Extraordinary Leaders - A special series on becoming remarkable - Episode 3

Extraordinary Leaders - A special series on becoming remarkable 

This is a 3 episode podcast special.

In each episode I share the answers to three big questions I have had about leadership over the last 35 years:

• What is leadership, and what is the extraordinary version of it that achieves more and has greater impact?
• What are the most important skills and techniques that allow these extraordinary leaders to be more effective and successful?
• How do these remarkable everyday leaders grow from ordinary to extraordinary? 

Episode 3:  The becoming of extraordinary leaders

In this last of a three-episode series on extraordinary leadership, I share the deep work that leaders must do if they are to grow fully into their potential to become extraordinary.  

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Take Care, Lead Well. 

Transcript

 It's not about the ordinary. We've got enough of that. It's about the extraordinary. And we need more.



 Hi there, I'm Gerard Penna, and welcome to the Xtraordinary Leaders Podcast. Where we spend time with recognised leaders and global experts, exploring the art and science of remarkable leadership.



 Hi and welcome back to the Xtraordinary Leaders Podcast. I'm Gerard Penna and I am your host. This is episode three of a special three-part series about extraordinary leaders and extraordinary leadership. In the first two episodes, we examine the difference between ordinary patterns of leadership and a more extraordinary pattern, which we named Catalyst Leadership. That unique combination of strength and warmth that when put together produces leadership, which is capable of doing more, achieving more, producing more, because it releases the energy, the commitment, the engagement, the capability and the potential of other people. If leadership is about influencing and mobilising other people, our ability to release the energy, the engagement, the capability, the commitment and the potential of other people is the ingredient that largely determines our success as leaders.



 In episode one, I shared some key ideas from my book, Xtraordinary, The Art and Science of Remarkable Leadership. And in episode two, we started to look at what are some of the skills and the practices that you can engage in to more effectively become a catalyst leader or show up with catalyst leadership.



 I also made an important distinction in these two previous episodes about the difference between horizontal development and vertical development. That as leaders, horizontal development might include the addition of skills or techniques or practices that we load on to ourselves as individuals. These are things that we can acquire and we can practice and bring into our leadership.



 Vertical development is the deeper work on self, the stuff that is inside of us that may need some adjustments, some innovations, some growth in order for our leadership to show up differently. And in this episode, I wish to dig deeper into this idea of vertical development,



 about the notion of the change and the growth that needs to occur within us in order for our external leadership to show up differently.



 And in doing so, not only do we evolve ourselves as leaders, we evolve ourselves as human beings, as people who are increasingly more capable of meeting the world where it's at and meeting the moment that we find ourselves in.



 I hope you enjoy this episode. It's going to be a good one.



 In the last episode, I shared the example or the analogy of a tree to make the distinction between horizontal development, that is the growing expansion of the leaves and the twigs and the branches, from that of vertical development. And that is the necessary growth in the root system in order to sustain the growth of the tree above the ground.



 We can't keep spreading laterally until we dig deeper root.



 Another way of thinking about the difference between horizontal development and vertical development is to think about the application of new skills, habits or techniques. In the last episode, I shared six of them. Let's take one as an example. I talked about this idea about connecting with others where they're at and then leading them from there.



 I shared the idea that something like curiosity, the ability to ask genuinely curious questions for which we don't expect to have the answers, and our ability to genuinely listen without judgment,



 are quite central to the practice of that particular habit. Now, you might have gone away and attempted then to increase your curiosity, to find yourself asking more questions, to practice more open questions, to listen non-judgmentally, to really look for new information that you hadn't been aware of. And you might have been successful. Or you might have been successful to a limited degree.



 Often people report to me that they often are confounded by a sense of urgency which causes them to not ask questions, or that they go into conversations with a set of assumptions, a set of beliefs about what's really going on, and then that drives their questioning to not be genuinely curious. It tends to be questioning that is intended to generate information that proves their starting assumption.



 These are good examples of existing things that are going on within us that might get in the way of our ability to apply some of these catalyst leadership techniques.



 It's as if these techniques might be leadership apps. You're using software and hardware in our language. An app is something that we load onto an operating system, and we might be wanting to load the app of curiosity, or it might be the leadership app of engaging with conflict, or it might be the leadership app of being present.



 Whatever the app is, sometimes we attempt to load it, yet it won't load. Or it may load, but it won't run properly. Or it's buggy, or it continues to crash. And so in which case, what we know from the world of computers and computing devices is then often to load an app, we may need to upgrade the operating system. My wife, Tamsen, had this experience recently. She runs an old iPhone. She's not a big fan of continually turning over devices. She thinks it adds to landfill. It's not good for the planet, so she's quite happy to use an older model of iPhone. Unfortunately, when she attempted to load Google Maps onto her iPhone not long ago, it wouldn't load. And that's because the operating system of the phone that she has, even though she has the latest version of the operating system, is incompatible with the latest version of the Google Maps app. It's a good example about how an app won't load when the operating system hasn't sufficiently evolved.



 We're going to take that idea and think about ourselves as having, if you like, an operating system.



 To do so, I want to make a distinction between three different use, or three different versions of you, not in some schizophrenic sense, but in a sense of who we are depends upon the access that we have to different data. So the outermost version of you is the perceived you. And that is the you that other people remember. It's the impression that others have of you. So if you feel they were to hear your name or receive an email from you or maybe a meeting invitation,



 it's the feelings and the thoughts and the memory and the experience that person has that will be generated within themselves that will then predispose them or create some kind of stance towards you. Is it a meeting they're looking forward to or one they feel anxious about?



 When they hear your name, do they have these positive thoughts or do they have negative thoughts? So that is the perceived you. How others remember you. Now, that is largely created by what you have done in the past, the outer you. The outer you is the you that other people get to see, get to experience, they get to hear it. It's what you do and what you don't do. It's what you say, it's what you don't say. It's your actions, your behaviors, your habitualized ways of showing up.



 And then there is the third you. We'll refer to this as the inner you. This is the you that other people don't get to see, though.



 It's the part of you which is hidden from them. It's what you think. They don't know that unless you share it with them. It's how you feel, which of course they don't know unless you share that with them. It's the mental models that you use to make sense of the world, the mindsets that you use to determine how you might respond to the world. It's not just the conscious values and assumptions and beliefs that you hold, but an enormous amount of the inner you is non-conscious. So not only is it hidden from others, it's hidden from yourself.



 And that's because during your life, a bunch of scripts or rules or beliefs or assumptions about how the world works and how you should interpret it and how you should respond to it have been learnt by your brain or by your mind and then have become internalized as automatic, habitual.



 And those automatic and habitual scripts or cognitions, biases, and heuristics,



 they need to be quick because they just help you process the inordinate amounts of data that you have to make sense of every day. Your sense data is taking in so much it can't process all of that consciously. So non-conscious cognition is a much faster way of processing the data. It happens within milliseconds.



 It's also effective because it happens so fast, it's useful for protection and survival. So these scripts quickly determine what's good, what's bad, what's helpful, what's unhelpful, what's welcome, what's unwelcome. And then when it presents options to your conscious mind, it generally has decided what is best for you. And so there's a saying in psychology that your conscious mind is merely an observer to what your non-conscious has already decided.



 Now, you might be a little bit skeptical about this idea because you'll be saying to yourself, "Oh, I'm conscious of everything that I think." And that is true.



 You have a conscious cognitive system. That is a thinking system of which you are aware of and in control and you can direct it and you can focus it and you can refocus it. However, that is the minority of all of the data that's being processed by your brain. So here's some figures for you. Of the 11 million bits of data being processed by your mind in any given moment, that is within a millisecond,



 the vast majority of that is being processed beyond your consciousness and beyond your awareness.



 Of those 11 million bits of data, only 47 bits are being processed by your conscious cognitive system of which you are aware and in control that you can examine and focus on. And it's like a bulldozer. It's incredibly powerful once you direct those conscious cognitions towards a problem or a task or an activity.



 But the remaining 10,999,953 bits, according to Timothy Wilson, a professor at Harvard,



 the remainder of those are being processed beyond your awareness and beyond your control as if they were in an operating system in a computer, just largely determining what happens to all the data coming in and what are the options for the data going out. In other words, your choices in response to the world.



 So that's about 99.99999996 reoccurring percent of all of the data being processed by your brain is being processed beyond your consciousness, beyond your awareness, automatically, habitually, and beyond your control. So the idea is quite important that what we have to do is accept that just because of the way our brains are structured, there's an inner you that might even be a stranger to ourselves. There's an aspect of what we think and what we believe that we've never examined.



 We've never been able to just consciously turn our mind, our conscious cognition, and with like a spotlight, highlight what our non-conscious is thinking and doing.



 But nonetheless, these rules are in operation. These assumptions, these beliefs are in operation, and they are having an enormous impact upon the sense that we make of the world around us and the options that we have available to us in responding to it, including our leadership sensemaking and responding.



 A large number of those beliefs and assumptions about the world and how we should be in the world were shaped by our lives up into the moment of emerging into adulthood.



 We used to think when we emerged into adulthood that our brains would not evolve much beyond that, or our mind would not evolve beyond that. It got a bit contrasted and compared with development and childhood. So there's unique and distinct stages of development of children, which we know exist and they're largely true for most, if not all children. But we used to think that we'd emerge into adulthood and we wouldn't go through any significant further stages of development of mind.



 And as a consequence, we would emerge into adulthood and the beliefs and the assumptions that our mind had adopted wouldn't change. But we know that that's actually not true. Developmental psychologists have clearly shown that our minds are capable of developing greater complexity and evolving through adulthood, yet not everyone's mind does.



 So over time through adulthood,



 there are potentially three further distinct stages of development that our minds can go through. And when we talk about the development of the mind, talking about a dear called complexity of mind, complexity of mind is the way in which we see ourselves, the way in which we see the world, and the way in which we see our relationship to the world around us.



 There are three unique stages. The first stage in adulthood, complexity of mind is called the socialized mind. And the vast majority of children evolve into this mind. And about 70% of adults stay in that stage.



 Less than 30% have a mind that evolves beyond that into what we call the self-authoring mind. And then even a much smaller number, less than 1% of adult minds, transform beyond that or evolve beyond that into what we call the self-transforming mind. Now a brief explanation of each. The socialized mind, in which 70% of adults all emerge into and 70% of adults stay within, is a mind which has adopted the beliefs that have been given to it by the world. It has been taught how to interpret the world, how to make sense of the world, what is the truth about the world. Usually the significant institutions and systems in which that mind has grown up in have a significant impact upon what those beliefs are. So if an individual grows up in a religious, a strong religious, traditional faith, that will have a significant impact upon how that individual interprets the world and what it believes about the world. Or if it grows up within a particularly strong country that has a set of really strong national beliefs, it will adopt those beliefs and use those to interpret the world around it.



 Family systems, cultures, even organizations can have a profound impact upon the mind and what it believes to be true. The second characteristic of the socialized mind is that it's held by identity. In other words, it has been taught through its life that there are certain identities or roles that need to be taken up and fulfilled.



 And taking up these roles, they're written in such a way as to describe what it looks like to be done well. So what does it look like to be a good son or a good daughter? It's a role, it's an identity. I am a son, I am a daughter.



 And the world tells me, my family tells me or others tell me what it looks like to do that role properly.



 I am a husband, a wife, a partner.



 It's an identity, it's a role, and there's a script that goes along with it about how we do it well. I am an employee, I am a team member, I am a manager, I am a leader.



 Again, more roles, more scripts, more identities. I'm an accountant, I'm an engineer, I am a doctor, I'm a carpenter, I'm an electrician. All of these things are our identities, the roles that we play.



 And those identities have boundaries, and we are typically not expected to step beyond the boundary of what that should look like.



 To the point you know this is in operation, because people at a barbecue might ask someone, "What do you do?" and they don't respond with, "I do accounting." They say, "I am an accountant."



 Or they don't say, "I do engineering." They say, "I am an engineer." Or they don't say, "I do banking." They say, "I am a banker." It's not just what I do, it's who I am.



 The third characteristic I want to draw your attention to about the socialized mind is it thinks in binary terms.



 Binary terms, it means that it goes to black and whites. It's yes or no. It's green or red. It's this or that. It sees two options. And usually those options are one is good and one is bad, or one is this and one is that. And they are the opposites of each other.



 Now we know that our mind can hold opposites, but they are in fact not true. For example, we can say we could hold profit and sustainability or environmental contribution to be mutually exclusive, but they're not. There are examples of where we can pursue both economic profit and be environmentally sustainable. In fact, there are organizations that not only pursue profit, they make a positive contribution to the environment.



 We might also hold strength and warmth in this way. So in the first episode, we introduced the ideas of warmth and strength. And we made the case that 70% of leaders believe them to be opposites, that you can't be strong and warm. But in fact, catalyst leadership, the more extraordinary pattern of leadership, is a consequence of individuals who are able to think beyond strength and warmth as opposites and see them as potentially being complementary or capable of being integrated with each other.



 So the socialized mind is often hold by the beliefs given to it. It seeks to fulfill the responsibilities and play the roles of its identity faithfully, and it tends to think in binary terms.



 The self-authoring mind is an evolution of mind that less than 30% of adults will emerge into. This is a mind which has started to self-author the beliefs that it holds to be true. So it rewrites beliefs rather than just adopting the beliefs given to it. So it might say, I understand that the world tells me this is true, but I actually think there's a different version of the truth. There's my version of the truth. There's my version of how this actually should be or the way it works.



 The self-authoring mind also starts to recognize the limitations of the identity that it's been given by the world. It starts to understand that they are just scripts, they're just roles. And we have been habitually, non-consciously, automatically just playing those roles without really examining what is that role and is it possible that that role can be played in my life?



 Many women, career women, will know this to be true. They seek to often play the roles of partner, daughter, dutiful, wife, mother, and successful leader or professional. And they know that it's impossible to play all of those perfectly, or at least perfectly according to the scripts given to us by the world around us, particularly through social media. That each of these has contradictions and challenges and that they have to define for themselves what does it mean to actually play these roles to the best of their ability and accept the trade-offs.



 And so in consequence, or as a consequence, this is a mind which is able to think in, not in binary terms, this or that, but it can think in duality. It can actually see that there might be this and that. Strength and warmth is a good example. And start to decide what it wants to pursue as a consequence.



 Stage three, or the next stage of adult development, less than 1% of adults grow into, it's called the self-transforming mind. This is a mind which actually starts to not only start to identify or accept its own systems of belief, it starts to transform systems of belief. It sees that beliefs are just constructs there. They don't actually exist in reality. They are constructs that we overlay the world with so that we can survive and thrive in the world.



 And that different people and different groups and different cultures have different belief systems. Some of those belief systems, some aspects of any belief system are helpful and some are unhelpful. And that their responsibility is to actually start to transform those systems of belief, including their own. They're also able to embrace the conflicts in their own identity and rather push away from those aspects of identity that they find uncomfortable, they embrace them. And they just understand that you can't be everything, you can only be that which you choose to be.



 This is also a mind that's able to think in what I call multiplicity, is able to see that there are many different versions of the truth, many different ways of seeing the world. And that's all they are. They're just versions of things.



 The reason I share this with you is because the stage of mental complexity that an individual has evolved to has a profound effect on their ability to lead and the kind of leadership they're capable of. So first, in terms of their leadership ability, there is any number of bodies of research which are to show the relationship between the complexity of mind and the results that leaders are able to produce or the quality of their leadership.



 There's one that I'll point to which was by Huygul and it was called leadership effectiveness. And what Huygul did was take a number of different leaders from different levels, including CEO and middle management. They evaluated them in terms of their complexity of mind, whether they're at the socialized or the self-authoring stage. So they're the first two stages of development as adults.



 And then they evaluated the extent, the quality of their leadership, their leadership effectiveness, and they found a very strong correlation that the more evolved the complexity of mind of the leader, the more effective their leadership.



 In fact, that of the ineffective leaders, they were typically were only found at that socialized or emerging out of socialized.



 That once you start to look at leaders who were self-authoring and beyond, they were in the higher levels of effectiveness. What I think is more interesting, though, is the question about what's the kind of leadership which is capable not just of maintaining the system around us, maintaining the status quo, kind of keeping things going the way they are, but what's the kind of leadership which is capable of transforming the world around it? The reason I'm personally fascinated by it is that I noticed when I started working with organizations who were attempting to transform themselves, that there was a different version of leadership that needed to show up for them to be successful. And I become particularly interested in the present moment because many of the challenges and opportunities we're struggling with in our organizations, in our communities, in our nations, and in the world require us to transform the way we do things, whether that's the transformation of the way in which we produce and consume energy.



 Whether that's the transformation of the social systems in which we think about constructs around gender, whether we make progress with the way our political systems are operating, whatever it is, it's going to require transformation which requires a different version of leadership.



 Bill Torbett is a guru in leadership development. He used to teach at various organizations, including Stanford. His colleague David Rook conducted a 15-year longitudinal study in which they wanted to understand what is the impact over the longer term of the stage of mental complexity of a leader and their ability to lead transformations. At the beginning of the 15 years, they assessed a number of leaders who were considered effective as leaders, broadly or generally. They classified them into two groups. There was a group who were assessed as being at the socialized mind stage, and then there was a group who were assessed as being beyond the socialized mind, so they were at the self-authoring or self-transforming stage.



 Those two groups were then tracked over a period of 15 years. One of the measures that they looked at was their success in leading organizational turnarounds or transformations.



 Of the group who had been assessed as being at the self-authoring and self-transforming stage, they each, on average, led three successful turnarounds or transformations during that 15-year period. Of the group who had been assessed at the socialized mind, they had collectively led exactly zero successful turnarounds or transformations.



 So what it appears is that what this data is telling us, that if we are going to successfully transform the systems of belief around us, we need to have transformed ourselves first. We need to have grown beyond thinking about the world and our place within it and responding to it, doing that in a way that reflects what we've been given by the world and starting to define for ourselves who we are, how we want to be in the world, and the impact that we want to have on the world around us.



 However, to transform the world around us, we first have to transform ourselves. So the question that we've been asking ourselves through this series around extraordinary leaders is, how do we grow into this catalyst version of leadership? How do we transform our own leadership so that we can move towards this more helpful, this more productive pattern? We're able to combine strength and warmth simultaneously in the same space and time.



 And that implicates our growth as individuals. It implicates the growth of ourselves on the inside. The way in which our mind determines the sense we make of the world around us and the sense that we make of our role within the world and how we then operate and the choices and actions we are capable of taking or not capable of taking.



 To understand this better and to understand the way in which we now show up as adults, and particularly the way we show as leaders, is to understand that we have emerged into adulthood following a set of beliefs and rules that have been given to us by the world. A set of identities that we now use to interpret the world and respond to it. And those identities can be incredibly helpful to us as leaders. In fact, I'm sure for you, they have been incredibly helpful to you so far in navigating the world and being successful in the world. But at the same time, they can also be limiting.



 So what I'd like to do is share with you the story about the way in which these identities form, the way in which these beliefs about the world are shaped, and the way in which they can be a source of our strength, and the way in which they can also hold us back.



 And ultimately, the way in which they perfectly explain why we sometimes show up with those less effective patterns of leadership that are low strength or low warmth or low on both, such as the control pattern, or the relate pattern, or the protect pattern that I talked about in episode one.



 And importantly, how we need to grow beyond these identities, grow beyond the limitations that those identities create for us into catalyst leadership.



 So here we go. This is the story of your development.



 To get started, I want you to answer or finish this sentence. I'm going to share with you in a moment a sentence and I'd like you to just whatever the first word that comes to mind to note it, write it down, don't deliberate on it, don't reject one word and then choose another. Just go with whatever word merges in your consciousness the moment I finish this sentence. The sentence is, "I have been successful because I have been..."



 Fill the blank. Take a note of the word. Now let me tell you the story about your development into adulthood.



 To understand our journey into adulthood, we need to know something about the development journey before adulthood.



 For the most part, as children, the world around us looks after us, or at least the people in the world around us look after us.



 We're told what to do, we're told what to think, and we're largely, for most of us, given what we need.



 So our parents, our teachers, our guardians, our families, the world around us pretty much tells us what we need and what we should be doing. It's cold outside. Take your jacket. Here's your dinner. Here's the next thing you need to learn in school. Here's the test that you need to complete. This is what you need to do to get this outcome.



 If we were to emerge into adulthood with that same pattern of behaviour, just receiving the world and just expecting the world to give us what we need at any given moment, we would emerge into adulthood helpless.



 We would be unable to protect ourselves. We not only would be unable to thrive, we would be unable to survive.



 So there's a very important stage of development in childhood, which is the last stage, which allows us to emerge into adulthood not helpless, not as victims, but to actually survive and thrive. It's adolescence.



 Adolescence, that period in our teenage years and early adulthood, is that period in which we learn that we actually need to do a deal with the world. We need to show up in such a way that the world will then give us what we need. Here's some examples.



 So as an adult, I need to learn how to work, work sufficiently hard enough to be paid or to receive what other rewards there are, which might be acknowledgement or validation, which might be a sense of contribution, but even just at a minimum to get paid. Getting paid allows me to then put food on the table, afford clothes, heat my house, do all those sorts of things. And if I wish to have a family, then to contribute to the care of my family.



 Likewise, I might need to learn that to be an adult, I need to know stuff. In fact, being an expert can be particularly helpful, knowing a bunch of stuff about a particular area, such as engineering or accounting or technology or carpentry or cleaning or whatever it is. I can develop some expertise and I can parlay that expertise into being able to survive and thrive in adulthood.



 And then there's a third way in which we can do it, which would be we need to fit in as well. We need to learn how to fit in. We need to work out when we need to comply, when we need to belong, where we need to fit in to the group. And it's not just the group in terms of fitting into a social group or a peer group, but how we fit into our families and how we go along so that we don't get rejected by our families or how we fit into the work organizational culture so that we're not rejected by the organizational culture. Even just how we fit into our societies. We have to learn to comply. We have to learn which side of the road to drive on and do so and to continue to drive on that side of the road is a helpful, useful thing. When we're in public to behave in particular ways and not behave in other ways, we learn that. And if we do that, we're accepted. Now, all of these learning how to operate in the world, which is largely what we have to learn during adolescence, is an incredibly important stage of development. And you probably know yourself through your own experience for observing any teenagers around you. What they're often trying to do is they're working out what are the boundaries of what they can get away with. They're often learning what they have to do in order to get the world to give them what they need. So in many ways, adolescence is about learning how we get from the world that which we need. And so often there's a stage which feels pretty selfish to anyone observing it, where adolescents, teenagers really just seem to be quite self-interested. And they are, because they're trying to work out how to get what they need from the world. How to not just get physically what they need, but emotionally what they need. How do they get approval? How do they get love? How do they get validation? How do they get what they need to feel secure in the world, to feel worthy, to feel safe?



 So I mentioned there's these three ways in which people often learn how to do that. These three ways of being in the world that we can not only feel approved of and validated and safe, but also secure. One way is we start to learn to work hard. We learn to take control of things. We learn to take action. We learn that through our own agency, volition and effort, the world will reward us. And we learn to be hard workers. We learn to control.



 Another identity is one in which we learn to be smart. We learn to use our intellect. We learn to use our ability to learn and have good answers. May start in childhood where we start to get a praise and approval. This is certainly something which happened for me in the classroom. And we learn that if we use our intellect and our brain, the world will tell us we're doing okay. And every test we pass, not just pass, but do well in. Every grade that we move on from, every certificate we get, every honor, every mention, every diploma, every degree, every postgraduate degree is a validation. It says you are worth something, you are worthwhile. And they also lead to opportunity, they lead to rewards.



 And another way of being in the world, another identity that can form is to be the person who's good at belonging with other people, a team player, a people person. Again, it's something which might emerge in childhood. Often I talk to people and they were the, they're often the person that in the family kind of kept everything harmonious or kept everything together. Or they had a particular parent who still hadn't fully evolved themselves. And that child learnt that it was their job to help their parent feel okay about themselves.



 To look after their emotional needs. And so they learn to fit in, they learn to harmonize, they learn to be the person who belongs. And that's an incredibly important and helpful thing because we need to know how to do that. But it's not only something they learn how to do, it becomes who they are. I'm a people person. I'm a mediator. I'm a team player.



 And so these three different identities can form. I'm a hard worker. I'm a relater. I'm a person who fits in. I belong or I am my intelligence. And it's not just that's what they do. It's who they are.



 It's not just I work hard. I am a hard worker. That's who I am. And that that is how I need to be in the world to feel safe, to feel secure to the point where to not be a hard worker would be to feel unsafe would leave me feeling insecure in some way and perhaps not worthy.



 Now, each of us can occupy one or more of these identities. We can form that identity around us.



 It's possible that we may inhabit all three, but usually one or two of those identities is particularly stronger for me. The identity that I sort of emerged into into adulthood was the identity around intelligence and the identity around working hard. They were the two things that I learned that if I could do or be, then the world would reward me. My parents would reward me. My peers would reward me. My superiors would reward me. The world would reward me. And I parlayed those two things into a successful adulthood, successful career.



 Just take a moment and ask yourself which of these identities might be true for you.



 Now that you've identified those three identities, which are either I am my results, my choices, my volition, my agency and effort and or I am my expertise, my intelligence, my knowledge, my experience and insight.



 And or I am my relationships, my connection, my loyalty, my belonging and my identification with others. Once you've identified those, then what we need to understand is they then become the lens through which we see the world.



 They inform how we make sense of the world around us and they inform what choices we think are available to us and how we respond to the world. In effect, what our mind has done is it's learned now to do a deal with the world, a deal with the system in which it operates, whether that system is the family system, whether that system is the organizational system or the country system or the whatever that system is in which we operate where that thing that we now are is a strength. So, for example, to be intelligent, to be smart, to be an expert is a strength or to be a team player, to be someone who's good at belonging, someone who's good at relating to other people, that's my strength or to be someone who makes stuff happen, who takes control and that's my strength. And that that I am worthy if I am that, that I am secure and safe in the world if I am that and that I am okay if I am that. And in fact, to be in the world is to be that. To be in the world is to be that.



 And as a consequence, these three identities, I am my relationships or I am my intelligence or I am my results, they can produce this really helpful set of behaviors as well as in unhelpful behaviors. So let's talk about each of those identities and the sorts of character that forms and the helpful and unhelpful behaviors they can produce.



 So the relating identity, which is about my relationships, it's the one that built around a character so we other people would describe us or we would perhaps like to describe ourselves as warm, sensitive, likable, maybe even loyal.



 And that can produce some fascinating behaviors, some very helpful behaviors. It can produce really helpful behaviors around connecting and pleasing and belonging and fitting in and going along and playing by the rules. And they are incredibly helpful behaviors for all of us to have adopted because if you don't fit in, if you don't please, if you don't belong, if you don't play by the rules to a certain extent, the system will not reward you.



 Unfortunately, though, when those behaviors are so automatic, so habitual, so powerfully triggered by everyday life experiences, they can actually become strengths that become overextensions. Those strengths actually start to become our kryptonite. So for example, with the relating behavior, it can overextend, particularly when we're under pressure into things like sugarcoating or avoiding conflict or being overly agreeable. You know, where we agree even though we actually don't agree or we're so focused on the relating and the connecting, we're actually not focused on doing anything or making anything happen. And we can therefore flip flop. We don't hold a position. We flip flop according to the kind of prevailing view around us or who we're talking to. And we might surrender. We might give in our needs to other people's needs.



 So the relating identity has these wonderfully helpful behaviors. But unfortunately, when those behaviors are so automatic, so habitual, so reactive, or particularly when we're under pressure, it can produce these really unhelpful behaviors as well. Now, you might have already noticed that those unhelpful behaviors, sugarcoating, conflict avoiding, overly agreeable, unfocused, flip-flopping and surrendering, are all of the behaviors that we see in the relate pattern of leadership. That is the high-warmth, low-strength pattern of leadership.



 Let me go on. Let's talk about another pattern of leadership or pattern of identity and how that identity translates into leadership. So let's take the opposite. This is the identity, which is all about making stuff happen. You know, I am my results. I am my hard work and my results. We'll call it the controlling identity, where the individual's identity is about taking control of the world, taking control of themselves and how they show up in the world around them. Maybe the character structure that they would describe themselves as, or others might describe them as, is strong and tough and they're right. And they exercise some kind of dominance. They're dominant over their environment and other people.



 The really helpful behaviors that that produces that we often applaud are the behaviors of excelling and achieving and winning.



 And we celebrate those in Western culture.



 Also, behaviors around controlling. So actually, they take control of things and make stuff happen. And competing. So actually being willing to compete against others and strive and thrive as a consequence and even perfecting. To take control and make the outcome perfect. They are incredibly helpful. They are super strengths for many people. Yet that same identity around controlling can also produce some automatic habitual kind of reactions when triggered or when under pressure that are less helpful, such as becoming dictatorial, micromanaging, over controlling, even punishing other people when they're not doing what you want them to do.



 It can also morph into kind of win-lose behaviors where, you know, to win, the other person has to lose. Behaviors can even become aggressive when challenged. So rather than backing down when challenged, it actually becomes more forceful, even stronger and it loses its warmth, even attacking. So the identity which is being built around this control, I am my result, I am my agency, I am my effort, can produce a lot of helpful behaviors and some unhelpful behaviors.



 Let's look at the third identity, which is the one around intelligence. This pattern is one in which the character structure is very much around the use of intelligence, the use of rationality.



 So the character is irrational. It's unemotional, might be described as insightful and critical.



 And it's interesting because I find many people in corporates or organizational life who have these characteristics, particularly in the white collar professions, where these ways of being in the world, being rational, intellectual, unemotional, analytical, are real strengths that people bring into their occupations and into their work. And so the helpful behaviors that are produced from that identity are around the evaluating, critiquing, correcting, finding errors, making sure those errors don't continue on. I mean, in organizational life, particularly the industrial way of thinking, the key is to actually continue to eliminate errors to produce perfection. What it also produces is resisting. So it will resist until you present it with a compelling argument as to why it should engage. Now that's helpful because a lot of systems should not change unless there is a good reason for it to change that will produce something helpful. And this also produces detaching behavior, which is being able to remove itself from the emotional dance, the emotional state, the messiness of all of that, and get into a place when it can view things rationally. It can be very helpful to groups when groups get caught up in emotion at the same time when that identity is so strongly held.



 By that individual, or perhaps the individual is so strongly held by that identity of their intelligence, that it can produce some overextensions, some automatic habitual reactions when under pressure around things like criticizing and blaming, and over resisting and withdrawing and being unresponsive and avoiding. All of the behaviors that are associated with someone who is unable to engage emotionally with others, and someone who is really waiting for a low risk proposition or an argument or proposal before it will engage, and often looking for fault in the world around it to avoid the dangers associated with error and fault.



 So there you have it folks, you have these three identities that we often emerge into adulthood having learnt to occupy one or more of those. And they drive not only how we see ourselves, but how we think non-consciously. They largely determine what we think is right, what is wrong, how we should be in the world, how we should respond to it. And when we are tired and fatigued and we are under pressure and there is a lot to be done, we rely on these beliefs about the world to just get through the day. They produce those automatic, habitual, instinctual reactions to the world.



 Maybe again it is time for a little bit of reflection.



 Which of those three patterns of behavior, which of those combinations of strengths and limitations might be true for me? The good news is, we can take the gifts from those identities and those strengths, and we can grow beyond the limitations that those same identities produce for us, or those unhelpful behaviors.



 The first step is by recognising that those identities exist within us. That in some way our way of being and responding to the world has been shaped by our adoption of those identities.



 And the moment we can see that that identity has been driving us and hold it out from ourselves and say, "Isn't that interesting?" I can see how my way of being in the world has been created by this controlling need, this controlling tendency. And I can see how that has produced a bunch of really helpful things in my life. But the same way it actually might also be a limitation. It might be producing these ways in which I'm turning up with my children, or my teammates, or my team members in such a way that I don't want to keep doing that, then we can start to choose. The moment we become aware, we can start to choose. And we can learn to grow into something else as a consequence. So for example, if I can see that I've got these controlling tendencies that are my habitual, automatic response to the world, I can start to say, "In that moment, can I choose something different? And if I could choose something different, what would I choose?" Well, maybe it would be rather than showing up purely with strength and controlling, maybe I could add some warmth. Maybe I could start to experiment with how could I add warmth in this moment? And in doing so, what I'm fundamentally doing is learning to grow towards the catalyst pattern. Because when you think about it, the catalyst pattern is simply a control identity that's learned to manage its overextensions around control and is learned to add warmth.



 The catalyst behavior is patented leadership is also the protecting identity, which has learned to actually step more courageously into the world to engage with risk, to not have the answer, to not always find faults, to sometimes just say yes.



 Or the relating identity, which has learned to add strength, to find its strength and add its strength.



 And they are the three fundamental adaptations that I often see leaders having to work on.



 These three adaptations, these three really important shifts.



 And if I could boil down the last three plus decades of work that I've done around helping leaders grow and develop beyond the limitations of their own identity today, there would be these three things I'd encourage everyone to think about.



 The first one that if you know you have a controlling tendency, and that continues to stop you from being more consistently in the catalyst zone, then the fundamental adaptation is learning how to let go.



 Start learning under what circumstances with which people, under what conditions you should, could let go.



 And start running some safe, small experiments about what might happen if I let go.



 Until you start experimenting, you'll never find out.



 If I have that identity around intelligence, which might start to produce some of that protecting behavior, which is the low strength, low warmth, so this is about behavior that allows me to protect myself from danger and risk when the world feels unpredictable and dangerous.



 Perhaps the adaptation is learning to not know. That often people step into that kind of expert role because having a sense that I know everything I need to makes the world predictable and knowable and therefore feel safer. But what if you can't know everything?



 What if you can't have all the answers? What if the only thing that you can really do is learn to have a bunch of good questions?



 So what if I substitute my need to have all the answers with genuine curiosity, which is paradoxical when you think about it, because often the thing that we started doing at the beginning of the formation of the expert identity is we were genuinely curious.



 Yet over time we learn somehow to not be as curious.



 And what's the adaptation if my identity though is the relating, the complying one, the one in which we are great at fitting in and belonging and being a team player, but we're actually no longer prepared to challenge the status quo. We struggle with conflict.



 We don't know how to rock the boat in a helpful way. We're afraid to stand up for ourselves when we really should be and say no when we want to. I think the fundamental adaptation here is being okay with not being liked. A lot of the reasons we behave in those relating and complying ways is to be approved of by others, to be accepted of by others, to not be rejected from the tribe.



 But you can't spend your whole life doing that. It's impossible and unhelpful. So we have to learn to use our discretion to understand that there are moments where we need to engage with the idea of being disliked and not being approved of. It might be the moment that we ask a team member to do something that momentarily they feel really uncomfortable doing or give some feedback that someone might momentarily dislike us for giving them, even though our intention was to help them grow and develop so that we together could produce more results or better outcomes that they could be more successful.



 Any parent who's had to discipline their child and have their child say, "I hate you," but still as a parent making the choice to not reverse the decision that you've made knows just the challenge that this presents. To truly love that child would mean to turn up the heat and keep the heat there. It's that genuine love and care for other people that allows us to be willing, even if momentarily, to be disliked by them, to be disapproved of them.



 And it's these three adaptations, learning to let go, learning to not know, and learning to be disliked and not keep meeting the expectations of everybody else, are the three fundamental adaptations that can allow us to grow into catalyst leadership. They require inner work. They require deep reflection on self. They require us to curiously and compassionately observe ourselves in the world and how we show up and be open to feedback from others about how we show up in helpful and unhelpful ways. It also requires courage because we have to confront those aspects of ourselves that perhaps we may not choose to examine. But I think the courage comes from acknowledging that those aspects of self have been so helpful to us and have produced so much which has allowed us to be successful in the world. And we should never let go of that or forget that and fail to honor and cultivate and protect those aspects of self which have played that important role.



 It's just about learning to understand the way in which they may be also limiting us and to reauthor those things a bit differently so we can be leaders who are more consistent with our aspiration for self.



 And I encourage you as a listener, as an individual, as a leader to keep doing that work. It's worthwhile. If not for yourself, it's worthwhile for the people you care about or the purpose that you pursue or the vision that you hold.



 The more effective you can become as a leader is dependent upon your growth as an individual. If you can change, then perhaps the world will start changing around you.



 And you can start to live in the world in which you want to.