm like “What? No,” she goes just to be sure. Let me do another scan. So I said okay, can you do it before Wednesday? Because I'm flying on Thursday. She said I really don't think you're flying. But yes, we'll see you on Wednesday. So still, I didn't believe it. Tim, I just thought nah, it’s a mistake. And you know, these scans are misread sometimes. But anyway, I'll go on. I'll go on Wednesday. Yeah, so off, I went alone. Had a more detailed scan. First I had just a pelvic ultrasound. And then I said I can't wait for the results 10 days because I'm flying tomorrow. So can you just tell me what's on your screen? And he said, I remember the radiologist saying, see these dark clouds over here. And on both sides here. That's your left ovary. That's your right ovary, these dark clouds covering both ovaries. That's cancer. See these other dark clouds? That's your upper abdomen? Yep. See all how they floating looks like a skyline? That's cancer. You have cancer. Yeah, we don't know the staging yet. Because we've got to do more details. And I was like, oh, shock. I'm alone. What do I do? So I asked them, what would happen next? They said, Okay, we do an MRI, which is more detailed. And that will definitively tell us what's going on. So I asked if they could fit me in that afternoon. And they did. It was about 2:30. I had my scan on the fourth of August. After the MRI. straightaway. Yeah. Confirmed. So obviously I was a little bit. Yeah, I was in shock. I was numb. I was, it when I'm telling you this. Now it doesn't even feel like it's me I'm talking about, but it is me, though. I called Dan. I actually didn't even call him first. I called Dan's best friend. And his name is Anders. And I said, Look, I'm probably going to die. So I need you to take care of them for me. So can you do that? And at this point, I was crying. He couldn't even hear me. And I'm you know, so I just said, just promise me that you'll do this for me because, you know. It's important. Yeah, of course, whatever you do, blah, blah, blah. Then I phoned Dan. I told him, he came over straightaway to the hospital, along with my two daughters. And yeah, we just were a little bit in shock. The doctor came, spoke to us all. And it was at that point I knew well, we're not going to Sweden. So we went home and we played a board game and ate sandwiches. That's the first thing we did, which ,I don't like, I'll tell you why.
Tim 24:57 That Red House that was so close. You could almost taste it.
Debbie 25:00 I was on my way.
Tim 25:02 And you wanted more suddenly was suddenly like it was right there. And suddenly, it's just now thrust farther and farther away. It's not about the house. It's just that, you know, as the as a backdrop to your cancer journey, that you weren't going to Sweden.
Debbie 25:16 Not at this time.
Tim 25:18 No, but you went home and you ate sandwiches.
Debbie 25:20 And played a board game. God knows why.
Tim 25:22 Played a board game. What happened next from now you're redoing all the math. This point was,
Debbie 25:31 No, I didn't even. Now I thought about life and death. So now my, my whole...
Tim 24:33 Your spreadsheet changed, now it had two columns.
Debbie 25:36 I didn't even look at that for about a year. Actually.
Tim 25:42 If you know what I mean, is if you may have met one, it would have been pretty stark it would have been like, yeah, that's it.
Debbie 25:48 Yea, so I just decided to, again, because I'm such a practical organized person. Okay, now death is coming. Let's get all my ducks in a row before I die. You know, so I need to do this, this, this, this and this. Okay, what should I do? Well, I didn't have a will, believe it or not. Okay, I need to get a well done. And even then, kind of, you know, Dan would say, Look, that's not priority. Right now, we need to see what can we do about this disease, we have an appointment in two weeks' time, everything in the UK is two-week wait under our national health system. And I said, I'm sorry, I can't sit here or lie here, knowing I have ovarian cancer and wait two weeks to hear how they can help me. Anybody at all who's had any kind of diagnosis of a terminal illness, it does not just cancer loads. You can't wait, Tim, two weeks and just stew over all the sooner you know, and the most dangerous thing is you go to Google and you start Googling. And Google is the worst thing you can do when you've been diagnosed, because the results it gives are not your results. They could be someone else's. And you know, you could be reading into it in the wrong way, which I did. I Googled how long can people with ovarian cancer live? And they, you know, maximum two years is what I was reading, and I'm like, Oh my God, I've got two years to live. No, I can't.
Tim 27:21 So you were literally Doom scrolling? Well, like without, we use the term Doom scrolling, like lightly now. But you were.
Debbie 27:29 Yea, I was.
Tim 27:30 You were building up the doom.
Debbie 27:31 I decided to try and speed up things again, make it happen, you know, using my power. And I just woke up one morning, and after two days, I think from diagnosis, so this would have been a Saturday morning. I woke up at 5am. And I said, Dan, I'm getting dressed. I'm going to the hospital. He goes, baby, it's 5am Where are you going? I said, I'm just gonna sit there until I can speak to someone. I'm not waiting two weeks, I really can't. And that's exactly what I did. I woke up. He came with me. We'd sold our car as well by this time. So we because we were moving to Sweden, so we didn't have a car, got an Uber to the hospital.
Tim 28:09 And all your stuff is in a truck as well. Right? Debbie 28:10 Well, it’s in Sweden. It’s already made the journey. We had to get Anders and other friends to come and offload for us. It was a nightmare, an absolute nightmare. And so at the hospital, I just waited. I went in there six o'clock, as soon as the oncology department opened, I just there was sort of seating just outside. And I sat there and waited for a staff member that came through. I'm like, I need to speak to someone right now.
Tim 28:41 Right? So you were advocating for yourself, you're advocating for knowledge for not being left in the lurch. And saying
Debbie 28:48 I'm also knowing, I need to know, you know, is this? You know, I know that there are so many advances in, you know, the treatment of cancer today, it’s not as it was 20 or 30 years ago. It’s far advanced. So I just want to know, will I live? Or will I die? Can you put a timeline on it? Or can you not? What's the deal? And so yeah, I did actually happen to speak to a really nice oncologist who looked at all my sort of notes and my scan results and everything. And he said, and this is where it got even worse. It's it. This looks so complicated. We actually can't treat you in this hospital. So we need to refer you to one of my colleagues. Her name is Angela. And she's, you know, the hospital just 20 minutes down the road. It's one of the best cancer research hospitals, certainly in the country and certainly in the world. And you'll be in good, good hands. I’m making you an appointment for Monday. So yeah, go go and see. No, no, he saw kind of the distress and then sometimes I'm Tim, you have to go with your feelings. You have to trust what you feel like doing rather than keep second-guessing yourself.
Tim 30:08 Yeah, you weren't on anybody else's schedule. You weren't in anyone else’s rules.
Debbie 30:12 Yeah, I was on my own. Yeah. So that's another good sort of characteristic to develop because, you know best and you know how things should be. So yeah, I will just fast forward. I went to see Angela, Dan and I, it was our first time ever stepping over the threshold of a cancer hospital. Surprisingly, it was a lovely place. Even today, it's still my happy place. And saw Angela, she did more tests looked at me and said, Debbie, I'm so happy to tell you that we have developed a curative care plan for you and that word curative. I will never forget the emotion. The rush of emotion, our shoulders, both Dan and I, our shoulders dropped. We just breathed, exhaled a deep breath out. We both started crying. But smiling at the same time, because now I knew I'm not gonna die. So now I was...
Tim 31:22 Knew, not hoped.
Debbie 31:26 Knew. 100% knew. Yeah, she said curative? While I was talking to Dr. Angela. George. I googled her just to see. And I saw that wow, this woman is, she's a kick-ass boss lady. I mean, she is like, head of genomics head of research. She's fabulous. She's known the world over. So when I saw her credential, I almost then and I still joke with her today I say, Oh my God, you're a goddess. She's from New Zealand. And I always say to her, I didn't see her for two weeks one time, and because she was on vacation, and when she got back, I was like, Oh my god. Dr. Jordan, I missed you. Where have you been? Oh, I went home to New Zealand. Ah, great. What did you do there? You know, my mom had a long list of chores for me to do. What? Does your mother not know who you are? You are Dr. Angela? Can I, I need to speak to your mom. You should be home eating grapes with somebody standing fanning you and you know caring to your every need and whim. And she's like Debbie, I'm a human being just like you are.
Tim 32:27 It's funny when I wouldn't give to hear Dr. Angela's perspective and perception of you through all of this. Man, that would be would be something to hear.
Debbie 32:38 Yeah, I have heard it. Yeah, that's for another time. Okay. Anyway, so once she said that, and we knew both Dan and I, almost in unison, said, Okay, what should we do? Tell us what to do, and we will do it. And that was our mindset going forwards, even till today. It's tell us what to do. We'll do it. And of course, by they then you know, just to speed it up to them. Otherwise, we'll be here forever. She put a you know, six months chemo, followed by surgery, followed by monitoring tests. And basically, that's the plan. Yeah. And, you know, had all sorts of ups and downs during that time had nearly had my right leg amputated. I reacted badly to my first chemo drug. Paclitaxel, I'll never forget that I'm allergic to Paclitaxel. And on a scale of one to five, one being the not-so-bad. I'm a five. So basically, I passed out and woke up three hours or four hours later, with all these things attached my beautiful red dress split in half, because time was of the essence. So they have no time to, oh, let's not spoil her dress. And, you know, I'm here. I'm a fighter. I'm here. I'm resilient.
Tim 33:54 You gave yourself over to the process. That process was a curative process. That process was one more thing that you needed to do…
Debbie 33:59 To achieve my red house.
Tim 34:05 To achieve this red house.
Debbie 34:09 So I had to also have some psychotherapy whilst I was being treated for cancer because, yeah, it's an aggressive cancer that I have and it's also an aggressive treatment for it. So, during my, one of my therapy sessions, I remember my therapist said, Debbie, you need an anchor, you need something to hold on to throughout this process. And we call it an anchor and that's going to anchor you and keep you steady. And so what is your anchor, and immediately I blurted out, The Red House. That's my anchor. I'm just going to live and fight this battle for the Red House. Of course you do it for your, you know, my beautiful partner, Dan, for my children, and for the grandson I didn't yet have at that time. So you know, I'm doing it for all of them. But I'm also doing it for the Red House.
Tim 35:02 And the Red House is so much more than just a building. I mean, it is an expression of everything that you were heading towards, what an optimum life looked like for you. I mean, often when we're doing, we're doing career, when I'm coaching, and we're looking at somebody's career, I ask them the question, “What is what is this all for? What's your future look like?” And when it comes to a job, I'll say, “What is the best day of the last year you're ever going to work look like?”, or the last year of your career going to look like, and then that's our North Star, that's the one that we're going towards. And this Red House was your North Star.
Debbie 35:42 It was indeed, it was indeed. But also it was place, because both Dan and I are very sociable people. We are gregarious we are. We love friends and family. And we said, we're not going to get a little red house that just fits us too. We're going to get a red house where everybody can come our friends, our family. It's just a place of community and socializing, and fun and laughing and enjoyment and love and sitting around the fight. It's all of that, Tim. So the red house is that red house, but it is a bigger vision than just the red house.
Tim 36:22 Let's maybe use this then to talk about and, and like not to gloss over this. You have still, you still had to battle. You've still had other aspects when it comes to the cancer journey. You are thankfully healthy now. But it has come at no small amount of effort, right? At the same time, you are now in the dream. You are, the dream is now reality. So give us a sense of what were the surprises? What were the surprises, the little things that this house has meant to you, that this new life has meant to you, that achieving this goal has meant to you? And also, perhaps the things that you never thought were going to happen that suddenly are realities. What does life look like now in the dream?
Debbie 37:06 Oh, it’s wonderful. I can't… I actually have another dream because I can't live without a dream. We always have to have a dream. But that's something else. I'll tell you at the end. Remember to ask me what my dream is now. It's wonderful. I really cannot stress enough how as human beings, we need to believe that we are stronger than we think we are more resilient than we think. And we absolutely can achieve. Yes, it's hard, as you said, Yes. You know, the trajectory to the dream is tough. And you know, I was pushed down that mountain 1000 times, Tim. But I got up. And I kept going. So it isn't so much about failing, because I did. But it's how do you pick yourself up after failing? Do you hold on to that North Star, that anchor? What do you do? And that's exactly what I did. I held on and held on. And you know, I made sure I shared my dream with everybody. I came in contact with Dr. Georgia. And when I had my second, my recurrence, my cancer came back after five months of being clear. And she knew I had this dream. And she said, Debbie, don't get the stress because we can we can treat this by surgery. So look at this as a big boulder in you, going along the road to your dream, all of a sudden a boulder comes and gets in your way. What do you do? Just go around it and then continue. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to go around the bouider and put you back on your road. And yeah, again, you know, that was so close, Tim. We came back in June of 2022. After being given the all-clear. We were here for days, the surgeon in London phoned and said I'm sorry, we your scan you had two weeks ago showed two masses one, seven and a half centimetres, one three and a half centimetres. Do you need to come back? For days, Tim? Yeah, I went back and then in February of this year, it all came to be I didn't wait for the all-clear. I made an arrangement with my hospital in London that, you know, I'll come back every three months for treatment and tests and scans. So in February, we looked at 13 houses in two days. And it's a big area that we had to cover. Everything is like 30-40 minutes apart. And we looked at thirteen. I actually got sick from looking at so many, all the houses and then went back to London and packed up the few things that we could now bring with us. By this time we bought another car so we packed the car up, drove to Sweden from London with our stuff, put an offer into the house that we saw, which was this one. It was accepted by the lovely Gustaf, who is the developer, and he built this house with his own hands. And when we finally met, we shared our story with him. He started crying, we started crying. He goes, as I was building this house, I was hoping that it would go to someone with love and who saw it for what it was. And he goes...
Tim 40:19 He had no idea.
Debbie 40:21 Yea, he had no idea it was for me or for us. He even said I was going to paint it white because I'd ordered the red paint. And then I thought, no, all the other houses are white, I need to paint this one white. So you phoned the company where he ordered the paint from and said, look, can I change from red to white? And the company said, sorry, no, we've already mixed your paint for you. It's coming. So he said oh, okay, don't worry, I'll just paint it red. How about that?
Tim 40:52 Well, it's, you know, we can talk about serendipity for sure. But I'm sure Gustaf, he had no idea of when he was looking for somebody that would love that house, just how much meaning it would represent.
Debbie 41:04 Oh, he said that. And we actually invited him back after we'd moved in and, you know, changed things. That garden was developed. And it's now furnished, and it's got our stamp on it. And he came over, and again, he was filled with tears. And he's like, this is exactly what I had in mind that you would do in this room when I built it. This is how I, you know, our open plan kitchen and living room has a Fika area. Remember Fika? Very important. He actually said I want this to be the heart. And where we all gather? And for sure, Tim, everything happens in the Fika area.
Tim 41:41 Yea, and Fika, for those that don't know, what's the word?
Debbie 41:44 Fika is the art of Swedish coffee, drinking, where you go, you take time to be in the moment with friends, colleagues, family, whoever, no electronics, nothing, you just are present, and enjoy each other over a cup of coffee or tea, and a bun or a sweet treat.
Tim 42:03 I think I think that's really interesting to think I see you living always in two zones, you were very clear about what your vision was. But you didn't step too far away from the moment. Because you were always working. You were always working in the moment you worked. Not in somebody's two-week timeframe. But you said no, I gotta go advocate for myself, and you did. And then and then everything for you has been a balance between things being far away and having that Northstar, but then doing what makes immediate sense in order to leverage the situation that's in front of you.
Debbie 42:39 But I think it all circles back to what you said in the very beginning. You know, the Red House signifies this dream or vision or lifestyle that I wanted to have. And without that clear, definitive dream or vision, I don't feel I could have achieved it. So if I've said, Well, I could live in a red house, maybe a green one would do. Oh, I don't mind if it's close to the city or, you know, maybe it can just be in a field. I'm so sort of wishy-washy.
Tim 43:11 But but in this case, you did not compromise.
Debbie 43:15 No, it was a definitive kind of vision where it had to be. And the picture said it all I wish I knew whose house that was, but it was, you know, close to water with the forest. There, right there and clearly in the countryside. And that is that's how I wanted to live. Yeah,
Tim 43:33 Yea, it will be a question whether or not that was predetermined? Or if that is something that you made the most likely most statistically possible.
Debbie 43:44 I think it's a bit of both. Yeah, I think it's a bit of both because I believe this is my path. And you know, throughout it, I didn't sort of say I'm the cancer person, even though I introduced myself as that. But I always do put a caveat that cancer has never defined me, I still worked on DAP VA limited during my chemotherapy, I'm in the hospital. And, you know, I still did all the things I could do until I couldn't. And when I couldn't I took an eight month break because I had to focus on my recovery and beating this disease. But as soon as I was able to, I came back, and here I am. I've been working ever since.
Tim 44:24 And it's a life without compromise in many ways, is what I see, like there's of course you make small adjustments. But would you say that through all this, your ability to yes, both flow with things and move around the boulders as you need to. That's a skill that you've obviously developed but also, you're not living by anybody else's rules. Would you say that anything's changed from you and just that level of sort of determination of?
Debbie 44:53 I’ve gained a resilience I never thought I had, you know before a pre-cancer, you kind of or even pre-DAP VA limited, you kind of hear the word resilience, people talk about being resilient. And it kind of sort of doesn't settle. But since I've now had to prove resilience, I feel that now I totally understand what that word means. I also understand what self-discovery means. Because never did I look inward, I would always just do things and never sort of think, how am I doing this? And what's my driver? What's the goal? I would just do it, you know. And so, this whole becoming a business owner, having this dream, having cancer has taught me and showed me that yeah, I'm sorry to use the cliche, but we are so much stronger than we think.
Tim 45:51 You have to be careful not to believe what you think. That's so yeah.
Debbie 45:55 Yea, and I kept sort of feeding my brain with positive things. You know, funny thing is Tim, this house before we even moved, or even had viewed it, in London, I bought all the soft furnishings, for a four-bedroom house. And, you know, Dan was like, You're crazy. You don't even know it's gonna have three bedrooms or four. But I said, No, I know, I'm just buying this room, this room, this room, I bought enough stuff for two bathrooms. It's like, we don't know if we can have two bathrooms, baby. I said, no, I know.
Tim 46:30 Not everybody is going to always understand. And I think for those of the people that are listening, if this story doesn't give them some perspective, in terms of just how, you know, if you think your life is difficult, take a look, take a look at what Debbie's overcome and adopt some of her principles. And I mean, what I'm what I've jotted down here, as we've been talking is that North Star, that vision is, among the first the ability to break things down into into manageable chunks, the ability to then build a momentum. That's just incredible. And I remember back in the day, we used to say, you know, put yourself between the immovable object and the irresistible force, right? And then, you know, you know, Your situation may change and you're ready to be resilient for what unknowns are going to come up or what things how the environment or how the situation is going to change. You need to flow with that.
Debbie 47:27 And I think it's also the power of positivity, you know, I read her book at the time that I was actually I was staying in hospital. And you know, it's just that positivity, Tim, I know, it sounds like nothing, but oh, my God, the power of positivity is a force that you cannot reckon with. I'm sorry, it's staying positive. That's also another thing I learned. You know, I did consider myself a positive person before cancer, pre-cancer, but I didn't realize that positivity actually can change your life.
Tim 48:06 Well, I'm for those of you that are interested. Read has been on the show a couple of times, or we've got two episodes with read on it. We'll put links to those in the shownotes.
Debbie 48:12 Yeah, definitely.
Tim 48:15 Your story about how you're able to advocate for yourself is one of the things that I love most about that is just when you are willing to stand up for yourself, how many people will then stand up with you. Whereas if you're willing, if you're just going to relegate yourself to you know, being part of some predetermined process, people will keep moving the way they were moving anyway. And I think back to Dolly Parton, she had this saying if you don't like the road, you're on pave a new one. In your story, I just so many times you found yourself on a road more rocky than perhaps you had anticipated.
Debbie 48:56 Yea, so true. Dolly's words.
Tim 48:59 Yea, as we wrap up here, let's, let's talk a little bit about some of the amazing things that are happening now. Your story has inspired many other people.
Debbie 49:08 I'm filled with gratitude, really, Tim. You know, every day I wake up, I'm alive, I'm healthy, I can do all the things that I could be for my cancer, despite having body parts missing, ie, I have a stoma, that colostomy bag on my left side. And I can still do everything. So I'm really grateful. So then I just kind of thought, now I'm on my feet. I'm back at work. You know, I'm enjoying working with my clients, who I love and adore all of you, all of them. And how can I give back? How do we, what do I do? What should I do? I can't just sit here and bask in the glory of the grid house. So I decided to put myself in the most uncomfortable position ever, which is speaking in public. And so I share my story wherever I'm invited. In order to you know, spread awareness that we can achieve that getting a terminal or a serious illness diagnosis perhaps is the better term is not the end of the road. There is light at the end of the tunnel. And you know, just maybe adjusting our mindset a little because you do have to contend with dealing with your illness as well. But you know, within that, try your hardest to see the positive side of these things. For example, having Chloe, that's the name of my stoma. Chloe, the colostomy, gives me priority boarding on any flight. So wow, I love, I love Chloe and airport security. I just go present myself at the fast track with my little badge. And there I go on the fast track. I never queue.
Tim 50:55 There you go, so many silver linings.
Debbie 50:58 They are so yeah, yeah, absolutely. And also, I enjoy speaking, one on one like this. Very nervous about speaking in public. And so yesterday, I was invited to speak for a charity that actually helped us, Dan and I in 2021, when we were down and out, it's called the Macmillan Cancer Charity, based in the UK. I love them to death. Well, no, I love them not to death, but I love them. And so I love them to live. And they said, would you come and share your story as our away day so that, you know, all the people who support and donate and work in this charity understand, and just are reminded of why they do the job they do. It's because of people like me, they literally gave me life. They supported me when I was in my darkest moments in so many ways, Tim. And so I thought yeah, of course I'll do it even though my stomach was doing somersaults the whole time. And I felt like throwing up and pay off with me lunch and I couldn't eat. But I just thought now I've got to do this. And you know, there was not a dry eye in the room. And I didn't do it to make them cry. I said to them, no, I'm I'm emotional. Because I'm so grateful to have this platform, not only to share, but also to actually thank you, each and every single one of you, how much you, you know, helped us to thank you for, you turned our lives around. And so, you know what you do, please do not minimize it. You actually do change lives.
Tim 52:38 Again, it's a story for another time, but we can talk about, you've shared with me how influential you're being locally around local government and other areas. You're exercising your advocacy
Debbie 52:45 My a voice.
Tim 52:49 Yeah, yeah, your voice without making it too cute. If you weren't operating from this dream achieved, in a sense, you're in the red house. Now if you, if you didn't have this new these set of of traumatic and like, this amazing, but very treacherous journey that you've been on. You're seeing things with new eyes. If you if that hadn't happened? Would you have the voice you have today?
Debbie 53:19 No, absolutely not. I'd be on the treadmill that I had been on for 34 years. Same old, same old, nothing new.
Tim 53:26 So I'm gonna ask you two things. One is, let people know where they can connect with you.
Debbie 53:35 Absolutely.
Tim 53:36 Where would you like them to connect with you? And the second thing is, if you had a wish for people that are listening to this today, what would that wish be? Okay, so where can people find you?
Debbie 53:44 where can people find you so people can find me? I'm on LinkedIn. So it's just Google Debbie Potts. My company is DAP VA Limited. They can also just Google DAP VA Limited.
Tim 53:58 We'll put those in the show notes.
Debbie 53:59 Perfect. So yeah, I think my one wish for everybody who's listening and facing any kind of challenge, uncertainty, you know, indecisive. Don't give up; find your anchor, find your north star and work towards it. Because you'll get there.
Tim 54:22 And every step towards that star is going to be a discovery about who we really are.
Debbie 54:29 Absolutely. But it also takes you that one step closer. No matter what it takes you step, it takes you closer, so please don't give up whoever you are, wherever you are.
Tim 54:40 Keep coming back to that even when it seems that it's pulled away from you a little further, you know?
Debbie 54:45 Yeah, totally. Oh, you got it, Tim, you understand.
Tim 54:49 Right. Well, Debbie, love you so much. And thank you for spending time with me.
Debbie 54:55 That's okay.
Tim 54:56 Okay. Well,
Debbie 54:57 You’re so welcome. Thank you very much
Tim 54:58 Till next time. Buh-bye
Debbie 55:00 Bye.
Tim 55:01 There's so much more we could talk about. We didn't even get to talk about your next dream.
Debbie 55:07 Well, Do you want to know what it is, Tim?
Tim 55:09 Yea, I do?
Debbie 55:10 It's a Yamarin, six and a half foot, boat, speed boat. It has a sundeck at the back enough for six to seven people. It's got a little table so we can have our dinner in the middle of the archipelago in the ocean.
Tim 55:20 There we go.
Debbie 55:22 It's got to cover so that Dan and I can go and camp out in the archipelago should we wish. So I have a picture of a boat. So I'm working towards it. I'm close. I'm very close. The deadline or the timeline is March 2024 to purchase it. If not before. And then they will put it in the water. So I've been to speak to them. I've spoken I'm a regular visitor, I go sort of every two weeks, and they all know my name. They go ideally, you ready to buy the boat? I go no, no, no, not yet. But I have a question. So they're gonna put it in the water for us in April next year, already and good to go. And then we're going to use it throughout the summer season. And then in September, October, they're going to pick it up and store it for us. Ready for the following year. And they're going to clean it services, fix it and we don't even have to worry about any of that. So in order to achieve that dream, I first need a spot to moor my boat during the summer season. So, before I can buy the boat, because it's pointless having a boat and got nowhere to put it. During the summer season. I had to go and find the spot and of course all the spots are taken because we live close to the water. And you know, everybody has the boats in the summer. So everyone was like no, the spot is a two-year waiting list. Now I can't wait to use that spot. There's no hardly anybody changes. You know what I did? I went old school Tim. I typed on a piece of A4 paper. And we invite everybody new to the area. We live in (area of Sweden) and we're looking for a spot to moor boats. If anyone knows of anybody who's giving up this spot and will please remember this number. Old guy rang the number. And he says, oh, yeah, I know a spot over, maybe it's a five-minute drive from us that okay? And we go absolutely. We got a spot.
Tim 57:24 There you go.
Debbie 57:26 Got a spot.
Tim 57:29 So Debbie's next dream is the boat. The boat, the blue boat. What color is it?
Debbie 57:38 It's white. It's called a Yamarin. I'll send you a picture after this.
Tim 57:42 Sounds great. All right. Can't wait to hear about Debbie's next adventure soon.
Tim 57:53 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If, like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership. Please give us positive rating and review on Apple podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word to by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening. And be sure to tune in in two weeks time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading
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| 27 Nov 2024 | Empowering Women to Maintain their Career Goals With Melanie Potro | 00:37:06 | |
In this episode, host Tim Sweet and business stylist and image consultant Melanie Potro delve into the unique challenges women face in maintaining their careers during their 40s, 50s, and 60s. Noting that 66% of women cite family obligations as a reason for leaving the workforce and 40% believe menopause negatively impacts their careers, Melanie highlights the often-overlooked physical and emotional toll on women in these age groups. Tim and Melanie discuss the need for workplaces to foster open conversations and implement supportive policies, which can help reduce feelings of isolation and stress for affected women. The goal is to create a more compassionate workplace culture that enables women to thrive professionally through all life stages. Melanie also shares how her tailored styling services help women navigate these challenges by making them feel confident and professional. By offering personalized wardrobe solutions, she alleviates the stress of finding suitable clothing that fits and feels great, empowering women to focus on their careers with a renewed sense of self-assurance. Listeners are encouraged to explore their own feelings and relationships towards their style, their clothes, and circumstances to pre-emptively avoid career interruptions. Through Tim’s coaching and Melanie’s style of guidance, women can gain the support and expertise they need to stay on top of their careers at any age. About Melanie Potro Melanie Potro is a Business Stylist who helps leaders develop a signature style that aligns with their personal brand and goals. With over 30 years of experience, she has worked with influential individuals in the UK and abroad, helping them improve their appearance and confidence as leaders. Resources -- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Melanie Potro | MP Business Styling:
-- Transcript: Melanie 00:00 It's a great chance to redefine who you are and how you want to feel about yourself, what kind of vibe you want to give to others. And I think a lot of women come out as well a lot more confident once they're through this. And there's also another thing that a lot of people don't talk about is that once the brain fog lifts. However, like some people are more affected than others, the brain builds a lot of new connections, and this is so interesting because you really see a lot of things clearer. You're probably a better strategic thinker, so you're also a great addition to any workforce, and you are more capable than ever before.
Tim 00:42 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you, my friend are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. I'm Tim Sweet, and I'd like to welcome you to Episode 44 of the Sweet on Leadership podcast. Welcome back to Sweet on Leadership. Thank you very much for joining me today. I am very pleased to welcome a good friend for a return visit. This is Melanie Potro. Melanie, thanks again for being here. It's awesome. You are a style guru. You've got lots of clients that are in both the business and the political space, as well as other professions. We've been chatting. You've helped me in the past, which has just been so much fun and so enlightening. But what I want people to know most about you is that you're all about empowering women. So when we were talking earlier this month, we ran across a couple of issues that I thought were so important that we bring to the table. I want people to know all about you, because I'm excited to know you, and I just think that you know sky's the limit right now. So what have I missed? What would you like people to know about you before we get rolling here?
Melanie 02:09 As you said beforehand, I'm a personal stylist, but I really call myself a business stylist and image consultant, and I work to 95% with women, and I'm really passionate about getting more women into the boardroom, so.
Tim 02:28 Well, you and me both, so I think that's a great place to start. And one of the subjects that we've been talking about the last couple of weeks was what doesn't just get them in the boardroom, but what can keep them in the boardroom? What doesn't just get them to the apex of their career, but what can keep them there? Because, as we talked about it, we both have this observation where at a certain age range there's this kind of disturbing trend that people have a career disruption. And so, you know, today we're going to come on, we're going to talk a little bit about that disruption. And some of the common things that can cause it, and what we can really do about it. And so thanks again for for being here.
Melanie 03:09 Yeah, I'm excited to talk about this as well.
Tim 03:14 Awesome. What are some of the things that brought this to your mind when we had that conversation a couple weeks back? What's been going on in your life that has brought this front and center?
Melanie 03:22 I have a lot of women who are in executive positions, and as you said, as well, at a certain time in your life, there are several factors that can hit you, such as illness, maybe the death of a loved one, parent, probably as well. A lot of us have experienced that by now, or some illness of their parents, and then also your own physical changes. And this is something we're going to talk about today, right?
Tim 03:51 It’s not a small portion of the population that experiences this. It's literally every,
Melanie 03:57 Every woman, every woman.
Tim 04:01 Yeah, well, that's, that's okay. Fair enough. Fair challenge. 100%. Well, one of the the stats that I ran across out of a US Bureau of Labor and Statistics was that 66% of women who left the workforce, especially during these periods, cited that it was actually family reasons, family responsibilities and pressures that took them out of the workforce. And at the same time, New York Post reported that 40% of women believe that menopause will be or is a disadvantage at work, and they feel that it harms them in terms of their health, obviously, but also in terms of mental acuity, mobility, and a bunch of other reasons. So all of these things combine, at times, into this perfect storm, and can result in people leaving, resulting in attrition. So would those stats seem relevant to you? Seem accurate? Melanie 05:00 Yeah, definitely. I think a lot of women see a very negative impact of menopause because they don't really get the space to maybe retreat when they're not feeling well or find a medical advice and help. This is happening. More and more people are talking about this. There's a lot more help out there now, especially here in the UK as well, the NHS has responded recently, offering HRT to all women who hit menopause, but also the fact that it affects women who are actually also younger than 45 sometimes, you know, a lot of women are not aware. And also like just really talking about it and making your environment aware of the effects that it has, so that people can be considerate in those situations where you feel uncomfortable because of some of the physical changes that affect you, such as getting hot or cold, or some people experience anxiety suddenly or brain fog. But I think there are also some positive things you can talk about, and we can talk about that later as well.
Tim 06:08 Sure, we're going to dive deep on on all of these before we do, though I shouldn't forget to ask you, from a an emotional perspective, why is it important that we tackle this today for you, what really has you in the ring here with me?
Melanie 06:25 Okay, so I think women around 45 to 55 they really should be at the top of their career, and they're going up the ladder, working hard to enter their executive positions, or the next step on their career ladder, or the boardroom, and then suddenly something like menopause or the death of your parent hits you and you feel all alone, and it rattles your confidence, and it really throws you and distorts your career path, or you might even, as you said, want to leave your career and I think I want to help women to stay on their path and not be distracted, and, you know, support them as best as I can.
Tim 07:17 That is a real, as we said, it's a perfect storm that can hit people. And it really is a shame when we see it happen, and you've seen it happen quite a bit on your clients.
Melanie 07:28 Yes, definitely you have also illnesses coming up, something like cancer affecting women. And I had some very smart clients who have been really affected. And I just think like these are women, like they're so so capable and so good at what they're doing, and I want them to succeed, and I don't want their physical appearance or what they go through with menopause to affect them, and I know I'm in a position that I can help them in many ways. I'm a body expert. I've worked with clothes. I know how to make people feel comfortable in their own clothes, not only from their parents, but also from the wearer's perspective. And so I think that's where I come in, and I can do my bit to help them. Push them up.
Tim 08:23 That’s important. Thanks very much for sharing. I mean, that's great. Okay, so if you were to say, when we think about this time that many women face, all women face, and that it can deplete their capacity to deal with other life events that can be equally as challenging, but then it's like insult added to injury. In a sense, we've talked about leaving the workforce or something like that, but either before that risk or after that risk. What are the risks that this can mean if we if we let this go unaddressed, if we fail to deal with it proactively.
Melanie 09:03 A lot of people can go into a depression or become extremely anxious. And yeah, I think the depression comes as well, like if you retreat, you know, like you avoid contact, you're not talking about it, you don't feel like yourself in your own skin anymore. And this is not a good place to be. So this can really hold you back.
Tim 09:24 And that would be one more thing that would contribute to this, you know, this amplified or problem, you know, we're just layering on things. And it's, it's like, it's like it feeds itself, in a sense, the, you know, despair feeds despair. And so this is a real risk.
Melanie 09:40 Like a downward spiral, really.
Tim 09:43 Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, we see this like I remember a 2021 study, again, said that women are far more likely than men to experience burnout in that age range, the incident is almost 30% higher than men. There is real contributing factors that people have to deal with. And as you say, what can we do to shore each other up? So what do you hope for them? We're going to talk a little bit about the how, but you want them to avoid that depression. What else? What else would you like to help? Melanie 10:18 Well, I can help them simplify their lives. If someone is an expert and at the top of their career, they have a lot of things to deal with, and this is one part of the overload that I can take away. They can outsource to an expert who can deal with it, so they don't have to worry about what to wear, to find clothes that fit, to see how an outfit goes together and what makes them feel comfortable and what gives the right impression as well to others.
Tim 10:50 Yeah, tell me more about that when we think about this time of life, and I'll give you a little bit about what my experience has been with it. You know, I've got say over 70% of my clients are women, and been there when we're going through menopause and when we're going through other crises that they're going through. And there's that saying, you know, never waste a good crisis, because I've also seen that by restructuring and reframing and using this incredibly plastic state, this disruption as a chance to say, you know, the game has changed, or the rules have changed, but it's a chance to reset the board. It's a chance to say, you know, oh, who do I want to be as I go through the next half of my life. Who do I want to be as I, as I, as I, sort of progress forward. And so it's this, like, it's this transformational opportunity that, on one hand is is unavoidable, but the next hand, it's like, it's wonderful because you you can't avoid the shake up.
Melanie 11:57 It's a great chance, exactly, it's a great chance to redefine who you are and how you want to feel about yourself, what kind of vibe you want to give to others. And I think a lot of women come out as well a lot more confident once they're through this. And there's also another thing that a lot of people don't talk about is that once the brain fog lifts, however, like some people are more affected than others, the brain builds a lot of new connections. And this is so interesting because you really see a lot of things clearer. You're probably a better strategic thinker, so you're also a great addition to any workforce, and you are more capable than ever before.
Tim 12:46 We see that now because we're seeing such great examples of very inspiring women in highly influential, powerful positions. So tell me about the role of of personal style, when, when we're facing this chance to reinvent ourselves. You know, we can work on what our career is doing. It can work on our approach to relationships. We can work on our psychological well being. Where does Style and Image and everything factor?
Melanie 13:17 So I think the trigger is often that a lot of women, I think at least 30 to 50% of women, struggle to find clothes that fit them when they go shopping. And this doesn't get better when you hit menopause, because we all know with time, our bodies change. But then there comes some more changes when we are around a certain age. Some people have that earlier than later, but our bodies change, and we have these images that we need to be perfect and look like 20 year old women, which doesn't really happen. Nobody does look like the women in in the in the movies or in advertising. Anyway, we're also individual. But then obviously, a lot of women like put on weight around the waist and so on. They have physical changes, and this needs to be addressed, because clothes don't fit anymore, and you have to address this as a matter of fact, normally.
Tim 14:19 After you and I talked last week, I had a long conversation with my wife, and I asked her, I said, I've always assumed that she liked shopping. She's a great shopper to go out, and it is a form of entertainment, I said, but do you enjoy shopping for yourself? And she's like I did, and now I don't. And she said, it's actually really tough because you see these styles that you want to wear, but they're all designed around a certain age and a certain and fairly Junior and at a certain size, which is fairly slight. And clothes in general are not constructed for women once they do go through a size change.
Melanie 15:01 Exactly. This is a big problem.
Tim 15:04 Yeah, it's not front of the rack. And so she says, you spend a lot of time in the store feeling terrible because you you think something's cute on the rack. You bring it down, you try it on, and you end up feeling terrible about yourself.
Melanie 15:18 Yeah, and you feel inadequate. You think you blame yourself for this, not the clothing. So that is also something that is experienced very often, isn't it? Like you think, like, oh, there's something wrong with my body. No, the clothes are cut in the wrong way.
Tim 15:33 And when we think about trying to accomplish anything, whether it's in your job or it's in your home life, I mean, if you're already feeling at risk, and then you so let's say we want to go do something. We want to address your style or your wardrobe or something, and it's a terrible experience. If you're already facing an energy depletion because you're going through a hormonal change, or you're dealing with some emotional things or some illness, and then you got to go and feel crappy about yourself on top of all of that? Well, it's like, it's just, you know, more drains on the battery. And so from Jen's point, she was just like, oh, well, the other thing she said is that it doesn't just happen in the store, because then she makes choices and she comes home and she may never wear something. Do you ever see something like that happen?
Melanie 16:19 Yes, I mean, we've all been there. We go to a store, and then the sales assistant tells us, Oh, you look wonderful, and you look great, and this looks amazing. And you buy it because you feel good about yourself. You think, like, I have this really nice piece, and I look amazing. And then you put it on when you're at home, you think, like, oh, right, this doesn't really look as good as I thought. It doesn't really work with the other pieces that I have in my wardrobe. These are all considerations. This is something I'm never going to wear again, and it's just not right. So you want to, like, avoid these situations. And it's really easy to get there, because sometimes sales assistants are so nice, and you feel almost obliged to maybe at some point give in after you tried on the third piece and we don't feel right.
Tim 17:07 Well, I feel not just feel, not just feel emotionally, Jen, Jen had also said to me that, you know, often you want to wear something because it's cute, and so you make it work in the store. And she says, no end of mutual experience among her and her friends of where they they don't feel good by the end of the day because a piece of clothing is too tight, or it's too constricting in one part of it's just uncomfortable. She puts up with it, but then actually feels quite terrible at the end of the day, like, physically, my stomach hurts, or my, you know, whatever it's, it's, it wasn't a great choice. Putting yourself in a physical in physical discomfort, to try to fill some sort of emotional need or or gap. What would you suggest then? What's, what's some of the things that you teach people to build confidence and build a wardrobe that works?
Melanie 18:16 There are obviously different levels. But when it comes to the clothes themselves, I have a tailoring background, and I still have also a team of people who can make clothes. So there are different avenues we go through. And I'm also a member of the Harvey Nichols - Stylist Styling Club, which is like a big department store. So normally we go and we make this a much more fun experience. So we pull the clothes before the client comes there, we have a big room and space to try and close and really see if they're fit, if they work well, if they feel comfortable. And I'm able then also to say and judge whether we can alter pieces to make them fit better, not only in making them tighter or shorten them, but really like adjusting them to their proportions, and that is something that you wouldn't normally be able to get that service to understand, really, how this can fit. And then also we can make clothes for our clients that fit their frame, their body shape 100% and I think that's something unique. And people underestimate how good it feels to have something that feels really like a second skin, because you don't really find something on the high street that fits you ever 100% because we're not a standard figure ever.
Tim 19:36 Sounds good. So now I have this picture of you. Make sure I've got this right. So you you actually, you and your team would pre choose clothing for people, knowing what their sizes are, cutting down on the amount of choices so that they don't have to spend their time being disappointed and then delivering the, I guess, the hope or the potential. That, yeah, you know what? We're gonna buy it in this size so that we can tailor it down to your specific thing, so it fits perfect, and it's comfortable and it's functional and it's and it's all of these things. So that becomes a much more positive experience and much less onerous. And kind of sounds like, I kind of want to do it now. It kind of sounds like a day at the spa or something like it almost sounds you have a bridal couture line that you ran for years, and it sounds like what, as a man I would think of trying on wedding dresses, kind of thing, but repeated at the same sort of, is it same? Is the vibe the same?
Melanie 20:40 Yeah, the vibe is the same. So we do really half a day or most of the day out. So we start with some boutiques, then go to the department store, try on some things, and have a nice lunch. And make this a really fun, enjoyable experience, something that my clients can get excited about. And especially, for example, some people have maybe petite everything is always too long. And that is not just the trouser length, but maybe the sleeve lengths or the shoulders are always too long. And if you then get the opportunity to get something that's tailored to you, because my dressmaker comes, and all just the clothes that they really fit. They're almost like something that's made to measure, made to their frame. This is such a fun and empowering experience to have something that really fits you and feels like you, and something to be excited about. To wear clothes that really are aligned with you, that convey who you are, convey authority and confidence as well. But, yeah, it's something to be excited about and enjoy.
Tim 21:49 If I'm going to be a proxy for for somebody listening, I might say, you know, suddenly this sounds really expensive. Mel, like, this sounds like, like, I gotta pay somebody to do this, I'm adding overhead onto my clothing purchases. Is that? How people should think about it?
Melanie 22:07 It's a really good investment, because if you're at that executive level, you want to avoid buying clothes that are not right, as you said, even about your wife, you end up buying something that you're not going to wear. So you avoid all these clothing choices that are not going to serve you in any way, that drag you down, that are wrong, that you can't return, and instead, you really narrow it down to the clothes that you will wear that fit you and make you feel good. And this is also emotional baggage that you reduce, and also the overload choosing in the morning, oh what am I going to wear, how I'm going to look, and also giving a good impression, you know, it's going to help you to step up the career ladder, knowing that you look good and you feel good in your clothes.
Tim 22:57 Yeah. So we're talking about everything from personal power to the amount of sleep you can get, because, you know, it's not going to take forever to to choose an outfit to I mean, and this is something that I've, I've seen time and time again, not just in my house, but in general, when we're doing collections for charity or anything like that, clothing that still has the tag on it that people bought and and bring it home and never wear it. You know, the Maria condo thing, where it's, it's, you know, clothing that just does not make you feel good. And there's got to be a so if we add up all of those direct and indirect costs, they add up pretty quick. Not only is the direct wasted purchases. But then we've got all the wasted time of getting ready in the morning. We've got all the wasted energy of feeling crappier than we should do. We cut down our career potential and pathways because we're we're not showing up being as confident or as mindful as we could be in the moment, we're not, perhaps as influential or as effective as we might want to be, because part of it is first impressions with others and all of those things. And then there's the wider issue that we're talking about right now, which is that energy can not only go towards our career, but to supplement the energy draws that illness might take or looking after parents or kids or or going through a hormonal change, or whatever divorce or whatever else we're dealing with, we haven't started the day on the back foot or moving ahead. I love that. I think that's great. Tell me a little bit about the first thing that you think a person should do. Now, they've hopefully, they've listened. They're now inspired to step it up a notch, even the men listening, which I sure hope there are. What's the first thing they can do, or what's the first few steps?
Melanie 24:52 Being really honest with yourself and admitting or like seeing that this needs to be addressed, or this is a, maybe a problem that's holding you back, whether that is something that you think you're looking dated and you're not in line with the times, or if comfortable, and yeah, it could be holding you really back. So I think being really honest with yourself and seeing that this needs to be addressed, and also maybe thinking about how you want to be perceived as a person and how you want to feel about yourself. And I think sometimes, especially women who are already in executive positions or on a higher position, they become a bit defensive when it goes, comes to clothing, they see it as a weakness that they can't deal with their own wardrobe, because they are high achievers. They're so on top of the game. Exactly. They should just like be able to address this as well and deal with it. But this is something that can easily outsource to an expert, and you can't be good at everything. So this is something that sometimes people have to address that are high achievers. And they think like, yeah, really, I should be able to deal with it. Because sometimes women are made to think it's all so easy. You know, look, I just put on this outfit, I just put on this blazer, I look good in it, and then people end up copying an influencer or someone like that, and are surprised when it doesn't work.
Tim 26:29 Yeah, it doesn't fit, or it doesn't doesn't fit physically, or doesn't fit emotionally, or doesn't fit personality wise, or the image. Yeah, I think also it's very interesting, because I've seen the work that you've done. And you know, although you focus on women in the workplace and you focus on executives and politicians, you also advise how their sports attire looks, how their casual attire looks. I love that post that you put out a few weeks ago on with jeans and a blazer and all these kind of things. And my wife and she was, like, awesome. And my, I mean, the other, the other reason that I've, I've leaned into this a little bit, as you know, is that my daughter is very now interested in moving into the fashion industry and whatnot. But even picking out holiday wear and swimsuits, that can all be something that you lean into. Because as I you know, as I help teams and leaders lean into their strengths and be fluent in their weaknesses, we also know that not everybody can sing a tune and not everybody can cook with balance and do well, yeah, I mean, but everybody has strengths and everybody has weaknesses and and for some people, they're they just don't have an eye necessarily for fashion. They may not actually understand how they come across. And so having an extra set of eyes can be really helpful, and it can I imagine even like packing for a vacation, and knowing that you're happy with everything that's in your limited wardrobe is just such an empowering thing. And I mean, and I don't think it's just for women, as you say, you got 5% of your clientele are men, and I've been through this experience with you, albeit in a remote way, but it was enlightening, like I never had any idea about..
Melanie 28:18 Finding your patterns.
Tim 28:20 Contrast and patterns, yeah I mean, it just, it's honestly guided so much of what I've now chosen to invest in, right? So,
Melanie 28:29 Like a filter, I think, as well, like, because once you understand the colors and the contrast and the patterns that work for you, then you can just go into a shop and say, I can cut out all the noise.
Tim 28:45 Exactly for sure. Okay,awesome on that point, though. Let me just ask you one, one thing here before we because I think you've done a great job, both of us. We want to be there for women in these positions as they're going through. I don't want to have anybody who's high potential struggle to the point where they leave behind something they really want to do because of other circumstances. Yes, change happens, and yes, it might need to happen, but they shouldn't change under duress or, you know, because because of something that's preventable, especially if it's causing their own brain to lie at them in their own voice, then that's something that I don't want to I don't want to be party to. Want to stand up against.
Melanie 29:25 Yes, and you work with a lot of women, don't you? So you work with a lot of executive leaders.
Tim 29:30 Yeah. But for the other for the men listening here, what would be your hope for the men?
Melanie 29:35 So with regards to women hitting menopause, I really like them to be a lot more open about the effects that it can have, how it can really affect their mothers, their wives, their sisters, their work colleagues, and give them some space to talk about it without judgment. Maybe read up about. It, and also look into their company culture, if they can improve access to things that would make life easier for women. So I think it's just being open about it and ready to talk about it, and not sidelining women who are affected by it so and to take it seriously, as you said, it's a, it's a chemical thing that is happening to us and and sometimes I've seen women who have been really at the pinnacle of the career, very confident, and they've just suddenly been hit by anxiety, things like that out of nowhere. And these are things that can happen, and so they need to be addressed, but also that there has an understanding from the other side that this can happen. It doesn't have to happen. And I think there's a lot more help now out there. And, you know, women go through it and come out stronger, but so that there's a little bit of an academic understanding as well what's really happening there a scientific one.
Tim 31:03 You know, as men, we have a real responsibility to not stigmatize things and to normalize the conversation and and to not enter these things with misconceptions about what it means or it doesn't mean, but it is a perspective and an experience we will never have, and so not in the same way. I mean, there are some changes for sure that men go through, so then we have to educate ourselves, and we have to lead with empathy. Okay, we didn't get to a couple of things early on in the conversation. So first of all, I want to thank you for taking us through that journey, and we're going to just begin to wrap up here. So I've got a couple of of things. One thing that we do as a tradition here is that our previous guest had lobbed a question. This was from Seeham Cyrene. Seeham Cyrene wanted me to ask the next guest…
Sehaam 31:59 Who or what anchors you when you're having a tough time, and if they feel comfortable sharing how that will be wonderful. It could be a person, it could be a writer. It could be an actor, depending on what your profession is, right? It might be someone in your industry. Might be a family member, someone living, or they might be a historical someone who's just influenced you so much that you kind of go back to again and again.
Melanie 32:28 Okay, so I think I really have family and friends who I would talk to when I hit a really tough time, especially the best friends to have a good chat about things. And
Tim 32:42 Would it be a best friend that you talk to?
Melanie 32:46 Yeah, definitely. Best friend I talk to and lean into. It depends on what experience is it. So who I'm gonna speak then to all my sister as well, who's just been visiting me, and I also lean into myself. And whilst I'm not religious person, I as a half Indian person I have some spirituality. I used to do Indian dance as well, and for me, Ganesha is the remover of obstacles. And so I do a little prayer dance, prayer with Ganesha in mind.
Melanie 33:29 Wow, I'm learning all sorts of things. What a great question from Seeham. I love that. Thank you so much, man. We should really ask this question more from people. Okay, now there's a flip side. What is a question you would want to lob at our next guest.
Melanie 33:44 What was the trigger for that person that made him or her go onto that path?
Tim 33:55 Okay, so what was the trigger that made them choose their career path?
Melanie 33:58 Yeah, their career path, yeah.
Tim 34:00 Okay, yeah, got it. I will ask, okay, that's excellent. How can people get in touch with you?
Melanie 34:08 So they can connect with me on LinkedIn. But I'm also really excited because I have a very special free executive style guide that they can download here. Sweet on Wardrobe.
Tim 34:21 What, you mean you designed it for our listeners. Melanie 34:23 Yes. Tim 34:24 Okay, right on excellent. Melanie 34:25 And you will have the link in the shownotes.
Tim 34:30 I sure can, yeah, I will. I will post the link in the shownotes.
Melanie 34:33 Also, they can also book a free call just to find out maybe if my service is for them, either virtually or in person. And they can do this also through the link or through my LinkedIn profile. I also have a website which is MPbusinessstyling.com and they can get in touch with me there.
Tim 34:53 We'll put all of those links in the show notes. So. Melanie 34:55 Excellent. Thank you. Tim 34:57 Hey, no, that's great. Hey, that's really something that you put that together for us. I appreciate it.
Melanie 35:03 Well, I'm very pleased to be here.
Tim 35:05 No, I'm just, excellent. Well, I'm excited for all of those things that are happening. I'm sure there's lots we can look forward to, and I know that you've got good things on the go for next year.
Melanie 35:17 Yes, very exciting. Some training courses as well for companies. And, yeah, there's a lot coming up.
Tim 35:26 I'll put your Instagram in because even I love watching what's coming through, and I know that my my wife and and other women that are really important in my life are are following you as well. So we'll, we'll put those touch points in because you're producing some really, really informative stuff that's immediately helpful.
Melanie 35:46 Amazing. Thank you.
Tim 35:47 Wow. Mel, thank you so much for spending this time with me. It was a really interesting idea that you had for for us approaching this issue, and I'm so glad that we connected on it. And I just, I'm really interested in hearing what people's reactions are going to be.
Melanie 36:05 Yeah, I'm interested as well. And thank you so much for inviting me to talk about this, also as a man and husband and son of a mum who's gone through this, probably at some point, and also having so many clients who are going through these similar changes.
Tim 36:24 It’s as normal as normal can be. And we need to treat it that way. Melanie 36:30 Exactly. Tim 36:31 So hey, Big hugs from the side of the pond. Can't wait till we can get over to London and see you in person sometime soon.
Melanie 36:35 Yeah, definitely, that would be awesome. Okay.
Tim 36:38 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If, like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership, please give us a positive rating and review on Apple podcasts, this helps us spread the word to other committed leaders, and you can spread the word too by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening, and be sure to tune in in two weeks time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host. Tim Sweet encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 04 Oct 2023 | Managing Fear and Leading Through Empathy with Dave Sweet, Part 2 | 00:14:43 | |
In this episode, Tim Sweet is joined once again by his cousin, Dave Sweet, an experienced investigator with a background in law enforcement. Dave is known for his expertise in conducting interviews and uncovering the truth. His passion lies in bridging the gap between investigative practices and leadership in various fields. If you're interested in leadership, fairness, and decision-making, this episode offers valuable insights and practical wisdom. Tim and Dave also discuss the motives and instincts that leaders and investigators may have, which can lead to unintended consequences. Dave emphasizes the importance of trust in leadership and the role leaders play in creating a fair and accountable environment. They delve into the concept of individuals weighing risks and rewards in their decision-making processes and how this applies to both leadership and investigation. Dave also shares his perspective on the justice system and the value of due process in a democratic society. About Dave Sweet Dave Sweet is an experienced investigator with a background in law enforcement. With a wealth of knowledge in conducting interviews and uncovering truth, he brings unique insights into decision-making, fairness, and communication. Dave is passionate about sharing his expertise through consultation and workshops, and he aims to bridge the gap between investigative practices and leadership in various fields. Resources discussed in this episode: -- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Dave Sweet | Unconventional Classroom: -- Transcript Dave 0:02 As a leader in a workplace, the only thing I can imagine is that your track record and your fairness or your inability to be fair– Tim 0:14 yeah, your reputation will precede you, your brand will precede you. Dave 0:17 It 100% will. Tim 0:22 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you my friend, are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. Welcome to the Sweet on Leadership podcast. Tim 0:55 Dave, thanks again for joining me, our last conversation was so much fun. I think that we really got the jitters out. So, I noticed towards the end of it, we're really slipping into more what I feel with you and we're just sitting down and having a coffee. I love when we get this kind of tempo. Dave 1:14 Yeah, no, I agree. It's been good. Tim 1:17 What do you see as being, perhaps, from direct experience or witnessing others going through this? What are some of the motives or instincts that a leader or in your case an investigator may have that has unintended consequences? Are there moments? Are there things that can cause somebody to clam up and say nothing? Dave 1:40 Well, if the fear is so overwhelming, so let's talk about bad guys, right? So, bad guys have one more stake at the table, then maybe a witness does or a victim does, right? And that is jail. So, if the fear of jail, for life, is greater than or more overwhelming, then your ability as an interviewer, for example, to show them that jail isn't as scary as what they might think that will force somebody to never get to the place that you need them to be. You know, if the bad guy's biggest concern, in an interview, and he tells you, I mean, people tell you what they want to hear, you know, you just have to listen. So, I've always believed that if you listen, somebody's going to tell you what they want you to sort of tell them back. Like a really benign example is if you would, if you were an appliance salesman, and somebody came into your appliance store and said, I need a new dishwasher, this is the third one I've had in the last five years, I'm switching brands, I can't deal with this brand anymore. They're terrible, their service is terrible, I can't find anybody to get parts for this washing machine or dishwasher, whatever– Tim 3:00 You've just given them everything that they need to tell you what they– Dave 3:05 Right, so then all you have to talk about is you know, the warranty and the dependability of the next dishwasher, they're going to purchase. People tell you what they want you to repeat back to them. And so when a bad guy, if his concern is more about how he's going to be perceived in the community, or how this is going to affect his reputation or her reputation, they will inevitably, they're easier people to get them to sort of start to tell their side of the story, essentially, because that's their motivation. Their motivation is to be the guy that made the mistake versus be the monster. Tim 3:47 There's two parallels that I'm thinking about in my line of work and with business leaders and founders. You know, one is that if you, in my own work, if you don't put down a foundation of trust that the person is not going to lose their job, or something like this before you ask them to tell you what is really on their mind, you'll never have them say anything. And often if they don't trust the boss before you can even start to have a conversation. In my line of work, I come in as an intervening factor because I can establish trust, I don't have a trust break with them yet, and get them talking. Whereas, until we understand what the issue is, the boss doesn't have a hope in rebuilding trust. And so that's one thing. And then the other one is around dealing with founders and startups when they're confused why their whole life is tied up in an organization but their employees don't care as much as they do about the job, about the business and the founder, everything is at stake. And so they're willing to go to the ends of the earth to make that business float. For everyone else, the stakes are not nearly as even. And if it's between, you know, protecting one's sanity and work-life balance, or, you know, this is a job to them is what I'm trying to say versus it's, you know, your entire lifestyle. So, that whole idea of, they're doing the math, you know, they're deciding what is the bigger risk, and we don't have to look very far for this example. You know, the other day, there was a box of cookies in the morning, and by the afternoon, it was empty. And I said, who ate the cookies? And do you think anybody fessed up? No, because the result of what I was going to say to them was far less attractive than any upside that they could visualize, in the same way that saying, you know, don't eat the cookie. When you say that to young kids, they will do the math, they'll say, Huh, is the potential that my dad's gonna come up to me and say, I'm really disappointed in you for eating that cookie? Or is that greater or smaller than the joy you're gonna derive in the moment from eating that cookie? Well, most children will opt for the answer that has chocolate chips. So, you know, it's, we're pretty basic in this way. I think, you know, as apes, you know. Dave 6:20 The cookie example is exactly the same scenario that we deal with all the time. Right? When it comes to, again, it's people are doing the math. You know, we always get people, I like to think that I give a person an out, right? They will always take the easier thing. You know if I say, are you a monster, or a guy that made a big mistake? Most people are going to take the mistake over being a monster, right? They would rather be the guy that made a big mistake, and then have the excuses kind of fall into line of why they're a guy that made a big mistake. You know, as a leader in a workplace, the only thing I can imagine is that your track record and your fairness, or your inability to be fair– Tim 7:08 Yeah, your reputation will precede you, your brand will precede you. Dave 7:11 It 100% will. Sometimes when things aren't working out the way we want them to work out. Like, for example, we have employees that are constantly being late for the meeting, or they're not getting into work on time, or whatever it might be, or we're not getting the project completed on time, we're very quick to always point to that individual and say, you know, you're not getting to these meetings on time, or you're not getting to work on time, whatever it is, right? Instead of actually looking at ourselves and wondering whether or not our systems and our processes are contributing to that. For so, for example, if I'm the boss, and it's one o'clock in the afternoon, or it's over the lunch hour, noon, or 12:30. And I sent out a meeting invite for two o'clock, if somebody had to rearrange their schedule, or had to, you know, was backed up against another meeting, but they don't want to say no to the meeting itself, that might be a reason for why they showed up. And instead of like, looking at ourselves and going, well, you know what, maybe I should be planning these things out a little bit better, right? And you'll see that regularly, I think in all jobs spaces, including my own, when things go awry, there's usually some sort of a breakdown in the system itself, communication, accountability, you know, leadership, there's a breakdown somewhere there. And it's not always on the person that's made the mistake. Right? So, I think if we have an awareness of that, I think that could actually help us in sort of being fair in our judgments of individuals who we're working with. Tim 8:52 Yeah, I really like that. I think that's a great point. And John G. Miller wrote a book called Question Behind the Question. And the first layer question was, why are they late? Why didn't they show up on time? Or why couldn't they take the shift? Them, them, them, attribution bias. They've got a flaw in their character, versus we who would never be late on purpose. It would be environmental, it would be situational, right? But he says the first question is, why are they doing the wrong thing? But the question behind the question is, what am I doing that's making that result more or less likely? And so diving in and saying, am I upholding a system that isn't working? Am I introducing variables that aren't helpful? Dave 9:37 Why are my employees not talking to me? Why are they not coming to me with their concerns? Right? If you're a red-in-the-face boss who's always constantly heard throwing stuff against the walls in your office– Tim 9:49 Throwing tantrums, yeah. Dave 9:51 –that's why. So. Tim 9:53 Yeah, now they've done the math again, they will– Dave 9:55 They’ve done the math. Yeah. Tim 9:5 So, I mean, from that perspective, I think there's got to be a piece around if people are going to engage in the justice system, do they, by and large, understand and trust the system? Or do they see it to be something that's corrupt and ultimately will deliver an unfair result or something like that? Dave 10:20 Both are the two attitudes, I don't know, and there might be one in the middle. You know, sometimes it's fair, sometimes it's not. No, it's not. And, you know, the verbiage has changed a little over the years. You know, they refer to it more as a legal system now and less about a justice system. It's certainly not perfect, but it's not the worst in the world, either. One of the great things, and something I always think about is, is that our system is set up so that people like Dave Sweet, can't just throw Joe Smith in jail for what I perceive to be something illegal, and then not provide them any kind of due process or any of those kinds of things. We still have a legal system that allows people to have an opportunity to tell their side of the story. There's some due process, sometimes you know, what, on one side, it doesn't look like it's fair. But on the other side, it seems, you know, it worked out well for that individual. Right? But we had a number of people I mean, our grandfathers and great grandfathers fought for this right to have a democratic system that would be free, and that we could, you know, question. And it's not just the government or the state saying it's going to be this way, there are lots of countries in this world that aren't that way. And so when we think of our legal system, I'm certainly happy that we have the system we have versus what it could be in another place. You know, and that was a freedom that was fought for with lives and something that we still enjoy today. Tim 12:00 I think that's a great place for us to wrap up our conversation. I just want to say, you know, congratulations on the book, of course. And I understand there's going to be a re-release. So, I think that's an important thing to note. And maybe you can tell us if people want to get in touch with you, where can they find you? And what's most exciting on the horizon for you? Dave 12:25 Yeah, so I mean, I'm in the twilight of my career. I actually, it won't be more than a few months, and I will be out trying to be my own founder and leave the security of a government job to pursue something different, which will be consultation, investigation services. I'm very excited about some of the workshops and some of the training opportunities I'm hoping to be able to provide to corporate Calgary and also individuals and organizations across the city. And then yeah, we'll continue to work on the books. I can be found right now I'm on Facebook, you can find me just at the Unconventional Classroom. If you like my page, certainly I'll be updating it with new things coming up into the future, and have a website there'll be ready to launch sometime in September. And that's kind of where we're at right now. Tim 13:16 Oh, awesome. Dave 13:17 And the website will be www.unconventionalclassroom.ca which is the important distinction, so. Tim 13:25 .ca got it. Dave 13:27 .ca Tim 13:28 We’re proud Canadians, so let’s use it. Dave 13:30 Yeah, there we go. Tim 13:31 All right. Well, Dave, thank you so much for spending this time with me, and I really appreciate it. Dave 13:35 Thank you so much. Tim 13:36 And I'm sure there's gonna be lots of value that people can get out of that insight that you bring, which, to me, is always so surprising. So, thanks again. Dave 13:45 I certainly appreciate the opportunity. And thanks again, and everyone, just love people; it makes life so much easier. Tim 13:58 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. Like us, if you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership. Please give us a positive rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word too by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening. And be sure to tune in in two weeks' time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 08 Jan 2025 | Harold Horsefall - Balancing Material Success and Personal Fulfillment | 00:39:36 | |
Tim Sweet chats with Harold Horsefall, an Indigenous issues strategist from the Pasqua First Nation, about his inspiring path from firefighter to cultural leader. Harold shares his journey rooted deeply in traditional values and leadership principles. Harold highlights the importance of preserving language, place names, and cultural landmarks and how they shape the understanding of the land. He also opens up about the impact of his family's residential school history, which fuels his dedication to truth, reconciliation, and advancing Indigenous relations through meaningful projects like managing a memorial for residential schools. Harold offers insights into the progress and challenges in Indigenous relations, noting increased federal investments since 2015 and advocating for greater support in areas like education. He emphasizes continuous self-improvement and aligning work with personal values, drawing parallels between traditional practices like the sweat lodge ceremony and the process of reconciliation. Harold reflects on the balance of material success and personal fulfillment, encouraging listeners to pursue work that contributes to growth and happiness. Tune in to learn more about Harold’s inspiring story, his current projects, and his vision for the future of Indigenous relations. About Harold Horsefall Harold Horsefall is an experienced Indigenous Relations Strategist who is focused on creating meaningful relationships between Municipal Government, the Treaty 7 Nations, the Metis Nation of Alberta Region 3, Inuit, and urban Indigenous Calgarians. Harold has a demonstrated track record of attaining results and is skilled in advancing Truth & Reconciliation to build mutually beneficial outcomes. He is a strategic thinker who aims to co-create with Indigenous Stakeholders. Harold is a well-rounded professional and has a Master of Global Management (International Business) from Royal Roads University. Resources discussed in this episode:
-- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Harold Horsefall: -- Transcript Harold 00:01 There was a high school in Calgary. It was great. And I'm very thankful I got to go there. It's called the Plains Indian Cultural Survival School. And so in there, like, I got exposed to a lot of traditional values that I otherwise wouldn't have. And so even like pow wow singing, like I did, pow wow singing 10, 20, and 30. And so there's some traditional values that I was focused on. So like to be a leader, you had to be a person who risked your life for your people, for the people, and you did so selflessly. That was the big draw. To be a firefighter, to be able to say that I did that, and I did for seven years. And seven is, of course, if you didn't know, it's a very significant number to Indigenous people.
Tim 00:39 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you, my friend, are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. I'm Tim sweet. Welcome to Episode 48 of the sweet on leadership podcast.
Tim 01:10 Welcome to Sweet on Leadership. Thanks again for joining us. Today we have the privilege of speaking to Harold Horsefall. You are an Indigenous Issues Strategist. You are a person that I met when I was helping a team with a team building day and a strategy day, and you had me thinking for days after that with your presentation, which I really am grateful for. And luckily enough, one of the people there was was willing to put us in touch. And so here you are today, and I'm really excited for you to be on the show help our audience have a brand new perspective on a number of things, and I think it's going to be fantastic. So Harold Horsefall, thanks for joining me.
Harold 01:55 Oh, thank you for having me. The honor is, the honor's mine. The Privilege is mine.
Tim 01:58 I really appreciate it. So as we get going, here, you and I've had some conversations leading up to this point, and I'd like you to tell us, how do you see yourself? How would you describe Harold the person?
Harold 02:11 Sure, no problem. I guess to start, though, first I'll introduce myself and a name. My name is Harold Horsefall. I'm originally from the Pasqua First Nation, so it's on Treaty 4, just northeast Regina, the Qu'Appelle River Valley. So you know, if you jump in the Bow River, we're in Calgary here, you jump in the Bow River on my on a paddle board, I could get there eventually, but I'm born and raised in Calgary, Alberta here. So I just wanted to say that, and just say hello to any Indigenous listeners out there. Oki, Tân'si, Aaniin, and Dzīnísī Gújā.
Harold 02:41 Oh, thank you so much.
Harold 02:42 And Âba wathtech, sorry, Âba wathtech. I forgot that one.
Tim 02:46 Great. So people are aware, what were those languages you were speaking in? What was your?
Harold 02:49 Aaniin is Ojibwe, or so I'm Cree and Saulteaux, so the Pasqua First Nation is Cree and Saulteaux. Saulteaux is like plains Ojibwe, if you will. And then, Oki, is Blackfoot. Dzīnísī Gújā is Tsuut'ina, Âba wathtech is Stoney Nakoda, and Tân'si, or Tân'si is Cree. But also the Michif, their language, the Métis language, it tends to be, on average, that the verbs are Cree, sometimes Ojibwe, and then the nouns are French.
Tim 03:20 That is a great way for us to actually take a moment and although we didn't talk about this, but I mean, acknowledge that we are on this land as we record this today. I live just a hop, skip and a jump from the Tsuut'ina right there, like over a street I'm on. What is their land right now. I'm really thankful that we can just all be here and live in harmony together, and I think that it's great that it's such a vibrant part of our community here in Calgary. I remember on that day, when I came home, I was talking to my wife about how you were talking about the Elbow River, and that it was this confluence, and that everyone in North America knew that location, this this elbow, this trading area, was important. I had never appreciated you said you could get in a paddle board and end up where you needed to go, that that was the origin of that, that that word had so much meaning, that it was a that it was a fixed place in the mind of so many people. And that was one of the things that blew my mind that day. As we walked outside, we we looked around so.
Harold 04:28 Perfect. Well, I have another one for you if you want. Tim 04:29 Please shoot.
Harold 04:30 Okay, so everybody, well, for most Calgarians, go out to the mountains occasionally, or maybe some more than others, and they go past Mount Yamnuska. Yamnuska is so this is a little bit like, how did Indigenous people really know the land really good? And if you read any of the history, you know that was typically because that wasn't always, there was a lot of conflict. The Indigenous people in a certain area always knew their land better than than whoever was coming in. But how? There was no. Google, and there weren't any maps. A lot of it was, was is buried in the language, place names, especially so Yamnuska would be one of those. And my boss used to be Dr. Terry Poucette. She's a she's now a professor at the University of Calgary, and I think she was, she also a professor at University of Victoria. But anyway, she she, she was sharing with us that Yamnuska, if you say that to a Stoney person, that means messy hair. So that would be mount messy hair, which is a mistranslation, because then she said the correct way to say it is "e-yam-nuthka". So that's mount Îyâmnathka, and that means flat faced mountain. So then in the Indigenous languages, like with the confluence in Blackfoot, they say, Moh-kins-tsis. In Stoney they say, Wincheesh-pah. In Tsuut'ina they say, Kootsisáw, the Michif or the Metis called it Otos-kwunee. And they all mean elbow, the confluence of those rivers, yeah. And that would be and so there's all that language, all that variety, and the languages are very different, but they would tap their elbow because, yeah, the way that people would trade there was a sign language, and that sign language tended to be more uniform amongst the various speakers of different languages.
Tim 06:15 Was there a sign for Yamnuska?
Harold 06:17 I don't know that one. I'd have to ask Terry.
Tim 06:20 I should have a flatter face, but, you know, it's probably something. I'll put a I'll put a link for our listeners that are joining us internationally. I'll put a link to a couple of Wiki pages or something so they can actually see these areas and appreciate them later when we go out. I'll tell you a story about how I got trapped in behind Yamnuska, and I had to avoid a bear, and ended up there's a slough back there. And I crossed over, crossed over a creek, which then filled with water, and I had to hike all the way down to the highway, and I came out along Highway, what is it, 1-A, and there's the there's the lodge there, and then hitchhike back to my car, but it's long story so much younger days great. So if we were to think about, well, actually, this is a great opportunity for us to bring up a little tradition here, which is we have a question come from a previous guest. So, your question comes from Melanie Potro in London, who is a professional business and political stylist for women, and very concerned about women's place in leadership. So I'll go ahead and let her ask you a question.
Melanie Potro 07:32
What was the trigger for that person, that made him or her go into that path?
Harold 07:41 I used to work in oil and gas, and I worked in accounting, and I was going to get an accounting designation. But always in my in my heart, I really wanted to be a fireman, actually, actually, I wanted to be a police officer, but my father-in-law talked me out of he said, being a firefighter is better. And so, so eventually, it’s the path I went on. And then, so, while I was a firefighter, a friend of mine was, he was finishing his master's at the University of Calgary, and I was a fireman. So, then I took that career path. One of the benefits definitely was the work-life balance. And it was more like a life-work balance. I had a lot more free time, right? And I used to think, you know, you get you get time, or you get money. So I thought, You know what I want time because, like, that's you can't always just get that. So that was one of the main reasons why I chose being a fireman. At any rate, my friend was working on his master's degree and a side job. He worked hosting an Indigenous relations course that the University of Calgary still offers. It's called the Indigenous relations leadership course. He was leaving the job because he was finishing his program, he asked me if I wanted to do it. So I was like, sure, I'd love to. So I was a fireman. And then I was, I was hosting the Indigenous relations course at the University of Calgary. And then so it was great, because I would sit in on this course for four days. It was offered four days, three, four times a year, and I was sitting on this course. And so it was these professors would come in, and some of them were professors that I had when I did my undergraduate degree at the UofC. And then so they would come in, I started really picking up all the material, and I could, I could really go in depth with this. I was like, hey, you know what? I want to work in this field. And so then I got my own master's degree, global management from Royal Roads University. And then I started to hit the streets. I was like, Okay, I'm going to consult in this area. And I ended up meeting somebody at the City of Calgary, and they said, Well, I can't hire you because you're already an employee, because I was a firefighter. And then so then I was seconded into the, into my into that role that I have in my day job.
Tim 09:38 And that, of course, has led you to where you are today, and I really liked how you described how you see your position and how you see your own profession. So could you give us a little bit of that?
Harold 09:48 Sure, yeah, I guess I'll start though, is that my day job or the profession in which I'm in is more a deeper expression of myself. Because my mother went to the Lebret Indian residential school, and then so, as a result, we had in my family, my grandparents, there were very significant cultural, prominent people in our community. You know, they were healers, and all that information was lost. So they, like my mom was that the 12th youngest, and so she by the time she went through the residential school system, they just, I don't know the whole story. I didn't get to meet my grandparents. They passed away before I was born, but I just assumed that, you know, they learned that it was just much easier on the child if they didn't teach them as much, or really anything, especially in terms of the Indigenous language, my mom can hear it, and, like, if she hears it, she understands it, but she doesn't speak. So, a lot of those values kind of were, like, they kind of just went poof, right, which is a whole nother long story. And on my own time, I have a grant going forward. I'm hoping, crossing my fingers, I get it, and I'm going to dive deep on that story.
Tim 11:10 Can I just ask, when you say that they thought it would be kinder on the child, does that mean that the lessons and the language and everything, if they had passed it along, could have been a liability or could have been a risk for that, for that child.
Harold 11:23 Yea, 100%.
Tim 11:28 Because the more they related to that, the more in danger they were.
Harold 11:31 Yeah, and literally, they would get beatings and worse, the beatings would be the easy part.
Tim 11:38 So, to protect the protect the child, you have to protect them from their history or from their legacy.
Harold 11:45 Yeah, because the goal of those schools was to eliminate the Indian in the child. Sometimes, yeah, and we won't go too dark, but sometimes it went further than that.
Tim 11:54 So well, it is a history that is really painful and shameful, and it's something that everybody, I would say, around the world, like so many other atrocities that that human beings have managed to inflict on one another, they need to be appreciated, and they need to be brought into the light, right? And so people can see how we've evolved and why. It's not all pretty, that is for sure. But to sum that up. You had said that you consider yourself a practitioner, and I really, really love that term. So, could you just introduce us to that?
Harold 12:27 Sure, yeah, as a practitioner of truth and reconciliation, you know what I do is to advance truth and reconciliation. So, one of the projects that I'm currently managing is a memorial for Indian residential school to create an environment of a reconciliatory environment between Indigenous and non Indigenous people. And part of it is getting this kind of information out there. That is a huge part of it, actually. Another part is to actually give a physical place that people can go for this kind of information.
Tim 12:57 And, and that will be at that at that confluence.
Harold 12:57 At the Elbow, yes. At the confluence, that’s correct.
Tim 13:00 And, and so, you know, in a sense, that's really, I mean, I'm just thinking about this now, I kind of getting goosebumps a little bit. But it's like, if you think about trading the most important things, then trading in that story and that knowledge and that ability, what a place to do it right? Because people who come from around the world to actually trade in that knowledge, and…
Harold 13:27 That's what I'm hoping.
Tim 13:30 Oh, man, that didn't hit me until sort of just now. So that's a whole different level. I love the word practitioner, because when we think about leaders and people who are really, they're really moving thought forward, and they're helping people embrace things, and helping people become, you know, their own, powerful individuals, people that that can express themselves in the world. You know, a practitioner, in my mind, is somebody that you don't, that doesn't just talk like they do. They, you're seeing them practice whatever they are. They're espousing. It's so much more powerful than somebody who is simply theoretical. I think that's such a great word, and I think that's where we're going to be heading today. So, before we get too much into that. I also want to just ask you this, if we were to see Harold Horsefall on any given day, what are we going to see? What is, what is? What is Harold Horsefall, the person, engage in, day in, day out?
Harold 14:33 Day in, day out. I guess, like I've started volunteering in an effort to really get out there. So, I volunteer for the University of Calgary Alumni Board. So, so I've been, you know, making my best to go to as many networking functions as possible, just to really get in there with people. I'm part of a meditation group, and I think that that's really helpful. And I have four children, so that's definitely above average, more than the average Canadian. So, yeah, I'm but my youngest is fourteen now.
Tim 15:04 You're a practitioner of sorts there.
Harold 15:08 Oh, yeah, almost accomplished. I'm almost like, on the verge of being an empty nest, empty nester. But my youngest is 14, so maybe three, four more years, and then he’ll go to university then, and then, that's a whole nother, you know, it seems it's so expensive for the kids out there, right? Because I have a daughter who's at the UofC now, and she's still at home with us. Yeah, it's just so expensive out there.
Tim 15:29 It is, yeah, it's, it's something that just learning how to, how to exist in this world is such a wake up. My kids are going through the same thing right now.
Harold 15:39 So, then I'm like, the comma rents, you know, the pa-rents, free rent.
Tim 15:44 Yeah, there you go. Pa-rent. When we think about you meditating, and you and I talked about, you know, really making sure that we take time to develop ourselves and whatnot. How do you see people that are out in the workforce, when you see them managing their own lives and going through things and, you know, besides just your children, but people that you work with in, day in, day out, the community members we've got around us. What do, how do you see their relationship with time? Again, you talked about trading time for money that you would take time over that. What do you see out there in the in the world?
Harold 16:27 Oh, geez, a lot of people, you know, and I'm, I live in a material world, and you know, I prefer to have, you know, good, solid look good. Good, solid goods. And, you know, even clothing that makes me look good, right? But that said, like, definitely, I see, I see many people just chasing, like, this carrot, and you know, that's fine. It's good an all. But why? What does it do for you? Because I even got to speak with some, through the alumni, not through the Alumni Board, this is before I was on the Alumni Board, but through Career Services, because that university and the Indigenous relations course was through Career Services. And so I did speak to some alumni, some graduates, some new graduates, and as part of a panel, and I was like, Well, you know, like, you should really focus too on the things that make you happy, because even if you make a whole bunch of money, like, eventually the, I hope this doesn't get dark for people, but it's like 100% the one thing that we are sure of is that we will pay taxes and we will die. And so, it's like, so say you make, like, a billion dollars. You can't take it with you, not that I know of, right? So, so it's like, really, like, for your own self, like, and this was my, my message to new grads, right? And I don't know how it was received, but I felt that maybe it wasn't received as popular as some of the other people, because one person was, like a new they had a position with the Royal Bank of Canada, and it was like a director or something. And so that was the person, oooh we gotta like, you know, go around that person, and I'm just like, well, you know, you got to really focus on your life and what makes you happy as well. Doing well materially is good, but also making sure, hitting that it's like a Venn diagram, hitting that intersection between what's personally satisfying, I think, is also important.
Tim 18:15 I think that's a very interesting reaction to notice. I've seen the same with young leaders and even some accomplished leaders, that when you offer them a perspective that causes them any sort of doubt, when they're in a blind pursuit of something, you know, when they're heading towards something and they've either omitted facts or they've biased themselves towards things to overcome questions or fears or whatever they're doing, so that they can charge ahead in a certain area. And if one of those things is, you know, hustle culture, so it's like, no, you got to work hard, and you work hard young so that you can be rich later and get what you want or whatever. Anything that questions that, it's like it erodes the bedrock of what they or would actually say, erodes the house of cards that they're building themselves up upon. And it can get really scary for people that they will reject that thought outright, like, let's just not go there, because playing in that area is just it carries a lot more risk than we might realize for that person, because they're, they're built up on that. That's, you know, and I think it's, it's an, also an interesting thing, that when you meet people down the road in their careers, when they realize that they've built their approach on really shaky ground, and it'll last for a while, until the universe demands the truth. And then guess what? They're kicking in the water. They're thrashing around pretty good. So the earlier that we can get to truth, the earlier that we can get to facing these hard facts and really questioning what our assumptions, I think is a is a is an important point. I hope I took that in the right direction there.
Harold 20:07 Oh yeah, yeah, for sure, yes. Great conversation.
Tim 20:09 So when you think about the reaction of people to wanting to be around the person that emulates what they want to be, they want to be around that bank executive or whatnot. Tell me a little bit about that. What does that mean to a person besides, you know, potentially being an expression of we can see where their priorities are. But what's the hazard that comes out of that?
Harold 20:34 Oh, geez, I'm not sure. I've never really thought about that from somebody else's perspective, because, like, I wrestled with that, whereas, like, wanting to pursue a career that's gonna make me a lot of money and whatnot and high powered career, but for me, like, internally, I just couldn't there was this, like, a it was, like, it was a force field or something that I just couldn't get past. And because, like, for me, it was just, I really needed to, personally be able to be 100% invested in what I did. For example, it’s the real old school traditional value on the plains. The best way to say that, I say I'm a Plains Indian. There was a high school in Calgary. It was great, and I'm very thankful I got to go there. It's called the Plains Indian Cultural Survival School picks and so in there, like, I got exposed to a lot of traditional values that I otherwise wouldn't have. And so even, like, pow wow singing, like I did, pow wow singing 10, 20, and 30. So, you know, like, it was great. And so there was some traditional values that I was focused on. So like, Crowfoot. Hugh Dempsey wrote a book on Crowfoot. And so it was, it was done really good and huge. Dempsey is a local southern Alberta historian, or was before he passed to be a leader for me as a plains from the plains culture, where we had teepees and we buffalo hunted, so that, like some people say, they who are Indigenous people, and that's what they'll think of teepees and buffalo culture, but that's the plains culture. Whereas in like out east, they lived in houses, and they were farmers. And same with out west. They were they lived in houses, long houses, and they also farmed and they fished and they traded. But for me, that's, that's what it was. And to be a leader. You had to be a person who risked your life for your people, for the people, and you did so selflessly. That was the big draw. To be a firefighter, to be able to say that I did that, and I did for seven years. And seven is, of course, if you didn't know, it's a very significant number to Indigenous people. There are seven brothers in the sky, so the Big Dipper stars. And other than that, that's some, actually part of the grant that I've got forward and crossing my fingers that I'm going to explore many of those issues. But four is also another one. And I do know more reason about why four is significant. There are four seasons. There are numbers that we tend to see in nature. So then there are four seasons. And then, accordingly, you could even break up your day to be like the four seasons. You wake up in the morning, and then you have your afternoon, and then your late afternoon into the evening, and it's almost like a mini cycle. So you're in a mini cycle on a bigger cycle inside of a bigger cycle. So four seems to be the number that is most associated with cycles.
Tim 23:06 There's so much there that we could unpack, but it immediately makes my mind go to my friend Julie Friedman Smith, who's a parent and coach here in town, and she's part of our association here, helping our clients out. And she said something that was very similar at one point to me. And she said, you know, people will often, they'll say whether or not their day was a success. And she said, it's much better if you if you can develop the language where, you know, well, the morning wasn't a success, or this last hour wasn't a success, but the next one can be. And you chunk things down into that sort of seasonal thinking, where it allows us to be a little more gentle on ourselves, and refocus and rebase and kind of have these cycles within our life. But as you were speaking there, I was thinking back to you saying that you're a practitioner of truth and reconciliation. Now, truth and reconciliation in Canada has a very specific meaning, which I think is important, but more broadly, the pursuit of truth. What's the truth of who we are and where we're sitting, and then reconciling with that? And I often think of that like doing the math right, like getting to the facts doing the math, and say, We have to reconcile ourselves with the facts of what just happened, and that takes some work right to get through it. And so the importance of that as a program can't be understated. The importance of that as an approach to life is also something that's fairly important, is getting down to that, where am I actually, and how do I feel about that, actually? And what does it mean for me, actually? Where are we actually? What's the truth of that? So if I can have you sort of expand on that a little bit. Could you tell me where you think we are in that journey?
Harold 24:57 So I guess I would say first that in. General, the atmosphere in Canada is is quite good, in the sense that if you use the idea of like Pareto improving, it's been a while since I since I've done economics.
Tim 25:10 80-20 rule.
Harold 25:11 Yeah, exactly. But just if you take like each day, or even each hour, and like and to the person that you mentioned. So if you took yesterday or even 20 years ago. And if you looked at the status quo of what it meant to be Indigenous in Canada, and then you look at it today, there's improvements. And so some of those improvements are definitely like, so I went to the University of Calgary, and if we look back into the 1980s if you go to the, it's called the Writing on Symbols Lodge now, it used to be called the Native Student Center when I went there, so I'm dating myself, but there's a graduate list on the wall. And in the 80s, there was like one, and then the next year, like 1985 or something, and then the next year there'd be like two or three, and then it's kind of went up, like a logarithmic scale. And then it's like, okay, that's awesome. So whatever it is that the environment is definitely there. And so even then, you know, a lot more people are respectful. And even just that, the way that we opened on this podcast, I think that was, that was excellent, and I'm finding a lot more people are much more open. It's still a long journey. And so my approach as a practitioner is always like so when I was young, I managed to reclaim a good chunk of my culture, and I did that personally while I was a teenager, so, you know, and I still did live a teenage life, but I also did do a life where I went to a lot of ceremonies, especially sweat lodges. They were very important. I was very blessed and fortunate. And you know, I would get myself to these sweats when I was, like 16. And a sweat lodge, for those who don't know, is, is, it's like a cleanliness ceremony, it's a spa and it's a sauna, but then it's dark, and we sing songs, and you do a lot of prayer or focusing like, I guess you could find it in like Bhuddist culture, they call that single point focus. So you do a lot of focus on that thing that that you are concentrating upon to live a good life, was the one that was general for me. But the thing with a sweat lodge is that when you go in and it symbolizes rebirth, in a sense, but when you go in say that you're taking in a whole bunch of negative kind of crap that kind of lingers in you through this process, you sweat it out. And the idea is that all of your impurities go with that sweat, and it cleans you out both like physically and spiritually, in addition to other areas. So it's more holistic in that sense. And so you have to sit in that initial if, say, you go in and you have a lot of negative energy and you're sitting in there, it's painful in the sense that it hurts, it's uncomfortable, and it's in the dark and it's somewhat crowded, so a lot of fears are already triggered for many people. So then you just have to learn to sit still through all of that. It's uncomfortable. You sit through it, and then eventually, when you come out, then I would say that reconcile. So that's like, kind of my model for truth and reconciliation. It's like sitting in a sweat. It's uncomfortable, but you sit there and you do it. Sometimes you'd even come out and you know, you'd be pretty red, bright red, almost like a little bird sometimes, but you know, and that's the thing, is, like, if it gets hot, you can't once the door is closed, you have to wait until the door is open, or you could go run out screaming. But it's generally, it's not advised and it's frowned upon. So you have to sit still. And that's the thing, when it gets really hot, if you like, start thrashing around and panicking, it just escalates on the top of itself, and you end up in a mess, right? So you have to really sit still, and you have to sit quiet, and you can't move, especially when it's really hot. That's one of the things I learned, and actually came in really handy, is when I was a firefighter working in really hot environments, because in, like, physically hot, because you don't move too fast. You have to stay composed, and you have to actually move very slow, and you have to be very purposeful with each movement.
Tim 28:47 So quite literally, you're sitting there having to face all of those things that are are weighing on you, moving you forward or holding you back. You have to take some deep, honest reflection and emerge with some increased amount of fluency about who you are and where you're going.
Harold 29:09 But that's the magic, because, like, you surrender to it, and then you when you do get out, you definitely are better than when you went in. And if you keep doing that repeatedly over time, then that's when you see the benefits.
Tim 29:22 I think that's cool too, because you haven't said anything really, although you're sweating it out. It's not like these things, these things remain. They're part of you, in a sense, right? But your relationship with them is different, and you can process it differently. You can handle it differently. When I go back to that thinking of those young people at the university that are new in their career and their and their orienting around about wealth and who they want to be. And we also talked about openness being so key to this, and then the societal openness may be open at one point, but then be getting more closed in other ways. Often, you know, we think of things in a static place that it's either open or it's closed, we're open or we're closed. The society around us is getting more open or more closed, but it's like this pendulum that kind of swings and seeing things in that cycle pattern, as you said before, where we have to be observant about that and whatnot. Do you think that it's getting better right now, or is it getting worse? Or are we on a pendulum, or is it, you know, where are we at this?
Harold 30:31 It's definitely getting better. A colleague of mine did send me email that in terms of finances, and it says, since 2015 This is taken from the Fraser Institute.org, and it says Since 2015 the federal government has significantly increased spending on Indigenous peoples from roughly 11 billion to more than 32 billion. You know, that sounds like that could sound like taxpayer money, but I don't. I would be more curious to dive into that. That's a whole process unto itself. But there is a large trust fund that is held on behalf of Indigenous people, and that's where many Indigenous things, like in education, which was negotiated during the treaties. In essence, I've done Indigenous relations courses for various organizations, corporate organizations. And one item that I like to always point out to, and I don't have it handy on a presentation, but if you look at annual GDP of Canada, and then you can, you can even look at areas like from natural resources, and you look at that value on an annual basis, and then you compare it to what the treaty rights are. So I get $5 a year, and I get education, maybe, maybe I get education. That in itself, is a whole episode. Probably do really investigating that, but it is pennies to billions of dollars. So then you think like, that's really where it is. So a lot of those funds, though, do come from a National Indian Trust account. And I encourage you to google it. I could probably even just throw in a link to a short video.
Tim 32:10 We'll put that link in the show notes for you.
Harold 32:11 Sure. Yeah, and it's put together by the Yellow Head Institute, and it's a really good video to watch. And it's just a short video, two and a half minutes, I think maybe two and a half to it's under five minutes.
Tim 32:18 Yeah, I think that's that's a really important thing too, for people to for Canadians to appreciate. Because there's a lot of myth and a lot of, I would say, bias and hearsay that goes into exactly proportionally. How do we support our native communities? How do we make good on the on the Treaty and the agreements that were promised? And it's pretty shocking when you see, you know what it actually means on an annualized basis. And then, oh, on the flip side, I'm optimistic with what you've said in terms of this exponential growth in education and whatnot. Because as I follow Indigenous creators, and I've got a few, as I was telling you before, people that I'm really, I'm really enjoying, kind of having in my life, and following their journeys, and, you know, appropriately consuming their content. There's a positivity that's out there, and there is an optimism that's out there, and there is a and there's an energy that's out there, which I think is just fantastic. And so although the totals may not be appropriate, and there's definitely room to move there. What people are doing with the time and the opportunities they've got is so inspiring. So that, to me, means that there's a new energy, there's a new confidence, there's a new identity that's coming out, and I think it's a steam roller. I think it's unstoppable. You know, you think of that, that Jim Collins example of the flywheel, if you've ever heard this, where you have this massive flywheel, and it's the size of a city, and one person could go up against it, and they could smack it one way or the other, and the thing wouldn't even move. It would be like a monolith that wouldn't even move. And often we have communities that are all smack it in different directions, and so the thing couldn't start to move even if it wanted to. But if we get enough people slapping that thing in the right direction, it starts to shudder, and then it starts to spin, and then it spins faster and faster, and pretty soon, that thing, which we thought was immovable, is under its own energy. And it's, you know, it's unstoppable, so that any one unreasonable and logical dissenting voice can't, can't stop it. So that's, that's what, what I hope for, is that unstoppable momentum.
Harold 34:39 Sure, I definitely I would get on board with that.
Tim 34:43 We'll be smacking that flywheel. Yes. Cool. So as we sort of head towards the end, what would you like us to focus on? Was there somewhere we didn't get that you would like us to get?
Harold 34:56 Really like for me, these are like questions in my own. Mind that I just can't something in me always brings it back to the service. Hey, I need to focus on this and so, like, continuous improvement would be one of those things in that focusing myself, like, what do I want from my careers? And that was the thing I do have a question for the next guest.
Tim 35:17 I love that you're unprompted, go for it.
Harold 35:22 What do you get from your career? And how does your work fill your bucket? Because those are things that I always ask myself. And so what am I getting from this? What am I doing for this? How does this work for me? Yes, I get to pay the bills. Maybe I get to get to I have a thing for boots. My wife will tell you, I buy too many boots. She's probably right. So like, in addition to me getting a new pair of boots, but what does it do for me personally, like, as a person? How's it, uh, advanced my own journey, my own destination? People, quote, like, Crazy Horse. If they don't know who Crazy Horse was, from the American point of view, they say, well, he's like, hoka hey, it's a good day to die. Like, he's gonna charge out there on the battlefield and but that's not what it was. That's only like half of the quote, because…
Tim 36:03 I think [who?] from Star Trek, said that. But what did Crazy Horse actually say?
Harold 36:10 He said, hoka hey, today is a good day to die, because all is well with the world. And the Stoney Nakoda, because they're, they're, they're Nakoda Sioux, they say Âba wathtech , and that's their greeting, and it means hello, today is a good day. I think it's implied all is well with the world. So what that means is, like for you inside, is everything well, in the sense that, if you were to die, would you feel that there are unresolved issues? And so really, then your attention, for me, that exercise brings me to like, okay, what are those unresolved issues and I gotta address those. Sometimes they're scary, sometimes they're hard, but it's just like sitting in that sweat, right? And so, so for me, that's what I would leave. And the question I'd post to the next guest.
Tim 36:53 How is what you're doing? How is it filling your bucket that is something that I can relate to, I'm really passionate about. You know, often when I'm working with executives, etc, you know, one of the things when we're we're looking at career, when we're looking at where they are, is to have them focus on, from a career perspective, what is the best day of the last year you're ever going to work look like? And are you heading towards that as a reality? And then more generally, are you in balance in your life? Right? Like, are you are do you feel like you're where you belong? And do you feel like that you've got this beautiful flow going on that you have enough sense of control or stability and you still have the right types of excitement and anxiety and those things, I feel like we've just scratched the surface here, Harold. So one thing I want us to do is is stay up to date on your grant and your research project, and want to make sure that when that gets rolling, you come back and we and we talk about that.
Harold 37:59 Perfect. Sounds great.
Tim 38:00 Yeah, I think that would be great. And in the meantime, if people wanted to reach out to you, if they wanted to, if they wanted to experience what I experienced, or if they were interested in the confluence, where can they find they you?
Harold 38:14 They can go to the confluences the website, and I think it's www.theconfluence.ca or something, or just Google “the confluence Calgary”.
Tim 38:23 Sure, we'll put that link up in the show notes.
Harold 38:25 Yeah,if you want to get in touch with me, please reach out on LinkedIn: Harold Horsefall.
Tim 38:29 right on, lots of exciting things coming up for you. Thank you very much for dropping the question for our next guest. Harold Horsfall, it was just an absolute treat to have you on.
Harold 38:39 Thank you, Tim.
Tim 38:29 I can't wait till we can meet at that conference together. I'm really itching to get there.
Harold 38:45 Sounds great.
Tim 38:46 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If like us, you think it important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership, please give us a positive rating and review on Apple podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders, and you can spread the word too by sharing this with your friends, teams, and colleagues. Thanks again for listening, and be sure to tune in in two weeks time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host. Tim Sweet encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 27 Dec 2023 | Hanne Ballhausen - Finding the Freedom to Feel | 00:55:18 | |
In this emotionally charged episode, Hanne Ballhausen, a dynamic entrepreneur, opens up about her journey from a challenging childhood in post-GDR Germany to becoming the founder of Outer Earthlings. Tim Sweet skillfully guides the conversation, emphasizing the transformative power of embracing emotions in the workplace. Hanne discusses her early experiences, highlighting the struggle to express emotions in an environment that viewed vulnerability as a weakness. The pivotal moment arrives when she shifts to managing a research project, fostering an open, vulnerable work environment amid the pandemic. This experience inspired her to launch Outer Earthlings, a T-shirt brand advocating for emotional expression. Proceeds support Friendship Bench Zimbabwe, linking her personal journey to a broader mission. Tim and Hanne explore societal expectations around emotions, particularly for men, and the impact of emotional suppression on mental and physical health. The conversation concludes with insights into the positive outcomes of embracing vulnerability and the potential for creating a more compassionate and connected world. About Hanne Ballhausen Hanne Ballhausen is an innovative entrepreneur, skillfully blending her expertise in project management and strategic planning with a profound commitment to societal well-being. Her extensive experience in management, operations, and research forms the backbone of her endeavours, particularly her passionate pursuit to enhance the lives of individuals living with diabetes. Beyond her significant contributions to healthcare, Hanne is the visionary founder of Outer Earthlings, a pioneering platform that champions the cause of emotional authenticity. This initiative reflects her deep-seated belief in the importance of emotional health and her ambition to empower individuals to embrace and express their feelings more freely. Hanne's unique combination of entrepreneurial spirit, dedication to emotional wellness, and ability to empower others sets her apart in her diverse pursuits. She continuously strives to make a meaningful impact in both the healthcare sector and the broader domain of personal well-being. Resources discussed in this episode: -- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Hanne Ballhausen | Outer Earthlings: -- Transcript: Hanne 00:00 The relationships that I've had, ever since I've been down that path of actually sharing my full open self, have been so beautiful, nurturing, trusting and kind and compassionate. We are all carrying weight with us through our experiences that we're having. We all go through this life, which we all know that as a roller coaster, we cannot always be 100% performing strict executives that are always rational and logical because we are feeling beings and we cannot deny this to ourselves.
Tim 00:42 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you my friend are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. Welcome to the Sweet on Leadership Podcast, episode 23. Tim 01:13 Hey, everybody, welcome back to Sweet on Leadership, we're already having a bunch of giggles over here. I'd like to welcome my special guest, Hanne Ballhausen.
Hanne 01:22 Hi. So happy to be here.
Tim 01:25 Oh, great. And I'm still working on the pronunciation. I'm just gonna go ahead and own that fact, but I'm doing my best. Dear listener, we are in for a treat. Because not only do we have an amazing person in front of us, but we get to say that this is her very first time being on a podcast. And I am so honoured that you chose to let me introduce you to the world in this way.
Hanne 01:49 Awe, thank you so much, Tim. I'm super excited, a little bit nervous. But I'm super stoked to be here. Thanks so much for inviting me.
Tim 01:57 Well, you have so much to offer. And you have such a delightful way of doing it. And that's one of the things that we're going to get into here. So, maybe we could start though by just, give everybody a bit of a snapshot of who you are right now in the world.
Hanne 02:12 Well, right now I'm sitting where actually everything began. So, I'm back at my parent's place for a couple of days before I'm travelling on. So, I recently moved to the Cayman Islands. So, I'm always going, yeah, in between here and there, up and down, across the world. I’m a global citizen now. But I grew up what used to be the GDR, the German Democratic Republic, or basically like I always say, I grew up in a forest and I mean that quite literally. It's quiet here, very quiet. It's snowing a lot outside right now. But this is where my journey began. And once I was 18, I obviously packed all my things that ran away. Since then I have gotten a background in management, and corporate sustainability, worked in different leadership roles, and specialized myself in diabetes over the recent years, got my own company now, which I'm very, very proud of, and get to work with lots of amazing people all across the world and the diabetes space. And you usually will find me either exercising or somewhere in a deep meaningful conversation, or in my kitchen near my fermentation station. And yeah, that's me in a nutshell, I would say.
Tim 03:29 Well, you certainly have an effervescent personality. So, you in fermentation go side by side. Anyway, with that in mind, as we were sort of getting set up for this conversation, and I should mention, for those of you that are paying attention, you'll realize that we previously had Greta on and she is also involved in the diabetes space. And your introduction to me actually came through her. So, thank you very much. And we'll put a link to her episode down if you haven't listened to it because it's also a lot of fun. But focusing in on you, as we were getting set up for this conversation and getting to know one another and talking about our different viewpoints on the world and whatnot. We lit upon this part of your identity, that is really fascinating. And I'll let you speak more of it. But I'm really referring to the idea that you feel you're a person that is highly empathic, you're a person that can empathize with others, that has deep feelings of their own. And when you first brought that up to me, in some small way, there was some indication that in the past that's been seen as a weakness. Hanne 04:46 Yeah, absolutely. Tim 04:48 So, maybe you can take us back and talk a little bit about how do you conceptualize largely the importance of emotion, empathy, authenticity in your professional or personal life? What's your relationship with it?
Hanne 05:05 That's a lot of points that you just mentioned there.
Tim 05:10 Let's narrow it down to one. So, if I were to ask, what's your relationship with being a highly emotive, or being an empathic person?
Hanne 05:19 I would say, it's mostly a loving relationship, but sometimes can go a little bit down the love-hate relationship as well. Because it is also exhausting to feel a lot and to feel so much. But I wouldn't want to change it for the world. Because I feel that it makes me connect on a deeper, more authentic, trusting level with the people that are around me. I also made it my personal purpose to spread joy in the world and spread the message of feelings are your superpowers in the world. Because I think that's what it is for me. And I can be a better, healthier human being, allowing myself to feel the things that I feel, and to explore them, even though they're not always good things. But they all have a purpose. They all belong.
Tim 06:25 When we think about certain workplaces, and I have lots of clients that are in what I would consider linear vocations. They're in vocations that are highly logical, they're straight ahead, they can be very quiet workplaces, they can be very serious, they can be very academic in nature. And in all workplaces, accessing our feelings and whatnot, it's not always safe, or it doesn't feel like the norm. For those that are listening, and may not yet fully understand how we're defining this. How would you like to paint a picture of a person that is on this emotional spectrum? How are they presenting themselves in the workplace? What would you actually observe? In your mind?
Hanne 07:13 So, for me, I've obviously connected with other highly emotional people in my work life as well. But I, of course, can share mostly my own experience of how I think I'm presenting myself. And the relationships that I've had at work, in my recent career, ever since I've been down that path of actually sharing my full open self with the world have been so beautiful, nurturing, trusting, and kind, and compassionate. We are all humans, we are all carrying weight with us, through our experiences that we're having, we all go through this life, which we all know that as a roller coaster, we cannot always be 100% performing strict executives that are always rational and logical, because we are feeling beings, and we cannot deny this to ourselves. So, I'm incredibly blessed. And so excited to even hear when I'm now connecting with people that I've worked with. And I've told them oh my god, I'm having this amazing opportunity of speaking about having a kind and compassionate leadership and leading with the heart to someone on a podcast. To the amazing Tim Sweet on the podcast, they've all come back to me. And they all said, like, Oh, this is why I loved working with you so much. Because I could, I felt like I could be myself around you. And I feel this is like, for me the nicest compliment that my efforts of trying to create a safe work environment, a trusting work environment, are actually successful. And people they connect with me. And I hope that this will be much more the case in also other environments. And this was by the way was a research environment and I was incredibly blessed to have such a fantastic team around me that were all very open as well and shared there every day. And you know, it's totally okay to stand up in the morning and be like, Hey, guys, I really do not have a good day to day, didn't that happen yesterday? And I mean, you don't always have to share specifically what happened. But sometimes it also connects you when you actually say like, my dog died, and I'm not feeling well, and I might have to take out a couple of days today. And usually, the answer is not like oh, how dare you? It's like, oh my god, are you okay? Why are you even at work? Take Your time, it's okay. That happened to me a year ago, I know how you feel, let's have a tea and talk about it.
Tim 10:08 I mean, there is this pressure for many people at work that they feel that they have to leave it at the door. And that's a belief that's really has survived for generations now in the workplace, is that you're not meant to bring your home life or your personal experience into the job, you're there to do something, you know, buckle down, we're not here to deal with those issues. That's the pressure. And so as a result, we have people of all different emotional ranges, that find that they can't bring these feelings up. And the one thing that I would like to say to anybody who's out there who's listening, is that I've worked with a lot of people, 1000s of people on teams and leaders and whatnot. And the ones that think they've got this locked up the most, or are trying the hardest, to never let it out, are the ones that show it the most, they don't necessarily show it in terms of emotion, they can bottle something up. And then eventually, that's where we'll have a blowout, it's like too much water behind the dam. And then finally, when it does come out, it's dramatic, it can be very off-putting it can be violent even, it can be verbal and very messy. So, we can have these blowouts. The other thing is maybe a person is very good at controlling it. But it comes out in other ways. It can come out in sternness, impatience. It can come out in labelling people, it can come out in all of these ways that really have nothing to do with the external, they are largely intrinsic in nature. And it's that person's own struggles with their situation, their identity, their beliefs, and all of these things that are bubbling up to the surface in ways that they didn't intend. So, I think one message that I say to most of the leaders I work with is, you're not as good at holding all this back as you think you are. It is very possible that it's going to come out at some place because you are under tension. And that tension with whatever you're feeling has to be resolved in some way, shape, or form. So, we can either deal with that on the surface, or we can hold it back, which is why I think it's so encouraging when you say that when you finally tell somebody that your dog is sick or something has happened, they will rally around you. And human beings are meant to do this. We are programmed to be communal, we are programmed to support our compatriots up, right? Has that been your experience?
Hanne 12:43 Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, with those people that you just described that bottle up, there's the saying hurt people hurt people. And it's so accurate. And there's also been studies now that are showing that if you're not sharing your emotions and your feelings, and you're not great at emotional regulations, all of that can actually lead to not just, you know, mental health problems and depressions– Tim 13:13 Physiological problems. Hanne 13:14 –It can actually, exactly. It also presents physiologically, and it's not worth it, it's really not worth it. And like you said, people rally around you because at the end of the day, no matter how stern or how executive cool, powerful, we want to present– Tim 13:34 Stoic. Hanne 13:35 Yeah, like all humans at the end of the day, and evolution has put these emotions inside of us. They serve a purpose, they are meant to be there and they are meant to be felt. And they help us in so many ways, decision making, like the very famous gut feeling. There's so much about that that is so true and so powerful. So, I think we should all tap into use it more. Tim 14:03 I said, stalwart and I also said stoic in the same sentence. What's really interesting about the idea of stoicism, we hear this lot, there's a resurgence in stoicism, which is excellent. However, that word in particular is misused. It's used typically in terms of unshakable or strong in this kind of thing. Whereas really, when we think about the pursuit of stoicism, I don't want to go down this path too much. But it's a great example of how the word has been co-opted. There's one thing to say about rational control, but that doesn't mean that we impede useful emotions. It doesn't mean that we stifle someone's virtuous expressions, you know, and we have to be accepting of these things. And understanding that there is no sense in covering up reality. And when we look at emotional constraint, if it is an effort to mask reality, then not only are we not being logical, but we're also not being authentic that this is something that we're dealing with. And so the new manager in my mind, the new leader, and the new expectation on leaders, and where some people, frankly, are being left in the dark, and in the dirt. They are being left behind, is that there is power in emotions. And you and I have talked about this. So, I'd love your thoughts on that. What's the power, what's the benefit that people unleash, when they come to terms with and are the owner of their emotions?
Hanne 15:43 So, the power is, for me, obviously, I have so much more joy in life, a lot of energy. And I look at the world always in wonder like a little child that sees for the first time, the sky turning red at sunset, or sunrise. Feeling a lot can be exhausting, like I said earlier, but I wouldn't change it for the world. It's also in terms of relationships with friends, and also my husband. I think that I have quite meaningful, deep relationships with the people around me because I always openly share how I'm feeling about certain things, even if it's sometimes a bit more difficult. But this is where trust comes in. And I believe when you have an open, authentic emotional expression, with your loved ones, it will only just grow trust more and lets you have a more genuine human connection. It combats loneliness because you are connecting to people so much. And loneliness, by the way, we all know since the pandemic is on the rise, and it's really getting a big problem out there as well. It combats, I think depression and anxiety somewhat as well, because you're openly sharing how you feeling even in your darkest hour. And I think in the workplace as well, it's beneficial because, from my experience, I think I created a safe team environment, where people hopefully love what they were doing and working towards a common goal together as a team. So, I think it also creates a deeper bond in the workplace with your team that you are leading and that you're having around you. And they are much more likely to actually hop onto a task, and you get them to buy into the goal that you're setting, the strategy you're setting. So, I think tapping into your feelings and tapping into that potential of that power. It only expands you as a human being and it expands you in your space. And things come to you as well when you're just open and vulnerable, like opportunities like getting to speak on a podcast about it.
Tim 18:17 And there's lots of other good things which we'll talk about in a minute that have come to you through this exploration. So, we've established, at least in part, that openness and the expression of our feelings and being at peace with our feelings can lead to inclusion, it can help us in terms of health, both physical and mental. And loneliness is not a small subject. I mean, the feeling of loneliness is not that far away from nihilism. And if we're alone, and we're not sure why we are in the world, it can lead to some pretty dark feelings of what is it all for. And that the interesting thing there is a life without feeling, a job without feeling is a series of connected tasks. We can go and we can do and we can execute on something. But that's just the doing of something, right? Whereas the living, living a life, is feeling a life. It's the feelings we get through all of these different situations. There was an excellent thing that I just read and it talked about the idea of and what we're seeing in Alzheimer's and what we're seeing in memory generally, and the loss of memory that we've had in childhood and things like this. We may lose the facts, but we rarely lose the feelings. We may lose the pure context of what happened, but we don't lose the feelings. Right? And that our life is an expression of one feeling after another, one event that yields an emotion that leads us to another event that yields an emotion. But oh man if we were to live life without feeling, it would be like turning down all the colors and just living in a gray world.
Hanne 20:06 Yeah, absolutely. And it's so nice to hear this from you, because you're a man at the end of the day, right? And especially in– Tim 20:13 Jury's out. No, I’m just kidding. Hanne 20:16 –And especially, you know, for men to express their feelings, I think there's a whole nother ballgame then for us women to stand there. And there's been studies where showing emotions is, you know, that word unmanly. And where we now see also, the results of that there are actually higher, way higher suicide rates in men than they are in women. And the highest suicide rates of those are in Africa, specifically Sub-Saharan Africa. And I know that mental health care is not really accessible there. And also not very much talked about, but also Europe is, I think, second in the ranking. I think the statistic was that 18 in 100,000 men commit suicide. And if only men were allowed to feel, and if we could encourage them, little boys from you know, small onwards, when they're babies, when they're toddlers, to talk about their feelings, to feel their feelings, wouldn't also the world be a safer place?
Tim 21:33 I think so. I mean, the issue right now is we still have a culture where feelings can be weaponized, and they can be weaponized against people and they can be weaponized towards people. And there is some, I would say evolutionary reasons why men and women, and I'm talking about 500,000 years ago, where it was an evolutionary advantage for the hunter of the tribe, or the warrior of the tribe, or whatever you want to say, to not feel an emotion in the moment and be able to go forward and do something. Now, this doesn't always have a place in today's society. But we have to remember that I mean, we are still, physiologically, we are still very much the same being that we were 100,000 years ago, right? Like we are, we haven't, we haven't evolved. We're very, I say this over and over again, we're very dumb monkeys like we're very dumb apes, we sort of have, we are apes with choice, which we probably aren't really prepared for. But your point is not lost. Men do deal with this, are dealing with this on a cultural level. And I think that when we talk about wokeism, or awakening, and how important that is, it's not just an outward expression of understanding how other people are feeling and living their lives. It's actually an embracing of how we present in the world and how we're in our in between our ears, even that, just saying that I know is going to turn off a whole bunch of people that are listening to this. Because that is a scary prospect, to fully embrace what we're feeling and why we're feeling it. What the histories behind those feelings are and how much we may have been programmed or have given in to certain things and to come to terms with that, at this juncture in human evolution, over COVID through the Me Too campaign around the George Floyd issues, here in Canada, around the residential school issues, we've had to come to terms with how we feel about all of these things, environmental issues. I mean, the list goes on and on. The Middle East, Ukraine, all of these things come to the forefront. And if we don't talk about it on those levels, how do we ever get down to the truth of really getting down to why we think the way we think and why we feel the way we feel? So anyway, I mean, thank you, I think? But at the same time, we're rounding around a couple of things here that I'd like to steer us back towards. And that is, we've outlined why this is interesting in the present and why it's helping you in the present. But would you be willing to go a little into your own personal journey with what it meant for yourself? How you framed being emotional as you grew up? And then what were your first experiences, career-wise, school-wise, that have led us to today? Because I think for some of the people that are out there, it would be very helpful for them to hear a journey someone else's taken. Take us back to as early as you'd like to go.
Hanne 24:45 Sure. So, like I said, I grew up in what used to be the GDR, so I'm a post wall came down, baby. So, born in the 90s and my parents, specifically my dad, I think we have to go even a bit further back. He must have had also a terrible childhood. And they do say either you reproduce what happened to you as a child, your traumas, or you go a complete different way. Unfortunately, I got the reproduction site. And my childhood and teenage years were not easy. They're a dark place that I don't often journey back to. But I do remember when I was a little child, I was never allowed to cry, because apparently I was acting. And it was tough when you constantly get criticized and shouted at, not to cry. So, I always tried to suppress it. So, much so that I ended up hyperventilating, which usually made things worse because I was acting even more.
Tim 26:03 Yeah, you're being even more dramatic.
Hanne 26:06 Exactly. So, I learned from very early on that my, let's call them bad emotions, my negative emotions, me crying was bad. On the other side, from my mom's side, I'm gifted with an infinite pool of tears. So, it comes from my granddad that has come from my mum. And now I'm gifted with this too. I cry at everything, be it happy, be it something, a moving conversation, be it little puppies on Instagram, being my best friends getting married. People being happy, I cry at those, I cry at everything. My husband always said that that's one of my superpowers. So, we have like those two very polarizing effects that I grew up with in my childhood. And in my teenage years, I was so awkward, I was so weird. And I fully like ended up in depression. So, I never really fully fit in this tiny place here that I grew up. And I was a yeah, in a very, very dark place. As a teenager,
Tim 27:22 You were in a dark forest. Literally.
Hanne 27:27 Literally. It's easy today to talk about it because it's a story. That is part of me, but it just doesn't define me of who I am today anymore. So, the more I talked about actually suffering through depression in my teenage years, and sharing those feelings with other people. It made it easier for me to share the story. And when I was 17, this was when anxiety enters the room. You're about to, you know, finish school, head into this big, bad world out there.
Tim 28:01 You managed to survive your childhood and your teenage years. And am I going to be enough when I enter society at large? What is that going to look like?
Hanne 28:10 Right? So, I left the big dark forest and took my–
Tim 28:18 Literally and figuratively.
Hanne 28:20 –Yes and I took my anxiety with me, I kind of managed to overcome the depression. And I ventured out into the world. And I was in London. This was when I first kind of experienced fully fleshed capitalism and Liverpool Street with all its big buildings, and everything that was there. And I ended up actually studying international business for my bachelor's. And, again, I've felt weird because it's business. So, everything is business and you get taught to be in a certain way, and that your vibrant self doesn't have a place there. Your anxiety doesn't have a place there because you're obviously gonna be a high performer. You're gonna finish your Bachelor's with the best marks.
Tim 29:12 And oh, by the way, emotions do not factor in that. Yeah, right. The high performance and emotions, it's not in the same category.
Hanne 29:23 Yeah, it totally, don't go together. I mean.
Tim 29:26 Well, they do. I mean, this is the thing we're learning. They do. But at that time, in your experience, you slipped into the cultural definitions of what high-performance meant.
Hanne 29:36 Exactly. And then for my master's, I got the chance to study at a quite prestigious university. It's a solely postgraduate University and intensely grateful for this experience because I didn't come out with a degree but also with a husband and friends for life. So, that was an amazing experience. But again, I encountered these people that made you believe that when you study management and your only way is to enter one of the top five consultancies, that's your like, goal, that's what you want to achieve. That's where you want to be at. And for that you obviously, again, you're going to be a businesswoman, you're not gonna share your feelings, you're going to be tough, you're going to be hard. And you're just going to, you know, work 80 hours a week and sleep two hours a night, and then you're successful. And people actually sometimes told me, what do you want in a consultancy, because I again, was a bit weird for being a management student. And so here it comes, I enter the work world, I work in a big corporate an American corporation. And again, I don't feel like I'm fitting in and I'm trying to be different than who I am, toning myself down, toning down my muchness as I call it, trying to fit into the mould that they needed me to be a bit more greyed than colourful. Keep my private life outside, just be a corporate Hanne, with clothes that I didn't like wearing, and just to fit into that mould. And three months down the line, I had locked jaw, I had tinnitus. And I muscled through two years, because that's what they say, right? Your first job, you should keep it for two years, if you want to make it in your career and I muscled through and poo, it was not good, it really wasn't.
Tim 31:39 So you, the picture I have is, you had a very conservative, you're in a small town, forest town, mountain town, things were pretty in a box, how things happened, that came with consequences. And then you left the dark forest, you found this new, divergent space where you could be yourself, meet all these different people, have all these different ideas, start to learn about your talents. And then as we start to say, Well, where are these talents applied? We're looking at one of the big firms, we're looking at traditional corporate, Western-style corporate environments, you're back into a gray, risk-ridden existence, where there's a whole bunch of shoulds of how you should be behaving yourself and what it means to be a professional at your level. You're back into a dark forest at that point. So, you came out into the light for a bit, and then you were back into it. And that's when this physiological issues started to manifest, right? What was the moment when you said no deal? Where you said, this is not the way I'm gonna keep going forward.
Hanne 32:53 So, that was actually unintended. It was just me throwing myself in cold water and just doing 180, a friend of mine, who's a pediatrician, amazing researcher also lives with type one diabetes. She's one of my closest friends, and we had to catch up, and haven't seen each other for a long time. And I knew that they had gotten a big grant for a research project. And I was asking her about it. She was telling me how they were looking for a project manager, couldn't find one. And she said, Hanne. And this was the moment where I was like, Okay, this is it. I'm going finally, like, this is it, where I leave corporate, for now behind. And I just punched myself into cold water being an internal research world, with different universities and institutions spread over five countries. That was at the end of 2019. So, of course, you know, what's coming next, the pandemic hits. I’m managing about 30 people across five countries, throughout the pandemic, in this big 1 million euro research project that's been funded from the EU. And because my friend is in it, I'm more myself because I know her and
Tim 34:14 The roots were in friendship, not in professional optics and what you're supposed to be, right? It wasn't about your professional brand and degree it was about friendship and trust.
Hanne 34:24 Exactly. So, I've applied this kind of trust and openness to the whole team. And of course, when you talk to people only online, you've never seen them in person. And we're all suffering through this dark veil of the pandemic and are so insecure about what's going to happen and scared. And we're just, you know, in our meetings, talk about how we're feeling, who had a friend, the friends who had COVID, how did they do, oh my god, how we're feeling and through all of this vulnerability and openness, all of a sudden I started tapping into this potential of a safe, non-toxic work environment, where people are talking about how they're feeling. Where people are talking about like, Oh, my dad is sick, I'm worried. I don't know if I should work today or not. And I'm like, please just turn off your laptop, go and see your dad, it's way more than important.
Tim 35:26 And I take it, they're still highly productive, and they're still high-performance. And they're still getting the job obsolete. In fact, maybe more so. And so emerging from that dark forest, all of these rules that you were given about how to show up, and what you needed to be, what it meant to be strong, what it meant to be professional, they're falling away, is the picture I have. These are not actually the answer. In fact, they're holding us back from what is truly possible. If we just incorporate feelings into the professional experience. Am I close there?
Hanne 36:08 Yeah, 100%, we've delivered this very big research project, very successfully. I think there were like 18 publications that we got out of it, with very high-profile journals out there. And some of us still talk to each other, work together. We're always plotting on how we can get back together because we had such a blast. But you know, as it is, with projects that are not meant to last, so– Tim 36:32 Transient, yeah. Hanne 36:34 –It eventually finished. But I think despite COVID and everything sort of shutting down, we were so successful in what we did.
Tim 36:47 Hanne, I have a question. So, as projects are, you just said they're transient? And away you go. Right? We’re on to other things. How many of those teammates do you still keep in contact with?
Hanne 37:03 Very closely? Well, definitely my friends. And another two, three people, four people.
Tim 37:11 But you keep tabs on them, you have a personal relationship? On top of the professional relations. Hanne 37:13 Yes. Tim 37:14 And if this had been a traditional Big Four consultancy House Project, we would have been around these other people all with our shields up, right? The project would end and what would happen? They would sink back into the background, we would never talk to them again. And big deal. Right, they were just walk-on extras in our lives for a while and away they go. You're opening something for me, because one of the things that's always been kind of natural to me, I guess, is I maintain relationships with people from my very first jobs. And I reach out to them, and we're quite close in the rest of it. And maybe it was because I'll just share a little bit about myself. I went through a period where, you know, I was a heavy kid, I wasn't obese by today's standards, but I just was broad and endomorphic. And, you know, it always played sports and whatever, but I was always the big one. So, I would either get challenged to fights because I was the one to knock down or try to, or I was the one that was a little bit different. And so, you know, easy to pick on. And I countered that with being the class clown for years and doing things like that, that was my compensation. And maybe I still do that. I don't know. But um, you know, I was quite at peace with that. I remember, at a fairly young age, this moment, where I was kind of fatigued about trying to be somebody for somebody else. And I just said, you know what, I'm just going to be myself, and they can take me or leave me. And that kind of always carried in. And so maybe it was some sort of rebellion, or maybe it was some sort of, I don't know, selective learning? But I never put a lot of stake in social orders. Right? It's probably something that's helped me now because I go up and I deal with senior executives and I don't have a heck of a lot of fear. You know, I go up and I just, I like, these are people, they put their pants on one leg at a time. Everybody poops, everybody pees, we're all human beings, like don't act like you don't. So, at some point, we just go and I meet with them on that level. I start with them on that level. But I've had relationships last for decades, long after we close out the work. And we talk about all the struggles that certain people have maintaining client bases and being you know, validated in the eyes of others and the rest of it. At the same time, if we're– and I'm saying there's a very real nugget for people who are listening to incorporate into their own personal brands or their own ideas of growth. Think what becomes possible if we connect with people on an emotional level where they actually see us as human beings and care about us, we care about them. It makes a lot of the professional stuff just so much easier. I don't think we can really tack a lot of, we could probably not identify a lot of professional sports teams that don't have some degree of care for one another. Right? So, anyway, that's one of the things that you're ringing for me is that you stumbled on a way to create deep and lasting relations with people that can't be based on transactional means. Because then it's only good, well, you're good for me. Rather than what about what I'm good for you? Anyway, sorry. Taken over a little bit there. Apologies. But how does that sound? Am I on your wavelength?
Hanne 41:05 Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with you. And I mean, this journey I've been on is fairly recent. So, it's been kind of since 2019, since I'm on this journey, and maybe since last year, when I'm fully consciously leaning into it. And seeing that it's a strength as a leader, or as a person that wants to be a leader, to tap into this potential and be your true self and be open and vulnerable. To be soft, it's not a weakness, this is something that I've been told my whole life by, also, my dad is, oh god, you’re so soft, how you're gonna make it, but actually being soft, you are so courageous, and you're so brave to be soft, in a hard world that is out there. And with all of the softness, and that light you're sharing, you're gonna touch so many more people out there, and they are going to remember you. They're going to look out for you when you need needed the most, they will be there for you. And be it the people that are your friends and your family and your chosen family. I'm all about the chosen family, but also people at work, they will have your back when you cannot be your 110% super power energetic woman or person to perform. They will have your back and they will pick up your slack and they will be there for you. So, I feel you can only win by putting yourself out there.
Tim 42:47 This has been proved again and again and again. And I mean, I remember back in the mid-2010s, working with several groups that are doing mega projects, where they're several different contractors, some of them competitors coming together to deliver large, very large projects. And that historical tendency is that these mega projects when we're talking about in excess of two $3 billion. They are prone to providers under bussing one and each other, hamstringing one another because if I can make my competitor look bad, then I'll get more of the work kind of thing. Right? And they also are the ones that tend to be overspent. They've blown their schedules. And they tend to result in a lot of litigations and changes and things like this. And it goes way back, you know, we see a whole bunch of behaviours that come out of that they underbid and then disappoint the client later and all sorts of things. Well, we sought out to change this. And so we started to really get into not just collaborative contracting, but collaboration and teamwork from the start. And so in two-year projects, we would see competitors, instead of looking for opportunities to underbus, their project colleague, to actually get to have opportunities to stand them up. Even when it might have slowed themselves down. They were more communal and said, so we can get the entire project done. It doesn't make any sense for us to move faster, because we're not on the critical path, you are. So, what can we do to help? They would lend resources, they would lend people, they may have received materials first, they would give those materials over trusting that they would be replaced with the competitor's order when it finally came in if it was delayed. What happened? We had a team that came to the end and we had very seasoned workers that had been doing this work for three decades. That said, I've never worked on a project like this. And I've never felt that the entire team has my back. And we had young workers with new families saying, I feel like they're telling me to be safe and they mean it and they really care whether or not I get back to my family safe. And I remember this one young woman, she was probably 27, right at the beginning of her career. And she came from a difficult personal life. And she was out in this remote location working with these groups of strangers. And she said, You know, I come back to this place, and it feels like a family. I miss this place when I go. I mean, she was there for two, three years. And she meant it, she meant every single word of it, because not only was it stable, from a cultural perspective, but emotionally, it was so supportive. And she really felt like people had their back. And I remember this other young professional woman said, at the very end, she had the very last word, and she said, It's not goodbye, it’s see you later. And she really meant that. And she, I've talked to her since and she's carried so many good relationships forward with her. So, it's just so inspiring to see those types of people have those experiences. And that's what we're at the root of here, in a sense, and you're helping to illustrate, is just that there is so much personal potential, if we let the tears flow when they need to flow. And we deal with them when they're happening. Hanne 46:10 Yeah, well said. Tim 46:12 Tell us a little, sorry, you're just bringing up so much for me that it's like it's really quite great. Can you tell me, please, what are the things that you're working on right now? Because you've got also some new chapters in your story that had been opened because of these realizations, I would love for you to share that, because I'm so excited for it.
Hanne 46:36 Thank you so much. Yes. So, with leaning into all of the potential of feelings and the power of it, I wanted to make T-shirts for myself with emotional messengering on it and just, you know, proudly, boldly walk around there in the world, on the beach in Cayman Island, or in the streets of Berlin, where I used to live, just to kind of plaster it into people's faces, like, hey, you know, feel your feelings. And then my husband was like, Nah, you can't do that, you really need to make a webshop and put it out there for people to buy them and for people to also wear them if they want to. And I'm like, okay, so I actually sat down, and I've never done anything like that before. And I built my little Shopify, online shop and designed a t-shirt with a beautiful friend of mine from London, who's a designer as well, big shout out to Sam. And we came up with this t-shirt that we actually managed to launch on the 10th of October, which is World Mental Health Day. And it reads very, very big on the back, how're you feeling? Because oftentimes, you know, number one, we don't take the time to check in with ourselves. And oftentimes we get the How are you feeling, good you? Yeah, well, good, bye. Okay, ciao. But no, we want to give you a moment to take a moment, take a breath. And just really think about how are you feeling right in this moment. So, hopefully, in the future, there's going to be more T-shirts, definitely with big bold messaging around feelings. And maybe people are interested to also boldly wear their feelings on their sleeves, and just join that movement of giving feelings and emotions that stage that they deserve, the attention that data serve, and tap into that superpower that our feelings are.
Tim 48:44 So, to step back through your story, from the little girl in the dark forest, that was bottled up, through the university student that found a new voice, through the professional consultant that was back in the dark forest and a little bit bottled up, through the person that took advantage of a friend's kindness and found a new voice. We now see this emergence, Hanne, who is going to grab the world with this vision of having people literally wear their hearts, maybe not on their sleeves, but on their backs, and create and really fight for a new standard of what it means when we ask a person Hey, how are you doing? Or what are you feeling? Or how's it going today? To have the space to actually deal with that for real, rather than just steamroll past it into what I'm really asking, which is did you get that TPS report completed or something right? So, there's some room for emotion here and sharing your belief that so much good stuff is opened when we make this part of us not just when we wear it, we wear it. We literally wear it.
Hanne 50:02 Yeah, 100%. And it's not just about having done this and hopefully encouraging people to also sign up to this mission of making the world a more feeling place. But also, the proceeds are going to a good cause. So, I've chosen a charity that's very close to my heart. In Zimbabwe, it's called Friendship Bench Zimbabwe, and there is no access to mental health services. So, what it does, is they’re training community workers to give evidence-based counselling to people who really need it, by just using WhatsApp and booking an appointment with a community worker who you then meet on the bench, and you can talk about your depression, your anxiety, any struggles, you're going through, suicidal thoughts, even. And I think it's so impactful. And so important that in places without access, something like this exists. So, very passionate about this as well. And it just kind of aligns very beautifully as well with the mission that Outer Earthlings. So, this is my little T-shirt company.
Tim 51:10 I was about to prompt you to make sure you give us that name.
Hanne 51:14 Yes, it’s called Outer Earthlings, which is actually a German word for not sure how to spell this German word. Außerirdischer (not sure if this is correct), so, an alien, but it's a literal translation of it, an Outer Earthling. So, it's about you coming out of your shell, and sharing your feelings. So, very much Friendship Bench Zimbabwe, and lines a lot with our mission at Outer Earthlings and getting to people to feel more openly and honestly and vulnerably. So, yeah, I'm very excited about that.
Tim 51:42 Anybody who knows me knows, I'm a huge fan of putting stuff on T-shirts. So, I am so excited for your journey, this will not be the first and the last time you're with me if I can do anything about it. Because we're going to follow up and see how things are going. And I just really want to say thank you for spending the time with me today and sharing your story so that other people can use this as a ladder to consider their own lives and where they're climbing to. I've prepared you for this. But let's go through it once again. You've already told us about Outer Earthlings, we're going to put the link in the show notes. If people want to get in touch with you what's the best way?
Hanne 52:25 That’s probably via LinkedIn. So, just by finding my name, and there are two Hanne Ballhausen’s out there, both of us are German, but one of them
Tim 52:34 Both of you are in pharmacy and/or have had experience in med tech.
Hanne 52:39 Quite similar, actually, it's quite funny but message the one that's based in the Cayman Islands, and you'll get to me. Otherwise, you can reach out on the website of Outer Earthlings as well. As well, as our Instagram page, Outer Earthlings. And you're very welcome to also drop me an email anytime if you want to.
Tim 53:02 And we will of course put all of that contact information in the notes. So, that is awesome. Last question is where we wrap up. Amazing journey. Thank you for sharing with us. If you could hope for something if you could make a wish for someone who is listening here today. What would your wish be for people that are listening here today? How would their lives be improved?
Hanne 53:29 So, if I can make a wish for the people listening today, I hope you're kind to yourself. I hope you treat yourself with compassion. But also put that kindness and compassion out there in the world. Trust your gut feeling. It's there for a reason. Tap into your superpower that are your feelings. And just join me and to give into all of your muchness of who you are. You're beautiful.
Tim 54:04 Yeah. Be Your muchness and then you can find your enoughness.
Hanne 54:05 Now, I’m crying. Great, you've done it. I've done so well for the past hour.
Tim 54:15 Oh, no tears are always welcome with me. So, thank you so much.
Hanne 54:17 Thank you, Tim. This was beautiful.
Tim 54:19 Can't wait till we can do it again. Hanne 54:21 Me neither. Tim 54:30 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership. Please give us positive rating and review on Apple podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word too, by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening and be sure to tune in, in two weeks' time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 03 Apr 2024 | Jagroop Chhina - Crafting Impactful Content | 00:45:08 | |
In this insightful episode, Tim Sweet engages in a thought-provoking discussion with Jagroop Chhina, the visionary founder of Psy Spark Strategies, exploring the transformative power of sharing expertise and experiences to create invaluable content and forge a strong personal brand. As they delve into the depths of this topic, Jagroop sheds light on the art of translating complex technical knowledge into relatable language and underscores the profound influence of psychology on the trajectory of business success. Furthermore, they navigate through the evolving landscape of attention in today's society, portraying it as the newfound currency and dissecting its profound implications for individuals and businesses alike in the realm of content creation. The discussion goes beyond theory to practical methods for engaging audiences and maximizing impact through personal and business branding. Jagroop masterfully guides listeners through the intricate process of cultivating an audience and harnessing the potential of authentic storytelling to not only captivate but also inspire and educate. By imparting practical insights and actionable advice, this episode serves as a beacon of guidance for aspiring content creators and seasoned professionals alike, illuminating the path toward personal fulfillment and collective growth in an ever-evolving digital landscape. About Jagroop Chhina Jagroop Chhina is the founder of Psy Spark Strategies. A consulting firm that offers psychological solutions to solve business problems. With an M.sc. in I/O psychology he takes a behavioural science approach to branding, marketing, employee, leadership, and business challenges. At 23 he launched his first company and went on to build a multimillion-dollar business in real estate. He’s advised companies like Shopify, Shaw, Lotto 649, Go Solutions, and London Drugs on their brand strategy. While also coaching politicians, entrepreneurs, and professionals on their personal branding and business challenges. Now, his mission is to transform 10,000 leaders into culture creators. Catalyzing great people to shape our society, make an impact, and move with purpose. Resources discussed in this episode: -- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Jagroop Chhina | Psy Spark Strategies:
Transcript: Jagroop 00:00 I think a lot of people end up becoming experts in their fields. And the next big step is translating that expertise for a more general audience. I've worked with quite a few engineers and helping them build their brands out becoming consultants and known in the space that they're working in. That's one of the big challenges that they have, they get very technical because they know that so well. And the challenge really does become how do you communicate in such a way that the average person is going to understand and be interested in it?
Tim 00:33 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you my friend, are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. Welcome to the Sweet on Leadership podcast. This is our 30th episode. Thanks for joining us. Tim 01:07 Welcome back, everybody. Thanks for joining us again, here on Sweet on Leadership, I am welcoming today, somebody that I think you're going to get a lot of value from. And although I haven't known him for very long, in the short time that I have, I am very inspired and impressed. Jagroop, could you please say hello and tell people who you are?
Jagroop 01:26 Hey Tim, it’s great to see you. I'm happy to be here. So, I'll do a little brief introduction of myself. I am he organizational psychologist who happens to do branding and marketing and solving business problems, basically. Right.
Tim 01:43 That's excellent. And when you were telling me about that, you had a really nice way of saying that, you know, that is an area where people need help, because they often don't realize that they have that tool, right? They don't have that option.
Jagroop 01:57 It’s a phrase that has psychological solutions to business problems.
Tim 02:03 Awesome. Yeah. So, if we were to see you on an average day when our first conversation a few weeks ago, I think what really inspired me about you was that it's not just that you're not just doing that, although that's I mean, it's a major focus for you, obviously. But you're involved in a bunch of other industries and a bunch of other hobbies. And such a passion for doing well in all of those areas. So, could you give also the people who are listening, a little bit of an understanding of how you are one of these, do-it-all kind of guys?
Jagroop 02:34 So, I like to take a bit of a generalist approach, you know, I've learned that when people are into something, there's usually something dope and interesting about that. Right? So, I'm always interested in like, learning new experiences and trying new things out. So, I've become a bit of a generalist just through that practice alone, right? So, I have a side business in building homes, you know, on the day-to-day, I might be consulting a business on tax mitigation, or a leader on how to put out content for themselves, right? So, my days vary, basically, from day to day. So yeah.
Tim 03:12 Your formal education is in Organizational Psychology. And when you think of any of those things that you strive to do, be a managing homebuilding company, or helping people with tax mitigation or answering very specifically those marketing questions. Do you find that that's a great vet to have? Like, is your knowledge and organizational psychology something that you lean on constantly?
Jagroop 03:35 Oh, for sure. I think the basis of all business is psychology, you know, whether you're building out a team, you got to understand how people operate, their personalities, their motivations, you know. You're doing marketing and sales, how is the content that you're putting out being perceived, right? Sales, how are you actually persuading other people to buy your product, right? So, a lot of it really does come down to psychology. So, if you understand how people operate, then your business should thrive, right?
Tim 04:03 This is why you and I have, I think such an intense professional connection. Because, you know, I'm all about helping people become fluent in how they think and how their teams think. Fluent in what they care about, and how they show up, and how do they find fulfilment in work? Where do they pinpoint those areas of joy? So, that, you know that massive amount of time we spend in our vocations can be a great humanistic time where we feel that we're growing and we're sharing and we're contributing and we're helping others, right? That's the next level away from saying, you know, I've got a job okay, fine. I collect a paycheck. Okay, fine. But is this now connecting me with something that's larger? Something that's that, why, or that purpose? I’m totally–
Jagroop 04:55 It gives meaning to what you do.
Tim 04:56 Yeah, absolutely. Let's talk about that then. When we think about being in this world where people are often pushed towards specializations, right? They're having to choose something. What advice would you give someone that wants to open themselves up to thinking just how broad their contribution can be?
Jagroop 05:19 You know what, there's nothing wrong with becoming a master of your craft, you know, I think there's huge benefits to just doing that, right? So, when you learn one skill, what I have a tendency to do is to take that skill and try to apply it to a different field, to something that's completely unrelated, right? Or the other way around, right? You learn how to play music. And you learn how to improvise with a group during a concert or something. How does that play into say, building a business or leading a team of people, right? So, life is all a metaphor and as soon as you start recognizing some of the lessons you learned, they can be applied to other spheres and dynamics of it, right?
Tim 06:06 That’s a great point. I mean, when I think about my own mind group, they're often specialists that are coming out of, say, geotechnical fields, or they’re professors at universities and these kinds of things. And they've made their career and they've established their sense of worth, and they've established their sense of professionalism within a bubble of experts. So, they might be very familiar, let's say if they're engineers, very familiar with the way engineers talk and the way engineers think, and they climb in those spheres. And at a certain point, they outgrow just the engineering bubble, and they burst out and suddenly now, they're outside where not everybody thinks like they think, but if they're solid in their own practice, and if they're masters of their craft, often it's something that we can leverage. And I remember that with engineers, when I'm teaching them how to build teams, it's one thing for them to say, Oh, I've got to now learn how to build a team. Well, let's not talk that way. How do you engineer your team? How do you apply your engineering principles when it comes to people? If you're a geotechnical person, how do you apply your geotechnical knowledge, which is all about, you know, understanding what's happening 1000s of feet down on the ground without ever seeing it, to uncovering the unknowns in some other sphere? Or if you're an organizational psychologist, like yourself, you know, how does that then not just translate to the people working in home building, but the home building process itself?
Jagroop 07:40 I think a lot of people end up becoming experts in their fields. And the next big step is translating the expertise and dumbing it down for a more general audience. So, I've worked with quite a few engineers and helping them build their brands out becoming consultants and known in the space that they're working in. Right? And that's one of the big challenges that they have, they get very technical because they know that so well. And the challenge really does become, how do you communicate in such a way that the average person is going to understand and be interested in it?
Tim 08:18 Not only can you be translated into somebody else's, and be interested in it, but I guess it works the other way, too. How can you use that as a gateway to understanding what they mean? Maybe enriching the conversation. We never think about that. Because we're an expert in one thing, we may forget about the fact that it's cross-applicable.
Jagroop 08:40 Yeah, for sure. Like an engineer trying to build out their team? Well, they understand that in order to build out a product, there are certain variables at play. Now, when you're building out a team, what are the variables that you're looking out, to build that team out? Right? What are the characteristic traits that you want to see in a person that's going to mesh well with your culture, your team? So, reframing a perspective that aligns better with wherever trying to look at it, that's the game.
Tim 09:07 I think about my first degree was in history. My next pursuit was to get a chef's papers and become a professional chef. I was good at it but didn't stick. But I still use lessons, both from history and cheffing, cooking. From history, it's I carry so much over into building an argument and understanding things and doing my homework, doing the research. But even from cheffing, the fundamentals of how to create this is in high cuisine, but how to create balance on a plate, balance in the flavour palate. And those are metaphors that I think of immediately, you know about creating balance in somebody's life. If I'm coaching or balanced on a team if I'm doing team building, and really appreciating the flavours that a person brings. And I would say that I have almost that olfactory experience of, you know, you're beyond just the sensations that you get from people being in front of you. It's not just about sight, smell and taste, there's something else, there's some other experience when you really connect with a person and are able to, you know, kind of find that symbiosis with them.
Jagroop 10:19 Creating a harmony where you don't expect there to be one that you know. And it's from an accumulation of all the experiences that you've had, you know, you can take lessons from, say, cheffing, or sports or playing music, whatever it might be.
Tim 10:33 If we think of ourselves and those around us as this culmination, and this collection of all these different experiences, and all this lived experience, and all this acquired knowledge and all these lessons that come out of triumph and failure and difficulty in good times, and the rest of it, what does that then leave us with, when one thinks about, well, what do we have to offer the world?
Jagroop 10:58 I mean, that's what leads to the value you create, right? So, creating content is about delivering value in one form or another. And that can be either educating other people or entertaining them in some way. But when you've lived through certain things, it's just sharing those stories. That brings a value rate. When I work with, I want to say, more well-respected and older clientele. They focus on things like legacy and creating value for generations after themselves, right? Because after three generations, we as a person, were going to be forgotten, dead, and everybody who knew us, is going to be gone as well, right? And we are lucky enough to live in the day and age where now we can put out content that can live beyond us. Like, I would love it, if I could see what my great great great grandfather did back in the day, and how he was living a life, like how what was his perspective on things, right? And now we have the opportunity to actually document our lives, to share that with the people we care about.
Tim 12:02 My cousin, Dave Sweet. He was the chief homicide detective here in the city. He joined me for two episodes earlier on. When he approached writing two books, he said that it was so that his grandchildren or his great-grandchildren might have heard about this, you know, crazy great-granddad, that was this veteran policeman who did all sorts of crazy, crazy things. And so he wrote his first book, which was Skeletons in the Closet, I think it was called. And it was stories that he, Skeletons in My Closet that's what it was called, you know, stories about all of these things he had learned through these, these really quiet, what you and I would see as dramatic experiences. While this is a way for him to transmit that and now that he has retired from the police force, he is writing his second book, or it's about to come out. And it's called the Unconventional Classroom as his new company. And it's about learning from all of these lessons that people don't appreciate they got from life, really looking at it as what is this thing? If we think about life as an unconventional classroom? What can we extract from it? Right? And it gives us this next sense of purpose. And when you were talking about that idea that we have things now that we can share, what came into my mind was the picture of dynamite for some reason, or gunpowder. You know, when we think that gunpowder is a combination of sulphur, and charcoal and, and saltpetre, right, and we put these things together, and suddenly they create this explosion. And if we think about leaders, this is often why I look at multiple facets of people, when I'm helping them understand who they are, they kind of have their main gear and it's kind of the steady-eddy, the thing that they're always in. And so it might be you know, I'm really detail oriented. And so if they play on that gear too much, then suddenly they're micromanagers. Right? But if they start bringing in other gears, I'm a detail-oriented person who also really cares about trust, it takes on a completely different flavour. And sometimes they haven't quite connected to that other gear, that other skill. Whereas if we look at all the ways they provide value into the world, all the ways in which they've learned, it could actually really help a person balance themselves out and say, you know what, from this vocation, I'm going to take my engineering expertise, but you know what, over here, I'm a member of a curling rink. And so I'm gonna take some of my team knowledge, I'm gonna bring that into the mix. And over here, you know, I've volunteered at old folks homes, so I'm going to help people connect to like, what is it all for or something right? Suddenly, you become this, this really volatile, potential filled individual, when you know, carbon on its own will burn, but not nearly as well as if it has an accelerant or something else, then all of a sudden it becomes explosive. And so in a way, how do we become something that's just smouldering towards something that when it needs to, it can throw shockwaves of value and heat and, you know, move mountains literally? Right? So, get a little too into the metaphor, but there you go.
Jagroop 15:34 No, I love it's, it's bringing in a wider range of experiences and putting them all together. You know, I think Steve Jobs did some version of it, where he, at a time focused on learning calligraphy. And from learning those lessons, he translated that to producing the first iPod and iMac or whatever was right?
Tim 15:58 By being style-focused and really creating this aesthetic that nobody else had at the time.
Jagroop 16:02 Yeah, like just pursuing whatever you're passionate or interested in, you never know how further down the line that's going to become valuable to you.
Tim 16:10 I love that. It goes back to… let me take a quick aside, whenever I talk to Americans, talking to an American, we got an American, a really exciting American coming on the show fairly soon, we're recording. Well, whenever I talk to Americans, you know, sometimes we touch on this idea of the melting pot. When I was a kid, we were always taught that Canada was not a melting pot. Canada is a quilt or Canada is a motif, right? We take all of our differences and we use them to create something even more vibrant and even stronger. In the cooking analogy, we want the flavours of all the foods to come out, to be complex, we don't want it to be just homogenous. It's like, you know, a vibrant stew or something, right? And so, you know, when I think about us appreciating ourselves, even, is to see ourselves as this construct of all of these different identities that we have. All of these different ways we face the world. And not just switching gears from one to the next to the next to the next. But allow the other ones to, and appreciate the other ones for being able to give us. Are we accessing our entire Batman belt? Or are we only taking one pocket into the fight? Right? Like, do we have it all at our disposal? And maybe we do this subconsciously? But what if we do it consciously? What if we do it intentionally? And we appreciate ourselves for the–
Jagroop 17:37 For the entire tool belt? You know, yeah that's when you develop a superpower, basically, right? When you can tap into X, Y, and Z, depending on what the situation or circumstances require.
Tim 17:50 And blend those suckers as well. So, maybe they became something brand new.
Jagroop 17:54 Yeah, creating something brand new that didn't exist before and a new perspective that couldn't exist unless you lived it out the way that you lived it out, right? So the first step is basically to figure out who you seek to serve, and the next is to figure out what you have to offer, and then the last step is bridging that gap between the two. What do you have to offer and what does your audience need and want, and how do you actually bring that value to them? Tim 18:21 What’s your suggestion on what platform to choose? Jagroop 18:23 It depends on what your sphere is right? So like if you’re doing it to build out your business and your clients are all on LinkedIn, but that might be the spot, right? But if you’re a boxer trying to make it to the Olympics, you probably don't want to be on LinkedIn, right? Tailor it to whatever works best for you and your audience Tim 18:43 Should people be afraid of different types of media? Can they be written or photo or film? Or what's your advice about what should they focus on? Or should they focus? Jagroop 18:54 So I think the most valuable format these days is in short video, if you record a long-form video, and you can chop that up, that kind of works on every single platform, tick tock, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, all of them support video. But if you write a blog post, that's only going to go on LinkedIn, it's not going to be showing up on YouTube or TikTok, right? So go for the one that's most high leverage across all the platforms available to you. Tim 19:20 What's the advantage of going in bite-sized pieces and having a whole bunch of small snippets where you share concept after concept after concept after concept? Rather than having it all in one large video, what's the advantage is putting it up like that? Jagroop 19:34 It's top of funnel, right? So it's exposed to a lot more people and then they see who you are. And if they're interested in what you say. They themselves will seek out that long-form content. Tim 19:42 And you'll also see where they're hitting on the short form so you can use it.
Jagroop 19:48 There's plenty of testing right there as well. Tim 19:52 And then we get to, you know, the old marketing analogy of the of the unique selling proposition? Well, if you are a unique combination of all these things that make you you, and you find a way to bring all of that to bear, in a sense, leverage each other. So, it's one great harmonic within yourself, you are A) more powerful than you'd be otherwise and B) more unique. Because how can you replicate that? So, now you truly have something you can lean on that’s special. And I love that it fights against the idea that you should be something else. And that's the biggest thing when you read leadership books and stuff. I'll read a book, to become, somebody else, right? Help me, be me kind of thing. So the easiest thing in the world? Right? Jagroop 20:34 Yeah, I was just having a conversation about this literally earlier today. And it's trying to find the balance between what the world wants you to be or telling you who you should be versus who you authentically are, and bringing out the best versions of yourself, right? And that's the real hero's journey, hero's story, right? Is to bring out the best version of yourself, in a world that's telling you something completely different.
Tim 21:09 A diamond will not sparkle if it's only got one face. So, you know, what are all your facets and maybe get really fluent in those. And understand just what you have to lean on.
Jagroop 21:19 Yeah, there's lessons, I always think there's a lesson I can learn from every person that I meet. And at the same time, there's something that I have to teach them as well, you know?
Tim 21:30 Well, on that note, that's a great segue because I got lots more to learn from you and sort of people listening. Let's move into, you and I earlier had talked about, you know, a couple of the pieces we want to hit, and I think it's now time to bring up this idea. So, if we can establish what the value is that somebody has, in the context of everything that they are and all the potential they have. So, let's talk about that thought of sharing it and moving ourselves into that content creation or that engagement space. So, I'd like you to go a little bit into, around why a person owes it to themselves to share that.
Jagroop 22:14 So, for me, personally, I was always a pretty smart kid. And I had a tendency to just write the answers to whatever the problem or the thing in the classroom was, right? And where I always lost marks was in showing your work. That was my feedback over my entire, like, elementary to high school, show your work, right? And that's what creating content is actually about. It's about showing your work and documenting what it takes for us to succeed, right? Because that's how we actually learn our lessons, you know, well, other people learn lessons from us is by showing them, Oh, this is what we go through on the day to day to build this out, right?
Tim 22:56 Otherwise, you're nothing but a black box, stuff goes in and comes out the other side and it's kind of a graphic picture. But we're given something to work with and suddenly we come up with a solution and they don't know how. And so given them nothing to connect to. We've given them nothing to believe in, in some ways.
Jagroop 23:47 Yeah. And then the added challenge of like, how are you known as well? Like, what's your reputation as well? Right? The problem is, most people struggle on in obscurity is what it is, right? And what you want to do is go from obscurity to notoriety, to being actually known as an expert in what you do, right? And that's what bridging that gap is creating content that delivers value, showcasing, yes, I do know about, you know, drilling oil or whatever it might be, right?
Tim 23:47 Yeah. So, I mean, some people are going to buck against that, in the sense of there are certain people that do not want to be notable, they don't want to be out there, they want to fly under the radar. And there is some justification for that, for sure. But I think this doesn't only apply as we're going to talk about in terms of massive audiences. But let's say you just are the owner of a business and that business does not need to be out in the sphere, although I think we both would challenge that. But let's say we just want to reach your team, you just want to reach inside. We're talking about the same thing here, we're talking about showing people your work, so that you can inspire others and give them a path to follow and give them a role model, right, that they can consider. And I like that aspect of there's no answers in the answer, right? There's answers in the decisions or the steps you took to get to the answer. And they might need to know, they don't just need to know this can be solved, they need to know, what am I missing, that's that I'm not able to solve it. And if they can find that in your journey, then there's something that they can emulate. Or it's very direct, it's a task or a behaviour or something.
Jagroop 24:20 Yeah, for like, what I see for small business owners is that your clients can work with you if they don't know you. And it's overcoming that obstacle, which is difficult for most people, right? And I advocate for just documenting what you're doing because you're already kind of doing it. All you got to do is now hit record and share that rate. Because your expertise is going to come out through that, right? Tim 25:32 So, you may want to share everything. But it doesn't matter a lick if people aren't going to pay attention, so drop on them. Because you gave me a line a couple of weeks ago that I think it's just gold. So, tell me all about that. What do we need to know about attention? Jagroop 25:44 I think attention is the new currency is what it is, right? So, the original way a business basically exchanges value for money. And that value is either a product or a service, right? But now we live in a day and age where money isn't necessarily the most valuable thing. It's people's attention, right? Where are they actually focusing, where are their eyes going? Right? And that's where it goes into the idea of content relating to the attention you get, right? So, delivering valuable content and the attention that that brings back to your business to whatever you do, right?
Tim 26:25 Anybody who has a child in school would, if they gave, that statement to a teacher, I'm sure the teachers would be nodding furiously because the ability to hold the student's attention long enough for them to learn and be transformed is their number one challenge. There are so many more distractions that are more enticing. It becomes a war against distraction, it becomes a war against dopamine. Like, short term–
Jagroop 27:03 There's quite a bit of work actually going on in the space where they're looking at people's attention spent and how they used to be compared to how they are now, right? There's a gentleman, he's a researcher, and his ability to read academic articles and studies has gone down over the past 10 years. So, before he could read and study for, say, six hours of just academic content, now it's down to say, three, right? So, our attention spans as a society are decreasing, and blame Tick-Tock, Instagram or whatever it might be. But there are so many more ways to get a quick hit of dopamine, that captures your attention, right? Compared to having the fortitude to actually like, focus on a single task for a given amount of time. Right?
Tim 27:56 Yeah, and learning, learning to attend to something, and that becomes a, it becomes economic in a person's brain. It's what's giving me more pleasure or usefulness or is flipping my switch.
Jagroop 28:06 Yeah, and it's so easy to just scroll away on TikTok, or scroll away on Instagram or whatever it might be. The big difference is the content you consume versus the content you produce. Right? Are you a creator or a consumer? And in business to make value, to make money, you got to be a creator, you know, you're delivering value in some way. And that's what it comes down to content, right? Like you have to focus on your kids, what do you want them to be consuming to actually help them grow? Right? Are they just watching dances and stuff? Or are they listening to educated speakers talk about their expertise? Are they learning lessons from that, right? Are they just looking to be entertained? Or are they actually looking to be educated? And the best version of that is when you're entertained and educated at the same time.
Tim 28:53 So, then there's a next layer of thought here, and that is, those dancing videos, those videos of oh, man, the ones I hate are the ones that are like staged emergencies and things that are out, that’s fake. Or dogs, doing whatever talks do, right, like, there's all sorts of things that we can waste time on. And so when we talk about getting the attention of others, we're not just talking about producing something that's going to join that river of useless information. Right? We're also talking about, well, we've got a purpose to why this is out there. And we have people that we want to connect to that use it. So, talk to me a little bit about the importance of the quality of that information that we're putting out there.
Jagroop 29:36 Yeah, I think a lot of leaders focus on making an impact, right? And this is where it comes on to a different scale of things. So, when you create great content, what you're actually doing is you're crafting culture in a new way, right? You're setting the agenda for the way you want society to move. So, all of a sudden, it goes from being Oh, this is just some goofy thing that I do for fun to just dancing or whatever it might be, all of a sudden, it's a major responsibility for leaders to make an impact and add value in a way that's going to resonate with the audiences that they seek to serve.
Tim 30:20 Jim Collins years ago, and good great talked about the flywheel principle. And he talked about how you can have this huge, if you can imagine this huge stone flywheel in the middle of things, you can go up to that and you can push it, it won't move, it will be this imperceptible amount of force versus the size of this thing. But if enough, people slap that thing, in the right direction, eventually it'll start to move. And eventually, it'll start to spin until it can finally maintain a momentum of its own. You still have to keep going but it's you know, it's spinning in its under its own inertia, or it's got a great deal of inertia. So, what's interesting about what you're saying about crafting these cultures, is that you may not have total control over the direction of the world. But you can certainly choose which way you want to slap that flywheel. You can certainly choose the arena in which you're going to play and the voice that you're going to have, and the vibrancy of that voice, and just how many angles you might give it so that people can connect to you and see themselves in your journey.
Jagroop 29:39 Momentum kind of builds momentum, you know. And the idea becomes people like us do things like this. So, your audience kind of has a tendency to find you. So, in the beginning, nobody's going to see what you do. I think that's something that everybody is really nervous about, especially early on is, oh, I'm going to be judged for looking X, Y and Z. You're saying something stupid in like a video or whatever it might be, but especially early on, nobody's really gonna see it, it doesn't really matter, right? But as you develop your craft, and you start putting out better and better stuff, that's when momentum starts building when you start actually building out a tribe of people who think and believe and look like you, right?
Tim 31:30 So, we see, there's all these reasons for us to get out there. There's all these ways that we might not be yet expressing ourselves. And now we're giving people a reason to say you know what, you can actually affect the world, it may feel small, it may feel imperceptible. So, we're not just talking about people putting themselves out there, but we're talking about them, helping to move this big flywheel, helping to shift culture, helping to shift thought in a certain direction. And to your earlier point, if we are showing our work, we're giving people a pathway to follow where they can start moving that flywheel in their own way, but still in the direction, so we're sort of starting that common effort. And they make it moving it in different spheres, they could be moving in different volumes from us, greater or lower. But we're giving people have stream to join, in a sense, literally.
Jagroop 33:05 You’re creating a group of like-minded people in one way or another, right? I think it was Kevin Kelley that went into the idea of 1000 true fans, you know, when you have 1000, people who absolutely believe in what you do, or what you're about, your message, your story, and they resonate with all that, that's when you can actually deliver actual value, right? And when you have 1000 true fans, well, the next step is usually monetization, you know, how can you leverage that audience in order to create capital for yourself, right?
Tim 33:38 The idea of true fans is a great one. And Elena Schneider, who was on the phone, the phone on the show earlier, she had this great perspective, and it was around when I was going out there, and I was asking my clients for referrals. They were giving people an easy answer, oh, you're having a problem, oh here, call Tim Sweet, and people would call me. But inevitably, those people or often those people, the answer came too easy. And so they were never as fully invested as the person that found me, started following my stuff, and developed some trust with me before I even met them. And suddenly, when they call me, they're ready to do the work, like they are ready to get down. And they've already decided that I've got something that I can inject into their life that's good, or I can bring to their business. And I don't mind referrals, don't get me wrong. But there's something to be said for people that are true fans that have found a deep and lasting connection to you for reasons that you may not understand versus trying to tell them who you are. And, you know, just the fact that somebody signs off on me, or something like that, which again, I appreciate, but no work went into that, right? Jagroop 34:52 And that's the power of an audience, you know, you build a funnel of people who already see what you're about, and they naturally build that trust in you. Right? So, they become a warm lead right off the bat, because they already know what you're about. And they want to work with you. Right? Tim 35:10 Okay. So, I hope we've convinced people that there is power in seeking an audience, right, and developing a real relationship with that audience and giving them some of the inside track, some of the other facets of our personality, showing them our work, so that they can start their own journey of growth and learning. But here's the but, for people out there that have never tried to do this or have been primarily consumers of social media, rather than producers. And maybe they're in a line of work where they never really saw themselves as being social contributors. What would your pitch to those people be? What practical steps would you offer them to get started?
Jagroop 35:54 I look at it like this, how valuable would it be if your name was associated with your niche? So, say that you're a general engineer, and you work as an elevator consultant. If you're the most well-known and notorious elevator consultant, how many more clients are going to be inclined to work with you, right? So, it does become more of a business play as well. Building your name and reputation is about people doing business with people, right?
Tim 36:27 But let me give you a challenge then. A whole bunch of my clients are not motivated by money. They are academics, or they are specialists in the public health sphere or their educators. Maybe there's no monetary upside. If we take the monetary aspect away. What kind of benefit should they be focused on by getting a larger audience?
Jagroop 36:55 A lot of is just sharing your knowledge, you know, you're an expert in your field, but nobody knows. And you don't actually deliver that to anybody. What do you actually do? You know, you're operating in a void. And the impact you want to make is by working with other people who gain value from your expertise, right?
Tim 37:16 Early in the conversation, you said, that in three generations will be forgotten. Everybody who knew us and loved us will be dead. Right? There was a Buddhist philosophy that I heard of years ago, which I really liked. And it was on their concept of the afterlife, that our ability, or the length of our afterlife was essentially a reflection of the amount of friction we caused in the world. amount of heat we put into the world, and how long it would smoulder and last. I like to think that the amount of my fingerprints will stay on the surface of this earth, is how many people can I touch, how many people can I help lead a better life. We spent a lot of time at work, I would love if all if it was joyful, right? If I can give people lessons that they pass on to, you know, their mentees or their kids. And that carries on for a few generations. When I've spent my entire life amassing this knowledge, to hold, it would be selfish. And to have it just benefit a few number of people feels inefficient, and it feels like a waste. When, you know, why help one person when you can help 60, why help 60 when you can help 600? Why help 600 when you can help 6000? I'm privileged to have the ability to go and learn all about leadership and learn all about teaming. And I don't have to lead a normal business. So, I can help CEOs that do, because they don't have the luxury to go out and find those lessons. I hear from you know, 1000s of leaders, not just you? Wouldn't it be awfully selfish of me to just hold all that back? Right? So.
Jagroop 39:05 Elon Musk had a bit of an equation for this. So, it's the amount of value or impact you make, times the number of people, right? So, you can make a major impact on a few people. And that is as valuable as a small impact on a larger group of people. So, it's basically playing with that equation and how you want it to play out for yourself. Right?
Tim 39:30 Okay. So, we've given people a reason to consider who they are, and what their multiple facets are within their life, and just how much they've got to offer. We've talked to them about the value of creating an impact and really producing, not just consuming, into the public consciousness and how that can help them steer culture, and benefit themselves, if they are a business owner. I think that's important. We can't step away from that fact. But it's so much larger than just dollars and cents. It's about these true fans. And we've given them a couple of ideas in terms of how to motivate themselves. What are the very first actions that a person should take?
Jagroop 40:09 First, is to figure out who you seek to serve? Who do you actually want to make an impact for? And then figure out the rest. What is it that you bring to the world that nobody else can? You know, you're an accumulation of a wide range of experiences and how do you package that all together to make the impact that you want to make for the people you care about?
Tim 40:35 I mean, something that I've been learning is that a lot of what I have to teach in a consulting arrangement isn't exactly what people necessarily want to consume on LinkedIn, or want to consume on Instagram. So, I actually start taking side roads in there, because that's what that audience wants to consume. They want to consume. Well, that's what they need, I should say. And so go where the need is. Great. Okay. So, we're at a point here, where I would ask if people want to reach out to you, what is the best place to find you?
Jagroop 41:11 Well, my website is psyspark.ca. And across all the platforms, I am psy.spark, and that's P-S-Y- dot spark.
Tim 41:21 And we will put those links in the show notes. If I was to ask you, what you've got going on, that you want people to know about.
Jagroop 41:31 Yeah, my focus these days is mainly on personal branding and business branding, right? So, helping leaders become content creators in their space. And I guide them through a step-by-step process, from figuring out who their audience is, to what kind of content that they want to push out, to actually putting it out there, right? Giving them my formula so that they got to invest the least amount of time to make the biggest amount of impact with what they do.
Tim 42:00 Second to last, what would be your wish for people, as they're moving forward here? If anybody has taken something away from this conversation, what's the key point you want them to leave with? What's your wish for them?
Jagroop 42:12 It would be to share the experiences and lessons you've learned so that other people can grow from them as well.
Tim 42:21 Generous with your knowledge. Inspired by Debbie Potts, I want to ask you the new question, we're gonna be asking from everybody that is on the show, not necessarily on this subject matter. But if I was to ask you, regardless of who the next leader is that comes on the show, what is a question you would like me to ask them to answer in the kickoff to the show? What's something that you think is a great question that somebody else should be put on the hot seat for?
Jagroop 42:52 So, the question that I usually ask is, what's the most significant lesson you've learned in the past year?
Tim 42:59 Awesome. All right, done it. Watch for it. Thank you very much for joining me today. It's been a real pleasure to spend some time with you. I hope that people can check out your site, I think it's going to be rewarding. And I think that there's so much there that can change a person's life. So, again, I really appreciate you coming on here and dropping a lot of knowledge and I can't wait till we have a chance to play again.
Jagroop 42:34 Thank you for having me on. Oh man, I really appreciate it.
Tim 43:27 All right, Jagroop Chhina. Thank you so much. Talk to you again soon.
Tim 43:32 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If, like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership, please give us a positive rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word too, by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening. And be sure to tune in in two weeks' time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 23 Oct 2024 | Tim Beissinger and Renee Miller The Trail Provides—Lessons in Life, Teamwork, and Adventure | 00:31:07 | |
In this episode, outdoor adventurers Tim Beissinger and Renee Miller, known as the “Thruhikers,” dive into their transformative journey from academia to the trail. They share stories of how they re-prioritized their lives to pursue hiking, including Renee’s incredible achievement of completing the Oregon section of the Pacific Crest Trail in a record 14 days and Tim’s memorable solo hike around the Tahoe Rim Trail. Along the way, they reflect on the mental and physical challenges of such feats, the unexpected influence they've had on others, and how hiking opened new doors in both their personal and professional lives. Tim and Renee emphasize that making room for big goals sometimes means stepping away from traditional career paths and taking the leap into the unknown. They also talk about the concept of "the trail provides," explaining how nature often teaches lessons of resourcefulness, teamwork, and resilience. They encourage listeners to follow their own paths, embrace unconventional choices, and make time for passions that may not fit the mould of societal expectations. With practical tips on overcoming challenges and advice for those seeking balance between their goals and careers, they offer an inspiring call to action for anyone feeling stuck in a routine. Listeners can follow their journey on social media and dive deeper into their insights with their new book, *A Guide to Life on the Trail*. About Tim Beissinger and Renee Miller Renee Miller and Tim Beissinger, @thruhikers, love going on outdoor adventures by foot, bike, canoe, or any other non-motorized transport. In 2021, they thruhiked the Continental Divide Trail: 3,000 miles from Mexico to Canada. They have also thruhiked the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada and hiked approximately 1,000 miles around Germany. They have backpacked all over the USA, bike toured in Europe and South America, and have both completed an Ironman. They love to cook and eat. They live in Mountain View, California. And then a more recent update is that Renee recently achieved an impressive feat by completing a thru-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail across Oregon in just 14 days and 14 hours—shattering the previous record by 1.5 days, all while contending with record-breaking temperatures! Resources discussed in this episode: -- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Tim Beissinger and Renee Miller | Thruhikers:
-- Transcript: Tim Beissinger: 00:01 It's compelling to want to mimic the path that's worked for others, but everybody's individual, and it can be more powerful to follow the path that makes sense for yourself. That's one thing that that I think can be a fear for folks when they're thinking, what do they do next? And they want to do the right thing instead of wanting to do what makes the most sense for them. Renee Miller: 00:20 If you want to take a break from your job and hike for six months, if that's right for you and that's what you want to do, just do it, and the trail will provide. Life will provide and you'll be a better person and learn a lot and have a great story to tell because of it.
Tim Sweet 00:35 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you, my friend, are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. I'm Tim Sweet, and I'd like to welcome you to Episode 42 of the Sweet on Leadership podcast. Well, welcome back to Sweet on Leadership today. We're going to explore exploration. We're going to talk to two explorers about the journeys that they're taking and the journeys that all of us are able to take, what's open to us. And sometimes, you know, we may have these things at our fingertips, and we don't actually realize that we can pick them up and enjoy them. And I'm really happy to welcome Renee Miller and Tim Beissinger. They're a dynamic couple that are known on social media as the Thruhikers, and when I think of people that are just gripping and ripping it, that are just living life to the fullest, I can't help but have your faces come into my mind. So thank you so much Tim and Renee for joining me here today.
Tim Beissinger 01:52 Thank you. It's great to be here.
Renee Miller 01:54 Yea, Thank you.
Tim Sweet 01:56 For those of you that don't know Tim and Renee and we're going to give you ways that you can follow them, because it's exciting. They have conquered some of the most challenging wilderness trails in the world, from the Pacific Crest Trail to the Continental Divide Trail, and most recently, Renee, you smashed the record for the Oregon section of the PCT the Pacific Coast Trail in just 14 days and 14 hours. So congratulations for that. Not to be outdone, Tim then answered with his own solo event around the Tahoe Rim Trail. So, you know, it's so much fun to watch you guys do this.
Tim Beissinger 02:31 Just to interrupt for a second, I was outdone. I just walked in a circle around a lake at a normal amount of time. Renee set a record. So I was outdone. No question there.
Tim Sweet 02:41 And when we talk about Renee that accomplishment, I mean that was, as you said, unsupported. And I was watching one of your posts the other day. You were sharing these stats, which I thought were just amazing. You had started with, was it a 38 pound pack, and it ended up being 12 pounds at the end of it, and you were pulling in these major hours, like, well over or what was it? 180 hours walked, and, you know, pulling in these major distances. So talk to us just a little bit about that. What's the size of something like that for you.
Renee Miller 03:12 Yeah. I mean, it was probably one of the hardest things I've done, both physically and mentally. A lot of fun though, at the same time.
Tim Sweet 03:19 Yeah, I found you when you were originally setting out on the transcontinental. And I remember that first episode where you were filtering water out of a cattle trough, and it was gross. And I was like, oh, man, these are my type of people. And I can imagine when we look at how many people have followed you since then, 2.1 million on TikTok, 364,000 on Instagram, 868,000 on YouTube. You are a major part of people's weeks. They take a moment to live vicariously through you and be inspired by you. And so much of it is just again, it's like this different relationship with the world in front of us. Does it feel strange to have that reputation and that meaning in people's lives?
Tim Beissinger 04:10 Yeah, it does, really. It all started because we like to be outdoors, exploring, and our first thruhike was the Pacific Crest Trail. That's 2650 miles. We didn't make videos, we didn't document it. We just loved it, so we wanted to do it again. And we were playing around with videos, and people started watching, and that's been exciting, but also it is… it is strange to know that we're influencing how people approach the outdoors and what folks goals are out there, and we sort of ended up with the voice of authority that we've never quite set out to have, but hopefully we're doing an okay job of it.
Tim Sweet 04:49 What's it like for you, Renee, when you bring this into your regular life, into your day job,
Renee Miller 04:54 Tim is more of an extrovert. I'm more of an introvert. So you know, starting out, it was more of a challenge for me to put myself out there, but through Tim's encouragement and through the responses we got saying that we are inspiring people to get outside, to live healthier. It's been pretty rewarding.
Tim Sweet 05:15 That's awesome. We have a tradition here, where, before we get into the meat of our conversation, I bomb a random question at you from from our previous guest, and this one comes from Erin Ashbacher. So Erin's question was and she didn't know who I was going to be lobbying this at. At the time when you have those big things in life, those big projects, or those big goals, and they're sitting in some shelf getting dusty somewhere. For yourselves, how do you take those big, gnarly goals off the shelf, and actually, you know, starting on them. What's your process? That was her question. How do you handle big stuff, big goals?
Tim Beissinger 05:56 Yeah, so the way we've done it in the past is we make room for them, and I'll give an example. But if the big goal is big enough that it needs to push something else out of the way, we push it out of the way. The example is our first through hike of the Pacific Crest Trail. Renee really wanted to do that trail, and I was a new a professor. Renee was an engineer, and we felt like, I felt like there wasn't room to tackle that big project, that big goal of doing the PCT, it was something to put off until we retired. And Renee was persistent and said, No, we're only going to get slower and weaker and like now's the right time to do a hike like this. So why would we wait until we're struggling with health when we're retiring, instead of doing it now when we're 30? And so we quit our jobs. We made room, we took that off the shelf, we put some other stuff on the shelves, which were these jobs that were going quite well, and we tackled the PCT. And I think for me, that was a really hard leap of faith to say, wow, I've got my career going just the way I want it, but it's not going to be the priority right now, but we can figure that out later. And it worked, you know, we did that hike, we came back. We both sort of didn't even hit a speed bump in our career trajectories. And so it was a big learning that we could make room to take something off the shelf and do it without it slowing us down.
Tim Sweet 07:29 And if you'd cave to that fear, that idea that it would derail your careers, it would have been a risk that you were mitigating. That wasn't actually a risk. And by the way, you said hike. But how many days was that, quote, unquote, hike?
Renee Miller 07:46 Four and a half months.
Tim Sweet 07:48 Yeah. There you go.
Tim Beissinger 07:49 Yeah. So for that one, we quit our jobs entirely. And you know, my PhD advisor found out that I quit my job as a professor and told me, this was career suicide. What are you doing? He was wrong. It was not career suicide. After the trail, I got a better job as a better professor at a better university, and so it was fine to do that, and we would have missed the opportunity. And like you say, it wasn't a risk, and Renee had the same sort of job situation,
Renee Miller 08:18 Yeah, yep, I was able to get a job after our you know, a job is a job, and a career is long term. And we've both had successful, very successful careers, even though we've had to quit a job here or there.
Tim Sweet 08:34 Yea, I mean, Tim was saying that, and that you were the driving force behind that. So before it was clear to Tim, or before you went in on faith, Tim, what was that vision that just made it a must do. That was the path of least resistance for you.
Renee Miller 08:54 Yeah, I think it was wanting to tackle something unknown. You know, I don't like to follow the normal path of that society tells me to follow. That's kind of always been a trait that I've had, and I think it was a big adventure, a big unknown adventure. And, you know, I loved the outdoors, and thought, Why? Why not?
Tim Sweet 09:19 If I was to ask you, in your mind at that point, if you can, if you can, cast back to that, what was the risk of not doing it? Had you not done it, what would have likely happened that would be the source of regret, or, like, where do you think you would have been if you had not done it?
Renee Miller 09:37 I don't know where. Yeah, that is a good question. It has definitely changed our lives. And so, yeah, I mean maybe still just living a normal life, yeah.
Tim Sweet 09:47 So it'd be stuck in the mundane, that average existence, yeah. And we talk about, you know, what's average for everybody? May not, you know, help us be who we truly need to be in the moment. So you've done these amazing things. Tell me a little bit about what some of the most memorable times on the trail have been for you, as you've gone out and tackled these various challenges put in front of yourself.
Tim Beissinger 10:12 Oh gosh. I mean, the dangerous times are always memorable. Those are embarrassing too, because there have been a few times we've gotten ourselves into into trouble. We've never been injured out there, but, but we've come close. So, you know, one time, we were trying to cross the Olympic Peninsula, and there was a lot of snow, and we were walking for miles on a really steep slope on the side of snow and ice, and I slipped and fell, and a tree caught me and I partially dislocated my shoulder. It does that. It's a skateboarding accident from when I was young. So, so anyway, it was okay, but I smashed into this tree, and Renee was watching, for all she knew, I was dead, and my shoulder was kind of dislocated, so for all I knew, I was terribly injured, and turned out we were fine. But that's memorable, because it's embarrassing. We shouldn't have done that. We ended up turning around and going back and finding a different route, much safer route, around those mountains. Had the snow not been there, it would have been great. But that's one thing that stands out for me, for sure.
Renee Miller 11:21 And I think another thing is just the people you meet, you think you're going into a wilderness experience, but you always bump into other people out there hiking, and there's a lot of cool, interesting people out hiking or in the trails along the way that you never would have had the experience to interact with had you not done a trip like this.
Tim Beissinger 11:44 Anybody who's spending four months on a long hike is likely to have an interesting background that got them there. And so we've had some really great conversations and met some really good friends out there on the trail.
Tim Sweet 11:57 I remember you did a post that was, tell who's the thruhiker by what tent they use. And I remember watching that and being like, I got it mostly right, but I was thinking, you know, somebody has a tent that has a generator and blows up or something. It's like, you know, cool. So, at this point, we find that this is a big part of your life. You are having new opportunities and new aspects of your ability to impact and influence people open up. So you've done these amazing things. You've set goals for yourself, you've made big life changes in order to make them possible, and you've made that space for them, as you talked about you're both professionals, and you're influencing and leading other people. What would be a more commonplace example of where you see a person's inability to make space for something get in their way.
Tim Beissinger 12:55 I think jobs as people are picking their career path, it's really tempting to want to do the right thing. So I was an academic for a long time before I've now switched over to industry, but in the academic world, it's really set. If you want to be a professor, first you do a PhD, then you do a postdoc, then you might do another postdoc, then, if you're lucky, you get a job as the professor. And it doesn't have to go that way. You could go from PhD to a company, to a postdoc to a professor, or PhD to a, you know, whatever, to straight to a postdoc, and then switch over to industry and build some chops there and come back and professor or or maybe be a professor for a little bit and decide to switch over. I think people have a fear of getting off of that PhD postdoc Professor path, because all of the examples they look to are doing exactly that, and it's compelling to want to mimic the path that's worked for others, but everybody's individual, and it can be more powerful to follow the path that makes sense for yourself. That's one thing that that I think can be a fear for folks when they're thinking, what do they do next? And they want to do the right thing instead of wanting to do what makes the most sense for them.
Tim Sweet 14:11 Renee, how would you add on to that?
Renee Miller 14:13 You get so caught up into your daily lives and the tasks that you you know, you go to work and have to get all these tasks done and come home and have responsibilities at home, but yeah, you kind of forget about yourself. And you know what about that professional engineering license that would be really good for my career? Oh, I don't have time for that, because I'm busy working and, yeah, just talking with people and reminding them to prioritize themselves and their resumes, and it'll probably be good for their company as well to get those certifications. Yeah.
Tim Beissinger 14:52 I've witnessed that from Renee. She, as a young engineer, was always making time for a professional society that really had no bearing on your day to day job, but it was so big for networking and meeting folks.
Renee Miller 15:09 And staying current on your industry. Yeah, yeah.
Tim Sweet 15:13 So many of the people that listen are engineers or stem folks. You know, it's a huge part of my practice, working with engineers and geologists and, you know, scientists, chemists, etc, often when I help them move through things, not to make this about me, but we can lean on their engineering jobs, you know, because you can design and engineer the life you want, and the outcome is always, or usually, a product of, well, what's the design? And I use this video, if you may have seen it. It's probably 15, maybe 20 years old now, but a group from MIT had designed a bike with square wheels that could roll as long as the road was a series of ARCs right, the same distance as a side. Now, it wasn't a terribly flexible system, right? But often people, they try to mould themselves to the road, rather than molding the road to themselves. It's such an inefficient way to live, in a sense, because then you end up shaving off the corners, shaving off those sharp bits that make you special and that make you particularly effective, in order to conform, and we have to often realize that we have the ability to change those things. We have things we can leverage and choices we can make. Sorry, to dive into my stuff, but, Tim Beissinger 16:44 No, yeah, it's a great way to put it. Tim Sweet 16:40 Yeah. So the next thing that I would ask you is, when a person tells you they can't do something, what might be a typical response that you would use to open them up to the possibilities that could be in front of them?
Tim Beissinger 16:52 Oh, gosh. I've got a lot of experience training graduate students. So that's a typical encounter, is I don't know how to do this, or tell me how to do this. I can't do it. I have a very practical answer. This isn't quite philosophical, but it's just practical. What I always tell them is, you know how to use Google, and the answers are out there. You can figure it out. And I think that attitude of being resourceful and figuring things out is huge. I'm going to get personal. I hope that's okay. When I was a child, my dad had brain cancer, and I had four siblings, so there were five of us total. My mom spent a lot of time taking care of my dad. It was a great upbringing, but it meant I didn't get quite as much attention as I might have if I was an only child and had two fully functional parents. That taught me how to be a little more resourceful. It meant if I wanted to solve a problem, I couldn't just ask my parents to do it. I might do it myself. Or if I wanted to get validation at a school sports outing, it didn't necessarily come from the traditional my parents sitting there on the audience with a tape recorder filming every single event. And that was a good thing that really instilled this attitude of independence and resourcefulness, and I think it's helped me be the person I am today. So, that is what I try to teach my graduate students. Is Google it, ask people questions about how to do things, try and fail. We do a lot of coding in my field. So like, you can write code if it doesn't work, erase it, write it again, and keep doing that 100 times.
Tim Sweet 18:29 What is that again? So everybody is… quantitative geneticist. Is that right?
Tim Beissinger 18:32 Yeah, that's what I am, a quantitative geneticist. Yeah. There you go. So, so that's my my standard advice when people feel like they can't do something, is they can. They might just have to learn the base.
Tim Sweet 18:43 So if confidence isn't in your DNA, you would say confidence isn't in your DNA yet. Tim Beissinger 18:48 I'd say, Google it.
Tim Sweet 18:49 We're going to code it in there and Google it. There you go. So Renee, would you have any experiences when you have people that come to you feeling stuck or feeling like they can't?
Renee Miller 19:03 In addition to what Tim said, I think teamwork is a huge thing, and don't feel like you're stuck by yourself trying to figure it out. Get help and talk with the people around you. And more brains are better than one at solving problems 100%
Tim Sweet 19:22 I'm going to call an audible here and talk a little bit about one of your episodes that I really liked when you were doing the Tahoe Rim Trail, you shared that you were having some issues with feet problems and that you were breaking your own rules. I heard you say Renee usually kept you on the straight and narrow when you were hiking together, and so the two of you formed that kind of partnership where you know you're thinking about different things, and that teamwork was felt literally by you on that trip. Like here's something that I may not think about in the moment, but Renee keeps me honest.
Tim Beissinger 20:10 Yeah, yeah, I don't think I used that phrase the straight and narrow. I did something, but I didn't say that.
Tim Sweet 20:06 No, you didn't say it that way. Sorry. I am paraphrasing, but
Tim Beissinger 20:08 But really close just keeps me on the straight and narrows, but, but no, that's absolutely true. When we're hiking together, we know, here I'm talking in the “we.” Because together, we know that doing too many miles too soon is a recipe for injury, and honestly, it's not so much of a we it's really Renee reminding us that over and over again. And so there I was doing a solo hike. We almost always hiked together, but I did the Tahoe Rim Trail alone, without the wisdom of Renee, and I injured myself right away. It was four days in, and I had a busted Shin, and had to take five days off, and so that was a reminder that we're we're better together than alone. I probably offer some stuff to our joint partnership, also when we're out on a hike. Renee Miller 21:00 Yes, definitely. Tim Beissinger 21:01 The wisdom part is definitely coming from Renee.
Tim Sweet 21:04 Well, let's hit the other side, then Renee. What does Tim offer?
Renee Miller 21:06 Well, he's a good cook, so I definitely eat better when he's around.
Tim Beissinger 21:15 So you keep you keep it nourished, and keep the color in your cheeks, in a sense.
Renee Miller 21:19 Yep, yep. But yeah, I think we're really good as a team, and he definitely likes to push us. You know, sometimes I come up with these crazy ideas, but Tim helps make sure we follow through with these crazy ideas and so it's a really a cool team that we have together, and it's good to do it on our own, and work on all sides of ourselves as well. And remember what our strengths and weaknesses.
Tim Sweet 21:49 I think that comes through in so many of your posts. So I think that that's a great thing that people can expect to take away if they were to follow you, as we sort of wrap up here. I guess what I would say is this is we talk about all of these things, and I can't do your accomplishments and the amount of effort you put into these things justice. I can't in this amount of time, I really would encourage people to look out for you and follow you. But when you think to the people that are listening here, and many of them are are engaged with us, because we bring such unique people like yourselves onto it, what's that point that you want them to leave with today. What is that wish that you have for them?
Tim Beissinger 22:34 I think, it's a phrase. The phrase is the trail provides, and that's a lesson that you learn on a long hike, which is when you really need something, you get it from the trail. There's direct examples we have of of needing a cell phone cable that we forgot to bring, and that exact cell phone cable was just lying on the road. But the more important ones are the indirect examples, like when that I mentioned earlier, I fell down the mountain and hit a tree while the trail provided an alternate route around that mountain. It was there. There was a mapped bike path that we were able to walk instead. It wasn't what we had been aiming for, but it was provided by the trail. Or there's been times that we're running low on water, and a water source that we hadn't expected based on our maps showed up and it was in excess. There's tons of examples like that, and then they come back to life. And in normal life, when you're opening your mind to not just following one direct, clear path, but letting your life provide opportunities, you can follow those opportunities and have a lot of fun with them. An example from our life is our videos that we make. We never planned on being large internet influencers. We just happened to post some videos that got a lot of views, and then we ran with it, and it's been a really fun, really fulfilling project that we do. Life provides, the trail provides, I think that's a really important lesson that I've learned, and hopefully others can learn it too.
Tim Sweet 24:09 Yeah, just open yourself up to all of those doors that are in front of you and be observant. Okay, great. Renee.
Renee Miller 24:16 Just expanding on that. Don't be afraid to follow your own path if you know you don't have to follow what society tells you if you want to, you know, take a break from your job and hike for six months. If that's right for you, and that's what you want to do, just do it, and the trail will provide, life will provide and you'll be a better person and learn a lot and have a great story to tell because of it.
Tim Sweet 24:46 It's really interesting when you think about that, when we follow the path that might be traditional or laid out in front of us, whether that is the career arc of a professor or whether that is putting your job on hold to try something adventurous, the standard path that's in front of us is not there by accident. But part of that is it's not built on individual experiences. It's built on sort of the common experience. And if we know anything about looking at the averages of groups, it tends to trend towards the lowest common denominator. It tends to trend towards the path that's been the safest for the most amount of people, which means for half the population, that could actually be curtailing your potential. Gallup recently came out with a figure that said 10% of the population actually have the makeup, personality, skills, work style, expression of genius, all of these things to be leaders. And I think it's actually a heck of a lot lower than that, because there's many people that aren't given the opportunity to lead. Could be socioeconomic, it could be gender, it could be any myriad of other things, race or whatnot, that kept them out of that. So it's somewhere between 4% and 6% I would say typically, is what, where you get these natural died in the wool leaders, and I define that by it's people that are willing to take risks, especially when it comes to owning other people's results, and would potentially damage themselves, but never do it anyway else, because that's how they're built. I think for those people, your words are going to ring like a clarion call in the wilderness. All right, thank you so much for taking the time to join me. We're going to do just a couple of little wrap up exercises. The first is, I would like you to ponder on a question that you'd like to ask the next guest in line, and I will bring that up at the beginning of the interview.
Tim Beissinger 26:54 Well, I do have a question. We talked at the beginning about how to take things off the shelf, and my advice was, make room for them, take them off and push something else out. And so my question for the next guest is, if you have to do that, if you need to clear up room in your schedule, what is one thing that you're doing that you would or want to get out that you want to stop doing. We all have too many things to do and not enough time. So what would you cut? And it doesn't have to be like, Oh, I'd stop tying my shoes. It doesn't have to be that specific, but maybe just some idea about what you'd get rid of, if you could get rid of anything without consequences.
Tim Sweet 27:42 Yeah, do you know where your easy cut is? Well, I've enjoyed following you for the last it's got to be two years. It feels like easily, because it was covid when you started, right?
Tim Beissinger 27:53 Yeah, if you were watching us filter from cow troughs, it's been three years, three years.
Tim Sweet 27:57 Oh my gosh, time flies. I think people are going to be really interested in your in your story, and you've got so much to teach in such a wonderful way. Where can people find you? Where would you like them to look for you?
Tim Beissinger 28:09 For folks who are wanting to get outdoors more, we have a brand new book out through hikers, A Guide to Life on the trail, and our goal with that book was to make trips more enjoyable. So we took everything we've learned from 10,000 plus we haven't added it up in a while, but maybe 12 or 13,000 miles of exploring the outdoors, all of our learnings to have the most enjoyable trips that we can have, and put them in a book, along with a bunch of backpacking recipes for dehydrated food. So so that's one great place for people to look for us.
Renee Miller 28:41 Otherwise, we're at through hikers on Tiktok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, awesome.
Tim Sweet 28:48 We’re going to put all of that information in the shownotes. As people engage with you. What type of energy are you really excited to bring to your channel next?
Renee Miller 28:58 We love being outdoors, and all of our stuff is about hiking and the outdoors, and it's positive educational content about how to be safe and enjoy yourself in the outdoors and food and cooking.
Tim Sweet 29:14 And food and cooking right on. So, I want to say a big thank you for making this happen. I know that it was a bit of a route to get here, but you're not opposed to that. You guys set long routes all the time. So yeah,
Tim Beissinger 29:26 Thank you for having us. It's been really a lot of fun to talk about all this stuff. It's not the usual podcast, or not the usual podcast for us at least. Which is all about what's the most dangerous animal you've seen, which those are good too. But this was a fun exploration of other topics.
Tim Sweet 29:44 It’s podcasts like yours that helps people lead more enriched lives and inspires people by showing them look what's possible. And why not, you know? And it's just a matter of going to Google, in a sense, figuring it out, watching shows like yours, to get some tips, and then just, you know, getting on the trail. And I really appreciate that coming from you guys. You know for myself, getting back into hiking, it's a real source of energy and inspiration. So thank you.
Tim Beissinger 30:17 Thank you.
Renee Miller 30:18 Thank you.
Tim Sweet 30:21 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If, like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership, please give us a positive rating and review on Apple podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders, and you can spread the word, too, by sharing this with your friends, teams, and colleagues. Thanks again for listening, and be sure to tune in in two weeks' time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 01 Nov 2023 | Creating Willing Capacity, Ownership-Rich Teams | 00:19:41 | |
In this episode of the Sweet on Leadership Podcast, host Tim Sweet tackles the pressing issue of overcapacity among leaders and their teams. He highlights a significant gap in discussions surrounding employee engagement, with leaders often neglected in the conversation. Tim sheds light on the alarming statistics of burnout among engaged leaders, emphasizing the need for a sustainable approach to leadership. Tim introduces the concept of "pull and push" leadership, drawing parallels from manufacturing practices. He explains how adopting a "pull" system, which focuses on actual needs and choices, can significantly enhance team fulfillment and efficiency. Drawing from his extensive experience as a coach and consultant, Tim provides valuable insights into the mindset shifts necessary for creating employee ownership. The episode delves into actionable steps for leaders, including the importance of self-evaluation, the pitfalls of micromanagement, and the need for individualized leadership approaches. Tim emphasizes the significance of understanding each team member's work style and motivators, ultimately leading to a balanced and harmonious team dynamic. He concludes by urging leaders to grant themselves the same grace and understanding they extend to their teams, ultimately empowering them to transform their leadership style and improve team dynamics. Resources discussed in this episode: -- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: -- Transcript TIm 00:01 We begin to see the short-term focus and short-term gratification give way to long-term gratification. We begin to see teams become interested in the hearts and the minds around them, it becomes a way to create a community that happens to be working on the same thing, to begin to care about each other, they begin to care more about the work, they begin to feel like it is, where they're meant to be. And when you see it happen, and when you're on one of those teams, you know it.
Tim 00:31 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you my friend, are a leader, and this show is all about an all for you. Welcome to the Sweet on Leadership Podcast, episode 19.
Tim 01:04 Hey, folks, welcome back to another episode of Sweet on Leadership. I'm your host, Tim. And today we're diving into an episode with a bit of a twist. Instead of having a guest, this conversation is an exclusive one-on-one with yours truly, why? Because of late, I'm seeing an increasing number of leaders that are coming to me with worries about overcapacity, their own and their employees. And this is about an engagement issue, but not in the way you might think. Numbers are up, Gallup just reported that 32% of all workers are engaged. This is only 2% down from a record high last year of 34%. But at the same time, an American Psychological Association study of leadership burnout shows a dramatic increase in numbers. It shows us that 35% of moderately engaged leaders and 20% of highly engaged leaders are exhausted. This engaged but exhausted group is still passionate about their work. But at record high levels of stress, they're caring up to the point of collapse, the most engaged groups also have the highest rate of turnover and retirement. And this study never offered a conclusion as to why this might be. But I'll offer one, from my experience, the even higher numbers of these most loyal leaders are explained because they're the ones that will care to the point of liquidating themselves. They'll do this out of dedication, personal purpose or values that they hold dear. They'll do this until it's too late, and they can't stay at the job. You see, the professional communities are still hyper-focused on employee engagement, but they're leaving the leaders out of the mix. And you may be wrecking yourself in the process. This isn't sustainable and the issue isn't being discussed enough. And I'm on the leading edge of it. So, I've decided to dedicate an entire episode based on my current experience as a coach and a consultant. So buckle up, because I'm going to go through what you need to do, what you need to stop, what you need to start, the mindset that you need to adopt, and the actions that are behind how you do it and do it well. First off, let's get our terminology straight, I'm going to be talking about the concept of pull and push in leadership and in particular, creating employee ownership. The way in which I'm using these terms comes from manufacturing, push refers to any time we produce something without taking into account what the demand is. And on the other hand, pull means that you're producing something based on actual needs. This approach has a huge impact on resource efficiency when we're creating something of value. An older study by Harvard, which attempted to tie manufacturing into a then emergent software market found that using poll systems could cut lead times and inventory costs by up to 50%. So, therefore, it makes sense to think if that's the kind of system capacity it can create for manufacturing, why wouldn't it create capacity for you? Let me shift this into a simpler context. Think about a buffet. Do you want a chef that stands at the end of a buffet line and randomly heaps food onto your plate without asking you what you like? No, you'd want to choose for yourself. This preference for choice was confirmed by Cornell psychologists who found that when we had choice as employees, it greatly increased job satisfaction. So, it's a no-brainer that when we create a poll system between leaders and employees, guess what? We end up with higher levels of fulfillment, not just efficiency. Why should you care? A Gallup study showed that highly engaged teams show 21% greater profitability than those that aren't. So, for every dollar or minute, we can spend creating a poll environment, you're investing not just in your own capacity, but in a more profitable future for the company. Tim 04:53 Well, before we get into what we need to do, let's talk about what we need to stop. So much of the advice we get when we're trying to develop leaders appear as new things we have to start doing. In my experience, if we're going to create capacity, we can't be adding on more things and more things to do. So, we have to become able to scrutinize what's working and what's not working. One of the most important places to look are in those guiding principles, those quotes, those values that we hold really dear. We may have picked these up over time, we may be responding to things that we see in a colourful quote on LinkedIn. Take, for example, Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, widely regarded as one of the top leaders in history. He said before you're a leader, success is all about growing yourself. And when you become a leader, success is about growing others. It's a lovely idea. But it's one of the ideas that when blindly followed can lead to burnout. First rule of thumb in my book is value yourself as much as you value your team. You have to balance their growth and your growth, their health and your health, their psychological safety, and your own. All of these things properly done are a virtuous cycle. They're a two-way street, you can't effectively lead if you're running on empty. You can't give away what you don't have. Be careful how much you're chastising yourself. My favourite fear is micromanagement, micromanagement is one of those things that we hold up as an example of an absolutely toxic leader. But we have to look beneath what is the cause of micromanagement, it could be the lack of trust that a leader has in a person's willingness, experience, ability, and knowledge to perform the task that they need to do. This could be making the leader nervous about whether or not a person is going to produce as expected. So, they get down there, they hover like a helicopter, and they really try to control the situation. Well, the issue with that is that the leader is there to make sure that the team can execute, it's their job to manage these things. This bumps up against words of people like Simon Sinek, he eloquently put it leadership is not about being in charge but taking care of those in your charge. When in actuality, in many cases, it's about both. And when shit hits the fan, sometimes you have to be in charge. So, we have to look at all of these sayings with a measure of salt. And that's not saying we aim to disarm them. No, they still are important concepts. But what we have to do is get down to the root cause. So, if we don't trust our teams to execute on something, we have to stop and look at the root cause of why we are not trusting the team, then we need to work on that. So, I spent enough time talking about don'ts. The fact of the matter is that your journey is going to be different than anyone else's. And so before you start layering on all the things you need to stop doing or start doing, you got to get really fluent in terms of where you are now? What that means for you as a leader? What are the elements of your personal style, your genius, your work preference, and really get an idea of what's the right path for you? Needless to say, there's lots of things to consider, but it is bespoke to each person. The important thing to realize here is before you start adding on any new expectations on yourself, especially when we're dealing with capacity, it's really important for you to try to cut away what's no longer working. It cuts down on the conflict we're going to experience when trying to adopt new things. But also, it just creates a little more space and levity and lightness to your management practice. But don't get in trouble by trying to follow a paint-by-number approach to this. This is not a hack-and-slash job, we have to understand you deeply and then go in and make precision moves. Every leader is going to be different. Every experience is going to be different. We have to take you as a person in context, and we have to take what your current situation is in context. What is the team that's serving you? What place in the organization do you hold? What are your personal goals? All of these factors and all of these lead to a very unique set of challenges. Once we understand that it's not terribly complex. Why? Because we've got good data. Because we've gone through and we've used tools that we know are reliable, we've had conversations that we know are leading us towards truth and suddenly everything becomes easy. We can cut away what we need to cut away and we can add. Tim 09:44 So, what are some of the things that we need to think about adding? The first and perhaps most important thing that you need to have when it comes to your team, is a heavy dose of reality. You need to understand each of your people in context and if it's a multi-layer team, you need to make sure that each leader within those different layers understands their people. Only then can we truly appreciate what that person is experiencing. This isn't so we can serve them a carte blanche that has to be a balanced exercise, it's about making sure that everybody is there for the right reasons, and that all of their positive intentions, and 99.99% of staff are wanting to do the right thing, all of their positive intentions are working in harmony. Think of your team as an orchestra. If you're going to play a particular piece of music, you have to have the right balance of all the different instruments. Once you do, there is a part for everyone. So, it's not about being blindly inclusive to the parts that you've got. But understanding your team in context, how they work, what they're interested in doing, what the work requirements are for the team and the promises that you've made towards the business, and then marrying those things together. If you can give people on your team what they're best at, if you can give them what they care most about, then suddenly, you've got poll. People are going to want to feel better and better about the job they do. And the easiest way to do that is to know that they're valued, know that what they do matters. And oh, by the way, it's the stuff they find fun, and it's the stuff that they find interesting. And what's true about most work is that when a team is completely flushed out, there is no grinding, because even the stuff that you might find terrible, the stuff that you hate doing the most, somebody is probably enlivened, and excited to do that work, you just have to make sure that the jobs that you have to do are balanced with the people that you have that are willing to do it. Learn this term, willing capacity. And I'm coining this now because I don't hear anybody else saying it. It's all about willing capacity. Daniel Goleman, pioneer of emotional intelligence, pointed out that self-awareness is the cornerstone of all emotional intelligence. You need to know your work stop, your biases. Importantly, you need to know the same for your team. It's like playing chess, you need to not only understand how each piece moves, but how to use them in sync to protect your king, AKA your mission. And when we start this work, it's like a cascading reaction, it begins to speed up, we have even more space and comfort. We have more space and comfort to trust our teams so that we then can transform them. We can transform the work around them, and we see the command and control methods that we might be holding on too tightly begin to melt away. We begin to see short-term focus and short-term gratification give way to long-term gratification. We begin to see teams become interested in the hearts and the minds around them, it becomes a way to create a community that happens to be working on the same thing. They begin to care about each other, they begin to care more about the work, they begin to feel like it is where they're meant to be. And when you see it happen and when you're on one of those teams, you know it. And here's one of the conundrums with this approach, we can rarely make these changes if we don't start with the leader. We have to understand the team, but all of the mindset shift, all of the intent, all of the strategy really does start with the leader. And this is really impossible to get to, if the leadership is so busy doing everything for everyone else, that they don't take a breath, stop and actually do some things that make them feel good. They tune their own engine, and they don't just run it 150% constantly. So, we've talked about starting to see things in terms of willing capacity. And we've talked about realizing that everybody has a different work style, and we can tweak the team based on how those work styles interrelate. Tim 13:55 The next thing to understand is about incentives and that incentives are colourful, and they're dynamic, and they're different from person to person. Have you identified what currency each one of the people in your team truly operate in? And I'm not talking about their wage and the dollar figure. For some people work is all about achievement, accomplishment, even a competition. They might be accomplishing the bigger mission, they might be seeing themselves as winning a game. For others, it’s all about relationship connection, approval and belonging. If we don't have these in place, if they're not there feeling like they're working amongst a group of friends, well guess what? They feel alone. For others, it's a brain game, it's conceptual, it's all about thinking and exploration, problem solving and coordination. For still others, it's all about improvement or growth. It's about exploration, it's about really venturing into these new areas, perhaps having a large measure of autonomy to do it. And for others, it really is about influence and control and competence, in the best possible way. They want to turn chaos into order. They want to build trust and abilities and capabilities within their team. They want to open dialogues and really have a measure of impact on the business and the people around them. All of these different motivators are valid. But if we're not careful, we broad-brush people. Next time you pick up a book or a leadership article, take a look and see if they're writing from a perspective of one motivator, of one incentive. If they are, they're likely missing a trick. Tim 15:30 The last thing that I want to talk to you about is adopting the practice of giving yourself a little grace, cutting yourself a little slack. One of the hallmarks of a good leader is that you understand when people make mistakes. You give them time to develop and grow, and that you afford them some space, ensuring that they have some psychological safety. And when people are doing new and challenging things, of course, you expect them to fail a little bit before they achieve mastery. But leaders, perhaps you don't always afford themselves this same luxury, because whatever you're facing right now, whether it's a push or pull leadership situation, whether it's high or low capacity on your team, whether you feel wrung out or enlivened by the work, this is all a product of the design and the leadership processes that you're choosing to engage. And by understanding this design, and by becoming really, really fluent in your relationship and your staff's relationship to them, you have the power to change, you have the power to make your team and your work experience, whatever you want it to be. And I want you to feel that power in the same way you want feel that your team is empowered. Even by just attempting to do some of the tactics that I've shared with you today, you'll have great success, things will change. You're going to begin to see a whole bunch of benefits, you're gonna start to see increased accountability and team members are going to be feeling ownership. You're gonna start to see people empowered, where it's not a buzzword, but you can actually see and track, every investment of time and money you put into a person returned tenfold back on the business. You're gonna see a boost in morale. People will just be happier. You're gonna see enhanced innovation where people are not just bringing up problems, but solutions. You're gonna see stronger alignment with company goals and stronger alignment with outside teams. Why? Because they're not being defensive. You're gonna see improved communication, because things are easier to get a handle on, easier to put into words, and we're not scared about being transparent. Personal growth and team members is going to shoot up because they're growing in ways that matter to them. Operational efficiency will follow almost as a byproduct, staff will be retained, and the potential that people hold for the organization will go up. All of this will happen because you make a few key choices, right now. The coolest thing about all of this is that with understanding how you relate to your team and to the idea of work, you can begin to shift the flow of responsibility and ownership. You can actually share the idea of changing that system openly with your staff. You could share this episode with them and once they see that as beneficial, they'll be on board. And that cultural endeavour doesn't just rest on your shoulders but becomes everybody's responsibility. Tim 18:16 I hope you've enjoyed today's episode and see the potential that lies behind focusing on willing capacity. That work for you and your team can become a whole lot more enjoyable when people are able to pull down responsibility and ownership. Better for them and it’s better for you. If there's any particular part of today's episode that you're interested in hearing more about, feel free to shoot me a DM. You can reach me at teamworkexcellence.com or find me on LinkedIn at Sweet Leadership. In two weeks time, I'm going to be back interviewing another influential leader with a unique leadership perspective. I hope you'll join us. In the meantime, keep on leading, and thanks for joining me.
Tim 18:57 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership. Please give us a positive rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word too, by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening and be sure to tune in in two weeks time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 22 Jan 2025 | Karen Dommett - Belonging Starts Here: Fostering Inclusion Through Connection and Curiosity | 00:39:04 | |
In this inspiring episode, Karen Dommett, Manager of Games and Competition at Special Olympics Canada, joins the podcast to share her journey from rural Saskatchewan to her impactful role in inclusive sports. Karen shares with Tim and listeners how her love for boxing not only shaped her sense of community and resilience but also empowered her to compete and win the Western Canadian championships. She highlights the transformative power of sports in fostering belonging, building confidence, and creating opportunities for connection. Karen delves into her work at Special Olympics Canada, emphasizing the social impact of major sporting events and the importance of creating environments of psychological safety and inclusivity. She shares her leadership philosophy, which is grounded in guiding principles, human connection, and fostering a culture where everyone feels they truly belong. Karen also discusses how Special Olympics is changing perceptions of people with disabilities and calls for community involvement ahead of the 2026 Special Olympics Canada Summer Games in Medicine Hat, Alberta. Tune in to hear Karen’s unique insights on the long-term cultural benefits of inclusive sports, the challenges of leadership, and how we can all make a difference by fostering authenticity and inclusion in our own communities. About Karen Dommett From the rural landscapes of Saskatchewan to the national stage of Special Olympics Canada, Karen Dommett has built a career grounded in resilience, passion, and the transformative power of sport. As the Manager of Games and Competition for Special Olympics Canada, Karen brings a wealth of experience in fostering inclusion and creating life-changing opportunities through sport. Karen's journey began as a determined young athlete convincing her farming parents to let her take up boxing—a path that not only taught her grit but also revealed her ability to adapt and excel. Her tenacity led her to a Western Canadian Championship title, where she mastered the art of turning challenges into advantages. With a degree in kinesiology and a love for the collective energy of major sporting events, Karen found her calling in sports administration. From contributing to the World Juniors in Saskatoon to leading national-level competitions, Karen has dedicated her career to creating moments that inspire athletes, build communities, and develop future leader Resources discussed in this episode: — Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Karen Dommett | Special Olympics: -- Transcript Karen 00:01 I think everything I've ever learned or felt like the outcome always landed back to in an inclusion moment or social impact or any deep achievement, it's always rooted back to people first and true connection. And whenever there has been that upfront investment in that time, and building that psychological safety, building that connection, and always peeling back that like just people are people are people, man, the efficiency, the return on investment, on human connection, it makes those hard, difficult situations so much easier.
Tim 00:40 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you, my friend, are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. I'm Tim Sweet, and I'd like to welcome you to Episode 49 of the Sweet on Leadership podcast. Tim 1:12 Welcome to Sweet on leadership. Thanks again for joining me today. I am thrilled to welcome a truly inspiring leader in the world of inclusive sports. Karen Dommett. Karen, thanks for being here. I really appreciate it. Karen 1:23 Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. Tim 1:25 From your roots in rural Saskatchewan in your early days as a boxer, which, that's one of the connections that you and I have, because boxing is something that has been a very special part of my life. To your current role of Manager of Games and Competition at Special Olympics Canada. You know, I look at your journey, and it's one of resilience, it's one of passion. It's one of driving social change. And I can't wait till we can dive into it, because I think people are going to get a lot out of it. Karen 1:51 Well, thanks so much. Tim 1:52 Can you tell me and tell us a little bit about your history, and where do you find yourself now, and what would we see you doing day in and day out.
Karen 02:02 Yeah, so I guess sport has always played a part in my life. I was always a kid who was begging her farming parents to put her into sports, and somehow convinced them boxing was a sport they should say yes to. And yeah, sport has just always been where I found connection. It's always felt home to me where I have felt sense of community. I wasn't necessarily ever really clear what I wanted to do when I when I grew up. So I went in kinesiology, knowing that was kind of the foundational work for sport, and went into my degree not knowing where I would land, whether it was like a phys ed teacher or physiotherapist or what would happen. And partway through my bachelor's degree, I got introduced to the administrative side of sport, major sporting events, and we had some really cool stuff come through Saskatoon that I got to be a part of, like the World Juniors were there while I was in university, and got to work on some cool student-led projects, and, yeah, I just really saw that, like collective effervescence that happens in a major sporting event, and just how the ripple effects have on community and how you're creating that best moment in someone's life, and how that sticks with them and creates a pathway and motivation for them to give back and do more in community, and how, how you are part of developing other leaders through creating those opportunities. So yeah, then that's really where my career has taken me. It’s kind of just been chasing major sporting events.
Tim 03:41 And furnishing others with those best moments, as you say, right when you think back, if I take you back into the boxing ring, many of us have that transitional, transformational moment in sports when you understand what just happened. You may have to think back on it, but you were a different person a moment ago, right? Do you remember an instant when you were boxing where you reflected back on about or some training and you felt like a different person?
Karen 04:13 I mean, we were a really rural Boxing Club of just like a bunch of farm kids that this was probably the only access to opportunity that we had. So we never took ourselves too seriously. We'd go to big tournaments and cards. And you know, you're up against these, like, inner city kids from Edmonton that are, like, 16 years old, covered in tattoos, and like, we're knocking off, like the horse poop off our boots to get in, and you always feel a little bit out of place. And then, you know, maybe viewing yourself as lesser than or not quite fitting in, in those big tournaments.
Tim 04:48 Did rocky ride a horse?
Karen 04:52 I had, I had had, like, a really tough couple seasons where I was, I was really underweight, so I would always have to try to bulk up. And you know, they're just not that many female boxers at, certainly at that time. And so in order to get a sanctioned fight, I'd often be fighting girls a weight class or two above me. So that didn't come with a lot of wins. And then I had a season where things kind of just really turned around. Found the way to to use my shorter stature and shorter reach to my advantage, and got really good at like, ducking and slipping and working around someone's reach advantage and how to really work the body, and won the Western Canadian Championships. And, yeah, just had that moment of like, Oh, wow. Like, success is something that is actually attainable. To me. It's weird to think that you know, you train and compete in something, and you've just accepted, like you're just actually there for fun and, like, the social part of it, and this is cool, but then, yeah, you actually find your loophole and what works for you and the tools that you have, and how that drove to success that was, yeah, like, a really different moment of like, oh, I don't actually have to accept that the bar is down here. I can use what I have and find a different pathway.
Tim 06:09 I love that it's kind of like you've decoded something for yourself, and you've found how you fit. And that it doesn't have to be everybody else's journey. It doesn't have to be everybody else's style, you figured out your own. And to me, that creates such a different level of possibility for oneself, such a different level of confidence for oneself. And then when you fast forward to what you're doing now, and you describe that effervescence that you create, that bubbling, that buoying up of the entire field, it's giving you know that's seeing a bunch of people on mass have this opportunity to decode themselves and suddenly have this feeling of belonging and this feeling of potential. Does that describe that effervescence as part of it?
Karen 06:58 Yeah, you experience energies and moments that really just like, stick with you and change you when you're part of that collective effervescence, right?
Tim 07:08 Yeah. And those moments, it's so cool, because, would you agree? In my life, I found that those moments, the ones that really matter, it's like a ratcheting up. It's once you've ratched it up, it's very hard to lose that. You know it, it's something that lasts. It's something that sticks with you. It's not like it's fleeting, like it was it. You know that moment of clarity, that realization that you can design yourself to fit a certain competition and to excel that sticks with us. It's not like we lose that and it's so that's to me. It's yeah, anyway, that's what it is to me. Is it is very ratcheting. So it sticks with a person.
Karen 07:53 I think it's that like, what is that quote that Brene Brown has, where the opposite of loneliness is not fitting in, but it's belonging. And like, I think it's that, it's that, that moment where you've stopped trying to fit in and find a way to fit in, but you actually have that true sense of belonging. That's that unlocking of that like, as you put it like that, ratcheting that, you know, you're not trying and and it's not grabbing on. That's what fitting in is, right, that you keep trying it on for size, and it's not working. It's that when you really found your, your authentic way to do it, sticks.
Tim 08:35 I like using the word arrive. I always feel like those people, they arrive at a you know, I remember that feeling when I was, when I was in my first, I would say, major international professional role. There was a moment where I was like, I knew I belonged. I knew I had something to offer. I knew that I could, I could not compete, but I could operate at the same level as everybody around me, regardless of what their specialty was, or how senior they were. And that knowledge that I belonged in that room at that table, was really empowering. Cool. Okay, well, so tell us a little bit more about, you know, the role and what it involves, and what does it take to actually create this effervescence. What is the nuts and bolts of it look like? What are the what are the challenges lend?
Karen 09:33 Yeah, so hosting a multi sport games, I think you know what people are most familiar with would be an Olympic Games. It is a massive logistical, strategic plan that you're starting from, something, from nothing. So we always use the analogy you're building the plane as you fly it, and you're trying to fasten all the pieces, and you really hope everyone's on board. How. Uh, when, and everything's tightened where it's supposed to be when you go to land the plane, and that's the event day. So it is a lot of logistical things, of, you know, beds, adding beds in and meal plans and bus schedules and all those things. But what I think the real opportunity is with major sporting events is the social impacts that it has. So there's so many things that always seem like the nice to haves on the shelf when we talk about legacy that's left behind a major sporting event, and what is most I think, often viewed as facility enhancements. When we talk about an Olympic Games and talk about, you know, the infrastructure that comes as the legacy with a major game standing. We're both based out of Calgary that, you know, we know that our city was built on the legacy of an Olympic Games. What I do in my work with Special Olympics is that we focus less on that physical infrastructure and more on social impacts. So it's not only hosting a really high quality athletic competition in really great venues and logistically really well ran games, but also, how are we changing perceptions of persons with intellectual disabilities. So Special Olympics is designed solely for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities to compete in sport, because otherwise, without Special Olympics, that access and opportunity for sport and physical activity would not exist for many people with an intellectual disability. So how do we not only create that access and opportunity and quality sport experience for that athlete, but how do we also get the rest of the community involved and change those perceptions of disability? Disability is often something that is feared or is uncomfortable or awkward, and it's not something that people necessarily feel welcomed to partake in, or there's fear of doing the wrong thing, or just fear and ignorance In general, if it's not something that is part of your nuclear circle of your family, right? It's maybe not something that you you think about getting involved with or thinking that it necessarily matters so hosting these huge, huge events that use, take up an entire city and use hundreds of different contractors and partners and sponsors. Every single one of those partnership deals leads to a conversation about disability inclusion.
Tim 12:51 Cool. So if I was to think about that more generally, the easy conversation is, what's the short term economic benefit that it brings to the community? What are the rinks that it might create, or, what are the, you know, what? What's the infrastructure that it might leave behind? And if we were to, if we're parallel this to a business, it's like, what's the operational improvements? What are the, what are the nuts and bolts profit margin that that it's bringing in? But the more lasting effect is, how does it shift the culture? How does it shift the way in which we treat one another? How does it leave people feeling, people humans, beyond just having access to more gear or more depreciating assets? You know? I mean, there's, it's, it's like, what are the assets that don't depreciate? What are the assets that that appreciate, I guess, in a sense, and those can be cultural assets that we leave behind. And it reminds me of our guest that is in the episode that we just had right before you, Harold Horsefall. I mean, he is very much coming up against uncomfortable topics around Truth and Reconciliation and how do we how do we discuss those things, and how do we bring up Indigenous issues? And they're in the middle of building a welcoming space, a shared space on an old trade grounds, or, you know, where people would meet at the confluence of the bow in the Elbow River, and it's literally called The Confluence. And we had this great talk about how, even though there was a sign in North America that everybody understood, even if they didn't speak the same languages, that's where we're going to meet this welcoming space, right? And creating that space. That's a big challenge. And so you know, as the person that's the GM for 2024 Special Olympics, you're now Team Manager going into the 2025 Winter Games, right? You have all of these moving parts, and it's a very, very, it sounds like a very complex and a very. Tough role on top of everything else. So I think it's a great time for us to bring in Harold's question for the guests, because I think it applies. And so Harold's question was.
Harold 15:12 What do you get from your career, and how does your work fill your bucket? What am I doing for this? How does this work for me? Yes, I get to pay the bills, but what does it do for me, personally, like as a person, how does it advance my own journey, my own destination?
Karen 15:26 I think what I get out of my career, in the work that I do, is perspective. I am so fortunate to get to work in a space that has the opportunity to include so much inclusion and answer so much social issues that I am constantly learning and being afforded perspective that I didn't necessarily inherit. And I think what fuels me so much, and what that gets to me personally, is the ripple effects that that gets to have in my personal life, that my work gives me so many gifts, that it gets to change and influence the conversations that happen around my dinner table, that happens in the Community Groups I'm involved in that it never just stays in a project.
Tim 16:26 Could you share an anecdote? Could you share a story of one of those perspective moments, those things that, like lit you up and you were like, Whoa, life is not going to be the same after this.
Karen 16:43 I mean, there's like, our kids are our greatest teachers, and so anyways, when you hear an original thought from a five year old, that's a pretty cool moment. So I think for me, you know, we, try to normalize disability so much in the work that I do, and as a result, you know, my husband and kids have got to come along the ride to a lot of really cool initiatives and events. And the hope is that that perspective and normalization of disabilities ingrained in them too. And this sad story, but when my oldest was in kindergarten, in grade three, now, they had their first ever substitute teacher, and there's a little boy in his class that has a lot of sensory processes, processing difficulties, and just very early in that stage of starting to have some of those tools for emotional regulation and sensory regulation in the classroom. And he came home so heartbroken and said at dinner that night that the teacher was really hard on this little boy because she didn't think he was listening. And my son said he's not trying to be bad. He wasn't trying to not follow the rules. That's just how his body works, that he just can't always sit down in his chair all the time, that she just didn't understand that, that different people have different needs, and that's how his body just works. And…
Tim 18:19 It was misconstrued as a respect issue, or it was misconstrued as not paying attention or not not doing their work.
Karen 18:26 Yeah, and I was just like, so grateful in that moment that like that everything I think I tried to lead with of, wherever possible, we try to take an individualized approach, and we try to meet people where they're at to the best of our ability, and to see that that's like ingrained in a five year old was pretty cool.
Tim 18:52 Was it an experience that he had had, or was it a conversation that he had had? If you were to take a guess at some of the pivotal moments, some of those ratcheting moments that he would have had to be able to, you know, stand up for his classmate with with such conviction. What do you think he was exposed to?
Karen 19:14 So, in a previous role, I was the Executive Director of a project called Calgary Adapted Hub, powered by Jump Start, where we would create different adaptive sporting opportunities and experiences for children and youth with disabilities. So with that, there'd be a lot of like, try it, days of sledge hockey or wheelchair basketball and things like that. So yeah, he would get pulled along to a lot of these events. And, you know, I think he knew more about wheelchair basketball before he ever knew about generic basketball. And just being in those environments where disability was really normalized led to a lot of those conversations on the way home, and those conversations of you might see something today that you might have questions about, and that is good and okay to have questions about that. And I think this is what I think the power of sport and adaptive and disability inclusive sport has is that I don't think anyone ever meant to not be inclusive to a person with a disability. But when we think about, you know, when we were kids, and you see someone on a street corner using a mobility device or an aid, or behaving in a way that is different from what you've ever seen before, you would have looked up to your big person that you were with and pointed and said, what is that? Why are they doing that? Why are they using that? And what was that met with? It was met with your grown up, then being embarrassed and saying that's inappropriate. Don't look, don't stare, don't point, don't shush, shush, shush. So then what's encoded in your body is like, Oh no, I did something wrong. Whatever that thing is, it's bad and scary, and don't look and acknowledge like we shut off.
Tim 21:02 Yeah, no kidding. It get, it gets transmuted onto the person with the disability being wrong instead of, you know, not to say it's not right to ask questions or something. But that whole experience as a young, young child being told like, don't, don't talk, don't, you know, it makes it that forbidden thing you can't talk about, that you can't you know, well, then why? Now I've got, is it scary? Like, what am I? What am I up against?
Karen 21:29 Yeah, and I think, unfortunately, some of that has stayed with us as we become the big people. And we don't necessarily always stop and give that moment of, Oh, wow. That's a really good question. I wonder, like, what do you think? Why do you think that? And if there's a moment where it's appropriate, maybe we go ask. And maybe it's not always appropriate, but you find those sliding door moments.
Tim 22:01 Well, and it's funny, there's a couple ideas that I rail against constantly. And one is that at adulthood, when you reach adulthood, that suddenly you've got it all sort of figured out, or suddenly these lessons stop that whole “shush, shush, shush, we don't talk about that.” Now, it may not be related to a person you know, walking down the street that is using a cane, and we don't understand why, or whatever. But there's other things in professional environments that people shush each other about, and they don't talk about things. They're these no fly zones. And so they become scary, or they become unknown, and they stay unknown, or they become surrounded by myth adults, reinforce these types of, these types of fears in each other along this very same way, like we don't, you know, that's that's verboten. We don't talk about that. And then the other thing is, I think back to, I was a chef at one point in my life, right? And so I remember when we first had our first child, she's 19 now, and I was learning about, you know, what foods to introduce, and I ran across this developmental article, and it said, when you first introduce a new food to a child, their brain is going to freak out, right? And it's going to not know what broccoli tastes like, you know it's going to panic and so their face is going to squidge up, right? But this isn't that they don't like it. This is that this is a brand new sensation. This is a brand new feeling. The brain is just figuring it out. And often, parents will try a child on broccoli or whatever mash peas or whatever they're giving them, and the child will screw up their face, and then the parent will say, oh, you don't like that. Now, the parent says that with a question mark, you know, Oh, you don't like, Oh, you don't like that—question mark. But the child's brain depending on, you know, if it's just reading the inflection or whatever is is hearing, Oh, you don't like that period. And that goes into programming, and that becomes the, oh, they don't like broccoli. Oh, you don't like broccoli, and it's and we program children unwittingly to believe they like or don't like something. They're scared or not scared about something, and this rather than giving them the chance to be uncomfortable or be, you know, unsure of what something is, and work through that, you know, and then fun, you know, funny enough later in life, if you give it a chance, and you can get past, you know, whatever the myth was around liver or brussel sprouts or whatever it's like. I don't actually mind these things like these are you. You know, the taste was never the problem. It was the idea. Karen 25:04 The story I was telling myself. Tim 25:06 The story I was telling myself, and the programming that went on. And I think that that's when you say, you know, shush, shush. We don't talk about that. That's rude. That's like programming on a social level,
Karen 25:15 yeah? And I think you know, to your point, how that exists in team cultures, too, at work, right that? Yeah, I'm a huge believer in the power of what our sporting events can have to the external community, but I think it starts within our team first. And yeah, so I do a few things when I lead a project in how we change our team culture first, because I can't be the only person championing this. It has to be felt throughout. So we always start a project with defining our guiding principles. What are our top three decision pillars that we make every single decision against typically, first and foremost will always be the athlete experience. Creating the best experience in this person's life. But we do it collectively as our leadership group, and then we pulse check those as people come on the team, and then we do rules of engagement, of how do we operate with one another within our team? And that has to match up with what the social impacts are that we trying to make. Because if we're not doing it inside the house, it's not going to happen outside the house. And then some more, like granular things that we do. So in a sporting event, there's always your staff team, but then there's a much, much, much larger volunteer base, and how you create that culture amongst your volunteers is incredibly challenging. So anyone that's listening to this, that maybe works in nonprofit knows the value and importance of your volunteers and how hard that management dynamic can be, like it's such a different ball game when someone is voluntarily doing something, and you know, you don't, you don't often fire a volunteer. If you do, it's really bad. So how you developed that culture is so important. So one thing that we did on these past games, instead of, you know, in oil and gas you typically will open a meeting with a safety moment. We started every single staff and volunteer team meeting with an inclusion moment, and sets the tone for every meeting. So often we'll do like, a two word check in, that I'm a big believer in you temperature check and pulse check where everybody is at when they're stepping space into the room, so that we can have a productive conversation. And then we go into the inclusion moment. And an inclusion moment sometimes is like a funny YouTube video that maybe addresses a topic, or maybe it's a definition of a word that's important to the work that we're doing, or it's more of a conversation, you know, around, you know, as part of these games, we have a mandate to address Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action 87-91 in any major sporting event, that is your duty. So how does that show up in all of our day to day work, in the language that we're using, not just at what's going to happen at this big opening ceremony, and the blessing that we're going to have and which elder is going to do what, and what that protocol looks like. But how does that reflect in our day to day language that we're using? So what does the term stakeholder really mean, and what are those roots of that word, and how, what language are we going to use instead? And what's the why behind that. We use key contributor. Yeah, so it's, it's those moments of trying to create some more awareness and acknowledgement in those things that maybe were like encoded in us, like that big person shushing you on the corner. It's taking that moment to stop, pause and like completely we're all learning and doing it together. We all can strip off our armor collectively, together as a team, and have that safe and open space of have a conversation about it, and unlearn or challenge our perceptions.
Tim 29:18 Not having to be right, right now so that we can, we can be humble and take on some new information. And, yeah, it's funny, you talked about pillars. And I mean, pillars are something that you see all the time with organizational dynamics, and it's like, these are the pillars, and this is how we stand up, and this is how we behave. I think it's important to say, if these are our pillars, this is what we value. Those pillars, right, that are really important to us, those things that are that are key to who we are. They should also tell us where questions are allowed and where questions are safe. And if the question is offered in the spirit of standing up one of these, then there is no shushing. There is no. There's no need to feel, you know, embarrassed. You can go ahead and ask your question, and it'll be received with the spirit that it's offered, right? And so it's okay to not know in service of that pillar, not just to go and do something, but actually risk something, to be to be unsafe for a moment, and then that's how we're going to rebuild this trust. That's great. I really like that, that idea of not just safety moments, but inclusion moments. I mean, inclusion is safety, right? When we get down to it, you know? Karen 30:34 It is psychological safety Tim 30:35 And so that's something that that, once we understand that, you know, it's not hard to justify taking time to do that. It's really important. If we were, to think about what the average leader could take from this, this conversation in terms of a practice that they could bring into their team, or a mindset that they could take into their claims include inclusive moments would be one of them. What else would you like each leader listening here to challenge themselves, to think about?
Karen 31:05 I think everything I've ever learned or felt like the outcome always landed back to in an inclusion moment or a social impact or any big achievement. It's always rooted back to people first and true connection. And whenever there has been that upfront investment in that time and building that psychological safety, building that connection, and always peeling back that like just people are people are people, man, the efficiency, the return on investment, on human connection. It makes those hard, difficult situations so much easier. I always kind of lean back to that saying people are hard to hate close up.
Tim 31:53 Yeah, no kidding. That is a great that belongs a t-shirt. I'm putting that on a t-shirt. How that really resonates with me. You know, often professionally, I found that I could design great processes, I could reduce costs, I could identify risks, I could do all those things professionally that I was designed to do, but if we couldn't get people on side, everything was for not like you could. You could do all that work. You could have all the nuts and bolts, all the complexity that you could mitigate through and in your world. You can have all the right number of porta potties or whatever it is, right? Yeah, but if people aren't on board, if they're not along for the ride, there are so many unknown ways that things can get messed up, and all the planning in the world won't compensate for people when they're hurt, when they're scared, when they're angry, when they're you know, whatever that is, no amount of planning can can help us compensate for that. And the inverse is true, right? As you say, when everybody is safe and open and talking really difficult, complex things can suddenly become a heck of a lot easier to accomplish.
Karen 33:09 Yeah, I say maybe, like two things in response to that, that then everyone's off the same song sheet, right? Everyone's marching in that same direction that so many things will get solved without even coming up to the senior leadership level. Problems get managed really well at an operational level, that don't always have to come up the chain, because you've got that shared belief and vision. So, yeah, that's where your return on investment also really comes in. And then your point of, like, the processes and systems. There's this quote from, I think it's Michael Babcock, who used to coach the Leafs, that says, you know, I can have all the different technologies and drills and high performance skating programs, but you wouldn't believe how fast I can get a player to skate when I know the name of this dog, there you go. And it just goes to like that power of human connection, right?
Tim 33:57 And start where they're at and start with the person. I'd be remiss if I didn't share that when we were having a conversation last week, I was asking a little bit about the appropriate language to use. And I think that that's something just very tactical, besides the great lesson that you dropped here about, you know, hold people first start there. You helped me understand that, legitimately, I wasn't sure, right? You know, it's we used to say that the person was disabled, or we have differently abled, and all these kind of things. And I did some reading about it afterwards and helped myself understand what you had said to me. We now say person with disability, or a person with a disability, or whatever. It doesn't define them. They are a person first and then, like me, I'm a person who's follicularly challenged. I have no hair on the top of my head, but it doesn't define me, right? Well, maybe it does a little bit, but the the point is, you know, people first. In our language, people first in our approach, very hard to hate a person up close. I think that's excellent. I can't wait to use that. I'm gonna pull that out. That's fantastic. Okay, so we heard from Harold Horsefall, and we heard his question. Before we say goodbye here, I want you to have a chance after giving us so much value to lob your question at the next person to visit us, so what would your question be, Karen?
Karen 35:31 I hope I articulate this in a way that makes sense. So when you find yourself at a crossroads of conflicting good that conflicts with good, how do you find that moment of clarity or that direction in those conflicting moments?
Tim 35:46 Right when you're faced with a choice of where you're going to go and what you're going to do, and both options seem like the right thing to do, but they don't work at the same time?
Karen 35:55 Yeah, yeah. I think it's that you know, you're never going to be amazing at all things. But how do you feel like you're not sucking at everything.
Tim 36:06 Alright, so how do people find clarity in that moment to proceed? All right, I will carry that question forward. Karen 36:16 Okay well thanks so much Tim. Tim 36:17 No problem. All right, couple of things to clean up here. What are you most excited about what you've got on the go right now that you want people that are listening to know about and possibly get involved in?
Karen 36:27 Being that this is Alberta based Special Olympics Canada Summer Games are coming back to Alberta in August of 2026 they will be hosted in the beautiful city of Medicine Hat, which is not far from us.
Tim 36:42 That's my wife's hometown.
Karen 36:44 So if you want a glimpse of what it looks like to be involved in something so much bigger than yourself, whether it's as a volunteer or a sponsor or get involved as a partner in some way that you can help with this massive logistical event, do check out the Special Olympics Canada, Summer Games 2026 in Medicine Hat.
Tim 37:05 All hell for a basement. As I say about Medicine Hat.
Karen 37:12 Yeah, that's a Hell's Basement Brewery, right?
Tim 37:15 Yeah, that's right. They've put lots of gas under there, all right. So we'll make sure to include links to the 2026 involvement sites, or anything that you can give us there if people want to get in touch with you. Karen, where can they where can they reach out?
Karen 37:30 Probably LinkedIn is my best form of connection, so just Karen Dommett on LinkedIn. You can find me through Special Olympics Canada as well, but we're a Sport for Life in Cochrane is where spend a lot of my volunteer time, or with Team Alberta as well, when generic sport with the Canada Games movement.
Tim 37:48 Great. And I should mention that we were introduced by way of Erin Ashbacher. So special. Thanks to Aaron, because this has been absolutely fantastic. And thanks so much Karen for taking the time to speak to me today.
Karen 38:01 Oh, thanks so much, Tim. And thanks to Erin.
Tim 38:05 Yeah, have a great day, and we will be following your track forward, and anything we can do here too to help you spread the word, we will do so thank you so much, Karen.
Karen 38:14 Okay, Thanks, Tim.
Tim 38:19 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If, like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership, please give us a positive rating and review on Apple podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders, and you can spread the word too by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening, and be sure to tune in in two weeks time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host. Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 01 May 2024 | Dan Löfquist - Courage, Openness, Change and Dramatic Tech Growth | 01:03:03 | |
In a dynamic discussion, Tim Sweet and seasoned software engineer Dan Löfquist explore the intersection of technology and leadership in today's dynamic landscape. They discuss the need to adapt and stay flexible to meet innovation head-on. They highlight the importance of leaders who embrace change and foster collaboration across generations. This episode is for any leader having doubts about how to navigate the complexities of leadership in the digital era. Tim and Dan also discuss the imperative for leaders to adapt and embrace uncertainty amidst a rapidly changing world. They touch upon topics such as generational differences in the workplace, the evolving role of technology, and the value of transparent communication. Drawing from Dan's experience as a consultant, they share the significance of modular thinking and delegation to navigate complex challenges. Together, they reflect on the shifting paradigms of work and advocate for prioritizing empathy and collaboration in driving organizational success. About Dan Löfquist Dan Löfquist is a seasoned consultant and principal at Input Consulting in Stockholm, boasting nearly 40 years of combined experience in software development, banking, finance, and the travel industry. With a strong foundation in systems design and a relentless drive for innovation, Dan brings unparalleled expertise to the forefront of modern technology and leadership. His extensive background equips him with the skills needed to guide organizations through complex technological transitions, optimize systems for efficiency, and foster a culture of innovation and growth. -- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Dan Löfquist | Input Consulting: -- Transcript: Dan 00:02 It's very important how you design your system, you basically have very small parts of your system that can connect together to make a feature, for example. So, if you have an order system, you have one little part that deals with a client or the customer, you have one little part that deals with the history of the orders and one little part that deals with what happens when the customer do an order. So, you have to break it down in very small bits, which makes changes much easier.
Tim 00:35 Do you rely on others to set a vision and then get them what they need so that they can achieve something they never would be able to do on their own? Whether or not you formally lead a team. If this sounds like you, then you, my friend, are the definition of a leader. And this show is all about bringing you new insights from real people that you've never been exposed to. So, you can grow and increase your impact on the world and feel more fulfilled while you're doing it. I'm Tim Sweet. Welcome to the Sweet on Leadership Podcast, episode 32. Tim 01:09 Welcome back, everybody. Thank you very much for joining us for another edition of Sweet on Leadership. If you haven't joined us yet and this is your first time, we are all about bringing exciting insights from leaders around the world. And they come from very different backgrounds. Today, I have Dan Löfquist in front of me, Dan, thanks very much for joining me. I really appreciate it.
Dan 01:31 Oh, you're welcome. I'm glad to be here.
Tim 01:34 Dan, you are a principal with Input Consulting in Stockholm. That Correct? Dan 01:39 That is correct. Yes. Tim 01:41 What else would you like people to know about you and where you find yourself professionally?
Dan 01:45 I am a software engineer the base of it. And I've been working with software development, almost 40 years. And I still look this young.
Tim 02:00 We'll make sure that we have a portrait in the show notes. So, go check it out if you're listening over audio. Dan, also comes to us because your partner is our very good friend, Debbie Potts.
Dan 02:15 That's correct.
Tim 02:17 So, if you're wondering what the connection is, there, we are all one big happy family. What really excites me about talking to anybody that deals with complex systems is that that knowledge transfers over into their perceptions of business and organizations and leadership. And it's if you have people like this in your life, I would really encourage you to bring people like Dan into conversations that don't involve just software or IT or anything like that, because they can handle complex relationships and networks. And so Dan, I'm super excited to have you bring your insight into this forum.
Dan 03:01 I’m glad. I hope I can bring some knowledge to you.
Tim 03:04 Well, we've had several conversations now and I am not worried. I have a lot of fun. Before we get going here though, we've got a little tradition that's been evolving here on the podcast. Dan a previous guest will always offer up an out-of-the-blue question to break the ice. And today's question comes from Anna Morgan. Her question for you would be what is one thing that you know, will pay back in the next year, will have immediate benefit within the next year if you were to pull the trigger on it? But you may have been avoiding. Does that sound like anything familiar to you?
Dan 03:47 That's a very good question. Thanks, Anna. We have just moved to the countryside in Sweden, we are living very close to the sea. And obviously, you need a boat. We've been talking about this for a very long time. But something comes up blah, blah, blah, and we procrastinated a lot. So, we finally decided to get the boat. We both know it will benefit us tremendously over the years. Especially, when we have so lovely summers here in Sweden warm and nice. So yeah, it's gonna be it's gonna be great. So, that's the thing.
Tim 04:26 You mentioned something seemed to always get in the way. Why do we think that things? Why do we think that life finds a way to interfere with these obviously, you know, important and beneficial decisions?
Dan 04:42 Oh, that's a good one. Prior to station I guess it is you prioritize sometimes, right and sometimes you do it wrong. Sometimes because it's convenient to go that way or the other way. You don't always do the right thing even though you know it's the right thing to do.
Tim 05:00 Right on, there'll always be another fire to fight. Or there might be a place of safety. That might be suspect. All right, right on, I think this is gonna bode well as we go forward on some of the questions that I've got for you. Of late, Dan, I've noticed that the community on both sides of the pond, we have seen this type of switch, we're at this sort of intersection, when it comes to technology where, in my estimation, years ago, when I would be deployed to help process and change teams, tackle, say, large ERP deployments or big systems deployments, it was always about solidifying these great big systems so that nobody could object to them, and that they were ubiquitous across organizations. And the challenge then, when you tried to make change to them was that they were very difficult to change. But now it's like we're in this almost schizophrenic relationship with technology where things are much more fractured and modular and paces is quickening. So, that's what I'm seeing from the outside and what I see my clients dealing with, do you share that experience? How would you categorize sort of the situation we're in today and what it means for businesses and large institutions and society at large?
Dan 06:27 Ooh, that's an interesting question. That's pretty much my life, what I'm doing daily. So, if we're going to take some perspective on it, if we look, historically, in the beginning, when I started to work with computers, people had actually white robes in the computer central's, so a lot of things have changed. Computers back then were very complex, big, noisy, and you couldn't do much compared to what you could do today with a computer. To build a system was a complex thing, it took time, it took effort, when you have built it there was there, basically and you couldn’t do much about it.
Tim 07:04 It was like a big refrigerator or hundreds of refrigerators sitting in the middle of the floor.
Dan 07:09 Oh, yeah, or a big heater. But today, we are facing a different problem, not necessarily problems, but challenges. And that's because the technology has changed so quick and fast. It is a very aggressive to the I don't know really where it's gonna end. But we are all in a transition state, it is never going to end, it's just going to continue to evolve, which means we can make the systems that are more agile and follow the changes in the companies. And so it's going fast now.
Tim 07:58 I've used both PC and Mac. And I think back to in the day, we used to say that we would have risk or sisk-based designs. And my layman's understanding was that Apple followed a, what is it, a complex design a sisk with a C, but it was really more around software, rather than the hardware. The hardware would be robust, and flexible, but software was what was going to make the performance differences versus the, you know, Windows and UNIX environments where they were really much more around technologically dependent, you know, processing speed and these kinds of things. Maybe that's a layman's understanding. I don't know if that's even relevant anymore. But.
Dan 08:44 No, it is still relevant. I mean, if you look at Apple today, they both the hardware and the software, managed to merge them together in a very nice way. It has benefits, go with hardware and software from Apple. Obviously, their hardware is modular and changeable, because the hardware also evolves and things get smaller and easier to change and pgrade. And so yeah, absolutely.
Tim 09:20 I bring this up, because when we had these big server rooms and mainframes and we were installing, as you say, heaters, that people would heat their buildings off their server rooms, the hardware still there, obviously. And it's still complex. And yes, it's getting smaller. And yes, it's getting faster. For many people, it's almost faded into the background. And for my kids, everything is app-based. And this transcends not just to their devices, but even how they approach their lives. They have long-term gratification versus immediate gratification. And, you know, when we're on our phone and we want something to do something, we install an app and now all of a sudden the phone can do this thing. But when it's ourselves, we have to do the work and develop the skill. And there's a much longer runway in order to make something happen. But the general feeling within society now, and not just in technology, but feels like things are immediate, we want them now, we want them to be flipped on. It's a zero to a one, immediately a real digital relationship, and that we lose sight of the gray, the servers in the backroom, you know, everything that goes between our need and satisfaction of that need. And I see that in our kids. But is that something that enters your head, your mind? And do you see that in the client relationship as well?
Dan 10:46 Absolutely, I mean, we all live in a society where you need instant gratification. If you look at the Instagram, all kinds of social media, it's a fix, an instant fix. But there is always backends in all apps, they all big machines in the backroom, doing all the processing for you. But it is challenging because people are getting used to having information at their fingertips, they can pretty much do everything with the phone today. It's no difference. I'm old school that way. I mean, I use phones, to pretty much everything. But some certain tasks, I want the computer, I just need to get into that headspace and just sit and do my thing on the computer. And then I can continue on my phone. I mean, the younger generation, they don't have that problem or that hinder. It's a natural part of their life, they have no luggage when it comes to well, we couldn't do that. Because there was no internet or anything. They don't have that limitation. Yes, it’s there. They expect everything to just work instantly. To get answers instantly, or whatever they need or tasks that need to do. It’s fascinating to see young people today using their phones or devices because they're using it in such a different way than you and me are doing because it's just fascinating to see how humans evolve. If you say, get used to technology in a very easy way, it's very easy to get used to technology because it solves so many problems for us. But we don't have to move that much. Because we just need to lift our hand and the problem is solved. Instead of back in the day, you had to come up and do make a phone call.
Tim 12:47 Go to the library, check the encyclopedia.
Dan 12:53 Yeah, exactly. And that transpires into how companies around today. I mean, there is a difference between old companies and new companies. Old companies, so usually, they have that baggage, so they live throughout generations, while new companies, startups, they start from a fresh start. They start how people are using their devices today and how people are interacting the day. That's different.
Tim 13:19 For sure. When I'm working with startups, and they're young leadership teams, they definitely have more of the millennial bend to them. I remember doing generational work 20 years ago, where we thought the Gen Y were right in behind Gen X was going to eventually wake up and figure out that, you know, there's the real world and then there's the digital world, there's the online world that they would eventually get mortgages and kids and they would become like us. And it was a massive miscalculation. Because they don't think that way. They still don't think that way. In fact, if anything, Gen X Nexus, they've moved towards the Gen Y and even the millennial ways of thinking. And when we see younger workers and the younger generations and their relationship with technology, you and I were raised where technology was separate from us, we had to sit down and engage with it. Although, I don't think this is always true, because my phone is pretty sewn to my hand at this point. It's slowly meshing but for young people, their phone is an integrated part of their personality. It's an integrated part of the body almost, it's a sensory organ in many ways. It's a logic center and a decision center of the brain in many ways, to the point where they're lost without it and it sounds Orwellian. But at the same time, they're finding a healthy relationship with it where we see threat. My son just produced an album. And he did it after he had had a knee injury, and it kept him from dance. And he's relentlessly creative. So, he sat down, and within an hour, he said, Dad, I can't take this sitting around, I'm nervous. I said, Well, what's at the root of it, it was creativity. So, work on your music, he sat down and wrote an album, he just, it just went up on Apple this week and Spotify. And it's going viral, which is really interesting. He did the whole thing from an iPad. You know, I played in lots of bands, we rented studio space, we worked hard and practiced our songs. He's produced an album, and it's good. It's not garbage. It's like it's a first shot. But there's a couple of songs on there that are real bangers, and they're worth it. So when I wanted to support him, I said, Well, what do we need? You know, do we need to get you an interface? And do we need to get you a computer setup? And do we need to get you all of these things, and he's like, Oh, I wouldn't mind a larger surface. But other than that, I'm good. I want it to stay tactile, I want it to stay in this environment that I understand. And he doesn't want the technology to interfere with his creative process at all. He just wants to be able to transmit his vision into something quickly. He's got a quick and dirty style anyway. But get it in there and create and paint on this thing without having to worry about the learning or worry about, you know what I mean? So, he's just working in this intuition, intuitive space. And it's really interesting. And I don't know if I would have been the same way. I don't know.
Dan 16:46 I don’t know. It's like cutting out the middle hand, which is technology. And they go directly to being creative and stuff because they have the right tool for it. The hardware and the software is there today to be able to do these things, which releases people from dealing with the technology because that's always been taught. And it's complex. And it takes time to learn. And, as you said, interface, and cables, and blah, blah, blah, keyboards and all that is all there. And as he rightfully stated, It needs more screen mistakes, to do more things.
Tim 17:23 Well, at one point, he's got this creative vision and this intense sense of control on the outcome. But the flip side, it's like he doesn't need physical or tactile control, he doesn't need, in fact he's very flexible. If something's not working, he just turns on a dime. And so my next question for you is around, in your work, and when you see organizations or leaders with their relationship with technology, what is the sense of control that you see various people crave or try to exert? And does that vary depending on their relationship with their technology? Or perhaps their generation? What's the need for control? And how does that show up?
Dan 18:09 Oh, that can show up in so many different ways. But mostly is based on age, it tells this like that older generations are bound to a certain technology. And they know that technology very well. And they don't want to move away from it, or they feel comfortable in doing what they do in their bubble, if you like. That's the control need, because they need to be able to control what they're doing. That's how they are brought up. They, that's what the school taught them. And that's how early work life taught them how to be. And so it's hard to break out and think outside the box that you are in that compartment. But there are obviously, people that managed to balance between both worlds. Those are the gems, those are the ones you need to take care of, in an organization. The younger generation that has no problem whatsoever to try, new things or not scared of failing, or because it's part of the process. Because if you find something that doesn't work, then you throw it out and try something else that does work.
Tim 19:24 Right, whether it's their attention span or just the speed at which these things happen. They don't live in failure very long. They don't know. They don't let it attach to them. They don't–
Dan 19:35 I don't think they see failure as a failure. They see failure as a way of learning and move forward.
Tim 19:46 Problem solve. Well, I'm going to start squeezing your brain for some precise thoughts here as you're saying that the younger generation doesn't have an issue with change or with control as much. Immediately the words that jumped to my part yeah, except for they've got an issue with the older generation sometimes and vice versa. So, when you see these gems, the ones that are able to either older or younger, bridge this gap, what is the skill or mindset that an older leader needs to have present in order to, that you have witnessed, what were what would be some of those attributes that allow them to function well, in this new, more flexible world?
Dan 20:27 I think you need to be open-minded in that sense that you need to allow people to do their work at their best ability, as they know themselves can do it the best. It's very hard for someone to tell someone, you need to do it in this certain way. We need it to be done in those certain terms of jobs. That doesn't work anymore. While it does work but it's starting to change. Yeah, I would open mind. It's probably the biggest skill you need.
Tim 21:06 So, to clarify a little bit. Would you say that that would be like being open-minded about how it gets done? You know, years ago, when we were doing process focus versus task focus, we would encourage the leaders to say be outcome-focused, like, what is the outcome you're looking for, the quality you're looking for? That should come first before we talk about how we're going to get there. Strategy and outcome before structure and process, right? So, for the older generation to be open-minded and a little less offended by new ideas of how to do things, maybe.
Dan 21:44 Yeah, that's the trick.
Tim 21:47 It is. Well, it's even with parents, right? What bothers us with children, and new ideas, new ways of doing things is it offends our sense of order in the world. And we take it as an offence because that's not the way things work. Who says you've got a monopoly on the way things work? Right?
Dan 22:09 Yeah, exactly. When you build systems, just going back to systems, when you build systems back in the day, you started to build a system. And you said, Okay, this system is going to do X, Y, Zed. And then even if the requirements were changing over the process of, I don't know, five years it took to build the system. That was kind of the standard back then. And even if the requirements changes, they were so complex that they couldn't change it. So, when they eventually was released, it still was not exactly what they wanted anyway, so it was a way of time. But now you can change during the project. And it's very common that you do, you start up, okay, we're going to reach this goal. But halfway through, no we're going to change and we're going to pivot to that. You can do that now, with people and technology, which is great, very rewarding to work in projects like that.
Tim 23:08 Do you think that modularization in a sense, is part of that where it’s, if the outcome changes mid-project, it's much more granular like we can talk about not having to change this big end to end, interdependent system that we can't remove part Q without, you know, screwing up part P, and things can just be swapped out a lot easier? One solution for another? It almost feels like without even realizing it. Everything now is almost an app approach. And as you're talking here, I'm thinking about now. And the next question I was gonna ask you is, what mindset does the younger leader, the more modern thinker need to keep in mind in order to play nice and get the best out of the older leader? Or the older colleague, or worker?
Dan 24:03 Yeah, that's a good one as well. That's very person-dependent. Because as we talked about earlier, it's can be a little bit friction between the generations. I mean, in the same way, the younger leaders is that a little bit of understanding. Also, the older people have a lot of experience, a lot of experience and they know what to do and what not to do. Take advantage of that. They're also trying to wean them into a new way of thinking. Don't surprise them with it, but just ease them into it. From my experience, it works quite well.
Tim 24:51 Yeah, I think if we can, when you say know what to do and what not to do, older workers and more experienced workers, thought leaders, managers, whatnot, they have a deeper understanding of the potential risks and threats that are out there, you know, threats that we need to mitigate opportunities that we need to exploit. If we can decouple the how, from all of this, that seems to be, again, where people are getting stuck is in that control space, that how are you going to go do that, within reason, I mean, there still has to be order. So, to bring us up to speed here, we've got, we're in this period of great robust change, we've got rules that have been altered, we have a new way of working, we have a new way of thinking, we have a new relationship with technology. And as such, we've got new risks that come up, when we try to exert too much control, or we're too resistant to change, we talked about the younger generation being not as scared of failing, not having the same relationship with failure, and seeing it as much more of a stepping stone or something that was temporary versus defining. Although, in my experience, I see sometimes that is a source of conflict. To what degree is your shame sticking, some leaders are very unnerved when a person doesn't feel deep and lasting shame or guilt. And it's not a real positive thing. So, and we talked about the mindset that needs to go into this. How harmful and how costly can a lack of this confidence and ability to connect in an organization ve when you're trying to guide somebody through rapid change or needed change?
Dan 26:58 It's sometimes it's problematic because a big organization is just not one person is many departments and usually when you are running a project, you need to speak to a lot of departments, some departments are more pro-change, there's some not and it can be quite harmful for the company as a whole when very simple thing can't be solved because of people are not playing ball basically. That is a tricky situation to end up being. I've been in that kind of situation many times. And it takes a lot of communication, a lot of meetings and explanations, but eventually, you kind of reach a compromise. It's all about compromises, really.
Tim 28:00 When we see that behaviour of having to have meetings in order for people to get comfortable. And I do a lot of work in higher Ed and they refer to the collegial mindset and these kinds of things. It's working out the risks and making sure that everybody's heard and that degree of comfort. And I remember, you had said something in a previous conversation to me that really stuck. In my world, a phrase that I use is all change means loss, right? Change means losing something, saying goodbye to something, something dying. And you had said that, that loss at times can be the the feeling of expertise. And so if I'm thinking about departments or silos in an organization where one doesn't want to change and the other is ready, there's usually something in that silo that they're losing control of, or they're losing expertise over. Can you talk a little bit about that, about the idea of our relationship with our own expertise and how we can be flexible with that?
Dan 29:14 Yeah. You have to have an open mindset because things are gonna change whether you like it or not like it, you can't control it, you can't do anything about it. So, the best thing you can do is to embrace change. It is daunting, and it's scary to do that because you let go of something and you let go of some control. But on the other hand, you can gain control from something else instead. That's how I see closes. That's how I tried to be myself. I mean, I can't stick to old things that doesn't work. It doesn't make me happy and I can't do my job properly. So, I need to adjust and to learn new things, new processes, new techniques or whatnot. In order to move forward, I think you have to have that mindset. And also, it's good for you. Because if you are in your comfort zone, nothing fun or exciting is going to happen, every day is going to look the same. In order to have some kind of excitement in your life, or in your workplace, or anywhere, you need to step out of that comfort zone, because the amazing things happen outside. But it's a scary place, but it's very rewarding if you're there.
Tim 30:42 Yeah, there's, I remember years ago, that whole idea of letting go. And at the same time, I remember when I decided to really get real about what I can control and what I can control. That was it's a liberating thing. But I would ask you to take us back into the archives here, Dan, as you were developing, 40 years of experience, there would have been, I would imagine, there would have been a time where at least you realized this happened. Or maybe it was a specific event, where this idea of gaining control by giving up control so that you could find that authenticity, so that you could struggle less with trying to move things that you couldn't, can you take us back into your history and give us a bit of an anecdote of when that happened to a younger Dan.
Dan 31:36 A younger Dan. Well, it happens all the time, daily with me. I think I was working at a big bank in Sweden. I was stuck in between mainframes, the old water-cooled mainframes and the new pieces that just came out from IBM. So, I remember transitioning into doing more work with PC because I thought that's more, it seems to solve problems easier than to have to deal with the mainframe. So, that was, I think that was the big work-related shift of losing control that I can remember. Yeah, I was right.
Tim 32:18 And just being really comfortable with what you didn't learn in school, in a way, right?
Dan 32:22 Yeah, exactly. That's the same thing because you learn one thing in school and when you graduate, it's old ready?
Tim 32:31 Yeah. So, fixing one's expertise to a certain how of doing things might be, and I’m reflecting on my own space. Now, I mean, my success is because I bring a deep toolbox and lots of experience, but I never get married to the how we're going to do something. This is a little different in the consulting space. But you know, like, just in the last two years, I would meet with clients, I can put together a pretty good agenda. You know, I know how to structure an agenda. I used to teach, you know, meeting skills. And well, there's a reason why we have a very structured rigid agenda. So, I'm very good at this. And then I realized that when I'm working with these executive teams in these complex issues, or I'm working with a team that's under crisis, or are a leader that I need to be listening to, if I start with my agenda, I'm in a way impeded, and I'm done. Because until I get in the room, and I do a lot of prework, but until I get into the room, I don't know exactly what's going to happen. So, I have to be able to spin on a dime. And so, man, I didn't think I was gonna go here. But I literally had conversations with clients where I was like, they would be like, where's the agenda, and I'm like, I don't use an agenda anymore. I have a series of outcomes that we are going to strive for, and that I'm going to promise. But if I told you, I knew what minute of the two days, we're going to be working on a certain thing, and that we're definitely going to use that tool. And that's the thing we're going to be using. I would be lying to you. And I mean, because I have too often started down the road and within the first 10 minutes, the agenda is out the window, then what do you do? And so I abandoned that sense of control early on. That relationship with how we define our expertise then around being enough and trusting ourselves that we're going to be able to, you know, forward into the unknown. It's something that the older generation has to redefine in many ways and the younger generation seems to be doing literally out of hand, right? Just–
Dan 34:50 Yeah, no real different ways to approach things in life. I mean, for me as a consultant, I have the experience. I've been working for a long time in both banks, finances and being in the travel industry, all that knowledge that I have accumulated throughout the years with travel, for example, that's the business learning, that I know their business inside and out. And I can apply that to whatever technology there is. That is we're going to use to solve a problem today. So, that never goes away. I still have that knowledge with me. But I can adapt that into whatever technology is being used. That's keeping the best of both worlds. That's why it's so important for the younger people to tap into that knowledge in the older people.
Tim 35:46 Well, that's why we as Gen X can say, with a great deal of or great lack of humility, we're the best generation there's ever going to be. Yeah, because we're on. I don't think that's going to hold true. But anyway, I think it's interesting, though, and especially when we turn this towards the needs of many of my listeners, which are going to be struggles around hiring and retention, struggles around that we have a different level of willing capacity or discretionary performance that showing up in the workplace right now. And also, we've always talked about for years now, we've talked about entitlement and things like this with younger workers. But this is all fitting together for me in the sense that the older workers right now, the older generation in the professional areas, was the importance of the resume and all of the experience that they're bringing into it. And of course, that is practically important. I'm not disputing that. But we have younger workers that come in, and they don't think they're being in many cases, they don't put the same weight into their experience. They feel you're hiring them, they feel you're hiring their potential, they feel you're hiring, they're whether you think of it as confidence, or whatever it is, but you're hiring them or hiring the person, not the resume. And so there's a great deal of confusion when you sort of say, well, you need to cut your teeth or a statement like that, what you need to do, you know, you need to pay your dues and spend your time. And I wouldn't say that it's outside their thinking, they know what it means and it's not a problem with them. It's that the answer is somewhere in between. Because what we want them to learn today, depending on the role, could potentially be obsolete tomorrow. And so we need that speed of learning. We need that ability to be nimble, and to be responsive. And actually, here's maybe not the most politically correct way to think about younger employees. But what would happen, and this is me musing now, what would happen if we treated the employee more like the app we need to put on our phone and say, or even we use that language with them? Your role is like an app that we need to install, and we need it to do certain things. Perhaps we could get a different level of independent work slash relationship with the work. I never thought I’d go down that path, but it's definitely, do they think of themselves in the app, right?
Dan 38:37 Yeah, no, I mean, as a consultant, you are the hired short-term. Tim 38:44 Oh, yeah, Ronald Gun. Dan 38:38 So, you’re an app, unless you're doing a very good job and stay wherever the company happens, yeah, you are an app, basically, because the employee needs help with a certain task, bringing that expertise and do the thing and teach the other employees and then leave.
Tim 39:07 Okay, so this now we're at a really interesting point, because you and I have the bias in this room right now that we're both in a sense, you know, keep what you kill, run and gun consultants in the sense that, we go in and we help people with no long term expectations to be holding them hostage, or around for a long time, we're there to fix problems. And hopefully, they call us back when they've got the next problem. Right? But we make our name based on our results and on the relationships we keep. This is a small portion of the population that is able to function in this way. I would say we have sort of a Buddhist philosophy in employment, Buddhists is the wrong way to go. But it's temporary. It's a Mandela, right? We know it's going to change. It's meant to be swept away. My experience with the working layer in professionals, the bulk of the population does not feel really comfortable with that level of open risk. Right? Yeah, absolutely. How does that stability translate for the older and the younger generations? And I think it's really, it's a question that's worth asking. And I think I'm inspired by you to go and ask it.
Dan 40:25 Yeah, no, as I said before, we're older, well for us. The good CV meant everything that was the most important that was the paper that you meant something, I've done this, I can use this paper to get a job or that I mattered that I accomplished things. For the younger generation doesn't matter. Because they just want to work with fun things and get paid. And also we were bound to stay with the same employee for years. Because you did that, you didn't job hope in any shape or form, because that was looked down on. Someone changed job within two years that, oo what’s wrong with that person? And now it's the opposite. Why have you worked with that employee for 10 years, you’re weird.
Tim 41:27 That’s true, it went through a period of the late '90s-2000s, into the 2010s. Well into now, where, you know, people were highly, highly transient when it went into work. And that was the way to get a promotion, you went out and you hunted a promotion through changing your jobs, if you're a professional. You're going to climb through jobs switch. What's interesting, and I think this is really cutting edge now is that for businesses that find that feeling of comfort, and able to keep the employees working on fun things and keep them challenged, and let them suddenly develop that backlog of skills and familiarity, and have a real social experience, there is a greater desire now than I've seen in my 25 years of working in this space. I believe the needle is starting to switch back over to I want to find a long-term, perhaps role for life. I want it to be part of me. And I don't want it to be something that I need to, I know it's going to develop, but I want it to always be there and I want it to be, it's kind of like your contract with your phone company, as long as it's working. And you get a new phone, a new office every once in a while, you get new apps, new roles and challenges every once in a while. I'm good. Yeah, I can focus on other stuff, bigger questions, things that matter. There's different questions. I mean, younger generation workers that I see, that I'm coaching, they care as much about what social initiatives and social values, the CEO demonstrates, or the company is willing to challenge as they do what their mission is, in the world. This isn't true for everybody. But it's true for a lot of people they are looking deeper at, they don't want to associate with a business that treats them as disposable. There's a real attraction to that, that place of being and that they can say it with pride, and that they don't have to worry that the reputation of the business is going to rub off on them if it's stink, right? They don't want to be associated with that. I see much healthier relationships with this and Europe and Canada, and parts of Southeast Asia and Australasia than I do in the States. In the States, I see we're going through a dehumanization in some ways, right? Dan 44:08 It's brutal. Tim 44:10 It is, it’s absolutely brutal.
Dan 44:15 It is brutal. Just a short run, but I've seen also is that the older generation tends to stick around longer obviously. Because it's a sense of security for the younger generations to hop around a little bit more. But there's a risk to that because all the companies who lose intellectual value because their brains are disappearing, so they need to find a way to keep the knowledge in the company, but at the same time provide all the flexibility, all the good stuff.
Tim 45:00 Yeah, intellectual capital has to be put on the balance sheet. Reputational capital needs to be put on the ballot.
Dan 45:10 Yeah, yeah. When we, I mean, older generation, we are more important than your free time. And now that change sort of your free time is more important than your work. So, it's all those aspects as well.
Tim 45:26 In training one group of executives I was working with a couple of months ago, I was talking to them about learned helplessness. And that your employees when you hire them all in many ways, you're never more optimistic about what they can provide, because guess what you've only known them for practically three hours through the interview process, and you've seen their resume, and you've got all sorts of imaginings about what they're going to be capable of. And then the real world hits, and they've got good things, and they've got bad things. And sometimes you're more impressed than disappointed, sometimes you're disappointed than impressed. You begin to judge and classify what this person is capable of, in the course of real work. And if it's not managed properly, you can begin to really instill a great deal of, again, shame, guilt, whatever you want to call it, you can start to let the new employee know when you're disappointed when they’ve failed. And if you do this improperly, and they get confused about what they're actually still in control of, they can stop trying, because they don't know what's going to make you happy, or they don't know what's going to have what's considered winning anymore. And so they get paralyzed because there's no winning, they don't know what the rules of the game are. It was never explained properly, or we didn't connect on it. What is really interesting when we think about the older generation is how much we actually relied on for lack of a better term. And I'm sure I'm going to be raked for saying this. But how much we relied on learned helplessness. We were helpless to affect whether or not we needed to be in the office working. We were helpless to alter sort of the the level of negotiation and how we would go about applying for a job. We were helpless to initiate a human rights complaint or something like that if something happened. I mean, I wasn't prone to it. But man, I worked in some industries, specifically in kitchens, where they still wouldn't pass muster when it comes to how people are supposed to be treated. I mean, it's just way too aggressive. Right? So, helping these new dynamic multigenerational workplaces, dealing with this pace of change and all the new opportunities it brings, as well as the expertise and all the lessons we've learned and all the organizational knowledge that we've captured. Man, I love the work I do. It is so complex, which again is why I love talking to a guy like you because complexity is your is your stock and trade. Right?
Dan 48:07 Yeah, no, I love it. Just the fact that it's changing so much all the time, and you have to adapt to people and you have to adapt to technology and systems. Talk to people to bring everything together. That's what's kept me going, daily basically.
Tim 48:26 Let me ask you a question. Now I'm gonna want to break this down to some practical advice for leaders. I'm gonna take a risk here, we may have to cut it out. If you think about a large system that you're installing, or augmenting for a client, and they can be end-to-end? Am I?
Dan 48:45 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, it can be.
Tim 48:50 In order for that system to be designed for improvement, what are three-four attributes that you need to keep in mind when you're designing that IT landscape? What are some design characteristics that allows it to be nimble and change?
Dan 49:09 Well, first of all, you need to build a modularization, modularize. Oh, that's a hard word to say.
Tim 49:15 Modularization. Yeah, modular, it’s got to be modular.
Dan 49:20 And also the, it's very important how you design your system. You basically have very small parts of your system that can connect together to make a feature, for example. So, if you have an order system, you have one little part that deals with the client or the customer, you have one little part in that that deals with the history of the orders and one little part that deals with what happens when the customer do an order so you have to break it down in very small bits. Which makes changes much easier. It is not gonna be super simple anyway, but it's going to be much easier to deal with, you don't have to change your whole system, you have to change parts.
Tim 50:10 So, the idea that you can change part of it, and that is modular from design, and that you understand what the different bits are for and what they do. And that they are specialized in a sense. Leep those three things is as paramount, everything will be a little bit easier, much easier. In fact, we do the wrong thing, it becomes static, that becomes the brick of a mainframe that we have to, you know, tear right down to its nuts, if we're going to change anything.
Dan 50:41 Well, there are huge breaks in maps as well. So, it's hard to do.
Tim 50:47 All right. Now, here's where my instinct is leading to me, leading me to, if we translate that thinking into how a person approaches their leadership style, then maybe the running of their team, let's just start with the knowledge of self, the fluency of self. If I take a modular approach, to my sense of self, if I think of myself as not one big thing, but a bunch of little things, how would that affect my ability to change and adapt?
Dan 51:25 I think you need to be flexible as a person, and you need to learn how to accept new things, and you need to be able to process new things and see if this is a good thing, or if it's gonna hinder me, or if it’s gonna reward me, or if it's gonna make my life easier. So, you need to change that. Also, when you're working with people, you have to delegate, that's the most important thing, when you work as a leader. Because you don't know everything, there is always people that know things much better than you and use them. Because then you can change, basically, because you have people working for you that know things very well.
Tim 52:19 I think I get where you're going here. And when I think of that modular aspect, it parallels to changing a part of what you're doing, or one of your thoughts or one of the ways you conceptualize things, or even that what you were an expert now is now obsolete, and you have to lean on other things, that modular approach means that we can protect, well not protect but it doesn't alter our sense of self. It doesn't threaten the whole, it's just a part. It's just a thing, right? And then when you said about delegating, and I think about that, the bits that all do different things. One of the first moves that I make with teams or with leaders or executives working on their career, is that they understand all the different roles in which they show up in, and that there's a certain function they have in this group that they don't have in this group. So, how are you entering the meeting? Do you know what your your role is? When this employee comes to you, do you know what they're asking you to be? Are they asking you to be the critic of their work? Or do they need somebody that helps you sort out a confidence issue? What role are you filling? What bit are you accessing right now? So, Dan, I'd like to ask you, if you were to focus on some of the most actionable advice that you would offer to leaders, what would be the things that you would say that have to be at the forefront of their mind?
Dan 53:58 I think the most important thing is to be transparent. Be able to communicate and to listen, because you're dealing with people, and there is not one person that it's the same as the other one. Everybody has different needs. Everybody wants different things. Everyone has different personal lives, which affects their work life. So, you need to be able to communicate. I think a big thing is to be transparent and to listen.
Tim 54:28 And if we fail to do that, we're treating that person like they are just a mindless cog. And they’ll be disappointed.
Dan 54:38 Yeah, because they're human beings. A human being is happy then they will produce.
Tim 54:47 Should we have hope for how technology is changing and what it's going to allow us to become as a species, as a planet?
Dan 55:00 Hmm, philosophical. The software, I think people– Tim 55:01 Guilty, guilty. Dan 55:03 I think people will evolve together with technology, we are kind of staring our own destiny in that sense, because we are making technology do things for us as a human species. We are lazy by nature, we have these machines that do things for us. So yeah, of course, we're going to move towards that. We are always in a transition state, there is no finite state, this is nothing more it's going to happen, it's always going to happen. We always going to have these generational clashes like we have with the younger, they will have kids and they will suffer the same thing. When they get older, their kids will evolve in things where in ways that we can't even imagine. So, I think there's a constant evolution.
Tim 56:00 Well, Dan, you've really opened my eyes to a number of things here. And I love that we're at the place we're at. We talked, some of the big things that I'm going to take away from this is that idea of being able to stay in that state of creativity, and that letting go and knowing that things are shifting constantly. And that they're not just shifting for us, but they're shifting for everyone. And that when we approach others to understand, you know, be transparent, perhaps vulnerable, listen, and be empathetic. And really communicate clearly to try to cut out as much of the error as possible. Because everybody's in this change with us. And they're all changing in their own ways. And we need to focus on giving up that sense of control over the how necessarily, unless we've got things to add, so that we can embrace who we are and focus on our own happiness, and then the realization that everybody else deserves the same thing. They deserve to find themselves and be happy in that. Dan 57:25 Absolutely. Yeah. Tim 57:25 So, in that sense, I mean, technology can really open up, perhaps a greater level of humanity. Because it'll take us farther away from this industrialized kind of mindset.
Dan 57:25 Yeah, I hope so. We'll see.
Tim 57:30 All right. Well, here, let's go through some of the final thoughts here. If a person wants to engage with you, and consider their own technological journey, or just reach out, where's the best place for them to link up with you?
Dan 57:47 That would be email or LinkedIn.
Tim 57:51 Okay. So, we'll put both of your contact spots there. If I was to ask you, maybe it's the boat, maybe it's something else. But what do you have going on perhaps professionally, or in your life that you're really excited about? And that you would want people to be aware of that you're, you know, the circles that you're moving in professionally, or the efforts that you're expending? What are some things that you're excited about?
Dan 58:19 Oh, what am I excited about? I'm working on a big system right now. We are not gonna transition a very old system. That is all we're talking ourself into new technology new. I can't say what the client is, because it's, but that's gonna be really exciting to be part of and work with. That's a huge job.
Tim 58:46 And helping people know that it's possible.
Dan 58:50 Yeah and also, it's a great realization of the client that they need to do it. They can't just bound virtues their old system.
Tim 59:01 You know, it's funny, because when we think about organizational change, especially cultural change, people have to come to terms with that systems and processes and policies that were designed under certain mindsets, actually solidify and calcify that behavior in the organization. And sometimes if you're going to go through this real meaningful change, you got to admit that stuff.
Dan 59:31 Yeah, yeah you have to. Could be a time when people are at ready, when the companies are ready to do it then we can do it. You can't force a change like this. That's just how it is.
Tim 59:42 We don't want to force it. But oh, wow, I imagine that it's when they're ready, it's a heck of a lot easier than if you're pushing rope. What is one wish that you want every listener to leave this conversation with? What do you hope for everybody that's listening?
Dan 59:59 I wish people, all people in general to be a little bit more transparent and listen more to people around you. Because people are amazing. And you can learn a lot from them.
Tim 1:00:14 Yeah, that's great. Last order of business. Dan 1:00:15 Last order of business. Dan 1:00:17 Yeah, last order of business for the next guest on Sweet on Leadership. Put them on the hot seat. What's a question you would want them to answer to get us going to break the ice that you are really curious about?
Dan 1:00:35 What you know, now, would you change anything when you graduated school? If you could turn back time?
Tim 1:00:43 If you could turn back time, what would you say to your younger self? Change when you graduated school? Okay. All right. Dan Löfquist, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. I'm so glad I got to spend this time with you and learn a little bit more about you and connect on this level. And I'm really happy. I'm really happy that I can bring this expertise all the way from the sticks in Sweden, to everybody that's going to be listening around the world. So thank you so much.
Dan 1:01:18 My pleasure. My pleasure, Tim.
Tim 1:01:20 Take good care and enjoy that boat.
Dan 1:01:23 I will, I will.
Tim 1:01:30 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership. Please give us a positive rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word too by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening. And be sure to tune in in two weeks time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 19 Jun 2024 | The Permission to Seek the Career You Deserve | 00:30:58 | |
In this insightful episode, Tim responds to the most compelling questions submitted by listeners over the past year. A major theme explores permitting yourself to make big changes. Tim dives deep into topics such as recognizing and navigating career slumps, the evolving nature of skill sets in rapidly changing industries, and how to pursue passion in your career. For those balancing leadership roles with creative ambitions, Tim offers guidance on re-engaging with your passions without sacrificing your career progress. Tim shares practical advice on determining whether it's time for a career shift or if you're just in a temporary slump. He also tackles the challenges of feeling obsolete in an automated world and provides strategies for reassessing your career path. Lastly, he discusses the complex interplay between career progression and family life, providing ideas for maintaining balance and fulfillment in both areas. -- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: -- Tim 00:34 Do you rely on others to set a vision and then give them what they need so that they can achieve something they never would be able to do on their own? Whether or not you formally lead a team. If this sounds like you, then you, my friend, are the definition of a leader. And this show is all about bringing you new insights from real people that you've never been exposed to. So, you can grow and increase your impact on the world and feel more fulfilled while you're doing it. I'm Tim Sweet and I want to welcome you to the Sweet on Leadership podcast. This is episode 35. Tim 01:10 Hey, thanks for joining me, this week, it's going to be just you and me, we're going to be flying solo, somebody had come to me and said that they really liked the direction that the podcast is heading. And one of the things that they noticed is that everybody that's been on, it seems to have this really clear sense of who they are and what they do. And they have been able to take a big bold step, and change their life up. And they encouraged me to do an episode where we talk about giving yourself permission to make big change. What is it we need to do in order to shake ourselves up and to seek something better? So, what I've done is I've gone through some of the best questions that I've received over the last year, and there are dozens of them, and I narrowed it down to 10. And I'm hoping to get through five, maybe more today, if we can. Give you a bit of the response that I would have provided the person writing, and then build on those. So, if you're one of the people that have contributed these questions you're going to know, and thank you very much for listening. Thank you to all of you. Without listeners, this podcast doesn't have much of a purpose, does it? So, I'm really happy to find out that you're getting value from it, that you're enjoying the eclectic mix of leadership experts, and insightful visionaries that we've got joining us every week, and I can't wait to bring you the next 30 episodes. So, let me start off by saying, my goal in life has always been to not have people struggle. Nothing bothers me more than when I come into a relationship with a person and I understand that they've got something in their life that just really is, not just hard, but it's routinely hard. It's this pattern of struggle that they've got. When I work with teams, I look for the same thing. Where do we have patterns of unnecessary struggle? Work should be challenging, work should be hard, we should be applying ourselves and we should be enjoying taking our skills to difficult problems and projects and making them better. But working with people shouldn't be hard. And being a fit for a job shouldn't be hard. We spend so many hours of our lives in a profession that we deserve, to really feel like that profession is bowing us up. So, whether you're a leader, and you're used to talking to me or listening to the podcast with ears of a person that's leading a team, or you're somebody who's involved in a profession, or a pursuit, where they're really a subject matter expert, or they want to leave a legacy, I'd encourage you to listen to these questions. Each one of them I think builds on an aspect of that finding permission to seek out more, it doesn't always mean leaving a job either. Sometimes it can be reengineering the job that you've got, and looking very specifically for those elements of the job that you are struggling with. It's such a huge part of my profession now to work with executives who are climbing ladders of success or are getting more and more passionate about the areas that they operate in, whether that's leading people, or organizations, or ideas. So, let's dive right into it. And I'm going to just take the first five of these questions, and we'll see how we get on. Heck, it’s my podcasts, so if we don't get through all of them, and you like this, make sure that you give us a follow, tell your friends and drop me a line, find me on LinkedIn and say, hey, you know, do more of that. Tim 04:50 So, this person was writing, and they came to us from Ireland. And the question reads like this, feeling stuck in my current marketing role, what are some of the signs that I should be looking for telling me it's time for a change? I've been in this position for several years, and I'm torn, I'm not sure if I'm just experiencing a slump, that's gonna pass. Or if it's really time to move on. I also feel guilty, because I'm leaving colleagues that I've built relationships with and a product that I'm really proud to develop and bring to market. So, you know, when I encounter people like this, that are at this tipping point, and they need to decide if this is something that's going to pass, or if they're just in some sort of a temporary negative phase, or if it really is something deeper? Well, first of all, we'll try to identify the source of discomfort. I remember back in 2012, helping a particular executive through this and drawing a cartoon on a whiteboard to do it. And it's funny, I tell the story quite a bit when I open this whiteboard, and I seem to open it every week. I took a snapshot of it, later on, I coloured it using an app on my phone, and I can't seem to get away from this particular cartoon. Anyway, in the cartoon, we'll see this person that's sitting there in the doldrums. So, the first question that I ask is, is getting the work done frustrating? Or is the work no longer a fit? Is it no longer a good match for you? When we're looking at what could be the sources of frustration, they tend to be things that provide operational ambiguity, right? If you want to think of it that way? Do you have goals? Are they clear? Do you understand what's next? Is the team that you have, the right team? Is it large enough? Does it have enough capacity? And does that team possess the right skills? Do you have the right skills for the work that you're being asked to do? And when all of those are true, can you be appreciated for the work you're doing? Just this morning, I talked to somebody who was telling me that one of the concerns that they have constantly is that they will put in a great deal of effort. And I don't know if it's being appreciated, or if people are seeing it as progress. This is a particular issue that came up during COVID, as we had teams rallying together, and trying to just make it through. And that all-hands-on-deck mentality, we had people that were really going above and beyond. But when the danger passed, and we were all going through it, it was like organizations were almost too fatigued to acknowledge just how much work had been done. Because there was always another crisis right around the corner. As we've come through COVID, we are much more sensitive about how we spend our time and our money, and where our lives are headed. So, it's increasingly important that we feel that our contributions are valuable. And for no small percentage of the population, they have to be able to see their progress or be acknowledged for what they're providing. Okay, all of those things can create frustration. When we look at fit, we have a few other things to deal with. You know, one is, are we really happy with the style, the interactive style of the people that we work with? Do we enjoy their language? Do we enjoy their energy? Do we enjoy how they communicate? Do we enjoy how they raise problems? Is it something that fits with us that we can respond to? Or does it raise our hackles? Or does it bore us senseless? So, do we fit with the style of communication that's going on in the team that we're with? And if it's not the interactive style of people, it could be the task type that we don't fit with. Is it overly routine? Is it troubleshooting? Is it scheduling? Is it pure head-down, execution? Is it strategic? Some people love strategic work, and some people loathe it. Some people love tactical work, and some people loathe it. And many people love crossing tasks off a list. And some people loathe it. Is the task type of the work that you're doing currently something that you fit with? And then perhaps one of the largest ones, which likely warrants its own category, but it doesn't seem to be a problem with our friend from Dublin here. Do you have a connection with the values on the team? And if there's disconnect, is it small or large? Unless it's a big values disconnect, we can pretty much overcome any of these through good planning. And so to my friend here in Dublin, the advice was and remains that they should get very clear on exactly where do they feel this slump. Because likely, it's not a general malaise, it's a feeling of an expenditure of energy in the form of bad fit or frustration, which is causing them to not feel one with the team, one with the work, or like they're progressing. Once we can get that out in the open, then we can take very, very defined steps to go and get it. So, if you find yourself in a position where you're in a slump, get granular, ask yourself those questions. Is it fit, or is it frustration? And then take a look at if you see some answers, because usually those will give you a roadmap that you can approach with your team, or your leader, and talk about how we can shift some of the work. Tim 10:48 Alright, the second question that came to me this read, you highlight a lot of people who have found their passion, similar to the person I talked to last week, but I don't feel like my skill set is relevant anymore. I work in market research, and the industry is automating quickly. And I'm assuming they mean the AI or something. And I'm worried about being able to compete using my current skill set, as a Gen X. Hey, welcome to The Club. It's frustrating for me to feel like my experience might not be enough this late in life, what steps can I take, as I'm starting to feel obsolete? Okay, this is a very, very common problem, especially as we're seeing people arrive late in their careers, there's a couple of options. I mean, one option is that you can try to find a place that's not using technology, that's a possibility. But let's just take that one off the table, because frankly, that means that you're having to settle. And I'd never think that it's a great idea to go and find a substandard industry to just hope you can sort of survive in it. But you do have a lot to consider. It's important to break down your experiences, not simply looking at the industry, how they've been applied. But what are you actually gifted at? Market research, as an example, has several transferable skills that can be brought into other forms of analysis, other forms of investigation, and all sorts of things. And this is going to be different for many different market researchers, these skills will not be consistent across the entire group, because each one of them will have gravitated to slightly different mixes of skills. And so in this case, it's really taking a look at you're not starting from zero here, you have skills, and passions, and interests, and habits, and a style all your own, that can be very, very conducive to success elsewhere. And it's just about finding where that elsewhere might be. The other thing to think about in this particular case is that you know, often people discount their skills or their worth because they begin to use the metrics that they're given at work. They're seeing themselves first through their role, or through an annual assessment that the company creates. We have to remember just how myopic that is, that is not a real-life expression of just how much is there. But if you tend to be in the same company for quite a while, that same industry for quite a while, you start to feel pigeon-holed. Really important to get out and take a look at what you really like doing and where else can that be applied. And you'd be surprised how successful people can be. I remember that in 2015, right in through COVID for some people, we had layoffs in the geotechnical space. Geologists are amazing at understanding the unknown, and really taking calculated guesses of where we're going to find value. And it doesn't have to be downhole looking for gold or oil or anything like this. They can be doing interesting searches for possibilities in all sorts of areas. Market research would be among them. But of course, we don't want to saturate that market any longer. Engineers said the same thing, engineers who realize just how artistic they are can jump all over the place. So, don't get too crammed into the idea that you're only one thing that you are your industry, if I can say it that way. Tim 14:31 Hi from South Africa. I recently graduated from Limpopo Turfoop Graduate School, and I'm exploring different career paths. It's exciting but also overwhelming. There seems to be so many possibilities. I want to make sure I choose a path that aligns with me and my interests. You seem to talk to people who are so happy. How can I make the best decision? Martha. Okay, Martha, you know if you are coming out of school, maybe for the first time, maybe you're a returning student and upgrading or something. The typical advice is that you need to research all of your possible career options and make a plan. But, you know, we have to be careful what criteria we put against these. And that's one of the most important things when we're giving ourselves permission to look elsewhere, is make sure that we have become very, very precise in the criteria that we're looking at. You can't necessarily just look at what's the most prestigious first step or what has the biggest paycheck? Or which company wooes you to join them with all sorts of promises? And you need to be very, very precise. Well, how do you do that if you're not part of a company? The answer is kind of, we have to flip it, you don't want to look necessarily at the company first, you want to look at being fluid, becoming fluent in what aspects of your work fit, your workstyle, the type of work that you are performing in any given day, what brings you the most amount of joy. And then we look where others with a similar mix to you are also experiencing joy, we try to find our people somewhere, they don't have to be precisely like you, but they have to be in compatible spaces. If we always focus on that, if we focus on first looking at finding the best, the best choice among options that we've predetermined, already have a very high probability of fitting us, then we are going to be much more successful when it comes to choosing something that we can try out and really experience enjoying work in a certain industry. Enjoying a certain industry will never compensate for not enjoying the actual work you're doing in that industry. I help a lot of people 10 years down the road, that find out they really dislike the industry they originally chose. And they could have been choosing it for really wrong reasons. Just check out the last episode we put out with Julie Freedman Smith. I mean, we talked about exactly this right, getting stuck in the wrong place. One important note here is it's not about personality fit, you don't want to just look for people that have the same personality as you. Personalities are somewhat fluid as we grow and as we mature. Know, these things that we're going to try to understand and measure are much longer lasting, you can look for hints in what you find the most amount of fulfillment in or the type of work and contributions you find the most amount of energy and joy in. Things that you've experienced up to this point in your life and I promise you that if you focus on those things that make you feel the most productive, you will make a good decision. Alright, let's move right along. Tim 17:51 So, we're on to our fourth question here. Let's see. So, let's do this one, feeling stuck in my career. It's not what I signed up for. I used to love the creative process. But over the years, I have been put in the lead of bigger and bigger teams. And I know leadership is your thing, Tim, but I'm much more interested in getting back to actually creating stuff. I'm jealous of my staff's freedom. And well, I like working with strategy. I just don't feel like I'm contributing. What strategies would you recommend for reassessing my career, possibly making significant change? I'm passionate about design. I wanted my legacy to be about design and not managing, my idols used to be Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry, how can I evaluate, I got to figure out who those people are? I know Frank Lloyd Wright is but Frank Gehry, I'm gonna research. How can I evaluate my options, and move to something that reignites my passion and puts me ahead again? Okay, so ahead, we'll assume, I'll assume you mean your legacy. Okay. Yeah. And that's what, how I would answer this question. Well, when I think about a person that's in your position, and I mean, the previous answers will still fit. I mean, let's take a look at, you know, what's frustrating, etc. But this is more of a career path discussion. You're already somewhere and you found yourself in a leadership position. And you miss being on the tools, so to speak, not uncommon, not uncommon at all. Primarily, and let me talk about why for a minute, primarily, because in a lot of organizations, the only way up is taking on management positions. Unless the organization is very large, and can handle more than one expert. There's less room to move up as a technical specialist, or a subject matter expert, or really a visionary in a certain idea space, that's much less common. But for all of you who run big corporations out there, it's absolutely essential that you have that pathway for people, otherwise you're going to really miss out on a lot of talent. The interesting thing here is when we think about being again, stuck in a sense of having taken the wrong off-ramp. And now we've got to, we've probably got to get back on to our main road, you're in a leadership position, you have leverage, you have choices you can make, you can decide perhaps, in your own strategy, maybe without even asking anybody that you're going to take a portion of the work, you're going to have a small portfolio of things that you directly contribute to, this is not a bad idea. It's not a bad idea for a couple of reasons. One, is, at least in the short term, while your staff perhaps need to be prepared for you to go somewhere, you could fill your boots with your own project, that is something that you could really, you could really do. So, we want to look at what leverage we have. And in a leadership position, you got a fair amount, and then what choices are you not currently making that you could be making, that could be, take on a portion of the work, there's nothing wrong to going where the work is done, and getting your hands dirty for a little bit. Not to mention, it frees up some leadership opportunities for others. It's not unheard of to have people demote themselves, or become a visionary subject matter expert, being sponsored by their business. The other thing, and this is not something that when I responded to this individual, this is not something that I would take lightly. But if you have this passion, and you really are concerned with legacy, understanding that being part of a. when you look at Frank Lloyd Wright, or you'll look at okay, standby. So, Frank Gehry, I just looked it up, he designed the Guggenheim and a few other things. So, these are, you know, both architects, they had teams that were underneath them, by all means, but they were the visionaries within this this organization. Does your organization have a visionary at the top? Or does it have a finance professional or something like that running it, I don't know your your specific situation. But in this kind of a case, well, why not take a shot for the top seat, or alternatively, why not decide to start your own show, and go out there and take all of the business knowledge that you have, and hire the right people that can do it, and open your own design house. I would say that talent is not a small consideration here. So, selling the farm and banking on the fact that you can be at the level of this, probably you should be making sure that you have a marketable style, and those kinds of things. There is a pathway here. And that's why I think, you know, taking some side projects, or working within the system that you're currently in could be an excellent way to do that. But at a certain point, if you decide that you are the big cheese, and you are the selling feature, embrace that, become that creator with the team in behind them, not somebody managing a team that's producing it in more of a commercial organization. Lots of choices there, always take a good look at just how much leverage you've got and just where you are making choices. Before you do, you've got to be very, very fluent in who you are, and where you want to work. You also want to be really sure that you've got something to sell that people will buy. But that being said, it is a wonderful life, to feel fully in charge of bringing what you're best at into the world. Tim 23:40 Number five. Now, this is the type of question when I get makes me really happy. Like I talked about the person that inspired all of this is a similar question. As a mom returning to work, I need tips on balancing career progression with family life. Before I had kids, I was very aggressive and had set big aspirations. But how can I now manage both, effectively? It's tough to juggle my responsibilities at home with my work and still try to excel. I feel guilty for not being able to give my all to either space, what strategies can help me find a better balance and ensure that I can progress in my career without neglecting my family? Okay, there's a lot to break down here. The first is there's always going to be a struggle between vital and moral courage. Vital courage is the ability to do what's most important for you, that you can stand up for yourself, and your values, and your health, and all of these things. And then the next thing is you have to stand up for the moral courage of any structure that you're part of. One of those structures is going to be your family. Another is going to be your work and you might have others. In our family, we have the dance studio, that we’re part of, we have the schools that were involved in, and we have other structures that were part of. I sit on boards and things like this. Okay. So, the first thing I'd like you to realize here is this balance is actually three ways, it's you, and your family, and your job. Your career aspirations are separate from the job. And your family responsibilities are separate from that job, or you. So, imagine trying to balance a set of scales, thinking that there's two baskets to add weight to, when there's actually three. And then you're not dealing with a, you know, straight across two-dimensional scale, you're dealing with a three-dimensional scale. No wonder we have difficulty finding a balance. The second thing is just the notion of balance, although we use it, it's more about an appropriate blend between these things. Because balancing something assumes that they are on two opposing ends, or in this case, three opposing ends of an equation. We need to think much differently than that. There's a lot of work that I do with people to have breakthrough structural sessions around understanding just what these decisions and what these opposing tensions are in their lives, and when they're in conflict and how we can resolve them. But the Coles notes is that it's very difficult to keep them in the opposition. And instead, we have to make a decision and design an approach that really properly prioritizes what we do first and second, and everything else becomes features of the priority. So, getting clear, in this particular, it is a false dichotomy. Because there's other things at play here. But when we think about balancing home versus career, being at peace with what comes first is really important. Because am I going to be fulfilling all of my responsibilities of the home and achieving my career aspirations when I can? Or am I going to achieve my career aspirations, and ensure that I am compensating or filling the responsibilities in some way that I have at home? Sounds like I'm being cute. But if you think about having a blend, where that future, where everything is properly blended, and serves each other, as part of a design, you now have one thing pulling you forward, one massive well-working thing, you're not torn between two things, or three things, right, so we have to get back into what I like to call work-life design, which is, what is the design behind care for ourselves and our family and our work and all of the areas that we choose to, I like to say lead, I really do. Because it doesn't matter if you're managing a team or something, you're taking on responsibility greater than yourself, you're really not passive in this, you are being really active and caring, both for yourself and others and people you've never met, right? So, my advice, in this case, is to stop first with trying to balance stuff, make some hard choices, make them well, and once you make those choices, you're going to find that you're in a much greater state of flow. Flow, structures, tensions, all of these things are very important to understand that it's part of a larger effort that I think is so important for all of you listening. And that is to become very, very fluent in your life, and what you care about and what you're out for, and to focus on those things that matter most. And to begin to cut away a lot of the rest. Tim 28:47 So, whether or not you see yourself inside these examples, I’d encourage you to just ponder some of these questions and consider for yourself, do you have the job that you deserve right now? Do you have the work-life blend that you deserve? We get what we deserve in a lot of spaces. Do we have the car that we deserve, do we have the watch we deserve? Do we wear the clothes we deserve? Sure. But then we suddenly become a lot more passive when it comes to our own well-being. It's very easy to neglect oneself in one's path and to just soldier on and it never works out that well. Whereas, when we spend a little bit of time understanding ourselves and making great decisions that take us forward, and following the amazing advice that we've gotten over the last year for many of the guests that have been on the show, whether it is really focusing in on your passion or finding positivity in the workspace or dealing with your mindset or cutting away the noise or focusing on that true north. There's so many lessons that have taken place over the last 35 episodes that I really hope you take some time if you haven't listened to the back catalogue and find what resonates with you because the answers are there. We just need to love ourselves enough that we listen and are able to articulate them. I'm always available if you'd like to ask questions like this, if you have ideas for future podcasts, or you have other questions you'd like me to add to this list that I did not finish and will not finish tonight, feel free to go ahead and reach out to me and find me on LinkedIn. Or you can reach me at teamworkexcellence.com I really appreciate you taking the time to spend with me. And I really commend you for taking a little bit of time for yourself. Keep doing that. Keep on leading, keep leading the best life that you can. Look for another episode in two weeks. Thanks for joining me.
Tim 30:46 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership. Please give us a positive rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word to by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening. And be sure to tune in in two weeks time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 18 Oct 2023 | Streamlining Your Workflow with Sarah Elder | 00:45:40 | |
In this episode, Tim Sweet is joined by special guest Sarah Elder. Sarah is the director of strategic initiatives at a battery storage energy company called Infinite and the founder of Prep Your Professional Designation (PYPD). Sarah shares her insights on productivity, focus, and the importance of effective task management. The conversation centers around the challenges of staying focused in a world filled with distractions and the impact of ADHD on productivity. Sarah emphasizes the critical step of capturing tasks efficiently and using a reliable system for organization. She also introduces Todoist, a task management app that she finds highly effective due to its easy capture features and flexibility. Tim and Sarah discuss the power of task management and productivity using the Todoist app. They highlight key features like team collaboration, single ownership of tasks, and the importance of clear accountability. The conversation dives into organizing tasks with sections and labels, as well as utilizing priority levels (P1, P2, P3, P4) based on the Eisenhower matrix. Sarah emphasizes the importance of context in task management and how it leads to a sense of calm and control. They also touch on custom filters and views in Todoist, such as the "Today" and "Upcoming" views. \Dive into this episode to revolutionize your productivity and take control of your to-do list like never before. About Sarah Elder Sarah Elder is the director of strategic initiatives at Enfinite, a battery storage energy company. She is also the founder of Prep Your Professional Designation (PYPD), a startup aimed at helping professionals manage various aspects of their professional development. Sarah's expertise lies in productivity, task management, and leveraging technology to enhance efficiency in both professional and personal spheres. Resources discussed in this episode: -- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Sarah Elder | Prep Your Professional Designation: -- Transcript: Sarah 00:01 One thing I learned is that writing anything down, everything down, is the most important step. Capturing has to just be easy and efficient. And it has to be somewhere that you can find it again. Quick scraps of paper, dangerous, easy to lose. A notebook that you'll stick with forever, like glue, also a great solution. It doesn't have to be your phone because that comes with other risks. Then, the second half is using what you've captured, processing it, tracking it, working with it.
Tim 00:33 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you, my friend, are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. This is episode 18. Welcome to the Sweet on Leadership podcast.
Tim 01:08 Hey, everybody, thanks for joining us. Welcome back to Sweet on Leadership. I'm Tim Sweet. And today I am joined by a real special individual. This is my friend, Sarah Elder. Sarah's coming to us today to talk about, well talk about remaining focused, and I think it's an area that she's got so much to offer. She's a very interesting individual. I want you to hear all about her. But for right now, let me just say Hi, Sarah. Sarah 01:34 Hey, Tim, how's it going? Tim 01:37 It's good. Sarah, maybe you can talk a little bit about all the cool stuff that you're involved in right now? Sarah 01:42 Oh, yeah, I have a few things on the go. I started a new job recently at a battery storage energy company called Enfinite, where I'm the director of strategic initiatives. And on the side, I have a startup called PYPD, Prep Your Professional Designation, which is focused on helping professionals manage many aspects of their professional development. Tim 02:05 Anybody out there that's in engineering, or any of especially, you know, APEGA, or any of those organizations? Check out PYPD because if you're dealing with engineers and training GIOS and training, it is a fantastic resource. Sarah 02:20 Yeah, that's who we're helping right now. And we're excited to bring it to other designations, hopefully next year. But our engineers are our bread and butter niche that we're trying to help right now. Tim 02:29 Right on, if you are an engineer or have an engineer you love, check out the show notes, we'll make sure we link to it. And that's how you and I met was through PYPD which is, which is great. But today, we're here to talk about something else that you introduced me to, we're gonna get a little bit into an app called Todoist. But before we get there, let's talk about the reason why tools like Todoist actually exist. So, what do we see today that we didn't see 10 years ago? Sarah 02:59 Definitely, people are more distracted. You know, there's more distractions than ever right in front of our faces. We were talking about a pretty cool stat, well, not a cool stat and the unfortunate stat that 60 some percent of people, what was it 60% of people, when they're watching TV, have a second screen in front of them? Tim 03:18 That's right. Yeah, and we're seeing some other things come up. I mean, over the last 10 years, they say that we've seen an increase from declared adult ADHD from just over 6% to now just over 10%. And that may not seem extreme, but that's 8 million people in the US are declared and 139 million worldwide that are identifying in that way. Think about the level of whether or not you agree with the need to be diagnosed or whatnot. It's just the fact that we've got people out there that are coming to the table saying, You know what, I have a different way of thinking. Sarah 03:58 Yeah, yeah, I'm one of those 8 million as well. A lot of women are now being diagnosed with ADHD later in life. And that's actually how I came to love to do it so much. It's the culmination of a decade of trying to figure out how to just get anything done. How to make any progress. And yeah, I'm sure we'll talk a lot about that. Tim 04:22 Absolutely. And I mean, and whether or not that's the case for you, dear listener, we all can go through periods where we feel anxiety, we may not be meeting the goals that we set out for ourselves, we may find that through the course of the day, we're forgetting to do something, or we're just handling a lot of complexity. If you're bothered when you let somebody down or you don't follow through on a promise. I mean, that, to me is debilitating. I absolutely hate if that happens, and just that we could be missing important things. We may not be prioritizing things the way that we should in our lives. So, I think for all these reasons, we can have a lot of pressure building up in our lives, we can have a lot of self-criticism and things going on. And what if you had a tool where you could step around that, and develop a system, as you say, to make life just that much easier. And with so much distraction in the world, that's not going away. I mean, I think that's one of the things we can say for sure, and for certain, it's not going away. So, we have to utilize the best tools that we've got at our disposal. So, perhaps you can tell us what did it mean to you, to have a system emerge for yourself what's the journey toward a system. Sarah 05:38 So, I actually got the benefit of not being diagnosed with ADHD. And there is a lot of downsides that came with that. But we're going to talk about the upside, which is how I came to find Todoist. And that's when you have ADHD, one of the hardest parts is a severe lack of working memory, and as well as executive dysfunction. So, working memory is being able to remember something someone just told you a couple of action items from a meeting or those chores that somebody asked you to do downstairs, just remembering that can be almost impossible sometimes. And then the executive dysfunction is being able to execute tasks. And that's the main part of the brain that's actually impacted by ADHD is, is the executive dysfunction. And so it makes it just being able to do something, harder. And so when you're constantly trying to overcome that, if you're not using any tools to help you, you're kind of just out on your own, with an unreliable brain and an unreliable system. And so that's like the ADHD perspective on it. But that applies to pretty much everybody, we can't remember everything, we have more going on in our lives, we have more complicated lives than ever, because we have so many opportunities in this modern world. And so, because I didn't know that I had ADHD, I unfortunately was quite hard on myself. I thought I was lazy. I thought I was stupid, totally incompetent. And I was always trying to better myself and overcome that, without realizing that there was some other solutions that would have really helped me. Instead, I had to develop my own tools and develop my own system. One thing I learned is that writing anything down, everything down is the most important step. Capturing has to just be easy and efficient. And it has to be somewhere that you can find it again. Quick scraps of paper, dangerous, easy to lose. A notebook that you'll stick with forever, like glue, also a great solution. It doesn't have to be your phone, because that comes with other risks. Then the second half is using what you've captured, processing it, tracking it, working with it. I can stop there before I get too far down the rabbit hole. But those are kind of the two pieces that led me here, is capturing all the things that I'm going to forget. And then making it easier to action them and easier to keep track of them. Tim 08:05 I'm quite a number of years ahead of you on this planet. But over the course of COVID, I mean, we were looking into our children's situation. And I thought it was only fair that I go in and get tested. And when I talked to a psychiatrist, his point was, you know, I'm either on the cusp or whatever, he said, look, you know, 10 years ago, we wouldn't have diagnosed you. But now I can give you a diagnosis if you want. But do, you know, you are also just a very random, very fast thinker. Is it something that he would permit, in my case, say we should medicate he was like, not in this case, there was an anxiety issue that I needed to deal with coming through COVID and having a knee replacement, doing all those kinds of things, something that, that counselling, and everything helped me with greatly, and I was thankful to have access to that support. When it came to looking at my own struggles, if I can share is that you know, I came through always being a very random thinker, always being intensely interested in different things and switching hobbies and really diving deep on things. And when Wikipedia came out way back in the day, ah, man, for me that was just information crack. Like I love rambling from subject to subject and learning about things. In the same way, I like rambling from people to people and learning about people. But I was very, like always, lots and lots of input coming at me. And I remember it wasn't until my university days that I got really adept at taking notes and using a day timer, you know, in a paper scheduler and things, and even now, I mean if I'm in a meeting, I'm a rapid note taker like I just have to get through it. And then I have to process it to the point where and I've had this experience you know sticky notes for me other than being in a facilitation or something are deadly because I would write things down on them, I'd stick them somewhere, and I'd forget about them. And I needed to have that single source of record that I could go through. And as I went through and tried different products and whatnot, you know, this is a podcast so people won't be able to see behind me. But I had a large file structure on my wall that I would meet with a client, it's private feelings and thoughts, I would tear out a page, so I didn't carry it with me, and I put it in their file. When it worked. When it didn't work, my padfolio got full of random pages that I then had to sit and sort, which was just awful. I didn't like that at all, it would get away on me. And now I'm using something called ROCKETBOOK, which everything is digitized. And I get to wash the book with this special link that goes away. So, I feel also more ecological. But it forces me to process. And I love it. I think it's one of the best tools that I've run across because I didn't want to another thing I had to plug in. But really that writing everything down and processing step was such a game changer for me, professionally, and in university and just learning, allowing me to really capture sequential and random thoughts, you know. So, yeah, I can definitely relate to that. I can also relate to the feelings of self-criticism, and you know, being hard on oneself, because perhaps you didn't think like others. But in my days, as a chef, I had one chef that called me a splat learner. He says you don't learn like like cutting the tomato open; you throw it against the wall, and it looks like chaos to everybody else. The flip side is I'm a strong discerner. So, I can walk into a business, and I can see what's going on. And I know this about you, too. Like you've got a high discerning, you're able to process a lot of chaotic data quickly. So we've got these superpowers, but they come at a cost. Sarah 12:00 There is a cost. Tim 12:01 Right? There's a cost. So, if we're going to run real fast, we may have to wear a uniform that doesn't burn up or something. Sarah 12:10 Yeah, and you need really good shoes.
Tim 12:12 Yeah. Okay, great. Let's seek to help people that are listening, that may feel to various degrees, that they've got the tiger by the tail, they are dealing with a lot of inflammation and distraction. So, tell us about, you went from a list and being able to process that list. What was next for you? What's the next stage of evolution? Sarah 12:37 I would have started with just like paper lists, like before fighting to do it. Because I think everybody starts there at some point. You're just gonna write everything down. And I iterated through doing calendars, Google Keep, paper notebooks, paper calendars, kind of a bit of everything. And it got me through university, I never really found any digital tools that I would stick with. Because that's part of it, too, is that there's part novelty, it's part procrastination, like productive procrastination, where you are working on your systems, instead of working on your work. I did a lot of that, oh if I just find a new planner that had the right, you know, columns, or if I just color-coded everything a little bit better. And spending time rewriting lists in different organizations, and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting. And that was what really started to get me is that I'm spending too much time on aesthetics. I'm spending too much time reorganizing, and I'm still just not getting anything done. That's like a hard reality to face. Is that like you are just procrastinating when you're trying to work on these things. Tim 13:54 Oh, yeah. I remember trying to bullet journal. And it was just like, yeah, it was, it was just the worst. Sarah 14:00 Oh, yeah. Tim 14:01 And I wouldn't say I'm done yet, which is one of the reasons why Todoist was so interesting for me, is that I try something, and it works. But if I set it down, and I can't get it into a habit, it's not gonna stick, right? Sarah 14:12 Yeah, I had that same thing. And I so I went down the rabbit hole that ADHD folks and many people will understand. And I looked at every tool, I looked at every option, and I compare it to every feature, and I was like, What do I need a tool to do for me to stick with it? So, I decided I needed Easy, easy, easy capture, capturing has to be the easiest part of this process. If it's even an extra half-second, it's gone. And I have to spend a minute trying to remember what it was and it's just there's like these micro taxes to my time as someone with ADHD is micro taxed constantly. If I'm leaving the door and I have to go upstairs three times to go and get stuff. It takes me 10 minutes to get out the door and you know, someone else two minutes so it's trying to reduce those moments all day. And the second part was something that was very flexible, so that I could change it around as things evolve. I could play with it, some aesthetic parts that I can play with, but not too much. So, there's enough flexibility that I can play with different systems, I've changed how I organize my Todoist several times, in really good ways as I've evolved as my life has changed. But then, you know, you can really only change a couple of colours and a couple of view layouts, you can't waste much time on. And that was really a big part for me is stopping, forcing myself to stop. Tim 15:37 I, we’ll get into me a little bit later. But I think I'm hearing a lot of myself in this story in the struggle. So, you had this element of finding something that was not so much aesthetic, was not so infinitely, well you stopped searching. Sarah 15:55 I stopped searching. I did the big search. Tim 15:57 And something, yeah, did the big search, picked something, and then decided to get good at that something rather than good at the search. And I can relate to that 100%. And I mean, hey, in my time on this planet, and in this role, there's been no shortage of you should do it this ways. Right? That's a strange thing to pluralize. So again, having a system that works, and is reasonably adaptable for our intricacies, but manages the big thing is important. Okay, so take us a little deeper into what you look for, what's the next layer down. So, you found the system. We've said it a bunch of times, but this again, is called Todoist, which is T-O-D-O-I-S-T. And you can find it at the App Store. And I'm sure you can find it online. Sarah 16:48 Actually, I'll plug that as one of the parts that of the things that I look for. It's got great mobile, it's got great desktop, and it's got great web. So, I can use it everywhere all the time. And it's got good widgets for quick entry on your phone. So, that was really important to me, too. And then like I can just see, I can have my to-do list on my phone, I guess as a widget as well. I'm not sure what's available on Apple, but I think they have widgets as well. Tim 17:10 No, it's they do have widgets. And we'll get into this a little bit more. But there's some functionality that I found really compelling, and especially in a team environment and a home environment. Okay, yeah, so, Todoist. Sarah 17:24 Yeah, some other parts that I loved, I really appreciated, aside from being able to capture everywhere, it's actually the way that they enable the capture with natural language processing. So, that means while I'm entering a task or a note because sometimes I use it for quick notes of things I want to remember, but it's the fastest way for me to capture them. So, I don't mind bastardizing my system a little bit to just get it into the any of the system. Because there's a couple of problems. And I'll talk about that as well. You can tag to your projects and add tags, without clicking any buttons. So, as you're typing, if I want to assign a task to a specific project, how it's organized, I just have to add a quick little hashtag, and then the project name, and it'll kind of automatically fill that. And it can recognize dates, and times and reminders. So, if I want to start a new habit, and I say, every day at 10 am, remind me to get up and get water and take a five-minute break. It'll set a daily reminder at 10 am. And make a task every day. It's just like really quick to make those things happen and make changes as your day changes or as you're kind of working with with your list. So, I liked that quick, easy, you'll see that everything I'm trying to do is I'm just reducing friction. Anything that makes working with it faster, easier, smoother is so good for me. The other part that I alluded to earlier is that I don't keep absolutely everything in Todoist. Because another realization is something I had to admit that there's just not one app that does everything. I have not found the Holy Grail. Some people have their own holy grails that they've built in really custom apps. I thought that for me to get there, I would be spending the rest of my time making it pretty, making it work, iterating, iterating instead of doing work. Life tasks live in Todoist, my thoughts and quick ideas live there. But my notes live in Notion, my calendar lives in Google Calendar. I let those things live in the places that do them best instead of trying to wrap it all into one because that just turns into too much work and distracts me from the real important that I'm trying to get to. Tim 19:31 Well right now I'm using notes on the iPhone for my notes and on my– Sarah 19:34 That's great. Tim 19:35 –on my Mac. Sarah 19:37 On, you know, sorry, I'm gonna interrupt. One thing that's great about that is this. There's no formatting. You can't waste time. Header sections, pretty fonts, colour, nope, it's just the text. And that's like the beauty is in that simplicity. Tim 19:52 And I'm just gonna stop there but the note just so we're we got a good game plan going forward. Anybody who knows me? Don't worry about interrupting because we are one brain at this time, and it's like we are two hemispheres banging together here, and that's okay with me. So get it out, while it's there, because otherwise it's gone. And I'm still learning like I'm a baby when it comes to Todoist. But the calendar integration is important. I have yet explored a Slack integration. But that's where we gestate and develop ideas is in Slack. Because I want something that's team ready, which is actually I'll just mention it now, which is the other functionality about Todoist that I really like and that is that other people can, we can share tasks well, shares, not so much how I like to own it, we can pass tasks, back and forth, and people can task me and I love having contractors who are, are higher in the tenacious genius in hiring the wandering genius, they are tasking me with stuff because that helps me augment my weaknesses and my blind spots. I really like being managed at a certain level when it comes to really highly like execution pieces. So, I'm super happy for the person who helps me do writing or the person who's who's helping me with social media. Sarah 21:05 Yeah, I like the team features as well. And they employ a principle that I think is really important to note for team-based task management. And that is a single owner, you cannot assign a task and Todoist with more than one person attached to it. And that is a really important principle of if it's assigned to more than one person, it's assigned to no one, because that creates ambiguity and enough fog, that that thing doesn't get done, or it doesn't get done fast enough, or doesn't get done, right. Oh, I thought that was with you, Oh, I thought you were going to do this thing. And suddenly that thing didn't get done. So, it forces you to assign it to one person. Tim 21:45 I love that too. Because it means you know, hot potato, this is yours now.
Sarah 21:49 Hot potato, it’s with you, it gives that accountability. Tim 21:52 Yeah, pass the ball, pass it fully, pass the baton, pass it fully. It is their time now, until such time as they say it's no longer their time. And that's okay. But then they have to assign ownership to the next person. Sarah 22:05 Exactly, subtasks. You know, there's all kinds of ways to do that. Tim 22:11 But when we talk about collaboration, and really having everybody involved and knowing when to pass something off, it's great to have a system that allows us to do that. And also to know who around us has what skills, has what perspective, so that we can farm work out appropriately, right, farm in farm out and be like, I need you to do this now. And so for real dynamic teams, where they're highly collaborative, but also have people that want to own their little win. It's funny, because I just spent three days with a team talking about this, how do we chunk things down to a point where the people that feel like they need to be strong closers can maybe not wait for the grand reveal at the end for the home run of the entire project being done, but can find meaning every single step along the way that they're involved in. It's so much more rewarding for most people to be able to say, I know that we're not all the way down the path. But I did that. That was my section. And I've worked it. And now I've given it to the next person, I'm ready to take the next piece of work, right? It's extremely, extremely motivating. Awesome. So, we've got the integration, we have the baton pass element to it, and the single owner element. Sarah 23:33 So, we've got everything in our system. And now we've got to work with it. Tim 23:36 We've got to work with it. So, I've got a suggestion here. What if we were to task people that are listening today? To pause this podcast? And go out and get it?
Sarah 23:50 Yeah. Tim 23:51 And maybe even try it a little bit before they, it's dangerous for a podcast to say, you know, come back and join us for part two. But I'm tempted to say let's all now go and get it. Sarah 24:06 Okay, here, I can come up with a quick little exercise they'll take but I gotta give them a five-minute exercise because, you know, otherwise they’ll– Tim 24:15 Get ready everybody, here's your five-minute exercise. Sarah 24:18 Okay. Make an account, log in, set up one project, one new project on the free version, you'll get five. So, pick something kind of general. Whatever is the most important thing in your life right now, that's giving you actually or the thing that's stressing you out the most. Make a project called that. You can change it later. And then just enter a couple of tasks. Put a couple of things in there that are on your mind that are on your to-do list already. And play around with that like the natural language processing a little bit, see what it can kind of do. Try and type some dates for when some things are due. Tim 24:56 Try using the voice feature which I love.
Sarah 24:58 Oh gosh, everyone uses that. Tim 24:59 Instead of my keyboard, I use my microphone and say and I dictate the task and the duration and the date. Sarah 25:07 Oh, perfect, I'm gonna start doing that. I'm getting really into like voice notes to myself and things like that, anyways. Tim 25:11 Okay, so they're gonna go on, they're gonna create, create a– Sarah 25:14 –project. Tim 25:14 What level, project, and make a task. Sarah 25:18 Make a project. Put in at least like three or five tasks. And if you like, put a couple other things, anything else that kind of came to mind while you were doing this, put those in too but put them in your inbox, that's the default place. And then we'll come back and talk about how to kind of strategically process everything that's in your inbox and how to handle things that are already in a project. Tim 25:37 All right, so hit pause, download Todoist, create an account, one project, four to five sub-tasks. And then we're gonna come back. Sarah 25:50 Right, let's do it. Tim 25:51 All right. Hey, Team break.
Tim 25:56 Well, welcome back. By this time, you've downloaded the app, you've either the first time or the second time you were asked to do it, you've gone in, and you've applied to the app, at least one project, and identified a handful of tasks. So, Sarah, what do we do next? Sarah 26:14 Okay, what we're going to do next is organize our project a little bit, which is how we're going to explore some of the features, then we're going to talk about different ways to view everything that you have. And then we're going to go and talk about my favourite strategy for processing everything that you're capturing and making these systems work really well. But you kind of have to understand how the tool works to realize the beauty in those later systems. So, you're gonna circle that way. Tim 26:42 Right on that's about what's about to happen. Now, I haven't included this caveat before, but I'm going to include it now. And that is neither Sarah or I am paid or compensated by Todoist. This is fan wisdom. Here, this is legitimate in the street reviews. So, Todoist will probably be informed that we're we've done this podcast after the fact. But we don't represent the company. So, just an important little caveat there. All right. Back to you, Sarah. Sarah 27:14 All right. Now let's get this kit. I guess I should say I do have a referral link. But other than that, it doesn't actually make me any money to say this. But if anyone does ever upgrade, then I would maybe get something from that. But yeah. Tim 27:28 Fantastic. Well, that referral link. Now you all know the deal. It'll be in the show notes. Sarah 27:34 If anyone ever even uses it, I'll just put that money back towards my premium for Todoist. And use it forever. Tim 27:39 Whoa, all right. Sarah 27:40 Give it to me as a credit. Okay, once you have a task in there or a couple of tasks, you want to be able to organize them. So, within your project, I'm going to walk you through a couple of the features that there are, the first thing is sections. So, this is within a project a way for you to organize. If you want to limit the number of projects that you have, you can use sections as individual projects. That is I think best in the Kanban view where you can see them kind of in their own mini-lists. The Kanban view can also be used as sort of a Productivity Process where things go through stages, not started, in progress type of thing. I don't choose to do it that way, but you could if that interests you. The next really flexible piece is the labels. These are processed through the natural language processing with an @ sign. And I've used them a couple of different ways. Since the app only has five projects, when you're on the free version. I used to use the labels to be my projects, like my sub-projects. So I would tag it like to, you know, I would take it to PYPD, I would tag it to a home project, something like that to keep them organized. I also like to use the labels as indicators for how much time a task might take actually, I probably won't need to do that anymore. Because now to do is has durations, if you're setting the date, on a task, you can set how long it will take you. That's actually a brand new. Tim 29:03 I love that functionality. Yeah. Sarah 29:05 They’re always pushing new stuff. It's actually awesome.
Tim 29:08 This company is really on top of there. Sarah 29:10 They’re so on top of it. One time they pushed something new. And I noticed like a typo or link was taking me somewhere strange. And I just threw them the feedback and they fixed it within the hour.
Tim 29:20 One note for people who are my mentees and coaching clients, I like to use the project breakdown in terms of what's my role, right? So, I have a different project for every one of my coaching clients. But I also have a different project for every one of my leadership areas. Right? So for my own business, I have to have a finance leadership component. So, that's one of the buckets. So to me, it made sense to say anywhere that I've got an explicit type of leadership or I have to be you know, it's a sort of a dedication to it. That's distinct from others, then I have that in there. So, if it's a project, I'm running with a team, it gets its own line. If it's client, it gets its own line. If it's something a function in my business, it gets its own line. That worked really well for me by role. What's my role? Also, dance dad is in there.
Sarah 30:15 I quite like the role-based as well. That's a nice way of looking at it. I also use the tags as like in progress and waiting, my favourite is next action. So, I always know what the next thing I should do when I go visit a project that I maybe haven't worked on in a minute. I can remember where I was at, a little bookmark. Tim 30:30 I'm using the rules in the project level, but then the tags, it's getting down to a sort of subsections. I'm still learning though. So yeah, don't follow my method necessarily.
Sarah 30:42 Yeah, there's a lot to it. So yeah, once you've kind of played around, and you have some sites and dates, some maybe, some times, maybe a few labels, you'll want to be able to see, especially once you have more than one project, you want to get a view of everything that's going on, or you want to be able to maybe see really specific things. The next kind of set of features are the default views that Todoist offers, and then your ability to create custom filters. The default view that I live by is my today view, I'm always just caring about what is happening today. This is where you can play with your view as well about you can group by tags or labels, you can group by project, you can group by the date it was added, all kinds of things. And then you can also sort and then filter things out. So, it gives you that power to really see and organize what you're looking at all day. I like to put my daytime tasks, I order that project to be at the top, so that I can really go through my day in order and I don't necessarily have to see everything at the same time. Tim, we were talking about this earlier, it can be overwhelming to see absolutely everything that you need to do, when in reality, sometimes all I need to see is what do I need to do this morning? What do I need to do this afternoon, what is next? It's a lot to look at everything that you do in a day, because we do a lot in a day, we get a lot done. So, today is one of my favourites, upcoming, is that a good way for planning and seeing how much you've already put in every day coming up in the next little while. I actually made my own filtered view called upcoming as well where I just filter out my daytime tasks. So, I can see how much of my personal time is scheduled or I'm committing away to the work that I'm trying to do. Those filters are really powerful, though. And you can create all kinds of views for anything. So, all of those tags, all of your projects can be used to filter and create really custom systems. So, right now in my system, I'm living by that next actions tag. So if I run out of to-do items, I can go and look and I've got next actions at my day job and next actions in personal and next actions in PYPD. And then I have one that's like for shopping, just a filtered view of anything I need to go and buy without having to have a whole project dedicated to it. You can customize the systems to your what your life looks like, and how you want to see and view and work with them. Tim 33:12 It's a good time to remind people that one of the reasons why you're down to this level of granularity or this level of capture. Same as I am, it's that I deal with those fleeting thoughts, you know, that 10-second rule of it's in my brain, I'm thinking about it, if I don't write it down, if I don't capture it somewhere, and I don't capture it, well, then it's gone. And I have to then stress that I forgot something or that, you know, I should have remembered that or that kind of thing. So, again, it's this, this ability to get in and process that thought quickly, to classify it, put it where it belongs, delegate it to yourself later, if you don't need to think about it right now. It's so important, so that you know that it's somewhere that it's going to come up reliably when you need to deal with it by priority or by time. Sarah 34:02 That's it. That's exactly it. Let's talk about processing because you reminded me of my other favourite tool. And one of the original reasons I started using Todoist is that it has P1, P2, P3, P4. Priority 1, 2, 3, 4. That custom field that will naturally process as well through that natural language processing, which is born from the Eisenhower matrix. Are you familiar with that one, Tim? I'm sure you are. Tim 34:28 I'm sorry to disappoint you that I cannot recite it. I am familiar with it. But– Sarah 34:34 You’ll know, you’ll remember. Tim 34:35 I'm sure yeah. Sarah 34:36 The Eisenhower matrix is just a little two by two and the axes are urgent and important. Tim 34:44 Oh gosh, okay. Of course, I always think of it as Covey's quadrants. That is the Eisenhower matrix. Sarah 34:52 That’s the Eisenhower matrix. So, if something is urgent and important, it's P one. You should do it, do it right away. That might be mean scheduling it to do it today or do it tomorrow, but you should do it. If it's urgent but not important, ideally delegate it. But you may just have to do it as well. If you don't have anyone, you can delegate or ask for help with that. If it's important but not urgent, schedule it, put it in the calendar, put a date against it, so that it will get done before it becomes urgent. The toughest one, not urgent, not important, delete, get rid of it, you probably don't need to do it. And it's very hard to say, that's not important or urgent, and I'm not going to do it. Some things you can just, you know, maybe it will be important later or urgent later, you can set them aside. And it's good to have a place to set them and be able to revisit and look at them. But ideally, you are deleting some things that you just don't need to do. Tim 35:51 Oh, yeah. Well, that's so important when you're talking about, one of the first things I do with clients is, is they need to have capacity in order to improve, they need to have capacity, if they're working on their career, or if they're working on their leadership style, or they're reorganizing their team or whatever we're doing. You need to have capacity so that you can perform that improvement. And we talk about what are the things you think you need to be doing, but really, perhaps are somebody else's responsibility. Perhaps you really just hate doing them, perhaps they're not getting you anywhere. And it's just, you're doing them because you've always done them. But it's, you know, we do it because we've always done it that way. Or perhaps they're just like, you know, in quadrant four, total waste of time or quadrant three, something that is, you know, a pressure to be in and we just need to stop. Meetings are a good example of this. If somebody can't tell you why you're at a meeting, and you're just there because you were invited, probably a great hour to win back to go and work to reorganize your day. Justify why you want me here and why you can't tell me what you need from me and a memo or an email. Or pass me task on Todoist. So, *drum noises*. I can see you how working that through is a great way to do it. What is the shortcut? Or what's the what's the label for priority? I'm trying to remember? Sarah 37:14 Just P. P and the number and it'll recognize it. Tim 37:17 P and the number. Okay, yeah, so. Sarah 37:20 Yeah, another and is a quick way. And so we're talking about processing, I think we should talk about getting things done. The– Tim 37:26 Sure, before we do though, can you just share for us, so because people are gonna be listening to this primarily. If you were going to talk us through what you enter in order to have it language processed. What information would you be giving to Todoist? Sarah 37:43 Yeah, let's pick a task that I need to enter. What do I need to do that I haven't written down? Tim 37:50 You're gonna get an oil change for your car. Sarah 37:52 Better yet, I need to schedule my bike for tune-up before the winter. Tim 37:56 There you go, better yet, okay. Sarah 37:57 Better yet. Okay, so I'm going to enter this task. And since I'm a pro, I'm going to do all my tagging at the front, sometimes I do it at the end, because you're like, gonna write down the thing first. So, I'm gonna put hashtag personal and put it on my personal project, then I'm going to tie @ next action. That's a label that I have for me. I'm going to put this as P3, it is important, but it's not urgent, it can wait a little bit, then I'm going to type out the task, which is, I'm going to make it it's an actionable task. You can write tasks in different ways. Call bike shop, and Schedule a tune-up. And I'm busy for the next couple of days. But I've got some free time on Sunday. So, now all I'm going to type is S-U-N, Sun. It's going to recognize that and highlight that and put it on Sunday. The you know what, I have a meeting in the morning. So, I'm also going to put a time. I'm going to put Sunday, I'm going to put 11 am. And it automatically puts it to the time. And if I've set up that calendar integration, then it would sync to my Google calendar from that project. But we didn't talk too much about that. Tim 39:06 So once again, that would be hashtag personal, @ sign next action. P– Sarah 39:13 I did P3. Tim 39:15 P3, call bike shop? Sun, S-U-N, 11 am. You have a fully formed task item? And I can say that if you do this even I've been using it with Siri. Siri, I'll say Hey, Siri, and I always say please Siri, could you please create a Todois task? Now if you don't say Todoist task, it's going to create a task in their task thing. So, I say can you please create it Todoist task? Oh, she's talking to me right now off-camera.
Sarah 39:51 She's trying to do it. She’s trying to help ya. Tim 39:52 She’s trying to do it. And– Sarah 39:55 –And you would say Sunday, 11 am, call the bike shop. Tim 39:59 I would actually say hashtag personal, @ next action. And, you know, P1, or P3, call bike shop. She's still talking to me. Sorry, I've got to turn her off. But she's so eager to help. Thanks, Siri. Sarah 40:18 Yeah, and she just does it. Schedules it. Tim 40:23 Sorry. I feel bad now turning her off. Anyway, so yeah, so again, the nomenclature, hashtag personal, @ sign next action, P3, call bike shop, Sun, 11 am. And kaboom, it's in. Sarah 40:40 It’s there. So, what all of those pieces are called in that system that I was mentioning, getting things done. That is context, once you have fully contextualized a task, it will get done. There's no choice. There we go, context brings calm, that's beautiful. That's the shirt Tim is wearing right now is this context brings calm. You give everything context. Now it's, you can rest easy. It's out of your brain, it is scheduled or it's in the waiting place where it should be. And it won't get forgotten, it won't get missed, at some point, you will come back to it. So, giving it that context is important. But you don't have to. That's the other nice thing. That's why I mentioned puts a couple of things in your inbox, you don't have to give it all the context right away. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't necessarily know everything that I'm doing Sunday, I don't know if I'm actually free at 11 am. I might not like to do that all right away, but I just need to get it in. You need to schedule some time that's the other half of what makes this work. Schedule a bit of time to go through your inbox, go through your projects, and find any actions that are need to be scheduled. I do that in a couple of ways. Daily, get today that today view to zero. That way, the next day, you're not starting with a bunch of things that are out of order that aren't necessarily going to get done that day that you now have to give context to give new context to. Just make sure that today is at zero, you don't have to do everything. That's okay. Sometimes they don't get everything done, just make sure to move them at the end of the day to make tomorrow, successful. And then once a week, ideally, once a week, you go through everything. You go through your inbox and give everything context that you just captured through the week that you didn't give any context to and go through your projects and find anything that needs to be done anything that's become urgent, all of a sudden, or anything that's been flagged as a next action, you're like, Okay, I gotta get on this, or anything that you might have missed, or you've been ignoring. The thing is that once it's written down, you can't ignore it anymore. Tim, you talked earlier about building capacity, you can't build capacity, you can't have capacity without understanding the state. So, getting everything into one place, and being able to understand that is the first step in building capacity. You can't cut what you don't know. Or you might cut and it might not be enough. Tim 43:18 We're at very different stages of our life. I mean, I have three kids. And so there's always an unknown coming. There's enough surprises. There's enough surprises running a family, running a dynamic business, having clients that call in with ad hoc needs and are in some sort of crisis. And that's fine, right? There's lots of that. And what I find this helps me do is then move things, knowing that I can pick them up again later. Where should people go Sarah, if they want to get started? Sarah 43:47 A great place to get started is on Todoist’s site, they have a whole page dedicated to productivity methods, a blog, it has all the information on getting things started, the Eisenhower matrix, eating the frog, the Pomodoro Technique, honestly, all of my favourite systems that can help you be more productive and set up these systems within Todoist itself. So, if they want to just explore using it beyond the basic features, this is a great place to go and explore that. Tim 44:13 Fantastic. Okay. I think that's a great place for us to wrap it up. Let's meet offline, we're going to talk about what could be the next level of this build. But in the meantime, let's encourage people to, if you haven't already, go out and give Todoist a try. Follow Sarah's instructions in terms of how to set it up. And then we can take it to a next level when we have Sarah back again to talk about this, or PYPD, or just being an all-around cool person. All right? Thank you so much for joining me, Sarah. Sarah 44:47 Thanks so much for having me, Tim. Tim 44:48 All the best.
Tim 44:51 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership. Please give us positive rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word too by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening. And be sure to tune in in two weeks' time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading.
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| 18 Sep 2024 | The Courage to Stay Real A Leaders Challenge | 00:31:56 | |
In this episode, Tim Sweet delves into one of the most crucial issues in leadership: having the courage to remain authentic. He explores why the truth can be uncomfortable and how, in our society, we are incentivized to avoid disturbing the peace, even if it means advocating for what is right. This causes a tendency to sugarcoat or omit details. Doing so may seem easier in the short term but can lead to long-term problems. Tim introduces the concept of the "fear barrier" and explains how fear influences our decision-making, potentially causing us to compromise our values. He shares personal stories and insights into why embracing truth and building trust is crucial. Tim also provides actionable strategies for embracing uncomfortable realities, staying authentic, and leading with integrity. Resources discussed in this episode: -- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: -- Transcript Tim 00:01 Many people would rather stay in the bubble where that narrative can be controlled, where they can keep telling themselves that story of absolutely everything is fine, and remember, we're not talking about things being wildly out of whack here. Often we're talking about just a few percentage points of your life. But those few percentage points matter, and they're held in balance of everything else good that we're doing. Tim 00:24 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you, my friend, are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. I'm Tim Sweet, and I'd like to welcome you to Episode 40 of the Sweet on Leadership podcast. Tim 00:56 Well, hi, everybody. Today, we're going to tackle something crucial yet often sidestepped in leadership circles. The challenge of staying real, of staying authentic, of having the courage to embrace the truth and integrity, even when the pressure to compromise or to capitulate feels overwhelming. Think about the last time you faced a difficult decision. It wasn't just uncomfortable. It was unsettling. Maybe it was one of these moments where you felt compelled to ignore certain facts, to be part of the team, to accept a vision, to toe the company line. You might have justified a strategy or even the very purpose of a business, all while something deep inside you, the ground that you were standing on felt not as solid as you would like. It's in these moments when our options often feel limited, we want to be inspiring to create a sense of right, that we're here for a good purpose. We want to avoid giving power to focus that oppose our company's interests, but in doing so, sometimes we end up compromising a part of ourselves. Maybe you tackle the situation head-on, or maybe you sidestepped it, omitting a key detail here or there, spinning the situation a little just to make it a little more palatable. Well, it's in these moments, small or large, that we can start to feel like we're selling out. We're jumping on a bandwagon. We're playing a popularity game, and let's be honest, that can feel cheap and sleazy, and conflicted, and downright tiresome. In fact, it's exhausting. But what if there was a different way, a way that doesn't involve you compromising who you are or what you stand for, and this is where we're going to talk about what it looks like to really walk a path of truth and integrity, and courage. And I know all of you listening are good people, and you're all trying to do the right thing, and you are all brave people, but it's even in these little moments where we have to compromise that we can find a great deal of exhaustion. I have to tell you that this path of truth and integrity, and courage was one that I had to make a decision around several years ago when I decided to get out of regular management roles. Part of that was because I wanted to be beyond having to forward any particular campaign. So, I made a conscious decision that I wouldn't compromise just so I would have to be involved in that political space. It wasn't that I wasn't good at it. It's just that I found it exhausting. I also recognized that the people in businesses that I held to the highest esteem often were those that were able to be Maverick. They were able to say no, they were able to defy convention. And in those moments where they were living in that extreme truth, that risky truth, that's where they really shone as leaders, and that's who I decided to emulate as much of my daily life around from a professional perspective as I could. Now, look as a consultant and a coach, it's a bit easier because I'm paid to stand outside of a machine. In fact, there's many times when I'm brought into organizations or coaching relationships, precisely because they need a dose of reality. I'm often called a new set of eyes or an unbiased perspective. But in truth, it's simply a reset. It's a return to facts. It's establishing a through line, and those through lines have to be supported by data and analysis and reality if they're really going to stand up. One of these times when this clarity often hits home for people is right now, we've just come off of summer vacation here in North America, and during vacation, when we're away from the office, free from a Daily Grind and disconnected from usual dogma or pressures or community, you know, triggers and reinforcements, we start to sense our own truth more clearly. It's in these quiet moments when you might be driving home from the lake, or you might be mowing the lawn, or you might be just sitting around and enjoying a drink at the end of the day. When you're not surrounded by that constant hum of work, and you're able to disconnect just long enough to look at your life from an outside perspective that you can see things for what they really are. And it's here that people find themselves questioning, have I always lived true to who I am? Some people avoid vacations, even, because that step outside of reality is too uncomfortable. That step outside of the rat race, where they realize just how messed up their situation is, really makes them feel helpless. Many people would rather stay in the bubble, where that narrative can be controlled, where they can keep telling themselves that story of absolutely everything is fine. And remember, we're not talking about things being wildly out of whack here. Often we're talking about just a few percentage points of your life, but those few percentage points matter, and they are held in balance of everything else good that we're doing. So, they'd rather stay in the bubble. And let's face it, some organizations even prefer to keep people in the office. In fact, this is one of the reasons we're seeing why people are pressured to be back in the office. Why? Because they're in that bubble. They're where we can control the narrative. They're where we can have a singular reality that is focused around and justified by where we are in the world. So, as people that are out there wanting to do well, wanting to inject the universe with good stuff. Why do we find ourselves in positions that compromise our values? Why do we work contrary to those facts, even in small ways? Well, that's what we're going to dive in today. Tim 07:12 I'd like to introduce you to a concept called the fear barrier.
[Start of Clip from Dune 07:16] Paul Atreides: Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me. Where the fear is gone, there will be nothing; only I will remain. [End of Clip from Dune 07:37] Tim 07:38 Let's talk a little bit about fear because it's at the heart of why we make compromises. It's at the heart of why change is difficult. It's at the heart of why offices will polarize, why some people will excel, and other people are held down. And it may not be your fear, it may be the fear of others, but fear is at the heart of it because so many things come from lack of knowledge, lack of perspective, and fear. And fear takes many forms. It can take the form of avoidance. It can take the form of anger. It can take the form of our struggles. It is a force. It's what keeps us internally from speaking up, from challenging a status quo, from standing firm for our beliefs. It's what has us a fear of losing our place in an organization or losing our advantage in life. It has us thinking we might be seen as difficult. We might be seen as that squeaky wheel. We might have a fear of rocking the boat, but this fear doesn't just keep us silent, it also builds walls. And we build these barriers up to protect ourselves from the discomfort of facing the truth itself, from a risk of being that one who speaks up when everybody else says the right thing, or at the very least, is quiet. It's easier to go along, to nod in agreement, to sidestep the odd difficult conversation, just to get things done. But here's the thing, these barriers don't just keep the truth out, they keep us trapped. They're at the heart of why we have problems with equality in the workplace and inclusion in the workplace, that's all based in fear. We become trapped, as a company and even as a society, in a cycle of avoidance where pressure builds and builds until something breaks. It's that breaking point that often comes at the worst possible time when the stakes are highest. It's at that point where the costs are greatest and little decisions come back to haunt us. This is what the fear barrier is. It's that wall we use to shield ourselves from uncomfortable truths we don't want to face. And behind that fear is an imbalance. It's a conflict between personal courage, we sometimes call it vital courage and moral courage. Personal or vital courage, is the push for ourselves to succeed, to look after ourselves, to really fulfill the life that's important to us as individuals, to lead, to achieve our goals, to be who we want to be. And moral courage, likewise, is also noble. It's what pushes us to do right in groups, on behalf of society, on behalf of the organizations we choose to align ourselves. We have several of them. They can be our job. They can be clubs or sporting teams, or churches that we're involved in outside of work, and therefore we have to stand up on both sides of these things, demonstrating courage on both sides. And when we discount one, immediately, we're thrown into imbalance. When these two forms of courage are out of balance, we find ourselves making decisions that might feel safe in the short term, but long term, they have consequences. We get ourselves into situations that we can't easily undo, it's where the challenge lies, and it's where we need to be most vigilant. I remember that quote in Game of Thrones, where at the end of season seven, Jon Snow has to make this impassioned speech: When enough people make false promises, words stop meaning anything, then there are no more answers, only better and better lies, and the lies won't help us in this fight. [Start of Clip from Game of Thrones 11:09] Tyrion Lannister: But have you ever considered learning how to lie every now and then? Just a bit? Jon Snow: I’m not going to swear an oath I can't uphold. Talk about my father, if you want, tell me that's the attitude that got him killed. But when enough people make false promises, words stop meaning anything; then there are no more answers, only better and better lies, and lies won't help us in this fight. Tyrion Lannister: That is indeed a problem. The more immediate problem is that we're fucked. [End of Clip from Game of Thrones 12:00]
Tim 12:01 This little quote, albeit fictional, helps us get to the very heart of what we're discussing here, the danger of letting untruths become part of our leadership and our cultures and our lives. There's a danger to omitting the truth. Let's get into this idea about omission, not outright lying, but the things we choose not to say. Omitting a truth, downplaying a fact, can sometimes feel like a safer option. We're not technically lying, right? We're just not telling the whole story. We're not kicking the hornet's nest. We're not poking the bear. But this, too, is a form of self-deception, and when we realize that we are in that place, we know we're compromising something. When we emit key facts, we're not just keeping things smooth; we're creating a version of reality that is there to suit our needs and to maintain a balance and prevent a tension or a conflict. It's what protects us, it's what keeps everybody comfortable, it's what makes us nice to work with. But comfort is not the same as safety. In fact, often, short-term comfort sacrifices long-term safety. What happens when these omitted truths finally come to light? What happens when that house of cards that we've now built comes crashing down because we chose an easy path rather than the right one? The truth we've worked so hard to build over all of our careers, what we've built ourselves up as, can sometimes vanish in an instant, leaving us and our teams to scramble and pick up the pieces. There's that famous saying that it takes 20 years to build a reputation and only five minutes to dash it, and it's really clear in our current media environment how quickly this can happen when uncomfortable truths come to light. As leaders, our credibility is absolutely everything, and people look at us to be honest, and forthright and stable, to be the ones who are going to speak truth, even when it's hard. When we sidestep, when we choose spin, we erode that credibility bit by bit, and once it's gone, it is incredibly hard to rebuild. One little secret here is most people enter a relationship waiting to be disappointed. They don't talk about it very often because it doesn't seem very amiable. They will think this very, very briefly, and then they'll move past it. But there's a small part of them for the rest of your relationship that might be looking for indications that you are that thing that they feared at one point. We're not talking about personal family relationships here. We're talking about our dynamics, where you are the person that they need to report to, and oh, boy, would they be worried about taking a job where somebody might be tyrannical. This is where reality comes in. This is where reality is your single greatest ally, but it can also be a very, very rule-keeper. If you're aligned with reality, it'll support you; it'll guide you, it'll help you build something strong and fact-based and enduring. But if you're not, it's only a matter of time before the universe gives you a slap that you will not forget. Tim 15:27 So, if this is true, why do people sugarcoat things? Well, simple answer is, sugarcoating feels good, especially in the moment. It's easier to soften the edges, to make the tough stuff a little more palatable, and often we're rewarded for it. We tell ourselves we're doing things to keep the peace and to protect others, and to maintain morale, and indeed, we're often rewarded for that. In fact, there can even be performance reviews at the end of the year where somebody says, you know, you are so good at keeping it level, at maintaining morale, at making sure everybody's included. But deep down, we might know that that is about protecting ourselves, our reputation, and protecting others in the absence of that thing that needed to be challenged. Being fluent when we're doing this, and especially having a practice where you're able to see where you are being positively reinforced for maintaining a short-term piece, short-term gratification, versus long-term gratification, where you are buying into a pitch that things need to just slow down, where we need to not share so much, where we need to keep someone on the outside. All of these things can ring a bell in us, a little bell that, if we listen to, we realize that you know what, this is the easy road. It's not the right road, but that temporary relief that comes from sugarcoating things, spinning things, just that, it's temporary. It feels super good in the moment, and it's trained to be there. Whole cultures have built mechanisms within them to make sure that people toe the line. But eventually, that truth catches up, and when it does, the fallout is often worse. Maybe it just takes someone we care about out. Maybe it takes us out. Maybe it takes an entire department or entire company, or sometimes an entire industry, through the mud. We know this. We've seen it happen before, and little spins do not make an untenuous situation. We shouldn't be overdramatic where we say that any form of truth carries the same weight. So, why do we do it? Because we're trying to deal with short-term discomfort, we might get ourselves into a long-term problem. Now, it's not always as dramatic as losing a job or losing a company, but what I want you to think about is even the small stuff takes energy. It takes energy, and it sucks it out of you, right? You have to maintain that thing. You have to shore it up because reality isn't shoring it up for you. You have to be the one. And it's like having to put a band-aid and duct tape on a wound that really needs time to heal, or it needs to be, you know, set properly, but instead, we just keep managing it, and it might cover it up for a while, but it's not healing anything. So, what happens when reality finally catches up with us? It's not pretty, and it's in those moments that we've been dodging when things can feel like they all come crashing down if you think about when a team is in crisis, if you think about when there's an emergency, you can usually step back through things using a five wise methodology, a root cause analysis, something where we get back to a decision point, when a decision was poorly made, and nine times out of 10, you're going to find that that decision was bereft of facts and it might have been self-serving in some way.
Tim 19:11 That harsh drop when everything resets and all of the mistakes become laid bare, is fertile ground for broken relationships, failed careers, losses of trust. We see entire project teams who have dedicated years of their lives to making something come over the line, lose all respect and credibility in the 11th hour. We see long-standing institutions lose credibility when they're not able to uphold fundamental truths, usually because we were avoiding something uncomfortable. Whatever form it takes, these resets are a wake-up call, and like the big reset, that can be very, very disturbing, to say the least, we can look out for small resets, small little indicators that, wait a minute, we might be canoeing up a stream. We might be fighting a current here, and that current might be the truth. It's in these times that we need to take a moment, breathe and assemble our team and our peers and say, are we on the right path here, folks? But the longer we paddle against a current, the longer we're expending energy, and when reality finally catches up, we may not have the energy to maneuver properly and to write our course. Those moments where we have to take a breath and reset and ask ourselves why we're here and where is this all headed, can actually be the start of something better. Remember, the absence of fact does not necessarily mean ignorance. It just means that something is off, so it might be having to go out and make sure that we're properly assessing the situation and that we're engaging in a discernment conversation, that we've asked the right questions, that we've got everybody around the table, and that moment, that little scare, can be the catalyst that pushes us to embrace the truth. So, it's not about always being on and being omniscient and knowing everything. It's not about being infallible. It's about learning and really getting keyed to say, are we paying attention to the feedback we're getting from the decisions that we're making? This has never been more important than it is in your own individual career. Remember that balance between personal and moral courage. Well, in the personal courage realm, we have to have the ability to, when we're feeling like something is off, stop and say, how did I get here? Why am I here? What am I actually feeling and what am I going to do with that? Then we can discern where are we going to go from here. When we start to embrace this power of fact and reality and any kind of time we feel that we're slightly off some truth, it's a chance for us to lead our careers. It's a chance for us to lead our teams better. Tim 22:16 It starts with this commitment, a commitment to say, I'm going to face the truth head-on whenever I see it, no matter how uncomfortable. And in this case, when a team supports this, when you have a culture of leading through fact and truth, it becomes very easy to shift people. It's actually harder to shift individuals in their career, because they tend to have much more complex, unspoken reliances and pressures on them. If you are a parent in a family and you are a breadwinner and you have commitments, well, you might shelve a truth about how you're feeling about your career, how you're feeling about how you spend your days, in order to just be a good mom or be a good dad, to just make your commitment to other things that are extraneous, that really can cloud things, and that's when it's most important to say there's got to be a way that we can balance all of these things together so that we can get what we want and be who we want at the same time. It's not about being perfect. In fact, if anything, it's about embracing our imperfections. We have to become fluent and sensitive again when we're tempted to omit and sugarcoat things, when we're tempted to avoid a hoarder path, when we do this, when we become fluent in that, something amazing happens, we start to build trust, not just with others, but with ourselves. When people compromise, when they force themselves into a situation, you have to remember that one of the relationships you're violating is with yourself, and if you constantly disappoint yourself, why would you love that person? If you're the hardest person on you that there is, if you're the one that gets you into deeper trouble than anyone else, if you're the one that promises things and pulls them back, why would you want to trust that person? It can create a real resentment for the decisions that you feel you have to make, and resenting yourself is a crippling vaquitas type of circle that can just bring you down into some of the most terrible lows that you're going to feel. The antidote has to be truth. The antidote has to be fact. Tim 24:44 So, there's a challenge before you, a challenge to stay real, both for yourself and for the people you serve. There's a challenge to embrace this truth and this integrity, and it's not easy, and it requires courage, and it requires self-reflection, and it requires you taking a moment to listen to podcasts like this, or other podcasts that allow you to pull yourself out of your day-to-day grind, of your family relationships, of the mind F's that you're giving yourself, and just look at your life objectively and look at your roles objectively. It requires that willingness to do that pull yourself out, stop doing the work, and start looking at the work, seeing the work, working on the work. It requires that willingness to face uncomfortable realities that you might have a person on your team you do not trust, you will not promote, you will never give them something to make them successful, but you're avoiding a tough conversation or even a dismissal because that would make you a bad person. It might cause you to face a harsh reality about a spouse, or a child, or a parent, or a sibling. It might cause you to really question what you're doing in this world and how do you get right with that? What I can tell you from personal experience is that the reward is worth it because when you're in this position where you don't have to second guess what you're doing, you're free to set all your sales forward, to cut loose the anchors that aren't helping you and to move. You can lead your own life with a newfound strength. You can form teams that build you up, and that you really deserve to have around you when you're striving to accomplish what you're going for, it allows you to align with organizations or to create your own that are going to be where you want to be in the course of a day. It doesn't mean the work is going to be easy. It doesn't mean it's not going to be challenging or risk-free. It means you feel like you have arrived and you are where you need to be in this universe. You only have 80 to 100 years on this planet if you're lucky. Why would you want to spend any of them really feeling like you don't belong? You can be afraid. Fear is good, but let's think our relationship with fear is really what's important. When we create this culture of honesty and the teams we work for and this instinct for truth and data that's around ourselves all the time. It helps us avoid the wrong types of fear. Look, fear is good. There's always a place for it. We should spend a certain amount of time an excited state, in an anxiety-rich state. That is what really precedes a lot of the best things in the world, a lot of amazing accomplishments. But it's that right type of fear, that fear of mitigating what's out there that we can't yet control, versus fear that we give into and problems that we create for ourselves. Tim 28:00 So, if you're finding yourself now at the end of, as this is recorded, the end of summer, we're right at the beginning of September here, or you're listening to this later through the year, and you find yourself resisting this a little bit, this notion that you might have fear in your life, I would use it as a challenge to sort of double down and say, Where are there areas that you have made uncomfortable, or, I would say, sub-optimal decisions that you knew were not the best decision at the time. Where did you sell out a little bit? Where did you avoid things a little bit? Do that, take that moment to step back and really say, you know what, I am fallible. It's a chance for you to challenge yourself, step outside your comfort zone. It's also a sign that you're on the right path. You're on a path of truth and fact and courage. So, take that step. Commit today to living without spin, or at least to recognize it, to face your fears, to challenge those uncomfortable moments. So, thanks for taking this time with me today. If you've lasted here to the end, I think you've probably had to swallow at least some uncomfortable concepts. I want you to take a step back now and reflect. I encourage you to journey with me. I'm on this road too. Follow me on LinkedIn. Please subscribe to the podcast, and let's keep this conversation going. Don't just make truth and authenticity a buzzword. Really live it and develop a practice when you can understand where you might be contrary to it.
Tim 29:48 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If, like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership, please give us a positive rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders, and you can spread the word too by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening, and be sure to tune in in two weeks' time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading.
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| 17 Apr 2024 | Anna Morgan - Radical Honesty and Building Career Insurance | 00:48:00 | |
In this episode of the Sweet on Leadership podcast, Tim Sweet and Anna Morgan, the founder of CAREERBFF, join forces to explore strategies for career resilience and success. With Anna's 15+ years of talent acquisition expertise, they delve into battling imposter syndrome, recognizing signs of a career shift, and the power of networking and continuous learning. Anna advocates for radical self-care, honesty, humility, and seeking help to thrive in today's competitive job market, drawing parallels between yoga practice and career development. Together, they stress the significance of investing in your "career insurance" and taking proactive steps to secure your professional future. From tracking professional wins to cultivating a supportive network, Anna's insights, enriched with analogies to yoga, inspire listeners to take charge of their professional journey, whether they're job seekers, entrepreneurs, or seasoned executives. About Anna Morgan "Anna Morgan, the driving force behind CAREERBFF, is not just a recruiter—she's a lifeline in the professional world. From career misfit to becoming a top 5% recruiter, Anna's journey is a beacon for those feeling overlooked in their career paths. Her company, CAREERBFF, stands at the intersection of recruiting, consulting, and coaching, specializing in turning career stumbling blocks into stepping stones. With over 15 years of experience in talent acquisition, Anna has screened over a million resumes, conducted interviews with over 11,000 job seekers, negotiated thousands of salaries, and collaborated with nearly 2,800 hiring managers across diverse industries—from Retail and Healthcare to Technology and Sports & Entertainment. Her all-encompassing experience has not only positioned her as a top talent in placing job seekers at all levels but also as an empathetic ally for those navigating the challenges of mental health, ADHD in business, and alcohol recovery. In addition to her work with job seekers, Anna also advises recruiters and HR departments across North America, sharing her wealth of knowledge and innovative strategies to enhance their recruitment processes. Her unique CAREERBFF Method is distilled from extensive hands-on expertise, helping thousands fast-track their way to promising opportunities. Recognized as a "Top 16 LinkedIn Expert in Atlanta" and one of the "Top 25 Job Search Experts to Follow on LinkedIn," Anna's influence is undeniable. Whether you're seeking to jumpstart your career or need strategic business advice, Anna Morgan can be your career or business BFF—guiding, inspiring, and transforming your professional journey." Resources discussed in this episode: -- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Anna Morgan | CAREERBFF:
-- Transcript:
Anna 00:01 It's really important to do like monthly or quarterly and be saving, you know, your snapshots of where you've been highlighted or celebrated and making sure you're tracking those wins. And so, when you need to update your resume or your profile, it's so easy, and you're consistently doing that. And again, it's not such a heavy lift.
Tim 00:26 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you my friend are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. Welcome to the Sweet on Leadership podcast. Tim 00:56 Well, hey, everybody, welcome back to the Sweet on Leadership podcast, thank you very much for taking the time to invest in your own leadership development and join us here today. Joining me is my good friend, although it always had been a virtual friend, Anna Morgan. Anna and I had a chance to meet during COVID, and I originally ran across Anna on clubhouse and would listen to her speak. And then later it turned out, we were connected. And then I had a chance to reach out and we were running in the same circles with Tracy Borrison and a few others, right? And Anna was kind enough to have a meeting, a few years later, you know, my business was changing. And I remember having this period where I was, you know, just in one of these periods of questioning, and I needed a friendly ear to hear me out and to soundboard and Anna, you came to the rescue. And it was just something that I won't forget. And I really appreciate you taking time for a person that you knew very little about. But to just give me some simple guidance that was just so meaningful in the moment. So thank you very much and thank you so much for joining me today.
Anna 02:08 Well, thank you for sharing that story with me, I didn't realize that I had that kind of effect on you. And so that just makes my heart expand. So, I’m glad to be here.
Tim 02:21 Anybody who gets a chance to work with you is going to feel the same kind of energy and excitement that I feel every time we talk. Your handle, your catchphrase, of CAREERBFF is so accurate. And I just love it, for you taking the time to be with me today is just a real treat. And I can't wait for people to experience Anna Morgan.
Anna 02:42 That’s right, your CAREERBFF, a rescuer of careers and also a rescuer of dogs, which is how the name came about. But it's all about that helping someone feel like they are speaking to their best friend where they know that they are going to encounter compassion and grace. But also get a little bit of that tough love and someone that understands them, but also needs to push them a little bit. So, it's a delicate dance, but everybody needs someone in their corner, rooting them on and you know, part of my story is, underdog to top dog. And I always tell people that every setback is a setup or a comeback.
Tim 03:27 Awesome, I love that. So, when we were talking today a little bit earlier, you were telling me that you are into a bunch of things. And please fill the listeners in on anything that I missed. But one of the things as we were setting up for this, as we were talking about how much time we had, and you're on your way to a yoga class, tell us a little bit about why yoga is so important to you.
Anna 03:49 I was really lucky to get into yoga about four years ago, four and a half years ago. I was headed to a retreat in Costa Rica. And part of it was going to be yoga-ish. And I was like, Oh, I don't know much about yoga. So, I went to a local studio and I became obsessed. And I loved it so much. Because I am ADHD and yoga is about your time with yourself and breath and movement. And it was really the only time that I was allowed and able to quiet my brain because I had to focus on my breath and my movement and so everything else just faded away. And then in those beautiful moments at the end of class, the Shavasana as they call it, is where I would have the most powerful like downloads and insights and aha moments and tears, all kinds of things that have really helped me overcome various challenges in my life and in my business. And, you know, it's something that I've taken for granted and I'm in the process of kind of making my way back to my mat, as I am set up for a comeback with some of my health challenges. And it is just a wonderful practice. I mean, yoga is for everyone. And it is, you know, something that I try to prioritize now and just get my body moving a little bit each day and stretching. That's another big piece, especially for women, as we get a little bit older, your mobility can go really quickly. So, working on that.
Tim 05:30 Well, I hear you and anybody who has been following me for any amount of time knows that that was a double knee replacement. You know, I turned 50 this year– Anna 05:37 Me too. Tim 05:38 –And sometimes the body feels like it Oh, samezees. Sometimes the body feels like it's kind of falling apart, and I fell on my can over the Christmas break. And so I've been dealing with, you know, sciatica and stuff and whatever I mean, but yoga is one of those things that you know, a little bit of investment in a sound routine, practice sure saves us from a whole bunch and gives us more benefit.
Anna 06:06 I don’t know, it's one of those practices where I tend to see things that I've experienced in that class, or I've heard in that class that show up in my everyday life. And that for me makes yoga, a little bit of a spiritual experience as far as the messages that you just kind of receive along the journey. And it's just so important, as an entrepreneur or job seeker or a busy executive, to take some of that time to have some quiet and allow yourself to breathe, and maybe turn upside down, get the blood flowing, or maybe get your legs up in the air. So, your blood flow kind of re-circulates a little bit. And yoga helps you heal from the inside out, which I think is really powerful.
Tim 06:55 I think it's such an interesting metaphor. And dear listener, don't be confused. We are going to be talking about careers. And we're going to be talking about how we really create a practice around career. And that's what Anna's going to talk about. But I think yoga provides this interesting, especially the idea of a practice is really this interesting metaphor that we can use. It also gives me a chance to put you on the hot seat. So, one of the games that we've been playing lately is every time we have a guest, either right at the end of the episode or sometimes in the post-credit, I ask my guests to come up with a question and at the end of this, I'll be asking you for one, that we put a future guest on the hot seat with. Your question comes from Aaron Ashbacker who a few episodes ago. She's the health consultant here at Teamwork Excellence, who helps my leadership clients deal with the physical goals that they have because we have to be building the life at the same time as the career. And as the leadership impact improves, we want to make sure that any barriers in their way if they're physical or family or whatever, we put an expert against Aaron's that for us. Aaron, though when we were talking about the importance of investing in your health, asked the question for a future guest, which is you. When does the imposter syndrome end?
Anna 08:20 Great question, Aaron. Did she have the answer? The answer is, it doesn't. And I'm going to invite you into a part of my story and we didn't talk about this Tim earlier. But part of the reason I go to yoga and I do the work that I do is also that I've been alcohol-free for almost 12 years. And part of my recovery story. When you're an alcoholic, you know it's alcoholism, and it's not wasm. And I feel like imposter syndrome could be a little bit like that ism, versus the wasm. There are ways to keep myself healthy and sober and spiritually connected by doing certain tasks. The same applies to minimizing the loud ugly impostor syndrome voices. And a lot of that looks like radical self-care, radical honesty, humility and the ability to ask for help. I think those are the four things that help keep you healthy and minimize the imposter syndrome. Just like my alcoholism will never go away, I know that if I do certain activities, I will stay healthy with my recovery. And I feel the same is true with impostor syndrome. If I speak my truth, if I ask for help, if I solicit coaches and trust my intuition. And, you know, have that reflection of radical honesty with self, about my career, about red flags, about relationships in my professional environment, then I have the best shot of overcoming impostor syndrome for today. And I feel like it's the same thing just one day at a time.
Tim 10:24 Stellar, stellar answer. Okay. I feel very much the same way. I was joking. That was my that was how I responded to Aaron, you know, it doesn't. But I'll ask the question. I remember somebody telling me at one point, you have to love that imposter within it's there for a reason. The act of asking those questions, it's just yourself trying to keep yourself safe. But often, it can be your brain lying to you in your own voice. And saying, you know, that sometimes it can be that you're not ready for this. Whereas, actually, there's a lot of data to say you already.
Anna 11:00 Right, you're not smart enough, you're not worthy of having access to that. Those types of opportunities don't come to you. I mean, I've heard it all. I've experienced it all. And like I said, it's a daily reprieve, and I think it is a bigger issue for women. And I applaud you, Tim, for bringing up that conversation, because it is a lot for us to carry as we continue to break through barriers as business owners, as executives, as thought leaders out there alongside of our peers.
Tim 11:39 Yeah, it's I appreciate that. I follow an influencer on TikTok, Ella Lowgren. She's an advocate for ADHD and feminism. And she had this awesome thing to share. Microfeminisms, they were calling it, and that this particular, she's an Australian social personality, what she does now, is demonstrate this little push back, if she is talked over in a meeting, or something like this, she won't really let it stand. If somebody takes credit for her work or coworkers' work, she won't let it stand. And she just makes sure that she announces in my language, she announces the game. Or and it might not even be malicious, you know, it just might be a really bad habit. Or it might be an entitlement that a male coworker feels, she brings it out. And I love it. And it's a practice that she goes through.
Anna 12:41 Speaking of careers, and why people come to see me, is for some of the similar reasons that you just mentioned that they are being passed over, they have toxic leadership, they're not advancing, their work is being taken, other people are taking credit for their work. Very much a part of why people reach out to have a CAREERBFF in their corner and peel back those layers, look at the imposter syndrome, look at their current assets, look at what's possible moving forward.
Tim 13:18 I was thinking as you were, as you were sharing about, I'm sorry, just so we can–
Anna 13:22 Radical self-care helps minimize impostor syndrome. Radical honesty with self, right, being willing to fully turn the mirror on yourself and look at your assets and your liabilities and also being able to receive the brilliance that you do have. And this is a lot of where my experience in recovery comes into my coaching, is that we oftentimes need someone to believe in us until we can believe in ourselves. And just because some crazy old sober ladies believed that I could have an awesome life and I could heal from a lot of the damage I had done. That gave me just that bridge and just that hope that got me to the next day. And that's the same thing with healing from making a job transition, from being laid off, from working through impostor syndrome.
Tim 14:27 And we're gonna go there, I think that's great. And it's so important to have those mentors that really are willing to advocate for us and reinforce our vision for what can be or even introduce it. But radical self-care, radical honesty with self, radical approaches to asking for help, and number four was?
Anna 14:46 Well, I had said the humility and the willingness to ask for help.
Tim 14:50 What's cool about this and we're gonna get into the career thing is that we think about the practice of yoga, very much the same approach, self-care, being honest where you are in your practice, ask for help when you need to, being humble when it comes to and demonstrating humility when it comes to where you are in your yoga journey. This in terms of fighting the imposter syndrome. And then so much of this seems directly transferable to when we want to prepare ourselves for being resilient and break-resistant when it comes to our careers. And so now we transfer all of this, and it gives us a great map and a kind of a good substrate for us to go into the awesome stuff that you offer. Right? So, when we were talking, you know, I would ask you the question, all of us can go through periods where we find ourselves in need of a career shift, either by choice or because something is happening to us. When do people typically reach out to you?
Anna 15:58 Usually about six months too late. And here's why. People, unfortunately, don't think about their next career move, when they land in their role, which people don't want to think about this. I've worked so hard to get this job, I don't want to be thinking about my next move in two and a half, 5, 10 years from now. However, you know, if you're not aware, and you're not queueing into the, you know, signs that there may be some instability, if you're not keeping up with the economic impacts and news, and you are not safeguarding yourself from layoffs, or having trouble being honest with yourself about relationships with leadership, or, you know, should you be on to that next level as the Senior Director versus a director, you know, are you able to play the internal equity game, and if that's not working, oftentimes, those are the symptoms or the indications that now is the time and always is the time to be really networking and building what I call career insurance, so that you always have options. So, that if, and let's be honest, since COVID, it's not a matter of if it's a matter of when, unfortunately, the rug gets pulled underneath you, you find yourself in this career fender bender of sorts. And just like insurance, you want to be able to withdraw, that currency to support you in recovering, right? And most people are not putting in the deposits into their career insurance bank. And so when they come to me, they're like, oh, I don't know how to do this. Modern-day job searching scares me. When I last applied for my job, I faxed my resume over. So, there's so many moving parts, and it's overwhelming. Marketing yourself, and selling yourself is complex and if you're starting from ground zero with a shaky foundation, it is certainly hard to launch from.
Tim 18:35 So, being radically honest about where you're at. And then taking that step to give yourself a little bit of love in this space and do it for yourself so that you can build this career insurance, so that you can build this pipeline–
Anna 18:51 Yeah, humble yourself and also care about yourself enough. And this is the other thing I see, especially at the manager to executive level, is people get so wrapped up in their identity as a small company CEO or as an executive. And it takes me so much time to unwire and alchemize a lot of that identity that if I don't have that, I am less than or I'm not enough, and it's balancing out and making sure that you have hobbies and side hustles and things that bring you joy outside of that 40-45 plus hour workweek, so that you are just not in that rabbit hole of you know, work which and then you look at your life because nobody on their deathbed is going to be like, I wish I worked more. Right? They're gonna say I wish I spent more time with my kids. I wish I went on more trips. Like my husband and I got teary the other day on the last day of Spring Break thinking, we only have three spring breaks left with our daughter before she goes to college. Right. I’m glad we take those trips.
Tim 20:13 It's over before you know it. And so taking that breath before you need to, before you're forced to, to just take a look at your career, see how you're set up in terms of having some insurance, and maybe even just taking the time to reflect and really do that balance point. I was looking at it from a work-life design perspective, is the design getting you what you want, we can change anything, you're not broken, everything you've got today is a product of the design that you're using. You want something different, we change the design, right? And so taking a chance to get up to 10,000 feet, take a look at how we're doing, go through and really do some deep questioning, look at what we need and make sure that we get to that place where we feel like we're enough, A. to deserve taking that time and B. to have confidence around what you're going to do professionally.
Anna 21:11 It’s really important to do like monthly or quarterly and be saving, you know, your snapshots of where you've been highlighted or celebrated and making sure you're tracking those wins. And so, when you need to update your resume or your profile, it's so easy, and you're consistently doing that. And again, it's not such a heavy lift and kind of going back to yoga. I mean, I love it, my yoga teacher says like, you can just come here and be in child's pose, or in Shavasana, and just lay here and breathe, and that's still Yoga. You can still go at your own pace, and the same with your career, right, it's just only you know, how far you can push that edge, how much you can twist, or you know, how long you can find that Drishti, that focal point that you're going to look at too, you know, ground you as you do a tree pose. And that's your own pace, that's your own game. But if you don't have that humility, and that radical honesty with self, then the imposter syndrome is going to get heightened, the what everybody else is doing, the noise, it's gonna be really loud. And it makes it harder to find your way through. And really take that breath for yourself. You know, you talked about the airplane recently. And so many of the people I work with, they're healers, they're coaches, they're, you know, heart-centred people like me, and they forget to put that oxygen mask on themselves before they do for others. And it's just a very common problem in massive working world and in entrepreneurship too.
Tim 23:04 Yeah, just to expand on that from a previous episode. I think what you're referring to is, we have this weird thing going on in the modern world right now, where people will not take time to invest in their own health, they won't take time for, you know, there's an interesting study where people can be diagnosed with a serious illness, they can be diagnosed with cancer, diabetes, or something, and they will not, sometimes they'll fill the script and not take it, sometimes they won't bother filling the script. They don't love themselves enough to think they're worth it. Whereas, if their dog and you've got that, you know, beautiful Frenchie– Anna 23:42 –and four others. Tim 23:43 –and four others, and they will bend over backwards, they will go without eating in order to get the dog the medication they need. Not everybody, but a lot of people because they will extend life to a pet or a child or friend. And they won't let them get away with what they let themselves get away with. That's where we need to kind of give ourselves a shake and make sure that we're balancing and–
Anna 24:13 –And breathing, and getting CAREERBFFs before it's too late. And it's hard to invest in yourself. Right? And it's hard to ask for help. And, you know, by the grace of a power greater than myself, I have learned time and time again that it is just such an easier softer way. When I get support when I outsource. When I can humble myself to say I'm too close to everything. Can you pull me back and help me objectively, honestly look at where I was, where I am and where I want to be?
Tim 25:00 I mean, good coaches have coaches and therapists and whatnot. I have lots of coaches. Anna 25:05 Me too. Tim 25:06 I have a therapist I appreciate. And I think it's one of the most powerful things that you can do for yourself. I mean, we talk about personal and moral courage, moral courage to stand up for the job you're in, or your family or whatever group you're part of. That's moral courage, upholding them, the moral code of that it's not about morality, it's about moral code. But there's the personal or the vital courage, the courage to be humble, ask for help, invest in yourself. And that takes courage. And it's going to take people courage to reach out to you and say, Anna, how can you help me? And I think what's to get us sort of back into that track, people wait until they're six months too far back to help you and we'll get on to the what can they do? But before we do, we've talked about what they need to sort of move forward. But what are the typical excuses that they're using to wait for six months? We talked about the imposter syndrome, we talked about them investing in others before themselves. What other excuses do they have for not putting time into making sure that they're career-ready?
Anna 26:18 Denial. It won't happen to me.
Tim 26:23 Yeah, and so they could see the company falling apart around them. But you know, I'm gonna hope I'm safe.
Anna 26:30 Or they think that they're playing the game well enough and that they'll be spared any layoffs. I think also, it's fear. Making a job change is a life decision, I equated just as important as choosing your spouse, choosing to have a child, or choosing to buy a home, it affects every aspect of your life, where you work, what your hybrid or remote situation is, you know, can you make it to your kids baseball game, or drive to a swim practice, right? And that overwhelms a lot of people. So, I would say fear. And remember, fear is false evidence appearing real. And that is part of my job to help my clients overcome that fear. And also find that clarity, right? Again, looking at success, career assets, really getting into the heart of if this was a magic wand, and I was your career fairy godmother. And, you know, we could create that next utopian role. Nothing is off the table, what would that look like? And then we build, brand and like reverse engineer our way into those opportunities, those conversations, that do diligence, those situations that they can connect core competencies, experience, their process to being able to do that in a new industry, in a new sector or something like that. So.
Tim 28:23 And do that heavy lifting before they need to. And I mean, that's really one of the key barriers here is, the person may see things falling apart around them, they may not, but when they need to do this work, is it comfortable? Has it been done? Can they step into it? Or is it now they're in a crisis, and now they have to they have to play catch up?
Anna 28:43 And the whole energy changes, just like in sales, right? If you are like, Oh, I gotta close Tim right now, I gotta get that, you know, $20,000 sale. And if you're going to sell differently from a place of desperation, and fear, then when you are gainfully employed, and there's a little bit of red flags, you have some confidence and you can still be like, fully in yourself and embodied and moving forward in those bigger bolder goals that you want, and still have that stable income, but be building that rock-solid foundation, in case you know, they're like, peace out, Tim, then you have this currency, this foundation that you can launch from, and that is all about just like going to yoga, building that practice every day of, you know, how can I show up? How can I network? How can I take a deeper breath and twist just a little bit more to that edge that you know, and then the next day or the next week, you find yourself that Oh, wow, you can get into that kind of pose. Oh, wow. I actually can speak with another small company CEO, and she can tell me what it's like running that type of company and give me insight into, is that something I would want to do.
Tim 30:12 You know that that, that ability, and you call it career insurance, that ability to take the time to do that before you're under duress because what you said there about having to make, you're on the back foot. And there's nothing worse than if you're having to consider an offer. And it's the only offer out there and you haven't worked for three months or something like this. In fact, there's a great another great piece of research, which I'll put into the show notes around, you know, it only takes three months for people to be without a steady paycheck to reduce their mental health substantially. Right, and it doesn't even matter if you are somebody that is fairly affluent, and has money in the bank, it's that uncertainty of where, you know, heaven forbid, you're living paycheck to paycheck. But you know, what is your role in the world, and where's your next paycheck coming from, what are you built to do, it only takes three months of uncertainty for even an established professional, to have a lot of self-doubt just become debilitating and take them over.
Anna 31:20 Absolutely. And it's a mental health issue, which is also why I feel so passionate about unlocking career insurance for other people because it's been my lived experience. And it has provided me such, you know, release and comfort because I have options. And that's what I want to give to everyone, especially those that I coach. So, they have those tools in their tool belt, they have, you know, they know the poses, they know where they're going in the flow so that they can always have access to health, to opportunities.
Tim 32:06 And operate in that way that's both safe and functional practice, so that they're not ripping muscles. One of the key, you know, in this world, love it or hate it, LinkedIn is the place to be when it comes to managing your career. It's the modern resume. It's the modern Rolodex, it is the most professional of the social medias. It's what we're out there representing ourselves. And yet so many people that I run across, especially when I'm in sort of not necessarily common areas of business. But a lot of my clients are in higher ed and things like this, sometimes they're not even aware of it. And so a lot of your help manifests in getting a person ready, not only for a job search and be searchable, but actually, so that they can be connected with the right people. And the people who need to know them are finding them naturally. Right.
Anna 33:07 And it's just like, you know, how I mentioned in Shavasana, where you get these, like unexpected, just aha moments and have these big ideas. Like, I tell people with LinkedIn to just stick around until the miracles happen. Because it's not only are you building career insurance and a strong foundation so that you always have options. But you're gonna get to meet really amazing humans like Tim, that you become friends with, that inspire you, that say nice things to you and make your heart explode and give you that, you know, nudge that you need to, you know, go on one more day. And, you know, I can't tell you just how many incredible mentors and champions and friends that I've made, and then just the blessing of hearing other people's stories, even if they are hard, and just being a little bit of a bright light in their day, in that moment to give them that little oomph, you know, to the next recruiter call, to the next interview.
Tim 34:10 Yeah. And that little bit of that sense of abundance, right? And that when we're in that scarce place, where we don't know where things are coming from, or we're doubting ourselves, or we're not operating on fact, because I run across this all the time with my leadership clients where, you know, it's not about what they know, they know. And it's not about what they know, they don't know. And it's not about what they don't know, they don't know, it's about what they forgot they already knew, you know, how am I going to do this? Well, let's go to the history books. You've done this a whole bunch of times, in other formats, and we just need to remind ourselves and that's why when you were talking about keeping that portfolio of work of accomplishments, that's one of the first things that I do when it comes to, I’m not in a career recruitment perspective, but if I'm getting a person square on who they are and how they're going forward, one of the first things we do is we use card statements. And some people use star statements or whatever. But what's the challenge? What was your action? What was the result? Take a moment and log it when it happens, take a moment and step back through time. And think about all those pivotal moments, all those times you knew you were adding value. And often, if you're feeling any kind of doubt, just cast your eyes over all of the great stuff that you've put in the world already. And usually, there's a lot of evidence, where you've done what you're scared, you can't, if you haven't done it directly, you've done it in the aggregate.
Anna 35:43 Exactly. And I think Claire Davis, we're both fans of hers, she calls it the brag book, and Marie Forleo, I think called it the upward spiral notebook. Or, you know, I just keep a love folder, and it's got loves and sparkles. And anytime I get an awesome comment, or a shout-out from a hiring manager, or a special recommendation, to your point, you know, I put that in there. And you know, if I ever need to update a resume again, or create a bio, or write a book one day, which is kind of a thing that's coming up for me that I have places to come, you know, to spark that memory, because in the moment, we think we're gonna remember it. And then I don't know about y'all, but for me, a couple of days later, I'm like, what, what's that?
Tim 36:35 Yeah, Oh, totally. Well, I often am reminded, and I think I've probably talked about it on the podcast before. But when we talk to children, you know, one of the things if you're, if you've got kids that are squabbling or something, we used to use the think model, we used to say, Hey, before you say that, try to have the practice of thinking is what I'm about to say, you know, true, helpful, inspiring, necessary or kind. Good luck with that, as a parent, if they're often not thinking about that, but it gives you some good talk. But then when we're more rational, we're adults, we've learned not to talk, we've learned not to speak. And so with leaders, when it comes to helping others fill their brag book, don't forget to speak when it's true, helpful, inspiring, necessary, and kind. Because we often don't give praise when we should. And then the third step is don't forget to you know, write it down for yourself when it's true, helpful, inspiring, necessary, kind, even if you were the one to do it, I think that's a great acid test to add it to your car statement list or your brag book, right.
Anna 37:48 And you know, if you are in leadership, right, and/or if you're in conversations with people that are struggling, the power of telling someone that you believe in them, and what's possible for them, is so powerful. And so that is another thing to just keep at the forefront of your brain that is something that could just mean everything, especially to someone who's going through an extended job search or a difficult job search. Again, you know, I'm all about that little spark, that little light, that little bit of hope that we can give others until they get to that next spot. And then, you know, kind of going back to being prepared for the future. It's about like, making yoga, a priority, booking that, you know, that appointment and holding yourself accountable. But also, you know, booking that time for yourself to be active on LinkedIn, to network with the people that are doing super cool, awesome stuff that you want to do, that you're inspired by so that you're building community of like-minded people, so that you have options, you have conversations that you can start that will fast track you to your next opportunity and future proof your career so that you're not in that instability, in that unhealthy place starting from ground zero, because that's a hard place to be and it's humbling, you know, and I think about it, and you've had knee surgeries, and I've had knee surgeries as well. But when you're, you know, set back, come back, but sometimes it gets to that point where you're looking at the mountain and you're like, so unmanageable, right? But it's all about just taking one step, one step, one day at a time, in service of your highest self, the woman that you want to be, the man that you want to be, the person that you want to be, and making that a priority, and if there's anything that people take away from our conversation today like, my hope is that they just take a minute, get quiet, take a breath and think about what do they want for themselves professionally? And how can they take that one breath, that one step towards making that happen? And if that involves reaching out to me, they can reach out and I’ll be of service.
Tim 40:24 There you go, well you jump, you beat me to the punch, but that's something that as we sort of round off towards the end of our conversation here, again, I was gonna ask, what's your hope for people? And so it’s take that moment, take a breath. And, really, you know, invest in yourself and, and take that time to reflect. I didn't say it as nicely as you did and I may even have a producer cut that out, because I wanted to very useful summation. All right, Anna, a couple of things as we finish off here, if people are ready to feel more secure, and know that they've got that career insurance at their back, how can they find you?
Anna 41:10 On LinkedIn, AnnaMorgan-recruiter-careerBFF is my handle. And just under my name, under my headline, under my recruiting top voice collaborative article batch, you will see in all caps, book a call. And that is an open calendar link, for amazing humans like you that are ready to take a breath of radical self-honesty with yourself about your career and where you want to go. And we can have a chat, and I will do all that I can to support you. And we can go from there.
Tim 41:48 Awesome. If I was to ask you, what you've got on the go, that you are really excited to share, what things lately do you want people to be aware of that you're involved with?
Anna 42:03 So, I am the host of the Ask a Recruiter audio events and audio events, essentially. It's on the third Thursday of the month. And I gather myself and other recruiting vendors and superheroes to rapid-fire answer questions from job seekers. And it is a way for the job search community to get relevant real job search tips from recruiters who are directly working with hiring managers. It helps turn down the noise from all the creators on LinkedIn that are giving out not-so-great advice. So, that is something that we do to be of service to the, you know, the job search community. And then I also just launched with a partner, Tabitha Cavanaugh, the rise of the recruiter audio event, which actually happens tomorrow, April 10th, which won't matter when this is lunch, but it happens the second Wednesday of the month. And we have various recruitment experts, or we have different conversations to level up the recruitment industry. And this is a place that I tend to coach is recruiters, sourcers, talent leaders, HR and HR-related departments. So, it's super fun to have that peer levelling-up experience. Because let's be honest, not all recruiters and talent people were raised equally. So, it's such a cool opportunity to learn from each other. So, if you're in TA or HR, please join us.
Tim 43:41 Okay, right on, I will do my best to co-promote, so reach out to me. So, all of those links will be in the show notes. And I would encourage anyone in the recruitment community to really join that powerhouse.
Anna 43:56 Yeah and, you know, I'm a generalist as far as a recruitment leader. So, I do take on clients that aren't in the TA/HR space. And I do offer, you know, a certain number of slots per month, you know, for folks to book those complimentary calls where you get 30 minutes of plugging into my brain and my experience so that I can help kind of jumpstart things for you. If you're stuck, kind of or–
Tim 44:26 And I can speak from experience, 30 minutes with Anna can change your life. So, there you go. All right. So, we've covered the wish. We've covered the how-to contact we've covered what you're excited about. Last question, if you were to put the next guest or a future guest on the hot seat. What is the question that you're curious about and doesn't have to be related to recruitment, it can be anything, it can be just any music. If I was to ask you what would that be?
Anna 45:00 Intuitively the thing that came up for me and maybe this is part of what I'm working on in my career and my entrepreneurial journey is, what is the the one thing that you're avoiding doing that you know could offer the greatest ROI in your business or career a year from now?
Tim 45:28 Yeah, so what's the thing you're avoiding doing that you know would have immediate payback a year from now? But you're just for whatever reason, despite that logic, and that knowledge, you're not getting on it. Love it. Okay, awesome. Anna, did you have some fun? How do we do?
Anna 45:46 If I ever get to Canada, I'm gonna come to visit. Although, Canada's very big.
Tim 45:53 Canada is very big, but we're not that big.
Anna 45:55 What part are you in again?
Tim 45:56 I'm right next to the Rocky Mountains. I'm right next to Banff, Alberta.
Anna 46:01 Okay, I travel quite a bit. I just don't know if I'll make it there.
Tim 46:07 At one point, Banff was considered the most beautiful place on the planet. So, you gotta get up here. It's got to happen.
Anna 46:17 I love it. Thank you so much for having me.
Tim 46:19 Anna Morgan, thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate it.
Tim 46:27 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership. Please give us a positive rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word too, by sharing this with your friends, teams, and colleagues. Thanks again for listening. And be sure to tune in in two weeks time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 10 Jan 2024 | Learning How to Shove with Erin Lydon - Poker Power | 00:40:26 | |
Discover the powerful parallels between poker and leadership as Tim Sweet engages with Erin Lydon, President of Poker Power. Erin, with a Wall Street background, shares insights into teaching poker for leadership excellence. The discussion explores vital skills like courage, risk-taking, and resilience, drawing parallels between poker strategy and effective decision-making in various contexts. Erin highlights poker as a confidence and negotiation tool, especially for women in business. The conversation delves into key poker strategies, emphasizing their practical applications. Erin also discusses Poker Power's impact on corporate programs and its mission to empower young women early in their careers. The episode concludes with Erin's advice for leaders: embrace change, say "yes" more than "no," and recognize the transformative power of taking risks. About Erin Lydon Erin Lydon, President of Poker Power, is a finance industry veteran and advocate for workplace equity. Fueled by her early challenges on Wall Street, Erin founded Poker Power to empower women through poker-based leadership training. With a background at JPMorgan and as a strategic advisor to Evil Geniuses, a global e-sports organization, Erin brings extensive experience to her mission. Recognized with the Global Gaming Women “Women of Inspiration–Woman to Watch” award, she holds an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and a BA from Bates College. Erin is a sought-after speaker, having graced prestigious stages like TEDx and Money 20/20 RiseUp. Erin's dynamic leadership journey, commitment to workplace equity, and pioneering efforts at Poker Power showcase her as a trailblazer, inspiring women globally to harness the strategic prowess of poker for personal and professional success. Resources discussed in this episode:
Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Erin Lydon | Poker Power:
Transcript: Erin 00:00 So often at a poker table, nobody has a made hand, you know. So, it really is going to come down to the person who's going to play their chips most aggressively and get the other players to fold. That person is going to win the hand. That is something you have to practice, shoving your chips all in, when you have imperfect information, you don't know the cards still to come. And you certainly don't know what the other players have. That's a learned skill. Because it's scary.
Tim 00:30 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you my friend are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. Welcome to the 24th episode of the Sweet on Leadership podcast. Tim 01:03 Welcome back, everybody. Thanks again for joining us for Sweet on Leadership. My name is Tim Sweet and this is my special guest Erin Lydon. Erin, thank you so much for joining us today. Erin 01:11 Delighted to be here, Tim. Tim 01:13 Well, you and I had a chance to meet last summer here in Calgary as we were both presenting at Inventures, which was a tech and startup conference here in the city. And that sure was a lot of fun. I remember we first met sitting at a table on the very first day during the keynote.
Erin 01:29 We did and actually, I thought you were one brilliant, two really funny, and three really easy to talk to. So, it was a great first experience for me at Inventures.
Tim 01:39 Well, I thought you were absolutely welcoming. You were game for anything. And we just took the challenges of the speaker and it was Duncan Wardle, I remember. And he was giving us games to play. And we just jumped right in. And it was so much fun. So, I knew right away that I had a person next to me who loved to play games. And what you might not know about me is that I actually have a long history and a love for Dungeons and Dragons of all things. Because it teaches people, well, a. it's role-playing. So, you're allowed to go and have a different experience and get out of your own head. And at the same time, it's like improv. So it's several people sitting around, and I played with my kids now. And it's like you're writing a story together. So, you learn to pick out people who are game, who are ready to just, you know, drop all the pretense.
Erin 02:33 Yeah, I take that as a huge compliment. Because during that session, we really did have to put down our barriers and get very vulnerable. And remember, we had to draw, you are much better at illustration than I was, but there was just there's a lot of connection that happened quickly through that session. So, I'm thrilled we're back together for another conversation.
Tim 02:51 Oh, that's wonderful. I think for everybody listening here, it would be remiss of me to not give you a chance to just explain who you are. I mean, I know. And the really exciting thing that you bring and that you brought to Inventures and that you're bringing here today.
Erin 03:07 I am Erin Lydon, and I'm the president of Poker Power. I've been in this role for almost four years. We are a startup, I say we're a long-standing startup at this point. So, we have made it we're over those initial barriers of startups. But that's really not who I am, you know, deep down or for most of my life. I was not a poker player. And I'm sure we'll get into that. But I have been in startups since 2012. I love the chaos. I love the energy. I love the success and the failure that comes with being in startups. But prior to that, I was on Wall Street. So, I had a very serious corporate job at JPMorgan. I worked with many clients, I traveled three or four days a week. And the only reason I left that job truly was because I had a young daughter, I was getting into my late 30s. And I really struggled on how to be on that very fast track career, and also have a newborn at home. And for listeners who are much younger than I am. This is in the 2000s. And we really didn't have the programs and the policies and the opportunities that now so many firms are making available to working parents and new parents. But before all that I grew up in Maine, so a long way from Calgary, but somewhat similar weather I think. Truly, I just had a terrific childhood. You know, I spent most of my summers on the ocean, on the main coast, on a sailboat, and went to college in Maine at Vates and then moved to Chicago, and shortly thereafter went to business school at Northwestern, and everything started from there.
Tim 04:29 That’s excellent. And when you think about an industry and a location to cut your teeth, in the professional world, I can think of few examples that are more aggressive than Wall Street. So, I mean, you were in with both feet. This is not for the faint of heart.
Erin 04:48 No, and I didn't go into it with eyes wide open. I'll be honest, I had been in healthcare previously before going to business school and actually expected to go into healthcare management. I loved, I was a fundraiser primarily raising money for cancer and women's health programs. And really saw that as my career path forward when I was in my mid-20s. What happened in Business School is one, I figured out that I was very bad at consulting interviews, because that's the direction I was heading down. So, when I failed at those, I had to pivot pretty quickly. And it was actually one of my dear friends, he said to me, one evening, early in September of our second year, he said, Erin, you should go into banking. And no one had ever said that to me. And my dad's the CFO, you know, he'd worked with nurses his whole career, but I literally had not had a math class in years. And so in order to really make that change, for a career pivot, I had to get a lot of classes, I took a lot of finance classes, in my first semester, and I got very good at interviewing for the banks, and interviewing for the banks is a whole different experience than interviewing for consulting. And it turned out that I was very, very good at solving the questions that they were asking. And so when I, you know, hit Christmas time of my second year, I had eight banking offers. And I really had my choice of where to go next. And I always say I picked JPMorgan because, during my holiday break, my future boss called me one time over the holidays. And he wished me a Merry Christmas and said he hoped my family was well. And the competing firm called me every single day of my holiday break and started to badger me about why I had not accepted the offer. And what that taught me, this was an early tell that I picked up on, is that I am not the type of person who's going to call you every single day and try to make a sale, that would never have been me. So, I realized pretty quickly that I'm not going to fit there. And I fit very, very well at JPMorgan.
Tim 06:34 There's two things I love about that scene that you've painted for us. The first is that you're not going to be the one that's going to be pushing rope, you want to be pulled into something and you want others to be pulled into something. The other thing is you dropped the word tell. That was an early tell that they gave you which I think pulls us right towards the knowledge that a game like poker can begin to give us. You're in Wall Street, you start your career there. How then does that take you to now? Can you give us a bit of a sense of what the travels were at that point?
Erin 07:08 It was not at all a linear progression. And truly when I say I would still be at JPMorgan, I would still be at JPMorgan if I had been able to solve for the early motherhood challenges that I experienced. But it ended up being you know, as so many times in life, you know, when the door closes, the window opens. And I think you know, several windows opened for me. The first is that I was able to move into startups. And then secondly, one of my original, very early clients at JPMorgan, I had stayed in touch with all those years. And she had this idea around teaching teenagers how to play poker, particularly teenage girls. And she shared it with me over the holidays in 2019. And I said that's a really stupid idea. And I really meant it. Because my whole time on Wall Street, there was always a poker game going on. And I never felt included. But worse, I never felt like I could ask to sit at that table. I just didn't see myself there. And so poker was always on the periphery. But I was never a part of that game. So, once you have this idea, and what the reason I said it was stupid is because I couldn't fathom outside of you know, James Bond, Hollywood movies, and basement really gross places where men play poker. I couldn't fathom what this could become. Fortunately, she laughed too. And she came back a few weeks later. And she said, No, I really think you need to get involved with this. And that was three weeks before the pandemic. And if you can remember in February, and going into March, none of us thought this pandemic thing was going to last very long. And at that time, when you think about poker, you think about real humans, real chips, real cards, it's very hard to imagine this game in a virtual world, especially when you don't know how to play it. But that's exactly what we had to figure out. And the pandemic was our perfect storm. Because while the teenagers went the wayside because they were so overwhelmed by their new virtual lives, suddenly, every single company around the globe was looking for a way to get us to turn our cameras on, and to engage with each other. And just at that moment, we had created a virtual curriculum. We had a poker app to play on. And we were able to really break down the barriers of bringing the game into companies first in America, and now globally.
Tim 09:17 When you think about breaking down barriers, that really is one of the key parts of this, and I thought you'd been in Wall Street, there was a poker game going on all the time, but you were never at the table. And women and even men, often the challenge that they come to me with is I want to go up in the organization, I want to be in with the senior team, how do I get invited to these tables? How do I position myself so that I can, you know, get behind those closed doors so that I can be part of things and that's a huge progression that when leaders are wanting to really accelerate their career up into senior leadership and executive leadership. That's a skill that many people have to stumble upon, and not necessarily learn. So at this point, you've got this, this app, perfect storm, things are rolling. I mean, I remember that wasn't that long ago. But I remember myself getting involved in virtual social activities, just so that we didn't feel like we were going crazy. When we were in the middle of lockdown up here in Canada. You were positioned there. And so what was the initial reaction? Were businesses clamoring to get on this? Was it individuals? Were you originally marketed as this way to get women involved?
Erin 10:39 We were as soon as we pivoted to corporates. And we actually started with Morningstar. So, a very well-known financial firm headquartered in Chicago. I think back to 2020 and them being willing to take a risk with us because we were clunky. Like every other business that was now a virtual business and trying to figure out how to, you know, engage across the screen. What we figured out pretty quickly though, is 1. Poker has to be fun, doesn't matter who the players are, you have to think this theme is fun in order to want to come back. And then 2. because poker is such an intimidating game, for so many people. It's the jargon, it's the rules, it's the math, all these things prevent people from wanting to engage with the game. We knew very early on, we had to make it highly accessible, and very bite-sized. And if we could get those two things, right, make it fun, so you want to come back, make it approachable and quick to learn, so you only have to remember two or three things in every one of our classes, then you're going to start to engage with us. And that was the secret sauce is exactly as you described him. During that first year, the pandemic, people were looking for regular touch points with other humans. And we were a little tired of talking to the ones that were living in our homes at that point. And so the opportunity to be in a classroom setting, playing a game, getting better at the game. And best of all, in a competitive game, there is something that brings you back. And you have to understand what Poker Power, there's no money transacting. So, there's no gambling, there's no money put into the app, it is truly competing for bragging rights and a leaderboard. And that was enough, it's still enough that you know, you want to see your name at the top of that leaderboard. And that's what we figured out. And then we were able to package it up as leadership development, professional development, and started first with financial firms because that's where we have so many good relationships. And now we have 230 corporate partners. So, we have expanded across industries, all sizes of firms, and women at every level. You know, as much as I love having interns and associates. I also love having the C-suite learn to play this game.
Tim 12:37 Yeah, for sure. Okay, so let's get a little bit into, there's two things that I want to know when I'm trying to decide what order to hit them in. I want to understand why this speaks to you. And when you were going out for funding, what was the personal skin you had in the game? Right? Why was this particular venture so compelling for you to get involved in? And then I want to get into a little bit about the mechanics and what a person can actually learn in poker that they can't learn otherwise.
Erin 13:06 During my time in banking, during that first year, at the end of the first year, you all get a bonus. The firms done well, your team has done well, you've done well, you get a bonus, and it's a large number, it's usually more than just your salary. And when I received my first bonus, it was a really big number for me, because I was coming from a nonprofit background. And I received it, I shook my boss's hand, and I adored him. I learned so much from him over the last year. And I just said thank you very much. And I walked out of the room. This is at a time when there were paced secrecy rules. So, you were not allowed to share your numbers. Some of that has gone away, a lot of it truly hasn't. But as often happens, you know, it gets late at night and all the new cohort gets together and you share. And in that moment of sharing, I learned that I was paid significantly less than a male colleague to the point that it was 1000’s of dollars, not hundreds of dollars. And my response to that was, how did you get that? It was a genuine question. How did you get so much more? And his answer was that he had asked. And for me, it had never crossed my mind. I was supposed to ask for more. And that sounds crazy to me now because now I know how to negotiate and so many people know how to you have to ask in order to receive. But I truly was just in a position of being grateful. I went on with my career, things got better. I'm glad I learned that lesson early on. However, it always stuck with me as why didn't I already know how to ask? Why wasn't comfortable? I didn't have the confidence, the courage, the background, and what was holding me back? And if it's holding me back, it's probably holding back a lot of other people, especially a lot of other women. And so fast forward almost 20 years later, I do a TED Talk and the TED talk is all about equal pay. Because truly from that day of not receiving the bonus I wish I had I got on to the Equal Pay bandwagon. And in that talk, I have five really great solutions for equal pay, none of which are poker because I didn't know about poker yet. But I say if I were to do that same talk today, I would only say the answer is poker. And the reason for that is through learning poker and playing poker, you are honing the skills that you need for negotiation in a really critical way. And you're building confidence and you're building confidence certainly in the game, which then translates to more confidence. All of those things will be done at the poker table. So, it is very personal to me because while I missed out on an opportunity, you know, early in my career, I don't want other women to miss out on it.
Tim 15:29 What are some of the key skills that poker teaches? Could you give us some of the highlights?
Erin 15:35 Our curriculum has 12 leadership lessons. So, each one of our weekly lessons has one of the skills as the theme. The first lesson is courage, it takes a lot of courage to sit at a poker table. The second one is bold, and the word bold really is slash aggression. So, the word playing aggressively the word aggression in a poker game is a really strong positive. And the reason I say that is and you’ve played poker Tim, so you understand, is so often at a poker table, nobody has a made hand, you know, so it really is going to come down to the person who's going to play their chips most aggressively, and get the other players to fold, that person's gonna win the hand. That is something you have to practice, shoving your chips all in, when you have imperfect information, you don't know the cards still to come. And you certainly don't know what the other players have. That's a learned skill. Because it's scary. Like the first time I ever did it, I had butterflies and I wasn't even playing for real money, and I still had butterflies. So, lesson number two is being bold and aggressive. And then we go on with risk-taking. With every hand that you play in poker, it's a risk because you don't know the outcome. One of the great things about playing a poker game over and over is you get immediate feedback on your risk-making decisions. There aren't a lot of areas in life where you get that immediate feedback, like that was the right decision, you won the pot, that could have been a better decision had you made some different decisions along the way. We continue with resilience, perseverance. We do teach poker math, it's a really important part of the game. A quick story about poker math is that it used to be lesson three and it was our most skipped lesson during the pandemic. And we couldn't figure out why. We're like, Why is no one showing up for poker math, until of course, a marketing person said, Well, you're calling it poker math. Tim 17:16 Poker math. You said the “M” word. Erin 17:18 So, we moved it to Lesson Seven, because I know once you've already taken six lessons, you're probably gonna come back for lesson seven. And we now call it calculating. It's really about the calculations and the equity and the probability of the game that we want to teach.
Tim 17:34 The thing that really resonates with me is this idea of aggressiveness and boldness. And, you know, when we think about… I think I can't remember what the number was. But when when we have a reaction to men, or women being aggressive in the same situation, 76% of the time, women will be seen as too aggressive. When they're right at the same level, when only 26% of men will be accused of being too aggressive. And there's all sorts of labels. And there's all sorts of mechanisms in place, cultural mechanisms, and whatnot, that really work against women in the boardroom, where they're written off, or they're talked about as being too emotional, or they're talking about, you know, all sorts of manner of degrading assumptions can be made. You know what I mean? This is very common. I've seen this happen firsthand, where women are made to feel not enough in the situation when they push their chips all in. So, focusing on that for a minute, when we think about the kinds of lessons that you teach in that first or second segment, what would be one of the key messages that you draw out of that?
Erin 18:49 You know, it's actually fascinating to watch a total novice play this game, in the early days, because typically, in the beginning, there is a lot of hesitation to push the chips all in to shove. And the reason is, even though there is no monetary value, is that a woman will say during the game, that's so many of my chips, can I just hold back a few of them?
Tim 19:13 Ah, scarcity mentality?
Erin 19:14 Yes, and I have now played poker with a lot of men, and I have never, ever seen a man say, can I hold back a few of my chips? And I think it's that pattern of behavior that we are trying to change. And so if I can get you to practice, it's a physically doing the move. It's physically feeling what this feels like to have something at risk. And it's also getting that, you know, did you win the chips, or did you not win the chips? It's often good that you don't win the chips and you lose, because then we pause, and we talk through what happened. And so there's this learning element to decision-making that is so critical to making better decisions. And so one of the things that you will see with professional poker players is they write down their hand histories so they're, you know, if they're on their phone, they might be surfing but they're probably write down their hand histories, so they can go back and study points in the game where they made a misstep. It's a very analytical game from the sense of you can improve game after game, day after day, week after week. And you can see that improvement. Yeah, I've now been playing almost four years, and I play a lot of poker now both do in our app, and I also play in Vegas. And I know I have better. Am I great at this game? Absolutely not. But has it given me a new framework and a new method of problem-solving, and thinking through situations where there's a number of different outcomes that could occur? Absolutely. It's changed my perspective.
Tim 20:34 It's funny to talk about hand history because often one of the coaching techniques that I'll use is to have people even write down and observe, what are they feeling in the moment. How are they playing this situation with a staff member, or with a boss, or with a partner, or a customer? At one point, you have to be there, you have to be present, you have to be authentic, you have to be building trust, but at the same time, you have to be fluent in how do I typically react in this situation? And what is that like? And is this, am I feeling the pressure or the tension with a belief of what I'm capable of or not capable of? And is that pulling me towards a certain behavior? And can I resolve that tension? So, I can act in the manner that's needed in the moment? And you know, hearing you speak about poker and I remember, I believe it was when we were in Inventures, or maybe it was your presentation. But it was the notion of, yes, I feel this way. Yes, I feel nervous or whatnot. But now I can shelve that. And I can make the right move. And I can essentially, observe my own behavior and get out of my own head and say, What is the situation require? And how am I going to behave in this situation? Right, so that it can become somewhat, not careless, but in fact, very, very intentional. And it's like I'm about to make this move. And it may not be comfortable. And that's not the issue, the issue is, what's the right thing to do in the moment?
Erin 22:06 Right, and it's the repetition because one of the great things about poker is it's a very fast-moving game. And so yes, you lose a hand, you give up some of your chips, but the cards are already getting redelt for the next hand. And it is because of that practice, you get to do, you know, in an hour playing poker, you can play 10, 15, 20 different hands. And so you're getting to make a number of decisions, with all these different inputs that are always evolving, you know, as the cards come out in the center of the board on the other table, your decision-making is going to change based off of new information, and based off of what you're observing from the other players. So, it's a very dynamic game from that standpoint. And you have to keep rethinking, what do I do next? You know, how big is my chip stack? How big is your chip stack? What are the patterns that I've observed with you over the last half hour and what do I think you're going to do next? And all of those characteristics make it such a fascinating game, to practice because it is the boardroom, it is the interview room, often it is the classroom. And so if you can get better in a simulated scenario, you're going to be able to translate the gameplay from the table to the gameplay in your real life.
Tim 23:14 Yes, and I think and you'll be able to carry that metaphor back into your real life. Whereas when you're learning it in that metaphoric sense, in this arena that's taken away from the regular work world, you're able to approach things with a lot less fear. And I think what's important here for people to realize, too, is that it's not just an app, yes, you're training people on the app, but you're also running live events. And you're working with corporations, and you're working with higher education institutions. And you're able to bring this into a very real situation where you have colleagues playing together, and they're able to pull out of that. And if I go back to that D&D thing, we have a program called Budgets and Boardrooms, which is based on it's a D&D module that we play in a business sense, and it's pretty– Erin 24:00 Oh, I love this. Tim 24:01 Oh, yeah, it's a lot of fun. But, you know, when we think about these opportunities that leaders have to build teams, or to impart skills, or to really challenge limiting beliefs, you know, Poker Power gives us an example of that, in that there are some characteristics that leaders should be looking for, and you've spoken to a lot of them already, where they're able to be in this sandbox. They're able to experience the consequences of their decisions very quickly, far more quickly than you would get in normal life. So, that they can practice, and they can see themselves, and they can have this iterative type of development experience. And those are very important. What would be some of the other things that just generally you think that a good off-site or development session has, naturally I appreciate that Poker Power would be demonstrating that but on a wider contextual basis, what should leaders be looking for?
Erin 25:00 Stay with poker for just a moment, but then I will go from there is the poker table of being a meritocracy. And I think that is a critical factor when you gather people together of all different levels. And the reason it's meritocracy is if no one really knows how to play this game, then it doesn't matter where you went to school, doesn't matter what your title is, doesn't matter how big, or strong, or tall you are, all of those things typically designate winners in our culture, in our businesses. And all of that goes away. Because at the poker table, the only thing that matters is how you play your cards. And that's all up here, that is inside your head. And for women in particular, it levels the playing field immediately. And in fact, one of the best things about poker is you actually don't ever have to speak. And the reason I highlight that is so often in a boardroom setting, in a meeting setting, a woman will contribute an idea or plan, and she will be overtalked, or the idea will be taken and put into the mouth of someone else. And this is a real pet peeve of mine and something that I care a lot about women being able to reclaim their words and their ideas. So, they do own them. That happens at a poker table because you don't have to speak all of your decisions, all the way that you show value is through how you maneuver your chips. And it's like a light bulb, you know. And so I like to take the scenarios that happen within a poker game, and then translate them to the real-world scenarios that you know, all of us are experiencing in our business lives. I think another thing that is really important, is enabling women to feel that they can take a risk. And it is, okay, if it fails. You know, so often like you think about when women apply for jobs or promotions, will only do it if we literally tick every single requirement that's been put into the job description, and then men only need five or six, if that and they're going to apply. So, women are more hesitant in many scenarios to take that risk. When you are playing poker, unless you literally plan to fold every single one of your hands at some point, you're gonna have to put chips into that pot. And that's a risk. And so I want you to know that even if you lose the hand, there's a lesson and a learning that's going to come to that, that as you start to piece together these different learnings from the poker table, they're going to start to make sense and how you interact and behave within a business setting.
Tim 27:21 That I think is such a great takeaway from this in the sense of, you know, it is two things there. One is what do we do in the face of risk? And are we able to translate that risk into opportunity? Is it the risk itself that creates the differentiator that allows one person to move forward or not? And how we handled I think that's a great part. The other thing is, and I know this as a coach, and learning and development specialist that facilitates a lot of these team sessions. Primarily, the tools we give people are verbal in nature. And so, you know, you've really got me thinking what a bias that immediately imposes that we talk our way out of situations, or we do these kinds of things. Whereas the physical, and the ability to let you know, even for myself when I'm say facilitating a strategic session, or if it's a conflict resolution or something, silence is such an important skill for me. There was a great book back in the day that was for facilitators called, Don't Just Say Something, Stand There. And it was like, just let the room breathe and see what they're going to do. And that silence is a very real power. And sometimes the person who speaks first truly does lose, wow, that's not entirely true. But it's like, you know what I mean that you need to you need to use it, and you need to use your physical presence as well.
Erin 28:47 There are certain moves in poker, in the actual gameplay that we talk a lot about, just as you have said. So, the move that you just described that pause, and call it the power of the pause, that's the check move. So, when you're playing a hand of poker, it's your turn, and you're the first to act. And so you have a decision to make, you can put chips into the pot, you can raise the amount of chips in the pot, or you can literally tap on the table or verbally say the word check. And what that does, is it gives you that breathing space so that the gameplay moves to the person who is to your left, and they will then make their decision. If they decide to put chips in, it's going to come back around to you. But in that moment of checking, you're saying, I'm just going to observe what's going on here. I'm going to step back for, it could be seconds, it could be you know, 30 seconds, and really think through my next move here. That's huge. That's huge that you can play a game where you get to actually control the tempo of the game and how you play your moves. Because that's what you want to do in a negotiation. You don't always want to be the first to speak, you want to state you know what you want. You want to give the breathing space for someone to respond to you. Tim 29:50 You don't want to set an anchor. Erin 29:52 Yeah, you've gotten them to speak first and then you can take that moment of pause and I think so often we are, and partly, it's just, you know, having spent so much of our time now in a virtual world and we have so many digital inputs that come to us, is we feel this need to respond immediately, to a slack, to an email, to that text message. And in fact, I use the power of the pause, that check move in just my day-to-day interactions with my team, with other people within the firm. Like, I actually don't have to answer this right now, I can pause and I can think through what I want to say, that's empowering to know that you can do that. Yeah, and then I think the other move that's so important that follows that that check is the power to raise. So, to really put a lot of value into a poker game, and say that you're dominant, to tell the story because so much of poker is telling a narrative of strength or weakness. And so you put a lot of chips into the pot, and you are telling everybody else that you'd like your hand. Now, you might be bluffing. And bluffing is a really important skill in poker. Or you might actually have, you know, those two kings are those two aces and a really strong hand. But you're able to decide how you're going to maneuver and push around other people at the table. And I always say that when women get a big chip stack, so they have a lot of chips in front of them more than anyone else at the table. We always say you're now you're the bully. And that's a real like, you will see women actually sort of recoil at that word or like pause, like, why are you calling me the bully. And I'm saying in a really positive way, you're the bully at this table because you have the most value in front of you. And you can push other people around. And so infrequently do we get into those positions of power that we can make in the workplace, doing it at the poker table is incredibly enlightening. And it also helps you understand being on the other side of that when you don't have the big chip stack and you're being bullied around, what does that feel like?
Tim 31:42 We're talking about bullies, and we're talking about the ability to force people's hands or anything along those lines. Poker is naturally an adversarial game. And so I mean, it is really us against the table. But I think it's important for the listeners to realize that even though we're testing it, we're testing ourselves in that form. It doesn't preclude us from being collaborative, it doesn't preclude us from coming together and accomplishing something. However, when it comes to getting your thoughts across, or being as influential as you need, or having that confidence, or being able to articulate and represent an idea, without softening or stepping back on important issues, and the rest of it, that's when these skills come in. So, they're not absent in a collaborative sense. I mean, obviously, we're not going to bring a bully methodology into a team environment. But they do exist. And it's not about always seeking a win-lose. It's about making sure that you advocate for yourself and advocate for your ideas. And, you know, sport teaches us so many good things about this, but not everybody has had the experience of having to be in an aggressive competitive environment, be it sport, or dance or gymnastics, or Taekwondo or whatever they're doing. Fencing, you know?
Erin 33:01 Yeah, no, so many young women drop out of sports once they hit high school, you know, 13-14 years old, and they and they stop. And one of the surprising things that has happened in our games is that, yes, it's a zero-sum game, just as you describe, one person is going to win the pot, everyone else is going to lose, and you don't want to play again. But in that moment of someone winning, what is happening at the table is very fascinating to me, because the person who wins is, she feels like a rock star, like literally feels like a rock star. And she's often you know, taking pictures and selfies of herself, scooping those chips in. But the other thing that's happening at the table is those eight or nine other women that she's seated with, they're celebrating her, and that I do think is a very uniquely female characteristic is you just took all my chips, but I am so incredibly proud of you, I am so happy for you. And the reason this is so important at our poker table is our tables feel good. So, even if you lose all your tips, you're doing it in a setting that feels very collaborative, very supportive. And one that you want to be back in again, like women tend to like those types of environments, we're willing to play the game. But we also want to make sure that we're all feeling really positive about the game. And I think that then lends itself to the poker table being a place where networks are formed, relationships are built, deals get made, we know that's what happens, you know, at or at real poker tables. And we want to give women those same spaces and environments to experience them.
Tim 34:28 It's got me thinking back to, you know, when you see these caricatures of people, when you watch professional poker on TV, oh, and by the way, I mean, there's a reason it's on a sporting network and not on something else, right, because it really does have this competitive edge that you don't find in a lot of cerebral games. You know, but you see these caricatures and these archetypes of like the Phil Hellmuth where he's just, you know, the biggest whiner when he's losing and so arrogant when he's not versus other players that come to the table. And at least they're controlling it that way. But they want to have fun. And they're trying to encourage, you know, they're wanting to make it jovial. And notice the others that sit there and say absolutely nothing. What a way to be able to explore who we are, and really test ourselves and become fluent in how we're going to approach certain situations and gain some awareness and face up to some potentially challenging facts about ourselves, and maybe how we were raised or what beliefs and identities we hold. And we have accessible to us so that we can fill our toolbox with other options. So, I mean, this is really exciting stuff. Erin, I hope we get another chance to talk and see how this goes. I think it's absolutely fascinating. And I can't wait to hear a little bit more. But in the meantime, let me ask you a couple of questions. When it comes to Poker Power or your life in general, what's the most exciting thing that's happening for you right now? What do you have going on?
Erin 36:03 Well, I'm in a state of transition personally, in just that my children are grown, life is going to probably take me in a different direction. Certainly where I live is changing. I actually live in North Idaho of all places. And so I think, you know, there's a personal transition that will happen in my life, and I'm really excited about that. I love change, I thrive on change, so it doesn't scare me. And when people say, Well, what's next, I'm like, I don't know, it's gonna get figured out, you know, the cards aren't all dealt yet. So, we'll just wait and see. I think for Poker Power, we're also in a state of transition, you know, we've been a startup, successful startups are very good at trying a lot of experiments or pilots, things that you fail at, you know, that's what makes a really good start, because you've failed a lot. And you've learned from it. And you've been able to pivot and really focus on what is working for the business. We're at that stage now. So, our corporate program is fantastic. You know, we have inbounds from corporates all over the globe. And we work in 40 countries virtually. And so we feel that's a really strong part of the program. What's coming next, though, is I need that teenager, and I need that young woman who's in college, because if we can get her to start to think and strategize and negotiate like a winning poker player today, you know, when she's 20 years old, not 40 years old, she is going to enter the workforce on a more level playing field, at our origin, at our most important mission at Northstar, that's what we're trying to do is get the skills and strategies into the hands of young women as early as we can, because we really do think it's going to have a generational impact on leadership and success. And then I think, what's next, I'm hoping to get to the beach in a couple of weeks. You know, it’s been a long year. So, I'm not heading back to Canada, as much as I like to ski and as much as I love Calgary. I'm heading to the beach, here in a few weeks.
Tim 37:53 That’s great. If people want to get in touch with you, where can they reach out?
Erin 37:56 Yeah, so pokerpower.com is our website, you can access our app there. And you can also get it from any of the app stores. It's called Poker Power Play. And that's how you can start your poker journey with us, you can also register for virtual lessons that we offer every week, you can do that on the website. And if you just want to reach out to me personally, please do so on LinkedIn, I'd be happy to DM with you and learn more about, you know, any of the interests that you may have.
Tim 38:20 We'll put all of those links down in the show notes. Last question here. If you were to have a wish, for one of the leaders listening today, what would it be?
Erin 38:31 I would say to say yes, more than no. And the reason I say that is for about 25 years that has really been my life motto is that I say yes to everything. And that gets me in trouble, absolutely. I get myself into situations that I don't know how to solve, necessarily. But I figured them out, you know, with a lot of effort. And you know, a lot of us sort of self-awareness, I figure things out. I think leaders have to fail too, they have to say those yes’s, and then they have to have mistakes that are made and lessons that are learned you can't ever stop, you know, those experimentations and taking the risk. And I love being around people who say yes, instead of no, in all parts of my life, I find that very energizing.
Tim 39:11 You can't lead from the room that you've closed the door on yourself. Right? But you can certainly lead when you've said yes and you're on the other side of the door and then we'll take it as it comes. Right? But anyway, Erin, this has been absolutely fascinating. I am just tickled that you and I had a chance to talk again, and I can't wait for the next opportunity. So, thank you so much.
Erin 39:32 All right. Great to see you, stay warm up there.
Tim 39:35 Will do. Okay, see you soon. Tim 39:38 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If like us you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership. Please give us a positive rate rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word too, by sharing this with your friends, teams, and colleagues. Thanks again for listening and be sure to tune in in two weeks' time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 20 Sep 2023 | Cultivating Leadership and Ideal Workplace Culture with George Trachilis | 00:45:00 | |
In this episode, Tim talks with podcast guest George Trachilis about recognizing and cultivating leadership in their work as leadership coaches. Both Tim and George share their history of how they found themselves working with organizations to improve their processes and systems and the top takeaways each took regarding the power of leadership. As an expert in Lean Leadership, George provides insightful ideas on workplace culture. Drawing inspiration from leaders in mindset and workplace culture, such as James Clear, Normen Bodek, Shigeo Shingo, and Mike Rother, this episode is a treasure trove of resources for leaders who want to focus on self-improvement. If you consider yourself a leader or someone who has a vision and gets things done, this episode has tons of resources and ideas to help you grow. About George Trachilis Author and speaker, George Trachilis, is the Shingo Research Award winning contributor and publisher of the book, Developing Lean Leaders at All Levels. His insight as an entrepreneur and Lean Coach will astound. George is one of the most experienced and knowledgeable people alive in the Lean world today, and his focus has changed from Lean, to operational excellence to leadership excellence. It has always been about leadership and leading by example. Connect with George today to address your leadership needs. Resources discussed in this episode:
-- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact George Trachilis | Leadership Excellence: -- George 00:00 The more you focus on the laggards, the more attention everybody else will want from you, and you'll lose good people. Focus on your superstars. You know, that's the direction you're going people get caught up.
Tim 00:12 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable. If any of these describe you, then you my friend, or a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. Welcome to the Sweet on Leadership Podcast, episode 16.
Tim 00:46 Thanks again for joining us on sweet on leadership. I'm really pleased today that I have person who I have followed for years joining me. And when I contemplated what we're going to talk about today was the obvious choice for who to reach out to and that's George Trachilis. George, thanks very much for taking the time.
George 01:08 Oh, thank you. Thank you, Tim. So
Tim 01:10 today, we spent a little bit of time here before we hit record talking about what we want to cover. And we don't really know where this is gonna go. But I believe it's all around how both of us, our careers have taken us into the area of strategy, leadership development, team development. And we share a common starting point. And that is really moving from operational excellence, and the tools that are involved there all the way into this, this era. So maybe as a start, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, what you're working on. And then we can get into how we found ourselves down this path.
George 01:53 So, my name is George Trachilis. For those of you that don't know me, I started off in Lean In 1994, working for a company called Motorcoach Industries, which was Greyhound Buses. And in those days, I was a young engineer, just coming out of school basically. And I was asked to be on an implementation team for an ERP implementation, which took me to Pembina, North Dakota in the US from Winnipeg, Canada. And we implemented an ERP system, which included total quality management, and what we knew as Lean back then, and Kanban, and all the tools. And we had consultants come in from all Oliver White Consulting. And what they did was they share the tools with us, the leaders of the group, and then they asked us to go train others. And I loved it. What I say is I caught the bug, that was it, I can no longer work in a regular job. It needed to be about change, and looking at the light go on in people's eyes. That's what it was all about. And it hasn't been for 30 years now. The first 10 years was me implementing with a team of people the second 10 years, was owning my own consulting business going to Edmonton Calgary throughout Canada. As a matter of fact, I had an online course that created maybe the first online course, on Lean 101 the Lego Simulation Airplane Game. And the Government of Alberta bought it, which means I was allowed to sell it for them. And they trained 300 companies in Alberta, Canada, which then expanded because in 2011, I just said let's give it away to the world. And I had like in December of that year, something like 300 students on average registered per day. So, it was pretty amazing that everybody in 2011 love this thing called Lean. Okay, Lean is great. But I found I was missing something because I would go into a company, somebody would show me the Toyota way and the 4P model. Okay. I didn't know what all that meant. And then in 2012, I was doing more online courses and I met Jeff Liker, and I met Norman Bodek. Actually in reverse Norman first, Jeff Liker, and met a lot of the Guru's and I went to Japan learned a lot about the Toyota way of doing things, met with a lot of Toyota coaches, especially on Toyota business practices, and learned that and now I coach and develop people using Toyota business practices. But throughout the last 30 years, even though the last 10 is all on leadership development, I still go in, I still do value stream mapping, I still do the tools. So that's not a problem. I love doing that. But I get the benefit there. Not everybody else necessarily. If I can teach that, well, somebody else is getting the benefit. Now I coach and develop companies. And I've got two big clients today where I'm coaching leaders to be leaders. And they're coaching others. So, the mental model I used to have in the first one years was the five principles of Lean. Okay? Define value from the customer's perspective, right? Define the value stream, first flow, then pull, and strive for perfection, great five values, great five principles of Lean. Now, ever since Jeff Liker and I put the book together, called Developing Lean leaders at all levels, the model we share there is, number one, live the core values of the company. Okay, that's number one. Number two, commit to self development, because everybody knows, if you don't develop yourself, you don't have that attitude, you're going nowhere, you're going nowhere, plus, you're causing everybody else, no end of pain, because you're in it for yourself, everybody's got to do something for you. And you're not enough for the customer or the company, or your teamwork, or your team players. Number two coach and develop others, we need everybody to be a coach, as a manager. If you're not coaching and developing somebody, you're just not doing your job as a manager. Number three, support daily Kaizen. And then number four, define your targets and align all of your processes towards those targets for that year. So create vision, and align targets. That's number four. So that mental model today is a model that I refer to as the Lean Leadership Development Model. Jeff, and I created a company called Lean Leadership Institute. And we have an online course that trains that to the masses. But really step one, I always say if you can't improve, if you can't say, I want to improve, there's something wrong. And it's not with a everybody else. It's with you. So, so just just making sure people know and then I usually get the question is like, what happens when you meet somebody like that? Well, don't worry about them, don't focus on them as a leader, the more you focus on the laggards, the more attention everybody else will want from you. And you'll lose good people focus on your superstars, you know, that's the direction you're going people get caught up. So what I'm working on today is remote coaching for several companies, and helping them understand how they should be thinking so that they can teach that mindset to others.
Tim 07:33 It's a real basis and thought, when we think of just the pure efficiency of playing to your strengths, or supporting, I liked what you said there about focusing on the superstars. Because we're going to improve our reach, we're going to make sure that we have all the right thought going on in the organization, rather than focusing on constraints, it it's a good place to be but with teams, we need to be marshaling everybody into a common goal. And what was that old saying that they used to say? You know, do you want to be the hero with 1000 Helpers? Or do you want to be the leader with 1000? Heroes? You know, really, can we bring that out in people? I'm still floored by just how similar the evolution is between yourself and myself and where we've landed.
George 08:26 I'm not. I think it's funny, because when we're a Lean thinker, what is it we're looking for? We're looking to help people, okay. And when we see the gap, we kind of say, hey, let's close the gap. And this is the gap for a long time. We just never saw it. And we've been distracted by others, like, let's call them thought leaders that have driven us in a certain thinking process. We've been distracted for about 10 to 20 years. But today, I think we're on top of the real issue, which is our leaders are not leaders, at times, they're not behaving that way. They're thinking about short term results and behaving in a way similar to get those versus the long term game that they could get by staying on course, you know, making sure people understand they're valued at the company. They're the only appreciating asset. You're growing the people that's your job. When I was in Japan, it was funny because Matt Amezaga he was the Vice President of Operations at all of Toyota. He said that Fujio Cho, asked him to go back to Kentucky and get the culture back because they had a leader there. This particular leader didn't do a good job. And in a matter of one year, he destroyed the culture. And it took four years to get it back. But he did it in three, he was very impressed with himself. So, this is the kind of culture that you need. And you, you got to think of the culture as the behaviors. And the behaviors, behaviors of the leadership go furthest. When you see somebody in front of you, and they're the CEO of the company, and they bend down, they pick up a piece of garbage, and they throw it in the garbage can. That's not like for show. That's because they live it. That's because they, they understand that if they don't demonstrate what they want from others, they're not going to get it.
Tim 10:30 Yeah, I think tied on to that is, if the leaders are behaving in a way, or if the managers or the executives in those that should be in leadership roles are behaving in a way that demonstrates the worst possible things, then that also becomes how we define the culture because you know, that culture is defined by the worst behaviors we're willing to accept. And it can be so debilitating for an organization to have the wrong people getting the attention. It really takes away from the enjoyment and from the fulfillment, that everybody who's fighting the good fight is able to derive from it. And when I think back to some of the experiences that I had, I remember what my first major regional management role was with was with a large commercial bakery, and I had Thunderbay to Vancouver Island. Spent a lot of time in Winnipeg, incidentally. You know, working in that area, I spent two years creating, I was deploying TQM back in the day. So we were doing quality circles and having a bunch of unionized employees wrangling waste, and getting it down and, and really working with the union to help them understand why we were having people work off page and not necessarily working to their their job description, but getting excited for their role. And one organizational shift where they decided to take our regional office out of Calgary and send it back east, and that we were no longer going to play nicey nice with the unions, it dismantled culture overnight, it dismantled all of that positive work we had done, and really made improvement. Not impossible, but a fight again, that didn't have to be. And throughout my career, I think as I evolved, I could design great, elegant processes. I could go in and do the work, I could come up with the answer I could, I could define and measure and analyze and improve till the cows came home and loved doing it, it was a lot of fun. You could get the right answers. And if the leaders weren't on side, you were done. You were dead in the water. And if you manage to get it over the line, the leaders decided that that wasn't what they were interested in anymore. They could dismantle it overnight. I started out as a junior team-building consultant, and then I and then I went in school, I found operations management, and loved it. And then I came full circle. And I realized that really, I could enable other people to do the improvement, teach them the skills and let them go out and, and reengineer the processes. But I needed to focus on hoeing the row for those improvement projects to take place. And getting leadership excited. Yeah, so I mean, that's very similar in terms of where I've ended up because it yes, the other work is very, very important. But it needs to have fertile ground. Otherwise you're, you're throwing good money out.
George 13:49 Yea, it's interesting, you say fertile ground. And I think immediately about the leader. If the leader doesn't have fertile ground in their brain, we've got a problem. And Gallup, for example, just came out with a statement that 70% of all hiring decisions are wrong, based on you know what a good leader is. And you think, well, what's the characteristics of a good leader? They only have other than the skills, the hard skills, the soft skill, one of the main ones is that they're willing, and they believe in improvement. They believe in Kaizen, it's almost like Kaizen resides in their heart. I believe I can be better tomorrow than I am today. And the day after can be better than tomorrow. And ultimately, if they have that belief system, and they're willing to do the work on themselves, that's like a beacon. It'll just generate light for the rest of the organization. Nobody tests for it. So the fertile ground in my mind is in their brain. And today, I've actually avoided working at mid-level in a company. Avoid 90% failure rate is guaranteed when you're not dealing with the executives, and you're not dealing with the people who actually can, in some ways, demonstrate and expand and proliferate Kaizen and improvement and call it Lean, call it excellence. If they don't do it, nobody else is gonna do it.
Tim 15:21 That lesson was hard one for me, because often, I'd be entering into the wrong level of an organization. And, you know, it took me losing. Well, we did great work, but the work was…
George 15:36 It's not sustainable. Okay.
Tim 15:41 Well, there's priority changes, and the work was just the work was just taken out from under us. And, and it was, it was awful. That, because we knew we knew where we were in the answers we were bringing in, but it was a fickle leader made a snap judgment. And so yeah, I have since for several years now, I only work if I'm starting from the top, because you need to have that conviction. And that willingness, and that space, that space to improve. It's really interesting. Sometimes when you're talking about, you'll run into teams that have capacity challenges and want to improve. And one of the first things that I say is a great reason to go and chase some waste is we have to create enough capacity that we have capacity to improve. And then that is that, I think back to that Covey model, where they talk about the Covey's quadrants, and how that quadrant one is urgent and important. And Quadrant Two is really important but not urgent. If we can get operating in quadrant two, that would where Lean resides in my mind, it's the only quadrant that pays dividends. It's the only one that creates more space to create more space, more efficiency to create more efficiency. Capacity building on top of capacity. If we don't have the support of the leaders to start that process, it's really tough. You have that support lined up top to bottom cascading down through the organization. And it's really easy. That's not only easy, it's fun. And I mean, the work is tough enough, trying to convince leadership trying to work and overcome turbulence in teams. That's tough. Like it's, let's let the work be tough. Let's not let's not make working with people tough. So you'd said something earlier again, before we had hit record here. I want you to share that thought around starting in the students mind. You take care of that a little bit. You're talking about Gemba. And I thought that was fascinating.
George 17:54 Like a progression for me over the years. But I brought Ritsuo Shingo, bless his heart, he's the late Shingo now. Shingo San, I brought him to Santorini, Greece, along with others, who were leaders in their industry, you know, there's business owners, there's, you know, others like Paul Akers, as an example, I brought him to Santorini, Greece. And we did training there. And we went through a Gemba Walk of Santo Wines, one of the biggest, the biggest winery in Santorini. And we're watching somebody work, we're watching somebody work. And what they're doing is they got a big light facing them, and they got, you know, like three bottles on each end. And they're looking, their eyes are focused on the bottle, and the light is behind it. So, you might be able to see something, you know, in the bottle. And so they're looking for spiders, because the bottle sometimes just, just over. So they do wash the bottles, but sometimes, you know, if there's like a big nest in there, you put that bottle aside and needs extra washing, but this is what this person's job function was. And ritual wouldn't leave. And he's just observing. And I'm thinking, what's he, what could he possibly observe? Like the flow is such that there's such a queue in front of them, and the line is running, and there's no way he's gonna be out of work. Like, he's got a lot of work and the lines running, maybe he's not, maybe they're slack. I don't know if he's trying to calculate how much time he's actually working, versus how many bottles are moved. I don't know what he's doing. And it was so shocking. I said, what do you what are you doing? He says George San, watch his eyes. And I'm watching the workers eyes. And as he lifts the bottles, his eyes are down. I'm going oh, Shingo San I never thought to watch the workers eyes. Like pretend you’re in the worker shoes, and think you're the worker, and your job is to do this function. And he says also, there's no standard. I sai, what do you mean no standard. Sometimes he lifts up three bottles, and two, and sometimes two and two, sometimes three and three, there's no standard. And I'm going, Wow, he got all that from what I would just say that's just not important. Okay. So from that, I thought, How does somebody look at improvement? And so for example, I'm coaching somebody now he’s a, he’s a great coach. His name is Raj Pathak, I'm sure he's he's okay with me using his name. He just went through PDCA excellence training with myself and Dr. Jake Abraham, who is my Toyota coach. And we just finished training. And he did a great A3, now it's time for him to train others. And they've got a big project to do. He's leading the project. And I said, So Raj, tell me what you're thinking, what's the first meeting look like? And why? He says, Well, I want to go right into step one, okay. And I'm trying to understand why he would want to just go right into step one, for everybody of problem-solving, when we got a whole team here, and they're different areas, and he might not have a challenge for each one. So I said, what's your challenge for each individual, and he doesn't have that thought through. So I'm thinking, we need to do some visualization, what this might look like. So that's kind of the biggest thing for me, is if you can't visualize the end, to some degree, getting into it right away, that's the gap. There's a gap between being able to visualize the results, and get everybody else signing up into a charter saying, Here's what we want to do great. That charter, I've seen so many places, I've seen it work, it never works without everybody signing. So that's part of the Nemawashi though the consensus building that you need in Lean today, in order to make it work. So that's why I say you got to think about like, what's in their head? For two reasons. Number one, you want to know if there's any gaps. But number two, what are the gaps between them, and you. You could be the one in the learning seat. And so that's where the teacher sometimes learns more than the student. You know, show me more, tell me how you get that. I did that a couple of times, with students that I'm going, okay, I better pick up that book and read it.
Jim 22:37 Yeah, in my parlance, over the last few years, fluency has been the big word. And it's, you know, are you fluent in your own beliefs and your own thoughts around what we're about to do? Are you fluent in that and how you conceptualize work and what you value? And how you align to the corporate goals? Or what are your own goals? What's your workstyle? What's your genius?
George 23:03 We call that a little different. We call that the line of sight. But let me ask you this. What's your long term goal?
Tim 23:10 Myself?
George 23:11 Yeah, 10 years.
Tim 23:13 10 years out? I mean, I think it will be that I've managed to train enough leaders in this, in this practice, that they are self-sufficient, that my own company has a body of work behind it, that allows what can be would you say automated or that can be approached individually is happening and that we are focused in that space where other people can can begin to do some of the heavy lifting, I guess. Whereas for myself, I focus primarily on the teaching, and, and really getting the senior most leaders lined up for the work. The challenge becomes, can you carry that work all the way down to the coalface can it cascade through the organization effectively? And so, I mean, from my own practices, I think that's really important that the company has my clients have the ability to carry this thinking all the way down, internally. And so I'd say for the next 10 years on this, it's really about Systemizing. And in getting that, that together, and I'm on track for that. Whether or not it will materialize in that way. I'm not sure. But I don't exactly know “the how” yet to be frank.
George 24:41 Yeah. So one of the most amazing things I've come across is some guy on the internet. Norman Bodek, by the way, who's dead again, you know, like he he's gone. Mike, another coach is gone. Norman Bodek said, You need to learn about the people-side of Lean. And I'm going I don't know what that means. So he was talking about the Harada Method, with Kakashi Harada in Japan, teaching people how to be self-reliant. And they come up with their goal. They come up with their tasks, they go and execute and and one of the famous, the famous baseball player in the world today Shohei Ohtani did the 64th chart with Takashi Harada, in Japan. So it's pretty amazing that there is a process for almost every problem. But when you want to be successful, you need a system. You can't just have a process, we can go in with Lean. And we can say, here's a problem describing the problem, which is obviously half solved if you can do that. And we put together some tools and we say let's go through this. And we got a solution. For every problem, there's a solution. But for really successful people, they need a system. And that's why the Harada Method came into into play for me as well. 10 years ago, yeah,
Tim 26:09 that'll help me answer that, that question. More retrospectively, but yeah, the biggest leaps that I've taken in my business and my coaching practice and, and working with leaders, and again, I specialize in academics, and STEM leaders, people that are they're fairly linear in their thinking or at least linear in their, in the practice. And it really has been. It's funny, because as we talk about where that catastrophic derailment happened due to a that's actually what was the impetus for me taking a step back and looking at everything that I practiced over several decades of doing this work two decades doing this work. And deciding that I wanted to just really box what was working the best and I ended up starting to put my practices into some structures and into some processes. And I'd shied away from that. As the Lean guy, I'd shied away from that instead, you know, opting for more of a artisan approach or job shop approach, because I wanted, I wanted to make sure that I gave everybody a unique path through and I had to get my own mind around the fact that you know what, once I had systemized my approach my first conversation, say with with new coaching clients, suddenly I had a bunch of things going for me one, I didn't have to imagine where I was going next I had a place that I could start. And I knew they were reliable tools I used the most. They're things that I believe in, and that they've always worked. So there, I had linear thinkers I was dealing with, I could show them the path. I remember one point in my career, I had an engineer come up to me and say, Man, that was amazing. You did it was a piece of collaborative contract we're doing. But boy, you sure you sneak up on people. He said to me, I said, What do you mean, he says, We I didn't know what this was all about. And then towards the end of it, I was just like, amazed at how far we come out sure would have been calmer. If I had known where you were gonna take us well, now I can put a roadmap in front of this is what we're about to do, I'm not going to wait and deliver a punch line and, and make a guess at what we're going to do. And then the ability to just really test those theories, as blueprints for people doing well, and prove them out until they can be now I can isolate if I'm going to improve something about them, I can see the whole path. And, you know, it's so funny because I try not to be too hard on myself. But you know, you know these tools, and just the ability to step back and apply them to your own business, something that could seem rather chaotic, has made a big difference.
George 29:01 The entrepreneur does that. The entrepreneur thinks they must recreate everything for our client for every customer. So look, that's not a bad thing. You just got to recognize that if you want to stay a one person company, you'd better start thinking differently. Entrepreneur not. Because yeah, because there are people out there that like a system. And nowadays two companies are growing. Their reference of the past is not as relevant as it was. So what they're doing is they're experimenting their way towards the future. And understanding how to experiment is critical. So you know, of course Mike Rother is, you know, that Toyota Kata guy, and he used to be a student of Jeff Likers. So, you know, it's coming kind of from the same place. What did we miss with Toyota? What we missed was the soft stuff. We got the hard stuff. You know, 4S, they have at Toyota not 5S, we kind of know how to do that. But we don't have the discipline. And we're always thinking, look at all these tools, what are they there for? They're there to develop the people. And we never thought like that. We were, you know, great people, great products, they kind of bound it in between you got all your tools and systems and results. But it starts with great people. And it ends with a great product. You know, they kind of bound the problem there. And I don't know too many industries that wouldn't start like that, you know, we need great people. And what are those great people? Well, they're the ones that want to improve. And because they're doing it, they can demonstrate to others, in several ways coach and develop them to do it. And what are they striving for? Well, we need to get short term and long term results, you got to do both. So it's kind of like a big challenge in industry, especially everywhere, it doesn't matter. But we got the quarter crunch, the year end, you know, we got to make our numbers all the time, I just remember that the nightmare I was in, when I worked at New Flyer Industries, which ultimately ended up going bankrupt or taken over whatever. But it was a nightmare. We owed all our suppliers, like a lot of our suppliers, tons of money 120 million past 90 days. So it was like crazy, that's the way to run a business is to try to start a bus so you can get a progress payment, and then pay for parts on the buses that are in the yard. So you can actually get them shipped to the customer. So the challenge is applying lean is like an exercise in futility. What we got is great people, and we got to get those results. So we kind of nailed it. And Toyota went bankrupt way back in the 50s. So that's where, you know, they kind of learned their lesson. That's why they have a big bank account.
Tim 31:57 The big question that's left is you think about your journey through and how your thinking and your and your application. And your focus has evolved. When you think about that leadership experience that you're now focused on the other part of that Gallup poll that I thought was really interesting, or sorry, not Gallup poll, but their their recent publication was, they had said, They figure 10% of the population has the DNA of a leader, the ability to actually, you know, operate in them. And I my hypothesis is, it's actually smaller, because although they may start with 10%, only a fraction of that, I like to say 6% have the opportunity to lead or have not incurred other baggage, or something that will take them out of the mix, or don't have a personal situation that wouldn't allow them to do that, or haven't suffered trauma that wouldn't allow them to do that. So when you look at the leadership experience, and as you watch the leaders that you're working with, really grasp these concepts and then apply them and become higher and higher performing. What do you think the key, in your experience, what are the key mindsets? As I say, you know, you've talked about the five principles, what are some of the watershed moments that you see with leaders where they, you know, a light bulb goes on? And, and it clicks and they really get something? Could you share some thoughts on that? In terms of what are some of those big pivot points?
George 33:32 Yeah. Okay, I'm not sure they're big pivot points. This is part of the problem.
Tim 33:34 Sure.
George 33:45 The problem is we have a lot of little pivot points, which end up making a lot of big change at the end of the day.
Tim 33:48 Great, perhaps, what are some of the common little pivot points?
George 33:50 Yeah, so, number one, when I look at leaders getting excited, I think about why are they getting excited? It's because you've pointed out something, whether it's through your book or what have you. It's something that they did not expect. Okay, here's what they expected. And they got something else, there's a gap between what they expected and what they got. That gap is called learning. And as soon as you can increase the learning for that leader, they get hooked. It is the adrenaline, it's the dopamine that you know, gets released in your head. As soon as they do that, they get hooked. So one of one of my students in Germany, she was, I can't remember how we got to this. We were talking about a book called The Power of Habit or something. And I said, Look, a company is made up of habits. So tell me the behavior you would like to see. Tell me what the trigger is and how do you make sure that trigger happens? Because you got to have a trigger. You know, and then you can do the routine was the behavior and you need to kind of reinforce for yourself that that was a good thing to do. And you reinforce it in many ways. So she was, I want to make my bed every morning. I don't know why maybe she heard it and you know, they do it in the army and stuff. Okay, I want to make my bed every morning. So I said, Great. Let's talk a little bit about the trigger. So the trigger is, okay, I'm not gonna have my coffee. I'm gonna get up, I'm gonna put my clothes on, I'm gonna put my slippers on or whatever she's doing. There's a trigger somewhere for her to make her bed. Good. Then she makes the bed. And I said, what's the reward? And she struggled. We have a hard time programming our own thinking to say this is successful. And I said, Okay, I think in the book, they talked a little bit about somebody going on the sheets, just straightening out the sheets. And that felt good. I think it was a Febreeze thing. I mean, they did that as a reward. And I thought, Okay, why don't you try that. And she says, George, it worked the next day. It worked. I can't believe it. Specifically thinking about the reward. I did this on the bed, and it smoothed out. And I felt good. I smiled. Well, okay, good. The smile is the reward too. So we have a hard time building in new habits that we know we need to have. Because we don't understand that we need a trigger. We need to do the routine because you know, it's important. And we need to create that little reward. And after that becomes a habit, you're done. You're done. Because every time today, when I go into a meeting, I always ask, what's the purpose? And what's the desired outcome of that meeting? I always ask it's a habit for me. And at the end, I always say it's time for Hansha, which is Japanese for reflection. Okay, what went well, during this meeting? What can we do better? How do we build that in for next time, and we improve our meetings each time. So that's just my meeting routines. But the habits make the difference. And so when I start with somebody, what, what we're doing is we're learning. And when we're learning, I'm saying, Are you satisfied with everything? You know, the way life is? Or would you like to improve something? And of course, we bring up the Taiichi Ohno no problem is the biggest problem of all? Yeah, okay, if you're, if you don't have a problem you want to fix then then I'm really no good to you. But let's, let's fix something, let's break it up, let's make sure we have little habits that we put together, maybe that'll create a routine, maybe that falls into a system that we built for you. Okay, so this is excellent when they can see how all this comes together. And they're excited about it, and then they transfer it to others. So I just think it's those little learning bits that make all the sense in the world.
Tim 38:00 Well, there's one other thing that you said there that I think I like to just stop on. And that's for your students that you talked to make the bed and then smooth out the sheets. And take a moment to reflect that you did this and that you're enjoying it and that the smile is the reward. You had said earlier that it's really important to, you know, go to the Gemba. And that being get into the students mind and understand what they're starting with. Right, this kind of thing. And I think it's a really interesting concept to say, maybe that going to the Gemba is getting into our own mind for a minute. And just stop for a second. And appreciate why you appreciated the reflection again, but saying, hey, you know, understand what you're out for here and understand what you just created for yourself. And take a moment, I used to be a chef. I was so I was a I was a classically trained chef, before I went back to business school. And what's the most important thing that a chef can do throughout that, that experiences if you're not tasting, you're not in control of the process? You have to stop and enjoy. Your own soup for a minute, if you're going to truly understand is it ready to go out? You have to look at it and say is this beautiful? What I just created here? You have to take a moment. And I think that's also part of sort of empathy when we're dealing with other people see it from their perspective. Appreciate it for a moment for what it is take a moment to be there with the person but you know, and this is where I'm like be there for a moment with yourself because I'm I was always really bad at that. I would do something meaningful. And I would steamroll right past it. Right. I wouldn't take praise for it. I wouldn't. Very bad at saying You're welcome. These kinds of things. You have to take a moment and say we just did something for a minute here, let's just put pause and realize, we got to the milestone we thought we were gonna get it because that gives us fuel for the next time we make the push. And the next time we do the next piece of effort,
George 40:09 That's called celebration, but we have to celebrate. Yeah. And being grateful. Look, that's all preparing your mind. And that's preparing yourself to be a better person, which you can then translate to others. So all of this is all teachings that you can apply to work. The customer, really, we got to turn this into value-added, we've run a business, we can't go home and say, Hey, I did this, I smoothed my bed. And now I want you to pay more for that product. No. So all of this is part of the little steps that it takes for them to say, Hey, I did this at home. Why can I do this at work? What's wrong with doing five paths? In a way, where there's a trigger? Five minutes before the end of the shift? Everybody does a five-minute 5S and we give each other a high five before we leave nothing wrong? Unless you're in COVID times, then maybe it's an elbow bump, you know?
Tim 41:16 Yeah. Well, it's been really enlightening to hear your perspectives on this stuff. And I hope we can do it again, because I'm having a lot of fun. And I'm learning through this conversation. So thank you very much for that. I want to make sure that people know how they can get involved with your thinking, how you'd like to be contacted, if somebody is inspired to reach out.
George 41:38 So my name is George Trachilis, they can go to georgetrachilis.com, they can contact me if they want to talk to me, or, you know, book me for a meeting and my calendars right there. That's the best way. Also, there's resources like the Harada Method I mentioned, you can go to finditgeorge.com, which is a great place that I'm building up now. And anybody can type something like A3, and they will have examples of A3s there. But if you type Harada, you'll get the five, five worksheets to use in the Harada Method. If you buy the book, I don't have anything to do with the book. But I promote the book. And those five worksheets are in there. So type Harada and download them for free.
Tim 42:32 Great, we'll make sure to put those links in the show notes so that everybody has quick access to them. One piece of advice from George Trachilis.
George 42:40 Yeah, and you know what I put it as a quote on my website, too. I've been where you are Tim, and I thought I've got so much to offer. You know, these executives, they just, sometimes they just don't see what I see. The key is to have an open enough relationship with these people where you can ask a question, and you ask a question to learn. And you can ask a question to teach. And in those situations, you're going to have to ask a question to teach, you're gonna have to figure out what that question is, that will allow you to not be offensive. Because Lord knows we can be offensive in what we're asking, and come across in a way that's very respectful, but gets your point across. But it's a question. They don't have to answer it. So many times. They're thinking short-term. And the question can simply be, are we thinking about the long term and the ramifications of doing this? Six months from now, versus what we get today? So, you know, I my quote was always just ask questions. Sooner or later, you'll become a teacher.
Tim 43:56 Once again, hey, thank you for for doing this. It was fantastic to spend some time with you. And we'll do it again. I'll talk to you real soon. Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership. Please give us a positive rating and review on Apple podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word to by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening. And be sure to tune in in two weeks time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading | |||
| 07 Feb 2024 | Ryan and Shane Pegg - Ageless Courage and Curiosity | 00:42:31 | |
In this episode, we dive into the inspiring story of Ryan and Shane Pegg, a father-son duo who prove that age is just a number when it comes to courage and curiosity. Shane, a parent and business leader, shares practical insights into parenting, emphasizing the creation of a mistake-friendly environment. Ryan, a budding entrepreneur, recounts his experience attending the Inventures conference at the age of 12, showcasing his fearless pursuit of knowledge and networking. The conversation explores the dynamics of learning from failures, the pivotal role of mentors, and the power of encouragement in fostering innovation. Tim continues the conversation with Shane, who is currently working in a Cochrane-based incubator. Shane draws connections between nurturing creativity in children and guiding adult entrepreneurs. Tim and Shane discuss the significance of providing space for exploration, encouraging curiosity, and breaking down age-related barriers in the entrepreneurial journey. Ryan further shares insights into a school program focused on intellectual property exploration, prototyping, and marketing, providing a glimpse into the emerging entrepreneurial mindset of the younger generation. The episode concludes with Shane detailing his involvement in the incubator, where he offers support and opportunities for local businesses. Shane and Ryan encourage listeners to be fearlessly creative and curious. Fearlessness is a quality that transcends age, shaping the future of entrepreneurship. About Ryan Pegg Ryan loves meeting new people, creating ideas and inventing new things. He is currently a grade 8 student at Rancheview school, coming to the Rocky Mountains from Ontario and settling in Cochrane. His extra-curricular activities include track and field and playing on his school's Jr.A basketball team. Outside of school, he has been working on a startup built around the idea of fresh innovation and new creations. One of his biggest interests is hunting and getting outside, he has gone on many expeditions and adventures with his dad, scaling mountains and trekking coulees. This past summer, he competed in triathlon in the Alberta Summer Games, winning 2 silver medals. About Shane Pegg Shane thrives in connecting, serving and celebrating entrepreneurs and community leaders. He’s spent the last 2 decades in the Kitchener-Waterloo and Calgary-Cochrane innovation ecosystems, working in and with startups, scale-ups, large companies and incubators. He currently runs the new startup incubator in Cochrane, Alberta and serves on the Boards of Innovate Cochrane and the Calgary Innovation Coalition. He enjoys outdoor adventures and various sporting activities alongside his wife and 3 children. Resources discussed in this episode: -- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Ryan and Shane Pegg | Innovate Cochrane
-- Transcript Ryan 00:02 I feel like business is not only about the money side of things like you're not only trying to make money, you're trying to build new things you're trying to help people. And that really changed the way that I thought of it.
Shane 00:18 It's amazing how money can follow when you're not focused on it. But you're focused on doing good or doing something that you really enjoy doing. And you do it really well. And the money will follow if it's meant to be.
Tim 00:32 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you my friend, or a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. Welcome to Episode 26 of the Sweet on Leadership podcast. Tim 00:32 Welcome back, everybody. Thanks for joining us again, for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. Today, we're going to try something a little bit different. We have three of us here today. And I'm joined by a dynamic father and son duo who I met last summer. Well, last late spring/summer at Inventures here in Calgary. And I'm really excited to welcome Shane and Ryan Pegg to the show. Guys, thank you so much for joining me today. It's a show I've been looking forward to for quite a while.
Ryan 01:36 Yeah, we're excited. Shane 01:39 You bet.
Tim 01:39 So, why we've assembled this ragtag group of travelers today is because when I first met, Ryan, Ryan had reached out to me before I was giving a talk at this particular conference. This was a guy that just was so full of gumption, and get up and go, and announced that he was coming to my session. And I just was tickled because, you know, this is a young man who is passionate about business, and really seemed to have a path in front of him. And it was just such a pleasure to have you there. And then to stand and talk to both of you after that session. And ever since it's stuck with me, and what's got me curious is to really just explore what it's like, at this point in your life, Ryan, and Shane watching Ryan go through this, and the relationship that's developing with entrepreneurship and business and leadership. And for us just to really understand what that looks like. And I think there's some exciting things there. But before we get into all of that, I just want you both to introduce yourself a little bit. So, Ryan, why don't you kick us off? Tell us a little bit about yourself. What is life like for you right now? And then we'll get into entrepreneurship and business in a little while. But who are you? Who do we see in front of us here?
Ryan 03:00 Yeah, so I'm Ryan. I'm a grade eight student in Cochrane, Alberta. And I love sports, not just business, such as basketball, triathlon, running, track and field on my school team. And I just love creating new things and going into the business world and looking at what people make. Tim 03:29 That’s awesome and Shane, on top of being Ryan's dad, who do we have in front of us?
Shane 03:33 Yeah, yeah, absolutely proud dad to Ryan, also have a couple of daughters, one older, one younger. We actually moved out here, my wife and I with the kids about four years ago to Cochran from the Kitchener Waterloo area. And so yeah, my life has been in the business world working for a startup and then acquired by a company out here, which brought us out here. And now I'm currently at a sort of incubator. We get into that a little bit later. And outside of the work world, we're involved in different things around town, a couple of not-for-profits, Innovate Cochrane, and from a sports side, I really enjoy getting outdoors into the mountains. That's one of the things we're excited about being here and playing some hockey and doing some running with Ryan, trying to keep up with him now, getting harder and harder, as the years go by.
Tim 04:21 Young legs, they've got the speed, that we are certainly blessed with the mountains and having that nearby. And it's one of the real perks about living here. That's great guys. Ryan, maybe we can get into this a little bit when we think about what you're interested in. And there's lots obviously, you're interested in sport, you're interested in nature, you're interested in drinking it up right now. But specifically when we talk about what was that motivation to get to that, Inventures that entrepreneurial and innovation conference? What would drive you there?
Ryan 04:57 So, really my dad was gonna go to this conference and almost as a joke, I was like, Oh, can I come? And he was like, do you really want it? And I'm like, oh, yeah, sure. And he found a way to do it. And I was planning, like a week ahead of where I was going to go, what I was gonna do, everything. And I had it all planned out, and then emailed you or sent you a message. And it just started from there.
Tim 05:33 Awesome. Well, Shane, what was that like for you? Was that surprising to have Ryan make that request? Or can you paint us a picture of how that actually went down?
Shane 05:44 Yeah, not necessarily surprising, you know, Ryan and his siblings have done and he'll probably talk this about a little bit more later. But they've done a little bit of entrepreneurial stuff before this. And so when he reached out, he loves, they all love getting into different adventures like this. And so it's like, yeah, you can come. But you know, this is, it's a big conference. And so make sure you do some prep work for that. And so that's why he did the research, the full schedule when he came out. And we talked about it and suggested maybe reaching out to some of the folks you never know until you ask, you can get into pretty interesting adventures. And so that's what he did, is reaching out to you. And it was exciting to be there. I knew a few people there but didn't know a lot of people, but having him there and then turning them loose at the event. I didn't go to your session, he went to your session, as you know, later on in the conference. It was encouraging to see that and just for him to take the lead and how to kind of lean into that and kind of create that space for him to go and do that. And that was exciting for me to see. Tim 06:44 Let’s talk about that space a little bit. Why is it important to create that space for you?
Shane 06:48 I find that each of these kids have their own interests and their own potential. And we can try to live our lives vicariously through them, or we can try and help them live their lives. And that space often can surprise you and delight you, watching what they do, maybe sometimes frustrate you, but watching that to say, hey, he's going to become who he was made to be. And part of that is giving him that freedom to go and explore, to try new things. And that space is, you can keep them close to you. And obviously, there are times when you need to for safety reasons. But on an event like that, at that time, he was 12 years old, he didn't have a phone, and he was in downtown Calgary, we turned him loose, and said, Hey, go to a couple of these sessions. We'll meet you back in a couple of hours. That was the plan. And there were 1000s of people at that conference. And so and he figured it out. And when you create a space like that, it creates that sense of independence, I think that's kind of part of the entrepreneurial journey is there are a lot of things you need to figure out. And there's no playbook for entrepreneurs, you got to kind of figure things out on your own. And have you just create that space to do that.
Tim 07:59 So, Ryan, you were turned loose at this conference? And besides the sessions themselves, what was that like? What was it like to sort of be under your own steam?
Ryan 08:08 So, it definitely felt adventurous, like, you know, I was off on my own, there's a ton of people, but it just made me go like wherever I wanted, because, you know like I was alone. So, I could look at this stuff, look at different stuff, and just do what really I wanted to do. Instead of talking to people, my dad wanted to talk to or like doing the things that he had already planned to do. I could just like wander. And I love that, you know.
Tim 08:41 Yeah, well all those that wander are not lost. So, when we think about that, when you say you did things that you wanted to do, what were you looking to do? What were you looking to discover in that conference?
Ryan 08:54 I wasn't really looking to discover anything. I had some sessions planned out, like with you, and a few other people. And during the time between those sessions, I wandered, and I found exhibits, people to talk to like some people commented and like, Hey, you're kinda young to be here. I'm like, Oh, yeah. And then we just the conversation started from there. And then I met new people. And yeah.
Tim 09:26 What were the big takeaways that you managed to take away from the day?
Ryan 09:31 Definitely, a lot from your conference. I have a full sheet of all the different notes that I took from your session. But the biggest one is that I feel like business is not only about the money side of things like you're not only trying to make money, you're trying to build new things. You're trying to help people. And that really changed the way that I thought of it.
Tim 10:00 Wow. What's it like to hear that Shane?
Shane 10:03 Oh, it's encouraging I think there's only so much a parent can say that's actually going to stick. It's, you know, often it's somebody a complete stranger or something else that they read or see or hear from others. And so it's encouraging, you know and you try to model kind of an attitude of generosity and compassion, thinking of others and other first mentality. That's kind of a big part of life here. It's what about others, kind of takes your focus off of yourself. And so the kids are all great at doing that. And, yeah, it's encouraging. And that's certainly a life lesson that we find later in life. It's amazing at how money can follow when you're not focused on it, but you're focused on doing good or doing something that you really enjoy doing. And you do it really well. And the money will follow if it's meant to be.
Tim 10:50 Yeah, Ryan, I know you've got lots of ideas on the go, you're fostering a lot of things you've got, you're moving in different directions. When you think of that, and understanding that you're still at the genesis of a lot of what you're thinking, what does this open up for you as possibilities for your future and what you're interested in doing?
Ryan 11:09 Well, I feel like a lot of people have told me, I'm very creative. And sometimes I just get like a sketchbook and start jotting down random ideas. And these ideas, I'm suddenly like, Hey, this could work. And it starts like refining the idea, why would it work? Why wouldn't it? And just making it better. And these can be like, starters for business, and new ideas?
Tim 11:44 Yeah. So, we were talking in the prep session that we had for today about some of the things that you're doing at school. And maybe you can tell us a little bit about the class that you find yourself involved in right now. Then I'd like to ask a few more questions.
Ryan 12:01 Yeah, so the class is an option that we have, but we don't really get to choose the option, all students do it. And we have to create an idea with either a partner or create an idea by yourself, and you'll be paired with someone. And when you have the idea, you have to go through different steps of creating the idea. So, we just finished doing a patent application. And then we have to build it, market it, create ads for it, and then a final product, which we can sell out a little business show at the end of the year, sometime, and people can actually buy your product.
Tim 12:45 So, you're learning about intellectual property, you're going through prototyping, you're going through marketing, probably market testing, then you're getting out into this. You know, everybody has their favorite subjects at school. Some people love art, some people love math, some people love science. What makes it easy to like that class? Do you think? What kind of people tend to gravitate towards really enjoying a class like that?
Ryan 13:10 They're really creative ones, for sure. They like creating the ideas. They're the ones that have the most love for that kind of stuff, where some people only like sports or video games. If you like creating stuff or like drawing, the arts, then you could create whatever you want almost like find a way to make that. So.
Tim 13:36 I mean, entrepreneurialism is a creative pursuit. So, Shane, when you think about your role now in an incubator, and we look at how this kind of parallels what you might see when people come in with ideas, and when they're fired up about maybe learning the basics, or just bringing something to market or going through. What strikes you about seeing this happen at Ryan's age, in a junior high school, versus watching this happen when you're at a municipally funded, you know, incubator?
Shane 14:11 Yeah, well, first off, it's exciting that they're creating that course and the opportunity for these kids to go through, not all of them are gonna get into it. Like, Ryan may be more into that. And other kids might be more into other subjects. So, for them to kind of foster, create that environment that they could do that I think it's great, and then those that are interested in it. I think as a parent, it's great to be able to kind of show that support and ask the questions. And you know, when you're asking questions, we might know a little bit more on certain things than they do but we don't know a lot. Like, I learned a lot listening to Ryan, sometimes what he says goes over my head, like oh, I had never even thought about that. And so I think of other people in my life that I will bring into Ryan's life. It could be other friends of mine that are mechanical engineers, Ph.D. Bring them in, and it's like, you're probably going to be better off talking to my son than I am at some of these things he's thinking about. And so watching them kind of learn and ask questions and start getting into that, at that age, I think it's a neat opportunity, we'll see where he wants to go, interest can change, obviously, quickly. But at this point, you know, he's got that. And so we'll feed into that, and again, create those opportunities kind of in his life that if you want to continue pursuing it, and he's got questions, if I don't have answers, other people do, and I'm not afraid to kind of ask others to get involved and say, Hey, why don’t you have a conversation with Ryan and approach him?
Tim 15:39 In your role at the incubator, it's very much sort of in that mentorship space where you're connecting people and helping people deal with their own blocks and whatnot. And not unlike my role, I may be faced with a person that perhaps is an employee and wants to get into an entrepreneurial experience, they want to buy a business or they want to take something to market. And often it's dealing with the trepidation and the fear or the blocks that they've got in front of them. And helping them sort of get past those, get networked, and deal with the roadblocks that face them one after another. From your professional experience, when you're dealing with adults that are trying to bring something out for the world, do some good in the world. What would you see as some of the roadblocks that you commonly see facing people? What are they bumping up against, which threatens to stop them in their tracks?
Shane 16:33 There are a few things that I think of, a conversation just today with some folks that are either in incubator or thinking about coming in. It's around connections to maybe expertise, or kind of opportunities that I know I want to go here, but I don't know who to talk to. And so they're looking for connections, it might be for sales channels, it might be for talent, it might be for kind of equipment, that how to? I know where I want to go. Yeah, it could be yes, either. It's usually like, you know, obviously, if you talk to any of them, I need access to funding, I need talent, I need access to customers and the channels to get there. But I find there are some very passionate people that are smart, have a few connections here, but they're just unaware of what's going on in the ecosystem. And just Alberta, Calgary, and Cochrane or Cochrane and greater Cochrane/Calgary is there's a ton of great resources and programs and people available. And it's amazing that if you can make a connection, then just get out of the way. And so, you know, even up for Ryan and others his age, they don't know they're not exposed to this yet. But the adventures conference was just one example of meeting some very interesting people like yourself, like, look where the opportunity went. Ryan reached out to you and next thing you know, a few months later, we're sitting here on this podcast. Which is pretty neat.
Tim 17:54 Yeah, I do a lot with Startup TNT, here in Calgary. And that is another group that's really, yeah, interested in unlocking the potential and great ideas and good businesses, and getting them in touch with people that can stand behind them and have their back and really help them move forward. And it's such a fun experience. And in the time that I've been there, given that it is in that precede focus, there's so much to learn. But when I met you, Ryan, and one of the observations that I would make, and even just thinking about what you're saying, Shane is, the questions and the fears that are blocking people even in adulthood, are the same things that Ryan is up against. It's the same things like they're not age specific. And I'm wondering, Ryan, can you hear what I see, and I don't know if this rings true for you, is that elements that you could consider challenging are the same things that adults face. There's no monopoly on where the good ideas come from and where the drive comes from. And I mean, I've met several people, your age, Ryan, and there's a difference. Some of them are interested in that creative exercise, and it's going to express in many different ways. And others are not so much interested in that. And that seems to track well with what we see in business generally, where we have a certain personality type or certain workstyle or a certain expression of value that likes to go forth and really try difficult things and push the boundaries and find the edges and challenge themselves. And I know Shane, you know, you and I've had a short talk about that, that opportunity to really help people find the edge and I don't think it's just Ryan, I think you're helping these entrepreneurs find their edge you know, you're not there yet a little bit further. Go take a risk, drive fast, don't use the brakes.
Shane 19:56 I think that's what's needed with Ryan and kids his age are, they're more fearless than us, like, look at them, whether they're bombing down to ski hill, or, you know, keen to get behind the wheel of a vehicle, little bit time there yet Ryan, but close. But they're just, they're fearless. And they're surrounded by a bunch of peers that are into all sorts of different things. As you get older, you start to kind of gravitate towards people that are like you. And so then sometimes you can lose that creativity based on kind of who you're hanging out with, what you're listening to. And often, your leaders talking about, listen to a diverse range of podcasts, read different books. And so as kids, you're surrounded by a bunch of kids you've been thrown together with at school, some of them are into hunting, some of them are into crafting like they're just into all sorts of different so that creativity there and that fearlessness are two amazing qualities based on your environment and how do you, when you get older, and you get a little bit more comfortable with where you're at who you're around, be able to ask different people for help, for questions, have that humility? You know, we start to think we know more as we get older. But as you get wiser and learn more realize, man, it's like, we get less smart as we learn more because we realize there's so much to grow. And the kids are just curious, and they're willing to try things, which is exciting to watch.
Tim 21:15 Yeah, I don't know if I've mentioned this to either of you. But my father was a principal. He was a principal in a school and an educator, and he actually specialized in Ryan's age group, and really how to bring that forward. And he was the principal here at the Calgary Science School, which later became Connect Charter. And they are really into that sort of innovative space. And he used to say, and I remember at his retirement when he was talking to the kids, he said, you know, be mindful of your friends, because your trajectory of success is going to largely be the average of those you surround yourself with. And I've always thought that such a good piece of advice because there's, you know, we want to make sure that we're surrounded both in our jobs and in our personal relationships with people that lift us up. And yes, there's going to be the time when we have to lift other people up, but we can't, or we have to be careful not to be dragged down, in a sense, and settle for that lowest common denominator, you know really–
Shane 22:13 Yeah, wise words, wise words.
Tim 22:14 So, Shane, you said that it's important to give them space, right, to make sure that they have a chance to find their own way.
Shane 22:25 Right, you know one of the things that came to mind there is trying to create an environment and model, the fact that you're going to make mistakes, and it's okay. And I as a parent, you know, I make a lot of mistakes. I just think of it last week, I came in, I came in after a day at work, we had some things to do afterwards, we had the kids I'm like, my daughter and Ryan, like, Okay, can you guys like the barbecue? We're gonna have a quick barbecue, and then we got to get rolling, we got a sporting event. And I came in, and they're like, hey, barbecue, I haven't lit the barbecue, like what, it was like 10 minutes ago, like, but I came in hot. I was kind of frustrated. Like, I'm like here, grab this, and then I went and started it, and then lit it and got going but at the dinner table, I'm like man, like that's the wrong, there's a teachable moment right there. Right? And so you got to kind of suck up your pride. And say, and Ryan knows this, I've had to apologize a few times, right? And it's like, Hey, listen, sorry. And then just walk through. Here's what I should have done. Like, if I could replay that scene, I'd say, hey, laugh about it's like, oh, yeah, it can be tricky. And you guys have never lit this barbecue like this before. And walk them through it, model that, and show them that. So, there are a few lessons that you try and teach. And again, that's one example. There are many more that did not end as maybe great as that. But model that for them. Of it's, A. it's okay to mess up like dad messes up and then kind of walk through it and then talk and say what was the lesson learned and ask for forgiveness, and grow. And I think the people in Ryan's life, like you and others, take an interest, listen and ask questions, and ask him about what he's doing, which almost gives him permission to try things and work on it, and laugh at the mistakes and not berate him, instead of making a statement about a screw-up. Maybe ask them a Question. Hey, what do we learn? And how can we improve next time?
Tim 24:19 I mean, people that criticize you when you make a mistake, and they're armchair quarterbacking from a safe position. They don't have the information that we have, in the moment that we're making that mistake. And I just finished reading a book by Carol Dweck, but also Amy Edmondson, which I've referenced in the show before, her work is all about failing well, like how do we learn to fail forward? Or how do we learn to understand what it takes to be resilient and really, you know, make those steps and know that it's not about getting it right. It's about getting it. It's about over time, getting up, it's about getting it right eventually. After we learn, right, you can learn very few things through immediate success, you learn a whole bunch through short, consistent failures, that get you to the right answers. Right?
Shane 25:16 Yeah, I think that resiliency is key. We talked, my wife and I talked about that as we moved west again, like, we're not moving to another country, like when we moved from Ontario out west here, when the kids were four years ago younger. And there's level of resiliency, like Ryan had his buds back there, and all our family. And so there's a level of resiliency of coming out here that we as parents need to understand, it's one thing for us to come out there and, you know, develop our new friendships, but also kind of looking out through the eyes of our kids. And there's a level of resiliency there. And so we love that it's tough, you're gonna kind of fail, I'm trying to make new friends and see it's tough, but you can either kind of swoop in and try and fix it for them, or walk along beside them in the journey and support them as they are finding their new friends, finding their way.
Tim 26:02 So, I'm curious, Ryan, do you follow anybody in the business world at large, or any celebrities or anybody that you find, starts to emulate kind of where you could see yourself going?
Ryan 26:15 I would consider you pretty famous.
Tim 26:18 Oh okay, thank you. I appreciate that.
Ryan 26:18 Yeah, you. For sure, bigger people, maybe huge business leaders like Jeff Bezos, maybe I could, maybe I could build a business big like him, or just be a leader, like you, or my dad, who's just running the incubator, and teaching people or you was also teaching people how to lead their team and bring their company to victory, I guess?
Tim 26:58 Well, I mean, the most important thing here is that you figure out who you are going to be. And we find ways to tap into that, because you're gonna have your own very special way of bringing all this together. And whatever that is, I'm sure it's going to be fairly fantastic. Let's go the other direction really quickly, either for yourself or somebody that you've seen, been working with Ryan at school or otherwise. What would deflate somebody who's trying to take a risk? You know, when we talk about things that adults can say, or friends can say, that can really make it hard to take that risk? Could you pinpoint something for us?
Ryan 27:40 Yeah, so just telling them that it's going to be too hard is probably the biggest way. But anything that brings them down, like, it's too hard, it's gonna cost too much, you're not gonna be able to do it. You're not creative enough, anything that's gonna bring them down, it's gonna, and you have to bring them up instead of put them down. Because if you bring them up, then they're more likely to succeed. And build their path to victory.
Tim 28:13 Yeah, it's funny. And Shane, I want to give you a minute here, to formulate an answer. Well, I'd like to know what you're able to say to people when they hear that or they come to you having been challenged in that way. For myself, when somebody tells me not to do something, because it's too hard. Or if they come to me and say, they're not going to do something, because it's too hard. I will usually one of my key tools to come back. And as well, how are you calculating hard? Like, what does that actually mean? You know, is it too much time? Is it too much effort? When you say this is going to be too hard? You know, what are you seeing as being the effort, get into hard for me, so I can understand what you mean? Because their definition of hard, if they have one, and often they don't. It's just kind of this big, nebulous thing, that they're saying, oh, there's this boogeyman out there called hard and you're not going to be able to get past it. But when you ask them to actually explain it, they can't. It's just kind of this nebulous fear. Rather than saying, well, it's going to be really hard, because you're going to have to go and meet at least 20 people, and you're going to have to find funding for at least $100,000. And you're going to have to go and you're going to have to find experts in this space of design and you're gonna and by the time you walk them through all that. It's like, that's all stuff to do. But it's complex, not hard. It's something that I can put on a plan and say, gotta find $100,000, all right, can do it. Test the number, maybe it's $25,000, maybe it's $2,000. Maybe it's nothing. Right? But you know, get curious and quantify and, you know, before you stop yourself, just say and what do you mean hard? Like, what does that actually mean? So, Shane, what do you say to a person that comes up and says that they're thinking about packing it in because it's too hard?
Shane 30:10 Probably somewhat similar to what you do and your approach is. I just kind of asked them the question back of, okay, well, what are you going for? What is it that needs to be done? And then when you start breaking it down to those bite-sized bits, like you've said, like, if what was going through my mind was the same thing as you were just audibly saying is, okay, well, let's break it down. Like if you, Okay, so you last year you made $100,000? This, you need to make a million dollars. Okay. Well, how many customers does that represent? Okay, well, let's break it down just 12 months, there's four quarters, let's break it down monthly. What do you need to do? How many calls do you need to make? And then based on, you know, a 5%, close rate on that? Let's break it down. It's okay. Well, that means that you need to make 10 calls every day. Can you make 10 calls every day? Yeah. Okay. Well, let's just start. And then it just needs let's just start. Because the whole process of try something, learn, adjust, repeat. Like, that's business. It's, let's try something, especially in the startup phase, like people say, Oh, we pivot. It's almost like the word startup, the definition of startup is pivot. Like, you're constantly changing and trying and like, No, this didn't work that didn't work. It's all revolving around talking to the customer, the end user, the person you're with, like, how do you learn from them? And so really just asking the person, what is it and then it's that having that belief, like you said, there can be self-limiting beliefs. But sometimes you just need somebody to believe in them. Somebody needs to encourage them to challenge them. And you know, we both are into leadership and listen to great leaders and try to emulate them. You hear these great leaders, if you dig into all their pasts, I've had somebody or people in their lives that have challenged, encouraged, and called them to a higher level of leading and of living.
Tim 31:53 Yup. Now you're speaking to the choir, because I mean, that's what I built my business around. That's what I'm interested in. Yeah. It's funny when we think about this, it reminds me of a story I have about my daughter. She's 18 now, but when she was quite young, I think she was probably seven, six or seven. She came to me and she said, Dad, I want a Barbie. And I said that it was this mermaid Barbie. And I said, okay, and she said, Can we go get one? I said, Sure. How much money do you have? And she said I've got eight dollars. I said, How much is the Barbie? The Barbie is $14. And I said, Well, I guess you can't buy the Barbie yet. That's what you want to do, is buy the Barbie. But I said I'll tell you what and we went to the store. And we bought five pounds of sugar. And we bought a bag of apples and I sprung for some chopsticks. And I sat and I worked for free. And I colored the sugar and I candied some apples and I put them on a tray and she walked out front. And she sold one for three or two for five. And she ate one or two. She pretty soon she came back and she had you know, I think it was 40 or 45 bucks or something she had anyways, it was a fair amount. I think people gave her more money than they were worth. But anyway, they gave her lots of tips. And she said oh can I buy the Barbie now? And I said well, you could. Yeah, you could buy the Barbie now. Or, and so then we took that 50 bucks or whatever it was back to the store we bought, you know, four or five bags of apples and a bunch more chopsticks and we still had sugar leftover. And I stood there the next week and I candied apples and there's these poor suckers. These kids down the street trying to try to hock lemonade. Well, lemonade wasn't selling but those candied apples sure did. And so we did that a few times. And by the end of it, she had, you know, this box full of like 600 bucks. She had cornered the market of Northwest Calgary for candied apples. And, you know, but it lit something in her. And so now she's running her own jewelry business. And she's done that for a couple of years, just out of high school, and now it's just going live online and the rest of it and she's still looking for work and whatnot. But she runs stock. And two summers ago, we learned about identifying her core market, we changed her messaging, and she rebranded and, you know, she's been able to do really well identify her market niche, not you know, not sell things that other people are selling, really hit the you know, and so it lights something in kids and it sure is exciting to see. You know, because it's just such, it's they're good lessons for life in terms of you want to do something, break it down, get it done. And it's not about I was also gonna say actually, as we were talking there, I've always thought that we shouldn't call it startup. You know, I think that's such a dumb word. You know, I need startup capital, or we're going to run a startup thing. I'm starting to think we should call it keep going. Right? Like, maybe we should say I need to keep going fund or we need to do you know what I mean? Because anybody can start up but can you keep going? I think is one of the key determinants there. So, maybe that yeah. Okay. Right on? Well, it's been a lot of fun for me today, having you here. Maybe before we say goodbye, we could cover a few bases here. Ryan, what do you have on the go right now in life, it doesn't have to be anything specific. But what's got you excited? What's got you excited as we move through the year here?
Ryan 35:29 So, on the business side, I've just finished creating a first prototype of a future product that I wanna sell. And this is like a rough draft, I made it using an old t-shirt and cut it up. But first draft and it turned out great. I learned a lot, how it was built, and all that. And I'm hoping to build that to another level.
Tim 36:00 Well, when you're ready to launch it on the world and tell us because I know right now, you're still behind a veil of secrecy, which is just fine. But we're going to have you back. And we're going to make sure that we tell as many people as we can when you're ready to take that to the next step.
Ryan 36:14 Sounds good. Tim 36:15 Sound like fun? Ryan 36:16 For school. I'm on the school's junior A basketball team. And tomorrow, actually, we have a basketball tournament. And we've been working hard. So, we hope we do well. And learning lots, this is our first tournament of the year, so. Tim 36:37 Good luck with that. This is where the rubber meets the road. And all that hard work is gonna come and be put to the test. That's excellent. Shane, how about you? What's up?
Shane 36:47 Yeah, well, you know, these three kids of ours and watching the journey they're on and becoming who they were created to be is definitely exciting. And every day is a new adventure. So, loving that, on the work side, just started working the last couple of months at this new incubator here in Cochrane. And so kind of filling it and trying to become that place where if you want to start or grow a business in Cochrane, Alberta, or surrounding area, hey, we're gonna help you out and watching some of these businesses interacting with them, and seeing kind of the potential they have and helping them try to get to where they want to go. It's just super exciting. It's super encouraging, knowing being part of a startup in the past and the journey that it is, I got a little bit more empathy for them. And it's just neat because you kind of feed the fire, right, and just add fuel to that passion that they've got and it's just super exciting to watch.
Tim 37:45 Well, and you and I've had a couple of good conversations now about what it's like to see these incubators run in smaller towns, and what they're going to do for smaller towns now that we've had this revolution in work-from-home, or the caps have really been taken off the monopoly that large civic centers had on business. Well, how is this going to change the world as we see these incubators be more local for people? It's going to change where people feel they can operate?
Shane 38:19 Yeah, and connecting with others in the community. Like, we got the headquarters for Garmin, Canada, located right in Alberta. But you've got all sorts of great not-for-profits and other businesses that you connect the community together. And it becomes more than just a few small business startup founders. But it's the whole community where you've got mentors helping them out and then being inspired. And this this whole element of innovation happening in our community, which is super neat. And engaging with the local high school is going to have a pitch competition. And then Ryan's going to be on there next year, our oldest daughter is in high school. And so it just feeds from the youth, right up and giving back. Tim 39:00 And tapping into that amazing energy. Yeah. So, I'm going to have you back. And I want to talk to you about that at a later time. Because I think that there's a lot of cool stuff there too. But if people want to get in touch with you through the Cochrane incubator, where can they find out more about that? And then where could they contact you directly?
Shane 39:17 Probably the best place to start is by reaching out to me directly on LinkedIn. They can just find me Shane Pegg on LinkedIn. And then through the town of Cochran, if you go to the town of Cochran, go under the business incubator spot, it's under the business section. You'll be able to kind of learn about the incubator and then just reach out to me directly or dropping in for anybody that's local. At the station, right downtown Cochran, they can kind of stop in and take a tour of the incubator and see how we can help them out.
Tim 39:43 Right on. Here's a question that I ask everybody as we wrap up. Ryan, if you can think about the people that are listening, they're going to be all different ages. There's going to be some adults, they're going to be some people that are working in businesses right now, they got jobs, there's going to be some people that are maybe founders, maybe thinking about becoming founders, might be people that are wanting to shift into leading teams and this kind of thing. If you could give them a wish. If you could wish anything for them, do you know what that would be?
Ryan 40:16 I feel like it would be bring the idea to life and do what you want to do. Don't just follow on someone else's path that they've said, oh, yeah, you should go this way. Or you should do this job, or invent this idea. You should just create your own idea and really make that a business or–
Tim 40:41 Or let it rip. Shane, how about yourself? If you could wish anything for a listener today, what would it be?
Shane 40:49 I’d go back to probably one of the first comments we made is creating space and opportunities for the youth like Ryan and others. For that learning, for building the courage, for curiosity. How do you allow them that opportunity to explore what they're interested in? And just keep kind of feeding that fire.
Tim 41:14 Well, you've certainly created some space for me there, fellas, so I appreciate that today. Okay. Can't wait to follow along and see how things shift here for you. And I just want to say another really big thank you for taking the time to come on today.
Ryan 41:29 Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thank you for having us.
Shane 41:32 Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity, Tim.
Tim 41:34 All right, well, good luck at your basketball tourney tomorrow. We will catch up real soon in the future, and all the best guys.
Tim 41:47 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership. Please give us a positive rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word too, by sharing this with your friends, teams, and colleagues. Thanks again for listening. And be sure to tune in in two weeks time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading | |||
| 15 May 2024 | Brent Yonk - Beyond Titles in Leadership | 01:01:39 | |
What does it take to create an impactful leader? Find out in this episode of the Sweet on Leadership podcast. Tim interviews the insightful Brent Yonk—Leadership Coach, Culture Change Agent, and Senior Leader at the FBI—about his extensive experience coaching diverse leaders from around the world. Their conversation will provide you with a wealth of wisdom, including why leadership titles don’t matter as much as we think they do, how to develop yourself as a leader first before seeking followers, plus the impact of technology on organizational leadership structures. You don't want to miss this episode if you want to grow your leadership skills and inspire others around you! Brent also shares stories from his experience working as a leader within the FBI and coaching leaders in law enforcement around the world. You’ll hear about the many misconceptions people have about leadership, the mistakes organizations make when searching for leaders, and how to cultivate those skills in yourself. For the aspiring leaders out there, you’ll learn why it’s so powerful to unlock your potential by believing in yourself and cultivating a culture of leadership in your environment. By the end, you’ll be inspired to make changes to the way you lead and the way you view leadership. About Brent Yonk Brent Yonk is an Assistant Section Chief for the FBI Counterterrorism Division’s Technology and Data Innovation Section. In this role, he oversees the development of novel technology solutions supporting international and domestic terrorism investigations and other critical incidents around the world. Prior to his current role, Brent served as the FBI’s In-Q-Tel Interface Center Director leading the Bureau’s commercial scouting, testing, and evaluation of emerging technologies. Brent is also an Adjunct Faculty for the FBI Academy, instructing and facilitating courses in leadership, organizational change, and project management for law enforcement partners around the world. Prior to joining the FBI, he spent over 10 years working in the private sector with several Fortune 500 companies in the areas of organizational change management and workforce development. Resources discussed in this episode: -- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Brent Yonk: -- Transcript Brent 00:01 And the beauty is usually when you're exercising leadership without titles, the competitive nature of it doesn't really ever come into play. Because there's really not an opportunity for you to one up anybody else, right? It's really about looking at each other, evaluating each other's strengths, understanding what each person on that team brings to the table, and then really just giving each other and empowering each other to bring their best selves, to support whatever the shared objective or goal is.
Tim 00:33 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you, my friend, are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. I’m Tim Sweet. Welcome to the Sweet on Leadership Podcast. This is episode 33. Thanks for joining us.
Tim 01:08 Welcome back to the Sweet on Leadership podcast. Thank you very much for joining me today. This is a podcast that has been months in the making. I am absolutely electric with excitement for talking to my guest today. I'd like to introduce Brent Yonk. And Brent, I'm gonna let you tell people all about why I'm so jazzed today. Tell them about what you do. And what you find yourself doing day in day out. It's not my normal cup of tea.
Brent 01:39 Absolutely. Well. Hopefully, I don't underwhelm everybody. But, so my name is Brent Yonk. I'm an assistant section chief with the Federal Bureau of Investigation or FBI. Specifically, I'm in the FBI’s counterterrorism division. And so my role, I focus on leading a group of folks who develop kind of the next generation technology that supports our agents and our analysts who are both at our headquarters divisions, as well as out in the field actually doing the casework day in and day out. That's really what my day-to-day is comprised of, is ensuring that we understand what are the threats that our agents are facing? And what are some of the ways that we can both mitigate those, but we can also fill in the gaps and help them collect the information that they need to be able to make real-time decisions and catch the bad guys as quickly as we can.
Tim 02:29 And, I mean, this is something for me sitting here in Canada, pretty normal Joe, mostly only sees this stuff in the news and on the TV. And so, it's a world that I think most of us would, would say is pretty mysterious, or has a certain amount of intrigue around it. But let me back you up. Because on top of being involved in something that's so exciting, you also are what I would consider one of the thought leaders in the leadership space, you're definitely a person that I follow constantly. And so, I'd like you to tell us a little bit about, you know, what brings you into that sphere? And what drew you to leadership practice cultural transformation, these types of pursuits. Can you give us a little bit of background on that?
Brent 03:11 Yeah, absolutely. You know, leadership is something that really started to kind of pique my interest. Early on in my career, I had some interesting conceptions of what leadership was, what it wasn't at that time. And it's evolved over the course of my career. But really, there's always been kind of this internal desire that I've had to find ways to bring the best out of those that I work with, whether it's a pure coworker, direct report, somebody who I who I lead, or even somebody who, who leads me looking for those ways to ensure that we're all able to bring our best selves. And our best performance to whatever it is that we're doing is something that is a real driver for me. So I have spent a lot of time really kind of focused in on understanding what leadership really is, how anybody can start to utilize it and apply it in their lives, not even just in the professional sense, but also in their personal lives, to start to really kind of change the dynamic of the way that they think and view the world and ultimately the outcomes that they're able to achieve.
Tim 04:23 I share that sentiment. It's one of the reasons I'm involved in what I'm involved in. I remember years ago, I used to say, no one can promote you to leader. Like, that is a choice. That's something you make deep inside. Could you take us back a little bit further, maybe pre-FBI, what kicked you off being inspired to really think about this deeply. What were you seeing in your own roles or around your community that made you ask these questions?
Brent 04:51 Yeah, absolutely. So, if we go to one of my first jobs, I joined an organization called Quest Communications and I stepped into a sales role at the time. And so went through a very rigorous program, learning how to effectively sell. And, you know, in that role I aspired to be the best salesman that I could be. And of course, you're exposed to a lot of other people and a lot of different perspectives and views. So, in that early role, the way I viewed leadership, which is probably similar to how a lot of people may view leadership is, to me, it was almost synonymous with management, right? So, when you would talk about a leader, my mind would almost instantly just go to, oh, you're talking about a supervisor or manager, an executive, somebody who has a title. And I kind of thought that way. And I really kind of heard that echoed in many of my peers as well. I had somebody who reached out to me from our Training Department at the time, and they asked me, I was one of our top salesmen in the location I was at, they asked me if I would be willing to step in, and lead some training programs for a period of time. And so I had the opportunity to, to transition. And it was, it was a great opportunity, I had a wonderful opportunity to get exposed to a portion of Disney that I don't think many people are aware of, called Disney Institute. And Disney Institute is focused on providing trainings, for businesses on how to take their, their game performance and take their business to the next level. So I had an opportunity to attend this training, which was focused on how do you take your customer service essentially, to the next level, and then kind of bring that curriculum and that content back, package it into our own kind of internal content, and then provide that out to our workforce? Going through that process? And really starting to think about human development? I started to question some of my own fundamentally held views and perspectives of what leadership is and isn't. And I very quickly started to recognize that, well, yes, there are aspects of management that do kind of overlap very nicely with leadership. There's elements of it that don't. And then in fact, you'll see, and most people can share experiences where they've, in fact, encountered people in management roles, people with fancy titles, who, if you were to ask them, Would you follow that person? They would probably say, Not if I didn't have to, right? And so I really started to have this kind of divergent moment where, okay, leadership and management are two different concepts. They can absolutely coexist. And in fact, they're most effective when they coexist. But you can 100% be a leader without having any form of formal authority. And I think this is something that, you know, Simon Sinek, did a great job of bringing into the kind of the public conversation, as he was talking with his book Leaders Eat Last, that authority can absolutely kind of give a bigger impact to your leadership. But it doesn't define your ability to be a leader or not. At that point, I really started to dive into Okay, so leadership is something that can absolutely be done outside of any type of management or supervisory role, and starting to explore okay, how do we unlock that? How do we enable people to effectively step into that leader role? And then of course, the question becomes, if you've got multiple people that are stepping into that leadership role on the same team, how do you effectively kind of co-lead and bring the whole team together versus turning it into more of a competitive type situation? And the beauty is usually when you're exercising leadership without titles, the competitive nature of it doesn't really ever come into play. Because there's really not an opportunity for you to one-up anybody else, right? It's really about looking at each other, evaluating each other's strengths, and expanding what each person on that team brings to the table. And then really just giving each other and empowering each other to bring their best selves, to support whatever the shared objective or goal is.
Tim 09:07 I like that sentiment. And myself, we say, lead without titles, but lead with your strengths, lead with your geniuses, lead with lead with what people are best at. And think of them in those terms when you bring them to the table. So we can become this cohort that's got all sorts of potential. But titles alone don't mean anything in the same way other than it's just an organizational label. And the other part that you said there, which I think is really important to pull out, make sure we highlight is leaders have followers. And if you don't have people that would follow you somewhere, if you don't stand up for something and people are willing to stand with you, then you can manage. You could be an authority figure. But you're not leading someone by the brain and the heart. You know, it's not the same thing. It's not the same thing as leading somebody because they have contracted with you to do something in a transactional sort of way. I think that's a really important point that you brought up. I mean, and again, that other piece around look, leaders in general, are managers, but not all managers are leaders. If you're a lead something, it doesn't mean you're a formal manager, but you're managing, you're managing thought, you're usually helping people gather around some, there's an element of manager there.
Brent 10:27 And sometimes, you know, sometimes I even, I struggle with just the semantics of how we talk about leaderships in the broader public sphere. This has kind of been a developing conversation around just emotions in general. But they'll say that, you know, if the only labels that you're aware of when you talk about emotions are happy, sad, and upset, or angry, like, you're always going to be struggling to really understand what's going on inside of yourself. And I think very similarly, if the only labels that you have to describe people in, in these management roles as leader, then you're always going to struggle to like, you can have a very ineffective manager who has very poor behaviors, and that you would still refer to them, even if you refer to them as a poor leader, you're still kind of giving them that title, right?
Tim 11:25 You're in a leadership position.
Brent 11:27 Yeah. And so it, and the way the human brain works is kind of fascinating. Like, even though we're saying, Oh, you're a bad leader, there's still like, it seems like the human psychology has this, this fascination with leadership. And I think it's rightly so, we're looking to people to help us come together on something. But if we're following that thought, and we're still thinking of these four leaders, as leaders, we're still giving them, I think, a sense of, we're giving them some of our support almost. And so it's almost like, we need to start broadening our dictionary to say, Okay, you're either a leader or you're not. You may be a manager, but you're not a leader, right now. You may be a dictator, you may be and there's, there's a whole bunch of other words that we can, we can use as a label, as you know, the behaviors that are going on without ceding that, well, you are a leader.
Tim 12:28 Just as a small aside, I mean, when I'm in my circle, trying to find things to read and be inspired by in the rest of it, I'll often type into a search bar or a news site or LinkedIn, I'll look for articles associated with leadership. Inevitably, it takes me to political leaders, and we use that term their political leaders. Well, not all of them are political leaders in the way we're talking about it. I mean, we're talking about people that are able to be inspiring, and, and gather people that may be peers, and maybe leading co-leading with them. But you're, you're forming a would you say, a gravitational center for some thoughts, some cause some, some purpose, and you're giving people a place to gather and even in the intro of the show, it's like, Are you a person that, you know, brings people together to do amazing things that they couldn't do by themselves? It really becomes that finding one plus one equals four or whatnot, but you're bringing people together to do something meaningful. And that doesn't mean that you're just in a position of power. Leadership as a word has been incredibly cheapened. And maybe we should spend a moment and think about what would be the word that would be even closer than leadership to what we mean a person that's inspiring a person that's going to support people and value them and align them to a purpose.
Brent 14:04 I feel like the rightful name there is leader, I think, really the, it should be on the opposite side of that spectrum that we're kind of discussing. When you're exhibiting non-leader-like behaviors. Like, let's, let's be honest about that. And let's call it what it is. You're not a leader right now.
Tim 14:24 When people say, Oh, that's toxic leadership, even that's sort of a weird thing, because it's like, you don't choose to toxically lead or maybe you do, but if you're if you're being toxic as a manager or as an authority figure, you've kind of taken yourself out of the pure leadership sphere. And it's like you, you don't get it. You are vacuous in this area. Good luck. Right?
Brent 14:49 Obviously, it's that's that is something that is very ingrained, I think, in just our culture. And I think it's almost universally across cultures. The way that we kind of refer to leadership and how we have it, so synonymous with the concept of those authority figures. But I think that by promoting that discussion, and by having that, that clarity to say you may be in an authority role right now, but you are not being a leader gives us that opportunity to 1—help those individuals start to maybe capture a little self-awareness, or recognize maybe there are some behaviors right now that I am exhibiting, that are absolutely taking me away from being a leader? And how can I start to reform those? How can I start to adopt other behaviors, more positive behaviors, that can really help me to step into that leadership, role and title.
Tim 15:51 And it's funny too, because when we think about leaders, they may not always have structures underneath them, they may not always have rafts of people underneath them, they can be thought leaders, they can be people that are representing an idea. And some very inspiring people may have no will to actually lead people, but they do it by sheer force of intellect or sheer force of brilliance of their ideas. They open people up and it doesn't mean they desperately want to be the guru. They're just the source.
Brent 16:24 Yeah, that's another thing that I started to see, especially earlier in my career, is when people have that kind of assumption of leadership and management being the same. And when they witnessed people in management begin to behave poorly. It's almost like that disgust or that disenfranchisement that they feel towards those managers leads over to the whole concept of leadership for them. And so when you even try to have a conversation about what is leadership, how do we exhibit leadership? If they have a real strong connection between leadership and management in their heads, and they've experienced real toxic management, they may not want to have any conversation around leadership at all, they may shut down completely, just because when you say leadership, they immediately start thinking, Oh, it's those people that treat you poorly, that leverage their power and use it abusively. And so, they almost run away from the entire conversation of leadership, because they just don't want to get exposed to those behaviors.
Tim 17:23 Yea, they've been burned. And I've been doing a facilitation and in the first quarter of this year, I've been working with industry, I've been working with higher ed, executives in both fields. So I read provosts, deans, presidents, those types of industry, you're up in the C suite, the rest of it, and, you know, one of the conversations that was going around that is, how do we support and how do we enrich and embolden and encourage our, our staff? How do we increase their potential? How do we develop them? I counterpoint to that, that I brought up these folks. And I said, you know, when we look at some of the data, it says that the satisfaction with employees, and the employees own sense of potential and growth is never higher than when they first get hired. And so, is the challenge to just rebuild what's missing? Or is there a side challenge, which is, what do we do to not erode that person's sense of self and potential and growth? And if we can protect that and leverage it, and perhaps build on it? Great! But those toxic leadership behaviors when we talk about these people that are turned off of the idea of having to be that or another person may have experienced that erosion, that destruction of himself and psyche. And, you know, that is something where, oh, I've had no shortage of clients where it's organizational trauma that we're up against. Yeah.
Brent 19:02 Yeah, and so in this, this is I think we're that principle of everybody can be a leader. And if we give them that ability to think that way, and if we start to empower them, and we start to think through, how do we get them to leverage more leadership, behaviors, and abilities in whatever role they're in? They not only are conditioning and kind of protecting themselves against those, maybe climate aspects that may demotivate them. Yeah, but they're also acting as a buffer between the rest of the population and negative environmental impacts. And so, the more leaders that you have, at every level of your organization, I think, the more protected you're going to see that employee population be against some of those very pervasive, just, elements of business and just any organization, are those dysfunctional elements that will erode the trust and the engagement. It's really important that people, they do feel that sense of empowerment. And one of the things that you had mentioned, right is the concept of followers. And there may be people out there that think, well, I don't have anybody following me, like, you may have a single person that, like, nobody follows me, well, that's probably not true. There are people that are following you, in the sense that they are watching you, they are taking cues from you, they may even be modeling some of their behaviors after what you're doing. You just may not be aware of that. But even if all of that were taken away, there is still one person that you can absolutely, have follow you. And that's you. And that may sound really funny. But I have seen so many people, that you can clearly see that they don't have that confidence in themselves, to lead themselves effectively. And if you're already struggling to recognize yourself as your own leader, like what hope do we have for you to be able to effectively lead others? So I think that developing that internal compass, that internal sense that the power to make decisions, the power to guide your fate, as it were, is in your hands, right, you get to choose the actions that you're going to take, you get to choose whether or not you're going to try to broaden your awareness of what is influencing and impacting you. Or you can just shut down and you can just put your head down. And you can just focus on doing the easy thing, right, follow that the downward path, that choice is there. And when you recognize that I can lead, even if it's just myself, I can be a leader, you start to unlock that potential, you start to broaden your horizon, you start to open that aperture, and see more possibility for yourself. And then that will continue to broaden. And you'll start to see people around you. And you'll start to recognize in them the skills, the abilities, the knowledge, the potential that's there, and then you can start to encourage them to join you on this journey. And now you're starting to see exponential impact happen from that.
Tim 22:17 Really, people can get beyond that scarcity mindset into that abundance mindset that starts with the self, it's like, do I appreciate myself for the potential that I've got, so that I don't have to be selfish with it, or I don't have to be jealous of someone else's potential. And that the there's two points that I'd like to mention about that. One is the kindness that you have to approach yourself with, to find that first foothold is important. But also that in my career, I've seen many people who have been very, very successful leaders in one sphere. And I mean, leaders in the proper sense of the word. They moved them over into a different environmental situation, a different job, different industry, different team, different leader, or different, I should say, director, manager, whatever, direct line management figure, and suddenly they start to struggle. And suddenly, they start to doubt themselves. And so, although you can find this, I think there are periods where people go through times of doubt, and times of uncertainty, and they have to reinvigorate that because you can't give away what you don't have. And so if you find it's feeling synthetic, or it's feeling artificial, you better you better stop and say hey, wait a minute, are my roots still hydrated? Am I still, am I still gripping the earth, because you may be going through the motions, but have lost some sort of confidence about yourself. And, and you can see this with some of the biggest names in business, they can be torn down. And, and it can happen and it can happen for very simple reasons. It does not have to be fancy, it doesn't have to be salacious, it doesn't have to be dramatic, and they can lose faith in themselves. And that's something that's, that's a very real thing. But I love that, that statement. I want to move us towards one of the reasons why I think you're such a force in this area. And why I really like you this time talking to you without trying to butter you up too much. But anyway, there's a very real reason why I'm fascinated with your perspective and your background. And that as we got to know each other, you told me about what it's like in the FBI and what the different experiences that you've had. And I see it as this tremendous laboratory to test these ideas. Because of how dynamic it is, because of how far-reaching it is. So can you just paint a picture for us about what's life like for leaders within your organization and also just how far that reach goes. And for you as an expert in this space, this is time to share just why I'm enamored with the, the scope that you've been exposed to, because I think that's such an important thing for people to know about Brent.
Brent 25:21 Yeah, absolutely. You know, so the FBI is probably one of the most well-known, well, it's perhaps one of the most well,
Tim 25:32 Everybody knows the three-letter acronym. You know, no one asks how to spell FBI, right?
Brent 25:37 Maybe, maybe the right word… it is one of the most well-covered organizations in the world. There are absolutely elements, you know, of what you see in Hollywood, or what you even see on the news, which may not actually be the reality of what the actual FBI is like. But one of the elements of the FBI that is 100% true, whether you know, you see view it in, in the movies, the TV shows, whatever it is, is there is an incredibly committed workforce of people. And they're all brought together by this singular mission. Right? You know, as you walk into the FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, you'll see a Starbucks on your left, nice Starbucks. But right in front of you on the wall is the mission statement of the FBI, which is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution. And everybody walks in. And everybody sees that, and everybody feels that every day when they come to work. And so, you know, the FBI is like any other large organization, it comes with this dysfunctions, bureaucracy is in our name. So of course, we have that. But the commitment of the people in that organization, I mean, when, when something happens when you have one of these black swan events, one of these unexpected crises that arise there, there are a few places I think that will pull together as quickly and work together as effectively as the people in the FBI. And so it's, it's a fascinating place to work. I grew up with, with two parents who are in law enforcement, my dad was a deputy sheriff, and my mom was an adult probation officer. So I kind of got to experience the law enforcement perspective, you know, as a very young child all the way growing up, I didn't get away with hardly anything, right, I got to see the full cycle of justice in my house. And so, you know, even growing up, the FBI was this kind of vaunted place where the best of the best strive to get. And so to be able to step into this organization, you know, as I've been going through my career, and to be able to see behind the scenes and actually encounter the people and work with them. It's been, it's been fascinating. And, you know, it's in this is one of the things that I tell everybody is, the FBI has a reputation that draws the very best people from society to come and join our mission, right? Private sector companies would pay boatloads of money to try to attract and bring in the quality of people that just naturally are attracted the FBI, because we stand for.
Tim 28:26 Self selection and self-alignment. They're already led by an idea, in a sense.
Brent 28:31 Yes, absolutely. So it is, it's a fascinating as you, as you said, a laboratory from a leadership perspective, because not only do I have these very motivated and very engaged and very willing participants, but they are completely bought into what we are here for. And if developing and becoming a better leader is going to make them more effective, at the furtherance of our mission, they're all for it. Right. And so, so yeah, so it's, it's, it's incredible, being able to work with these committed individuals, to see the willingness and the desire that they have to try to get better at what they do every day. And to try to empower the people around them to do that as well. The other benefit that comes along with this is, you know, the FBI is known as the premier law enforcement agency in the world. Right. Very lofty title, in many ways, very well deserved. You know, in some ways, we may be resting on some of the Hollywood mythos, but the FBI has this opportunity to share our knowledge and share our expertise, not only with local law enforcement that we work with across the United States, but we also get to share it with our international partners. And prior to the, I think there was the CBS television series FBI International that came out a couple of years ago. I think prior to that show coming out, most people probably didn't realize that the FBI had an international presence. In most embassies around the world. There are FBI, special agents and employees that are also attached. Their focus is to investigate any crimes that happened to American citizens abroad. And so we have this global footprint. And so we're always engaging and interacting with international partners, whether it's federal or local law enforcement agencies in these different countries. And you know, one of the benefits that I have had the opportunity to take advantage of, being a adjunct faculty member for the FBI, is I've been able to actually go out to these countries and meet with these international partners, and sit down with their, their frontline leaders with their executives, and really start to talk in depth about what is the power of leadership in their organizations, and again, to share some of these concepts that, hey, leadership extends to much more than just your people with titles, your frontline workers, the peoples that are out protecting the communities that you serve, like you can empower them to be leaders too. So having the ability to share and kind of take that message out to these groups has been a real privilege. For me. It's a fascinating realization, I think to, to see that regardless of what boundaries may divide us, from a nation-state perspective, or even from a political perspective or any other, we all share many of the same fundamental concerns, issues, challenges. And in many cases, the answer to resolving or getting closer to a resolution on those comes through effective leadership.
Tim 31:51 Each of those exposures is likely to have I mean, I have been in business in Southeast Asia or in Africa and whatnot. And there are cultural barriers, there are socio-economic barriers, there are gender roles that are different than we might assume there are, how you view elders and things like this. And the and the authority networks are can be very, either formal, but perhaps very different than we would see in Canada. So you're seeing all of this, and yet through it, there's this throughline of what humans want, or want to be, they want something to follow, or they, they want to be able to express themselves and collect people around them so that they can lead the charge on something is an important realization, but then also to experience what are the barriers that different people feel? And can we get? Can we get a fluency around? What are the tensions that people can feel when they're dealing with this, and as you've said, those tensions don't have to be from people outside our country. Everybody can have hangups, of one ilk or another. Could you share with us maybe an anecdote of something that was surprising to you, when you had brought an idea to a group or a team or witnessed a type of realization or transformation.
Brent 33:10 This would have been last year I was out in East Africa, we were in Nairobi, and we were meeting with a cohort of Law Enforcement Executives, across several different countries, they had all come to Nairobi to for this training. And, you know, my role I was responsible for really kicking the event off and kind of getting this, this week long training conference through the first day and a half. So I was introducing many of these concepts that are very common knowledge here in the United States, things like emotional intelligence, and you know, unconscious bias, how to cultivate a healthy culture. And it was fascinating talking with these leaders in these different international organizations. And seeing that, while they may not recognize all of the labels, and all of the names, they may not know what emotional intelligence is, the underlying concepts of it, they were able to actually very quickly make connection to, through their own experiences, right. And so really, for them, it was just kind of translating, oh, well, we may not label it as emotional intelligence here, we may call it something else. But that's what these principles are, and watching them make those connections and then start to relate and see how those connections could support their efforts in the work that they were doing was fascinating. One of the concepts that I tend to talk with a lot of executives and especially in law enforcement communities around is a acronym, it's called VUCA. And for those that have never come across the acronym VUCA it stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Essentially, it's kind of the four broad elements that we encounter in our modern world, right? And it makes making decisions effectively, very difficult. Because things are constantly changing. There's all sorts of different things that you can't necessarily track, right? Everything is complex, everything is kind of interconnected. And you may try to tug on this thread and not realize that it's going to have all of these secondary and tertiary ramifications. And so how do you effectively help an organization achieve its objectives in this very shifting and constantly, you know, fluid environment. And for the East Africans, this was a completely new concept to them, they had not heard of the acronym VUCA. And it stuck. It was incredible how well it stuck with them. So the program that I was supporting is a year-long program that we offer to many of our international law enforcement partners, where they end up spending a week in each of the host countries. And then they'll do a capstone week back in the US and DC. And so I had the opportunity of reuniting with this cohort, when they made the journey back over to DC a year later at the end of their program, and walking into the room and seeing them after several months, it was incredible to watch their faces light up when they saw me. And the first words that leave their mouth weren't brands, it was VUCA. Right? They were so excited about that concept, and how it helped them frame their discussions that it just it, it stuck with them. And so that was, that was a really gratifying moment for me to realize, okay, you know, some of these other concepts, like we have these fancy names for them, but they may already be concepts that they get they understand. But it's great to be able to bring something that's new, that's genuine, something that expands the way that you know, these different folks can have conversations, and to watch them kind of embrace that and, and really retain that information. To me, that was really exciting. Especially
Tim 37:04 Especially, if you're especially if your lifestyle. And where you find yourself in the world is filled with volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. I absolutely think that maybe that's getting closer to the definition of leaders, somebody who provides an antidote to that. And…
Brent 37:21 100%, or at least gives you the ability to feel safe and confident making decisions.
Tim 37:30 You’re the foothold. I remember being hired for a role. And I love this role. And when, when I was, was being scouted for it, and when it was being sold to me, the guy leaned over the table, and he said, Look, I want you to know something about this role. I said, What? He goes: maximum exposure zero safety net. And I was like, awesome, like, sign me up, you know. And it's, you know, if you're comfortable with high levels of ambiguity, can still find the through line, then, then that's what we need. I'm like, awesome, my job. So, as you're training these other people, and as I think about, I'm thinking about your job, but want to bring us back there, technology and data innovation, counterterrorism division. Like, whoa, man, so much better than what I've got on my business card. Anyway, we talked a little bit about, we're going to change gears just a little bit here. Because as we're talking about these leaders, finding their feet, being this foothold, and expressing, for lack of a better word, pure leadership, your role within the FBI, also is heavily technology-focused, right? You're dealing with data and all of these things. In conversation before this. We were talking about what the role of technology can be in the leadership experience. And I'd like you to dive into that. Your view on that I found really compelling.
Brent 38:55 It is a really fascinating environment to be in to be developing technology solutions that are addressing real-world threats, and supporting, like really serious investigations, right? Counterterrorism became a really big known thing after 9/11. And even though most of the people that are now joining the workforce are actually born after the events of 9/11. And they don't have that, that kind of same connection that some of the others do. There's this sense of importance to that mission, still, because of the impact that it had on not just the United States, but on countries around the world. We all went through very turbulent time after those events. And so to be able to support our agents, our analysts and our partners in this space is something that I have found to be extremely, both exciting, but just gratifying. And so you know, working with my team and leadership in this respect is really about empowering my people to have not just the physical resources, they need to do their jobs, but to also have that connection with the mission, to really understand how the work they do ties back to that purpose, have the psychological safety to be able to feel like it's okay for us to, to try and to make mistakes, which saying, make mistakes, and counterterrorism in the same sentence can be a very difficult thing. But the reality is like, if we are not striving, if we are not pushing ourselves to the point where you know, we are occasionally hitting that failure barrier, then we're not going to be developing the solutions that are ultimately going to help us achieve our vision in the FBI, which is to stay ahead of the threat, right. So if you look at all of the different threat actors that exist in the world, right, you'll see that they are iterating, at a pace that is incredibly difficult to match, especially when you factor in just the general bureaucracy that tends to go with large government agencies. And so we have the benefit of because we are a smaller team within the FBI, focused on a specific mission set, we can iterate a little bit faster than if we were trying to do this at scale at the level of the entire organization, we have this ability to experiment to test hypotheses to you know, really try to find where is the value add. And I think sometimes that can be a challenge for those that are in the technology development space. Because oftentimes, you may have this great idea. And you may go, kind of gangbusters trying to develop it, build it out. But if you never actually validate it, if you never actually get that feedback from the end users to say that, yes, that actually is a really useful thing, you may end up developing the most useless, the most beautiful, useless piece of technology that's out there.
Tim 42:03 And then it can be even worse, it might not even just be useless. It might feed the wrong data, or overemphasize something, or cloud the judgment of others.
Brent 42:12 It's part of our mantra, we partner very closely, and when in fact, we try to recruit some of the more technically minded people from our workforce, to come from the field directly into our shop, because then they're bringing that real-world experience and insight directly into the development discussions. So we're able to solve some of the most pressing issues that our folks in those counterterrorism seats are experiencing.
Tim 42:37 On the other side of, of your job description. And in a very general sense, what are the are some of the big risks of an over-reliance or, you know, what, what can be the ugly things that happened when we, if we don't properly control how we enable leaders and teams with data and technology. I'm a big data guy, I always say I would rather, you know, know than hope. And so the flow of information and the flow of data is really important. And the use of technology and the adoption of it is appropriately important, when it's when it's useful when it's the right answer, when it's not a faster pencil.
Brent 43:21 Absolutely well, and so there's the phrase, if you can't measure it, you can't improve it right. And so to your point, data is essential. And so we're on the operational side, of course, data is what empowers our agents to move their investigations forward. When you think through the concept of it in a leadership perspective, and especially in more of a broad organizational context, if you don't have the ability to collect the data to kind of understand your current state, then how do you plan? And how do you put in place any type of initiative to move from that state to your desired future state? And so you may be throwing in all sorts of different solutions, whether they're human resources, solutions, or technical solutions. But if you don't have the data underlying to help you understand where you're actually at, you may be trying to navigate from, say, Washington, DC to New York, when in fact, you're actually out in, you know, Salt Lake City, Utah, right? Maybe anything slightly different part of the country, and so you're just not going to get where you need to go. So yeah, so data is huge. And so from technology perspective, I mean, technology has given us the ability to not only collect data at a scale that we've never been able to before, but it enables to connect the dots in a way that makes it so much more impactful and meaningful if we do it the right way. Now, I think where, you know, a lot of organizations tend to struggle is they tend to bring or they tend to struggle bringing the right players to the table to ensure that we are connecting all of those relevant dots, it's really easy, especially the bigger organizations get, it's really easy for these silos to start developing within the organizations. And they may be building this great technical solution or this great development tool or whatever it is. But it's not being informed by all of the relevant data points. And so it's going to miss the mark, it's not going to deliver the desired results, because it's not factoring in some of those other underlying issues that may be out there.
Tim 45:31 There's a depolarization that I see in teams when they get a certain size and a certain complexity when teams are, especially when they're, they're young and entrepreneurial, where they tend to network people, and they classify information and systems and tools, right? They, when things start to get really, really hairy, and we start to slip into those silos. And sometimes when we adopt these, these systems of organization that that really don't fit with an organizational mission, or what we're trying to do or the nimbleness that exists there already. You can see this inflection point, this switch flip. That happens. And you'll see this often when businesses get to a point where the leaders don't feel like they can reach enough people. And what ends up happening is we go from networking people and classifying tools and information to classifying people and networking tools and information. And the problem is the data and systems at least, you know, not in the last, maybe it's changing, but they don't do the thinking. And they don't do the connecting and then people feel isolated. And so there is this potential hazard when it comes to technological systems and data that it can be ignored, that it can be misapplied. Or it could even be misused if a person is of a certain mind or of a certain motivation. All of those things I would say are probably of paramount importance to you. Do you see that as part of the toxic or lack of leadership expression where they can have certain attitudes towards information, data, and technology?
Brent 47:11 So especially when I talk about this kind of toxicity that sometimes creeps up into cultures within organizations, you know I think a lot of times we tend to view it nefariously right, like, there are these people that are vicious in nature. And the reality is, in many cases, it's not. It's what's happened is it's organically spread. And nobody's been tracking it. And nobody's been pulling out the weeds. And so those weeds have just started to engulf the rose bed, as it were, and they're starting to strangle the plants. It's not that there was any nefarious intent in it, it was just it was allowed to occur. And in some cases, a lot of it, I think, is due to just general ignorance, especially when we're talking at the at the management level. One of the issues that I have seen over the course of my career, is there's a propensity for organizations to promote, not based on your competency to fulfill the role, but based on your prior performance, right? As an example, in my first career as a top salesman, right, whenever a new supervisory position would open up, they would come to the top salespeople, and they would say, Hey, are you interested in this job we would like you to put in for this role. And the assumption was, if you're a great salesperson, and we put you into a supervisor role, then you will just automatically shed your brilliance onto all of the people you supervise, and they will magically become great salespeople as well. Right? It sounds great in theory, but in practice, it doesn't work at all. Because what happens is you put that person into that role. And it's completely different from what their previous role was. Now they've got to have different types of conversations. Now they've got to start leveraging different skills that they were never developed to utilize. And so, in the instance, where you get stuck in that position, what do you do? Right? You try to tell people how to do their jobs, because that's how I did it. That's how I was successful. So you start to see micromanagers just flourish because that's, that's all they know, I was put in this role to get everybody else to be as good as I was. This is the formula I used to get there. And I think that's another important element that, you know, sometimes we miss when we talk about leadership. There isn't a standard methodology to this.
Tim 49:37 No, in fact, there shouldn't be. Because of how unique people in situations are, there’s guideposts, but there's got to be a lot of tailoring.
Brent 49:45 So, when you get stuck with somebody telling you exactly how you're supposed to do your job? What do you do? You shut down.
Tim 49:51 Yeah, especially if you've got an internal tension or conflict with that something.,
Brent 49:51 Yes. So, you'll either shut down, or you'll fight back. Right?
Tim 50:00 I think there's one other option, if I may. Sure. And that is it can set up a really, we have harmony and teams. But we can also set up a very negative harmonic. And I think of the example I show this with is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge on Puget Sound in 1940, if you've ever seen this, there was only a 30 mile an hour wind, long suspension bridge, and the thing started to move just a little bit, just like a leader bugs his people little bit, little bit more, until the thing starts to swing and eventually tears itself apart. It didn't take a very strong wind, if you have the wrong type of advice applied in light, well-meaning doses frequently enough, you can see an employee tear themselves apart. Right? And absolutely, maybe that organizational trauma sets in.
Brent 50:51 So obviously, there's a, there's a, I think, a huge gap there. Where if organizations focus their time and attention on Okay, as we're developing people, we need to start having conversations about how to manage effectively, and how to lead effectively, because those are two different disciplines. And those conversations and that development needs to happen well in advance of putting that person in that management role. Right? Like, you're not going to put your 10-year-old child behind the wheel of a car and say, go ahead and learn by doing. Right? Like it's just it's not going to have a happy ending. But that's essentially what we're doing. In many cases, when we promote people into these supervisory or management roles.
Tim 51:35 Maybe leadership should be called people craft.
Brent 51:38 Yeah, absolutely. But how do we bring people together. But to tie it back to the, to the data and the technology aspect of it. So I think in many cases, you've got all of these different systems that tend to grow as an organization is evolving. And you start to, to your point, you start to lose some of those connections. And pretty soon the data starts skewing in certain directions. And if you are not, if you are not prepared, or if you are not knowledgeable enough to be aware of how that can occur, then you can take the data that you're given, and just trust it. And in fact, it may be painting a very drastically different picture from what the objective reality is. And so you may be thinking that you are making data-informed decisions that are in the best interest of your organization, when in fact, at the ground level, these are, these decisions that you're making, are having some truly challenging, and sometimes even, you know, like debilitating effects on your, on your workforce, and ultimately on the performance of your organization.
Tim 52:53 This has been really rich, and I appreciate you going on this journey with me. And I hope it's not the last time we do it, I really want to have you back. And I know you've got some things, which we won't mention on the go, which may, which may bring that up as an opportunity. But as we wrap up, Brent, I'm gonna ask you a series of questions real quick. One is what's got you most excited right now? What's got you really fired up?
Brent 53:18 Yeah, so over the past, you know, year or so I've been really getting kind of deep into organizational culture, like what makes organizations tick, understanding some of those group dynamics and trying to pick apart essentially, where are some of the just common flaws that are impacting organizations, whether they're public sector, organizations, like the FBI, or they’re private sector, companies. You know, in a lot of ways, we share a lot of these issues and similarities. And so understanding how you can cultivate a culture so that it promotes healthy behaviors, and encourages people to come together instead of to divide. I think that's been something that occupied a lot of my attention over the last year.
Tim 54:09 It's such a polarized world. And we're seeing that in Canada, we see it in the States, finding that rational middle in that that area for discourse and cooperation in the middle is such an important thing for us to protect. Yeah, I'm with you.
Brent 54:24 Just keeping that perspective that it is okay to disagree. But there is nothing wrong with differing perspectives. That's, that's what makes us both, you know, as nations but, but as a species. That's what makes us so strong is the ability to have different viewpoints and still be able to work together.
Tim 54:47 It's where creativity lives. Creativity does not work on the edges in the periphery. That's just dogma. So that's great. You are writing on LinkedIn, I follow you, it's great. You are speaking you are out there and and present. If a person wants to get in touch with you to, you know, consider you speaking at their organization or just to say, hi, where can they do that? What's the best way to get in touch with you?
Brent 55:16 Yeah, absolutely. So, the easiest way right now to engage with me, I think is through LinkedIn. If you go on there you search Brent Yonk, I'm the only one. In fact, I think, if you Google Brent Yonk, I'm the only one in the world. But, but yeah, so LinkedIn is an easy way to follow me, you'll be able to see some of my thoughts that I've tried to put out on a relatively frequent basis. But you can always direct message me there. And we can start to have a deeper conversation or if you're interested in, in having me bring some of these thoughts and ideas to your organization or to a conference, I'm always happy to have a conversation and see if it fits.
Tim 55:53 Right. We'll put links in the show notes. Last couple of questions. After we've had this conversation, thinking of the people that are listening, leaders that may be in a leadership or management position for several years, or they might be burgeoning brand new to the practice. What would be your hope for them to take away? Or to feel generally What's your wish? For leaders out there?
Brent 56:20 Yeah, absolutely. I think well, for those that are not in a formal role of management, or that don't have that, that title, the first thing that I would want them to walk away from is leadership is not exclusive. It's not something that comes with a title. It's something that you choose to be that you choose to adopt. And by doing so you're going to realize incredible benefits. And again, it's not just a professional skill set, or a professional mindset. Leadership permeates every aspect of our lives, whether it's at your home, whether it's your social circles, it permeates all of it. And so, by developing your leadership abilities, you are going to holistically improve the quality of your life across the board. For those that are in formal management roles, the thing that I really would want them to take away from is how can they as organizations, how can they in their teams, really start to have meaningful conversations with their people about adopting a leadership mindset and stepping into a leadership role, even if it's within their individual roles, because if they can encourage their people to do that, the quality and the breadth of outcomes and results that they're going to realize, will be well beyond anything that they could do through, you know, the traditional business practices.
Tim 57:45 So, the end of every show, we'd like to ask a couple of questions. So, this comes from Jagroop Chhina. And he wanted to ask you, what's the most meaningful thing that you've learned in the last year?
Brent 57:59 Yeah. So you know, it, surprisingly, it ties back to what we were just talking about, that. I think that that, that pulling apart that we are seeing in society, that inability to recognize the middle ground, helping people to reconnect, and to realize that whatever your political ideologies are, whatever your religious philosophies may be, they're these narratives that we have. But they don't impact our ability to relate to one another as human beings. And as individuals. In order to have that connection, it starts with curiosity. And it starts with just having the courage to approach somebody who you don't know, and strike up that conversation. And what I found is by doing that, and by encouraging that, you start to watch all of these other walls and labels just kind of start lowering. And so, fostering those human connections, is the most impactful way that we can address some of the divisiveness that we have seen in our modern world.
Tim 59:11 Your turn. The next guest, what would be the question you would like to challenge them with?
Brent 59:19 Well, so I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna play it off of what we've talked about, how do you inspire the individual contributors especially, but even those that are in management or supervisory ranks? How do you inspire them to really adopt their, that leadership mindset and perspective? How do you encourage them to be leaders and what does that look like?
Tim 59:45 I will carry that forward. Brent Yonk, thank you very much for joining me. It was a real pleasure. Thanks for being so generous with your time.
Brent 59:53 No, not at all. And I appreciate the opportunity to come and to be on the show. Really enjoyed it.
Tim 59:58 Okay, well, can't wait till the next time. You have a great one. And we'll see you soon.
Brent 1:00:06 You as well. Thank you.
1:00:10 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership. Please give us a positive rating and review on Apple podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word too, by sharing this with your friends, teams, and colleagues. Thanks again for listening. And be sure to tune in in two weeks time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 17 Jul 2024 | Jeff Massone - Distraction and The Death of Development | 00:46:46 | |
Welcome to another insightful episode of the Sweet on Leadership Podcast. Tim Sweet hosts leadership coach Jeff Massone. Their conversation delves into the complexities of personal and professional growth, focusing on overcoming distractions and fostering positive influences. They start by dissecting the pervasive impact of social media and continuous news cycles on our mindset and productivity. Throughout their discussion, Jeff underscores the importance of intentional relationships, urging listeners to surround themselves with supportive and motivating individuals. He provides strategies for minimizing negative influences both in professional settings and personal lives, emphasizing the concept of signal-to-noise ratio—where the key lies in filtering out distractions to prioritize valuable information. Tim and Jeff challenge conventional corporate training methods, advocating instead for personalized coaching that aligns with individual strengths and aspirations. Drawing from insights in Marcus Buckingham's "Love and Work," they highlight the significance of understanding unique differences in job satisfaction. They explore Patrick Lencioni's team-building strategies, emphasizing their adaptability to foster deeper team cohesion and commitment. Ultimately, Tim and Jeff stress that effective leadership isn't about rigid adherence to rules but about cultivating individualized paths toward leadership fluency and competency. Through intentional choices and strategic focus, listeners are encouraged to navigate their leadership journey with clarity and purpose. About Jeff Massone Jeff Massone is a dynamic and accomplished leader with a proven 20-year track record as a project leader in corporate America, including professional training as a coach, trainer, and speaker on leadership through the John Maxwell Team. Resources discussed in this episode:
-- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Jeff Massone | Prepared Leader Consulting -- Transcript Jeff 00:01 How do you replace the void that comes from not binge-watching television shows? And from not, you know, watching Social Media, yes, get a coach. But start your own self-development. You become an expert in leadership by reading a leadership book a month, and just work with it. Like, you know, I could never give away my books because I have all my notes in them. They’re reminding me of a situation.
Tim 00:26 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you, my friend, area leader, and this show is all about and all for you. I'm Tim Sweet, welcome to the Sweet on Leadership Podcast, episode 37. Tim 01:00 Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Sweet on Leadership podcast, I am really happy to be inviting a brand new friend that was introduced to me just a few days ago. But I mean, man, Jeff, we've hit it off, I think. Professionally, you and I are just, we're on the same wavelength.
Jeff 01:16 100%. I mean, we had talked the other day, I had kind of really wished we were recording at that point. But here we are today. And you know, really ready to dive in.
Tim 01:26 The term you use, which I really loved was leadership geek, if we're going to geek out about something geeking out on leadership is one of my favourite things. So, when you and I had a chance to talk, I was really enthused by what you stand for, and how much it really fits with my own thinking. I've always said that the thing that fuels me and moves me forward is I hate watching people struggle. I hate watching people stuck. And you told me a little bit about distraction. Tell us all about that. What caused you to this work?
Jeff 01:57 It's so interesting. So, we live in such a distracted world, when you think about what we have to do as workers right? You know, whatever job that you have, you know, whether you have an office job, whether you're out doing construction, a teacher, cop doesn't really matter. You know, we have this ever-present social media, this phone, this leash that we have attached to us, that when you watch people, you're watching them scroll, right? They're just scrolling on social media, with no real purpose, right? And, you know, we know a lot of those distractions, you know, are actually making you angry, fearful, making you sad. And, you know, that's going to do nothing for what you're trying to do for your career. Right? So, that's number one. And then the kissing cousins that are is 24/7 cable news, you know, that does the same thing, the anger, the fear, the anxiety, the depression, and you know, it just takes your eye off the ball, right? You're trying to, you know, in my world, project management, you know, launch a new product, right? Or trying to come up with a new product design, no matter what you're doing in your world. There that distraction is, if you let it. I work with people, I tell them right away. So, why don't we do this? Why don't try this at least six weeks diet, have no social media just take it off? Right? Well, you know, I need to– no, you can have it on your computer, but just take it off your phone, right? Let's try that. Let's try not looking at the news for that same amount of time. And what you do is the best thing you can do is replace that time because you realize there's going to be a void. You're so used to reaching for that phone to look at Instagram or looking at LinkedIn or looking at Facebook. This time you’re like, Oh, there's nothing there. Once you replace it with a TED Talk.
Tim 03:35 Yeah. Something positive.
Jeff 03:39 Something positive that's gonna help your career. You know, for me, I'm sitting there, and I watch. I'm like, wow, you know, 24/7 News. You know, even the one in the left and the right, right, even though I agree with, it's not helping you be a better parent, right? It's not helping you be a better business owner, be a better team leader. It's helping you with exactly nothing.
Tim 04:01 So, really being intentional about where we direct our attention. And what we consume. My family is full of teachers, my sister has this great saying and she says little pots have big handles. And I don't think it's just kids, I think we have big handles too. And if we let the wrong something in, well, it can stay there. Or it can at least occupy space that could be better used. And one of the things that you'd said in our lead up to this and I know we're gonna get there again. But this distraction isn't just happening that's externally sometimes this can be distraction by the wrong tools or things that were handed within our pursuit of management, or leadership, or sales, or our own business. And there's things that are presented as answers, but they can also be distractions, they can also take us away from the things that are going to provide real value. And that's something that I really like that line of thought.
Jeff 04:58 For those that are listening here, you know, and obviously, we know, we're well aware that Tim and I are that way to be able to promote this yes, we have to use social media, right? You're going to be seeing, you know, some promotions on Instagram, you know, LinkedIn places. But at the same time, I've worked with people who, again, use social media, and that's how they make money. And they're not on the platforms save maybe a half hour in the morning and a half hour at night. Because they know that distraction that at least, so if people who are actively using social media to bring in money, and so they're putting food on the table, aren't engaging in the platforms all day long, that should tell you something, right? You know, often, they'll hire people, like if they're reaching out to you for their services, it's not really them, right? It's their team, even though it's under their name. So, again, be mindful of that fact that, you know, even in that case, that extreme case of usership on social media, they're not using it any degree that most people are using it today at this time.
Tim 06:02 So, what I hear you saying is that we have to control and be mindful and intentional around what we're bringing in. And I like the phrase signal to noise ratio, we need to turn up the signal and the quality of those signals, and we need to really be mindful of and try to lessen the noise, right? And so we have all this external noise. When we think about coaching, and the pursuit of it, or the pursuit of personal development, career development, all of these things, what are some of the specific sources of noise that you encounter? And maybe I'll ask you first to talk about what's really common among people that you run into?
Jeff 06:45 The biggest source of noise is what I used to call it water cooler talk, right? You're kind of going to the water cooler, and you hear all the negative things that somebody feels about the company, somebody feels about their life. And, you know, that's, you know, again, doesn't serve you in terms of, you know, what's entering your mind. Other things, that's just really important. I mean, you have to guard what's going into your mind, you know, what a lot of people don't understand is, you know, that your thoughts, impact your emotions, your emotions, impact your actions, and then your actions then lead to your results. But what people don’t realize is, you know, what starts with the thoughts, I mean, you're being fed something. So, that's, we have to figure out like, what am I going to stop this? So yes, we talked about social media. Yes, we talked about 24/7 news. But then there's the negative people, right? So, who are you around, you know, in, you know, in your business or in the workplace, and are they you know, a positive force? Do you feel good when you've actually walked away with 10-minute conversation? Do you feel motivated? Or do you not? So, I mean, I think that's really, you know, something that's very important for people to understand, and I didn't realize it, right, you know, you go into, you know, you start a job, and then you kind of just kind of get around folks, and, you know, you have to stop that like, as soon as you start hearing something that's not positive, you have to go out and say, Alright, you know, let me just find a new tribe. Right? And that's just so that's just so important. Because you know, then it gets, you know, you have this other negativity that's getting in your head and that's hard. The hardest thing I'll say to Tim, is when the negative noise are your family and friends.
Tim 08:24 Oh, yeah, that can be rough. And as you were talking about whether it's at the home, whether it's at the watercooler you're saying, one of the characteristics of that negative talk that I've noticed a lot is that it can develop a life of its own, it can become this myth. And these stories, and these opinions that people forget where they come from, but they turn into these self-perpetuating doom tornadoes, and stigmas, and stories that people now have to contend with, when we don't even know exactly if they're based, in fact, any more, but they become the popular rhetoric because maybe it allows people to externalize other nerves and stuff that they're feeling. And so it fuels this thing like a really negative fire, and the ability to spot that, not contribute to it, and then pull oneself out of it is really important. But speak to me a little bit about this, because what I've noticed is when one chooses to pull oneself out of that, they can then incur the wrath of all the believers, right? They can then become the target and that often is enough motivation for people to stay at that water cooler and in that tribe. So, what do you suggest when a person feels exposed by trying to out the negative story?
Jeff 09:47 There’s a certain finesse that you can do that. I mean, you certainly don't say wow, you're the most negative person I've ever heard, please never talk to me again. You just politely sort of like, you know, move on and then slowly kind of ween yourself off hard, right? Like, it's like you're not, you know, you'd be like, wow, like, you know what, what just happened there. And you just try to find yourself and this is hard, you know, I come from, you know, larger organizations, you know, fortune 500 pharmaceutical companies. And when we were in the office consistently, at least where I work, there was a lot of opportunity to just find a new tribe, you know, when you're in a really small company, that can be very, very difficult. Right? But, you know, in general, you know, what you're trying to look for is you're trying to get around folks that are where you want to be.
Tim 10:30 Yeah, what I say your success and your place in life is the sum average of those you choose to surround yourself. Right?
Jeff 10:37 Right? They usually say, I think it's like the average of the five people you hang out with, you know, and again, you so, it's almost like, you have to do it and like little silos, right? The workplace silo, and then like, you're outside of work silos. Like who are you hanging out with, you know, outside of work? Are you hanging out with strivers, right? You know, which is awesome, you know, are you hanging out with people that are just, like, happy to punch the clock, so to speak, and you know, get in/get out. We actually, you know, the best thing you can do is hanging out again, like I said, you know, if you're a business owner, you hang out with a business owner that's been doing it, you know, in his or her realm for, you know, 5, 10, 15 years and has scaled and has grown, and you're like, Oh, my God, you make what per month? You're not gonna have, you're gonna have much, you're just gonna have much different conversations. I think one of the things that I heard years and years ago, I think I said to John Maxwell, that was, you know, people are literally around the same table with the same people talking about the same thing. And they're wondering why they're in the same position in their life, particularly from a career perspective.
Tim 11:43 I mean, certain types of energies are like air and water for people. And I used to use the term water hole, because it was like, the water hole that I needed, the water that I needed to drink was different than other animals. I want to find people that are in search of the same water holes that I am, that are in search of tapping into those same energies. And so, for instance, I do a lot of work with startup companies. There's a specific energy around that. I do a lot of work with universities, there's a specific energy around that. And I do a lot of work in sports entertainment, sports event company, that is a specific type of energy. Now, they're all different venues and different spaces. But the energy that I get out of it, that I look for is this is a compatible waterhole for lack of a better word. And that water hole is not comfort. And that water hole is not safety. And that water hole is not leisure, that water hole is, you know, if I think about the mountain biking race company that I'm part of, find what's on the inside-outside is their tagline that speaks to me on levels that I can't even properly articulate all the time. So, look for those sources of people that are out for the same thing, that are fueled on the same sustenance, and are with you in the hunt, and with you in the gather.
Jeff 13:08 Yeah, it's interesting. And I love how you gave those different examples, right of the startup or the university, you're not going to one specific avatar, right? But you know, the energy of the people that you're trying to get here, that positive energy, that energy of creation, right? You know, who you are around, right? Like, when you start talking to people, I love talking to successful business owners, right? It's a different energy than, say, a corporate executive. Right? And, you know, maybe the bank accounts look similar, right, in terms of their annual income. But it's so very different. When you talk to somebody who has, you know, started, like, you know, we're a startup, you know, then they're a company, and then they scale their company, and that they're continuing to grow, you know, because what they're doing, what they have done, you know, is they've got their own coaches to say, hey, you know, mentors, you know, to see how they, how can they get to the next level, okay, you know, we’re a six-figure company, and now we're a seven-figure company, eight-figure, and now we're trying to get to nine, right? And it's, you know, they don't just stop, you know, whereas, you know, as successful executive, you know, they fly to a certain level, right? And executive can mean different things to different people, you know, but, you know, maybe you're making, you know, 150, or 200. And that's where you'd like to live there. And then you're just kind of just there, right? You know, what are you making 300 or 400, as an executive, you're just kind of there, right? And if you're not looking to grow or scalel that you're just like looking to hold on to it, which is different. Tim 14:33 It's very different. Jeff 14:34 Then trying to grow something.
Tim 14:38 In the back catalogue, we've had two shows now with my good friend, Richard Young. Now Richard was on the Own The Podium committee for Canada and then the UK and then New Zealand, and he continues to run his practice out of New Zealand. Well, I mean, Richard is one of my favourite people ever. But his PhD and his research is all about what predicts a person from consistently meddling at the Olympics, or within higher sport competition, and a huge part of what Richard teaches is it's not about what we add, it's about what we let go of, you know, and many of the people that have worked with me will talk about the folly of additive logic versus reductive logic or transformation versus additive change. Anyway, when we look at the people we want to surround ourselves with, one of the hallmarks that I see in people that are moving easily in the strata that we want to achieve is that they're moving easily in the strata, they're moving, it's the path of least resistance for them. It's the thing that is that they've let loose of a lot of the preconceptions and the shoulds that a lot of popular business books or courses teach that you have to do. And they've just focused in on the right kind of signal, right? And they focused in on the things that that bring results. And that leaves them all sorts of room to be themselves and to believe what they're going to believe and go in and live their lives. Because they don't overcomplicate things, because they figured out that formula that they are enough. And often the people that are striving, which is a great place to be to strive, right? It's funny how often striving means doing less, it means getting to a point where it just feels easy. Or at least comparatively easy, I guess is what I would say.
Jeff 16:32 I love how you brought up, you know, I have to look into Richard Young and his work, you know, but as a consistent mentalist, I mean, my son is a competitive swimmer. You know, he's in high school level right now. And we're watching the US Olympic trials right now. And my guess is when this airs, it'll be the right before, right during the Olympics. Like when you see the people that this is their third trip, right? Like, what is driving that? Like, what are they doing, you know, like, quote-unquote, differently? You know, and people want to study that. And people want to hear from that, you know, and you're talking about a high-level elite athlete, or you're talking about, you know, a super successful business owner, business person like Bezos or Musk, right? Branson? Wow, like, you know, but people see the end, right? They don't see the unglamorous start, they don't see the equally unglamorous kind of middle. People see the end, right? And I think they get so end-focused, right? You know, you have folks who say, I want to be a VP by 30. Okay, for who do we want? You know, what are you looking to give up to be able to do that? So, it's, it's really interesting when you study excellence, and I also say to like, when you have those people, you know, those drivers, those super elite athletes, and it's no different than professional sports, and that, you know, here in the United States, NFL, or major league baseball, those elite athletes can pay, you know, 10s, in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars to do a sport. The elite Olympic athletes are different. Yes, they get sponsorships and whatnot, the top of the top, most of them aren't getting anything.
Tim 18:07 There's not a lot of sponsorship for certain sports.
Jeff 18:10 Which means that after they're done, they gotta go do something.
Tim 18:13 Yeah, or do it while they're, while they're training and everything else.
Jeff 18:17 And I often think of like, I haven't seen a lot of elite athletes in a non-commissioned based role in corporate, you know, maybe somebody's hidden, once this is out could say, hey, you know, but I say that, because we don't have a meritocracy, right now, in the corporate world. People are getting promotions and whatnot, a lot of times for other reasons than accomplishing things. And I would imagine that, you know, the elite athlete trying to, you know, get into the corporate American watching this. It's a direct conflict, you know, with what it is that they've done throughout their young life, you know, and how they've achieved, you know, put in the work and achieved and then that's how you get, you know, your accomplishments. And that's not corporate America, it's more of the entrepreneurial world, right? I mean, what you're putting in and what you're getting out, high risk, high reward, but it's very different. You know, and it's just, I said that a while ago on the clubhouse app, you know, put it out to one of those clubhouse rooms, and people were just they sat there and thought they're like, yeah, that there was nobody in that room so to speak, that could come up with somebody that they knew that, you know, we're in a not again, non commissioned role, that I just don't think it exists because it's just diametrically opposed to their lifestyle.
Tim 19:30 I think one of the the outcomes of this episode should be, I think we need to A. talk to our listeners who do you know, that has been elite in their sport and has managed to translate that into performance in business, or academically or some other pursuit? I do know that there are several people that I've been exposed to that have been ex-CFL football players or ex-NFL or Olympic people in everything from curling, to fencing, to, you know, but they've been achievement-focused to cycling, right? And the key with that, and it brings us to another sort of interesting crossroad here is that they were either lucky enough, or had guidance enough to be able to maintain their growth from a business professionals perspective maybe, but also had opportunities to join institutions and organizations that could see the value of their life experiences, and apply that into certain roles, rather than getting stuck on a tenure track of being a subject matter expert, which is why leadership is often a great place for these certain people to enter if they don't have a technical skill, or proficiency. But it raises an interesting point when we sort of circle back around to the focus that a person needs to maintain. There's so much in the area of team development and personal development, which is myopic on either a single answer, like so say it's a program. But that program assumes that you have a standard type of development through the beginning of your career, that you've gone to school, and you've got a degree and you've got all these things. And then there's this magic bullet process, which is suddenly going to answer everything. Whereas really, you know, one of the first key things that I note when I coach and facilitate to large groups is, people are all incredibly different, there will be no, this seems like a bit of a dumb thing to say. But when you have people that are starting from such different places from an education, experience, lifestyle, socio-economic, gender, could be race, can be all of these different elements that make them who they are. And we try to give them a vanilla product that's going to suddenly be translated, you know, it just doesn't work. I mean, scientifically, that's lunacy, we've got so many different variables that we need. Sure. I mean, there's nothing wrong with a good program, but then we need to go bespoke, we need to be able to customize or give them the tools to customize it to their needs.
Jeff 22:15 That's absolutely right. And I know, you know, in our previous conversation, I mentioned a book I just finished by Marcus Buckingham Love and Work. And, you know, he goes into a lot of topics, but one of them is the uniqueness of people. People are so unique that people in the same role love different things about it. In his book, he goes into housekeepers at Disney, you know, and interviewed them when he was with Gallup. Right? He was just trying to figure out, you know, like, okay, like, Well, what do you love about your job? Right, you know, and all the different things. So, when you extrapolate that to, you know, any job function, you see that uniqueness, and to your point, you know, this one magic pill, you know, one thing that I've seen in corporate is, you know, the onsite, you know, the two-day on-site training, or the off-site, you know, whichever way–
Tim 23:04 Pre-packaged, pre-scheduled, yeah.
Jeff 23:08 And it doesn't work. You know, corporations are spending, like six figures, depending on the size of the corporation, maybe even more to deliver this kind of, like, here it is, this is what leadership is, then they wonder why things haven't changed, people don't retain and it's proven, that, you know, once a couple of weeks have gone by, maybe they remember 17% of it, and then another couple of weeks after that, you know, 2%. You know, and then people just kind of go back to their normal ways of working, because that delivery model training, isn't transformative. Training is not transformative. And you know, when people think of it that well, okay, well, what should we do? You know, I had another conversation at a networking event. So, people like to check the box. So, a company so well, we provided them leadership development training, so good on us, right? If it didn't create better leaders, then what did you really provide? You know, and people don't realize, you know, coaching, right, coaching is really the modality that causes transformation. Unfortunately, you know, people don't see coaching, you know, beyond, you know, executive coach, right, you know, you have an executive that's deemed to be not a great leader. So, you know, give him, you know, an executive coach, so that, you know, he can brush up on his leadership skills and, you know, maybe show up better, you know, with his or her direct reports. You know, that's what people think about coaching is this remedial thing, you know, and, you know, you take a step forward, and you say, oh, wait a minute. You know, it's particularly from a leadership development perspective. If you offer group coaching, right, group coaching to individual contributors before they had the privilege of leading others. That's something different, and virtually nobody's doing that today. Right? People don't realize that that's something that can be offered. That's something that should be offered. A lot of it's on the coaches themselves, they go right to the executive because they know, they go right to the business owner. When I get it from a coach, that's what I'm gonna work with, because that's what pays the bills. So, but you're coaching for like a transformation. You know, one of the things I've said for years is, you know, the leadership development I've seen, you know, that's given a brand scholars to sales professionals call that leadership development to turn a buck. They say, alright, well, we'll give our sales professionals leadership development training, and you know, they're going to start selling 25% more, and this is great for the bottom line and makes all the sense. But in any given company, most companies are, you know, they're not sales professionals. Yeah, how about leadership development, to change a culture to really go in there and change the culture much like, you know, I just said the other day, Major League Baseball, right, has this farm system, right? And, you know, they decided to build their farm system, you know, because they want to compete consistently at the high level, you know, in five to seven years. You know, what I think companies should be doing today in terms of leadership and culture, is build their farm system, who's their farm systems, individual contributors that are out of college, out of graduate school, that aren't leading people that leading one soul you know, yet. It's the people who put through group coaching program for leadership development, you know, in a year format, and see, like, wow, these people are going to now be operating in a different level. And oh, by the way, prepared to lead others, once they're given the privilege, say, you know, what, I think this person can handle a couple of direct reports. But you know, what, I think she can handle her own team, or this one, you know, yes, team tomorrow, department, right, and entire department in two years from now. So, these are the kinds of things that nobody is doing, right? You know, people are promoted for reasons other than their, we think they're going to be a great leader. I mean, to me, people don't even know where leadership is, right? Leadership is a battery of competencies, a battery of dozens of different competencies. But people confuse leadership for, you know, as being a subject matter expert, because you're the kind of you know, in the company, well, then we need to promote you, you know, you're the greatest marketer, well then we need to promote you, that is necessarily mean, you're going to be a great leader of other people. That confusion of leadership and excellence, is, you know, I think what's gotten us down a wrong path, you know, and from a corporate perspective, at the very least.
Tim 27:30 When you think about it that way, and touching on a few of the points that you've brought up. Leadership is a battery of competencies. Yes, nd many different people with many different styles, different personalities, different backgrounds are going to deliver and emulate and express those competencies in very, very different ways. The competency is the outcome, it's not the way we get there. It's the ability to do something, it's not that you have to paint by number to do it a certain way. You have to find your way to do that. And, well, I think it's, you know, you'd said earlier that you can have groups that come together, and they like their job. And often, I mean, I just finished two more rapid normings, though, over the last couple of weeks. And I teach this, this portion called, The Wheel, where we have to talk about the six things that we have to identify as part of the team that we have to be talking about with employees and whatnot, so that they feel stable, who we are, what do we do? What do we care about today? Who's doing what? How do we behave? And why are we the team that's going to do it? And that's drawn from the work of Pat Lencioni. The issue and what Pat didn't touch on, is that everybody needs to connect to those things individually. Who are we as a team? It's a mix of people and histories and all this, why does that matter to me, and it's gonna be very different than why it matters to you. What do we do? And what do we care about? Why do those two things matter to me? And that's going to be very different than it matters to somebody else? What's our code of behaviour on? What's the role division and how we're aligning the work? And why are leaders believe in us? And why are those things important to me? Why do they make me feel whole when I'm in the workplace, and then take the work as a leader and as a leader of people, we have to coach this and mentor people into it. Do I both know and foster in everybody on my team a connection with the work not just the task, not just the paycheck, but what we're doing. And it doesn't have to be a deep connection in the sense of, you know, I'm a sanitary professional that goes around and picks up garbage. We can laugh at something like that. But for people that do that, and they do it long term, they can connect to other things. I like being outside. I like the movement. I like big, heavy machinery. I like getting a glimpse into people's lives. I like to earn a paycheck. I like to do a job that disgusts everybody else. It could be different for everyone else.
Jeff 29:54 It doesn't make sense to you. And that’s part of what Marcus says too, like it doesn't have to sense. Tim 29:58 Yes. What’s the connection? Jeff 29:59 Absolute sense to the individual. You know, and I'm glad you mentioned Patrick Lencioni, too. And we've talked, you know, in this podcast, you know, I mentioned John Maxwell, we mentioned Patrick Lencioni mentioned Marcus Buckingham, you know, there's a theme here that I want the audience, you know, today's audience to listen to and say, understand that there's not this one thought leader that you just read the one author, right? There's so much truth in it, you start reading out and like I said, nerd out, on all of these authors, because there's going to be truths in there that you can apply directly to your career, right? And really, you don't just read it to get through it–
Tim 30:38 Read it for application. Where's the tool?
Jeff 30:43 Right. Exactly. You read it for application. You know, how can I get better? Right? That's the screen. Like, how can I draw conclusions to that? And I think that's really where, you know, I want people to understand that how do you replace the void that comes from not binge-watching television shows, then from not, you know, watching cable news, social media. Yes, get a coach. But start your own self-development, start your own curriculum, you become an expert in leadership by reading a leadership book a month, and I encourage you many different authors. And just work with it. Like, you know, I could never give away my books, because I have all my notes in them, reminding me of a situation,
Tim 31:25 I was talking to somebody the other day about audible, and that I tend to buy the audible book and listen and buy the book. I buy both because I want the expedience of and the kind of listening experience of the audible book. But then I want to be able to go back, make notes, extract text, do all of those things with and have the tactile thing of having that reference material. I have an eclectic mix of books on my shelf. And I have a little spot that's for the ones that haven't earned their place yet. And every one of those books are books that I go back to again, and again and again because they are proper reference material. But an interesting thing I was going to bring up that, again, went back to what you were saying before, businesses often hire these trainers to come in. And that's really about adhering to a process and a certain, you know, paint-by-number approach, certain methodology. If a person is going to make use of that, and that can be good things coming into that too, or they're going to read things or whatever. As you said something earlier, something crystallized for me. As coaches, we're not there necessarily to help them learn to be leaders. In a way we're there to help them unlearn to be leaders. They've got to unlearn all of the useless stuff. And I like using the word fluency, get them fluent about themselves, how they want to be how they are today. So, that you can see the gaps that they have to go searching to fill. In a sense, they have to go, you know, if you're going to fill your toolbox, well know what tools you're short of, or know why you have each tool in the toolbox and make sure that it's you know, there's a place for everything and everything in its place. But that toolbox will be specific to you and your craft, and how you handle the tools, and how you approach the work. So, help them unlearn to be able to learn. Help them get fluent to be able to seek, you know, and that to me is is so critical when it comes to be the difference between you know, these program coaches who are largely trainers, they're going through a paint-by-number piece. I used to teach meeting skills and so I was very good at a very formalized agenda. And I ever used it, especially in my line of work, I now just have a list of outcomes, say, here's where we're going to get. And I've got a general approach in mind. But anticipate I will be calling an audible because I don't know what I'm dealing with until I'm in dealing with a group, until I'm in dealing with people, then I will start where they are, and I will craft for what they need. Not start with my agenda and my method, because otherwise, I'm not there for them. I'm there to deliver a commodity and that's not how I work.
Jeff 34:09 Yeah, no that's absolutely right. And I think, you know, it's understanding that difference between training and coaching. Like training as a delivery, coaching is a journey. As a coach, you want to be able to guide people through that journey. And it's a very, very different thing. And again, you know, what's great, what can be great about training, or we can be great about going to a conference is if it starts that journey, if it's a catalyst, right? It's just saying, hey, you know what, you know, I am going to commit to your meeting X amount of books on leadership, you know, this year, or I'm going to commit to going through a coaching program, you know, to find out like, how I can lead better, you know, because it's not only is it individualistic, it's also you know, based on the company itself, like you know, what's going to work you know, in, you know, your role today, you know, may not work, those leadership skills may not work in the same company in a different role. Right? So, that's why it's always this kind of journey to say, alright, you know, what got me here isn't necessarily what's going to get me there. And is that thing, that's what I tell people, you know, that the concept of building your leadership skills to the fidelity that you built, you know, whatever subject you went to school for, right? You know, you could be, you know, the best accountant in America, right? or Canada. Right? But, you know, what have you done to build your leadership skills to be at that level, that same level, right, you know, people think I need to get continuing education, so I can keep my project management certification, and they're, like, not even paying attention to it, you know, they're sitting there for, you know, the three days and they got, they got it. This is not that this is like really getting serious about it. And it's serious about the craft of leadership, but not taking yourself too seriously.
Tim 35:57 Well, the craft of self-development.
Jeff 36:00 You're right, it's not an I'm better than you scenario. Not in any way. It is, I've decided that I want to be a better teammate, or I want to be a better leader, you know, I want to be just grow to be, you know, a better version of myself. I mean, I know that that's, you know, can be sort of like that trait overused term. But the fact is, I mean, how many people are actually actively trying that and again, I had an event here in New Jersey, a couple of months ago, and I talked to it and one of the slides I threw up was a stock ticker, right? Your leadership development journey is going to look like a stock price, the up-downs, and hopefully, it's trending upward. But like, it's not about perfection, either. Like, you know, people think about, like, if I'm going to be a leader, like, you know, I have to be perfect, it's not about perfect, it's about trying to get better. And that's where people, that's where coaching gets into you, we never possibly ever get that from a leadership development training. And for those people in leadership positions now, that thought, like, oh they were doing right, you know, by providing this training, and then they're frustrated, because, you know, you spent all that money and it didn't work. Think about getting coaching for your team, getting that done, because that's really very, very important.
Tim 37:17 To wrap up here, the distinct differences, when you're realizing that coaching is the modality, not necessarily trained. Training is information-based. It's content, not context, coaching puts it in the context of the individual, and you're from New Jersey, but I often think of Beantown when I think about, I know, it's not super close, but anyway, it's closer than I am.
Jeff 37:41 Close enough. Same general type of person in North East.
Tim 37:43 But there's that scene in, in Goodwill Hunting, when he said, you know, you're gonna be sitting back, and you're gonna be looking at all your student loans, and you're gonna have a $400,000 education or something, and you're gonna realize that you could have learned all this with a buck 75 and late charges from the library. And, you know, information is not the problem here. And I've actually run into groups that come to me and say, Hey, we want to want you to put together a Leadership University for us. And I'm like, go on LinkedIn. Like you don't need me to generate content, the content is out there. What you need is you need people to learn how to steer their lives, to be able to source the right content, apply it well, and do it all so that both they win and their family wins and their career benefits and that they're in balance. And that we're not out of whack here, anybody can pick up a new idea and try to apply it as a bright, shiny thing, and sometimes destroy themselves doing it. Right? So–
Jeff 38:50 Absolutely, you know, and that's the thing too, like, people don't want to go to school anymore. Like they went to school already. And you know, something, you know, whether you finish in high school, college, graduate school or beyond, right? And then in corporations were given them more school, that's what training is, this is school again. You know, again, not only does it not work, people really don't want that. But like when you get them a coach, right? And again, you got to do your due diligence on coaches, right? If you're a business owner, or an executive thinking about getting a coach for your team, you know, and that coach has never had a coach before runaway because that tells you that they don't believe, you know, in the process of coaching, because if they did, you know, and they're asking you to spend money, because if they did, you know, they would have had coaches themselves. I know you have had several coaches, I have had coaches and continually like, you know, working with two guys right now, you know, and again, it's again to continue to improve like the, you know, the person that's got coached by me and 2023, you know, is a different coaching experience for those that are working with me right now in 2024. You know, and will be in 2025. The point is continually getting better at the craft of coaching, right, you know, so people need to understand that as well. I don't know in terms of that, again, that training piece, if people remember nothing else, and again, to all the folks that are listening to provide training, God bless you, the training does not work. I’ve been on the training end, both end up training, delivering training and receiving training, it just doesn't work. And coaching does–
Tim 40:23 Just, you know, ask anybody who spent money on a training scenario to go out and anonymously poll their group. And you'll find that some people, man, it was great, it's the best thing they've ever went through. And often the leader will have gone through the training, and think that this is just the bee's knees. Well, the reason was, the leader was ready for that piece of information at that time, and it was very useful for them. But that doesn't guarantee that 90% of anybody else in that call is ready or can use that information. The information doesn't steer it, you’ve got to start where people are. And as you say, it's the journey, and the ability to go through that journey.
Jeff 40:58 And too, the content is there like and that's one thing we talked about, I just want to kind of give the opinions here the content, there's been content, oh, just since 1990, right? Like how much leadership development content is there. But yet the workplace still sucks. People will hear Simon Sinek, “Leaders Eat Last,” and say this is the greatest thing in the world, and not behave in any way of how he's describing but they listened to his
Tim 41:22 Got the certification, check. Jeff 41:25 Right, they showed it to their team and say now that they quote him at a town hall. Tim 41:29 Bought everybody a copy. Jeff 41:30 That in reality, they're not acting like him. So, again, the content is always there, you can go out there and learn yourself, you know, you get an education yourself that self-learning, whether it is you know, the TED Talk videos on YouTube, go on YouTube, search, leadership development, get the books, but again, the only way that it's really going to kind of move the needle for you and your team is through coaching.
Tim 41:53 Yeah, if you've hold the row for that particular seed to take plant. Take route, here we go. So, we're going to wrap up, I want to thank you very much for opening up to us. I love where we're headed. I think we're gonna have to book another one because I think we've got lots more to talk about, I think we could dive deep on some of these issues. For sure. We've got a couple of traditions here, as we close up and people who have heard these before, the first thing I want you to tackle. So, we have a question from Rita, who joined us last episode. And this is gonna get bombed at you. But don't worry, you're gonna have a chance to bomb a question at the next person. Rita asks, what is the advice you would give your newly minted self if you were just entering the workforce? And you wish you had had that advice when you started?
Jeff 42:43 Absolutely, you know, I think about this a lot. And from my perspective, it is really get around the right people. Now, explain what we explained at the beginning of the podcast is getting around people of who've achieved where you want to go. And if you're starting to hear people in your workplace that are negative, you know, just politely kind of distance yourself from them, you're not better than them, you just don't need to hear negative things. That's exactly what I would tell my younger self is that, again, leadership development is not about being better than your coworker. It’s not about being better than your neighbour, it's about being the best version of yourself and adding value to other people. So, that's exactly what I would say, just get around the right people, get away from negative people Tim 43:27 Choose that focus. Jeff 43:29 Put yourself on that focus.
Tim 43:33 Yeah, right. Love it. If you were to have a wish, for anybody who is listening that they're going to take away from this podcast, what would you wish for people be?
Jeff 43:44 Honestly, I wish people, you know, to disengage from all the negativity that is out there in social media in 24/7 news, it is not serving you guys in any way, shape, or form. Those things are there to honestly make money for the advertisers that advertise on there. So, you know, if you can just remove yourself, you know, live like it's 1980. Right, you know, and again, not hiding your head in the sand. I'm not suggesting that, but you just don't need to take in this kind of content. And it will it will change your world. No question about it.
Tim 44:17 Without going down this path. But we can talk about it a little later. We just had an announcement here in Alberta that the public school system now is going to ban social media apps and personal devices during the school day.
Jeff 44:29 That's awesome. There's a couple of governors here that are doing the same and we're going to try to see what we can do in New Jersey for that because it's–
Tim 44:36 We've got the data now yeah, we know what's we'd like to think of ourselves as adults but we are learning beings and we are just as prone to that. Okay. If I was to ask you a question you want answered from the next leadership, visionary, what would it be?
Jeff 44:56 Sure, absolutely. So, I would say, you know, what, do you want to be known for as your leadership legacy?
Tim 45:03 I love that question. I think I would actually add on to that and say, what do you want to be known to as your leadership legacy? And how can we help other people find out what they want to be known in their leadership? You know, how can we actually create that for others? But I am very curious to ask that question. In both phases. If you don't mind, I'm going to tack that one on because like, it's a great one.
Jeff 45:24 No, attack that on, absolutely. Tim 45:27 Jeff, it's been a real pleasure to have you on the show today. And I hope you had a lot of fun.
Jeff 45:33 Tim, it's been great. And I can't wait to come back because I feel it percolating, like another 30-40 minutes of, you know, a completely different interview. And I'm looking forward to when we can do that.
Tim 45:44 Oh, no. 100%. Well, let's look more for Jeff in the feed. And to all of you out there listening. Thank you very much for taking the time to invest in yourself. And Jeff, we'll see you again real soon. Jeff 45:53 All right. Take care, Tim. Tim 45:53 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership, please give us a positive rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word too, by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening, and be sure to tune in in two weeks time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 27 Dec 2024 | Retrospective Special - Part 3 - Capacity | 00:14:54 | |
In this final retrospective episode of the year, Tim Sweet delves into the concept of capacity, exploring how it extends beyond time and energy to include personal priorities, relationships, and intentional choices. Drawing on insights from guests, including Renee Miller and Anna Morgan, Tim underscores the importance of leaders prioritizing themselves to avoid burnout and make space for personal and professional growth. Additional clips from past guests, including Richard Young, highlight the power of evidence over hope in decision-making, while Dan Löfquist and Julie Friedman Smith discuss the rewards of stepping out of comfort zones to embrace challenges and foster adaptability. Jeff Massone emphasizes the transformative role of positive relationships, and Tim Beissinger shares how focusing on key goals can lead to significant achievements. These conversations provide a holistic view of capacity as a critical leadership tool. Tim concludes the episode with a call to action, encouraging listeners to evaluate their current state, identify areas of over-commitment, and align their choices with their goals and values. By creating space for what matters and surrounding themselves with supportive relationships, leaders can build capacity for success. Tune in to discover actionable strategies for intentional living and leadership. -- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: -- Tim 00:00 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you, my friend, are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. I'm Tim sweet. Welcome to Episode 47 of the Sweet on Leadership Podcast.
Tim 00:31 Today we're diving into the critical topic of capacity. Capacity is about more than just having enough time or energy. It's about making room for growth, prioritizing what matters and understanding how we lead ourselves and others sustainably. We'll be drawing on insights from nine incredible guests to explore this theme. These are leaders, thinkers, experts, who have all shared authentic, surprising and fearless perspectives on how we can unlock our own potential while creating environments where others can do the same. They've been my guests over the last year with Sweet on Leadership podcast. So I'm eager to dive in. Capacity begins with prioritizing yourself. As leaders, we often focus so much on serving others that we forget to check in with our own needs and aspirations. But here's one truth, you cannot pour from an empty cup and a well that gives no water is just a hole. When I spoke to Renee Miller in Episode 42 her perspective on this was both authentic and actionable. Renee one of two intrepid thru hikers that join me, challenges us to see how easy it is to get caught up in daily demands while sidelining our professional and personal dreams.
Renee Miller 01:42 You get so caught up into your daily lives, and the tasks that you, you know, you go to work and have to get all these tasks done and come home and have responsibilities at home, but yeah, you kind of forget about yourself. And you know, what about that professional engineering license that would be really good for my career? Oh, I don't have time for that, because I'm busy working and, yeah, just talking with people and reminding them to prioritize themselves and their resumes, and it'll probably be good for their company as well.
Tim 02:20 Prioritizing yourself is not selfish. It's essential for sustainable leadership. Anna Morgan, a career coach and speaker, added another layer to this. In episode 31. Anna spoke powerfully about the importance of balancing your professional identity with the things that bring you joy outside of work.
Anna Morgan 02:37 Care about yourself enough, and this is the other thing I see, especially at the manager to executive level, is people get so wrapped up in their identity as a small company CEO or as an executive, and it takes me so much time to unwire and alchemize a lot of that identity that if I don't have that I am less than or I'm not enough, and it's balancing out and making sure that you have hobbies and side hustles and things that bring you joy outside of that 40-45, plus hour work week, so that you are just not in that rabbit hole of you know work which, and then you look at your life, because nobody on their deathbed is going to be like, I wish I worked more right? They're going to say, I wish I spent more time with my kids. I wish I went on more trips.
Tim 03:41 Servant leadership is an important concept, but we can't let work, we can't let our roles as leaders define us entirely. Our capacity expands when we make room for joy and relationships and fulfillment and development beyond our current office, beyond our current team. But it's not all feelings, capacity also depends on evidence, concrete facts that help us move from I hope this works to I know this works. If you're seeking to manage your capacity, the word hope should be a red flag. If you're using it, you're no longer in the driver's seat. You're playing the lottery without evidence. We risk making decisions that are based on emotions instead of facts. Richard Young, my friend, a performance researcher and the author of Simplify and his new book Amplify, shared a powerful story in Episode 27 about how evidence can close performance gaps.
Richard Young 04:34 They said, "hoping" is a flag for evidence that's missing, and "knowing" means the evidence the gap has been filled. So it's a good word, generally, universally, for human nature to have hope. But in the performance game, it's another trigger, and there needs to be a leader who spots that and says, Well, it's, you know, I hope it all comes off. So before Olympics, I hope I get Lane eight. So there was one rower who was world champion, and they started to fade, and they became kind of disillusioned with their fitness. And the psych team, an army of good intent, you know, wrap themselves around her. But it turns out it was, and I had this one in the book as well. It turned out it was the evidence that they had numbers for, but she wasn't aware of them, and so he just presented those numbers to her every day on how she was tracking. And suddenly she had evidence that it's not as bad as I thought. Feelings aren't facts. Facts are facts. And so suddenly her progress since she became world champion that year, and he knew it wasn't mindset, because you can't hope your way to victory. You do have to have prep. You know that goes into flow, which we can talk about later.
Tim 05:55 Context brings calm. It's a saying that I love, and it's truly t-shirt worthy. Evidence fuels confidence and clarity, and when you focus on what you know, you can build capacity with intention and precision. But how do we know what to focus on? Sarah Elder, founder of Piped, a platform helping engineering interns document their most meaningful experiences, shared in Episode 18, that the first step in building capacity is understanding your current state, often in the simplest of ways.
Sarah Elder 06:29 Once it's written down, you can't ignore it anymore. Tim, you talked earlier about building capacity. You can't build capacity. You can't you can't have capacity without understanding the state. So getting everything into one place and being able to understand that is the first step in building capacity. You can't cut what you don't know, or you might cut and it might not be enough.
Tim 06:52 Whether it's your time, energy or goals, getting a clear picture of where you stand is key to moving forward. As we continue this clinic on capacity, we must realize that it also requires us to leave the familiar behind. Growth that gives us the ability to handle more is found outside our current comfort zones. Dan Lofquist, a technology consultant and one who shares the Red House of Debbie Potts, emphasized how stepping out of a comfort zone drives growth and adaptability.
Dan Löfquist 07:23 That's how I try to be myself. I mean, I can't stick to old things that doesn't work and it doesn't make me happy, and I can't do my job properly. So I need to adjust and then learn new things, new processes, new techniques or whatnot. In order to move forward, I think you have to have that mindset, and also it's good for you, because if you are in your comfort zone, nothing fun or exciting is going to happen every day. It's going to look the same. In order to have some kind of excitement in your life or in your workplace or anyway, you need to step out of that comfort zone, because the amazing things happens outside, but it's a scary place, but it's very rewarding if you're there.
Tim 08:15 Growth is always on the other side of fear. Taking bold steps to develop outside of your comfort zone, leads us to rewards that you never thought possible. This is one area that pays dividends again and again and again, but easier said than done. Right capacity isn't just about adding more to your plate. It's about making choices trade offs. It's about carving out space for what truly matters and who truly matters and being true to yourself in the process. Julie Friedman Smith, again, great friend, teammate, author, podcaster and a parenting (my parenting expert) spoke about this in Episode 34. Julie captures the uncertainty that many of us feel when we're navigating our roles and responsibilities outside of work, often asking ourselves, Am I doing the right thing?
Julie Friedman Smith 09:05 I'm doing all these adult things. I still do not feel like an adult. I'm not even sure that what I'm doing is something I like, but I'm not sure how to get out of it, or, am I going to look stupid for getting out of it? Or, you know, and, and that is what another time where we kind of take that left turn of like, oh, it could be different. And if this is what adulting is really about, how do I do it in a way that makes sense for me, instead of playing the role of adults, how am I going to be an adult that's really true to myself? So I think there's a, there's some kind of a pivot point in that mid 30s that comes along as well.
Tim 09:42 I remember, in my experience, it was almost like a you start to focus on something a little bit more, and you have to cast off certain hobbies, and you have to cast off, even in some cases, friends and certain social groups. And it's like I have to pick my lane, in a way, I guess is how it...
Julie Friedman Smith 09:59 Or I want to, also, I want to do this like I want to spend time doing what I really want to be doing, if I can. Or maybe the question is, how do I spend time doing more of what I really want to be doing? I have these obligations. I've got to meet those things. I've got to meet the needs. I've got to earn the money that I need. And, you know, fulfill these obligations, and how do I carve that piece of my life that's really fulfilling?
Tim 10:25 In truth, to be in charge of our own capacity means continuously evaluating our choices. Carving time out for what truly matters means being intentional and courageous about how we allocate our energy. Capacity and capacity management just isn't about what you do. It's about who you surround yourself with. In episode 34, I met Jeff Massone, a leadership consultant I discovered I'd like to spend time with.
Jeff Massone 10:51 From my perspective, it is really get around the right people. Now explain what we explained at the beginning of the podcast, is getting around people of who've achieved where you want to go. And if you're starting to hear people in your workplace that are negative, you know, just politely, kind of distance yourself from them. You're not better than them. You just don't need to hear negative things. Leadership Development is not about being better than your co-worker, not about being better than your neighbor. It's about being the best version of yourself and adding value to other people.
Tim 11:25 Capacity isn't just a solo journey. It isn't a unilateral decision. It's shaped by people we surround ourselves with. When we're intentional about building positive, supportive relationships, we can create environments where growth becomes contagious. Finally, to bookend this episode, let's talk about how capacity means we can make space for those big, audacious goals. Tim Beissinger, a trailblazer and thru hiker, shared how prioritizing what matters allowed him and his partner Renee Miller to chase their dreams of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail and have many more adventures.
Tim Beissinger 11:59 So the way we've done it in the past is we make room for them, and I'll give an example. But if the big goal is big enough that it needs to push something else out of the way, we push it out of the way. The example is our first thru hike of the Pacific Crest Trail. Renee really wanted to do that trail, and I was a new professor, Renee was an engineer, and we felt like, I felt like there wasn't room to tackle that big project, that big goal of doing a PCT, it was something to put off until we retired. And Renee was persistent and said, No, we're only gonna get slower and weaker and like now's the right time to do a hike like this.
Tim 12:45 Tim and Renee's story is a reminder that you can't do this alone, that making space for what matters isn't just about time. It's about aligning your actions with your priorities and the people you care about. From Renee's reminder to prioritize yourself, to Richard's focus on evidence, to Anna's wisdom about identity, to Julie's quest for fulfillment and Jeff's emphasis on relationships, we've seen how capacity is a balance of internal clarity and external alignment. So here's my challenge for you, understand your current state. Where are you? Where are you over-committed? And where can you make space, create time for what matters, what obligations can you re evaluate to prioritize your goals and choose your relationships wisely. Look around who inspires you to grow and supports your capacity for success? It isn't just about doing more. It's about doing better. It's about living and leading and aligning with your values so that you can create the life that energizes you and sustains you.
Tim 13:47 Thank you for joining me on this retrospective. I hope you'll join us for the next new episode, and I hope you'll check out our other two retrospectives on Vision and Arriving. I'll see you. Hopefully with better capacity and more gas in that tank to lead. Take care.
Tim 14:07 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership. Please give us a positive rating and review on Apple podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders, and you can spread the word too by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening, and be sure to tune in in two weeks time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host. Tim, Sweet encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 28 Jun 2022 | What's Lurking in Your Life-Fridge? Pt1. What's that smell? | 00:18:03 | |
To kick off the SWEET ON LEADERSHIP Podcast, I am joined by Julie Freedman-Smith to talk about the stress and languish you may be feeling at home and at work. In this four-part series, we explore what has sat too long in the back of life's fridge; what might be festering and what can you do about it. Join us for this conversation and begin with a cleanse to help you feel free and focused. __ Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Julie Freedman-Smith | Author, Blogger, Podcast Host and Parenting Expert: | |||
| 28 Jun 2022 | What's Lurking in Your Life-Fridge? Pt2. Is that bubbling? | 00:15:59 | |
To kick off the SWEET ON LEADERSHIP Podcast, I am joined by Julie Freedman-Smith to talk about the stress and languish you may be feeling at home and at work. In episode two of the 4-part series, we continue to explore what has sat too long in the back of life's fridge; what might be festering and what can you do about it. Join us for this conversation and begin with a cleanse to help you feel free and focused. __ Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Julie Freedman-Smith | Author, Blogger, Podcast Host and Parenting Expert: | |||
| 28 Jun 2022 | What's Lurking in Your Life-Fridge? Pt3. Has it ever been this full? | 00:21:01 | |
What happens when we want to BE too many things. What happens when we have set the bar high in so many areas we just don't know where to start? And after years of pandemic panic - we likely have a backlog of unmet dreams and goals. To kick off the SWEET ON LEADERSHIP Podcast, I am joined by Julie Freedman-Smith to talk about the stress and languish you may be feeling at home and at work. In this third episode, of this 4-part series, we continue to explore what has sat too long in the back of life's fridge; what might be festering and what can you do about it. We talk about OVERWHELM and how to create space so you can create space. Join us for this conversation and begin with a cleanse to help you feel free and focused. __ Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Julie Freedman-Smith | Author, Blogger, Podcast Host and Parenting Expert: | |||
| 28 Jun 2022 | What's Lurking in Your Life-Fridge? Pt4. How long have I been standing with the door open? | 00:22:24 | |
What happens when we face a mountain of floundering goals, projects and dreams. What happens when we have set the bar high in so many areas we just don't know where to start? And after years of pandemic panic - we likely have a backlog of unmet dreams and goals. In this fourth episode in our 4-part series, we talk about dealing with what has sat too long in the back of life's fridge. Let's explore how to get moving and keep moving. Build momentum back into your home and work. __ Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Julie Freedman-Smith | Author, Blogger, Podcast Host and Parenting Expert: | |||
| 31 May 2023 | The Feelings Of Leadership with Paul Farmer | 00:42:14 | |
Tim Sweet welcomes guest Paul Farmer of Mentoris to the show to talk about feelings. Specifically, how feelings apply to business and leadership. Paul works to get leaders to understand exactly how the feeling of a purchase or investment drives consumers and employees far more than logic when you get to the heart of things. He and Tim break down how it works. Paul’s saying is “it’s not the thing that they want, it’s the feeling that it gives them” and the driving force behind his coaching hits on exactly that. He takes the example of a cup of coffee. Do we buy a cup of coffee for the hot water, beans, and milk? No, we buy it because of the feelings attached to it, because we want that emotion, that sense. And business works the same way. Tim Sweet and guest Paul Farmer discuss what Paul identifies as the three levels of feelings where they pertain to business: with the clients, with the team that includes internal employees and external supplies and contractors, and with the roles and responsibilities of each. Paul breaks down how finding the feeling a leader wants in their business clarifies the logic and strategy of moving forward. And he shares why feelings are vital to understanding employees and their job satisfaction within the organization, which is directly linked to productivity and efficiency. Everything in this episode is important for any employee, business owner, or leader to hear. About Paul Farmer Paul Farmer, Business Mentor and Founder of Mentoris Group, completed his Bachelor of Commerce degree at the University of Southern Queensland before he moved to Brisbane to pursue an accounting career. He worked for both Bentleys MRI and Snelleman Tom, being admitted as a Certified Practicing Accountant (CPA) in 2002. Playing Premier Rugby Union for Norths (1996), GPS (1997 – 2002, Club captain 2001), Australian Combined States U21 and Australian Barbarians in 1996 enabled Paul to develop a strong network of professional contacts. In 2002 Paul took a sabbatical to the UK, gaining invaluable exposure to different cultures, work practices, travel opportunities and sporting pursuits. After 20 years working for large organizations both in Australia and the UK, it was time to give something back. Leaving a strategic leadership role, Paul saw coaching as a way of guiding others through the ever increasing uncertainty and pressures life presents, similar to those he encountered. Paul is a registered CPA, Associate Member of the International Coach Guild, Member of the Coaching Institute, working towards being an International Accredited Professional Master Coach and currently holds a Blue card for working with children and youths. — Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Paul Farmer | Business Mentor, Founder of Mentoris Group: — Transcript Paul Farmer: “If we value integrity and someone isn't doing what they say they're going to do, what's the feeling that pops up? Frustration. It's not, We're in flow. We're out of flow so things aren't going as they are, because at the end of the day, if we are in alignment, then it feels good.” Tim Sweet: [00:00:01] I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you, my friend, are a leader. And this show is all about and all for you. Welcome to the Sweet On Leadership podcast. I'm so glad you're here. Welcome to Episode Five. Announcer: [00:00:33] Welcome to the Sweet On Leadership podcast, where we unlock the secrets of the most influential, trusted and impactful leaders in business today so you can become your best version of a leader. And now your host. There's no I in team, but there is in Tim. Tim Sweet. Tim Sweet: [00:00:58] Today you're in for something really special, my friend and former colleague Paul Farmer. Paul is an amazing coach and consultant who calls Brisbane, Australia home. Today you're going to hear Paul's unique take on how he creates profound and lasting change with his clients by focusing them in on the feelings they want to create in their lives. When he clarifies the feelings they need to create, change becomes obvious. Change becomes inevitable. So get ready to take some notes and experience the one and only Paul Farmer. So, hey, welcome, Paul Farmer. It is fantastic to have you here. I'm super excited about the fact that we get a chance to talk. You and I worked together years ago and this has just been top of my list for a number of months now, and I'm finally getting to do it. So thanks for joining me. Paul Farmer: [00:01:53] I'm stoked. I'm absolutely stoked. It's been a while from the days in Cowtown, stoked to be able to share some of the things that I've experienced since we've last caught up. So yeah, I'm ready to go. Tim Sweet: [00:02:06] Awesome. So, Paul, today we're going to talk about feelings and how they pertain to business and business performance. And this came about because you shared with me a statement that you bring to clients often. And why don't we start there and why don't you tell us about that, that central premise that you've got. Paul Farmer: [00:02:23] It's interesting. Thanks, Tim. Yeah, it's one of those elements that a lot of people are challenged by, feeling. Logic we can deal with because it's a fact. It's numbers, it's cash flow, things like that. But the feeling in the business space is something that people can be challenged by. I have a saying, which is 'it's not the thing that they want, it's the feeling that it gives them'. Tim Sweet: [00:02:46] So it's not the thing that they want, but the feeling it gives them. Paul Farmer: [00:02:49] Let's take, for example, a cup of coffee. Do you buy a cup of coffee because it's hot water, beans and some milk, maybe some sugar in a cup? No. You buy it because of the fact that it makes you feel good. Now, depending on the quality of the coffee determines the level of satisfaction that you get from that coffee. But regardless, it's not the coffee. It's the feeling that you get from drinking the coffee. So I was sitting one day drinking a cup of coffee and it was like, is it the coffee that I want, or is it the feeling that I get when I when I drink the coffee? And it's like, actually, no, it's the feeling. And then decided to think about, well, how does that apply to business? And for me, I started to think about things in a way that, thinking about clients, and I thought, Well, does a client actually want a house built? No, really, what they want to do is they want to be able to sit out the back, invite their mates around and show them how good their house is. The built in barbecue. It's not the built in barbecue. It's the fact that they can sit there and show off to their mates that they've got a 15 burner multi smoker and they can do all this stuff and it's in their house. It's not the smoker, it's not the house, it's not the stuff. It's the feeling that it gives them when they have that stuff. Tim Sweet: [00:04:14] It's a great place to go. And I have a couple of metaphors around homes as well. And it reminds me of one that when you're selling a home, we often talk about, the real estate agent will be sneaky, they'll go in, they'll bake some bread. So it gives this feeling, homey kind of feeling. But I remember hearing when they're staging a home, they'll often take the pictures of the family out of the frames or replace them and take those personalizations away. They don't want to have any barriers between that walk through and the person imagining themselves owning the home, imagining them and their own pictures being on the wall. And then I would extrapolate to what you're saying. Imagine that feeling they're going to get when they invite their friends over for the barbecue when they're sitting in it. Paul Farmer: [00:05:01] That space there. First things I do with any of my clients is ask them - if it's an existing client - every time I catch up, it's like, what's the feeling in your business at the moment? I get them to experience it because then we get an understanding of if it's a good experience and they're in flow and things are working, then they re-experience what it is that they're feeling in their business. If things aren't working, they also re-engineer that feeling and then they go, and I say, So how does it feel? And they'll go, Oh, it's not working. My team aren't working, all of this. So they reconnect with the feeling they have in their business and then they have a choice. They can either keep feeling that or we can do some stuff to change it and to shift it. Tim Sweet: [00:05:49] Yeah. And that connection to feeling, I like how you say that, have them tune in to what are you feeling right now? And if they can get crystal clear on the fact that this is not where I want to be, then now it's something that we need to move away from. Now that there's some motivation to say, well, we need to move away from this. So then what? Where are we going? Paul Farmer: [00:06:08] Bingo. And so in that space there, it's a matter of going, okay, we've got two choices. You can either keep experience the feeling that you have at the moment. But if you're not willing to do anything about it, then you've got to just stop whingeing, bitching and moaning about not having a feeling that you want because you're not prepared to do anything about it. If I'm in a space where I don't have the feeling that I want, then it's two choices. Either I stay in the same space or I create some change. And that's a choice. So we can we can do that. Tim Sweet: [00:06:41] Yeah. That choice to stay there and remain unhappy becomes fairly undesirable. I mean, I like the phrase when they say we want to put them between the immovable object and the irresistible force. If that immovable object is, Okay where I am today, that doesn't feel good. Where am I going to go tomorrow? So let's talk about how we take them to the target, then. What's the future look like? How do we talk about that in terms of future? Paul Farmer: [00:07:09] That's where we have to go first. For me, what I do is I get people to stand at a point in time. In a space where they have what it is that they actually want. So for example, let's take the house situation. Yeah. Just say, okay, well, you're looking at building a house. Okay, well, stand - and if I'm physically in the room with them, I stand one side - and then I take a step to the right and then go, So tell me about what that feels like. Close your eyes and explain and describe the space that you're in, where you have what it is that you want. And from a House perspective, for example, there might be a bare block of land. And I just say, okay, close your eyes. Yep. Right. Picture. Tell me, tell me what you see with your eyes closed, Tell me what you see. Tell me what you feel. What does it look like? What are the, what do you hear? Yeah. So I get them to stand in the space where they have what they want and get them to describe it. What does it look like in a business, for example. Who are your clients? Who are you working with? Who are you not working with? Yeah. Tell me about your team. Tell me about you as a leader. Who are you being? What is it that you are adding to the business and get them to experience this thing because if we can get them to experience the sensation of having what it is that they want, then they can go, That's the feeling that I want. So we're getting them to attach the feeling to what they want, and then we go, okay, well let's step back to where we are now. Do we have that feeling? No. Well, what are the things that we can do to take them from where they are to where they want to be, where they can have that feeling. Tim Sweet: [00:09:02] And close those gaps? I'm on your wavelength. But when we're taking them to that future place, they can describe it logically, they can describe it tactically, they can describe it in terms of metrics. They can describe it in terms of cash flow, whatever that is. But then we have to drive them to, And how does that feel? What is the result of that? It is something that people can miss. They can miss the fact that if they set the wrong targets and even if they achieve them and it's what they think they should want or should get, but then it doesn't yield that sense of satisfaction or accomplishment or comfort or whatever, or family or community or whatever the feeling is that they're going after, and they've missed the mark, then they're not going to be happy anyway. Paul Farmer: [00:09:50] At the end of the day, emotion is the gatekeeper to quality results. Unless we engage the emotional space and the emotion around what it is that we're looking to achieve, it is purely going to be logic and it's not tying into the actual driver of why people want certain results, because the results that they want, the goals, the intentions, they're merely the vehicle for them to experience the feelings they actually want. Tim Sweet: [00:10:21] It's interesting when you think about our existence as a human being and that really when I touch my hand, I'm not feeling that, I've got sensory information that's going up through a nervous system, electrical impulses, going to my brain that then interprets it as touch. Anything that's happening to me now, I'm looking at you, I'm looking around the room. Yes, we say we're seeing things, but really it's my brain interpreting the signals that I'm given. And so everything is a simulation, be it past, present or future. And we're experiencing everything and we're kind of taking it in. Yes, we understand it, but we're - I'm getting a little deep here - but we're feeling everything. And if we don't connect to that, if we don't connect to that, what does it actually leave me with in a cognitive level or an emotional level? Then we're missing a whole language, a whole experience that we can't access. And let me ask you, Paul, in your experience, what happens to you when you've seen people fail to make this this connection? Paul Farmer: [00:11:26] I see someone that gets even more frustrated. Because they don't get the ultimate outcomes that they're actually looking for. Yeah. So what they do is they end up getting a bunch of logic and a bunch of results, but they're meaningless because they can make an extra $100,000, does it make them happy? No, because what it does is it doesn't actually, they haven't really achieved what it is that they really wanted. They've got more stuff, but more stuff doesn't necessarily make them feel better. It doesn't make them happy. I know a bunch of real estate agents who, they hit their targets and they hit their bonuses and they and they get all this extra cash and they're as miserable as buggery because of the fact it's not actually the extra cash that they want. It's the ability to be able to have a life on their terms. Comfortably. But they're spending all of their time in the business earning the commission so they can then have a life outside of the business. But they're chewing up all the time outside the business in earning the commission. So you'll have people, they will feel like they want more stuff, whether it's cash, whether it's promotion, whatever it is. But they lose sight of why we really have this stuff really, is to allow us to be able to create an element of happiness in the things that we have or how we choose to operate. Tim Sweet: [00:12:58] If I picture a client that you're helping or a team that I'm working with and they have all these options, they have preexisting processes and policies and they have ways that they've done things. And if they're individuals, they have all their stuff around them, they have their career and the beliefs and the identities and everything that they're holding on to. And, following your logic, if I can focus them in on the feelings that they're getting, and what of that experience, what of that life, what of that business drives them towards those feelings? And which ones are either taking them away or are, you know, negligible in terms of whether or not they're going to get them there. Suddenly I can look at my world in a completely different way. Suddenly I can look at a business strategy in a completely different way. Paul Farmer: [00:13:44] Totally, totally. I ran a half day strategy session earlier this week and we talked about the clients and the work that we'd like to do with this business over the next 12 months. There were 2 or 3 pieces of work that came into the conversation. It wasn't understood that people had that experience in a prior life. So in a prior work life, there were a couple of people who had certain skill sets that the business hadn't been leveraging because they didn't know about them. So creating an opportunity for us to understand what it is that people actually want to do in their space, what they have access to, allows us to be able to then create opportunities to maybe tap into some of their prior experience to allow them to do things that are going to make them do work, and allow them to do work which is stuff that gives them a buzz. Tim Sweet: [00:14:43] It helps them be fulfilled and feel that the work is really meaningful. Paul Farmer: [00:14:46] So because you look at, you take a business, for example, that to me there's three areas that we can focus on to allow us to influence the feeling that comes into a business. Yeah, you've got the clients that we work with. Let's take that. If we work with A-class clients as opposed to D-class clients, how do you think our team are going to operate when they deal with good people or they deal with good work or they do stuff that they're interested in? That's going to shift the feeling in the business. Tim Sweet: [00:15:17] Well, they're going to feel like they fit. They're going to feel like that client appreciates them. They're going to feel like they have a reason to win for that client. Paul Farmer: [00:15:26] And the clients are working with us, not against us. Yeah. So we're we're in a space and we're working with - and I'll call them A-class clients - but if we're working with A-class clients consistently, they are looking to grow, enhance, but we're there to solve pain points that they can't solve themselves. Tim Sweet: [00:15:42] And that's A-class as defined by that particular business and team. What's the top kind of avatar or profile of a client that we want to work for? Paul Farmer: [00:15:53] Hundred percent. So you take the example I was talking about in terms of there are a couple of areas that weren't identified by business that people had skill sets in. So you look at it, you can say, well, actually now that we know that people are, they have an experience in something, we can go, Well, maybe there are clients within our existing client base that need that, but we didn't know that we could offer it. So now what we can do is, now that we have an understanding of some of the things that our people want to do, we can then go to our existing client base and go, Well, who do we know? Let's say, for example, it's web design. We can sit there, if we haven't been offering it, we can go to all of our clients and go, Well, who needs who needs web design work? And all of a sudden you've got the skill set that's not being utilized by someone who loves that stuff, to be able to go, well, all of a sudden we've got 15 websites to be designed. And if someone, if that is their buzz, that's their jam, they get to do stuff that they really enjoy. Tim Sweet: [00:16:58] Yeah. So in terms of clients, by identifying the feeling that we get from those clients and focusing on our A-class clients, the ones that fit us the best, we can not only do a better job, be more prepared, bring the right clients into the business, but we can move laterally across our client set and begin to look for opportunities that may not be current products, but stuff that we can offer that elicit the same feelings for us and the same feelings for them. Okay, so clients is number one, this is great. Paul Farmer: [00:17:28] Clients number one, team number two, if we want to influence the feeling within a business, then the team that we have, when I say team, team can be internal. So we've got full time employees or part time or people that are on the payroll. You've got contractors and you've also, for me, I throw in there, if we're dealing with suppliers as well, I want to throw them in there as well. Because as a group, if we're able to shape up the quality of those people that we are dealing with, then again, when we're all on the same page, we're all working together and everything is in flow. And I say in flow because things are working, team members are there getting that feeling that they want, the culture is being built, we're working with suppliers and they're working with us, not against us - subcontractors or contractors - they're working with us, not against us. You think about that space and you go, Well, what would that feel like? Oh, that'd be awesome. We're all working together. Yep. So then you're sitting there going, Well, what feeling does that create in our space? Well, if you look at our internal full time people, they're in a space where they're in a place where they can grow. They understand what opportunities exist. They're dealing with A-class clients, so they're getting access to good people. They're surrounded by good people, they're being listened to. And the culture is one of inclusion and empowerment where we are promoting them in a way where they go, Well, you know what, they listen to me and they ask me what it is that I'd like to do and I can tell them. And then that also then goes, okay, we can shape some of the stuff that you do. Because if we can increase your ability to enjoy your space, then by looking at the work that we're doing or how we shape the workplace, then that's going to be a big winner, both for those that are already part of that team space, but also attracting people. I use the barbecue example. If you've got someone at a barbecue who's sitting there talking to their friends and someone says, Oh, so for example, so you know, Tim, you're working for a business and say, Oh, so what are you, what do you do? If someone sits there and goes, Oh, well, I do a bit of this and a bit of that, or if they sit there and go, You know what? I do this and I love where I am because we get access, we work with good clients, we act with good people, we say no to the rubbish and we say no to the BS that comes up with all the politics and whatever, and we just get on with it and we get to interact with each other and people care about us as people. Which side of the conversation is going to be more attractive to someone who might go, Well, actually I'm having a pretty shit time at the moment. My boss is terrible. I don't like him, and he's hammering me and it's, and I get none of that. It's like, well, you know, come and check it out. Tim Sweet: [00:20:32] Yeah, absolutely. The picture that you're giving me is that we have to have this feelings conversation and be aware of it. And I would say from the leader's perspective, it's probably really important that you're aware of what is, you have the conversation, what does create this, these feelings for the individuals and the people on the team? And then have it across your supply chain. So now we've involved the clients, we've involved our partners, our suppliers, internal contractors or employees, and ourselves. Right? And so are we aware of what the feelings we're going after and is that important to everyone? Paul Farmer: [00:21:12] Managing the expectations. Tim Sweet: [00:21:14] And if we're speaking that language, then when things go a little off the rails or they start to slip, we've got a whole different vocabulary that we can bring to bear to say, Does everybody else feel this happening? Paul Farmer: [00:21:29] But even before that, what we get to do is we get to manage the expectation around dealing with people both internal and external within our business. Because what we can do is when we take on a new client or when we take on a new supplier, or if we are working with suppliers and and clients and whatever, then if we set the expectation that, for example, you know what, we have 5, 4 or 5 core values, these are our non-negotiables. What you can expect from us is we will operate according to them. If we aren't, you can call us on it, but we also expect you to abide by the same. But what happens and why we do that, is because we like to work with quality people who are aligned. Because then we then find that the feeling that we have in the business, but in the relationship we have, is one that just feels good and we get on and we work together and we get great results and everyone's moving in the same direction. And how does that feel? It feels great. Well, guess what? The expectation we set is that if you want that, that's fine. But these are the non-negotiables that are going to allow us to be able to operate in a way where we create that feeling. If there are any red flags in there, it's like we have a, you know, respect. Yeah? Respect means that you pay your invoices on time. Respect is that you will respect us when you come into our business, but we will do exactly the same for you. Tim Sweet: [00:23:06] Well, and maybe taking it one step further, to have not just the tactical conversation of what's the, how quickly do we need to pay our invoices and what are the policies around that, but I remember working for a large company, we were on a complex project where my job was to bring together a bunch of contractors and engineering firms in this mega construction project. And my pay cycles, for instance, are very different than a large multinational, and so, you know, for them to appreciate that, for me, there's a feeling that being paid on time is very, very direct. Whereas for a different type of company, the feeling might not be there. So by being able to share that and say, Hey, this is what this policy means to me, this is what on time payment means for me, or vice versa. Behaviors are important. Values are important to discuss, but compared to feelings, they're rather abstract, right? They're just a something to do. It's an ingredient, not the cupcake. Paul Farmer: [00:24:10] So, I mean, we talked about clients, we talked about team, but in terms of values for me have become super important, super important, because they're in a space where they create an element of non-negotiable for us. Yeah, they're the things that matter to us. But ultimately it's not the values that we really want to be in alignment with. What we want is, is the feeling that comes out of those values. So for example, if we've got a value of integrity, we do what we say we're going to do, now if we have purely have that value written on a wall somewhere without context, it means something to you. It's just a word. So the context is about applying what is the emotion attached to either being in alignment or being out of alignment? And that feeling, that's the thing that is the ultimate outcome of why we have values in place is because if we value integrity and someone isn't doing what they say they're going to do, what's the feeling that pops up? Frustration. It's not we're in flow, we're out of flow. So things aren't going as they are, because at the end of the day, if we are in alignment, then it feels good. Tim Sweet: [00:25:33] So we talked about client, we talked about our staff and our team. Is there another point? Paul Farmer: [00:25:40] The roles and responsibilities, That's the third point. So we take our team, for example, or we take our owners or senior leadership team, or if we look at the roles and responsibilities that we have within a business, then what we choose to do or not do allows us to be able to again impact the feeling that we are creating in the business. Because if I've got a role that requires me to do a bunch of stuff that I don't enjoy, how's that going to go? Tim Sweet: [00:26:11] Oh, you know, it's funny, when I, earlier in the year, we started to really focus in on a program we call Work Self. And the very, there's two main things that we deal with in that program. And the first one is, you know, how do you work? How do you want to be working in the course of the day? Are you a highly strategic person that wants to be spending a lot of time in that space, or do you want to be down in the weeds being tactical and getting things crossed off your list? Or do you want to be the planner and the person directing it? And then what's your capacity to switch between those roles and how often do you want to do that? And so often we have people that come up through the business that have been successful and have gotten a lot of fulfillment and positive feelings out of a certain type of work. And then guess what we do? We say, Well, you're doing the best of your team, so we're going to promote you to manager. And suddenly, suddenly the feelings are gone. Paul Farmer: [00:27:05] What we tend to do is we tend to promote the technical stars and put them into spaces where they have to manage people. How does that work? It doesn't. Tim Sweet: [00:27:14] No. And yet if we stop to consider, how does this person like to work? And on the other part that we focus on is what genius are they accessing? How does this person provide value to a team and how does that team, you know, consume that value? And if we get those two things right, then the person feels like they fit. They feel like, and if it isn't right, the person feels like their jeans are too tight and they can't help but want to get them off and quick. Paul Farmer: [00:27:44] Bingo. But what we need to do, we need to understand what it is that they want in their space. That whole element of seek first to understand before being understood. If I have a vision where I think someone, where I would like them to go in the company, then that's great. But what if they don't want that? Now can I give you an example? I was working with, I was working with a client and and he said, Oh, look, I've got this guy in my business and he's, he's a really hard worker and works well and I want to promote him into a leadership role. It's like, Oh yeah, cool. He said, But I've got this other person who I'd also like to bring into the business, but I would have to put them over the existing person if they were to come into the business because their experience is over and above the existing person. So he was torn between I'd like to promote the person because they're working hard and I'd like to promote them, but at the same time I don't feel like they want to be a leader. So I'm kind of torn because if I bring someone else in from the outside above them, they'll probably go, Well, I've got no promotion aspects here, so I'll just leave. And so he was in a quandary. He said, Well, what do I do? And I said, Well, do you know whether that existing person wants to be in a leadership role? And he said, Well, no, I don't. And I said, Well, why? Why would you put your filter on what he wants? Why not ask him what he wants? And then based on what he would like to do, then you will have an understanding maybe of why he may or may not feel like he wants to step into a leadership role. And so two days later he rings me and he and he goes, Hey, I asked him. I said, Yeah, well done, congratulations. Then what happened? And he said, he said, Well, he doesn't want to be a leader. I said, Oh how good is that? And he said, Yeah. And he, he wants to come to work, do his job and then go because he's saving up money. He wants to be a dancer. And I said, so what did it take for you to get an understanding of what it was that he actually wanted, not what you wanted for him? And he said, Ask the question. I said, yes. I said, How do we fully understand what's in someone else's space until we have an understanding of what's in their space? Tim Sweet: [00:30:09] You can get to that understanding. And as you say, most importantly, drive the conversation towards a mutual understanding of what is going to be felt through these possible futures. You're going to have a pretty rich discussion with that with that teammate. Paul Farmer: [00:30:25] 100%. 100%. That came up because I said, you know, how's it going to feel when you have this person and this person, he was happy to turn up, do his job and go. He was in flow because he was doing what he wanted to do because it was driving something else external to the business. He was, as you know, happy as a pig in mud. He was getting what he needed. And emotionally, the feeling that he wanted was not being pressured to be a leader. It was just leave him alone. Get on with his job. That's what he wanted. Because he had aspirations to be things bigger outside of the business. Tim Sweet: [00:31:05] So the three levers again, and I'm going back here, but client, you know, team, and roles and responsibilities all observed within the context of feelings. So the leader begins to get this right, now what's the promise? What's the promise? The leader or the owner or the business, they begin to get this right. Paul Farmer: [00:31:25] So what's the promise? Tim Sweet: [00:31:26] Yeah. Paul Farmer: [00:31:27] So. Depending on the way that the conversations happen with the owners, then choosing to bring that feeling into the business allows the business to grow in a deliberate way whereby the business feels good for all of those that are involved in it. Yeah. Now, ultimately, depending on the mindset of the business owner, maybe, just maybe, the business owner would like to be someone who isn't full time in the business. Maybe they'd like to be considered like a consultant to the business. So if they're in a space where the business is in flow and it doesn't need them to be in the middle of it diving on grenades, then what does that provide for the business owner? Well, it provides them flexibility to be able to choose where they spend their time. Now, that choice may be that they do three days a week. But that three days a week, their roles and responsibilities aren't being up to their elbows in work. It is business development. So that three days of work could be, one of those days could be playing in a corporate golf day. Business development. Tim Sweet: [00:32:46] If we have everybody aiming at and knowing that their work or that their position or the way in which they comport themselves yields the feelings that they're interested in and that the owners are getting that, it means that we're going to see the business as not just successful, but mutually successful. Paul Farmer: [00:33:03] Yeah, people will be empowered to grow the business in the direction that the business owner would like it to go. Tim Sweet: [00:33:11] And not just the, not just the business because you said golf game. So it means it's also going to furnish your life experience that you want. Paul Farmer: [00:33:19] 100% yeah. Let's be honest. Where a business isn't functioning and where a business doesn't feel good, then that impacts how people involve with that. It impacts them outside of the business. Yeah? So if we've got a business that's in flow, then we talk about work life balance. Well, you know, we might have a business that is growing and doing everything it possibly can, but it also sucks our energy, which means that when we walk out of the office, then we're not 100% present. We're grumpy, we're minimizing our ability to invest in us, in the stuff that actually matters, filling our cup and spending time with family and doing things, activities that we enjoy, that then allow us to go 100 miles an hour in the business. So when the business is in flow, that then essentially, that then allows us to take that flow out of the business and that impacts where we spend our time and how we how we turn up. Tim Sweet: [00:34:25] I think, you know, we're, I think in the organizational development and the leadership and the career space now, we're struggling with the concept of work life balance because it's not to say it's completely wrong, but the term is becoming somewhat harder to explain because people mistake it as being a time balance, for instance, or something along those lines. But as soon as we start talking about work life flow or work life blend in the sense that we need to be feeling, what are we feeling in both aspects of these of our lives and is the feeling in balance? We have these two states of flow that feel like they're supporting one another. Is that what's in balance? Not the time per se or the stress level or something. Paul Farmer: [00:35:14] It comes back to choice. If, for example, and I'll give you another example, I was working with a client and they'd finish at five, but on the way home they'd stop off and they'd do a couple of jobs on the way home, which was work. But they do a couple of jobs on the way home. And they'd get home at 630. And I said, So how does that feel? And he said, Well, yeah, I'd do some extra work and we get some extra money. And I said, Yeah, but what about your family? How does it feel for them? And he went, What do you mean? I said, Well, let's be honest. What do they want more than anything for you? And he said, he said, Well, time. And I said, and he won't mind me saying this, but I said, So how does it feel to value that money more than the time with your family? And literally he sat there and he went, Oh, I've never thought about it like that. I said, All your family want is quality time with you, that hour and a half you could have spent straight home and you've got an hour and a half with the family. All they want is time with Dad. Tim Sweet: [00:36:23] Because it makes them feel a certain way. Paul Farmer: [00:36:26] Bingo. Yeah. So it was interesting because I said, Well, what you're doing is you're taking away their ability to fill their cup. Because the thing that fills their cup is your time, but you're choosing to value that time with them, you're choosing to value earning money over spending time with them. And I said, That's a choice. I said, That's a choice. You may not be conscious of it. I said, But you're choosing to do that on the way home. You could choose to go straight home and have an hour and a half with your family before the kids go to have showers and dinner and bed and whatever. I said, But you know, that's your choice and that's okay. But just be aware that it's not just you that it's impacting. And the feeling that they get is there's an hour and a half less time they get to spend with Dad. I said, So your action doesn't just impact how you feel. It also takes away their ability to be able to experience the feeling that they want as well. So it's a double, it's a double whammy from that perspective. And he just went, Oh, and I said, So I just want to, you know, I just want, I just hope that that money that you earn on the way home, I just hope that there is something that invests in their happiness that allows you to somewhat compensate them for the fact that you've taken away an hour and a half of their of your time, which means a lot to them. That's all I'll say. Tim Sweet: [00:38:01] No, I think, you know, it's funny. And in some closing thoughts here, I mean, feelings have been part of the conversations that I've had with clients for years. But you're giving me a new sense of the power of being able to actually transact on these feelings when it comes to conceptualizing. You know, how do we form our teams? Where do we choose to do business? How do we choose to organize? And then I think it extrapolates out to saying, Do we have a richness of understanding in terms of how our choices are impacting ourselves in our home life and those around us in that sphere? And so that is a fascinating, fascinating concept. It really isn't terribly complex because we all feel feelings, but I think it's such an important thing to to hammer home. Paul Farmer: [00:38:49] Yeah. And as I said at the start, a lot of people aren't comfortable feeling feelings because they're not sure what's going to come up. Yeah, because some people, they deal in logic so they don't have to go into the emotional side of which may, which may be driven by past experiences or exposure to beliefs and values and whatever. It's like, No, no, I'm going to keep that emotion. So I walked into a into a room full of accountants one day and wrote feelings and emotion on the board. And I had a couple, I had a couple of people get up and start walking out. And I said, Hey, guys, where are you going? And they said, Oh, we think we're in the wrong room. I said, What do you mean? They said, Well, we're here to talk about leadership and whatever. I said, Yeah, come back, come back. I said, Come back and have a seat. I'm an accountant. And I just went, You know what, if you get this concept, it will change your life. It will change your business, it will change your career. But the element of embracing the influence feeling has on our space. I said, You choose to leave it out and ignore it as if it doesn't matter, I said, You're going to get 20% out of you and your space. You embrace it and learn how it influences your space, I said, You're going to get 80% plus the ability to be able to then harness it to get to 100. Because it goes into sales, it goes into marketing. Everything in our business revolves around tying into the feeling before engaging the gatekeeper, before we can then talk logic. We earn the right to talk logic. Tim Sweet: [00:40:37] Well think about the way we use that, I mean when we say the term shit just got real. It's because feelings make reality. real, feelings are what what mean, oh that just, that just got personal. That just got... Paul Farmer: [00:40:51] Feeling feelings. Where we don't feel them. It just would. Tim Sweet: [00:40:56] Awesome. Okay, Paul, I think that's a fantastic place to start, but I've got more questions. So can we do this again real soon? Paul Farmer: [00:41:03] Yeah, sure. Yeah, I'd love to. And as I said, I can, this is something that I find in business is not understood, not valued. And it's game changing in a space where it's not rocket science, but it's becoming conscious of the influence and the ability to engage emotion and feeling to allow us to be able to then understand it so we can then talk logic. Tim Sweet: [00:41:34] Loved having you here today, Paul. It was a real pleasure. Paul Farmer: [00:41:37] All right. Thank you for that. And the last, remember the last saying. You know, it's not the thing that they want, it's the feeling it gives them. Tim Sweet: [00:41:45] Love it. Okay. Well, thank you so much. We're going to do this again real soon. Paul Farmer: [00:41:48] Thanks, Tim! Tim Sweet: [00:41:49] Thanks. | |||
| 31 May 2023 | Individualism vs Teamwork with Rita Ernst, Part 1 | 00:36:21 | |
Rita Ernst, Positivity Influencer and Consultant, joins Tim Sweet on the show to talk about big changes in business. When exactly does a business go from thriving to struggling, and why? Rita’s hint is that it happens far before the impact is seen in the financial bottom line. She and Tim unpack the signs. Rita identifies how a change in work habits is the first sign of a business in the midst of change. She illustrates this with examples from COVID, where organizations all buckled down and gave their all during the first years but now are experiencing a push back, a difference in how people are interacting with customers, work that was always on time before now being unfinished. This is where righting the business should start, but businesses wait until they see it in the bottom line to call in a consultant like Rita or Tim. Tim Sweet and guest Rita Ernst dissect how an individual can right the course of a business going through big change. If everyone is afraid to say the hard truths to the boss, how will change begin? It’s not about being toxic, it’s about showing up with an honest desire to help. Positivity is the key ingredient in Rita’s book Show Up Positive and she discusses specific lessons from her book with Tim. It’s a conversation every level of employee in a business needs to hear. About Rita Ernst In 2005 Rita Ernst left corporate life and established her independent consulting and coaching practice. She has an extensive catalogue of satisfied clients in organizations that range from construction to pharmaceuticals to non-profits. Rita leverages her expertise in organizational psychology to craft solutions for business owners and staff members that break through the hostility while restoring pride, teamwork, and profits. Through her ground-breaking training and lessons, she reveals how to intentionally cultivate positive thoughts and behaviors instead of automatically reacting from the trappings of a depleting cycle of frustration and discontent. Resources mentioned in this episode: — Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Rita Ernst | Positivity Influencer, Authour, Consultant: — Transcript Rita Ernst: [00:00:00] You need to stand up and challenge that behavior and stand for your values in that moment. And that is showing up positive. So it's not about just smoothing everything out. And like we were talking about earlier, it's not about avoiding conflict at all, but it is about being true to who you need to be to have the workplace around you that you desire. Tim Sweet: [00:00:28] I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you, my friend, are a leader. And this show is all about and all for you. Welcome to the Sweet On Leadership Podcast Episode 6. Welcome to the Sweet On Leadership Podcast, where we unlock the secrets of the most influential, trusted and impactful leaders in business today so you can become your best version of a leader. And now your host. He once saved a company $2.5 million with a $15 rubber stamp, and he won't shut up about it. Tim Sweet. Tim Sweet: [00:01:23] Hey, everybody, welcome again to the Sweet On Leadership podcast. I'm joined today by my friend Rita. We're having a great conversation already and we want to pull you into it. Today we're going to be talking about really what is it like to be part of an organization that is going through big changes. And many organizations all around the world right now are facing this. I mean, we're coming out of perhaps the most tumultuous time that many of us have been through. And so in talking to Rita, I'm learning all sorts of new things, although we share that, you know, as you said, we share this collegial passion for improvement and everything else, Rita. But I'm just learning all sorts of things, and I want to make sure that we get this down and we're recording it. So, Rita, welcome and thank you very much for coming on today. Rita Ernst: [00:02:09] Thank you for inviting me, Tim. I love getting together with colleagues like you because I'm a solopreneur, so I sometimes really miss having my experts around me where we can just kick things around and stuff. And so it's so fun to get to just talk shop with you and oh my gosh, we're going to let everybody else listen in while we talk shop. How cool is that? Tim Sweet: [00:02:32] I think so, because it's funny, when we pick up a vocation like this, many people don't have that luxury of working on leadership science, and working in operational science, and really making that their focus. Most leaders out there, they have to have the day job. They've got promises to keep. They've got metrics to manage, they've got targets to hit. And that means that they don't have time to always sit back and look at the business. They're working in the business, not on the business. And so for people like us, I think we're in a pretty special place when we can play with it and see what's working, you know, that's what we bring to organizations. So let's use that and talk more today. As we have been getting to know each other and as we've been sharing our professional experiences, I really want to have you articulate, because I think it's so unique in its own way, what are the triggers that you see? What is the moment that you know that a business needs to consider change, it needs to consider something different? Rita Ernst: [00:03:35] Well, unfortunately, I think that most businesses miss that moment by the time I'm walking through the door. So let me answer from the place of if I were whispering in a business owner's ear what to watch for, how to know when that moment is. That moment is always showing up in the people before it shows up in the bottom line. Tim Sweet: [00:04:01] Can you tell me a little bit more of that? Because I think that's great. Rita Ernst: [00:04:03] If you really dial in and you listen to your people and you have genuine, meaningful, open, courageous conversations about what's not working, what could be better, what's making your job difficult? I've been watching Silicon Valley on HBO, we just recently got a subscription to HBO Max and I've been catching up on some shows, and Silicon Valley is one of those. And there's this hilarious moment, I don't even know what season it's in, where the CEO of the company has this wise, like, Dalai Lama type personality person who's his sidekick that he's talking to. And he looks at him and he says, People aren't afraid to tell me the truth, are they? And you just see it all over this guy's face. And he's like, Um, no. And your people know so much, they are interacting with customers differently than you are. They are interacting with their peers differently than you are. And even if you don't intend to be in an ivory tower, as a leader it is very easy to end up there if you are not being very intentional about how you are showing up in the organization and the way that you are engaging with people. So most of the time, if you are talking to your folks and really talking to them, you will see where things start to fall off before you start to see it in the financial documents. But most of the time when people are engaging with folks like you and I, it's because it's now costing them money. It's really hitting the bottom line of the business. And the financial pain is there. Yes. Tim Sweet: [00:05:40] So if we're looking for those steps that are before the financial pain is the impetus, what would you suggest people keep an eye out for if their staff may not be bringing them exactly what they think, if they may not be having the hard conversations? What kind of indicators do you see on the people side that are perhaps nonverbal, that are situational? What could a leader look out for? Rita Ernst: [00:06:06] I think you see a change in work habits. It's one of the key things that happens and it usually goes something like this. So there was some traditional time line when people were in the office and working, and then all of a sudden people are working extra hours and it's looking a little chaotic in the office. And you can see the start of the burnout kind of stuff building. And then you actually see a drop off where people start to vote with their feet. They're like, well, screw this. You know, they're not saying that out loud, but in the back of their minds, they're saying, Screw this like I've got a life to live. Yeah. You're willing to put all this time in. I work with a lot of independent business owners. You're the business owner, you're making all this money, you're just paying me a paycheck. I'm not getting paid to work this hard. I'm not getting rewards for this. But you can actually sort of chart it. It shows up in how people show up doing their work, the volume of work that they're doing, the amount of time that they're spending. And then this moment of standing up for themselves, you know, even if it's silently, when they start to vote with their feet. When all of a sudden there's work that needs to get done and nobody's around to finish it, or you're chasing down deliverables because your team isn't completing stuff on time or in time. And that's not been typical. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Like there's a huge alarm bell that says there's something to look for. Yeah. Tim Sweet: [00:07:31] I can get down with that. And that's very much how I think about this as well. Rita Ernst: [00:07:34] I'm curious to know what you've seen though. Like, how would you answer that? What do you see? Tim Sweet: [00:07:38] Um, I really feel that there's a sense of imbalance and what I call it is the work/self balance, right? And so employees, leaders, owners, they're always trying to balance all of their different roles in the world. And two of those that show up at work that are usually having to be considered is how the person represents and advocates for themself - their dreams, their needs, how they see growth, and how they show up as an agent and advocate for the needs of the corporation or for the company. And so these two things can or are always having to be kept in balance. When they're out of balance, what I see is that you go through these periods where, all right, you know, the business is dealing with a pandemic. It's all hands on deck. And so people start to give up their energies that they put towards themselves and put them into work. And so things go out of balance and they start to work harder and we see them showing up and yes, they're getting a lot done, but they're liquidating their own self to do that. And at a certain point, this builds up to such an imbalance and such a tension that it has to snap back. And at that point, we see the rebellious statement where it's finally, you know, why am I working this hard, and this isn't working for me, and I feel like I'm being damaged in some way. And we see it snap back. And so what I look for is often when you see businesses that are not necessarily always all about the employee or it's always all about the work, but that they're going through these wild swings, these oscillations, right? And one month it'll be all about making sure that we're coming together. And then if you talk to the employee, you'll usually hear that, Oh, yeah, well, this will last for a while and then we're going to go back to the other and you really can pick up this sine wave. This oscillation. Rita Ernst: [00:09:33] Yes. Yes, that oscillation. I love it. And you know what that made me think of, Tim, in terms of how do you notice. If you are an executive or a business owner especially, if you start feeling resentment for the amount of work that you're putting in or for the way your team is showing up, if you're starting to feel resentment, like why am I working so hard and why aren't they matching pace with me? If those are the conversations, again, like, big alarm bells, right, these are early, early indicators. It's like the hurricane siren is going off in your business. And if you don't do something, you're going to end up without a roof. You're going to end up with trees. Yes. Tim Sweet: [00:10:19] It is work on fire. And with a few clients we use the phrase stop, drop and roll when you feel like that. When you feel that your life is on fire or that things are sort of burning, stop what you're doing, right, and drop down into the processes. Drop down into the work and really take a moment to get underneath the task of the day. And how are we actually collecting? How are we talking? How are we organizing the work? What's the source of stress here? What's the underlying driver? And then consider how your role has to change, how your role, is your role - in your earlier example - to go and tell the boss, to go and say something. Is that something you're not doing? And you need to take that and actually make that part of how you show up. Because I see if people just work harder at what they've always done, then they get to where they, I like to use the phrase 'be careful you don't get where you're going'. Right? Because if you just go faster and you barrel ahead, you could be part of your own misery. The way in which you're approaching work could be part of it. It's not always to blame ourselves, but it's to really take a look at and say, what's within my sphere of influence? What can I change? And perhaps I'm actually not fulfilling part of my responsibility the way I should. And that could be as easy as put your hand up and raise the issue. There's other reasons people don't put their hand up and raise the issue. But as an example, stop, drop, look at your role. Rita Ernst: [00:11:47] Well, you know, one of my favorite mentors and most impactful to me, in terms of my own personal professional development in this field, is Peter Block. And Peter Block has this wonderful teaching that is when you choose safety and security, you give up your power. And that is exactly what happens in organizations. This piece you're talking about, role, and is it my role to speak up? Is it my role to advocate for what I need? When we choose safety and security in our role, well I don't want to rock the boat, I don't want to get yelled at, then we give up our power to try to change anything that we need changed. And so for most people, one of two things happens. You either sort of die on the vine and you just stay and collect your paycheck and you work as a miserable thing, or you pack up your toys and you go to another place. And the question that's always there is, was there a choice that you could have made somewhere way earlier that where packing up your toys wasn't what had to happen here, but you chose safety and security in silence. And so you know, you gave up your power to create what you wanted. Tim Sweet: [00:13:02] It's really a fascinating area because we're in an era right now where everything is about inclusion and psychological safety and making sure that we have healthy cultures and these kind of things. And often that's misinterpreted as we can't hurt anybody's feelings. We can't collide with anybody. We have to maintain this superficial politeness or we have to we have to make sure that everybody is happy all the time. That's not what psychological safety means, right? And choosing the status quo or choosing to remain silent in order to avoid offending somebody or a negative consequence on yourself, and I mean the stats in this area are really quite alarming when you look at how many people would rather the long term outlook suffer than hurt a person's feelings in the moment. And again, I'm not talking about being rude and toxic. I'm saying being willing to collide with somebody and ask them a question that might make them uncomfortable, that even might offend them, and say, I'm going to risk something here with this person in order to better them and myself and the situation around us. And I'm not going to shy away from that challenge. I'm going to rise to that challenge. That's such an interesting observation that you make, Rita, because it's like people want to do the right thing and the right thing is protect people's feelings, and I don't always think that that's the best approach. Be respectful, yes. Long term feelings, big picture identity stuff. Absolutely. Stand up for your staff. But telling them that perhaps how they communicated or didn't communicate a piece of information to you and essentially saying you want it done a certain way or you need it done a certain way or you'd suggest a different way, that's not the time to avoid potentially hurting someone's feelings because you're suggesting that they didn't get everything right all the time? I don't know. Rita Ernst: [00:14:53] I love where you are. I want to hang in here for a minute and just put a little more meat on this beautiful platter that we're that we're building in this conversation. Because my background is psychology. And I am not a trained therapist. I do not practice as a therapist. A lot of my clients call me their business therapist because we do this intensive conversation around themselves and their feelings and all of these things. But I do lean into a lot of psychology and the science of psychology and some of the better tools that come out of therapy. And one of the things that you learn in therapy is the only person responsible for your feelings is you. If we can let go of this idea of hurting other people's feelings, because that is somebody else's response to your words and your language. And so you can be very thoughtful about those things. You can be thoughtful about your tone. You can be thoughtful about the words that you use. You can use permission statements, you know, other kinds of things. There was a saying from very early in my career that has always stuck in my mind, which is 'feedback in the absence of a request is a nuisance', right? Isn't that how we all feel when somebody offers us feedback? Or you could do that better advice or whatever, and you're not like open. It's a disinterest kind of response. Tim Sweet: [00:16:20] There's no growth at play, right? Rita Ernst: [00:16:22] But it feels like a nuisance. And so, you know, when you're offering something to somebody and you have not laid the right groundwork for them to be open and ready when the relationship and the conversation and context isn't right, sometimes it'll land that way. It'll land like a nuisance. It won't really get you what you want. So there's all kinds of things that are within your control that you can do to try to be heard to the best of your ability. But at the end of the day, the first thing you got to do is get your intention right. And that's probably one of the lessons that I teach every leader I touch, is start with your intention. And when your intention is truly from a place of helping and building somebody else up, not correcting them, not fixing them, right? There's a difference between wanting to fix somebody and wanting to help and lift them up. And when you can make those distinctions and you can operate from those distinctions, your success rate will likely climb. Tim Sweet: [00:17:23] And it does change the nature of why we open up uncomfortable conversations. Also, what I just took from what you said, which I thought is a point that I'd like to really highlight, there's a skill or a style or a personal comfort or confidence that comes with voicing what you feel and becoming and achieving that openness. And again, I think it's learning the language or learning your style or learning how you approach a conflict or that crucial conversation is such a skill that many people don't have. They've avoided the tough stuff because they don't know how to make it maybe not safe, but they don't know how to to make it effective, to make it growth oriented, to include the request and not just make it a nag or somebody bellyaching. There's a skill to that. I know that it's something that I've had to learn and perfect and spend a lot of my days in the middle of, is how to position and... Rita Ernst: [00:18:16] We're both consultants. As a consultant, you're always asking tough questions and naming hard things. If you're not, you're, you know--. Tim Sweet: [00:18:25] -- you're not helping. Rita Ernst: [00:18:26] You're not going to be successful. So those are skills that we get to practice all the time. But I am just nodding my head furiously in agreement with you that yes, when people keep choosing avoidance, it is to their own professional detriment. Now, in the US, you can tell me if this is the same in Canada, but one of the most interesting things, and I share this sometimes in leadership talks that I give, is that in the new generation, in fact, it might be in my book, in the new generation, our education system has shifted to more group and team type learning. So when I was coming through school, everybody had their own little individual desk and you sat in your desk and you weren't really encouraged most of the time to look at, talk to, do things, occasionally there might be a project - now it changed in college, but I'm talking in through K through high school - now work is very collaborative and people are taught how to come together and work as a group and accomplish things and they have all the same challenges of, you know, this person isn't pulling their weight and those kinds of things, but they learn to navigate that now in school. And so there is some capacity and capability that kids are entering the workforce with. And yet I think we have norms in place that really don't allow them to tap in and use that skill set. And like so many things, when you don't use it, you lose it. Tim Sweet: [00:19:56] Yeah, so much of this is about how we show up. And so can you tell us a little bit about your book from the title on through to what you think are the why people should consider that as a support for everything we just talked about? Because I think we're there. Rita Ernst: [00:20:11] Okay, lovely. I love to talk about my book. The book is called Show Up Positive, and it is in two parts. So I really tried to think about you as the reader when I was writing the book and designing the layout of the book. And so the first part of the book is - and it's about a 50/50 split on the number of pages - the first part of the book is the call to action. And it really explains the impetus behind Show Up Positive, which I'll share here in a minute, why I've written this book and its relevance to this moment that we are in. And then the second part of the book is more of a road mapping of what to do to get yourself into the Show Up Positive mindset. In part two there are 50 show up positive behaviors that are defined in guidance given on ways to incorporate them into business. But at the core of the book and the whole why behind the book, what happened during the pandemic, is that I started getting calls from essential businesses, and the leaders of these essential businesses are like, We're imploding. And I know, I know some things I need to do. I need to get all my employees together. We need to get reconnected. We need to get back on the same page. We need to find our teamwork again. We've sort of fallen out of all of that, but it just feels overwhelming. I don't know what to do. I don't know where to start. And I said, I can help you with that. Rita Ernst: [00:21:45] Let's figure this out. And what was so interesting is they all started from this place of, I need to get my whole team together again. Like they really felt that that collegial-ness and community was missing. And so in both instances, the first two clients that I did, one of the first things we did was we brought everybody together in an all employee meeting. However, what we did is not spend all of our time talking about what's wrong or where we're going. We spent a huge amount of time looking backwards, talking about where we've come from and who we are. So we talked about the history of the organization, and how people connected into the organization, and the culture and the values implicit in the organization, and in the leaders of the organization where you have the founder still engaged in the leadership of the business. And that remembering of what it used to be like, how it used to feel in the organization, and remembering why did I join this company? What did I come here to do? Why was I so excited to become a part of this? Just helping people remember those things, because they've been stuck in this COVID conversation that, you know, you're getting it on the news, you're getting it on your social media feeds, you're getting it in your family discussions. This was in 2020, early 21, when the rules were constantly changing. We, you know, we were learning all the time about how this spreads. Do we need to wipe down surfaces? Do we need to, you know, it was just constant, constant, constant change. Rita Ernst: [00:23:29] And that was just consuming all of our time and attention. And it was creating anxiety and fear to boot. So from a psychological standpoint, we had our fight or flight system kicked on in high gear, which is why we kind of went a little crazy because we were acting from that place of our amygdala hijack versus the logical prefrontal cortex in the front of the brain. And so just explaining all of that to people in part one and really helping them understand that we do know how to have amazing organizations. I interviewed people in these companies and they said we would trip over one another to serve our customers. We were seamless. We just helped each other out naturally. Nobody had to ask. Nobody had to wait. I cared deeply about this company, like you could put my name on the sign out front because that's how much ownership I feel for us delivering to our customers. So these are people who were very engaged and integrated and it just fell off. And now they're missing that. They were longing to get that back, but not really sure the pathway to do that. And the answer is rather straightforward. Honestly, if we created it before especially, we can recreate it again. But we have to start remembering and we need to get reconnected to, not that you are replicating who you've been, but it's that feeling and that mindset that you had, and that intention that you had at that time. Tim Sweet: [00:25:05] There's great confidence that comes from looking at the facts that we've actually been there before. And it's funny, when you talk to organizations, often talking about that kind of stability when people are triggered or when they've gone through this type of low level trauma, to them it feels like they have no ability to get back there. It's like so far off and just remembering that they've already been there. I mean, there's that classic pie chart which you draw the one sliver and it'll say, you know, here's what we know we know. And then you draw another tiny little fractional sliver on this thing, 5% of the pie chart. Here's what we know we don't know. And then we used to, I use this all the time, you draw the rest of the pie chart and you'd say, here's what we don't know we don't know. But I've always said that there's a piece of this pie chart that's missing. There's a fourth piece that's quite large, and it's we've forgotten what we already knew. You know, we already learned something and because we're moving so far and so fast, we've shelved it. Or because there's been a bright new shiny thing, we've declared it obsolete and moved forward. And I don't think for a moment you're suggesting that we move backwards and pattern off of something that's, because life has evolved. We're two years farther ahead. But that grounding that you're talking about, that you're giving people, is really, it's a confidence boost. When you say remembering why I joined the company in the first place, remembering what we stood for or when things were clear, we can stand for that again, albeit in a different way. We know what it felt like to be stable. We got to be all about what we are next. Sure, but what are we jumping off from? What's our foundation? Rita Ernst: [00:26:55] And, you know, it didn't take that long. It didn't take that long, but the impact was so enormous. And of course, that wasn't the only thing that we did. But, you know, it gave us then, like you said, it was the perfect foundation to then start talking about our current celebrations and our current achievements and other things. But giving them in this perspective of, at one company had a woman say, it took me three years to get a job here. Like that, I just kept showing up and checking in, because the position that she wanted was limited and somebody was in that role and she's like, as soon as it's like, you know, when you have your dream house and you're like, if it ever goes on the market, we got to make an offer. Same thing. She was like, this is my dream job. And when this position is available, I want to be top of mind. We think about that, think about that, and to now be at this place and during the pandemic where she's questioning like, I don't know if I belong here anymore. I don't know if I should stay here anymore. Tim Sweet: [00:28:03] And maybe it is time to go. It's possible. Rita Ernst: [00:28:05] It is. Tim Sweet: [00:28:07] Those memories have been pushed aside out of survival. And as you say, we've gone down into that lizard brain and we're just like, things are very, very reactionary. So taking a moment to really, to reground, I think is just, that's really, that's a great suggestion, like bravo. I think that that is brava. That is awesome. So. Rita Ernst: [00:28:31] Well thank you. So you know the book is, it is really meant for individuals and there's work there for teams, organizational work, as you can appreciate, Tim, really requires more consulting from people like us to kind of bring it all together. But the biggest message that I want people to get from the book is that you have agency, you have power, and that if one person can come into your team and can change the dynamics such that they disrupt your team and erode your ability to perform as a team, one person can come in and pull it all together, you know, so just be that person. The really simple call to action is to be the coworker you wish you had. Instead of waiting for somebody else to change and allowing that to dictate, if you feel like you need more honesty in your team, then you show up and start being the honest person. If you need more camaraderie, then you show up and be a good friend and colleague to the people around you in the way that that means to you. If, you know, whatever it might be that you feel like is missing, that you are longing for, when you think back to when you really loved being a part of this team, what it was like, if people were helping, more helpful to one another, you set the new standard and do it for yourself. Rita Ernst: [00:30:02] You're not doing it to prove somebody else bad. You're not doing it to, you know, it's not a vanity thing. It's a if I start being this person again, then I can feel better about myself. I can contribute. And what's so interesting about this is it's risky. It's really super risky when you start because you are standing against the team norms that have you trapped in this really negative space. And that's why people feel so stuck. They feel so stuck because the norms have now evolved around maintaining this negativity. So it takes a little bit of courage to go against, because you might get rejected. People might make fun of you, you might get bullied a little bit. But at the same time, when you do this for yourself and for your commitment to what you want to bring into the organization, there are some people that are going to look at you and go, I would much rather hang out with Tim and be a part of that conversation than this backbiting, backstabbing stuff going on over here, and they will start to migrate. Tim Sweet: [00:31:08] Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. Rita Ernst: [00:31:09] You become this beacon of possibility for others. It will happen in that way. But it does take a little bit of courage to be the one to stand. And I'm not talking about swallow it down false positivity. You know, when people are being disrespectful, when people are harassing others, you need to stand up and challenge that behavior, and stand for your values in that moment. And that is showing up positive. So it's not about just smoothing everything out. And like we were talking about earlier, it's not about avoiding conflict at all, but it is about being true to who you need to be to have the workplace around you that you desire. I believe this from day one, walking out of my graduate school, I'm a behaviorist in psychology. And so I do believe that we have the power and the potential to generate things in our lives that we want and need. Tim Sweet: [00:32:11] I think that that is a really great message to end on. So, Rita, I want to thank you for being here. I think that you've encouraged me to bring the past into the conversation a little bit more and to remember what has happened. And I've always been a believer in, you know, before we start sort of pointing the fingers at why something isn't happening or waiting for somebody else to create that change, that positivity in our work environment, that we have to first say, you know, perhaps this is my role. And when you have a team that's coming together and every one of them feels it's their responsibility to ensure that the team is functioning well and that everybody on that team is benefiting. Amazing things happen. Rita Ernst: [00:32:54] It's changing habits. And changing habits take focus and intention. Tim Sweet: [00:33:00] And a feeling of license and the ability to take action. Rita Ernst: [00:33:03] Yes. So it's important that you, you know, have a plan and you work that plan. And so I figure with 50, you've got a lot to choose from. And it can be every week. It could be you could work on one behavior for a month and you would still be successful. So, but start. The thing that won't work so well is trying something new every day. You're going to wear yourself out. You really need to sort of take that more yoga style mindset of like, you know, really getting in intentional and building the practice, building the muscles, you know, the mental muscles to show up consistently in this way that you want to show up. Tim Sweet: [00:33:45] And don't be afraid to specialize if it's something that really is impactful and it's how you lead or it's how you bring positivity or it's how you, people can be specialists. They can be better at one style of leadership or engagement than anybody else is. Hey, don't apologize for it. Like, do it. Do it a lot. Right? Rita Ernst: [00:34:07] Yes. And encourage every little nugget of positivity you see in others around you. A lot of times the most subtle things, but having somebody notice when you bring something into the interaction or the experience, is reinforcing both positively and negatively. Tim Sweet: [00:34:31] It's a great place to start. So, Rita, we're going to call that one. I'm really happy with that. I think that there's lots there for you out there that are listening to embrace and chew on. There's actions that you can take and instill some of this thinking into your lives and you'll probably see immediate change, and a move towards a brighter future. And I love that suggestion about, hey, let's not forget our roots. Let's not forget why we're here and where we came from, and engage on that. And Rita, before I let you go, let's just remind people, if they want to find you, what's the best way for them to connect with you? Rita Ernst: [00:35:05] My website has everything that you will need to find me, and all my social media links, my book information, everything. It's IgniteExtraordinary.com. That's also my social handle on Instagram and Facebook is @IgniteExtraordinary, and of course I'm Rita Ernst Positivity Influencer on LinkedIn, so I'm happy to connect with people, and if you purchase the book, read the book, have questions, I have a Monday show that I do at 12:45 Eastern Time every Monday, that introduces one of those positivity words from the back of the book. And then immediately following that, there's a link where you can join a community conversation. So please come join the community and let me help you navigate this next chapter of your life and how you want to show up in your workplace. Tim Sweet: [00:35:58] Awesome. Rita, I want to thank you again for being here today and we'll do this again real soon. Rita Ernst: [00:36:03] Thank you for the invitation, Tim. Have a great afternoon. Tim Sweet: [00:36:06] Thank you. I appreciate it. | |||
| 31 May 2023 | Individualism vs Teamwork with Rita Ernst, Part 2 | 00:53:32 | |
Tim Sweet welcomes Rita Ernst, Positivity Influencer and Consultant, back to the show to discuss the differences between generational education and how school focus has shifted from individualism to teamwork. How does that shift translate into business preparedness? In talking about this, Tim and Rita address the fundamental occupational processes they both respect and the order in which necessary change must be addressed. Rita explains how she experienced a shift from her own education to the education of her children, where schools her children went through very much encouraged collaboration and community. She and Tim examine conformity versus individuality and how systems function both through the more team-based approaches of the modern day versus the more solo-focussed approaches from earlier decades. Tim Sweet and guest Rita Ernst look at what makes individuals unique and how that translates to business strength, and how individual skills are still highlighted and valued in the current collaborative operational style. Rita explains organizational development using the analogy of Kentucky Derby horse racing and breaks down, with Tim, why a right answer might not be correct for your business if it’s not answering the question at hand. Both host and guest are dedicated consultants who share their unique insights into business in a very open and meaningful conversation. About Rita Ernst In 2005 Rita Ernst left corporate life and established her independent consulting and coaching practice. She has an extensive catalogue of satisfied clients in organizations that range from construction to pharmaceuticals to non-profits. Rita leverages her expertise in organizational psychology to craft solutions for business owners and staff members that break through the hostility while restoring pride, teamwork, and profits. Through her ground-breaking training and lessons, she reveals how to intentionally cultivate positive thoughts and behaviors instead of automatically reacting from the trappings of a depleting cycle of frustration and discontent. Resources mentioned in this episode:
— Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Rita Ernst | Positivity Influencer, Authour, Consultant: — Transcript Tim Sweet: Before we get going, I would like to talk a little bit about what you're about to hear. I'm joined by Rita Ernst, owner of Ignite Your Extraordinary. She's a true expert in organizational psychology. And in this episode, Rita and I are going to be diving deep into the fascinating world of teamwork and collaboration in the workplace. This conversation evolves from what we've learned in school and how that differs from how we approach the workplace to the impact of general perspectives on collaboration and building high performance teams from scratch. We'll be discussing the history of team based systems in business, the influence of Japanese processes and the importance of trust and collaboration in organizations. But that's not all. We're going to discuss our individual perspectives on just what's at stake when it comes to poor teamwork. And Rita offers up an analogy of horse racing in Kentucky, which beautifully illustrates the importance of aligning individual potential with team goals. So saddle up and hit that subscribe button, because I'm pretty sure that this thought provoking conversation will have you pausing the playback and really thinking about your own team dynamics. So now let's ignite our extraordinary with Rita Ernst. Let's get into this. Rita Ernst: Right. Well, a lot of people hear the conversation, I think, like this, Tim: Don't talk to me about teamwork, I can't even get butts in seats. Tim Sweet: Yeah, no kidding. Rita Ernst: And you and I can look at that and say, Yeah, but if you had better teamwork, you could keep butts in seats. I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you, my friend, are a leader. And this show is all about and all for you. Welcome to the Sweet On Leadership Podcast, Episode Seven. Welcome to the Sweet On Leadership podcast, where we unlock the secrets of the most influential, trusted and impactful leaders in business today so you can become your best version of a leader. And now your host, you know the person who asks the server's favorite dish on the menu? Yeah, he's that guy. Tim Sweet. Tim Sweet: Rita, I'm really glad that you've come back on and that we've got another chance to talk about this and we get to continue our conversation from last time. So thanks again for joining us. Why don't you just remind people who you are again and what you do and then we'll get into the conversation. Rita Ernst: I'm happy to be back with you, Tim. Thank you. I am Rita Ernst. I am the author of 'Show Up Positive', available at your favorite bookseller. And I am the owner of Ignite Your Extraordinary, a consulting practice that focuses on helping organizations align to achieve their fullest potential. Tim Sweet: Well, I am very honored that you've come in again. For those of you who saw or listened to the last episode with Rita, we had a great conversation about what can a leader do to anticipate, before it's on the financials, when not everything is running green and when there may be early warning signs that we are going to enter a period of struggle, specifically struggle when it comes to how the team is feeling, what they're meeting, what they're doing, and what are eventually going to come out in terms of productivity, efficiency and profit. And you drop some awesome gems during that last session. The one that sticks out most in my mind is the fact that we shouldn't shy away from digging back into the story of the company and even our personal stories of why we joined in the first place, and that we really do ourselves a disservice if we don't allow ourselves to feel that strength and that stability of that foundation, and instead, get embroiled in the chaos that is today and are always looking for, well, it has to be new, new, new and obsolete everything else, which, yes, we know we have to grow and change, but boy, does it ever create some instability and some nerves when we don't feel like we have any foundation to draw on. So really, I thought that was just such an excellent point. And then you also brought us through an explanation of some of the wealth that they can find in the book and specifically around what leaders can do to take action right away and really be that force for change, be the change they want to see in the world, as Gandhi said. Right. What did you think of the last conversation and was there anything that was burning for you as we left it? Rita Ernst: Well, I am anxious to hear more feedback from your listeners, so please jump in, if you're subscribing to the podcast, and give us some comments because we did say at the beginning that this was going to be sort of our little collegial geek out conversation. Tim Sweet: Leadership geeks. That's what we are. Rita Ernst: And so I hope people were hanging in there with us. But, you know, there was a whole side conversation that we could have had that we didn't have that I'm hoping we can have today, Tim. And that is that beautiful insight that you gave about the difference between the homogeneity in the school system and what people experience as teamwork in those kinds of places versus what we really mean by high-performance teams in the workplace. And those don't happen by default. Those have to happen with structure and effort and intention. And so I think there's this really juicy conversation that we can have about the difference between being a collection of individuals in the workplace, trying to accomplish something on the pathway to becoming a high performing team, and why your listeners might want to care about achieving that goal of the high performance team. What do you think? Tim Sweet: I think that's a great place to start and I'm glad to hear that that was something of interest to you. I think that's awesome and it is a big topic that we have to face every day. We've known for years that generational issues do play a part. And I remember I often will talk about when I was running my first business and we were really contemplating what did the entry into the workforce of Gen Y look like and how was then a much younger Gen X dealing with it, and how were the Boomers, which were still very much in play there dealing with this new digital, digitally enabled, digitally minded generation moving into the workforce where Gen X was still pretty analog, we saw in shades of gray, and we saw the emergence again of this digitally sure group. The feeling of the time was that they would have kids and get mortgages and incur the wrath of taxes or whatever. And they would eventually get it and they would wake up and mature and slip into the normal way of thinking. Well, it didn't happen. Rita Ernst: They did not. No, it did not. Tim Sweet: They were as motivated by the same things as they were from the beginning. And actually what happened is Gen X and even the Boomers began to gravitate towards this new digitally-minded experience. And so now we've seen this. I think we've learned from this, at least in the leadership sciences, we've learned that generation is not nearly that easy to pin down, for one thing. But there are trends. And one of the trends that we've got right now is the school systems are very, very different in general than they were for previous generations. And that collaboration and teamwork are at the forefront of those schools. Rita Ernst: Well, and valuing differences and accepting differences as strengths instead of weaknesses. Right. There's a whole value system in our education that is much more finely tuned, in my opinion. Yes. Yes. Then when I was a student. Tim Sweet: Yes. But I would also caution I guess, and that is that we have to remember that where is that value system showing up and how is it showing up. And it is showing up between adults and children in institutions which have a very real mandate of moving children through - if you look at the work of Dan Pink - you're moving children through this industrialized educational experience. And as a result, you have to demand some homogeneity on how the children show up, which means that even though we're asking these new questions by and large, and even though it's team groupings and things, there's still a great deal of conformity that's required and there's not necessarily a clear tie to performance as maybe there were in the past, because grades and assessments can be much more subjective and very fluid. And can be influenced greatly through other factors. And it's not to say that the educators aren't great. They're great. I mean, there are many, many great teachers out there. But we have to remember that this culture is coming to a different industry that would be very, very different than you're going to find in most private or public organizations. And so I guess my question to you is, does that type of education prepare a person for the type of high collaboration, high-performance teaming that we need in many organizations? Does it lay a suitable groundwork or is there work to do? Rita Ernst: Well, you know, I hate to lean so heavily on the generation thing, but I think if you look at young entrepreneurs who've built businesses, you know, that has been built from the ground up by millennials and even younger people, clearly they know how to get high performance out of their peer group. Tim Sweet: We're seeing this for sure. Rita Ernst: We're seeing it for sure. When we have organizations led from the mindset of the older generations of the Boomers and Gen Xers, not so much. Do we see the preparedness? And the only way I can come to any understanding of that difference is this clash of values and norms which get to the core of what makes a team or not. Tim Sweet: It's interesting because some of these traditional businesses or the older businesses that we see around there, the more established businesses or at least the ones that are longer in the tooth, their cultures and their systems and their processes and everything that makes them up body and soul, found their genesis in a much less collaborative time. And so when we go to install higher collaboration within teams, etcetera, we're not up against change resistance in individuals. We're up against change resistance that's been calcified into the organization and the culture because that's what it was crafted around. Rita Ernst: Let me put a personal fine point on what Tim is saying, all of you lovely listeners. So I finished graduate school in the early 90s. And I worked in manufacturing plants at the time, and we were just converting operations from traditional militaristic types of management/supervisor models of operating hierarchy into team-based systems. So that is how new team based systems in business are in the history of businesses, right? So to your point, Tim, there are companies like General Electric, Ford Motor Company that have many more years of history and experience outside of the team model than they do inside of the team model. Tim Sweet: And I think what is really fascinating about that is when we look at some of the genesis points of, again, high collaborative teaming, I actually think that is where much of the education systems have drawn their inspiration. I mean, that is, it was happening in my memory, in business before it was happening in schools. And then whether or not it was because of exercises that perhaps administrative teams or somebody was going through, I can't speak to that. The language started showing up and when my kids went to school, and my oldest is 16 right now, they were speaking a language that we were using corporately to bring people together, bring them forward, and how an 11-year-old processes that or how a 7-year-old processes that I can't say, right? But it was far beyond the book report style teaming that we used to go through, which was, all right, you're going to group up and you do the title page and you do the bibliography, and then the other three suckers get to write, do all the work and write the book report. You know, that was sort of the extent of teamwork if you weren't on a sports field or perhaps putting on a play or a production or being part of a band, things were not terribly collaborative. Rita Ernst: I can only speak to my experience in grade schools here in Louisville because once my kids got into middle school and high school, I was not an involved parent in those systems. And in many cases, like in the middle school that my oldest daughter went to, they did not want you around or involved, like they really wanted parents out of the building. So you had to have very specific reasons to be there. But in the grade school, what I noticed immediately that was so discernibly different than my experience when I was the age of my children entering grade school, was there was this purposefulness to creating community and respecting and valuing one another that was ingrained, K through 5 is is grade school for my kids, and in every year there were messages and very purposeful intention given to making sure that across the entire school inclusive of the parents beyond the kids in the classroom, there was this messaging around we're a community, we come together, we support one another, we care about one another, those kinds of things. Tim Sweet: It's funny because as you tell me that, it does remind me a little bit of our differences, Canadian and American, and specifically because I remember having a conversation with an American colleague a while back. And when we think about some of the sort of major tenants of the national identity or something along those lines, you know, the US was really seen as a melting pot. It was seen as we come together and we're stronger and so that there really is this all together mentality or at least this American national mentality. Whereas in Canada, it's funny because when I was brought up, we used to not have that approach. We saw the national landscape as a, it was like a patchwork quilt. We're built on our uniqueness and therefore when a person moves to the country, we have to leverage their skills, taking the best from their culture and not expect change and not expect conformity. And that's a gross generalization. And I realize that it's a gross generalization, but it was really pressed into us that individuality was always quite high in the approach. Now, that didn't translate into the type of individuality that we're talking about in businesses, because I think that even though you had identity that was different than somebody else, you were meant to behave in a predictable, regular manner. And often that was because of the size of the classrooms or something. Teachers needed children to conform. And I guess that was one part of the conversation from last time. Do we feel that this new individuality, this new language around teamwork and whatnot, has solved the conformance problem, or are they still expected to conform? Just like I'm curious on your thoughts. Rita Ernst: I'm going to maybe step back and try to thread it all together. But before we brought the Japanese Kaizen processes and ideas of teamwork into the US, which is really what we were doing, we were trying to be globally competitive with our pricing and our productivity and that kind of thing. Tim Sweet: That's when we had the rise of Deming and the operations masters. Rita Ernst: We were getting killed in the global marketplace, American producers. So that was the whole impetus. But before that, nobody cared if you got along with your coworkers, you had a specific job, set of tasks that you were supposed to do, show up, do your tasks. You know, if you're, like, I was in a manufacturing plant, you're working on the line, this is your station, you're just doing your tasks. Nobody cared. Nobody was having conversation about it, It's important that Tim and Rita communicate well and get along with one another. Like nobody cared about those things. But when you started moving into this model of teaming, now we need to know and understand. We need to have a shared language with one another. We now are going to have certain decisions that we get to make that we didn't get to make before. Great example on the Saturn production line back when Saturn was was like one of the best examples of team-based manufacturing in America, and each team had a goal for how many cars they would produce off the line during their shift. And, you know, and everybody was doing their part. They understood how they fit into that bigger goal of making that happen. But they also all had the right to pull the cord and completely stop the line if there was a major defect or issue. So that was huge like I always feel like it's helpful to people who don't know this history because it's not taught very many places. So it's important to understand where we came from, what we got to, so when you talk about the conformity piece of it, that was like the misconception we were always trying to dodge, as an OD person trying to do team development or install teams inside of organizations, is that it's not cult of conformity, but it is about having and respecting norms and ways of operating together that are going to get the best for everyone. The work that is required, the conversations, the intentionality - and in talking with my children, I still have one in high school, I have one in college, they're not doing that kind of elementary, First, we're going to agree to be a team and talk about what it means to be a team. And they're not, they're just saying, You're going to collaborate together and and and work on these things together. However, because there has been this other shared value that they've had since entering the school system, that we don't discount others for their otherness, there is stuff that they do emerge with around appreciating and looking for each individual's ability to contribute that I think people of our generation, we had to break through a whole lot of assumptions and stuff to be able to get into the head space. Tim Sweet: To get to a point where we could look at that uniqueness as a strength, in a sense, yeah. You've reminded me of the term. So in Canada and Canadian school systems, we used to say Canada is not a melting pot, Canada is a mosaic. And to see organizations as teams in that in that way is important. But I do think that there's a few steps that can go beyond simply appreciating other people's uniqueness and making room for it. And when we move into high performance, it becomes less about simply accepting and making room for it. And I'm not saying that every team is that there's obviously teams that go beyond that, but I think the real juice is found when we say, how do we now leverage that? How do we use it as a feature, not a bug? How do we use it as a competitive advantage, not a liability to be managed? And when you see teams embrace it that way, to really get fluent in what makes them different and how that actually helps them organize around the work, it's a complete game changer in my experience, and it's not something that people often feel they have time to do. It is truly in that 'important but not urgent' quadrant where we succumb to these older notions of, well, you're hired to do a job, you've been educated to do a job, slip in and do the job. Again, gross generalization. But that's the other end of the spectrum. Rita Ernst: Well, I agree with you. Your assessment about it being important and not urgent with this one caveat, and this is based on my experience that I wrote about in the book Show Up Positive, and that is except for people who have experienced high performance. And then it is both urgent and important because it's palpable, the difference. Tim Sweet: There's a gap. There's a vacuum. There's an awareness of how good it could be. And that's a very good point because, I mean, when you're announcing your champion to take an organization to be the local rep or, you know, a champion that's on the ground, often it's easiest if that person has experienced it before. And it's mind-boggling to me, actually. Sometimes you get into some more traditional organizations, you run across entire teams where not one person has real experience being on a high-performing team. They actually, they don't know what that looks like. They do good work. They get their job done. Everything's happening. But they're not on a high-performing team. Organizations where teamwork we wouldn't consider terribly sophisticated can still be wildly profitable. It's just, again, what is the team experience look like? What does the employee experience look like and are they as profitable as they could be? You know? Rita Ernst: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I was just having this conversation with my graphics designer because I've been trying to distill an idea into like a one-page graphic. And I was saying to her, I want to put numbers to this because some people really just need to be grounded, in fact, I make a joke about it in my book about like, you know, if you're just one of those people that really just you need to get into the numbers for this to have any value or meaning to you, this chapter is for you. We're going to talk about all the research that's been done that tells you the economics behind having a positive culture. But there is a difference in terms of getting people to see this as important or urgent, depending on whether you're talking about you could be getting better quality of X percent, you could be reducing cost of turnover by X percent when you're in the could be, versus when you can flip it on its side and you can say that absenteeism is costing you X amount of dollars. Every person, every turnover in this job is costing you this amount of money off your bottom line. When you can really get it into the place where you can exchange this idea of what it could be into, like this is the money you're leaving on the table, then you tend to get people to get it in that important and urgent category because nobody likes to lose money, right? Tim Sweet: I mean being able to put teamwork on the balance sheet is something that that takes a fair amount of skill. Now, you come from a psychological background. I come from an operational background. And so for me, even though I'm in the OD space, nothing happens in my mind whether or not it improves the system and it has a bottom line, it is a bottom line effect or a top line effect. And when we're able to say there are these intangible human-centric things that we're going to instill in the business, but we can show a logical effect to improving those within the financials, within our operating metrics, that we can say that attrition and turnover is one that is really, really important right now because, of course, we're in the middle of a movement where, at least in Canada, people are having trouble finding qualified staff. It's not just about finding them, it's about finding them because they want to work in the way they work. So you better know what type of attrition rates you're having and are you in control of those. And is there a decision around teamwork or culture that is directly related to that? Rita Ernst: Right. Well, a lot of people hear the conversation, I think like this, Tim, don't talk to me about teamwork. I can't even get butts in seats. Tim Sweet: Yeah, no kidding. Rita Ernst: And you and I can look at that and say, Yeah, but if you had better teamwork, you could keep butts in seats. Tim Sweet: Or you'd have, or you'd have the reputation because - and this is the other thing that's really interesting - is that your team problems, your cultural problems, in most instances are not that private anymore. Rita Ernst: No, they are not. Thank you, Glassdoor. Tim Sweet: Yeah, Glassdoor for sure. And if not Glassdoor, you know-- Rita Ernst: --Reddit-- Tim Sweet: --well, or just, or LinkedIn. I mean, you know, I advise my executives that are out if a job search is in the cards, you know, begin to interview people that have worked at that organization and ask them very, very pointed questions about the elements of culture that are important to you personally. Because you have the ability to go and ask those questions now. We are tied together. These things are not private matters anymore and they won't stay private for long, especially if they're dramatic. Going back to that point about being able to quantify the effects of teamwork, positive and negative, let's talk a little bit about that, because, you know, in another conversation that we weren't recording, you were giving me this analogy of understanding the variables. I'm going to ask you to go here now if you're okay with that. And you were talking about you're from Kentucky, racing - horse racing - is a big industry and a big draw there. Can you tell everybody that's listening here a little bit about that, a little bit about the variables and you put them into the metaphor of horse racing. And I thought that that was excellent. Rita Ernst: I don't know if I can do it in the same way again, Tim, but I will do my best-- Tim Sweet: Go for it. I trust you. Rita Ernst: -- to try to recreate that moment of magic because it was, it just popped into my head when we were having the conversation. But, you know, we were talking about how it's important that we recognize the potential in individuals, and then we're doing the work to align to, and enable, that potential to manifest in the team. And I was sharing with you that, you know what's interesting when you start thinking about that and you think about the overall business and aligning things together, we are known for the Kentucky Derby, that's what Louisville is known for. Churchill Downs, everybody comes for the greatest two minutes in sport, the run. But what is fascinating, something I just learned from reading the book Horse, is in the history is that we used to not race thoroughbreds at such a young age. That is something new that has happened. And the reason that we didn't race thoroughbreds before the age of four, or smart trainers didn't, is because you were going to do damage to the horse. So you could race them early and take purse and make money off of them, but you were trading off the early money for the longevity of money that you could get with the horse. So if you thought that getting some early purses and then you put them out to stud made a good business, you could do that. But if you really had this vision for your horse that the earnings were really going to come down the road in their peak years, which is sort of five, six, seven, you didn't want to do damage that you couldn't repair when they were gelding at age two. All of that has changed now in horse racing and a lot of that has changed, as I shared with you, because we know so much more about the physiology of horses. And so now we know the veterinary sciences of diet and training regimens and things like that so that you are not doing irreparable damage to the horse, and you can still get more longevity out of them. But sort of the same thing holds in companies, in teams. If you go back to the conversation we were having the last time we were together, that when organizations go through these really, really rapid growth spans, when you're chasing this business and the whole team, I write about this in my book, the whole team is behind you. Like everybody's on board. We're going to chase this business, we're going to grow, we're going to get this thing, and then you get there, and what happens is burnout. Because what it took to win that business and what it takes to sustain that business are not the same things. And you haven't done the work to sustain the business. And that's sort of what this, to me, this whole high-performance conversation really becomes about is when you achieve high performance and when you build that foundation and you know what that feels like, when you hit these moments of stress, you have something deeper to dig into. It's like the veterinary sciences that allow you to get through this blip without doing permanent damage to your organization. Tim Sweet: You talked about the various, you know, with the horse racing example or when we're talking about appreciating differences in people, drawing on that deeper awareness, on those deeper triggers, those levers that you can pull that are down there, or you have to make sure that they're shored up and that you're supporting people and all of these intricate spaces. That gives us another level of power. When you think about the veterinary awareness of an animal, all of the different variables that go into making a champion. When we think about the student coming out and just being self-aware of all of the things that can make what they want to see so that when they are the young entrepreneurial high-tech startup, they know what they want to see in their organization. And it's a lot more holocratic than you're going to get in some of the more structured vertical organizations. But we develop this new language around all of these different variables that we can now go and we can change and test and augment. And I know you and I've talked in the past, you brought it up, the power that gives you and the control that gives you, because it's not simply about saying, Well, we're going to change all of them at once, but we're going to go observe the one that matters, and we're going to make an educated guess and say, Okay, this is the constraint at the time and we're going to change that and we're going to observe and watch. And that was the other piece that I wanted you to speak a little bit to because it's like, you know, think of the power that we get in a team when we have the language and the granularity. Granular awareness of all the things that matter, that we can go in there and we can pick out the one thing that's going to make a difference. Rita Ernst: There is a method to the madness, so to speak. There is science behind teamwork, right? And so you cannot just jump and skip steps. So it's forming, storming, norming, performing for a reason. And so order does matter. If you are trying to do norming, which is about behaviors and processes and how we work together, but you have trust issues because we don't really know one another, you're dead in the water. You got to go all the way back to the forming stage where building relationship and trust with one another. So in my world, there are three key things that always have to be present. And the first and foundational piece is mutual respect. If there is no respect present, nothing can happen. So if I walk into your organization and things have devolved to the place where the employees are ready to rage against management and walk out the door, right, they're ready to picket this business, they feel disrespected, they feel unheard, they've got... Us trying to put in a new system or a new process is a waste of time. You've got to heal. Tim Sweet: Busy under-bossing each other. Rita Ernst: Yeah, you got to fix the relationship and the respect thing first. Nobody - was it Maya Angelou who said, Nobody remembers what you said, but they remember how much you cared, or something, there's a saying like that - I mean, it's sort of that that that essential idea of see me as a person. Connect with me at that level first. So respect is the entry condition. You cannot have teams if you do not have mutual respect. That's just going to have to happen. Then the next thing is mutual purpose. So now that I respect you and I'm willing to be in relationship or in team with you, do we have a shared purpose that we care about? Are we committed to creating something together that rallies us? I go back to the same example. So even if all of your team is happy with everybody else in the team, but they're still failing to meet the goals, I can't dig into fixing systems and processes if we've lost sight of what the goal is, where we're trying to go, you know, and why it's important. So if they think that what we're about is excellence and customer service and they are putting as much intense time, which is costing you money to the bottom line, to really be there for customer service and you've switched gears and you're not so hot on customer service at the moment, and you're thinking, No, like at this point we just need more customers, we just need faster customer integration to our system. Well, those are different messages, different purposes, and they're driving different behaviours and it's creating the conflict. And then the third piece - so we have to have mutual respect, we have to have mutual purpose - and then we can get to mutual meaning, which is the norming part of the conversation, which is about, you know, shared language and how we work together and processes and things for how we operate so that it is as effective as it can be. But you do have to take things in a certain order. And if you just try to start changing everything all at once, there's too much interconnectedness and it's impossible to anticipate how that dynamic will play out and what the result will be. Tim Sweet: Yeah, it's a fundamental error that a lot of teams get or leaders get trapped in is if, let's say we're in that organization where trust is really the breakdown, where it's mutual respect - and if you use like model, trust before conflict, before commitment, before accountability, before results - if you start trying to work accountability when you haven't dealt with mutual respect and trust, science will often call that a beta error, you know? The alpha error being you get the answer wrong. So two plus two equals three, alpha error, right? If it's two plus two equals penguin, the answer may be a penguin, just not to that question. So, you know, beta error is we're getting the right answer to the wrong question. And so, yeah, let's work on accountability systems. Let's install a new performance scorecard or something. But that's the wrong answer if we haven't dealt with the fundamentals of trust and respect. We have to start. Rita Ernst: I'm loving this analogy. Yes. Yes. Yes, absolutely. Tim Sweet: As I said, I started my management journey really in operations management, performance improvement, you know, Deming, Six Sigma, Lean, Hammer, all of those. That's, I'm deeply schooled in that stuff. But I found that I could go in and I could design elegant processes, big processes, floor-to-ceiling processes, performance systems, management systems. Sure, great. Do it. But if I didn't have the people and I didn't have them properly collaborating and I didn't have trust and I didn't have leaders on board and people on board, it didn't matter. It was the right solution to the wrong problem. The problem I should have been looking at was trust. And that's why my first business gave way to my second business, which was all around the right people on the team working on the right stuff with the capacity for excellence, is what the problem is all about. It's not jumping to the engineering of the processes. Rita Ernst: I love mastermind groups. There's something to be gained from that. But it, but this is also one of the important things to remember about not seeking true expertise in situations like this, and then - I've talked about this in the book, but you see this - as a leader, you go out to your leader network and you talk about the symptoms that you're seeing, right? Somebody can give you a band aid for that symptom. Right solution for the wrong problem. Right? It's just not really going to get to you. So if you're a diabetic and your insulin is out of whack and somebody can tell you, oh, well, take this medicine for that ache and pain, oh, try this like, yeah, like you can, that'll help with some things, but that's not, that's not going to fix the fundamental issue that you need to have fixed. I do encourage you to recognize, dear listeners, that there is some expertise to really understanding the order of things and really assessing. So in our practice, we always say, Well, I have to come in and assess. It's not... and so that gets to number two, be leery of the consultant that comes to you that says, I have it in a box. Let me give you the solution in a box because as you just said, without really getting to the heart of the issues and knowing where we are, it could be the perfect solution that will never work because it's in the wrong order. Tim Sweet: Yeah. Be careful of the solution that they're providing with an economy of scale because it means it likely is a rubber stamp. It likely is a paint-by-number. And it's likely full of shoulds. Here's the thing you should do. You should really do that. And beware of shooting all over yourself, because it's like that's when there's a person that needs a diagnosis of being a diabetic who's been saying, you know, you should really take more vitamin D or you should really, you know, have you thought about journaling. Like it's a good thing to do, but it's not going to solve your problems. And, you know, and this is where I would toot the horn of the small bespoke operator here, is that I take a deeply personal approach and I'm sure you do as well. Where we go in and we get to the bottom of what really is there and we're not on our agenda. We're not, we're on theirs. We're not trying to sell - I have a massive toolbox, and I'm sure you do, too - I don't bring it out for everybody. I'm there to find the right, the best possible solution to their unique special challenge, and even more importantly, wake them up to that uniqueness and wake them up to the challenge so that they can see it. And once they see it, once we create that gap and maybe that gap is because they experienced it before. But once we create that gap, then they will solve for it. They will find a way if they understand what high function looks like. Rita Ernst: And, you know how I love my little analogies, if I can give a great analogy to build on what you're saying. The other thing I think that we bring in the way that we practice is akin to captive versus independent agents in insurance. So you're experiencing symptoms of diabetes. You may not be, like you may still have some functioning. We can say, okay, so here's some naturopathic choices, here's some Eastern medicine solutions, here are some traditional things, here's some health and wellness practices, like we can bring a whole suite of options to you, versus we have insulin. Tim Sweet: But centred around a qualified problem. Centred around a qualified and quantified analysis or a deeply understood pattern that makes sense. And everybody goes, yes, this is a real thing. I may not see it from your perspective, but I can understand that this is legit now. Rita Ernst: Because at the end of the day, insulin injections may always be required, but the amount and frequency could be very different if you incorporated other practices. Right? Tim Sweet: That uncovers another issue with teamwork when we're undergoing these types of transformations, and that is resist the urge to boil the ocean, resist the urge to change everything, resist the urge to give up on everything that you've been doing right for all these years. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Appreciate what you're doing well, and go in and cut with a, operate with a scalpel, not a shotgun. It's a much better approach. Rita Ernst: When I'm networking with people and they ask me to describe my clients, one of the things that I say is that my clients are very smart, successful business people, because it's true. I don't know everything. I'm not McKinsey and Company. I don't have millions of people that go to research on all these things. What I lean into is my ability to use inquiry and curiosity and to, you know, connect the dots to ask questions that allow that business owner to uncover their knowing and genius. They know a lot of things that I don't know that I need to know. You know, I'm like the special seasoning in some ways that you sprinkle in to to to make the great recipe that, you know, that really takes it from mediocre to like five-star restaurant quality. But at the core, I'm trusting that they know their business and really helping them to uncover the things that they know, but they're just not accessing because they are so overwhelmed with the volume of things competing for their time and attention. Tim Sweet: I mean, they're busy working in the business, not on the business. And we have the luxury. We have the luxury, again, I've said this to you before, and I mean, as a profession, we have the luxury of analyzing what does it mean to lead, about studying the science behind leadership, about looking at, about staying up on the latest ideas and developing a toolbox of everything from the latest to the, you know, greatest hits that work well and everything in between. And then we spend our time getting deeply involved with business owners learning about their business. They're the experts in those spaces. But understanding the types of struggles that they undergo and eventually using that to help us diagnose and lead to good questions and inquiry and Socratic coaching and everything that we need to do to really get to the bottom of something. And I'd say that we, there is a time and a place for the McKinsey and for the Deloitte's and for the, you know, PwC's, and when you're dealing with something that's a massive, massive organization with a big change, they can operate at those scales. Sure. But even if you're in a large organization or a small organization, I think the quality of your result with an outside provider or with your team, is going to be directly related to the quality of the relationship that precedes that. And how, for lack of a better word, how intimate is the knowledge, professional knowledge between those two people, and are they sharing on a level? And if that level is deep and you're able to have high trust and lots of transparency and lots of openness, and really get to the bottom of things? Boy, those are the clients that I love and I continue to work with because it's just, they are the clients for life, not because we're never solving the issue, but because we're solving issue after issue after issue. Rita Ernst: Yes. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Tim Sweet: And it's so fun because you feel like your, you don't feel like, you are part of their journey. Rita Ernst: When I talk about clients, I talk about them as if I'm on their payroll. Because I just feel like I'm part of the team. Like we've really melded in that way. Yes. Tim Sweet: And personally invested in not just the success of the company, but the success of the people. And again, I don't say this so that we're, like we're kind of waxing poetic on the thing. It's more about this particular vocation, I think requires you to go in and care. And because doing it without a modicum of care, it's pretty cold. And you lose a lot of the nuance and you're and you're unable to, I think, you're unable to connect to the degree you need to connect to make real and lasting change, especially in the areas where the change has to occur in mindset, where it has to occur in personal identity and the understanding of where beliefs are getting us, and all of these things that are actually pretty they're pretty tough. It's much easier to go and draw a flowchart. It's way easier. Rita Ernst: You're reminding me, Tim, of this epiphany that I've had in the last year for sure. I love Simon Sinek's work on 'Start With Why', I've spent a lot of time thinking about why and about my own personal values and other things. And at the end of the day, what I realized, what I came back to, is a long time ago I did this leadership course and we had a deck of values cards and we had to like get it down to 3 out of a deck of 52. And there was a whole process for that. And my number one card was legacy. And when I think about myself and what I do and how I do it and why I choose the, make the choices that I make, legacy is still that guiding value. It's really at the core of my why. But what is different for me is that when I think about legacy, I don't think about wealth building financially. I think about wealth building in relationships. And so my legacy is measured, for me, in terms of my ability to really leave somebody better than I found them. And that's really my definition of legacy. And so it does, to your point about this beautiful space that we get to be in, you know, that that is always my intention. My intention is how can I come in and contribute in a way that's going to leave this person and this organization at a better place. And that is so tremendously joyful for me to be a part of that work and that conversation that I don't ever see myself walking away and doing anything else. Tim Sweet: Yeah, I think finding that definition for yourself and, you know, it's funny when you talk about pulling out the deck of cards and doing the values. I mean, I do this all the time. That's what I travel with a deck of values cards like because you never know when that's going to be, when that's going to be the issue, when that's the disconnect. It's a really important part to start with. And for myself personally, it's not legacy that drives me forward, but it's something similar. I want to see people reach their full potential. And I hate, hate to see people struggle. If I see a system or a process or a person that is struggling, especially if that is self-generated friction, oh, there's something that I just, because it feels unfair and unnecessary that a person would have to struggle against themselves or the process, certainly we can find a way that you can go to work and the work is challenging, otherwise it would be called a vacation. But you go and you work, but it's also rewarding and it happens with ease. So having success be that path of least resistance is so important. Finding that for everybody. But man, you know what? Life is going to put rocks in that river. It's going to put logs, it's going to put beavers generating dams and old rusted cars, and the river of your life is going to have to move around all of these things. And the question is, can they be removed? Have some of those you put there and you assume are there permanently, and we can remove those. And that kind of takes us full circle to the shoulds that were offered, the bright and shiny things that guess what, that's somebody dropping rocks in your river and you now have to operate around that thing. Whereas if we can simplify and we get down to the basics of what makes you effective and what makes you, what makes a team function properly and an organization excel, often that is a reductive process. It's not an additive process. It's like, let's ditch the garbage and get back to the basics of what really is predicting success. Sure, adapt new ways of doing things, but make sure the basics are covered and covered well. So anyway. Woo hoo. Boy, Rita. Rita Ernst: What a great conversation, Tim. What a great conversation. Tim Sweet: We inspired a whole bunch of people that want to now become consultants or we've scared, you know, a whole bunch of people off. Well, I mean, the thing is, it's a really interesting insight perhaps, for people to see two people that are involved in organizational development and dynamics playing with these topics. Because I know of you and I know of me, we think deeply about these things and it's important for us to be craftspeople when it comes to it, to be artisans of our trade, right? And I think maybe that's helpful for people to see. Like not just that we sit back and we kind of let the knowledge wash over us. We're pretty active. You're pretty active. Kudos to you. Rita Ernst: Well, thank you. And kudos to you as well. So I have enjoyed coming back to spend time with your audience. Thank you so much for inviting me to continue our conversation. And it has been a sheer pleasure to just get to think more deeply, because again, I'll go back to what I said before, being a solopreneur I'm not surrounded by people that I get to have these great, deep conversations with, and I always walk away with some new nugget from listening to you on your podcast or talking with you. So thank you. Tim Sweet: It's wonderful to play around with these ideas with you and deepen my own understanding, and I really appreciate that. And Rita, I want to just thank you so much for being here. And I can't wait till the next time we can play around with these things. Rita Ernst: Thank you very much. | |||
| 31 May 2023 | Simplicity, Alignment, and Performance with Richard Young | 00:16:04 | |
Tim Sweet is joined by Richard Young, performance clarity expert and author of Simplify, to talk about Richard’s three systemic keys that set repeated medalists apart from the rest. Richard’s insight on sustained performance isn’t solely applicable to sport, but to every aspect of life in which we want to excel. Richard is no stranger to great achievement in sport, having won international gold medals, coached world champions, and participated and coached in several Olympics. He created programs that have contributed to this success around the globe, and it’s that performance insight that he draws on when he explains his three keys to high-performance sport success. Tim Sweet and guest Richard Young break down the three keys of strategic simplicity, language alignment, and performance wellbeing. Richard defines wellbeing as performing well in every moment and he explains how sustained performance is the main goal, the necessity of alignment to success, and what simplicity looks like. Richard’s words resonate with clear insight and striking analogy, and are directly applicable to leadership in any capacity and performance in any job. About Richard Young Richard Young has been involved with preparation for 10 Olympics across most roles (athlete, coach, leader, researcher). He has won international gold medals, coached world champions, and created programmes in innovation and learning that have contributed to Olympic medals for three countries. Richard has a PhD and later targeted his research to the differences between medallists and non-medallists, their coaches, technical staff, leaders and the system they are in. He is driven by helping others convert high potential into sustained high performance. He works internationally helping leaders and experts simplify, align and accelerate. He was married 24 years to a beautiful person, Donna, who passed away in October 2021 from illness. Born in the UK, raised in Canada, Richard currently lives in Dunedin, New Zealand with his four children. — Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Richard Young | Performance Clarity Expert, Author, Breakthrough specialist: — Transcript Transcript Richard Young: [00:00:00] Your bones get stronger and we recover. So we need stress. And Gallup studied 121 countries and 150,000 people, and they found that meaningful lives had stress. No stress. No meaning. But coping was the key difference. So if you can't cope, then it's not a meaningful life. It's a real corner you're stuck in. Tim Sweet: [00:00:25] I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you, my friend, are a leader. And this show is all about and all for you. Welcome to the Sweet on Leadership Podcast, episode eight. [00:00:53] Welcome to the Sweet on Leadership Podcast, where we unlock the secrets of the most influential, trusted and impactful leaders in business today so you can become your best version of a leader. And now your host, don't get him started on why Dungeons and Dragons teaches life skills, Tim Sweet. Tim Sweet: [00:01:17] In this episode of Sweet on Leadership, I'm absolutely thrilled to welcome my friend and mentor, Richard Young, to the show. Richard is a true expert in the field of high performance. He has decades of experience as an athlete, coach, leader and researcher. I first met Richard years ago when we were both studying structural consultation with Robert and Rosalind Fritz in Vermont. We were bonding over being Canadian, having mutual friends in the Calgary biking community, and a shared passion for helping people achieve their full potential. I remember I felt I had known him for years. His curiosity, sense of humor and easygoing personality made him easy to connect to and care about. Since then, I've been lucky enough to stay in touch with him. His work in sport has been absolutely influential to my practice with business and academic leaders. In his book 'Simplify', he's distilled these years of knowledge and experience into a high-performance playbook that will help you win the long game. In the book, he outlines three systemic keys that set repeat medalists apart from the rest of the pack. Strategic simplicity. Language alignment. Performance wellbeing. These are keys not only applicable in sport, but in any aspect of life and career. Richard's research has focused on decoding what makes successful competitors, coaches and support teams perform at their best. Tim Sweet: [00:02:42] As a former Olympic athlete and coach himself, Richard has won international gold medals and coached world champions. He's also created several programs in innovation and learning that have contributed to Olympic medals and world championships around the globe. I've been fortunate enough to learn directly from Richard, and that's what I'm wanting to bring to you today. I can attest to the value and applicability of Richard's work, not only from how it's helped me help clients, but helped me directly. Beyond 30 years of impressive credentials, I have to say that Richard is just a great guy. He's warm and thoughtful and deeply committed to helping others achieve. It's an absolute honor to bring Richard to you today so he can speak about his work and insights that he's gathered over an incredible career. So without further ado, let's dive into this conversation with Richard Young. Richard, it's really great to have you join me again. Every time I talk to you, I get so excited not just because you're so knowledgeable in your space, you're just one of those people that is great to spend time with. It just fills me with joy every moment that I get to spend with you. And it's really a gift for you to be here today. So thank you for joining me. Richard Young: [00:03:57] Oh, same to you, Tim. Same to you. Tim Sweet: [00:03:59] We were talking just before we hit record here and, you know, chewing around some ideas of what we could speak about. And I think the one that really resonated for both of us was this idea of sustained performance. And when I think about this in terms of the needs of my audience and my clients or any organization for that matter, we're in a period right now where people have worked hard to make it through a tumultuous time, and they've put a lot of systems in place and they feel like they're doing a lot right. But I hear back that we still have attrition and we're losing people, and it feels at times like people aren't connected to their career and they're not connected to the goals of the business. And the teams will start to kind of dissolve and separate. And so you do so much work in this space. Maybe you could tell me a little bit about some of the work that you've been doing that's exciting in terms of sustained performance and then either before or after, really give us a rundown on what you think that means and how you define it. Richard Young: [00:05:06] Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So my area is high-performance sport. So that's where I have lived most of my life and that's most of the work I do. And so I work with senior leaders and experts, so that means they have in that game won a lot. And so sustained performance has a different tone to them. So it isn't just a medal now and again, it's a sustained winning culture. And winning isn't just output and outcomes. So after a lot of years in the game, and most of the senior leaders would say the same thing, that high performance is communication. And so the medal is symbolic and it always catches up to high quality communication. So that's what starts the game and sustained performance. It turns out from having done work at the Olympic, it's mostly Olympic sport, and then compared the differences across five Olympics of medalists and non-medalists, and so repeat customers basically, so winning a medal isn't that hard. But maintaining a winning culture is very hard. And so a couple of points that you raised there of burning through people and churning through good people. So that's typical in winning cultures. When it's an output, they just burn through people and move to the next one. And I live in New Zealand and so the population is small and you can't burn through people here. So the talent pool is small, the population is small, and so it stands out when you're burning through people that there's nobody in line to take over. Richard Young: [00:06:54] And not only that, it's not just a numbers game, but nobody's voting to join because of the culture that you've got. So I found three things in my work that are key systemic differences between sustained performers and the rest. And that's they have well-being, they have simplicity, and they have alignment. Those three, and how you see it, well-being is energy and you can feel it in, like one performance director said, it meets you at the door. So the kind of energy and well-being, it isn't just healthy habits because in sport there's a lot of healthy habits. That's one definition of well-being or wellness and there's life well lived is another definition. But the definition that I've arrived at over time is performance well-being. And that's performing well in every moment. So, or as the Dreyfus brothers said, skillful coping. And you get a lot of disasters in sport from people who can't cope and stress is part of the game in not only sport, sport's no different to the rest of life. You know a lot of people talk like it is, but it isn't. So there's wins and losses and, you know, public scrutiny and sometimes you get hired, fired, selected, deselected, all of that. It's life. And so the leader is, across the board, like the athlete as a personal leader, the better they are at coping what's in front of them. And then they leave the sport bigger and better. Tim Sweet: [00:08:28] When you say skillful coping, and I think it's a great term, is it related to, say, resilience, the ability to handle what's in front of you and then adjust, recover, move to the next step? Would that be a good analog? Richard Young: [00:08:41] So that's one part of it, because resilience is you don't break, and antifragility is probably closer to skillful coping, which is you get better with stress. So like a bone, like you were just telling me about your surgery. And so with stress, your bones get stronger and we recover. So we need stress. And Gallup studied 121 countries and 150,000 people, and they found that meaningful lives had stress. No stress, no meaning. But coping was the key difference. So if you can't cope, then it's not a meaningful life. It's a real corner you're stuck in. So antifragility in this game and in sport for sustained performance, is it. And so we deal with empowering and transforming people so that they are able to respond. You know I got Lane Eight but I wanted Lane One. How do you cope? It's small things and then it's big things as well. I'm deselected, life is over in my first thought, but my second thought is no I've learned a ton in sport and I've got a lot to offer. So that's part of the triangle. And the other is the simplicity. They're doing what matters. And it's pretty simple. Tim Sweet: [00:09:58] And that sounds like that's a, that wellbeing or that choice that you just put in front in that example, I've been deselected, wait a minute, I've learned a lot. I now need to go forward and get from the eighth spot to the first spot. This is a chance for them to focus in on what really matters and that simplicity that you're talking about. Richard Young: [00:10:16] Yeah, that's right. So they're interconnected. So it looks like a triangle, probably like that, but it's actually not a triangle. It's like an infinity symbol like that. So you touch one thing and you touch the rest. If things get simpler, then it's easier to align people up to a purpose. And in sport, the purpose matters and it has to be something that fires you up to get you out of bed. And so if you've got repeatable winning, you can hear kind of the exhaustion in people. They've done it before, but there's something deeper, and so sustained performance is the new deeper. So how do we maintain a successful culture? And yes, medals are appearing, but how do we change how we operate, how we communicate across our entire organization? And so on. A triangle of well-being, alignment, and simplicity, it can be laid over any part of the organization. So how they select, so what's the entry like? What's the exit like? When you're deselected, what does the organization do for you? When you've been in the game for 20 years and they've just hired a new coach and you're out, how does the organization deal with the out? What does that look like? So it's role modelling sustained performance all the time, performance communication all the time. Everybody's watching and you role model how you want the organization to look even when there's no one in the stands. Tim Sweet: [00:11:50] What happens when a group steps off that sustained performance, steps off that role modelling and they fail to in an instant? Is it catastrophic? Does it reverberate through the organization? What happens when they mess up? Richard Young: [00:12:07] Yeah. So it depends what level they are. So if you've got an athlete that's messed up, we can, you know, we can realign. So, you know, values, purpose, all the work that you do as well helps realign. So it isn't just an event, Oh that went wrong, just do it differently next time. It's actually looking underneath, like arduous work as well. What's underneath that? So the event, the pattern, and there's typically a systemic component underneath every event. So we can work with the athlete at that level. If it's at the leadership board level, it's a bigger ship steering a lot slower so it can have a bigger ripple. So the alignment, spinal alignment, it's called in sport from top to bottom, from board chair to athlete. Tim Sweet: [00:12:54] I love that. Oh, that's great. Richard Young: [00:12:56] And if that's not there and the top steers the boat, so if you're looking at the athlete down here and the board chair up here, if they wobble, you can see it's a big instability in the whole boat. If we've got some small wobbles down here, it's not rocking as much. But the alignment across the top to bottom, our purpose, our values, what matters. And so the model works to help just bring unconscious to conscious. Tim Sweet: [00:13:25] And that is your third point to that triangle, isn't it? Alignment. Richard Young: [00:13:28] Yeah. Yeah. And it's seen in language. So from all the reviews that I've done. So it was hundreds and hundreds of interviews and an analysis of language. You can see the clarity. And then when you're inside the organization, you can, you can hear it and you'll know that in your work, like what people say describes the alignment they've got. And the longer you're in the game, sometimes we've got more because experts have more assumptions than others, which is a bummer. But that is how it is. And so uncovering these assumptions and blind spots is the difference maker between a performance and a sustained performer. Sustained performers have fewer blind spots. And so I use that triangle to uncover blind spots. That's really where it's pointed. Tim Sweet: [00:14:22] So we should begin to alter our thinking. I mean, we often talk about high-performance organizations, and high-performance organizations are not the pinnacle of performance. We need to be thinking about sustained performance, which is really a superior position because it allows us to perform excellently and keep on performing excellently and make sure that, I imagine it's also a continuously improving entity at that point because it's dealing with things as they arrive and understanding them and reconstituting itself to handle those external pressures and internal strife and whatnot. You have given me so much new language from the spinal alignment, which I think is just fantastic - I said that right, I hope - to antifragility and oh man, every time, Richard, every time I talk to you, it's like a treasure trove and a gold mine of new learning. And I just really appreciate you taking us off the page when we get so stuck with thinking about standard business thinking and theories. You really challenged me today, and I love it. And I can't wait for the next time we do this. Richard Young: [00:15:37] Right. Same here, Tim. Yeah. Tim Sweet: [00:15:38] Yeah. But so much to chew on. So thanks very much. And I can't wait till the next time I can get you on the mic. So thanks for joining me, Richard. Richard Young: [00:15:48] Pleasure, Tim. Pleasure. Love your work. Tim Sweet: [00:15:51] All great. Thank you so much. We'll talk soon. | |||
| 14 Jun 2023 | Breaking Free Of Inaction with Julie Freedman-Smith, Part 1 | 00:35:28 | |
Tim Sweet welcomes Julie Freedman Smith back to the show. Julie, the creator and founder of Parent-Break online community, and Tim have a discussion about the feeling pervading people’s lives and work-lives today. They break down why there is a sense of malaise and where the fear stems from. Julie has a perspective on how work and life have shifted in very recent years for children and young adults. She shares from the sense of what Covid concerns and access to world news in real time have done to satisfaction and a sense of meaning in their lives. Julie sees the changes as essentially optimistic in that the challenges presented are opportunities for growth, which is an opinion not everyone shares. Tim Sweet and guest Julie Freedman Smith dissect the current inertia dragging at both the business world and individual lives. They talk about how low-level anxiety and depression have helped shift the feeling, why individual dissatisfaction and sense of meaning travels up into holding business back, and just why we are collectively holding our cards closer to our chest in terms of what we’re willing to give in these uncertain times. It’s an illuminating conversation about the dramatic shift we are all enduring. About Julie Freedman Smith Julie Freedman Smith is the creator/founder of Parent–Break, an online community providing time and space for parents to connect with themselves and each other, to offer guidance, and to acknowledge the parenting challenges while celebrating the successes. Author, Blogger, Podcast Host and Parenting Expert, Julie Freedman Smith has been guiding parents across North America for 20+ years. Julie also enjoys practising and teaching Tai Chi and working as a professional choral singer and clinician. — Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Julie Freedman-Smith | Author, Blogger, Podcast Host and Parenting Expert: — Transcript Tim Sweet: We've been going through the motions. Not everything. Not everybody, not all the time. In aspects of our life, certain people have been going through the motions, I'd say a lot of people have been going through the motions. And that's why when they wake up that they're at a point where I feel its absence. They know something needs to change. Then the question comes, Where's my foothold? I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you, my friend, are a leader. And this show is all about and all for you. Welcome to the Sweet on Leadership podcast. Welcome to the Sweet on Leadership Podcast, where we unlock the secrets of the most influential, trusted and impactful leaders in business today so you can become your best version of a leader. And now your host, in the pandemic he wanted to pick up a new skill and chose hair colorist, Tim Sweet. Tim Sweet: Hey, Julie, thanks for joining me again. This is great. I'm so excited to talk to you one more time. So it's interesting that over the last few weeks, our conversations have sort of gravitated towards the same space. And what's been happening in my world is really an influx of people that suddenly are feeling a bit of malaise and are ready to take on some new challenges, but are struggling with how do they get started. So I thought we could talk about that today. Julie: That sounds great. I'm hearing the same thing. I'm hearing that from parents about their kids and I'm hearing that from parents about themselves. So I think it's pretty universal and it's not surprising. So it's a great place to start. Tim Sweet: In the parenting world when you're dealing with parents, what are some of the reasons that people are finding it difficult to get moving? Julie: This is just my perception, but I feel like there's just a drag, like just people, I don't know, don't feel like they've got to get up and go. I think there's a little bit of hesitation about what's coming, fear of where Covid's going to lead us moving forward. And I think everybody's just exhausted from the last two years of everything we've been going through and pushing forward, pushing forward, pushing forward. And now there's no push. And I don't think that's abnormal because I think there's got to be these lulls. You know, there's a season for spring and there's a season of fall and there's all these seasons. But it does feel like this lag is pretty pervasive. Tim Sweet: Yeah. I can't remember what the term is exactly, but it's people have been operating at, you know, peak, running on adrenaline and now, you know, you can only do that for so long when you're living in this push, push, push state, it feels like we're pushing rope sometimes. It doesn't feel like we're drawn into things. We're really forcing ourselves through this experience and having to dig deep to get there. Julie: Yeah, and I think it's overcoming inertia in a way, right? It's just like, ugh, how do I get myself started? Because maybe if I can get myself started, we can move forward. So I'm hoping to talk about that today. I also, neither of us are psychologists, nor do we ever claim to be, but I was reading a really interesting article in the New York Times on Sunday about the fact that there is so much sadness and overwhelm, and it's not surprising, like it's not necessarily a crisis because there are a lot of feelings left over from two years of this. And it's not unreasonable that our bodies are feeling that sadness and that fatigue. Interesting to think about. Okay, here's a feeling. And then how are we going to find things to inspire us to move forward? Tim Sweet: I mean, there's most certainly this low-level anxiety or depression that people are exposed to because there's been a lot of uncertainty, and sadness, and it's just so ubiquitous right now. We've come to accept it, have pushed through it, but now it's just sitting there like noise coming out of a set of old speakers, that we've just grown to kind of accept it as that. The record scratch that comes. Julie: The fuzz in the background. Tim Sweet: Yeah, yeah, fuzz in the background. And would you say that the challenges that parents are facing now are bigger than they were in the past? Julie: Oh, my gosh. I don't know how we answer that question because I wasn't in the past. Were you? Tim Sweet: I mean, bigger than they were two years ago or three years ago. Are they meatier challenges or are they really the same? What I'm asking: does the hill feel bigger to climb? Julie: Oh, I am, presume that the hill feels gigantic because of all the stuff that was there two years ago, this feels like a throwback to the last set of conversations that we had. All the stuff that was there two years ago is still here and now there's something piled on top, right? But I also think there's a whole layer of worry for parents. I'm worried that my kids missed out. I'm worried that they missed out socially. I'm worried that academically they're going to be falling behind. And so the worry adds another level, right? And so sometimes it's can we take that worry and put it aside and just focus on what we're doing here? Because if you're spending so much energy in the worry, we don't have the energy to devote to the new. Tim Sweet: We're kind of putting a bunch of energy into the friction that's there rather than the solution itself. It's kind of just maintaining that reaction to the noise. If you're riding in a car, maybe your wheels are misaligned and you're spending a whole bunch of your energy on the wheel and maybe the rubber that's on the tires in just constantly making these sort of adjustments that are just suboptimal. You're constantly drifting towards the right, so you got to keep a hand on the left. Yes, it's moving you forward, but it's really not efficient. Julie: Yeah, exactly. And your mind is trapped there. How are you finding this with your leadership clients? Tim Sweet: One of the most interesting things is we have teams of all sorts. We have teams that have been together forever. We have teams that have formed and that are new. But what is most interesting to me is a lot of where we're gaining traction is getting right back to basics. It's pretty standard things that teams need to accomplish, which over the last three years have kind of been thrown out or ignored. Basics in communication, basics in relationship building, basics in trust building, conceptualizing one's, you know, amount of choice in a process or system dealing with how overwhelmed we are with the little things that are happening. And it all starts to manifest as kind of a feeling of fatigue. But I would say fatigue is probably not as accurate as - and I'll use this in a very specific way - resignation, saying I'm resigned to the fact that this is just what work feels like now. And yeah, not so much resignation in terms of we talk about the great resignation in terms of people leaving their jobs. But I just mean sort of the great acceptance that it's going to just be, it's going to just be tough. There's a lot of questions about why try to get out of it. And that need to say, you know, am I capable of something different? And I think a lot of the reasons for that is people were running on adrenaline and they were trying to make things better. And then they kept getting hit from the side. And we would try to improve something over here. And maybe we thought we were kind of getting a handle on it. We're moving through Covid. We don't really know how to handle it. And then all of a sudden whack, they get slapped and everything changes again and another challenge comes up. We thought we had a light at the end of the tunnel and then it changes. And so again, it's this trying to get people into a state where they see choice, hope, they feel empowered. Julie: Possibility, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tim Sweet: And it doesn't feel complex once we get there. But even if we've got the answers, even if we're saying, you know, I could really try something in this area of my career or this area of my role, then the question comes, Well, how do I get started? There is a lot of, or I would say an extra layer of resistance than that would experience with clients three years ago. Julie: Yeah, for sure. The way you were talking about it made me think of this idea of there's a feeling and feelings are quite transient and we spend a lot of time teaching kids, Yeah, you have a feeling it's coming through your body and that feeling is going to be here and then it's going to go. And yet what I hear you saying is that those feelings have now almost been glommed onto a person's identity. So this feeling is now here, it's static. And so part of it is, is there a possibility for a new identity? Is there a way for us to imagine ourselves without that glommy feeling? What might that look like and how? And even if we can just do that for a small amount of time, we can maybe find our way into moving forward and see where we go. Tim Sweet: That acceptance is a big part of this, I think, and I think we should really think about that. Again, we're not psychologists, but they often talk about what's your range of highs and lows and do you understand how elastic you are in your own mood? And we have to be aware of if that mood begins to close and if we become less reactive or if the set point, if our median level of happiness begins to slip to one side or the other. I think we can use a similar sort of model on capacity for change for organizations and capacity for change in individuals. And what we've seen here is that through disappointment, through fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, people have shut in a little bit and they're protecting a little bit. And so the challenge for creating change, creating innovation, creating momentum is just that little bit more sticky. And their capacity or their willingness or their excitement around change has moved, I would say, to the more resistant side of things. Julie: Right? So there's that courage, that willingness to be hurt again or to be disappointed again. Can we find that? Tim Sweet: I think so. And when we look at how much change we've undergone in the last two and a half years, I mean, we have been, really the business community or other organizational entities or whatever, there really should be quite impressed with just how much change - and I'm not saying all of it's positive - but I mean, there have been massive, massive shifts and people rallied and they made big, big changes and they strode into the unknown not knowing what this would really mean. And we're finding some of that out right now. And I think even then didn't exactly know all the good and all the bad that would come out of new ways of working and new challenges and what happens when you create different types of options. And we don't just adhere to traditional ideas of what it means to work and, you know, pull a 9 to 5 and get paid. And what is the agreement, the transaction between employer and employee, et cetera? A huge amount of change. And so this is kind of like change fatigue on a grand scale and at the same time being tremendously personal and protective. I think it is a byproduct of people also - perhaps this is one aspect of it - isolating. And so change now has been made very personal and is much more granular than perhaps it was before, or at least it's, the change is promised on a wide organizational level but then when it comes down to it, it's individuals that are having to change and they may not feel terribly supported or aligned with, you know, the overall movement. Tim Sweet: And so in the business sense, that's where we have it's a much higher lift because it's kind of like, well, what are you going to do tomorrow? Not what are we going to do and are we going to team around this? But now individually, people are hanging back a little bit. And if individuals hang back, then teams hang back. And if teams hang back, then organizations hang back. And there seems to be a lot more disconnect between setting that large vision for change and what is the individual actually going to do. So, I mean, we're banging around with a number of different factors here. We've talked about fatigue and we've talked about how is this change carried through the organization. We've talked, you know, I think there's still more to talk about. But from a business perspective, I think all of those reasons are there. It's manifesting as it's just harder to get people moving. And I would say one other thing. It's a little easier to get them moving for their own reasons. It's a little harder to get them moving for collective reasons. So again, I think that's part and parcel of this individualization and people being somewhat more fractured. So I don't know, does that ring true for you or does it have any bearing on family structures? Julie: Yeah, I think it really does. I think we also just have to remember that we all are obviously existing within these different levels of society, right? Like you can look at your team, you can look at your business, we can look at our kids and our families, but we also can look at the social structure and we can look at what's happening in the world and the battles that are being fought throughout the world. And it's really easy to be, because they all come into our immediate bedrooms with our devices, it's really easy to have the overlay of that trap us in our thought. Like, like, why do I, why does it even matter if I'm pushing forward here when people are being killed there? Am I a good person for blocking that out so that I can get my work done, or should I be investing all of my time in at least standing by them in some way? Right? So part of it is how do we take all of this stuff that's coming into our worlds and discern, okay, this is all happening and how am I choosing to live within this? And think in families, our kids are seeing that. And because they're well-meaning, they're caring, they're thoughtful, they're sensitive, all of this news that's coming in and smacking them in the face all the time can feel really overwhelming and unmotivating like, why am I even bothering if we aren't going to be here in ten years? And I'm hearing that from various levels, like I'm 50, so when I'm talking kids, I'm talking 20s and 30s as well. Obviously 30-year-olds are not kids, but that's kind of the way I'm thinking about it. I'm hearing these different generations talking about, well, should I even be planning for X if I'm not going to go that long? And so they're just not having that this is my arc of my life and how can I live that life as opposed to, yeah, why even bother? This is really glum. Tim Sweet: Yeah. No, but I mean, you're like when the external threats become so large and the external challenges become large and our feeling of what we mean in the world becomes comparatively smaller, that sense of nihilism really can set in and it can be a) what is it all for? If I want to go in and I want to work with a team to improve, I don't know throughput of their, of how many customers they can process or something. Okay. So they get an extra 10% of customers. Yeah, it probably means something. It probably means we can probably track that back to profitability and the rest of it. But then immediately if you're expending that effort and meanwhile you're seeing people dying on social media or these huge threats emerging, it does feel like you're playing out a simulation. You're, it's a game compared to real life. I think the interesting flip side is at the same time, we have people wanting to have more investment in their own personal pursuits and their own, you know, spending time with family, maybe, it could be in fitness, it could be whatever the life side of the balance is, they're spending time there and these could be equally, you know, for instance, okay, if I'm thinking about my kids, it could be time on a video game or something. These could be nonproductive, but they are, they're feeling good. And so then we get back to, well, are we talking about we have this nebulous fear out here, this big, broad fear, and we get back down into, well, what am I doing in the moment? And is there an immediate payoff? And one aspect of organizational change or process change within a business is it's theoretical and then it is something that you can apply, but it's not terribly personal. And then it tends to have delayed gratification, if any gratification. The gratification may actually be experienced by somebody else in the organization or the customer or something along those lines, and they may not even recognize, you may not dot line your effort all the way through to that achievement unless you're measuring it or unless there's a system set up to do that. And so it can feel pretty unrewarding. It can feel like you're tipping your life force into some effort and you're not sure how that benefited me, right? In a way. Julie: Right! are But so that is so cool because if we aware of that, then we have an opportunity to ask ourselves the question, So where can I find that gratification? So how can I find this motivating or interesting? How can I tie this into something that's really important to me and be inspired by it? Because we choose that. Like we can wait for somebody else to make this interesting for us, or we can step in and say, No, I'm here, I'm using my time. How do I make this important to me? How do I make this valuable? Is it that yes, I'm doing a job that is not overly stimulating to me, but I'm earning money and I'm taking that money and I'm donating it to a cause that I really believe in. How do we make it something special for us? Because delayed gratification is something that we all need to learn to deal with, and part of that is playing a few games with ourselves around, Okay, so how do I make this special? How do I feel like I'm contributing? Is it about the people? I think that's really exciting, that to recognize that and then to figure out, okay, how do I play this game? Tim Sweet: I had a conversation just recently and it's another episode in this podcast with Paul Farmer from Mentoris down in Australia. And he is a very tactical consultant. I mean he deals with financial and strategy and yes, he's general business, but his practice has switched over into basically - and I've adopted some of this - his opening concern is how do you want to feel? When you're doing what you want in life, how does it feel? If the most important thing to you is arriving at a state where you feel successful, let's actually describe what that feels like. And then are we taking moves to move us closer to that? And I think if I then apply that to this conversation, if we don't have a clear bead on that, and we can't judge where we are and are we getting closer or farther away, we really are lacking something. I think for when we're engaged in sometimes unhealthy short-term gratification, you know, small distractions, these kinds of things, we get this kind of immediate snippets of this feeling, but it's not necessarily building up to the long term vision because, again, we don't know if we're going to be here in ten years. Tim Sweet: So that's kind of out of the table for right now. We're not too concerned. You know, everything's moved close up. We're not really thinking long-range. Again in business or - I hate saying that 'in business' - but in say, in a person's job, we're one step removed even from that. And it's kind of like we're not even promised that this is going to feel good. We haven't found why it's rewarding. Why is it fulfilling? Why do I take, why do I take pride in what I've done? Or why do I feel a sense of happiness, gratification, achievement, whatever that is, it just feels too far away. And in fact, I think maybe what's happened over the last two years is people have just been moving and settling for action without any clear reward or, you know, you're moving in spite of it. You're moving with no feedback or very little or random. And so we need to kind of get in tune again with why work, for instance, or parenthood or sport or whatever our pursuit is... Julie: Or making dinner or loading the dishwasher or going to bed or whatever, yeah. Tim Sweet: Okay. Let me amend. I mean within our sensory, whether it's physical or it's emotional. Julie: I get it. Tim Sweet: Yeah. But it happens within, it doesn't yet translate into any external measure, you know, yet. It's really, it's within our own simulation, within our own sensory net. It's like, did that just matter? And I think we've been going through the motions for quite a while. Not everything. Not everybody, not all the time. In aspects of our life, certain people have been going through the motions, I'd say a lot of people have been going through the motions. And that's why, you know, when they wake up that they're at a point where I feel its absence. They know something needs to change. And the question comes how to start, what to start on, where is my foothold? Julie: Gigantic shoe here, right? Tim Sweet: These umbrellas of fear that are just hanging over everybody and a lot of uncertainty and a lot of... I never thought - I mean, just to talk about the Ukraine for a minute - I'm a child of the 80s. I mean, I remember when the wall came down. I never thought we would be back there. I never thought in my lifetime we would be talking about renewed, you know, threat of nuclear annihilation or Cold War. I mean, we're not even in a Cold War, we've got a hot war right now. But, you know, and it's the last thing in the world I would have wished for my kids. Julie: Sure. And we can say the same thing where I kind of thought women's rights had kind of come a little bit and now we're watching them go backwards. Tim Sweet: Oh, yeah. Well, and you see these waves of like two steps forward, one step back or one step forward, two steps back. And I think a lot of that in my mind, and this is a little bit off-topic from where we are, but what I'm seeing is we're seeing such a move towards polarization in society and people have moved closer to the extreme. And what we're missing is we're missing this rational middle where people can disagree and still get stuff done. We're not missing it entirely. But I just think... Julie: No, I would argue that the media is telling us that we are a lot more disparate than we are, and there's a bunch of people hanging out in the middle who are just wanting the middle to be here. And I agree with you that all those scary things, hearing those scary things and the disparity and the distance between us is it's not easy to just kind of go, okay, let's go. Tim Sweet: And this is what's really interesting is when we think about 2018, 2019 and years before that, to understand just how fragile that social contract was. And I'm not saying it shouldn't. There's aspects of it that absolutely needed to change. But we again, we've approached a lot of change and a lot of areas very, very quickly, been more successful in some than others. But just how it didn't take much to question what is the employee-employer relationship, what does that actually, what is the promise of work actually look like? And what are our options? The bulk of society, do they have to assume that work looks a certain way and the transaction looks a certain way? And what is accessible to a person? What are they allowed to stand up against and be activists against and where are they allowed to find satisfaction in work? Julie: For me, that's what makes this time one of the coolest times to be living in. Because I think, and I might be the only person who thinks this, but I think we have, there are so many invitations for change or opportunities, directions that we might be able to make change in because we've seen what's happened over the two years. We've seen resourcefulness, we've seen inventiveness and people being given a crisis and then rising to it and figuring out a way that we can make this work. We're all talking to people across the world through Zoom now in ways, or Instagram and all the different social media. We just have connections in so many different ways and so many opportunities to fight for what we really believe in and to create opportunities for people to work together or to start those opportunities happening. And so for me, this is a time of like, Woah. Tim Sweet: Oh yeah, it's a time of renewal for sure. Julie: I know that's not for everybody. But for me, I think living right now is super interesting because we have the opportunity to step in and step up. Tim Sweet: I think it is for everybody in a way. I'll say why. I don't think it's necessarily accessible to everybody, but I think we've come through an age. We've come through an age of the human being that is as profound as the industrial revolution. We've, this is a new age. It's a new revolution. And people have been trying to coin what kind of revolution is this. And it could be the new individualism. It could be the new... Julie: I hope it's not. God, I hope it's not. We've had enough individualism. We need some... Tim Sweet: Yeah. One philosopher was calling it The Age of Accessibility and another one was calling it The Age of Location. Like you can work from anywhere. You can choose how you're going to show up. And so whatever we're going to call it and I don't think it's been coined yet, it is different. And I think the critical mass we're seeing now, I do think we've been polarized, but I think we're going to see this crash back into the middle. And people are realizing that they can't wait for it to - it sounds kind of trite - but they can't wait for it to return to what it is. I don't think anybody's really thinking that way, but just that change is a-coming and I got to do something about it. And we're going to see more and more people rebalancing and resetting where they are. And I mean my coaching practice is just like it's, they're all showing up a little bit differently. But there just seems to be this, there has been this new energy. And so although we're talking about getting started, the will is there and it's growing. And so I think we're going to see another reset. This reset, though, is going to be more intentional than the last one. Julie: Yes. Or feeling a little bit more controlled, like we have more control over it. Tim Sweet: Maybe it's the Age of Intentionality. I don't know. Maybe we should come up with the old one. We better start making t-shirts. All right. Well, we've kind of, we've kind of talked, you know, and there's a couple of places that I think this is going. Here's what I would suggest. Why don't we put a pin in this right now? Let's have some closing thoughts around where we got to today. But then let's talk about where we want to shoot when we talk next. Because as everything you and I do, I mean, it's one thing to talk about the situation and to kind of visualize it, but then the question comes, what are we going to do? What are we going to actually, how are we going to turn this into something? Julie: Let's make it happen. Tim Sweet: Yeah, yeah. So what are your big, what are your big sort of summary thoughts on what we've managed? Have we managed anything? Oh, my gosh, we've meandered. Julie: I think there's the yin and the yang. There's the lethargy, there's the being stuck, the malaise, those low points. And there's the possibility and the opportunities that are still coming in regardless of how many years we're here. Right? We're here. Let's, let's do this. Let's figure out how we're going to do today. And so, yeah, I think it's looking at the whole picture. It's okay to have all of those things, the lows and the highs and that they all make up what life is. That's what I'm taking away from it. What about you? Tim Sweet: I think it's funny, the visual that I got when you were saying that the lows and the highs, was thinking about a groove in a record. And I think-- Julie: Groovy. Tim Sweet: Yeah. But I think people's malaise, right, the languish that has been sort of a reasonable feeling. Maybe it's helplessness, maybe it's depression, whatever it is, this kind of dull ache that we've had the last two years is there and then in stark relief, is starting to appear these peaks of desire for things to, you know, be more in control of the individual. What can the individual do? How do they need to change? There's an energy that's building in people. And the synergy is expressing itself in a whole bunch of different ways. Yeah, it could be personal success. We're seeing it a lot, you know, and we've seen it a lot in people's willingness to get back together, to accept certain risks and to try to reassemble. But we're seeing this stark relief of where we've been satisfied. And now people are going to rise up against their own experience and say, I want more. I want more of something, I got to, I don't know what that is yet. I haven't put my finger on it yet. And I certainly may not know what to act, how to act to get going. But there's just this, again, this relief between what... I think the tolerance for being tolerant with one's lack of fulfillment or kind of lack of potential in the world is going to quickly come to an end. Julie: Yeah, I see it as you're talking about, it's like now is the winter of our discontent, right? There's this like darkness, this the earth, you know, settling. And the leaves have fallen down and it's the cold and it's the winter. And it's this low point that we've been in. And then underneath the ground, there are these seeds. And while we can't see them, they're starting to send out roots and they're starting to poke and starting to grow upwards. They're still underground. But they're starting, right? There's that little frisson of something that's starting. Don't know what it's going to turn into. We can't see the plant yet, so we don't know what it is. But we know that even under that darkness and in the mud and in the cold, there is this something coming up. So cool. Tim Sweet: I think people want to matter again. And many people have gone through a question of just how much do they matter. We go back to that nihilism piece. We're not starting from being in a, you know, in a lord and vassal relationship. We're not starting with, you know, having come from abject poverty by and large. Julie: We aren't. Tim Sweet: We aren't. Some people are. Julie: Many people in this world are. Tim Sweet: [ Many people are, granted. But in the first world, you know, a Western context, we have a point of comparison where we were brought up believing in our own potential and our own power. We raised our children this way to believe that the world was their oyster. And so the last two, three years have fallen and gone against those reassurances. And so whether or not it's accurate, whether or not, you know, there's other challenges, people have felt like they matter more than they matter today. And. Yeah, many people, not everyone, but many people. And so there is, I think there's an impatience with feeling like they are smaller than they want to be. And again, it won't be everybody and some people will remain oppressed and some people will will be moving from oppression into something else. But again, I'm speaking in gross generalities. I think within the business community, people want to matter again. They want to feel like their work matters and they want to feel like they've got--. Julie: Purpose. Tim Sweet: Yeah, they want to feel like their canoe paddle can turn the boat a little bit. And I think whether or not it's accurate, we're going to see a renewed interest in at least the leadership portion of the business community getting really active. Right now I think that activity is going to be really scattered. If it's not approached properly, it's going to fail every once in a while, and that might drive people back down, right? So anyway, that would be my big takeaway is that those little, those hips and valleys as the needle's going over are starting to make a lot of noise and that noise is starting to be a screech and people are going to want to get this into a rhythm and get some orderliness and some harmonies that they can dance to. Julie: I'm feeling the metaphor. I'm hearing the metaphor. Tim Sweet: So I think that's the period we're in. Yeah. All right. Well, that was fun. So that was, I love having these opening conversations because I think what it does is it steers us towards a more pointed conversation next time, right? So let's move forward to, you know, how do we move through this period and get active? Julie: Sounds good. Tim Sweet: All right. See you next time, Julie. Julie: Talk soon. | |||
| 28 Jun 2023 | Breaking Free Of Inaction with Julie Freedman-Smith, Part 2 | 01:09:22 | |
Tim Sweet is joined by Julie Freedman-Smith once more to continue the conversation they started in the last episode. They delve deeper into how we can break ourselves out of inaction or malaise to start changing our lives. Every journey starts with a step, so what will push us into action? What will our first step be? Julie speaks from the perspective of families, of parents acknowledging their childrens’ feelings and finding ways to set examples within their own lives. Tim speaks from the perspective of businesses and workplace teams, of taking action towards goals and not being so blindly adherent to a single vision that we can’t see what’s happening around us. Tim Sweet and guest Julie Freedman-Smith explore what it means to create safety where people can imagine a different identity and take the first steps to get there. They share the questions ‘Where do I want to go?’ and ‘What if I could?’ as valuable stepping-off points towards making change. How do we shake ourselves out of malaise? Tim and Julie talk about what motivates us, how to give ourselves space to examine our internal needs, and the practical steps that can shake us up to start making the changes we desire. Both are coaches from different perspectives and offer insightful examination of the human condition and ways to contact them to continue the conversation started here. About Julie Freedman-Smith Julie Freedman-Smith is the creator/founder of Parent–Break, an online community providing time and space for parents to connect with themselves and each other, to offer guidance, and to acknowledge the parenting challenges while celebrating the successes. Author, Blogger, Podcast Host and Parenting Expert, Julie Freedman Smith has been guiding parents across North America for 20+ years. Julie also enjoys practising and teaching Tai Chi and working as a professional choral singer and clinician. — Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Julie Freedman-Smith | Author, Blogger, Podcast Host and Parenting Expert: — Transcript Julie Freedman-Smith: We can all only see what we can see. And so sometimes it does take somebody else to come in and say yes and, like you were saying, like the person that's belaying, or whatever, the climber, can still say, okay, yeah, there's something over there that's just out of your view that you can't see. And I think sometimes that can be helpful too.
Welcome to the Sweet On Leadership podcast, where we explore leadership success through conversations with remarkable experts. Curated by Tim Sweet, these guests share profound knowledge fueling your growth. Get ready to unlock true impact with your host, Tim Sweet.
Tim Sweet: I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you, my friend, are a leader. And this show is all about and all for you. Thanks for joining us and welcome to the Sweet On Leadership Podcast, Episode Ten.
Tim Sweet: Welcome back, Julie. We're going to carry on a conversation that we started earlier and we're going to have a little more focus on this one because I was really taking us down rabbit holes. Julie Freedman-Smith That's never happened before. Tim Sweet Our last conversation really focused, well focused or approached. What is this? A general malaise that we all know about? I mean, I don't think it's a mystery. But then there's this kind of bubble of action coming? Or are people getting impatient? So I think where we can focus this time is, let's talk again about how can people take this feeling? And, you know, really start to build some energy up at so hopefully they can pop and they can break orbit a little bit? Julie Freedman-Smith Sure. Or even just start, right? Because every journey begins with a single step. Right? We need to start before we can burst through the atmosphere. Tim Sweet Yeah, so let's find a foothold. And we're going to as always, we're going to approach this from two perspectives. One is that you are really the expert in the room when it comes to home life parenting. And and that is the sphere that you live in. Right? It's how do we build positive experiences in the home? And I'm going to come at it from what am I seeing within the context of the businesses that I work for? Which isn't everybody across the globe? Julie Freedman-Smith Well, actually, you are working across the globe. Tim Sweet Yeah, for sure. But it's, it tends to be you know, it's it's not the experience of everybody. So I mean, I'm pretty, we are talking from a Western Canadian context, we're talking from, you know, by and large, a first world context. And it's, and I think we made the point last time, it's important to remember that not everything we're saying is accessible to the experience of everybody. Julie Freedman-Smith Right? And we could have that argument again, because first world context looks different depending on who you are living in this first world. However, let's go forward. So how are you helping people to get started to take that first step forward? Tim Sweet Well, typically, when, when we, when somebody approaches me, or they're part of a team that's approaching me, they already know that there is some incremental value to be had, by finding momentum in some area that they're working, there's something to improve, there's something to, there's some benefit to get, they're not going to invest in my help, unless there's a payoff in some way, shape or form. It doesn't always have to be direct revenue line, but it's going to be employee experience, it's going to be something that's a cultural improvement, you know, anything along these lines, customer experience, they're entering with a reason to get going. That reason may not always be super clear. And it may not be well understood. And it will also vary, you know, Is it understood by the team? Or is it understood by the individual? So, for myself, I always work in two main gears. And the first is that we need to understand, and I think this is more complex than this, but in the simplest possible way. And this is not groundbreaking. It's, you know, where do you want to go? And where are you today? And what's the gap in between? And so recognizing that as a team is really important. The next thing that I really work on is making sure that everyone on the team can buy into that and understand why they want to go there. And perhaps, or if it's just the individual working, then I skip to step two, and that is where do I want to go? Why does it matter? And where am I today, get crystal clear. And then how do I close the gap? And so it's not rocket surgery. It's about getting pretty clear. Where we're going and really honest about where we're at. And use whatever data, whatever tools we need to clarify, define that position. So that we're not fooling ourselves. That's the very, very first step in my process is to get pretty honest and chunky on where at. That would be it. I don't know. Can I go deeper for you? Julie Freedman-Smith Yeah. So then are there tools to start on that process to get through the gap? Tim Sweet Oh, yeah, absolutely. The number one tool in my arsenal is the conversation. It's making sure that I'm understanding what people are trying to achieve. And that I'm understanding it from their perspective, not from some abstract norm that all businesses should aspire to, not some paint by number thing, but why do they want to get there? What does that actually mean? And as we talked about the last time, what's the feeling that they're going to achieve when they get there? So, you know, can they articulate that, and then can they attach to it personally, so that it matters. They can't unsee the fact that they're not where they want to be. And then it creates this pull, this vacuum, where, of course, that's where I want to be. And now I'm disrupted and uncomfortable with where I am today. And it creates a longing and a reason to take a step forward. And that step forward can include being scared, trying some things that aren't, aren't really comfortable, challenging the way we think. But getting them into that position of longing, I guess is, am I being drawn towards something? Is that inspiring? Is that where I want to be? And have I put that person between an immovable object realization of where they are, and an irresistible force of a future that they want to be moving into? And anyway, that's, that's my first move. It may not sound fancy, but that's, that's it. Julie Freedman-Smith Yeah, that sounds just so interesting to me. And I, I love that it's this clarity and honesty, because oftentimes, when we're actually articulating it, instead of just making it the shoulds, and woulds of the greater being… Tim Sweet Which are dangerous, for sure. Julie Freedman-Smith Then we can say something out loud, and then sit with it and say, well, actually, is that where I want to go? Like, I thought, that's where I wanted to go. But does that feel right? Like, is that where I want to go? Or is it slightly different than that, but until you actually have the courage to make those words come out of your mouth, instead of we're kind of going here, then you don't have the clarity of, of possibility and where you want it to go? That's really intriguing to me. Tim Sweet Yeah. And holy moly, when you talk about the shoulds and the woulds. I mean, those are landmines. Because if you if you're going there for the wrong reasons, or you're trying to paint by number, you're putting a standard out for yourself that isn't real, authentic, or, you know, something that you actually want that you that at your core you feel is important. You're going to be fighting to tack towards that target. And there's always going to be crosswinds and headwinds, and you will be in conflict with that future. It hardly is a path of least resistance at that point. It is it'll be a fight. Julie Freedman-Smith Yeah, because you're fighting within yourself. Tim Sweet Yeah. I mean, we see this a lot in organizations where people are toeing the party line, they think something is very, very important. But there's a limit to where they're willing to go. As soon as it's challenged by either some other priority, or perhaps they have a chance to pick up and go, it's no longer important, I can just cash in my chips and that's, that's that. And they were filling a role, which is really important. But there perhaps wasn't a sense of true attachment to that goal, where they could feel fulfilled with the promise of getting it. Now look, you don't want to stay in a toxic work environment or something just to see some objective fulfilled. But there, you know, in my mind, if you're really motivated to complete something, it shouldn't just matter to the organization, but you should find why it matters to you. And that it's like, you know what, if I can see this through it, actually, this is where we're using identity and belief in our favor. It's like, this really helps me achieve who I want to be. Or it really it becomes a testament to what… I'm not just talking the talk, I'm walking the walk, like this is makes me feel like I've achieved something at the end of the day. But again, shoulds and self manipulation, and these things are risks. Because it's kind of like well, I should do that because that's the way it's always been done or I should do that because that looks like what Mr. Brown on the street is doing, and you know what I mean? Like there can be a lot of toxicity in that. So setting those goals and setting them to something that is is really healthy is important. Quality of the goal is as important as having a clear one. You burn a lot of teams out chasing something that's not terribly helpful or noble in the long run. Julie Freedman-Smith Right. And sometimes you don't know that until you started down that path. I think, like, you can be like, yeah, we're all in. And then as people are going along, they're like, are we though? Like, is this really where we want to go? And we can't know that until we start stepping in that direction. If we made the wrong decision, then we turn around and we kind of use that information. So I think that's valuable. Tim Sweet That's a great point. Because getting into that trap of saying, I said I was going to do it so now I'm going to do it. When you've taken three steps down the path and said, you know, actually, this is starting to feel bad or wrong but I said I was going to do it. And then we run up against other questions. Why? What's wrong with taking a new read and changing? Yeah, because that's sort of blind loyalty to do an objective, I used to call this steering with the headlights, right? You can't steer a car with the headlights. So if all you're seeing is sort of the end vision, yeah, that's important, it's important to look ahead. But you can't steer the car with the headlights, you got to be taking a read on your current situation, you have to be feeling the road through the steering wheel, you have to be sensing what's happening with the gas and the brake. And you have to be taking a look at the critical dials on the dashboard and what's going on around you. But if you're just blind adherence to the vision, you can cause a lot of problems. Julie Freedman-Smith Oh, wow, that's so fascinating. Okay, so this is not me talking from the Home Base perspective. But this is me talking about where we are in the world. I know I'm kind of going back to the first thing, I won't stay here for long. But I just think that just resonated for me so clearly. Because for many things, because there's so much change happening right now, and we're existing, and planning for a world that we don't quite know what it is, those headlights are not working. So if you're trying to steer from the headlights, you can't even see where you're going like, as arts organizations right now, and all the way through COVID, I'm steering an arts organization right now. And and nobody knows what's going to happen, because are we going to shut down? Can we still will we still be able to have concerts this year? What can we be doing? And then in the grander scheme of accessibility, and decolonization and all these areas where we're trying to take scope of all of these things, we don't even know what the vision is, we can see just beyond where we're driving to, and we're trying to move that forward. But we don't even know what it looks like, because there's so much change. And so I think that's just reinforcing this idea that yes, let's stay with the car, let's stay at the steering wheel, let's check the readings as we are driving, and having that feedback to check in staying present instead of going towards a future that we may not even know what that looks like, from global warming perspective, from different resources and fuels that we're using, from the shift within certain provinces to moving towards technology, as opposed to fossil fuels that we were using, there's so much new stuff, you know, there are no bright beams there. Tim Sweet I came up with that analogy in like 2006, or something. What's interesting about that, and what it raised for me is, maybe a better analogy at this point would be landing a plane in a blizzard, or something along those lines. You know, yeah, we have headlights, sure. Or maybe we can see a bit of the ground, but it's obscured by cloud and snow, something that we're familiar with. Modern air travel couldn't happen with just ground recognition. You know, they've got a transponder, which is the long term signal of am I moving closer or farther away from something? They've got feedback from the ground, potentially, of people, you know, telling them what's happening and what's going on around them. They've got onboard radar that can cut through the clouds, you're flying by instrumentation, they often call it right? They can understand if they're if they're level or if they're descending if they're ascending. And they can and and I think the metaphor carries to what you're saying, because whereby we used to be myopic, in a business on one aspect of where are we headed and how do we know if we're getting there? We may need to have multiple points of reference, multiple check ins to say are we being successful as an organization? And what that could mean, is are our goals from an ESG perspective, managed? Are our goals from a revenue perspective managed? Or goals from a customer or market position, perspective managed? Do we have all of our feelers out? And this used to be just the purview maybe of the topmost layer that would bring in all this information or have a broad view. But perhaps now, and I actually think this would follow with what I'm seeing is that we have to tie in that sensitivity down through the organization. Julie Freedman-Smith Exactly. To the ground. Tim Sweet Yeah. So that people have they have more than just the headlights, they have both the instruments that matter to them in their position and what they're doing, and a sense of where the the organization is going. And this is, again, it's nothing new. I'm saying it's probably more important right now that people understand their role within an organization and the health and the direction of the organization overall. And we see this from a social standpoint, where it's now very important for staff, in many organizations, if they're going to tie to something more than just a job, they tend to gravitate towards organizations where they believe in the cause, where there's something bigger than a paycheck. We don't really want to get into some of the complacency or that's existing in the workplace right now. But it's readily accessible, was we talked about last time, people wondering what's this all for? And so they can get quite complacent and despondent and nihilistic in their roles. If people are going to attach to an organization or communal, even a family goal, they've got to see it from so many different angles. And when the blizzard rolls in, they better be able to fly on instruments. You know what I mean? One of the greatest ways to do that, it's just really interesting. And I will often think back to, you know, in our family we have, we have bombers, which is I mean, it's war time, but they would have a navigator, they'd have a co pilot, they'd have a pilot, and when things got hairy, everybody's eyes were out the window, they were all looking for points of reference, they were all, you didn't just trust one set eyes, you couldn't. And it kind of feels like that a little bit, although I'd rather remove the war reference. But anyway, there we go. Julie Freedman-Smith Let's take it out of the sky and back into families here for a sec, if that's okay, although I love the way that you've said that. Because I think we need to remember that as we've got teenagers or kind of young, young children, but beyond the toddler stage where they're out and beyond that, like early school age, where they're coming into it, their eyes matter for sure. We need to see their frame of reference, they don't get to drive the plane, we're not putting our young kids in the cockpit, we're not letting them drive the plane. But we really want to know what they're seeing. Because that their point of view is not valued, or believed or important, they shut down, and they're gonna go into social media, they're gonna go places where they feel like they can have a say. So our words, and our actions really have to align that way. Because if we're saying, Oh, we want to hear what you have to say, and then we shut them out, or if we can't handle what they're saying, you know, they're coming at us with big emotions, and we can't handle it, and we might be saying, tell me, tell me, tell me, but then they tell us, Oh, my gosh, oh my gosh, I can't, or we just elevate up or we're bursting into tears or we're launching back at them. They're gonna learn really quickly that even though our word said, we want to hear what you're seeing, what your point of view is, that it's not happening. So I do think that's really interesting. And I love what you started with at the beginning this, where are you now? And where do you want to be? And I think that happens in families too, right, if you're, you're living that same argument day in day out, you're feeling disrespected, you're stuck in this spot. And it's almost like this, my childhood, my teenager doesn't even care, like they're not even willing to talk to me so why do I even bother to try and so you can find yourself in that malaise. But if you get to that point of articulating where you are, and where you want to be, and defining that gap, then you can come up with some language. And that's, I work with parents on that all the time. What are those next steps? What's the language? How do we pull everybody together for a conversation? Even with a child who maybe doesn't want to talk? And how can we help them to believe that we want to hear what they have to say, and we're open to having a conversation, instead of just a one directional, here's what you're going to do, because we want everybody within that family to feel like they have a purpose. Tim Sweet I want to tack on to your your example a little bit and tell me, I think this is both organizations and and families. If we fail to see the challenge, or the gap, or the journey through the child's eyes, and where we are, their point of reference, or perhaps the employee's eyes, and they don't feel that they're moving in a way that is also addressing some of their own needs - and I'm going to take it back a little bit into I don't know some form of transportation - but they start to I don't know if it's panic or resist or something but they might start hanging their their hand out the window. They might, you know, they form drag and, and they might even want to go off to, and it doesn't take long. The vision that's popping up in my head is, and it's not always a healthy one, but it's the child that that isn't seeing their their immediate needs met or want met in a grocery store when they go buy the candy aisle or something. And they go on their knees and now they're being dragged along. Julie Freedman-Smith Yes, yes. The soft body thing when you're trying to get them up and they can't. That goes right back to the toddler. Yeah. Tim Sweet Absolutely. And so suddenly the forward moment time that we had as a family or as a team can be, can be held back by people dragging their feet or being scared or not seeing their needs met, and essentially, like drag is the right word, they begin to drag. And then I mean, all sorts of bad things can happen in terms of resentment can build up, we don't feel like we're moving, as you know, forms a major distraction. Julie Freedman-Smith I'm in one of my children's rooms right now. And one of the ways that that happens in the home, right, with an older child who's not going to be lying on the ground being pulled, is they go up into their room, and they don't come out. And we have employees doing that too, right? I mean, you we all know the people that you've asked them for stuff. And you're waiting for them to get back to you. And you're waiting. And then you're you're kind of using the kind of nice language, hey, thought that was going to be coming and when can we expect an update? And they've gone into, they've just gone into their shell, and they're not coming out. And it could be that they're in there because they're frustrated and angry, it could be that they're in there because they don't feel they can do it. They're stuck. Tim Sweet That is a really interesting idea. Because maybe, maybe we see the behavior creeping up in families where people become insular and they start to isolate themselves off. But in organizations, when we started staying at home and everything, we isolated people. Julie Freedman-Smith Yes, yes. Literally and figuratively. Yeah. Tim Sweet Literally. And so, to me, it's kind of interesting, because depending on the group, which is the cause and effect there? Are, are they now isolated? Because we isolated them? And they had to learn to do that, as a matter of survival? Or are they isolated, because something else has changed and they've, you know, we kind of opened the door, and now it's become more and more isolated? And I don't think it's as simple as I mean, I've had conversations with some people is this extrovert introvert, you know, behavior? Maybe? Well, I mean, some people may operate better than, or whatever, but I think it's learned, it's learned to a certain extent, coping mechanisms and the rest of it. But then also, you're from a different vantage point, or you're cut off from certain information. And, you know, now ou've learned to fly a certain way. Julie Freedman-Smith It's your new identity. Yeah, you're just trapped there. Tim Sweet New perspective, new paradigm. Julie Freedman-Smith Yeah. So again, it's part of our jobs, I think, in both of our work is, how can we help people to feel safe enough to imagine or be willing to imagine a slightly different identity and then take those first steps to get there. Tim Sweet I think both of us do this. And as anybody who's listened to us before, I mean you've coached me as a parent, and… Julie Freedman-Smith And you've coached me. Tim Sweet Did I say that right? You've coached me as a parent, no Julie Freedman-Smith You have been a client of mine, you have coached me and I have coached you. So, sure, yes. Tim Sweet But you know, one of the things that I think is, is is interesting here, when we talk about getting them out of this malaise is giving them more points of reference. Giving them more dials on the dashboard, throwing them back into different ways of framing, and looking and analyzing, measuring where they are and where they're going. Because the old instruments, the old standby ways that they're viewing the world might have become myopic, they might have become too limited, maybe enough to survive, but not enough to thrive or change or move forward. And so help them imagine and reframe, and analyze, again, redefine re-measure, where they are, where they're going. Give them a slightly different set of tools, or a slightly different set of, a different viewpoint, so that they can start to broaden their awareness again, so they can start to use different senses and see them see themselves through because perhaps their measures have become too limited. Perhaps their their their ways of navigating have become reliant on, you know, the wrong input or limited input. Yeah. I mean, I know, as I said, you know, when, when you've coached me, that's been your, probably your top roll, is to say, have you thought about it this way? Or can I offer that, you know, that we look at this from this perspective? And it's in those moments that I get out of my own head and my limited scope of seeing the problem, and I go, okay, now I can see that there's actually a foothold over here that I can reach for, but I didn't see it before. Right. I didn't, I didn't have the viewpoint. Julie Freedman-Smith And so so often, I use this in my coaching. I'm not saying this is where you are, but it's kind of that same thing. Oftentimes, it's us against our child in a situation. It doesn't work versus us and our child against the situation, or within the situation, depending on whether you want to be against something or just like, okay, we're both stuck in this problem. And we know we need to find a solution but there's a very big difference between we need to find a solution, and I'm going to tell you the solution. No, I'm going to tell you the solution. Tim Sweet Yeah. Are we up against our limited perception of the situation? Are we up against a paradigm or a picture of the situation that maybe is not shared by two people, and maybe is too limited to give us all of the, you know, I think of like an old school TV. While we kind of have an outline, and we're looking through static, but we don't have color, we don't have definition, we don't have contrast. We need to tune this in. And we have several different knobs we need to spin to do that. Julie Freedman-Smith Yes, you realize that TVs aren't even a thing anymore. Tim Sweet They’re not even a thing anymore, I know. Julie Freedman-Smith Feeling a bit old today. Tim Sweet Uh well, I mean, here's an interesting analogy, which is super old school, you know, because our family and our parents or grandparents are aging, we're inheriting a lot of stuff. And one of the things that we inherited was an old record player. And this particular record player is able to play 78s and LPs. And the way in which a stereo LP works, and I just learned this, when I was thinking about this, when I was curious, is that the needle isn't just riding up and down, it's riding side to side. And that's how you get stereo, it's actually vibrating side to side more than it is up and down. In addition, up and down. Whereas the 78 is bouncing up and down. And there's only really one input, and it's a mono input, right, because it's up and down. There's nothing being fed from above, whereas if your left and right, you can, you can have two sauna waves, right. And we're trying to judge the world through this mono vision through this, and we're missing out a whole bunch of detail. And we're or at least we're missing out, we're just missing out from we have to, we have to step into a different way of looking at things that's probably more relevant to our situation. And then move. Julie Freedman-Smith Yeah, and our kids are seeing things. And the younger generation is seeing things so differently than we are. And so it's really important to take that in. It's so valuable. Tim Sweet It’s so fascinating as a as a parent, and I think this again, can be applied towards who we see, as senior leaders in organizations. There was a quote, and I can't remember it exactly, but essentially, parents have the experience, and they find conflict with the children, when their construct of the world is being challenged. When it's how I understand the world and where I find a position of power or control or, you know, the ability to navigate. Suddenly the child is, they're not necessarily rebelling, although that's how we take it, but they're seeing the world a different way. They're seeing different possibilities. And it's threatening, in some ways, because all of a sudden, it's like, I didn't realize how much I didn't know. Julie Freedman-Smith The walls are coming down. Yeah. Tim Sweet The walls are coming down. And now it's a move or die situation because you really start to feel like oh, am I the dinosaur here? And I think in organizations, we're still running on old assumptions. And in many cases, trying to try to behave the way the tried and true ways of doing it. Well, you know, what, if you tried to run a business, the way you ran a business in 1926, today it would fail. Or at least it would be pretty limited in its ability to react. If you tried to run a business or something like a, you know, 17th century print shop, you know, yeah, you're gonna be able to print a book, but it's not going to be able to stand up to a lot of the things, we just we can't move backwards in that way. And yet we've, we've limited ourselves. So yeah, I guess I would say, I'm gonna go back full circle here, it's about what's the viewpoint? Can we give them a new sense of instrumentation? Appreciation? And again, in my context, with you, it's always been, if I just moved three steps to the right, does a new shadow fall on a new handhold that I can reach for and get myself up this wall? I remember that in climbing all the time. You know, you'd have a person on belay. And they would say, you know, I know you can't see it, but just reach out to your left and you're gonna feel a crack. Got it? And you needed that because you're in the blind, right? And I think it's important. Okay, so getting started, maybe a great first step for everybody that's listening is bring in some different perspectives. Check your instrument set. Julie Freedman-Smith And when we talked about bringing in some different perspectives, at the risk of saying you don't need us coaches, because you do, but also take the perspective of the people who are in the room. Don't just go outside. Listen to the people. That's a huge part. Tim Sweet It's funny you say that because it's like, there is the perspective, there's our perspectives and maybe let me clarify, because I think one of the big things that you've done for me, and I think I do this with businesses, is it's about facilitating the conversation between those perspectives. And so, absolutely. I mean, sometimes it's getting to those perspectives. That's the challenge. And maybe that's the role even that we play. More than simply giving them answers. Julie Freedman-Smith Is talking about them, or how to talk about them. And yeah, absolutely. Tim Sweet We used to say, he wants a consultant, a consultant, they borrow your watch to tell you the time. Julie Freedman-Smith No, I don't think that's what you and I do. Tim Sweet I hope it's not, I don't think that's what you and I do, but the fundamental truths in an organization. Somebody else usually knows them. They just haven't risen to the surface yet. So how do we, how do we find them amplify them? You know, let them see the light of day and let everybody see them. So that somebody on the team, the answers are there, it's about, can we get to them and in a family, you know, if you're listening to your kids, you're probably going to get a slightly different or, you know, if partners are working together or whatever. If you're listening to other heads than just your own, you're probably a little better off. Julie Freedman-Smith I think so and that, but then there's always that thing of, we can all only see what we can see. And so, sometimes, it does take somebody else to come in and say, yes. And like, you were saying, like the person that's belaying or whatever the climber can still say, oka, y eah, there's something over there, that's just out of your view that you can't see, and I think sometimes that can be helpful too. Tim Sweet Oh, yeah. So I want to ask you what are some of the tools that you would use or suggest for people to consider when they're really tuning in to where they are today, and how they're feeling? And perhaps, you can start here if you like, why do people avoid asking those questions naturally? Why is it not a natural state for people to just get there on their own? Julie Freedman-Smith Well I think it's very scary because there's a lot of sadness that we, and some could say grief, that is kind of in there and if you dig you will hit something. And so it's just, it’s way safer to just not dig and we can use videos and all sorts of things to kind of keep us kind of distracted from that. So I think there's a lot of things that can distract us from that. We also, it's scary to dig from a parent-child perspective because we're not sure that we're going to be able to help our kids if we actually asked them about how sad they are. And so if we just keep hoping that we just don't talk about it, maybe it'll just go away, maybe it'll just go away. So I think that's part of it. It's just this fear of what if I personally don't know how to handle where I get to? What if I don't know how to handle when my child is getting to and maybe it'll just get better? Plus again, we're seeing on social media, all these crises that people are going through. And so, I think there could be a little bit of hierarchy of sadness. Like, do I have a right to feel sad when I have a home? I have food, I live in a perfectly safe environment. I've got theoretically, all the stuff that should be making me happy, and then there are people who do not have access to food. There are people whose countries are in war. There are people who can't make choices over their own bodies. Really is my thing even that, or should I just put it away and just keep trudging down the same path. So I think those are all reasons why people aren't necessarily willing to admit or take a peek at how they're really feeling. Tim Sweet I love that last point and you and I had a conversation in a few days ago about I remember seeing a social post which talked about this wheel of privilege, I think it was. And it was all the ways in which you can experience privilege, and it's pretty good. It's pretty good viewpoint in terms of saying, you know, it would talk about gender, male, female, and then other expressions, right? And it would talk about wealth, it would talk about age, it would talk about, you know, and really and I don't say this with, I'm just being open here, I looked at myself and of these however, many 15 categories, by this person's estimation or whoever created this, and in this is where I'm privileged. I hit the lottery in all but two of them, you know, the only place I was failing was I was heavy, you know, in stature. There wasn't one for hair there, but if there had been, it would have been like bald would have been to the outside and age, right. That I'm in the middle now, but really, I mean, recognizing that. And then realizing that actually, really, for me, this has been a source of consternation in that I really do feel like I don't have the right to complain, all heck of a lot and so you always, I remember saying to, some of it, I was talking to, you know, my I was telling them, they were asking what's up? And I was telling them, you know, where we're got some challenge in the rest night and I prefaced and said, you know, these are first world problems and they truly are. Julie Freedman-Smith Yeah. But there's still problems, that’s the thing. We're all, we all can only live in the world. In the lane that we've been dealt are in the. Yeah, I'm sorry, much metaphor. Tim Sweet I can't change it, right? Julie Freedman-Smith No. You can increase your understanding. And I think I've heard that definition of privilege, as being, you don't have the understanding of the other situations within that lane, but we are all in this lane and we can have those feelings. And, and, you know, when we're talking were teaching kids about feelings, we teach them that feelings change. And there are all sorts of feelings. And there are feelings that are uncomfortable to us and there are feelings that are more comfortable, but we need to have them all. They don't define us as a as a person. All people have a variety of feelings, they can change and a friend of mine said the other day and I think he's heard this somewhere else, is that instead of just trying to feel better, let's be better at feeling. So let's be aware that all of these feelings are there and once we find a safe way to explore them, then we can release, like we can move through them and we don't necessarily stuck in them. And sometimes we need a balance of different feelings together to kind of shift our way into a new feeling. Now I know that we were trying to keep this short and and we can do that, but can you tell me a little bit about why that would happen in the workplace? Why people are not confronting their feelings within the workplace? Tim Sweet Sure, I do want to just I want to put a point on your, on this issue of do I have a right to feel sad or or lacking in some way. I want to just break before I leave that one entirely. I think that is existed for me and then you have to say, as you said I'm still unhappy and I'm going to do something about it. Just because… I want to make the most of this life so I'm going to do the best I can and just because I'm ahead of others by some measures, does it mean I should stop trying to be the best I can be? Or, you know, open up possibilities for other in the process because I'm creating space to care for others. Whatever that is. So that's a real thing in one way. I just want to tack on one of the thought and that is, maybe this is for later, but I think this is actually stifling a lot of conversation because people are, I find myself as a creator, careful of what I talked about because I am in a position of privilege. I am in this struggle where I have to say, but I'm going to talk about it anyway. I'm going to do it with respect, understanding my perspective on the world, and that there are other viewpoints and I need to be conscious of those. It's really an interesting conversation probably for later. Which is just to say, you know, that position in the world, should that stop me from trying to do better with what I've got and should it stifle what I'm willing to share? Because I could be, and have been, by the way accused of been, you know, pale, male and stale. Julie Freedman-Smith Yeah. But, and you still feel. Tim Sweet And I still feel. So I think, but we'll put a point on that and say that is one reason why people don't don't strive in terms of what am I seeing in the business, I would say I see people putting other people first in many ways, especially among leaders. And I remember reading this excellent article, that was around this study that was done that said, most people who own pets or dogs or horses or cats or whatever they are, will make sure that a horse has a chiropractor and they'll make sure that that chiropractor is booked while their own back is, in trouble. They will fail to fill subscriptions or take their pills regularly, where if the dog gets sick, I mean that pill is in peanut butter and it's going down the dog's throat come hell or high water. You know, that is that's happening. And so I think one of the reasons why we avoid getting lower complaining is actually we simply don't prioritize ourselves or our own needs. It's very easy for us to deny ourselves and to say well we actually don't matter. iI's why in organizations you see people finding very safe to talk about making the situation improved for everyone. But on more than one occasion, when I shift the conversation over and say, why does this matter to you? How does this benefit your career? Let's really attach to that as a source of motivation and do well for the community. In certain organizations t his is like a no-fly zone, because if there's any indication that I'm doing this for selfish reasons, you're seen as self-serving. And it's not a, you know I'm doing it for myself or for the organization, if we're really going to drive an impetus to change, it's got to be, I'm motivated to do this. I can succeed personally, and professionally and I got to be comfortable with it. And I think that translates into the getting low discussion, getting getting down into the weeds and being worth taking a look at the dark stuff and questioning do I want to live in darkness in these areas? Do I I want to feel uncomfortable? And do I want to feel like I'm less than I could be? Or am I allowed to feel unhappy, right? Do I want to really understand that. I think you got a value yourself a certain amount to invest the time to say, you know what, I really want to understand this for myself and be worth the climb, right? Based on one of our other conversations, it's really interesting because at one time we become more and more isolated, very, very self-centered. You drive on the roads and you see nimbyism is everywhere right. The what's in it for me stuff is really really strong right now, but at the same time people are not necessarily really saying why, why am I what do I need to do? And so it's this funny kind of kind of contradictory thing we're at one point we want to be alone but at the same time we still that doesn't mean we want to do the work right to really understand. So I don't know if that's a great answer but there that would be, that my answer be. Julie Freedman-Smith There's an element of courage there. Do I have the strength? Do I have the love surrounding me to help me dive into the deep stuff and also what you're saying resonated s o clearly for me because I am totally generalizing here, but I just what you were defining was exactly a mom's thing like I'll eat the burnt toast and give everybody else a nice piece of toast or I'll scrape the bottom of the pot and make sure everybody else has food. It's just such a thing. And what I talk about in parenting is that if we have these key values, if we are saying, if our words are saying everybody in the family matters, that we respect everyone in the family that we show care and kindness and compassion for everyone, but our actions say, I'm going to show care and kindness compassion for everybody, but me, it's our actions that are teaching our kids. And I think that that totally carries through in a business, right? If we want people to be willing to fail, to willing to explore, how they have a role in the company and yet, as a leader, we're doing that or we’re pretending we're kind of focusing on that or talking about it for everybody else but not leading by example, then it's not going to happen. And so culture is really important that way we need to model the culture that we want to create within the organization whether it's a family or a business I think. Tim Sweet One of my first professional challenges when I opened my first consultancy years ago, I remember was dealing with a maintenance manager and he was the hardest working guy that I had met up to that point. I mean was a, you know, he was always on call, he took no time for himself and he was a true definition of martyr. And then he wondered, why he couldn't Inspire anybody else to follow him in leadership. And there was two primary reasons that are very simple. One, is he made it look like such a drag that, who the heck wants to go there? Because his life was in shambles kind of thing. Or at least he was, he was sacrificing and liquidating his own health to make sure that the factory was up and running. And the second thing was, he didn't let anybody do it because that was his role, that was his identity, was being the person who ate the burnt toast, you know, being the person who had garbage can you know, whatever was left on the table and and take the drinks and that was part of his identity. And you know, it was really early on in my career, doing identity and belief work where we had to get down to this, you know, you're holding onto this and there's deeply rooted reasons why this is what you think a leader looks like and what a leader does and it and it really it wasn't the hero with a thousand helpers, kind of. But it was like the martyr with, you know, a thousand, like it was really it was really clear, and when we got him out of that state suddenly he was able to mentor people into his position because he'd opened up enough space to let them try and fail and work. And the other thing was, is that it is that he had something that people could conceptualize from the outside of being more of a success. And I mean, I know as a parent but I take this into the home every once in a while you slip into that really negative space. And it's like, you know, I haven't even I haven't even taken any time for myself for the last. I got to do this. Yeah, I got to do the dishes again and wahh. You know, that's like the parental tantrum. In the workplace, y ou see some toxic behaviors in a lot of teams, which is how's it going? Ah, I'm just so busy, so busy, everything is so busy and I have no time for myself and it's like, that's your opening statement. And you see environments where employees will even if they're not terribly, busy, boy, will they hustle, you know, back in the day that hustle from desk to desk or they be late for meetings because to be anything else is to admit that you're not flat out and just just straining to to meet your workload. Right. So yeah I think that's a funny one. Where are we going to take that, Julie? If we want to get low, we have to get over ourselves. Is that it? Julie Freedman-Smith I think we need to find a way to infuse the other side of it, and inspire and find hope. And what's going to get us excited about something? Tim Sweet That's a good one. What immediately went to there is that's very little about external inspiration. That's a lot about internal inspiration and a lot about internal. Julie Freedman-Smith Yeah. Well, we just need to own it right? Tim Sweet Okay. Julie Freedman-Smith That's where we're going next. Tim Sweet That's where we're going next. So as we often do, we approach a conversation from a bunch of different places and we're onto this fourth conversation in this kind of exploration and it was all around that there seems to be this this unsatisfied need for change and improvement and it's showing up in the workplace and it's showing up in the home and we're seeing this movement again. I'm seeing it in my practice, you're seeing yours. We talked about that occurring and people feeling the need, then we talked about how were they really going to get started? And then we talked about why do they avoid getting started in the first place and understanding that. So potentially, that can help people really check in and see if that might be something that's holding them back. For the last conversation here, when a person moves through this, they have the opportunity to learn how to become more change ready, how to adopt an ability or a habit to stimulate change so that when they feel there's a need they can complete this loop a little more quickly. And so you and I talked off mic about how would we introduce this and you warned me that this might be a dated example, but I'm going to do it anyway. When I was growing up, there was an Irish-born British dog trainer and you knew name and I didn't Julie Freedman-Smith Barbara Woodhouse. Tim Sweet Barbara Woodhouse. And on the TV, when she would train dogs, she used to say walkies - you probably do it better than me. Julie Freedman-Smith Walkies! Tim Sweet Okay, right. And if you in in the show, as soon as she said that to the to the dog, the dog got really excited and was ready to go and having owned dogs in the past. I mean, as soon as the leash comes out, the dog is ready to go off and the dog will bring the leash to you and be ready to go. And I this metaphor kind of it feels like this to me because if there's a need for change how do we get ourselves into that change ready state? How do we bring out the the walkies for ourselves so we're like amped up and that's what I want to talk about today is how can we adopt a practice priming ourselves for change? Julie Freedman-Smith Yeah. Can I jump in? Tim Sweet Please. Julie Freedman-Smith Okay so I appreciate that's a really old metaphor and I love it because if you have seen the show, you know, you know exactly what happens. And I think it's a really good cue for all of us about that exact thing which is to take ourselves for a walk. Because we talked in the last segment about finding the courage to understand how we were feeling to recognize the lows that we might be feeling and the discomfort about where we are and where where we might want to be. It takes courage to figure out where we are, especially if that where we are feels yucky. And it is daunting to imagine where we might want to be as we've said because we've just had two years of n ope, can't do that, can't do that, can't do that kind of coming at us and it's like, do I even want to try again? And yet, I find that one of the ways to really listen to the internal self and to and to find that inspiration for okay, what do I want? Maybe there's something inside of me that I really want, but I don't even know what it is, because I've been dumbing it out, numbing it out. So if we take ourselves on a walk into nature, ideally on our own, and ask that question, as we're walking, the idea of not having other things to numb it out and to just create this space and ask and be open to listening and it might not come in for a few minutes and just noticing the trees and the birds and whatever it is, that can really create that space within ourselves, the quietness, to be able to hear the messages that are asking. So I think walkies is a good, kind of a great way to think about that, as a way to inspire ourselves to move forward. Tim Sweet I didn't make that connection at all. I think you're 100%, right. I was just thinking that John Muir, who is somebody that I really followed as a young man, he was this naturalist and mountaineer who… there was a quote that he he had every walk with nature, I just called it up “every walk with nature one receives far more than they seek”, right? And he had one more that I loved, and which was “between every two pines is a doorway to a new world”, but he used to talk about this Muir trek and I did this as a child. My dad turned me on to it and and I remember as an 18, 19 year-old, man, I couldn't afford much but I could afford, I went to the Salvation Army and I bought a fondue cooker that took alcohol fuel and I packed, you know, a few pounds of rice and beans. I had a tarp and an old sleeping bag and I would go out into the mountains and spend several nights on these Muir treks. And they were seriously for an extroverted, you know, pretty comfortable in crowds guy to get into the mountains and treat that, as my cathedral, my confessional, whatever it was going to be. And really spend some time with myself, as a young man, contemplating life, whatever, and doing it because it's just, it's, you elements silence survival, maybe being quite comfortable in in that backcountry. But still, you're not pretty much down to a fairly primal existence, right? And just treking for days. And that, I mean, it's an extreme example of what your saying. Julie Freedman-Smith Yeah. Around the block will do it. Tim Sweet Around the block will do it and hey, there's a personal element to this. Like, as you know, I just had a double knee replacement come. And so for years and COVID i t got really bad. I could walk less than three house lengths before I had to stop and turn around. Couldn't do it. Yeah. It is amazing how imprisoning that is when you can't be with yourself in that sense. There's always mobility concerns so that some people will be in wheelchairs and and traveling in different ways. But just to have that available because it really is something that's just stellar to go out and just lead yourself by the hand a little bit. Julie Freedman-Smith Mmhmm. And listen. Tim Sweet And listen. Yeah, like, you know, what are you actually saying and why does it matter and and are you asking yourself questions. You know, people think that they say something and they understand what it means to themselves. Dig deep, I love that one. Okay so prime for change, get walking. Julie Freedman-Smith Yeah, or a lot of the time asking yourself a question and allowing your body to write the answer. So where do I want to be? What would it be like if? What am I thinking about right now? And just allowing the pen to write it instead of the voice to speak it. Because oftentimes, what comes out of your pen as a little bit different than what comes out of your mouth. Tim Sweet Wow, that's that's really close to home. During the last year, or so, I was running a group first thing in the morning 6:30, at have a group of people that would join me online for 12 minutes. That was our goal. Julie Freedman-Smith Yep. Tim Sweet And, you know me, and 12 minutes that goes pretty quick. Julie Freedman-Smith Yep. Tim Sweet But I still run these from time to time. We're going to be kicking off another one here. I t was based on. Yeah, the work by Julia Cameron, which was– Julie Freedman-Smith Morning Pages. Tim Sweet Morning Pages. Yeah. And so we would get into a room and we would just write. You don't write for anybody else. You don't have a set task at hand, you just right Tim Ferriss calls it spiritual windshield wipers, right. And you just dump your random access memory onto this page without any kind of constraint and see what comes out. And either it's worth something or it just needed to be out, but it is really the inspiration for a lot of questions I'll tell you. And often, even though you don't want it to mean anything, boy, does it ever. Julie Freedman-Smith Yes, exactly. Kleenex boxes are handy beside those pieces of paper, in my experience. And then, so, oftentimes creating that for possibility. There are a bunch of voices in our heads that say, yeah. But that's not or no no no no no or we protective voices, right? Reluctance, resistance. And and if there is an opportunity, even for a series of minutes and you could set a timer for this to say, okay resistance, I know you're right there, I'm going to sit you right beside me. We can we can put you right back in in two minutes but for two minutes, I'm going to imagine the possibilities without the resistance. If this was different, if life was different, if I wasn't who I was or whatever it is, you know, however, you need to dispose of that resistance for a couple of minutes. It's not saying, hey just get rid of that. No, just put it beside you, it can sit in the chair right beside you, and just dream for a moment. That often is a way to just spark that possibility that can guide you forward. Tim Sweet I call those background conversations when you've got some nagging doubt or something. You know, all the reasons why you can't. When we do this with group work we called this what if we could conversations and it's like, yeah okay I understand there's a bunch of reasons that we can't do that right now. There's a bunch of perceived strains known constraints. But what if we could? What would life be like, on the other side of that achievement? How would it change for ourselves or company or customers? Whatever that's going to be. Yeah, what can be such a compelling vision, that it's like, then we can ask the question, well, why can't we? And then we can start to challenge those assumptions and those constraints. Julie Freedman-Smith So those are my three thoughts about how to, how do we step off to a new place? Tim Sweet Yeah, unexpected and great. I love that. So again, go for a walk, change your perspective from that, you get out, get moving, write it down, see what comes out of the end of the pen, and then really, you know, give those inside voices their due but not before you have a chance to dream. Julie Freedman-Smith I love that. What if we could? What if we could? Tim Sweet I love that. What if we could. Great acronym. Anyway. Julie Freedman-Smith Walkies! Tim Sweet Walkies! As we were just kicking off there, I went a slightly different direction, I think in terms of change, like prime for change and it kind of It kind of goes back to what are your sort of patterns of resistance and things like that? But I found it really, really useful right now for people to get in touch with getting a little more fluent in what are their kind of base operating systems? So, for me right now, I've been doing a lot of work with Lencioni's Working Genius. And so it's do you understand what genius you you operate consistently in? And if not consistently, at least you're competent in. And you understand what geniuses that other people have that, you find that you lack and you find even frustrating to engage in. So that's where you can say these are my blind spots and I can get into that. I think that's a yeah, having a perspective like that of how do I tend to approach challenges? Am I way up in the ideation space? Am I in the collaborate and activation space? Or am I down in that get ‘er done space? And it'll often give you some insight to why you might be biased towards something else, right? So being prime for changes understand your own bias, understand your base operating system and be fluent in it. It's not to feel bad about it. It's just so that you can recognize patterns of thought and anticipate them. And also anticipate maybe dipping in or seeking some outside h elp might be from a different perspective. So understand yourself a little bit more, and I don't think it has to just be that tool. I think there's, in the work world, we can use things like, you know, work style preferences where we're saying you know, do I want to be up in the ask big questions space? If I avoid that space then maybe I need to, you know, have a little help to get there or recognize that I'm not there yet and go into it. I think there is that willingness to tap those around you, honestly. We see this a lot in the boxing community. When we see people leveling up and raising and raising their game, it really is about making sure you've got the right team in your corner and you have, you know, in a boxer's context, you have your promoter, you have your coach and your trainer, and you have your cut man and you have medical staff and you may have somebody else that's there or just sort of a your entourage or whatever it is. But each one of these people, they fill a really specific goal because what was it, Muhammad Ali had that quote that said you know, “everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face”. And and so, in those times when you're down, and you may be resistant to change, that you have trusted people around you. Can be a spouse. It can be, it can be, I don't know clergy or whatever it is, whatever that's around you. But you know, getting the sense of, I realize that something needs to change here and I need to like let's bring the corner in so that so that we can, we can get moving. I think that's a, that's a big one, especially organizationally because it and it fits with the other one because you may have blind spots and you, and you may not see everything. And this goes back to what you and I were talking about before. Being able to see that hand hold that's out of reach, and gain a different perspective. So I think having that team around, you being being able to get outside your own head. So and I think that's really interesting because going for the walk, when we talked about that, that's like really getting in your head and I think that's really important but then if you're stuck let's bring in the cavalry and how do we get a little bit of help. Julie Freedman-Smith So hold on to whatever your else you're going to say, because I don't want to make you lose that, but that brings up two more things for me. One is In the singing world - I think this is the same one in whatever world you're in, probably in the boxing world. When you're singing with people who are slightly better - I heard somebody say this best, if you're the smartest person in the room, find a new room, you want to have people around you that are slightly at a higher level so that you can rise to that, right? So part of it is looking at that team and seeing are there mentors? Are there people who can inspire me, and to whom I can aspire, you know, to become? And then I think also the in the boxing analogy in Taoism there's this idea that our opponents are really valuable to us because they raise us to be as good as them. So whenever we are challenging something, someone, or competing with them, we want to be competing against an excellent competitor because that raises the bar for us to become even more than we are. And so I think it's yeah, it's really just about that idea of when you're building your team or when you're finding your team, even if it's somebody who's a competitor, identify those competitors that will inspire you to become better. And have those people around you, that you can rise up because that gives you some kind of a goal. Something to work towards. Tim Sweet The strongest trees grow in rocky soil. That's what they say, right? I want to go back to the comment you made about who you surround yourself with. And I remember that when my dad retired from teaching, he addressed the class at his school and he said, you know, if I can give you any advice, it is to ensure that you surround yourself with people that lift you up. You will be you will be as successful as the average of the people you surround yourself with, which is a commonly said thing, and I really do believe that that is true. And it doesn't mean we shouldn't have room in our hearts and our lives f or people that may be struggling. Julie Freedman-Smith No, we need it all, we need all of it. Tim Sweet That's right. But I, what's interesting about that statement is And and, you and I, we deal with or we're exposed to especially in the family since, you know, the concerns over social media and whatnot like this. And of late, it's not a minor topic that people get stuck in a real negative cycle of comparing themselves with the ideal images that people put up online. Yeah. And I remember reading an article, which I actually take issue with, that said, do not engage in comparison with others, like don't compare yourself, there's a lot of grief to be found there. What I found lacking in that article is I actually think we need to have a healthy relationship with comparison. We have to we have to approach it and say, you know, yes I can find inspiration in other people and I can use that to inspire, motivate, mentor myself into a different position. I'm involved right now in a group that's all about high-tech startups and I am surrounded by people that are infinitely more knowledgeable than I am. And I have things to contribute but it is absolutely rewarding to be in this place and just be opened up to aspects of business that I have not had sufficient exposure to, and they're lifting me up and I feel absolutely privileged, or-- Julie Freedman-Smith Grateful, to be in. Tim Sweet Grateful. Julie Freedman-Smith Blessed to be amongst them. Tim Sweet Yeah. To be in and just learning through osmosis in some ways, right? Julie Freedman-Smith Yeah, yeah. Swimming with great brains like call it. Like your brain is in the same water as all these amazing brains and it's just it's all coming together and inspiring the different thoughts. Yeah, fantastic. Tim Sweet And in order to do that and, maybe this is this is one other thing, maybe I can add on an additional thing here and that is, you know, a knowledge of when we're in a scarce mindset when we are engaged in scarcity, because if you are in a scarce mindset and you see someone, you see this, I see this in my kids all the time when they're, you know, they're going through adolescence and they're trying to figure out, where do they fit in the world, and they engage in a lot of comparison with, with their peers. But if you're in a scarce mindset, you start to engage in that well, if they're good, that means ipso facto I'm not and the better, they are the worse I am versus seeing it as they're where they are, and I am where I am. And if I choose to I can raise my game in that area and it's not about like it's kind of like that infinite pool of potential and really not seeing it as so competitions. Great competition from the sense of scarcity. Although, I mean, look in some forms, we do have first second, and third happens, but their potential doesn't. They're worth received fourth doesn't dictate my own? Julie Freedman-Smith Yeah, exactly. exactly. Well, we've talked about so many different ways to begin that seed coming out of the earth and developing into something new and places, you know, having that purpose ahead of us so that we can create the steps to get us there. We got to a good place, it was so grim in the first one. Tim Sweet Well, I mean this is the thing and I think as we're you know, as we're prefacing this for people, we have to open them up to the possibility that we're going to arrive just where we got. Julie Freedman-Smith Yes. And you have to go low to get high. And like down comes the up and then up comes down and… Tim Sweet Yeah and I think that that may be a great note to stop on, is just the fact that for all of us to remember that, you know, just because you feel that change needs to happen and you're lower than you want to be right now or the rest of it, is to have some general acceptance that whatever happens there is potential in movement, right? There is always,you know, we can be sometimes tossed around as being a little bit new agey but say that you know well change is inevitable and all change can be good change. I think that that is not entirely true but I mean, you know what, you can you can find a way through. Julie Freedman-Smith I hope so. And if you can't then find somebody to help you find a way through. Right? Tim Sweet Boom. I don't know anybody like that do you? Just kidding. Okay. All right. Julie, once again, so much fun to explore this with you. Julie Freedman-Smith Yeah always fun. Tim Sweet Maybe what we should do, really briefly, though, is just if people want to approach change and the need for change and how to get there differently, how can they find you? Julie Freedman-Smith The best way to find me is through my linktree which is julie.f.s. Well, I'm sure we'll have everything listed below or attached to whatever format this is this is coming in. Yeah, I help parents find their voice and get them feeling confident that when things are not going well they're going to be able to know what to say and and feel like they can create a family life that they want so that their child's childhood can be fun and feel safe and that they can teach their kids how to become the adults that they eventually will be. Tim Sweet Life's a garden, dig it. Julie Freedman-Smith What about you, Tim? if parents, no– Tim Sweet Parents, don't call me, call Julie. Julie Freedman-Smith Yes. If teams want support, if leaders want to know how to lead and teams want support, how do they find you? Tim Sweet TeamworkExcellence.com/discovery, you can book a half an hour with me and the best way to start is to start. There's lots on that website that you can find, information, but if you want to book a half an hour with me, that's the link. Otherwise look for me on social on @sweetleadership and always happy to answer questions. Have you read my stuff? You find it inspiring? Great. Julie Freedman-Smith Yeah. And it's easy to talk to us. We're very talkable, as you can hear. We're always interested in having that first conversation and in letting you decide where you want to go from there. Tim Sweet Julie, thank you so much again. It's always a pleasure. Julie Freedman-Smith Yeah. Super fun. | |||
| 12 Jul 2023 | Changing Ideas On Growth with Paul Farmer | 00:49:09 | |
Tim Sweet is again joined by Paul Farmer, Business Mentor and Founder of Mentoris Group, to discuss how leaders are addressing the new needs of both employees and clients in how their businesses bring value to the world. Are leaders still clinging to old thoughts about growth, and how can they change? Paul shares how business leaders he works with are presenting arbitrary ideas for growth that don’t necessarily answer the right questions for today’s market. What do leaders really want from their businesses? What do they personally want to achieve? Can that be accomplished by increasing value instead of simply bodies or labor? Paul gives several examples of old versus new thinking patterns. Tim Sweet and guest Paul Farmer address three key areas where leaders can benefit from re-assessing their business needs to fit today’s worker and client demands. Paul singles out client and workflow as the first area, the employee team as the second area, and roles as business owner or leader as the third area to assess. Tim and Paul dissect each of these ideas in detail, explaining how thinking has shifted and how the new questions to ask benefit business growth in different ways. About Paul Farmer Paul Farmer, Business Mentor and Founder of Mentoris Group, completed his Bachelor of Commerce degree at the University of Southern Queensland before he moved to Brisbane to pursue an accounting career. He worked for both Bentleys MRI and Snelleman Tom, being admitted as a Certified Practicing Accountant (CPA) in 2002. Playing Premier Rugby Union for Norths (1996), GPS (1997 – 2002, Club captain 2001), Australian Combined States U21 and Australian Barbarians in 1996 enabled Paul to develop a strong network of professional contacts. In 2002 Paul took a sabbatical to the UK, gaining invaluable exposure to different cultures, work practices, travel opportunities and sporting pursuits. After 20 years working for large organizations both in Australia and the UK, it was time to give something back. Leaving a strategic leadership role, Paul saw coaching as a way of guiding others through the ever increasing uncertainty and pressures life presents, similar to those he encountered. Paul is a registered CPA, Associate Member of the International Coach Guild, Member of the Coaching Institute, working towards being an International Accredited Professional Master Coach and currently holds a Blue card for working with children and youths. — Resources discussed in this episode: — Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Paul Farmer | Business Mentor, Founder of Mentoris Group: — Transcript Paul Farmer: [00:00:00] What is growth over the next 12 months? Because at the moment what I'm starting to find is that's shifting because if we look at the capacity of our team, for example, it's changing. But if our expectations of growth do not change, then we're going to be in a space where we're going, Well, hang on. Tim Sweet: [00:00:19] Welcome to the Sweet On Leadership podcast, where we explore leadership success through conversations with remarkable experts. Curated by Tim Sweet, these guests share profound knowledge fueling your growth. Get ready to unlock true impact with your host, Tim Sweet. Tim Sweet: [00:00:38] I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you, my friend, are a leader. And this show is all about and all for you. This is the Sweet On Leadership podcast Episode 11. Tim Sweet: [00:01:09] Well, hey, I'm here with Paul Farmer joining me from sunny Brisbane, Australia. Paul, thanks again for taking the time to join us. We're going to spend a little bit of time picking Paul's brain over an issue that I know is common with my clients, and I think it's out there and it's something that we need to talk about, and that is how are leaders coming to the table and bridging this gap between what their people need out of the work experience and what the business needs to service its clients and to bring value into the world. Paul, I know you've got lots of thoughts on this, so I wanted us to dive right in. But first I just want to say thanks again for coming and spending some time with me. Paul Farmer: [00:01:50] My pleasure. And I hope things are well up in the Northern Hemisphere. I actually caught up with one of our colleagues who was down south of the equator last week, with Paul Ferneyhough. So he sends his regards and from a leadership perspective, he ties into the way we want to look at things because he looks at things in a very practical way. So in terms of looking at the way that things are changing, and one of the conversations we had was things are changing now, those that don't feel like they want to change the way they do things, it'll become even more challenging as leaders because the way that people, I'll call them younger generation are coming into the workforce, they think differently, they operate differently, they have different expectations. And they're not tarred by the brush of this is the way we've always done things and the mindset of if we want more, we just work harder, we work longer, we sacrifice more to be able to have more. Now, that model historically has worked because people have been prepared to do more, do longer hours, sacrifice more weekend work, things like that. And when I was working in corporate, that was what we just did. You just do it because that's the expectation of we've got so much work to do, this is what you will do. And you do it unquestioned. Now what we're tending to find is people are becoming a little more aware of what truly matters to them. And I'll say the pandemic has really shifted people's perspective around what truly matters to them. Paul Farmer: [00:03:30] And I'm starting to find that it's not about working more, about working longer. It's more about what is it that I want to fill my space with. I'll generalize, but gone are the days where people will go, Well, I'm just flatly going to do 50, 60 hours a week. Now, if the business needs that, then operationally we look at our capacity and go, well, let's be honest with ourselves, this is the capacity that we have. How do we get more out of our capacity rather than being in a space where we're challenged by adding extra capacity to our space? The way we used to think was, We'll just get our team to step up consistently and they'll do it because they want to work for us. Whereas now the ability for people to move between organizations, the stigma about moving between organizations has been removed. So they now have the ability to be able to go, Well, you're asking me to do 60 hour weeks for not much more. Then I can go over here, I can do 35, and I can get exactly the same as what I'm on, but not be expected to do 60 hours a week. Yeah, I'm going to be in a space because what matters to me is time. And I'm going to be in a space where I'm resetting what truly matters to me and what's going to make me happiest, which is going to be focusing on what makes me happy, not what makes everyone else happy. Tim Sweet: [00:05:00] Covid. It has left us with a population that has decided they're going to change or they're more careful about how they spend their time. They're more careful about how they spend their money, and they are very conscious about how they want to work or what they don't want to be doing. As you say, you know, people used to tough it out and the promise of work for a number of years was you would work and you would receive a revenue from it. So, I mean, you've got cash in. Well, now people are thinking truly about what's the cost of having that job. And so the equation is shifted and it's, you know, if I'm going to be going into that, well, what am I giving up? Am I giving up time with a family? Am I giving up some portion of myself? Am I liquidating my personal values and beliefs in order to work at this place? And they're just not necessarily willing to do that anymore? I wouldn't say not necessarily. Paul Farmer: [00:05:57] It's less about money and it's more about how they feel about where they're spending their time. Covid has provided an opportunity for people to sit back and go, well, you know, what? Am I truly spending my time where I want to spend it, or am I choosing to spend it where I'm getting paid but am I really happy because now the job market has opened up. Whereas if you're a skilled, highly skilled, individual or leader, the opportunities are everywhere. Less about being in a space where it is constantly, you have limited options. Now it's like a smorgasbord of everything from a worker's perspective it's opened up. From a leader perspective it's become more challenging because now we're in a space where that option of asking people to work 50 to 60 hours a week unquestioned has become more challenging. And so as leaders, as you mentioned before, our job is to try and work out how we get our vision and strategy delivered with the capacity that we have in our organization. And it's what's our capacity, which may have changed. Tim Sweet: [00:07:09] Yeah. And the notion of capacity has changed as well. I mean, originally it was, do we have enough headcount to do the work that's required? And then we get a little more sophisticated and we said, do we have enough skilled headcount to be doing what we need to be doing? And we could add that in. If it's taught me anything over the last three years, it's that we have to start looking at capacity differently and saying it's not just about capacity and skill and maybe discretionary performance within that person. It's also willing capacity. Is that person approaching the work with a real generosity and willingness because it fits with what they want, right? They're being fulfilled by the work. And so when we look at the resources that we have within an organization, are they the people that really want to be doing that thing because they're going to be that much more productive or happy doing it and feel better doing it? Paul Farmer: [00:08:05] What you've just highlighted, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It's, you know, seek first to understand before being understood. When we get an understanding of what drives those that are in our organization, we get an understanding of how we're able to tap into that to help them see how they can help us achieve what it is that we're looking to achieve. So if we stand there and tell them what to do, that may not align and they're going to go, Well, hang on, you're telling me what to do? You're telling me I'll have to work 60 hours a week? For what purpose? They're going to challenge it because we are asking them to give up their thing that, or something in their space that truly matters to them. And so now people are pushing back saying, well, no, my contract says that I do 40 hours a week being in a space where we're understanding what drives them helps us be able to understand how we can be in a space where we can, as leaders, we can work in a way that aligns with them but also aligns with how do we get the best out of them so they get what they want, we get what we want, and it's a win-win, which is another, I think, win-win. So in that space it's creating an opportunity to say, Well, okay, as a business - and the three things that pop up as a business owner, business leader - is looking at the three areas, one is clients and workflow. Historically, it's been all about more, more, more, more, more. Yeah, growth is only growth if we are getting bigger. Tim Sweet: [00:09:47] Versus bigger in the right ways with the right people. Paul Farmer: [00:09:50] And so at the moment, what I'm finding is resetting, resetting hashtag growth. What is growth to a business owner, to a business, to a leader? What is growth over the next 12 months? Because at the moment what I'm starting to find is that's shifting because if we look at the capacity of our team, for example, it's changing. But if our expectations of growth do not change, then we're going to be in a space where we're going, well, hang on. For example, a business I was talking to, they wanted to go from 12 people to 20 people in the next 12 months. But they haven't been able to add one person in the last year and a half. So the expectation for them was frustration because we will have 20 people by the end of 12 months. I said, for what purpose? At the moment you're already challenged with how much time you spend with your family. You're already challenged by delivering what you're trying to deliver now. I said, How is adding another 7 people to your team, how is that going to give you a business that you feel better in? Anyway. Well, if you're not growing, you're going backwards. I said, Well, sometimes you've got to traverse the mountain to be able to go again. And so in that space the conversation was what does growth actually mean now? What does growth mean? And I look at the leadership space and if the business owner is trying to add $10 million to their turnover, but they don't have the capital to be able to deliver $10 million of extra work, then is that growth aligned with the organization that we have at the moment? And the pressure, I use pressure deliberately, because the pressure is going to come back to the leaders to be able to get more out of their teams. But their teams are going to go, you know what, no, I'm not going to do 50, 60 hours a week. And so middle management - business owners have expectations, the people below them have expectations - the middle management are the ones that are getting squeezed because they're the ones that are going to have to be delivering growth. But growth in the old view of growth as opposed to the new view of growth. And then you've got to manage the expectations which are based on the new version of growth for people in the business. But we haven't actually reset any alignment. So the people in the middle are in that element where they're going, well, we're trying to deliver for the owner, but then also we're trying to deliver for the people and we're in the middle of going, Well, there's a misalignment with what's going on in this space. So the leadership space, I'll call it middle management, that space there, unless we actually step back and reset what growth means as an organization then there's going to be a misalignment and the leaders are the ones that are going to get caught. They're going to get hammered because the expectations are they will deliver this. At what cost? Tim Sweet: [00:12:59] We've seen that very clearly. I mean, the pressure is on middle management right now because they have, over the last 2 or 3 years, supplemented a lot of the needs of their employees. And they have also said yes and they've shown that they've been the layer that traditionally has shown that grit. We always hire for grit. The person that's going to stick it out when things get tough, show up for that 60 hour week. And so they're also the ones that are getting burned out or they are leaving. And in many cases, they're getting scapegoated for when things aren't changing. And as we move towards, you know, a new balance, a redefinition of growth, for instance, or scale in business, it's funny because as you're talking, I'm thinking back to my days in total quality management and we were looking at, you know, when we start to design a product or we start to design a process, we have to not just look at what the outcome of that process is, but is that outcome tailored to the qualities, plural, that we want to see out of that product? And we have to start thinking about both the leadership experience and the employment experience and the strategy of the business in terms of what's the business outcome by the true qualities that it actually possesses. Tim Sweet: [00:14:20] So if we're going to say, you know, how do we define what growth is in an organization, what does that actually mean? What does it feel like? What does it look like? Is it size? Is that growth? Is it number of customers or is it quality of customers? Is it average revenue, whatever that is? And then we get into saying the same thing, well, what is the employment experience going to look like? And then most importantly, to myself and my clients, what is the leadership experience going to look like? Is it going to look like you're able to build the team around you that's going to be, you know, happy and healthy and showing up fulfilled and ready to work. And it is in balance with what they want to see out of life. Paul Farmer: [00:15:03] We get to choose. So I'll put a business owner hat on. We get to choose the feeling that comes into the business. Yeah. So there are three areas that I see that have the biggest ability to influence, that, is - and again, we choose these areas - but one is the clients and the workflow. Who are our clients? Now, historically, we may have had a certain client who was our ideal client, but that may have shifted because our previous ideal client may be labor-intensive. Our new ideal client may be the client that takes less labor but adds the same value. What's to say that traditionally we've worked with a certain type of client, what's to say that that client continues to be an ideal client? Now maybe there's an element that we haven't reset an expectation from an existing client. And this comes back from our leaders. And I've had a conversation with a business owner last week, and they're in a space where their product is shifting consistently. So in that space they have clients who previously had a certain product, but that shifted in six months, whereas previously it would have been a seven-year product. So resetting who their ideal clients are, the ones that are able to take on constant change and the ones that want to be updated whenever there's an update, they become your ideal client as opposed to the set and forget. So the change in the client and the workflow in that space is looking at it to say, well, do we have to do as much or is there a way to be able to have more but not have to do more? Paul Farmer: [00:16:55] Now that workflow and client ideal client space is resetting that space to go if we want to turn over $10 million and we've done it with a certain, let's say we did it with, you know, ten clients, a million bucks a year each client, then what's to say that we have to continue with ten clients at a million bucks a year? What if we were to have five clients at 2 million bucks a year? Do we need the same capacity as ten, but with five? We could end up with the same amount. We reset our expectations because we have a capacity that's set. So looking at our business from a capacity perspective and going, well, if we're in a space where it's challenging to find extra capacity, then look at the capacity we've got and say, well, how do we make this work for us? And so top one, clients and workflow. That for me we have the ability to be able to look at our client base and go, Who are our people? That may have shifted during Covid, that may have reassessed? Historically, these are our clients, but then we look at it now and go, Well, actually we're moving into a different area or we're attracting different types of clients, or we're in a space where we go, Well, we want to be able to attract clients that have extra value, but don't take extra resources because we don't have extra resources at this point in time. Paul Farmer: [00:18:21] That's number one. Number two is our team. So our team, who's on board, the type of people that are on board, the environment that we're providing that gives them the ability to feel like something that's bigger than just them. They are not a profit center. They don't turn up, do a job and leave. You know, some people want to do that, because - and I had this conversation two weeks ago - there was a guy who said, oh, there's a guy on my team, he turns up, does his job and leaves. And I said, So what's the problem? And he said, Well, you know, I want him to step into a leadership role and whatever. I said, Do you understand what's going on in his space outside of work? And he went No, not really. I said, So can I ask you to find out? Anyway, next time I spoke to him, he said, Oh, he said, he's got four kids. His wife has just finished up a job and she's about to start another one. And he's in a space where he has to spend time picking the kids up so he can't work longer. Paul Farmer: [00:19:22] So outside of work, there's a bunch of stuff going on that means that his time is valuable not just for the business but for himself. And so the business owner hadn't made time to find out what was going on in this person's space. All he assumed was what he saw, which was this person's not performing. So digging a little deeper and getting an understanding of what's happening in people's spaces outside of work, it's not I want to know about your personal life. It's just I want to understand that if there's stuff outside of work that is influencing your capacity at work, then I just want to be in a space where I get it. Are there ways that we may be able to structure things or help you in a way to ensure that, you know, when we're at work, we would like everyone to be at 100%? If there's stuff that we can help with, then let us help because we want someone who turns up that's running on all cylinders. And if it's not, then we want to be in a space where we can provide an environment where you feel comfortable, there's trust, and we're there to help you because we want you to be successful. And it may be that there's stuff outside of work that's impacting work. We just want to come from a space of help. That's two. Tim Sweet: [00:20:43] Yep. So clients and workflow, number one. Paul Farmer: [00:20:45] Client workflow, number one. Team, number two. And your role either as a business owner or as a leader. What is your role? Because when you are clear about what your role is and what you are doing, then it allows you to be able to choose what you do in your space. So where you're choosing to do stuff, whether it's consciously or subconsciously, whether you're choosing to do stuff that isn't in your wheelhouse, then often that then starts to eat away at your ability to bring a feeling into the business, which is a feeling of I feel like I feel great, I feel awesome, I love what I'm doing, whatever. Looking at your role and going, Well, what is it that I can bring to my role? Or what are the elements that are challenging me and can I have a conversation about those elements with those that are either in the business or those that may be outside the business. So, for example, you look at leadership in a space. If I'm in an environment where I feel part of something bigger than me and there is trust, then I'm in a space where I feel like I can ask for help. Because I feel like I'm not good enough pops up and I'm going to get sacked because I'm not good enough in my job. Whereas being in a space to reach out to a leadership coach, a leadership specialist, to be in that space, to say, well, you know, these are the expectations and there's a couple of things that are challenging me, but I don't feel like that's something that within the workspace I want to chat to someone about, that's where someone external becomes really valuable because you can have it in a safe space to help you keep moving forward. So those three things, those three things are the things that I see. We can choose how we deal with those three, which will influence the feeling that we bring into the business and the business will reflect the clients and the workflow, the team, and our roles as leaders. Tim Sweet: [00:22:51] As you're speaking, one of the thoughts that keeps crossing my mind is people know that things have changed over the last three years. There's very few people that don't feel impacted by Covid. And I think it's pretty well known that most people have gone through, you know, a great deal of introspection, thinking about how they want to live their lives, rebalancing for themselves what's important. And yet we return to work, we return to these strategies, and we may be trying to hold up strategies that were crafted in the old way. And if we've got employees and leaders and customers that have changed, we have supply chains that have changed. We have access to capital that's changed. We have technology that's changed. All of this stuff has shifted. And in many ways it's shifted for the better. And the notion of grit and the exchange between how long I'm going to spend at work and what I'm going to get out of it and what it's going to cost me has all changed. From that perspective, it's logical that businesses have to shift to say how we are actually calculating the business and designing the business to produce value for everyone in that grand win, has to be reconsidered and we have to approach it with the same level of introspection, openness, and creativity that we have given ourselves. And if these businesses are the children of the people that created them and those that nurture them, then of course they're going to change too. As we talk on here, I think we still have people that are struggling to catch up, that are trying to do it the old way, that are plagued by limiting beliefs and myth and a feeling of security about it's always been done this way. And they're trying to hold on to that. Paul Farmer: [00:24:47] If you don't reset, then you can hold on to the historical. That's what you've known, that's what you know, and that's what you go, Well, no, nothing's changed, we'll just keep doing, we'll keep everything the same as what it was before. Then what you're starting to find is the mismatch between the business expectations and the team's expectations are like this. And so then, as I say, then you get a mismatch. And if the definition of growth isn't reshaped, then what you find is that in the middle there's a middle manager. And as you said before, middle managers are the ones that are, you know, taking, from a metaphorical term, they're taking the beating of a mismatch because they're having to manage a mismatch. Now, depending on the size of the organization, you're going to have shareholders that want the targets that were there previously and they're going to want all of the return and all that sort of stuff, which is a different beast again. However, being in a space to be able to say, well, you know what, if we said $10 million turnover is what we wanted, then we can still suggest that $10 million turnover is, we can see for that. But let's shift the way that we look at getting there. Does it have to be ten and a million? Can it be five at 2 million or, you know, whatever it is? But if we try to keep putting a square peg in a round hole because the hole's always been round, then who loses? You're going to lose really good people because they're going to take a hammering for not hitting an old version of growth. Tim Sweet: [00:26:32] So when I'm taking leadership teams, if we're doing strategy work and we're trying to get ready for change, we're trying to disrupt so that they can think differently, my first protocol is always to go out and gather perspectives from around their business, and then we put those in the middle and we say, this is where everybody's minds are at. And if we can get very, very clear on what that is, we usually see what can or cannot work moving forward. And that's usually for myself, that's one of the first steps I use to really say, the future you thought you were going to have is not the one you're going to get. Because just look at where everybody's minds are, including your own. Tell me a little bit about if you run into an owner who is still, you know, got an iron grip on the past. What are some of the tools or some of the conversations you have to really shake them up? Paul Farmer: [00:27:32] I had this conversation two weeks, I was down in Melbourne, and I had this conversation with a business owner who, and to be honest, they were the example was wanting to go from 13 to 20 trucks on the road. That's what their view of growth was. And so I was like, okay, well, for what purpose do you want 20 trucks on the road? And they said, well, you know, it'll this, this, this, this, this and this. And I said, okay, well that's great, but what if you could have that without having to add 7 trucks? They went, What do you mean? I said, Well, what says? I said, at the moment, what's the biggest thing that you are challenged with in your space? And he said, Finding people said, No, it's not. I said, You've got good people. The challenge is you don't have enough time to spend with your family. And he went quiet and he went, Oh, actually, yeah, you're right. I said, So how's adding 7 people to your business going to give you more time with your family? I said, You got 7 more people to deal with. You've got to add an extra admin person. You've got to add all of this onto your business. Paul Farmer: [00:28:38] So can I ask you one question is what is the business that you actually want? What is it? Is it 13? Is it 17? Or is it a business that allows you to choose where you spend your time and allows you to be able to choose to spend more time with your family? Because at the moment, that's the thing that is lacking and that's the thing that's driving you to add more people so you can spend more time at home. But you add more people, you're going to spend more time away because then you've got to get more clients and all of this. I said, So what if we reshaped your space and said, well, what is your definition of growth over the next 12 months? And he said being able to spend more time at home. I said, does that need more people? And he said, no. I said, what if you could get 5%, 5% extra profit out of the current team that you have at the moment? For whichever way, whether it's your mark up or whatever. I said, what if you get 5% extra on a $5 million business? Tim Sweet: [00:29:47] With five hours more with your family. Paul Farmer: [00:29:51] True. I said, So profitability is one. So that's, you know, 5% of a decent number is a decent number. But then also you get the ability to be able to choose to have Friday off or have Monday off or be in a space where you can choose to take a day off, which means you work four days a week. But at the same time, you're in a space where you don't have to manage an extra 7 people. And the final question I asked him, I said, Would you like to be able to become a consultant to your business? And he went, Oh, and his shoulders dropped and he said, Oh, yeah, but I can't do that. And I said, no. I said, I'm not saying now. I said, Would you like to be in a space where you are not part of your business, you choose where you spend your time in your business. And he went, Oh, that'd be awesome. I said, So look at your business. You've already got the basics to be able to make that happen. I said create it as though you're not there. And who will be doing, if not me, then who? Who'll be doing what you want him to do? So running a strategy day, for example, is sitting down with a business and going, Well, let's be 100% honest with ourselves. What is it that we actually want this thing to be? Do we want to find more people? Do we want more people? If the answer is yes, then that's okay. However, for what purpose? What do you want, more profit? Yes. Well, what if we could add efficiencies to the way that we currently operate? Or what if we were to look at our client base and go, Well, you know what, 50% of our client base is on our old pricing. What if we had a conversation about what it is that we have done historically and say, well, we're going to be honest, we need to reset the basis on which we operate because that's, you know, 1970s pricing. So if we revisited that and say, well, you'll get more value because we're choosing to not go exponentially more people, we're going to give our existing client base better value, which means that they are potentially prepared to pay bit more for that. If not, then at least we're having a conversation with them around, you know what, things have moved on. Yeah. Reset. Tim Sweet: [00:32:13] Yeah. There's a whole nother mind shift there in terms of playing with that example, if you were to have that conversation with your client and the client said, No, we're here because of the price. If you then choose to say yes to that, well, you've just determined your own worth and you truly are stuck. Paul Farmer: [00:32:30] And potentially you're not valuing yourself. You're choosing to value the relationship more than what your value is. Because if you were to say no, for example, if you were to go back and say this is what it looks like, then it's interesting how some people can be in your space forever. But some people may not be in your space forever. Yeah. So you look at an element to say, well, we've got a potential client that, you know, let's say your charge out rate's 200 bucks an hour. Yeah. Historically it's been 200 but because of the fact that now our business has grown and our expertise has grown and we deliver better value or whatever, you know, that $200 has gone to $400. Then if someone's only prepared to pay $200 for what is more valuable, then they become price driven. And are your ideal clients price driven? No, they're value driven. So potentially you may have outgrown them. And the value that you offer has outgrown what they're prepared to pay for. So maybe they become someone else's clients, not your clients. And so from a leadership perspective, dealing in that space is, it's challenging because you've got a relationship, but also if there's an expectation that you'll continue to hit targets and there's a conversation that comes up about an existing client who has delivered consistent quantity, to then go, Well, hang on, our pricing is half what it should be, but we're getting consistent quantities, then as a middle manager, are we going to be in a space where the expectation is that, for example, the work may not be the type of work we want to do, but there's a historical legacy relationship there. So then the people doing the work aren't going to be happy. Then you've got middle management who are dealing with it and they're not hitting or they're not contributing to their targets as they could be if they said no to that person, but said yes to someone else at the new rate. So they're in a space where they feel like there's a ceiling on what they can do. But then the owners are sitting there going, Well, the expectation is you'll deliver at this level and you'll deliver this, this, this and this, which may be the old style of growth. If we don't go back and have a, what I classify as having an adult conversation, you say, just going to be honest, this was the price back then. Paul Farmer: [00:35:02] We've moved on and the value that we offer has increased. We offer better value. Now if we're in that space, then if we value ourselves, it will be the price will be the price. If the price is a little out of someone's league, then maybe, just maybe, we may have outgrown them in the value that we offer and what they're prepared to pay for. Either they come on board or it's a conversation to say, well, you know, if we choose to keep them at the same pricing because they have a massive volume, that's our choice. But at the same time, the question of for what purpose do we continue to allow them to have the old rate? Because if they have the old rate, then anyone they know is also going to want the old rate. Oh, but they're on that rate. So well, things have moved on, but they're getting that rate. All of a sudden if we choose to not value ourselves, then they will take us on their journey as opposed to us taking them on our journey. Tim Sweet: [00:36:03] People have turned their lives to deliver what they believe they deserve. And as we said before, people are spending in different ways and they're deciding how they want to work. We have to consider every element of the business from the customer landscape through to, you know, the processes that we use and the policies we deploy and how we organize around the work with that same lens, with that same level of discernment, and say, you know, we've done the work over here. We've had the adult conversation already in our homes, around our table with ourselves, and we cannot avoid having that same level of introspection or analysis done in the business side. It deserves it and it'll never furnish us what we need as our new selves if we try to maintain the old. It has to be up for conversation. Up for debate. Paul Farmer: [00:37:01] And I'll be honest, at the moment I'm finding so many business owners are getting frustrated that the business isn't what it was. They're not getting from the business what they were getting from it previously. It's changed. The dynamic of the business has changed. You know, it used to be double-digit growth and we could find people and whatever. Certainly down here, anyway. It's the element, the access to human capital has changed. Now it's in a space where the frustration is coming up that we can't find enough good people to do what it is that we want to do. But that's based on what we wanted to do with the people that we had previously. We're not resetting. Tim Sweet: [00:37:44] You had mentioned Paul Ferneyhough earlier. We're both big fans. We love that guy. And having worked for him and experienced him as a leader, you know, lots of fond memories. But when we were working together in Australia, I don't know if you remember, but I likely would have used this video in one of my sessions and that was students at MIT had designed this bike and the bike had square wheels and it could roll just like any normal bike if the road was a series of half circles. And the distance of the half radius was the length of one side of the square. Right? And so you could change. And I think what's happened here is we've realized just how much we've had to shape ourselves for this style of work. And we don't want to be square wheels anymore. But unfortunately, now the business is kicking back because we designed the wheels for the road and not the road for the wheels. And so now we have to stop and say it is not a sacred cow. It's not something we cannot touch. We have to look at it and say the answer is not to find more grit and work faster and work harder and keep all the clients and add 7 more trucks. And all these things were sort of the original assumptions. It's to back it up and say, What road do we want to be on here, folks? Paul Farmer: [00:39:13] Let's design a bike that can go on multiple roads. And it isn't just for one road, but we also, and the word, the key word that you said before, was stop. If you don't stop and look at the road ahead, if you don't stop and look at where you are at the moment and go, well, what bike do we need? Do we still want to have a bike with square wheels? So that means that we can only go on roads that have, that are shaped like that, or do we look at it and say, well, what if we looked at our bike and say, well, do we need a racer? Maybe we need a mountain bike, but with round wheels, which means that we can go on that road, we can go on this road. We can choose any road we want to, but it fits into us and our space because we're focusing on our bike, not what other people expect us or the bike that we had previously. Tim Sweet: [00:40:05] When we back that up, then when we think about those leaders who are having trouble with the transformation. One of my mentors, Donald Cormier, always says all change means loss, right? And when you have people that have made their careers about riding real fast over this road that was built for square wheels, suddenly now that's how they found success. They were experts at the old game. And so I feel that part of that resistance to open the books and look deeply at what we can change and what beliefs we can challenge, you know, they were experts at that game. And if I lose that confidence and that surety that I'm going to win at the new game, it's tough. Paul Farmer: [00:40:54] That's based on fear. Tim Sweet: [00:40:56] Yep, 100%. Paul Farmer: [00:40:59] If you sit in the space where you go, well, you know what, and let's say infinite possibilities, but in challenge there is opportunity. So if I was in a space where I was the expert at the square-wheeled bike and all of a sudden the square wheel bike is going to become obsolete, what's the opportunity for me to look at my expertise and go, Well, how do I apply that in another space where they want to leverage the fact that they are a business that have a square wheel bike and they want to be able to change from the square wheel to the round wheel? Well I'm an expert in a square wheel, so I can say, well, this is what I know. And then, well, what would you need to change to be able to translate that into the new one? Well, this, this, this and this. And all of a sudden you become a transformational expert because you're the expert in the old, but you become really valuable because those that are wanting to change, you can look at it and say, well, this is how we change. There is opportunity in challenge. Tim Sweet: [00:41:55] Oh, for sure. And if they are only looking at what they're going to lose, there's no abundance. If they say, Yeah, we're going to lose some stuff, but look what we can gain. And we open up the horizon and say, this is what's possible, and I really do like what you said earlier in the conversation around, you know, what are we really after? Are we defining growth wrong, and are we assuming that we've got one way to get there? Trucks, rather than saying if growth means more time with the family, we've got to ask better questions, we have to actually question whether or not we're trying to solve something with the right solution, but to the wrong problem. We need to check what's the problem we're really after here. Paul Farmer: [00:42:38] Looking at it and going, well, what does growth really mean to us? And be 100% honest with ourselves and go, what is growth? What do we want this thing to turn into, say, in 12 months time? And be honest and say, well, this is what it looks like. Tim Sweet: [00:42:52] Your advice from earlier, just to recap here, as we sort of wrap up, three places to look at. We're going to look at clients, if you're an owner or you're a leader, let's open the books on, you know, clients and the workflow that we use with those clients and to satisfy them. And are we doing that in ways that are based on historical assumptions? Could those be opened up and look at them different ways? The team, is the team functioning in a way we expect the team to function? Are there behaviors, the correct behaviors? Is the team crafted around the new way of work? And potentially have we outgrown some of the members of that team? But, you know, we don't always look there first. But still, is the team makeup right? Paul Farmer: [00:43:34] Do we understand what their space looks like? Tim Sweet: [00:43:38] Yes. And the empathy. Yeah, for sure. Paul Farmer: [00:43:41] That also is a massive piece as well. Tim Sweet: [00:43:43] Great. And then the leader or the leader owner, what are they expecting? What are they, what are their current challenges? What are they, how do they see themselves? Paul Farmer: [00:43:53] What's their role? Tim Sweet: [00:43:54] Yeah, what's their role? And I always like to use the word fluent. Are they fluent in how they work and how they want to work, what they do and how they add value, how they bring genius to the table. Right? But can they assess that and is that tuned properly, each one of those three things? Well, that's really great, Paul. Paul Farmer: [00:44:14] All of that will influence the feeling in the business. Because if you have good clients and good workflow, if you've got a good team and your leaders and owners are clear on what their roles are, then if you've got those elements there, then that creates an opportunity for the business to feel good, which means that when the business feels good, you're working with good clients, doing good work with good people and there's clarity around the roles of the leaders. But then it also, that gives the team line of sight of what it could mean for them because they could be going, Well if, an example just quickly, the example popped up that, you know, people were finding it hard to have people who quality people to step up into that leadership space, into a partnership space and I said, well, I'll be honest, why would they? You work 60 hours a week, you do weekend work, you're always at the office. I said, Why would someone want to pay to be in that space to buy equity so they can do that? I said, No way. I said, Your role, you have to be clear, but everyone has to be clear about what your role is. You get to choose the stuff you want to do. I said, Because if we want people to step up into your role one day, we've got to make it as though they want to step into it, not I don't want to touch that with a 60 foot stick because that is, I don't want that. Yet that's what they, the message they were having people aspire to. You can you can be like us. You want me to buy into something where I've got to do 60 hour days and spend no time with the family? Tim Sweet: [00:45:50] Hard pass. Paul Farmer: [00:45:51] Yeah. No thanks. No, thanks. Tim Sweet: [00:45:53] Yeah. We'll wrap this up, but there's something that I want us to kick around next time, and I'm going to make a big note for myself here, and that is, businesses are still hanging on to these old notions or these old arguments because I think they're easy to talk about. And you said the word honesty. They mask that honest conversation, that conversation we need to be having. And so, like typical ones would be something along the lines of, well, okay, it's the economy or it's the cash flow crunch or it's our capacity with trucks as we talk about, we keep kicking that example around. You know, businesses can have this boogeyman that they always refer to. And it keeps us from actually looking at the real issue, right? So if we're always, you know, lamenting why we're not doing, why we don't have the staff we need, they're not working hard enough. They're not at their desks early enough or whatever. It's masking the real issue. And we have to get down to what do we really need to be talking about? Maybe it's not capacity of trucks, it's actually, you know, are we working in a way that helps people feel the way they want. Paul Farmer: [00:47:02] The element in that space comes back to taking 100% responsibility for what it is and having what it is that you want. You know, we don't need to do anything. But the space is that if we want a business that feels good, then these are the things that we look at. Now, it's not we don't have enough people. It's like, well, we have what we have. So why wish, the three wise men wishing, waiting and hoping? Yeah. Why wish we had something else? Let's look at what we actually have. Look at the business and go, Well, let's reshape it. Let's work with what we have with a view that if we can then add extra people, then we can then upsize what we're doing. But let's be honest, we don't have an extra 7 people. So why wish, wait, and hope and blame everything else? If we took 100% responsibility for everything that was in our space, regardless of whether we create it or not, look at it and go, We have 13 people. Tim Sweet: [00:48:03] What can we do smarter, or... Paul Farmer: [00:48:06] What can we do smarter now to create it, to still create growth? But maybe we're in a space where rather than going up the tree, we can traverse, we can add extra value, which will then give us time to breathe, which will then allow us to say when the right people come along, then we might be able to incrementally grow. Tim Sweet: [00:48:24] Yeah, it may not be intuitive right now for that team, but maybe we need to change the nature of your intuition and then things won't seem so logical or so constraining. Awesome, Paul. Well, thank you very much for spending the time with me. It's always enjoyable. Paul Farmer: [00:48:41] Thank you, sir. Always a pleasure. Always a pleasure. I hope things continue to be great up in the Northern Hemisphere. And I may be up September time. Maybe. Let's see. Tim Sweet: [00:48:53] We're going to have to put some beef on the barbecue for you. Paul Farmer: [00:48:56] Sounds good. Tim Sweet: [00:48:56] All right. All right, Paul, best wishes. We'll talk soon. | |||
| 21 Feb 2024 | Richard Young - A Deeper Sense of Winning | 00:32:24 | |
In this episode of the Sweet on Leadership podcast, Tim Sweet engages in a dynamic conversation with Richard Young, a seasoned expert in high-performance sports. The episode explores the transition from hope-to-knowing in achieving sustained success, emphasizing evidence, conviction, and a system-thinking approach. Richard, drawing from his experience with Olympic athletes, highlights the importance of simplicity, alignment, and well-being in optimizing high-performance teams. The conversation extends into the business domain, illustrating the applicability of these principles for building and sustaining excellence in various leadership contexts. Throughout the discussion, personal experiences and insights are shared, providing an exploration of the key elements that contribute to lasting success in both sports and business leadership. The episode unfolds as Tim and Richard discuss the nuances of confidence, conviction, and the mind-body connection. They delve into the impact of evidence-based decision-making, the role of a cohesive team in individual confidence, and the systemic factors that produce conviction. Richard introduces his upcoming book, "Performance Leadership," offering a preview of the systemic differences between repeat medalists and non-medalists. The episode concludes with a powerful message, emphasizing the accessibility of performance fulfillment and the importance of focusing on the journey. About Richard Young Richard’s deep knowledge of people and performance has made him a highly sought-after speaker, mentor and strategist. He has experience across 10 Olympic cycles across most roles (athlete, coach, leader, researcher). He has won international gold medals, coached world champions, and created medal-winning programmes for three countries across innovation, research, learning and leadership. Richard has a PhD in medical science and later focussed on uncovering the key differences between medallists and non-medallists, their coaches, technical staff, leaders and the system they are in. Using his first-hand experience of leading people and programmes to create change for better performance he can make new high performance work for you. In your own arena, at work, and at home! Richards's values are family, productivity, belonging, discovery and transformation. He has been described as a ‘world-class performance creator’. Born in the UK, raised in Canada, he lives in Dunedin, New Zealand with his four children (and dog Dougal). Resources discussed in this episode:
-- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Richard Young | Simplify2Perform: -- Transcript: Richard 00:01 Hoping is a flag for evidence that's missing and knowing means the gap has been filled. So, it's a good word generally, universally for human nature to have hope but in the performance game is another trigger. And there needs to be a leader who spots that and says, Well, I hope it all comes off. And then we're looking at opportunity. And the opportunity is typically inside the gap and that could flag a gap in evidence. So, what don't we know?
Tim 00:32 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you, my friend, are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. Thanks for joining us for the 27th episode of the Sweet on Leadership podcast. Tim 01:04 Well, hi, again, everybody. This is going to be one of my favourite episodes. I know that I'm confident, I don't have to wonder about that. I don't have to guess, I don't have to hope. I know it's going to be one of my favorite episodes. Why? Because I've got evidence. I've been with the wonderful person that's in front of me here today. Before I know what we're capable of. And I am fully confident. Please let me welcome Richard Young, to the podcast.
Richard 01:34 A right on Tim. Wow, what an intro. What an intro and same back to you too. So, always a pleasure joining, you ask deep questions and yet connect some dots. And we always get somewhere, I learn a heap.
Tim 01:47 Well, the feeling is mutual. But before we get going too much for those of you that haven't checked out Richard in previous episodes, I'd like you to introduce yourself. Could you tell us who you are? Who do you serve? And what do you mean to those people?
Richard 02:04 Yeah. Right on so. So, I live in New Zealand. I’m Canadian, you can tell the accent. And so I live in the south of New Zealand with my four kids by the beach here and worked in high-performance sports, primarily the Olympics my whole life. So, from an athlete, coach through to leader, and researcher all in three countries as well. Three years ago, I decided to do some of my own work, I felt without the kind of bureaucracy and the dogma around me, I could help more people faster. And so that's what I've been doing. So, I work primarily with sports leaders, so senior leaders into experts in sports, they don't necessarily run the sport, some could be ahead of medicine, and some do run the Olympic Committees and things for different countries. And I help them streamline their approach to high performance. So, typically, when you've been in the game a long time, I call it winners bloat, they've got so many good ideas, that one before, it's hard to filter. Because they can make a good case for everything that they've done before you get enough people in the room like that. And it's a real bloated place of great ideas. And so I help come in and streamline big rocks down to even bigger rocks. So, there's only a few of them. And there's a pattern in repeat medalists that I noticed. And they learned that at the end, and so I help people at the beginning, figure that out sooner.
Tim 03:33 Awesome. And there's so many parallels, anybody who is listening, that's worked with me, you're gonna hear a lot of similarities. And that's because you and I come from very similar schools of thought. And we've trained together in certain practices. And so the whole idea of resolving conflict, and aligning tensions, and all of that is something that you and I are all over. So, before we got going here, I sent you a video and I thought I could really kick off our conversation today. And I was really inspired by what this person was saying, and I thought you get a real kick out of it. This is a quote from Ange Postecoglou. He's one of the premier league coaches for Tottenham MFC. And he's got a really interesting take when a reporter asks him, do you ever visualize yourself hoisting a trophy over your head? So, let's take a listen. And then we'll come back together we'll give it a talk.
Reporter 04:24 Do you ever picture yourself lifting trophies as a more general question? Ange 04:28 I got real pictures, mate. Quite a few of them. Just look at the ones I've got. I’ve earned them, I'm not lucky. I love winning, mate. That's all I've done my whole career. And now, don't say that dismissively that I've got pictures and I don't have them on my ceiling mate, as you suggested, but that's what drives me every year. I start the year hoping that at the end of the year, there is a picture of me with a team and lifting a trophy. That's what I've tried to do my whole career. And I've got plenty of evidence of that. So, that's what my sort of intent is here. It's not something that I have to visualize. It's what I do.
Tim 05:14 So, there's the video, what are your first thoughts when you hear that, Richard?
Richard 05:19 I hear the master in that leader. So, he's pointing out something very particular to the best in the game is that they do have a picture. So, Anders Ericsson, did all the research on you know, 10,000 hours and things and he had said, to become an expert, there needs to be a benchmark around you, you need to see what high performance looks like. And so some new sports of the Olympics struggle with that, you know, surfing and breaking and things like that. There's no benchmark yet. Whereas the other ones, you can see all these world records dropping, because they know the benchmark, they've seen the picture, and sometimes they're in the picture. So, what he's talking about there is, you wouldn't hire a coach who hasn't won before, is another way of putting what he's saying there is Tottenham would not hire someone who hasn't won before. So, he does have a lot of pictures. And you don't want someone learning on the fly, you want them tuning and synthesizing but not starting from zero. So, the best in the game are like him, they do have championship pictures or winning pictures around them. They may be aiming he says, aiming for better, and you know, the continuous improvement and all those things you hear about leaders, but their past is a record of victories, they have a history of winning. And that's what we find in the performance leaders in the sustained metal systems. The group, the people, the athletes are surrounded by people who have won before. And the sports that have a barren land of people who won before, they're doing their best. They're putting in a massive effort, but there's a misdirection on the main things.
Tim 07:02 You know, it's funny when I think of teams that I work with, it's a very common behavior for people to chart a win, really get something right, do something wonderful. And then steamroll, right past it on to the next thing, and not even take a moment to record or to acknowledge that that was a win. And then when it comes around the next time where they are having to do perhaps something very similar again, they almost can't recall that they had already, you know, had this experience. And you've talked to me before about being able to see those wins because Ange didn't start out being a Premier League winner. Those wins had to be found elsewhere. Right? So, can you talk a little bit about that for us? Because I love your perspective on this.
Richard 07:53 Yeah. So, his win, there's another great video of him because he was a premiership. I think he was a premiership player as well. And there's a shot of him in the dugout, and this is maybe last year with Tottenham. And the ball, you can tell based on his vision that someone's kicked the ball up high, and it's coming out of bounds, and it lands right beside him and he traps the ball. He's in a suit.
Tim 08:17 Oh, right. I've seen that body memory whap.
Richard 08:21 That’s right. Yeah, taps the ball and pushes it out to the field, and just shrugs his shoulders at the crowd. Who are you, I don't know if it's a standing ovation. But anyways, just so impressive, but there's the premiership history in him. And so in sports, there's this myth. And it's important to bust myths as well that you have to have been a premiership performer, or a championship performer to be a champion leader or a champion coach. And that's like asking a leader to be the best at you know, every department, he or she manages, and impossible. And so sometimes the best athletes do not make the best leaders. They can't see out of their own self because you have to be very self-absorbed to be an athlete and then you have to see wider to be a leader and a coach. And so if you've got winning those winning they need to be with people, not just you with a metal, Look at me go. It's the leaders and the change-makers that see like him, him lifting a trophy with a team. That's what he said it's not him with a trophy. It's with the team and so that perspective for leadership is the win is on us, it's not me, is vital. And you don't often see that in the leaders who are just working their way up. It's still about me they're still trying to prove like a new athlete selected to a team. It's natural to try to prove yourself first. They found that I did research on the All Blacks, they wanted me to review their caps, they call them caps here is how many times you've been in a test match, a championship game. And so the players under 15 caps, the players between 15 and 40. And then there's a cut-off that you're a senior player after 40 and someone like Richie McCaw, who was the captain down here. And by the way, rugby is crazy down here. It's like hockey in Canada. Everything is about rugby. Even in the town I'm in when the World Cup was here, there was going to be four games, not one of them an All Blacks game. There was a referendum of petition put out to there's only 120,000 people in this town. Should we spend 150 million on an indoor stadium for these four World Cup games, It'll take us 50 years to pay it off. It was a unanimous, Yes. So, and that's what we have is an indoor stadium. So, Richie McCall, I number of caps. But the difference was, it was all me under 15 caps. It was all us but I'm not sure where I fit between 15 and 40. And it's all us. And I know where I fit after 40. So, their picture changed from a me to a we. And so that coach there that you just quoted, interesting, he points out, it's a we picture and same with a McCall, but it's him with the team and the cup. Tim 11:23 Him with a team with the cup. And it's funny, because as you were saying that simplistically, I was thinking, Well, does a person have to have success as a leader going forward? No, not necessarily. I mean, this is why being part of that us as a junior, whether it's a junior person in business, or in education, or in sport, being part of it, you have to be part of the us, and then you have to think in terms of that collective thinking. And, you know, we often try to inspire that in leaders that they think, you know, around who are they serving, and that they don't get too myopic on their own needs, obviously. But this is actually a precursor for them to be able to even achieve those next levels. It's so much more than just a good habit. It actually is their conceptualization of success before success. And what does that look like? And boy, you know, I love talking to you, man, because every time there's so many examples, that, sure I may have helped people get past but it brings new light things and new realizations. And I'm right now I'm thinking of an example of a leader who was struggling. And this just explains so much that ego picture had gotten in the way that I picture had gotten in the way. Where they had all sorts of examples for WE wins, but they weren't accessing them. I mean, it speaks to one other thing. And I use one of your philosophies in my coaching practice. And it's all about that performance mindset. And once you have this experience, and again, as Ange says, in that clip, he has pictures of himself winning, he doesn't need to wonder if he can do this. You know, and you talk about hope versus know. And I always talk about in business, hope is a four letter word, don't tell me you hope something is gonna happen. Don't tell me you think it might happen. Like, let's access the data and everything we know, to take a very good educated guess of whether or not this is going to happen. And nothing's better than experience and evidence of it happening before. So, when you are working with these teams, what kind of an example would you give us about really helping somebody bridge that gap between hope and know?
Richard 13:44 Yeah, yeah. A lot of it is evidence-focused, right? So, the knowing means there are metrics around me or a picture that I can see this has happened and it can happen again. And so that conviction that brings for people, the data that I tracked it, six Olympic cycles now have medalists and non-medalists in a yachting group here who had won three Olympics. And they said hoping is a flag for evidence that's missing and knowing means the evidence the gap has been filled. So, it's a good word, generally, universally for human nature to have hope. But in the performance game is another trigger. And there needs to be a leader who spots that and says, Well, in the end, I hope it all comes off. So, before the Olympics, I hope I get lane eight. Tim 14:40 Screeching tires. Richard 14:41 That's right. Yeah. So, there's the second question that gets asked. So, performance leaders ask the second question, and then we're looking at opportunity and the opportunity is typically inside the gap and that could flag a gap in evidence So, what don't we know? So, there was one rower who was World Champion, and they started to fade and they became kind of disillusioned with their fitness and their times are wavering and stuff and so the whole support staff thought it was mindset. And so the psych team, an army of good intent, wrapped themselves around her and things then the coach looked and he came at it from the hoping/knowing and he got to investigate what might be under the hood, for he knew her well, also. But it turns out it was and I had this one in the book as well, it turned out it was the evidence that they had numbers for but she wasn't aware of them. And so he just presented those numbers to her every day on how she was tracking. And suddenly, she had evidence that it's not as bad as I thought. Feelings aren't facts, facts are facts. And so suddenly, she progressed and she became the world champion that year. And he knew it wasn't mindset, because you can't hope your way to victory. You do have to have prep, you know, that goes into flow, which we can talk about later.
Tim 16:12 For sure. It's funny that you say that, because something that started with me when I used to wrestle, and it's continued through university, and even now, it doesn't happen as often now. But you say, Sorry, what? Please repeat that for me. Feelings… Richard 16:29 Feelings aren't facts. Tim 16:30 Feelings aren't facts. I have a very physical response when I'm feeling uneasy, or I don't have the facts, or I'm not sure of how something's panning out. I'll get tightness across my back when I was wrestling, this would show up as muscle impingement and stuff like that, right? Like it really got tight. And then all I had to do was kind of rationalize stuff. It sounds so silly, but if I was studying for a test and I was feeling tense, I’d start to feel this tension in my back. And so then I would just take stock of what I knew. And what I didn't know. And as soon as I had a handle on it, and I moved it sort of from that emotional side over to where I could see it. Honestly, sometimes it was like it felt like an injury and it just went away. Within hours. It was gone. And I've had this happen dozens of times over my life. I mean, it's this strange sort of mind-body connection. It sounds a little cheesy. But I felt, you know, I literally felt injured. Through uncertainty, I guess.
Richard 17:32 Yeah. Yeah. Awesome way to put it. Yeah.
Tim 17:36 Well, I don't know if it's that. But it was just, you know when you said that it really gave. And I can imagine for this, this performer, once she had that data was just a deep breath. And like, Wow, I feel better right now. Like the fog just clears and the fog of war lifts and you can see what's in front of you and you remind yourself what your job is. And it's funny, you know, I think you and I've talked about this before, but when we talk about that hope versus knowing, you know, I love that there's always that circle with the pie graphs. And there's this little thin piece that says, we know what we know, these little thin piece that says we know what we don't know. And then there's this massive piece that says we don't know what we don't know. And I always think there's a fourth slice, which is that we forgot what we knew, you know, we actually failed to recognize what we already have learned and committed it to memory.
Richard 18:32 A friend of mine gave me a great line yesterday because he's a leader in a business. And he said a lot of my staff know what to do, but don't do what they know.
Tim 18:42 Yeah, no kidding. And that's a great segue, actually into the next question I got for you because you've mentioned the word conviction quite a few times here. Do you draw a distinction between conviction and confidence?
Richard 18:55 Yeah, so confidence is a frame, a mental frame, it is deeply inside, like your somatic sense of a feeling of being unprepared or something and that twinge in your back. So, conviction is deeply felt. It's just acknowledging and it's systemic, it's wider than me, it's bigger than me. There's something coming together here. My teammates, my staff, my home life, there's a whole picture is conviction, whereas confidence is this. That's right. Yeah, yeah. So, a much bigger piece is conviction. That's really a key difference between the sustained high performers and the rest because they are system builders. And when you have a system behind you, you just know the system's got your back, and suddenly it's conviction.
Tim 19:51 That's such a great way to put that. And again, when you build that system around people, and of course in the work that we do and the work that I do, so much of it is just helping people become fluent in where they are and what they've got. And that they're part of that system. And that system is around them and that it’s functioning. And so really, that is that feeling of being inside something that has a purpose and has a way of operating in a system of support or rules or code or whatever it is, but it's got a way to perform. Now all of a sudden, you are in that second space where you can perform, you're in that, it's not home, something else, it's a different vocation. And you have a role. And I think that that feeling of belonging leads to confidence as much as anything else.
Richard 20:39 Yeah, yeah. You’d love to read called Belonging. And maybe the listeners would like to read that too, written by a Kiwi. I think he's out in Britain now. But a lot of the rugby group and on this theme of cohesion, and team cohesion is a fantastic book. And there's a difference. You just pointed something out there. To him, the confidence is me. Conviction is we.
Tim 21:06 100%. Great. And I'll add this to the show notes. But does that Owen Eastwood?
Richard 21:08 Yeah, that's him. Tim 21:10 Owen Eastwood. Richard 21:11 And he's on LinkedIn, by the way. So connected. I've connected to him. And yeah.
Tim 21:17 Send me an invite man. Put us together. So, unlock your potential with the ancient code of togetherness. Excellent. Okay, that is on my list for sure. So, I like that cover too, I want them to be a tattoo. Anyway. Awesome. Okay, so what have we covered, we've covered being able to see the wins and distinguish that hope from know that security that gives us and another layer of security, you have brought us into this, me versus we and this ability to access this layer of conviction now that we have purpose and everything else. And that will yield among other things, probably give us a greater sense of confidence individually because we are part of something. They've got to play off each other. I'm sure. So, man, that's fantastic. What's your thinking as were at this point in the conversation?
Richard 22:13 Well, I'm not surprised we're connecting some dots here, Tim. So, you know, the synthesis between– Tim 22:14 Strong galvanization? Richard 22:20 Yeah. You get a couple of system thinkers, there'll be a lot of listeners out there that you know, the system thinking folk at all systems mean is people, places, and things and how they interact. It's just a helicopter view of the environment you're in, the orbit that you're in. And so everything can be framed as a system, even the video you played at the start, we could analyze his conversation, that one line from system thinking. I just got off the phone with a coach who wants some help with their plans for the World Cup. And it's basically system thinking, just to have a reflector pointed out are these really the big rocks? And how do we interconnect people, places and things? So, just good coaching, you know, like you do for your clients and leaders, all we are our system reflectors, really. And we point the lens back at the expert in front of us who knows the context. And that's what sport is. It's a series of experts, some with massive egos, by the way, a whole series of experts, and they need to be coordinated together so that their output is like all the arrows hitting the dartboard. And it's one dartboard. There's not multiple dartboards. So, yeah, that's where you find cohesion produces a team performance. That's the exciting part about sport is particularly team sport, you know, the physiology sports, that's my background, it's pretty straight, you know, you can kind of tell who's going to be within. Like rowing here is the best thing in the world, and their training is repeatedly 98 to 99% of world records. So, that's what they do, just keep going. And so physiology can do that. Whereas in a team, you never know when they're going to lift and just be that different team, you know that, wow, look at that. And there's something exciting. And that business team is just as exciting. Because the same peek, the same flow can happen in a business team. So, you asked what reflect like, what's happening, I can see all of this pointing to business, really, you know, the area that we're in these examples, you're heavy into business, I'm heavy into sport, but the bridge between the two you can you can hear the similarities between them.
Tim 24:38 I’m telling you the last few months have seen me crossing over. You know, I've been involved in cycling on that side. And now I'm getting involved in curling and pickleball was the most recent. So, you know, and it all is that sort of expression of well, I think conviction is the word but I love cohesion, finding that synergy, and really helping people be their best selves together kind of thing. I want to have you back and probably before too long, because I want us to have a separate conversation on flow, because that is one of my favourite areas to teach and play with. And then we can have a business focus discussion. Before we wrap up here, it's important to note that as much as we talked about sport, you are making huge inroads into business. So, if you are a business owner, you should really be thinking about checking out Richard, and especially if you're on that side of the pond, what are you dealing with? What are some of the most notable benefits I guess I could say? Or advantages when business owners start to take lessons from what you've learned in sport?
Richard 25:42 Yeah, so primarily, the high-performing team. So, I know that's a big focus of yours. And in performance–
Tim 25:53 Now it’s sustained high performance, somebody helped light me up to the difference between high performance, anybody can podium once, and sustained high performance. How do we do it over and over again? Do you remember his name? What's his name? That's right, it was Richard Young. Anyway, go ahead, please.
Richard 26:13 Yeah, so that's where the triangle came from. So, what I use in business and sport, and that's the theme of the next book, which is in finished drafts, so that'll be out in another probably two months. So, the key systemic differences between repeat medalists, sustained high performers, and non, and for us, it's pretty binary on metals and non so we have a pretty easy number to measure if you've got it. But inside that metal is a whole lot of depth if it's sustained. Anyone can win wants, it's actually pretty easy to win an Olympic medal, but to repeat it is totally different. And so they have a different and I don't mean to be little an Olympic medal, by the way, if there's listeners out there who've, you know, put their whole. So all I mean is the system required to do that even a business that achieves you know, they surpass all expectations. It's to repeat that. And you can just feel the difference in that while we got it together. But do we know exactly how we pulled that off, then it's more deliberative, it's sustained. So, the triangle is simplicity, alignment and well-being, so to keep it going, and there's a great book called The Living Company by Arie De Geus. He was the CEO of BP Oil a long time ago. And he was curious why some companies live longer than humans, but most don't. And the ones that live longer, that like past 100 years, they had certain things in common. They weren't connected to the ecology of their environment. They were adaptable, they were thrifty on their finance. So, it was a few things like that. And in sport, that translates to simple, we're not trying to do it all. We know what matters aligned, we're rowing in the same direction not as easy as it sounds when you've got a whole roomful of people who’ve won before. And then well-being means we're okay and you can feel the difference. You walk into a sport with systemic well-being. It's not gym passes, and they are fit already. But inside, there's a lot of pain in a lot of sport. And so the approach is changing completely in high performance because a lot of disasters that have happened for athletes and staff as well, which happens in other industries, but it's quite public in sport when something bad happens. And so it just means that there's all hands on deck to figure it out. So, that triangle works. And so the translation of that into business is a higher performing team. And you can call on flow, it's not psychological, it's preparation. So yeah, for sure, let's talk about that next time because there's this whole, you know, between us the session on flow, it's a deep, meaningful call to attention. It isn't something psychological.
Tim 29:16 I know we're going to do a good job on that one. All right. Any working title for the book right now?
Richard 29:24 Performance Leadership is the as the working title. Yeah.
Tim 29:28 Stay tuned to both of us because I'll be shouting that one from the rooftops. All right. And if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way they can get in touch with you?
Richard 29:37 The website or LinkedIn? So richardnyoung.com is the site that goes to simplify to perform but yeah, richardnyoung it's just a name easy to remember them.
Tim 29:52 No problem, we’ll put it in the show notes so that it's there. And as I asked every one of my guests now. Not the last time you were on, I don't think we started this little tradition. If you had one hope for the athletes, the business owners, the founders, the leaders that are listening today, if you could hope or you wish them… well hope, let's talk about the different kind of hope. What's your wish for them? Let's talk about that. What would you like them to feel and know coming out of this, this conversation?
Richard 30:23 We know this, that performance is more than a metal. It's deeply personal and its fulfillment. So the ones that achieve this sustained high performance, there's a sense of fulfillment and metal or no metal, all of what we've talked about, flow, conviction, metal matters but that isn't the main thing. There's a performance fulfillment that a lot of people never get to in sport and business, and it's closer than we think. So, yeah. So, hopefully, there's some trigger in here that it might be hey, you know what, maybe I've overcomplicated things. Maybe there's a couple of smaller arrows I need to be focused on than these big arrows, maybe I'm all results-focused, and the ones who are journey-focused, they get there faster than the rest.
Tim 31:11 That is an experience or that is a feeling. Fulfillment is something that everybody deserves. And a lot of people don't think it's within reach, but it is. They just need to break it down a little bit. All right, Richard Young, man. Love spending time with you.
Richard 31:29 Same with you, too.
Tim 31:30 Alright, let's do it real soon.
Richard 31:32 See you for the next month. Tim 31:33 Excellent, all the best.
Tim 31:39 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. Like us, if you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership. Please give us a positive rating and review on Apple podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word too by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening. And be sure to tune in, in two weeks time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 23 Aug 2023 | Managing Fear and Leading Through Empathy with Dave Sweet | 00:31:37 | |
Tim chats with his cousin Dave Sweet, homicide detective, author, and consultant, on the overlapping themes between leadership in business and in the world of policing. You’ll hear fascinating insights into how our minds manifest and manage fear and align with strategies to help your teams open up, give feedback, and share ideas. Whether it’s eliciting opinions during a board meeting or encouraging a witness to give a statement, when leaders empathize and give speakers the freedom to be honest, the more valuable the information given will be. Dave talks to Tim about the idea behind his book, why he pivoted to the world of consulting, and what is next on his horizon. Dave’s desire to show up as a leader, see people as they are, and serve the community is what drives him in his profession as a detective and as a writer. Tim confirms that his cousin is perfectly matched for his job and that as leaders when our work aligns with our passion, it no longer becomes work but a calling. This episode will have you assessing your leadership skills, inspired to improve your communication, and learning to overcome your irrational fears. Stay tuned for part two of this conversation coming soon.
About Dave Sweet David Sweet is an active-duty Homicide Detective with twenty years on the job. He has worked in the Drug Unit and the Organized Crime Section, and he teaches new recruits and presents at law enforcement conferences and various community groups. In addition to a Distinguished Service Award in 2010, Detective Sweet received the Chief’s Award for Investigative Excellence in 2017. He’s also the author of Skeletons in My Closet: Life Lessons from a Homicide Detective and has another book in the works.
Resources discussed in this episode:
-- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Dave Sweet: -- Transcript Dave 0:00 If you can remember to love people, it goes a long ways to be able to ultimately accomplish whatever you're sort of setting out to do that particular day. Everyone has a story, we would all think, Oh, well, I would never be in that situation. But the truth of it is, is that the majority of people that we investigate, had no idea that morning, they woke up, that they're about to take a life that day, and the victim had no idea that they're about to lose their life. Tim 0:26 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you my friend, are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. Welcome to the Sweet on Leadership Podcast, episode 14. Thanks again for joining us for Sweet on Leadership. I've got someone really special for you today. Not just because he's family, but because of his story. And well, it's one for the books literally, say hi to my cousin, Detective Dave Sweet. And today the two of us are going to be coming at you. So we might want to rename the show, not Sweet on Leadership, but Sweets on Leadership, just for this episode. Dave's been with the Calgary police service for a good two decades, and a big chunk of that was in the homicide unit. But here's the twist. He's taken those intense years and turned them into a book, Skeletons in My Closet: Life Lessons from a Homicide Detective. And it's not a typical cop tale. Dave goes deeper, he shares life and leadership lessons from his days on the job. And it's something to read. As a cousin, I find that our conversations often are somewhere between a gripping crime story and the heart-to-heart you'd expect from family. It was surprising to me that in his book, Dave takes us behind the scenes into some high-profile cases and shows us that even when faced with tough situations, people can do incredible things. And that's really a theme that Dave is touching on more and more. It's not about the gritty crime details, although there's plenty of those. It's more about the heart and the impact of those experiences and what he's found in them. Now, Dave is shifting gears, he's moving into a world that I'm more familiar with, which is consultation, and he's gearing up for even more public speaking. And there's a new book on the horizon. This time, he's tackling the idea of courage and fear and where that takes us as leaders. So I hope today I get to explore some current issues that you as leaders may have, but through Dave's lens, we're going to pull in some leadership lessons from his unique experiences. We're going to get to see a seldom-seen side of the world. And Dave's journey is one that has the potential to make a difference in your life. So no matter where you're starting, I think you can learn from it. So with that said, let's jump in, I'd like you to meet Dave Sweet, my cousin, a detective, an author, and soon to be a sought-after consultant. Man, it's great to have you here. Dave 3:16 Thank you so much, Tim, I really appreciate it. Tim 3:18 So this is gonna be a little bit different. I've never interviewed a cousin before, I had a brief chance to interview my dad, but you're gonna see me smiling a lot, because it's just so neat to be trying to interact with you in this way. Dave 3:33 Ya, no, it's gonna be definitely interesting. I've done a few podcasts over the years, but never one with family. So this is gonna be a lot of fun Tim. Tim 3:41 Hear you go. So when we were talking, before we hit record here, we were coming up with a few areas in which we could sort of kick-off and chew around a few leadership concepts. And the one that I thought was really compelling and what I would be interested in, in chewing around with you, is the idea of transparency and resistance and bringing ideas forward in the workplace. Amy Edmondson talks about the psychological safety aspect in the workplace. And often, we find that leaders have trouble eliciting information from people, but you're an expert in this space. And so I thought maybe that's something that you could tell us a little bit about from your, from your line of thinking. Before we do, though, is there anything that you'd like to share just about how you came into this role as a thought leader? Dave 4:37 Yeah, absolutely. So as you sort of said, well, I've spent the last 14 and a half years investigating some of the city's worst crimes, being in homicide, and sort of through that perspective, or through that lens. I've come to learn like, you know, our life… nothing's guaranteed for tomorrow. And so with that sort of perspective, I realize that, you know, one day I'm going to die. I think we all are. And so coming from the perspective of a homicide detective, I looked at it and thought, you know, what's really important to me is that I have some sort of a, a legacy that I leave behind whether it's no, and hopefully it echoes for some time. And service, the thought originally behind the book, the first book, Skeletons in My Closet: Life Lessons from a Homicide Detective. And the reason I wrote that book is it's so that my, my written word, could be a legacy that can be passed from a generation to another generation, they could learn a little bit about, you know, what this crazy, great, great grandpa was all about at one point in time or another. And maybe some of the things that I think about are things that they would be thinking about, as well, you know, in 50 years, or 75 years. And so, that was sort of the inspiration behind it. But it all sort of bases and stems around, you know, this idea that we're not here forever. And so we need to make as much impact in people's lives each and every day. Because Tomorrow is not promised to any one of us. And so, when I look at this world, and I think about it, you know, the offerings and the opportunities to learn from it every day are right in front of us. We just have to sort of seize the moment and take time to learn the lesson, whatever it is that we're supposed to learn that day, we think that we do all our learning in school, but the majority of our learning is through experience. And it's outside of the four walls of a school. So that's sort of the basis for where this all comes from. I think that our world is just a beautiful, big, unconventional classroom that allows us an opportunity to learn things. And then hopefully, we can go back and share those experiences with people that we love, and so that they can maybe learn from our sort of wisdom that we're taking on every day. Tim 6:58 That is a calling for many leaders is that you have to be able to care for your staff in some way, shape, or form and pass on what you know and what you've learned, as well as create opportunities for them to learn about themselves and, and really engage in the world around them. And so I think that there's a lot of parallels there. I've always thought there's a lot of parallels between parenting and management generally, yeah, for sure. When I think about your profession, and what you do, you're an investigator, you have to establish the truth, you’re about getting down to what is the truth of the situation. And whereas I may deal with people's work lives, and their career choices, and things like this, your game is much higher stakes, and the pivotal moments that you see people have, and through happenstance, I've happened to meet families that have had tragedy in their life and who you've helped. They always ask me, you know, is Dave your… Are you related to Dave Sweet? I say, yeah, I'm related to Dave Sweet. So I've seen, you know, second hand or the impact that you've had on people. And when you're going after the truth, you're going after some really hard to find, or at least very impactful and very dramatic truths, things that have changed people's lives profoundly in an instant. Right. So it's much higher stakes than what a leader is going to face in a typical business. But I think there's still lessons in that. So drawing from that and your legacy that you're leaving behind about how you conducted your life and how you how you brought value to humanity. Tell me a little bit about how you see your role when you wake up in the morning. And you've done so for several years, what drives you to go out there and seek truth? Dave 8:55 It’s sort of talking about I think that's really important, which is sort of the essence of somebody or what your mantra is going to be, you know. So, I mean, first of all, and I'll always consider myself a servant to the community, you know, first and foremost, and secondly, even on the worst days with some of the worst people, if you can remember to love people, it goes a long ways to being able to ultimately accomplish whatever you're sort of setting out to do that particular day. And it doesn't matter who it is. Everyone has a story, the uniqueness of the world that I'm in the world of murder and stuff, we would all think, Oh, well, you know, I would never be in that situation. This could never ever happen to me. But the truth of it is, is that the majority of people that we investigate, had no idea that morning, they woke up, that they're about to take a life that day, and the victim had no idea that they're about to lose their life. And so there's, there's always a backstory. If you can remember to love people, and it becomes a lot easier to do sort of relate and empathize with the person sort of sitting in front of you, whether it's a witness or a victim or, or the accused person or the, you know, the offender themselves. That's a big part of what we do every day. But I think what I wake up to in the mornings is really this concept or this idea that, you know, I'm a servant to the community. I embrace that as a role. It makes me feel good. I'm doing this, truthfully, I'm doing this for myself. I mean, I pick this career, right? So when I'm having a bad day, I just have to remind myself of that, you know, we live in a city of I think it's 1.4 million people. The truth of it is there's more Calgary Flames that live in this city than there are homicide detectives at this point. And if you were to like, look at this, the world of sport and hockey and all those things, one in every, I don't know what it is 80,000 kids that plays hockey in this country gets to play one game in the NHL. And so when I think about statistically, where are the odds that I'd be in the spot that I'm in, because I think I'm in a pretty cool place. And I think a lot of people out there would think, hey, you know what, I'd love to sit in that chair. But there's only a very small number of people that ever get to do that, I have to remind myself, I picked this profession, I picked this location I have, there's a lot of luck to get to where I'm at. But I have to this really, even in the worst days, just be so thankful for the opportunities that I've had. Tim 11:27 And we're all so proud of you, you know that but there's a luck that happens to be around you that allows you to be in that position. But there's also the question of job fit, and that so many people that I've worked with myself included, I mean, I could not see myself in that role, I think I would ring out, I'm not sure that I could do it, you have to be wired a certain way and, and have a certain tolerance for being able to deal with traumatic situations. And, as you say, maintain that perspective and maintain that empathy while you're doing it. professionalism. And not everybody is cut out for every role, not everybody would choose every role. So luck is part of it. But all skill is another part of it, and then just fit for the role and fit with the lifestyle and everything that goes with it. Because it is, you know, it's a tough shake. It's not for everybody. Dave 12:21 It's definitely true, we found each other in terms of careers, you know, I found it and it found me and it has worked out really, really well. It is an area of policing, where you can make impact every single day. Just this morning, I met with a mom who lost her son last year, and she's moved through the various stages of grief and at this point in time is just incredibly angry. And for all sorts of reasons. And I and I understand, and I do my best to empathize with her position, although I've never been in that spot. You know, you try to you try to still get into the hole with her whatever deep dark hole she's in right now and try and help her kind of move through it. And by the end of the meeting this morning, I feel like we got a little bit further with her in terms of being able to she maybe, it's alleviated some of the stresses or the concerns that she's had up until this point. And that was an easy opportunity to just sort of help somebody today move through a crisis that they've been dealing with now for a year, sadly. Tim 13:27 Yeah. I mean, I think we move through seasons of our career and, and whatnot. But we, we hit these periods where we're, we're a perfect fit. Every once in a while we've got the skills, we've got the knowledge, we've got the motivation, and we've got the values alignment. And I mean, that's where it stops being a job and starts being a calling. And it's not necessarily that you stay in that position forever, because everything changes. But the basics remain the same. The urges that you're serving, the purpose that you put yourself too often stays the same, right throughout your life, and what's going to satisfy you. Dave 14:05 I think that's really what you're talking about there. What you're touching on are like what our core values are, you know, what we go back to in times of crisis, or adversity or those types of things, you know, what your core values are, and they're foundational to you. So you always go back to it. And that follows you everywhere you go. Tim 14:25 Well, with that if we move, if we move the conversation on a little bit, I think I'm really interested for my audience and the people that tune into this podcast, which are primarily managers and leaders. They can be in the STEM fields or they can be in academia, they can be all sorts, all sorts of different places. They're dealing with also trying to find their purpose and what they're doing in what they're doing and how they've pointed their lives. And one of the drivers of a person in a leadership position is that willingness to make larger problems your own right, this is one of the key determinants that we see in about 6% of the population. It's people that are willing to make larger issues their own, and and not just sort of coast around them. And you know, when I think of our talk today, and I'll go back to that, that question, so much of what you do is about getting people to come forward. And, and there's a fear on teams, perhaps a leader wants to know how people are feeling, because they want to make things better, and they want to improve the lives of both the employee and the the operation. And sometimes getting people to come forward, people are just resistant in wanting to report what they've seen. And so I can imagine that something that you deal with on a day-to-day basis, is how do you gather information and get the facts? Dave 15:59 If I was to parallel that, I think you're, you know, it's when we're investigating any kind of a new crime or a new case, obviously, there's, there's a desire, there's hope that we'll have people come forward with information, they're gonna, you know, put us on a course where we will ultimately successfully identify the person that's responsible for whatever the crime is that we were investigating how we get there? Well, some say witnesses are more than willing to come forward. Right, they have no problem or qualms. But often, of course, that's not always the case. And people have a number of fears. And some of them are very, very natural fears, you know. What are the types of things that witnesses fear? Well, a big one is safety. I mean, they have safety concerns, right? And that's, that comes from somewhere, typically, I think it comes from what they've seen on TVs, TV, or in movies and on film, heard in the media, a fear that if you know, they come forward, that they're going to be somehow targeted by the person right? After the fact, the reality of it is that's likely not going to be the case. And so when a person has a fear like that, you need to take some time, first of all, to understand whatever the fear is, it's coming to you have to understand what the fear is, empathize with it, and then do your best to try and overcome whatever that person is saying. And in a case of a witness, the truth is, in the 14 and a half years of investigating murders in this city, and dealing with hundreds of thousands of witnesses, I've not known one case where a witness has been murdered, sometimes life can be a little bit rough and uncomfortable, certainly. But we've never had somebody significantly hurt that I'm aware of, in the time that I've been there. And so this fear that people have, it's generated from something else other than what is actually reality, right? Perception versus reality are two different things. But you know, speaking in that sort of same vein, of course, the next part of some witnesses and their concerns, is the way they're going to be perceived. And then how that person is going to be received back into the community they come from. It's no mystery that a lot of our witnesses are also in a criminal lifestyle. And so if you are coming forward with information, you are still going to end up going back into that lifestyle that, that you came from, and how are you going to be received? And how are you going to be perceived within that group, it's another big piece. And so again, it's making people understand sort of perception versus reality, the reality of it is, is that three or four people have come forward from that community and provided the same type of information. And then at that point in time, the person will start to sort of feel more at ease about being open and cooperative, and things of that nature. Tim 19:05 So those are two great ones. A fear of retaliation. And we want to make sure that people understand contextually how often that doesn't happen. And I liked the part about empathy. And really, you know, hearing them and not underplaying what their fears are. But then say, let's look at the facts. How often does this actually happen? And then the next one is, again, that context of saying, I understand you're worried about losing your community around you, and maybe your status, but there are others that are coming forward to. And so, you know, you're not alone in your concerns. You're not alone in your action here. Dave 19:42 And there are programs in place to I think it's important to know that, you know, again, we're fortunate, we have programs that will allow people to come forward and it was some anonymity as well. Right, which does help and I think, in the bigger picture world, those are like those whistleblower programs and things of that nature. In my world, that can be Calgary Crimestoppers, right? You know, there are other avenues where people can provide information and feel like they're protected in some way, shape or form from the information that can be provided. Tim 20:15 You know, a number of the groups that I work with, stories are so important and, and the the stories that frame up how we perceive work frames of how they perceive the culture that's around them. And I thought it was interesting that you, you raise that issue of what they've seen on TV, and sort of how that dominates what they're expecting this interaction to be, be like, when a lot of the crime dramas and whatnot that are on TV, have that Hollywood version of what a witness's experience is going to be like, or, or whatnot. That is the story that they're operating from. Dave 20:53 Well that’s the number one reason why people can't get over some of their fears or alleviate some of their fears is because, we all do this, we all catastrophize we always look at a situation. And we imagine the worst possible outcome that could come as a result of whatever the situation is in front of us. And really what we're doing with victims, or witnesses, or teammates, whatever it is, we're always trying to try to minimize somebody's catastrophizing. And the catastrophizing often comes from, like you say, and what, you know, we spoke about earlier, things that we've learned along the way. Years ago, before I was in homicide, I was in the drug unit. And I spent, you know, three or four years working as an undercover police officer, purchasing illicit drugs from a variety of people in the city. And during that time, prior to ever going into the drug unit, I had always heard a number of things about drugs. First of all, I heard the drugs are bad. I had heard that people that use or abuse drugs are scary. And you know that the drug dealers are evil. Right, these are the kinds of some of the messages we, I had at least, at different points in time, I don't know exactly where I received all of them, some of them probably from my own home as I was growing up as a kid. And then from other places as well. And so, with all of that in mind, I remember I used to pick up the phone and call up some guy I'd never met before to see if he would make a meet with me. He always sounded like he was about six foot three and 300 pounds, and just beef and muscle. And when I actually did convince the individual to come and see me or meet with me, you know, they were usually five foot three, 110 pounds soaking wet, and driving their mom and dad's Range Rover, you know, like it was a completely different thing. But I was catastrophizing would make me nervous. I would be fearful of like this sort of impending meet with this guy that sounds like he's huge, and mean and scary and would show up to, to uh, meet me was not that at all, it was something completely different. And that's just an example of how I used to catastrophize things all the time as well. And so through experience, I started to learn, you know, that, actually, they're not that scary. Right, and they're not that evil. Tim 23:32 It's funny, because, I mean, often, when I talk about the origins of fear, you know, when we think about ourselves as a species, one of the reasons that we've created such wondrous things, one of the reasons why we can we are conscious about our own mortality, why we can think deeply about issues and whatnot, is that our brains are essentially a giant simulation engine. I mean, that's what they are. And I run this exercise with some groups where I ask them to envision and imagine what certain flavours are, and what they would eat and what they would need in combination, and they can do it because that's what our brain is designed to do. And then we coupled this with the fact that we have a very primal sense of, you know, things by and large fall into one of two categories either this thing is good for me, this person is a provider that will help me hunt and stay warm in the winter. Or this is a tiger in the grass and poses a threat to my family and my, my group and we definitely, in my experience, people their simulation engines bias towards the threat and towards you know, more things are going to eat us then they're going to you know not. And so when you're speaking about this, people's perceptions are A-they simulate so they're living in the future and B-that's probably the most catastrophic future that they can imagine. Right? They are really angled towards what are the bad things that are going to happen and then avoiding the risk. But we don't know what we don't know. Tim 25:11 There's a best selling author, speaker, you know, she's an authority on leadership. Her name is Margie whorl. And I read a quote from her once and it was really, really great. She said, you know, human beings are wired to overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity. And so the way I see it, because I agree with her, if we're not taking risks, if we're being risk adverse, then we're performing like, everyday average human beings. And we're also you know, shortchanging ourselves on so many of the new opportunities and challenges in our life. And so, risk aversion is such a big part of why we don't do certain things, what we're afraid of. And so we just become risk averse. And we see it in so many different, so many different ways. Organizations, we see it all the time, that way. People are worried about liability and, and perception and reputation. These are the same things that witnesses are worried about, you know, sometimes offenders, but organizations worry about these things as well, right perception or reputation. Yeah. Tim 26:21 It's the thing that we prep against. It's often that we prep against loss versus prepping for benefit. It's why often, people think first of themselves as a cost rather than an investment. Dave 26:33 That’s right. catastrophizing, catastrophizing, catastrophizing all the way along. Tim 26:38 Okay, well, that's so. So, I mean, it's a really valuable perspective to be able to say, even you going through these are prepared for the worst. But, you know, through experience, and as we get older, I guess, we learned to double check ourselves, just how often we can cave to that cognitive bias of assuming that, you know, the threat is right around the corner. Dave 27:06 It's, you know, I actually say often, I mean, other than if you've done something really illegal, and really, really bad, right? What is getting in trouble as an adult really look like? Tim 27:17 Especially in a privileged sort of, you know, we're in the first world where first world problems getting in trouble is I got a rock chip on my windscreen kind of thing, right? Dave 27:27 What is, what does it look like to be getting in trouble with your boss? I mean, like, really, at the end of the day, what does that look like? You know, it might be a don't do it again, but, you know, these are things that we can overcome, you know, and so it's okay to… Tim 27:42 It's not a Wookie that's going to rip your arms off. Dave 27:45 No, hopefully not. You know, we've created a role within our team. It's called a devil's advocate. Tim 27:49 Yep. Blackhat Dave 27:55 Whatever you want to call it. Yeah. And I believe the devil's advocate, has a hail. It's an important thing, because it allows you, everybody gets a turn up being devil's advocate, or people can sort of step into that role at different points in time. It really does help with the decision-making. Tim 28:10 Have you ever read the book The Six Thinking Hats? It's an old one, but it's quite a good one. And they talk about the different colors and everybody gets to wear different hats at different points. Years ago, we ran a workshop where we would actually teach people the hats, and there were coloured hats. And the white hat was a person that was data, facts, information, you got to know what's known or needed. The red hat is instinctual. It's all feeling hunches. Intuition, the yellow hat is the values-focused hat, you know, are we being true to ourselves and our organization? A blue hat is all processes, action plans, next steps organization. Green Hat is wildly creative alternatives, new ideas, and then the black hat. The black hat is the devil's advocate. Some people love the Blackhat. Some people hate it, Right? That’s a good one to talk about, oh, that’s a really, it would be a really good one to knock around. Dave 29:06 As a leader in a boardroom, if you want people to step forward with new ideas, and I, you know, I guess he, you know, maybe you don't give them feel comfortable putting somebody on the spot, but it's nothing wrong with going around the table and saying, here's the dilemma. Here's the problem. Tim, what are you? What do you think? Yeah, I think that's okay. JP, what do you think? I think this, okay, and you go around, and you know, you're gonna get a variety of different responses. And then at the end, you make your decision, based on what everybody said, if you do a really great, you know, what, Tim, I really understood your perspective there. I like it. I think it's certainly valid, but it's not the direction I'm thinking I'm gonna miss. You know, JP, Johnny and Lee. I think I'm in agreeance. With you, he made some really valid points. This is what we're gonna do. And this ends the conversation. There's no more debate. Tim 29:57 At that point. You're at decisiveness. And I think what's interesting about that idea of the leader has to do that. But to get there to elicit all of those ideas, it's got to be safe for people to speak up and share. And often, you know, the leader wonders why there's silence in the room. And it's because there's a tension against saying anything, it could be fear of being wrong, not being in a creative mindset, fear of looking stupid, you know, there's all sorts of reasons why people don't tell you what they're thinking. Dave 30:31 Well, thankfully we drew that out, because I actually think that's a really valid thing, right? Like when things aren't working out for us as leaders, whoever the leader is, things aren't working out for you. Maybe it has more to do with you than them. Tim 30:52 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the shownotes. If like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership. Please give us a positive rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word to by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening. And be sure to tune in, in two weeks time for another episode of sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading.
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| 20 Mar 2024 | Erin Ashbacher - Kick Your Own A$$ First | 00:45:06 | |
In an empowering episode of Sweet on Leadership, host Tim Sweet sits down with Erin Ashbacher, a highly accomplished CSEP-certified personal trainer and Senior Health Advisor. Tim and Erin delve into the crucial intersection of health and leadership development, with Erin emphasizing the need to view health as a dynamic lifestyle change rather than a time-consuming endeavour. As a powerlifter and former dancer, Erin draws on her expertise in cardiac rehabilitation, challenging common excuses with a focus on small, consistent steps and flexibility in workouts. Erin emphasizes intentional movement, goal-setting, and the creation of personalized fitness programs. The episode explores overcoming the common “no, but” mindset with the mindset of yes, and. They emphasize the evolving nature of fitness journeys and the positive impact of investing in health on professional success. Erin's unique approach combines her expertise in listening, goal-setting, and life balance, positioning her as an invaluable resource for clients seeking personalized fitness and coaching services. The episode encourages leaders to prioritize preventative wellness and provides the resources to start your journey to a healthier work-life balance. About Erin Ashbacher Erin Ashbacher, a distinguished Senior Health Advisor and CSEP-certified personal trainer, is a driving force in health, wellness, and fitness. Armed with a Bachelor of Kinesiology from The University of Calgary, Erin, a powerlifter and former dancer, seamlessly combines expertise in movement, nutrition, and motivation. As the owner of ERA Fitness, Erin boasts a top 10 industry performance since 2016, offering personalized training and coaching services. Her approach, emphasizing life balance and aligning health with professional goals, positions her as a key collaborator for leadership development clients in Calgary and beyond. Erin's superpowers encompass listening, goal-setting, movement expertise, and the ability to create customized programs, both in-person and online. Rooted in a famous Alberta rodeo family, she brings a unique appreciation for farming and ranching to her multifaceted lifestyle, which includes enjoying outdoor activities with her partner, Doug. Resources discussed in this episode: -- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Erin Ashbacher | ERA Fitness: -- Transcript: Erin 00:01 There's definitely been a lot of people who think that being busy is really, you know, the gold standard and you know, making sure that we do it all. And it's hard when you're working in cardiac rehab, and you see people that have all of a sudden just been stopped in their tracks. And it made me really realize that preventative medicine, preventative wellness is where we want to be.
Tim 00:25 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you my friend, are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. Welcome to the Sweet on Leadership podcast. This is episode 29.
Tim 00:59 Hey, everybody, welcome back to Sweet on Leadership. Today, I am thrilled to introduce to you somebody that I've known for years now. I mean, I think we've known each other since 2014. Or maybe even before that 2013, 2012? This is Erin Ashbacher. Erin and I met years ago when Erin was my trainer at a gym. And I would say it's been a friendship I value more and more every year that I know you. So, welcome, Erin.
Erin 01:29 Oh, thanks, Tim. That’s so sweet of you, I very much value our friendship as well. So, thank you.
Tim 01:36 And for those of you that work with TWE, you'll know that Erin is our in-house trainer. Fun stat is about 90% of the executives that I work with rank their health and their balance as one of the things on the life side of the work-life equation that always needs work. And so recognizing this, I'm not qualified in this area but I sure as heck know somebody who is. Erin is part of our team and as well as running your own business, ERA Fitness. Erin is our key associate in this area. So, happy to have you as part of that team There.
Erin 02:12 Yeah, I'm super thrilled to be part of the TWE team as well. Yeah.
Tim 02:17 So, Erin, why don't we just take a moment and besides what I know about you, why don't you take a moment and introduce yourself to everybody that's listening today?
Erin 02:25 I'm a Kinesiologist and went to school at the University of Calgary for Exercise and Health Physiology, started my career in cardiac rehabilitation, which was the scary side of being in kinesiology right, like people have already done and experienced a really traumatic thing and now they're super grateful to have a second chance. It was a really great learning experience for me and it was where I wanted to start my career. And then I eventually brought myself back to Calgary where I got to work downtown, and I went into kind of the corporate world and got to work with ton of wonderful, wonderful clients from all walks of life, you know, and got to experience what it's like to work hard, not only from like, I want to complete this race on the weekend, but just like a stress management perspective with my clients of getting them to be able to kind of add that health and wellness into their world. Yeah. And then I've gotten a chance to be part of a little bit part of everything that interests me, I've got my mountain bike coaching certificate, and I've been doing that for the last few years, worked with snowboarding and got my coaching with snowboarding. Although, I will admit I'm a horrible snowboarder. I just really love doing it and I enjoy coaching. Yeah, so that's my kind of professional career. And yeah, I grew up in rural Alberta, part of a big family on a ranch with cattle and sheep and I still to this day, well along with a lot of help from my parents run 100 head of meat breed sheep, which is super exciting, to just continue to be part of that.
Tim 04:09 And for those listeners that are listening from around the world, you may know that Calgary and the Calgary Stampede is a big part of our heritage here. We are an agricultural province besides oil and gas, that is one of our key areas. And of course, the Ashbacher family is renowned as being one of the big rodeo families in the province. And so something that I always think it's such a neat aspect to your life and what a thing to be involved in as well. I mean, you're a powerlifter, I think that's important to mention. And you're an award-winning trainer. You're not just a kinesiologist and a trainer run of the mill, you are award-winning.
Erin 04:47 Yeah, I was recognized for I think four years in a row with my company as being the top trainer. It's interesting because it was never something I was really necessarily aiming for. But when you're doing what you love and things are just kind of clicking in place, it just made sense to me that all of a sudden, I found myself on top. And I was like, Oh, this is kind of cool. Like who knew? Yeah.
Tim 05:07 And I love when you talk to me about what you're learning and where you're going, that you're so active in that space. I mean, you're still attending conferences, you're still up on the literature, you're not passive when it comes to continuing to grow and to develop and to learn and to stay on the cutting edge of what it means to help others be healthy.
Erin 05:25 Absolutely. Our industry is constantly evolving, and there's constantly new evidence-based research out there that can be implemented. And I think it's really important to understand like how our society is evolving, and how the people around us are evolving, and how we can continue to make sure that, you know, health doesn't come in a bottle, that health is one of those things that we need to continue to invest in. And knowing how I can help assist my clients with that is really important. So yeah, continuing education is a big part of that.
Tim 05:59 Yeah, and I think for anybody listening, many people will have been exposed to trainers. And a lot of trainers are kind of fly by night, it's something that they're doing in the part-time, it's something that they do just so that they can, you know, I don't know, they don't tend to be educated much beyond what they're getting on the job site. For those of you listening, Erin is not that, okay? This is somebody who I admire because professionally, you are gripping and ripping it. I mean, you are always expressing yourself to the utmost of your potential. And that's something that I find inspiring. So again, just happy to have you here. And I can't wait till we get into what we're talking about. So, when we thought of having you on the show, we're really thinking about this balance that I see so many of my clients have, which is although they're excelling in their professional lives, and they're shooting for higher and higher levels of impact with their teams, perhaps going on promotions, and they tend to be you know, these are really leaders in whatever industry that they're in, they can still struggle with health. And an interesting stat, as I say is 90% of them will have health concerns. They don't feel like they're quite as balanced as they want to be in that area. And the other part is any of them with kids also tend to have 90% of people with kids had family concerns, which is why as you know, we have Julie on the other side with the family expertise. But for you, when you come through cutting your teeth with cardiac rehabilitation, and having been around business stress and professional stress, a lot of my life, we're no stranger to seeing people go down from that as a problem. Because it's often one of the things that people who work too hard and don't look after themselves have to face. How does that ready you or lead you towards your thoughts on the importance of one's leading their own health? Can you speak a little bit to that for me?
Erin 07:59 Yeah, I mean, there's definitely been a lot of people who think that being busy is really, you know, the gold standard, and you know, making sure that we do it all. And it's hard when you're working in cardiac rehab, and you see people that have all of a sudden just been stopped in their tracks. And it made me really realize that preventative medicine, preventative wellness is where we want to be. And I've always kind of said to my clients, like, let's try and make small steps for a better, more active, healthier lifestyle today, so that we don't get that big stop of, oh, gosh, we've had a cardiac event and now we need to change your life completely, right? When you're all of a sudden taken out of work and being able to care for your family because you've had this serious cardiac event. We don't need to get there, we can pull it back. And we can take care of it right now in small doses, that compound and build on each other in a really positive way. So, you know, making sure that we're taking care of our stress and taking care of our physical health as well as our mental health. Absolutely.
Tim 09:06 There's no shortage of examples of people who don't even get the chance to second crack, they work their entire lives, and they can often be very successful. They don't get a chance to enjoy retirement, they don't get a chance to see what's on the other side of all that hard work. They're always waiting for tomorrow, aren't they? And I speak from experience here. You're always waiting for tomorrow.
Erin 09:27 I don't have time today. I'll do it tomorrow. Yeah. Well, even some of my clients that have reached retirement, and they've had a really successful career, and now that they're retired, they're like, oh, now I'm going to take care of my health. But maybe they have an ailment that has been kind of creeping around on them. And so they just feel like they're starting at a really deep bottom. Like, oh man, if I would have just started going to the gym or being a little bit more active in my 40s or my 50s. Now that I'm in my 60s, I wouldn't have to deal with this big mountain, right? And then it can be a bit discouraging to people when they kind of thought that their retirement was going to be one way. And their health and physical limitations are creating some a different story for them. Right? So yeah, let's take care of it today.
Tim 10:14 I was facilitating and teaching a room of about 40 Higher Education executives last week. I was sharing with them, you know, we often think about how are we going to empower our staff, or our faculties, right? And the interesting thing about that is I was showing them how often when people start a job, they are never going to have more potential, they're never going to feel more optimistic about growth. And then we start to scuff them up. And the leader can inadvertently push that person down and liquidate that person's sense of potential and sense of growth. And then we're in a position where we have to build it back up. And I'm reminded of that as you're speaking, because we would never knowingly want to liquidate someone else's health and then have them have to try to on the back foot, get it back. We wouldn't let an employee do that. That would be outside the value set for so many of the people that I work with. But we seem awfully comfortable letting ourselves liquidate our health and then having to find ourselves on the backfoot trying to gain back our health, right, trying to gain back our fitness or trying to gain back because we had an event or where we've now had a nagging injury that's gotten worse and worse and worse. We would never treat anybody else like that. But we seem quite comfortable letting that be the standard of our self-care. Is that something that you see, too?
Erin 11:43 Yeah, absolutely. Like, like you said, you would never let your spouse treat you that way. But yet you're willing to treat yourself that way. You’d never let your leader treat your employees like that, right?
Tim 11:55 Yeah, there's people that will take their dog for a walk because they don't want their dog to be overweight, right? But they won't make the time to take themselves for a walk. To keep themselves in fitness.
Erin 12:05 I think some of the limitation on that too comes from there's this idea that taking care of your health and being physically active is a bit of a luxury, right? It's a luxury in time. It's a luxury in finances if you're paying for a gym membership, or whatever. And so this idea that I'm being selfish if I'm carving out this time for my health, and so I don't want to be selfish because I want to make sure I'm giving to my team or giving to my family. And so we kind of easily just kind of, you know, sweep it under the rug. I'll do that tomorrow. Right? And yeah, it's something that we are saying to ourselves that we really need to change in my opinion.
Tim 12:48 Erin, I want to play you a little clip here and get your thoughts on it as we continue here. If you don't mind?
Audio Clip 12:52 Baby, I feel sorry for you. Did you forget your headphone? Stop being a girly man and work out. I don't have enough time. Which of course the biggest bullshit I’ve ever heard because we have 24 hours a day. You didn't have time for working out, you’re not having time for taking care of your body, are you out of your mind? You don't have time. Manage your time better. Okay? The gym is too busy, well then go at five in the morning, you forehead. Okay? Have you ever seen a gym at five in the morning? There's almost no one there. So, just get up early and go to the gym early.
Tim 13:28 So, Erin what do you think when we hear Arney speak there?
Erin 13:31 It's a bit tipsy. Right? But I mean, it makes you laugh. And there's so much truth to it. I mean, we do, we have a ton of time in our days, you know, are we scrolling for an hour? What are we doing that we can put something more positive in, you know, we get so much more out of it. Right? So, stop making excuses. If you need accountability, find someone that can keep you accountable, right? Whether that's your trainer, right? Well-educated trainer, or whether that's a good friend, that you guys are making a commitment to each other. But yeah, he's not wrong. Take care of your body.
Tim 14:05 It's funny because he talks about, you know, I love how he uses the term, you know, get up at five in the morning, you forehead. And I don't know if this is what he means. But I feel like half the time we're in our own brains. We talk ourselves out of stuff. Practically most people know why it's important to work out. Most people understand why it's important to put in the effort and put in the time and not slack on that, like we understand, theoretically, that people have to exercise. We've received all of the information for the most part. Very few people can claim to be ignorant, that it's not important to you know, at least be active if not engage in resistance training or do something cardiovascularly. So, we don't need a lot of science to tell us that's important. And in many cases, we know we feel better when we go and we do it. So, why in your experience, do people find it so hard? What are some of the excuses? Or baby excuses that you hear?
Erin 15:05 So many baby excuses. Yeah. I mean, one of the big ones is, well, I just don't have a full hour to dedicate, or like, you know, an hour and a half to dedicate, by the time I get there and then get back to the office. Yeah, so I just like to tell people like stop making it so rigid. Like nobody said, your workout has to be an hour, you have 20 minutes, go for a really nice brisk walk, call it a good one. Try again, tomorrow, right? Doesn't have to be this rigid time interval. So, that's definitely a big excuse that I've heard. The other one that I've heard is always this. Well, you know, my boss won't let me get away from the office. And I'm at the office for nine hours a day. And then there's an hour commute. So it comes down to that, I don't have time. Yeah. But then they tell me about all the TV shows that they watch when like, maybe you can be working out while you're watching those TV shows, I don’t know.
Tim 15:53 Yeah, or they take a bunch of time to record a podcast. When Sandra Sherry and Arnold Schwarzenegger mean. You know, if we think about the time issue, and we think that really we could break it up into different choices, 20 minutes here, 20 minutes there. Another team I'm working with, when we went through, and we were looking at getting back a sense of camaraderie and teamwork that they seem to have lost. We talked about one of the traditions that they had lost, one of their senior leaders or senior colleagues had always gone around and tapped everybody on the shoulder and said, Come on, we're going for a walk for 15 minutes. And then as the group got younger, and he started to question whether or not he was sort of had the same sway or, because it was lateral. He wasn't their boss, he was their colleague, he stopped doing it. And he assumed that nobody wanted to be bothered. And he felt like he was bothering people. But the interesting thing was, is that I talked to those younger staff, and they were all like, Man, I sure miss when so and so would tap me on the shoulder and say, Come on, let's just go for a walk. And I really miss that. And so it's funny how we talk ourselves into these excuses. And look, I'm no expert here, you've heard me talk myself into excuses all the time. I was dealing with a knee replacement but I had focused because I knew that if I didn't get that movement back, and it's turned out well. But if I didn't get it back in six weeks, I was not going to see significant improvement. But since then, like I fell on my can over the Christmas holiday and so I had a sore butt. That sore butt has been a pretty convenient excuse for not getting up and moving. Right? And it's really late at home to me just how rampant sitting disease or I don't know what we call it officially. But you know, spending a lot of time sitting in an office, working virtually, working on technical things, is such an easy way to see yourself slip. So, very quickly. And then the little pains in the age start to come in. And we have reinforcers that oh, you know, it's hard. And you know, I've talked about this, but why is that such a flawed formula? You’re hard on me, I'm alright with it.
Erin 18:24 That’s loaded. I mean, it is hard. But I feel like most of us when we think about okay, we need to go back to the gym. Like I said, it comes back to that rigidity, if it has to be me lifting weights at my max capacity, it has to be me going to the pool for an hour, it has to be right and it doesn't have to be. It’s so easy to just say this is going to be hard, and I'm going to be in pain and I won't be able to sit properly for a month after I start. So, I don't want to do that. I don't want to do that pain, right? And I think that like I said, your physical fitness needs to be and your physical health needs to come in as a lifestyle change, right? Go for a 20-minute walk. I am stressed out about all the things that have been flying at me on my keyboard today. I'm just going to take a moment and go for a 15-minute walk. And it might be brisk, or it might be strolling. You need to choose your own adventure in that right but stop getting wound up and all of the things that you think it has to be.
Tim 19:25 And it’s so counterintuitive, because if I feel really stressed, often it can be like Oh, I'm stressed I got so much to do. I better stay at my desk and slug it out, versus saying you know what? If I went for a 15-minute walk I'd probably come back and be even more productive.
Erim 19:41 Absolutely, and there's there's tons of research that shows that that actually happens right? Even me, I had something come up just recently super stressed. I didn't know where to turn I needed to talk it out. I phoned up my bestie and I'm like we need to go walk the track because it's winter so we're walking the track instead of outside and you know we're gonna go do a workout. And we got five ways around the track. And I said, No, I still need to keep walking and venting. I can't I'm not ready to lift weights yet. And it was great. We had a, you know, short impromptu weight session after that, but there was no intention of doing weights. I just wanted to go for a walk and get it out. Right? So yeah, we just need to stop. And then just do. Yeah.
Tim 20:24 You forehead.
Erin 20:25 Yeah, I have one of my clients, they put a sticky note on their computer. And just when it gets hard, go for a walk, right? Or do 10 Push-ups, right, like, get away from that stress thing, the oh my gosh, my to-do list is 150 things long. And I only have 10 hours to do it in and just take 10 minutes, 15 minutes to yourself. They'll come back better.
Tim 20:49 Yeah. Julie has this thing. Again, Julie Freedman Smith is on the parenting side of our association here. But she talks about not having to be rigid around, Oh, we had a good day parenting and if in the first, let's say you have a messy morning, and then you know, the breakfast was kids were fired up. And it was they were whining and whatever. And then you're like, Oh, my whole day is shot now. She's like, What are you talking about? Like, there's another interaction coming around the corner, do well in that, like, start granulating your day down to saying, I can't get away for an hour, you've told me this, I can't go to the gym for an hour. So, I'm not gonna go. It's like, well, whatever, go to the gym for 20 minutes, or don't go to the gym, go to the grocery store and buy a couple of four litres of milk and walk home with them or do whatever, right? And it doesn't have to be fancy. Focus on the outcomes, not the definition of this is the only way to do it or your window is closed. Often it just we have to consider, is it our own limiting belief or our own definition of what things have to be that is flawed? There's a bunch of different ways to do it. And I remember seeing how people who are training for long-distance running. When you look at the much less affluent teams in Africa, when they're training distance runners. They have training regimes and equipment and stuff, which people would think comes from a junkyard half the time, it doesn't matter because they're focused on what's the roots of what they're trying to do. And what are the outcomes that they're seeking? They're not worried about how it shows up. It's just about getting it done in a way that's always moving towards progress. Because if they were locked into that they had to, you know, you're part of some community that doesn't have a lot of money and you're locked into some thinking that you have to have the latest and greatest equipment or you can't compete, they would never be showing the way that they're showing in the Boston Marathon or anything like that. They would be so paralyzed by all the things that can't be.
Erin 23:00 Yeah, we need to we need to practice I feel being more a yes and when it comes to our fitness. Like, oh, my days crazy busy. I have to run to this meeting. And then I have to run with my kids. Yeah, and? Where can we put in 20 minutes of exercise? You dropped off your kids at the center, so they can go do their thing. And there's a gym right there that you have access to go spend 30 minutes, why not? Right? Yes, and, instead of the no, but.
Tim 23:27 Yeah. I think of Gabby Reese, right? Gabby Reese is an Olympic volleyball player, married to Stuart Laird, the championship surfer. And I've talked about this before, she talks about this going first mentality where it's just like, sometimes you just need to risk it. Get off your biscuit and risk it. Right? So, what really makes it hard? Does life make it hard? Or the way we perceive life makes it hard?
Erin 23:58 Oh, the way we perceive it for sure. Right? That's a no-brainer to me.
Tim 24:04 One of the things I love about these conversations is I get to put myself forward as a proxy for the audience. You and I've had a lot of these conversations in part before, but it's always a rediscovery. I mean, and I'm being sincere here when I say every time I talk with you, it's enlightening. And I can't wait for other people to experience this when they get you one-on-one. But one of the emotions that this raises for me is I start to get really frustrated with myself. I start to be like, You know what, sweet, you know better than because right now, like I've told you, I mean, I'm dealing with a bit of back pain and the rest of it, but I know darn well when I was working at that university and I chose to walk back to the hotel instead of getting a cab and I'm rigged to walk back to the hotel, I wear certain shoes and I wear a backpack so that I can walk if I want to and I made that choice. The next day was better. I know what the math says. But I still, despite the knowing I managed to slip in behind and have to keep sort of vigilant about this stuff.
Erin 25:07 It doesn't easily become our lifestyle change, right? But giving yourself the opportunity to be ready for it right like wearing the right shoes, I have a backpack too, I'm ready to walk anywhere for any amount of time. And you know, it's late at night, I'll just hop in a cab instead, right? It becomes easy to like, take that second to stop and be like, No, I am equipped to walk back, I can do this, right? Any habit change is hard. So, when it comes to our fitness, just being able to give ourselves the best opportunity to just take that pause and say, Yeah, I'm gonna walk or I'm gonna do 10 Push Ups before I sit on the couch, or whatever it is, right? I like to give my clients these like tiny little challenges which amount to a lot when they stick with them. I think I've given you this one before Tim or like, I want you to go for at least a 20-minute walk every day. Tim 25:58 Or intentional movement 20 minutes a day. Erin 25:59 Intentional movement for 20 minutes, right, gives you a lot of opportunity to choose what that is. I've also given you the opportunity to do 50 pushups a day, they don't have to be all at once do 10 in the morning, before you get out of the bedroom and to the kitchen and do 10 more before, you know, sit back down at your desk, right? But eventually, I want you to do 50 in one day, and, and they can look all sorts of different ways. People say to me, I can't do a push-up. Great, but you can do a wall push-up. So, let's start there, right?
Tim 26:31 You can do a push-up against the stairs if you need to.
Erin 26:35 Yeah, so, when I'm working with my clients, I try to find, talk to them and find ways that we can add more movement into their day. So, that when they get to that one training session, or two training sessions, or three training sessions a week, they're not feeling like I haven't done anything since the last time I saw you. Right? Like, I want to give you that ability to just pause and say yes, and, every time you can.
Tim 27:00 I like that, because it's you know, we often talked about pattern before perfection. I remember listening to one guy say, you know, even if you get in your car, and listen, he was talking about the gym, but he says even if you get in your car and you drive to the gym, you sit in the parking lot, you decide you're not going to go in, you drive home that it’s still better than having stayed in bed. Right? Because sooner or later, you're gonna figure out well, I'm already here, I'm going to go or whatever. And I think it doesn't have to be that complex. But like before you get nailed that, oh, I need to be cracking off 50 pushups the way I did when I was 18. Which I will say there's one thing that I think is really interesting, and that is for people who have been athletes in the past. And then if let things slip, I do believe there's like a mental barrier to come through because I've been a high performance, not professional, but I've been a high-performance high school athlete where I was, you know, captain of teams and wrestling and training all the time before my knees were shot. And I remember what those days were like, and I remember what it felt like, everything was in flow, and it was working. And then you know, you're like, Okay, well, I'm gonna try to do this again. And suddenly, it's like, well, wait a minute, guess what? You sit on your can for 20 years and yeah, burpees aren't gonna be that easy. So, we kind of disappoint ourselves. And then we get all in our heads.
Erin 28:26 So many of my clients have had this experience, like when I was 20. And like, yeah, you've sat on your butt for 20 years, right? Or I’ve even got the privilege of training some ex Olympic athletes, right? And they do the same thing. Oh, man, when I was training and like we always remember ourselves at our peak, we always remember what it felt like and how good we felt and how good we looked. When we are at the peak of our performance. We rarely ever remember what the first day felt like, right? And even myself, a competitive powerlifter, a couple of years, 2020-2021. I didn't train, I just wasn't lifting weights. It was not a possibility for me in my life and man got back into the gym and immediately wanted to go right back to Okay, this is where I stopped/left off training two years ago. Like, wait that's not where we start. And I was fortunate enough that I went through a back injury, which is what got me into powerlifting that I could remember, remember how crappy that felt when you started powerlifting. Let's go back to not the back injury, but just easing my way into it and giving myself the grace to come back to where I want to be, right? And like just because you were competitive 20 years ago, doesn't mean you to be competitive today. It's not necessarily about the competition, right? It's about making the best choices for yourself and your body so that you can make the best choices for your life.
Tim 29:53 So, one thing is that there's if we were to make sure we have that in the notes. The one thing is it's not about necessarily turning back to what you were capable of before. But accepting what means progress today. I think there's a counterpoint to that, that I'd like to talk about a little bit. And that is, sometimes we get very complacent about, we may be stuck with what we've got as well. So, then there's the other side of that, which is to say, it doesn't have to be what it was when we were 20 but there's lots to work on. And I'll give you a little story, when I was going through just recently here and getting a checkup on my knees and whatnot. So that involves getting a lot of X-rays and things like that. I was flipping through and researching, you know, this back issue and looking for, what does the skeleton look like? Just to educate myself. And I ran across some photos, and I'm gonna share one with you now. And I am going to put it in the show notes so that people can see it, and I'll put a link to it on the website, so people can take a look at this. And what this was, is I was going in for something called a scattergram, I used to have a leg that was almost three-quarters of an inch, but a centimetre shorter than the other, just through fluke or tremendous skill of my surgeon, now the Delta, the distance between leg length is less than two millimetres. And so I've got almost an equidistant leg length. And that's great, because my mechanics in my body are a lot more in line, although my body's getting used to it, which, you know, is still happening two years later. Anyway, I'm looking at these X-rays, and I'm gonna show these to you. One was sort of an illustration, the other was a full-body scan. And it was, you know, of people of various widths, I will say, I looked at these X-rays, you can see, well, the ones in illustration, you can see a simulation of two skeletons, which are the same skeleton. But one is showing a person that's carrying about 50 pounds, 80 pounds of extra weight, but the skeleton is the same size. And then when you look at people that might be the on the much more heavy, morbidly obese side of things, their skeleton is the same size as anybody else's. But sometimes in my mind's eye, and I'm a big guy, and you know, it's like, I'm more of a cartoon skeleton like we would have seen in WALL-E or something where this is all bone under here. Well it's not. I mean, my skeleton is still my 20-year-old skeleton, in a sense, it might be a little more beat up. But I've hung a ton of stuff off this frame. You know, I've hung sure muscle and stuff. But I've also hung a– Erin 32:39 A little bit of adipose tissue. Tim 32:40 A little bit of pasta on some you know what it means, beer, is hanging off of there a little too much cheese and whatever. But you know, when I showed this to my wife, we were like, you know, this is actually quite a powerful image to have in your head to say, there is a delta here, there is a gap that we can close that it's possible, there's still this skeleton, this smaller form within us that we've decided to surround with things. So, from a weight loss perspective, because some people deal with that. There's so much potential, there's so much, so much can happen. And maybe for some people, it's more running distance, or cardiovascular or putting on muscle mass, or bone strength and bone density or whatever their particular gap is that they're closing. But it's not so much that you have to shoot for the old 20-year-old version of yourself. But what can you do today? Where's the potential? Because there's that saying, you know, if you want to know what you're committed to look at what you've got. And at the end of the day, there's only so many explanations for why a person could find themselves out of their own version of optimum health. People have different challenges in the rest of it. But are you doing the best with what you've got? Yeah, maybe you've got an endocrine issue, or you've got whatever, but are you doing the best you've got with that?
Erin 34:19 Yeah, well, and I mean, there's this. Yeah, there's this evolution, right? I think that it's important for people to remember that. I mean, when I think back to when I was in high school, I was a competitive dancer, and I loved dancing. It was it was amazing. And, you know, I went to university and that wasn't an option anymore for me. And so I casually went to the weight room because I thought that should be something I was doing. And, you know, and then got into running when I came back from Australia because I was broke and I needed to do something physically active. Which by the way, I'm like, I admire runners because I ran every day or every six days a week for over a year, and I still don't enjoy running, so go runners. Good. Good on ya. Yeah, and then, you know, I after a back injury fell into powerlifting. And I mean, can I lift my leg over my head? Like I could and do the splits? Like I could when I was a dancer. Absolutely not. I cannot do that anymore. But that's okay. Because I became a runner for a short period of time I became a powerlifter. I took up mountain biking in 2020. And now I get to be a mountain biker, and I love cycling. So, I can bemoan the things that I don't have. And like, oh, well, I used to do this. And I used to love it. And my body used to be able to do this. Or I can say, Yeah, and I get to do this today, I get to fall in love with a new sport, a new activity, a new social engagement, right? So, I think that it's super important for all of us to just kind of be like, Yeah, we could do that. And that's okay, that this is where we're starting today.
Tim 35:57 So having that optimism and that openness, and that idea that things are possible, is important. And then there's the just, let's take a step.
Erin 36:09 Yeah, let's let's put our heads down and be a bit serious about the fact that this is important to you, it's important to the people around you, and you need to get it done.
Tim 36:18 So, for people that are leading others, let's go back to this. That is our core mandate here, although we serve everybody, but for people that are leading others, maybe they’re parents, maybe they’re teachers, maybe they are working as leaders in a business, what would you like them to focus on when it comes to their particular set of excuses? If you could boil that down to sort of three key things that you think they should be taking away?
Erin 36:45 Three? Only three Tim?
Tim 36:46 Okay, well, let's remove the number. What would you like people to think about?
Erin 36:51 I want people to think about the fact that when they're investing in themselves, in their health, in their wellness, it's not selfish, right? Like, this is not that you're taking away time from your team or taking away time from your family, it's that you're giving yourself back in an even better way. Right? Be a bit hard with yourself about making sure you're being active, there's so much benefit to being physically active. We have so much research to support that. Make sure you carve out that time, right? Whether it's daily, this time works for me 5 am, every morning, and let your spouse know that and you don't get into the office until seven, if that happens, or whatever time it is, right? I don't like daily, my schedules change every single day. So, I like sitting down on Sundays and planning weekly. But you know, you have to find out what works for you. Right? And then yeah, whatever excuse there is, find a best friend, whether it's yourself or whether it's an actual best friend to say, okay, yeah, that's just a roadblock that you're putting in the way let's find a way around that. Right?
Tim 37:55 When we deal with personal achievement, or making change in an organization or making change as I work with people around their careers, and coach them, it's important that one person's incentive is not necessarily going to work for somebody else. Do you understand yourself because if we think about some of the key ways in which a person is gonna see success, can they translate that into some into a currency that works for them? Some people, it's going to be achievement, it's going to be, you know, running a race or getting a bucket list thing off their life list. For other people, it will be social. For other people, it's going to be doing it because it's logical, and they enjoy the science behind it or something along those lines. Other people will be witnessing their own improvement. And other people, it'll be that sense of control, like so much today, we can trace back to longevity efforts, and those kind of things. And I mean, it's a million other things. But it's not all about you, sport. And it's not about like, No, all of those things can make us not just better for ourselves, but better for everybody that cares about us and the people that rely on us. And you know, that idea of it being just selfish. What a cop-out because it's like, what's really selfish is the fact that you're willing to liquidate yourself, you know, nobody will enjoy you and you won't be nice to be around and you'll be frickin miserable or whatever. You know, find your currency man. Holy moly, maybe that's money. I did this exercise and I remember telling you about it. But I figured out that every pound I carry that's extra costs me I figure and if you ever want to know the formula, feel free to give me a ring. But I figure costs me about $2,700 in productivity and marketing potential. And I've got real justifiable reasons for that. I actually think that it limits my market potential, I think it limits my productivity and confidence and everything that a person in my position who motivates others and has to inspire others can't afford. You cannot give away what you don't have. As we wrap up here, tell us, what's one thing that you're working on that's got you really excited? What's something that's coming up in your future? What's on your Horizon that fires you up, personally?
Erin 40:28 Oh, for the first time, no, that's not true. Not the first time, I've put my entire summer towards coaching mountain biking and training clients exclusively. And so it's been this really fun balance of figuring out where I'm going to be on my mountain bike, but also having access to my clients when I need to be with them. And so I'm really excited about my summer I have coming up. For me, any day on my bike, it's a good day, except that one time, no, I'm kidding. Yeah. So, I'm really excited about my summer. It's kind of a bit of an experiment to kind of juggle this mountain bike coaching gig and my business. So yeah, that's what I'm looking forward to.
TIM 41:14 You know how deep TWE is in that. So, stay tuned, everybody. If people want to get in touch with you, where should they look for?
Erin 41:21 Right now I'm working on a new website. It's not up yet. But as soon as it is, I will send it to Tim, best way to get a hold of me is my email address, which is EARashbacher@yahoo.ca. Fire me an email and I'll get back to you right away, we can set up a virtual call and or an in-person call if you're in the area, and we can get you rolling on whatever questions you have, or whatever fitness journey you're wanting to embark on, for sure.
Tim 41:49 And for any of you that are already under contract with me, remember that Erin is part of the TWE team. And so, I'm not trying to be possessive there. I'm saying until you get your website up and we link to it. You can always find her at TWE.teamabout and take a look at everything awesome about Erin there. So, you are easy to get a hold of we're gonna make sure all of those dates are in the show notes. Okay, tell me a little bit about, if there's one takeaway that you could say, everybody here and you mentioned it a little bit earlier. But recap for me at this point in the conversation for everybody listening? What do you hope for them? What's your wish for them?
Erin 42:31 Yeah, my wish is that everyone knows that investing in their health and their wellness is going to always give back in so many new ways, and so many different ways and all other aspects of their life.
Tim 42:46 So, like any other change program, or investment we would make in business or any institution that we're working on. Let's take a look at this is not an area of cost. This is an area of investment. And we have to see it that way. And recognize it. Recognize it for all the good stuff it gives us back. Okay, awesome. Erin, I just want to tell you how happy I am that you took the time with me today to go through this and I know it's going to do a lot of good for a lot of people. And I can't wait to see how the world opens up for you. And for everybody that you help.
Erin 43:21 Oh, thanks, Tim. Super appreciated being on today and I had a lot of fun.
Tim 43:25 Thanks so much for joining us.
Tim 43:33 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter, you can find the link in the show notes. If like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership. Please give us a positive rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word too by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening. And be sure to tune in in two weeks time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading. Tim 44:12 Hey, did you have fun?
Erin 44:17 I had a ton of fun, Tim.
Tim 44:19 Awesome. We’ve got some great people coming up. If you were to give me a question to pose to them that I guarantee I will ask them what would be a question you'd like me to throw by other leadership experts?
Erin 44:32 Yeah, I want to know when does the imposter syndrome stop as a leader? Yeah.
Tim 44:37 Yeah. We'll make sure to talk about that. Newsflash. It never stops. Erin 44:41 Oh, good. I'm not alone. Tim 44:42 No, that's fine. But we didn't learn to deal with it in a much different way. And it can actually believe it or not, can be something that's an area of strength for you. So, stay tuned. We're gonna get somebody else to weigh in on that question. Thanks again, Erin.
Erin 44:58 Thanks, Tim. Tim 44:59 Okay, Big hugs | |||
| 05 Jun 2024 | Julie Freedman-Smith - From Parenting Skills to Leadership Qualities | 00:50:20 | |
In this engaging episode of Sweet on Leadership, host Tim Sweet sits down with Julie Freedman Smith, a seasoned parenting expert, for a thought-provoking conversation on parenting and leadership. Julie shares important insights on how parents can support their children in finding their own paths while balancing guidance and empathy. They discuss the importance of understanding the unique perspectives of children and how parents can embrace courage and flexibility while parenting. Julie and Tim explore the idea that children operate on a different "currency" than adults, valuing friendship and good feelings over time and achievement. They emphasize the necessity of reassessing parental expectations and focusing on short-term progress rather than long-term outcomes. Additionally, they draw parallels between parenting and leadership, discussing how adults can avoid limiting themselves to specific roles or activities based on early career choices or societal expectations. This episode is packed with practical advice and is a must-listen for anyone looking to enhance their parenting skills and leadership qualities, fostering growth, adaptability, and genuine fulfillment in both personal and professional realms. About Julie Freedman Smith Julie Freedman Smith is the founder of JFS Parent Education and co-founder of Parent Mentor Now. With over two decades of experience guiding parents across North America, she is dedicated to transforming family dynamics by fostering safe, respectful communication that builds lasting connections. As an author, podcast host, parenting expert, and mother of two, Julie understands the thrilling yet challenging journey of raising children in today's complex world. Her empathetic and practical approach empowers parents to support their children's growth and development while maintaining a positive family dynamic. Through practical strategies and open communication, she helps parents navigate the stresses and joys of parenting, ensuring both they and their children thrive. Julie's mission is to equip parents with the tools they need to create harmonious and resilient family environments, enabling them to handle the ups and downs of parenting with confidence and grace. Resources discussed in this episode: -- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Julie Freedman Smith | Parent Mentor Now: -- Transcript: Julie 00:01 So, I was just talking to a family this week about a child who's playing one level up. So, he's the youngest kid on the game. He's being picked on all the time and then he's taking that and he's picking on everybody else in his class because that's what it looks like. And so we can just take a step back, sit in the discomfort, this means I might not know the entire path for my child. And can I just be here? Can I be with this child right now with what they need from me right now, and see where we get to next?
Tim 00:34 Do you rely on others to set a vision and then give them what they need so that they can achieve something they never would be able to do on their own? Whether or not you formally lead a team. If this sounds like you, then you, my friend, are the definition of a leader. And this show is all about bringing you new insights from real people that you've never been exposed to. So, you can grow and increase your impact on the world and feel more fulfilled while you're doing it.
Tim 01:01 I'm Tim Sweet. And I'm glad you could join us for episode 34.
Tim 01:08 Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Sweet on Leadership podcast. Joining me once again, this will be your seventh visit? Seventh visit is, Julie Freedman Smith. Together, we form some sort of a superhero duo, yet to be named. We've been talking off-camera about things that are going on in our lives, we decided to hit record. And today we're going to take you into a subject that I think both of us seem to be orbiting. Now and again. It really came out for me as being important that I saw some of my clients pigeonholing themselves. And really, you know, we're dealing with the fact that they've always thought they needed to be something. I was telling you about this and you see a similar thing can happen with parents and children. But before we get into all that, let's introduce Julie and Julie other than being a great friend who gives me wonderful chocolates, on occasion. Why don't you tell everybody who you are and what you do?
Julie 02:08 Sure. Hi, everybody. My name is Julie Freedman Smith and I have a company called JFS Parent Education. People asked me, What does JFS stand for? It stands for Julie Freedman Smith, which seems to go over their head. But that's okay. My website is Parent Mentor now, and really, I'm about helping parents to create the family harmony that you've always wanted, without having to change who you are. And so, I've been friends with Tim for ages. In fact, Tim, I wanted to congratulate you, because I think this is podcast numbers 30, or like 34– Tim 02:42 34. Julie 02:43 We're a year in, eh? Tim 02:45 Yeah, but if we take away the very first four, which was a four-part special that you and I did about casting off some of the things that are no longer helpful in our life bridge after COVID Sitting right around episode 30. So this is in many ways, this is our 30th episode. But technically, Episode 34. Julie 3:03 That's pretty great. And a year of this talking to so many different people, I loved listening to your guests and learning these tiny little smidgens from each of them. So, congratulations. Tim 03:14 Well, I appreciate that. I mean, it has been something to try to maintain that consistency and that cadence of every two weeks we're putting out an episode. But it really has been a chance to learn from all of these really interesting people. And again, the format of the show is to look for inspiration for people who find themselves in leadership positions and leadership situations and really wanting to bring their best selves to work, whether that's working for others, or, you know, managing a business, or leading on a sports team, or any of those things. What can we learn from one another, and there's so much wisdom out there that will never be published in a book, so many great stories that just can't make it anywhere else. And so when I meet great and interesting people, I want to bring them onto the show and just really open my community up to them, and so it's been exciting. Today, though, we're going to be talking about this issue of pigeonholing who we are and what we can do. And maybe by way of a little bit of a background here, of late, say in the last six months, it's been happening my entire career, or at least as long as I've been running a coaching company, that when I'm helping leaders and owners get fluency over how they want to work and how to make their work more meaningful and more fun because I'm a big believer that anybody can move their job into areas that are more rewarding so that you spend a lot of time at work that you're doing things that really fit, really feel like an expression of you and what you're passionate about. But increasingly, when we're doing that exploration, or at least it's been more noticeable to me of late. We run into these shoulds. Throughout these 30 episodes, you've heard me talk a lot about shoulding all over yourself. But when people have actually chosen vocations because of what they should be, rather than what they are, and this can work for some people who properly identify, but for others, they may be, you know, a year, five years, 10 years, 20 years into a career, all the while doing something that while they may be good at it, it really doesn't speak to them, it is purely a job. And so, understanding why that happened led us to an interesting place. And often that was they received feedback very early on, about who they should be, and why they should be that thing. And it made sense, the math made sense back then. And so, you know, when I brought this up to you, it was as a dad, also saying, hey, what happens when we become the person shoulding all of our kids? But rather than me go down that path, do you see that happening with parents and children? Has that been your experience? Okay, so take us in. Julie 06:10 All the time. So, my sense of this is, for many people, parenting is the most important job that they will do, or certainly way up there in the things that they are doing. And also the thing at which they are least educated. So, they don't have a clue what they're doing. And they want to do a fantastic job right away. And so whenever we're in this situation, when we find an answer, or when we find what we think is an answer, we glom on to it, we hold on to it. And one of the ways we do that is figuring out our kids. So, when our kids are little, you know, we're just trying to figure them out. And suddenly our child takes to something, they take to an activity, and it's an activity that they love. And they might love it because we're clapping for them to do it, they might love it because who they were at that moment that they did it, it was fun and cool. And we go ah they love that, they love hockey, or they're going to be a dancer, or this is my little reader or whatever it is. And so we start to define the child by their action. And so, typically, when our kids are young, they actually think we know what we're talking about. And so if we, as parents are saying, you're a hockey player, you love hockey, and we get in there, and we put them into hockey. And we get on the board of the Hockey Association, and we coach and we are the team mom, and we are the manager, and we are all these things and the whole family's identity is around this particular activity. The child as they go along might not like that activity anymore. And yet, it's kind of what's expected of them and so they do it. So, I see that a lot. And I often see it where a parent will come to me and say this, my child wants to quit this, but this is their thing. They were gonna go to college on a scholarship, we've poured so much money into this. And so just this idea of, okay, so there's a corner in the pathway, how do we help to turn that corner? And do we even give our kids the opportunity to tell us like, some kids even too scared to say that they're not involved in it? So, that's one way that I see this happening. And it's completely with the best of intentions. This idea of I figured this piece out, I'm gonna ride with this particular thing and it might be around education, academics, sports, arts, it could be around a lot of different areas. So, that's one of the ways that I see it play out.
Tim 08:43 And I mean, you and I've had this conversation in a bunch of different areas. I mean, listeners will know that my three kids are all dancers. We're a dance family. And this is one of those areas that I remember early on. I think you and I had a conversation years ago, years and years ago, like, really early on in our relationship, this would have been 2015, or somewhere in there, 2016. And you had said something along the lines of, if the child is a dancer, and when they're asked what they are, I'm a dancer, what do you do, I dance and the as is our society when people say what do you do? You don't say well I walk a dog three times a week and I hike in the mountains and I love to bake bread you say I'm you know, massage therapist, I'm whatever. You know, that you had said to me? If the child's when asked says what do you do? I'm a dancer or I'm a hockey player or I'm going you know, I'm a competitive swimmer or I'm in debate club. Yeah, or whatever that is. If that falls away because of a situation, because of injury or because they don't make the grade or whatnot. And that's all they have, is that identity. It's what they do, is who they are, not who they are and they happen to do some stuff. They're lost, lost. And I remember seeing this in small scale when my daughter was injured, and it threw her off her dance career for two years, and in many ways, not a bad thing, because she had to consider what else she was. Although it was, she was in grade 10. And it was quite traumatic. Because suddenly that was who she was. That's how she filled her days. My youngest son walked away from it at 11. Still want to dance? He’s like, no way. So, he's figuring out his world, his oyster, my middle boy, though, is planning on being a professional dancer. Luckily, he seems to be interested in many things, although all in the arts. So, we'll see, you know, but I do remember you saying that to me early on. Julie 10:49 I was wise back then.
Tim 10:51 You are wise now. Wisenhiemer, but it was, you know, it was meaningful, then. And we have children that can be influenced in this way. Well, we know we have a situation in North America overprescribing kids when it comes to extracurricular activities, and we tend to focus them into one. And it's always about the drive for excellence. Julie 11:14 Right. We are also children, even as adults, right? Like, Tim 11:17 Yeah, that was where I was going to go. Julie 11:18 Like, we’re still doing that. it was. Tim 11:19 Yeah, that's right. And so for certain personality types, nothing can be done by half. So, if you're going to do it, it's how do I not just experience something, but I've got to turn it into this like major hobby, it can't be that I can just enjoy, this my latest thing, I can't just enjoy drinking Yerba Mate. No Se Llama, Canmore, Alberta, support them, they're really nice people. But I've got to know everything about it. I've got to, like, educate myself. And I've got to be, you know what I mean? It just can't be simple. It's got to be full on, you know, what are the health benefits? What are the cautions? And what's the right temperature to drink it at? And what's the tradition? And, you know, just can't be, you want to drink some stuff, that's going to be a little different. Nope. You know, so. Okay, so we have that as children. And then, as you say, we have that in ourselves this drive, to do it. So, talk to me a little bit about the pivotal moments, when that can really be formed. When in a person's experience, do we start to really listen to these things? Can the voices from the outside, I'm sure they're always important, but are there moments that are more profound than others, or timing, that's sponge-like? Julie 12:34 As kids, we're very dependent on everything we're being fed, from our parents, literally and figuratively. And then often in that, you know, adolescent place we might push away, so we might actively go against whatever the prescribed thing is. I think also another time where that happens, you and I haven't talked about this, but is this, as we're moving into adulthood, the initial part of being an adult is role-playing being an adult. So, I'm going to get X, Y and Z certification, I'm going to buy adult-looking clothes, I'm going to get married, or I'm going to move into an apartment or I'm gonna buy a house or, I mean, who's buying a house nowadays? But there are those kinds of play-acting, what adults do and– Tim 13:26 What you call swim to the center of the pool, right? In a sense, they're pushing off us in they’re trying some things out. Julie 13:26 Yeah, and we're all doing those things. And we tend to do that until somewhere around age 30 something, where we suddenly go, I'm doing all these adult things, I still do not feel like an adult, I'm not even sure that what I'm doing is something I like, but I'm not sure how to get out of it. Or am I going to look stupid for getting out of it? Or you know, and that is another time where we kind of take that left turn of like, oh, it could be different? And if this is what adulting is really about, how do I do it in a way that makes sense for me? Instead of playing the role of adults, how am I going to be an adult, that's really true to myself? So, I think there's some kind of a pivot point in that mid-30s that comes along, as well. Tim 14:20 I remember, in my experience, it was almost like a, you start to focus on something a little bit more, and you have to cast off certain hobbies, you have to cast off, even in some cases, friends and certain social groups. And it's like, I have to pick my lane in a way, I guess is how it– Julie 14:37 or I want to also, there is this element of I want to do this, like, I want to spend time doing what I really want to be doing if I can, or maybe the question is, how do I spend time doing more of what I really want to be doing? I have these obligations, I've got to meet those things. I've got to meet the needs. I've got to earn the money that I need and, you know, fulfill these obligations and how do I carve that piece of my life that's really fulfilling. Tim 15:04 That's a very interesting point. Because I remember as a boy transition, when I stopped playing with toys, in a sense, like sort of gave up the toys, and I was more interested in sports and girls and music and things like this. And then that happened again, going into university is like another ratchet on the maturity spectrum, I'll use mature lightly. And then you know, you make certain life choices, and it's, and you kind of have to throw your lot in with a certain path. And around 30, there's another one where, as you say, where it's kind of like, you hit that 30 mark, and you kind of, you know you're through your 20s, you know, that it's serious now like you're… I actually remember when we had our first child, I remember the very moment after she was born and I've had this conversation with a lot of fathers, where it's just like a weight is on and suddenly it's no longer about you. You are very clearly the protector, the whatever that is, I don't know what the I'm not saying it's a cultural role, though it might be but I think it's actually genetic, where we're like, these are my responsibility now and it's like a totally different role. And you thought you knew what it was all the way up to the moment you held that child. And then you're like, Oh, I get it now. And you kind of it's scary. And it's like, this is what responsibility feels like, kind of thing. On that note, when you go through all of those, I've noticed, especially around the 30s, maybe in the 25s as well, when I'm working with my clients, younger clients, some made a decision, and others went through it more passively. The decision happened to them, in a sense, they went with the flow for good or for bad, whereas others were kind of like a mid-midlife crisis. I don't know, but it was very active.
Julie 16:58 They were steered into their role. Yep.
Tim 17:01 So, when that happens, we have some people that approach this with a high degree of risk and adventure. And, um, you use the term discomfort at times and others that do not. So, can we talk a little bit about that role of when we face these milestones of what would you say, further defining our identity? There's this element of are you passive? Or are you highly active? And what does that look like? We're dealing with two things here. One is the adults impression they leave on the child. Later on in life, there's our own questioning of ourself and our path. And perhaps let's go back to the first one and say, when we are helping to form or involved in the forming of a young mind, we can either be passive, or we can be highly active. What would trigger a person to be highly active versus passive? What do you see in parents that allows them to be really relaxed and just kind of go with the flow? And what might happen where a parent needs to intervene or feels they have to steer heavily? Julie 18:11 Part of it is temperament. I don't think it's as easy as well, if you just turned left at the third corner, you would be this kind of a person. And if you kept going, then you became this kind of person. I don't think that's what it is. I do think there's an element of control. I'm very anxious to make sure that my kid is on the right path. I am going to do everything I can to keep them as safe as possible and keep them on this path. So, certainly– Tim 18:35 Because it's my job, my responsibility. Julie 18:38 Yeah, exactly. Which, of course, is impossible. Absolutely impossible. But there is that feeling. So, for some people, that's how they hang on. Some people are like I don't know what to do, so I'm not going to do anything. There's an element of, you know, moderation and all things including moderation. So, the ways that I would say that you can safeguard against doing that pigeonholing is creating some kind of opportunity for conversation and discussion around like, it's the next year to sign your kids up for the thing that they've been doing for the last year. Often towards the end of the year, kids are getting tired of something. And so we're like, do you want to keep doing this? And they're like, no, I don't. And I don't think quitting something when you're having a lousy time at it, is the best time to quit something. I think leaving something when you've had a good time, but you're done with it is more helpful if you have the opportunity to do that. Sometimes we don't have that opportunity, but just checking in and saying, do we want to keep doing this this year? Or do you want to do something different? And so for a lot of parents, I talked to a lot of parents who are like very clear that they want to have one kind of active hobby for their child and one kind of artistic hobby for their child. And so in order to do that they have to choose something but they don't necessarily have to choose the same thing every year. Now we have a lot of sports and music, things where you're in it, if you leave, you're sacrificing the place you have. And you might not get back into that same level. And so there's a lot of pressure. But the thing is, if the kid doesn't want to be there, if they don't like it anymore, then maybe that's okay. Like, maybe it's okay to step away from that thing. And every time we make a choice or a decision, there are consequences that happen, as a result of that. And again, part of our job as parents is to help our kids realise that they have the ability to make choices, and they have to live with the consequences. So, just creating these opportunities, having conversations, instead of just assuming that the child wants to keep going in this. And sometimes it's more than assuming it's like, well, we're in I've already said I'm going to be on the board for next year. So, we're kind of all in this, we just gotta keep going. And the child kind of gets pulled along. Tim 20:58 And even then, that's interesting because I've been there, I've been there where I've, I've made a commitment to a studio or whatnot. But really, just because I've made a commitment that can be undone, you know, but all of that boils back to, it's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable for me to have to now back out of a commitment that I made, it's uncomfortable for me to have to consider, what if my child doesn't find the next thing, or is quitting or is letting his team down?
Julie 21:29 Letting the team down? Like, this is not about leaving halfway through the year, although that can happen sometimes, too. But this is about before we sign up again. Right? But you're right, there is the what if there's a sitting in the discomfort of if you're not a hockey player, what are you? If you don't play classical guitar, what do you do? Who are you? Tim 21:49 We had our youngest in a rowing club, and he was young, two years younger than they usually let in. But he was big, and he was able to row and he did quite well. He also got picked on. So, we were halfway through the season, when they were just starting to get into looking at competition. And all the, I can’t remember what they were called but anyway, the big regattas and everything, and we pulled him. We were just like, you know what, maybe in two years, but for right now, this is not, the juice is not worth the squeeze on this particular one. Julie 22:16 No, definitely not. That's another issue as well, which is, but my child shows skill, my child showed talent, they're gonna move him up to the next team, they're gonna move her into the next level. Great. But there's a lot of other consequences that come from that that being picked on is one of those things. I was just talking to a family this week about a child who's playing one level up. So, he's the youngest kid on the game. He's being picked on all the time. And then he's taking that and he's picking on everybody else in his class because that's what it looks like. And so yeah, we can just take a step back, I guess, is part of it, take a step back, sit in the discomfort. This means I might not know the entire path for my child. And can I just be here? Can I be with this child right now with what they need from me right now? And see where we get to next? Tim 23:09 And then there's the flip side of this. And now let's get back to the professional. Where i remember 24, I had a run three years of being very well known. Like, well, at least, I was a known chef locally, like I was at the top restaurant in the city at the time. I could have gone with that. I had the opportunity to go to Spain, or Australia, or Japan. And we decided not to and part of that for me was when I really broke it down. I didn't enjoy it. Am I creative and artistic? Yeah, I am. Was I a great cook? I was. Did I get awards? Sure I did. Did I like it? Nope. I didn't, just because you're good at something doesn't mean, that is what you have to do. There were elements of that lifestyle that I really didn't like, I respect other people for being in it. But it wasn't for me. And then I went back to school and got a business degree. And I think that's part of why I do what I do. I know the difference between being happy with what you are in and what you're not. If we flip this on the other side, when we're sitting with ourselves, not our children, and we put ourselves back into that place of how did I get here? And what was the math I did and really have to put in its place the attention we have with who we should be or who our parents were or what we were afforded and how they invested in us. Right? It's hard to undo. But once you undo it can be very, very clear, in that moment where you can really embrace and say, You know what, I really love what I do, or now that I look at it this way, I'm not entirely crazy about what I do. You know, I'm not getting a lot of joy from this. So, what can I do to raise that level of joy, or for this to feel like it's a better fit? Julie 25:04 And sometimes there are a lot more responsibilities at that point, right? Because you still need to be earning the money to support yourself, or to pay your rent, or to support your family or whatever it is.
Tim 25:16 All right, so we have, we have these opportunities where we can sit and take these moments to really explore where we are, where our child is, if we were to step back and really state what do we think our expectation is on all of this, where are we may be layering that in, come to terms with what we're afraid of for the child or what, you know, what we really want to land, we can get things to a much more rational position, where we are not emotionalizing everything and layering on so much pressure on ourselves or on the child, that we're causing them to take a lane.
Julie 25:57 Yup, and just bring it back to like here, this amount of time, instead of thinking about how this is going to impact their university and what kind of person they're going to become in their 40s. What's happening in the next three months, six months? How do we move forward in that amount of time?
Tim 26:15 It's really interesting that you say that, because when we, when as I go through, and I talk to my kids, they have such a different time scale. It couldn't even be down to the fact that I don't feel like I have any friends at this place that I’m at. Or I have a friend and that's why I want to be in it. And their currency is something that's so different than ours, it's not in time and achievement. It's in friendship, it's in good feelings. They're operating on a different currency, rather than, oh well do this so that you can win the next Nobel Peace Prize, or whatnot. Let's shift from the parenting perspective to one that we'll all have, which is, how did we get where we are? And those might not have been little moments, depending on how we were raised. They could have been big blowouts. They could have been unspoken rules. They could have been all sorts of things. But I guess taking that moment for ourselves, where we let ourselves step back and look at the roots of why we have a certain expectation on ourselves. And maybe can we get it down to that, you know, it's almost like, understand the design behind our life that led us here because it wasn't by accident. I mean, this is one thing. It's so funny when I when I work with people, they're never broken. In that sense, when we talk about career, the career is perfectly where it's supposed to be based on everything that's happened up to that point. It's led us here, right? And in here we are. So, what's your thinking about serving that child inside, in a sense, now talking to the adult? Who's having to consider, you know? Julie 27:58 So, I think there is value in going backwards and looking in the rearview mirror and asking how we got here and why we're here. And I think we can get so caught up in all of that, that it's just another form of distracting us from the what do we do now? So, for me a question that I prefer to why I don't like it as a parenting question. And I don't really like it as a question in general, why am I stuck in a job I don't like? Why don't have, why? I like the question, how? How do I take a small step towards where I want to be? Because, as we just talked about, there could be a lot of reasons to stay in this job or to tolerate where you are right now. Because your education has led you to that point. And different education would be expensive. And there are people counting on you and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm not saying you should stay there forever. I don't believe in that. And the thing is, if anybody was to take a look at your life career, life timeline and my life timeline, you and I have had so many different jobs in so many different ways. We're very privileged to have that freedom to choose and to ride the waves that came along. That being said, there's nothing to stop us from moving one degree towards that thing we might want to do. It doesn't have to be our career. It could be something we're doing once a month, it could be something we're doing every Saturday morning, it could just be some slight curve in the path that's going to help us to feel better about how we're spending our lives. It's feeding us to be able to continue to do the other stuff. Tim 29:40 Using that analogy. I'm going to layer preemptively into that idea of what we want to do. That is a great question to be asking. Because if we're going to angle towards this idea of true north, is that our true north, or is it a true north that was– is it the true north we would choose, right? And coming to terms with what we want is a really big step because you could be layering in all of these supposed to be’s, on to that, what do I want to do? And it could be going all the way back to where we started, which was, well, I'm a dancer, and therefore what I want has to involve dance. What if it doesn't? What if it is something? So getting right down to that, what do I really want? And is that different than the story I've always told myself? Julie 30:34 Yes, and what don't I want? Tim 30:36 And what don't I want. Julie 30:37 Sometimes it's easier to figure out what you want, when you can be like, I don't know what I want. But I know that I don't want to be doing this. There's one part of this that I don't want. Tim 30:49 I'll put a link, I shared an article recently that I wrote in 2015 called “What Leaders Can Learn from My Blender.” And I have a blender, which I'm in love with, I love my blender, I love my salad spinner. I don't know why they're just two implements that I just dig, shout out Vitamix. Vitamix can clean itself in seconds. If you do it right away. If you don't, it's like some sort of industrial adhesive and you're in there with a brush and a chisel if you're unlucky, or whatever. The point is, in cheffing, we used to say clean as you go. And so that idea of not just saying what we want, but what we don't want. What are we going to let ourselves, what are we no longer going to pursue or be? That's going to be a big part of managing the energy it's going to take towards where we need to go. And coming really to terms with cleaning as we go and say, and it's back to that example you said, when we're 30, we're kind of in this new lane of saying while we're doing this, we're gonna cast off some things. It might be that rejuvenation, again, we might be in this season of literally turning the leaf and like a palm tree shedding its fronds and putting up new shoots, right? We have to go again. And that little cycle of reinvention it's is great. But what true north are we using to decide what these new leaves are going to look like in which way we're going to how many coconuts we're going to be hanging at the end?
Julie 32:22 I don't know that you necessarily can know that. I think it’s okay to not know that. Tim 32:25 But can we get closer to a yes? Julie 32:27 Yes, it's pointing the ship slightly closer. I was listening to an interview with Sally Field this morning. And she was talking about, and I hope I can paraphrase this correctly. When we're little, and we're going through hardships or fears, we might knit ourselves a sweater to keep us warm and safe. And we keep wearing that same sweater, even when we're much older than we were in the sweaters too. I'm now taking her analogy and I'm switching it a little bit. But you know, we're wearing that tiny sweater of I should do this, I need to be this person which fit us then but it really doesn't fit us now. And it's cramping our style. And part of it is, take the sweater off. You can figure out what sweater you want to put on next. But take that one off, notice those things. Notice those thoughts that you're telling yourself, notice those stories that you were telling yourself that got you here and served you very well to here. And now, how are you going to start knitting the new sweater to keep you safe in this new way of being you? And part of that is you know, like can I be a little bit more uncomfortable? Because I'm older now and I can handle a little more discomfort? And then, you know, how can we just slightly try something different? It doesn't have to be all or none. We don't have to know exactly where we're going. Because who knows where they're going? I knew exactly where I was going as a child, right up until the time that I didn't get into med school. And then I didn't have a clue where I was going. So, like even if we think we know exactly where we're going. We don't.
Tim 34:01 That recognition that “what got you here won't get you there,” was what Marshall Goldsmith always said, right? What got you here is not going to get you there. Because all it's, where you've arrived is now you're on this new cliff face, you're sitting. You're sitting in this in this place where you can see what's possible. But the climb at this point is not going to be what the next thing looks like. You can take certain tools, you can learn certain steps, you can apply certain skills, derisk things perhaps. But if you keep doing it the way that you're doing it, you will not, it won’t amount in change. Because you're just that's what got you here, not what gets you there. So, I think that that's–
Julie 34:42 I think we got here. Tim 34:44 I think we got here. A couple of couple of parting thoughts, which I think is good. And I think, you know, that willingness to put ourselves into that. That state of vulnerability and discomfort is really important. Which raises I guess what I would say, a thought that's really coming out for me right now. And I think for me personally, it's going to even help me with my clients, it'll help me with my kids. You bring this up when you're 50, and you're talking to other 50-year-olds about how they're feeling about life, my mental age is 26. I don't know why it just is 26. And we went, we're at dance competition this weekend, and I was going around the table with other parents and said, What's your mental age and people were like, 32, 37, 26, 23. Everybody could tell me who they are in their head. For whatever reason. I don't know why that is. But it's, you know, at a certain point, you look in the mirror, and you're surprised to see this face. Julie 35:37 Absolutely. Or this hair colour, right? We were talking about that? The silver quality of both of our pictures. Tim 35:46 Yeah, silver chin, the understanding that when we're making these leaps, we have to give up comfort, we have to say we're now at a point where we're making a change. And we're at this precipice. When we think of this now, in the parent-child context, the child is the one that's got to live with the consequence. They're on the edge, they're on the, they're ready to make the shift. When the parent or the mentor or whatever comes in, the All-Knowing, all-seeing, been there, done that, do it my way, mentor whatever, comes in over the top and speaks with such certainty. And such absolute, when in reality, our ass does not have to cash these checks. Do you know what I mean? Like we're about to make a decision that this child is going to have to live with maybe into their 30s, 40s, 50s. And I'm just saying to speak with it with such certainty. I would much rather take a moment and say, Wait a minute, picture your child as being in this uncomfortable, uncertain place. Stop for a moment and realise that you're not the only one feeling uncomfortable here. They're putting it up, they're putting up their chips to be risked, in a sense, it's not just us taking the risk. Maybe that's obvious to others. It's sure it's not obvious to me. It hasn't been as I've gone through this. Julie 37:20 Right? And I also think we, you know, we walk a delicate line, because depending on the age of your child, like you're not going to let your two-year-old decide, like, yeah, we have to keep them safe. And we need to meet them where they are. And love them for who they are not what they do, and take them the next step or two down the road. And here's the thing, I mean, we were talking off-camera about this. Every one of these things that's recruiting your child to be a thing is a business. They want your money, and they're trying to get you to sign up. So, that you feel stuck there. Or so you don’t miss out. Tim 38:02 Oh, you're talking about the extracurricular stuff. Sure. Julie 38:05 Yeah, all of the choirs and the hockeys and the dances and all the things. Tim 38:09 They got an angle. Julie 38:10 Yes, they have an angle. And quite frankly, your money will be just as good to them two months down the road, most of these things. So, if you say I have to sign up now because if I don't, you're not gonna let my kid in, there's a good chance that two or three months down the road, you could come in and say, you know what, we made the wrong decision. And we really want to be part of this, we realise what we're missing. And in all likelihood, they're going to take your money. They work for you.
Tim 38:44 Sure. And then there's the, you know, I want my child to be successful. And so I want them to go into a certain vocation, and they've always gotten been good at math. So, therefore, they must be an engineer, or something. It's their life. They've got to deal with those consequences. So, I guess what I would say is, as a coach, I want to see my clients love their work, you know, not struggle, like all of those things that are just generally what I want for my clients. And I think as parents, sometimes we are willing to offer advice. But as a coach, I know that I'm not there to see that through. I can be with them, but they're doing the work. It's their lift. It's their choice. Julie 39:30 And we kind of want to see people struggle. Tim 39:32 We do. Julie 39:33 With no struggle, there's no growth. Tim 39:35 100%, what I mean is that I think can sometimes be clouded as a parent, where we don't necessarily know what we're signing the child up for. And a few words spoken from our own baggage of what we should be or whatnot or living vicariously through them or making it about not letting our parents down or not letting, whatever, can program that child in a way that we don't even realise, right? Or may take choice away from them that we don't even realise? And it's not about I mean, I'm not saying everybody should be living a bohemian lifestyle where we're just like, hey, let it rip. Julie 40:14 Well, we're gonna do this in so many ways. Part of it is, I guess the hope is that we're conscious of some of the times that we're doing it. Because we're, I mean, none of us as parents are going to come out of this without making mistakes. Just as no parent, no parent ever does, right? Like, we're gonna mess up our child in some way. So, just getting clear about what we're doing and the direction that we're taking. Some people are gonna listen to us and say, Yeah, screw you. I'm going to still push my child to do this. Great– Tim 40:42 Because it's more important. Julie 40:43 Make a conscious choice. Yeah. Tim 40:45 Yep. Okay, I'm going to do two things here at the end, I'm going to ask if you could leave our listeners with any parting thought or have a wish for them, what would it be? What would you hope for anybody that's stuck with us this far? Julie 41:03 Well, I think it would be my favourite value, or virtue or whatever, which is courage. Courage, courage, courage to sit in the hard stuff to notice the emotions that you're having to not, you know, roll it away, or eat it away, or drink it away? Just to sit in that discomfort and just check in? What are my emotions actually telling me? Yeah. Tim 41:27 And how many of those are my super imposing perhaps? Or– Julie 41:31 Yeah, just like, what is what am I trying to figure out? Tim 41:32 Where are they coming from? Yeah, I love that. Julie 41:36 And how do I move forward? So, I wish for everyone courage, it's my favourite value. I think it's super powerful. What about you? Tim 41:43 So, what do I wish? I hope that, particularly when people are thinking about their own career space, that if they feel that something's not on, if they feel like something's not a fit, to stop and listen to that feeling. It doesn't mean you have to stop the train. You don't have to slam the brakes on. But pay attention to that feeling. And try to articulate it and try to write it down and really discover what's at the basis of that. What is actually bothering us? Because if we don't get down to that, if we're not fluent in the thing that's bothering us, and why, then that can come out in all sorts of negative ways. Whereas, if we can get fluent in it, and understand where it was from, as you say, we can then design for the future, right? We can make a choice, we can understand how that what's influencing that tight knot. And I think then the second part of that is, spare a little thought for understanding when you were having all these moments of discovery and potentially insecurities or whatnot. Kids feel this stuff, too. I make a point at the dance studio, even when kids are eight. I try to talk to them, like human beings, which I still have a responsibility to be an adult, I get that. But what I'm asking what they're doing, I want to talk to them and listen to them as if they're maybe not fully formed. But their thinking, feeling beings with their own view on the world. Because if I hear it through my adult years, I'm not listening. I'm taking my position and processing through it, which has to happen on some level. But the flip side is trying to see what's, get down on your knees and see what the world looks like, from their perspective. And I just think we listen with a fuller heart, or with a more open heart when we do that.
Julie 43:41 And courage is also comes from the heart, curl kurage. It's feeling scared and doing it anyway and finding the strength to do it anyway, that comes from love. So yes, the heart is a big part of this whole thing. Tim 43:53 So, we've got one more piece of business. But before we get to that, I want to ask you, if people want to reach out to you, where can they find you? Julie 44:00 Probably the easiest place to connect with me is at my website, parentmentornow.com. You can send me an email through there, you can check out all of my services, you can book a free call with me. All of those things are easy. You can find my book there. Everything's there. So, parentmentornow.com. Tim 44:20 The last piece of business, we are episode 34. Our previous episode was Brent Yogge, who is a section chief with the FBI in technology and counterterrorism and things like this. Excellent. Excellent, excellent, but the tradition of late is to ask every guest to drop a question on the guest after them. So, Brent's question. I'm going to try to paraphrase this a little bit. When you think about individuals, he was talking about individual contributors. But in this case, it could be anybody that's contributing say, to a family or to a, in a job or on the choir or anything that you're involved in. But especially those that are looking out for others in your vocation that could be parents potentially? How do you inspire them to really adopt the mindset and perspective that they are leaders, that they are influencing others, that they are in that position of power? And then how do you encourage them to be just leaders? Or the leaders they want to be? That's his question. And I think it's how do you inspire them to really embrace that idea of leadership? And even if they're not managers, we're not just talking about managers, we're talking about people that are influencing something other than themselves outside of themselves? How do you inspire them to really take that on? If that works in your context? And then once they have that, how do you encourage them to embrace and fully actualize that? So, first of all, to be it, and then to make it there, to see it through? Julie 46:10 Okay, so thanks for not warning me about this beforehand. Tim 46:12 No, it’s fine. Julie 46:15 So, I work very hard at living the life that I speak about. So, I model the life that I encourage for others. And one of those things is I empathise with people and see them for their path that they're walking, not my path that I'm walking. So, I am, I hope that what I do is I check in with them, see them, help them to know that they are not alone in the struggle that they're having. Because more often than not, I've met somebody who feels exactly the same way as they have, they are feeling. And sometimes we feel like we're the only one going through this. And so it's really hard to find the courage to step forward, when we feel like we're not alone, maybe we feel a little less shameful, we can climb out of that shame and step forward. So, just connecting with people seeing them for who they are and building community around them. And then helping them to find, you know, comes back to that how, helping them to find that one step that they can take that feels safe for them to take, that's going to move them out of where they're stuck one little bit, so that they can feel good about that and believe that they can change and then help them to make the next step. Tim 47:42 That it's not this overnight success, everything everywhere all at once. Julie 47:47 I think that's how I do it. Tim 47:48 I don’t know, I would say that that is exactly how you do it, having been on the receiving end of that. So, I think and I think that was a perfect answer, and this is why I love this show. Because it's like this is where we have knowledge coming from you. That, as far as I'm concerned is directly applicable into the life of somebody who's trying to mentor other leaders or bring up their staff, or anything like that. All right, yeah. One last question. Julie 48:11 What's my question? Tim 48:12 What's your question for the next person to put them on the hot seat? Understanding they may not be parents or they may not be whatnot. Let er’ rip? What would you be curious about? Julie 48:24 How did they find the courage to do the hard things?
Tim 48:32 Julie Freedman Smith, so many hugs coming your way. Julie 48:35 And right back to you, my friend. Tim 48:37 Okay, I can't wait till we can do this again. Thanks very much for joining us. Julie 48:39 Thank you, so much fun.
Tim 48:46 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter, you can find the link in the show notes. If like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership, please give us positive rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word too, by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening. And be sure to tune in in two weeks time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 02 Oct 2024 | Erin Ashbacher - Unlock Your Leadership Potential Fitness Choices that Boost Energy and Performance | 00:33:38 | |
Have you ever wondered how small fitness tweaks can unlock your leadership potential and supercharge your energy? In Episode 41 of Sweet on Leadership, host Tim Sweet welcomes back Erin Ashbacher, a CSEP-certified personal trainer and senior health advisor, to discuss the powerful connection between physical fitness and leadership performance. Erin reveals that even the smallest changes in your daily routine, like a brisk walk or standing on one leg while brushing your teeth, can recharge your mental and physical energy, helping you grow stronger in both your personal and professional life. Throughout the episode, Tim and Erin dive into the challenges executives and caregivers face in maintaining their health while leading others. Erin offers practical, bite-sized strategies to help listeners integrate wellness into their busy schedules without feeling overwhelmed. From building mental resilience through exercise to the importance of proper hydration, the conversation is packed with actionable tips to boost your personal energy and leadership capacity. Whether you're a leader managing a team or a caregiver balancing responsibilities, this episode offers empowering insights to help you thrive in every aspect of your life. About Erin Ashbacher Erin Ashbacher, a distinguished Senior Health Advisor and CSEP-certified personal trainer, is a driving force in health, wellness, and fitness. Armed with a Bachelor of Kinesiology from The University of Calgary, Erin, a powerlifter and former dancer, seamlessly combines expertise in movement, nutrition, and motivation. As the owner of ERA Fitness, Erin boasts a top 10 industry performance since 2016, offering personalized training and coaching services. Her approach, emphasizing life balance and aligning health with professional goals, positions her as a key collaborator for leadership development clients in Calgary and beyond. Erin's superpowers encompass listening, goal-setting, movement expertise, and the ability to create customized programs, both in-person and online. Rooted in a famous Alberta rodeo family, she brings a unique appreciation for farming and ranching to her multifaceted lifestyle, which includes enjoying outdoor activities with her partner, Doug.
Resources: National Saftey Council 2019: Cost of Fatigue in the Workplace Centre of Disease Control 2016: A good night’s sleep is critical for good health A purpose in life by day results in better sleep at night: Northwestern 2017 Study
-- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Erin Ashbacher | Shred Sisters:
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Transcript Erin 00:01 Take the disruption in the season or in the schedule as an opportunity to reassess and add in something new or change what you're doing right. All summer long, I was on my bike, and it was amazing. And now that it's fall, it's getting a little bit cooler, and taking it as an opportunity to reassess my activity schedule and get back into the gym and lift some weights again. So it's okay to do that.
Tim 00:25 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you, my friend, are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. I'm Tim Sweet, and I'd like to welcome you to Episode 41 of the Sweet on Leadership podcast.
Tim 00:56 Well, Hey everybody, welcome back to the Sweet on Leadership Podcast. I'm excited, once again, to introduce my friend, personal trainer and TWE Health and Wellness Consultant, Erin Ashbacher. Erin is a CSEP-certified personal trainer and a senior health advisor. She's been involved in several different sports, and I'll let her tell you all about that, but she brings a wealth of experience to the table, and because 90% of the executives that I help have concerns in the health area. I am wonderfully privileged to have Erin on staff so that I can pass them off to her because she's infinitely more qualified than I am to help them in that space. So welcome again, Erin. Thanks for being here. Erin 01:41 Thanks for having me again. Tim. Tim 01:44 So on that note, you've done so many cool things. Tell us a little bit about yourself, maybe a little bit about your history, and what's got you moving and active right now.
Erin 01:55 Yeah, I did my degree at the University of Calgary in kinesiology, and I fell in love with how the body moves and how it reacts to different inputs, and I’ve had an amazing career working in cardiac rehabilitation and then working with high-level executives in downtown Calgary, as well as lots of different athletes from across a multitude of sports, both getting ready to compete, as well as some rehab and some prehab. So I just spent the entire summer on my bike, coaching mountain biking and getting athletes ready to hit the trails. Few that were looking to get faster for some races, but a lot of just kind of recreational people wanting to get out and enjoy the beautiful place that we live. Tim 02:42 Right, and I mean, we are at the foothills of some amazing riding, and as we know, we've got several friends in that industry, and such a joy to be able to work with people that are involved in that sport and putting on awesome events in that sport. So really good. So before we go too much further, we've got a little tradition here, as you know, and that is that we have our previous guest lob a question at possibly the next guest, who often they never know who it is. So your question comes from Massimo Bacchus, who's a fellow leadership coach and my new friend. I love new friends. Massimo asks, what is the one thing that you are most afraid of to let go, and if you did let go of that thing, who would you be?
Erin 03:29 Ooh, it's a great question. I would say that my biggest fear is being able to confidently tell others about my value and what would I bring to the table, it's always been this pull of you can make money or you can be genuine and authentic, and I know that that's not true, and so I would love to be able to kind of let that go, and I know that I would be able to make a much larger impact if I can get it for that. Tim 03:59 What would the first few days of a relationship with a new client look like if that stress was off you? Erin 04:07 Oh, I would probably sleep better in the night before I met a new client. Yeah, I mean, I know that I would come into things a lot more confidently. I wouldn't be worried about kind of this, like background of what the bill looks like at the end of the day, and just being able to walk in they would see that they know that, right? Tim 04:29 Well, it's funny that you say that, and it almost sounds like a plant, but I assure you, dear listeners, that it is not. We're going to be talking today about capacity. We're going to be talking today about our personal energy, and the energy that we're able to put into the workplace and put into our professions and put into our lives, and that body battery, that mental battery that each of us has, because Erin is the perfect person to talk about, how do we increase the ability of that battery to take more energy in, to use it more effectively, to recharge faster. Am I expecting too much from you there, Erin? Erin 05:07 Uh, no. Not at all. Tim 05:09 You're totally game. Right on. A couple of little stats here that we were talking about before we got going. You know, when we look at the state of the workplace, and I have, I would say, almost all of the clients that I have, all the teams that I deal with, especially as we've come through some fairly tumultuous times, fatigue in the workplace, ability to feel like you've got anything left at the end of the week is an issue. Before COVID, the National Safety Council down in the states had done a study, and this was from 2019 where they figured at that time, it cost the US economy $136 billion in lost productivity when businesses weren't able to properly manage their capacity and manage their fatigue levels. And the Center for Disease Control at the same time told us that one in three adults didn't get enough sleep. Now, that, to me, is not surprising. In fact, I would be really surprised if that number, that number was from that number is actually from 2016 pardon me, if that isn't higher now, because of all the distractions and whatnot we've got plaguing us. Erin 06:17 Absolutely. Tim 06:18 Doom scrolling right before bed. Erin 06:21 Right, well, and thinking about quality and quantity of sleep, right? So, yeah, interesting. I'd love to see the new stat on that. Tim 06:29 Well, so as we launch into that, what do you see as the connection between physical and mental wellness and being able to show up and be the professional, be the leader, be the decision maker? How do you see that? Erin 06:45 Yeah, well, I mean, there's a lot of research that shows that exercise of all types, of light, moderate and vigorous exercise will help to enhance your mood, improve your energy levels, and promote your quality of sleep, and when we have all of those things, we can show up at our nine to five with more energy, right, more to give, right? And exercise is also going to be decreasing our stress hormones, right, increasing our endorphins when we exercise, so those feel good chemicals that we get in our body, and also decreasing our stress hormones, our cortisol levels. So, decreases in anxiety and increases in our mental health. Tim 07:31 For anyone that is able to get out for a walk when they are stressed, I was talking with a team around when they were dealing with high conflict in the workplace. And what do you do when you have to address a really, really difficult situation where you've got somebody that's in near on crisis, or at least is panicking, the ability, even just to get them out walking, switch the script. And I know that that's more the act of and it's a bit of a distraction, but I really believe that you know you're outside, you're breathing. In the moment, you can process things. You can set everything else aside. And that's, I mean, that's in the short term, but of course, you're also talking about in the long term, long-term capacity. Tim 08:13 Absolutely. And that's that whole like light exercise, right? Going for a 15 minute walk when something's really intense. Yeah, we see those that increase in heart rate right, when in a good way, right? And it helps to create, give us more clarity and more creativity, so that we can come back to our difficult thing with open eyes. Tim 08:35 So last time you were here, we talked about sort of the common challenges and resistances that people have to putting in the work or finding time throughout the day to exercise and take that time for themselves, and that it's really difficult mentally for some people to value themselves enough to do that. As you've worked with so many, I would say, executive clients you were working with clients that are at the top of their game, their CEOs, VPS, you're right in that space. What are some of the common health challenges that you have seen over the years crop up in that particular subset of people? Erin 09:17 The ones that aren't taking care of themselves? Tim 09:19 Or maybe they come to you with something? Erin 09:21 Yeah, they come to me with something. I mean, there's a lot of high blood pressure and a lot of sleep problems as well. When we are not taking care of ourselves, we're not taking care of our mental health, it can start to affect our sleep, right? Sleep is the number one predictor of health. So, you know, that's one of those things that we need to also take care of. Tim 09:42 There was a stat around the sleep connection that said it's like a virtuous cycle, right? That when people are getting better sleep, they are able to make more difficult decisions quickly. They're able to handle more stressful situations, as you say. But then also, if they get through those situations, if they are happy with their job, if they're content with their career, if they're happy with the staff that they've got, they can see up to 63% less sleep disturbances. In 2017 Northwestern did this study where they said, if you are satisfied at work, if you have less work stress, how does it impact your sleep? And they said it's well over a 50% increase that you can now put back into your day. So to me, that tells us that it's like you're getting the chance to not just refill your battery. It's like this virtuous cycle. It's getting better and better and better. Better sleep, a little more productive through the day. More productive through the day, less stress about taking an hour for yourself to go out and sweat. Erin 10:55 Absolutely, and I mean, I can speak to that in my own personal journey, right? When I was downtown, I was 12-14 hours a day, face to face with clients, and I would get my hour workout in, you know, five days a week minimum. And people always ask me, how do you do it? I'm like, I love what I do. That's how I do it. And, yeah, when I go home at the end of a day, I'm invigorated, because I feel like I've made such an impact, and working in an environment that is positive, right, surrounded by great people, it just, it's that cycle that you just keep feeding in, and then you have great night's sleep, and they feed in again, and it feeds you, yeah. Tim 11:36 Yeah. You know the challenge of being able to wake up on a Monday and be excited to get to work. It comes with its own challenges. I mean, you got to be careful not to work through your vacations and stuff. But you know, being excited and eager to do what you're doing with the people you want to do it with, there's no better way to feel like you are where you belong. And it's always surprising to me when there's people have yet to experience that, and they can just sit back and say, Wow, I really enjoyed that week. I can't wait to hit the ground running next week. And you know, I would say, I've got a brand new client, and he was telling me that, but we're working on capacity with him and his team, and I started talking about electric cars. And, you know, we have to work capacity from two sides. One is that, yeah, we have to have the environment and the systems and the head count and everything to be able to handle the work that we're doing. Or, you know, if it's just us, we need to have the flexibility to really rise to an occasion and operate at a greater output for short periods of time, or whatever that is. Yeah. Okay, that's your personal capacity. The next thing is, is your job and the people you work with and the quality of your team filling your bucket as you're doing that. And I said, it's like regenerative breaking. It's like the difference between having a an EV that can climb a hill and and handle those dips and yaws in the road to one that can do that and regenerate in the process when it's going down the other side. So that's what we're building into his practice. And I'm pretty happy with that metaphor. Actually, I'm gonna keep using that sucker. But, when you are face to face with clients who have these demands and they've got a lot at stake, what are some of the strategies that you suggest that can help them manage their responsibilities to themselves?
Erin 13:39 I mean, the best thing is, if you have control of your own schedule, I had one one person 10am every single morning, whether she was working out with me or whether she was just going for a walk around downtown, that was her time, and she blocked it off, and her entire team knew that 10am to 11am is her time. And I mean, that's an imperfect world that you can just be really hard headed about putting it in your schedule. I have another client that we discovered that he is a better parent, a better spouse when he takes a break between the work and returning home, so rather than sitting in a car, or like, you know, on the bus, takes time to walk every single day. If he can't walk, he, you know, comes for a workout with me, goes to the gym, but yeah, when he is working from home because a lot of us have hybrid models these days, he still takes that half an hour to 45 minutes to break up his work life and his home life, which I think is amazing. Yeah, recognizing that it doesn't have to be big, right? Sometimes it's a 15 minute walk in the morning before you have coffee, or while you're having coffee, pick one ritual that you're already doing and see if you can make it active. Tim 14:59 Julie Freedman Smith, she's our parenting and family associate at TWE, I believe it was she who introduced me to the term transition time. Both for the kids, when you're going to ask them do something, you got to give them a bit of transition time. You got to help them switch gears. But also for me as a dad, I had to have that. And interestingly enough, I mean, just a couple of weeks ago, I was talking to an old client. I mean, he's been around forever. We still coach, but we're more friends now than anything, and he does what you just said. He'll stop, and he will sit in the car and transition for like, 10 or 15 minutes. I think that's a really good strategy that he has. He's able to then, like, really clear his slate before he goes in and dads, but why not walk like, why not walk for that 15 minutes? Or, you know, what would I'm gonna suggest that to him? What would, what would the net benefit be if he did the exact same thing, but just didn't do it in his car? I mean– Erin 15:58 Make it active. Tim 16:00 Totally. Just, you know– Erin 16:02 Just a small thing– Tim 16:04 Little Erin Ashbacher boost to your day. Erin 16:06 Right? Well, hey, you know, I have a client who's recovering from an ankle injury, and I'm like, you brush your teeth, how many times a day? Twice day? Okay, stand on one foot while you're brushing your teeth, right? Just a little thing that can start to have a bigger impact– Tim 16:21 Sounds familiar? Erin.
Erin 16:26 I love finding ways to tweak your routine, right? It's already there. Let's add one thing. Tim 16:33 That's awesome because the next question I was going to ask you was incorporating small little habits. So let's talk about that standing on one leg, standing alone one leg would be a total gimme. Like, why can't you do that when you're standing on two legs? You got an option, right or left, right? What would be some other give us more. Come on. Give me. Give me. Give me. Give me. Give me. Erin 16:54 Thanks. One of the things that I gave one of my other clients was she had to get down to a filing cabinet. She's an older, older client. And I just like, instead of getting down onto your knees to search through that, like, is it possible to squat down to get there, right? Just changing the way that we're moving in the office even, right? Instead of using the stool all the time, maybe we stand up and reach and kind of get a little off balance in a safe way. I love making my meetings with clients and my meetings with friends more active, too. So I love a walking meeting, or if the weather permits, getting out on our bikes and taking like a nice cruisy bike side by side. We have beautiful pathways in the city, so makes it easy. Yeah. Tim 17:40 My friends over at OSP, we just had the OSpluza, which they have done every year. I was there as a speaker for one of their very first ones. I think I was there in 2018, I want to say, but anyway, every year they've got this great event that is such an expression of their culture. But you're always moving. Last year we did a scavenger hunt around the zoo. So we did professional development for a day and a half. And then scavenger hunt, holy moly, it was a blast. And then this year– Erin 18:10 Running around the zoo? Tim 18:14 You know, it was crazy. It was timed. And then, and we put in a lot of steps. And then, and I was on new pegs, right, like I that was one year into my into my knee surgery. And so, man, I was gained because there was no way I would have been able to do that a year before that. And then this year, it was bowling. So it's funny, I thought of you during that, because we were, we went to the the bowling alley, and I had to put on those shoes. And I thought, Okay, I better do like, a full straight bend, and really bend this out. Because, as Erin knows, I mean, some of you might have heard this. I mean, I suffered a fall saving a hamster. It's a long story. Ended up with, you know, nine to 10 months of spinal damage, Hamster related spinal damage. So anyways, a little stiff. Let's just say this my form was coming back. But, you know, when you've got big hands and you've got to use a double x, not a regular bowler, but you've got to use a double x, old ball, they tend to be, you know, 14 to 15 pounds. So you're swinging this 14 to 15 pound thing. And if you've got any self respect, you know, you're going to do your best to do you know, even though it's just casual, you're gonna do your best. I'm fairly competitive anyway, so I was stretching beforehand, thinking Erin would tell me this. Erin 19:29 My other favorite hack is staying hydrated. So especially if someone is coming into the gym and working out, lifting weights, and they're fairly new to it, or they're new to it again, obviously water is going to help us recover, and it's going to help, but even if we're sitting at our desk and we're not sore, just drinking lots of water forces us to get up and walk the office and go to the bathroom and then walk back. Yeah, so I'm a huge pusher of staying hydrated, which research shows that Staying hydrated also plays a vital role in our brain function and in our concentration. Tim 20:09 Tell me this. I've tried many I still, I mean, I track most of the time. I have done the big jug thing. You know, I try to drink as much water as I can, but it's what's your personal favourite hack? And I mean, I'm still, I'm always looking for tricks, because I will forget to drink. Erin 20:30 Right, if you’re a visual person, having it right in front of you is pretty good. But I have clients that I set a reminder for them, I'm like, you should be drinking you know, one cup, 250 milliliters every 15 minutes. So I'm a sipper, but like, hey, if all you need is a 15-minute ding on your phone to tell you to drink some water, go for it. Tim 20:53 Yeah, I'm not a sipper. I'm a guzzler. Like, I we've always had, uh, no TV where we eat dinner. That was always a rule for my wife and I and our kids, and we always have a pitcher of water on the table, and it's always full, and we often without thinking it, start off the meal with all of us sort of pouring a glass of water, because it's kind of nice to have people pour water for you, and then I always drain it, like I drain just I but that's just the way. I think it comes from working in the kitchens or something, when we used to get really hot and you would just or planting trees because– Erin 21:32 You have time, take it. Tim 21:34 Well, and you couldn't cool yourself any other way. So you're using this hydration as almost a cooling tool. But yeah, no, I'm not polite when it comes to I just it's kind of a race. I don't know if it's kind of a personal thing, but it's like– Erin 21:47 I will finish my glass first. Tim 21:49 I rarely put down a full glass or even a glass with any water left in it. Erin 21:55 The other trick I have is that if you know, you're a tea sipper or a coffee sipper, that you always have a one-to-one ratio. I’m pretty hard about that, because caffeine is, uh, not great. It’s okay, in small quantities, but people are drinking. I drink no water at all, but I drink two cups or two pots of coffee a day; maybe, switch that. Tim 22:18 This sounding familiar again, Erin.
Erin 22:18 It’s getting a bit personal. Tim 22:20 It is, although my dentist always said, always have water when you're having tea, like, always order a coffee in a water, or always order a tea in a water, if for no other reason than the fact that you need to rinse that stuff off your teeth. Right? So all good tips. I'd be really interested when we publish this; if you've already listened, go to the posting for this on my LinkedIn account, and enter your best water hacks. And then we'll put those on a giveaway, and we'll make sure everybody gets, we’ll doing one of in our newsletters. Hey, we'll put, you know, here's your top 20 water hacks, goldfish bowls, not just pretty, but delicious. Anyway. Cool. All right, let's keep going. So we've got a lot of good reasons why a person should be exercising in order to increase their capacity and recharge their brain and be resilient, and the data is fairly sound that this is valuable. The one thing I wanted to ask you about was this, and that is, you'd mentioned that you had leaders that have teams that are supportive of them going out for their walk, things like this. I would throw in the middle of all this that you're either feeling guilt or shame or discomfort or fear trying to take time for yourself and work out, or you feel like you're inconveniencing your staff, or you can't leave your team alone, or your days are far too full. You might be in an environment that simply will not afford you the time, and so look for design changes that you can make. You know, how do you increase the productivity of your staff so that you can take some time off? Are you doing everything for everybody else and covering other people's work? Or do you need to shuffle how things are done, or even the people that are doing it? Don't subsidize your team or organizational health, with your life, with your own health, because it's just not a good deal, and it's so often really unnecessary, and that terrible shit tornado that just tears us down into a vicious cycle, right? Erin 24:33 I like to always say, don't be the person that if you win the lottery tomorrow, your entire team is going to fall apart, right? I used to say, get hit by a bus, but I'd like to be much more positive than that, so I'm going to say, win the lottery, right? So make sure that you're giving your team all the tools that they can be successful, and so that you can guilt free take that time, yeah. Tim 24:58 Well, and also so that they can take that time. Right? Oh, and that raises a really interesting thing that you and I talked about last week, and that was, we're not just talking about professionals and people who are leading in an organizational capacity. We also have people that have new roles thrust upon them, right? And this could be, you know, you've got kids going to school, okay, we're just entered the school year, now you got a whole brand new way of parenting. You might be a stay at home parent and you need to you're at a whole different level. My son just he's had a knee injury, but we just found out that he's going to have to have meniscal repair. So my wife now is gearing up to, like, have to be a caregiver and focus on him for three to five months, because he's going to need more support. And you and I were talking about that in terms of the caregiver, whether you've got a, you know, a parent or I'm of the age where the parents are getting sick, talk a little bit about that. Erin 25:53 I mean, we very easily when we were sitting on a plane. It's like, you know, you put your oxygen mask on first before you help others. And that concept rings true when it comes to our everyday life, but realistically, it's very easy to grab the oxygen mask when it's physically right in front of your face. When we take a look at putting on our own oxygen mask in our lives, it's much more difficult to understand those things, and there's tons of research that shows that caregivers are at higher risk for physical and mental health issues. They're at higher risk for sleep problems, and they're at higher risk for chronic conditions such as high blood pressure. So if those caregivers can think about being preventative and taking care of their mental and physical health before those things happen, then they can be better caregivers, right? Take care of yourself, take care of others. And so yeah, knowing that it's not selfish to take that time and carve out that so that then you can be better for those people that you're helping to take care of. So in your wife's case, your son, right, she needs to take care of her own physical and mental health so that she can help him when he's recovering. Tim 27:05 Another client, their spouse, is going through a total knee replacement, like I did, so they've been asking me questions about it, and they're gearing up to be their caregiver for eight months. My advice to them was, don't just think about being a support to the other person. You as the caregiver, need to think about your caregivers. So can you increase your own support? Can you afford cleaners or something? Or can you make, can you make life a little bit easier? Or can you let yourself off the hook when it when it comes to, you know, putting out fancy meals, and instead, you know, opt for something that you can produce on mass or whatnot, or just ask for help, you know. Erin 27:43 Wait, you can ask for help. Tim? Tim 27:46 You can, you can risk some, some questionable lasagnas. But, yeah, you can, you can ask for help. All right, cool. So we've, so what have we covered here? If I think back to everything you've said, Erin, we're sitting at this time of the year where we've got a lot of things changing. People have new roles thrust upon them, new responsibilities, and they're feeling fatigued, and like so much in business, you know, we have to not think about the cost of taking time for ourselves. We have to think about it as an investment, and we have to say these things will pay back if we can just get started, even if that's small. Hydration is an easy place to start. Standing on one foot is an easy place to start, doing a squat instead of bending over is an easy place to start. Pretending you're tying your shoes but actually stretching before you bowl at a team-building event is an easy place to start. You know, make it easy, like, do the easy thing. Do the thing that doesn't always feel like it's the big, fancy new thing. Just do the easy thing. Erin 28:56 I have a shout out to my dearest friend who this year, started every single morning with five sun salutations. So basically, just touch your toes, go into a plank, stand up. For those of you who don't do yoga and it's a two minute practice and it's made a huge difference in their lives. Tim 29:18 Yeah, I think that's true, and I'll give a shout out quickly to you. You know, when I was coming back from this tkr, you said 20 minutes, Tim, just every day, an intentional 20 minutes. And I've managed to keep that up, regardless of what's been happening, and that, if nothing else is just says I did it. I did my 20 minutes. You know, even if it's not always stellar, but check I'm gonna start doing– Erin 29:42 Something is better than nothing. Tim 29:44 You know. And how often do we say, if it's not perfect, we're not gonna do it? I mean, barf, all right, cool. It's been great. So as I always ask, we've covered all this ground. If people were to take one thing away, if you were to see people transform in one way, if you had to ask it a simpler way, if you had one wish for people who are listening today, what would it be? Erin 30:10 Take the disruption in the season or in the schedule as an opportunity to reassess and add in something new or change what you're doing, right? All summer long, I was on my bike, and it was amazing. And now that it's fall, it's getting a little bit cooler, and taking it as an opportunity to reassess my activity schedule and get back into the gym and lift some weights again. So it's okay to do that. Tim 30:32 I love that. You know, pop the bubble. Change doesn't have to be a threat, right? It can be an opportunity. Cool now to continue on to our tradition. If you were to lob a question at our next guest, not exactly sure who that would be, why don't you fire one at me? Erin 30:53 My question is, how do you stop your big, juicy challenge that you've been dreaming of doing from sitting on the shelf. How do you anchor that? Get into it? Tim 31:05 Okay, so we've got some guests coming up that I think are going to be perfect to throw that at, so I'm looking forward to that. Okay, thank you very much. Erin, before we go tell people what you've got going on, anything you'd like to share that you're excited about.
Erin 31:24 Starting with Cochran minor hockey this fall, doing some team training. Very excited for their off ice season coming up. Yeah, just looking forward to a few changes in my personal life that maybe I'll share next time. Tim 31:37 Yay, maybe you'll share next time. I'm going to throw one in there too, and that is that you've already helped several of the people that are my clients. And so if you're already doing leadership development, or you're already doing personal coaching or something like this, layer in, it's a great time to layer in the physical aspect, especially if it's the number one thing that bugs you, if it's the thing that's really got you down, no amount of professional coaching is going to overcome grief of a bad physical situation. Start with the biggest constraint, right? And if that's your sense of self, at least work at it in parallel, which is what I'm so happy for you to be on the team. So thanks so much. All right. Well, I think that wraps us up. It's so awesome to have you back. Erin 32:29 It's great to be back. Tim, thank you. Tim 32:31 Okay, well, we look forward to talking to you, hopefully right before the new year, if not right early in 25. Erin 32:37 Sounds great. Tim 32:39 Listen for updates and look for Erin to be offering in some writing and some posts as we move forward throughout the year. If you want to follow us, you're welcome to sign up to our newsletter, and in the meantime, Erin, go get him.
Tim 32:56 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership, please give us a positive rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders, and you can spread the word too by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening, and be sure to tune in, in two weeks' time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 06 Mar 2024 | Teresa Waddington - Leading Teams Through Authenticity and Vulnerability | 00:43:04 | |
In this compelling episode of the Sweet on Leadership Podcast, industry leader Teresa Waddington joins host Tim Sweet on a mission to revolutionize the energy landscape. Teresa's diverse background, spanning from engineering to corporate relations, reflects her passionate commitment to converting her father's oil patch into a sustainable energy garden for future generations. The conversation explores multifaceted leadership, emphasizing the significance of authenticity and vulnerability in fostering cohesive teams. Teresa shares profound insights into the intricacies of the energy industry, addressing the delicate balance between profitability and sustainability. The episode underscores the transformative potential of leadership grounded in connection, creativity, and a shared vision for the future of energy. Teresa's advocacy for bold thinking and collaboration resonates, offering listeners valuable perspectives on navigating the complexities of the global energy crisis and the importance of continuous self-improvement in leadership. The episode underscores the power of diverse perspectives in driving transformative change within the energy sector. About Teresa Waddington Teresa is on a mission to turn her dad’s oil patch into her daughter’s energy garden. This has driven her contribution to shaping the global energy garden, helping to plant and nurture the molecules, electrons, technologies, policies, and workforce that will drive our energy transition. Teresa believes in thinking big, having fun, and that the intersection of creativity and technology will be the ultimate transformational force in our society. This mission – informed by her engineering education and diverse work experiences (from corporate relations to running a gas plant to leading a maintenance crew), along with a cheeky nature and a love of drawing - has driven her to create a YouTube channel where she animates a variety of industry-relevant topics. She’s been published numerous times in the Globe and Mail, typically from work inspired by her three kids and husband. She is always seeking to connect and communicate around energy. Resources discussed in this episode: -- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Teresa Waddington: -- Transcript Teresa 00:01 Be yourself. And I mean that in the way of, do the hard work to know who you are. Take the time to constantly strip away all the outside influences and muddy up who we think we should be, what we think success looks like, and who we're performing for our parents or our children, or somebody else. Take the time to constantly strip that away into reground. So, that you can truly be yourself in every aspect of your life. Tim 00:32 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you my friend, are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. Welcome to the Sweet on Leadership Podcast, episode 28. Tim 01:05 I am really happy that I've got Teresa Waddington joining me. So, hello, Teresa. Teresa 01:11 Hello, I'm excited to be here. Tim 01:14 We're just saying off-camera, this feels like we've known each other for a couple of years, but it feels like a lot longer. And every once in a while, you meet people that I don't know, maybe we remind each other of other people in our life or just feels like we're we're in sync. So, I'm really excited for today. And let's see if that translates into a podcast. I think it will, as I mentioned that you and I've been connected for a couple of years now. And I remember the first time that we met was because I had run across one of your articles in my feed. And I remember looking at your profile bio, which you still have, which I would really encourage everybody to go look at. And the line that stuck out in my mind, as both of us were involved in the energy industry was turning my dad's oil patch into my daughter's energy garden, which just hit me like a ton of bricks. And that was something that always stuck with me. And then I think I reached out and we had a few conversations and it was good. But I really appreciate and cherish the opportunity, I have to talk to you and every time that you make time for me. So, thank you so much for that. And I can't wait to introduce others to you. So, with that in mind, why don't you tell everybody who's listening a little bit about yourself? Teresa 02:23 You nailed it. My Profile bio, which I've spent a lot of time thinking about over years and years and years, is that I'm on a mission to turn my dad's oil patch into my daughter's energy garden. And when I think about who I am, and how I've come to my journey, it does feature a lot about my family and my family that I came from and my family that I've created with my husband, in terms of my parents and my kids. So, I come from a family of five engineers, it was a genetic requirement. My parents and my siblings are all engineers, there was a genetic requirement that I would graduate with an engineering degree. And after I did that, I joined Shell where I've held jobs in all kinds of different functions from Project Engineering to Commercial to Operations and Maintenance, to HSSE, and now I'm in Corporate Relations. So, a big kind of span across the energy industry. And really, throughout all of it, I've had a huge amount of mentorship and support from my dad, and my mom. My mom was also an engineer in the early days of the Calgary oil patch, although I wouldn't say it was her her oil patch, it was definitely something that she struggled with as she kind of came through her career. And now I'm building on kind of the legacy, they've left me to try and create transformation and change, not just in the molecules, electrons, policies, but also in the people that are going to build that future for our children. And when I think about that future energy garden, I really do think it is a whole host of things. It's a whole host of technologies, and couplings of those technologies between kind of old and new, that will really drive us forward. And we're going to talk about leadership today. A huge piece of what I believe my role in many of our roles is now is really, how do we lead and create a fertile ground for that transition, to enable other people to contribute in their kind of super specialized creative ways to lead and to create and to build that energy garden of the future. Tim 04:18 I think it's really interesting. I mean, myself, I'm involved in oil and gas and a bunch of other industries as well. But having been brought up in Calgary, it's been such a part of our identity to be the oil patch or the energy center of Canada, and in many ways of the Western world. And there's no end right now to the controversy that we find ourselves in because of the world's relation with hydrocarbons. And it's really interesting to me, that from the outside, there's a general assumption that the bulk of people that work in energy are very focused on profit and simply, you know, producing this fuel or whatnot, and they don't really give a mind to, you know what else is going on. And I find that that's just not true. The you know, the people that are here are in service of society by and large, they know that at the state that the world is in this is required. I mean, we require hydrocarbons for fuels and advanced fuels, we require it for plastics, we require it for clothing, we require it for all sorts of petroleum-derived chemicals and whatnot. But nobody is feeling like it needs to stay the way it is. I think there's a wide recognition that if we're going to be part of the future, it has to move. And so Canada has always been at the forefront of ethical production, it's always been at the forefront of thinking about how do we transition this into something that is sustainable. Because even if we get away from combustibles when it comes to fuel, we still require petrochemicals to engage in environmental technologies. And so it's such a huge issue. And when we think about changing, as you say, when you think about changing the people along with that, I think that there's such a visionary component. And today, when we're going to talk about this, it's not just changing that garden from within, I see it is changing how people appreciate the role that this industry plays in modern life, and sustainable life and health care and everything else, all the things that work right now, not to dismiss the things that need to change. But you know. Teresa 06:38 It’s interesting because my dad's oil patch was in a bad place, in a lot of ways. There's a lot of values and ways of doing things that I think absolutely are going to be required as we move into that next iteration. But he said something early on that I think was super interesting that the concept of profitability being a bad thing, that we should be doing things out of altruism, and charity. And every dollar we spend is a vote for something. It's something we believe in or something that we value or something that we need. And so the fact that, you know, petrochemicals and fossil fuels still attract such a high rate of return, and they still get so much investment, just points to the fact that people are continuing to vote for them. And so we need to lead change, we need to make that difference, and I completely agree with it's kind of both, but to cast profitability as a negative thing, I think really undermines our ability to understand how we contribute to the world in an incredibly tangible way. ESG investing is a great example, where it's really uncommon, that higher ESG metrics are ranking truly translates into better profitability. So, why is that? Like? What needs to change? When is that going to change? Who's going to change it? Yeah, absolutely. It all comes back to people at the end of the day, Tim 07:55 It's not simply a mindless pursuit of profits, it is voting with those dollars, making sure that they are of use to many people. And I mean, the reason why it is so strong is because people vote in ways that they don't even realize. I mean, when they buy a certain good and that good is reliant on transport arts relying on manufacturing, or it's reliant on chemical inclusion, or whatever it is, they are part of the supply chain, they're part of the decision to continue to extract resources and the need to extract resource in the enjoyment of everything that comes as positive as oppose. And as you say, ESG, environmental social governance, the fact that that isn't a high rate of return area, I guess, would be a fair way of saying it. It's not returning on value. Teresa 08:47 Having high ESG rankings doesn't necessarily mean people will pay more, or wherever it doesn't translate to direct value for consumers. Tim 08:57 That’s right. It's not represented necessarily in the footprint of what people are paying for. So, yeah, I think all of that really needs to change, which then brings us around to what we're talking about today. And so there is a very heavy issue that has a lot of different opinions floating around, and a lot of learning to happen on all sides. And also, it's one of those issues that does not function well in a polarized society, because it really requires that we have that Rational Middle, that ability to have good dialogue, and to educate and hear from all parties. It doesn't deal well as a polarized issue, because then nobody's listening to each other. But this takes us full around to the fact that if you stay in your box, inside a company, and you're dealing with this and you're part of it, well okay, you're going to fulfill a function. But there's such a larger opportunity. And that's what we're really here to talk about today. And that is that idea of multifaceted leadership, you're not just leading operationally within your position, within some company. There are other opportunities to lead. So, when you and I started talking about this, I was really excited by what you were saying. So, can you take us a little bit down that path? When you think of a leader having multiple avenues of influence? Why is that important? And what does that mean? Teresa 10:23 I'm going to start with a piece of advice that I think we've all been told at some point, and then come bring that back to leadership and multifaceted leadership, which is just be yourself. Which is unbelievably difficult to do, which is why it's so often repeated and is so critical in creating the change and the multifaceted leadership in terms of showing up consistently in all kinds of avenues and really helping drive belief in that you really do mean what you're saying in whatever area you end up standing in. So, I'll start with when I was a junior engineer, leadership looks like, you know, doing flare stack calculations and designs and adding an extra layer of insulation to help reduce CO2 or whatever it was, but it was really for me, it was about how do you make things that are both efficient and sound technically? And getting into my first few leadership roles I learned a lot about having technical know-how is great, it is a foundational element to be incredible in a lot of different areas, but being able to listen, and to really hear what people are saying, the technical elements are really important and being able to evaluate how to balance those, but also, what scares them, what inspires them? What are they really looking to do in their work? Are they looking to send their child to school to have a better ability to provide than they did? Are they really excited about creating change in the renewable space, whatever it is that's fundamentally driving people helps understand where they're coming from, and then also how you can connect into their energy to make even more happen. And then the final element is kind of within your peer group. And I found that as I've gotten further into my career and working with a big company, it's really how do I connect the dots between what other people want to do so that we can get an inspired group of people who support each other, who drive change, who truly create in every sense of the word in a business environment, and creativity is essential, I think, to everything we do. Because if you really want to lead, it means going into places where others haven't been or going there in a different way. And to do that, you need to imagine things that don't exist. And to do that with a collaborative group of people who are representing different points of view, different bits of expertise, different understandings of how the world works, and how to make it move. If you get a big group of people who really complement each other driving that change, you can build incredible things and bring incredible things to life. And so when I think of truly multifaceted leadership, it's being part of teams like that, with the urge to create, with the different skill sets that are required around it to do it, or they can go get those skill sets because they realize the gaps. Who really make things different in the world, who bring new things to life. And there's nothing better to me than being part of a team like that, that gets to drive something brand new into the world. Tim 13:28 There is so much there to unpack, and I'm going to tell you what I heard. And we can see where it takes us. I thought it was really interesting when you talked about, you know, that drive to build belief in oneself. And I've been having some interesting thoughts about the word belief because the issue with the word belief is it requires untested faith. Like it requires things that, you know, we have to believe something on the surface. And I don't think we always use it that way. And when you were talking, I heard more about it's creating surety that we are who we say we are that we are thinking what we say we're thinking, and that is a huge component. In that, that's authenticity. That's I am what you see in front of you. And authenticity is one of those three key pillars of trust alongside logic and empathy. The other word there that's really important from leadership and team perspective, is that authenticity requires a certain measure of vulnerability to say, I'm going to be who I am, I'm going to tell you what I'm thinking, I'm going to tell you what my fears are. I'm going to tell you what my interests and inspirations are and I need you to deal with me on those levels. That doesn't mean they're not going to change, but you need to understand that this is who I am. And that I mean what I say when I say it, and I think that that's a huge part of this and it is a precursor to being able to go out and create with others. And what's really neat about teaching and making that the way in which energy professionals show up, is that then allows us to not only connect with people inside of organizations but to connect with people that are part of other interest groups, perhaps they’re Aboriginal groups or perhaps our environmental groups. And rather than ostracizing and isolating ourselves from them, we can talk with them at that level. And we can understand them at that level, what are your fears? What are your inspirations? What are your interests, what's driving you? What is your child's garden look like? But we're such a creature of fear. And the phrase that has been bouncing around, in my mind. And I don't know if I heard it somewhere, if I'm coming up with myself is that human beings are such children of fear, and they're such children of risk. I heard a great thing said the other day, and I've been sharing it where when we were primeval, or when we were developing, we could make an alpha or beta error. If there was a tiger in the grass, and we failed to see it, it would eat us. And that was a beta error, we deserve to be taken out of the gene pool, in a sense. But if we ran away, even if there was no tiger in the grass, we were right, we might have been wrong, but we were alive. Running away was the way to get into the risk and run away. So, I mean, from simulations, simulating being the way our brains are designed to create and to imagine the future and do all these things. If we imagine risk, there was a big payoff from staying in the gene pool perspective of running away, of stopping the conversation, and bolting. And so we're up against that, where we have to sort of stay facing the tiger in the grass, even when it's scary, and talk about our risks and talk about things that make us vulnerable, even if they're inspirations. The last thing that you said in there that I thought was great, was that it becomes this kind of skill set to be able to say, look, are we able to create here? Or do we need to get more opinions? Do we need to get other people involved? And so really teaching that ability to get over ourselves and then go out and gather more opinions, even if they are contradictory, and bring them into the fold, so that we can create and get into this chaotic space of developing something new that we didn't expect? How am I doing? Teresa 17:25 Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right. And the whole diversity, you're kind of making me think of a conversation my sister and I had when we were mountain biking in Bread Creek a little while ago. Both her and I are female engineers, we have both been told by various people we've worked with at some point, oh, you're a diversity hire. And we were talking about in the teams that we've worked in, you know, Tim 17:45 Can I say barf real quick? Teresa 17:46 Trust me, don't worry, her and I covered that. We've covered that ground. But it was really interesting talking about what are the limits of diversity that you can handle in a team before everything busts apart? And so we weren't talking about gender diversity, per se, we're talking about like true thought diversity. And how do you ensure that your team of people who are about to go create something and she has a startup on the side, so we were talking about that, has enough value-based overlap, and yet difference of opinion that you will want to stay together? And it's a physics concept, right? It's how much kind of magnetic force do you have before you start to lose things off the edge? And the concept of having a limit to diversity feels like a really difficult thing to say, like, are you allowed to say that, is that trending into some politically, very unsavory territory? But I do think the concept that diversity brings value, but only if you have enough common ground to want to move together. Otherwise, you just lose. Tim 18:54 I think it's a great point, when we think about how teams perform, they can perform instinctually, which is down on the task base, they can perform from a planning a project space when they're in that sort of tactical zone, they can get strategic, and they can be deciding where they want to go. So, you sort of have the strategic tactical, operational, but then up above that, you have this challenge zone, which is where the team may have to look periodically outside, be exposed to external forces. So, I think to be functional, you're right, you know, you have to have cohesion. And you have to have a team that faces very little resistance, the work should be hard, but working together shouldn't. And so the team has to be crafted in order to go and do things. And indeed, having constant authenticity and trust operating within that team is paramount. When we're facing these larger challenges, I would say, every once in a while, we open ourselves up to a different facet to a different form. And we go out we gather and maybe we have periodic exposure to really challenging thoughts that keep us on the knife edge, then we take that and we return and we say, okay, how do we turn that into something functional thinking in terms of those phases? So, not just that we have different phases to our leadership into our team. But there's a timing element. And there's a, there's a practicality element that we have to say, you know, you can't always be interfaced with somebody who's in an oppositional, right? But you can certainly go and listen, have a good conversation, take those back and work them and say, Okay, now what if we could? What if we could change it to be more aligned? What would it take and seek that sort of common ground, but it's, I love that. I love that notion that you're saying of having that molecular connection, that cohesion, that natural gravity towards each other, where it's like, this makes sense, why we're all together. It really involves being connected not just on a professional level, but also on a linguistic level, and on a cultural level, and on on a personal, you know, interest, like you and I. I mean, when we talked in the beginning about having a natural kind of clique? Well, at least I feel that way, I won't speak for you. But it's kind of the static between us that makes it easy, makes it easy to come in. And we don’t come from the same backgrounds. And so I may be saying things that are a little on the outside, and you're saying things that are on the outside, and here we are. With that in mind, then let's talk about if we can do that, if we can find that rhythm and that magnetism inside and still remain open to what scared to what scares us, to what inspires us. And every once in a while, open the door to other thought, what's possible? What is possible if we're able to do that? How does that enrich, and fertilize your daughter's energy garden? Teresa 22:04 I mean, that's a huge question. First off. Tim 22:08 You're right. What do you see as possible, that is impossible today? Teresa 22:14 So, I can't even envision the different ways that the world is going to merge the geopolitical crisis, the energy crisis, and the climate crisis. But I firmly believe that the whole people, planet, profit Triple Bottom Line concept exists, and that it is absolutely possible. But it will take huge leaps of faith, creativity, and a desire for people to come together without yet knowing that the outcome is possible to create a possible pathway. And like one super minor, and this is just because we're talking about the D&I thing afterwards made me think about it. I had a conversation with a guy who was very upset about the concept of D&I and hiring practices and kind of some of the equity stuff that was going on. And I said, Well, why? And he goes, Well, because we've got a perfect meritocracy now, why wouldn't we be keeping the meritocracy in place? And I was blown away. I'm like, you believe that we actually have a meritocracy in our workplaces? Because like, just putting it out there, buddy, I don't think it's perfect. I don’t think it works, the way you think it works, and opening up that space to say, Why do you want to preserve this, for the people who are exceptional at preserving status quo? And by that, I mean, like, CEOs of certain companies, you know, the people who are saying, we're not going to change, I would love to say, where's that conversation to open up why? Why do you think this is perfect, and what is worth preserving? Because I also don't believe that we need to throw away everything. And I think sometimes that gets lost in some of the like, rhetoric and some of the more extremist views is– Tim 23:53 –very dangerous. Teresa 23:54 Everything is broken. Yeah, throw everything away and we're gonna have to go down this 100% renewables from day one standpoint as an example. And I think in order to get to the point where things have really changed, we do need to do a portion of that a portion of, you know, like, If Ford had built, you know, what the people wanted, he would have tried to make faster horses and he had to completely re-envision what does transport look like to get to a car? I think we're going to need a piece of that. We're gonna need that revolution, we're also going to need the evolution and we're going to need them to come together to really step change us into what is completely new. So, when I think about like, from a leadership perspective, it's being open to change. It's looking for the holes in your argument. And I'll give you an example of my own leadership journey. I've always tried to say what am I blind to? So what are people saying about me that I should know in order to decide if I'm going to change anything about what I do, how I show up, how I build my skill sets, how I build my allegiances because if I don't know, it might feel comfortable, it might feel like I'm not, you know, exposed to negative opinions of myself. But if I do know then I can make a choice and be comfortable enough to ask for the bad feedback, it requires a measure of worthiness or belief in your own worthiness. And when I think about the people that I mentor and support, the ones that I want to see continue to drive forward and change the world. It's reinforcing their own core worthiness, while at the same time gathering feedback. And last example, my kids all got their report cards last week, I think a lot of kids did in Calgary, and we sat through and we looked at their marks. And one of the things that I'm always really keen with my kids to understand is that their marks are not a measure of their worth. They are a moment in time and you know, in some of the marks that weren't great, I asked my kids, are you happy with this? Is this where you want to be? And do you feel in control, because the only thing I want, if you're gonna get like, the Alberta has this four-point system, if you get two’s, which means barely pass or just passing, but it's something that you are not wanting to put more time and energy into and you feel like you do have control, you could get better marks if you wanted to get tutoring or put more time in, then my goal is that you feel that you have control, and can make a choice on what types of kind of threshold you're able to achieve. And to put reality on that too. My one son just doesn't like English. And it's never going to be his best subject. But he has to pass it in order to get into the high school that he wants and university, right? So, that's part of the conversation as well as how do you acknowledge who you are, and what you're exceptional at, and not letting your weaknesses draw you back? Tim 26:51 Yeah, there's so much there again. I'll hit on a couple of them. The idea of meritocracy. Oh, my gosh. Look in pure meritocracy, sure people should– Teresa 27:02 What even is it? How do you even measure– Tim 27:04 Judge it on the merit of your work, sure. But as a roadblock we put up to change, it's so funny. And it reminds me of, I was working with a board of executives. And, you know, everybody was in large agreement that things needed to change. No one was terribly happy. But inevitably, when I'd gone in and interviewed all of those executives, and this happened several times. So, if you're one of my clients, yeah, I might be talking about you. But you're probably not the only one. There's an assumption that people see it your way, it's natural for us to assume that our view of the world is somehow the chief paradigm. And you know, I remember that we were going through this disclosure of everything that I had heard from people and what people wanted to see this team become. To their credit, they stopped the conversation and said, I don't get it. What's happening right now is really working for me. Why do we need to change anything? Teresa 28:06 That really working for me, it's the perfect, perfect descriptor, sorry. Tim 28:11 But that's 100%. I mean, it's myopic on, it's really working for me. But like any good scientific method, we need to, we need to change certain variables and test what the reaction is right? And so, you know, the reason why when it comes to diversity, and inclusion, D&I or EDI, if you talk about it that way, Equity, Diversity Inclusion, why we need to test these things is because we don't fully understand the degree to which the systems that we currently have, are resistant to change, are so ingrained, we don't even realize what we're looking at. It just looks like the woodwork. But when we look at the individual brains, it's like, look, this is really exclusionary. So, we put in, we get away from a meritocracy for a moment, and we look at be a quota systems or different ways to test it. These are just tests to see when we stress it, to look at what does it look like when we strive for 50% female inclusion on the board, or multiple orientations on the board, or racially diverse board, or all of the above as it should be representative of the society or whatever way you want to put it. And what starts to break, what starts to buck, what starts to fight us? Well, then we know we have structural conflict, and we can go after those structures. Because when we look at all of these things that we have in society today, you know, often we think, Okay, well the energy industry is broken, or the way we structure boards is broken, or the political system is broken. It's not broken. It's doing exactly what it's designed to do, which is sub-optimal, 100%. If we're not happy with it, but we have to realize that from a perspective, it's the outcome of the way it's designed. And if we want to change it, we got to change the design. But we got to get away from that. Yeah, might be working for me, but who isn't it working for? And the other thing you were saying about, I just had the same conversation with my son and my daughter. She just graduated high school, she's taking a gap year, she's thinking about what she wants to do. And she keeps saying, you know, I think I might go into biology or whatnot. And she loves biology, but she doesn't like the learning and the lab work and all these things. She loves it as a concept of curiosity. Meanwhile, she's this amazing artist, she's started her own jewelry launch, and she’s been running it for four years. And you should, I can't believe how good she's doing over in this space. Sea and Stone Jewelry on Instagram, by the way, plug, but, you know, play to your strengths, because she just has such natural creativity in this space. I don't want to hold her back from anything she wants to do, as long as she is, she feels fulfilled, as long as she's bringing everything she's capable of. And maybe this is me, being that type of, I don't know, performance-minded person. But whatever you do, whatever path you pick in life, you know, does it feel like we're really putting your best stuff into the world? And so I think it's, yeah, anyway, I agree. Grades are not the measure of the worth. It's what are you gonna do with it? I talked to a former dean of my university last week. And I mentioned to her how in my last semester of business school, I went to the dean of the business and said, I didn't want to take any of these courses. They're just useless to me. Can I write a thesis instead? And she said, Sure, but that's a little bit of a heavy lift. And I said I'll take it because it was an expression of what I wanted to do and who I was. Anyway, am I on your wavelength? Teresa 31:58 Yeah, no, when I went to university, I took engineering because it was the easiest path to a degree for me, that's what I'm good at. And so to have done, oh, God, anything in social studies would have just absolutely murdered me. So, it's interesting how it depends on what you're good at. And for the longest time, I valued things that I wasn't good at, in a disproportionate way because they were hard for me. So, my husband's a naturally gifted athlete, I'm like, Okay, I'm always going to be involved in some kind of athletics because that's important to me. And I placed the middle of the pack on mountain bike racing, which I did at the university, and stuff like that. It was important to me that I did it, but I could not win. And I inordinately valued the win on a mountain bike race, versus getting, you know, the gold medal for my year in university, which to a lot of outsiders is like you're an idiot. You're doing academically, incredibly well, why isn't that as important to you? And it's like, well, because it comes easily. And so one thing that I've really taken for my kids is, don't undervalue what you're fundamentally gifted at, but continue to hone it. Like perform at the highest level possible, within the things that you love and are good at. And don't ever think that it makes it less important, because you're good at them. Tim 33:13 Oh, man, and I think you're rounding us around to sort of a natural conclusion of where I think we saw this going. And that is, when you're in that exploratory phase when you're honing all those thoughts, when you're really sharpening all of your areas of impact, whether or not they're the ones that you're naturally gifted at, you don't rest on your laurels, you know, you still are active and inspired and going out and trying to influence things. You know, those are those opportunities to go out and lead either directly, or to create, what a friend of mine actually years ago from Shell, he brought up the term. How did he put it again? The forums for collision, right? That you're opening up these areas where people can come in, and they can bring all their best stuff together and all their passions together and see what truth emerges. Teresa 34:18 Just to build on the collision thing, and we kind of touched about, I think in a previous conversation about what are the things you do? So, I'm really active in a whole variety of places. I'm on a committee for the UFC board. I do, you know, I have a YouTube channel where I animate little videos, I put stuff out into the Globe and Mail and other forms. I'm really active in a lot of places. And I really believe that if I get too strategic on what is really important, where are the places that really need to show up? I cut out this whole area of what do I want to do? What's interesting, yeah, play and it creates intersections of people you would never otherwise meet. When I go to work events, and those who meet me at these work events can attest, it's kind of like this group of us that go around to all these different things, we see each other every time. It's not a lot of net new. And so going out and being a volunteer with Scouts Canada, joining UFC committee, like all of these things have broad net new relationships and viewpoints and super interesting tangents that I don't know where they're gonna go. And maybe it's not important that every single thing is done with perfectly forward-dimensional movement, it really matters that you create this raft and this kind of 3d shape around everything that's important to you and what you're trying to do in the world. Tim 35:43 And that 3d shape allows other people to get a foothold, and realize when they can reach out and connect with you. It is that 3d shape is the shape of your molecule that can then attract others that can then you know, thinking of like form chemical bonds, right? With others. Man, I love this. Sorry, we're playing right now. Right? Teresa 36:05 Yeah, absolutely. Tim 36:07 Okay, well, so much here, the big message here that we're trying to convey, I believe, is you embrace that play, you embrace that vulnerability, you lean into all those things, and even, maybe define or at least open yourself up. And man, you can lead or you can contribute in so many different areas. And it really enriches our time on this planet. Teresa 36:39 And maybe just building on that Tim, don't treat networking as a get-rich-quick, like there is no one relationship that's going to pull you up through to where you want to be or to get you access to what you need to build what you want to build. It's like brushing your teeth, you do it every day. And in the end, you have great teeth. And if you just treat relationships with the same kind of diligence and care and constant routine around it, I believe that it creates the molecules that then really do make a change in the world. Tim 37:10 Yeah, wow, you really are talking about farming different gardens. And those relationships are part of that, you know, nurturing them and watering them, and tending them. Man, okay. I think we're gonna have to have another conversation. I always say this with people. But I'm like, there's going to come a point where we're going to have to solidify on something else here. And it's, as I go through these podcasts, I don't only keep all the guests in mind, but it has these different as I’ve learned through these different conversations, it opens up new areas of intrigue, and then I know there's going to be a chance for us to bring this back together. And I'm already getting some little sparks. But let's leave that for the next time and for a side conversation, thinking of the future ahead. What has really, really excited in the world, what do you want people to know you're doing? What you're up to? Teresa 37:58 I mean, for me, personally, the work I'm doing with LNG Canada right now, bringing Canada's first LNG export facility to life is super exciting. So, my day job is absolutely keeping me busy and driven, and motivated. And I'm working with an incredible team. And I really do believe that opening that up is part of the energy garden, it's part of reducing global climate impacts, while at the same time enabling power to developing nations. And that kind of brain trust that's coming out of developing nations as they get increasing access to the types of things that have enabled the developed world's populations to contribute in the ways that we have, it's going to be transformational for our world in a positive way, I really do believe that. So, that's a big piece of what I'm working on, trying to get in a few more days on what's been a bit of a skinny ski season. It's another side project– Tim 38:47 A lot of rocks. Teresa 38:49 A lot of rocks out there. And then I'm also, as you probably know, I'm quite active on LinkedIn, and I have a YouTube channel that I make little videos on. And I've also done a few courses for a company called SAGA Wisdom. One is an LNG Fundamental, which is going to be coming out shortly. And another one is called Oil Patch to Energy Garden, Energy and Transition, which is a much longer course about all kinds of things including molecules, electrons, people, policies, geopolitics, all kinds of aspects of what does that transformation look like? And in a lot of those kinds of side work projects that I've been doing, it's really about how do I channel my energy into helping drive groups of people to join our cause, to help move forward, to help create that energy garden. Tim 39:38 Yeah and for those on the outside, I just want to I want to put in a plug for for LNG for those of you listening that don't understand the difference between liquid and gas, petrochemicals. It has the potential to be transitional from a technology perspective, because if you're just thinking about combustion, what is it? It's one-quarter, as pollutive as the– Teresa 39:54 Half. Half is coal. Tim 39:56 Half as cool. And so I mean, while we're figuring things out, not to mention, I mean, LNG is so critical when it comes to developing fertilizers and everything a bunch of other things. Look at what that would mean for the planet. And for anybody that hasn't that has not looked into that, understand the difference, understand the difference of why that there is a transition within the energy sphere, around what chemicals become dominant, what forms become dominant. I just want to put that plug in. Teresa 40:29 Absolutely. And just I sometimes get well, you know, you work for an LNG company, obviously, that that's what you think it's actually the other way around. I work for an LNG company because that's what I think. Tim 40:41 Yeah, yeah. Also, we'll put links to all of that in the show notes. If people want to reach out to you directly, what's the best way for them to find you? Teresa 40:48 Join me on LinkedIn, I'm pretty good about responding to messages there. But feel free to connect or follow. I am a little bit prolific on what I put out there. All again, in service of this concept of oil patch to energy garden, and how do we, how do we collectively make that happen? Tim 41:04 And as I ask my guests, if you had one wish for the people listening today, coming from all different walks of life, coming from all different industries and whatnot, what would your wish for them be? Teresa 41:16 I’m gonna go back to that first piece of advice. It's be yourself and I mean that in the way of, do the hard work to know who you are, take the time to constantly strip away all the outside influences that muddy up who we think we should be, what we think success looks like, who we're performing for our parents or our children or somebody else, take the time to constantly strip that away into reground. So, that you can truly be yourself in every aspect of your life. Tim 41:45 I think that is timeless wisdom. And I think that it's something that if people can get into that, you know, my relationship with wanting to inspire fluency of self. If you can define that for yourself, and realize why you're worthy, realize why you're worth, you know, putting love into and getting yourself out there, man, it opens doors. So, thank you so much for this, Teresa. I really appreciate it. Teresa 42:08 Thank you, Tim. Tim 42:10 All right, we're gonna do it again. Teresa 42:11 I can't wait. Tim 42:14 Talk to you later. Tim 42:20 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership, please give us a positive rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word too by sharing this with your friends, teams, and colleagues. Thanks again for listening and be sure to tune in in two weeks time for another episode of Sweet On Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 18 Dec 2024 | Retrospective Special - Part 2 - Vision | 00:15:34 | |
In this special retrospective episode, Tim Sweet takes listeners on a journey through the most profound moments shared by past guests, all centered around the transformative power of "vision" in leadership. Through inspiring clips, guests reveal how they discovered their vision, how it shaped their leadership decisions, and why having a clear vision is vital for success in both business and life. Whether you're seeking inspiration or looking to craft a roadmap for the future, this episode is a compelling guide to creating clarity and purpose. Tim Sweet delves into the importance of aligning it with one's values and experiences. He highlights insights from 11 guests, including Teresa Waddington, who bridges past and future through her vision; Ryan and Shane Pegg, who value innovation and helping others; and Debbie Potts, who found strength in a vision of a little red house in her dream country. Erin Ashbacher stresses the link between physical health and vision, while Erin Lydon draws parallels between poker and leadership. Tim ends the episode with an inspiring call to listeners to define their vision and share it boldly! -- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: -- Transcript Tim Sweet 00:00 Over 42 episodes I’ve have had the privilege of conversing with incredible guests. One thing stands out, vision is deeply personal. It’s shaped by our experiences, values and our willingness to embrace vulnerability. Vision isn’t just about what we see, but why we see it. In this episode, I’ll share insights from 11 remarkable guests who have illuminated what it means to craft, nurture and live your vision. Their stories showcase authenticity, courage, the joy of discovering brilliance and exploring unexpected places.
Tim Sweet 00:35 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you, my friend, are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. I'm Tim Sweet. Welcome to Episode 46 of the Sweet on Leadership Podcast. Today we're diving deep into the concept of vision. It's more than just setting goals or dreaming big. It's about clarity and knowing where you're headed, and the courage to take steps to get there. And authenticity ensuring that your vision aligns with who you truly are.
Tim Sweet 01:20 So let's begin. Vision begins with purpose. It's not about ambition for its own sake. It's about what truly matters to you. When I spoke with Teresa Waddington, an engineer and Vice President of Corporate Relations, in Episode 28, her story struck me. Teresa's vision bridges generations. It's shaped by her father's legacy and her aspirations for her daughter and the world she lives in. She beautifully illustrated how vision connects the past and the future. It's why I sought her out; because it's just such a compelling picture. Here she is.
Teresa Waddington 01:54 I'm on a mission to turn my dad's oil patch into my daughter's energy garden, and when I think about that future energy garden. I really do think it is a whole host of things. It's a whole host of technologies, and couplings of those technologies between kind of old and new that'll really drive us forward.
Tim Sweet 02:12 The idea of legacy can deepen and strengthen our vision. Teresa reminds us that its purpose that gives our vision its resilience. In episode 26, I spoke with Ryan and Shane Pegg. Ryan, a grade eight student and an inspiring entrepreneur, a triathlete and a wearable technology ambassador, had a keen eye for innovation and a desire to make an impact. His dad, Shane leads business incubators in their community, where he fosters creativity and collaboration. Their conversation covered the origins and purpose of how visions evolve and create value beyond ourselves. Here's Ryan.
Ryan Pegg 02:51 I feel like business is not only about the money side of things, like you're not only trying to make money, you're trying to build new things, you're trying to help people. And that really changed the way that I thought about it.
Tim Sweet 03:08 Ryan's clarity and focus stem from values that he's seen modeled and experience that he's been allowed to have. Shane shared how cultivating an others-first mentality has shaped not only his approach to business, but also his family's outlook on life.
Shane Pegg 03:25 It's encouraging, you know, you try to model a kind of an attitude of generosity and compassion thinking of others and others-first mentality. So that's kind of big part of life here. It's what about others kind of take your focus off of yourself, and so the kids are all great at doing that, and yeah, it's encouraging, and that's certainly a life lesson that we find later in life that's amazing at how money can follow when you're not focused on it, but you're focused on doing good or doing something that you really enjoy doing, and you do it really well, and the money will follow if it's meant to be.
Tim Sweet 03:57 As I reflect on this delightful conversation with the Peggs, it became clear that a really powerful vision transcends personal achievement. It is truly about creating something larger than ourselves, something meaningful and something that will leave that lasting impact. Having a vision is one thing, sharing it with others is another, and this is where clarity and confidence come into play. In episode 13, I was joined by Melanie Potro, an image consultant specializing in personal branding, she highlighted how our vision for the future is intertwined with the vision we have for ourselves in the future. This influences how we present ourselves and therefore can shape how we're perceived by others and how we can forward ourselves in life. First impressions often pave the way for new opportunities that will allow us to fulfill the vision we've got in front of us.
Melanie Potro 04:51 If you want to inspire other people and want to make sure that they feel that you're trustworthy, competent and so on, and you feel that we don't carry that across at the moment, then you need to look at your appearance, because that's the first thing they see. So that can really be the entrance ticket, the ticket to open the doors for the next step in your career, or to get a big client on board, or to make a big sale.
Tim Sweet 05:17 Melanie's insights inspired me. I hadn't considered that we can make ourselves a visual representation of where we plan to go. Our presentation reflects our confidence and our values and reinforces our undermining mission and where we're going in life. Likewise, Elayna Snyder, a creativity coach from Episode 25, took this idea further. She challenges her clients and our listeners to align their work with their unique identity and to use that alignment to push boundaries beyond what most people would think is possible.
Elayna Snyder 05:54 What we're really looking at is this main question around, how do I powerfully articulate what I do to create more of my best clients at the fees that I desire? And there's another question that comes on the back of that, too. And that question is, how do I integrate more of myself into my work? What's that next big idea? Maybe it's a new offering, a book, or even the creation of a movement.
Tim Sweet 06:19 This is an important reminder that a vision isn't static. It evolves as we grow. It gives us a new launch point to push even further. In fact, a vision usually is something we simply haven't achieved yet. The question isn't just what's my vision, but how is this a much more intense version of who I am? Obviously, vision isn't just about the immediate future, it's about the bigger picture. In episode 20, Debbie Potts, an educational economist, HR and productivity expert, shared a harrowing tale of her personal battle with illness through her struggle, my friend Debbie found an anchor, a vivid, unwavering vision of a red house in the forest that gave her strength and focus to survive and become an advocate for others. Here's Debbie. Tim Sweet 07:08 What did the Red House represent to you?
Debbie Potts 07:10 Oh my gosh. It represented freedom. It represented achievements. It represented living life on my terms, and obviously I love nature, as you do, and it just represented, you know, being able to be close to nature. And, you know, completely do a 180 turn around of my life. You know, I lived in a big city, London, full of people, full of traffic, full of everything. And I've now completely reversed that.
Tim Sweet 07:43 Debbie's story revolved around this idea of a true north giving us direction and focus in life during our most challenging moments. It's a compass that helps us define a path to those spaces in the world where we can truly thrive. Obviously, our vision is about how we care for ourselves now so that we can experience what's next. In episode 29 Erin Ashbacher, a leadership fitness coach and member of my team, spoke about the intersection between physical health and vision. She highlighted how neglecting our well being can become a barrier to fulfilling those goals in the future. In fact, it can completely derail where we think we're gonna be.
Erin Ashbacher 08:22 There's definitely been a lot of people who think that being busy is really the gold standard and making sure that we do it all, and it's hard when you're working in cardiac rehab, and you see people that have all of a sudden just been stopped in their tracks. And it made me really realize that preventative medicine, preventative wellness, is where we want to be. Some of my clients that have reached retirement, and they've had a really successful career, and now that they're retired, they're like, oh, now I'm going to take care of my health, but maybe they have an ailment that has been kind of creeping around on them, and so they just feel like they're starting at a really deep bottom, like, oh man, if I would have just started going to the gym or being a little bit more active in my 40s or my 50s, now that I'm in my 60s, I wouldn't have to deal with this big mountain, right? And it can be a bit discouraging to people when they kind of thought that their retirement was going to be one way, and their health and physical limitations are creating some a different story for them, right? So, yeah, let's take care of it today.
Tim Sweet 09:27 Those insights are both sobering and inspiring, challenging us to think if we are caving to short term comfort rather than investing in our future selves to achieve a vision, we need to be physically, mentally and emotionally prepared to enjoy the journey. This podcast is about leadership, and therefore it's about high achievers. But vision isn't about perfection. It's about showing up even when things are uncertain. In episode 24, Erin Lydon, founder of Poker Power, drew a fascinating parallel between poker and leadership. She explained how leaning in to take calculated risks, even when you don't have perfect information, even when you are out of position and maybe even at a disadvantage, is a skill that's applicable both at the poker table and in life.
Erin Lydon 10:13 So often at a poker table, nobody has a made hand, you know, and so it really is going to come down to the person who's going to play their chips most aggressively and get the other players to fold, that person's going to win the hand. That is something you have to practice, shoving your chips all in when you have imperfect information, you don't know the cards still to come, and you certainly don't know what the other players have. That's a learned skill, because it's scary.
Tim Sweet 10:40 like poker, a vision requires courage, not the absence of fear, but the willingness to act regardless of what hand you're dealt. Reflecting on these stories, I'm struck by how authenticity and trust in ourselves are intertwined with vision. In my conversation with Hanne Ballhausen, a director and diabetes advocate, I was deeply moved by her openness about putting a difficult history in its place. Hannah's honesty about her journey through a dark emotional forest showed immense courage. We can't show the whole episode here, but I would encourage you to listen to it for now. Just take this little snippet.
Hanne Ballhausen 11:20 Trust your gut feeling. It's there for a reason. Tap into your superpower that are your feelings, and just join me in to give into all of your muchness of who you are. You're beautiful.
Tim Sweet 11:36 Right before Hannah's episode, I met with Greta Ehlers, a med tech professional and diabetes technology advocate who shared how belief in your vision can inspire others. In episode 22 she highlighted how passion and conviction drive leadership forward, and there was a great moment when she realized the leadership torque that that had given her. Again, I encourage you to listen to this whole episode, but for right now, here's just a few words.
Greta Ehlers 12:04 Leadership can be finding something you really believe in and driving it forward. And if it is something you believe in and you drive it forward, then others will follow.
Tim Sweet 12:14 Hanne and Greta demonstrate how authenticity makes the vision and the person magnetic. People are drawn to sincerity and passion. It inspires them to take risks and pursue their own adventures. And on that note, in Episode 42 Renee Miller, an engineer and avid hiker who knows a little something about carving her own path, described how stepping away from societal expectations can lead you to unexpected growth. Here's Renee.
Renee Miller 12:45 You get so caught up into your daily lives and the tasks that you know, you go to work and have to get all these tasks done and come home and have responsibilities at home, but yeah, you kind of forget about yourself. And you know, what about that professional engineering license that would be really good for my career? Oh, I don't have time for that because I'm busy working and, yeah, just talking with people and reminding them to prioritize theirselves and their resumes, and it'll probably be good for their company as well.
Tim Sweet 13:21 Rene's story, which was shared with her partner, Tim, showed how this vision of adventure often emerges when we step outside our comfort zones, when we refuse to be defined, when we take risks, when we trust that life will provide and when we embrace what's over that next hill. Well, that's it. And I hope in this episode, with all the different facets we've explored around the concept of a vision, you've found some inspiration that you can use to meditate on your own. It's not about predicting the future, it's about creating it. Because life is a creative process, and our level of creativity is parallel with our willingness to dream boldly, express ourselves authentically and take courageous action. So here's my challenge to you, define a vision that resonates with your deepest values, share it boldly, let your uniqueness shine through in every detail and when needed, challenge that status quo and step courageously into the unknown. Take that first step today, write down a few words craft that future that only you can imagine. Remember, the world needs leaders. The world needs you. The world needs your vision, your passion and your unique perspective.
Tim Sweet 14:40 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership, please give us a positive rating and review on Apple podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders, and you can spread the word too by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening, and be sure to tune in in two weeks time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host. Tim Sweet encouraging you to keep on leading you. | |||
| 04 Sep 2024 | Massimo Backus - The Importance of Self-Compassion in Leadership | 00:31:56 | |
In this episode, Time Sweet and leadership coach Massimo Backus discuss the journey of leadership through the lens of self-discovery, curiosity, and self-compassion. Massimo shares his personal transformation from an objectively bad manager to a transformative leader, emphasizing the importance of curiosity and working within the natural laws of leadership. The conversation delves into the pervasive nature of self-criticism and its impact on mental health, advocating for reframing self-criticism as a protective mechanism. Trusting oneself emerges as a foundational element of leadership, often overlooked in discussions about trust. Massimo shares his journey of overcoming defensiveness and developing self-trust, touching on challenges like imposter syndrome and the struggle with self-compassion. Tim and Massimo explore the concept of authenticity, emphasizing that self-trust allows for honesty and transparency, leading to more genuine connections. The episode concludes with a call to action for leaders to practice self-compassion and kindness towards themselves, with Massimo encouraging listeners to reach out for book collaborations. About Massimo Backus Massimo Backus is on a mission to help one million people believe they are worthy and enough. Like many ambitious leaders, Massimo faced early struggles with impostor syndrome and a relentless inner critic. Dyslexia was one of the main drivers for his insecurities and later, his perfectionism. The practice of self-compassion helped him see that what was considered a disability was actually cognitive diversity. Facilitator, speaker, and executive leadership coach Massimo Backus provides no-BS one-on-one coaching with open-minded and committed senior leaders, and he runs transformative programs with organizations that are serious about change. His fifteen-plus years of experience in talent development and leadership coaching have given him a front-row seat to observe company cultures in the US, UK, and Canada, while working with 3,000+ emerging and seasoned leaders in mid-size and Fortune 500 companies, including Cisco, Accenture, Slalom, Salesforce, Nintendo, Amazon and Fox Entertainment. Resources discussed in this episode: -- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Massimo Backus | Leadership Coaching & High-Performance Team Development: -- Transcript Massimo 00:01 Leadership is about leading others in the human experience, in the human condition, and that isn't something to be solved. It's not a problem that we can find the single-threaded answer for. It doesn't exist. And so it will always be more art than science. It's a form of nature more than it is anything else. Tim 00:21 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you, my friend, are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. I'm Tim Sweet. Welcome to the Sweet on Leadership podcast episode 39.
Tim 00:50 Hey everybody, welcome. Thanks again for joining us. Today, I've got a very special guest. He is an executive coach. He handles some very deep stuff, and through his powers of self-compassion and other things that he brings to his clients, he's able to change lives. He helps people become their best selves. And I'm really looking forward to this conversation, if what we've been talking about up to this point is any indication, I think we're going to, as we said before, Mas, we're going to be playing jazz. Please welcome Massimo Backus. Massimo 01:26 Thank you so much for having me, and I am looking forward to playing some jazz. Tim 01:30 Right on. Mas, why don't you tell us a little more about yourself, let people know who they're listening to today. Massimo 01:38 Yeah, I've spent my career in leadership development and executive coaching. I think most notably, I am a reformed, objectively bad manager and bad leader. I recognize the hypocrisy in that, it is not beyond me, and at this point, I've worked with over 3000 leaders intimately and closely, one-on-one, and observed their transformation. I fundamentally made an attribution error at some point, and I mistook the transformation of my own clients for my own. And it wasn't until I received some 360 feedback, which I'm sure many people are familiar with, getting feedback from peers and from my direct reports and skip levels and people above me in the organization, that some news came to light that I was not as great of a leader as I thought that I was, and that is what led me on an unexpected path of my own development that has then informed the work that I do with the executives and leaders that I work with today. Tim 02:34 How many years have you been focused on leadership as the science, rather than, you know, having to make some other deliverable. How? How long has that been your sole focus? Massimo 02:47 Probably around 12 years that it's been, and the thing about leadership, first of all, it's a word that is used so often that it loses its meaning entirely. There have been countless books on leadership written to this day, and in 10 years, when you and I chat, there will be another countless number of books around leadership, which indicates one thing to me, is that we're trying to solve the unsolvable because leadership is about leading others in the human experience, in the human condition, and that isn't something to be solved. It's not a problem that we can find the single-threaded answer, for it doesn't exist. And so it will always be more art than science. It's a form of nature more than it is anything else. What does it mean to actually be a leader? Is something that evolves and changes and is as unique as you and I, our as our thumbprint and as our fingerprint. And so recognizing that takes all the pressure off of me to have to be the quote-unquote expert and have all the answers, because frankly, I do not, and with that, I can approach you with a great degree of curiosity. And so I'm deeply curious about leadership. I'm deeply curious about what makes for trust in relationships. I'm curious about what makes for peak performances, individuals and teams. I'm curious about what makes for a long, rich, impactful career. In that curiosity, I have found certain things that seem to be North Stars, or maybe you could kind of consider them to be, like the natural laws of physics. I think there are the natural laws of leadership, but again, they're not to be solved. We work within those conditions. We don't solve gravity. We work with gravity. Tim 04:29 That's well said. It's definitely a mix of science and art and natural order and natural selection in many ways. And I think that there's so many different components, and I share your curiosity. I mean, in my time focused on this, I think one of the, one of the greatest privileges that I have is to be able to focus on the leadership experience, to be focused on, well, what does it mean for one person versus another, and how. Having dealt with 1000s of leaders and teams and these kinds of things share the same sort of scope, the excitement, the curiosity, comes because so many different people have to find their unique leadership groove. They have to find that way that allows them to accomplish that amazing thing that they can't do alone or to shepherd or support or enrich or, you know, really encourage others to go down that path. And so many don't have the, they're too busy doing to to to really experience the joy of it, in a sense, and to find that, to find that voice and find that style that's all their own. But when they do, holy moly, when they do, it is such an amazing thing to see. And even just this past week, you know, just having a leader in their manager report come back and say everything's changed. We happen to land on that, one of those things, that in two weeks, everything's changed. So I'm with you. I'm really glad that I have a chance to hear it from your perspective, because there aren't that many. There's a lot of people that coach, well, let's just say there's some people that dedicate themselves to it in different ways. Put it that way. Anyway, take us back in to your starting point, that moment that you received some feedback. Where were your blind spots? Where was the feedback, where, you know, you thought you were doing better than you were, for you personally. What was, what was a blind spot that you faced? Massimo 06:48 Well, let me just start by the gut-wrenching experience of getting feedback in that in that way. Just, you know, I believe that feedback is a gift, and I believe that we're all better off when we get it, but that doesn't mean we have to like it. You know, eating some of our vegetables is not doesn't always taste good, but it's good for us. And the main piece of feedback Tim was that I was defensive. That I was defensive in people questioning my thinking or my ideas, my approach to things, defensive in all areas. And like any rational person, I responded with, what do you mean? I'm defensive. I'm not defensive. You are being defensive. For saying that I'm defensive. I'm not doing anything wrong, right, because I was clearly on the right side of things. What I foolishly learned is that not only was I defensive in all the places that came back in the 360, but I was defensive in all aspects of my life. And once I got curious about it and realized there's some truth to this, not just one person saying many people are saying it. I asked my wife about it, I asked my friends about it, asked other family members about it, and lo and behold, it was showing up in a lot of different areas for me. I also learned that it was one of those behaviours that ran in the family, not to place blame at all, but to go, oh, maybe this is learned behaviour, and if it was well, then I can unlearn it. I can learn a new behaviour. So that was refreshing. Made me realize this wasn't something that couldn't be fixed. This was something that I now had the opportunity to fix. I spent six months on my own thinking I am a leadership development expert. I'm seen as this guru within the organization that I worked in. I have all these skills and knowledge. I should be able to fix this on my own. And six months later, I had a follow-up meeting with my then manager, and I was hoping that the feedback would be we can tell you've worked really hard, and you've made an incredible turnaround. It's not what I heard. What I heard was we can tell you've been trying, but you've made very little progress. That was devastating. And in that moment, I was pretty sure that I was going to be asked to leave the organization. But to my manager's credit, to that organization, they didn't do that. And in fact, they invested in me and my own development, and I ended up going to a retreat called the Hoffman process, which has been around for about 40 years, started by a gentleman named Bob Hoffman. And their slogan is, if you're serious about change, and I would say, for anyone who is serious about changing the way that they view the world, experience the world, and, most importantly, experience themselves, that it's worth checking out. And it was during that week long retreat that I had an epiphany, which is the epiphany that I that I want for all leaders. It's the epiphany that I want for all people, and it's a leadership epiphany, and it is the value, the importance, dare I say, the necessity, to have a practice of self-compassion. And it was at this retreat that, for the first time in my life, I was 36 years old at the time, that I experienced for the first time, what it was like to actually love who I am, to love myself, to accept myself for my shortcomings, my triggers, my biases, my limitations, but also my strengths and my gifts and the qualities that make me me. All of it, that was a what I call a bedrock moment, that that was a moment that has anchored me every day since, and will continue to be an anchor for me. I do not always practice self-compassion. I'm not always kind to myself these days, but I always remember what is possible when I do and that is that I was able to stop being defensive, that I was able to change my way of being. Tim 10:49 I think when you acknowledge or when you let us in, that you're not always practicing self-compassion, as you know the rest of us struggle with. I mean, if it's a meditation practice, you find the ability to silence your mind. You have these moments where everything goes still, and you are really nothing. And then you start thinking about that credit card bill you need to pay, or that the cat needs the litter box changed or something, and you realize you've slipped out. And then you have to strive to get back into that state, meditative state. And you never do it well, but all you can do is you can continue to practice so you get better at it, and that's why they call it a practice, and a practice of self-compassion, realizing and being able, I find in my own personal work, it's not just the realization that we're not or the you know, that we're not terribly self-compassionate, or that we're saying something that's untrue or whatnot, but it's that ability to suddenly hear it, like you can hear the thoughts in your mind saying and it can or at least you can pause and go, well, that wasn't really kind, or that wasn't really true. And you can take a moment with it and then immerse yourself in that practice of recentering, getting back into it, acknowledging what you were thinking, acknowledging what the trigger was, acknowledging what you know, where you need to get back to and and get back into it. And it's a practice. It's building those muscles, it's it's exercising them, and it's very easy. In fact, I would say it's epidemic in our culture that people lose the ability to hear when they're being cruel to themselves between the ears, and it's the easiest thing in the world, and it's the most accepted thing in the world. I think let's understand that it's a human condition to not trust yourself, because you know what. Nobody's let yourself down more than you because nobody knew all those dreams that you had that you didn't make good on. Nobody hears the language you use about yourself and others. So nobody knows how dark you can actually go. Massimo 13:12 That self-critical, self-judgmental voice. It knows us very well because it is us, and it's hard to separate the noise of that from other parts of our psychology because it knows all of our triggers and, fundamentally, self-criticism, judgment, imposter syndrome, all of these things that ail us, that are, that are epidemic, are designed by us psychologically to protect us, to keep us safe. But there's one thing that they have wrong, and that is that as adults like they were formed when we were children, as adults, we don't need to be held safe in that way, that we are actually safer, as you said, when we do trust ourselves, we're safer when we can be kind to ourselves, we're safer when we humble ourselves to ask for help. Tim 14:05 When we deal with the exposure, when we apply the stress and the adversity. Massimo 14:07 Absolutely and accept our limitations instead of trying to hide all these things. And it's a show of strength. It's an incredibly difficult thing to do to face the most vicious and toxic voice in our lives that comes from us, to face that head-on and to not meet it with resentment or this ego death bullshit that people talk about, which I fundamentally think is wrong. It's about a relationship. Ego serves a purpose. There's value to it, but you need to have a healthy relationship with it, and, you know, to kind of make this real as an example, my defensiveness that I had for so many years was protecting me, or so I thought, by making sure that, well, I always have the last word. I need to make sure that I'm the smartest person in the room. I need to. To demonstrate my worth, but it was doing the opposite. Everyone else saw, that I was hiding my own insecurities, except for me. Tim 15:10 One of my favourite bosses, still to this day, he's one of these forever bosses. Because, I mean, I went into consulting practice very, very early, and then when I finished school, I had. A number of years as a regional manager, big, big management position, but then very quickly, went back to consulting. But then was scooped by a couple of companies, and one of them was a company I was happy to stay in and I ended up working for a commercial team to, you know, raise my financial acumen and do all the stuff, and also the best experiences I still absolutely, you know, hold this guy in great esteem. And I remember that I'd be in these, these meetings with the C-suite, or with executives, like fairly high ranking people, and if I had a point to make, I always had a quote, or I had some research, or I attributed it to some author. And he said, you know, you're making all these good points, and it's very, very valuable, but you have to then cite it. And I said, Well, I come from a historical background, so, like, everything is provable in this kind of thing. He said, I don't think that's it says, I don't think you're willing to own that. I think you want to make sure that you can share the load with some other author or whatnot. And man that stung. That was because he had me nail like he had me totally made. And was one of the most valuable things I learned under his mentorship, because it was a few months later that I had to stand up for an idea to one of the top guys, big multinational corporation and I remember I stood on my own two feet. I made my point, and the point was tough to deliver, and it hit hard, but I felt in that moment like I was in a different gear, right? And it was that, in a sense, one of the facets of self, trust and love was to stand on my own two feet and be and like, you know what you're talking about here. Just go ahead. And it was like an arrival. It was like, I belong here. I know what I'm talking about. I don't have to apologize or whatnot. And I was never the same after that. That was one of those leverage moments. Massimo 17:26 Yeah, yeah, one of those bedrock moments that you can always go back to remember what it was like when you truly trusted yourself. And you know, in the organizational context and leadership, you know, landscape, we talk about trust all the time, like leadership. How many books have been written about trust? How often in trust conversations, do we talk about the value of trusting ourselves, or do we ask, How do I know when I trust myself? How do I know when I'm not trusting myself? What do I need in order to be able to trust myself? What's present when I trust myself least? These are questions that are very rarely asked in the broader conversation about trust, it is always about another person or the team, and that's important, absolutely. But I believe, and I found, with the leaders that I've worked with throughout my career, that often when trust is not present on a team, there is trust that is not present for each individual with themselves. Tim 18:37 Oh, 100%. You cannot give away what you don't have. Massimo 18:39 Right. Tim 18:40 Absolutely impossible. So talk, talk about that a little bit actually, and you know what I'm going to I'm going to do something a little bit off the wall here. I was, saving a question. We have a question every episode, and I was going to save yours till the end, but because we are at this point in the conversation, I'm going to go ahead and and voice it. This comes from Peter Root with Wildfire Robotics, and he asked the question for the next guest, which is you, what are some of those pivotal ways that you build trust with your staff? With clients? Perhaps, you know. So I think you're landing on this now. So why don't you, why don't you flesh that out, speaking to Peter for a moment. Massimo 19:28 I love Peter's question. Tim, so thank you for sharing that and the conversation of trust. There's, there's very little that has not, that hasn't already been explored around honesty and transparency, credibility, competence, reliability. But when you think about going into a relationship where you want to build trust, the value of trusting yourself going into that relationship, if I trust myself, I feel grounded. I know my capabilities. I know the limits of my capabilities. I am going to be in a much better place, to be honest, because I am willing to show up in a way that is asking the other person to meet me where I'm at. I'm not trying to be someone that I'm not. I can say, here are the things that I'm good with, and here are the things that I'm not. Lucky for me, I have a huge cadre of other coaches and consultants that I work with clients will come to me and ask me to help them with some body of work that I might not be best suited for, and I know my shortcomings in the areas that I'm not best suited, but that's why I have this community of other talented people to bring them in. So I'm able to approach these conversations honestly and transparently and with confidence that isn't boastful. Now, Tony Robbins talks about confidence as a mindset. It's something that we can, you know, get ourselves into this mindset. And yes, maybe there's, there's some truth to that, but I think that it's actually a way of being. If I'm being honest with myself, then I'm able to be confident because I'm not trying to be something that I'm not. And where we get ourselves into trouble when it comes into relationships and building trust is we make some assumptions around who I need to be in order for this person to trust me, or if we're really, you know, going to the playground as kids, to like me, because so many people actually, they just want to be liked, they want to be included. They want to be picked for kickball, right? But if I trust myself, we could say, hey, like I'm, you can pick me on the kickball team. I'm a good kicker, but I can't catch for anything. They’re either going to pick me or not pick me, but at least I don't have to worry about being somebody that I'm not. And they might say, yeah, come on here. I'll teach you how to catch. Great. I want to be a part of the team, but I'm not trying to hide something that might be a limitation and say, you know, just hope the ball doesn't come to me because if it does, I'll be found out
Tim 22:03 That ability to distinguish when we're trying to develop ourselves and develop that confidence, develop that, I like to use the word fluency, of who we are, so we can be right with it. It's really important to differentiate that from the management of an identity, a visible thing that you want other people to see and that you want to you want other people to think, and that often covers up the guilt or the shame or the scarcity or the fear and you know, we, you often see people that are fronting so hard on something because it's the last place that they want people to actually question them or see what's under the surface, and to be able to let that go. Talk about energy management, I mean capacity. Now we, we've, you know, we're a few years past COVID, not past COVID, but anyway, we're coming out the other side in many ways, but organizationally, we have people that are still tapped. They are stretched capacity-wise, mentally, what a source of energy to not have to keep your deflector shields up, to not have to keep the holographic emitters up, to not have to keep the story going and and manage the and not to say that people do this even consciously. You know that it's not like they know they're putting on some sort of a mask, but that because the mask has been on for so long and it's there as a protection. But if you don't have to keep that up, wow, and just be confident that you're, you're, and I love… you and I both use the word enough a lot, and it's right on the top of your LinkedIn profile, but to just be at peace with the fact that it's like, you know what? This is what you've got. This is what you've got in front of you take it or leave it, and I'm super cool either way. And it's liberating. I recently, well, two plus, yeah, two years ago now, almost coming up on my two-year anniversary, actually had both knees replaced after lots of sports. It was a big surgery, a big pivotal moment in my life, because I've got 19-year-old knees, and not to take the speaking conch chair for too long, but I was following, or I follow this, this coach. She's in a spiritual sort of sector, but she made this point, and she talked about the meditative practice or the realization that, you know, that spark that is our consciousness, isn't it just uses the brain as an organ, and it uses the body as a mechanism, and to almost visualize yourself. I always think of of that scene in Men in Black, where they're eating pierogies, and the face comes open, and it's that little alien. But to realize that you're wearing this meat suit, right, and that you're, this is the way we get around the world is in this meat suit, but it's not you, per se, like it is, but it's not your consciousness. And when I started to think about that on the physical side and said, Well, hey, this is just my meat suit. My meat suit has two artificial needs. My meat suit requires certain things. It's built in a certain way. That means I'm capable of some things and not capable of others. Wow. What a liberating thought, and what an ability to kind of love my meat suit, because I'm not going to get another one anytime soon, and I can sit back and say. Hey, this, takes stock. This is what I like about it. This is what I find challenging about it. But I can love the whole mess and just realize it like it's a, you know, I think people often have more love for their cars than they've got for their body. And that's pretty funny, you know. And so I know that, that we're not talking physicality here, but again, it's that, that ability to say, You know what, even if I'm carrying some family baggage part of my operating system, I can still love that part of myself as I seek to to work with it. Massimo 26:15 Absolutely. I mean, Tim, what you just shared is, this example is a beautiful example of what a practice of self-compassion looks like, and it balances the acceptance of what it is that we have with the compassion to take care of what it is that we have, right? So, this isn't a passive practice, this isn't something that is just accept my limitations and don't do anything with them. It's accept them and then, from there, choose what will I do with them? What am I going to let go of and accept and what are the things that I'm going to double down on and continue to improve and change? So it's a very, it's very proactive. This is a very energetic practice, and the energy that we need to do it comes from letting go of that mask or the hologram or all the different ways that you describe structure, which is so true. It the single biggest waste of energy in organizations today is people masking, hiding, parading, politicking, doing all these things to hide who they really are for fear that if someone saw them they would be rejected. And the reality is, the person that they really are is better on all accounts than the person that we pretend to be. We just have to trust ourselves enough to show that to people.
Tim 27:41 I think it's also really interesting when you're comfortable to lead with who you are, warts and all, and you're rejected, you're getting real feedback. If your mask is rejected, if the image you're putting forward is rejected, you're one step removed. You can actually be kind of deadened to the, to the reality that rejection doesn't really mean that much, no, nor does the praise, you know, or the positive feedback, because we're letting the marionette go first. We're like, you know, one of these guys with the Jim Hensen and it's a puppet. Yes. The puppet can take a lot of abuse. The ventriloquist. Yeah. Tim 28:30 Well, you know what? There's so much farther to go. And I just want to really thank you for taking the time, because we've gone deep in the in the time that we've got. So I want to do two things here. Well, maybe three. First of all, I want you to tell everybody what you're most excited about, because you've got some big news. So, and I know you didn't want to really be the guy to come on and talk about it, but man, you gotta because I know I'm inspired to pick a certain something up. So, quick. Let's tell the people. Massimo 28:58 Thank you. It is very exciting. My first book, “Human First, Leader, Second: How self-compassion outperforms self-criticism”, is coming out in September, September 10, and people can find it on Amazon right now. And for anyone listening whose interest is piqued around, what is this self-compassion practice? And how do I start? This book is written for leaders and teams to start to develop that practice. And it's not a one-size-fits-all all. It's a choose your own adventure, and it will lead towards a place where that energy isn't being wasted and trying to be somebody you're not, but being your best self as a leader. Tim 29:40 If you had one, well, if you had one wish for anybody listening today, what would it be?
Massimo 29:43 Go do something kind for yourself. Tim 29:45 It doesn't have to be big. It doesn't have to be profound. Go do something kind for yourself. Massimo 29:51 Go do something kind for yourself. Take a five minute break in between meetings and get some fresh air. Go stand in the sunshine. Drink a nice cold glass of water. Call an old friend. Doesn't matter what it is, you're worthy of it. You're worth it. And Tim, I know there's a question that I should be asking for the next guest, correct? Tim 30:09 Yeah, what's, what's, what do you have on your mind?
Massimo 30:12 What is the one thing that you are most afraid to let go of? And who would you be if you did?
Tim 30:19 If people want to get in touch with your mouth. Where can they find you? Massimo 30:22 Massimobackus.com, I'm on LinkedIn. I'm pretty sure I'm the only Massimo Backus out there. And please reach out. And if you buy the book and read it, I want to hear what you think. This is something that I felt called to do. I had an epiphany. I want to share it with other people, and I take no ownership of the idea of self-compassion. I think I've been called to be a messenger, one of many, I hope to share the value of it. I don't see how the world could not be a better place if we all learn to be a little bit kinder to ourselves. Tim 30:54 Love it. Okay. Mas, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. It was a real pleasure. Massimo 31:02 Thank you, Tim. Talk to you soon. Tim 31:06 We'll be in touch when it comes to your launch party.
Tim 31:11 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If, like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership, please give us a positive rating and review on Apple podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders, and you can spread the word too by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening, and be sure to tune in in two weeks time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 24 Jan 2024 | Elayna Snyder - Illuminating Your Innate Creativity | 00:48:31 | |
In this dynamic episode, Tim Sweet and Elayna Snyder discuss the transformative impact of understanding one's unique perspective in marketing and leadership. Elayna challenges common misconceptions, asserting that the essence of a personal brand lies in understanding one's perspective and creativity. Tim engages her in a thought-provoking conversation that unravels the intricacies of marketing, emphasizing the need to slow down to speed up. Elayna shares her remarkable journey, transitioning from teaching in Japan to becoming a personal brand coach, illustrating the transformative power of articulating one's perspective. The episode delves into the concept of "guardrails," exploring their role in authentic connection and effective translation of one's heart across diverse cultural contexts. Tim and Elayna navigate the continual process of calibration, highlighting the importance of validating others' experiences and utilizing insight timelines for personal and professional growth. Elayna's upcoming project, a creativity tracker, is introduced, accompanied by an invitation for listeners to ponder the liberating question, "What if it were easy?" as a catalyst for overcoming obstacles and nurturing creativity. About Elayna Snyder Elayna Snyder, your atypical personal branding coach, is on a mission to redefine how we approach brand creation. Having lived in four diverse countries, Elayna thrives on translating her curious heart and creativity across cultures. Beyond traditional personal branding, she guides individuals to authentically communicate and lead by understanding and leveraging their unique perspectives. A seasoned coach and consultant, Elayna engages in thought-provoking discussions on LinkedIn and shares invaluable insights through her newsletter: thereframenewsletter.com. Passionate about transforming conventional ideas, she's unveiling an exciting project—a creativity tracker that fosters self-awareness and taps into innate creativity. Resources discussed in this episode:
-- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Elayna Snyder
-- Transcript: Elayna 00:01 When we're talking about creating opportunities for ourselves specifically in the marketing space, that truly is a translation. Let's look at LinkedIn for a second, the way that you show up there cannot be the same as the way that you show up in your delivery with clients. And I find that so many people, they're thinking that it's a direct translation, well, I do this with my clients, this must be what people want to hear, or they just have no conception of how we're going to build in those guardrails to create a really powerful translation so that people who don't know them yet know to lean into them.
Tim 00:42 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you my friend are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. Welcome to the 25th episode of the Sweet on Leadership Podcast.
Tim 01:13 Welcome back, everybody. My name is Tim Sweet. And you are here with us on the Sweet on Leadership Podcast. Today I am joined by a very special new friend, this is Elayna Snyder. Elayna, you are teaching me all sorts of new things about how to approach myself, and how I represent myself to clients. In the short time since you and I were connected, you've got me thinking in totally different ways about how I need to be presenting who I am in the world. And I have to say, it's helping me feel a lot freer about things. But enough about me. Tell the people who you are. And let's get into this because it's an exciting topic. Elayna 01:55 Yeah, Tim, thanks so much. And thank you for showing up to play with me in that way. Because not all of us are for everyone. So, I'm glad that we've had this immediate connection already. And hello to your audience. I'm very happy to be here. In terms of who I am and what I do. I work with top coaches and consultants. And what we're really looking at is this main question around, how do I powerfully articulate what I do to create more of my best clients at the fees that I desire? And there's another question that comes on the back of that, too. And that question is, how do I integrate more of myself into my work? What's that next big idea? Maybe it's a new offering, a book, or even the creation of a movement. So, I want to just preface this just a tiny bit more for us. Before we dive in, Tim because we've already been having so much fun. In both of these questions, what we're really looking at is the idea of truly owning our perspective, and unlocking our creativity, because it's on the other side of that, that those yet to be imagined opportunities exist. And truly, that's what I believe we're really after.
Tim 03:07 And I'm really excited for the people that are listening today, not only because this has application when it comes to, you know, marketing a business and the rest of it. But for those that are listening, that are employed, or are in leadership positions, which is a huge part of my audience, this has legs. This idea of being able to articulate who you are and really the essence of that for yourself and others, allows you to lead in really authentic, really powerful ways. And in my experience, that fluency really helps us unlock a pathway to connect with other people and to do really interesting and profound things that matter to us. And through that excitement, are that much higher quality for others. So, I think if you are not solely in the marketing interest or running a business, there's still going to be something here for you. So, hang on, because Elayna has got a lot of good stuff to share. Well, Elayna, perhaps as a way for us to kick off, we were talking earlier around what it means to have a sense of who you are, and we hear a lot of terms kicked around around this. We hear the term, you know, is it your character? Is it a persona? Is it how you have to show it professionally? Is it your personal brand? Can you give us some thoughts about what those terms mean to you? What are the terms that are being used out there? And what do we need to know? Elayna 04:38 Yeah, and let's start with that last one that you said, the personal brand because most people are going to call me a personal brand coach, and they come to me to help them build their personal brand and the first thing that I always tell them to do is we're going to throw the idea of personal brand out the door. There are huge misconceptions around what that is. And they end up getting in the way from the actual discovery that we need to explore and really harness who we are. So, the way that I describe personal brands, because I am going to contextualize this in that, that we've got a little bit of a foot in the marketing space. But as we continue our conversation, I think that we're going to see how that dissipates pretty quickly. But when I'm thinking about personal brand, what I'm really thinking about is the way that you see the world. And this is your perspective. And there's this other thing that comes in too, because it's not just the way that you see the world. It's also the way that you express the way you see the world, which I call your creativity. And this is so unique to you, when we really get down into it, that when we lean into those definitions, and when we explore from that side of things, what we discover is truly yet to be imagined just about ourselves, but then that leads to these opportunities that we're looking to harness and yet we don't have the language around what they really are.
Tim 06:17 So, if we have that expression of the way we see the world, and how we express it to others, how do you capture that? What would a term that you would use if not personal brand? Elayna 06:27 That's a good question. I use personal brand, because it's a catch-all. And we can definitely talk more about that because that is very marketing. I've thought a lot about this for myself. But when I'm sitting on the couch, drinking my coffee and thinking about it, I'm thinking about it strictly as creativity. It's your perspective, and it's your creativity. What does that mean? How do I deepen more into it for myself? How am I supporting my clients to do that? How are we doing that in our communities? Tim 06:58 Awesome. When we think about that expression of creativity, and how people experience us, that's really core to some things that I teach around leadership. I do use the term brand and I think we can't get away from that. But for the duration of this podcast, everyone who's listening, please, when we consider this, if we say the word brand, let's keep in mind that we're using it in this evolved sense that it's not simply a tell them who we are set of words, colours, imagery, whatever, we're not trying to manipulate anybody, it's about that genuine article, if they're going to experience our brand, it's going to be tied into how we see the world and how we genuinely express that. So, if we fall into that, that's where we'll continue from. But what's really interesting about that, to me is that if people don't have a handle on this, if they don't understand how they see the world, or at least they haven't articulated for themselves, or they try to be something else, because they're supposed to be, they should all over themselves. Right? If you're not intentional about it, it's going to come out anyway. You can tell people one thing, but through your actions, and through your comments, and through how they experience you, your brand or your viewpoint on the world and how you process things, it's kind of come out. So, the question is, do we want to embrace that? Or do we want to say one thing and do another? And when we miss that, I mean, we can cause all sorts of problems for ourselves. Elayna 08:35 Very much so. I think the other side of that, too, is that when we're looking to create something and when we're learning something new, we tend to think that the answer lies outside of ourselves. How do I do that? Where can I learn how to do that better? And this hidden assumption often comes with that. I have this all the time, I check myself with it daily, minute by minute sometimes. And that assumption is that we're adapting something new, what we have is not good enough, or it needs to be changed, or it needs to be filtered in a different way. And the first thing that I am always doing with my clients, and what I am a little bit obsessed about is creating experiences, even in conversations like this, for us to think about that in a different way and to harness the awareness around that piece of it because it gets in the way. It doesn't allow us to see what's already there because it's not just that it's getting out right like it's not just about your brand getting out. It's that it truly is already there. What happens when we look at it and put some intentionality around it and harness it?
9:55 And get other things out of the way. It’s funny because, in a conference last year, I was speaking about the trouble we get into when, this was for startups, and a lot of them are coming from science and technology. And so if you're coming from a STEM background, you tend to think in an additive way we're taught in school, that when we go through learning, or we go through an experimentation, it's about step by step, one thing, complete it, then go to the next step, add another thing, add another thing, and everything is additive. And when we want to bring value, or we have that feeling that we're not enough, it's always well, what do I need to add? What do I need go and get? Because of that, because we're always missing something, there is this subtle scarcity, this, this deficiency that creeps up, where we're always like, what's the next thing I need? If I can just get that I'll finally be good enough. And then you get there. And it's like, well, wait a minute. Now I'm missing this. And I gotta go get that. Rather than taking a reductive approach and saying, What can I give away? What can I end my relationship with, so that everything else can kind of shine through? Coaching the other day, I said to somebody, maybe we don't need to set any more sales on your boat, maybe we just need to cut a few of these anchors loose. Right? So, tell me a little bit more about that feeling about being enough, and how that gets into people's way. Elayna 11:21 Gosh, there's so many different ways that we can explore this. And it's funny, I think I'm tripping up a little bit in the idea of it being around being enough. I'm taking a beat here to really let that sink in. I think that sometimes the excitement around it can mean that we're looking for that idea so hard, that we're looking for those ads, we're looking for the next and we don't actually stop long enough to even have the question of, Is this enough? Or am I enough? And yet I love that you've brought that up. Because it's a few layers down, it's just the access to it. We have to be able to slow down enough in order to have that. Tim 12:16 To sort of take stock. Take stock and say what do I have working for me? Before I go out and gather more? Elayna 12:21 Yes. Well, definitely, that is exactly it. Because really what we're talking about, when I'm talking about owning your perspective and unlocking your creativity, what I'm really saying is what's already working for you? That thing that you want to create, that thing, that next big idea that you know, you need to add something or change this or, and you're looking for that coach who might help you or you've just been journaling on it, and you're in that motion, you're in the action. That's all really good. But if we don't have that moment where we can really sit with the process, and slow ourselves down enough to realize that this frustration, this wandering, this need to do more, is part of the process of building into that idea. And so it's that paradigm of slowing down to speed up, which I love how you've talked about what anchors do we need to cut because oftentimes those anchors are more things that we're just doing. So, we're going, we're going, we're going. Slowing down to speed up is a huge piece of how this can all really begin to click in place in a way that we can feel it. Tim 13:44 My friend Richard Young always talks about athletes and athletes, when they hit a certain age of 16, 17-18, they begin to question. It's a natural evolved response, they start to reject authority. So, they begin to question and reject the advice of coaches and teachers and parents, right? And then they start to look for those extrinsic things that they need to adopt. And this can be the superstitions, this can be the latest vitamin, this can be the training regime that they need to be on because everybody's doing it. And they begin to add these things on. And so much of what Richard proposes for these teams is get back to a state of what really determines whether or not you are able to express yourself through the sport. And what are the essential parts of that and are you doing those rather than all this getting distracted with all these other things? And so I think naturally as human beings were hunter-gatherers, we go we find that thing and then we store it away. We have to bank all of these supplies, in case we need them. We're loading for bear constantly because you never know when. And that idea of enough is probably too simplistic. It's sometimes you have to go learn something, right? I guess what I'm visualizing there is that we're getting in our own way sometimes. As you say, we need to take time to process to experience that. And calibrate, maybe? Elayna 15:26 Definitely, what you're getting into there with the word calibrate is the fact that this is all a continuum. This is all a process and there are different stages of that process in terms of where we're at with understanding our perspective, owning our perspective, expressing that to the world, and creating those opportunities for ourselves. It's never linear. It's one of the most confusing parts about marketing because marketing is all about people. It's all about connection. And what do we know about people and connection? Well, it's messy, it's changing, it's shifting. Our energy is changing and shifting in the way that we're showing up with each other right now. And it could have been different, or it was different 10 minutes ago versus 20 minutes ago. And so how do we harness all of those nuances? And yet, not get caught up in those supposed complexities of that, right, because that we could feel that everything that I'm saying is so complex? Well, what do I do? Is it even worth it? Or, we could slow down to take a minute and realize, well, yeah, I do know I'll to be true.
Tim 16:43 So, let's turn this lens on you for a bit, because I think this is a great time for us to learn a little bit more about how you found yourself here. When I hear you speaking, I would assume it's very important to you that people find that sense of self that allows them to fully express their value, or really feel like they're fulfilling their purpose or those kinds of things. So, that seems like it's a driving factor for you. Would that be accurate? Elayna 17:09 Yeah, and I really came to that through feeling like I should be adopting something else to make this business thing work, because I don't come from a business background. Tim 17:21 Tell us a little bit about that. Why don't you take us up to now, give us a bit about your history? Elayna 17:25 I have a track record of doing things that are completely unknown to me. I do not come from a marketing background, I don't come from a business background, I come from a background of teaching English primarily in Japan. So, when I got started with marketing, I was following a system, then changing systems, what I was doing was actually really working, I ran a really successful program all about being authentic on LinkedIn and getting clients. But what I started to realize is that it was attracting a certain kind of people. And it was keeping me and those people in a box. And the reason that it was doing that is because I had a very specific guarantee on my services. It was, you know, work with me and we'll get your next one to three high-paying clients, or I'll work with you for free until we do. Great for sales. But what that ended up meaning is that if they didn't follow these exact steps, they weren't going to get what was promised. And the other thing that I was realizing is that most business owners don't actually know what they do, or who they do it for. And I was also realizing that as a business owner, which I completely fell into, I didn't know what I did or who I did it for. And so I went on this incredible journey of trying to figure that out. And a huge piece of that, that I couldn't name at the time was understanding how my perspective and where I came from with my teaching background and I've lived abroad for the majority of my adult life as well, how that experience perfectly positions me to help tap leaders, coaches, consultants, translate themselves to create new opportunities. So, this looks like marketing, personal branding. But I really want to step out beyond that, because so many of my clients discover things that they didn't know to want in the beginning. Including, I had one client who got so clear on who she wanted to work with. She fired a few clients, had some space, started a new business, and I helped her build the brand of that business. She could have never imagined that when we began together. So, the most important piece of my story for me, which is also the most important part of my story for my best clients as well. It's usually what gets them leaning in. That's the trick, right? Not the trick, the truth rather.
Tim 20:06 That's the key. Elayna 20:07 That's the key. I love that. Yes, that's the key. And the key really is, is that for me, because I have spent the majority of my life outside the States, I have always been looking for ways to translate my heart into whatever culture, context or language I was connecting through. And that is a skill that I didn't know that I was building at the time when I went to Japan. I didn't speak the language, I knew nothing of the culture. And I had no idea that I would need it in the way that I did. I lived so rurally, that if I didn't speak the language, I would not have any friends, or just not have any life, right? And so when we're talking about creating opportunity for ourselves, specifically in the marketing space, that truly is a translation. Let's look at LinkedIn for a second, the way that you show up there cannot be the same as the way that you show up in your delivery with clients. And I find that so many people, they're thinking that it's a direct translation, well, I do this with my clients, this must be what people want to hear, or they just have no conception of how we're going to build in those guardrails to create a really powerful translation, so that people who don't know them yet, know to lean into them, know to lean into their perspective and the unique gifts that they have to bring to the world. Tim 21:40 Think that idea of guardrails is really interesting. So, what I'm taking from this more than anything, and perhaps the most profound statement that you've made to me, is this idea of being able to translate your heart into other cultures and languages, into other situations. Right? So, that people can appreciate it from their perspective. I love that statement that says, we start where they are, we don't start where we are, right? If we're going to present ourselves to others in order to make a connection that's really clear and help them see us or experience us in the way that we want to be experienced. So, that there's not a lot of noise. We have to be conscious of where they are and how we speak in that moment, or how we act in that moment, or how we convey in that moment. And those guardrails, that idea of having guardrails really takes me back to the statement that said, you know, the human brain is only able to process so much information at once. And when we see people walking down the street, and we're with friends, we can't process everything, the feelings of everyone that's around us, or what's happening. We can focus on our friends as ourselves as the main character, and that's our supporting cast. But everybody else has to remain as background, they’re NPCs, as my kids say. They’re kind of background imagery and noise. We understand they’re people, but they're just figures moving. And in the same way, that guardrail helps people give people something that they can digest that they can get their hands around, that they can conceptualize in sort of a semi-pure form, without being distracted about all these other things that they might have to consider. So, we're helping guide thought, am I on track there with what you're thinking? Elayna 23:34 Definitely, definitely. And I find that so many of us, we have this thing that we want to talk about. And that's really good. I would say that when we start to speak, we do want to meet the person where they're at, right? So much of that fuel, though, comes from within us. So, to be able to kind of dance with the within and the connection that we're trying to create at the same time, is so important. And this is one of those weird things that language does is because I know that you agree with that. And sometimes when we try to communicate these ideas, we have to choose almost which one is more important. What I find with myself and my clients ask me this a lot too, is that I have this thing that I want to talk about. I love talking about creativity. But my best clients aren't sitting there thinking about creativity. So, if I want them to listen, I've got to validate their experience right now. And we can talk about that as being pain. You and I were talking about this earlier, right? Like there's a quality of it that yes, it can be pain, but a lot of us don't sit there thinking that we're in pain even when we need help. I don't think that way. So, we're really looking to reach into that experience of these other people, our best people and then look at what's really under that because what's really under that, for me, is almost always creativity. I can take any conversation and show you where the creativity is. So, what is that for you? Right? This is kind of a fun thought experiment for your listeners. For you, Tim. It's like, what is that thing that you can always refer back to? That thing that you want to be known for that thing that you talk about all the time that fuels you, throughout your day? Tim 25:25 That question you want to raise in the minds of others that that impression, you want to leave them with that feeling? All of that. That is exciting. And it's funny, when you talk about creativity, my mind always strays back to the idea of flow. And that in a positive direction, when we have a state of flow, we have this creative anxiety that's balanced properly, with a sense of control and a sense of, you know, we’re creative, but we also feel secure, we feel safe enough, right? So, that we're not straying over into fear, and being unnerved. And when we think about trying to control, especially an abstract or an inauthentic message to someone, it just sucks the creativity right out of the experience and slows us right down. And not only that but why are we doing that? We're doing that because we fear not being enough as we went back to. So, we have to be this something else, this thing we're supposed to be. But if we also keep sort of on the flow analogy, doing too much of that control, especially when there's no payoff and no juice in it for us, leads us to boredom and apathy. And one way that I've seen people burn out on their careers, and absolutely cave, when it comes to having to be a solopreneur or a founder and starting something is by chasing somebody else's dream or chasing that thing of what you're supposed to be in, it doesn't feel natural. And after a while, you get kind of bored of it. It sucks the life force out of you. And you're just left feeling unrestored, there's no payoff. Right? And so, when you help people connect, and clarify, what is their source of creativity, even if that's not how, they're saying, you're helping them tap into a fuel tank, you're helping them find their juice in the world, right? So, you've expressed a little bit about how this has led to your own enlightenment or your own your own drive. Could you walk us through a hypothetical or, you know, a name-free case study of what this transformation might look like in practice, how a person may come to you? And what kind of conversations are had so that you can illustrate for us what does this transformation experience actually look like?
Elayna 27:58 I mean, like any, it looks very different for many people. One of my more recent clients came to me, he'd been in business for four years and wasn't making sales. And he knew that there was something that he needed to address. And he just didn't really know what. And so by tapping into his perspective, and looking at what he did through that, it gave him an entirely different way of seeing the need for it, positioning the need for it, and having the clarity and confidence to have those sales conversations. And within six weeks of working with each other, he lined up all different kinds of conversations and got a new client from that. That's a very kind of quick overview. What I'd like to do is actually invite people into some of this practice for themselves right now. Tim 28:56 You can use me as a guinea pig if you want. Elayna 28:57 Yeah, okay. So, really, when we're starting with looking at your perspective, the most paradoxical thing about this is that your perspective is so close to you, how do you see it? It's not something that you can just look at. And so what I do with my clients is help them tap into ways that they can experience their own perspective. This is something that we're really not taught to think about. And so I invite all of us right now, wherever you're at, to look around you. And this is kind of funny, but like, literally, you are the only person in the entire universe who is seeing what you're seeing, even if you're sitting with someone right next to you.
Tim 29:49 This is just my paradigm and nobody else holds this. Elayna 29:52 Yes. And the other piece of that is that we often think about our perspective and talk about our perspective as just being one of many, right? And that we need to be aware of that, we need to be careful of that. And I'm not discrediting that. But that's not where I'm coming from. Where I'm coming from is that your experience, how you've lived your life, all of that is sitting with you right here at this moment, and guiding you to pick up certain things in your surroundings, and that will naturally be different. So, it's not just about the fact that I'm sitting in my sister's living room, I'm in the States right now. But it's what I choose to actually see here. And it's that, that when we're talking about coaches and consultants, it's that, that your best clients want and they need when we're talking about leaders. The people who need you to lead them, they want your perspective, you will help them see there's in a different way. There's fireworks that happens there. That's where new insight comes from and that's really what's going to help us tap into creativity and innovation.
Tim 31:09 When you see teams trying to collaborate, and I've got clients in the throes of this right now that I'm helping on team and departmental levels, organizational levels, is when they misconstrue what a person's motive is either from the service side or from the beneficiary side. It immediately causes consternation, it immediately causes friction and the inability for them to digest each other's values. And to serve properly. They're operating from this space of assuming that the other person thinks the way that they think that they see the world through their eyes, and that they understand what they understand. And just that realization that only we can see the world through this space and time. The implication is, the other person has just a unique of view. And so tell me a little bit about how we bridge that or what's the next step. Elayna 32:08 The next step for me and my clients is actually not to look at the other person yet. It's to look deeper into ourselves because now we've seen that we have this unique perspective just because we're looking around ourselves. But how do we actually have that what has happened? What has catalyzed us into this perspective that we have? And so what I do with my clients is we're looking at what I call their insight timeline. It's not the experience that matters, it's the insight that comes from that experience. So, we're looking at what have been those major insights across your life that positions you here today. And how do you understand that better in preparation for the next step, because the next step is to leave yourself at the door, and to look at who you're here to serve as a leader, as a coach. And now we're looking at what I call perspective matching. Where are those ways in which you really connect into the people that you lead? The clients that you serve? What does that mean? What does it mean to connect with them, validate their experience and help them see what they need to see in order to achieve what they're looking to achieve? Tim 33:38 I like that, and those insights, I mean, the vernacular that I've always used is, we all go through this life, and we amassed different understandings. So, there's pivotal moments, there's pivotal learnings, there's things that shape us. And we add them to ourselves as a construct. I often use the term you know, this is where we take on new beliefs, and we craft our identity around them. And I like the other term that you use, you said catalyze, but that categorization or that crystallization, or that construction now that this belief or this thing that we feel this identity, we hold this insight that we've taken on it forms us, it becomes part of our understanding of the world, it becomes how we explain things and how we are biased towards one thing or another. So, to back up, the first thing is the basic realization that you are unique. You are the only person that is seeing things through your eye. The next thing is to fully digest that or at least do some work to get fluent on what those things are and bring those into the conscious brain. Only then are you even remotely prepared to go out and say, okay, now I can appreciate or begin to appreciate what the other person is. Am I following? Elayna 35:02 Yeah. I mean, of course, this is nonlinear too, right? We need language to give us enough structure to be able to communicate it together here. But there's always going to be that feedback loop between understanding who you are because you're helping me understand how I'm being received right now. And vice versa for the people that you serve. How do these things all fit together? And how do they– Tim 35:28 –it's not three stepping stones, it's a million different steps where every step brings us a new realization that opens up something else, if we choose to take that opportunity, that then gets us to another position, another paradigm where we can then take on the next piece of information. And it's really organic or nonlinear like that. That you can't just say, Okay, we're going to define all this. And oh, boy, howdy, do certain tools, try to promise you that you can, right? That you can just run I mean, I run, there's a couple of different inventories that I will use around performance and work style and how people find their genius. They're pretty humble in the sense that they don't attempt to explain everything. And do people ever want to have a shortcut towards this stuff? I don't know if it's because it's work or it's scary, or it's almost unnerving to realize that you are as unique as you are because that comes with the with the caveat that all that also means you're terribly alone in some ways. Elayna 36:31 Yeah. I mean, we think that we're afraid of the darkness, when truly we're afraid of the light, and there is so much light in each of us to truly bring that to the world is the scariest thing that I think we can ever do. It's definitely the scariest thing that I've done. And it's not something that you finish. That's another piece that I feel like our conversation is going towards is this idea that there are tools to help you do X, Y, Z. Great. And yes, some of those can be really helpful. But this is not about getting to this space where we have everything that we need and we just can sit back and relax and watch everything happen in front of us. I'm sure there are people who want to believe that that's true and those are the kinds of people that I don't work well with. Part of what I love about this kind of work is that once you've done it once, you have a different way of interacting with it for the rest of your life. Tim 37:34 When you take on that responsibility, when you don't absolve yourself from that knowledge, then you've come up face to face with the awesome realization that you've got a lot of choice. And that choice then means that there's only so much runway for staying ignorant. And as you were talking here, I was racking my brain trying to find one of my favourite quotes. And we've talked a little bit about all the lists or the records we keep, I have a massive favourite quotes file that I maintain. Because I just don't want to let these things go when I want a man that's pivotal. And I'm always sort of scanning over it if I need inspiration, but one of them was from Marianne Williamson. And she said, Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. And I think it's such a fear because then we have the acknowledgement that we may not be utilizing our brief time on this planet. Well, that's quite an inspiring and terrifying condition for some people. But for those of us, for those searchers, and those people that are looking for you and looking for me, I mean, we do have one thing going for us and that is they are people that are driven to be more or to find clarity or to fully actualize like they are. They're heading in that direction. Searchers is what I like to call them, right, because it's and, you know, being careful not to say that you're always deficient until you're complete. People are complete right now, today. And what can we do with that? So if you were to leave people with one thought, anybody who's listening, they're into a marketing effort or they're into a sort of self-discovery effort. What would be the key takeaway that you would want people to take, from this introduction to the way you're thinking? Which I think is absolutely fantastic, and I can't wait till we can connect because I have some questions. I provide guidance and answers, but I never want it to be thought that great coaches don't have great coaches. Great coaches need, you know, a support system. And as many of the people know, I mean, a lot of the people that are a part of my company, I hold them as counsel. Right? They are qualified in areas that I am not. And they are able to help me see the forest through the trees, you know because you can't see that when you're on a limb of a specific tree, and you are trying to appreciate everything that we are, right? It's just not our business. But what would be the thought you would leave people with? Or the hope, or the wish you would have for them? Elayna 40:35 What I would encourage all of us to do, and I'm going to include myself in this because I'm in a constant evolution with my own business, is get that thing that you want, in your mind, like feel that for a second and feel like the should I do this? Or should I do that? What's that next thing? Because we can feel like that kind of shaking energy. If you can see me, I'm kind of shaking right now. Because we, we know that it's there. Right? And that's the key. It's there. So, feel that and really look at what's already happening here. And how do I work with that? Actually, let me rephrase. It's not how do I work with that? It's how am I already working with that? Tim 41:27 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's funny when you said that I just had a thought crystallize in my mind. And that was so often I think we are mistaking a feeling that feeling of anxiety as something that is absent because we mistake that for something that's a gap, versus something that is not fully tapped into yet something is going unused. You know, that statement when you're a kid, and you're given some money, and they say it's burning a hole through your pocket, you can't wait to spend this energy on the planet to get something done. Okay, that's a pretty negative analogy in the sense that we're not supposed to spend money, willy-nilly. But when we think about we have potential that's burning a hole in our humanity wallet. And yet we mistake that for a feeling of uneasiness that could be easily misconstrued internally, as I'm not enough right now. Or I'm not I'm missing something. But what we're missing is that expression, that ability to emote or create with that thing, that's that unused tube of paint, it's that palette knife, we need to grab and I'm vibrating with you. I'm like, Oh my gosh, I got I've got something in the basement here. I gotta go. And I've got to get it out. And sometimes it's just, I love the the work of Julia Cameron, right, she talks about unlocking/unblocking writer's block, right? And people who've been part of my morning pages group that's called The Morning Stoke, we go and we do a writing exercise where we journal down all these random thoughts, just so we can get them out of our brain, we spend 12 minutes there. And that for people is often enough to just get those monkeys back in their cage. You know, spiritual windshield wipers is what Tim Ferriss calls it, we just get we get through all that. So, we can go and we can be. So, this is super exciting. What is the most exciting thing you've got on the go right now? What if we're looking at you, albeit through our paradigms, but if we're looking down from space at Elayna, what are we gonna see her doing right now? What's got you excited? Elayna 43:46 Yeah, I'm really excited about continuing to reframe all these traditional ways that we look at marketing and business. So, one of the things that I'm working on right now is a way of actually noticing what's already happening, and figuring out how we're already working with that. And that might sound really vague. But there's a few different pieces of it. One is it's kind of an anti-productivity hack of sorts, like we're not, we're not talking about productivity and time management, because those kinds of things just create more space for us to do more. I'm in the process of developing a different kind of tracker, a creativity tracker, although it's not necessarily about tracking creativity. It's a creative way to track and build awareness around what's already happening for you, and how to work with that. So, that's a new offer that will be coming in the new year that I'm extremely excited about. The other thing that I want to leave us with is this question of, what if it were easy? And I'm saying this right now because this idea that I've had, I've been mulling over for like, literally years. And this morning, I finally just sat down and wrote in this notebook right in front of me and wrote down everything that's needed in 15 minutes, using the question, what if it were easy? Moving us into this space of where are we getting in our own way? What does it look like if we just ask ourselves, what if it were easy? And then come from that space? Tim 45:32 What if we just did the actions? What if we just went forward with it? And what if it was the easiest thing in the world? I want to invite you back because when that tool is ready, I would love for you to introduce people to it here, as well as wherever else you're putting it out. Elayna 45:46 I'm super excited. And just think, as wild as you can, because that's what this is going to be.
Tim 45:53 Wow, love it. Where can people connect with you? Keep you on their radar? What's the best place? Elayna 46:01 Two places I'm active on LinkedIn, I post often there these kinds of insights, this kind of conversation. I also have a newsletter. And you can find that newsletter at thereframenewsletter.com. So, either one of those places and the newsletter is really all about reframing these usual ideas that’s up. Tim 46:22 All right, well, we will put both of those in the show notes. Do you have a title by the way for this creativity tracker? Is there a working title or something? Elayna 46:32 Oh, gosh, I wish I could just pull one out of my head– Tim 46:35 Oh, no problem. Well, let's maybe I can help you workshop it. That would be fun. All right. Well, oh, man, Elayna, thank you so much for taking the time to introduce yourself to a whole new group of people. And I am very excited to see where your own creativity unlocked, helps people that I care about. And maybe even helps me to care about myself once in a while. It's gonna be awesome. So, such a wonderful take on things, and I really appreciate it. So, thanks again for spending time. Elayna 47:12 Yeah, Tim, thank you so much. And thank you so much to the ears that are with us right now. It's been an absolute pleasure and reach out if you hear this conversation. I really do just love connecting and having more conversations. So, thank you. Tim 47:27 Well, I can't wait to help you spread the word. All the best. We'll talk soon.
Elayna 47:32 Thanks.
Tim 47:37 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If like us you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership. Please give us a positive rate rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word too, by sharing this with your friends, teams, and colleagues. Thanks again for listening and be sure to tune in in two weeks' time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 03 Jul 2024 | Rita Earnst - Comparison and Other Poison Apples | 00:34:24 | |
In this engaging episode of the Sweet on Leadership podcast, Tim Sweet welcomes back organizational psychologist Rita Ernst. Rita, the founder of Ignite Your Extraordinary and author of "Show Up Positive," delves into the detrimental nature of comparison in the workplace. She emphasizes the importance of maintaining a growth mindset and extracting value from every experience, regardless of current job satisfaction. Rita shares personal anecdotes from her career, highlighting moments of discontent and the inner critic's role in fostering negativity. She offers practical advice on recognizing and challenging these detrimental thought patterns, ultimately guiding listeners toward a more positive and fulfilling professional life. This episode is for anyone seeking to enhance their workplace experience and personal growth. About Rita Ernst Rita Ernst is a distinguished organizational psychologist with over 15 years of experience in corporate roles focused on organizational development, performance management, and human resource development. She is the founder of Ignite Your Extraordinary, a consultancy dedicated to designing workplaces people love. Rita is also the author of "Show Up Positive," a book aimed at helping individuals and organizations recover from the pandemic's impact and cultivate healthier, more joyful work environments. Her passion lies in fostering human-centred leadership and creating spaces where employees thrive. -- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Rita Ernst | Positivity Influencer, Author, Consultant:
-- Transcript Rita 00:01 Are you maximizing each experience? You know, you may not be where you want to be yet. And this experience may not be the best experience. But that doesn't mean that you can't take something of value out of it. So, every step that you go, is an opportunity to learn and grow, if you have that mindset.
Tim 00:26 Do you rely on others to set a vision and then give them what they need so that they can achieve something they never would be able to do on their own? Whether or not you formally lead a team. If this sounds like you, then you, my friend, are the definition of a leader. And this show is all about bringing you new insights from real people that you've never been exposed to. So, you can grow and increase your impact on the world and feel more fulfilled while you're doing it. I'm Tim Sweet and you're joining us now for episode 36 of the Sweet on Leadership podcast, welcome.
Tim 01:03 Hey, everybody, it's Tim here. And I want to say welcome. I also want to welcome a repeat guest. This is Rita Ernst. Rita, always happy to have you, it's always such a positive experience to have you come into my space. And I just can't wait to play again with you. Rita was one of our very early guests. It was two episodes. So, make sure you check out the back catalogue because it's excellent. But for those who haven't been exposed to the brilliance of the jewel, that is Rita Ernst, Rita, could you give us a little bit about yourself, please? Rita 01:36 Thanks for inviting me back to Tim. It has been a bit of a minute since I got to be with you on the show. But we love to talk. Tim 01:44 We're out a year almost exactly. Rita 01:44 Probably, so but yeah, we both love to talk. So, this will be a chock-a-block full. I will work on conversations go. But it's good to hear I'm on stay on brand good to know I stay on brand. So, I am an organizational psychologist, that's been my entire career. I spent the first 15-plus years working in traditional corporate roles, doing a lot of organization development, work performance management work, human resource development work, and then I decided to extricate myself out of corporate life temporarily. And that sort of became permanent. And I started my own business called Ignite Your Extraordinary, my focus is still on using my organizational psychology skills to design workplaces people love. I mean, if we just come to the short of it, that's really what is all about. We spend 90,000 of our waking hours in our lifetime in the workplace. And I just believe those need to be happy, productive, fulfilling hours. That's what I want for myself. That's what I want for my parents. That's what I want for my siblings, for the people that I care about my life, I want them to be in a workplace that they love, and that loves them back. And I want to help people learn how to create those spaces. Tim 03:02 I think finding a workplace where you can really at the end of the day, love the time that you spent there. I think even loving the people that you're spending that time with to a certain extent, and we don't like to talk about that a lot. Professionally, love is never fully on the balance sheet. But I think it's important to find connection with the people that we're spending all of this time with. And I am now and have always been a big fan of that and the efforts that you put forward in educating people. So, I want to make sure that we let people know that they can also follow up with you. And we're going to tell them a little bit more about that at the end of the program. But for right now, when you and I were getting ready to hit the record button here. It's interesting, you're at a very, very neat crossroads in your professional career. You're an author, you have multiple writings out now. And you're finding more and more influence around the globe, you're finding that the interest is starting to go beyond the Pacific and the Atlantic. And I'm so excited for you that that is now a new chapter that's opening up for you. And I think that that's excellent. But as we were considering that, that work, and those pursuits can sometimes come at a great cost. And we push ourselves into certain areas. And so I thought it was fascinating and this is where I'd like to take us that when we set big goals like that. We have to be conscious that we don't sacrifice too much of ourselves or other areas of our lives while we do that. So, maybe you could tell me a little bit in terms of when you started to set the goals that were most meaningful for you in life. What types of things jumped to mind? What were the things that you wanted to accomplish, and are so far on track to do so?
Rita 05:00 Well, I fell in love with psychology and found the application of psychology in business when I was in high school. In Organizational Psychology, this was before positive psychology really had a lot of traction. You know, if I were going to do another degree, now, I probably get a degree in positive psychology. But I'm not volunteering to go back to school. So, that's not going to happen. That's not on the game plan. But because I love psychology so much, you know, I knew the work that I wanted to do, I knew I wanted to go in and help businesses be more effective. I've always believed in human-centred leadership. But we're not turning people into machines, or asking them to check their brains at the door, we are taking humans and all that is humaneness, and figuring out how to maximize that individually and collectively in a workplace. And so that's just been my passion. But I did have an experience a formative experience internationally that really gave me the bug, I wanted to work internationally. And I got to do a little bit of that, and my second last corporate job, and then my husband and I decided to start a family. So, at that point, I knew I didn't want it to do a lot of international travel, that's very difficult on your body, and it's difficult on your family. And I sort of put that aside. And now I've got a college graduate since we talked, and my oldest daughter is entering her senior year of high school. So, our family life is moving into a place where I've decided that I really want to pursue that opportunity to work and serve audiences internationally again. And so I feel like I'm just sort of coming full circle again. But I feel so blessed that I've been able to pace my career in my life, it is a place of privilege, not everybody could do all the things that I've done. Not everybody has the privilege of being able to step out of a corporate job that's giving them health care benefits, and 401k matches and those kinds of things. If you don't have a spouse, for example, if you're single parent really hard to do that. So, I do recognize I have a lot of privilege in where I am sitting right now. But it is fun to be coming full circle. And so my daughter, I've got one more year before she heads off to college. So, I'm not looking to be jumping deep into a lot of international travel, I want to really enjoy this last year that we have together with her in my home, but it's on the horizon. You know, I need to start building the groundwork, making the connections, finding the opportunities. And so I'm always sort of playing a little bit of a long game. When I made all of those early decisions. I didn't see this coming up. But it is fun to see that this opportunity is emerging and passions that I held at such a young age, I didn't completely step away from them, I just stepped aside of them for a while. And now I can merge back in. Tim 7:57 It's interesting that you're at that point where you're in a season of your life where things are becoming possible again, and I think that sets us up for a great conversation because it hasn't been necessarily right until now. Now that it's opening up and it's happening. But you know, speaking to you and understanding sort of how you've come through this, and how both of us are developing professionally. And I share a lot of the goals and the tensions that you experienced, up to that point when it wasn't quite there. And this is now open to you again. But the motivation necessarily for you to be moving into these spaces was still there. It was simmering, or it was still smouldering under the surface. But it was the right time to do it. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship with that? Rita 08:49 Yeah, I mean, I would say to Tim that it wasn't even necessarily conscious, right? So, in 2022, just to catch up with listeners who didn't catch our earlier episodes, in 2022, I wrote a book called Show Up Positive. That was based on the consulting work that I did during the pandemic. And when I wrote that book, I wasn't thinking, Oh, this is a parlay into international work. What I knew is I wrote this book because I had a message that I wanted to get into more people's hands to help people repair a damage done by the pandemic in their workplaces, get on to a path of healing, that would bring back more joy and fulfillment for everyone in the workplace. And a book is one of the ways that you can get information out to way more people right, than just people trying to find me. So, I wrote the book and I knew I was going to start positioning myself to take the stage at conferences and stuff, that having a stage presence would enable me to get more connections and more people get the message out further. I'm very passionate about the work that underpins show a positive, and the show a positive movement, which is about bringing workplaces back into this place of healing and health and well-being. And I didn't really construct that. But as I've gotten into this, I see, and it's like, oh, yeah, I used to love that, like, I want to do that more. I actually love being on stage and speaking at big conferences and stuff. And I get very nice reviews from people that just affirm and make me want to do more of it. But designing and delivering is something that makes me happy. So, it's really awesome when you have a career that fills your heart. And when you stay open, I have this larger intention, I have this larger goal or purpose of serving into the world, and leaving people in a better place. And I just keep following that path. And then other interesting things come about, but I do think there is a certain level of openness that you have to maintain for that. If I made the decision of like, oh, as soon as my kids are out of the house, while my husband and I are both gonna retire. We're older parents. So, we could theoretically be saying that, and I'm not going to be doing this work anymore, when none of that would be in place. But I love my work so much. I'm like, I got at least another decade in me that I want to keep working, I'm not ready to shut this down, I'm having too much fun. Tim 11:36 I'm glad you're in a state of flow with it. I'm glad that it's coming as it comes and it's the right time for this. I think it's exciting when new opportunities are opening up. And they're feeling like they're right there. And I'm also I would say privileged to be in that state of flow with my career, and the rest of it. But so many people that I talk to and I meet, they are not there, they are not in a position where they feel that work is where they should be. Work is getting them where they want to be. They're not finding that they are moving at a pace that is right for them. This must impact the ability to show up positively at work and feel like I know why I'm here and I know where this is going. Or at least I'm comfortable with where it's taking me and the path of least resistance is a great path to be on. What are some of your experiences? Or what do you see, being typical when a person is not fortunate? Like we are, to be feeling that we’re heading in a trajectory that makes sense.
Rita 12:38 I think if you had your north star, if you know your purpose and your intention where you want to take your career, what experience that you want to have, you know, one time I thought, Oh, maybe I want to be the Chief Human Resources Officer somewhere or hold a position in the C suite. And then life took me kind of in a different direction. And I'm like, Okay, I can't even imagine being in that role or doing that job. Like that wouldn't be gratifying to me anymore. But there was a point in my career where I thought that would be kind of gratifying to me. So, you know, what I would say is, you know, once you know where that is, then the question is, are you maximizing each experience? You know, you may not be where you want to be yet. And this experience may not be the best experience. But that doesn't mean that you can't take something of value out of it. So, every step that you go is an opportunity to learn and grow, if you have that mindset. So, it's that growth mindset that we talked about a lot, right? If you come to every opportunity with a growth mindset, you will walk away with something that will advance you closer to the place you want to be. That's what I think. Tim 13:58 Sure. That's great. I will press a little bit because I know that a lot of people feel that that growth mindset is escaping them. It's not there. And I mean, I think that people can be really tough on themselves, they can really start to fear that they're not growing, that they're stagnating. You know, and one of the things that I noticed is that often that feeling is not predicated by where they find themselves situationally, but how they're conceptualizing where they are. Right? And you and I talked a little bit before about relative comparison and seeing, you know, I should be further along. I really should be doing more with this talent that I have, or I should be reaching a greater level sooner than I am now. Could you walk me into a little bit about how that influences that thinking of people staying in the growth mindset or staying positive about where they are and where they're headed? And having the energy then to strive, or continue to feel love for their job, or their vocation?
Rita 15:09 I want to talk about a little bit of history for me, and then maybe where I am currently in my business. So, when I was in corporate, most of my corporate jobs that I left, I loved the company, I loved what I was doing. I was learning, I was growing, until that moment when I wasn't or I felt like I wasn't. And it's hard when I reflect back on that, it was hard in the moment, and it's hard now to even exactly name what it is. But you know, now that we have this term, quite quitting, be less engaged. I mean, before I made the leap from one company to the next, I definitely felt that shift in my own engagement that was happening. And it was happening because of exactly what you're talking about. It was happening because we have this storyteller that lives inside of our head, called our inner critic. And our inner critic is an awesome storyteller, but kind of a OneNote storyteller, in that the inner critic never notices all the good things that are happening, the inner critic just tells you all the things that aren't happening, or that are problematic about what is or is not happening. And so that's where our personal discontent comes from. And discontent is the enemy of feeling positive at work. And so, good for you, listener if you're noticing your discontent because so many of us fall into a habit of discontented thinking that we don't even recognize because the tricky thing about our inner critic, is our inner critic blames everything outside of us. So, it's our discontent is not anything to do with us. It's because of our circumstances. It's because of this person. So, why did that person get promoted? I worked just as hard. I've been here longer, I should have gotten promoted. Why did that person get the job? Why did that person get a bigger raise than I got? You know, a lot of companies now have transparency of pay. Or why is that person making more money than I am making? You know, whatever it might be, in the kind of roles that I held up, for me a lot of times it was more of the like, where is the leadership of this organization, steering the ship? Why are they making those decisions? And do I feel confident about the direction that we are headed as an organization? I mean, things like that would create my discontent. And honestly, there are times when the right thing for you to do is to leave, when you're experiencing that discontent, that is a signal, it's like putting your hand on the hot stove, right? And you don't just leave it there, to get fourth-degree burns, right? You like you feel the hot stove, you pull your hand back, you're like, oh, signal there, I don't touch that that's hot. Do not touch that, you know, sometimes we are getting legitimate signals that are like it's hot, it's time to move on. Sometimes we're just caught in our own internal stories. And when you can't move on, when you're in a situation where the timing isn't right for you to abandon this job because you need the benefits. Or you need the convenience between your children's school and your work so that you can make the carpool thing work, you know. I mean, there's all kinds of crazy stuff right in our lives that dictate or limit some of our choices. And so when you're in that place, you can just stay in your discontent and despair. Or you can start to challenge the thinking of that critic, you know, and decide what you can influence, what you can change, what you want to make different in your life. And so, I've certainly gone through places and stages in my corporate job, where I started to have doubt or concern, or jealousy over again, that comparison, comparing myself to other people, sometimes not even in the same company. I would have a friend from graduate school that was working for a different company. And they would say, Oh, I got a senior director role. And I'm thinking well, why am I not a senior director yet? Maybe I should be a senior director. You know, all of these things get planted inside of your mind, should I be looking for a senior director role? What would that be? Where would I go? But you know, their situation is not my situation. Their company is not my company. You know, if you talk to somebody and ding, ding, ding, if you have not figured this out already, at least in the US, if you talk to somebody that works at a bank, that you went to school with and they said, I'm the VP of something that's like just a general title, every person working in a bank seems to, if you're not a teller, you're probably a VP of something. That whole thing about comparison is the enemy is so correct. So, there are all kinds of things that can lead to our discontent. But comparison was always a big one that I noticed in my life, and now in my business. And as I think about and plan for the future, as an author of multiple books, you know, there are a lot of messages and signals out there that tell me, I should be making seven figures and I should be selling millions of books, and I should have a million followers on my social media channels. And I should have, you know, so much inbound lead generation that's coming in that I don't have to work, and those messages are everywhere I got people hit me up all the time that wants to sell me something, teach me how to do something. And if I'm not careful, I could get caught up in that comparison. I have to trust that the timeline I'm on is the timeline I am meant to have. Tim 21:14 Yeah, it's the timeline you're on. It's such a huge part and if I think back to what you've shared so far, which I think is great, we all have the story, we all have these choices that we've made. And we tend to minimize the quality of the decisions that we've made in the past. And if not the quality of the decisions, the conviction with which we've made them and said, you know, for me, we're going to choose that we're going to have kids, and we're going to now embark on a life that has that as one of the influences, one of the underlying designs. And that is going to now flavour every decision that comes past this. And we made a decision nobly and with a lot of conviction, and it's come with a lot of great benefits. And it's come with some trade-offs. But to then compare our subsequent decisions to what other people are doing or where they've gotten, it's very easy to see individual facets of their achievement, not looking at the other portions of their lives where they've had either circumstances that allow them to operate in certain ways or choices that allow them to operate certain ways. And so we begin to sort of zero in on one aspect of another person's life that we want, while disregarding everything else. And so, that story, that inner critic that you're talking about, that leads us to that point of saying, wait a minute, we don't have enough power, or we're not as far along as we should be. I was reminded of attribution bias when you were saying that, you know, there's that thought, when I'm rolling down the road, if somebody cuts me off, it's because let's say if I merge sloppily into another lane, I can say to myself, well, it's because I am late to pick up my kid and people around me will understand because everybody makes a mistake once in a while. But if somebody else does it, it's like, moron, that guy has a character flaw that allows them to not concern themselves about me at all. And neither of those statements are entirely true. But they're simplified. And so we jump to it. And we think that that's the truth. And in the same way, if we're comparing ourselves to someone else, or if we're looking at a position within a job, it's that what I heard you say was, there's this inner critic or this, it could be like, we talk about the imposter or whatnot. We don't have the power, we need to go where we want to go. If we turn that into a compelling reality that we can't escape, and we cannot make any other kind of choice or see any kind of leverage in the situation then likely it's time to go. Because you are simply resigned yourself to the fact that you have no way out of this. Rita 24:06 There's a conversation that says, like, take a celebrity like Angelina Jolie or somebody like Oprah Winfrey, well, they have the same 24 hours in a day that you have and look at all they get done. But it's not true. Like we've we've debunked that myth, right? You can look at somebody else's life and the results that they're getting and you can make all kinds of assumptions, but to your point, you don't really know the reality behind that. Tim 24:33 Gross oversimplification. Rita 24:35 And they may be making trade-offs that you would never make. I didn't want a full-time nanny. I wanted to be home and raise my kids. That's a trade-off that I made. Whereas, other people would, you know, do something different, the amount of investment that you're willing to make in your education and other things. So yes, comparison is the thief of joy, because we do not really understand the whole structure, the whole system around that. And we make all kinds of assumptions. And at the end of the day, if we can leave you with no other message, learn to trust yourself and trust your path. You can have honest dialogue, I do with myself all the time, you know, if I want to be working internationally, in what's my time horizon? And what's going to allow that to happen? Well, I've got to make connections, I've got to start finding speaking opportunities. I got to find people that opened doors for me, well, am I following through on those things? Then I'm taking action, the fact that I don't have things locked and loaded and ready to go doesn't mean that I shouldn't trust myself, or then I'm not making progress. Tim 25:48 Yeah, you’re not working as hard as you can work or to the best of your ability. And it's so easy to really criticize oneself. And we had played with the idea of patience and being patient with oneself. Well, if you're judging yourself compared to somebody else's pace, that could be really a recipe for disaster. Often, when I'm coaching people, I say, you know, you gotta be fluent in who you are. Because the tractor may be jealous of the Ferrari Testarossa. But if the task is to pull a plow, you don't have the right torque ratio in a Ferrari, to pull the plow, you have to trust yourself that if you've chosen the right vocation, the right field, you've got the right torque ratio and tire set and everything else, traction to do what you need to do. And to second guess ourselves constantly is really, it can be debilitating. And so, rather than patience, rather than comparison, maybe we focus on calibration and saying, am I right for the road that I've chosen to be on? Am I happy with how I'm performing on this road, because I chose not to go into a stream that would have seen me go up to a C suite, I've chosen to coach to the C suite. And I'm highly satisfied with that I'm in my 50th year, that that was the path that I took. If I compare myself to someone else, suddenly it's very unfair to the choices that I've made and the joy that I've derived from them. And yeah, it's a trade-off. But some of those were tough. But I think that that trust itself is a really big one. Rita 27:28 I love your word calibration. I mean, I think calibrating is absolutely it's your own goals. It's your own journey. And really self-monitoring and calibrating where what is reasonable. You know, my father, I was posted about this week, he is now on his third cancer journey. So, now, part of my calibration is making time to make sure that I'm there to support him during this time, that changes a little bit of what my pathway looks, it doesn't mean I have to abandon things. But I might need to recalibrate. Tim 28:06 Yeah. And don't judge yourself against Beyonce or Brene Brown or somebody else who does not have the same contextual experience. They're not where you are. So, trust yourself, you know where you are. And if you don't, you better find out. A couple of things as we wrap up here. So, if you were to have one wish for anybody listening today, what would it be? Rita 28:28 So, my wish is that you would really tune in and develop that trust in yourself, step away, give yourself permission to step away from the comparison. Stop, my wish for you is to stop looking at all of those adversaries that you're seeing on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn that are telling you, you're not enough that you need to be more and more and more that whatever you're doing, you should be making more money, you should be driving a nicer car, you should be living in a better house, whatever it should be. Somebody else's more doesn't have to be your more. I have firmly rejected those things. And I would encourage you to do the same. And a proof that I can give to you is I know somebody that coaches people like Tim and I to build their businesses. And this person is now telling the story about how they were working so hard that they gave up time with their kids that their home life tanked all of these things to get to their multimillion-dollar business. I never wanted to give up all those things to get to that business. So, I don't have a multi-million dollar business. But yes, that mean honestly saying this is what it took and this is what it costs me. You are the only person that knows the cost equation that makes sense in your life. And you got to trust yourself to pay attention to that.
Tim 29:52 Absolutely. A previous guest had asked the question, by the way since you've been on we have this new tradition and that is, you get et to lob a question of your own at the next guest. As you give a quick answer to the lobbed the question of the past guest. So, Julie Friedman-Smith asked the question, how do we find the courage to do the hard thing? And I think we're in a perfect position to answer this right now. Rita 30:19 Well, I truly believe that courage is not overcoming your fear, but moving forward, despite your fear. And so I think the way that you find the courage is that you trust you believe in yourself, you draw upon the best resources around you that you can, and you take a first step and you forgive yourself, for the times that you falter. You can lift yourself back up out of that, and let go the expectation that it's going to be perfect, or that there is this clear and clean, perfect path. Sometimes we just have to be the adventurous spirit that is going to make a lot of mistakes along the way, but eventually, they will get to where we want to be. Tim 31:03 I love that. I love that you said draw on the resources around you. And listen to yourself and believe in yourself and believe in the resources around you and allow you to don't discount them. Excellent. Excellent answer. Closing minutes here. Where can people find you? Rita 31:19 Well, I have to give you a question first, right before– Tim 31:22 You do. Thanks. That's why you should be in charge. Rita 31:24 Wait, wait, I was supposed to give you something else. Tim 31:26 Yeah, sorry. Oops. Rita 31:28 Yeah, question to pass on to the next person would be, what is the advice you would give to, as I've gotten a newly minted graduate, If you could look backwards and talk to your newly minted self coming out of college, starting your career, knowing where the landscape is now, what advice would you give, to help them find their path to happiness and well being at work? Tim 32:00 Great question. And I will revel in the answer that the next person gives. Rita 32:07 I’m gonna have to now have to get to listen. So, that's how you get us listening and making sure we're listening to multiple episodes. Tim 32:13 Now we're developing. It's so great to see this. Well see this community of people have been on this podcast cropping up. I really love it, because they're so supportive, and they're so helpful towards each other. So, it's great. Okay, now the question. Mindful. Rita 32:38 So, find me at igniteextraordinary.com. It's all one word igniteextraordinary.com That is my handle. Well, Facebook just temporarily took my site down. So, I don't know maybe on Facebook, on Instagram, I'm @igniteextraordinary. On LinkedIn, I'm Rita Ernst Positivity Influencer. So, it's pretty easy to find me when you just add that positivity influencer. And you can find my book Show Up Positive is in print, digital and audio available anywhere that you buy your books. Tim 33:04 100%. We will include links to all of those in the show notes. Rita Ernst, it has been my pleasure to have you come on and spread your particular brand and positivity, which I love. Thank you so much for spending time with me, touching the lives of the people that are listening, and really putting yourself out there as an example of how to make those hard choices. Rita 33:26 I love this conversation. Thank you for inviting me back, Tim. Tim 33:31 No problem. I can't wait to see what's next, Rita.
Tim 33:38 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter, you can find the link in the show notes. If like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership. Please give us a positive rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word too, by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening. And be sure to tune in in two weeks time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 13 Dec 2023 | Greta Ehlers - Passion, Predicament, and Embracing Leadership | 00:35:29 | |
In this episode of Sweet on Leadership, Tim Sweet interviews Greta Ehlers, a passionate advocate for diabetes awareness and innovation. Greta shares her journey of living with type one diabetes since the age of nine and how it led her to become a prominent voice on social media. The episode explores the intersection of personal experiences, advocacy, and leadership in the context of diabetes. Tim highlights Greta's role in creating a supportive community, breaking taboos around topics like mental health and sex, and her current work in diabetes technology innovation. Greta opens up about her 20-year journey living with type one diabetes and her role as a leader in the diabetes tech space. Tim Sweet skillfully navigates the conversation, exploring Greta's early experiences, her advocacy on social media, and her current position at the Diabetes Center Berne. Greta's unique perspective on leadership challenges traditional notions, emphasizing that leaders come in various forms. Together, Tim and Greta cover essential topics like the impact of technology on diabetes management, the importance of mental health discussions, and Greta's commitment to making life easier for people with diabetes. The conversation is both informative and empowering, shedding light on the complexities of living with a chronic condition while showcasing Greta's resilience and leadership in the field. About Greta Ehlers Greta is a dynamic MedTech professional, devoted patient advocate, and an inspiring speaker, driven by a mission to ignite innovation in the field of diabetes technology. With a rich background in marketing and a personal journey as someone living with type 1 diabetes, Greta brings a unique blend of professional acumen and personal empathy to her work. Her career is marked by a relentless pursuit of scouting and nurturing start-ups specializing in diabetes technology. Greta's vision is to revolutionize the landscape of diabetes management, making it more manageable and less intrusive for those affected. Her hands-on experience with type 1 diabetes fuels her passion for finding and supporting innovations that promise to simplify life for diabetes patients. Beyond her role in MedTech, Greta is a powerful voice in the diabetes community. As a speaker, she shares her insights and experiences to educate, inspire, and drive change. Her advocacy work is not just about raising awareness but also about creating tangible improvements in the lives of those living with diabetes. Greta's approach is characterized by her creative marketing strategies that are as empathetic as they are effective. She understands the nuances of the healthcare industry and leverages this knowledge to bring groundbreaking diabetes management solutions to the forefront. Her commitment to making a difference in the world of diabetes care is not just a professional choice, but a personal one. She stands as a beacon of hope and a source of inspiration, not only for those battling diabetes but also for the broader MedTech community. In her journey, Greta continues to push the boundaries, fostering an environment of innovation and excellence in diabetes care. She is a true champion in the fight against diabetes, committed to lighting the path for the next generation of innovators in this critical field
Resources discussed in this episode: -- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Greta Ehlers | Diabetes Center Berne: -- Transcript: Greta 00:01 There was this really distinct image of a leader in my head. And I know other people who I would definitely describe as a leader. But in my head, I was just too young, not too much of an expert, too little experienced, and all of that. And then I think talking to you also helped me see that leadership comes in different shapes and forms, right? There's not one definition of what a leader is at all.
Tim 00:28 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you my friend, are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. Welcome to the Sweet on Leadership podcast, episode 22.
Tim 01:02 Welcome back, everybody. My name is Tim Sweet. Thank you for joining us again, for Sweet on Leadership. Today, I am joined by an absolute rain sunshine, which I keep saying, this is Greta Ehlers. Greta, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. Greta 01:18 Thank you so much for having me, Tim, I’m really excited to be here. Tim 01:21 Greta, I want you to tell everybody where you are in life. So, maybe just for the first few moments here, tell us a little bit about yourself. Greta 01:31 Absolutely. So, I'm 20 years old. I graduated from university two years ago and I think right now I'm enjoying my first two years of full-time work. And I've been living with type one diabetes for 20 years, which is quite important, plays a big role in my life. We'll talk more about that later. And I'm very passionate about innovation, about innovative technology, especially diabetes technology. And outside of work, I love traveling, I love exploring, I love classical music, and talking to interesting and inspiring people all over the world like you, actually. So, I'm really excited to be here. Tim 02:15 And I'm really excited to have you here. And I'm really honored that you’d spend the time with me. I think it's important to note that a 20 years of age, we might be tempted to equate the time that you've had so far and you're relatively new, or starting your career with someone who may not yet have a great deal of experience to offer our audience. And I want to hit that right on the head. Because the thing is, is that age is just one of those things that really is not a good measure of what a person's life experience is. And I think talking to you and learning more about you, I'd like you to take everybody who's listening today back into where your journey started. Because that was not, you know, just yesterday, you've been involved in something passionately for a number of years. And so take us back to that story about type one diabetes and getting involved in that. And really establishing yourself as an advocate in that space. Greta 03:09 Absolutely. So, I think in order to go back to where it all started, you have to go back around 20 years, and that's when I got my diagnosis. And my diagnosis, obviously, or living with type one diabetes isn't me or all of me, but it plays a really big part in my life. And it's also definitely part of where I am now and why I'm here. So, I was nine years old. I was on summer holiday with my best friend, we went to the Baltic Sea. And for a number of weeks, I've been feeling really thirsty, you know, I've been physically unwell. And the only thing I remember from that holiday is not the beaches or the fun we had. It's mostly how thirsty I was, all the time. The amounts of times I woke up during the night being so thirsty, I had to go to the kitchen and have some water. I came back from holiday, my parents picked me up and they took me to a doctor because I wasn't well. And they took some blood tests and told me and my parents that I was only nine. So, I didn't really understand what was happening. But they told me, you have type one diabetes will rush you to the hospital, and then you will learn how to adapt and kind of make all the adjustments you need in order to kind of live with that chronic condition. Tim 04:38 That's a very shocking and sudden introduction to having to adult really quickly at the age of nine. And suddenly and almost overnight. Greta 04:43 Yes, absolutely. And it was just you know, a big word. I mean, all I heard back then being nine years old is you'll have to inject yourself several times a day for the rest of your life. And I think that's what I remember. And I think that's where my whole journey started. Tim 05:04 When you think back on that time, you were dealing with it personally. But very soon the journey became more public. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Greta 05:12 Yes. So, growing up, you know, they had these camps for kids with type one diabetes. And now looking back, it's obviously a great thing. But back then I was like, No, I don't want to hang out with other sick kids, I'm not going to do that. And that was fine. My parents were like, Okay, we're not going to force you to. But obviously, 10 years later, or 15 years later, I realized that I literally don't know anyone else who's living with the same thing, and has to manage all these challenges, which I have to manage every day. And, of course, you regularly check in with your doctor. But that's also not the same as you know, talking to someone who is kind of your age and lives with the same thing. And that's when I turned to social media, actually, I think I was 20. And I created an Instagram page. And my first intention, and my only intention back then was to get to know other people with type one diabetes and exchange and talk about it.
Tim 06:14 And did it serve that purpose? Initially?
Greta 06:21 Yes, absolutely. I think the diabetes community is very unique, very supportive, very, like relatively small, but people are just very supportive of one another. And I very quickly felt like, oh, there's loads of people I can turn to, there's loads of people who go through the same thing. And kind of this whole new level of mutual understanding, I guess, which I never felt like I had before. Tim 06:46 So, you're facing the situation. And in doing that, you felt the need to or wanted to process it, you wanted to be part of something that camp wasn't for you. But you found social media, and you found your people. And you suddenly were surrounded by these people that could see the world, or at least see it through your eyes, or at least approach a greater degree of empathy. But you didn't stop there. Right? You didn't stop there. So, then what began to happen as you found your people, and you began to use Instagram?
Greta 07:22 So, I think the beginning like the first year or something, I was just like, you know, I was kind of sharing pictures of my food and my blood sugar levels being like, Oh, I discovered this and that. And then, after some time, it must be like, four years ago, maybe I think, I realized two things. First of all, there are certain topics, which really impact my life, which are not spoken about enough. And the second topic was, there's lots of false information on social media. And basically, what I did, I created this platform to tackle both of these problems. So, what I did was researching papers, scientific journals, I was studying at university back then. So, I had access to all of these, you know, research papers. And I started speaking up about topics, which I felt when talked about enough, and that might be diabetes and mental health. I mean, now it is a bigger discussion about mental health in general, but five years back, it wasn't necessarily. Or diabetes and sex, how does a chronic condition like that may impact your sex life? And all of these topics, which I feel are quite a big part of people's lives, but they're hardly spoken about. And I found out things, which I never knew, none of my doctors had ever talked to me about it. And I started sharing these facts and research statistics over social media to help other people find this information and maybe answer some questions they had.
Tim 09:05 The view that I'm having here, of you getting really deep into it. What was the response that people started to show? Greta 09:13 For me, it was absolutely overwhelming. Because I remember I started posting these research stats on these letter boards, maybe you have seen them, where you can stick on these letters. Because I was like, Okay, we need science-based information. But also it needs to be kind of easy to understand because not everybody can be bothered to read journals. So, I wanted to kind of share it in a simple, aesthetic way. And I remember when I shared the first of these boards, so many people shared it. I think, today, it's been a while since I've checked, but it got over 3,000 reshares and my account back then wasn't big or maybe had like 2,000 followers or something. The response was great, immediate– Tim 09:58 And overwhelming. Wow, that's great. When we look at your journey, you had identified a need that people obviously felt, and you provided a solution, right, you provided a source. So, if I look at this, as we were talking and we were setting up for this interview, what's really interesting to me is that you saw this as being a social media influencer, you saw this as being a public figure in that space. But you didn't see this in other ways. You didn't see this necessarily in terms of leading this group. Can you tell me a little bit about that? And how that has changed for you? Greta 10:35 Yeah, so I think for me, it was just back then something that I needed. And so I shared it with the world. And then I very quickly got the positive response. So, it made it very clear for me that other people also have that need. And then the logical consequence for me was okay, I'll make more of these. But I would never have seen myself as in somewhat leading people, you know,
Tim 11:04 After you had gone through this and moved through university and whatnot, can you tell us a little bit about then where life took you? You now have established yourself as a voice in the diabetic community, and people are responding and you're getting followers, you're seen as a source. How did that look for other parts of your life? What did that look like, as you went to finish school and find your first job, those kinds of things? Greta 11:29 Even though in the beginning of these years, when I was very social on Instagram, and I got invited to speak at conferences, even before I dived into my whole professional career, it's never been my goal to end up somewhere in the med-tech space, where I am now. But after I graduated, I got a job offer for where I'm now actually from Switzerland, by someone who I knew over social media. That's why I'm saying kind of all of these things brought me here. Because Maura and my colleague who kind of reached out to me back then, we've been known each other for years over social media, she also has type one diabetes. And she asked me shortly before I graduated, whether, yeah, I could imagine moving to Switzerland, I was studying in Sweden. And she was like, there is this really cool technology center, driving diabetes innovation, and I think you would be the perfect fit. Do you want to move to Switzerland? And my first response was, hell no. I wanted to see the world you know, I've just studied and learned in a very small Swedish town, two years of COVID. My plan was to, I don't know, go travel, see the world apply for a job somewhere in Tokyo or whatever, see where life takes me. But then this opportunity suddenly just, I don't know, flew to me somewhat. And then I was like, actually, yes, this is exactly what I want to do, like make life easier for people with diabetes, just like myself. Tim 13:02 Let's go a little bit into that organization that you're part of now and what your role is currently. Greta 13:06 So, we are a privately funded nonprofit organization. And our high-level mission is, or vision is to make life easier for people with diabetes. That sounds very abstract, but it is ultimately really just that. And we do that by conducting research on the one hand and translating this research into real solutions on the market, which people with diabetes can use. And that is mostly startup support. So, I’m working in business development. I scout startups with innovative ideas on how to make life better for people with diabetes, and I help them get their solutions off the ground. Tim 13:54 Probably a great time to say, if people wanted to find that particular organization, where would they look?
Greta 14:00 We're caught Diabetes Center Berne, you can find us on LinkedIn, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn, and I'm happy to conveniently enough, I'm also in the business development team. So, feel free to reach out to me or Google us, Diabetes Center Berne, and you'll find us. And we have a big innovation challenge a bit like Britain's Got Talent, but for diabetes startups. Tim 14:22 Awesome. So, we'll put all of that in the show notes. And where can people find you on Instagram? We're only midway through the conversation here. But I want to make sure that we stop and let people know that they can take a look while they're listening here. So, where can people find you on Instagram? Greta 14:38 It's gretastypeone on Instagram, all letters, no numbers. And it's been a while since I've been active, life is busy, but all the content is still there. Feel free to check that out. Tim 14:52 Right, as a resource, it could be great for yourself or somebody that you know, dear listener, so make sure that you check that out, and again, we'll put the link in the notes. Okay, so here we are, we've got you out, and you are working and you're working in an area that obviously realizes the importance of your perspective and your experience and your passion as they've scouted you. Give us a quick snapshot of what is life like right now. Greta 15:22 Right now I am five days away from a three-month trip. You know, I am based in Berlin, and people, even if they're not from Berlin, keep telling me, how do you even manage Berlin winter, it's so sad. Everybody's so grumpy. You honestly, you should just go somewhere else. This year often thinking yes, actually, why not? So, I'll be on the road traveling to Southeast Asia and to India. And very lucky to still work, we have a very flexible working environment. So, I'll take some time off. But I'll work some from a nice Airbnb somewhere in Indonesia, I hope. I'm very happy where I am, I love my job. I'm very lucky to kind of be motivated to go to work every Monday and really feeling like I can make a difference. You know, I don't feel like this tiny number in a big organization. I do feel like, in this area where work and my job, I can make an impact. And I can drive innovation. And this impact is somewhat visible for people out there. Tim 16:29 Let's talk about that impact for a minute. If we think about the fact that you can pick up and travel, is that experience any different now, as it would have been, you know, when you were nine years old? Is traveling with type one diabetes, has that changed in the last several years? Greta 16:48 Yes, I think that's why these technologies advancing are so amazing to me because I know how much easier everyday life is because back then 20 years ago, I had this blood sugar meter where I had to prick my finger several times a day, and I had, you know, glass vials and syringes. And now I have a small sensor on my arm and an insulin pump, which looks like a fancy MP3 player. And it does make it easier. And then of course makes traveling easier. And not just traveling but everyday life. Every single day. So, that's what I mean by saying this impact is very real to me. Tim 17:29 And that's the technological impact. What with the mindset of a person with type one diabetes, would that have changed over the last several years? Or is there a mindset or a maturity that people have to go through when they're first diagnosed in order to feel free and able and, and all of that? Is there a mindset shift that people have either gone through on mass or that you see individuals as having to tackle? Greta 17:59 Type one diabetes is so individual, I think everybody is going through their own struggles and feelings. Everybody's having their own, needs to take their own amount of time to kind of, you know, get used to that and accept the diagnosis, of course. One thing I would like to say is, sometimes what I hear working in this very tech-advanced field is that a lot of people think with all the tech we have now it's basically not something I have to think about ever because now I have the tech and it's basically doing the job for me. And funnily enough, that's not something which has changed at all. So, I don't think that maybe slightly, the amount of time I spent thinking about it has changed a bit. But it's still very much there, even though the actual handling of it has gotten easier. But you might talk to another person with diabetes, and they might give you a completely different answer. I think, for me, it has become easier, but it's still very much there. Tim 19:02 I mean, I'm a high-maintenance person. Years ago, I was diagnosed with a nonceliac wheat allergy. That diagnosis happened to, this was way before gluten-free and everything was a fad. I was having health issues, and I couldn't drink a cup of coffee without, you know, jittering. And then I was quite sick all the time and the rest of it. And I happened to find a doctor who was also an endocrinologist. And he took me through a range of tests. And it resulted in me having to drastically change the way that I eat. Now, I'm an old schooler when it comes to eating wheat-free. And although I was working at a bread company at the time, which didn't make me a very popular person, but it became one of those health-based obsessions in a sense. It was not something that I was doing, you know, out of fad or popularity or anything like that. It was something that I had to be aware of. I knew what the consequences are if I slipped up, and it continues to be something that I am conscious of, and it is active, it's not something that I can push to the background completely. Would that be similar to the experience that you have? Although I'm sure you're for those of you that don't know, I mean, maybe tell us a little bit about, if you've were to let it off your mind. What's the result for a person with diabetes, some people probably still do not understand what happens if it goes out of control? Greta 20:33 A lot of people think that type one diabetes is you have to watch what you eat, and then maybe you lose a bit of weight, and then everything's gonna be okay. But it's an autoimmune disease, we're still not really sure what causes it. And basically, for a healthy person, your pancreas produces insulin, and mine doesn't. And that's why I have all the injections or the insulin pump, which will give me the insulin I need. And if I wouldn't, then there's something called DKA, Diabetic Ketoacidosis. Very complicated word. But basically, you fall into some sort of coma at some point, and then you'll die. So, it's something you want to, you know, kind of, keep in range. Tim 21:19 So, damage to organs, damage to all sorts of things can happen. Damage to the brain. Greta 21:24 Yes. It is very serious, like, it's one of these, people like to call– Tim 21:26 It’s not a lightweight diagnosis. Greta 21:28 Yeah, I think it's one of these. I've heard that sometimes, it's what people refer to as a bit of an invisible illness. Because I mean, you can't really see unless they maybe have like, my insulin pump in my hand or something. But it's still very much invisible. And I think that's sometimes why people think it's not too serious. I bet that's what a lot of different conditions as well. But. Tim 21:54 So, we see you moving through life, you've got this great job, you're about to embark on this travel adventure, you're enabled to travel in those ways. I did ask you two questions at once there. So, that's my bad, but that in terms of it being the ever-present, you know, friend, or whatever you want to call it, that obsession. Is that similar to your experience, but it's not something that's ever far from mind? It's just not necessarily. Greta 22:20 Yes. Yeah, exactly. I think that pretty much nails it. Tim 22:23 Yeah. I was thinking of it almost like a person when you have that little friend joining you the whole time. How do you feel about it now? What role as a character in your life does diabetes play now? Greta 22:38 It's an interesting kind of thought sometimes. Because, for me, obviously, the reason why I work in diabetes tech is probably because I got diagnosed back then. And I've talked to some different people. And I know people who say, Oh, I'm actually somewhat kind of grateful that I got this diagnosis because otherwise, I would not be where I am today. And whilst I think that it is, that is completely true, also, for me, I wouldn't be where I am today if I wouldn't live with diabetes. I'm 100% convinced I would have found another passion. So, I am, of course, I'm grateful where I am now. I love my job. I love making impacts, working with all these great people. But I'm also convinced I could have found all of that somewhere else. Tim 23:26 Would have found all of that. Greta 23:28 Yeah. Tim 23:29 If I may, let's shift gears on the conversation here a little bit because you're starting to traipse into my world, something I would coin is natural leadership. Right? We've got a lot of decent research out there right now that say that people are either wired to be leaders or not. Gallup estimates it at around 10% of the population. I personally think it's much lower. Because even if you have the personality, neuro structure, whatever you want to call it, to be interested and gravitate towards leading, and you will find a thing to lead. If it's not diabetes, it's something else. Not everyone has the chance. Some people have socioeconomic conditions, or they're a certain part of the world or they live within certain traditions, or they have certain life situations and trauma that have kept them from the leadership sphere. And so even if 10% of people have the possibility, I tend to think it's closer to about six 6% of people will actually express themselves as leaders. And the definition which listeners here will have heard me say before is of that 6%, 80% of them will be damaged in the process. They will suffer somehow in their life, or make trade-offs for the good of others and for the good of a cause. But they will not stop. And that really is a mark of a leader in my mind, is well some will emerge unscathed. Others will have to make sacrifices in order to uphold their values and the cause that they're head of. And so when you and I were talking about this off camera, this is a show for leaders. This is a show, I feature people that I am inspired by and see their role in the world as being at the forefront of something, having insight that they can share with others. But you had a very interesting reaction to that, didn't you? So, can you talk a little bit about that? I think that that's one of the most interesting parts of your and mine getting to know each other. Greta 25:36 Yes, no, I do remember when we had a chat, and I was asked to be a guest on this podcast. I had two thoughts. And the first one was, I felt so honored. I also thought, like, why am I invited on the leadership podcast, a podcast on leadership? Because I would have not described myself as a leader.
Tim 25:58 May I describe you as the leader for a moment? Greta 26:00 Please, yes, go ahead. Tim 26:01 Now, let's talk about the story that you've told us so far. What I want people to be thinking in the back of their minds, as they're listening to this, is that many of the attributes that Greta you've demonstrated, so well, through your journey, are things that certain people have to back up and go in actually pursue intentionally, they don't land on them as naturally. So, let me take you through some of what I was thinking. You were faced with the situation, the situation of being diagnosed at a young age with type one diabetes. And very quickly, you found your people, you found a group of people that had similar interests or were facing similar challenges. But you didn't stop there, you opened yourself up, and you shared, and you let people in. And you made your individual journey, what you've said is really unique. But you made it accessible to people so they could see you going through it. And that's a mark of a leader. And then you took topics that people had fear about, or were not talking about, or that weren't at the forefront of professional like the doctor's minds. And you made them safe to talk about, and that's the mark of a leader. And then you took it upon yourself to guide and find the truth and do the research, and declutter and denoise life for others. And that's the mark of a leader. And then you built a platform, and a collision space where people could come together and ask awkward questions, and get information that they may not find elsewhere and find others, find those people that you'd found earlier. And those creating of collision spaces, I mean, that is the mark of a really impressive leader. And then I'm getting a little repetitive here, but bear with me. And then you spoke up and you stood for something. And you know what there's that statement that says, if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything. And I think that's okay, that's a fine statement. But there's another notion, and that is if you stand up, and you stand up, and people know what you stand for, they will stand with you. And if they can see themselves in that, then they find standing up for themselves easier, because you're there as that sort of ladder to being self-representative and advocating for yourself. And you broke that silence and was able to speak up on topics of mental health and sex and how it influences youth and probably maturing through all of this, and what it meant to find yourself. And if that's not leading, I really don't know what it is. So, just from my part, when we talk about all of those attributes, the fact that you created something you were taking assertive control over a really nebulous situation, and making it real and giving people stability. And that is leading a movement, and I am so impressed. And again, just have to give you such credit for doing that. And do it so consistently and continue to do it. So, anyway, that's a little bit of a, I don't want that to be too aggressive or too much like a lecture.
Greta 29:22 Thank you so much. It means a lot because I think when I yeah, when we had that chat about like me coming onto this podcast, it really kind of forced me to reflect. So, it was actually really good because I was like, I don't think I'm a leader. I just, you know, identify this change that I needed. And I did it and then I think it was talking to my girlfriend over Sunday brunch and she was like, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, it took me some time to realize that actually, that might be leadership too. You know. Tim 29:55 I hope you embrace that. I mean, you already are but you're having an amazing life and you're helping others, I'm sure, find theirs. And that's just something that's very inspiring, and what might life be like for you? If you really lean into this notion of being a leader? Would it change your approach at all? Would it embolden you in any way? Greta 30:17 I think it makes leadership more accessible, somehow. Growing up and stuff, there was this really distinct image of a leader in my head. And I know other people who I would definitely describe as a leader, but in my head, I was just too young, not too much of an expert, too little experience, and all of that. And then I think talking to you also helped seeing that leadership comes in different shapes and forms, right? There's not one definition of what a leader is at all. Tim 30:52 In fact, it can be awfully debilitating, and toxic, and exclusionary, if we try to define leaders as being something that people have to be and have a very narrow definition on top of all of that. Leadership is such a, it's such a personal expression. And, you know, the first responsibility I think of every leader is to be really fluent in themselves, and how they think, and, and where their own, you know, tensions and biases and whatnot are, so that they can flow with that, is most certainly not one size fits all. You may be pondering the label. But as I say, the action has been proven, you've got a resume that I think many people would envy, understanding that it was not the easiest way to get there. And that you were probably thrust into that more than others have been. But boy, did you ever take up the charge? So, good on you for picking up the flag and running with it. So, Greta, let me ask you, as we sort of wrap up here, let me ask you a couple of questions. If people want to find you, we talked about that, can just give them another place to find you personally. Greta 32:13 I think that the best one to reach out to is LinkedIn. So, if you look for my name on LinkedIn or the link, if you put it somewhere. Tim 32:20 We’ll absolutely do that. What is the thing you're most excited about right now, besides the travel that you've got on the go? Greta 32:26 I think personal growth. I feel like next year kind of has a lot in store for me been talking to loads of interesting people. I feel like this year, I've really, I'm on a good way of finding out what I want to dive into, like my professional life. And I'm very lucky to be surrounded by so many great people also professionally, who are so willing to help me get there. I'm very excited to learn and grow. And I think that's what next year has in store for me. And it makes me very excited. Tim 33:00 I don't want to put any pressure on you. But if you begin to post both your travels and some of this on your Instagram, I am eager to follow along. Don't make it become all-encompassing or ruin your trip. But boy, I think any of us who are listening today would sure be interested to see what happens next. Greta, if you had one wish for our listeners today, what would it be? Greta 33:24 It's not as much as a wish as something I really learned in the past like two weeks. And it is that leadership can be finding something you really believe in and driving it forward. And if it is something you believe in, and you drive it forward, then others will follow. And I think that's the whole kind of thing that I learned that I made a change that I needed and others followed. And I've never kind of lost that. And that's what makes the whole thing so unique.
Tim 34:01 Absolutely. And that you're so stalwart in it. And so consistent. It's been a real pleasure to talk to you today. I hope people take from your story, everything that I'm taking from it because it is absolutely inspiring. And absolutely just a real honor to have you here. Greta 34:17 Thank you so much. It's been so great chatting to you. Tim 34:20 Let's make a plan that when you're back from your trip, and as life moves on, we do this again. Greta 34:27 Absolutely. I would love that. I hope by that time next year. I'm kinda you know, have new things to talk about.
Tim 34:36 Greta it's been absolutely my pleasure. We'll talk to you soon. Greta 34:38 Talk soon Tim, thank you.
Tim 34:45 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If like us you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership. Please give us a positive rating and review on Apple podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word to by sharing this with your friends, teams, and colleagues. Thanks again for listening. And be sure to tune in in two weeks' time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 07 Aug 2024 | Peter Root - Transforming Relationships with Fire, Forests, and Technology | 00:34:21 | |
Join Tim Sweet in an enlightening conversation with Peter Root, co-founder of Wildfire Robotics. They delve into the intersection of technology and wildfire management, emphasizing how a relationship-based approach can revolutionize traditional methods. Peter shares his journey from oil and gas drilling to creating a groundbreaking robotic snake designed to combat wildfires. This episode highlights the critical role of leadership in fostering innovation and building strong relationships with both technology and the environment. Peter Root discusses the importance of understanding and adapting to the changing nature of wildfires, influenced by climate change and human expansion. He explains how Wildfire Robotics' innovative technology offers a proactive and strategic solution to wildfire management. This episode offers leaders ways to cultivate valuable relationships and how to take your own adventure into real life. About Peter Root Peter Root is the co-founder of Wildfire Robotics, a company dedicated to innovating wildfire management through advanced robotics. An engineer by training, Peter moved to Alberta in 2013 and has since developed a passion for creating technologies that can significantly impact communities affected by wildfires. His work combines his love for the outdoors with his expertise in robotics, aiming to provide safer and more efficient fire management solutions. Resources discussed in this episode: -- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Peter Root | Wildfire Robotics: -- Transcript: Peter 00:01 You got to get to something of value as fast as you can. And so we did that, I think by design, which was actually very fulfilling as well, you know, as a sometimes impatient engineer, I love that we could get feedback on what we're building so quickly.
Tim 00:18 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you, my friend, are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. I'm Tim Sweet, welcome to the Sweet on Leadership podcast. This is episode 38. Tim 00:49 Hi, everybody, I hope you're having a great week. Joining me today is Peter Root. I am really excited to welcome Peter to the show today, Peter and I met a while back when he was part of Startup TNT here in Calgary. He's an all-around, pretty exciting guy with an exciting technology that he's bringing into the world. And I'm just so glad that he can come on the show today. And we can chew around some leadership ideas in the context of his experience and what he's going through right now. So, thank you very much for joining me, Peter.
Peter 01:21 Thank you very much for having me.
Tim 01:22 So, for the benefit of everybody that's listening, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and Wildfire Robotics?
Peter 01:29 Sure. So, I'm an engineer by training and I moved to Alberta in 2013. And I grew up on Vancouver Island. So, I have a passion for being outdoors, you know, those two places are, are quite good Mecca is for exploring the outdoors. And I didn't have a firm relationship with wildfires until about 2016. And I think a lot of people in Alberta, that was a pivotal year. And I had two friends who live there and they got the call to evacuate. And they had to leave within 15 minutes. And through before that time, I built sort of technologies in oil and gas drilling and a bunch of different areas and really grew passionate about building robotics, things that you can control to do novel things and to automate tasks or mechanized tasks that led me into this wildfire world. So, it really hits a lot of key passions of mine, which are being outdoors, robotics, and something that can give back to communities, you know, especially communities that have been affected by wildfires in the past.
Tim 02:24 So this would have been Fort Mac, back in the day, Fort McMurray. Massive fire in an entire city, for those of you that aren't aware. Northern Alberta was evacuated, there was a fair amount of destruction. And we realized just how hard it was to react in certain environments. And this is only increasing as we're seeing the effects of climate change and warming. And we seem to be on a trend right now. So, this is, you know, this is something that's in the news last year, it's going to be in the news this year, we're there. But I can imagine seeing your friends having to evacuate and seeing the human toll that made this foray into a brand new innovative technology possible for you. Tell us a little bit about the innovation that you brought, and how you would sort of conceptualize that?
Peter 03:16 Before I go there trying to do a startup is no easy task. And so you want to make sure that you're doing something that you care about. And something that has an impact. Doing something in wildfire is very meaningful, and can provide a lot of feedback in good and bad ways when you do it. So, it's a good place to be. So, the innovation actually comes from my co-founder and partner. His name is Allan Richardson. He was actually my boss before we joined together doing this. And he's innovated a lot in his career in different areas, but primarily in oil and gas drilling, which is directional drilling. So, you're trying to punch something through the earth and steer it where you need to go. And then you're distributing fluids or communication signals along the length of it to do various things. And if you can take that concept of putting together long, skinny things and going kilometres into the earth, just thinking about doing that on land. And instead of oil and gas things, you're moving water or retardant. And instead of fracking for fluids, you're spraying water strategically. So, you can stop the advance of a fire or you can mop up a fire or you can monitor the perimeter of a fire so that if things flare up again, you can address it. And the way that we get that thing that long conduit there is through a robotic so, we have a really long robotic snake and it can go long distances over rough terrain. And that can be you know, a kilometer, two kilometers, 10 kilometers. And then we can remotely control the distribution of water anywhere along its length. And so that's where the innovation came from. Really it was taking something that worked well in oil and gas drilling, said hey, can we leverage all of the knowledge and skills that we've accumulated and can we put it into something else and apply that something different? And it's a great place to start because you know certain elements of technology that will certainly work because you've seen it work before. But then you have new challenges, you know, especially the terrain that you're going through is quite challenging in a lot of these fire prone areas.
Tim 05:07 What we'll do is we'll put up a link to your site so that people can visit and take a look at exactly what this large robotic snake looks like, as it's crawling between trees and dragging hose behind it and these kinds of things. It is phenomenal. It's really, really interesting. And you and I talked a lot about first principles and the importance of those. And I'm hearing that now as you're going through sort of dissecting, well what hasn't been applied in a in a fire context, in a sense, right now. Can you tell us a little bit about how that thinking from yourself or from Allan was adopted as you seek to both develop this thing, but also then share it story and explain to people why it's different and how it overcomes some constraints that we've accepted for years?
Peter 05:59 Yeah, I want to back up to and talk about fire a little bit before I talk about that first principle. I think it's important. And you mentioned it a little bit after I mentioned Fort McMurray. But it does seem, you know, I think the general person can sort of observe that these fires have gone from something that I didn't know much about, to something that I hear about and smell and feel the effects of every year, or I know someone who was evacuated. And it seems like it was about 10 years ago, where that switch was flipped. It really changed everyone's perception. So, people started looking at it. And so did Allan and I. We really looked at, well, why are these fires happening the way they are now and what's different than before. And there's really three main factors. So, one of the factors is that we have over-suppressed fires, we have been so good at putting them out for about 100 years that we've exacerbated fuel accumulation, instead of letting fires do their natural and inevitable thing where they go and they are low-intensity fires, they burn just along the forest floor, but not the actual big trees, they reduced fuel loads, they actually, they actually provide some ecological benefit to certain types of species that has been curtailed by our efforts. The second thing is there are more things we care about where fires burnt, we have humans have expanded on the landscape at an enormous pace. Where do we want to live, we want to live in the forest we want to live where there's a nice view, we want to live in the mountains and those are all places that are fire-prone and need fire. And so now there are more things to protect when fires burn. So, if a fire does get out, there's a higher likelihood that it will interact with something we care about. And then the third thing is related to a shift into drier and hotter summers. There's about a three to six-week increase in the total length for fires to burn. And a big factor of that is that there's less water moisture in the air during the summer, you just increase the likelihood of a high fire weather severity. So, dry, high winds, those two things together, and then ignition events, both human-caused and natural. This just all leads to a fire environment, which is much more severe and unpredictable than before. And so then, unfortunately, it's only typically when you have approaching a crisis that people start to think outside the box and start to look for other areas where they may be able to improve what they're doing. So, if you're if you're doing a really good job at wildland firefighting for a long time, you may not think that you need to change. And certainly, I think that was the case for a long time, it was very well managed. But there's a collective opinion that we need to put more fire back in the landscape, not less. So, more low-intensity fire, more prescribed burns, more cultural burning and it is indeed true. There's a lot of studies supporting this. And so part of the paradigm shift for us that we're trying to both educate ourselves on but also educate is that we want to provide a very reliable separation means for fire containment, both for wildfires, manage fires, which are wildfires that are then allowed to go where they can, and prescribed fires and do that in a way that doesn't have much personnel overhead is low risk, has high reliability, and doesn't have a huge impact on the ecosystem. Because bulldozers certainly do you're clearing large swaths of land to remove fuel. And so we had to educate ourselves a lot about wildfire. But now it's like, hey, we have this new tool that can do a bunch of new things. And I think the trick for us was really just finding people who believed in us and what we were doing, and then working with them on the fire, to actually learn and develop and really get to a really strong solution.
Tim 09:34 What's really interesting about what you've just said there is this isn't just about reacting to the way things have always been. Your role in this or what you're becoming part of is a brand new approach to how we think about fire generally. So, what's really interesting is that the technology is not just about prevention, it's actually about helping us better manage the entire resource and what we're doing and that confluence between, you know, increased fuel load, drier conditions, and then our proximity to all of these things requires that we try a different approach, overall, not just in this one aspect of things. And so that different approach is going to require more nuance, more options, more flexibility, these kinds of things. And that's really what it sounds like you are beginning to provide. When I go back to that previous thought, when you think about entering this new era of relationship with fire, what then do you find is the most challenging aspect?
Peter 10:45 I really liked that you said relationship with fire because that's what it needs to be. It can't be fight the fire, it needs to be a relationship with a fire. So, good on you, and that's a great message for everyone thinking about fire generally, is it's going to be a relationship. And, you know, perhaps that's the word too, for us. It's the relationships that we are building and working on, that will allow us to be part of the solution. Because I firmly believe that there's no sort of Immaculate Conception of technology. You have an idea you might be on your way there. It's when you find someone who has expertise in that domain, and then they get interested, then you work together to go deploy it, you know, our objective is to deploy as many miles as possible, in as many different terrain conditions as possible, with as many different vegetations as possible, as many him fire behaviours as possible. Because only through all of that, well, we learned enough to be really good. And we are only allowed to do that once we build relationships with the people who do that for their livelihood. And the one other comment I had to this is that one of the challenges with fire, especially if you're doing a piece of equipment or method that has safety implications, as in this thing needs to be reliable to protect people's lives, which it does, your barrier to entry to try to go out and learn is a lot higher. And I think we've gotten over the hump with some key people and some key areas. But we would love to do that in more areas.
Tim 12:15 Right, so, have the chance to get out and prove the technology because people are going to be putting their trust in this thing, in a sense. If you look at a fire hydrant on the corner of your block, you know what that's there for. If you look at a smoke detector, you know what that's there for people have a relationship with these things. Albeit crisis-based, right? So, it seems to me that there's a couple of different facets then that you're having to enter on. One is augmenting people's, as we say, relationship with fire or their conceptualization of that, but it's not just reactionary, this needs to change. So, then they see the reason why this new technology has a place. And then the second thing is to get out there and actually see it, or see the difference it's making and see that that technology is learning and evolving as it will because it's brand new so that then they can see the obvious application for it in their own minds, and say, Okay, now this makes sense. I understand why we would use something like this, I understand why we may use it as part of a controlled burn program or something along those lines. And I know what it does for me, I know why it's there. I know what I'm getting from it. I get enamored by the technology itself, and just how many rules it breaks. In a sense, you know what I mean? Like, well, literally, you know, you think about what a firefighting response or a fire control response looks like right now we think about big trucks, we think about planes dropping water, or people rappelling out of helicopters, and using shovels and doing all these kinds of things. And this is a completely different animal in a way, it's a totally different idea around an approach. And when we have those brand new ideas, getting people to open the door is challenging. So, when you look ahead from that perspective, you had mentioned that you've got some good key relationships in place and those are happening. Managing a company or yourself and your partner Allan going forward. The experience of having to bring that to market, tell us a little bit about your actual experience like how has that changed you? What has it changed in the way that you approach people or problems or say from your your oil and gas days? What's been the net learning?
Peter 14:42 I think then if I can sum it up in a sentence, then I'll expand on it is sort of ruthlessly pursuing the thing of value. So, that means finding the thing of value and then making the thing of value. And my example of that is we picked up a prototype size for a first version and everyone has to do this, say, well how, you know, how capable is this thing going to be. And I do think we made the right decision. But we made it pretty small, pretty low capacity. But what that allowed us to do was we could design things and manufacture them and by manufacture, I mean, we built them within days, or fractions of days or weeks, not months, or years. And when you're building hardware, that's really critical. So, there were circumstances where we had designed something up, and we were looking at all the components that we need to do that. And one of the things took a week and we said, no, we're going to redesign so it takes a day to get here. And that was cool because that has shortcutted learnings probably by an order of magnitude. And I don't think we would have actually had a prototype that was compelling enough if we hadn't designed it in that way, like designed by lead time. At least right now. I think there's points in the future where then you can shift that to a bit more optimization, but there's no point optimizing too much right now. When you're running a startup, you have a runway. You have a limited time to get from this point in time, we just said, Yeah, I'm going to do this thing, to where you have a line of sight on either funding or revenue. We've talked about it before, about hardware being a little bit of a different animal than software, because for whatever reason, people tend to need to see the hardware working to believe it. And I think there's a lot of faith in software right now that it can do these amazing things, which you can. I mean, AI has been pretty wonderful to work with, for some things for a lot of people. And it looks like magic, really. But it seems like there's disbelief in hardware until you actually have it. So, you have to hedge your bets a little bit, go out there with something you believe in and then try to massage from there. And so that's, that's a little bit harder. And so for me that the biggest learning difference from an oil and gas environmental, though there are similar things there. But it was just, you know, you got to get to something of value as fast as you can. And so we did that, I think by design, which was actually very fulfilling as well, you know, as a sometimes impatient engineer, I love that we could get feedback on what we're building so quickly.
Tim 17:10 I mean, I think we are at this really interesting intersect right now of people's tolerance for risk, it actually being fairly low, and people's patience, and that also being fairly low. And we talk about collectively as a society that people's attention spans are limited. But what I'm hearing and what I see is that, you know, back in the day before we had AI, and we had a lot of virtual products and things that would exist on your phone, but you could install an app, and you could uninstall it as quickly as you would otherwise. And there's very few things that we are on this huge adoption curve, but many of them are not going to impact us in some major way. And so you know, it looks good on paper is fine, unless, it's the difference between your house burning down and not. And so I remember years ago working with some leaders from General Dynamics who were in a defence contract, and they were developing a walkie-talkie, like, this is old technology, it took them years to bring it over. But I remember talking to them about the design specs for this handheld radio that troops would be using. And one of them said, it all looks good on paper but can the thing drive a tense spike into the ground? I said, that's interesting. Tell me about that. He says, Well, we have to plan for as many contingencies as we can and we have to also understand that if it's in somebody's hand, and it can be used as a device to hammer in a tent spike, we have to make sure that it's not going to fall apart. Is it going to pass a field test because that's what's going to determine whether or not the troops will actually accept this thing and whether or not it will be reliable or not. I did a lot of military history in my early days, and there was a lot of lessons that come out of when privateers are promising big things from implements of war. I remember one was called the McCallum shovel and it was this Canadian design where the designer of this trench shovel had the brilliant idea of it being a doubling as a piece of armour that they could pick up over the edge of the trenches with. And so he put a hole with a door right in the middle of the shovel. The thing wasn't thick enough to stop a bullet. So, it wasn't good as a piece of armor and it was a shovel with a big hole in it. So, it didn't do a great job of digging either. And, you know, it's again, one of those things. It's like looks good on paper. But you don't want to be the guinea pig, trialing it you want to see it work. And so that practical application that going and seeing how this thing responds to the world and how people develop a relationship with it is really important. The other thing that I thought was really profound about what you said was that there's no point optimizing right now. We're taking this piece at a time, you're taking a modular approach, we call this theory of constraints all the time, you know, exploit the thing that is the bottleneck or the thing that's holding you back. And I'm reminded of an expert that I talked to around the formation of habits. And he said, you know, when we're trying to get a person to adopt a new lifestyle/principle of going to the gym, you don't judge the person on whether or not they went to the gym and had an optimized workout, first. You first lay in, can they get up in the morning, even if they drive to the gym, turn around and go home, that's better than if they didn't go at all. Because we have to first work at being less than optimal. You have to develop the habit before you get good at it. So, go in and risk it being you know, the technology is a little bit different, but focus on what matters first, and then work in the optimization. Because if you go for perfect, originally, what do they say, it's always that perfection is the is the enemy of progress, right? We want to focus on getting it done in a virtual space. So, I think those are two really important things, right is that, as you say, get off paper, get out of the virtual world, and then go where the work is done or go see it work. Build that relationship while in development, but then also a relationship with the people observing it. And then focus on what you need to. On that virtual point, though, let me ask you that. When you are out looking for funding, or in the context you and I met, you were up against software, right? Do you see that? That people's relationships with an innovative, durable object versus software is very different? Do you see that the, be it investors or potential customers, have a different kind of relationship with it? Or am I imagining that?
Peter 21:58 No, you're spot on. Very different relationships from most people I meet actually between the two. And I think, especially so because what we're building is more akin to almost military hardware, then sort of other types of hardware that are built like drone-based things, or Agtech or something like that, because they have this sort of human life aspect of it. So, it adds another layer of complexity and difficulty to the hardware equation. But certainly, you know, I'll admit there's more overhead for making a piece of hardware than there is a piece of software. I do believe there's more upkeep on some software because you have to constantly be, you know, making sure it integrates with all the new implementations of all sorts of different codes, that's made its way to hardware now too, because you're constantly updating software, look at modern EVs, or modern cars, they have updates over the air. So, you're constantly updating and keeping alive that piece of software. But I think though, what hardware offers which software doesn't, which investors do understand, but they want to see you a little bit further along until they sort of recognize this as something to celebrate. But the protective moat is much larger, the barrier to entry to build a wildfire-fighting robot is very high. Because not only do you need to know a bit about fire and a lot about robotics, you have to have the connections and someone that believes in you to actually get out there on the fire and learn the right things. That is no small thing to go do. But if you do it and you do it successfully, then you have built very durable relationships in that space that then lend themselves to a very durable business. So, I think you have to be a bit more patient with hardware. But know that I think that the potential benefit of that thing can bring, and the sustainable business that I can create are quite compelling.
Tim 23:51 We talked about innovation, and I'm starting to see this business that you're involved in, in the technology, you're trying to bring in a very different lens, just through the course of this conversation. You know, when we think about, when we think about a lot of software, or you know, the adoption of marketplaces or new ways that we're going to interact with our phone or manage our phonebook or whatever, you know, whatever. Like, these things are all faster pencils, in many ways. They're things we already do and it's convenience. You're involved, if we strip everything else away, you're involved in creating something that in 100 years could be as ubiquitous in a forest as a firefighting plane or a pump truck or shovel. Like we're talking about something that would be part of the landscape in the way that the automobile became part of the landscape. Right? Sure there's been lots of innovations, but there was the first automobile that people were like horseless carriage, what the hell, right? Like this is something that A. again, I'm a practical guy. I think practically this thing makes all sorts of sense. And so it's like, why didn't this exist before? So, that's like one of the things on my, you know, get good at making it. But why wouldn't you do this? Right? If you can have a Roomba, you can certainly have a self-directed hose that's gonna put itself somewhere. I mean, hey, you know, you could even have small-scale stuff that waters lawns, I don't know. But why wouldn't you do this? Because it just seems so logical when you're talking about firebreaks. They're big, and they're long. And well, great. Let's do this. And so that creating something, though, that's that profound. And as you say, you're taking a huge chunk, you got to know a lot about fires, and you got to know a lot about robotics, and you've got to have the relationships in place to do it. And you're disrupting, in a great way, how people think about this other option that makes a ton of sense. But man, what a lift, like it's not. It's not like it's not like say, hey, you know, you want a better way to whip eggs. It's not, it is a huge lift. And I think it's a great lift. You know, talk about gumption man. So, I mean, I hope for the people listening that they can get a sense of, and I can't wait till all of you listening, get a chance to see this thing, videos and whatnot, because it is cool. Let's talk a little bit then as we sort of head towards our wrap-up here. If you were to think of the well, so I mean, one of the takeaways is that relationships here are key, right? Getting into the right spaces, and then not just opening up business but opening minds is such a huge piece here. So, first of all, what would something that wildfire robotics is, is on the cusp of right now that you'd like people to be aware of? Or how would you like them to spread the word? What's something that you would like people to shout from the rooftops?
Peter 27:01 Well, we're about to do a bunch of work with Alberta wildfire. And this means taking our team and our alpha prototype, and eventually our next version out to real fires, and interacting with them and the people there in a real way. And that, to me, is the most exciting part of running the business. This is where I wanted to be like, you know, three years ago, but I'm finally here. And this is where I think the relationships get solidified. You know, we've built the beginning up, but this is where we show them that, hey, we can come, we'll bring our thing, and then we'll improve it next time we're out here. And we're going to do that until it's something of such extreme value that you'll never kick us off again like that's where we want to get to. And we're at the beginning stages of this. And we're also in an environment now where it's really fun. Like, there's nothing more fun to me, than going out to a wild area with a bunch of hardworking people who have been containing and interacting with a wildfire, which is such an extreme event and such an admirable profession, to be around those people and then to be able to bring them something new, and work collectively to build it. What's more fun than that? So, I'm really excited about that portion of it. And you know, we are still looking for people to help out on this. So you know, if this is something of interest, like, come talk to me, there's lots of fun things to do in wildfire.
Tim 28:18 I think what I want us to follow up on but when you say that, I would say you've got a story developing here, you've got a hero's quest developing here. This is an adventure that you're on, you're going to have several destinations, all of these different things that are happening. And if people want to follow along with your story, where's the best place to do that right now? And would that be something that you'd be interested in people getting more in touch with?
Peter 28:47 Yeah, and so I don't think I've done a good enough job at that yet. But with these trials, I will be sharing information, right now I do that on LinkedIn, through myself. I don't do that through our company, webpage there. But maybe I'll look to other means to share this because it is something that I think a lot of people care about.
Tim 29:07 I think so many people are going to care about this. And so, Peter, I think as we move forward when that story starts to flesh out, and I want to have you back, I want us to talk about that. About getting people into your story, get them following along and all of those things because it is that relationship that we need to think about. We'll put your deets down in the in the show notes. So they can reach out to you on LinkedIn. If they're just listening today. What's your handle on LinkedIn?
Peter 29:36 It's something complicated but look up Peter Root Wildfire Robotics.
Tim 29:39 They'll find it alright. We'll have all these in the show notes. If I was to ask you what's one wish that you have for the people listening today? What would it be?
Peter 29:48 Take your own journey. It's a lot of fun, very humbling. You learn a lot. It's sobering in all the right ways. So yeah, take your own adventure.
Tim 29:58 Awesome. Take your own adventure and do it in real life.
Peter 30:01 Yeah. Do it in real life.
Tim 30:02 Yeah, no kidding. Right on. Alright, little tradition here that we do at the end of every show. One is I'm going to ask you a question that comes from our previous guests. In this case, it was Jeff, he was asking, and this is directed at you, and then we can talk a little bit about how a person arrives there. But what do you want your leadership legacy to be? When you think, far off into the future? People are thinking about you and what you accomplished, and how you did it. What do you want people to be saying?
Peter 30:31 Sustainable leadership, just in the sense that you got to be making a whole bunch of decisions on things that you may not have any experience with. And that's very taxing. And then you also you're innovating, you're coming up with new things. And there's an expectation, I think that generally, you do that at the cadence of sort of pure output work, like just something that you need to be at 100% all the time. And that's really not realistic. If you really think about your best innovations or your best work in life, it's ebb and flow, there's periods of high productivity, followed by recovery. And I think I want to make the people who have worked with me, and will work with me in the future to know that that's what I believe in, so that they can lead a more fulfilling life, because I think if we just grind all the time, we grind ourselves down. And so I think there's more productivity to be seen, if you accept this natural flow of high productivity and rest periods, while still working. But just just know that, like, you know, there's gonna be super intense periods, and we all got to be on but if we were on for the past year, Full Tilt, we won't be ready for that period. And I want to make sure that my teams know that and that other people take on the same thing.
Tim 31:46 I love that I can't wait to introduce you to the work of Richard Young, he's been on the show a couple of times, he works with Olympic athletes, and works with sustainable high performance, something that I've brought into my practice. But you know, one of the metaphors for that is training, like you would for a marathon. You're going to perform, you're gonna have these periods of performance where you're delivering. But then as you say, there's this recuperation. And then there's this conditioning and training and practice and learning new things and honing your craft. And then there's a period of performance where you deliver, and then getting comfortable with that cyclic nature of things. Right. Awesome. Love that. Peter, what would be a question you would have for the next guest? Keep in mind that this can be any type of person that we bring on who we feel has unique and sometimes eclectic leadership.
Peter 32:39 Well, you know, I think because the topic of our chat here has been really, a lot of it's been about relationships, I would ask them, how do they build trust in their business, both with the people who work for them, and their customers and their investors?
Tim 32:55 Awesome. I think that that is something that a lot of people would be very interested in answering. I will make sure that I pose that question to the next guest. And I'll put together some resources that I have that I think might be helpful for the people that are on that same quest. Peter Root, Wildfire Robotics, man, this one was a scorcher. It was fun. You are, you know, a lot of flame, not a lot of smoke. A lot of good stuff here. I really appreciate it and I hope you had fun.
Peter 33:28 I did. Likewise. Thank you very much. Tim 33:29 All right, can’t wait to have you back.
Tim 33:31 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter, you can find the link in the show notes. If like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership. Please give us a positive rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word too, by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening and be sure to tune in in two weeks time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 09 Aug 2023 | The impact of personal style on leadership with Melanie Potro | 00:21:50 | |
In this episode, host Tim Sweet invites Melanie Potro, a Business Stylist, to discuss the importance of personal style and its impact on leadership. Melanie helps leaders communicate effectively and develop a signature style that reflects their personal brand. They explore the significance of first impressions, the emergence of personal style in the post-pandemic era, and the differences in pursuing style for men, women and non-binary individuals. Melanie emphasizes the connection between authentic style and boosting confidence in leadership roles. Melanie highlights how a signature style can enhance a leader's communication and impact, making them more memorable and effective. The conversation explores the psychological aspects of first impressions and how authentic style can inspire confidence in others. Melanie explains that men and women approach personal style differently, with women often being more self-critical and aware of their perceived flaws. She stresses the importance of feeling at ease in one's clothes and using personal style as a tool for self-expression and authenticity. A key point discussed in the episode is the role of contrast in personal style. Melanie explains how understanding contrast can help individuals create a cohesive and empowering wardrobe that aligns with their personal values and goals. Tim and Melanie plan to have future episodes on two specific topics: how to save money when building a wardrobe with intent and the significance of contrast in personal branding and style. Don't miss out on the valuable insights and practical tips that Melanie Potro has to offer in future episodes. Whether you're a leader looking to enhance your personal brand or simply seeking to improve your style and confidence, Melanie's expertise will undoubtedly inspire and empower you. So mark your calendar and join us for the next episodes of "Sweet on Leadership." About Melanie Potro Melanie Potro is a Business Stylist who helps leaders develop a signature style that aligns with their personal brand and goals. With over 30 years of experience, she has worked with influential individuals in the UK and abroad, helping them improve their appearance and confidence as leaders. Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Melanie Potro | MP Business Styling:
Transcript Melanie 0:01 If you want to inspire other people, want to make sure that they feel that you're trustworthy, competent, and so on, then you need to look at your appearance, because that's the first thing they see. So that can be really the entrance ticket, the ticket to open the doors for the next step in your career, or to get the big client on board or to make a big sale. Tim 0:26 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you, my friend, are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. Welcome to the Sweet on Leadership podcast. So lucky to have you. This is episode 13. Tim 1:00 Hi, everybody, I've got a real treat for you today. This is going to be something that's a little bit out of the ordinary because we're not just going to be talking about leaders, we're going to be talking about leadership brand. And joining me today is Melanie Potro, and she's a good friend of mine, she's helped me personally. And she's an amazing stylist, who is dressing some of the most influential people in the UK and abroad. And Melanie, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. Melanie 1:28 Thank you for inviting me, I'm really thrilled to be here. Tim 1:31 Well, I think you've got so much to offer. And I'm more than happy to introduce you to people on this side of the pond. I know you have North American clients, but I hope more people learn about you and what you offer. Maybe we could just spend a moment and you could tell people how you arrived where you are, and why it's important work that you're doing. Melanie 1:54 Okay, well, I'm a Business Stylist and rather than a personal stylist, I address people in leadership positions to communicate more effectively, and to communicate with their personal brand in mind. So, I help them develop a signature style so that they are memorable. And they become more effective leaders, people who are inspired by them through their leadership as well. And so to make their voice carry further, yeah, so. Tim 2:25 I think that's such an interesting point. And when we first met, as you know, I used to be a chef. And I was in charge of the very first dishes that anyone would have coming into the restaurant. And often, I was also doing the last dishes they would see. But then we always had that saying that the eyes feast first. And people are going to make so many decisions about who you are and what you stand for in the first 20 seconds that we see you before you've even opened your mouth. Melanie 2:53 Exactly. I mean, some people even say it's only seven seconds, some people say it’s twenty seconds, it doesn't matter, really, but first impressions count. Tim 3:01 It’s less than a minute? Melanie 3:03 Yeah. And you do it every day yourself, you know, whether it's in the tube, which you call underground, you know, you look at the people standing opposite you, you make assumptions, are they wealthy, are they religious, you know, like what kind of profession do they have, and so on. And you do that, obviously, as well in a professional situation. So, if you want to inspire other people, and want to make sure that they feel that you're trustworthy, competent, and so on, and you feel that you don't carry that across at the moment, then you need to look at your appearance because that's the first thing they see. So, that can be really the entrance ticket, the ticket to open the doors for the next step in your career, or to get the big client on board or to make a big sale. Tim 3:50 When we think about making those sales, it's often about trust and consistency. I was talking to somebody yesterday just about how their behaviours and their words in those little moments consistently needed to follow what they've stated as their purpose and their mission and what's important to them as leaders so that people can see that consistency. We can extend that to their image and how they show up visually, right, that has to be consistent with what they're saying. Melanie 4:19 Yes, exactly. The way I work with my clients is I develop a signature style because that will give them also other people the idea that they get to know them, they can recognize them the second time they see them. They say okay, I've seen this one before this builds trust that someone like this recognition and build a personal brand based on their personal values, their goals and their role. And this is really going in deep because we're starting rather than just looking at you know what style of clothes flatter you and what colours look nice, we are looking at the whole persona like and 360-degree version of you, and in which capacity you're working. So, that's the most important one. And we're looking at the goals of the person who wants to develop a signature style. So, we're looking at why do you want to do this? You know, what's not working at the moment? So, who do you want to dress? Who is your audience? Where do you want to carry your voice further? Who do you want to attract? And in which situations and in which environment do you work? You know, so you work from home, you go to offices, do you see people at business lunches, these are all different situations. So, you need to adapt to that. Tim 5:37 And it is something that warrants for me, it was a very enjoyable, introspective. And I'm still learning, by the way. So, I mean, you're still helping me, we're still working it out in a way. I'm not the easiest client. But the practice is very enjoyable. And, you know, I'm sure we've got lots to learn about this. And I do think it's going to extend over more than one conversation. So, we won't try to fit everything in today. Plus, I think we've got to give people a chance to, like you have a lot to teach over your course and just with your social media shares and whatnot, so that people should really connect you and learn a little bit more. I am going to have you back, though. But I was hoping that for today, one of the major things I'd like to cover is why is personal style emerging again, now that we've come through the pandemic, and things are normalizing? I'm really getting a sense that the cycle has now shifted, and we're starting to get more rigorous around our attention to style. Would you say you're seeing the same thing? Melanie 6:43 Yes, I see the same thing, but in a different way than before the pandemic. So, I mean, as you said, the trend was in general, going more casual. If you look back 15 - 20 years, when I worked myself in investment banking, for Goldman Sachs, they were dress codes. And if you didn't adhere, you would be put to the side and told off and said, like, you know, the next time you need to come in, you know, and dress appropriately or do something and this was really enforced. And in the past 10 years, this has really changed a lot, especially for women as well, who were a lot more allowed to come in different styles, other than just a suit. You know, that could bring in more colours, more personality, and so on. And then we had COVID and everything became very casual. People started wearing tracksuit bottoms, and T-shirts. But now that everyone is coming back, and the economies are going into full swing again, even though it's not that rosy here in the UK at the moment. But we're all going back into the offices and a lot of people and also companies are rebranding, as you said yourself, you know, they're redefining their purpose. Some purposes and goals shifted as well because people got a different outlook on life. There's a lot more thought about sustainability and you know, showing up with your personal values in mind, and you want to communicate that, you just don't want to look like everyone else. You want to make sure that you stand out from the crowd and show up in a way that people understand that you are different, you know, like that. You are like standing out from the crowd Tim 8:23 And that it's you, right? Melanie 8:25 Yeah. Because yeah, that is very authentic. Yeah. Tim 8:28 In an episode that's going to precede this, I was talking to Claire Davis. And we were talking about how representing yourself as a leader, or when you're in the middle of a job search has really become about letting the humanity shine through, not just what your qualifications are. And in Episodes 11, and 5, I talked to Paul Farmer, who's a friend of mine down in Brisbane, Australia, and he focuses on the feelings that we need to go after in terms of success, personally. And so thinking about those two conversations, and now what you're saying. Would it be incorrect to say that 12 - 15 years ago, it was really the mandated fashion of the institution or of the team that you are on? And I mean, 10 - 12 years ago, I was wearing suits and cufflinks and tailored shirts, right? That was the how our team dressed. We dressed like that on purpose. And we enjoyed dressing like that because it meant we were, we were all about the job and getting it done. And we were showing up very intentionally to anything we did. We were a high-performing team, and we were gonna let people know it. And that was though largely company side. And so now we're ramping up again in terms of people being more intentional about how they're looking, but it's much more personal now. It's more about being authentic and saying this is who I am and that is an extension, not of your profession, but of yourself and how you're showing up. So, would that be the right? Melanie 10:04 Yeah, that's correct. I mean, you really, you still have dress codes, even though they're not like official or not always so conservative, which you used to think about best posts. So if you go for example, into the conservative industry, you still see a lot more suits, you see a lot more blue and navy and black, a neutral colours. And if you go into a creative industry, such as marketing, or even architects, so you see a lot more casual clothes, and people dress in more colours and textures are different as well. These are also dress codes, but overall, you have the brand as the red thread in, you know, maybe a company's style, but everyone has some scope, to interpret that, to show up with their own personal brand. And especially as a leader, you are at the forefront, you know, you want to really show up and give a bit of way of your personality. Tim 11:03 Yeah, make it a window. Melanie 11:05 So, you take something that's really personal to you, and you show up with that. And the better you know yourself, what suits you, but what connects with you, you know, everyone has a favourite color, you know, even if it's from your childhood, there's something that connects with you. If you bring that in, that makes you also more approachable, more authentic. Tim 11:25 Confidence is such a huge deal for people that if you are dressed in a way that feels like you and shows yourself, then I think it can be a road to confidence as well, if you've planned it out, and you've taken that time and treat it almost as self-care and preparation. I remember that this is a slightly different context, but early on in my career as a regional manager, I was running a safety initiative. And we had a lot of head lacerations. So I brought in this factory I brought in mandatory bump caps, they're not quite hard hats, they're just things that protect people's heads in case they stand up underneath a belt or something. But it was the act of putting on the uniform or when I was a chef tying my knot because I was a classical chef. So, we would wear neckerchiefs, with a formal, intentional knot tied in them that was sort of a symbol. And you were putting on a uniform and kind of readying yourself for the day. It was an extension of getting ready. And even if you're tailoring that to your own needs, it's kind of a reminder of you're putting that time into yourself and so maybe that can lead me to a different question. And that is I think that's always been or perhaps more commonly been the case for women. I know from my experience, from my wife that she would always spend a lot more time getting ready for something that I would. But what is the difference in that pursuit of style and individual style? How might it be different for women or men, or non-binary people and anyone in between? What would be some of the differences that you see? Melanie 13:03 I have obviously primarily worked with women over the past 30 years. I've made a lot of made-to-measure clothes, and also work in bridal couture, as we just talked about. And one thing I really noticed with women is they are a lot more self-critical and self-aware about their bodies and their flaws, or perceived flaws. And as such, going down to find a style that is really authentic and that boosts the confidence has a really great impact. So, if you feel we always think it's like you're feeling at home, you know, like when you feel at home in your clothes, you know, you feel empowered, you know, you feel you can do anything you want. If you’re at ease, you move around and, you know, that is the one thing that I would like to achieve. And with men, I've also worked with men a lot and especially lawyers or people in more conservative industries, and a lot more pragmatic, you know, they say, Okay, I need to style that works, that connects me with people because this or this or this doesn't work or I can improve, but they don't reflect so negatively on themselves. You know, like if, whether they're tall or small or overweight or not, you know, like any of these things, it doesn't matter. They just like put it on and they're happy to get advice. And with women, it's a lot more they're a lot more layers to it, like with regards to their body image as well as getting advice and taking advice, you know, like fold in itself because you're competent by should you take this and there's a lot more of this whole critical thinking going on when you style women. So, I always like to think though it's like taking someone by the hand and you know, giving them the room to explore and leading them towards what is really in them. You know, just opening up that door, opportunities as well. So. Tim 15:01 I really love that thought about feeling at home, and almost taking care of that fear or that part of the equation. So, we can move past it during the day and focus on what's underneath a little bit, and say, Okay, I've got the outside sorted. Now let's spend a little time getting the inside sorted and make sure that my inside self is ready for the game. So, I mean, it really is part of the whole package. And I like the idea, just a feeling together. I'd say that's the single most important for me personally, is that I have a lot of things that are together in my life, and I have some other things that sort of fall by the wayside. And it's really about taking that time to make sure that, you know, if I'm inspiring confidence in others, I better not look like I'm not, at least mostly started. Melanie 15:53 Exactly, yeah. If you look put together, people will assume that you got your stuff together. Tim 15:59 Yeah, they can assume. Melanie 16:02 Well know, that you know what you’re doing, you know, but if you look like someone puts their clothes on in a random way, you know, like, you know, well, that, you know. Oh my gosh, who is that person? So, that might be super competent. But you first assume otherwise, you know, someone looks sharp. You know, I was like, with men, I always like to look at Obama. He had like, the signature style, he looked always sharp, but he didn't always look the same. Obviously, always, most of the times he wore suits, you know, we know, we know that. But he would address the young audience, he wouldn't wear a blazer, he would put up the sleeves, you know. Tim 16:39 Wear a sweater, yeah. Melanie 16:41 Yeah, or sweater and address the audience, you know, in a more conservative setting, he had his suit on, but he looked always sharp, you know, so sharp. And that's something obviously that you can get also through made-to-measure, but it was also suitable for his job for his role, you know, inspired confidence. You have different roles, and you require different kind of attire. So. Tim 17:05 Absolutely. So, I think just to sum up where we've come today, you know, really, we've had a chance to hear a little bit more about you, we've also been sort of exploring around just how important it is, and how worthwhile it is for the self, to spend a little bit of time in this space, and to really dress the way you deserve, I think, as a leader. You've talked to us about and reminded us how important it is to be visually balanced with what you're trying to convey, and that it can really help amplify yourself and your message. And I think we've also sort of covered that the time is now. It's going to begin to ramp up and these are skills that people can learn. And I think when I have you back, I really, as I said, I'm going to have you back, there's a couple of points I just want to earmark that people could get interested in. One is that when figuring the wardrobe and the style out, you can actually save a lot of money, at the beginning, by going out and buying with intent at something that you've shown me. Melanie 18:07 Exactly, you can put together a capsule wardrobe, you know, like all pieces are fitting together. Tim 18:13 Fitting together. If people are scared about this, there's actually there's a light at the end of the tunnel, because it helps you in making your life actually lower stress and helping you feel at home every day. And the other thing that I want maybe as a separate conversation, one of your services or one of your, I would even say one of your kind of gifts that you showed me, was really talking about, both from a wardrobe perspective or a colour palette perspective, you talked about the importance of contrast. And this is something that was absolutely game-changing for me, or at least was such a surprise to hear about. And I remember I've shared it with a bunch of people and they think it's just one of the neatest things. Both it's important to understand as a skill when purchasing clothes and dressing. But also just sort of as a metaphor, understanding how you show up, the degree of contrast you have as part of your brand, and how to leverage that either your contrast is really staccato and different, you know, high contrast, or maybe you have a much more subtle style. And so I want to have the contrast conversation with you. And I– Melanie 19:21 Yeah, definitely you also just can, you can look at nature. And you can see what a contrast does to us, you know, the warning signals and you know, anything that's toxic, and anything that's pleasing for the mind, even the flower bouquets and anything that just, well when you see someone, so that's really where you relate to your own contrast levels. And we talked about that as well. I know so because that's so important as well, like whether you have a strong contrast within yourself or not. Tim 19:50 So, we're going to book those two dates pretty quickly. All right, Melanie, I just want to say again, thank you so much for joining us. I'm going to make sure that we have links for you in the show notes, but very quickly, where can people find you if they want to search you out? Melanie 20:05 So, they can find me on LinkedIn, Melanie Potro and my Instagram as well, mpbusinessstyling. And so that's the easiest way to get in touch with me. Tim 20:15 And one of the ways they can start working with you is through your course correct? Melanie 20:20 Yes, I do offer a six-week signature-style course, for leaders. And well the outcome is really that you have a capsule wardrobe that is fit for purpose, and that really suits your personality, your role, and your finger clicks on all that. Tim 20:38 So, you've made that really accessible and yeah, easy for people to get into. Melanie 20:42 Yeah, a really empowering wardrobe that is a game-changer for your career. Tim 20:47 Awesome. Well, we'll have some contact information for that as well in the show notes. Okay. Melanie Potro, thank you so much for joining me today. And we'll see you again real soon. Melanie 20:57 You're very welcome. And thank you for inviting me. Tim 20:59 All right. See you, Mel. Melanie 21:01 See you. Tim 21:04 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership. Please give us positive rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word too, by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening. And be sure to tune in in two weeks' time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 06 Sep 2023 | Avoiding Burnout through Authentic Leadership with Tracey Borreson | 00:44:34 | |
In this engaging episode of the Sweet on Leadership podcast, Tim Sweet interviews Tracy Borreson, an entrepreneur and advocate for authentic leaders. Tracy shares her insights into what it means to be authentic, how to avoid taking servant leadership too far, and how to build team dynamics. She highlights the importance of self-awareness and balancing leadership responsibilities to avoid burnout. If you're an entrepreneur who feels like you're juggling all the things alone, this episode is for you! The conversation explores the concept of authenticity as being true to oneself and fostering honest communication. The episode emphasizes the need for leaders to prioritize self-care, create a high-performance culture, and encourage team members' involvement in solving problems. Tracy also introduces her upcoming conversation series, "Crazy, Stupid Marketing," where she tackles marketing misconceptions with a panel of experts. Listeners gain valuable insights into authentic leadership, team engagement, and effective marketing strategies. About Tracy Borreson Tracy Borreson is an entrepreneur and authenticity advocate known for her commitment to creating awareness around true authenticity. As a mompreneur, Tracy's journey has been driven by her passion for aligning experiences with personal values and unique contributions. Her work focuses on challenging conventional notions of authenticity and encouraging individuals to be honest with themselves and others. Tracy's insights are grounded in her experiences in corporate marketing and leadership roles. Resources discussed in this episode: -- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Tracy Borreson | TLB Coaching & Events: -- Transcript: Tracy 00:00 It comes down to an awareness like what am I doing? Is it actually having the impact that I'm trying to create? And if the impact is more important than the things that I'm doing, it creates space for me to look at new things I could do that could also serve us. Let yourself be part of the we. What could we do to serve us?
Tim 00:26 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you my friend, are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. Welcome to the Sweet on Leadership Podcast. This is episode 15.
Tim 01:01 Welcome back to the Sweet on Leadership Podcast. Today I'm truly thrilled to be speaking to my colleague and friend Tracy Borreson with her passion for authenticity that fuels both professional and personal journeys. Tracy's commitment to lighting personal brands on fire has inspired many, including myself. Today, we're going to be digging deep on the essence of authenticity. So, join us for a conversation that will challenge, encourage and inspire you to consider how you show up. Knowing this will help you make a real connection between authenticity, leadership, trust, and your personal brand. So, stay tuned as this conversation can be the difference in your next professional relationship. Without any further ado, here's my conversation with Tracy. Tim 01:45 Welcome back, everybody. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. I'm joined today by my good friend and longtime colleague now because we've been at this we're working on something always for about three years now. Tracy Borreson Tracy, why don't you introduce yourself to the people so they know who you are. I know who you are. But I want you to introduce yourself, please.
Tracy 02:07 Hello, Tim's people. I am Tracy Borreson. And also, if you are Tim's people that you are my people. We are each other's people. What are the important things to know about me? First and foremost, I am a mom, I became an entrepreneur because I wanted to spend more time with my son. So, I identify as a mompreneur very fondly, I am all about authenticity. And so I think there's many places in the world where authenticity is a buzzword, but we don't really know what that means. And if we don't know what it means for us, then things can't be authentic. And so one of my big goals is to try and create some more awareness onto what authenticity actually is, instead of what people want to tell us, it should look like and create our experience, whether that is a career experience, a home experience, a community experience, life experience that is aligned with the things that we want to do, or that we can uniquely contribute, instead of what people tell us we should. And if you've listened to Tim Show, I, I've heard I know, you've all heard his opinion on shoulds, so that's probably why we hang out.
Tim 03:17 Don't should all over yourself. I won't go into it. But there you go. Don't do it. If you're gonna stop listening, stop listening now.
Tracy 03:26 We’re not gonna tell you, what you should do is but–
Tim 03:27 No, we're not. No, no way, Jose. So, before we hit record, here, we were talking about authenticity, we're also talking about servant leadership. And we're talking about how an immature understanding of those terms and a failure to grasp the nuance of both of those terms can get a person into trouble. And so that's, you know, that's really where we're going to focus, our exploration here, at least I'm hoping it's such an important thing to grasp, and they have their place. And they're not negative things, unless like anything else. We don't appreciate how to roll them out and deploy them properly. And so today, we're going to be talking about authenticity. We're going to be getting Tracy's thoughts on that. And we're going to be chewing it around from the perspective of a leader of people, and where servant leadership and authenticity can sometimes form a toxic stew, and how we can make sure that that's not in our bowl, but like anything, it's always good to have a little bit of both. So, when we were gearing up for this, I really loved your point, which I'll ask you to sort of expand on as we get going here, around what happens when a person is overdoing the whole servant leadership thing in your experience.
Tracy 04:46 Well, I mean, simply burnout. So, things and lots of things get burnt out. So, I know we all know the whole put your oxygen mask on before you put someone else's oxygen mask on, and we seem to be able to do that on a plane. When it comes to servant leadership, this most of the time isn't what we are doing. We are prioritizing other people’s oxygen masks first. And it's not bad to care about another person's oxygen mask. Tim 05:16 No, not at all. Tracy 05:17 It is dangerous to care about everyone else's oxygen mask on top of yours. And so when I see servant leader, what usually I see is that the leader ends up feeling, I'll use a descriptor I have used for myself, previously, that your entire team is living on a beach, an island beach, and they've got all the drinks and all the sunshine, and round that island is a stone wall. And the leader is running around the stone wall, fighting off dragons, stopping the dragons from getting at the people. And the people's experiences this one of like calm, relaxed, productive, right? All the good emotions we associate with work. And the leader's experience is overwhelm, stress, aloneness, right, like they're not part of what they're creating for other people. And that is not sustainable. It's not sustainable from a human perspective, feeling alone, feeling exhausted, feeling like you're the only person putting up the good fight. I'll be honest with you, I lasted eight years, and I thought that was pretty good. Until I was like, No, I can't, because one, my team isn't learning how to fight dragons. And so not really helping them in their life, in their career, by protecting them from all these dragons, they are eventually going to have to experience. So, I'm not really helping them. And I'm not part of the team, I am overly exhausting myself. I go home, and I'm stressed at home because I've been stressed all day, which is not unusual. And this isn't sustainable, right? It's just not sustainable. And I know, we still focus on that narrative of servant leadership, I think we need to work on like a hybrid for talking about like hybrid work environments, we need to talk about a hybrid leadership model where yes, I am here as a leader to care for the people and to take care of the people. And like you said, before we went live, you can't do that I can't give you something if my cup is empty, I have nothing to give.
Tim 07:36 It's funny because a servant mindset, it's really interesting to me. And it is one of the key areas where I find burnout, as you've said. Where we find poor utilization of capacity. And in many cases, while the leader is running around the wall, fighting off the dragons, and refilling the Mai Thais at the same time. People are disconnected from the work and often bored, and often not really engaged in the work anyway. And it's like this helicopter parenting for leaders, where we go through and we make everything safe to the point where it's no longer an engaging existence. A few episodes back, Richard Young was a guest. And he pointed out that when we look at the Olympic teams, and the rest of it, lives without stress, are not fulfilling, they're not balanced at all, we need a certain amount of creative anxiety, we need a certain amount, even adversity to face if we're going to feel like we're truly part of something. And often leaders relegate themselves to the protector role. But you know, there's that saying that says, you know, don't just stand there, do something. Well, sometimes it's don't just do something, stand there. And so we have to think that every once in a while you need to let people swim. But then that can get us into just as much trouble. And so, you know, when we think about this all-or-nothing leadership relationship, either you're a servant leadership, that would imply that if you're not that you're well, what are you, you're vampiric leadership, or something. The truth is, it's got to be somewhere in between. But what I found is it's always easier for people to serve others and leave themselves underserved. We often don't value ourselves enough that we want to invest in ourselves and do some of the tough stuff for us. We would rather serve others all the time because you know what, they're worth it at a certain point.
Tracy 09:35 This reminds me of a really good friend of mine, Carlson Watkins. I, him and I used to do a show called Authentic Leadership. And I remember talking about this once and it was some advice that he got from his grandmother. And she had asked him, Do you like helping people? And he was like, yes. She was like, Do you think other people like helping people? And he was like, Yeah, what do you think happens when people who like helping people, you don't let them help you? And I, like always remember that because I'm like, this is a thing, I think from that servant leadership perspective, and any of the other kind of self-sabotaging behaviour we might have in other parts of our lives where we just over-serve, we forget that the people around us, like helping people too. And if we don't let them help us, then we're not letting them have full expression of who they are. And I think too, from a leadership perspective, this does come back to this like societal narrative of, I'm supposed to have all the answers like I'm a leader, I'm supposed to have all the answers. And while I don't think most of us logically believe that, like, we know we're human, you can't possibly have all the answers. This is why we have a team, we have all these other narratives. But our way of being is that I am the chief, right? Like it rolls up to me. Tim 11:02 I’ve got to be the giver. Yeah. Tracy 11:04 Yeah. And so this is where it kind of plays into authenticity is we have to be able to notice these things about our experience. Because that type of narrative might not be conscious for you. But it is feeding your experience. It is feeding your experience you create for other people. And until we start to look at like, Oh, why am I doing that? Because it doesn't feel good for me, or does it feel good for me? What about it feels good for me? And, again, from a societal perspective, leaders are so busy, right? We got all the things to do. And I was talking to a lady a few days ago who has 150 direct reports. And I was just like, what, like, it's not even possible, right? It's unrealistic. It's not possible. Even if one person cared that much about serving that many people, you couldn't, it's a bad model. And so we don't look at those things, you would just be like, in the experience, constantly feeling you can't serve all of the people that you want to serve. And that is not an empowered mindset. So, now like, I don't even know what happens, I work overtime, and I do all these things. And then I miss out on my kid's dance recital, and then I'm mad at myself for that. And then your whole experience becomes disempowered. And authenticity is the flip of that. It is about paying attention, so that we can on an ongoing basis, create more empowerment, in our experience, because this is what I would choose. This is how I would do it. And I mean, there's probably somewhere you want to take that, Tim but– Tim 12:42 No, I think that’s a good one. Tracy 12:44 My definition of authenticity just for everybody here because you can find lots of definitions of authenticity is doing or saying what you would do or say when you want to do or say it. So, it's not about doing or saying all the things. It's not about doing or saying things all the time. It's using your experience and trusting yourself enough to say this is what needs to be said right now. And that's what I can do. And sometimes it's right, sometimes it's wrong. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it has a different impact than your intention. This isn't about getting it right. It is about being honest, in an honest expression. This is how I see the situation. This is how I can contribute in a positive way. And do that, instead of being worried about like, is that right or wrong?
Tim 13:40 That's an important distinction. Because if you're operating on the best information that you've gotten the time, it doesn't mean that that's not going to change, it doesn't mean that your instinct isn't gonna change eventually. Tracy 13:50 We grow and we learn. Tim 13:51 Yeah, it doesn't mean that it has to either. But, you know, I think that's a beautiful point. People have to have an opportunity to help as well, or you are not the only person who is getting something out of this transaction. I think often that we are not fluent enough in how we like to transact with others, and why we're choosing to transact in a certain way. If we are constantly giving, what are we expecting back? Now is that we're giving down into a team of 150 people or something? What is the thing we're expecting back? Is it like silence and loyalty? And that's what we expect back? Or is it just hard work and productivity? And that's what we expect back? Or is it something along the lines of I'm going to help them be the most effective people they can be in their job and find some purpose in the role and in turn, they're going to help me feel some purpose in what I'm doing. And it doesn't have to be emotional at this point. I think it can be very, very operational. You know, often when we look at how an organization is lined up, we have the strategic levels of an organization, the tactical levels of an organization, the operational levels of an organization, and a really healthy company will be passing things down and sending them back up. You know, so we have strategic goals that the leaders are passing up and passing down. And we have questions and requests for support that come up. And then we have targets that are sent down and we have productivity that sent up. And we get a nice interchange of things flowing all the way up and all the way down in this kind of current. But if a leader decides that they're going to put themselves in the middle of that, and they are going to shelter people, as you said, from the dragons, and those people will still expect Mai Thai then you're going to find yourself in a vacuum. And the moment that reverses, and those people begin to try to provide value into the system, and you're not built to recognize that they're trying to help. But that's not what your processes are lined up to do, then you create a pressure zone, and suddenly they don't feel appreciated. And so having this ability to transact, and to breathe in and out and respirate the value of others is such an important thing to be able to do. And then to be able to do that in a way that makes sense for you. That is an authentic expression of how do I actually like to transact? It's an important step to be able to mature into that way and say, you know, I feel quite comfortable with just how much I'm willing to take on or how much I'm not, and how much I'm willing to let them swim, and how much I'm not. Right. So that we're covering in a lot of ground here. I mean, hey, this is way up in 10,000 feet in an organization. But what are some of the worst expressions of servant leadership that you've seen?
Tracy 16:56 I have one specific scenario where a leader that I worked with was, he was waiting to hear back to hear whether or not his wife had cancer. Well, it’s like pretty big. Right? A pretty big moment. Like, you're probably feeling emotional. And I was like, so we were on the leadership team together. So, he didn't manage me, but like he was a leader of people. I wouldn't listen, watching this guy like slowly stress himself out. Because he thinks he has to be here because he has to be for the team. And what if the team needs him and blah, blah, blah. And I watched that energy transition into all of the salespeople. Guess how productive sales was that day? It’s just not, right? A little example, I told him, like, why don't you just go home, like, just go home, wait with your wife, like, be together? Because I think what we don't notice is this energy transfer, right? We might have the best intention of being there to support the people. But if our energy doesn't actually match that the message the people get, is not that, right? Now the message that my people get us like, I want to try to protect him because he does so much job protecting us. And then all of a sudden, like, no one's really protecting anybody. I think the biggest problem is that then we're not in this as an us, right? Like, it's just you and me. And you're over there doing your thing battling dragons, and I'm over here, sitting on a beach drinking Mai Thais, and you're not on this path to performance together. We don't have the same understanding that like, yeah, if anybody is dealing with an extreme personal issue, and it's emotional for you, that you should go home and be with the people that you love because that will likely be the best place for you to feel safe. But we don't have that conversation. We try and isolate, insulate the parties from each other. And then we don't have an us. And if we don't have an us, then we are not going anywhere together.
Tim 19:08 Yeah, well, and I think that there's a dark side of that. I love what you're saying. We don't have an us conversation. But it becomes an us whether we like it or not, in a sense, like that stress that they're feeling, that tension that they're feeling is going to come out one way or another. So, even if they're a person that chooses to be stoic, and never ask anything of anybody else, they may not do it verbally, but they're going to require that people walk on eggshells or feel crappy during the day or worry about the other person. Like, it's kind of like the exchange is happening anyway.
Tracy 19:45 And is this the exchange you want, right? Is this the type of energy we want as the team, is this– Tim 19:52 Or is it a wildfire? Is it? Tracy 19:54 One of the things I always think about, like I grew up playing competitive sports and so there is a role that the coach plays. And there's a role that the team plays. And that's not the same role. But we all have to be aligned on where we are going. And we have to go there together. You cannot win at team sports unless you're going there together. And that doesn't mean we're all doing the same thing, it doesn't mean that we all shoot 40 points on a given night, right? It just means that we are all on this path together. And if I want to create a high-performance culture, then we got to be on the path together. And we got to be able to say like, Hey, we got something going on on this team that is not going to allow us to move forward today. And that's okay. Right? But then we have to have that space. That this is like a multi-layered conversation, that like we're just gonna skim the top of and the short conversation. But this is why authenticity also matters. Because if you don't show up as caring about that, from the beginning, and saying the coach is equally as part of the team, as the player, even though he's not on the court doing the thing. Now thinking about like a sales team, or that just because you're not making sales calls, doesn't mean you're not a critical member of the team. And if a critical member of the team is incapable of serving in their capacity today, and isn't confident enough, in their normal contribution to say, I am not capable of performing this role today, which every human experiences, no matter how long you've been a leader, whether you're not a leader, or you're hoping to become a leader, all of us have experienced this, like even if it's just in our mindset, I'm not capable of executing this today. I remember one day in corporate just coming in logging into my computer and looking at my email be like, Nope, I can't deal with this today. And I took a flex day, and I went to the mountains, and it was better for my soul. And I came back the next day, and I was fine. But if we don't have the practice, if we don't have the space, and if we don't have the most importantly, self-awareness, to be able to observe those things about ourselves, then we do, we let that more toxic poison energy just seep out because we're not being intentional about creating something different.
Tim 22:22 But we are going to be creating something regardless.
Tracy 22:25 Oh yes, something is created by default. Just is that what you were hoping for?
Tim 22:30 Yeah, for sure. And so we are taking a rather broad skim at things here. And we're covering a big topic, but I do feel like we're starting to land on, you know, a foothold that people can use to just do a crazy Ivan on their own level of authenticity, or their own choices around leadership. When it comes to my leading authentically, perhaps it is the servant leadership piece.
Tracy 22:54 Okay. Can we talk about that? The important thing about authenticity is, like I said, very much related to your self-awareness. So, it's not that you would necessarily be being inauthentic, if you don't know some of these deeper things about yourself or your deeper, why I might be showing up like this? So, one of the examples I always give is, I was quite a different person. When I was in my corporate life before I was a mom. And then I became a mom and I changed, things about me changed. I learned things, I experienced new things that changed who I was, I'm a learning row kind of person. So I started to evolve very quickly, and I have evolved beyond where I fit with my job anymore. And there is a mindset of like, bringing your like, it's almost like the riding a bicycle thing. Once you can ride a bicycle, you can pretty much always ride a bicycle. And as you've seen some things and you say like, oh my god, I can never unsee that. Right? Like, did you can't go back, you can't evolve that backwards. This is not a thing. So, now we have evolved. And now we look back on our old experience. And our new experience might be that we were being so inauthentic back then. But that's not actually the case, you were being yourself. It was just a less informed version of you. And so there's this important permission, as a leader and as everyone to allow that space for evolution. Because you will change, your employees will change. They'll have personal experiences that will rock their world that will make them not the same anymore. And if we don't create this space for ourselves and for other people to evolve, then we're also like trapping things in this old box.
Tim 24:53 I think that's a really good point. I mean, there's a notion that it is a trap to say that we're heading towards our ideal self. We're heading towards and I use this every once in a while our best version of ourselves and the rest of it right, but I mean–
Tracy 25:08 I hate the word better because people are like a better version, like better than what?
Tim 25:12 Well, I think it's, I think it's the best you can be in the moment. And it's an acknowledgement that we're not done. I hate the term adulting. That one's always bothered me, because I'm like, Look, I'm 49. And I'm still a child, in so far as I am learning constantly, like I am not done, I will not be done. I don't have a hope of knowing everything. But every day is a learning experience. And every day is brand new. I mean, you're more mature than you were the rest of it.
Tracey 25:42 I like to say be the most you. Tim 25:44 Yeah, be the most you. Tracy 25:45 The best version of you, what is that? The best at some random thing that someone else decided, right? Like, that's not helpful. But if I can, at the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey, I think you know this about me, Tim, but I started measuring a personal KPI. How authentic did I feel today? So, that was measuring like, this is how many interactions I had with people in a business sense. In how many of those did I feel like I was being my authentic self? Or did I feel like I had to impress somebody, or did I feel like I had to prove something? And in making that my personal KPI, I have been able to build a habit of just like paying attention to this. And when I feel like something is inauthentic. One of the most drastic examples I have was teaching my cardio dance class. And at the time, I was going through like pretty legitimate grief episode. And I put on this playlist and for whatever reason, my interpretation of the songs in that moment was just like really sad. They weren't specifically sad songs, but I was interpreting them and I was feeling very sad. And I pasted a smile on my face for the entire dance class. Because, quote, unquote, that's what other people expect of me. Right? And so on my list that was clearly obvious to me that in that moment, I was not being authentic. Now, did I change what I was doing? No, I kept my smile pasted on my face for the entire class. I wasn't ready to like process, why I thought I needed to do that in real time. And this doesn't mean that we can all process all these things in real-time, right? It just means that we notice, I noticed I'm being inauthentic right now what is causing that? I know my cardio dance class, or like some of the most accepting people of me, like, they love me and all the things that I do. So they would be fine. If I just said, like, Hey, this is making me super emotional. Can I send you guys a recording for today? They would have all been fine with that. But I had to process like, Why was I doing that? What was I expecting of myself? And so when we look at these types of things, we get to measure like, is that what I would do? Did I feel good doing that? And then we can go back, we can't change that we did it at the time. It just enables us to do something different next time. And then in so doing, it gives us the capacity to then see that in other people. When do you see when like someone's normally like super loquacious in like team events, but they're, like really quiet today, there might be something going on there. And I feel like people in general just like to have someone else notice. You don't necessarily have to like fix their problem, which I think is another thing leaders tend to try to do. It's not that I don't even know your problem. I don't even need you to share with me what your problem is. But I noticed that like something's going on. And if you need space, I can create that for you. There's like and these are types of things too, right, like, the awareness and like what you would do. I had experiences where I like, do a thing. And then as soon as I do it, I'm like, Nope, that's not what I would do. And then I have to try something different next time. But that's why the concept of the evolution is important. And we continue to evolve closer to the “you-est” version, the “me-est” version of myself, so that I can look at my team on a Zoom meeting, or I can look at my social media provider. I can look at this event I hosted or wherever you're showing up and be like, yeah, that was me. I did that.
Tim 29:34 I think that even the notion though, of evolving towards the “meest” version, where I was going with this is that the notion that we're heading towards something versus we're exactly where we're meant to be, you know, are you the most of yourself right now. And the KPI is funny because I have a similar one that after reading Csikszentmihalyi Flow book, that always has been where I marked down, how did I feel today? Was I balanced between, you know, having enough creative stress and enough control? And for me that comes in that zone where you're like, I'm exactly who I need to be right now. I'm exactly who I am. And sometimes that's a great fit for the situation. And sometimes it's not. Man, I can say whether I want to engage in a certain piece of work or not. But I know that I was in a state of flow in that moment, and for me, it comes across as I know, I'm there. I know what I'm there to provide, very little confidence issues, because I'm worried that I'm faking it. The thing that I would typify the last 10 to 15 years of my work is just that constant, diminishment, you know, that low the lowering and lowering and lowering and lowering of the ratio of your day, where you, it's not about not knowing what you're talking about, because I don't know what I'm saying half the time, I gotta learn. But it's just being really, really comfortable saying, You know what, I am right for this situation. And I'm not at all remorseful about how much I know or don't know, I don't feel any. To me, it's actually an expression of guilt, I guess, is I would say, it's like, I don't feel guilty about being too much or not enough.
Tracy 31:23 Not being a brain surgeon.
Tim 31:26 Yeah, it's like, I feel pretty rigged for this situation right here on Earth. And I'm more than happy to be in my own skin, in my boots, where I'm at, and I feel fulfilled. And I think that that often I talk about fluency, right? And it's, do you understand how you show up in different situations? Do you understand as a team, what genius you're there to provide? And then you can appreciate the genius of others. Do you understand your work style? And then you can appreciate the work style of others. Do you understand the strengths, your strengths, and then you can appreciate the strengths of others? Do you understand who you are? And are you comfortable in your skin? And if so, can you be comfortable then with others not being you and not being cast in your image? Or a threat because they're different? Right? And so that authenticity, to me, is a place of comfort. Like, it's like, I just felt better than not, right? Hey, my shininess ratios pretty, pretty good today.
Tracy 32:31 I like, I recently ran an in-person event for the first time since COVID. And it's like, it was July 2023. Some people extrapolate that based on when you're listening to it is a long time. And I did all the planning, I did all my prep, I know what I care about, I had a very specific attention, right? And I was like, I've done what I can do, that didn't stop me from staying up until like 10 to 10 o'clock the night before trying to prepare stuff. And then once it happened, and it was like happening, and everybody was like just being exactly what I hoped it would be. I had this moment of like, I did that. And like, yes, there were the other people contributed to it. Absolutely. Other people contributed to it, I always have five for people contributing, because I can't make that happen by myself. And I've created the space for that all of that connection would not have happened if I didn't do that. And so there is something to be proud of. And there's something that I am like uniquely good at. And it's not about being cocky, or any of those things I know a lot of people have fear of that as well. I remember saying once to a client of mine, you're pretty much as far as you possibly be from cocky. So if you just be yourself, there's no way you can be cocky. Like it's not a thing. Also, that doesn't mean that someone's not going to interpret you that way. But you can’t control other people's thoughts and experiences. And so like, it's okay to take that moment and just feel I've been doing just like three deep breaths every time I feel that and just be like, just breathe this into my being.
Tim 34:09 Man, that really raised something for me when you just said that you can't control how other people feel about you. I really love the statement that you know, it's none of your business, what other people think about you, as people are like, Well, yeah, it is. Is it your business what you think about them? Is it their business what you think about them? If they asked you would you tell them the truth? It's like, let it go. It's your business what do you think about yourself for the most part and even then you gotta be careful, you don't agree with yourself all the time because you could be a bad read. But the the notion that you're going to disappoint people, I think there's a really interesting, dynamic when you get into teams and large groups, and you get around some people that are that are pretty comfortable with the skin they're in and people who aren’t and I see this all the time. I see people resent the people who are comfortable, quite a bit. And also starting to, you know, there's a lot of aspersions cast, that that person just doesn't get it, but that person doesn't understand. And it's fine to feel fear, and it's fine to feel, you know, destabilized every once in a while. But I remember as a parent reading about the norming behaviour that kids go through when one child is feeling a lot of anxiety or anger or something, they will try to normalize the rest of the house, so everybody else feels so way too, right? And I think we can put that on to that feeling of comfort and confidence and authenticity, that if somebody is feeling really confident and settled with who they are, and they don't feel terribly great need to, not without kindness, but to alter how they're feeling for someone else. Um, that can be offensive to other people. It can be like, Oh, you're being awfully arrogant, or you're not sensing how other people are feeling? Well, no, I am. But I'm also quite fine with my choice to be who I'm going to be in this moment, right?
Tracy 36:11 Yeah, and I think there's one, I was gonna say, like, I've experienced that from my parents, not just kids. I'm sure people have experienced it in the work environment as well. What I have found is that while people might not understand that confident perspective, what it does do is it still brings the vibe back to like a more like central level, right? So if things are starting to get high, and someone can be like, No, I won't let you take me there. Like, here's my place, here's how I'm balancing my energy. And you can go there, I'm not saying you can't go there. I'm just saying, I'm not going there on the emotional level with you. And if you want to go there, maybe we can create space for that to happen. I've been in work environments where like, literally, it was the best-case scenario to just take a 10-minute cry break. Okay, we've screwed this up big time, we're all really upset about it, let's just give ourselves 10 minutes in private to like, let it out. And then we can come back and try and figure out what we're going to do about it. Like this isn't anybody's fault. And that doesn't mean you're not feeling the emotions, right? So let's just like create that space, and come back to it. Even if people don't appreciate it or don't understand it or it makes them angry, it still neutralizes the tension. And I've just like– Tim 37:34 Just take a time out. Tracy 37:36 –so many times myself. And I think too, it's important to look at like, a lot of times we treat a lot as if it's urgent, right? Like we need to fix this right now. We do this right now. And if I learned this in parenting, if I can take two minutes to settle Nicholas, my son down, so he'll put his shoes on. That's way better than fighting with him for 20 minutes about him not wanting to put his shoes on. So, yeah, it doesn't mean I'm not spending any time, but it means I'm intentionally bringing things back.
Tim 38:11 It's called transition time. I'm gonna transition you from a point of play to putting on your shoes. What keeps coming back to my mind is that and just to round off the where we started. When we think about the servant leader perspective, it's I have to provide this for everyone else. And those are the Mai Thais, and maybe we need to let the dragon's roar, stuck behind the wall, pour ourselves a drink?
Tracy 38:41 Well, I mean, this is the thing. This is the thing I think about like one, I'm serving a whole bunch of Mai Thais. Do my people even like Mai Thais? I don't know, two, what if I have someone here who loves making Mai Thais and would love to step up and make all the Mai Thais? And I could drink one? That would be great. What if there was some like genius here who could make like a defense shield that would actually make it unnecessary for any of us to fight dragons? But I haven't asked them because I'm trying to keep them safe. Like, I'm actually not serving anyone. So, I do think that at the end of the day, this comes down to an awareness like what am I doing? Why am I doing it? Is it actually having the impact that I'm trying to create? And if the impact is more important than the things that I'm doing, it creates space for me to look at new things I could do that could also serve me, like serve us, like let yourself be part of the we. What could we do to serve us and bring that to the team because people want to help you. So let them help you. But yeah, it starts with self-awareness.
Tim 39:56 Okay, I'm thinking about a couple of things here, I think when I'm going through my notes here and thinking about some of the big words that are standing out for me. Transparency, and honesty, and practice self-awareness, all of these elements are really important that this is a skill that people have to learn. It's not that hard to find it. But it's also easy for us to lose it. And so every once in a while, you know, and I think that maybe this is a good action point for people out of this to take a check-in and say, how much time out of the day do I feel like I truly was being me that I really felt like I was in flow with who I needed to be in the moment. And then to get beyond the feeling that it's not all about them. And it's not all about me. But we've got to create this we in this us in there, and that by everybody finding an expression of themselves, then we can find what that looks like collaboratively, then we can say, Okay, what is the us look like? Maybe perhaps this is what we can talk about, you know, follow-up conversation. There's authenticity on the individual level, but there's also authenticity on the team level. Here's the brand of the individual and the individuals. But then it's what do we choose to be together? And is that in alignment with who all of us want to be individually? Right, so it becomes that, not a rulebook, but a focal point where we can we can start to concentrate things. As we're finishing up here, Tracy, if people want to find you, why don't you just tell us where they can find you? And perhaps what are you most excited about right now? What are you working on?
Tracy 41:39 So find me on LinkedIn, you can mostly find me on LinkedIn, Tracy Borreson, my little tagline thing is togetherness based on uniqueness. So if you see that, that's me, connect with me. I love to connect with people, it feels like the following is weird. Don't stop me just like meet me. More comfortable for me. Something I'm excited about right now. So, I'm actually in September, I'm going to be launching a new conversation series is like one of my favorite things to do. So, it was big thinking like this in a panel. So, even more ideas. And it's called Crazy, Stupid Marketing. So my background is corporate marketing. And what I saw a lot of what I continue to see today, and maybe even worse now, because it's so easy for quote-unquote, marketing gurus to give you marketing tips on the internet. There's a lot of stuff that people are telling you to do that is actually 100%, the opposite of what we should do. It doesn't make sense at all. So I got a panel of X corporate marketers, who will be joining me in the conversation to help bring some of these things to light so we can be a little bit more authentic in our marketing efforts, and a little bit less attached to what the marketing gurus tell us we should do. So stay tuned for that.
Tim 43:00 Cool. Well, I'll make sure that all the show notes are updated both so people can find you. And as that program rolls out, what's the label again, stupid marketing? Tracy 43:10 Crazy, Stupid Marketing. Tim 43:12 Okay, Crazy, Stupid Marketing. As the date gets closer, we'll make sure we update the show notes so that people can find in there if they're listening late. All right, Tracy, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. And I can't wait till we do it again. This is some big thinking here. And it's great to just sit and play with you. So, thank you for showing up and being so you and helping we be so us.
Tracy 43:37 Yes, this was so us. It was an us episode.
Tim 43:40 That's right. Okay, we'll talk to you soon. All the best. Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership. Please give us a positive rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word to by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening. And be sure to tune in in two weeks' time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 11 Dec 2024 | Retrospective Special - Part 1 - Arriving | 00:23:17 | |
In this special retrospective episode, Tim Sweet revisits past guests' most profound moments to explore the idea of “arriving” — that deep sense of alignment when purpose, values, and actions converge. Through compelling anecdotes from leaders across diverse fields, this episode sheds light on how moments of arrival are not endpoints but significant milestones that shape our journey. From navigating authenticity to redefining success, Tim unpacks how leaders grow into their roles and discover their impact. Listeners will hear insights on combating imposter syndrome, fostering self-trust, and staying true to personal values. This episode celebrates growth, resilience, and purpose by featuring wisdom from figures like Tracy Borreson on avoiding burnout, Tim Beissinger on non-traditional career paths, and Aaron McConnell on leading through challenges. Tune in to learn why arrival is not just a destination but an evolving state of being. Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: -- Transcript Tim 00:00 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you, my friend, are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. I'm Tim Sweet, and I'd like to welcome you to Episode 45 of the Sweet on Leadership podcast. Tim 00:31 Today's episode is a little bit different. It's a reflective one. Over the past 42 episodes, we've been exploring leadership growth, transformation with some incredible guests, but one theme has stood out across many of these conversations, and that's the theme I want to bring you today. Today is all about arriving. So, for this episode, I'm diving back into some of our favourite guest contributions. You'll hear short quotes; you'll hear more in-depth stories and anecdotes. Each will add to our understanding of what it means to arrive. When I say, arrive, what I mean is that moment that you know you're enough, that moment that you know you are exactly where you belong. You are fulfilling a purpose. It's a special thing, and when it happens, you know it. But what brings it about? Is it an age or experience thing? Is it a moment? Is it a milestone or maybe just a feeling that we stumble upon when we least expect it? Let's start with the basics. What does it mean to arrive? In episode five, one of my good friends and guests, Paul Farmer, a leadership coach in Australia who specializes in guiding others toward alignment and purpose, captured it so well-
Paul Famer 01:50 Depending on the way that the conversations happen with the owners, then choosing to bring that feeling into the business allows the business to grow in a deliberate way, whereby the business feels good for all of those that are involved in it.
Tim 02:08 That's it, right? It's the feeling of alignment when your actions and your purpose, and your values all click. It's not always about what you accomplish, but how it feels when you're in sync with yourself and when you're in sync with yourself, you can be in sync with others. I remember a moment in my own journey when this clicked. Early in my career, I leaned on quotes and research and experts to validate my own ideas, but a mentor told me, You're making great points, but you're not willing to own them. It stung, but it planted a seed, and a few months later, I stood up in a high-stakes meeting and delivered my perspective without quoting anyone else. And in that moment, standing on my own two feet, facing senior executives, I knew I had arrived, not because of what I had said, but because I knew I belonged at the table. To the newer leaders out there, I know how hard it can be to wait for this to happen. You spend your days dealing with imposter syndrome. You spend your days wanting to know why you're not being accepted, wrestling with feelings that you might not be good enough. You're looking ahead and wondering, When am I going to start to feel confident? When am I going to feel like I am where I belong? Here's the thing: arrival isn't something you can rush. It's not something you can force. It's something that you literally have to grow into. It's not based on some predetermined plan, and most importantly, it's not someone else's plan. My good friend, Tracy Borreson, who helps entrepreneurs and business owners really figure out how they belong, talked about avoiding burnout and how to discover authenticity. And she had this to say–
Tracy Borreson 03:53 I think there's many places in the world where authenticity is a buzzword, but we don't really know what that means, and if we don't know what it means for us, then things can't be authentic. And so one of my big goals is to try and create some more awareness of what authenticity actually is, instead of what people want to tell us it should look like, and create our experience, whether that is a career experience, a home experience, a community experience, a life experience that is aligned with the things that we want to do, that we can uniquely contribute, instead of what people tell us we should. And if you've listened to Tim's show, I've heard, I know you've all heard his opinion on shoulds, so that's probably why we hang out.
Tim 04:39 If you're chasing someone else's version of success, you'll never feel aligned. In episode 42, Tim Beissinger, one half of that dynamic duo, the ThruHikers, who's a professor and a quantitative geneticist, spoke about risking a non-traditional career path.
Tim Beissinger 04:57 I think people have a fear of getting off of that PhD, postdoc, professor path because all of the examples they look to are doing exactly that, and it's compelling to want to mimic the path that's worked for others, but everybody's individual and it can be more powerful to follow the path that makes sense for yourself/
Tim 05:20 if we can connect with things we're passionate about, we can start to see the impact we want to have on the world, and that's when everything starts to come into focus. You don't have to follow the same road as everyone else. Your journey will look different, and that's a good thing. So take a breath, trust the process. You're not behind. You're just on your own path. For those of us further along who've had this sense of validation, we realize that these arrivals don't always happen when we reach some milestone or event or achievement. It's often found in small moments when you show up fully, even on the hardest days, it's the journey up the mountain that shapes us more than our time at the summit. Dave Sweet, yeah, my cousin is a bit of a legend in the policing community in Canada and now around North America. He was a top homicide detective here in our city, and he's one of these guys that is constantly on true crime shows. His work has given him a unique perspective, he now acts as an expert witness, consultant and author who speaks about empathy and leadership under pressure. On one of his visits to the podcast, he shared this powerful reflection about how he found his calling and when he realized it was more than just solving crimes. It was being present for others.
Dave Sweet 06:41 The essence of somebody or the what your mantra is going to be. So first of all, I'll always consider myself a servant to the community, you know, first and foremost, and secondly, even on the worst days with some of the worst people, if you can remember to love people, it goes a long ways to being able to ultimately accomplish whatever you're sort of said, you know, to do that particular day. And it doesn't matter who it is, everyone has a story, the uniqueness of the world that I'm in, the world of murder and stuff, we would all think, Oh, well, you know, I would never be in that situation. This could never, ever happen to me. But the truth of it is, is that the majority of people that we investigate had no idea that morning they woke up that they were about to take a life that day, and the victim had no idea that they're about to lose their life.
Tim 07:31 Even when things are tough, there's something grounding about staying connected to your purpose and values. That's where arrival moments happen, and sometimes it's a personal transformation. Debbie Potts, a former teammate here at Sweet on Leadership, who's also a Senior Educational Administrator, reshaped her entire life to reflect her passions and the connections she wanted to nature. Tim 07:57 What did the Red House represent to you?
Debbie Potts 07:58 Oh my gosh. It represented freedom. It represented achievements. It represented living life on my terms. And obviously, I love nature as you do. And it just represented, you know, being able to be close to nature. And, you know, completely do a 180 turnaround of my life. You know, I lived in a big city, London, full of people, full of traffic, full of everything, and I've now completely reversed that.
Tim 08:32 Innovator Jagroop Chhina, a psychological content strategist, say that three times fast, shared this perspective on transformation and its importance. Tim 08:45 And blend those suckers as well so that maybe they become something brand new. Jagroop Chhina 08:47 Yeah, creating something brand new that didn't exist before in a new perspective that couldn't exist unless you lived it out the way that you lived it out. Right? For me, personally, I was always a pretty smart kid. And I had a tendency to just write the answers to whatever the problem or the thing in the classroom was, right? And where I always lost marks was in showing my work. That was my feedback over my entire, like, elementary to high school—'show your work.' And that's what creating content is actually about. It's about showing your work and documenting what it takes for us to succeed, right? Because that's how we actually learn our lessons—well, other people learn lessons from us is by showing them, 'Oh, this is what we go through on the day-to-day to build this out. Tim 09Æ41 Even though we're focused on professional experiences, it's deeply personal. It's about those moments when you feel fully aligned with who you are and what you stand for. In an episode that we published our very first summer, George Trachilis shared a rich story about learning alongside a mentor.
George Trachilis 10:01 I brought Ritsuo Shingo, bless his heart; he's the late Shingo now. Shingo San, I brought him to Santorini, Greece, along with others, who were leaders in their industry, you know, there's business owners, there's, you know, others like Paul Akers, as an example, I brought him to Santorini, Greece. And we did training there. And we went through a Gemba Walk of Santo Wines, one of the biggest, the biggest winery in Santorini. And we're watching somebody work, we're watching somebody work. And what they're doing is they got a big light facing them, and they got, you know, like three bottles on each end. And they're looking, their eyes are focused on the bottle, and the light is behind it. So, you might be able to see something, you know, in the bottle. And so they're looking for spiders, because the bottle sometimes just, just over. So they do wash the bottles, but sometimes, you know, if there's like a big nest in there, you put that bottle aside and needs extra washing, but this is what this person's job function was. And Ritsuo wouldn't leave. And he's just observing. And I'm thinking, what's he, what could he possibly observe? Like the flow is such that there's such a queue in front of them, and the line is running, and there's no way he's gonna be out of work. Like, he's got a lot of work and the lines running, maybe he's not, maybe they're slack. I don't know if he's trying to calculate how much time he's actually working, versus how many bottles are moved. I don't know what he's doing. And it was so shocking. I said, what do you what are you doing? He says George San, watch his eyes. And I'm watching the worker's eyes. And as he lifts the bottles, his eyes are down. I'm going, oh, Shingo San; I never thought to watch the worker's eyes. Like pretend you’re in the worker's shoes, and think you're the worker, and your job is to do this function. And he says also, there's no standard. I said, what do you mean no standard? Sometimes he lifts up three bottles, and two, and sometimes two and two, sometimes three and three, there's no standard. And I'm going, Wow, he got all that from what I would just say that's just not important.
Tim 12:10 Okay, one thing that's clear with many of our guests is that they've all had several moments of arrival. Once you've had that first moment of arrival, you're now free to help others find theirs, because, you know, it exists. Rita Ernst, an Organizational Psychologist and author who explores positivity and authenticity, put it this way–
Rita Ernst 12:32 You become this beacon of possibility for others. It will happen in that way but it does take a little bit of courage to be the one to stand, and I'm not talking about swallow it down false positivity. You know, when people are being disrespectful, when people are harassing others, you need to stand up and challenge that behaviour and stand for your values in that moment, and that is showing up positive. So it's not about just smoothing everything out, and like we were talking about, really, it's not about avoiding conflict at all, but it is about being true to who you need to be to have the workplace around you that you desire.
Tim 13:20 From a completely different perspective. Brent Yonk, an FBI section chief, emphasized that self-leadership was the foundation for guiding others. Here's his reflection.
Brent Yonk 13:31 There are people that are following you in the sense that they are watching you, they are taking cues from you. They may even be modelling some of their behaviours after what you're doing. You just may not be aware of that. But even if all of that were taken away, there is still one person that you can absolutely have follow you, and that's you. And that may sound really funny, but I have seen so many people that you can clearly see that they don't have that confidence in themselves to lead themselves effectively, and if you're already struggling to recognize yourself as your own leader. Like what hope do we have for you to be able to effectively lead others? So I think that developing that internal compass, that internal sense that the power to make decisions, the power to guide your fate as it were, is in your hands, right? You get to choose the actions that you're going to take. You get to choose whether or not you're going to try to broaden your awareness of what is influencing and impacting you, or you can just shut down, and you can just put your head down, and you can just focus on doing the easy thing, right? Follow the downward path. That choice is there. And when you recognize that I can lead, even if it's just myself, I can be a leader, you start to unlock that potential. You start to broaden your horizon. You start to open that aperture and see more possibility for yourself. And then that will continue to broaden, and you'll start to see people around you, and you'll start to recognize in them the skills, the abilities, the knowledge, the potential that's there. And then you can start to encourage them to join you on this journey. And now you're starting to see exponential impact happen from that.
Tim 15:26 Here’s the thing about these moments of arrival. They don't happen all at once. They come in waves. And they don't happen all in the same place. They can happen in different areas of your life, different roles that you're fulfilling. Peter Root, an engineer and innovator working in wildfire robotics, reflected on his long journey.
Peter Root 15:48 Well, we're about to do a bunch of work with Alberta wildfire, and this means taking our team and our alpha prototype and eventually our next version out to real fires and interacting with them and the people there in a real way. And that, to me, is the most exciting part of running the business. This is where I wanted to be, like, you know, three years ago, but I'm finally here, and this is where I think the relationships get solidified. You know, we built the beginning up, but this is where we show them that, hey, we can come, we'll bring our thing, and then we'll improve it next time we're out here, and we're going to do that until it's something of such extreme value that you'll never kick us off again. Like, that's where we want to get to, and we're at the beginning stages of this, and we're also in an environment now where it's really fun, like there's nothing more fun to me than going out to a wild area with a bunch of hard-working people who have been continuing and interacting with the wildfire, which is such an extreme event and such a such an admirable profession, to be around those people and then to be able to bring them something new and work collectively to build it. What's more fun than that?
Tim 16:51 In another episode, Massimo Backus, an executive coach focused on self-trust and leadership, brought this to the table.
Massimo Backus 16:59 Yeah, yeah, one of those bedrock moments that you can always go back to remember what it was like when you truly trusted yourself. And you know, in the organizational context and leadership, you know landscape, we talk about trust all the time. Like leadership, how many books have been written about trust? How often in trust conversations, do we talk about the value of trusting ourselves? Or do we ask, How do I know when I trust myself? How do I know when I'm not trusting myself? What do I need in order to be able to trust myself? What's present when I trust myself least? These are questions that are very rarely asked in the broader conversation about trust. It is always about another person or the team, and that's important, absolutely. But I believe, and I found with the leaders that I've worked with throughout my career, that often, when trust is not present on a team, there is trust that is not present for each individual with themselves.
Tim 18:05 As we wrap up this retrospective, I want to finish on a couple of notes. Let's remember arrival isn't the end. It's a base camp, a place of safety along the journey. It's about trusting yourself, celebrating your growth and staying open to new possibilities. It's a revolution and an evolution. Here's a beautiful part of what Teresa Waddington brought in Episode 28.
Teresa Waddington 18:29 We’re gonna need that revolution. We're also gonna need the evolution, and we're gonna need them to come together, to really step change us into what is completely new. So, when I think about like from a leadership perspective, it's being open to change. It's looking for the holes in your argument. And I'll give you an example on my own leadership journey, I've always tried to say, What am I blind to? So, what are people saying about me that I should know in order to decide if I'm going to change anything about what I do, how I show up, how I build my skill sets, how I build my allegiances. Because if I don't know, it might feel comfortable. It might feel like I'm not, you know, exposed to negative opinions of myself. But if I do know, then I can make a choice, and to be comfortable enough to ask for the bad feedback, it requires a measure of worthiness, or belief in your own worthiness. And when I think about the people that I mentor and support, the ones that I want to see continue to drive forward and change the world, it's reinforcing their own core worthiness, while at the same time gathering feedback.
Tim 19:39 I want to give the last word to Aaron McConnell, my lifelong friend and the CEO of TransRockies. I feel that this story of his is very genuine and very real, and something that many of us can relate to because it's in the middle of hard work that these moments happen. I'm going to let Aaron wrap us up with this last story. Tim 20:02 These are great events. You often talk about them as if they are summer camp for adults, right? And so people are out there, and they are having a blast, and they're doing what they love, and they're out in the sun, and they're out in nature, and they're sweating in all the right ways, and good food, good drink, good friends, campfires, the whole nine yards, and they must look at you and say, Wow. What a job to be able to do this for your entire career, right?
Aaron McConnell 20:38 Well, there's definitely two sides to it. So we live double lives, I guess, and in this industry, because there is the times when we're in the field, basically, so when we're at an event. We're working on an event, we're with the athletes, and for the most part, that's really positive, you know, unless we're dealing with some kind of crisis that comes up, which does happen sometimes as well, but that's what we live for at events, or even when we're on a scouting trip or doing route planning or something out in the field, and that's where the glamorous side of the event promoter lifestyle is maybe a little bit true. I mean, yeah, sometimes we're trying to figure out where to put the porta potties or something. But you know, still, you know, being creative and hanging out with great people and really cool places.
Tim 21:31 Here's the thing about arriving: it's not the finish line; it's a feeling, a realization, and sometimes it's just a moment of clarity. It's never really over. And each time we reach a new understanding of ourselves, it allows us to open a door and then further explore our purpose and our impact until, eventually, we arrive again. As you reflect on your own journey, remember this. You're exactly where you need to be right now, whether you're at the start of your race, navigating switchbacks or midlife transitions or finding new ways to give back to others, know that each moment of arrival is a pivotal part of your story, and they're worth celebrating. Thank you for listening to this retrospective, and thank you for joining our community as always, keep leading, keep learning and keep arriving, and I'll see you in the next episode. Tim 22:26 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership, please give us a positive rating and review on Apple podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders, and you can spread the word too by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening, and be sure to tune in in two weeks' time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 26 Jul 2023 | Your Authentic Self with Claire M Davis | 00:31:32 | |
Tim chats with resume specialist, career consultant, and speaker Claire Davis about her work at Traction Resume. She shares general tips on creating a resume or personal brand that reflects your authentic self and why you want to focus on your uniqueness rather than the overused buzzwords. Claire also describes the common mistakes people make when putting together their job applications and how to avoid them. Both Tim and Claire weigh in on the importance of finding your true self to advance your career. Whether you’ve been laid off, are looking for a promotion, or want to consider switching to consulting, you don’t want to miss this episode! Further into the episode, Tim and Claire share their own moments of discovery when they realize they possess skills that put them in demand, regardless of what their name tag read. Claire explains how it often takes your colleagues, friends, or strangers to help you know your true value, skills, and uniqueness. Once you know those elements of yourself, you’ll be in a better position for career success. You’ll also want to listen for the surprisingly accurate casserole metaphor! About Claire Davis Claire Davis is an award-winning Medical Sales Resume Specialist, Career Consultant, and Speaker with 15+ years of experience. Claire help clients land great roles with dream companies by leveraging the sales techniques they already know to fuel their career advancement. Resources discussed in this episode: — Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Claire Davis | Traction Resume: — Transcript Claire 0:01 What are those specific things that you're known for doing? What do people commonly compliment you on? Because probably that's something that people know you for. And you might not even have an opportunity to recognize that until you work with a resume writer or a coach, somebody who makes you stop and say, Oh, huh, that does sound a bit like a system I'm might have been using all along, and I didn't even recognize it. Tim 0:26 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you my friend, or a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. This is the Sweet on Leadership Podcast, episode 12. Tim 0:57 Thanks very much for joining us. We're having a good time here in the studio, I'm joined by my really good friend Claire. If you need to find her on LinkedIn, you're going to find her under Claire M. Davis at Traction Resume. But Claire, thank you so much for joining me today. I know it's a little short notice. But I am absolutely ecstatic, we were able to pull this together. Claire 1:16 Oh, my goodness, me too, Tim, this is just our way, I don't know if anybody had the chance to catch Tim on my podcast last year. But you're an absolute gem, you have so much to share. And I think that now this will be our third impromptu podcast recording together. So I'm thrilled Tim 1:32 We're getting up there. And if it's not our third, it will be soon. You know, it's funny that we come from such different angles professionally. You, of course, are helping people really get prepped to find their next best role and enhance their careers. And while I do the same thing, I come from a slightly different angle, and that is leadership, consulting and coaching. But we have a lot in common because the challenges that people are facing today are really similar. And there's some themes emerging. Wouldn’t you say? Claire 2:02 Yeah, I would say and you know, when I first started my business, and for anyone who we haven't met yet, I'm Claire Davis, and I run Traction Resume. So essentially what I do is work with professionals in the medical sales industry, and help them to come across as how brilliant they are in real life on paper. So, what I didn't recognize would be part of the role when I very first started this company, was that there would be so much coaching to help people to really foster what leadership and core morals look like for them. On the inside. I really thought, Tim, that it would be, hey, everybody kind of knows their Northstar. They've got their why down pat, they know what their their core drivers really are. And I get to just put that on paper. But a large part is finding out those things as well. So I am eternally grateful for specialized coaches like you, because you help people figure out that internal stuff, and then we put it on paper to share that with the world. Unknown Speaker 3:04 I mean, the more I work, and as I'm entering now, what I'm two and a half decades into doing work with leaders. And you know, I'm just convinced every day that fluency is at the heart of everything they have to know themselves before they can properly represent what they're ready to be out in the world. And if they can be that honest self, when they take the job, through the interview process, into taking the job and then with their teams. It's just so much easier. And it's so much more authentic. And it's the easiest way to build trust, because you don't have to put it on. It's you're just ready to do it all day every day. Because guess what, you don't have a choice. That's who you are in the wool. So I'm with you 100%. I mean, getting people to the point where they are ready to put it down on paper is such a big step. Claire 3:59 It really is. Time 4:00 Even if they’re gonna stay where they're at. It's better to be dealing in reality, because otherwise the universe is going to give you a smack. Let's avoid that at all costs. Claire 4:08 Yeah. Tim 4:09 Well, as we were getting ready to hit record here, we were talking about a couple of different things regarding personal brand. But I'd like to get your thoughts on, really what does that look like from an importance perspective, both in you know, medical sales, but also more generally, just for anybody that's in the middle of a career pivot. What does that look like on the outside? Claire 4:32 So back in 20—Oh, I'm going to date myself here about about 10-15 years ago, you know, I was entering into the workforce into my chosen field, which was, at the time, marketing. And I had come up in the ranks through my career from a pharma recruiting business with my parents. So, you know, the career conversation for me was always something that was very familiar. So the shock was that after my first job, which I had the degree for, I had been getting great results from my employer. The job comes along, it lasts about six months, and then I get laid off. And I was absolutely floored Tim, because learning how to interview from age 13, and being the only one coming up to the city volunteer job with a brag book, I really thought I had any kind of career snags, you know, completely wiped out. Right. So huge shock. So I get back into the field. The next job I have is where I enter into medical sales and absolutely love it, start doing well in the field, start getting great mentorship, falling in love with healthcare, and helping people with their health. And a year and a half later and get laid off again. And so the reason I'm sharing this story was fast forward, I did not realize until the third layoff, so another one after this, that people wanted to do business with me, not because of my product or service, but they actually wanted to do business with me, because of me. But I didn't recognize it that way until that next job comes along. And again, another layoff and I get this phone call, Tim, it was one weekend, I remember sitting in our little farmhouse out in Penryn, California at the time. And I get this call from the lab and the lab director says Claire, we are completely out of kits, we need to run this diagnostic test for this breast cancer patient. She she needs this stuff right away, can you help us? And I said, well, I mean, absolutely. But I mean, you know, I don't work for that company anymore. I'm more than happy to help you. But also, I know that I introduced you to your new rep. So I'm curious why, you know, also you reached out to me. And by this time, I already have the kid on the way. So I mean, it was help and then question. And my thought was, you know, he knows I'm not there anymore. But what is it about still wanting to work with me? And he said, well, Claire, we just know that wherever you're at, even if it's not the company where you used to work that you would help us. And I think that was the first time I recognize that me-ness that I had in my impact on other people. And it was the first time that I started to realize that I had value to offer, aside from what my nametag read. And aside from what Title I had business, and aside from what company and what product I was carrying in my bag. And so I think to your question, beginning to understand the value that we have, is the very first step. And I don't think that we often have the opportunity to do that, until maybe we take a retreat with the team, you know, a year and a half into our employment, or maybe just maybe we have an amazing leadership coach brought into the organization to start digging up some of those internal things. But for me, it was quite a surprise. So I'm actually curious, when did you start recognizing that it was going to take the internal work in the internal discovery to start bringing out the external results? Tim 8:15 In others or in myself? Claire 8:17 In yourself. Tim 8:18 Sure. Well, before I tell you that, I want to say what a great story that is, and how much I want the people that are listening to really key in to some of the important parts of that. And that is, you know, we often think that we're the sum of our education or our work experience or everything that would typically be on a resume or on a LinkedIn profile, at least traditionally. And what we're discovering more and more is our reach is not defined necessarily by just our expertise and our qualifications. But that we're showing up as an individual that people want to understand the story of and want to know how they got there, just like you're asking me, and we're talking about this now. I was just going to drop that there was a really interesting stat that came out that when they were talking about how LinkedIn controls its algorithm. It's not looking for subject evidence that a person has a certain degree or education they're looking for, are they talking in the context of their profession? when they're talking casually, and they're talking about their family and can they and is this a real person? And so that realness I think is so important. And to answer your question, the watershed moment for me, was about 2006 - 2007 and I was working with a plumbing HVAC company. And I'd done a lot of good work with them. We redesigned their inventory systems. This is when I was more operationally focused, I did a bunch of coaching for them. But there was a lot of hard operational work that went into turning this multigenerational company into a company that was full of trust and excitement, and teaching a lot of old dogs new tricks. I remember we had a senior stock guy that was well into his 60s. And then everybody thought, you know, he was sort of was his way or the highway, this guy took up what I was teaching around, how are we going to lower that sunk cost of rolling stock in their trucks, and we lowered it from like, 300,000, average, per truck, down to 14,000, which is a huge savings when you're not talking about having a bunch of parts, just rolling around the city and getting obsolete. Anyway, long story short, I did all this hard work. And then I left. And about a year, year and a half later, I got a call saying we have a conflict, we have a real problem with an employee, somebody, somebody was hurt, they fell, they got hurt on the job site. And we don't understand why. And they're not really willing to talk to us. But we need to get to the bottom of it. And we suggested that we talked, they talked to an HR person or somebody that we could bring in that was independent, and yours was the name that came up. And we want you to come in and and I said, well, I'm not in the HR field. I'm not a, I'm not, this is not the type of work that I do. I mean, I've done it, I've done readiness for work, but as a manager, and they said, no, we'd really like you to come up. So I checked with my lawyer, everything made sure I was clear. And I got in the car and I rolled up, it was about, you know, two hours out of town. And I get to this, this company, I sat down with this gentleman. And it was a hard story. There was an issue with pain, and there was an issue with medication management. And he was not fit for work. Period. And I had to tell the people that trusted me to bring them this, that that was my conclusion. That wasn't what they wanted to hear. It's what they needed to hear. And so why I thought that was important is because although I was safe to weigh an opinion in and I was ultimately, you know, reasonably qualified for what they were asking me to do, the biggest thing was, they trusted who I was, and then I could hold the trust of these people on both sides of both management and the workforce fence. And everybody was happy with, well, everybody was satisfied and felt complete. And to me, that was a huge moment that said, this had nothing to do with what I know, other than some experience doing it some common sense and, you know, basic management principles and things like this. But I wasn't an expert in that field. It was who I was, and who I had meant to these people and the trust that I had garnered earlier. Thanks for asking, I didn't really expect my story to be in the middle of this. But you know, yeah, that really would, would probably be the moment. And then it became clearer and clearer when I went in. And I designed great, designed good processes, I was running Enterprise Risk Portfolios and things like this, but it always boil down to leadership. And leadership always boil down to character. And when I teach brand, both for teams and individuals, I like to say: don't confuse brand with marketing. We can talk about it that way. But it's not just the font and the color. You can say anything on a piece of paper. But what do people experience? And so if you're going to put something down on on a piece of paper, it better be the same thing they experience, because that's truly your brand. The moment they experience you, any words you put down on paper are secondary. But from a resume perspective, to say it that way, they better be consistent, right? Claire 13:44 Yes, absolutely. And one of the many things I've learned from you is the flow state that you often talk about. And so I feel that if someone is to trust you to that point, right, so when they experience you after reading your resume, they know they're not getting catfished because Tim is exactly what we expect, right? Tim 14:11 Well, sometimes. Claire 14:12 You're exactly who I expected. When I got to know you on LinkedIn. I wasn't shocked, necessarily. I was delighted. But I wasn't shocked that you were who I had experienced through your marketing, and then aligned with who you are really, and who your real brand really represents. Right. I wasn't shocked that you were who I thought you were. But I think that it takes a level of that trust that you build to give people the confidence to say, look, we need this thing done. And we know that it's not necessarily your specialty. But we believe in we trust you. And we know you. And so we are comfortable with saying, Tim, please help us get in the flow. And then you learn from there. Tim 14:55 Yeah. Well, I think that's, that's important. And I'm gonna throw it back at you, sorry, but I got to do this because it's funny. When I talk to my, when I talk to the people that help me with production and social media and those kinds of things. And we're talking just, just last week, we were talking about a carousel post something simple on LinkedIn, when we talk about, you know, part of the things that have to carry, carry us and yes, it was my brand, but she said, you know, what do you like? And I said, go to Claire Davis's page and take a look. I'm serious. And not a word of a lie. And I will, and again, not to pump your tires too much. But I mean, for people again, go to Claire's page. And see because the thing is, is it's it's professional and slick, but it's also you, like through and through. And you go for the carousel posts stay for the Claire. That's what I would say to everybody out there. Claire 15:47 That’s gonna be my new tagline, Tim, thank you. You’re hired. Tim 15:50 Better than a breath of fresh Claire, we could say. No, sorry. No, but I mean, seriously, like, as you know, and you've helped me suss this out. I work with a lot of linear thinkers and a lot of engineers. And I remember, oh, man, it must have been 11-12 years ago, and I was working with a group in a mega project. Somebody came up to me afterwards. Hey, man, that was awesome. Because I had done this collaboration session between competitors. And they said that man, you sure sneak up on people. And I said, What? And he's like, we had no idea who you were or what you were about to do to us. And I'm quite comfortable in the nebulous, right. But as a comment, they said, just so you know, engineers, geologists, scientists, whatnot, we're pretty linear, for the most part. And we really like it when you tell us what you're about to do. And maybe even risk spoiling the surprise a little bit. But don't try to pull back the punch line. So now, I mean, I think I'm kind of message forward with everything. They're gonna figure it out anyway. And I'd rather not surprise them, so. Claire 16:59 Oh, yeah, absolutely. Well, and you know, I think, I don't know if you know, this, but I have a degree in advertising, from Ohio University, Go Bobcats. If there's any Bobcats out there, there you go. And, you know, when we were coming through and earning that degree, a lot of what we learned was that being clever was part of the job. And now there's something to be said about people who can bring levity to a message and really, you know, kind of zag when people zig and so on and so forth. But sometimes, if we're a little bit too clever, or if we sacrifice clarity for cleverness, it can get lost, it can get lost just as ambiguity can and something I see commonly with resumes. What I find is people are usually very nervous to speak about the specifics that they know that they are good at, because they feel that the industry expects them to use certain words and to use certain ways of putting things so that they will look prestigious on paper. But what happens is, everybody ends up saying the same thing. While I'd love to say there were like magic power words, right? Let's list some right now: experienced, team player, market disrupter, okay, those are have already been overused. And instead, a large part of what we do at Traction Resume is that we help people to recalibrate and understand what are those specific things that you're known for doing? What do people commonly comment or compliment you on Tim? Because probably, that's something that people know you for. And you might not even have an opportunity to recognize that until you work with a resume writer, a coach, a storytelling strategist, somebody who makes you stop and say, Oh, ha, there is a through line. And I'll be darned, that does sound a bit like a system I might have been using all along and I didn't even recognize it, but that's who you are. Claire 19:03 You nailed it, which is why I mean, I really appreciate you as a peer mentor, like I do. Like I'm just coming up on the anniversary of this double knee surgery, right. And I think I told you the story where there was a really essential piece of work that I had to do and I ended up doing it the day after I got home from the hospital, in my bed, marathon two nine-hour day virtual sessions. The second one after sitting too long. The first day was 100% from my back with my laptop propped up and you know, so that they're looking down on me as I'm resting my head. Oh, and my knees are up in the air with ice packs on them. But I got such a nice compliment from one of the people coming out of that session. And he said, you know, you've got this way of, of making sure that everybody's voice is heard, and everybody feels listened to in the room, and you always find a way to make space for everybody to get their thoughts out. And I never thought about that at all, as being something that I was able to do. But it's 100% core to my process. And it's also core to me individually, because, you know, from an empathetic perspective, I hate to feel like, just because you're introverted, or you're taking time to process what you're listening to, you're not getting your point across, because meetings aren't always built for everybody in the room. So from that perspective, and as you say that I'm like, You know what, I haven't even put that on my resume yet, or my profile. I've never really, I think I put the quote on my LinkedIn or something at one point. But as you say that I've never actually connected those dots till right now that that was meaningful for that, for that reason. So thanks for that, of course. And you know, what I find most often, especially with people who have been in business for a while, and even not in business, it doesn't matter if you're in business necessarily to recognize this. But what I find is what is most familiar and natural for us what is just something we do so naturally, we would never even recognize it as quote-unquote special is exactly what is so remarkable to other people about us. It's like our mundane is remarkable to others. I remember, I was talking with my husband a long time ago about cooking. And I learned everything that I know about cooking from his mother, as far as it comes from a recipe and she was this incredible chef, baker, she could make absolutely anything people would come from literally for miles to join us for dinner at her house. And so she taught me everything that I knew about cooking from a recipe. So one day, we're in the kitchen, and you know, we're talking about what we're going to make, and we didn't happen to have the things for the recipe, my husband and I, and his mother. And so I look in the fridge and I, I kind of just look at the chaos that's going on in there. You know, we've got like three jars of pickles, we've got like a couple of things a tuna and like a couple of and I go well, we can make a pretty decent casserole. And both of them are like, I'm sorry, what? Like, like a casserole? And I was like, like, if you connect these dots and so on, this might work and that's kind of a vinegary thing. And, you know, and it'll make sense, you know, that all the chaos will make sense. And both of them stopped in their tracks like, okay, okay, well, let's try it, you know, but I was so used to, I think cobbling together. Because we didn't do a lot of recipes growing up, that for me, I am very much like an order out of chaos type. But I never looked at myself that way until a little things like that will come up or someone will tell me. Someone will get on a phone with me before we write their resume. And we'll talk for two hours and they will throw every detail from when they were 25 and on at me. And we will talk through everything. Time 23:03 And you take the chaos and you make it clear. Claire 23:06 And they they often even apologize. Hey, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. I was rambling. And I'm like, no, no, no, that's the good stuff. The stuff you don't think is like mind blowing, is what people often miss about themselves. That's so incredible. But it's hard when you're so used to doing things one way you don't recognize it as significant. Tim 23:28 So Claire Davis takes a messy career pantry turns it into an amazing resume casserole. Claire 23:38 Exactly. That makes that gets you a job. Tim 23:42 That gets you a job. A three star Michelin casserole. Claire 23:44 Exactly. Thank you. Tim 23:45 With nothing but Ritz crackers. And, and well, no, it's got to have more than Ritz crackers and a can of tuna but no, that's great. And it's funny because so I don't know if you knew this but I mean, I was a professional chef for a number of years. Claire 23:49 Oh gosh. So this is you shaking your head. Tim 24:06 No, no, I love it. No, I'm I love we used to call it in the kitchen, the Jesus Christ factor not to be sacrilegious, but to say that this is a person that can turn water into wine. Claire 24:17 I love it. Tim 24:18 And you often face those things where something doesn't turn out and you have to make it work. And I remember going through my classical chef training and there were there were three masters. There was Escoffier which which the American School teaches and there was (Richard) Hering which was slightly different approach which are, er, which was a German original master. And that's the school that I trained under in Alberta here because we had a lot of Swiss German and Austrian chefs we were working with. And among the the Masters, there was a book by Saulnier, called The Repertoire. And the difference between those three books is that Sony just told you what the ingredients were no levels, no preparations, the book was tiny. And it expected, because you were creative, and flexible, and knew the basics about how all the ingredients work together, that you'd be able to figure it out. And it was an amazing book, it says the rest of the books are quite thick. And Saulnier was just this tiny little thing, and it would just say, Okay, we're going to make this classical dish, here's the six ingredients. And that was it. Claire 25:30 Period. Wow. Tim 25:33 Period. Good luck. But the thing is, is that, that when you think about it, you never know exactly the nuances of what you're dealing with. And so, you know, balance, and composure and your back to flow. Right? When you're talking about that. There's the creative anxiety that has to be there, the excitement and the ability to take something, and then the ability to turn that into something digestible, and the control that's needed. What do I do with it? How do I form it up? How do I make it useful? And so a balance between those two things, right, the chaos and the order, very, like really, really important, and in a way, so much more dynamic. And it has so much more potential than starting, you know, paint by number, which is like rounding around to the original part. And maybe this is a great place for us to begin to wrap up and maybe consider where we go next conversation. Is that the resumes, as you said, originally, they can't be formulaic. And they can't be so traditional, because we've gone the route of painting by number, and it puts you into the hopper with a bunch of other people that look pretty similar to you. Not a lot of differentiation. So maybe part of brand is embracing the chaos. And getting through the messy stuff. I love this thought of like brand casserole. Wow. Claire 26:58 And maybe a little Jesus Christ moment on top. You know, all you need is a little help. Tim 27:04 A little help, But I mean, and that's the thing. Why? Why do we need help? Well, if we're in a project, if we're in a project, we need a lot of different personalities or workstyles. To bring that project home, we need the deep thinkers, and the inventors and we need the people who can tell what's a good idea and what's a bad idea. And we need those people that are going to connect the dots, we need those people that are going to bring the essentials to making it happen. And then we need those people that are actually going to bring it home and produce that thing. And anything we do that's of consequence and worth has all of that it's rare that a single person, let alone the person from the inside the, the applicant can do that fairly for themselves. It takes an outside view to become fluent. So anyway, I'm excited by this, the casserole, so we could maybe next time and maybe not too long, we should really try to find time. I know it's summer, but let's let's go for it. Let's talk about some of that internal journey and some of that chaos and dealing with it. And then also maybe some of the fear that stops people in their tracks for for saying you know what? You got pickles. Got some tomato paste. This could work. Claire 28:15 There’s a caper. Tim 28:16 A caper. You know, we're either going to have, we're going to have a casserole or we're going to have some warm antipasto. So, let's, let's make this happen. All right. Claire 28:25 Yeah. Also, now I'm hungry. Tim 28:28 Final thoughts there, Claire? And maybe as we as we wrap up, let people know where you are, what you're doing, how can they get in touch? How can they learn more. Claire 28:37 So thank you so much for having me today. I can't tell you what an honor it is to be in leagues with you. And you're so incredibly generous with the advice and the peer mentorship that you share. So thank you so much for having me. It's such an honor to be on your show, you know. Tim 28:56 Ditto. Claire 28:57 Now it's a lot of fun. We just keep impromptu recording shows together. It's how it should always be. But I would say you know if anybody is out there and they are struggling moving forward in their career, or you've been laid off, or you want to get a promotion and you are stuck and you keep getting passed over or hey, maybe you've had a beautiful career, and you want to get into the C-suite, but you're just not sure how to package yourself to do those things. Give us a call because Traction Resumes. That's our bread and butter. What we do is we really listen to your story. And believe me, we've heard some really complex, challenging ones, and we help you to sort it out so that not only do you show up brilliantly as you are on paper, but also so that you learn how to talk about yourself too. Because a lot of times just going through the process can remind you what that system for success really looks like for you. And why that makes you absolutely powerful. And what that system is that you're ready to bring in terms of value to somebody else. So if you want to find me, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, I pretty much live there. Or you can always find out more at tractionresume.com That's tractionresume.com Tim 30:13 And we'll have all of those links in the shownotes. Claire 30:16 Awesome Tim 30:16 So we'll make sure. And you know, one more time, I know that you've really helped me clarify who I am and what my offering is. Claire 30:23 I’m honoured Tim 30:23 And so, you know, honestly, I can speak for an experience that you, people will know. Just don't go and see, folks. Claire 30:32 You can send me a message. I'll send you a voice note. Tim 30:34 There you go. Claire 30:35 Love it. Yeah. Tim 30:36 All right, Claire, thank you so much. And I can't wait till we do this again. Claire 30:41 Me too. Thanks, Tim. Time 30:46 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership. Please give us positive rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word to by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening to be sure to tune in in two weeks time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading. | |||
| 13 Nov 2024 | Unlocking the Power of Coach Leadership with Sehaam Cyrene | 00:44:11 | |
Imagine a world where leaders don’t just direct but inspire—where every conversation sparks growth and trust. In this episode, Tim and Sehaam explore how modern leaders can use coaching skills to foster collaboration, innovation, and stronger team connections. Sehaam discusses the rise of younger leaders eager to embrace a different model of leadership—one that prioritizes understanding individual team members, building mutual trust, and supporting personal growth over command and control. She illustrates through examples and practical advice how a coach-leader mindset can reshape organizations by encouraging leaders to embrace listening, curiosity, and patience. This dynamic approach, she argues, not only inspires teams but also provides leaders with greater fulfillment and strategic focus. Sehaam also shares insights from her book, The Better Conversations Rulebook, which provides leaders with actionable questions and phrases for fostering more profound, more effective communication. Tim and Sehaam delve into the nuances of building coaching skills, the art of asking the right questions, and the powerful impact of trust-building on team morale and productivity. About Sehaam Cyrene Sehaam Cyrene is an Executive Leadership & Strategy Coach to CEOs and Executive/Senior Leadership Teams. She is the Founder of Coach/Lead Ltd. and creator of the CPD Certified online course Leaders Who Coach(tm). The Better Conversations Rulebook is based on some of the skills and competencies taught to leaders in organizations across many functions and industries. Sehaam's deep knowledge of what keeps leaders awake at night and passion for leaders to find joy in their work make this Rulebook an immensely easy-to-read and instantly applicable conversation resource that every leader should have at their fingertips. A seasoned business leader, entrepreneur and live speaker, Sehaam is on a mission to make coach-leadership a global standard. Resources discussed in this episode: — Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Sehaam Cyrene | The Coach/Lead Coach: -- Transcript: Sehaam 00:01 What I love about this younger generation of leaders coming through is that they're really hungry for a collaborative style of leading. They're not accepting of what they've seen before. They know it can be better. They might not know what that better is, but they're really searching for it, and they're challenging organizations, and that is fertile ground for leaders having these coaching skills and modelling coach leadership because you are, you're modelling your team and your peers. Watch what other people are doing, and so it's just, how do you show up? That's what's exciting.
Tim 00:34 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you, my friend, are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. I'm Tim Sweet, and I'd like to welcome you to Episode 43 of the Sweet on Leadership podcast. Tim 01:08 Well, Hey everybody, welcome back to Sweet on Leadership. Thank you very much for taking the time to join us today. Thank you very much for taking the time to invest in yourself and broaden your horizons. And the person that's in front of me today and the person that you're listening to join me is a very dear friend, a colleague that we've been in each other's orbits since around 2016-2015. Sehaam is a leadership coach. She's an advisor. She's the founder of Coach Lead, which is a fantastic organization that's helping leaders and people that I'm very fond of on this side of the pond. But of course, Sehaam is in London, England. So, thank you very much for joining us today, Sehaam. It's so wonderful to spend a little more time with you.
Sehaam 01:49 I'm really excited to chat with you. Tim, it's been a while.
Tim 01:53 Well, you and I are cut from the same cloth. We care about many of the same things. Some of my fondest professional activities have been co-writing articles with you. We've done series in the past. Some of the most meaningful pieces of writing that I've done have been in conjunction with you. And so, you know, I'm really excited to see what comes out of today as we record this conversation and and play with a few ideas.
Sehaam 02:21 Definitely, I'm not sure we've got enough time, but we'll see what we can do in the next half hour or so, Tim.
Tim 02:27 There's always another time. There's never has to be just one, but before we keep going, though, what would you like people to know about you when they're envisioning who you are and what you do?
Sehaam 02:40 Well, I'm super passionate about leaders using our coaching skills as coaches because we know how amazing that is for people, how it unlocks people and gets people unstuck. So my passion, all my work, is devoted to teaching leaders how to use coaching skills, and that might be learning to use a question. land a question, land a phrase, how to show up in a conversation all the way through to actually, really digging in and learning at depth the skills and techniques of coach leadership and the nuance within that. Because you're not a pure coach, you're a leader who uses coaching skills, so happy to share more about that a little later. So, I do that through my one-to-ones. I work with senior leadership teams. I have a program that I built during lockdown called Leaders Who Coach and I run cohorts and connected programs for organizations. Really about building that coaching culture, that coaching capability within teams and organizations. I love it.
Tim 03:47 And there's nothing more rewarding. I think of some of my longest-term clients, and it's funny how I have these, I like to say clients for life, the ones that it just never stops. I mean, I have coaches myself in various areas of work and life that I use and that continue to always offer me new perspective and ways to see myself and to get over some of the barriers that I think are insurmountable, but when they break it down, it's step by step, but It's wonderful to see your clients graduate into that, demonstrating the very skills that that we're helping them with, and really becoming that coach to others. Always found that such a gratifying experience. It doesn't stop. I mean, it's funny, in many cases, it makes them hungrier and hungrier to try new things, but that leader as coach, it's a term that you introduced me to, and it's something that's always stuck in my mind. And so, yeah, I'm happy that you're here and that people are going to get a chance to see this. On that note, we talk about the skills that a leader must develop in order to be an effective coach, and I know that is one thing we're going to be introducing a little bit later here. But before we do, our previous guests, Tim Bessinger and Renee Miller, were here, and when asked about our little tradition, about what question would you lob at the guest that is going to follow you? And here was the one they left for you. As we know, everyone finds themselves engaging in activities that are not always clearly helpful to who we want to be and where we want to go. And our conversation with Tim and Renee was really about amazing adventures and big choices that they had made. And Aaron, the previous guest, had said, you know, how do you take that one big thing off the shelf and dust it off and actually get it done? Tim Beissinger Clip 5:47 If you have to do that, if you need to clear up room in your schedule, what is one thing that you're doing that you would or want to get out that you want to stop doing. We all have too many things to do and not enough time. So what would you cut? Tim 06:06 And it doesn't have to be something like stop tying your shoes, as he said, it doesn't have to necessarily be that specific, but would be the one thing that you, as a coach to others, so that people know we're human, would choose to cut to create more capacity for yourself.
Sehaam 06:23 Cleaning the house. Tim and Renee. Cleaning the house, right? Household chores are important, and there can be some sort of meditative element counter to doing those chores. But I think if it's to stop one thing in my life, it would be to hand that over to somebody else. If I could afford it, I would have someone cook me meals. Because as much as I love. I do love cooking. I absolutely don't mind house cleaning, but to me, that would be a luxury to have that side of things taken care of. As a mum of 20 plus years, that would be quite liberating to just not have that responsibility. And then hopefully come back to, maybe not the house cleaning, but come back to, you know, enjoying cooking food, because I have the time to really kind of indulge. But, yeah, that's probably two things, right? But we'll stick with house cleaning.
Tim 07:18 I love how you phrase that because it's not just what are you going to cut, but what's the thing that it makes space for? And why is that, you know, a net positive on your day or or in your year, right? And I think that's such an important thing that we do the math and we say, you know, what is this really worth? And it's funny, in that afford conversation, yes, it's a luxury for somebody to clean your house. You know, often it's funny. I like building things, but sometimes I do things myself. I build a fence when I should be hiring somebody to do it. Or sometimes they're faster than I am, they're better than I am, they're cheaper than I am. Like, just go and build a fence. Like, economically. It makes no sense for me to stress– Sehaam 8:04 False economy, right? Tim 8:05 Yeah, false economy, 100%. Great answer. I'm gonna let you think about it. Towards the end of the show, I'm gonna ask you to lob one at our next guest. Okay, let's get into what we were talking about before we hit record here. You were sharing with me this idea that the new generation of leaders that are that are moving in, right? We have Gen Z and millennials coming in, and you and I have seen the rise of Gen Y, and we've seen now the tailing off of the boomers. Now, Gen X is slowly leaving the workforce, and we've done generational work, right? So we see this new generation of leaders with new pressures and new ideas and different experiences come into the workplace. You've got some fascinating insight into what this group is looking for. Can you share a little bit about that and kick us off?
Sehaam 8:54 Yeah, sure. So my observation is that it's nothing new, but leaders are getting younger, and I think there's a certain amount of a whole culture of startups and scale-ups that's really driven this and encouraged people at a younger age to start something or get involved early in a young organization, and inevitably, those leaders find themselves leading teams of people, having to make strategic decisions they've never encountered before. They're having to be aware of board meetings and governance and a whole bunch of things. How do you build a team? How do you scale? Very often, their own experience is either quite short or doesn't exist. They're absolutely doing it from the beginning for the first time. And also, I notice the number of direct reports that these people have is getting bigger, right? You know, it can very quickly mushroom from one or two people as your direct report to 10 or more, right? In a short space of time, because of the nature of the types of work that we're doing. Because most work is technology work, and so they come with a different expectation. They're very well educated about what good leadership is. This plethora of books, around all of that, I've added one myself to the piles of books. So they are educated, but they're not practiced. And I think this is where this sort of big gap is, and that's the bit that I'm excited by because I think they're challenging the norms and expectations of leadership. They're actually naming some stuff that I think in my generation certainly didn't question. You just joined the workforce; you didn't really ask questions. You did as you were told. Very much command and control. And I think these younger leaders, from young millennials through to Gen Z coming through, we have different desires, different ideas of what good looks like, a greater self-advocacy. It might not feel like that to them, but by comparison to our generation, definitely much better self-advocacy of this is, you know, this is what I expect. Why can't we have a culture like this? I'm expecting a leader or, you know, a manager who can grow me, so all of those make for a very exciting space. What comes next, right?
Tim 11:34 For sure, it's funny that when I think back to early work with generation, we were working with Gen Y, and they were the first of the digital generations where we were, you know, just waiting for them to grow up enough where they would get it and they would stop caring about what they cared about. And that didn't happen. Instead, Gen X started to think like Gen Y, and now Gen and so I see this thing that even though I'm 50, I don't feel 50. I feel 26 in my head. And so myself and my clients, I see them struggling with many of the same things that for you, dear listener, just because we're talking about the younger generation if you're my age, my vintage, don't stop listening. We still care about these things, but we're approaching them from a position of change, changing over from what we knew, the command and control structures that we knew, they're being gestated in this, you know, they're bringing that language, often from their parents and often from media. They're entering the workforce or entering their leadership journey with these things being the reality, whereas we're catching up. And for us, it's often a change experience, but for them, it's a foundational thing. And so when you look at that, what are some of the keywords, what are some of the key topics that we have to be really aware of are at the forefront right now for all of us, and in particular, these new leaders.
Sehaam 12: 57 I think there's a reality, isn't there, that work life, working in a team, looks a certain way, and there are expectations or an ideal of how a team should function, how your manager should manage you, how you as a manager should show up. Gosh, I so very often hear from managers that they really don't know what they're supposed to do in these growth meetings, so they end up reverting to them being very tactical. You know, how's your week going? What have you achieved? What are you working on next type meetings, rather than, what's your big aspiration? Where do you want to go and knowing how to get into it? Stay with it. Allow time for it to build from one conversation to the next. I often say to people, we ask too much of a single conversation, you can't cover everything, and you're not going to build trust in one conversation. You're not going to uncover someone's desires and aspirations, and passions in one conversation. So I think for all of us, it's just the realization that so much of our happiness at work hangs on the quality of our relationships, but the quality of our relationships depends on us being able to understand people, to be able to be in conversation with people, and actually know what's going on for that person, the stuff that they say, as well as the stuff they don't say and that maybe they conceal, and having the patience to and the skill to earn that permission to get to a deeper level with that individual in that conversation.
Tim 14:37 And even to handle that you know, Gallup put out some, and I quote these numbers quite often, but Gallup put out a study that said, you know, they figure that when we look at people's general makeup, about 10% of the population have the capacity to be what we would deem as modern leaders. And I think it's much lower than that. I think it's like 6% because I think a lot of that 10% never got the chance. Socio-economically, gender, race, just situation they were never afforded. The window never opened for them to be in that position professionally, but for the rest, the ability to get into that space, to have the capacity to care deeply about who a person is, and carry that with you as a leader, because you're now taking on their success on top of your own, which I think is the definition for me. You get yourself in the middle of them being as successful as they can. That requires a capacity to do that, and for some people, is exhausting. They cannot hold that with them. It's too burdensome. Doesn't make them bad people. You need to create those spaces. And I love when you say that, stick with it, have that conversation, and oh, boy, do we like to introduce tools and personality profiles that are some sort of substitution for getting to know people, versus doing the work and actually understanding who they are. And as you say, when you've got a team of one and two, it's important to do it, but maybe not overdo it. And when you have a team of 30, it's really hard to do it to any great extent. And so finding what your number is is really important too. Is it seven seems to be an off-quoted number? Is like seven is like a good quality number for direct reports. But can you build that capacity up, that vision of yourself, putting that on yourself, as your responsibility, as part of your not just about getting the tactical stuff done or focusing on that, because it's easy, but really being that glue that is a defining idea for leaders, isn’t it?
Sehaam 16:48 I very often say to leaders, you have two responsibilities. One is to be strategic, so that thinking time, the networking, the getting to know your peers, the being out there, and whatever your function requires. And the second one is growing the capability of your people. And if you're doing the coding, if you're doing the admin, if you're doing all of these things, you are not fulfilling your responsibility in that role. You're missing out on the opportunity to grow. You're missing out on the opportunity to feel rewarded. Because, as you say, seeing other people's success is hugely rewarding, seeing someone grow and do that, and you're missing out on being at the strategic decision-making table. If you're sitting in meetings and haven't got anything to contribute, then you've got to think about why. So, to Tim and Rene's question, what would you clear out the way it's the doing, and really look at what is your calendar filled with, and should you be in those meetings? And how do you extricate yourself? Who do you need to build up? Who do you need to grow so that they can own that part of it, which indeed is part of their job description, right? So that frees you up to be strategic. So, if your weekly calendar isn't focused on those two things, you need a really good, hard look at it to see what you could be doing better.
Tim 18:16 It’s funny, because, as you see, especially when you see technical specialists, and we see this a lot in education, where we have people that are coming up, they're professors. I mean, they're academics, or they're scientists and engineers, or they are doctors and whatnot. They're coming up through being the key contributor, right? They're the expert. And then they move into leadership spheres, and their idea of what value they provide can still be so deeply rooted in being on the tools that it's very tough to give up that. And not only are you robbing yourself from being at those strategic meetings, but you could be robbing your reports of truly developing their own capabilities. And, you know, we talk about micromanagement. It's so funny, in many of my leadership meetings, micromanagement will come up as that thing that I need. I don't want to do, I don't want to be, and we treat it like it's this thing. Micromanagement, to me, is an indicator. It's a lack of trust. It's like, I don't trust it's going to be done as well as I could do it. Maybe you're not, and there's lots of reasons why it happens you haven't taken the time to learn, or you haven't let go. But there's a trust challenge, like let it go, let them manage it. Be less operational, less tactical. Get into the strategic. Give them room to make mistakes and figure out what you're going to do when it happens. But that micromanagement, to me, is always an indicator that there's a lack of trust, that there's a lack of relaxation and release, that this person can do the job, maybe not as well as me, but differently than me, you know.
Sehaam 19:54 And that's also a reflection of the leader's skills themselves. So one of the hardest things when I take leaders through leaders who coach, or a Leading Through Change program, and I'm teaching them coaching skills, and we do live practice on each other, and it's only when they're actually in that that they start to see, gosh, this is quite difficult. It's that tendency to want to give someone the answer to get to the solution as quickly as possible, right? And often, you know, yes, you're under pressure. And I would say in a crisis situation, absolutely, you need to be more directive, but you need to loop back with that person and then reconnect in some way. But generally speaking, because I'm the expert, because I have got all this knowledge and expertise and so on, I do know what the answer is, great. And there's a place for that towards the end of the conversation, that if you bring that in too soon, you are squashing that person's perhaps their interest. Maybe they actually walked into the room and had some ideas, but you never asked them. They didn't get a chance to share. You didn't get to have a chance where you could really challenge them to think bigger or to take an idea even further. You missed the opportunity to really understand how do they think? You know, what's their motivator? Where do they tend to get stuck? And how can you support them? So this desire, tell people you've got to sit on your hands and just, you know, use some other ways. And those ways can be as simple as a phrase like, Tell me more. What have you already thought about doing? What's causing you to feel stuck here? It's back to that. Allow time and stay with it for a little while to really, like, you know, find the evidence, go on an effort to kind of really explore and understand. How does this person think? What ideas do they have? Because that will mean that you can go on holiday, on vacation, and know that your team members have got everything covered, because you know how they think, then you know how they're going to resolve problems that come up. No one needs to ring you or message you or WhatsApp you or whatever you don't need that you can really have that time out so that desire to tell people what to do or to come up with a solution, give it to them, is actually to your words, denying them. It's robbing them of a chance to really express or explore or develop a stronger emotional attachment to the process, right or the outcome, because you know what, that's what's going to drive them us telling them what to do. It went, Yeah, okay, but you know that's not my context, and you didn't really understand it, and you didn't really ask me about it, so I'm just going to ignore you and go and do my own thing, and then we get those surprises, right? Well, things weren't done the way we wanted them. So.
Tim 23:00 If we put ourselves into the mind of that young leader who's maybe two, five years into this, and they're starting to extend trust, and then all of a sudden, it turns out that, oh, something wasn't going on. I mean, often, if you are that domineering type leader, if you come with all the answers, and you are the expert, you're intimidating, or they feel they have to surprise you. They feel they have to impress you because otherwise, they can't compete. And that's a real way to ostracize people, is to make them feel somehow less or that they can't be intellectual peers, or can't rise to the level of performance, it's unattainable, those surprises. And we talked a little bit about this off-air, so I think that's a great segue for us to take into this. Talk to me a little bit about the types of surprises that people suddenly have and how that plays on the mind of the leader, and how it could actually cause them to maybe regress and to become more than command and control or micromanaging leader if it's not properly addressed if people don't have the skill to deal with it. So tell me about those surprises.
Sehaam 24:12 Yeah, you hear it, don't you? You delegated something to somebody, and the work didn't come back to the quality, or it just didn't happen at all, or there was a key piece of information that you know you as a leader because as we go up through the layers, less and less information gets passed up, and because everyone is making a judgment and filtering that information based on what they think is most relevant. But if you don't have the trust, you are going to find that the surprises are where information is held back in a team that's trying to innovate, that's crucial that your team members are generous, and they can only be generous if there's a high level of trust, and there's a way of collaborating that really is very inviting. So people are going to hold that information back for lots and lots of reasons, right? So a good word is concealment, and concealment because it's not information that was omitted or forgotten, it's information that I'm not going to share with you because you might judge me. It might be politically, a really bad move for me to share something, and that might be about an event, an incident, a mistake, something that happened that actually, you don't want your boss to know about. Your team might mess up, someone might make a decision, someone in your team, if you've got a hierarchy, someone in your team might make a mistake, and you don't share that upwards because you're protecting a team member. You're protecting a decision that you made or the fact that you actually didn't have a conversation with your director report. And now this problem has surfaced again, and judgment might be in the form of I've had this incident a lot where someone they were trying to get their team member to produce a very simple document in PowerPoint, and they went through a couple of rounds of resetting a new deadline, and when they got to the bottom of it, that person didn't feel confident using PowerPoint, and it is so tiny, and for us, we can forget that maybe some people just don't have the confidence to use certain tools, and we assume that they've had the training, or they've used it somewhere else and they haven't, and that can create massive frustration, because if you're relying on it as a presentation to a regional team meeting, for example, and it doesn't show that looks poor on the team. So what are you going to do? You have a direct report who concealed the fact they don't know how to use PowerPoint, and you can't share that information at a regional team meeting because you're protecting that team member. But it's essential to some decision-making. It's essential to the intelligence that's being shared in the organization, right? And then there is active concealment. I don't want you to know this because it's not to my advantage that you know it. I'm going to keep it for myself. I want to be the person that is seen as holding that knowledge or having that influence. So we do it for lots of different reasons, and those are the kinds of surprises that we don't like. Those are the things that create friction in our day, right?
Tim 27:33 For sure, when we have people that aren't sharing, what impedes that willingness to expose oneself or to be open? That gotcha moment.
Sehaam 27:45 I think that we do a lot of self-judgment first of all, so if you are my manager and I come into the meeting, I may judge a certain piece of information as silly, not relevant, tiny, minor. But actually, it ends up being a massive blocker to us getting something done or starting a task, right? And you maybe gave me a task to do, but there's a sequence in there. I really have no idea, so I didn't know what to do about it. I sat on it and so on. I might have a personal challenge that means I am just not comfortable. My style might not be to share certain things that you're asking me to share. And so that's why having that ability to observe people, to read the situation, to ask questions rather than assume something about someone. Those skills are so important. Have always been important, but we've not been very good at them, but I think super important for younger generations of leaders because they want to have a very different way of being with people. And I think we've gotten a little bit waylaid by things like talking about being vulnerable at work or imposter syndrome. I feel they are distracting from what really we should be talking about, which is our ability to have conversations with people.
Tim 29:19 You know, when we take the employee perspective, or at least the person that's reporting into the leader they're carrying with them, their identity of who they think they need to be. And I mean, one of the chronic things I see is that when people get their first salary job, or when they're showing up at a boardroom table, they have this idea that they got hired to be the person that was fire and forget it. Should know everything about everything and should not come with questions or fears or a need to learn and grow. And so if they're asked something they don't know, I hate that fake it till you make it. Just despise the term. But often, people will say nothing, or they will fear that vulnerability. And at the same time, we've got leaders that, as you say, they need to be fluent in their own style and the style of their people so that they can tell that. You know what, this person just doesn't open up in this way, we require a different approach and then make it safe, like imposter syndrome means that a person has to fake it. You know what? I mean? Like, I feel like I'm faking it. Well, when are you enough? When are you enough to just go in and say, this is where I'm at? And if the leader is leading in a way that they are growth-minded, as we say, and not scarce-minded, or transactionally minded, that this person is supposed to show up with all the answers, then we got room for that. Does the employee understand that that's the case? Is their experience consistent, that it's constantly reinforced, and then we can get to this period of openness? And I think that's what you answered, was, why are people worried? Why would they ever hold back? Well, because they're humans.
Sehaam 31:02 Absolutely, and I think we go into conversations assuming we have a right to have this conversation. So another thing that I teach is what I call trust, permission, dynamic. You might have worked with someone for a long time and think that you know them and you have a certain level of trust, but actually, for each conversation that you're in, you can't assume that you have the trust enough for the topics that you need to discuss, and so it's being mindful of what's the mood that you're both entering this conversation with. Has one of you come out of a tough conversation or a meeting and is feeling a bit flustered or is distracted and really just syncing with each other and establishing, you know, contracting how you're going to use this time together. What are you going to talk about? What are you going to resolve? But we too often assume and step into spaces, and because we're not inviting enough, we're not inviting of the other person, there just isn't that exploration, there isn't that sharing, there isn't that emotional connection between us to get into it. And so it's important that we do make time for these, and I know people are stretched, but honestly, there's a lot of meetings that we're in that we shouldn't be in, don't need to be in. And like I said earlier, we should be making time for that. And there is that expectation, right?
Tim 32:27 Yeah, you used the word false economy earlier, and I think that that's really, you know, that thought that we're saving time by skipping over the connection time, it's going to bite you. You're going to pay for it one way or another. That knowledge of, do we have the right to do things? I mean, even when you and I talked most recently here, I know that I have time blindness. I don't view the passage of time and something I've had to learn about myself. And when you and I talk, it could be years between conversations, and for me, it's like yesterday. I have to be very careful that I'm not assuming trust for somebody that has felt the passage of time, you know. So I have to sort of start where we're at. And as you were speaking, it brought up something really interesting for me, a leader, because they're out there doing the strategic stuff, because they're out there talking to the CEO, or they're out there, you know, in the public, and then maybe they gave a press conference, or they're talking in front of the whole team there, there's going to be a lot of questions. They're very visible, and there's a lot of questions from the report saying, What does this mean for me? And you may need to have time to have them answer those questions, whereas the challenge for the leader is that person may have been working tactically, operationally, and we don't know exactly what they're doing and what they're dealing with. And so where our work is highly visible and we need to explain it, yet their work is somewhat invisible or hard to see, and we need to have them explain it. We're coming from two very, very different positions, where they're making a lot of assumptions based on what we're doing, and we're making a lot of assumptions based on what we did when we did the work, or what we think the job should be, and holy moly, what a powder keg that can create if we don't deal with it.
Sehaam 34:11 Right? And there's definitely a power imbalance, right? Just by virtue of us being their boss, can skew, so if we are setting the agenda and we tell them how to do stuff, or we say, this is what we're going to talk about. Okay, you're the boss. I'm going to go with that, rather than actually bring something up that might actually be an idea about how the team functions, what we could do better, right? All of these things. So, yeah, you know. And a certain amount of ego and showing that we know stuff and so on, but we really have to let go of that and create that space for growth. I think you mentioned that earlier, for someone else to grow, because if you're not doing it, you're not fulfilling your role, right? And those nasty surprises and all that concealment will continue. We conceal things to protect ourselves, to make ourselves look better to others, to manage our reputation, and so on. And you've got to be aware that those things are happening, you know, within your team and through the whole range of malicious to innocent and just, you know, I'm not experienced at work. I didn't want to talk about it, because I think it has a lot of air time, but this idea of imposter syndrome, it's the feeling that you have that you don't know enough, right? And so what we don't teach people to do is to hatch a plan, come up with a strategy, think stuff through, reach out to people, right? Have a way that you respond to situations where you don't have all the information. And you know, on the flip side, it's that the thing that drives leaders to jump in with an answer or tell people what to do, is this value that we hold in society, that we should have the answers that leaders do need to know. And to your point earlier, right? I'm hired because I know how to do this stuff, 100%, 110%, so actually, yeah, that bit's great, and that's important, and that's why you're in the role, and you've certainly earned your stripes to be in that leadership role. But now things have changed, and now you have other people that you're growing and, you know, I mentioned earlier, the opportunity to share your knowledge comes towards the end, and you and I know that as course correcting, what have you, and stress testing somebody's ideas, so getting into those sorts of questions of, you know, how do you think it'll happen in this situation? What have we not thought of? And I can share my perspective or my experience of doing this. And it went, what do you think? Do you think that has merit for here in this situation that you're dealing with? Is there something that would be valuable there? That's where we can come in with our knowledge, that's where we can do that course correcting and teach that person to think more deeply, to think several steps ahead, because that's what we want. We want our team members to be able to respond to things, to adapt, to foresee and anticipate, and even just know how to conduct themselves when the unexpected happens.
Tim 37:16 And to have a good relationship with that. Not knowing, you know, it's an oldie, but a goodie. You don't know. Add the word yet. You don't know yet, and be able to have those yet discussions with your staff and say, No, you don't have the answer yet. How are you going to get there? Tell me what you think you need to do. And then, as you say, come in at the end. And you've given us this great model, or at least this visualization of, you know, for the leader, understand that they have pressures of their own, and we need to understand what those are, and the concealment is a natural thing, and it's going to happen. And as leaders, we can work with this positively by making sure that we're giving them the opportunity to recognize that in themselves and coaching them through it, and then being supportive and moving a lot of our initiative to the end, saying, all right now we can review how they did, and maybe they've taught us a thing or two so that we don't have to be caving to our own pressure to be the expert, or to get it done quickly, or to be the rightest person in the room, right?
Sehaam 38:26 What I do hear a great deal from leaders who graduated from Leaders Who Coaches, and even through the program, they talk a lot because I make them go and practice these skills, right? So sit on your hands, ask these questions, listen, and so on. And they come back, and they go, Wow, they came up with something I never would have thought of. I really didn't know that that was going on, or I didn't know they had that position or those thoughts. They actually came up with something better. And once leaders start to build up their own evidence for those skills working. It's really easy to keep doing them. You know, you get a much richer conversation and an outcome when you do sit on your hands and stop telling people what to do.
Tim 39:12 I think we’ve covered a lot of ground today. As you've said, I think that's a great segue knowing what graduates of your program look like to let's take a moment here, and we're going to get you to the question you're going to ask the next person. But before we do, let's talk about, what are you excited about. You’ve got this course that’s available. Tell us a little bit more. What else are you excited about?
Sehaam 39:31 I'm excited about us moving into truly what I believe to be the next wave, if you like, or the next era of leadership. And you and I talked earlier, there's command and control that everyone knows and hates, and then we've got servant leadership, which doesn't always get a good rap. We also have had a decade or two of coaches being around and people, more and more people, know what it's like to be coached, and certainly know that coaches exist, right? So, for me, the next obvious sort of move is that leaders have these coaching skills, and that's what excites me because what I love about this younger generation of leaders coming through is that they're really hungry for that. They're hungry for a collaborative style of leading. They're not accepting of what they've seen before. They know it can be better. They might not know what that better is, but they're really searching for it, and they're challenging organizations, you know, with talking about culture and so on, and that is prime fertile ground for, you know, more and more leaders having these coaching skills and being coach leaders or modelling coach leadership through the organization or with their team, because you are you're modelling your team and your peers. Watch what other people are doing because they're looking for answers, too. Nobody has all the answers. Nobody knows everything that they're doing. Everyone has doubts. And so it's just, how do you show up? That's what's exciting.
Tim 41:12 If people are going to engage with these thoughts of yours, where can they find you? What can they pick up?
Sehaam 41:18 Folks can go to my website, which is coachlead.co, you can find me on LinkedIn. So my handle is Sehaam, S, E, H, double, A, M, and you'll find me on YouTube as well. Sehaam Cyrene.
Tim 41:33 And you mentioned you injected a book into the mix, into the universe. Tell us about that.
Sehaam 41:38 It's called The Better Conversations Rulebook: Questions and Phrases Practiced Daily by Leaders Who Coach. It's a sequence of essays, if you like, with a total of 88 questions and phrases and explainers for why you might use them in different situations and what's their purpose. So it's a very practical guide to different scenarios that we're facing, and many of them are the sort of the most popular ones that Leaders Who Coach use. So yeah.
Tim 42:09 Okay, let's get to the question. So you were kind enough to feel the question the pop fly that Tim had sent for you. What would be your question to the next person in line? Sehaam 42:21 Okay, so my question is, Who or what anchors you when you're having a tough time, and if they feel comfortable sharing how, that will be wonderful.
Tim 42:34 So the who or the what would be that would be a memory or a pivotal moment or a pivotal person.
Sehaam 42:41 It could be a person, it could be a writer, it could be an actor, depending on what your profession is, right? Might be someone in your industry, might be a family member, someone living, or they might be a historical someone who's just influenced you so much that you kind of go back to again and again.
Tim 43:00 Okay, great. So I will lob that question at the next person there, and for all of you, it's a great question for our listeners to ponder. Right. Sehaam, as always. It's been a fantastic conversation. I really appreciate your smiling face and your wonderful ways. It's just such a joy to spend time with you. Sehaam 43:18 Thank you, likewise, Tim, I do. I do. Enjoy our chats.
Tim 43:23 Okay, let's not take it too long before the next one. Tim 43:28 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If like us. You think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership. Please give us a positive rating and review on Apple podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders, and you can spread the word too by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening, and be sure to tune in in two weeks' time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet encouraging you to keep on leading you. | |||
| 29 Nov 2023 | Aaron McConnell - Building a Career Around Your Passion | 00:32:27 | |
In this episode of the "Sweet on Leadership" podcast, host Tim Sweet engages in a captivating conversation with Aaron McConnell, president of TransRockies Race Series. They explore Aaron's journey from a childhood fascination with mountain biking to becoming a trailblazer in organizing multi-day running and biking events. The discussion delves into the challenges, triumphs, and the essence of creating a career around one's passion. Aaron McConnell shares insights into his early experiences with mountain biking, from discovering the sport as a child to organizing races and publishing newsletters. The conversation touches on pivotal moments, such as winning the bid to host a mountain bike World Cup, the challenges faced during the pandemic, and the strategic thinking behind sustaining TransRockies Race Series for over two decades. Aaron emphasizes the dual nature of the event-organizing industry, balancing the glamour of on-site experiences with the behind-the-scenes grind of logistics, budgeting, and team management. About Aaron McConnell Aaron McConnell, the president of TransRockies Race Series, has built a remarkable career around his passion for mountain biking and event organization. Starting with a childhood interest, Aaron evolved into a key figure in the industry, organizing races, publishing newsletters, and contributing significantly to the endurance sports community. With over two decades of experience, Aaron's leadership has not only shaped TransRockies but also inspired enthusiasts to pursue their love for outdoor adventure. Resources discussed in this episode:
-- Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: Contact Aaron McConnell | TransRockies:
TransRockies Race Series Events
-- Transcript: Aaron 00:00 You need to follow our strengths really, figure out where we can bring value to the organization, value to our participants, and work hard to really ensure that we are creating sustainable performance and being able to be in a position to provide these great experiences and have that icing on the cake, which is part of the year that we get to spend with our participants and in really cool places.
Tim 00:28 I'd like to ask you some questions. Do you consider yourself the kind of person that gets things done? Are you able to take a vision and transform that into action? Are you able to align others towards that vision and get them moving to create something truly remarkable? If any of these describe you, then you my friend, are a leader, and this show is all about and all for you. Welcome to the Sweet on Leadership Podcast, episode 21.
Tim 01:03 Welcome back to Sweet on Leadership. Today, I am going to welcome one of my best friends in the world. This is Aaron McConnell. I've known Aaron since I was just a wee tike. I mean, we started in what? Grade one, pre-school?
Aaron 01:18 I don't know if it was kindergarten, or grade one. But yeah, I think we lived a few blocks away from each other. And yeah, we were friends all through grade school.
Tim 01:29 Yeah and then I mean, since we've also been working, well we've done professional things together, things have just progressed in such a neat way. But today, I'm excited to let people in on your story, because, to me, it represents this move of taking your passion and creating a career around it. And when you and I were kicking around the idea for this podcast, the phrase that kept coming up in my mind was, if you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life. And I think as we go through this conversation, I want us to challenge that because I'm not sure that's entirely true. I think both of us have the advantage of doing what we love. But I'm not sure about the second part. So, anyway, Aaron, tell our listeners a little bit about yourself so that they can they can develop a picture.
Aaron 02:21 Sure, I'm president of TransRockies Race Series. And so we're an event production company, we primarily organize races. So, like running races, and bike races. And we do a lot of multi-day events, multi-day trail running, multi-day mountain biking, gravel cycling, road cycling, and they’re mass participation events. So, for the most part, they're not for professional athletes, they are more for, as you would say, enthusiastic amateurs, weekend warriors, and people who love to stay fit outdoors.
Tim 03:01 Absolutely, but they still are serious races. And they are where people test themselves. And then where people really can achieve something that may have been in their bucket list for years and years. And so I know that the reputation around Calgary in the Rocky Mountains is quite high when people think of your brand. So, I'm certainly excited to be involved. It's just something that I love to see every year, year on year, how much better it gets and how much stronger the team gets. So, I'd also like you to just take us back. And when I think about us hanging out at your house, or we'd be in your kitchen, I remember your dad had that den that was off the family room. And there was that, you know, first-gen Macintosh that was in there. And I'd love you to tell us how did you first discover mountain biking, and then take us up to the point where you began a newsletter which I remember as a kid, I thought that was just the coolest thing ever.
Aaron 04:00 Well, how I discovered mountain biking was my family was into hiking when I was a kid. And yeah, I don't know that I always enjoyed hiking that much as a little kid. Yeah, you're in these beautiful places and exploring but it's also kind of long grueling hikes. And my mom would feed me lifesavers, as a five-year-old to try to motivate me to keep going. I remember we were hiking one time and these people came ripping by on bikes. And I have this kind of vivid memory of how exciting that looked. And, you know, I think I spoke to my parents. I said I’d like a mountain bike. And they said, well start saving your money and I think within a few years I had the best Canadian Tire mountain bike that money could buy when mountain bikes were still pretty new in the early 80s.
Tim 04:56 Yeah. And then this didn't just happen, It wasn't just a one-and-done for you though it wasn't just start writing and be excited about things, you got into all aspects of the sport and what it meant.
Aaron 05:08 Yeah, for sure, I did my first race when I was 12. I did one race that year. That would have been 1987 and I was probably the youngest person in that race. And it was just outside of Calgary, organized by Release Cycle. And I did that race for many, many years. Yeah, so that was my first encounter. And then with racing, and then I got more involved with racing over time, as the scene developed. And there were more mountain bike races around Calgary and Canmore. And around the world. And then I guess, to get to your question about the newsletter, as you alluded to, as in the early days of the Macintosh computers, and home desktop publishing started to become a thing. And so we had this computer at home. My dad was an art professor at the University of Calgary and computers are starting to become part of that. And I don't know what made me think of it. But I started publishing my own little newsletter about the local scene. So, I do it on the computer at home, and then I'd have these high-quality masters outputted and then copied into newsletters. And so it just sort of gave a little report from all the different events and results. And I distributed them to the local bike shops. I think they sold for a quarter. It just sort of helped to build the mountain biking community at that time.
Tim 06:35 Yeah. And how old would you have been at that point?
Aaron 06:38 Well, I guess I would have probably been closer to 15, I'm guessing. Yeah, cuz I've been racing for a few years when I started to put those together between 12 and 15.
Tim 06:48 And they ran for how long?
Aaron 06:51 I think we did it for a couple of years, or I did it for a year or two on my own. And then the Alberta Bicycle Association, which had become the sanctioning body for mountain biking, officially, I could do it as part of their newsletter. So, it became a subsection of the Alberta Bicycle Association newsletter, which then led to me becoming more involved in the Alberta Bicycle Association as well.
Tim 07:14 So a columnist by 17.
Aaron 07:17 Yes, something like that. Yeah.
Tim 07:19 All right. So, this happened and I remember around that time you started working, you were sponsored by a couple of different shops and manufacturers. You were on a team. I remember you were on Chugs team. And that was a big deal because he was designing and building his own bikes west of the city. And then it became more and more of a profession. So, you were working at bike shops, I bought bicycles off you, I remember that?. Tell us a little bit about how it became part of your career, then how did that open up? Like how did it become your initial working experience?
Tim 07:56 So, I rode for Ridley’s Cycle in Calgary. It was the first team I was involved with. And I think that was just because I was hanging out at the shop so much, they wanted to organize something, so that I wouldn't be asking them questions all the time, or something like that. And then I was on The Cycle Tech team that was a local distributor that had their own branded bikes for a couple of years. And then Jeff Shugg, with Cog frameworks, he was a custom frame builder out in Springbank. And I was working for him and started kind of organizing his racing team, which was like a, it was not really a pro-team, but like a semi-pro team to promote his bikes. So, it's kind of in the Calgary area, but also beyond. And so we were racing Canada Cup circuit a little bit into the US National Championships, that sort of thing. And so I was working in a shop, helping with the frame building a little bit and mechanical work and then organizing the team, organizing sponsors. And then we started organizing some races, really just to support the team as a fundraiser and profile builder. We did weeknight racing life at Blackfoot Motorcycle Park in Calgary for a while, and that led into more opportunities with organizing bigger races or organizing Canada cups for a few years. And that led to World Cups. And, you know, by that time, I guess you can say I was organizing events full-time by my early 20s, I suppose.
Tim 09:36 Yeah, and at the same time, you're going through and doing your degree in kinesiology. And that's all happening, but this is all happening at the same time. And it's funny, you know, I'll be around traveling around the world. I'll be in, in Southeast Asia. I'll meet up with Canadians and if it happens that they are from Western Canada, and happen part of the mountain bike scene. Last, you know, Aaron McConnell and they always say, oh, Aaron was the guy that ran that newsletter, or Aaron was the guy that was running the events, and you had such an impact on that community. I don't think you'd ever set out to develop a brand for yourself. But that happened, right? And that really became part of it. So by 20, you're running full-time events. And that's when you started getting heavily involved in that life. Right? And so the early part of your career, what was the event seen? Or what was the event roles that you would be part of?
Aaron 10:36 Yeah, well, I think when we won the bid to host, a mountain bike World Cup was a pivotal one. And I think that was what set me off on the path of being sort of a full-time professional event organizer more or less since then. And I was early 20s, just finished my bachelor's degree. And we've done a few Canada Cups and kind of on a whim, put in an application to host a World Cup. And we were actually really surprised when we got a three-year sanction to host a World Cup in Canmore. So, that was a World Cup cross-country race. And, you know, the people that were part of the scene at that time, I think, still talk about it, because all of the top pros were there. And big crowds at the Canmore Nordic Centre. I think, on some of those years, they were some of the biggest crowds that anyone had seen, you know, since the Olympics at the Canmore Nordic Centre. That was really key. You know, there was definitely some challenging times to that, as well as, you know, lots of excitement. And I was honestly pretty inexperienced and pretty green to be taking on something of that scale. But I built a great team around me, I had a good business partner, who helped a lot with the business side of things. And, you know, we did that for three years. But then the World Cup was going in a different direction, the venue was no longer really suitable for what they wanted to do. And so there was a change. And I did a few other things over the years, but kind of kept coming back to that management. So, I worked for 24 hours of adrenaline doing their 24-hour mountain bike races for a few years, I worked for Alberta Alpine Ski Association, which was a little bit more peripheral on the event side, and then had an opportunity to join TransRockies, in 2004, when the company was just a couple of years old.
Tim 12:34 Sure, and at that point, it wasn't run by you, it had been started by another gentleman, right?
Aaron 12:40 Well, a couple of people. My current business partner, Hiney, who's in Munich, and another gentleman, Chester, who came from Germany, but was based in the US, and then Ken Reid, who was one of the crazy Canuck famous Canadian alpine skier was, was one of the partners at that time. And the owner of the bike shop at that time in Calgary, Kevin McNaughton was also one of the partners.
Tim 13:06 So, leading up to that point, here's a question for you. Was there an instance where you knew that this was going to be your profession by that time? You’d run the newsletter that had a lifespan on it, you had worked part-time for others and supported others as employees, that had a lifespan on it. You picked up the rights to hold the World Cup for three years that had a shelf date on it because of the menu and their direction. So, in this entire build-up of your career, and all of these different roles that you had, and these different events that you run, and these different ventures that you that you embarked on? What was the moment that you realized that I was gonna go all in on this?
Aaron 13:49 Yeah, I think it was somewhere between finishing the World Cups in 2000. And starting with TransRockies, in 2004. The other thing that happened in that time period was I started working on my MBA in 2001, I started and I guess when I started working on my MBA, I didn't know that I would want to continue as a small business entrepreneur, and I guess a field that maybe seemed like it might have questionable viability from a business perspective. And it wasn't really until I started with TransrRockies, that it seemed like, this is probably going to be something that I really pursue. I'd had that vision since before we started on World Cups in the late 90s. But I didn't know if it was something that would kind of work out. Or, you know, there'd be other opportunities that would be more attractive down the road.
Tim 14:52 And I know that there's always periods where different opportunities are presented to us and we look at them and there's those questioning periods where we say, would I jump to do this or try something else? And then there's that question of, you know, do I keep going? And I go through those. I mean, I go through those in my own in my own career and with my own company. But when we compare, say, my line of work as a consultant to your line of work, as a guy organizing these amazing events, there's something too that I think, is really interesting. And that is, every once in a while, okay, from my perspective, I'll be facilitating a session, I'll be having a lot of fun doing it. And then I'll get people coming up afterward and saying, you know, I look like you're having a lot of fun there. And this would be pretty interesting. And I wonder if I could be a consultant or I could be a facilitator, or I could be a coach? And you present yourself in a way that they think this looks funner than my day job? Man, I really like to do this, this must be you must be just having a-rockin' good time. Yours is even more extreme. I mean, you're out. I love, TransRockies, for those of you who haven't yet looked at it, you need to go to TransRockies, transrockies.com, show notes in the link, link in the show notes, sorry. These are great events, you often talk about them as if they are summer camp for adults, right? And so people are out there and they are having a blast. And they're doing what they love. And they're out in the sun. And they're out in nature. And they're sweating in all the right ways and good food, good drink, good friends, campfires, the whole nine yards. And they must look at you and say, Wow, what a job to be able to do this for your entire career. Right? Become this adult, camp counselor, camp manager? How much fun could this be? But what's the behind-the-scenes of all that, Aaron? What are your experiences with people having questions and assuming certain things? And then what's the reality?
Aaron 17:03 Well, there's definitely two sides to it. So, we live double lives, I guess. And in this industry, because there is the times when we're in the field, basically. So, when we're at an event, we're working on an event, and we're with the athletes. And for the most part that's really positive. You know, unless we're dealing with some kind of crisis that comes up, which does happen sometimes as well. But that's what we live for at events, or even when we're on a scouting trip, or doing route planning, or something out in the field. And that's where the glamorous side of the event promoter lifestyle is maybe a little bit true. I mean, yeah, sometimes we're trying to figure out where to put the porta potties or something, but, you know, still, you know, being creative and hanging out with great people in really cool places. And then the other side is making it all work on the back end. So, you know, we're on our Twitter, we're on the phone, we're, you know, booking the toilets, we're working on budgets, and having to do all that behind-the-scenes work to make sure, A. everything works logistically for the event, we're meeting our sales targets, we're spending within budgets, and really being like a grown-up organization. And the interesting thing about, I guess, race organizing is that a lot of people that organize races, do it as a sideline. They might be professionals in their real lives, but they kind of organize races as a hobby. And they don't necessarily have to take a salary or that sort of thing, they put on sometimes some really awesome events, but they don't necessarily have the ability to scale or the ability to stick with it over a long period of time, that sort of thing. Because they're only doing one event, we're doing 35 event days a year, over many years with a business that's intended to outlive its current employees and shareholders. So, we have to kind of run it to a different standard and think differently about risk and profit and all that sort of thing.
Tim 19:13 For everybody's information, you've just completed which season now?
Aaron 19:16 21st, I guess, yeah. 21st season of operation.
Tim 19:22 And that 20th season was happening the year before this one was happening right at the sort of tail end of the big of COVID and the pandemic. And that pandemic, I mean, having been there with you through that, that put into sharp relief, you know, where the business required support and adulting or whatever you want to call it. That was a rough year for many events or a rough few years for many events. And a lot of event companies didn't survive. You know, a lot of companies just had to shutter but you saw it through, and you had put levers in place and supports in place so that you could make that through. When you think back on that time as really a massive milestone in all of this, how did you conceptualize your journey, at that point, thinking back 20 years when it all started? And did you draw on that, in order to make it through? Did you have to draw on the passion in order to make it through the real, tactically risky portions of those few years?
Aaron 20:35 Yeah, absolutely, we had been through some challenging times, just with trying to make the events profitable and survive as a company and grow. And we had actually, a few years before the pandemic, we'd taken on a new group of investors, which just helped us with some financial strategy and some advice. And, you know, it really helped us during that pandemic, to be able to get together and talk about things and strategize, you know, I'd also been working with you for a few years, which was another great source of support. And it was definitely the biggest crisis we'd seen. But it wasn't like we hadn't seen crisis before. So, on one side that helped. It also, I think, helped that, you know, there were a lot of signs that kind of reassured people in the endurance sports industry, that there was demand, and that demand would come back. It took longer to get back to events than anyone thought, especially in the beginning. We thought we'd be back to events, you know, later in 2020. But it was really late 2021, in the US, and 2022, in Canada, when we got back to a semi-normal season, that accumulated a lot of rollover liabilities from people that didn't get to go to the event that they had signed up for. And we promised them that they could get their entry later on. And meanwhile, we kept all our employees during that time. So–
Tim 22:11 Added employees during that time. Aaron 22:12 Yeah. Yeah and then we also did look at it as an opportunity. We took the bandwidth, it opened up and created a few new events, which we operated for the first time in the last couple of years. It actually allowed us to scale our business, that was still a big time of an investment. But I feel like we've got something to show for it, coming out of it. You know, the way that it transformed all industries in terms of how we looked at remote work, and how we operate as a team also transformed us.
Tim 22:45 So, the big picture that I've got in my mind after talking today, and watching you for these many years, and then working with you since what 2016, is exactly what you said there, there are people that can come on, and they can run these events once. But to sustain them and to keep them fresh and to make them economic and to have them be a place that can employ people and really make it into a standalone venture that isn't simply a one-off. It really is an achievement. And I think to Richard Young, who we both know who's been on the show before, and he talks about, we have to get out of our talk around just high performance, but it's sustainable high performance. Anybody can podium once, can they podium again and again and again, can they perform over and over? And really that's what you're demonstrating. And that becomes the behind-the-scenes that people probably don't really appreciate. What's that saying? You know, you're an overnight success that happened to take 20 years to create kind of thing, right? So, when we look at this, and we round around to some of our initial questions and thoughts here. So, this rounds us around to the question of the day, after seeing you go through all of this over the years, and being there for a lot of it with you, which has been an absolute joy. It's been one of the highlights of my work. Can we say that there's any truth to that statement? That if you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life? Is that statement incomplete?
Aaron 24:19 It goes back to what I said before about living two lives. There probably are some people in certain industries that can come a lot closer to that, where they can really follow their passion. But we get a piece of that when, as I said when we're in the field, which is a good chunk of the year, but you know, there's lots of other parts of the year where we are grinding, for sure. And I think in that part of the time, you need to follow our strengths, really, and figure out where we can bring value to the organization, value to our participants, and work hard to really ensure that we are creating sustainable performance and being able to be in a position to provide these great experiences and have the icing on the cake, which is part of the year that we get to spend with our participants in really cool places.
Tim 25:20 I know for you, between the two of us, we've had, you know, a little metric off to the side, which is how much time can Aaron spend in the saddle or as a participant, right? And that's really important. And I love the point that you made about, we have to play to our strengths or realize our strengths. It's also about surrounding ourselves with people that enjoy the things that we might find a grind, right? So, that we can really make sure that we maintain that love and that excitement that ultimately is going to carry through to the experience that the customers have, because you can't you can't give away what you don't have. Right? So, you have to be living that joy. But there's very real work in behind that that goes into it. So, it's not always roses, but we have to keep the capacity open for the enjoyment of it, as well. And have you found that that has to be a conscious decision to make sure that you are maintaining that time for yourself?
Aaron 26:21 Yeah, absolutely. We've made more of an effort in recent years to go to other events, people's events that we don't produce, and try to participate in other events, both as individuals and sometimes as a group as well. Which can be, you know, a bit of a team building thing, but it's fun for us and we all sort of buy into the lifestyle, and yeah, that's why we're here. But it also kind of gives us legitimacy as event organizers, when, you know, we know what the experience is, like on the other side of the fences. We know what it means to suffer out on the trail and celebrate with a beer afterward, you know?
Tim 27:05 Yeah, well, I mean, the energy from these events is palpable. And, again, anybody who's listening, I would really encourage you to go and check out Aaron, check out Aaron on social, check out TransRockies on Instagram, and you'll get a feel for what the energy on these transient race track campuses are from event to event. And it's really something. So, with that in mind, what's got you excited about TransRockies, adventure sports in general? You know, what really do you feel is going to be the next step for you and the company?
Aaron 27:42 We’re kind of at an interesting point now, where our season is very full. For the number of employees that we have, there's basically six of us that are either full-time or between half and full-time. And, boy, we're busy with the number of events that we have. And so on the one hand, we're looking at optimizing, you know, which events make sense to continue, which ones might not, where does it make sense to grow? Can we grow with our current structure? You know, because we're sort of mostly in a place now where we can only be in one place at one time as an organization. And how do we make that step to being in multiple places at once? You know, does it even make sense to make that step? Or are we better just to focus on doing fewer, or the current number of things that we're doing now? How do we avoid burnout in our core crew? If we're growing the organization, what's going to be most viable and sustainable for us as a group? So, that's kind of exciting. Right now we've got certain aspects of our business that are doing really well. And so we're looking at opportunities to grow in those areas. And, you know, others we’re maybe struggling a little bit and trying to change our format up and make it more attractive to people and more accessible, which is all, you know, really interesting, kind of creative, strategic thinking, work that is keeping us engaged.
Tim 29:11 And it's all around if we go way, way back to the Macintosh sitting in your dad's den. It goes back to the fact that there is a community that needs to be served, right? You've done it all the way along your career. And there are technical challenges, there are organizational challenges, those have gotten bigger and gnarlier. And, you know, regulatory and everything has gotten tighter. But you're still holding that at the core. Right? And that excitement around bringing that to people and seeing them light up and when you get Junior riders coming out and seeing them experience it for the first time. Maybe not on a Canadian Tire special, but you know, in their own ways. So, that's just got to be full of it. Well, Aaron, I want to say thank you for joining me today. I think your story is one that people will really be able to empathize with in their own ways. In that way, I hope that people find what they love within their career.
Aaron 30:09 Well, thanks for having me on giving me the opportunity. And also thanks for all your help and support and coaching and so forth over over quite a few years now. Great to have you as part of the TransRockies team.
Tim 30:22 Yeah, it's always been my pleasure and I love getting into it. And I love spending that time with you and the crew. All right, let's also not miss this opportunity to tell people if they want to get involved, if they are avid in running or cycling, and would like to check these events out. What's the best way that they can get in touch with TransRockies? Or you?
Aaron 30:42 Yeah, absolutely, for TransRockies, it's transrockies.com. The main social handles are @transrockies and @transrockiesrunning. And then myself, it's @aaronMcConnell on socials.
Tim 31:00 Well, we're gonna put a link to that in the show notes, we're also going to put a link to each of the different events because you've got the Fondos, you've got the runs, you've got all of the marquee events that you put out over the years. And really, there's something there, for everybody and for every skill level. And it's a great way to get involved. And I know it still attracts some of the hardcore competitors too. So, it's not like they're absent from this. It's just such a great opportunity to get out and enjoy things and what a milestone for people. So, really encourage you to go check it out. It is so much fun.
Tim 31:43 Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership. Please give us a positive rating and review on Apple podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word too, by sharing this with your friends, teams, and colleagues. Thanks again for listening. And be sure to tune in in two weeks' time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you, to keep on leading. | |||