The most difficult emotion in our work, teams and ourselves is honesty. In this episode, we will look at honesty vs. candor, how to apply it, and deep dive into it in your career, your personal life, your work and yourself.
SHOW NOTES:
http://thecrazy1.com/episode-54
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The most difficult emotion in our work, teams and ourselves is honesty. In this episode, we will look at honesty vs. candor, how to apply it, and deep dive into it in your career, your personal life, your work and yourself.
SHOW NOTES:
http://thecrazy1.com/episode-54
FOLLOW THE CRAZY ONE:
Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook
What's going on everybody, and welcome to the 54th episode of The Crazy One podcast. As always, I'm your host, Stephen Gates. And this is the show where we talk about creativity, leadership design, in all kinds of things that matter to creative people. Now while you're listening to the show, take a couple seconds make sure whenever you go over to your favorite podcast platform, you hit the subscribe button so you get the new episodes whenever they come out. And also while you're there, take a couple minutes and leave a review to let people know how you feel. Today we are coming to you from north of the wall which I think is probably better known as the suburbs of New York City. But as I was just outside and it was a lovely tropical nine degrees with a minus 15 degree Windchill, it is not a whole lot of fun to be in my studio today. None of you would have no reason for knowing this but I assume or I record the show is above the garage in my house. The fun part of that is exposed to the elements on all sides but one so I have my little space heater going I've got the big sweatshirt on. And I'm guaranteed to be able to stay awake through this entire show because Cuz it is really damn cold outside, it seems appropriate that many of you have probably just finished making a list of New Year's resolutions. I thought that you know what, this would probably be the perfect time, especially coming off the last show where we wrapped up 2017. And one of the big themes was honesty. And I thought, you know what, that would probably be the perfect place to start this new year. Because last year, we talked a lot about fear and frustration, happiness, empathy, all these different emotions. And those were hard shows to do. Because I've talked about this in the past, whenever I do these shows, I'm not interviewing somebody else, I'm not bringing in somebody else. I'm asking their opinion. This is coming from my life, my careers, my experiences. And so that requires me to be vulnerable about all these topics and admit these things, which is incredibly necessary, but also kind of uncomfortable. But I think that all of those shows also left me knowing that there were some big topics that we still needed to discuss and I think honesty is Definitely one of those. This is one of the most influential and one of the most difficult emotions we're going to talk about. I've struggled with it personally, my entire career with my work, my leadership, and even myself. And so I think that that's why I want to take a little bit of time and take a look at this topic so that we all can think about this. Because, you know, this is another one of those places where we can talk about the theories of leadership, we can talk about the theories of creativity, even if we know the right things, our ability and how we apply it, our ability for how truthful we are, for the situation's we're in, really dictate how successful we are. Because you can know the right thing to do. If you aren't honest with yourself, if you aren't honest with the people around you. You're not going to then feel the need to be able to do that you can rationalize it, make it all kinds of other things so that you can look at it and say you know what, I'm okay with where I'm at. And that this is so much of that phrase that I use it again and Have comfort is the enemy of greatness. Because so much of comfort, I think is born out of the fact that people aren't honest with themselves. They're not honest about their work. They're not honest about their careers, they're not honest with their teams, and that they can rationalize a lot of things away until it gets to a breaking point. And that's something that we need to fight. So we're gonna look at a couple different things today. First, we're just gonna even look at his honesty, even the right word, because I think there's some taboo around that there's a definition around that I think we need to look at, I think we need to talk about a little bit of what I just mentioned, we need to talk about how do you actually apply honesty in all these different areas. And then there are four different areas that I want to delve into. I want to look at honesty as it comes to your professional life. I want to look at it and your personal life, which is an area that we haven't gone into a ton in this show, but I think here it's going to be necessary. We don't talk about your work, and then we actually want to talk about how you apply it to you. That's what we want to talk about today is to spend a little bit more time digging in on this emotion and it's like I said, I think this is a show I've been working on for quite a while because these emotional topics are tough. I think there are things that I want to have other conversations with other people around. Because I don't want this just to be in a in an audience of one. Before we even start talking about honesty, I had to ask myself, is that even the right word to use? Because whenever I sat down to think about it, we all say that we need to be more honest, or we feel like we need to be more transparent, which seems to be the word of this year, is that it's, you know, transparent and honest things like that. But honest means that we are completely transparent, and we tell the entire truth. And that whenever I sat down to think about it, and this is just my interpretation, you can feel free to disagree. But for me, complete honesty is really more about moral, right, being morally right about something. And we aren't talking about morals here. That's being Complete honesty is rarely productive or constructive. And that's the thing is it's we need to be able to talk about this in a way that's going to help us personally and professionally. So I spent some time to think about, well, if honesty maybe is too big of a word, or if it's a word that isn't really positioned the right way, well, then what would the right word be? I work on these shows, some of them for a couple hours, some of them for months at a time. And that's because I really am want to make sure that the content for them is really good. But it also gives me the chance, especially with more difficult topics like this, to be able to take a little bit of time to reflect on and to think about some of these things because some of them are a little bit deeper, and they take a little bit more time. Now, this question around if honesty was the right word had been rolling around in my head for a couple of weeks. And it was interesting, just because over the break, I had gone back and I was rereading one of my favorite books, and it hit me what the right word wrote was I realized I was kind of surprised and maybe a little bit disappointed myself that I didn't think of it sooner. The book that I was reading is called creativity Inc. And it's by one of the founders of Pixar, the animation studio who has done Incredibles, Ratatouille, Finding Nemo, all the movies that you and all your kids love. And one of the founders was Ed catmull. And if you haven't read this book, you need to go out and get it. Get, get the hardback, get the audiobook, get whatever you need to do to be able to talk about this because I think that what Ed has done in this book is an incredible look at how does a productive I mean, almost prophetic in house team work, how do you do creativity at an incredibly high level in a professional setting? And so this is why I go back, I get a lot of inspiration for this book, I get a lot of insights, I find that there are different things that I get out of it. Whenever I go back and read it. And I think that you know, whatever I was reading it was what I said is that Ed gets this problem of honesty Exactly right. And the reason why I think he gets it exactly right isn't instead of using the word honesty, he uses the word, candor. And in the book, he spends a lot of time in really going in and elaborating on the importance of candor, in the daily functions of Pixar, because you can really see and come to understand that everybody at Pixar is encouraged to speak their mind whenever they see a potential problem coming up in a project. And that it really wasn't honesty, because honesty was something a little bit different. candor puts a slightly different band on things. And I think the best way that I would know to describe this, I think, is to take an excerpt from the book, just say what he said and use that as a starting point for this episode. And so what Ed wrote was that candor could not be more critical to the creative process. Why? Because early on, all of their movies sucked. That's a very blunt assessment. I know But I choose that phrasing because saying it in a softer way fails to convey how bad the first versions really are. I'm not trying to be modest or self effacing. Pixar films are not good at first. And our job is to make them go from suck, to not suck. I think part of the reason why I like this book is because it is. It is comforting. It is really nice. It's great to be able to see somebody who you idolize these companies that we even fetishize about how well they do something, struggle with the same things that we do. And I think that that's one of the things that I've come to appreciate. I think in my growth in my ability to take an honest look at a lot of companies is that I've really come to understand and reading this book and looking at Pixar in the work that I've done with Apple or other ones like that. You come to realize that every company, every team is dysfunctional that their ideas are bad at first. It's just how functional are they with their dysfunction? How functional are they? And how Canada are they willing to be to really be able to make things better? Because that is the secret sauce in so many of these other places that I really think is what it comes down to our things like empathy, and in this case, candor. Because candor is honesty, but it's not in that pure, raw moral form. It's about combining it with courage and conviction, so that we end up with something that we can use that is productive and constructive. But it's having the strength, to be honest, to be able to put that opinion forward. But the humanity to have the courage and conviction is what we really need to talk about. That's the foundation of all leadership. That's the foundation of all great creativity is in that moment. Do you apply candor in its full force, do you say that something isn't good? Knowing what that reaction is going to be knowing the way people may react to that? And in a bigger way, as a leader, how do you actually start to institutionalize that and build that into your team? So that that really is the thing that so many people strive for, is the ability to push each other. Because that's the thing for me is that candor, for me is constructive. It's giving honest feedback not to be negative, not to be destructive, not to put somebody else down, but to make the work better. And because of that, I really think that this topic, this topic is really the glue that holds so much of the other advice that I've given about leadership together, and it's why I wanted to do this episode. So it could be something we can talk about. It can be something we can get better at controlling and understanding its impact. Because you can apply Like I said before, the steps of leadership, the steps of how to give feedback, the steps to how to be more creative. But if in the moments after you do those initial steps, if you don't have the strength and courage, to be honest with the people that you work with, if you don't have the strength and courage to be honest with yourself, then that's where it's going to start to really struggle. Because that's the part of this is that you have to be able to step back and figure out, how do I make this work? And now, that's the other tricky part of this is really as we talk about, how do you apply candor? How do you make it constructive? Because now that we've got the right word here, there's one other overarching thing we need to talk about before we really get into the details. And that is that I've found whether it's personally or professionally The trick to candor is understanding when to apply it and how much to apply. These are hard things because we all need to grow. Some people love this type of feedback. Some people absolutely hate it. The reactions are going to vary, if we are talking about things that are personal professional, if you're looking at your own work or even if you're looking at yourself, but how much how often how transparently, you apply these things are going to determine your success in every one of these situations. But that's really the thing is that it's finding the balance in all of this. Because if there is too little of it, then you really start to become ineffective. But if there's too much of it, then you're just kind of an asshole. Let's actually start there. Let's start looking at your professional life and how it applies to that because I've found that you know, and everybody will be able to relate to this. There is a difference between how candor is perceived, how it's received, whenever we're talking about things that are in your personal life versus your professional life. And the thing that I've discovered is that Canada is received a much better and is wanted much more in a professional setting. And I think this happens because people are more open to feedback. They want to grow and get better. So they're looking for leadership more at work than they probably are at home. So let's just start with that. Because you have to start by looking at how honest you're going to be with your team. Because it's a fine line, you have to walk and you don't want let's just not narrow down to that. It's not just with your team. This is with the designer, the writer, anybody else that you work with, you need to walk this line. Because too much honesty too much candor, and you come off as a bully, or you're an asshole that just tells everybody what to do. And you give an unfiltered opinion without caring about what they want or what they need. You become self centered it becomes about what you need to be successful about them working like you. As opposed to trying to figure out how do I use candor be To make the work better, but to not use it to as something that's just simply going to be to put everybody else down. Now the inverse of that, and this is why this is such a tricky topic is that too little candor, and you're a manager, you just deal in deadlines, your team doesn't buy into your vision, and you don't help them grow their career. And that's a problem. Because people want and at least the thing that I've discovered is that no matter how hard the message has been, at the end of the day, people will respect me, if I am honest with them, they will respect me if I'm going to tell them what I think the truth really is what's going on. Not in a judgmental way, not in a way to put them down. But to just simply say, look, this is what's going on. This is one of those places where I'm a big fan of thinking about if the shoe was on the other foot. And what that means is that if the roles were reversed, if I was sitting in their chair and they were sitting in mind, what would I want to hear what would be the thing that would help Me and I think that that so much with so much of this topic is the best and the right place to start. Because like I said before, anything that you talk about, whether it's honesty, whether it's candor, whether it's any of these sorts of things, if you're going to be transparent with people, you have to do it with humanity, you have to do it in a way that's constructive. Because the reality is that when we talk about things in this sort of professional realm, it gets complicated. Because as a leader, you've got to blend how you apply candor with the type of message that you deliver. And again, this is true as a co worker to this is important, because we never talked about things like this. When it's an easy subject, or it's a small problem. You never need to think about how transparent Am I going to be for somebody? How do Am I going to go into this tough conversation? Those aren't the moments where this becomes challenging. We need it in the moments honestly and this sounds a bit like a Hallmark card I know, but we need it in the moments where leadership is born. In the moments where things are hard in the moments where people are looking to you to be the person who has a plan, they're looking to you to be the person who can help them. And that's where candor is important. Whether it's something that they're doing in their work in their craft, in their leadership and their relationships with other people, your ability to say what other people want, but to do it in a way that they can still walk away feeling good about themselves, where they can walk away, feeling like there is something they can do about it. Those are the moments where your leadership has to be a blend of authority, confidence, and honestly hope, authority that you know, how you can get them through this challenge that they're facing. Because again, this is just like anything else coming in the saying, Okay, look, all I have is this problem and I have no solution. That doesn't work. Any boss, it makes it extremely difficult to be able to do that. But again, if you're going to be a leader, if you're going to give somebody that candid feedback, your responsibility is to do more than just complain. It's to do more than just point out what's wrong, is to do more to just point out how their work could be better. Any asshole can do that. What is hard? What makes the difference? What makes you stand out is your ability to transcend the easy, the petty, that deconstructive to be able to get into a place where you can actually then offer solutions offer your personal experience. What have you been through? What have you done? Where would you start? How would you think about it? Even if you don't necessarily have the answer, the ability to give somebody a starting point, gives you some authority gives them some ability to have some idea what they're going to do. And that goes hand in hand with the next part is to them, give them some sort of confidence by letting them know that you're gonna go through this journey with them and that you're going to be there to help Because it's like I said, whenever you think about the people who are the jerks, whenever you think about the people who generally probably don't like, they're the ones who would just simply point out a problem and walk away. There's no investment, there's no camaraderie, there's no empathy, there is no investment, that this is something that you not only recognize the problem, he can give some advice, but are willing to be there to support them. This is the humanity in this that I think that so often we miss, because to me, people are not resources, they're not numbers on a page, they're not just 40 hours a week, for what it is that we do, it is too emotional, it is too difficult it is to trying to be able to to treat people in just such a trivial way that you need to be able to go on this journey with other people. That again, that's the secret sauce of all these teams, whenever I've been around them is their investment in other people is their ability to have the authority, the confidence and the hope to be able to work with these other people. And hope again, I think can be one of those Words that maybe rings a little bit hollow just because it tends to get overused. But hope because everybody has problems. We all go through them. This just means that you're human. This just means that you're normal. It just means that you're creative. I mean, that's one of the most fascinating things. And I do it very deliberately, whenever I do a lot of talks, especially when I talk about things like in house teams, is I'll put a bunch of themes up there. And I'll just get the audience to applaud with how many of these statements do they relate to. And the thing that you see is that the vast majority of people will applaud, they will react. And these are people that are from the biggest companies in the world down to the smallest individual startups or individual freelancers. And that's because in all of this, there is a shared condition. There are shared struggles there are these different things that we all go through. But are the thing that we don't like to do is to admit those we don't like to admit those struggles. We, again, in the social media age have gotten to this place where we all need to be perfect. You don't get hope. You don't get it If you don't get things like that out of trying to bluff everybody else into thinking that you're perfect. So again, you need to be able to show the way to be able to help them through that. And not just point out, you know, the easy sort of asshole path of just, here's all the stuff that's wrong. So from there, let's change gears a little bit. And talking about this in your personal life. And I know this is an area I don't normally go into with this show. But for this particular subject, I just want to talk about because I think this is an area that I've struggled with. I've struggled with this because I think as I've grown professionally, as I've tried to get more honest, as I've tried to get more candid feedback as I've tried to do those things. I'm increasingly aware that with so many of these topics, there is not a bright line that divides my personal and my professional life. I don't leave the office at whatever time I leave at night and flip a switch and stop being creative or stop using these things or stop seeing the world a particular way. The more you develop them, the more likely Shoot they become the bigger that bleed I think starts to be. So I've struggled with how to apply this when it comes to my friends, my family and even my marriage with my wife. Because you have to again, go back and look at how and when do you apply this? Because it's different at work. People want feedback, you know, we're that's what we're there to do is to come together to have ideas to be more open to that exchange. In your personal life, people are a little bit more set in their ways. The subject is different. It is not something that is up for debate nearly as much. So people are far less open to change, and they don't like hearing things that are hard to hear. My wife will openly admit and it's something that we've had to work on. It's something that I've had to work on because she will openly refer to as work, Steve, and how is she absolutely hates work, Steve. She thinks that he is too honest and to mean and a lot of other things that she really doesn't like I would argue, probably unsuccessfully because it's with her that in a lot of cases, for me, it's not being mean that I will often argue that I think being honest is not being mean. I think that it's just the context that has changed, which is why people hear it differently. And it took me a while to understand that, that the type of kind of candid blunt feedback I would give it work doesn't work in your personal life. And so for me, the personality has split a little bit become slightly schizo, frantic, and that whenever I get home, I'll dial it down. But I think that, you know, you've got to do this. And I think pretty much no one tells the truth about what's going on. And that's a hard conflict. And, you know, for me, I'll often look at it as I need to help people out. I help people out at work, I try to invest in them. I try to grow their careers as much as I can. I fail at it countless different ways. In a lot of ways, I think I'm so much more acutely aware of my failures since I've started doing this show? Because I think a lot of cases whenever you think about things intellectually, and you understand what the right answer is, you would think that then the application of it becomes easier. in a weird way, I think it almost becomes harder because then you're just so much more acutely aware of what you're not doing well, or how it just simply talking about it, in theory, devoid of real life situations, really personalities, can make it sound easier and simpler. And I think that this is the danger on the personal life side, do I need to talk about it? Because I've gotten to the point, literally, with some of my friends, where because of that, you know, my feedback on people, my willingness, my want to be honest, which I was viewed as just being, you know, kind of blunt with somebody and kind of seeing what other people wouldn't isn't really perceived that way. And I think with some of my friends, it even got to the point of, you know, I needed to understand, did I want to be right or do I want to have a friend because it just wasn't that easy. But it's something to start to think about about how do you dial up and dial down some of these emotion, some of the things that were asked to do, especially as your career gets more complicated, especially as your role gets bigger between your personal and professional life, how do you start to firewall at least pieces of those apart? How do you make sure that when you go home at night, there's times when you don't check your email? How do you be able to kind of let your brain take a break, because the other thing that I've found is that my creativity is exponentially better. Whenever I do take breaks like that. Whenever I do dial it back whenever I do, be able to kind of just shift things a little bit. So it's not just that same cadence all the time. But it's just something to be aware of. That the way that you apply this in a lot of cases really can make a big difference in the way people are going to react to things. Now, probably the other part about it whenever you think about candor, and honesty, obviously the biggest place where this comes into play, I think is in your work. Because how honest you can look at and you can judge your work is going to play a huge factor. In how good your work is going to be. And I think it's important to work in two different ways. The first is it you develop your palette. We've talked about this in past episodes, the measuring stick that you can judge your work against. This is why I use Pinterest, I go out and consume so many other things so that I have some sense of whenever I have an idea, I have a measuring stick to measure it against, is it any good yes or no. But the key part of that is that even if you have the best palette in the world, but you lie to yourself about the quality of your work, your palette is basically rendered useless. And this is why here again, you can develop this great tool, but if you are not able to honestly assess against it, you defeat the purpose of having it because the ability to really look at something and to say, does this measure up to the standard that I admire? Yes or no? If it is no, how do I get it better? How do I get better? How do I make it better the next time to keep pushing and keep driving against that? Standard, but part of that is to take, take a step back and take an honest a candid look at what you've done. Because we've talked about this, again, in the past that one of the things that's very easy to do as a creative is to fall in love with your creation. It comes from you, it comes from your experience, it comes from your investment, of course, there is an emotional investment that is then tied to it. But your ability to be able to forget all of that, to develop the short term memory loss to take a step back and look at it with unbiased eyes with candid eyes against that measuring stick. That's what's going to really drive you to be able to know if this is good or not. Because that's really the second part of this is to really kind of look at this area work to make sure that you don't easily fall in love with your ideas. Because that can be a blind spot. You think it's so wonderful. It's so great. It's your baby, you cuddle it's so tightly. I mean, you can't really see if it's good or not. And I think that you know as an industry, we may great strides over the last, you know, whatever it is been five or 10 years to help break that stigma down the days of the precious creative of the exclusive, you know, shutting people out sort of approach to creativity is breaking down. It's breaking down because of things like research and focus groups and prototyping, where we can take an experience and give it to somebody else free of the blind spot free of our connection to it, and to be able to get an honest reaction to it. And to be able to see what that is. Because those are some of the most humbling moments. There's some of the hardest moments, but they're the ones that really let you grow the most. But in both cases, whether it's really looking at the palette you develop or not falling in love with your work. It is the ability to almost develop this willful short term memory loss to stake take a step back and take a candid look at your work to say is this good enough yes or no. But here again, to Try to figure out how do you do it in a constructive and a productive way. Because the other part of this, which is something that I struggle with is you can just take a step back, and all you see is the mistakes, how it wasn't good enough, you can't ever kind of find the way forward. Because this is where candor goes wrong, is whenever I said this before, it's just what you point out what's wrong, and you don't push through that initial negativity, you don't push through to be able to start to find what are the things you can do different? Why did you make that mistake? Why was it something that was there? How do you find the hope and the things in that so that you can continue to improve and get better? Because that's what makes it powerful, but it makes it productive? Because candor can be a destructive emotion. I you know, it's one of those things where I kind of laugh where it's like whenever I look at my portfolio, I often joke I see as the mistakes you can always be better can always be different. If you did it again, it would always be better. That's always gonna be true. But it's looking at that and saying, Okay, what can I do different next time? How can I be better next time? What were the things where we didn't really step up. And we didn't do things as well as we could have your ability to have that conversation with yourself with your peers, with your team that really defines a lot of what success is really rooted in. Because all of these other things we talked about, about creativity about leadership, a lot of it comes from that just base self awareness. And so that's really the thing and so much of this is can you if you had to stop right now and think about it, if you had to ask yourself this question again and do it honestly. Can you take a step back and look at yourself to see what you're good at and what you need to work on? Can you look at yourself in the same way that you would look at one of your co workers Workers, one of your team members and do that assessment. Because in all the areas we talked about, this is probably the hardest place. To be honest, we are our own biggest blind spot. We can rationalize all kinds of reasons why we do the things that we do, why it works, why we need to hold on to that. But it's a critical part of being able to build your brand. It's a critical part to being able to grow your brand and a critical part to find success as you move through your career. Because we all want to tell ourselves that were great. They were doing a great job, and that we want to be happy with who we are. It's not letting it go so far that it undermines any of those things. But it is taking a step back with the candidate eyes the same way we would look at a client the same way you would look at a brand the same way you look at anybody else and if you did a pros and cons a strengths and weaknesses a three word definition, anything that would just be a part of like a basic brand strategy. Can you do that for for yourself, because if you want to get better at any of the things that we talked about, if you want to get better at investing in these things, because this is why I realized I waited too long to do this episode. Because with so much of what I do, it's asking you to work, to change to improve, to lean in whatever the phrase is that you want to use. But it's asking you to do these things to develop the self awareness to be able to get in and do this work. But if you can't make an honest assessment of these things, if you can't really look at this and figure out what these things are, then again, you have the tools but you have no ability to apply them correctly. And so I think that in all of these ways, whenever it comes to professionally, your ability to work with other people around you to lead your team to do whatever it is to make sure that you are going To be candid and honest with everybody else about what's going on your ability to develop what I've seen at Apple and other places that I can only describe as an almost brutal approach to the best work to be able to make sure that this if this is not the best idea that we all are going to commit, to be honest with each other, to be candid with each other about what that is that we are going to do in a constructive way to not just simply point out what the flaw is, or that we're going to come together and talk about this is where I think it needs to be stronger. And these are the ideas that I have of how we could fix it. Anybody can just point out what's wrong. Anybody can take the easy road of just telling you what the problems are. Too many leaders, too many co workers, too many of the people just simply love to dwell on the negative. Because it's so easy to do. It's so easy to criticize and pick apart. Go read Yelp reviews for any restaurant and you will see how this is the case. But that's the price. Write is that hope is more work. constructive is more work. But we all have to commit to that. Because the work is always going to start out to be bad, whether it's Pixar, apple, or wherever it is that you work, it's going to start out bad. It's going to start out where it needs work. But it's our ability to push through that to be honest with each other to come together to commit to saying those things and to try and figure out how do we work through the problem. Not do what so many companies do is we come together, we do this, we hit a problem. And instead of coming together, instead of being honest, instead of being vulnerable, which is, again, a very big part of this, because that's what candor does, it takes vulnerability on both sides, to be able to be the person who is strong enough to say it, but to also be the person who is vulnerable and strong enough to hear it. Not just listening not but you actually hear it, understand it and understand the validity of that person's opinion. We don't do that. What we do is instead We all run to our separate corners and start sending emails and paperwork. And we all start preparing not to get blamed. The creative process will always be about getting it wrong. But here again, this is why honesty and candor is so important is because the difference is in that moment, is when you choose hope is when you choose feedback. It's when you choose to come together to do that work. That's what makes the difference. This is why people study all these companies and write all these books and can't figure out what the secret sauce is to replicate them. It's this moment, it's this emotion, it's that moment where they choose hope. Because in that room, everybody at Apple innately knows and believes that their purpose to be there is to change the world. And in order to fulfill that mission, they need to come together to work together to get that done. And again, this can be brutal it is I've been in the room when any has been in just to the point of being almost insanely uncomfortable because you're just sitting there going I can't believe what that person just said and how he just ripped that idea apart. Your inner voice is going, they were completely right. I was absolutely thinking that, but they just had the courage and knew that they had the support to be able to say that. But it also is then about everybody else in the room. Who doesn't take it personal, who doesn't have that initial reaction to who hears it as the good hearted, honest, hopeful feedback that it is even if it comes in a very brutal wrapper, that that's the key. But your ability to do that, in a professional setting, your ability to do that with yourself, and how often you can do it how honest you can be. That's gonna be a massive, massive dictator, what your success is going to be because the more honest you can be with yourself. The clearer you can be the more you can find a path forward. The more you can grow, the faster you can grow, the more you can get on to different things because That's what this is really about, is it's about that change. And it's again, because this is the thing that I've struggled with being honest, being candid, it does not take away from what you've accomplished. What it does is it sets the bar, so you can keep pushing yourself forward, you can keep growing, you can keep moving forward. It doesn't diminish where you've been. And I think this is something that I personally struggle with is that I have to literally force myself to stop and take moments of taking stock of looking back and understanding where have I been, and what have I done, that it's not just the problems that lay in front of me that are important that sometimes it's important to stop and look at the accomplishments that are behind me. those tend to be short lived with me before I want to start moving on again. But it's remembering that this is just the engine. And that like I said, it doesn't take away from From what you've accomplished, it doesn't make you weak to be able to be somebody who knows that they need to keep growing. I am constantly driven, constantly haunted by the success that I think that is sitting just dimly on the edge of what I can see in my future. And how do I chase that? How do I get to that? I think this starts to get into a lot of kind of what you'll feel like is that imposter syndrome or some of these other things that can be destructive, but I think those come whenever you again, let this creep in the wrong way. But understand and set those ground rules. And I think that's the critical part in this because for this to be successful, you have to sit down with yourself, with your coworkers, with your team, with your boss with whatever it is and have this open discussion about how we need to be more honest how we need to be more candid how we need to hear that feedback, how are we going to make sure that it is actionable Back, then we're going to talk about not just what the problem is, but what are we going to do about it, you need to lead by example, to be the person that's going to do that. Because initially, it's going to be hard. It's gonna be hard to be the one that says the thing is that other people think about won't say, it's gonna be hard to do it in a constructive way. But you have to sit down, and you have to do this. But again, everybody has to be aware of this. Everybody has to understand the ground rules. And everybody has to be committed to doing that. Because that's the only way that it's going to work. Because not everybody is going to do this naturally, not everybody is going to come to this sort of conclusion. So think about on your drive to work, on your commute, on the quiet time before you go to sleep or whatever it is. How do you have those moments with yourself? How do you sit down and try to take that honest assessment? Do you do it once a month? Do you do it? once a quarter do it once a year? Whatever the cadence is for you, but how do you do it? And then how do you push You and the people around you, the people on your team to be able to get to that place so the work gets stronger. So you can accept that creativity is problem solving. But it's the solving part of it. That's where this comes into play. But that's why I think was so much of this, like I said before, honesty is the glue that underpins and holds together so much of what these things are. And that really is the thing that becomes so incredibly important. Hopefully, you found this helpful. Hopefully, this has been something that you think you can use. If that is if this is something you get anything out of the shows, like I said at the beginning of the show, take just a second, go to your favorite podcast platform, hit subscribe, I have a bunch of other interesting topics coming up a bit more on emotion and stuff like that, that if this is something that you actually get something out of make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss any of those episodes. You can always find out more about this podcast, get the notes from the show, which I do and some links that go head over to podcast Stephen Gates. dot com Stephen has always STP H e n.com. That you can listen to the other shows you can get show notes, things like that. If you have any questions, if you're there things you like things you don't, anything you're going through whether you want to do it publicly or privately look, reach out to me on social media I'm on you name it and I'm on there, you can always head over to Facebook and just type in The Crazy One podcast like that page. I get questions from people every week, I answer them as quickly as I can I post articles that I find interesting about these topics, all sorts of stuff. So just any of those channels feel free to reach out. As always everybody down in legal, it's not just the boys anymore, the boys actually finally caught up with the rest of the times. And so it's not just a boys club down there anymore. But as always, they want me to remind you that the views here are always my own. And they don't represent any of my current or former employees and employers, not employees. And finally, I say it every time because I mean it every time but thank you for your time. I know that time is truly the only real luxury that any of us have. I'm always incredibly humble that you want to spend any of it with me So hopefully go out. be brutal. be candid, do it with yourself. Do it with your team, make the work better. And all the while while you're doing it. Stay crazy.