The Resilient Leader: Harnessing Persistence in Times of Change Ep 47

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In this episode of Transform Your Future, Eddie Isin sits down with leadership coach Brian Gorman to explore the transformative power of resilience and persistence, especially in the face of organizational change and personal challenges. Drawing from his decades of experience, Brian shares valuable insights on how to cultivate mental toughness and lead effectively through uncertainty.

Key Highlights:

• 00:00 – Introduction
  Eddie introduces Brian Gorman, leadership coach and expert in navigating change, discussing the importance of persistence and resilience in leadership roles.
• 03:00 – The Origins of Brian’s Passion for Change
  Brian reflects on his early experiences with change, starting with a pivotal moment in college when he confronted institutional racism and learned the importance of advocating for change. 
• 06:00 – The Personal Nature of Change
  Brian explains that change is deeply personal and how each individual responds differently to change. 
• 08:30 – Anchors: Finding Stability During Change
  Discussing the concept of "anchors," Brian explains how identifying what keeps us grounded during turbulent times can help us stay resilient. 
• 12:00 – The Hero’s Journey and Resilience
  Brian introduces the idea of the Hero’s Journey, a concept popularized by Joseph Campbell. 
• 16:00 – Neuroscience and Resilience: Creating Stories from the Future
  Brian dives into the neuroscience behind persistence and resilience, explaining how our brains process challenges and the importance of creating “stories from the future” to help us build new neural pathways for success.
• 19:00 – Changing Your Story, Changing Your Life
  Brian shares the concept of changing the story we tell ourselves. By shifting our internal narratives, we can overcome self-doubt and create lasting change in our lives.
• 22:00 – Persistence and Overcoming Imposter Syndrome
  Eddie and Brian discuss the common obstacles people face when they are making a big change, such as imposter syndrome. Brian offers practical advice on how to push through these feelings and embrace persistence.
• 26:00 – The Role of Leadership in Times of Change
  The conversation turns to leadership. 
• 30:00 – Final Thoughts: Embracing Change with Persistence
  Brian offers actionable advice for anyone facing a challenge or undergoing change. 
• 31:00 – Closing Remarks
  Eddie wraps up the episode, thanking Brian for his insights and encouraging listeners to embrace change with resilience and persistence.

Connect with Brian Gorman:

• Website: https://TransformingLives.coach 

Connect with Eddie Isin:

• Website:https://transformYourFuture.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwardisin/

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Transcript

0:00

Papaya, welcome Brian to Transform Your Future podcast. Thank you so much for joining me. We had some technical difficulties, but we overcame, we persisted, and we won. We won, and I love winning. So Brian, welcome. How are you today? I'm great. Thank you for inviting me, Eddie. Thank you so much. Brian, as a leadership coach, there's lots of things that I want to talk to you about, a lot of your ideas that we've been communicating back and forth about our ideas that I'm deeply, deeply interested in. Let's talk a little bit about change and work and the patterns of work and change. I want to just lead up and just give me an idea of why change and working with leadership and understanding change and teaching change has been a defining thing for you and why it's important to you. It actually started my freshman year in college at, which is back in 19 67, 68, I was doing youth work on the Onaga reservation outside of Syracuse, and at the time the university mascot was called the Saltine Warrior. Saltine Warrior was portrayed by Caucasian fraternity brothers, dressed up like Hollywood Indians and running around. They were drunk, and I recognized that as a racist, xenophobic representation of native peoples and tried to get the university to change its mascot. I failed, it took the nation 10 years to make that happen, but this spark inside of me about change was ignited. I didn't even realize it for many years, but my entire career was fueled by making change happen and then moving on, making change happen and. Interesting. Very interesting. Yeah, I mean today you tell that story today and it's like, well, that makes sense, right? Today, in today's world, the way people think and the way the consciousness around these ideas are, it's a no-brainer, right? But back then it was not on people's minds. People did not see it, did not understand it. What were some of the defining principles that you started developing about change? In the beginning. It was all gut instinct. Early on, meet the challenge, figure it out, work it out, move on. But then in 1988, I was a management consultant with KPMG and they formed an alliance with Daryl Connor. Daryl is recognized as one of the founders of the change management profession, and I got to train under Darryl and I realized that there really was a science, a language, and the profession behind what I had been doing at that point, almost two decades. And this is what led you into being a leadership coach and teaching change to organizations? Well, for many years I worked as a change management consultant externally, and I also worked inside of organizations that had major change underway. Probably 2006, I got tired of living in hotels and airports, which is what consultants do, And I left my job. I was actually working for Daryl Conner at that point and went out on my own, but I went out on my own developing training programs around his methodology and at times delivering those. And then it was 2016 that my coach, who I'd been working with since 2007 said, there's a coach training program I think you might be interested in. And the first day of that training, it was being delivered by Damien Var, who was two time past president of the International Coaching Federation board of directors. The first day I realized that my entire life had been preparing this coaching, which is all about helping people move through change. And one of the things I realized is that organizational change management itself is a misnomer because organizations don't change, it's people that change. So organizational change is individual change at scale. Tell me a little bit about, I think is appropriate time right now. Tell me a little bit about what is this about really when we're talking about the idea of management change, changing directions, give me some ideas here, some handles on the end here to guide me into better understanding for our audience. What's specific kind of things we're talking about when we're talking about change? It can go from the coffee pot got moved across the break room to we are globally joined a global organization. At the end of the day, the question is what does this disruption in my expectations mean for me? So for some people, the coffee pot got moved across the break room. So what. For others, it's a major disruption. At the end of the day, all changes personal, what I see as a positive change, Eddie may see as the worst thing that could happen. Yeah, so it's about how I respond to those things that change in the day-to-day, the new focus that comes in, some new thing that we have to talk about and keep at the forefront of our mind, maybe some change in the production or maybe the change in the environment. So things are always changing. I mean, that's really what we're talking about is things are constantly changing all the time and I need to respond in some way, shape or form. And maybe as an organization, you don't want people responding negatively and morale to go down and productivity to go down, and so we need to understand how to implement these things in a successful way. Is that kind of a nutshell of what we're talking about? Absolutely. Exactly. Exactly. And one of the things that most change management methodologies forget is what I refer to as anchors. We talk about all the things that are changing. We try to make the case for why you'll be better off in the future and all that kind of stuff, but let me give you an example of what I mean by anchors. Early on after Covid hit, I would hold online workshops around moving through covid and anchors. I lived in Hoboken, New Jersey during Superstorm. Sandy. We were flooded. There were feet of water in the street outside my apartment. I couldn't get out for days. When I did, I started walking around town and looking at the damage at the northern end of Hoboken is an inlet to the Hudson River where people anchor sailboats. As I was walking up along the river, there was a sailboat sitting on the sidewalk, still attached to the buoy, still attached to its anchor, but hundreds of yards away from where it had been before the storm where I got up to the inlet. There were some sailboats that were bouncing along like nothing had ever happened, and then there were mast sticking out of the water where the anchor held, the rope held, But there was not enough adjustment to the rope for the rising water. We all have anchors in our lives, those things that give us that sense of stability and security. And during turbulence, during change, sometimes we have to adjust those anchors. So in one of these early anchors workshops, what I would do is introduce the concept, explain that anchors are, and then I would send people out into breakout rooms to talk to one another and identify their anchors that then come back, would share that, and then I'd talk about how do you adjust them? This one workshop, this guy comes running back into the zoom room, so to speak, and before I could say anything, he said, now I get it. Now I get it. And I said, what do you get? He said, I'm a Wall Street lawyer. For the last 20 years I've been taking the subway every day to work. When covid hit for the first two weeks, I'd go into my home office and I'd get nothing done. I had access to the law firm's computer system. I had my laptop, I had my files. I'd pick up papers, I'd put them down, I'd go online, I'd forget what I was looking for. Then I walked into my home office and I was back in control. I don't even own the suit, Eddie. For him, his suit was his ankle. I could see that. I could see that making that shift from your daily routine of going to work, and now that's completely disrupted and your work now is maybe 10 feet into another room in your home, and I could see the ritual of getting ready. You're leaving to go on the train and go to work, to go in the other room. I could see how that can activate you in a certain way. Big on activation, right? I'm big on activating myself, activating my emotional state so that I can perform at the best level. So up on just what you're saying, he said I added a second routine back now before I leave my home office. At the end of the day, I text my wife to tell her I'm coming home. It's so awesome. Yeah. So we do that. We do that. We create certain ideas and premises really just to kind of trick our mind into doing things the way we want. What was the quote earlier on? Unfortunately, we weren't recording, but we were talking about some things, and you mentioned that quote by Joseph Campbell. I wanted to write that down. What was that quote? I'm not sure I have his words exactly right. No, you were paraphrasing. But what he said is, while we approach every change as if it's unique and unpredictable, it's not. We're taking the same journey over and over. Again. And Campbell called it the Hero's Journey. Yes, I've. Studied Joseph Campbell and his work has been a culturally significant work. I feel in many ways, a lot of the ideas and consciousness of today that's so informed in everybody's day-to-Day world comes from many of his ideas 30 years ago, 40 years ago, from his research and work, the Hero's journey has influenced millions of people in their job, their function, the way they tell stories, the way they sell their ideas, the way they think of themselves. It's pretty deep. It's pretty deep. It is, and it has become really the framework for my coaching when I'm working with clients who are looking to make a significant change in their life. Yes, yes. So let's talk about that because I'm curious, I understand maybe on a logical level what this means, but can we just dig in about how really, although for example, I see the current things that are different in my life today than they were let's say a year ago, that I'm going through this process right now where I was in one, let's just call it a job. I had a job, let's say, and now I've left that and I'm doing something completely different. And so although I see it as I'm doing something different and I had to write it out as this is a new thing that I'm doing in a new direction, the truth is that the patterns that I'm in are the same patterns that I'm always in. It's just some of the exterior stuff is different, that's all. So if you're in a different weather pattern, it's still me changing and dealing with that just because now it's raining when I'm doing it, that doesn't mean that it's different because it's raining. Let's dig a little bit deeper on this idea of how there's patterns. What are the patterns? Well, the pattern begins with I'm going to make a change in my life. I'm going to get a new job. Most of the time. We approach that as sort of an intellectual exercise. I need to write my resume. I need to maybe talk to recruiters. I may be, I need to network with friends, and it can be very painful as an exercise to go through. And there are inevitably obstacles along the way. And one of the patterns of change, you asked earlier about patterns of change is that resistance is a part of the journey. Even when we choose to take the journey, we don't know what we don't know when we get started. So we tend to resist when those unknowns become known and appear insurmountable. And here's where I bring some neuroscience in. Please. I work with my clients to create a story from the future, not a story about the future, but a story from the future. Stories about the future, again, tend to be fairly intellectual. The neuroscience that comes into play here, and not every neuroscientist will use this language, but they'll all agree with the facts behind it. In our hearts, we have the same motor neurons, the same sensory neurons, the same electrochemical activity as happens in our heads, in our guts. We have about as many neurons as in a cat's brain. Some neuroscientists will call it the cephalic or head brain, the cardiac or heart. Brain and the enteric or gut brain. Others will talk about the cephalic brain and the neural networks and neural clusters in the heart and the gut. 90% of the communication is upward from heart and gut into our heads. So first of all, listening to your heart, listening to your gut is not some sort of woo woo. It's real. Yes. There is science behind it. The story from the future is a head, heart, gut story. And it actually, last piece of neuroscience here, the brain can't tell the difference between story and reality. So if I continue to revisit that story from the future, I'm building new neural networks as if I'm actually there. So when we run into those supposedly insurmountable obstacles on the journey, our unconscious goes to work because it knows what it's like to be on the other side of them. So we begin with the story from the future. This is what it's like now that I have this new job. Now we start preparing, not planning, which is what most people do, but we only plan for what's in our and what's in our awareness. The. Preparation calls up those things that are not in our awareness that can get in the way. Again, what are the anchors? What are the adjustments we need to make to those anchors? What anchors do we need to let go of? What anchors do we need to hold onto? Or what new anchors do we need? Maybe your new job is taking you to Costa Rica and you have to learn Spanish are the limitations. What are those things that I won't accept in a new job? What are those things I must have? What are the nice to haves? Now we can begin the planning and the planning is a rolling kind of activity as we move through the journey. So this week I'm going to make 10 networking calls. Next week I'm going to make another 10 networking calls and get at least two meetings. Keep on rolling the planning forward as you take the journey. And then there's living in that new reality. Because things have changed. Even if you're doing the same, let's say you're an accountant. I can't imagine that as an accountant, but let's say you are an accountant, you're still going to be doing accounting maybe, but in a different environment, maybe with different software, definitely with different people around you with a different commute. So that's the journey. One thing. I. Love it. I love it. By the way. To add to that, and this is a quote from Sir Edmund Hillary, it's not the. Mountain we conquer. It's ourselves. We get in the way of the changes we want to make in. The stories we tell ourselves. And if we change those stories again, because the mind doesn't know the difference between story and reality, if we change those stories, we can change our lives. Yes. Yeah. Yes. I've been writing a paper and my papers on resilience and mental toughness and overcoming obstacles because when we have a desire that's inside of us to change something in our lives, for example, me, I went in this whole other direction all my life. I've been an entrepreneur all my life. I've really worked for myself. And then I decided to go work for somebody else for many reasons. It did great. And then now I walked out because it's the same thing as working for myself, and I want more freedom and control. So I'm doing that. So when we make these decisions and we have these desires, I'm going to go start a business where I'm going to go work for myself, or I'm going to go work remotely right now so that I can travel whatever. We make these changes in our lives that we're working towards. There are all kinds of obstacles and challenges that come in the way. We have negative self-talk, and I've been doing a lot of research because I love reinvention. I love the idea of reinvention and changing one's identity. And I know we could argue, as I did for many years with people that at the core, maybe there's a core me that will never change, but it's how I interact with the world and how I change what I am interested in and what I follow. I mean, there are changes that are made. Maybe it doesn't change Eddie at the core of who Eddie is. I'm still that young kid from the Bronx that was an underdog that feels like he's got something to prove. Maybe I'll never get that changed, but you can change. And so when we go to do these changes, there's a great paper was written called Possible Self. And in this possible selves, one of the things I was fascinated about is how we choose actually the mechanism of how we choose what we want to do and where we want to go. And then because there's no social proof and we haven't been trained in this thing, or maybe we have no experience in the thing, then we feel disconnected. This whole idea of imposter syndrome is something that's been bothering me for a few years. Every time somebody says that word, I don't understand it. I'm in my brain. I'm like, stop saying that. But I understand it now because really all it is is if I want to change and become a leader in something, a speaker, a coach, open up a new business and be a business owner. If you haven't done that before, you haven't trained on that before. You haven't had people in society, in your social circle say, Hey, how's your business going? That's great. You're doing that, or you ran a business with somebody else. Then you naturally feel like there's a component missing, and that is where that imposter syndrome comes in, right? Because nobody has done that. So these are obstacles and challenges that we face that need to be overcome. So I've been writing about it, and I love what you're saying, and we do have to conquer ourselves. It is all about me and mastering my own mindset, my own talk to myself and the stories I tell myself because those are the things that kill us. Those are the things that kill me. Those are the things that hold me back. I want to go back to neuroscience because I find this fascinating. Let's talk a little bit more about that, Brian, if you don't mind. Because the idea that I've been meditating for 36 years and when I'm working with other people and trying to help them to understand that the answers are all inside of themselves, that they have everything they need already installed inside of them, that they just need to get in touch with that part of them. And I regularly talk to 'em about getting in touch with their body, with their heart, their gut, and their consciousness in their body, not in their heads. And this is an interesting idea because that's kind of like where intuition, the voice of reason, consciousness, maybe God, people's identifications of God, hearing God or visualizing God, this is where all that comes from. Can we just dig a little bit deeper because I find it really great that obviously I know that there's science that supports all these things. Sure. So we receive approximately 11 million bits of data, a second sight, sounds, smell, taste, touch, intuition, 11 million bits of data. The science on how much hits our consciousness varies a little bit. Some scientists say 127 of those 11 million bits, some say 134 of those 11 million bits, it doesn't really make a difference. The reality is not very much of that data can get into our consciousness at any one time. All of that other data is stored. So think of it this way, if you live in the city, you don't hear the noise most of the time when you go out into the country, you hear the silence. Yes. People who live in the. Country don't hear the silence, but boy do they get a headache when they go into the city. That's. Sort of a gross example of how our filters work. So meditating helps you change those filters. I sometimes work with my clients with a process called gremlins to gurus. That story, I'm telling myself that I'm an imposter. I want to believe that I am capable and competent. So the gremlin is the imposter. We're going to call him George. And the competent me is Charlie. The first thing I need to do is become aware of that gremlin being triggered, because again, that gremlin lives in our unconscious. It's triggered. When my boss puts me on the spot. It's triggered when my boss puts me on the spot. My boss just triggered me again, I can call on Charlie and not let George out this time. And as I call on. Charlie, I'm changing. My story. And eventually that trigger automatic brings out my competence rather than my self doubt. I have not changed. I'm. Still the same me. I am developing more skill in this new role maybe, but I am at my core. Still me, but my story has. Changed, and how I show up is changed. I. Love it. I love it. And just to piggyback on what you said, so I'm from New York City. I grew up in New York City. I spent most of my life there until I was 25. And the first time I left the city, I was probably, I dunno, 18 years old when I went to the country, and it was actually up in the hills of New Jersey over there the first night I couldn't sleep because it was so silent. It was weird. It's just really interesting how your brain and your experience, you get used to something and then you have this complete change and you're like, what is this? I had to put noise on so that I could sleep. I needed noise. It was very funny. And I have this pattern then since then that I have to sleep with noise. I have to use white noise or a fan noise or something like that. Always. That's how I go to sleep all the time now for many, many years for God's sakes because of that. It's interesting. But I love it. I love it. This stuff we're talking about is fantastic. So one of the things I think about is how you need that experience, right? This is what we're really talking about, essentially is if I want to have children, for example, I've never had children before. I've never been a father before. This is some desire I have. And then I feel like, well, am I really a dad? Do I know how to do it? Am I going to do good? Am I do bad? But at some point, you just have to do the best you can and experience it. And then after experience that for some period of time, now you feel like, well, I'm a dad. You know what I'm saying? And so it's these ideas of having to push and go and do those things to start experiencing those things, talking to other people about those things, finding people who are maybe successful in those things, and talking to them about the patterns and things that they did that helped them, what they learned or whatever. And then you start doing that. And then over time, then you totally feel like you belong and you're in the right place and you're the right title or whatever, because you've now put in the work, right? And it's just getting over that. And I love that. And I love how, again, we go back to telling the story that it's not George, I'm going to act as Charlie. I'm not going to act like George. George is in there, but he's a liar and he just tells these stories that are not based on any facts. So let's stick with Charlie because Charlie knows he's going to do the best he can with what he has, and he's going to keep learning, growing and changing. Exactly. Brian, let's just say that somebody listening to this in the audience is right now going through some revision, some change, either because things have been handed to them that they need to change the way they do things or because they have a desire to change whatever, and they're facing some obstacles and challenges. What would you say to them about that? How could you give them some advice to help them to find the right way to make it through to be successful? Probably the first thing is reconnect with your anchors. Be very consciously intentional about connecting with your anchors, because no matter how big, how disruptive this change is, there's still a whole lot of things in your life that aren't changing. The next thing, and this comes from a lesson that my grandfather taught me when he was teaching me how to play pinochle, and I would get grumpy when I got a bad hand. You can't determine the hand you're dealt. It's always up to you how to play it. So given this change, what is the. Best that you can make of it? Create that story about living into that best and then move toward it. Stay in touch with that story no matter how tough. I love. It. Yeah, I love it. And I want to add to that, that just, I don't know why, but a long time ago, I read in this great book in the early nineties that the, I'm just going to go to the end. The end of the story was the truth is he who makes the rules wins the game. So the story that you tell yourself, those are the rules that we're setting up, and then you can't lose because you're setting it up yourself. And I want to just talk about this overarching, we talked about anchors several times. So an anchor would be, for example, the things that anchor me in my life that I have, like my relationship with my wife, my relationship with my kids, the fact that there are certain things I enjoy, hobbies I might have, that these are the anchors of my life that never going to change. I'm always going to be incorporating that in whatever I do. And these are the things that I need to continue to focus on, to know that I'm the same person with the same life. Nothing's really changing except this one area. I like that. I like that a lot. I think that's very useful. Thank you. Brian. I know you have to run. I've appreciated your time. We should do this again sometime. I'd like to talk more and get some more insight about resilience and change and leadership change. I mean, there's a whole area we didn't even get into about how to lead with through change that I think we need to discuss. Absolutely. Absolutely. I love it. All right, Brian, you have a great day. Thank you. You too. Bye. Bye.