Overall, when we're speaking about leaders in general, so
maybe across any type of situation, any type of industry,
how would you say leaders can reframe chaos as a creative tool
rather than a threat? Stop reframing.
It's one of the worst things you can, because what we're talking
about is a paradigm shift. Running with broken legs?
That's a paradigm shift. Before we dive back into today's
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Music licensing reimagined. In your life, ladies and
gentlemen, you'll once again welcome to the Kingdom's
podcast, Diary of the CFO and the Medium Dollar Greenprint
podcast through Inward. Why?
Because today I've got a very, very, very important guest Keepo
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America. Teddy Santos.
And when the action begins, the Co host in the studio is Noeler,
the world's best sales expert. You also get welcome Teddy, not
Teddy Pendergrass, but Teddy Santos.
How are you doing today, Sir? I'm doing alright.
You only you only forgot one line.
Let's get ready to rumble. Let's get ready to rumble.
Let's go. Whoa.
It is it is really, really amazing having you on the
podcast. You're somebody that we
appreciate beyond words. And it's, it's great to have the
great philosophers of your time, the great minds of your time.
It's a privilege. You know, growing up, I, I did
read a lot of the ancient philosophers and wish I could
have conversations with them. Well, now I'm privileged, right?
And now the stars have aligned. Everyone is in blue.
Wow. So sit back.
You know why? We'll give you your flowers by
you or the leadership disruptor turning peers will to
breakthroughs champions today. Our guest is a powerhouse in
leadership transformation. A man who doesn't just talk
about break engineers, then Ted Santos is the CEO of Turn Around
Investment Partners and the creator of the Disruptive
Leadership model. Has spent over 2 decades
transforming struggling companies into industry leaders
and helping CEOs master cares, build resilience, and create
what others call impossible. From Wall Street boardrooms to
Innovation labs, Ted has 1 mission to turn chaos into
Breakers. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and
girls, let's make welcome the leadership disruptor himself at
the one and only Scientist. Thank you.
You'll see hands of my Co host because I'm too pumped for this.
I have to pay the gas prices because I'm gas stock.
So, Ted, I'm so happy to have you here.
It was lovely meeting you the other day and getting a little
bit of insight into who you are as a leader and what really
makes you an expert in chaos. Basically, it's amazing to hear
you're known for our audience who may not know who you are.
You're actually known for helping leaders create problems
intentionally, and to a lot of people that's a really radical
concept. What inspired the birth of the
disruptive leadership model that you are in charge of?
So first I want to say thank you both.
I also enjoyed our conversation a few days ago.
So my pleasure to be here and to have this kind of conversation,
especially with people who can appreciate counterintuitive ways
of seeing the world or counterintuitive mindset.
And I would say I learned at a very young age that disruption,
breakdowns, problems, chaos could have the effect of pulling
extraordinary out of people. So I I learned that at a very
young age. That's amazing.
Is there maybe when you say you were in that at a really young
age, is there maybe a memory or like a job you had or maybe a
relationship with a family member that kind of sparked that
early on? When I say young, I mean like
really young. I was six years old and I saw my
mother run with two broken legs. Oh wow.
Right. So it was New Year's Eve and she
had taken at the time, so I'm the oldest of four children now,
but at that time there were only three.
And she took us to New Year's Eve party at her mother's house
in the neighboring town. And she comes home, I don't
know, I, it's dark, so I'm sleep in the front seat.
And normally we would have been in the back seat, but she drove
her brother and his wife home and figured she didn't want to
wake children up. So she just drives home and it
could be 456 in the morning. And I wake up and the tree is
wrapped. I'm sorry, the car is wrapped
around a tree. And so I'm sitting right next to
her in front of the radio. So I'm cut nose broken, blood,
knee gashed. And my brother and sister are
we're all crying and I look over to my mother and she's gone.
So I'm just tall enough to look over the dashboard and I watch
her run. I mean, I'd seen my mother run
and she ran just like always. And she runs home, my father's
home with his cousin. They come out the house in no
time, pick us up, take us to the hospital and that's that.
But I learned my mother had two broken legs and a broken arm and
I saw her run. So that that event changed my
life because I was thinking if she can run with two broken legs
and she it was about 100 yards from home and I saw it.
I thought human beings have something really special in them
and we just don't know how to get it.
So how do you get that? So at nine years old, I start
studying human behavior. I wanted to understand people.
I also wanted to understand women and dating.
So I studied a lot about women and biology and, and sexuality
and dating and what women liked and didn't liked and, and then I
started studying all people and you start studying neuroscience
and I'm just, you know, a young guy.
I'm not even in college yet and I'm learning all of these
things. And I didn't see it as research.
It was just me searching for this thing that I'm going to
pull out and at 11, I start working out.
I wanted to have cut. I wanted to build this body that
could do great things. And I'm 5 foot six.
I weighed 143 lbs and I was dunking basketballs, which is
not normal for someone my height.
And I played US football and I played the position of the
biggest guy on the field, which was the defensive nose guard.
And I was the way I trained as I trained, like I trained to run
with broken legs. Mm hmm.
So I had that mindset from six. And you know, I'm, I'm
researching things where the woman lifts the car off of her
child and you, you hear all of these miraculous things and you
know that people are doing them. And I witnessed it watching my
mother run. So I know there's something
there. And I'm, I'm committed, like
highly committed to pulling it out in my training is around
running with broken legs, being able to do that now and not
later. And so that gave me the mindset
to train through sports to be a high performer.
And it spilled over into other things.
And then the second major disruption happened when I was
21, and I received a phone call, and that call changed my life
forever. And what I was told on that call
is both my parents were no longer alive.
And so now I'm at 21, my brother's 19, and my two sisters
were 12 and 16. I'm taking over the family.
And I still have that mindset of running with broken legs.
And what I learned about leadership in the face of chaos
and disruption and what I saw my brother and sisters be able to
do this was just more confirmation that in the face of
disruption, chaos, breakdowns, problems, that people have
something in them and they can do extraordinary.
I saw my sisters do extraordinary things, things
that you wouldn't expect a 12 or 16 year old to do and kind of
fast forwarding. But when I became a chief
operating officer, literally all of those things that I learned
from my parents death were transferred and being able to
lead other people. How do you coach people up to do
things they don't know how to do?
And how do you turn a mediocre or a good team into an
extraordinary, a really high performing team and so high
performing that they don't even need you unless it's like really
important, so self-contained. And when you have that, when you
understand as a leader how to create those problems first, how
to coach your people up so that they can be able to effectively
navigate the chaos without falling apart, it allows you as
a leader to look at other possibilities that can be
disruptive. And your team has the capacity
and nimbleness to be able to take on new possibilities that
turn into break. So first of all, thank you so
much for sharing that about your past, about your story, about
the roots of really where this first type of belief system came
about to the point where you've learned how to completely
transform chaos into leadership. This is such a valuable skill,
not just for, you know, this is a skill.
And I said this the other day too, that just as individuals,
this is something that as individuals, we try so hard to
figure out how to pinpoint the chaos in our lives and kind of
transmute it into this successful energy or something
that actually helps us instead of hurting us.
Or something that moves beyond that framework.
Or even maybe that mindset that we were in at the time that that
chaos came about in our lives. And you're able to actually do
that for entire businesses, you're able to completely
restructure their framework. And that is just such an
impactful skill that I would just say is invaluable 100%
overall when we're speaking about leaders in general.
So maybe across any type of situation, any type of industry,
how would you say leaders can reframe chaos as a creative tool
rather than a threat? Stop reframing.
It's one of the worst things you can, because what we're talking
about is a paradigm shift running with broken legs.
That's a paradigm shift leading, serving as a, you know, in a
leadership capacity. When your parents died, there's
a Are you all familiar with Malcolm Gladwell?
Yeah, the guy that that wrote the book off Liar.
Right, outlier tipping point. He has another book David and
Goliath. It's it's worth reading when in
daviding. OK.
And outlier is really good because the sort of punchline is
if you practice something for 10,000 hours, you achieve
mastery. Yes.
So if you think about, you know, me starting to study human
behavior at 9, by the time I was 18, I probably had 10,000 hours
of studying, research and understanding human behavior.
But in his book David and Goliath, he talks about how the
premises with David and Goliath, David's disadvantage served as
an advantage for him in the long run because he wasn't as big as
David as Goliath. Sorry, he had to develop
weaponry that would support him to be an opponent that was
significantly larger. And so his smaller size gave him
the advantage of intelligence to use a weapon, a slingshot, and
he defeated Goliath. So in that book, he talks about
how losing a parent around the age of 20 is an unfortunate
situation that is no different than David's miss for, you know,
he said people who lose a parent develop these leadership skills.
And one of the things that comes out of it is the loss of a
parent creates chaos. So when that person is leading a
company, they will they will see the chaos in the company as not
as extreme as the chaos they dealt with with the parent's
death. And I remember one specific day,
because this company was growing so fast, it was falling apart.
They couldn't sustain it. And I remember standing away
from everyone and saying, well, I've seen chaos.
I've seen massive chaos when my parents died and I worked
through that. And this is not even as extreme
as that. And I'll definitely be able to
work through this. So it gave me this sort of
stable foundation to not lose focus of why I was there to lead
a company. So part of that I'm saying you
don't want to reframe it. Mm hmm.
You want to be able to confront it and go through it.
You don't want to try and make it something that's more
digestible or this feels better. Let's call it a challenge or
it's a chaos, it's a breakdown, it's a problem.
And some of those come that you don't see coming, like a
pandemic or an economic crisis. And if you're more nimble to
intentionally create chaos and problems, then when something
comes from the competition, from the economy, from a pandemic or
some other global event, you are in a better position to be able
to navigate that than someone who is just, we always did it
this way and we know how to do it, and we're good.
And then the disruption comes and it's like what you used to
do is obsolete now what do you do?
So you're you are that you're at a disadvantage and you'll have
to play catch up with the person or the organization that's much
more nimble. Absolutely.
So reframing, Reframing shrinks you as a leader.
It's because then it becomes something you're already, once
you say, have to reframe it. You're already talking about
avoiding something and there's no power in avoiding anything.
It's my work. A lot of it is very much about
going head on and dealing with things instead of trying to,
well, let's, let's figure out a positive affirmation to make us
all feel better. It's it's not about feelings and
in a cold thing to say is facts are not feelings.
I mean feelings are not facts. Sorry.
Feelings are not facts. They're just feelings that you
have and they will derail you. I really appreciate what you
talked about, you know, the resilience that you build from
creating chaos intentional. And of course, you spoke about
the pandemic, right? And it reminds me of what I was
doing at the time of the pandemic.
I was working with PwC, that's the world's second largest
accounting event. And before the pandemic, we were
already discussing the possibility of, you know, remote
working. And I was one of the equivalents
of, you know, that style of working.
I love remote working. And there was this team at PwC
on PCM PCs, continuity management.
So they 38 strategies, you know, for the continuity of the peace
test, even in the face of, you know, what you call an act of
God, you know, crisis, economical crisis, political
crisis or whatever crisis, right?
But these test has to continue. And I remember they were testing
the possibility of remote working.
I was one of the people who did the better testing.
You know, we're working from a hotel accommodation, working
from home and all, and we tried to test the disruptions, right?
What happens? There's disruption to the Wi-Fi
at the office, right? We have the backup, right?
We also gave the all staff members, I think backup Internet
for them to use in their homes, right?
So you don't need the, the pandemic was coming.
So when the pandemic heats, it was just plod and play.
We're all just working from home.
It just felt like then nothing happened.
And, you know, a lot of the competition were adversely
affected, you know, by the pandemic.
I I got promoted in that year, that same year that the pandemic
happened. And I think I even bought my
yeah, I think I bought a Mercedes SUV in that same year.
You know, it just felt like. When there's a casting down for
others, there's a lifting up flow for me, just like the Bible
sees. But The thing is, it comes with
being prepared for these disruptions, right?
And I think that is like a classic organizational example
of what's your body of work strongly stands for.
Very good story. And I'd also like to distinguish
something. I think when most people say
resilience, they're talking about an event happens and they
recover. What you just described is not
resilience. That's preparedness, that's
training. You all trained for a pandemic.
You didn't know it, but you trained for it.
And it's no different than an athlete that trains a guy like
Michael Jordan trains to have three defenders on him and still
be able to score. MM Hmm.
So it's it's it's resilience is recovery.
It has its value, but my work is really about being able to
navigate in real time and go through the eye of the storm.
I thi I think I, I sort of disagree with the definition of,
you know, the bounce back when it comes to our resilience,
because I, I have the word resilience up here.
AI overview on Google, right. It says resilience is the
ability to cope with adversity and to bounce back from
stressful situations, trauma or misfortune, right.
It can also refer to a material's capacity to resume
its original shape after being deformed.
So in psychological contexts, resilience involves developing
behaviors, thoughts and actions that help you to adapt to change
and stress. So I think people look at the
other half of the word just to bounce back.
But it is also about, you know, coping and driving through
adversity. So it's more like you have an
elastic elasticity basically, right, of a bacteria and it's
able to withstand pressure. That's my own definition of
resilience. I hope I'm not being
misunderstood. No, I I get it and I'm asking
you to consider. I'm not saying that.
Oh, OK, OK, OK, yeah. And of course, you know, I, I'm
trying to define properly what, in what context I'm using
resilience. So the ability to adapt, you
know, and drive through adversity, not just about.
Right, right. So, so when you talk about
paradigm shifts, when you talk about adaptation, you're talking
about you have an existing paradigm and you can adapt
within that paradigm and you can make that paradigm better where
you can recover, you can do more of it, or you can do something
different. What you've adapted, that's not
what I'm talking about. OK, we're we're talking about
two very different worlds. OK, you're talking about the
world of improvement and improvements have a place.
But when you talk about intentionally creating
breakdowns, that's that's not an.
So let's kind of walk through the process that you're talking
about, that you're an expert on that has shaped businesses from,
you know, the point where they're falling apart to the now
they can thrive, Now they can thrive.
Can you walk us through maybe a real life turn around story to
where we're embracing chaos and it led to the extraordinary
results? You know, let's talk about the
breaking point, how we had to embrace chaos, strategic
disruption, and obviously the results.
But I think that's going to help a lot to give us some more
insight. Give us a real life example of
your plan in action. Sure.
So improvements and that's the paradigm that we're given.
We're given the paradigm where, OK, we want to make this better.
If that doesn't work, we'll do it differently.
And if that doesn't do, we'll just do more of what we've been
doing and that will make it better.
So it's it's taking what you know and stacking on that
something more better or different.
And so perhaps the best way to start the path of this
conversation is the first thing for me to engage the two of you
with a question. My question is, can you give me
an example of something you both know?
The alphabet. Great.
Perfect. No, no, that's that's so
perfect. It's just really simple,
elegant. Do you want to add anything to
that or something you know? I know nothing.
I'm John Snow. Whoa.
Alphabets are simple. OK, let's say numbers.
Perfect. So you know numbers, you know
the alphabet. We can comfortably say you both
know how to speak English. So these are things that you
know. Now give me an example of
something you don't know and you know that you don't know it.
I know that I don't know how to speak fluent German.
Perfect, perfect. You want to copy that example?
I know, I don't know the tribes that exist in Costa Rica, but
I'd be. Perfect.
Good. Well, and if, if Noela you
wanted to learn German, there are resources, there are plenty
of places you can go hire a a teacher.
You know you can, you can learn German, you can go to Germany.
There are many things. And if you want to know the
tribes in Costa Rica, you can look it up on the Internet or
you can go to Costa Rica and damn, what's the name of that
tribe? I actually lived in Costa Rica.
So there was a guy, I think he was trying to marry me off to a
woman in one of these tribes because her husband died
prematurely. So he was like, oh, this guy's a
really good worker. Anyway, so now another example
I'm going to ask the two of you to give me.
This is an important one. Give me an example of something
you don't know and you don't even know you don't know it.
Nothing. Of course, I don't know that.
I don't know it, so I don't know it.
Because that's something that we would only have if we had an
extended amount of awareness. So now we're at a point where
we're talking about having no awareness of the subject or
awareness of the gap or awareness of what would come
after if we had awareness of either of those.
Perfect. And that's is the domain of
breakthroughs. So the domain of improvement
happens where you don't know it and you know you don't know it.
So you can go learn German, you can improve your knowledge, you
can make improvements. The paradigm of breakthroughs,
it's in the things you don't know, you don't know, and you
don't even know you don't know it.
So they are worlds apart. The language of that domain is
not the same as improvement. So what One of the challenges
and most breakthrough initiatives fail in
organizations. Most people do not achieve
breakthroughs because most people are taking the paradigm
that we were given about adapting and more better
different. And they impose that and try to
get to what they don't know, they don't know and don't even
know they don't know it and it won't work.
It's like trying to make a horse that flies as opposed to
creating an entirely new paradigm of flying machines.
So you're both with me, you're both with me.
I just, that's just a, a start. You you asked me for an example.
Yeah, no, I'm definitely with you because I kind of want to
give an example. Paradigm shifting, it's actually
a topic for a lot of people who even study, not just in business
or you know, any type of belief shifting or manifestation.
And there's different spiritual work and things like that where
paradigm shifting comes up. I had a coach at one point and
she when she speaks about paradigm shifting, she is kind
of saying we are so used to focusing on the things in the
boat, which I guess would be beliefs, our beliefs.
And then the actual paradigm is the actual boat.
But if we're not, there's no way for us to be aware of what the
boat is just by trying to bring more awareness to what's in the
boat. OK, so it's.
Yeah, so should the The boat is like the context.
Like if you had a bowl and then you put fruit in it, that's the
content. But the bowl itself is the
context. That holds.
Content, right. So creating and sometimes
creating a new context can work. And that could be a way that
people say they reframed. What I'm getting at is there
there is a there is a mindset in a language that's more analogous
to running with broken legs. It's just counterintuitive.
You don't just go break your legs and say I'm going to go
run, right. Does it make sense?
Except there's a a mindset and there's a guy named Steven
Cotter. He's written a book, The Rise of
Superman and Stealing Fire. And they're talking about the
flow state. I do the two of you know what
the flow state is. Yeah.
OK, so one of the things that they learned is that when people
are in the flow state, the frontal lobe shuts down.
And that's the frontal lobe is like the conductor of the
orchestra. It tells each part of the brain
what to do. Well, if that shuts down and the
rest of your brain is still performing and has you run with
broken legs or has you do something in sports that you
would describe as an outer body experience and you can't explain
how you did it, You just did it. That's the the neuroscience that
they've been studying and it's the frontal lobe that shuts down
all you could say you're kind of your identity.
The you that knows what you can and cannot do is no longer
functioning in a flow state. So you don't know what your
limits are. You don't know that you can't
run with broken legs. You don't even consider that.
And there are things that you know about yourself that you
don't even know, that you don't know about yourself.
There's so much you don't know about yourself.
And we'll talk about that. So I can tell you.
I can if you want, I can tell you 2 stories. 1 is how I became
an accidental chief operating officer.
That wasn't on purpose. It was, it was almost a joke
that I did that. So I was, I was hired at a
transportation logistics company as a salesman and in nine months
I tripled my income and the other salesman were doing very
well. So the company was now growing
so fast that it was bursting at the seams.
They could not, they couldn't manage the growth.
And every week the there were two owners.
One was the president, 1 was the CFOCFO was the money guy.
And the president met with the sales force every week.
And every week I was saying, hey, Mike, you know, if we take
this guy in operations and put him here, and if we put this
structure in and if we do this every week, I was making
suggestions or right, what do you think if we do this?
And one day he said, you know what?
I'm sick of you telling me how to run my company.
Do you think you can do a better job?
And I said yes. And he laughed and he said, you
know what, You know what, I'm going to just, I'm going to give
you a chance to do that. I'll give you 30 days and then
30 days if you don't do a better job than me.
Never want to hear another word of you from you about how to run
my company. So I said you have to do one
thing. You have to no one can go to you
with their problems and you have to tell everyone I'm in charge
and they can't go to you. They have to come to me.
So he did that and in two weeks he said the job is yours.
I don't need 30 days. And it's it's because I was
stabilizing. So you could see in two weeks
that the tumultuous growth and sometimes we lost clients that
started to calm down. Now I had an advantage because
before that I was a sales trainer.
And as a sales trainer, you do a lot of role-playing and we
specifically trained people in the psychology of sales in
dealing with acrimonious prospects.
So how do you deal with conflict with a prospect and still close
the deal? So where I started with my
people and, and also I was extracting from my parents
death. So a lot of what I developed in
my parents death was became now relevant.
One of the things that I did was when people came to me, I didn't
solve their problem the way the president did.
I would ask them, what would you do if I wasn't here?
You'd they go to, well, I'd go to Mike.
Well, you can't do that any longer.
So what would you do? And so we'd have a short
conversation and I'd ask more questions and they'd go back and
solve it themselves. And then they'd come to me and
say, hey, I already know you're going to ask me this list of
questions. I've already thought them
through. And this is where I'm stuck.
And either I ask another question, but I would engage
them and they say, huh, I didn't think of that and they're gone.
Simultaneously, I knew as a salesman that we made promises
to clients and they were not always delivering on them.
They were kind of laxed. So I raised the bar in
accountability. Do you know what we promised
this client? Do you know, why aren't we
delivering that? Why aren't we delivering that?
And they started taking that seriously.
And instead of me going to them and asking why aren't you taking
care of this client, they actually would come to me and
say, I know you're going to ask about this, but I promise it's
already handled. And then few things happened.
They didn't come to me with problems because they developed
their own capacity to solve problems and the promises to
clients were now being exceeded on a consistent basis.
And the other thing that was very important was the culture
was a culture where we when we made a mistake, they would think
up and they thought it was funny.
I actually saw it. They would think up a lie to
tell the client and they would spend all this time, you know
what I told the client this time, Ha, ha, ha.
I saw that as a salesman. I said from now on we tell the
truth, we make a mistake. Whoever made the mistake, you
call the client and you tell the client the error you made and
how you are correcting it. And one woman laughed and said,
and then we'll be out of business.
So she started role-playing. She said, well, what if the
client says this? What if this happens and we role
played and she said, that doesn't sound like it's going to
work, but you're the boss, I'll do what you said.
And next week she said, well, it worked.
That was luck. What if next time this happens?
So there was a lot of role-playing and I would do it
in front of everyone. And what it did is the
role-playing gave them a new way of looking at managing problems
with clients. And soon they didn't need me
unless it was really an emergency.
And when they said the client wants to speak to someone in
charge, I'm like, no, what's the problem?
Did you do this? Did you do that and they go
handle it? Or sometimes you really do have
to speak to the client and I would do it in front of them so
that they could see how I handled it.
And that way now they had a greater capacity for how to
engage clients. I'm saying all this to say it's
just saying we're going to be like a Nike commercial and just
do it is not a great idea for creating breakthroughs.
You really do have to coach your people up.
You really have to train them to be able to handle what's
happening now and what's possible in the future.
So with that company, they went from coming to me asking for
problems and then saying, I know you're going to ask these
questions to hey, two weeks ago had this problem, partly our
fault, partly the client's fault.
Here's how I handled it. The client loved how we handled
it so much that they picked up the phone and called one of
their clients and sent one of their clients to us.
Now my clients are selling for us because my operations team is
like a special forces that can handle just about anything,
which noun means that myself as a leader and the president are
in a better position to go create new, new services for the
clients and not be worried that our people won't be able to
handle it. In fact, they will embrace it
and say, you know, bring us more.
So that transformed, you know, me as an accidental COO,
transform the culture, coached people up and, and, and I
stabilized the company that was growing out of control and, and
increased the growth rate and that allowed us to go after new
kinds of clients that drove revenue and allowed us to like
quadruple in revenue. So that wasn't our normal
trajectory. We were actually on a course for
we were going to crash and burn at the rate we were going.
It was unsustainable, The growth we had, that's a great problem
to have. It was just unsustainable.
Amazing, amazing. I would say I'm going to kick it
over to my Co host, go into the next section for for us, because
I know that we are, it's about leaning into uncertainty, but
it's also about paradigm shifting.
So would you say that your expertise, if the company
doesn't know what they don't know, that we leverage you
finding that out or you leverage finding out what they don't know
that they don't know and then you're training them on that?
Sure. So part of it is what derails
you. What are your blind spots?
And so, you know, I've already mentioned how we have a language
for adaptability and resilience and all those things.
And we, we want to make that fit into a paradigm of intentional
breakthroughs. Mm hmm.
You in your past is what will get in the way.
So had a client, guy was ACEO, Ivy League educated, definitely
high IQ and running and running a great business.
And it's growing really well. One of his challenges was to
grow even faster into that next level and get him out of the
weeds was he was going to have to hire someone who's maybe
smarter than him or more capable as a leader so that he can step
back and get stay at the helm of the wheel instead of being
involved in operations. And what we found is what got in
the way was an incident that happened when he was five years
old. He's five years old.
I think he's a middle child of three.
And he's the only child in the car and his parents in the front
seat, He's in the back. And his parents are having an
argument. And mother says stop the car.
And she gets out the car and she's really upset with the
husband. And he's really angry with his
father now and he wants to save his mother.
So he opens the door and runs out the car and crosses the
street. And he told me he didn't even
look to see if cars. He said he could have literally
been run over but he didn't. So as a 5 year old his
interpretation is I was a hero and my dad was a bully and I
saved my mom from the bully by being the hero.
What that turned him into as a leader was a hero in a bully
because he's the guy who felt like he had to do everything.
And so if he hired someone that was smart, he would micromanage
them. He would technically be a bully
to them. So he would be reliving this
five year old in him. So he's aware that that incident
happened, but he doesn't distinguish how it's running his
life as a guy in his 50s. And even though he's highly
intelligent, Ivy League educated and doing a good job, he's
stifling the growth of the company to its next level.
So what it allowed for is him to be able to bring on more
qualified or higher performing people.
And they were able to open a completely new division because
this was a company that was manufacturing food, and they had
for generations been manufacturing food under their
own brand. They had their own brand.
Well, they opened a new division.
That was the breakthrough that they were now in Co
manufacturing and making foods for other people under a
completely different brand. It wasn't even their brand.
They were just making it for someone who went out into the
world and sold it. And that allowed them to take on
that, allowed them to bring on about 20% and new revenues of
untapped revenues that they never would have gotten and
brought on the largest client they ever had in the company's
history, which was about 90 year old company at the time.
But that was a huge breakthrough.
And what that breakthrough did is it allowed them to make
products for others. So it created an entirely new
R&D that allowed them to make things that their current
equipment would have never made. And it was more profitable per
square inch. So it and and they had a plant
that was lying dormant that they didn't know what to do with.
They were either going to sell it or something.
But now in this place was a breakthrough in revenue was a
breakthrough in products. And it also gave them a new name
in the marketplace as as innovators.
What it was was five year old incident that was holding him
back. And most people don't see that.
Most people, and I'll tell people up front, look, the five
year old and you were still running your life and they'll
say you're kidding. You know who I am.
But when I take them, when I walk them through my, I call it
a mindset technology. Mm hmm.
When you walk them through the mindset technology, they start
to distinguish and they can see how, Oh my God, this has been
affecting my entire life and, and I just couldn't see it.
So part of that, of what happens is that 5 year old will derail
you when you start dealing with chaos, uncertainty, anything
that reminds you of, of what happened in the past.
And being aware of it just isn't enough.
Because being aware doesn't give you the tools to actually go
through it and be able to navigate and come out on the
other side where it's no longer running your life.
But before you have the tools, it's running your life and
you're just aware that something happened.
So awareness is in that paradigm of things you don't know and you
know you don't know, and you can improve it.
But in a paradigm of breakthroughs, it's possible to
actually untrigger your triggers and you unlearn them.
You reverse engineer and unlearn them.
So this is no longer resilience. It's actually the capacity in
real time to be able to navigate.
You're not adapting, you're navigating something.
And what derailed you in the past is not no longer derailing
you. You're now in free.
It's my value proposition ultimately to people is freedom
and power. That's a lot of park right, but
I want to talk about fear control and the cost of our
burdens this. What was the last word?
Fear, control and what? And the cost of avoidance?
Avoidance. OK, yes.
You talk about people's traumatic past haunting them and
affecting, influencing the occurrence, behavior, attitude,
you know, patterns. And you reminded me of somebody
that I know they lost a loved 1, you know, many years ago when we
were younger and did not end up attending the funeral of that
loved 1. And it sort of affected them,
right? And they just thought in your
head or discussing travel and that was the way to cope with
the loss. Anytime you know talks about
that person, but it brings back negative emotions, right?
And this person now started using avoidance as a means of
coping or stressful situations. And it has LED you like many
delusional attitudes, which you know does not make sense.
So how do you help such a person break free from that kind of?
So if you're looking for a formula at there's there's no
magic formula there's no magic wand.
But yes, do many people do live a life of of avoiding yeah and
that that death may have reminded them of something that
may not be the source of it. So with the CEO where five years
old, that was the source of what derailed him.
So we had to get I'm interested in getting to the source.
So I understand a loved one dying, but I would also want to
understand if if that was a trigger to remind them of
something that happened before that event.
So we'd have to get to the source of that.
But it's actually a good example in another way.
So you said that if something happens that reminds them of the
death of that person, they get. Any other thing or even any
other thing, they just like to avoid, you know, the thoughts of
different situations. And like.
You. Cannot.
Right. Keep avoiding difficult
situations. You know this.
Yeah, the bull matador. What I'm saying is that when
people often get upset or have fear, it's usually not what's in
front of them. It's what it reminds them of and
they relive the thing. So people are generally not
upset with you. They're upset they're they're
upset about their interpretation of you and what you remind them
of. They may be aware with the head
they think that that is that response is who they are.
And they actually may have feelings because they're having
an entire conversation with themselves about the thing they
want to avoid. And I'm not going to let that
happen again. And that conversation tells the
brain to trigger neurochemicals like cortisone and other things.
And now they say I feel bad and they're going to say, well, you
made me feel bad. But it's really what they are
saying to themselves that's the catalyst for all the
neurochemicals that are being secreted.
And so then people are stuck with, well, it doesn't feel
right. It doesn't resonate.
And it's like, I'm trying to avoid this, this thing.
And, and you even ask people about intimate relationships and
what are you committed to? What would you like in a
relationship? And they can tell you, well, I
can tell you everything I don't want.
And if you think of it this way, if you're in a room, you point
to any corner and say in that corner is everything you don't
want. And the person is in that corner
saying, I'm, I'm never going to let that stuff come out.
But it's like in the other corner is everything you really
want. But because you're focused on
the corner that you don't want, you never actually get to the
other corner. And then life begins to look
hard and it looks like you can never have the things that you
want because you're spending you're, you're spending all of
your committed time to these things that you don't want.
And so it becomes like a trap. I agree.
Yeah, yeah. The mind is a complex tool, but
it's I see this, you know, the mindset skill set, tool set
framework is my field ones with you.
It's difficult to train with mindset.
And that's why for me, as a founder, as the Ceoi just love
to work with people that align with the mindset.
That I appreciate, but I don't know if it's difficult to to
train mindset. I've heard people say that, but
I don't know where that's written in stone.
OK, think about this mindset, skill set, tool set, right?
That is the order to me in my philosophy for collaborating
with people, right? For bringing people on my team,
right? Because in the past, I've had to
be very, very heavy for bringing on people that have a high skill
set or poor mindset, right? And I realized that you can
force a host to the stream or you can't force it to drink.
And there are certain mindsets that are good for collaboration
on certain projects, right? And it's not like certain people
are not good people, but they don't have the required mindset
to achieve certain difficult challenges, especially when they
are not very much interested in it, right?
You have to be passionate about what you're doing.
But I'd like for you to speak to that philosophy, right?
What do you think is easier to train?
Is it easier to train the skill set or train a person to use a
tool set or a mindset? Well for me I I have not found a
lot of training people that are unwilling on mindset.
OK CAU queru falao conchigueno Trujillo MO vos EPO GE and
tender me see her now. Combo estas MI amigos.
No, no, I I did not speak to you in Spanish.
What did you say? I don't know.
I satellite Spanish to me. I know it was Portuguese.
Oh, I said if I see yes, if I, I said if I speak to you in
another language, can you understand me?
Right, Exactly. And so it's the same for
mindset. See, you don't speak Portuguese
because no one gave you that language.
You have the language that was given to you.
And if you speak 5 languages, they still didn't give you
Portuguese. Mm hmm.
And if I would have said Ochimprat, Napaz, Nakamitsa,
that's Russian for a pleasure to meet you.
They didn't give you that either.
But it doesn't mean there's something wrong with you.
You just have what you were given.
People have the mindset that they were given.
And I've lived in the jungle with Mayan Indians.
I've lived in the jungle with Costa Rica.
I've, I've been to Greenland and Iceland.
I, I've been to the Amazon and what I saw in all those places
and many more in many states in the US, there's one human
paradigm and everyone's been given the same paradigm.
If you speak Mandarin, German, English or French or IBO, you
still are going through the same human experience.
And there's a language within that.
And maybe there's a here's a way to express that.
So I can have four basket 4 basketball players and one guy
is really good on the playground.
He plays in high school and he gets a lot of girls and he plays
well, but he just doesn't make it to the NBA because when he
plays, he says I'm going to get all the girls and he
accomplishes that. The next guy says I'm going to
make it to the NBA. So he trains to make it to the
NBA, and he does. The next guy says I'm going to
start in the NBA, and he trains. And this guy starts in the NBA.
And the fourth guy says I'm going to break every record in
the NBA. And that's where you get your
Michael Jordan's and your LeBron James's.
They're not saying I'm going to make it to the NBA.
They're not saying I'm going to start.
And they're not playing to chase the girls.
They are training to break records.
That's a mindset that's created, invented.
It's it's there are lots of examples in the world where
people invented a future that didn't exist.
So for Michael Jordan to break records and saying that from
high school, he's committing to a future that doesn't even
exist. And so this is where those
things from the past will say, well, you know, you can't do
that and remember this or your your parents died and you, you
for lots of reasons. But none of that mindset is just
as nimble or malleable as water. So there's no such thing as
someone who's stuck. And that's why when someone says
to me transforming corporate culture, transforming mindset is
difficult, or when people say change is hard, this is what I'm
going to ask your listeners to hear.
The only reality that exists is the one that you say exists.
If you say change is hard, you will be right.
As long as you think that way, you will go out of your way to
change is hard. If you say it's hard to change
corporate culture, you will be right.
Now, I'm not saying you're going to just get up and go play in
the NBA and break all records if you didn't train and prepare for
that. So there is train, there is a
commitment. If you're really committed to
accomplishing something, what's the body of work required in
that paradigm to prepare you to accomplish that?
There are lots of examples where the facts of life existed
before. Do you guys know who a guy by
the name of Roger Bannister is? You should know Eddemola.
Roger Bannister. Roger Bannister.
That name rings a bell. So what he's he known for?
Yeah, I don't. Can't Google it.
No cheating. I don't, I don't know him.
It rings a bell, but definitely I I'm not a cheater.
I really can't remember what he's known for, but I know I've
heard that name before. That's why I have one.
He's a no for. British guy.
He's a British guy who's the first one to run the mile in
under 4 minutes and before him, and he did that in 1956.
Before that, the scientific fact was it's humanly impossible to
run the mile in under 4 minutes. Humanly impossible.
The world record for the mile is 3 minutes and 43 seconds.
It's the same mile. So he had to break from all the
conversations that said it's humanly impossible and train and
do things that allowed for 359. And when he ran a 359 shortly
after quite a few other guys ran it.
But that from 1956 to, I forget when the current record was
made, 2000 something to go from 4 minutes to 343, that's 17
seconds. You can't imagine how much
distance is in 17 seconds in a mile.
That's huge. And they believed that it was
humanly impossible. See, as long as they believed it
was humanly impossible, people trained to run horrible minutes.
Four O 1. There's a guy, 15 year old boy
in Australia running under 4 minutes now.
I'm laughing because I'm impressed I've never been able
to run it in less or 4 minutes. No, that's, that's good, that's
good, that's good. If you can run a mile and for
anything, even for 459 is still it's that's not competitive, but
it's you're in shape to run it that fast.
Yeah. Sure, I ran.
I used to do 5 minutes. Plus for, you know, overtime,
yeah, started going below 5 minutes, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. If you train, if you train,
yeah, you have to train for that.
That's not you just woke up one day, you're smoking a cigarette
and got to have the beer on the other hand, and it's like I'm
going to go run a 4 minute mile. Yeah, yeah, man, hold my beer.
I got it. Do do you know the interesting
thing, Noela? Should we tell him?
Right.
She I think we were just randomly speaking earlier today
and I took up a challenge. I told her I will do 5
kilometers in about 30 minutes. I actually thought it was a joke
and I stood up and did it. Yes or no?
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's that that that is the I I love fitness.
I love fitness. It's it's good to be feet and
you know I. Believe you're.
Physically, feet and mentally fit right goes a long way.
Right. Absolutely.
Yeah. I've had CE OS tell me that they
still work out. These are retired guys.
They talk about the importance of being physically fit.
So yeah. So do do you get what I'm
saying? It's like, as long as you say
it's hard, as long as you say it can't be done, you'll be right.
And I'm not saying like it's not like a pipe dream.
Do do you guys know who Yeah, Robert Goddard is?
You ever hear that name? Robert Goddard.
Robert. Goddard.
I did a long time ago, like 100 years ago.
I know my Goddard, No Robert Goddard.
So, So in the 1920s, Guy, an aeronautics engineer, said one
day man will fly to the moon. And the New York Times wrote an
article saying criticizing him, calling him an idiot and he
didn't have the intelligence of an elementary school child and
blah blah blah. No, the guys in. 1960 they had
to write another article to apologize, but what he said was
one day man will fly to the moon.
It sounded ridiculous and it can't be done.
And so he declared this future that did not exist.
And as a nation, we we grew into it and made it happen.
But we had to train and develop, but we had to develop technology
that allowed for it to happen. So it's not an airy fairy pipe
dream, right? And this is what people need to
be able to distinguish. So if I told you I'm going to
build a machine to fly to Mars next month, that would be a pipe
dream because there's nothing in my past to support that.
You just. Haven't prepared and trained
myself for that. You better be of.
Somebody you reminded me of somebody OK, when I was back in
Nigeria, I had this right. And I used to tell them I I want
you to get that impression of yourself.
Like I used to try to push them. OK, Try to do this.
Take this course, you know, read this book and you know, one day
the person that's in me, that's it.
Thank you very much for always trying to encourage me, Right.
But what if I don't want to be a better virtual myself?
Like stop stressing me like I'm I'm not interested.
I don't want to be better. Like I'm OK where I'm at.
And then, you know, it hit me. It hit me hard that you can
force off us to the stream. You can't foresee to drink.
And to me, it made me realize that you cannot help a person
who is not willing to help themselves.
But what would you say about that kind of mindset?
There's a fixed mindset and there's a growth mindset.
That's a really important question.
So there was a company that did do research on people who were
engaged in workshops doing breakthroughs and, and those who
avoided it, those who went through it.
And what they found is that there were quite a few people
who would prefer to not have the breakthrough because they
thought it would say in the past, like, I must have been
really dumb. Like how could I not have known
this in the past? So they'd rather avoid having
that conversation, which would question.
So let's say they walked around and said, I'm really a smart
person and you can't tell me anything.
And then they have a breakthrough.
It's like, Oh my God, I wasn't smart after all.
And and that could leave them saying, even though I had a
breakthrough, maybe I'm still not smart.
So people are left with this conversation in the human
paradigm. Look at it this way.
People really want two things in life.
Well, they want to survive, right?
And one way to survive is to look good or avoid looking bad.
And if I have a breakthrough that makes me look bad because I
was not very bright in the past and maybe I'm not bright now,
it's I'm going to look bad if I have a breakthrough and it and
it's not that the world sees you that way.
It's how you see yourself. Would you say that that what
you're describing right now, mostly the human paradigm, is
why leaders are still reluctant to confront internal
breakthroughs? Or do you think there is maybe
more reason to that? No, that, that's a big one.
So you know, I'm Aceo, I'm supposed to have the answers.
I'm really smart, I'm well accomplished.
And why would I need a breakthrough?
I'm already at the top of the food chain, so it's my people so
and I've actually seen this like really happen.
I used to do CEO roundtables and I invited current CE OS and
their your revenues had to be between 100 million and a
billion dollars. And then I would invite usually
former CE OS, retired CE OS of Fortune 5 hundreds.
And I've had former CE OS of Chase Bank, Dun and Bradstreet,
Xerox Hires hotel and casinos. I've had chairman of the New
York Stock Exchange. So when you bring those really
heavy hitters to sit down and talk shop about CEO, you get to
talk about really important things.
And I had Aceo, who was still, you know, I had him come in to
talk in the round table and he was still the CEO of a Fortune
500. Said he had the skill of turning
companies around and he had the other skill, which was to drive
revenue. He said most CE OS are one or
the other and he said he had both.
And he was brought into a company that was underperforming
and he got rid of a bunch of people and brought in quite a
few of his own and it still didn't transform the culture.
So then he hired an outside consulting firm and said, fix my
people, they need to be transformed.
And it wasn't working. So company he brought in said,
hey, would you consider you transforming first before we get
the people say, Oh no, no, no, I'm the CEO, I don't need that
man. You have to understand I'm
really accomplished. And they convinced him if you do
it, then that will send us very powerful message to the rest of
the organization. So he gave in and he said when
he transformed, the rest of the company just went right with
him. And he said it was such a
valuable lesson that whenever he wanted to go in and transform an
organization, he knew that he had to transform himself first
before he could transform the rest of the company.
So people are often, God, they're walking around with a
conversation about how great they are.
And I'm not saying this is all, but sometimes that can hide
things that you don't want others to see about you.
And if you admit to transforming, it may be
admitting to the things that you're hiding from people.
You follow me on that? Yeah.
And, and now you're shooting yourself in the foot because
you're hiding and you, you think there's something wrong.
And, and maybe I'll give you a great example of, of an
entrepreneur, a person who had a really good company.
And one day she said, Ted, why do I always have to be right?
I said, well, maybe when you're about 5 years old, you gave the
wrong answer. She said, Oh my God, yes, yes.
I was five years old in the dentist's office in the waiting
area with my mom. And there were other kids with
their mom. And the dentist came out and he
said, hi, children, who knows what this is?
And I don't know whatever that was, but he said, who knows what
this is? And she said, I know, I know.
And she said, that's Bah, Bah, Bah.
And he said, Nope. And she doesn't even know what
happens after that because all she could think was I was so
stupid. I was so embarrassing.
I gave the wrong answer. And now she's sitting there
feeling bad about herself. And she she made a promise.
I'll never let myself feel that way again.
So now you put her in a situation and she's ready to
fight to be right because she wants to avoid that five year
old incident. And most I want to say all
people have that, that they don't know that it's running
their life. And I'm talking to this woman
and now she's 45, also Ivy League educated.
And can you guess what her occupation was?
A lawyer? Yep, trial lawyer.
And and you know what? If you wanted a lawyer to defend
you, she was going to be right. She was going to fight to the
death for you. She was going to be right.
She went to a top school and and learned everything.
And she comes out to know the law went down as a president,
CEO of a company leading that way was crushing her people.
It was almost like she was a samurai.
And she just cut everyone's head off.
So so people have this is what gets in a way of creating
breakthroughs. There's this thing that you want
to avoid and it's looking bad. So the way she survived in the
world was to be right. Now, what was interesting, and
it usually has two sides to it. If you put her in a in a
conversation about finance, for example, she knew nothing about
finance and she couldn't fight you to be right.
And so in the moment, that conversation is too much for
her. It's like clockwork.
She would say, my tummy hurts, I don't feel good, I want to go
eat. And she would literally sound
like a 5 year old. This is a 45 year old sharp,
very good attorney who now shrank to the five year old in
the dentist's office because she can't be right about finance.
So it's either fight to the death to to be right or you fake
that I don't feel good and my tummy hurts and I want to go
home and and this is what's running the world.
I have very, very lawyers as friends and you know it.
It was a very, very easy guess. Like many of these guys, people
fight you to the right. And of course, you know, like
have had the opportunity to speak on a very personal level
with them. I went to university.
That is considered the habit of Nigeria.
So like we had multidisciplinaries, right?
So even though I started economics, I had roommates that
were lawyers and you know, we used to have a lot of
conversations involved like that, right?
And I love something that you said, which actually I reached
to something he said in the session earlier today and I was
smiling, right? Talking about leading by
example, transforming yourself, threats.
I spoke about a partner I had a PwC highly, highly respected
guy, Tony Radile gay. He's been on this podcast with
more and he he taught us something and he has this quoted
record that has been with me for the I will be with you for the
rest of my life. He says what is important is not
the example of your power. What is important is the power
of the example. So it's important one is the by
example. Yeah.
So in the current paradigm that we're given, like you're given
English in whatever your language is this this looking
good and avoiding looking bad and surviving by being right and
other things. In that paradigm, when we want
to create a breakthrough, what derails us are all these
conversations that we inherit. So that woman in the dentist's
office never looked embarrassing.
She was not stupid, but her interpretation of what occurred
had her see herself in that way and not never want to experience
that again. Right.
And we, we know these things happen in our lives, but they
become like mines in the minefield, like they blow up and
they, they derail us and we have no way of dismantling them.
So we have an entire language that supports us in this
paradigm and tells us how to deal with these situations.
It's almost like everyone has a radio station playing in their
head that they cannot turn off. And it's telling them that looks
stupid or that was your dad was a bully or you're the hero for
doing that. And so we have all these
conversations and they shape our actions.
They tell us what we can and cannot do and we're left at the
effect of it. And even though we know these
incidences have occurred in our lives, we don't have the tools
to dismantle them and unlearn them.
So we're stuck. And what what you're left with
is a conversation is this is who I am.
This is just the way I am, and it is what it is.
And So what I'm asserting that nothing is what it is.
There's an interpretation. And there's a radio station that
plays that tells you who you are, what you can and cannot do.
And then it says, go create a breakthrough.
And as soon as a problem shows up that's unfamiliar to you,
it's easy to say, well, this doesn't resonate with me.
I'm not cut out for this. I'm not meant to be a leader.
There are all kinds of things that that people come up with.
It's like, see, here we go again.
This is like being in a dentist's office.
I don't know what I'm doing. And so it becomes very difficult
to break out to have a paradigm shift when when the rules of the
paradigm you're in and keeps you in the paradigm.
And it from the examples that you've been sharing, you've
shared a few of them now, it sounds like sometimes the
paradigm is created based off of either trying to stay away from
a certain emotion or maybe even move towards a certain emotion
depending on the paradigm, you know, depending on the person.
So would you say that or how would you say that emotional
intelligence overall? Because I guess it seems like
the root of it has to do with emotions and how we're feeling.
And so we're running our whole lives either trying to avoid a
feeling we felt as a very young child or trying to find more
things that make us feel that way, depending on what happened.
How would you say emotional intelligence intersects with the
work you do as or with disruptive strategy?
So when we're moving towards a going into the chaos, we said,
OK, we're not going to operate in paradigms anymore.
How do we use emotional intelligence to navigate that?
I think you will not like my answer.
That's OK. So the the quick and dirty
answer to your question is it's irrelevant.
OK. And I guess my next question is
why, like how or why or how, like a why?
Or why does emotional intelligence or the connection
with our emotions not matter at all when we're moving through
it, or when? You're go ahead or when?
When we are, I would say, I guess all I'm trying to say is
release from our old emotions or our old emotional ties in order
to move through chaos and build this empowerment that we have to
move through things we've never been through before.
Right. So what you're still doing is
you're using the current paradigm to help you get into a
new paradigm. OK.
That's that's like stacking more of what you already know and no
one expecting it to be to get you into the things you don't
know you don't know. I think I'd like to drop
something from the scientific perspective, you know, using
neurology, right? Neuroscience.
You spoke about how the frontal lobe, you know, which is
actually responsible for judge pen, you know, in the brain and
you have a prefrontal cortex, for example, right?
And you know, all of the parts of the front of the lobe are
responsible for cognitive, you know, behavior and judgment and
decision making. So in these paradigm shifts, we
tend to use the subconscious mindset, right?
The subconscious mind is what is at least activated.
And you know, you, you sort of have like a shutdown of the
frontal lobe, right? So if you're still using the
frontal lobe, you or use, you're transitioning from what you know
to try to, you know, know what you don't know or something,
right. I, I think that's just what I
will drop to the table in order to sweeten this conversation up.
You are the expert, you are the pro.
I'm the Joe. I'm just, you know, putting my
thoughts out there. If you notice, you haven't heard
me use the word subconscious once, or the word ego or
consciousness not once. That's still the old paradigm.
And you're attempting to use all the knowledge and the old
paradigm to make a quantum leap, to make a greater breakthrough,
and it just doesn't work that way.
Those are things that you know. You're attempting to use what
you know. Our education system is not good
at getting people into the domain of things you don't know
you don't know. We're also not good at helping
people distinguish between thinking and having thoughts.
Most people think it's a matter of semantics.
They are the same thing, and we can come back to that.
But let's deal with Noella's question.
So what's the source of emotion? All thoughts are based on
beliefs, or our feelings are based on our thoughts, which are
based on our internal beliefs. So can you have a belief without
a conversation? Yes.
OK, give me an example of a belief that is not a
conversation. So if you, if I believe that I
am alive or I believe that I am clean or like I believe my body
is clean or something like that, or you can have a belief about
yourself or the world around you, I guess based off of your
own perception. So perceptional beliefs.
So if you say I am clean or I am alive, is that a conversation?
So I think in this context. Is.
I don't believe so. So if you say a sentence, you're
saying so are we having a conversation?
Yes. And is the conversation the
result of words being put in a certain order and we call it a
sentence? Yes.
OK, so how do you have a belief without a conversation?
So I'm asking here conversation with oneself, is that also?
In the equation or you're talking about conversation with
outer beings. Well, if you say I'm clean to
yourself, but the words never came out of your mouth.
But you just had a conversation with yourself, correct?
Yes. OK.
So that's why, that's why. Observation.
You know, distinguish, Yeah. No, I didn't.
I didn't say self observation, I said a conversation.
OK. Your belief?
A belief that I am clean, I am alive.
Those are all conversations you can have with yourself or you
can have with someone else you have with anyone, but they're
they're conversations. Those are you could say another
word is those are thoughts that you have right.
But to have a thought, you're having thoughts in a in the
context of a conversation. OK, correct.
Yes, good. So when I asked what's the
source of emotion, you said beliefs, right?
And and I'm I want to get it down to what's actually there.
And the belief is a conversation you have about something
yourself, right, the world. And so if you have a
conversation and and it's really great that you said it because
that's that's where it is. If you have a conversation with
yourself that says I am clean, there may be certain
neurochemicals, your body secrets.
If you have a conversation with yourself that says like the
lawyer in the dentist's office that I am dumb, I'm stupid, it
you're probably going to secrete cortisol and you're going to
have this experience, this feeling of stress, you can get
that right. So if instead of her saying in
the dentist's office that I'm embarrassing, I was stupid and
I'll never let that happen again.
If she so that those conversations told the brain,
this is not good, something you want to avoid and this is
stressful and let's secrete cortisol.
But if instead she would have said, Oh my God, this is such a
great opportunity. And I'm not saying it in
positive thinking, but if you said wow, I just learned
something new today, would she have secreted cortisol?
Not necessarily. Probably not if 'cause she's not
giving. So if she's her body like.
Cortisol. Exactly.
She's not giving her brain the instruction and her brain will
then say tell the body what to secrete.
Mm hmm. If the conversation was what
actually occurred, she secrets cortisol.
If she said, wow, this was such a great learning opportunity,
perhaps she could have secreted dopamine and it would have felt
great that I just learned something new.
Hey, mommy, look, I just learned something new.
You know what that is? And so instead of me wanting to
deal with the feeling, and I know the source is the
conversation you have, and then we can go back and reverse
engineer where the the sort of genesis of that conversation and
then see that what actually happened is very, very distinct
from the story you made your interpretation of what happened.
So what happened is you're in the dentist office in the
waiting area with your mom. Other children are there with
their mom. The dentist comes out, he opens
the door and says, children, do you know what this is?
I said, oh, oh, I know. And I said X and he said no,
that's what happened. At no point did anything
embarrassing stupid. It never ever happened.
That is your interpretation. That's a whole story and
sometimes from some people write an entire novel about what they
think happened and how they want to avoid it.
That the conversation in that story is what's secreting the
biochemicals. So if we can like, confront that
and see the story you made and then have it as a distinction,
this is what actually happened. This is the story I made-up.
And now I can distinguish myself as a human being from the story
and what happened. I'm no longer stuck with the
story running my life. And I'm going to say whether
it's marriage, whether it's people avoiding breakthrough
initiatives, whether it's leaders avoiding transformation,
it's the story that people are avoiding.
They're not. And they have no way of dealing
with it. They are aware that the event
occurred, but they have no distinctions for being able to
reverse engineer and be able to dismantle it and no longer be
stuck. So once you can distinguish the
story, you now have something that you may have never had in
your life is a choice. Do I want to continue to live
with the story or am I going to live with what actually
happened? And you'll soon start to see how
that story has shaped other things in your life.
And it was kind of a a trap. So it's not the emotion, it's
the actual conversation that you made-up that became the catalyst
for the emotion. So if I only deal with the
emotion, I'm dealing with a symptom.
And so maybe I have to wait. People talk about how do you
hack your brain or have to make positive conversations to feel
good, to kind of cover up the story so that the story doesn't
bother me, But if I can actually confront it and deal with it,
the story begins to actually lose its power and now, and I
have the power to act. Yeah.
Absolutely, Absolutely. So at no point did I talk about
emotional intelligence. I know it sounds harsh to say
it's irrelevant, but I really want to get to the source of it
because my commitment is that people are free from the past
and they have the power to move forward.
And so if you don't deal with that, then you have to be
resilient. But if you can deal with that,
then you can go through it. And it's not this monkey on your
back that wants to derail you. You can go through.
Here's the punchline. Chaos is not chaos.
Mm hmm. It's something occurring.
It's something happening. What you say about what's
happening can be the story that derails you.
So what we are talking about now is self mastery.
We're not talking about creating a superhuman being because
things happen in life, right? I mean, I lost my parents,
right? People have lost jobs.
They've people have had all kinds of situations they don't
want to be in. So it's not saying we're
ignoring the things that happened, but it's giving you
power in your own life over about what happened so that when
something happens that reminds you of it, you're not stuck with
the story derailing you. And so now you have this level
of mastery that allows you to go on what people typically call
chaos. And you can see like this
opening for a set of actions that will support you to get
where you want. It's like for the average
person, if you want to play baseball and that ball's coming
at you 100 miles an hour, it's just like what just happened.
It just like it just kind of looks chaotic.
You don't know what to do with the ball coming that fast.
But a guy who's trained for that, he has distinctions for
that ball and he can see the threads and he knows which way
the threads are turning and he knows what kind of pitch it is.
And there are guys who see the ball coming and before it even
gets to them, they're saying that ball has home run written
all over it. That's mine.
And that's so it's creating that kind of mindset.
Not a pipe dream, not airy fairy, just do it.
There is a training, there's development.
It's, it's all of that, but it's actually being able to see
openings for actions where other people see their story that
derails them and they they haven't been able to confront,
dismantle and unlearn the story. So we finally got to the punch
line of chaos. Absolutely or.
Why? It's not really chaos.
Yes, yes, yes. The goal of the goal is not the
goal itself, but the person you become in the process of
achieving the goal. Really good yeah the journey is
can be more valuable than the final destination.
So chaos is never chaos. It's something that's occurring,
something happening like a 2 year old wanting to tie their
shoes. It could look chaotic, but for a
10 year old, it's no big deal. And if you're 20 and you're
having fits over your shoe string coming loose, people
start to have questions. You're 20 man, and you're,
you're freaking out over your shoe having to tie your shoe
string. My shoe string always go.
I can't tie my shoe strings. That's why I need Velcro.
I need a block off. Job to say that and we'll join
back soon. Wow.
OK. It's just so deep.
It's as deep and you know, I appreciate your what I say
unconventional philosophy. It's difficult for people to
understand the unconventional, right or to appreciate the
unconventional. If you don't understand it, how
can you even appreciate it, right?
And. How?
Yeah. If you don't understand me, that
you stand under me. You know, like lately in my life
I have decided to ignore like, a lot of people and not give, you
know, people too much attention. Why?
Because I discovered that there are a lot of low IQ individuals.
And when I was a teenager, I took the IQ test and I was a
gifted individual. Albert Einstein 446.
I am 130 something that is as a teenager.
I don't even know what I am right now.
I think I need to take the test again, right?
So I guess I should probably be in the warm 40s or 80s.
I don't know. But I know I have a very high
IQ. But one thing I've noticed over
time is whenever I am speaking to low IQ individuals, there's
always a very serious mismatch and they can't understand what
I'm saying. I don't understand the the logic
behind what they're trying to, you know, argue about.
Because, you know, in philosophy there's something called logic,
right argumentation and critical reasoning, right?
For you to compose a solid argument, you need to have a
string of logical premises before arriving at a logical
conclusion. If the premises are flawed, then
you have a flawed argument. But people a lot of people right
that are low I key individuals string together illogical
premises to miss your conclusion and then he's be confused.
I'm like, OK, I give up if they say anything I I'll talk.
OK, no problem. I think so.
Here's. Here's here's here's a here's a
challenge with that. Imagine we're back nine 2100
years ago. It's 1925, and we meet a guy
named Robert Goddard who says we're gonna fly, man, to the
moon. And it's like, well, just 20
years ago, we just started flying, and now you're saying
we're going to fly to the moon. And so that would sound
illogical, wouldn't it? It would be like, how did you
get there? And do either of you know that
cars built in the early 1900s had a top speed of 40 miles an
hour? Did you know that?
Yes, I did, yeah. Did you?
Because either. Why?
In the UK that that's the for a lot of roads.
Do you know why those cars were built with a top speed of 40
miles an hour? I guess.
I mean for safety. Reasons for safety, OK, yeah, it
has to be safety reasons, yeah. OK, so Noella, you're going to
appreciate this. What's the fastest you've ever
driven a car, Noella? Personally, maybe. 1120, yeah.
I was going to say fastest one 10120.
Don't ask me, I have a speed demo.
Don't ask, don't ask me. I've done 200 before man.
Oh wow. That's awesome.
Yeah. So.
So, Noella, in early nights, you would have been endangering your
life. They believed that if a woman
traveled in an automobile more than 40 miles an hour, her
uterus would explode. That's very interesting and.
And it was a scientific fact. And science is ever evolving.
Science is ever evolving for sure.
Can you imagine that? The person who disrupted that
and said, I'm going to make a car that goes 50 mile, 50 miles
an hour. Imagine they're like, you're
crazy. You can't do that.
Well, well, let's get to 100. But no, the, the, it may be the
engine will make it with the, the human body won't sustain
that. And now to fly out of the
Earth's gravitational pull, you have to travel over 17,000 miles
an hour. So imagine in the 19, imagine
early 1900's, the woman's uterus would explode if he goes more
than 40 miles an hour and a guy named Robert Goddard's.
And so 40 miles an hour is the top speed.
And when the Wright brothers invented flying, that belief was
still there. That conversation was still a
fact of life. So imagine an airplane today.
Imagine we never disrupted that in our airplanes, only flew 40
miles an hour as a top speed. How many people could you put on
a plane? There'd be no 747.
Right. So there are lots of
conversations that derail us from possibilities that are
beyond what we can see right now.
And so people will say, well, he was just ahead of his time, but
it's it's transforming those conversations.
No different than running the mile in under 4 minutes.
There are just so many examples. Copernicus telling people that
the Earth was not the center of the universe, They had a problem
with that. Yes, he didn't live long because
of that. And we actually, we talk a lot
about technological advancement and the conversation around AI
and other industries and how it's impacting every industry
right now. And it's funny, just earlier
we're mentioning that it's quite interesting, but quite
impossible to see where AI is going to move within the next
five years, next 10 years, because we cannot predict how we
underestimate it. And even when we don't realize
we're underestimating it, we still are underestimating it.
And I think that that goes straight into kind of all of all
of the disruption and all of the things that businesses have to
face, not even just an AI, but there's no way to really
actually plan for. All we can really plan around is
how we move through or if we're able to go into a flow state
during that time and allow the rest of our body to take over
and trust the system or the group or whatever we've built in
that system. It's really interesting to hear
that kind of the stance on emotional regulation because you
have a book about love and leadership and when people talk
about relationships and love and all of that, it's very
emotionally charged. It's a very emotionally charged
topic. Your book is called Here's Why
You Can't Find Love and it actually links relationship
struggles to business performance and you talk about
paradigm shifting. What parallels do you see
between personal self sabotage and professional self sabotage,
or between interrelationship when it comes to the romantic
aspect and the work you're doing with businesses when it comes to
maybe understanding disruption and understanding that chaos is
not really chaos, What are the parallels between those 2
industries? So lots of them.
The first is a financial impact. So do you know that corporate
America is losing $300 billion every year in workplace
productivity? I have heard a similar, yeah, a
similar stance for sure. Why do you think that is and
what do you think the parallels of that I'm?
Going to ask you what? Do you know why they are losing
300 billion every year? In productivity.
Divorce. No, no, no, you.
You have to let her see your your well.
I'm curious, I'm curious to know if it's because of an efficient
or, you know, unaligned workplace relationships or the
lack of quality in workplace relationships.
But I haven't had any, I haven't been able to do any research on
it. So I'm actually very excited and
to hear your stance on it. But I don't have a stance on it.
So there's an organization called Life Innovation.
They did the research and they found that corporate America is
losing $300 billion every year in workplace productivity
because of one word divorce. Wow, OK.
So divorce and, and you can throw in there, you know, bad
relationships, whether an engagement broke up or a
relationship that just fell apart.
And they also found, there's another organization that found
that when a person is going through divorce, their workplace
performance drops by 50 to 75%, right?
So imagine a divorce rate of like 53% in the US.
That's a lot of people being affected and being not
performing. They're really underperforming
and it's not intentional. They just have a distraction and
you could say they are in the midst of what appears to be
chaotic. They are in a situation they
never wanted to be in. Most people do not marry to get
a divorce. I would assume perhaps there
are, there is a percentage of people, but even if they did
plan, it probably didn't go the way they wanted the divorce to
go. So there's a fight if there's
children, if there are assets, and just the whole dealings and
courts and lawyers and all those conversations that are really
designed to create cortisol secretions with.
People, so you are or the purpose of your book was to
really bring light and information and possibly healing
to the insanely damaging financial impact on the
corporate world just through divorce and relationships.
Are there any maybe self sabotage patterns or
professional patterns or barriers or transformations
between relationships into the corporate world that you've seen
or you've been able to witness or even coach on at all in your
practice? Sure, sure.
So the the same things that derail you and breakthrough
initiatives will derail you and your relationships.
It's really the stories. It's the things about your past
that you have a story about and this person reminds you.
So I wrote the book not to provide information.
I wrote the book as a guide and a journey of transformation for
the reader. So I didn't write it as this is
a Ted talk and Ted is telling you like I am Ted and this is a
Ted talk. I I didn't write it for that.
It's written in a way that it's dynamic in a way the reader can
relate to it. So it's almost like a workshop.
There are five women, 5 separate characters who are engaging me
in a conversation about relationships.
And it's like Ted, but you're a guy and how could you see it
that way? And this doesn't make sense.
And so the reader will go on the journey of transformation with
the people. And it's based on a real
situation. So I read it so that the reader,
their perspective of relationships is transformed and
they have a greater capacity for being in a relationship.
So if we can reduce or eliminate divorce in the US, we can get
rid of that $300 billion in workplace productivity because
with that much productivity loss, corporations will usually
tend to lay people off at some point.
And that affects everyone. So I think Google, I think it's
Google just announced they're going to layoff 14,000 people.
That's a lot. So that means possibly the auto
car automakers will layoff people and then the home
builders will layoff people in the washer and dryer will let
you know. It's this downward spiral.
So I'd like to contribute to eliminating that.
So if you can train your people to be more effective in managing
chaos and conflict and problems in the workplace, they will
develop the tools, the skills, competencies that they own and
take them home and have better marriages.
And a big part of it is conflict resolution.
So when we were talking about the woman in the dentist's
office, if she gets into a situation where she believes she
has to fight to be right, she's in conflict with herself because
there's this thing from the past she wants to avoid and there's
something she wants to discuss, and now she's in conflict.
So she's in a conflict with the person and not realizing that
she's really in conflict with this thing from the past that
she's fighting to avoid. That's the essence of conflict
resolution. The conflict almost never has to
deal with the other person or the situation.
It's the conflict you're having with yourself that you want to
avoid, and you haven't addressed it to be able to unlearn it.
And if people could develop that, then in their marriages,
the conflicts that occur, they'll, they'll find that
technically there was never a conflict with the other person.
There's something that reminded them and they went into this
whole survival, this thing that I have to avoid.
And I'm going to look bad if I allow myself to go back to that.
So I have to fight, you know, I have to fight.
And they end up with a divorce when really there was just a
misunderstanding and the the proper questions were not being
asked. There was more of a defense.
They went into defense mode. That's a lot to impact.
I think I like to talk about engineering growth through
pressure, pressure the CE makes. Diamond Engineering growth,
Yeah, through. Pressure, right?
Pressure. The CE makes diamonds.
Yeah. So how can CE OS intentionally
design healthy stress right within their teams to spark
innovation instead of sparking burnout?
So I'm going to say that as long as we as a society keep talking
about how burnt out people are, we'll be right about that.
We are enabling and telling people to be burnt out.
It it's almost like we're giving people an excuse to be an
underperformer. That's a conversation that
really needs to transform. We're talking about burning out.
Because when you put someone in an environment or situation and
they say they really love doing this, they'll work right through
for hours and never know that time went by and they'll never
say I'm burnt out. So if you create an environment
where people don't know how to address the conflicts they're
having with themselves, it's easy to go to burnout.
So it's it's not the burnout we want to address.
It's the mindset of the people who are more nimble and able to
manage what's occurring in front of them.
And so that way chaos actually disappeared and it's just
something that's occurring and I've got I have to manage that.
Pro athletes are really great at this.
Like the top athletes, you're running back.
Football can be considered chaotic and stressful.
You gave me the ball. These guys are coming to kill
me, but you don't lay on the ground and say, Oh my God, don't
hit me. You've run right through those
guys and you may have moved. Some may be more powerful and
they run, they forced through and others can move there and
they have the agility to take the hit, spin around and and
keep going. But they trained for that and
there's a mindset. It's kind of like a mindset of
running with broken legs. There's this unstoppable
mindset. It's interesting, you actually
are a trainer of CEOs and he feels like you.
You took what I say some pages off 2 CEOs we've had on this
show. One earlier today, the CEO of
Keeper, he spoke exactly what you're talking about.
He said he likes to make sure that people are passionate about
the job they do in his company. If you're passionate about
something, you will walk right through the fire to get it done.
And he said something he said I would never, I would never work
on something I'm not passionate about.
If I get bored, you know, I have some sweet what I'm working on.
And you know, that speaks to even what we do here myself and
Noella, like we're passionate about communication.
I'm passionate about music. And sometimes we probably like
get what I say, maybe offers to do something we're not
passionate about and we end up not pursuing those offers
because you will. That is writing a letter to
burnout, right? And the CEO of Ticor at the
investment company, it's an investment source too.
He said something. He said his own blueprint is he
likes to employ X pro athletes. Like for you to work with Ticor,
you have to be an athlete, right?
Because athletes on this TAD, you know, the process, the
mindset of doing repetitive tasks, you know we have a
discipline you don't. He doesn't like to trim.
People on the mindset he. Guess people who are pre trained
at athletes have that mindset, you know, ready made, you know,
it's a default setting for for athletes.
That's one thing you know, I really appreciate it even about
my own background. You know, I was involved in
martial arts very early on in life, you know, from Taekwondo
to karate, judo, mixed martial arts.
And he taught me something even till today.
I'm always very confident. And we I go to because I know,
yeah, I can handle business. And you know, he gives me that
discipline of being able to do things even when I don't feel
like doing it. If I put my mind to it, I can
get it done. And another thing is if you, if
you doubt me, I think doubt is fuel for me.
Just doubt me and. You'll see me do it so.
Yeah, athletes actually have, you know, that dissipate of
getting things done even when it is difficult.
And they enjoy that chaotic, you know, process.
And, you know, there's something with putting yourself through
difficult situations, right? Earlier on in this interview,
you talked about how sometimes you discover things, debug
yourself. And you know, it reminded me of
like setting workouts. There was a time I used to do
easily. Now I can do 5 kilometers.
But just like when the weather tells me earlier today, I just
stood up and eat 5 kilometers, right.
But at some point I was doing 10 kilometers.
And I think there was a day I, I think I broke about 15
kilometers exceeded it. And when you go past five, you
know, that's what you do regularly.
When you get to 10, your body is telling you, oh, bro, you're
tired. When you stretch to 15, your
body goes to a very, very dark place if you've got trained for
it. And you know, I like to stretch
right? So I want you to talk about it,
right? When you go to that dark place
and you exceed your record, right?
You discover things about yourself that you never before
knew were possible, right? What's the psychology behind?
That the way, the way to get there is I have to ask the two
of you a question. I'm going to present both of you
with a relationship, an intimate relationship and you have two
different people and the people are equal in looks and tell it
like they're equal in the things that you want.
But here's here's what's going to happen.
And one or the other in one relationship, it's going to be
very passionate. That's you have a choice between
this very passionate person with this person, or you have the
choice of a highly committed person, a highly committed
relationship with the other person.
Which relationship are you choosing?
Are those the only two choices? So if you want polygamy, we can
create a third, but or you can have them both this, this is
this is about this is it, this is game time.
It's making a decision. This is a choice.
This is your life. This.
You're. Choosing the passionate.
I said if we're doing polygamy, I got it.
You're going to have to make a choice, one or the other.
You got to be a great decision maker here.
You choose the person who's going to be who it, with whom it
will be very passionate or you choose the highly committed
relationship. Which are you choosing?
The clock is ticking. What if I don't choose anyone?
Well, I would choose. I think it's interesting because
it does give a parallel to business and how we're speaking
earlier about if they are working in a scope that they are
passionate about, then they can work for hours and hours and
hours and hours and hours and there is no burnout, in which
case the commitment would come naturally.
Nope. Nope.
You don't. Nope.
You get highly committed or passionate.
That's it. That sounds horrible.
I was. No, but this, this is life.
This is life. Life is about making these
choices. Every day, every second of your
life, you're making choices, and this is an important one.
You're choosing that this person can be your spouse, and the
choice of a spouse is the most important decision to make in
your life. Hi Ted.
I guess maybe that's why I'll go Barry till till now.
That's all right. Yeah.
I I'm I'm asking you both to answer the question.
It's interesting you're both struggling with this.
It's a very simple question. I would very simple.
If it's for so we're speaking about a life partner, then I
would say and you and if we know for a fact that the passion
would be without commitment, then I would choose commitment.
But I do believe that in the right relationship that.
No, no, you, you're choosing between two people.
OK, this is it. It's it's really cut and dry
because one person is going to be highly, is going to be very
passionate. The other one is highly
committed. Then I would choose highly
committed. OK, great.
Thank you. Which of you choose me?
He's. Choosing highly passionate.
Why? Why you choosing for me?
I think I'll go. I'll go with committed.
Yeah, I think I'll go committed. Yeah, now.
Isn't this interesting? Isn't this?
Interesting when the red. No, no, wait, wait, wait.
Hold on, hold on, hold on. When the rubber meets, when the
rubber meets the road, when it's really important, what do people
choose? I've asked countless people this
question. Only one person ever said
passionate, and everyone else says Kylie committed.
Yet we talk about wanting to be passionate about things.
When you look at an athlete like Usain Bolt, you don't see a guy
who's highly passionate about running, because when that guy
trains, he trains so hard that he vomits.
When it's passionate, you do it when it feels good.
In the moment, it's not feeling good and you're vomiting.
This doesn't resonate and I'm out.
But when you're highly committed, none of that matters.
So the divorce courts are filled with passionate couples.
It's filled with them, but I promise you, it's not filled
with highly committed couples because those highly committed
couples worked together. They're committed to making it
work and they will do the training, preparation, whatever
it takes to make sure they understand one another and work
it through. Highly passionate.
There's a feeling I want and when that's gone, man, I'm
having questions. Maybe this is not, I didn't sign
up for this. I'm signing up for the feeling.
So in my book, the punchline is love doesn't create a great
relationship. Mm, hmm.
Love is a byproduct of a great relationship.
So if you have the capacity for creating a great relationship,
the competence, the skills, the competence to create a great
relationship and two people are compatible with that kind of
competence, you're going to create a highly committed
relationship. If you don't possess those, why
should anyone love you? Because you're going to be
incompetent and all you can do is offer a feeling and that's
it. But that feeling doesn't create
a great relationship. It's, you know, are we
compatible in the way we resolve conflict?
Are we compatible in how we manage money?
Are we compatible in sex? Are we compatible on how we take
care of our mental and physical health?
How do we want to raise and discipline our children?
How do we want to educate? These are areas that will be
consistent over time. And these are are the reasons
arranged marriages work so well, because arranged marriages
require the families to come together and they're looking for
these things to be compatible. Not that, hey, we both like a
certain kind of music and we like to party at the same clubs
and go to the same vacation spots.
Those are things that you have in common that may dissipate as
you get older and then you'll say, we have nothing in common
anymore and the passion is gone. But if you're highly committed,
you'll talk through those things and even where it comes to
areas. Well, I see it this way.
You see, that way a highly committed couple can operate
like water, and water is made of hydrogen and oxygen that come
together to make something neither of them could have done
on their own. Mm hmm.
Be like water, my friend Percy. Yeah, be like water, my friend.
So, so it's interesting you both chose commitment.
So when, when people talk about I want to hire people who are
passionate, No, I want highly committed people because they're
going to go through it. And I've hired people who I've
asked them to do things and they didn't know how to do.
And they, they were frustrated and they, why are you asking me
to do this? I don't know how to do that.
And you're, you're asking me to do something that is beyond me
and blah, blah. And then they did it.
They never knew they could do it.
They had no passion for it, But then they became good at it,
like really good at it. How do you learn if you can only
do the things you're passionate about?
How do you learn something new? How do you get to the paradigm
of breakthrough and and paradigm shifts?
Because you're going to be passionate about the things
you're good at. And then one day you're
obsolete. You're just a, a buggy whip.
You're a horse and buggy and no one is riding you anymore unless
you go to New York and Central Park.
They have. Absolutely.
I'm trying to remember a quote right?
It says when motivation fails, discipline will carry you
through. When motivation fails,
discipline, you know, gets the job done.
And I have something on my wall here that says it's not over
when you lose, it's over when you beat.
OK, good. Yeah, very good.
There's a quote. His last name is Marquis.
It says when you make people think, they are thinking, they
will love you. When you make people really
think they will hate you. Mm.
Hmm. My work requires people to
actually think. But the value of actually
thinking instead of just having thoughts is so profound that
allows you to see a world that may have been there and you just
it was right there hidden in plain sight, and you couldn't
see it. Mm hmm.
And so your actions were only shaped by what you could see.
And like the guy Robert Goddard, who said man will fly to the
moon, he saw a world that that the rest of the world could not
see. But, and it was possible it
wasn't a pipe dream. Mm hmm.
It's having access to that kind Nikola Tesla kind of innovation
to be able to see possibilities and then take the actions
without getting derailed because there are problems.
There'll there'll be gaps. Here's where you are, here's
where you want to be, and there will be problems in those gaps
that you have not seen in the past.
And having that highly committed will support you when working
through them as opposed to being derailed and saying it's just
not meant to be. Are there any trends or anything
that you believe or can't think about in regard to predicting
future trends for the next generation of CE OS?
You have an insane, an insane background of working with all
types of different CE OS, Fortune 500 CE OS, people that
you've collaborated with, teams that you've built, people that
you've helped in paradigm shifting.
When it comes to the generation coming up right now, do you have
any predictions that will define the entire generation coming up?
Kind of like someone's going to the room or.
Yeah. So, you know, it's interesting
that generation, Generation Z coming up, you're hearing many
of them turn down management positions because they say
what's going to be demanded of me is not worth the money.
So I'd rather, you know, just have a easy 9 to 5.
That could be a challenge also could be the catalyst that
starts to train people to be able to better navigate chaos.
Because if we have people who are not comfortable with that
and we have too many people who grew up where everyone gets a
trophy just for participation, that creates an unspoken policy,
which is you get rewarded even for being mediocre.
And so it takes away the possibility of of people running
with broken legs, right? So like you go in the gym, you
work out and you break down a muscle, but that's how you build
it to be bigger and stronger. So if people are avoiding those
that that breakdown, what will eventually happen is there'll be
a breakdown and people will have to then deal with that.
They will have to lift themselves out of of the
breakdown. So participation trophies will
not suffice anymore. Like people will actually have
to do the work. So I'm asserting people not
having the capacity to deal with chaos and wanting everything to
be easy and comfortable will eventually create an environment
where they will have to be trained to be more committed or
highly committed and and have a greater capacity for navigating
the chaos. Which then I would say then
creates an organization that instead of focusing on financial
re engineering where you slash jobs and slash expenses and file
bankruptcy to, you know, you pay back pennies on a dollar.
I'm going to say it the wrong way.
First, we will focus on engineering human capital.
So instead of financial reengineering, it's human
reengineering and, and training and developing people in such a
way that they are more facile and more effective in dealing
with the chaos that comes. And what I assert will also
happen out of that is people will become better in their
marriages and their personal lives and we can mitigate the
divorce rate. Right now the divorce rate is,
is strangling us and we're pretending it's not happening.
If so, if you think about bad divorces and, and the conflict
it creates, people bring that to the workplace, even though in
the workplace the difference is they tell you this is business
etiquette and you, you respond to what triggers you at work
like this, But at home, anything goes.
So if we can and there's, there's really no training for
how to be a good spouse, anything goes.
People will say, well, you're getting the best of me and
you're, you're getting all of me.
And I there, this is, this is the real me.
It's like, wow, I don't want the real you.
I want the you that you give to everyone at work.
I want that one right, That one who's who's a professional, be a
professional husband or wife or boyfriend or girlfriend and
actually talk about that in my book.
So I'm, I'm saying that we will create an environment that's
unsustainable, that will force people to create an environment
that is much more empowering. But it it may come out of the
darkness of running 15K. Whoa, that's a very, very dark
place. Trust me.
Wishing yourself beyond free conceived units.
I can't express it in words, but you know, sometimes, and this,
this is just me. Sometimes when I do, not just in
terms of, you know, pushing the body, but also pushing the mind
to complete certain things, I have been this kind of person
who I spit myself in, you know, many challenging situations,
many challenges, testing myself beyond limits.
I'm a numbers guy. I love to break my own records.
And sometimes when I break that record, I look back and be like,
oh wow, you did that shit. And it gives me a new level of
self esteem, self respect to myself.
Like put some respect on my knee.
The press. You know I.
Pushed myself to do that. Yeah, right.
But you have to remember those guys from Kenya and Ethiopia run
26 miles at an unbelievable pace.
Yes. And there there's a there's a
huge mind shift in that, you know, they used to say once you
pass 20 mile mark, it's it's really rough.
And So what would have gotten you to be someone else after 20
miles is is a mindset. You said the their preconceived
notions are getting to 15 K is is a lot but.
Yeah. There's a different mindset even
when I work out, so I've experimented.
Yeah, I've got 20K by the by the way, but man, oh good, I had to
skip for a whole day. Man.
My legs are sore. When I've worked out, there are
parts where it's like, OK, this is the part where it's going to
hurt. And then I create a conversation
saying, wow, if I say that that's what's going to happen
and I'm going to run out. And just by altering that, not
having positive speak, it's like, OK, I actually have the
power to keep going. If I tell myself I don't my my
body, my biochemicals will support exactly what I'm saying,
that I'm going to feel pain and it's unbelievable how much
powers is left in that. And I've just done this with
experiments with myself quite often.
Yeah, it's so important what we tell ourselves and what the
stories that we have. It shapes who we are.
We're going to do a quick fire round, so just shoot off a few
questions to you. We're going to go back and forth
and see how quickly we can get answers from you.
Before we do that, I just want to say it's been such a pleasure
having you hearing your wisdom and your expertise and getting
some of that to our audience. We have people that are all
different walks of life around the globe and we love to bring
truth from different countries in and really help define that
for people around the globe. So this has been such a pleasure
to have you to get this insight to business leaders, CE OS, CF
OS entrepreneurs and or just dreamers right now who are maybe
in a start up phase or too scared to even take that first
step, but they are working towards that.
So thank you so much. So I'll have AI start and then
we'll just kind of go back and forth and then we'll be able to
close out. OK, Want to say something really
quickly to what you said. And it's also going back to your
question about the future. And I would say that what
businesses need in the from now on going forward is wisdom.
We technically don't need AI. We don't need AI.
We need more wisdom. You don't need to be not just
the top absolutely we need we need more.
We need leaders who can lead from wisdom as opposed to just
short termism. And Mackenzie just did a wrote
an article about the difference between CEO leading short term.
How do you navigate that and really deal with the long term
and your investors? So yeah, it's wisdom if there's
a gap in wisdom. Absolutely.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and for the
Lord gives wisdom, and from His mouth commerce, knowledge and
understanding. So.
I'm, I'm a very big person of faith and I know like I don't
know if other people you know, would allude to this, but I
believe very much in God-given wisdom and seeking direction
from God. There are times where in our
human abilities, human knowledge, human understanding
fills us. You know, the Bible says lean
not onto your own understanding and you know, trust in God in
all your ways and he will lead you the right time.
And of course, if any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God
who gives generously to all without find and fold and it
will be given to you. That's James chapter 1
described. That's not to put that in.
I appreciate very much on your when I say not wisdom.
Wisdom is property route to direct.
Thank you. So let's fire off Rep.
Yes. Are you ready to rumble?
There we go. I know.
OK. What book every CEO should be
besides your own? Blue ocean strategy.
Blue Awesome.
Yeah. Blue ocean.
The in the blue ocean. Alright.
I love that book. Yes.
What's your greatest leadership lesson learned from failure it?
Wasn't my failure, it was someone else's failure and
person who was trained and coached from AVP level to become
a president, was hired as the president, had the job doing
well and the failure came from and I this is important for a
lot of professional managers. One of the things that happens
when you become president or a higher level manager, the
employees will attempt to train you and tell you how things are
around here and how they should be done.
Once you buy from the employers, employees as opposed to
understanding your job is there to make something happen that
wasn't going to happen. The employees are not there to
do that. They are there, and this sounds
a little bit dictatorship like, but the employees generally are
there to keep things the way they are.
They're not there to have someone come in and disrupt them
and have them do something different.
Employees will do their best to tell you this is the way it goes
around here. Even though you're the new
manager, the new leader, once you buy into that, you're no
longer a leader in that organization.
You're just an employee and you risk losing your job at that
point. So I've seen someone get the job
and lose it because they allowed the employees to train them on a
lot of different things and IT just wasn't in their best
interest at all. So that was a failure that I
saw. And an important lesson for any
person going into a new organization, especially in in
the C-Suite, that you go there to understand what's happening
and then make your plan for what's possible in the future as
opposed to letting the employees tell you the way it's going to
be. Absolutely.
OK, they also order which breeds the most creativity.
Neither, it's your perspective of the playing field.
No, I love that perspective. Perspective.
Who is the most disruptive leader alive today?
Elon Musk. That was the answer of my mind.
Some people may say Trump, but Musk?
OK, if leadership had a soundtrack, what song title
would define yours? Music is not advanced enough to
be able to make a song for me. Whoa.
They would have to have a paradigm shift in music to do
that. No way.
OK, we we will, we will come up with this song.
Don't worry if you're musicians, I don't said it right to you.
You will get that song in your e-mail, a lot of press, you
know, Thank you very much. We highly, highly appreciate
you. What a person shares the time
with you to share their life with you because the aspect unit
will measure at 5:00 this time. So love and of course, massive
respect to you for joining us on the show today and of course,
sharing Nuggets upon Nuggets. We can't wait to have Episode 2
over to Noel Ruk. Yeah.
Again, just thank you so much. Your wisdom is invaluable,
especially in these times of participation trophies and not
really wanting to do the work or really seeing the value of doing
the work. You're helping massive, massive
teams in business make shifts that people spend their whole
lives dedicating themselves to and trying to figure out how to
do within their own awareness. And you're kind of speaking on a
completely different level. I think it's so insightful, so
valuable and essential for everyone to take in this type of
knowledge and their own personal lives and again and their
relationships because we are the extent of our relationships and
it has a global impact for us as human.
So thank you so much for your time and your was truly truly
appreciated. Thank you very much.
It's been my pleasure to be here with the two of you and thank
you for asking such great questions that allowed for
really insightful conversation. So thank you.
Thank you once more and across to the audience, I'll just go
for something in your life. Conceive, believe, strive to
thrive and achieve. Confess you guys.