Diane Hamilton and Maja Zelihic
Authors of “The Power of Perception”
The Power of Perception
Episode Summary
Dr. Diane Hamilton and Dr. Maja Zelihic discuss their new book, “The Power of Perception.”
They say how we perceive (not what we perceive) influences what we think and believe. In turn, this affects our behaviors. To engage others, we must become more self-aware of our perceptions and those of others.
Detailed Episode Summary
https://c-suitenetwork.com/advisors/the-power-of-perception/
Check out the “60-Second Preview” of this episode!
Diane Hamilton
Dr. Diane Hamilton is a nationally syndicated radio host, speaker, moderator, consultant, and author. She is the former MBA Program Chair at the Forbes School of Business. Dr. Hamilton is the author of multiple books, including Cracking the Curiosity Code: The Key to Unlocking Human Potential. She is the creator of the Curiosity Code Index® assessment. Her groundbreaking work in curiosity has been heralded by some of the biggest names in leadership. Her books continue to be required reading in universities around the world.
Maja Zelihic
Dr. Maja (Maya) Zelihic is a Fulbright Specialist, Full Professor, and a Department Chair of the Advanced Management Studies at the Forbes School of Business and Technology. She is a co-founder of Dima Innovations. Dr. Zelihic is a Global Dialogue Partner at NAFSA, the world’s largest nonprofit association dedicated to international education. Dr. Zelihic serves on the Board of Advisors of the International Fellowship Program in Arbitration and Scientific Assessment, the comprehensive global academic review platform. She also serves as an industry advisory member at the Amity University Novel Communication Lab (AUNCL). Dr. Zelihic is the recipient of the Amity Academy Excellence Award. She is an expert in e-learning development and implementation in the developing world. Dr. Zelihc is a Board member at the Center for Women’s Leadership at the Forbes School of Business and Technology, launched in June of 2020. She was listed as Top 200 Global Leaders to follow in 2021 by PeopleHum.
She is published in more than 20 peer-reviewed journals. Her research ventures took her to Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, Jordan, Zambia, the Balkan region, and many other parts of the world. She is a global speaker, having presented in 20 countries across the globe. In addition to being a Fulbright specialist, she is a four-time recipient of the University Fellows research grants, enabling many of her global research ventures. Her book on Perception, co-authored with Dr. Diane Hamilton, was released in December 2020. Her chapter contribution to the International Leadership Research Handbook is in the final stages of publishing.
Website – Dr. Diane Hamilton
http://drdianehamilton.com
Website – Dr. Maya Zelihic
https://drmajazelihic.com/
LinkedIn – Dr. Diane Hamilton
https://www.linkedin.com/in/drdianehamilton/
LinkedIn – Dr. Maya Zelihic
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-maja-maya-zelihic-90905a35/
Twitter Dr. Diane Hamilton
https://twitter.com/DrDianeHamilton
Twitter – Dr. Maya Zelihic
https://twitter.com/drmajazelihic
Facebook – Dr.Diane Hamilton
https://www.facebook.com/drdianehamilton/
Instagram – Dr. Diane Hamilton
https://www.instagram.com/drdianehamilton/
Perception Power Index
https://drdianehamilton.com/perception-power-system/perception-power-index/
Leadership Quote
Diane: “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”—Albert Einstein
Maja: “Wherever you go, go with all of your heart.”
Get Your Copy of Diane and Maja’s Book!
https://drdianehamilton.com/books-and-training/
https://drmajazelihic.com/books-articles/
Subscribe, Share and Review
Full Episode Transcripts and Detailed Guest Information
www.KeepLeadingPodcast.com
Keep Leading LIVE (Live Recordings of the Keep Leading!® Podcast)
www.KeepLeadingLive.com
Transcript
The key to sustainable leadership lies in the ability to thrive during uncertainty, ambiguity, and change. Grand Heron International brings you the Coaching Assistance Program, giving your employees on-demand coaching to manage through a challenging situation and arrive at a solution. Visit GrandHeronInternational.Ca/Podcast to learn more.
This podcast is part of the C Suite Radio Network, turning the volume up on business.
Welcome to the Keep Leading!® Podcast, the podcast dedicated to promoting leadership development and sharing leadership insights. Here’s your host, The Leadership Excelerator®, Eddie Turner.
Eddie Turner:
Hello, everyone! Welcome to the
Keep Leading!® Podcast, the podcast dedicated to leadership development and insights. I’m your host Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®. I work with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact through the power of executive and leadership coaching, facilitation, and professional speaking.
Today, it is essential that we understand when our perceptive powers are working for us and when they’re not. In fact, our perceptions may actually work against us. My guests today believe that being an effective leader means we must become more self-aware of our perceptions and those of others. They’re going to help us shape our perceptions so that we can become more effective leaders in our organizations. My guests today are the authors of The Power of Perception: Eliminating Boundaries to Create Successful Global Leaders.
My first guest is a returning guest. In fact, the first time I’ve had a returning guest on the Keep Leading!® Podcast, the amazing Dr. Diane Hamilton, and you may have heard that first interview with her in episode 4, Cracking the Curiosity Code, She is a phenomenal leader and I can’t wait to hear what Dr. Hamilton shares with us along with her co-author Dr. Maya Zelihic. Both of them are phenomenal folks. I’m going to let them tell you who they are and more about them.
Dr. Hamilton, Dr. Zelihic, welcome to the Keep Leading!® Podcast.
Dr. Diane Hamilton:
Thank you, Eddie. It’s so nice to be here. Dr. Zelihic, do you mind if I call you Maya?
Dr. Maya Zelihic:
Absolutely. Thank you, Eddie, so much for this wonderful introduction. We’re happy to be here with you.
Eddie Turner:
Thank you, ladies for being here. And Dr. Diane, she always snaps my hand when I call with Dr. Diane. Okay. So, I’m going to say Diane and Maya.
So, Diane, will you just start by telling us a little bit about yourself?
Dr. Diane Hamilton:
Sure, I’d be happy to. I worked a long time in education and that’s where Maya and I met but I have a background in a lot of different areas. I’ve been in Sales for many decades. I’ve worked in everything from pharmaceuticals to lending, banking, real estate, you name it before I got into the education realm and met Maya. We both have worked as the MBA Program Chair of the Forbes School of Business. After I left, she had that role and now she’s gone on to other things. I’m a dean at another school. And we still have maintained our relationship as friends and colleagues and we thought it would be really interesting to write a book together and that’s what led to our interest in this particular book because we thought we had such unique perceptions from our backgrounds being somewhat different and we thought it’s so important in the working world. So, we collaborated and we created not only the book but the Perception Power Index Assessment to go along with the book.
Eddie Turner:
Excellent. Maya, tell us about you?
Dr. Maya Zelihic:
Sure. Well, I’m a Fulbright specialist, professor and department chair at the Forbes School of Business and Technology at the University of Arizona global campus. I’m also a global dialogue partner and I work on a few different industry boards. When it comes to my background, I’m coming from a Finance background prior to the world of academia. And as Diane mentioned, when we met in different capacity at the Forbes School of Business and Technology, we encountered a few situations where we felt that our own perception differ and we were actually teasing each other about it and we were really fascinating about how perception shapes the world of business and how perception impacts our effectiveness as leaders. So, that is how we started with our collaboration which resulted in this book.
Eddie Turner:
So, you all were just talking back and forth and decided “Let’s write a book about this conversation.”
Dr. Maya Zelihic:
At first, we actually encountered a few situations where we realized that our perception is actually influenced by different factors such as our culture, our experiences, our life experiences, our corporate experiences, our emotions to a certain degree, our personality types, our curiosity levels. And at first it was just a conversation. That conversation led to a collaborative research and that research ultimately resulted in this book.
Eddie Turner:
Yes. If my audience hasn’t discovered it yet, both of you are far more educated than I am. Both of these professors, these amazing women with doctorate degrees decided “We’re going to put some deep research behind the answer to this question.” So, tell my audience, for those who may not know, so we’re on the same page, about what exactly perception is.
Dr. Diane Hamilton:
Well, I’d like to address that because I think that we think of perception sometimes of if you see the blue stripes on the dress or the gold stripes on the dress or all the memes that go around the internet of what you see if you’re able to watch a video and a gorilla walks across the screen but you don’t notice and all those kinds of thought experiments come to mind when you say perception but what we were thinking about was how we recognized, how we came across to others and how others came across to us and how we utilized our perception process to come up with our ability to communicate effectively. So, it’s really kind of a combination of, as Maya was kind of saying, which is why we both looked at it, was it was IQ, EQ for emotional quotient, CQ for curiosity quotient and CQ for cultural quotient and you combine these things together and you get this process. And we came up with EPIC as this acronym for the Evaluation, Prediction, Interpretation and Correlation that we go through before we come up with our conclusions that we make. And if you recognize these things as part of how we communicate, then everybody could do a lot more to be successful in a global and very diverse business setting.
Eddie Turner:
Now, you ran together three different acronyms right there and I just want to break those down one more time for our listeners. You combined IQ, intelligence quotient with EQ, emotional intelligence or emotional quotient and CQ, the curiosity quotient.
Dr. Diane Hamilton:
And the cultural question, one more CQ. So, we have four of them in there.
Eddie Turner:
Ah! See, I missed one. Excellent. Now, that’s the interesting combination. I like that.
Dr. Diane Hamilton:
Yeah, it was not enough just to look at just culture or not enough just to look at emotional intelligence. The IQ can combine the critical thinking and a lot of those elements. And we really looked at how we have this process. And if you don’t recognize the factors that impact that process, you have a very tough time having empathy which, of course, is a big part of emotional intelligence. So, it seems like simple to think that if you just open up your mind to see other people’s vantage points but we’ve never seen a time that people had a harder time doing it than right now if you look at the political climates and things that are going on. So, it’s really very timely that we came up with this research.
Eddie Turner:
It does appear that way indeed. I mean, when we think about where we’re at in our world today, at every level of society, there is a recognition that we need more people to understand, as you articulate in the book, themselves as well as others.
So, Maya, what did you find is the best way for leaders to recognize their own lack of or need to develop their perceptive powers?
Dr. Maya Zelihic:
Well, absolutely, when it comes to the business professionals, and we wrote this book with the business professionals in mind, however, some of the book’s concepts are applicable across different industries and also in everyday life, we are currently in the ever-evolving highly diverse workplace. So, we have to recognize the need to understand the complexities that can revolve around perception. For example, an interesting statistic we found out is according to Psychology Today, we make about 35,000 decisions a day.
Dr. Maya Zelihic:
That many. I’m reflecting on all the decisions I’ve made since I woke up this morning and it didn’t appear to me that it’s been that many. However, we do. So, why does perceptions matter? Well, many of our decisions are small and insignificant while some have major impact on our professional careers, major impact in a professional and corporate setting. So, we’re dealing with some perception mechanism. Some of them are conscious. Some of them are subconscious. And in some situations, you can trace your decision making, your perception back to a particular experience in life or to your parents or to your upbringing. For example, I always knew I wanted to be a PhD, I wanted to be a doctor in something because my father was a PhD and I felt like he inspired me to strive for the excellence in the academic arena. So, I can pinpoint where that perception came from, where that decision came from but there are so many where we’re hard pressed to figure out where those came from. And some of our research is to recognize that perception impacts everyone’s reality. What are those mechanisms, what are those variables impacting our perception and how those correlate with effective leadership because the effective leaders are the ones that are able to tap into a potential of their own perception and back to your point, Eddie, understand others?
Eddie Turner:
I’m still stuck on 35,000 decisions a day. I’m sorry, I’m just thinking about how many I’ve gotten wrong so far. Did your research produce the algorithm?
Dr. Maya Zelihic:
Well, I think I made a very poor decision when it comes to my choice of high-calorie lunch. That’s the one that I can definitely pinpoint as the wrong one but a lot of decisions are just something that we’re doing subconsciously – “Do I wake up at this time? Do I wake up at the other time? Do I take this medicine?” – but we’re focusing, of course, not on all those decision-making. We’re focusing on the ones that are impacting your effectiveness in the world of business.
Eddie Turner:
And does indecision count in that 35,000?
Dr. Maya Zelihic:
Yes, I would imagine. So, we have a lot of those. Not making a decision is a decision, right?
Eddie Turner:
Yes, that’s why I ask.
Dr. Maya Zelihic:
Absolutely.
Eddie Turner:
All right. So, then we think about decisions we’re making as individuals, how does the role of our perception of others play into this. And I think that’s partially what Dr. Diane was referring to.
Dr. Diane Hamilton:
Well, it’s really interesting to look at how certain things influence perception and perception influences certain things. When we talk about what plays into any of this, well, think about what influences perception. You’ve got culture, you’ve got experience, you’ve got curiosity, intelligence, gender, spirituality, emotions, you name it. Those things influence your perception but then you got to look at how perception influences innovation, critical thinking, engagement, creativity, collaboration, thinking, leadership. And you go through these lists of if we can recognize this impact that perception has and tie it into we all want to be quantitative in this group, we want to figure out how it’s going to save you, so money and organizations are saying “Well, why is this helpful?” Well, if we’re improving emotional intelligence because we’re improving our empathy to be able to see some things from other people’s perspectives and understanding their vantage point, I mean, we know we’re losing tens of billions to hundreds of billions a year on emotional intelligence depending on where you get your data and that’s same with leadership and collaboration the numbers are kind of similar and engagement as well, our perception of our jobs and whether we like what we do or we don’t like what we do at work, if we have that improved engagement, we know that over 500 billion is lost each year because of that. So, I think that a lot of leaders want to see data and statistics but they don’t really recognize that there’s so much to perception. And as we talked about the cultural aspect, we’ve seen some companies that have been great about doing some cultural training and that’s just, as we said, one of the two CQs. I mean we have IBM, they’ve done a lot of training to ensure that employees are have learned about culture before they send them overseas, for example. And the Coca-Cola does the same but they make sure the spouse is even trained because they say happy wife, happy husband, happy life or whatever, you look at that either way but there are so many companies from Accenture, McKinsey, the data out there shows that the more perceptive the organization, the more successful they’ll be. And HBR had 40 case studies that showed that clients that had this sense of understanding of people with whom they interact are 152% likelier that they would understand the client. And if you can understand your client, then your sales go up. I mean, there’s a lot of data out there but really, it’s kind of intuitive to think that if you can put yourself in somebody else’s shoes and see things from their perspective that you’re going to be much more open and much more successful.
Eddie Turner:
And if a leader wants to improve in this area, what’s the secret?
Dr. Maya Zelihic:
Well, the thing is one has to be in tune with his or her own perception, one has to evaluate one’s own perception, being aware of how you perceive as a leader, listen to others and observe and to a certain degree being able to predict as to what the others may perceive and that is part of the index that we developed. It is part of our book and part of our training program. It’s to evaluate and predict and then also going further what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to interpret. What are we interpreting? What all of that means? A lot of times, leaders think they project one thing and they end up projecting something completely different.
Eddie Turner:
Exactly. That’s one of the reasons why I was curious and I’m so happy you said you have the index so that it’s not left up to themselves and their own self-deception.
Dr. Maya Zelihic:
That is true. And recently, I actually worked on an article where I was sharing the one experience I had in the Finance industry where one of the middle level managers was addressed by his superiors and basically they told him that every single member on his team was unhappy with his leadership and his comeback was “I’m an excellent leader.” So, his perception of himself and the perception of everyone else was completely different. Well, usually, we don’t have this Grand Canyon of difference between one’s perception versus the perception of others. usually, this is far better aligned but at the same point of time, if I go into a meeting and I’m supposed to communicate something to my team, I know exactly what I’m trying to project and I’m hoping to know my team in order to be able to know how they’re going to perceive my projection. With that said, we are trying to help the leaders polish their own perception, being in tune with the perception of others and being able to come to that ever fluid concept of a business reality. And the reason why I said ever fluid is one person’s reality may not be what the other person sees. However, there is such a thing as close to possible to the business reality that we’re living within and working within and that is the one within which our leadership is able to become more effective.
Eddie Turner:
Wonderful. Well, I am enjoying this conversation with you, Diane and Maya, and we’ll have more with you amazing professors, scholars, leaders, and speakers right after this break.
This podcast is sponsored by Eddie Turner LLC. Organizations who need to accelerate the development of their leaders call Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®. Eddie works with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact. Call Eddie Turner to help your leaders one on one as their coach or to inspire them as a group through the power of facilitation or a keynote address. Visit EddieTurnerLLC.com to learn more.
This is Karen Jacobsen, the GPS Girl, and you have reached your destination because you are listening to the Keep Leading!® Podcast with Eddie Turner.
Eddie Turner:
Okay, we’re back, everyone. I am talking to Diane Hamilton and Maya Zelihic, two amazing scholars, professors, and authors of The Power of Perception: Eliminating Boundaries to Create Successful Global Leaders.
Before the break, we talked about what perception is, ladies, and how leaders can improve their own and how they interact with other people but you said that you don’t leave it up to leaders to say that they’re good at themselves. You just created an index. Diane, can you tell us a little bit more about the index you created.
Dr. Diane Hamilton:
You brought up a really important point about how you cannot just rely on what you think you’re doing well as leaders. Sometimes you have to measure certain things and quantify certain things, right? I had Francesca Gino on my show a while back, who’s a very impressive professor from Harvard, and we talked about how leaders think that they embrace curiosity but if you ask the people who work for them, the percentage is far less of whether they believe that the curiosity that they would like to see is actually something that they reward, the employees didn’t agree with the leaders. So, our perception of what we want to have happened or what we think is the reality is not always the case. So, when we train companies, we give them the Perception Power Index and that is where we discuss the four factors of Evaluation, Prediction, Interpretation, and Correlation. So, it’s kind of like you’ve taken a disk for those types of assessments where it’s not that long, 10, 15 minutes and you get this big 26-page report of all your results but what we’re looking at is under evaluation we’re looking at self-control, composure, acceptance, body language, tone. We’re looking at some of these things about our self-evaluation because that determines our actions. And then they’re looking at prediction next which, of course, covers things like our empathy, sensitivity, translation, how we look at alternatives. There’s all these different subfactors within each of these four major factors. And just as if you take an emotional intelligence test, you would get your results of how high you are or how low you are in each of these areas. In interpretation, we’re looking at curiosity, logic, cultures, those things and correlation, we’re also bringing it all together with vantage point experience and other factors of how we reach our conclusions. So, if you go down this list, we go through “Well, how are these impacting you? What are your differences in perception?” We saw that there’s a difference a little bit between men and women, which I thought was kind of interesting because women were more likely to believe that others can allow their perceptions of their gender impact them where men didn’t see that as a big factor. Well, maybe they didn’t have the same life experiences. So, there we’re seeing culture and different things play into our life experiences. Men were more likely to believe that a person’s health can impact their decision-making abilities. They did not view race and age as much of an issue in decision making though as women did. So, there’s a lot of differences but there weren’t huge differences. We saw on and off just smaller variations but what’s interesting is when we get these results, we take a look at kind of a personal SWOT analysis that we do with these groups, we go through this and we go “Okay, now you know the factors and you’ve assessed how they impact your perception. So, let’s do your personal SWOT. What are going to be your weaknesses and strengths when you’re creating these smart goals to overcome some of these limitations you have going through this process?” And it’s not just a personal area of improvement that we work on. We go through all the personal issues and help people create their own personal smart goals but then now that they’ve understand how perception impacts everything, they take what they’ve learned and they help their organization leaders create a corporate smart goal process to bring back to leadership. And who [inaudible] training the courses could be HR professionals, could be somebody Maya and I could be training or other people in HR. Consultants and anybody who’s certified to give this will have this great report that they bring back to leaders to give them and say “This is what your employees think would help them to improve their perceptions to be more well-rounded in these four areas that we’ve identified.” And so, it’s kind of like what you would do if you had an engagement survey. You incorporate that into their development goals. And it’s something that employees get really excited to help give feedback to the company because we know when you get feedback from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, that’s when you really get some success in the end.
Eddie Turner:
Where can individuals get a copy of the Perceptive Power Index?
Dr. Maya Zelihic:
I think it’s PerceptionPowerIndex.com. it’s also on Dr. Diane’s website Dr. DianeHamilton.com but PerceptionPowerIndex.com will take them directly to the index.
Eddie Turner:
PerceptionPowerIndex.com. So, we’re going to put a link to that on your page for this episode so folks can go there and take that.
Dr. Maya Zelihic:
Absolutely. And if any of the HR managers, consultants, corporate training professionals, if they’re interested in learning more, they can get in touch with us and we will actually help them get certified in order to be able to provide this training to their companies because one of the things that we talked about prior to our break was what is the core purpose of all this. Well, the core purpose is to ensure that we’re polishing our perception, being aware of the perception of others because without having that skill set, you are unable to be an effective leader in a corporate setting. And we were also focusing not only on the concept of leadership in general. We are focusing on concept of global leadership because I think we all can agree that if you’re a leader in today’s environment, you have to be prepared to be a global leader. So, one of the concepts that we discuss in our book is ‘Suspend Your Beliefs’ and that is not to give up your values. It is just to be open-minded to embrace the values of others, observe the values of others, perceive the values of others and understand others in other cultures in order to be able to do effective business internationally. And as I did a lot of research ventures in different parts of the world, different lectures and interacted with different business leaders across different cultures, one of the things that was one of the biggest values that I’ve seen for the effective leaders was that ability to be not only open-minded but to suspend their own beliefs, not giving up on their beliefs but just suspend them, observe, learn from others and that is where that prediction part of the EPIC index comes in place – “I’m aware of who I am as a perceptive individual but now I’m actually trying to predict what the others perceive about me and about the situation that we’re in.”
Eddie Turner:
Wonderful. So, you’re giving people an opportunity to get certified in this, not just be a person who takes this. They can get certified and issue this as a credentialed assessor.
Dr. Maya Zelihic:
Absolutely, absolutely. And as a matter of fact, Diane and I were happy to do some of the training, some of the certifications but it’s just the two of us with all the other obligations that we have. So, we’re happy to certify the HR managers, consultants, corporate training managers and that way they can administer that within their companies. We do believe that this will increase employee motivation, employee productivity and effectiveness because how many times all three of us were in a meeting on the receiving end of a particular message and we walk away from that meeting with three different perceptions. And Diane and I, we were in those types of situations ourselves. And understanding who we are as individuals and how that impacts our perception. Everyday life you have an argument with your significant other. Her impression of what you’ve said versus what you said, Eddie, are two different things. You were both in the same kitchen.
Eddie Turner:
Yes, I am always wrong no matter what I think.
Dr. Maya Zelihic:
And also, one of the stories that we share in the book that I actually found quite fascinating, one of the things that Diane was talking about, the gender differences, we have a story about a gentleman and a lady looking at a painting. And the lady is saying “Look at the colors, look at the way the sun hits this barn, look at the old man in front of the barn and how happy he is.” And the man is looking at the painting saying “Boy oh boy, that barn needs some repainting.” That is oversimplifying and it can be other way around but a lot of times, we are in a situation where the same thing happened, we were in the midst of that same event in a corporate setting, we walk away, two completely different perceptions.
Dr. Diane Hamilton:
I’d like to add to Maya’s story. My husband, I asked him his perception of what he thought of my hair when I cut it one time and he said “If you like it, I like it.”
Dr. Diane Hamilton:
It’s interesting to look at what we can train people to overcome in terms of their process. And I wanted to add to what Maya was saying about we can train people but they also get five hours of [inaudible] certification credit which is really nice if they go through the certification training program. So, it is available for sure.
Eddie Turner:
That’s good to know because for a lot of people, that really does matter and make a difference. I like the idea that you all have put together a body of research, published a book that shows that perception is a leadership quality. And because of the rigor behind it, this combining which I absolutely love, you don’t know this but before recording this episode, I was working with a very senior leader in an organization and I was talking about culture. And I’ve covered this in a couple of different episodes but you’ve put this together as a nice formula – IQ + EQ + CQ – and I missed that, you have the second CQ where cultural competency. We are no longer and perhaps COVID has increased this need but we are no longer dealing with our local communities, our local states and our local country. We are truly a global society. And so, we must be culturally competent as leaders.
Dr. Diane Hamilton:
What was interesting about culture to me was you couldn’t just have like one factor be IQ, one factor be EQ one be CQ and another CQ. They all overlap to some extent. It all interacts with the other things. So, that’s why we came up with this EPIC acronym because it is more of a process. And all those things weave throughout the process. So, it’s really important to recognize the whole process that we go through so that if we are weak in part of the process, we can correct those areas.
Eddie Turner:
Wonderful. Well, thank you for taking time to talk to us today about the power of perception. Is there any closing comment that you would like to make for our listeners?
Dr. Maya Zelihic:
Well, I would like to say that the core purpose of this book and the training and the certification is not to have everyone think the same, just the opposite, but for everyone to be able to effectively lead in a very diverse, very multi-layered business setting where every single person is aware of what they are projecting, aware of how they perceive things and aware of the other’s perception and then aligning everyone as close as possible to that concept of business reality because within that particular ever-fluid concept, that’s where we produce, that’s where we excel and that’s where we perform. So, that is our core purpose.
Dr. Diane Hamilton:
I don’t know if I can top that. That was exactly what I’d like to end with but there is no truth, there’s only perception and you have to recognize that what you see may not be what other people see or what they interpret. So, it’s really important that we look at the world and realize that we’re more alike than we are different but if we can work on our differences in our perceptions of how we go through our decision-making process, the better and more successful we’ll be in the business world.
Eddie Turner:
Wonderful. So, we’re going to put a copy of the book on our website so the folks can visit you at KeepLeadingPodcast.com, visit your episode and have an access to the assessment and access to your book. We’re going to put links to your profiles so people can follow you both. And I neglected to say that Dr. Diane Hamilton has one of the best podcasts out there. So, when you’re not listening to the Keep Leading!® Podcast, listen to Take The Lead which is in how many episodes now, Diane?
Dr. Diane Hamilton:
I lost count after 1100 people. It’s a lot.
Eddie Turner:
Yes, some outstanding numbers. So, just to put things in the context, after two years, I’ve crossed the 100 episodes.
Dr. Diane Hamilton:
Oh, you have? Congratulations.
Eddie Turner:
Thank you. So, I want my listeners to understand how hard it is to get to 1100 and counting. So, truly phenomenal work. I don’t think there’s anybody left that Diane Hamilton hasn’t interviewed.
Dr. Diane Hamilton:
Well, there’s got to be but they’ve all been wonderful including you, Eddie. Thank you for being a guest on my show.
Eddie Turner:
And Maya, it’s a pleasure to have you with us as well. I’ve had a chance to do some work with you very closely and just a joy to be with you two ladies. Thank you for being a guest on the Keep Leading!® Podcast.
Dr. Maya Zelihic:
Thank you, Eddie.
Eddie Turner:
That’s it for this episode, everyone. I’m Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®, reminding you that leadership is not about our title or our position. Leadership is an activity. Leadership is action. It’s not the case of once a leader, always a leader. It’s not a garment we put on and take off. We must be a leader at our core and allow it to emanate in all we do. So, whatever you’re doing, always keep leading.
Thank you for listening to your host Eddie Turner on the Keep Leading!® Podcast. Please remember to subscribe to the Keep Leading!® Podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen. For more information about Eddie Turner’s work, please visit EddieTurnerLLC.com.
Thank you for listening to C Suite Radio, turning the volume up on business.
The Keep Leading!® podcast is for people passionate about leadership. It is dedicated to leadership development and insights. Join your host Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator® as he speaks with accomplished leaders and people of influence across the globe as they share their journey to leadership excellence. Listen as they share leadership strategies, techniques and insights. For more information visit eddieturnerllc.com or follow Eddie Turner on Twitter and Instagram at @eddieturnerjr. Like Eddie Turner LLC on Facebook. Connect with Eddie Turner on LinkedIn.
