Transcript: 5 Steps for Personal and Professional Growth (EP105)

 

Aneace: I'm not sure I can trust these people to do the stuff that I've empowered them or I've delegated to them, so let me control them even more, as opposed to saying, okay, I'm scared to death because if they screw up, my next on the line with higher ups. Gulp. I better just let go anyway and let them succeed because I chose them, they're my people, I've groomed them. It's finding that balance, which is very difficult.

Brendan: Welcome to The Culture of Leadership. We have conversations that help you develop and become a more confident leader.

Is your desire for personal and professional growth greater than the discomfort of growth? If it is, you've got a far greater chance of achieving your desired end result. Today's guest is Aneace Haddad, a renowned global nomad, executive coach, and author of the mindful leadership book, The Eagle that Drank Hummingbird Nectar.

In this episode, you'll learn Aneace's five-step framework for personal and professional growth. He knows from the many executives he's worked with, if you loosen your grip on your own labels and embrace the journey with a light-hearted approach, it leads to remarkable results. This is The Culture of Leadership podcast. I'm Brendan Rogers. Sit back and enjoy my conversation with Aneace.

Aneace, how about you tell us a bit about your purpose or your drive for writing this book?

Aneace: I wrote two other books 20-something years ago in payment systems back when I was running a tech company in France. I've had a drive to write another book. I thought it was going to be a similar book, kind of how-to on the things that I've learned since selling my company and moving into coaching and facilitation. I had a first manuscript, but I found it was really dry and boring.

I didn't want to just put out another how-to book because there are so many of them, so I decided to come at it from a very different direction through fiction. The intent was to find a way to communicate my experience and everything without it being teachy, so through telling a story. That was the format choice, which proved to be extremely difficult.

I had three writing coaches working with me at various times. They would read a section and say, you're teaching, you're telling people stuff here. I go, no, I'm telling a story. They said, no, no, read it. I discovered that I was really good at camouflaging my advice-giving in a story.

It was really deep work to remove that in order to just really tell a story on personal transformation later in life, the difficulty that senior executives go through in personal transformation, for all things that are universally applicable but also some very specific areas on why it's difficult for senior executives.

Brendan: I guess it's quite ironic, too, that you are going through a bit of personal transformation in the process of doing that when that's also the focus of the book.

Aneace: Yes, and since going through that, I've come to quite a solid conviction. I will tell this to the people that I coach. If you want to lead transformation in an organization, you need to be in transformation yourself. You need to be struggling with the messiness of that transformation. Otherwise, you're teaching transformation, and you're not really leading it.

That was from that firsthand experience of going through that while writing my book. I'm really convinced of that now. A leader who steps outside and says, hey, we need to change, it doesn't really do it. We're changing, and here's how I'm struggling with the change myself. That becomes leadership as opposed to just telling people to change.

Brendan: Do you find that that's something that holds leaders back, that they're uncomfortable with the messiness of whatever a transformation may look like for them from a personal perspective?

Aneace: Yeah, and it's scary. I show this a good bit in the book. We get to a certain point in life because of our authority, expertise, knowledge, and everything built up over years. We are paid to have answers and bring solutions to the table. At some point, something shifts and you don't have the answers anymore. Your answer to anything really underneath is I don't know.

That's an extremely scary place to be in, but that's the only place you can honestly be in. Anything else is pretend, and it's very difficult. But the most successful leaders figure that out intuitively, and they're able to live with it. For a lot of others, it's learning that.

That's a lot of what the book is about, is making it okay to not know. Not only okay, but that's the place you should be. If you're doing something brand new, you don't know. And still being able to function at a high level, even when you don't know.

Brendan: Was there any specific moment in your past that gave you the drive as to why you felt the need to do this and to write something that you hope has an impact on many others out there?

Aneace: I can't think of a single moment that came through. It was seeing in my own, where I've struggled the most and where I've made my biggest mistakes. It's holding on to things too hard. When I'm able to loosen my grip a bit, things go easier, and seeing that over and over with people.

Noticing the difficulty and loosening the grip, I think it came from that perspective. That just started to become so clear. Three of the chapters in my book are on loosening your grip, and three different areas that I found are quite big areas in the work world, in our work world.

Brendan: It's a great point that you make and a great segue that's going to take us into the book. Let's talk about a bit of these five key areas. The first one I understand is entering the path. Do you want to share what is that about? And we'll unpack that a little bit.

Aneace: That's the point at which the discomfort of stepping out of your comfort zone is smaller than the need to transform. For a lot of people, rather stay comfortable is just a human thing. Entering the path is that something changes and where the desire for growth or the need for growth is bigger than the discomfort of stepping out.

There's always a transition moment. Around 15% or 20% of the book is my own personal journey, the rest is fictionalized. I mentioned the story of a man in the book. A managing director of a textile company, textile business, who's going through fatalities, so they have higher than expected accidents and even a few fatalities.

This man had done lots of work with outside consultants. They put together all of the systems, processes, and dashboards for safety. They've done everything, ticking all the boxes that they were supposed to do, but they were still having fatalities. I had asked him at the time, how committed are you to safety? He said, 9 out of 10.

The conversation became, maybe that's why there are still accidents happening. What is that 10? Then he got angry when I suggested that and said, 10 out of 10 commitment to safety means I'd have to be on everybody's backs, and I've got thousands of people. They jump on a forklift to get from one side to the other. They do stupid things. I can't be on everyone's back. His definition of what a 10 was felt impossible to reach.

In that process, through that realization that maybe it's his own, there's something missing in his commitment. That's what set him on the path. He finally figured it out. He found what 10 out of 10 meant for him, and the fatality stopped. But there was that realization that he wasn't going quite all the way. That's entering the path.

Brendan: Have you found any patterns or any regularity around the triggers around people moving into this path of change and transformation?

Aneace: I guess the biggest pattern is that the need or the desire for that change becomes so strong that we're willing to really do a lot of work to get there. It's our human history. Why have we gotten canoes and went off to distant places and explored new places without knowing what's on the horizon? I think it's in our DNA.

At some point, we love comfort, obviously. We love to set our roots down and all that. But at some point, something drives us and we need to move. We need change. We see it in personal lives when you become a parent. Do you have kids?

Brendan: I do.

Aneace: How old are your kids?

Brendan: They are now 23 and 20.

Aneace: Okay. You've gone through a few personal transformations as a father when you first had your children, you had no experience being a dad. You're forced into transforming your identity, your way of being into fatherhood. There are challenges with that.

When your kid goes into the terrible twos, you're a different kind of dad. When they become teens, if you stay the dad of a toddler, you can't parent teenagers. You've had no experience parenting teenagers up to that point, and yet you become a different kind of dad at that point. We're all going through these constantly. 

As soon as we get comfortable with it, boom, something changes again, and they're going off to college, and then we have to change again as parents. That same process is everywhere.

Something grows. Something's important enough to require the change. If you didn't need to adapt to teenagers, you never would have. It's just not like, okay, that's what I'm going to do, I'm going to learn how to deal with teens. Most people don't do that. You're forced into it, and you do it because you love your kids. There's a very strong driver for that.

Brendan: You've touched on something today already, which is why I was so excited and keen to have a conversation with someone like you, because my wife and I also foster children. We've had a little girl with us since she's been two weeks old. She's almost one soon. That transformation is close to the heart in my experience as a foster dad now. As a dad to my kids 20 odd years, starting is just a whole different sensation and experience, which is unbelievably emotional, but unbelievably gratifying at the same time.

Aneace: I have tremendous respect for people to do that. I wouldn't know how to even start something like that.

Brendan: You've raised children, you love kids, and you just put it all on the line. It's that vulnerability piece, which is part of this entering the path, isn't it? You've got to be open and face your vulnerabilities, and really take these things on board, and not be afraid of getting broken or getting hurt.

Aneace: Yeah, it's hard. It takes courage. That's why it's the first chapter of the book. It's the first step, entering the path, because it is a cautious choice that takes courage.

Brendan: Taking courage, I get that. What stops people from entering the path? Obviously not being courageous, there are some fundamental things there that stop them.

Aneace: Yeah. Just generalizing, I'm looking at it from the outside. It's easy to say it's fear of change and all that. In my experience with people, I see fear more as a symptom. I think the real thing for not taking that step forward is that the end result is nice to have.

If I'll ask someone, if they want to work on something, they say, hey, I want to get ready for this next position, this next roll, I'll ask them from 1–10, how badly do you want it? If they say 3 or 4, it's nice to have. They're not really going up. They'll go through the motions because that's the next roll that they're supposed to be going after, but they don't really want it.

If they say 8, 9, 10, yup, they're going to get it. They're going to go for it. They'll find the courage to go through the change. I wouldn't say it's because they lack courage. I think everybody's got the courage. Everybody that I have ever run into in my life has the courage to make those big changes if their desire for the change or the impetus for that change is so strong that they find the courage.

Brendan: I think that's a great rule for so many things, isn't it? We've entered the path. I've wanted to make some change, I want it bad enough, I need it bad enough. There's this burning bridge desire for me to help it. I love this, what you've called the chapter, Seeing into the beautiful abyss of the mind. What is that about?

Aneace: That's about identifying our cognitive dissonances, our cognitive biases, the beliefs that we hold that are getting in the way. In the vast majority of literature, coaching, training, leadership development, and all that, these biases are considered really bad, negative things. I look at them very differently.

I think there are neurological shortcuts that allow us to function much easier in a very complex environment. Ninety-nine percent of the time, they're very accurate and they work well. If I step into the street without looking, there's a chance I get hit by a car. That's a very solid belief. It's a bias. It's baked in. We look around and we step into the street.

Every once in a while, we have a few of our biases that get in the way. This chapter is about beginning to admire the way our brains do that so that we don't get into a wrestling match with our biases. It's more training the biases, relearning.

For example, with the gentleman I described earlier, his belief was that 10 out of 10 commitment is impossible because that means I have to stay on everyone's backs, and people are idiots. That's a 30-second summary.

He had to work on that to realize that maybe 10 out of 10 commitment didn't mean what he was thinking. It meant something different. People aren't idiots, they don't want to die. They don't want to have accidents. There are other reasons that they might jump on a forklift. Maybe I can look at it as how I'm creating an environment that encourages them to jump on forklifts.

It's wrestling with these biases in a more gentle way, and then trying to beat them out. But it's identifying them, respecting them, learning to live with them, helping them transform a bit so that these beliefs are not holding us back so much.

Brendan: How powerful are these biases and that term limiting beliefs in stopping us moving forward?

Aneace: They're pretty much the tool that we use in our brains to justify staying where we're at. It's a very powerful tool. 

I was coaching a man in Malaysia. He's a senior leader at a company in Malaysia, overweight, smoked, not very healthy, 43 years old I think at the time, and he told me he wanted to work on his health.

He says, but don't tell me to quit smoking. I said, I'm your coach. I'm not going to tell you what to do or not do. As we spoke, he kept saying, anyway, it's in my DNA to die young at 50 or 52. We unpack that. It turned out his father died of some heart disease or something at early 50s. A couple of uncles died.

He had created a belief in his head that he was going to die at 52. When I would ask him, where do you see your life going to in the next few years, he had no vision beyond that date. In essence, he was doing everything to make that belief real.

We started exploring people in his family that did not die at 50 or 52. He actually discovered that there are lots of people that didn't. It started to stretch his belief about the future, which allowed him then to develop a dream of seeing his youngest daughter get married, which would then be 20 years later or something, so we're looking at late 50s, early 60s.

He finally went to the doctor and had an annual physical, which he hadn't had in a few years. His wife was a doctor also, by the way, so this whole thing was quite complex and preventing him from moving forward, all because of this belief that all the men in his family die at 50.

It's a story we tell ourselves among the hundreds and thousands of stories that we tell ourselves. It's some of these that really prevent from moving forward and get in the way. Those are the ones that need to be looked at. The idea in the second chapter is shining light on those beliefs. Once you shine light on them, they usually just crumble and fall away.

Brendan: Just referring to that example, but does this rule apply for many of these limiting beliefs that you start to overcome those limiting beliefs, breaking those down through logic?

Aneace: Pre-logic, I would say, is simply looking at them. Very much, we'll tell kids that have nightmares about someone chasing them. One way of dealing with that is for the child to try in the dream to turn around and ask the monster or whatever it is what you want. Adults do that as well. Usually, this scary thing just dissolves. You might get some vision of something. Very often, it turns out to just be something quite small that we've turned into a monster.

I would say, it's pre-logic from that. It's not prefrontal cortex stuff. It's more limbic system and dealing with emotions and fears. Looking at them head on, courage comes into play there. To be able to turn around and look at one's monster or dragon takes a bit of courage. Logic can come in after that, but I usually find that logic is a bit later in the process.

Brendan: Do you find that people who are wanting and have that burning desire to overcome some of these limiting beliefs, the most successful way to do that is to seek some help from someone like yourself or somebody who specializes in that area? Or have you found that, hey, people can have the drive and they can overcome these themselves?

Aneace: I think the vast majority of people have the drive and overcome them themselves, generally. Every once in a while, sure, it helps a lot to have somebody to bounce them off of, get feedback on, and have somebody suggest something that might allow one to see forward. Human beings are extremely resourceful, resilient, and generally manage to get a lot through this on their own. I'm speaking of the vast majority of people, generally healthy.

I've mentioned this a few times, I need to give a caveat. I don't do anything in a clinical environment. Nothing that I say can relate to people that really have some psychological issues that need professional attention. I work with healthy people that are generally succeeding quite well and just want to tune things up a bit.

Brendan: I understand. What's the indicator for you in this area that people don't have what it takes to move forward, to move past this barrier, this hurdle?

Aneace: I've never seen that situation in the world that I live in. I've never seen that. I've seen people deciding, actually, I don't want that thing.

Brendan: Making a clear conscious decision.

Aneace: Yeah, I've seen that. Usually a little younger, usually in the 30s, maybe early 40s, there's a realization. Occasionally, a realization that actually, this kind of line that I'm going down, that's my parents stuff. Especially in Asia, there's more of that than in the Western world. That realization can be scary in itself, but it opens up new pathways.

Someone doesn't have what it takes, but I really have never run into that. The thing that they're going after, they generally have what it takes to get it if they really want that.

Brendan: Interesting. You say, again, the different cultures and Asian culture speaking generally. There's a lot of drive from the parents, not just Asian cultures various, but Asia particularly. It sounds like there's a time, and I guess that's a unique journey for people where they stop living their parents' wishes. They start to realize their own journey and progress and move forward with their own journey.

Aneace: Yeah, I think people of my generation, that happens a little later in life in 30s, early 40s. For some, it never happens, and they create a story. They fit, and it works for them, and they live very, very full fulfilled lives.

What I see in Asia, that separation and desire for one's own journey is happening much younger now than it would have maybe 20 years ago. There's a bigger acceptance of people going on their own paths and not necessarily following in their parents' footsteps, generally. Like any generalization, anybody listening to this is going to know all kinds of exceptions to that.

Brendan: Always. If anyone wants to share exceptions, please put them in the comments in YouTube below. Absolutely no problem because we love the dialogue. 

Before we go into the third part of this transformational process, I just want to ask you about those five chapter headings. Again, I really liked the chapter headings. Did you come up with those, or this was one of your three storyteller coaches?

Aneace: No, this was completely me. It went through many iterations to get to the current chapter headings. The earlier chapter headings sounded much, much more business-like. A I went deeper and deeper into fiction and removed the telling voice, teachy voice, and all that, the chapter headings became more playful and a bit more, I never mentioned the word mindfulness in the book like mindful leadership, but that's what's behind all this.

It's a form of mindful leadership, not in the sense of sitting down and meditating, although that's great. I do that every day. It's more really being mindful of how we're showing up as leaders in all these different areas so that the chapter headings and the contents, anybody who's familiar with mindful leadership, would recognize it a bit there.

Brendan: That level of self-awareness always comes through and has to come through in talking about leadership and leadership development, doesn't it?

Aneace: Yeah.

Brendan: The third part in the chapter heading, Detaching from the illusion of self. What's that about?

Aneace: The chapters three, four, and five. The last three chapters are all about letting go, loosening one's grip on different areas. The first one is about labels, detaching from the illusion. We create all these labels around us, and they help us to define who we are or who we're becoming. They're extremely powerful and extremely useful, which is why we use labels, and which is why in a lot of our politics today, there are a lot of label attacks from one to the other.

We've been doing it for a very, very long time. Labels help us move forward in a very simple way. However, they can get petrified. When they get too solidified, and we're holding on to them, because we're comfortable with them, and it feels like that's me, then we can't move forward.

My last name means blacksmith, Haddad. It's as common as Smith in English. It's like Miller, Smith. We've got so many surnames that were actually trade names hundreds of years ago. But the trades that we got involved with hundreds of years ago were so solid that it became part of our identity, and it would go on from father to son.

It would go down the line until we woke up and said, hey, we don't have to be that same trade all the time. And that trade is dying, I need to be something new. Do I need to change my name? Things became less fixed through that. In the same way with lots of other labels.

This whole chapter is about having a looser, lighter, more playful relationship with all of our labels so that we were not holding them so rigidly, so that we can let go of labels, adopt a new label, and see it as transit story as opposed to something really fixed, so this is my personality. That whole area is a way to look at ourselves, even any sense of identity as being something that is flowing, growing, and in transition.

Brendan: How do you move people forward? What do you suggest to people who, there's some power in labels as you said earlier, but you don't want it to be a barrier for progress and for growth? How do you encourage that change, that mindset shift?

Aneace: Part of it is rational, where people see that, yeah, I have changed. Before you were a dad, that wasn't your label. It wasn't your identity. You became a dad, and that became part of your identity. We do see these things.

I was a programmer, originally. We see it in the work world. When I first started managing people years ago, if I kept thinking of myself as a programmer first, I'd have a lot of trouble managing people. I needed to add this new identity of manager. Some people succeed in keeping the old identity of programmer and becoming a very technical manager, but even then that's them.

At some point, they need to let go of that identity of programmer and say, okay, I can program, but I'm really a manager. We've all gone through that countless times. Part of it is realizing that what I just described. That's easy for people to pick up because they've seen it in their lives.

Another part is an exercise that I use called not this, not that. I describe it in the book. It's coming up with labels, preparing a list of labels, and then going through each of the labels to say "I am not that." For example, for me, I am not an American in Singapore. The quote around it is "Loosen up the brain." The brain says, okay, I am an American in Singapore, but there are the quotes. What does that mean?

When you say that, you start to see some of the beliefs that we carry around those labels that maybe aren't very useful. For example, I'm not a dad, I'm not a father. It feels weird at first. The brain goes, of course I am. Then the quotes start going, okay, well, all right, no, I'm not that kind of a dad. I used to be that kind of a father, I'm not that kind of a father anymore.

It just loosens it up. We're able to see some of the baggage that we've added around certain labels that maybe don't serve us anymore. That's what I call loosening up. It doesn't make it disappear, but it loosens it up so its hold is not as strong.

Brendan: I think just in regards to labels, Aneace, that you could have an absolute job for life just in that area. As you said, labels in society—I'm speaking very generically—it's almost like people want labels. They want to proudly wear these labels around things, which maybe provides for them or gives them other benefits and things like that. But in some areas, as you say, it holds them back.

I like your view on loosening the labels. What's coming through to me the whole time is it's not this fighting of whatever it is, if it's a label or this change, this transformation you're trying to make. It's acknowledging and almost dancing with it, so you're in tune, and then you can adjust it.

Aneace: Exactly.

Brendan: When you start fighting stuff, it gets harder. But raising awareness, understanding it, moving with it, coaxing it, and dancing with it, then you can get into some flow, and it just feels better.

Aneace: Yup. There's gratitude involved. You can thank the labels that got you to where you are today. 

There's a famous quote by a coach, Marshall Goldsmith. "What got you here won't take you there." It's extremely common. People have heard it all the time. Senior leaders know what got me here won't get me there.

It's that same thing. But rather than fighting with what got me here, there's a sense of also being able to play with it, having gratitude. Thank you for getting me to here, but I don't need you anymore. Or you're in the way for moving forward, but thank you for getting me here. It's that lighter relationship with all this stuff.

Brendan: How does that relate to a level of authenticity if there's openness around labels dancing with it, so to speak, and making moves forward? Is there a link to authenticity in this process?

Aneace: Absolutely. You start to realize that your authentic self is none of these labels, that there's something beyond the labels, that's your authentic self. You just get glimpses of that. Rather than pretending to be a certain label, it allows you to say, okay, I'm wearing that mask right now, but you realize it's a mask. Your authentic self can more easily appear.

Brendan: As a coach in your space, seeing that must be enormously gratifying as well. It must be almost like a bit of a cloud moving or some shackles being released, and then you probably see something in the eyes, and the moment to take forward just blossoms from there, I imagine.

Aneace: Yeah. You're describing the moment when they see the moment. The person you're speaking with sees the moment. That's always really beautiful.

Brendan: Let's move on to the next area, Relinquish the lust for control empowering others. Again, you refer about letting go. Tell us a bit more about what this area involves.

Aneace: Control is necessary, especially in business. We need control, we need the dashboards, we need numbers, we need KPIs, and we need things to be measurable. Otherwise, we can't move things forward. That's why I use lust for control. It's beyond simply control. It's really grasping onto control out of fear.

I don't have the answers. I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what to do next, so it lets me control things even more. I'm not sure I can trust these people to do the stuff that I've empowered them or I've delegated to them, so let me control them even more, as opposed to saying, okay, I'm scared to death because if they screw up, my next on the line with higher ups. Gulp. I better just let go anyway and let them succeed because I chose them, they're my people, I've groomed them. It's finding that balance, which is very difficult.

Where is my control? Still healthy? And where has it gone into something else? That one is loosening that grip. 

My own story on that is in the book. It was a huge aha moment for me. It was on a ropes course. It is a leadership ropes course, where you're up in the trees and stuff, and you've got the harness and everything.

Brendan: Great fun.

Aneace: Lots of fun. I've done it lots of times, and this one was designed for leadership. I think it was near the end of my company, or I had sold the company already. In one of the exercises, you're paired up with someone else. You go up to the top, there's a rickety bridge, and then one of the participants of the pair has to put a blindfold on and let the other person lead them across.

The facilitator said, I put the blindfold on. The person with me was a young woman who's scared of heights and didn't want to go forward. I told her, it's okay, just go ahead and I'll follow you. She was paralyzed. Then my alpha nature kicked in.

I solve problems. I get things done. When something isn't moving, I move forward. We get across. I said, okay, never mind, get behind me, and hold my straps. I still have the blindfold on, I felt my way across, and I got us both across. Whereas other people had fallen, and they're dangling looking like puppets. I didn't want to look stupid like that.

I was really committed to getting us across. I had gotten across, and I was proud. I looked down, and people were cheering except the facilitator who was glaring at me. I came down, and she was saying, what the hell were you doing up there? You wasted the opportunity for her to lead you.

I had an aha moment that, even though I delegated, I empowered lots of people around me. In that situation and many others, I acted more as a courage vampire. Her courage didn't show up, so my courage came in. I didn't hold back enough to allow her courage to come up. That took my sense of empowerment to a whole new level.

I was already a CEO. I had already built a company. These things can be learned. It can take a long time to learn them. That notion of empowerment, where you're able to put your own courage aside so somebody else's courage can inflame, ignite, was very new to me.

Brendan: What should you have done? And what would you have done if you had the moment again?

Aneace: Encourage her and say, look, I'm here, you got to get us across. Your role is to get us across, I believe in you. I'm here, let's go.

Brendan: Really, that story and journey of uplifting others, and that's a foundational key piece on leadership.

Aneace: Leaders do it intuitively. They will all recognize times when they stepped up and did that. The idea is to become aware of when we're not doing it so that we can do it more consistently as opposed to just intuitively.

Brendan: When are the times when control is important in a leadership capacity?

Aneace: When we're dealing with managerial tasks, when we're dealing with—I'll use this term, it's a bit derogatory—business as usual. We know the outcomes that we're after. Building an airplane is complicated, but you can manage it. You know all the processes that go into it and everything. Control is involved, safety, building the plane, running them, and flying the plane.

Raising a child is a very complex thing. It's a very different thing than building an airplane. Being a parent of a teenager for the first time, your teenager is going nuts and everything, you don't know what to do, and you've got all the professionals involved in the school and everything, but it's your call and you don't know what to do, control can get in the way in those situations when you're dealing with very new things. You need some control there, but there are certain areas where control will not get you past that. It won't produce the result. It takes something beyond.

There are people that will revert to control and have more control when the situation is ambiguous and changing, filled with uncertainty, but it often falls apart in those situations. You can have control for the areas that are less ambiguous that are involved in that particular thing, but there are areas where it can't be used anymore.

Brendan: It feels like to me that that (call it) line in the sand is where there's the opportunity to elevate others. Relinquishing control is a good thing. There are other things that you've shared as examples, where there's always an element of control needed. Would that be fair to say?

Aneace: Absolutely. Your control of the situation doesn't allow the other person to solve the problem on their own and grow from it.

Brendan: Back to this word, lust. Again, I love it because it's almost like lust is ironically something that's difficult to control, so they're difficult to control the controlling nature they have.

Aneace: Very good point.

Brendan: With that said and the ironic piece of that, how do you work with people to get to control that level of lust so that it downgrades from lust and being an awareness around what they're doing and how they can manage it?

Aneace: In a lot of my coaching sessions, when some of those conundrums come up like that, I laugh. And the executive starts laughing, too; they can be very serious people. I find it humorous, the complexity that we're involved with, because we're such complex beings, paradoxes.

I think that by laughing at those paradoxes, they become a bit easier to live with and live through. If we take ourselves too seriously, we've got so many of these complicated paradoxes. I don't know how we deal with stuff.

Brendan: It's interesting and great point even just reflecting on, I guess, the seriousness of my question, but then your laugh actually dropped a level a little bit in a good way, just by how you laughed about the situation. I could see how that can work really well to be honest. Interesting approach. Embrace the joy of a lifelong beginner, the final piece of the puzzle.

Aneace: Yup, I love that one.

Brendan: What's it about?

Aneace: We build up authority and expertise. Earlier, the control and all that, there are the labels with the self, the control, a lot of it is based on knowledge. The last one is on the authority and expertise that we built up over decades. We become so attached to that that it's difficult to be a beginner again.

When I was running my tech company years ago, it was a payment software company, so my clients were banks around the world. I started the company in France, grew it to 30 countries. There are large banks around the world—Barclaycard in the UK, ANZ Bank in Australia and New Zealand, Commonwealth Bank, out here is Maybank in Malaysia, BPI in the Philippines, Visa, MasterCard, Amex. I wrote two books in that area. I would give talks at banking conferences around the world.

I had a huge amount of authority and expertise in that space, which made it difficult to be a beginner again, because then I was treated like nobody. Yet, we need to go back to that space all the time more and more today. ChatGPT just came out, GPT-4 came out, AI is everywhere. We're hearing about it all over the place. We know things are going to be transformed over the next weeks, months, couple of years. The only real attitude to that is, okay, let me start over again, let me relearn, let me be a beginner.

Once that letting go happens, there's a real joy in that. There's youthfulness because you don't have that weight of authority and expertise that you're still dragging along and pushing forward. If people don't recognize it, you bang it into their faces because it's old stuff, but it's still valid for you.

Brendan: I can see where that becomes super powerful and, I guess, a lot easier if we look at that letting go scenario through three, four, and five. But the releasing of the labels, dancing with the labels, is a bit more not just making them own you, then removing or reducing the lust for control, and then enables that process to encourage the QRC, I suppose, in that new learning and looking through the very fresh lens.

Aneace: Yup, that's why it's the last chapter of the book.

Brendan: How do you encourage people to drive the level of curiosity hereafter? You made reference to ChatGPT, ChatGPT 4. There are people that are curious in embracing that. I recognize a hell of a lot more people who are sitting there very scared about what it entails for them. How do you move people around that?

Aneace: I don't, actually. I don't come from an agenda of you need to be more curious, get around that, and all that. If someone says it's important to figure this out, okay, we can work on that. If it's not important for me to figure this out, or I've really made up my mind that this is something bad, and I really don't want to go down, I don't know anybody like that.

There's nothing like, okay, fine, what do you want to talk about? My role isn't to tell them you should be dealing with this stuff. It comes in through other areas. This is a conversation that's come up just a few times over the last 2–3 weeks with different coaches in different countries, all very senior, already C-suite in large international organizations.

They're considering what is their roadmap for the next 10 years till they 65 say 10–15 years? How do they end their career with this organization? What is the next thing? Is it C-level? Is it CEO level? Is it something else?

My role there is to help them see that if that's what they're saying they want to see, and then also to stretch that. I'll ask them, for example, what about afterwards? Some people have some sense. A lot of times, people closer to my age, when they've gone through a long career with two or three organizations, it really just finishes.

It's a lot like the guy who couldn't imagine life after 51 because all the men in his family are dying. Once they start thinking, actually, I may have 30 or 40 more years after that, and yeah, I want to be doing something not what I'm doing today. I don't want to be playing golf for 30–40 years. What would it be? Curiosity starts to come in automatically.

People will be drawn in whatever direction they want. AI may play a role, looping it back to what you're asking. Or it may not, and maybe some different conversation than that.

Brendan: Fundamentally, what I'm getting again is that the mind is just such a powerful thing in our journeys. If we can harness the mind in a really positive direction, then anything is possible. Also, if we harness the mind in a more negative direction, also, anything is possible. But there are vast differences between those journeys, aren't there?

Aneace: Yup, and small words can make a big difference. I was coaching a leader the other day. He was about to get up on stage to speak to 150 of his team, 200 people from his company. He was about to get up, and he ran these first lines by me. He's going to talk about two kinds of people, people who see a mess on the floor and walk past it, and other people will see a mess on the floor and they clean it up. He says, we want more of that second kind of people.

I suggested rather than people, which is fixed, I am this person or I'm not, you can switch it to mindset. We all have these both mindsets in our heads. Just that shift of word made his delivery lighter, a little bit more playful, because otherwise it's scolding. You're either this person or that person. We don't want this kind of person in the organization.

When you're leaving, it goes down that route. We've got two mindsets. Which mindset am I going to bring to the table today? Little shifts like that can really change and work with our belief systems in powerful ways.

Brendan: The power in that is giving people a choice through the subtle change of words. They have a choice to have a mindset of X, or they have a choice, have a mindset of Y. People love choice. They love to be able to control their journeys.

Aneace: It's empowering.

Brendan: Absolutely. Nice way to bring the full circle. What would you say to leaders out there listening that are encouraged by what they've heard today to take a step forward on a personal transformation journey?

Aneace: I would say, what a wonderful journey you're on. You're already making that choice. You're finding a desire in it. Have fun on the journey. Try to find the humorous aspects of that journey. Make it as light as you can, and fun, and enjoy it. It's part of being alive. It's a major part of being alive.

Brendan: I love it. We certainly can take ourselves a bit too seriously at times. Particularly, when you're in fairly serious roles or responsible for so many people, that raises the seriousness, doesn't it? Have a laugh at yourself even more.

Aneace: That story I told you about the man with fatalities, I would not be having this conversation with him right now.

Brendan: Different scenario.

Aneace: Very different scenario. Very different.

Brendan: I get it. Aneace, final question. What's the one thing in your journey that helps you become a more confident leader?

Aneace: Have I become a more confident leader? I guess. I have tremendous self-doubts. What makes me confident is when I'm focusing on others, when I am coaching. Around a third of my work is one on one coaching, two-thirds is facilitation of leadership workshops, usually top team journeys.

When I'm working with people, my confidence is there, my courage is there. I'm focused on them. When I'm off the call or out of the room backing myself, I don't know how confident I really am.

Brendan: What you're saying is you're on this personal transformation journey every day of our life, which is very true. We're all on it, aren't we?

Aneace: Yeah. I think the day that I'm not would be a sad day.

Brendan: Absolutely. I did lie. I didn't mean to lie. It's not the final question because what I'm also very interested to know, and I reckon our listeners would, given your background a very long time in the tech lead side of things, what took you from this very rational and logic world into very illogical and irrational at times world?

Aneace: I sold my company when I was 47. I'm 63 now. I thought I was going to be a serial entrepreneur because I thought there's nothing else I know how to do. I discovered, actually, that what gave me the most pride was, whenever I'd hear of somebody that worked for me that became a CEO, CTO, CFO of another company, that gave me tremendous pride, more pride than the technology.

When I thought back to the mistakes I had made over the years, and I was grappling still of what I could have done differently, they were all human-related. They weren't technology-related mistakes. All that stuff, I couldn't even remember. It was that realization that took me into that space.

At first, I became a mentor to entrepreneurs; that was easy. Then that mentorship became coaching. For a few years, I did not coach anybody in the payment and banking space because I knew that space too well, until it had grown so much that I didn't know anything about it anymore, so it shifted.

It really came from that realization of what I was proud of the most. I got an email just a few weeks ago. Somebody that we had hired 25 years ago almost as an intern in accounting is now a managing director of a company. I knew him, but I didn't know him really well. I didn't really work with him directly.

He wrote me a very long, gushing email on that period of his life and how it did defined him and helped him. That's 20-something years later. It's that pride in people that really sent me in this direction. 

I have a little quip that I put on my book and my website. I discovered with astonishment that I liked people more than computers. It's true. That's what I was.

Brendan: I'm with you. People are far more fascinating and exciting than computers. Mate, a really great story to share to finish off our conversation. Thanks very much. It's really a great story because for me, it's the pinnacle of leadership, your ability to elevate others, so well done. Thank you for that.

Mate, you've been a great guest on The Culture of Leadership podcast. I really appreciate your time. You've got a very calm, soothing approach about you, which is, I'm sure really positive aspect and gives that feeling to the clients and the groups that you work with as well. I'm sure you have done great things and will continue to do great things in the future. Once again, mate, thanks very much for being a wonderful guest on our show.

Aneace: Thank you so much, Brendan. It's been a real pleasure talking with you. Thank you.

Brendan: We’re all on a personal transformation journey every day of our lives. Leaders choose to walk the ‘positive journey’ path.

These were my 3 key takeaways from my conversation with Aneace:

My first key takeaway, confident leaders embrace the discomfort of transformation. Recognize that the discomfort you might feel during personal and professional growth is smaller than the need to transform. The desire for growth should outweigh the temporary discomfort, motivating you to enter the path of change. Courageously choose to step into the change zone and fully commit to the process.

My second key takeaway, confident leaders confront biases and redefine labels. Take a deep dive into the abyss of your mind, identifying and challenging your beliefs, cognitive dissonances, and biases. Rather than being held back by biases, shine a light on them, unpack them, and realize that they often aren't rooted in reality or actual outcomes. By loosening your grip on labels and embracing a looser, more playful relationship with them, you can move forward authentically and experience a greater sense of satisfaction.

My third key takeaway, confident leaders relinquish control and empower others. Find the balance between necessary control and unhealthy micromanagement. Avoid acting as a ‘courage vampire’ by allowing others' courage to shine through. Empowerment lies in putting your own need for control aside and elevating others. Remember that relinquishing control can lead to remarkable outcomes, especially in times of uncertainty.

In summary, my three key takeaways were: confident leaders embrace the discomfort of transformation, confident leaders confront biases and redefine labels, and confident leaders relinquish control and empower others.

Let me know your key takeaway on YouTube or at thecultureofleadership.com. Thanks for joining me. Remember, the best outcome is on the other side of a genuine conversation.

Thanks for listening to The Culture of Leadership. You can access the show notes at thecultureofleadership.com. If you enjoy the show, please follow, rate, and give a review on your favorite podcast platform.