Braver Leadership: Mental Fitness for Age of AI

Be someone who listens and you will be heard.

It's a simple motto and it's what we explore in this episode.  Often when we try to bond with people our heads are so swamped with our own agenda we're not really in listening mode.  Yet we know how fundamentally empowering and valuing it is when we ourselves are heard and listened to.

We explore the power of this form of listening and some tips on how to calm your inner toe tapping urge to break the silence, build bonds and emotional capital with people.

You can catch the whole transcript for this and other articles plus more podcasts on my website www.ianbrowne.com  and it's also where you can find details of the work i do to help people develop Quietly Successful Careers - all the ambition, just less of the noise.

Dale Carnegie said “A person’s name is, to that person, the sweetest, most important sound in any language.” Names matter. The sound of your name cuts through any background noise, we’re conditioned from birth to hear it above anything else. It makes us unique, special and said in the right tone, valued. Remember someone’s name and you’re indicating their importance to you. Get it wrong and don’t get it at all and you’re instantly in the space of indicating someone’s lack of importance.

In this episode we look at the value of names and how they can build trust in a relationship and unleash the conditions for connective energy.

You can read the transcript in full, read more articles, find more podcasts and if you like what you're hearing, how to work with me at www.ianbrowne.com and develop your own quietly successful career.

Hey welcome back to Season 3 of the Thriving Leader.  This season with 13 episodes was researched and recorded over the summer of 2022 to be released during the autumn / fall of 22.

Connective Energy is the third part of the energy leader model.  Like the other quadrants it's an important one and it represents out ability to get more things done by combining our energy with the resources of others who often will give this up voluntarily.  It's a real skill particularly if youve been used to having organisational power and are moving into an environment where commanding people is no longer viable.

You can read the transcript on my website www.ianbrowne.com and find more episodes, articles for free and learn about some of the ways I help people to develop quietly successful careers

Many of us tend to think in a linear fashion or were raised on project management principles of define scope, develop, execute etc. and yet the creatives and inventors that we most admire rarely worked in that way.

The challenge with a linear process is that it is inherently reductive - the goal is to tightly define an objective and then strip back extraneous detail until something definite is delivered even if it's not really what people want or isn't useful because the need has moved on.

In this episode I explore a model from Ries in the Lean Startup.  It's called the Build Measure Lean Loop, it's an iterative way of using ideas and data to continuously improve a concept and also let go when it's no longer adding value for the investment you're putting in.

Creativity is messy and I know corporate life isn't all tha tolerant of mess, it likes order, structure and certainty.  But sometimes imposing that certainty as a central value means you absolutely get something, you are just likely not to get something as good as it could have been.

It has been a blast writing and recording season 2 of the Thriving Leader, please stay subscribed, I'm taking a short break to finish research and recording season 3 which will be about how to harness the power of collaboration and the energy of others into your leadership style.  We often think as junior leaders that what holds us back is the number of people in our team but out there are a host of people chasing similar dreams to you.  You can all run on parallel tracks or you can choose at times to jump in the same kart, pedal together and get to that goal faster.

Thank you so much for subscribing - I'd love it if you leave a review on your favourite podcast service and recommend this to others and remember if you want to work with me at a personal level, you can get in touch at www.ianbrowne.coach

If you allow this to happen - you are the greatest barrier to your own creative talents.  All to often our concerns and hang ups that we're not as good as others, that people will laugh at us, that we're not worthy, qualified or smart enough to contribute means we stay silent.

When we stay silent we not only deprive the world of the good that's in our thoughts, but because ideas spark off other ideas, we're holding back the creativity of others.

Time to get over ourselves, overcome our creative fears and get out there - that's what this episode is all about

Often we feel intimidated by creativity - the blank sheet of paper, the pressure to come up with something new.  But this is really pressure we needlessy put on ourselves.  Most of the world's best inventions came from additive thinking, recognising something out there already and improving upon it.  In this podcast episode I give you a couple of ways to bring additive thinking into your team, harnessing the vast range of knowledge and skills at your fingertips I bet you never even knew you had

when we were around five years of age we were awesome questioners.  If we wanted to understand something we just made the ask, why, but why and but why.  And then as we move into school and start being told there are facts, unquestionable facts we acquire a sense that our role is to absorb and accept realities presented by others.  And then we transition into the workplace complete with an ego to be bruised that has built its sense of pride on what it knows, not what it doesn't know.   And that stops creativity dead because no-one's listening and no-one's looking for anything than what is already out there.   This episode is all about remembering our inner child to channel creativity

Beliefs are powerful things, they build through our childhood, reinforced in adulthood to the point where we can't remember why we see the world a certain way - why for example we are not creative.  In this episode I'm opening up the notion that creativity can take many forms and that often people are creative in one dimension e.g. outside work but not creative inside work.  This gives seven ideas for bringing more creativity into the culture of your organisation

“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less”, General Eric Schineski.  Often when faced with the task of creativity it feels better to stay as we are in the safe harbour.  In reality out on the high seas are people who had the courage to set sail and they're not waiting for you.  In this episode we look at the cost of a safety first principle and challenge why we see creativity as risky.  And Ian adds his own thoughts on innovation in food and beverage offerings in airports and transport hubs for good measure.

At school we were all told the story of Isaac Newton. He sat one day under the shade of an apple tree and at one point the apple fell on his head and he more or less instantly discovered and was able to identify that the moon isn’t falling to the earth and the earth isn’t falling into the sun and in short articulate the theory of gravity that rests with us today. Marvellously convenient, except of course it’s not true – a grain of truth with an awful lot of embellishment.

The thing is Eureka myth stops people from seeing creativity as within their gift and it belittles the value of expertise and study that's often behind the great innovators we know and love.  so in this episode we're going to break apart the Eureka Myth and reconstruct something we can all get behind to bring more creativity to our organisations