Good Leaders in Turbulent Times − with Martin Farrell

In this episode we explore what it means to lead with authenticity, courage, compassion and wisdom when the pressure is on. Our guest, Martin Farrell, author of Good Leaders in Turbulent Times, shares insights from six decades working for and with civil society organizations including the Red Cross and Save the Children.

Through the metaphor of coffee roasting—the “second crack” that releases a bean’s full flavor—Martin reminds us that it’s often the heat of turbulence that helps leaders grow, if they have the courage to face it.

Highlights

• The heat transforms: Growth happens in challenge, not comfort. Leaders evolve by facing turbulence, not avoiding it.
• Authenticity matters: Good leadership begins with self-awareness and alignment between inner and outer worlds.
• Avoidance fuels crisis: Many problems stem from ignoring early signals. Awareness and reflection are the antidotes.
• Listen to learn: Deep listening and “thinking partners” help leaders see what they can’t see alone.
• From ego to eco: Real wisdom comes from seeing oneself as part of a larger whole—organization, community, planet.
• Three enduring qualities: Compassion, courage, and wisdom form the foundation for leading well in uncertain times.

Reflection questions

• When I’m going through turbulent times as a leader, what are the signals I might be missing — or perhaps don’t want to see? How can I stay more open to them?
• So even if there is a crisis, how can I create space for reflection and ask myself, “What’s really going on here?”
• And whatever the outcome, success or failure, ask: what can I learn from it, and how can that learning become part of who I am as a leader?
• How can I turn discomfort or pain from crisis, into fuel for growth, rather than something to resist or suppress?

About Martin Farrell

He is an author and long-time international facilitator with over 60 years’ experience in civil society organizations. His book ‘Good Leaders in Turbulent Times’ is available through major booksellers.

Learn more at martinfarrell.org

Martin has also published leadership articles on his Substack

About Second Crack
More information about us and our work is available on our website: secondcrackleadership.com. Contact us now to explore how we can support your leadership development in a company-wide initiative or with individual executive coaching: hello@secondcrackleadership.com.
 
Connect with us on LinkedIn:
Martin Aldergård
Gerrit Pelzer

Transcript

Ep 51 Good Leaders in Turbulent Times, with Martin Farrell

[00:00] Martin F: It's a deeper kind of acceptance, which then leads to the next stage, which is embracing it. You do something about it. You don't just accept and kind of collapse in a heap or feel depressed about it. And as a leader if you do that, it's incredibly powerful because what the action that you take as an individual leader will impact on your team of 12 people, of your organization of a hundred people, of your organization of a thousand, 5,000 or whatever people, which is why leadership is such a privilege to have that kind of impact. 

[00:45] Gerrit: Dear listeners, a warm welcome to a new episode of Second Crack - The Leadership Podcast. If you're new to the show, this is where we explore complex leadership dilemmas and paradoxes, and where we invite you as our listeners to self-reflect. I'm Gerrit Pelzer. I work as an executive coach, and I bring to my coaching a combination of Western science and Asian wisdom.

Joining me today as always is my dear friend and business partner, Martin Aldergard. Martin specializes in driving change and transformation within organizations, and what we both have in common is that we always put people at the center of our work. Hi Martin. It's great to be recording with you again.

[01:31] Martin A: Hi, Gerrit. Yes, likewise, and today we will talk about a topic that is very close to our heart, and actually also the essence of Second Crack, and how I can develop as a leader especially when we are in difficult situations and there is a lot of pressure.

[01:51] Gerrit: Yeah. To help us do this, we have a wonderful guest on the show, Martin Farrell. He is in his sixth decade of working with and for civil society organizations, like the Red Cross, Save the Children, and a myriad of community organizations. He has worked with young offenders, in mental health, with refugees, and over 20 years ago he started working independently with his company, "Get 2 the Point", as an international facilitator and coach. Martin, it's wonderful to have you on the show. Welcome.

[02:27] Martin F: It's a pleasure to be here, a pleasure to be here.

[02:31] Gerrit: One of the reasons why we're talking today is that a book that you wrote got our attention. It's "Good Leaders in Turbulent Times, how to Navigate Wild Waters at Work". And I was thinking, wow, you know, it's really so close to, as Martin said, close to our heart where we talk about these dilemmas leaders are facing every day. I see with my clients, every leader is under huge pressure. We could also say they are "in the heat" and I think that is what also resonated very well with you, the, the heat that leaders sometimes need to go through to grow.

[03:14] Martin F: Correct. " Second Crack", I thought, what is this, what is this to do with the leadership? And then I looked on your lovely website and it immediately became clear. And that's the frame that I will use for this conversation. And certainly starting with the first crack, which I understood and took to be the nature of that coffee bean. They're all different, of course.

[03:40] Gerrit: Maybe we should make this reference: so the Second Crack refers to the coffee roasting process. So when you roast coffee beans you hear two different cracks. And the second one is, what should we call it, the one way you get the full flavors.

[03:55] Martin F: Yes. Thank you. And so we'll be talking a lot, I think about the Second Crack, the title of your podcast. But the first crack I think is also relevant here.

[04:06] Gerrit: Hmm.

[04:07] Martin F: we think of leadership, whilst as human beings, we have much more in common than divides us, there are things which are different. And we may aspire to be various kinds of leaders. The kind of leaders that you may aspire to be may be different from the kind of leader that I'm aspiring to be. And I think that's a good starting point. As you said, I've spent in, I'm now in my sixth decade of working with civil society organizations. It seemed obvious to me when I was a teenager that I needed to do good stuff. I needed to work with people, I wanted to be in charities. At that time, I didn't know quite what that meant, and I certainly didn't know that now, you know, 50, 60 years later, I would still be doing it or being doing it now in a way which fits, that fits my age and also the Age. So I'm doing it in a different way as listeners would see if they went to my website. But that was also a question that I asked when I was doing some training on authentic leadership, I want to talk here about authentic leadership. And there's some training locally, and I asked people, I put up a series of types of leadership styles. Coaching styles, supportive styles, strategic style,servant leadership, democratic, and so on. And they said, oh. And I said a little bit about each one without overthinking it, which one, which ones do you go for? And everybody had three dots. And they put the dots there and they came up with the, the, the coaching style, supportive, strategic. In that, of, in that order, no one said, I want to be a bureaucratic leader. No one said, I want to be an autocratic leader. And we see enough autocratic leaders around the world. They were all people working in charities, the local charities, fairly small charities, and they all were focusing on those kind of leadership styles. 

And what I think that does is that it opens you to some difficulty. Because being authentic is difficult, but I would propose that being phony and being false is even harder. So being authentic that is being true to yourself, knowing your inner world at the same time as engaging with the outer world is really hard. But pretending the whole time and being phony is harder work. So those charity leaders had a hard job, which is why they were coming to the training that I was offering to help them work through the challenges that they had, which they were, if I can put it this way, taking too heart. 

[07:05] Martin A: hmm. But, but this also then leads to the Second Crack, right? 

[07:08] Martin F: Quite so. Quite so because with the Second Crack, which involves heat and particular kind of heat for a particular length of time to make the coffee bean just to bring out its full potential, that particular type of coffee bean to bring its full potential, I think heat can also help us come to our highest future possibility.

What is it that would be the greatest thing, the best thing that I could do to fully express myself and to serve those teams, those organizations that I'm working with. So I think the heat metaphor works very well. There's a difference, however, which is, I've never done coffee roasting, I have to say. But I have a neighbor and a very good friend who's very, very keen on good coffee. So just a few steps from where I'm recording this now, But you can control all that. You control the heat, you control the length of time. In an organization you don't control it in that way. Yes, you have an influence. Certainly you have an influence, but you do not control. So things can quite frequently go wrong. There's too much heat or too long or in the wrong bits. Um, and it's those things which the characters in this book could lead us in turbulent times have experienced.

If I may, I would, may I just give a little bit of an idea of the structure of the book? It's slightly idiosyncratic. Well, it is idio idiosyncratic and I think somewhat unusual. There are nine characters, civil society characters. A chair of a charity, chief executives of charities, a founder, and so on. And it tells the story over seven years. Let's start with chapter two. Chapter Two is when it's called 'Wild Wednesdays'. That's when they're in the greatest heat. There is heat on them, it's all gone wrong. Each of those nine broadly unknown to each other, they're not in one team, they are separate stories. Although in chapter One, which was one year earlier, before the Wild Wednesdays, and there are signs bubbling up. There are things happening in their professional lives which they are not noticing and they're not reacting to. Which is why they ended up in chapter Two, the Wild Wednesdays, by which it had all gone wrong, and they're all in deep crisis. Chapter Three is a year later when they are beginning to digest the learning from their crisis, and chapter Four is five years later, which is when they've integrated their learning. No one has died. People have, everybody's had a hard time, but people have integrated and learned, and if I may put it this way, become the best coffee bean they can be.

[09:56] Martin A: Hmm.

[09:57] Gerrit: They've used that heat, the situation which they allowed themselves to drift into, to really learn to be a stronger and a better leader. There are, however, five chapters. The fifth chapter is different. The fifth chapter has the testimony from, or the learning I should say, from 12 real leaders. They're all anonymized. People I've supported and who have said, we wish to contribute to your book, we want to pass on some of our learning from our own pain. So I, and they, we collaborated to write their stories and specifically their learning to pass on. So they're the real leaders. So the chapter, chapter one is on a Tuesday, the Wild Wednesdays is on a Wednesday, the digesting is on a Thursday, the integration is on a Friday. And the chapter five I just spoken about, it's on a Monday. It's a new week, a new beginning, a new possibility. Throughout the book, there are 138 nuggets of advice. Nuggets of wisdom if you like. And there's also 41 cool cartoons from Steven Applebee who is described as an absurdist cartoonist. Who speaks of what you see and speaks of what you don't see. So that lightens up the page and also informs the story so people can learn, not just from the bits of advice that I put in, but from seeing the parallels in their experience with the experience of the people in that book. I, I really like the structure with the weekdays and the word that got my attention was the 'learning' because I think we can't avoid the difficult situations in personal life and professional life. But the question is always, what can I learn from it? And it goes back to the heat that we mentioned earlier. You know, sometimes we, we need the heat as unpleasant as it may be, we need it to grow and to develop our full flavor, so to say. So I'm curious, what can people learn from your experience and the experience the people in the book had?

[12:05] Martin F: Yes. Well, the first thing that comes to mind is avoidance. That I perhaps you probably we all have the tendency to avoid those things, which are uncomfortable. Whether it's a relationship with another person at work, whether it's something that's happening in the team, whether it's, oh, you know, the money seems to be running out. Well, you know, it'll properly turn around. Whatever it is. Our tendency is to push it to one side. We may of course, get involved in heavy drinking or other ways, which just blot our mind out. 

 But we have ways of avoiding. I had experience when I was chair of a charity, and I can admit this, where we, the money was going down and we knew, and we didn't take the urgent action that was needed. We did take the urgent action that was needed when, if I can use the metaphor of plane coming down, running outta fuel or whatever, or, and just tipping the tops of the trees. Then we took off again. So we, the organization survived, but we had months of struggle and we could have done that better if we noticed what was happening and acted on it earlier. So I think that's the first thing. There's two characters in the book. One is the chair and one is the chief executive of the same organization. The chief executive is a newly appointed chief executive, after the founder chief executive who'd been there 25 years. Always a red flag. Very difficult to take over from someone who's always been there. And half the board was criticizing the chief executive, he had to leave the chair had approved his appointment and saw the qualities that he had. It was a potentially destructive situation. What happened was wonderfully, and this is absolutely true to life, that both of them decided we need to get together. We are gonna talk about this. We are gonna model the conversation that should have been happening some while ago. We are gonna make that happen now.

And they both did and they found a way of working with that particular mix, that particular history of that organization, a youth organization which had been going for 25 years. And a particular quality of the chief executive who loved to be in front of the camera and was pushing everybody else outta the way, but they, they came to an understanding about the separate roles that they could each take and how they could work together. And they modeled that working together, which then calmed the situation.

[14:43] Martin A: I'm hearing wonderful things here around avoidance. And one thing I'm hearing is they took out their egos. They found a joint purpose where they both were passionate, or they felt a lot that the importance of the purpose of what they were doing was, was bigger than their own personal egos, so they could find a way together. I'm also hearing role modeling. Role modeling the conversation that should happen across the organization. I'm, I'm also hearing avoidance might be one is: we don't know because we are not aware of it, we don't see the signal. And the other point is we avoid it because we, we know it's happening, but we don't want to deal with it. So, so there might be also two things there to unpack, both the signals and then how do we talk about it.

[15:39] Martin F: Unpacking, let's do that. And Gerrit, your question was, 'what are the things that don't go right?' And I say, well, not noticing, not acting. And I think there's another thing which we can add to that, which is feeling a sort of general discomfort and just not reacting to that because it's not that bad, we get used to it. Maybe it's like, you know, you've got a slightly sore leg, but you kind of get used to walking that way every day. You kind of forget about it. If you try to run, then it hurts. It hurts. So you kind of get used to that discomfort. I've found it massively helpful in my career to have people to talk with, people who listen. I was, I was going to say blessed, is that overdoing it I don't know. Anyway, very fortunate, that, Nancy Klein, who some people, listeners may know of, was my coach for 14 years, and she listens. She listens, and she listens intently and then offers some advice after a two hour coaching session where I'm talking, talking, talking, including one where actually I cried the whole time, including one where I was silent the whole time. She had that capacity to help me notice what I could not notice myself by that form of, I think she's calling it 'generative attention' generative attention, so really paying attention. 'Beyond the ears' the term I heard from Raquel Ark, who also runs a podcast. And beyond the ears, so you are listening deeply. So if you listen deeply. Yes, to others. Yes to yourself. You may well come up with some discomfort. You may well come up with things you would prefer to avoid and turn away from. My experience is if you, if you first of all, notice those and if you then accept them, 'this is the situation. I prefer to be in a situation where it isn't like this, but no, I accept it.' But this isn't the kind of acceptance where you say, 'oh God, well okay, I'll just have to get used to' it kind of acceptance. It's a deeper kind of acceptance, which then leads to the next stage, which is embracing it. Embracing it, which means that you do something with it. You do something about it. You don't just accept and kind of collapse in a heap or feel depressed about it. You then take some action about it. And I think it works when you embrace what is happening in a team. And as a leader if you do that, it's incredibly powerful because what the action that you take as an individual leader will impact on your team of 12 people, of your organization of a hundred people, of your organization of a thousand, 5,000 or whatever people, which is why leadership is such a privilege to have that kind of impact. Uh, I'd like to pick up the point on ego if I I may My working hypothesis, my proposition is that those leaders who put their ego in first place will damage more than they heal. They'll hurt more than they help, because their primary motivation is to feed their own ego, to feel good about themselves. So the rest of us become material for their ego massage or ego reinforcement. And my my observation is that that is dangerous, it may produce a short term result. It may be, wow yes, we can be angry, I feed my ego and something good happens short term. But I don't think that is one which will stand the test of time. And we can look at the international situation and think that might be the case. So Otto Scharmer, U theory may be known to some listeners, uses the convenient 'ego to eco'. So eco is, as I said a moment ago, looking more broadly. Looking more broadly in time, both to the past and then to the future, maybe we come to that future, how one can look to the future, but also looking more deeply in space. So it's not my organization, big organization, five, 10,000 people, 60,000 people, but that's tiny in relation to life on the planet. So there would be some kind of recognition of that broader, if you like, the ecology that I'm part of, one person, I'm part of that ecology of eight point something billion people in the world and of all the living beings and so on, and I think that is really strong to have that perspective.

[20:38] Gerrit: I'm still thinking about what we said earlier about recognizing the signs, and I loved how you introduced the book. You actually started with chapter Two where the crisis already happened, and you said chapter One is a year earlier, and I think you used an expression like 'things were bubbling up'. And Martin Aldergard gave the example of the different kinds of avoidance. 

 And I, I wonder if you have maybe a specific example about what people have learned from going through the heat of a crisis? 

[21:13] Martin F: I think of one character. As I say, these are true to life, they're not real characters. But it brings to mind a real person character in the book brings to life a real person who, in that person's struggle was basically saying, 'I can fix this. I can fix this.' You know, it's, there was someone from a local authority who was inappropriately behaving on the board and there was, boundaries were getting very mixed up and overstepped. That person spent, as I recall, a couple of years, three years, fighting that, fighting that, fighting that, trying to say, I can do this, I can do this, and then said, I can't do this. That person might have discovered that or acknowledged that, accepted that, and embrace that a year earlier and save themselves a lot of pain. A person then went on to another job, which actually was wonderful, was a fantastic board, a great mission, and that they discovered after six months that they had not sufficiently processed it because they were then, as a leader of that organization, were then struggling under the pressure of even relatively small challenges of a staff challenge. So they, at that point, decided to leave even though the job was ideal in many ways, and went to a job which was much easier. Well, first of all, gave themselves half a year or a year to recover, and then went to a much easier job and then started building up, building up again from that base of recovery, which also reminds me that's a real person. It also reminds me of what happened to me after I'd been made redundant from the Red Cross, which was very painful. And then went to an organization, which I dunno why I took the job, but I did. And I lasted two years. Um, and I needed recovery time. So I learned to give myself that recovery. And that's when I started "Get2thepoint", the consultancy, and actually it was an easier situation, so I gave myself recovery time in order then to start flying.

 There is no quick fix, but if you have someone alongside you, as I had, and as all of us could, can have, then it's, it is possible to find a way through this situation and then to integrate it, not just to digest it, not just to cope with it today, but to really integrate it into my way of being so that I'm different next time round.

Hmm. I'm interpreting this as, as this journey towards your Second Crack as a leader, sometime you need to realize that just pushing on and leading in the same way that I'm doing, that has brought me so far, is not going to be the right thing. It doesn't work. And, and the faster you can face this, so to say truth, the faster you can start to work on it. And then of course the solutions might be different. I personally believe so much in collective wisdom of an organization. So if we as leaders can drop our ego, be authentic, be vulnerable, then you can also unleash this power from within the organization. And, and you don't need to stand at the top of the organization with all the answers and feeling the pressure to fix every problem. Invite your teams to help you. Maybe I could offer another story, which I think has relevance here. 'Cause I think, there's three words are pretty important. Compassion and Courage and Wisdom, which play, it's not everything, but it plays, well I think with the nature of leadership. And that compassion, under that one can put a, a number of things. And the story comes to mind of my first day at the Red Cross some decades ago when the chief executive Nick Young said, "Martin, I'm going to take you to lunch first day, or to take you to lunch." Oh. Very good. Anyway, it was fish and chips in the basement. It wasn't exactly a five star, you know, meal somewhere, so it was pretty basic. But I was so excited just from what he was saying. He in that moment was able to convey the vision of the change that was going through. So the compassion, the "passion with" was conveyed to me at that point. And I thought, "yes, I'm absolutely gonna do this and it's fantastic and it's wonderful to be working with this leader because he is able to convey to me his passion so that I have that passion with him." Also, I often think of, I forget which management guru it was, it's probably many decades ago that said, oh, you know, I get paid all this money to be a management consultant, blah, blah, blah. But this is my advice: send thank you cards. And I think that's very, it's, it's a bit too faci, maybe it's facile. Um, but I remember when I got, I, as I'm giving a lot of examples from the Red Cross, but anyway, they come to mind. I'd being asked additionally, in addition to all the other things I was doing, to run a refugee program. This was in the time of Yugoslavia and the Bosnian crisis, and the organization got money and it landed on my desk at five o'clock on a Friday afternoon to set up refugee reception centers, which I did. And a couple of years later, I got a card from the then director general, the chief executive saying, thank you, Martin. It's great. You've done really good work. And that stayed on my desk for the rest of the time that I was there. That took one minute, probably maybe a secretary said, here's a card. Just write it out. I don't know. But it really worked that I was recognized and that that leader sent a thank you card. So I think if you feel the thanks in you, if it's authentic in you, it's very good to say 'thank you' and to send a card. Not just to say thank you in the corridor, but to send a card, send thank you cards, because you're chiming with the person. You have some idea of what they might be experiencing when they receive that card. 

Hmm. So I think compassion is pretty important. And alongside that, I think courage comes into this.I was just recently looking at the story of Sir Ernest Shackleton, which some listeners may be aware of. About a hundred years ago, an attempt to get to the South Pole over, over land, of course. And the ship got stuck in ice. So the story, this was the story of his leading people, his 27, him and 27 men off the ice, which he succeeded in doing. And I understand from the reading that I did that his entire mission had changed. It was to get to the South Pole. He was then decided, no, my mission now is to get all my men, home alive. And he was very concerned about their mental welfare and in a whole variety of ways was working with them, chiming with them. In a whole range of ways. For example, at seven o'clock every evening, everybody had to come together to, they played games and they did all sorts of things on this ship, which eventually sank, and then they survived by being on the ice. So this seemed to be enormous amount of courage, which probably none of the rest of us would ever get close to having to, to face. But his approach was not to be tough and you know brutal with it, but was to look after the inner world of the individuals who he had decided he would get to freedom. 

And I was struck that he had conversations with himself, quote, so he would take time every day to think to himself. He was writing a journal, so this is documented. He had conversations with himself. There were one or two confidants that he spoke with, to help him be sure that he was on the right track. He also did a smart thing, which was the handful of men who were disruptive and who were going to wreck the whole mission of getting them home. He brought them into his tent. He didn't have them separate, he brought them into his tent. You know the saying, be close to your friends and be even closer to your enemies. So get alongside them, chime with them. And as a leader, that's so important. There will always be people who are not quite chiming with you. Whether they're enemies or not is another matter, but be close to them. Bring them into your tent.

So wisdom, as I've said already, is to do with a broader perspective, both in time and in space. I had direct experience of that. It was a training situation, learning constellations. And there was, the example was of an organization which was currently struggling. I'm going to abbreviate this for the sake of time. I was chosen to represent the founder and I then chose where I would stand in that quite big room. And I chose to sit right over in the corner and I was 140 years old. And I was probably the oldest person in the room. And the play went on a very ablely facilitated to shift the dynamic, the current dynamic, and so on which happened. And I, in that constellation training session, started feeling so furious. I mean, I was sweating. I was, I was, my heart was beating 'cause I was being forgotten as the founder. The trainer, very wisely and wonderfully said when it was all finished he said: now let's see what our founder, let's see what our founder has got to say. I, I won't use the language now, but I used some quite strong language about being ignored and forgotten and how could they do that? And yeah, so shouting across the room, it was a wonderful moment, I could tell you. And then they said, "well, what do you want?" I said, I don't want to do the work you're doing, I'm 140 years old. This is just, I can't do that anymore. But what I want is you Chief Executive and new Chair as leaders of this organization occasionally to look in my direction, give a nod in my direction, mention my name as the founder, and it shifted the dynamic of what the people were doing. It certainly changed my feeling, and I think that was a little example of wisdom. Well, both from the trainer, that was skill, but also wisdom from the leader and the chair, who would then in that very real constellation training session, which emotionally, you know, the emotion was quite high, would then look to me, and I think it's very good to do that. It seems irrelevant, it seems a bit woo woo, a bit silly, a bit fluffy. But it has real power. And if you don't do that, then that the, the founder is gonna carry on sort of digging. It's going, it's a disjunction, so it needs to happen. Many other forms of wisdom. But you ask for a story, there's a little story.

[32:56] Gerrit: Beautiful. And it, it sounds to me like we have these three pillars, compassion, courage, and wisdom on a foundation of authenticity. And thank you so much for sharing your wisdom, Martin. And typically we wrap up each episode with some reflection questions and is there anybody who would like to go first?

[33:20] Martin A: I have one thing that has stuck with me from this episode is this concept of signals, and so my reflection question is: when I'm going through turbulent times as a leader, what are the signals that I might be missing, or what are the signals that I don't want to see, or that I don't want to act so that I start to avoid them? How can I start to be more open to receiving and taking in those signals? Because to me that seems like a starting point of the personal transformation that is needed for a leader to take on change.

[34:03] Gerrit: Yeah, we've, we have been doing this for too long together, we start thinking alike, I had a very similar question around this because I think this is really so important. Because the signs, the signals, they are there and for whatever reason, we don't notice them or we don't want to notice them. And maybe just to add, not so much as a, as a question, but maybe on how to approach it. I think a, a word that I also heard today and also is a pattern throughout all our episodes is the reflection. So even if there is a crisis, find the time to reflect and ask also this question: "what's really going on here"? And as Martin Farrell said so nicely, maybe you want a thinking partner in your corner for this. 

And the, the other question that was on my mind was around learning. So when we go through this heat, when we are in the wild waters at work, whatever the outcome is, right, whether I had a say relatively good outcome or even a great outcome, or even if I have to say, well, we've kind of failed here, there's always this question, "what can I learn from this?" I think that is very powerful and it also links again to reflection 

To the other. Martin, any, any reflection question you would like to add? 

[35:26] Martin F: Well, a reflection. I've got a couple of other things. I don't know if these are reflection, well reflection of everything we've said about that it's quite possible as it were, to take the challenge, whether it's pain or just difficulty, and turn that into the fuel that we use. And I don't think that's just fanciful, I think that could happen. Pain to fuel, or challenge to fuel. 

[35:51] Gerrit: I think that's not fanciful at all, I think that's extremely powerful. And if people who listen to the podcast feel, "wow, you know, it's really interesting", how can they get in touch with you? How can they find your book? 

[36:04] Martin F: Well, they could look at my website, martinfarrell.org. I just recently refreshed it to update it for my current offer. I, I'm there for people who are working for justice, decency, sustainability. That's what I've done all my life. And I'm still doing that, and those people who are doing that, it's always been difficult. And now the whole environment is even more difficult. And so my proactive career is over, but my vocation continues and I'm doing it in a different way. I'm doing it in a way which fits my age. I'm in my mid seventies, well, 75, that's about mid seventies, isn't it, 75, befits my age and The Age, capital T, capital A, because I don't wanna just sit around in the garden. Well, I do want to sit in the garden, but I don't want to just do that and ignore what's happening 'cause that would be painful for me. So I want to do something which fits with my energy and my capacities, and where I can bring my skill to bear, wisdom if I've got any. And the book I'll say about in just a moment perhaps.

[37:11] Martin A: That's, that's wonderful, and we will put the links in the description of this episode. 

[37:17] Martin F: Good. And the book from Practical Inspiration Publishing. Go there, go to bookshops, of course it's online as well. It's in all sorts of places. 

[37:25] Gerrit: Fantastic. We will, we'll certainly put all these links into the session notes. Thank you everybody for a wonderful discussion. And this concludes today's episode. If you would like our support in, for instance, developing your leaders, be that in the company-wide initiative or through individual executive coaching, please do not hesitate to contact us via hello@secondcrackleadership.com, that's all in one word. And if you enjoy the podcast, please remember to subscribe and tell a friend about it. And if you could leave a positive comment or rating, we would certainly appreciate that. 

Bye for now.