Welcome to the Potential LeaderLab, and I'm your host, Perry Maughmer. Now, as we know, words create worlds. And so, I wanted I just always start off with a little bit of an explanation about Potential LeaderLab. And I believe we're always in the act of realizing our potential as a leader. We're never we don't ever arrive. So I view a potential leader as any leader. I don't care if you've been, in your mind, leading for 25 years or you've never led. You're always viewed as a potential leader.

And the lab for me is more of a mental state, not a physical location because it's somewhere we can experiment. So it's a state of mind. It's a state of mind we exist in that we can always be running those experiments. And I like to say that the the podcast, this is where we, you and I, explore some things so that you can experiment with them. So that you can decide what ones fit into your own evolution to become the leader that makes the world a better place for those you care deeply about. Now, I will ask you to do 2 things for me. Here's the first one. If you like what you hear or if you don't like what you hear, either way, give a review.

There are 5 stars, pick as many or as few as you like. You know, I I listen to a lot of podcasts and a lot of people say, leave us a 5 star review. I think that's a little forceful. Leave whatever review is appropriate because I like the feedback. So if there's stuff you didn't like, don't leave 5 stars. If there's stuff you like, leave 5 stars. The other part of that is when you do that and you're thinking about why you're leaving whatever number of stars you're leaving, think about what concepts resonated with you. And the second part is more important to me, is that you would recommend the podcast to people that you think would enjoy it, because that gives you a community to explore and experiment, evolve alongside, because development as a leader is a team sport.

We can't do it alone, because when you start talking about things and you share things with people that you've heard on any podcast, mine or anybody else's, or you've read a book, you read an article, or you talk to somebody, you heard this you heard a great speaker who gave these couple concepts you thought really resonated with you. The more you share them in the first 24 to 48 hours, the more likely they're going to be retained for you. Because the physiological act is you're building connections between neurons. And what happens is, to get highly, not highly technical, just technical, is that there's a something called a myelin sheath that forms between over a dendrite, forms over between synapses. What happens is myelin is a fatty tissue that conducts electricity. So the more you revisit that concept, the more you revisit and talk about that concept, the more myelin is developed along that sheath so that the signal goes quicker. Right? That's muscle memory, if you wanna use just a general term. So the more you talk about it, the more you repeat it, the the thicker that myelin sheath gets, the easier it is to remember it.

So, again, learning is about that. Right? We're picking up new things. We're we're experimenting with new things so we can evolve. So the more you talk about it and you're not trying to boil the ocean. Don't do all of them. Just pick a couple. So couple things, leave a review and then talk to somebody. Talk to somebody about the concepts that you heard here that that resonate with you.

Alright. Let's get going. So today, warning warning. If I had a buzzer, I'd ring it or a bell or if I had a red light, I'd spin it around because there will definitely be cursing today in this episode. So it is not safe for work or home depending upon your work or home. It might be safe for you depending on your, you know, the culture of your organization. I I just wanna give you a fair warning because then the what we're gonna I'm sure everybody knows what the acronym STFU stands for. Right? So STFU, I won't say what it is, but I am gonna say the second one.

See, I've got a second one, which is STFD. So instead of shut the fuck up, it's slow the fuck down. So that's what we're gonna talk about today. Because I believe that our culture of urgency is ruining us. Everybody has to have a sense of urgency. Now, doesn't mean that I don't want things to get done, but I do wanna challenge the concept that leadership is about being decisive and acting with urgency. And the term another term they use is called bias to action. Because I've worked with, I'd say probably hundreds of people over the last 10 years, and I have seen more than my share of them make regrettable mistakes because they acted too quickly.

And then we get into this thought process that that is the point of it, is to take quick action. And I want you to think about I want you to think about this. Is that I think we can act with intention. We don't have to act with urgency. I think intention is far better than urgency. Now and it's it's really kind of funny to me because if you in some in some concept in some concepts, like Stephen Covey will tell you, you know, there's the there's the Eisenhower matrix, urgent and important. And and they try to steer you away from stuff that's urgent. We shouldn't get caught in the in urgency.

But yet, we we constantly tell people we have to act with a sense of urgency. Act with a sense of urgency. Act within, you know, you know, act a bias to action. We should always be doing things. Be decisive. And again, there's time for that. I'm not saying you never do that, but I'm saying when that becomes the default, we lose something. We lose some of our best qualities, I think, when we're constantly acting with urgency.

And I think that part of it, as many things that we discuss on the podcast, come from the way our brain works. Because our brain is wired for binary thinking. Our brain wants to conserve energy, So, it's going to try to figure out very quickly. It's gonna it's gonna look at any situation you're put into and it's gonna figure out what it's similar to in your memory banks. It's gonna slap that on there. It's gonna tell you this is the solution and then you're gonna act like you thought it through. Because you aren't even aware that your brain did that. Now, by definition, binary thinking is there's only 2 sides, and you pick 1.

And it's also known as dichotomous thinking, and and it acts as a way to simplify complex ideas and situations. And the gray area in the middle is often unnoticed or goes away. Now, there are times when this is awesome. Again, I'm not there there's no eitheror here. Right? I'm not telling you do or don't do. I'm telling you that judgment and discernment become really important in our lives, because everything cannot be rightwrongblackwhite. But yet, you find in our society, oftentimes we're trying to distill things down to that level. And we're not spending the time to think about, what if it is or what if it isn't? Because I believe that being a leader and leading effectively is all about nuance.

It's all about understanding subtlety. And if you don't slow down, you will gloss right over very important things. There's actually, Michael Fullan wrote a book called Nuance Leadership. He says, nuanced leaders have a curiosity about what is possible, openness to other people, sensitivity to context, and a loyalty to a better future. That's an awesome phrase, a loyalty to a better future. I think we should all have that. We should all have a loyalty to a better future. They see below the surface, enabling them to detect patterns and their consequences for the system.

They connect people to their own and each other's humanity. They don't lead, they teach. They change people's emotions, not just their minds. They have an instinct for orchestration. Now, you notice he said the first thing, leaders have a curiosity. Well, here's what's funny. Do you know the requirement? You know what curiosity requires? Time. You can't be curious quickly.

You can't be efficiently curious. Curiosity requires time, and curiosity is, if you if you approach things with a sense of curiosity, you also have turned off something very important, which is judgment. You've turned off your judgment because we all walk around with that firmly in the front of everything that we do for 90% of our day. And it's necessary. Again, I'm not saying abandon it. I'm saying know when to be curious and when to use judgment. But here's the thing I've said this ad nauseam but when you judge, when you're in judgment mode, there are 3 things, 3 very important things, 3 very life affirming things, you cannot do. You cannot learn, you cannot lead, and you cannot love, if you're judging.

So, you have to choose. Because if you're judging all the time, then you're never leading, loving, or learning. And and so you have to balance for yourself when you need to be in judgment mode, because there are gonna be times during the day where it's it's really important that you exercise great judgment. But there's also a bunch of times when you don't. And again, that takes energy. You're you're fighting your brain. I cannot stress this enough. You are fighting your brain at every turn in this, because it's expensive.

As we know, your brain is about 2 to 3 percent of your body mass and requires about 30% of your resting calories to run. It's an expensive piece of machinery, and it wants to conserve energy. It doesn't want you doing this. So you have to be really aware and in tune with how you feel. So, I'm gonna introduce a concept to you. I'm gonna talk about it briefly. Right? It's called stochastic thinking. And it's really interesting to me, because it recognizes that outcomes are byproducts of chance and randomness, and that causation is probabilistic rather than inevitable or predetermined.

And it requires us to look at context around cognitive, environmental, genetic, and social, around agency and interacting causes and structures. And it recognizes the random variations that produce unpredictable results. It recognizes the randomness in our universe. And so if you think about stochastic thinking, it's it's kind of the opposite of deterministic. It reminds us that outcomes hinge on complex contingencies that we can't ignore. This kinda goes to the point of focusing too much on an outcome, of saying, I am going to x. It's and you've all heard some of these sayings, you know, control the controllables. Focus on what you can do.

Focus on the things you do control. Focus on your activities. I would argue that there aren't many the only thing you control, basically, in this world is your own well, I'm not sure we do a great job of it, but theoretically, we could control our own actions, our own decisions, and our own behaviors. If we do it if we focus on it, we can. But outside of that outside of that, we focus on very little. And I and I can't tell you the number of people that have shared with me when we talk about leadership. And this kind of goes to this example of stochastic thinking. That the easiest way to drive change in the world is to change yourself.

So focus less on everybody else, Focus on your behavior. I was in a meeting yesterday with a group of leaders for a company and one of them spoke up and said, I have seen dramatic change in my organization because of the way I've changed my behavior. And they were flabbergasted. They're like, I can't believe it was that easy. For all of these years, I've been focused on everybody else and just telling what I want them to do and not do, and all of that. And and they said, all I had to do was just turn that focus inward and really work on myself. And then I see all of those changes that I wanted happen. And so, I'm just gonna share.

I'm just gonna read this to you, because I think it's an amazing thing. So I said that, you know, hinges on complex contingencies that we mustn't ignore. It's this contingency that should remind us not only of the vital importance of chance, accident, coincidences, and decisions in life, but of our own agency, our subjectivity, and our ability to make choices and decisions, exercise our capacity to act, and take responsibility for those actions. It doesn't it doesn't mean the world's out of our control. It means that we have to constantly evolve. Explore, experiment, evolve. There's freedom in that, because we give up. It isn't called decide and act and make happen.

It isn't called determine and create you know, people that get so focused, well, I'm gonna focus on this, I wanna make this happen, I'm gonna achieve this goal, I'm gonna okay. That that's fine. I'm not I'm not judging anybody. But there's also a lot of pressure we put on ourselves. Because whenever you establish this hard goal, you're in you're failing until you reach the goal. Right? So you're in pre goal failure. Then you reach the goal, and then there's a moment of I reached the goal, and then you have to have a new goal, so now I'm failing again. Whereas in this, we're just we're evolving.

In this process, we're exploring things, we're experimenting with things, we're evolving. And we're, by the way, we're achieving the same things. But I'm not I'm not upset and angry and frustrated and have anxiety or any of those things because I recognize there's a great number of things in this world that are far outside of my control. No matter what I do, all I can do is take action based on what I think's gonna happen, wait for results, and then take other actions, because I don't lose, I learn. And that's important, because everything we do is an experiment to gather data. And that data comes back from the world. We get that feedback from the world. So we have to listen to the feedback.

We have to be open to the feedback. We have to we have to want the feedback. Now, there is a and and our our brains are fascinating. Right? So there is this, concept called need for cognitive closure. And it was, you know, it's comes off some research by a couple of guys named Webster and Kuglansky. And it's it's essentially why it explains why people avoid uncertainty and seek answers. There there's a cool little you can look it up, and need for cognitive closure, NFCC. And if you look that up, there's actually a little, like, quick quiz you can take to see what your score would be and how much how high your need for cognitive closure is.

If you go back to binary thinking, it's what drives binary thinking. Because essentially, what happens is we we rush we don't as humans, we don't like uncertainty. So what we do is we try to simplify and gain certainty as quickly as possible in things. Now, some people are wired differently. So there are some people who seek it more than other people. Lisa and I are opposites in this manner. I'm very okay with uncertainty. In fact, I I'm I'm pretty sure sometimes I'm too okay with uncertainty.

Like, I don't have any kind of framework for things or and I find that I can I can easily aggravate? So I have a marketing an outsourced chief marketing officer, guy here in town named Nate Riggs, NR Media. Nate's a great guy. Known him for years. I frustrate the hell out of Nate. Like, I drive him fucking crazy. Right? Because of my wild ideas and left turns and right turns and u turns and you know, and I and I it's so and I I work on it. Like, I'm aware of it. I don't wanna do it, and so I do work on it.

But oftentimes, I'll just I can I can obliterate somebody's day by just asking them a question? I don't I don't even care what the answer is. Like, I'm not saying I wanna do it. I'm just saying, hey, what do you think about this? And it can completely derail people. But it's like, what the hell are you doing? Like, we're on a trip. We got it. I'm like, okay. I'm fine. That's cool.

I get it. You know, I'm just asking. Right? So I understand that. I understand I'm on the other end of that spectrum and how it impacts people, and I I'm working on it. I'm and I appreciate. That's why I align myself with people who aren't like me. It isn't always comfortable. It isn't always fun.

It isn't always, you know, those things. But it helps me become better at what I need to become better at to get the result that I want, which is the way I look at my behavior. But I just give you that example because we all there's no good or bad. We just everybody's kind of, you know, we have comfort in different levels. And, and Lisa and I operate on different levels of this. It's a certainty thing for her. I mean, she wants if we're gonna do something, we're gonna do it. And I'm like, yeah, I'm okay with doing it.

And she's like, well when do you want it? I'm like, well whenever. Like whenever it happens. Where and I she's gonna love this but we're looking for a house, in Georgia, in the mountains in Georgia. And this is one of those great examples because she keeps taking Zillow on and off of her phone because she gets frustrated because she'll send me houses and I'll and I'll look at them and I'll be like, yeah, those those are nice. What do you think? Oh, I think they're nice. Well, what do you wanna do? I don't know. What do you wanna do? Like I if this takes a year and a half, I'm okay with it and she's not. And so, and I try not I don't wanna frustrate her and I don't wanna be frustrated because I I have just a different viewpoint than she does and neither one of these are right or wrong.

I just use the example of something real that hopefully, people can relate to and understand that it happens all the time. So if you wanna take that, the need for cognitive closure quiz, you can look it up and and take a look at it. And why do we and so why do we even need that? Why is it a thing? Because for some people, uncertainty is a very unpleasant state that people want resolved quickly. They wanna get out of quickly. I'm sure there are people listening now and you know people that do not like uncertainty. They don't like ambiguity. They don't like indecision. Again, they're back to that decisiveness.

Let's move on. Let's let's fire through these things. You know, fail fast. Whatever you wanna say. And it causes friction for people. And most people have a tolerance, you know, in between the two. There's a certain level of comfort with a certain amount of uncertainty. But here's the thing, because we want homeostasis, which is a human seek homeostasis, which is kind of sameness.

The best example I can give you is, if you have a certain way you drive to work, you don't drive a different way to work every day. Right? You default to, you drive a certain way to work. And here's the thing, after about 2 or 3 times, after a month or 2, you don't even think. You don't you're not even aware that you're driving to work. In fact, there are times you've probably gotten to work and you go, oh. I don't even remember driving. Right? That's what our brain does. It wants that homeostasis.

It doesn't wanna have to invent or think about a new way to go to work every day. Now, that's an example of where there's no there's nothing wrong with it. I'm just giving you a base example of how our brain does that. It wants predictability. Now, the challenge again is, there are certain times we need to shut that off. We do need to feel stress in certain situations, and we need to let things take longer because there's things there that we need to find out that we can't gloss over, that we shouldn't gloss over. We need to do we need to be curious. We need to understand the nuance and the context.

And I always tell leaders that I work with, when the the the case studies and the newspapers and the news is littered. I said, newspapers. Look at that reference like most people like newspaper. Who the hell reads a newspaper? I don't read newspapers. But, there there it is. So, what happens is, we see plenty of stories of people who have been successful in like running company A, and then they get hired to run company B or C and they fail. This is the greatest example I can give you because what happens with our brains is, we had success doing things a certain way. We go to a completely different situation with different people, different scenario, and we have a solution that we're now gonna use to fix that thing.

Like we fixed the other thing. And 90% of the time, it fails miserably because we don't look for what's different, we look for what's the same because that's what our brain does. And so, I tell leaders I work with, no matter what, whenever you're in one of those situations, always make sure you stop and say, I understand these things are the same, but what's different? Let's find some things that are different. Let's find some different things in the nuance, in the gray. Let's look at different contexts, so we understand both what's similar and what's different. Because what's different can cause us to fail, if we ignore them. And we don't like being we don't like these open loops. Right? Because we want to quickly we want to look for similarities.

We're not differences. We wanna categorize things and people and situations so we can move on. Now, this convenience is an issue because our brain is chasing the path of least resistance. And so again, we wanna recognize patterns, we wanna be mindful, set intentions, evaluate trade offs we might have to make, and then make gradual changes. Even down to, you know, there's, you know, cliches. Right? Just think about this. So, where this is where cliches come in. Cliches are phrases or opinions that are overused and betray a lack of original thought.

And it's a it's an example of how our brain our brain gravitates to easy. So, I mean, just think, we we all use them. There's nothing wrong with them. It's just, we don't wanna have cliched thinking. Because that's what this is. So, we always get annoyed with people that use a lot of cliches. But then imagine that that's actually your pattern of thinking is to do cliched thinking. You're just repeating the same thought process over and over again.

It betrays a lack of original thought. We can't lean too heavily on things we know. We can't because any strength, if levered too highly, becomes a weakness. And we just have to be aware of that. So, what do we do? Discernment, I think, is the big thing. And here here are some ways to think about discernment. It's the quality of being able to grasp and comprehend what is obscure. It's the ability to perceive, understand, and judge things clearly, especially things that are not obvious or straightforward.

In having there there are 7 essential attitudes, and these are general. Right? That if you wanna be a discerning individual, you're gonna you're gonna practice these. Number 1 is openness. I'm gonna be open to things. I'm gonna be open to people's opinions. I'm gonna be I'm gonna be open. I'm gonna be generous. I'm gonna have interior freedom.

I'm not gonna be held hostage to what society and my company and other people think. I'm gonna give myself the freedom to think what needs to be thought about. I'm gonna reflect on my experiences. I'm not gonna just take them for granted and turn them into action steps. I'm gonna reflect on what's the same and what's different. I'm gonna make sure I have my priorities straight, and then I'm not confusing ends with means. Because oftentimes, we get we listen to the noise from the outside, and we let that drive the things that we think about. We let people rush us.

We let people tell us that we need to make decisions when we don't need to. And think about that, and I I just wanna share this with you. When anybody, if you're in a leadership role, and anybody comes to you with a problem, they're not telling you everything. This is not I'm not saying this is negative or positive. I'm saying it's human nature. Most likely, they're coming to you with their story, which is, and by the way, we're always the hero of our own story. They're coming to you with their story to get you to make the decision that they want. So nobody's coming to you without an idea of what they want out of that scenario.

They're not coming to you completely objectively like Walter Cronkite in the seventies reporting the news. They're coming to you and saying, they're giving you their version of the story so that you will reach the conclusion they want you to reach. That's why you should slow down and ask a few questions. Now, it it is important to understand the difference between discernment and intuition. Right? Because intuition is a direct perception of truth, independent of any reasoning process. It's immediate apprehension of something. It's a it's a fact or a truth perceived in a certain way, quick, keen insight. So you can balance those two things because intuition is important.

It's and if you read any Gary Klein's work in decision making, it's naturalistic decision making is an actual decision making process. So it's you wanna have intuition, you wanna have discernment about your intuition. Because here's the reason this is all very important. If you're if you're leading in organizations, if you aspire to lead in any type of way, one of the main jobs of a leader is to teach people how to think, but not what to think. And the only way you can do that is if you actually have a process by which you can explain it to them. And, that means we gotta be far more concerned with the process than the outcome, Because we don't control the outcome, we control the process. And how can you teach somebody how to think? If you don't understand how you think and can show them a process by which you do it, which has to exist objectively outside of your skull. You can't teach somebody something that you don't understand yourself.

And so, I'll leave you with this. It's just an idea. It's called integrative thinking. So you can look and look it up, integrative thinking, and it has kind of 4 steps. Right? One is determine salience. Determine what's important. Analyze the causality. Envision the decision architecture.

They so integrative thinkers don't break things down in independent pieces and work on them separately. It's not mechanistic. That we they look at the architecture of the problem. They it's a systems model of thinking. Right? So you can either look up integrative thinking, you can look up systems thinking, but they look at the system. We're not mechanistic. We're not Newtonian. We're not gonna break it down and think everything's a pocket watch, that if it's not working, we just need to take it apart, fix each individual thing, and put it back together.

Because we all know that people don't work like that. We can't just take this person out and plug that person in and have the same output on a team. So we have to look at this from kind of a systems architecture. And then, the last thing would be achieving resolution because as a leader, we do need to get somewhere. We do need to resolve things, but we can't say it's finally done and we move on because as we all know, most problems are not solved with any amount of finality, because in today's world, as interconnected as everything is, a solution for one problem just causes another problem. So the the the process repeats itself. And that's why as a leader, we have to slow the fuck down. And I say that half jokingly, but, but I mean it.

Because in sports, and I don't I don't tend to like to use a lot of sports analogies, but there's one where we talk about great athletes. Usually, it's a quarterback on a football team. And you'll hear people say, he's got to a point where the game slows down for him. And I think that's what we can all aspire to. It's because it the sense of time is relative. Einstein proved that. And so, you can be in situations where things don't move as fast for you. That's where you want to get people in your organization to the point where they don't feel hurried.

They don't feel rushed. They don't feel that urgency. But just please, stop telling everybody you want them to act with a sense of urgency. Think about possibly acting with a sense of intention. I think that's much more scalable and sustainable than a sense of urgency. And also, it'll lead to much greater outputs and outcomes, because we'll get focused on integrative or systems thinking, and using discernment and and less judgment, and more stochastic thinking and less dichotomous thinking, and understanding when we need those two types of thinking and when to employ them. Because both are very very important. One's not more important than the other.

But we can't just use one all the time. Either way. And that means you gotta fight your brain, as always. Now, we've come to the end of our exploration for today. So, now it's up to you to experiment with whatever resonated with you, if you believe it will empower your own personal evolution to become the leader that you wanna be, that you are meant to be, that you potentially could be. So that you can create a better world for those that you care deeply about. And I and real quickly, I just wanna revisit, having a loyalty to a better future. That's what I wish for all of us.

Have a loyalty to a better future. I thank you for joining me and being one of those relentless few who are committed to your journey. And I do believe that Seneca was right when he said, as long as you live, keep learning how to live. And, I will leave you this from Herman Hess. It seems to me that love is the most important thing in the world. It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain it, and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it. Not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration, and respect.

If we could do that, the world would definitely be a better place for those we care about. Take care of yourself, and take care of those around you. See you next time.