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Keep Leading!® Podcast 138 | Scott Walker | Order Out of Chaos

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Scott Walker
Ex Kidnap-for-ransom negotiator | Keynote Speaker | Featured in the NY Times and HBR | Best Selling Author
Order Out of Chaos

Episode Summary

Listen to this Keep Leading!® podcast episode for an extraordinary interview with Scott Walker, one of the world’s most experienced kidnappers-for-ransom negotiators. Scott’s new book, Order Out of Chaos, delves into his remarkable career, where he has successfully resolved over three hundred cases, including piracy and cyber-extortion attacks. This captivating episode is filled with practical advice and inspiring stories from a true expert in crisis negotiation.

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Bio
Scott Walker is among the world’s most experienced kidnappers-for-ransom negotiators. He has successfully resolved more than three hundred cases, in addition to other crises like piracy and cyber-extortion attacks. He dedicated sixteen years to Scotland Yard as a detective, focusing on covert operations in counterterrorism and kidnapping. In 2015, he left the police force to assist organizations, government entities, and private individuals in negotiating the release of hostages globally. He is in high demand as a speaker worldwide and provides coaching to executives and leaders at all levels on enhancing resilience, developing emotional intelligence, and refining communication skills. He works with companies to foster a resilient culture and to create engaged, fulfilled, purpose-driven, and productive teams.

Website
https://www.scottwalkerbooks.co.uk

LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottaw/

Twitter
https://twitter.com/S_WalkerBooks

Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/ScottWalkerBooks

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/scottwalkerbooks/

Subscribe, share, and review on Apple Podcasts!
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/keep-leading/id1461490512

Scott’s Book
https://bit.ly/3IfPhNu

Subscribe, share, and review on Spotify
https://open.spotify.com/show/0I7uAW3x4AWsLe6cnAzHp7?si=14549a44dec3495f

Full Episode Transcripts and Detailed Guest Information
www.KeepLeadingPodcast.com

Keep Leading LIVE (Live Recordings of the Keep Leading!® Podcast)
www.KeepLeadingLive.com

Connect with Eddie Turner
Website: https://www.eddieturnerllc.com
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Agent: https://gray-miller-agency.webflow.io/roster/eddie-turner
100 Coaches Agency: https://www.100coaches.com/coaches/profiles/eddie-turner/

About the Keep Leading!® Podcast
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 about their journeys to leadership excellence. Listen as they share leadership strategies, techniques, and insights.

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Inspired by what you hear? Share the episode with your network and help spread the message of empowerment and leadership. Use the hashtag #KeepLeadingPodcast and join the community of listeners who are dedicated to continuous growth and leadership excellence.

Transcript

Eddie Turner:

Hello, everyone. All Welcome to another edition of Keep Leading® LIVE. Keep Leading® LIVE is dedicated to leadership development and insights. I am your host, Eddie Turner. I work with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact through the power of executive coaching, masterful facilitation, and professional speaking.My guest and I are streaming to you live today on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube. So, if you’re joining us on one of these platforms, please type in the comments to let us know you’re here, ask any question you’d like to ask or just give us your feedback, let us know your reaction to what you are hearing. And if you’d be so kind, press that share button and share it with your network so that they can join us live or they can catch the replay afterwards.

Today, I’m going to talk about a subject that is in the news but also is something I consider a life skill and that is negotiation but we’re going to cover from a different perspective. My guest today is Scott Walker. Scott Walker is one of the world’s most experienced kidnap for ransom negotiators. He’s a former Scotland Yard detective engaged in covert counterterrorist and kidnapping operations. He supports organizations governments and private individuals worldwide in negotiating the release of hostages. Scott is a sought-after speaker who coaches executives and leaders at all levels enhancing their resilience, developing their emotional intelligence, and perfecting their communication skills. Scott Walker joins me here on Keep Leading® LIVE to share his new approach to succeeding negotiations when failure is not an option and Scott does this in his new book that was just released Tuesday, Order Out of Chaos – Win Every Negotiation Thrive in Adversity and Become a World-Class Communicator. You can get your copy on Amazon or on his website. I’ve got my copy on the desk behind me, as you’ll notice.

Scott, welcome to Keep Leading® LIVE.

Scott Walker:

Hi, Eddie. Thanks for having me. Good to be here.

Eddie Turner:

I am just so excited to have you. I’ve been enjoying your book. And a lot of times people will say “You had me at the word ‘go’” and in your case, this is really true. I started in the introduction which sometimes I might skip but I was just locked in. What a fascinating book, but before we get into the book, please tell our audience today a little bit more about you, anything I may have missed.

Scott Walker:

Well, that was such a great introduction there. I’m not quite sure where to go with that. I think throughout all of my life, I’ve been really curious and interested in what makes people tick, what makes them think, feel, and act the way they do. Even as a kid, I was really nosy, really inquisitive and that probably meant why I went into the police service growing up because I was curious as to why people did what they did. And then, obviously, I made a career out of it. 20 plus or so years later, I’m still doing it, and this time I think it’s ended up in the point where it’s allowed me to help other people simply have better conversations. And if you could sum up all of what the book is about, it really is about how we can have better conversations with each other.

Eddie Turner:

Indeed. And when I initially picked it up, that’s not what I was anticipating, but as I was reading it, I said “Wow! This really is a practical daily guide” and I’m going to ask you a little bit about that but I got to ask you this first. And maybe it’s just me but when I hear Scotland Yard, I think Sherlock Holmes. So, for those of us who may not know Scotland Yard and the significance of what you did there, just tell us just a little bit about that.

Scott Walker:

Well, actually, you mentioned Sherlock Holmes there and that’s a really good example of what a good negotiator is. And I’ll come back to that in a second, but Scotland Yard is really just the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police in London. And the day-to-day policing is spread out across London and there’s various units and departments just like any other major city police force. It’s got its SWAT teams, it’s got its homicide teams as well as organized crime as well as the mounted branch on horses, etc. So, that’s what the Yard is but it has developed a bit of a reputation for itself over many, many decades in movies. Another thing you mentioned there about Sherlock Holmes. Actually, I always advise clients to be more Sherlock Holmes than Gordon Gecko a negotiation because you’ve got to be curious, you’ve got to be hungry for the truth, you’ve got to be inquisitive, you’ve got to have that persistence to really find out what’s going on for the other side as opposed to playing hard ball or thinking …

Eddie Turner:

That’s an interesting perspective, you said instead of just playing hard ball, because when many people think about a negotiation, Scott, that’s what I hear people say “Win at all cost. Take no prisoners. It’s only a victory if I get everything I want.” So, you’re saying there’s a different definition of negotiation that people should have.

Scott Walker:

People think, and there’s lots of negotiation training and books out there, who say you’ve got to separate the person from the problem. It’s just a trade of resources or money but they’re missing the biggest aspect of all of this is that we’re all human beings and human beings are driven by emotion. The emotions we experience drive all our decision-making and our behavior. Even if we think we’re rational creatures, we only do that after the event. And so, often if we fail to address the person, the emotions that are underlying and lie behind the needs and the drivers for that particular deal, we’re going to miss a trick here. And really what I stress to people is every negotiation that you enter, no matter what it is with your family, in business, or in the community, wherever it is, seek that cooperation and collaboration. Have in mind that you want to bring about a client for life, not a onetime hard ball negotiation. Yeah, okay, if you’re going to buy a car, it’s a one-off transaction, that’s slightly different, but for most people, particularly in business, you want to get clients who come back to you time and time and time again but you’re only going to be able to do that if you can identify and satisfy those emotional needs.

Eddie Turner:

Interesting. And the idea that you want a client for life … there are some one-time transactions as you mentioned, maybe purchasing a new vehicle or something of that effect, but in a business perspective, we don’t want to have that mentality. So, I appreciate you sharing that. And you also bring this home to something that you say very early on in the book is the idea that we are always negotiating and we’re negotiating even when we think we’re not negotiating. And in fact, when you shared some of the tools, I want to read this part directly, if I may, from your book because I found this fascinating, you said “Successfully resolving a kidnapping negotiation with ease requires the same skills used in any stressful conversation.” And you talk about the fact that this involves even everyday events. And so, I got to thinking is it just as simple as planning the family vacation, is it as simple as the daily conversation with my three-year-old who I call a threenager, or the boss who we have where we have that negotiation conversation coming up about our pay raise or our promotion. You said it’s the same skills.

Scott Walker:

Absolutely. And it’s about realizing that a negotiation is simply a conversation with the purpose. You talk to a lot of people and they get very nervous or they get scared or they want to avoid anything that involves negotiation but actually, it’s a straightforward conversation where you want to get something from it, the other side wants to get something from it. And if you approach it in the right way, whether or not it’s a family vacation or whether or not it’s a multibillion merge and acquisition deal or it’s the release of hostages, both sides have to feel as if they’re getting a good deal as much as possible from that. And so, if you can approach in that way, it becomes a lot easier. And it applies to every aspect of our life because what are we doing day in day out if we’re not looking to influence or persuade or bring about some form of cooperation or collaboration whether or not it’s your three-year-old or it’s with a board of directors. The same principles apply there.

Eddie Turner:

Interesting. Well, then I’ll have to keep working so I can get better at both. Now, I’m going to just turn the page, if I may, a little bit to a more serious aspect of negotiation, when I open up the paper, we open up the front cover of our newspapers, we look at what’s happening in the world around us, Scott, and with your worldwide experience negotiating in high stakes situations, one of the most notable occurrences that comes to mind is the unfortunate circumstances of the hundreds of Israeli hostages who are in many cases still held hostage or someone like an Evan Gershkovich, The Wall Street Journal journalist, who’s been held hostage I believe for about a year now, when we think about circumstances like this and you get called in, what’s your first line of thought, even though you’re not in these situations, what’s your line of thought that you use that can give us a lens into the type of thinking that you’re having to bring?

Scott Walker:

Sure. Well, Evans’s case, the Wall Street journalist, that’s a state-sponsored or it’s state detention where a foreign government will detain usually a journalist or an aid worker on charges, usually spurious, against their will. And so, that then becomes the diplomatic back and forth between the two governments involved. It’s frustrating for the families because it gets tied up in the bureaucracy and at the government level and these things take time, takes a long time, but we’ve seen around the world an increase in those kinds of abductions or detentions, I should say. So, there’s that aspect. In terms of the old Israel-Hamas situation right now, as far as hostage negotiation perspective, it doesn’t get much more challenging when you think about it. Even just trying to secure the release of one hostage is difficult enough, but when you’ve got a hundred plus who’ve been held for a long time in an active war zone, in an environment and in a backdrop that is very sensitive, is very volatile, it presents its own unique challenges. And countries like Qatar have gotten involved third-party intermediaries. And we see this in negotiations all the time, not just in this one where a trusted party will get involved, act as the mediator, as the facilitator between everyone involved. And that goes to the heart of the success factor in all negotiations and that is trust. And without it, negotiations fail, whether it’s with your kids or whether not it’s with terrorists or whomever. And so, in this particular case, the Qataris have established trust with these raiders and the Americans and Hamas and others on the other side and they’ve been able to leverage that to get to a deal where we are now, but the principles still apply, is these things can take a long time, highly emotive, highly challenging but above all, that trust is a success factor to the succeeding in the end.

Eddie Turner:

Yeah. One of the reasons I ask you about this mindset we have to bring because you’re negotiating with someone who you can’t trust or in a case where it’s a situation where maybe it’s not a person you just can’t trust, maybe like an employer or something or the other side of an acquisition and M&A, but it’s just that maybe it’s a difficult person or it’s a difficult organization, a difficult transaction. What has a person to do in those circumstances?

Scott Walker:

Well, let’s bring this to the everyday scenario, the everyday situation now, whether it’s in business or in people’s personal lives. I think it’s fair to say, Eddie, that you, and I’m sure people watching and listening to this have come across those difficult people, whether not you want to label them as narcissists or sociopaths or just being a bit difficult, they’re part and parcel of doing business. And so, what I always advise people is you need to reframe your thinking, see them more as worthy opponents as opposed to some kind of adversary that you’ve got to beat, because if you go up against these people in a fight, you’re likely to not come off that well because, for them, it’s all driven by ego, it’s all about them and they will do whatever they can to actually win at all cost. So, if you can approach them as a worthy opponent, what that means is you can suspend your own ego, you can actually see this as is an opportunity for you to get curious, to manage and regulate your own emotions and really ask yourself “Okay. Well, what is driving this person? What are the needs here?” And usually, it will be things like they’re looking for certainty, significance, to save face but above all, control. And actually, if you can still bring about a really good outcome here, you can give them all of that, you can give them the semblance of being in control, you can frame the options to them as if it’s their idea, you can do all these things that can make them think as if they’re winning while actually you’re both going to succeed here, but I think what I’d say there is avoid this locking horns and seeing this as a battle because you won’t win.

Eddie Turner:

You’re telling us not to look at them as an adversary but to look at them as a worthy opponent. And then you talked about the need to look at what’s in it for them, what are their feelings. And so, I hear you talking about what you mentioned a lot in your book and that’s this need to introduce the word of empathy into negotiations. And that’s just not what a lot of people would think about when they think about negotiations.

Scott Walker:

And particularly when you’re facing conflict, and conflict is part and parcel of negotiation, I have to say, in every kidnapping or extortion negotiation, there’s been conflict in every single one. So, again, I’d always advise people accept it’s going to be there, embrace it, and empathy is a way of diffusing that. And empathy, people misunderstand what it is. It’s not sympathy. It’s not pity. It’s not even compassion. Empathy is a doing word. You do empathy which then enables the person on the other side, your counterpart, to start to feel that rapport and that actually they’re seen, heard, and understood. And this is particularly powerful if you disagree with them. If you’re at loggerheads, if you’re disagreeing over a particular aspect of a deal, if I can empathize, if I can validate, if I can put myself in that position and crucially articulated to them and they go “Hey, yeah, Scott really gets me” or “Yeah, Eddie understands where I’m coming from here,” even if you disagree, then you’re just opening the playing field then for you to have earned the right and the trust, you’ve earned the right to then start to influence and persuade them and put across your side.

Eddie Turner:

So, even if we don’t agree, I need to make sure they feel seen, heard, and understood.

Scott Walker:

Particularly if you disagree with them, that’s even more powerful. It’s harder to do because you may be triggered in it, your ego would be there, that negative loop would be going around inside your head, that chatter. You got to suspend that because otherwise it’s …

Eddie Turner:

I got to stop telling myself all these crazy stories about the other side.

Scott Walker:

Exactly.

Eddie Turner:

Oh no!

Scott Walker:

I’m good. They’re bad. I’m going to do what I can to prove I’m right, they’re wrong. And in the end, you both walk away with either no deal or a lousy deal and then you feel really bad afterwards and it doesn’t serve anybody.

Eddie Turner:

And that’s interesting because you call the book Order Out of Chaos. So, by that title, I wasn’t expecting all the deep negotiation and communication skills that you’re teaching. So, tell us about that specific title and how that factors into what you’re teaching.

Scott Walker:

Well, it doesn’t actually have anything to do with Chaos Theory, as somebody mentioned to me the other day. It’s really a job description of my role as a negotiator has been to (inaudible). It could be in the family home. It could be in the boardroom somewhere. And there’s inevitably some kind of chaos. There’s uncertainty. There’s challenge. There’s change. There’s a crisis going on. And, actually, it’s to bring some semblance of order and calm. And so, when you’re at the center of that storm raging all around you, you can operate, you can negotiate, you can communicate from a place of equinity, of calm, of groundedness. And from that place, you can go “You know what, nothing is going to phase me now.” And it’s contagious because if I turned up and sat down with a family of the hostages or in the company boardroom where one of their colleagues had been taken and I was getting all flustered and I was contributing to the chaos, they’ll be like “You’re good to us here.” So, I very much saw as my role, one of my primary roles, was to bring that order to what is a very chaotic and uncertain situation.

Eddie Turner:

Interesting, interesting. That’s really good to know and to think about. And in your book you actually share what you call a Jedi mind trick, something very specific that we can use when it comes to negotiation. Do you mind sharing it with our listeners here?

Scott Walker:

I’m just trying to think what that is, if you can give me a hint on it, because there a couple of mind tricks in there.

Eddie Turner:

Anyone that you want to share.

Scott Walker:

I think, it’s really about if you can validate where the person is at through the empathy, through the summarizing and labeling, that is really powerful. If we’re disagreeing, Eddie, on a business deal right now and I can go “Eddie, let’s just pause for a second. Is it okay if I just share with you where I think you’re at right now with this?” and then I go “Well, you know, to me it sounds like you think I’m maybe even trying to rip you off here, that you’re not getting the best deal. I’ve had long enough to put up a better counteroffer here and you feel that even I might be dragging this out to try and get more money out of this.” And straight away, by doing that, it diffuses the tension, it makes you feel seen, heard, and understood, but all I’m doing is I’m just reflecting back to you where I think you’re at. And it sounds so simple but it is really, really effective to do that. It’s simple but not easy because people want to go “Yes but” and they want to put their spin and they want to rationalize as to why they should have their viewpoint, but the golden rule of this is it’s not about you. You’ve got to first seek to understand before being understood. And if you can do that, as I said earlier, you’ve earned the right, you’ve earned the trust to then start influencing them persuading the other side. So, really, what I would suggest is it is about if you can reflect back, if you can paraphrase or summarize and label what you’re sensing is going on through the person, it’s really, really powerful.

Eddie Turner:

I like that and that is something in your book that you call the golden rule, I believe, in negotiations in that you first seek to be understand before being understood. Yes, yes, yes, excellent. And I like what you’re describing here, as a coach that really resonates because that’s one of the things that I try to do as a coach but also as a person who works as a coach trainer, we teach coaches, is to call out what you’re seeing in the moment, highlight what you’re hearing and get on the same page with the person in terms of what they’re understanding, try to understand what they’re saying. That doesn’t necessarily mean agreeing. So, thank you for sharing that as one of the techniques that we can use in the middle of a negotiation real time. And I think that also gets back to what you were talking about earlier about bringing that empathy in because you can’t do that effectively unless you’re empathizing in that moment and also reframing the stories that we’re telling the person ourselves about the person that we’re negotiating with.You’ve given us several tips. You’ve told us what it means and what the mindset of a negotiator should be. Is there one mistake that you see people make over and over when they are negotiating?

Scott Walker:

Some of the common mistakes, blocks, barriers will be where you’re making it about you, it’s about “What can I get from this deal at the expense of somebody else?” It’s potentially looking to problem solve too soon. And we learned about this really and practiced this in the hostage world where if somebody’s there on the ledge or holding a hostage and, say in the first 30 seconds of the first call “Okay, if you put the gun down, turn to your left, walk out the door down the steps and we’ll meet you there,” they’re going to go “What are you talking about?” because you haven’t addressed, as I said in the beginning, around the whole emotional aspect that’s driving this. Those human beliefs, the values, the rules, the emotions, the needs need to be met first.

Eddie Turner:

So, don’t jump in trying to problem solve too quickly when it comes to negotiations.

Scott Walker:

Absolutely. So, take your time, understand and identify the needs driving the other side. Don’t look to problem solve. Don’t look to try and offer advice when it’s not wanted as well particularly in relationships. And it’s when people allow their emotions to get the better of them. Again, one of the number one skills of the top negotiators in the world is being able to emotionally self-regulate, to have that antenna, that sensory acuity that when you walk into a room or you’re going to pick up the call in a high-stakes situation, you’re pretty cool, calm, and collected and you can kind of convey that and tune in with what other people are experiencing as well and then do what you can to allay their concerns and fears and to bring them down if you need to.

Eddie Turner:

Before I read your book, I did not make that connection that you just made, the connection between emotional intelligence and negotiating, because you must have this element of self-regulation down, you must have mastered it because in a situation, this is where, from what I understand, your reputation has become known when a situation, everything’s hot and volatile and emotions are high, you come in cool as a cucumber and you’re able to maintain that calmness and bring calm to the storm, calm to the chaos so that you can effectively negotiate. So, I appreciate that connection that you’re making with that.

Scott Walker:

It’s fundamental to it, Eddie. Without that emotional intelligence, you will not succeed long term in any negotiation.

Eddie Turner:

Indeed. Now, in a world where we have not just people but also cyber security is becoming a huge issue, and I was not aware of this how big of an issue this was until some time ago when I was working at the C-level with leaders, and I started to understand how many times this happens and it can’t even be talked about that organizations are hit with this. So, be it data, in terms of cybersecurity, be it people, there’s a need for all of us in business, all of us in our daily lives, as you have highlighted so clearly to really listen to this message that you bring out and that you share in your book.

Scott Walker:

In the cyber world with cyber extortion as well, the similar principles apply there but, again, the weakest link in any chain would be the human being but also the strongest link will also be the human being. I know I’m repeating myself a lot here but we’ve got to understand about what makes us tick. What makes us think, feel, and act the way we do particularly as part of human nature particularly when we’re under stress because those emotions make clever people do stupid things. And we’ve seen that many, many times when people have clicked on the email with a dodgy attachment and all of a sudden, they’ve been hit by a ransomware attack, for example.

Eddie Turner:

Well, good information for us to consider. Again, the book is Order Out of Chaos – Win Every Negotiation, Thrive in Adversity and Become A World-Class Communicator.Scott, what is the biggest message you want everyone who’s listening to us today to walk away from our conversation knowing?

Scott Walker:

If you want to be able to influence anyone, you must first know what already influences them. And the way you do that is by bringing more curiosity than assumption to the table.

Eddie Turner:

Bring more curiosity than assumption to the table. Excellent. And where can my listeners learn more about you, Scott?

Scott Walker:

Well, obviously on LinkedIn. I’m active on there on a daily basis. And people can also head to the website ScottWalkerBooks.co.uk where, again, I post things on there and they can find out about some workshops and other information about the world of negotiation, how I can best support them.

Eddie Turner:

Excellent. So, I’m going to encourage all my listeners to follow you, Scott, connect with you on LinkedIn and visit that website ScottWalkerBooks.co.uk. Excellent.Thank you for being a guest on Keep Leading® LIVE.

Scott Walker:

Thanks for having me.

Eddie Turner:

And thank you for listening, for tuning in to our discussion today. I’m Eddie Turner, reminding you that leadership is not about our title or our position. Leadership is an action. Leadership is an activity. It’s not the case of once a leader, always a leader. It’s not a garment that we put on and take off. We must be a leader at our core and allow it to emanate in all that 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.

The post Keep Leading!® Podcast 138 | Scott Walker | Order Out of Chaos appeared first on Eddie Turner.

Keep Leading!® Podcast 127 | The Success Factor for Leaders and High Achievers | Ruth Gotian

admin — Sun, 14 Nov 2021 13:46:23 +0000

Ruth Gotian
Chief Learning Officer in Anesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medicine
The Success Factor for Leaders and High Achievers

Episode Summary
Have you ever wondered why some people achieve exceptional success while others reach average levels? On Episode 127 of the Keep Leading!® podcast, I interviewed Ruth Gotian to learn the answer. Ruth invested decades researching and studying the most successful people of our generation to understand what they do when the world isn’t watching. Learn what they do that ultimately puts them in an elite class and how did they overcome failures!

Check out the “60-Second Preview” of this episode!

Bio
Dr. Ruth Gotian is the Chief Learning Officer and Assistant Professor of Education in Anesthesiology and former Assistant Dean of Mentoring and Executive Director of the Mentoring Academy at Weill Cornell Medicine. She has been hailed by the journal Nature and Columbia University as an expert in mentorship and leadership development. In 2021, she was selected as one of 30 people worldwide to be named to the Thinkers50 Radar List, dubbed the Oscars of management thinking, and is a semi-finalist for the Forbes 50 Over 50 list. In addition to publishing in academic journals, she contributes to Forbes and Psychology Today, where she writes about ‘optimizing success.’ Her research is about the mindset and skillset of peak performers, including Nobel laureates, astronauts, and Olympic champions. Her forthcoming book, The Success Factor, will be out in January.

Website
https://www.ruthgotian.com/

LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rgotian/

Twitter
https://twitter.com/RuthGotian

Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/RuthGotian/

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/ruthgotian/

Leadership Quote
Do something important, not just interesting.

Get Your Copy of Ruth’s Book!
https://www.amazon.com/Success-Factor-Developing-Skillset-Performance/dp/1398602299/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=The+Success+Factor+%E2%80%93+Developing+the+Mindset+and+Skillset+for+Peak+Performance&qid=1621708330&sr=8-1

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Keep Leading LIVE (Live Recordings of the Keep Leading!® Podcast)
www.KeepLeadingLive.com

Transcript

Did you know that indecision is costing you money? When employees get stuck in indecision loops, it can impact their work, the work of others, commitments to clients and ultimately, your bottom line. Give your employees access to coaching when they need to stop in decision loops and keep your business moving forward. Visit Grand Heron International.Ca/podcast to learn about the Grand Heron Plus Program for corporations.

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 coaching, masterful facilitation, and professional speaking.Do you ever wonder why some people achieve exceptional success while others only achieve average results? My guest today has invested decades in researching the answer to that question and she’s studied the most successful people of our generation to understand what they do when the world isn’t watching, what do they do that ultimately puts them in an elite class, how do they overcome failure. My guest today is the amazing Dr. Ruth Gotian, the chief learning officer and assistant professor of Education in Anesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medicine. She has been held by the Journal of Nature and Columbia University as an expert in Mentorship and Leadership Development. In 2021, she was one of only 30 people in the world selected to the Thinkers 50 Radar List, known as the Oscars of Management. In addition to publishing in academic journals, Forbes, Harvard Business Review and Psychology Today, she is set to release a new book entitled The Success Factor: Developing the Mindset and Skillset for Peak Business Performance due out January 2022. I am excited to welcome Dr. Ruth Gotian.

Ruth, welcome to the Keep Leading!® Podcast.

Ruth Gotian:

Oh my God, Eddie. That is the best introduction I have ever gotten. I feel like I need a tiara.

Eddie Turner:

Oh my! You deserve a tiara is so much more. I am just in awe of.

Ruth Gotian:

That was beautiful, Eddie.

Eddie Turner:

Tell us what I missed about your amazing background.

Ruth Gotian:

Well, I actually started my career in Business and Finance and International Banking, my bachelor’s and master’s are actually in Business and then I decided to go back to my first love which was working with students and I decided to work with high-achieving students. And I ran a combined MD PhD program for nearly 20 years. That’s for students who get both the MD and the PhD degree simultaneously in seven years. And at the age of 43, I decided to go back to school while working full-time and raising a family and I got my doctorate and I studied Adult Learning and Leadership to figure out how people like you and I learn, which is certainly different than the K-12 model, and to figure out why certain people rise to leadership and do it well and others don’t even seek it out or don’t do it well. And I became really obsessed with success. And I was studying it deeply. So, my original research was on the most successful physician scientists of our generation, those who got the MD and did research. And then I started to question if the four things I found in the physician scientists who were Nobel Prize winners and a former surgeon general would I find those same things in other extreme high achievers. So, I started studying astronauts and Olympic champions and Fortune 500 CEOs and senior government officials. And what do you know? The Nobel Prize-winning scientist is just like an Olympic champion speed skater.

Eddie Turner:

Are you telling me that a scientist is like an athlete?

Ruth Gotian:

Oh yes, oh yes, not an athlete, a supreme athlete like Olympic level athlete.

Eddie Turner:

Supreme athlete, okay.

Ruth Gotian:

Olympic level. And they’re like the astronauts because they all do the same four things. And once I realized they all do the same four things, I said “That means they learned these things. And if these are learnable skills, I’m an adult educator, I can teach those skills.” And that led to me writing The Success Factor and all the other articles and speaking about it to anybody who will listen one-on-one or on stages and here we are talking about us some more.

Eddie Turner:

Here we are indeed. Yeah, I mean, I love this concept and that’s why I wanted to talk to you about this. And here we’re looking at this episode as being the success factor for leaders and high achievers. I want to know how you define success.

Ruth Gotian:

So, I actually studied this and as my committee told me, I did two dissertations before I ever got to my dissertation because I had to figure out how to define success. And, Eddie, what I can tell you is that success is a moving target and the definition changes based on who you ask and it changes based on rank, based on gender, and based on race ethnicity but one thing that they all had in common, two things actually that they all had in common was that in order to be successful, you have to push your field forward in some way. You have to push it so that people do things differently, see things differently, act differently because of what you did. You developed some sort of new knowledge right so you pushed the field forward but just as importantly, as you succeeded, as you moved up, you brought people up with you. You paid it forward in some way either one on one, so for example, Nobel Prize winner Bob Lefkowitz, he has mentored over 200 people one on one, or you could develop big programs that really get many people together. So, astronaut Dr. Charlie Camarda created the Epic Education Foundation and he’s reached hundreds if not thousands of people all over the world to get them to think in a more innovative manner about solving major problems and he’s getting kids out of the classroom to do big, big projects just about thinking differently. Those are the two things when you ask me how you define success – push the field forward and bring people up with you.

Eddie Turner:

I absolutely love that definition and appreciate those two good examples of what it may look like. Thank you for sharing.It sounds like that requires a certain mindset. Can you talk to me about the mindset of high achievers who achieve this type of success?

Ruth Gotian:

Absolutely. So, Eddie, there’s actually four things that all of them have done. So, I said you can’t just copy other people’s habits. If I’m a high achiever and I’m a morning person and you’re a night owl, you’re not going to turn into a morning person because that’s my habit. It’s just not going to work but there are mindsets that you could absolutely emulate. Now, there’s four things, and you have to do all four things together, but there’s something you have to do first and that is to find out what you are passionate about, what is your purpose, what you are put on this earth to do, the reason that you wake up in the morning and you cannot quiet your mind at night because you’re always thinking about this, you would do it for free if you could because you love it so much. There’s a fire within you that’s always burning. There’s an intrinsic why – why you need to do this, why you need to solve this problem.Now, Eddie, this is very different from extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation means you are doing something because you are getting a promotion, you’re getting a big salary, you’re getting a diploma, an award, a recognition. Eddie, that means other people are judging you. And if other people are judging you all the time, it’s really hard to stay motivated and what will happen is you will fail out or burnout but when it comes from within, you don’t care what other people think because you have a bigger purpose for doing it. That is your reason for doing it. So, that’s the first one and that’s step one. You must get that right. And that’s why when I coach people, I always take them through a Passion Audit to figure out what it is that they’re so passionate about doing because just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you’re passionate about it. Big difference, right?

Eddie Turner:

Absolutely, a really big difference. I like the way you explain that and that makes a lot of sense and I really like the point that you made about how it has to be different for different people because sometimes you read about someone who gets up at 4 a.m. and all of a sudden, if you’re a night owl, you’re thinking “I got to get up at 4 a.m.” It’s depleting to even think about it. So, therefore, that person doesn’t try.

Ruth Gotian:

You’re just going to sleep.

Eddie Turner:

Right.

Ruth Gotian:

One thing I want to offer your listeners is, if they want to do their own passion audit, they can. There’s a passion audit on my website that they can just download. So, just go to RuthGotian.com/PassionAudit and you can download one for free and really start to figure out what is it you enjoy doing, what you would give away for free if you could, what you don’t enjoy doing and what is something that you must continue doing.

Eddie Turner:

Excellent. We’ll be sure to put a link to that in the show notes so that folks will simply click on that and not miss the opportunity.

Ruth Gotian:

You got to figure out your passion. You ready for number two, Eddie?

Eddie Turner:

Go right ahead.

Ruth Gotian:

When you love what you do, you are going to outwork everyone not because you have to but because you want to. And you fall into what’s called a state of flow because you love what you’re doing, you become hyper focused at it. You’re not tired. You’re not hungry. The sun sets, you don’t even notice. You love it and there’s a fire from within that is pushing you to continue. Now, don’t get me wrong. You know how to balance this and balance it with your life but you need to solve this question. It will always come from within and you will really outwork everyone and you will do it with so much passion. You’re not just spinning your wheels. You’re actually being extremely productive. So, that’s the work ethic, the perseverance, the grit, all of that, that’s number two.Ready for number three?

Eddie Turner:

Go right ahead.

Ruth Gotian:

You need to have a strong foundation which you are constantly reinforcing. So, the same things that you did early in your career are the same things that you would do later in your career. Doesn’t matter if you got the Olympic gold medal. Doesn’t matter if you got the Nobel Prize. So, for example, I spoke to Ryan Millar who’s a three-time Olympian and gold medal men’s volleyball player, he told me in the training for the Olympics what thing they would work on is ball control. And they would do ball control with the game called Pepper. And he said pepper is what he played in his backyard when he was seven years old. It’s the same exact drills. Kobe Bryant would do layups in his workouts at 4, 5, 6 in the morning. Those are the same workouts and the same drills you would see in any junior high gym. Hasn’t changed. Kobe Bryant just had better sneakers, better coaches, better equipment but the drills are exactly the same. The scientists, they don’t give up writing grants and writing papers and doing their research because they got the Nobel Prize. They just keep doing it. So, these things, it’s about really developing that strong foundation and constantly reinforcing it.And last but certainly not least is all of the high achievers, they never think that they have all the answers. In fact, they are continuously learning and they are learning by informal means. So, they’re not sitting in the classroom. That’s unreasonable for most adults, especially adults who are also working. So, what are the other ways they can learn? Well, you can read books. You can read journals. You can read articles. You can listen to podcasts such as this one. Hopefully, you’re hearing great things now. You can watch YouTube videos. You can talk to people. Now, with that talking to people, all of the high achievers surrounded themselves not just with one mentor but with a team of mentors. And that is what is so critical. You surround yourself with people who believe in you more than you believe in yourself.

So, those are the four – intrinsic motivation, perseverance, strong foundation, and learning through informal means and mentors.

Eddie Turner:

Thank you for explaining all four of those and thank you certainly for summarizing them again so that we can understand the mindset of extreme high achievers. And I was recalling the quote that “Excellence is not an act but a habit” as you explained the third one there. So true that when people achieve, they don’t stop.Thank you so much, Ruth.

Ruth Gotian:

Oh, thank you.

Eddie Turner:

I’m talking to Dr. Ruth Gotian. Dr. Ruth Gotian is the author of The Success Factor: Developing the Mindset and Skillset for Peak Business Performance. We’ll have more with Dr. Ruth Gotian right after this.

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.

Hi. This is Dr. Steven Stein, psychologist and founder of MHS Assessments and you’re listening to the Keep Leading!® Podcast with Eddie Turner.

Eddie Turner:

We’re back. I’m talking to Dr. Ruth Gotian. She’s the author of The Success Factor: Developing the Mindset and Skillset for Peak Business Performance.Before the break ruth you were explaining the four mindsets of extreme high achievers. And so, I would like to know for the leaders listening to this discussion who want to be high achievers how can they go about developing that mindset you described.

Ruth Gotian:

So, as I said, you have to do all four of these things together and it really starts with tapping into your intrinsic motivation. And I told you about the Passion Audit and your listeners, where they can find it. They could just go to RuthGotian.com/PassionAudit but once you find that and a good tip to really think about is when you’re procrastinating what is it that you are doing when you’re procrastinating. And also, look at what you’re doing on your time off nights and weekends. What are you doing during that time? That’ll give you some insight as to what you might be passionate about but there are so many ways, and that’s what I talk about in The Success Factor, of how to develop each of these four mindsets, how to tap into your intrinsic motivation, what are the different ways that you can tap into your perseverance and your work ethic and be more productive. Just because you’re busy doesn’t mean that you are productive. So, I talk about finding your peak cognitive hours. So, for example, I am a morning person. It is when I do all of my cognitive work – my reading, my writing. I am not on Zooms in the morning if I can help it because that would not be a good use of my time. It would have to be in the morning for me. I also work in what’s called sprints. So, sitting for three hours even during my peak hours, the third hour is not going to be as productive as the first hour. So, I actually work in sprints – 25 minutes on of deep focused work, take a five-minute break, do another 25 minutes, take another five-minute break, etc. It’s something called the Pomodoro Technique. And I actually wrote an article for Forbes about it and I said during the pandemic I actually used the washing machine as my timer – put a wash in and that was my deep focused work; cycle was over, that was my break. And then I continued that.And other ways to develop, for example, your informal learning. We talked about the books and we talked about the journals and we talked about the podcasts you can listen to but my God, there has been an explosion of webinars and LinkedIn Lives during the pandemic. The world’s leading experts are giving away their knowledge and talking and giving master classes. And there’s also these online courses you can take, of course. There are these individual courses people have, there’s LinkedIn Learning type of courses that you can take but there’s really just such a plethora of options that you can choose from. Look, I have access to some pretty impressive people. I mean, I study extreme high achievers, right?

Eddie Turner:

Yes.

Ruth Gotian:

But I found out that if I want to learn from people, I can just tap into these webinars that are being offered for free or almost free and learn such incredible stuff. And then what do the high achievers do? They’ll listen to this and they’ll pick something up and they’ll listen to something else and pick something up and listen to a third thing and pick something up. You know what the former undersecretary of the US Navy told me?

Eddie Turner:

What’s that?

Ruth Gotian:

Innovation is just poaching other people’s ideas and thinking about them in a new way. And that is something that you can start doing every day. Just put yourself around really interesting people. And when you put yourself around really interesting people and interesting ideas and pay attention, oh my God, the things you can learn but learn and think about it and see where you can connect dots that other people don’t yet see. Those are just a few of the ways. I have four chapters in the book The Success Factor devoted to this including how to find mentors, where to find mentors, how to approach those conversations. And I tell people you can’t just have one mentor. You have to have a mentoring team. You need your own board of directors. So, how do you put that together. Who should be on that mentoring team? How do you develop those relationships? I mean, this is a key, key topic. And this could be really differentiating because did you know, Eddie, 76% of people think mentors are critical but only 37% actually have them? Isn’t that sad?

Eddie Turner:

Well, I learned that you’re one of the world’s foremost authorities on the subject of mentoring. So, that’s a very good statistic and I’m glad you shared that. And if an individual wants to build out their mentoring team the way you said that high performers do, high achievers, how do they do that?

Ruth Gotian:

So, Eddie, there are layers and layers to this mentoring team and you can always add to it. That is what is so great because this is not a dissertation committee. They don’t all need to meet together to discuss you. This is not an actual board meeting. You can pick and choose who you turn to at any time for information about a certain topic. So, for example, when I wrote my book proposal for The Success Factor, I actually reached out to my former dissertation advisor who’s my mentor and one of the most gifted writers I know and I asked her to review it. I also asked another mentor of mine who’s an editor of a big journal to review it. I didn’t ask the military person, I didn’t ask the scientist, I didn’t ask the lawyer because that’s not the type of expertise that I needed for this particular project but if I’m going to have a negotiation, you bet I’m going to talk to that lawyer who’s an expert in negotiation. If I need to write a grant, I want to talk to someone who’s written lots of successful grants. I don’t want to talk to the person who’s never written a grant. That’s why you need all of these people.Now, there’s different levels of people. You need somebody who’s senior to you, at least one, I say many, because you want someone who has the experience and has the skills and has the expertise and has that political capital and that network you can tap into but you also want people who are at your level, what we call peer mentors, and some that I call friendtors, friends who are your mentors because, Eddie, peers rise together. So, even if you’re junior and you’re at the bottom of the food chain, you are not going to be there forever. And I actually talk about Dr. Lynn Wooten who’s the president of Simmons University in Pennsylvania and Dr. Erica James who is the Dean of Wharton at UPenn, top business school. The two of them are best friends. They’re best friends and they’re also each other’s mentors but now, one is a dean of a big business school the other is the president of a university but they met in their 20s when they were grad students and they’ve been friends and peer mentors ever since.

Now, the last layer that you need is actually people who are junior to you because people who are junior to you actually can help you and give you perspective about some of the things that you may not be familiar with. Eddie, it’s how ten years ago I learned how to use Twitter. It’s also how I am helping a Nobel Prize winner who’s a generation older than me get the word out about his book because he only knew how to talk about it in his demographic, in his industry. He didn’t know how to cross industries. And even though he’s a generation older than me and he’s a Nobel Prize winner and I’ll never get the Nobel, I am able to help with that because I know how to do that and I have the network for that. And I think his book is brilliant.

So, this is how you can learn from people who are senior to you, at your level, and junior to you. And you also want to get some retirees on that mentoring team because the retirees, they do not hold back. They will tell you everything you need to know. They will tell you who will have your back and who will stab you in the back. They know all of this information. So, there’s multiple layers to this. You also want people who know the personal you and people who know the professional you and people who are two levels away that with one or two introductions you can meet. There’s a whole science to this.

And, Eddie, if any of your listeners want to start building out their mentoring team, I have a template they could just follow. Just go to RuthGotian.com/MentoringTeam and you can download it all there. There’s also articles if you want to read more about it. There’s a lot in there. Look, Eddie, I geek out when I have to talk about mentoring or success. I could be here all night talking about it.

Eddie Turner:

I bet you can. And thank you for summarizing that and saying that you have a template because I was sitting here thinking as I’m listening to you “Wow! It’s more evolved than many of us may think.” And for some people, they may think “Wow! There’s so much work. I’m not going to bother with it.” So, thank you for making it easy by giving us a template because people operate without a mentor at their own peril.

Ruth Gotian:

Yes. There’s actually research on the study. People who are mentored out earn and outperform those who are not mentored.

Eddie Turner:

Isn’t that something? I did not know that but I can see why that would be the case. And mentoring is different than coaching or sponsoring.

Ruth Gotian:

Yes, very different, very different. Mentoring is really long term. It’s really somebody over your entire career. And coaching is usually more nuanced, much more nuanced. And sponsoring is someone who talks about you when you’re not even in the room. They will recommend you for opportunities. They will recommend you for choice projects, committees, awards, promotions, recognition. So, you really need to have all of these people on your team.

Eddie Turner:

Absolutely, absolutely. Well, Ruth, I thoroughly have enjoyed talking to you and I think that you have just shown me even more so why Thinkers 50 said that “You are a prolific mentor and educator leading important research into the secrets of success.”

Ruth Gotian:

Oh, thank you, Eddie.

Eddie Turner:

What’s the main message you’d like to leave our listeners with?

Ruth Gotian:

Eddie, I don’t believe anybody wakes up in the morning aiming to be average. I think people really want to be successful. And I am so excited that I was able to figure it out, create a blueprint and give you options that you can choose from as to how to implement it that works with your life. So, I am really excited about The Success Factor. I’m excited that it’s already available on pre-sale and it’s going really well because I was told by my mentor do something important, not just interesting because when it’s interesting, it’s a hobby; when it’s important, it will have an impact. And I want to leave this world a little better than I found it. And I’m hoping that by helping people who want to achieve greater success, however they define it, I’m hoping The Success Factor helps them do that.

Eddie Turner:

Do something important, not just interesting.

Ruth Gotian:

Yeah.

Eddie Turner:

I like that. I like that. That is definitely a quote that we can use to help us keep leading.

Ruth Gotian:

Yes.

Eddie Turner:

You’ve given us your website but is there anything else we should know about how we can connect with you?

Ruth Gotian:

So many ways. So, absolutely on my website RuthGotian.com. All the social media is just my name Ruth Gotian. You can also go on Forbes and just put Forbes Ruth Gotian and you can click to follow my articles which come out every week and you can learn something new all the time because I’m always leaking out this information. And there’s also profiles on some impressive high achievers and leaders that I have come across including the host of the show.

Eddie Turner:

That is true, actually. Yes, yes, I was honored to be covered by you.

Ruth Gotian:

That was fun.

Eddie Turner:

Indeed, it really was. I almost forgot about that. That’s true.

Ruth Gotian:

That article did really well. I think that article on you inspired a lot of people.

Eddie Turner:

Thank you, Dr. Ruth Gotian. Nice way to sneak that in there on me.Well, folks, listen. I really am crazy about Dr. Ruth Gotian. She is amazing. pick up any scholarly journal and follow her – Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Psychology Today and a plethora of others – and certainly pick up the new book when it hits the market in January 2022, The Success Factor: Developing the Mindset and Skillset for Peak Business Performance. Follow her on social media. Connect with her. You will learn a lot because she is just a big deal.

Ruth Gotian:

I’m going to go get my tiara now, Eddie.

Eddie Turner:

Thank you for being a guest and thank you for helping us to understand success here on the Keep Leading!® Podcast.

Ruth Gotian:

Thanks, Eddie.

Eddie Turner:

And thank you for listening. That concludes this episode, everyone. I am Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®, reminding you that leadership is not about our position or our title. 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 post Keep Leading!® Podcast 127 | The Success Factor for Leaders and High Achievers | Ruth Gotian appeared first on Eddie Turner.

Keep Leading!® Podcast 112 | Trust Yourself as a Leader | Melody Wilding

admin — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 10:32:40 +0000

Melody Wilding
Executive Coach to Sensitive Strivers® and HBR Contributor
Trust Yourself as a Leader

Episode Summary
Brene Brown gave readers the courage to be vulnerable. Susan Cain reminded introverts of the power of being quiet. In 2021, Melody Wilding has emerged as the expert reframing the intersection of ambition and sensitivity as a strength! Listen to this episode to learn how to Trust yourself!

Check out the “60-Second Preview” of this episode!

Bio
Melody Wilding, LMSW, is an executive coach, human behavior expert, and author of Trust Yourself: Stop Overthinking and Channel Your Emotions for Success at Work. She has coached hundreds of private clients, from CEOs and Fortune 500 executives to leaders from the US Department of Education, the Federal Reserve, and the United Nations. She teaches graduate-level human behavior and psychology at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College in New York. Her writing is regularly featured on Medium and in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Forbes, Business Insider, and Quartz. Her advice has been featured in the New York Times, The Cut, Oprah Magazine, NBC News, US News, and World Report, and more.

Website
https://melodywilding.com/

LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/melodywilding/

Twitter
https://twitter.com/MelodyWilding

Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/melodywildinglmsw

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/melodywilding/

Leadership Quote
“Don’t wait to be praised, anointed, or validated. Don’t wait for someone to give you permission to lead.” –– Tara Mohr

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Transcript

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 coaching, masterful facilitation, and motivational speaking.Brené Brown gave readers the courage to be vulnerable. Susan Kane reminded introverts of the power of being quiet. In 2021, Melody Wilding has emerged as the expert reframing the intersection of ambition and sensitivity as a strength. I am excited to delve into that with Melody Wilding. Melody Wilding is an executive coach and human behavior expert. She is the author of Trust Yourself: Stop Overthinking and Channel Your Emotions for Success at Work. She’s been featured in the Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Forbes, Business Insider, New York Times, NBC News, and Oprah Magazine, just to name a few.

Melody, welcome to the Keep Leading!® Podcast.

Melody Wilding:

It’s a pleasure to be here with you. Thank you so much for having me.

Eddie Turner:

Oh, I am just delighted to have you, Melody. Melody, It’s not often that I have a guest or have someone who listens to the show approach me and say “Listen, you’ve got to interview someone who I am interested in having you talk to” and that is Fred Amador. He’s a friend of the Keep Leading!® Podcast and typically, I’m really picky about who I have on the show and when I looked at your materials, I was fascinated and I said “Yes, I must interview her.” So, Melody, tell our listeners a few things about you that I did not mention in the opening.

Melody Wilding:

Yes. So, you covered some of the biggest hits in terms of my professional background but where a lot of my work intersects, as you were talking about the intersection of ambition and sensitivity, in my new book Trust Yourself what I’ve done is put a label on that personality and talk about what I call a sensitive striver. And that moniker comes as much from my professional experience as it does from my personal experiences. So, I am this sensitive striver personality myself. I am someone who all my life has been very driven, career oriented, wanted to check all of the boxes and make sure I was doing everything right and be successful but also highly sensitive in that I am a deep thinker and feeler and always have been. And that combination of traits, when leveraged correctly, can be our superpower, makes us observant, perceptive, deep thinkers and contributors but many of us are not given the right tools to understand our sensitivity and ambition, especially not leverage it in the workplace and as leaders. And so, this work I am doing today with sensitive strivers is as much a product of my personal background as it is my professional background.

Eddie Turner:

So, the two have collided.

Melody Wilding:

Absolutely.

Eddie Turner:

Wonderful. Yeah, when you use that phrase sensitive strivers, which you own, it’s your registered trademark, what’s the reaction, especially of men?

Melody Wilding:

That’s an interesting question. I have to say what’s been something I did not expect as I’ve talked more about sensitivity over the past few years is that the number of men in my community, especially male leaders, has grown substantially. And I think that’s because I think we’re starting to see a shift overall in the culture of leadership in our workplaces where we are starting to embrace more emotionality and taking more of a human-centered approach to work but, I think, talk talking about sensitivity, writing about it for places like Forbes and Harvard Business Review gave a lot of men permission to say “Actually, you know what, I am a very compassionate, heart-led deep-feeling leader. That’s who I am.” And so, that has been a really interesting side effect of talking about sensitivity that I did not anticipate in the slightest.

Eddie Turner:

That’s really good to hear. Would you say, Melody, that you’ve seen, you talked about this change and how people are responding to the phrase and how they’re responding to that quality, would you say that perhaps we’ve rewarded the wrong qualities for far too long and people are just ready for this and it’s the right time that your work is coming out?

Melody Wilding:

Yeah, I think what we saw was an emphasis on qualities in the workplace that lead to quick results, right? Being harsh, being mean, that sort of “I say jump and you ask how high” command and control mentality tends to get results quickly but I think what we’ve seen especially in the last 10-15 years or so is that the long-term consequence of that is that it leads to disengagement, burnout among your people, low retention and high turnover. And so, now, I think we’re starting to see that sea change where we see those consequences and now we’re starting to embrace this different view of what leadership can be being much more sensitive and empathetic and human-centered but I also think it’s colliding with some of the trends of technology and certainly the pandemic has accelerated so much of that where we bring all of ourselves to work now because there is no separation between work and life anymore, there’s such a blend between the two.

Eddie Turner:

Indeed, now more than ever. As you said, the pandemic has allowed qualities to come out that we perhaps would not have allowed to come out pre-pandemic or would have taken far longer to emerge and we’re more accepting of it.

Melody Wilding:

Exactly. We’re seeing people now taking Zoom calls from their bedrooms or having their little kids or their pets barge in. And so, yes, and we’re seeing people at their best and at their worst.

Eddie Turner:

Now, people have said that being sensitive is a bad trait. What do you say about that in your book?

Melody Wilding:

I say that we need to reclaim the word ‘sensitive’ and that is one reason why I termed it ‘Sensitive Striver’ and not ‘Empathetic High Achiever’ or something else. I didn’t want to dance around the word ‘sensitive’. And also, what I think people misunderstand about sensitivity, you use the word ‘trait’ which is very accurate, that sensitivity is a biological disposition and we don’t often realize that. We think it’s just a quality. We don’t see it and respect it as a personality trait just like introversion or extroversion. And so, people who are sensitive actually have different neurological wiring. Their brain lights up in different areas that are related to things like attention, planning for action, making connections and synthesizing information. And what I found really remarkable is if any of our listeners out there are sensitive, you may feel like you are a person who is a sponge. You can feel the feelings of people around you. And the neuroscience points to why that is a fact, which is because sensitive people have more active mirror neurons which are our empathy neurons. So, we are scanning the environment we are attuning to and noticing the nuances in people’s behavior which can be a tremendous asset. And so, I want to sort of correct that misunderstanding that sensitivity is a flaw when actually it’s an evolutionary advantage that has persisted because it helped a certain amount of the population, about 15% to 20% or one in five people, survive and really come out ahead in situations.

Eddie Turner:

And by using this phrase ‘Sensitive Strivers’, you’re saying it’s not just about owning it and being happy to accept it but it’s something to strive for. I love that. Do you have any tips for people who want to start to be more sensitive in a positive way?

Melody Wilding:

Yes. I think especially now what we can focus on is active listening. So often so many of us think we’re listening but we’re not. We’re in our own heads thinking about that email we have to send or that to-do we need to check off our list and we’re not actually paying attention to what is happening right in front of us and really attuning to and being present with that person. So, better active listening means asking more informed questions, what and how questions – “How did that make you feel? How did this come about? What is your perspective on this situation?” – taking the conversation deeper. And many times, active listening sounds like saying nothing at all, sounds like being silent, letting there be dead air instead of anxiously talking over them. And I see this a lot with managers and leaders with their direct reports that perhaps they’ll be in a one-on-one and they will just be talking, talking, talking, talking, talking and not leaving a moment of pause for their direct report to jump in or if their direct report shares something difficult or a challenge that they’re having, the manager automatically jumps in to help and try to fix the situation and “Let me figure out how to solve this” rather than leaving a moment of pause where the person could go deeper, where they may start coming up with solutions and ideas themselves. And so, that type of active listening is one way we can be much more sensitive and present with everyone around us.

Eddie Turner:

Active listening, step one. If we listen better, we will ask better questions. Thank you for explaining that. And if a person is not really sure how to listen better so that they can ask those better questions and not monopolize and dominate the conversation, where could they learn more about that?

Melody Wilding:

I have some resources on my website in terms of listening more effectively, questions that you can ask people. One of my favorite books on this topic that I think is so underestimated in the leadership world is Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg, I believe. Fantastic game-changing book about communication, about listening. It will change the way that you communicate with people.

Eddie Turner:

Thank you. And some people feel like “I’m really not showing up the way that I should or the way that I want to.” They feel like an imposter. What does your work reveal about that?

Melody Wilding:

Yes, imposter syndrome is the number one challenge that sensitive stivers come to me with and is particularly common the higher you rise and the further you advance because the pressure that you’re under tends to increase as does the ambiguity and uncertainty. The path is not as clear anymore. So, it’s much easier to read into situations and think “Oh my gosh, I have no idea what I’m doing here and everyone’s going to find that out” which is the core of imposter syndrome. So, very common for sensitive strivers because we tend to have a really deep thought. We are so self-aware that we tend to become self-conscious. So, whenever I’m working with clients around this, the first place we always have to start is by interrupting the negative self-talk that comes along with imposter syndrome, the self-talk that says you’re not good enough, you have no idea what you’re doing, everyone’s going to find out and they’re going to fire you, all of that negative self-talk that our mind automatically defaults to. One really powerful way to interrupt that is by naming your inner critic, giving that imposter syndrome a voice a name a moniker, an identity that is separate from you. So, personifying it. You can call it The Little Monster. Mine is called Bozo. I have one client who calls it his Darth Vader and he got a Darth Vader lego action figure to sit on his desk and it was just a helpful reminder that every time his negative chatter would start up in a board meeting or in all-hands meeting, he would be able to look at it and say “Not today, Darth” and put it in its place. So, that is first and foremost, really being able to recognize and interrupt the negative talk track of imposter syndrome.

Eddie Turner:

Wonderful. Wonderful example.I’m talking to Melody Wilding. She is the coach to sensitive strivers and the author of Trust Yourself: Stop Overthinking and Channel Your Emotions for Success at Work. We’ll have more with Melody right after this.

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 Dave Sanderson. You may know me from the last passenger off US Airways Flight 1549, The Miracle on the Hudson from the movie Sully and you’re listening to the Keep Leading!® Podcast with Eddie Turner.

Eddie Turner:

I’m back talking to the amazing Melody Wilding. She’s the coach to sensitive strivers. Her book Trust Yourself: Stop Overthinking and Channel Your Emotions for Success at Work is the foundation of our conversation today and we want leaders to trust themselves. They second guess themselves too often as we discover as coaches. So, Melody, can you tell us how does being a sensitive striver, as we discussed before the break, relate to trusting yourself as a leader?

Melody Wilding:

Sensitive strivers, if any listeners are sensitive, you like me have probably been told your entire life that you take things too personally, you need to grow a thicker skin. And so, from a very young age, people who are sensitive high achievers, sensitive strivers internalize messages that “We’re not okay as we are. We can’t trust our own thinking and judgments.” And this further gets compounded by the ambition piece – “We want to succeed” – that sometimes we become so addicted and so dependent on external validation, on praise from other people, on pleasing others and doing things that will make us look likable in their eyes. So, many times sensitive strivers can be so spread thin and so led astray in their professional lives because they’re trying to please everyone else and make everybody else happy. And so, that is exactly why the book is called Trust Yourself because that is the outcome, that is the results I want for every person in this book. And every sensitive striver I have worked with over the past 10 years, the number one skill that helps them achieve what they want to achieve is greater self-trust, hands down.

Eddie Turner:

Greater self-trust. And when we don’t trust ourselves, is that where the overthinking comes in?

Melody Wilding:

100%. Second guessing, rumination or worse, going back on your decisions, letting louder, more dominant aggressive voices dominate and drown out yours.

Eddie Turner:

That’s one I don’t think about often but you’re right. I often think about being afraid to make a decision or paralysis through analysis and decision making but you’re right – “Okay, I finally made the decision but I’m not sure I made the right one. Let me go back and redo it.”

Melody Wilding:

Right, exactly. Backtracking.

Eddie Turner:

Yes, and that costs leaders not only on a personal level but specifically in the organizational context, there’s a real financial cost to the organization.

Melody Wilding:

Absolutely, as is there not listening to sensitive strivers. And if I may, I can give you a short story about this that might drive that point home.

Eddie Turner:

Please.

Melody Wilding:

So, sensitive strivers, as I mentioned, are very observant, perceptive because of the way our minds process information. We tend to make connections before other people. So, my clients are those leaders in the room who tend to be one or two steps ahead of other people to see “Oh, here’s why this strategy is not going to work” which on the upside saves really valuable time and money. So, I’ll give you the example of one of my clients. I will call her Rebecca. She was a research and development director at a pharmaceutical company. Her company was seeking to acquire another smaller firm. And Rebecca saw instantly that this was not going to turn out. Well, it was going to be a debacle for their operations. It was going to completely back them up. And so, Rebecca went to the CEO and the COO and said “I want to give you a warning that I see this coming” and they blasted right past her and went through with the acquisition anyway. And exactly as she predicted, it was a disaster and actually led to the firing of the COO because it turned out so poorly. And the CEO came back to Rebecca and said “You know, if I had only listened to you, I would have saved my reputation” because it was a black mark on the company in the industry. And he specifically said to her “I wish I had more people like you who were so sensitive and observant of what was happening and perceptive and I should have listened to you.” And so, if that doesn’t underscore the business cost of not recognizing and valuing and listening to sensitive strivers, I don’t know what does.

Eddie Turner:

That underscores it quite nicely. Thank you for that story that lets it really stick with us a lot better than just the anecdote alone. Now, as I think about something else that you talk about in the book, we are often told to do what makes us happy. You argue we should do what we’re suited for. What’s the difference?

Melody Wilding:

In many ways, I think, one leads to the other. I think that doing what you’re suited for leads to greater happiness because what the research shows is that when we have a role that matches our personality, we experience greater job satisfaction, we are more effective, productive. We earn more because of all of that. And so, I think one leads to the other.

Eddie Turner:

Okay. And when I think about where we are in the stream of time, what we’ve gone through as a country, as a global community with the pandemic, how can sensitive strivers and those who are developing the ability to trust themselves as leaders, how can they improve in this specific area post pandemic?

Melody Wilding:

In terms of focusing on matching your professional life better with your personality, I think this is a great time to be reassessing what your needs are because we really have an opportunity. We’re in transition and transition always presents opportunity for change, right? So, it’s a great opportunity to reassess now that we’re coming out of the pandemic, what over the past year actually did work for you and what didn’t. So, for example, many of my clients actually found the switch to working from home to be very advantageous for them because as sensitive strivers, about 70% of sensitive people are also introverted, meaning they need time, they need downtime, they need concentrated time and sensitive strivers in general need more space to process. And so, being at home gave many people much more control over their surroundings to really dictate their day and where and how they were working. So, in the book, I actually have a chapter on finding the right fit. And in there, I take readers through different criteria to assess whether your job is the right fit for you now, the first one being that idea of physical needs, your workspace, what does it look like, how much stimulation is there, how quickly are things moving. The next would be relational needs – what types of relationships do you need to have in the workplace to feel like you are fulfilled and you are giving your best. Then we get on to organizational needs which is what type of company motivates you, their mission, their impact, the type of leaders that they have. Then we move on to health and lifestyle needs which touches on flexibility, how often do you need to take breaks, when would you start work, when would you end work. And then finally at the tippy top of the pyramid, we have learning and performance needs and this is looking at in your role, what are your special gifts and talents, what further competencies do you want to develop and how can you get better at applying those in your current role.

Eddie Turner:

Wonderful. And then when you think about the relationships, friendships, professional or otherwise, it makes me think about something I heard someone say recently and I can’t remember who said it or what context, so I can’t make proper attribution, but they said “Decide which relationships are post-pandemic worthy.”

Melody Wilding:

That’s a great way to put it. I love that idea.

Eddie Turner:

Yeah. Now, along the lines of what you said there, what about if I’ve had setbacks during the pandemic? What can I do to get my confidence back and trust in myself as a leader and be a sensitive striver?

Melody Wilding:

Sure. And you know what was interesting is the pandemic hit just as I was finishing this manuscript and actually pretty much around the time when I was working on the chapter in the book on bouncing back from setbacks. So, it was this really unique timing where I actually went back through the book several times and looked at it for how can we reframe and offer strategies that are going to work in this new world. And so, this idea of coming back from setbacks, in the book I offer a three-step process that really builds on a lot of the other learnings from the book. So, first is to rest. I think many times as sensitive strivers we want to fix. We want to keep doing. We think we can act and think our way through problems. And many times, we need to just separate ourselves from the problems. We need to take a break and ground ourselves, reset our nervous system, manage and pay attention to our thinking because our thinking is going to guide our actions. So, that’s the first step is rest, take a step back. Next would be reflect. And I think we’re seeing a lot of people do that now where they are thinking about, as we re-emerge from the pandemic, reflecting on “What are the lessons that I’ve learned? How have I grown? How do I want to be different in this new phase?” So, specifically, in the book, I touch a lot on the idea of giving yourself permission, where do you need to give yourself more permission to succeed, to fail, for example, where do you need to be listening and consulting your intuition, how can you return back to your core values and how are those guiding your life and the decisions you’re making about your work going forward. And then, finally, we have Recalibrate. This is where you take action. So, now that you have rested, you have reflected, now with different insights, you can take different steps forward. So, recommitting to reassessing our goals, adjusting them as needed. I think the pandemic has really taken people off autopilot and made people realize that “Maybe I don’t want to be doing as much as I have been. Maybe I want to be doing less but better” and rebuilding our boundaries. You were talking about which people in our life are post-pandemic worthy and I have seen people become so much more … they respect their own time much more and are much more willing to say “No, I’m sorry. I can’t commit to that right now.” And I think people have also become much more understanding of that. So, really recommitting to reassessing your boundaries. The last point under Recalibrate would be thinking about changing the game, thinking about if you want to make a bigger switch, how can you adjust, how can you take those criteria that I mentioned in terms of finding work that’s a better fit and start to make some incremental changes to make your work life be a better fit for who you are and your needs as a sensitive striver.

Eddie Turner:

Wonderful. And so, if anyone is wondering, in the book, that is under the section Sustained Self-Growth: Bounce Back from Setbacks. What a fascinating chapter. What is the main message you would like to make sure our listeners leave our conversation with today, Melody?

Melody Wilding:

That sensitivity when managed correctly can be your greatest strength and asset.

Eddie Turner:

Thank you. And I’d love to know on the Keep Leading!® Podcast, what’s the best piece of advice or quote that you use that helps you, Melody, to keep leading.

Melody Wilding:

Never put off once-in-a-lifetime moments for work that can be done tomorrow.

Eddie Turner:

I love that. Thank you. Where can my listeners learn more about you?

Melody Wilding:

You can find me at MelodyWilding.com. There you can learn more about the book. You can also find the book wherever books are sold.

Eddie Turner:

Wonderful. And what I will do is make sure there are links to your social media profiles to your book, your main website of course, in the show notes to make it easy for people to connect with you, follow you, read your book and stay connected. You’re so fascinating and I am so happy that you have come on the Keep Leading!® Podcast to share your knowledge with our listeners.

Melody Wilding:

It was so much fun. Thank you for having me.

Eddie Turner:

Thank you, Melody.And thank you for listening. That concludes 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 C Suite Radio, turning the volume up on business.

The post Keep Leading!® Podcast 112 | Trust Yourself as a Leader | Melody Wilding appeared first on Eddie Turner.

Keep Leading!® Podcast 092 | How to Be Time Smart as a Leader | Ashley Whillans

admin — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 08:32:33 +0000

Ashley Whillans
Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School
How to Be Time Smart as a Leader

Episode Summary
As a leader, you’re busy—sometimes too busy. As leaders, we get so busy at times we neglect the important things in life. Would you like a playbook for taking back the time you lose to mindless tasks and unfulfilling chores? Listen to my interview with Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans, as she shares proven strategies for improving what she calls your “time affluence.” Her new book: “Time Smart—How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life,” was released on October 6, 2020.

Check out the “60-Second Preview” of this episode!

Bio
Dr. Ashley Whillans is the Volpert Family Associate Professor at the Harvard Business School. Professor Whillans earned her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of British Columbia. Her research seeks to understand the associations between time, money, and subjective wellbeing. She is particularly interested in understanding how individual, organizational and societal factors like gender, workplace policies, and income inequality predict how people value and spend time and money, with possible implications for well-being.

Website
https://www.hbs.edu/awhillans

LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleywhillans/

Twitter
https://twitter.com/ashleywhillans

TEDx Cambridge
https://www.tedxcambridge.com/speaker/ashley-whillans/

IMDb
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1139650/

Leadership Quote
“Follow your passion and the rest will follow.”

AND

“One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world´s end somewhere, and holds fast to the days, as to fortune or fame.” –Willa Cather in Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert.

Get Your Copy of Ashley’s Book!
https://www.awhillans.com/new-book-ndash-time-smart.html

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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.

Eddie Turner:

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, masterful facilitation, and professional speaking.If you’re listening to this podcast, that means you’re a leader. As a leader, you’re busy, sometimes too busy. As leaders, we get so busy at times, we neglect the important things in life. Would you like a playbook for taking back the time you lose to mindless tasks and unfulfilling chores? My guest today is Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans. She has proven strategies for improving what she calls your time affluence. She shares what to do and how to do it in her new book Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life. Ashley Whillans is an assistant professor in the Negotiation, Organizations and Markets unit at Harvard Business School, teaching the Motivation and Incentives course to MBA students. More broadly, she studies how people navigate trade-offs between time and money. In 2016, she co-founded the Department of Behavioral Science in the Policy, Innovation and Engagement division of the British Columbia Public Service. Her research has been published in numerous academic journals and popular media outlets including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

Ashley, welcome to the Keep Leading!® Podcast.

Ashley Whillans:

Thank you so much for having me.

Eddie Turner:

It is just an absolute joy to have you today. Tell me what I missed.

Ashley Whillans:

Well, I think it’s always fun to start the conversation by sharing a little bit about how I became interested in the study of happiness and time management. So, maybe we can start there, if that sounds okay.

Eddie Turner:

That sounds good.

Ashley Whillans:

Great. So, if you Google me after this podcast, you will probably come upon an IMDb page. I used to be an actor before I was a professor at the Harvard Business School. And my research really comes out of this deep interest I have for human motivation from theater school. So, one of the very first research jobs I had, in undergrad I went to college for a little bit and then I quit college to become a professional actor. I wasn’t a very good one. I was always more interested in studying in the library about the historical context in which my characters lived than learning my lines or learning blocking. So, in theater school, I wasn’t exactly an A student. And then I ended up going back to college and fell in love with Psychology. And my first ever lab job was giving false feedback to someone where I had to use all my acting skills to make a psychology experiment run and, basically, in combination of putting my acting interests and Psychology interests together. That’s how I ended up in the field of Psychology. And during my PhD, I became very interested in the topics of time, money, and happiness. So, I followed a very famous researcher student Dan Gilbert who’s a tenured professor at Harvard in the Psychology department. His student Elizabeth Dunn was a psych prof at University of British Columbia where I did my undergraduate degree and she was looking for a raise and she was really interested in understanding how can we spend time and money to maximize happiness. So, that was my first foray into the scientific study of time, money and happiness. So, I’ll just leave it there but I’ve been a time, money and happiness nerd for almost a decade now. So, I’m excited to share some of my thoughts based on my research with you today.

Eddie Turner:

Absolutely. We want to know all about that. wow! You gave me a lot to unpack there right out the gate because I was going to ask you later on about your acting career. That’s a fascinating tidbit about you. And you combined acting with Psychology. How many people would think to do that?

Ashley Whillans:

Everyone always ask me “How did you go from acting to Psychology? It makes no sense to me.” And like I said, acting is really trying to understand your character’s motivations, why are they acting the way that they’re acting, what are they trying to get out of the situation. And Psychology is no different. In acting you enact your character’s motivation and in Psychology, you study it. So, I’m definitely more of the nerd in the library type as opposed to performing on stage although I do a lot more performing in this job than I ever thought I would back in graduate school. I sometimes joke to my colleagues that I do more acting as an HBS professor than I ever did as a professional actor. So, definitely those skills are not lost in my current profession but there’s definitely a lot of similarities between Psychology and acting.

Eddie Turner:

So, is it a scenario where someone comes to you and says “Professor” and they believe that here is a concept that is correct and you must now put on those acting skills and not humiliate them but give them the right answer?

Ashley Whillans:

Yeah, you have to help them come up with their own answer themselves. A lot of improvisation techniques come into play. So, if someone provides a suggestion in class, not saying “No, that’s not right,” but “Sure, that’s one interesting perspective but does anyone else have any other ideas?” So, this yes-and mentality that you’re taught in improv to continue on a scene without a script definitely plays in the HBS classroom.

Eddie Turner:

Nice. Thank you for sharing that and making that connection. And you mentioned that you were not an A student at first with what you were going through and trying to juggle both things but obviously, you did something right because you ended up getting your PhD and now you are a renowned Harvard Business School professor.

Ashley Whillans:

Well, I’m still working on my reputation but I’ll take your compliment.

Eddie Turner:

We’re putting it out there. You’re in the major journals and that says a lot. You’re in the academic journals and of course, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, as we mentioned. So, yes, we’re going to put it out there and I expect to see you continuing to stay there, especially with the release of this new book that we’re talking about. What motivated you to write the book?

Ashley Whillans:

So, my book is called, as you mentioned, Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life. And it really came out of my own research interest in this area as well as my personal experience with navigating time and money trade-offs. I was doing all of this research in graduate school showing that people who focus more on time as opposed to money are much happier, have better social relationships, better physical health, they are better able to contribute to their communities, they volunteer more. There’s a whole suite of benefits of having a time affluent and time-first life. And yet, in my own personal life, I was prioritizing work and productivity over all of my personal and social relationships. And it was coming at a cost to my emotional health. And I thought to myself in my first year on faculty, spending Christmas alone after breaking up with a partner of 10 years, “If I am struggling with time and money, I am struggling to make the right decisions day in and day out. I must not be the only one.” And sure enough, my research suggests that 80% of employed Americans report feeling overwhelmed by the demands of daily life. So, I wrote the book to try to put my research …

Eddie Turner:

That’s staggering.

Ashley Whillans:

Yeah, it is. So, in large-scale data, I find that 80% of working Americans report feeling time poor and that these feelings of time poverty have greater negative effects for happiness than unemployment.

Eddie Turner:

You talk about this concept of time poverty. Is that what you’re referring to when you say that?

Ashley Whillans:

Yeah. So, it’s the psychological feeling of having too many things to do and not enough time to do them. And it afflicts all of us regardless of how old we are.

Eddie Turner:

You can’t see me raising my hand right now.

Ashley Whillans:

I know. Well, if you ask people how they’re doing, the quintessential response is “busy” and “stressed” and all of us are feeling overwhelmed. And so, yeah, I wrote the book out of this growing recognition in my own life that it’s very hard to live a time affluent, time-first life in our modern society, modern day. And if I was struggling, other people must be too. So, I tried to put my science into concrete strategies we can all take in our everyday life. So, the book isn’t just theoretical, just academic. It’s really practical on purpose. I want people to live the truth that we all know but have a hard time actually putting into practice, which is time is our most valuable resource, not money.

Eddie Turner:

Yes. And in my head, every time you say time, money, happiness, in my mind I have all those years of trying to get things right with my financial team and talking about time, value, money. So, I have to drop the word ‘value’.

Ashley Whillans:

We often were trained to think about time as a way to get money. And I really want to re-flip this thinking that we need to be putting time first and thinking about money as a way to get back our time. And so, it’s really important to break this script in our minds that so many of us have that money is the most important resource, not time. Don’t get me wrong, money does matter but it’s more important for removing stress. It doesn’t necessarily produce greater joy. And we look to money as a mechanism by which to get happiness and meaning in life but my research shows over and over again that that’s not the best path to happiness. Forming and maintaining valuable relationships, having meaningful work, engaging with your communities that you care about, that really is the path to greater happiness but somewhere along the way many of us, myself included, get misled and focus on prestige, career, and money at the expense of happiness.

Eddie Turner:

Yes. And I like your contrast. You move from talking about poverty as it relates to time to the antithesis to affluence. So, you have a concept you go through about time affluence. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Ashley Whillans:

Exactly. So, time affluence is feeling like you have enough time to do all the things that you want to do or have to do, that you feel in control of your schedule and time affluent people are having a life where their actual time use maps on to their ideal time use. One exercise that I go through in the book and that I like to share and try to do this on a regular basis is go through yesterday or go through your last typical work day. What did the morning, afternoon, and evening look like for you? What activities did you do in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening? And how did you feel about each of those activities? Were they joyful? Were they stressful? Were they meaningless? Were they purposeful? And then write out what your ideal version of that day would have looked like. What does your ideal work day, your ideal productive day look like? People who are time affluent have actual days that map on to their ideal days to a lot greater extent than people who feel time poor and who feel like their time is slipping away from them.

Eddie Turner:

Very interesting exercise. And you mentioned that your book isn’t just full of academic theory, that there are very practical steps that we can take. Can you just share one step that we can take to become more time affluent?

Ashley Whillans:

Sure. So, once we’ve identified the time traps that get in the way and make us feel time poor, which I will just briefly outline as some of the points we’ve already talked about – our technology gets in the way of having us enjoy our leisure, we focus too much on money and work and not enough on time – once we identify these steps in our own life, it’s then up to us to use strategies to have more and better time. So, I talk about three strategies in the book which I’ll outline very briefly and delve into detail on one of them. The first is finding time, the second is funding time, and the third is reframing time. So, finding time is what we just talked about, which is identifying where in a day you mindlessly engage in activities like spending too much time on social media and deliberately limiting those mindless activities and replacing them with something more productive or meaningful.

Eddie Turner:

So, you’re saying we got to cut back on the Facebook and the Insta.

Ashley Whillans:

Yeah and this is very difficult to do because the whole point of technology is to pull our attention. That’s the business model. So, we need to make sure that we’re being very active in our control over our technology.

Eddie Turner:

And that’s a nice illustration that really is real because even when we find with those who may not necessarily manage their finances well that sometimes the money is going away to junk food as it were or things that are not as important. So, if we can do the same with our time, the social media or the social junk food, and apply it to things that are more in line with our overall goals and things that will lead to happiness, then we can be time smart.

Ashley Whillans:

I love that analogy. I have a similar analogy I make in the book around accounting for time. So, you were talking about the importance of accounting for money and making sure we’re not wasting too much of our hard-earned money on discretionary purchases that are unintentional, mindless or don’t bring us joy or satisfaction. I take a similar approach in this concept of finding time where we need to be as deliberate with the way we’re spending our time as we are with our money and truly account for it so that we can see where it goes missing and where we need to tighten up our time budget, if you will, and start being a little bit more deliberate in some of our actions.

Eddie Turner:

Indeed. Well, I am having a fascinating conversation and hopefully becoming more time smart as a leader as I’m talking to Ashley Whillans. She is a Harvard Business School professor, helping leaders everywhere get smarter about time through the new book that she’s released, Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life. We’ll have more with Ashley right after this.

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This is Chester Elton, the Apostle of Appreciation, and you are listening to the Keep Leading!® Podcast with the one, the only, Eddie Turner.

Eddie Turner:

We’re back, everyone. I’m talking to Ashley Whillans. She is a Harvard Business School professor, helping leaders everywhere get smarter about time. She’s the author of the new book Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life.Ashley, I really enjoyed what you were sharing before the break. You gave us three F’s – Finding, Funding, and Reframing – and you summarize very nicely what it means to go find time in our lives. Can you give us the summary of the next two, funding and reframing?

Ashley Whillans:

Sure. So, funding time is this idea that we can give up some of our money to have more and better time. This might look like working fewer hours and taking more vacation paid or unpaid. This also might look like spending as little as 40 dollars to have a meal delivered as opposed to cooking. The secret with outsourcing and spending money to save yourself time is you always want to be thinking about minimizing the amount of time you spend in negative activities that feel frustrating and maximizing the amount of time that you spend in enjoyable activities. So, if you like cooking, don’t outsource that but maybe you hate deep cleaning your apartment. So, that would be a task that you might want to consider spending money to save yourself the chore of having to deep clean your apartment if that’s something you really don’t like to do.One thing I often hear from readers is that they feel like the strategy is unattainable. I would encourage you to think about how you might be able to substitute the amount of money that you might spend on a shirt or in a picture frame, something that doesn’t actually bring you a lot of happiness, and substitute the money you would have spent on those objects that don’t bring joy and spend it instead in ways that save time because my research has shown that as little as 40 dollars can produce detectable increases in happiness and reduce stress.

Eddie Turner:

Really?

Ashley Whillans:

Yeah. So, this is one thing I love. Some of the college students that listen to me lecture during my graduate student days would take this buying time or funding time principle and put it into action in their own life by buying a used bike so they didn’t have to walk to campus or having an automatic coffee maker that served as an alarm so they didn’t have to stumble around in the dark to brew their own coffee. I love that example.

Eddie Turner:

I love that.

Ashley Whillans:

Yeah. And so, saving time via giving up some of our discretionary income is truly attainable even for the college students that I was teaching during graduate school. So, that really emphasizes the important point that we want to make sure that we’re spending as much of our time in productive, meaningful, happy, satisfying pro-social ways and really minimizing the amount of judge work that we have in our life.However, administrative tasks, cooking, and cleaning aren’t always something that we can get ourselves out of even if we throw money at the problem. Sometimes there’s things in life we have to do even if we don’t enjoy them and often at work, this comes up as more administration and paperwork seems to be added to all of our jobs every day. And so, for those kinds of tasks, the third strategy I have is this idea of reframing time. And what this means is that you just need to change your relationship with the task so that it doesn’t stress you out quite so often. One of my dissertation students has a project showing that if you think about a task you really don’t like it work that seems a bit pointless in a way that reframes that task as helping a colleague so you think about that email or that report you’re writing not just going to be something your manager looks at once and never thinks about again but as a way of helping your manager fundamentally get their work done. This can increase the satisfaction we get from those tasks and decrease our stress. And so, that’s one very simple strategy that doesn’t cost anything at all simply. Reframing the negative experiences that we sometimes have to engage in can be a really positive and effective strategy for reducing our stress and increasing our joy.

Eddie Turner:

Thank you for going through those. And I love the practical application even at the college student level. So, this is something we all can do.

Ashley Whillans:

Absolutely. And I think that’s a major point that I want people to take away from the book. When we think about getting to greater time affluence, most of us, myself included, think about time as being something I’ll worry about when I have enough money or when I can quit my job or something that will take going on a sabbatical or making a drastic decision in our lives. However, my research that I’ve conducted over many, many years with people living all over the world suggests that even small simple decisions about how we spend the next 30 minutes can have powerful effects on the amount of time affluence and joy we experience. So, it doesn’t take winning the lottery or quitting our jobs to get to greater time affluence and happiness. It really takes consistent small changes around the margins to live a more time smart and happier life.

Eddie Turner:

And that’s interesting that you say that. I was going to ask you more about that because everybody defines happiness differently. So, what does happiness mean to you? How do you address this in the book so that people can then make that connection as to how they’ll spend their time and money to pursue the happiness?

Ashley Whillans:

Happiness, I define it as an academic who studies what academic types called subjective wellbeing, is really a combination of two critical factors. The first factor is this overall life evaluation – how you think you’re doing in your life generally. This is known as the cognitive component or sometimes referred to as the reflective component of happiness. So, when you take a step back in your life, how well do you think you’re doing? And that’s one key element. The second key element is probably what more people think about when they think about happiness, which is how you feel in the moment. This is sometimes known as experiencing happiness and it’s really a sense of the extent to which you experience joy, happiness and satisfaction on an everyday basis and also the extent to which you experience more positive emotions as opposed to negative emotions like stress, worry, rumination, and sadness. So, in all of my studies on this topic, I’ve looked both at how focusing on time makes you feel about your life overall and also how it affects your day-to-day mood. And as I’ve already mentioned, focusing on time, putting time first, making sure you feel in control of your schedule is really good for both key elements of subjective wellbeing. And I think that is driven in part by the fact that people who are more time focused also prioritize social relationships more than people who are more money focused. And we know from decades of research that social interactions, even short ones, 5 to 10-minute conversations with a friend or your neighbor, have really powerful impacts for both how well you think you’re doing in life and also your day-to-day mood.

Eddie Turner:

Yeah, absolutely. I couldn’t agree with you more. That’s wonderful. And I knew there would be no way I could talk to a Harvard Business School professor and not learn something. The next time someone asked me if I am happy, I will tell them about my subjective wellbeing.

Ashley Whillans:

Perfect. A+

Eddie Turner:

Excellent. I love that. Fantastic. Speaking of being at the Harvard Business School, you spent some time at my hometown Chicago at the University of Chicago. One can forgive you for leaving us and heading over to Harvard Business School but I do have to ask you since you spent time in Chicago, your pizza choice, who’s your favorite.

Ashley Whillans:

Oh, I don’t know if I have a favorite but I do love deep dish and I did go to some Cubs games with my grad school buddies and we ate deep dish pizza and drank beer and it was a wonderful American experience. I’m Canadian. So, it was definitely like a quintessential US experience for me in grad school, although. Again, I was a bit of a nerd in the library. I can’t say I went out enough during my period of time there to know which pizza place to go to but I do like deep dish and I did eat it at a Cubs game. So, I feel like I’m not a total failure in the going out department.

Eddie Turner:

No, no, no, that’s excellent. You have a true Chicago experience. You ate deep dish pizza and you went to a Cubs game. Excellent.

Ashley Whillans:

Right? I think that’s pretty good. I love Chicago. It’s one of my favorite cities in the US. I hope one day I get to spend enough time there again that I get to eat my way around Chicago as I’ve done Boston, two great cities for eating, but in grad school, I think I was too focused on data analysis and not enough focused on eating deep dish pizza but I think maybe this book will reform me.

Eddie Turner:

So, what’s it like to be on the campus especially right now?

Ashley Whillans:

HBS is taking a hybrid approach model to teaching. I wasn’t teaching last year in part to finish writing the book and write some cases. As people listening may know, all of our classes are taught not through lecturing or assigning academic journals but actually by assigning case studies based on companies we reach out to and talk to. And so, as I make it through the ranks at the Harvard Business School, more of the case writing responsibility becomes something I take on. So, I was busily writing cases for a new upcoming class I’m teaching in January called Motivation and Incentives. So, I wasn’t teaching MBAs during the work-from-home period. I was teaching a few exec-ed courses that were completely virtually administered. And right now, we really have a limited physical campus at HBS. The students are, to the extent that they want to be, on campus but they’re in their rooms. There’s limited physical engagement. Some students are going to class in a hybrid model. So, they’re physically distancing, the instructor will be in the room with a face shield, some of the students will be in class and then some of the students will be virtual so that we can accommodate the physical distance requirements. And I’ve been to campus only once since March. I had to pick up my computer and set up my home office at home since I’ll be parked here sort of indefinitely but there’s definitely a much quieter experience on campus. MOST of us have been working from home offices since March. And I think that’s going to be the cadence going forward at least until the end of the school year. I have been really proud of the case counts and the due diligence that everyone is taking on campus to be mindful of the restrictions that are in place due to COVID. And so, although we’re definitely missing these in-person social interactions, I’m very happy to see that everyone is staying safe and staying well on campus and we’re all getting a lot better at Zoom teaching. The very first time I taught, I was teaching an exec-ed and I was joking to one of my colleagues, I said “I didn’t know you could work up a sweat in front of your computer” because, usually, when you’re teaching, you’re in a big class, you’re running around asking questions. And apparently, you can also work up a sweat in Zoom teaching. I felt like I’d run a half marathon by the end of it given all the hand gestures and trying to cold call people very quickly to keep the energy up in a Zoom room. So, it’s definitely been a different experience but everyone’s adjusting to the best extent that they can.

Eddie Turner:

Fantastic. And not everyone knows what the pedagogical approach is there at HBS. And so, thank you for enlightening my audience. And I always wondered who wrote those cases. And so, it’s nice to know that I now know at least one person who’s responsible for pouring through the interviews and going through all of this and making it happen.

Ashley Whillans:

Yeah, it’s really an interesting exercise. I’m a social psychologist. So, usually, I don’t focus on individuals as data points. I’m looking at average level responses across multiple people. So, it’s been a really fun exercise to really get in the minds of the CEOs and the founders and employees of large companies and try to understand what they were thinking as they were making a business decision. I call myself a pracademic, an academic who really cares about practical orientation. So, HBS is a perfect job because when I was thinking about what I wanted to do after graduate school, I wasn’t so sold on the idea of only publishing in academic journals and having only a handful of my colleagues, various team colleagues, of course, but colleagues nonetheless, be the only one that really thinks about the work I’m doing. So, it’s been so fun to be at HBS and have all these really meaningful conversations with people such as yourself, authors, founders of major companies, employees at large companies and hear their experiences. I think it’s one of the great opportunities of HBS and business school in general both as a student participant but also as an instructor just all the interesting conversations you get to have about whether and how your ideas resonate with other people or other likeminded people.

Eddie Turner:

Yes, I can only imagine.

Ashley Whillans:

And also getting students pushed back on your ideas, I love that. I personally love the case method where you just pose a question and students debate with each other and they’re debating with you. Now, when I give seminar talks and no one talks, I’m like “Come on! Tell me my idea is wrong” like “Come on! Let’s go for it.”

Eddie Turner:

Looking for some pushback.

Ashley Whillans:

Yeah, I’m used to the pushback now and I always demand it in meetings as a result.

Eddie Turner:

Well, fantastic. I could talk to you for hours. You’re simply fascinating and I love the work you’re doing and how you’ve put it in the hands of the masses that made it simple for us.What’s the main message you would like to leave us with today?

Ashley Whillans:

The main message I’d like to leave you with is that time affluence and happiness is largely determined by our actions on an everyday basis. Like physical fitness, time affluence is something that we can all work toward each and every day. So, for listeners, I want to ask you to think about what the one activity is or the one strategy you might try to live a more time affluent and happier life tomorrow in the next 24 hours and tell a friend about it, tell a colleague about it, get someone to hold you accountable because we all know what makes us happy and we all know that time is important but sometimes, we just need a little nudge in the right direction to help us live that truth.

Eddie Turner:

Wonderful. And this is the Keep Leading!® Podcast and as such, I always like to know a quote or the best piece of leadership advice you’ve ever received to help our audience keep leading.

Ashley Whillans:

Sure. So, the quote that I really like and think about a lot is related to the professor that I spoke to you about earlier in this interview, Dan Gilbert, who’s citing Willa Cather, and he cites this in his book Stumbling on Happiness, and he writes and quotes Willa Cather, “One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness. One only stumbles upon them by chance in a lucky hour at the world’s end somewhere and holds fast to the days as to fortune or to fame.” What I like about this is whenever I think about this quote, it does remind you that so much of our life is out of our control. And when we find things that are good and are working for us, we need to hold on to them. However, the only way we can really achieve that goal is when we take the time and make it enough time in our schedule to truly enjoy and get more of the things that bring us joy and meaning.

Eddie Turner:

That is wonderful and thank you for explaining the application. I like that. Tell my audience where they can learn more about you.

Ashley Whillans:

I’m quite findable on social media. You can find me on twitter @AshleyWhillans. Also, on LinkedIn you can find my faculty page. I’m really excited to hear how everyone listening is being time smart in their own life and how they’re thinking about applying some of these strategies to the work-from-home scenario that so many of us are in. So, please feel free to reach out. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Eddie Turner:

Wonderful. Ashley, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule there at Harvard Business School to talk to me and share with my listeners your amazing work and tell us about your fascinating book and helping us all to be able to be time smart and reclaim our time and live a happier life.

Ashley Whillans:

Of course, thank you so much for having me.

Eddie Turner:

Thank you.And thank you for listening. That concludes 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 C Suite Radio, turning the volume up on business.

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