As a leadership coach who's stood in the eye of many storms, I've learned a thing or two about the push and pull of confidence and doubt. On this episode of The Reload, join me, Sean, as we wade into the quagmire of balancing the quiet assurance of internal faith with the cacophony of external voices. We'll delve into the resilience required to maintain one's vision in the face of relentless questioning and the allure of social validation. With tales from the trenches and the wisdom of experience, we examine the strength derived from vulnerability, and why leaders who can admit they don't have all the answers often end up charting the most innovative paths forward.
Have you ever felt like a solitary lighthouse amidst a sea of conflicting opinions and advice? That's the conundrum we unravel as we discuss the fine line between personal conviction and openness to feedback, where one's own compass must remain steadfast even as waves of outside input crash against it. We talk about how to treat external feedback as mere data points rather than edicts, ensuring that your core principles aren’t swayed by every passing storm. It's a conversation about the courage to stand by your values, even when they lead you against the current, and the wisdom to listen, learn, and evolve from the diverse perspectives that surround us. No guests, just us – let's explore together the paradoxes and power of leadership.
Are you an executive, entrepreneur, or combat veteran looking to overcome subconscious blind spots and limiting messaging to unlock your highest performance? Feel free to reach out to Sean at Reload Coaching and Consulting.
As a leadership coach who's stood in the eye of many storms, I've learned a thing or two about the push and pull of confidence and doubt. On this episode of The Reload, join me, Sean, as we wade into the quagmire of balancing the quiet assurance of internal faith with the cacophony of external voices. We'll delve into the resilience required to maintain one's vision in the face of relentless questioning and the allure of social validation. With tales from the trenches and the wisdom of experience, we examine the strength derived from vulnerability, and why leaders who can admit they don't have all the answers often end up charting the most innovative paths forward.
Have you ever felt like a solitary lighthouse amidst a sea of conflicting opinions and advice? That's the conundrum we unravel as we discuss the fine line between personal conviction and openness to feedback, where one's own compass must remain steadfast even as waves of outside input crash against it. We talk about how to treat external feedback as mere data points rather than edicts, ensuring that your core principles aren’t swayed by every passing storm. It's a conversation about the courage to stand by your values, even when they lead you against the current, and the wisdom to listen, learn, and evolve from the diverse perspectives that surround us. No guests, just us – let's explore together the paradoxes and power of leadership.
Are you an executive, entrepreneur, or combat veteran looking to overcome subconscious blind spots and limiting messaging to unlock your highest performance? Feel free to reach out to Sean at Reload Coaching and Consulting.
Welcome to the reload, where we help unconventional leaders craft the life they truly want by questioning the assumptions they have about how life works. My name is Sean and I'll be your host on this journey. As a performance coach and special operations combat veteran, I help high performing executives kick ass in their careers while connecting with deeply powerful insights that fuel their lives Right on, right on. Welcome back. Hopefully this is not your first time, but if is welcome and, with any luck, you stick around for a while Now as a caveat before I jump into today's topic. If you are not feeling particularly patient today, maybe this is not the episode for you, because, as I was working through the list of bullet points that I used to structure these, most of these episodes are struggling. I was struggling to figure out, okay, what you know, what is? What am I really wrestling with here, based on some of the things that I've seen in sessions with my clients, what is it that I'm attempting to convey? Why do I think it would be important for the audience to hear this? And I have not been able to 100% reconcile that before I lit up the microphone and part of the reason why I'm willing to demonstrate this vulnerability to you is to show you that this show is not some highly curated, highly edited, highly produced show which anybody that's been listening for any amount of time is probably going to be able to see that but to be able to recognize and to personally display areas where I have uncertainty. I believe that that can help, can help others to also acknowledge that we can put things forth into the world, not having to be the foremost expert and not having to be so so tightly attached to us being right, in part because so many of my clients suffer from that. They suffer from this over control, they suffer from this association that they have with being the leader and needing to be the one with the answers, as opposed to the person that can see. I know how to collect a pool of talent around me and I'm the one that's willing to endure certain stresses in order to balance different personalities, in order to, at times, push the pace so that we can achieve more than we think is possible, but then also to lead by example and to say, oh hey, maybe I don't have all the answers, maybe collectively we're able to come up with the better direction.
Speaker 1:Now, what is the topic for today? The topic for today is really discussing internal faith versus external validation. Why do I feel that that topic is useful for you? Well, if you are like my clients and my clients tend to be top level leaders in companies, steering the direction of their respective organizations so, with the vice president or C suite officer level, that could be a division or department. And then for my clients who are CEOs or the tippy top of the leadership pyramid, if they're don't have a CEO title, they're leading the entire organization and so, as part of that senior leadership role, they tend to deal with a lot of uncertainty. They are expected to steer and guide the organization into the future, which, if you have two brain cells that can rub together, you will recognize is highly uncertain, whether it's a pandemic or whether it's a war, or whether it's a stock market crash or what have you.
Speaker 1:There are all these sort of cataclysmic seeming events that occur and that. Yeah. Sure, there are always pundits that talk about how they predicted this, but by and large, a lot of them catch us off guard. Now can we generalize and say, okay, yeah, we know bad things happen in this world, or we know that unpredictable things happen and therefore we can, given enough thought, preempt some of these broad categories of mishap, like natural disasters. We know tornadoes occur, we know that hurricanes occur, we know that earthquakes occur, etc. Etc. Yes, of course, we know that wars occur, we know that stock markets crash. So there are ways in which we can make our organizations more resilient to some of these broad categories, but oftentimes the critical ingredient that's missing is knowing when.
Speaker 1:So, in either case, there's a lot of uncertainty that my clients tend to deal with, and that's not even including some of the personnel uncertainty, because they're dealing with humans and they themselves are, you know, human, and humans do some pretty erratic shit based on emotion, intuition, whatever. So if you are like my clients, then I thought it would be useful for us to start to look at yeah, how do we maintain internal faith in a course of action or a direction, a strategic direction? And if we think about strategic direction, we're talking about something that generally, by necessity or by definition or, at the very least, by implication, is something that's going to take a while for it to play out. Very, something that is very transactional, is typically associated with something that's short lived and short duration, and therefore the cycle of beginning to conclusion is much shorter and therefore we tend to draw more associations or more correlations and, dare I say, we tend to draw causation much more quickly. Oh, I received why? Well, it must have been X. X must have been the necessary ingredient for me to achieve the result of Y, and obviously that's not entirely true either.
Speaker 1:Also, there's a personal element in this, and I don't mean it personally, as in Sean Hansen, but personal in the sense of my own grappling with uncertainty as a coach, trying to help people wade through the murk of unconscious drivers, psycho-emotional drivers, and also sifting through, in the case of 360 feedback, external inputs on performance. How much do we give credence to the observations that are being made excuse me, by the people around us, versus staying deeply connected to a belief that we're doing, that we're on the right path, as it were? So I think one of the common things that I've noticed is that human beings one, were very social creatures and if you look at our ancestry, we were organized in tribes, very small tribes, for the majority of our evolution. And even today, in this more stratified technological society, we still have individuals seeking out their respective quote-unquote tribes online. What kind of person am I? Where are my people? And for some that's organized by race or ethnicity, for others it's lifestyle choice, for others it's socioeconomic, for others it's perhaps recreational. And I would argue that for most people there's a sort of an amalgam of different ways in which they express themselves and identifiers that they have and where it is that they're trying to seek belonging. And part of that sense of belonging is also guiding our behavior and guiding our choices off of what our quote-unquote tribe is indicating back to us.
Speaker 1:As far as affirmation or validation that we're on the right track, we're so often, I think, operating in a place of scarcity or lack of confidence or lack of connection to our own internal faith that we look to external validation to affirm or inspire a sense of confidence, whether it's the share price of our company is it going up or is it going down Even though there are plenty of articles that will talk about the fickleness of the markets or of analysts, the fickleness of random acts in the universe like natural disasters, the proverbial act of God or other forms of affirmation external affirmation or praise or agreement from the boss or others. But generally, when you get praise or affirmation from the boss, it tends to weigh much more heavily on the average person and it tends to influence them a lot more consciously and unconsciously. Other external affirmation tools are hitting KPIs. We said we were going to achieve this and look, we did. Especially when hitting those KPIs seems to also correlate to quote unquote success. That goes back to what I was saying a few minutes ago about how we often tend to look at the results that we've achieved as proof that our process was good, and I've talked about this, that concept, in the past and I don't know I might try to weave some of that back in here today. But from what I've noticed in having, you know, coaching sessions with really intelligent and really educated and experienced professionals, is that even with those individuals who have so much in their resume, it is so easy for them to be pushed off their own internal faith in what is right. They really find themselves unwittingly focusing on external results versus that the process, orientation and adherence to internal core values. And there's often a comparison to how others are doing something, whether it's how another leader is leading their department or their company, how other companies organize themselves. That could be individual policies, like PTO policies, for instance, or just general corporate structure. We so often find ourselves looking outside for guidance and we're missing this deep inner connection to faith. You know, sort of colloquially, we are unwilling to play our own position, we're just looking at others.
Speaker 1:Now should you ignore all external feedback? Is there never a time to take external feedback on board? I would say no. I think that there is certainly a time to take external feedback on board. And I don't when I say a time, I don't mean that it is a finite time, that there's only one window of opportunity for this. When I say that there is a time, I mean it more in the there's a time and place for everything sense. But just because there is a time and place to take external feedback, I also don't think that you should worship external feedback.
Speaker 1:And again, a lot of my clients they're, they're going to be a lot of my clients they're, they're good people, they're strong people and they want to do what's right. And I think oftentimes it's because they want to do things right that they find themselves inadvertently worshiping external feedback, whether they recognize it or not, subtle hints that we're doing the right thing. The boss is no longer on our ass. Oh, that feels good, because before it was pretty stressful. But now I must be doing things the right way because the pressure is off. Well, who knows, maybe the boss is just distracted by something else and as soon as your turn comes around again, it'll be just as stressful. Who knows? Now, when do I think that taking external feedback on board is appropriate? I think in very broad and quite likely totally unhelpful terms. But hey, I'm I'm a leadership coach, so you know I'm not going to give you anything too concrete here. Yeah, let's, let's be serious. All joking aside, I think that there's.
Speaker 1:The time when we can take external feedback on board is, first and foremost, when we are able and we truly deeply recognize inside ourselves that we are willing to take it in as a piece of data, not something that is totally dispositive about what course of action we should be on. Additionally, I think, as a litmus test, if you find yourself swinging back and forth between different courses of action, especially if those courses of action are opposing in some way because so and so weighed in on one side of the argument or another, that's generally an indication that, ooh, yeah, maybe we're not totally anchored here, we're not grounded, we're flapping around in the wind and we're pivoting based on the pressure that we're receiving, which leads to my next point I think part of maintaining the balance between internal faith and external validation and when it you are probably in a better position to receive external validation in a way that's actually truly helpful for the long run and doesn't have you flip-flopping in the breeze is when you are willing to be a martyr for your faith. And to be clear, I'm not talking about religion here. I mean it can obviously apply to that, and there are plenty of historical figures that have had martyr experiences, and I think that oftentimes those religious examples can be quite instructive of what does it mean to be a martyr for one's belief, one's faith? And if we look at it in the dictionary, a martyr is a person who voluntarily suffers death as the penalty of witnessing to and refusing to renounce a religion. Alternatively, a person who sacrifices something of great value, and especially life itself, for the sake of principle. And oftentimes, when we look at key historical figures that have martyred themselves, they did so at the cost of their own life first off, and without proof that they were on the right track. So there is massive penalty without proof that they're going to win in the long run. And yet they're doing it anyway because they believe that they're going to win.
Speaker 1:Now, the balancing point here, I think that is when we are in our own sort of cone of silence, if you will, or our own fortress of solitude in terms of our beliefs, and we never take in data from the outside world, especially as mere mortals who are very, very, very egocentric. We are so singularly and in individually oriented even my clients that that really take a lot of pride and you know they say pride goeth before a fall that take a lot of pride in how, how deeply of service they are to others and how much they factor in other people's perspective. Those individuals are still individuals. They're still operating with the implicit and unconscious biases that have been working on them their entire life the ways in which things were communicated to them as important or unimportant, as right or wrong, moral, immoral, ethical, unethical, etc. Etc. Experiences that were painful for them as children, for instance, in terms of how they related to other people. That's just one example, right?
Speaker 1:So we're always operating in a bit of a vacuum chamber of one or echo chamber sorry, not vacuum chamber, echo chamber of one and so being able to take outside feedback on board, not necessarily allowing the course of action to shift or your conviction to shift, but at least taking it on board and working through it, chewing it up, seeing how it relates to the beliefs that you have, to the core values that you have, to what you truly believe to be right or wrong. That, I think, is where it becomes quite useful. And with being willing to martyr yourself for your, your faith, your belief again not necessarily religious, but could be belief in a certain product line, belief in the culture that you want to create in your organization, that this is the right way for us to treat each other, regardless of what the outside rewards or punishments might be. That it's a willingness to do so, not necessarily some overriding desire, because I've also come across individuals who wanted to martyr themselves, who wanted to throw themselves on that blade, and I think that is tilting too far in the other direction. There's a difference between being willing to do it if you're sort of called to task, as it were, and then desperately seeking out that, that moment. But the willingness to step into that challenge, that willingness to have your faith tested, I think is a very powerful indicator that you are deeply connected to inner faith again not necessarily religious inner belief and quite often it's the individuals who have never ever sounded the depths of their own soul, as it were, to really truly know what core values do I have, what is deep inside of me such that I will sacrifice myself for it. And we all like to think that we have an idea. I like I'll know it when I see it, kind of thing.
Speaker 1:But it's quite useful to spend time in deep reflection, really grappling with what is it that I believe in so much that I would endure tremendous punishment, the loss of a job, the loss of status. And if you think that the loss of status is just something superficial, I would encourage you to take another look at that Because, again, from our anthropology, we recognize that status is highly important, especially if we look at sort of cave person days. If you were of lowest status, you probably ate last. And if the animal is only so big and there are so many mouths to feed, eating last may have meant actually eating nothing. And as much as I try to help clients see beyond status so that it's not just this overarching, overriding instinct inside of them, I also, in good faith, have to acknowledge that, yeah, it has an influence and in some cases, a very powerful influence? I well, most cases probably.
Speaker 1:But to grapple at a deep level with what do I really truly believe, and not just what do I believe, but for what am I willing to sacrifice? If I say I wanna be a good boss or if I wanna be a good leader, I mean nobody really. Generally people don't say they wanna be a good boss, at least not in today's culture but they typically say I wanna be a good leader. What does that mean and what personal risk are you willing to endure to be the good leader that you say you wanna be, according to the definition that you've mapped out for yourself? On a wider level, if you're talking about steering a division, a department, a company, to what extent are you and your leadership team willing to endure punishment because of the belief that you're on the right track, and how can you augment that belief, supplement that belief on a periodic basis with external information that might help you stress, test that inner belief, as opposed to allowing the external inputs to actually be the guiding force? Hopefully today's been somewhat helpful.
Speaker 1:I'm always, as I said at the beginning of the show, a little leery when I put something forth where my convictions are not quite settled, but again, hopefully, in me expressing my uncertainty and my own sense of responsibility. I'm not gonna be able to say that I'm a good leader, but hearing the ways in which my voice is conveying that okay. Yeah, maybe I don't quite know what's happening here. Hopefully that can be an example to you in terms of how it is that you lead in your team, because one thing I have seen quite a bit is when the leader attempts to be foolproof or infallible or invulnerable, it tends to create a lot of problems down the road, tends to create subordinates who simply rely on that strength instead of digging deeper into their own, and it also tends to create organizations that are very authoritative and top down which, over time, from what I've seen and granted, I haven't seen everything, but from what I've seen it tends to start to choke the independence and free thinking and discretionary effort out of that organization.
Speaker 1:So, anyways, if you are enjoying the show, either this episode in particular or the show more broadly, we love it If you would thumbs up, subscribe, smash like buttons or whatever it is that you have in your technology technological platform that you're using and share it. Share it with people that you think would benefit or don't. Totally up to you Until next time. Take care of each other.