Welcome to the Potential Leader Lab, and I'm your host, Perry Maughmer. As always, words create worlds, and we're always in the act of realizing our potential as a leader. And the lab is kind of meant to be a mental state, not a physical location, obviously, in which we experiment because we have explore, experiment, evolve. Right? So we have that framework, a framework that I continue to call different things, every time that I mention it because it's evolving, quote, unquote. And I know there's some challenges with that. But if you do like what you hear, please consider doing 2 things for me. Leave a review, good, bad, or indifferent. I like reviews.

I like feedback of any source. So I'm not gonna tell you leave a great review, leave a 5 star review, leave a leave whatever star review you choose that matters to you that that, is reflective of your experience. And then, obviously, if you do like it, recommend the podcast to some other folks, so they have the chance to explore, experiment, and evolve on their own. Because if you get a community to do that, it would be a lot easier for all of us to create that better world that we're looking for. And then finally, the best way to lock in any of the things we talk about, any concept that strikes you, resonates with you, connects with you, if you share it and talk to somebody about it in the next 24 hours, it's gonna connect that synapse for you. So the more that you talk about it, the more it's gonna lock it in for you, the more you're gonna be able to use it, and the more of your evolution that will be driven by it. So with that said, let's get going. Alright.

So this, this episode is called check your state of mind. Leadership starts in your head. So this this ought to be good. Right? So, state of mind. What is it? Mindset, worldview, mental attitude, called a lot of things. But I like state of mind, and I'm gonna explain why I like that. And it's it's actually defined as a moment to moment experience of life as generated by our thinking and feeling. Now what you think about and how you choose to feel about it, not how it makes you feel.

So I wanna be clear, nobody makes you feel anyway. You're never made to feel anyway. We choose. This is the first this is the first thing I wanna point out. Things happen, and we choose how we feel about them. We have to own that. It has to be intentional. Let me rephrase.

We don't have to own it, and it's okay if you don't want to. Again, everything I say, I, I'm a messenger. Right? I wanna evangelize a point of view. And the reason that I talk about these things so passionately is because I believe them, and I believe they can have a positive impact on people's lives. And if enough individual people do this, it changes for the collective. Right? Now having said that, this is not something everybody has to do, must do as bad if they don't do. That's not true, at least not from my standpoint. I wanna share these concepts.

I wanna bring them to people, and then it's your choice. And if you choose not to, I'm good with that. I just want each person to own that choice. That's it. I just want it to be I want you to feel in control of your choice. That's, I guess, the main part of this is I want you to feel like you can choose, and you do choose. Even as Rush so famously told us, making no decision is still a choice. Right? We still choose.

So, anyway, back to the topic here. So state of mind, it's how we choose to feel about things that we're thinking about. Now it's also a temporary condition that can change moment to moment because we can continue to choose. Now as if we're leaders and and, by the way, you know my definition of leadership is really, you know, people who wanna make the world a better place for those they care about, and at a very basic one word definition is just influence. So anybody you influence, which means that all of us any day, all day, everybody we come in contact with, we're leading because we can influence them, and we influence people in one of 2 ways. I don't typically, do too many binary things, but this one I do. Every conversation, every interaction, I don't care if it's email, text, phone call, in person, however you wanna do it, Zoom call if you want, any of those, when you're done, somebody feels either built up or torn down after that interaction. Very not gonna say never, but very rarely does somebody leave an interaction with somebody and just go, meh.

I feel the same way I did before we started talking. Doesn't happen. So, really, what we're trying to do is is trying to prime ourselves that for every interaction or for the majority of the interactions we have, are we going in with the intention, regardless of the content? We wanna make this person feel built up. We wanna build their self efficacy. We wanna make them feel better even if it's a challenging conversation. So we must be aware that we choose. Everybody gets to choose. Right? Because we, you know, we direct this for ourselves because we wanna positively impact other people.

So we're the we're the tool. Like, we're the deliverer of this thing. And if you think about the impact you can have, how many people you come in contact during the course of a day, it it's pretty amazing. Right? And it's also exponential because you think about you know, you keep going out. Okay. You you interact with let's say, let's just conservatively. Let's say, 25, 30 people, and that's conservative. And let's say that half of those people walk away from your conversation feeling really good about themselves or whatever you talked about.

And so that influences what they do with the 25, 30, 40 people they meet and so on and so on and so on. You can see how this ripple effect works. Now, what's critical about this is we have this process, and we typically think that something happens, we have a thought about it, and then we decide or or choose a behavior, and then we get a result. So we think we're we're rational and logical. Event, thought, behavior, result. But the challenge is that's not the way it works. The way it works is we missed a spot. We missed a step.

So event, thought, behavior, result. Here's what actually happens. Event, thought, feeling about the thought, or we could say emotion about the thought, and then the emotion drives our behavior and the result. So I'm sure you can think of a recent time where that happened. Right? Because we didn't choose the emotion. We didn't choose the feeling. We simply felt it, and then that drove our behavior, which may or may not have been the thing that we really wanted. Again, back to choice.

Event, thought, behavior result. Now, we have event, thought, feeling, or emotion, behavior result. At each one of those steps, after the event, we get to choose our thoughts. After our thoughts, we get to choose our feeling. After our feeling, we get to choose our behavior. We don't get to choose the result. So you have 3 moments of choice in that process that you can exercise control over, which everyone loves because we all love control. And this by the way, the secret is this is the only thing you can control in the entire world.

You can't control anybody else or anything else because the world does not care what you want. Right? We all know this. We we strive. Our our whole life is really the all of the anxiety we feel in our lives is typically rotated around or centered around this concept of wanting control we can't have. You know, anxiety is a generalized feeling about uncertainty, which is the world we live in. So, anyway, I recently heard a great speaker, Mark Panciera of the Pacific Institute, and he he had this line that just resonated deeply with me. And he said, we must think about what we think about. We must think about what we think about.

And that's really what led me to develop this whole episode is just how intentional are we being with our state of mind. Now there's another saying that kind of goes along that I've said for years. I don't I it's on bumper stickers. It's everywhere, and it says, we can't believe everything we think. You know, you shouldn't believe everything you think. And that's really true because we are not our thoughts. I I just had a meeting yesterday with a group of people, and we were talking about this very thing that we often don't stop and think about that because we are not what we think. We're in control of being able to observe and be objective about what we think and whether we actually want to think better or not.

So the difference is people that wanna lead, and that's an activity. It's a verb. People that wanna lead can do it with intention, must do it with intention. Because, really, what leading is is about creating a compelling future that pulls others to work to do the work required to realize it. And it's about having that future being very heartfelt for them so that any, quote, unquote, problem doesn't throw things off course. It's merely a bump in the road. And problems don't get in the way when you want something deeply, when it connects in here to your heart, when it's something meaningful for you that pulls you out of bed in the morning. Problems don't matter because you'll go around, over, or through them.

You've you know people like this. Maybe you are one of these people. And you also know people that are somewhere along that spectrum other than where you are, where any problem becomes insurmountable and a reason to stop. And as leaders in organizations, we often get challenged because, we see a lot of that in an organization. And and the reality becomes, instead of leaning into that person and figuring out what's quote, unquote wrong with them, why they're not working harder, maybe we should step back and say, was the vision compelling enough? Is the vision connected to them? Did they connect to the vision? Because if that happens, Katie bar the door. Man, you're you're gonna go. People are gonna go. They're you're gonna have to keep up with them.

They're gonna run till tackled. Right? And that's why being, part of who I am and part of what I preach most of the time is relentlessness. And and the reason relentlessness kind of resonates with me is because it it is a state of mind. It's a state of mind that can give you the strength to achieve, to survive, to overcome, to be strong when others aren't. It means craving the end result so intensely, the work becomes irrelevant. So think about that. Craving the end result so intensely, the work becomes irrelevant. It doesn't matter what I have to do to get it.

I'll do whatever. A lot of you can connect to this. You understand what I'm talking about. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what your title is. It doesn't matter what job's put in front of you. It doesn't matter what somebody says needs to be done. It's like, okay.

Put it on the list. That's the mindset. Over, under, through, around. Doesn't matter. No obstacle big enough. That's relentless. Right? My favorite definition of relentless is just oppressively constant. If you're if if you are oppressively constant, it's just that methodical, and I know you'll probably hear this as the it's that that bass tone, that beat of you just don't go away.

It's just methodical, constant, trot you know, you just trudge. It doesn't matter. You just won't stop. Nothing can stop you. I think that's really why, zombie movies took off. That's one of the psychological issues of zombie movies. It's that that's why it creates so much anxiety for people to watch those. There's a whole psychology behind it.

A part of it is they're just they're relentless. Like, they never stop. They just they don't go fast. They're not running, which is really funny. Right? When you watch movies, like, well, you could just outrun them because they're they're obviously not very fast, but it's this. They never stop. They are by definition relentless. So I digressed a little bit, but, you know and and we can only hope to do this.

We can only hope to be to start leadership in our mind and to check on our state of mind if we're gonna spend time pondering. What I mean by that is to consider something deeply and thoroughly, to just think on something. Not think on it to do, and not think to act, but think. Having time in your calendar, in your schedule to ponder. And, again, I'm not talking about hours here. Everybody's like, oh, I don't have time. I don't have time. 5 minutes? I can tell you something.

If you sat quietly for 5 minutes and thought about something, you would think it was an hour. That's why time is, as Einstein proved to us, relative. Right? Time is relative. It's relative to what you're doing. And if you stop and you're quiet and you think about something really deeply, really ponder it, really really go through some thought experiments, which we'll talk about in a minute, 5 minutes is a long time, and it's a long enough time to start with. I would even you can put a stopwatch up. I'd say do 2 minutes. Just think about one thing.

Think about a challenge, a problem, an opportunity, something in your life just for 2 solid minutes without doing anything else, without talking to anybody, without looking at your phone, without being on your computer, without any noise whatsoever. Just sit and think. And then expand from there. So we're not talking about hours. We're not talking about days. We're talking about minutes. Now this is the kind of the opposite of what we see everybody do because we're always judging and solving and directing. Right? We're always in all of those things, judging, solving, direct, it's all activity based.

We gotta go. Right? But and you hear this, phrase biased to action. Like, we want do, do, do, do, do. Well, here's the thing. If we're always doing things, what are we thinking? How intentional is the action if we're not thinking about it? Because some of the stuff should take a while. Quite honestly, it shouldn't be done immediately. It shouldn't even be done today or tomorrow or next week or next month. Some of the stuff should be thought about for months before any decisions are made.

That's discernment, and that's what you have to figure out as a leader. So we we actually see the opposite of this in most of our days. And the other part of this is your brain's a tool. Right? And you need to be able to direct it to achieve the objective that you want. And the real amazing part of this is leaders think differently, and so, therefore, you're able to see the world differently. Because we don't see the world as it is, we see the world as we are. And so whatever you think about, however you whatever your worldview is, whatever your state of mind is, greatly impacts what you see in the world, because there is no objective view of the world. Every viewpoint of anybody you ever talk to is is 100% subjective.

It's theirs and theirs alone. That's why we are horrible at, first person, you know, interviews about when things happen. If they if they wanna get, you know, if they wanna see spectators who see an accident, they wanna get a report from them and say, okay. What did you see? They interview 5 people and they get 5 different stories down to the colors of the things involved, the colors of the cars involved, who ran the red light, who ran into who. You get 5 different stories. Like, I can't figure of any more proof of how witnesses who see an event and all describe it differently, how that couldn't be supportive of everybody sees the world differently. We can't rely on our own understanding as fact. It's it means something to you, and it should, but it isn't a fact.

It isn't an objective fact. So let's go down a rabbit hole for a minute when we're talking about all of this thinking. So philosophy. So I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna take you down this rabbit hole, and we're gonna go we're gonna come out of the rabbit hole, go around the barn, come back and connect these concepts. Alright? So bear with me a minute. So philosophy, love of it's it's definition love of wisdom. Now what's wisdom? Wisdom is accumulated knowledge. That's usually applied now this is interesting.

Usually applied with a sense of empathy, ethics, and enlightenment. Alright? It typically comes from a place of deep understanding in humanity and involves careful consideration of all factors and parties involved in a particular choice. Wisdom, what we would aspire as leaders to exhibit, to accumulate, to share. So I wanna I wanna walk through that again. Think about this as a definition. Wisdom is a type of accumulated knowledge that's usually applied with a sense of empathy, ethics, and enlightenment. It typically comes from a place of deep understanding and humanity and involves careful consideration of all factors and parties involved in a particular choice. Sounds aspirational to me.

I think it's worth pursuing. I think as leaders, we aspire to gather that. We aspire to be wise. Well, you're not wise in a hurry. I think we can all agree to that. And you're not wise 40 times a day because you start selecting the areas that you're gonna get involved in. So let's let's pick a term out of we know empathy. We've talked about that before.

Ethics, we'll get to at some point. Let's talk about enlightenment. And since I've already mentioned philosophy and we're now we're talking about enlightenment, it makes perfect sense in my mind to go to Immanuel Kant. Now, Immanuel Kant is known as the father of modern ethics. Now, he he had this interesting thing, this interesting idea. He said enlightenment is a man's emergence from his self imposed nonage, n o n a g e, nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self imposed if it causes if it if it causes the lack of understanding and indecision and a lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance.

So one of the, one of the, kind of, the catch phrases of the enlightenment, if there was so, or the motto was, have the courage to use your own understanding. So we wanna break out of our knowledge. Right? We wanna be able to rely on our own understanding. We wanna have the confidence and the courage to act on our own understanding. But we have to be able to to define that. Right? We have to be comfortable with that. Now so after Emmanuel Khan also had this this other thing called the categorical imperative just as an aside. And that was a way to evaluate your behavior.

And what he said was, we should act in a way that by example, we're we're telling everyone else to act identically. So we don't have to tell anybody. It's kinda like, one of my favorite sayings from Saint Francis of Assisi, you know, preach the gospel every day and use words when necessary. So Kant said, however you behave, you're essentially telling everybody else that's how they should behave. So it's it was do as I do, which is a embodiment, which really goes to any concept of philosophy, your philosophical, your state of mind, your leadership philosophy, any of those things. The best way to show it to the world is not to talk about it, but to embody it. Do you do the things that when people can see you from afar that you don't even know are watching, do they know what you're about? Now, what do philosophers do? Right? So they do things like, I mentioned earlier, a thought experiment. And that simply put, a thought experiment is creating an experiment in your mind.

You you come up with a scenario and you contemplate it. Now, I will tell you, you do this all the time. In business, we do it constantly. We do scenario planning. We do we do planning for next like, right now, it's it's September of 2024. So everybody's in planning mode for 2025 right now. So they're doing tons of thought experiments. Now they're not calling them thought experiments.

What they're what we actually do, which is, unfortunate, is we plan. And then we plan in a way that is more concrete and conclusive than it should be. So small digression here is when we plan, we make this underlying assumption or we imply that the plan has a 100% certainty to work. And then we're shocked and dismayed by the end of Q1 of next year when things didn't turn out the way we thought. Now we, as as, Taleb said in his book, Black Swan and I think he was getting it from he essentially got that from Eisenhower, is planning is indispensable. Plans are useless. So planning the process, indispensable. We should always do it.

I'm not saying we shouldn't do it. But to come up with a plan and then to think that to have the, the hubris, to think that that's gonna happen and that we can actually make that plan happen, that's where we run off the track, back to our sense of need for control. Right? So what's interesting is if, and I think Annie Duke talked about this in a couple of her books, is if we had to put a per because, essentially, all we're doing is betting. Her book is called Thinking in Bets. And so if we were to think about this and we're sitting around a table with people planning for next year, it would be great to have somebody say, well, how much you know, how certain are you on a scale of 1 to a 100%. You and I and don't say a 100% because if if you do, we're gonna fire you because you cannot be a 100% certain that strategy is gonna work. Are you 40%, 30%, 70%, 80%? Because if you tell me that, then I can ask questions and I can have you explain, well, if you think that's what we should do and you're only 60% sure, what are the things that are they give you hesitation? Now, that's a great conversation that we don't have now because somebody gives you a plan and we're like, oh, great. You gave me the plan.

Alright. You're committed to this. You're gonna achieve it. Yep. Okay. Good. We just play this game, and it is a game, unfortunately. Because everybody knows they're if you're in an organization and you're responsible for putting forth a plan, you're putting forth a plan that you think will get approved.

Not one you necessarily believe in, just one that will reduce the numb number of confrontational conversations you have to have during the budget process. Not healthy, but it works. Right? So, back to philosophy, and that because that is a thought experiment. The whole budget process, the whole planning process is a giant thought experiment. Now, if we if we named it, again, back to words create worlds, if we called it thought experiments, we'd have a different outcome. Because, again, experiments connote failure. Experiment is I have a hypothesis, which is essentially what a business plan is. It's a it's a very expensive hypothesis.

But if we called it these things, if we put different words to it, if we said, this is my hypothesis for how next year is gonna turn out and here are the experiments because the the here's here's what I'll tell you. Take your take your budget, whatever you're putting in an Excel document, you know, that the numbers, and then say, this is my hypothesis. This is what I think is gonna happen. And then your whatever you write down as your strategy and tactics, you say, these are the experiments that I wanna run to try to prove my hypothesis. My hypothesis being my net operating profit, my revenue, whatever those things are. You say, this is my hypothesis if we and what I'm saying is, my experiment is, if we do the stuff over here that I've written down, I think we'll get the thing over here. Because that's what we're doing in all honesty. But we don't do it like that.

We we act with certainty that we have to do this. We have to achieve these numbers. There's no turning back. We must go forward. There's no, you know, there's no redo. There's no mulligan. Well, I will tell you there are plenty of mulligans available because I worked for a very large company a long time ago. And by February, we had to redo the entire year.

We had spent from August to November creating all of these intricate budgets and strategies and tactics and reams and reams and reams of paper. And then once January's final numbers came out, we were instructed to take those numbers and reforecast the entire rest of the year, start over again. It happens. Right? But here's the thing about all of this. Here's why it matters from from if you're if you're gonna try to influence people, if you're gonna try to do the activity, the verb of leading, How well you think determines how well you lead. If if you remember, I said that, you know, our topic today was checking your state of mind, leadership starts in your head. Well, this is the this is the other side of that. The reason we're talking about any of this, thought experiments and philosophy and pondering and all of these things is because how well you think determines how well you lead.

And I believe that, as a leader, you're actually teaching other people how to think. You you're in effect a philosophy teacher. I know nobody wants to hear this, but you are your your job, your main function is not to help people get better at their job. You got people for that. You're trying to help people understand how they think and to be critical thinkers. You want them to think big thoughts. You want them to ponder. You want them to do thought experiments about how this is gonna work out.

If you do x, y, and z, what do you think is gonna happen? And is that how certain are you that? Are you 50%, 60%, 30%? There's no wrong answer there. It's just I I really wanna know. And we may go with something that's 30% because that's the best we got. And that's okay. Right? But I at least wanna know going in. It it's it's almost like so I'm gonna use another, another another philosopher. We're gonna talk about Plato in his allegory of the cave, and you you can look this up if you want to. But, essentially, the short story is a bunch of people were chained to look at the wall of a cave, and there were people behind them that had a fire.

And behind that, they were holding up things that made shadows that were cast upon the wall in front of the people sitting with the chains. So the people in the cave thought that the shadows on the wall were the real world. Sound familiar? So what you're trying to do is you're trying to, a, unshackle yourself so you can get a clearer view of the world because the world ain't on the cave wall, and then you're trying to get everybody else to unshackle themselves as well. And you can't unshackle them. See, I'm I wanna be clear on what I said there. Here's the thing. It's learned helplessness. They're not really shackled.

They just think they are. They can get up, turn around, and walk outside into the bright daylight and see the world. But oftentimes, we don't want that. We just want a reality we can tolerate, that we can pretend about, because the other one's overwhelming, and that's okay. This ain't for everybody. Everybody can, most won't, few do. You choose. As Morpheus said, red pill, blue pill.

For everybody. And Cypher wanted to go back. If you if you remember the movie, at one point, Cypher's like, I don't wanna be here anymore. I'll go back. I don't care. And that's okay. Right? It's okay. Everybody ain't gonna make the trip.

But the you want those people that wanna be unchained, who want to stand up and and and the shackles will just fall off is you have to understand, you have to question every assumption because it isn't real. Like, what you believe is not objectively the real world. It is what you believe, which is fine. But you don't believe things because they're true. They're true because you believe them. So that means right? So follow the logic. If that is if that is essentially true, you can make something else true by believing that. Now, this becomes really powerful as a leader because what you believe about other people is their truth.

Sit with that one for a minute. What you believe about other people is their truth. So, if you choose to believe somebody's capable, not capable, good, bad, whatever you're whatever you're doing as a leader, whatever judgment you're passing, that's their reality. That's the power that you have. But the this is it. Like, this is the job because you wanna create thinkers, not doers. There's this great you know, leaders don't leaders don't create followers. Great leaders create other leaders.

The the job is not to create followers. That feeds your ego, but it doesn't move the needle from a human perspective. Leaders create leaders. Now I'm gonna wind this up with the tough part. Here's the tough part as a leader. So, Zach Bryan, I I love listening to his music. He's a he's an awesome performer, and his lyrics are fantastic if you haven't heard him. He's got this song called East Side of Sorrow.

It's an amazing fucking song. Like, I love the song. Now, there's a line in it that is out of context for what it is. It's meant differently in the song, but it applies to what we're doing here. So what he says is, let it be, then let it go. And the reason I picked that out, and it resonated with me, is because if you do, in fact, create leaders, if you create thinkers, they are going to challenge you as they should because they're thinking. And if everybody's thinking alike, they ain't thinking. So you're you're not trying to get a bunch of people in the room to agree.

If you've got a leadership team in the room that agrees on everything, you got a problem. Now, you gotta be agree you gotta be dis you can disagree without being disagreeable. Like, that's the goal. But I need we need that. Right? We need other points, alternative points of view. So as a leader, if you if you start unshackling people and suddenly they start seeing the world differently and they start asking questions, instinctively, you're gonna push back because you have been the smartest person in the room, the only pea the only person seeing things clearly. Now the veil has fallen from their eyes and they see it clearly, they have opinions too. And if you truly wanna raise up leaders and you wanna and you wanna be able to move away from being the the, hub in the spoke in the wheel of your business, that means these people have to make decisions.

But you've been doing this for so long, you're still gonna default to being the smartest person in the room. You have to shut up. You have to allow other people to have ideas and make decisions even if they're not as good as yours. Maybe they're not. I don't know. Even if they're not, you have to decide, what am I really wanting here? Do I want every decision to be perfect? Because that's how I'll make them, which is a fallacy too. Just nobody tells you. But I see people all the time, leaders that complain about people not taking initiative, not making decisions, not taking action.

Right? Well, you know why? Because nothing they do or say or any idea they have is ever good enough. It's not that it's bad. You never say, oh, it's a bad idea. You go, well, I I don't think I think we should do this because it's better than that. Not that theirs is bad, but yours is better. Well, how how long does it take before people are, like, okay. I get this formula. And I'll tell you a quick story, that happened to me, my dad.

We were, my dad and I. My dad was one of those people. And he and he was right most of the time. Like, he knew how to do just about anything around the house, cars, the house, whatever. So we're down at my grandparents' house in Circleville, Ohio one time, and we're moving a a freezer. And I'm standing on the front porch with my uncle, with my dad's brother, Clarkie. And he was my dad's younger brother by, I think, 7 years. And so I'm standing now you have one thing and you don't know my uncle Clarkie, but, I saw my uncle Clarkie almost every Sunday for 18 years, and I think I had 2 conversations with him and heard him say 27 words.

He was a man of few words. Nice guy. Smiled all the time. Nice guy. But just didn't talk a lot. So, my dad says, hey. Back the truck up to the porch here so we can carry the the freezer out. So I did.

Backed the truck up. Got out of the truck, went up, stood on the porch. My dad got off the porch, got back in the truck, and re backed it up. And, as he's doing it, I just had this puzzled look on my face, and my uncle, Clarkie, looks at me. He goes, you didn't think you were gonna do that. Right? Did you? I just was, like, I guess not. And I don't know how many millimeters difference they it got closer, but that happened. It was a real story.

Now I also wanna tell you the next thing. My dad's 86. In about 10 years ago, after he had knee replacement and had a couple, heart surgeries, he needed help doing a lot of stuff. Well, at one point, I don't know when it happened, it was always, he would supervise. Not he at this point, he's even stopped supervising. Like, he didn't even come out and see when things are being done that he would normally do that he did for years. But he would come out and sit. Like, we used to put the the pool cover on their pool at the end of the season.

And so we he would come out and sit on the deck and give his 2¢ worth and, you know, the boy my boys would be with me and my wife and my daughter, and we'd go out and put the pool cover on. And and they would inevitably say, hey. How does that look? He goes, well, it looks great because I didn't do it. So he got to the point where he's like, I get I can't do this anymore. Like, I'm no longer capable of doing this. And I got news for every leader out there. It's gonna happen to you and your business. See, we move from, from, like, a liquid to a crystallized intelligence over the year.

And when we're younger, our minds can crank out tons of data. Like, we can crank we can do the heavy lifting of thinking when we're younger. As we age, our brain our our knowledge shifts into more crystallized. It's in that wisdom category where you just can't do the the heavy lift of all the calculations. You can discern and you can listen. You can see patterns, which is extremely valuable, but you cannot keep up with the computational power of a younger brain. So don't try. Plus, I gotta tell you, I've seen I experienced this with a lot of organizations.

Most of the leaders have been away from the frontline long enough that the assumptions they're making about what's actually happening in the business are not accurate. And it's kinda sad because the people that are on the frontline know it. But they can't tell them because they don't it's the emperor has no clothes. Right? So at some point, you have to make the shift. You have to understand that, well, I haven't done that job for 5 years. We have all these clients I don't know. Maybe it is done differently. Maybe I should listen to other people.

But back to go around back to Zach Bryan, if somebody says something and you have an instinct to say something that's better or you wanna change it or you wanna offer your thoughts, let it be, then let it go. See what happens. Because what you gotta realize is when you do that, it's not serving your goals. Because you must always know what you want most and choose the state of mind to ensure your behaviors are moving you closer to that thing, not away from it. Now everything we've talked about today comes down to one core idea, your state of mind. It's not some abstract concept. It's the moment to moment experience of life driven by your thoughts and feelings. The reality is this.

Why what you think about and how you choose to feel not only shapes your actions, but the actions of those around you. How you choose to feel about what happens and what what you think shapes not only your actions, but those around you as well, those those actions of the people close to you. And remember, no one is made to feel anything. You choose your reaction. You can't afford, as a leader, to leave that choice the chance, And the state of mind you cultivate directly impacts those you lead, either positively or negatively. You're either building them up or tearing them down. To be quite candid, the problem is most of us get stuck at the feeling stage and don't even realize we've skipped the thought part. We're not acting rationally.

We're acting emotionally. But, like Mark said, you must think about what you think about. And it isn't just some motivational quote. It's the key to leading with intention. You know, at the end of the day, leadership is not about controlling the room. It's about controlling yourself. And as, we're gonna go from Zach Bryan to Ice Cube. As Ice Cube told us, it was probably in the late eighties, you better check yourself before you wreck yourself.

And that's the real work, isn't it? So here's my final challenge to you. Before your next leadership move, before your next decision, before you know, just take a moment, check your state of mind. Are you reacting, or are you thinking? Are you being relentless, or are you surviving? Because only when you're in the right state of mind can you help other people reach theirs. And until next time, keep thinking, keep leading, and remember, your state of mind is your most powerful tool.