Geoff McDonald, Ideas Architect

Geoff McDonald interviews author Alan Silcock about his new book, Five Gift Flourishing in episode 116 of the Ideas Architect podcast.

Alan Silcock’s website – Following Forsyth

Alan Silcock interviews Geoff McDonald about his next book, Deep Minimalism

Download the Interview Recording

Geoff McDonald  00:00

Hi, Alan, welcome to the show.

Alan Silcock  02:14

Good to be here, Geoff. As always,

Geoff McDonald  02:16

We’ve known each other for a long time. So, it’s great to actually put something down on – what you can’t say recording anymore, can you? So, Alan, you’ve just written a book. So, start from the beginning. Tell us who you are.

Alan Silcock  02:32

My name is Alan Silcock. And my writer’s name is Alan Forsyth, and the Forsyth refers to my Scottish upbringing and identity, although I’m very much Australian. And having said that, I’ve just spent the last five and a bit years in Scotland living in Edinburgh, which is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and has produced some of the best writers in the world has, as I’m sure many of you have read.

So, it makes sense that whilst in Edinburgh, I take the challenge that my wife offered to me and I actually write and write a book on my writing a book challenge is now resulted in two books, both of which are going to be published this year, one in just two weeks or so. So, I’ll tell you about those in a moment. Beyond that I’m very much a family man with a new dog who you may meet during this recording, so don’t be surprised. And living in Melbourne, Australia, which is a delightful place to live, and I love it reconnecting with all my friends, all my family, all my networks here and enjoying a great quality of life in Melbourne. It’s good to be back even though we had to spend 14 days in quarantine, to get here. And while some of the tennis players complained, we also complained.

Geoff McDonald  03:54

No one noticed

Alan Silcock  03:56

Geoff has asked me to introduce myself so that’s probably enough, for now. Certainly, I’ve had a huge background as an organizational development consultant and coach over three decades and helped people transform in companies, in charities, in community groups, individuals and small businesses across that period of time. Also donated a hell of a lot of my time to things I think are important, like men’s health. And my last big achievement is setting up a men’s shed in Edinburgh, where there wasn’t one, there wasn’t one and that’s now sustainable, I have left it in good hands. And I’m delighted to have done that. And that’s another chapter, I think.

Today we’re here to talk about my first book, which is ‘Five Gifts Flourishing’ and that is simply aligned to my passion in helping people to discover themselves and create for themselves a life that involves less suffering and more gratitude, more enjoyment, more satisfaction. And I have been doing that for 30 years. But now that’s my focus pretty much.

Geoff McDonald  05:18

That’s kind of the thread that I see. So, we first met at Accelerated Learning in the early 1990s. I was still in architecture school. You’re working for probably Yellow Pages back then. But then our paths really crossed around, probably a love of learning as much as anything.

Alan Silcock  05:35

Yeah, I think you’re accurate, Geoff. I think we’re both very passionate about learning and I never forget teaching you how to juggle. And as a result, Geoff is also known as ‘Geoff the Juggler’. Certainly, to my family, and my kids are all all adults now.

Geoff McDonald  05:55

I still remember that very clearly because we were in your house in Thornbury. One of your sons was just being born, he might have been one or two. I know you’ve got three now. And it was literally you taught me how to juggle on that one night, and I went away, and I practiced, and I can now juggle.

Alan Silcock  06:11

Yeah. And look as a metaphor for learning, I always found juggling to be such a useful activity, because now someone can do something they’ve never done before, or they’ve at least broken down the steps to learning and understood them. Which implies that you can almost learn how to do anything that you want, almost. So, it was pretty auspicious beginning for us, I think, Geoff. Now, we sit here, both of us having generated books, and made a bit of a difference in our own different ways in the world. So it’s pretty satisfying to reflect back on those early days. Yeah.

Geoff McDonald  06:52

So, what was the seed that started ‘Five Gifts Flourishing’?

Alan Silcock  06:56

Well, it was a challenge for my wife, my wife is a senior executive in business, and one of the biggest fund managers in the world had suggested from Australia to the UK. And as a result, we traveled to New York quite regularly. And on one of the trips to New York, we managed to be walking around the city, looking at one of – the dogs just chewing the microphone. We might have to bring the dog out and put her outside. Come on. Here we go.

Geoff McDonald  07:41

So, the plugin cord for the microphone. So, but that’s what you get with a six-week-old puppy.

Alan Silcock  07:48

Yeah, so we were in New York, and we look at this Lego type building, which goes all the way up into the clouds, and I’m mesmerized by this thing. And so, looking at it, I just said to Linda, look, love to have an apartment in that building. And she said, Well Al, write your first book. And we will. And I took that on as a challenge. Not that I desperately needed an apartment in one of the biggest buildings in the world. But I took it on as a challenge. And when I got back to Edinburgh, I started writing, I was writing a novel, not the book that I’ve just talked about ‘Five Gifts Flourishing’, which is a book to help you transform your lives. And that’s where it started. And from there, yeah, the novel has also been written and will be published later this year. And that’s going to be called ‘Milk Tea Can’t’. As in you can take the milk out of the tea.

Geoff McDonald  08:46

Oh, beautiful. So, if you’re going to sell me the book, ‘Five Gifts Flourishing’, what would you say to me?

Alan Silcock  08:51

Well, I’d say that you like everyone have gifts, would you agree?

Geoff McDonald  08:56

Yep.

Alan Silcock  08:57

And you may be aware of those gifts, I reckon you’re aware of most of your gifts, but maybe there’s a few just lingering around that you haven’t put your finger on yet. And what my premise is, is that the more you’re able to have your gifts, fly in your world, on a daily basis, and I’m not talking generally, day to day, the more likely you are to lead a life of genuine happiness, not superficial to happiness. When the Dalai Lama talks about this, and the Buddhists talk about this difference between happiness and genuine happiness.

So that would be my sell, but I’d recommend it would be… The book makes it easy for you to identify your gifts. It makes it easy for you through stories, from my gifts, for you to think about what my gifts are. So, what I really want to focus on here, and then my 30 years of experience as an agent of change and transformation I’ve introduced, I know as you do in your books, a host of techniques, strategies, so that you can actually bring the idea into action into everyday living. So, they become habits rather than just gifts.

Geoff McDonald  10:16

And five, is that the magic number?

Alan Silcock  10:19

It was for me. And I might find that that changes throughout my life. I’ve used my five and I’ve explained how I’ve calculated and encalculated Yeah.

Geoff McDonald  10:34

Sounds good to me.

Alan Silcock  10:35

I was gonna say encarcarated into my life and make the difference. So, incorporate is probably easier. It’ll be whatever it is, for everyone. Yeah, whatever number they come up with.

Geoff McDonald  10:51

So, what did you find out about yourself while you’re writing this?

Alan Silcock  10:55

Well, one of my gifts is, is learning, right? And so, I realized that when I’m not learning, or when, when there’s an absence there, that I’m not firing all cylinders, there’s a gap in my life, not enjoying myself as much. Yeah. And I know that since I’ve come back to Australia, we’ve been in lockdown very powerfully, because one of the things I was doing in Scotland is I joined the choir called ‘The Rock Choir’, and it was fantastic. And made great friends, I was singing on a weekly basis, we were travelling around the UK and Europe, we got to Paris, we sang in front of the Eiffel Tower. Imagine how good that was. I get back to Australia and everything’s locked down. And I can’t do that activity. And, you know, that was an area of learning, developing my voice developing my skills in music, and it’s just absent for me. And that whole area of playing and performing was really absent for me. I noticed it was gone.

Geoff McDonald  11:56

The gift was there. But it wasn’t flourishing.

Alan Silcock  11:59

No, it wasn’t flourishing at all. And until recently, and I’ve joined the choir here called ‘The Pop Choir’, I’ve only been twice now, and I love it. I know it’s going to be good for me. I’ve already talked to a couple of my friends in joining me tomorrow. It must be good in that I’m engaging others to come along.

Geoff McDonald  12:16

That’s actually an interesting point, because that is about the part of the flourishing is that you’re naturally going to be buoyant about it, you’re going to share it with people and want them to enrol in joining you.

Alan Silcock  12:28

And you learn with others. And in my first gift is it is about connection. So that’s, I draw a mind map most days and I put these gifts out there. And the image for my first gift is just simply the world. Because I now know people around the world. And I do my best to stay in contact with people around the world. And I’ve learned how to become a better conversationalist than I ever was when we first started when we first met each other. And as a result, I’m able to and this does blow a lot of people away stay in contact with most people across the world. It increases in number all the time. I probably should learn that one. I’m not so good. I tend to just let things go like that. Yeah, I’m not active around it. Yeah. I get to the stage where I’m almost like that.

When we were out for lunch before I got a message from Dr. Alan Stewart in Adelaide, a professor. And I had called him the other day and left a message. And he called me back and said, ‘Yep, let’s touch base.’ He does the right thing, he reminds me that I called him. He knows that we’ll get in touch because he’s good with conversations generally. We’ll talk to him tomorrow. So yeah, that’s really important. That’s important when it comes to learning.  So you see a lot of these gifts, they merge into each other. Right? Yeah, and they change as I move along. For instance, my third gift is a balance between serving community, charity and generating wealth or maintaining wealth. So that’s the third gift, and that changes considerably. And now, I’ve got more of a focus on the wealth side, because I’m renovating my house next door.

We’ve just arrived back in the country. You know, we’re planning for the future and trying to both at retirement age, my wife and I, and so there’s more focus on that when that than there has been in the past. In Edinburgh, for instance, when I was full time managing a charity. I wa not really concerned much about that. So yeah, so it is pretty dynamic as we move forward, I think. And if I can have people appreciate that in their own gifts, and develop their own flexibility and be able to nuance that cleverly, then I think the gifts can be sustainable. And I think like I can genuinely achieve that happiness that you and others talk about.

Geoff McDonald  15:05

That’s kind of the way I… like when I tell people my story around architecture. I spent seven or eight years studying. I worked in an office for a couple of years, and most people go ‘Oh, that was a waste, wasn’t it?’ It was like, well, actually, it wasn’t. I still see myself as being an architect right now. And that’s literally where the Ideas Architect came from. And the way I say it is that I just express it differently. And at the moment I write books, or I help people with ideas or presentations or whatever.

Alan Silcock  15:30

We’ll just let the dog back in.

Geoff McDonald  15:33

I think that’s an important point.

Alan Silcock  15:42

Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

Geoff McDonald  15:43

That the gifts are something deeper, like, are they strengths? Perhaps? Or, or would you…

Alan Silcock  15:50

I think the way you get to them, and there are a number of activities that are provided. And, you know, these is, certainly the one of the core ones his values. And, you know, Geoff, how powerful values are in terms of a direction, a sense of direction.

Geoff McDonald  16:09

Well, particularly in decision making. Values point to go. That would be consistent. That might not be, I’ll go down that path.

Alan Silcock  16:16

Exactly. And, you know, when you’ve made a decision that is out of kilter with your values. And I’ve just written about that in an article to support the book. And there was an awful decision that, you know, I’d hit a dog on a dirt road. I was there with my first boss in the passenger seat. And he had said, to me, the dog was in the side of the road whimpering. And the kid caught up who was walking the dog. And my boss said, ‘The dogs dead, don’t worry about it’. And I said, ‘No we’ve got to pick up the dog and take him to the vet’. That was my immediate decision. And the kid doesn’t know what to do because it’s his dog and he shouldn’t let it off leash and he shouldn’t run in front of me and all that. And, I said, ‘No, we’re taking the dog to the vet.’ And my boss said, ‘No we’re not, it’s a company car, we’re not taking them in the car’. And just to that point, someone else arrived who was a friend of the kid. And they said that would take care of it. But I didn’t last in that organization. Because that decision, just perturbed me significantly, I had nightmares over that. To think that he was going to leave the dog on the side of the road. And I would be forced to do the same, you know. Yeah. I just couldn’t, I just couldn’t go with it.

Geoff McDonald  17:45

Yeah, it’s kind of… what I’m hearing is, and this might not be totally accurate for all situations, but it’s kind of the absence of a gift. Or when the value gets kind of confronted or challenged in some way that they become more obvious. And otherwise, mostly, they’re almost transparent or invisible. Is that accurate?

Alan Silcock  18:03

Yeah. Look, it’s you know, what’s important to you and we don’t quite get to that sometimes. We get to that through what we’re told is important. And because if you play Facebook full time, it’s like playing pokies from time to time. You’re just getting told to…  Sorry.

Geoff McDonald  18:26

Someone always rings.

Alan Silcock  18:28

That’s another good learner, actually. But yeah, if someone’s gonna tell you what to do. What’s more empowering is if you decide what’s important to you in your life, and then you start to enact that, and the nature of gifts, you would have had a shit gift. We all have. So, one where someone’s just got it because they have to. They haven’t thought about who you are, what you are, what you like, right, who is giving you this gift. But that’s not what a gift is. I’m talking about true gifts. It’s about you thinking very carefully about ‘What is your gift to you? And what is your gift to others in that others would say, that was a great gift?’ Yeah, thank you for doing that. Thank you for being that person. You know, and that for me is maybe a bit deeper than values. Values will give you direction, but the actual you know, delineation of what your gift is takes a good deal of thought because it’s not just for you.

Geoff McDonald  19:43

Yes.

Alan Silcock  19:43

Values is just for you. Yeah. Unless it’s organizational values, which is a different conversation.

Geoff McDonald  19:49

And strengths are the same. There are things that are my preferences that come out of me.

Alan Silcock  19:53

Yeah. And I think gifts will come out of your preferences for sure. Yeah. And we look, we know we’ve all done personality inventories like MBTI. I used to be credited in that. And that will give you a bit of an indication too of who you are. But then you’ve got to take that a step further, and say, ‘Okay, if that’s who I am. But how do I want to show up to others? What’s my gift of others in this world?’

Geoff McDonald  20:18

Some of this is going to be accidental as in you just find your way forward. How do you do this deliberately?

Alan Silcock  20:25

Well, you buy the book. There is about three chapters of activities. Yeah, I won’t go into detail now. Because, but certainly one of them is values. And another one is moods, yep, yep. We just focus on those two, there’s two chunks that we can perhaps look at. Some of the work that Mark Molony who I know, you know, and I did with the Rotary Youth Leadership Award people over a decade’s worth of facilitating that program, or part of the program. We would have the young leaders consider what moods that they inhabited on a regular basis by giving them a series of at least six distinctions around core moods, as determined by a Chilean philosopher, Fernando Flores. And that was a wake up to many of them, just the fact that they started to learn, we can wake up in the morning, and you know, we can, we don’t have to go through the whole day of being anxious, we can change that. Which would mean we might have a better conversation with someone else, which would mean that we might be more open to ideas from someone else

Geoff McDonald  21:39

It actually changes the whole life.

Alan Silcock  21:40

It does. That we could go, we could try and bend that into curiosity, for example. And how’s that going to change things? Like we can look at this wee dog down here, and it just embodies curiosity, to the extent of wanting to chew the cord on the microphone right. It’s not not limited at all, by its exploration of the world right now. And that’s why we called him ‘Scout’. Activities like that, values analysis, just help you get deeper into your core self, and what your core desires are, and how you want others to see you.

Geoff McDonald  22:19

Is this best done in isolation or with someone else? Or a bit of both?

Alan Silcock  22:23

Well, really, again, depending on your gifts, right? And depending on your preferences, like some people probably like to do it in a group, as we did with the young people at the Rotary Youth Leadership. We’d have 30 or so young people, and we’d run them through these exercises, and they would have conversations about it, and then they would go away, and they’d design their own way of fitting it into their lives. The book really is a starting point. And there’ll be more material that’ll come out beyond that. Certainly, like this, you know.

Geoff McDonald  22:54

Book two, three, four.

Alan Silcock  22:55

Yeah, maybe other books. But more, I think more interactive ways to engage people in a way that they will choose to be engaged. Whether that’s spoken books, whether that’s online stuff, whether it’s TED talk type stuff, whatever it is, or coaching one on one. I’d like to meet whatever preferences people have. And, I don’t know, it might challenge my publishers a bit.

Geoff McDonald  23:24

But that’s what you’re here for. So probably sets up Is there some way to do a diagnostic tool around or you’ve mentioned before, that’s kind of a…

Alan Silcock  23:35

There’s a number of them I’ve put in there. People would maybe be sort of familiar with or unfamiliar with. So there’s a good dozen tools in the book.

Geoff McDonald  23:45

But as you said, they’re kind of like, ‘Oh, it says, my gift is so and so. But then it’s really up to you to go and engage with that’.

Alan Silcock  23:53

Exactly. Exactly. And and there’s the there’s a number of activities on that, too.

Geoff McDonald  23:57

Okay, perfect.

Alan Silcock  23:58

Have you once having identified what you’re really passionate about in terms of gifts that works for you works for others, okay, so how do you enhance that? How do you plus that into you, from the moment you get up in the morning right out to the end of the day? Yeah. And how can you monitor it? And how can you check in with others and yourself as to how well you’re doing with that?

Geoff McDonald  24:19

Because I’ve certainly seen and met and heard people talk about, ‘Oh, I did this test that says I am an X. And therefore, I don’t do that anymore. It’s kind of like… Mmm… Okay.

Alan Silcock  24:30

Yeah, so, it’s more an idea that comes with action than a diagnostic tool.

Geoff McDonald  24:39

Good.

Alan Silcock  24:40

In a way that we know because we both exercised heavily in the past, we still do. We know that you only get yourself out on five or six K run in the morning, because you get yourself out and you’re five or six K run in the morning. You only identify one of your gifts and make it shine in the world because you do that. It’s down to you. I can make it easy for you to do so in terms of strategies that have worked and are working, you know, and I’ve fortunately studied the best of the best with regards to that over 30 years. And that’s all this stuff does work. But ultimately, it’s down to you making it work for you.

Geoff McDonald  25:19

Yeah, that’s kind of the bit people don’t want to hear.

Alan Silcock  25:22

Yeah, well, you know, yet it’s rewarding to. Well, the tennis club is trying to explain that one yesterday. This is his first major win. He has worked solidly at that, you know, since he was a wee boy. Yeah. Yeah. And now he’s, you know, I think he’s early 20s. Popyrin? Is that his name?

Geoff McDonald  25:45

Alexi Popyrin.

Alan Silcock  25:46

Yeah, yeah. And, oh, man, I saw the end of that. And I was almost in tears watching him – he’s so good. It does take work. Don’t think it’s you have to work as hard as he did.

Geoff McDonald  25:58

But it’s all different journeys. Someone might have to work twice as hard as him. Someone maybe has to work slightly less. But what I’ve read in the research I’ve seen is that the satisfaction and happiness comes from knowing that you’ve worked at something. Absolutely. It’s not a gift from the point of view that lightning came down and struck you and all of a sudden, you’re Superman, and you got it. There’s not satisfaction in that. There might be moments of glee. It is pleasure, but it’s not deep happiness or satisfaction.

Alan Silcock  26:30

Yeah. I wrote about John Bruna. I recently did an article on him. He’s the guy who’s part of the Mindful Life Program in the States.

Geoff McDonald  26:42

At one level his life has been hell.

Alan Silcock  26:45

Yeah. Well, as he tells his story, and if you want to reference it, you just go to TED Talk, TEDx, I think you’ll find and put in his name, John Bruna [Free Will is a Skill]. And he says that, you know, after being kicked out by his wife, for alcoholism and addiction. When he had a young child, he said he spent his life wanting to be the father, that would be good enough for his daughter to say, I’ll come back to you. What a huge outcome, right? And he did. He became a Buddhist monk, along the way, he taught along the way. And eventually he got that outcome. I’ll never forget him writing about it in the description of his daughter, in a best dress come to see her dad for the first time since so many years ago.

Geoff McDonald  27:36

As a gift, it’s not like it was given to him on a silver platter.

Alan Silcock  27:41

He’s worked at it, as most of us do, I think. And I know, over the past two, past five years, I’ve really worked it to get these books together. Initially, it was going to be one book and then it merged into two. And its daily work, you know.

Geoff McDonald  28:01

And some days is blood bloody hard work.

Alan Silcock  28:02

Sometimes it’s bloody hard, like in Scotland when it gets dark at three o’clock, and you’re still going, and you’ve allocated another few hours to write. It’s snowing and yeah…

Geoff McDonald  28:14

Some days the words just don’t come out that well. They come out but they don’t make any sense. Or you can’t quite say what you mean.

Alan Silcock  28:22

There is labour there. And I think if you prepared to put in the labour yes, I totally agree with you. And I’m sure John would agree with you that you can achieve that satisfaction. And it’s that satisfaction that leads you to genuine happiness as defined by the by the Buddhists.

Geoff McDonald  28:44

And probably what he would say, based on what I’ve read about John, in his book, that, yes, the outcome of having my daughter meet me on those terms was fantastic, joyous, all those wonderful things. But he’d also be proud that he put in that thing and became the person he wanted to be, which was what it was about.

Alan Silcock  29:04

Totally agree having met him a few times. But you know, I just find it lives can be inspiring. And your life can be inspiring too, you know, and even if you just inspire one person, that doesn’t matter.

Geoff McDonald  29:20

Well, you shared an example with me just before we had lunch around the guy you met in Edinburgh who played the guitar. who was curious about the internet, and whether he could be on the internet? And we concluded that for us, it kind of seemed like a simple idea, but for him it was this magical experience that he was actually on the internet.

Alan Silcock  29:43

Yeah. And I think in terms of my personal gift of connection, I think that’s where this had me out in the park listening to Tony play guitar, freezing cold. He’s got on a short sleeve shirt, 80 years old. And you heard that the video that I shot of him, and his voice is pretty croaky. But his songs are really melodic. And he just gets out there every day. And that’s what he does. And I just I just think it’s amazing that he puts in that labor when he doesn’t have to do that. When he gives his gift, yeah, when he doesn’t have to do that anymore. People say, look, you retired 20 years ago, why are you doing this?

Geoff McDonald  30:31

But then that’s the definition of a gift, isn’t it? If I gave you something and expected, something back, that’s actually a trade or a sale or something, it’s not a gift in the true sense.

Alan Silcock  30:43

I agree totally. Yeah, a gift is something that you don’t expect a return on.

Geoff McDonald  30:48

And you give willingly of.

Alan Silcock  30:50

And you give willingly of. And then whatever measure Yeah, and Tony did this. And he was so surprised that I could get him on this magical thing he thought was the internet. And it’s so delighted to tell his friends that he was on the internet. I’ve given him my card and my web address, and I’ve got his video on there. If you go to FollowingForsyth.com, Forsyth being the Scottish Forsyth name, and search for videos, you’ll see him play a couple of songs just delightfully. And yeah, he was blown away by that. His gift to Edinburgh, in some way, mimicked my gift to him to allow other Edibereans and others to see his gift.

Geoff McDonald  31:40

It was also a really important point from Warren Buffett a few years ago. Oh, time’s up. And so, there was that point from Warren Buffet a few years ago, where he was talking about how he became rich.

Alan Silcock  31:54

Yeah, by charging people more and…

Geoff McDonald  32:00

Thank you very much. So that’s why I’m not rich. I just keep talking. Now I’ve got it. Okay, so he was saying, so my gift is actually I know how to trade and make money on the stock market. And that was fairly obvious. But the interesting thing he said was, ‘I’m actually just fortunate that my gift makes me a lot of money. Your gift may or may not make you a lot of money or any money’.

Alan Silcock  32:23

Yeah, and I guess that’s why I focused on contributions as far as community or charity. And wealth because I need to have a level of wealth, or at least income to be able to support and sustain and support my other gifts, including gifts to others like Tony. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think that’s a good distinction to hold in your life.

Geoff McDonald  32:49

When is the book available and how do we contact you?

Alan Silcock  32:53

It should be available very soon. We’re talking the start of March, I don’t know specifically, when in March, but it’s been released by Olympia Publishers who are based primarily in London, but also in New York and in India. And so, it’s a matter of how, you know, we get it to this side of the world and get it distributed amongst book stores and all that. But I’ll be doing a book launch, if not the end of March, probably into the beginning of April here. So, it might even get close to Easter, just so we can you know, stand on the shoulders of that.

Geoff McDonald  32:55

So how can someone get on the list to be either get the book or be at your book launch or…

Alan Silcock  33:41

All my details are on my website, www dot FollowingForsyth.com. You’ll see my contact details and send me an email. And yeah, I’ve just sent off a letter to the publishers this morning asking those sorts of questions. I’ll know very soon. Yeah, where the book will be available. It’s just an easy click to to get it.

Geoff McDonald  34:10

Fantastic. Well, great to talk to Alan and look forward to having more conversations, interactions and sharing our gifts.

Alan Silcock  34:17

And having wee Scout chew things.

Geoff McDonald  34:20

Not my shoelaces thanks.

Alan Silcock  34:22

Yes, thank you very much, Geoff. It’s a pleasure to be your friend. Oh,

Geoff McDonald  34:26

Oh, back at you, Alan. Thank you. Bye.

Alan Silcock  34:29

Bye Bye.

Deep Minimalism is the topic of Geoff McDonald’s next book. It’s what you get when you apply the principles of Minimalism to all (or at least, more) areas of your life. The first slice of this topic is shaping as a standalone book, Minimal Work. In this podcast episode (#115 of the Ideas Architect Podcast), Geoff is interviewed by his good friend, Alan Silcock, author of Five Gifts Flourishing. This is the first time Geoff has been interviewed about Minimalism.

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Alan Silcock  00:09

We’re here to chat with Geoff McDonald, sometimes known because I’ve known him for so long as ‘Geoff the Juggler’. And there’s a story behind that. And Geoff, and I’ve been good friends for many, many years, ever since the ALSA, the Accelerated Learning Society of Australia, which, unfortunately, no longer exists. But when it did exist, many decades ago, it was sensational. And we’ve learned Geoff and me together through that organization, some really fundamental learnings around how we learn as humans, and that’s been of significant benefit, I know in my life as an author, and as someone who’s going to have their first book out next month, and then later in the year, my first novel, and certainly in Geoff’s life. He’s been a prolific writer throughout his life and a prolific ideas person throughout the time that I’ve known him and a delight to have a chat with him, which will be no different today. So Geoff, welcome.

Geoff McDonald  01:18

Thank you, Alan, it’s kind of a nice point to reflect on because back then I was studying architecture. And it kind of never made sense for me that I was going to this Accelerated Learning thing. I was coming up to Melbourne, and I was writing their newsletter and all of that sort of stuff. And it was kind of like, I was putting in all this time into Accelerated Learning, which had nothing to do with what I studied or what I thought. But it’s kind of when you stop and think and you make connections, and you view these things a bit more broadly, it’s like, well, I still see design or creativity is just a form of learning. It’s my way of exploring the world. And, and I think that’s where we’re bonded is that we both love learning and being curious about the world and ultimately creating stuff. So it’s kind of funny that we both finished up writing books.

Well, exactly. And in the title of my book that’s out and a couple of months, or a month or so is called ‘Five Gifts Flourishing’. And one of those gifts that I have, and I’m encouraging people to find their own gifts and have them flourish in their lives, is learning that sits in there as a call for me, and I know it’s a call for you.

Geoff McDonald  02:27

Well, it’s kind of a way of… I guess I get stuck with it. Because at one level, I go, how do you explain this? But I think sometimes it’s best to explain the opposite, that if I didn’t learn, I’d be repeating the same mistakes over and over.

Alan Silcock  02:43

Yeah, and you might even be lost.

Geoff McDonald  02:45

Yeah. And ultimately, I always wanted the business card that said, Geoff McDonald, Explorer.

Alan Silcock  02:53

Yeah, explorer.

Geoff McDonald  02:54

Explorer was kind of, Okay, I’m an explorer, I just want to explore the world. But I don’t necessarily want to, you know, I do want to travel around the world, but I don’t actually want to be going through deserts, maybe, but more than I want to explore ideas and what’s possible, and I think that’s the ultimate in creativity and learning.

Alan Silcock  03:09

Yeah, and from the time that I’ve known you, certainly are an explorer and willing to engage in areas that maybe not that many people are. And I guess that’s, that’s certainly what we’re here to talk about, which is your latest, I know that you’ve written a number of books, and the last of those that was published was ‘Done: How to finish your projects when traditional ways don’t work‘, and they’re snappy little books and really helpful books. And today, we’re here to talk about one that is currently underway and will hit the streets in the future. And that is,

Geoff McDonald  03:50

The working title at the moment is ‘Deep Minimalism’. I guess this is probably a similar question for you. It’s like, what are you going to write about? And this one kind of came around… Someone just said something to me, really, you know, just part of a normal conversation that was like, well, you’re living a minimal life anyway. Why don’t you write about that? And I had already written notes about what I was doing and how I’d been doing it. And I just, I’ve been looking for different stuff. And in the finish, I just said, okay, that’s the one I’m actually been living it, I might as well tell people some of the things I’m doing. Yeah. And when you look at the minimalism conversation, it’s nearly always about having less stuff. Yeah, no, that’s the one people and I realized, well, actually, there’s more to it than that, because I think it’s actually a philosophy rather than just a set of action.

Alan Silcock  04:42

How does that differ from a set of actions, compared to a philosophy or movement, if you like?

Geoff McDonald  04:48

I think philosophy is a deeper piece. So you would, it’s a bit like, I might have a value, I might value something, therefore, I act in a particular way. Yeah. My simple definition of philosophy is that it’s a way of seeing the world’. And so if you see the world in a particular way, and in this case, if I see the world as fundamentally, ‘less is more’.

But there’s also another piece, I think the fundamental piece, if you look at it, psychologically, is that we get our happiness internally. There’s no happiness out in the world. Yeah. And that is simply a way to explain. I don’t need more stuff, because that’s actually not going to make me happier, I might want more stuff, and I might still buy stuff, but I don’t actually have to crave it anymore. And after I got rid of all my stuff, when I started moving house, a few years ago, it just became really obvious I’d always lived almost a student lifestyle, anywhere where I’ve never had lots of money. I’ve always lived pretty leanly. I’ve never really craved a lot of things. So it was kind of second nature to me to operate in that way.

Then I started house sitting for a while. And it’s kind of like, well, that’s minimal living. Yeah, you know, I had friends asking ‘how was homeless Geoff going?’ because technically, I was homeless, because I didn’t actually have a fixed address, which is kind of the definition of homelessness. And when you start to then apply it and go, Okay, well, how would this look around my diet? Or how would look this in the mindfulness space, or there’s a great book by Cal Newport called ‘Digital Minimalism’. So how do I do digital, but in a minimal way? And it’s kind of becomes this whole way of looking at life and not just about the stuff, I have to own or all the things I have in my house. And that’s kind of what I mean, by philosophy. It’s this way of operating in the world or even seeing the world rather than just a discrete set of actions.

Alan Silcock  06:43

So it seems to me that and I because I’ve got three young men who are in their early 20s to 30s, these days, and all three of them at some stage, refer to what you’re talking about and guide their lives around what you’re talking about. One of them, Callum, for instance, travelling around the planet for over a year out of a minimalist approach, in terms of living in terms of moving. He left London recently to get back to Australia. And I’ve noticed and forming how they’re going to be living next. Currently. Yeah. Is it something that is specific to that generation, to sort of generation Xers and beyond? Or is it something that, you know, that resonates with a broader group of people?

Geoff McDonald  07:47

Yeah, it’s a really good question. Because what I’ve been trying to find out is where it all starts. Yeah. And there’s a type of Google search, it’s called, you can type minimalism, and Google can tell you where it’s been searched. But there’s also another one where Google’s got Google Books [Google Ngrams]. And it can actually tell you that word usage over time. Yep. And the word minimalism almost has no use usage up until the 1960s. Then it kind of spikes to about 2000. Yeah, then dips, then it comes back up in the last five years.  So there’s certainly something about it being contemporary, generational, all the rest of it. If I was to put a big picture view on it, there’s probably two things I’d say. So the first one is the Industrial Revolution comes along, we get all these machines, all of a sudden, we can pump out almost anything. And this explodes after the Second World War, where we’re buying fridges and cars and washing machines. And all this stuff is now cheap. People could buy houses. And we kind of get to the point where we can have more, more, more, more and more. Add some credit in there. And people, particularly in the Western world have got, let’s say it this way: they’ve got lots of stuff.

Alan Silcock  09:03

Oh, so much stuff. They need to put them in storage units out of their property.

Geoff McDonald  09:08

Yeah, you got to know you’ve got a problem when you go too much stuff in your house. But if the other side of that point is if you look at the origin of it, and partly because I’m an architect, I looked at it as an aesthetic that came out of the modern movement in the 1920s, particularly in Europe. And they were starting to fight the Industrial Revolution piece, because they were talking about machines, building buildings, as distinct from handmade buildings, which had decoration, all the rest of it. So they were talking about it from an aesthetic point of view that less and that’s where ‘less is more’ kind of got phrased.

But I think there’s actually an earlier point than that, and the Japanese would never call it this. But if you go back to Zen Buddhism, and everything around the samurai actually was about living a minimal and perhaps a simple life, not a minimal life. They might have said a simple life. Yeah. But they kept it. The samurai is a good example because they basically, were highly tuned into whatever they were doing at that time. So if I’m eating I eat. It’s the whole mindfulness approach, which comes out of Zen and Buddhism. And that’s probably as close as you can get to what minimalism actually comes from, even though the Japanese would never call it that.

So I think there’s a simplicity of life and a philosophy of simplicity from way back then. And you could probably draw a fairly comfortable line and say, in the last few years, meditation, mindfulness, and those notions of simplicity, have come back. And I think that’s almost a complete reaction to everything has just got so friggin complex and chaotic. And what’s important. Certainly, the pandemics brought that home for people as well, to come back to what’s important here.

Alan Silcock  10:58

So can simplicity generate satisfaction?

Geoff McDonald  11:05

Yeah, I think it can. I think I hinted at that before, or when we were talking earlier about, where does our happiness come from? Yeah. And there are some interesting studies on consumer behaviour. So people think, Oh, yeah, I’d love to have that shirt or that new computer or whatever. And it will make me happy. That’s kind of a presumption, but it’s actually a marketing position. They’ve actually told us to buy this car, buy this computer because it will make us happy. What psychology shows is that the point where you’re most happy about any of your purchases, is in the instant, before you hand over your money.

Alan Silcock  11:42

Yes, that’s right.

Geoff McDonald  11:42

Before you hand over the money. Before you actually buy it. And that what I saying is, if you really want to be happy, grab the thing off the shelf, walk up to the counter and say, I’ll have this please and just before you hand over your card walk away.

Alan Silcock  11:56

That’s right, isn’t it? Because I’ve also been studying significantly in the area of mindfulness and a number of studies which lead to say that, you know if you do get that car that you want, and you’ve always wanted, or as desired. Yes, that point that you talk to strikes as the most significant point. But then even if you do buy it, it’s only a matter of a couple of weeks down the track that you’re not as happy is worth. Yes. Yeah. And attracted to that, just like it’s a minimal amount of time, that you’re still deriving pleasure from this thing that you bought two weeks ago.

Geoff McDonald  12:30

Yeah, there’s a great TED video [The Surprising Science of Happiness]. I can’t remember the guy’s first name, but it’s Professor Gilbert from one of the US universities. And he tracked people who had won lotteries. Yeah. And yeah, that researcher, and he also tracks people who’d become extremely unwell or become a paraplegic or something like that. And basically, there was something like after about three months, their levels of happiness had returned to what it was before prior to winning the lottery. So I think the view that we can be happy by external things is actually true, but it’s short-lived,

Alan Silcock  13:07

It’s short-term.

Geoff McDonald  13:08

And there’s a much deeper resonance, happiness, satisfaction level generated from within ourselves. And that’s kind of what I think the point is that the Japanese or the Buddhist would say that the world and my room, is actually a reflection of what’s in my mind, or my heart. And when you take it from that perspective, you can see that if I get myself in a good space, then everything else will just take care of itself.  And we’ve been told a bit of a lie around happiness, that you actually have to have all these things before you can be happy. Yeah. Whereas what the truth is, you can actually be happy now. And the beautiful part is if you’re happy now you’re more likely to work harder and be successful. So you can actually have it but you’ve got it around the other way.

Alan Silcock  13:55

And achieve and have that level of satisfaction throughout your life.

Geoff McDonald  13:58

Yeah. And mindfulness is a really good example of minimalism. You know, do you have the monkey mind or the chatter in your head? Yeah, versus if I can just become at peace with myself. I’m not going to want and crave ice cream, or the new car or whatever.

Alan Silcock  14:16

Today, as part of my discipline, which I talked about in ‘Five Gifts Flourishing‘. Every morning, I go for a walk. And every morning I ask myself three questions influenced by Buddhists. And the first question is, what am I grateful for? And this morning, I noticed as I asked myself that question, what am I grateful for? I didn’t have the answer until I took a breath. So I’m grateful to have this fresh, beautiful lively air in my lungs, every day. I’m in the city, and I’m still going into the park and I can breathe this beautiful air. I’m grateful for that. And there are other things that come up.

Just doing that on a daily basis for me, and also looking at kind of the opposite of that, which is, you know, what are the facts? What is the impermanence that I face every day? It delivers me a great way to focus one day. And I do agree with you, Geoff, that simplicity in just doing that, like, there’s no there’s nothing complex about it. I’m not out on a million-dollar bike, driving in the hills in a million-dollar car. I’m just walking in a 20 buck pair of runners, you know, a shirt I’ve had for about 40 years. You know, people avoiding me obviously. And yet, it’s such a simple, delightful thing to do. And I always stand beside the fountain in Victoria Gardens, which is a delightful fountain, and do a bit of Qi Gong that I learned when we studied the ontological equation some years ago. And it’s delightful. It’s such a great way to start the day.

Geoff McDonald  16:13

That’s a beautiful example. It costs you nothing. You can do that whenever you want. And it takes minutes.

Alan Silcock  16:20

As long as I can walk, I can do that.

Geoff McDonald  16:22

But it’s also easy to dismiss that as some sort of trick shot. Yeah, as distinct from this is actually quite profound if I’m willing to stop and consider that, compared to a lot of the other things, I decided about life. I need that, I want that, I must have that. Or if something goes wrong, and we, make a mess of ourselves as well. There is something that’s easily missed here.

Alan Silcock  16:51

Yeah. And, you know, unfortunately, you know, my other research into mindfulness, and in the Buddhist psychology side, is that there’s a McDonald’s mindfulness starting to appear. Where, you know, people are starting to charged people a lot of money, for instance, to find out what satisfaction is within? Well, yeah, as the story I’ve just told you, doesn’t cost you anything really. You shouldn’t have to. And that’s a simple thing in itself. What if you could just do it for yourself, you know, you don’t have to pay a guru 1000s of dollars to take you through in programs, you know. Yeah.

Geoff McDonald  17:40

Well, there’s always a McDonald’s point of view, from an aesthetic point of view that you can buy simple furniture. But you kind of can live it as a stylistic thing rather than as a genuine thing. And the other one is, you can have lots of stuff that you can hide in cupboards. So you walk into the room, and it all looks nice and simple and clean. But the reality is, you’ve got a whole bunch of clutter somewhere.

Alan Silcock  18:04

Yeah, well, that’s the case with the artwork. You can have heaps of pictures up on the wall. What’s the point in having them in secondary storage?

Geoff McDonald  18:13

Yeah. There’s also a flip side to this, though. So when I’ve spoken to my mom about this, it’s like, well, the house looks so bare. Yeah. And it’s kind of like, Well, yeah, that’s the whole point. But, it’s kind of this expectation about or this standard, or this, it should be a particular way. And the big challenge at the moment, you’re writing about minimal work. And the idea is, well, if you could actually get all your work done in four hours instead of eight. Most people go ‘Hey, fantastic. I love that.’ But then there’s almost like this. ‘Oh, hang on’. There’s this pregnant pause.  And I remember when Tim Ferriss wrote his book, ‘The Four Hour Workweek’. So he was talking about four hours across a whole week, not just a day. And he said the biggest thing that stopped people was not actually having a four-hour workweek. But what the hell am I gonna do with the rest of my life? And this is kind of the other side of this equation that we could have a whole bunch of other things happen. But there are always consequences. Because if you only had to work four hours a day, what the hell are you going to do with the rest of your day? Or if I didn’t have something on the wall? What am I going to put there? Or if I didn’t have my monkey mind? It’d be quiet, wouldn’t it?

Alan Silcock  19:26

I gotta fill it. Yeah.

Geoff McDonald  19:28

But that’s also the craving around the happiness and the willing to be at peace or willing to be with yourself or willing to be with your thoughts, that it does force you to a deeper level of engagement with yourself, and probably with other people. Because ideally, you’re not going to take the cheap way out and just, ‘Well, I’m feeling crap today, let’s go buy a new TV.’ And that might be helpful or it might not be a very good strategy at all. Whereas if you could actually sit down – this is classic around food.

Alan Silcock  20:00

Yeah, that’s interesting.

Geoff McDonald  20:01

A lot of our food is emotional eating because we have a sensation in our stomach, and we go, ‘Oh my god, I must be hungry. I should eat ice cream.’ And I love my ice cream. But from doing fasting, I’ve been told that the key to your hunger is not in your stomach. And it’s not a feeling there. It’s actually a taste on your lips. Yeah. So if you want to go, I’m going to manage my food and be minimal around what food I eat. Then there are certain ways around it rather than again, bouncing out of some emotional, reactive space into buying something, eating something, and so forth. Yeah.

Alan Silcock  20:39

So is there no room for indulgence?

Geoff McDonald  20:42

No, not at all. I think we talked about this before about having a beer that, you know, we’re here to enjoy ourselves as well. But the point is, by all means, have a beer. Just know that beer is not the secret to happiness. But it might be fantastic right now because it’s bloody hot and the cold beer is beautiful. So it’s kind of where are you going consistently for your joy? And, by all means, have a beer, by all means, go and yell at the referee at the football. But just don’t try to make that your go-to position. That’s probably what I’d say.

Alan Silcock  21:18

Yeah. Okay. What’s the MLP? The Mindful Life Program – That’s stimulus-driven happiness? Yes. As a distinction from genuine happiness. No, sorry, let me rephrase that. Stimulus driven pleasure as a distinction from genuine happiness. Yeah, so there is room for stimulus-driven pleasure.

Geoff McDonald  21:44

Absolutely, otherwise, you’d be a monk sitting down meditating for the rest of your life. You’d be very happy, but you wouldn’t really go a great life.

Alan Silcock  21:52

Yeah. You wouldn’t have that those pleasures in your life? Which do contribute to our happiness in some way, too. Absolutely. So what about so you’ve talked about food. Can you tell me more about the work side in terms of minimalists? Like maybe even bring it into an organizational setting? How can you have a minimalist organization?

Geoff McDonald  22:20

Well, I look at it from the basic principles. So you’re trying to do more with less. So it’s very much what all of our productivity stuff is talking about: how do you get more done with less effort or less time or less attention? So the same would apply. So one example would be… There’s some interesting research around work where, basically, so we’ve got the problem in a lot of organizations around mental health challenges. More people seem to be running into problems around that. So what’s causing that? And there’s probably a number of things.

One of the things that I’ve kind of picked up on is that there’s research out there that says, We’re probably our brain works from a high-performance level for about four hours a day on task focussed work. After that, you’re probably either dropping your performance or depleting your wellbeing at some level. Yeah, in the sense that the extreme example would be, I can’t do 12 hours a day on a computer all day, because eventually, I’m going to be a wreck. So that kind of says, if we use that as a benchmark, rather than a limit, we can go ‘Okay, what sort of work could I do during the day? And what type of work do I have to do?’

So you might go, if we’re going to use Cal Newport’s idea around doing Deep Work, which is strategic work, thinking work, study type work, to come up with new innovations, or even just think about our way forward, or planning or write books, whatever it might be, then you might limit yourself there to four hours of work a day.

This is consistent with some historical figures that have been writers and researchers and the rest of it. A lot of them did not write for 12 hours a day. They wrote in small chunks, and then took breaks. And that actually fits in with brain research.  Our brains this, what they’re coming up with, there’s two types or two parts to our brain. There are a few different models here. But one of them’s the Uptime brain, which is task-focused. Yeah. The other one is the Downtime brain, which is kind of connect the dots brain. So when you’ve been in the shower, and you’ve come up with the idea, that’s because you’ve switched out of the task focus, and you’ve gone into this Downtime brain. The brain is going that fits for that. And that fits that. And ideally, we should be cycling in and out of that.

Alan Silcock  24:17

Yeah, that that makes a lot of sense. And I’m just thinking the way I do my own life is like that. I’ll do task-focused stuff for a few hours at a time. And then I need to do something else to stimulate. So it’s either having a conversation or it’s walking or it’s, it’s something or it’s reading or it’s something else that allows by two hemispheres to connect.

Geoff McDonald  25:02

Perfect. One of the things I’ve started to tease out is this idea of a Three-Phase Day. So the three phases are one would be task-focused work. Yeah. One is the downtime work. And one is some sort of rest and recovery. Yeah. And the downtime piece might be the socialization. The classic way, you can apply that if you’re a solo entrepreneur, let’s say you’re a coach or something like that, where you might do your study planning strategic stuff, or your computer works for a couple of hours each day, then you might talk with your clients for a couple of hours a day, then you might have to time off to go for a walk, ride your bike, exercise, or just hang out with friends. And you’re actually cycling in and out of that rather than doing long sessions in each of those phases.

Alan Silcock  25:51

So I think that’s what I do naturally.

Geoff McDonald  25:54

I think that’s the interesting point.

Alan Silcock  25:56

That is, yeah, for me, it’s evolved. But it works for me. Well, it actually is a certain time of the day. Like, once I’ve done by, as I explained before, early morning reflection, and my mindfulness stuff, I’m set to do other stuff, I can dive into it, I chunk it in and get it done, you know, and I’ll get to the end of that, and I’ll need to do something more creative.

Geoff McDonald  26:24

Absolutely. So one of the concepts I’ve been sharing with people that seems to resonate is the idea of ‘Work like a human’. So if you think of where our work comes from, it actually comes from the Industrial Revolution, someone standing next to a machine for 12 to 16 hours a day going clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk. Yeah. But humans are not like that. We need breaks, we need socialization, we have good days and bad days, we need some variation. And there is some more of a natural flow or rhythm about how we could be working rather than expecting to be consistent all the time.  The other piece that’s on this is we need to know that social media is not a break for the brain. If you think about it technically, the brain just goes I’m sitting at my computer tapping on things still, it doesn’t know whether you’re having fun on social media or whether you’re chatting to your boss or writing a report. So we’ve got to look at the things that actually are our recovery, and have them as distinct recovery.

Alan Silcock  27:27

I totally agree with that. No, just read another piece on that. Yeah, it’s it feeds the monkey mind. Alan B. Wallace has some nice pieces on YouTube TED Talks, where he passionately talks about, you know, how if we entertain the monkey mind it’ll just take over. We’re really not doing anything to help ourselves escape at all. Quite the opposite, we’re imprisoning ourselves by embracing social media, not the opposite.

Geoff McDonald  28:05

Yeah. And even down to socialization is very important. So some people are showing up at work and being lonely. That’s a problem at one end of the scale. The other is people not spending time alone. Yeah. And, you know, being surrounded by or having their phone constantly chatter to them is not switch-off time. Now, that’s being on alert all the time. That’s building distraction. It’s building the habit of distraction because fundamentally, this is about habit.

Alan Silcock  28:31

Yes. You know, well, it is a bad habit. And I don’t know if you saw the documentary on social media recently, where they had, I can’t remember what it’s called, but it was it had it featured some of the leaders, the guys who invented things the ‘like’ on Facebook, and you know, the architect, and you’ve probably seen it, and to a man the dozen of them that were on that show said they would never have their kids engage or very little engagement in social media.

Geoff McDonald  29:04

Yeah. Well, there’s no accident that Facebook has the nickname ‘crack book’ because it’s like crack because it’s been designed to grab your attention and keep it there for as long as possible. So these are organizations that are basically buying your attention because they want to sell you stuff or expose you to ads. I have nothing wrong with that. But you need to know what you’re buying into when you sign up.

Alan Silcock  29:26

Exactly. And, you know, you need to have strategies around your exposure to stuff like that. Yeah. That are as you have suggested helping you to gain a balanced workday. That makes sense. Otherwise, you know, it’s gonna be stimulus-response like that little buzzer. Does that mean we get our beer now, Geoff?

Geoff McDonald  29:56

It’s Pavlov’s dog. The buzzer goes off. Or it’s beer time. Great.

Alan Silcock  30:00

I’m really fascinated by all that stuff at the moment because I just see so many people caught in the same way as you know, the hook to gambling online and in pubs and clubs and stuff. And it’s insidious.

Geoff McDonald  30:14

Well, no accident, they have poker machines and the casino environment are designed in the same way that Facebook was. They’re designed to shut out the external calls to go home. And it’s designed to keep you playing for longer. You just need to know that that’s what’s going on, then you can choose around it.

Alan Silcock  30:31

That’s right. So if that’s the downside, what’s the upside if we turn away from that, or you know, or experienced that judiciously? What’s the upside to being more minimalist in our approach?

Geoff McDonald  30:44

I think for the person there’s a calmness, a peacefulness and a more meaningful life because it’s kind of like if I’m putting it this way, if I’m only going to spend four hours of work a day, I’m going to have to be pretty clever about what I choose to focus on. Yeah. And probably by implication, that means that’s not important. That’s not important. That’s not important. And all of a sudden, I’m much freer. I’m not trying to get as much done. So there’s a personal value around calmness, happiness, meaningfulness.

The spin-off on this is though if you actually read the habits books. Professor BJ Fogg is the world expert on habits. And if you read a book on habits, it almost nearly always comes back to his research, even if he’s not quoted. One of the things one of the Maxim’s he’s got in his book called ‘Tiny Habits‘, is that people best change when they feel good about themselves. And if you think about that, it’s kind of commonsensical. It makes just obvious sense, of course.

So what he’s saying is, if we actually want to change anything about ourselves, we first got to feel good. So if we can actually put ourselves in a place where we’re happier about stuff, yeah, we don’t actually have to rely on the external fixes to make us happier.

And the same applies to climate change. So this might be stretching a bow, but this is kind of the connection, I see that on a good day, I can quite clearly go, ‘Hey, we need to do something about the climate’. But when I’m stressed and anxious, and my bandwidth has shut down, and I’ve got to get that report out, yeah. I don’t care about climate change.

And I think that’s the thing if we can start to see that these external panaceas, these external pills, and even the external vaccines we’re trying to take to solve basic, human immune system problems, do work. But we don’t want to rely on them. Yeah, that if you change at that level, then the potential to relate to problems like climate change shift too. And I’m not saying it’s the instant fix. Yeah, it’s an orientation that has our start to say, ‘Hey, this is something important here. We should probably address this.’

Alan Silcock  32:58

Yeah, I do understand that. From like to just think we go on holidays, right? Yeah, you spend the first week not really been detoxing. And they get to the end, and you’re heading home. And that’s the time when you think I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna do that go into that and you get to the office the next day, it all disappears, right. But of course, the opposite of that is, you know, being in that place where you can make change happen is the place where you just had a disaster in your life. Yes. And you have to make change happen. So at both points, I think change is possible. Sometimes, unfortunately, I’ve found as a change agent over 30 years, that disaster has to happen in someone’s life in order to turn them enough to say ‘shit, I’m going to do something differently.’

Geoff McDonald  33:46

Well, I think it’s a beautiful way of describing the pandemic and the lockdowns, people, including yourself have been through. If we’re ever going to get a forced reset, that’s got to be pretty close to it. We’re not going to get a better wake up call. And then and partly what prompted me to start writing about this was that I could hear people wanting to make change happen. And they may not have known the direction but they kind of going ‘Okay, that last bit I was living, that’s not quite how I want to keep going forward.’ So there is a moment of change here that I think on the planet, as a scale is available as well,

Alan Silcock  34:21

Perfect timing. So when will we be able to see another book from Geoff McDonald on this topic?

Geoff McDonald  34:30

I’m aiming by the middle of the year, so mid-2021. At the moment, I’m just picking off Minimal Work. And I’ve got a four-week program running around that. And what’s emerging is that’s a big enough topic that might even be a separate book. At the very least, I’ve got an E-book coming out this week that summarizes my seven principles. And I might even turn that into a book in the next month and just make it a shorter one.

Alan Silcock  34:54

How can I get hold of that in the meantime?

Geoff McDonald  34:56

The usual place Geoff McDonald dot com is my website. Pretty much once they go over there they can find me and see all the stuff that’s on there.

Alan Silcock  35:04

Go and purchase it, folks. It’s good stuff. So it’s pleasure Geoff chatting with you again. And I thoroughly enjoy these moments as I do our friendship over many years and know that it will continue in a minimalist way.

Geoff McDonald  35:20

In a minimal way. Minimal friends, that’s another story. Thank you, Alan.

In his latest book, Heart Leadership, business mentor and leadership expert Ian Berry talks about the progress from the mind of leadership to leading with the heart. It’s an interesting update on leadership styles and more timely than ever given our experiences with the pandemic, lockdown and often, leading from afar with more teams working from home. It’s also a powerful framework for self-leadership.

This is a special episode #114 of the Ideas Architect podcast – the first in over two years – and a worthy topic.

Ian has a lot of resources and you can buy his book on his website at IanBerry.biz

I previously spoke with Ian Berry on the Ideas Architect Podcast here.

Download the podcast episode here

Geoff McDonald  00:00

Hi Ian, welcome to the show.

Ian Berry  00:02

Thank you, Geoff. I really appreciate the opportunity and nice to be able to see you for a change.

Geoff McDonald  00:08

Yes, absolutely. I was looking at my notes. The last time we spoke as a podcast was back in April 2015. Things have changed since then.

Ian Berry  00:21

There you go. I think that podcast is still on my website, actually, because it was a good, wide ranging interview, I thought. So. Hence, I’m happy to have a chat again.

Geoff McDonald  00:32

And of course, the prompt forward is this. So your fabulous new book, and I do think it is fabulous. I think it’s kind of that beautiful next step in what you’ve been talking about for a long time here. So it’s ‘Heart Leadership – Become the wise leader you want to be’. And that’s really what we want to talk about today. Where did the book come from, what’s it about, how people can get it, maybe even how you produced it, and whatever else comes up in the conversation. So tell us about your book.

Ian Berry  01:03

Well, I mean, it’s like everything. It’s an evolution, isn’t it? I mean, it’s a journey. And it really, I guess, began back… I can remember the date, actually, it was September the 15th 2017, my wife that day received her registration as a marriage celebrant.

Geoff McDonald  01:21

Oh, wow.

Ian Berry  01:21

But it was also the days where she received a cancer diagnosis. And it wasn’t grim and she immediately went into treatment. And you know, the drugs almost killed her. I tell the full story in the book. But it sent us both on a journey to explore not so much what’s in our head, but what’s what’s in our hearts.  We found doctors, there’s a few exceptions, but we found doctors know about trauma and drugs, but they don’t necessarily know a lot about well being. They don’t necessarily know what’s in our heart. And what we discovered on that journey, Carol, particularly searching for her own answers, which in the end led to her getting well.

Geoff McDonald  02:02

Good.

Ian Berry  02:03

We discovered the folk at Heart Math. We discovered in numerous different angles that the heart knows, we just got to learn to listen to it first and tell our brains to be quiet. And you know, I think like a lot of blokes you know, that was my modus operandi. I was used to following my heart, because that’s what I’ve been doing over 30 years, when I first left the corporate world and started out on my own, I really was following my heart. But very soon my head took over and you know, and I think that was the way for a lot of people. And so I began to explore this idea of tell my mind to be quiet, listen to my heart first. And I discovered in my own experience that my heart knows.

Geoff McDonald  02:50

That’s spectacular. And I really love that that it was kind of like you were jolted into a different awareness around it. So yes, I’ve been going along and there was no need to question a lot of stuff.

Ian Berry  03:02

That’s true. I mean, I was, as you know, we were quite comfortable. And now we were, you know, things were going. But then as Carol got better and I started to work with this more personally, then I reached out to some of my clients and began to workshop, some of what was new ideas and new material from my past works. And I’ve been thinking about, because long before Coronavirus, I made the shift to doing most of my work online. And so I was already zoomed, zoomed in, long before the virus. I started workshopping with a few people who I thought were really open to this idea of heart leadership. I also co-created a program last year with a colleague, Susan Furness, about ‘strategic heartistory’, as an alternative to strategic planning. And that really that conversation, along with many other conversations really, I guess, made me aware that heart leadership was actually at the core of all of my work and that I should be paying more attention to it and the more I spoke to my close clients about this, the more that became the case. A book started emerging. I began with a with a mnemonic because I was helping the people I was working with remember it and so I began with harmony with yourself, seeking harmony with other people and with the planet, listening to your heart, listening to your mind, then engaging your hands and the consequences of all that was happenstance. Being the word I discovered had a ‘H’ in it, which helped the mnemonic but it means ‘coincidence or serendipity or synchronicity’. And my clients really loved the model. And so, the book really emerged using that model. And it flowed you know, I wrote the book in about six months.

Geoff McDonald  05:17

That’s pretty good.

Ian Berry  05:19

Which, you know, previous books have taken me a lot longer than six months, as you would know yourself having written, what have you written, I think 10 or 12,

Geoff McDonald  05:27

Something like that.

05:30

Up until this moment, I had found, I was very disciplined, you know, I’ve been writing 500 words a day for 40 years. Most of it’s rubbish and doesn’t go anywhere. But the discipline, but I always found writing books and writing articles, and so on, I’ve found it hard work. But hearing my heart first, first of all, really focusing on being in harmony with myself, and then listening to my heart. What I discovered was a flow to my writing, and all of a sudden, writing wasn’t that hard anymore?

Geoff McDonald  06:04

Ah, that’s interesting.

Ian Berry  06:07

And it just flowed. I mean, one day, I was running from my car to be serviced. In two and a half hours, I write 5000 words,

Geoff McDonald  06:15

Oh, wow. You should do that every week.

Ian Berry  06:16

That’s never happened to me ever. But the whole thing flowed. And then I put the Working Draft out to 25 or so people, including yourself. And the feedback I got was that it could be a little bit more together. And that some of the things about the heart were clear, but not so much the lining up or the flow to the head and the hands. And so I did some more workshopping with my clients and ended up with the final book. I also added a prologue and an epilogue to the original Working Draft, which kind of pulled it all together more. And most people have said, there’s a flow to it that wasn’t there in the Working Draft.  And I’m very happy with it now. I’ve personally sent out, I sent out the 50th copy this morning. I’m signing just 100. And I sent out the 50th one this morning. And it’s also selling quite well on Amazon and other places. I’m very pleased with the journey to get here and what’s happening now.

Geoff McDonald  07:34

I think it’s an interesting twist, isn’t it, you set out to write this particular book, in the leadership domain. But here, you’ve got this beautiful example of how it’s freed you up with your writing. And the way I hear it, and I’d love to get your comment on this is that it’s, when I’m in my head, I’m trying to get it right. And there’s all this rational stuff trying to say this is the right thing, or that, and I need arguments for it. But when I’m kind of in my more heart or intuitive space, it’s kind of, I’m freer for it to be my opinion about here’s what I just think the next move is.

Ian Berry  08:13

The brain is a wonderful instrument. It’s you know, it’s a marvel. It’s brilliant at ‘how to’ but what I’ve discovered it’s not so good at the ‘why’ and the ‘what’. Whereas the heart is the ‘why’. And you know, as we know from Simon Sinek‘s work and other folk starting with why is key.  What I learned that when we hear our hearts truly, we stop second guessing ourselves. And then we can move to the mind and engage with our minds. Because that’s the ‘how to’, there’s a lot of past value in our minds, but the heart is coming from the present that’s another thing that I learned. The heart’s ‘the now’ It’s the reality of now and accepting the reality of now.  One of the stories that I share in the book comes from one of the heart leadership enthusiasts who’s a member of my regular groups, Brad Smith, he talks about, you know, rather than a new normal, he talks moving ‘from normal to now’ and that’s one of the stories that I share in the book. I think that’s really true the heart is the present moment. It’s about the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ the head is more the ‘how’ and of course the hands then you know, work out ‘the who where and the when’.

Geoff McDonald  09:35

I really like that you haven’t thrown out the head it’s kind of this meshing of it to say, the head by itself is very useful, but not enough. What we actually need to do is mesh it in with the heart.

Ian Berry  09:47

True. So I think this is natural flow, heart-head-hands. Lots of people have used that process that metaphor and I originally found it on the internet. There’s lots of people have used that idea. But I haven’t come across anyone who’s used the idea in the way that I have to suggest a flow. Yeah, but also to suggest a wholeness, you know, a coherence, if you will. Starting with harmony, I think I’ve met lots of leaders in my time I’ve, I’ve worked with more than 1000 leaders, one on one, some really great ones. And one of the things I’ve learned through the experience of working with other people is that a lot of people haven’t focused on the whole self, they focused on the business, or even the head, the numbers, all that stuff. And we need that. But we miss out on a whole lot of other important things. And so the idea of heart leadership is to put it all together and it says, lead from your heart, lead with your heart, but coming from a place of being in harmony with yourself. Then engage the head and so on.

Geoff McDonald  11:07

Yeah. So where does emotion fit in here? So we’re not saying head motion hands, hearts got a different spin on to just emotion. It’s not pure emotion. Is that accurate?

Ian Berry  11:19

Well, look, I think it’s a feeling, you know, which could be an emotion but in the book, I talk about the heart qualities, which I first learned from the Heart Math folk, and in the book, I talk about eight such qualities. And it’s a, it’s a quality, you know, it’s a, so it’s more than an emotion. I mean, one of them, of course, is love.

Geoff McDonald  11:42

Yeah, we’re not allowed to talk about love in business.

Ian Berry  11:46

Well, look, I think Stephen Farber is right. His latest book is called ‘Love is just damn good business‘. And I think he’s absolutely right. And I talk about love from the perspective of the ancient Greeks use of it. I mean, they had, everyone knows Eros. And Agape probably is the two famous ones romantic love and spiritual love. I came at it from the word ‘philia’, which means affectionate regard. And what I’ve discovered that when there’s affectionate regard for colleagues in the workplace, that performance improves. And I’ve been measuring this now for a very long time. And the more affectionate regard there is, and the more genuineness there is, and it involves some of the other heart qualities to them. As I say I use eight in the book, another one of them is appreciation. Another one is kindness. Another one is compassion. So these are more than emotions more than feelings they’re actually ways of being.

Geoff McDonald  12:50

Yeah. I’m kind of poking a little bit here, because traditionally, business was all about moving stuff around. And so we have this very transactional language about it. Whereas what you’re getting down to is the heart of sorry, the heart of us, actually talking people to people. It’s a huge shift in itself.

Ian Berry  13:15

In a way, I call it you know, ‘who before do’. You know, it’s really about? Really, we’re human beings, as as many people have said, not human doings. Yeah. And the focus in most businesses is about doing. And I think the focus should be more about being and then let people do their own thing. Because, you know, we don’t need to be told what to do, even though this is what the industrial revolution, that’s still the hangover. And I think there’s crazy talk, you know, about a fourth industrial revolution. I think it’s nonsense. We don’t need any more industrial revolution. What we need is a Human Revolution.  Some writers like say, Gerd Leonhard, or, you know, Kutarna who wrote The Age of Discovery, I forget his co author, [Ian Goldin] but that they reckon that there’s a new Renaissance happening since about the 90s. And I agree with them, that this new Renaissance is a shift away from as it was back in the 15th century, that was away from feudal systems. It was away from dogma and doctrine that control people, which is what the Industrial Revolution did. Yep, it was moving away from that it was focusing on people being true to themselves, finding their essence – the way I described in the book – and then being left alone to do it, because we don’t need to be told what to do. When we’re following our hearts, and yet most of the workforce is about being told what to do.

Geoff McDonald  14:50

And for a knowledge worker who knows stuff up here and spends a lot of their time interacting with other people. That makes perfect sense because the knowledge worker is the expert in something. But they don’t want to be told what to do. It might be a case of, we need to go down that path. But telling them exactly what to do is going to ruin our game for them.

Ian Berry  15:10

Well, that’s about that’s how authoritarian places work. Yeah, I mean, the knowledge work was a Drucker term. And it might have been relevant in the 1950s. I don’t think it’s relevant anymore. We’re not knowledge workers. One of the bits of research that I quote in the book comes from Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, who’s a neuroscientist. And a lot of her work was based on her own experience recovering from a stroke. And she says, we are feeling creatures who think,

Geoff McDonald  15:42

Aha, okay, good. So instead of a knowledge worker, what are we?

Ian Berry  15:49

Yes, we need knowledge, but in my opinion, we need more wisdom.

Geoff McDonald  15:54

Okay, Great,

Ian Berry  15:57

I think we know, you know, because these days, everyone is getting skills training, you know, if people are not being given the skills at the workplace is not going to last long in the 21st century. And so people have the knowledge, they have the know-how. But what we need more of is bringing, you know, the best version of this one of a kind self that each of us is, bringing that person to our work. That’s a whole different ballgame.

Geoff McDonald  16:27

So what are some tips, tricks, suggestions, you can say? How can I do this today? What would you suggest?

Ian Berry  16:34

Well, I think first of all, it’s just learn to listen to your heart and keep your head quiet. Yeah, one of the ways that I practice is myself, I was lucky in during a recovering from illness many years ago to learn meditation. So I already knew how to quiet my mind. But we have this constant chatter going on, it looks like this person sitting on our shoulder going, that won’t work or, you know, whatever it is, some people call it the inner critic. So it’s telling that person to be quiet. I even had to say it out loud for a while. Just say, Look, you’re not needed right now. And just really focus on my state of being. Yeah, you know, was I really coming to the situation, from a place of love, from a place of kindness, from a place of appreciation, etc. And when I was really sitting in that place, I would then engage my hand and my head in my hands to work out what’s next.

Geoff McDonald  17:40

Yeah. Beautiful.

Ian Berry  17:42

So it’s just that simple exercise.

Geoff McDonald  17:45

It’s kind of keep repeating that cycle of keep coming back to that space.

Ian Berry  17:50

Yeah, it is a hence, hence, harmony, heart, head, hands, happenstance.

Geoff McDonald  17:56

I really like happenstance, as in, not just the way you came about it, like it was kind of a spontaneous thing. But it actually does put you in the moment, rather than constantly be in the head and trying to plan things forward. I think we can be much more authentic, more engaging, more present to other people as well.

Ian Berry  18:17

Well, wonderful, wonderful piece of wisdom that I use in the book that came from Viktor Frankl who his version of therapy logotherapy he called it but he wrote the manuscript for that in Auschwitz. I mean, enough said,

Geoff McDonald  18:35

It’s hard to get your head around that, isn’t it?

Ian Berry  18:37

But one of his beautiful pieces of wisdom was that between stimuli and response, there’s a space. And in that space, he said, lies our freedom. I just think that’s a wonderful, I mean, that’s when wisdom and knowledge you don’t know that you have to be that. And the more I work with this, something would happen. stimuli comes in, and I would take that moment, which is 90 seconds to really feel it in my heart, and over time it took me 18 months, not to respond from the head, but to respond from the heart. And what I found was that happenstance happened more often than not. I found a flow, you know, to things, I found myself less anxious about things that I might have been in the past. One of the interesting things for me is I stopped. I’ve been a make it happen kind of person for all my life. But this process has changed me. I’m now more letting it happen.

Geoff McDonald  19:53

Haha, that’s a big change.

Ian Berry  19:55

You know, some of the old habits you know, they still arrive occasionally. I mean, no one’s perfect, but there’s a lot more flow a lot more letting it happen. And even in work, you know, I sort of made a decision, I really only want to work with people who are enthusiastic about heart leadership. And as a consequence, you know, some people who weren’t dropped off, you know, they just disappeared.

Geoff McDonald  20:24

And I think that’s a really good thing, by the way.

Ian Berry  20:27

Me too. I mean, it’s a lot easier than firing them if they just disappear. But you know, what remains now is a core group of people that really want to do the work. And of course, for me that that’s energizing, ou know. I’m a fan of Jason Fox‘s one word and my word this year is ‘energized’. And a part of its come from this regular group of people who really want to dig as you know, and keep on digging into this idea that we lead with him and from my heart.

Geoff McDonald  20:57

And I’m guessing if you’re letting things come, rather than forcing them, you’re actually conserving your energy at the same time.

Ian Berry  21:05

There’s no question about that. And as you know, I’ve had my own health challenges. And one of the things that I’ve had to do is to really work on conserving my energy. And a consequence of that, I have to take these drugs to keep my melanoma at bay. And as a consequence, I can get really fatigued if I don’t watch myself. And what I’ve learned, even though I’m working about a quarter of the time I once did, I’m 10 times more productive because I don’t have this baggage around, about worrying about, you know, stuff that used to worry me in the mind before.  And I really am able to approach most things with a cool head, as I say, no one’s perfect. And we zip back into the old way sometimes. But the more I work at this, the happier I get, the more contented I get. And the less doubt and the less worry, I have. Wayne Dyer called them life’s two most useless emotions, I think it was pretty. But I’m having a lot less doubt and a lot less worry, by only using my mind to help me to do things. But I’m focused on being the best version of me first, and then move to the do.

Geoff McDonald  22:24

And you’ve been workshopping this with a lot of clients over quite a long period of time as well, what sort of things are showing up for them?

Ian Berry  22:31

Well, I think the surprising thing for some is the practicality of all of this, it actually leads to better results quicker. Which was not something that was expected. It’s led to, you know, better home life for lots of people, you know, the stress of being locked in, which has been the case for most of my clients, some of them with young children. It’s helped them to cope with that, and all of the things that go along with that a lot better than what would have happened otherwise. It’s reduced anxiety with people.  It’s helped people, I think we all have a degree of imposter syndrome. You know, we say ‘why me?’, the more we lead, and the more success we have with learning, the more we ask ‘why me?’. And a lot of my clients have felt that disappear, and that they’re more comfortable in their own skin. One of the biggest ones is that they’re not second-guessing themselves as much as they used to. Which I think is a byproduct of you know, what we’re talking about?

Geoff McDonald  23:48

Yeah, one of my favorite books from a few years ago was by John Kay, who was a professor at the London School of Economics, and the book was called Obliquity. And if you think about the word ‘oblique’, his premise was, we get our results indirectly. And it’s kind of this really interesting thing you’re talking about here that normally we go down the productivity path, and it’s all about I’ll do this more efficiently and all the rest of it. But what you’ve pointed to is, if you shift the way of being that stuff kind of just gets taken care of. Is that a way of saying it? It’s all correct?

Ian Berry  24:23

Yes, I think that’s right. I haven’t put it in such language. But I think in the book I talked about because what I’m in my work is about helping people to become the wise leaders they want to be. In the book, there are three pillars to that. And because I think the best workplaces that I’ve seen, are where people feel valued, where people live the values and where there’s a focus on value, delivery and exchange. So those three things valued values, value. The three foundations that lead to those things are people leadership, process innovation and progress sustainability. And it’s this progress sustainability that I think addresses this idea of progress rather than outcomes. I was a person focused on outcomes my whole life. I’m not anymore. I’m focused on following a process or as Seth Godin, called it a practice – a book I recommend, by the way, his latest one The Practice – because we’ve all got a practice. It’s our way of being and our way of doing and Seth’s work has helped me to really fine tune that for myself.  And one of the consequences is, we keep progress visible. So we’re less worried about outcomes more focused on progress. I talk about The Progress Principle in the book, which was what I learned from Teresa Amabile, her husband, Stephen Kramer, who wrote that great book, The Progress Principle. And I referenced that a little in the book, it’s this idea that we keep meaningful progress visible. And I think that’s really that’s really powerful.

Geoff McDonald  26:12

Absolutely. That was the key thing that came up when I was writing about Done and productivity. The number one piece is around motivation. And the key to motivation is some sense of movement towards something.

Ian Berry  26:27

Yep, same thing. Yeah. And I think also where we are in the 21st century, you know, hopefully sooner post Coronavirus world, I think meaning has become, you know, a key for most people. And finding meaning in your work, I think is what’s the quest for lots of people. And when we lead from our hearts, and we focus on the person, that we’re looking in the mirror and competing with that person, and not worrying about competition with anyone else, and being in harmony with ourselves, and then hearing our hearts, then engaging the mind, and then, you know, doing our work. I think it’s one way to achieve more meaningful work. And that’s, that’s been a common thread with the readers of the book so far, but also the people that have been working with for some time.  And even people that are kind of, you know, new edit one member of my group, Laura, whose story appears at the end of the book, I mean, I think she’s been a heart leader for a lot longer than what she might feel, but she talked to this, like a duck to water. Because it’s very human. You know, and I think what we’ve been taught, is really in-human in so many ways, you know, we’ve been taught that you must be taught what to do that, you don’t speak until you’re spoken to, and all these things that are a hangover from a different world. And I sense that one of the ways to peace in the world. In fact, I quoted this, out there in various places yesterday, because the words of AJ Muste came to me yesterday when I was just contemplating. And he said, ‘You know, there is no road to peace, peace is the road.’

Geoff McDonald  28:30

We’ve got it down the wrong way most of the time.

Ian Berry  28:32

And I sense that people want more peace in their lives. And heart leadership is a pathway to greater peace. And a consequence of that peace is in many ways a paradox is we do better work.

Geoff McDonald  28:50

Yeah. That’s the side effect piece isn’t. My comment to you was that it was timely because I felt it made more sense in the Coronavirus, the pandemic and in lockdown. Is that accurate? Or do you think it’s kind of like, is this going to make more sense going back into the office surrounded by people? Or does it make more sense now? Or is that just the wrong question?

Ian Berry  29:13

Well, I’m really I’m working towards helping people to not go back to normal. You know, we had to drive out to Melbourne yesterday, Carol and I, and you know, the smog’s back and all the traffic bullshit is back. And why would we do this to ourselves? Yeah. And so I don’t want to go back to that world. I’ve got a couple of clients where up to 50% of their workforce don’t want to go back to the office and they’re facilitating that kind of process. I think we’ve got to find find something new and different, and valuable and meaningful to do in CBDs. Yeah. Now, in my own view, the move to cities was a giant mistake made by civilization.

Geoff McDonald  29:58

Yeah, or it ran its course, it was useful for a while.

Ian Berry  30:03

It’s definitely done. Yeah, a lot of people, of course, their livelihoods were based on all those workers. And so we’ve got to find a different way. And I think there’s many options and you know, City of Melbourne’s, you know, a great thing that I mean, there are lots of things, there’s more dining out on the footpath now, for example. So it’s an experience. And I think that it doesn’t mean cities have to die. It just means that they have to live differently.

Geoff McDonald  30:33

Yep. The next evolution. Thanks.

Ian Berry  30:36

Next version. And so I don’t want to go back to normal, you know, I think airlines have got to really take a hard look at themselves, their business model is not viable. You know, their industries don’t exist without government handouts. So that to me says something’s wrong with the industry. So the needs that needs to be rethought. We don’t need to be flying all the time, as as we’ve proven over the past year. You know, I think the fossil fuel industry is another one, they don’t exist without government subsidies either. And they don’t employ as many people as they make out. And so there’s this whole, you know, there’s paradigm shifts that I think are happening, we did not need a fossil fuel industry, we should have been transitioning 30 years ago, or even longer. And I think the inevitable of those things will come and we will end up transitioning away from those kinds of things. And all the BS that goes on in the political sphere about those things will disappear. I sense. And that’s another, I think, an outcome of focusing on human beings. So like, you know, talking about Renaissance, earlier, one of the dogma of right now, is that data is the new oil and technology is the answer to everything. Well, no, it’s not. And, you know, I’m always amused by artificial intelligence, because it’s artificial. I’m amused by these things.  Now, of course, you know, there’s wonderful things that happen as a consequence of artificial intelligence, with the vaccine was created using artificial intelligence. So I’m not knocking artificial intelligence. But my point is, technology is not the answer, if it doesn’t enhance the human experience. And so I see a more human world in 2021 and beyond. And I think people that are focused on being in-human, whether that’s a president inciting violence or whatever it might be, I think that’s an old world. And that world is disappearing at a fast rate of knots. And I hope it can that disappearance continues to accelerate.

Geoff McDonald  32:53

And I think that’s probably a good segue into why people need the book. Because what I’m hearing is the layers that it can actually impact things. This is not just about, I’ll do this differently. It’s about live differently, see the world, create the world be with people differently. And it has all these ripple effects. It’s not just about you, and your work and your productivity. It’s not just about how you interact with your clients, customers, family, but it has this ripple effect of we’re actually going to think about some of these things like climate change, leadership, politics differently as well cities. So it’s a big shift.

Ian Berry  33:31

And some of those, you know, as Buckminster Fuller, he was on to this a long time ago, you know, it’s not about necessarily creating something that’s new. What it is about is, is maybe building on something. But as a consequence of something that is new or something that works in a different way old things become obsolete. And I see this, you know, very much. The future is the way of leading as in an authoritarian, dictatorial telling people what to do. I think methods like heart leadership will make those old ways obsolete.  I think one of the one of the biggest things that I say this right at the start of the book, and this has become the key to my work. And that is that doing heart leadership, my way will not work for you. But the model is something that you can learn to use in your own way, your own best way. I say in the book that what I say is important, but it’s nowhere near as important as what you hear yourself, say to yourself, and who you become and what you do next. And so although it’s, you know, it is a model and it is a process and all of that it’s really designed to help people to apply the learnings in their own best way not not my way.  And I think that’s also a new thing and leadership. It was always many, many consultants and authors and so on… take these seven steps and you’ll be a zillionaire sort of thing. Well, I think that’s an old world. New world says, here’s the principle, learn to apply that principle in your own best way.

Geoff McDonald  35:19

I’ve had people asking me how to how to write books. And it’s like, well, you’ve got to find your best way. Here’s my the that works for me. Try it out. But you’ve got to tweak it twist to find your way. So just on that, how did you write your book? What was your strategy?

Ian Berry  35:33

Pretty much I stayed with the, you know, writing every day. But then it became more than 500 words, but I’d really try to write 1500 words a day, that was my, my aim. Which is about five A4 pages. And I tried to write without editing and just go back to it later. But I had a process in mind. And then to put that together in the Working Draft. And then once that’s done to get it out to people for feedback, and input. And then probably the critical place is the editing, I’m blessed that I’ve got two good editors one is a person who has read my work for more than 30 years. And the most important person is my wife, who knows me better than anyone else. And when she tells me this doesn’t make sense, I got to pay attention.  So it’s really working working through that. And I think one thing I’ve learned, you know, this, it’s having having the ideal reader in mind all the time. You know, will this be valuable for them? And so they’re the kinds of things and I think then the publishing too, I mean, Carol’s taken over the publishing process. In the last two bits, we went through Ingram Spark, which is a distributor place. Carol learnt the process. But what we’ve what we’ve discovered is that if you get it right, you can basically have your book out in the world, in their case, they’ve got more than 40. distributors. So once you get once you get it right, and you get it uploaded to the Ingram site, in our case, it was on Amazon 24 hours later, Because they’ve got the process, right.  And Carol’s worked out how to do the Kindle versions, and so on, you know, as well. So I think if you spend the time working out how it works and that’s what she’s done, which is freed me up, I just focused on the writing. I don’t have to worry about the other stuff. Because it, you know, it did my head in, where she’s, she’s willing to work at it until she, she finds out how to do it all and then it becomes a flow from there. So this is the second one we’ve done with Ingram Spark. And this time, it was a lot easier in the first the Kindle version which of Heart Leadership which comes out soon. It was easier than the last one and I’m sure the next one, because this is part of a series of 12. So I’m sure that by the by the time we get to the next one, it’ll be even easier.

Geoff McDonald  38:20

Perfect. So where can someone get a copy of heart leadership?

Ian Berry  38:24

Well, if they want the signed version, there is still 50 of those. I’m only signing 100. So there’s still 50 of those. They can go to my website and sign up for the event that’s on the 24th of February. Overseas folk, it takes three to four weeks I’ve discovered in the Coronavirus world to get things so I will send people a PDF so they can read it before the seminar so that that gets them the signed copy. If you want to buy it normally it’s available via my website. It’s in Book Depository in the UK, for example, which is my favorite bookstore. It’s in Booktopia in Australia, It’s on all the Amazon‘s. Basically just Google it. But if you want one of the one of the 100 signed ones go to my website.

Geoff McDonald  39:16

And what’s your website address?  IanBerry.biz I A N – Berry B E R R Y dot BIZ. That’s it. Perfect. Well, great to talk to you. And I think we could have talked for another five hours just pulling out all the pieces and putting it back together. But I but I’m guessing I reckon you’ll agree with this that reading it is the first step. But going off and doing it and being it and living it and practicing it is the key.

Ian Berry  39:48

Absolutely. Absolutely. So I really appreciate the opportunity Geoff.

Geoff McDonald  39:53

My pleasure, great to have this conversation, even though I’ve read the book, and we’ve had some discussions about it. It’s great to return to it and just explore it in different ways. I’ve enjoyed that as well.

Ian Berry  40:04

I must say, too, when people go to the website, even if you don’t get the book, as I was writing the book, I recorded a whole lot of videos. So there’s 24 videos. Basically, it’s a course, you know, one every fortnight say. And I also did 24 podcasts, the videos are all under five minutes. And the podcasts are all under 10 minutes. So even just listening to one of those videos, one of those podcasts or watching one of those videos would tell people whether the book is for them or not. That’s stuff that’s available – just people go to my website, you’ll see there’s a tab that says Heart Leadership Resources. That’s where all the videos and podcasts or that’s where you access them from.

Geoff McDonald  40:47

Yeah, and I’ll just warn the listeners in advance. There’s a lot of other good stuff on your website. So you might want to allocate a little bit of time just to explore or at the very least, bookmark the page so you can come back.

Ian Berry  41:00

Yeah, look, I’ve tried to make my website as a resource center for people interested in Heart Leadership. That’s what it’s designed for. So yeah, there is quite a bit of stuff there. But I’ve tried to segment it now. So that Heart Leadership resources has got its own page. But it’s a nice way to see whether the book might be for you before you buy it.

Geoff McDonald  41:24

Yeah. Perfect. Well, thank you for being on the show and great to talk to you.

Ian Berry  41:29

Thanks very much.

Geoff McDonald  41:30

Okay, bye.

Ian Berry  41:32

Bye.

It’s official. Today – this very blog post – I have now written and published 1000 blog posts on this website. Three cheers for me! Yes, That’s a bit self-indulgent and I’m proud of this result – that’s a lot of writing over a ten-year period.

In this podcast episode #113, Brett Jarman from Help Me Leverage and Experts on Air interviews me about my blogging journey.

Some of the questions he asks include:

Some of the other things we talk about include:

Brett Jarman – Ideas Architect podcast interview

Sandi Givens runs an online program for women across the country called Find Your Courageous Voice. Her passion is to enable more people to have courage and authenticity in their conversations.

Sandi is also the author of Women on the Move, a CSP professional speaker with PSA, a supporter of Beyond Blue and a highly experienced trainer and course facilitator.

In this episode (#112) of the Ideas Architect Podcast, Sandi Givens talks about having courageous conversations. In particular, we talk about:

Typically, men are more likely to want to hide away in their caves and solve their problems on their own. In contrast, women are more likely to seek help from others.

Sandi shares her golden rule: just do the next step. Instead of being overwhelmed by the whole process, just take the next step. Plus, we discuss the importance of doing some exercise and making advanced decisions.

[bctt tweet=”Golden Rule for action: Just do the next step via @SandiGivens #goldenrule” via=”no”]

How to make decisions in advance so you are more likely to commit and perform your tasks day-to-day. And why you ‘should’ avoid the ‘shoulds’.

Drip-feeding content to participants in training is a better approach than the usual water-hose method of providing lots of information to learners all at once in one mind-blowing session.

[bctt tweet=”Drip-feeding content to workshop participants is better a fire-hose via @SandiGivens #learning #training” via=”no”]

Completing your tasks alone can be tough. Accountability to a coach or as part of a program can be a simple addition to your actions that call you to be in a simple and effective way.

Sandi is running her ‘Find Your Courageous Voice’ as webinar-based training. This has enabled her to reach a wider audience across the country, maintain her lifestyle by being able to deliver her sessions from anywhere plus provide the content, accountability and support for her participants.

Why ‘moving from our comfort zones may not be the most empowering description of what we’re facing.

To complete this podcast episode, Sandi shares a poignant story about her son to illustrate a useful principle.

Do More with Less is episode #111 of the Ideas Architect Podcast. Here is the video and transcript…

Are you stretched to your limits? Are you just hanging on?

Today I will show you five ways to get more done in less time with less effort and fewer resources.

The first key to getting things done is to create a project. Projects define our focus and put a boundary around what’s important and what’s not.

It’s likely you’re already pretty good at planning and finishing your projects. You wouldn’t be in your current position if you weren’t.

But, the way we usually go about our projects is a lost opportunity.

Most project planning only focuses on the tasks we need to get done. While this is crucial, it’s not enough. If this is all we do we miss a big opportunity.

The first step to get more done: create a project

To get more done in less time with less effort and fewer resources you need to do things differently. Doing things better will only get you so far. Doing things differently requires a different perspective – the right different will take you much further.

I want you:

You might be thinking that sounds like Mission Impossible. It would be if you only had one strategy for improving.

However, if you had 12 strategies and you added one strategy at a time until you had a number of them all working together then anything is possible.

If you simply improved 10% using four different strategies that would be a total improvement of 46%. Now that would be worth playing for!

Like Thomas Edison, I’ve failed a lot. I often failed to finish my projects.

I was an architect in my first career. Architects plan everything and then they hand the plan over to the builder who makes it all happen.

When I started my own business this didn’t work for me. I had lots of ideas but I couldn’t make them happen. This was frustrating and it was costing me time, money and my reputation.

Traditional project planning simply didn’t work for me. I had to come up with a different way to get things done.

My research into neuroscience, psychology, entrepreneurs, linguistics and other areas showed the number one reason that our projects fail is a lack of motivation.

It’s like a rider on an elephant. We need the Rational Rider to provide direction and we need the Emotional Elephant to provide the energy to get things done. Our projects fail when the Rational Rider can’t keep the Emotional Elephant on track for long enough.

This is why planning what to do is not enough. We need both the rider and the elephant to work together.

The #1 reason our projects fail: lack of motivation

The solution to project success is to design for motivation. Bernice McCarthy created the 4-Mat Motivation Model for teachers to provide lessons that appealed to everyone in the class.

Traditional Project Planning only appeals to one style of motivation – what needs to be done. This works for task-focused people and not for others like me.

When we appeal to all four different styles of motivation we multiply our ability to stay on track and complete our projects. This is the key to project success.

In each of the four areas of getting more done, in less time with less effort and with fewer resources there are three major strategies.

This gives us 12 growth strategies that we can apply to any project. Applying one strategy will give us a good boost, applying several will give us a big boost and applying all of them…

As a sample, let’s look at four strategies – one from each of our growth domains.

Usually, our manager gives our projects to us. Research shows that our motivation levels flag and our resilience falls when we don’t have a choice over our work.

To overcome this drop in motivation and resilience we need to own the project we are given.

One of the most powerful ways to do this is by creating a personal or inner goal around one of the four types of intrinsic motivation: purpose, relationships, autonomy or mastery.

This will help us get more done because we have our own reason for succeeding.

Own your project by pursuing inner goals to get more done.

In projects, we usually plan a lot. We try to identify all the steps along the way. This takes up time and effort and ignores the reality that any plan is trying to predict the future and is likely to be wrong.

The alternative is to plan more loosely using simple rules of thumb. Goldilocks did this when she was testing out which porridge to eat and which bed to sleep on. With this approach, you define how to respond to situations so individuals are empowered to make decisions along the way.

This keeps progress moving, avoids delays and maintains the overall strategic intent. As a result, more gets done in less time.

Stop doing big plans, start using simple rules of thumb to get more done

A lot of people rely on their willpower to tough their way through getting things done. This is an important short-term strategy that we all rely on.

However the problem is willpower uses a lot of energy and eventually we run out of it.

The alternative is to design your environment so that it is more likely that you will do the things you know you need to do. This invisible force allows you to get more done with less effort.

Having the right resources can make all the difference in completing our projects quickly and easily.

However, we typically approach our projects with the resources we are given. This is limiting.

The way to access almost any resource is to make a powerful request. This is not a guarantee that people will say ‘yes’ to all of your requests and it does shift your mindset to being more resourceful.

It also helps take away the illusion of limited resources.

Beat the illusion of limited resources with powerful requests

Finally, if we could get more done in less time with less effort and fewer resources that would be a great result. And it still misses the big opportunity of project planning.

Surveys show that between 60-80% of employees are not engaged in their work.

The single best way to get more done in less time with less effort and fewer resources is to be engaged in your work – be passionate, be motivated and be inspired.

We can achieve this if we design our work through the lens of motivation.

When was the last time you wowed yourself at work?

More: subscribe to our YouTube channel here

Bill Jennings runs Time and Space – community events for secondary schools that help mums and dads and mentors have conversations with young people that they wouldn’t normally have. It’s all about hearing the perspective of the other generations.

Bill is a former secondary school teacher and a Certified Speaking Professional with the Professional Speakers Association (PSA). He has presented programs across Australia and the UK.

In this episode (#110) of the Ideas Architect Podcast, Bill Jennings talks about:

Have you ever caught yourself saying: “I always wanted to have a conversation like that but when was I ever going to find the time and space to do it…” This is the key idea that Bill Jennings has based his business upon – creating time and space. It’s the fundamental value that his business provides.

Bill is clear that he is creating an experience for people. His ambitious goal is to create the time and space for parents and their children to have a conversation they will remember and cherish. Powerful!

QUESTION: What’s the fundamental value that your business provides? Consider the emotional value it offers.

A lot of damage can be done to our relationships when we have stressful conversations. Bill Jennings finds that while we have a yearning for connecting with our children, too often our major conversations are had in moments of high stress.

Frame your conversations so everyone can speak freely and be heard

We have a natural preference for new technology rather than traditional ways of getting things done. While social media can be good, the core technology Bill Jennings uses is face-to-face conversation. It might not be sexy and it sure is powerful!

QUESTION: What is your core technology? What are the benefits of being face-to-face or virtual?

The majority of Bill’s clients at Time and Space are repeat customers. He has now delivered this flagship program over 500 times. And for one client, they have worked together for 11 consecutive years.

Bill talks about the importance of continuity, having a repeatable program and how that has allowed him to build systems and consistent improvement. This has allowed him the opportunity to build relationships with his client and understand exactly what and when they need it.

QUESTION: What can you build repeating value for your clients? How can you partner with your clients?

[bctt tweet=”Think partnerships with clients, not transactions via @Bill_Jennings #repeatbusiness” via=”no”]

One of the big advantages of a repeatable service is the opportunity to build robust business systems. In part, this is to streamline production and it also fits Bill Jenning’s bigger goal to license and leverage his business.

A big part of this process is gathering feedback and evaluations from his customers. Over the past ten years, he has used the same three questions every time and now has over 30,000 replies. That’s a whole lot of information to make informed decisions.

[bctt tweet=”Collect feedback from all customer interactions to improve the #experience via @Bill_Jennings #simplesystems” via=”no”]

The podcast show notes include people, products and tools mentioned during the show:

One of the big ideas in Project Passion is borrowed from the work of Scrum and the Lean Startup: the MVP.

This is to overcome one of the big mistakes many of us make in our projects is to pursue perfection. We naturally start our projects with the view of the perfect result that we will have when we are done. That’s fine if that inspires you. It’s not fine if it stops or slows your progress if you’re pursuing perfection.

[bctt tweet=”How to overcome Perfectionism #perfection #projects #getmoredone” username=”ideasarchitect”]

In Episode 109 of the Ideas Architect Podcast we have the seventh chapter and sixth of the Seven Rules of Done from my book Done.

Some of the things you will learn from this episode include:

Steve Job said ‘Real Artists Ship’ use it to overcome your perfection gene

Project Passion Book Introduction

Project Passion Introduction Part 2

Project Passion Book Introduction

Project Passion Introduction Part 2

Project Passion #3 How not to Plan Your Project

Business Coaching: Don’t Fix Problems

Inner Goals Over Outer Goals

Seven Rules of Project Passion

Carolyn Tate is an author, educator and community builder. She has written five books with her latest being The Purpose Project. (Her purpose is to write books that truly matter.) She is also an educator running workshops and speaking to groups about how to bring purpose to work and at home as an antidote to some of the world’s woes. Carolyn Tate is also the founder of the Slow School of Business.

In this episode (#108) of the Ideas Architect Podcast, we talk with author Carolyn Tate about her journey from a corporate marketer, running her own marketing practice through her loss of faith in marketing. She then took a circuit breaker and a sojourn in France to work out her next move.

Carolyn Tate talks to us through her varied experience in writing her books and how each of her five books was written in very different ways. For one book she hibernated for four days in a country cabin, another was six weeks of slog each day, her third book was written a little bit each day over five months and her last two books were written in a mix of blitz and daily action.

Why is purpose such a hot topic right now? Carolyn suggests it because we can no longer rely on our leaders – corporate and political – to do what’s best for the majority of people. Thus we’re taking our own lives into our own hands and being responsible for what happens. It’s a message that is for individuals and organisations and a shift from profit and performance to meaning.

Carolyn shares her thoughts on Passion versus Purpose using a personal example. She suggests that purpose is that thing that we know we just have to do. For her, it’s writing her books. It’s the think you can not do and that’s always calling your name.

The big question we all want to know is: How do we find our purpose? Carolyn suggests that we need curiosity to lead to our purpose. Too little curiosity turns us into a spectator in life. Whereas too much leaves us in danger of being a constant distraction and skimming the surface of many things. Ultimately, we need to be growing and learning to find our purpose

[bctt tweet=”Meaning is the new money #purposeproject @carolyntateco” username=”ideasarchitect”]

Marty Wilson is Australia’s funniest motivational speaker. He followed the traditional career path from Pharmacist to Advertising Copywriter to Stand-Up Comic – well not so traditional – to become Australian Comic of the Year.

Today, Marty is a regular on the corporate speaking circuit making audiences laugh about the serious topics of resilience and change.

Marty Wilson is also a best-selling author with a series of innovative book projects.

In this episode (#107) of the Ideas Architect Podcast, we have a laugh with Marty Wilson about:

The best comedian is easy to spot – they made the audience laugh the most. But how do you tell who is a great conference speaker?

Marty shares his thoughts on the challenge of getting audience feedback and how the different motivations of the audience can make a huge difference.

Everyone has great content but can you hold your attention?

How do we thrive when things get tough? Based on some personal circumstances Marty Wilson began to explore the role of humour to boost your resilience. Along the way he realized that our brains evolved to humour for a reason.

Note: We include Marty’s practice to our list of Master Habits to help you automate your success.

Do change well and the rest will be easy

How do you write a book series? Marty has written more than a dozen books in different formats and on different topics from Depression, Teenagers, Diabetes, Cancer and Motherhood (!!!). Along the way he has learnt a number of clever strategies for getting a book written – including co-authors, interviewing experts and partnering with others.

Find people who are already doing what I want and tap into their wisdom

If writing a book is the easy part, the big question is: How do you sell lots of them? Marty Wilson has succeeded in selling books by the boxful. His strategy was not to seek out individual sales. Instead, he looked for ways to sell bulk orders. This included a range of partnerships with gyms and not-for-profit organisations.

The secret to #HowtoSellbooks is to ask: Who can gift my book?

One of the great challenges for organisations is to hire great people. Marty shares his thoughts on what makes a great leader and a desirable place to work. He also pokes fun at the serious work of business.

[bctt tweet=”A good sense of humour cuts through serious work #lightenup @martywilsontwit” username=”ideasarchitect”]

PS: Marty’s final thought in our interview is a cracker – it might just make life a little lighter.