Grow and lead for all of us

Emotions

Episode 7: Bob Dunham On Reliable Promises And Listening For Commitment

Episode 7: Bob Dunham On Reliable Promises And Listening For Commitment

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Amazing things happen when you remove your blinders and see what it actually takes to coordinate action with others. First, you focus on how we make commitments to each other through conversation. Then, you realize that listening isn’t about being nice. It’s about producing reliable promises. Finally, you take seriously the notion that your public identity–or “personal brand”–depends on your understanding of others’ concerns, the offers you make to address those concerns, and your emotional mood as you walk down the hallway.

Bob Dunham has been introducing leaders and coaches to these points for three decades–and helping them practice their way to excellence. In Episode 7 of The Amiel Show, Bob distilled these lessons into an hour of actionable insights. Bob and I discussed:

  • 2:00 Our blindness that action starts with commitment
  • 7:00 How understanding conversations demystifies innovation
  • 13:00 Bob’s rapid success as a manager by evoking reliable promises
  • 21:00 The conversation for action, listening acts, emotions, and body language
  • 33:30 Getting people to say “yes” is an absolute disaster
  • 40:00 Having opinions but no evidence
  • 51:00 Personal brands and influencing senior leaders
  • 57:30 What Bob is personally practicing in his life

BD-edited

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Flipping Complaints to Commitments (Jedi Leadership Tricks)

Flipping Complaints to Commitments (Jedi Leadership Tricks)

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As you spend more time watching how you interact with others, you may notice something about your conversations.

Specifically, that you bitch and moan about things that bother you. Maybe not every minute, but probably a few times a day.

What’s the problem with bitching and moaning? After all, everybody does it.

flip pancakes

Three things:

  1. You feel lousy. Maybe not at first, but within a few minutes, kind of like eating french fries with ice cream—something I loved doing after high school soccer games at Wendy’s fast food restaurant.
  2. People see you differently. It’s the weirdest thing: even though we all complain, when we hear somebody else doing it, we quickly make a judgment about them. You can lose credibility that you worked so hard to build up.
  3. It dampens the mood of your team. When people hear you making negative comments, it affects their emotional state. This is because, as brain science teaches us, our nervous systems are intertwined. Your periodic complaints about, say, how IT or HR let you down, can shift others into moods of resignation, resentment, or fear.

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Episode 6: James Flaherty on How People Change and Where Excellence Lives

Episode 6: James Flaherty on How People Change and Where Excellence Lives

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James Flaherty taught me how to coach, created the organization where I met my wife, and challenged me to grow myself as a person.

That’s quite an influence for one person, don’t you think?

In Episode 6 of The Amiel Show, I had the privilege to talk with James about some big stuff I’ve learned from him. We discussed:

  • 3:00 So much of our experience is an interpretation versus a fact “out there”
  • 8:20 Why self-observation is as important as 360 feedback
  • 13:30 Truly changing involves our bodies, social worlds, and language
  • 24:00 Excellence is evoked in relationship rather than something we create alone
  • 30:30 Aristotle’s notion of excellence, including all parts of ourselves
  • 35:45 What’s up with emotions in our culture
  • 43:00 Executive presence happens in the body
  • 51:50 What James is deliberately practicing to develop himself

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Episode 3: Jennifer Garvey Berger on Leadership and Adult Development [The Amiel Show]

Episode 3: Jennifer Garvey Berger on Leadership and Adult Development [The Amiel Show]

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In the 21 years since I started developing leaders, I’ve come across a handful of truly game-changing ideas. One of these is adult development. It’s the notion that after our bodies reach maturity, our minds can develop through multiple stages. Each stage gives us the capacity to handle greater complexity, yet also involves a loss of something we hold dear—namely, the way of seeing the world that up until now felt like “me.”

In Episode 3 of The Amiel Show, I speak with Jennifer Garvey Berger, one of the foremost educators about adult development in leadership and organizations. We discuss:

  • The many ways we expect leaders to be both superhuman and supremely human
  • How awesome it is to have new capacities to look forward to as we get older
  • How learning about adult development makes us more compassionate and less judgmental toward others
  • The massive achievement of the Socialized Mind, when you first move beyond vast loneliness and self-centeredness and feel connected to others
  • How the Socialized Mind leaves you unprepared for many leadership situations
  • How much of emotional intelligence requires the Self-Authored Mind
  • The Self-Authored Mind, when you develop the code of your own life and realize that, no, people don’t “piss you off,” because you make your own emotions
  • How it can take decades for people to develop the Self-Authored Mind
  • The value of having a companion to help you deal with development’s uncertain gains and painful losses
  • The Self-Transforming Mind, when complexity and ambiguity become our natural playgrounds

Jennifer-Edited

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Episode 1: Janet Crawford on Leaders’ Brains, Emotional Literacy, and Power [The Amiel Show]

Episode 1: Janet Crawford on Leaders’ Brains, Emotional Literacy, and Power [The Amiel Show]

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It all starts with those 3.3 pounds of living tissue called the brain. “It” means people’s behaviors, leadership in organizations…and The Amiel Show.

In episode 1 of this podcast, Janet Crawford and I speak about

  • Why neuroscience is the modern day equivalent of the decoder ring
  • How much of people’s behaviors comes from unconscious patterns
  • What it takes to become emotionally literate
  • How to produce more strategic thinking by keeping our prefrontal cortex online
  • The role of GABA Goo in calming down the amygdala
  • Unconscious bias in organizations and what this tells us about why some people become more powerful than others.

Janet-Crawford

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Getting Unstuck: The Vending Machine Incident

Getting Unstuck: The Vending Machine Incident

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A story about getting unstuck:

I once got my arm stuck inside of a vending machine. The scene of the crime was Camp Geneva in Wisconsin. I was six. The goal was to steal a Milky Way bar by reaching up the chute and opening the latch.

These were the 1970s. Vending machines were not yet designed to prevent such theft. That made this period the golden years for kids with a big sweet tooth, little money, and few scruples.

Lunch had just ended, and six of us – all boys my age – were in the cafeteria. Except for us, the room was empty: the perfect time for stealing candy. I was the last to perform the heist, mainly because I was afraid of getting caught. After a dose of goading from the others, I reached my arm up the chute, extended my fingers toward the Milky Way, and…found myself unable to reach my target. I pushed and wiggled, but no luck. [Read more…] about Getting Unstuck: The Vending Machine Incident

Teaching Doctors How to Say “I’m Sorry”

Teaching Doctors How to Say “I’m Sorry”

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Seven years ago, on a hill overlooking Portland, I taught fifteen medical students how to say “I’m sorry.” It wasn’t part of their curriculum. It wasn’t why I was invited to speak.

But life is about seizing opportunities. In this case, the opportunity was to transform the grief of losing a child into a teachable moment. Not by lecturing. Not even by telling a story. But by cajoling future doctors to say out loud the words I wished I had heard six months before.

What followed was a test case for the notion that you are what you say—and that what you say matters—a lot.

The invitation came from an OB/GYN known in the community for being compassionate with patients, particularly those with difficult pregnancies. He wasn’t our physician, but he heard about us through the grapevine. We knew him by reputation. [Read more…] about Teaching Doctors How to Say “I’m Sorry”