Fully Integrated Leadership

In this episode, I am joined by the founder of Conbrio Consulting Bill Bancroft.  Bill an I cover a wide range of topics, beginning with the current social and political climate in our country and world.  We then transition into a discussion of what organizational development is, what organizational culture is, and why they should matter to leaders.  We talk about why culture is so often overlooked by leaders and why it can be a competitive advantage to stay focused on it within your team and organization.

Conbrio Consulting offers services in strategy, culture and people development.  As you will hear from Bill, his goal is to create conditions for people to "do their best work and live their best lives."  To learn more about Conbrio and to contact Bill, visit their website at https://www.conbrioconsulting.com/.

In this episode, I offer a practice to help you get out of your head and into your body as we all experience the uncertainty and anxiety of the ultra VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambigous) world of COVID-19.  To do this practice well, we must adopt three beliefs:

1. 99.9% of reality is energy

2. Our minds and bodies work together to make sense of the world

3. We have three brains in our body: the head, the heart, and the gut

The practice I offer in this podcast is one that helps to tap into the physical and the energy bodies that help us to make sense of the situations we face on a daily basis.  

In this episode, I share my learning and experience with how to adjust the "default settings" in our brain that tend to want it to wander and lose contact with our direct experience.  There is a network of brain regions called the Default Mode Network that come online when we are not consciously focused on one thing, when our mind is wandering.  Research shows that the default mode network exists for many reasons, but the one I am most interested in is that it is there to help us conserve calories.  The human brain requires a lot of cellular energy to run (about 25% of our total energy demand is from the brain!).  It is especially taxing to focus on our direct experience, so the mind goes into power saving/default mode to help us save energy.  This made sense for our early ancestors where food was not as plentiful, but for most of us today this is not a problem.  We therefore do not need to go into mind wandering mode as much because we can keep our energy levels up throughout the day.

Think of the default mode like you think of the factory settings in a new computer.  The power saving mode in the new computer is designed to come on often, especially when the computer isn't plugged in.  You can adjust these settings, and the same is true for our brain.  How? Through practices like the one I offer in this episode.  If we practice "open awareness", being in our direct experience instead of in our narrative/mind wandering experience, we can adjust the factory settings in the brain.  And being in our direct experience, being present is perhaps the most important thing we can do to work well in a VUCA world.  Being present allows us to see past our biases, past our brain's desire to seek validation for our story/narrative.  It allows us to listen to other perspectives, to see things in context, to be aware of what is happening in our bodies, and to be aware of our emotions.  

To learn more about the default mode network and the role that mindfulness can play in lessening our mind wandering, go to: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4529365/

In this episode, I have a wonderful conversation with the founder of Conscious Leadership Academy, Dr. Jan Bellerman.  Jan is a former IT executive who had a series of profound experiences that set him on a life journey to uncover the mysteries of human consciousness.  He has since applied his learning to the field of leadership development and now trains leaders on how to think and act in more conscious ways.  Jan and I explore a number of topics, including:

• How different levels of leaders are approaching the COVID-19 situation, comparing his home country of Germany to other European countries and the US;
• The default mode of the brain to be in "protection mode" and how we can shift into "growth mode";
• How to reverse engineer our actions to our consciousness to show why we take the actions we do;
• How to access different types of intuition to listen to a deeper sense of knowing as we encounter novel and uncertain situations as leaders

To find more about Jan, visit his website at: https://www.conscious-leadership.academy/

He also mentioned the Barrett Values Centre, which you can find at https://www.valuescentre.com/

In this episode, I again "go solo" to talk about some of the "default strategies" our brain likes to use and why these strategies get us into trouble in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world.  I cover the following topics:

• Our brain as a "giant survival organ"
• Our brain is constantly trying to reduce chaos and unpredictability
• It tries so conserve calories!
• It wants to validate its stories/models of the world
• It is addicted to seeking small pleasures

I also show how these "habits of mind" are misaligned with what is needed from the VUCA world.

In this episode, I once again go "solo" and share thoughts on the current COVID-19 situation.  There are three primary parts to this episode:

1. Reflections on President Trump's leadership and once again calling on this community to practice compassion;
2. Taking a Systems Thinking approach to the opportunity to redesign the potentially broken systems in which we operate in the world;
3. Using history as a guide to help us think about how to evolve our individual and collective thinking to support a new way of being and acting in the world.

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I was recently invited onto another podcast by my new friend Steve Fredlund.  Steve has a podcast called "Just Steve" where he interviews interesting people.  I was immediately struck by Steve's zest for life and naturally inquisitive way.  I thought it would be a good idea to bring the episode to this listening community.  You all hear so much from other people, but this is a deep dive into me as a coach, husband, father, and citizen of the planet.  In this episode, we cover a range of topics, including:

• What it means to live a values-aligned life and how it helps guide me and my family as we navigate the complexities of life;
• How we become investigators of our unconscious beliefs that drive our behaviors;
• Practices that optimally support a high-performance life;

I encourage you to implement the practices in your own life and reflect on your experience with others.  This is the best way to support optimal learning and growth.

In this time of great uncertainty, Martine Cannon's voice and wisdom provide a sense of calm and compassion.  In this episode, she and I engage in an "emergent" conversation, meaning we surrender the illusion of control and allow what is to be present.  Martine encourages us to live our life from this place of surrender because it is in giving up control that clarity about right action shines through.  

This is not a passive stance.  Rather, it is an active choice to let go and be still enough to realize what's best in this moment...for ourselves, for others, for the planet.  Martine and I share some of our favorite ways of accessing the deep inner knowing that resides within all of us, and we give some steps people can take to bring more peace and calm in this time of overwhelming struggle with COVID-19.

Martine Cannon has been a consultant, performance coach and speaker across Europe and Australia for eight years. She specialises in helping organisations work with how they can develop sustainable leaders and sustainable practices. Her clients include Blue Chip organisations in Retail, Finance, Telecommunications, Media and Consulting.

Martine is a thought leader on vitality leadership, which addresses the complexities of being an inspirational and effective leader from a place of personal vitality. She believes truly effective, responsible and stable leadership can only be achieved when the individual is fully vital and operating from a strong personal axis.

In her private practice Martine has helped people cure terminal disease, radically change their life situations, find untapped potential and move to the absolute top of their professions. She has helped organisations rethink their approach to human performance, communication and organisation effectiveness, realising that how we think about business and our life has implications for how we act.

Martine Cannon has a Masters in Organisation Consulting & Sustainable Leadership from Ashridge Business School.

Prior to this Martine worked for seven years in the Human Capital Management sector. She held the General Management role for a UK business employing 1500 people and specialised in business performance improvement and organisation effectiveness. Before this Martine Cannon was a Business Consultant working with mid-sized organisations on strategic development, people and communications.

 

In this episode, I welcome my friend and mentor Steve Beckett.  Steve is an amazing human being and has such deep wisdom as we all navigate the situation with Covid-19.  

We talk about the situation as it stands in the UK and the US as of March 17, 2020, including:

• How quick people are to label "the elderly" and "the medically compromised" as though they are a mere category
• Where Steve is seeing the rallying of community in the face of a "tsunami" that is coming for both countries in the coming weeks
• How the Integral quadrants inform our approach to daily life (including specific practices Steve is doing to regulate his nervous system and remain centered)
• What we are seeing in the "system" in terms of values, trade-offs, and lessons learned

We then do a deep dive into why President Trump is making the decisions he is and why he has been approaching this Covid-19 situation with such arrogance.  Steve takes us through multiple leadership frameworks to make sense of what seems so senseless to those of us living through it in the US.

Steve then walks us through a practice we can all use to regulate ourselves and ensure we are getting out of "fight or flight" mode in a time of overwhelming information coming at all of us.

Here are some links that Steve shared after the interview that I am already finding to be immensely helpful and interesting:

Steve's bio:

http://integralcoaching.org.uk/steve-beckett/

Steve's Covid-19 Spotify Playlist:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6KfAGsnp6MFDXirAqF5bPj?si=xGCuAVqUQXOZdb5aOj_S_Q

Good Podcast about Immunity:   https://open.spotify.com/episode/3lND2PQs92AZCE2zDdpDxD?si=qAdRJiQwRb-_CsuH_Mv-gw   Sense-making in Corona times:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3--5kcQIkyQ   Singularity University Summit on Corona:   https://www.crowdcast.io/e/covid-19-virtual-summit/2   Crowd sourced Corona Handbook - great for communities with templates etc:   https://coronavirustechhandbook.com/?fbclid=IwAR2qbOgr057uFZ0KVJl2qhK_zQYLmQGc79O9q4mVWyh0jnFpt-vCQkSOS2o

In this episode, I share a few personal updates on what me and my family are doing in response to the Coronavirus.  I then shift into three "frames" that have been helpful to me as I watch our leadership/citizenry come to terms with the virus:

First is the "Stockdale Paradox" which comes from Jim Collins book Good to Great.  It invites us to balance optimism with realism in the face of challenging situations.  I believe we have a leader in the US who is not confronting the brutal reality of Coronavirus, and this is having ripple effects throughout the country as people wrestle with how much to practice social distancing.  

Second is a three stage process that one can observe when change is being introduced into a system.  Our system is being forced to change from one that is about individual freedom, individual gain, and economic prosperity to one that is about the collective good and public health.  As we navigate this change in the system, it will go through three stages:

1. Ridicule: we saw this early on, and continue to see it somewhat from our president, as people started to self-select into social distancing.  
2. Violent opposition: as people start to see how disruptive social distancing is on our lives and our economy, they fight back against it and become quite upset with those of us who are practicing it.
3. Adopted as self-evident: eventually, people come to terms with the gravity of the situation and they adopt the practices because it's obvious they must do so.  The faster we can move to this point in our society, the more people will survive this pandemic.

Third, I talk about the work of Viktor Frankl, survivor of three German concentration camps during WWII.  Dr. Frankl wrote a wonderful book called Man's Search for Meaning in which he talks about the "last of the individual freedoms...the ability to choose our attitude in the face of challenging people/circumstances."  I believe we are facing a time in our society where focusing on our way of being is equally, if not more than, important to what we do.