Sherpa Leadership Podcast
Welcome to the Sherpa Leadership Podcast, where we help you climb higher in life and leadership. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, business owner, or leading a team, this podcast is designed to give you practical leadership tools, frameworks, and real-world insights to help you grow.
Sherpa Leadership Podcast
Bonus: Blind Spots to Breakthroughs
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What if the very habits that built your success are now capping it? We dive into five leadership behaviors that start as strengths and quietly harden into ceilings: rigid thinking, people pleasing, over-reliance on hustle, perfectionism, and impatience. Our goal isn’t to shame your wiring; it’s to layer the right skills on top so you adapt, delegate, and execute with clarity.
We start by reframing behaviors as changeable—not identity. From there, we unpack how stability can become stagnation and how harmony can morph into artificial peace that hides avoidance. You’ll learn to test small instead of betting the farm, invite thought challengers so assumptions don’t go unexamined, and replace vague praise with kind-but-clear feedback that actually moves performance. For leaders stuck in “busy,” we walk through the leverage ladder: prioritize high-value work, measure impact over hours, and use delegation and automation to scale without burning out. If perfection has you stalling, we normalize 80% launches, set “done by” dates, and use versioning to learn from the market faster. And for those wired with high urgency, we channel that responsiveness into strategic patience—impatient for action, patient for results—so your team gains momentum instead of whiplash.
We weave in research on decision quality, team performance, and stress reduction, plus real stories from the field that show how small shifts create outsized returns. You’ll leave with a practical playbook to mine healthy conflict, protect your focus, empower others to solve problems, and design an environment that supports change. Leadership is a journey, not a personality test score. When you combine your natural drive with learned skill, everyone wins.
If this resonated, subscribe, leave a quick review, and share it with a leader who’s ready to turn blind spots into breakthroughs. Then grab the free ebook and behavioral assessment from our toolkit and tell us: which behavior are you upgrading first?
You're listening to the Sherpa Leadership Podcast, your guide to climbing higher in life and leadership. I'm Reed Moore, and alongside Chase Williams, we're here to help you break through obstacles, scale your potential, and lead with greater clarity and purpose. Hey everybody, welcome back. You're listening to the Sherpa Leadership Podcast, and we're here to help you climb higher in life and leadership. I'm here with my co-host, Chase Williams, and uh this is an awesome bonus episode that we're bringing to you called Blind Spots to Breakthroughs. We're here to help you and encourage you. So I hope you enjoy this content. Welcome to the webinar uh Blind Spots to Breakthroughs. We're super excited to uh have you guys here. Chase, why are we even doing this?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I think we've had the opportunity to be kind of on this leadership journey together and apart, actually, for a really long time. And as we get the opportunity to kind of climb that mountain ourselves and the opportunity to guide and lead a whole bunch of other leaders, we start to see some patterns. Yes. Right. And patterns are a real indicator of where there might be opportunity. And as we kind of analyzed that and chatted through that, we thought, you know, why don't we talk about some of the patterns that we see that maybe are uh hindering us and hindering others in their leadership journey and the growth of their businesses and companies and their teams. And that's really the genesis of why this webinar.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we uh we have the opportunity to kind of have this vantage point of not just being uh owners and operators of companies, but also being able to coach people. And uh you you like you said, you just see patterns and things that uh my perspective is when when I'm in the trenches leading, uh I lead with blinders a lot of times. Yeah. And I don't always see the things that I need to see. And so this is just an opportunity to kind of zoom out for a second and say, hey guys, uh we're on this leadership journey together. Let's talk about some of the things that maybe we don't see when we're in the act of leading or growing in our leadership. So that's what today is about.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So let's jet, let's dive in here. We've got a lot of good stuff to cover. So here's what we're here to do today is bridge the gap really between our potential as leaders and how we're performing and influencing uh those that may choose to follow us. And really the promise for today is I love the way that Craig Grishel says this, and you may have heard this before. Everyone wins when the leader gets better, right? And so that's what we're gonna work on today is getting better so that everyone else can win as well. And the way that we're gonna do that is we're gonna build some lasting leadership skills, right? There's this concept that skill actually transcends our natural behavior. Yeah, right. If we take our natural behavior, how kind of God made us or we're wired, and we add skill on top of that, then we can continue to break through higher and higher uh ceilings as we hit them in our leadership journey. That's really kind of like this growth mindset, and some would call it adaptive behavior.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So even if I'm kind of made or wired one way, if that's stopping me from growth, I can apply skill and adapt there and then continue to climb higher.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So the problem that we deal with as leaders, a lot of times, um, it's it's a little bit hard to be able to navigate with a lot of the typical business training that we go through or the leadership training that we go through, because uh a lot of the skill sets that we develop over time in organizational leadership, they don't really uh help us address sometimes what is the biggest challenge in our businesses, which are our own personal underlying behavioral issues. You know, uh it's it's fun to play in the ocean, it's fun to splash in the waves, uh, but a riptide is no good and it's dangerous. And our natural behaviors, not only have they gotten us where we are in our leadership journeys, but a lot of times they create an undertow and they create an under an undercurrent that really undermines uh that behavior as a strength. And so that's the problem that we're looking to address today is helping us be able to maximize these behaviors and get the best out of them and really mitigate the risk that they come with.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, if you're a leader on this call or you're no matter where you're at in your journey, if you've been doing it for a while, you've probably experienced some of these feelings. And if you're early on in your leadership journey, uh trust me, you will experience them if you haven't just yet. And some examples are sometimes feeling trapped, right, in this cycle of endless work. Maybe it's constant turnover that you're experiencing. It could be a challenge kind of breaking through a certain production level or size or scale of your business. Uh, you may feel trapped because you've been a leader for a long time and you don't have a very solid succession plan, either in the current role you're in or for your business as a whole. Uh, sometimes we feel frustrated despite always working harder, right? You're not a leader because you're lazy, right? If you're on this call and you're a leader, you're not lazy. And so our default can be kind of working harder sometimes, and we'll talk more about that. But um, leadership, in essence, is actually not just you doing more. Uh, part of leadership is succeeding through others. Yeah. And so when that's not going as well as you'd like, that can that can be frustrating. Uh, you may feel tired, tired from using strategies that don't work, tired from solving the same issue over and over again, right? Might feel a little bit like a hamster wheel, or you're experiencing the same bottlenecks in your business that continue to be a challenge for you. Um, you may be wondering, like, is this really as good as it gets in my leadership journey? And the answer is no, should you do something about it? And that's why we're here today. But that can leave us feeling tired, right? Uh, feeling empty, even when maybe to others you look successful. Um, oftentimes leadership can be a little bit lonely. You might have heard, oh, it's lonely at the top, right? Uh that's not always true, but it can be, and it can leave us feeling a little empty. Um, you're wondering if you can progress. You're wondering sometimes if you've even regressed in your leadership journey, right? And even though others may hold us in high regard as leaders, um, we can we can have that empty feeling on occasion. So that's the pain that we want to move away from, right? And that's what we're we're here to talk about and teach about today.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and finally is our perspective. So uh your luck on this webinar, our perspective is that you're not stuck, right? You might be temporarily stuck, but it doesn't have to be that way. And we when we look at these underlying behavioral issues, one of the perspectives that I would encourage you guys to take uh along for this ride is that behaviors are just that. Behaviors are behaviors. And if we're not careful on our leadership journey, we can take behaviors and we can elevate them to the level of identity. And as soon as we elevate anything in our life to the level of identity, it starts to become like hardened concrete. It really, really starts to feel uh immovable. And for the most part, this is actually the beginning, or maybe even a deep-seated, uh, fixed mindset. And so when we're talking about the things that we're talking about today, we're talking about them because they're consequential. And my experience is that consequential things uh are not easy. And so we're asking you guys to take a look at this and say, hey, as we explore these different behaviors, uh, come from this mindset of this isn't who I am. I can't tell you how many leaders, especially seasoned leaders, uh, you know, through frustration or pain or frustration or just being tired, the things you talked about, they just get to a place where, like, this is just who I am. This is just how it is, this is just how I communicate. Uh, and they do that to the detriment of their own personal growth as well as to the organization, right? So we want to be mindful that today uh we have this opportunity to change. And all great leadership always starts with one place, and that's self-leadership. Uh, self-leadership, the hardest type of leadership there is, I think. I'm the hardest person to wrangle. My guess is that you are too. But just today, uh, my encouragement is take that fixed mindset of this is just who I am, set it on the shelf. If if you wanna, if you want to take it back, it's free, it's yours, just take it. But for now, consider that behaviors, even if hard, can change.
SPEAKER_01:So, speaking of who we are, right? Like you might be wondering who are our guides today? Who the heck are these two guys? Great mustache, no mustache, no hair. Uh, tell us a little bit about yourself, Reed.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so I started my leadership journey in the military uh in 2002, I believe. No, actually 1998, I had the opportunity to actually uh start training people in the military in my career field. And I started falling in love with this idea of building people and have really made a career out of it ever since. And so I've had the opportunity to be in the real estate space now for over 25 years, I believe. Uh, had the opportunity and the privilege now of leading salespeople to over$3 billion in real estate sales and our vertical, that's a pretty decent number. And I've also been a professional coach uh for over 15 years, just giving me a lot of opportunity to serve leaders and do things just like this.
SPEAKER_01:So, about me, I guess probably like a lot of you on the call, and I'm guessing, I really started my leadership journey as a kid, right? Whether that was on sports teams and high school in certain roles, college, and then I started my professional leadership journey when I graduated college and I went to work for a Fortune 100 company. And I was kind of in sales leadership and management, kind of climbing the corporate ladder for the better part of a decade. A lot of people uh say climbing the corporate ladder in a negative way, I had a great experience and really learned a lot. And at that point, I got into the real estate space as well. And I've been leading in that space for the last, I think, 13 years, at one point, up to about 8,000 agents out here in the Northwest region. And I've also been coaching professionally, business owners, entrepreneurs, and leaders for uh a little over a decade. So there's something that I like to say, Reed, and that is that you actually really don't get a choice of whether you're a leader or not. What I mean is if people are following you, and for those of you on the call, someone is, and more than one someone, more than likely, then you're a leader by default. You really don't you really don't get the choice there. What you do get a choice around is the quality of leader that you will become, the quality of leadership that you will pursue. And so um I'm just honored to get the chance to share some of our experiences and and some of the patterns that we've seen in others we get to support along the journey because uh my hallucination is we're all choosing today to take a step closer to the the quality of leader that we want to be.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I love it.
SPEAKER_01:From leadership challenges to breakthrough solutions. Here's some of the emotional reality that we're dealing with when we find ourselves trapped in some of those pains or frustrations that we talked about. Um, the first one is that everything rises and falls on leadership, right? We know this. Both you and your team get some of the rewards when you're leading well, and they get to pay the price when maybe you're not leading well or you're or you're feeling stuck in your leadership, right? And the other thing that we're dealing with is this idea of plateaued results or frustration, right? As leaders, we have vision for a better future, right? That that's part of what we do as leaders. And usually a better future doesn't equal plateaued results, right? So when we're experiencing that, we feel frustration, right? And then uh burnout from constant firefighting. We talked about like the hamster wheel, which is like these same problems keep popping up for me over and over and over. I'm dealing with the same kinds of things. Um, when we're when we're playing fighter, firefighter rather than leader, we can start to feel burnout. And then this idea of untapped potential, which I know for a lot of you, if you're anything like me, untapped potential is really scary to me. I don't I don't want to get to the end of my life and feel like I didn't tap into the potential that God gave me. And um, there's this challenge sometimes as leaders where we feel like we're like we're killing ourselves to reach our potential, but we're not sure if we're actually making the progress that we're capable of. Reality is sometimes we're not. And that's because of some of the blind spots we're gonna talk about today, so we can't break through.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So as we get going today, I just want to let you know there's a reward for you at the end. So we have a transformational toolkit. So we're going to be able to scratch the surface on these things today in this hour and a half we have together. But uh stay to the end. We have a QR code and there's going to be a full ebook available for you guys at the end. And it's gonna be uh it's gonna take all the content from the slide. So if you're feverishly taking notes, that's great. Also, you're gonna get all of this content in ebook format uh with uh just kind of really fleshed out. It's gonna be a really good resource. The other thing we do is as we go through this, if you're having a hard time identifying uh like the most important behavior for you to start working on, we also have an assessment available for you. All that's free at the very end. So stay tuned to that. Uh, and uh here we go, along for the ride. All right, so here's where we're gonna start today for blind spots to breakthroughs. So the first thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna work and talk about uncovering the hidden leadership habits that we have, right? Identify the things that are holding us back and we're gonna explore those different things. And some of them are gonna resonate with you, some of them might even be painful to hear, right? And other ones, you're gonna be like, I don't know if that applies to me. That's fantastic. So we're gonna take that and we're going to start working on this mindset of replacing these things with skill-driven strategies, replacing these behaviors because they're not identities, with skill-driven strategies. And we're gonna really work on like stop reacting in these areas of our life and then start leading better. And then next, we're going to build our next level leadership mastery. And this is gonna be uh hopefully a launch pad or a runway for you identifying and starting to work on these areas that matter in your leadership.
SPEAKER_01:Cool. So let's talk about why most leaders fail. When we say fail here, what we mean is failure to reach your potential, failure to break through the next ceiling of achievement or uh develop the influence that you desire. It's not for lack of drive, a drive. Ambition's not your problem, right? Again, you're you're not a leader because you're lazy. So, like this idea of like maybe I'm not working hard enough, you can toss that to the side. That's that's not the reason why most leaders fail. It can be the reason why some people fail. Sure. If you don't give effort, then you can't expect much of a result. But that's not likely your problem if you're on this webinar. More than likely, it's because uh you have a blind spot. And it's called that because you can't see it, right? Or you don't know that it's a blind spot. You might you might be connected to it or aware of it, but you're not aware that it's actually holding you back. And that's kind of the bulk of what we're gonna we're gonna start to dive into. Um, and the idea here is that these behaviors that actually got you to a certain level in your leadership that were very powerful and valuable for your growth are the exact same ones that might be holding you back.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_01:Isn't that kind of scary? It's like, oh, this worked really well for me for all these years, and now it's the same thing that's keeping me from uh the next level of success. And here's the reality um if you keep doing more of the same, that's a rock hard ceiling that you may never break through. And that's what we that's what we really want to avoid. So, how do we do that? This is kind of our core hypothesis. Like we said, those core behaviors that shape your business instincts that created a lot of, if not most of your success, um, really are the foundation of where you've gotten to thus far, right? And we want to be proud of that. We want to actually acknowledge that because um we don't want to throw that out entirely. It is the foundation of what we've built. And so um the next step, though, is identifying when those same behaviors move from being an asset for you to a liability, right? It's like this idea of an unchecked strength actually tipping over the point to becoming a weakness. We want to identify when that happens, what key areas of our business or leadership that happens in. And the the goal there is so that then we can layer on skill under our natural behavior, adapt our behavior in certain situations to achieve this elite level of success, whatever that may be for you, right? And so here's here's a truth that I want to offer you the best leaders are that way, the best leaders are great leaders despite some of their natural behaviors. That's true, not because of their natural behaviors. I want you to hear that again. The best leaders are the best despite their natural behaviors, not necessarily because of their natural behaviors. They have learned to adapt in the right situations with the right people and the right conversations that kind of help them achieve this elite level of success. That's what we want for you. It's what we want for ourselves. That's why we're on the journey together. So here's our expedition plan. We wouldn't be called the Sherpa group if we didn't have an expedition plan. The first thing is we're gonna identify five key behaviors, and there's more than five, but we're gonna talk about five key ones today that we have experienced and patterns in our leadership and others, and actually through some of the research that we did and we'll share with you, discover how they impact your success. Then we're gonna move to unpacking where are they helping you, how are they helping you in key ways, and then where might they be hindering you, where those strengths become limitations or liabilities, like we talked about. And then we're gonna provide some skill upgrades, so like some practical things you can do to break through in those scenarios or overcome those liabilities if they've turned into that, turning weakness into strength. And then we have a call to action. We have some additional resources for you, next steps for you, because let's be honest, like changing your behavior, readset it's really hard, is not going to happen in an hour and a half. We want to expose you to some of this and then give you kind of the next steps of the expedition plan so that you can go to work on actually breaking through.
SPEAKER_00:So let's do an overview of these behaviors that we've been talking about so far. So uh when Jace and I got ready to do this webinar, we were asking ourselves the question, you know, what are these patterns that we see uh in ourselves? What are the patterns in in that we see in people that we lead with and in coaching clients that we have? And we we just kind of sketched it out and and came with came out with with these five behaviors. And so then we decided, okay, well, let's just see if is this an anomaly? Is this is this normal? And we went out, we started doing research. We look at Stanford, we look at Yale, we look at Harvard Business Review and some other um other people that have been writing about this kind of stuff for a long time, like McKinsey and company. And what we found is there were about seven different uh behaviors that leaders tend to have that end up becoming assets and then uh they kind of uh like de-evolve into liabilities over the course of time. And so we were really happy that five of the ones that we identify were five of the seven. So the ones we're gonna talk about today are the inability to adapt or what becomes rigid thinking. Uh people pleasing, which kind of devolves into fear of conflict, over reliance on hustle, right? Like just like uh, you know, if founder, founder's like, you know, oh, like yeah, I you know, I were I I ran uphill both ways to school, and everybody in my business should do the same, right? I can outwork anybody. Yeah, you gotta be careful with that. Uh perfectionism, uh, you know, working on over-preparation and then impatience. Uh, this one uh is near and dear to my heart. Mine too. Uh so we're gonna talk about that for maybe a little extended time. And that's, you know, we're highly responsive people, some of us. And so we're gonna talk about some of the blind spots around that.
SPEAKER_01:Right on. So behavior one, let's go. Inability to adapt. Now, first we want to talk about the strengths around this, right? If you um if you don't recreate the wheel, right, you continue to stay focused on what works. You may have heard it said this way if it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? That can actually cause you to focus on key areas of your growth, your business, your team that actually really do move the needle, right? It can build a confidence inside of you, it can create stability in an organization or a team and consistency, right? If you know the thing that works and you go and do that every day and you uh you stay focused on that, um, that can be a really key strength to get you to a certain point. Yeah. And it can be a really uh key behavior that you want to impress upon or teach someone else, right? So remember, that's the strength side of this natural behavioral style, right? Where it starts to turn into a weakness is if it causes us to be stuck in outdated strategies, right? There's a reason none of us still ride around in horse and buggy, but it worked great then, sure, right? There's that we can be slow to pivot as leaders when we when our inability to adapt starts to turn into this rigidity, right? We're like, again, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Well, that can be valuable and overused, that can cause us to be slow to pivot. And it can also cause us to be resistant to innovation.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:If we know one thing to be true for sure, it's that the world is changing at an incredibly rapid pace, right? Maybe faster than ever due to certain technologies and whatnot. And so, although we want to have confidence, stability, and consistency in our leadership, we also don't want to be resistant to innovation.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, our world is uh pretty hostile now to what I would call sameness. And one of the challenges that we have as leaders is a lot of us start our leadership journey or our leadership trajectory with being innovators or disruptors, right? Like you were the young guy, you were the young gal at one point that was breaking things. And now you kind of get into a place where where everything stabilizes. And then we have this tendency to forget that uh that we had to do that at one point, and that as the world continues to move, we need to continue to take a look at that. And there's a good way to do that, and there's also a desta destabilizing way to do that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, you might have heard some of these famous business stories, right? Like one famous example is Blockbuster. You know, they were they they had these brick and mortar stores where you could go and rent a DVD and otherwise, and um, in their time, they were pretty innovative. Oh, yeah. They they kind of like blew that industry up in a in a good way for them way back when. Well, uh, here comes Netflix, right? Uh, this digital experience. And at first they had these boxes where you could go and return them whenever you wanted, put them in the mail, and then of course, that evolved into like a complete streaming and digital experience. Well, you may know that Blockbuster had the opportunity to buy Netflix for around 50 million, yeah. Which 50 million is not that big of a number anymore compared to what Netflix is worth now. Netflix actually went to Blockbuster and was like, hey, would you buy us for 50 million? No, we're good. We're gonna stick with brick and mortar. Yeah, didn't work out too well. Not so good, right? There's only one store left, it's in Bend Oregon, and it's more of like a uh a uh, what is it, an antique like kind of relic that you can go and visit than an actual store that most people would, right? Another quick example is Kodak, right? Kodak was really in the film business, even though they had cameras, right? They had cameras with film in them. And as this digital camera experience started to evolve, they didn't they had the technology first, one of the first, but they didn't want to use it because they thought it would hurt their film sales, right? Didn't work out too well for them. And so here's kind of uh some research insight, right? This is from Harvard Business School, and this is you know, specific to disruption. Primary challenge most large companies face, and you could replace large companies with small companies, leaders, entrepreneurs, is disruption, the response to which requires a new strategy, new processes, and a new set of behaviors. I promise you, right now, there's somebody, whether it's a large company with billions of dollars backing them or just a new competitor in your marketplace, they're burning the midnight oil to figure out how to beat you. And they're probably burning the midnight oil, figuring that out through innovation and not being too attached to the way things used to work. So that's where the risk is for us, right?
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so what do we do about it? Here's the skill upgrade. So we make sure that even though there's some strengths behind this, we're not being too rigid in our leadership. The first is to test small. So what this looks like is piloting new strategies before making big commitments, right? Jim Collins would call it uh firing bullets before cannonballs. So it's like, what does it look like to take a small piece of my business or maybe one person in my organization that can pilot new strategies, new strategies, new ideas? Uh, an example would be maybe um using AI, that's kind of a hot topic these days, in a small portion of your business to see how it can change the efficiency or some of the results that you can get rather than we're gonna use AI in every single part of our business starting tomorrow.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Right? Like if you're if you're if you're bordering on rigid, that might not be a good idea. It might not be a good idea, anyways, right? Bullets before cannonballs. Another example might be offloading certain tasks in your organization to a virtual assistant. Sure. If you haven't done that before, like a small portion at first to see how that works. Maybe um uh changing or or alternating some of your marketing copy in a way that doesn't completely disrupt the flow of leads or business that you're generating, but has like a small portion at first to see if something new works, right? You could even budget in part innovation in your business. Yeah. You have a small budget to try new things, to test new things. Now, this is a skill to help you overcome writing contracts on carbon copy, right? We can sign those electronically now as an example. We want to be careful of that. The second thing is really to challenge your assumptions. And one of the best ways to do that is just to surround yourself with thought challengers, right? Ask this question Do people on your team challenge your ideas?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Or do they all just say, yes, Chase, that's a great idea? Well, I know that's not true because I've had plenty of dumb ideas. So I need people around me that are going to challenge my thinking, challenge my strategy, challenge my ideas. The other uh way to kind of surround yourself with thought challengers is things we might think of as like masterminds or or being around our peers that maybe are in other locations or even the same location that are in the same space, same business, and might be trying new things more readily than you, um, and might be able to kind of point out that that's an old way of thinking, or even expose you just to a new idea that if you're working with blinders on, you might not have seen. Yeah. That's another way of thinking about that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, if you're finding yourself in this place where you're resistant to change, um, this is, I think, great advice because one of the things to not do is to is to just, you know, put all your eggs in one basket on a new strategy. There's a good chance there's younger or newer leaders or leaders with a fresh lens inside of your organization, and they're going to want to challenge the assumptions that the company's working on uh are working from. And if they have a like a small batch ability to be able to do that, that's going to be really, really helpful. That leads us right into our next behavior, and that is people pleasing and the fear of conflict. Boy, those two really go well together. Oh boy. So one of the things you might have found is if you have this people-pleasing gene, you you want to see the best from people, um, this can devolve into a fear of conflict, which is really, really toxic to uh to a business culture. The strengths that come along with people pleasing, especially early on, is it really builds strong relationships. It's so clear that you want everybody to win and succeed and you're out for them and and and you know for their best and all of those things. It's great. You start teamifying and team building, this can really yield itself or lend itself to helping with that. And it can create a sense of harmony. The challenge is over time that harmony kind of becomes an artificial harmony because we as leaders, maybe one of the things that we get paid for more than almost anything is dealing with the hardest things. And most times the hardest things have to do with people and relationships. And so people pleasing becomes a real challenge to the growth of our leadership over the course of time. So the weaknesses that show up is we have a lack of boundaries. And uh, I think that there are a lot of leadership problems that actually come down to a lack of boundaries. Um, we as leaders uh put don't put boundaries sometimes around our families. And so business creeps in and then overwhelms uh things that ultimately are more important. We, you know, we say things like call me anytime, we have an open door policy and all of these things. And and what happens as a result of um having boundaries is that this really takes a toll on you as the leader. You might find yourself getting really annoyed, really frustrated, really burnt out, and and you start maybe thinking it's your people, you start thinking it's the vertical you're in. So maybe you need to go build a different business or get a different leadership position. But fundamentally, a lot of this comes down to boundaries, and this comes from this blind spot of people pleasing. Ultimately, you're going to over time say no a lot more than you say yes, which is a sign that you're getting healthy boundaries. And and and there's a fear attached to that when you have this as a blind spot. Avoiding confrontations and then ultimately delaying decisions is a really big cost when it comes to this behavior.
SPEAKER_01:Yep, you got it. I think that, you know, if you think about saying yes to everyone else in your world, but no to your family as an example of no boundary, that's problematic. I again, I don't think anyone does it on purpose. No, right? And so um it's a it's a really great opportunity to be a recovering people pleaser like us, because it's it doesn't happen overnight, uh, but just understand the true importance of it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so uh research insight on this uh disagreements are an inevitable, normal, and healthy part of relating to other people. There's no such thing as a conflict-free work environment, dot, dot, dot, church, household, community, community, parenting, information, parenting, all of this, right? Um, I actually had the opportunity to totally mess this up about two weeks ago. We had an executive uh meeting, and inside of our culture, we're very collaborative. I've had the fortune of just being surrounded by absolutely brilliant, wonderful, wise people for many, many, many years. Andy Björkestran, who runs the company, Blake Elder, my other partner, Chase, and the whole list of people. And so in our culture, it's very, very normal for me to bring an idea to the table and say something like, hey, here's something I really want to do. And what I mean is I want to bring this to the table, let's beat it up and see if it's worth doing. And we're very collaborative in it, and it works really well in a lot of situations. Well, a couple of weeks ago, I brought an idea to the table, and it wasn't just an idea for us to beat beat up, it was, hey, I've made this decision, we're gonna go this way. Now I want to spend our energy working on how to make this great. And so all of the communication I that led up to that meeting, um, in my mind was I've made a decision and I've made that clear. Uh, after some feedback uh from Chase and other executives in the company, and after rereading the communication that I that I had put out there, I put out communication that said things like, This is something I would like to do. And in my mind, I was clear. But after I started reflecting, I realized this is a result of this. Blind spot still at work in me because I am still not direct enough when I need to be direct because of the potential of backlash or or or blowback from being direct when you need to be direct. So still a work in progress. Okay, what do we do about it? Skill upgrades. Kind but clear communication. Kind but clear communication. This is where we're wanting to go when it comes to moving this instead of fear of conflict, to being able to be healthy and have great boundaries. So the very first one is a simple, not easy one. And that is being very specific in our feedback. Whether we're giving uh constructive or feedback that's that's meant to change somebody's direction or we're giving praise. As a leader, a lot of times we can give general praise, like, hey, you did a great job, right? You're awesome. You're awesome. High five, right? That kind of stuff. The issue is that it's it's not super clear and it doesn't necessarily tell the person, uh, hey, these are the things I get rewarded in this company specifically. And if I'm overly vague or I kind of pull back on details of corrective behavior, uh, then I'm actually not being kind. And so I want to be able to say, hey, uh Sam, I want to say the other day, thank you. I was in a real bind and you made these three phone calls and reached out to this person. And as a result, this is what happened for me. And I wanted to say thank you because that really helped me move the needle. That is something that is really, really helpful, as well as very specific feedback. In the moment, it creates conflict, but it is clear and it is kind. Secondly, set boundaries with confidence. I can't commit now, uh, but I can revisit this later. You having boundaries ultimately uh supersedes you and your leadership, but it starts showing other people how to model protecting priority in their life. And one of the things you might find is people may in your organization may not do what you say, but over the course of time they will do what you model. And so this is something that is going to, it's gonna be very helpful inside of your business. Number three, don't delay tough conversations. John Maxwell said this best, I think. And that is the the lowest price you're going to pay is the price you're gonna pay today. If I have a situation that shows up and I decide that uh because of people pleasing tenancies, because of this blind spot, I'm going to delay this decision. Now, this is different than I need to like get more context, right? I need to, I need to really figure out what's happening here. But if I do it because of this people pleasing blind spot, uh tomorrow is gonna be a harder conversation. Yep. A month from now, it's gonna be a very hard conversation. Two years from now, it may be so difficult that I won't even approach it. And if you're in that place in business, you can direct message me and say, hey, I got myself in a in a pickle. I have a really hard conversation and I think it's gonna cost me too much to have, and we can help you work through that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, the analogy I like sometimes is this firefighting analogy. It's like usually where there's smoke, there's fire. And when you know there's a fire, you run to put the fire out, right? You don't wait because then the fire gets bigger and it spreads to the next building and burns the whole town down.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Right? Like smoke, fire, run, put it out. That's that's that's not avoiding or delaying tough conversations. Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_00:Uh, and lastly, one of the the things that happens when you start being intentional about moving from this uh uh underlying behavior of fear of conflict and people pleasing is you don't just create an environment where uh conflict is okay and we have conflict, but you actually look for it. You mine it out, you seek out differing perspectives and you deal with the discomfort in that moment so that your company can have better results over the course of time.
SPEAKER_01:Can I give you an example, right? Like this would be like, let's say you're presenting an idea to your team and everyone's saying, like, oh, that's the best idea ever. We love it, it's great. Asking a question like, if something were to go wrong with this, what do you think it might be?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:That's an example of mining for conflict, scratching off the surface level answers so that you can really root out what you want to know.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and a lot of times the people who have the best feedback are not those that are the loudest. So if you're looking for body language and you see Charlie sitting in the corner or Samantha's over here and they're not making eye contact and they've been quiet the whole meeting, there's a good chance that they see something that you don't, and it's worth digging for.
SPEAKER_01:You got it. Okay, behavior number three, over-reliance on hustle, or what some might think of as the hustle culture, right? This is a common one in recent years. Yeah, just pull up your bootstraps, uphill both ways, like you said. I'm still gonna use that with my kids, by the way, but yeah, I don't know how well it'll work. But this idea of over-reliance on hustle. Now let's talk about the good qualities of hustle, right? It creates grit, resilience, work ethic. Success does involve hard work, right? And again, if you're a leader, it's because you have a certain level of hustle in you, of work ethic in you. You have put in the time, you put in the hours, and that's not a bad thing. The challenge is if you start to over-rely on just sheer gritting your teeth and hustle, right? If you think about like you could probably cut down a tree with a butter knife if you hustled hard enough, but it's really not that effective. Right. There's better ways of doing it, right? And if you try to cut down a tree with a butter knife, you're gonna get burnt out at some point through that process, right? As an example, you're gonna create limited scalability in your business and your team because there's only so many hours in the day. I know we've heard that, but it's really true. And if we're just over-relying on hustle, we're gonna miss the opportunity to grow or scale or even lead others, right? Because there's this idea that if we're the one, if we're the ones hustling, that's us doing again, a certain amount of that is appropriate. But if we're leading others, we want to be succeeding through others. Um, it can also create diminishing returns. All you're doing is hustling all the time and just adding extra hours. Uh you get tired, right? You make mistakes. You're not, you're not your best, the best version of yourself. So there's kind of better ways of thinking about this. And a couple of things I would offer you here is it was taught to me one time that simply adding hours, right? Or hustling as you might think of it, really is cheating your growth and effectiveness as a leader, right? You're you're cheating just by adding more time rather than upgrading your skill, upgrading the way you lead others around you, upgrading other tools and techniques that can help you get more out of each hour. If you're just adding hours, you're really cheating yourself. And I'll tell you a quick story. Uh, I worked with a leader uh for quite a long time, and there was a period when she was trying to replace herself in a key leadership role, right? One of the hardest workers I've ever seen, by the way. And when we were talking through, like it doesn't seem like anybody uh is gonna be the right fit for my job, or I can't seem to find anybody who wants to be in my role. I asked her a question that sounded something like Have you checked how many hours you've worked in the last six months? When's the last time you took a vacation? Do you think anyone would want your job based on the way that you're operating your job? Because I wouldn't.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_01:Right. And and and again, as a compliment, one of the hardest workers I've ever seen. But this over-reliance on hustle was causing her to operate in a way that most people wouldn't even want to operate in.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Right? It's not a lifestyle that they would desire. So we have to be really careful of this one.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, people in your business, um, you might even have a little bit of shame around this, where you know you start getting any level of freedom inside of your business. If maybe if you're a founder, you start thinking that you know people don't want to see you win, they don't want to see you on the golf course or whatever, you know, whatever you're into. The challenge with just throwing more uh you know, unthought through hours at stuff is that what your what your company may actually need from you is for you to have perspective, for you to have vision, for you to have enough space that's not filled with things, so that way you can get outside of the noise and they can trust you to help guide them. And that's really hard to do when your default is just hustle, hustle, hustle. And it really does lend itself to this idea of if I'm modeling the way, I want people to want to, I want people to want my job. Yep. Right.
SPEAKER_01:Yep, that's right. So this is just a little bit from our research again from the Harvard Business Review this time. Busyness has become a status symbol. People consider those who exert high effort to be morally admirable regardless of output. Yeah, that's a problem, right? Regardless of output is the problem. Right. And so, like, I I I'm fond of saying, like, busy is kind of the dirtiest four-letter word we have now. Yeah, just be careful using that. It's almost like a conditioned response. Hey, how you doing, Chase? Busy, right? Like so much so, and I stole this from a colleague. So, Leslie, if you're on the call, you might be, I stole it from you, because you said this to me one time and I really loved it. In terms of reframing my my mindset, was like, ah, life's really abundant, yeah, right, rather than busy. And and and another way to tell if maybe you're over-relying on this is if things are actually going pretty well in your world, you're getting great results or good results, and you have some downtime or moments of there's really nothing planned to do, and you feel like you're being lazy because you're not doing anything. This is just an insight into like you might just be comfortable being busy all the time rather than getting perspective, adding in some thinking time, other things that can actually be beneficial than just filling time with work so that you don't feel like you have nothing to do.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So here's kind of the skill upgrade. We'll call it the leverage ladder. And it's this first one of prioritizing high value activities. You guys have all heard of the 80-20 principle or the Pareto principle, which says that 20% of your activities get 80% of the results. Those are the high value activities, and not everything matters equally, it just doesn't, right? So we have to make sure we're spending time where our impact is the greatest, right? The second kind of step or skill here is measuring impact, not hours, yeah, right? Focusing on the actual results generated. And the reality is that output is not necessarily tied to hours, right? Right now, how do we do this practically? You want to make sure you have tracking and scoreboards in your business that indicate the actual output that you desire. Otherwise, you could end up working 90 hours just like that, because you're a hard worker.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And I don't my hallucination is that's not really what you're going for. And we've seen that it has legitimate limits. Hustle and effort has a legitimate ceiling that you just can't break through. It's 24 hours a day. Yes. Right. The third one is um delegate and automate. Identify tasks that you can hand off. Now, the first question you're going to ask around delegating is who? That's a really powerful question. Who else can be doing this other than just me? It gives you an opportunity to empower others in your organization and delegate some actually really important things. It doesn't just have to be menial things to others that you're working to develop in your world. So that's the first question. Who? The second question might be what? So, for example, automating might be tied to technology.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_01:What piece of technology can automate some of these things that we're constantly doing uh in our world over and over again? That's different than just hustling or adding hours.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Right. So a really smart person uh said this to me one time, and it really impacted me in my leadership journey. He said, leverage isn't lazy, leverage is focus. That was this guy right here. And I was like, oh man, because it sometimes it feels like I just need to be doing everything or I'm gonna be burdening someone if I delegate to them. And uh, you know, now I don't have as many things to do. So am I actually lazy? No, you're not. Leverage isn't lazy, leverage is focus on the high value activities and prioritizing the impact that those bring your business. Love it. Number four, perfectionism and over preparation, right? So when we have this tendency to be perfectionists in our leadership journey and in our businesses, there are some strengths that can come from that initially, right? We have this high focus on excellence, right? We take a lot of pride in either the product or the service or the way that we're delivering things in our world, and that can create a lot of excellence, which is probably has brought you business and brought you opportunity and brought you into a leadership role, right? We can be very detail oriented, which means we, you know, hopefully don't make too many mistakes or we avoid as many as possible, which is kind of this idea of quality control, right? We're delivering a world-class experience because we have this element of perfectionism and we prepare a lot to make sure that we're doing doing these things well. When we kind of tip the scale, and this becomes problematic or a liability, is when it causes us to have paralysis by analysis, analysis paralysis, right? It's like we're we're we're researching it, you know, for hours and hours and days and weeks and months, and we're getting all the details and we're talking to a hundred people that can give us their advice on the same thing. Yeah. That's analysis, paralysis, right? Um, which can cause us to have slow execution, right? And slow is generally not a word that works well in a competitive environment.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_01:Right. Now there's moments when it can make a lot of sense, but when we need to be executing at a high level to deliver that world-class experience that some of our perfectionism helped us create, we typically don't want to be doing it in a slow fashion. And when we're when we want everything to be perfect or we're overpreparing, that can happen. And it can also cause us to um miss opportunities, miss opportunities in the marketplace, miss opportunities for uh developing other leader leaders in our space because they're not perfect yet. By the way, neither are we. No, right? There's this idea of perfectionism that just cannot be achieved. And what that can cause is you having unreasonable expectations for those that you lead.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:If other people think that you expect them to be perfect because that's the way you're behaving and they know they can't live up to it, that's tough. Yeah. That's problematic.
SPEAKER_00:Sometimes those unreasonable expectations um show up towards others, but you can't live up to them. And that can be a really big challenge around perfectionism. Some some people are extremely uh perfectionistic and and excellent in everything they do. My experience is that a lot of times leaders uh end up telling themselves a story about how good they've always been, and then they go to hand it off to some somebody and they just can never measure up. But I've had the opportunity to be on the other side of transactions or business situations with some of those leaders. It's easy to have a belief about yourself that if you are measuring it against the same measurement you're you're measuring others, you actually might not even measure up to what they're capable of.
SPEAKER_02:Yep.
SPEAKER_00:So you have to be very careful that there's an element of perspective here that may be warped when it comes to perfectionism.
SPEAKER_01:It can also lead you to micromanaging others because you have this desire for it to be exactly right and perfect. And and I'm betting that no one on the call is like, yeah, I want to be a micromanager. That's me. That's my leadership style that I desire. Right. We don't because nobody likes that. But when we're working so hard for everything to be perfect, it can cause us to lead that way. It can also cause us to disempower others in our world that we lead. Because they're not perfect and we see it's not perfect, we want to take it back, or I'll just let me do it. I can do it better. That's kind of what you're describing. That's incredibly disempowering for those that you lead. And so this is where that kind of perfectionism kind of tips the scales and can become a liability for you. So here's some insight. Leaders succeed by holding themselves to a high bar. That's a good thing. But in crisis and uncertainty, pursuit of perfection wastes time. You might have heard of this concept before of peacetime leader versus wartime leader, right? That's from a really popular book I can't think of the name of this second. But it's this idea that there's different styles of leadership that are required depending on the situation, what's going on in the industry, who you're leading. And you guys all understand that. But if um if we're wasting time because we're overpreparing or we're looking for things to be perfect, that can be really problematic in our world.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:So, what do we do about it? Here's the skill upgrade. It's kind of the 80-20 in a different way execution role. Launch things, uh, whether those are initiatives or ideas or people, at an 80% readiness, right? Dan Martell in his book, Buy Back Your Time, says 80% done is 100% awesome. That's great. And I love that reminder so that we don't like we don't spend all this time trying to take it to perfection when it's really not necessary. And so what we encourage you to do is kind of commit to this version 1.0 mentality. Yeah, right. You there's huge companies that do this really well. Apple is a great example. If you look on the software of your iPhone, it's you know version 2.31.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Right. And that means that it started at some point at 1.0. And there's actually a legitimate benefit to doing this, right? You're letting the marketplace in that in this example kind of take it to the finish line for you with incredible feedback from those that you're serving. It's actually faster than trying to get it perfect before you launch it, right? Mike Tyson has this famous quote where it says everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Well, I love that quote, but it's kind of like putting something out there that's really good, really, really good, right? Again, high bar, 80%, and then getting such great feedback because it's already really good that we take it closer to perfection faster.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, one of the secrets of perfection is you actually can't reach it without the feedback of the marketplace.
SPEAKER_01:That's right.
SPEAKER_00:You can't build something in a petri dish. So if you're frozen up, this idea of 80% gets it to the marketplace so that reality can have its way with it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. The other thing is I want you to think of reframing this perfectionism or over preparation as actually it's fear a lot of times, right? And and so let's call it what it is, so that we're bringing it into the light. Sometimes it's fear around um avoiding judgment, right? Or it's fear around what will people think of me if I get it wrong, or well, am I gonna like lose all my customers because I made a mistake? Or is someone that that I'm leveraging stuff to gonna make me look bad if they make a mistake?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Ooh, let's bring that into the light. Because if I'm afraid of those things, my my hallucination is you don't want to be a fearful leader, and you're not a fearful leader. So if we can identify that as actually fear rather than high standard, then we can address it appropriately and move forward, right? The other thing is to set done deadlines, right? Strict time limits to launch something or go forward with something or make a decision so that you can stop tweaking on it forever and you can get that feedback from the marketplace. An example of that, Reed, is this webinar. Yeah. Right. Like we we were working a lot on it, but ultimately we set the date. We started inviting you all. Thanks for being here. And and that just caused us to kind of speed up the execution and the research and all the tweaking that we needed to do to get it where we thought it would be uh pretty good. And hopefully it is, but we know it's not perfect, and we actually covet your feedback to get it even closer. So that's an example of we got to set a done deadliner. We could have gone until December and never even taught any of this content, even though we had it. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00:First of all, let's just zoom out for a second. Isn't this fun talking about all these like really hard behavioral things?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so fun. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, so I just want to give you guys some context before we go into this one. And that is the only reason we're talking about this is that you guys are successful leaders. So there's a lot to be celebrated. These behaviors drive, like we've talked about, a lot of strengths, a lot of really great things. And so just you know, if you if you're feeling beat up or like, oh my gosh, I have to time out, it's okay. Like, we're all on this journey to climb higher in life and leadership. So just take a deep breath. Take a deep breath, take a deep breath. All right, behavior number five impatience and high responsiveness. Uh man, I want to tell you that this is just nothing but strengths, nothing to see here. This is all good. Uh, and uh, and it's not. That would be untrue. That would, that would, that would not be true or helpful. So there's some strengths, and some of you guys, if you have this, you know it's speed, it's urgency, it's responsiveness to clients. Man, clients love this, right? This is so helpful when you're working B2B or B2C. It's just it's awesome, right? Great, great, great strengths. Oh, there's some challenges though. If you are impatient and you are highly responsive, um, uh it for me, it's it's a compulsion, right? Like there are there are times where I end up being so highly responsive that I'm almost feeling like it's controlling me, not me controlling it. That's not good leadership, right? Right. So it can lead to rushed decisions, snap decisions. The the level of urgency uh can talk to me like like importance, but it's not importance, it's just urgency. And and this constant sense of urgency, uh, it can lead to frustration and burnout. This is maybe one of the biggest enemies that leaders have when it comes to their enjoyment, their joy, their success over a marathon, not a sprint, right? Uh, because uh everything all the time can be not done fast enough, right? And and it's all urgent to the point where you start adding deadlines way before, like you know, you don't you don't tell anybody the internal deadline, like they have a two-week deadline, but internally I want it done yesterday. Yep. Right. And so I can come across, and other other people that have this as leaders can come across as never being able to be pleased and and can just run everybody into the ground. It's really a big problem. I think it's one of the most impactful behaviors uh as a positive and as a negative. Okay, so where it shows up, man, it shows uh up into jumping into ideas too fast before letting anything play out. Uh, we have a strategy that we work with our coaching clients on uh to be able to help protect them from this if they happen to have this behavioral makeup, because the last best idea gets executed until the next best idea shows up, and that might be 22 hours later. 22 seconds. 22 seconds later. And it just creates massive organizational whiplash and it creates challenges uh when it comes to the ability of your business to actually just continue to grow and scale in a consistent way, uh, expecting in uh instant results all the time, leading to individual frustration for the leader as well as for the team, and then missing uh the long-term effects. Man, um, you know, Warren Buffett said this, uh, I think it was Warren Buffett, and he said that almost everything great in life compounds. And I, man, that is so true. I've been married for 25 years this year, and just it gets better and better and better and better. Uh if you're in uh if you're an investor and you've been making good decisions from a very young age, it just gets so great over time. If you are impatient with your money and with your relationships and with your business, you never get to see the results of compounding. And you might put so much energy and and maybe like you combine this with hustle culture and you just outwork everybody and you're impatient and everything's urgent. You might do really well for yourself, but nothing's compounding. Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I want to I'll share a quick little story here. And I asked Reed's permission to share this one so I wasn't throwing him under the bus, but it wasn't that many weeks ago. Uh, there was something exciting happening in our business, and it was at the point where it kind of was touching my area of responsibility, right? Reed was excited, all he wanted to do was help, and he had this like this responsiveness, this internal compulsion to like make sure everything was going well. And um, and what what actually happened is it created a little chaos with the team. Yeah, if I'm being honest, and I shared with Reed, like uh, and and of course, luckily we have a lot of relationship and context, and we're both working towards the same goals, so it wasn't any big issue. Um, but but I shared with Reed I'm like, hey, buddy, I got it. I got it, right? Yeah, and and he was super appreciative of that. But if I'm being honest, like there's this element of like, is it that you don't trust me to do my area of responsibility, or is it that am I moving too slow for what's required? Or or or right? And again, we have great relationship in great context, but when you're acting in this like high responsiveness, it can disempower other people, not on purpose, yeah, right. And so you want to be really careful of that. And like you said, this is one of the biggest strengths and also one of the biggest challenges. And that's just one small example.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So something to be mindful. Okay, so what do we do about it? All right, so first thing is awareness and restraint. Man, that sounds easy, doesn't it? Oh, it's all easy, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Awareness and restraint. The first thing I want you to just be aware is that the sense of urgency that you might wear as a badge of honor, or even just say, you know, like, I think that this idea of being highly responsive and impatient is is like a core value. Again, not identity behavior, right? We want to be aware that this has a positive and negative effects inside of your business. And then we want to actually start working on self-control and restraining ourselves. And this can mean things like when we talk about what we do in our business planning, and that is that we make a commitment to restraining ourselves from turning directions unless there's actually an emergency. Uh, we want to ask ourselves the question, right? Um, is this really going to move the needle faster? There are times where your urgency, uh, your awareness of your urgency, uh, if you step back, you realize if I move faster on this, I'm going to burn more energy that I might not have right now. And the end result actually needs to be three months from now. And so all I'm going to do is waste energy and maybe get in other people's lanes. Secondly, uh, know that you are not the only problem solver in your business. A lot of times this can be matched up with this feeling of being an assessant problem solver. Probably why you got to where you are in leadership, at least in large part. But now your impatience can undercut the process of other people being able to continue to grow in their ability to solve bigger and bigger problems. You want to disempower people, show up and be the the the let's mastermind, like let's talk about this. And really, what I'm doing is I I want to get like I'm excited about this, let's solve problems. It's not good.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and actually, I would argue that true leadership is not solving other people's problems, it's teaching them to solve their own problem and how they think and what resources they have and and a bunch of different pieces, right? So if you feel like you're constantly solving everyone's problem, uh check your ego, right? It might be because that makes you feel good. Yeah, and it's probably because you're good at it, but it's not actually leadership right now.
SPEAKER_00:And and uh when when you commit to that, it actually puts their development to a large extent on their timeline. And if you've raised kids, you start to realize how uh toxic or frustrating impatience can be when you're developing somebody over the course of 18, 20 years, right? Like it can be problematic. Um we want to reframe our impatience and we want to channel it where it fuels growth, where it fuels progress. That impatient, that sense of urgency, that high urgency, man, it has a place in your business, but it has to be focused, right? Think of this, it needs to be it needs to be kind of coming out of the barrel of a gun, not not a uh just a bomb randomly going off in your business all the time. Lastly, strategic patience, impatient for action and patient for patience for results. We want to take action, we want to get things in in order, and then we want to continue that process so that it can compound.
SPEAKER_01:All right, so let's summarize really quickly here, right? This comparison, the dual nature of these behavioral styles. Again, inability to adapt as a strength can create stability. Overused or as a limitation can create stagnation. And we have to be able to identify when that that's that change is taking place. People pleasing as a strength helps us build strong relationships initially. As a limitation, can create boundary issues, right? Over reliance on hustle gives us a strong work ethic, and that's required. That's important. But overused, the limitation is it can create burnout and some other problems that we discussed. Perfectionism, it can create a level of excellence, but it can also cause us to get paralyzed when we're we're fearful of what might happen if something's not perfect. And then impatience, one of my favorites too, and one of the strongest and most valuable in this like sense of urgency and responsiveness, but overuse can cause us to make rash decisions, create organizational whiplash, disempower others, and on and on and on and on. So, again, what we don't want to do here is throw the baby out with the bathwater. These are valuable behaviors. We need to know when to use them, when not to overuse them. Right. Right. So that's really kind of the goal. And the transformational process that we've gone through is first awareness, right? This idea of I recognize these as deep default behaviors and I recognize that they have value, but I'm now identifying when maybe it's crossed over from asset to liability on the trajectory of your influence, your leadership, your organization. And then we talked about some practical skills that you can layer on top of your natural behavior to create adaptive behavior and help you kind of break through to the other side, right? And continue to grow. The reality is that we have to work on this over and over and over. We have to apply, apply this practice consistently because, as we said, we're not gonna change our behavior overnight, right? There's this idea of mastery that that takes 10,000 hours, right? It's commonly said. And I believe it's true. So, like if you're bumping into the ceiling of your natural behavior, there's this pursuit of mastery that is certainly gonna be required to help you get to the level you're capable of. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So let's just rock through these again, just with the real world impact. So the first one is our ability to have adaptation before when we're, you know, when we're just rigid, we have resistance, right? So uh changing to familiar methods uh or we we we cling to familiar methods uh despite evidence that says, hey, things are changing around you. Afterwards, what we want from mitigating the downside of this behavior is we want flexibility, testing new approaches with controlled experiments. We want to uh work on our people pleasing and and so so we learn how to do conflict management. Man, one of the things that's just a killer of a culture is avoidance when everybody is avoiding uh hard issues primarily because of us uh as leaders, right? We let issues fester to maintain what's ultimately artificial harmony. And afterwards, we want engagement, addressing concerns directly and respectfully. But you want to see a group of people engaged, talk about substantive things, talk about things that have conflict. I can't remember the last time I watched a good movie that at its heart didn't have substantial conflict. That's the same when you and your team are talking about substantial things. Uh leverage is the outcome uh that we're wanting for this this third one. And that is we want to go from being a solo effort, like I hustle, right? I grind, uh, I do everything personally, and then I make a limited impact because I'm limited by the number of hours I can throw at something to afterwards delegation, uh focusing on high-level work and greater results. Moving from perfectionism from analysis paralysis to being able to uh focus on execution, launching at 80% done. Dan Martell, 80% done is 100% awesome. By the way, even as a perfectionist, not an identity, a behavior, you don't feel that way. Give it a go. All right, and impatience. Uh before just frustration, right? Uh we we abandon strategies before they before they mature, and afterwards, we have strategic patience, consistent action with long-term perspective, so we can see things compound over time.
SPEAKER_01:So here's some of the research that we did was we want to remind you like, why does this stuff really matter, right? How will you know that this is making an impact in your journey? And these are just a few stats for you, right? Like a 30% increase in your decision quality. Like that's from the Harvard Business Study Review. I'd love to have that in my growth as a leader. I'm sure you would too. 40% increase up to a 40% increase in team performance and an increase in team effectiveness, 25% in stress reduction. Hey, Reed, do you want to take your stress down by 25%? Yes, please. Add skill on top of your natural behavior. That's what we're talking about. One that didn't make the slide here, but I have in my notes is uh McKenzie Global Institute reports strategic delegation saves executives eight to 12 hours weekly. Wow. Strategic execution, save, save eight to twelve hours a week. How can you repurpose that on high value activities or for your family or time to think about and envision cast for the future of your organization? Still valuable pieces. So this the stakes are truly high on adapting our behavior and understanding when and how we do that. So I wanted to share this with you because it's like again, why the heck does this stuff really truly matter in breaking through our ceilings? Now, we're talking about change, folks, and we all know that change is hard. So let's talk about some of the common obstacles to change. Um, the first one is your social environment, yeah, right? Like others that you lead, people around you, your wife, your kids, your friends, they've gotten used to how you typically show up, your natural behavioral style. So um, one of the things that you can do is just be open and honest with them about some of the change that you're working on. Yeah. Like, hey, Reed, I recognize that sometimes I show up as too responsive in certain situations. So if you see me like holding back or not responding as quickly as you're used to, understand I'm just trying to identify the areas where that's helpful and identify the areas where that's hurtful. Can you help me out with that?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, people will give you a lot of grace if you approach it this way.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, if they if they don't know why you're doing something different, then they they're seeing something different, what they expect, and that's an obstacle to change, right? Also, just the neural pathways. Like our old habits are deeply ingrained in how we operate, and some would call them ruts, right? Like we've done it that way for so long. There's this rut, and old habits die hard. So we need to be aware of that and uh understand that that's potentially an obstacle to change. And then the other obstacle is uh expecting too much too soon, right? This wanting like immediate change. It's like I went to the gym for one day and I didn't lose 20 pounds. What the heck is going on? This doesn't work. I better try something different, right? Now that sounds absurd, but that's kind of how we operate sometimes when we're trying on behavioral change because the ruts are so deep, the people expect something different from us. This is gonna take time. It's gonna take time, it's gonna take practice, it's gonna take accountability, it's gonna take a lot of things. But the slide I showed you before is why it's worth it, right? That legitimate breakthrough, legitimate growth. The last one is the obstacle to change is time pressure, right? When there's stress, we we tend to divert back to our natural behavior. We all understand that. That's why it's always our natural behavior. You understand that natural behavior is generally kind of set by the time you're in your early to mid-20s for most people. Unless something really dramatic happens in your life, most of your natural wiring is kind of set. So, unless you learn to apply skill on top of that and adapt, you're gonna still continue to revert back to the that old wiring. And in certain cases that's helpful, in certain cases it's not. So if we understand change is hard and we understand that these are common obstacles to change, how do we overcome the change? And here's a couple of key things we want to offer you. Uh, and we talked a little bit about this. As you create an environment for success, design new surroundings around you might require getting into a different mastermind or peer group. It might require coming back to your team and say, hey guys, I realize that I've not really done a great job of encouraging conflict or encouraging different ideas or encouraging people to challenge me. And I really want to get better about that. So create, you might have to create a new environment or change the current environment. Again, enlist the help of those that are around you. They want to help you. Uh, celebrate small wins, acknowledge progress to build momentum. Give yourself some grace and celebrate some of those small wins as you work to change your behavior, which is really hard. This one really resonates with me. Matter of fact, we were with a group of guys last night, and I was I was sharing that sometimes I struggle celebrating small wins for myself. Yeah, I'm better about celebrating it for those that I lead. I want to get excited for them and let them uh leverage that momentum, but I'm not always doing that for myself. And that's the wrong way of thinking about it. Because now I'm not getting the advantage of whatever little momentum I'm starting to build. So celebrate those small wins because this change is super hard. And because it's super hard, we always encourage you to engage a coach if you don't already have one or you don't have the right one. Hire an expert that helps guide you towards your next steps, right? The uh the best of the best on the planet have coaches, right? And guides or Sherpas, if you will. And there's a reason for that, especially around behavioral change. Yeah. Enlisting someone to come alongside you and support you and guide you on this 10,000-hour journey of becoming the best version of yourself is so, so valuable. It's the highest return that you'll ever get, in my opinion. We have coaches, yeah. We coach others, we're also coached, right? Because we understand that this stuff is hard. And then the fourth is expect setbacks.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, big one.
SPEAKER_01:Let's not be naive around getting this perfect. Remember, we talked about perfectionism. We're not going to get it perfect every day. We're not going to get it perfect in every conversation we have. And so we can expect that. Why? So that when we have an inevitable slip, we can plan for recovering from that. We can plan to rebound from that. We can think about how we'll respond if I don't get it right one time. I don't have to just abandon the growth or the change or the skill, right? I can plan for that, right? Okay, I didn't make the gym today. I'm not gonna just stop going to the gym all the time. I'm gonna get back on track tomorrow. I'm gonna get back on track in that next meeting, back on track with that next conversation I need to have. So expect for those to happen so that they don't throw you completely off track. All right, so we're gonna land the plane here pretty quickly in the next few minutes here. So stick around because as Reed said at the top of the webinar, we've got some really cool stuff for you. A blind spot behavioral assessment, because you might want to take an assessment and say, hey, which ones are my biggest challenges?
unknown:Right.
SPEAKER_00:And how much of a challenge?
SPEAKER_01:How much of a challenge? Where might it be limiting me and my growth? And then also the ebook, which is some of the information, but with a lot more detail and resource that you can use to start on your journey. Because remember, um, you can use these tools for yourself, but you can also use them with your teams and others that you lead to help them identify these things and start to develop some of the skill to break through.
SPEAKER_00:So we want to talk just real quick about our approach to dealing with things like this. So that if you want to know more about what we do, that's great. But also if you want to take this rip it up, rip off and duplicate it and use this approach inside your business, you're welcome to it. Number one is we think that expert guidance is a massive part of continuing to break through or climb higher mountains. We also think that a customized path is important. Every leader's journey is very individualistic and assessing where they are in their behaviors and their skills and what the next steps are up the mountain are something that we thrive on helping uh clients with. Being in a supportive partnership, because the reality is leadership doesn't have to be lonely. And we want to be able to help you guys not go it alone and summit higher in your guys' success journey. Our philosophy is this. Number one, is we want to help you guys see clearly. And hopefully in this webinar, there was just this glimpse of I think I see more clearly the when you know how how it looks, maybe to others, when I show up this way with this default behavior. So we want to kind of expose you to being able to see this more clearly. Secondly, we want you guys to be challenged to think differently, develop new mental models of how to deal with yourself and how to deal with your leadership. And then the the ultimate piece of this is after I see clearly, I'm thinking differently, now I'm acting intentionally. So we've had the opportunity of coaching uh dozens and dozens of people. So just a couple shouts and shout outs to some of our clients that are on here right now. Stephen Perry from the Well has a phenomenal business. Uh, he went from zero to 40 team members into a 12-month period. He's already running uh a multi-million dollar business, soon to be a DECA and then a centramillion dollar business uh here soon uh with Well Recruiting Solutions. Uh David Weiser, I know you're on here with Backyard ADU over in the Tacoma area. It's been such a pleasure to help you build out your systems and see your leadership grow and thrive. What about Billy Scott?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, Billy and Sarah, yeah. Billy Scott Real Estate. They had 14 deals pending at the end of March, which was their new kind of high watermark, soon to be their ceiling, right? They've just done an incredible job of taking some of these concepts, implementing in their business, and then building more and more success on top of that. So couldn't be more thrilled to get to work with them on a weekly basis. Love it. Okay, so next steps. We want you to complete the leadership assessment. Here in just a minute, we're gonna give you a link to download that and identify your specific patterns. Remember, there's five common ones that we talked about today, which isn't entirely comprehensive, but it's a really great foundation. So this assessment will will really help you. We'd love it if you are interested to schedule a strategy session with us, a one-on-one consultation with our team. That way, not only can you identify some of your key opportunities, but you can start to think through kind of a customized comprehensive plan to break through and develop your customized roadmap for growth. And then ultimately, we want to come alongside you to help you break through in your leadership journey. Uh, we have a limited number of spots available for the one-on-one, about 10 of those. So we're going to give you information on the next slide to kind of uh reach out to us and book one of those one-on-one strategy sessions. So the first 10 we'll be able to guarantee for sure. Um, and so here's how you do that. And there's some other ways to connect with us. If you're interested in connecting with our team one-on-one about this and your business and your growth journey, you can email us at hello at sherpa consulting group.com. So go ahead and do that now, especially if you're committed to your growth. You can also go to our website, sherpa consultinggroup.com. There's a lot of great resources there as well. And we'll continue to add more and more and more resources as we do more trainings like this and develop some of these things that are helping us in our journey and we think can help you. Facebook, Sherpa Consulting Group, easy to find there. You'll see some content being put out um pretty frequently from now on on the Facebook page. And what about the podcast, Reed?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we launch a leadership podcast and we're talking about we've started our first season with talking about the different elements of what uh what research system makes for great organizational leaders. And we have just some just lights out guests on the podcast. And so we've already launched three or four episodes of that. We'd love to have you guys over there on that journey with us. Uh, really, really grateful for you guys uh to be able to be here with us, uh, hopefully learning and growing and being challenged. So last slide. All right. So I'm gonna pull up the chat box, guys. Uh, have a couple of asks uh from you here as we land the plane. This QR code, very, very important for us guys. We love feedback. We want our leadership to get better. We want this uh experience for you guys to get better. So if you would click that uh, what's that thing called?
SPEAKER_01:QR code the QR code, yeah. One of these with the old phone. Yeah. Scan it. I don't think you can click it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so scan the QR code. Uh, and there's this a very short survey to tell us like, hey, that was great. Hey, that was a waste of time, whatever that looks like. Uh, I don't think it was a waste of time. So I appreciate you guys being here. Uh, and then um also this is gonna be your access to the ebook, which is absolutely gonna be worth having. Take it, take it to your team, use it, and then the behavioral assessment. Same thing. Do that for you. Uh, maybe give it to a leader that you love, uh, but do it, do it the right way, right? Do it the right way. Like, hey, like I just did it.
SPEAKER_01:Gentle suggestions, it found value in it. Super messed up. So, like, maybe you're not as messed up. You know what it does. Thanks everybody, as usual, for listening to the Sherpa Leadership Podcast. Remember, if this episode inspired you, please leave a review, subscribe, share it with a fellow leader. And of course, there's always additional resources available at Sherpa Consulting Group.com. Remember, leadership is a journey, every step you take matters. Keep climbing. We'll see you next time.