Hey guys and welcome back to another episode of Change Wired Podcast. My name is Angela Sharina, I'm your host, your executive coach 360, someone who is passionate about human potential, change your leadership potential, creating the best version of ourselves every single day. And on this podcast we are talking about personal change, transformation, unlocking more of our potential through body, mind, work, practices, the science of behavioral change. We talk on this podcast with leadership, with scientists, with researchers, equally passionate about unlocking more human potential, researching it, delivering to people in all the different ways, applied and super practical. And also on this podcast we are not about fluff and theories. We are about learning the best strategies and doing our best to distill all the practical wisdom so, personally and collectively, we get to grow better, faster, for more fulfilling, meaningful lives and more positive impact in the world. So, without further ado, let me introduce someone who I'm super excited to have on this podcast Joining me today as my guest.
Speaker 1We have Dr Martin Dubin, or Marty for short and warm. Martin Dubin is a clinical psychologist, serial entrepreneur, business coach and advisor to C-suite executives and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Marty founded and sold a multimillion-dollar healthcare company, served as a vice president at Anthem BCBS and later became a partner at RHR International working with Fortune 500 leaders and top venture capital firms. Marty's latest book that we are talking about today Blindspotting how to See what's Holding you Back as a Leader Harvard Business Review Press 2025. The book distills decades of experience in Margie's experience into a practical framework for identifying and overcoming leadership or anyone's blind spots. And why is it important? Well, marty shares that blind spots are often the flip side of our greatest strengths and when we build self-awareness and make a small but powerful adjustment to our behaviors daily small behaviors and we avoid getting stuck in our default behaviors that might brought us where we are but no longer serve us all that well keeping us stuck. So some of the main takeaways you're going to learn about six common blind spots that leaders that all of us, to be honest, face Identity when your role evolves, but your self-concept doesn't Motive. Not seeing the true drivers behind your decisions and actions. Traits, overplaying strengths until they become your weaknesses, holding you back. Emotions, failing to recognize and regulate your own or others' emotions, thinking that is just how I am Intellect, relying too heavily on one type of intelligence I'm definitely guilty of that IQ, speed or creativity, or street smarts, you know, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail or something along those lines. But when we guys rely only on one strength or one type of intellect, we tend to solve all of the problems with the same tool, where it might not be at all the most optimal solution.
Speaker 1The sixth blind spot kind of blind spots, behavior, blind spots in our communication, in our influence, in our priorities. We're going to talk about all of this and how they can be holding us back and what to do about them, how to identify them and change, adjust our behaviors to overcome these blind spots so we could progress on our journey faster and better without getting stuck all that much. We're going to talk about how strengths often become our blind spots when they're overused, in the wrong context. We're going to talk about metacommunication context. We're going to talk about metacommunication, communicating, about the communication, which is a powerful way to clear misunderstandings fast and align our intentions with the impact, the results we create. We're going to talk about five things only CEO can and should do and, as a bigger concept, we'll talk about this idea is your calendar aligned, is what you do every day, aligned with the role that you either want to occupy or occupy currently, and if there is no alignment, there might be a problem.
Small tweaks matter more than big transformations Like adjusting decisiveness with guardrails or changing the timing of your most important decisions. Small tweaks become big changes. What you'll also learn in this episode how to overcome, uncover and overcome blind spots in your leadership and career. Why emotions are data and how to use them to guide your decisions. The four kinds of intellect leaders should balance in teams. Practical strategies to align identity, behavior and motives with the roles you aspire to get to. How to use the blind spotting framework inside your organization to build more effective teams. This and a lot more very interesting, practical, applicable and important stuff we're going to cover on today's episode of ChangeWired with Dr Margin Dubin anybody else's fault, or it's the company or the economy to kind of look at themselves and say what's my part?
Speaker 1Yes, so we'll talk more about it during our conversation, so let's jump in. Thank you again so much, marty, for joining ChangeWire podcast. It's such a pleasure for me personally and, I'm sure, for our listeners, to listen to this conversation and be exposed to your work. So thank you.
Speaker 2Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity, Angela.
Speaker 1Yes, before we jump into our conversation, can you tell our listeners a little bit of a backstory? So you have quite a career journey, I would say, from a clinical psychologist to business owner to now one of the most I don't know talked about coaches in the US and in leadership space. I think I want you to start with. How did it all start Like, even becoming clinical psychologist? How did you decide to become one?
Speaker 2Yeah, I well in college. I was well, I'll go back. So my father was a physician and if you look at my initials you can see that I was probably destined, as the oldest son, to follow in my father's footsteps and I never really I liked the. I was curious about medicine but I never really liked it that much. And I discovered psychology when I was in college and I really wasn't that clear even about what kind of profession it was. But I just was curious about myself, as most of us are when we're at that age, and so that began the journey at that point.
Speaker 1Yes, journey at that point, yes. And I guess when you got into that were you thinking like, yes, this is the right choice, I guess probably yes, if you stayed, what were you thinking once you got into it?
Speaker 2Yeah, I did a little bit of kind of public mental health and a little bit of teaching and then opened a private psychotherapy practice for adults and I thought that's what I would do for my whole career, kind of open my office door every 45 or 50 minutes and have a new client come in and I really I liked the work but I actually didn't like sitting in an office all day long and you know they don't teach you that in graduate school, like what's the life of the profession being? So I found myself just kind of searching around for other kinds of things and healthcare was changing in the US and I became curious about what was going on kind of on the business side of healthcare. And as I look back, I'd always done little business kinds, entrepreneurial kinds of things in college and earlier. So we'll talk about identity probably as a part of my chapter. Business wasn't really part of my identity. My identity was I'm a psychologist.
Speaker 2But as I got into the business part and we started with a couple of colleagues we started a company managed the healthcare health care for very large insurance companies and I was very intrigued with the whole aspects of business, so it opened up that part for me.
Speaker 2And then we grew our company and ended up selling it to one of the largest health insurers. And then I discovered this whole area of coaching and got involved in that kind of at the third part of my career and when I look back, I didn't start out to write a book, I just started out. It was during COVID and to keep my brain engaged, I was just writing because I'd had an unusual career and kind of like why did I say what I said to this particular client or that one and what seemed to make a difference? And trying to really just understand my career, having worked from the basic psychology standpoint, having worked with people both with mental health problems as well as very successful leaders who wanted to get better, and so that's what kind of got me started. And then at some point I realized, oh, this is really a book, I should kind of get serious about it, and and then I started on the book journey.
Yeah, okay, that's how it came to be, because when I was reading the book I thought to myself it seems like you've had it all along in you. But also from experience I know that when usually the book is out, you have a whole lot of life experience, a journey that you went through before the book kind of ripened in you and then you put it out. So, yeah, you already started talking about the book and how it came to be and, yeah, you mentioned that it was the experience that you had, the thinking like, what were the common things that I work with, with leaders, etc. Was there anything else that inspired you to write the book? And I don't know, maybe a difference that you want to make in the world? Or what was the main motivator for writing and for putting it out there? Main motivator for writing and for putting it out there?
Speaker 2Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know that I could articulate it when I was first writing it, that this was the reason, but it became pretty evident to me after a while when I shifted to becoming a coach to business leaders. I kind of took a sabbatical for a year and read all I could about coaching. I kind of took a sabbatical for a year and read all I could about coaching and then I ended up working with two of the premier coaching firms in the US and I was really, quite frankly, very disappointed in that. There wasn't really a science in my mind of coaching. There's a science of leadership, very much so, and some very interesting and intriguing things about the science of leadership.
Speaker 2But I was used to as a psychotherapist of having a patient would come in the office and I have a categorization system, a diagnostic categories and a variety of different treatment techniques and tools to use depending on what the problems are, and I found coaching had none of that. It was really a lacking of a rigor and of a science. And if you think about it, science, all science kind of proceeds first by description and then categorization and then prediction and then control, and you think about biology and chemistry and physics the hard sciences that have really done a lot in that way, and in the brain sciences it's so complex we haven't proceeded much further than description and a little bit of categorization, but none of that existed in coaching, and so that was really. The purpose of the book is to create a taxonomy of what I call blind spots, areas where we get better and it directs the coach and the leader to like what needs to be fixed.
Speaker 2And then and then I've got techniques and ideas in the book and I I hope it spurs more of this categorization and more application of what kind of tools and techniques work, depending on what the problems are.
Speaker 1I think it's going to do this and more. When I found your book, when I found out about your book at Harvard Business Review, their social media, I was just so happy because, again, a lot of clients started to come to me with this specific problem. Like, I know I'm not moving as far or as fast, or I know I'm doing something wrong, but I'm not exactly sure what it is right, and the only word that came to my mind was blind spots. And I'm like, okay, there must be a book on that, how to fix that. Right, and there was such a book and it just came out. I'm like, oh, how lucky I am, so thank you for writing it and let's dive into the book a little bit further. So, blind spotting how to see what's holding you back as a leader and I feel like a leader or a person in general right, how to see what you can't see, which is holding you back. How do you define blind spots? First and foremost, what are blind spots?
Speaker 2Yeah, I think the first thing that really kind of pointed me to kind of look at that was, as you well know, a traditional thing that coaches do is collect feedback it's called a 360 about the leader from everybody around and no matter how you and I do that by an interview format and when you do that it tend the the responses tend to fall into two categories. No matter what questions you ask, you know what is the leader great at and where are they not so great? Where are the opportunities for them to improve? And I think, like most coaches kind of saw those as two separate categories and most of the leaders that I talked to weren't that interested in the strengths part. They knew all of that. They were real curious about their impact on people and where they were missing the boat their impact on people and where they were missing the boat.
Speaker 2And at some point I started to realize that often the opportunities that need to be addressed were actually the flip side of the exact same thing that people were talking about as the person's strengths, and that it was their strengths work most of the time and in most situations and they're the go-to tool for the leader because it's part of their default personality. But there are times when leaders would be using that strength and it was inappropriate to the particular situation and the leaders weren't aware of it, because why would they be? It works for them almost all the time and that was the first little key that started to unlock for me around self-awareness. I mean, the book is a book about self-awareness. The first one was about that your strengths, overplayed, can actually become a problem.
Speaker 1Yeah, so I think you know, reading your book made it for the first time time really clear to me that what I take so much pride in actually also was holding me back, because in every situation that is my answer to everything.
Right, but, as you just mentioned, it's not the right answer to everything and very often that actually backfires in so many ways and you are not really aware of that and very often, to that point, not all of the people who will give you feedback also can give you the kind of feedback that you can hear and in the way that makes sense and you can use to correct your behavior, right, yeah, so, speaking to blind spots and strengths, your book is divided in six parts and I really love the structure because it kind of covers everything, from what I can think of at least, and, as you said, it's very well structured and allows one to use it as almost like a map to identify where the blind spots or the gaps. So the six parts are identity, motive, traits, emotions, intellect and behavior. Could you maybe go through them and identify what are those areas? I call them areas of blind spots because obviously they can be in so many shapes and forms.
Speaker 2Yeah, as I was writing the book, you know, as we talked about I, reflected about my history both as a psychotherapist and as a coach and really, and in psychotherapy, when you I think these same things are applicable in psychotherapy as they are in coaching. I mean, like, where, what are the areas of who we are as people? I mean, like, what are the areas of who we are as people? There really isn't a well-agreed-upon personality model for normal personality, there's pathology and what that looks like, and so I really that was my challenge was to construct a bit of a map, as you said, of our personality in terms of our self-awareness, because that's what we're, that's what I'm after and that's what all coaches are helping the leader become more self-aware. And so the territory, you know, I had maybe six or eight or nine things and different at different points. I kind of pulled it into these six and they are natural words, part of our everyday language. They should be intuitively recognizable to people, and I think about it in terms of what we're most aware of.
Speaker 2The diagram that I have for this is like a target three concentric circles kind of a center and then a ring and then an outside ring, and the outside ring is what we're most aware of, what's easiest for us to access, and that's our identity and our behavior. And I mean we see our behavior, other people see it. Our identity are kind of the name tags where I am a mother, father, son, you know, psychologist, engineer, so we are pretty accessible to most of those things. There still are blind spots in both of those areas. And then the next ring are things that are a little more hardwired, they're harder for us to get a hold of, but we still recognize them, our intellect, our emotions and our traits.
Speaker 2And then at the core is what's driving us, kind of the engine in the system, and that's our motives, or our needs, our drives and those we can. Sometimes we're very aware I'm doing this because of this. This matters to me, but rarely are we singularly motivated. We have many motives that are going on and sometimes many times we're not aware of those motives. So that's kind of at the core and the motives really then kind of emanate out through all those other parts. The diagram has dotted lines in between all of these because all these parts interact and have feedback to each other all the time.
Speaker 1Yes, it's again such a great structure and I immediately also could recognize that a lot of it in myself, how it works and also in the clients that I work with Like to that point. For example, when I start working with someone, I always try to together, we try to create an identity that we are striving to create through different behavior, change right, who, why am I changing this? So that also touches the motive. But then also like who am I? Is this person doing these things? And that tends to work so well for also to maintain that discipline or motivation which often is required to create behavioral change. So maybe let's dive in a little bit of detail in each one and maybe you can give some examples so listeners also can figure out. Okay, this is what we are talking about and these are some of the signs that I might have some blind spots there and maybe ways to address it. So where would you like to start from? The core, or, like in the book you started with, identity.
Speaker 2Yeah, I think we could go through the chapters. I mean I organized them. I kind of thought maybe the clearest way for people to get an idea and the stories were the way that I organized the chapters so we could start anywhere. But that's a good place.
Speaker 1Let's start with identity. So what are blind spots in that area of identity, and maybe some stories, for example, and how people can figure out if they have some blind spots there to work on.
Speaker 2Yeah, and as I said before, that you know your personality and who you are works if you're successful and you're doing well, it works most of the time. So in each of these it's the point is, what are the blind spots and what are the triggers? Why would you have a blind spot? And for identity it often happens when you're at times of change, change in your role. So an identity blind spot is when your identity and your role are not perfectly aligned. So, for example, you know you're a subject matter expert, domain expert in a particular area, you're a, you know a graphic designer and you're working at a company and you get a promotion to become now a manager. That's a shift in your role and there's an identity shift. And if you stay stuck in I'm the best designer and all your efforts, and if somebody looks at how you spend your time at work, it's all on designing, then you haven't shifted to the new role, which is a manager of other designers and you clearly obviously use that subject matter expertise to inform how you manage. But your identity should change and along with your role change and you hopefully would be getting gratification from that new identity If you find out that you're always you're struggling with that, you don't like the management part of it, even though it's a salary increase and other things then that's a real time for you to take a deep question, as you kind of said earlier, about who am I and what am I really interested in.
So the goal here is to get your identity and your role change well aligned. And when it isn't, those are the times when your blind spots occur. You could go to work for a new company and find out that somehow it's not fitting for you, and when you really think about it, maybe the goals of the company, the culture of the company, the mission of the company isn't resonating for who you are, and so your identity hasn't shifted to fit with the identity of the new company, of the new company. So any of these mismatches are opportunities when you can kind of explore a potential blind spot that's holding you back from being as effective as you can be in your job.
Speaker 1Yeah, and I think that's such an important notion of being effective in the role that you're choosing. And that's where I think it's very important, you know, before taking on any role is to identify, okay, what this role is about, what it means to be effective here. What's the goal? What's the outcome? Like, if you're trying to be a manager, right, what's a good manager does, if you're trying, if you're getting into CEO or any CCO position, like, what does it mean to be a great at that position? What are my responsibilities? What should be on my schedule? And that goes also to your behaviors, right and then you're also like, it's such a great point that it's not like either, or you have to like change. No, if you don't want to change and it's really not who you're comfortable with being, you just don't choose it and choose something else, and I think that's so important.
Speaker 2You bring up a good point about getting ready for the change and you can be aspiring to the next role and you're waiting for the opportunity to come. And so the advice I give and there's a couple examples in the book is to act as if you're in the role. So you're not yet in that new role, but you start to, as you said, observe and think about what's the responsibilities of that role, what is the requirements of that role, how does that change from who I am today or what I'm doing today? And you begin to start to act as if you're already in that role. You know, obviously not in a way that's counter to the culture and getting along well with people.
Speaker 2But you then start to advertise. We all have brands, our identity is kind of a brand at work. And you then start to change your brand and your brand and people start to say, oh, they're act. You know they don't consciously say they're acting like the next role, but they start to see you speaking up more, you know bringing up ideas that are considered for that next leadership step. And pretty soon people see that you're ready for that because they see you already behaving in that way.
Speaker 1Yes, it also reminds me of a few cases from my coaching where my clients would bring to me this issue of like well, there is this role, next level, but I know that I'm not even considered. And then I would ask well, how would you like the person who considers people for this position? How would they know that you even want this role? Did you talk to them? Did you do something? Did you ask for, like, certain projects, etc. And then they realize that, yes, they, you know, nobody's reading your mind and if you're not somehow behaving in a way or speaking up about that, then it's hard to to see that you are now want to be in that position, with that identity, and and that, well, we can jump into the next one, which is I think it's what is it Motive?
Speaker 1Motive yes, that, but I also feel like you know the identity. It's so, and also it's in the graphic in your book. It's aligned well in the same circle as behavior, and I feel like identity and behavior are so interlinked because, yes, as you said, it's your identity, is your brand, in a sense that how you behave is how your identity usually perceived by others yes, exactly yeah.
Speaker 2it's what other people see about you and you know, as you well know, so many leaders talk. You know you give them a 360 feedback and they read something they say I never said that or that's not right, and it's the difference between your intention and your impact. So the behavior is what other people see. It's the impact about other people. You know your intention might be in your motive about why you're doing something, but there can be you know, how it shows up for other people in your behavior can be very, very different.
Speaker 1Yeah, well, behavior. I think we'll talk about that throughout the whole conversation because that's as you write it, that's what people see. Let's talk about motive, what it is and how people, what kind of blind spots leaders can have in that area and how they know that they have it there.
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean you can think about. We all do this, right, we're all armchair psychologists, we're all trying to figure out the people around us and ourselves. So you know how often have you said oh, you know, she's only doing that for the fame or he's only doing that for the money, and so we are, you know, trying to assume and figure out what is somebody's motive. Obviously, that's how we negotiate our way through life figure out other people. So it's important to know, as a leader, that everybody's trying to figure out what your motives are. And obviously, the more you know your motives, the more you can be declarative about them and say, here's, I'm doing this because this is what's important to me. And then we all do that in a natural way. So I was, oh, when I was in graduate school or undergraduate maybe. I remember reading.
Speaker 2There's a Harvard psychologist, organizational psychologist, David McClellan, who wrote about three core motives in organizations and in business life, power, affiliation and achievement. And I've found those to just ring so true. We have lots of other motives. We have our own personal life history and you know motives to. You know make friends or prove ourselves or we're. You know the whole sense of imposter syndrome that lurks beneath the surface with people. But the motive of, but those three core motives, and how well they're balanced and where we are on those are a good place to start. So that's a place for people to think about.
Speaker 2Why am I doing this? How much of it is for these three different reasons. You know different reasons. Power is for control over people and situations. Money is often a measure of power. Achievement is doing a good job for the sake of doing a good job and what that means to us. It's not for approval from anybody else, it's our own sense of how important that is. Approval from anybody else, it's our own sense of how important that is. And affiliation is love and companionship and relationships and doing something for those kinds of motives and so being in touch with how those three motives are interplaying in your life. And maybe when you're stuck in some situation that isn't working well and you're, you know you're in a meeting and you can tell you're, you know people aren't tracking with what you're saying and you're losing the. You know the group and you're trying to influence them in a particular way, these people I'm talking to right now. And where am I on these three motives of affiliation?
Speaker 1achievement and power and trying to adjust as necessary. I think for me it's also like one of the hardest to identify very often, like in my work, when I work with clients, when they start struggling with like all right, this is what I want to change. But then it's somehow like when we start working on certain behaviors and they often find a reason why they can't do it or why it's not working out. That's where I actually start asking like well, what are we trying to achieve? Like what's important to you.
Speaker 2What's important. Yes, yeah.
Speaker 1And how are we getting there? And I find that actually, this breakdown of behavior and intention very happens at this motive level, where they don't really want what they say they want because they're driven by something else.
Speaker 2Yeah, that's really well articulated. Yeah, and that emotion. The emotion seems to me to be kind of the road to what's really important to them. I mean, you know they'll talk about. Well, I'm frustrated right now, or this is what makes me happy, or you know, sense of frustration, of discomfort, when those motives and needs are being realized. You have that sense, that warm feeling of fulfillment and a good feeling Because there's so many choices and what do we really want? And so getting a hold of the feelings and starting to search those, the feelings will tell us the truth about ourselves.
Speaker 1Yeah, it's sort of our inner compass that just doesn't lie and you can talk yourself almost into I don't know, any belief or I guess what I'm trying to say is like feelings. You can't really fake it. You can't make yourself feel something that is not true to you and that's why it's such a great compass For me. For example, I know that when I make a difference in people's lives or when I add to knowledge area that is important to me, I feel like really good, like my day wasn't a waste, and that's why I know like these are my motives and as long as I align my work and my life with them, like I'll be happy.
Speaker 2Right.
Speaker 1Yeah, exactly, that's exactly right.
Speaker 2And people see that about you right. They see that you're driven to do that and so you know. Obviously your clients want to see that in you because they know that's going to be helpful to them. So our motives really often are very clear to other people, sometimes before they're clear to us.
Yes, exactly, and especially if we are not so maybe used to talking about our emotions, right, and that leads to the next blind spot, area, our emotions. And I found that, and you found that in your work as well that some people are more emotionally aware, some people less, and I feel like the more emotionally aware people are, the also easier it is to understand your motives, like when you're aligned with them or not.
Speaker 2Yes, I talk about this in the emotion chapter of kind of about five levels and of sophistication, really, in being able to use your understanding of your motives in a strategic way. That's what the book is about in each of these chapters. Once you get a hold of your self-awareness and you understand what your blind spot is in each of these different areas, then you have more choice. You can always change your behavior. You can always. You know. So if you're feeling something very strongly and you're not aware of it, it's showing and it's coming out in your behavior. Once you become aware of it, then you have an ability to make a decision about do I want to show my feelings or not? In what way do I want to show them? How do I want to show them?
Speaker 2So it's you know, and you know I've met many leaders that just see emotions as getting in the way of work. And you know I tell them it's just data. You know if you're ignoring your emotions or you're ignoring other people's, you give a great presentation and you've got all the logic and yet people haven't gotten on board and you're upset about that and you realize it's because of their emotions, of their interests, of other things, not a logical analysis. Well then, you need to get on board with that other data set of their emotions and what's important to them, and that should go into your presentation, as well as all the rational arguments that you've got the rational arguments that you've got.
Speaker 1Yes, and speaking about emotions, how leaders and people can identify how emotionally I don't know if I'm trying to find the right word how emotionally aware and effective they are. What are some of the signs? Like you mentioned, that maybe, if a leader cannot relate to the emotions of employees or teammates, what are some other signs that the person might not be as emotionally proficient as they'd like to be or as it can be beneficial to what they're trying to do?
Speaker 2Right. So all these things about us, I mean. Psychologists think that most human characteristics are along a bell curve, a natural distribution. So we all are that way, with all of these things. Some of us are more aware of our emotions than others and just in a natural way, of the way we're built. So it is. For some people it does take a fair bit of effort because it just doesn't naturally come up to them. So, but we're, we're always tuned into this. In other people, I mean communication theorists talk about 90 plus percent of what's communicated is communicated nonverbally, and that is people's emotions. You see that, and so sometimes it just takes a practice of starting to become aware, and you can become aware of your physical feelings.
Speaker 2You know a sense of tightness in your chest or in your neck or something which says you're feeling something and it's showing up physically. And then it just begins a practice of starting to ask yourself what am I feeling right now? Or why was I upset in the meeting that I just left right now, or why was I upset in the meeting that I just left? And taking that extra 10 minutes just to kind of begin to become self-aware and start to notice things. And as you do, you'll start to notice things in other people. You know the leaders that can quote, read the room really well. What they're reading is those emotional reactions that they're seeing in physical behavior of people.
Speaker 2And I had one leader tell me that his direct report was telling him, told him. He said stop screaming. And he said I know I was not screaming, I've worked hard on modulating my voice and I was not screaming. And he told her that. And she said your face was screaming. And he said you know you got me. Of course, you know I was upset about this, and so what would have been the best thing for him to say is I'm upset right now that being able to, when you can recognize what you're feeling and articulate it a lot of the energy that we're kind of trying to, you know, hold back. Our feelings gets dissipated by just the acknowledgement and the verbalization of it, and then you know it can be. Feelings gets dissipated by just the acknowledgement and the verbalization of it, and then you know it can be something you smile and laugh about, or something you're able to control and just show in a minor kind of way. But emotions really become problematic when we try not to recognize them and we try to push them down.
Speaker 1Yes, either in ourselves or other people, right Even. I feel like if someone is not great with maybe reading the exact emotional context, you can always ask right, well, it seems like you are experiencing, you know, a certain emotion and it's hard for me to read it right and the person will tell you more like why they're experiencing what they're experiencing and maybe what's the reason and why it's important.
Yeah, in the behavior chapter I talk about three complex behaviors and one of them is communication, and what you just talked about is this technique of metacommunication communicating about the communication. It's taking yourself out of the interaction for a moment and then commenting on it. So to say, I can't read your emotion, is commenting about what's going on in your interaction, or I'm feeling like we're off kilter with each other right now. I don't quite know why Any of those things are. Instead of just staying caught in it when you can remove yourself and pull yourself out of it and talk about it, you open up a whole new ability to be able to bridge the gap and improve the communication. Staying caught in it when you can remove yourself and pull yourself out of it and talk about it, you open up a whole new ability to be able to bridge the gap and improve the communication, and often it is around feelings or what's happening.
Speaker 1Yes, actually what I say. You introduce this new phrase into my vocabulary metacommunication, what I would usually say over-communicate. Whatever it is on your mind, all of your assumptions, just say it out loud so everyone can see it, and then you can actually communicate on the same level, versus like you say something and then you think something, and then somebody says something in reply to what they thought you said, but you never said it right and you have this. This, like several communication, only a couple of which are visible, and I found that when leaders start doing that, their just like ability to be effective with people goes several levels up.
Speaker 2Yeah, you know, I think that's an important step is that kind of overcommunication, like you said, to get more articulate about it, more thoughtful and strategic about it. And once you get good about all that, you don't have to overcommunicate, you can be strategic and maybe you decide to overcommunicate because you think that's what's going to work here, maybe you think maybe it's a negotiation and you don't really want to show all your cards.
Speaker 2Yeah, but, you have all that awareness that you just talked about going on in your head, and so then you're deciding. You know what do you want to share and what do you want to show and what do you want to hold back yeah, so that's, uh, that's the next level of awareness.
Speaker 1Instead of, yeah, having blind spots, you have all this, I would say, not extreme, but just very good clarity of what's happening. And also a little note about your book, as you tried, as you said, to introduce some sort of taxonomy or just different, I guess, vocabulary or the way to talk about these things. I feel like your book introduced so many of those like, also sub-layers of all right, this is, like you know, your emotional sort of proficiency and it has that many levels. Or, like, as we're going to talk about intellect, there are four types of intellect and this is how you can spot them and once you have this vocabulary, even that already makes you more aware of like these things exist, and then that gives you an ability to spot them in yourself or in other people.
Speaker 2Yeah, that's beautiful. And there's two things about what you just said that I hope happens with this book. One is that it does become part of everybody's vocabulary, you know, and you can say, oh, I think I just had an emotional blind spot there, or you can say that to somebody else, you know, is that an identity blind spot? And that this becomes just part of normal vernacular, like other kind of tools that have been in coaching and in psychology. And the other part of my writing the book is you know, I'm not a researcher.
Speaker 2I didn't, you know, have you know, 100 people go through some experiment to prove out these things in the chapters. It's my own, being a psychologist, with one person at a time and trying to really understand them, with one person at a time and trying to really understand them. And so my other hope is that people will read these chapters and say, well, you know, there really aren't four intellect, maybe it's six or maybe it's three, and maybe I could help generate, you know, a couple hundred PhD theses, that people, doctoral dissertations, that people try to really prove this out and see what works and what doesn't work, doctoral dissertations, that people try to really prove this out and see what works and what doesn't work. So I hope I'm kind of, as you said, kind of creating a map that people then can really try to, you know, make some sense out of.
Speaker 1Yeah, make sense out of and then build on it and then exactly bring more precision maybe into that.
Speaker 1But it definitely sparks curiosity and it's like oh, I didn't think about that this way. Now I do. So I want to explore more of that, and especially around intellect, as I already started talking about that. That, I think, was my favorite part, actually, because I think my biggest blind spot is actually in this arena. Since I was a kid I was praised for being smart, right, and I read a lot, I go through a lot of information really fast and I always thought that that is such a superpower. But then I did a few assessments and after reading your book especially, I'm like, ah, that was almost my to-go one tool that I tried to solve almost every problem, and that's not because all the other tools were not available or I wasn't aware of them, but it just became, as you said, such a super strength that it sort of eliminated everything else and I started using in every single case. So intellect let's talk about that and four types that you named there and how one can sort of support which one might be their dominant one and how do I?
Speaker 2do that, go ahead, yeah. So in this chapter, as in the others, as we're talking about, the idea is that we have certain about, you know, the idea is that we have certain strengths, we have certain default personality characteristics that we go to and, you know, realizing that what we think is natural and normal you know, everybody else has their own definition of what's natural and normal, and really being able to see that there's a broader perspective is helpful. So you know, psychology my profession is probably most responsible for getting this over-indexing on IQ and intelligence and what I call that horsepower in the chapter that that type of intelligence is certainly associated with high achievement in academic pursuits and and in and in much of life. But but I'm you know we all have people that we see rise to great success and they're they don't have that particular type of intelligence in the greatest degree, and so it's like what else is going on there? And so I think that type of processing and a lot of information and being able to really analyze that well is one type. The second type I talk about is processing speed, which you sound like you have that one as well which are people that are able to take all that information and do something with it in the moment, not like, okay, I need to go back and think about it and I'll come back with my answer later. That's horsepower without the speed, but the processing speed is people are able to really pull things together in a comprehensive way and articulate it kind of in the moment, and that clearly is another skill set. I worked a lot with venture capitalists who were really trying to understand business opportunities and they're very good at this processing speed very quickly.
Another type of intelligence is creative intelligence, and these are the people that often make these connections that other people don't see and that sometimes they just seem distracting, like what are you talking about? That has no relation to the problem we're trying to solve, but if you let them speak about it or sometimes they don't even really know how they made that connection but if they begin to process and articulate the connection, all of a sudden you start to see, oh, wow, there is something here that we're missing and what they're bringing in is really a, you know, often a game changer kind of way of looking at things. And then the fourth category is a little bit of a catch-all, but it's these people that I, you know, I call. You know, street savvy, street smarts, business acumen they're kind of head on a pivot. They're just always noticing all sorts of things going on.
Speaker 2Kind of emotional intelligence is certainly a part of this, but it's very, it's often very strategic. It's seen kind of the downstream implications of what's happening and the data they're pulling together and they may be just, you know, average in terms of kind of IQ type of intelligence, but they're really picking up on all sorts of other cues. So you know, my advice is try to figure out where your strengths are in those and realize that there are. The best decisions are probably made by inputs from all these different kinds of intellects and surround yourself with people that bring in all of this, and a leader who's constructing a team around them should try to identify people that have these different kinds of intelligence and bring them into the decision making and problem solving process. You know, if you just have the high horsepower people solving a problem, you'll get great analysis. But it may not actually fly in the light of day where the street savvy person could have helped you with, or it may miss something very big that the creative person could have helped you with.
Speaker 1Yeah, and I could definitely recognize myself, for example, that I probably don't have that much street smart, as you call it, because I have all these like strategic ideas and I see like I can analyze stuff, but actually getting stuff like done you know business wise as well not my thing and that's why probably I haven't built. You know such a great business been, and I think you know the saddest part about that is that you don't even see it, because when, once you are aware of it, you can use your intellect to work on it, but when you are not aware of it, it's like it's not working and you don't know why.
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean, you just articulated the whole thesis of the book, right?
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean you just articulated the whole thesis of the book, right? Yes, you know there's great leadership science out there and you and I could read about what's the best way to engineer a change management process at work, or something like that, and we can both take away the five or ten lessons out of that. But the impact of how we apply those is filtered through who we are in terms of our personality and you know you might overstress certain things in that I might overstress other things in that I might miss certain things in that change process because it just doesn't register as strongly for me, even though intellectually I get it. And so that's why this self-awareness is, in my mind, the most important leadership tool for a leader.
Speaker 1Yes, and speaking about that self-awareness right, you have this whole book. So how would you recommend leaders to approach the application of what's in the book, to increase that self-awareness and to put them in practice what they learn about themselves, about their possible blind spots?
Speaker 2Yeah, so it is exactly that. It's awareness and then action. I mean you mentioned before about how you feel good about when your clients make a connection. You help them see something, and that's very important. But that is just step one. When somebody says, oh, I understand now why I don't do that right or why that gets in my way, okay, but now what are you going to do about it? And often that's small things.
Speaker 2I've found that small changes, small tweaks, once we have self-awareness, can have a large change in our behavior. So first, I think people should approach this whole process with the idea that this is not about anything like transformation. You can't transform your personality anyway, nor should you. I mean, you're fine who you are. So it's figuring out where are those really?
Speaker 2It's really important places to make a small change often comes from sports and athletics, and if you look at what goes on with elite athletes, it's small tweaks that make a huge change. You know the golfer that changes his grip on the golf club a quarter of an inch and gets an extra 10 or 20 yards on his drive, or more precision. So that's what we're talking about. So first it's figuring out the awareness and then it's figuring out what change will have a different kind of impact on my leadership, what little change in my behavior will have an impact. So each chapter in the book has those two steps. It has a step of awareness and a step of action and they're just kind of more thought experiments.
Speaker 2Obviously I didn't write a how-to book because everybody's how-to is going to look different, but it's a good place to start. We also have developed a blindspotting test because if they are blindspotted it is hard for you to see them. So the blindspotting test it takes 10 minutes. It's based on a longstanding psychological, organizational psychology test. It's based on a longstanding psychological, organizational psychology test and it'll help give you it'll help, as you said earlier, have a compass to kind of point in the way of where you might be getting in your own way and having trouble.
Speaker 1And then it starts to give some pointers on what you can do about it, and I think you know, very important, at least in my mind, is understand what are you trying to achieve with that right? Because whatever you're aware of in yourself, it's like also in all of the stories in the book. You know some leaders that you work with, some founders or business owners. Yeah, they know things about themselves and they know that it might be hurting, but they're like that's fine. You know, I don't want to change anything about that. I feel like that is such an important thing to understand. Like where are you going in your life? And if you're already like getting everything you want, then maybe it's not a thing to change, right? So there should be like this motive to why do that in the first place.
Speaker 2Right, and sometimes the change is not changing yourself at all, but Right. And sometimes the change is not changing yourself at all, but just surrounding yourself with people, as I said earlier, with the intellect, that are complementary to you. So you don't have to make any change other than use that awareness to say I'm not that great in these particular kind of situations, or I tend to over index on a particular trait of mine, and so I need to kind of watch for that and I'm going to bring these people in when I you know, so that I don't make that kind of mistake again.
Speaker 1Yes.
Speaker 2We didn't talk about traits and just to give a real quick.
Speaker 1I forgot that.
Yeah, that's the most common area, right? That's what leadership books are full of. What are the leadership traits? And these are, as you said earlier, these are the strengths that we like about ourselves but often get overplayed, and so I tell people one way to get an idea of where that is. So you know if your super strength is you're confident, or you're decisive, or you're organized or you're creative, just put the modifier T-O-O in front of it. What happens when you're too creative? What happens when you're too organized? What happens when you're too decisive? And so and those are probably things that your partners or your friends often tell you about yourself that you're overplaying your strength and it doesn't work in certain situations.
Speaker 2So, with that awareness, you can start to say you know, what do I look like when I'm too decisive? You know well, I start to cut off communication. I say I'm done, I'm ready to move on. So you may not be aware that you're being too decisive, but you can be aware that when I start to cut conversation off, when I think I'm done, that's my little clue that I might be becoming too decisive and making a decision too early. And I can catch that sense in myself and then make that small little change of just saying all right, I'm not going to cut things off right now. I'm going to say to the person I'm talking to, let's continue this conversation a little bit more next week. I think I'm ready for a decision, but I need to think about it a little bit more and that little tiny tweak, you know, all of a sudden makes you appear not so overly decisive, not so dismissive of others.
Speaker 1Yeah, and probably helps you also to look perhaps into decisions with a little bit more deliberation or just to make, also because you know, like too decisive. I think I'm also on that side, and what account can play out in a negative sense is you're so decisive that you don't take enough time to actually consider all the possible downsides of your decision, right, and you make it. And then you're like oh, oh shoot, I did not consider all of these things deciding. And now on my side, I create for different decisions different timeframes, like, for example, buying decisions. I make certain buying decisions only on Saturday, right.
Speaker 1Or if I'm not sure about commitment, I usually say let me think about that, and I actually make decision in a couple of days after that, right, because I know that I'm more in the sense like a couple of days after that. Right, because I know that I'm more in the sense like yes, let's do this or no, and then my trigger it later. So I also call this practice of setting guardrails okay, you know that about yourself, right? So put the systems in place where you know you're not gonna do your best or exercise your best judgment.
Speaker 2And those are, that's beautiful. I mean, those are such small little changes, right, Do it on Saturday, you know, you know, say I'll think about it some more. I mean, these are, you're not changing your personality, you're changing those little tweaks in your behavior that then have these great results for you.
Speaker 1Yes, and again, like, I think this book is so amazing in a sense that it helps you to become like aware in these different areas your identity, your emotions, your traits, your intellect, about all these different things you didn't know you had possibly. And then that helps you to start looking at like, oh, maybe I'm not getting results because of this or that, but I think, like even when people just read the book, they will start seeing themselves in many different situations. Because I also want to mention to listeners that the book has so many stories and it's almost impossible not to see yourself in one of the stories if you have that, so that's also feel like such a brilliant way to write this book.
Speaker 2Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it's very story driven. I mean including my story at points and the stories of the people and and these, and I've had feedback that these are very relatable stories. You know, sometimes we read books that you know they've kind of tweaked this story to make it just fit their points so well and you'll read in the book. I mean, there's lots of people that don't make you know changes and that have problems here, and there's others that use coaching or other self-awareness to make an adjustment. So, yeah, people should see themselves and other people pretty clearly in all these different stories.
Speaker 1Yes, the book has again. It's so rich in information and practical value. There are also interesting things at least I found them very interesting around specific CEO behaviors or how like I never actually thought about that deeply about what behavior CEO should engage in and should not. Can you maybe speak to that as well, because, for example, listeners of this podcast many either in founder or transitioning to CEO and many leaders in general like, okay, now I'm in this more leadership position, what things should I do? So can you speak to those five activities or how do you call them? I forgot.
Speaker 2I was really influenced by an article I read that was oh, it's probably 20 years old at this point from AG Lafley, who was the CEO of Procter Gamble, and the title of the article was what Can Only the CEO Do? And it's that only word. And I found I've done a lot of work with entrepreneurs and leaders, and when I ask a leader that it's been so interesting how I get this like I've never really thought about that. The only part means in your role, what is only your role can do this. So it applies for other roles as well, and I think for the CEO, and many of these five apply to most of the other roles too.
Speaker 2There's five things that only the CEO can do. First, the CEO is the only person that can actually pick their team. So if HR picked their team or if they inherited a team, then they are not exercising that thing that only they can do. Do they really have the right people around them? And because, as I've said earlier here, we all have our own different personalities, the right people around you and the right people around me are going to be different. So that's one.
Speaker 2Number two is the CEO is the champion of the culture of the company.
Number two is the CEO is the champion of the culture of the company, and it doesn't mean they do culture things all the time, but that they own it in their brain and how they carry themselves at work and outside of work, and what initiatives that they push and how communication appears, all those things are about culture and culture is so powerful in companies.
Speaker 2So, knowing that only the CEO really owns the culture at the top, the three priorities for this year and for next year, and owning those and knowing that those are really only up to the CEO, and finally, there are certain relationships that only the CEO owns, that you know the board, certain key customers, maybe government regulators, whoever it might be, and if you, you know, if you defer those to your or delegate those to your sales team to meet with these important customers, and that customer wants to talk to only the CEO for certain things. And you need to know that and be very thoughtful. And so you can look at your calendar and say, if I look at my calendar, am I covering these five things that I know only I can do, or is my calendar filled up with other activities where I'm really, you know, adding value? For sure, but I'm neglecting these five things that I really should be taking care of, and either somebody else is doing them or it's not getting done.
Speaker 1And I think that that is such a key thing to understand in general in any position in leadership like what are the key things that only I can do? And prioritize those first on your calendar before any other activities. And that's where I feel like it's not only applicable to CEOs, but also to anyone in a leadership position asking themselves this question like what are the things that only I can do in this position? And then prioritize that. So it began in another such a great piece in the book. And so, margie, I want to be mindful of your time. I could be talking to you about the content of the book for ages, but you have other things to do. To conclude our episode, a couple of things Homework for our listeners. I always like to give our listeners homework. How do you approach diving into the book and then taking it to more practical level, what people should do? Let's say they read the book. What are the next couple of steps that you would like them to take?
Speaker 2Yeah, I mentioned in the first chapter of the book that I think you can read the book in different ways. You could read it all the way through and just kind of maybe take middle notes or underscore certain things that you want to come back to, and the book has a appendix in the back of all the. You know I had these six areas and I have probably 60 or more blind spots listed. So you can do that. You can then go back and say I want to open that identity chapter again and that resonated for me. Or you can read the book and stop when you get to something that really resonates for you and dig deeper into it, and again, at the end of each chapter there are some questions to get you thinking more about it.
Speaker 2So those are, I think, a couple ways to turn the book into some kind of an action way for you. We've created it with. Some colleagues have created a website, blindspottingcom, and so we have a lot of more content there. Some other ways to begin to think about all this that assessment that I mentioned, where you can take an assessment to try to understand your blind spots. You can find that on blindspottingcom as well. So those are a few areas to kind of take action.
Speaker 1Yeah, it's amazing, a few areas to kind of take action. Yeah, it's amazing this I'm going to link all the stuff that you mentioned, the website. Also I'm going to link the assessment, the book. Another question that I have what is the success? We kind of already briefly talked about that, but maybe could you say again what in your mind is success for this book, for this venture that the book is. Let's say, we're talking in three, five years, where would you like to see go and what impact, I guess, to create?
Speaker 2Yeah, so the books, when you and I are doing this podcast. The book's been out for two weeks at this point, so it's all brand new and I'll give you kind of a non answer answer, I guess. But I this is my first book and you know people say, isn't it like you know? Or there's the thing of it's like you know, you birth a child or something, and it's more like you have created a child that's now become independent.
The book is doing things that I mean it's an, it's a physical, it's not an organic thing, but it's just been. I mean it sparked all sorts of ideas in you and in other people and I guess I'm almost more curious just to see what happens. I hope it's very useful in that kind of way you and I spoke about kind of a map, a taxonomy, a way to begin to organize your thinking, just make things so it's not all just kind of a buzzing confusion, it kind of points people in directions and I'm just very curious to see where it goes. I've got there's one organization, a good-sized company, a half a billion dollar privately held company, that has really embraced it and it's become part of the vernacular in the company. They're using it all sorts of ways, blind spotting, and so I think there might be a bit of a contagion effect in some ways, because I think it is very approachable and people just understand it intuitively. And so I'm just curious to see how people are going to be using it, and I hope they do.
Speaker 1Yes, I'm sure they will do. You know, I'm going to be one of the facilitators to make sure that more people use it. You actually sparked one question that I feel is important. You mentioned the organization that is using your book. How would you suggest, let's say, a leader is listening to this podcast and they have a team or they lead a whole organization, how would you suggest they use the book inside their organization to help the concepts in the book to create more effective teams and people?
Speaker 2Yeah. So back to that question of what can only the leader do and I mentioned about the culture things start with the leader. So if a leader is engaged with the book and finds it really useful a leader is engaged with the book and finds it really useful I think they can start with themselves and say here's what I learned about myself. You know, I get a lot of questions about how do you give feedback effectively, and there's some guidelines in the book and lots of things about that. But it starts with you sharing about yourself, and so the leader can say here's what this book has meant to me and here's what I've learned about myself and I've noticed.
Speaker 2I think I have this blind spot and I want to and here's what I'm doing to to not have it affect my leadership in an adverse way, and can you all help me with that, hold me accountable point, help point it out to me. So, just even beginning with that kind of a conversation, and then I think you know, then the next step and I wouldn't rush this, it would be I would like everybody to read the book in my team right here and have us have an exercise where we all do this kind of sharing and we all help each other and hold each other accountable. And actually we're working on a team report from the blind spotting test where a team can say where are our team blind spots? You know where are we. So I think I mean I think that'll evolve, but I think that would be a good beginning step for a leader and it should be fun, quite frankly. I mean the stories are interesting and fun and, as I said, it should be these small tweaks, so this isn't a huge lift for people to do.
Speaker 1Yeah, maybe also a suggestion if somebody has a book club in their company Like I'm, a part, for example, one of the book clubs with a HR group of people, right, and we have our monthly book club so I would suggest the book for sure, so that I think another great way to engage with the contents of the book just make it a part of the book club and then discuss and then all kinds of ideas will spark how one can apply it in the organization. So that's that. And the last question, where you want people to go and connect with you you know, besides your work I'm going to link the website and everything but also with you personally what are the best ways people can follow you and your work?
Speaker 2Yeah, sure, Thank you. I have an author website, martindubincom, and you can find me there. I'm posting events and podcasts and other things speaking that I'm doing and I'm on LinkedIn, so any of those places would be great places. And yeah, and I enjoy that. I've been getting feedback from people about how they're using the book and we can have a collaboration at a distance in that way.
Speaker 1Yes, so I'm gonna link all of this in the show notes as well. Highly recommend people to connect with you on LinkedIn and website whatever social media you have and just follow the journey of you and your work, and I'm sure it's going to unfold in so many beautiful ways, especially with AI and everything that you can do with it these days to spread your work to more people. So, Martin, again thank you so much for doing the work, for writing the book. It's been a pleasure to also talk with you, so thank you so much. Really appreciate what you've done here.
Speaker 2Thank you, Ange. It was a lovely conversation. Thank you.
Speaker 1Thank you.